As Ski Patrollers Bargain for Better Pay, Many Still Do the Job For Free
Can this dynamic endure? (I want to hear from Ski Patrol)
At first patrol was something to duck and dodge. Speed traps. Police on skis, radios crackling across the night. Crushers of our glove-patted ramps in the pre-terrain park ‘90s. Blunt and final. “You can’t build that here.” Our scourge. The lone adults on a teaming Midwest hillside.
Later I’d seek them out. My daughter, 10, pinwheeling off the steep and fast Hawk quad unload ramp. Stunned surely. Hurt possibly. Knocking on Belleayre’s mountain-top shack door, patrol invites us in. “What’s your name?” they ask her. “Where are you?” “Who are you skiing with?” She’s OK. We’re released to lap Deer Run in the March sunshine.
But then one day I really needed them. A routine run, an empty weekday, an unreleased binding, a leg wrenched with industrial force, two bones splintering into confetti. The pain indescribable. What Saw movies invite us to imagine. Then I’m marooned, alone, leg pinned beneath me, no way to move, no way to do anything other than shout, less a call for help than a release of agony.
At some point Black Mountain of Maine patrol arrived. Four or five of them. Then: quiet action amidst my confusion and pain. My life-bending event, normal to them. They hoisted my deadweight into the sled. Moved my broken body downslope without breaking it more. EMTs with a fentanyl drip already waiting at the bottom. They cut off my pantleg, tugged off my boot, ordered my strewn gear into piles. This all surprised me. The great order and competence of it. How prepared they were. How smooth it all went at this backwoods ski area two hours from the nearest interstate highway.
But my cracked bones were workaday stuff. Imagine: bigger mountains, higher altitudes, the critically injured, freefalling ungroomed terrain, no clear trail to base, darkness, storms, wind, sinking temps, altitude, panic among the injured. Then: avy mitigation, explosives, thousands of acres buried beneath hundreds of inches, and all your responsibility. Patrol work is cold, hard, specialized, localized, and physically and mentally demanding. If ski areas had Navy Seals, they would be ski patrol.
It’s a hard job, and one that should be well-compensated. That’s not always apparent from the pay scale. When Vail Resorts set company minimum wage to $20 per hour three years ago, it set the starting pay for patrollers at just one dollar per hour more. The 12-day patrol strike that more or less paralyzed operations at Park City over the holidays can be traced at least partially back to that decision – the union’s most high-profile demand was a bump from $21 to $23 an hour. But signs of patroller discontent loom throughout the West. Nine U.S. ski patrols have unionized since 2021 – just two of them at Vail Resorts.
But here’s where things get weird. Or at least complicated. The vast majority of active U.S. ski patrollers receive no wage at all. They are volunteers, often doctors, nurses, or EMTs on their off-days or in retirement, who typically work in exchange for season passes, lift tickets, discounts, or other benefits. In a recent profile of National Ski Patrol President Stephanie Cox, the Colorado Sun noted that just 5,000 of the association’s 32,000 members were professional – read “paid” – ski patrollers. That’s just over 15 percent.
The pro-to-volunteer ratio varies hugely between mountains. Some big western mountains use only paid patrollers. Many use a mix of paid and volunteer. But enormous numbers of independent ski areas keep very few – if any – pro patrollers on their payrolls, according to several operators that I’ve spoken with. In some cases, hundreds of volunteer patrollers supplement a single paid employee. Other ski areas rely entirely on volunteer patrols. Many independent areas maintain a handful of professionals for the more rigorous mountain-management work, and tap volunteers only for medical responses. The operators describe these arrangements as both fiscally necessary given already high labor costs and mutually beneficial to both ski area and volunteer, given the many perks doled out to volunteers and, often, their families.
Which brings us to this: how does the ski industry assign a fair wage-and-benefits package to a job that so many people are willing and able to do for free? And what is to stop ski areas who fear unionization drives from simply dismissing their pro patrols entirely? Certainly the fiasco in Park City demonstrated that patrollers are not interchangeable, but what happens if unionization reaches Vail’s less temperamental and complex ski areas, like Afton Alps or Crotched? And how can professional patrols argue for fair compensation for their specialized skillset without extinguishing the volunteer patrols without which many independent ski areas say they would not be able to function? How is the correct ratio for pro-to-independent patrol established, and how does that vary by ski area and by state?
Unions still represent a small number of ski patrollers (and other workers) – around 1,100 at 14 mountains under United Mountain Workers; an unknown number under the Aspen Professional Ski Patrol Association, which covers Aspen’s four mountains; and random groups working at small hills scattered around the country, some of them city employees covered under municipal unions. But the movement appears to be growing (A-Basin patrollers ratified their first contract shortly after the Park City strike ended). For an increasing number of patrollers, something isn’t working. In order to better understand the complex dynamics here, I’d like to hear from both patrollers and operators about what’s working and what isn’t in those top-of-the-mountain patrol shacks.
I will include select answers – or at least sentiments – in a future newsletter. I’ll keep all answers anonymous (unless you would like to be identified). So I ask you:
If you are a patroller:
What is the relationship like, at your mountain, between pro and volunteer patrol?
Do you believe that your ski area maintains a reasonable balance between pro and volunteer patrollers?
How do you believe the existence of volunteer patrol impacts compensation for pro patrol?
If you are an operator:
How crucial is an at-least partially volunteer patrol to your ability to sustainably operate?
How do you determine which duties are appropriate for pro patrollers versus paid?
If you are just a civilian like me:
What are your ski patrol stories like the ones I wrote above? What happened to make you fully appreciate their presence on the hill?
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