Product Description

In this impassioned expose, lifelong skier Hal Clifford reveals how publicly traded corporations gained control of America's most popular winter sport during the 1990s, and how they are gutting ski towns, the natural environment, and skiing itself in a largely futile search for short-term profits.

Chronicling the collision between Wall Street's demand for unceasing revenue growth and the fragile natural and social environments of small mountain communities, Clifford shows how the modern ski industry promotes its product as environmentally friendly--even invoking the words and emblems of such environmental icons as Ansel Adams and John Muir--while at the same time creating urban-style problems for mountain villages. He also uncovers the ways in which resorts are carefully engineered to separate visitors from their money, much like theme parks.

Clifford suggests an alternative to this bleak picture in the return-to-the-roots movement that is now beginning to find its voice in American ski towns from Mammoth Lakes, California, to Stowe, Vermont. He relates the stories of creative business people who are shifting control of the ski business back to the communities that host it.

Hard-hitting and carefully researched, Downhill Slide is indispensable reading for anyone who lives in, visits, or cares about what is happening to America's alpine communities.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #692076 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 300 pages

Review
"[This] book should be mandatory reading."--Los Angeles Times -- Review

About the Author
Hal Clifford is the author of The Falling Season: Inside the Life and Death Drama of Aspen's Mountain Rescue Team, winner of the Colorado Council for the Arts Prize for Best Non-Fiction, and Highroad Guide to the Colorado Mountains. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Business Week, National Geographic Adventure, Outside, and Orion. A former editor of the Aspen Daily News and Ski Magazine, Clifford currently serves as Executive Director of Mountainfilm in Telluride, Colorado.

Customer Reviews

A fine piece of investigative journalism
This book reminded me of Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation" (thorough, probing, disturbing & readable). "Downhill Slide" takes a look at the dangerous reach (Disneyfication) of Corporate America. This book is a must read for skiers (avid and former), the ski industry (listen up!), environmentalists and those who care about those "last best places."

Current History in Paradise
This is the kind of book there should have been more of forty years ago; then we might not be in this fix.

Clifford sketches the transformation of the ski industry from a quaint and healthy alternative to gambling and drinking in the 19th and early 20th centuries, to a monster industry in the 21st, still healthy but not so quaint, that gives drinking and gambling fierce competition for discretionary dollars in our nation's mountain towns.

As mining and logging was gradually phased out, the focus shifted to recreation, changing charming towns into mere appendages of mega-resorts whose reason for being is the hawking of overpriced real estate, overpriced equipment, overpriced food, overpriced lift tickets-- and in the summer overpriced greens fees and tickets to film and music festivals. In most cases the resorts' gouging rest upon a firm foundation of reasonably priced public land leases, usually involving the US Forest Service, an agency of the Dept of Agriculture.

This last detail presents a problem for Clifford and his publisher, Sierra Club Books, For as logging and mining revenues to the USDA decline, it is hesitant to raise too sharply the rents or regulations on its new, relatively clean tenants, the resort operators. When Clifford makes the case for saving elk or lynx habitat the Forest Service is no doubt sympathetic, but probably a lot more interested in saving its own budget, and all the jobs that it supports. And a ski run, while not ideal, is a much better place for wildlife to thrive than what's left after a mining company extracts ore.

In Colorado there is a pair of sites, both mentioned in DOWNHILL SLIDE: Copper Mtn. Ski Area, and just 5 miles up the road, the mothballed Climax Molybdenum Mine. Copper Mtn has cut down some trees for ski runs and probably uses too much water for snowmaking and doesn't build housing in its "village" for non-rich people--but these are all things that can be fixed. At Climax what is left is a gray, treeless wasteland of slag heaps and tailing ponds. Half a mountain has been eaten away and the leftover sludge sluiced onto a vast flat area resembling a parking lot, into which you could fit dozens of parking lots as big as the one at Copper. Clifford spends many pages criticizing Copper and its owner, Intrawest Corp, but cites Climax only in a lone paragraph as a company which paid a good wage to its employees.

It seems to me that authors and publishers of perceptive and thoughtful books such as this one ought to propose real solutions to problems they elucidate. For example, why not build low cost employee housing for Copper Mtn on top of the wasteland at Climax? Anything, but anything they built, even Bauhaus, would be an improvement over what is there now. Looking at a map, one sees that a high speed quad could be run about 3 miles from this proposed employee housing to the top of Copper Mtn, thus cutting down on the commuter traffic from Leadville. The illegal workers discussed in Chapter 9 could realize the all-too-often elusive American Dream of skiing to work.

Words from a Vailite
As a life-long Vailite, and an active board member of Colorado Wild and the Ski Area Citizens' Coalition,
I have found Mr. Clifford's book invaluable. We have known for quite some time that the sport of skiing
is in trouble and that the recent corporatization of skiing and associated development is causing enormous
stress on ski towns and the environment. Clifford has concisely and coherently expressed the problems, chosen
superb and telling examples and given citizens of ski towns throughout the country a lot to think about.