The Boomerang Has Returned!
The Snow is Here and The Boomerang is Ready! For the second year in a row, Mount Washington Alpine Resort will be introducing a new chairlift. It just happens to be the same chairlift as last year!
“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.