‘You fall, we haul’

EDITOR’S NOTE

In the first of a two-part story, the history of ski patrol unions unfolds in Aspen between 1959 and 1986, leading to the Aspen Professional Ski Patrol Association. Next week’s second installment will follow APSPA’s perilous path through changing management groups to the present, their dramatic confrontations and the rise of the national United Mountain Workers CWA 7781 union.

Stunning the ski and recreational industry this past December was the David-versus-Goliath spectacle of the striking Park City ski patrol winning couch-change raises and other concessions from Vail Resorts Inc., which owns and operates 42 mountain resorts in four countries.

Vail Resorts saw a gross profit of $1.2 billion in 2023, according to macrotrends.net, while paying its CEO $6.2 million that year. A sign carried by striking Park City patrollers read, “Wage $21, asking $23, hamburger $25.”

Today, the combined wealth of the 14 individuals in the world’s $100-billionaireclub now exceeds $2 trillion, according to labornotes.org. A ski patroller making $23 an hour would have to work 4.3 million years to make $100 billion. 

Top dog amongst these 12-digit folk, Elon Musk, spent one-tenth of 1% of his $432 billion, or close to $250 million, on the outcome of the 2024 elections, Reuters reported on Dec. 6. More recently, the $25 million he spent on the Wisconsin Supreme Court election turned out to be in vain. On his agenda is the hope of having the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 declared unconstitutional, which, if reversed, would leave labor unions without federal protections and at the mercy of state government whims.

Most Americans oppose this sentiment, recent surveys suggest. A 2023 Gallup poll shows 67% U.S. approval of unions, while an AFL-CIO poll finds that 88% of Americans under 30 approve of unions, writes Jane Slaughter of labornotes.org. As the hourglass economy swells at the tippy-top with more wealth, union growth in the U.S. has been rising at the lower end since 2020 after shrinking between 2001 and 2020. 

A growing faction of this union momentum is in the ski and recreational industry, wherein the United Mountain Workers (unitedmountainworkers.org) and the independent Aspen Professional Ski Patrol Association (apspa.us) are gaining more benefits and establishing public and corporate recognition of the need for their ski patrol professionalism. 

At the same time, the ski industry continues its trend toward monopolization by the top two acquisitionists, Vail Resorts Inc. and Alterra Mountain Company, whose stakeholders include the billionaire Crown family, which also owns the still-independent Aspen Skiing Co. Nevertheless, unions representing employees whose rights to have a say in the terms of their employment have been historically protected by the NLRA still cause knee-jerk reactions in management psyche. Coupled with the loss of full control, upper management under whom unionization spreads run the risk of becoming outcasts by corporate boards and owners, dampening their hireability elsewhere. 

Though a ripe peach for the picking if it were to join forces with the United Mountain Workers, APSPA with its 196 members has remained an independent union in Aspen since its tumultuous founding in 1986. The growing UMW — formerly the United Professional Ski Patrol Association — is affiliated with the Communication Workers of America, CWA local 7781, which represents 1,100 essential mountain workers from 16 distinct units at 13 ski resorts. This includes “ski patrollers, bike patrollers and ski lift mechanics and electricians working in technical, hazardous and under-compensated roles,” the UMW website reads.

Driven by laddered department budgets attached to management raises and bonuses that figure into a company’s net income as it rewards shareholders — which includes the chasm between wages and upper-management salaries — companies often push legal boundaries to stop unions. By conceding to one group of employees the right to unionize and negotiate workplace dynamics, higher wages and better benefits, a company’s biggest fear is lack of control if union contagion spreads into other departments. 

Threatening to fire employees who organize is the first corporate defense, followed by non-recognition, stonewalling and not bargaining in good faith. These tactics can be considered violations, subject to National Labor Relations Board review. Typically, a company then forms employee groups (“rump unions”) and selects employee representatives to discuss work issues, often rewarding raises and benefits to nonunion employees to marginalize union folk. 

