Before all the resorts, golf courses and restaurants stamped Central Oregon as a recreation mecca, there was Mt. Bachelor ski area - or, as it was known in 1958, Bachelor Butte.

There also was lumber and a Nordic passion for skiing that people like Nels Skjersaa and Emil Nordeen, who worked side by side in the old Shevlin-Hixon mill, brought with them from the old country.

Bend was still a town of fewer than 12,000 people in the high desert when Bill Healy and others banded together to develop Mt. Bachelor, which will celebrate its 50th anniversary on Dec. 19.

The closest downhill skiing for serious skiers was 45 miles away at what was then known as Hoodoo Bowl.

Bend was primarily a one-horse town, and the timber companies were its single economic engine. But in 1958, the town was less than a decade removed from the shutdown of two major mills. Roughly 900 to 1,000 jobs were lost in December 1950, said Jim Crowell, a local historian.

"Before Bachelor, the tourist season was restricted to summer and early fall hunting," Crowell said. "Bachelor turned Bend into at least a two-season visitor area, and by aggressive marketing and by building golf courses and resorts, (Bend) became a year-round destination." Meanwhile, the timber-based economy upon which Mt. Bachelor grew is all but gone, Crowell said.

According to Crowell, where Mt. Bachelor is today and where Bend and Central Oregon have followed resulted most notably from the actions of one man: Healy.

Healy, a prominent furniture store owner in downtown Bend, had fought in bloody battles as a ski trooper in the Army's 10th Mountain Division in World War II, according to "Mt. Bachelor: Bill Healy's Dream," a 208-page history of the mountain written in 1999 by Peggy Chessman Lucas.

The book, now out of print but available online and in the Deschutes County Public Library system, tells the story of Mt. Bachelor from its inception through its first 40 years.

Much of the history recounted here comes from the book and The Bulletin's archives.

Healy was able "to infect others with his unbridled enthusiasm" to raise financing for the ski area, Chessman Lucas wrote.

Mt. Bachelor's golden anniversary brings back memories for Alana Audette, COVA's president and CEO, and a lifelong Central Oregon resident.

"For me personally, I got to grow up in an amazing environment and skied Mt. Bachelor every (winter) weekend of my existence," Audette said. "It is why I still believe (strongly about Central Oregon's tourism product) the way I do. I love this place." COVA was founded in 1971 through the efforts of Healy, helping to create a cooperative marketing voice in the region that combined the financial weight of its top players, including Sunriver Resort, Seventh Mountain Resort and Brooks Resources Corp.

"The legacy Bill Healy gave to this community is priceless," Audette said. "He planted the economic seed for this region's history and is one of the single strongest influences for the transition from a lumber to a tourism-based community." Many others also played a role in the development of Mt. Bachelor, including Vince Genna and Olaf Skjersaa, Nels Skjersaa's brother, who joined a group comprising Healy and others in search of a closer place to ski after fire destroyed much of Hoodoo's equipment.

Other pioneers included Gene Gillis and Don Peters, who brought with them a knowledge of European ski areas and connections with the U.S.

Forest Service, respectively, to get the ski area running.

Bachelor was the unanimous choice for a closer ski location, according to Chessman Lucas.

Aside from Healy, the four other major stockholders were Dr. Bradford Pease, Phil Gould, Felix Marcoulier and Oscar Murray. The stockholders raised about $100,000 from local investors and made a flurry of management decisions that would shape the direction of Mt. Bachelor and Central Oregon for decades to come.

Each of the five founders was an avid skier, except Murray, who donated his construction company resources to the project in exchange for shares because he thought a winter resort would be a "shot in the arm" for Bend's economy, the book says.

Building a new resort was not easy. Shareholders had to raise money, build a new lodge, hire staff and ski patrol, and market the area outside the region.

The first mechanized lift, which could transport as many as 520 skiers an hour to an area just above timberline, was imported from France and used about $60,000 of the group's capital, according to the book. There also were two rope tows.

Heavy snow allowed the ski area to open Oct. 18, 1958. An all-day ticket cost $3.

There was almost immediate success. The ski area stayed open 86 days in its inaugural season, drawing 35,000 skiers.

The resort made a profit that season, which pleased stockholders, who invested their dividends back into the mountain.

With the exception of 1977, when drought limited operations to January through March, the ski area was profitable.

After that season, Healy demonstrated his sense of humor, Chessman Lucas wrote.

"After the potato famine and the depression, last winter wasn't really that bad!" Healy was reported to have said.

