Downhill Slide: New Ski Village
Posted: Jan 6th, '08, 19:25
From Down Hill Slide by Hal Clifford
Why the Corporate Ski Industry is Bad for Skiing, Ski Towns...
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On the plaza of Keystone Resort's River Run Village, in front of Starbucks, a fire pit blazes with light and warmth on a cold January weeknight. A man with heavy wrinkles around his eyes and a long white beard stands beside it, talking to a dozen adults and preteens. He wears a thick Indian blanket made of red wool, a coyote skin cap, fur boots, and fur gloves. This faux mountain man is regaling his audience with the lore and legends of the Snake River Valley.
Beside him, the fire roars steadily. Or, rather, it hisses. The four-foot "logs" that are stacked in a rough pyramid in the pit are made not of wood but of blackened iron. The metal ends are marked with fake tree rings, the logs welded into their unvaryingly casual heap. The flames licking around them are fueled by natural gas. There are practical reasons why a gas fire is preferable to a wood-fueled one. The gas flame burns cleaner, reducing the air pollution in a high, cold valley subject to smog-trapping thermal inversions. There are no ashes or wood chips to clean up, and one can ignite the blaze with a switch. There's no need to harvest the multiple cords of wood that would be necessary to fuel such a fire each winter and drag them from the surrounding lodge pole pine forests, a process that requires noisy chain saws and trucks. Exposing visitors, even summer visitors, to the messy reality of cutting firewood isn't something resort executives want to do. After all, the ski industry devotes so much energy to insulating the sport's customers from the impacts of their pastime. The gas that fuels this fire comes from hundreds of miles away-from the grid tablelands of northwestern Colorado or the plains of eastern Wyoming-and that's the way resort planners want it. The fact that natural-gas drilling is a highly disruptive industrial process that can ruin water tables, pollute homeowners' drinking wells, destroy property values, and devastate wildlife habitat is well hidden from the bundled visitors listening to the mountain man's stories.
The fire is warm enough. And while nobody here this evening believes the mountain man is the real thing, the deception runs much deeper than is obvious in this little circle of light. The mountain man is paid by a commercial association that taxes the surrounding merchants to the tune of a million dollars or more annually (the association goes by the pointedly quaint moniker Keystone Neighborhood Company). At the end of his shift, he will walk out to the sprawling parking lot east of this so-called village, get in his car, and drive a dozen miles down U.S. Highway 6 to Dillon, a real if ugly accretion of condominiums, strip malls, and fast-food restaurants sprawling around Interstate 70's exit 205. He'll probably kick back with a beer and watch SportsNight on cable. While the fakery of the mountain man and his fire are evident to all but the smallest children, the real and much more effective sleight of-hand involves the whole place, the "village" that is not a village at all. It is a carefully planned, highly managed, centrally controlled commercial construction designed to manipulate visitors for the sole purpose of relieving them of a maximum amount of their funds, then funneling as much of that money as possible into the pockets of Vail Resorts and Intrawest, partners in the village's development.
I leave the mountain man and retreat to my lodgings. My room is comfortable, but not too comfortable. The developers don't want me to snuggle in here; they want me out in the village, spending money. I reside for the evening in a one-bedroom condominium, which in Intrawest's development schemes typically run as large as 590 square feet. Studios run up to 480 square feet, two-bedroom condos up to 850. Not only does Intrawest want me to spend my evening, and my savings, in nearby establishments; if I happen to own this condominium, Intrawest also wants me to be only moderately rich. The truly wealthy don't buy small condominiums like these; they buy big condos that cost a million dollars or more. That's a nice onetime windfall for the condo's developer, but such expensive units are rarely made available for rental. They stay empty most of the year and are known in the industry as "cold beds." If nobody stays in them, nobody can leave them to spend money in shops and restaurants. The size of these smaller condos is a function of price; they need to be just nice enough, just big enough, and just expensive enough to attract buyers who are well off but who still won't turn their noses up at the prospect of rental income.
The resort developer's objective is to create and manage "hot beds"-units that are rented out with a high occupancy rate, that function like a hotel room. If the developer does things right, each condo in a village provides both a onetime profit at its point of sale and an ongoing annuity. Management companies (which in the New Ski Villages are owned by the village's corporate developers) usually split rental income about fifty-fifty with owners. Plus, of course, there's all the money to be made everywhere else in the village from the people sleeping in those rented beds. So the developer profits three times: from the sale of a unit, from its rental, and from the income earned in other village concessions frequented by renters. Hot beds help indirectly, too, in that success breeds success: people like to stay in a place that's bustling.
The inside of my River Run condominium is as pleasantly bland as the tasteful spaces outside: maple veneer and blued steel around a glassed-in gas fireplace; distressed pine coffee table and chairs; heavy pine trim around the doors and windows; pine sideboard, bed, and tables; and a color palette that's a study in beige. A few tasteful black-and-white period skiing photographs grace the otherwise empty walls. It's all very nice, yet in combination with the blandly fake village outside, the whole place makes me long for something, anything, authentic: a child's paper drawing taped to the door of the condo's empty refrigerator; a dead weed poking up through the heated paving bricks in the plazas; a Chicano low rider driving past the gas campfire; even dog sh*t in a snow bank.
But I won't find any dog sh*t, because there aren't any dogs here-a sure sign that nobody actually lives in this, the modern Potemkin village. Everyone involved in their development, operation, and promotion calls these creations "villages," but saying it doesn't make it so. Sure, the place is bustling, the beds are hot. But nobody here knows anybody else-what sort of a village is that?
New Ski Villages such as River Run are considered by the industry to be a better mousetrap, an innovation that will save and revive the ski business by paradoxically making skiing responsible for a smaller portion of the profits.' They lie at the center of the strategies being embraced by Vail Resorts, American Skiing, Booth Creek, Hines, and many smaller operators, including the Aspen Skiing Company, Jackson Hole Resort, Winter Sports, Inc.'s Big Mountain, Grand Targhee Resort, Telluride Ski and Golf Company, Stowe Resort, Durango Mountain Resort, Boyne Mountain Resort, and Crested Butte Mountain Resort. Yet no developer executes the New Ski Village concept
so well, so effectively, or so completely as its innovator and pacesetter, Intrawest.
Intrawest had enormous early success with villages at Whistler, British Columbia, and Mt. Tremblant, Quebec. Both ski resorts took off in the 1980’s and early 1990’s in conjunction with the development of their Uase villages. Those developments were the brainchild of the grandfather of the New Ski Village, Eldon Beck. Beck is the principal of his eponymous Richmond, California, landscape architecture firm. He first learned his craft when he helped convert the original Vail Village core to a pedestrian-friendly hamlet in the I97os. He and Vail's first town manager, Terry Minger, then moved up to Whistler, where they shaped that nascent development. Beck went on to create the village at Mt. Tremblant, which he considers his greatest success. Intrawest-and the industry committed themselves to the village concept after they saw the bottom line at Whistler and Tremblant, which had become cash cows and top-rated resorts in skier surveys. Beck went on to work at Keystone and Copper Mountain in Colorado; Northstar, Mammoth, and Squaw Valley in California; and Vermont's Stratton.
Beck does not design the buildings in New Ski Villages. He designs the villages themselves, sculpting their spaces, views, and forms to make them attractive places. He determines the placement, height, and mass of a village's buildings, then leaves the details to others-in the case of Intrawest's only Colorado resort, Copper Mountain, the cleanup hitter designing the actual building is OZ Architecture, based in Denver. This firm's name is just right, for the result of Beck, Intrawest, and OZ's collaboration is fantasy world not far removed from the one at the end of the Yellow Brick Road.
Throughout most of the twentieth century, the vast majority of ski-resort developers failed to connect the ski-area base to the ski slopes as well as they could have. This failing usually was a function of the financial limitations of a developer who couldn't control sufficient land. Pete Seibert tried to do it at Vail, as did Bill Janss at Snowmass, and each achieved limited success. Development such as Beaver Creek and the original Copper Mountain attempted to follow in their footsteps, But often the result was disappointing. At Copper Mountain, for instance, the Base area was dominated by a muddy parking lot when Intrawest purchased it. And many ski areas-Aspen Highlands, Crested Butte, Sugarbush-simply are too far from the near by town.
Intrawest enlisted Beck to solve that separation problem by building fake villages right at the bottom of the ski lifts, and the corporation put its financial muscle behind his ideas. During his formative years as an architect, Beck traveled extensively in Europe, Australia, and Mexico, developing themes that he has brought into play in the New Ski Villages. Much of what Beck does is import the Best elements of Old World villages, then tweak them to their specific resort locales. His other major influence: Mother Nature. "I spend a lot of time backpacking," Beck told me, "looking at natural systems as another basis for how I design."
