I was employed by New Hampshire state parks for 42 years as a seasonal and full-time employee.
I started out as a laborer and retired as a regional supervisor in 2004. I have a warm place in my heart for our parks system.
I believe the people who work for parks are among the most dedicated state employees, and I’m proud of them and proud to have been one of them.
I do not support the proposed west bowl expansion at Mount Sunapee. My reasons are many, but I will mention only a few.
I have been reluctant to speak out in the past because I did not want anyone to think I was speaking against the state park staff or Commissioner Jeffrey Rose of the Department of Resources and Economic Development. I am not and will not.
During my tenure with parks, I spent many winters at Mount Sunapee. Most of the time I worked as a groomer and was the head groomer for several years.
I knew every inch of the trails. The areas of trails that face the west do not hold snow well. There is no reason to expect that will not also happen on the new trails in the expansion area.
The ski area will have to make more snow per acre on these trails than it does on its other trails in order to maintain adequate snow coverage. When this snow melts, it will drain toward Gunnison Brook in Goshen.
All of the water used for snowmaking at Mount Sunapee comes from Lake Sunapee. When snowmaking was proposed in the early 1980s, opponents were assured that all water taken from the lake would drain back to the lake except for a small amount lost to natural causes, such as evaporation.
That promise will be broken when the first snow gun is fired up in the west bowl.
There have been very few, if any, letters concerning wildlife.
In my time at the mountain, there was a large deer yard west of Ridge Trail (today’s Outer Ridge). I have looked at the proposal maps and I cannot say for certain if any trail will go through the yard. At the very least, it does look to me that the yard will be between two trails.
One has to wonder how the increased activity (noise from around-the-clock snowmaking, grooming machines working on all sides, skiers, etc.) will affect the deer in the yard.
A letter in a local paper claimed, “The flexibility to grow is a simple business necessity for a ski area to be competitive.” If that is true, then all ski areas are doomed to fail.
All ski areas face limits to their growth through expansion (the letter implied that growth and expansion were the same). Ski areas face limits to expansions, such as unsuitable terrain or property ownership.
Ski areas find other ways to be competitive. For example, they find ways to inflate the trail count without adding new trails.
Trails are split, and the top has one name and bottom another; crossover links are named, and areas that aren’t trails at all get names.
How many Mount Sunapee skiers have said, “Let’s take a run on Flyway?” If the management of the ski area is of the same mold as the writer of the letter to the editor, then I must ask what will their next proposal for expansion be?
Mount Sunapee won’t fail without the west bowl. The management has proven itself to be creative in its successful efforts to compete with other ski areas.
(Don Davis lives in North Sutton.)