Sneak Peek of the Week
Colorado cavers, wildlife biologists working to slow the steady march of white-nose syndrome
32
Number of bats detected with white-nose syndrome on Colorado’s Front Range this spring, up from one on the Eastern Plains in 2023
This spring, wildlife biologists found 32 bats on the Front Range with white-nose syndrome, up from one on the Eastern Plains in 2023. And Utah wildlife officials this month reported a first bat with the fungus that causes the syndrome that has killed millions of bats across North America in recent years.
“This is definitely a surge. Imagine Colorado is a big rock sitting on a beach and the waves coming in around it are this disease,” said Daniel Neubaum, the species conservation manager dealing with bats for Colorado Parks and Wildlife. “That’s what we are seeing. We are probably going to see the disease trickle down from the north and I think the western parts of the state will be the last places we detect it in Colorado.”
The Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Region — spanning 17 national forests and seven national grasslands in Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska and most of South Dakota and Wyoming — last month issued a three-year order detailing closures for 88 caves on public land in four states, including 16 caves in Colorado’s White River National Forest. But unlike the year-round closures at caves in the East, all but 11 of the Rocky Mountain caves are closed for part of the year to protect bats during their hibernation and fall swarming. (Swarming is when bats gather for mating and teaching young bats how to set up for hibernation.)
Since 2006, white-nose syndrome has been detected in bats in 40 states and nine Canadian provinces. Back East, the rapid spread of the deadly disease has led federal land managers to close most all caves and mines to all public access year-round.
Protecting access for the vibrant caver community and state wildlife officials is critical for Forest Service officials as they track the spread of White Nose Syndrome in the mountainous West, where bats are more dispersed and tend to hibernate in smaller groups in cracks, crevices and mine shafts versus the big caves out in eastern states, where they hang out in the thousands.
Cavers arguably have the most to lose than any other humans when it comes to cave closures. But they have been instrumental in helping state and federal wildlife biologists track the spread of the Pd fungus as well as detail the locations where bats roost and hibernate. Cavers often help biologists reach remote caves as well.
“Cavers are fascinated by curiosity and learning and that’s tempered by conservation. We don’t want to destroy something we love,” said Jennifer Zedalis, the chair of the Colorado Cave Survey, which represents seven regional grottos, or caving groups in the state that are members of the National Speleological Society. The Colorado Cave Survey works with landowners and federal agencies to protect cave resources and access.
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The Playground
Vail Resorts plans layoffs as revenue flatlines
44,900
Seasonal employees at Vail Resorts 42 ski areas
Blaming stagnant revenue and a declining stock price on poor snowfall last season, Vail Resorts last week announced it was planning layoffs.
The largest resort operator in North America has grown from 10 ski areas to 42 resorts in the past decade, doubling its workforce to 7,600 year-round employees and 44,900 seasonal workers. As its stock hovers at a four-year low and fiscal 2024 revenues were even with the previous year, the company is planning a “resource efficiency transformation plan” that includes laying off 14% of its corporate workforce and less than 1% of its on-the-ground resort workers. The company said only 0.2% of its frontline ski area workers would lose their jobs.
“No matter how big or small the impact of position eliminations, we do not take lightly any decision that affects our team members,” Vail Resorts chief executive Kirsten Lynch said in a Sept. 24 filing by the company with the Securities Exchange Commission.
Vail Resorts last week told investors that visits to its North American resorts for the 2023-24 season fell to 17.6 million, down from a record 19.4 million for 2022-23. The company said snowfall at its western North American ski areas for the 2023-24 season declined 28% compared with the previous season and was 44% below its 10-year average.
But with more than 70% of its lift revenue coming from passes purchased before the season, the company reported an 11% increase in season pass revenue. Skiers spent more on ski school and mountain dining, offsetting declines from fewer visitors. Total mountain revenue for the company’s fiscal 2024 landed at $2.5 billion, which is about even with the previous year. The company told investors to expect revenues closer to $3 billion for the 2024-25 season with earnings between $838 million and $894 million. That’s a yield of around 29%.
The company reported $825 million in earnings for its fiscal 2024, which ended July 31. That is below what analysts expected, despite a warning from Lynch in June that earnings would be lower than what the company had projected in January and March. The depressed earnings have been a drag on the company’s stock. After peaking in late 2021 around $370 a share, Vail Resorts stock has traded for less than $180 a share since June.
The company told investors it planned to spend $214 million to $219 million at its resorts for the 2024-25 season, which is a similar investment to the previous season. The upgrades this year include $13 million to expand its new My Epic Gear rental program, which debuted for the 2023-24 season at Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge and Keystone, offering delivery of daily or seasonal rental gear. The company is not planning significant capital upgrades at any of its five Colorado ski areas for the 2024-25 ski season, following investment in new chairlifts and terrain expansions at Vail, Beaver Creek, Keystone and Breckenridge.
The workforce reduction will save the company $100 million by the end of the 2025-26 season.
The Guide
New village plan at Vail illustrates resort industry rejection of real estate development
The Town of Vail, East West Partners and Vail Resorts on Tuesday announced a unique deal to develop a fourth base village at the Vail ski area where the ski area operator once planned a luxury village with condos and hotel rooms.
The partnership deal — which will certainly include lots of workforce housing — settles the legal fight between the town and resort operator that pitted the need for housing against protecting habitat for bighorn sheep. Vail Resorts has agreed to drop its appeal of the town’s April 2022 condemnation and eminent domain acquisition of the 23-acre property in East Vail where Vail Resorts planned housing for 165 of its employees.
