February 18, 2011
By BILL PENNINGTON
The Mount Washington Hotel in the White Mountains.
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FOR years, the problem facing the Bretton Woods ski resort has been entirely its own making: It is too perfect. Perfectly groomed. Perfectly contoured with rough edges softened. Perfectly positioned, shielded from wind and blessed with sun and snow. Perfectly tranquil, neither hurried nor crowded.
Skiers and snowboarders went knowing what to expect. And Bretton Woods, New Hampshire’s largest ski area and a historic vacation destination high in the White Mountains, has always delivered. No surprises.
Be careful what you wish for.
Skiers and snowboarders sometimes want a little unpredictability, and Bretton Woods — part of the only true Alpine range in the Eastern United States — is nestled among some of the thorniest ski mountains in America. Wildcat Mountain, just around the bend, is big, tough and often icy. Nearby Cannon Mountain hosted the first North American World Cup ski races in 1967, a series discontinued years later, some say, because Cannon was so difficult that the European elite preferred to stay away.
So, as extreme skiing and rogue backcountry experiences have become more popular in the last 15 years, many snow sports enthusiasts who wanted to be surprised, even scared, drove past Bretton Woods on the way to New Hampshire’s gnarlier options. Bretton Woods remained unmoved. It catered to its market: families and those who wanted a more pampered ski trip. In time, some younger voices called Bretton Woods “Medicare Mountain.”
As a New England native, I first skied Bretton Woods as a college student. After some desultory runs that failed to stir my youthful quest for danger, I soon left for Cannon and its frightfully steep slopes. Ten years later, on a return visit to Bretton Woods, I appreciated newly open terrain that zigzagged around the occasional rock outcropping, yet still found the place a bit tame. In the last few years, however, I started to hear that Bretton Woods, now linked to the famed and adjacent Mount Washington Hotel, was carefully recasting itself.
A college roommate now living in New Hampshire told me it had become his favorite winter destination.
“I’m telling you,” my friend said. “New terrain on the mountain, renovated hotel, dog sledding, zip lines, a spa, miles of Nordic skiing, even a nightclub.”
At Bretton Woods? Now this I had to see.
IF you don’t ski or snowboard and yet have heard of Bretton Woods, you probably paid attention in your high school history or economics class. In the summer of 1944, with most of the world secure in the belief that the Allies would win World War II, delegates from 44 nations convened at the mountain’s Mount Washington Hotel to try to solve a world economically wrecked by the fighting. About 1,000 people arrived at a hotel built in 1902 in the tradition of the grand late-19th-century hotels of northern New England.
The Mount Washington Hotel was, and may still be, the largest wooden structure in New England, a palace built for the rich of New York, Boston and Philadelphia. Constructed on 10,000 acres by the New York rail and coal magnate Joseph Stickney, the hotel’s Spanish Renaissance Revival exterior and French Renaissance-style interior were created by 250 Italian craftsmen lured from Boston. The Great Hall lobby has 23-foot ceilings and Tiffany stained-glass windows that also adorn the adjoining dining and meeting rooms. There is a wraparound veranda that extends for a quarter mile.
The hotel had all kinds of innovations and idiosyncrasies: Turkish baths, a squash court, boot and gun rooms, a bowling alley and billiard parlor. Thomas Edison installed the electricity and a stock ticker wired directly to Wall Street. The Italian workers, meanwhile, imparted their own old-world superstitions. The number of steps to the floors, for example, were varied — 33 to the second floor from the main registration area but only 31 steps in the south tower staircase. Why? To confuse ghosts.
