Brave Little State is Vermont Public’s listener-powered journalism podcast. Every episode begins with a question submitted by our audience. Today, a question from Nathan Evans, who lives in New York and skis in Vermont:
“How has Vail’s acquisitions of major ski resorts in Vermont affected locals?”
Vail, a global resort corporation based in Colorado, bought Stowe Mountain Resort in Vermont back in 2017. Almost immediately, Vail cut the cost of a season pass at Stowe by more than half. But cheaper skiing hasn’t deterred people from lampooning Vail online or displaying angry bumper stickers in ski town parking lots. And in the years since, Vail bought two other ski resorts in Vermont: Okemo and Mount Snow.
Reporter Sabine Poux looks into what’s changed since Vail’s entry here, from chairlift upgrades to stress on the housing market. Plus, a general sense of change that’s a little harder to pinpoint.
Note: Our show is made for the ear. We highly recommend listening to the audio. We’ve also provided a transcript. Transcripts are generated using a combination of robots and human transcribers, and they may contain errors.
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The Stowe ‘fantasy’
Sabine Poux: Every fall and every spring, Lisa Mugford and 20 of her girlfriends gather for a weekend at the Echo Lake Inn in Ludlow. The inn is a short ride away from Okemo mountain — one of the more than 40 resorts that Vail now owns around the world.
When I run into the group of friends — completely by accident, by the way — they’re sitting in a circle of rocking chairs on the inn’s porch, in varying levels of layers — pretty typical for 3 p.m. in mid-October. I settle into an empty rocking chair to chat.
Sabine Poux: You’re here for a retreat?
Dawn Lefevre: Yeah. Till Sunday.
Lisa Mugford: There’ll be 22 of us.
Sabine Poux: That's a lot of people.
Diane Zried: Uh huh.
Sabine Poux: Some of the group lives in Lamoille County, in and around Stowe — another resort that Vail owns. So, when I mention to Lisa that I’m reporting a story about the company’s impact in Vermont, she has a lot to say.
Lisa Mugford: Our business is about halfway up the mountain road where they go skiing. And on the busier holiday weekends, it literally takes people probably three hours to get up to the mountain.
Sabine Poux: Lisa owns Stowe Beverage, a liquor store a few miles from the resort.
Lisa Mugford: Yeah. I've had people, like, leave their car running in the mountain road in line and come in and get liquor and go back (laughter).
Sabine Poux: It's that bad.
Lisa Mugford: At times. Yeah. On the weekends, yeah. I mean, the restaurants have all, like, just changed drastically, too. Cost ya an arm and a leg to go out to eat.
Sabine Poux: Yeah.
Lisa Mugford: Yeah.
Dawn Lefevre: Which keeps the locals away, I believe.
Sabine Poux: Chiming in is Dawn Lefevre, a home-health nurse who lives in Johnson. Dawn and her parents used to all work at the mountain. These days, she avoids Stowe because of how it’s changed.
Dawn Lefevre: Like when I go there, like the whole mountainside has all these big, like, condominium-style houses, and it just looks very commercial instead of the beautiful hills that we used to have and all the trees, you know, it just looks so much different now.
Diane Zried: I think they're just trying to make it more like Colorado.
Sabine Poux: Diane Zried is sitting in the rocking chair to Dawn’s right. She lives in Stowe.
Diane Zried: People have this fantasy, I think, in the city, about Stowe, Vermont — it's this magical place. But they — I don't know. They come, they, it seems like they have this image in their head, some of these tourists.
Everything started changing, getting more fancy and more expensive to match the, the tourism that's gonna, it's gonna draw. And with that comes more money for the town, but I don't know if the locals will ever see the benefit of that.
Sabine Poux: This is how a lot of conversations about Vail go. And sometimes they’re more like rants. You’ll see a lot of Vail hate on the Internet, and on angry bumper stickers in ski town parking lots. People bemoan the impacts of large numbers of tourists descending on relatively small towns — including the big boom in second homes and tourist-catered, short-term rentals up and down the Green Mountains. One local I talked to said that, for people who live in Stowe, Vail is a, quote, “four-letter word.”
On the other hand, people in the industry point to how Vail has made skiing more affordable. While day pass prices have gone up, season pass prices have dropped — by a lot.
But there’s also another impact I heard from people — something a lot more intangible. A general sense of change that’s harder to pinpoint.
Take it from Vermont’s own Noah Kahan. In his song “Paul Revere,” he laments that, quote, “Vail bought the mountains, and nothing was the same.”
In other words, as Dawn at the Echo Lake puts it:
Dawn Lefevre: One thing you can count on is change. I mean– (laughter).
