Ski Business

In the early ’80s, skiers finally learned to stay dry and warm.

Photo above: In the 1980s, Patagonia's fleece top helped launch the technical skiwear category.

Those of us who began skiing before 1980 remember bundling up in layers of nylon, wool and down. In dry weather we were warm. In wet weather we shivered and headed for the lodge, then waited overnight for the soggy insulation to dry out. Around 1970 a lot of ski parkas were made with synthetic fiberfills, which dried more quickly—but they still soaked up cold rain and wet snow, driving us indoors.

Forty years ago, in 1981, everything changed. We got polyester fleece, which resisted moisture unless submerged, and waterproof/breathable shells to protect the fleece from wind and wet. Skiwear companies educated us to layer. It helped that high-speed detachable chairlifts, introduced that same year, cut in half the time we spent in the rain. Over the next five years, skiers discovered they could get in a dozen runs even in a Sierra blizzard.

The skiwear revolution, of course, has a backstory. In 1941, Dupont laboratories invented nonporous acrylic and polyester fibers, introduced commercially after World War II as Orlon and Dacron. As fabrics, they resisted soaking and staining, especially when treated with water-repellent chemicals. They became popular for upholstery, carpeting and clothing. In 1961 the 90-year-old Norwegian company Helly Hansen, a maker of foul weather gear for seamen, partnered with the firm Norwegian Fiber Pile to create a thick acrylic pile sweater that became popular with Swedish lumberjacks and Norwegian fishermen.

Ten years later, Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard began looking for something better than wool and down for mountaineering gear. As he wrote in his book Let My People Go Surfing: 

We decided that a staple of North Atlantic fishermen, the synthetic pile sweater, would make an ideal mountain layer, because it would insulate well without absorbing moisture.

But we needed to find some fabric to test out our idea, and it wasn’t easy to find. Finally, Malinda Chouinard, acting on a hunch, drove to the Merchandise Mart in Los Angeles. She found what she was looking for at Malden Mills, freshly emerged from bankruptcy after the collapse of the fake fur-coat market. We sewed up samples and field-tested them in alpine conditions. It had a couple of drawbacks: a bulky, lumbering fit and a bad-hair-day look, thanks to fibers that quickly pilled. But it was astonishingly warm, particularly when used with a shell. It insulated when wet, but also dried in minutes, and it reduced the number of layers a climber had to wear.

Those first thick pile sweaters were boxy, but Chouinard worked with Malden owner Aaron Feuerstein and product manager Doug Hoschek to adapt the mill’s polyester baby-bunting material into a soft fleecy insulator that Patagonia marketed, in 1981, as Synchilla. Malden sold it with great success, under the name Polarfleece, to other outdoor clothing makers, including skiwear companies. In 1986 Malden changed the fabric’s name to Polartec.

In combination with waterproof/breathable shell materials like Gore-Tex, fleece kicked off a trend called “technical skiwear.” Stretch pants were exiled to the high-fashion corner of fine-weather skiing, and technical skiwear makers celebrated their boom at “poly parties.” (see “Crazy Ski Promotions,” January-February 2021 issue.)

By the mid-90s, Malden figured out how to make polyester fiber from recycled soft-drink bottles. In 1995, Malden’s factory in Lawrence, Massachusetts, burned to the ground. Over the next two years Feuerstein rebuilt the company, but the interruption opened the fleece market to competing firms. Feuerstein lost control of the company in 2001, and after an ownership change, Malden Mills became Polartec Inc. in 2007. 

Seth Masia is president of ISHA. His last article for Skiing History was “Alpine Revolution: Three Years that Shook the Ski World,” in the January-February 2021 issue.

Photo above: At its finest, skiing is both an art and a science—as is effective marketing. In 1993, Killington commissioned six artists to customize 45 cabins as part of the launch of the Vermont resort’s new Skyeship gondola. The public relations score was hauling a cabin to the Whitney Museum in New York City for an evening of celebration and national exposure. A legal kerfuffle ensued when an enterprising illustrator artfully claimed that his work had been exhibited at the Whitney. Mark D. Phillips photo

For skiing’s P.T. Barnums, no news is bad news.

It was about 6 a.m. on a chilly morning in the early 1970’s when then-Sugarbush marketing director Chan Weller and Gary Black Jr. of the Baltimore Sun began a slow hike to the top of the Sugarbush Snowball ski trail to witness an event which may have been a first at any ski area in the East.

After lighting smoke flares, the friends used an old wind-up 16mm film camera to record pilot John Macone, perhaps best known as the top PR executive at the Squaw Valley Olympic Winter Games in 1960, perform one of the most audacious PR capers of all-time: landing a ski-equipped airplane on a ski trail.

After a short flight from nearby Warren-Sugarbush Airport, Macone guided the plane to an uphill landing, bouncing across the moguls. He managed not to bury the prop in a pile of snow, according to Weller’s 2019 account on Sugarbush.com.

Soon, they realized their folly.

“Macone could get busted and his flight ticket pulled. I could lose my job as marketing director at Sugarbush. Black would be the only survivor,” Weller wrote.

