SKIING / CHRIS DUFRESNE : Resorts Find Fault With TV After Quake

Earthquakes and skiing are serious business in Big Bear. Last Friday morning, as Southland resorts were gearing up for what was expected to be a huge holiday weekend, the ghost of Landers rattled the area with a 5.4 magnitude quake.

Mother Nature has no respect for capitalism.

Brad Wilson, director of marketing at Bear Mountain, was near the lift-ticket line when quake struck at 8 a.m.

“Everyone said, ‘Oh, an earthquake,’ then went on to skiing,” he said.

That wasn’t the way it played on television down the mountain, and it still has resort operators fuming.

Local stations, as is the custom, broke into regular programming to bring us the up-to-the-second latest on the Big Bear quake, except that there wasn’t much to report and, worse yet, some of the reporting was apparently erroneous.

In one broad television stroke, ski operators claim, the weekend skiing well was poisoned and thousands of dollars were lost in an area already economically damaged in the aftermath of June quakes in Landers and Big Bear.

“I am 100% behind reporting the news,” Wilson said. “But when they report things that are hearsay, or exaggerated, well. . . . One (TV) station called the fire station in San Bernardino and asked if they were going to go up and help fight the fires in Big Bear. There were reports of fires burning, chimneys down. In fact, nothing happened up here.”

The misinformation was enough to scare thousands of weekend skiers away from Big Bear’s three major resorts: Bear Mountain, Snow Summit and Snow Valley.

Because of cool weather and improved snow-making capabilities, the Big Bear resorts have been able to open more lifts and trails sooner than at any time in recent memory.

Thanksgiving was going to be a turkey shoot for operators, the busiest ski weekend of the early season.

But then up stepped fear, the economy killer. Even with far better skiing conditions than there were last Thanksgiving, business was down about 20% at Bear Mountain over the weekend.

It was the same story at Snow Summit. And Snow Valley.

The resorts blame television.

“It’s a lot easier to get mad at the media than Mother Nature,” Wilson said. “But they’re both at fault.”

Carrie Shirreffs, a spokeswoman for Snow Summit, quickly went on damage-control patrol. She spent most of last Friday on the phone with local television stations, trying to convince them that the sky wasn’t falling.

“Some of them said there were fires in Big Bear,” Shirreffs said. “Yeah, it’s winter time, people had fires in their fireplaces. They said Highway 18 was closed. Nothing was closed, a rockslide closed a portion of the highway.”

It was too late. What do they say about trying to unring a bell?

“We figure from our surveying, at least 70% of the people that ski in this area make that decision the day before,” Shirreffs said. “What do you think it did to us on Saturday? And Sunday. We still had a great weekend of skiing, but I’m sure it had to affect our numbers.”

At Snow Valley, 15 miles from Big Bear, it was guilt by association.

“We think we may have been hurt over the weekend,” Randy Arrington, a spokesman, said. “We had no damage here at all. Even with the big one here last summer (June), we had absolutely no damage. We did notice a lot of folks leaving the mountain on Friday and Saturday from Big Bear. Usually they start leaving Sunday.”

Representatives of local resorts, of course, are in the business of getting skiers to their mountains. They can be expected to put the best face on anything that might affect their wallets.

But resort employees maintain that safety is their foremost concern. Operators at Bear Mountain stopped the lifts for 10 minutes after the quake to inspect for possible damage.

Other resorts took similar precautions.

Shirreffs said earthquakes are not taken lightly.

“But don’t scare people unnecessarily,” she said. “If it were a big earthquake, we would be the first to put it out on our (phone hot)lines. They do frighten people. They do loosen rocks. It is something to consider. But we’ve had so many of them, it was just another day in Shakytown.”

Resort operators have long had to match wits with Mother Nature. In modern times, snow-making abilities have allowed them to overcome the weather and stay in operation during dry times.

Now, nature is throwing them another curve.

Earthquakes and skiing make for disturbing images.

In Big Bear, it has amounted to a public relations nightmare.

“I know, it conjures up images from a James Bond film I saw,” Wilson said.

Wilson was talking about the A-word.

“But with machine-made snow, you could have a 10-point quake and you wouldn’t have an avalanche,” he said. “It’s firmly connected with the snow.”

This is not comforting enough to some.

This week, experts predicted that there is a strong likelihood a large earthquake will strike the San Bernardino area in the next few years.

OK, kids, who wants to go skiing?

“Geologists speak in geologic time,” Wilson cautioned, “which is hundreds to thousands of years. It could be a lifetime, it could be half a lifetime. Everyone thinks soon is tomorrow. We can make a lot of ski runs before soon.”

Skiing Notes

Mt. Baldy would love to provide skiers with an alternative to the rockin’ and rollin’ at Big Bear, except that Baldy hasn’t opened yet. The resort has the slopes, the weather, even the snow makers. But unlike Big Bear, it doesn’t have a lake, an all-important source in the snow-making business. Mt. Baldy has its own reservoir, but there hasn’t been enough rain to keep it full. It hopes to open some beginner slopes this weekend. . . . On the World Cup circuit, Julie Parisien is becoming America’s hope. The world’s top-ranked slalom skier entered last weekend’s World Cup opener at Park City with an attack of stomach flu. She wobbled to a ninth-place finish in Saturday’s giant slalom but rebounded Sunday to win her specialty, the slalom, by 0.03 seconds over Sweden’s Pernilla Wiberg. Parisien was too ill to eat, but the 21-year-old Maine native mustered the strength to win, thus becoming the first American to win a World Cup event on home snow since 1986. Parisien’s attitude is clearly the stuff of champions.

Maybe it was inevitable, but the Swiss World Cup team has dumped its traditional red and gold racing outfits to appease its sponsor. The new uniforms are yellow with little black holes painted on them. The team’s sponsor is a Swiss cheese company. . . . U.S. freestyle gold medalist Donna Weinbrecht tore knee ligaments Nov. 17 while training in Breckenridge, Colo., and will miss the 1993 World Cup season. . . . American downhiller AJ Kitt, who suffered a sprained ankle Nov. 10 while playing basketball, is back on his skis in an attempt to compete in this weekend’s first World Cup downhill in Val d’Isere, France. It won’t be known until later in the week whether he will race.