In Love in the Past

The summer afternoon monsoon approaching over Carbondale, Colorado

We were spoiled as kids. Each winter of my childhood, my family would decamp to our favorite hotel in our favorite, impossibly beautiful Vermont town for a stay in December. The place was a legendary institution, a bastion of authentic small-town hospitality, and a place where understated Yankee elegance was practiced as a finely-honed craft with precisely zero pretention. The staff made us feel like family whether we were little kids or uppity college students, afternoon tea by the crackling fire in the lobby was an event not to be missed, and the semi-formal Sunday buffet dinner in the dining room was a big deal. My skiing life and career in the snow sports industry have that very particular place woven through it from start to finish. We absolutely loved it, we always felt that the staff loved us right back, and we all love it still. And that’s the problem.

My parents, my siblings and I still love that unnamed hotel for what it was then. As kids, we’d leave for home at the end of our stay already looking forward to our return and feeling that the staff felt the same way. It is still a great place, always ranked high among the best hotels of America. And yet, slowly over time, the alchemy of our favorite home-away-from-home evolved such that it stopped spinning gold, it stopped rejuvenating our deep affection year after year. In the last few years that my parents stayed there to visit me at home in Vermont, we spent more time reminiscing about what it had been like then than being enraptured in the moment. I miss it, but I miss it only as it was not as it is, and therein lies an essential lesson for each of us who work in any sort of service, hospitality or tourism business. Or, for that matter, those of us who teach skiing and riding.

An essential truism for me in my work in the ski industry is that the guest experience and the staff experience run parallel 100% of the time. To be clear, the guest experience and the staff experience are not the same, they simply track each other in lockstep in ways big and small. Our relationship with any place, with our sports, with the organization for which we work or for whom we are clients, are relationships like any other. When we love them or each other, that love takes constant attention and care like any loving relationship does. Doing so requires that we ask ourselves some simple questions that, in order to answer sincerely, require us to look deeper into how experiences make us feel, and that is true for our guests and our staff alike.

If the staff of a resort remains deeply in love with the way their place used to be, like my family, it's likely that their guests’ loyalty and affection will similarly be based only on past experiences, and there will be trouble looming. That trouble may not manifest itself in the near term and it may not even ever really affect the bottom line of an enterprise or a place, but it will be a guidepost of some diminution, some loss of specialness. Many places and organizations succeed without love in this way as our old favorite hotel has, but I cannot help but believe that at some point failure will arrive, even if only in the subtle form of the loss of conviviality, loyalty, or of the deeper meaning a place can have for the people who experience it.

Ultimately, this idea of our loving relationships with each other, with places, businesses, experiences, and even ideas has been on my mind quite a bit this summer. I haven’t lived and worked in Aspen long enough to have any personal feelings about the way things used to be, and the reasons I chose to move here and vest my ski career here remain front-and-center, confirmed each day on the hill while teaching and coaching skiing. Still, I would like to challenge my friends and colleagues, our senior managers, the officials of our towns, and even our guests, to seriously consider this idea: do you love being here, skiing and riding here, playing in our mountains and taking full advantage of this exceptional and truly unique place, for what it is now? I sincerely hope the answer is “yes” and am confident that it is, but merely asking ourselves and taking the time to answer truthfully has real value when done without apprehension, without bowing to personal inertia or to pressure to conform to what we think we should be feeling.

This summer, I have had a sense that here in the Roaring Fork Valley of Colorado there is a significant undercurrent of stress among the working residents. The cost and difficulty of finding housing; the increasingly in-our-faces extravagance of the wealth of our guests and part-time residents; the sense of the yawning chasm between the haves and the have-nots; and the pressure on our towns to try to maintain some semblance of balance in light of the foregoing are constant topics and sources of anxiety. More than one person has expressed the sense that Aspen and its surrounding towns have ‘jumped the shark’. In response, I frequently ask myself and others: do we love it as it is now; can we protect the reasons we love it while embracing change; and are we pursuing our ambitions for our communities and our organizations with that love in our hearts? These are simple questions requiring tough analysis, the essential details can be badly obscured, and there are no easy answers. And yet, we really must ask.

Last weekend, I caught up with a family that are ski clients of mine. The two kids are curious, smart, engaging, thoughtful and genuinely hilarious, and they are a direct reflection of their very welcoming, kind and equally fun parents. We had an al fresco dinner in a busy restaurant that is on the short list of places to see and be seen in the downtown core of Aspen, and it was low-key and relaxed in a way that surprised me a bit but was quite wonderful, genuinely jovial. My time with them was a welcome reminder of why I do what I do, why I choose to do it here, and why that remains the right decision on an ongoing basis. It refreshed and rejuvenated my love for this place and for the people with whom I have the pleasure to ski, work, play, shoot the breeze, and eat slices of pizza the size of our faces in mountain lodges. And when we ski together this coming winter, I will fall in love with skiing all over again, all day every day. I hope the same can be said of this wonderful family and of all the other people with whom I ski, guests and staff: that they will love it as much as I do, and that their love for skiing will be replenished and grow all the time as we evolve as skiers together. That’s the goal, it’s the end of the analysis, and it’s still really the only answer that matters.