No one could be more optimistic for the future of Denton Hill State Park than the three men who make up Denton Go LLC.
Potter County natives Todd Brown, Jason Holmberg and Scott Carts are the men behind Denton Go, the private partner awarded the concessionaire’s contract to turn the state park into a four-season recreational facility.
“We have been involved in some degree since 2016,” Brown told The Era. The group has put in a prior bid to be a concessionaire once before with the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. And Carts had been partnered with the former concessionaire when the park was still open.
“Denton Hill has always been a favorite of his,” Brown said. “He knows hospitality and ski resorts. He knows that hill backwards and forwards. We’re confident in us being able to make a go of it.
“Having a four-season resort really spoke to us.”
All three of the men are from Potter County and have attachments to the park. “I raised a family on that hill,” Brown said.
Brown and Holmberg were “part of the Adelphia fallout,” Brown said, while Carts lives in State College and runs a forestry and recreation services business.
While the men are eager to get started, “working with DCNR, we’re at the mercy of their timeline,” Brown explained. Denton Go and DCNR are working out a 35-year lease for the park, which is a great thing, Brown said.
“Initially, the DCNR came out with a 10-year lease. It’s not really fundable to a lending institution,” he said. “I can go with a 35-year lease and get a working capital loan.”
Further, he explained the agreement with the DCNR requires “a capital influx of money.”
The longer lease “allows a longer period of time to get a return on that.”
Since the men announced they were the ones behind Denton Go, questions have been pouring in — the first of which is, will they be open for this winter?
No, Brown said. “We will still be in the process of negotiating the lease. We’re not sure how long it will take, dealing with the DCNR and the Commonwealth. I recognize we have to have patience.
“We’ve had patience for seven years. What’s a few more months?”
A timeline will come from the lease negotiations, he added. “We have a lot of great ideas. We’ve had a tremendous volume of people in support of it. I really haven’t heard a bad idea yet. It’s just a matter of where it will fit in.”
Where will they begin?
“The first thing to do will be to take advantage of the assets that are there,” Brown said, “put money back in the park. They have some lodges there they have not used. They maintained them. We need to look at what it takes to get them back online to make the park an attraction again.”
Looking at the skiing assets, Brown said one of the lifts is not fixable, but the other may be able to get back up and running.
“The lodge requires some work. We’re looking at can we use it as a lodge as it is until the state puts money into it. Over here in Potter County, we lack in venue places. Can we get the lodge open for weddings or graduation parties?
“Crawl, walk, run is our pace,” he said. The recreation under consideration is, well, just about anything. “We’d like to have an offshoot of Cherry Springs dark skies. Wouldn’t it be nice to take a lift ride to the top of the hill and gaze at the stars as a ‘light’ version of Cherry Springs?”
Much of the recreation will depend on what the DCNR regulations allow — like ATV and UTV usage, mountain biking, maybe an RV park and maybe even consider something like zip lining.
“It would be a great form of entertainment,” Brown said. “We don’t know a whole lot about it. It’s costly to install and they require a very long process by the time we would get it designed and approved.”
It’s probably not in the first five things the group will consider. It might come along in a few years.
First on the list is to get the lodge going as an entertainment venue. They’d like to get the lift going and get a restaurant up and running, too.
“We would like to have a bit of an RV park,” Brown said. “Is there space for that? At the end of the day we want Denton Hill State Park to be reopened and we want it to be a place people would go to.”
It’s a great location, right on U.S. Route 6 near Cherry Springs State Park and the Pennsylvania Lumber Museum.
“I don’t want to view this as a standalone startup,” he said. It’s one more attraction to bring people to the Pennsylvania Wilds. “We like the family atmosphere of the state park. Everyone looks out for everyone else.”
It’s different from a ski resort in larger places. “It was the type of place where someone will turn in a lost mitten,” Brown said, from his memories of being there with his family. And that’s what Denton Go is looking to bring back.
“Our goal is to try to reenact that again and have it be a good time for a family.”
Brown said the three men behind Denton Go have families, and are excited to think about their children being able to someday take over.
“Wouldn’t it be awesome if they could make a living at something we brought back?”
