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Welcome Sign Out For Mountain High's Extra-Diverse Market
By Craig Altschul
October 18, 2007
"We made a conscious effort about five years ago to expand what we already have been doing to make Mountain High a welcoming environment for skiers and snowboarders no matter what race, color, or creed," John McColly, Mountain High Director of Marketing and part owner of the resorts management company, told The Industry Report.
That's a tall order when your market is Southern California, a playing field that is among the most diverse in the United States. Los Angeles County alone includes 9.5 million residents. That's the primary market. Mountain High's Angeles National Forest location in Wrightwood is the closest major winter playground.
Just over 70 percent of the population is "minority" (clearly a misnomer here). Nearly 50 percent is Hispanic, with slightly more people of Asian descent than African-American. The winter sports market, in general, had traditionally been white, Anglo-Saxon.
Mountain High operators, under several incarnations and ownerships, have seen all this diversity develop over three-quarters of a century. The Big Pines area long has been a place where Hollywood stars and luminaries came to play. Legendary Alf Engen set a ski jumping record on the jump hill there in the 1930s. In fact, McColly points out, the famed Lake Placid Winter Olympics of 1932 almost were held in Wrightwood, had there been more plentiful snow.
The first rope tow went up at Blue Ridge in 1941. Sepp Benedikter, another ski legend and Hall of Famer (he started the Sun Valley Ski School), and John Steinmann opened Holiday Hill a snowball's throw away in 1948. Ski Sunrise (or Table Mountain, as it was known more than once), owned by Howard More, was also in the mix.
Bringing a lot of snowy history up to date quickly: Terry Tognazzi bought Blue Ridge (then called Mountain High) in 1979 and Holiday Hill in 1980, combining them into the "New Mountain High." Oaktree Capital Management bought the package in 1997, and added Table Mountain in 2004.
The eighties were the glory years for Mountain High. They saw attendance figures as high as 350,000 in good snow years and the addition of the first high-speed quad. But, the 1990s were a different story. Few capital improvements and little help from the weather saw skier days dwindle, so that when Oaktree jumped in, the ticket wickets were only spinning out about 180,000 lift tickets.
Just to cap the ownership saga: Valor Equity Partners bought the resort from Oaktree in 2005 and the resort management group today (Mountain High Associates) is led by Karl Kapuscinski, president, and McColly. You read here (first, by the way) that the ski resort was acquired by CNL, the large Florida-based R.E.I.T. this past summer. The management team has a 20-year lease from CNL with a 20-year extension after that.
McColly came on the scene after a brief stint following his mountain passion at Bear Mountain where he had worked for Brad Wilson. McColly was one of many resort casualties at Bear following two lousy snow years. He found himself in San Diego with a degree from University of California at Riverside and not much of a future in snowy climes. That changed fast.
"I heard through the grapevine that Brad was back in Southern Cal at Mountain High," McColly said. "He asked me to interview and offered a position that didn't show much future so I turned it down. But, he was persistent and made me a much better offer a week later. I took it. That was 11 years ago.
"We've been amazingly successful by reaching our audiences via radio and television promotions," McColly says. "It's been effective to have radio and TV personalities loaded up with giveaways and excited about a new season at Mountain High telling their audiences to come here rather than anything we can say."
Particularly in the younger demographic Hispanic market, he notes, deejays and media personalities "are Gods" with extraordinary influence. Latinos, unlike Asians, don't have a historical tie to skiing or snowboarding, so another key to that kingdom has been plenty of learn-to-ski and learn-to-snowboard promotions. The acquisition of Table Mountain provided ideal terrain.
Mountain High's employees are a mirror image of it skiers and riders (ok, make that many more riders than skiers. It's gone from 50-50 a decade ago to 80 percent snowboarders today). "There's no problem we can't defuse if communication or cultural issues are involved," he said.
McColly recalls an extremely upset Chinese guest who was increasingly frustrated when Customer Service tried to tell him what was going on with his daughter who they had brought to the Patrol Room. "It could have been a real nightmare," he says. The patrol quickly called in an Asian ski instructor who spoke fluent Chinese, calmed the man way down and, within 15 minutes, he left smiling.
The United Nations could consider some "R&R" there, alongside the African American purchasing director, the Peruvian payroll manager, the Filipino mountain operations guy, and even the Customer Service director who says he's of Mediterranean descent. They'd no doubt be impressed by the resort's signage in a number of different languages as well.
"Coming here was the best thing I've ever done," McColly says. Wilson, who has since moved on, and McColly, long have been credited by industry watchers with the resurgence of Mountain High's numbers. The resort reached its all-time "mountain high" at 567,000, but McColly believes "if all the planets align," 600,000 is a reachable goal.
The future is looking very good in Wrightwood. "We've worked very hard over a long time at building relationships with the radio and TV stations, so we're going to pick the fruit and continue down that path.
"CNL is really a big player now with 10 resorts and more acquisitions coming down the pike," he said. "We expect to be part of that expansion and hope to manage some of those new acquisitions. We couldn't be happier with the way things are going."
The Mountain High of today and, likely, tomorrow, is a revitalized success story. In any language.
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