It is a bright day on chairlift three at Mammoth Mountain. The sun glares off the bizarre bald stripe running up one side of Mark Finkbiner’s shaggy head when he finally turns to scan the lift ticket of a skier glowering at him from under a Gucci cap.
“I asked my housemate to give me a haircut so I could get a second job as a waiter,” Finkbiner, 23, soberly explains as he glances at the impatient skier’s ticket. “See, I’ve already learned a valuable lesson this winter: Don’t get haircuts when you are drunk.”
For as long as there have been mountain resorts, there have been ski bums. Since the 1960s and 1970s, when recreational skiing exploded, resorts have relied on seasonal employees to serve lunches, sweep floors and help customers on and off lifts.
The work is boring, but with perks such as free ski passes and subsidized housing, it is enormously popular among young people who are intensely into snowboarding, partying or, most likely, a lot of both.
But the ski bum is in crisis. Escalating costs in resort towns require most bums to juggle at least two jobs. Hispanic immigrants, who expect less pay and often prove more reliable than drifters and itinerant college students, increasingly fill entry-level jobs.
On busy days, California’s Mammoth Mountain, in the eastern Sierra Nevada, funnels up to 18,000 skiers through the hands of $8.40-an-hour employees such as Finkbiner.
After working the lift line from 8 to 5, he and his three housemates retire to their subsidized three-bedroom apartment, one of 500 that the resort constructed amid pricey condos to house seasonal employees. They pay about $650 a month in rent.
Meanwhile, the lack of affordable housing for workers who service second-home owners and vacationers has polarized communities from Lake Tahoe to Vail, Colo.
Vail’s mayor, Rob Ford, was forced to resign in 1999 after failing to combat escalating property prices.
“There is a new anger around here,” Ford says. “Thirty years ago, college graduates came here and put up with menial jobs because the future held enormous potential. The potential isn’t as great now, and people moving here are working two menial jobs a day just to make rent. It’s not as much fun.”
The search for workers who won’t call in sick after a big snowfall inspires resorts to aggressively recruit English-speaking employees from abroad.
According to the National Ski Areas Association, four-month visas issued to Australian and New Zealand university students, who are on summer break during the U.S. ski season, have increased more than 300 percent since 1998, to nearly 8,000 in 2002.
The Hispanic immigrant influx has radically changed the cultures of ski towns, longtime residents say. Community newspapers in Vail and other snowy burgs regularly print letters urging authorities to arrest and deport undocumented workers. Angry rebuttals decry racism.
“A real disillusionment has leached some of the glamor out of the ski bum lifestyle,” says Sarah Hautzinger, an anthropology professor at Colorado College who studies ski resort towns. ” ‘Peace and love’ has been replaced by ‘Get out of my town.’ “
Slope stats
Vocational aimlessness remains a badge of honor in the mountains. Only one-fifth of Mammoth Mountain’s 2,500 employees work year-round. The National Ski Areas Association estimates U.S. resorts hire 150,000 to 200,000 seasonal employees each year.
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Edited by Cara DiPasquale (cdipasquale@tribune.com) and Kris Karnopp (kkarnopp@tribune.com)
