Before the Takeover

Skiing, like many leisure activities, boomed after World War II. Tourism promised to shift the West from extraction-based economies toward something perceived to be cleaner and better for the environment: outdoor recreation.

Extraction activities like logging and mining had long operated on public lands in the West — areas owned by the federal government as reserves for resource development. So permits were issued to ski-area operators much like leases were granted to logging companies to clear-cut a section of public land.

By the mid-1970s, hundreds of ski areas were operating on thousands of acres of national forest. But the leases were still issued in small increments and had to be renewed frequently, like logging permits.

When Tony Accetta, the assistant attorney general in charge of consumer affairs in Colorado, learned that Vail and Aspen — two of the country’s most prominent ski resorts — were attempting to raise lift-ticket prices at roughly the same time during the 1974–75 season, he launched an investigation, alleging price fixing. His successful fight to block the midseason price hikes made headlines across the state — and caught the attention of US Senator Floyd Haskell (D-Colo.), who drafted federal legislation aimed at reform.

Haskell wanted to prevent monopolistic control by large ski-area corporations, clarify the US Forest Service’s authority to regulate rates and consumer impacts, and improve environmental oversight of ski-area development. His bill included language stating that the secretary of agriculture could not issue companies “more than one permit for identical outdoor commercial recreation activities” (i.e., additional ski-area operating permits) without congressional approval.

The bill also would have granted Congress “access to and the right to examine any pertinent books, documents, papers, and records of the permittee.” What’s more, permits for ski area developments wouldn’t be granted without “an assessment of the extent and nature of such development, its compatibility with other uses for and the protection of the resources on such forest reserve and private lands.”

Haskell held hearings in Aspen, Denver, and Washington, DC, in the fall of 1975 and invited Accetta to speak. Accetta voiced concerns about scenarios in which “a corporate monopoly will punish people who dare to speak against it by withholding favorable season pass privileges,” and corporate managers wielding “virtually complete economic and social power” over local communities.

Haskell responded by saying his bill would “provide for public hearings with citizen and interest-group input on the fairness of the rates” for passes.

“I know I can speak for the attorney general that the present process of making decisions and the present appeals processes which exist are a sham,” Accetta said. “Because without the underlying information upon which those decisions are made, no one can seriously or legitimately challenge a decision reached.”

Accetta concluded his remarks by telling Haskell, “I applaud your bill, and I support it.”

But not everybody supported the legislation.

The Forest Service opposed the bill, arguing that the existing permitting process was sufficient and warning that “broad disclosure of financial information could act possibly as a deterrent in securing further private investment.”

And Ski Country USA — a marketing group representing resorts such as Vail and Aspen — also objected to parts of the bill. The group’s president said, “It is neither realistic nor feasible to hold public hearings on each and every rate request for the multitude of ski areas in this country who operate on public lands.”

To help persuade the ski areas to get on board, Haskell added a concession requested by Ski Country USA.

At the time, ski-area operators received one thirty-year permit covering up to eighty acres of Forest Service land. They could supplement it with multiple one-year special-use permits for additional acreage.

Haskell’s compromise would have loosened that arrangement, allowing permits to last fifty years and cover thousands of acres, giving ski area operators greater assurances that their investments in chairlifts and on-mountain lodges would be protected.

Ski Country USA supported that change, saying the more generous terms would provide ski area operators “with an essential quotient of long-term security.”

Go West, Young Plan

But far beyond Colorado, a small group of powerful people viewed proposals like Haskell’s bill as antibusiness, reflecting a broader paranoia snowballing across the United States.

Corporate tycoons were growing weary of regulatory crusaders like Ralph Nader, whose campaigns had hamstrung profit margins across multiple industries.

The pushback was especially apparent in Colorado, home to beer magnate Joseph Coors, who cofounded the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation as “another concept of public interest besides Ralph Nader’s,” according to another cofounder.

Just a few years earlier, Nader’s activism had prompted future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell to draft his infamous Powell Memo, devising a pro-business master plan to freeze the regulatory efforts of Nader and others.

Powell’s fear that “regulation and control” had “seriously impaired the freedom of both business and labor” was similar to fears of Haskell’s bill, with one speaker at Haskell’s hearings calling the bill “government interference in private enterprise,” adding, “there is no danger that Aspen or Vail is going to monopolize all of Colorado’s mountains.”

Haskell’s bill passed the Senate in both 1976 and 1977, but stalled in the House. Meanwhile, in 1976, Powell, by then confirmed to the Supreme Court, wrote the majority opinion for First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, which ruled that corporations have First Amendment rights to engage in political speech. It opened the floodgates for companies to dump massive amounts of money into political campaigns, and they started doing so in the 1978 midterms.

