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Marc Carlisle: The mountains are community entities, no matter who owns them
BY MARC CARLISLE
On the Marc
April 16, 2008
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I come from a family of finders and keepers. I pick up pennies, for example, although as a friend likes to point out, I probably spend more money on the food I eat to replace the calories burned to bend down and snatch up the coin.
My brother is planning to build a new garage this summer, which is not so unusual in itself except because the first one is filled to the rafters with stuff.
At home I have size medium ski gloves (I use XL) and dot-matrix printers (is paper even available?), none of which have seen the light of day for a decade, but that I keep on the very off chance that I might find a use or a user for them.
And I have T-shirts, many dozens, including several that I’ve never worn and several I’ll never wear again because I’m a rank sentimentalist at heart. Among these is a plain gray from the 1994 Ghost Town Cup, the first mountain bike race I ever helped organize and the first held using the Breckenridge Ski Area as a venue.
The Cup was one of many events I’ve helped stage manage within the ski area’s USFS permit boundary, from mountain bike and cyclocross races to snowshoe races and moonlight tours, and this Saturday’s 17th Imperial Challenge. Some were a success, some less so, many were good ideas that died at the hands of sanctioning bodies intended to promote cycling and snow sports. In all cases, I’m glad I had the chance to give it a go.
Small events and small races are a tricky business for ski areas, because small events can carry the same, sometimes a greater risk of loss or financial disaster as large, high visibility events like the Vans Triple Crown.
In the 1990s, though, I assumed the easy cooperation from Breckenridge to be the norm, whereas a lot of people viewed the ski area as a selfish presence, they to the town’s we. Certainly, as a business, the ski area has had its own agenda and priorities apart from those of the Town or the community at large.
Ironically, until recently the ski area could have laid claim to actually being the community at large. Not only are they the largest employer, but by counting family members, the mountain had a numerical majority.
Even so, employment at the ski area was accepted as prima facie evidence of an untrustworthy nature. Developers and landowners, many with glaring and outrageous conflicts of interest found seats at planning and on town council, while mountain employees with long residence in town stood no chance of appointment partly because of the regularity of mountain business for town review, partly due to the expectation that mountain employees would be biased in favor of their employer.
While I’ve strongly disagreed many times with the mountain about expansion, pay parking, the value of experienced patrollers, even on the gondola, I’ve sometimes felt vaguely uneasy doing so because my disagreements are with the mountain, not with the employees who have made so many events possible.
Victoria, Ralston, Vail Resorts, those are just words. The word Breckenridge, however, has a face, personified by the many people who have helped make tours and races and challenges possible, help for which I am very thankful.
These days, the mountain is run out of Broomfield by the Kid Katz who has done an admirable job of quadrupling the stock price over four years to 65 in October of last year. Since then, the price has fallen back to the mid-40s, perhaps not for long.
The appointment of mountain insiders to the top spots at Breckenridge and Keystone seems a precursor to sale by the Kid who bought a $1,000,000 worth of Vail Resorts stock in early March of this year.
And if any future owners sport the latest in Beijing fashion, tomorrow’s mountain will still have the same occidental faces with four-letter Christian names than it did back in 1994, and can expect to be there in 2014.
Marc Carlisle writes a Thursday column. He can be reached at summitindie@yahoo.com.
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