The oldest continuously operating ski hill in the State of Maine, the Camden Snow Bowl, lies on the Ragged Mountain, second highest of seven hills back of Camden, ME. Snow Bowl began in 1936 as a winter site for the activities of the Camden Outing Club on land leased from the town of Camden. The town is more famed as a seaport and yachting center than as a ski town.
Clustered below the main street of the town as I drove up, the day I went to see the “new management” at Snow Bowl, namely, Wendy Frutchy and Dick Allison, lay four ole Maine lumber schooners, salvaged for the tourist trade, a remnant of the days when Camden was a premier East coast commercial port. The white painted masts rising below the main street of the town, deserted in the driving sleet storm that had arrived in Maine that day, gave the town a quaint archaic look. But Snow Bowl has a strictly modern look; a fair-size A-frame base box and a double chair running up 3,100 feet to the top of Ragged Mountain, with a parallel T-bar running up 4,100 feet, and a smaller thousand foot T-bar off to the side. Physically, Snow Bowl is your standard 950-foot vertical small ski area. Commercially, it’s an anomaly, a disaster.
It was a Monday. The sleet was pelting down. As I drove up, Wendy and Dick waved to me through the picture window of the base lodge. We went upstairs to the cafeteria where Dick pulled out a table from the side of the room, and said, “Want some lunch”? We were the only people there. The lifts were closed. Wendy went out to the kitchen and heated up some fish chowder which turned out to be delicious. I sat with the two of them, spooning up steaming chowder and looking at the sheer ice that seemed to be the only cover on the bottom third of the mountain, all that was visible. “What you see here is the bottom of a glacier moving slowly down the mountain,” said Dick. “We opened again this Saturday morning, and closed when no one came in the rain. We opened again Sunday. The rain lifted and we stayed open until 11:30, no one had showed up. So we closed again.” Now, on Monday, with the sleet pounding down, it looked as if Snow Bowl might never open again — unless there was some more snow, if ever. This was the eighth time since opening in December that Ragged Mountain had been wiped out. It was February 26th, halfway through the season. Somehow as I sat there with Wendy and Dick, it was as though we were stranded on some sleeting island, the three of us. Dick and Wendy had been there for three months; I had just arrived, the first person they had seen since being shipwrecked. The words were tumbling out, from first one and then the other, gesturing, interrupting each other, somewhat bitter laughter punctuating their sentences.
“We started out with six successive snow storms of six inches,” said Dick, “and each was followed by two inches of rain. And the seventh time, we got snow on Thursday, and did a great Saturday business.” He laughed a bit bitterly.
“That Saturday was 12 per cent of our gross ticket sales,” said Wendy. She laughed, a bit bitterly.
“Then on Sunday it rained us out again,” said Dick. “Wiped out seven times, that made it. This weekend was the eighth.”
“We got here and there were no maintenance records, no log of operations. But everyone in town says it is the worse season the area has ever had, and the Snow Bowl has been here 43 years.”
“Well, they are used to losing money,” said Wendy. “Last year they think, was their best year ever. They think they skied 83 days, and that was their best year ever, they think. And the area lost $14,000 dollars. They know that.”
“Dick, tell them about the Thiokol,” said Wendy.
“When I got here to take over manager of operations,” said Dick, “the key to the Thiokol was missing. They didn’t know where it was. But it didn’t matter anyway, because the Thiokol’s carburetor was also missing and no one knew where it was.” Dick, at 40, a bachelor, has deep eyes set under a prominent brow, a penetrating look about him. As a top hill maintenance man and trail developer at Sugarloaf, ME, for six years, he had come to Camden for his first “in charge” challenge: but the location had a history that, as often, in Maine, took charge.
“I finally found the carburetor in a box with the valve connections for the snowmaking equipment. In another box were the other parts for the Thiokol, parts for the lifts, and snowmaking gun parts.”
“One think I couldn’t figure out,” said Wendy. “The area operated 83 days last season and the books show they took in only $45,000. that’s between $500 and $600 a day. That’s less than 100 paying customers a day. There certainly were more skiers. But since they didn’t keep track of ticket sales, no one knows exactly what happened.”
Wendy is 30. She is alert, assertive, and – until recently – full of fun. She was public relations and promotion chief at Sugarloaf for six years, has a house there, and friends — and a thriving business (Schusspa, a massage and sauna emporium). She left all that for the chance to be a general manager on her own at Snow Bowl.
“It’s like serving a penance,” said Dick.
“I took a couple of children of stockholders up to Sugarloaf for a trip,” said Wendy. “Because there was no skiing here. After one run, one of them aksed me, ‘why did you ever leave here?’ And the other child in a matter of fact voice said, ‘You were very, very foolish!’ ”.
Dick said, “When we came, there were a couple of 11-year-old Tucker Sno Cats for grooming. I called a broker up to see what I could get for them. He said, ‘Dick, don’t you know a couple of rich yacht owners in Camden who need a mooring?’ ”. We tried to sell one to a French Canadian as a snowmobile, but he got out of control on it and wouldn’t buy.
“What they used to do with the shivs for the chair lift was this: when one side wore down, they took it off and turned it around and let the other side wear down, then they would move it to a different position on the rocker arm and use it there until the cable froze on it.
