Dec. 23, 2011 - Issue #845: Headstones

Let the Sunshine in

Resort looks to put dark days of 2011 behind it

An avalanche could hardly do more damage to a resort than the events of early 2011 did to Sunshine Village. High profile firings, striking patrol, a half-million-dollar lawsuit, a sheaf of bad press and an 8000-strong Facebook campaign cast resort management as villains in a classic skier's morality play. Not even a good snow year—that favoured antidote to almost all resort ills—could erase it.
"We refer to it as 'The Troubles'," Doug Firby quips. We're sitting in Chimney Corner, hot chocolates brimming with whipped cream and the December sun shining in through broad picture windows. But while Firby may make light now, it's clear he takes the matter seriously.

Sunshine Village's director of media and communications has invested considerable effort countering the negative cloud of publicity that lingers over the resort after the firing of seven ski patrollers almost 12 months ago, and the job isn't finished yet.

"I wish some people would just move on," he says. Who "some people" are, Firby doesn't elaborate, but they likely include the organizers behind www.supportskipatrol.com and the accompanying "Support Sunshine Village Ski Patrol" Facebook page.

There's also the small matter of that half-million-dollar lawsuit filed by the patrollers who claim they were wrongfully dismissed. Until that's cleared up, the matter can't fully be put to rest. Traci Baker, a former Banff resident and one active member of the Facebook campaign, thinks the resort should settle the suit in favour of the patrollers and acknowledge it handled the situation badly. "It really could have been handled differently, and it blew apart the lives of so many people," she laments. In the end, however, assigning blame in this situation may be akin to determining guilt in a prison riot, as George Koch wrote in Ski Canada online earlier this fall.

In the meantime, Sunshine Village is forging on. The battle ahead lays on several fronts: the court of public sentiment, to be sure, but more critically within the resort's own work culture.

Gone is veteran mountain operations manager Chris Chevalier, or "Chevy" as he's known to most. In his place is Al Matheson, who stepped in midway through last season to bring peace and order to a patrol crew reeling from several body blows.
 

This wasn't simply a case of cleaning house. Matheson worked on patrol at Sunshine for 12 seasons from 1987 to 2000, under Chevy's leadership, before departing for Kicking Horse. When Sunshine administration called to interview him for the position the first thing he did was call Chevy. "I worked closely with all those people, they're friends of mine," he explains.

That mix of intimate knowledge of the resort, as well as his being somewhat removed from recent events, made Matheson the right man for the job. Filling that role was key to an off-season restructuring that he says has resulted in better distribution of responsibilities.

"There's almost a fresh start, across the board," Matheson says. "At first it was a bit tenuous as we started, but we've all opened the ski hill before, we've all been in these situations before and we're relying upon that knowledge base."

Goat's Eye has yet to open on December 14 as Matheson takes a small group of media, staff and insiders up for a sneak preview. The steel T-bar is still anchored to the mountain, supporting lines of black Kevlar fencing. Snowdrifts are unevenly clumped against the open face of the slope.
Below the chair, four patrollers on work detail struggle against slippery snow and scree to get more fencing in. The resort is pushing for a weekend opening but nothing is certain at this point.
Deciding when an area is safe to open is a challenging matter, often fraught with complexity and conflict between a resort's safety operations and marketing department. Within patrol themselves, there are often varying opinions influenced by risk thresholds, personal experience and philosophy, along with the unpredictable nature of snow and terrain. A ski run may seem stable in one place, and can be entirely different just five or 10 metres away.

Then there are the inherent operating tensions—public safety is paramount of course, but the pressure to open terrain in early season weighs heavily on the resort's revenue-minded. In such an atmosphere, tempers can easily flare. And when a standoff arises between management and patrol, as in January, there aren't a lot of systems in place to protect staff within the ski industry, which has never suffered from a lack of warm bodies.

Historically, ski-related unions have not fared well. Back in 1986, Aspen ski patrol formed the first in the industry, but it remains one of the few in North America. Lacking that, strikes and litigation are among the few effective—yet publicly messy—alternatives.


Too much protection for workers can make an industry top-heavy. The challenge is to find a balance between protecting staff rights and allowing for necessary turnover. Some believe Sunshine ski patrol was ripe for just such renewal.

"They have a culture of safety but there can be a tendency to go too far," says Wes Harris, a Sunshine regular and ski film producer whose former company, Gnarstar, occasionally filmed on location there. "From my experience in business, if you don't change up who's operating your mountain things can become stale." 

Clamping down on debate at the resort and elsewhere, as Sunshine's critics feel happened in this incident, is an excessive measure, says Barker, the vocal Facebook member. A better way to go about it, she suggests, would be to host some town-hall style meetings to air grievances and help people in the community come to terms with all that's happened.

For Matheson, the solution now lies in developing a more collaborative culture at the hill. "We've created somewhat of a different structure, allowing people to give the feedback that their experience provides, working as more of a collaborative think-tank," he explains. "Opening terrain, for instance: ultimately I have the final say with the vice president of operations, but we tend to circle the wagons more often.

"[The patrollers are] all subject matter experts so we get them all sitting around the table, in the same room ... pulling from their collective experience. And also, using that experience to bolster the qualifications of people coming through the ranks."

In the wake of last year's controversy, reconnecting with the public is another part of Matheson's game plan. "Sometimes it's just a matter of riding the chair and talking with people, answering questions. It's a trickle down effect," he says. "Our goal is to get our people out and accessible, to remove the cloak of secrecy that may have been prevalent." For the most part though, Matheson thinks, people are ready to move on and just get back to skiing.

Few industries are as cyclical as skiing—each winter, each fresh layer of snow brings with it the opportunity for new beginnings. Two days after that December 14 scouting mission, Goat's Eye opened for the season. Surveying the tenure with a cautiously optimistic eye, Matheson says, "There's an old adage in the ski industry, 'as the bullwheel turns.'" With it, Sunshine Village is hoping, will come a turn of fortune.

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