Unhappy trails

Environmentalists come to the rescue of an old-growth forest on Wachusett Mountain. But their attempts to save trees could ruin a successful family business.

Text by Walter Crockett

The summit of Wachusett Mountain is closed to automobiles this summer. But if you park at the visitors center, you can walk up the paved road, past two major ski trails, and then turn left onto the Old Indian Trail.

You'll climb a few hundred feet on your way to the summit, over rocks and through shallow mud, among oak and hemlock and fern and undergrowth. And somewhere along the trail -- you'd have to be a biologist to tell just where -- you'll find yourself in the midst of the largest stand of old-growth forest in Massachusetts.

It's not like the old-growth forests of California, where 1000-year-old sequoias tower to the skies. No, these are twisted, windblown, soil-starved trees that have struggled for existence every day for several hundred years. Some of them send their roots spidering out over boulders, like Japanese bonsai trees. These trees, and their fallen ancestors, were here on the mountain when the Massachusetts Bay Colony was founded in 1620. Many of them saw real Indians walk the Old Indian Trail.

When almost every other forested acre in the state was harvested for firewood or farming, these trees were too gnarled, too inaccessible -- not worth the effort, even to farmers who thought nothing of breaking their backs building stone fences up and down the side of the mountain. And so they survived in a ring around the summit. And the little polypod ferns, lichens, and mosses -- the rare communities of intermingled plant and animal life that come together only in forests long undisturbed -- survived and thrived with them.

Acres of old growth were lost when the mountain road was built, and acres more when the ski area was expanded to the summit in the 1980s -- but nobody knew at the time. Until recently, biologists were taught that there was no old growth in Massachusetts. They didn't find it because it didn't look like the kind of old growth they were used to looking for elsewhere.

But there it was, standing wild and rugged -- and directly in the path of a proposed expansion of the Wachusett Mountain Ski Area, run by Worcester's formidable Crowley family, owner of Wachusett Mountain Associates (WMA), which leases 450 of the reservation's 2849 acres for the ski area.

Over the past three decades the Crowley family has become a Worcester-area dynasty, building two remarkably successful corporations, each of which plays David to its industry's Goliath. Their Polar Corp., a soft-drink independent, takes on Coke and Pepsi, while little Wachusett Mountain takes on Killington and Sunday River. Since the death of patriarch Ralph Crowley, five of his children have run the show: David, Jeff, and Carolyn at Wachusett, and older brothers Ralph and Chris at Polar.

The state gave the Crowleys their first lease on the ski area in the late '60s, when the mountain boasted just two T-bars and four trails. That was followed by a series of one-year leases, and capped by a 30-year lease signed in 1981. Now the mountain has three major lifts and 10 ski trails.

While the Crowleys have won great praise for creating a small gem of a ski area on the largest hill in Massachusetts east of the Connecticut River, their plans to expand have bogged them down in a storm of controversy. That storm intensified dramatically when the old-growth forest was discovered. And it turned into a downright blizzard this spring when at least 13 extreme ski trails were found on the mountain, many of them blazed right through the old growth.

This discovery prompted the Sierra Club to call for the state to revoke the ski area's lease. Although revocation seems out-of-the-question at this point, the battle over the expansion rages on. Meanwhile, the gnarly old-growth forest still stands, quietly growing older and deeper and mossier in the eye of the storm.

IT WASN'T UNTIL THE SUMMER of 1995 that Gordon Brownell, a longtime opponent of the ski area expansion, discovered the old growth and brought it to the attention of naturalists Joe Choiniere and Bob Leverett. Experts soon had identified 165 acres of old-growth forest, with the oldest tree 369 years old and many trees in the 300-to-325 year range. It's the only old growth in Massachusetts this side of the Connecticut River.

"It's been looked at by a number of very prominent old-growth scientists and pronounced extremely, extremely distinctive," says Choiniere, who is caretaker of Mass. Audubon Society's Wachusett Meadow wildlife sanctuary in Princeton. "Scientists often have to keep their emotional side under control, but when you've got scientists jumping up and down like I do over this . . ."

Not only is it the biggest single stand in the state, it is also the most biologically diverse, because its old-growth habitats vary from one elevation to the next. More important even than the age of particular trees is the interaction of the elements of the forest, Choiniere says.

