In March 2025, Loon Mountain quietly held an open house for locals to learn about an ambitious expansion plan. Known formally as the 2024 Master Development Plan, Loon would expand east with expert glades and west with cut trails and four new chairlifts. To longtime locals, this plan wasn’t new. When Governor Sherman Adams first built Loon, he eyed Lincoln Peak right above town. Loon President and General Manager Brian Norton said the main reason Adams developed Loon where it was: a smelly pulp and paper mill at the base of Lincoln. “Our founder Sherman Adams actually envisioned the ski resort starting close to the highway,” Norton told me in an interview this summer. “What we’re proposing now was his very first vision.”
The master plan combines a set of lift replacements with Lincoln Peak and Black Ridge expansions to create a 955-acre beast with seven detachable lifts and three gondolas. Loon Mountain operates on a mix of owned private land, leased White Mountain National Forest land and other private land so the expansion will take cooperation to be realized.
A portion of the plan includes upgrades to existing Loon. Perhaps most pressing is the aging White Mountain Express Gondola, which carries only four people per cabin. As revealed in May, Loon envisions a 10 passenger D-Line replacement. Norton said Loon is still refining the exact configuration but the system would move around 2,800 guests per hour with approximately 50 cabins. “That’s the longest lift line at Loon every single day of the week, all winter long,” he said. “What we’re working through now is it’s a big stinkin’ lift that needs cabin parking and we don’t have a ton of space at the bottom of the mountain.”
To the east, Black Ridge will debut for the 2027-28 season. This area will remain natural with 272 acres of gladed trees and no cut trails or lifts. Two of Loon’s most popular chairlifts – North Peak Express and Lincoln Express, are eyed to become six packs for additional capacity. Asked which could come first, Norton demurred. “I waver on this every day. Is North Peak more important than Lincoln Express if you think about what Black Ridge means to the ski resort?” Loon also plans to expand west, adding pressure to Lincoln. “You have a ski resort growing in both ways with critical lifts on both ends,” said Norton. “Neither of them are old, neither of them need to be upgraded but both of them could be as they support expansion East and West.” He noted it will probably come down to which one of the existing lifts is most useful somewhere else, either at Loon or within Boyne.
A race training T-Bar is also proposed to run next to North Peak Express, allowing for faster laps by Loon Race Team athletes. Interestingly, the East Basin double and Tote Road quad aren’t earmarked for upgrades and will remain fixed-grip. One reason Tote Road will stay slow: Loon plans to eventually construct connector trails for skiers to transit between Loon Peak and South Peak on snow.
As of October 1st, the Forest Service formally accepted westward expansion for potential approval. The Loon Mountain Resort Expansion Project encompasses 280 acres – 145 acres of traditional trails, 135 acres of glades and five aerial lifts. The first is already under town review and not a ski lift but rather a pulse gondola connecting the RiverWalk Resort with the new Timbertown base. At the community open house last March, Norton called the gondola “privately funded public transportation.” The six passenger gondola would land at a new Camp III base area with skier services building, two conveyors and potential night skiing. Adjacent to Timbertown, a detachable quad would service a new low intermediate terrain pod. “We have a lot of higher end intermediate but we don’t have that lower end intermediate,” noted Norton. “That’s a big part of what Lincoln Peak is, especially the Lift C portal – pure beautiful fall line with more sun.” Asked whether Lift C could be a repurposed North Peak or Lincoln Express, Norton noted both lifts are longer than needed for the new alignment. A night skiing pod open 14 hours a day may not be the best home for a repurposed lift.
The main attraction would be a ten-person gondola spanning 6,654 feet to a new summit lodge on Peak 2,324. Rising 1,632′ vertical, the gondola would move 2,800 skiers per hour and mimic the planned gondola on Loon Peak. Ending at the same point, a fixed quad codenamed Lift D is planned to serve lappable expert trails. Finally, a second fixed quad will run west of the new gondola base and serve beginner and low intermediate terrain. Lift F is closely tied to further private development. Norton noted day skier parking, workforce housing and maintenance facilities may all live at that end of the resort someday. He caveated Loon just solved a longstanding issue of parking with no lift at Escape Route and doesn’t want to replicate the same poor experience again. “Lift F would service that area so we’re not going back in time and forcing people to shuttle from parking again.” Loon noted in its announement that “conceptual trail and lift layouts are in place, but these allow for a flexible, phased rollout that can adapt to public feedback, operational needs, and environmental considerations as the project advances.”
