Skiing Heritage -- Story Before the News

THE NEWS. Some petroleum market analysts are predicting that the coming winter will see $5-a-gallon gas at the pump. Resorts wonder if the soaring price will discourage day and weekend skiing. They worry even more about the impact on their bottom line of soaring costs of oil to heat buildings and of diesel fuel to power snowmaking machinery. Meanwhile, skiing families heading for destination resorts will find their annual winter vacation cost way up because of sharply higher airfare, and reservations will be harder to secure because airlines are cutting back their flight schedules.

THE STORY BEFORE THE NEWS. Thirty-five years ago, skiing faced a different but more severe energy crisis. In 1973, OPEC cut off oil shipments to the United States as a means of punishing the West for its support of Israel in the Arab-Israeli war. Almost overnight, prices at the pump shot up from 35 cents to over a dollar a gallon.

As ski areas prepared to open for the 1973-74 season, the oil embargo created long lines of cars at gas stations, and the government pressured the stations to close on Sundays. For weekend skiers, there was no assurance you had enough gasoline to get home from the mountains. Thousands canceled Christmas-New Year ski vacations.

It did not help that the media painted an unflattering picture of skiing as a non-essential recreation. Ski resorts, it was claimed, wastefully guzzled oil to power snowmaking machinery and grooming equipment. The ski industry fought back. Hitherto an unknown presence in Washington, it started a lobbying effort, guided by Sherman Adams, President Dwight Eisenhower’s former assistant and the owner of Loon Mountain. Congressmen were reminded that if skiing shut down, thousands of jobs would be lost in mountain communities. Vermont ski areas pointed out that skiing accounted for 13 percent of the state’s income.
To limit the loss of business, resorts turned their gas allocations over to skiers so that they could fill up their tanks for the trip home. Vermont’s Okemo Mountain built a filling station on its access road. Maine’s Saddleback offered free lodging on Sunday night and free skiing on Monday to beat the Sunday closings. Some resorts gave lift ticket discounts to skiers arriving by bus or car pool.

By mid-winter 1974, the crisis eased. Saudi Arabia agreed to pump more oil, and by the middle of March, OPEC ended its embargo.

Can a winter like 1973-74 happen again? Why not? While the current energy crisis revolves around the impact of high prices, it’s not irrational to think that an oil supply shortage could be repeated. It might not be the result of an embargo, but rather of political instability and acts of terrorism in oil-producing nations (Iran, Venezuela, Nigeria), which could severely reduce the flow of foreign oil to the U.S. As they did 35 years ago, skiers would encounter difficulties reaching the slopes.

Skier-Days Gain Momentum in the 21st Century

THE NEWS. Snow falling abundantly in every part of the country caused skier and snowboarder visits to ski areas to soar by 9.1 percent to a new record of 60.1 million in the winter of 2007-08, according to estimates by the National Ski Areas Association (NSAA). New England skier-visits alone were up 19.3 percent.

THE STORY BEFORE THE NEWS. Last winter was the first time that visits have pierced the 60-million mark, up from 54.8 million in 2006-07. The sharp increase over the prior season, 9.1 percent, is the second highest recorded in 30 years. A skier-visit is one skier or snowboarder participating for one day. NSAA began compiling the statistics in 1978-79.

Skier-visits in the decade of the 1980s averaged 50 million per winter. With the advent of snowboarding, they increased to 52.1 million in the 1990s. A marked improvement has taken place in the 21st Century. Skier-visits in the past nine winters have averaged 56.6 million annually, up by 8.6 percent over the yearly average in the last decade of the 20th Century.

Today’s faster growth pace is rooted in several factors, according to NSAA President Michael Berry. Skiers, and their desire to ski more, are attracted by unprecedented high-quality slope grooming that happens now at almost all ski areas. High-capacity lift technology has dramatically reduced lift waiting time almost everywhere.

“Another factor,” says Berry, “is multi-generational participation. For the first time, we are seeing not only parents and children skiing together, but also grandparents. Real estate – second home ownership in the mountains – enables more family participation, and for the first time in the sport’s history we have active skiers in significant numbers belonging to three generations.”

