By Adam Frisk
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
With the unofficial start to summer underway, and cottagers and visitors beginning to make the trek to the County, tourist attractions are starting to get busy. There’s one draw that has been long gone in the Highlands, but for many, they can still hear the click-click-click of Teflon sliders hitting track joints while kids scream as they test the limits of speed and gravity.
The Haliburton Sky Slider was the place to be from in the 1980s until its closure in the early 90s. For many cottagers and locals, it wasn’t just a lure, it was a rite of passage.
“It was a bit of an attraction, there’s no question about that. It was a great attraction,” Dennis Gould Casey told The Highlander in a recent interview. “Kids loved it, just loved it.”
He explained that the ride was the brainchild of Steve Bowskill, a local entrepreneur who owned a shop in town. He turned to Casey to help him make it a reality.
“It was just like building a road, but with super-elevated curves,” Casey recalled. Casey had the help of Fred Nimigon, who operated a dozer at the time, with the team having to clear land for a chairlift and blast through rock. Casey said the project allowed for a four-inch margin of error, but his team delivered the track within a single inch.
“The guy from the States [who laid the track] said that he normally spent two to three weeks fixing everything,” Casey said. “We had it within one inch all the way down the hill.
“We were quite proud of ourselves,” he said with a chuckle. The Sky Slider played a large role in driving local tourism for more than a decade, and it employed about 10 to 12 staff members daily to manage the chairlift, cart logistics, and ticket sales. The attraction also had a small arcade and a food stand.
The ride itself was pretty simple. Guests would take the chairlift, with carts hanging off the side, to get to the summit. Once there, a staff member would unhook the cart, and the rider would face a choice: use the single centre-mounted brake handle or go full throttle.
“The carts had one handle in the middle. You pulled it, and it put the brake down,” Casey explained. He noted that many riders skipped using the brakes, often resulting in “the odd bit of road rash” at the 90-degree turn near the finish line.
By the early 1990s, the Sky Slider interest began to fade. A waterslide was added to pique interest, but eventually, the equipment
was sold off to a park in Peterborough, Casey said.
Today, the land is owned by Paul Vorvis, who still finds remnants of the park’s height.
“I’m still finding stubby beer bottles up there,” Vorvis joked, noting that the decommissioned hill became a popular party place for locals.
He said that while the forest has largely reclaimed the slope, some of the nfrastructure still remains if you know what to look for.
“There were some aluminum cables that were buried up there,” Vorvis recalled. The property owner managed to get his hands on one of the original carts and a collection of Sky Slider buttons a couple of years ago. Vorvis said the legacy of the Sky Slider is set to be formalized. Rotary is working on historical information panels to be placed at Skyline Park as part of the club’s revitalization project, with the attraction getting a shoutout in the County’s recreational history