Sabine Poux: Change, when we come back.
Vermont’s lost ski hills
Sabine Poux: Like any story about change, this one — about Vail’s ascent in Vermont — it relies on some nostalgia for how things were “back in the day,” when Vermont was practically bespeckled with ski hills.
Lisa Lynn: And the ski hill was what a basketball court or a tennis court is to recreation today, every town had one.
Sabine Poux: This is Lisa Lynn. She edits VT Ski + Ride, a skiing magazine based in Middlebury.
Lisa Lynn: It was sort of where you went in the winter. It was your social life. It was your exercise. It was your chance for glory if you raced or competed in any way.
Sabine Poux: Vermont’s earliest, legit ski hills — meaning, you didn’t have to walk up yourself — they opened in the 1930s. And they were serviced by motorized rope tows that would pull you up the mountain.
Still, they were pretty DIY — according to Poppy Gall, a lifelong Vermont skier.
Poppy Gall: A lot of them were on the farmer’s back forty. They weren't particularly steep.
Sabine Poux: Poppy’s a board member at the Vermont Ski and Snowboard Museum, in Stowe.
Poppy Gall: You could drop your kid off at the tow and give him a quarter for hot chocolate and, or two hot chocolates, and just leave them.
Sabine Poux: Poppy curated an exhibit here at the museum about Vermont’s more than 180 lost-to-time ski areas.
Poppy Gall: Every little area had its own sort of uniqueness and flavor and, and that really comes out when you do the research.
Sabine Poux: Like a rope tow in Island Pond that was powered by an old saw mill motor. The guy who owned the place converted his sugar house into a makeshift day lodge.
But these hills weren’t just catering to locals. Also in the 30s, there were things known as “snow trains” that brought skiers up from Grand Central in New York and South Station in Boston — to towns like Manchester, Rutland and Waterbury.
Poppy says, Vermont residents welcomed the influx of people, and the dollars they brought. They opened their barns to house them, and started inns.
Poppy Gall: Towns like Stowe were really sleepy little towns, not that much going on. But this really changed — skiing really changed everything.
Sabine Poux: Skiing took off. By the mid-1960s, locally-owned and operated ski areas in Vermont were booming.
More from Vermont Edition: Live From Jay Peak, a ski season preview
And then things started to change.
Lisa Lynn: And then we had some bad winters.
Poppy Gall: I think the skiers outgrew the rope tows because of their equipment and their interest.
Lisa Lynn: The cost of insurance went way up.
Poppy Gall: Liability insurance increased again and again and again, and they couldn't afford it. They couldn't afford their operations.
Sabine Poux: Some mountains shut down when the state started doing safety inspections. Those quirks that made Vermont’s early, DIY mountains so charming? They didn’t all pass muster with the state.
Poppy Gall: And running a ski area wasn't very profitable anyway, so I think a lot of those people just folded. A lot of those areas just folded.
Sabine Poux: By the late 1990s, there were only 20 Vermont ski mountains left.
Enter: Vail
Sabine Poux: Over the past three decades, those 20 mountains have more or less stuck around. It hasn’t been easy. In that time, it’s become even more expensive to operate ski mountains, in part because of those rising insurance costs, as well as expensive upgrades to lifts and snowmaking equipment that skiers have come to expect.
And skiers have come to expect higher prices, too. Many ski mountains, once like the basketball courts of their towns, have become more like luxury vacation destinations.
One way some of them have stayed afloat is by turning to a new tactic: consolidation. Mountains buying up one another.
In Vermont, perhaps the most notable of these acquisitions was in 2017.
Jake Rusnock: After months of rumors, it wasn’t a surprise to many, but the official announcement came today, that Colorado’s Vail Resorts intends to buy Stowe Mountain Resort. The price tag: $50 million.
Sabine Poux: Vail Resorts started as one ski mountain in Colorado. In the ’90s and early 2000s, it went public and started slowly buying up other ski mountains out west.
But it wasn’t until 2008 that the company made a decision that would change everything. That year, Vail introduced what it calls its “Epic Pass.” It gives skiers access to all of its areas for the price of one, as long as they buy it early — in April, May and June — months when American ski resorts were not really bringing in revenue. That system also protects Vail from winters that are becoming increasingly varied as a result of climate change, since it requires skiers to commit early.
And not only do those passes open up access to tons of ski areas, they’re also a lot cheaper than traditional one-resort season tickets. The year that Vail bought Stowe, for example, the price of a season pass was more-than sliced in half.
Parker Riehle: Now, that base Epic pass is only up to about $850, so it's still incredibly affordable compared to, what a season pass used to be at any given mountain – like Stowe, for example, which used to be over $2,000.
