A couple of questions about ski hills

[FarmerBEN]

A couple weeks ago we had discussions on trails on ski hills and that discussion raised a few questions for me.

1) What is the biggest excuse we need to overcome for most ski hills? (labor,hassle, cost of liability insurance etc...)

2) I assume it's liability insurance costs, just curious what does a summer's worth of liability insurance run for something like this?

3) Does morc recieve any chunk of the trail fees from these places? (assuming that morc does alot of mobilizing volunteers to build trails and promotes the trails maybe a some sort of an ag-style checkoff wouldn't be a bad way to increase morc's revenue)

just a few questions I had. Hope someone knows some answers.

[stefan]

I would guess that liability costs for a ski hill in the summer would be similar to what they pay for winter liability, maybe offset by an estimated amount of riders per month?

Either way, I think it'd be worth checking into doing some kind of 'morc sponsored' trailwork at a ski hill, and possibly getting some donations from the company who owns the hills.

[Buck]

I know they have a huge Insurance issue with it...(lame excuse really) then on top of that it costs about 500 a day to turn a lift on plus the three employees they are required to have on site.

L8Rz
Buck

[redlinmi]

A few observations:

-Overhead for labor (especially lift accessed riding) could be prohibitive for some smaller areas;
-Liability insurance (huge, huge increases in the past 5 years alone across the board); and,
-"Core business" philosophy-type issues (e.g. we are a ski hill first, this is where our revenue comes from, and we want to have some time off in the summer to relax and work on ski trail development).

These are just a few things that come to mind. Ski hills are quite the expensive operation these days between insurance, labor, and skier demands to develop new features (e.g. terrain parks, new runs, renovated chalets, better food, etc.). I think at the end of the day it's just more of a "sell" that needs to be made to get ownership groups interested. Definitely not impossible work, just a good challenge at a place that is willing to entertain the idea.

[FarmerBEN]

I was just thinking that assuming the insurance cost isn't too astronomical a good way around that would to do some pre-selling of season passes, I assume a place near enough to the metro (welch or wild) should be able to get enough people spending 50 or 100 bucks on a pass to pay down a chunk of that insurance premium before anybody even rides it. Riders would have to go out on a limb and hope they get their moneys worth, but I think it is a chance people would take to expand the sport.

[FarmerBEN]

I know they have a huge Insurance issue with it...(lame excuse really) then on top of that it costs about 500 a day to turn a lift on plus the three employees they are required to have on site.

L8Rz
Buck


I was assuming without lift service. I assumed that the number of riders it would take to justify a lift would exclude most midwest hills other than maybe a destination resort like lutsen. Are the three employees lift related or liability insurance related?

[danger!]

In relation to this thread, Wild Mountain has a real advantage as a resort to develop for MTB use, because they already run their lifts in the summer, and carry liability ins year round.

This leaves them with few excuses to fall back on, not that they need them, sounds like they'd be pretty receptive to the idea.

[Magic]

I was just thinking that assuming the insurance cost isn't too astronomical a good way around that would to do some pre-selling of season passes, I assume a place near enough to the metro (welch or wild) should be able to get enough people spending 50 or 100 bucks on a pass to pay down a chunk of that insurance premium before anybody even rides it. Riders would have to go out on a limb and hope they get their moneys worth, but I think it is a chance people would take to expand the sport.

Here is what it all comes down to, people don't want to pay to ride. Afton is a prime example of this. Myself and a few others have been working out at Afton trying to get this same topic to work. On our work nights or work weekends, we could only muster 3 or 4 people for trail work. And this is in the metro area. So getting a good work crew for another site will be hard pressed in my eyes.

Next is getting people to pay to ride. They all say they can ride Theo, Leb. or any other metro trails for free. This is true, but what Afton has for terrain comparied to these other trails is far more interesting to ride. All the state series racers should be riding Afton for training. It's all about the hills. There is the next reason why people don't ride SKI RESORTS. To much climbing, is what I hear from riders. Well, in order to go down, one must go up.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to riding at ski hills. I hope something good happens at some of these ski hills. But if Afton is any sort of indication of what will happen, then people need to look at this in a much broader view.

[FarmerBEN]

In relation to this thread, Wild Mountain has a real advantage as a resort to develop for MTB use, because they already run their lifts in the summer, and carry liability ins year round.

This leaves them with few excuses to fall back on, not that they need them, sounds like they'd be pretty receptive to the idea.

and I would think that that area is growing fast enough to support a pay n' ride. something I don't know steeple or welch will be able to. Steeple probably will due to the lack of alternatives in Roch.