Steering Heavenly into extreme future
Veteran resort manager facing storms, fires, fickle winters
It was the first clear morning over Lake Tahoe in two months, and Tom Fortune felt like he could finally exhale.
Fortune is the manager of Heavenly Mountain Resort, Lake Tahoe’s largest contiguous ski area, in an iconic mountain setting that rises from the lake’s southern edge and spans the California-Nevada border. He walked across the parking lot at the resort’s California base, clad in a blue shell jacket and clomping in ski boots. He is 61 years old, with light hair and weathered features befitting someone who has worked and played outdoors his whole life.
More than 25 feet of snow fell on the mountains in December and early January, and Heavenly was running out of places to stash it. Snowcats and plows had shoved it into 20foot-high banks around the lot, but even so, Fortune had been forced to commandeer about 100 of Heavenly’s precious parking spaces for snow storage.
“It’s one of those good problems to have,” Fortune said of the heavy snow. “But it’s nice to have a break, finally!”
Ultimately a ski area manager’s job is to move people and snow around a mountain as efficiently as possible. It sounds simple, but the business is challenging.
Winter weather — the backbone of the ski industry — has been as erratic as anyone can remember, burying Tahoe in historic amounts of snow between alarmingly dry periods. Those swings are widely attributed to climate change, which has begun to threaten Tahoe ski areas during the offseason with supercharged wildfires. A year and a half ago, the Caldor Fire scorched Sierra-at-Tahoe and threatened Kirkwood and Heavenly before it was brought under control.
More broadly, the early era of mom-and-pop operations has given way to what some describe as a corporate arms race to scoop up ski areas and roll them into national pass programs like Vail Resorts’ Epic, which Heavenly is part of, and Alterra Moun
“Over the course of my 44 years, winter used to be really consistent. Now we’re having to learn to deal in extremes all year long.” Tom Fortune, manager, Heavenly Mountain Resort
tain Co.’s Ikon. Those tend to funnel high volumes of skiers to specific resorts when the snow is great in one region, and complaints about long lift lines and ski traffic are louder than ever.
Skiing is steeped in tradition, but the pandemic forced a rethinking of norms and a modernization of business practices. While ski areas have embraced changes to their operations, some capital improvements bespeak the pressure Tahoe resorts feel to keep pace with advancements at skiing destinations across the West and even abroad (see Palisades Tahoe’s new $65 million mountain gondola).
In many respects, Heavenly is at the center of these dynamics, and Fortune is helping steer its future. Not only does he manage Heavenly directly, he also oversees Northstar and Kirkwood as vice president and chief operating officer of the Tahoe region for Vail Resorts, the industry goliath that owns 41 ski resorts around the world. He also serves as chair of the industry association Ski California and sits on the board of the Lake Tahoe Visitors Authority.
Fortune, who grew up near Stevens Pass Ski Resort in Washington and has lived in South Lake Tahoe for 13 years, is a lifer. He met his wife at a ski area. The couple raised their three children at ski areas, and all three now work for ski areas in the West — and will no doubt raise their own families at ski areas.
“This is my 44th ski season. I’ve seen it all,” said Fortune, seated behind his office desk at Heavenly. “I say that, and now something weird will happen.”
He quickly knocked on wood — the habit of a man whose business is subject to Mother Nature’s mysterious rhythms.
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Inside Heavenly’s dispatch center, a cavernous space with a single porthole in one wall for ventilation, Fortune and two operators looked over six screens feeding information on weather forecasts and chairlift operations. The office is the resort’s brain stem: It fields emergency calls, coordinates rescues, communicates with ski patrol and monitors every aspect of the mountain.
“Pretty much anything that needs to be handled comes through here,” Fortune said.
The 10-week spate of unceasing weather that subsided in mid-January made for a challenging start to winter for all of Tahoe’s 10 major resorts. At Heavenly, high winds and heavy snow, as well as a two-day power outage, grounded the resort’s centerpiece gondola, which picks up skiers in downtown South Lake Tahoe, for all but a few days during the busy holiday
season. When it shuts down, it effectively bifurcates Heavenly into two small resorts — one in Nevada, one in California — severely limiting skier mobility.
In those times, Heavenly gets an earful from frustrated skiers on social media. Some are cynical about the accuracy with which ski areas report the happenings on their mountains; they believe resorts exaggerate snow depths and conceal lift closures for fear of dissuading prospective customers.