Though superficially good, these rump groups then have no further contractual negotiating rights. The intention is to make the union appear ineffective to non-union employees. Ultimately, though, unionized employees have higher wages and better benefits than non-unionized employees. 

That fact found more traction when lift mechanics and electricians at Colorado’s Crested Butte Mountain Resort voted to form the Crested Butte Lift Maintenance Professional Union this past July. In 2022, Park City Mountain Resort’s lift mechanics formed the Park City Lift Maintenance Professional Union. Both groups are part of UMW.

Ski patrol union roots

In the 1930s, as small U.S. ski areas began popping up in the northeast, ski patrols consisted of whoever might help. Among those early enthusiasts, Charles Minot “Minnie” Dole, born into a blue-blooded life in 1899 in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts, helped spread the Arlberg ski technique from Austria. 

After a severe ankle injury in 1936 at Stowe where his skiing friends evacuated him on a tin sheet, he became inspired to form the National Ski Patrol system in 1940, a volunteer organization based upon camaraderie and devotion to the sport. From these hearty ranks, Dole promoted the concept of U.S. ski troops, which became the 10th Mountain Division in 1943.

As family owned ski areas gave way to corporate ownership, ski patrols consisted of volunteers with a few paid professionals managing the staff. This lower cost model in ski-area operations, based upon a higher degree of personal responsibility amongst hardy skiers, allowed for a long period of less expensive operations. As bigger ski areas evolved, the need for a paid professional ski patrol grew — as Sun Valley in 1936 and Aspen Mountain in 1947 found early on. Yet the corporate view yielded slowly to the higher cost of fully-staffed professional ski patrols, and much later bike and summer recreation patrols. 

Today, during winter, swelling crowds of skiers and snowboarders expect better trail maintenance and more exciting terrain expansion; rapid avalanche mitigation to open terrain; timely evacuations off sophisticated lifts when needed; patrollers working at night to serve events and non-skiers; more sophisticated medical rescue and response with skills equivalent to paramedic service on city streets; skier-boarder traffic control and dispute resolution; and impeccably documented accident investigations as defense against lawsuits. Every day professional ski patrols do their job well, ski companies save millions of dollars in litigation.

The late Howie Mayer, a near 50-year Aspen Mountain patroller who retired in 2001 and who organized the first Aspen Patrol Association in 1959, once remarked after seeing so many groundless lawsuits late in his career, “In the old days, it was us against the elements. If something went wrong you figured you just weren’t up to it. Today, they blame the elements.” 

That said, early recognition of the need for companies to pay more for a strong professional ski patrol brought associations and union talk into the conversation, which can be largely credited to the Aspen ski patrol, wherein labor organizer Mayer led the way. 

In the 1960s, Mayer built his own open cockpit biplane in his garage, the “Stardust 99er.” He had to bust down a wall to taxi out the finished product and then learn to fly it. During the 1970s and 1980s when local flight rules were more relaxed, he was renowned for swooping low over Aspen Mountain and down the barrel of Spar Gulch on his days off, with a white scarf flying from his neck.

In 1959, under the firm leadership of D.R.C. Brown, president and CEO of the Aspen Skiing Corporation between 1958 and 1979, corporation manager Red Rowland refused to meet with the first “Professional Ski Patrol Association” — which then was only the Aspen Mountain patrol. In a series of stories between Feb. 12 and Feb. 26, 1959, The Aspen Times outlined the unfolding drama under a strike deadline, in an era when paid-in-fun and powder was the corporation’s rationale for low patrol wages.

“The patrol group are not ski bums or transient skiers. Most are serious minded, permanent residents,” The Times wrote in an editorial. Having been “cut from 18 patrolmen to 13” at the start of the season to save expense, the ski patrol was promised a raise. No raise came, and the corporation refused to acknowledge the newly formed patrol association. 

 “These men are necessary to Aspen Mountain … . Their worth is not recognized by the owners,” The Times editorial said. Earning approximately $1 per hour, they worked seven days a week, with overtime after 40 hours. “Their wages at $8.95 per day are among the lowest in town. Other lift men earn $14 a day and patrol members feel they should receive a comparable salary,” The Times wrote.

