Building a Better Mountain : Squaw Valley: Five years ago, at age 70, Alexander Cushing returned to the site of the 1960 Winter Olympics to make his ski resort state of the art.

Thirty years ago last month, Alexander Cushing surprised the world by staging a near-perfect Winter Olympics here. But what, skiers soon began asking, have you done for us lately?

For a long time, the answer was not much.

At one point, Cushing’s mountain manager called the ski lifts junk, and his employees acquired a reputation as the rudest individuals this side of New York’s taxi drivers. The skiing was still great, but apres-ski lodging, dining and playing facilities were mainly a mess.

Then, about four or five years ago, a strange thing happened: Cushing left the East and resumed his role as resident squire of Squaw Valley--which is what everybody except the postal service calls this 6,200-foot-high Sierra domain 10 miles northwest of Lake Tahoe.

“I’d been away, as it were, for 10 or 15 years,” Cushing said the other day. “When I say away, not really away. I was here once a month, being an absentee landlord and so on and so forth, but it came on me that there was Squaw Valley, a place for everybody to see.

“You could characterize it any way you wanted to, good or bad or whatever, but there it was. It’s not like (being) a doctor. You don’t bury your mistakes or anything like that. Any mistakes we made were there. Anything we did that was good was there.

“And it occurred to me, ‘This is basically what you do with your life--it’s this place here.’ And a series of things happened. My (second) wife, Libby, died about five years ago. . . . We’d been married 15 years. . . . So, I was going to have to change my life anyway.

“But it comes to you, ‘Well this is what you do,’ and the next question is, ‘Well is this the best you can do?’ And you say, ‘Well, no. I’d never thought about it that way. It’s not the best I could do. Well then, why don’t you do the best you could do? I mean, what are you saving yourself for? Why don’t you get at it?’ ”

As a result of this little chat with himself, Cushing said, he changed.

“I really went back to work, is what it comes down to.”

At age 70.

That was five years ago, and since then, Squaw Valley USA, as Cushing has renamed it, has been transformed into a skiing work of art--but a work still in progress.

The 32 lifts have been improved; his ticky-tacky lodge has been replaced by solidly built condominiums; the old Squaw Valley Inn and Olympic Village have been spruced up; a new 400-room hotel is scheduled to open next winter; restaurants have been added both in Olympic House and on the mountain, and employees seem to be at least as civil as those at any other ski area.

In fact, a recent survey by Snow Country magazine rated Squaw Valley the No. 2 winter resort in the country, behind Vail, Colo.

“Squaw Valley has become a good ski mountain,” said Cushing, who stands a lean and erect 6-feet-5 and has only traces of gray in his sandy hair.

“It’s run better than it used to be. The reputation we had for rude lift operators and all that, it goes back quite a ways, but it takes a long time to overcome once you get it. I think gradually the public perception is changing, and it generally is a good place now.

“I know that we’re trying to produce the very best that could be done here. And, with that in mind, then it gets to be extremely interesting. I live out here six months solid a year now, in the wintertime. I still go back to Rhode Island in the summer, where I lived as a kid.”

Four years ago, Cushing, who has three daughters by his first wife, Justine, married for the third time.

Nancy Wendt was general counsel for the Squaw Valley Ski Corp., and Cushing, who has a law degree from Harvard, said: “It was like the old cliche. She got to be so expensive, I had to marry her.

“She’s the one, as much as anybody, who said, ‘Why don’t you get off the dime and do it right (at Squaw Valley)? You could do a lot better than that. What are you sitting around for? Your life’s not over. Let’s get going.’ ”

To really get going, Cushing decided he needed more land, and he has expanded his holdings from six acres at the bottom of the mountain, plus a leased parking lot and use permits from the U.S. Forest Service, to owning most of his end of the valley and the ski slopes.

A complicated deal for acquisition of the old Olympic Village property is in the final stages, and once it’s completed, Cushing plans to push ahead with plans for an Alpine village in the valley.

“We’ll get rid of the cars, park them underground,” he said. “We asked five of the best architectural firms in the country to draw up plans for the village. They wanted to know what style we wanted, and we said, ‘California Alpine,’ on the theory that there is no such style. We wanted to see what they’d come up with.

