Bill Whitney
We record with sadness the recent death of Bill Whitney, the proprietor for 33 years of Whitney’s in Jackson, N.H. Bill was one of the true pioneers in our industry. He was one of the very first to offer the skier a ski lift, a ski school and a ski lodge: the ski resort concept. That was in 1936.
Taking over what Ed Moody, Phil Robertson and George Norton had begun, Bill developed his own cable lift which was called a shovel handle llift.
Bill was an industry leader in his time. He was the third president of Eastern Ski Area Operators Association, and the first president of the New Hampshire Ski Area Operators Association.
A warm man, with a wry New England sense of humor, Bill Whitney was one of a small and dwindling group who could rightly claim that they were there when it all began.
Our energy future
The cold weather comes, the big compressors are turned on and our industry makes snow. We crank up the vehicles to push the snow around. We start up the lifts. We turn on the heaters that will protect our base lodge guests against the sub-freezing temperatures outside. No matter how you slice it, we are an energy-consumptive activity. And in making this obvious point we haven’t even mentioned the skier’s energy use in getting from his city to our mountains.
Okay, that was a problem in 1973, but now we even have a surplus, so there’s no more problem. Right?
Wrong! There’s a big problem just a little way down the road, and we are going to have to address ourselves to it. Cal Conniff has some important messages on the subject for our industry in his Newsletter (pages 54-55).
But the issue is going to go still further. It will carry us into the vanguard of a philosophical argument that will rage nationally: What are this country’s priorities, because there isn’t enough for everything. Where does recreation fit in?
The experts tell us that our country’s spiraling increase in energy use has to collide with the projectable shortfall in available energy sources — at least until some hazy point well down the road when we have the technology to tap new energy sources like the sun on an economical basis. Emile van Lennep, Dutch Secretary-General of the O.E.C.D. (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, representing the world’s 24 leading consumers including the U.S.A.), warns bluntly that, “Within less than a decade — whatever happens in terms of Alaskan, North Sea or other production sources — we are going to be hit harder than ever.” Mr. van Lennep suggested, as quoted by C. L. Sulzberger in the New York Times, that, “By 1984, no matter what happens, we will be back in a more serious crisis than ever before — unless really major conservation efforts are made. Hitherto we have been inclined to see the problems in terms of more energy production. The reality is that there should be more conservation.” He lists several targets for the avoidance of “meaningless waste of fuel” including “buildings unnecessarily and artificially isolated from nature’s normal seasons.” That could mean something like an indoor tennis court; it could mean the day lodge at a ski area.
In a recent article — also in the N.Y. Times, former Federal Energy Administrator John C. Sawhill cautioned that, “The relatively stable energy prices of the last year have lulled us into thinking the crisis is over. But nothing could be farther from the truth. We are in a worse position today than we were before the 1973 embargo . . . Moreover, in our energy-conservation efforts we trail every other industrialized country, according to the International Energy Agency.”
Sawhill went on to pinpoint four energy fronts on which action should be taken. The one most likely to impact on our industry was “conservation measures to hold down growth in demand for existing fuel.” He pointed out that election year politics prevented much action being taken in the 1976 Energy Conservation and Production Act, but the probability is that President-elect Carter will make strong moves in the energy field.
A gasoline tax as part of the price we pay for what Sawhill calls “our gasoline gluttony” would certainly hurt us less than the gasless Sunday idea. But there is no doubt that the American people will be re-thinking their priorities, and each individual industry — ours included — will have to realistically re-assess its strengths.
For instance, to someone who is being asked to make some sort of sacrifice — more likely, to put up with some sort of minor inconvenience — the thought of burning fuel to make snow — to make snow??!! — would be infuriating. And there’s a whole lot more of them than of us!
In the effective totals, we skiers number small, and our total energy uses are small. A national ban on non-returnable bottles, we are told, could save up to 100,000 barrels of oil a day used in glass production. Large-scale targets like that are going to be more appealing than pipsqueak targets like the ski area industry. Nonetheless, we will be targeted in the context of recreation.
Where, in the order of national priorities, does recreation stand? Those who are trying to arrive at these priorities will tell you that it will rank low. And that is the battleground we are likely to find ourselves on: not whether it is appropriate to run ski lifts, but the much bigger battleground of stress in an urbanized society, and how the health and physical fitness of the American people, through outdoor recreation, should command a high priority.