One of his favorite templates is a creek. In designing a pedestrian passage through a village, he will create "eddies"spaces out of the flow where people can pause, window shop, or have a cup of coffee, while leaving the center of the "stream" open for walking. Usually such eddies are slightly elevated perhaps eighteen inches above the main walkway's pavement to create a sense of separation yet still allow immediacy and interaction. His stream-based walkways blend with what Beck calls "entertainment retail" design. "The most important level of the village is the pedestrian level, and we should do everything we can to keep people's eyes down at that level," he says, noting that he specifies hanging store signs, low street lights, and small canopy trees wherever he can.
Beck's vision can be summed up in a few elements common to all of his villages and emulated, generally with less success, by Intrawest's competitors:
• The pedestrian system is the structure of the village. Wherever possible, people and cars are separated.
• Diversity in terms of architectural detailing and retail content is everything. "Diversity is strength; uniformity is the death knell of a village," Beck says, pointing to Tremblant as his greatest success in this regard.
• The villages are carefully oriented to their sites, so that visitors are given glimpses of the best mountain views. The visitor walking through River Run at Keystone, or Vail Village, or the base of Mt. Tremblant, is supposed to feel connected to the landscape around him or her. The resort is not an agglomeration of condominiums plopped heedlessly onto a landscape, but a set of buildings designed to relate to one another and to the land around them.
At Squaw Valley, Beck is designing a fourteen-acre site that will be home to seven hundred condominiums when it is complete. "It's going to be absolutely the most European village of all, in that it will have many narrow lanes," he says. "All of these lanes will focus on views of the mountains. There will be real drama; it will be an intense experience."
That's the goal-an experience. "Visitors want an experience that is not typical of their daily lives," Beck says. "They really want to go to a place that is different and is memorable. If we bring to the mountains the trappings of an urban or suburban area, I think we've really blown it."'
Many ski-resort developers, Beck included, have been influenced by Aspen, which for years was the archetype of an interesting town combined with a ski area to create a vibrant, organic, four-season resort. It was a place that looked, felt, and functioned differently from the rest of the world, and it embodied many of the elements that resort developers have tried to capture in the second half of the twentieth century.
Aspen's modern roots go back to 1945, when the Chicago industrialist Walter Paepcke decided the town should be home to what became the Aspen Institute. Paepcke wanted to create a resort that was a refuge for the harried modern American, a place that would lift individuals onto a higher plane, feeding their spirits, minds, and bodies. The Aspen Institute was his flagship, a place where America's businessmen could meet with the world's great thinkers. The years that followed saw the creation of the Aspen Music Festival, the Aspen Center for Physics, and similar intellectual and cultural centers. Paepcke's Aspen Skiing Corporation, which developed Aspen Mountain, would serve to feed the body, while the beauty of the surrounding mountains would elevate the spirit.
Paepcke's vision of a resort that fully rejuvenated the whole man was a great success-so much so that by the late 1960s and early 1970s, major battles were being fought over the future of the town. (One reason Seibert and Janss wanted to control their own developments so tightly was that they wished to avoid the messy politics on display in Aspen.) In an effort to limit resort development, which many Aspen locals felt threatened the town, elected officials began instituting growth controls in the 1970s, putting a tight cap on construction in town and in the surrounding Pitkin County. The effects were twofold: real estate prices began an inexorable climb (since supply had been limited, but not demand); and locals who could no longer afford to live in Aspen began moving down the Roaring Fork Valley and commuting to work. By the end of the I9gos, Aspen's problems-a community dominated by absentee homeowners, a downtown full of expensive boutiques, an unhappy workforce of commuters-looked similar to those of many other resorts, but they had been arrived at by a very different route. For decades, Aspen was on the leading edge of high-end ski-resort development. That position meant there were few or no examples the town's leaders could learn from. Aspen's demise as a small, intimate ski town came not because a major ski corporation had cashed in on consumer demand for second homes and mountain resort life; rather, Aspen demonstrated just how much demand there was for such things. Aspen's experience was the proof that gave impetus to the New Ski Village developments, which sprang up in the I9gos to profit from that demand.
Eldon Beck is Intrawest's public face, the avuncular, visionary front man for what's happening at these massive new resorts, featured in laudatory articles and even in the company's Iggg annual report. But the wizard behind the curtain is Lorne Bassel, Intrawest's senior vice president for resort development. Young, athletic, and earnest, with dark eyes and a steady gaze, Bassel describes himself as the villages' producer. `All the village is a stage," declares a PowerPoint presentation Bassel makes to prospective tenants "and all the tenants in it are the players!!" Bassel runs the show-for it is a show-at Copper Mountain and Keystone; Mountain Creek in New Jersey; Blue Mountain, Ontario; and Les Arcs, France. In the past he has been responsible for Intrawest's villages at Tremblant, Quebec; Stratton, Vermont; and Snowshoe, West Virginia. The degree of almost fanatical control Bassel and his staff exert over Intrawest's villages-who gets to do business there, what business they do, under what terms it will be done, what public face they will present, and even what hours they will be open-is extraordinary.
At Keystone, Intrawest operates a joint venture with Vail Resorts, and Bassel is disappointed with the results of River Run, a village he can't fully control. But at nearby Copper Mountain, Intrawest alone owns the ski area and the base village (with the exception of some existing I97os-era condominiums), and so Intrawest pulls the strings. With Beck's help, the corporation is redeveloping Copper Mountain to produce a signature base village.
Imagine visiting the Village at Copper Mountain. You are walking through the pedestrian zone when you come upon a chocolate shop. What serendipity! You and your kids watch the woman working in the window, making the chocolate in a huge copper bowl. The kids can't stand it any longer-they drag you inside, where you buy chocolate treats for the whole family. Back out on the street, you probably think you've had a nice, spontaneous, European-style experience.
What you don't know is this: The location of that chocolate shop was determined long before ground was broken on any of Intrawest's buildings at Copper Mountain. Its site was dictated by a careful analysis of the angle of the sun at varying times of day and times of year; analysis of traffic patterns for different demographic slices of the expected-visitor pie through the village at various times of day (especially families with children); and an understanding of which activities and other businesses would lie in the shop's immediate vicinity, with an eye toward mutual compatibility and the creation of a particular retail "neighborhood" with a very specific feel.
Although the woman working in the window owns the business, she didn't just wander in and lease the space. She answered a casting call for chocolatiers. She had to audition with Intrawest, not only demonstrating financial and professional capability but also proving to corporate executives that her chocolate shop would mesh with Copper Mountain's corporately determined theme of "high alpine, high energy." She pays a portion of the ten or twenty dollars she liberated from your wallet to a village corporation, in the form of a tax that makes sure you and your kids stay entertained by musicians, jugglers, and faux mountain men in the public spaces. She pays part of her profit to Intrawest. Before she even signed a lease with Intrawest, the company already had determined how big her chocolate shop was going to be-based on calculations about what sort of people will come to Copper Mountain, and how many will want to buy chocolate-what hours it will be open, and what color it will be painted, both inside and out. The developer built the shell of her shop with a thorough understanding of how Intrawest wanted the interior to be laid out, so that utility hookups such as sinks and electrical outlets were already positioned. The sign and interior decor were approved by an Intrawest executive, who also signed off on the menu and price list. The shop owner is expected to earn (and reveal) a minimum gross annual income, and if she does not do so, or if she otherwise displeases the management at Copper Mountain by failing to meet various "standards," she can have her lease revoked in favor of someone else who can run a chocolate shop more to Intrawest's liking.
The centralized, command-and-control economy thrives at the cutting edge of the North American ski industry.
All of Lorne Bassel's efforts at Copper Mountain, as at other Intrawest resorts, are directed toward creating a village that is an ongoing revenue generator for Intrawest. His goal: 15 percent annual return on investment, minimum. (Intrawest plans to invest a half billion dollars in Copper Mountain, both on the ski area and in the base village. Much of it will be recouped through real estate sales.) There's nothing wrong with this; corporations, after all, exist to make money. But there is a significant element of legerdemain. Visitors to Copper Mountain probably believe that they have come to a nice resort where they spend their money with a variety of shopkeepers, restaurant
owners, hoteliers, and street vendors, each of whom is an independent businessman or -woman. While these people are indeed independent, their freedom to do as they please is controlled by Intrawest's very short leash. The truth is, a portion of almost every dollar the visitors spend at Copper Mountain goes into Intrawest's pockets, and the "independent operators" that Intrawest characterizes as "mom and pops" cannot choose their offerings or decorative themes without the approval of company executives. They work hard and they are sincere, but Intrawest's tenants serve as human window dressing that disguises a corporate strategy committed to harvesting an ever larger portion of visitor dollars for Intrawest shareholders.
