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Who

Susan Donnelly, General Manager of Mount Sunapee (and former General Manager of Crotched Mountain)

Recorded on

November 4, 2024

About Crotched

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Vail Resorts, which also owns:

Located in: Francetown, New Hampshire

Year founded: 1963 (as Crotched East); 1969 (as Onset, then Onset Bobcat, then Crotched West, now present-day Crotched); entire complex closed in 1990; West re-opened by Peak Resorts in 2003 as Crotched Mountain

Pass affiliations:

* Epic Pass, Epic Local Pass, Northeast Value Epic Pass: unlimited access

* Northeast Midweek Epic Pass: midweek access, including holidays

Closest neighboring public ski areas: Pats Peak (:34), Granite Gorge (:39), Arrowhead (:41), McIntyre (:50), Mount Sunapee (:51)

Base elevation: 1,050 feet

Summit elevation: 2,066 feet

Vertical drop: 1,016

Skiable Acres: 100

Average annual snowfall: 65 inches

Trail count: 25 (28% beginner, 40% intermediate, 32% advanced)

Lift count: 5 (1 high-speed quad, 1 fixed-grip quad, 1 triple, 1 double, 1 surface lift – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Crotched’s lift fleet)

History: Read New England Ski History’s overview of Crotched Mountain

About Mount Sunapee

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: The State of New Hampshire; operated by Vail Resorts, which also operates resorts detailed in the chart above.

Located in: Newbury, New Hampshire

Year founded: 1948

Pass affiliations:

* Epic Pass, Epic Local Pass, Northeast Value Epic Pass: unlimited access

* Northeast Midweek Epic Pass: midweek access, including holidays

Closest neighboring public ski areas: Pats Peak (:28), Whaleback (:29), Arrowhead (:29), Ragged (:38), Veterans Memorial (:42), Ascutney (:45), Crotched (:48), Quechee (:50), Granite Gorge (:51), McIntyre (:53)

Base elevation: 1,233 feet

Summit elevation: 2,743 feet

Vertical drop: 1,510 feet

Skiable Acres: 233 acres

Average annual snowfall: 130 inches

Trail count: 67 (29% beginner, 47% intermediate, 24% advanced)

Lift count: 8 (2 high-speed quads, 1 fixed-grip quad, 2 triples, 3 conveyors – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Mount Sunapee’s lift fleet.)

History: Read New England Ski History’s overview of Mount Sunapee

Why I interviewed her

It’s hard to be small in New England and it’s hard to be south in New England. There are 35 New England ski areas with vertical drops greater than 1,100 feet, and Crotched is not one of them. There are 44 New England ski areas that average more than 100 inches of snow per winter, and Crotched is not one of those either. Crotched does have a thousand vertical feet and a high-speed lift and a new baselodge and a snowmaking control room worthy of a nuclear submarine. Which is a pretty good starter kit for a successful ski area. But it’s not enough in New England.

To succeed as a ski area in New England, you need a Thing. The most common Things are to be really really nice or really really gritty. Stratton or Mad River. Okemo or Magic. Sunday River or Black Mountain of Maine. The pitch is either “you’ll think you’re at Deer Valley” or “you’ll descend the hill on ice skates and you’ll like it.” But Crotched’s built-along-a-state-highway normalness precludes arrogance, and its mellow terrain lacks the attitude for even modest braggadocio. It’s not a small ski area, but it’s not big enough to be a mid-sized one, either. The terrain is fine, but it’s not the kind of place you need to ski on purpose, or more than once. It’s a fine local, but not much else, making Crotched precisely the kind of mountain that you would have expected to be smothered by the numerous larger and better ski areas around it before it could live to see the internet. And that’s exactly what happened. Crotched, lacking a clear Thing, went bust in 1990.

The ski area, undersized and average, should have melted back into the forest by now. But in 2002, then-budding Peak Resorts crept out of its weird Lower Midwest manmade snowhole on a reverse Lewis & Clark Expedition to explore the strange and murky East. And as they hacked away the brambles around Crotched’s boarded-up baselodge, they saw not a big pile of mediocrity, but a portal into the gold-plated New England market. And they said “this could work if we can just find a Thing.” And that Thing was night-skiing with attitude, built on top of $10 million in renovations that included a built-from-scratch snowmaking system.

The air above the American mountains is filled with such wild notions. “We’re going to save Mt. Goatpath. It’s going to be bigger than Vail and deeper than Alta and higher than Telluride.” And everyone around them is saying, “You know this is, like, f*****g Connecticut, right?” But if practical concerns killed all bad ideas, then no one would keep reptiles as pets. Everyone else is happy with cats or dogs, sentient mammals of kindred disposition with humans, but this idiot needs a 12-foot-long boa constrictor that he keeps in a 6x3 fishtank. It helps him get chicks or something. It’s his thing. And damned if it doesn’t work.

What we talked about

Transitioning from smaller, Vail-owned Crotched to larger, state-owned but Vail-operated Sunapee; “weather-proofing” Sunapee; Crotched and Sunapee – so close but so different; reflecting on the Okemo days under Triple Peaks ownership; longtime Okemo head Bruce Schmidt; reacting to Vail’s 2018 purchase of Triple Peaks; living through change; the upside of acquisitions; integrating Peak Resorts; skiing’s boys’ club; Vail Resorts’ culture of women’s advancement; why Covid uniquely challenged Crotched among Vail’s New England properties; reviving Midnight Madness; Crotched’s historic downsizing; whether the lost half of Crotched could ever be re-developed; why Crotched 2.0 is more durable than the version that shut down in 1990; Crotched’s baller snowmaking system; southern New Hampshire’s wild weather; thoughts on future Crotched infrastructure; and considering a beginner trail from Crotched’s summit.

Why now was a good time for this interview

As we swing toward the middle of the 2020s, it’s pretty lame to continue complaining about operational malfunctions in the so-called Covid season of 2020-21, but I’m going to do it anyway.

Some ski areas did a good job operating that season. For example, Pats Peak. Pats Peak was open seven days per week that winter. Pats Peak offered night skiing on all the days it usually offers night skiing. Pats Peak made the Ross Ice Shelf jealous with its snowmaking firepower. Pats Peak acted like a snosportskiing operation that had operated a snosportskiing operation in previous winters. Pats Peak did a good job.

Other ski areas did a bad job operating that season. For example, Crotched. Crotched was open whenever it decided to be open, which was not very often. Crotched, one of the great night-skiing centers in New England, offered almost no night skiing. Crotched’s snowmaking looked like what happens when you accidentally keep the garden hose running during an overnight freeze. Crotched did a bad job.

This is a useful comparison, because these two ski areas sit just 21 miles and 30 minutes apart. They are dealing with the same crappy weather and the same low-altitude draw. They are both obscured by the shadows of far larger ski areas scraping the skies just to the north. They are both small and unserious places, where the skiing is somewhat beside the point. Kids go there to pole-click one ano