The Fall Line Meets the Bottom Line (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine November 2002

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The Fall Line Meets the Bottom Line (Cont.)

FORTUNATLEY, CHANGE IS IN THE AIR. These days, the most talked-about success stories in skiing are not the big guys, but the small fry that got squeezed in the 1980s and 1990s. Local and regional mountains that focus on skiing as an end in itself are the ones quietly bringing new skiers and boarders into the sport, showing healthy increases in ticket sales, and even making a profit—places like Mountain High, California; Eldora, Colorado; Wachusett Mountain, Massachusetts; Hunter Mountain, New York; and Mad River Glen, Vermont, where the skiers themselves own the mountain.

Many of the most innovative hills around are set up as nonprofit companies, with surplus cash getting reinvested in the operation. Consider Idaho's Bogus Basin, a nonprofit that has set out to re-democratize the sport by making it affordable. In 1998 CEO Mike Shirley cut the season-pass price for Bogus's 2,600 acres from $500 to $199. The previous year he'd sold 2,854 season passes. That winter he sold 25,000. First-time pass holders get a season of rentals and a set of lessons thrown in for free; a kid's season pass costs $29. Shirley's conversion rate has been phenomenal; 65 percent of those who tried skiing in 2000 went on to buy a season pass in 2001. "The industry has assumed that it's elitist," says the 61-year-old Shirley, who also sits on the board of directors of the National Ski Areas Association. "We're saying it doesn't have to be. And we're not giving anything away. We're making more money than we ever have."

In nearby Bozeman, Montana, one resident in ten buys a $475 season pass to ski the 1,500 acres of Bridger Bowl, a nonprofit resort that recorded a hefty 25 percent return in 2000 despite lacking "village" amenities.

Mountain High, in Southern California's San Gabriel Mountains, has become a mecca for other ski area operators: In just five years, general manager Karl Kapuscinski doubled his skier days to 550,000 and is turning profits in the 20-percent-plus range. Mountain High lies within 90 minutes of 12 million residents of the Los Angeles Basin, probably the most ethnically diverse corner of the country. Skiing and boarding are typically lily-white sports, but not here. Forty percent of Kapuscinski's customers are non-Anglo, principally Asians and Hispanics. His clients are not boomers but in their teens or twenties; almost everyone is boarding.

At 680-acre Eldora Mountain, 21 miles west of Boulder, Colorado, skiers and boarders are discovering the advantages of a place that's close to home. "It's price and proximity," says Rob Linde, Eldora's director of marketing, who charged a top daily rate of $43 last year at the for-profit hill. Evidently, a lot of snowboard moms are figuring this out; Eldora's skier days grew from about 67,000 in 1989 to almost 250,000 last winter. "We have a responsibility to price the product and programs so kids can get into the sport," Linde says. "The Vails and Copper Mountains of the world don't have the opportunity to do that."

And finally, in western Maine, where Les Otten first started blowing snow, the nonprofit Maine Winter Sports Center is trying to re-create the skiing culture of the 1950s and 1960s in one of skiing's American cradles. In 2000, MWSC bought two tiny ski hills, BigRock and Quoggy Jo, and revived them. Aided by an average $10 daily ticket, skier days at BigRock rose from 11,000 to 15,000 in a year. This year it expects 30,000.

The corporate resort will always be with us, but for now it no longer defines the future. These days there are refreshing signs of revived interest in the thing itself: skiing. During the coming years, more of skiing's World War II-era pioneers will die or retire, and some of their ski areas will be sold. If those pioneers have done things right, they will have remembered—and taught those who take up the reins in their place—that skiing's success, as always, is found in an open hill, cold air, and a clean line.

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