Loon Mountain’s Brian Norton is a man of many hats

Loon general manager Brian Norton cuts the ribbon to open Timbertown on Dec. 30, 2023. (Josh Bogardus/Loon Mountain)

For those skiing Loon Mountain, I-93 is both a blessing and a curse. Odds are it helped you get to the mountain quickly. On the flip side, a lot of other people did as well.

Time it just right and one can go from the O’Neil Tunnel to sitting in the parking lot debating whether to go to gondola side or Kanc8 side in two hours. It is a lovely experience on a weekday, but for many, it feels like it is getting loved to death on a weekend.

A big part of the job for Loon Mountain general manager Brian Norton and his staff is finding that sweet spot of balancing the bottom line with ensuring people don’t pull a Yogi Berra — “Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.”

Norton spoke at length with New England Ski Journal recently on a wide range of topics about his role, snowmaking, hitting the midway point of Flight Plan 2030 and the future of the mountain. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

New England Ski Journal: How did the dry conditions of the fall affect the early season snowmaking? Or was it more borderline temperatures?

Brian Norton: We were never in a position where we were not able to make snow. What we did do and what we’ve never been faced with before is marginal temperatures. Are we really going to go like 26, 27 degrees for eight hours?

We have to fill a pipe that’s 4.5 miles long. It’s 400,000 gallons of water. Every time we turn the system on, if it doesn’t get to 26 degrees and it stays at, say, 28 degrees, are we going to put 400,000 gallons of water that we don’t want to waste out there in the ether, and making decisions like that were definitely something we’ve never been faced with before that we had to do.

Typically we’re mixing that pond water with river water. The river is really close, right at the base of the ski resort — the water doesn’t go far underground, if at all. But when we take the water from Connector Pond in town, it runs 4.5 miles underground and it geothermally warms itself. So by the time it comes out of the first hydrant it’s much warmer than you want it to be. (With river levels low, Loon was unable to pull much water from the East Branch of the Pemigewasset River until well into December.)

We adjusted and instead of just going from the pond to the base of South Peak and then outside my window here next to the gondola, we sent it up and over South Peak and then back down to outside my window. Because the pipe on the mountain is above the ground, that helped cool the water. We were learning our system under circumstances that we were never faced with before.

NESJ: We’re halfway through Flight Plan 2030. What have been the biggest takeaways from it so far?

Norton: To install three lifts in three years (Kancamagus 8, Seven Brothers, Timbertown) was a huge thing. The arrival changes at Timbertown — not just the additional terrain and the lift and all the expansion stuff that Timbertown provided, but the sense of arrival and not forcing people to get on a bus was a really big thing. We’ve made some major improvements so far.

A lot of little things, too, on the sustainability side of it, the connection to the town. We tested for geothermal in our main parking lot. We tested for bigger things, like solar panels, and how that would work. They don’t always work out like you hope, but we’ve explored a lot.

Where we’re heading in the next five years is very exciting, and we as a resort are planning a kind of halfway to 2030 meeting, kind of a public forum presentation for the beginning of March. It will be a real exciting moment for us to talk about the things that we’ve done, which are obvious, and then the really exciting path forward here.

NESJ: Timbertown, is that going to have a lodge? And the land over there, who owns that?

Norton: So we have a bit of a different scenario where we have two landlords essentially. The original Loon side of the property, the land up to about as far as you can hit a golf ball from the parking lot, we own that. Everything above that is U.S. Forest land, so it’s government land. That Forest Service line carries all the way over to the highway, more or less, beyond where we could potentially have a ski resort.

Once you get past the South Peak gate, South Peak LLC is the current owner of the land down there. We’ve got a really great relationship with the developer, fortunately.

He’s got a master development plan with the town to develop — I don’t know the exact number of units, whether it’s hotels, condos, private homes. On that land, we have easements and operating agreements. The land that the Lincoln Express Quad and Pemi Base Camp sit on, we don’t physically own, but we own those assets, and we have a right to be there. We have an easement for the trails. We have the right to exclusive food and beverages and all those things, but it’s not physically our land, which is great because someone else owns the land and we can focus on operating the ski resort.

It’s an interesting partnership because we don’t totally control our destiny, and they don’t totally control their destiny. Then you add in the Forest Service because they own the top half or two-thirds or so.

To answer the original question about the Timbertown base area, yes, there will be more facilities planned for down there.

When they started developing the big plot of land that’s just next to Fox Run, the first two townhomes are framed now, called Fireside. When they cleared all that land, they had a bunch of questions like, is that where the lodge is going? But there are plans for some facilities kind of in the parking lot, we call it A-lot, but the parking lot right there below the old Escape Route.

NESJ: What happened to the glade Undercut?

Norton: It was a glade that was hardly ever opened. There’s a big band of ledge in the middle of it. When we knew we were moving forward with Timbertown, we threw the tree cutting into the project with the Forest Service so we were able to cut the trees, have a plan with the Forest Service to go up there and mulch all of the organic material to try to fill in some of that ledgy area and try to grow some grass and retain the slope a little better.

