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rising to the challenge of winter By bruce wood

Mount Sunapee

iven a tight and immutable deadline to finish an eight- or nine-month construction project, it’s only natural to keep a sharp eye on the winter weather and hope that cold temperatures and snow stay away.

But what if the project is at a ski area, as it was when Trumbull-Nelson constructed a new lodge at Mount Sunapee Resort in 1999? Or when Trumbull-Nelson demolished the cramped old lodge at the Dartmouth Skiway and replaced it with the McLane Family Lodge one year later? Or when it raised up the Stratton Mountain Club in Vermont in 2003?

Several years removed from those inspiring, but tiring, efforts, Trumbull-Nelson’s Ken Merrow can laugh at the friendly divide between his company’s needs and those of its clients, who very much wanted the white stuff to come early and stay late, but at the same time had to meet construction deadlines.

“They are rooting for snow and you are rooting against it,” said Merrow, the superintendent of the Sunapee project, and superintendent and later project manager at the Dartmouth facility. “I guess somewhere in between is a nice mix.”

Glancing at an aerial view of the Sunapee lodge hung on the wall of his Trumbull-Nelson office, Merrow can smile. Like the McLane Family Lodge in Lyme, New Hampshire, and the Stratton Mountain Club in Vermont, the Sunapee project met its deadline and was ready to greet skiers before the first natural snow of the season graced the slopes.

That wasn’t by accident.

“If you are working off a fixed end date, you schedule backwards from there,” Merrow explained. “When you know you are going to get hit with winter weather you need to plan accordingly. You figure out which material has to hit the site at a certain date to be able to achieve that schedule.

“When you know you are going to get hit with winter weather you need to plan accordingly.”

“Anytime you work at a ski area you deal with elevation, and the weather is a percentage worse than it is elsewhere,” he continued. “In the case of Sunapee, they had to hit a December 15 opening date for their marketing plan. The lodge had to be online and ready. For us that meant doing whatever it took to get there.

Mount Sunapee

“It can be a lot of pressure. A lot of nights. A lot of weekends. There were some aspects where we really had to cram it in. But we pride ourselves on hitting those dates.” In addition to pride in meeting deadlines, the staff at Trumbull-Nelson also share a pride in the eye-catching buildings they add to the landscape, like the unique, octagonal-shaped lodge that fits in so nicely at Mount Sunapee. Like the airy Dartmouth Skiway lodge with its fireplace tall enough for the craftsmen working on it to stand inside. Like the Stratton Mountain Club, which manages to marry time-honored New England timber-frame design with modern conveniences like an underground parking garage.

The lodge at Mount Sunapee—which features towering round posts rising to radial rafters embracing a central skylight—was the first of the buildings to be completed. Like the others, it has an abundance of windows that bring natural light cascading in.

“Each project comes with its own trials and tribulations,” said Merrow. “What works and what doesn’t, what you would do different the next time. We built Sunapee first and the next season we built the Dartmouth Skiway and were able to bring ideas from one to the next. It helped that they had the same architect and the same project team.”

The Sunapee and Dartmouth lodges were designed by Stuart White of Banwell Architects in Lebanon, New Hampshire. Bensonwood Homes did the design, fabrication, and erection of the timber framing at Sunapee while Vermont Timberframe of Cambridge, New York, milled and framed the McLane Family Lodge from wood harvested at the Dartmouth Grant in Northern New Hampshire.

Dartmouth Skiway

While Mother Nature cooperated with Trumbull-Nelson in its race to get the first of the lodges ready for its mid-December opening, Merrow hasn’t forgotten the challenges they faced.

“A lot of times when you do a job the owner isn’t there every day,” he said. “This one they were, because they were building a new ski slope at the same time.

“You can hit winter weather in early September but we didn’t have any real early snow cripple us on that one,” Merrow said. “Every day we’d be checking the weather on the Internet. The ski area guys would come over and tell us what their 10-day forecast looked like. They were looking for 40-degree-and-below sustained temperatures so they could make snow.”

When the forecast was right, they started up the guns, which presented a unique challenge to the builders.

“While we were closing up the roof and the trim on the outside they were making snow,” Merrow said. “That’s really superfine, blown snow and it gets in everywhere. That was a problem for us at first, but they had no choice but to make snow so we worked around it. That was their most critical function. They could open technically without the lodge, but they had to make snow, period.”

Dartmouth Skiway

Among the challenges at the McLane Family Lodge were access and wetlands. “Sunapee was like building in a field,” Merrow said. “Dartmouth was really a one-sided site. There was a brook that ran alongside the road that created wetlands that we had to work around. So we had to access it from one side. Fortunately the road was sparsely traveled.

“The weather was also more severe between Holt’s Ledge and Winslow Mountain. Things tended to sock in there earlier and it was a little more windy.” According to Merrow, the time constraints weren’t quite as severe at the Stratton Mountain Club, still another graceful timber frame design.
“The construction wasn’t all that different from the first two lodges,” he said. “The parking garage in the basement was different and there were more high-end finishes, because it’s more of a private space.” And during 2002/2003, winter ‘came early and came hard!’ Snowboarders appreciated the fact that Stratton opened the halfpipe before Thanksgiving.

“It really is rewarding when you see someone walk inside for the first time with their mouth open and say, ‘Wow.’”

T-N’s presence at the mountain continued this past fall and will resume in the spring with renovation and repairs on the Long Trail House, a series of multistory condominium buildings that sit across from the base lodge.
Merrow was back at the Stratton Mountain Club for a wedding last summer and he’s spent winter days skiing at both Sunapee and the Dartmouth Skiway. Each time he’s returned to the mountains he has found himself looking around, not just at the buildings Trumbull-Nelson built under generally tight schedules, but at the faces of the people who use them.
Being in the construction business can be a little like being a parent. You don’t choose among your children. That said, there’s no rule against pointing out what you like and Merrow clearly likes shepherding projects such as the lodges at Sunapee, the Dartmouth Skiway, and Stratton Mountain.

“I’m an outdoors person and I ski, so doing those was a lot of fun,” he said. “It hit home. Doing an office building is great, but it’s not quite the same. With an office building you can point at it from the outside and say, ‘We did it.’ With the Skiway and the others, I know a lot of people who use them, and we talk about them all the time. They are in awe. It really is rewarding when you see someone walk inside for the first time with their mouth open and say, ‘Wow.’ ”

	Stratton mountain club