Member Spotlight: A Man and a Mountain

HE CAME AS A YOUNG MAN, AND NEVER LEFT

Driving a stage full of people up the Auto Road to the 6,288-foot summit of Mount Washington — that was Howie Wemyss’ first job with the company that owns the historic road. It was also beginning of his deep passion for the mountain.

That was in the mid-1970s. He would leave the company and the mountain a few years later, but he soon returned as the Auto Road’s General Manager. He says it was an unlikely leap from driving a stage. (It’s really a van but called a stage because it has been since the days of the horse-drawn stages that climbed the mountain.)

“I was a bit terrified about running this big, historic business,” he says. “I had no business experience.”

But he was finally convinced he could do it by the retiring general manager and a member of one of the four families that, for six generations, has comprised the Auto Road’s ownership group, the Mount Washington Summit Company. Wemyss became the first non-family person to be General Manager.

Wemyss would, as he puts it, “stick around” for 34 years. During his tenure, he led the company to new heights. His main focus was on expanding the number of events at the Auto Road beyond the races that were already taking place. “People want to challenge themselves on the mountain,” he says. “I felt there was a potential to not only get a lot of publicity from events but make money.”

One of the major moves he and his team (which over the years grew from 25 to three times that) made was to reinstitute the historic Climb to the Clouds car race. The crowds of people that over the years came to watch have seen the cars reduce the time taken to race up the 7.6-mile road from just over two hours in 1899, the first official climb, to just over five minutes.

In 1994, the Auto Road ownership group decided to expand its operations to its nearby property, building the Great Glen Trails Outdoor Center. Wemyss was tasked with running that as well as the Auto Road. Working only with the Auto Road, he had winters off. No longer. “It went from just coming into the office to keep things going in the winter to working seven days a week,” he says.

Two years ago, he retired from both jobs, though he’s still not far from the mountain and the Auto Road. In fact, he's just across the street at the new Glen House, a four- season, 65-room, three-story hotel, which opened its doors in 2017. It’s owned by the Mount Washington Summit Company, but Wemyss and his wife are investors and actively involved in its operation.

The new Glen House that sits across the road from the base of the Mount Washington Auto Road.

“We invested in it because it has long been one of my goals to bring it back before I retired,” he says. “There was a need for a hotel here. The property was without one for 51 years.” The newly built hotel is the fifth iteration of the Glen House, the original built in the mid-1800s. The earlier hotels were all destroyed by fire.

The new Glen House has state-of-the-art fire detection and suppression. But that’s not the only contemporary advantage the hotel has; it also gets high marks for sustainability. There is geothermal heating and cooling, elevators that can generate some of their own electricity to run, solar panels that provide one-quarter of the hotel’s electricity, and a hydro-electric plant that provides 100% of the electricity to the Auto Road Lodge across the street.

The goal, Wemyss says, is to get away from fossil fuels completely. “Aside from saving money, It’s a good business move,” he says. “There are people who will make a decision about where to stay based on the fact we’re trying to be as sustainable as possible.”

All of their efforts are paying off. Wemyss says the new Glen House has “bumped up” both the Auto Road business and the Great Glen Trails business. “The hotel is doing fabulously. It ramped up much faster than anyone expected,” he says. That was helped along by high praise from publications like USA Today (“One of top 10 best family resorts in the Northeast”) and Condé Nast Traveler (“One of the top hotels in New England”).

Service Credit Union is providing all of the financing for the hotel. “They’ve been great to work with, really great,” Wemyss says. “They cared about us and are proud to be a part of this historic operation. So that feels very good."