Sabine Poux: Parker Riehle is the former long-time president of the trade association, Ski Vermont.
He says that change in price brought a lot of people into the sport.
Parker Riehle: I could see it personally — the crowds that you didn't see before, the number of people, the demographic of folks who weren't typically your frequent flyers and skiers at Stowe Mountain Resort.
Sabine Poux: A year after Vail bought Stowe, it bought Okemo, in Ludlow. And a year after that, Mount Snow, in Dover. Both were added to the Epic Pass.
Sabine Poux: And now, there’s another big ski company with a combined pass: Alterra Mountain Company, which, like Vail, is based in Colorado, and which also owns ski resorts in Vermont: Sugarbush and Stratton. Alterra’s pass is called the “Ikon Pass.” Together, Vail and Alterra account for a quarter of commercial ski resort ownership here in this state.
Now, If you’re wondering if those numbers might be enough to get the attention of federal regulators — the answer is probably not. Regulators have investigated Vail for potential antitrust violations before. But those sorts of investigations are usually focused on keeping companies from totally screwing customers with high prices. But in this instance, consolidation is actually driving costs for consumers down.
And, at least right now, Vail doesn’t seem all that interested in picking up any more resorts in Vermont. These days, it’s turning its focus to new markets abroad, like resorts in Switzerland and Japan.
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More, more, more
Sabine Poux: So, more people these days are skiing on those more affordable season passes that Vail and other companies are offering. And Parker, the former ski trade association president — he says the pandemic also brought new skiers into the sport.
Parker Riehle: And so the last two years with with Vermont ski areas, we've been at 4.1 million skier, skier visits, which is typically kind of the upper end for our 10 to 15 year average.
Sabine Poux: From the industry perspective, of course — this addition of new skiers and snowboarders is positive.
But on the community side of things — this is where a lot of the heartache originates. Like, those lines up the mountain road that Lisa Mugford mentioned when I spoke to her at the inn.
Stowe has actually created a new paid parking pass system to address that traffic problem, to encourage carpooling and busing, instead. But that program, too, has drawn consternation from locals — who are annoyed about having to pay for parking without being guaranteed a spot.
And speaking of locals, several who I spoke with for this story said that it’s not just more people that are visiting the mountain — it’s different people. One innkeeper in Ludlow told me that these days, he sees a lot more young professionals coming to visit than families. The multi-pass system — it caters to frequent skiers who can travel to take advantage of other resorts on the pass, and who make their plans early, before the season starts.
It’s not nearly as good a deal for people who want to just get in a day or two, here and there. Walk-up lift ticket prices have gone up tremendously.
Ivan Tighe: And I think that it's definitely brought more of a tourist and people who are here for the amenities and all of that, and not actually for the sport of skiing.
Sabine Poux: Ivan Tighe grew up in Middlebury, and now lives in Duxbury. I met him in the parking lot of Stowe, before the mountain opened.
Ivan Tighe: In my mind, this was always like a home mountain for, like, really good skiers. And I think there are fewer and fewer of those type of skiers on the mountain as a percentage of the overall skiing public here.
Sabine Poux: Ivan had a season pass at Stowe long before it was owned by Vail. And he took a few seasons off as season pass prices climbed.
But a few years back, he got a good deal on an Epic Pass, and got an Ikon Pass, too. And he says even with all the ways the mountain has changed, he feels like he gets more bang for his buck.
Ivan Tighe: I mean, if anything, it’s opened up, in some ways, more terrain …
Sabine Poux: Like last year, he had to go to Utah for work. And he got in some days of skiing at one of the Utah resorts on the pass.
Vail is turning the money from its pass sales into more efficient snowmaking equipment and better chair lifts. It outsourced some jobs to its Broomfield, Colorado office and, earlier this fall, announced a round of layoffs for its corporate staff.
But it’s also kept a lot of long-time mountain staff on. Like Bruce Schmidt, the long-time general manager at Okemo who grew up skiing at the ski school there.
Bruce Schmidt: Sometimes you have to do things a little bit differently, and sometimes, you know, change is hard. But I think really, we've worked through that really well and continue to do these programs that are important and support the organizations that are important to the communities that we're in.
Sabine Poux: Undoubtedly — one of the biggest effects of growth in Vermont’s ski towns has been on the housing market.
It’s difficult to parse the impact of the post-COVID real estate boom from the Vail effect. But from recent regional and local housing assessments, it’s absolutely clear that the housing market has changed dramatically in the last several years — especially in resort towns. Those towns have seen some of the greatest recent growth in short-term rentals. In the last three years, for example, short-term rentals have more than doubled in Windham County, which is home to Mount Snow.
