Sander Hadley and Erin Spong head back to the lodge at Osprey Meadows after a spring day at Tamarack Resort, ID. Don’t forget to bring a towel. That lodge hot tub can fit a large party. Photo: John Webster “It is public land, and I think the great thing about public land is when you make it accessible, people will come,” Scott Turlington, president of Tamarack Mountain Resort, said in a statement. Scoles says backcountry skiers aren’t necessarily rejecting all development, they just want to have a say in what happens to the public lands they use. Vick says his resort is open to working together with backcountry advocates. Still that collaboration may come down to a change within the Forest Service process itself, which will need to amend its decades-long policy in order to give the community an earlier seat at the planning table. The push for realistic change is particularly clear in the Tetons, where two recent ski area expansion projects have brought the issue to the forefront. In March 2021, the Jackson Ranger District of the Bridger-Teton National Forest approved an expansion onto the south side of Snow King Mountain Re-sort, the ski hill that stretches across the south rim above the town of Jackson, WY. Snow King says it needs the expansion to stay economically viable, especially with a destination resort like Jackson Hole Mountain Resort in their backyard. “There was a period of time over the past 30 years where JHMR con-tinually made huge investments to improve their mountain’s infrastructure, lifts and base area. During that time Snow King invested little to no money into the ski hill and the result was that both locals and visitors migrated to JHMR,” Ryan Stanley, president of Snow King Mountain Resort, says. He adds that Snow King went through a multi-year EIS with the USFS and reviewed expansion plans with local elected officials and community members, arguing the ex-pansion felt like the best option for keeping the resort in operation. “This is all important because Snow King is at the heart of Jackson,” he says. “It’s where many locals have grown up skiing, recreating in the summer, and where we continue to provide affordable skiing…to make the sport more acces-sible to our community.” The local skiers of Teton Backcountry Alliance, a grassroots group that advocates for all kinds of winter backcountry recre-ation, say they love Snow King, but they don’t think the expan-sion, which includes a zip line and a new chairlift, was valuable for skiing or the ecosystem. “A low-elevation, south-facing ski area doesn’t make sense, and it’s encroaching on what was a really nice wilderness area,” says Gary Kofinas, chairperson of the Teton Backcountry Alliance, who has spent decades ski-touring in backcountry chutes just out of bounds. 056 The Ski Journal
The Ski Journal Volume 15, Issue 3: Page 56
