It took nearly 10 minutes of deliberation, two bidders dropping out and a back-and-forth bidding war amounting to $210,000 before a developer secured the rights to the former Granite Gorge Ski Area property along with the intent to reopen it for recreation.
Between breaks of silence, bidders at Friday’s foreclosure auction raised the stakes from an opening bid of $240,000 to a winning bid of $430,000 on site at the property, located along Route 9 in Roxbury. Bryan Granger, the senior vice president of Keene-based wholesale grocery company C&S Wholesale Grocers, clinched the final bid.
Granger represented Granite Gorge Partnership, LLC at the auction, which claims itself to be a local group of Keene investors with a “shared desire of returning winter and summer activities to Granite Gorge in a safe and inclusive manner,” according to a media statement Granger provided to The Sentinel.
The statement said the partnership reviewed the state of the ski area ahead of the auction and conducted an analysis of the chair and surface ski lifts.
“Plans are now being developed for lift repair, snowmaking, grooming and various other facility upgrades, with the goal of returning winter and summer operations as soon as reasonably possible,” the statement read.
The property’s opening bid was based on the mortgage amount facing foreclosure, according to Howard Lane of law firm Lane & Bentley, who led the auction. After the auction, Lane said he was interested in seeing how the partnership fares in bringing Granite Gorge back.
“An awful lot of kids in Keene learned how to ski here, including my kids, and it’s kind of a family tradition,” he said. “The problem [owning a ski area] is you’re at the mercy of the weather, and if the weather doesn’t cooperate, you’re dead.”
Before the bidding began, Lane informed prospective bidders they would be taking on just under $33,000 in unpaid real estate taxes with the purchase of the property. The partnership said it hopes to close its purchase of Granite Gorge within 45 days of the Friday auction, per its media statement.
Others vying for the property included Nick Williamson, the owner of a contractor business in Massachusetts, who also wanted to restore the ski area to its former glory as he said his family loves to ski, though he noted hadn’t operated a ski slope previously.
“This would’ve been out of my realm, but I just saw it in its state of affairs now and figured that’d be fun to fix up,” Williamson said following the sale. “I have some property up in Windsor, [N.H.,] and every time I drive to go to Keene and Home Depot, I’ve seen it.”
Williamson dipped out of the auction at around $400,000, saying he was uncertain whether he could recoup the investment if he had bid at a higher price.
“I was just running the numbers and I think anything more than that could be tough, at least initially,” he said. “I think there’s some value here, but you’ve got to be able to make the numbers.”
The Granite Gorge property first opened as a ski area in 1959 as Pinnacle Mountain and closed in the 1970s, a Sentinel report from 2003 stated. It reopened in 2003 under its current name when the Baybutt brothers purchased the land but has remained closed since 2019 after a series of near-foreclosures and reported safety infractions that troubled the site starting in 2013.
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