PASS PERKS PROLIFERATE
With passholders accounting for more than a third of all resort visits, areas are upping the ante to lock in buyers.

The Mountain Collective—originally Alta, Aspen/Snowmass, Squaw Valley/Alpine Meadows, and Jackson Hole—added Mammoth, Snowbird and Whistler/Blackcomb for 2013-14. The $349 pass includes two days at each of the seven resorts, with additional days at half price.

Vail Resorts added Eldora to its Epic Pass ($689 adults, $359 juniors), good at Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, Keystone, Arapahoe Basin, Heavenly, Northstar and Kirkwood. The Pass includes five days at Swiss resort Verbier, up from three last year. Budget-minded locals can get the Keystone A-Basin Pass ($279 adults, $199 kids) or a Tahoe-area pass ($389) for Heavenly, Northstar and Kirkwood.

The Rocky Mountain Super Pass Plus ($419) added three days at Monarch to the prior deal—unlimited skiing at Winter Park and Copper, six unrestricted days at Steamboat. In return, Monarch’s "One Planet - One Pass" includes one free day each at Winter Park, Copper Mountain and Steamboat, in addition to deals at 32 other areas around the world.

Powdr Corp. is focussing on youth. With its License 2 Ride season pass program, pass-holders 17 and under (18 and under for Killington and Mt. Bachelor) at any one of six participating Powdr resorts receive lift privileges at all six. Adult passholders are eligible for a 20 percent discount off of lift tickets at the other participating Powdr areas, including Boreal, Copper, Killington, Mt. Bachelor, Park City, and Las Vegas Ski and Snowboard Resort.

Consider Mountain High, too: it’s Anytime Season Pass ($299 this spring, $349 in fall) spans the Southwest and West Coast. Timberline, Schweitzer, and Angel Fire, are offering three free days to Mountain High passholders. That’s in addition to reciprocal deals Mountain High shares among its partners in a West Coast collective that includes Sierra-at-Tahoe, China Peak, and sister area Stevens Pass.

In the East, the White Mountain Superpass now encompasses four resorts—Bretton Woods, Cannon Mountain, Waterville Valley, and new addition Cranmore.

In Ohio, Peak Resorts is also offering a four-pack: Boston Mills/Brandywine, Mad River Mountain, and recent acquisition Alpine Valley Ski Area on one pass ($349/$399, juniors/adults).


PUTTING THE BITTER IN BITTERROOT
In the latest act of a long-running tragedy, Tom Maclay, who has long sought to develop a destination resort at Lolo Peak in Montana’s Bitterroot Mountains, lost control of his 3,000-acre property to Met Life Agricultural Investments through foreclosure.

Maclay had twice submitted plans for a Bitterroot Resort to the U.S. Forest Service, but both times the FS determined that his plan didn’t meet minimum requirements for a special use permit application. In the process, Maclay ran out of funds he obtained by mortgaging his farm, which had been in his family for six
generations.

That farm was considered the best entry point for a ski area at Lolo Peak. And the potential is immense: 11,000 acres, 3,000-foot vertical runs, ample snow at higher elevations, a resort on the scale of Revelstoke. But environmental issues (and, some allege, a conflict of interest with some Forest Service members who had designs on creating their own resort on the terrain) doomed the plan. So, terrain that Maclay and others believe could be some of the finest terrain in the U.S. remains out of reach for all but the most committed backcountry enthusiasts.

Like anyone in the resort business, though, Maclay remains an optimist, and recently told SAM he still hopes to see his dream come true. Stay tuned.


BOOTLEG SKI LESSONS ON THE RISE?
Underground instructors have been a thorn in resorts’ sides for decades, but the Internet has made it easier for bootleggers to find customers. Of course, it also makes it easier for resorts to hunt them down.

