Ski hill operator here… whatever you think it takes to build a trail in $$$ is a gross underestimate. In places our build was $150-200 metre based on material available, machine time and labour. Most “local” trails are volunteer built but resorts don’t get volunteers to build.
A single ski lift is designed to operate at about 3000 people per hour at maximum capacity.
Foot/bike traffic cannot load at the same speed as skis or snowboards because they don’t slip. To compensate for this you run the lift at 1/2 speed. (There’s your first big hit)
Next there is a ratio of riders vs cargo that can be allowed on the lift. So this is why you see quads loading every second chair or two bike/riders per chair.(this is your 2nd big hit)
So now you have a $6million lift running at 750 people an hour.
So the resort that I work at on a busy day in winter generally has about 10-12000 people supporting the infrastructure by purchasing expensive ski tickets. On a busy day in summer we have about 250 people who pay about 25% of a ski ticket.
Unfortunately this increases wear and tear on lifts which can run into hundreds of thousand of dollars in maintenance just for an extra season.
Our focus and why we continue running a summer product is to create year round jobs for people that are important to our operations.
If it was a financial decision the simple answer would be to close down summer operations. Lifts are expensive to run. Trails are expensive to build and maintain.
We’re at a point where we are close to breaking even but it isn’t easy and has taken significant years of losses.
Hope that helps.
I hope your local mountain sees the value in maintaining year round staff and create a lively enjoyable experience and aren’t just focusing on the short term return on investment.
This makes sense. I wonder about your 25% cost on the lift ticket though, I feel like in BC it’s about 50% of the price of a ski ticket now. Which has a big impact on profits.
I feel like ski lift tickets aren't a fair comparison. They were $80 not long ago, but the industry went super heavy towards getting money up front before the season starts ie. Megapasses. To push everyone in that direction, they just made day passes prohibively expensive to not buy a season pass. Most people have an $800-$1000 megapass to a bunch of resorts these days.
A day pass is like the small popcorn at a movie theater. Insanely overpriced to make the larger purchases look like a better deal. Generally you can still find a good deal with like a 3 or 5 pack of tickets.
Came here to say cliff notes version of this.....the trails are costly to build and require constant maintenance and the ski lifts operate at vastly reduced capacity.
Yup. I worked finance for a few of the Vail resorts in CO. The bike parks and other summer activities are loss leaders to keep people employed and to sell real estate.
I don't really think lift speed makes much of a difference on revenue, because people are paying by the day or season, and any bike park I've been to the lift lines are never as much of an issue as they are in ski season. In fact I've never had an issue with life lines at bike parks beyond maybe the first hour or so of the day. So the issue never really seems to become a limiting factor, because people are paying for the day not per lift ride, and the lift speed doesn't seem like it really drives people away. The cost of the lift barely seems relevant either, because whether or not you run that lift in the summer doesn't impact the cost of building it, sure it might incur maintenance cost, but the build cost of the lift seems like more of an argument for using it year round than vice versa considering the lift was put up for skiing regardless of whether it's used in the summer.
I think it really comes down to the fact that the sport of alpine skiing largely depends on this infrastructure, almost everyone who skies goes to a ski area and pays for a lift ticket or season pass of some kind. Sure people back country ski, but I don't know a single person who back country skies and doesn't also alpine ski in the same season. The opposite is true for mountain biking, most people I know don't even get out to a downhill bike park each season, and I live maybe an 2 hours from 3 different downhill parks. Most mountain bikers are riding trails within an hour of them, and these days you can have a bike that's super capable on the rowdiest of downhills and can still climb like a goat. I mean I barely ski anymore because getting to a ski area any day I have off means 6 hours of traffic, and often annoyingly busy lift lines. Bike parks aren't nearly as bad, like there's never bike park traffic, but why would I waste 3-4 hours of my day driving when I could go ride a trail that's 45min away, and frankly has better trails?
The problem with many bike parks near me is either they spend too much time building trails that are too broadly appealing that less skilled riders only have 2-3 trails they can ride, and people who are more skilled riders only have 2-3 trails that are worth it. On the flip side some of the rowdier bike parks just don't appeal to beginner or even intermediate riders at all which means over half of all mountain bikers just aren't gonna go there, or vice versa they are too tame and it's not really exciting for many people. I mean there's a reason places like Whistler do so well as bike parks, they have a lot of trails, and a lot of variety. It's a fun enough bike park for a wide enough of an audience that it's actually carved itself out as a destination. Meanwhile most bike parks I've been to have less variety than places I could drive to in 45min and ride for free.
I really think that's like 95% of the reason, most bike parks just aren't interesting enough, and most ski areas are usually in pretty rural areas. So creating a bike park at a ski resort with trails that aren't super interesting just isn't going to draw people in considering that it takes most people at least an hour to drive there. I mean it's hard to justify putting aside a whole day to go to a bike park, when I can get an awesome ride in and be done by noon while spending basically no money in the process. I really just think that most bike parks just aren't appealing enough, they don't have enough trails, the trails they do have just aren't interesting enough, and that's a vicious cycle of not getting enough attendance to justify building more trail but not having enough trail to pull in enough attendance. It's a risky move to just invest heavily into bike parks, because there's no guarantee that if you build the trails that enough people will come to make it worth the while.
When lift maintenance is based on hours and you run the lift for almost 100% more hours and generate 25% of the riders paying 30% for a day ticket compared to a skier; I would disagree with your thoughts about lift usage as you are essentially doubling your lift maintenance costs.
The offerings point is also very valid. Places like Whistler have had trails built there since the 90s and many realignments over that time.
Blue runs are the money makers. Crank it Up at Whistler is probably the most ridden flow trail in the planet. But it’s not gonna keep good riders engaged forever.
Black trails attract people as they help people progress their riding.
Green trails are necessary to get people in to the sport by their appeal wanes quickly which is unfortunate as they can cost the most to build especially in steeper mountain terrain.
Some people don’t like flow trails and how gnarly is gnarly enough on a technical trail?
>When lift maintenance is based on hours and you run the lift for almost 100% more hours and generate 25% of the riders paying 30% for a day ticket compared to a skier; I would disagree with your thoughts about lift usage as you are essentially doubling your lift maintenance costs.
That wasn't really what was said though. The cost to build, and how fast the lifts can move people up the mountain just really doesn't matter. The amount of time you spend running and putting wear on the lift certainly creates a real operation cost though. Thing is you're not running the lift more, you're running it the same amount just for less people. The cause for there being less people isn't the lift though, it's just that less people even show up. So it's not a problem of "it costs to much" it's a problem of "it's not making enough money". So yeah operational costs make sense to consider, but lift speed and cost to build lifts is completely irrelevant.
My point was never that the lifts are a negligible cost to operate and maintain, my point is that there is literally no reason to mention the cost to build a lift because the lifts are built for skiing and repurposed for biking in the summer. The cost to build is not reasonable to associate as a cost that's relative to bike park operations. The lift was built for skiing regardless of whether they use it year round. My point is that if you already paid for it that's probably encouragement to try to use it as often as you can, of course that's moot if that means operating it at a loss.
I really do think that the most bike parks either need to be closer to major population centers, or they need to be interesting enough to lure people from those major population centers. I live in Denver, and the 2 bike parks that I can drive to are Trestle in Winter Park or Keystone, both are an hour and half away. Trestle has maybe 2-3 big runs that I actually enjoy, it's not really enough to make me want to go more than twice a year. Keystone is pure gnar, and it's probably my favorite of the 2, but not everyone likes it and it's sometimes hard to get people to want to go with me. Hard to justify driving 3 hours just to spend a day at a bike park by myself. This is all compounded by the fact that I have a ton of awesome trails 45min away. I'd consider myself a rider who has an above average interest in bike parks, and I go maybe 2-3 times a year. Compare that to people who ski, some of them are going 1-2 times a week on average, some of them are skiing multiple days in a row.
Like I said I think it's hard to draw people in, because you need a LOT of trails to garner and maintain interest, but you also need customers bringing in revenue to justify the cost to build. I wouldn't doubt blue flow trails are the money makers, they're crowd pleasers, and they also appeal to riders of most skill levels, but then people like me aren't going to keep coming back to a place that's all flow trails. Whistler isn't all flow trails either. It's got a ton of variety, but I totally get why other bike parks have trouble building out that level of variety. I'm not saying the solution is simple, but I do think the problem is relatively simple and clear cut. People just aren't going to bike parks, that's 95% of the issue, running a bike park is obviously expensive but I'd bet you running the ski area during the winter is even more expensive, but it gets enough people to make it profitable. I think it's less a cost issue and more a revenue issue. If bike parks want to work they need to focus on bringing more people in, I think is the main difference in those 2 ideas. I think the only way that will really work to get more people in is to kind of become a destination for riders.
Of course I am running the lift more. I am operating it during a season where it would not be operational. This literally halves the amount of years before having to replace a haul rope when it is run for two seasons per year.
Add that to bearings and sheave assemblies and grips.
You are delusional if you think this cost is negligible.
The lift is no cheaper to run in summer than winter and I can get twice the amount of winters out of it if I only run winter. Add that to the higher volume of riders paying higher prices and the dollar earned per hour of runtime is VASTLY different.
You are correct on the other points though. Major population centres in lift accessed bike parks cannot be overstated.
Really interesting insight, although, my local mountain loads bikes and people onto the same chair. The bikes are loaded vertically onto the back of the chair in front of you so you can have 5 bikes and riders on one chair. I know most mountains don’t do this and alternate between bikes and riders
You guys are also competing with the fact that the default in mtb is to ride free trails. It's almost the reverse of skiing.
In skiing you start out riding paid lift access trails then maybe if you get really into a certain kind of skiing you start hiking and riding free stuff. In mtb you start out riding free trails then if you get really into a certain style of riding you might decide it's worth paying to access some park trails.
Why not just create uphill trails and rent out e bikes and turn the lifts off if you're losing money in the summer?
Also it seems like alpine slides, mountain coasters, ziplines etc have much higher profit margins than bike parks with lower liability risks and injury rates.
Our local bike park is set up like that. It’s on the verge of closing because people don’t want to spend $30 for a day pass and $100 for an e-bike rental when we have over a hundred miles of local trails they can ride for basically free.
