Gunstock becomes the fourth New Hampshire ski area with active expansion plans
November 7, 2021
Gunstock looks to expand in three directions, transforming the resort
They’re littered across the Northeast: the lost ski area in the shadow of the survivor. Highmont, overgrown beside thriving Belleayre. Timber Ridge, intact and skiable but liftless off the back side of Magic. Small parts of Whiteface and Killington are abandoned, as is the top of Ascutney (a skin track accesses the upper trails). Once in a while, the intact ski area resuscitates its dead neighbor, as Cannon did when it expanded onto the old Mittersill ski area more than a decade ago (Belleayre has long planned an expansion onto Highmont).
Gunstock, the county-owned ski area rising over New Hampshire’s Lake Winnipesaukee, could pull a similar trick with a massive, multi-sided expansion that would include the footprint of the overgrown and mostly forgotten Alpine Ridge. Per the Laconia Daily Sun:
Set aside, for a moment, that trail count is a terrible way to measure a ski resort’s size (Bretton Woods and Snowmass both advertise 98 trails – which mountain do you suppose is larger?) – this expansion would transform Gunstock. While it is a good mountain in a good location, Gunstock has long been constrained by its single summit lift. A trio of support lifts rise to mid-mountain, but, as general manager Tom Day pointed out to me on The Storm Skiing Podcast earlier this year, people want to ski top to bottom. Installing two additional summit lifts and expanding terrain in multiple directions would catapult Gunstock into the same league as the other large New Hampshire ski areas – Bretton Woods, Loon, Attitash, Cannon, Waterville Valley – and continue its long turnaround from a debt-ridden ward of the state to what Day now calls a “self-sustaining business.”
While the mountain will not reveal full details of the expansion until Dec. 4, some elements of it have been broiling for years. The “East Drainage” portion of the podcast is what Gunstock has formerly called “Southwest Pistol,” going skier’s right off the Pistol quad. While Day told me on the podcast that the ski area had at one time envisioned three trails terminating at the top of Pistol, the new plan suggests a summit lift could rise out of this terrain.
Alpine Ridge rises 400 vertical feet on Mount Rowe, skier’s left of Gunstock. Day told me on the podcast that he’s hiked most of the old trail network and imagines some of that could be mirrored in any expansion and served by a quad (most likely a fixed-grip).
He also told me that the base of this area would likely be the site of the hotel. The trail network, abandoned sometime in the 1980s, is no longer visible on Google Maps. The line of the original Gunstock single-chair, which ran from near the bottom of the current Penny Pitou lift to the top of Mount Rowe, remains intact, however. It’s unclear if the ski area would revitalize this lift line or connect with Mount Rowe from the current summit.
The third section of the proposed expansion is, as far as I know, new. It sits north-northwest of the current terrain, and the land “is not owned by Gunstock,” according to New England Ski Industry News. While the mountain has yet to provide details about what kind of terrain sits in that section, the third summit lift could rise out of what appears to be uncut forest.
New Hampshire has no shortage of ski areas: 27 operated in the state last year, according to the National Ski Areas Association. It does, however, have a shortage of destination-size ski areas: Bretton Woods, the biggest in the state, is just the 12th largest mountain in New England by skiable acreage (eight of the top 11 are in Vermont, the other three sit in Maine). The four largest ski areas in the state – Bretton Woods, Loon, Attitash, and Cannon – combined claim less skiable acreage than Killington.
This landscape is evolving. Large expansions are in various states of permitting and clearing at Ragged*, Waterville Valley, and Mount Sunapee. Les Otten wants to build the largest ski area in the Northeast at the abandoned Balsams ski area in the state’s far north. I hope they all happen. The state’s current ski footprint is too constrained to manage the hordes trampling north out of Boston on weekends and holidays. Add any measurable amount of natural snow, and it’s gridlock at the lifts. It’s time to go big.
*I haven’t seen an update on Ragged’s expansion in a while, though you can see on Google Maps that the resort has cut a bunch of the trails:
Posted from The Storm Skiing Journal
