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Snowbird owner Dick Bass

A few weeks ago, I found myself walking the couple of kilometres of road that separate Alta from Snowbird. It was a clear cold night and the stars were so bright it felt like I could reach up and touch them.

A few weeks ago, I found myself walking the couple of kilometres of road that separate Alta from Snowbird. It was a clear cold night and the stars were so bright it felt like I could reach up and touch them. I hadn’t seen stars that bright in a resort for a long time. But what struck me most that evening was just how close the mountain peaks seemed to be. I was in alpine country — no question about it. Unlike in Whistler or Aspen or Vail — or most other North American “valley” resorts — I was truly immersed in a big-mountain setting. The fact that there was no massive urban shopping mall development around only served to reinforce my feeling of being in a very special environment.

Yet Salt Lake City — that booming, bustling, bursting-at-the-seams Utah metropolis — was barely 15 minutes down the road…

It’s fascinating to me to see how we in B.C. have completely swallowed the questionable (and oh-so environmentally unfriendly) tenet that no big-mountain ski area can survive without a big-ticket resort as its base. From Whistler to Red Mountain, from Revelstoke’s Mount Mackenzie to Golden’s Kicking Horse, the real estate gold rush in this province is swallowing up valley land at an alarming rate. Yet the demographic/psychographic experts argue that there won’t be much of a market for these newfangled urban/mountain monstrosities in the future.

Ski numbers haven’t changed in a generation. Sure, there’s been a teeny bit of an upward trend in recent years, but not enough to be significant. And those numbers aren’t about to improve anytime soon. While Baby Boomers are dropping out of the sport at an ever-increasing rate (as they push the 60+ barrier and realize that old bones and crowded ski slopes don’t make a great combo), Generation XYZ isn’t so keen to pick up the slack. Especially now that they virtually have to sell their first-born just to be able to afford to ski…

So what gives? When did condos become more important than skis? Whatever happened to the now-discredited idea of a big mountain with a modest base? That’s what Whistler used to be. And it wasn’t that bad. In fact, many old timers today look back fondly on those days. “Skiing at Whistler was never supposed to be about owning a million-dollar condo and driving a Hummer to the towncentre,” says a 30-year resident here. “It was about getting away from the city and enjoying a simpler, healthier lifestyle.”

But somewhere, somehow we were convinced that a ski resort devoted strictly to the uphill transportation business simply couldn’t survive. I still remember Hugh Smythe lecturing me on the subject nearly 20 years ago. To him, people like Franz Wilhelmsen were dinosaurs. They lacked vision. They lacked the foresight to understand that profit margins were just too tight if you restricted yourself to building lifts and offering food and beverage to your customers.

It was all about creating wealth. If you couldn’t get rich from the ski business, why do it in the first place?

And that, my friends, is totally wrong!

Now I know that some of you are already preparing conceptual bombs to lob at my arguments. I’ve recently been accused of being a mountain socialist for my views. An anti-realtor ski-commie who would welcome the unwashed hordes to our little alpine enclave in a second. And that’s your prerogative. Slag me, beat me — call me what you want; I’m not going to change my tune. Simply put — I just don’t think the recent corporate approach to ski area development is sustainable. It’s not sustainable culturally and it’s not sustainable economically.

Let’s take a closer look at Snowbird. Since its launch in 1971, the “Pearl of the Wasatch” has had only one owner. Entrepreneur, mountaineer and raconteur-extraordinaire, Texan Dick Bass is one of the last-standing ski proselytisers of his generation.

Men like him — from Vail’s Pete Seibert to Taos’s Ernie Blake to Mammoth’s Dave McCoy — played a huge role in the development of skiing in North America. They were skiers first and developers second. To them, it was really important that people love their product. It wasn’t just about delivering services. It was about sharing a passion; sharing a deep and profound affection for sliding on snow in wintertime. Sadly, there aren’t many of them left anymore.

But don’t tell Dick that. Cruise Snowbird on just about any day of the week, and chances are you’ll find him hard at work — chatting with skiers on the tram plaza, or leading VIPs down the mountain, or hosting sherpas from his beloved Himalayas — and loving every minute of it. “Hands-on” management to Bass really means touching your customers.

“Dick is our not-so-secret weapon,” asserts Snowbird president Bob Bonar. An employee at the Little Cottonwood Canyon resort since the early 1970swhen he picked up a shovel and was put to work in construction, Bonar is a huge fan of the bigger-than-life Texan. “Dick’s roots are skiing and mountains,” he says. “And while he’d never say anything negative about resorts like Whistler and Vail, he’s made it very clear to me that he doesn’t want Snowbird to go down that road. Dick feels that one of his most important roles here is to protect this place from urban encroachment. And he’s really vocal about that.”

People like Bass, he adds, are few and far between in today’s ski industry. His original entitlement in Little Cottonwood, for example, was for 6,000 rooms. But he voluntarily cut that number down to a fraction of his allowable quota. “Dick really believes in the concept of a big mountain with a modest base village,” says Bonar. “It’s all about the experience for him. He truly feels responsible for protecting the integrity of this place for future generations.”

How serious is he about his beliefs? Put it this way. When Dick kicks off, Snowbird won’t be flogged to the highest bidder. Au contraire. Bass has already set up a foundation — the Snowbird Renaissance Centre — to which he will bequest all his Little Cottonwood holdings. “He really wants to do the right thing for the mountain,” explains Bonar. “He really wants to make sure Snowbird has a viable future after he’s gone…”

To be fair, the Snowbird mountain experience is not only sustained by Dick Bass’s vision. For the ski area also sits smack in the middle of Salt Lake County’s municipal watershed. “What would appear at first glance to be a major constraint has turned into a significant asset,” says Bonar. “That’s because it puts a big limit on what can be developed in these canyons. And there’s nothing anybody can do about it… No matter how strong their political connections are.”

Interestingly enough, those constraints have taught Snowbird management how to better co-operate with the region’s various environmental groups — particularly the once-vociferous anti-resort group Save Our Canyons. “It’s a win-win situation,” explains Bonar. “By working together, we’re able to create and build higher-quality projects. And that makes everybody happy.”

And it also leads to new initiatives. By listening to their critics when they were designing the new Peruvian Chairlift, Bonar and his team arrived at a compromise that made such a positive impact on Save Our Canyons, that the group came back and proposed to Snowbird that they work together (along with the U.S. Forest Service) on developing a state-of-the-art bike park within the ski area limits. “It’s a great partnership,” says Bonar. “It makes total sense.” And it shows just how much you can actually accomplish if you are serious about adapting to changing times…

It seems that others, too, are beginning to re-examine the “development-at-all-costs” ethos. Even Fortress — er, Intrawest — has hired some young guns recently who are trying to put the skiing back into “Ski Area”. Listen to Snowshoe Mountain’s new marketing director, Brad Larsen: "I truly believe we have to send out more messages (about the ski experience) that are on the bright side,” the 27-year old wunderkind told Mountain News recently. “This sport is all about romance, adventure, and sex appeal. The pioneers of skiing understood this spirit."

Larsen went on to argue that despite telling potential skiers about the super-sized condo rooms, fast lifts and high capacity of our modern resorts — all the things that are so important to the money folk — the industry hasn’t grown. In other words, he said, we've been selling the wrong thing for years!

So maybe there’s hope for the Snow-Eaters after all. Maybe there’s a chance that all these super-sized condos and ersatz shopping malls being built at the base of our B.C. ski hills will be scaled back and normal everyday people will be welcomed once again to come and play in the snow in wintertime. I can only dream…