Two of our contractors that we had lined up to do that last summer fell through and didn’t end up showing up, so we’re back to square one for another summer of that. The hope is that this coming summer we’ve got all the stumps and everything grinded and mulched, not really like changing the terrain, like we’re not blasting ledge or anything like that, but at least it’ll be able to ski in a good winter and then hopefully in the next capital cycle we could add snowmaking.

What’s important about that trail is with so many people not riding a shuttle bus back to those parking lots or skiing from those parking lots, it puts a tremendous amount of pressure on Cruiser, the trail there. All of that footprint being taken up by people skiing to and from Timbertown where they parked and having a second means to ski down to that portal is important, which is why we got rid of the glade and working toward a ski trail there because you’re essentially doubling the footprint.

NESJ: How do you deal with ensuring that Loon doesn’t get loved to death at certain times of the year?

Norton: We use Medallia as a service, but our net promoter scores, and you get these comments every once in a while, it’s like, “I’m giving you a zero because I don’t want anyone else to be here. I want it just to be me.” They’re rating us low because they love it so much. I love those comments as much as I wish they were giving me a 10 instead of a zero.

It’s a challenge, and we’re constantly fighting the battle of value over volume.

Since COVID happened, and we’re not the only ones that have been doing this, paying more attention, managing our business, we’ve really refined how many tickets, what products we have in the marketplace, and trying to manage how many people are here.

It’s been a big part of our business model because we want to maintain the surface, the experience.

What has changed is we are busier midweek. We’re busier in those off-peak periods because we’ve got dynamic pricing. All the things that happened with COVID. They started skiing on Fridays and Mondays and Tuesdays.

Overall, our business continues to grow, but on that peak Saturday, we’re not significantly slower, but slower because we want to be than we were pre-COVID, which is something we continue to refine. I’ve got a group here at the resort that meets three times a week to strictly talk about our capacity that we’re planning for the following weekend and what tickets and what products we have in the marketplace to make sure we’re managing to the expectations of our guests.

To your point about holiday weekend versus non-holiday weekend, a lot of people would say, Martin Luther King weekend, that’s like your busiest weekend of the year. My response is always, actually, the one before and the one after are always our busiest weekends of the year because on that holiday period, a lot of our pass holders are blacked out. Same with Ikon, you can’t ski here if you have one of the lower-level passes. Even if you have a gold pass, you might say, “I’ve got the perception that that’s the busiest weekend of the year, and I’m not going.”

NESJ: Parking, are there any plans to expand lots?

Norton: Paving the main lot has been a huge hit and simplified the parking process. I see more of that in our future because even though it was expensive, it has improved the guest experience so much and helped out our parking lot team. (And keep an eye out for Norton, who has been known to help point you to your space, especially in the Escape Route parking lots.) I could see us doing more of that in the future.

In terms of expanding parking, we’re looking at anything and everything that comes our way, whether it’s land, partnerships with the town or other businesses. The most obvious one is another form of mass transportation being the Riverwalk gondola project that we’re working on.

NESJ: About that, how’s that going to work, who is going to own that?

Norton: There is a lot to be figured out on that. It is a three-way partnership between Loon, Riverwalk and South Peak.

The way that the deal hasn’t been fully structured yet — we’re working through who owns it in the long run, who’s responsible for it, who sets the hours — through a really great partnership, Loon will end up being the deciding factor, whether that means we physically own it or whether that just means we’re the declarant of how it operates, and that’s just because we’re in the ski area business and they’re not.

NESJ: Still on pace for opening next year?

Norton: That’s my hope. I am far from committed to that because we have a lot of hurdles in front of us from a construction standpoint. First and foremost, we’ve got to get through some operating agreements. We want to make sure everyone’s happy.

Because of the connection to town, the people in town have a say here. The select committee and the planning board, everyone’s aware of it. We’ve presented it to them.

The Tramway board in the state … there’s a lot of people that need to sign off on something. We’ve presented a bunch of information to them. They’ve come back with a bunch of questions. That’s the level of detail we’re getting through right now. I hope that we’re getting signoffs from all of the appropriate agencies.

I don’t count on that until I have it on my desk.

NESJ: When you have some down time, how do you like to ride the mountain?

Norton: I don’t have time on Sunday mornings with my son because I’ve got to get him over to the seasonal program by 8:30, so we just sneak a couple runs in on Seven Brothers. His favorite is Lower Bear Claw because he says there’s lots of good side hits over there.

I almost always continue to stay out on the mountain Sunday mornings and I always make my way over to Timbertown. For someone who’s been skiing at Loon for 25 years, the terrain over there is not very challenging, but it’s just so different and it’s refreshing to go over there, and I love skiing at South Mountain.

I’ve just been infatuated with Timbertown, just kind of like the winding trails, the big wide-open, beginner stuff over there. It’s quiet until about 10 o’clock when everyone starts parking over there and the lift gets going, and then you kind of jet out of there.

If I had to pick one trail and one trail only, it would be Blue Ox all day long.