Joe Staufer can laugh now, but closing Vail Pass hurts.

Staufer, for many years the owner of the Vail Village Inn, had reservations for a two-day conference in the late 1970s or early ‘80s. About 200 people were booked into the hotel, and had reserved meeting room space and, more important, food for everyone. Everything was ready.

“Then Vail Pass closed,” Staufer said. “It’s funny now, but it sure wasn’t then. I gave the produce away, and was able to use a lot of the rest, but it’s hard when there isn’t any money coming in.”

Staufer has been in Vail since the first season, and owned the Vail Village Inn - where the Vail Plaza project is now being built - for a few decades. He’s seen everything from avalanches to droughts.

Today, despite advanced snowmaking, grooming and other developments, Staufer believes now what he found out early: “We’re snow farmers.”

The mountain resort business today is a high-dollar, year ‘round industry, but some of the fundamentals remain. It takes snow to draw skiers, and it takes good runoff when the snow melts in the spring to provide exciting rafting and water for green golf courses.

The good news is that local ski areas all have relatively high-elevation base areas, which helps ensure at least adequate snowfall.



But sometimes snow doesn’t come, and business suffers.

Staufer has more than once tried to keep customers happy by sending them where there’s snow.

In 1976 or so, Vail was hit hard by drought, and the slopes were mostly bare from Thanksgiving to Christmas.

A ski club from Gary, Indiana came to Vail around Thanksgiving. There was virtually no snow available at Vail, so Staufer did what he could, chartering a couple of buses to take his guests to Arapahoe Basin, where the slopes were at least covered, if not deeply.

“It cost me more to do that than I made from the room rentals,” Staufer said. “But they came back for years after that.”

The year after

Steve Davis, owner of AB Ski and Sport in Frisco, said a lot of visitors who rent equipment come to his place before they even check out their hotel rooms or condos. Davis, who’s been in the ski-rental business for 20 years or so and the rafting business longer than that, said a lot of tourists book rooms based on last season’s snow.

“We always see an increase in business the next year for ski season,” Davis said. “The last three days at Copper Mountain last season, when it really came down that week, had a lot of people saying, ‘We’ll be back next year.’”

Snow from one year to the next is generally an iffy thing, so Davis and his small crew make sure people are ready for whatever conditions a new season brings.

“If a first-timer doesn’t have a good experience, he’s not going to come back,” Davis said.

That’s why Davis’ store relies on an on-line equipment rental system, then makes sure customers’ boots and other gear fits right before they walk out the door.

“The experience in our shop often sets the tone for someone’s whole visit,” Davis said.

That applies in the summer, too, especially with rafting and fishing.

This year’s been a good one, Davis said, especially in and around Summit County.

“It didn’t get really hot early, so the water never got really high, and it was steady.”

Parts of Clear Creek were rafting earlier than usual, and the creek was open to commercial rafting in August, later than normal.

“It’s been pretty good, but yeah, the weather really affects what we do,” he said.

A little less farming

While much of the area’s economy still depends on the weather, Ron Byrne believes it’s less important today than it once was. Byrne, owner of Ron Byrne and Associates in Vail, specializes in high-end real estate. The people buying that property today, he said, aren’t as worried about the weather as they once were.

“It’s more balanced now,” Byrne said. “Vail Mountain will continue to be the number one source of our economy, but there are more factors now.”

Those factors include 12-month access to the Eagle County Regional Airport, and, at least now, a favorable exchange rate with a lot of foreign currencies.

Then there’s summer.

When you’re sitting in Chicago when it’s 102 degrees, Vail seems pretty magical,” Byrne said.

For a lot of people, skiing isn’t quite the draw it once was, Byrne said.

For those who do ski, area resorts do a lot of grooming, and can move snow around slopes where it’s needed, a practice called “snow farming.”

Vail Resorts officials also believe the annual cloud-seeding program that runs between November and January increases snowfall as much as 20 percent, wringing moisture from clouds that otherwise might just pass by.

But Jen Brown, spokeswoman for the Vail ski area, said the resort is usually blessed with at least consistent snowfall. And plenty of people hit the slopes in an average winter. But the second home market seems to be evolving.

“Five years ago, you maybe had more skiers,” she said. “For people in their 60s and 70s, it’s not quite as important.”

Even with the evolution in second home ownership, Staufer said the international skiing crowd can still go elsewhere.

“If the snow’s not good in Vail and it’s good in St. Moritz, they’ll go to St. Moritz,” Staufer said. “They’re very flexible.”

The changing forest

While rain and snow totals ebb and flow from year to year, Summit and Eagle counties now face something they haven’t seen before: a dying forest.

Thanks to a pine beetle infestation that’s turned out to be much worse than experts predicted, the forests in Summit County and around Vail are changing, and the process will take years.

“In Summit County especially, we’re expecting almost total mortality of the old-growth lodgepole pine forests,” said Cal Wettstein of the U.S. Forest Service.

The end result is going to be forests that turn red, thanks to dead needles, then gray, as those needles fall off. That will eventually be replaced by green, as aspen groves take over in stands of dead pine, then, years later, more evergreen trees.

“It’s just nature working its way through the process,” Wettstein said.

But that doesn’t mean people have to like it.

“Just about everybody says it’s horrible,” Davis said. Walking a “secret” route to watch the Fourth of July fireworks at Dillon Reservoir, Davis said he was shocked to see the amount of beetle-killed trees. “There was just nothing left over there."

So far, though, the dead and dying trees haven’t had much impact on business.

In Grand County, where the beetle kill has turned entire mountainsides red, reservations are still hard to get at Forest Service campgrounds around the Granby and Shadow Mountain reservoirs, and summer business at Grand Lake still bustles.

“We still expect people to come,” Wettstein said. That’s important, since the White River National Forest - which stretches from Vail to Aspen and vast swaths around those resorts - is the most-visited national forest in the United States for recreation.

Because of that, forest officials are working with resorts and towns to first, reduce the danger of catastrophic wildfires around communities, but also to help speed nature along a little bit.

At the ski areas, Brown said crews are removing trees that might pose a danger to slopeside lodges and homes, or lift towers and on-mountain buildings.

But, Wettstein said, the changing forest is going to keep changing for a long time.

“We spent quite a while fretting about it,” he said. “But now we realize the scale and scope of things. The forest carries on, regardless.”