No sooner do the temperatures drop below freezing than the ski resorts in the Poconos and New England roll out their big guns and start blasting away - at the rate of inches per hour.

It's a scene that, oddly enough, once took place in South Jersey, too.

If our early December snowstorm was any indication, perhaps the resorts won't need to make much artificial snow this season. Maybe the Farmer's Almanac prediction of a cold and snowy winter will come to pass after all.

My oldest son, Steve, and his wife, Karen, take their three children - ages 16, 14 and 12 - skiing as often as they can get away, either to Jack Frost or Big Boulder in Pennsylvania or to Mount Snow or Killington in Vermont.

But there was a time when it wasn't necessary to travel to Pennsylvania or Vermont to enjoy a day's fun on the slopes.

I learned to ski when my sons learned - not in the Poconos or on Killington's 100-plus slopes, but on the two cream-puff slopes of a little-remembered ski area right here in South Jersey known as Action Mountain, also called Ski Mountain.

Ski Mountain, in Pine Hill, wasn't much as ski areas go. Nor was it a mountain in any sense of the word. But it was a perfect learning place for families who didn't have the time or the means to travel to the more expensive north country.

And it was only 15 minutes from our home in Voorhees. That was a bit of luck. Our 1960 Ford, with 160,000 miles on the odometer and a hole in the back floor that doubled as a trash dispenser, wasn't fit for too many long trips.

As limited as its facilities were, Ski Mountain was able to field a beginners' class that taught everything from getting back on your skis after falling (it's tougher than it looks) to snowplowing to a stop. When we started skiing there, we could get to the top only by using a rope tow (you held on with your hands and let it pull you) or a pony tow (a metal bar attached to a cable that you either gripped or let push you after maneuvering it against the small of your back).

Eventually, a chairlift was installed and a new lodge was built, giving the place a more professional appearance. The only drawback was the slopes were so modest that no sooner did you get comfortable in your chair than it was time to get off.

The snow-making equipment, crude by modern standards, was powered by noisy, oil-fed generators, but it sufficed for the area it had to cover. With winter weather in the East so fickle - alternating periods of snow and rain - the surface was sometimes more amenable to ice skating than to skiing.

Ski Mountain had a very modest overall vertical drop of about 50 feet, a far cry from Mountain Creek's 1,040 feet in Vernon, N.J. The length of Ski Mountain's "main" slope, if I remember correctly, was about 900 feet. That was only about as long as the Battleship New Jersey and is dwarfed by Mountain Creek's longest run of two miles.

Still, it wasn't bad for a mostly flat state, where the highest spot is 1,803 feet above sea level, way up in the Kittatinny Mountains of the extreme northwest.

Eventually, the winters in South Jersey hit a mild stretch that made it very difficult to produce even artificial snow, and that contributed to the ski area's shutting down. The beautiful Pine Hill Golf Club and restaurant now sit atop what was Ski Mountain, where I once stood looking down and wondering how I would ever get to the bottom without suffering serious injury.

But for many novice skiers, the "mountain" served its purpose - a place to learn to ski before moving on to higher and more challenging places. And for many families it remains an odd treasure of a memory of winters past.

I remember one year in particular, when we awoke on Thanksgiving to find that 6 inches of snow had fallen overnight.

I called Ski Mountain. It was open. I looked at my wife, and she looked at me. I didn't have to say anything.

"Just be back early," she told me. The kids and I piled into the Ford, and off we went for a unique Thanksgiving outing, zipping down the slope at Ski Mountain.

The turkey never tasted better.