In his new role as Mountain Operations Director, Eric will oversee all aspects of mountain operations at Bolton Valley Resort. This includes managing the ski patrol, lift operations, lift mechanics, grounds, vehicle and property maintenance, snowmaking, grooming, mountain bike trail crew, and mountain safety programs.

Eric spent his formative years through high school and college working in the mountain operations department at Bolton Valley, doing everything from trail maintenance and snowmaking to helping design and lay out the Timberline chairlift and trail system, which were developed in the 1980’s.  Over the years, with his brother Rob, Eric cut some of Bolton Valley’s most beloved glades including Devil’s Playground and Lost Boys.

Eric will be joining the management team to lead Bolton Valley Resort during a time of transformative growth. One of the largest remaining locally owned and independent ski resorts in Vermont, Bolton Valley was built by Eric’s father Ralph DesLauriers in the 1960s and is now run by his sister Lindsay DesLauriers. His brothers Rob, Adam, and Evan are also involved in managing the resort.

“I am super stoked to go full-circle and be part of the Bolton Valley team again,” Eric said. “Everyone works passionately to create a positive and rewarding experience for our guests and coworkers. I am proud to be here and look forward to doing my part to build on the positive momentum at BV.”

Bolton Valley Resort is located in the heart of Vermont’s Green Mountains, just 30 minutes from Burlington and Stowe. The resort offers skiing and riding on 71 trails, along with extensive backcountry skiing and riding opportunities. With over 300 inches of snowfall annually and some of the best terrain in the east, Bolton Valley is a favorite among skiers and riders from across the country. In the summer months, Bolton Valley has established itself as one of the best downhill mountain bike parks in the northeast with a mix of raw, rowdy and ripping technical terrain and new flow trails from world class trail designers and builders Gravity Logic.
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For press inquiries please contact:
spellegrini@boltonvalley.com | (802) 989-8468

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What can I say? Sometimes you speak too soon. There’s just so much snow left and the skiing is just too good…. so…. we’ve made some adjustments to our bonus weekend plans.

And I assure you this is NOT an April Fools

Here’s the revised plan for our bonus weekends:

We will add in another day next Friday and call it a three-day weekend! That’s April 7th, 8th, and 9th … aaaaand…. we will keep Vista spinning too.

Vista will spin all three days and Timberline will join the party on Saturday and Sunday. We will operate from 10am – 5pm all three days to get a little more of the afternoon sunshine.

As of now, our plan is still to operate Timberline and Snowflake (including the park) for the second bonus weekend on the 15th and 16th, but we’ll keep an eye on the forecast and keep you posted on our snow report.

Thank you for being a part of the Bolton Valley magic. I’ll see you on the slopes or for après on one of the decks (where I’ll be working on my goggle tan).

Love,

Lindsay

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How did it get to be the end of March already??  I think the passage of time may always be a little uncanny and certainly the end of a season always seems to come as a surprise.  This year is no exception, and as the wind down each year is inevitably somewhat unique, I thought I would reach out to share our thoughts and plans as we prepare to bring another season to a close. 

As we have done for the past several years, we plan to run seven-day-a-week lift operations through the first weekend in April, after which point, we will assess whether we can extend our operations on weekends only to get some BV Bonus Weekends.  This year, thanks in large part to the 3’ storm mother nature sent our way last week, it’s looking like the answer will almost certainly be:  Yes! Yes! Yes!

But first thing’s first – this week and next week through Friday, March 31^st we will run full lift operations – all our hours, day and night.  March 31^st will be our last day of night skiing for the season so come out and get it while you can!  Enjoy the long day and catch a late sunset from the top of Vista!  April 1 and 2^nd – conditions permitting – we will spin all lifts 9am – 4pm. 

Ok – onto the plan for our bonus weekends. 

Depending on conditions we will extend ski operations through either one or two bonus weekends with the potential last day of the ski season for BV being April 16^th this year.  Note that our hours for the bonus weekends will push back a tiny bit to run lifts from 10am – 5pm.  Our thinking on this is…. spring brings its own conditions and dynamics – with firm mornings, softening through the day, we think starting a little later, letting the snow soften up a bit and then giving you a little longer to ski in the afternoons during these longer days will just be better and more fun! 

