Have you ever glanced at our logo and wondered What’s Slopeside Syrup? That story starts in 1961 when Mickey Cochran installed a ski rope tow on his hillside farm in Richmond, Vermont. He and his wife Ginny cut a few trails allowing their four children to ski countless laps right in their backyard. That set the foundation for their illustrious ski careers including World Cup titles, World Cup wins, World Championship medals, and Barbara Ann Cochran’s Olympic Gold.

The legacy continues with Mickey and Ginny’s grandchildren reaching World Cup and Olympic heights; now their great-grandchildren lap the Cochran Ski Area each winter.

The New York Times even featured the renowned family and ski area.

Fifty years after Mickey and Ginny started Cochran Ski Area, four of their grandchildren embarked on another Green Mountain tradition — bottling pure maple syrup.

In the summer of 2010 the four cousins constructed a timber frame sugarhouse, a snowball’s throw away from the slopes. Timbers for the building were milled on site from nearby trees. By August, the cousins had moved on to installing the tubing that would bring sap from the trees to tanks at the sugarhouse, and they were sugaring the very next spring. Slopeside Syrup was born.

Read the next chapter of the story where UnTapped finds its other athletic roots in cycling, here.