Snowboarding at Taos Ski Valley - a photo on Flickriver

            The End of an Era
Taos Ski Valley to Finally Welcome Snowboarders
By Carson Bennett, 12-15-07

Taos Ski Valley opened yesterday with more snow for the first day than they’ve had in thirty years. Three thousand skiers showed up throughout the day. My friends and I were among the first thirty or so, at 8:15am, racing for first chair.

As we stepped off the shuttle from the parking lot we were greeted by a Taos Ski Valley employee. He had some announcements. “Only the front side is open today. We have seventy eight inches of snow, and plenty of powder. The back side will be open on Saturday. Oh, and we’re opening the mountain to snowboarders on March 19th.”

Did I hear him correctly? I stood on the first step of the stairs to the ticket office and looked around at the other skiers. Most of us looked confused. “Snowboarders? But, this is Taos.”

Taos Ski Valley has never allowed snowboarders. It has been a purist ski paradise since it opened fifty-five years ago. Now, only Alta, Mad River, and Deer Valley will still prohibit snowboarders.

The news was all over the mountain within minutes, and was the main topic of conversation all day. I heard mixed reactions on the lifts, in Tenderfoot Katie’s Cafeteria during lunch, and from my friends who have been skiing almost exclusively at Taos for years.

“It’s the end of an era,” my friend Randall said. “It was inevitable, but I hate to see it happen. It’s going to change the whole culture of this place.”

I rode up Lift 2 in the afternoon with a man in a green wool hat and well-worn ski pants, and asked him what he thought. “I’ll tell you what I think. Those f***ing knuckle-draggers are gonna ruin this mountain. They’re gonna f*** up the lines, scrape all the snow off Blitz or anything steep, f*** up the bumps on Al’s. And you know they’re gonna be lying around the mountain like a bunch of god damn slobs,” he spat. He shook his head in disgust. “That’s the end of this mountain.”

The most common remarks were something along the lines of Ernie Blake “rolling over in his grave.” As legend has it, Ernie Blake, the legendary founder of Taos Ski Valley, made a dying wish that Taos would never open to snowboarders. As his granddaughter (and TSV Marketing Director) Adriana Blake told Albuquerque Journal reporters, “It’s a lie; it’s totally not true. His death-bed wish was that his grandchildren—and there are thirteen of us—have college educations…and he died in 1989. Snowboarding then wasn’t an issue. It would have never occurred to him.”

According to the new TSV snowboarding website, the Blake clan made the decision for family reasons. “Taos has a long-standing tradition of being family oriented, and now with so many young people snowboarding, we are turning away more and more families, particularly families that traditionally come to Taos. Opening to snowboarding allows us to refocus on being a family oriented mountain.”

Opening up to snowboarders will bring more families, more people, more business, more money—but what else will happen? More restaurants? More condos? Higher ticket prices? Over-crowded catwalks and narrow runs? Will Taos devolve into the next “family oriented” mega-resort, or will it be able to maintain its home-mountain culture? We’ll find out, I suppose, in March; when we’re all standing at Taos in the same lift line for the first time.
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Taken on: December 15, 2007
Tags:
Snowboarding
Taos Ski Valley
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