We had all better start thinking and planning our energy future!
Supplier relationships
Supplier/area relationships within the framework of NSAA represent a sensitive and an important issue. Few memories are that short that they cannot remember the tensions, frustrations and downright unpleasantness that so bruised these relationships in the first part of this decade.
We are pleased then, that NSAA appointed Jim Ferrara of Thiokol as supplier member of their Board to fill the unfinished term of Dick Crighton — and in all probability to get a full term after that. Jim certainly commands the respect of his fellow suppliers, and will undoubtedly represent their thinking well. Nonetheless, though the selection was a good one, the machinery that brought it about left something to be desired. A committee of one was appointed to report back to the Board on his recommendation for a supplier to fill this important position. There was no specific mandate given to this committee of one to sound out the suppliers as to whom they would like to represent their interests on the Board; nor, as far as we can see, was there any attempt made to find this out.
We think this was a mistake. Suppliers pay dues to NSAA, but have no vote or say in the conduct of the association. It is therefore doubly important that they be consulted on a decision like this. A good selection, like that of Ferrara, does not mitigate our criticism of the procedure that brought it about.
Another small, dark cloud on the horizon is the re-emergence in some quarters of the philosophy that the suppliers can be the guarantors of the solvency of ski area associations. It is all too easy for a ski area association officer, struggling to keep his organization going with a dues structure that is inadequate for its programs, to say, “Let’s hit the suppliers . . . they need our business and can’t very well turn us down.” But it is a short-sighted ploy that goes sour before too long.
Lest these remarks be misconstrued, we emphasize that the problem here is not with NSAA, where Cal Conniff continues to do a fine job of listening to suppliers and catering to their marketing needs. We don’t intend to point fingers, but just let the shoe fit where it will.
Recommended reading
If you haven’t caught it, be sure to read, “So you want to build a ski resort” in the December issue of Ski Magazine. It is funny, and all too true. The author listed is Rigomar A. Thurmer, which surely must be an anagram for someone who has gone through the mill.
Quite apart from the wry fun you’ll get from reading it, this sort of article can do lots to educate the skiing public on why a lift ticket costs what it does, and why it should really be more.
Growth—the big wet blanket
The Forest Service recently held a Winter Sports Symposium to which it invited a number of prominent ski figures — area operators, bankers, area consultants, editors etc. The purpose was to stimulate thinking and planning within the Forest Service as to the future of the public lands they administer, and the role of skiing in the multiple use mix of these lands. They got a wide array of blunt talk, not too much of which could have been very encouraging.
The overall mood was one of frustration — not pessimism, frustration. The banker pointed to legislative interference as the source of the “confusion and uncertainty” that was making his bank wary about extending credit to any new areas — as distinct from the “excellent banking relationships” they had with existing operations. As reported by Ski Business, “One after another, ski area managers, consultants, economists and an investment banker trooped to the podium to tell an audience of regional foresters that no growth is ahead for the nation’s ski areas.”
The problem does not seem to stem from a lack of skiers, but rather from inter-related economic and administrative problems. It is such a long, rocky, costly road today between the gleam in the eye and the opening of a ski area that few can, and fewer still do, attempt it.
What does that mean for our industry? Among other things it means a puzzle. Why do we need more ski facilities when current utilization is so low? If we do need more facilities, but see very little chance of getting them, why do we expend so much effort and money trying to create new skiers? The conundrum is well stated by ‘Doc’ Des Roches, executive vice president of SIA, in his report to his membership:
“Open-ended industry growth is restricted by the number of skiers that areas can service and support. If we introduce more skiers into the market than the ski areas can process, the ski areas will expand their facilities to accomodate the new skiers, but there will be a lag that could turn skiers to other leisure sports to the eventual disadvantage of the industry. Basically, this is the problem of the ski areas, but Ski Industries America must be sensitive to the booming problems facing the ski areas, such as the possible increase in Forest Service fees, the environmental problems and the rapidly increasing liability suits.”
Our hand-wringing about growth, however, if often a remembrance of the ‘good old days’ when ski areas were being started up right and left and lifts were being built by the hundreds. Suppliers prospered, and if the areas didn’t, at least they didn’t starve. But that growth rate couldn’t be maintained. Nor could that 16 per cent annual growth rate of skiers — originally deduced in the early 1960’s and blindly assumed for years afterwards.
