Outdoors/Business Reporter
Sneak Peek of the Week
Silverton Mountain snowboarders prove boards as efficient — even superior — guiding tools, upsetting decades of skiing guide history
SILVERTON — The skiers are struggling a bit. The snow in the trees is punchy, collapsing beneath skis. It’s intimidating to carry the speed needed to float through the mashed-potatoes snow.
“One of my jobs as a guide is to help you become better skiers,” says snowboarder Kyle Mack, a Silverton Mountain guide who won Olympic Big Air silver in the 2018 Winter Games in South Korea. “That’s what we are doing right now. Becoming better skiers.”
The rogue ski hill at the end of the road was built by snowboarders. The single-lift, expert-only area features some of the steepest lift-served skiing in North America. Guides shepherd skiers for most of the season and helicopters ferry guided skiers deep into the San Juans. And nearly a third of those guides are on snowboards, an uncommonly high ratio for backcountry and guided operations.
Silverton Mountain is a siren song for snowboarders. Some of the best riders in the world work at the ski area. The yellow-jacketed guides have proven snowboards are a viable guiding tool, ending decades of ski-only dominance in the insular guiding world.
“There’s a stereotype, almost, that snowboarders can’t do this sort of work of guiding and patrolling and avalanche control,” says Silverton Mountain guide Rob Roof, his Silverton-made Venture snowboard dangling from the double chair. “I feel like we’ve shown that it can be done.”
Silverton Mountain guides are a different breed. In the morning, before the guests arrive, they are out hunting avalanches, hurling explosives and cutting slopes to reduce the threat of a big slide. Then they come and connect with a group of guests — most of them skiers — for a day spent dodging avalanches.
“Those are two very different mentalities — patrolling and guiding. It’s such a rare thing,” says Silverton Mountain guide Skylar Holgate, who joined the ski area 23 years ago and grew up snowboarding in the San Juans.
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In Their Words
Turbulence at Purgatory as resort trims costs
$900,000
Spending Purgatory needs to cut by the end of April as part of a refinancing plan
It’s a new age for ski resort operators. Every move is dissected and analyzed on social media. Once-quiet maneuvers are broadcast globally. Internal communications are posted on the internet.
“It’s super frustrating. We show trust with our workers and they break that trust,” said James Coleman, the owner of Purgatory ski area outside Durango. “I guess there will always be bad apples.”
In recent weeks, the managers at Purgatory have sent memos to department heads asking them to send seasonal workers home, deploy full-timers on the ground and slash spending. The memos say the resort needs to shave $900,000 in expenses by the end of April, a cut of roughly $14,000 a day at the ski area 25 miles from Durango.
“I know this is a shock but it shouldn’t be a surprise,” reads one email forwarded to The Sun. “We’ve all seen the writing on the wall. This is the world we must live in now to create the world we want to live in later.”
Coleman and his team, which oversees more than a dozen ski and golf resorts in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah and Chile, are refinancing a loan and “trying to maximize the success of that refinance,” he said.
The cost-cutting is “what every ski area does when you go through the type of winter we are having,” said Purgatory General Manager Dave Rathbun, a resort industry veteran who has worked in management at Stratton and Killington ski areas in Vermont, Copper Mountain and Winter Park in Colorado, Sugar Bowl in California and Oregon’s Mount Bachelor. “We have to balance our expenses and our revenue. Any lender is going to look at current situations and make judgments about what interest rate they are going to charge. What we are doing is ski area 101.”
>> Click over to The Sun on Friday to read this story
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The Playground
National Park Service hosted record visitation in 2024, but don’t expect to hear that during workforce slashing
331.9 million
National Park Service visits in 2024, an all-time high
The National Park Service logged a record 331.9 million visits in 2024, besting a visitation high set in 2016. But don’t expect to hear about that from the agency as it endures layoffs and facility closures.
Colorado played a starring role in that record, logging 7.33 million visits at its 13 properties. Rocky Mountain National Park remains one of the most trafficked national parks in the country, ranking as the fifth busiest with 4.15 million visits. That’s down slightly from 2023 and slightly below the park’s 10-year average.
The latest visitation report released last week showing a 2% increase over 2023 lands as the Trump administration fires at least 1,000 employees with the National Park Service and thousands more with the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. The administration’s cuts include halting spending for the agencies and canceling leases for buildings used by land managers. (The list of possible cancellations for leased National Park Service buildings included the headquarters of the Natural Resources Stewardship and Science Directorate in Fort Collins.)
The New York Times last week said an internal memo at the National Park Service told agency managers to not promote the record-setting visitation numbers in news releases or social media posts.
“The National Park Service just reported the highest visitation in its history, as the administration conducts massive firings and threatens to close visitor centers and public safety facilities,” Kristen Brengel, the head of public affairs for the National Parks Conservation Association said in a statement. “It’s a slap in the face to the hundreds of millions of people who explored our parks last year and want to keep going back. Americans love their national parks; these cuts do not have public support.”
