Snow sports: Reborn, rebuilt Attitash Mountain Resort ready for action

Vail Resorts, the giant Colorado-based ski area owner, decided to put a 33-year-old former terrain park guy in charge of Attitash, the classic mountain in Bartlett, New Hampshire, that has long held a strong attraction for Central Massachusetts skiers.

It turns out that moving Greg Gavrilets up the chain to the Attitash GM job was a really good idea.

Gavrilets, a young veteran of the ski business, started as a ski patroller and then terrain park manager at Ober Gatlinburg, the ski area nestled in his home state of Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains. He went on to GM posts at a couple of popular now VR-owned ski areas in the Midwest before arriving at Attitash, picking up an MBA along the way.

Bringing back a venerable ski area

The ski area, a short ride from the bustling ski town of North Conway, opens for the season Friday.

Gavrilets has achieved plenty in the 14 months he’s been GM of Attitash, pushing through much-needed infrastructure improvements that are critical to the dependable high-quality skiing and riding experience that customers have come to expect. That’s mostly good snow and safe, reliable lifts.

One big project for Gavrilets over the summer was finally extending snowmaking to Wilfred’s Gawm, the iconic, plunging black diamond run from the Attitash summit that in sparser snow years often has resembled the boulder-strewn surface of the moon.

Doing that “made all the sense in the world,” Gavrilets said. “That’s the underlying theme for this whole mountain in general is the rebirth and rebuilding of Attitash.

“It’s no secret to anybody that there’s a lot of deferred maintenance on this mountain,” he said.

New talent at old resorts

Gavrilets is part of a cadre of up-and-coming managers in VR’s Northeast talent stable.

It says a lot that VR is promoting young, innovative managers — including a notable number of women — to run its classic New England resorts. VR’s portfolio in the region also includes Crotched, Sunapee (whose new GM I also talked to), Wildcat, Mount Snow, Okemo and Stowe.

VR had developed a reputation for corporate aloofness in recent years, as well triggering a certain animosity among some ski community locals and others who think the ski giant’s relatively affordable Epic Pass model, as well as Alterra’s Ikon Pass, has swamped many ski slopes and towns with too many people.

But VR has opened up to the outside world much more recently, in the process humanizing itself to some degree. Its top managers finally are talking to the media and showing they have vision for and knowledge about their individual resorts that is not simply dictated from above at corporate headquarters in Broomfield, Colorado.

The model for this new breed of mountain manager is someone who came up through the ranks, loves to ski, gets along with people, uses data analytics to make informed complex decisions, and is unafraid to shake things up and try new approaches.

I jumped at the chance to speak with Gavrilets recently because Attitash, with its swooping, serpentine steeps cut into White Mountain granite, is one of my favorite places in New England skiing but has languished over the past decade or so and suffered from lift problems and snowmaking lapses. I wanted to learn about what’s been going on over there.

“We spent a lot of time this summer replacing snowmaking line, adding hydrants and adjusting valves.” Gavrilets said.

Gavrilets also oversaw the reconnecting of the water system between Attitash and Bear Peak, which enables the resort to supply the lower Attitash slopes with more water for snowmaking.

“This is going to lead to more efficient snowmaking, specifically early season so we’re not splitting our efforts as we have in the past,” he said.

Attitash also did plenty of maintenance work on the Flying Yankee high-speed quad.

Challenges

The Mount Washington Valley, home to Attitash’s sister area, Wildcat — plus Cranmore, Black Mountain and King Pine, with Bretton Woods and Shawnee Peak and Sunday River in Maine within easy driving distance — has been staggering through a dry fall akin to last year and is getting a late start.

By the way, the North Conway area, the epicenter of Granite State skiing, is popular among Central Massachusetts skiers even if Mount Snow and Stratton are a bit closer in southern Vermont. That’s largely because Massachusetts has more of a cultural affinity with New Hampshire, sharing a long border with the state.

Most of the ski areas in and near the valley, and, indeed, New England and the rest of the country also are coping with a labor shortage, as is the larger economy as a whole.

Gavrilets and other VR managers say they are dealing with it by cross-training workers to do different jobs, focusing on capital improvements and not overextending themselves with services they can’t deliver because of lack of staff.

“The rumor mills have been swirling, but we have a full crew of snowmakers, and they’re going 24/7 right now,” he said.