"The system is not just old trees. So whether the largest or oldest components of the forest are cut or not is not material," he says. "It's full of microhabitats that develop over a period of a long time, and there are very subtle differences of temperature and humidity and light that develop on the forest floor. . . . So you get this series of slightly different conditions of an old-growth forest, which lend themselves to the growth of mosses and fungi. Those things take a long time to develop and a very short time to destroy."

The discovery of Wachusett's old-growth forest is good fortune for scientists, good fortune for nature lovers, and good fortune for the groups already opposed to the ski area expansion. But it is bad luck for the Crowley family.

By 1996, state officials had prohibited the cutting of old-growth trees. That meant WMA had to abandon plans announced in 1993 to build another ski trail to the summit of the mountain.

Instead, the WMA has scaled back plans and now hopes to build two smaller ski trails in adjacent woods to be cleared below the old-growth area. The ski area also wants to replace the Nor'easter triple chairlift with a high-speed detachable quad, to install a new triple between the Hitchcock and lower Smith-Walton trails, to make some other lift improvements, and to widen some of the lower slopes outside the old-growth area.

For skiers and snowboarders, the most exciting part of the expansion would probably be the "Alpine park" to be established on one of the two new trails. It would feature a half-pipe and a bunch of little jumps and hits to please the snowboarding population. The other trail would offer steep terrain for race training.

The new trails would increase the skiable area by only eight acres on top of the existing 103. But WMA wants state approval to increase the capacity of the area by 28 percent, from the maximum of 3225 skiers now allowed to a proposed 4125 skiers.

The fate of the $7 million expansion can't be decided until WMA produces its final Environmental Impact Report (EIR), which will assess the potential effects on the area. It may be ready later this month. And it won't be decided without a vigorous battle between the WMA camp and the loose coalition of environmental groups and local boards and citizens who oppose any further expansion.

Even leaving out the old-growth issue, there are plenty of occasions for the two groups to butt heads. Fitchburg's water supply sits in a lake precisely at the bottom of the mountain, so there are questions of runoff and possible pollution. Nearby residents are concerned about the noise and increased traffic from skiers, many of them from Rhode Island and Connecticut.

Safety on the mountain is another concern, because expanding the capacity will increase the number of skiers per acre well beyond the standard originally set for the area by its own consultant.

Underlying some opponents' arguments is a sense that the Crowleys think they own the mountain and can do whatever they want with it -- and that the state Department of Environmental Management (DEM), which really owns the mountain, has become all too cozy with WMA in recent years. Opponents say the DEM has allowed de facto expansion of the ski area without public input. Opponents also maintain that the DEM has become much too lax in its oversight.

Tom Lynch, who oversaw the expansion of the ski area starting in 1969 and maintained hands-on control of it until 1989 as regional director of forests and parks for the DEM, has become an ardent opponent of further expansion.

"We were asked to put in a nice -- not overpowering, but very nice -- ski area, and we've done it so successfully they want more," says Lynch, who retired from DEM in 1990. "Right now, 50 percent-plus of the use of the reservation is skiing. The tail is beginning to wag the dog."

On the WMA side, General Manager David Crowley says no ski area in the country has been put under such scrutiny as Wachusett Mountain. The ski area employs more than 600 people and has been grossing in the vicinity of $10 million a year -- 3 percent of which goes to the state -- but the Crowleys say they've been forced to run the business by committee. They've already been involved in 30 to 40 public meetings on the issue.

"We're proud of our environmental record," says David's brother, WMA President Jeff Crowley. "We've got probably one of the best reputations from an environmental standpoint of any ski area in the country. . . . All we're trying to do is . . . build eight acres of trails, and we're seeing a lot of scrutiny. It's easier to permit a grand summit hotel [in Vermont] than it is to get these eight acres in Massachusetts."

"We care as much about the environment as anyone," adds his sister, WMA Vice President Carolyn Stimpson. "Most of the things that happen from this expansion will actually benefit the environment. Nobody talks about the fact that there are 90 percent more trees in this area than there were 100 years ago, and there's a lack of meadowland."

The mission of adding more skiable meadowland to the mountain hit a second major mogul in the fall of 1996, when WMA damaged some old-growth trees while trying to drag in snowmaking pipe from the summit. Ski area management apologized and agreed, as punishment, to prepare a nature pamphlet, which has yet to be published.

