GILFORD — Many of those who come to the Gunstock Mountain Resort are unaware of the ski area’s history, or even of the fact that it is a county-owned recreation area. They may hear of the current controversy surrounding its plans for expansion, but do not understand how anyone could question an operation that in recent years has posted success after success.
Gunstock, like many early ski areas, owes its existence to the skiers themselves, members of the Winnipesaukee Ski Club who created trails on Gunstock Mountain, Belknap Mountain, and Piper Mountain. The ski club, now known as Gunstock Ski Club, formed in 1918, and “snow trains” brought skiers and spectators to the area from population centers like Boston to watch ski races, including the 1932 United States Eastern Amateur Ski Association championships.
It was during the Great Depression of the 1930s that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration came to Belknap Mountain to install a ski jump, a slalom course, and new ski trails. The Belknap Mountains Recreation Area officially opened on February 28, 1937, with a ski jumping event.
In 1940-41, a $100,000 ski lodge was built, using stone quarried from Cobble Mountain and local timber.
The Belknap Mountains Recreation Area came into its own under Frank “Fritzie” Baer, who took over as manager in April 1950, bringing his love of motorcycles with him. In 1938, he organized a motorcycle rally there that drew an estimated 10,000 people. The Gunstock Hillclimb would become part of Laconia Motorcycle Week, which kicks off this weekend.
Under Baer, the recreation area broke financial records and installed the first t-bar for skiers in 1954-55. Baer had plans to greatly expand the area, but he was replaced by Warren Warner as general manager in 1959, when the Belknap County Delegation passed legislation to establish a five-member Gunstock Area Commission to operate the renamed Gunstock Recreation Area.
Mother Nature
Gunstock replaced outdated equipment during the 1970s when Ernest Hegi and Dick Tapply served as general managers but the updates could not compete with Mother Nature. Several bad winters hurt revenues and Gunstock needed $150,000 in bridge loans to stay in business.
Nevertheless, Gunstock undertook a $10 million modernization effort in the mid-1980s. John Vorel took over as general manager in 1991, focusing on improved snowmaking, night skiing, and the launch of tubing.
He was followed by Greg Goddard, who initiated a $2.1 million project to provide off-season recreation, including a treetop obstacle course, high-speed zip lines, and Segway tours. In 2016, Gunstock added a $2.6 million mountain coaster.
Those initiatives put Gunstock in a position where it was relying on bridge loans from the county to continue operations during the off-season. The $950,000 bridge loan in 2016 followed Gunstock’s worst ski season in decades, and set up the clash between the Gunstock Area Commission and the Belknap County Delegation that continues today.
Tom Day, who took over as general manager and was named president of Gunstock two years ago, says Mother Nature continues to be the biggest challenge.
“We’ve got 13 weeks to make money,” Day said during an interview at his office last month. “We opened December 10 and we closed April 3, and basically, between when you open until you get to Christmas week, you’re not really doing a whole lot of business. Christmas weekend is big: 25 percent of your business happens that week, so you hope no bad weather happens Christmas week, but it always does. And then you hope you get through Martin Luther King weekend without any problems weather-wise, but you always do. Then you hope for February vacation week. If you can get two out of three, you’re doing pretty well.”
Making It Pay
Day did not plan on a career revolving around skiing. He majored in elementary education at Plymouth State College, but started working as a lift attendant at Waterville Valley right after college. He took over lift maintenance there and eventually became general manager from 1994 to 2010. When Waterville was acquired by a new company, Day facilitated the sale, then, “I basically retired,” he said.
“They were a great company to work for, and they taught me a lot,” Day said.
During retirement, he took a job helping a manufacturing company that was having financial problems, then worked as an independent operational inspector for an insurance company.
“It gave me a lot of exposure to about 50 ski areas, watching how they operate,” he recalled. “I would spend the day there talking with the rental shop people and see how they do things insurance-wise, and then I’d go up the mountain and ski wth the mountain ops guys and see what they do for avalanche control, with maintenance, safety, and all that kind of stuff. And because I was an operations guy to start with, I had a pretty good rapport with those guys.”
When he was approached by Rusty McLear and Alex Ray to help establish the welcome centers on Interstate 93, he got involved with the construction of the restaurants and stores.
Then he heard that Greg Goddard was retiring from Gunstock in the fall of 2019.
“I had some discussions with a couple of board members and threw my hat in the ring because I was interested in the ski area, and also I heard that there was a potential master plan development discussed, and that interested me because I’ve been involved in a lot of that.”
He started at Gunstock in January 2020 — and then the pandemic hit. He was forced to furlough half the staff that summer, bringing them back only when it was time to prepare for ski season.
“COVID was a tough, tough thing to deal with because you will get 50 percent less people in the lodge. … Your lift could run basically at about 50 percent capacity because you couldn’t load people that weren’t in the same party. There were all kinds of hurdles we had.”
Making it through that winter strengthened Gunstock, however.
“We made a lot of decisions, myself and the senior team, about how we thought this company could be run a little more [profitably],” Day said. “A lot of discounting was going on, so we did away with the discounting, and we had to limit ticket sales because you can have only so many people in there. So COVID gave us a little leg up on implementing a bunch of things people would not have necessarily thought was a good idea.”
Gunstock promoted season passes, which brought in money ahead of time, making it unnecessary to borrow money to get through the summer.
Not only did those steps give Gunstock a financial edge, it made skier visits much more appealing.
“Overall, we think the guest experience is so much better because you’re not jammed into a lodge, you’re not waiting in line for your tickets. We’ve pushed online ticket sales, and we created a free bag check downstairs in the stone cellar.”
He explained, “One of my goals when I got here was why do we need to borrow money to keep running? Why don’t we have money? So we haven’t asked to borrow money. We have a substantial amount of money in the bank. Our cash flow is high enough that you put a lot towards your capital improvements.”
Last year, Gunstock spend $2.4 million on capital improvements without borrowing, and Day predicts they will be able to spend $3.8 million on capital improvements this year.
“A big chunk of that is new snowmaking,” Day said.
Next: The Fight With The Delegation
This story originally appeared in the Laconia Daily Sun.