The Upwardly Mobile Downhill Slide

By John Skow

Ski biz sets out to get the whole family back on the slopes

It is a lot harder to break your leg skiing these days, and only part of the reason is that modern safety bindings will almost always pop your skis loose in a twisting fall. The rest of the reason is that you probably cannot afford to go skiing in the first place. So it seems, anyway, to skiers who dropped out of the lift lines a few years ago to start careers and have children, or simply to survive the recession. It is a jolt to realize that the tab for a week of skiing at a major resort is now roughly the cost of a small used car.

The price of a one-day lift ticket at an Eastern resort like Sugarbush, in Warren, Vt., is now $25 (slightly less in Western areas). Take your wife and two teen-agers along and that's $100, Daddy, not counting lunch. An overnight, with dinner and breakfast, costs an extra $200. Figure $500 or more for each adult-size person for skis, poles, boots and bindings, and an additional $300 to $500 for bib pants, ski jacket, long Johns, socks and gloves.

Prudent parents, even if they were dedicated ski bums during their own college years, may decide that the cold, crisp joy of schussing to bankruptcy is best left to singles with incomes at or above the orthodontist level. Not at all, say the business-oriented swifties who are taking over the management of big ski resorts from the old 10th Mountain Division veterans who founded them. The ski biz needs families to fill all the lifts and hotels it built during the past two decades and to pay the notes on the expensive snowmaking equipment it continues to install.

No one wants to discourage 26-year-olds who arrive in Porsches, but there just are not enough of these butterflies. The goal is to lure older, slightly stiffer ex-skiers--and their offspring--onto the slopes.

For those parents who still dream of down hill glory, resorts like Utah's Snowbird hold racing camps where they can polish slalom techniques while the youngsters run gates in separate classes. On the other hand, Charles Maas, director of marketing at Vail and Beaver Creek in Colorado, says that 15% of the people who come to Vail do not ski: "They want to shop or go ice skating." To amuse family members whose interest in alpine skiing is less than fanatic, resort managers are building elaborate tennis and racquetball courts, heated pools, co-ed Jacuzzis, ice rinks and--say it isn't so, Sepp--video-game rooms.

The worrisome truth is that skier days (one skier, one day) at the nation's resorts last season reached only 46.9 million, down almost 4 million from the season before. Was it just bad snow in the East, or has the skiing population reached a plateau? No one is really sure, but the best of the resort managers are choosing the same cures. The come-on is "Kids Ski Free!" At Waterville Valley, New Hampshire's largest area, there are free lift tickets on most weekdays for children under 13, if at least one parent buys a ticket.

Similar plans are working at Steamboat in Colorado and at Vermont's Woodstock Inn and Resort.

A second come-on might be called "Kids Disappear!" At Waterville, Vermont's Bolton Valley, Boyne Mountain and Boyne Highlands in Michigan, and Colorado's Beaver Creek and Copper Mountain, the staff will take youngsters off their parents' hands early in the morning, and some of the resorts will keep them until after the adults have enjoyed a leisurely drinks-and-dinner. Nurseries are nothing new, but they are now much more elaborate. At Copper Mountain, infants from two months to two years are cared for by a pediatric nurse. Older chil dren then move on to the Belly Button Bakery, where they can play or make cookies all day or try the carpeted slope.

At four they get on real snow. Instruction has changed too. Says a Keystone pro: "It used to be, 'Bend your knees and follow me.' Now I tell them where to go for a good pizza or where the video games are. It's part of my job."

Old-fashioned packaging is getting sharper; Jerry Jones, operations vice president at Keystone, west of Denver, offers discount lift tickets in supermarkets, trolls for new skiers with promotions aimed at Hispanics, and provides low air-fare deals with airlines ($49 for a one-way Minneapolis-to-Denver ticket) by absorbing the discounts at other concessions. Keystone -- lifts, lodges and all -- is owned and operated by one company (Ralston Purina, oddly enough, best known for animal feed). Thus Jones is in a much better position to optimize profits than Aspen Skiing Co., which owns lifts but not hotels and restaurants at nearby Aspen. Perhaps not coincidentally, Aspen is known as one of the last ski refuges of affluent singles.

Some of the cut-rate deals are impressive: TWA has a Kids Fly Free program on its New York-to-Denver run, and it throws in a free rental car to Steamboat Springs when parents pay the $652 fare for two roundtrip, midweek tickets. Steamboat gives children under twelve free lodging, rental equipment and lift tickets. Still, the cost for two parents and two children spending seven nights at Steamboat comes to the kind of money most families go to the bank for: $2,144, not including meals or drinks, or the pur chase of any equipment. What no one in the ski biz knows is whether enough families will make the sacrifices necessary to afford such bargains. If not, does any one make safety bindings to protect ski-resort corporations from out-of-control, twisting falls?

-- By John Skow. Reported by Eileen Garred/Boston and Robert C. Wurmstedt/Denver

With reporting by Eileen Garred/Boston, Robert C. Wurmstedt/Denver