This was evident in Colorado, where longtime Haskell rival Representative Bill Armstrong, a Coors protégé, was making a bid to defeat him. Haskell had popular support — Nader visited the state to campaign for him — but he couldn’t compete against the money flooding the state to support Armstrong, who used the new First Amendment rights of corporations to become the first candidate in Colorado history to raise more than $1 million in a Senate race.

The Washington Post, in a story about the avalanche of special-interest group money in the 1978 election cycle, reported that “one new senator — William Armstrong, a Colorado Republican — raised 43 percent of his campaign funds from such groups” to defeat Haskell, who only raised $600,000.

Haskell’s political career was dead, and buried alongside it was his ski-area reform bill.

Eight years later, however, the bill was exhumed by Senator Malcolm Wallop, a Republican from Wyoming. But Wallop stripped all language about preventing monopolistic control, improving environmental oversight, and regulating pass prices. All that was left was Haskell’s concession to the ski industry.

According to the legislation, ski area permits could last up to forty years, with no restrictions on the size of the resort. And ski operators could acquire as many Forest Service permits to operate on public lands as they wished, with no additional congressional approval required. Wallop’s bill passed both houses of Congress, and President Ronald Reagan signed it into law on October 22, 1986 — just in time for the ski season.

The Rise of Big Ski

Among the first people to capitalize on the new legislation’s potential for ski-area growth was Leon Black, cofounder of the massive investment firm Apollo Global Management and one of the founding fathers of the modern private-equity era of buying up distressed companies and milking them for profit.

If Black’s name sounds familiar, it’s probably because the Senate Finance Committee recently investigated $170 million in payments Black made to his colleague, financier and sex predator Jeffrey Epstein, finding that “part of the extraordinary amounts of cash Black paid to Epstein was used to finance Epstein’s sex trafficking activities and other crimes.”

Black stepped down from his role as CEO of Apollo in 2021 as controversy began to swirl around his ties to Epstein (who also owned a home in Vail). But long before he distanced himself from his firm, Black was known in the ski industry for orchestrating the company’s takeover of Vail Associates, then operator of just two Colorado ski areas, Vail Mountain and Beaver Creek.

Black was familiar with the ski business from his time spent working for the investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert, which had been using junk bonds to fund the business empire of Vail Associates owner George Gillett. When the debt on the notes came due, interest rates had risen dramatically, and Gillett couldn’t pay it off, declaring bankruptcy in 1991. Black then swept in and acquired Vail Associates from Gillett.

The company started expanding, soon purchasing three other Colorado resorts — Breckenridge, Keystone, and Arapahoe Basin. The US Department of Justice intervened, saying one company owning five ski areas within a few dozen miles of each other was too much market control, so Vail Resorts sold Arapahoe Basin.

The company went public, ushering in new access to capital, and moved its headquarters out of Vail. The operation started scooping up dozens of subsidiaries in other sectors, including lodging, transportation, dining, retail, real estate, and even media companies. It also kept acquiring ski resorts. By 2022, the company owned thirty-six ski areas in the United States and several more in other countries, including Canada, Australia, and Switzerland.

Meanwhile, longtime Vail competitor Aspen Skiing Company was also making moves. After opening Colorado’s Aspen Mountain resort in 1946, the company acquired nearby Buttermilk in 1963 and opened a third Colorado resort, Snowmass, in 1967, becoming the largest ski lift operator in the United States.

In 1993, Aspen Skiing Company inked an operating agreement with Aspen Highlands, the only other remaining ski resort in Aspen. Aspen Skiing Company later partnered with KSL Capital Partners, a private equity firm that owned the massive ski area Palisades in California.

The resulting company, called Alterra Mountain Company, then purchased Intrawest, which owned or operated Steamboat, Winter Park, and several other major ski areas. It went on to acquire Mammoth in California, Deer Valley in Utah, and Arapahoe Basin, the resort that Vail Associates had been forced to sell in Colorado.

“We Had to Make Lift Tickets Absolutely Expensive”

Most of the large ski resorts in the United States are now owned or affiliated with either Vail Resorts or Alterra Mountain Company.

“In the United States, these two firms now own or are affiliated with more than 50 percent of total US lift capacity,” according to a recent University of Utah study. “In most of the major skiing states, Vail Resorts and Alterra cover the vast majority of skiing or riding capacity, effectively creating a duopoly.”

Alterra’s financial information isn’t publicly available, but Vail Resorts’ financial disclosures show that the company regularly reports yearly net operating income of more than $800 million, more than $200 million of which is annually dedicated to capital improvements, including resort expansions. The company’s net worth is approximately $5 billion.

Much of Vail Resorts’ recent success can be traced to a radical innovation by company CEO and Black protégé Rob Katz. In 2008, Katz unveiled a new idea: the Epic Pass, a discounted season pass that guests purchased before the season started. The idea was called “pre-commitment,” and it took the industry by storm.