The Guide
Visits drop, but revenues are up for Vail Resorts, which is not showing a financial impact from the Park City patrol strike
Visits to Vail Resorts’ 39 ski areas in North America and Europe are down so far this season but lift ticket revenue is up. The largest resort operator in North America told investors this week that even with a 2.5% decline in visits so far this season compared with last, it harvested $1.1 billion in November, December and January, delivering $246 million in income to the resort company, up from $219 million in the same quarter last year.
Vail Resorts reported this week that the critical second quarter that ended Jan. 31 delivered $645 million in lift ticket revenue, most of that gleaned from skiers who bought 2.3 million season passes and advanced-purchased lift tickets before the season began.
The company expects resort earnings for its fiscal 2025 year to fall between $841 million and $877 million with net income between $257 million and $309 million by the end of July. That’s the same guidance provided last fall, before sporadic snowfall and a high-profile ski patrol strike at its Park City Mountain Resort challenged the company.
That strike was a common theme among investors this week as they questioned Vail Resorts CEO Kirsten Lynch and chief financial officer Angela Korch.
Lynch repeatedly told the investors the company “did not deliver the guest experience we wanted to” at Park City during the 12-day ski patrol strike, which left the resort unable to open terrain during heavy snowfall over the December holidays, triggering long lift lines. The company offered Park City guests discounts on next year’s passes and lift tickets.
“We’re very fortunate to have a passionate guest base. And we’re not always perfect. I think it’s key for us to acknowledge when things don’t go the way that we had hoped and make sure that we’re taking action to address those things and there are challenges that we face,” said Lynch, who noted that holiday guest surveys show much happier skiers at the company’s other resorts this season.
Vail Resorts has $488 million in cash and $1.2 billion in available credit. The company spent $20 million in the second quarter buying back about 100,000 back shares and has another 1.5 million shares available for repurchasing. The stock repurchasing and the pile of cash are a sticking point for workers who negotiate for increased wages and benefits in mountain communities where the cost of living and housing is soaring.
The company said it plans to invest as much as $203 million in its 42 ski areas in North America, Europe and Australia this year. In the past 10 years the company has invested nearly $2 billion in its resort, including the installation of 30 new chairlifts.
Lynch said the lift investments by the company said has reduced wait times. Lift lines with 10-minute waits or longer at the company’s resorts this season occurred only 3% of operating time, including weekends and holidays, she said.
“Our business model has made the sport more accessible and created unprecedented stability amid climate change for our shareholders, mountain communities and the sport more broadly,” she said. “Throughout this journey, we have achieved numerous successes as well as learned valuable lessons. Vail Resorts has a proven track record of turning challenges into opportunities for innovation and enhancement.”
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36 Outside magazine writers pull their names from the masthead to protest latest layoffs
The Outside magazine masthead — recently slashed by layoffs as part of a restructuring of a growing interactive media empire — is getting even slimmer.
Three dozen of the magazine’s most venerated writers and photographers — like Tim Cahill, E. Jean Carroll, Jimmy Chin, Megan Michelson, Marc Peruzzi, Grayson Schaffer, Hampton Sides, Abe Streep and Elizabeth Weil— sent a fiery email to the captain of Outside’s transformation this week, demanding that their names no longer be listed as contributors to the magazine.
“Despite the vast sums of money you have raised to consolidate the adventure media industry, your company now seems intent on destroying what Outside once stood for: bold, spirited journalism,” reads the letter sent this week to Outside CEO Robin Thurston.
The writers’ stampede followed a third round of layoffs since Thurston began funneling more than $150 million of venture capital into his vision to create a sort of Amazon Prime of the outdoors, with magazines, events and mapping apps available under a single subscription. Most of the recent layoffs targeted the Outside magazine he acquired in 2021.
“We have a deep regard for Outside’s almost fifty-year tradition of ambitious storytelling, which was created by hundreds of dedicated journalists,” the letter reads. “Evolution is necessary; dispensing with journalistic rigor is not.”
Thurston replied to the writers, noting that 60 of the company’s roughly 450 workers are in editorial.
“We believe that compelling storytelling and service about the outdoors is what continues to make Outside as a brand such a trusted source of inspiration to get people outside,” said Thurston, adding that his team is “working to build a healthy, viable business that supports the content our audience loves.”
The response landed flat.
Sides fired back a blistering response, arguing that stories are much more than content and “one of the greatest magazines on the face of the earth” had been marred “when you and your droids descended on the scene.”
“You need to know that there are many thousands of people, young and old, who are saddened, frustrated, bewildered and infuriated by what you have done,” Sides wrote. “Systemically, bit by bit, you have hacked the meat off the bone, fired the best minds, and jettisoned all the institutional memory. In doing so, you have turned a great if fragile publication, one of America’s best, into a crass and soulless purveyor of gear, nothing more.”
— j
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