During summer, the challenge of balancing capital improvement construction zones, staff schedules and tasks, and providing guests with activities and positive experiences requires a lot of planning, strong communication, and the ability to adjust when unforeseen circumstances inevitably arise. SAM convened a panel at its Summer Ops Camp in Steamboat, Colo., in early September to discuss how to plan for and execute this balancing act. 

The panel was moderated by SAM editor Dave Meeker; panelists included Dave Hunter, VP of resort operations at Steamboat; Jen Shea, VP of business development at Steamboat; and Steve Hoxie, senior director of mountain operations at Taos Ski Valley, N.M.

Both Steamboat and Taos have undertaken multi-year redevelopment projects that impacted summer operations across the resorts. These projects illuminate many of the issues that resorts must juggle while also trying to operate as normally as possible.

At Taos, this past summer saw the replacement of Lift Four at the resort’s backside base area, along with installation of a fixed-grip triple in the main base area for the Pioneer beginner terrain. The resort also pulled off a $500,000 upgrade of its wedding venue during a four-week lull in bookings; that entailed hauling 6,000 yards of fill and topsoil. An 80-acre blowdown event two years ago around the wedding venue added forest-health work to the to-do list.

In addition, the historic Hotel St. Bernard is being redeveloped, a project that also includes an on-mountain medical facility. Taos also built a new firehouse for the resort village and completed upgrades to several of its workforce lodging buildings.

Steamboat is nearing completion of the three-year, $220 million Full Steam Ahead capital program that has transformed the resort from base area to summit. Starting in spring 2021, Steamboat rebuilt its base area (for the second time in about a decade), added the Greenhorn Ranch mid-mountain beginner area with four conveyors and a detachable lift, developed 650-acres of new advanced terrain and added a high-speed chair to serve it, and installed the two-stage Wild Blue Gondola to tie it all together. 

In addition, the resort installed 30,000 feet of ductile iron pipe and 30 fully automated fan guns for its new learning terrain, and added a massive snowmaking installation along with primary and secondary power to Sunshine, its most popular intermediate area, and a lot more across the resort. 

“All the things we’re putting in are going to be here for decades to come,” noted Hunter. “I think it’s really important to remind yourself when you get into a project like this what you’re going to deliver at the end.”

Here’s what the panelists shared, including challenges and triumphs, lessons learned and best practices.

Dave Meeker, SAM: Projects like these require strong communication. What did that involve?

Jen Shea, Steamboat: Bringing stakeholders along really helped to build trust by making sure everybody understood what was in it for them and allowing them to ask questions and see the vision and the intentionality around it. Every decision-making filter started with, why are we doing this? Steamboat has had a lot of owners over the years, there’s been lots of grandiose plans. We had to make sure people understood we could really make this happen.

We did everything from building a public microsite online that showed the milestones of the project to hosting employee town halls where people could ask questions. We set up booths at the local farmer’s market and displayed construction drawings. We had a series of open houses where we handed out helmets, and took people around the construction site.

Pro tip: if you introduce the opportunity with breakfast burritos and free coffee, people will show up. The community got involved and they became ambassadors for the project. They got excited about what we were trying to do. 

 Above: Steamboat teased its various projects on the protective walls around work zones with clever “view finders” showing what was coming.

Meeker: Steve, the Taos community can also be a little skeptical. How did you overcome that?

Steve Hoxie, Taos: Our key principle was to build better, not bigger. We had teams go down to the plaza in Taos to interact with all the different stakeholder groups, discuss their different priorities, and explain what we’re doing. They’re pretty skeptical about development; we really like to call it “redevelopment.” We’re not trying to add a bunch of stuff, we’re just trying to make what’s there better. We hired a new position this year, a community relations manager. That’s been really key. We’ve also hosted winter and summer community days when we get community members to come up for free activities like watching movies with the kids and playing soccer out on the lawn.

