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Sugar Mountain Ski Resorts Expands With New Bold, Swooping Slope Featuring Steep, Challenging Plummets

Photos by Ken Ketchie
The new slope will be called “Gunther’s Way” in honor of Sugar Mountain Ski Resort President Gunther Jochl. Photos by Ken Ketchie

By Randy Johnson

Sept. 4, 2014. The largest ski area in North Carolina – and one of the biggest in the South – is about to expand. Sugar Mountain touts 115 acres of slopes on its website, but by this ski season, it’ll have close to 125 acres with the opening of a new advanced slope being built right now on the upper west side of the mountain.

The new slope takes a left off of the top of Switchback just as it turns below North Ridge. The wide new slope averages 150 feet across, as it alternates between swooping descents on gradual terraces and then steep, challenging plummets.

A new view is part of the appeal, which includes Grandfather Mountain. The slope bottoms out as it joins the base of the Terrain Park slope above Easy Street, offering access to the handle tow lift for experts wanting to head back up the mountain.

The 2,900-foot slope, more than half a mile, boasts 700-feet of vertical drop. On a recent tour of the slope, Sugar Mountain President Gunther Jochl said, “If you put in a brand new slope and don’t expand snowmaking, you haven’t made much of an improvement.” So the new slope required adding a massive new water pump that can pump 1,000 gallons of water uphill every minute. Ten new automatic SMI tower-mounted snowguns will cover the slope.

Jochl added that the improvement will cost more than $1 million, which includes clearing and grading the new slope; installing hundreds of feet of new snowmaking pipe; rebuilding the resort’s pump house to accommodate the new pump and the ten new snowguns.

Slope Should Be Ready for Ski Season Opener

While the slope area was logged last summer, Banner Elk-based Eggers Construction started working on the new slope on July 7. Construction crews, varying from two to 15 people, have been working from dawn to dusk to see the project through with big machinery, such has backhoes, bulldozers and dump trucks.

“Whenever [Eggers Construction] has had the go ahead for different sections of the slope, they’ve been ready and willing to work and try to get the job done as soon as possible and as quickly as possible,” Jochl said.

So far, 90 percent of the slope has been cleared with the upper portion of the slope already seeing grass. The remainder of the slope that has been cleared is ready for seeding

“There is a lot of infrastructure set to be done, laying snowmaking pipes and getting the electrical work done for the new snow machines,” Jochl said. “We’re hoping to have it finished, completed by the beginning of ski season.”

New Names Too

With the new slope will come new names.

Kim Jochl, director of Marketing for Sugar Mountain and former nine-time member of the U.S. Alpine Ski Team, said, “We’ve wanted to rename the Big Red slope for years, so we figured if we were naming a new slope we might as well do that.”

The process started with Kim and her husband, Austria-native and Sugar Mountain President Gunther Jochl soliciting names from friends and employees. Gunther was inclined to do something special for his mother and name it after her.  “No commitment was made,” Kim said but the tentative name was “Oma’s” slope. Everyone in the the family calls Gunther’s mother Oma, “grandmother” in German, a term of endearment many people use in German-speaking countries.

Then Kim got inspired with her own idea for a name. “I went up there alone and hiked the new slope and I looked down and saw how spectacular that new slope is going to be, the incredible view, and I realized that this was going to be the best slope on the mountain, and it just dawned on me, this is ‘Gunther’s Way,’ this is Gunther’s slope, and nothing else but that name would be fitting.” So Kim decided that would be the name and that Big Red would become “Oma’s Meadow” because of its gentle slope.

Previously, Gunther indicated he didn’t want to name a slope after a person, so she started “trying to figure out how I was going to tell Gunther that this was going to be his slope,” said Kim, who went on to hijack the process.

She hoped Gunther wouldn’t find out “until it’s too late for him not to like it,” she said with a laugh. She started planning to order the slope signs and make up this winter’s brochure, intending to keep Gunther in the dark.

“But I was really reluctant to do something that important without Gunther’s approval,” she says. “I’d done similar things like that before, and he found them a little unnerving at first, but he came though. He loved them. But I didn’t want this to be one of those antics I was going to pull.”

One evening on the deck after dinner, Kim confessed that she’d planned to have a fake trail map made for his approval and keep the news from him, but “I guess my conscience got the better of me.”

Thinking of all the effort involved, she blurted out her idea. “Typically, Gunther responds with a quick yes or no about work stuff, and then he explains his reasoning, but his reaction to this was at least two minutes of silence. And I was thinking, ‘uh oh.”

Eventually Gunther said he appreciated the thought, for him and his mother, but he said, “I’m not really sure that’s what we want to do.” And, “that was it, for two or three days,” says Kim.

Eventually, he “probably talked to some people,” she says. “For him it would just be uncomfortable to have a slope named after him, but a few days later he said, ‘Ok, let’s do it.’ And that’s how it played out.”

Kim thinks it’s “important to let this be a legacy for Gunther. Everybody knows he’s been here forever, and it’s important when people have an impact, at a ski area or in a community, whether it’s my husband or someone else, it’s important to honor that. And a great opportunity like this isn’t going to come along again. A new slope like this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that I wanted to take advantage of.”

Gunther looks at it philosophically. With a slight shake of his head and a smile, he says, “You only debate with Kim for so long and then she wins.”

See photos of the new slope below. Photos by Ken Ketchie

 

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Ten new automatic SMI tower-mounted snowguns will cover the slope.
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Gunther Jochl, president and owner of Sugar Mountain Ski Resort, stands along the location of the new slope.
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This culvert will allow the stream to flow naturally.
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A view of the slope under construction.
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A view of the slope under construction.
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Gunther Jochl, president and owner of Sugar Mountain Ski Resort, stands along the location of the new slope.
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An aerial view of the slope.
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An aerial view of the slope.
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The new slope will be called “Gunther’s Way” in honor of Sugar Mountain Ski Resort President Gunther Jochl.
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This scene is classic as one drives along Banner Elk Highway. See how the new slope is set up next to the other slopes.
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The bottom of the slopes connects to other areas of the slope network.
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The photo shows the “challenging plummets” that the new slope will soon be famous for.
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To aid in the snow making process, these pipes will sit in a ditch along the sides of the new slope. The new slope required adding a massive new water pump that can pump 1,000 gallons of water uphill every minute

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