The company's control starts with the village plan, and the plan starts with a matrix. First, Intrawest examines the demographic components of its visitors: Kids, Students, Independents, Families, and Gold Coasters. Within these groups there are day visitors, destination visitors, and residents. Almost all of Intrawest's efforts are dedicated to attracting and retaining destination visitors, who are a relative gold mine, spending roughly three times as much as day visitors. At Mt. Tremblant in 2000, the average destination visitor spent seventy-seven dollars daily on retail items, food, and beverages, in addition to lift tickets and lodging.
For each demographic group, Intrawest analyzes how individuals are likely to spend-or can be coaxed to spend-their time. "The reality is that at ski resorts, one of two guests staying at the resort is skiing, and those guests are skiing only about four hours a day," Bassel says. "That means that on average your guests are skiing about two hours a day. What are you going to do with them for the other twenty-two hours? What's the experience that's going to make them come back or not come back? We realize, and we've seen this from the data, the places where we have strong villages, people stay longer, which is very important for our villages. One of our financial goals, beyond anything else, is to get [visitors] to want to stay longer. If they stay a day longer, everything else takes care of itself."
The Intrawest matrix then breaks the day into periods: early morning, morning, lunch, apres-ski, evening, and night. Bassel and his team-an Intrawest working group known as The Village People-calculate how to cater to each visitor component during each time period, with the goal of getting every visitor to spend money around the clock, and with a particular goal of finding and exploiting marginal expenditures-that is, getting each visitor to spend above and beyond normal daily needs.
Some of the results of this analysis are obvious. At après ski, for example, a large portion of almost all the demographic groups wants to hit a bar at the base of the mountain and grab a beer. But that's about the only time of day when the needs of the various demographics coincide so tightly. For dinner options, a well-designed village will include brew-pubs and highend restaurants-but The Village People's analysis indicates they also should provide a kid-friendly place that can get a family in and out in forty minutes at 6 P.m. Miss that understanding, Bassel says, and you miss a chance to provide an "experience."
"We want to keep busy twenty-four hours a day," Bassel says. "What if I can come out of a bar at two o'clock in the morning and there's a place that sells slices of pizza? Holy cow, you've just extended my time clock and added to my experience. That's very different from having a Swiss raclette restaurant open-I won't go there. But if you can understand how I behave and provide that . . . " He shrugs, his sentence unfinished. Give him what he wants, Bassel says, and he'll spend more money on that "experience," even if it is as banal as buying a slice of pizza. Bassel uses the word experience a lot. So do other people who work at Intrawest. Their company, they say, is about providing experiences; in our modern world of material surfeit, we all understand (don't we?) that what we crave now are experiences. And the ski industry markets experiences. When it sells you something, it is selling an experience. But it doesn't talk about selling; it talks about "providing an experience." In Intrawest's lexicon, the word experience is code for "an opportunity to get the visitor to spend money." It is true that skiing and vacations are about having experiences; what's extraordinary is the comprehensive, entangling net of commerce Intrawest has woven around every possible experience to be found within its resorts. The Village People are committed to finding new ways to get you to reach for your wallet. Although a multitude of advertising signs hangs outside the shops and restaurants in an Intrawest village, and many different people run these enterprises, Intrawest pulls the strings at every one. For starters, the firm's Operations Group retains about 20 percent of the commercial space. Typically, it will run the big base area restaurant-at Copper Mountain, it's a food court and bar called Jake's-and the sporting goods store where visitors get skis tuned, rent mountain bikes, or sign up for a guided hike. The Operations Group may also run several other restaurants (this includes the demographic-analysis-driven mid-price pizza and-pasta place at Copper Mountain called Beachside Pizza) and other shops. The remaining 8o percent of retail space is rented out to other operators-cast members, as Bassel sees them on strict terms.
Not only are tenants obliged to pay taxes to the village merchants' association (about six dollars annually per square foot of retail space at Copper), which is responsible for arranging "animation" such as the jugglers and storytellers; tenants also pay their prorated share of property taxes and utility bills. This arrangement is not unusual in resort leases. Nor, even, is it unusual that these ostensibly independent businesses must share their profits with their landlord. These lease terms are common in ski resorts nationwide, yet they are not too far removed from the now reviled practices of sharecropping in the American South, or tenant farming in medieval Europe: the tenant does the work, the landlord skims the cream. This income stream, combined with rent, provides Bassel with his 15 percent annual return on investment.
Intrawest's goal is to neither overbuild nor underbuild for the market, but to match rental accommodations to retail and restaurant space so that everybody catering to visitors, from
coffee shops to rock climbing guides, grosses a minimum of four hundred dollars per square foot annually (in either U.S. or Canadian dollars, depending on location). In this stage of village planning, Intrawest's mania for control is most apparent.
"We don't call ourselves leasing agents; we're casting managers," says Bassel, who auditions prospective tenants. For each retail location, the company wants to hear a pitch. As with the chocolatier at Copper Mountain, Intrawest judges its would-be tenants based on their experience, their concept, and their financial strength. Before auditions begin, The Village People know exactly which business will go in each retail space, and how it will be operated. There will be only one chocolatier, only one baker, only one pizza shop.
All of this is detailed in the village plan. A breakfast nook will be situated on the way to the ski lifts. A high-end restaurant will be tucked in a corner where visitors have to discover it. The chocolate shop will be set where children can peer in the windows and watch the chocolate being made-windows of non-reflective glass that have been shielded from the sun, both to protect the chocolate and allow for better viewing from the walkway. For, Bassel says, the chocolate must be made in the window; that will be part of the lease agreement. The chocolate cannot be made in the back of the store. To do so would mean missing an opportunity to provide an experience, an experience in which the kids inevitably urge their parents to come inside and purchase a few chocolate-covered pretzels-just the sort of thing that Bassel and his colleagues know they can cause to happen, if they assemble all the village's pieces appropriately. Such a result is the key to Eldon Beck's "entertainment retail."
"The Dalai Lama says shopping is the museums of the twentieth century, or something like that," Bassel tells me. "What's happened in the leisure world is, many people now are not only going for whimsical shopping; vacation is actually their time to go do some shopping. That's when they stock up on clothes and stuff."' As a consequence, the villages are made for shopping. "We try to create places where people feel comfortable just to be, just to relax and slow down and admire all the things going on around them." Tourists can be sped up or slowed down simply by altering the patterns of the paving stones: straight lines accelerate people, arcs or other curving patterns slow them.
Slowing people down is important, because ultimately, Intrawest wants its visitors to wander into stores. Bassel designs a variety of "neighborhoods" in each village. At Blue Mountain, Ontario, a typical project, they include Arrival, Town Square, Main Street, Provisions, Events Plaza, Skier Plaza, Play Zone, the Docks, People Place, Lake Plaza, Georgian Way, and Waters Way, all within a few acres. At each of these "neighborhoods," there are opportunities for "experiences."
"You really don't go to a resort with the intention of stopping in all these stores to buy things," Bassel admits. "When I create a Main Street, the neighborhood I put on Main Street in my mind is called `small indulgences and quick and easy decisions.' You don't need it, and probably in a year from now you're going to throw it out." Bassel's typical examples of the stores likely to fit this bill include a place selling "inexpensive artwork, beads, small totem poles, artifacts of the region," and a candle store. ("No one needs more candles," Bassel confides, "but it's a small treat.") For Main Street food offerings he will station a juice bar or a soup place that serves passersby through a window. "You don't go to Tremblant saying, `I've got to go and get a juice,' but as you're walking down the street you can say, `That's an interesting attraction.' "
What you won't find on Main Street is a high-end jewelry store, an expensive restaurant, a furrier. Those are hidden on byways where they can be "discovered" by committed shoppers. "If I feel a village is sympathetic to people's behavior in a twentyfour-hour clock, I think we've won," says Bassel. "But if I've created a commercial experience within those villages that matches with what people expect to find, it's logical: `I expect that to be there, it's a no-brainer.' From their point of view, `It should be there, everybody knows that, it's logic'-that takes careful planning. To give you another example, when I create a neighborhood for provisions, I will put a butcher, a baker, a wine store, [and] a bank machine all in the same area. I will think about people's needs and that wonderful sort of Ping-Pong effect: `I'm going here to get my cheese; I'm going here to get some great meat; I'll go here to get some great wine; and I'm going to make sure that in that grocery store there's going to be take-out food that I may never even buy at home, because I'm treating myself.'
"If I can create a pocket of experience, as opposed to conventional malls-supermarket at one end, liquor store at the other, bank machine may be anywhere within the thing, that doesn't create that type of experience where people are having these fun sort of multi-experiences. And when I ask people at our resorts what they like most about them, they say there's so much to do. Part of the village experience is creating so much to do at different times."