Before work on a Friday morning, Feb. 20, 1959, with the patrol strike looming right before the weekend, Brown, who publicly said he would never negotiate, relented. With the patrol asking for $1.75 per hour and overtime over 40 hours, the two sides agreed to a raise to $1.50 per hour with an optional two days off per month.

In 1959, ads in The Aspen Times showed hamburgers at Fran’s Dog House next to the Aspen Pool on Galena and Durant for $.35 with a free beverage on weekends. An Isis Theatre ticket cost $.50. The Aspen Block Apartments offered units for $75 per month with utilities included, while Moore Realty listed for sale a “new home, two-bedroom, full basement $16,500,” with no real estate agent’s picture. Aspen Airways flights round-trip to Denver cost $39. 

Proportional costs such as these show a viable livability for a patroller, a tradesperson, or business owner trying to carve out an in-town life during Aspen’s earlier ski town years. Compare that to the disproportionate gap today of a starting patrol wage of $23, a $26 chicken sandwich at the White House Tavern, a $4,500 per month studio if one can be found, or a $12 million house.

Aspen Mountain employees unite

Four years after the 1959 settlement, Brown took another hard stand against a newly-formed Aspen Mountain Employee Association, composed of ski patrol, lift operators and “catskinners” (Tucker snowcat drivers). In a series of articles in The Aspen Times between March 1963 and February 1964, chapter two unfolded of Brown still stonewalling wage increases for employees, claiming their new organization did not fall under the protection of the NLRB. 

In response, the AMEA hired local attorney Jack Kayne to represent them and incorporate their group. After forming the association in March 1963, town sentiment and Times editorials favored the association and they won legal backing from the NLRB. That August, the AMEA, consisting of nearly all the wage earners on Aspen Mountain, minus the ski school, voted 43-6 to become an independent association under the NLRB, forcing Brown to recognize them. The Times wrote, “The association formed because employees reported that the Ski Corporation would not listen to requests for higher wages and improved working conditions.”

Banking on a sentiment against sensationalized unions, Brown rebuffed offers of arbitration and solutions by NLRB negotiators who had entered the long-stalled negotiations. After employees chose to work through the December holidays without disturbances, tensions peaked in January 1964. 

Having not had a raise since the 1959 settlement, the AMEA asked for a parity wage of $2.30 with increases to $3.05, along with paid national holidays or commensurate pay if the Ski Corp could not give holiday time off. Brown’s corporate negotiators, led by attorney Dick Moore of the Mountain States Employers Council, tendered their final offer of a $.05 raise to $1.80 and up to $2.05 tops, and ceased negotiating. 

With that, the AMEA negotiating team on Jan. 27, led by ski patrolman and president George “Mick” Strong — along with negotiators bearing bedrock Aspen names such as Ludvig “Luds” Loushin, Jesse Caparrella, Clark “Pop” Ilgin, Howie Mayer and Harvey Carter — called for an impending strike of mountain employees (minus the ski school).

1964: Director backs patrol, fired

Further hamstringing Brown’s entrenchment — and with a strike looming — 10th Mountain Division veteran and ski patrol director Hal Hartman refused to train a replacement crew of ski patrol that Brown had recruited from what the AMEA called “transient ski bums who do not contribute to the town’s year-round economy.” Brown also planned on bringing lift and equipment operators over from newly acquired Buttermilk (1963). The Jan. 31, 1964, Aspen Times headlined, “Ski Patrol Head Fired After 11 Years of Service.”

The Times quoted Hartman, “During the past 10 years I’ve worked with these men to build the best ski patrol in the country. I didn’t feel it right to work with a new crew when my men were trying to obtain better wages.” 