The Vail council late Tuesday unanimously approved the partnership plan, launching what will be a long planning process with many public meetings to hammer out details for developing the 12-acre parcel, which is home to a maintenance yard, very tired office and commercial spaces, a former gas station and an employee parking lot on the Frontage Road along Gore Creek.
It’s not the first time the Vail council has approved a major project on the resort company’s West Lionshead property. In 2012, the council wrapped five years of planning that included more than 80 public meetings to approve Vail Resorts’ plan for hundreds of condos, hotel rooms, a commercial village and parking garage at the project called Ever Vail.
All the town’s approvals for Ever Vail expired in 2020. Vail Resorts was a different company in the late 1990s and early 2000s when it first planned Ever Vail. Back then, ski resort operators were focused on village building and selling slopeside condos. The Great Recession decimated those companies — like American Skiing Co., the owner of Steamboat ski area, and Intrawest, the owner of Copper Mountain and operator of Winter Park ski area. Vail Resorts in 2008 launched the Epic Pass and began a transformative transition away from real estate development. The idea was to avoid the debt and volatility of real estate and deploy third-party builders — like East West Partners — to handle the risks of development.
Condo sales in ski villages in the early 2000s contributed half the annual revenue to companies like Intrawest. Today, real estate accounts for less than half a percent of Vail Resorts’ total revenue, which last year reached $2.5 billion, most of which came from selling Epic passes.
Today, Vail Resorts has no appetite for buying land, planning residential and commercial projects and building on that land. That process requires large amounts of capital, high debt and is susceptible to the whims of a global economy. Vail Resorts knows skiing and the company has pumped more than $2 billion into its ski hills in the past decade with hopes that skiers will buy season passes.
“In general, Wall Street and investors in the greater travel-leisure space prefer ‘asset lite’ types of businesses,” said Patrick Scholes, the managing director of lodging and leisure equity research for Truist Securities.
Wall Street appears reluctant to give high valuations to hospitality companies that own a lot of real estate, and Scholes suspects Vail Resorts “would like to stay away from that scenario.”
Expect to hear lots more about the West Lionshead project as the country’s largest resort operator and one of the world’s top resort developers team up on a new-school village project that will be a model for how busy ski hills balance access, housing, parking and, of course, high-dollar condos. The parcel bordered by Interstate 70 and the busiest ski hill in the country — and bisected by the Frontage Road and Gore Creek — has been targeted for development for decades, so hopefully plans for West Lionshead will not stir the fiery local opposition that derailed the East Vail housing project.
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Winter sports participation hits a record in 2023-24
30.3 million
Number of snowsports participants in 2023-24
For the first time ever, more than 30 million Americans went skiing, snowboarding, sledding, snowshoeing, snow biking and snowmobiling last season.
While the post-pandemic surge in snowsports slowed in the winter of 2023-24, the continued growth in participation bodes well for an industry that has been fighting for decades to lure new participants and praying the pandemic-bump was not a one-off anomaly.
The SnowSports Industries America trade group — or SIA — joined nine major sports and fitness trade associations in an annual 18,000 person online survey. Last year SIA’s participation study counted 28.9 million Americans participating in snowsports in the winter of 2022-23. This year, the number crept past 30.3 million, driven largely by skiers and snowboarders.
Before the pandemic, participation in snowsports sat around 25 million a year. After a huge wave of newcomers and old-timers returning to their wintery sports spiked participation numbers in 2022 and 2023, the industry fretted a downturn as people returned to their regular lives — and screens — after exploring the outdoors in the pandemic years.
Young males in the 18-24 demographic kept the numbers high in 2023-24. And there has been a strong showing of new arrivals in snowsports. Many of them are people of color, fueling hope that outreach by snowsports businesses is finally working. About 13% of winter sports participants for the 2023-24 season were Black and 17% were Hispanic. Those are all-time highs for both groups. The number of whites playing outside actually fell.
The largest demographic in winter sports is under 18, making up 29% of the 30.3 million participants. Next is people ages 25 to 34, followed by 35-44 and then 18-24. The SIA report shows 59% are male and 41% are female. And, not surprisingly, the most persistent trend in winter sports remains strong, with 32% of the participants reporting income of $100,000 or more.
The driver of winter sports is skiing. Always has been. And as skiers age, record numbers are leaving the sport. In the 2023-24 season, 6.2 million people who regularly go skiing said they were done with the sport. That decline was barely offset by first-timers — 2.2 million — and skiers coming back after a season or two off — 4.1 million. SIA estimates there are 13.3 million skiers in the U.S. That’s down from 14.8 million in 2018-19.
Visits to Colorado ski areas fell to 14 million in 2023-24, down from the previous season’s all-time high of 14.8 million. All six regions tracked by the National Ski Areas Association showed declines in visitation in 2023-24, with 60.4 million visits, down 5 million from the previous season. Both of those dips reflect a recognition that ski traffic is returning to normal after banner years in the post-pandemic bounce.
Good old snowboarders once again are saving snowsports, just as they did in the ’90s when skiing needed a youthful jolt of energy. In 2018 there were 7.8 million snowboarders and now there are 9.8 million.
Those six seasons of growth are reflected in every other category of snowsports, with healthy upticks in the number of people going cross-country skiing, snow tubing and sledding, alpine touring and snowboard touring in the backcountry and fat-tire biking on snow. And each of those participants in winter sports — other than skiing — are logging more days than ever before on snow.
— j
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