A bright spot for Attitash is the possible opening this season of an on-mountain bar on weekends and holidays, in an old building off the Upper Saco trail that Gavrilets and his crews have rehabbed. That depends on hiring enough staff, though.

Looking ahead at Attitash-Bear Peak

As many know, VR included Attitash in its aggressive $320 million lift upgrade plan, which will result in 19 new chairlifts across 14 of its North American resorts for the 2022-23 season.

Attitash next summer is slated to replace its old side-by-side East and West double chairs with a fixed grip quad that will deliver skiers and riders faster and more reliably to the junction above the Far Out beginner trail that takes you to the Bear Notch Pass connector trail to Bear Peak.

Improving the ability to get back and forth between the quite distinct Attitash and Bear Peak mountain bases is important.

Speaking of Bear Peak, it’s home to the happening Abenaki Parks terrain park area, which has benefited from Gavrilets’ expertise and interest in parks and also expertise and features from Mount Snow’s world-class Carinthia terrain park complex. Attitash is planning to bring events back to Abenaki Parks this season, Gavrilets said.

Long term, Gavrilets said he is planning a multiyear upgrade of the somewhat disorganized Bear Peak base complex.

The eternal question

I’ve asked the same question of every Attitash exec I’ve talked to over the course of many years.

It is: “When will you replace the horrid, slow, windy and cold Summit Triple?”

That potential replacement wasn’t on the big VR capital projects list.

Here’s Gavrilets’ response.

“It’s a high priority for both the resort and the enterprise in general. I hope we’ll have some positive news about that lift replacement in the future, and it’s something that I'm working on and that our entire team is working on.”

New Sunapee GM

Meanwhile, I hit Sunapee last Saturday a day after the biggest southern New Hampshire ski area, situated in idyllic state parkland above beautiful Lake Sunapee, opened for the season.

The drive to Newbury, New Hampshire, clocked in at 1 hour, 52 minutes, from downtown Worcester. Sunapee always has been the easiest big-mountain day trip from Worcester, mostly on super highways. Mount Snow in Dover, Vermont, is a close second.

The snow guns were in full artillery mode on this cold and clear day, and I lapped top-to-bottom runs on the four or so trails that were open on pretty firm snow.

After, I met up with new GM Pete Disch in his office in the old Spruce Lodge, equipped with a standing desk, two monitors and a big-screen TV. We both still had on our ski boots as we talked.

Young VR veteran

Disch, 34, a Minnesota native who started at VR’s big Keystone, Colorado resort and was most recently GM of Wilmot Mountain, a VR-owned area in Wisconsin, came to Sunapee in June 2020. He replaced a former Keystone colleague, Tracy Bartels, who moved to the GM slot at Mount Snow.

Disch is an absurdly fit ski nut with a well-used Suunto sports watch always on his wrist. He skis every day.

He said he is intent on preserving and burnishing Sunapee’s unique character as a sort of rustic hideout spot — albeit with ample, varied terrain including great woods, steeps and cruisers — for both longtime second homeowners and day-trippers from Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire.

“What's really jumped out at me since coming here is, you know, just the shared passion that people have here about this place,” he said. “It’s really that nice place where you can get away from the city.”

Tradition and data

Along with tradition, Disch emphasized that he’s ramped up his use of data and analytics since the first COVID-19 season started last year, when he needed to optimize lift capacity when ski areas were only allowed to partially load lifts.

The data tells him and his team how fast certain lifts need to spin at certain times to handle the most people and distribute them around Sunapee’s four pretty distinct sub-areas, and also what configuration of lift-line “maze” works best and at what times.

“We had to maximize capacity with the hand we were given, and we learned a ton about it,” he said. “We tried things we had never thought of before.

“You would think standard thought process is turning a lift to maximum speed, that’s going to be our maximum capacity,” he added. “ But that’s actually not true. You have to look at what the terrain is, the skill level of the skiers riding the lift.”

Staffing in a tight labor market

“Some of the ways we adapted was with staff sharing,” Disch said.

For example, with ski school demand down during the pandemic in the 2020-21 season, Disch reasoned that he should try to use instructors in other positions.

“We had all these people who were ready to work and wanted to be engaged, so the way we utilized them was to be a greeter over here, or go scan tickets for a little bit, or help park cars in the morning,” he said. “Everybody’s so passionate about this place and wanting it to be successful.”

—Contact Shaun Sutner by email at s_sutner@yahoo.com.

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: General manager Greg Gavrilets pushes improvements at Attitash Mountain Resort