Abruptly, the situation caught the attention of major Ski Corp stockholders and bigger guns in town. Stockholder Robert O. Anderson, president of the Aspen Institute, Mayor Harold “Shorty” Pabst and City Councilman Dr. Robert “Bugsy” Barnard met with the corporation directors and Brown and then separately with the AMEA to avoid a strike and the turmoil of labor unrest that might stain Aspen’s tourism, the Feb. 6 Times wrote.

At the brink of an AMEA walkout, that high-profile pressure led to resolution. During that bygone era of a local business community without countless commuters, coupled with low second-home ownership, long-term lift operators were ranch workers and in-town locals. Ski Corp jobs in the winter complimented their more-profitable summer work. Turnover was rare, and the J-1 visa was still an uninvented concept.  

“Aspen Strike Averted,” the Times’ front page headlined. But key to the final deal was a demand by the 13 Aspen ski patrol members that Hartman be rehired at a comparable job by Brown. Hartman accepted an offer to become development consultant for the planned Snowmass ski area and summer trails director on Aspen Mountain.

Brown and the AMEA settled for a $2 per hour starting wage, rising to $2.20 in the second year and $2.40 to follow, based upon a 48-hour week with time and a half over 40 hours. Soon after, the Ski Corp offered low-cost health insurance to employees and then free health insurance premiums to employees after 10 years of service.

On May 7, 1965, The Times reported that union organizer George “Mick” Strong and John Zupancis were in a Pontiac Tempest, following Littleton resident Don Keith in a Studebaker up Castle Creek Road, when both cars skidded in close succession off the road at the curve just above the Music School. All three were tossed from their cars rolling down the 100-foot embankment and killed. 

Zupancis worked as a Red Onion bartender. Strong and Zupancis were following Keith when the accident occurred. Legend says there may have been a disagreement at the Red Onion. The late Pete Luhn of Aspen once recalled how the Strong brothers “controlled the Red Onion.” Mick’s Gully at Snowmass Ski Area was named after Strong, and the curve above the Music School is known as “Mick’s Curve.”

Of note, proportionality of living cost to wages in the 1960s had crept up slowly, making the AMEA’s requests for a higher paycheck a fair request. A “charbroiled” hamburger cost $1.25 at the Golden Horn. Listed in The Times classified, May 21, 1965, were a three-room apartment for $125 per month, $150 furnished, and, for sale, “A 3-bedroom home on large lot, views, terraced lawn, flowers, apples, $21,500 with terms.” An Aspen Airways “38-minute flight” one way to Denver cost $22.

‘You fall, we haul’

As the slow-boiling frog of unaffordability in Aspen approached lukewarm in the 1970s, the ski patrol again challenged Brown to increase wages and compensate seniority skills. Standing out in the recollections of a local few was the failed affiliation with the International Brotherhood of the Teamsters and the resulting strike between 1971 and 1972. “You fall, we haul” became the mantra of picketing Aspen and Snowmass ski patrollers, represented by “Teamsters Local 961.” During that period, The Aspen Times chronicled the unfolding saga.

In the 1960s and 1970s, when the Vietnam War and the peace movement clashed, unionized industrial workers were considered conservative “rednecks” and often headlined with scandal and corruption. They supported “my country right or wrong” during the war, while the anti-war counterculture and progressives were not universally union supporters. And in 1971, hard-knuckled Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa, who ran afoul of the Mafia, mysteriously disappeared — some said with “cement shoes.” 

Recently reflecting on the Teamster fight for professional recognition versus the recent success of ski patrol unions, Local 961 leader and former Snowmass patroller and negotiator Kevin Cassidy, still of Aspen, said, “We may have lost that battle then against Brown, but we won the war. Most Americans back then hated unions and we were ostracized by half the community. Some wouldn’t even talk to us strikers for years after.”

With a choice between the Teamsters or the Communication Workers of America, the patrollers chose the Teamsters because they had a tougher reputation. And on Jan. 21, 1971, an NLRB-sanctioned vote affiliated the ski patrols of Aspen and Snowmass and their packing crews with the Teamsters, while Buttermilk voted not to unionize. On the former two mountains, a few “packers” picked rocks and bolstered the then minimal patrol with trail work, often as patrol trainees.   

