Bolton Valley in Vermont provides popular Alpine touring, backcountry ski experience
He’s got the loneliest job in ski country.
The uphill lift pass checker at Bolton Valley stood alone unflinchingly in the zero-degree cold on a recent Saturday at the northern Vermont ski area’s gateway to a vast backcountry Alpine touring playground in Mount Mansfield State Forest and around the Catamount and Long trails.
The young sentinel — let’s call him by his first name, “Mike” — smiled broadly as my touring partner, Larry Sher of Arlington, Virginia, and I fished for our passes among our many wicking and insulation layers.
We then headed up the storied Bryant Trail for an hour-and-45-minute, uphill-downhill loop through at times dense and then thinned-out woods that ultimately delivered us back to the base of Bolton’s Nordic-backcountry sports center for a brown-bag lunch and welcome warmth.
On the trail of pass evaders
Passes for a day of unlimited uphill trail access are $25, but that reasonable fee doesn’t stop some “skinners” (as AT practitioners call themselves after the climbing skins they affix to the bases of their skis) on $1,000-plus touring rigs from trying to evade Bolton’s solitary pass checker.
The skinners apparently crawl through brush, hide behind trees and take evasive routes around the sports center to avoid the modest fee, most often with the pass checker in close pursuit following their stolen tracks through the snow.
“God love that guy. It’s taken a long time to work that out. For a while, it was hard to really dedicate one paid employee to be doing that all the time,” said Adam DesLauriers, 48, director of Nordic and backcountry and a Bolton Valley co-owner. “But it’s popular enough where we need it because it’s a steady stream of customers.
“You’d be surprised at the lengths people go to. I have a perfect view of it from my office,” DesLauriers said during a lunchtime chat at the sports center before Sher and I headed out for another, longer lap. “Just people sneaking around and Mike darting back and forth. Love Mike.”
It’s a good problem to have and reflects just how popular backcountry touring has become (the sport’s explosive growth has also been spurred by the “get outside” pandemic mentality) since the DesLauriers family bought back Bolton Valley in 2017 and launched what was the first Alpine touring operation of its kind in the East.
Bolton’s prominent role
Adam DesLauriers’ sister, Lindsay, is president of Bolton Valley. Brother Evan heads up special projects. Their father, Ralph DesLauriers, built the resort in the 1960s and owned and ran it for 30 years until he sold it to a bank in 1997. The elder DesLauriers is president of the board and less involved now in day-to-day operations but has been overseeing a hotel and base lodge renovation.
While other independent New England ski areas, notably Black Mountain in New Hampshire and Magic Mountain in Vermont, also have made Alpine touring a priority in recent years, Bolton’s operation is unique.
The ski area serves as a portal to 10,000 acres of backcountry that is mostly not owned by the ski area but is directly adjacent to and beyond it. Bolton, along with several nonprofit groups, maintains the uphill trails in the warm-weather months and provides some rescue services with a Nordic ski patrol and ski patrollers from the inbounds ski area.
Bolton’s perch on the edge of a ski-able wilderness, even though it is only 40 minutes from Vermont’s biggest city, Burlington, addresses the Eastern backcountry access problem that Bolton and some nonprofit groups, such as the Granite Backcountry Alliance in New Hampshire and Vermont’s RASTA, have been working on.
By contrast, backcountry skiing is so much bigger in western ski country in part because of the exponentially greater number of access points that people can drive to or even get to using public transit.
In any event, Bolton has done more than any group to promote Alpine touring in the East — and the $25 day uphill pass and $180 season pass don’t produce all that much revenue, though they bring in some.
Bolton’s Alpine touring rental fleet of Dynafit skis boots, skins and poles is ample and up to date. It’s (ungroomed) uphill trail network is extensive. The backcountry downhill routes that skiers and split boarders (snowboarders equipped to go uphill with skins) can access are nearly limitless. Meanwhile, customers can also ski up two cool routes within the resort boundaries.
Bolton offers the services of 30 backcountry guides.
Book one now.
Ski area parking and the lack thereof
Amid widespread unhappiness across the country and in New England with ski area crowding, scarce parking on busy days and the advent of paid parking at Vail Resorts-owned Mount Snow in particular, one ski area has received lots of positive media attention somehow for its new and radical parking and transit strategy.
That place is Crystal Mountain, Washington, the ski area colossus near mighty Mount Rainier that offers 2,600 acres and 3,100 vertical feet of terrain just two hours from Seattle.
As it happens, my younger brother, Adam Sutner, is vice president of business development for Crystal, which is owned by Vail Resorts competitor Alterra Mountain Co. Adam was formerly chief marketing officer at Jackson Hole and marketing director at Vail.
New ski parking paradigm
This season, Crystal drew nationwide attention when it said it would charge daily parking fees, require parking reservations on weekends and also provide free regular luxury bus service to the mountain from the closest big community — Enumclaw, a city of 12,190 about 42 miles from Seattle and 43 miles from Crystal.
“We approached this not so much as a nice-to-have amenity that we would add, but a significant attempt at shifting an age-old paradigm, which is skiers hopping in their car and driving to the slopes and expecting a parking spot right at the foot of the resort,” Adam said. “Those days are probably over, and this is the way of the future.”
