Ski Scene
Skiing in Colorado has become quite the scene and I’m not referring to a scene from one of my films.
I recently visited Aspen and was surprised at how much the ski scene has changed since I moved from Colorado to Montana three years ago. I didn’t even ski while I was there, but I still noticed the "ski scene."
I left my ski equipment at home because when I packed for the trip, there wasn't any snow in Colorado. Of course, by the time I had taken the ferry from my island, driven to the Seattle airport and stood in line for three hours, it had snowed almost three feet in Colorado and every ski resort was in operation.
The lack of snow wasn’t the only reason that I left my ski equipment at home. I live at sea level and with each passing year, I find it a little harder to adjust to the high altitude of Colorado ski resorts. For the first three or four days above 8,000 feet, I move slower and sleep poorly. When I’m trying to sleep, my brain says, "Hey, your lungs are not sending me enough oxygen," so I wake up gasping for breath at least half a dozen times the first couple of nights.
Anyway, I was there to give a speech at a convention, not to ski. I have been giving a lot of speeches lately and I enjoy checking out the different resorts. This trip did not disappoint.
My hotel and meals were included in my speech fee, so I decided to splurge and have lunch in the hotel. It was the first time in my life that I have ever had to pay $13.50 for a hamburger sandwich. This McBurger with style set the scene for the upscale atmosphere the hotel was trying to achieve.
The rate for my room was even more expensive than the one I stayed in recently in Whistler, B.C. It was so expensive that I once again stayed up all night watching TV because I didn’t want to waste time sleeping in a room that cost $995 a night. (No, I did not leave out a decimal point.) During the Christmas holidays, that same room rents for only $1,650 a night.
I don’t know what a hamburger sells for during the high season, but there must be a market out there for rooms in that price range or they wouldn’t build hotels that charge that much. That $1,650 is about the same as the gross income of my first ski film in 1950, when you cold rent a room in Aspen for $3 a night at Ed’s Beds.
The hotels fit in with the rest of the pricing scheme in Aspen. While I was there, a local ski shop was having a 70 per cent discount sale. This was the first week of December and I wondered how they could sell something for 70 per cent off and stay in business. Apparently, that means 70 per cent off of the manufacturer’s suggested retail price, which anyone who has skied for more than three weeks knows is a fictitious price that they never pay.
The ski scene wasn’t just limited to Aspen. The morning that I left Aspen, they opened the back bowls of Vail for powder snow skiing. Some of my friends were skiing that day. There is only one chairlift coming up out of those back bowls. The first time my friends skied down, they had to wait 45 minutes to get back on the lift. The next time, the lift line was estimated to be about at least 1 hour and 45 minutes.
My friends stood around grumbling and trying to figure out where some untracked snow might still be left, if and when they ever got back on the lift. Finally, one of them pulled out his cell phone, called the ski school desk and had a private instructor ski down and escort them to the head of the line. The cost of a private instructor is $425 per day, not including a 15 per cent tip, but at least they didn’t have to stand in line for the rest of the day.
Yes, the ski scene in Colorado is changing.
While there, I also read an article in the Denver Post about how to miss the weekend traffic jams to and from the ski resorts. Sometimes it takes skiers as long as five hours to drive back to Denver from the ski resorts on a Sunday night. My I-70 traffic experience wasn’t too bad because I was driving opposite the traffic on a Friday evening. However, I was in a rented pickup truck with no snow tires, so the trip over Vail Pass took an hour and 15 minutes and I was out of control a half a dozen times. That was okay because it was a Friday night in early December and I wasn’t in a hurry because my three-hour wait at Denver International Airport didn’t begin until 7 the next morning.
Once I reached Denver I was back on my own expense account. I slept well at the local Motel 6 and enjoyed a gourmet dinner at the nearby Colonel Saunders. I was back to my familiar scene.
