I sometimes feel I do too much critiquing and too little suggesting. Like, somehow, I’m the 400 pound, mullet-sporting guy on his 3rd beer at the baseball game yelling at the 2nd baseman to hustle. So, every once in a while on a Wednesday I’ll try to balance the scales a bit and put my own ideas up for display, analysis, and critique. (view all ‘WID’ posts).

My wife skis a time or two each season. So do I. While I should hit 20 days on the mountain this year via snowboard, I still pick up the skis for a few turns every winter. So, as we selected a mountain that would cater to our beginer-ness, we drove past Beaver Creek, past Vail, and up to Ski Cooper, a small ski area nestled high (base elevation of 10,500′) in the mountains of Colorado.

Two runs in (close to the time I switched from the “pizza” to the more extreme ‘french fry”), I started noticing how awesome the snow was. Not just on the runs, but the piles of powder that sat untouched between the trees.

On the next trip up the lift, I looked over my right shoulder and saw a line of jagged peaks blanketed in snow and sun, put my arm around my wife, and thoroughly enjoyed the fact I wasn’t on a high-speed quad.

The Switch
At lunch, we pulled out some camp chairs, ate our home-made sandwiches, and rested our legs before I switched to the board for the afternoon. I’m glad I did. The snow that I thought was good on skis was some of the best I had ridden. The groomers were amazing, I’ve never been able to lay a carve down like that in my life not to mention the fabulous powder in the trees.

Before long I was comparing this day to all my days at Beaver Creek and Vail in the weeks/months before. Laughing, I quickly realized that this day was, by far, my best day of the season. Hands down, bar-none, you name it. Since I moved to Colorado I’ve been asking myself one question: how do these smaller resorts (areas) compete with something like the EpicPass? On Saturday, I started to find my answer.

Embrace What Your Mountain ISN’T
If I were at a small resort, I’d embrace the things the mountain ISN’T. At Cooper, I parked a short walk from the lift, didn’t feel weird eating a balogna sandwich for lunch, enjoyed the scenery from a slow lift, avoided going into debt to buy a pass, and found amazing snow.

The people in the lift lines weren’t skiing because of an image, GoPros were non-existant, nor they people skiing groomers on gear meant for Alaskan first descents. The week before at Beaver Creek I had parked 2 miles from the mountain, taken a shuttle to the base, never noticed the scenery as I rode high-speed quads, tried to carve on ice all day, and, honestly, had a pretty lousy time (add in parking and I heard it was even worse at Vail).

In a sentence, at Cooper, I was reminded why I love to ski.

Love the Resort You Are
If Cooper tried to compete directly with Vail, they’d lose. Their tagline could never be, “Like Nothing on Earth” or “Not Exactly Roughing It” but it could easily be, “Reminding Skiers Why They Love to Ski” or “Skiing: Pure and Simple” (lame examples, but you get the idea).

In my book, that’s not a bad position to have. So, if I were a small resort, I’d embrace that fact that we aren’t Vail (or Squaw, or Killington, or Deer Valley), make it public we never want to be, and instead of worrying about what we don’t have, I’d use that as our selling point.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.