One example: Wedge2Edge, an independent, unauthorized private-lesson provider that claims to operate at several resorts in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, and Vermont, has been served with a cease and desist letter from NSAA. How this will play out is not yet known. Another site, snowboardinglessons.info, claims to teach at most areas in the U.S.; one of its instructors had his Steamboat pass pulled this winter. NSAA is likely to become involved in shutting down this operation, too.

Another popular meeting place for underground instructors and potential customers is Craigslist; more than half a dozen illegal teachers were hawking their services this past season in the Tahoe area alone.

Resorts have argued that independent lessons constitute theft of services and trespass. As one insider noted, this is like setting up a lunch truck in a diner parking lot. That argument doesn’t always convince the perps.

What to do? Educate instructors and staff to be alert for suspicious activity on the hill, and report it to management. The Forest Service, local police, and resorts have in some instances set up sting operations to catch the interlopers, but that is a time-consuming process. The easiest route is to pull tickets, especially season’s passes, and spread the word that a resort is taking a no-tolerance approach.


BURTON OPEN move to Vail is a hit
After 30 years at Stratton, Vt., Burton’s U.S. Open relocated to Vail, to help maintain the progression of snowboarding. By all accounts, the change lived up to very high expectations.

The competitions at the core of the Open drew capacity crowds and rave reviews. True to the idea of progression, 14-year-old Ayumu Hirano, who finished second to Shaun White in the halfpipe, went bigger than the champ on his first run, prompting White to say, “What a talent, it's awesome to see."

As a celebration of snowboarding, the week hit all the high notes. An estimated 50,000 people attended the competitions, sponsor village, Riglet park, and evening concerts. Lodging was virtually sold out for the week. The weather alternated between bluebird days and powder days, the last of which wiped out the women’s slopestyle finals.

“This was just the beginning for what we, Vail and Burton, can do in Vail. We can really build the Open into an institution,” said Burton events manager Ian Warda.


POST MORTEM: MUCH ADO ABOUT INJURIES
A series of articles in the Denver Post in March challenged the morality, if not legality, of Colorado’s Ski Safety Act, as well as the actions resorts take in accident investigation and maintaining customer’s safety. The articles insinuated that resorts sometimes fail to properly ensure safety and routinely hide behind the “inherent risk” doctrine codified in the Ski Safety Act, and were picked up by many other news outlets nationally.

Some industry observers see the work of the Snowsports Safety Foundation (SSF) in this. The SSF, successor to the now-mothballed California Snow Sport Safety Organization, argues for greater police involvement in accident investigation and mandatory accident reporting for resorts, as well as dilution of the inherent risk doctrine. A lot of its arguments and viewpoints were reflected in the series, and some of its chief architects were quoted.

Resort associations and, presumably, individual resorts themselves, took the Post to task for the clearly unbalanced reporting. Letters to the editor mostly defended the resorts. One in particular, from the Summit County sheriff, defended the ski patrol from intimations that patrollers skew accident reports to protect resorts from lawsuits.

In the two weeks following the series, the Post backpedalled as much as it could. It printed a “point/counterpoint” that presented the resorts’ side of the argument and a lukewarm defense of the series itself, and finally, a Sunday editorial that argued against any new laws that would impose onerous burdens on resorts. The editorial acknowledged that skiing and riding are not especially deadly sports, that no sport catalogs or reports injuries in the way urged in the series, and refuted several recommendations in the series, saying they would mostly benefit “litigators” (i.e., the plaintiffs bar) and not consumers.


COURT CASES CHALLENGE INHERENT RISK
Ironically, given the Denver Post’s claims that the Colorado Ski Safety Act is overly protective of resorts, two current court cases may expose a limit in the protections in the law. One involved a 13-year-old killed in an inbounds avalanche at Vail, the second, a 19-year-old who died of asphyxiation after hitting an Alpine slide retaining wall at Howelsen Hill. In both cases, plaintiffs charge that the deaths occurred because the resorts failed to properly rope off closed trails, a responsibility the Act imposes on resorts. Both cases are in early stages.