The Outsider .. The long-lasting impact of the Park City patroller strike ...Middle East

Plus: CO’s first avalanche death amid surge of close calls, the outdoors as sober solace, Biden passes on Dolores River monument, Eagle’s ice castles

Jason Blevins

Outdoors/Business Reporter

Sneak Peek of the Week

Peeking into the Park City patroller strike. What did it cost Vail Resorts?

“If it were me, I’d never give Vail another dollar.”

— entertainment industry critic Bob Lefsetz

$375 million

Decline in Vail Resorts stock value since Park City Mountain patrollers went on strike

We don’t yet know the specifics of the new contract between Vail Resorts and its unionized ski patrollers at Park City Mountain, but we do know that the country’s largest ski resort operator certainly endured some blows in a storm of bad PR during the 12-day strike that ended Wednesday.

While patrollers collected more than $300,000 in an online fundraising campaign, Vail Resorts stock price remains near a five-year low, pummeled by widespread news reports and often-fiery social media posts showing long lift lines as the largest ski area in North America struggled to open more than a quarter of its terrain during the first ski patroller strike in decades.

While Vail Resorts is often the scapegoat for all that ails the increasingly consolidating resort industry, the tsunami of criticism overwhelming the company in the past week is unprecedented.

The company’s stock price — traded under the MTN ticker — has fallen by $10 a share since the 200 patrollers at Park City Mountain Resort went on strike — a decline of about $375 million in stock value considering the company’s 37.5 million outstanding shares. The Park City patrollers said the company had agreed to most of the contract issues but stalled on raising starting pay by roughly $2 to $23 an hour.

Park City chief operating officer Deidra Walsh said in a Jan. 6 guest editorial in The Park Record that the negotiations were about more than $2.

“First, please know: We care deeply about the work of our ski patrol; we have invested a lot in them and will continue to. Second, they are asking for much more than $2/ hour. In fact, on the day they went on strike, their demands equaled $7/hour more,” Walsh wrote, urging respect for strike-breaking patrollers the company had recruited from its other ski areas. “Finally, you should know that we have come to the table with compelling offers.”

The Park City patrol union on Thursday posted on Instagram saying the 10-month negotiations with Vail Resorts and the 12-day strike resulted in a contract that “achieved our goals.” The contract increased starting wages for Park City Mountain patrollers by $2 an hour and resulted in an average increase of $4 an hour for the union’s 200 members, with the most tenured ski patrollers getting an average increase of $7.75 an hour.

The deluge of bad press has certainly been more costly than increased paychecks for ski patrollers. How much more? That’s hard to say. Park City Mountain surely saw some declines in on-mountain spending during the strike. (The company suspended walk-up ticket sales Dec. 30.) But analysts who watch Vail Resorts worry the impact of the strike will come later this year when it’s time to buy tickets and passes for the 2025-26 season, with declines in lift ticket revenue potentially eclipsing payroll costs.

“We see the bigger risks coming from guests not renewing their Epic passes, not returning to PCMR next holiday season, and even more so from any wage increases to the PCMR patrollers possibly/eventually flowing through to hourly wages for employees at other/all MTN resorts,” Patrick Scholes, an analyst who watches Vail Resorts for Truist Securities, wrote to his investors in a Jan. 6 email. “While we do not take any sides on the contract negotiations, optically from a public relations perspective, it is not a good look for MTN to be playing hardball on an extra two dollars an hour in wages, to $23 from $21, when single day ski passes are currently going for over $300.”

Vail Resorts sold 2.3 million advance-purchase — and nonrefundable — lift tickets and season passes for the 2024-25 season, reaching the company’s goal of collecting more than 65% of its $1.4 billion in lift ticket revenue (and 75% of its visitation) from advanced sales of Epic Pass lift tickets and season passes. Part of the strategy to compel skiers to buy early includes pricing walk-up lift ticket prices above $300.

“If it were me, I’d never give Vail another dollar, I’d never vacation at one of their resorts again,” entertainment industry analyst Bob Lefsetz wrote in his influential Lefsetz Letter on Jan. 5.

Jim Burkett seems to be leaning that way. The vacationer from Tucson, Arizona, spent “thousands and thousands” on multiday lift tickets to Park City Mountain for his group of 15 family and friends over the holidays. They waited in lift lines more than they skied.

“And we got tired of skiing the same runs all day,” Burkett said in an interview with The Sun. “I don’t really want to throw stones at Vail when everyone else is piling on but this is something that you can’t ignore. I sent emails to their customer service and they didn’t really handle my complaint. It makes me wonder about being a Vail customer in the future.”