Now obviously, the weather may not cooperate and we may end up wrapping the season sooner than we’d like, but that’s our goal and, as of now, with the base we have, that’s our plan. 

But there’s more – there’s a twist!  We are going to try something a little different this year and we are going to hold our bonus weekend skiing at Timberline!!

Why – you might ask?  Well, we have a bunch of reasons. 

First – spring skiing at Timberline is the bomb.  It’s sunnier, warmer, and more wide open.  Second, thanks to Blauvelt’s Banks, we made a ton of snow down there for the banked slalom course that we can plow out and harvest to expand the season as long as possible.  Third, the new base lodge is sooo nice now and we love the indoor-outdoor flow of the lodge to lift experience, especially with El Gato cooking and the new bar down there, we think it will be the place to be for après ski in the spring sunshine.  We will also operate the snowflake lift in case you prefer to park in the main base area. 

And – as if those reasons aren’t compelling enough… there is also a logistical / operational function in this plan as well.  Moving to Timberline will allow us to start to turn over the main base area to get ready for summer operations and this year in particular, it will allow us to get started on some planned and necessary infrastructure improvements to the main base lodge ASAP, including most notably a total roof replacement. 

We expect the base lodge project to take at least two months and we really want it to be finished by the end of June so we can use the base lodge this summer.  Hopefully you have started to join us for all the fun we’ve been having in the summer – if not – put it on your radar!  BV Summers are off the hook with the Vista lift spinning, our MTB park with trails for all ages and abilities, scenic lift rides, our new outdoor pool, summer camps for kids, our weekly music on the lawn series, creemees…. yeah yeah – you gotta check it out!! 

So, yes, spring bonus weekends this year will be at Timberline – and if we keep running Blauvelt’s down there and stockpiling all that snow for the course, it could be the move every year.  We’re looking at this spring as a kind of pilot – we think it’s going to be awesome and, if it’s as fun as we think, it may just become the new normal at BV to extend the season at Timberline. So come give it a try and let us know your thoughts!

Moving forward – we will keep a tight eye on both skiing conditions and the weather forecast and make the best call we can about our bonus weekends in real time.  Please keep your eye on our snow report for all up to date information with all our spring operations developments as they happen. 

And thank you for making it another great season at Bolton Valley. 

Love,
Lindsay

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Who’s ready?

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And boy are we excited! Nonetheless, before we move forward with foliage fervor, we must take one more pause to acknowledge the historic nature of this past summer here at Bolton Valley.

Truly. Historic.

Sure, Bolton Valley Resort was well known as a year round vacation destination from the ’60s to the ’90s during Ralph DesLauriers’ 1st run at the helm of the place he built and raised his family. But after Ralph sold the resort in the ’90s, BVR really shifted it’s sights toward a winter only focus in the new millennium under the new ownership groups. But when the DesLauriers family came back home (along with some local investors 5+ years ago now) their aim was quickly fixed upon returning the resort her former year-round Green Mountain glory. And boy have we been trying. And gradually, year in and year out, we’d been seeing evidence we were on the right track and things were moving in the right direction. But this summer? Well, it just hit different. From July onward, it was on and none of us hardly had a moment to notice as we were suddenly so busy taking care of our beloved guests day in and day out. When we finally picked our heads up for a minute last week there was a collective realization of what had just happened. It’s an amazing feeling really… to be a part of a team that’s gone through that process of building toward a vision for the future and then to suddenly find ourselves operating within that dream. It feels pretty dang good, if I’m being honest.

From the new outdoor pool, to the hotel renovation, to the recent purchase of The Ponds (a well established wedding venue) to the renovation of the Timberline Lodge (now hosting various weddings, private groups and events in its own right) to the Bike Park… oh, the Bike Park. It’s been years in the making, with the permitting to get the lift running in summer and new trail designs approved, but this summer, with the opening of our new top-to-bottom beginner flow trail, it’s a whole new day in the Bolton Bike Park, that’s for sure! Just like winter, we’re now teaching so many folks to ride with us, whereas before our trails were mostly for advanced riders only. It has been truly amazing to see kids from 5 years old (sometimes even younger) on up loading their bikes on the lift for the first time only to see them an hour or two later in the base area, truly transformed with the joy that is downhill mountain biking. We knew it could be like this, we hoped it would be like this and indeed… here we are. It seems Lindsay’s a chip off the old Ralph block – vision is not something the two of them lack, that’s for sure.

