President
Mohonk Mountain House
Eric Gullickson, Mohonk’s president, co-leader of the resort and a 5th-generation Smiley family member directing the retreat, knows the resort’s 85 miles of hiking trails and carriage roads like the back of his hand. He’s been riding and trekking them for some 44 years—and can describe each in intimate detail. Like these more-than-a-century-old pathways (each mindfully etched into the verdant landscape to provide a view or a “reveal”), Gullickson’s career and relationship with Mohonk has been an invitation to discovery, a journey that took him deeper into the mission of a family business created to provide guests with the chance to renew and reset amid nature. He’s been a professional mountain bike racer, a journalist, a public relations professional, and attended hotel school—as well as graduating with various university degrees. Through all that, he’s lived on the mountain—or been deeply associated with it— since the age of ten, when he moved to Mohonk with his mother from California.
At the resort, Gullickson worked several jobs, including his first at the Barn Museum as a cleaner and later as a server at the Granary—which remains a fond memory. Like a rallying call, his sense of family—the definition of which he enlarges to include employees and guests as well as blood relatives—has fueled his life force as well as his belief that the essence of Mohonk comes from the land. “The hotel supports the land and the land supports the hotel,” Gullickson says, explaining that the proximity of nature and the myriad ways guests can access it is the resort’s true gift. Crediting his wife Robyn Gullickson ’95 with providing him the perspective that Mohonk was truly an enchanted place—the two met as employees and she didn’t know he was a Smiley family descendant until long after they started to date—Gullickson runs Mohonk’s front of the house. He’s most proud of the resort’s talented, caring staff, and deeply committed employees who “make this place so rich and valuable. They are as committed to Mohonk as our Smiley family—if not more.”
Special honors and memberships: Board Member of: Mohonk Preserve, Resort Committee of the American Hotel & Lodging Association, New York State Hospitality & Tourism Association and Mohonk Mountain House Trust.