Shea: We [also] realized we needed professional help, so we hired Julie Germond as director of resort transformation, and that really helped to liberate our teams to focus on the project and get things done correctly while she helped articulate roles, responsibilities, and milestones and made sure we communicated.

Meeker: You had to hire general contractors to get this all done, but they’re not necessarily ski people. Talk to us about the importance of communication with contractors.

Dave Hunter, Steamboat: When we first decided to use a general contractor, my initial reaction was, “whew, we don’t have to worry about anything. It’s all on them.” But you need to stay intimately involved with every step of the process, because they’re not a subject matter expert in your business. It’s our job to educate them on our “why.” 

The first winter we opened during Full Steam Ahead, there were still pickup trucks all over the base area while the snowmaking team was trying to make snow. A general contractor is great, but it’s really important that you have a large group of stakeholders connected to them on a daily basis. Things that are intuitive for us as operators are not for them, so you start at the beginning and explain to them what it really means to be “open,” and that the orange construction fence in the middle of your base area isn’t the most inviting guest experience.

It definitely can create some tension, but it’s well worth it in the end. And I think that’s something that we navigated quite well once we realized what we were dealing with.

Shea: We created a version of our staff uniform for the general contractors to incorporate with their logos and partners. Little things like that went a long way to show them that we see you as part of our team. 

 Closing off the construction site at Steamboat, with flair.

Meeker: Steve, how did you bring the contractors into the fold at Taos? 

Hoxie: My key wake-up moment came when I was talking with a subcontractor who was doing excavation for our Chair Four terrain. They were running around like crazy and said, “there’s just too much going on.” There was definitely some “I’m tired of these contractors” talk among staff, too. I recognized the friction point and pushed the message out that these guys are part of the team. 

What developed out of that is we started getting buy-in from the contractors, from the subcontractors, and from employees. One day we were scheduled to do a concrete pour at the base of Chair Four, but we weren’t going to be able to get the concrete until about 11 a.m. The agreement with the wedding folks was we had to be out of there by 2:30 p.m., so they could prep for a ceremony at 4 p.m. We were stressing that we might have to refund money for this wedding. 

Then we realized the general contractor for the St. Bernard [hotel] was getting concrete every day; it happened to be the same concrete supplier and they had a 7 a.m. delivery scheduled. We called up the general contractor on the St. Bernard, and they said, “absolutely, you can have the concrete.” Little victories like that are really key to building a collaborative relationship.

Hunter: Another big lesson learned is the sheer magnitude of meetings, and how to do those and your day job and have enough time to be in the field and oversee what’s happening. You have to understand where you’re at from a project milestone standpoint, and balance like 11 meetings a day where you’re often double or triple booked.

That’s where prioritization comes in. If we’re going to have a meeting, let’s make sure we understand who the right stakeholders are, be mindful of the amount of time we’re spending, and get right to brass tacks. It’s really easy to go down rabbit holes and then come out of an hour-long meeting and you just scheduled a follow up because you didn’t get anything done.

Meeker: Let’s talk about the balance of managing major projects while welcoming guests during summer. How did you adjust your operations while maintaining a safe and productive work zone? 

Hoxie: Chair Four is the main delivery hub for our mountain bike park and our via ferrata. It would’ve been really easy to say, “We don’t have transportation so we’re just shutting down.”

But as our vice president of hospitality, Jeff Moses, said, we need to learn how to operate in this environment, because we have years of construction timelines ahead of us. Most of us tend to kind of gravitate toward homeostasis, whereas allostasis focuses on embracing change and letting it change you, so you grow and improve as a result. 

So, while losing Chair Four, we decided to use UTVs to transport guests to the via ferrata. It was kind of a stopgap decision, but the guests absolutely loved driving up and over the mountain. Transport times were pretty similar to the chairlift, but now they get a really cool UTV ride going up and back. That’s something we’ll probably incorporate in the future and just eliminate the chair ride.