“I walked into this situation blind. But my eyes were opened when the Hall Lift service representative came down to inspect two weeks before opening. He just walked around here shaking his head, and spent 50 hours looking, writing, looking. He came up with the figure of 700 man hours and $7,000 in replacement parts.” The 700 man hours were Dick’s. The $7,000 came from the budget for the year, which was based on a projection of 14 weeks of skiing, a projection — again — based on the assumption that the lifts were operable and the snowmaking was operable.
In mid-season, the Snow Bowl was looking at a $35,000 deficit.
The area is still under lease to the Camden Outing Club from the town of Camden. And the Camden Outing club has its resources for handling deficits. These include fish fries, Beano, benefit suppers, and as well, a couple of high rollers. Camden is not your ordinary Maine coast village. It has a rich admixture of rich. And young professionals running hellbent from big city living. One of the high rollers, the late Tom Watson Jr., (of the IBM Watsons), donated the chairlift one season.
“What the Outing Club will do is have bigger Beano,” said Wendy, “and more benefit picnics and then somebody will come up with the donation to take care of the rest of the deficit. Myself, I’d rather see them run it as a ski resort, than a club.”
That isn’t — probably — exactly what the Outing Club had in mind. End the deficits, yes. But keep it clubby. “Every member of the club,” said Wendy, “has at one time or another through the years, been up here and picked rocks, cleaned up, donated their time. They feel it is their area. And when I asked them to allow the employees’ families to have free skiing as an inducement to working here, which would have involved no more than 10 people, the board voted it down. They even made the ski instructors buy tickets to ski here until last season.
“There are 24 members of the board of directors of the Outing Club, and every one of them has special ideas they want carried out, whether or not the whole board voted on the ideas or not. Between the directors, and the town manager and the editor of Camden Herald, I have enough directives to keep a staff of 10 or so busy every day.”
The permanent staff, of course, is Wendy and Dick.
Plus a federally-funded CETA custodian, who keeps the place clean, sort of. “Helen is good on a job, but then she has to sit down and rest for half an hour or so, after each job is done,” said Wendy.
The editor of the Herald has evidently been having definite ideas on how the resort should be run. Every week, there are editorial suggestions and admonitions in the paper regarding the ski area. The most recent (at this writing) stated that if the area ran up a deficit this season, it would be due to the extravagant publicity and advertising campaign put on by the management.
What the editorial referred to, perhaps, was Wendy’s promotional efforts resulting in getting tours up from Massachusetts, tours that accounted to date for 42 per cent of Snow Bowl’s business. (The editor has never been to the Snow Bowl since Wendy and Dick took over, or sat down to look at their area books.)
One of the great Maine winter past-times (and you do need those in Maine in the winter) is Wintertime Spectating, Overseeing and Quarterbacking. It predates skiing by about a hundred years as something to do in the winter.
“We had one old retired fellow who came up every Saturday to stand behind the T-bar operator and just watch him put people on,” said Dick. “He would stand there with his hands behind his back as if he owned the place. He made the operator so nervous I finally had to ask the old man to leave.”
“Then there is Francis. He used to be on the board of directors, years ago. He still comes up almost every time we have skiing to tell me what I did wrong. Last time he told me I should have been making snow at three in the morning. I told him to ‘shove it,’ and he started yelling at me, and I started yelling back at him, right on the slope. The T-bar operator shut the lift down so he could hear better what we were shouting about. Another of the employees came by in the Sno Cat and handed me a hammer to hit Francis with.”
Incidents such as these, and the fact that the former manager was from the region — had held the job for 15 years — and the fact that Wendy and Dick are outsiders, has the town in a typical posture for a Maine town on any important issue — split right down the middle.
Both Wendy and Dick are from out of state. Dick, being from New Hampshire, is particularly suspect. Wendy gets her share of suspicions, too. Particularly when she tries a freebie “promotion.” No one born and bred in Maine believes anything comes for free.
“We announced free skiing one Wednesday over the local radio station,” said Wendy. “We wanted to prove we really had good conditions. Eight people came. And then I had a ‘free roses for Valentine’s day’ all set up. And that really turned them off. Not a single person came.”
Camden has 5,000 people.
Nearby Rockland has 9,000 people. They won’t come over because they are made to feel by local skiers they are trespassing. And the idea of out-of-staters skiing there makes your average Camdenite hopping mad.
One of the slips in Wendy’s Suggestion Box read, “Keep those Massachusetts bus tours skiers away. They don’t know anything about skiing and just mess up the slopes for the rest.”
Dick has quit four times.
Then he’s walked around the building, cooled off, and come back. Wendy has quit twice. But they were only fooling, both of them.
What? Quit the first area you ever ran?
Wendy and Dick aren’t the type to quit.
They are going to make the Snow Bowl work or else; if it means getting there at 7:30 a.m. to open and staying until 11:30 p.m. to chop onions for the next day’s hamburgers — as it often has — then they will. And do.
Besides, they are getting enough funny stories to last them the next 10 years.
Next season will begin Book Two of “The Down East Adventures of Wendy and Dick.” That’s for certain.
