West Lebanon
Not just with snow — although there were two good snowstorms last week, the second severe enough to delay school openings one morning — but with a blizzard of customers rushing out to Golf & Ski Warehouse in West Lebanon to buy and rent ski equipment and apparel.
“It was the busiest pre-Thanksgiving Saturday we’ve had in 30 years,” said Scott Peters, founder and president of the four-store retail chain. “We were busting at the seams helping families” lease equipment for the season for their kids.
“There’s no question the snow has gotten people thinking about getting their stuff much earlier than in the past,” Peters said. “It’s been crazy — but a good kind of crazy.”
Mid-November’s unseasonably cold weather and pre-Thanksgiving snowfall had Upper Valley ski areas firing up their snow guns last week to begin laying down a base of powder in anticipation of opening within the next couple of weeks.
What’s being described as the most abundant early season snowfall in five years has prompted several Vermont ski areas — such as Mad River Glen, Bolton Valley Resort and Burke Mountain — to move up their opening days to this past weekend, joining Killington, Stowe, Mount Snow, Sugarbush and Okemo, which already had opened.
In New Hampshire, Loon Mountain, Bretton Woods, Cranmore Mountain, Cannon Mountain and Waterville Valley have opened, with Gunstock Mountain and Mount Sunapee set to welcome skiers next week.
Mount Sunapee’s opening originally was targeted for Nov. 23, but resort officials decided to push the date back to Nov. 29 — last year, the resort opened on Nov. 22, the day before Thanksgiving.
“We want to focus on the quality (of the snow) and have as much open as possible” on the first day, said Megan Burch, senior marketing manager at Mount Sunapee.
This is the first season that Mount Sunapee will be run by Vail Resorts, the Colorado-based operator that in September acquired the rights to the Newbury, N.H., ski and recreational area along with Vermont’s Okemo Mountain Resort.
Even though Mount Sunapee now has one of the largest ski resort operators in North America at the helm, it shouldn’t affect the experience skiers have known, according to Vail officials.
“There will not be a lot of visible changes for guests. People don’t want to see big changes,” Burch said.
Nonetheless, she predicted, Mount Sunapee “will see more skiers” this season because it now falls within Vail Resorts’ Epic Pass program, which gives holders access to any of Vail’s 18 ski resorts. The current Epic Pass costs $949 for an adult and $499 for children ages 5 to 12.
Killington Resort opened some trails on Oct. 20 and this weekend is hosting the women’s FIS Ski World Cup, which could draw more than 35,000 spectators to its slopes.
Last year, despite a decent amount of snow, resort operators blamed bitterly cold weather that kicked in right after Christmas for keeping skiers away from the slopes, resulting in just 2.26 million “ski visits,” a decline of 5 percent, according to Ski NH, the state’s ski resort association.
The year could have been even worse were it not for a March snow blast that brought skiers back to the mountains late in the season.
The roller coaster weather affected Vermont’s ski areas as well, although Ski Vermont, the Green Mountain State’s ski trade association, said the industry was able to eke out a small 1.2 percent increase last year, tallying 3.97 million “skier days.”
Vermont’s peak ski season was the winter of 2014-15, with 4.7 million skier days, surpassing even drought-afflicted California and Utah that year, according to Ski Vermont.
Whaleback Mountain in Enfield turned on its snow guns for the first time on Monday night and expected to be making snow later in the week in preparation for opening on Dec. 14, General Manager Adam Kaufman said.
Kaufman said Whaleback has spent “in the five-figure range” to build a new “(water) main pipeline” this past summer from the bottom to nearly the top of its primary ski run.
“The new pipeline will increase snow-making reliability and efficiency and replaces the previous pipeline,” he said, noting its capacity for a greater volume of water.
“It was time to upgrade with new equipment,” he said.
Dartmouth Skiway also was hoping to get a jump on making snow last week in anticipation of opening on Dec. 15, according to Doug Heller, general manager, who noted he’s added a couple of new snow guns and gun mounts to his snow-making arsenal this season.
“I don’t think we made snow until December last year,” Heller said, noting that the skiway “blew some last week” in test runs of the equipment. He said the temperature needs to be no higher than 28 degrees and preferably below 24 degrees “for production to go up significantly.
Dartmouth Skiway actually had a better season relative to the New Hampshire statewide average last year, Heller said, with ski visits up 6 percent over the prior season.
“A lot of people don’t come out and ski when it gets that cold,” Heller said, citing the “polar vortex” that brought record subzero temperatures to Northern New England after the Christmas holiday. “But we started to catch up in February and get ahead in March.”
The biggest snow-making equipment upgrade in Upper Valley was undertaken earlier this fall by the Woodstock Inn & Resort at its Suicide Six ski area.
The luxury hotel spent $400,000 to buy and install 10 new TechnoAlpin snow guns on “The Face,” the mountain’s signature slope, several of which have been mounted on 3-foot towers so the spray reaches the full breadth of the trail.
“It’s always been difficult with (the snow spray guns) getting to the other side,” said Courtney Lowe, vice president of marketing and business development at the Woodstock Inn. “The new guns will project much farther and generally produce more snow that we can push around more.”
Lowe said Suicide Six is targeting a Dec. 15 opening date, “a few days earlier than last year. But the middle of December usually works for us,” he said.
But one major ski area upgrade currently underway may not be ready for this coming season.
Ascutney Outdoors is in the process of installing a 2,600-foot-long refurbished Doppelmayr T-bar lift donated by a Quebec ski resort. The nonprofit has raised more than $150,000 from area organizations and people to install the lift that will replace the current tow rope line.
Glenn Seward, an Ascutney Outdoors board member who has been active in the T-bar project, said the lift’s foundations have been poured, after finally receiving Act 250 approval and a stormwater permit approval in October. Seward said he was shooting to have the base terminal completed by the end of last week.
Seward said he hopes the T-bar lift project — set to be another boost to the rejuvenated recreation area that had closed in 2010 and has been revived along with a new snow tubing hill and outdoor center in Brownsville — will be ready for skiers this winter. But, given the late season start at construction, he said he can’t guarantee it will be completed.
“It’s extremely challenging working on the mountain at this point. We’re taking it day by day with whatever Mother Nature dishes out. But I want to stress we are going to keep going until we can’t keep going any longer,” he said. “We don’t give up easily around here.”
John Lippman can be reached at jlippman@vnews.com.
