John LaPlante

Ski areas are starting to add Facebook, Twitter, and other social media tools to their marketing mix. Unfortunately, putting your name out there in the public sphere can also give members of the public–that is, your (would-be) customers–the opportunity to criticize you.

So how’s a ski area to respond? Somehow I don’t think that Welch Village, Minnesota, has the right idea. Here’s a notice from its Facebook fan page:

Attention Terrain Park Complainers: There are 60 runs at Welch Village that we are trying to open for all of our guests. We are taking advantage of this cold weather to make snow for the entire ski area, this maybe our last opportunity to do so. A lot of our park crew is working long hours making snow this year. We …will block users who only complain about the terrain park and erase negative and abusive comments.

In an earlier post, the Welch Village Facebook manager told customers, “You should just relax about the terrain park.”

Removing negative comments, from my understanding of online PR, is not the way to go. Announcing that you’re going to do it makes things worse. Telling customers to be quiet doesn’t help.

Welch Village has “fans” who defend it, and it ought to let them carry the load, while patiently explaining its plan for preparing the terrain for the season.

From one of my companions on the chair lift today:

“Yeah, I got a late start on learning how to ski. This is my second season. I’m 14 now.”

There are many ways of enjoying the snow–snowboarding (of course), cross-country skiing, downhill skiing, snowshoeing, dog-mushing and riding in one-horse open sleighs, tubing, engaging in a snowball fight or two, and … dancing on skis.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpobeAJN5hc]

In March of 2007, I spent a few days at the Mount Washington Resort, in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. The adjacent ski area grooms the snow a lot and the terrain is fairly mellow, making it suitable for ski dancing, which vaguely resembles figure skating. During at least one (and perhaps several) days there, I saw four or five couples ski dancing. The video gives you an idea of what I saw.

Life in a ski town can be expensive, with real estate being a prime component of the expense. Sometimes the topographical features of the area don’t give much room suitable for development. In addition, skiing and snowboarding, being expensive activities on their own, tend to attract people with disposable income with which they can bid up housing prices.

But the biggest reason for elevated housing prices, at least in some areas, may be the law. Government ownership can take a lot of land out of circulation, or at least subject it to an extra layer of scrutiny and thus, make development more expensive. For example, nearly 80 percent of Gunnison County (home to Crested Butte Mountain Resort) is owned by the U.S. Government. In Cook County, Minnesota (home to Lutsen Mountains), roughly 90 percent of the land is owned by the state or federal government.

Aside from owning land outright, governments have the power to regulate what happens on private land. As we’ve seen in the housing bubble of recent years, government policies can affect the demand for land as well. The Cato Institute, recently addressed the role of regulations in Truckee, California, a town close to the Northstar-at-Tahoe resort.

The town of Truckee, CA is an upscale community nestled in the Sierra Nevadas near Donner Summit off I-80. Housing is expensive. Truckee’s origins were as a railroad town, so there is older housing. In Truckee, however, downscale is funky and comes with upscale prices. The Truckee Town Council has decided to provide “downpayment assistance” with loans at interest rates as low as 2 percent.

Those who work in Truckee often cannot afford to live there and the Truckee Town Council hopes to make housing affordable for them. The program is thus paved with good intentions, but we know where that road leads. Cato’s Randall O’Toole and Hoover’s Thomas Sowell have shown that land-use restrictions and zoning are principal causes of high-priced housing. The recent housing boom and bust demonstrated how efforts to make housing “more affordable” largely made it more expensive. And they ended up putting many into homes that they could not ultimately afford.

There are no reports that the Truckee Town Council is planning to ease land-use restrictions. So they have done nothing to address the problem of pricey homes. It’s supply and demand, and the Council is working the wrong side of the equation.

Of course, if you have, through birth or the outlay of money, found a way to live in such a location, you may prefer that sort of arrangement, since it tends to keep the area undeveloped.

My local ski area received 8 inches of snow in a recent 24-hour period. Since it’s in Minnesota, you might think, “well of course.” But the Twin Cities aren’t exactly the epicenter of snowfall. Though we have cold temperatures, there are no mountains or big lakes nearby to cause snow dumps.

