YOUR AD HERE »

Snow may not be piling up at Colorado ski resorts this season but anxiety sure is

Coronavirus is still a worry, but now ski hill operators must wrestle with too few workers and not enough places to house the ones they’ve hired

Jason Blevins
The Colorado Sun
Vail Ski Patrol watches skiers and boarders get off Mountain Top Express on Opening Day at Vail. The weather was a mix of sun and clouds.
Chris Dillmann/Vail Daily

DENVER — It wasn’t that long ago that ski resort operators lost sleep over snowfall. Then they had to fret over once-in-a-lifetime protocols to limit the spread of contagion at their ski areas.

Now, the worries are stacked even deeper, with affordable housing, dwindling numbers of workers and ever-lengthening lift lines joining the perennial fretting over snow and looming threat of spiking COVID cases.

This year, ski area bosses are praying for snow, hoping for declining coronavirus cases and tinkering with a variety of strategies to entice more workers, get them into housing and manage the pending tsunami of ski vacationers.



“The primary focus this season, I think, will be to keep the lifts running. Everything else might fade some, but you need to keep the lifts spinning,” said Chris Diamond, the former boss at Steamboat whose two “Ski Inc.” books document the growth and recent rapid consolidation of America’s resort industry. “You can be sure of only one thing this season: it’s all going to change and it won’t be the same as any previous season. It could get better, it could get worse.”

Read more at ColoradoSun.com.




Support Local Journalism

Support Local Journalism

As a Summit Daily News reader, you make our work possible.

Summit Daily is embarking on a multiyear project to digitize its archives going back to 1989 and make them available to the public in partnership with the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection. The full project is expected to cost about $165,000. All donations made in 2023 will go directly toward this project.

Every contribution, no matter the size, will make a difference.