Former striking Snowmass patroller and now beekeeper Ed Colby recollects Cassidy saying in favor of the vote for the Teamsters, “I’m not going to ride a dead horse to a rodeo.”

This led to 11 months of sporadic negotiations and  charges of unfair labor practices against Ski Corp until and after the patrols began their strike on Dec. 22, 1971. That walkout continued after Brown assembled replacement patrollers, widely branded as “scabs” for crossing the picket lines. Supervisors and a few patrollers who crossed the picket line returned to work also.

Once again, Moore of the Mountain States Employers Council — essentially an employers’ “union” against unions — represented the Ski Corp at the bargaining table, while patrolmen Cassidy and Mayer with Chuck Hasslock of the Teamsters sat opposite. Among other issues werea 25-cent raise, seniority rights, uniform cleaning, and a closed or open union shop clause. At the time, patrol wages ranged between $2.64 and $3.12 per hour for a 120-day work season, the Jan. 6, 1972, Times wrote. As a wedge tactic, Ski Corp offered the Teamster negotiators a deal to give unionized workers the same lower raises that they were giving other company workers, said to be about a dime.

Coupled with another business or trade in the alternate seasons from winter, living affordability was still graspable by an employee. In 1972, a hamburger and fries at the Aspen Leaf Restaurant cost $1.65. A dollar bought a shot and beer at Little Annie’s. A studio apartment in the classifieds cost “$200/mo., year lease, lawn, laundry,” while a “3 bedroom, 2 bath, 2 lots, West End” listed for sale at $85,000 with no agent picture. 

Wild west rules

A sore point still simmered with the ski patrol after Brown had fired the six-member packing crew — led by Ken Lindsay (of “Lindsay’s Loop,” on lower 1A side, Aspen Mountain) — several weeks after the crew’s January 1971 vote to unionize with patrol. Ski Corp VP Tom Richardson, who participated in negotiations, said the new Thiokol snow cats could do much of the packing crew’s work. The firing of their fellow union members added to the Dec. 22 strike decision. 

With nearly all the ski patrol on walkout, this left the replacement Aspen Mountain patrol dangerously near the Forest Service minimum. Eight surrogate hires from Seattle had already quit because of harassment, the Dec. 30, 1971, Aspen Times reported. Down to 14 patrollers, any more resignations would leave the patrol understaffed and the mountain could not operate. A similar scenario played out at Snowmass. Alarmed, the Aspen Chamber of Commerce stepped in and met with both sides separately. 

“The extreme positions by both sides,” wrote The Times, led the ACC to recommend that “wages, equipment allowance and other benefits for the ski patrol be reviewed more realistically by the Ski Corp than has previously been done.” Still, the sides remained at loggerheads, and hearsay says that Brown remarked, “I’ll never sign a contract with the Teamsters!” 

Brown, whose father was an Aspen pioneer, had been the managing board member of Ski Corp since its 1947 founding and became president of the company in 1958. In 1947, he leased hundreds of mining claims he owned to the corporation, which essentially enabled Aspen Mountain to become a ski area. Thus, Brown felt a strong motivation to protect “his” corporation that he had shaped from the beginning.

As negotiations continued, patrol replacements came from other ski areas. This incited division in town and set the strikers against scabs who crossed the picket lines. Supporters and patrol picketers demonstrated in front of the Ski Corp’s offices and in the Little Nell parking lot, where parking was free all day on a first-come basis and the legendary Gallery nightclub rock and rolled below the upstairs après-ski Centre bar. 

But the times were raw, the wild west still real, and tensions ran high. By some accounts, words and fists were exchanged about town. Scabs were stalked and intimidated by “real patrol” sympathizers. Some scabs quit and left town. A few stayed, and over time became assimilated.  

Allegations said someone had cut a communications line shutting down several lifts for a day; strikers countered in The Times that the allegation was a devised accusation after a mechanical failure. On the fringes, there was talk “by some hotheads”— a source who asked to remain anonymous said — to blow up a lift tower. “Cooler heads shut that down” because “nothing was worth blowing up over $.25.” Another source remembered the halfway lift shack on Little Nell being set afire. 

