Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Ghost town


By JOHN REMBER

Last spring, a week after the lifts stopped at Tamarack Resort, Julie and I skied the place. We drove around the Tyvek-sheathed high-rises in the village center, parked in the parking lot next to the big white tents that had served as temporary base lodges, put on our backcountry skis and skins, and climbed to the top of the mountain through 6 inches of new powder. Then we skied the trees, because most of the runs had been spoiled by snowmobilers who had ridden past the "No Snowmobile" signs on the resort boundaries.

In the middle of a steep glade, weaving around giant Doug firs and ponderosas, feeling the thrill of skiing where I hadn't skied before, I decided it was a pretty good mountain. I regretted turning down an invitation to be wined and dined and shown around by the Tamarack Marketing Department.

The invitation had come because a long time ago I was a ski journalist. I'd written articles for Skiing magazine and Snow Country, among others. But Snow Country had gone out of business and Skiing had dropped its demographic to the 18-24 age level, which in the era of No Child Left Behind meant that my perceptions were limited to monosyllables and photo captions.

I rebelled, and sent Skiing magazine nostalgic stories about learning to ski on Ketchum's Kinderhorn with hickory skis, beartrap bindings and bamboo ski poles. One of the editors called to tell me that their readers wanted to read about ski equipment invented a few generations closer to the present. It had been years since my words had been printed on slick paper.

Tamarack wanted me anyway. And I knew that resort marketing departments treated ski journalists like corruptible politicians. "We offer a pharmaceutical-grade experience," the vice-president of a Colorado ski resort had told me as he picked me up at a mountain airport. This was back in the early '80s, when pharmaceutical-grade meant something, and I suppose I should have jumped at Tamarack's invitation.

But I had a bad feeling about the place. I had worked with Max McKinnon, a Sun Valley mountain manager during the '70s and '80s. Max had been a decent and hard-working guy, and he had invested in Tamarack during its WestRock incarnation, and he had died there, trying to get it off the ground. So there was that.

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I had also stopped feeling like a ski journalist. Ski journalists get paid for happy news, and I found less and less of it in a ski industry that had become a circumcised appendage of real estate development. Tamarack was the highest, newest and best example of this phenomenon. Its mountain wasn't there to sell lift tickets. Its purpose was to raise the premium on land and condos.

The brochures I saw hinted at huge returns on borrowed money, and the first auctions Tamarack held were sold out within days. Dirk Kempthorne, Idaho's governor, acquired property there and included the resort in his plan for a revamped Idaho highway system. Giant houses were built and put on the market at many multiples of their nonmortgaged costs.

Then the money stopped. Speculation in resort real estate started looking like a good way to lose your shorts. Banks refused to extend lines of credit or write new mortgages, and Tamarack, which had a good ski mountain but hadn't completed its village core, found its cash flow coming mostly from inadequate ski-ticket and restaurant sales.

Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf cancelled plans to build their luxury hotel. Subcontractors, working for too long on prayers and promises, finally grabbed their tools and went home. Valley County administrators, who had visited Hailey to see how they could avoid Blaine County's employee-housing headaches, watched as unplowed snow drifted high in the streets of Tamarack's new and empty worker-bee village.

So it would have been a hard article to write. Still, we had a gorgeous day of climbing and we put some good tracks through Tamarack's trees.

It would have been better without the snowmobilers. As I looked up from the bottom at the snarling machines going up and down the runs, I had a sudden vision of the Mongols overrunning beautiful, fairy-tale Samarkand, breaking the stemware, slicing the heads off all the nobles and chaining the women together prior to marching them off to the harem of the Great Khan. Skiing magazine wasn't going to buy that sort of imagery. We got the hell out of there while we could.




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