The economic conference — delegates stayed for three weeks — and the international publicity it generated revived the hotel, which had been battered by the Depression. But while the meetings, which established the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and produced what is still known as the Bretton Woods agreement, revived the world economy, the post-World War II renewal for New Hampshire’s White Mountain resorts was short-lived. Soon the Mount Washington was the last of the grand hotels standing. Never open during the winter season, it endured with the help of hiking trips, summer pro tennis tournaments and waves of golfers arriving for its championship-level golf course designed by the noted golf architect Donald Ross. When the Bretton Woods ski area opened in 1973, the hundreds of thousands of new visitors to the area stayed in cozy condominiums and smaller nearby inns. By 1991, the hotel, worn and threadbare, was put up for auction.
Local businessmen bought the hotel and, six years later, took over the ski area, too. Dozens of trails and lifts were added. The Nordic trail network was enlarged, and in 1999 a winterized hotel opened for the ski season and instantly became one of the largest and most majestic ski lodges in the country.
The mountain continued to develop its reputation for having the best intermediate slopes in the East, earning a loyal following that loved to cruise the miles of genteel, groomed corduroy.
In the latter part of the last decade, and especially since the Omni Corporation began managing the property in 2009, the resort decided to reach for more. The ski area would stretch its horizons and boundaries, and the 200-room hotel would be updated in the hopes of being more than a landlocked Titanic.
I HAVE three ski-racing children, and upon arriving in northern New Hampshire in the middle of a Friday last month, there was no chance we were checking into the hotel before skiing first. Within minutes, thanks to two high-speed lifts, we were flying down the renowned Bretton Woods groomers. I immediately felt as if my memory had deceived me. No, these were not death-defying runs, but they had an old New England feel, with dips and hollows that induced an entertaining rhythm of linked turns.
We ventured over to the West Mountain trails, opened in the late 1990s, and found the long Starr King trail, which had several good drops and pitches that demanded attention. On subsequent runs, we found small detours next to Starr King that cut through the woods, like John Grave’s Glades. These were 40-second sojourns, not exactly classic backcountry, but engaging diversions that I didn’t recall from past visits. Then again, Bretton Woods has grown to 102 trails, more than doubling what it had when I first visited in the 1980s.
On the east end of the area there was also the Rosebrook Canyon Glades, and it was hard not to enjoy a Bretton Woods tradition — weaving through stands of birch and pine trees. It had not been a great week for snowfall, and yet there were a few fresh inches of the white stuff underfoot, a product of what is known locally as the “Bretton Woods flurries.” Sandwiched between two notches in the mountains, Bretton Woods’s peaks get snow even when adjacent areas do not.
“Even when the parking lot gets nothing, there will be three inches of snow up on the trail network,” said Chris Ellms, director of ski operations at Bretton Woods.
Reliable snowfall fits Bretton Woods’s unintimidating aura. As does a trail system that makes sure there are beginner routes from every lift and that every trail filters to the same base lodge so that families can congregate in the same place.
This winter, in an effort to add some spice to the trail mix, Bretton Woods opened 30 new acres of glades on Mount Stickney, a rounded undeveloped hilltop that will most likely be the site of future trail expansion. These new trails, accessible from the top of the Mount Rosebrook Express Summit quad, have a slightly remote, isolated ambience.
“It’s a throwback experience, a soft backcountry,” Mr. Ellms said. “That’s what we’re after. We’re never going to be Stowe’s ultra steep Front Four trails and we don’t want to be. But we can give more of a sense of difficulty. We can change the surroundings a little.”
One other thing the Mount Stickney trails offer: unparalleled views of a sprawling white dwelling with a bright red roof on the valley floor.
“What’s that?” my 11-year-old son, Jack, asked, pointing at the Mount Washington Hotel, which almost seemed perched between the tips of our skis as we stood at trail’s edge.
“That’s where we’re staying,” I answered.
“Let’s go there now,” he said.
No one objected. It was about 2 p.m. In the 15 years we’ve been skiing as a family, I don’t recall any of my children ever wanting to head to the hotel early on a trip’s first day of skiing.
“It looks like a castle,” Jack said.
