This is a tale about corporate moguls playing musical chairlifts. And nobody’s a bigger king of the mountain than Adam Aron, the new 42-year-old CEO of Vail Resorts, Inc. His company already owns Vail and Beaver Creek, making it the sasquatch of central Colorado. It’s about to have an even larger footprint. Unless the Justice Department raises antitrust objections, Vail will merge with three other nearby resorts: Keystone, Breckenridge and Arapahoe Basin. Only Copper Mountain and Loveland in the area will be free of Vail.
Does it matter? After all, there’ll still be Aspen elsewhere in the state. And Steamboat Springs and Telluride. But consider the trend. Steamboat now belongs to the same Japanese company that owns Heavenly on the Nevada-California border, not to mention the French resort of Tignes. And Telluride owns a big chunk of Kirkwood, near Heavenly.
Aron’s well-run, well-financed empire is one of several emerging in North American skiing. For better and for worse, they’re forever changing the landscape of skiing. In the East, Leslie Otten orchestrated the marriage of the two largest chains. He already had Sunday River in Maine, Sugarbush in Vermont and the Attitash Bear Peak Cranmore complex in New Hampshire. In June Otten added on Killington and Mount Snow/Haystack in Vermont, Waterville Valley in New Hampshire and Sugarloaf in Maine. The antitrust police wouldn’t approve the deal unless Otten divested himself of Cranmore and Waterville, which he did by selling to George Gillett, who then went out and acquired three California plums, including Northstar and Sierra-at-Tahoe. It takes a scorecard to keep track of the white sales, which have also resulted in Vancouver-based Intrawest’s combining Blackcomb in British Columbia with Mont Tremblant in Quebec, Stratton in Vermont and a share of Mammoth in California.
All this downhill Darwinism doesn’t just mean fewer owners. Since 1961 the number of North American ski resorts has fallen from about 1,000 to 519. Skiing is a flat business these days–even with the rise of snowboarding, parabolic skis and the introduction this year of the “ski bike.” (It’s a ski! It’s a mountain bike! It doesn’t have brakes!) Lift ridership has grown less than 5 percent in a decade, environmentalists are still out for bear and the weather gods, as always, are fickle. The baby boomers, skiing’s former mainstay, seem to prefer baking their buns in the Caribbean sun to freezing them off in a blizzard. And their kids are not quite old enough to be hooked.
The new moguls hope their consolidations do two things: reduce costs and attract new customers. The first makes sense, since french fries and Sno-Cats are cheaper to buy on a grand scale; marketing and operations, too, can be merged. The second goal is trickier. To compete with Club Med and cruise lines, ski areas can no longer merely be “the uphill transportation business,” says Rachel Biederman of Colorado Ski Country USA. That demands offering a Total Winter Vacation Experience. Sounds cool, or at least cold. At Vail it means the new Adventure Ridge atop the mountain, which includes a skating rink, toboggan hill and trails for snowshoeing and snowmobiling. At other resorts, which used to be satisfied with a crackling fire lodgeside, there’s now paragliding and ice climbing to warm the adrenalin. Today’s base facilities offer more than a luxury hotel; you can load up on fur, jewelry and, of course, sleighfuls of food. Goodbye, lousy coffee and Cream of Wheat. Hello, elk steaks and focaccia.
Not everybody wants to be glitzified. Areas like Alta in Utah pride themselves on a retro experience–no quad chairlifts, no macchiatos and, at $27 a lift ticket, the best buy around. (Vail charges $52.) Alta restricts the number of tickets sold and even slows the lifts down if the runs get crowded. While the owners may not squeeze the last dime out of the facility, the place has retained its legend not just for its snow but its soul. No one laments the days of hickory skis and rope tows. But as every schussboomer knows, if the slopes get too slick, it’s just not fun anymore.