On Wednesday, freshly unionized ski patrollers at Keystone ski area met with Vail Resorts administrators to negotiate a new contract with a company that swells to 55,000 employees in the peak of ski season. Like their Park City colleagues, the Keystone patrollers are seeking increased pay and benefits to help them better manage life in Summit County, where the average home price is around $1 million. The 58 ski patrollers at Alterra Mountain Co.’s Arapahoe Basin were scheduled to vote on forming a union Wednesday and Saturday this week.

Bill Rock, the head of mountain resorts for Vail Resorts, in a note Wednesday to employees, said the pay agreement with Park City Mountain patrollers “is consistent with our company’s wage structure for all patrollers, unionized and non-unionized, while accounting for the unique terrain and avalanche complexity of Park City Mountain.”

The company proposed a similar wage format for Keystone patrollers during a long day of negotiations Wednesday, said Jake Randall, a Keystone ski patroller representing the patroller union there.

The Park City Mountain patrollers “set the precedent for other patrols,” Randall said, noting there are nine other outstanding contract issues that have been unaddressed by the company “for months now. We’ll see how this ‘mountain complexity’ incentive pans out for the rest of us.”

One thing that sits in the craw of unionized workers at Vail Resorts is the company’s focus on buying back shares of its stock, a move that increases shareholder value by reducing the total number of outstanding shares, which increases earnings per share. Since 2008, the company has spent $1.1 billion to repurchase 9.4 million shares of its stock, but in the past two years the buyback plan has picked up steam. Since April 2023, the company has spent $670 million to repurchase shares. In September, the company’s board authorized Vail Resorts to buy back an additional 1.1 million shares in the coming years.

In a letter sent to Vail Resorts CEO Kirsten Lynch on Dec. 31, unionized ski patrollers at Breckenridge, Crested Butte, Keystone and Park City said the unions “remain committed to the success of Vail Resorts.” But the patrollers said the company’s roughly $1.6 billion in stock buybacks and cash dividends in the past three years “could be more equitably shared between the investors who passively accumulate wealth and the workforce whose labor make this financial prosperity possible.”

Welcome to The Outsider, the outdoors and mountain newsletter from The Colorado Sun. Keep reading for more exclusive news on the industry from the inside out.

If you’re reading this newsletter but not signed up for it, here’s how to get it sent directly to your inbox.

Send feedback and tips to [email protected].

The Outsider has a podcast! Veteran reporter Jason Blevins covers the industry from the inside out, plus indulges in the fun side of being outdoors in our beautiful state.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Breaking Trail

First avalanche fatality of the season as incidents spike

2

Number of avalanche fatalities in the 2023-24 ski season

The Colorado Avalanche Information Center on Tuesday reported the first avalanche death of a backcountry traveler this winter. The 57-year-old skier – Donald Moden, Jr., an experienced backcountry climber and former member of the Ouray Mountain Rescue Team from Ridgway who was skiing alone – was killed in a slide on a northwestern-facing close around 11,300 feet in an area known as Bollywood east of U.S. 550 on Red Mountain Pass.

Avalanche danger spiked in the last week of December and early January as new snow blanketed the state, piling up on weak layers that formed in the dry weeks of mid-December. In the weeks since Christmas, the avalanche center has fielded reports of 10 backcountry travelers being swept down slopes in slides, including a snowmobiler Jan. 3 near Shrine Pass, a snowboarder in East Vail outside Vail ski area Dec. 31 and a skier near Peak 5 west of Breckenridge on Dec. 31.

The avalanche center has recorded 21 backcountry travelers caught in 19 avalanches since Nov. 9. Seven of those travelers were buried in avalanche debris. Those numbers through early January are not that different from previous seasons.

There have been lots of lucky backcountry travelers so far this season. Just like last winter, which was exceptionally busy for investigators at the avalanche center but there were only two avalanche fatalities. In the past 20 years, there has been only one season — 2016-17 with below-average snowfall across the state — when so few backcountry travelers were killed in avalanches.

The avalanche center — with an extra $1 million a year from the Keep Colorado Wild Pass — has revamped its arsenal of forecasting tools, but you aren’t going to see the bosses at the avalanche center connecting the decline in fatal avalanches last winter with their new focus on dynamic and regional forecasting, which is helping backcountry travelers better assess risks and hazards. (That’s a bit jinx-y in the elusive realm of avalanche safety.)

But I will. While each avalanche death is a tragedy, it’s impressive to see largely stagnant annual fatality statistics alongside robust growth in backcountry traffic. Avalanche hazards and incidents can change in a blink, but it’s not a stretch to link flatlined fatality numbers with increased efforts by avalanche scientists across the West to better educate and inform backcountry travelers.

The Playground

Helping divorce the outdoors from booze

“If we help that one person stay one more day sober then we did it. It’s worth it, all the money, all the time, all the effort.”

