As much as I love the theme parks we have in Southern California, it’s hard not to pine a bit for the developments we didn’t get. Driving up Highway 99 toward Yosemite last month, as we passed the turn off to Sequoia National Park, a friend started talking about how much he loved hiking up to Mineral King.

“You know they were going to put a ski area up there,” he said.

Oh, yes. I know. The Mineral King Ski Resort is one of those never-built projects that have become legend among Disney fans.

In the 1960s, Walt Disney fell in love with building a Swiss-style town in the Mineral King Valley, to serve as the base of a Disney-run ski area. Walt already had built a replica of Switzerland’s famous Matterhorn in Disneyland, so why not develop a recreation of its town of Zermatt in California, too?

While Disney managed to obtain the land he wanted for the development, as well as many of the needed agreements with state and federal authorities, fierce opposition from some locals and environmentalists kept the project from coming together as quickly as Disney had hoped.

After Walt’s death in 1966, Disney corporate management opted to drop the project in favor of the finishing the other big development that Walt had been working on at the time – a project in Florida called Walt Disney World.

Today, the Mineral King Valley sits undeveloped, annexed as part of the Sequoia National Park in 1978, effectively killing any plans to ever build a big commercial ski resort in the area. But what if Walt had lived long enough to see both Walt Disney World and Mineral King through to completion? How might have a Disney-run ski area changed the development of the winter sports industry?

Imagine Walt Disney promoting a California ski town on national television each week, the way he promoted Disneyland and enticed a generation of youngsters to badger their parents into taking them to Anaheim. How would have the development of the Sierras changed, with a Disney ski resort drawing thousands more tourists into the area every day?

How many more Americans might have taken up skiing, enabling the development of more slopes across the country, the way that Disneyland encouraged developers around the nation to build theme parks? How would existing ski resorts and ski towns had to have changed their business to compete with the winter entertainment center that Walt envisioned?

Even though Mineral King resort never happened, the work Disney did on the project affected the winter sports business. The National Ski Areas Association refined its trail rating system in the 1960s based on research the Disney Company did on which colors and shapes best communicated trail difficulty to skiers. So the next time you find yourself hurtling down a double-black-diamond slope, wondering why in creation you thought you could handle that run, remember that Walt tried to warn you.

Disney was working on much more than ski runs for Mineral King, too. Walt envisioned theme park-style attractions in the town to entertain visitors after their day on the slopes. One of the attractions designed for Mineral King, the Country Bear Jamboree, eventually made its way into the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World, and to Disneyland, where it closed in 2001 to make way for the Winnie the Pooh ride.

What might have Disneyland developed instead in that place if the Country Bears had taken up residence at Mineral King? The cancellation of Mineral King started a domino effect that influenced the development of attractions throughout the Walt Disney Company.

But it’s not just Disney that changed after the abandonment of the Mineral King project. Could Walt Disney have done for Tulare County and the winter recreation business what he did for Orange County and the amusement park business? We’ll never know … but that doesn’t stop fans from imagining “what if?”

Robert Niles is the founder and editor of ThemeParkInsider.com. Follow him on Twitter @ThemePark.