Under Fortune, Heavenly has become vigilant about posting moment-by-moment updates to Twitter and Instagram on lift operations and mountain conditions. Sometimes Fortune addresses commenters directly on the platforms. That kind of transparency is becoming the norm, especially at larger resorts that can draw several thousand skiers a day.
“Guests are happier when they know what’s going on, even if it’s not good news,” Fortune said. “It’s a good direction to be heading, as an industry.”
Leaving the office, Fortune stopped at a poster printout of the Caldor Fire burn zone tacked to the wall. “This brings back some memories,” he said.
A year and a half ago, Caldor burned 222,000 acres in the Sierra
and came within a quartermile of Heavenly. During the height of the blaze, South Lake Tahoe was evacuated for three weeks. Cal Fire staged its incident command in Heavenly’s parking lot, while the resort ran its snowmaking guns around the clock to stave off an ember ignition. Fortune decamped to a hotel at Northstar in Truckee and coordinated defense from there.
Having thousands of firefighters at Heavenly “was kind of reassuring,” he said. “I honestly believe our snowmaking kept the fire from burning the whole mountain.”
The ski industry widely acknowledges climate change as an obstacle to business but has stopped short of recognizing it as the existential threat to the activity some experts make it out to be. Fortune is optimistic that resorts can survive if they stock up on snowmaking equipment and expand their summertime offerings to tourists as Heavenly has with its yearround gondola and gravitypowered on-mountain roller coaster.
“Over the course of my 44 years, winter used to be really consistent,” Fortune said. “Now we’re having to learn to deal in extremes all year long.
“Technology will allow us to
move along, but I don’t believe climate change is going away,” he said. “It’s real, and it’s kind of scary.”
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Under the midmorning sun, skiers and snowboarders carved Heavenly’s freshly groomed trails, some of which hadn’t been accessible for several days in the rough weather. Fortune rode the lifts to his favorite spot, high on the mountain. In that range, the evergreen pines were plastered with ice, twisted and frozen into what Fortune called “snow ghosts” — a white forest that looked like a bleached coral reef.
From a 10,000-foot perch called Top of Sky, Fortune looked over the snow-crusted crescent of South Lake, pressed to the edge of Tahoe’s flat cobalt expanse.
“These are the moments you can’t believe you get to do this for a living,” he said.
Fortune said his career is winding down, though he’s not retiring anytime soon. In his final act he wants to steward Heavenly safely into the uncertain future.
“I remember coming here for spring skiing as a teenager from Washington and thinking, ‘My gosh, Heavenly is the coolest place,’ ” he said. “My legacy, I hope, is preserving some of the things that make this place iconic.”
Having the backing of Vail is a major competitive advantage, he said. The company poured $320 million into capital improvements at 14 of its resorts last year, which included swapping out a pair of aging chairlifts at Heavenly and Northstar with new high-speed replacements. Up next at Heavenly is a new gearbox and driveshaft for the gondola — improvements that no one will notice but will extend the machine’s lifespan by decades.
Fortune has a few more upgrades on his wish list.
High winds that force the gondola to shut down are a thorn in Heavenly’s side, but he has a couple of ideas. The first is building a new interstate lift that would facilitate ski travel from Heavenly’s California half to its Nevada side even in very gusty conditions, along a somewhat wind-protected ridge. The concept is included in Heavenly’s U.S. Forest Service-approved master plan, but probably a ways away, Fortune said.
A bigger fix would be to outfit the gondola with a tri-cable setup to make the passenger cabins more stable in high wind. “That’s not a short-term thing at all, but having a more consistent gondola in the future would be great,” Fortune said.
Lastly, replacing the old Boulder lift out of the Nevada base would significantly cut the ride time to Heavenly’s upper mountain. “It’d be a transformational change to that part of the mountain,” Fortune said.
Near the end of the day, Fortune skied the fast turns of a natural back to the California base. It was the first day he’d been able to tour the mountain in a month and he was feeling refreshed and energetic.
“People have strong memories of this place, and I have a responsibility to that amazing history,” he said. “But I also have a responsibility to continue proposing changes to modernize and improve the resort. That’s the balance, and I think it’ll be cool to see this place continue on for future generations.”