David Sax is not wrong in this recent opinion piece in the Globe and Mail:
Adults suck at winter. We see it as a long, dark, cold, uncomfortable season that we have to endure and survive. The older you get, the harder winter is. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
There are some cities that do better at winter. For whatever reason, Montreal has always felt to me like a city that embraces it more than say Toronto. Maybe it's because it's generally colder and snowier. Maybe it's because they have mountains nearby. Or maybe I'm wrong. It has just always seemed that way to me.
The trick, as David points out, is to find something you love that you can only do in the winter. For me, and many others, that thing is skiing and snowboarding. Here is a photo from yesterday afternoon taken from within the trees at Brighton Resort in Utah:
One of the things I love about Salt Lake City / Park City is how much ski and snowboard culture permeates everything. Drive around and you'll see people waiting at bus stops with all of their gear on and their skis in hand. The locals also tell me that if there's an epic storm, you can expect a lot of people to show up in the office around lunchtime.
This is one way to love winter. Admittedly, it's harder in a city without mountains and snow accumulation, and only cold winter weather. (Cities like Toronto.) So what are your options then? If you have any ideas or things you love to do, please share them in the comment section below. Us adults should suck less at winter.
People like ski and snowboard towns. Here's an excerpt from a recent WSJ article talking about Park City:
Prices continued to rise in most luxury ski towns this past year, but none grew as much as Park City, a former silver mining town 32 miles east of Salt Lake City. The average home sale price there grew 35% in 2023 from 2022, compared with a 9.4% increase at Vail and Beaver Creek and 3.2% at Aspen, according to the resort report by Summit Sotheby’s International Realty.
The main point of the article is this: Park City has gotten really expensive, and so people are now looking and buying homes further out in places like Heber City, Midway, and Kamas. Here's how expensive expensive is:
Over the last four years, Covid has stoked demand for western resort real estate. In Park City, single-family homes have sold for a median price of $4 million year-to-date, up from $1.996 million in 2019, according to Redfin, which averaged the monthly median sales prices weighted for the number of homes sold. One home was listed in September for $65 million, which could set a record for the state. It’s now under contract, according to listing agent Paul Benson of Engel & Völkers, who declined to disclose the sale price.
This, of course, isn't a novel phenomenon. It's the whole "drive until you qualify" thing. But what's interesting about this particular mountain example is that it's not centered around access to a CBD or downtown; it's centered around "how fast can I get to a ski and snowboard resort?"
For example, Deer Valley has a new East Village that is expected to open up in 2025. This brings the cities mentioned above closer in. And buyers seem to be doing that math: "It's a 25-minute drive today, but next year I'll be able to get on a lift in 15 minutes. Score."
Given that Deer Valley also doesn't allow snowboarders, it's interesting to think about how these trends could be bifurcating the region between skiers and snowboarders. I don't have any data on this, but I bet if you mapped it out, there would be some sort of clustering happen.
The article also goes on to talk about transportation. Because you can't talk about new development and real estate without talking about traffic. But I think Bill Ciraco (Park City Council) gets it exactly right in the article: This is a car problem, and less of a people problem.
In my mind, the Wasatch Range is destined for something like this ONE Wasatch concept, which is/was a proposal to link seven resorts through a handful of new skiable connections. This is similar to what you'll find in Europe, and it means less driving and more time on the mountain.
That's what everyone wants to be doing anyway.
Photo by Lauren Pandolfi on Unsplash
Snowboarding in Europe, of course, sounds really fancy. And don't get me wrong, it can be fancy if you want it to be. But the reality is that it's also a cheaper option. And that's because the price of a single day lift ticket at most resorts in America is now many multiples of what it costs in Europe. Think $250 vs. €50.
North America has become the expensive destination.
According to a recent Economist article titled "the economics of skiing in America," resorts in Europe are often owned by local or national governments. This is not the case in America, and it's why the lift tickets in Europe seem, by comparison, cheap. But this price differential is also the result of an evolving business model.
Historically, owning a ski resort has never been a stable business in the US. And this makes sense. Most resorts make their money on lift ticket sales. However, sales are dependent on snowfall. If you get a lot of snow, then you make a lot of money. If the planet starts warming up and you don't get a lot of snow, then you don't make a lot of money. Vail has since changed this.
What they have done is made it so punitive to buy a single day lift ticket in North America, that even if you're an occasional skier, the only sensible thing to do is buy a subscription-like pass in the spring -- well before the next season starts.
This is what I have started doing and it gives you unlimited skiing for less than the price of a few days. It also gives Vail a source of revenue that isn't so dependent snowfall. Season passes now make up about 61% of their lift-ticket revenue, according to The Economist. At the same time, it is a model that relies on being able to price discriminate against single-day, non-pass users:
In basic economic theory, excessive market power reduces the efficiency of an industry. Firms reduce output so as to be able to charge more. There is, however, an exception: if a monopolistic firm can charge different prices to different customers, it need not reduce output to increase its profit. The skiing industry shows the truth of this. As the industry has consolidated, daily prices have soared, extracting more cash from price-insensitive skiers.
But this isn't the only way to do it. There's also the whole real estate thing. Last year, Reed Hastings, cofounder of Netflix, became the majority owner of Powder Mountain. And here, they're trying out a different business model:
This December, Powder Mountain in Utah announced that it would be moving to a model where only local property-owners are allowed to ski certain chairlifts. The idea is to profit from real-estate sales, by offering private skiing without the crowds. “To stay independent and uncrowded, we needed to change,” says Reed Hastings, the firm’s boss.
Even still, neither of these approaches is making snowboarding and skiing more accessible. Which is why it's not uncommon to come across stickers and t-shirts at local ski shops that say, "Vail -- ruining ski towns since 1966." People are missing the old days when lift tickets were cheap and the lines on powder days weren't so long.
What skiing needs is in fact much of what the economy more generally needs: supply-side reform, and especially the construction of new housing and transport in the most popular spots. Though there are more skiers than ever, there are in fact fewer resorts than there were a few decades ago.
This sounds familiar.
All quotes are from The Economist.