Battling a warming world and fierce competition, a local ski resort fights to survive
For the handful of skiers gliding across a sun-drenched ridge high in the San Gabriel Mountains, the wide expanse of the Inland Empire stretched to the Pacific Ocean nearly two vertical miles below.
Across sparkling water, the rugged spine of Catalina Island graced the horizon.
The view rivaled anything at the posh, world-renowned ski resorts of Lake Tahoe, but this was humble Mt. Baldy — the familiar local mountain that, for a few precious weeks each year, becomes a downhill skiing destination that holds its own with anything in the American West.
A sign inside Top of the Notch restaurant at Mt. Baldy.
Last week — after the 10,000-foot summit that looms above Los Angeles emerged from storm clouds blanketed in white — was one for the ages.
But in a rapidly warming world, and in an industry dominated by two huge and growing conglomerates that are crushing the competition, every run feels fleeting.
These days, managing a small ski business is like trying to keep a mom-and-pop general store afloat after Walmart comes to town.
By noon last Wednesday on Mt. Baldy — a little more than an hour’s drive from downtown L.A. — it was getting pretty hot, and the snow was melting fast.
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For a skier racing between towering Jeffrey pines and plummeting through soft, slushy piles of forgiving snow, the hardest part was dodging exposed rocks and random tree limbs that appeared underfoot with alarming frequency.
The hardest part for the business is the fact that one of the conglomerates, Alterra Mountain Co., essentially surrounds Mt. Baldy.
Zac Chambers and his daughter Whitney, 6, of Upland, snowboard together at Mt. Baldy.
It owns Big Bear Mountain Resort and Snow Summit in nearby San Bernardino County, and Mammoth Mountain, the closest big resort in California’s High Sierra.
Although a season pass at Mt. Baldy is a relative bargain at about $300, it’s good only when there’s snow.
For about $800, you can get an “Ikon Pass” from Alterra, which offers access to all of its resorts in California and dozens more across the country and around the globe, including South America, Europe and Asia.
All of which makes keeping the lights on and the chairlifts spinning at beloved, but beleaguered, local resorts an exhausting labor of love.
Last week, Robby Ellingson, president and general manager of Mt. Baldy Resort, drove two hours to a rival resort in Big Bear Lake to pick up spare parts for an old chairlift that had broken down. He thanked them with a few cases of beer.
He planned to grab some tools and install the parts himself, with the help of an electrician.
Michael Phelps, left, and Seven Foster, of Riverside, take the chairlift up to Mt. Baldy Resort.
“I climb the lift towers, I drive snowcats, I do pretty much everything,” he said, chuckling at all of the hard, physical labor despite his executive title. “There’s a lot of things I do that none of the other dudes who hold my position would dream of — out of necessity.”
Another Mt. Baldy executive, Ellingson’s brother Tommy, turned up for an interview on the mountain in a camouflage hoodie, clutching an electric hand drill.
“Everybody’s like a Swiss army knife up here,” he quipped. “It’s awesome, it’s organic!”
It’s also very old-school.
While resorts like Mammoth invest millions in state-of-the-art chairlifts that whisk six people at a time up the mountain with astonishing speed, Mt. Baldy relies on slow, creaking two- and three-person lifts reminiscent of the 1980s.
A lot of the ski gear, ski fashion and the skiers themselves seemed proudly rooted in a bygone era too.
A skier carves down the mountain at Mt. Baldy.
Chris Caron, a 65-year-old retiree who lives 20 minutes down the road, stood at the top of the experts chairlift with a beard as white as snow, a black plastic sun shield across his nose and a cold craft beer in hand.
“There’s big conglomerates trying to buy everybody up, and I don’t want that,” he said, shading himself beneath the bill of his Pliny the Elder ball cap. “That’s what I love about here. It’s not so commercialized.”
Caron said he snowboards at Baldy every chance he gets — 20 to 30 days in a good year.
“I grew up here. We used to ride our bicycles and hike these mountains,” he said. “It’s like home.”
Driving back from visiting family in Missouri recently, Caron stopped at Taos Ski Valley in New Mexico, a bucket list destination for people who don’t shy from pricey vacations. He couldn’t help himself, he said — they’d just had a big dump of fresh powder and it wasn’t too far out of his way. But it didn’t feel right.
“It’s pretty posh,” he said with a resigned shrug. “That’s just not me.”
Also enjoying the uncrowded slopes and gloriously short lift lines on Wednesday was Tommaso Ghio, 28, an aspiring filmmaker from Italy who spent much of the afternoon snowboarding shirtless and looking like an extra from a Visit California commercial.
Old skis adorn a light fixture at the Top of the Notch restaurant at Mt. Baldy.
He and his friends drove up through the desert where it was, “like 80 or 90 degrees, and then we just ended up on top of a mountain,” covered in snow, he said, grinning as if he had won the lottery. “You can’t get this anywhere else.”
But the balmy weather that made the afternoon feel so decadent, and otherworldly, also poses a serious threat to Baldy’s on-again, off-again ski season.
It started with a surprise early storm in November — one that had locals dreaming of a record-breaking year — followed by a bone-dry December.
Then at Christmas, an atmospheric river that dumped several feet of snow on Northern California resorts arrived at Mt. Baldy, which tops out at 8,600 feet, as “catastrophic” rain, Ellingson said.
Rain washes away existing snow and destroys the quality of anything left behind.
And since Christmas week crowds generate about 30% of annual revenue at many U.S. ski resorts, the storm soaked Mt. Baldy in more ways than one.
Things stayed grim until last week’s storm, which dropped more than 2 feet of snow at the base of the resort and up to 3 feet at the top.
With limited snow at lower elevations, people make the up-and-down trip from the chairlift at Mt. Baldy.
It took some time to recover from damage done by the howling wind and make sure none of the enormous piles of snow on the upper reaches became life-threatening avalanches. When the resort finally opened, the skiing was as good as any in recent memory.
“I’ve lived in Mt. Baldy almost my entire life,” said Ellingson, who is 50, “and last Friday was one of my top five days ever.”
He’s hoping the storm delivered enough snow to stay open for at least a month, but the heat is not helping.
Ellingson’s family bought the Mt. Baldy Lodge, a restaurant in the village far below, in the late 1970s. They started running the ski hill, which they own a substantial share of, in 2013.
Increasingly fickle winters have forced the resort to branch out in an attempt to boost summer earnings and attract non-skiing customers: hosting moonlight hikes with live music in the restaurant at the base of the lifts, renting “glamping” tents on wooden platforms — with beds and locking doors — to tempt uneasy campers to sleep beneath the stars.
And in what Ellingson called a “swing for the fences” move, the resort recently bought a microbrewery in Upland. After serving beers at the restaurant for decades, it seemed like a natural next step.
Anything to avoid getting trapped in a “desk job,” Ellingson said, like his friends working as middle managers at the big, corporate resorts.
“I hate to throw shade,” he said, but do those guys ever go skiing?
Independence is priceless to Ellingson because, when you’re the boss and the snow is good, nobody can order you to stop throwing tricks in the terrain park and flying off jumps.
“I grew up during the X Games boom. That’s my identity,” he said. “I still get rad every single day.”
