What is the Ski Area Expansions Arms Race?
From Colorado Wild
"With skier numbers essentially flat nationwide for the past twenty years, any ski area expansion and concomitant marketing for the limited pool of skiers must steal skiers from other ski areas. This in turn pressures other ski areas to also expand or otherwise “improve” their ski area, in short, the “ski area expansion arms race”. In approving one ski area expansion proposal after another, the Forest Service continues to promote more and more expansions – and their concomitant environmental damage – just so other resorts can regain the “Newer, Bigger, Better” marketing edge. Any look at SKI or other popular skiing magazines illustrates the marketing of expansion terrain.

Ninety percent of ski terrain in the western U.S. is on public lands. On the White River National Forest (home Breckenridge and ski area icons Vail, Aspen, and more) between 1985 and 1999, skier visitation increased 28%, yet skier acreage has more than doubled (a 107% increase). The trend has only grown since then with Vail’s Blue Sky Basin, Breckenridge’s Peak 7, and other expansions planned at Copper Mountain, Keystone, and Arapahoe Basin. The Forest Service refuses to assess the nationwide impact of their policy promoting ski area expansions despite virtually no growth in skier visitation nationwide in two decades. More >>

Belleayre Resort plan raises constitutional issues
CATSKILLS - The Adirondack Mountain Club has praised the state Department of Environmental Conservation for scaling back its proposed expansion of the Belleayre Mountain Ski Center in the Catskills. Under the modified project plan, DEC has scrapped the proposed Belleayre East ski lift and trails, which would have included trails in the environmentally sensitive Cathedral Glen...

2005/2006 Ski Area Environmental Scorecard
Each year, the Scorecard grades 77 ski resorts throughout the western United States.

At Your Service
By Paul Tolme, Ski Magazine

Resorts, taking their lead from the airline industry, are increasingly segmenting the market by price. Skiers can pay to get on the slopes before the lifts officially open, cut liftlines once they do and eat gourmet meals in restaurants closed to the masses. They can park closer, have their warmed boots and waxed skis delivered to their rooms, then hit the slopes while others wait in rental lines.

Downhill Slide
Fueled by mergers and buyouts, America’s corporate ski resorts are more about real estate than ski runs.
By Hal Clifford (article)

Growth in "skier days" plateaued in 1980 and hasn’t moved much since then. The population was aging....This stagnation threatened the industry as a whole, but for the largest ski-resort developers in North America, it became an opportunity—one predicated on turning once-folksy ski-lift operations into massive real estate ventures. By 2000, a trio of publicly traded corporations that sell one-fourth of the nation’s lift tickets had trumped demographics. That year, they reported combined before-tax profits of $212 million on $1.8 billion in revenue. At 12 percent, that’s more than double the profit margin of the industry as a whole. More >>

Downhill Slide
Why the Corporate Ski Industry is Bad for Skiing, Ski Towns, and the Environment
By Hal Clifford
ISBN: 1578050715
256 pages
Price: $24.95

In this impassioned exposé, lifelong skier Hal Clifford reveals how publicly traded corporations gained control of America’s most popular winter sport during the 1990s, and how they are gutting ski towns, the natural environment, and skiing itself in a largely futile search for short-term profits. More >>

Solving the Resort Puzzle
By Martin Forstenzer, Ski Magazine

....The concept at Tamarack is that skiing will be just one component of an 1,100-acre recreational real estate project that will include an 18-hole golf course and Cascade Lake frontage. According to Tamarack CEO Jean Pierre Boespflug, a former ski instructor at Val Thorens, France, and Squaw Valley, Calif., the ski area will be large enough to accommodate 7,000 skiers and boarders a day, but will limit the number to just 3,500. Homeowners will get unlimited access to the ski area (and other facilities). After that, skiers from the general public will be allowed in until the resort reaches its daily limit.

“Skiing by itself has a tinge of the masses. When you’re skiing, you’re always with crowds,” Boespflug says. “Tamarack is an attempt to change that vision and have essentially a boutique resort with a private club, limiting the number of skiers.”
More >>

Powder Burn: Arson, Money and Mystery in Vail Valley
By Daniel Glick
Paperback: 272 pages
Publisher: PublicAffairs (January 2003)
ISBN: 1586481649

"On the face of it, this is the story of unsolved arson at a high-glamour resort, a mystery packed with suspects that range from crusty ski bums to radical tree huggers to the resort's own corporate honchos. But underlying this entertaining true-life plot is a greater theme that is playing out across America. Here, tensions mount between the progress-minded shareholders of Vail Resorts Inc., environmentalists, and locals who simply pine for the days when they weren't priced out of having a meal--or a life--in Vail, Colorado. Elsewhere, similar hostility brews over conflicting interests in pricey tourist regions like Taos, New Mexico; the Florida Keys; and the Hamptons of New York." More >>