That last stretch from Enumclaw to splendidly isolated Crystal on the infamous mostly two-lane state highway 410 East has become a traffic quagmire in recent years as Crystal has become more and more popular as a daytrip and overnight destination.
In addition to frequent elk crossings, compounding the nightmarish traffic is that Crystal has severely limited parking mostly because the resort is situated on U.S. Forest Service land and can’t expand its base footprint or parking.
So Crystal decided it would be logistically and ecologically sounder to charge $20 to $30 day Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays for vehicles that are not fully occupied and offer a steady stream of buses even amid COVID-19 hesitancy.
The bus program has been a success, Crystal’s data shows, according to my brother.
That 56-seat luxury coaches are equipped with bathrooms and WiFi (unlike most of highway 410) and are operated by drivers empowered to enforce mandatory masking, has helped. Crystal employees are also present at every loading to check for masks.
The parking changes, "are coupled with significant transportation options, which, in addition to being good for the environment and the experience, offer guests the opportunity to neither pay for parking nor make parking reservations,” Adam said.
Friday morning buses depart hourly and require reservations. Saturdays and Sundays feature a shuttle system with a “load and go” policy: people show up and grab the first available bus.
Crystal balances bus frequency with capacity limits at the ski area. On weekends, the overall bus capacity is for 1,200 passengers in both directions, which can amount to about 20 percent of the mountain’s total skier volume on a given weekend day.
So that takes about 600 people off the road, according to Crystal’s metric of about 2.2 passengers per car. Meanwhile, carpooling is up to 150 to 200 a weekend, which takes another 100 cars off the road.
Since instituting all the charge-for-parking and free bus program, Crystal says it has eliminated “park out” weekend days, when parking lots are full and the resort has to turn away visitors.
“Our objective with this program was twofold: one was to reduce road traffic by 10 percent and the other was to increase the average number of people per car similarly by another 10 percent,” Adam said. “The combination of those two thus far the season has basically eradicated our major congestion issues on Saturday and Sunday.”
Adam noted that a few other big ski areas, including Alta, Utah — an Alterra Ikon Pass affiliate — that are also suffering from traffic congestion are trying new parking and public transport approaches, and several other Alterra resorts are studying how they could do it.
Also, some New England ski areas are working on the parking problem. At busy Wachusett Mountain in Princeton, where three auxiliary lots often fill up at peak periods, a shuttle van picks up customers at a nearby train station who arrive on the “ski train” commuter service from Boston.
Meanwhile, for après-ski aficionados, I should note that alcoholic beverages are not permitted on Crystal buses.
“But some drivers are more easygoing than others,” Adam said with a chuckle. “To my knowledge, there have been no recorded incidents of alcohol consumption.”
Olympic success for New England ski racers
Last week, on the first day of the 2002 Beijing Winter Olympics, I quoted 1988 Olympian ski racer and longtime U.S. Ski Team member Pam Fletcher, a Westford native and product of her family’s Nashoba Valley Ski area, about the U.S. team’s chances this time.
She said she thought the team had a good chance to compete and win medals in China.
Fletcher was right.
Silver for Vermont-raised racer
Green Mountain State-bred Ryan Cochran-Siegel pulled of a spectacular silver medal-winning super giant slalom performance on Monday on the Yanqing track, joining his mother, Barbara Ann Cochran, who won a gold medal in slalom at the 1972 Winter Games in Sapporo, Japan.
Cochran-Siegel had scared ski racing fans when he nearly crashed but made a spectacular recovery in a downhill training run last week.
“Ryan just works so hard. He watches and analyzes video more than anyone,” Fletcher told me this week. “And it was a brilliant run too, especially after his wild ride on the first training run.”
And Charlemont resident Paula Moltzan, ranked world 45th in the event going into the Olympics, finished a surprising 12th in Sunday’s giant slalom, which is the slalom specialist’s second-best discipline.
Crushing early U.S. hopes for gold, though, superstar Mikaela Shiffrin crashed and skied out of the race. And a promising U.S. skier, Nina O’Brien, fell just feet from the finish in a painful tumble that left her with a fractured left leg.
“I am sad for Nina,” Fletcher said. “She was skiing so well.”
Sadly, Shiffrin, probably the greatest slalom skier of all time of any gender, crashed soon out of the gate in Tuesday’s slalom. It was shocking to see Shiffrin, a model of consistent winning excellence over the years, ski out in what was arguably the biggest race of her life.
But then again, the Olympics are just another race for elite skiers like Shiffrin, Cochran-Siegel and Moltzan, who ply the World Cup circuit year after year on considerably tougher courses with just as challenging weather.
Loss for the Worcester skiing community
Mark Welch, manager and veteran ski salesman extraordinaire at Strand’s ski shop in Worcester, who I profiled in the column last year, died unexpectedly on Sunday.
He was 51. The former ski race coach and instructor worked at the city’s 72-year ski institution for more than 22 years.
“He was a great guy, personable and very knowledgeable, with a lot of friends,” said Leif Mikkelsen, who with his twin brother Roy has run Strand’s for decades. “He studied the industry.”
My condolences to Welch’s family and friends. I enjoyed my friendship with Mark over the years.
—Contact Shaun Sutner by e-mail at s_sutner@yahoo.com.
This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Bolton Valley in Vermont provides popular Alpine touring, backcountry ski experience
