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Mount Sunapee |
Given 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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.’ ”
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Stratton Mountain Club |
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