U.S. Congress Seeks Federal Land Sale to Boost Housing, Could Impact Ski Areas
117 ski areas operate on U.S. Forest Service land - what could a change in federal land-use policy mean for skiing?
OK I get that things were different like 170 years ago, but seriously who did Congress send to map out the American West? SpongeBob SquarePants? Did he bivouac for a fortnight at an ayahuasca retreat en route? Did he meticulously plot out the schizophrenic universe of multi-colored squiggles, odd geometries, and overlapping land designations before Pony-Expressing the map to the Secretary of the Interior? Or did Mr. SquarePants simply trip and spill a tray of Krabby Patties across the map and declare, “close enough!”
However it happened, we ended up with a modern map of U.S. western land holdings that looks like this:
Orange, on the map above, is Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land. Green is U.S. Forest Service (USFS) land. White is something else – private property or municipality- or corporate- or state-owned land. Why the fellows in smoking jackets and monocles couldn’t just establish a U.S. Department of Public Land in some D.C. drawing room in 1852 I have no idea, but this is what we’re stuck with. Check out the mad patchwork of BLM, USFS, and private holdings that staple together Sun Valley’s Bald Mountain:
Well that’s funny. But why do we care? Because Congress is trying to authorize the sale of between 2.2 million and 3.3 million acres of U.S. public land. The bill’s stated purpose is noble: land “disposed of,” in the draft legislation’s arcane phraseology, “shall be used solely for the development of housing or to address associated infrastructure to support local housing needs.”
But the notion of a large federal land sale has ignited widespread concern among the outdoor community about what this could mean for our ski areas and access to the wilderness more broadly.
“We think selling off public lands is a terrible idea and we’re opposed to it,” Christopher Miller, senior vice president for sustainability and advocacy at Aspen One, said in a phone call with The Storm.
Aspen’s four mountains - Aspen, Aspen Highlands, Buttermilk, Snowmass - are among the 117 of America’s 501 active ski areas that operate under USFS leases (an indeterminate but smaller number are also partly or entirely on BLM lands). While this is fewer than a quarter of the nation’s ski areas, the inventory includes many of the largest resorts, and more than 60 percent of all U.S. ski terrain (around 150,000 acres) is leased from the federal government. The trajectory, stability, and sustainability of lift-served skiing as a business and as a viable recreational activity, then, is tied directly to the nation’s long-term posture toward public land use.
In exchanges between The Storm and a dozen ski area operators and industry trade associations this week, the tentative consensus was that the draft legislation most likely exempted leased ski areas from sale. Most pointed to a section of the bill stating that agencies “may not dispose of any tract of covered Federal land that is subject to valid existing rights.”
Wilderness.org translates a “valid existing right” to mean that “it excludes lands with property interests like oil and gas leases, rights-of-way or perfected mining claims in existence before the date of enactment of the bill,” but does not speculate whether that may include ski areas.
The bill itself does not mention skiing or ski areas. Tania Lown-Hecht, vice president of Communications at Outdoor Alliance, cautioned that operators should not assume that their leases are safe.
“We're not able to say with certainty if ski areas are excluded or not, but our preliminary analysis is that they would be subject to sale,” she wrote in an email to The Storm. “To the best of our knowledge, the typical ski area permit states that it conveys no property right and is itself subject to valid existing rights like mining claims, so we have included them as eligible for sale in our analysis.”
Not all ski area operators view this potential as a negative. “We’d love to buy our lands from the Forest Service, and not have to deal with the Forest Service anymore,” said California Mountain Resort Company CEO Karl Kapuscinski, who operates five ski areas under USFS lease. But, like the other operators I spoke with, he found the notion of a sale unlikely. “None of us think this could come to fruition anytime soon.”
Regardless of what a land sale would mean specifically for ski areas, opposition to the bill is consistent throughout the outdoor advocacy world. In a press release, The Wilderness Society says the bill “forces the arbitrary sale” of these lands to “cut taxes for the richest people in the country” while “masquerad[ing] as a way to provide more housing.” Outdoor Recreation Roundtable and the Outdoor Alliance issued similarly fiery missives.
The idea of a public lands sale appears to be incredibly unpopular with American voters. An April poll by Trust for Public Land found that 71 percent of Americans - including 61 percent of “Trump voters” and 85 percent of “Harris voters” - “oppose the sale of existing public lands to the highest private bidder.”
But America is in the midst of a housing crisis, and the proposal’s supporters frame this as a pragmatic opportunity to rebalance land use in fast-growing regions. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimates that the nation is 4.5 million housing units short of market demand. The draft legislation calls for agencies to give “priority consideration” to selling tracts that are nominated by state or local governments, sit adjacent to existing development, can tap existing infrastructure, and are suitable for residential housing.
“The proposal is easily caricatured as turning national parks into trailer parks, but there’s a lot of Western land that belongs to the government simply because no one else wanted it,” Binyamin Appelbaum wrote in a recent New York Times opinion piece. “It’s scrubland, not El Capitan.”
The BLM and USFS together manage 437.4 million acres of land, or roughly 20 percent of the total land area of the United States, including Alaska.
Not all 437.4 million acres would be eligible for sale. The bill (you can start on page 30), excludes areas designated as national monuments, recreation areas, parks, trails, wildlife refuges, and the like. No federal lands outside of the West would be for sale, and Montana would be excluded (Montana House representative Ryan Zinke opposed an earlier version of the bill). Stripping those exceptions, we are left with around 255 million eligible acres across both agencies:
Using the definitions outlined in the draft legislation, wilderness.org assembled an interactive map highlighting tracts that could be eligible for sale. The BLM and USFS would not sell all of these lands. The bill would mandate that each agency sell a minimum of .5 percent and a maximum of .75 percent of their total holdings: between 2.2 million and 3.3 million acres, or .15 percent of America’s total area.
That’s small in the context of the United States, but still not nothing: 3.3 million acres would cover an area 10 times the size of New York City, and 22 times more federal land than is now leased to ski area operators.
And what happens when “not later than 60 days after the date of enactment” the USFS and BLM “publish a list of tracts … nominated for disposal”? Could the richest people just take all the best stuff? Jeff Bezos buys Vail Mountain and transforms it into his personal Bat Cave. A cackling Elon Musk buys the Grand Canyon and bulldozes it full of iron ore tailings. A U.A.E. sheik builds his personal hang-gliding studio on top of Pikes Peak. Thanks for nothing, U.S. America.
But before we mourn the loss of national treasures to cartoon villains, let’s take a closer look at what could be for sale, whether this land could truly accommodate more housing, and what it could mean if ski area operators did buy their ski areas.