“John cranks her up, I get ready to release the rope, Gary rewinds the 16mm and points it at the plane for posterity and we have ‘lift off.’”

The two later chuckled that the Ski Patrol, none the wiser, were puzzled about two straight tracks down the mountain that simply vanished.

It remained a secret until the internet came along, and the clandestine escapade could be shared in all its grainy black and white glory with the world. (See it at https://tinyurl.com/sugarbushstunt)

Channeling Barnum

You’ll find them at Sugarbush and every other ski resort. At X-C touring centers. At gear and apparel manufacturers and at ski shows. Promotional stunts are skiing’s modern-day version of P.T. Barnum, the American showman who in the 1800s sewed a monkey’s torso and head onto a fish and called it a mermaid, and toured the country with a woman he said was George Washington’s 161-year-old wet nurse.

In the ski business, promoters went to extreme lengths to grab attention. The goal was to stage events so outrageous, so over the top, no media outlet could ignore it.

Consider some of the wackiest ski promotions of the mid-20th and early 21st centuries, which, so far, looks to be the golden age of ski stunts.

Bombs Away

At the head of any publicity parade would certainly be Walt Schoenknecht (1919-1987), the entrepreneur who opened Mohawk Mountain in Connecticut in 1947, then ventured north to purchase a 500-acre farm from the man with the perfect name: Reuben Snow. Mount Snow, opened in 1954, went to extraordinary lengths to generate awareness, according to Thad Quimby, writing in the Burlington Free Press (Feb. 12, 2016).

“He put a pool outside in the cold and a skating rink inside. He started a ski club in Florida. He allowed a fountain to run in the winter to create a mound of ice large enough to ski down (and people did ski it). A showman? Maybe. Crazy? That’s fair,” Quimby writes.

“He even commissioned the Atomic Energy Commission to explode an underground nuclear bomb to create a bowl for skiing and add more vertical feet to the resort. Thankfully, calmer heads prevailed, and his request was denied,” according to Quimby.

By the 1970s, publicity stunts were as much a part of skiing as stretch pants and bota bags.

For Pete’s Sake

In an inspired bit of Barnumesque showmanship, in 1977, Crested Butte promoters enlisted Tom Pulaski, then the 20-year-old director of the Gunnison Climbing School and Guide Service, to impersonate the fictional “Crested Butte Pete,” then camp at Crested Butte’s Monument Hill with his Siberian husky mix Charlie.

The plan called for Pete to remain on top from early November until he could ski all the way down, certainly no later than Thanksgiving Day.

He was only supposed to be there for 10 days, but needed to resupply to cover an eight-day delay. On Thanksgiving, a flock of sixth graders brought him a turkey. Meanwhile, thanks to a telephone line in his tent, he conducted radio and TV interviews nationwide, racking up publicity for happy Crested Butte executives. Even Charlie became a star of Colorado TV weather reports.

After 18 days, there was enough snow to make the first triumphant run of the year, all filmed by three TV stations and witnessed by numerous fans, according to Skiing Magazine (February 1978).

Recently contacted in Gunnison, Colorado, where he is a retired woodworker and property manager, Pulaski says he still hears from people annually who remember the stunt.

“The promotion really worked. It was just kooky enough that it caught everybody’s eye,” he tells Skiing History.

Speaking of first runs, Olympian Billy Kidd took the first run of the 1977-78 season in New York’s Central Park when Steamboat Ski Area and the Ski The Rockies association purchased a truckload of crushed ice and spread it on a tiny hill near Fifth Avenue and 72nd Street, exclusively for the NBC Today Show.

The idea was to give skiing enthusiast Tom Brokaw, co-anchor of the show, lessons in slalom racing. Steamboat flew in 550 pounds of powder, which had congealed into hardpack, then spread it atop 8-1/2 tons of more hardpack ice purchased in Manhattan.

It didn’t rain that day, it poured, adding to the not exactly prime conditions. Promoters asked the ice vendor whether he thought they should go ahead and spread the ice. “Why not?” he said, according to a story about the event in Ski Magazine (February 1982). “You paid for it.”

To his credit, Brokaw showed up in a business suit, apologized and begged off the stunt.

Ski The Rockies promoters were as crushed as the ice. But there was a happy ending: later in the season, Brokaw and a film crew visited Steamboat to ski on the real stuff.

Eye in the Sky

In the early 1990s, war broke out among New England ski resorts regarding who had the most trails. If a trail from top to bottom is defined as Upper Middlebrook and Lower Middlebrook, is that one or two trails? Some resorts increased their trail counts by creative naming, without cutting a single tree. Killington, determined to put an end to the nonsense, hired an independent aerial surveillance company to fly over their competitors’ terrain and count trails.

Former Killington marketing director John Clifford recalls, “We picked the top 10 ski resorts in the Northeast and left the smaller areas alone.”

Some fellow marketers thanked Killington for actually expanding their terrain; others requested that the “Beast of the East” mind its own business. The New York Times and Boston Globe lapped it up when the results were released.

