How does a small, broke, ski hill without indoor plumbing remake itself into a thriving, state-of-the-art model of disabled access? Ask the folks at Loup Loup Ski Bowl in eastern Washington, whose summer/winter partnership with the Easter Seal Society of Washington has them well on the way to doing just that.
Community volunteers had opened the Loup—as locals affectionately call it—on Forest Service land in the late 1950s and it has been volunteer-run on a shoestring budget ever since. As Richard Thomason, president of the Loup Loup Ski Education Foundation (LLSEF), describes it: “No checking account, no endowment, and we paid groomers out of our own pockets if no volunteers were available.” After a few sparse snow years, the Loup was in arrears on a $160,000 loan from the Farmer’s Home Administration and things didn’t look good.
Closing a place like the Loup affects the entire community and local groups just weren’t willing to let that happen. One such group was the non-profit Methow Institute Foundation (MIF). Recognizing the importance of the Loup to the community, they bought the assets at auction and settled the indebtedness.
The Forest Service was another group with a significant stake in the Loup’s future: closing it would mean extensive—and expensive—reforestation, as well as the loss of the kind of community recreation asset the agency had been emphasizing in recent years.
While developing the area’s master plan a few years earlier, recreation specialist Jim Archambeault had the foresight to make it broad enough to accommodate a summer partner for development purposes. Seeing this as a viable solution for the Loup, forest supervisor Sam Gehr and district ranger Laurie Thorpe managed to get internal agency support for the unusual act of permitting two separate entities at the same ski area base. The MIF, which had no intention of becoming a long-term ski area operator, deeded the winter portion of the permit to the LLSEF to ensure continued ski area operations, and began hunting for a summer partner.
The timing was “serendipitous,” says John Hayes of the MIF. The Easter Seal Society of Washington turned up looking for a site in eastern Washington to hold summer camps for the disabled. Peggy Smith, vice president of program development and community relations, says her first reaction was that the Loup was too out of the way, “But two hours there and I was hooked: This was the place!”
Establishing a partnership between the Loup and Easter Seals was neither quick nor easy. As facilitators, the MIF and the Forest Service were determined to build a relationship between the organizations that would transcend individual personalities. Archambeault describes the process as a mating dance, explaining, “The key to the whole thing was that the ski area and the proponent of summer activity had to be absolutely assured and comfortable with each other. It’s not just a simple building of buildings, but what the relationship means in terms of how the winter and summer operations are affected by the other’s facilities.”
After three years, the Forest Service gave the go-ahead for the MIF to transfer the summer portion of the permit to Easter Seals. By this time, the two groups were so “assured and comfortable” with each other that they had developed a new, shared and even more ambitious vision: to become a national cooperative model of universal access, fully integrating the disabled into both summer and winter activities at the Loup.
Today, the Loup is humming with shared plans and optimism. Funds are being raised for a new lodge (with indoor plumbing), a triple chair, cabins, a pool and a variety of sporting facilities for activities such as wheelchair basketball, quad rugby and therapeutic riding.
For one small local ski area, there is a happy ending. Or perhaps “happy beginning” is a better phrase, for despite all the time, effort and energy that has been poured into the project up to this point, Richard Thomason says enthusiastically: “Now the work begins!”