Investment continued in the 1960s and '70s when several new lifts were added, a lodge was built and attendance increased almost every year.

New lifts included the Black chair in 1961, Red chair in '64, Yellow and Blue chairs in '67 and '70, respectively, and Green and Orange chairs in '73. Outback, Flycreek (later Rainbow) and Sunrise lifts were added in 1975, '81 and '82, respectively. Only the Red and latter three chairs remain.

Reminders of Bill Healy's legacy are everywhere at his son's home in southeast Bend.

Tom Healy, 48, now owner of the Expressway gas station and convenience store in east Bend, collects the artifacts -including his father's oak skis that he used for ski-jumping at Timberline Resort on Mt. Hood, a Red lift chair, and a placard from the 10th Mountain Division - in tribute to his father's legacy.

By the 1980s, it was Healy's "obsession" to open the Summit lift nearly to the top of the 9,068-foot mountain because it would provide a "completely new image of Bachelor - new topography, a lengthening of the ski season, a far greater elevation and an opportunity to ski snowfields into the summer months," Chessman Lucas wrote.

Healy, though, knew the summit's weather conditions would present construction and operating challenges.

Strong winds and thick ice made construction of the $3.2 million Summit chairlift impossible until new technology allowed it to happen.

The new Austrian-made Doppelmayr lift was twice as fast as any other lift at Mt. Bachelor, and its chairs could be detached and stored at night to prevent icing.

Previously, the Black chair was the mountain's highest lift, reaching 7,600 feet.

When Healy's dream of opening a lift to the summit was fulfilled in 1983, Mt. Bachelor went from a regional to a national destination, Tom Healy said.

"People came from everywhere," he said. "It wasn't just from Portland.

They came from Colorado and Utah. It almost doubled the vertical feet and opened up hundreds of acres of new terrain. It just put Bachelor on the map." Then in his early 20s, Tom Healy worked on the crews that built the Summit lift. Much of the equipment was flown to the summit by helicopter, but the 21 crew members had to hike.

"You had to hike the mountain at least once a day, usually carrying supplies up, and you would leave the mountain usually after dark," Tom Healy said. "The whole building of the Summit chair was extremely hard because you had to dig into the snow, which was 20 feet deep in some of the worst places." He remembers climbing the mountain each day and his father's pride of accomplishment when the chair was finished in 1983, he said. The Summit lift was the first high-speed detachable chair on top of a mountain in North America when it was built, Tom Healy said.

For the rest of the 1980s and '90s, Mt. Bachelor continued to add more high-speed, three and four-person lifts after Summit, all of which remain part of the ski area's lift system today.

The ski area hit some roadblocks in the 1990s after Healy's death in 1993, as increased competition and the changing economics of skiing made it harder to compete with some of the new resorts.

In 2001, Tom Healy helped broker the deal between Powdr Corp. and Mt. Bachelor's 1,382 shareholders when the Park City, Utah-based ski company earned approval to buy Mt. Bachelor.

He had done what he thought was best for the mountain, attracting a well-heeled, experienced buyer who would reinvest money into the ski area, he said.

Powdr Corp. bought Mt. Bachelor for about $28 million, according to reports in The Bulletin.

Local skiers and snowboarders have complained the past few seasons about lift operations and a lack of reinvestment back into the ski area since Powdr bought the ski area.

The ski area invested $3.4 million over the summer to improve its lift operations and make other capital improvements after a 2007-08 season marred by customer complaints and a 7 percent drop in skier visits.

While Mt. Bachelor's attendance dropped, the rest of the state set a combined attendance record with roughly 1.95 million skier visitors last season, according to data from the Pacific Northwest Ski Areas Association.

For the first time in the association's history, Mt. Hood Meadows ski resort drew more visitors than Mt. Bachelor.

Four top officials, including Mt. Bachelor's former president and general manager, were fired in May at the end of the season.

Mt. Bachelor's new president and general manager, Dave Rathbun, acknowledged the ski area has fallen behind other resorts in technology and capital investment, but he said Mt. Bachelor is well-positioned to operate profitably and reinvest money back into the mountain as things turn around.

A new lift would cost between $5 million and $7 million, he said.

To mark its 50th anniversary, Mt. Bachelor is planning a celebration on Dec. 19, the official opening day in 1958, he said.

"The town and the mountain - we cannot separate the two," Rathbun said.

"The sooner we accept that we are linked at the hip, the better off we will be." The ski area is engaged in a long-term planning process that would reshape its working agreement with the U.S. Forest Service, which leases the land to Powdr Corp., he said.