Q&A: Bill Stenger: President of Jay Peak

Bill Stenger, 54, has a passion for skiing and for Vermont's landscape and people, all of which are factors in his work as the president, general manager and chief operating officer of Jay Peak Resort, which sets just miles from the Canadian border 25 miles or so west of Interstate 91.

Known as a skier's mountain, Jay Peak also gets a lot of snow - up to 100 inches more than some of its main Vermont competitors. Like several other successful ski resorts in the state, Jay Peak is on course to become a four-season destination resort, with plans in the work for a 27-hole golf course. Stenger, a self-proclaimed golf lover, is the driving force behind the resort's expansion plans, as in well as its commitment to both the local community and the state.

Stenger and his wife of 32 years live in Newport on lake Memphremagog, and they have three grown children, two sons and a daughter.

Robert Smith interviewed Stenger at the ski area on a warm mid-April Saturday. The resort was still busy with Spring skiing and a crowd that had come to watch its annual pond skimming ski contest. Stenger was an enthusiastic spectator for the event.

VBM: Could you give us some background on Jay Peak, and how you came to be involved with the resort?

Stenger: Jay Ski Resort was founded in 1955-56 by the local Kiwanis Club in North Troy. A local gentleman by the name of Harold Haynes and a local priest, Father Saint Onge started it, mostly for the local kids. It was started on what we now call Stateside on a piece of state-leased land. They put in a little trail with a rope tow.

The years from '55 to '60 were pretty legendary here for natural snow throughout the Northeast. So they had ample snow and the little area here kind of caught on.

VBM: It must have been one of the first in the state.

Stenger: It's one of the earlier ones. Stowe is a little earlier, but Stowe, Smugglers' Notch, Jay were all started around the same time. By the early '60s the area had grown quite a bit, relatively speaking. The land that was adjacent to all that state land was owned by the Weyerhaeuser Lumber company. So about 1962 or '63, Weyerhaeuser became a little enamored of the ski business. The 1960 Olympics in Squaw Valley had occurred, which was the first Olympics televised, the first time you had skiers on TV. Then 1964 comes along and you've got Billy Kidd from Stowe winning the silver medal and a lot of things are happening.

So Weyerhaeuser essentially bought that little ski area and then began to expand it in a very major way. By 1967, the aerial tramway and this part of the mountain had been built. The tramway opened at an interesting point in time.

It was the same year as the Montreal Expo, and it was also the year that Interstate 91 punched north and connected with the Eastern Townships AutoRoute. So for the first time, from the south at least, you could get relatively close to Jay Peak, and you could also come in from Montreal. So by the late '60s the combination of building up here and access to the area all kind of came together. Now Weyerhaeuser's main product was obviously lumber and building materials, and between '67 when they made a big push here, and '78, we went through two oil embargoes, the economy had some difficult times, and by '75 or '76 they were seeing that the ski industry wasn't their core business. They decided to sell Jay Peak. By '78 they no longer had a corporate interest in the ski resort. They sold it to a group of business people in Montreal that owned Mont Saint Sauvcur, which is about 40 minutes from Montreal.

In those first few years they ran the area principally as a day area out of Montreal. We're 90 minutes or less from there. But Jay is not a day area only. It's a day area for a lot of our Vermont residents and Quebec guests, but a mountain of this magnitude will never succeed simply as a day operation.

I met Jacques Hebert, who is a principal partner in the company, in '83 at a national convention that we were both at. I'd run two ski areas in Pennsylvania for 10 years, and Jacques and I had known each other from national meetings, and he invited me to come up here and be a partner in the operation. I'd pretty much finished my job in Pennsylvania. Those areas had been built out and completed, so I joined the company in '85 and have been here ever since.

In that time what we've tried to do is develop our day market to a more full capacity, but also develop a vacation and destination product with a four seasons flavor. In '83 the skier visits were about 89,000, we're at about 300,000 now. So over the last 15-plus years we've grown, grown, grown, grown. Mostly that's because our bed base has grown. We've added about 135 dwellings units townhouses, condominiums. We have a 48-room hotel. We have an aggressive outreach program for destination business. We have the inns and lodges along the road.

We've also done a lot to increase our Vermonter traffic. We had only 75 season passes that were Vermont residents when I came, here. We now have 2000. We also have 1,000 season pass holders from Canada. So that's a core of 3,000 season lift tickets.