It certainly isn’t
obvious when you arrive at a ski resort in the West, but nearly all
are located primarily on publicly owned lands. It is, to use the
U.S. Forest Service’s pet phrase, a “partnership.” The
federal government provides most of the land; the ski area
operators run the lifts and cafeterias.
In theory, this
partnership benefits the general public. In practice, many ski
areas have been akin to country clubs. The resorts cater to the
“swells,” meaning most skiers are as white as the snow they ski on.
But if ski areas hope to continue growing, this rich
vanilla ice cream needs a new flavor. Population demographics are
shifting rapidly. To justify biting off more chunks of public lands
in bigger-means-better expansions, ski areas must commit to truly
catering to the general public and not just to the well-heeled
among the fixed-heeled. Business as usual cannot be justified.
It’s not that racial and ethnic bigotry lace the
ski world. In several decades around ski resorts, I heard very few
slurs. Even so, darker faces were so rare as to provoke
double-takes. During the last ski season, minorities constituted 13
percent of skiers and snowboarders in the United States but 32
percent of the population. The gulf is even greater at the high-end
destination resorts of the West.
Money is one major
reason. Because minorities, with the exception of Asian-Americans,
earn significantly less than whites, ski areas naturally attract
whites. Even when lift tickets are relatively cheap, food,
transportation and other expenses add up. Anecdotally, the
threshold to skiing would seem to be a household income of $50,000,
although the per capita annual income of skiers at some resorts in
the West is above $100,000.
More important is the
cultural divide, one compounded by the innate difficulty of
learning to ski. The learning curve is already so high that of
every three people who try skiing, only two stick with it. This is
not bowling. Suddenly gaining feet that are five, six, or seven
feet long is a startling experience, but the real weirdness comes
with the new sensation of sliding downhill. What to an experienced
skier looks like a hill in Kansas, seems, from the perspective of a
beginner, more like the slope of the Grand Tetons.
Add
the experience of being the only Latino or the only
African-American, and you can imagine how intimidating skiing could
be. Imagine being Caucasian and going to a hip-hop nightclub of
black people to try open-microphone night.
But
demographics are shifting rapidly. Unlike Baby Boomers or even Gen
X, the new generation of about 22 and younger comes in decidedly
more shades of color. If the ski industry hopes to hang onto the
coattails of Echo Boom Generation, it must extend a hand to groups
it is unfamiliar with.
This is being done most easily
with Asian-Americans, whose higher education levels correlate with
higher income, which is what ski areas care most about.
California’s Northstar, for example, which hosts special
events centered on the Chinese New Year, has been able to convert
younger Asian-Americans from the Bay Area into regular snowboarding
visitors.
Near Los Angeles, a small ski area called
Mountain High is doing great business, catering to a rainbow
coalition of hip-hop snowboarders and skiers. Mountain High’s
marketing efforts begin on the beaches, where their patrons spend
summers.
Even at the swankest resorts of the Rocky
Mountains, ski areas are extending invitations to Latinos and other
groups. Vail Resorts Inc., for example, this year is giving out
2,000 lift ticket and ski-rental instruction packages designed to
introduce minorities to snow sliding at the company’s four
Colorado ski areas. Meanwhile, ski area operators are talking about
how to get more faces of color in the ski industry’s front
lines, not just in the kitchens.
Whites are likely to
remain overwhelmingly dominant on the slopes of Aspen, Bachelor and
Park City and other Western destination resorts for a long time
yet. Big bucks remain the ticket of admission for these
full-fledged vacation experiences, and that means mostly white baby
boomers. Hispanics last winter accounted for just 3 percent of
skier visits, but nearly 14 percent of the population.
Even so, changes are on the way. This winter, Tiger Woods bought a
lot in Jackson, Wyo. Can you imagine what will happen when ski
racing gets its own Tiger Woods or, even more significantly,
somebody by the name of Rodriguez or Trujillo?
Allen Best is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a
service of High Country News(hcn.org). He lives
and writes in the Denver area of
Colorado.
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