This Could Be The Last Resort

Last summer the mountain looked like a benign Colorado version of Mount St. Helen's. Toppled trees were everywhere, their trunks scattered like Vulcan's own matchsticks over great slashes of raw dirt. There was no steam, no underground thunder, no acres of gray ash, but still the devastation seemed final, the damage irrevocable. Now a blanket of snow has fallen over the mountain and the transformation is miraculous. Summer's ravages have changed into winter's glories, and the harshly barbered mountainside of July has become a network of ski trails, beautifully groomed, gracefully sculpted. It's a place of authentic splendor: Beaver Creek, long awaited and often despaired of, North America's latest major ski resort—and, just possibly, its last.

The last resort? Forever? Well, there are plans for a few others, hopes for a few more—dreams. But there is no guarantee that there will be another laid out on the scale of Beaver Creek—a first-class "destination resort" (travel-agent jargon for a resort that offers lodging) to rival the country's best and biggest: Aspen, Vail, Sun Valley.

Of course, the saga of Beaver Creek has been climaxed by success: the area will open on Dec. 15 with 25 miles of trails and six chair lifts strung over some 450 acres of the rugged Rockies. But reaching this happy point involved such a long, painful, expensive, exhausting, frustrating process that sane men may well be discouraged from trying ever again to create something like Beaver Creek. Cal Conniff, executive director of the National Ski Areas Association, is paid to be optimistic about the future and fortunes of the ski business. Yet he says, "I'm not suggesting that it's flat-out impossible to develop another major destination ski resort. It's not, but there are obstacles now that tend to scare away investment capital. It's a cumbersome process, full of roadblocks and inherent risks, and terribly slow. From the first conception of a new area it will take five years at least before you can even start the first lift running. The process tends to tie up a lot of money. And the cost of a full-blown destination ski resort is at a minimum $100 million, which means that only large corporations can afford to get involved. Individuals simply don't have that kind of money. Besides, a ski area is a long-term investment. You have to figure that you'll be in operation five years before you begin to get a true return on your money."

So it seems we've reached the end of an era in skiing; no longer can we look forward to the opening of new, better and bigger ski areas, at least certainly not at the frenetic pace that has typified new development over the past three or four decades. Even now, Beaver Creek itself is nowhere near completion. What will open for the 1980-81 season is a $30 million fraction of the entire project, including a mountain full of lifts and trails, an architecturally superb "grandiose rustic"-style restaurant at the 10,208-foot level and a 177-car parking garage at the foot. Period. This year there will be nothing else at Beaver Creek—not so much as a single bed to sleep in.

An estimated $500 million will be spent over the next few years—no one knows how many—to produce an 80-acre village with restaurants, shops, bars and taverns, plus 6,000 beds in hotel rooms and condominiums. In addition to the village, there will be 245 homesites (original price from $250,000 to $450,000; now as much as $600,000) tucked in among the trees, streams and beavers and along an 18-hole, par-70 Robert Trent Jones Jr. golf course. The homes are expected to be enormously expensive, at least $1 million each, and will be built by such insatiable devotees of retirement recreation as former President Jerry Ford, who bought the first lot at Beaver Creek, valued at $300,000, to add to the luxurious spread he already owns in Palm Springs.

Brian Rapp, 38, an ex-Yale quarterback, has zigged and zagged through a variety of careers since he engineered the 1964 defeat of Harvard—Presidential Executive Interchange Fellow at the State Department, assistant county executive of Santa Clara County, Calif. and, most recently, president of the Beaver Creek Resort Company. "To live here is something few people will be able to afford," Rapp says. "We expect it to be in the class of Pebble Beach, Sea Pines, Aspen—even St. Moritz or Zermatt. This will be a planned community, rigidly and carefully designed, a true new town, in its way. But it isn't going to be Columbia, Maryland. We are planning to make Beaver Creek better than the best."

Beaver Creek village will be located 10 miles west of Vail and 110 miles west of Denver, in a valley two miles from Interstate 70. In all, there will be 4,901 acres devoted to skiing, golf, the village and homesites; 2,126 of those acres will be privately held, and 2,775 others, which are federally owned, will be used under permit from the U.S. Forest Service. The sugar daddy for the whole $500 million shebang is Vail Associates, which, of course, owns the Vail ski area. But Vail Associates isn't generating that kind of money from skiing. About 80% of the firm's stock is owned by one Harry Bass, whose family fortune springs from the vast resources of the Goliad Oil Company of Texas. The Bass family has been in skiing for years—Harry's brother, Dick, underwrote the building of Snowbird in Utah in 1972—even though it certainly isn't the kind of investment hard-headed businessmen ordinarily seek out. Vail Associates has had quite a few millions tied up in Beaver Creek, but until next week, when the first trickle of skiers arrive to enjoy the resort's "preview season," Beaver Creek won't have generated a dime of income.

"For four years, Vail Associates has been pouring money into the development of the mountain, and there has been no cash coming in at all," says Rapp. "This is one reason people aren't being facetious when they talk about this as being the 'last resort.' Money men are reluctant to get involved in skiing because there's more risk than ever involving more money than ever. The downside is steeper than it's been before."

It wasn't always this way. Once upon a time, risk in the ski-resort business referred to possible broken legs among guests, and downsides—the steeper the better—were covered with snow. That wasn't very long ago, but then, nothing is really very long ago in the story of ski resorts. Indeed, as recently as 1930 there was no organized skiing in the entire U.S., not a rope tow, not a stumpless hillside, not a single tanned, handsome, grinning Austrian expatriate to utter that favorite phrase of ski instructors, "Bend zee knees; two dollars pleez."

In Europe, the Alps had drawn winter vacationers from England since the late 19th century, but few were skiers. Most were upper-class "toffs" who skated in top hats and played hockey in shirts and ties. It wasn't until the early 1900s that "plank-hoppers" or "skeesters," as they were rather contemptuously called, were commonly seen at the better European winter resorts. Sir Arnold Lunn, founder of the famed Kandahar slaloms and an early British disciple of skiing for fun, described the sport as he found it in 1898 at the French resort of Chamonix: "About four or five Englishmen at Chamonix skied, but I cannot remember seeing any of the locals do so, with the exception of our instructor, who regarded his skis with obvious distaste and terror. He slid down a gradual slope, leaning on his stick and breathing heavily, while we gasped our admiration for his courage. Somebody asked him whether it was possible to turn. He replied in the negative, but added that a long gradual turn was just possible if one dragged oneself round on the pole. He claimed to have seen an expert perform this difficult maneuver but modestly added that he was unable to demonstrate it himself."