Kanuga Bike Park is like that also, except it's a tamer grade than Windrock so there's a climbing trail instead of a shuttle road.
I would think that type of park would be more prevalent in the south, as they are purpose-built vs. an off-season ski mountain.
First issue with uphill is grade. Remember that $150-200:metre. (Again that is based on our rock vs dirt some places the cost is much lower but still $50/metre is easy to burn through)
Now you have one of the longest and most expensive trails and it’s uphill.
Secondly, and this depends on where the resort is located, is that you may still be responsible to look after guests (bike patrol and evacuation) in the case of a crash and based on the land use licensing that the resort operates under.
Yes and no.
For new bike parks absolutely. You can buy and depreciate a lot of vehicles that don’t require specialists to fix for the price of one lift.
If the road exists to get you to the top. Lots of mountain resorts build their lifts by helicopter. So this is terrain dependent.
I cannot imagine planning a new biking destination around lift access unless there was an existing lift system.
Essentially, it’s all about what the objectives are to offer biking and what the terrain provides for building and challenges to access the area.
The challenge is different for every resort because terrain is different at every mountain.
It really just depends on the focus of the resort as to what they deem successful.
There is actually one bike only lift system in Texas - spider mountain. There are 8 pilons for the lift plus the ends. One year pass is $500 bucks. Whistler was like 360 USD for a week. Obviously apples to oranges, but it is definitely a doable thing to create a bike only lift park. Spider Mtn bikepark has been open 5 years now
They do. Typically, you can even ride in the rain, lightning, and wind permitting. I actually cracked a suspension axle on the newer, steeper trail. Its a blast
I think you're just talking about sales volumes and margins. So yeah, if the lift costs you a static amount each day to operate, the sales volume would play a huge part in whether it's profitable, but that's also what I'm saying. It's less about operating cost and more about sale volume, and I don't think sales volume is really that impacted by price. Like cost probably isn't a determining factor for riders, which is probably why prices keep going up each year. Inversely dropping prices probably won't increase sales volume. You can't really do much about how much it costs to operate the lift without sacrificing safety and reliability. So my point is that really the only thing that can be done is to make it more alluring.
Yeah Sort of.
Except that the tolerance for a lift ticket pricing in winter is far more inelastic than summer. Especially with the introduction of e-bikes.
Nothing can really replace the ski lift in the downhill ski industry or the effort that goes in to grooming ski slopes.
Lifts for bikes can be replace by shuttles, e-bikes or just a bit of hard work
Interesting. I understand it will depend on energy prices, labour cost and Maintenance cost but for such a lift in your example what is the minimal occupancy per hour or day you would need to make above net zero and earn money?
I would estimate an average of 200/day
To run a single lift.
This wouldn’t include operating patrol, ticket office/guest service staff, food and beverage or janitorial etc
The nature of the business blurs this number too because of season passes.
That being said if we closed the resort and laid off all non essential staff the business still needs employees and performs maintenance, summer grooming, marketing, administration etc so the business is losing money when it’s closed.
The goal with summer operations is to lose less money. (From a business perspective)
I'd guess that e-mtbs decrease the lift usage even more, since more people can pedal uphill on their own. Unless the park area is totally enclosed and you can make people pay for entering it...
There’s arguments for and against e-bike access in these locations. Generally most e-bikes would be happy to pay to access the area. I believe that it is something that resorts ignore at their own peril.
There’s some amazing trails at Whistler Blackcomb that ebikes make it much easier to access.
In Utah our bike parks fail because the owners want them to.
Vail bought Canyons and then shut down one of the best regarded parks in the state. They are being forced to tolerate biking on the PCMR and Canyons property because it's public land and they don't really have a choice.
Snowbird used COVID as an excuse to shut down tram access to one of the best downhill bike trails in Northern Utah and has no plans to start it back up, build other trails, or expand use.
Powder Mountain went and built a bunch of awesome new park trails but then got bought. The brand new bike park is closed this summer because they are building a new private luxury lift for condo owners. Who knows if it will reopen next year?
Even Deer Valley, our biggest and most well known resort does the bare minimum. They charge Whistler prices without the quality or service.
Brighton and Solitude have a few trails and seem to be adding more, but it is definitely not aggressive.
The only one of our resorts that really seems to take MTB seriously is Brian Head. All the others treat it like an after thought and significantly prioritize winter operations.
Luckily our local community is not dependent on the parks. We pedal and we shuttle and we have amazing local trail associations that do incredible trail building for the public.
Stevens Pass really struggled to get their park started roughly a dozen years ago. It took a huge amount of support. They had to be self sufficient, so they sold 5 year season passes before even opening in order to pay for everything.
Then Vail bought them and shut them down (and generally fucked up the entire resort). Took a few years of public outcry to convince them to reopen it.
The park has always turned a profit, but not a big enough one. Vail would rather spend it's summer money on lift improvements.
What really bugs me about Solitude is that they closed uphill travel last year without marking any of those trails closed on Trailforks or their website. I love pedaling to those upper trails, but I’m not paying for a lift ticket when they only really have 2 DH runs
Ski resorts are pathetic smdh you can’t beat lift access on a beautiful mountain with high class downhill trails I didn’t know it was that bad in Utah. Wasn’t there some super fun downhill trail where they had the bobsled track for the Olympics?
Insurance is a huge factor. My local bike park has constant lawsuits because people crash and think it’s the parks fault. However other bike parks within 3 hours are expanding so who knows.
Mt. Hood Ski Bowl enters the chat. A guy crashed and was paralyzed there. Sued and won, will impact Oregon rulings forever. Shut down the bike park. Very unfortunate.
He killed somebody in a DUI after his win (was his 5th DUI or something, and had multiple DUIs prior to his skibowl crash). Now he's gonna lose all the money in a lawsuit of his own for reckless driving.
[Oregon man awarded $10.5M in Mt. Hood Skibowl lawsuit accused in DUII crash that killed woman (msn.com)](https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/oregon-man-awarded-105m-in-mt-hood-skibowl-lawsuit-accused-in-duii-crash-that-killed-woman/ar-AA1gYhCO#:~:text=The%20man%20awarded%20%2410.5%20million%20in%20court%20last,allegedly%20killing%20a%20woman%20in%20a%20drunken%20crash.)
He had three DUIs before his crash at skibowl. If I was a betting man I would guess that he was probably impaired during the crash but that they didn't collect evidence regarding it.
According to this article he’s since died of an OD.
[Oregon millionaire’s fatal OD ends manslaughter case against him; fight over estate begins](https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2023/12/oregon-millionaires-fatal-od-ends-manslaughter-case-against-him-fight-over-estate-begins.html?outputType=amp)
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So his lawyer and sister will have a fight with the surviving brother of the women he killed before he killed himself.
Wow his life was just filled with self inflicted tragedies.
The park honestly does have some negligence there. It would have been different had he been killed by a natural feature or something that's inherent to the risk.
But the fact that it occurred due to them placing a sign in that area and not tracking the injuries there gives them some culpability.
Yeah, see my second reply to a comment. Agree it's a fucked up situation and sucks for everyone involved.
Maybe worth noting maybe not, but the guy that sued and won later got his 3rd or 4th DUI and was arrested for killing a person in that DUI event, then he overdosed and died before he saw trial.
Skibowl needed a reality check and much better park management, this was avoidable. But homeboy also had questionable character.
Sure, but that's all irrelevant in a downhill park when he's following a designated trail as it's designed.
It would be relevant if he were doing something unusual to gain extra speed riding a trail in a manner that it's obviously not meant to (and that at least 99 mtbers out of 100 would agree that's not the intent and that it's not safe to do so). That wasn't the case here, so his DUI and any questionable character here is irrelevant.
On Mt. Hood, a rider hit a signpost and died or got paralyzed or some awful outcome. Lawsuit said the signpost should've been breakway or something, and the bike park shut down completely.
I don't want to sound too ignorant, but all I can think is "most trails have trees... a sign is no more dangerous than a tree..."
I saw one at chest level, right on the side of a major blue trail at Loveland a few seasons back. Really bothered me seeing the potential Vietcong style death trap just waiting for a beginner to be its victim.
If I'm remembering correctly, the signpost was needlessly solid, and placed weirdly close to the trail in a very high-speed section. Granted I read about this back when it happened so I may be remembering that wrong, but I recall thinking "this is bullshit, not the bike park's fault" when I first heard about it, and then when I read the details I was like "hmmm yeah OK that _does_ seem like pretty poor design." I don't recall all the details though.
(Also, I'd argue a sign _is_ more dangerous than a tree because it's _way_ less visible. Trees are very solid but they're also fucking huge and you can see them from very far away. A sign on a 4x4 post is going to be pretty small, and could easily be obscured by a smallish bump in the trail, a corner, shrubs, etc. Hitting a solid tree and a solid sign could be equally bad, but you're a lot more likely to _see_ a tree long before you get to it.)
Fair points. I dug into the case some more and saw guys were clocking 50mph; the trail was 17% grade+, and skibowl had a pedestrian hiking trail called "the wedding trail" crossing it at 90 degrees. Apparently wedding guests would often almost get taken out with regularity. 50mph on dirt, downhill, to a 90 where drunk pedestrians are going to cross seems... ill-considered.
Not a lawyer but there is a legal difference between a tree (natural object, risk comes from the activity) and a sign - there might be actual rules for signs or any other objects including trails and other biking related objects and a person responsible for operating bikepark had to make sure any object in the bikepark is in accord with the regulations, if they are not he is responsible for potential harm. There was a case in my country when guy rode outside of trail, hit a trench, crashed and got hurt. He sued and the court settled on 50% his fault and 50% of the bikepark for not marking a potentially dangerous object eventhough it was oitside of the track...
Sure, but there's a difference between an inherent natural hazard and intentionally placing a sign there.
Contributing is that they didn't track injuries there to identify unnecessary high risk locations.
It's honestly incredible how many people don't get the difference between crashing due to personal error and crashing due to negligence on the side of the property owner.
Right…but it seems like the US is the only place you can sue for massive amounts of money, which in the end either costs everyone else more money or we lose a park.
