Killington Road
Killington Road: Connection to the Beast of the East
Paul E. Kandarian
KILLINGTON, Vt. – Sidewalks, sushi and grits? Oh my. Of all the things
remembered about Killington Road since the last time I visited 21 years ago,
those aren't among them.
But The Cave? Now that rings a bell.
"Yeah, it's right over there still, by the ladies' room," laughed Jason Evans,
general manager of Wobbly Barn, a legendary wood-beamed bar, dance hall and
restaurant that's been here for 45 years, as he pointed to a little setback area
at the rear of the place where men gather to graze for women, its look and
mission unchanged since my own grazing days.
 Back then I had no kids and skied my brains out at Killington. Then kids came,
money dried up and skis rusted, but at age 54 now, I had to come back and check
out the road that meant so much to me as a place to eat, drink and be merry. It
is the only access road from Route 4 to the Beast of the East, as Killington is
known, the biggest ski area in the east.
One thing is the same; rounding the hill near The Summit Lodge and catching the
first glimpse of Killington's snow-capped peaks, I got that familiar
anticipatory belly churn I always did back in the day. But much is different;
for one thing, there are sidewalks now, largely unused, the locals said. And
there were never stop lights; three now regulate traffic on the roughly
three-mile long road.
 Other big differences leap out at me. Mother Shapiro's is no more, Sushi Yoshi
has taken its place. The restaurant Powderhorns is now Garlic. And over at
Wally's American Bar and Grille, a 50s-style retro restaurant/watering hole that
a half century ago used to be a gas station and still boasts gigantic porthole
windows in front, Roger Sims slings grits. Sims is 29, a full-time chef and
part-time singer hailing from the West Virginia mountains who fancies cowboy
hats and makes one of the meanest omelets on the road.
"I'm a new northern face," said Sims, who came to Killington with his girlfriend
in the fall and decided to stay, "with a southern taste."
Wally's is a fun joint about two years old where oranges bounce along an
overhead conveyor belt toward to a juicing machine and wait-staffers zing orders
on a zip line to the kitchen. Sims said he'll do some singing at Wally's and
other places on Killington Road.
"I love it around here," Sims said. "It feels about as close to the West
Virginia mountains as it gets."
 The road has never been jammed with buildings, as some resort access roads can
be, but lodging has been boosted in recent years with the addition of places
like The Killing Grand Resort Hotel, a 300-room behemoth near the base of the
mountain. Many existing lodging has been updated and renovated, including the
Birch Ridge Inn, bought in 1997 by Massachusetts natives Bill Vines and Mary
Furlong, he formerly in the tech trade, she a former executive for Ocean Spray.
"This had been a small executive retreat," Vines said of an A-frame structure
now boasting 10 cozy rooms. "We expanded from about 4,000 square feet to 10,000
and have been busy ever since."
When Vines and Furlong took the business plunge, they were the first new
commercial venture on the road in a dozen years, Vines said. Now the newest is
the purchase of Killington and adjacent Pico Peak last year by Powdr
Corporation, a Park City, Utah-based business that owns several ski resorts and
has already invested more than $5 million in improvements at Killington.
"It's a wait-and-see thing," Vines said of businesses on Killington Road
wondering what additional investments the mountain's new owners will make in a
resort that many say went drastically downhill under the watch of former
proprietor, the American Skiing Company. "The mountain is what drives this
road."
Horace "Red" Glaze, 77, is a contractor, and knows the road better than most.
Glaze came to Killington in 1960 from his native Westfield, Mass., specifically
to build the Red Robb Inn, a building now home to the Killington Mountain
School. He never left.
"I sold the inn in 1971 and retired – for about two weeks," Glaze laughed. "I
played golf but got bored and just had to get back to work."
He's been building ever since, including Café Toast on Killington Road, a small
restaurant he built for his second wife who loves to cook, and a new
6,000-square-foot home for both of them just off the road.
"It's more house than I need," he shrugged. "But it makes my wife happy, and
that's all that counts."
 Killington Road is bustling in winter, dead as bear trap bindings in summer,
Glaze said, and that's something that needs to be addressed. Most huge mountain
resorts thrive in warmer months. Killington doesn't and businesses on the road
suffer.
"We need a lot more flowers on the road, a lot more ambience, this place is
absolutely dead in the summer, and that's a shame," Glaze said. "We have two
great golf courses here, one of them is the only municipal golf course in
Vermont, the Green Mountain National. They need to build on stuff like that to
get more people here in the off-season."
 Evans, 37, has been at the Wobbly Barn since he was a youngster, helping out
when his dad ran it. The place gets its name from the way it looks – and reacts
when club hits its 600-person capacity. Constructed of wobbly old planks from
New England barns in 1963, it is solid but when the club rocks, the ceiling
lamps in the restaurant below wobble pretty good, he said.
"We bumped out the stage and made some other improvements, but not much else has
changed," Evans said, pointing to two bars where the most visible differences I
see from decades ago are flat screen TVs. "It's still the Wobbly."
The quality of businesses has improved on Killington Road, he said, because "we
all had to get better to compete with one another. Restaurants are better, ski
shops are better. We all force each other to be better."
 The Cave will not change, he said, not that it matters to me anymore. Anything
that happens here happens well after my bedtime anyway.
"Nope, The Cave won't change," he said. "We'll leave it alone."
Photo credits: Paul Kandarian and Killington Ski Area
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