Hunter: We have a single portal base area, so closing really wasn’t an option. One solution was to run Christie Peak Express, our six-pack lift, for mountain biking in the summer, which we had done during Covid. Previously, mountain bikers would take the Steamboat Gondola to the top. That’s 2,200 vertical feet on their first run—not the greatest first experience. Running the six-pack lift, which only goes half that distance, really provided a great opportunity for the mid- and lower-level guests. This summer we ran both the Steamboat Gondola and Christie Peak Express, and that’s something we’ll probably continue to look at moving forward. 

 Installing Lift 4 (top terminal shown here) required Taos Ski Valley to make operational pivots, such as transporting via ferrata guests by UTV, a popular change that may continue even after the lift opens.

Meeker: Steamboat removed the mountain coaster and what looked like a kickass mini golf course, in addition to all the new things that were installed. Why? 

Hunter: We’re in a space where we’re really starting with a blank canvas on how we look at summer activation. When we recreated Steamboat Square, those activities really didn’t fit in with what we were trying to do, so we’re not going to bring that stuff back.

We needed to slow down and really understand who we want to grow up to be in summer, and be very intentional with that. We’ve always been really intentional with winter operating plans, and we can do a much better job of that in summer.

There was a pivotal moment where we were looking down at the base area and one of our owners asked how long the coaster had been there, and what are the financials.  Being a single portal base area, the discussion was about egress and where the lifts go. That’s the primary vision we had to get right. We realized that the mountain coaster was secondary to that, and we took it out.

Meeker: Change is hard on staff, and construction fatigue can lead to burnout. How have you addressed that?

Hoxie: We have weekly operations meetings and really home in on the message about allostasis—that this is making us better—and taking the focus off “this sucks, this is hard.” Take a step back and look at what we’ve accomplished. I can’t wait to see what this all looks like in 10 years, so we keep the team focused on that.

Shea: One of the cores of our culture is fun, but it’s hard to force fun when there’s deadlines and too much to do. What we’ve tried to do is share gratitude for the people who make the resort happen. It’s so easy for the front of house to forget all that goes into making a perfectly groomed run and ensuring those lifts are turning daily. So, we did a regular video series showing what these teams were doing and sharing it with the other teams and the community.

Hunter: I really like what Steve said about focusing on the wins and taking a step back. We’re fortunate to have a strongly connected team that collaborates well. A lot of that came to the fore with Greenhorn Ranch because it took so many different departments to bring that to life. It’s important to remind people they’re part of something bigger than they could have ever imagined. 

SAMMY Guest Editor says...

Preston Cline, Snowshoe Mountain, W.Va., 2023 SAMMY Leadership Award HonoreeWhile summer construction projects have always been a part of the industry, the engineering, complexity, scope, and cost of such projects continue to rise along with guest expectations. However, industry leaders are looking beyond the “biggest, most expensive, and sickest” to focus more on sustainability, efficiency, safety, and the employee experience.

Safety, in particular, has become a major factor for guests choosing where to visit and employees choosing where to work. The expectations have never been higher for operators to provide a reasonably safe atmosphere. The increase in summer operations, along with more and more people exploring remote areas within ski area boundaries, complicates this. Clearly, both Steamboat and Taos conducted a safety analysis of the impact construction would have on their summer operations, especially their bike parks, and implemented accordingly. 

Executing consistently is probably the most difficult task when it comes to juggling summer operations with short construction seasons. As Dave Hunter points out, an orange-fenced construction site in your base area isn’t exactly inviting, so it is important to explain the “why” to all stakeholders, including contractors, so they understand the need to balance safety with the resort being open for business. 

That leads to the importance of communication when it comes to summer construction projects. The value of consistently communicating with all potential stakeholders throughout the process cannot be overstated, and will most likely provide for the efficient, safe, and sustainable completion of any project. 

I applaud both Steamboat and Taos for their efforts to engage with their teams and other stakeholders. Communication goes both ways, so inviting feedback from a broader audience breaks down the siloed and focused thought processes that tend to arise in the industry. Collaborative thinking amongst stakeholders helps in creating proactive solutions rather than retroactive fixes.