But the snow really hit the goggles on April 11, when Choiniere, searching for turkey vulture nests, discovered the first of what turned out to be at least 13 illegally cut ski trails, blazed by skiers or snowboarders who were looking for extreme thrills. The next day a gaggle of state officials was on the scene to condemn the woodland vandalism -- and WMA and DEM both found themselves on the hot seat. Although none of the older trees was felled by the vandals, many saplings and branches were trimmed and the delicate old-growth ecosystem was threatened.

Opponents of the ski expansion don't go so far as to accuse WMA of creating or sanctioning the extreme trails, but they find it hard to believe that ski area officials didn't know about them. Even Todd Frederick, director of the state Division of Forests and Parks, says WMA and DEM should have known.

"I can't imagine," says Frederick, whose division reports to the DEM, "that the ski patrol and other folks didn't see ski trails going up into the woods." Despite $3000 in reward money ($1000 each from Mass. Audubon and the Sierra Club, $500 each from WMA and DEM), the vandals have yet to be found.

Frederick says heads haven't rolled at DEM over this latest embarrassment, but there have certainly been "stern discussions with people involved in terms of what the Commonwealth should be doing [and] what WMA should be doing. It's been made loud and clear by myself that we need to be more vigilant up there. And you're going to see in the next six months that that is going to be the case."

The trail cutting prompted the Sierra Club of Massachusetts to declare that WMA should lose its 30-year lease on the ski area (a lease that runs until 2011). It was the last straw in a series of abuses of public trust, says state Sierra Club President James McCaffrey.

His call could be viewed as a shot across the WMA bow in an environmental battle in which the Sierra Club plays bad cop to Mass. Audubon's good cop. Nobody really expects WMA to lose its lease. And even Tom Lynch says he wouldn't go that far. "I like the Crowley family," he says. "I think they do a good job of running this area." In fact, all of the expansion opponents contacted for this story stipulated that the Crowleys run a high-quality, state-of-the-art ski area.

WMA'S RESPONSE to the trail cutting has been a study in contradictions. On the one hand, WMA officials say, many of the "illegal" trails were actually years old, one perhaps as old as 40 years, and another one was hiked by the Wachusett Mountain Advisory Committee five years ago, when the original expansion was proposed. On the other hand, they say, they didn't have the first idea that anybody was skiing on them.

"Honestly, we did not know about the trails," Stimpson says. "Had we known, we would have done more, because to have people skiing in the woods is a total liability on our side. . . . So we did not know about it and that was possible because . . . what happens is, as you go down the trails people duck in and out of the edge trees and it's part of what is fun about skiing. They'll go in maybe one or two trees deep and they'll spit back out." With 450 acres to supervise, it's unlikely that anyone would notice a skier who decided to duck further into the woods and take an extreme trail, she says.

But the original DEM report from April 14 by Chief Ranger Curt Rudge indicates that the trails were well planned, and that more than a few skiers must have known about them. All the extreme trails connected with existing ski trails, and most had well-hidden entrances and exits. And, Rudge wrote, "Almost all appear to have areas where the users stop to rest and drink alcoholic beverages."

A more complete tally two weeks later by DEM staff listed 13 trails ranging in length from 225 feet to 1330 feet, at least one with a "very visible" entry from the ski trail. On one trail, two chairlift pads had been used to cover large rocks.

WMA officials, while condemning the forest vandalism and vowing that it won't happen again, also downplay the extent of the cutting and the damage. They believe ski area opponents have exaggerated the issue. Basically, they argue, some misguided skiers took it upon themselves to prune and clear sections of pre-existing trails.

"It's mostly brush removal and there were some limb cuts," says Stimpson. Those cuts might not have even been made during ski season, she says.

"There were no trees cut down. There were tiny saplings cut down," says David Crowley. "The largest tree was three inches in diameter. There may have been one of them. One trail they said was 100 feet wide. The reason it was 100 feet wide is it goes over a cliff to begin with. A lot of this is hype that is great for the Sierra Club to get people excited about, and a lot of it is an unfortunate group of people that go into the woods [to ski]."

But Mass. Audubon's Heidi Roddis, who has been doggedly diplomatic in her pursuit of information and accountability from WMA and DEM, and whose organization is not part of the Sierra Club's coalition to stop the expansion, begs to differ with WMA's assessment of the damages.

"It's really disturbing to me that they're saying that now, because several weeks ago they were saying that they recognized this was a problem," Roddis says. "One of the largest trails with the most serious damage to the old growth was definitely brand new this last winter. It was not a pre-existing trail. Based on the vegetation, you could tell it was newly cut between November and this March.

