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Master plan proposes new lifts, restaurants and larger ‘comfortable carrying capacity’ at Snowmass Ski Area

 Skiers and snowboarders slide down Fanny Hill to the base of the Village Express chairlift at Snowmass Ski Area.
Tamara Susa
/
Courtesy of Aspen Skiing Co.
Skiers and snowboarders slide down Fanny Hill to the base of the Village Express chairlift at Snowmass Ski Area. A 2022 master plan for the resort includes an idea to replace the six-pack chairlift with a 10-person gondola and also proposes a new “Coneygame” chairlift that would load near the Snowmass Mall, giving skiers and riders another option to get higher up on the mountain from the village core.

More mountain biking trails and kid’s activities in the summer, more skiable glades in the winter, more seats for more lunch guests at more on-mountain dining venues, served by more chairlifts with more capacity: It’s all in the Snowmass Ski Area 2022 Master Development Plan, which lays out everything Aspen Skiing Company might want to develop at Snowmass in the next decade or so.

The latest plan includes some concepts from earlier master plans and some new proposals, too.

Chris Kiley is the senior vice president of planning and development at SkiCo, filling Dave Corbin’s position after Corbin recently retired. Kiley said it’s a plan of ideas, not guarantees, which makes it hard to give a ballpark estimate on the dollar value of all these proposals.

“We'd need to prioritize and try to get our arms around, ‘what's the most important in here?’ Not necessarily contemplate actually building everything,” Kiley said in an interview along with senior project manager Mak Keeling at SkiCo’s Basalt offices on Tuesday. “The idea of the master plan is to throw every idea out there and see what sticks.”

The U.S. Forest Service accepted the master development plan in January, and SkiCo promoted it with an email linking to a web post last week.

“Acceptance” means that the Forest Service deems the plan consistent with the requirements of the Snowmass “special use permit” and a 2002 White River National Forest Land and Resource Management Plan, also called the “Forest Plan.” But it doesn’t give final authorization for SkiCo to proceed with any of the projects, according to the 145-page plan posted to the Forest Service website.

That will require a more detailed project analysis and site-specific environmental review.

The Town of Snowmass Village also gets to review the plan to make sure it’s consistent with the town’s regulations, as the ski area is inside the town’s boundaries. Kiley told the Snowmass Village Town Council Monday that SkiCo is preparing to submit the master plan to the town in the spring for review later this year.

Then, individual projects will be presented one-by-one, with top priorities — like a new lift from the Snowmass Mall area and expanded capacity at an on-mountain burger joint — cropping up first.

“For both the Forest Service and the town of Snowmass Village and the greater community, we want to put all of our ideas on paper, and we'll roll them out one at a time, depending on our priorities and our needs across the mountain,” Kiley said.

Keeling said in the interview Tuesday that a lot of the ideas in the master plan aim to improve and maintain the on-mountain experience by giving skiers and riders more room to move around.

“We're putting more people into a more diverse, spread-out product and allowing them to then have, hopefully, a better experience at lunchtime, to have a better experience throughout the day,” Keeling said.

The master plan includes ideas for two new restaurants, one on the Gunner’s View run accessed via the Elk Camp chairlift and one at the base of the Alpine Springs chairlift, plus expansions at the Sam’s and Ullrhof restaurant buildings and updates to the Spider Sabich picnic area and Lynn Britt Cabin.

Existing restaurants are higher up the to-do list, Kiley said, especially at the casual Ullrhof burger spot near the base of the Big Burn chairlift.

“Ullrhof is pretty high on our list for study, because it's such an important location on the mountain that is accessible by so many people and one of the places we really feel the crunch,” Kiley said.

Skiers and snowboarders form a long line to access the Cirque surface lift at Snowmass Ski Area.
Tamara Susa
/
Courtesy of Aspen Skiing Co.
Skiers and snowboarders form a long line to access the Cirque surface lift at Snowmass Ski Area. The ski area’s master plan proposes a replacement that would double the lift’s capacity to carry riders to the highest point in the resort.

Chairlift upgrades would boost capacity at the Alpine Springs and Elk Camp chairs and at the Cirque surface lift. And a proposed 10-person gondola to Sam’s Knob could replace the existing six-pack Village Express chairlift.

There are also a couple of new chairlifts in the plan, like one on western Burnt Mountain, initially approved in 1994.

Another lift called “Coneygame” would replace the existing 37-year-old Coney Glade chairlift and stretch further down to the Snowmass Mall, near the site where the old Burlingame chairlift started.

The Coneygame lift is such a priority for SkiCo that officials are already preparing that specific proposal for further review, with the hopes of starting construction in the summer of 2024.

Keeling said the Burnt Mountain lift is a more far-off idea that may or may not actually extend to an area near the top of Long Shot, which would eliminate the current five-minute hike skiers take to access the terrain near Elk Camp.

And while the master plan shows the Burnt Mountain lift starting at the bottom of Longshot and extending nearly to the top, SkiCo officials still like the idea of maintaining some “hike-to” terrain in that Burnt Mountain area, which skiers and snowboarders currently access via a short walk uphill from the access gate near the top of the Elk Camp chairlift.

