Browse Our Archives

In the annals of American ski area development, there has been no shortage of bold and imaginative ideas. There was Mineral King, Walt Disney’s proposed resort spreading over a series of lift-linked bowls in California’s Sierra Nevada. And Fritz Benedict’s concept to unclog Roaring Fork Valley traffic by linking Aspen Mountain, Aspen Highlands, Butter-milk and Snowmass with a series of cable cars and other aerial transports. And who can forget Walt Schoenknecht’s vision to bring bowl skiing to Mount Snow, Vt., by setting off a “small thermonuclear device,” as then-GM John Christie described it, on the mountain’s north face?

Mineral King was thwarted by the Sierra Club’s powerful opposition, due to its location next to Sequoia National Park. Benedict’s sky transport was aborted by a combination of environmental, aesthetic and economic challenges. And Schoenknecht’s earth-moving scheme was defeated mostly by the outrageousness of it all.

In the years since, proposals have both become less spectacular and more highly scrutinized by a variety of federal, state, county and local jurisdictions, as well as conservation, environmental and anti-development entities. In fact, no one would propose such bold projects these days. Even considerably more modest projects are investigated and regulated intensely.

But it’s still possible for existing resorts to turn dreams into reality.


TOUGH MARKETS
Arguably the most complicated web of oversight is found in the Tahoe Basin, a 500-square-mile area that crosses the boundaries of five counties in two states. To complicate things more, the five county seats lie outside of the basin. The U.S. Forest Service manages 80 percent of the land, which includes not just mountains but also marshes, meadows, streams and, of course, Lake Tahoe itself. And presiding over it all is the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency (TRPA), federally charged to preserve and enhance the beauty of the Tahoe Basin.

In 2010, TRPA’s late Dennis Oliver, who had 40 years of perspective on development in Tahoe, noted that Tahoe was now at a crossroads, with “gaming declining and facilities aging.” He recalled the flurry of often random development spurred by the 1960 Winter Olympics at Squaw Valley that in turn led to TRPA’s charter, to oversee all development and the restoration of damaged lands.

“The first 10 years were tumultuous,” he recalled to a group of visiting journalists. The compact [creating TRPA] had to be redrafted in 1980. There was a building moratorium, lawsuits and much discussion. The mid-1990s brought a traffic reduction mandate to increase air and water quality improvement.

It was in that atmosphere that Heavenly Valley sought to add a gondola or tram from the downtown city core of South Lake Tahoe up to the resort. As vice president of planning for Heavenly, Andrew Strain has become intimately acquainted with the assorted regulatory agencies that review the resort’s plans in what he describes as “one of most environmentally regulated landscapes in the country.”

The 1997 master plan, with the access lift as one of its major components, was presented to the U.S. Forest Service, TRPA, the California Water Control Board, Alpine and El Dorado Counties in California, Douglas County in Nevada, and various local jurisdictions. It had been several years in the making, but achieved unanimous approval. The process was completed under the ownership of Kimihito Kamori, and later modified by American Skiing Company to include control of the land at the base terminal.

While the process may have been slow, due to all the agencies involved, the steps were well defined. And that made it possible to find a solution that suited everyone. A gondola from South Lake Tahoe to Heavenly’s terrain met the resort’s goal of providing more two-season activities as well as regulators’ desire to mitigate traffic congestion on Tahoe’s South Shore.

Vermont has had similarly stringent assessment, application and permitting processes ever since 1970, when the state’s Act 250, regulating land use and development became law. At the time, Act 250 created the most stringent state controls on mountain development. Over the years, ski areas and other developers have become accustomed to the hoops they need to jump through, and they know pretty much what they have to do.

When Okemo wanted to pull river water for snowmaking, for example, there was a “long but defined process,” says Ethan Mueller, son of Tim and Diane Mueller, Okemo operators. “It was clear and transparent. We were told, ‘If you do this, you can do that.’” As at Tahoe, having a defined path made navigation easier.


SNODGRASS: BAD-NEWS POSTER CHILD
That defined path is not always there. Ethan Mueller wears the dual hats of director of operations at Crested Butte and vice president of development for Triple Peaks, the parent company for Sunapee, N.H., and Crested Butte, Colo., as well as Okemo. At Crested Butte, the Muellers poured millions into upgrading the mountain and redeveloping the base village. Next, they aimed to add lifts on Snodgrass Mountain, across the valley from the Mt. Crested Butte base.

Snodgrass has been a part of the master plan at Crested Butte for decades. But it has always been controversial, and at the end of a long permitting process, Crested Butte’s plan to develop real estate and the on-mountain terrain was rejected by the Forest Service, and the resort became the poster child for plans gone awry.

At the presumed end of the road to Snodgrass Mountain approval, the process went off track. The original plans for Snodgrass were formulated in the 1970s, before the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) had established the now-familiar NEPA process. Over the decades, the NEPA and Forest Service guidelines for development shifted. And, as Crested Butte found, some of the requirements are ambiguous.

