All white? Only the snow is
Decked out in a sleek, black jumpsuit, black helmet and white wraparound sunglasses, Ramon Baguio looks every inch the hotshot skier. And yet, in a sport where the participants are typically as white as the powder they carve, Baguio has always stood out.
His was the only brown face on the Vermont mountain where he learned to ski as a boy. He can’t recall ever meeting another Filipino ski patrolman. Today, the 42-year-old ski area manager is an anomaly in a business run largely by white men.
At Mountain High Resort near Wrightwood, however, Baguio fits right in.
“A lot of resorts talk about diversity,” said Baguio, who oversees the ski patrol, grooming and facilities at the resort 80 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. “Here, we embrace it wholeheartedly.”
In a business that has unsuccessfully searched for ways to lure minorities to combat stagnant growth, tiny Mountain High has earned an outsized reputation as the Ellis Island of ski areas.
Roughly half its customers are nonwhite, compared with about 11% nationwide. Among its patrol members and ski and snowboard instructors are a number who speak Spanish and others versed in Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and Farsi. Along with Baguio, several top managers are minorities -- another industry rarity.
“I think Mountain High is doing absolutely the right thing,” said Jim Spring, president of the Leisure Trends Group, a Colorado-based outdoor sports research and marketing firm, which tracks skier demographics. While the industry “gives lip service to the idea of having more minority customers, they don’t do a hell of a lot.”
For the ski industry, the stakes are high. After decades of rapid growth, sales of lift tickets have, on average, remained relatively flat in the last decade.
While snowboarding has helped fill slopes in recent years, the fear is that white male baby-boomers -- skiing’s core demographic -- are dying faster than shredders can replace them. It’s estimated that 5.4 million skiers and snowboarders took to the slopes last year, down from about 6 million a decade ago.
Not surprisingly, the most homogeneous of sports descends from one of the most homogeneous of places. Norway begat modern skiing in the 19th century, and for decades the pursuit was largely the province of European aristocrats. After World War II, returning veterans -- in particular those who fought in the Alps for the Army’s famed 10th Mountain Division -- built the American ski industry.
Southern Californians have been skiing the Big Pines area in the San Gabriel Mountains since the 1930s, when a huge ski jump was built in an attempt to lure the Winter Olympics. The Blue Ridge and Holiday Hill ski areas, the precursors to Mountain High, oozed a faux European flavor.
“Runs can be punctuated with refreshing interludes at the attractive little Swiss-style restaurant-warming hut,” The Times wrote of Holiday Hill in the 1950s. “The ski school teaches the French method.”
When Karl Kapuscinski became general manager of Mountain High after it was sold in 1997, the resort was like an aging skier with two bad knees, far past its prime and teetering on the edge of failure.
“I had an opportunity to build from the ground up,” Kapuscinski said. “We are a different animal than your average winter resort. When you come here, you can throw out everything you know about the ski industry.”
Kapuscinski grew up skiing in Vermont and ran a resort in Minnesota -- two of the least diverse states in the nation. But looking down on Southern California from his mountain perch, he saw untapped multicultural markets that could be lured through a relentless focus on youth and snowboarding. Today, 80% of Mountain High’s customers are boarders.
“Boarding is the sport of youth,” said Kapuscinski, a blond, hyperkinetic 43-year-old who gives his age as 39. “And youth doesn’t see color the way old people see color.”
Mountain High eschews new groomed runs for half-pipes and rails, and promotes itself at skateboard and surfing contests. It advertises on ethnic radio and provides free video footage that’s shown on Asian- and Spanish-language TV weather segments. It hands out season passes to hip-hop disc jockeys in hopes of an on-air plug and word-of-mouth momentum.
“You can’t buy that sort of thing,” said marketing director John McColly, who at 37 is among Mountain High’s older managers.
The effort has paid off: Mountain High expects to sell 500,000 lift tickets this winter, nearly three times as many as a decade ago.
Those extra tickets are being bought by people such as Charlie Perdomo and Ben Tam, both young snowboarders.
“I have friends who, when I say, ‘I going snowboarding,’ they say, ‘What are you doing that for? That’s for whites,’ ” said Perdomo, 25, of Panorama City. “That’s a stereotype. Snowboarding is for everyone.”
He has tried other resorts and found them “dominated by white people.” He prefers Mountain High because of its city-transplanted-to-the-woods atmosphere.
“Nobody looks at you as being different here,” he said.
Similarly, Tam, a 30-year-old who once lived in New York City and San Francisco, said Mountain High stood in obvious contrast to ski areas he had frequented on both coasts.
“I’ve seen a lot of resorts, and this one’s different,” he said, pointing to a base-area lunchtime crowd that looked like it had spilled out of a big-city college dormitory.
Still, like Perdomo, Tam is a rarity among his Chinese American friends in Monterey Park who didn’t grow up with skiing or snowboarding and see them as foreign sports.
“They worry about driving up here in the mountains. They worry about the weather,” Tam said. “But once I get them out here and they learn how to do it, they love it and keep coming back.”
Getting them to come that first time is the trick. The ski business has long been dominated by traditionalists resistant to change. Many resorts were slow to embrace snowboarders in the 1980s, for example, amid complaints from skiers.
The industry held what was billed as its first-ever diversity conference just two years ago -- a meeting spearheaded not by resort executives but a beverage salesman.
Frank Tansey is account sales manager for PepsiCo in the United States and Canada. He’s also an avid skier worried about the future of the resorts he sells to, and passionate that the answer lies in tapping diverse markets.
“A lot of these guys are so set in their ways,” Tansey said. “Their attitude is if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it. They don’t want to acknowledge that it is broken.”
In part, that’s because Wall Street has signaled that everything is working just fine.
Ski areas have been hot properties in recent years, with private equity firms snapping up resorts at record prices. Analysts say the enthusiasm has more to do with square feet than vertical feet: Investors see big profits catering to an older, deep-pocketed crowd wanting expensive restaurants, boutiques and ever-more-luxurious vacation homes.
American GIs gave birth to skiing in America, but Realtors are shepherding the sport into its golden years.
“The endgame now is to sell real estate -- it’s become much more lucrative than the skiing itself,” said Spring, the sports business analyst. “It used to be expensive, single-family homes. Now, it’s time shares. They’re selling every piece of property four times.
“They’re not going after young people who can’t afford the real estate. But when the real estate goes away, I’m not sure what they’re going to do.”
Mountain High has no condos to sell. And its base lodge has the scruffy ambience of a traveling circus, with bathrooms in a trailer and a cafeteria that looks like it hasn’t been remodeled since the Carter administration.
Still, the resort’s ability to draw a young, diverse crowd caught the eye of investors who believe its business model prefigures the future. In 2005, Kapuscinski teamed with a Chicago-based equity firm to buy the resort.
At least once a month, he gets a call from a ski executive who asks, How can we do what you did?
“They want some magical, easy answer,” he said, shaking his head. “I tell them you can’t be all things to all people. If selling real estate is what you do, great. We’re a skateboard park that happens to have been moved into the mountains.”
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Begin text of infobox
Who’s on the slopes
At least 85% of skiers and snowboarders are white, according to an industry study, but Mountain High Resort has been able to attract a much more diverse group. Nationwide, participation in skiing has remained relatively flat for the last decade.
Ethnicity of skiers, 2004-05
Includes snowboarders
African American 1%
American Indian 1%
Mixed 2%
Latino 3%
Asian 4%
No answer 4%
White 85%
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Source: Leisure Trends Group Graphics reporting by Mike Anton
