The Mountain Without A Snowboard
By Paul J. MacArthur
Earlier version published in Vermont Magazine
January/February 2005


Teaser: Snowboarders now outnumber alpine skiers. So why is a Vermont resort flourishing while it bans snowboarders from its slopes?


A throwback to the pre-glamour days of skiing, Mad River Glen is the antithesis of the mega-resort.  Forget super fast quad lifts, tons of snowmaking, miles of groomed corduroy, and swanky amenities. Mad River is for hardcore skiers who want killer steeps, cool glades, intense moguls, and a certain funkiness missing from modern resorts. If you're snowboarder, however, you literally can't buy a ticket to the mountain. Mad River Glen is one of only four ski-areas in North America that forbids snowboarding. Though snowboarders have fought for more than a decade to gain access to Mad River's facilities, they've had no success overturning the ban. "It's a totally unwinable battle," says Ben Hewitt, Eastern Editor for Skiing Magazine. "There would be a lot of angry people if they started to allow snowboarders in."

It wasn't always that way. Mad River Glen actually embraced snowboarders during the '85-'86 season. "It worked out okay at that time because there weren't very many of them," says Eric Friedman, Marketing Director for Mad River Glen. "As it grew in popularity they started encountering some problems with the single chair."

Mad River's single chair lift (b. 1948) is one only two operational single lifts in North America (the other residing at Mt. Eyak, Alaska) and has a flat landing instead of the more common sloped ramp. "When you get off the lift, you have to step to your right and get out of the way of the chair," says Friedman. "The lift operator grabs the chair, swings it around your body and then puts it into the guide. Because snowboarders don't have poles, it was very natural for them to push off the chair and it started derailing the lift."

Tired of the derailments, Mad River's lift operators advised then-owner Betsy Pratt to bar snowboarders from the single-chair in the late-'80s. Pratt took their advice, but still allowed boarders to ride the three double-chair lifts. There was a slight problem with Pratt's solution. The single chair is the only lift that reached the summit, thus snowboarders felt shafted as they were denied full mountain access.

Perhaps a compromise could have been reached, but the opposing personalities made that impossible. Snowboarders and skiers represented very different cliques circa 1990. The differences went beyond age, music, clothing, and body art. Young snowboarders were in your face and worshiped anti-heroes like Shaun Palmer. They were rowdy teenagers, just like the teenage ski bums of decades past. But the generation gap annoyed older skiers and the snowboards served as scarlet letters that marked them as the enemy. The boarders felt the single chair policy was unjust and let Pratt know it. For her part, Pratt was an eccentric, determined woman and not one to bow to pressure from, well, anyone, let alone a group of teenagers.

During the '91-'92 season, Pratt was confronted at a local supermarket by some teenage boarders carrying a video camera. Sticking the camera in her face, one teen, in an expletive filled tirade, demanded to know why they couldn't ride the single chair lift. The other used racial epithets and compared the single-chair policy to segregation. "As best as we know," says Bryan Johnston vice president of marketing at Burton Snowboards, "the blowout appeared to be a clash of personalities and cultures at a younger time in the world of snowboarding."

In response to the clash, which wore out her patience on the issue, Pratt eliminated snowboarding completely from Mad River Glen. When she sold the resort to a cooperative of Mad River skiers in 1995, the ban remained intact. At the first cooperative shareholder meeting in April 1996, a non-binding straw poll saw 76 percent of the shareholders vote in favor of upholding it. Since then, the issue has never come to a vote. "All it takes for snowboarding to ever be allowed here is a two-thirds majority of the shareholders to vote in favor of lifting the ban." says Friedman. "Internally it's never been an issue."

Mad River skiers, in fact, consistently cite the lack of snowboarders as a plus. The reasons are several: Most skiers don't understand how snowboarders ride. The former tend to go down the fall line, while later can turn on a dime, make sharp carves, and often zigzag across the mountain. Snowboarders have a blind spot that leads to collisions among the inexperienced. Some skiers don't like the way boarders sit around on the trails and scrape the snow into patterns that aren't as conducive to skiing.

Despite these differences, economics dictated that these two groups share more than 480 U.S. resorts in harmony last season. While there's no desire among the Mad River faithful to allow snowboarding, the viability of a permanent ban is debatable. Since the ban was enacted the snowboarding population has increased by more than 350 percent, while the number of active skiers has dropped by more than 45 percent. In 2004, the snowboarders outnumbered skiers for the first time in history. Simply put, more kids are picking up one board instead of two skis.

Yet despite these statistics, Mad River Glen is flourishing. Since the cooperative took over, the mountain's skier visit numbers rose by up more than 50 percent between the 1995 - 2003 seasons, while the rest of US resorts have went up by 5.7 percent during the same time frame. The Mad River faithful are complaining that lift-lines are too long - not exactly a sign of market weakness.

While the short-term numbers favor Mad River, Johnston remains unconvinced that a snowboard ban can survive. "Our opinion is that it's fairly absurd and outdated," he says. "Right now they're riding a wave of market eccentricity where you have a defined group of people that is an aging population that only want to be around skiers. At some point and time we're all going to die and when your customers are dead and in the grave what are you going to do?"

In the past Burton has been involved in colorful campaigns to get the snowboard ban lifted. Bumper stickers that read "Mad River Glen: Ride It If You Could" (a play on the Mountain's "Ski It If You Can" slogan) resulted in a cease and desist letter from the resort. Burton ran a parody ad in Ski in 1999, which took shots at overindulgent skiers and their snowboarding prejudice. A couple seasons later, the company took out full-page ads in Ski and Skiing that compared snowboard bans to racism. "It's just a form of age discrimination," Jake Burton said of the ban in 2002, "which sort of embarrasses me and everyone involved around here that something like that can exist in Vermont." Friedman takes exception to that notion. "You shouldn't equate the ban and racism," he says.

Of late, the Mad River scenario has not been a Burton priority. "There's really nothing to protest," says Johnston.  "The economy of not spending money at the resort is the best protest we can advocate. I think economics and more importantly families will drive the change. The fact is what do you do with your kids that snowboard if you're a member of Mad River Glen? What happened at Aspen (one of the last snowboard holdouts) was you had families with economic clout and wealth that wanted to be together on the mountain."

Oddly enough, families have been a growth area for Mad River since the Cooperative took over. Whether the mountain will continue to buck industry trends remains to be seen, but Friedman doesn't suspect the snowboard ban will end soon. "I think the only way it would ever come to a serious discussion is if financially we needed it," says Friedman, "And we don't. I don't think that we will with proper management. This place is not profit driven. That's not the first and foremost part of being a co-op. Our mission is protection and preservation and making sure the environment here and the ski experience remain unchanged."

"I definitely feel for the snowboarders," says Hewitt.  "Mad River is a really unique place to ski and not snowboard. I think that snowboarders feel that that they've gotten the short shrift in the situation and perhaps rightly so. There's definitely a different dynamic at work at Mad River. Whether that is because there aren't snowboarders or not, it's really impossible to say. But there's something very unique about that place and I think that's in large part what makes the snowboarders upset is that they're not able to experience that."

A freelance writer and passionate snowboarder, Paul J. MacArthur can be reached at writing66@yahoo.com.

Copyright (c) 2004-2005 Paul J. MacArthur

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