Jackson Hole
22 April 2024
I’ve never skied anywhere other than Europe and, even then, mainly only in two regions. The Oztal, high in the Austrian Alps and the combined Val D’Isere, Tignes and Le Fornet area.
I was interested in taking a look at what a US resort might be like, and so plotted a route to include Jackson Hole. I’d asked the chaps in the Pintxos bar in Missoula their opinion, but they just guffawed.
“Don’t bother with Wyoming. It’s SO expensive and we have skiing right here!”
“How far are you from the nearest resort?”
“It’s less than two hours drive”
“No, no, no” I said and then explained what, in my book, ‘convenient’ skiing consists of…
“I like to get up at eight, as I will have enjoyed the Hotel Bergwelt’s signature, inclusive five-course dinner the night before, with wines chosen by Ralph, the excellent Sommelier. After a cooked-to-order omelette mitt speck und kasse and some healthy-looking, bowel-exercising, German floor-tile bread. I’ll then tog up and walk out of the boot room and carry my skis 50 metres to where I glide down to the nursery slope button lift. There’s a short run to the Hochfirst station where I’ll need to take my skis off to get the gondola, only to have to put them on again at the top! And I’ll be wailing inconsolably to myself, the whole time, about the inconvenience of it all, and the cruel hand fate has dealt me.”
I sense Jackson Hole does not make its guests suffer such indignities. I thought it similar to Telluride but here, Sotheby’s International does not even list how much the properties are valued in their window. If you need to ask the price, not only are you highly unlikely to be able to afford it, you probably shouldn’t be here in the first place.
I’d read an article in The Economist the week previous that seemed to confirm what the Missoula boys had said. Most skiing in the US is now controlled by two, publicly-listed companies. The remainder, by consortia of billionaires who have bought entire mountains around their properties and insist you own a home in the area to ski there. A gated skiing community, in effect.
The resorts that do open to the public have deployed the full gamut of revenue-maximising techniques. This includes ‘dynamic’ pricing that rewards those prepared to pay in advance on a ’no refunds, no tears' basis if the weather is shit. What the financial-markets call a ‘derivative’, in effect.
Alternatively, you can look out of the window, see the sun shining and think: “I’ll go skiing today” but then a ‘what-the-market-will-bear’ rate is calculated and applied in real-time.
The Economists’ correspondent seemed in a bit of a tizz about this. On the one hand, marvelling at the perfect functioning of a consolidated and mature market, supply and demand in perfect equilibrium, guided by Adam Smith's ‘Invisible Hand’ but furious that they’d been charged $250 for a single day of skiing, and had to wait over an hour to get on a lift and do one run.
To the closet Marxist in me, allowing two companies to dominate a market to the detriment of customers looks a lot like a conspiracy against the laity. Moreover, it points to an abject failure or complete absence of regulation, but such a facile conclusion is probably one of many reasons I don’t write for The Economist.
And to cap it all, there’s not even that much skiing here. Jackson Hole has 110 Km compared with over 350 Km in the Val D’Isere region and 250 Km in the combined Obergurgl-Hochgurgl-Solden area.
I’m pleased I’ve found something where Europe has an easy and demonstrable advantage over the US: £2,000 plus to get there in cheap airline seats; Christ knows how much for food and lodging and then get milked by this market-driven bullshit for a ski pass to do three runs a day having waited for hours on end?
Sorry, Jackson. You’re a pretty town, but not that pretty. I’ll stick to what I know and love where dinner, bed & breakfast in considerable comfort AND skiing for the day - without queuing - is the cost of a single day’s lift pass here.
But… Jackson does have Bar 22. A combined wine-shop cum-Euro-small-plates restaurant… They encourage customers to come for Happy Hour in the bar from four until six and then invite them to choose a couple of bottles from the retail store.
These are sold at the shop price, rather than marked up to restaurant prices by a factor of three. You then enjoy them with the simply delicious food, chosen from an eclectic menu that spans Spain, France & Italy.
As for the wine, all budgets are catered for, right to up and including a 1999 Penfold’s Grange from Australia and a 2020 ‘Sassicaia’, the legendary Super Tuscan red. Even without restaurant markup, the prices are laughable but irrelevant, I suspect, to most of their customers.
The shop server confirmed that this is a resort only for the super-rich. Not the ‘comfortably-poor’, which is how the late Felix Dennis, founder of Dennis Publishing and later, author of the highly entertaining 'How to be Rich’ broadly characterised the solvent middle-class. He also repeated what I’d heard in Tofino and Walla Walla. The people who do the ‘proper’ jobs here such as him, can’t find anywhere to live.
Many of the $10 million plus homes here are unoccupied for 40 weeks a year or more. Not that he could afford to live in one, of course. But the owners are extraordinarily effective at using money and influence to ensure that no housing development takes place that could spoil their little patch of paradise.
What was I thinking when I thought I might come here rather than go to Obergurgl? It’s a lovely place alright, but in another life.