Attrition and circumstances

Striking Snowmass patroller Bob Bogner, who later became an Aspen Mountain patroller, recalls how “this was a life-changing experience for many longtime patrolmen. Some went broke, some left, some went to Telluride, and some were rehired by seniority later after the strike. The Teamsters paid the strikers a token strike pay, and we met at Doc Holiday’s bar in Glenwood after visiting the pool.”

As results seemed less attainable, the fervor for picketing waned when the 1971-72 ski season entered January. The Teamsters hired picketers from Denver to bolster the ranks. Brown, who perhaps still felt aggrieved by the 1959 and the 1963-64 uprisings, refused to budge. In a letter to patrolmen in 1971, Brown wrote in prose that would be risky today, “A union is a lot like a girlfriend, a lot easier to get into than get out of.” 

Strike stamina peaked through the Christmas season and past New Year’s. Then on Jan. 27, 1972, The Times reported that Aspen and Snowmass patrols abruptly called off their strike. “The 34 striking patrolmen couldn’t go back to work. Their jobs had been filled.” The same edition said that earlier in the strike a bomb threat had closed lifts briefly at Snowmass, and that “a strike sympathizer was fined $200 for poking a replacement patrolman.”

The Teamsters demanded “unconditional reinstatement of all striking patrolmen to their former positions.” Richardson, the company vice president, said that was impossible because they had “an obligation to the replacements,” but that striking patrol would be hired back by seniority as jobs opened in the future. Perhaps this was part of the Teamster deal. Yet, the teamsters pressed their hope to reinstate strikers in court and the NLRB ruled that the corporation was guilty of unfair labor practices by firing the trail crew earlier, said the Jan. 27 Times.

Legalities petered out over the summer and into the 1972-73 ski season. With the Aspen and Snowmass patrols restocked in the corporation’s favor, on Dec. 1, 1972, the Snowmass patrol voted 28-2 to de-unionize and disaffiliate from the Teamsters. A year later, on Dec. 12, 1973, the Aspen Mountain patrol voted 13-6 against representation by the Teamsters.

One-time striker Eldon “Buddy” Ortega recollects the “real patrol” crashing a scab keg party at the infamous Pub bar downstairs at the Wheeler and a fight involving burley Bob Bacon. Ortega, a four-year patrolman then, said he got his job back in 1973. “When I went on strike I was making $2.64 an hour and I was rehired at $4.50,” he said. He liked to think the strikers’ sacrifices had led to better pay.

Throughout the 1959, 1962-63, and 1971-72 labor organizing, the ski patrol maintained that they were a professional asset while Ski Corp bosses held that they were replaceable employees who could be restaffed with those who would work for the love of skiing and a lower wage. 

Brown said then that the job was suitable for a couple of years of skiing fun before pursuing a real career. Later, in 1986, when then-President Jerry Blann of the Aspen Skiing Company would be cast against the Aspen Professional Ski Patrol Association union, he echoed a similar sentiment, saying at a meeting in the patrol’s 1A locker room right before APSPA formed, “I’m not here to build white picket fences for employees.” 

This idea of the expendable employee has always been a factor fueling unionization, and in the history of professional ski patrols this has been a reoccurring theme that has lost footing as public support for the profession has grown. A long-held principle of labor organizations is that unions form because of a failure of management at the time.

In 1978, 20th Century Fox bought the Aspen Ski Corporation. Then in 1981, Denver billionaire Marvin Davis bought 20th Century Fox, and the Aspen Skiing Corporation became the Aspen Skiing Company (“SkiCo”). Soon after, living affordability and other workplace issues became a concern for the Aspen, Snowmass and Buttermilk ski patrollers, and once again, talk of unionizing arose.

This led to the 1986 NLRB vote to form APSPA, which will be covered in part two of this ski-patrol union series.