“The main goal was really to get people to buy their skiing before the season began, so that we’d have more consistent visitation year in and year out, and that people would ski more even during times when the snow wasn’t as good,” Katz said in a recent podcast episode.

Alterra Mountain Company unveiled a competing product, the Ikon Pass, in 2018. Katz welcomed the competition, telling a reporter at the time that “if you ski, you should consider a season pass.” Many people followed this advice; Vail Resorts now reportedly makes more than a billion dollars on Epic Passes before the ski season begins.

In addition to the competition from Alterra, Vail Resorts says it appreciates the role independent resorts play in the ski industry.

“There are nearly five hundred ski areas in the U.S., and Vail Resorts owns and operates thirty-six,” said Max Winter, a Vail Resorts worker whose job title is senior manager of corporate storytelling. “We believe everyone in our industry wants it to thrive.”

In his recent podcast interview, Katz framed season passes as a win for everyone involved. He credited such pre-commitments with creating more stable dynamics for the local mountain communities.

“It was critical for us to do that to make, obviously, the financial situation for our company better, but it was also critical for us to do that to create more stable employment,” Katz said. “It’s really been quite transformational.”

But these season passes have also been transformational in another way: They’ve allowed the resorts to raise and keep lift-ticket prices high, even amid adverse conditions.

This was demonstrated this season when, despite historically low snowpack, Vail Resorts’ flagship property, Vail Mountain, was charging $356 per day on New Year’s Day, and Alterra’s crown jewel, Deer Valley, was charging $349. The properties had only a fraction of their terrain open due to the lack of snow, conditions that would appear to demand reduced prices. But the companies had already fixed their prices months in advance, and now they wouldn’t budge.

According to Katz, this was all part of the plan.

“The main goal was really to get people to buy their skiing before the season began, so that we’d have more consistent visitation year in and year out, and that people would ski more even during times when the snow wasn’t as good,” Katz said on the podcast. “We had to make lift tickets absolutely expensive because we wanted people to move from lift tickets to the pass.”

“Blatant Disregard”

In addition to driving high prices, many say ski-industry consolidation has had other detrimental effects on the country’s winter wonderlands.

For example, a $100 million Fair Labor Standards Act case alleges that Vail Resorts regularly failed to provide adequate wages, overtime pay, and other required benefits to staff members across fifteen states. While Vail Resorts has denied the allegations, the case is currently making its way through federal court.

Randy Dean Quint, a ski instructor who taught at Mount Brighton in Michigan when the area was purchased by Vail Resorts in 2012, is the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit. He said the company’s dominance in the ski industry has intimidated employees into staying silent about working hours they were never paid for.

“The size of Vail Resorts, combined with its deep pockets, make many view Vail Resorts as a ‘Goliath’ that will overpower any attempt to hold it accountable for its violation of state and federal labor laws,” he said.

Ski instructor Bryan Griffith told a judge that he would often be scheduled to work seven-hour shifts, “but of those seven hours, on many of those shifts I’d only get paid for one hour, the one single hour that I was in a lesson.”

Norman Bowles served in the White House during the Clinton Administration before changing careers to become a part-time ski instructor with Vail Resorts in 2003. According to a declaration from Bowles filed in federal court, he has never seen a company “so blatant in its disregard for the needs of employees, nor so open in its exploitation of its human capital in order to maximize profits.”

Some employees who have spoken out were apparently not only terminated but also barred from purchasing ski passes the following season.

That included Tim McMahon, a Vail Resorts restaurant worker who posted a sign in front of one of the company’s livestream cameras reading “profits over people” after he witnessed his colleagues getting evicted from company housing during the COVID-19 pandemic. In response, he says the company fired him — and refused to let him purchase an Epic Pass the following season, restricting his access to public lands across the West.

It’s exactly the type of scenario Tony Accetta predicted might happen fifty years ago, when he warned that “a corporate monopoly will punish people who dare to speak against it by withholding favorable season pass privileges.”

Ski instructor Jill Adler, who has worked for resorts owned by both Vail and Alterra, says employee dissatisfaction isn’t exclusive to Vail Resorts.

“Ask any ski area employee . . . and they will likely complain about some or all of the above ever since they started their jobs,” she wrote on her blog. “​​I aggressively asked for help on a private Facebook page about the inability to reach a human being to get my paperwork done and was told if I didn’t like it, maybe (the competing ski area) Deer Valley was hiring.”

Environmental Fallout

The labor-law case is one of several legal disputes keeping Vail Resorts’ attorneys busy, including numerous lawsuits over environmental violations.

In 2021, Vail Resorts leaked two million gallons of water containing the chemical algicide into a nearby creek in Vail, killing about 120 fish. The state of Colorado ultimately settled with the company for $275,000.