This extraordinary control over the village can be viewed two ways by the business operators who sign on as tenants. On the one hand, it is very comforting to know that Intrawest cares deeply about each tenant's commercial success and is willing to offer professional design and other services to make sure each business succeeds. Intrawest clearly perceives that the success of its villages depends on the success of each element within them and will devote enormous resources to ensuring that success.
On the other hand, if ever there was a company town, the Village at Copper Mountain is it. For all the lip service given by Eldon Beck and the rest of the Intrawest team to the idea of "diversity" and "individuality" in the businesses, the reality is written right in the lease: Intrawest's way or the highway. What's diverse in this game is what Intrawest says is diverse. Nothing is left to chance if it can be controlled.
The New Ski Villages themselves are not physically large; one could walk from one end of the Village at Copper Mountain to the other in three minutes. Susan Byers, Intrawest's commercial leasing manager there, takes me on a tour to show how the place keeps visitors amused for a week. The ski area lies to the south, the main passenger drop-off point to the north. A walkway through the village connects the two across a creek, clearly revealing the ski slopes from the drop-off. "The Beach" is a large plaza at the base of the ski area. Surrounding tenants include Indian Motorcycle Cafe and Lounge, a Toronto-born clone of the Hard Rock Cafe; on the eastern side a fast-food stand will be set up, a Canadian franchise called Beavertails that sells a trademark chocolate-covered sweet. On the western side of the village, a small plaza is dominated by an artificial rock climbing tower, which will be run by an adjacent outdoor store. Byers stops beside the tower.
"Let's say you're a guy from Texas or St. Louis, and you climb this forty-two-foot-high climbing wall, and you go back to the office on Monday morning," says Byers, a blond woman in her forties who wore a black pants suit and street shoes for our January tour. "You go, `Goddamn, I climbed this forty-twofoot climbing wall, and I got myself an ice ax.' You know you're never going to use the ice ax, but you're going to bring the ice ax back as a memento of your trip. It's all about creating that feel, creating that experience and then creating the memories."'
Experience and memories translate into a commercial transaction; that's the equation underlying everything Intrawest does. I have to wonder if the company doesn't deeply overestimate the stupidity or gullibility of its visitors-I fail, for instance, to see the $150 ice-ax purchase ever happening-but then again, the firm's profitability suggests otherwise.
On the east side of the village, Intrawest is developing a boardwalk around a two-acre man-made pond. Vacationers will be able to visit nine "character buildings," such as an "antiqued" log cabin, a post-and-beam-built structure, and so on, each connected by a boardwalk and containing a small business: a gelato shop, a place to buy cheap jewelry. The criteria for such businesses, Byers says, is that they would offer "real authentic Colorado things, gifts and things, wonderful sculpture, do-ityourself pottery." Visitors will be able to rent boats to row around on the pond-"not the cheesy blue boats, these are authentic rowboats that are really indicative of a high-alpine kind of town," Byers says with conviction.
Despite nearly two decades of residence in small mountain towns in Colorado, I have never seen any watercraft that are "indicative of a high-alpine kind of town," since highalpine towns here don't normally come equipped with lakes. In my experience, Intrawest's impending boats are the product of a too-fertile imagination at the corporate offices. Besides, the vaunted "authenticity" seems somehow diminished by the unpleasant and very authentic reality of Interstate 70, situated four hundred yards beyond the boat docks. Here beside the pond, the roar of tractor-trailers hammering down from Vail Pass is constant.
At this point in my tour, despite Byers's obvious sincerity and genuine niceness, I've about had it. Bassel has talked about strategically positioning stores that sell stuff visitors will throw away in a year, and making sure a village has a minimum of Gap, Starbucks, and Nike stores to satisfy shoppers' expectations. Byers is describing tchotchke shops that sell "Indian" dream catchers, rubber tomahawks, and cheap silver jewelry, and chain stores like the Color Me Mine do-it-yourself pottery franchises. Both have told me they are "incubating" Indian Motorcycle and Beavertails in other resorts and hope to franchise them into still more Intrawest destinations, along with the Canadian clothing retailer Roots. Byers has said if she finds a store she likes in another resort or city, she'll try to recruit it to Copper Mountain, and perhaps then incubate it for other resorts as well.
Both have insisted to me that each Intrawest resort is different and special, yet when pressed, the only thing Bassel and Byers can say about how they are different and special is that they are built in geographically different places. "There will never be another Copper," Byers says, and she is absolutely right. But there certainly will be another Village at Copper Mountain, or something that feels and functions much like it. Sure, the buildings will be laid out a little differently, the store fronts will be painted other hues. But a visitor will find many of the same options and "experiences" at Keystone, Stratton, Mt. Tremblant, Whistler, Mammoth, and the rest of Intrawest's properties. Despite strenuous assertions to the contrary from Joe Houssian and everyone on down the ranks, the fact is that Intrawest is very guilty indeed of cookie-cutter development at its base areas-not because the buildings look identical, but because the theory, objectives, and manipulations underlying New Ski Village development are unvarying. Consequently, all efforts to the contrary notwithstanding, the finished products are going to seem-and to be-remarkably similar. Lorne Bassel admitted as much when he told me, "It's the Holiday Inn thing of having no surprises."
Most New Ski Villages cover a few dozen acres. But even with such relatively concentrated development (some buildings at the base of Vail ski area, for instance, reach up eight stories), sprawl still happens. In fact, it may be even more likely to happen. Vail Village was the mother of all North American ski villages, built in a tight cluster. Today, the Vail community is generally considered to run for at least eighteen miles along the valley floor, which is broadly covered by condominiums, single family homes, and ten golf courses! All of this happened, it is fair to say, because of the success of the original Vail Village.
Ski-resort development is an attraction that leads to sprawl as real estate prices go up. Absent the absolute prohibition of construction on surrounding lands-which is possible only if they are purchased as open space or the development rights are retired via conservation easements-those lands are almost sure to be developed, and that can be disastrous for a resort's neighbors. The American Farmland Trust concluded:
Private valley lands near ski resorts are prized as non-commercial ranchettes. The market price is potentially well above the $2,500 per acre paid for large ranches. 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.'
Despite all this, New Ski Villages are popular. The appeal is visceral. These places suggest the small towns where we grew up, or where we wish we had grown up, or they remind us vaguely of the pre-automobile hamlets of Europe. They are scaled for pedestrians, not cars. They feel safe. And they are full of the most benign and comfortable incarnations of the things that we like about our modern lives.
There's a walled quality to them, just as there is to a cruise ship, even though there are no walls. Like a cruise ship, they contain everything a well-off visitor needs; they import a wholly safe, rich, luxurious experience into an exotic environment wherein you don't have to travel, to open yourself up, to put yourself at risk at all. The staff members live somewhere in the bowels of the ship-or an hour's drive away-and always behave politely, even if they don't speak English very well. You never have to mingle with people who aren't like you. You pretend you live in the tourist zone of the village, just as you pretend you live in a stateroom. The tourist zone in a New Ski Village comprises places where visitors are expected to spend their time. It is a corporately envisioned, architecturally executed form of social engineering that gives visitors no obvious reason to venture out to where the real people live, where they might risk an actual, authentic encounter with someone who truly lives here-an organic, unscripted, noncommercial experience. (Isn't that what we crave?) Indeed, such wandering by tourists would be alarming to village developers if it occurred on any significant scale, since it raises the possibility that visitors would spend their money outside the defined tourist zone, thus depriving the developer of its cut. That would defeat the whole purpose of the New Ski Village.
These villages aren't about going somewhere else so much as they are the social, architectural, and economic sine qua non of taking the most pleasant, least threatening aspects of the upscale mall, the revitalized urban downtown, and the suburban McMansion, reducing them to their essences, and cobbling them together near some ski slopes.
Intrawest's incarnation of the New Ski Village is a breathtaking tour de force of consumer manipulation. Everything is just where it should be, where you'd like it to be without having ever thought about it. "When people are up at our resorts, they're on vacation," Bassel says. "It's kind of more exciting if they don't have to think about it." Or perhaps, it's better for Intrawest if they don't think too hard about it. For Intrawest has gone one better than Disneyland and the rest of the theme park world. When you visit Disneyland, you walk through the gates and know you are in a place where everything is connected to the Walt Disney Company. You know every dollar you spend goes to that company. But when you visit Copper Mountain, you don't know that. You are actively manipulated into spending more than you intended to, and you do so under the illusion that you are putting your money into the coffers of many different small businesses. Although that is technically true, what is unspoken is that you also are always-every time you reach for your wallet-putting your money into the hands of the corporation that is the man behind the curtain in the Emerald Cities of the modern ski industry.
