Podcast #182: National Ski Areas Association President & CEO Kelly Pawlak

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast

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Who

Kelly Pawlak, President & CEO of the National Ski Areas Association (NSAA)

Recorded on

August 19, 2024

About the NSAA

From the association’s website:

The National Ski Areas Association is the trade association for ski area owners and operators. It represents over 300 alpine resorts that account for more than 90% of the skier/snowboarder visits nationwide. Additionally, it has several hundred supplier members that provide equipment, goods and services to the mountain resort industry.

NSAA analyzes and distributes ski industry statistics; produces annual conferences and tradeshows; produces a bimonthly industry publication and is active in state and federal government affairs. The association also provides educational programs and employee training materials on industry issues including OSHA, ADA and NEPA regulations and compliance; environmental laws and regulations; state regulatory requirements; aerial tramway safety; and resort operations and guest service.

NSAA was established in 1962 and was originally headquartered in New York, NY. In 1989 NSAA merged with SIA (Snowsports Industries America) and moved to McLean, Va. The merger was dissolved in 1992 and NSAA was relocated to Lakewood, Colo., because of its central geographic location. NSAA is located in the same office building as the Professional Ski Instructors of America and the National Ski Patrol in Lakewood, Colo., a suburb west of Denver.

Why I interviewed her

A pervasive sub-narrative in American skiing’s ongoing consolidation is that it’s tough to be alone. A bad winter at a place like Magic Mountain, Vermont or Caberfae Peaks, Michigan or Bluewood, Washington means less money, because a big winter at Partner Mountain X across the country isn’t available to keep the bank accounts stable. Same thing if your hill gets chewed up by a tornado or a wildfire or a flood. Operators have to just hope insurance covers it.

This story is not entirely incorrect. It’s just incomplete. It is harder to be independent, whether you’re Jackson Hole or Bolton Valley or Mount Ski Gull, Minnesota. But few, if any, ski areas are entirely and truly alone, fighting on the mountaintop for survival. Financially, yes (though many independent ski areas are owned by families or individuals who operate one or more additional businesses, which can and sometimes do subsidize ski areas in lean or rebuilding years). But in the realm of ideas, ski areas have a lot of help.

That’s because, layered over the vast network of 500-ish U.S. mountains is a web of state and national associations that help sort through regulations, provide ideas, and connect ski areas to one another. Not every state with ski areas has one. Nevada’s handful of ski areas, for example, are part of Ski California. New Jersey’s can join Ski Areas of New York, which often joins forces with Ski Pennsylvania. Ski Idaho counts Grand Targhee, Wyoming, as a member. Some of these associations (Ski Utah), enjoy generous budgets and large staffs. Others (Ski New Hampshire), accomplish a remarkable amount with just a handful of people.

But layered over them all – in reach but not necessarily hierarchy – is the National Ski Areas Association. The NSAA helps ski areas where state associations may lack the scale, resources, or expertise. The NSAA organized the united, nationwide approach to Covid-era operations ahead of the 2020-21 ski season; developed and maintained the omnipresent Skier Responsibility Code; and help ski areas do everything from safely operate chairlifts and terrain parks to fend off climate change. Their regional and national shows are energetic, busy, and productive. Top representatives – the sorts of leaders who appear on this podcast - from every major national or regional ski area are typically present.

This support layer, mostly invisible to consumers, is in some ways the concrete holding the nation’s ski areas together. Most of even the most staunchly independent operators are members. If U.S. skiing were really made up of 500 ski areas trying to figure out snowmaking in 500 different ways, then we wouldn’t have 500 ski areas. They need each other more than you might think. And the NSAA helps pull them all together.

What we talked about

Low natural snow, strong skier visits – the paradox of the 2023-24 ski season; ever-better snowmaking; explaining the ski industry’s huge capital investments over recent years; European versus American lift fleets; lift investments across America; when it’s time to move on from your dream job; 2017 sounds like yesterday but it may as well have been 1,000 years ago; the disappearing climate-change denier; can ski areas adapt to climate change?; the biggest challenges facing the NSAA’s next leader, and what qualities that leader will need to deal with them; should ski areas be required to report injuries?; operators who are making progress on safety; are ski area liability waivers in danger?; the wild cost of liability insurance; how drones could help ski area safety; why is skiing still so white, even after all the DE&I?; why youth skier participation as a percentage of overall skier visits has been declining; and the enormous potential for indoor skiing to grow U.S. participation.

Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview

First, Pawlak announced, in May, that she would step down from her NSAA role whenever the board could identify a capable replacement. She explains why on the podcast, but hers has been a by-all-accounts successful seven-year run amidst and through rapid and irreversible industry change – Covid, consolidation, multi-mountain passes, climate change, skyrocketing costs, the digitization of everything – and it was worth pausing to reflect on all that the NSAA had accomplished and all of the challenges waiting ahead.

Second, our doomsday instincts keep running up against this stat: despite a fairly poor winter, snow-wise, the U.S. ski industry racked up the fifth-most skier visits of all time during its 2023-24 campaign. How is that possible, and what does it mean? I’ve explored this a little myself, but Pawlak has access to data that I don’t, and she adds an extra dimension to our analysis.

And this is true of so many of the topics that I regularly cover in this newsletter: capital investment, regulation, affordability, safety, diversity. This overlap is not surprising, given my stated focus on lift-served skiing in North America. Most of my podcasts bore deeply into the operations of a single mountain, then zoom out to center those ski areas within the broader ski universe. When I talk with the NSAA, I can do the opposite – analyze the larger forces driving the evolution of lift-served skiing, and see how the collective is approaching them. It’s a point of view that very few possess, and even fewer are able to articulate.

Questions I wish I’d asked

We recorded this conversation before POWDR announced that it had sold Killington and Pico, and would look to sell Bachelor, Eldora, and Silver Star in the coming months. I would have loved to have gotten Pawlak’s take on what was a surprise twist in skiing’s long-running consolidation.

I didn’t ask Pawlak about the Justice Department’s investigation into Alterra’s proposed acquisition of Arapahoe Basin. I wish I would have.

What I got wrong

I said that Hugh Reynolds was “Big Snow’s head of marketing.” His actual role is Chief Marketing Officer for all of Snow Partners, which operates the indoor Big Snow ski area, the outdoor Mountain Creek ski area, and a bunch of other stuff.

Podcast Notes

On specific figures from the Kotke Report:

Pretty much all of the industry statistics that I cite in this interview come from the Kotke Demographic Report, an annual end-of-season survey that aggregates anonymized data from hundreds of U.S. ski areas. Any numbers that I reference in this conversation either refer to the 2022-23 study, or include historical data up to that year. I did not have access to the 2023-24 report until after our conversation.

Capital expenditures

Per the 2023-24 Kotke Report:

Definitions of ski resort sizes

Also from Kotke:

On European lift fleets versus American

Comparing European skiing to American skiing is a bit like comparing futbol to American football – two different things entirely. Europe is home to at least five times as many ski areas as North America and about six times as many skiers. There are ski areas there that make Whistler look like Wilmot Mountain. The food is not only edible, but does not cost four times your annual salary. Lift tickets are a lot cheaper, in general. But it snows more, and more consistently, in North America; our liftlines are more organized; and you don’t need a guide here to ski five feet off piste. Both are great and annoying in their own way. But our focus of difference-ness in this podcast was between the lift fleets on each continent. In brief, you’re far more likely to stumble across a beefcaker on a random Austrian trail than you are here in U.S. America. Take a look at skiresort.info’s (not entirely accurate but close enough), inventory of eight-place chairlifts around the world:

On “Waterville with the MND lift”

Pawlak was referring to Waterville Valley’s Tecumseh Express, built in 2022 by France-based MND. It was the first and only lift that the manufacturer built in the United States prior to the dissolution of a joint venture with Bartholet. While MND may be sidelined, Pawlak’s point remains valid: there is room in the North American market for manufacturers other than Leitner-Poma and Doppelmayr, especially as lift prices continue to escalate at amazing rates.

On my crankiness with “the mainstream media” and climate change

I kind of hate the term “mainstream media,” particularly when it’s used as a de facto four-letter word to describe some Power Hive of brainwashing elitists conspiring to cover up the government’s injection of Anthrax into our Honey Combs. I regret using the term in our conversation, but sometimes in the on-the-mic flow of an interview I default to stupid. Anyway, once or twice per year I get particularly bent about some non-ski publication framing lift-served skiing as an already-doomed industry because the climate is changing. I’m not some denier kook who’s stockpiling dogfood for the crocodile apocalypse, but I find this narrative stupid because it’s reductive and false. The real story is this: as the climate changes, the ski industry is adapting in amazing and inventive ways; ski areas are, as I often say, Climate Change Super Adapters. You can read an example that I wrote here.

