Suicide Hill (Ski Jump) National Register of Historic Places Listing

Winters in Michigan's Upper Peninsula swallow the land in white. In 1925, iron miners and Norwegian immigrants in Ishpeming decided to conquer this brutal weather by building a massive, terrifying wooden scaffold. They created Suicide Hill. The name actually came from a local newspaper reporter. He watched a jumper named Walter Anderson crash violently during a 1926 practice run and declared that sliding down that monstrous incline was suicide. The moniker stuck immediately. Since then, the hill has served as the beating heart of American ski jumping. Pure adrenaline on hickory planks.

The National Register recognized this site because Ishpeming is the birthplace of organized ski jumping in the United States. The National Ski Association started in this tiny town back in 1904. Suicide Hill itself has hosted national championships and Olympic tryouts, drawing tens of thousands of spectators who stood in waist-deep snow, cheering as jumpers cleared ninety meters in the biting Lake Superior wind. Think of it. Men flying through the air with zero safety nets. Upgrades replaced the old wooden trestles with steel and concrete over the decades, but the raw terror of that drop remains exactly the same.