Why the Corporate Ski Industry is Bad for Skiing, Ski Towns...
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On the plaza of Keystone Resort's River Run Village, in front of Starbucks, a fire pit blazes with light and warmth on a cold January weeknight. A man with heavy wrinkles around his eyes and a long white beard stands beside it, talking to a dozen adults and preteens. He wears a thick Indian blanket made of red wool, a coyote skin cap, fur boots, and fur gloves. This faux mountain man is regaling his audience with the lore and legends of the Snake River Valley.
Beside him, the fire roars steadily. Or, rather, it hisses. The four-foot "logs" that are stacked in a rough pyramid in the pit are made not of wood but of blackened iron. The metal ends are marked with fake tree rings, the logs welded into their unvaryingly casual heap. The flames licking around them are fueled by natural gas. There are practical reasons why a gas fire is preferable to a wood-fueled one. The gas flame burns cleaner, reducing the air pollution in a high, cold valley subject to smog-trapping thermal inversions. There are no ashes or wood chips to clean up, and one can ignite the blaze with a switch. There's no need to harvest the multiple cords of wood that would be necessary to fuel such a fire each winter and drag them from the surrounding lodge pole pine forests, a process that requires noisy chain saws and trucks. Exposing visitors, even summer visitors, to the messy reality of cutting firewood isn't something resort executives want to do. After all, the ski industry devotes so much energy to insulating the sport's customers from the impacts of their pastime. The gas that fuels this fire comes from hundreds of miles away-from the grid tablelands of northwestern Colorado or the plains of eastern Wyoming-and that's the way resort planners want it. The fact that natural-gas drilling is a highly disruptive industrial process that can ruin water tables, pollute homeowners' drinking wells, destroy property values, and devastate wildlife habitat is well hidden from the bundled visitors listening to the mountain man's stories.
The fire is warm enough. And while nobody here this evening believes the mountain man is the real thing, the deception runs much deeper than is obvious in this little circle of light. The mountain man is paid by a commercial association that taxes the surrounding merchants to the tune of a million dollars or more annually (the association goes by the pointedly quaint moniker Keystone Neighborhood Company). At the end of his shift, he will walk out to the sprawling parking lot east of this so-called village, get in his car, and drive a dozen miles down U.S. Highway 6 to Dillon, a real if ugly accretion of condominiums, strip malls, and fast-food restaurants sprawling around Interstate 70's exit 205. He'll probably kick back with a beer and watch SportsNight on cable. While the fakery of the mountain man and his fire are evident to all but the smallest children, the real and much more effective sleight of-hand involves the whole place, the "village" that is not a village at all. It is a carefully planned, highly managed, centrally controlled commercial construction designed to manipulate visitors for the sole purpose of relieving them of a maximum amount of their funds, then funneling as much of that money as possible into the pockets of Vail Resorts and Intrawest, partners in the village's development.
I leave the mountain man and retreat to my lodgings. My room is comfortable, but not too comfortable. The developers don't want me to snuggle in here; they want me out in the village, spending money. I reside for the evening in a one-bedroom condominium, which in Intrawest's development schemes typically run as large as 590 square feet. Studios run up to 480 square feet, two-bedroom condos up to 850. Not only does Intrawest want me to spend my evening, and my savings, in nearby establishments; if I happen to own this condominium, Intrawest also wants me to be only moderately rich. The truly wealthy don't buy small condominiums like these; they buy big condos that cost a million dollars or more. That's a nice onetime windfall for the condo's developer, but such expensive units are rarely made available for rental. They stay empty most of the year and are known in the industry as "cold beds." If nobody stays in them, nobody can leave them to spend money in shops and restaurants. The size of these smaller condos is a function of price; they need to be just nice enough, just big enough, and just expensive enough to attract buyers who are well off but who still won't turn their noses up at the prospect of rental income.
The resort developer's objective is to create and manage "hot beds"-units that are rented out with a high occupancy rate, that function like a hotel room. If the developer does things right, each condo in a village provides both a onetime profit at its point of sale and an ongoing annuity. Management companies (which in the New Ski Villages are owned by the village's corporate developers) usually split rental income about fifty-fifty with owners. Plus, of course, there's all the money to be made everywhere else in the village from the people sleeping in those rented beds. So the developer profits three times: from the sale of a unit, from its rental, and from the income earned in other village concessions frequented by renters. Hot beds help indirectly, too, in that success breeds success: people like to stay in a place that's bustling.
The inside of my River Run condominium is as pleasantly bland as the tasteful spaces outside: maple veneer and blued steel around a glassed-in gas fireplace; distressed pine coffee table and chairs; heavy pine trim around the doors and windows; pine sideboard, bed, and tables; and a color palette that's a study in beige. A few tasteful black-and-white period skiing photographs grace the otherwise empty walls. It's all very nice, yet in combination with the blandly fake village outside, the whole place makes me long for something, anything, authentic: a child's paper drawing taped to the door of the condo's empty refrigerator; a dead weed poking up through the heated paving bricks in the plazas; a Chicano low rider driving past the gas campfire; even dog sh*t in a snow bank.
But I won't find any dog sh*t, because there aren't any dogs here-a sure sign that nobody actually lives in this, the modern Potemkin village. Everyone involved in their development, operation, and promotion calls these creations "villages," but saying it doesn't make it so. Sure, the place is bustling, the beds are hot. But nobody here knows anybody else-what sort of a village is that?
New Ski Villages such as River Run are considered by the industry to be a better mousetrap, an innovation that will save and revive the ski business by paradoxically making skiing responsible for a smaller portion of the profits.' They lie at the center of the strategies being embraced by Vail Resorts, American Skiing, Booth Creek, Hines, and many smaller operators, including the Aspen Skiing Company, Jackson Hole Resort, Winter Sports, Inc.'s Big Mountain, Grand Targhee Resort, Telluride Ski and Golf Company, Stowe Resort, Durango Mountain Resort, Boyne Mountain Resort, and Crested Butte Mountain Resort. Yet no developer executes the New Ski Village concept
so well, so effectively, or so completely as its innovator and pacesetter, Intrawest.
Intrawest had enormous early success with villages at Whistler, British Columbia, and Mt. Tremblant, Quebec. Both ski resorts took off in the 1980’s and early 1990’s in conjunction with the development of their Uase villages. Those developments were the brainchild of the grandfather of the New Ski Village, Eldon Beck. Beck is the principal of his eponymous Richmond, California, landscape architecture firm. He first learned his craft when he helped convert the original Vail Village core to a pedestrian-friendly hamlet in the I97os. He and Vail's first town manager, Terry Minger, then moved up to Whistler, where they shaped that nascent development. Beck went on to create the village at Mt. Tremblant, which he considers his greatest success. Intrawest-and the industry committed themselves to the village concept after they saw the bottom line at Whistler and Tremblant, which had become cash cows and top-rated resorts in skier surveys. Beck went on to work at Keystone and Copper Mountain in Colorado; Northstar, Mammoth, and Squaw Valley in California; and Vermont's Stratton.
Beck does not design the buildings in New Ski Villages. He designs the villages themselves, sculpting their spaces, views, and forms to make them attractive places. He determines the placement, height, and mass of a village's buildings, then leaves the details to others-in the case of Intrawest's only Colorado resort, Copper Mountain, the cleanup hitter designing the actual building is OZ Architecture, based in Denver. This firm's name is just right, for the result of Beck, Intrawest, and OZ's collaboration is fantasy world not far removed from the one at the end of the Yellow Brick Road.
Throughout most of the twentieth century, the vast majority of ski-resort developers failed to connect the ski-area base to the ski slopes as well as they could have. This failing usually was a function of the financial limitations of a developer who couldn't control sufficient land. Pete Seibert tried to do it at Vail, as did Bill Janss at Snowmass, and each achieved limited success. Development such as Beaver Creek and the original Copper Mountain attempted to follow in their footsteps, But often the result was disappointing. At Copper Mountain, for instance, the Base area was dominated by a muddy parking lot when Intrawest purchased it. And many ski areas-Aspen Highlands, Crested Butte, Sugarbush-simply are too far from the near by town.
Intrawest enlisted Beck to solve that separation problem by building fake villages right at the bottom of the ski lifts, and the corporation put its financial muscle behind his ideas. During his formative years as an architect, Beck traveled extensively in Europe, Australia, and Mexico, developing themes that he has brought into play in the New Ski Villages. Much of what Beck does is import the Best elements of Old World villages, then tweak them to their specific resort locales. His other major influence: Mother Nature. "I spend a lot of time backpacking," Beck told me, "looking at natural systems as another basis for how I design."