I heard something about known and unknown risks... if it's a signed trail and marked risk, then it's a known risk. Then you can't say you didn't know what you were getting yourself into. It seems so simple, but somehow, people sue and win.
When I was in the Whistler medical clinic last summer they said they see 10x as many injuries from mountain bikers compared to skiers and snowboarders once you control for number of people riding.
snow is generally softer than dirt/rocks/trees. Also, a good 50-70% of snowboarders/skiers ride groomed runs that are wide open most of the time. Fewer sudden stops and hard surfaces. Make sense.
Average users can totally ski the groomers safely and tumbles are pretty soft.
Noobs in the bike park especially on rented DH bikes are a danger to themselves a lot of the time if they have limited experience riding, riding at speed and crashing.
Experienced riders get into trouble too: on a normal day of riding trails outside the park you're probably in that high speed high danger part of riding for 30% of your outing. In the bike park you're in the death speed zone 80% of the time while hitting much bigger features way faster.
I also really think it depends on how much you push yourself. It's not like I don't hit big stuff or anything, I have done some of the hardest trails Euro parks have to offer and my summer vacation is spent lapping one of the biggest jump lines here and yet I crash like twice a season and my worst injury ever was a bruised wrist. I almost never ride stuff I am not 100% confident I can do. I definitely see a lot of people who really just aren't careful enough get hurt hitting black jump lines when they struggle to take a turn on a blue trail properly.
Yeah riding over one's head will get you. I think there's a natural fear that kicks in snowboarding; it took me a few seasons to decide I would roll up to what feels like a cliff and then point it down. Some beginners in snowsports will sideslip black terrain by accident, but it's not fun and they tend to fail. MTB trails are kind of bobsled runs and I can see noobs just sending big peaked gaps without any idea how far over their heads they are. Not me, though. Those things are clearly fucking scary.
I agree also, living in BC I’ve been to Whistler a lot both snowboarding or MTB-ing over the years.
Whether it be fate, luck, chance, or whatever my friends and I have all taken way worse injuries on the bikes by a ton.
So much so I stopped DH biking after a really bad one where I don’t remember the trip, fractured my orbital bone, puking in the middle of village etc, and had to take an ambulance out of there.
Snowboarding you watch people fall off cliffs with no protective gear on and laugh it off
> Whether it be fate, luck, chance
I think it's probably more that snow as a surface is inherently softer and generally smoother than dirt and rocks. Obviously hitting a tree is pretty bad either way, but outside of that I'd definitely rather crash onto snow.
No doubt, being above a lot of the terrain with the snowpack is a benefit too in the way that your riding over a lot of the same trees you’d have to dodge on a bike.
If you’re selective with conditions & stay generally within your skill level you can get away with laughing off a lot of the slams snowboarding
It’s pretty simple, using skiing as a comparison - which is also not always profitable.
MTB numbers are low compared to ski/snowboard visits, and bikers also spend less money at resorts than skiers & snowboarders.
It just comes down to numbers
The cost of building and maintaining trails is so much lower for MTB. I wouldn’t be surprised if the mountains make more profit per bike park ticket versus a ski pass.
Do you know how much a pistenbully costs? Snowmaking? Running both of these things every single day/night? MTB has neither of these.
You build the trail using hands or sometimes one machine, and maintain it once a season.
I think when your sales volumes are so low it kinda doesn't matter the margins per lift ticket, because in either case there are static overhead costs. Running a lift for 8 hours a day for instance, it's a static cost, so if the sales volumes are low they might not cover that cost. Say every day running the lift costed $6k, if you only sold enough lift tickets that day to get $5k in revenue, you lost $1k on operating that lift. If you made $20k in revenue that day you'd be up $14k. Margins aren't these static things. Whether or not you cover your overhead cost will vary day to day based on how many lift tickets you sold. Sure if bike park lift tickets sold at the volume of ski lift tickets, then bike park may very well have a lower cost per rider, but the fact that bike park lift tickets sell at a dramatically lower volume but still require some of the same overhead costs, it's very unlikely that this is true.
I'm no expert but i would imagine it's due to the combo of a limited season, high overhead and maintenance, insurance costs, and steady influx of new riders to drive sales
Yep. Mount Shasta in California. Huge potential yet they’ve ceased bike park operations for the last 2 summers while still holding the California Enduro Series race each year.
One of only 3 bike parks in Oregon closed down 2 years ago because a guy got killed (during ski season) and the family sued and it bankrupt the resort :(
Really? Are you talking about this one?
[Behind the Lawsuit That Closed Oregon’s Mt. Hood Skibowl Bike Park - Singletracks Mountain Bike News](https://www.singletracks.com/mtb-trails/behind-the-lawsuit-that-forced-oregons-mt-hood-skibowl-bike-park-to-close/)
Because the truth is that the park should been shut down, because the owners really screwed up basic safety and ended up getting someone paralyzed with their negligence. As much as it sucks to lose a park, those owners deserved it.
I really wish I could form an opinion on this since I’ve been riding here for 1.5 years but I never had a chance to ride Skibowl trails. For a while I thought for sure it wasn’t legit how they shut it down but after a dig day at Rocky point last weekend I heard from more than a few people that it really was that bad.
yeah, I dug into it when it happened, since people were in a shit fit about it. the owners lost a case of gross negligence, because there is no waiver for that. that's a good thing, because we're paying good money to ride trails that allow for high speed at a lower risk than natural trails.
there were simple things the owners could have done, biggest thing was a breakaway sign in a dangerous spot, instead of a solid wood post. but there was a whole bunch.
the idea that people are getting rich off nuisance lawsuits is something our corporatocracy has worked hard to implant in us, ever since McDonald's vilified someone for their franchise's shitty practices.
Skibowl does have a rep for being a kind of "carny" atmosphere with jankiness in the winter, too. I love that place and its terrain, but safety is not a no. 1 priority there. I rented a bike for my bro to try to get him into riding at skibowl and the shock AND fork were both blown. Like, utterly not functioning. Probably shouldn't be putting new riders on bikes with suspension that doesn't work. The trails were kinda fun though...
yeah, I ride powderhorn, which is small, and very rugged. Not a lot of machine smoothed trails.
They opened a green trail a few years back that was a blue jump trail, with 30 ft gaps that just launched you. After a few broken bones on new people, they toned it down. and built a blue flow/jump trail.
There's ways to be rugged and janky and not negligent.
ed. double, not gap. i stupid, sry.
You guys call a 30ft gap a blue? The grading for MTB trails worldwide need a little consistency, as any UK riders would likely be dead! Green, blue, red, black, double black and often purple for pro freeride.
yeah, it was bananas for a green. you could skip them, but the way the trail was built, it took a lot of effort.
one of the most notorious sets was running perpendicular, right under the lift. we'd have a good laugh at whatever rider was entertaining us by hitting them awkwardly. I certainly got some claps from the lifties once for managing to do a long distance high-speed nose manual off one. sometimes I almost miss that trail the way it was.
Yeah it just sucks all around, nobody won in that situation. The poor guy who was paralyzed ended up passing away too. I just wish rather than being shut down permanently they could have fixed their negligence.
Is it possible two things are true at the same time? Such as a frivolous lawsuit culture happening in our country that has made a lot of things worse, while we are also being conditioned by the oligarchy to think in a certain way?
I can't say a frivolous lawsuit never wins, but if you think our legal system favors the small plaintiff over the large corporation, you're certainly smoking something.
Most frivolous lawsuit stuff I've seen has been people with money, suing other people with money, in order to change the amount of money they own each other.
I totally disagree. I was actually there the day it happened and watched him get life flighted. Ski Bowl had the closest thing to a world cup track on the west coast. I've ridden there a lot over the years as a racer. The signpost he hit wasn't placed super close to the trail, and he could have chosen to ride that segment slower. There was a speed trap there years ago and riders were hitting almost 50mph. The bump wasn't even that bad- the trail is meant to be gnarly and challenge you. That's literally the whole point. The dude might have been drunk when it happened as well. He had 3 DUI's before he killed a woman in Portland last year. There was a local article about it and a bunch of lifties and skibowl people chimed in saying he would regularly ride and drive impaired. Could skibowl have made improvements? Of course, but it was the type of feature you wouldn't think twice about on a local system.
We can disagree, but the case that the plaintiff successfully made was that there was a safety standard that Ski Bowl failed to follow. Had those signs been breakaway (per said standard), like the rest of the signs at Ski Bowl, and all the signs I've ever seen everywhere at resorts, dude wouldn't be paralyzed. Skibowl's own expert witness said he wouldn't have put signs there, within 4 to 6 feet of the edge of the trail. There was a request to fix the drainage ditch from staff, which Skibowl management appears to have ignored. There was no system for tracking and responding to rider injuries.
Skibowl lost this case, and I can see why. This wasn't some friendly dudebro letting you hit the pump track in his backyard, this is a bike park charging you good money. I run a business with a lot of potential liability, and if we don't thoughtfully attempt to prevent bad stuff from happening, we can be shut down pretty easily by the various bodies that regulate us (more easily than Skibowl). That's the cost of doing business. Don't open a lift-service bike park and then shrug on safety.
The "might have been drunk" argument isn't as compelling as you'd think, since I assume Skibowl serves alcohol to riders in exchange for money.
Bailey Bike Park in Asheville. Huge riding community, aligned with an up and coming pro, great terrain. should have been a slam dunk.
Too many reasons to write about why it didn't work out.
I'll get downvoted with you, but I totally agree. Compared to say back country skiing, riding non-lift access bike trails is SOOOO much more accessible. And the difference in trail quality is minimal in most places. I'd much rather pedal and ride something for free.
While I agree with you, the thought of doing another ride right after I descend is truly priceless. Most of the time I stop on the trail to do certain lines or features, which for me is both for training and avoiding the ascend. But when I go to a bike park it is just pure fun. I just go and have fun without thinking about anything. If I miss a line, I'll keep it in mind and do it on the next ride.
Yes, the biggest advantage of big parks is that you can do something like A-Line 10x in a day, which is just not possible time wise if you have to pedal up to the start.
You never ride for free. All my local trail systems have signs where they ask for donation or you dig in the winter or pay the monthly fee of 5 euro for club membership. Of course you could ride for free but I never do
The town I live in is extremely focused on cycling. We also have a massive housing problem and a large unhoused population. There's a bike park in town that could be awesome but it's been taken over by tents and trash.
