The chairlift at Mont Ripley was built to carry skiers, but on a Sunday afternoon in early October it does something else entirely. It hauls leaf peepers. For a few hours, the Husky Chair swings up the side of a hill that has been part of the Keweenaw's winter life for generations, and the people riding it are not looking for powder. They are looking for color.
Mont Ripley Fall Color Scenic Chairlift Rides run on select Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays through late October, with the Sunday, October 4 session scheduled from noon to 5 p.m. Riders board the Husky Chair and rise to the summit, where they can step off, wander, take photographs, and breathe the crisp Upper Peninsula air before riding back down. The view from the top takes in the Michigan Tech campus, the Portage Waterway, and the surrounding Keweenaw landscape. There are no reserved seats; you ride when you show up.
What makes the ride worth writing about is not just the scenery. It is the hill underneath it. Mont Ripley, owned by Michigan Technological University, is the oldest ski area in Michigan. The ski area sits in Franklin Township in Houghton County, just outside Hancock and Houghton, on a slope above the Keweenaw Waterway. It rises 440 vertical feet, spreads across roughly 112 acres, and carries a reputation for snow: Houghton and Hancock, the twin communities below it, are frequently described as the snowiest cities in the Midwest. Mont Ripley's own snow report recorded 313 inches for the most recent season.
The land has a longer history than skiing. The village of Ripley began as a ferry landing in 1846, drawing entrepreneurs and their businesses to the waterway. The Quincy Copper Mining Company was organized nearby in 1848, and the Quincy smelter went up along the north side of the Keweenaw Waterway, where it still stands. Ripley became a station on the Mineral Range Railroad, and a post office opened in 1886, though it closed two years later. The village's namesake is uncertain; one possibility is Eleazer Wheelock Ripley, a general in the War of 1812, though that connection is not documented. What is documented is that the slope above the village was christened Mont Ripley and eventually turned into a ski resort.
The modern operation includes a chairlift, T-bar lifts, and snowmaking, along with a terrain park, a tubing park, and a scenic overlook of the waterway. Nick Sirdenis, the general manager who has worked at Mont Ripley since 2000, has made the case for the hill's snow plainly: "If snow isn't the main ingredient to skiing, I don't know what is. That being said, we have the best snow conditions possible."
Fall is the shoulder season, the quiet stretch before that snow arrives. Firing up the chairlift for color tours is a way to keep the hill working when the trails are bare, and it has become part of the broader Upper Peninsula tradition of scenic fall chairlift rides. Across the U.P., ski hills and mountain resorts run their lifts long before the snow flies, from Copper Peak near Ironwood to Snowriver Mountain Resort near Wakefield. Mont Ripley's version is distinguished by its setting: a hill that looks directly down on a university campus and a working waterway, framed by hardwoods turning in the Keweenaw's early, northern autumn.
The Keweenaw changes color earlier than most of Michigan, sitting farther north than the typical Lower Peninsula destination. State fall color reports in recent years have put the peninsula at peak in mid-October, with the season stretching across several weeks. That timing is why Mont Ripley's schedule runs deep into October, and why the October 4 date falls in the heart of the transition.
There are complications worth knowing about. The color tours are not offered every day, and private events occasionally close one summit or another; the ski area's own announcements have noted a Saturday in late September when the Eastern Summit was closed for a private event, and a Saturday in October when the Western Summit was closed and no tours ran at all. The weekend of September 18-20 was postponed entirely in one recent season. Weather, as with any outdoor operation on a hill above Lake Superior's neighborhood, can affect whether the lift turns. Visitors are advised to check current conditions and posted signage before making the trip.
For the price of a movie ticket, though, the ride offers something a movie cannot: a slow, open-air ascent over a landscape that has been mined, farmed, skied, and photographed for more than a century. The Husky Chair does not go fast. That is the point. It gives you time to watch the hillside slide away beneath your boots and the color open up ahead, and then, at the top, to stand on a summit that in a few weeks will be buried in snow again.