Some milestones are worth celebrating. But for Mountain High, Calif., the arrival of 2009 brought a distinction that seems all too prevalent in the resort industry these days: the 10th anniversary of a master plan that is stuck in limbo. The reason? Lack of resources in the U.S. Forest Service.

Although Mountain High has money in the bank, chalked up record holiday attendance and has been ready to implement some needed improvements, the wheels of progress aren’t turning, says general manager Karl Kapuscinski. “We’re the largest recreation facility in Angeles National Forest, but we’re not able to get projects underway,” he says. “Through retirements and transfers, the Forest Service is being depleted of its expertise. Come this May, our local office will have neither a district ranger nor a permit administrator. We start on something and then have to restart in three months because of personnel changes. About all we can hope for is working with them on critical day-to-day operations.”

Across the country, a wave of temps, transfers and retirements in the agency has eaten into the supervision of recreational lands and, according to many ski area managers that SAM spoke with, Forest Service staffers with knowledge of winter sports are becoming as scarce as the Rocky Mountain lynx. These defections, coupled with growing budget cuts, are impacting everything from lift additions to avalanche forecasting, they say.

Mountain High, an amalgam of what used to be three separate ski areas, has a modest laundry list of upgrades that includes new base facilities in its West Resort, service buildings in its East Resort, more parking, and a few lift improvements and trail reconfigurations. None of these would be considered major development, says Kapuscinski. But time marches on while the master plan languishes on the sidelines. “We’ve had a great relationship with the Forest Service on the ground floor, but with planning issues there needs to be a top-down review of the whole system,” he adds. “And they need to attract young, talented and inspired people who have an interest in winter recreation.”


Consumed With Fire
Ski area planners may think about figuratively lighting fires under the bureaucracy, but the Forest Service clearly has its hands full putting out the real ones. According to a new agency report, the Wildland Fire Management portion of the total Forest Service annual operating budget increased from 13 percent in 1991 to 45 percent in 2008. In 2008 the tab was $1.6 billion, and last August the Forest Service siphoned about $400 million from program dollars to pay for the costs of disastrous fires.

The Angeles Forest alone has been hit by disastrous fires in five of the last six years, including one in 2007 that torched the district office in charge of overseeing Mountain High. Another blaze last year literally reached the doorstep of a second district complex, threatening employee housing, a fire station and administrative offices. Out of the 655,000 acres in the forest, multiple fires each year can burn as much as 12,000 acres each, according to Forest Service spokesman Stanton Florea.

As the new Congress gathered for the first time in January, a coalition of some 30 recreational and conservation groups that includes the California Ski Industry Association (CSIA) met with legislators in Washington D.C., to push, once again, for passage of the Federal Land Assistance, Management and Enhancement (FLAME) Act. This would create a dedicated emergency fund for fire suppression and simultaneously erect a firewall around program budgets. The FLAME Act was introduced last year but didn’t survive the rites of passage.

“This time, we’re getting positive feedback from the relevant House and Senate committees, and the Forest Service considers this the mother of all issues,” says Bob Roberts, executive director of CSIA. “Our coalition is going to be very focused on pushing for this to stop the desecration of the Forest Service budget.”


Personnel Problems
Even if the FLAME Act is adopted, manpower remains an issue. USFS managers point out that post-fire reconstruction efforts can put huge time demands on fisheries biologists, architects, land-use planners and other key personnel who might otherwise be working on ski area master plans.

And then there’s the constant drumbeat of environmentalist opposition to resort expansions, and the protracted NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) review process. “The amount of workload, scrutiny and public resistance on ski area projects is unbelievable,” says Bernie Weingardt, former regional forester for Region 5 (Pacific Southwest), who retired from the agency in 2007. “People do not want change when it comes to ski expansions. Even if you have funds to start a NEPA team and you do the studies, you know you’re in for a long battle. When you use every last dime you had in your budget for recreation, and a court tells you to go back and do another EIS (Environmental Impact Statement), it’s frustrating,” he says.

So it should come as no surprise that filling key recreation management positions in the Forest Service is problematic, adds Weingardt. “Who wants to be a winter sports administrator when you’re just going to get beat up for most of your career?” Weingardt should know, since he’s served in other Forest Service regions that have been rife with controversy, including the Wasatch in Utah, where he was forest supervisor, White River in Colorado, and the Cascades in the Pacific Northwest.

For Washington and Oregon, especially, progress on ski area plans seems to be measured in decades, not years. “We’ve seen uneven administration and a continuing loss of winter sports expertise in this region,” says Scott Kaden, president of the Pacific Northwest Ski Areas Association. A decline in timber harvesting has had a detrimental impact on the USFS Region 6 budget, and a spate of retirements and “acting” positions has created “a system of musical chairs,” he says. The turnover, combined with a gauntlet of legal appeals, have stymied Washington’s White Pass, which has been trying to expand for 20 years. (See “Getting It Right,” page 56, for more on White Pass.)