In 1993, Killington created its high-speed heated Skyeship gondola. To add some sizzle, they commissioned six artists to create 45 artsy designs for the exteriors of 139 cabins, calling the result an “art gallery in the sky.” So what better way to launch the new lift than at a private event at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art? A gondola cabin was trucked to the Whitney to impress otherwise blasé New Yorkers. The event generated enormous exposure for the resort but later resulted in a lawsuit. It seems one of the gondola artists claimed his work was exhibited at the Whitney. Technically yes, for one evening. But the buyer of one of the artist’s other works sued for misrepresentation. Killington was happy about the promotion. The buyer of the artwork, not so much.

Human Snow Globe

How could this possibly fail? To create excitement at the annual Ski Dazzle ski show in Los Angeles in 2002, Greg Murtha, then the marketing director of Sugar Bowl, near Lake Tahoe, created an inflatable 18-foot Human Snow Globe. Visitors could step inside to enjoy a “blizzard” of shredded Styrofoam. Jeep, a corporate sponsor, parked a new car inside. It was a huge hit, although Guinness World Records turned down their submission because the globe didn’t contain water.

The plastic see-through attraction toured California ski and auto shows until Murtha realized that it might not be healthy for visitors to breathe in Styrofoam dust. Later, Sugar Bowl turned the giant plastic globe into a sumo wrestling arena. People lined up to don one-size-fits-all inflated sumo suits and have a go at it.

“It was hysterically funny. People would watch for hours,” says Murtha, who now runs Xplorit, an interactive virtual travel company in Incline Village, Nevada.

“We succeeded in putting a smile on people’s faces as they engaged with our brand. There were a few drunk rounds of faux wrestling, but those stories are best untold.”

How Now Brown Cow

It’s not just ski shows and resorts that resorted to press stunts. The largest ski industry association also succumbed to the siren song of publicity. During a 1983 trade show, DuPont and Ski Industries America (SIA) hosted a cow-chip tossing competition in the Rotunda of the Las Vegas Convention Center. In the same hall where the Beatles performed in 1964, SIA encouraged the industry to bond and create publicity by throwing dried cow excrement, for distance.

“The rules were simple,” said then-SIA president David Ingemie. “Reps competed against retailers in an event well-lubricated by free alcohol.”

Ingemie remembers the cow chips, on arrival, were, “very fresh – right off the ranch.” They had, however, dried into fragile discus-shaped pies. It turned out that mere strength wouldn’t win the contest: throw too hard and the pie disintegrated. Finesse and technique ruled the day.

I was in the room where it happened. After about an hour I looked at Ingemie. He looked at me through a cloud of dry cow chip dust, and we both realized how disgusting the event was becoming. The name of the winner is lost to skiing history.

But Ingemie managed to nail second place and has the plaque to prove it. “To this day, my wife still gives me, er, crap about hanging a cow chip on the wall, but I remember it as one of the funniest events we ever did at the Ski Show.”

Another legendary SIA Show escapade began in 1982. A boom was on in polyester fleece and Gore-Tex skiwear, so journalist Bob Woodward (not the Washington Post Woodward) and friends thought it would be a hoot to dress for dinner in polyester leisure suits. Woodward dubbed himself The Right Reverend Lester Polyester of the Holy Church of Synthetics, and his flock convened at El Sombrero, a far-off-the-Strip Mexican restaurant. Dozens of reps and retailers dressed like extras in a John Waters movie for an evening of debauchery that is fondly recalled to this day. The Poly Party became a tradition.

“The ’83 party was a ripper as word spread around the SIA Show that good times were to be had at a totally out-of-kilter party which would be the complete opposite of the typical corporate big bash,” Woodward told the trade publication SNEWS.

By 1986 the party drew dozens of staid corporate ski executives channeling their inner Saturday Night Fever. Woodward needed a larger venue. In April 1987 Sports Illustrated reported, “One highlight of the convention was the ‘Polyester Party’ at the El Rancho bowling alley. People who never wear anything but cotton turtlenecks and wool sweaters raided the Vegas boutiques for synthetic shirts and shorts, and prizes were awarded for the flashiest getups.”

Woodward recalls, “The realization that we had created something really big came while waiting for baggage at the Las Vegas airport, and watching a ski show attendee’s bowling ball rolling out onto the conveyor belt.”

So next time you read about a crazy ski industry stunt involving former speed skiing legend C.J. Mueller strapped on top of a moving car, or click on a viral video of a two-year-old snowboarder at Jiminy Peak, or watch TV coverage of a ski area’s sled dogs hauling along Central Park South, remember these stunts don’t just happen. Behind the scenes is a ski promoter risking a job, just to get you to slide a little more often. 

ISHA vice president Jeff Blumenfeld, a resident of Boulder, Colorado, is the president of the North American Snowsports Journalists Association (NASJA.org). He is author of Travel With Purpose: A Field Guide to Voluntourism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). Learn more at travelwithpurposebook.com.

Skiing has always been a perilous journey for public companies.