In retrospect, the believers in zero growth rate of a couple of years back were probably also wrong, and we could all have saved ourselves the money we poured into the Glendenning report. But that’s another subject.
We are inclined to believe that growth is an activity like skiing is the result of its own built-in dynamics. Nobody really creates a demand; at best one can recognize a potential and perhaps trigger it.
Interest in skiing grows or doesn’t grow because of a complex, interacting, unmeasurable set of social and economic considerations: the responsiveness at any one time of people to such diverse stimuli as romance . . . outdoors . . . beauty . . . excitement . . . challenge . . . glamour . . . fitness and exercise . . . elitism, etc. — all against a background of ability to pay, stock market performance, mobility, family status and other personal constraints. Weather also affects the growth rate of any one season.
The ebb and flow of this sort of growth is significant, and we seem to be getting it without even fishing in different socio-economic strata (the “negative income drift” our learned friend Jim Branch calls this).
But what stymies our industry now is interference by various levels of town, county, state and federal jurisdictions — and the threat of more. The so-called Haskell bill, for instance, prompted Ski Magazine‘s editorial director, John Fry, to say, “I am somewhat horrified by it and wonder indeed about its constitutionality . . . when it says, among other things, that to determine whether a permit shall be issued, the Secretary is ordered to ‘require that a conceptual land use plan be adopted by the state and local governments involved’ . . . To which I must add that if no such plan is forthcoming, then state and local government can effectively exercise a veto over the development and utilization of outdoor recreational facilities and services on federal land. Or indeed, state and local government can make plans that virtually rule out development on U.S. Forest land.”
The cure for all this? Nobody is offering one, other than a lot of patience and a lot of money. The ultimate determinants may be the laws of economics and the ballot box. When winter tourism is vital to the economy of a town, a county or a state, political persuasion becomes a real factor. This happened in Vermont where there was an economic and political backlash to the more extreme aspects of its no-growth environmental legislation — which, incidentally, was itself originally enacted as a backlash to some of the worst developmental land rape to be found.
What we’re saying is that it is time for ski area executives to become highly involved in, and sensitive to, their town, county and state politics. There are many areas which have become superbly sophisticated in this science (art?), and it will surely pay off.
For a new approach to our National Forests
The following is excerpted and adapted from remarks made by John Fry, Editorial Director of Ski and Outdoor Life magazines at a recent Forest Service symposium:
There is no easy way for you to reconcile all the varying interest of skier-consumers; of their suppliers (the ski area owners and operators); of such users of Forest land as wood cutters, fishermen and hunters; and then of the inhabitants of states like Colorado where so much of the land is federally owned.
I do not think, however, that we are going to resolve these often conflicting demands by conducting endless surveys to determine what the public thinks or what it imagines it needs. The people, in their great common sense, have grown weary of politicians who tailor policies and programs to what the latest Gallup poll shows. I think the people are hungering for good judgment and leadership on the issues, not a pandering to opinion research.
Let’s face it. We are in an area where we are not talking so much about what consumers want, as we are about what consumers ought to have. We are talking about the exercise of value judgment. We are moving into a territory where . . . as they say . . . the weak-of-will and the pale-of-heart . . . had better turn around and go back if they don’t like the work ahead. The ordering of priorities for the use of U.S. Forest land is an enormously complex public issue. To struggle with those complexities in the next few years is going to require a high degree of intellectual discipline combined with goodwill among the people working to achieve a solution.
Last winter, one of our editors on SKI got into a discussion with a European — a Swiss — who was skiing here in Colorado. They were discussing why, here in America, we have had virtually no new construction of ski areas in the past couple of years. The skier from Switzerland had difficulty in understanding why.
“Your country has such beautiful mountains — such ample terrain and snowfall. Why is it that not more Americans are permitted to enjoy them?”
“Well, you see,” our answer went, “we realize a precious resource when we see one and . . . ah, um . . . well, we believe in preserving for future generations what we are . . . um . . . fortunate enough to have today.”
“You mean to view,” said our friend, “not to have, not to enjoy. The development of skiing in Europe is intense—yet the ecology of our mountains is sound. We love our mountains no less than you — but you Americans cage your resources, like animals in a zoo, like a miser who banks all of his wealth — the counting gives him satisfaction, not the benevolence to which it can be put. Your attitude toward your mountain environment . . . it really is quite sterile.”
