STOWE: WORTH $35 MILLION?
If you apply the $425 share price to all the company’s shares, as I did, and add an estimated $14 million dollars of indebtedness, the Stowe operation would be worth about $35 million. That’s a good deal less than the recent sale prices of Stratton and Steamboat. A Mt. Mansfield spokesman denied the stock move presaged a sale of the ski resort by AIG. But another major American corporation, Ralston Purina may be getting ready to exit the ski business: Keystone, Colorado, reportedly is for sale.
FILM FESTIVAL DISAPPOINTS
Is the quality of ski films in general collapsing? Or is Jerry Simon’s 16-year-old International Ski Film Festival not attracting quality entries? Whatever the reason, the five finalists I viewed at this year’s film competition at Snowmass ranged from lacklustre to embarrassingly bad.
The overall winner, “A Sleek Week…of Steep produced by young Blake Miller (no relation of Warren), is a 26-minute, low-budget film that attempts to make up for the usual absence of plot in ski movies by organizing its bump, steep and deep action into days of the week. It doesn’t help. After a promisingly funny beginning, the film falls into a crevasse of mindless turn sequences and aerials.
The Film Festival — sponsored by Bausch & Lomb’s Ray-Ban Sunglasses — does not allow entries over one hour in length, so Warren Miller’s best work was not included. Nor was last year’s runner-up producer, Greg Stump. Miller’s 9-minute promotional film for Canada’s Loch Lomond/Candy Mountain, however, won the Resort & Travel Category.
Widely known for the volume of television work it does, Jalbert Productions won the Racing and Competition Category, but failed again to win an overall title. Its entry, “The Variables”, was marred by choppy editing, jarringly irrelevant music, humdrum script and footage that did little to make the show’s title meaningful. Meanwhile judging of the contest wasn’t helped by the poor quality of the video projection.
Curiously, the most original and striking film shown at the Festival — a surreal, amusing film promoting Austria’s Tirol — wasn’t a finalist.
ON THEIR OWN
Jerry Jones, former Vail Associates executive, is working as a ski marketing consultant, representing Tito Lowenstein’s Las Lenas, Argentina resort and the big new Innisquaw Creek resort at Squaw Valley, among others.
Raivo Puusemp, recently departed Stowe and Sugarbush and a leading candidate last Fall for the top United Ski Industries Association marketing job, has formed Ski Vermont, a reservations and ski vacation company. Puusemp offers a toll-free 800 number that lets skiers book tickets, lodging, lessons, equipment rentals through him. He says he has agreements with Killington, Mt. Snow, Stratton, Sugarbush and Stowe.
WHY ASPEN DIDN’T KICK IN
In addition to New York’s Hunter Mountain, the other big resort not contributing to the industry’s $5-million-plus broadcast advertising campaign is Aspen Skiing Co. ASC officials are reluctant to discuss the company’s non-participation, but their logic, I learned, is this. They asked USIA, “What is the primary goal of the campaign?” The answer they heard was: “Create more skiers to combat the lack of growth in skier-days. Twice as many skiers today ski half as often.” Aspen’s response: “Then the solution is not to create more skiers, but to get the industry’s doubled number of skiers to ski more often.” Ironically, a recent USIA-fostered insert in People Magazine included an ad by Aspen.
WATERVILLE WINS 1991 CUP FINAL
Tom Corcoran’s New Hampshire resort, which has been the scene of more World Cup races than any American area, was the winner over Steamboat and Stowe in the bid to host the prestigious final races of the 1990-1991 Cup season. The first Cup finale was at Jackson Hole in 1967.
The five-day affair at Waterville in March, 1991, will include slalom and giant slalom races for both men and women. Head-to-head parallel races on the final day may attract $100,000 in prize money for the winning teams, pending FIS approval. The U.S. Ski Association, meanwhile, nominated Vail to host women’s World Cup races March 16-17, 1991.
EX-SIA PRESIDENT EYEBALLS MERGER
Jim Woolner, a past-president of SIA, using phone calls and letters last Fall, organized a committee of his fellow past-presidents concerned about what effect SIA’s merger with NSAA might have on the 30-year-old group of importers, wholesalers and manufacturers of ski equipment and clothing. Woolner’s letter inviting his fellow ex-presidents to join him (he says they all agreed) reflected skepticism about the merger’s benefits.
Woolner’s committee hardly got formed, however, before it became embroiled in a controversy of its own. Although the contents of the letter supposedly were cleared with USIA head David Ingemie, former SIA President Henry Barreca said they weren’t and resigned from the group. Ingemie confirmed to me that he didn’t really see the letter in advance, but appears to hold no grudge against Woolner, “my old buddy.”
SKI TEAM FUMBLES CROSS-COUNTRY
The Park City offices of the U.S. Ski Team, now under a single administration with USSA, is supposed to be streamlined and better organized than before. That isn’t what I found. Talking recently with General Secretary Howard Peterson, I told him of reports that the cross-country program remains a mess. Peterson denied my report and said the U.S. would produce medal winners in cross-country in the next Winter Olympics (25 months from now).
Two days after Peterson told me this, his organization dismissed head cross-country coach Steve Gaskill at the World Cup opening races in Utah. Firing a coach at the beginning of the season raises the question of why his shortcomings were not perceived earlier. And the results of the first races, with traditional low placings by Americans, should raise concern about Peterson’s judgement in assessing the team’s future so optimistically.
As a recipient of almost daily press releases from the Ski Team, I’ve concluded that Park City officials no longer seem to be able to differentiate fund-raising talk from the facts needed to confront and analyze their very real problems. We are now entering the fourth winter of promises that the Team is improving and that success is around the corner. But despite a good start by the U.S. women’s alpine team (America’s strong suit in international racing for 40 years anyway), the alpine men and nordic skiers appear to be going nowhere.
FLYING FUR RECALLS A PREDICTION
You’d think lack of worker housing, parking and traffic logjams on the only road into town would be enough to keep Aspen’s mayor and City Council busy. Not so. The noisiest issue in town has been a proposed ban on local merchants selling furs. Aspenites who believe their elected representatives should have more pressing concerns than fur on their minds are petitioning for a vote to recall the mayor and three councilmen. Meanwhile, some fur-wearing tourists in town have been subjected to verbal assault by animal rights militants.
Futurist Herman Kahn predicted more than a decade ago that a feature of American life in the final years of the 20th Century would be the rising conflict between guest and host in recreation areas. Which echoes what I said in the last issue of SAM: so-called environmental opposition to ski development is, in reality, societal.
