PARIS – Murray “Mike” Thurston, who founded the first ski slopes at what is now Sunday River Resort in Newry, died Tuesday at the age of 87. An Army veteran, having served from 1942 to 1946, he had been living at the Maine Veterans’ Home.

Dana Bullen, general manager for Sunday River, extended sympathies for the family and friends of Thurston, on behalf of the resort.

“Murray was an intricate part of Sunday River and our success is much in part to Murray’s leadership,” Bullen said. “As we go into almost 50 years of operation, Murray’s forethought and vision very much still echoes through our resort.”

A graduate of Bethel’s Gould Academy and Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., Thurston developed a plan to establish the lodge and a tow rope to access two trails on Barker Mountain in 1959, after an inspiring hike up the mountain with his young son, David.

A staunch Democrat and politically active for much of his adult life, Murray Thurston was elected to the Maine Senate in 1958 just before he launched his plan to develop Sunday River. He remained an avid skier until his early 80s.

Last year, when the elder Thurston was inducted into the Maine Ski Hall of Fame, David Thurston remarked on how his father established the resort on a shoestring so long ago.

David remembered laying the first T-bar line with his father, after hiking through the woods from where the Jack Frost Ski Shop now sits to where the Barker Mountain Lodge is now. They used a compass to lay the line.

It was so simple.

“If you had to do that kind of thing today, with all the regulations and permits? There would be no chance. It’s a great example of what perseverance and not a lot of money can do,” David Thurston said. “This was a pure, community effort. Families would come in on Saturday and Sunday and help clean and burn brush.”

Murray Thurston, who had to raise $90,000 to make a go of the slope, sold lifetime and five-year passes and stock in his Bethel Area Development Corp. Then, the group applied for a $40,000 Small Business Association loan to bridge the gap needed to open.

“The first and probably only SBA loan to start a ski area was given to Sunday River,” David Thurston said last year. “One of the first big investors, which means he probably had $250 in it, hid a bottle of Scotch next to a brook on the way up the mountain. He poured the SBA guy three glasses, and that’s how they got the loan. That’s fact.”

Sunday River opened for business on Dec. 19, 1959, and struggled along until the early 1970s when it was purchased by Killington Ski Area in Vermont. Les Otten, one of Killington’s young managers and a Bethel native, bought the Barker Mountain operation, leading the development of the resort to its current configuration.

Boyne Resorts, Sunday River’s newest owner, has poured $19 million in capital investments into the resort in the past year, including a new chair/gondola lift and expanded hiking and biking trails. On Tuesday, Boyne announced its highest real estate dollar volume in sales in a single month since the mountain boasted condominium development.

“Sunday River is on track to have its most successful year ever,” said Mark Hall, director of development for Sunday River, which now consists of a compound some 3 miles wide, with 700 resort condominiums and two full-service hotels.

It’s a world away from Thurston’s vision to carve out a place where members of the community could enjoy skiing for 75 cents a day, hauling themselves up the mountain on a 400-foot tow rope for each pass down the trail. It was a place carved out of the wilderness by volunteers and maintained by a core group of supporters.

“There was no reason to believe there would ever be anything more than that,” David Thurston. “There was never any sort of grand scheme.”

It’s been quite a ride, he said.