“The Boomerang will launch Mount Washington into the next level of service for a destination alpine resort… the steep and the deep,” says Mount Washington Alpine Resort President Peter Gibson.
“For the high-end customer, it’s going to be extremely exciting because this is a first for them,” Gibson said. “We’ve had the powder, the face and the back basin, but we didn’t have the unlimited black diamond and double black diamond.”
The double black diamond territory is called The Outback, and it’s 162 hectares (400 acres) serviced by a new, $3.5 million chairlift, the Boomerang Quad. The Boomerang is Canada’s first double offload chairlift; the addition of this lift gives riders 1,600 acres in bounds in which to play.
The Boomerang Chair was touted as the steepest and deepest, the highly anticipated double black diamond chair. However, due to the winter season of which we won’t speak, the chair was only ever christened by staff and a handful of media.
The theme this year is ‘Sweet’” says Gibson. The Resort spent some $250,000 last summer to cut and clean up the existing Boomerang trail. “The bottom three-quarters has basically had a haircut,” he says. “We’ve gone with the brush saws and we’ve cut everything. We haven’t done that in a while because we haven’t had to.” What the ‘haircut’ will mean is the Resort can open runs with less snowpack, because there is less ‘stuff’ to poke through early snowfalls. “In spite of everything, we’re optimistic,” says Gibson.