Ski Resort Ad Bursts Holiday Bubble

By Bob Berwyn, 12-16-07

	Caption: More awesome than the Taj Mahal! Photo by Bob Berwyn

All is well in Summit County — well, almost all. The dining room table is covered with holiday snow globes and mountains of Christmas confectionary, including enough chocolate-dipped pretzels to feed a small army. There’s a multi-hued gingerbread house with a Paul Bunyanesque-ski figurine and a Hawaiian Hula girl shaking her grass skirt beside a candy cane fire pit. Our somewhat whimsical and psychedelic ski chalet was the creative brainstorm of my nine-year-old son, Dylan, and my girlfriend, Leigh, who poured her heart and soul into making the season festive and bright. Along with instigating a three-day baking marathon, she put up with neighborhood kids dropping in for cookie-decorating visits and extreme nighttime sledding sessions — as long as I kept the Guinness flowing freely.

Outside, it’s a winter wonderland. The snow at our resorts is about as good as it gets this time of year, with base depths ranging around 30 inches and new terrain opening nearly every day. The backcountry is going off, too. The generous and surprisingly stable early season snowpack means powderhounds are happy. All in all, life is good.

So why complain about an ad in a ski magazine? I suppose I’d have to give the same answer George Leigh Mallory gave when he was asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest: “Because it’s there.”

Here’s how it went. I walked across the street the other day to check the mail. In amongst the holiday catalogues (It’s getting late, order now!) was the new issue of SKIING magazine. I started to flip through the pages before I even made it back inside, drawn by the vintage 1975 cover photo of Mark Jensen executing a fully extended backscratcher. That’s my era! That’s when I caught a serious case of ski fever that seems to burn hotter each season, despite what some would say is my cynical attitude about the current state of the snowsports industry.

I didn’t have to venture too far into the magazine to find a reason to gripe.

Spread across the inside of the cover and the first page was an ad for Vail, the giant resort that many people — myself included — love to hate. To be sure, there’s little that compares with the famed resort’s back bowls on a classic Colorado powder day, and they’ve certainly figured out the business of skiing to the benefit of local businesses and company shareholders.

But even when I’m skiing there on perfect day with friends, I can never shake the lingering feeling that they haven’t quite grasped the concept of too much of a good thing. They can’t ever seem to say enough is enough.

Picture the ad. Shot from across the valley somewhere above the Gore Range, probably in a helicopter, it shows the full spread of the front side of Vail Mountain.

So far, so good.

Then there’s the caption above the photo.

And you thought the Great Barrier Reef was “AWESOME.”

In smaller font beneath: Then you plunged into Vail’s Front Side.

On the following page comes the punch line: There’s no comparison.

“Hmmm,” I thought to myself. “What are they saying?”

Feeling a little put off by the generous helping of hubris. I tried to give the copywriters the benefit of the doubt.

“Maybe by saying, “There’s no comparison,” they’re admitting that the Great Barrier Reef is an unmatched wonder of the natural world,” I mumbled to myself, shaking the snow off my Sorels.

“Naaah, they’re clearly implying that Vail Mountain is way cooler than a living ecosystem that’s hundreds of miles long and encompasses an incredible variety of marine life, all of which is in mortal danger because of global warming,” I concluded.

It’s as if I compared our little gingerbread house to the Taj Mahal, I thought.

I brought the magazine inside, eager to show the ad to Leigh, who was dipping a few more marshmallows in a vat of melted chocolate. She visited the reef a year ago and it just so happens that we had a conversation about it the night before, so I wanted her feedback.

“It’s really disturbing when there’s a comparison between a natural world wonder and a man-made ski area,” she said.

Leigh is definitely tuned in to nature, but she is not a screamin’ greenie by any stretch of the imagination. So for better or worse, her reaction reinforced my own perception of the ad as inappropriate at best, and a travesty at worst.

It’s not a big deal, I know, and I learned long ago not to take these things too seriously. But I really do think Vail can do better by staying on a more realistic level when it comes to advertising. So I’m curious to hear from New West readers. Any thoughts on truth in ski area advertising? Should I just shrug of the Vail ad as a futile exercise in hyperbole? Is it a simple case of delusions of grandeur? Or is there something more serious and sinister going on here? Click the comment link below and let us know what you think.