Why Wisp's Biggest Upgrade This Winter Is One You'll Never See
September 24, 2026
September 24, 2026
Ron Hawkes will spend his last season as Wisp Resort's General Manager overseeing a project most skiers will never notice. No new lift. No flashy terrain expansion. Just pipe, pumps, and twelve permanent snow guns buried into a trail called Little Dipper. That's the headline investment heading into the 2026-27 season, and it tells you something real about how this mountain thinks.
If you've skied Wisp for more than a season or two, you know the drill. Some years the snow comes early and stays deep. Other years you're checking the trail report daily, wondering if North Camp will even open before the holidays. The gap between those two winters isn't luck. It's snowmaking capacity, and this year the resort put its money where the problem actually lives.
Little Dipper sits in Wisp's North Camp terrain, the section that's historically been slower to open and pickier about conditions. This offseason, crews installed two new 20-foot permanent Technoalpin TL8 stick guns and ten more 30-foot units on that trail, along with a new 700-foot, 24-inch water supply pipeline running between a snowmaking pond and the pump house. None of that shows up in a trail map or a lift ticket photo. All of it shows up on opening day.
The math behind it is worth sitting with for a second. Twelve permanent guns on Little Dipper doesn't just mean twelve more guns total. It frees up six portable guns that used to live on that trail, and those six get redeployed across the rest of the mountain wherever coverage is thin. One trail's upgrade becomes flexibility everywhere else. That's a different kind of investment than a new chairlift. It's the kind that compounds.
This builds on real momentum. Last summer, Wisp added 28 new snow guns as part of a broader $2.5 million package that also covered a lodge renovation and IT upgrades. This year's Little Dipper project is smaller in gun count but more targeted, concentrating work on the terrain that's been the bottleneck. The two projects take different approaches.
If you're the kind of local who skis after work, mark this down. Wisp's own site currently lists night skiing as anticipated to begin in January 2027, which is later than last season's start. Skiers who remember hitting Wisp Trail under the lights the week before Christmas in 2025, when the resort ran $19 Wednesday night specials as part of its 70th anniversary season, should expect a different rhythm this year.
The projected opening for the 2026-27 season sits at December 4, with the season expected to run into mid-March. That timeline puts several weeks between opening day and the return of lights on the hill. It's a reasonable trade if the extra weeks are spent finishing the Little Dipper work and building a deeper base before flipping the switch on night operations. Either way, plan your early-season nights around daylight hours until that switch flips.
A few other season markers worth having on your calendar if you're local:
None of this happens in a vacuum. This is also Ron Hawkes's last season as General Manager. He's closing out 49 consecutive years in the ski industry, five of them at Wisp, before stepping into an advisory role with the resort's parent company, Pacific Group Resorts, focused on ski and snowboard school programming across their portfolio. His replacement, Erik Barnes, joins this season as General Manager Designate. Barnes spent recent years running Ragged Mountain Resort in New Hampshire and, before that, held senior leadership at Mount Snow in Vermont. He's also been a Professional Ski Instructors of America examiner for 23 years, which tells you where his instincts run.
The two will work side by side this whole season, an arrangement Pacific Group Resorts designed on purpose. Hawkes put it simply when the transition was announced back in June: "One of the things that gave me confidence in this retirement decision was knowing Wisp would be in capable hands."
That handoff frames the whole season differently. Hawkes isn't coasting to the finish line. He's spending his last winter finishing the infrastructure work that will outlast his tenure, on a trail that mostly matters to the people who ski it regularly rather than the ones who show up for a weekend. That's not a flashy way to go out. It's a practical one, and if you've paid attention to how Wisp operates over the past five years, it fits.
None of this changes what Wisp is. It's still Maryland's only four-season resort, still the reason a lot of people move to this side of Deep Creek Lake in the first place. But the season ahead has a specific shape to it if you know where to look. Expect a Dec. 4 opening, weeks of day skiing before the lights come on, a completed Little Dipper project with new snowmaking infrastructure in North Camp, and a new GM quietly learning the mountain from the man who ran it for five winters before him.
If you're weighing a move to McHenry or you already call it home and you're trying to figure out whether this season's changes matter to you, the honest answer is that they matter most if you ski regularly and you've been frustrated by North Camp's slow starts in past years. That's the terrain getting the investment. Everything else, the music series, the New Year's party, the lodge upgrades, is Wisp doing what it's always done well: giving locals a reason to be there even on the nights they're not on skis.
Chefs and mountain operators actually have more in common than you'd think. Both jobs come down to prep work nobody sees paying off in the moment that matters. Wisp spent its offseason on pipe and pump houses instead of ribbon-cuttings. That's the kind of work that happens before the snow finally falls and the trail you've been waiting on opens.
If you're thinking about what it's like to actually live near Deep Creek Lake through a full ski season, not just visit it, Adam Murray at Chef's Edge Real Estate has spent enough winters here to talk you through the real rhythm of it. Let's Connect if you want the long view on McHenry before you make a move.
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