“This is all for Elevation 6,200. We also have big plans for Elevation 8,200 (at High Camp, the upper station of the cable car tramway).”

Cushing pulled a sheaf of drawings from his desk--he works in his house, which is under the gondola tramway and is cluttered with memorabilia and photos displayed against bright red walls complemented by an equally bright red, shag carpet--and unveiled his longtime favorite dream, now part reality.

“This is going to be a genuinely fantastic thing,” he said. “Up here at the top of the cable car, we’re building an ice rink, 100 feet by 200 feet; a spa with eight pools, an outdoor pool and a swimming lagoon; 14 tennis courts, and we’ll have summer skiing, using the Bailey’s Beach chairlift.

“The ice-making system can also make snow and doesn’t depend on low temperatures, so even after our winter season ends on the Fourth of July with the McFadden Memorial race-- which we are going to revive--we’ll still be able to offer year-round skiing.

“We hope to have it all ready, except for the tennis courts--John Gardiner’s guy is coming up tomorrow to talk about those--by sometime this summer. The building was 90% done last summer.”

The plan also calls for three hotels near the top of the mountain, and Cushing said the entire concept is consistent with Squaw Valley’s transition from mainly a day ski area to a destination resort.

“We’re trying to do the type of thing they did in St. Moritz (Switzerland), where they have other activities for people who don’t ski,” he said.

“Some of this stuff is not economically sound by itself, but the way I look at it, it’s like a band you have in a lounge. Well, an orchestra doesn’t make money but it contributes to the overall effect. We think that having something like this on the top of the mountain, and the fact that we’re on two levels, is going to set us apart from anyplace else in this country.

“It’s like Courchevel (France), where they have Elevation 1,400 (meters) and Elevation 1,800 (meters). We have Elevation 6,200 (feet) and Elevation 8,200 (feet). And we’ll connect the two levels by three great machines--the cable car, the gondola and a new tramway, which may be a funicular that goes through the mountain, so we’ll have access in any kind of weather.

“All this stuff, it’s a real kick. It’s going to make this place what it should be. We are putting in the unusual things--you could never get anybody else to invest in some of them--but I think that when it’s in, they’ll say, ‘Well this guy isn’t quite as much of a screwball as we thought. This is for real up here.’ Then we think we can get investors for the other things.

“I think myself that a hotel will do well up there, and if nobody else will build it, we’ll build it, because I believe in it.

“Of course, I’ve got to be careful that I don’t go broke. But you have to realize that I’m in sort of a hurry. I’m not putting this stuff in for posterity.”

Last summer, in addition to the construction at High Camp, Cushing, who has Rockefeller banking connections, also put in five new chairlifts, including the high-capacity Squaw Peak Express detachable quad, and a $5-million snow-making system that he has yet to use.

“This is a real tale of woe,” he said, “In the fall, when we really needed the snow making, the county wouldn’t let us turn it on. They said we hadn’t filed an environmental impact report (EIR). So, now we’re compiling one. It had the effect of stopping us for a year.

“It’s getting so they’re requiring EIRs on top of EIRs on top of EIRs. I don’t know how many we needed for the two lifts to make the connection to the new hotel so it will be on the lift system when it’s ready. Both lifts are in. Big Red is operating now, but Squaw Creek, which comes up from the hotel to meet Big Red at the top of Red Dog (mountain) isn’t running, because the county said we needed another EIR to grade for the larger landing space where two lifts come together.”

The hotel, which is supposed to be enlarged by 400 rooms in its second phase, is the first high-rise structure in the valley.

Located on the edge of the meadow that was used as a parking lot during the 1960 Winter Olympics, it will be adjacent to a golf course that is scheduled to open with the first nine holes in the summer of 1991.

Cushing is also in the middle of a legal battle with Placer County over his plans for a 33rd lift, called Silverado, which will serve Shirley Canyon, and he said there is a small group of local residents opposing anything he tries to do.

“But we’re getting support from a new group called the Squaw Valley Council, composed of about 300 people who like living in a ski resort,” he said.

Squaw Valley has a potential 8,300 acres of skiing, but Cushing estimates that only about 6,000 will be developed and served by 35 to 40 lifts. The terrain is rated as 25% beginner, 45% intermediate and 30% expert--including such world-renowned steeps as the West Face of KT-22.

