Snowblog

Will Nonprofits Like Montana’s Turner Mountain Rescue a Bloated, Beleagured Ski Industry?

By Greg Seitz, 1-25-11

	A snowboarder enjoys Bogus Basin, a nonprofit ski hill near Boise. Photo by Flickr user Stupid Dingo.

Ah, the time-honored winter tradition of the West: the ski road trip. Ever since the veterans of the 10th Mountain Division brought the modern ski industry to our country, winter sports types have made an annual ritual of loading the car and pointing it to our region’s alpine areas. Some, like Warren Miller, even made a livelihood from the ski road trip’s mystique. 

As time passed, however, skiing’s development has reached a fork in the road, between a wholesome family activity and a playground for the rich and pampered. The recent decline in resort real estate sales has exposed the Achilles’ heel of operating a ski area: It’s really, really tough to run a ski resort solely with revenue from ticket sales.

As such, high-end resorts are scrambling to attract premium customers (thus real estate sales) with amenities, and smaller ski areas are competing by getting back to basics with a focus on quality of experience for the price.

Along the way, this distinction has opened the door to some interesting potential road-trip themes. A bargain hunter can seek out deals on a road trip of resorts in bankruptcy or foreclosure, finding luxury bargains geared toward increasing cash flow as reorganization proceeds at places like Moonlight Basin, Snowmass and Tamarack.

Or, popular among the Buy Local crowd, is the road trip to smaller ski areas that emphasize great skiing and a laid-back atmosphere; these days such a trip could very well focus on touring community-owned, nonprofit ski areas. 

Nonprofit designation of ski areas like Bridger Bowl, Bogus Basin, Mt. Ashland, Pajarito and Sleeping Giant have made news lately, because they are geared toward community enrichment rather than profit maximization. Instead of paying out dividends to shareholders, all receipts are reinvested in the ski experience.

Also, nonprofit ski areas, whose owners are often listed as education foundations, qualify for grant money. This model, though somewhat contested, has produced results. For example, Bridger Bowl, with two brand new chairlifts, remains debt-free. 

In my stomping grounds of Western Montana, Turner Mountain stands out.  Located 25 miles outside Libby, a town whose economic base has borne the two black eyes of a faltering timber industry and an asbestos-mining legacy, Turner exemplifies community pride.

A couple of friends, my wife and I pointed the minivan to Turner this New Year. After driving about 20 miles up a narrow, ice-packed forest road, Turner presents itself with a full view of its entire 2,100 feet of continuous, steep fall lines. A day of skiing costs $30, or less than one third of a Vail ticket. Having spent our cash in downtown Libby the night before, we paid for our lift tickets by credit card. Luckily, I still had a dollar for hot chocolate, because despite blue skies, the temperature was hovering around zero.

In the parking lot, fewer than a dozen cars spilled skiers, dogs and barbecue grills, the latter in anticipation of the signature Turner Tailgate, where true lowbaggers can troll for a little free lunch. A few more vehicles would arrive throughout the day, but many backcountry trailheads host more cars on a typical weekend.

After a warm-up run, a teenager overheard our group talking about trying to find the good skiing. He pointed us to the Backside, where Turner’s tree skiing really shines. 

With 1,000 acres of skiing on a mere 26 trails, Turner remains mostly forested. Dense lodgepole pine covers almost every square inch that isn’t a cut ski trail, making tree skiing quite the adventure for the first-time visitor. Where the volunteer thinning crews have worked, the trees have been limbed and thinned into patches, making for sustained powder stashes instead of the usual perfectly spaced glades of most ski areas. Turner’s tree skiing gems, by definition, have to be discovered pretty much by accident.

Where the cat track returned us to the main ski trails, the teenager was waiting with his father. They wanted to know how we liked the volunteer thinning crews’ handiwork, an obvious source of pride. That was when Turner Mountain really made an impression on this skier. 

At the end of the day and as we changed out of our ski boots, a man walked a lap around the parking lot, asking each group: “You got everybody with you?” This was the daily mountain sweep. He turned out to be Bruce Zwang, CPA and president of Turner’s board of directors.

A week later, when I contacted Bruce to research this story, he remembered our conversation, our white minivan, the dogs that accompanied us. Bruce told me the decision to operate as a nonprofit was easy because the mountain has always been community-owned—and never made a profit in the first place. In operation since 1961, Turner adopted a nonprofit designation in 2000.

He attributed community pride as the main driver of Turner’s success. With only seven employees, volunteers handle most of the work. In 2001, when Turner replaced its wooden T-bar (the longest in the world) with a chairlift cobbled from three separate double chairs, the project was partially financed through selling business and citizen sponsorship plaques placed on individual chairs and lift towers.

Now, this story is not to bash for-profit ski resorts. Most provide a great experience and the shareholders who accept the risk of investing in a resort arguably should have the incentive of potential future dividends. But, taken to an extreme, industrial skiing can tend to be detrimental to the ski experience itself. Most of us ski for its feeling of freedom, the joy of gliding and moments of weightlessness, not for outdoor hot tubs and Egyptian cotton bathrobes.

The trend of local ski areas adopting nonprofit missions will be one to watch, as isolated markets, aging chairlifts and rising insurance and energy costs show no signs of going away. Many small, for-profit operators like Maverick Mountain, Snow King, White Pine and Antelope Butte hang in the limbo of financial troubles despite loyal customer bases. 

If places like these close, not only do the shareholders lose, so does the skiing public at large. 

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