But I digress… when I sat down to write this blog post it was going to be all about fall. Frankly, I have so much more to say about this past summer still… Well, maybe we’ll have to get the #FoliageCheck rolling for 2022 the same way we did last fall when we declared peak foliage in early October. Please keep in mind, past performance is no indicator of future peak foliage date. You’ll just have to get on up here to see how it progresses for your yourself, I guess. Or watch that blog series

But there can be no doubt, fall is clearly arriving as I type this at the highest base area elevation ski resort in Vermont and you know what? We’re ready for it! We love pumpkins and apple pie, cool nights and mums, scenic lift rides and our favorite fall flannel… it’s all just part of the joy of living here in Vermont, each season bringing it’s own vibrant joys.

And certainly with the onset of fall, our snowmakers are getting antsy, too. Didn’t make the most of your summer? No problem, make up for it in fall, winter or next summer, it’s all good. We’ll look forward to seeing you around the mountain soon – whatever your preferred season in Vermont’s Green Mountains.

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All ticket sales were handled through the Vermont Ski & Snowboard Museum. We are excited to host their event and celebrate the 6 deserving inductees together… but one in particular really makes us swoon…

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Our very own Ralph DesLauriers will be inducted into the Vermont Ski & Snowboard Hall of Fame next month.

This year’s inductees will be honored in a special ceremony at our very own Timberline Lodge on September 24 – a very fitting location as Ralph was so integral in the recent renovation of that building, now a gorgeous groups & events space. We would of course love to have you join us and the DesLauriers family for this special occasion.

We hope you’ll consider joining us for the VTSSM’s signature annual fundraising event.

More Info & Buy Tickets

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Not only that, but our founder, Ralph DesLauriers, and his children own and operate this resort we all call home. Ralph is quite the visionary. He had the audacity to dream of a place where folks live, work and play year-round nearly 60 years ago, and that vision lives on today.

Ralph saw this thicket of woods in a glacial bowl at 2,100 feet (without a road up to it at the time) and had the audacity to dream of it becoming a family friendly/accessible to all ski resort for the local every day working person and school children, which was a pretty atypical target demographic at the time for Vermont ski resorts. This is why he quickly installed the night lights (now converted to LED’s to reduce our carbon footprint) because he knew extending the skiing and riding lift hours would allow the working person to come after work and school buses to unload school children 4 afternoons a week.

The After School Program remains one of our proudest vocations to this day. We have taught 10s of thousands of school children to learn to ski & ride with us – mostly from Washington & Chittenden Counties – over the last 50 years or so and are looking forward to that number climbing into the 100s of thousands in the next 50.

We are also proud of our partnerships with incredible organizations like Vermont Adaptive, the CHILL Foundation and Unlikely Riders, all focused on reducing physical, mental, financial and/or societal barriers to make Bolton Valley welcoming and inclusive to all. Supporting their work is important to us and will continue well into the future.

The legacy and foundation we’ve built together over these last several decades is something we’re very proud of. It’s a foundation we are excited to continue building upon into the future. As you’ve likely noticed, ever since the DesLauriers’ re-purchased Bolton Valley with local investors in 2017, we’ve been hard at work on several projects around the resort. Some were simply overdue “deferred maintenance” but there’s also been some really exciting and new growth happening.

We’ve really grown our operation these last few years to turn summer back “on” as it was when the DesLauriers owned it the first time around. From our vibrant Downhill Mountain Bike Park, summer camps and lessons/programs that mirror winter to the newly thriving wedding and summer hotel business, with new outdoor pool, we’re quickly returning to that year round Vermont mountain resort of years past.

Additionally, under the leadership of Lindsay DesLauriers, we’ve been VERY busy investing in some behind the scenes infrastructure projects across the resort that may interest you… Probably most important to mention here would be improvements to our snowmaking capacity and efficiency, the new and improved Timberline Lodge (and The Ponds across the road), a rather substantial hotel renovation and the newly installed outdoor pool, which opened this summer and has already been a massive hit for hotel guests and mountain locals alike.

Returning back to our roots as a Vermont resort for year-round adventure (and weddings) in the mountains and continual improvements to the skiing and riding guest experience in winter is our focus and our passion.