By SETH MASIA

If you had put $1,000 into Vail Resorts stock in 2004, your investment would have grown to $14,000 by August 2018. Vail, a supernova of skiing investments, now faces its most daunting competition ever in the nascent, privately held Alterra Mountain Company.

In truth, Vail is the only public company in the history of North American skiing to have shown long-term health. Other than Vail, the stock market has been a bad marriage for skiing. S-K-I  Ltd. was a steady if unspectacular stock for many years, until purchased by Les Otten. Peak Resorts returns a modest dividend and has shown no price growth.

Sometime in the late 1970s, commenting on a ski-equipment anti-dumping action, Fortune Magazine noted that “Skiing is an odd little segment of industry better left to people who understand it and deeply care about it.” For many years those have been words to live by, especially for investors from outside the peculiar business...

Read full article, pages 10-11.

 Swiss reader Luzi Hitz recently sent us a collection of photos of snow rollers used to groom pistes in Switzerland and France during the 1950s and 1960s. The picture at right, for instance, was apparently taken above the St. Bernard Pass in 1950 (but it may be as late as 1964). This raises the question whether any of these devices predate Steve Bradley's packer-grader, first used at Winter Park in 1950.

Well, yes and no. In both Europe and the United States, the process of rolling snow to achieve a smooth surface long predates the development of ski lifts and trails. Snowy roads were commonly packed out hard by hauling heavy agricultural rollers behind teams of horses. The purpose was to provide easy gliding for sleighs and sledges, and solid footing for the horses pulling them (horseshoes were often equipped with caulks to give them traction on hard and icy surfaces). In the American Ski Annual for 1945-46, Phil Robertson, manager of Mt. Cranmore, described using an agricultural roller in the fall of 1939 to pack down the early season snow so it would freeze

to the ground and make a solid base for later snowfalls. The resort used a small Caterpiller tractor to haul the roller. European snowsports operators had the same idea in the prewar years, but by November of 1939 they had more pressing issues to worry about. 

Repeated rolling did nothing to break up the icy surface that developed under heavy skier traffic, or after a melt-freeze cycle. Robertson wrote “We remedy this condition by scarifying late in the day, creating a powder surface which freezes during the night to the harder snow below. This operation is carried on with our invention called the Magic Carpet, a network of chains and caulks 10 by 14 feet, weighing 1200 pounds, which is hauled over the slopes with a tractor.” Find photos of this device in action accompanying Jeff Leich’s article on early snowmaking and grooming in the Spring 2002 newsletter of the New England Ski Museum.

After the war, new resorts used pre-war grooming methods. Despite the development of early snowmobiles (and the 10th Mountain Division’s Weasel), no over-the-snow vehicles yet existed with the power to drag rollers through the deep soft snow found in the Western states, and bulldozers were too heavy – they sank out of sight.

In the United States we generally credit Steve Bradley as the father of snow grooming. Bradley assumed management of Winter Park in June of 1950 and immediately began working with Ed Taylor on ideas for stabilizing and smoothing the snow surface. Taylor, a member of the Winter Park board of directors, was a former chairman of the National Ski Patrol and had a special interest in snow physics, based on his work controlling avalanches.

Bradley and Taylor appear to be the first experimenters to focus on the problem of smoothing out moguls. At the time Winter Park was smoothing out moguls manually, by sending out teams of men with shovels. According to Jerry Groswold, who watched Bradley and Taylor at work, they tried a number of devices to automate the process, beginning with their own version of Cranmore’s Magic Carpet, a six-foot length of chain-link fencing they pulled down the slope while skiing.
 

By the close of the year Bradley had designed and built a roller design, but with a difference: First, it was a “slat roller,” which had the effect of packing half the snow and “powdering” the rest for a soft, skiable surface. Then, in front of the roller he put an adjustable steel blade, spring-loaded to shave the tops off moguls. It worked like a road grader and steamroller ganged together. It wasn’t just a packer-and-smoother: it was the Bradley Packer-Grader. The January 15, 1951 issue of the National Newspaper of Skiing reported on the successful use of the Bradley XPG-1 -- X for experimental, PG-1 for the first packer-grader.

The gravity-powered Packer-Grader weighed about 700 lb and was steered by a skier. The technique: go straight down the fall line, depending on the blade for speed control. At Winter Park, Bradley sent teams of “pilots” down the mogul fields in V-formation, like a squadron of fighter planes. According to Groswold, they earned 25 cents an hour “combat pay” over and above the trail crew wage. Rig and pilot returned to the top of the hill via T-bar. Jim Lillstrom, who was one of the pilots, believes that their crew were the first skiers to use the newly-invented Bell fiberglass helmet. (Video link: See a formation of XPG-1 in action at Winter Park)

Bradley filed for a patent on the packer-grader in December 1951. By 1952, Fred Pabst was using his new Tucker Sno-Cats to pull slat rollers up and down the Bromley slopes.

Patent number 2,786,283 was issued to Bradley in March, 1957, covering “Apparatus for grading and packing snow.” That year Bradley mounted a Packer-Grader behind one of the new Kristi snowcats just going into production in Arvada, Colo., rigging a hydraulic cylinder to control blade height in place of the original steel spring. Thiokol Corp., then beginning snowcat production in Utah, licensed the Packer-Grader technology and modern powered snow grooming was born.
 