“With things like the master development plan, you have to show the extent of what something could be. … Whether or not the lift goes to the top at the end of the day, whether there's a different alignment, whether the bottom goes up, that's all in play, but we have to show the bottom as far to the bottom as it could be and the top as far to the top as it could be,” Keeling said.

Skiers and snowboarders look toward the top of Burnt Mountain from the unloading area at the top of the Elk Camp chairlift at Snowmass Ski Area.
Tamara Susa
/
Courtesy of Aspen Skiing Co.
Skiers and snowboarders look toward the top of Burnt Mountain from the unloading area at the top of the Elk Camp chairlift at Snowmass Ski Area. The Snowmass Ski Area 2022 Master Development Plan includes a proposal for a Burnt Mountain chairlift, but planners say they may still consider ways to preserve the “hike-to” character of the terrain currently accessed via a short walk uphill from the access gate.

The master plan also proposes glading that would apply to more than 200 acres of tight trees inside the ski area boundary, turning it into a roomier skiing experience in areas like Alpine Springs, Sneaky’s near the top of Big Burn and Wildcat on Sam’s Knob.

Keeling says he’s excited about that idea, and not just for the skiing experience.

“From the environmental health side, there is a huge coalition of local entities that have gotten together to discuss wildfire,” He said. “When you ski through these tight areas, it's not just, ‘Oh, these trees are too tight,’ it's that ‘oh, God, half of them are dying.’”

SkiCo turned to a Forest Health Plan from the White River National Forest to help inform where the proposed glading might happen, then also asked the question of skiability to pick out the proposed locations, Keeling said.

There’s also another environmental factor at play in this master development plan: snow, and a lack of it due to climate change. The plan includes ideas for multiple new snowmaking ponds and dozens of acres of additional snowmaking coverage with more efficiency as climate change impacts early-season natural snowfall.

“The majority of the improvements that are proposed in this plan regarding snowmaking are higher elevation snowmaking,” Keeling said. “We're trying to prepare for the future, at least the anticipated future.”

Many of these proposed updates in the new master plan could help incrementally increase Snowmass Ski Area’s “comfortable carrying capacity” from about 12,500 people to more than 14,800 people if everything in the plan goes into place. For comparison, the planned comfortable carrying capacity from the 2015 master development plan was about 13,600 guests.

That number comes from a tricky equation of “vertical supply” and “vertical demand” that basically represents how many people the resort can comfortably fit on all its slopes, lifts, restaurants and skier services at one time.

Kiley said it’s a “theoretical number, not an actual number.”

“We track our skier visits, and we haven't seen it hit those numbers, but that's something that again, we want to plan to, as a theoretical on the busiest day of the season.”

At least, they don’t see it hit that number all at once. Keeling said the busiest day brings about 12,500 people to the ski area. That count, though, is spread over the course of a day, not a single moment in time.

Kiley said the improvements are about maintaining the “highest level of service” to keep existing business, not necessarily grow it a ton.

“As a part of that, we also anticipate some modest growth, but growth out in the ski resorts has been relatively modest,” Kiley said.

Though the plan considers guest experience and services at length, it doesn’t say much in the way of employee growth to serve those guests, nor does it mention much about housing for those employees.

Given the current challenges in the Roaring Fork Valley’s affordable housing landscape, will SkiCo be able to find enough employees to staff those services?

Kiley said that planners are “sensitive” to that question, making note of the existing housing SkiCo has helped develop for employees. He also said that where plans propose replacements instead of new infrastructure, there won’t be much employee growth.

Keeling added that there are technological “efficiencies” that have reduced the need for employees in some areas like ticketing and restaurant checkouts as automated machines serve some customers. But planners are still well aware of the long-term need for more housing.

“We live here too, we see and we know what's going on,” Keeling said. “And we're doing everything in our ability to work with the town, work with the community to develop new housing projects.”

He also noted that the master plan will be implemented over a decade or more, not all at once.

“As projects are implemented, you can bet that the Ski Company will be there in lockstep with the community and fulfilling our obligations and then some when it comes to employee housing,” Keeling said.

There’s another question, though, in the cliché that says “if you build it, they will come.”

The statement suggests that new development will drive more demand. Keeling disagrees.

“Our valley’s special, our area's special, and plenty of people are currently realizing that or have known that for a long time and are trying to get it through the gates. … People are here, people are going to be continuing to come and this is a response to it,” Keeling said. “We're not building it, and they'll come because we built a new six pack instead of a quad. They're coming because they already know it exists.”

So, he says, it’s back to the guest experience.

“It's our goal to keep the experience level as high as it can be for as long as it can be,” Keeling said. “And there's a lot of different ways to put the pressure on it or relieve the pressure, I should say, but this plan allows for the community to really work together to try to continue to keep Snowmass where it is.”

Kaya Williams is the Edlis Neeson Arts and Culture Reporter at Aspen Public Radio, covering the vibrant creative and cultural scene in Aspen and the Roaring Fork Valley. She studied journalism and history at Boston University, where she also worked for WBUR, WGBH, The Boston Globe and her beloved college newspaper, The Daily Free Press. Williams joins the team after a stint at The Aspen Times, where she reported on Snowmass Village, education, mental health, food, the ski industry, arts and culture and other general assignment stories.