One of his favorite templates is a creek. In designing a pedestrian passage through a village, he will create "eddies"spaces out of the flow where people can pause, window shop, or have a cup of coffee, while leaving the center of the "stream" open for walking. Usually such eddies are slightly elevated perhaps eighteen inches above the main walkway's pavement to create a sense of separation yet still allow immediacy and interaction. His stream-based walkways blend with what Beck calls "entertainment retail" design. "The most important level of the village is the pedestrian level, and we should do everything we can to keep people's eyes down at that level," he says, noting that he specifies hanging store signs, low street lights, and small canopy trees wherever he can.
Beck's vision can be summed up in a few elements common to all of his villages and emulated, generally with less success, by Intrawest's competitors:
• The pedestrian system is the structure of the village. Wherever possible, people and cars are separated.
• Diversity in terms of architectural detailing and retail content is everything. "Diversity is strength; uniformity is the death knell of a village," Beck says, pointing to Tremblant as his greatest success in this regard.
• The villages are carefully oriented to their sites, so that visitors are given glimpses of the best mountain views. The visitor walking through River Run at Keystone, or Vail Village, or the base of Mt. Tremblant, is supposed to feel connected to the landscape around him or her. The resort is not an agglomeration of condominiums plopped heedlessly onto a landscape, but a set of buildings designed to relate to one another and to the land around them.
At Squaw Valley, Beck is designing a fourteen-acre site that will be home to seven hundred condominiums when it is complete. "It's going to be absolutely the most European village of all, in that it will have many narrow lanes," he says. "All of these lanes will focus on views of the mountains. There will be real drama; it will be an intense experience."
That's the goal-an experience. "Visitors want an experience that is not typical of their daily lives," Beck says. "They really want to go to a place that is different and is memorable. If we bring to the mountains the trappings of an urban or suburban area, I think we've really blown it."'
Many ski-resort developers, Beck included, have been influenced by Aspen, which for years was the archetype of an interesting town combined with a ski area to create a vibrant, organic, four-season resort. It was a place that looked, felt, and functioned differently from the rest of the world, and it embodied many of the elements that resort developers have tried to capture in the second half of the twentieth century.
Aspen's modern roots go back to 1945, when the Chicago industrialist Walter Paepcke decided the town should be home to what became the Aspen Institute. Paepcke wanted to create a resort that was a refuge for the harried modern American, a place that would lift individuals onto a higher plane, feeding their spirits, minds, and bodies. The Aspen Institute was his flagship, a place where America's businessmen could meet with the world's great thinkers. The years that followed saw the creation of the Aspen Music Festival, the Aspen Center for Physics, and similar intellectual and cultural centers. Paepcke's Aspen Skiing Corporation, which developed Aspen Mountain, would serve to feed the body, while the beauty of the surrounding mountains would elevate the spirit.
Paepcke's vision of a resort that fully rejuvenated the whole man was a great success-so much so that by the late 1960s and early 1970s, major battles were being fought over the future of the town. (One reason Seibert and Janss wanted to control their own developments so tightly was that they wished to avoid the messy politics on display in Aspen.) In an effort to limit resort development, which many Aspen locals felt threatened the town, elected officials began instituting growth controls in the 1970s, putting a tight cap on construction in town and in the surrounding Pitkin County. The effects were twofold: real estate prices began an inexorable climb (since supply had been limited, but not demand); and locals who could no longer afford to live in Aspen began moving down the Roaring Fork Valley and commuting to work. By the end of the I9gos, Aspen's problems-a community dominated by absentee homeowners, a downtown full of expensive boutiques, an unhappy workforce of commuters-looked similar to those of many other resorts, but they had been arrived at by a very different route. For decades, Aspen was on the leading edge of high-end ski-resort development. That position meant there were few or no examples the town's leaders could learn from. Aspen's demise as a small, intimate ski town came not because a major ski corporation had cashed in on consumer demand for second homes and mountain resort life; rather, Aspen demonstrated just how much demand there was for such things. Aspen's experience was the proof that gave impetus to the New Ski Village developments, which sprang up in the I9gos to profit from that demand.
Eldon Beck is Intrawest's public face, the avuncular, visionary front man for what's happening at these massive new resorts, featured in laudatory articles and even in the company's Iggg annual report. But the wizard behind the curtain is Lorne Bassel, Intrawest's senior vice president for resort development. Young, athletic, and earnest, with dark eyes and a steady gaze, Bassel describes himself as the villages' producer. `All the village is a stage," declares a PowerPoint presentation Bassel makes to prospective tenants "and all the tenants in it are the players!!" Bassel runs the show-for it is a show-at Copper Mountain and Keystone; Mountain Creek in New Jersey; Blue Mountain, Ontario; and Les Arcs, France. In the past he has been responsible for Intrawest's villages at Tremblant, Quebec; Stratton, Vermont; and Snowshoe, West Virginia. The degree of almost fanatical control Bassel and his staff exert over Intrawest's villages-who gets to do business there, what business they do, under what terms it will be done, what public face they will present, and even what hours they will be open-is extraordinary.
At Keystone, Intrawest operates a joint venture with Vail Resorts, and Bassel is disappointed with the results of River Run, a village he can't fully control. But at nearby Copper Mountain, Intrawest alone owns the ski area and the base village (with the exception of some existing I97os-era condominiums), and so Intrawest pulls the strings. With Beck's help, the corporation is redeveloping Copper Mountain to produce a signature base village.
Imagine visiting the Village at Copper Mountain. You are walking through the pedestrian zone when you come upon a chocolate shop. What serendipity! You and your kids watch the woman working in the window, making the chocolate in a huge copper bowl. The kids can't stand it any longer-they drag you inside, where you buy chocolate treats for the whole family. Back out on the street, you probably think you've had a nice, spontaneous, European-style experience.
What you don't know is this: The location of that chocolate shop was determined long before ground was broken on any of Intrawest's buildings at Copper Mountain. Its site was dictated by a careful analysis of the angle of the sun at varying times of day and times of year; analysis of traffic patterns for different demographic slices of the expected-visitor pie through the village at various times of day (especially families with children); and an understanding of which activities and other businesses would lie in the shop's immediate vicinity, with an eye toward mutual compatibility and the creation of a particular retail "neighborhood" with a very specific feel.
Although the woman working in the window owns the business, she didn't just wander in and lease the space. She answered a casting call for chocolatiers. She had to audition with Intrawest, not only demonstrating financial and professional capability but also proving to corporate executives that her chocolate shop would mesh with Copper Mountain's corporately determined theme of "high alpine, high energy." She pays a portion of the ten or twenty dollars she liberated from your wallet to a village corporation, in the form of a tax that makes sure you and your kids stay entertained by musicians, jugglers, and faux mountain men in the public spaces. She pays part of her profit to Intrawest. Before she even signed a lease with Intrawest, the company already had determined how big her chocolate shop was going to be-based on calculations about what sort of people will come to Copper Mountain, and how many will want to buy chocolate-what hours it will be open, and what color it will be painted, both inside and out. The developer built the shell of her shop with a thorough understanding of how Intrawest wanted the interior to be laid out, so that utility hookups such as sinks and electrical outlets were already positioned. The sign and interior decor were approved by an Intrawest executive, who also signed off on the menu and price list. The shop owner is expected to earn (and reveal) a minimum gross annual income, and if she does not do so, or if she otherwise displeases the management at Copper Mountain by failing to meet various "standards," she can have her lease revoked in favor of someone else who can run a chocolate shop more to Intrawest's liking.
The centralized, command-and-control economy thrives at the cutting edge of the North American ski industry.
All of Lorne Bassel's efforts at Copper Mountain, as at other Intrawest resorts, are directed toward creating a village that is an ongoing revenue generator for Intrawest. His goal: 15 percent annual return on investment, minimum. (Intrawest plans to invest a half billion dollars in Copper Mountain, both on the ski area and in the base village. Much of it will be recouped through real estate sales.) There's nothing wrong with this; corporations, after all, exist to make money. But there is a significant element of legerdemain. Visitors to Copper Mountain probably believe that they have come to a nice resort where they spend their money with a variety of shopkeepers, restaurant
owners, hoteliers, and street vendors, each of whom is an independent businessman or -woman. While these people are indeed independent, their freedom to do as they please is controlled by Intrawest's very short leash. The truth is, a portion of almost every dollar the visitors spend at Copper Mountain goes into Intrawest's pockets, and the "independent operators" that Intrawest characterizes as "mom and pops" cannot choose their offerings or decorative themes without the approval of company executives. They work hard and they are sincere, but Intrawest's tenants serve as human window dressing that disguises a corporate strategy committed to harvesting an ever larger portion of visitor dollars for Intrawest shareholders.
