Seventy miles north of Vancouver, B.C., surrounded by the snow-capped peaks of the Coast Range, a long line of riders waits patiently for their turn up the Fitzimmon’s Quad chair. The sun beats down on busy patios and cafes: the Whistler Village is abuzz with people from all over the world. It has all the makings of another winter day at one of North America’s busiest ski resorts. The difference is, it’s the middle of July. Winter hats have been swapped for full-face helmets, Gore-Tex suits exchanged for head-to-toe body armor, skis and snowboards replaced by $5,000 full suspension bicycles.

In the seven years since Whistler started developing its mountain bike park, with trails purposefully designed and developed to attract mountain biking’s new breed of enthusiast, or “freeriders” as they are known within the sport, the resort’s summer business has experienced exponential growth. Since 1999, rider visits to Whistler’s bike park have increased by more than 800 percent. Ninety-one thousand rider visits were recorded in Whistler’s 2005 summer season, pumping millions of dollars into the resort in a time traditionally known as the “low season.”

Whistler’s widely publicized mountain bike success story has sparked a boom in the development of new bike park programs at ski resorts around North America. While most resorts have allowed riders to ride lifts and descend on service roads and multi-use hiking trails for the last 10 to 15 years, it has been a minimalist stab at accommodating a recently revolutionized sport—one that involves more than just clearing a few branches off the trail. Today, it’s a whole new ballgame. Think of these bike parks as terrain parks—places where creativity rules and features abound. Resorts like Silverton, Colo., Kicking Horse, B.C., Snowshoe, W.V., Mount Snow, Vt., and Mammoth, Calif., to name just a few, have all invested heavily into building and marketing mountain bike programs. But it is a business that requires significant effort on a number of fronts, one whose returns are often candy coated by the success of Whistler.


What Does it Take?
Contrary to the widely-held perception, geography is not the biggest issue. Most of the riding on Whistler takes place on the lower mountain, on a fairly small percentage of Whistler-Blackcomb’s total acreage. Mountain bike parks like the Diablo Freeride Park at Mountain Creek, N.J., and Plattekill Bike Park in upstate New York, dispel the myth that big geographical features are necessary for bike park success. Both are highly successful and well-developed bike parks where mountains are barely, well, mountains.

“There are no hard and fast rules to building a bike park,” explains Rob McSkimming, Whistler-Blackcomb’s VP of business development and the man behind Whistler’s bike park. “Ideally you want your lift to be 1,000 vertical. Typically, resorts start off with a lift for sightseeing and mountain biking. Once you get up to 15,000 visits you want a dedicated lift.”

When it comes to trail infrastructure, “it’s more about having the right mix as opposed to having lots of stuff,” says McSkimming. “You need entry level trails, you need a machine-built jump-and-berm-style trail like our A-Line, you need intermediate and advanced singletrack, and you need some feature type stuff: wall rides, boxes, a bikercross course.”

Seems like a significant investment at first glance. And it is. Whistler currently employs a full-time trail maintenance staff of 12, with annual budgets well into the six figures. Tack on a fleet of rental bikes, devices for carrying bikes on lifts, trail building equipment, and the return on a bike park investment can be a long term affair. The benefit, however, especially to many resorts where bullwheels lay idle six months of the year, comes with the prospect of a thriving summer business, one that is not nearly as weather dependent as its winter cousin. Not to mention the opportunity to market a product that accesses a resort’s winter clientele, while employing many of the same people and using the same base infrastructure from wintertime.

“We see a huge transfer between winter and summer,” continues McSkimming. “When it comes to staffing, you’re using a lot of the same people and skills that you do in the winter. You need maintenance and you need patrollers.

“When it comes to getting started, a great way to kick off is to talk to your existing clients, many of whom often share similar mindsets and attitudes.” McSkimming cites a 40 percent overnight average of bike park clientele. “They’re doing all the same things as our winter clientele: going out for dinner, going to the bar afterwards, shopping.”

Another challenge presented by the bike park is the environmental concerns of trail building. According to McSkimming, “with the right construction technology and the right planning, you can build trails that are very environmentally responsible. While you’re going to have different challenges depending on where you are, a well-built mountain bike trail can be low impact. There is an excellent knowledge base out there when it comes to building environmentally sustainable trails.”


The Safety Question
When it comes to safety, Laszlo Vijtay, president of Plattekill Mountain—one of the original bike parks, with over 70 miles of trails on two lifts—cites the difficulty in balancing the demands of today’s adventure-fueled mountain biker with the risk of liability and safety, one of the biggest concerns among ski resort managers when considering a bike park. “You have to be very smart in how you build things. We’re taking a more conservative approach, using top-notch equipment, spending money on features, but emphasizing safe, wide and rideable stunts, rather than thin, dangerous features that are only rideable for some. It’s a similar approach to what you’re seeing in winter with the use of the fun box rather than the two-inch rail.”