The catastrophe involved snowmaking equipment, which has become increasingly critical for ski areas during low-snow seasons.

Vail Mountain recently went to great lengths, literally, to improve its snowmaking system, seeking approval for 32.5 miles of new pipeline under the slopes — more than six times the length of Manhattan. The Forest Service approved the project in 2019 in a matter of months, allowing more than four hundred new snow guns to be installed within a year.

Such rapid approvals were likely not what regulators envisioned decades earlier, when lawmakers like Haskell sought to require ski areas to assess “the extent and nature of development.”

At times, critics say, development has proceeded even without prior approval. In 2022, a Forest Service worker discovered that Vail Resorts had bulldozed an extension to a road without authorization in sensitive Alpine tundra while expanding lift-served terrain at Keystone Resort. The project was already unpopular because it encroached on habitat for moose, mountain goats, deer, bears, and boreal toads.

Regulators issued a notice of noncompliance, forcing Vail Resorts to undertake habitat restoration in the area. Still, the project resumed a year later.

Ski resorts’ ability to flout labor and environmental standards is directly tied to their consolidated corporate power, said Michael Childers, an associate professor at Colorado State University and author of Colorado Powder Keg, Ski Resorts and the Environmental Movement. Childers was one of the first industry watchdogs to note that most of Colorado’s ski resorts are owned by giant corporations.

“Colorado’s larger corporate-owned ski resorts remain the dominant economic and political force within the state’s, if not the nation’s, ski industry,” Childers wrote in his book. As a result, he argued, resisting resort expansion into new areas of untrammeled backcountry has become increasingly difficult.

And Childers says these mega-resorts’ thirst for expansion has only intensified since his book was published in 2012. This is particularly evident in Colorado, where Vail and Alterra now control 86 percent of all lift capacity.

“These ski resorts — Vail has been the master at it, but Alterra has too — they’ve figured out how to increase the number of people, and therefore squeeze the capacity so that now they have to expand,” Childers said. “That’s part of the whole model, right now, the growth model.”

Independent Pass

Some observers see opportunity in the backlash against corporate consolidation.

As mega-resorts face declining attendance, leadership turmoil, and criticism over high ticket prices and labor practices, supporters of independent skiing say the moment may favor the sort of independent, public-focused, and affordable ski areas that reformers like Accetta and Haskell championed a half-century ago.

In New York, the state-owned ski areas of Whiteface Mountain, Gore Mountain, and Belleayre Mountain are operated by the New York State Olympic Regional Development Authority, which was created by the state to manage the facilities built for the 1980 Olympic Winter Games.

Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul recently said the state’s investment through the authority has “strengthened the state’s winter tourism industry, creating jobs, driving economic growth, and enhancing the quality of life for residents.”

In Colorado, meanwhile, publicly owned ski areas are thriving in the shadow of global resort corporations

One example is Ski Cooper, a county-owned 480-acre ski area near Leadville that contracts operations out to a father-and-son management team, Dan and Patrick Torsell. Lift tickets cost $49 to $69 during the week, rising to $99 on peak weekends.

The ski area widened its boundaries during the 2019–20 season without taking on any debt, paying cash for a new lift that added seventy acres of terrain. Torsell said the lift had virtually no lines for its first three seasons before beginning to draw one-minute waits in 2023, a sign the expansion was gaining popularity.

Earlier this year, the tiny town of Nederland moved to purchase Eldora Mountain ski area, hiring an alum of Oregon’s Mt Ashland Ski Area — one of the country’s best-known nonprofit ski areas — to helm the operation.

In response to expensive corporate season passes, independent, nonprofit, and publicly owned ski areas have developed cooperative passes of their own.

The Olympic authority in New York offers the SKI3 Pass, which offers unlimited access to Whiteface, Gore, and Belleayre for $899 when purchased before August.

Meanwhile, nonprofit Bogus Basin in Idaho, along with Mt Ashland, Ski Cooper, and other resorts, have banded together in a reciprocal program called the Freedom Pass, allowing passholders several days of skiing at partner mountains. Ski Cooper and Bogus Basin also belong to another cooperative network, the Powder Alliance.

The most ambitious example is the Indy Pass, a collective pass first launched in 2019 that allows skiers two days of access at more than three hundred independent ski areas worldwide for $368.

Erik Mogensen, director of the Indy Pass program, learned to ski at a small independent hill. He now sits on the board of the nonprofit Antelope Butte Mountain Recreation Area in Wyoming and helped save Black Mountain in New Hampshire from closure by turning it into what he calls an “independent mountain laboratory” for innovation.

It’s all part of his life’s mission to help ensure that the remaining independent ski areas aren’t swallowed up by Big Ski.

“We’re going all in on saving the spirit of skiing,” Mogensen said.