The Fall Line Meets the Bottom Line

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Outside Magazine November 2002

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The Fall Line Meets the Bottom Line
A vetern journalist argues that the ski industry has sold its soul to Wall Street, turning too many mountain towns into overbuilt Disneyfied retail hubs. But don't despair: All over snow country, a back-to-basics counterrevolution is under way.
By Hal Clifford


	(Illustration by Marcos Chin)

MAMMOTH LAKES, California, is a beautiful place, tucked into a woodsy alcove on the edge of the Owens River Valley. The escarpments of the eastern Sierra Nevada rise 4,700 feet above town, and the John Muir and Ansel Adams wilderness areas wrap around it. Though Mammoth Lakes butts up against the Mammoth Mountain ski area, the two-lane road leading to town, Highway 203, lacks the sprawl lining many resort approaches.

The Vancouver-based skiing corporation Intrawest, which owns a majority share of Mammoth Mountain Ski Resort and eight others in North America, is looking to liven the place up a bit. Intrawest is halfway through a decade-long plan to spend $500 million on Mammoth, for base village construction, homes, condominiums, and golf courses. The total investment, including money from other parties, approaches $800 million, equal to $123,000 for every current Mammoth Lakes resident. The strategy is to bring the resort, which saw about 950,000 skier days per year in the late 1990s, back to its historic high levels of 1.4 million in the mid-eighties—when visitors started straying to the Vails and Whistlers of the world.

I got a peek at the future one afternoon not long ago, when thenÐIntrawest sales director Rick Davis, 48, took me on a tour of new properties. Driving across town in a black GMC Yukon Denali, Davis rattled off the numbers. Juniper Springs Lodge, constructed by Intrawest in 1999, offered 174 condominiums for $200,000 to $600,000 each. The 77 condos at the Sunstone building had sold out in two and a half hours in the spring of 1998, at a sales event in Los Angeles. A new gondola and 18-hole golf course were under construction and would open over the next two years.

We stopped at The Timbers, 32 Intrawest town homes that would list at prices from $650,000 to $900,000 (to date, 27 have sold). The Timbers units supposedly reßect a California Craftsman bungalow design, but the houses were oversize, inflated-looking things with concrete siding textured to resemble wood. The interiors had the charmless elegance of upscale hotel suites.

And upscale they were: For an additional fee, starting at $65,000, you could get a town house that was completely furnished, right down to the napkins. "The sky's the limit," Davis said, taking me into a unit's newly built wine closet—an option that went for $31,969 and came stocked with 300 preselected bottles.

Out on the new golf course, the ball-washing gizmos were mounted on four-foot-tall carved wooden bears. "It gives the place character," Davis said. "We're hoping in a few years that we'll be competing with resorts like Vail and Aspen and Beaver Creek. We have all that nature offers. We just need the man-made stuff."

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