Returning to the St. Bernard photo: Note that this is a slat roller machine without a grading blade, and that the skier behind the roller controls the speed by sideslipping or snowplowing. A note on the French website http://www.skistory.com/F/domaines/B32.html suggests that more sophisticated powered grooming machinery was introduced by Emile Allais, who arrived at Courchevel in 1954 after having worked in North and South America since the opening of Squaw Valley in 1948. He brought American and Canadian ideas with him.

By John Fry

For 35 years, the National Ski Areas Association (NSAA) has reliably measured the volume of winter visits at U.S. areas. The statistic—one skier or snowboarder on the slopes for one day with a lift pass—is not perfectly accurate, but it is the most consistent available to track the trend in participation over the years. Visits reached record highs of over 60 million-plus days in 2008 and 2011. Last season, however, at 53.3 million days, they were down 11 percent from the record highs. Ski area visits are back to the level of 30 years ago in 1987. 

Something else may have changed, too. According to the latest NSAA research, frequent skiers and snowboarders—people on lift-served slopes for six or more days a winter—now account for 70 percent of all visits. 

Put another way, only 28 percent of 9.2 million skiers and snowboarders account for 70 percent of all ski area visits. Anyone planning to be on the slopes more than six days a winter can be tempted to buy one of the many varied season passes, such as Epic, Ikon, or Mountain Collective, plus a myriad of passes offered by individual ski areas to reward frequent skiers. 

Roughly speaking, anyone willing to lay down between five hundred and a thousand dollars before the end of November is enjoying the lowest lift prices, adjusted for inflation, in the sport’s history. For everyone else, there’s a mixed bag of discounted passes throughout the season, too varied and numerous to describe here.  Infrequent or casual skiers and snowboarders unfamiliar with how to purchase discounted tickets in advance can be experiencing the highest-ever ticket prices. 

Last winter, the average U.S. weekend window lift ticket price was $122.30. That’s 30 times greater than it was a little over half-a-century ago when the 1965 weekend lift ticket sold on average for $4.18. Over the same period of time, U.S. disposable family income multiplied 2.75 times, rising from $14,174 to $39,155. In other words, the window lift ticket price grew 10 times faster than people’s income available to spend in a discretionary manner.  

During that time, obviously, the on-slope experience has been substantially improved by resort investments in grooming, snowmaking, faster lifts, new and upgraded day lodges.  But an economist who found that the cost of an industry’s product or service over a half-century had increased 10 times more than did disposable family income, would be unlikely to form an optimistic picture of the industry’s future.

Almost all of U.S. family income growth since 2008 has gone to just ten percent of Americans. That may be okay insofar as skiing correlates with higher incomes. But a prime component historically of the skier population, young college graduates, has been negatively impacted by this trend. NSAA notes a decline in visits of young men and women aged 13 to 24, coinciding with a downturn in snowboarding. 

College loan indebtedness has doubled in the last ten years. Paying interest on their loans has left men and women in their twenties with less money to spend on recreation. 

Of course, cost isn’t the only factor impacting ski area visits. People’s leisure time is being eaten up by social media and computer games. It has affected all outdoor sports. Compared to the decline in tennis and golf, ski participation has done well, merely by declining less.

A CLOUDED FUTURE

The late Jim Spring, who did consumer research in skiing over many years, found a high number of people who call themselves skiers not participating for a season. The most promising way to increase participation numbers, he concluded in 1995, was to convince people to ski every year. 

In similar thinking, the McKinsey consulting firm in 1989 concluded that the best prospect for increasing skier numbers lies with light skiers who’ve already made a commitment to the sport. McKinsey reasoned that heavy skiers held little additional potential to expand the market, though they are the easiest for ski areas to reach.

McKinsey didn’t highlight cost, rather the need to improve the experience. And there’s the problem. Skiing is a sport involving bodily injury risk, discomfort, possible fear of heights. While many ski areas offer attractive learn-to-ski/ride deals, the newcomer must have suitable clothing, stand in lines to buy a ticket and rent equipment, and pay a ski school to learn how to slide down a hill without risking a fall or collision. According to research conducted by NSAA, more than four out of five newcomers exposed to this experience eventually decide not to take up the sport. 

If the experience remains unaltered, and ski areas offer their best pricing to people already committed heavily to the sport, it’s difficult to see, with snowboarding participation in decline, and global warming, how measurable downhill skiing activity will grow in the years ahead, or avoid declining. 

Smart minds are at work, and the business model adopted by the mega-resort companies like Vail and KSL Partners may attract the interest of  investors. Pre-season sales of season passes are bringing them millions of dollars of cash flow before the snow has even fallen. But it remains to be seen if their financial interest will ultimately serve the best interest of the sport. 

The ski industry is not synonymous with the sport, as if we needed reminding. The cross-country ski and freestyle crazes of the 1970s, and later snowboarding, which attracted hundreds of thousands of new participants, were not ski industry marketing programs designed to increase participation. They arose out of the sport’s heart, and in some cases the “industry” didn’t initially respond well to them. 

