Such is the case at Kelly Canyon Ski Resort in Ririe, near Idaho Falls, where mountain manager Danny Harris learned to ski on the same hill where his grandchildren are now taking up the sport. Kelly Canyon was founded in 1957 by a group of farmers who decided they wanted their own ski hill after visiting Sun Valley. “They just wanted to ski,” Harris said. They already owned the land, so, come winter, they would put a tractor at the top of the hill and attach a cable that would haul up a makeshift sled full of skiers standing sideways in their skis. Usually, this worked just fine, but occasionally, a group of would-be skiers took an unexpected sledding adventure. The area’s first two lifts were made in a farmer’s shed in 1960.
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| NOVEMBER 4–10, 2009 | BOISEweekly
Now, with the addition of land leased from the U.S. Forest Service, Kelly Canyon has four lifts, roughly 950 vertical feet and night skiing. The ski area is still privately owned and still depends on the loyalty of the community. Like the Little Ski Hill, Kelly Canyon runs a large after-school ski education program for regional schools, but the crowds come at night. Harris said on an average night, between 400 and 500 skiers and boarders will be on the slopes, many of them making the easy 25-mile drive from Idaho Falls after work. The vast majority of clients are locals, and most of those are families who want to take advantage of an intermediate hill. A full 80 percent of people on the hill are usually snowboarders, and Kelly Canyon has created a terrain park with at least 10 features to
draw the high-school crowd. And while Kelly Canyon is larger than the Little Ski Hill, with a 1,000-foot elevation drop, 26 runs, four lifts and two rope tows spread across 640 acres of mostly beginner and intermediate terrain, it still puts its focus on being the community ski hill. “It’s more of a hometown feeling,” Harris said. “People come up all the time, and all the employees know them. “Those who return, we see them years and years and years,” he said. “That’s one thing that’s nice; as they get older, they come back.” Keeping those skiers coming back is key not only to individual resorts, but to the industry as a whole. Even the biggest ski areas see the importance of the small hills as a way to create the
next generation of skiers. “You learn at a smaller area, and as you progress, you hope to go visit the larger [resorts]. But the smaller [area] is the firsttime experience for skiers and boarders in the U.S.,” Hawks said. “It adds to the health and longevity of the industry.” “I’ve had many mangers at bigger hills say it’s their farm team,” said Cliff Tacke, former director at Cottonwood Butte Ski Area. While every ski area is competing for limited discretionary dollars, most of the small guys don’t see it as a matter of competing against each other, or even against the larger resorts. “Even though, technically, we’re competitors, for the most part, we’re family with other resorts,” Pebble Creek’s Reichman said. “If anyone makes a new skier somewhere, it benefits all of us.” Pebble Creek is doing its part to get skiers on the hill, creating numerous specials designed to keep people skiing, despite tight budgets. “We realize that within the community we have people who might want to ski, that have been laid off or have different income levels,” Reichman said. “We feel very strongly about giving back to the community.” Those specials include major discounts for tickets bought with advertising partners or free skiing for kids after 3 p.m. following the switch to daylight savings time. “Because we’re small, we can do things like that,” Reichman said. In its 60th year, Pebble Creek has grown from a rope tow-only resort started by a private group of skiers, to a hill with three triple chairlifts, 2,200 vertical feet of drop, 54 named runs and a reputation for backcountry glade skiing. Still, community remains the focus with an expansive after-school program and specials for families. “With being a small area, we are able to get to know our guests and specially design programming for our community,” she said. “We have a lot of kids that, over the last 20 years, learned to ski in after-school programs that are coming back with their small kids.” That’s exactly what Tacke did at Cottonwood Butte Ski Area, north of Grangeville in North Central Idaho. Tacke started skiing on the small hill when he was in the eighth grade, later returning with his own children and eventually joining the ski area’s the board of directors. The hill was started in the 1960s by a group of locals who secured lease agreements on private land. The group bought Bogus Basin Mountain Resort’s old T-bar, hired someone to log the runs and built a small lodge. The private corporation was replaced in 1990 by a nonprofit, which continues to run Cottonwood. When the original used T-bar finally wore out, the volunteer board of directors found two old T-bars at other small Idaho resorts and cobbled them together. Now, one T-bar (which happens to be 3,000-feet long) and a rope tow take local skiers up the 845 vertical feet to explore seven largely intermediate runs spread across the 260 acres of the area. Of course, it’s not the amenities that make Cottonwood interesting, it’s the location. To reach the base, visitors drive along the outer fence of the North Idaho Correctional Institute—a minimum-security prison—and WWW. B O I S E WE E KLY. C O M