Stowe gets a needed lift
By Gene Sloan, USA TODAY
STOWE, Vt. — Rod Kessler doesn’t mince words when he talks about the old chairlift to the summit of Spruce Peak.
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Small-town Vermont: The Stowe Community Center looks peaceful under a mantle of snow, which typically blankets the village from Nov. through April. |
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| Gene J. Puskar, AP |
“It was a tough ride,” says the head of operations for Stowe Mountain Resort, recalling the infamously frigid crosswinds that would buffet skiers on the 13-minute trip to the top.
Like so much else in this aging grande dame of New England resort towns, once known as the Ski Capital of the East, the slow-moving Big Spruce lift hadn’t gotten an overhaul since the area’s heyday in the ’50s. It wasn’t just old; it was a relic.
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SKIING STOWE |
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 Vertical drop: 2,360 feet
Skiable acres: 485
Annual snowfall: 333 inches
Trail mix: Beginner, 16%; intermediate, 59%; expert, 25%
Ticket prices: One-day adult pass, $74; five-day pass, $224.
Information: 800-253-4754; stowe.com. |
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But now, as Kessler eagerly points out in a midday ski tour, things finally are beginning to change — and change big — both on and off the mountain.
Big Spruce is gone, replaced this year by a new high-speed lift that reaches the summit in under 6 minutes. And that’s just a small piece of a $300 million, 10-year extreme makeover of the ski area now underway that developers hope will catapult Stowe back to the top spot among Eastern resorts.
“There’s not a resort in the world that we will not compete with,” boasts hotelier James Horsman, the Ritz-Carlton veteran tapped to run a new ski-in, ski-out luxury hotel and spa that will form the cornerstone of a posh new pedestrian village. It’s designed to lure vacationers from across the USA and even Europe.
The 170-room property, now under construction at the base of Spruce Peak, won’t open until next year. But already, the first elements of the new base area — luxury ski-in, ski-out cabins — are beginning to bustle with well-heeled skiers.
And there have been significant changes on the mountain over the past year, (more…)
