FEATURE – November 2013
by Jaed Coffin | Photography Sarah Beard Buckley

It’s a gorgeous April day in Bethel, less than 24 hours since Sunday River Ski Resort has closed its trails to skiers for the 2013 season. There is still snow on the mountain—shadowy, fluted bands; icy stripes and ridges—but the lodge is empty, and so is the parking lot, and the world here, which days ago had been bustling with families, looks all but evacuated. 

But it will not stay this way for long. 

This is the single week of the year when New England’s second-largest ski resort is without major action. Yet the off-season hasn’t always been so busy. While standing in the parking lot gazing at the mountains of Western Maine, Dana Bullen, resort president and general manager of Sunday River, describes the Sunday River of the previous decade as a completely different scene. “Ten years ago,” Bullen says, “you could have pulled a chain link fence across the gates and not opened them again until November.” Now, Bullen says, “We’re really giving people a reason to be here. All year.” 

A quick scan of Sunday River’s 2013-2014 events calendar makes it clear that Bullen’s claims are the real thing: October will offer a Fall Festival Weekend, which will include a Mountain RAID adventure race, the North American Wife Carrying Championship (see it to believe it), and the Blue Mountain Arts Festival. Ski season typically opens around Halloween, and over the next five months of winter, guests will have access to a range of entertainment, both zany and enriching: performances by fire dancers and hypnotists and sword swallowers, reptile and science shows for kids, singles weekends for the young and unattached, Parrothead weekends and pond-skimming contests to celebrate the arrival of spring. Much of this joyful madness will be gathered around Sunday River’s newest offering for the 2013-2014 season: a lodge-style restaurant called Camp, where up to 300 guests can comfortably dine across some 5,500 square feet of flexible space that can be transformed to fit the mountain’s various hosting needs. 

The question, of course, is how, since 2007, Sunday River, during a period of national recession, found a way to make all of this change possible. 

The first step in the journey began with Sunday River’s partnership with the Boyne Resort family. Over the last five years, Sunday River has added over $35 million in capital investments. This year, the mountain is adding another $5.7 million in improvements. Perhaps the most talked-about change on the mountain is the new 15-acre T72 terrain park, designed in partnership with Snow Park Technologies (the same firm that designed terrain for the X Games.) Here, riders and skiers will have access—via two lifts—to the new 18-foot Superpipe. In addition to the new terrain park, 60 acres of new glades have been added to the mountains offerings. To keep this new terrain well maintained, the mountain has invested over $1 million in new snow guns, which will continue to keep over 95 percent of the mountain’s 820 acres of skiable terrain well-snowed. 

After driving up a steep gravel road to a sparsely wooded area called The Peaks, I’m standing on a wooded overlook with Bullen, VP of development Mark Hall, and VP of marketing Nick Lambert, contemplating the 11,000 combined acres of the resort’s property. Currently, the resort utilizes roughly 3,000 acres of that property. The long term development plan expects to utilize the remaining 8,000. 

Lambert tells me that the imagining of so much of Sunday River’s future began with a single, and apparently simple, question: What is Sunday River? 

“We had to ask ourselves,” Lambert says, “where are we going, and how are we going to get there?” Lambert, a lifelong skier who began working for Sunday River directly after graduating from Colby College, knew that the clientele of the mountain was diverse: “We had Boston people, college kids, and lots of locals from deep in Maine.” Meeting the needs of all those guests was a daunting task. “There’s an old saying in this business,” Lambert says, “You can’t be everything to everybody.” 

But that doesn’t mean you can’t try. 

One of the steps that Bullen, Hall, and Lambert took—in conjunction with a team of other minds from within the Sunday River community and also from the town of Bethel—was to reimagine their mountain’s future identity with an abstract but deeply grounded “five-zone strategy” that Hall calls “both geographical and experiential.” After much consideration and contemplation of both the history and future of Sunday River, the resulting strategy was gathered around five theme-based zones: Heritage, Luxury, Serenity, Vibrancy, and Camp Sunday. Bullen tells me that the appeal to these linked themes are all devoted to a mission of folding the vastness of the resort into a town center of sorts—“less a city than a collection of neighborhoods,” says Bullen—where guests can watch fireworks, where kids can eat dinner and buy ice cream cones, where wedding parties can gather and where conference attendees can get to know each other in the presence of the mountains. 

Based on informal research, social life at Sunday River has in fact become more “vibrant.” 

“Five years ago,” Hall says, “the bar at the base lodge closed down at 5 p.m.” 

“Now,” Lambert adds, “we’re throwing ‘em out at 1 a.m.” 

It’s important to recognize that this five-zone approach to the mountain’s rebirth isn’t something you’ll see marked by colored blazes or flags. Rather, Bullen and others have come to think of the zone-strategy as “a map by which to make decisions, a logic we use to move forward. But this resort,” Bullen explains, “was built on snow quality. So we want our guests to think not just snow, but snow and food. Snow and spa. Snow and golf. But snow’s what grounds all of this. Snow,” Bullen says, gesturing to the range of mountains, “is where we come from.” 

Later that day, I drive with Lambert into downtown Bethel to get lunch at a small cafe called Erin’s. In the past, the relationship between Sunday River and the town of Bethel had been somewhat distant. But Bullen tells me that one of the first steps to re-envisioning the identity of the mountain was “realizing that the [Bethel] community was a vital piece of the resort as a whole. They understood our struggles. And they were some of the same struggles that they had as a town.” 

In recent years, Bullen, Hall, and Lambert have worked closely with Jim Doar, the Bethel town manager, and other community members and institutions (Gould Academy among them), to collaborate on how to solve some of the problems that Bullen was referring to. It’s no coincidence, Lambert tells me, that concurrent with the expansion of dining options at Sunday River—a restaurant called the Phoenix and a ski bar called the Matterhorn—dining options in Bethel improved, too. 

All of this—the vision, the zones, the development, the details big and small, the renewed collaborative efforts between Sunday River and Bethel—speaks, ultimately, to a larger idea about what, these days, is required of not just a ski area, but any Maine-based business, to thrive. Good snow might be the grounding element of Sunday River, but the relationship of this ski area to the state of Maine is one that is founded on decades of heritage. 

Recently, the resort has worked very hard at developing relationships not only with Bethel, but also with other institutions and businesses in the state. At all the restaurants on the mountain, you can find Maine-sourced lobster, shrimp, and crab, just as you’ll find Maine-sourced blueberries, tomatoes, lettuce, corn, and carrots. The mountain gets potatoes from Green Thumb, out of Fryeburg; beef and cheese from Pineland Farm, out of Gray; sausages from Sausage Kitchen, out of Lisbon; and milk from Oakhurst Dairy. Even the syrup you’ll find on your pancakes comes from the 950 taps plus the 100 traditional metal bucket taps on the Sunday River property. Every spring, the resort produces the syrup in its own sugaring house, built trailside so that skiers can pop in and learn about the sugaring process, and where kids—and adults—can get free maple sugar candy. 

As we head back to the mountain, Lambert tells me that the hardest part of developing all of this energy around the mountain is the humble art of maintaining it. “There’s a desire to sprint,” Bullen says. “We have to remind ourselves that it’s a marathon, not a sprint. We need to have patience without losing the passion. To us, all this envisioning feels logical. But to the guest, it should be invisible. It’s in the details, when they’re comfortable, and they feel like they’re home.” 

As we pull back into the parking lot, the mountain casts a cold shadow over the valley, and brings with it the quick shift in temperature that reminds you that—despite all that will be happening here over the golden months of summer—winter is never far, and that the snow is where it all begins