A Legend in the Gore
Gunnar Baldwin ’55 and his sliding track
BY KATE DUNLOP
Until someone tells him otherwise, Gunnar Baldwin ’55 stands by his belief that snow tubing, now ubiquitous at ski areas across New England, was invented right in his backyard on the sliding track he’s built every winter since 1965 at his home in Thornton Gore, New Hampshire.
It all began on an October day a decade after he’d graduated from St. Paul’s School. A father of four then and a math teacher at Moses Brown in Rhode Island, he was bringing the school’s Outing Club members to New Hampshire’s White Mountains so frequently that he decided to buy a property he could use as a base. Having grown up in a research forest the son of a forester and a botanist, Baldwin was drawn to a 65-acre former sheep farm in the Gore surrounded by the White Mountain National Forest. When considering buying the property, he followed one of its paths down to Eastman Brook, where a gorgeous pool lined with colorful fallen leaves was glinting in the sunlight. Standing in the middle of that pool on what he’s dubbed Decision Rock, he knew he’d found the perfect place.
Soon after building a new house on a hill dotted with rocks and birch trees, Baldwin’s first marriage ended. Two years later, he married Heather, his wife of 50 years now. With eight children between them, the family made the Gore their fulltime home and he started teaching at the local high school.
Where there are kids and snow, there will be sliding, and from their first winter in the North Country, the Baldwin children loved sliding down their hill. To keep them safe as well as entertained, Baldwin shoveled snow into banked turns along a 700-foot course, eventually adding a starting gate complete with a tunnel off the back deck, more twists and turns, lights for night sliding, and even a 1,200-foot second course. During its heyday in the 1980s, the track was in constant use by the eight Baldwin kids, their friends, neighbors and even, once, 150 high school seniors who stayed past midnight to take run after run. By then, the Baldwin clan had traded plastic sleds for the overinflated truck inner tubes they used to float on the brook in the summer — the first such use of inner tubes, Baldwin believes. “A lot of the kids who used to slide here went on to work at Waterville Valley, Loon, all these ski places that have tubing now,” he says. “I really think they got the idea from their time here on this hill.”
In the Pixar film “Monsters, Inc.,” the city of Monstropolis is powered by the screams of children before it’s discovered that laughter is an even more powerful energy source. As long trains of linked tubers fly down the luge course, reaching up to 25 miles per hour, it’s the combination of delighted screams and whoops of joy that power Baldwin and motivate him to build the course another year. “I measure my reward in decibels,” he says of his annual effort. “The louder the sliders are, the happier I am.”
In 2015, however, Baldwin was less than delighted when well-known New Hampshire television host Fritz Wetherbee stood at the foot of his driveway to tell the story of how Thornton Gore had been, before the Civil War, a thriving farming community but that now there was nothing there.
“He was 200 yards from the top of the longest sliding course in the state, where tubing originated,” Baldwin says, still a bit indignant. “That’s not nothing.” Baldwin wrote a number of letters, and a crew finally arrived to film a segment for “New Hampshire Chronicle” on Baldwin’s backyard tradition.
Now, with a new knee and a new tunnel mold to help build this year’s course, Baldwin just needs one thing — snow. Inquiries about the legendary track’s status dot his inbox and social media pages, and though the weather is iffy, he knows one thing for sure: that when he builds it, they will come to revel in winter fun once again.