In the long run, the ski industry exists because of the sport, and not the other way around. 

John Fry is the author of the award-winning The Story of Modern Skiing: The revolution in equipment, technique, competition, resort design, and media after World War II. The book is available in paperback and on Kindle. Fry is the chairman of the International Skiing History Association.

Just how many of us are there? That’s a controversial question. 
By John Fry

How many people ski in the USA? Or ski and snowboard? Neither of the industry estimates that are typically and most prominently mentioned in the press is precise. I’ve arrived at a rough estimate after weeks of emailing, phoning and Googling, and listening to all sides in a controversy that’s been going on for almost 60 years...

The man who wrote the manual recalls early efforts to bridge the cultural divide between skiers and snowboarders. By Roger Lohr

In the early 1990s, snowboarding was booming at mountain resorts across America, and skiers were not shy about voicing their disdain. Skiers mostly saw riders as reckless young upstarts—wise-assed, foul-mouthed kids who were crossing the fall line, pushing snow off the slopes, and ignoring the vaunted “Skier’s Code of Ethics.” They were poachers in paradise. 

At the time, I was working for the United Ski Industries Association (USIA), a three-year trial marriage of the National Ski Areas Association (NSAA) and Ski Industries America (SIA). I was named liaison to the newly created USIA Snowboard Committee. The committee comprised Jake Burton, Brian Sellstrom of Trans-
World Snowboarding magazine, Brett Conrad of Wave Rave and Lee Rogers of Snow Summit, who was replaced by John Rice of Bear Mountain in California, where the Outlaw Snowboard Park was the first area with jumps and jibs.

Skiers were hating snowboarder antics on the slopes and the committee felt it should address this “situation.” At the time I was a telemark skier, which qualified me as a member of the lunatic fringe, so the decision-makers at USIA felt I was a good fit to work with the snowboarders. It wasn’t long before peer pressure required me to hang up the tele boards and become a “one plank wanker.” It took me about three seasons to master the snowboard…and on powder days, I’m particularly grateful that I did.

The committee’s concept was for me to research and produce a guidebook for ski area operators. The book would inform them about how to accept snowboarders (and their money) while de-escalating the simmering war on the slopes. The concept became a 15-chapter manual covering the essentials, including snowboard rental operations, etiquette, designating snowboard-free areas, tracking, marketing, instruction, and building halfpipes and parks. I tried to find examples of best practices at the few ski areas around the country known for embracing snowboarders. 

Resort operators had some trepidation about the manual, titled the USIA Snowboard Operations Manual for Ski Areas. I was informed that the association attorney would have to review the well-researched manifesto. He decided that for legal purposes the concept of snowboarding would hereto be termed “snowboard skiing” on every page of the publication. He also renamed the chapter titled “Conflict Mitigation,” which covered how areas could address snowboard attitudes and antics as well as skier prejudice, to “Harmony Through Education.” This chapter provided ideas such as proactive education, snowboard ambassadors, and the ultimate “red slip” warning—clipping tickets to throw the bums out. Some of the information was based on the Snow Summit brochure Read This or Die: Tips on Doin’ Your Part Towards Global Harmony. I was so proud of the manual, which was published in 1992, that I dedicated it to my mother, my wife and my son. 

The second iteration of the Snowboard Committee was launched after USIA dissolved back into separate associations, SIA and NSAA. The snowboard product suppliers were becoming increasingly plentiful and important to SIA, and they were gobbling up space at the annual trade show. The SIA Snowboard Committee was expanded to more than a dozen members and Brad Steward (Bonfire, Salomon) took over the committee reins.

The “Share a Chair” brochure was developed in 1994 to relieve the continued tension on the slopes between skiers and ri

ders. Dennis Jenson, the marketing guru at Burton, translated the Skier’s Code into “snowboard-ese” and made it hipper. Steward enlisted art director Ross Wordhouse to design the brochure and the committee developed tag lines like “There’s been more than just snow accumulating at your local resort” and “Things we all have in common.” Some of the “Important Things to Consider” included “destructive and offensive behavior is totally lame.” 

The brochure was a masterpiece and upon receiving the mock-up, I contacted Wordhouse to inquire about the neat font he had used for the copy. He replied, “Font? I printed it by hand!” Color me impressed. We printed 250,000 copies and shipped them off to ski areas across the nation. 

Later, when Steward served on the SIA Board of Directors, we chatted about the difficult days of assimilating snowboarders. He said: “I once spoke with an older lady who was sitting at a resort lodge, looking up at a slope filled with skiers and snowboarders. ‘It’s so nice to see all these skiers having fun,’” she said. “Everyone just got used to each other.” 

Roger Lohr worked at SIA from 1986 to 1998 and then as a snowsports project manager, writer and promoter. He is the cross-country ski editor for  SnoCountry.com and SeniorsSkiing.com

By Seth Masia

The wholesale/retail scene was rocked in September when Newell Brands Inc, announced it would sell or fold K2 Sports and its subsidiaries.