"On the large trail there were literally hundreds of saplings and shrubs that had been cut down. It was fresh-cut. There was brush purposely piled up under overhanging ledges to make a more even slope."

At the request of Trudy Coxe, secretary of the state Executive Office of Environmental Affairs, the DEM convened a series of four working meetings between all sides to try to reach consensus on the various expansion and old-growth issues. Perhaps the only consensus reached was that DEM and WMA would work much harder to protect the old-growth forest next winter.

DEM's policy until quite recently has been to keep the old-growth forest under wraps so that the public doesn't get too curious and walk all over it. This strategy appears to have been a dismal failure.

WMA's new strategy will be to educate skiers about the old growth and to take away their lift tickets and possibly even turn them over to DEM for prosecution if they ski into the woods. There will be signs on the mountain, notices on the ski area brochures and the Web site, and an interpretive nature trail and exhibit to teach people about the old-growth forest. People seen skiing into the woods will be met by the ski patrol when they re-emerge.

Like snowboarding, extreme skiing and the unauthorized blazing of new trails are nationwide phenomena. So it's not yet clear how well this strategy will work. But the Crowleys believe that even extreme skiers will act responsibly when they understand what's at stake.

If the strategy doesn't work and the old-growth forest is damaged again next season, it is fairly clear that the Crowleys will have to kiss their planned expansion goodbye. If the strategy does work -- well, it's still too close to call.

CURRENTLY ARRAYED against WMA in its battle to expand the area is a coalition including the Sierra Club, Clean Water Action, and eight other smaller environmental groups. In addition, Mass. Audubon, the town of Westminster's Board of Selectmen, its Conservation Commission, and its Board of Health, and the Montachusett Regional Planning Commission have major questions they want answered about the expansion. But probably the biggest thorn in the Crowley's collective side is Donna Brownell, leader of WEST (Watchdogs for an Environmentally Safe Town).

Brownell, whose husband, Gordon, discovered the old-growth forest, is an experienced environmental activist who'd just as soon see no ski area on the mountain at all, but she's realistic enough to settle for stopping further expansion. And that's what she aims to do.

"Nobody is trying to shut down the ski area," Brownell says. "I'll fight them until they stop expanding. And that is a given. So if they think that I'm going away any time soon, it's not going to happen."

Heidi Roddis of Mass. Audubon is concerned that the trees WMA wants to cut for the new slopes might be a necessary buffer for the old-growth forest. But she says her organization won't be able to make a decision for or against the expansion until DEM comes out with a new management plan for the whole reservation. Nothing should be added to the ski area until the needs of the whole mountain have been studied in detail, she says.

Environmental Affairs Secretary Trudy Coxe may be on the same page with Mass. Audubon on that one. Coxe has made it clear that she is extremely concerned about DEM's and WMA's stewardship of this public resource, and that she doesn't want DEM approving anything on the mountain until it comes up with a plan for the entire reservation.

The agency is hastening to do just that. Todd Lafleur, a DEM program manager, says a resource management plan for the mountain could be complete by December. So it looks like the very earliest WMA could start clearing away trees for the two new trails would be next spring.

FOR ITS PART, WMA strongly maintains that the expansion is necessary for the ski area to remain competitive.

"People will roll their eyes when we tell them that there are ski areas going bankrupt every day. And they say it will never happen in Massachusetts," says David Crowley. "Mount Tom, when I was 15 years old, had lines -- and it closed down for good this year. It takes only takes 10 or 15 years for a ski area to [die]. . . . This won't be the crown jewel of the DEM park system that it is now. This property is absolutely the finest ski area of its size in the country."

The Crowleys say that rather than overloading the mountain, an increase in capacity from 3225 to 4125 skiers per shift (there are two shifts a day) would result in less crowding on the upper slopes, where the old growth is, and fewer traffic jams outside the parking lots.

"The thing that's going to create the additional ability to bring volume into the ski area is that the Nor'easter lift is on extremely underutilized terrain and once we change the triple chair there into a detachable quad most of the capacity will be used up in that area," says David Crowley.

Among those standing with the Crowleys are a small army of skiing groups, the North Central Massachusetts Chamber of Commerce, and a group called EAST (Environmentally Aware Skiers and Townspeople), whose current spokesman, Edith Morgan of Princeton, recruited to represent the group by Carolyn Stimpson, suffered a credibility crisis at a recent meeting when she didn't know what her group's initials stood for.