Mount Ashland Ski Area, a non-profit, community-owned resort in southern Oregon, has been struggling for 20 years to overcome persistent legal challenges to add 71 acres of largely intermediate terrain to its mostly advanced-to-expert trail layout. In 2007 the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals blocked the expansion, citing what it called shortcomings in the Forest Service environmental plan. “We had a commitment from the Forest Service to address these deficiencies within six months to a year, but we’re still waiting,” says Kim Clark, ski area general manager. “In the meantime, one of the chief writers of our NEPA document, who wrote a majority of our two EIS documents, has retired and there is no idea when he will be replaced.” Remaining staffers have been shuffled to other positions or been given new responsibilities, he says, to the extent that “last season I never made a single run with our snow ranger.” The ski area has invested most of its earnings, some $2.4 million over 14 years, in studies and legal fees, deferring maintenance on facilities that are 45 years old, says Clark. If Mount Ashland is unable to move ahead and thus be competitive with other resorts, “we could be out of business in 10 years,” he warns.


Forest Safety: Hard Choices
Mike Heilman, USFS Region 6 special uses coordinator, acknowledges that the pendulum has swung from what ski areas once considered “too much hand-holding” to being under-managed. “We’re losing a skill base and jobs are not being replaced, or if they are the chances are high that it’s with someone who is skiing only five days a year,” he says. “The pure ranger positions are pretty much gone. Instead of skiing 100 days a year, these people are indoors doing master planning and NEPA documents. And when July rolls around, the budget is put on hold and everyone is sent out to fight fires.”

When property and lives are at stake, fire suppression is clearly the top priority with the agency. But the budget cutbacks are ironically eating into winter public safety programs that ski areas and their USFS partners have worked years to establish. Case in point: the backcountry avalanche warning system. “It upsets me that we (USFS) are backing out of avalanche forecasts,” says Weingardt. “That budget has been nibbled away forever, and some areas are getting zero Forest Service dollars for forecasting. This was one of the best things the Forest Service ever did, but now it’s the private sector—the REIs and the Black Diamonds—that keeps this going.”

Bob Moore, a recently retired USFS manager who is widely regarded as an authority on snow safety issues, says that the dearth of Forest Service newcomers with mountain goat dispositions will impact skiing in other ways. As a snow ranger with the Truckee Ranger District of Tahoe National Forest, Moore was considered the patriarch of expertise on ski areas. Among his attributes, he had an important relationship with the Army and Marines, helping ski areas locate gunnery and ordinance for their in-bounds avalanche control. When several field pieces were called back for deployment to the Middle East, it was Moore who leveraged his connections to find the alternative—in this case surplus 101mm recoilless rifles. And Moore organized training sessions for ski patrollers on how to operate and maintain the artillery.

Now that he’s gone fishin’, when will Moore be replaced? No one’s exactly sure, and it’s a fair bet the agency will have difficulty finding someone of his “caliber.”


Sharp Advice
There was a time when the ski industry represented a prime recruiting source for careers in the Forest Service, but that is rare today. One who took that path was Kent Sharp, who left a resort administrator job to work for the agency for eight years. Now he’s back in the private sector, as a principal with the SE Group in Frisco, Colorado. His experience with the agency has helped more than one ski area navigate through potentially troubled waters.

Sharp has advice on how to deal with the incredible shrinking Forest Service. “Engage the agency early in the planning process, so that they have a sense of co-ownership in the project,” he says. “Also, it’s important to turnkey as much of the work as possible in order to deliver a document that meets their needs. This makes it easier for them to move to the approval process.” Also, adds Sharp, it’s better for ski areas to “take smaller bites from the project list” rather than pushing an entire plan through the NEPA process. “We prefer a menu-driven approach, in which you select from various elements and put them in small, logical groupings.”


Possible Solutions
Apart from assuming the burden of more planning dollars and outside consulting to fill the agency’s staffing void, what more can be done about the thin green line of the Forest Service?

Several regions have undertaken joint industry/agency reviews to identify areas of concern. The Pacific Southwest Region (Region 5) and the California Ski Industry Association, for example, completed an exhaustive evaluation in 2007, culminating in specific staffing and procedural recommendations for both parties. The Eastern Region (Region 9) formed an intra-agency task force of winter sports specialists who could put a full-court press on one project after another, thus preventing any single USFS district from being overwhelmed and understaffed. And, apart from supporting the FLAME Act, the National Ski Areas Association (NSAA) is campaigning for a Congressional measure that would authorize and expand permissible summer activities at ski areas.

But Weingardt believes that the core solution is not simply making the best use of dwindling resources, but providing a new vision for the agency. And to that end, he’s involved in starting a steering group called Choose Outdoors, which would include representatives of user groups throughout the recreation community (www.chooseoutdoors.org).

“We need to reestablish recreation as a priority on national forests and public lands,” he says. Ski areas, he adds, can be major players in working to solve social issues such as youth obesity and delinquency. “It’s time for Congress to take a look at what it is we want to provide to the American public with these lands,” he says. “We need to stop treating them as just forests to be managed for timber. It’s time to recognize their value for recreation.”