According to McSkimming, signage and trail design are crucial to minimizing injury. “It starts with trail markings and how well we communicate the difficulty rating of a certain trail to people so they know what they’re getting into. Also, having some kind of filter to the entrance of a trail, like a technical drop that sets the tone, seems to be quite effective.” Both resorts claim that insurance and liability from their winter business easily carries over to their summer mountain bike business.


The Market
As far as the sport of mountain biking is concerned, the freeride genre is mountain biking’s fastest-growing and most lifestyle-influenced genre—a discipline that seems to have found its home at ski resorts. “With the growing popularity of freeriding and the fact that mountain bikers are seeking really unique and highly challenging trails, ski areas can play a more important role than ever before,” says Pete Webber, communications director for the International Mountain Bike Association (IMBA), the sport’s most influential sanctioning body, and a group that invests heavily in sustainable trail development and land-use solutions. “They have the ability to create specific freeride trails in a special use situation much better than you can on public land.”

Some downsides to the freeride genre are its dependence on a fairly high base skill level (falling on dirt hurts) and the cost of the bikes themselves, which can easily exceed $5,000. As well, even though freeride is often referred to as mountain biking’s fastest growing segment, it is a fairly small part of the overall mountain bike demographic (industry estimates put freeride at 8 to 10 percent of the mountain bike market). In a recent study released by the Outdoor Industry Association, the sport of mountain biking as a whole has seen its core demographic (those who ride 20 or more times per year) rise from 2.5 million in 1998 to 7.6 million in 2004.

However, Vijtay says that even though the mountain has seen a 100 percent increase in rider visits since they opened for mountain bikers 11 years ago, slow growth in the downhill/freeride segment may prove to be the bike park boom’s greatest hurdle. “More and more bike parks are opening but the rider numbers haven’t gone up,” claims Vijtay. “Downhill and freeride mountain biking is very expensive, and it is not a family participatory sport, like skiing and snowboarding. As a result, its growth seems to be leveling off, so we end up all sharing the same number of riders, thinning out the visits to our individual ski resorts.”

Whether or not the recent boom in mountain bike parks throughout North America (currently 175 resorts offer some sort of mountain bike program) will outpace growth in the sport itself is something only time will tell. What resorts are discovering is while the new style of bike park forged by the likes of Whistler and Plattekill presents enormous opportunity, it is a product that needs to be done right. “The quality of what you build will be reflected in the business that you attract,” says McSkimming.

But perhaps the most important fact resort managers should be looking at is the overall participatory levels of mountain biking as compared to skiing and snowboarding. According to the National Ski Areas Association, last year there were 11 million people who went skiing and snowboarding at a U.S. resort at least once, which amounted to 56.8 million total visits. Compare that to mountain biking, in which the Outdoor Industry Association (OIA) determined that 39.5 million people in the U.S. rode singletrack at least once in 2004, with 632 million total outings. “When you see numbers like that, one thing’s for sure,” concludes McSkimming, “the potential market out there is big…really big.”

The Guest Editor’s Take
This is a great article that describes an opportunity, and draws deserved attention to what many resorts in our industry have worked hard to provide. And many resorts, like ours, are challenged with the huge scope of the commitment that goes with it.

At Schweitzer Mountain Resort, we provide summer lift access for sightseeing, hiking and bikes via our Great Escape Quad. Over the last three years we have hosted the NORBA series and we will continue to develop and grow our trail systems but, for us, financial justification in expanding trails or building a park is a challenge. The question is, will it actually drive incremental visits?

Mountain bike access and trail systems are important but the user group demographics are tight. While mountain biking as an amenity is wonderful, it must be in harmony with multiple other activities for a resort to be a successful destination. Whistler is a great location and very successful in a large range of activities and, while mountain biking is an important part, it is a small chunk of their overall visitation.

With that stated, if a resort is committed to entertaining the summer guest, it seems clear that bike trails and parks should be included. The challenge is developing a variety of options for our guests’ wide ranges of interests and abilities.

One thing is certain, if you do choose to take this on, to be successful, it is necessary to provide a high quality, well rounded experience and compete with the many available options, such as the vast number of free access public bike trails across the country.

Sound familiar? As with our winter business, in the end, we have to be the best at whatever we choose to provide our guest. —Ron Nova