A love letter to Loon Mountain

I lived in New Hampshire for about two years of my life, yet it remains an integral part of my personality that I refuse to relent.

I went to college at the University of New Hampshire. Years later, I worked there as a professor. I learned to snowboard at Waterville Valley when I was in elementary school, but it wasn’t until years later that I fell in love with it at Loon Mountain. 

It was 2013. I was a 21-year-old college kid, wearing a pair of silver Spyder snow pants and a windbreaker that held no hope for keeping me warm. My friends were all so much better than me. It would have been pretty easy to give it up, or retreat back to the lodge and do some homework. But my friends never left me behind, and eventually, I was able to keep up. A year later, we'd all be ducking into the trees together, popping out at the base, and cracking a Busch Light at the lodge while our Campbell's Chunky soup warmed in the lone microwave. We were broke, we were hungry, and we were probably skipping class. It was perfect.

Riding Loon was a crash course in snowboard culture. Dudes were running cotton Eastern Border and Lahout’s hoodies in the middle of a snowstorm. There were more pairs of ThirtyTwo boots on the hill than in the local shop itself. I would run through Loon Mountain Park with my friends and see tricks I had only seen in videos on Torstein Horgmo’s website before.

A few years went by. I graduated, moved to the Berkshires for a reporting gig, and hated every second of it. I was miserable, and I only made it through the desolate western Massachusetts winters by a combination of beer league hockey and weekend shifts in the rental shop at Catamount Mountain. The occasional Wednesday trip to Bosquet or Butternut was the only thing keeping me sane.

When I needed some comfort, I drove four-plus hours through Boston traffic to UNH, picked up some friends that hadn’t graduated yet, and drove north to Loon Mountain. It was a horrible snow year, and there wasn't much to do aside from lap Springboard. It didn't matter. It was grounding. A return to a happy place, if only for 48 hours or so.

Desperate to "make it" as a reporter, I moved to Texas. It was new, and exciting, and I had convinced myself that I didn't need snowboarding right now. It was time to focus on my career, right? Grow up and become an adult. I remember sitting in the living room of my Killeen apartment in early December feeling like something was missing. I went to YouTube, played the Adidas film 3 AM, and immediately had the feeling of "I got to go wax my board."

Except that I didn't. I wasn't snowboarding anytime soon.

But it was Texas, believe it or not, where the obsession became fully realized. I used that as a springboard to ride out west. It was my first introduction to Big Sky and Bridger Bowl in Montana. I came back to Texas and promptly started to plan how to get back to colder weather. And after I moved back to the northeast, where was the first place I went?

It was Loon, of course.

Since then, it's been the place. It's where I went nearly every Tuesday of the season while I was in graduate school in Boston, because that was my only day off all week. It's where my family booked week-long vacations. I've taken job interviews from the lodge and worked remotely from The Paul Bunyan Room. My friends have gotten married there. I rode there the day after my grandfather's funeral.

I don’t live in New England anymore, but I try to make it back to Lincoln, New Hampshire at least once a year. For a while, it didn’t look like it was going to happen this season, until my fiancée planned her bridal shower back in her home state. I, of course, needed to be there to visit her at the end of it with flowers. I, of course, needed to fly up a day early to hit Loon during its closing weekend.

I’m not going to sit here and say that nothing has changed at Loon Mountain Resort. It was purchased by Michigan-based Boyne Resorts back in 2018. There’s a new chairlift with heated seats and a bubble now. Food and beverage options have expanded. The soul of Loon, however, has remained the same, at least to someone who doesn’t work there or live in the region.

Even the faces behind the bar at the Paul Bunyan Room are the same. That hits me particularly hard as I hand over my credit card to pay my tab, an action that would have taken a significant portion of my net worth 12 years earlier.

I am getting married this week, and with that, entering my next stage of life. My fiancée and I have taken countless trips to Loon together. After one of the first trips, she bought me a Loon-branded bottle opener that I keep in my wallet to this very day. The mountain is now as much of a part of our story as it was a part of mine.

These days, there aren’t many things that remain the same. You can debate the merits of whether that is good or bad all you want, but I’m not here to do that today. All I’m saying is that while the name and owners of CJ’s Penalty Box have changed, the feeling I get when I take the Exit 32 off-ramp and turn left hasn’t.

As I enter the next stage of life, I hope to bring my future children to Lincoln for a week. We’ll be in the parking lot for first chair. Hopefully, I’ll get to sneak in a beer at the Bunyan room while ski school finishes up. We’ll take the train back to the parking lot, get sandwiches from Wayne’s, and maybe be lucky enough to crash the hotel pool before passing out for the night. Just like I did when I visited Loon for the first time.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.