Downhill Slide: Why the Corporate Ski Industry is Bad for Skiing, Ski Towns, and the Environment

Downhill Slide will almost certainly play well among class warriors, ski town kvetches and the Chicken Little faction of the environmental movement. But if you're looking for objective analysis and honest debate over real issues, look elsewhere.Hal Clifford questions almost every statement made by senior industry managers (backing many with snide comments), but treats pronouncements made by industry opponents - including some based on patently false assumptions - as gospel. In Clifford's world, ski resort managers are highly biased, but environmentalists, EPA staffers and disgruntled former ski resort and Forest Service employees are objective beyond question. This simply isn't the case. An honest assessment of the issues related to ski development would examine the motives and views of those opposed to mountain development as diligently as it does those who favor it.Clifford assails, correctly, the piecemeal approach by which some ski areas obscured their growth plans during the permitting process. But he places all of the blame on resort operators and totally ignores the no-growth movement's direct responsibility for the creation of that tactic: subversion and abuse of regulatory and public comment processes. These abuses, which result in a staggeringly expensive and indeterminate permitting process, are well documented; it's no wonder that resorts attempted to keep their public and financial exposure small. He also ignores the fact that a growing number of progressive resorts now conduct their planning and permitting processes openly and invite environmental groups to participate. An objective book would at least acknowledge these efforts and give fair assessment of the questionable tactics used by some industry opponents.Instead, Downhill Slide assumes that resorts and related real estate developments are uniformly creeping environmental disasters overrunning the mountains (in fact, skiing's footprint on the land is tiny; a fraction of one percent of the public lands in the mountain states are impacted by ski development). Clifford especially despises the concept of the modern ski resort village, which can be viewed as a response to the environmentally irresponsible sprawl that occurred around the base of ski areas decades ago. The new villages concentrate visitors on a small footprint, leaving more open land. So why isn't this a good thing? In Clifford's view, it's because they're built for transient guests, rather than providing a year-round haven for ski bums and colorful oddballs, and because developers can make money building them.Clifford is correct in noting that some resort communities have essentially become second-home vacation retreats so expensive that resort workers can't afford to live there. Clearly, the industry could be more diligent in providing housing for staff. But resorts already do better job housing low-income workers than do most non-ski communities. Nor is anyone is forced to work (or live) in one.The book's biggest stretch is the suggestion that social ills such as racism, alcoholism and domestic abuse in some areas of the Rockies are the fault of (and, by extension, the responsibility of) the ski industry. The argument is fallacious - both post hoc ergo propter hoc and as a splendid example of affirming the consequent. Clifford even implies that ski resorts are responsible for the presence of illegal aliens (apparently, that responsibilty falls to Vail, not the INS)- but cites not one case in which a ski resort ever recruited or hired an illegal alien, even by oversight.Finally, Downhill Slide advances the premise that three companies, which between them represent about 30 percent of the US market - have driven the sport into a death spiral making the sport accessible only to the super-rich. This is utter nonsense. 30 percent of market share, split three ways, can't possibly conrol an entire industry. Besides, skiing has always been an expensive sport, and relative to disposable income - especially considering the ticket deals out there currently - skiing is actually more affordable to more people today than it was 50 years ago. That the sport hasn't grown (Clifford repeatedly hammers on that point) has far less to do with price than it does with with demographics, weather conditions over the past decade, competing recreation options and inept marketing.Stripped to its essence, Downhill Slide is a plea - backed by fallacies of logic, appeals to pity, false dilemmas and half-baked environmental and social concerns - for things to be the way they used to be. Clifford openly states that he misses ski town life of old. Fair enough. But humans cannot freeze themselves in one moment in time. Such a freeze is what Clifford desires - and advocates - in holding up a handful of niche resorts in unique market situations as the model for how ski resorts should be run. That many ski areas which once operated in similar ways have gone out of business isn't mentioned. Nor is the fact that skiers and snowboarders vote with their wallets. Most clearly prefer the experience provided by larger resorts.Clifford's prescription would kill skiing, not save it. He's welcome to patronize the niche resorts - indeed, they'd no doubt love his business. But to suggest their model is the only acceptable approach to skiing is arrogant beyond belief. So is Downhill Slide.

There are two elements to Clifford's book. Foremost is his "deep environmentalist" screed. Other reviewers have accurately described the flaws in this thesis: Clifford is a ski-town leftist who really wishes that the rest of us would just go away. It is impossible for the reader to avoid his anti-free market rantings, they crawl through the chapters like head lice.I think Clifford has adequately struck a nerve, however, on his second theme: the homogenization of skiing. Many of us have stood on a slope in Vail, or Whistler, or Sun Valley and wondered where we are. I think Clifford is on to something about how this is the real reason that skier visits are flat and skiing is very different on the mountain than it is in the brochure.Surely, his prescription would make the disease worse. But, the geniuses who manage skiing in America had better fix the problem of the disney-ification of skiing. Their stagnant markets show it's a problem, and their investors will demand it.

This book never gets old. As we watch the resort industry circle the drain EXACTLY as predicted in Downhill Slide, it makes you wonder how we could all be so stupid. A few get very, very rich at the cost of thousands of people left with nothing and an environmental disaster where taxpayers pick up the tab. This book is about the ski industry but could easily have predicted the inevitable downfall of Enron or Goldmann Sachs.

Read this book when it came out and thought, well, maybe. But it is true and our mountain community is proof. Ask any skier from the Bay Area - we are wrecked. Traffic at a standstill, emergency services crippled certain hours of the day, not enough infrastructure for the amount of people that the ski industry sells passes to. He predicted the future very well in this town.

Good read if you live in a mountain town.

Very introspective, well written and researched. If you're a fan of skiing big resorts, small mom and pop hills, or are interested in resort real estate then you have to have a boo at this.It changed how I search for resort holidays and also made me stay in Canada save for trips to the independents in the US.