The plethora of lifts and vast expanse of slopes have enabled Cushing to guarantee, in commercials that he does himself on San Francisco Bay Area TV stations, that if skiers have to wait more than 10 minutes for a lift, they can get their money back.

“We have crowds now of as many as 14,000, plus nobody knows how many of the 4,000 season-ticket buyers, and we still rarely have anyone say they had to wait in line,” he said.

To get the guarantee, a skier must add an extra dollar to the $35 fee for an all-day ticket, and register as either beginner, intermediate or expert. The guarantee then applies only to those lifts corresponding to that level of ability.

Cushing gave refunds once when a power failure shut down lifts from noon to 1 p.m.

“You could say that’s not our fault and it wasn’t,” he said. “But we paid because I wanted to make it credible . . . like a Reno gambling house, you know, just to get the word around that we really pay off.

“Then, last year, on the Martin Luther King holiday, we had 25 busloads of students from L.A., and at 2:10 p.m. there was an 11-minute wait on one of the expert lifts, which was very unusual. We figured the kids from L.A. all bought expert guarantees, but we paid out 160 refunds.”

Squaw Valley’s lifts have not always been so reliable. A series of accidents in the 1960s caused Hans Burkhart, then Cushing’s mountain manager, to resign, calling them all junk. But Burkhart later returned as the company’s president and also supervised installation of the Garaventa cable car.

Now a consultant in Bend, Ore,, he remains “a close friend and adviser,” according to Cushing, who admits that his original Poma chairlifts were “lightweight.”

He also says the cable car accident in early 1978 that killed four people was one that “could never happen,” or so he had been told by the Swiss company’s engineers.

“But it did,” he said. “One of the cables came loose and cut through one of the cars. I vowed that unless we could find out exactly why it happened, the cable car would not be rebuilt.”

An Austrian tramway expert was hired--”skiing’s Red Adair,” Cushing called him--and recommended two backup safety measures beyond those in the original design, and there have been no problems since.

A few years later, Cushing replaced the original gondola tramway, between the base and the Gold Coast mid-level restaurant, with one designed by Lift Engineering Co. of Carson City, Nev.

“That’s when Burkhart resigned (the second time),” Cushing said. “He told me not to buy it because the company had never made one before. It might be OK the second year, he thought, but he didn’t want to nurse it through the first year.

“Then (even) in the second year, that gondola had 32 stoppages on Washington’s Birthday. The customers were so mad, they’d spit in the attendant’s face when they finally got off at the top. How the hell can you run a business like that? So, I said, ‘We’ve had enough. We’ve got to get rid of this thing, no matter what.’ ”

The gondola was replaced again, causing a bit of a family crisis. The president of Lift Engineering was Janik Kunczynski, who happens to be Cushing’s son-in-law. His Yan chairlifts are highly rated, but this was his first gondola.

“He’s still my son-in-law,” Cushing said with a laugh. “He doesn’t speak to me . . . at least, not if he can help it. But he wouldn’t have spoken to me if I hadn’t given him the job. And he doesn’t speak to me when I do give him the job!”

Now in its 40th year of operation, all under Cushing, Squaw Valley has had its ups and downs, in more ways then one. But no matter what the master plan produces in the future, it would be hard to top the moment on Feb. 18, 1960, when the sun suddenly broke through a persistent cloud cover just as the Walt Disney-orchestrated opening ceremony launched the VIIIth Olympic Winter Games.

Five years earlier, Cushing came from nowhere--Squaw Valley wasn’t then and still isn’t a city--to snatch the Games away from Innsbruck, Austria, employing nothing more than its founder’s cockiness and a three-dimensional model of mostly non-existent facilities.

“It was a wonderful occasion for all of us,” Cushing said. “They were the first nationally televised Winter Olympics. CBS paid $50,000 for the rights. Now, they go for between $300 million and 400 million.”

They were also the last human-scale Olympics, with 665 athletes competing within walking distance of their events. Eight years later, at Grenoble, France, 1,293 athletes took part, and some of the venues were 40 miles away.

America’s skiing boom has been attributed in part to the Squaw Valley Games.

Asked if he deserved credit for it, Cushing said: “Who knows? People have been kind enough to say we set off the ski explosion. But all I remember are those 10 perfect days.”