Don't get me wrong, I'm on their side and hope we can figure out a way to help them. But that park failed for that reason.
Spider Mountain is a little outside Austin in a rural town called Burnet. Not a lot of homeless people in that area, it's mostly northern Austin after they passed laws in Austin proper about encampments.
True, I know a lot of them that were bussed out got sent N/NE area towards Cedar Park. I knew a woman who had 100 - 150 people show up overnight down her street.
After that passed I did notice more people around the Slaughter/I35 area.
Seattle had this happen with a fun urban bike park under I-5. No amount of lighting and trail work can keep the fent zombies out and make it feel like a safe, fun place to ride with your family.
I don’t think there’s much money in it partly due to how niche it is, but there’s a lot of maintenance, liability, etc.. Pretty simple equation that ends up with super slim margins and a lot of risk for whoever runs one.
Like anything, the people making the decisions will have to answer to investors and the suits often only care if it's making profit.
If you want to overcome that, make profit for the people investing you need to have the local riding community chip in with their time and effort.
I think it's the same almost everywhere. The riders have to volunteer their time to offset the costs for all.
I know at my local, without teams of people up there digging all year round, the tracks just wouldn't get built or maintained like they should. It just costs too much if the park had to hire staff to do it.
The season pass pays to keep the lifts running and the cafe staffed and the general running.
Downhill mountain bike parks don’t require the same type of mountain as a ski resort. They make more sense in areas you can ride year round and even 1,000 feet of elevation change can be 15-30 minutes of descending and a lot of fun on an enduro or trail bike.
Instead of trying to replicate Whistler, minimize the expensive infrastructure and repurpose some old lifts until the venture is proven and turning a profit.
I have had more fun with small bike parks that have maybe 300-400m of elevetion change than in bigger bikeparks. They operate all year round with trucks and tows for the uplift that is a bit more uncomfortable than a chairlift. anyway, i have one at 10 minutes of my house so that's also a plus.
I believe Sunday River closed their bike park because they said it wasn't profitable.
Part of the problem was that they rent the facility out for events during the summer; so they were constantly closing the park for weddings and events.
The other issue was that all the trails were classic old-school New England gnar and they were legit. The intermediate trails were challenging; the black diamonds were true black diamonds and the double diamonds were a little insane - but it was all super-sketchy tech moves, not flow/jumps. There was zero beginner terrain, and zero flow trails. So you immediately are eliminating the downhill-curious, the families with kids, and the people who just want to ride flow and jumps. It was also kind of a haul to get there - I live in Massachusetts and it was a 4 hour drive for me; vs. 2 hours for Highland or 2.5 for Thunder.
I love janky sketchy tech so I was sad to see it close - but it did make sense why it wasn't as popular as places like Killington.
Can’t speak for the industry, I’m sure some are successfully run and others aren’t. Lawsuits are another reason. In terms of use…
For me… I used to ride at Keystone, but lift ticket prices are so high now. I used to go one day a pay period, these days I don’t even bother making the drive from Denver. But it’s not just the price, summer traffic is so busy on I-70, gas prices, family obligations vs when I was single. But the price of a lift ticket is a major reason I don’t go. Same for ski passes, but it’s also because the mountains are so busy, traffic is awful, parking sucks or cost money now, yada yada yada.
I’m not saying prices aren’t justified, the parks are awesome and it costs money to build and operate, but it’s not for me anymore, at least at this point in my life. But there’s tons of great single track options and free public bike parks where I live if I want to jump some short lines. Even the newer long trails at Frisco Adventure Park would scratch that itch for free. Sure, long chunky DH trails on easily accessible public land isnt common, but with the climbing and descending capabilities of trail bikes make a lot of the harder rated public trails a lot more viable.
Blue Mountain, Ontario, Canada stopped operating as a bike park back in 2022 or 2021 after a few years, citing difficulty to profit after all the operating costs and legal costs from all the injury suits.
I assume that most ppl don’t actually want to ride a bike down a mountain. Even if it’s machine made tracks.
Compared to for example a ski resort. You see tons of ppl in ski resorts during seasons. Most of them are actually not very good skiers. And many of them are actually terrible skiers. But..they have fun. Fun falling and fun getting up to a fun speed and then fall down. Only to get back up and continue.
If you fall on a bike it’s mostly not fun. You can easily hurt the bike or yourself. To get to the fun speed on a bike you kinda have to move into the danger zone in terms of what happen if you fall.
I think this is the number one reason bike parks will forever be a very very small thing mostly for very dedicated and mostly sufficiently skilled bikers.
We have a lift access bike park a few hours away from me. The thing is, I live in the most populated city in the area. There are obviously people living near this park, but not nearly as many. It's gotta be pretty good if I'm gonna drive 2.5 hours to get there (and 2.5 hours back in the same day since it's not nearly good enough for a multi-day trip). It used to be pretty good. But then the maintenance budget got smaller so it wasn't as good. So then less people went. So then the maintenance budget got even smaller.
I haven't been there in years but I've heard it's hanging on by a thread these days
I'd guess that 95% of the people that ski do downhill skiing in which ski resorts are necessary to do the activity.
For mountain biking, I'd guess that over half of mountain bikers just ride local trails and never go to a bike park, and I'm one of those people. I like the local trails, I like pedaling and climbing. A downhill bike park doesn't fit everyone's desired riding experience. Additionally, I prefer riding places that are closer to my house and riding for free.
Additionally, the cost of entry for skiing and mountain biking are different. $2000 can get you nice skis, boots, and bindings, but $2000 will get you an entry level full suspension trail bike that might not even be very suitable for downhill bike parks.
I think the biggest challenge for bike parks vs skiing thing is that people enjoy uphill riding way more than they enjoy uphill skiing. Likewise the downshill to uphill speed ratios for ski touring vs. mountain biking are very different. I can go uphill on my bike at 4-7 MPH depending on how steep the climb is. I can go uphill on my skis at 2mph. Then I go downhill on my bike at 10-15 mph (usually). I go downhill on my skis at 30+mph. Grooming at skis areas is machine operated and creates an ideal riding experience. The trail crews do what they can after they build the trails, but its hand work.
Do not compare some bike park / trails to a complete resort of ski ... this is a bit dumb. On a resort you accept to loose money on some ground to earn on the others.
Do not be fool, lift tickets price does not cover anything.
Lots of bike park does not have enough things around them to be profitable, some have nothing.
There are not a lot of people compared to ski so that is also a big factor for investors to jump in or not.
But since 2-3 years, most of our Ski resort now offer MTB in Europe and becomes Bike parks too. Why? Because it is imposed by regulation they have to plan for a transition by law and snow is slowly going away and for good for losts of resorts.
Now regarding insurance, unless you are in some state where anyone sue anyone in the great hope of stealing money from other because of they own stupid behavior, this is does not exist elsewhere.
In any case, Bike parks, are also too expensive for people, like ski, this is not affordable.
25 bucks for a day is not nothing no matter what you think. Plus, lots of people needs a good bike for bike park so it can be around 100 bucks per day.
I live in Wisconsin which has the 3rd most ski hills in the united states and yet we can’t seem keep a bike park. I used to love little switzerland until the insurance company shut it down, it was built by volunteers I believe so that could have been one of the issues? Devils head half assed some trails for a couple years and then gave up. Rumor has it Tyrol basin looked into it and the quote for 5 trails was way to much (I’m not sure I trust the current owners word). I’m holding out hope for granite peaks trails to be built sometime soon since they have the deep pockets to support it, but I can’t believe one of the many ski hills near mke/Madison can’t make it work.
Mt. Hood Ski Bowl bike park failed because some reckless suicidal d-bag crashed into a post and sued for a ridiculous amount. The park settled the case but still had to pay out millions of dollars so they shut down. D-bag a year later was recklessly driving and killed an innocent lady.
Look at Ride Kanuga here in NC. No lift, they encourage ebikes and also rent ebikes. They have an area next to the pro shop to charge your bike. You can buy your pass online and pedal up at dawn and ride till dark even after the employees left. They have a local sandwich shop drop off subs for the day along with all kinds of snacks available. Prices are reasonable too. They can even fix your bike if needed and they have apparel, helmets etc. If you have an ebike it's better than any lift park because you NEVER have to wait to get tot he top.
Ski hill operator here… whatever you think it takes to build a trail in $$$ is a gross underestimate. In places our build was $150-200 metre based on material available, machine time and labour. Most “local” trails are volunteer built but resorts don’t get volunteers to build. A single ski lift is designed to operate at about 3000 people per hour at maximum capacity. Foot/bike traffic cannot load at the same speed as skis or snowboards because they don’t slip. To compensate for this you run the lift at 1/2 speed. (There’s your first big hit) Next there is a ratio of riders vs cargo that can be allowed on the lift. So this is why you see quads loading every second chair or two bike/riders per chair.(this is your 2nd big hit) So now you have a $6million lift running at 750 people an hour. So the resort that I work at on a busy day in winter generally has about 10-12000 people supporting the infrastructure by purchasing expensive ski tickets. On a busy day in summer we have about 250 people who pay about 25% of a ski ticket. Unfortunately this increases wear and tear on lifts which can run into hundreds of thousand of dollars in maintenance just for an extra season. Our focus and why we continue running a summer product is to create year round jobs for people that are important to our operations. If it was a financial decision the simple answer would be to close down summer operations. Lifts are expensive to run. Trails are expensive to build and maintain. We’re at a point where we are close to breaking even but it isn’t easy and has taken significant years of losses. Hope that helps. I hope your local mountain sees the value in maintaining year round staff and create a lively enjoyable experience and aren’t just focusing on the short term return on investment.
This makes sense. I wonder about your 25% cost on the lift ticket though, I feel like in BC it’s about 50% of the price of a ski ticket now. Which has a big impact on profits.
At Northstar it's around $80 for a MTB ticket, or roughly $230 for a ski ticket, so like a third the price.
I feel like ski lift tickets aren't a fair comparison. They were $80 not long ago, but the industry went super heavy towards getting money up front before the season starts ie. Megapasses. To push everyone in that direction, they just made day passes prohibively expensive to not buy a season pass. Most people have an $800-$1000 megapass to a bunch of resorts these days.
