Bound by forest, Waterville is an alpine oasis

November 06, 2011|By Brian Irwin, Globe Correspondent

WATERVILLE VALLEY, N.H. - His tiny 4-year-old’s fingers fumbled with the bead, designed to replicate miniature dice. Winking one eye shut, he guided the thin wire through the bead’s lumen, completing the bulk of the necklace he and his siblings were making.

“It’s done, Daddy,’’ he exclaimed as he held up the jade cord. “And it says R-E-I-D. That’s me!’’

One of Waterville Valley Resort’s more popular retailers, I Dream of Beading is a small shop laden with endless trays of colorful glass and plastic nuggets awaiting their lacing from adults and children alike, the flexible chairs providing relief to legs tired from skiing one of New Hampshire’s most unique areas. The store resides in the Town Square, Waterville’s Colonial-style ring of condos, pubs, restaurants, and shops that rest in the shadow of Mount Tecumseh, birthplace of freestyle skiing and the East’s most racer-friendly hill.

But it’s not a hill. Over 2,000 vertical feet of terrain define Waterville, its slopes decisively plotted by former Olympian Tom Corcoran. In 1966 Corcoran founded the resort as it currently stands, a modernization, in the New England sense, of a ski hill that was first built and used in the 1930s by the Waterville Valley Black and Blue Trail Smashers Ski Club, which still operates today.

Waterville was built as a racer’s mountain. Corcoran laid out the trails to accommodate high-quality, World Cup events. That was his passion, which he proved to the world on the US Olympic Team in 1956 and 1960, finishing fourth in the giant slalom in Squaw Valley, Calif., in 1960, the best finish in that event for an American until Bode Miller in 2002. During Corcoran’s tenure as president of Waterville Valley, which he relinquished in 1993, the resort quietly carried on his mission of ski racing excellence, hosting more World Cup races in the United States than any other ski area.

The road into Waterville has a remote feel. The pavement threads miles of snow-encrusted conifers that frame the idyllic Mad River. Unlike its Vermont counterpart, the Mad River Valley is protected from development. It is mostly National Forest, like the 770,000 acres of untouched wilderness that surround Waterville Valley Resort. Reaching the ski area requires a patient drive through pristine wilderness, at the end of which is a clean, manicured, and timeless village.

An alpine oasis, Waterville’s base area sits separate from Town Square, the ice arena, indoor pool, and racquet club. A few miles of road, which will someday be bypassed in an overland gondola, span the valley floor which, at 500 acres (some of it still undeveloped) comprise the only developable land in the valley.