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Vermont: Skiing back in time
Thursday, November 25, 2004 Posted: 10:25 AM EST (1525 GMT)

Skiers ride the single-chair lift at Mad River Glen resort.

WAITSFIELD, Vermont (AP) -- Skiers driving from I-89 to Route 100, between Burlington and Montpelier, Vermont, are faced with two key forks in the road.

One route leads to Sugarbush, a modern ski area with high-speed quad lifts, major snowmaking, groomed trails and condos.

The other goes to Mad River Glen -- and a step back in time.

Little snowmaking. No snowboarding. No condos. In fact, one of the attractions is the single-chair lift, the longest in the country at 1 1/4 miles and the second-oldest, built in 1949.

"There are few things in life that offer the experience of a time machine," said Brad Simmons of Rowayton, Connecticut. "It's not for everybody, and that's part of what it is."

Simmons is one of just under 1,700 owners of Mad River Glen, which Glen officials say is the only large ski area in the country owned by its skiers.

The place has taken on a sort of cult status for many, and it shows in the bumper sticker, "Mad River Glen -- Ski It If You Can." The sticker was started as a marketing tool in 1984.

Skiers take the sticker on trips around the world to photograph it in unusual places. Pictures along the wall in the Gen. Stark Pub show them holding up their stickers in the Arctic Circle in Finland, the Galapagos Islands, the Guinness brewery in Ireland, and Mount Kilimanjaro. Astronaut Catherine Coleman, a Glen shareholder, even took her bumper sticker into space.

The area is particularly attractive to expert skiers, young and old. About half of its 45 trails on 3,637-foot Gen. Stark Mountain are black-diamond, the designation for the most difficult trails.

But it also is family-friendly, with a ski school for toddlers, and trails that all funnel to the base lodge, making it difficult to get separated or lost.

Old-fashioned character
It is all pretty much the way Roland Palmedo probably envisioned it when he bought the land and began building his concept for a ski area in the late 1940s as "a mountain community" where skiers could enjoy nature and skiing, not a winter theme park designed just to make money, according to Glen marketing director Eric Friedman.

At national ski association meetings they talk about competition from cruises and Disney, and how ski areas must compete for those dollars, Friedman said. "Roland would be rolling in his grave hearing that kind of stuff," he said.

Palmedo was a New York banker and former World War I and II fighter pilot who invested in the Stowe, Vermont, area, but built the Glen because he thought Stowe had become too commercial. He ran the Glen until 1968 when he sold it to a group of investors, which in turn sold it to Betsy Pratt in the early 1970s. She was ready to sell in the mid-1990s and suggested a cooperative structure to maintain its old-fashioned character.

They needed 1,667 skiers to pay $1,500 each for a share to pay the $2.5 million asking price. They got 900. But Pratt gave them an interest-free note for five years, and they took over the area in 1995.

Since then, the price of a share has risen to $1,750, but the debt has been paid, and about 65 percent of the shareholders are from out of state, many from Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Connecticut.

No one can own more than four shares to make sure there is no dominant owner, and each shareholder must pay $200 a year for every share. For that, all they get is a $117 discount on a season ticket, or a $7.50 discount on the $50 daily pass. There is no profit sharing -- the average $150,000-a-year profits all go back into the area.

'It's worth the wait'

The resort's single-chair lift still runs on diesel fuel, one of the last left in the country.
Owning a share is more a sign of allegiance than a way to save money. Why else would a group of Glen employees got together to buy a share, although they can ski for free?

"The general idea is to keep preserved the skiing experience offered here," said Brad Simmons, who bought his wife, Susan, a share for a Christmas present.

A nine-member board of shareholders meets every month to talk policy, and the annual shareholders' meeting is held in April. At their first meeting in 1995, shareholders decided they didn't want the area to change.

So the single-chair lift still runs on diesel fuel, one of the last left in the country. When it broke down for four days in 2003, steel had to be ordered from Ohio and a local machine shop made the replacement part because parts are no longer available.

When the time comes to replace the lift, a majority of shareholders would opt for another single chair, though it would cost more than a double chair, said Jamey Wimble, general manager and president.

"They're willing to pay a premium for it," he said. "The skiers will decide. There's not a lot of places where they do decide."

People accept up to a 30-minute wait in line on a busy weekend to make the 12-minute run to the summit, though they can choose among three double-chair lifts that don't go as high.

"It's not a very economical way to get people up the hill," Wimble said, but added that "the single is very much the identity of Mad River."

However, the limited uphill capacity, along with winding trails lined by woods, means there often are no other skiers in sight on the trails.

"It's worth the wait," Susan Simmons said.

Shareholders also have limited snowmaking to about 15 percent of the mountain to hold down costs and to keep the natural snow experience -- the mountain averages about 250 inches annually.

And although snowboarders represent about 30 percent of the business at more commercial areas, the Glen has banned them since 1992 because snowboarders had trouble getting safely off the single-chair lift, Wimble said.

"If we were struggling financially, that's the only thing I see to change," Wimble said. But with no debt service and no snowmaking, "we run a pretty lean ship to make it work," he said.

And besides, a survey of shareholders a few years ago showed 86 percent liked the ban.