In Stowe, short-term rentals and seasonal housing combined make up more than half of the total housing stock, leaving a dearth of affordable housing for the town’s growing population. And these days, the average appraised value for a house there ranges between $1 million and $2 million, according to an assessment done by Stowe this year.
And the resorts themselves have scrambled to find housing solutions for their workers in the tight market. A few years ago, Vail purchased a property about a mile from Okemo mountain that it’s used to house employees there.
These growth spurts and growing pains tell a familiar tale of a place that’s settling into — more. More money. More visitors. More second homes.
But there’s another variable that doesn’t come across in the data. Something that, in some ways, is more about an overall vibe than anything else.
‘McVailing’
Sabine Poux: There's one aspect of the change that’s a lot harder to quantify. And that caught the attention of ski journalist Lisa Lynn when Vail started buying mountains here.
Lisa Lynn: I think there was sort of a general trolling on the internet of Vail Resorts. And people were really ready to jump all over Vail for pretty much anything.
Sabine Poux: In 2022, Lisa wrote a piece for VT Ski + Ride called “Why is Everyone So Angry at Vail Resorts?” And she honed in on this one element that, in Vermont, seemed to be drawing a lot of angst: consistency.
Lisa Lynn: You know, there's a real kind of consistency to the product that is being offered, and it feels more like a product. So, just in the way that if you go to a McDonald's in Vermont or McDonald's in Colorado or McDonald's in California, you're going to get the same kind of burger — what people started to see at Stowe and Okemo and Mount Snow was what some people started calling a “McVailing” of skiing.
Sabine Poux: A McVailing of skiing. The resorts’ websites started to look the same. The lifts were getting upgrades. Lisa noticed that at Stowe, the summit cafe stopped serving local coffee and started serving Starbucks, instead.
Changes that might seem pretty harmless, maybe even more convenient.
Lisa Lynn: But there was also a loss of the individuality. And I think just the loss of individuality that many of these ski areas had really hit home for many people, particularly Vermonters.
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Vibe shift
Sabine Poux: It’s a blustery Sunday afternoon in the parking lot of Stowe Mountain Resort. In just a few days, this lot will be mobbed with visitors. But today — a week before the mountain is open for the season — there are just a dozen or so cars here, all with green license plates.
It’s a little like turning back the clock. There are no crowds. No running express lifts. No passes. From the backs of their cars, skiers stick skins onto their skis and splitboards, so they can hike up and ride down the one trail with just enough snow to make the effort worth it.
Kayla Henry: I skin a lot just because it's close by and I can do it before work a lot of times.
Sabine Poux: Kayla Henry lives about 20 minutes away, in Morrisville. She grew up in Stowe.
Kayla Henry: The mountain had a much chiller vibe before. Like, you kind of just came up skied your runs, a lot, sort of like more of the ski bum life.
Sabine Poux: Kayla says now, the sense of community and friendliness has changed. People are clamoring to get to the first chair, to be the first one on the new snow. And while she can’t exactly put her finger on why the vibe has shifted, she says it’s enough that she doesn’t buy a pass here anymore.
Kayla Henry: So I actually drive to Jay now, because it's sort of like a 2000s Stowe vibe, and everyone's just having fun and everyone's happy, and everyone's hooting and hollering on a powder day, and no one's upset with each other. And I really like that. And I don't have to wait in line when I'm driving, even though it's a little further, I don't have to wait in traffic.
Sabine Poux: Another impact of Vail’s presence in Vermont — it’s pushed some skiers right back to that old-school style of skiing— the kind of local-hill vibe that was so characteristic of Vermont’s earliest ski areas. Skiers are heading to Jay Peak, to Bolton Valley. And those ski areas are taking a page right out of Vail’s book, with their own multi-resort pass, for independent mountains — appropriately dubbed the “Indy Pass.”
And for maximum nostalgia, there are still some mom-and-pop rope tows, like Cochran’s Ski Area and Northeast Slopes, which have been able to stay alive thanks to various combinations of donations, town support and good ol’ fashioned community enthusiasm.
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Credits
Thanks to Nathan Evans for the great question. To learn more about the new exhibit on Vermont’s lost ski areas, check out the Vermont Ski & Snowboard Museum in Stowe.
This episode was reported by Sabine Poux. It was produced and edited by Josh Crane and Burgess Brown. Digital support from Sophie Stephens. Angela Evancie is Brave Little State’s Executive Producer. Our theme music is by Ty Gibbons; other music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Special thanks to Laura Nakasaka, Nina Keck, Abagael Giles, Robert Parrish, Jason Blevins, Tom Gianola. Lindsay DesLauriers and Izzy Mitchell.
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