Turning Snow into Gold, Part 1: Work Locally, Ski Globally

“This is just like home,” Jackson said, standing on his skis atop a cloudy glacier in Iceland, “except we’re on an island in the middle of the Atlantic in July.” My son exploded into the world on a halcyon August day in the Tetons and has lived there ever since; before he could walk he’d gotten in a couple dozen days at Jackson Hole and Snow King Mountain Resort (on my chest) and by 3 was notching more ski days a season than most of America. And the first place he’d ever skied outside the Tetons was Iceland. And here we were, standing atop the Snaeffelsjokul peninsula, the place where Jules Verne said you could climb into the center of the earth in “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” and the kid was about to enjoy his first international turns for less than it would cost me to throw him on a gondy in the US.

Last year he turned 11. And he’d already skied in Japan, Iceland, England, and Montana. He still hasn’t skied Colorado. Not to hate on the land of the skibro and the 10^th Mountain Division, not to take down the first place I skied out west, or to turn some of the greatest ski hills into the world into some dystopian money-grubbing dragon. But the skiconomics just don’t work for me. It’s cheaper to ski the rest of the world.

The Working Class Skier

The Colorado ski trip has been a flex for all of us mortals for time eternal. The world hasn’t changed, and this won’t be an article where I drone on about how life used to be so much easier. But it used to be doable.

I grew up in an east coast city, more TJ Burke than Bryce Kellogg, learning to ski on heaps of grass in Maryland, West Virginia and PA where 2 inches of natural snow was a pow day and where the black diamonds were tough because skiing on rocks is always tough. The best my family could afford was a ski trip to the Poconos.

I never skied out west until I went to San Diego for college, met a girl from Colorado and visited her. Next year I moved to Steamboat, Colorado. And after moving back home for a stint I sold enough knives to visit her and take trips to all the front range resorts. As a 19-year-old I bought lift tickets to Breckenridge Resort, Vail Mountain Resort, and Copper Mountain. It wasn’t cheap, but I could swing it if I scrounged, and there was also the old art of clipping a ticket.

The cost of a lift ticket at the vanguard of Colorado skiing are now $299 for Breckenridge Resort, $264 for Copper Mountain, and a soul-shattering $329 at Vail Ski Resort. Hell, Aspen Mountain, formerly the epitome of wealth and extravagance and indulgence, only costs $264.

At this point in life I’m comfortable. I have a house, pay my bills, always have food and make more than the US mean income. But I can’t afford to ski anywhere in Colorado. Or Utah for that matter ($288 at Park City Mountain Resort). So what do I do? I want my son, who’s starting his first season of freeride ski comps, to ski everything he can. I want him to learn how to get a new resort dialed, to discover the difference between snowpacks and terrain across all over this fat globe, and I want to spend time with him as he discovers that, get that father-son adventure bond dialed.

So what do I do? I take him on a Father Son Ski Trip to Japan.

Alright, so what does a dad do who’s not in the top 20% of wage-earners if he wants to take his family skiing? What does a young adult do if they didn’t inherit a ton of money? Go overseas.

Let’s run some digits. Given that Spring Break is coming up, I decided to price everything out 3 months from the writing of this article, to give you a worst-case scenario. I also priced out 4+star accommodations and full ticket price:

Japan Ski Trip Cost

• LA to Tokyo over Spring break: $1314 (direct)
• NYC to Tokyo over Spring break: $1606 (direct)
• Then an additional $221 to Hokkaido from Tokyo if you don’t take a $100 train ride to Hakuba.
• A weeklong family room at the ski-in, ski-out Hilton at Niseko, a 4-star hotel at Niseko – $1400
• 1 week ski pass for adults: $443 USD
• 1 week ski pass for kids: $268

Total from NYC: $10,122

So a grand total if you fly NYC to Hokkaido, stay at the exclusive and cavernous Hilton, and buy 2 adult passes and 2 youth passes for a week is $10,122. I did it for less using discounts from my season pass, I stayed in Sapporo, and purchased my plane tickets 9 months in advance. I also checked out some other resorts in the area that were even cheaper but still amazing. This is the luxury last-minute experience. So you can cut this price way down if you explore a bit more, but that’s true of all of these, yes?

Japan trip total (not including ground and food): $10,122.

Alps Ski Trip Cost

• LA to Geneva over Spring Break: $839 (1 connection)
• NYC to Geneva: $883 (direct)
• Weeklong stay at Les Balcons de Savoy, 4-star ski-in ski-out property at Chamonix: $1750
• 1 week of lift tickets for 2 adults and 2 kids at Chamonix: $1020.6

Total from NYC: $6302.60

Again, this doesn’t include ground transportation, and food in Europe is a good bit pricier than in Japan, where the yen is low and street food can compete with gourmet 5-star restaurant food anywhere in the Western world. Also, though, there are less expensive resorts in the area.  