Skiing, or wheeling and dealing?
By Mark Matthews, High Country News, April 18, 2005

New resorts smell a lot like real estate bonanzas
MISSOULA, Montana — With an urban population topping 65,000, Missoula’s drivers can’t escape idling at the intersection of five major streets, locally known as "Malfunction Junction." But even while they stew in traffic jams, drivers heading out of town can find solace on the southern horizon, where Lolo Peak rises. More >>

Ski areas’ ’green’ image not backed by action
Researchers call ‘Sustainable Slopes’ program ‘greenwashing’
By Bob Berwyn, HCN, April 4, 2005

You buy your veggies "organic," your chicken "free-range," your lumber "sustainably harvested." And when you go skiing, you look for another green seal of approval — the "Sustainable Slopes" logo, indicating that a ski area has agreed to meet a code of environmental ethics. But according to a pair of public policy scholars, the Sustainable Slopes charter is little more than a green fig leaf for its 177 member ski resorts. More >>

Developers push ahead with mammoth ski village
Feds say they’re largely powerless to regulate impacts of ‘The Village at Wolf Creek’
By Alex Pasquariello, HCN, February 7, 2005

The developers of what will be the largest ski resort village in Colorado say they’re ready to begin construction in Alberta Park, an alpine meadow high in the San Juan Mountains. The project’s opponents, meanwhile, are trying to derail "The Village at Wolf Creek," using whatever roadblocks they can find. More >>

Does the Forest Service love communities as much as it loves ski areas?
By Paul Larmer, February 19, 1996

Readers of Snow Country magazine recently discovered a special advertising supplement tucked between stories of equipment and resorts: "Stewards of the Land: Skiing and the U.S. Forest Service, a public and private alliance." The 15-page glossy infomercial, complete with ads of Colorado’s premier resorts, paints a rosy picture of the 140 ski areas that use national forest lands. "America’s winter playgrounds’ are run by environmentally sensitive ski companies committed to recycling, environmental education and disabled skier programs. And the Forest Service is an appreciative - but tough - landlord, putting the companies through rigorous planning processes before giving out permits.
As for those who might question whether the relationship between the feds and the ski industry is too cozy, "the Forest Service’s Jack Ward Thomas promises: "not as long as I’m Chief." More >>

Santa Fe ski area growth enrages locals
By Elizabeth Manning, HCN, February 19, 1996

If the Forest Service were ever to deny a ski expansion based on protests by locals, the recently approved Santa Fe Ski Area plan would have been the perfect candidate.
A local 1994 newspaper poll found that 70 percent of Santa Feans opposed the expansion into the Big Tesuque, a high mountain basin just south of the existing ski area. The area is both sacred land for Native Americans and popular with Santa Fe urbanites who like it undeveloped. More >>

Where do we put the condos?
By Eric Whitney,March 29, 1999

The valley’s middle-of-nowhere location has always dampened locals’ fears of its becoming "the next Vail," and it has remained a quiet, three-chairlift resort, 50 miles away from the nearest airport. The resort has only 96 hotel rooms, and there’s not much night life. As its new owner, George Gillett, puts it, Grand Targhee is "an incomplete resort."
Between a flurry of phone calls at his home in Vail, Colo., last summer, Gillett explained why Grand Targhee needs a makeover... Before he can build a new Grand Targhee, Gillett wants to work a land swap with the Forest Service: privately owned grizzly bear habitat for prime Forest Service real estate at the base of Grand Targhee. More >>

Ski workers look for a home
by Elizabeth Manning, HCN, February 19, 1996

Imagine Adam’s Rib in operation. Now picture 4,300 new workers scrambling for housing in a county that boasted five vacant housing units last year.
"It’s not clear where the new people would go," says Cathy Heicher, a member of Eagle County’s planning commission.One thing is certain: Even if the resort became an ace at providing affordable housing, Adam’s Rib would cause further dislocation in Western Colorado, where ski industry workers are finding it increasingly difficult to find a place called home. More >>

Ski area arms race dirties the water
Colorado critics say snowmaking should not be allowed
By Allen Best, HCN, January 29, 2001

Although Arapahoe Basin was the fourth busiest ski resort in Colorado in 1961, it’s been surpassed by ski areas that didn’t exist then. To regain a competitive advantage, managers want some new technology: machines that turn water from the Snake River into snow. More >>

