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The ski-industry promoters have had their work cut out for them recently, attempting to persuade Americans that alpine skiing remains a relatively safe activity despite two fatal accidents involving prominent people -- Michael Kennedy and Sonny Bono.
The industry is right, of course. As leisure activities go, skiing is fairly safe -- about one fatality per million skier-days. Figure the average skier's day involves six hours in lift lines, riding the lift, or even actually skiing, and that works out to one fatality every 6 million hours.
For every six million hours that Americans spend in their cars, 36 die in accidents, so the actual skiing is much safer than the journey into the mountains to reach the slopes.
Of course, that statistic won't help the ski industry's
current image problem. It's hard to imagine ads that
proclaim Once you get here, you're 36 times safer than
you were on the trip. Good luck on the trip home -- and
honest, it really doesn't take six million hours to get
back to Denver from Vail on a Sunday afternoon.
The other problem with promoting safety is that it's not very exciting, and the industry wants to sell excitement. Have you ever seen a ski poster featuring a wholesome family cruising serenely down a bunny hill? Or is it more like some gnarly dude soaring and zigzagging along a black-diamond run?
Our ski industry faces the same dilemma as other commercial outdoor recreation.
River outfitters around here want you to believe that the Arkansas is an untamed free-flowing torrent which cascades through hidden wilderness, rather than a very accessible stream whose flow is controlled almost to the drop by the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District. And they also want you to believe that whitewater rafting is a safe family activity.
Likewise skiing is simultaneously an out on the
edge
adventure in natural powder, and a safe sport with
guaranteed opening dates on manufactured snow.
Little wonder that I've never known a ski resort's marketing director who stayed on the job more than a year or two -- presenting two contradictory images strains the considerable talents of Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, and there just aren't that many people who can do that for a sustained period. For which deficiency, perhaps, we should be grateful.
But we still have the safety-image problem for our vital ski industry -- the source of thousands of low-wage no-benefit jobs, the inspiration for hundreds of elegant trophy homes occupied for a fortnight each year, the very reason for expensive plans to expand the capacity of the Interstate 70 corridor.
Now consider the trees along the runs. They're important in an esthetic sense, of course, but in most other respects, they're nothing but trouble.
For appearance' sake, slope-side trees can't be logged, so they're worthless as timber. Given all the commotion nearby, they don't offer much in the way of wildlife habitat, either. Studies at the Fraser Experimental Forest near Winter Park have demonstrated that trees suck up millions of gallons of precious water each year, and that clear-cutting improves water yields, thus providing more to divert and more real-estate development along the Front Range.
And then there's the safety hazard so tragically demonstrated recently. It's safe to predict that a lawsuit will be filed one of these days, alleging that the ski area and the U.S. Forest Service were negligent in allowing trees to grow in areas where people could be reasonably expected to encounter them.
The solution seems obvious. Replace the real trees with plastic ones which bend or even topple in collisions.
Supply should be no problem -- we already have an industry which produces handsome artificial Christmas trees in several natural-looking varieties of fir and spruce.
Removing the real trees and replacing them with plastic trees would provide summer employment in a now-seasonal industry. The supply of firewood and lumber would increase, to the benefit of both the poor who heat with wood and the rich who build new chalets. Plus, the fabricated flora would not consume water, thereby allowing Colorado to continue to grow.
Most important, appearances would be maintained -- a Christmas-card picture-perfect slope flanked by evergreens with a light frosting of fresh Colorado champagne powder. Who would even notice that both the snow and the trees, natural as they might appear, were both artificial?
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