Lartmada

In the Northwest ski business, time flies and dreams die.

Which actually might not be such a bad thing - especially if you awake older, wiser and convinced that reality doesn’t bite so much, after all.

Consider the cases of Crystal Mountain and The Summit at Snoqualmie.

Exactly 10 years ago, when the old guard was ousted at these two popular, venerable - and behind-the-times - ski resorts, the new guys in charge were running around acting like the business-world equivalent of teenagers.

Remember?

The new kids on the block, Boyne USA at Crystal, and Booth Creek Ski Holdings at the newly rebranded Summit, were talking big, raising capital and writing expansion plans that would, it was boasted, put Crystal and the Summit in the ring with Whistler and Sun Valley, or at least Big Sky and Mount Bachelor, in the sparring match for skier/snowboarder dollars and affection.

Booth Creek, a Colorado company run by George Gillett, the developer of Vail, popped out a master plan that basically wiped the old Alpental, Ski Acres, Snoqualmie Summit and Hyak areas off the face of the Earth, replacing them with a new, integrated Summit snow-play area with a base of operations in a completely different place, snug up against Interstate 90.

Boyne, a family-run resort company from Michigan that already operated Brighton in Utah and Big Sky, Mont., among other properties, announced similarly sparkling plans for Crystal, with a major tram to the 6,872-foot summit, a new hotel and a rash of new lifts into every corner of the Mount Rainier-area resort’s famed backcountry peaks and bowls.

Fast forward a decade:

• Boyne, to the delight of local snow hounds, accomplished a large chunk of what it set out to do at Crystal, the state’s largest ski area. The base area was reorganized and modernized; new, higher-capacity lifts replaced old, slower ones; midmountain dining facilities opened; and new, lift-served terrain will finally open this winter, with completion of the Northway chair into the area’s North Backcountry.

But Boyne’s big-ticket items - the tram and a new hotel, which might put the resort on par with regional resort competition - have yet to get off the ground.

• Booth Creek, after making modest improvements then scaling back expansion plans, fled the scene, selling the Summit resorts earlier this year for $35 million to CNL Properties, a Florida-based real-estate investment trust that also operates a handful of major amusement parks, as well as Whistler’s Creekside development.

That company recently assigned Summit management duties to none other than Boyne, which has a similar arrangement to operate CNL properties such as Cypress Mountain, B.C. Result: The Summit, considered pedestrian to expert riders, but still one of the nation’s oldest and most successful skier/snowboarder training grounds, is now run daily out of the offices of John Kircher, Crystal’s general manager and Boyne’s manager of western operations.

ALL OF THIS MEANS that the bulk of the Puget Sound area’s ski and snowboard resort business - The Summit and Crystal combined draw an average of 700,000 annual skier visits - is now under the thumb of one company; in fact, one man.

Given that, a bit of updated brain-picking seemed in order: Despite some real-world sensibility gained along the way, Kircher, 10 years after arriving from Big Sky, is still bullish on the Washington snow-sports industry - which is one he admittedly now views in a somewhat different light.

Do his expectations of 1997 merge in any way with the reality of 2007?

“I’ve often thought about that,” says Kircher, 49. “In 10 years, we’ve done a lot. We’ve put bushel baskets of money (about $30 million) into the area. We’ve put in far more than we’ve taken out. On a good year, Crystal rings the bell.”

The mountain itself “has really come together,” he says, “especially with the Northway lift going in this year.”

But, he concedes one major feather in his own 10-year plan remains absent from Crystal’s cap.

“I would have thought that we would have had some sort of nice overnight lodge built here by now.”

An 80-room hotel remains in the company’s master plan, which has been approved by the Forest Service, the landowner that leases to Crystal under a carefully scrutinized special-use permit. But financing such an expensive addition - especially one built on public land - has proved difficult.

“You’re talking like a $20 million sort of investment,” Kircher says. “That’s a big decision. Nobody wants to throw that much money at a bad decision.”

A modest hotel is the one thing the company needs in order to compete, at least somewhat, with destination resorts such as Mount Bachelor, Ore.; Whistler, B.C.; Sun Valley, Idaho; and even Timberline on Mount Hood, where venerable Timberline Lodge is a successful, historic lodging property operated entirely on federal land. Crystal hoped to compete with those resorts for at least a handful of “destination” overnight skiers - something he says it can’t do without more overnight lodging.

But the public/private Timberline arrangement, in particular, gives Kircher hope.

“At some point,” he says, “I think we’ll be able to do it.”

Still, a shortage of buildable land in Crystal’s dead-end valley ensures the area will never be a mega-sized destination resort.

“Personally, I think there’s a lot of good in that for Crystal,” Kircher says. “To me, it’s a unique place - a destination mountain without destination lodging.”

KIRCHER, AN AVID SKIER, also realizes that many of Crystal’s fans think the place is big and crowded enough the way it is, and don’t relish the thought of a hotel using even more space or adding to lift lines.

“This is probably an odd thing for a ski-resort operator to say, but for all three ski areas directly outside (Seattle), there is more business on the weekends than we probably need sometimes,” Kircher says of Crystal, The Summit and Stevens Pass. “If you add another 500 or 600 people, you just aggravate an already crowded situation. But (a hotel) would help midweek. A modest hotel would be able to fill itself, winter and summer.”

For now, that’s down the road - probably even behind the already-designed, 60-person tram, which Crystal managers hope will lure visitors to the area both in winter and summer. Other scheduled improvements remain a bit further down the road.

