NYTimes article about Taos

[rhymeandreason]

Interesting and mulltifaceted article about Taos in the NY Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/...t-few-skiers-can-a-new-owner-change-that.html

Also a companion article about inbounds avalanches

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/...tion=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article

 

[marzNC]

Good article. Finally had time to read it carefully.

The Children's Ski School and the beginner terrain is definitely more family friendly than back in 2017. Having a high-speed detachable lift out of the main base helps to get people distributed around the mountain first thing in the morning. But things do seem to get a bit crowded if the backside doesn't open because of ski patrol work or high winds.

I stopped in to talk with the woman who has been working on selling the resort condos planned for the building that is going next to the Blake hotel. That construction project will start in the spring. Expected to take at least 18 months, like the Blake. The traffic patterns related to the parking lot shuttles probably won't be final until the 2020-21 season.

" . . .
But the mountain’s heyday was back in the 1990s, when skier visits peaked at about 350,000 a year. As the facilities aged, skiers drifted away. By the 2005-2006 season, annual skier numbers plummeted to fewer than 160,000. (By comparison, an average season at Telluride, Colo., easily crests 400,000). Locals loved the empty lift lines and untracked powder, but the business was dying.

So, when the financier and conservationist Louis Bacon purchased Taos Ski Valley from the Blakes five years ago, he set out both to turn the business around with $300 million in on-mountain and base-area investments, and win over undecided, possessive locals. Or, as Taos chief executive David Norden put it, “make this a sustainable business without messing with the magic.”
. . .

My visit in early January seemed perfectly timed. . . .
I was greeted by fresh snowfall and buoyant Taos executives: they were celebrating a 20-percent jump in 2018-2019 season pass sales over the previous year, matching a three-year trend, and the holiday season had just delivered the strongest two weeks of business in Taos history.

Taos was undergoing a renaissance. The directive, Mr. Norden told me, was “change everything, but change nothing at all.”

The new ownership had set a deliberate pattern to its rollout of changes, focusing on families with children, lodging, food services and the quality of the skiing, both for experts and beginners.
. . ."

 

[marzNC]

Here's a local article about the transformation in process at TSV. Includes comments and background of the current CEO, David Norden. At the end of the article, Norden compares the transformation to what he helped do at Stowe to develop Spruce Peak 2003-06.

I think that what Win Smith did for Sugarbush in the last couple decades and will continue to lead has similarities. Sugarbush was facing bankruptcy when Smith and his partners bought it in 2001. Will be interesting to watch what happens at TSV and Sugarbush in the next decade. Smith decided in 2019 that selling to Alterra made sense in the long run.

Dec. 18, 2019, Santa Fe Reporter
Do North: Taos Ski Valley's fabled past beckons skiers and boarders to a new future
" . . .
Sipping tea by the fireplace in the restaurant of the resort's new slopeside hotel, The Blake, the 59-year-old CEO of Taos Ski Valley says he's "a good halfway" through a transformation of Taos that promises to take at least a decade and sport a price tag of $300 million or more. Once a low-key warren of shops, smallish condo projects and coffee carts at the base of epically steep terrain, Taos has started to look more like a resort. It's a cautious transformation that seeks to balance new lifts, new hotels and new restaurants with an old vibe.
. . .
The skiing has always been the thing here. Founded in 1955, the resort's salad days of the 1960s and '70s fostered a reputation for steep-and-deep powder tracked only by locals and those willing to endure a long road trip into mysterious New Mexico or a flight to Albuquerque and a three-hour trek north. Those brave enough—and skilled enough—to peel off their skis and kick their way to the ridges above the highest lift were rewarded by truly remarkable runs that attained legendary status.

But the kind of people who can ski—and, since 2008, snowboard—that terrain can't sustain a resort. Taos has always had enough tame territory to accommodate novices, and the ski school was so good that locals from Santa Fe were known to sign up to hone their skills. The mountain saw skier days dwindle, though, from a high of more than 300,000 in the mid-1990s to around 200,000 in an average year.

The massive project under Norden's purview has the stated goal to "grow better, not bigger." He'd like to see Taos hit that high again. Last year's season drew 265,000 visits, even with a midseason avalanche tragedy (a US Forest Service review said the resort's safety work was in line with industry best practices, and Taos installed a remote detonation system this year on part of the mountain to further enhance its avalanche-control measures).
. . ."

 

[Susan L]