High Hopes On Slopes As Temperatures Cool Down, Preparations Heat Up At Ski Resorts

A few chair attendants to ensure you don’t fall on your face as you get off the ski lift. A few kegs of beer. A couple dozen inches of powder.

What more do you need to turn dirt mountain slopes into a ski resort?

Plenty.

Skiers who make the drive to North Idaho’s two largest ski hangouts may experience only a fraction of the manpower and hours sunk into planning and running the sprawling resorts.

With only a month or so remaining before the start of ski season, the workload is mounting faster than snow in a blizzard at Schweitzer Mountain Resort and Silver Mountain Summer and Ski Resort.

Staffing the resorts is the top priority right now. Both Schweitzer and Silver will be filling positions until about Nov. 1.

Down below Schweitzer Mountain at the Sandpoint Job Service, Leanne Cesario interviews smiling face after smiling face for 140 jobs to be filled this winter.

As the largest seasonal employment push in the area, the positions attract more than 400 applications, mostly from locals but some from Colorado, California and other places in the West. The best jobs pay $9 an hour, but most are around $6.

“Some of these people we hear from have never even seen Sandpoint,” Cesario said. “A lot of resort employees want to try out other resorts to work at.”

Many people who work seasonal summer jobs with the U.S. Forest Service, or who work at summer resorts like Silverwood Theme Park near Athol, Idaho, make the transition to winter jobs at ski resorts.

People are the linchpin to resorts. Hiring them, keeping them and training them right make all the difference in what ski execs like to call, “the product.”

Every encounter a skier has with a resort employee changes their perception of the product, said Tom Trulock, newly appointed mountain manager at Schweitzer, which has about 70 year-round employees. Keeping uniform quality in the staff separates good resorts from average ones.

Worker retention from year-to-year is a personnel mantra in this business.

“We try to have as many employees as possible return from last winter,” Trulock said, munching some chicken strips at the resort’s day lodge. “The more experienced folks who come back, the easier it is to get ready for the season.”

Schweitzer ramps up from its core staff to 450 employees at Thanksgiving to nearly 500 during the frenzied holiday weekends. The Christmas season is where ski resorts pull down a big portion of their revenue.

What makes the difference between just another applicant and a Schweitzer employee?

“Communications skills,” Cesario said. “We want to see people’s guest services skills when we interview them here.”

Cesario and her crew pre-screen applicants and set up interviews on the mountain. Schweitzer department heads make the final call on hires.

Up in the maze-like offices where Schweitzer plans for the season, communications director Bill Mullane ponders just where he’ll find someone to wake up at 3 a.m., drive up the snowy mountain and perform the vital job of snow reporting.

“This person has to be able to talk live on radio, to do all sorts of things,” he said. “Fortunately, I’ve got two of three people returning and they’re fantastic.”

Mullane’s worries go far beyond snow reporting. He coordinates the jam-packed calendar of events for the season, much of the marketing and travels on fall weekends to ski shows around the region to tout the mountain.

Knowing he’ll be putting in up to 80-hour weeks up to opening day, he takes 4-hour bike rides up steep mountain access roads to stay sane.

“If you don’t make time and try for a little balance, you get what I call the embittered/embattled disease,” he said. “You’ve got to make some time for yourself.”

Mullane’s counterpart at Silver Mountain, Tim Newhart, faces the same grueling weekend travel schedule. “You’ve got to love the job,” he said.

Silver Mountain sports an 80 percent return rate for its 250 winter employees, most of whom are from the Silver Valley, said Terry Turnbow, general manager of the growing resort.

That creates a flexibility to open the mountain as conditions demand. Last November, Mother Nature was in a rare cooperative mood, coating Idaho’s peaks with a blanket of skiable stuff.

Silver’s crew sprang to life. In a matter of a weekend, Turnbow and Newhart recalled lift operators, food preparers, ticket window staff and even pitched in themselves to open the gates.

“I remember shoveling the ramps around chair one,” Turnbow recalls, a task not typically under the job description of general manager. “We’re all hands-on here - our managers can step in and do any of the jobs out there.”

For the resorts’ full-time staffs, work never ends, it just changes pace. It slows down at the end of ski season, picks up speed through the summer, slows again in the early fall before booming toward opening day.

Before the last snow from the previous ski season melts, preparations are under way for the following year. Marketing campaigns are formulated. Ski lifts are carefully checked and inspected. Snow groomers are pieced apart and revitalized after a winter of wear.

The expanding summer programs at both Schweitzer and Silver Mountain have helped the operations prepare for the upcoming winter in several ways.

Summer has become more profitable, though income will never pull in half the cash flow of the regular ski season. Perhaps more important than cash, it helps keep key personnel on staff for much more of the year.

As the temperatures drop and flurries fly in the Silver Valley, the wait-and-see game begins for opening. Good snow in November can jump-start a ski season, as skiers get excited about the sport and book hotel rooms in Kellogg in advance.

Schweitzer wants to have its staff in place Nov. 1 and begin training. Silver will have most of its staff ready to go by the first of the month as well.

Advertising campaigns plotted in the spring come to fruition in ski magazines. Both Schweitzer and Silver had taken more of a regional focus to marketing. Both want skiers from Seattle and Portland to think about making the trip to Idaho along with more Inland Northwest skiers.

But all the efforts of Trulock in Sandpoint, of Turnbow in Kellogg, and all the preparations made by hundreds of eager resort employees, everything lies at the whim of the weather.

No snow means no work. While the forecasts for this winter suggest cold and wet - a combination that makes resorts drool - everyone in the ski business knows that working all hours of the day won’t do much if there’s no white stuff to bring people up here.

“You have to have a sense of humor about all this,” Mullane at Schweitzer said. “I planned four moonlight cross country tours last year, and it rained every night. You’ve just got to laugh that off.”

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