SINCE 1902, the best seat in the house at the Mount Washington Hotel has probably been next to the oversize hearth opposite the portico entrance. Observing the arrival of new guests — part of a 109-year procession — remains an education in itself.
George Miglierini, supervisor of the laborers who built the hotel, was still on the job in 1945 when he told a Boston Globe reporter that he lamented the new kind of Mount Washington guest. “Now people must rush around and play games,” Mr. Miglierini said. “They must be kept amused every minute.”
Watching the cavalcade bursting through the Mount Washington entry on the Friday night of our visit proved that things have not changed much in 60-plus years. The roofs of arriving cars and a succession of bellmen’s trolleys were piled high with downhill and Nordic skis, snowshoes, ice skates, swimming pool floatation devices and what looked like rock-climbing gear.
It was going to be a busy weekend.
While my wife and I were sipping wine by the hearth, our children were already in one of several Jacuzzis and soon headed for the heated outdoor pool. Facials were reserved for the next day. As was a late afternoon of dog sledding. Plans were made for a Saturday-night dinner but with an understanding that several runs on the nearby tubing hill would come first. There would be, of course, more Alpine skiing on tap. And Nordic skiing for my wife and one daughter in the afternoon.
All of this had been accomplished not long after check-in with a single visit to the concierge desk, which is really more like an activities reservation center at an amusement park. At other hotels, the concierge might be arranging dinner reservations or finding show tickets. But restaurant options in the Bretton Woods area are limited, there are no Broadway shows, and the closest movie theater is about 15 miles away. No, people flocked to the concierge to make plans to get outside and ski, hike, snowshoe, climb or zip through the air attached to a wire.
Bretton Woods was once understandably worried that its image as a traditional, even timeworn, resort was snuffing out its future. Its new owners are trying to overcome that reputation by embracing the resort’s peerless location — a vast, untamed and original outdoor playground — while capitalizing upon and modernizing its past.
With this in mind there is Wi-Fi in all the rooms, flat-screen TVs and marble bathrooms. As part of a $60 million restoration project in the last three years, each of the hotel’s five restaurants and bars have been refurbished with new menus, including a pub-style steakhouse with a farm-to-table dining menu. The Cave, an underground, Prohibition-era speakeasy, maintains that hideaway ambience with a narrow, tunnel-like entranceway and a dark, distressed wood interior. It also has late-night entertainment.
But the melding of old and new may be most evident in the doors of the hotel rooms, which feature a no-touch wireless entry system in two-inch-thick original mahogany doors that have graced the rooms since 1902.
The hotel also added a 25,000-square-foot spa and a 20,000-square-foot convention center, but those additions were constructed low to the ground and at the back of the property so as not to interfere with the view of Mount Washington from any of the first-floor windows.
The result is bustle within a timelessness, and according to Larry Magor, the resort’s managing director who came to Bretton Woods in November 2009, business is up because of it: “We just kept promoting the ski area and all the other things we have to do up here. Business went up 20 percent in the first year.”
On Friday evening, I looked out toward the snowy mountains from the grand hall and saw a wedding party posing for pictures after a rehearsal dinner next to a couple gliding around on the hotel skating rink. Far off in the distance, people were returning from a snowshoeing expedition, and very near the hotel — so close I feared they would end up in the background of the wedding party photos — were three children I recognized in terry cloth robes scampering up a heated walkway from the outdoor pool.
THERE is no time to prepare for the sudden and powerful pull of six barking and excited Alaskan husky sled dogs. The driver gives a command, and with a jerk they dash away, bringing the sled to about 20 miles an hour in a few seconds. Being led through a winter landscape by a team of dogs is not peaceful like a horse-drawn sleigh ride. It is far more engaging, which seems appropriate to the place. Dog-sledding is more like a sport.
Though seated and comfortable, you watch how the lead dogs set not only the pace but also the chosen path, which is far from straight, by the way. The dogs get distracted by the things they see — deer, birds, was that a moose? — and the sled veers hither and thither. It’s part of the adventure. The dogs work in unison, and sometimes they do not. In time, you feel less along for the ride than part of the team.
