The U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association (USSA) couldn’t be happier with the recent success at the Vancouver Olympics (21 medals), but “discontent is simmering among skiers who say budget cuts have sliced too deeply into athlete financing, forcing elite competitors to pay for everything from airline tickets to training camps even as the organization’s top executives are among the highest paid in the Olympic world.”
Resort companies like Rock Resorts are implementing green initiatives (on-mountain recycling programs, solar-powered trash compactors, composting programs etc.) at their properties to reduce their carbon footprint, save on operating costs, and hopefully attract a new demographic of eco-friendly guests.
“‘We’ve seen a natural progression of the customer experience at our properties as more travelers are willing to help and commit to eco-friendly practices,’ Paul Toner, COO of RockResorts, told Travel Agent. ‘The majority are leisure travelers who want to feel they can give something back, and we want to provide such opportunities to them,’” reports Kirk Cassels of Travel Agent Central.
Wasatch White: Cameron Williamson of Stuff.co.nz treks to Utah’s Wasatch Mountains in search of untouched powder and to explore the Ski Utah Interconnect Adventure Tour (six resorts in one day).
“Our band of 12 is secretly stoked to be passing through the meticulously groomed terrain, riding the lifts to almost 3000m to get at the snow beyond the boundary. It is illegal to jump the fence, but our guide’s holding a rare backcountry concession, so we can confidently pass the ski patrollers, duck the tape and dive into the woods.”
Homage to the early days of skiing: photographer/skier Dave Heath’s slideshow submitted to Kootenay Mountain Culture Magazine for The Gathering at Red Mountain (Rossland, B.C.)– “a three-day photo/film shred fest attracting some of the ski industries most talented people…”
Despite a 12-year campaign to engage snow sport newcomers, the skiing industry reports that the “conversion rate from newbie to active participant has only risen from about 15 percent since 1999.” These numbers, the slumping economy, and a future that won’t include the current and aging baby boomer demographic have the ski resorts scrambling to adjust their business models and on-mountain offerings.
“Things are changing though. In the last decade, more resorts have embraced snowboarding, added terrain parks and boosted offerings beyond skiing, for instance with summer mountain biking.”
Terrain Parks–winter playgrounds for younger rail-riding, half-piping skiers and snowboarders–have slowly worked their way into the ski resort zeitgeist, offering opportunities to build upon aging demographics, and also ways to “shrewdly” design ramps, jumps, boxes, rainbows, and rails “that segregate the populace, although not necessarily in an overbearing way.” Keep the snow tribes apart, and keep them happy.
But to feed the economic and cultural on-mountain continuum “resorts have to find ways to nurture park beginners so that they will progress to an advanced level. This is good business: no one will keep at a snow sport without becoming at least somewhat proficient. So operators need a large, experienced park tribe to justify the cost of building and maintaining the complicated, outsize terrain parks now common at large resorts.” Bill Pennington of The New York Times reports.
Extended as a one-year trial by the U.S. Forest Service, Telluride ski resort will be offering advanced-level skiing tours and backcountry terrain education through its subcontractor Eco Adventures–a professional guide service allowing access to the “enticing and notoriously perilous terrain of the vast Bear Creek drainage.”
Telluride Resort CEO Dave Riley explains the offering: “‘The Forest Service believes in access to their federal lands, and [the Bear Creek drainage] is getting a tremendous amount of use. They put a counter at the bottom of the creek last year, and on a nice day there were 200 people that came down,’ Riley said. ‘So they saw a need for education and service, to provide a guided option for the public.’”
Of course, not everyone is excited about a private commercial operator expanding day-use operations into federal forests. “The San Miguel Conservation Foundation and the town of Telluride itself have protested the use of the backcountry area and forced Riley to amend his special-use permit with an agreement to route his tours around a town-owned preserve.” Scott Willoughby of The Denver Post reports.
Christopher Solomon of National Geographic Adventure spends a few weeks exploring Norway’s Lofoten Islands–a “70-mile-long archipelago built from some of the oldest rock on Earth”–in search of untrammeled telemark terrain, the Norwegian’s “self-effacing,” but self-reliant, spirit, and easier ways to navigate amongst the country’s mostly remote alpine ski resorts.
“[F]or all its domestic popularity, skiing in Norway has historically drawn few outside visitors. Part of the reason for this is simple geography. Norway is all mountains and water, a pinched spine of peaks fissured with deep fjords. And while this should be a skier’s dream, it can make getting from one ski resort to another a logistical migraine.”
Built in 1937 as a Depression-era “jobs project” for nearly $1 million dollars, Oregon’s Timberline Lodge at the base of Mount Hood has been a site for iconic movie sets–like The Shining and All the Young Men, remains an epicenter for skiing and snowboarding enthusiasts (spawning the popular High Cascade Snowboard Camp), and has been home for the Kohnstamm family for nearly a half century.
“Since its birth in the late 1930s as a New Deal project to create hundreds of jobs for Portland workers, craftsmen and artisans, Timberline has dug out its own place in American culture.”