Two of the oldest brands in skiing, Völkl and Marker, thus have cloudy futures. Völkl has been in more-or-less continuous production in the Bavarian town of Straubing since 1914; Marker was founded 150 miles south, in Garmisch, and has been in continuous production since 1952.

Major ski, boot and binding companies have been sold in the past, but few in a manner that threatened the future of the brand. In recent times, only Benetton’s failure, in 2003, comes close. Nordica was salvaged from that disaster through its sale to Tecnica, but the Kästle brand was shelved, to be revived four years later by an Austrian industrialist with no ties to the original company.

The sale of K2 Sports follows the April merger of Newell with Jarden, the consumer-products conglomerate that had purchased K2, along with its affiliated brands, in 2007. The merger created a $15 billion company, manufacturing 46 mass-market brands, including Rubbermaid, Papermate, Elmer’s, Coleman, Irwin Tools, Sunbeam and Mr. Coffee.

On October 4, Newell CEO Michael Polk told a group of investors that the company plans to sell the winter sports brands during the first half of 2017. Sales director Pete Iverson confirmed that Newell wants to sell the group as a package, and not as individual companies. In addition to K2, Völkl and Marker, the package would include Line skis, apparel lines Marmot and Zoot, Full Tilt ski boots, snowboard lines Ride, Morrow and 5150, plus snowshoe brands Tubbs and Atlas.

Polk indicated that “underperforming” brands, contributing about 10 percent of Newell’s annual revenue, would be unloaded, including Rubbermaid and Irwin. The tools division has already been sold to Stanley Black & Decker for $1.95 billion. Most of the brands for sale are “durable goods.” What would be left are “consumable” goods like office, restaurant and kitchen supplies – products that customers replenish several times each year.

Polk was widely quoted saying “Some of them are the kinds of businesses that would be difficult to sell and therefore, we should just shut down because they create no value for [investors] and they are a distraction for us.” On its face, this is a rash statement for an executive who hopes to realize any value from the assets, and Polk later said K2 Sports would remain open.

Iverson noted that in October K2 began showing next winter’s samples – including seven new skis and four new boots -- to key retailers and buying groups. Völkl and Marker were evidently on a similar schedule, though in early November other shop owners remained uncertain if all the brands would be deliverable next fall. Nonetheless, Iverson said, interest from potential buyers is keen. The K2 brand names – with or without the actual factories – may wind up in the hands of an outside investment group, or with an investor-backed group of K2 executives, at a bargain basement price. The intellectual property, especially Marker’s portfolio of patents, has value to its competitors.

Potential buyers for the K2 Sports group include its competitors, Amer (the Atomic/Salomon group), Rossignol/Dynastar/Lange, or Tecnica Group (including Nordica and Blizzard). But a senior executive at one of those companies said that, at press time, Newell had no sales presentation, financial data or advance orders available to show to potential buyers. That may mean that a buyer is already lined up.

Of the large manufacturing groups, Tecnica would be the best fit – it has only a single ski brand and is powerful in boots, where K2 is weak. Critically, Tecnica Group has no binding and should therefore be interested in Marker. But Tecnica, like many hardgoods companies, is skating on thin financial ice and would probably need to bring in an investment partner.

K2 was founded in 1962 by Bill and Don Kirschner of Vashon Island, Washington, and rose to world prominence as the ski supplier to Phil and Steve Mahre. After several changes in ownership, in 2001 production moved to Guangzhou Province, China and the Vashon factory closed. Cheaper production and improved margins allowed a new period of expansion, and K2 Sports -- parent company of the K2 brands -- bought Völkl, Marker and Marmot in 2004.

Vail’s purchase of Whistler/Blackcomb is historic: it makes the company twice as large, financially, as the number two ski resort operator. Vail is now poised to leap oceans.

By Seth Masia

When, in August, Vail Resorts (VR) announced its $1 billion dollar purchase of Whistler-Blackcomb (WB), the company solidified its position as the largest ski resort operation in North America, the second-largest in the world by acreage—and by a long shot the largest in the world in terms of revenue. 

A billion dollars actually understates the scale of this deal. It’s the highest price ever paid for a ski resort, anywhere in the world. Because VR is buying a 75 percent stake (Nippon Cable holds the remaining 25 percent), WB is worth a bit over $1.3 billion. The resort has more than tripled in value since going public in 2010.
Whistler’s value to Vail is threefold,
according to Hugh Smythe, former WB president: WB is profitable all summer (unique among mountain resorts); it’s therefore a hedge against global warming; and it opens access to world markets, especially the fast-growing East Asia market.

Vail began expanding in 1980 with the opening of Beaver Creek. With this acquisition, VR controls 13 resorts, covering about 45,000 acres (18,000 ha) in three countries—the United States, Canada and Australia. In extent, that’s second only to Compagnie des Alpes (CdA), which manages 11 ski resorts in France covering more than 125,000 acres (50,000 ha). 