Now the view of that Swiss, that European, that’s something I can share. I have hiked in the Swiss Alps and used their hut system. And I find it deplorable that, apart from the Appalachian hut system in New Hampshire, we have so little hiking of that kind in this country. I find it deplorable that we have such militant preservationists in North America who do not regard such back country travel or skiing as benign.
Yes, we do act like misers about the recreational use of public land. We are intimidated. The trouble is that America does not trust itself to develop tastefully and intelligently. As a consequence, we have decided in many cases to put a padlock on the gate to public land.
I am compelled to take the view — that when we talk about the recreational use of Forest Service land we are talking about recreation for all of the American people. Indeed it is even possible to believe that when this immense recreational resource was taken in title by the American people as a whole, an unseen hand drew an ultimate purpose for it: that a day would come when the urbanization and industrialization of our country would require a resource of this kind for the people, especially those not resident in the states where those federal lands happen to be.
Perhaps it is premature to say this, but I believe the day will come when we will no longer talk about the multiple uses of U.S. Forest land. Rather, we will talk about priorities of use and that recreation may take precedence over wood for example. Why? Because the psychic needs of an urbanized society eventually will take precedence over our needs for the physical resources of the land. There is more than one way to build a house than out of wood or to bring information to the public than on 300-page Sunday editions of newspapers. But there is no substitute, no ersatz way of supplying the people with a direct confrontation with nature and with health and fitness.
What I am saying is that the balanced human personality of the late 20th and of the 21st Century is going to be based on access — wide access — to the outdoor experience. I commend to you Herman Kahn’s new book “The Next 200 Years”. I quote from one of Kahn’s many predictions about the future: “Reduced costs of travel and increased leisure time will lead to hordes of tourists by 1985. The host-guest relationship will bring strains and stresses on society and could become a major political issue.”
Now if you think I am preparing you for a hard sell on why we should open up the gates to the public land and cover the face of them with ski resorts, I am not necessarily saying that.
I don’t think we need respond to every projected increase in skier demand by rubber-stamping replica Vails and Coppers and Snowmasses all over the map. I don’t believe the non-skiing, conservation-minded public is going to accept that view. But what they might accept is if we ask ourselves: what can we do that is in the best interests of the people in whose name and trust the land is held?
Let me suggest a way of thinking, a direction to a new policy. And if that line of thinking should lead to the need for ski resorts, or more accurately certain kinds of recreational facilities on Forest land, then so much the better. But I think we must determine first that a bankrupt policy is one that simply has its end or goal investment in large scale resorts, lift systems and second home developments on or adjacent to National Forests.
Almost any expert who has thought seriously about the future of America has concluded that disease — both physical and psychic — is a matter of serious national concern. We are spending billions and billions of dollars on sophisticated treatment of disease, and virtually nothing on preventing illness. Preventive medicine — again psychological as well as physical — is a priority of the future, if not the national priority. Moreover, the physical fitness of young people in America is at an all-time low.
I would like to suggest that our great federal lands can be the scene of a great and constructive fight for a future America that is healthier and fitter, that is released from the totality and tension of urban life and more at peace with itself because it has conserved an outdoors where it can re-create. In short, I am suggesting a policy for recreational use of federal land that takes as its priority what is good for the health and physical fitness of the American people.
It is interesting to see some of the practices that might flow from this way of looking at recreational use of federal land. For example, we might apply substantial federal expenditures in the name of physical fitness and illness prevention toward the management of U.S. Forest land. We should rationalize the school year into four working semesters, releasing students in winter as well as summer for recreation on public land. And there could be facilities at resorts for students to participate in a healthy, physically fit experience. Possibly, we should reinstate Selective Service and draft young people for one year’s service in constructing trails, learning wilderness survival, helping maintain property on Forest land.
In redesigning resorts of the future, the government could be concerned about the physical fitness and health benefits of the planned development. Cross country trail construction and inexpensive hosteling ought to rank high among the priorities of future recreational development of Forest Service land. Most of all, we should be developing the land for active, fitness-oriented recreation, for the opportunity it offers urban-raised youth to come face to face with nature.
I leave you with the thought, then, that 1) recreation will become a priority use of Forest Service land in the next 20 years; and 2) that we should therefore start to frame a concept of what we mean by recreation and that I strongly suggest to you that it be physically active and therefore conducive to contributing to the national health.
And if that policy leads to the construction of ski resorts of a certain character, then I say let’s go on with the job.
