Seeing Double at Sun Valley
Talk about brand enhancement! No ski resort has more powerful brand identity than Sun Valley, the storied ski shrine in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, owned by Earl Holding. How do you use the 2002 Olympics to enhance that brand? If you also own the Olympic Downhill venue of Snowbasin, Utah, you change its name to Sun Valley, Utah. Magic! With the stroke of a pen, your Idaho flagship bathes in the Olympic glow. Not bad! At presstime it wasn’t official, but the Sun Valley graphics on the two 8-passenger Doppelmayr gondola cabins don’t exactly look as though they had been applied in error!
On another Olympic note, there’s some grumbling about the Women’s Downhill venue on the Wildflower Trail. Wildflower??? A little wussy, perhaps, compared to Beaver Creek’s Birds of Prey, and a good deal less memorable (read “marketable”).
Earl Miller Pursues “The Cover Up”
Some things, like wine, mellow with age. Some people, though, like the 75-year-old Ski Hall of Famer, Earl Miller, just develop more and larger prickles. These days, Earl pursues a personal vendetta against the snowboard industry for what he sees as a conspiracy to put the public on non-release “bear trap” bindings and to ignore his and the other release binding on the market. The result, he proclaims, are the 100 deaths he counts worldwide. He has assembled his case in a 282-page book called “Snowboard Deaths—The Cover Up.” The blurb reads “Could this conspiracy really happen in America?”
Maverick Miller has formidable credentials as an inventor, including a heel-and-toe release binding in 1952; in 1964, the first ski brake (in a virtual tie with Cubco); and the granddaddy of the fat ski revolution, the Miller Soft in 1972. He has never lacked for recognition, the most recent being inclusion by Ski Magazine in its list of the 100 most influential skiers of all time. But, as a person, he has always been about as embraceable as a thoroughly pissed-off porcupine.
The book makes it easy to see why. Among those repeatedly slammed are the Transworld boarding publications, Jake Burton and his company, safety guru Jake Shealy (a “patsy” for Burton); the U.S. Government and the whole “beartrap cartel” of the snowboard industry (“God is Greed and safety is the last thing ever considered”).
Reaction? Mostly a disinclination to rise to the bait. One of Miller’s charges is that snowboarding publications collusively refuse to accept his ads. [Personal to Earl: “We’re not God, but Hey, we’ll take ’em at SAM!”]
From NSAA to USFS: (Pointed) Comments
In recent weeks, several proposed Forest Service drafts have called for public comment and NSAA has not been shy about telling it like it is, in the process pointing to such things as inconsistency, illegality, timidity, plus bumbling and stupidity (not NSAA’s words). Will our concerns be heard? Cynics assume the Forest Service can predict our reaction and have already discounted it. Some of the issues are big. One is caught in these NSAA words: “The agency’s desire to shift the principle underlying forest planning from multiple use to ecological sustainability would require an amendment to the National Forest Management Act (NFMA).” The proposed planning regulations say, “the first priority for management is the maintenance and restoration of ecological sustainability.” NFMA, however, the basic enabling legislation for Forest Service operations, clearly identifies multiple use management as the priority of forest planning. NSAA’s zinger: “. . .the regulations are in violation of the very statute pursuant to which they are being promulgated.”
Does all this help? Hard to say. NSAA’s director of public policy, Geraldine Hughes, says it is “a matter of process.” That is, you’re not a player unless you participate. On the more targeted issues (such as the details involved in the agency’s road-building suspension), an organization like NSAA can, and indeed has, made a difference. But when it comes to far-reaching developments, such as the proposed changes in the way the Forest Service handles forest planning, we, as an industry, are, in Hughes’s words, “a very, very small fish.” Given NSAA’s limited resources, Hughes explains that our ability to influence is at best “minimal,” on the broad-gauge issues. The national elections this year will probably do more than anything else to determine the near-term future of management of public lands. But that’s the immediacy of politics. Of longer-term significance, however, is the direction of public opinion, which simplistically wants clean water and air. Those themes resonate when politicians and protectionist groups use—or misuse—them. As business people, we must recognize that the attitudes of the public—even skiers—toward recreation will not necessarily be in sync with our own.
Winter X-Games: Triumph or Fiasco?
Reactions to the Winter X Games at Mt. Snow run the gamut. The huge gate (body count of 83.5K over four days) compared to what Crested Butte delivered the previous two years, validated ESPN’s decision to move to a venue better able to tap into big urban markets. Doubters, though, wondered whether there was a net gain, given the monster traffic jams and overcrowding problems that inconvenienced (infuriated!) many existing customers. Example: the base lodge got so jammed at one point that people were allowed in only as people exited, leaving many skiing customers unable to reach their belongings. Too, the bathroom deficit was critical, with memorably offputting results. Also to be weighed against the huge promotional benefits were the losses felt by some lodge owners whose regular customers cancelled, only to be replaced by bottom-feeding teenagers seeking eitht-to-a-room economies.
While Mt. Snow got generally high marks for its hosting of the games, it clearly was overwhelmed at times by the logistics involved—nothing, though, that can’t be handled next year. The bottom line question still to be answered: what net and long-term benefits does Mt. Snow and the ski industry get from the television and spectator exposure? Do the benefits for the sponsors translate to increasing the participant base for the ski/boarding industries? It’s a good question and one that should also be asked of Olympic exposures, even though those events are at least more mainstream than the concocted-for-TV Winter X Games.
Club Med in Crested Butte. . .Honest!
It’s official: the rumored arrival of a Club Med facility in Crested Butte, Colo., was confirmed on February 9. Club Med will convert the Crested Butte Marriott Resort (sale expected to be finalized in April) into a traditional family ski village along the lines of its other ski facility at Copper Mountain, Colo.
The bemused CB set wonder how the high-touch, highly structured Club Med culture will fit into the funky, anti-structure culture of their community. Resort officials are enthusiastic; some locals are asking Club Dead?
Ski Town/Ski Area Financial Schmooze
“As we do well, the town should do well,” says Tim Mueller, owner of the dynamic Okemo Mountain Ski Resort in central Vermont. That, of course, is the way it’s supposed to be between a ski operation and its community, but rarely is. Mueller offers more than words: specifically, $1.5 million to the town of Ludlow over the next 12 years, offsetting the effects on the community of a major resort expansion, for which approval is expected in April. The money, responsive to a wish list from the town, would be used to fund such items as sidewalks, a new police station, a new ambulance.
A depressed Vermont woollen mill town at the time a small ski area started in 1955, (“the only culture could be found in the yoghurt section of the deli,” says Okemo’s Pam Cruickshank), Ludlow’s tourism economy today is driven by Okemo’s success. The proposal calls for the funds to flow through the Ludlow Enterprise Fund. To administer the funds, a five-member committee will be established with municipal and resort participation.
$15 Million That Didn’t Get Away
It was only months ago that a $9.8 million verdict went against Bear Mountain, in southern California for a 1996 accident that involved a collision with a snowgun. Gloom prevailed. Were we back to the bad old days of Sunday v. Stratton or Peer v. Aspen?
Then, on February 11, an Orange County jury surprised everyone by finding for the defense in a $15 million suit against the same Bear Mountain, stemming from a 1994 accident. The judge in the case did the defense no favors; indeed he raised barriers. But defense attorney John Fagan persuaded the jury to vote common sense, not sympathy, by finding Bear Mountain was not negligent in where it put and how it padded the signpost that the plaintiff collided with. There will be no appeal because of a prior agreement between the litigants. “It was,” said Bob Roberts of California Ski Industries, “a very important victory.”
