A resort in flux

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

By Ben Cannon

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-On the closing day of Jackson Hole Mountain Resort’s ski season this year, hundreds of revelers – mostly from the under-40 set, and many of them outfitted in the colorful, purposely tacky costumes favored during such local fiestas – gathered in and around the grounds of the Village Café. The pub has been a locals’ favorite for years, a gathering point for the valley’s big name and wanna-be-big-name skiers alike because of its casual atmosphere and familiar faces.

Dom Gagliardi, the owner of the cafe, was on hand to enjoy the final day crowd as they enjoyed their beers and the company. Although the VC, as it is fondly known, was in no jeopardy of losing its following, Gagliardi announced to the crowd that there would be no party in or around his cafe this time next year.

The popular après ski spot will be closing next March, weeks before the mountain closes for the season.

The VC is located in prime real estate, next to what will be the new aerial tram. The building, the Village Center, also counts among its tenants a handful of other locally owned and operated businesses like Wildernest Sports and the action sports film production company Teton Gravity Research.

But it is also 40 years old and getting overshadowed by the ski resorts new developments. The person who oversees the property for Teton Management, Joe Byron, said “you can’t even buy the elements for the water heaters anymore.”
Gagliardi has known for some time that the building’s location in a base village full of as yet unrealized potential is ripe for redevelopment.

“This is going to happen one way or another,” Gagliardi said. “We have to evolve.”
Developers plan to raze and redevelop the Village Center next year as part of an ongoing remodeling of Teton Village. Such development has brought in the Four Seasons, and famed Aspen, Colo., boutique hotel, the Little Nell, is currently in negotiations to build a sister lodge here.

Gagliardi, who also books music for another venerable neighbor business, the Mangy Moose Saloon, and is the promoter behind valley DJ troupe Front Street Productions, bought the VC about eight years ago.

And, while many of his faithful customers who return for inexpensive slices of pizza and cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon frown at the prospect of the losing the café as they know it, Gagliardi is ready for the revamp.

“I thought change was going to come faster,” Gagliardi said. “There’s a good amount of negativity from people who hang out in my café. They see it as ‘the man’ coming to take their place.”

Gagliardi said he has the right of first refusal on a space in the new building. It is not a sure thing that he will open the spot in that building, but Gagliardi said if he can make the books work, the VC will in a couple of years inhabit “a newer, shinier” locale next to what some have said could be the one of the most exciting - and expensive - developments in the world of skiing: the new tram.

In the early 1960s, Paul McCollister had a vision to create a European-style ski village in Jackson Hole. McCollister and several other investors founded the Jackson Hole Ski Corporation. In 1966, the aerial tram began whisking people over 4,100 feet to the top of Rendezvous Mountain.

Meanwhile, nearby Colorado resorts like Vail grew with investment dollars pouring in from Wall Street, though some argued the growth in small Colorado ski towns came too quickly. Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, meanwhile, remained isolated for years as money poured into Vail, Aspen and other premier Colorado resorts.
The same year the tram went up, Pepi Stiegler, the Austrian gold medal Olympic skier, boosted the resort’s reputation by starting up Jackson Hole’s ski school. As a fledgling ski resort in the halcyon days of American skiing, Stiegler accompanied McCollister to ski shows in New York City and elsewhere, working to promote both the resort and the sport itself.

“We were like a stepchild out in the wilderness,” Stiegler said in a recent interview. “People would say, ‘Oh, this place is too cold and too steep and too hard to get to.’ They didn’t even know where Wyoming was.”

In the early ’90s, Stiegler and former wife invested in the foreseeable growth of the resort and built the Olympic Sport Plaza, a clean, white building designed in the style of alpine architecture typical of Bavaria and parts of Austria. The building today houses, among other tenants, Pepi Stiegler Sports, though the couple no longer have any stake in the Olympic Sports Plaza. The Village at that time was not a hub of growth and the building became too much of a financial burden, he said.

“It was a little too early,” he said of his investment to build in Teton Village.
In the wake of the 1994 comprehensive plan, which outlined growth and preservation in the valley, the county placed a moratorium on new resort development and effectively put the kibosh on Teton Village growth.

In 1996, the U.S. Forest Service approved the Mountain Master Plan, which scaled back the number of skiers permitted on the mountain during a peak day to 7,690 from 11,500. This was largely viewed, even by resort management, as a desirable downscaling from the inflated figures outlined in a similar 1981 plan.

Two years later, in 1998, Teton County approved the Teton Village Master Plan, which opened the door for the resort area as it is poised to grow today.

Beyond some improvements to on-mountain amenities, the ushering in of the new resort era came with the constructions of the Teton Club in 1998, the Snake River Lodge and Spa, the resort’s first spa facility, in 2000, and a high-end, condo-hotel, the Teton Mountain Lodge in 2002.

The Four Seasons Resort, which opened the following year, was the first in that chain to open at a ski area. It remains the only outpost of a major chain hotel in Teton Village.
The opening this year of Hotel Terra, which garnered some national press for sustainability principles and an internationally recognized environmental certification, and the forthcoming Sweetwater Lodge, both developed by Rob DesLauriers’ Terra Resort Group, have helped galvanize the emergence of green development in the Village.

Teton Village was different from many of the nation’s other destination resorts owned by large, publicly traded corporations such as Intrawest and Vail Resorts, Inc., because it remained in the hands of a number of developers, businesses and property owners, who all have a stake in the resort’s district.

