Shifting Ski Culture: Mountain town gentrification and its cultural consequences

Billy Mann’s worn boots tread over the thawing night's ice that coats the narrow neighborhood streets of Ketchum, Idaho. Each step pierces the chill of stiff mountain air, singing melodies into the valley of tourists and second-home owners who have infiltrated the town below. He’s abandoned the cane that his hip surgeon prescribed, opting to hobble over the icy streets with surprising grace—a demonstration of his familiarity with the town that once felt like home. While his feet recognize the icy concrete he treads upon, the overflowing Starbucks and traffic-filled roads surrounding him seem foreign.

Mann has been living in Ketchum for over 30 years. When he was a new graduate looking for direction, the vibrant mountain town of Sun Valley offered everything a ski bum could dream. Ski bunnies poured from dive bars, Bald Mountain offered the best mogul run in the country, and a conglomerate cohort of mid-twenties rascals ran the town.

But over the past few years, dive bars were built into overpriced restaurants, the moguls shrank as the crowds on the mountain grew, and Sun Valley became a hub for retirement rather than rascals. The spark that made the town so special was shifting.

“Skiing was kind of a renegade sport for a long time, but new people have different ideals. We were all about reckless abandonment, and getting strong so you could experience greater levels of joy,” Mann said. “But as skiing moved up that mainstream market all these other things became important, like having lattes at the top of the mountain, or all these niceties that people never used to care about.”

With an influx of affluent families purchasing second homes in the mountainous West, and a rapid corporatization of the ski industry, the local flavor of the snow sports is disappearing. As mountain towns turn from localized to tourist hubs in the midst of mountain gentrification, a widespread housing crisis and labor shortages are taking a toll on local communities, altering ski culture as a whole.

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the trend, sparking accelerated migration from busy cities to the small mountain towns of the West where access to outdoor recreation is right outside the door. Idaho is currently the fastest growing state in the country, with a 2.9% growth rate, according to the U.S. Census Bureau population estimates.

Ketchum, home to Bald Mountain, has historically grown at 1%. But in just two years since the pandemic began it has risen to an alarming 25%, which has spurred a massive housing crisis. For local, year-round residents, especially those earning 120% or below the area median income, housing has become increasingly unaffordable and scarce.

According to Project Ketchum’s “Housing Action Plan’s” most recent survey, the proportion of long-term rentals decreased from 31% in 1970 to 10% in 2019, and the listed rent prices have jumped by 50%. This is largely due to the influx of wealthy part-time homeowners who consider Ketchum to be a vacation town and thus don’t contribute to year-round community life. Meanwhile, seasonal and short-term rentals have increased by 49%, pushing the low-wage locals who run the ski resort out of the beloved town. This has left fewer people to contribute to the local economy and jeopardize many small businesses.

“I think people that are coming here, they just want to take and not give back,” said Gretchen Gorham, a small-business owner and Blaine County Housing board member in Ketchum. “I think we’ve lost a sense of community accountability, we have a lot of second homeowners here who aren’t involved in the school board, they aren’t involved in community activities, whether that’s nonprofits or supporting local businesses, we’ve kind of changed the way we seek to take things rather than give.”

The spike in mountain town real estate isn’t exclusive to Ketchum. Ski resort companies such as Vail Resorts are blazing the trail for the masses to move West, and increasing the cost of living in many mountain towns in the process. Vail Resorts, which is the largest publicly owned mountain resort company in the U.S., has become a target of hate amongst the traditional skiing community for delocalizing many resort towns.

Vail Resorts owns 40 U.S. ski resorts, which have become increasingly accessible through the EPIC pass: a multi-resort multi-day season pass to Vail-owned mountains. This year, the conglomerate dropped the price of the pass by 20%, resulting in 76% more sales than the 2019-2020 season, according to a National Ski Areas Association (NSAA) December shareholder report. Record numbers of skiers are flooding Vail-owned resorts, but the quality of the skiing experience is taking hits in the process as fewer staff are available to run lifts, groom hills and serve meals.

Many resorts are experiencing labor shortages largely due to the increased cost of living in mountain towns. At Park City, a Vail-owned resort in Utah, ski patrollers approved a 98% authorization to strike against Vail Resorts due to frustration over unfair wages given cost of living adjustments. According to Park City ski patroller Zanna Stutz, employee retention rates at Vail-owned resorts have drastically decreased. Stutz began this season with $13.25 per hour wage, which was unsustainable for supporting herself in the pricy town.

“I think it’s hard when you have a conglomerate company like Vail coming in and trying to standardize operations across a lot of different places that they’re operating in, and not necessarily being able to adjust to unique situations in particular towns and places based on a lot of these changes that are happening,” Stutz said.

Vail-owned ski resorts do offer first-come first-serve affordable employee housing at some of their resorts with monthly payments between $400.00 and $500.00. However, many of these resorts have struggled to maintain employee retention, with many workers leaving in the middle of the seasons.

According to Nathan Kertz, a current lift operator at Vail Ski Resorts, a Vail-owned resort in Colorado, the corporation is promising a $2.00 per hour bonus for all employees that remain at the mountain through the 2021-2022 season. Despite the offered financial benefits, Kertz does not plan to stay through the season, expressing frustration over feeling undervalued while working in a corporate environment and the cost of living in Vail.

“It’s not just that the tickets are expensive, it’s that everything is expensive. I have to go elsewhere to get a burger that’s less than $30.00. Plus, ski culture out here is very different. People are constantly stopping to take pictures and there’s a lot of amateurs on the mountain. It's a tourist destination, it feels a lot like Disneyland,” Kertz said.

Like Kertz, Griffin O’Neill spent the 2018-2019 season working under the Vail umbrella at Breckenridge in Colorado as a ski instructor. O’Neill also felt undervalued, and emphasized the moral conflict he experienced working corporately.

“It really feels terrible to work for a company that’s so demonized across the ski world. There’s a lot of negative press that they’re getting and it’s hard to miss,” O’Neill said. “I couldn’t imagine going and telling my ski bum friends that I would be happy working at a Vail owned resort, regardless of how much they would be paying me. How could you go and support something that is ruining something we hold so dear.”

Labor shortages at resorts and larger crowds on the mountains due to increased ticket sales have left employees overworked and frustrated. According to Kertz, wait times in lift lines are currently up to between 30 minutes and an hour, and some lifts aren’t in operation because there are not enough experts on the mountain to run them.

Diminishing numbers of employees are not limited to the slopes. Small businesses in mountain towns are struggling to find year-round employees as wealthier people infiltrate the towns with little interest in doing the low-wage jobs. With minimal affordable housing, young ski bums historically willing to work the ski lifts and sandwich shops are unable to fill the gap. Ketchum’s local favorites such as Lefty’s Bar & Grill and Perry’s Restaurant are closing this year. Gretchen Gorham, who is an advocate for small businesses and owns the locally-loved sandwich shop, Johnny G’s, isn’t far behind her competitors.

“John and I have had the shop for 24 years, and we’re working now more than we ever have before. It’s sad because people want those ma and pa businesses, but they don’t want to do what it takes to help them stay,” Gorham said.

Both Gorham and Mann, who have been in Ketchum for 30 years, fear for the future of the culture of the resorts they’re loyal to and the mountain towns they’ve supported for years. However, the approval and funding to build the Bluebird Village, a workforce housing project in Ketchum, is projecting hope for the reintroduction of affordable housing for Ketchumn locals. Mann hopes that accessibility to housing will improve the current housing crisis and labor shortages, and ultimately help to restore Ketchum’s local culture.

“We don’t want corporations to take over wildness,” Mann said. “That’s what we stand for up here.”