And while we’re talking about snowmaking, we think it bears pointing out that while we certainly aren’t immune to the challenges of climate change, we are doing everything we can (incrementally within our means) to get ahead of those challenges as we grow into the future. Beyond just increasing our snowmaking capacity, we are also focused on our impact in the community we call home. Upon their return in 2017, the DesLauriers family were quick to make environmentally sustainable improvements by replacing our diesel compressors in snowmaking with electric compressors, displacing 25,000 gallons of diesel fuel with the much cleaner grid energy supplied by our friends at Green Mountain Power. If you don’t know, from a sustainability lens, we are awfully lucky to have them as our utility, that’s for sure!

Additionally on the demand side, we converted our old night lights on the slopes to energy efficient LED’s to further reduce our carbon footprint while we’re skiing and riding at night. On the supply side, we’ve been involved in projects to restore the production from the wind turbine at the top of Vista Peak (which was dormant for many years previously) and a newly installed solar array at the bottom of the access road (down Route 2 a little ways on an old DesLauriers tract of land – the old driving range for those of you that remember that far back). And the electrification continues with our recent delivery of electric snowmobiles for our mountain operations team. We were the first delivery of Taiga’s cutting edge snow machines this past April and can’t wait to put them to use this winter. You’ll quickly appreciate the quieter drive bys of our lift mechanics and patrol, but also the lack of fumes! And our local watershed will certainly appreciate the lack of fossil fuels that can otherwise find their way into our streams and lakes any time any of us drive our cars or gas-powered lawn equipment for that matter.

We’re not trying to claim any sort of hero status here and we know we have more work ahead of us than behind us on this front, but we’re committed to doing better when and where we can long into the future, because this place is important to us.

We wanted to share all of this with you because we’re very proud of where we’ve been, but even more excited about where we’re headed. And we hope you’ll consider joining us. At Bolton Valley, we are members of this community and stewards of this land, and we look forward to continuing to grow together; in concert with each other.

We hope you’ll consider supporting these efforts by choosing to have fun with us this winter at Bolton Valley. If that sounds good to you, just be sure to lock in your season pass before midnight on Tuesday, September 6 when pass prices go up.

Thanks for your consideration and we’ll hope to see you on the mountain again soon!

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In this sit down chat with our President, Lindsay shares some of our excitement around the evolution of our Bike Park. Although we’ve long been know for our technical mountain bike trails, we’ve been working hard to bring more beginner to intermediate flow trails to the mountain so riders of all ages and abilities can learn with us. And recently, with the addition of our top-to-bottom beginner flow trail, Ebascootcha, it is truly the dawn of a new era for the Bolton Valley Bike Park.

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In this installment of Letters From Lindsay, Bolton Valley’s President addresses the recent surge in COVID-19 cases we’ve seen in the local community and across the country. Certainly, our staff is not immune to the extra pressure this has placed on our operations and for that reason, we’ll be taking some proactive/strategic steps to try and relieve some of that pressure on our staff who’s been working so hard!

The main impact to our guests will be a reduced lift operations schedule on Tuesday January 11 through Thursday January 13. Instead of opening at 9am, we will begin spinning lifts at 1pm on those three days and still operate lifts through the night skiing hours and close at 10pm. Some other outlets across the resort will adjust hours as well based on staffing levels.

As always, hours of each outlet can be tracked at boltonvalley.com/hours as this continues to evolve. We hope next week’s lift drawdown will be the only such measure we need in the coming weeks, but remain open to the possibility that we may have to deploy a similar strategy at other times as staffing levels dictate. On the plus side, as we get ready to launch this latest video, it’s been snowing for a few hours now. Hope to see you around the mountain soon!

Tuesday 1/11 – Thursday 1/13 lift hours will be reduced to eliminate lift service from 9am  – 1pm.
Lift schedule on these 3 days will be: Vista 1-9pm | Mid Mountain 2-10pm | Mighty Mite 1-8pm

If you have any of our Daytime Hours Season Passes, your pass will work at the gates right on through until 10pm on those 3 days. If you already purchased a lift ticket or lesson for the morning hours on one of those 3 days, email guestservices@boltonvalley.com and they will refund or exchange your ticket per your preference.

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