— Nick Pearson, founder of Sober Outdoors

The alcohol-free movement is gaining steam as more people are finding an imbalance between what booze offers and what it takes.

Colorado Sun reporter Erica Breunlin recently caught up with hikers scaling the snowy St. Mary’s snowfield as part of an outing with Sober Outdoors, a growing group that provides support for people exploring good times without alcohol. The nonprofit offers outdoor outings with accessible gear as well as presentations by athletes and adventurers who have found the sometimes challenging path to sobriety eased with outdoor fun.

“Now with sobriety and nature, I get to find that peace,” Sober Outdoors founder Nick Pearson told Erica. “It’s at the top of a mountain. And I get calm and I find comfort in just life and being in my own skin and feeling like a real human being in this journey of whatever this life is that we’re all living. I got to see that when I stopped drinking. I got to see how beautiful it was, and I wouldn’t have been able to do that had I not been to the backcountry.”

Sober Outdoors has hosted about 800 people at nearly 40 events since 2022 and new chapters are opening in Oregon and Massachusetts.

The outdoors industry has a seemingly intractable connection to booze. The beers flow at trade shows. Ski towns are hotbeds for accomplished athletes who charge just as hard at the bar.

The decades-long union of skiing and drinking has prodded a revamp of the 1962 Skier Responsibility Code to clearly state that skiers should not schuss under the influence of drugs or alcohol. (Which overlaps, it should be noted, with a growing array of places to get a drink on most ski mountains.)

Sober Outdoors is one of many groups aiming to shift the party paradigm a bit by connecting a growing community of teetotalers with the solace of the outdoors.

“It makes me realize how small of a person I am and how much out there (that there) is to explore and how much opportunity I have to become the person I want to be,” said Seamus Cronin, a former beer brewer who is a regular at Sober Outdoors events. “Those moments where you can actually hear silence, that’s me going to church right there.”

>> Click here to read Erica’s story

The Guide

Biden’s monumental salvos skip Colorado

“The national political reality is what it is.”

— Dolores Canyon National Monument supporter Scott Braden

President Joe Biden this week designated two new national monuments in California protecting 848,000 acres from drilling, mining and energy development. Absent from Biden’s departing designations was anything in Colorado.

That means the push to create a 390,000-acre national monument around the Dolores River in Mesa and Montrose counties is, for now, dead.

The controversial campaign for a national monument protecting the canyons on the lower Dolores River before it rolls into the Colorado River in Utah is now switching gears into support for legislation that would establish a National Conservation Area around the river.

There is already a National Conservation Area proposal — proposed by Colorado’s U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet in 2022 — that would increase protections for about 68,000 acres around the southern Dolores River in Dolores, Montezuma and San Miguel counties. Mesa County, which opposes the call for a 390,000-acre national monument, in April surveyed residents and crafted a counter proposal for a nearly-30,000-acre northern Dolores Canyon National Conservation Area.

“We still support a monument but we are happy to come to the table to discuss legislative alternatives like an NCA,” said Scott Braden, whose Colorado Wildlands Project is among 13 conservation groups backing the monument plan. “Mesa and Montrose counties have shown they are serious about wanting to come to the table and compromise on an NCA.”

Ice Castle wonderlands in Colorado

The dozen-plus ice artists arrived on the banks of the Eagle River in October. They started with icicles, growing them by the thousands by mid-November. Then those icy fangs were assembled just so, along with trickling flows as the temps dropped.

The resulting winter wonderland by the Eagle County Fairgrounds is an icy landscape of towers, sculptures, cascades, tunnels, thrones and slides, all embedded with glowing LED lights. It’s a real-life snowscape reminiscent of the lair of Bumble, the Abominable Snow Monster of the North.

The Ice Castles installation in Eagle is the second for Colorado, joining Cripple Creek west of Colorado Springs. The Utah-based Ice Castles — founded in 2011 by a dad who built a winter playground for his kids in their front yard — opened an installation in Cripple Creek last winter as well as in Minnesota and New Hampshire.

The Ice Castles display will run into March at the Eagle and Cripple Creek locations. Get tickets at icecastles.com.

— j

The Trust Project. Read our policies.

Corrections & Clarifications

Notice something wrong? The Colorado Sun has an ethical responsibility to fix all factual errors. Request a correction by emailing [email protected].

Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( The Outsider .. The long-lasting impact of the Park City patroller strike )

Also on site :

• What will the IMF and World Bank do in the latest economic crisis?
• Doctor Who Boss Shares the Unusual Note He Got About Psychological Thriller Featuring a Deaf Character
• Miss Manners: His driving was terrifying. Was I wrong to ask him to slow down?