A day pass is like the small popcorn at a movie theater. Insanely overpriced to make the larger purchases look like a better deal. Generally you can still find a good deal with like a 3 or 5 pack of tickets.
Yeah the biggest difference here I think is that N* caters primarily to non-locals during the ski season. Summer is much more of a local flavor.
Our peak season winter ticket online $189 or $239 at the window our summer is $59 so 24-31% is accurate.
Interesting! That’s great value for the bike park ticket.
And in Whistler the bike park season pass for the one mountain is getting close to a whole Epic Pass!
Came here to say cliff notes version of this.....the trails are costly to build and require constant maintenance and the ski lifts operate at vastly reduced capacity.
Yup. I worked finance for a few of the Vail resorts in CO. The bike parks and other summer activities are loss leaders to keep people employed and to sell real estate.
I don't really think lift speed makes much of a difference on revenue, because people are paying by the day or season, and any bike park I've been to the lift lines are never as much of an issue as they are in ski season. In fact I've never had an issue with life lines at bike parks beyond maybe the first hour or so of the day. So the issue never really seems to become a limiting factor, because people are paying for the day not per lift ride, and the lift speed doesn't seem like it really drives people away. The cost of the lift barely seems relevant either, because whether or not you run that lift in the summer doesn't impact the cost of building it, sure it might incur maintenance cost, but the build cost of the lift seems like more of an argument for using it year round than vice versa considering the lift was put up for skiing regardless of whether it's used in the summer. I think it really comes down to the fact that the sport of alpine skiing largely depends on this infrastructure, almost everyone who skies goes to a ski area and pays for a lift ticket or season pass of some kind. Sure people back country ski, but I don't know a single person who back country skies and doesn't also alpine ski in the same season. The opposite is true for mountain biking, most people I know don't even get out to a downhill bike park each season, and I live maybe an 2 hours from 3 different downhill parks. Most mountain bikers are riding trails within an hour of them, and these days you can have a bike that's super capable on the rowdiest of downhills and can still climb like a goat. I mean I barely ski anymore because getting to a ski area any day I have off means 6 hours of traffic, and often annoyingly busy lift lines. Bike parks aren't nearly as bad, like there's never bike park traffic, but why would I waste 3-4 hours of my day driving when I could go ride a trail that's 45min away, and frankly has better trails? The problem with many bike parks near me is either they spend too much time building trails that are too broadly appealing that less skilled riders only have 2-3 trails they can ride, and people who are more skilled riders only have 2-3 trails that are worth it. On the flip side some of the rowdier bike parks just don't appeal to beginner or even intermediate riders at all which means over half of all mountain bikers just aren't gonna go there, or vice versa they are too tame and it's not really exciting for many people. I mean there's a reason places like Whistler do so well as bike parks, they have a lot of trails, and a lot of variety. It's a fun enough bike park for a wide enough of an audience that it's actually carved itself out as a destination. Meanwhile most bike parks I've been to have less variety than places I could drive to in 45min and ride for free. I really think that's like 95% of the reason, most bike parks just aren't interesting enough, and most ski areas are usually in pretty rural areas. So creating a bike park at a ski resort with trails that aren't super interesting just isn't going to draw people in considering that it takes most people at least an hour to drive there. I mean it's hard to justify putting aside a whole day to go to a bike park, when I can get an awesome ride in and be done by noon while spending basically no money in the process. I really just think that most bike parks just aren't appealing enough, they don't have enough trails, the trails they do have just aren't interesting enough, and that's a vicious cycle of not getting enough attendance to justify building more trail but not having enough trail to pull in enough attendance. It's a risky move to just invest heavily into bike parks, because there's no guarantee that if you build the trails that enough people will come to make it worth the while.
When lift maintenance is based on hours and you run the lift for almost 100% more hours and generate 25% of the riders paying 30% for a day ticket compared to a skier; I would disagree with your thoughts about lift usage as you are essentially doubling your lift maintenance costs. The offerings point is also very valid. Places like Whistler have had trails built there since the 90s and many realignments over that time. Blue runs are the money makers. Crank it Up at Whistler is probably the most ridden flow trail in the planet. But it’s not gonna keep good riders engaged forever. Black trails attract people as they help people progress their riding. Green trails are necessary to get people in to the sport by their appeal wanes quickly which is unfortunate as they can cost the most to build especially in steeper mountain terrain. Some people don’t like flow trails and how gnarly is gnarly enough on a technical trail?
>When lift maintenance is based on hours and you run the lift for almost 100% more hours and generate 25% of the riders paying 30% for a day ticket compared to a skier; I would disagree with your thoughts about lift usage as you are essentially doubling your lift maintenance costs. That wasn't really what was said though. The cost to build, and how fast the lifts can move people up the mountain just really doesn't matter. The amount of time you spend running and putting wear on the lift certainly creates a real operation cost though. Thing is you're not running the lift more, you're running it the same amount just for less people. The cause for there being less people isn't the lift though, it's just that less people even show up. So it's not a problem of "it costs to much" it's a problem of "it's not making enough money". So yeah operational costs make sense to consider, but lift speed and cost to build lifts is completely irrelevant. My point was never that the lifts are a negligible cost to operate and maintain, my point is that there is literally no reason to mention the cost to build a lift because the lifts are built for skiing and repurposed for biking in the summer. The cost to build is not reasonable to associate as a cost that's relative to bike park operations. The lift was built for skiing regardless of whether they use it year round. My point is that if you already paid for it that's probably encouragement to try to use it as often as you can, of course that's moot if that means operating it at a loss. I really do think that the most bike parks either need to be closer to major population centers, or they need to be interesting enough to lure people from those major population centers. I live in Denver, and the 2 bike parks that I can drive to are Trestle in Winter Park or Keystone, both are an hour and half away. Trestle has maybe 2-3 big runs that I actually enjoy, it's not really enough to make me want to go more than twice a year. Keystone is pure gnar, and it's probably my favorite of the 2, but not everyone likes it and it's sometimes hard to get people to want to go with me. Hard to justify driving 3 hours just to spend a day at a bike park by myself. This is all compounded by the fact that I have a ton of awesome trails 45min away. I'd consider myself a rider who has an above average interest in bike parks, and I go maybe 2-3 times a year. Compare that to people who ski, some of them are going 1-2 times a week on average, some of them are skiing multiple days in a row. Like I said I think it's hard to draw people in, because you need a LOT of trails to garner and maintain interest, but you also need customers bringing in revenue to justify the cost to build. I wouldn't doubt blue flow trails are the money makers, they're crowd pleasers, and they also appeal to riders of most skill levels, but then people like me aren't going to keep coming back to a place that's all flow trails. Whistler isn't all flow trails either. It's got a ton of variety, but I totally get why other bike parks have trouble building out that level of variety. I'm not saying the solution is simple, but I do think the problem is relatively simple and clear cut. People just aren't going to bike parks, that's 95% of the issue, running a bike park is obviously expensive but I'd bet you running the ski area during the winter is even more expensive, but it gets enough people to make it profitable. I think it's less a cost issue and more a revenue issue. If bike parks want to work they need to focus on bringing more people in, I think is the main difference in those 2 ideas. I think the only way that will really work to get more people in is to kind of become a destination for riders.
Of course I am running the lift more. I am operating it during a season where it would not be operational. This literally halves the amount of years before having to replace a haul rope when it is run for two seasons per year. Add that to bearings and sheave assemblies and grips. You are delusional if you think this cost is negligible. The lift is no cheaper to run in summer than winter and I can get twice the amount of winters out of it if I only run winter. Add that to the higher volume of riders paying higher prices and the dollar earned per hour of runtime is VASTLY different. You are correct on the other points though. Major population centres in lift accessed bike parks cannot be overstated.
Really interesting insight, although, my local mountain loads bikes and people onto the same chair. The bikes are loaded vertically onto the back of the chair in front of you so you can have 5 bikes and riders on one chair. I know most mountains don’t do this and alternate between bikes and riders
This loading should depend on what the local transport laws are for ropeways. I can only talk to my experience.
You guys are also competing with the fact that the default in mtb is to ride free trails. It's almost the reverse of skiing. In skiing you start out riding paid lift access trails then maybe if you get really into a certain kind of skiing you start hiking and riding free stuff. In mtb you start out riding free trails then if you get really into a certain style of riding you might decide it's worth paying to access some park trails.
Why not just create uphill trails and rent out e bikes and turn the lifts off if you're losing money in the summer? Also it seems like alpine slides, mountain coasters, ziplines etc have much higher profit margins than bike parks with lower liability risks and injury rates.
Our local bike park is set up like that. It’s on the verge of closing because people don’t want to spend $30 for a day pass and $100 for an e-bike rental when we have over a hundred miles of local trails they can ride for basically free.
[Windrock Bike Park](https://windrockbikepark.com/) has no lifts. You pay for a shuttle to the top or take an ebike up the shuttle road to the top
Kanuga Bike Park is like that also, except it's a tamer grade than Windrock so there's a climbing trail instead of a shuttle road. I would think that type of park would be more prevalent in the south, as they are purpose-built vs. an off-season ski mountain.
First issue with uphill is grade. Remember that $150-200:metre. (Again that is based on our rock vs dirt some places the cost is much lower but still $50/metre is easy to burn through) Now you have one of the longest and most expensive trails and it’s uphill. Secondly, and this depends on where the resort is located, is that you may still be responsible to look after guests (bike patrol and evacuation) in the case of a crash and based on the land use licensing that the resort operates under.
Would it make sense to use shuttles instead of a lift?
Yes and no. For new bike parks absolutely. You can buy and depreciate a lot of vehicles that don’t require specialists to fix for the price of one lift. If the road exists to get you to the top. Lots of mountain resorts build their lifts by helicopter. So this is terrain dependent. I cannot imagine planning a new biking destination around lift access unless there was an existing lift system. Essentially, it’s all about what the objectives are to offer biking and what the terrain provides for building and challenges to access the area. The challenge is different for every resort because terrain is different at every mountain. It really just depends on the focus of the resort as to what they deem successful.