When ski areas fail, taxpayers clean up
High Country News -- May 17, 1993 (Vol. 25 No. 9B)

The Forest Service is beginning to come to grips with a little known impact of skiing on public lands: the reclamation work that must be done when ski areas go belly-up.
A handful of old resorts that could not compete have shut down, leaving behind such headaches as open dumps, decrepit buildings and sewage treatment plants.
Environmentalists have long charged that the Forest Service never saw a ski area it didn't like. Indeed, the agency rarely rejects proposals for new ones. But a growing number of defunct ski areas are straining the agency's longstanding love affair with the industry.
In Colorado, reclamation work for the Pikes Peak and Berthoud ski areas alone is expected to cost at least $400,000. The cost of reclaiming an area called Geneva Basin, closed since 1986, is unknown. More >>

Ski resort plans ruffle feathers
By Shea Andersen, HCN, February 2, 1998

The forested hump of Pelican Butte stands like an island in Oregon’s Cascade Mountains. Bounded by a wilderness area, a national park (Crater Lake), and a national wildlife refuge, the butte is known for its stands of old-growth Shasta red fir, nesting spotted owls and wintering bald eagles.
A ski area proposal from Jeld Wen Inc., a development company that owns a nearby golf resort, could disrupt the area’s serenity. The company says it wants to mix old-fashioned tourist attraction with modern ecological sensitivity on the 8,036-foot mountain. More >>

Vail and the road to a recreational empire
By Allen Best, High Country News, December 7, 1998

VAIL, Colo. - Diane Gansauer was on a future-of-skiing panel for activists a year ago when she heard a representative from Vail Resorts outline a vision for Interstate 70, a highway sometimes called Colorado’s "Main Street through the Mountains."
For 50 miles or more, he said, the four-lane highway would link a chain of interconnected ski areas and their accompanying second homes, strip malls and parking lots. It would be just like the highly organized resorts of the European Alps.
"I left that meeting chilled," recalls Gansauer, executive director of the Colorado Wildlife Federation, primarily a group of hunters. "Who says we want to be anything like the Alps?"It’s a question others have also been asking as they view growth along I-70, a sometimes diesel-fumed highway linking Denver to high-altitude western Colorado. Already, I-70 drivers pass by 829 ski trails served by 124 lifts and gondolas within 60 miles. Hay fields and sagebrush are fast giving way to factory outlets and condo developments, while high housing prices turn many workers into commuters who must drive 50 miles over mountain passes to reach affordable housing (HCN, 11/23/96). More >>

The New West’s servant economy
By Ray Ring, HCN, April 17, 1995

...Item from the Rocky Mountain News: "An Eastern family recently paid $5.6 million for a vacation house at the base of Vail Mountain. They plan to demolish it and replace it with another ski-in, ski-out trophy home."
Simultaneously, the Associated Press reports that 39 of Vail’s 48 cops and firefighters can’t afford to live in the town. At any given moment during ski season in the two counties, 2,000-3,000 jobs stand vacant because there aren’t enough workers willing to accept the terms. It’s the opposite of unemployment: The counties are 6 percent to 9 percent unstaffed. More >>

Seeking power, a few ski workers go union
By Ray Ring, HCN, April 15, 1995

It was a gritty interruption of ski business: At the base of the main lift of the Red Lodge ski area in Montana, on a busy January Saturday, 15 lift operators staged a sit-down strike.
Their starting pay was a scanty $4.75 an hour and they wanted a raise. They were also protesting an attack on their benefits: The charge for employee meals was being upped from $2.50 to $3.50.
While a crowd of skiers gaped, the strikers chanted and called upon their bosses to make concessions.
Such organized outbursts of anger are not new to ski country. Around the West, ski workers who feel squeezed have tried to take some control of their situation. More >>

Ski industry masters the sneak attack
By Jon Margolis, HCN, June 24, 1996

Congratulating themselves, the guardians of the citadel weren’t looking when agents of the ski resorts slipped through a crack in the walls.
They are promoting a bill that would: a) preserve the current (and low) level of fees which ski resorts pay for use of Forest Service land; and b) let them renew their 40-year leases without environmental review.
Specifically, the bill says that "the reissuance of a ski area permit to provide activities similar in nature and amount to the activities provided under the previous permit shall not constitute a major federal action for the purposes of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969."
That means no environmental impact statement, no environmental assessment and quite possibly no examination by any public body, state or federal. The legislation itself explains its virtue: "To reduce federal costs." More >>