On the NSAA’s Covid response

There’s no reason to belabor the NSAA’s Covid response – which was comprehensive and excellent, and is probably the reason the 2020-21 American ski season happened – here. I already broke the whole thing down with Pawlak back in April 2021. She also joined me – somewhat remarkably, given the then-small reach of the podcast – at the height of Covid confusion in April 2020 to talk through what in the world could possibly happen next.

On The Colorado Sun’s reporting on ski area safety and the NSAA’s safety report

The Colorado Sun consistently reports on ski area safety, and the ski industry’s resistance to laws that would compel them to make injury reports public. I asked Pawlak about this, citing, specifically, this Sun article From April 8, 2024:

[13-year-old] Silas [Luckett] is one of thousands of people injured on Colorado ski slopes every winter. With the state’s ski hills posting record visitation in the past two seasons — reaching 14.8 million in 2022-23 — it would appear that the increasing frequency of injuries coincides with the rising number of visits. We say “appear” because, unlike just about every other industry in the country, the resort industry does not disclose injury data. …

Ski resorts do not release injury reports. The ski resort industry keeps a tight grasp on even national injury data. Since 1980, the National Ski Areas Association provides select researchers with injury data for peer-reviewed reports issued every 10 years by the National Ski Areas Association. The most recent 10-year review of ski injuries was published in 2014, looking at 13,145 injury reports from the 2010-11 ski season at resorts that reported 4.6 million visits.

The four 10-year reports showed a decline in skier injuries from 3.1 per 1,000 visitors in 1980-81 to 2.7 in 1990-91 to 2.6 in 2000-01 to 2.5 in 2010-11. Snowboarder injuries were 3.3 in 1990, 7.0 in 2000 and 6.1 in 2010.

For 1990-91, the nation’s ski areas reported 46.7 million skier visits, 2000-01 was 57.3 million and 2010-11 saw a then all–time high of 60.5 million visits. …

The NSAA’s once-a-decade review of injuries from 2020-21 was delayed during the pandemic and is expected to land later this year. But the association’s reports are not available to the public [Pawlak disputes this, and provided a copy of the report to The Storm – you can view it here].

When Colorado state Sen. Jessie Danielson crafted a bill in 2021 that would have required ski areas to publish annual injury statistics, the industry blasted the plan, arguing it would be an administrative burden and confuse the skiing public. It died in committee.

“When we approached the ski areas to work on any of the details in the bill, they refused,” Danielson, a Wheat Ridge Democrat, told The Sun in 2021. “It makes me wonder what it is that they are hiding. It seems to me that an industry that claims to have safety as a top priority would be interested in sharing the information about injuries on their mountains.”

The resort industry vehemently rebuffs the notion that ski areas do not take safety seriously.

Patricia Campbell, the then-president of Vail Resorts’ 37-resort mountain division and a 35-year veteran of the resort industry, told Colorado lawmakers considering the 2021 legislation that requiring ski resorts to publish safety reports was “not workable” and would create an “unnecessary burden, confusion and distraction.”

Requiring resorts to publish public safety plans, she said, would “trigger a massive administrative effort” that could redirect resort work from other safety measures.

“Publishing safety plans will not inform skiers about our work or create a safer ski area,” Campbell told the Colorado Senate’s Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee in April 2021.

On ASTM International

Pawlak refers to “ASTM International” in the podcast. That is an acronym for “American Society for Testing and Materials,” an organization that sets standards for various industries. Here’s an overview video that most of you will find fairly boring (I do, however, find it fascinating that these essentially invisible boards operate in the background to introduce some consistency into our highly confusing industrialized world):

On Mammoth and Deer Valley’s “everyone gets 15 feet” campaign

There’s a cool video of this on Deer Valley’s Instapost that won’t embed on this page for some reason. Since Alterra owns both resorts, I will assume Mammoth’s campaign is similar.