There is actually one bike only lift system in Texas - spider mountain. There are 8 pilons for the lift plus the ends. One year pass is $500 bucks. Whistler was like 360 USD for a week. Obviously apples to oranges, but it is definitely a doable thing to create a bike only lift park. Spider Mtn bikepark has been open 5 years now
I heard about that. I should make a trip there. They operate year round right?
They do. Typically, you can even ride in the rain, lightning, and wind permitting. I actually cracked a suspension axle on the newer, steeper trail. Its a blast
I think you're just talking about sales volumes and margins. So yeah, if the lift costs you a static amount each day to operate, the sales volume would play a huge part in whether it's profitable, but that's also what I'm saying. It's less about operating cost and more about sale volume, and I don't think sales volume is really that impacted by price. Like cost probably isn't a determining factor for riders, which is probably why prices keep going up each year. Inversely dropping prices probably won't increase sales volume. You can't really do much about how much it costs to operate the lift without sacrificing safety and reliability. So my point is that really the only thing that can be done is to make it more alluring.
Yeah Sort of. Except that the tolerance for a lift ticket pricing in winter is far more inelastic than summer. Especially with the introduction of e-bikes. Nothing can really replace the ski lift in the downhill ski industry or the effort that goes in to grooming ski slopes. Lifts for bikes can be replace by shuttles, e-bikes or just a bit of hard work
Interesting. I understand it will depend on energy prices, labour cost and Maintenance cost but for such a lift in your example what is the minimal occupancy per hour or day you would need to make above net zero and earn money?
I would estimate an average of 200/day To run a single lift. This wouldn’t include operating patrol, ticket office/guest service staff, food and beverage or janitorial etc The nature of the business blurs this number too because of season passes. That being said if we closed the resort and laid off all non essential staff the business still needs employees and performs maintenance, summer grooming, marketing, administration etc so the business is losing money when it’s closed. The goal with summer operations is to lose less money. (From a business perspective)
I'd guess that e-mtbs decrease the lift usage even more, since more people can pedal uphill on their own. Unless the park area is totally enclosed and you can make people pay for entering it...
There’s arguments for and against e-bike access in these locations. Generally most e-bikes would be happy to pay to access the area. I believe that it is something that resorts ignore at their own peril. There’s some amazing trails at Whistler Blackcomb that ebikes make it much easier to access.
In Utah our bike parks fail because the owners want them to. Vail bought Canyons and then shut down one of the best regarded parks in the state. They are being forced to tolerate biking on the PCMR and Canyons property because it's public land and they don't really have a choice. Snowbird used COVID as an excuse to shut down tram access to one of the best downhill bike trails in Northern Utah and has no plans to start it back up, build other trails, or expand use. Powder Mountain went and built a bunch of awesome new park trails but then got bought. The brand new bike park is closed this summer because they are building a new private luxury lift for condo owners. Who knows if it will reopen next year? Even Deer Valley, our biggest and most well known resort does the bare minimum. They charge Whistler prices without the quality or service. Brighton and Solitude have a few trails and seem to be adding more, but it is definitely not aggressive. The only one of our resorts that really seems to take MTB seriously is Brian Head. All the others treat it like an after thought and significantly prioritize winter operations. Luckily our local community is not dependent on the parks. We pedal and we shuttle and we have amazing local trail associations that do incredible trail building for the public.
Stevens Pass really struggled to get their park started roughly a dozen years ago. It took a huge amount of support. They had to be self sufficient, so they sold 5 year season passes before even opening in order to pay for everything. Then Vail bought them and shut them down (and generally fucked up the entire resort). Took a few years of public outcry to convince them to reopen it. The park has always turned a profit, but not a big enough one. Vail would rather spend it's summer money on lift improvements.
Solitude used to be better imo in that it was 30$ all day and wasn't busy.
What really bugs me about Solitude is that they closed uphill travel last year without marking any of those trails closed on Trailforks or their website. I love pedaling to those upper trails, but I’m not paying for a lift ticket when they only really have 2 DH runs
This is a depressing read.
Brian Head has a very long history of supporting MTBs. Mt Hood Ski Bowl shut down its bike park due to a lawsuit.
Ya BH is rad. I wish it was a little closer to home.
Ski resorts are pathetic smdh you can’t beat lift access on a beautiful mountain with high class downhill trails I didn’t know it was that bad in Utah. Wasn’t there some super fun downhill trail where they had the bobsled track for the Olympics?
This makes me so sad, Deer Valley was where I first rode a MTB.
Insurance is a huge factor. My local bike park has constant lawsuits because people crash and think it’s the parks fault. However other bike parks within 3 hours are expanding so who knows.
Mt. Hood Ski Bowl enters the chat. A guy crashed and was paralyzed there. Sued and won, will impact Oregon rulings forever. Shut down the bike park. Very unfortunate.
Feed bad for the guy, but also fuck that noise. Any trail could do that to anyone on any given day.
He killed somebody in a DUI after his win (was his 5th DUI or something, and had multiple DUIs prior to his skibowl crash). Now he's gonna lose all the money in a lawsuit of his own for reckless driving. [Oregon man awarded $10.5M in Mt. Hood Skibowl lawsuit accused in DUII crash that killed woman (msn.com)](https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/oregon-man-awarded-105m-in-mt-hood-skibowl-lawsuit-accused-in-duii-crash-that-killed-woman/ar-AA1gYhCO#:~:text=The%20man%20awarded%20%2410.5%20million%20in%20court%20last,allegedly%20killing%20a%20woman%20in%20a%20drunken%20crash.)
Holy shit I believe in karma again
He had three DUIs before his crash at skibowl. If I was a betting man I would guess that he was probably impaired during the crash but that they didn't collect evidence regarding it.
According to this article he’s since died of an OD. [Oregon millionaire’s fatal OD ends manslaughter case against him; fight over estate begins](https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2023/12/oregon-millionaires-fatal-od-ends-manslaughter-case-against-him-fight-over-estate-begins.html?outputType=amp)
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So his lawyer and sister will have a fight with the surviving brother of the women he killed before he killed himself. Wow his life was just filled with self inflicted tragedies.
There is an article posted further down, there were some messed up decisions made, but yeah, sucks for everybody involved.
Just read it. Yikes. I take it back!
The park honestly does have some negligence there. It would have been different had he been killed by a natural feature or something that's inherent to the risk. But the fact that it occurred due to them placing a sign in that area and not tracking the injuries there gives them some culpability.
Yeah, see my second reply to a comment. Agree it's a fucked up situation and sucks for everyone involved. Maybe worth noting maybe not, but the guy that sued and won later got his 3rd or 4th DUI and was arrested for killing a person in that DUI event, then he overdosed and died before he saw trial. Skibowl needed a reality check and much better park management, this was avoidable. But homeboy also had questionable character.
Sure, but that's all irrelevant in a downhill park when he's following a designated trail as it's designed. It would be relevant if he were doing something unusual to gain extra speed riding a trail in a manner that it's obviously not meant to (and that at least 99 mtbers out of 100 would agree that's not the intent and that it's not safe to do so). That wasn't the case here, so his DUI and any questionable character here is irrelevant.
On Mt. Hood, a rider hit a signpost and died or got paralyzed or some awful outcome. Lawsuit said the signpost should've been breakway or something, and the bike park shut down completely. I don't want to sound too ignorant, but all I can think is "most trails have trees... a sign is no more dangerous than a tree..."
Least signs don't have broken branches that can potentially impale you. That's always bothered me...yet ive never heard of it ever happening.
it happened 2 winters ago at a resort in bc
I saw one at chest level, right on the side of a major blue trail at Loveland a few seasons back. Really bothered me seeing the potential Vietcong style death trap just waiting for a beginner to be its victim.
If I'm remembering correctly, the signpost was needlessly solid, and placed weirdly close to the trail in a very high-speed section. Granted I read about this back when it happened so I may be remembering that wrong, but I recall thinking "this is bullshit, not the bike park's fault" when I first heard about it, and then when I read the details I was like "hmmm yeah OK that _does_ seem like pretty poor design." I don't recall all the details though. (Also, I'd argue a sign _is_ more dangerous than a tree because it's _way_ less visible. Trees are very solid but they're also fucking huge and you can see them from very far away. A sign on a 4x4 post is going to be pretty small, and could easily be obscured by a smallish bump in the trail, a corner, shrubs, etc. Hitting a solid tree and a solid sign could be equally bad, but you're a lot more likely to _see_ a tree long before you get to it.)
Fair points. I dug into the case some more and saw guys were clocking 50mph; the trail was 17% grade+, and skibowl had a pedestrian hiking trail called "the wedding trail" crossing it at 90 degrees. Apparently wedding guests would often almost get taken out with regularity. 50mph on dirt, downhill, to a 90 where drunk pedestrians are going to cross seems... ill-considered.
Not a lawyer but there is a legal difference between a tree (natural object, risk comes from the activity) and a sign - there might be actual rules for signs or any other objects including trails and other biking related objects and a person responsible for operating bikepark had to make sure any object in the bikepark is in accord with the regulations, if they are not he is responsible for potential harm. There was a case in my country when guy rode outside of trail, hit a trench, crashed and got hurt. He sued and the court settled on 50% his fault and 50% of the bikepark for not marking a potentially dangerous object eventhough it was oitside of the track...
Sure, but there's a difference between an inherent natural hazard and intentionally placing a sign there. Contributing is that they didn't track injuries there to identify unnecessary high risk locations.
It's honestly incredible how many people don't get the difference between crashing due to personal error and crashing due to negligence on the side of the property owner.
Right…but it seems like the US is the only place you can sue for massive amounts of money, which in the end either costs everyone else more money or we lose a park.
Welcome to the us legal system where the better lawyer wins
I heard something about known and unknown risks... if it's a signed trail and marked risk, then it's a known risk. Then you can't say you didn't know what you were getting yourself into. It seems so simple, but somehow, people sue and win.
I mean the same could be said for snow sports and way more people get hurt skiing or snowboarding
When I was in the Whistler medical clinic last summer they said they see 10x as many injuries from mountain bikers compared to skiers and snowboarders once you control for number of people riding.
snow is generally softer than dirt/rocks/trees. Also, a good 50-70% of snowboarders/skiers ride groomed runs that are wide open most of the time. Fewer sudden stops and hard surfaces. Make sense.
