By Tom Ayres , Senior Staff Writer
The privately owned Mount Ascutney ski area was a centerpiece of economic activity in West Windsor for more than 80 years before it shuttered and went into bankruptcy in 2010. As the quintessential Vermont small town reeled from financial and social impacts of the ski area’s closure, it took a visionary group of committed community leaders to revive and reinvent the ski area under the ownership of the Town of West Windsor.
The town acquired the 470 acres associated with the former ski area in 2015, with assistance from the Trust for Public Land. A conservation easement over the ski site acreage was conveyed to the Upper Valley Land Trust, along the more than 1,100 surrounding acres known today as the West Windsor Town Forest. A new non-profit organization, Ascutney Outdoors (AO), was formed and given responsibility through a long-term lease for the management, oversight, and development of the recreational, educational, community, and conservation activities that today are hallmarks of the thriving, all-season recreational site, which draws many thousands of visitors annually for Alpine and Nordic skiing, mountain biking, and hiking.
West Windsor native Shelley Seward and her husband, Glenn, who has lived in the community since he was a child, have been at the very heart of the renaissance of Mount Ascutney — negotiating the purchase of the ski area by the town, overseeing its renewed development and management, and managing its finances over the past decade, all under the umbrella of AO, the community organization they helped to found. Next week, Shelley, who presently serves as the chair of AO, and Glenn, who has been a heavily engaged volunteer board member since the organization’s inception, will step down from their substantive leadership positions and be named board emeriti. Fellow AO board members reflected on the Sewards’ legacy of service to their hometown and its social and economic renaissance in phone conversations earlier this week.
“Shelley has been one of those seemingly irreplaceable people over the last 10 or 11 years, ever since Ted Siegler first suggested in Shelley’s and Glenn’s kitchen one night a decade ago that the town should acquire the mountain,” noted Steve Wood, a native Vermonter who grew up on the sides of Mount Ascutney, where he learned to ski in the 1950s and 60s. “I remember that Glenn said to me, ‘I think Ted has really gone around the bend. It seems like such an implausible thing,’” Wood, who’ll take over from Shelley Seward as Interim Chair of the AO Board at the non-profit organization’s annual meeting next week, added. “But Glenn quickly warmed to the idea,” Wood said.
Glenn and Shelley Seward have been integral to the rebirth of the vaunted Mount Ascutney ski and mountain biking area under the auspices of Ascutney Outdoors (AO) and the Town of West Windsor over the past decade. The pair will step down as founding members of the AO Board of Directors and become Board Emeriti when the organization convenes for its annual meeting next week.
Courtesy of Shannon Harrington
Ted Siegler, a West Windsor resident for more than 35 years, has known Wood and the Sewards for all that time. Presently the Chair of the West Windsor Conservation Commission, Siegler also serves as the town’s liaison on the AO board. He and Glenn Seward served together on the three-member West Windsor Selectboard during the time when the Mount Ascutney ski area transitioned to town ownership. “I was on the selectboard with Glenn for about six years — and that was when the town was pretty depressed. We had the general store closed and the mountain wasn’t open. It was a really tough time for the town,” Siegler recollected on Monday.
“We had a meeting of some people in town, probably about 2012 or so, and we agreed that the things were scary,” Siegler offered, discussing the town’s deliberations about buying the old ski area and the subsequent formation of AO, which today operates the ski and mountain biking facilities at Mount Ascutney under a lease arrangement. “Glenn had been working really hard to try to find someone to purchase Mount Ascutney and run it as a for-profit ski area. But it was a dead end every time — the water supply was insufficient and the mountain doesn’t get a lot of snow. Glenn and Shelley were pretty skeptical about the town buying it and taking it over, but they decided that there really wasn’t any other alternative. Glenn really took the bull by the horns and started to move,” Siegler recollected. “He was the primary negotiator with the owner about purchasing the property and using the Trust for Public Land as leverage so that we didn’t have to borrow a whole lot of money. Once the town agreed to it — at what I think was the largest Town Meeting that West Windsor has ever had — Glenn and Shelley worked especially hard to put all the financing together.”
Glenn Seward, who had served as the mountain manager at Mount Ascutney when it was a for-profit ski area, was also instrumental in developing the mountain biking trail network in the West Windsor Town Forest. “He approached a trail builder in town. Putting trails in the Windsor Town Forest became another aspect of the rejuvenation of the area,” Siegler said. “Plus all the infrastructure on the mountain – the water and sewer systems — were failing because they hadn’t been maintained. So we had to go in and rejuvenate those, too. The Sewards had a role in all of that, plus Glenn, because he was the former mountain manager, also managed the construction of the new T-bar. And Shelley had a lot of success as a financial advisor, so she was able to contribute a significant amount of financial expertise to the whole effort.” Coincident with the emergence of AO, the Sewards also acquired a private property abutting Mount Ascutney, known locally as Mile-Long Field, and established a network of mountain biking trails on the land that they graciously allow the public to use, Siegler stated.
As lifelong and near-lifelong residents of West Windsor, the Sewards were uniquely positioned to bridge any divides that may have existed in the community between the natives and more recent denizens who were especially engaged in the efforts to revive the ski area under town ownership. “The great thing about Glenn and Shelley that I think is really important is that they are friends with everyone,” their longtime friend and colleague Siegler reflected. “When we were on the selectboard, I used to joke with Glenn that I would be the bad guy who would get the flack about some decision we made, while the people in opposition would still consider him a friend. That’s just a real characteristic of his — and Shelley is the same way. That’s a huge part of this whole story: they grew up in the town and they’re the kind of people who can reach out and be friendly with everyone, even as they’re working really hard to improve things. That’s just a key characteristic of both of them.”
Siegler and Wood both remarked on Shelley’s boundless energy in serving AO over the last decade. “She is such a super high-energy person,” Siegler said. “She has basically spent the last 10 years organizing everything to do with AO — getting the volunteers lined up, making sure that everything is functioning correctly on the mountain day after day, dealing with all the parties that want to use the lodge for various events. She’s really been the driving force behind all of this and it just comes from this huge amount of energy,” Wood, who’ll step into Shelley Seward’s ski boots as the next chair of AO on May 7, concurred with Siegler’s remarks about both Sewards.
“The restructuring of the organization — moving the board and the management of the mountain into a new iteration — is just the subtext for this story,” Wood said last weekend. “The founders are sort of cycling off and it will be up to a new generation of AO board members to learn how to manage a non-profit sustainably so that Brownsville and West Windsor don’t have to go through the trauma that the closing of the ski area brought back in 2010,” he continued. “But the real story is what Glenn and Shelley have contributed for the last 10 years. And even as they step into emeriti status, physically they are not going anywhere. Shelley is going to take on the role of a non-paid bookkeeper and they’ll always be around.”
The essence of the Sewards’ character, both Siegler and Wood offered, is to deflect attention from themselves to others when it comes to the many accomplishments of AO and on Mount Ascutney.
“We all understand that about their character and personalities,” Wood concluded. “But we just can’t let this point in time pass without some sort of community-wide reflection on what these people have done. It’s more than just giving it the good old college try: just look at what has happened with the [Brownsville Butcher and Pantry] and the thousands of people that show up for events here every year. It’s just remarkable.”