It’s no secret that Loon gets crowded as one of the most accessible large mountains from Boston. Asked whether this expansion is about spreading people out or attracting more people, Norton said some of both. “We’re going to spend a bunch of money over here and we need to pay for that. There’s unused demand at Loon. We’re managing the capacity of the ski resort on peak days. We’re telling people sorry, we’re not going to sell you a ticket and sorry we’re not going to let you come as an Ikon Pass holder because we’re trying to manage the experience.”
The public can learn more about the proposal via a virtual public meeting on October 14th. Asked whether Loon would have to go through a multi-year Environmental Impact Statement to get the expansion approved, Norton said the resort and Forest Service settled on an Environmental Assessment taking around 12 months to complete. “Our expansion at Lincoln Peak is a proposed expansion into a Forest Service zone that’s meant for ski area expansion.” said Norton. “Loon’s new MDP, although slightly different with lift and trail alignments, has largely been the same for 35 or 40 years.”
Loon going huge.
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Great to see Loon making this announcement official, as South Peak Resort has advertised it for a few years now. Loon needs additional terrain to become the full weekend resort it wants to be, and this should really get the mountain to that point (the Black Mountain glades are great but too niche to really help here).
I understand the lift layouts are conceptual, and I wonder if Lifts C & D would even be built for the first 5-10+ years of operation. Skiers have shown a strong preference for detachable lifts when available, and Lift E is pretty easy to lap itself. If Lift E were to be a chondola instead of a gondola (they want at least some cabins for the Summit Lodge), everything could be easily lapped from the summit. Being a pessimist, would the Loon Race Team really need a lift for a Race Arena (Lift D) plus a T-Bar on North Peak? Is Timbertown so successful that it needs, essentially, a second parallel lift (Lift C) when it could alternatively be realigned to serve everything?
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I tend to agree. Except Lift C seems to be in a better alignment and location than Timbertown. I feel like what would make sense is build Lift C and use the equipment from Timbertown to build Lift F. Lift D doesn’t seem necessary, at least for now.
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In order for a beginner to reach the easy trails of Timber Town from the top of Lift C they would have to use Cruiser, an intermediate run. This would defeat the goal of making TT greens-only.
Even now, Cruiser is in need of a relocation so Fox Run can originate from the top of TT. This relocation is depicted on the map as Run 21. The old Cruiser alignment would become part of Fox Run.
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how much of the season does loon actually have enough natural snow to open up glades?
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its more which season actually gets enough snow for them to be open for more than a few weeks, as NH ski region weather has a much bigger range than northern VT or Quebec.
I’d guestimate it’s probably about 50% of seasons they’re open for a decent amount of time. Well-gladed terrain needs much less snow than bushwacking old overgrown glade trails and stumps. In a 130-140″ season, which is Loon’s average, they could be open for a month or more. Maybe 3.5 months if it’s the rare winter like 25/26 was where it snowed enough to matter and stayed cold. About 2 weeks or less in the 50-90″ seasons, or the years that appear decent by total but had enough rain to ruin any base depth quickly.
Over the last decade there’s about 4 years near the average with 1-2 months of base depth and temps, 2 with good snowfall but warm temps/rain and crap base depth, 2 with good snow and prolonged cold temps, and 2 complete garbage years.
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It seems like North Peak and Lincoln Express could find homes at Sugarloaf or Sunday River. Both resorts need to upgrade some fixed grip lifts.
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I think Sunday River is the most probable place where these lifts will go, since they have a lot of lifts mentioned for eventual replacement in the Sunday River 2030 plan: Tempest (White Cap), Aurora, South Ridge Express, and North Peak Express. It would be funny if North Peak from Loon goes to North Peak at Sunday River and keeps its old name. Though maybe that’s unlikely since Boyne could just do the same upgrades to the current North Peak HSQ that they’ve done to relocated detachables of the same vintage and keep that lift running for awhile longer.
Sugarloaf is another candidate for relocation of the HSQs, with Double Runner potentially being the most likely alignment, though I personally think a fixed grip might work better there.
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Loon’s North Peak replacing Sunday River’s North Peak seems like a lateral move. Sunday River’s North Peak is completely sufficient for what it does and replacing one 20+ year old detachable with another 20+ year old detachable seems silly. I wonder if they could retrofit a lift while keeping it on its existing footprint?
I think the obvious choices would be:
I am curious to see if Sunday River and Sugarloaf release updated master plans in the coming weeks. If I recall correctly, Loon, Sunday River, and Sugarloaf all released their 2030 master plans a few weeks apart from each other back in like 2021 or something.
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Maybe Sugarloaf releases their updated plan ( 2035 plan :-) ) this weekend at their annual meeting that they are starting again during homecoming weekend.
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Wow, definitely an ambitious plan. A few thoughts:
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