The company's control starts with the village plan, and the plan starts with a matrix. First, Intrawest examines the demographic components of its visitors: Kids, Students, Independents, Families, and Gold Coasters. Within these groups there are day visitors, destination visitors, and residents. Almost all of Intrawest's efforts are dedicated to attracting and retaining destination visitors, who are a relative gold mine, spending roughly three times as much as day visitors. At Mt. Tremblant in 2000, the average destination visitor spent seventy-seven dollars daily on retail items, food, and beverages, in addition to lift tickets and lodging.
For each demographic group, Intrawest analyzes how individuals are likely to spend-or can be coaxed to spend-their time. "The reality is that at ski resorts, one of two guests staying at the resort is skiing, and those guests are skiing only about four hours a day," Bassel says. "That means that on average your guests are skiing about two hours a day. What are you going to do with them for the other twenty-two hours? What's the experience that's going to make them come back or not come back? We realize, and we've seen this from the data, the places where we have strong villages, people stay longer, which is very important for our villages. One of our financial goals, beyond anything else, is to get [visitors] to want to stay longer. If they stay a day longer, everything else takes care of itself."
The Intrawest matrix then breaks the day into periods: early morning, morning, lunch, apres-ski, evening, and night. Bassel and his team-an Intrawest working group known as The Village People-calculate how to cater to each visitor component during each time period, with the goal of getting every visitor to spend money around the clock, and with a particular goal of finding and exploiting marginal expenditures-that is, getting each visitor to spend above and beyond normal daily needs.
Some of the results of this analysis are obvious. At après ski, for example, a large portion of almost all the demographic groups wants to hit a bar at the base of the mountain and grab a beer. But that's about the only time of day when the needs of the various demographics coincide so tightly. For dinner options, a well-designed village will include brew-pubs and highend restaurants-but The Village People's analysis indicates they also should provide a kid-friendly place that can get a family in and out in forty minutes at 6 P.m. Miss that understanding, Bassel says, and you miss a chance to provide an "experience."
"We want to keep busy twenty-four hours a day," Bassel says. "What if I can come out of a bar at two o'clock in the morning and there's a place that sells slices of pizza? Holy cow, you've just extended my time clock and added to my experience. That's very different from having a Swiss raclette restaurant open-I won't go there. But if you can understand how I behave and provide that . . . " He shrugs, his sentence unfinished. Give him what he wants, Bassel says, and he'll spend more money on that "experience," even if it is as banal as buying a slice of pizza. Bassel uses the word experience a lot. So do other people who work at Intrawest. Their company, they say, is about providing experiences; in our modern world of material surfeit, we all understand (don't we?) that what we crave now are experiences. And the ski industry markets experiences. When it sells you something, it is selling an experience. But it doesn't talk about selling; it talks about "providing an experience." In Intrawest's lexicon, the word experience is code for "an opportunity to get the visitor to spend money." It is true that skiing and vacations are about having experiences; what's extraordinary is the comprehensive, entangling net of commerce Intrawest has woven around every possible experience to be found within its resorts. The Village People are committed to finding new ways to get you to reach for your wallet. Although a multitude of advertising signs hangs outside the shops and restaurants in an Intrawest village, and many different people run these enterprises, Intrawest pulls the strings at every one. For starters, the firm's Operations Group retains about 20 percent of the commercial space. Typically, it will run the big base area restaurant-at Copper Mountain, it's a food court and bar called Jake's-and the sporting goods store where visitors get skis tuned, rent mountain bikes, or sign up for a guided hike. The Operations Group may also run several other restaurants (this includes the demographic-analysis-driven mid-price pizza and-pasta place at Copper Mountain called Beachside Pizza) and other shops. The remaining 8o percent of retail space is rented out to other operators-cast members, as Bassel sees them on strict terms.
Not only are tenants obliged to pay taxes to the village merchants' association (about six dollars annually per square foot of retail space at Copper), which is responsible for arranging "animation" such as the jugglers and storytellers; tenants also pay their prorated share of property taxes and utility bills. This arrangement is not unusual in resort leases. Nor, even, is it unusual that these ostensibly independent businesses must share their profits with their landlord. These lease terms are common in ski resorts nationwide, yet they are not too far removed from the now reviled practices of sharecropping in the American South, or tenant farming in medieval Europe: the tenant does the work, the landlord skims the cream. This income stream, combined with rent, provides Bassel with his 15 percent annual return on investment.
Intrawest's goal is to neither overbuild nor underbuild for the market, but to match rental accommodations to retail and restaurant space so that everybody catering to visitors, from
coffee shops to rock climbing guides, grosses a minimum of four hundred dollars per square foot annually (in either U.S. or Canadian dollars, depending on location). In this stage of village planning, Intrawest's mania for control is most apparent.
"We don't call ourselves leasing agents; we're casting managers," says Bassel, who auditions prospective tenants. For each retail location, the company wants to hear a pitch. As with the chocolatier at Copper Mountain, Intrawest judges its would-be tenants based on their experience, their concept, and their financial strength. Before auditions begin, The Village People know exactly which business will go in each retail space, and how it will be operated. There will be only one chocolatier, only one baker, only one pizza shop.
All of this is detailed in the village plan. A breakfast nook will be situated on the way to the ski lifts. A high-end restaurant will be tucked in a corner where visitors have to discover it. The chocolate shop will be set where children can peer in the windows and watch the chocolate being made-windows of non-reflective glass that have been shielded from the sun, both to protect the chocolate and allow for better viewing from the walkway. For, Bassel says, the chocolate must be made in the window; that will be part of the lease agreement. The chocolate cannot be made in the back of the store. To do so would mean missing an opportunity to provide an experience, an experience in which the kids inevitably urge their parents to come inside and purchase a few chocolate-covered pretzels-just the sort of thing that Bassel and his colleagues know they can cause to happen, if they assemble all the village's pieces appropriately. Such a result is the key to Eldon Beck's "entertainment retail."
"The Dalai Lama says shopping is the museums of the twentieth century, or something like that," Bassel tells me. "What's happened in the leisure world is, many people now are not only going for whimsical shopping; vacation is actually their time to go do some shopping. That's when they stock up on clothes and stuff."' As a consequence, the villages are made for shopping. "We try to create places where people feel comfortable just to be, just to relax and slow down and admire all the things going on around them." Tourists can be sped up or slowed down simply by altering the patterns of the paving stones: straight lines accelerate people, arcs or other curving patterns slow them.
Slowing people down is important, because ultimately, Intrawest wants its visitors to wander into stores. Bassel designs a variety of "neighborhoods" in each village. At Blue Mountain, Ontario, a typical project, they include Arrival, Town Square, Main Street, Provisions, Events Plaza, Skier Plaza, Play Zone, the Docks, People Place, Lake Plaza, Georgian Way, and Waters Way, all within a few acres. At each of these "neighborhoods," there are opportunities for "experiences."
"You really don't go to a resort with the intention of stopping in all these stores to buy things," Bassel admits. "When I create a Main Street, the neighborhood I put on Main Street in my mind is called `small indulgences and quick and easy decisions.' You don't need it, and probably in a year from now you're going to throw it out." Bassel's typical examples of the stores likely to fit this bill include a place selling "inexpensive artwork, beads, small totem poles, artifacts of the region," and a candle store. ("No one needs more candles," Bassel confides, "but it's a small treat.") For Main Street food offerings he will station a juice bar or a soup place that serves passersby through a window. "You don't go to Tremblant saying, `I've got to go and get a juice,' but as you're walking down the street you can say, `That's an interesting attraction.' "
What you won't find on Main Street is a high-end jewelry store, an expensive restaurant, a furrier. Those are hidden on byways where they can be "discovered" by committed shoppers. "If I feel a village is sympathetic to people's behavior in a twentyfour-hour clock, I think we've won," says Bassel. "But if I've created a commercial experience within those villages that matches with what people expect to find, it's logical: `I expect that to be there, it's a no-brainer.' From their point of view, `It should be there, everybody knows that, it's logic'-that takes careful planning. To give you another example, when I create a neighborhood for provisions, I will put a butcher, a baker, a wine store, [and] a bank machine all in the same area. I will think about people's needs and that wonderful sort of Ping-Pong effect: `I'm going here to get my cheese; I'm going here to get some great meat; I'll go here to get some great wine; and I'm going to make sure that in that grocery store there's going to be take-out food that I may never even buy at home, because I'm treating myself.'
"If I can create a pocket of experience, as opposed to conventional malls-supermarket at one end, liquor store at the other, bank machine may be anywhere within the thing, that doesn't create that type of experience where people are having these fun sort of multi-experiences. And when I ask people at our resorts what they like most about them, they say there's so much to do. Part of the village experience is creating so much to do at different times."
