The quake in central Vermont was not detected by seismographs, but the aftershock rocked ski areas all over the state and into neighboring ones, too. Overnight, 48 new ski trails had erupted in Killington’s daily ski reports. On January 31, the area reported 107 trails, the same number as Sugarbush and 20 less than its corporate sibling, Mt. Snow. But when the sun rose February 1, the number had miraculously grown to 155. Killington had not only claimed the most trails in Vermont, but also in the East.
Killington is not the first ski area in Vermont, or in the country, for that matter, to inflate its trail count without, as the saying goes, “cutting as much as a single tree.” What made the seismic event remarkable was its swiftness and its efficiency. Killington did not waste any time or corporate resources conducting boring contests to name four dozen trails; it didn’t order signs to identify the 48 newcomers; and it didn’t send artists back to the drawing board for new trail maps to reflect the sudden changes.
The new alignment was a follow-up to a $50,000 aerial survey of nine ski resorts—seven in Vermont and two in Maine—that Killington had commissioned last year. W. Byrd LaPrade, a professional surveyor licensed in Vermont, calculated from photos how many acres of ski terrain and how many miles of trails each area had. To no one’s surprise, the LaPrade study found that Killington, with 827 acres and 70 miles of trails, was the biggest of them all. The study also found that the average trail for all the areas measured was .435 miles long and covered 5.35 acres.
“When we got finished with the LaPrade study we had a reliable comparison of the amount of skiing at different areas,” Clifford said. “Killington had an average of 7.7 acres per trail and an average trail length of .65 miles, which was more acres and mileage per trail than all but one [Stowe] of the areas surveyed. Clearly, this amount of skiing was not being reflected in our trail count.”
With the stroke of a press release, Killington brought forth 48 more trails and pared its average trail down to 5.34 acres and .452 miles, which was about as close as anyone could get to LaPrade’s combined average. Only Stowe, at .867 miles, had longer trails, and only Stowe and Sunday River in Maine, at 10.66 and 5.69 acres, respectively, had roomier trails. Using Killington’s criteria, Stowe could double its trail count overnight.
Gary Kiedaisch, Stowe’s president, paled at the suggestion. “We feel the names of our trails are historic,” he said. “To butcher or subdivide them is not worth it. And consumers and discerning enough to know it’s misleading.”
“Frankly,” said Killington’s Clifford, “my hat’s off to Stowe for having stayed at 45 trails all these years while other areas have massaged their trails. It’s not something we wanted to do. But with the trail numbers the radio, the television and the newspapers had been reporting, it sounded like Killington had the third most skiing. Our competitors are not happy with us now. They think we have violated some unwritten rule. But there’s no rule that says you can’t do this. There’s no definition of what a trail is, either.”
But marketing personnel at several Vermont areas said they feared that Killington’s action would produce a negative reaction among skiers to the entire industry. “The only thing that makes me glad about this is that it screams for changes in the ski reporting system,” said Bruce McCloy, marketing director of Mt. Snow, which was dislodged as king of the trail-count mountain by the quake. “Trails are a non-measurable commodity. We should be reporting the miles of trails open, by the type of terrain.”
Scott Van Pelt, marketing director of Okemo, said he reacted with a mixture of anger, frustration and other emotions when he first saw Killington’s revised ski report. “However, and this may surprise you, I think that from Killington’s perspective, they did the right thing. They had to know they would be ridiculed, and decided to take their hits for a week or two and what the hell, from then on they’ve got 155 trails on the ski report. Skiers, however, may have some difficulty locating 48 of them.”