On Heavenly’s collision prevention program

More on this program, from NSAA’s Safety Awards website:

Heavenly orchestrated a complex collision prevention strategy to address a very specific situation and need arising from instances of skier density in certain areas. The ski area’s unique approach leveraged detailed incident data and distinct geographic features, guest dynamics and weather patterns to identify and mitigate high-risk areas effectively. Among its efforts to redirect people in a congested area, Heavenly reintroduced the Lakeview Terrain Park, added a rest area and groomed a section through the trees to attract guests to an underutilized run. Most impressively, these innovative interventions resulted in a 52% year-over-year reduction of person-on-person collisions. Judges also appreciated that the team successfully incorporated creative thinking from a specialist-level employee. For its effective solutions to reduce collision risk through thoughtful terrain management, NSAA awarded Heavenly Mountain Resort with the win for Best Collision Prevention Program.

On the Crested Butte accident

Pawlak and I discuss a 2022 accident at Crested Butte that could end up having lasting consequences on the ski industry. Per The Colorado Sun:

It was toward the end of the first day of a ski vacation with their church in March 2022 when Mike Miller and his daughter Annie skied up to the Paradise Express lift at Crested Butte Mountain Resort.

The chair spun around and Annie couldn’t settle into the seat. Mike grabbed her. The chair kept climbing out of the lift terminal. He screamed for the lift operator to stop the chair. So did people in the line. The chair kept moving.

Annie tried to hold on to the chair. Mike tried to hold his 16-year-old daughter. The fall from 30 feet onto hard-packed snow shattered her C7 vertebrae, bruised her heart, lacerated her liver and injured her lungs. She will not walk again.

The Miller family claims the lift operators were not standing at the lift controls and “consciously and recklessly disregarded the safety of Annie” when they failed to stop the Paradise chair. In a lawsuit the family filed in December 2022 in Broomfield County District Court, they accused Crested Butte Mountain Resort and its owner, Broomfield-based Vail Resorts, of gross negligence and “willful and wanton conduct.”

In May, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled on the incident, per SAM:

In a 5-2 ruling, the Colorado Supreme Court found that liability waivers cannot be used to protect ski areas from negligence claims related to chairlift accidents. The decision will allow a negligence per se claim brought against Vail Resorts to proceed in the district courts.

The decision, however, did not invalidate all waivers, as the NSAA clarified in the same SAM article:

There was concern among outdoor activity operators in Colorado that the case might void liability waivers altogether, but the narrow scope of the decision has largely upheld the use of liability waivers to protect against claims pertaining to inherent risks.

“While the Supreme Court carved out a narrow path where releases of liability cannot be enforced in certain, unique chairlift incidents, the media downplayed, if not ignored, a critical part of the ruling,” explained Dave Byrd, the National Ski Areas Association’s (NSAA) director of risk and regulatory affairs.

“Plaintiffs’ counsel had asked the [Colorado] Supreme Court to overturn decades of court precedent enforcing the broader use of ALL releases in recreation incidents, and the court unanimously declined to make such a radical change with Colorado’s long-standing law on releases and waivers—and that was the more important part of the court’s decision from my perspective.”

The Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling “express[es] no view as to the ultimate merit of the claim,” rather it allows the Millers’ claim to proceed to trial in the lower courts. It could be month or years before the lawsuit is concluded.

On me knowing “all too well what it’s like to be injured on a ski trip”

Boy do I ever:

Yeah that’s my leg. Ouch.

Don’t worry. I’ve skied 102 days since that mangling.

Here’s the full story.

On “Jerry of the Day”

I have conflicted feelings on Jerry of the Day. Some of their posts are hilarious, capturing what are probably genuinely good and seasoned skiers whiffing in incredible fashion:

Some are just mean-spirited and stupid:

Funny I guess if you rip and wear it ironically. But it’s harder to be funny than you may suppose. See The New Yorker’s cloying and earnest (and never-funny), Shouts & Murmurs column.

On state passport programs

State passport programs are one of the best hacks to make skiing affordable for families. Run by various state ski associations, they provide between one and three lift tickets to every major ski area in the state for some grade range between third and fifth. A small administrative fee typically applies, but otherwise, the lift tickets are free. In most, if not all, cases, kids do not need to live in the state to be eligible. Check out the programs in New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, and Utah. Other states have them too – use the Google machine to find them.

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