This year, the focus is on completing and opening the Northway lift, the first to cut into the area’s famed backcountry.

The $2 million lift, accessed via the Green Valley chair, will open 1,000 acres of bowls, chutes and cliffs previously accessible only to backcountry skiers and snowboarders who hiked into it. The lift originally was envisioned as a high-speed quad. But Kircher opted for a fixed-grip double chair - the slowest kind of mass transit available, in ski-lift terms - instead. It’s a deliberate slowdown - an attempt to limit the speed at which powder snow in places such as Northway, Morning Glory and Paradise bowls gets tracked out.

“There have always been two schools of thought about it,” he says. “Some people say that when we put the lift in, we kind of deflower the beautiful backcountry flower over there. I ski a ton in the backcountry, and I completely understand where people come from on that.”

But he hopes that by restricting lift access to 1,200 people per hour to Northway’s all-black-diamond runs, backcountry skiers will learn to live with it - and even enjoy it.

“It’s hard for people to see things until they actually see them,” he says. “They’ll be fine. Yes, it is going to change the character of the area, in a small way. From a mechanical standpoint, I hope it really spreads people out, gives them some breathing room.”

The Northway lift may or may not be completed before the ski area opens for the season - towers were still being placed by helicopter in recent weeks - but in any case it likely won’t open until deeper snow accumulates in the area. None of the runs accessed by the new lift are groomed, so deeper snow levels will be required than for much of the rest of the now-2,300-acre resort’s slopes.

AT SNOQUALMIE SUMMIT, Booth Creek’s focus, like the Moffett family’s before it, was on maintaining the area’s tradition as a skier/snowboarder training ground, and popular night-skiing area.

That’s not likely to change under Boyne’s leadership. In fact, it’s likely to be re-emphasized.

The management changeover came too late in the season for large-scale changes to be made in the operation this winter. But Kircher and his staff plan to spend a lot of this winter evaluating what’s there, and what needs to happen.

He’s already worked up a to-do list. Some lifts are rusty; day-lodge and rental facilities, despite some recent improvements, are not up to his standards.

“What I look at in the short term is just to get things operating in a more orderly fashion there … before we can look at expansion of any kind,” Kircher says.

The goal: Capitalize on the area’s proximity to the Puget Sound basin by keeping people flocking to The Summit to learn to ski or snowboard - and not scare them away with bad facilities or service.

“The goal is to have people not get ground up in the meat grinder that sends (first-time visitors) away at a national rate of 85 percent,” he says. “We retain 15 percent of people who try it for the first time. In comparison to other sports, that’s very low.”

The answers are obvious, he says: better rental equipment, instruction, facilities. And simple things, like decent food.

“That’s a major goal - to really produce some good food up there, which, to my knowledge, has never happened in history,” Kircher says with a chuckle.

THE SUMMIT HAS ITS OWN master plan, now being mulled by the Forest Service, to reorient existing lifts or replace them with new ones that take better advantage of topography, and provide better links between Summit West, Summit Central and Summit East.

The plan also envisions ongoing additions such as “tree islands,” to make the current wide-open, clear-cut runs feel more natural; better manage crowd control; and give skiers the “psychological sense of speed,” according to the plan’s environmental impact statement.

Long-term plans also call for a renovated Thunderbird Lodge at Summit West, a new restaurant atop Summit East and perhaps a year-round gondola and new lift in Internationale Valley at Alpental.

But don’t expect any of that soon. In the short term, the main benefit of the joint Crystal/Summit management will be some season’s-pass perks: Crystal Mountain Unlimited pass holders will get up to 10 days of skiing at The Summit and Alpental; Crystal’s midweek pass holders get five days.

The company also has announced a new, upgraded “Big S Unlimited Plus” pass for Summit skiers, who in addition to their Summit access would receive five free ski days at Crystal, and up to 10 free ski days at other Boyne resorts. (Some holiday blackout rules apply; see resort Web sites for details.)

That’s likely to be the extent of group marketing efforts for the two areas, which largely serve different audiences: The Summit as a learning factory to produce skiers and riders in search of drier snow and steeper steeps - at places like Crystal, Stevens Pass, Mount Baker, White Pass or Mission Ridge.

IT IS, IN THAT SENSE, a natural marriage. And for Washington skiers and riders, perhaps a fortunate one. Boyne, founded in Michigan by John Kircher’s father, Everett, in 1947, and now largely run by his sons, isn’t a resort conglomerate the likes of which run Whistler and Vail. But it’s no financial weakling, either. Capital backing from CNL, mixed with Boyne’s on-mountain experience, could prove a fruitful combination.

Best of all, it’s a company run largely by people who get it, and actually ride the slopes they manage.

That’s something John Kircher, who lives in Bellevue, hopes to be doing again soon. He just finished a rough course of chemotherapy and radiation treatments for early stage bile-duct cancer, related to a long-standing liver condition. Sometime soon, he says, he will need a liver transplant. A close friend already has stepped up and agreed to donate a portion of his own liver to make it happen at the Mayo Clinic.

Kircher views this, like a low-snow Washington winter, as just another bump in the road.

“I’m still coming back,” he says. “I’ll be all the way back when I get the liver transplant. I can’t wait to go skiing again.”

And neither can his staff. With the clock counting down to what everyone hopes will be a pre-Thanksgiving opening day, employees at both resorts are itching to go, Kircher says.

“We’re ready,” he says. “We could open tomorrow.”

Ron Judd: 206-464-8280 or rjudd@seattletimes.com

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