Bretton Woods

Our class traveled to Bretton Woods New Hampshire this past Thursday to take a look around the mountain. Bretton has had great success in marketing towards families and the beginner crowd. Since the mountain itself has minimal expert terrain advertising towards families and beginners fits the resort. A rock wall in the middle of the lodge is a great example of an easy way to generate revenue, and was one of few things Bretton Woods was doing to promote the family atmosphere. We spoke to people from several departments including snowmaking, guest services, lifts, and terrain parks. The gentleman from the guest services department was really knowledgeable about the business and made it appear to be a gratifying position.  The snow-making in particular was interesting because they fired up the guns that same day and we got to hear about how they handle the variable preseason situations. As well as getting a tour of the mountain we explored the Mount Washington Resort Hotel. It was enormous and had a lot of interesting history behind it like story behind the Gold Room, and the different celebrities who had stayed at the hotel. As a whole the amenities available between Bretton Woods and the Mount Washington Hotel are endless and can provide any type of visitor with a luxurious experience.

Jay Peak

This past Thursday we got a hard hat tour of the incredible new expansion going on at Jay Peak. Nearly every facet of the mountain is changing in an effort to make it even bigger and better than it already is. Trails wise Jay's planning on expanding a whole new face in West bowl dedicated mostly to glades, and expert terrain. With the possible expansion of West bowl in the near future it would definitely give off the feeling of riding out west with its expansive terrain. But the real progress is being made on the grand hotel, water park, ice rink, and condos. The waterpark is massive, and it makes Jay Peak incredibly unique by installing it, and the amenities included with the hotel and tram lodge are seemingly endless. From the multiple buildings we walked through there was no shortage of places to relax, and services to partake in. The new bar in the tram lodge stood out to me in particular for obvious reasons. The use of old lift equipment and view of the main face and base area make it an awesome place to be before, during, or after taking your runs. The hockey rink as well as the water park sets Jay apart from nearly every other mountain on the east. It's state of the art, and is home to the North American Hockey Academy already. With a hockey rink, waterpark, grand hotel, golf course, amazing skiing and riding, and everything else Jay has truly become a full fledged year-round resort. In an effort to put it all into perspective Jay Peak is giving its best effort to become a national destination and they are destined to succeed.

Trip to Burke

Burke Mountain

On Thursday the 13^th our class visited the local hill, Burke Mountain and got an inside look at what was going on with the mountain. Dick Andross the head of mountain ops was nice enough to show us layouts of the long term plans at the mountain. They ranged from cutting more trails, to adding a lift that runs through east bowl and the current in progress lift. I always wondered how exactly mountains planned for the future, and how short term their decisions were. It was interesting to hear that nearly every larger scale mountain has a plan for roughly 5+ years into the future. We were given a small tour of the new lifts parts, and saw part of the base being built and learned why it was put there. After that we checked out the new wind turbine at the top of the mountain up close. It was exceptionally windy that day, and I was surprised as to how quiet it actually was. It was incredibly nice of Dick to take that much time out of his day and show us what was going on around the place. I’m looking forward to opening day as I’m sure everyone else is, and getting on the new quad on Christmas as well.

Cannon Mountain 9/29

On Thursday we visited Cannon Mountain in Franconia Notch New Hampshire. While there we visited the New England Ski Museum and got to briefly explore the the mountain. The museum had all types of interesting memorabilia like Bode Miller's Olympic medals, dozens of skis from different era's and a lot of pictures and personal accounts of skiing history in New England. While there we sat in on a presentation about the history of ski areas and their formation in New Hampshire which was very informative. After visiting the museum we looked around the Man on the Mountain display and learned all about its discovery and what lead to its collapse. Shortly after we rode the tram to the top of the mountain in a dense fog which was unfortunate, but it was still cool to see the amount of technology at the base and summmit of the mountain involved in running the tram. The size of the counterweight and cables at the top of the tram in particular were impressive to say the least. Hopefully I can make a trip to Cannon sometime this winter to ride the tram again and experience the mountain even more.