It is mid-January, 1965; opening day at the brand new Paradise Basin Ski Area. A typical Rocky Mountain storm has dumped 18″ overnight and a few cars are already stuck in the parking lot. The small crowd of locals, most of whom helped build the area, and employees, distinguished by their trim red parkas, stand back as dignitaries approach. The U.S. Forest Service supervisor is handed a bottle of champagne by the area manager. Without hesitation he steps around the pile of sandbags from yesterday’s load test and smashes the bottle against the counter-weight of the shiny blue double chair. The high school band strikes up “America the Beautiful” and every kid in town, a few ranchers and old timers join in. The county commissioners and town council move forward and the mayor hits the start button. Off into the swirling snow goes a young couple who won this privilege at the Dallas boat show. While the lift foreman keeps his fingers crossed and the ski patrol digs out a sled next to the shack on top of the mountain, the area management congratulate themselves for being only 3 months behind their ambitious 12 month permitting and construction schedule.
Twenty-five years later Paradise Basin is a big league area, right up there with Steamboat, Breckenridge, Park City and Telluride. On a cold, clear January night the new high school auditorium and Performing Arts Center is nearly full with 800 somber people gazing down on a sparse stage holding a dozen dressed-up bureaucrats who resemble a coroner’s inquest. Down the road a piece, Hidden Meadows, at the base of Cloud Peak lies quiet under a foot of sugar snow with a few weathered survey stakes the only features. It was purchased nine years ago by developers with visions of yet another great ski area in the valley. The topic of tonight’s meeting, the fifth so far this season, is sewage treatment.
What has happened to Paradise? Success has struck, along with the unintended consequence of social change and environmental limits.
Throughout our mountain regions, and especially in the West, the prosperity of the last two decades has bumped up against an awareness of the finite nature of our resources, and need to defend public interest against potentially damaging private development. Sentiment and science have come together in legislation protecting air, water, species and habitat. More locally, citizens have strived through law to protect us from ourselves with land use and fiscal constraints.
This regulatory climate, which to some appeared to have developed overnight, has confused and angered mountain resort developers. Their good intentions to bring prosperity and healthy recreation to some remote valleys, mostly in the West, have been increasingly met with skepticism and outright opposition. Surprisingly this sometimes came from past allies, including the Forest Service, which once encouraged and welcomed ski areas onto their districts. Now the agency seems to duck and cover behind endless environmental review processes, while wildlife, transportation, law enforcement, and social agencies review and amend, often in full view of an unkind public.
The awareness of change and sense of limits which drives the implementation of regulation did not spring from imagination. As the lights of development began to glow over the ridge-tops, persons in the adjacent valleys began to wonder if they were going to be next. Under those lights, when the taxes went up and the leash laws came down and sewage treatment plans debated, it wasn’t difficult to lay blame.
Meanwhile, across the country, but especially in the West, other industries dependent on natural resources were also feeling the changing sentiments of public concern — interests that were already old hands at resource development by the time the ski industry arrived. Their executives and lobbyists watched with dismay while legislation pertaining to clean water and air, endangered species, wilderness and land use were signed into law over their objection.
At this moment in Congress, review of the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act and a few remnant wilderness bills is under way. Western public land grazing policy is being scrutinized and most significantly the Mining Law of 1872 is facing its most serious challenge of a long century. The mineral industry, fearing the loss of their absolute “right to mine” enabled by this archaic statute, has mounted an awesome propaganda campaign predicting doom and desperate times for the West should any further constraints, such as royalty or reclamation, be placed on their projects. This attack on the nation’s environmental protection laws comes at a time when free enterprise advocates see the public resources being placed out of reach from development as a result of environmental activism.
Out of the reaction of industry, forced by regulation to change and acknowledge limits, has grown the “Wise Use Movement” (WUM). This coalition of organizations, made up of the mineral, timber, grazing and motorized recreation industry and trade groups, is dedicated to unraveling environmental protection regulations at all levels of government, all of which they see as threatening their wellbeing. They seek unrestricted access to all natural resources for economic use, benefit and profit. To do this they have targeted environmental organizations and governmental agencies, such as the Forest Service and the Army Corps of Engineers, as enemies that must be crushed by public opinion and Congressional sanction. The WUM sees environmental regulation as symptomatic of two core sins committed by government and fostered by the environmental community: taking of private property rights and limiting access to resources on public lands, thus depriving citizens of economic opportunities. They wish to establish the principle of private domain on federal land which would give special use permittees rights of use rather than privilege of use, as is now granted upon compliance with regulation and law.
A “right to ski” movement might seem pretty seductive to thwarted developers, hungry planners and suppliers at this point. But should the ski industry use the WUM model of propaganda, polarization and political patronage to insure that their concerns about natural resource allocation be answered? No. Is it our agenda to demand a right of development wherever the combination of hill and dale and low temperature would dictate? No, it shouldn’t be. Do we roll into communities just like the mining companies, with a new ambulance and a few softball diamonds, but promise mass transit contribution and employee housing so everything will be hunky-dory. It appears that may be the case.
In other words, it is beginning to seem that the ski industry attitude, which in many cases is scorn for environmental regulation, and disdain for environmental groups and some government and elected officials, is running parallel with the WUM advocates. This would be a bad alliance for we are not an extractive industry by nature. We are a service industry, dedicated to providing recreation, employment, prosperity for the public and communities. We are moral in our purpose and do not leave a trail of destruction and ruin in our wake as most of the WUM big money supporters have.
At this juncture in time, as these regulations are being reviewed and as new and expanded ski area developments are proposed and in process, we need to re-examine our position in the increasingly competitive rush for natural resources. We need to look at our influence on the environment and communities through the eyes of others. We need to realize that we are providing service and pleasure for the very persons to whom the Wise Use Movement would be an aberration. We need to proceed carefully to insure that there will always be a wise ski industry agenda that is supported by the people to whom we owe our living and our energy.