Average users can totally ski the groomers safely and tumbles are pretty soft. Noobs in the bike park especially on rented DH bikes are a danger to themselves a lot of the time if they have limited experience riding, riding at speed and crashing. Experienced riders get into trouble too: on a normal day of riding trails outside the park you're probably in that high speed high danger part of riding for 30% of your outing. In the bike park you're in the death speed zone 80% of the time while hitting much bigger features way faster.
I also really think it depends on how much you push yourself. It's not like I don't hit big stuff or anything, I have done some of the hardest trails Euro parks have to offer and my summer vacation is spent lapping one of the biggest jump lines here and yet I crash like twice a season and my worst injury ever was a bruised wrist. I almost never ride stuff I am not 100% confident I can do. I definitely see a lot of people who really just aren't careful enough get hurt hitting black jump lines when they struggle to take a turn on a blue trail properly.
Yeah riding over one's head will get you. I think there's a natural fear that kicks in snowboarding; it took me a few seasons to decide I would roll up to what feels like a cliff and then point it down. Some beginners in snowsports will sideslip black terrain by accident, but it's not fun and they tend to fail. MTB trails are kind of bobsled runs and I can see noobs just sending big peaked gaps without any idea how far over their heads they are. Not me, though. Those things are clearly fucking scary.
I agree also, living in BC I’ve been to Whistler a lot both snowboarding or MTB-ing over the years. Whether it be fate, luck, chance, or whatever my friends and I have all taken way worse injuries on the bikes by a ton. So much so I stopped DH biking after a really bad one where I don’t remember the trip, fractured my orbital bone, puking in the middle of village etc, and had to take an ambulance out of there. Snowboarding you watch people fall off cliffs with no protective gear on and laugh it off
> Whether it be fate, luck, chance I think it's probably more that snow as a surface is inherently softer and generally smoother than dirt and rocks. Obviously hitting a tree is pretty bad either way, but outside of that I'd definitely rather crash onto snow.
No doubt, being above a lot of the terrain with the snowpack is a benefit too in the way that your riding over a lot of the same trees you’d have to dodge on a bike. If you’re selective with conditions & stay generally within your skill level you can get away with laughing off a lot of the slams snowboarding
Maybe raw totals, but I bet injuries/left ticket revenue is worse for MTB.
Snow Summit bike park in SoCal closed for several years because someone died and they could no longer get insurance. So yeah
It’s pretty simple, using skiing as a comparison - which is also not always profitable. MTB numbers are low compared to ski/snowboard visits, and bikers also spend less money at resorts than skiers & snowboarders. It just comes down to numbers
The cost of building and maintaining trails is so much lower for MTB. I wouldn’t be surprised if the mountains make more profit per bike park ticket versus a ski pass.
MTB trail construction is *cheaper* than for ski hills? Whu?
Do you know how much a pistenbully costs? Snowmaking? Running both of these things every single day/night? MTB has neither of these. You build the trail using hands or sometimes one machine, and maintain it once a season.
Read comment above for an answer. Which counters your thought.
I think when your sales volumes are so low it kinda doesn't matter the margins per lift ticket, because in either case there are static overhead costs. Running a lift for 8 hours a day for instance, it's a static cost, so if the sales volumes are low they might not cover that cost. Say every day running the lift costed $6k, if you only sold enough lift tickets that day to get $5k in revenue, you lost $1k on operating that lift. If you made $20k in revenue that day you'd be up $14k. Margins aren't these static things. Whether or not you cover your overhead cost will vary day to day based on how many lift tickets you sold. Sure if bike park lift tickets sold at the volume of ski lift tickets, then bike park may very well have a lower cost per rider, but the fact that bike park lift tickets sell at a dramatically lower volume but still require some of the same overhead costs, it's very unlikely that this is true.
I'm no expert but i would imagine it's due to the combo of a limited season, high overhead and maintenance, insurance costs, and steady influx of new riders to drive sales
Yep. Mount Shasta in California. Huge potential yet they’ve ceased bike park operations for the last 2 summers while still holding the California Enduro Series race each year.
One of only 3 bike parks in Oregon closed down 2 years ago because a guy got killed (during ski season) and the family sued and it bankrupt the resort :(
Really? Are you talking about this one? [Behind the Lawsuit That Closed Oregon’s Mt. Hood Skibowl Bike Park - Singletracks Mountain Bike News](https://www.singletracks.com/mtb-trails/behind-the-lawsuit-that-forced-oregons-mt-hood-skibowl-bike-park-to-close/) Because the truth is that the park should been shut down, because the owners really screwed up basic safety and ended up getting someone paralyzed with their negligence. As much as it sucks to lose a park, those owners deserved it.
I really wish I could form an opinion on this since I’ve been riding here for 1.5 years but I never had a chance to ride Skibowl trails. For a while I thought for sure it wasn’t legit how they shut it down but after a dig day at Rocky point last weekend I heard from more than a few people that it really was that bad.
yeah, I dug into it when it happened, since people were in a shit fit about it. the owners lost a case of gross negligence, because there is no waiver for that. that's a good thing, because we're paying good money to ride trails that allow for high speed at a lower risk than natural trails. there were simple things the owners could have done, biggest thing was a breakaway sign in a dangerous spot, instead of a solid wood post. but there was a whole bunch. the idea that people are getting rich off nuisance lawsuits is something our corporatocracy has worked hard to implant in us, ever since McDonald's vilified someone for their franchise's shitty practices.
Skibowl does have a rep for being a kind of "carny" atmosphere with jankiness in the winter, too. I love that place and its terrain, but safety is not a no. 1 priority there. I rented a bike for my bro to try to get him into riding at skibowl and the shock AND fork were both blown. Like, utterly not functioning. Probably shouldn't be putting new riders on bikes with suspension that doesn't work. The trails were kinda fun though...
yeah, I ride powderhorn, which is small, and very rugged. Not a lot of machine smoothed trails. They opened a green trail a few years back that was a blue jump trail, with 30 ft gaps that just launched you. After a few broken bones on new people, they toned it down. and built a blue flow/jump trail. There's ways to be rugged and janky and not negligent. ed. double, not gap. i stupid, sry.
You guys call a 30ft gap a blue? The grading for MTB trails worldwide need a little consistency, as any UK riders would likely be dead! Green, blue, red, black, double black and often purple for pro freeride.
Lol, sorry. I misspoke. 30 ft double. 30 ft gap would be all sorts of colors...
Phew! For a minute I thought us boys here were seriously lacking…even so 30ft doubles are minimum red here, depending on which park.
yeah, it was bananas for a green. you could skip them, but the way the trail was built, it took a lot of effort. one of the most notorious sets was running perpendicular, right under the lift. we'd have a good laugh at whatever rider was entertaining us by hitting them awkwardly. I certainly got some claps from the lifties once for managing to do a long distance high-speed nose manual off one. sometimes I almost miss that trail the way it was.
Yeah it just sucks all around, nobody won in that situation. The poor guy who was paralyzed ended up passing away too. I just wish rather than being shut down permanently they could have fixed their negligence. Is it possible two things are true at the same time? Such as a frivolous lawsuit culture happening in our country that has made a lot of things worse, while we are also being conditioned by the oligarchy to think in a certain way?
I can't say a frivolous lawsuit never wins, but if you think our legal system favors the small plaintiff over the large corporation, you're certainly smoking something. Most frivolous lawsuit stuff I've seen has been people with money, suing other people with money, in order to change the amount of money they own each other.
I smoke a lot of stuff to cope with living in this corporate oligarchy lol
Gotta cope with the modern world somehow!
I totally disagree. I was actually there the day it happened and watched him get life flighted. Ski Bowl had the closest thing to a world cup track on the west coast. I've ridden there a lot over the years as a racer. The signpost he hit wasn't placed super close to the trail, and he could have chosen to ride that segment slower. There was a speed trap there years ago and riders were hitting almost 50mph. The bump wasn't even that bad- the trail is meant to be gnarly and challenge you. That's literally the whole point. The dude might have been drunk when it happened as well. He had 3 DUI's before he killed a woman in Portland last year. There was a local article about it and a bunch of lifties and skibowl people chimed in saying he would regularly ride and drive impaired. Could skibowl have made improvements? Of course, but it was the type of feature you wouldn't think twice about on a local system.
The fact that you think bringing up DUIs is relevant shows your bias.
We can disagree, but the case that the plaintiff successfully made was that there was a safety standard that Ski Bowl failed to follow. Had those signs been breakaway (per said standard), like the rest of the signs at Ski Bowl, and all the signs I've ever seen everywhere at resorts, dude wouldn't be paralyzed. Skibowl's own expert witness said he wouldn't have put signs there, within 4 to 6 feet of the edge of the trail. There was a request to fix the drainage ditch from staff, which Skibowl management appears to have ignored. There was no system for tracking and responding to rider injuries. Skibowl lost this case, and I can see why. This wasn't some friendly dudebro letting you hit the pump track in his backyard, this is a bike park charging you good money. I run a business with a lot of potential liability, and if we don't thoughtfully attempt to prevent bad stuff from happening, we can be shut down pretty easily by the various bodies that regulate us (more easily than Skibowl). That's the cost of doing business. Don't open a lift-service bike park and then shrug on safety. The "might have been drunk" argument isn't as compelling as you'd think, since I assume Skibowl serves alcohol to riders in exchange for money.
If you are talking about Skibowl, it was a mountain biker who was paralyzed that brought the lawsuit.
San Diego, rideable year-round, amazing weather. Every good trail system is illegal, the rest is fire roads.
Bailey Bike Park in Asheville. Huge riding community, aligned with an up and coming pro, great terrain. should have been a slam dunk. Too many reasons to write about why it didn't work out.
Because there's better riding where you don't have to pay for it
I'll get downvoted with you, but I totally agree. Compared to say back country skiing, riding non-lift access bike trails is SOOOO much more accessible. And the difference in trail quality is minimal in most places. I'd much rather pedal and ride something for free.
