Downhill slide: fueled by mergers and buyouts, America's corporate ski resorts are more about real estate than ski runs

Sierra, Jan-Feb, 2003 by Hal Clifford

Whether they're bunny slopes or double-black-diamonds, ski runs are permanent clearcuts. Air quality in car-dependent mountain towns has often failed to meet federal clean-air standards. Biodiversity in woodlands surrounding ski areas drops significantly as a consequence of year-round disturbance. And snowmaking creates or exacerbates drought conditions in mountain streams.

But the most significant impact is the sprawl fostered just beyond the resort boundaries. When Vail Village was created, the idea was to build a tight, Tyrolean-style cluster of buildings on a few hundred acres in a rural valley. Today, the town of Vail is I0 miles long and the Vail community runs for at least 18 miles along the Eagle River valley floor, which is broadly covered by condominiums, single-family homes, and ten golf courses.

As real estate prices climb, nearby land succumbs to bulldozers. The American Farmland Trust concluded that "private valley lands near ski resorts are prized as noncommercial ranchettes.... It is this virtually unconstrained market pressure, encouraging the sale of working ranches to absentee owners, that is seen as the principal threat to the ongoing viability of the traditional ranching communities."

SPRAWL IS ALWAYS HARD ON WILDLIFE, doubly so when it consumes critical habitat. The mountain sites so valued for vacation homes and golf courses--south-facing slopes near rivers and streams--are often on essential calving or forage terrain. For instance, a golf course opened up 820 acres on the flanks of Big Mountain ski area in Whitefish, Montana. Foraging grizzly bears, a threatened species, avoid crossing open land. Instead, they move downhill looking for cover. That leads them straight into town, where they are likely to come into conflict with humans--a conflict bears usually lose. (See "What Grizzlies Want," July/August 2002.)

Bachelor Gulch Village, just down the Eagle River from Vail, was built in one of the last places where the resident elk herd was able to find winter forage and cover. The animals already had been pushed out of their traditional wintering grounds around the ski area base and the valley floor. After construction began, during the winters of the late 1990s several hundred starving elk charged across the four lanes of Interstate 70, which follows the Eagle River valley, in a desperate hunt to find forage and refuge on the north side of the highway.

The Canada lynx also found itself evicted by ski-resort development. For a decade, Vail Resorts wanted to add 855 acres of terrain to its ski area, but the land--part of White River National Forest--was considered some of the best habitat in the state for lynx, a species listed as threatened during the late 1990s. Biologists with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service concluded that ski area expansion would doom an entire regional population by severing lynx in the southern Rockies from those north of 1-70.

But in 1998, political appointees at the Fish and Wildlife headquarters in Washington overrode field staff, stating that Vail's expansion would not jeopardize the lynx and could go forward as planned. The biologists knew otherwise. "If we couldn't call jeopardy in this situation," says former Fish and Wildlife biologist Gary Patton (who's now with the Forest Service), "we couldn't call jeopardy in any situation."