In time, you also get to know the dogs, many of them rescued from shelters. You learn their names, and their personalities by watching them work. The solidarity, the cold and the mission at hand — go somewhere but get back to where you started, too — delivers its own sense of purpose. And heading back to the hotel, with the dogs in an easy canter, yields its own kind of restful calm. And in the end, you have spent another 40 minutes in the New Hampshire countryside in a way that’s different from the usual family ski trip.
It was certainly a different experience from our typical ski trips. We are that ski family marching through the hotel lobby at 8 a.m., dressed, instant oatmeal eaten, ready to be at the lifts when they open at 8:30. It’s part of the racer’s lifestyle to train early; even on vacation, we remain creatures of habit.
Ever wonder who gets those choice parking spots in the front row right by the base lodge? It’s people like us.
But our trip to Bretton Woods jarred us out of our admittedly maniacal routine. While Bretton Woods has done much to offer more diverse terrain, it does not have boundless stashes of untracked powder longing to be discovered by dawn’s early light. Getting first tracks on the steepest tracks is a big thing at other resorts; it’s not so important at Bretton Woods.
So we took it a little easier. We rose a little later (parking all the way back in the sixth row), and we once again left the mountain a little earlier for the dog sledding, the tubing and the Nordic skiing, which is not to be underestimated. With nearly 70 miles of trails, Bretton Woods has one of the largest cross-country trail systems in the East.
This is not to demean the downhill skiing at Bretton Woods. If anything, it is — to coin a phrase — perfect for the majority of family-oriented skiers. For the super-serious skiers and riders who want more consistent challenge, there are other resorts that would be a better choice.
But my family’s recent weekend is testament to how the Bretton Woods approach — call it active culture multitasking — can work even for the hard core among us. We won’t be abandoning our favorite mountains, but Bretton Woods has filled a gap in our understanding of what can make a great winter trip. We got out and enjoyed a variety of snow-related activities, and when we were done we sank into the charms of a grande dame of a hotel. It was a nice change of pace.
At some point during our visit last month, I recalled a conversation in the car from a different family excursion to New Hampshire a few years earlier. Weaving our way south after a day at Wildcat Mountain, we started to pass various other resorts. We had skied all of them.
As we passed Bretton Woods, my wife said, “And what’s this place?”
“We’ve never been there,” I said. “It’s known for impeccable grooming. Big place, good snow and just lots and lots of comfortable cruising trails.”
My wife turned to me: “And why exactly haven’t we been there?”
IF YOU GO
Full-day lift tickets at the Bretton Woods ski area (brettonwoods.com) are $37 to $76, with discounts for staying at one of the resort’s lodging properties. The price for a three-and-a-half-hour canopy tour, a series of treetop zip lines, is $99 to $110. A shorter racing zip line is $15 a ride. Reservations are suggested: (603) 278-4947.
Dog-sledding tours are about $100 for two people in a sled with each additional person an additional $32. A Nordic trail day pass costs from $7 to $17 (rental gear is available). Call the resort at (800) 314-1752 for additional information on all programs.
There are accommodations in a handful of resort-owned properties including town houses and an inn, but the cynosure of the resort is the Mount Washington Hotel, which has 200 rooms and suites. Rooms are priced from $229 to $449 with suites from $409 to $829. Lodging reservations: (800) 680-6600.
The hotel and ski area are on Route 302, about 160 miles from Boston and 350 miles — or a six-and a-half-hour drive — from New York City.
There are nonstop flights operated by US Airways and United Airlines from La Guardia to Manchester, N.H., the nearest major airport to Bretton Woods. Continental flies from Newark to Manchester; US Airways and United fly from Philadelphia.
BILL PENNINGTON is a sports reporter for The New York Times.
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