This past season was the unofficial “year of the snowmaker.” Snowmaking systems were pushed to the limit. At Gore, there was a somewhat fortuitous coincidence in this regard: a major snowmaking upgrade took place in the summer of 2011. The mountain added 160 high efficiency guns designed for precisely what the season dictated — constant resurfacing at marginal temperatures.
According to a story published in today’s Adirondack Daily Enterprise, Bruce McCulley the general manager of Whiteface Mountain Ski Center will step down from his job in September. Bruce is leaving his position to become a minister at the High Peaks Church in Saranac Lake.
Late this week Bruce announced that he’s leaving after working for more than 30 years at Whiteface. McCulley began his career in the ski business as a teenager.
He started at Whiteface as a lift attendant in July of 1981. He worked as a snowmaker, on the trail crew, as the night snowmaking foreman, and as a lift supervisor. He was promoted to assistant general manager in 1996 and in 2009, he took the position of general manager, when Jay Rand left to become the executive director of NYSEF.
“When I was a boy, we made skis out of barrel staves. We didn’t know we were supposed to use poles,” George Remington recounted.
George, my grandfather, grew up on Racquette Lake, where his parents were caretakers for a great camp. Some historians posit that Racquette Lake got its name because a retreating Tory brigade abandoned their snowshoes (“racquette” in French) on their flight to Canada during the Revolution. It’s a paradox that Grandpa was figuring out skis in a place named for a huge pile of abandoned snowshoes.
My grandfather would have been on skis in the early 1920s, about the same time that the first ski races were held in Lake Placid. Originally a summer resort, the town began promoting winter sports around 1905. One account suggests that winter vacationers back then had to be taught how to have fun on the snow.
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