Basecamp podcast: Rich heritage and an exciting future at Waterville Valley

Tim Smith has been general manager at Waterville Valley since 2015. (File Photo)

Waterville Valley Resort, as you know it, is about to become even more of a New England destination. 

“It’s the one drawback of Waterville that we, as the ownership group have identified; we’re not connected [to the town of Waterville Valley],” resort general manager Tim Smith said. “We connect through a bus, but it would be much more convenient and better for our guests if we had some sort of a lift there.” 

A new gondola, or chon-dola, near Town Square is just one step in Waterville’s comprehensive, 10-year master plan. It promises to help push Waterville Valley into the conversations of top ski town destinations in the East. 

Smith, along with his wife, Katie, director of accounting at Waterville Valley, joined New England Ski Journal Basecamp podcast hosts Eric Wilbur and Mike Specian to discuss the resort’s rich history, its new, one-of-a-kind chairlift, and the changing face of Waterville Valley. 

Listen:

Highlights from this edition of the Basecamp podcast: 

On Waterville’s new Tecumseh Express chairlift. 

Tim Smith: It’s a Swiss design, so it really runs well and has some really neat aspects to the machinery that you don’t see on a lot of the other lifts out there right now. We also got really heavy into the design of the chairlift with the engineering team at MND to make sure that we try to mitigate some of our wind issues that we have here. We’re very aware that we have a chairlift on a ridge line and it has a tendency to get hit by wind. So they designed it with really high tension, long lift spans. 

On why the Indy Pass hasn’t meant any overcrowding at the resort.

Tim Smith: Our mountain being developed by Sal Hannah and, and Tom Corcoran, they developed a mountain that really can handle a lot of people. Our comfortable carrying capacity is around 6,200. We rarely see anything over 4,000.  So we have a very good, comfortable carrying capacity. We also have a really nice mix of lifts with the new T-bar up top that does 700 feet per minute. The new chairlift is at 1,200 or or six meters per second. So, we spread our guests out really, really well.

The podcast can be streamed at skijournal.com/podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple, Spotify and Amazon.

More: 

Waterville Valley is on the verge of a new era