Rather than a monolithic ski corporation controlling both real estate and the mountain, the future of Teton Village is in the hands of disparate groups and individuals. The investors must work closely together – if, on occasion, begrudgingly so – toward the common goal of creating an economically viable resort that attracts visitors throughout the year.

Earlier tensions among Teton Village’s investors have been well publicized in the past, but many involved have said they have reconciled many of their differences.
“They’re all in bed together,” said one county planner, who did not give consent to go on the record. “They don’t all want to be but they have to be.”

Currently, visitors entering Teton Village along the newly constructed entrance road are met to one side by massive earth mounds, the evincing of a major project that began about a year ago.

The land shaping is part of the Shooting Star development, a subdivision resplendent with a Tom Fazio-designed, 18-hole golf course. Fazio is one of the most influential course architects today. However, he has also drawn criticism from course purists, both for greatly raising the average costs of building a course and re-imagining landscapes.
The course, which stretches to the south and east of what will be a 182-home residential section, will be largely “member-driven,” said John Resor, the developer whose family operates a ranch south of the development. Locals will be able to play on the course starting off at about $50 for a round, Resor said. Greens fees for locals will go to about 45 percent of what visiting golfers without memberships or lodging agreements would have to pay normally. The course is set to open next summer.

Resor said the introduction of the golf resort near the ski resort is keeping up with many other destination mountain resorts and should help lure visitors to the area year round.
“What happens in other resort communities is that people who come in the winter are more likely to come back in the summer with golf,” he said.

The next phase of Shooting Star, still some years away, is a mixed-use development abutting what will become the core of the redeveloped Village.

The Ranch parking lot, which the resort leased from Snake River Associates to help it meet the bulk of its parking needs, will revert back to Shooting Star. There are conceptual plans filed with the county to develop it also as a mixed-use area. That will mean a residential hub with a sizable portion of affordable and employee housing next to the Village core buildings.

“What we want to see happen is the affordable housing make it more of a dynamic place with people living there year-round,” Resor said. “[Visitors] will want to know what there is to know, what the locals are like.”

When the county approved the Shooting Star Master Plan in 2005, it tightened the belt on available commercial space. With only an expected 10,000 square feet to work with, Resor and others have said a grocery store will probably go in to help anchor full-time Village residents and reduce trips to town.

That phase of the Shooting Star development will eventually have to go before the Board of County Commissioners for approval, putting groundbreaking still a few years away. Even so, the Ranch lot will undergo water and sewer infrastructural work – preparations for construction – as soon as this summer.

A new parking lot, to replace the Ranch lot, will go north of the old single-access road.
At the Olympic Sports Plaza, where JHMR houses many of its administrative offices, a conceptual architectural model fleshes out the resort’s mountain master plan, now 12 years old. The model itself, maybe a three-foot by four-foot rendering has accumulated a slight dusty look that comes with age.

From a nearby conference room, Jerry Blann, the president of Jackson Hole Mountain Resort since the mid-’90s, is pleased to point out a newly erected tram tower, a sleek Swiss design of galvanized steel. The tram project is estimated to cost $25 million and is a huge investment by the Kemmerer family, who bought JHMR from McCollister in 1992.

To complement the new tram, designed and built in Switzerland by Doppelmeyer/CTEC, Nick Wilson’s Café will be redeveloped into a multi-purpose base lodge.
“After the tram, there’s no doubt the resort will be handicapped in terms of capital,” Blann said. “That’s a huge capital investment and it’s going to take a while for us to dig out of that one.”

Blann noted JHMR had a “very positive year,” that saw more than 480,000 skier days, the industry measure used to determine how many uses were generated by individual skiers. Still, he said the resort aims to crest 500,000 in the near future and “hopefully, go north of that.”

But daily lift ticket and season pass sales alone cannot make a financially viable ski resort, and Blann said the organizations and businesses, whose fates are inextricably intertwined with the mountain, would have to continue filling guest beds, retail outlets and plane seats.

“Are we outmoded?” he said. “No. We’re growing. New customers continue to come here. We have an increasing variety of lodging, but we’re still relying on Jackson Hole to provide 45 to 50 percent of our bed base. As the resort matures, a lot of people are coming in as non-skiers. The community is changing and at the same time Teton Village is changing.”

Still, with the nation facing an economic crunch, market conditions will determine the clip of development in Teton Village, Blann said.

This summer, JHMR is beginning to look to expand its summer product by beginning a via ferrata, a route of fixed cables and ladder rungs hammered into rock north of Bridger Gondola. The course is based on a kind of mountaineering system popular in Europe. The resort will also begin expanding its mountain biking trails and look to install zip lines in some upper mountain areas, JHMR Brand Manager Anna Olson said.
The old tram, decommissioned in 2006, took as many as 90,000 people to the top of Rendezvous Peak in the summer. The new one, with a capacity of up to 100 passengers per cabin, will allow the resort to considerably increase that amount.

“The brand we call Jackson Hole, it is upper mountain … it’s adventuresome, it’s for adventurous families,” Blann said. “We’re not trying to do water slides, alpine slides. That’s not the kinds of things we want to do.”

Back at the VC, the staff has already closed things up for the off-season, a lull period that independent retailers like Gagliardi said is too long. He’ll shutter until the start of the summer season, which he said is too short and does not generate the kind of revenue seen in the ski season.

Gagliardi philosophized on how the spirit of his business would fare in a new atmosphere.

“All we want to do is ski, drink beer, eat pizza and high-five one another,” he said. “And
I don’t think that spirit is going anywhere.”

Courtesy sketch
In Teton Village, big changes await.

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A resort in flux | Planet JH News Article: Cover Stories

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