Perhaps the biggest factor accelerating skier-visit growth is the intensive marketing in the 21st Century of season passes. In the past couple of winters, season-pass holders have accounted for 32 percent, or almost one out of three skier-visits. That’s up from an estimated 15 percent 20 years ago. Season-pass holders chalked up more than 19 million skier-days last winter.

Why the increase? Once people make a fixed investment in a pass, they tend to want to ski more days to rationalize their investment.

The Private Ski Area – Old Story with New Twist

THE NEWS. Battle Mountain, a private ski area served by multiple lifts, will be the centerpiece of a 5,300-acre development with 1,700 homes that has been approved by Minturn, Colorado, a town between Vail and Beaver Creek.

THE STORY BEFORE THE NEWS. The concept of the members-only ski area has drawn attention in recent years, partly because real estate has come to be the most important factor in determining whether new ski areas get built. The real estate often turns out to be private clubs, whose members own second homes and condos, some of them accessed through gates manned by security officers.

There was no gate to the nation’s first club-owned private ski area, created in 1936 by the Springfield Ski Club in Massachusetts’ Berkshire Mountains. There was a rope tow, and members typically reached the hill by car. At one time, the club “limited” its membership to 5,000 skiers. But the area struggled to survive in the 1970s. Membership today is down to 3,000, and while the club still owns the area -- with five fixed chairs and snowmaking – anyone can buy a lift ticket. The skiing is no longer private.

North America’s most intensive region of privatized skiing, and the most successful, is around Collingwood, Ontario. For the several million people living in the greater Toronto metropolitan region, good ski terrain has always been in short supply.

In 1949, a group of affluent Toronto skiers formed the Osler Bluff Ski Club, raising enough money to build a ski area on the escarpment at Collingwood. Ontario ski clubs, with a passion for youth racing, have since launched or privatized five more areas on the 700-foot-high escarpment, including Georgian Peaks and Craigleith.

The desire by Ontarians for private membership skiing spills over into neighboring upstate western New York State. Near Ellicottville, Canadians account for almost half of the membership of semi-private Holimont, where families pay a one-time $14,000 initiation fee and $1,700 a year to ski on weekends and holidays, free of crowds.

Not long after Windham in New York’s Catskills opened as a public ski area in 1960, it converted to a private club. The aim was to furnish members with uncrowded slopes. Among the members were writer Peter Benchley, Ethel Kennedy’s star-crossed Skakel family, and prominent Manhattan attorney Tom Sheridan. Indicative of the limitations on the area manager’s authority, a Windham Club committee decided when and where to make snow. The Club was not a financial success, and Windham wound up being sold for $2.1 million to Irv Naylor, who re-opened it to the public.

More recently, the huge real estate sales success of Montana’s Yellowstone Club, next door to Big Sky, has encouraged copycat developments. The Yellowstone Club’s original developer, who is involved in a messy divorce, now wants to exit the place. Warren Miller was the Yellowstone Club’s original skiing director, but left the position, while still owning a home there.

Others have tried to follow the trail blazed by Yellowstone, but with less success. Among them are the Mt. Holly Club at the defunct Elk Meadows ski area in southern Utah, and the Haystack Club next to Vermont’s Mt. Snow.

Starting 60 years ago, ski clubs clustered around rope tows and early T-bars, headquartering in inexpensive chalets. They often had their origins in racing, or a shared love of the sport. When Vermont’s Sugarbush was at the height of its fame in the early 1960s, prominent New York and Boston socialites congregated in a modest, wooden building, Club 10.

At resorts like Vail and Aspen today, the ski club of history is scarcely recognizable. A healthy bank account and investment portfolio, not a Nastar gold pin, are qualifications for membership. Initiation fees run from $30,000 to $200,000 and more. The club interiors resemble the lounges of luxurious private golf clubs, with exclusive luncheon areas for members and guests, ski valets, and special parking slots close to the lifts.

JOURNAL OF ISHA, THE INTERNATIONAL SKIING HISTORY ASSOCIATION
The International Skiing History Association is a not-for-profit corporation, whose mission is to preserve and advance the knowledge of ski history and to increase public awareness of the sport's heritage.

ISHA, 4582 South Ulster St., Suite 1340, Denver, CO 80237 303-893-0903
Skiing Heritage, 133 South Van Gordon St #300, Lakewood CO 80228 303-987-1111