TRUE GRIT
Today is a dismal era for the lovers of the last bastions that put culture above capitalism — places like independent bookstores, record stores, and, to some extent, ski areas.
Musty bookstores, where you could spend days wandering aisles packed with best-selling novels of yesteryear or oddball, commercial failures of books that perhaps gleam a little brighter with the aid of a few decades of history, have been replaced by the cancer of Amazon — a soulless, characterless efficiency that not only adds nothing to a community’s character or culture but, it could be argued, actually slowly tears it apart.
Record stores, of course, are suffering the same fate. A couple clicks of the mouse in the iTunes store now replaces the act of wandering through a world of New Orleans jazz, past banners of Hendrix and Marley, grasping the artwork, browsing the lyrics, and re-reading the history of decades of musical progression.
It’s a ruthless efficiency that makes perfect capitalistic sense, but batters local culture into a bland, homogenized, mass-market palatability.
It’s obviously too late for record stores, and not looking good for bookstores. But some select ski areas that have escaped the world of publicly traded resort operators have been bright spots of culture over capitalism. These ski areas might not be milking tourists for millions in profit each quarter, but they were solvent businesses that were unique enough to be more than real estate or resorts.
The fear — and you can feel it almost palpably enveloping longtime Squaw skiers and residents in particular — is that this all changing in Tahoe.
Sierra skiing had been the product of pioneers like Alex Cushing, Warren Hellman, Dave McCoy, Dick Reuter, and Bud Klein — ski industry giants who did not treat skiing like an investment fund.
Cushing, for all his faults, was the type of stubborn iconoclast that made his life’s work the creation of a world-class mountain, not a money-making machine. You can look at Squaw’s haphazard lift pattern, majestic cable car route, and stunning High Camp location and know that Cushing was not creating the Amazon of ski areas. He most likely could have made millions more by engineering Squaw Valley into a resort that catered to middle-aged non-skiers. Instead, he worked tirelessly to create something authentic, distinct, and unique.
The late Warren Hellman, part owner and former chairman of Sugar Bowl, was a billionaire banker who turned his pockets inside out to put on one of the world’s finest music festivals — Hardly Strictly Bluegrass — and invited everyone to attend for free. He ran 100-mile races with broken ribs, donated prodigiously, and gave up banking for banjo playing. Under his direction, that same spirit was ingrained in Sugar Bowl. Modest development at the Donner Summit ski area might not have maximized profits, but it did something even more important — it retained a culture and flavor at Sugar Bowl that remains today. With identical cookie-cutter ski villages dotting the nation from coast to coast, Sugar Bowl still stands out as a genuine ski area unhomogenized by a world of ski conglomerate buyouts.
Dick Reuter, one of Kirkwood’s founders, was a tough-as-nails mountain man’s mountain man known for lumberjacking entire Kirkwood ski runs singlehandedly.
Cushing, Reuter, Hellman, and Klein have all recently passed away. Is the iconoclastic ski pioneer spirit passing away with them?
It will be a tragedy for Tahoe if these ski visionaries’ creations are overridden by a legion of pencil pushers, business algorithms, and spreadsheets; if family businesses are pushed out for an extra percentage point in profits; and the mountain dreamers are replaced by MBAs peddling engineered theme park–style attractions.
Hellman famously said that he viewed money ‘like manure.’
‘If you spread it around, good things will grow — and if you pile it up, it just smells bad,’ Hellman said, according to an interview with Forbes.com that was recently quoted in The Bay Citizen.
For pioneers like Hellman, money did not dictate a life’s direction. That visionary, culture-over-capitalism view cemented Hellman as a larger-than-life original, and benefited the entire Truckee/Tahoe region by creating a civically minded, unique ski area on Donner Summit.
In these pivotal times, Tahoe’s ski industry is clearly on the verge, or perhaps in the middle, of widespread changes. The future of Tahoe skiing is now predominantly in the hands of publicly traded corporations and private equity firms.
There are no more Warren Hellmans, Dick Reuters, or Alex Cushings coming along anytime soon. But I hope that there is enough of their spirit left in the Tahoe area to keep our ski industry from stripping away our culture for the sake of a fistful of extra profit.
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