The story of ski-resort empires begins with Fred Pabst, who scattered rope tows about the northeastern quarter of North America during the Depression era. At one time or another, Pabst owned 25 ski areas, most using a single rope tow or T-bar, spread out between Wisconsin and Quebec’s Laurentians. During World War II, Pabst discovered he couldn’t personally supervise all his small fiefdoms, and consolidated at Big Bromley, Vermont. Since then, notable ski-empire entrepreneurs have included:

• Everett Kircher, who built his first lift at Boyne Mountain, Michigan in 1947. Boyne Resorts now manages about 14,884 acres (5,953 hectares) of lift-served terrain at 10 resorts—including Big Sky, Montana; Crystal Mountain, Washington; and Sugarloaf, Maine.
• Aspen Skiing Company, beginning in 1948, which today operates four neighboring lift networks on 5,306 acres (2,122 ha). 
• Irv Naylor, who assembled a collection of four mid-Atlantic ski areas beginning with Ski Roundtop in Pennsylvania in 1965.
• George Gillette, who morphed from owning Vail to operating the nine Booth Creek Resorts, including Waterville Valley and Grand Targhee. At its peak in 1997, the company operated on 9,431 acres (3,772 ha).
• Powdr Corp., a.k.a. the Cumming family, which acquired Nick Badami’s properties (Alpine Meadows and Park City) and today operates seven resorts totaling 9,600 acres (3840 ha).
• Charlie Locke, who built Resorts of the Canadian Rockies beginning in 1974. Today the company manages six resorts covering about 4,000 acres (1,600 ha).
• Tim Boyle at Peak Resorts, with a string of small and mid-size ski areas from Missouri to Maine, including Attitash, Hunter and Mt. Snow.
• Les Otten, who began with Sunday River in 1980 and by 1998 controlled about 23,000 acres (9,200 ha) through the American Skiing Company. The company folded in 2008.
• And of course Joe Houssian’s Intrawest, which acquired Blackcomb in 1986 and at its peak, in 2003, ran lifts on 25,000 acres (10,000 ha) plus about 3.2 million acres (12,348 square kilometers) of heliski terrain through its subsidiary Canadian Mountain Holidays.

The newly expanded VR enters an entirely different realm in financial terms. With WB on board, the corporation is on track to post more than $1.65 billion in revenue for the 2017–18 season, on more than 10.6 million skier-days. It’s roughly 15 percent of all skier days in North America. 

And the revenue is twice what Compagnie des Alpes realizes (695.6 million euros, or $785 million) on fewer skier days (CdA reports 13.6 million). CdA gets only lift-ticket revenues, while VR also has profitable food service, ski school and retail/rental operations. But for a number of years, Vail also has pursued a savvy pricing strategy, pushing same-day ticket-window purchases steadily higher to make the company-wide season pass look more attractive. Faced with prices up to $175 for a day pass, even the ski-week customer feels obliged to spring for the $800 Epic Pass. Last year VR sold half a million season passes, valid at every resort within the realm. With Whistler in the mix, that’s likely to go past 700,000. A senior resort executive, declining to be identified, estimates that will be around 40 percent of all season passes sold in North America. According to Kelly Ladyga, VP of corporate communications at VR, the season pass program now constitutes 40 percent of the company’s ticket sales, and 15 percent of VR revenue. As the pass grows more attractive, that’s likely to go higher.

The strategy: Lock in the market share. Keep Epic Pass skiers travelling within the VR empire (VR commands about 43 percent of all Colorado skier days). Once you have the Epic Pass, how likely are you to pay the day-ticket price at Sun Valley or Jackson Hole or Telluride?  Seeking an answer to that question, those resorts—along with Alta, Snowbird, Aspen/Snowmass, Mammoth, Squaw Valley/Alpine Meadows, Stowe, Taos, Lake Louise, Sunshine, Revelstoke, Thredbo and Coronet/Remarkables—have ganged together to offer the $409 Mountain Collective Pass, which offers two days of skiing at each resort, plus a 50 percent discount on additional days. The Collective might try to match the Epic Pass value, by expanding the number of days at each resort while bumping up the price. The Vail-Whistler deal won’t close until the end of 2016 and Whistler won’t join the Epic Pass program until the 2017-18 season. So the rest of the industry has about 18 months to come up with an effective response.

Meanwhile, VR wants even more growth. It’s reaching market-share saturation in North America, not to mention testing the limits of the U.S. anti-trust laws. Europe beckons, as does Japan. And so, on September 1, the company announced that the Epic Pass will be good for two or three days of skiing at each of 31 ski areas in Europe, covering Austria’s Arlberg region (including St. Anton), the entire Vanoise region in France (Val d’Isère, Les Arcs/La Plagne and the Trois Vallées complex), the Verbier region in Switzerland, and the Dolomites in Italy (each resort has its own rules for Epic Pass access—check http://tinyurl.com/EpicEurope for details). Europe’s resorts customarily exaggerate their acreage, but a rough count puts the terrain at 170,000 hectares (425,000 acres). For the North American skier with airline miles to burn, that certainly amps up the value of the pass. And for European skiing, it looks like Vail has secured a beachhead.