The Crowleys' opponents tend to see ski area supporters as sometimes prone to being on the WMA payroll. But the pro-expansion forces feel as strongly on their side as the no-expansion folk feel on the other. In fact, more than a few townspeople would rather not even talk about the issue, because whatever they say is bound to alienate someone.

"Have you got an 11-foot pole? Because most of those questions I wouldn't want to touch with a 10-foot pole," says Princeton resident Russ Vickery, when asked his views on the controversy.

But as a member of the Wachusett Oldtime Skiers, Vickery, 82, is clearly in the WMA camp. He moved to Princeton in 1948 and skied the mountain when there were two trails and no lifts -- not even a rope tow. Skiers had to walk all the way to the top after each run. "The best I ever did was eight runs, and that was a day's work," Vickery says.

Vickery was superintendent of the mountain for 20 years, from 1948 to 1968. Then he ran the DEM's Lake Avenue skating rink in Worcester until he retired in 1980. He's worked on and off for the Crowleys.

"I think that they've done a terrific job of operating the facility," Vickery says. "They have the funds and they have the youth and they have the equipment. And I think that's what it takes."

"There are people and organizations who don't want anything done," he says. "They would like the mountain to get back to the way it was in the mid-1700s. You and I know that would not be possible. There's a lot of people who live in this country and there's a lot of people who live in this area, and many of them need a place to recreate, to exercise, and the mountain furnishes that. And the skiing furnishes exercise in the wintertime, a period when most people out here used to hibernate."

Todd Lafleur of DEM also praises the Crowleys' efforts. He says that despite the Sierra Club's request the agency has no plans to re-examine the lease.

"We look at our relationship with Wachusett Mountain as being a good one," Lafleur says. "I think they're a good tenant, so to speak, and I think our relationship with them has worked well. I think they're sincere, honest people."

Edith Morgan says she fears that paid environmentalists may succeed in shutting down the whole mountain to the general public.

"People like the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club have been making such noise and making false accusations," Morgan says, "the whole use of Wachusett Mountain, not just the skiing, is threatened."

Of all the attacks on their plans, the Crowleys, naturally, seem most upset by the Sierra Club's. They say the call to revoke the lease was timed to sabotage the DEM's consensus meetings. They accuse the Sierra Club of raking in fundraising dough as a result of the attack. And they complain bitterly that the Sierra Club has been posting outdated, inaccurate information on its Web site.

The Sierra Club's McCaffrey replies that the announcement had long been in the works and the group decided it couldn't postpone it until after the meetings. He vehemently denies that the call for an end to the lease helped the organization raise money and says, in fact, it probably hurt.

But McCaffrey admits that the Sierra Club's Web site information (which until last week claimed, among other things, that WMA's plans involved "Removal of thousands of trees, many over 300 years old!") was way out of date.

Like WMA's other environmental opponents, McCaffrey says he's not trying wipe the ski area off the mountain, he just wants to halt further expansion.

"I don't think we would spend any of our effort or energy on reducing [the size of the ski area]," McCaffrey says. "We have never questioned the fact that skiing on that mountain creates a valuable resource."

Opponents worry that if WMA is allowed to expand the area to remain competitive, it will want to expand again in five or 10 years to remain competitive. Where will the expansion stop, they wonder, and what will be left of the mountain that was set aside years and years ago for "passive" recreational use? And how long can its unique old-growth forest survive if the woodlands around it are gradually stripped away?

And, WEST's Donna Brownell wants to know, why did it take citizen volunteers to discover the old growth and the illegal trail cutting? Who's minding the store? She's not impressed with the fact that Todd Frederick gave DEM and WMA a good scolding over the illegal trails.

"I'm so sick of the scolding," Brownell says. "They've pulled so many infractions that its time they do a little bit more than scolding."

On a recent misty morning, three years after the old-growth forest was discovered, there was barely a word to be found about it in the display at the DEM's Wachusett Mountain visitor's center. And at the top of the ski lift, at the summit of the mountain, right in the middle of the old-growth forest, there was no signage to indicate that anything worth preserving was nearby. Just a big billboard with a ski map and Dannon Yogurt and GM Truck ads on it. Just an overflowing trash container sitting in a bed of wildflowers next to an empty Bud can.

It seems that forests aren't the only things that grow slowly in this rocky New England soil. Sometimes appreciation of nature can be far more fragile than nature itself.