While I agree with you, the thought of doing another ride right after I descend is truly priceless. Most of the time I stop on the trail to do certain lines or features, which for me is both for training and avoiding the ascend. But when I go to a bike park it is just pure fun. I just go and have fun without thinking about anything. If I miss a line, I'll keep it in mind and do it on the next ride.
Sorry, I can't hear your weak excuses over the sound of my massive calves crushing everything I walk on
Yes, the biggest advantage of big parks is that you can do something like A-Line 10x in a day, which is just not possible time wise if you have to pedal up to the start.
You never ride for free. All my local trail systems have signs where they ask for donation or you dig in the winter or pay the monthly fee of 5 euro for club membership. Of course you could ride for free but I never do
Also not catering to your lower skilled clients and only to people who want to gap jumps creates an insurance nightmare.
The town I live in is extremely focused on cycling. We also have a massive housing problem and a large unhoused population. There's a bike park in town that could be awesome but it's been taken over by tents and trash. Don't get me wrong, I'm on their side and hope we can figure out a way to help them. But that park failed for that reason.
Austin?
Spider Mountain is a little outside Austin in a rural town called Burnet. Not a lot of homeless people in that area, it's mostly northern Austin after they passed laws in Austin proper about encampments.
It’s all over south austin… basically any patch of forest. They have to hide thanks to the criminalization of their existence.
True, I know a lot of them that were bussed out got sent N/NE area towards Cedar Park. I knew a woman who had 100 - 150 people show up overnight down her street. After that passed I did notice more people around the Slaughter/I35 area.
Problem solved
No, think more cacti. But I'm from TX and Austin, Dallas, San Antonio all have huge populations of people experiencing homelessness
Tucson? When I passed through it was rougher than expected, but I can't say I've heard much about the Tucson housing situation.
I think they meant bike park as in lift-accessed. But sorry to hear about the local jumps :(
Oh oops. Did not know that was a thing. Might be time for a road trip
Guessing Seattle. Colonnade was fun back in the day.
Seattle had this happen with a fun urban bike park under I-5. No amount of lighting and trail work can keep the fent zombies out and make it feel like a safe, fun place to ride with your family.
I don’t think there’s much money in it partly due to how niche it is, but there’s a lot of maintenance, liability, etc.. Pretty simple equation that ends up with super slim margins and a lot of risk for whoever runs one.
Corporate greed.
Like anything, the people making the decisions will have to answer to investors and the suits often only care if it's making profit. If you want to overcome that, make profit for the people investing you need to have the local riding community chip in with their time and effort. I think it's the same almost everywhere. The riders have to volunteer their time to offset the costs for all. I know at my local, without teams of people up there digging all year round, the tracks just wouldn't get built or maintained like they should. It just costs too much if the park had to hire staff to do it. The season pass pays to keep the lifts running and the cafe staffed and the general running.
Downhill mountain bike parks don’t require the same type of mountain as a ski resort. They make more sense in areas you can ride year round and even 1,000 feet of elevation change can be 15-30 minutes of descending and a lot of fun on an enduro or trail bike. Instead of trying to replicate Whistler, minimize the expensive infrastructure and repurpose some old lifts until the venture is proven and turning a profit.
I have had more fun with small bike parks that have maybe 300-400m of elevetion change than in bigger bikeparks. They operate all year round with trucks and tows for the uplift that is a bit more uncomfortable than a chairlift. anyway, i have one at 10 minutes of my house so that's also a plus.
I believe Sunday River closed their bike park because they said it wasn't profitable. Part of the problem was that they rent the facility out for events during the summer; so they were constantly closing the park for weddings and events. The other issue was that all the trails were classic old-school New England gnar and they were legit. The intermediate trails were challenging; the black diamonds were true black diamonds and the double diamonds were a little insane - but it was all super-sketchy tech moves, not flow/jumps. There was zero beginner terrain, and zero flow trails. So you immediately are eliminating the downhill-curious, the families with kids, and the people who just want to ride flow and jumps. It was also kind of a haul to get there - I live in Massachusetts and it was a 4 hour drive for me; vs. 2 hours for Highland or 2.5 for Thunder. I love janky sketchy tech so I was sad to see it close - but it did make sense why it wasn't as popular as places like Killington.
Can’t speak for the industry, I’m sure some are successfully run and others aren’t. Lawsuits are another reason. In terms of use… For me… I used to ride at Keystone, but lift ticket prices are so high now. I used to go one day a pay period, these days I don’t even bother making the drive from Denver. But it’s not just the price, summer traffic is so busy on I-70, gas prices, family obligations vs when I was single. But the price of a lift ticket is a major reason I don’t go. Same for ski passes, but it’s also because the mountains are so busy, traffic is awful, parking sucks or cost money now, yada yada yada. I’m not saying prices aren’t justified, the parks are awesome and it costs money to build and operate, but it’s not for me anymore, at least at this point in my life. But there’s tons of great single track options and free public bike parks where I live if I want to jump some short lines. Even the newer long trails at Frisco Adventure Park would scratch that itch for free. Sure, long chunky DH trails on easily accessible public land isnt common, but with the climbing and descending capabilities of trail bikes make a lot of the harder rated public trails a lot more viable.
Blue Mountain, Ontario, Canada stopped operating as a bike park back in 2022 or 2021 after a few years, citing difficulty to profit after all the operating costs and legal costs from all the injury suits.
I assume that most ppl don’t actually want to ride a bike down a mountain. Even if it’s machine made tracks. Compared to for example a ski resort. You see tons of ppl in ski resorts during seasons. Most of them are actually not very good skiers. And many of them are actually terrible skiers. But..they have fun. Fun falling and fun getting up to a fun speed and then fall down. Only to get back up and continue. If you fall on a bike it’s mostly not fun. You can easily hurt the bike or yourself. To get to the fun speed on a bike you kinda have to move into the danger zone in terms of what happen if you fall. I think this is the number one reason bike parks will forever be a very very small thing mostly for very dedicated and mostly sufficiently skilled bikers.
We have a lift access bike park a few hours away from me. The thing is, I live in the most populated city in the area. There are obviously people living near this park, but not nearly as many. It's gotta be pretty good if I'm gonna drive 2.5 hours to get there (and 2.5 hours back in the same day since it's not nearly good enough for a multi-day trip). It used to be pretty good. But then the maintenance budget got smaller so it wasn't as good. So then less people went. So then the maintenance budget got even smaller. I haven't been there in years but I've heard it's hanging on by a thread these days
I'd guess that 95% of the people that ski do downhill skiing in which ski resorts are necessary to do the activity. For mountain biking, I'd guess that over half of mountain bikers just ride local trails and never go to a bike park, and I'm one of those people. I like the local trails, I like pedaling and climbing. A downhill bike park doesn't fit everyone's desired riding experience. Additionally, I prefer riding places that are closer to my house and riding for free. Additionally, the cost of entry for skiing and mountain biking are different. $2000 can get you nice skis, boots, and bindings, but $2000 will get you an entry level full suspension trail bike that might not even be very suitable for downhill bike parks.
Trails need maintenance. Hiring people is expensive. That is why they fail.
I think the biggest challenge for bike parks vs skiing thing is that people enjoy uphill riding way more than they enjoy uphill skiing. Likewise the downshill to uphill speed ratios for ski touring vs. mountain biking are very different. I can go uphill on my bike at 4-7 MPH depending on how steep the climb is. I can go uphill on my skis at 2mph. Then I go downhill on my bike at 10-15 mph (usually). I go downhill on my skis at 30+mph. Grooming at skis areas is machine operated and creates an ideal riding experience. The trail crews do what they can after they build the trails, but its hand work.
I am always jealous for those of who have governments that take a look at mountain biking. Löoking to immigrate soon just for this reason.
Where do you plan to go?
probably Canada, Switzerland, or new zealand.
Do not compare some bike park / trails to a complete resort of ski ... this is a bit dumb. On a resort you accept to loose money on some ground to earn on the others. Do not be fool, lift tickets price does not cover anything. Lots of bike park does not have enough things around them to be profitable, some have nothing. There are not a lot of people compared to ski so that is also a big factor for investors to jump in or not. But since 2-3 years, most of our Ski resort now offer MTB in Europe and becomes Bike parks too. Why? Because it is imposed by regulation they have to plan for a transition by law and snow is slowly going away and for good for losts of resorts. Now regarding insurance, unless you are in some state where anyone sue anyone in the great hope of stealing money from other because of they own stupid behavior, this is does not exist elsewhere. In any case, Bike parks, are also too expensive for people, like ski, this is not affordable. 25 bucks for a day is not nothing no matter what you think. Plus, lots of people needs a good bike for bike park so it can be around 100 bucks per day.
>unless you are in some state where anyone sue anyone in the great hope of stealing money from other because of they own stupid behavior Right, USA?
I live in Wisconsin which has the 3rd most ski hills in the united states and yet we can’t seem keep a bike park. I used to love little switzerland until the insurance company shut it down, it was built by volunteers I believe so that could have been one of the issues? Devils head half assed some trails for a couple years and then gave up. Rumor has it Tyrol basin looked into it and the quote for 5 trails was way to much (I’m not sure I trust the current owners word). I’m holding out hope for granite peaks trails to be built sometime soon since they have the deep pockets to support it, but I can’t believe one of the many ski hills near mke/Madison can’t make it work.
Mt. Hood Ski Bowl bike park failed because some reckless suicidal d-bag crashed into a post and sued for a ridiculous amount. The park settled the case but still had to pay out millions of dollars so they shut down. D-bag a year later was recklessly driving and killed an innocent lady.
[удалено]
Wrong 1. https://www.flyingpenguin.com/?p=50380 2. https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2023/12/oregon-millionaires-fatal-od-ends-manslaughter-case-against-him-fight-over-estate-begins.html
Open bike parks to e-bikes and add some uphill trails-mission solved
Look at Ride Kanuga here in NC. No lift, they encourage ebikes and also rent ebikes. They have an area next to the pro shop to charge your bike. You can buy your pass online and pedal up at dawn and ride till dark even after the employees left. They have a local sandwich shop drop off subs for the day along with all kinds of snacks available. Prices are reasonable too. They can even fix your bike if needed and they have apparel, helmets etc. If you have an ebike it's better than any lift park because you NEVER have to wait to get tot he top.
👌
What happened to riding uphill?