If you look at the historical data from NOAA, you may find a surprise here and there. For example, there’s a city in Arizona–Flagstaff–that gets more snow per year (100 inches) than Buffalo, New York (94). Flagstaff’s mountains produce more snow than Buffalo’s Lake Ontario and Lake Erie.

Being right on a Great Lake can help with snow totals. Muskegon, Michigan (home of the Snurfer!), on Lake Michigan, gets 96 inches of snow a year. But Grand Rapids (home of President Gerald Ford) gets 25 percent less, though it’s only a 45 minute drive to the east.

Though snow in Chicago can wreck your airline travel, the city gets relatively little snow–39 inches, less than Pittsburgh.

Any fan of the NFL has heard of the “frozen tundra” of Green Bay, Wisconsin. The city is on a bay (naturally) and close to Lake Michigan. Yet it barely gets more snow than LaCross, a city on the other side of the state, far removed from the Great Lakes.

The NOAA database doesn’t include small mountain towns, for the most part, so you’re not going to find ski area towns that claim 300 or 500 inches of snow in a year.

I’ve listed only a few towns from the report, and have only scratched the surface. Take a look and see if you find any interesting patterns.

ALASKA
Anchorage — 71
Barrow — 30

ARIZONA
Flagstaff — 100
Phoenix — Trace

COLORADO
Denver — 60
Grand Junction — 24

CONNECTICUT
Hartford — 49

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA
Reagan National Airport — 17

IDAHO
Boise — 21

ILLINOIS
Chicago – 39

INDIANA
Indianapolis — 24
South Bend — 71

IOWA
Des Moines — 33

KANSAS
Topeka — 21

KENTUCKY
Louisville — 16

MAINE
Portland — 70

MASSACHUSETTS
Boston — 42
Worcester — 68

MICHIGAN
Detroit — 41
Muskegon — 96
Grand Rapid — 73
Marquette — 141

MINNESOTA
Duluth — 81
Minneapolis/St. Paul — 50

MISSOURI
St. Louis — 20

MONTANA
Missoula — 46
Kalispel — 64

NEBRASKA
Lincoln — 28

NEVADA
Las Vegas — 1.2
Reno — 24

NEW HAMPSHIRE
Concord — 64
Mt. Washington — 261

NEW JERSEY
Newark — 27

NEW MEXICO
Albuquerque — 11

NEW YORK
Buffalo — 94
Rochester — 92
Syracuse — 116
New York City (Central Park) — 28

NORTH CAROLINA
Asheville — 15

NORTH DAKOTA
Fargo — 41

OHIO
Cleveland — 57
Cincinnati airport — 23

OKLAHOMA
Tulsa — 10

OREGON
Portland — 7
Sexton Summit — 98

PENNSYLVANIA
Philadelphia — 21
Pittsburgh — 43
Erie — 89

RHODE ISLAND
Providence — 36

SOUTH DAKOTA
Sioux Falls — 41

TENNESSEE
Knoxville — 12
Memphis — 5

TEXAS
Dallas — 3
Lubbock — 10

UTAH
Salt Lake City — 59

VERMONT
Burlington — 79

VIRGINIA
Roanoke — 23

WASHINGTON
Seattle — 7
Spokane — 49
Walla Walla — 17

WEST VIRGINIA
Charleston — 34
Elkins — 77

WISCONSIN
Green Bay — 48
LaCrosse — 43

WYOMING
Cheyenne — 56
Lander — 100

Wandering around a ski show sometimes presents you with the opportunity to see some new and different products. During one show, for example, I came across someone selling FastStrap carriers. They are, as the name suggests, straps (about the width of a very wide belt) that you can use to carry a snowboarad, surfboard, pair of skis, boots, and other sports-related equipment.

They have glorified snowboard leashes as well as straps for carrying your board behind your back.

Useful? Not? I don’t know. I normally don’t travel that far between my car and the hill to use the snowboard strap. Plus, my pockets are full enough as it is.

But some people may find such a strap useful.

