In 1966, Ralph DesLauriers (February 2, 1935-October 4, 2025) achieved the seemingly impossible: He built the bulk of Bolton Valley Resort in under eight months. Construction on its 4.5-mile access road began in May, and by mid-December three chairlifts, nine trails, a base lodge, a cafeteria, a restaurant, a ski shop, a parking lot and 24 hotel rooms stood ready for guests.
But there was no snow.
A couple of days before Christmas, Ralph spotted Father John McSweeney sipping a beverage in the corner of the resort’s nearly empty restaurant. Ralph invited the local pastor to eat dinner with him. The two moved to a window table, “and, of course, he wanted to say a little grace before dinner,” Ralph recalled in the Vermont Public documentary “History of Bolton Valley.” McSweeney told the good Lord that Bolton sure could use a little snow. Halfway through their meal, it started to fall. “And it snowed, as I recall, for 54 hours,” Ralph said.
“It could be raining on Christmas and, by God, he’d still be smiling.”
Dave Kelley
Bolton Valley opened the day after Christmas and enjoyed plenty of the white stuff for the rest of its inaugural season.
Life had a way of working out for Ralph. Friends and family described him as an optimistic entrepreneur. Ski resorts endure highs and lows, said Dave Kelley, a Greensboro lawyer who has represented many of them, including Bolton Valley. Ralph, “the eternal optimist,” had the ideal personality to succeed, Kelley said, “because it could be raining on Christmas and, by God, he’d still be smiling.”
Like the ski industry, however, Ralph’s life had its ups and downs. His two marriages ended in divorce, and the oldest of his nine children, Christina Smullen, died of cancer five years ago at age 63.
While he was a successful developer, both in Vermont and out West, his plans sometimes failed. He tried to build a hotel in Mexico but never broke ground. His most crushing business setback came in 1997, when mounting expenses and back-to-back poor winters pushed Bolton Valley to the brink of foreclosure. Ralph lost the resort he’d built and run for 31 years.
In Kelley’s mind, Ralph and Indiana Jones fell into the same category: “risk takers that always landed on their feet,” he said. “They went places that normal people don’t go, and yet the movie always ends happy.”
Twenty years after he gave it up, Ralph, five of his children and a group of investors bought back Bolton Valley, restoring its legacy as a family-run resort for Vermonters and cementing its founder’s commitment to create a thriving year-round mountain community.
On September 29, Ralph suffered a heart attack. His eight surviving children, a smattering of grandchildren and siblings, and one of his ex-wives were with him in his final days. He died on October 4 at 90 years old.
Ralph Roland DesLauriers, the oldest of seven children, was born in Brockton, Mass., on February 2, 1935. His father, Roland, was a regional manager for A&P grocery stores. His mother, Evangeline, was a homemaker. As a child, Ralph spent lots of time outdoors with friends, his sister Nancy Stone wrote to Seven Days: “The Gang was made up of all boys and, occasionally me, thanks to an indulgent big brother and leader of the pack.” When Nancy was diagnosed with polio in 1944, Ralph, then 9, “took the part of entertainer and protector in my world,” she said. “He let no one tease me about braces or crutches.”
In those same years, during World War II, Ralph dug clams, took his rowboat out to fish and shared his haul with women in the neighborhood whose husbands were away at war. He erected a makeshift mast and sail on that boat and taught himself to sail.
The family moved to Weymouth, then to Braintree, Mass. In 1952, the summer before Ralph’s senior year in high school, his parents bought a dairy farm in South Burlington and announced plans to move again.
“Bewildered” best describes Ralph’s reaction, his brother Chuck said. “He was president of the student body at Braintree High School. According to Ralph, he dated the most beautiful girl in the high school, and my dad walked in the door and said, ‘We’re moving to Vermont.’”
Ralph learned to drive a tractor and moved cows from the barn to the pasture across the two-lane Williston Road. After graduating from Burlington High School, he studied agricultural economics at the University of Vermont. His second year there, his dad returned to A&P for a year and the family moved back to Massachusetts, leaving Ralph to go to school and run the 280-acre farm.
The lingering smell of manure under his fingernails embarrassed him, but Ralph’s farming days were drawing to a close. His family sold their cows and began converting their barns into motel units that would become the Cupola Motel Restaurant & Lounge, a picturesque Williston Road complex crowned by multiple cupolas. They built houses along neighboring East Terrace and Dorset Street, not far from where Ralph started Quarry Hill Club, then a tennis, golf and swim club.
In those years, Ralph’s daughter Lindsay DesLauriers said, “my dad built — literally with his hands — buildings with his father and learned every element of the trades.”
Ralph was 29 when his dad bought 8,250 acres of timberland in Bolton from Plant and Griffith Lumber. In the Vermont Army National Guard at the time, Ralph flew over the land in a helicopter, decided it would make a good ski area and began planning a mountain village, where people could come, park their cars, and walk or ski everywhere.
State legislators approved construction of an access road in April 1966, and the first trees were cleared on May 1. To stay on track for a December 15 opening, Ralph promised the job foreman a fifth of whiskey for every fifth of a mile paved by November 1. The crew finished on October 20, and Ralph delivered.
At the top of the road, construction hummed along on schedule until early September, when Ralph’s chief financial officer, Roger Hovey, arrived at their regular meeting one morning alarmed. “Boss!” he told Ralph. “We’re going to run out of money!”
“He’s going through all these numbers,” Ralph said in a resort video series called “Story Time With Ralph.” “I said, ‘Son of a gun, Roger, we’re going to run out of money!’” The next morning, they hatched an idea. They quickly constructed a mountain road that they had planned to build later for a housing development, surveyed it and offered lots for sale. Nineteen sold in 10 days.
“We raised $95,000, which was 10 percent of our entire budget, and we finished the damn thing on time, on budget,” Ralph said in the video. Then he shot the camera a sideways grin. “We didn’t have a single permit,” he said. “That’s the best part.”
From the start, Ralph aimed to build a ski area for local people. He lit trails so they could ski after work. He provided childcare. Aware that a tiny percentage of his high school classmates could ski, he offered to teach local kids for free if schools would bus them to the mountain. “Except people didn’t appreciate free,” he said in a video. “So the first year, we charged $10 a year for lift and lesson one night a week for the whole ski season.”
Ralph counted the program, which is still going and served 2,100 kids last year, among the resort’s best. Thousands of children have learned to ski at Bolton Valley, including Ralph’s. “We never didn’t ski,” Lindsay, 46, said.
Sons Eric and Rob used to tear up the mountain, as Ralph recalled in another video. “I remember the patrol came in one day and said to me, ‘We have a problem, Ralph.’
“‘What’s the problem?’
“‘Your kids … They’re always skiing in the woods. They’re not staying on the trails.’
“I said, ‘Well, take their tickets away.’
“‘We can’t catch them.’”
Eric, now 61, and Rob, 60, became pioneer extreme skiers.
Bolton evolved into a four-season resort that included a basement discothèque, condominiums, cross-country skiing, swimming pools, tennis courts and a tennis program that once employed Australian pro Ian Fletcher.
But in 1997, expansion costs, coupled with bad winters, forced Ralph to sell the resort to the bank. “He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t depressed,” said Lynda DesLauriers, his second wife. “He wasn’t anything — other than brokenhearted.”
Lindsay left for college that year, but she saw the effect the sale had on Ralph. “His lifestyle contracted quite a bit,” she said. “There was a period of time where I didn’t feel comfortable asking my dad for 20 bucks.”
Ralph moved to Wyoming to join Rob and Chuck developing Teton Mountain Lodge in Jackson Hole. In addition to development expertise, Ralph, whose first wife, Ruth DesLauriers, was from Mexico, brought fluent Spanish to the project and talked with construction workers in their native language. Next, Ralph led development of Teton Springs Lodge in Victor, Idaho.
Moving back to Vermont proved more rewarding than he had expected. He was building condominiums at Quarry Hill with his children when Larry Williams, who co-owned Bolton Valley with Doug Nedde, asked Ralph if he’d like to buy it back. Ralph didn’t appear to take Williams seriously at first, according to his youngest son, Evan. But Evan, now 37, was enthused and said to his dad, “What if we write a business plan?”
In 2017, the deal was finalized. The DesLauriers family and a group of investors purchased Bolton Valley. Ralph was 82.
New energy shot through the resort, 20-year employee Anastasia Grechen said. The place had grown stagnant with few development projects, virtually no summer activities, and owners who weren’t on-site day in and day out.
Ralph, who lived on the access road and had remained a regular presence at the resort after he sold it, was back in charge. He was everywhere, Lindsay said, “talking to people, shaking hands, kissing babies.” He oversaw hotel renovations and construction of an addition on the Timberline base lodge.
As the employee party at the end of his first season back was winding down, Ralph wanted to keep the party going. “Rental shop!” he called out. And the action moved to the rental shop, where Ralph played beer pong with the staff.
After two years, he turned over his president and CEO titles to Lindsay and became president of the board — and continued to come into his office at least five days a week, until decreased mobility made it too difficult.
“It’s not work for him,” Lindsay said. “It’s life for him.”
Ralph’s vision, 60 years ago, of a mountain village has come to fruition. Other ski areas have condos, said guest services manager Lemira Chittenden, who grew up in Waterbury Center as one of those kids getting bused to the mountain once a week. The difference, Chittenden said, is that “ordinary people,” including resort employees, own and live year-round in many of Bolton Valley’s condos, “and it creates an environment that’s very different from a lot of other ski areas, because this is not a place for just the elite, ultra wealthy.”
“It’s magic,” said Grechen, who lives on the mountain.
“It’s more than a ski area,” Chittenden continued. “It has a heart that other places don’t have, and that’s really because of Ralph. He created that.”
This article appears in The Winter Preview Issue 2025.
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