Pop Baldwin's legacy: Nothing to luge

Gunnar Baldwin of Thornton Gore is 81 and not a boastful man, so when he tells you, "I've probably shoveled more snow than any other living human being," you're inclined to take him at his word.

It may be hard to verify the claim, but there's little doubt that the man known as Pop Baldwin has moved an awful lot of snow over the last 50 winters. Almost all of it has been to make a luge track for his kids, grandkids and now great-grandkids to slide down.

Each year the father of eight carves out a winding track on the hilly 56-acre property he’s owned the since the mid-1960s. Up until five years ago, he did it with nothing more than a snow shovel and ice chopper. An octogenarian who still skis, Baldwin hasn’t exactly slowed down, but he has employed a couple of new tools to make the luge track: a snow blower and small tractor.

The luge, as everyone calls it, is not open to the public. Family members and lucky friends slide down the 700-foot track on inflatable tubes. The trip is done on your back, feet-first, and takes less than 30 seconds. But as Baldwin’s wife Heather puts it, “Your adrenaline is coming out of your ears.”

The beginning and end of the luge are graced with 16-foot long tunnels. Baldwin estimates that there's a drop of about 150 feet from start to finish. He decided to add the tunnels in the winter of 2016-17 to make the luge more exciting.

"It’s deceptively fast,” said Baldwin’s stepson, Sam Coes, a building contractor in Rumney. “As soon as you get on these tubes and start to go down, there's no brakes. You're not stopping."

Coes was dubious about Baldwin's scheme to build the two tunnels by covering inflatable truck inner tubes with a tarp and then blowing snow over the tarp.

"I took a look at that thing and informed him flat-out it was never going to work. There's no way," Coes recalled. "And so he kept going, and next thing I know, he has a perfectly formed tunnel."

Baldwin subsequently made an eight-foot long, semi-cylindrical wooden form to built the tunnels. He positioned the form on top of a rectangular table with skis attached to its legs. After the form is covered with snow, he slides the table forward and repeats the process to create another eight-foot section of the tunnel.

A former math teacher who rowed as an undergraduate at Yale, Baldwin concedes that making the luge track better every year is a bit of an obsession. On a recent weekend after the sun went down and the mercury was in the teens, a reporter watched him blow snow on the first tunnel, which is located at the edge of a deck outside his living room. Visiting kids and grandkids gathered in the warmth of the living room and kitchen.

"My reward is the sound of people screaming [as they slide] down the luge," Baldwin declared.

"The more the kids squeal and laugh, the better," said Heather Baldwin, his wife of 46 years and the matriarch of their blended family. She remembers the years before her husband went to work in the plumbing industry. The household was on such a tight budget that the eight kids qualified for free lunch at school. When state authorities shot a bear that ate one of the family's pigs, the Baldwins had a local butcher cut the bear up “like a beef critter.”

Tubing at Thornton Gore predates the tube runs at nearby ski resorts, including Waterville and Loon Mountain. Not only does Baldwin’s luge have several turns and banks, but tubers here don't, for the most part, slide solo because doing so can result in spinning if your feet touch the sides of the track as you're going down. So tubers slide in trains, sometimes up to 18 tubes long. The more tubes in the train, the more momentum.

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"You never want to ride in front,” said grandson Jackson Hipple, a high school senior in Portland, Maine. His mother Sarah is the youngest of the Baldwin siblings. “Being in the front of the train is the scariest. You just feel the force of everybody behind you."

When Ally Noble, one of the Baldwin daughters, was a child, kids didn’t wear helmets as they slid down the luge.

“As a little kid, I never felt that it was not safe,” said Noble, a nurse practitioner in Benton. “That abandon was so enjoyable.”

Helmets are now mandatory. Noble's daughter Louisa, like many of the grandkids, went down the luge for the first time as an infant in her mother’s lap.

There’s no lift to take tubers back to the start of the luge, so even little kids have to trudge up the hill.

“At the bottom you're thinking, 'OK, good. I'm done. I don't need to go again,’” Noble said. “And then you get back up to the top and you're, like, 'Yeah, I'm going to take another run.'”

Baldwin gets comments on Facebook from people who went down the luge in the 1970s and remember it as one of the high points of their adolescence. Not long ago he met a middle-aged woman at the local fire station who told him she slid down the luge with her Brownie troop. Every now and then a stranger approaches the Baldwins in Concord and tries to figure out why the couple look familiar. Usually it's because they had been to the luge as teenagers.

In 1987, nearly the entire senior class at Plymouth High School attended a luge party at the Baldwin house. It was an “epic party,” according to Amy Hall, one of two Baldwin kids who were seniors that year. She started tubing at the age of three. Now a medical research project manager at Dartmouth-Hitchcock, Hall looks back at the time her stepfather spent making the luge year after year as “a Herculean effort. It keeps him young.”

Her brother Sam Coes agrees.

“This is Pop's legacy,” said Coes. “No question there.”