“We thought it was a clear process,” says Mueller. But it wasn’t cut and dried. For example, the resort knew there was need for public support, but there was some question as to what “public support” meant. To make a long story short, after $2 million and more than five years, the Forest Service denied the Muellers’ application for the development of Snodgrass.

In hindsight, Ethan Mueller sees the need to “put a metric” to such applications and for transparency all along. The resort feels that the Forest Service was not as clear as it could have been during the NEPA process. And it seems that the Forest Service itself agrees: As part of the application denial, the local USFS district was told by it Washington superiors “to work with Crested Butte on what can and can’t be done,” Ethan notes.

It’s in everyone’s benefit for the process to be as specific as possible, Mueller believes. “Like us, the majority of resorts want to do things right. We want things to work out for the environment and our communities, but they [the regulators] need to work with us,” he says.

The Muellers continue to believe that the development of Snodgrass Mountain is important to the future of the resort and the community. Triple Peaks is now looking at Snodgrass Mountain options, and Ethan Mueller literally keeps looking at the Snodgrass Mountain proposal, which he uses as his screensaver.


LONG STORIES SHORT
Five years in, Snodgrass is still on training wheels in comparison to some other resorts’ expansions. It took Loon Mountain, N.H., 23 years from conception to completion of South Peak. And Telluride, Colo., proposed an expansion into Prospect Basin (now called Prospect Bowl) at least 15 years before it opened.

In Loon’s case, there were sea changes in the realm of mountain sports, including the advent of snowboarding and advances in lift technology and grooming, by the time the long-anticipated expansion occurred. And the final project was more suited to the state of the industry than it might have been otherwise.

Rick Kelley, president and GM of Loon Mountain, N.H., cautions, “When you enter into a project like this, you need to be in it for the long haul, and you need to be totally committed to seeing it through. When we finally opened South Peak in December 2007, it was not only a huge accomplishment for the Resort, but also for Loon’s supporters and the community. At the time we started this project, it was the largest expansion requiring an EIS to be proposed on Forest Service land in New England in over 20 years. The EIS process had just been updated to include more fact finding earlier to aid in the decision-making process. This included a Joint Review Committee consisting of regulatory agencies, environmental groups and individuals. We initially moved through the process, which resulted in a positive decision. Then, the parties who were unhappy with the decision appealed, lost their appeal and litigated. This lengthened the approval process by approximately eight years. One of the drivers that continued to keep us moving forward was our core group of supporters who were tenacious and unwavering in their support of the resort and of the expansion.”

Telluride’s story is similar. Dave Riley, CEO of Telluride Ski & Golf, cites objections from an environmental group, a lawsuit, and negotiations that “took time” to resolve.

The resort’s plan came at a time when changes in sensibilities and regulations were occurring. Due to those changes, in 2000, the Forest Service asked the resort to update its master plan, which it did, taking what Riley calls “an extraordinary amount of public outreach,” with public meetings and an online survey of different stakeholders in the area. He calls it “front-loading to develop a plan that meets the needs of the community.” As a result, by the time the implementation phase of the Prospect expansion arrived, the project was on the cutting edge of terrain development. “Now, it is held out to be an example of best practices to protect wildlife and wetlands,” Riley says.

Like Mueller, Riley stresses the need for “a high degree of transparency and communication with the Forest Service District Ranger and Forest Supervisor. We try to act on a ‘no surprises’ philosophy, to avoid the trauma often associated with ski area master plans. It takes a lot of work to keep that partnership.”


HAPPY ENDING
Not all projects come under such intense scrutiny. Silverton Mountain, the experts-only backcountry area in southwestern Colorado, a close crow-flight to Telluride, operates on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land that had historically seen a great deal of prospecting and mining activity. The only real objections to the one-lift area came from one Jim Jackson, who held a mining claim in the steep-walled basin that comprises Silverton’s ski terrain. He had made noises in the 1980s about developing a ski area there, but never got his idea off the ground. That didn’t stop him from trying to keep his options open. “He did his best to get the BLM not to give us a permit, and once we got going, to rescind it,” says owner Aaron Brill. In the end, he adds, “Jackson sold Silverton 100 acres inside the valley and walked away.”

BLM may be easier to work with, given that it has historically had a more commercial bent than the Forest Service. For example, when Silverton began using a helicopter for avalanche control on distant terrain rather than an expensive and less accurate Avalauncher, the BLM agreed to permit heli-skiing in the public interest and to offset the costs of the control work.

But BLM is no rubber stamp, either. The agency keeps a tight limit on the number of visitors allowed on the mountain each day. The area’s initial limit in 2002 was for 20 guided-only visitors; that grew to 40 the following season and 80 the year after that. After studying the area for three years, the limit was expanded to 475 unguided visitors in 2005.

As with many other things, size matters. That helps explain why some developments, such as Silverton, experience fewer delays. In fact, some have hardly any delays at all. These tend to involve private land or special situations. For example, when Snowbird wanted to dig a tunnel to provide direct access from existing frontside lifts to the Mineral Basin expansion, it worked with the Salt Lake City water authority. The area first received a conditional use permit and soon thereafter a final permit. Since no building was involved, the process took about eight months.