This extraordinary control over the village can be viewed two ways by the business operators who sign on as tenants. On the one hand, it is very comforting to know that Intrawest cares deeply about each tenant's commercial success and is willing to offer professional design and other services to make sure each business succeeds. Intrawest clearly perceives that the success of its villages depends on the success of each element within them and will devote enormous resources to ensuring that success.
On the other hand, if ever there was a company town, the Village at Copper Mountain is it. For all the lip service given by Eldon Beck and the rest of the Intrawest team to the idea of "diversity" and "individuality" in the businesses, the reality is written right in the lease: Intrawest's way or the highway. What's diverse in this game is what Intrawest says is diverse. Nothing is left to chance if it can be controlled.
The New Ski Villages themselves are not physically large; one could walk from one end of the Village at Copper Mountain to the other in three minutes. Susan Byers, Intrawest's commercial leasing manager there, takes me on a tour to show how the place keeps visitors amused for a week. The ski area lies to the south, the main passenger drop-off point to the north. A walkway through the village connects the two across a creek, clearly revealing the ski slopes from the drop-off. "The Beach" is a large plaza at the base of the ski area. Surrounding tenants include Indian Motorcycle Cafe and Lounge, a Toronto-born clone of the Hard Rock Cafe; on the eastern side a fast-food stand will be set up, a Canadian franchise called Beavertails that sells a trademark chocolate-covered sweet. On the western side of the village, a small plaza is dominated by an artificial rock climbing tower, which will be run by an adjacent outdoor store. Byers stops beside the tower.
"Let's say you're a guy from Texas or St. Louis, and you climb this forty-two-foot-high climbing wall, and you go back to the office on Monday morning," says Byers, a blond woman in her forties who wore a black pants suit and street shoes for our January tour. "You go, `Goddamn, I climbed this forty-twofoot climbing wall, and I got myself an ice ax.' You know you're never going to use the ice ax, but you're going to bring the ice ax back as a memento of your trip. It's all about creating that feel, creating that experience and then creating the memories."'
Experience and memories translate into a commercial transaction; that's the equation underlying everything Intrawest does. I have to wonder if the company doesn't deeply overestimate the stupidity or gullibility of its visitors-I fail, for instance, to see the $150 ice-ax purchase ever happening-but then again, the firm's profitability suggests otherwise.
On the east side of the village, Intrawest is developing a boardwalk around a two-acre man-made pond. Vacationers will be able to visit nine "character buildings," such as an "antiqued" log cabin, a post-and-beam-built structure, and so on, each connected by a boardwalk and containing a small business: a gelato shop, a place to buy cheap jewelry. The criteria for such businesses, Byers says, is that they would offer "real authentic Colorado things, gifts and things, wonderful sculpture, do-ityourself pottery." Visitors will be able to rent boats to row around on the pond-"not the cheesy blue boats, these are authentic rowboats that are really indicative of a high-alpine kind of town," Byers says with conviction.
Despite nearly two decades of residence in small mountain towns in Colorado, I have never seen any watercraft that are "indicative of a high-alpine kind of town," since highalpine towns here don't normally come equipped with lakes. In my experience, Intrawest's impending boats are the product of a too-fertile imagination at the corporate offices. Besides, the vaunted "authenticity" seems somehow diminished by the unpleasant and very authentic reality of Interstate 70, situated four hundred yards beyond the boat docks. Here beside the pond, the roar of tractor-trailers hammering down from Vail Pass is constant.
At this point in my tour, despite Byers's obvious sincerity and genuine niceness, I've about had it. Bassel has talked about strategically positioning stores that sell stuff visitors will throw away in a year, and making sure a village has a minimum of Gap, Starbucks, and Nike stores to satisfy shoppers' expectations. Byers is describing tchotchke shops that sell "Indian" dream catchers, rubber tomahawks, and cheap silver jewelry, and chain stores like the Color Me Mine do-it-yourself pottery franchises. Both have told me they are "incubating" Indian Motorcycle and Beavertails in other resorts and hope to franchise them into still more Intrawest destinations, along with the Canadian clothing retailer Roots. Byers has said if she finds a store she likes in another resort or city, she'll try to recruit it to Copper Mountain, and perhaps then incubate it for other resorts as well.
Both have insisted to me that each Intrawest resort is different and special, yet when pressed, the only thing Bassel and Byers can say about how they are different and special is that they are built in geographically different places. "There will never be another Copper," Byers says, and she is absolutely right. But there certainly will be another Village at Copper Mountain, or something that feels and functions much like it. Sure, the buildings will be laid out a little differently, the store fronts will be painted other hues. But a visitor will find many of the same options and "experiences" at Keystone, Stratton, Mt. Tremblant, Whistler, Mammoth, and the rest of Intrawest's properties. Despite strenuous assertions to the contrary from Joe Houssian and everyone on down the ranks, the fact is that Intrawest is very guilty indeed of cookie-cutter development at its base areas-not because the buildings look identical, but because the theory, objectives, and manipulations underlying New Ski Village development are unvarying. Consequently, all efforts to the contrary notwithstanding, the finished products are going to seem-and to be-remarkably similar. Lorne Bassel admitted as much when he told me, "It's the Holiday Inn thing of having no surprises."
Most New Ski Villages cover a few dozen acres. But even with such relatively concentrated development (some buildings at the base of Vail ski area, for instance, reach up eight stories), sprawl still happens. In fact, it may be even more likely to happen. Vail Village was the mother of all North American ski villages, built in a tight cluster. Today, the Vail community is generally considered to run for at least eighteen miles along the valley floor, which is broadly covered by condominiums, single family homes, and ten golf courses! All of this happened, it is fair to say, because of the success of the original Vail Village.
Ski-resort development is an attraction that leads to sprawl as real estate prices go up. Absent the absolute prohibition of construction on surrounding lands-which is possible only if they are purchased as open space or the development rights are retired via conservation easements-those lands are almost sure to be developed, and that can be disastrous for a resort's neighbors. The American Farmland Trust concluded:
Private valley lands near ski resorts are prized as non-commercial ranchettes. The market price is potentially well above the $2,500 per acre paid for large ranches. 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.'
Despite all this, New Ski Villages are popular. The appeal is visceral. These places suggest the small towns where we grew up, or where we wish we had grown up, or they remind us vaguely of the pre-automobile hamlets of Europe. They are scaled for pedestrians, not cars. They feel safe. And they are full of the most benign and comfortable incarnations of the things that we like about our modern lives.
There's a walled quality to them, just as there is to a cruise ship, even though there are no walls. Like a cruise ship, they contain everything a well-off visitor needs; they import a wholly safe, rich, luxurious experience into an exotic environment wherein you don't have to travel, to open yourself up, to put yourself at risk at all. The staff members live somewhere in the bowels of the ship-or an hour's drive away-and always behave politely, even if they don't speak English very well. You never have to mingle with people who aren't like you. You pretend you live in the tourist zone of the village, just as you pretend you live in a stateroom. The tourist zone in a New Ski Village comprises places where visitors are expected to spend their time. It is a corporately envisioned, architecturally executed form of social engineering that gives visitors no obvious reason to venture out to where the real people live, where they might risk an actual, authentic encounter with someone who truly lives here-an organic, unscripted, noncommercial experience. (Isn't that what we crave?) Indeed, such wandering by tourists would be alarming to village developers if it occurred on any significant scale, since it raises the possibility that visitors would spend their money outside the defined tourist zone, thus depriving the developer of its cut. That would defeat the whole purpose of the New Ski Village.
These villages aren't about going somewhere else so much as they are the social, architectural, and economic sine qua non of taking the most pleasant, least threatening aspects of the upscale mall, the revitalized urban downtown, and the suburban McMansion, reducing them to their essences, and cobbling them together near some ski slopes.
Intrawest's incarnation of the New Ski Village is a breathtaking tour de force of consumer manipulation. Everything is just where it should be, where you'd like it to be without having ever thought about it. "When people are up at our resorts, they're on vacation," Bassel says. "It's kind of more exciting if they don't have to think about it." Or perhaps, it's better for Intrawest if they don't think too hard about it. For Intrawest has gone one better than Disneyland and the rest of the theme park world. When you visit Disneyland, you walk through the gates and know you are in a place where everything is connected to the Walt Disney Company. You know every dollar you spend goes to that company. But when you visit Copper Mountain, you don't know that. You are actively manipulated into spending more than you intended to, and you do so under the illusion that you are putting your money into the coffers of many different small businesses. Although that is technically true, what is unspoken is that you also are always-every time you reach for your wallet-putting your money into the hands of the corporation that is the man behind the curtain in the Emerald Cities of the modern ski industry.
