Sizing up the 800-pound gorillas of ski resorts

Here, if you’re a troublemaker, is a volume to leave casually in the conversation pit at your slope-side rental condo. But read it first.

“Downhill Slide” is about the business of skiing and how the three 800-pound gorillas of the industry have seized upon the sport (and its offspring, snowboarding) as a tool for the making of real estate development fortunes.

The gorillas are Intrawest Corp. (owner of Mammoth, among its many resorts), Vail Resorts Inc. and American Skiing Co., which together grossed nearly $1.8 billion in 2000, earning just under $300 million in before-tax profits. Together they sell one of every four lift tickets in the U.S., and in order to conduct business -- here’s a recurrent theme in the book -- they collectively lease 40,000 acres from the U.S. Forest Service.

The irony at the core of this book, and the ski resort industry generally, is that, as author Hal Clifford gently puts it, “the ski industry is dying.” That is, while the U.S. population has been galloping ahead for the last two decades, the number of skier-and-snowboarder visits has remained essentially flat, and no new major ski resorts have opened. But evidently many people need not ski to enjoy a ski area. Demand for second homes in and around mountain resorts is so strong that the big three are rushing to expand resorts such as Mammoth, building and selling as many units as neighbors and environmental laws will allow. (One side effect: Service workers are forced out of town and into long-distance commuting.)

This is a tough, thoroughly reported book, and behind it stands an author in love with skiing, alarmed by the social and environmental implications of the evolution of the mountain resort business and scornful of the faux villages popping up around the mountain West.

My only quibble, and it depresses me to raise it, is Clifford’s assertion that these companies will achieve greater success, and serve society better, if they pay more attention to what skiers want. I’m not sure of that.

As air travel grew easier and this country’s passenger-rail industry shriveled and mutated into always-unprofitable Amtrak three decades ago, somebody said this of the rail companies: “They thought they were in the railroad business. But really, they were in the transportation business.”

The ski industry’s big three, it seems, have realized they’re not in the ski business; they’re in the business of keeping wealthy Americans comfortable and amused on their vacations. That goal may often prove problematic for plants, animals and human communities of the rural mountain West, but it may well please the stockholders of the big three.

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Day by day, the terra to our south gets more cognita. Hence, after years of guidebooks aimed broadly at Mexico or slightly more specifically at Pacific Mexico, we now have the first edition of a Moon guidebook aimed strictly at Guadalajara and its immediate environs.

This is good, and it’s also good that author Bruce Whipperman is a veteran of Mexico travel and fact-wrangling. He gives us not only the usual hotel and restaurant survey but also an update on the environmental trouble brewing as waters recede at Lake Chapala and some sound words on spending practices. For instance: Many merchants will happily accept dollars, but “you will nearly always save money by insisting on paying in pesos.”

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Here are about 600 images of Asia, some stunning and moving, some less so, wedged into about 320 unnumbered pages.

Like conditions on the ground in many of these counties, the resulting spectacle is chaotic. And like the employees of one of those upscale mountain resorts where Hal Clifford has been muckraking, the text of “Asia Grace” has been banished off campus.

The book, clad in a gleaming pink-and-gold cover, holds nothing but images within, most of them shot in the 1970s, some in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

For words to make further sense of the images, you have to find your way to www.asiagrace.com, where you can learn that photography is Kevin Kelly’s second gig: He’s better known as the co-founder of Wired magazine. The Web site also offers caption information and allows visitors to order signed ink-jet prints of images at $100 each.

The book’s pages include terraced rice paddies, soaring mosques and sprawling deserts, covering 16 countries from Iran to Japan.

It’s an exhilarating but wearying journey. Like an overwhelmed newcomer on the banks of the Ganges, I found myself craving fewer images, more words and more order.

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Calendar writer Christopher Reynolds’ book column appears twice a month.