Loon Mountain Resort

Sherman Adams left his job as White House Chief of Staff to President Eisenhower in 1958 and went home to New Hampshire to build a ski resort. That resort, Loon Mountain, opened in December 1966 with a modest 12 trails across 80 acres — a fraction of what’s there today. Expansion came in phases: a West Basin addition in 1978, the North Peak zone in 1984 that pushed the vertical past 2,100 feet, and a South Peak complex in 2007 that arrived only after years of environmental litigation over its construction.

The resort that resulted from those additions now counts 80 runs and 45.77 km of trail across three connected peaks, with a 666.2 m vertical drop from a 262.3 m base to a 928.5 m summit within the White Mountain National Forest. The terrain splits fairly evenly by difficulty — 10.81 km easy, 25.22 km intermediate, 8.2 km advanced, and a smaller 1.35 km rated expert — a mix that keeps the mountain approachable for families while still offering some technical terrain on North and South Peak. Twelve lifts, including a gondola and a beginner-zone magic carpet, cover the network, and snowmaking reaches better than 86% of the terrain, useful insurance given the marginal early-winter conditions typical of this part of New Hampshire.

Boyne Resorts, the Michigan-based operator, took full ownership in March 2018 after a period of partial ownership through Booth Creek and then CNL Lifestyle Properties. That put Loon on the Ikon Pass system: the full Ikon Pass grants seven days here with no blackout dates, while the cheaper Ikon Base Pass allows five days but carries blackout restrictions.

Loon sits in Lincoln, New Hampshire, a town built up around the resort’s tourist trade. Lebanon Municipal Airport is the closest air option at roughly 71 km, though Portland International Jetport in Maine, at about 116 km, serves as the resort’s larger recorded gateway given its bigger flight schedule. Manchester and the Quebec city of Sherbrooke are both plausible ground-access hubs from the south and north respectively, at 118 km and 152 km.

The three-peak structure is central to how the mountain skis today. The original terrain around the base area tends to carry the most traffic and the gentlest grading, North Peak’s 1984 expansion added meaningfully to the vertical and to intermediate cruising, and South Peak, the newest of the three after its long-delayed 2007 opening, spreads skiers out further and adds terrain variety on what had been one of the more congested mid-size resorts in the White Mountains before the expansion.

The gap between Loon’s modest 1966 opening — a dozen trails on 80 acres — and its current 80-run, 45.77 km footprint illustrates how much New England ski areas grew over the second half of the twentieth century, often in fits and starts driven by land acquisition and, in Loon’s case, years of environmental review before South Peak could finally open. That history also explains why the resort’s difficulty mix still carries a fairly even spread across easy, intermediate, and advanced terrain rather than concentrating hard on one style of skiing: each expansion phase added a different flavor of terrain rather than simply replicating what came before, from the original base-area beginner slopes to North Peak’s cruising runs and South Peak’s later, more spread-out layout.