Vail Ski Trip Cost

• LA to Vail over spring break: $504 (direct)
• NYC to Vail over Spring Break: $619 (with 1 connection, direct it’s over $3K)
• Grand Hyatt Vail (4-star, ski-in/ski-out): $7028 for the week
• Vail lift tickets for a week: $2233/adult, $1540/kid

Total from NYC: $17050

Again, you can get tickets a little cheaper with one of the big passes (Mountain Collective, Ikon, Epic), though at time of print most are sold out. And each all-but limit you to their own ski cartel of resorts. Plus there are other resorts near Vail but as I pointed out before, don’t look for the prices to be much cheaper.

So doing some napkin math we just learned you could fly to and ski for a week in Japan AND a week in Chamonix at a 4-star ski-in/ski-out for less than it costs for 1 week in Vail. And come home talking about having skied in Japan and the Alps instead of Colorado. And while the food you can find at Vail Village is pretty bomb, will anybody pretend it’s better than the food in Japan and France that incidentally costs considerably less? Of course this isn’t reality, no, there are special passes and discounts and such, yes?

Kind of. But that applies for all 3. And, again, using the Mountain Collective access option thanks to my own local ski pass, I got Niseko for half price. Which meant the lift tickets cost about the same as a decent lunch at my favorite US ski towns.

See the World While Having More Money to Ski

Let me paint a picture for you. You cruise up a curvy autobahn, with tunnels at all the dangerous passes, past centuries-old stone farmhouses, to a resort where they invented chalets long before, where the mountains smell like Africa, the lift lines are never crazy, and where the apres scene is like Coachella in the snow. That’s Europe.

Or how about this: Heated toilet seats everywhere. Ancient houses with distinctive roofs and bamboo floors, mixed with elegant hotels, and restaurants that serve the best ramen and curry you’ve ever eaten, mixed with 7-11s that carry better food than you’d find in most ski town restaurants. Ride lifts with hardly any lines and then swim through the deepest pow you’ve ever seen. That’s Japan.

On top of seeing new terrain and wildly different snow, spend the rest of the time in and around those ski hills meeting people who are different from you, from the way they look to the way they dress to the way they approach life and the world. These are more than just ski trips; they’re ski experiences. They take a little more planning and you’ve gotta be ready to get out of your comfort zone, sure. But they’re experiences you’ll never forget.

I haven’t been back to Austria in 23 years but could still describe the runs at St. Anton and the sundeck scene at Lech. I could tell you about the old farmer who thought it was “just super” as I jibbed off the roof of his old, half-buried outhouse. I can still tell you what it felt like to wander through ancient cobblestone streets in Innsbruck with a head full of schnapps in search of bratwursts.

Not to take away from the amazing resorts we have here in the United States. I first discovered pow at Vail’s China Bowl, learned to hit money booters at Mammoth Mountain, and got dialed on techy lines and big hucks at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort. But what are those experiences like? Long lines. Towns full of bars and restaurants that play like a caricature of the wild west, with local scenes that are starting to die because long-term locals are priced out of the towns they helped build. Base villages that feel like a mixture of Fashion Island mall in Newport Beach and the food court at Epcot.

If you can’t leave the US to ski, save your money and wait for days like this and come up and visit us in Jackson Hole!!!

And let’s get down to what’s really important: when I first skied those resorts I was a ski bum and a ski bum could still swing a lift ticket. You just skipped a few meals a week, ate frugally for the others, and you could get on even the priciest hills, and find a hostel or a budget motel. That’s what has disappeared in America.

“If an ass goes traveling, he’ll not come home a horse.”  – Thomas Fuller

The point of this look at ski-conomics isn’t to get everybody traveling to the rest of the world for their ski trips. There’s a certain element of the American ski traveling demo who expects to be catered to and while the customer service the average or even above average person gets in other countries is far above anything you can expect here, no place is as good at kissing the ass of the uber-wealthy as America. If you go side-slipping down a tight couloir in France and push all the snow off because it’s above your pay grade, you’re likely to get cussed out, in French.

Traveling abroad does take a certain level of open-mindedness, some desire to embrace other cultures, and an acceptance of the fact that people won’t necessarily pucker up when you throw bills at them. Though if this season has shown us anything, the lack of support for guest-facing ski employees at American hills will start to affect the customer service anybody gets at a US ski resort (more on that in part 2).

Your friend’s dad is gonna take them to Deer Valley Ski Resort? Cool. I’d rather check out some place completely off the map, like Bulgaria. Though maybe that’s a little beside the point? Because for me, the point of this article is to open a dialogue about how ski resorts in the US can rediscover their soul and remember the culture and communities that made them into the multi-billion-dollar tourist destinations they are.

For me and like-minded adventurers in search of diverse terrain and genuine experiences, I’m gonna be changing my hard-earned dollars for euros and yen for the foreseeable future any time I wanna go explore.

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