You don’t have to be 60+ or even a member of AARP (where membership starts at age 50) to get a discount for age. Lookout Pass, on the Idaho/Montana border along I-90 in the Idaho panhandle, offers “Boomer Fridays.” If you’re over 40, you get a lift ticket on Fridays for $20, with a few exceptions for holidays.

For a few seasons–two or three, I forget which–I taught snowboarding. I’m not doing it now, but I was talking with a friend about it, and that conversation reminded me of the benefits of teaching.

Instructors get a free season pass and some pay, though where I taught, the hourly rate was comparable to stocking shelves at a store, and since you got paid only if you actually had a lesson, the pay was lower. Still, there are a lot of benefits to being an instructor:

(a) The clinics they give to instructors are a great way to hone your own technique;

(b) Think you know how to do something? Then try to teach it to someone else. That helps you nail it;

(c) You get a great satisfaction seeing someone gain skills and confidence–one woman I taught, about 50 years old, told me she could now cross an item off her bucket list. Hearing that made my week (the $20 tip was a bonus);

(d) You get some camaraderie by being part of a team of instructors;

(e) You get discounts on gear from various shops;

(f) It helps compensate for the times that you get bored by the terrain. Here in the Midwest our descents are 300 feet, not 2,000 feet;

I’m sure there are some other benefits, but those are the ones that quickly came to mind.

The season still hasn’t started in most places. If you’re at all interested, ask your favorite ski area if they’re having a clinic for new instructors. It will probably be spread over several days, after which you may be selected. You may have to pay for the experience, but it will be a good education.

An important but often overlooked part of the ski scene is the lift attendant. One newspaper in southern Oregon describes the lives of lifties at Mt. Ashland.

Some of the points the article makes aren’t surprising. For example, the work is physical and sometimes mind-numbing. What I haven’t thought much of, though, is that some lifties go out of the way to have a game face on for hours on end.

“The thing that keeps me doing it is all the guests,” says [Becca] Henriksen, 19, “seeing them come back and getting to know them.

“You just try to be interested in how they’re doing,” she says, “or comment on their hat or glasses. It’s always nice when somebody comes up and before you have a chance to say anything they say ‘How’s it going’ or ‘Nice to see you.'”

Being friendly for an eight-hour shift can be exhausting, Henriksen says. “You’re ‘on’ all the time. You have to be on all the time, and you have to like being on all the time.”

I’ve seen a variety of lift attendants in my time. Some are like Henriksen. Others are silent.

Given the boredom that accompanies the job, I’m not surprised that some lifties bring along a boom box and turn out their favorite tunes. That’s a hit-or-miss proposition, though, as what appeals to the lifty may not appeal to the guest.

Lifties also keep fresh by alternating stations, either from lift to lift, or from the loading station to the unloading station, or “top shack.”

The article also mentions that lifties might like or dislike particular stations, based either on the particular configuration of the chair, or the types of guests (children, experts) who come through.

I have also seen lifties enforce various rules, which wasn’t mentioned in the article. For example, if you ride alone (which I often do), you may be expected to sit on the “inside” of the chair. On occasion, I’ve also seen lifties ding a snowboarder for not having a leash.

So, dear readers, here are some questions for you:

Do you prefer a lifty to be “seen but not heard,” or part of the environment of skiing or riding? Do you usually talk with the lift operator, or remain quiet?

Do you prefer to have music at the loading station, or none?

Have you ever gotten into trouble (say, catching an edge on the loading ramp, getting clothing caught in the chair, etc.) and had to rely on the lift operator for help? I’ve seen lifties be very helpful and others seem almost content to let a guest who falls off the chair be dragged up the hill.

(Hat tip to Michelle at Alyeska Lift Crew for the pointer.)

Today’s the 63rd anniversary of the first example of man-mad snow outside the laboratory, an event which has provided many benefits to riders across the country.

Flying over Mount Greylock, the highest point in Massachusetts, GE research scientist Vincent Schaefer seeded a cloud to produce snow. Schaefer’s interest in snowmaking originated, in part, in efforts during World War II to create fog to hide ships at sea.

You can read more at the site Mass Moments, a project of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities.