Howelsen Hill slip, sliding away
Ground under the iconic ski jump is eroding, and Steamboat studies how to fix it
steamboat springs» In the 102 years since Norwegian immigrant Carl Howelsen built the first ski jump on the hill that would later bear his name, the Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club has produced 88 Olympians, starting with ski jumper Johnny Steele in 1932 and most recently accounting for 14 at the Sochi Games.
SSWSC skiers and snowboarders have brought home 15 Olympic medals — four gold — and lived out a lot of improbable dreams, none bigger than the worst-tofirst story of the homebred U.S. nordic combined team that won four medals at the 2010 Vancouver Games.
For generations, tiny Howelsen Hill has been the focal point of life in Ski Town USA. Some 900 children — one out of three in town — currently train in one of the programs the Winter Sports Club offers (alpine, nordic, freestyle, snowboarding, freeskiing). When school gets out they flock to Howelsen by the hundreds to train into the evening on floodlit slopes.
City Council president Walter Magill calls it “the heart of the community.” But Howelsen in its current form is threatened.
The ground is sliding, threatening much of the hill including what lies underneath the two biggest ski jumps. Other maintenance at the city-owned facility has been put off for years. The council wants to know what Howelsen needs and what its options are. A 29-year-old agreement between the city and the Winter Sports Club, which expires next year, may be rewritten.
“We’ve got infrastructure rotting in the ground, and there’s no plan to fix it,” said Jim Boyne, the club’s executive director who oversees a $3 million budget. “Now we’re in a dialogue with the City Council, looking at capital planning, looking at capital reserves and what we need to sustain Howelsen for the future. We’re not there yet.”
There have been mudslides the past two years. Last year, an area the size of two football fields slid 8 feet, damaging a lift tower and forcing the club to remove an alpine slide which attracts tourism dollars. It cost the club about $100,000 in revenue.
“This place is something that’s got to be preserved,” said Boyne. “The next 100 years isn’t guaranteed. You’ve got to be proactive. This is eroding every day. If we don’t get after it, it’s just going to
get worse and worse.”
Should big jumps be saved?
The town suffered a blow in 2002 when the U.S. Ski Team relocated the nordic combined program to Park City, Utah, where modern ski jumps were built for the Salt Lake Olympics. That also ended a run of seven years when Howelsen hosted annual nordic combined World Cups to the delight of Steamboat children who would file out of school on a Friday morning by the hundreds to watch, squealing and waving American flags.
Now some are wondering if it makes sense to save the two largest jumps where those events were held. Kids who want to be ski jumpers can learn on four smaller jumps, and if they get good at it, they can travel to Park City six hours away for training stints on bigger jumps. Nobody wants to lose the big jumps, but it probably would cost $1 million to $2 million to stabilize the ground underneath them.
“Not every kid in Steamboat can learn how to jump these hills and is brave enough and adventurous enough,” Magill said. “But I don’t know if we want them to collapse into the ground. If they’re going to be repaired, let’s say it’s going to be a million-dollar price tag. Is it in the city’s best interest to repair a 120K or 90K jump that 30 people in town can go off, and we still don’t get FIS races because they’re going to Park City instead of coming here?”
Steamboat, Park City and Lake Placid, N.Y., are the only places in the U.S. that have full-sized ski jumps. Magill believes the jumps on Howelsen can be saved through private fundraising, but the city also must decide what to do about deferred maintenance and other costs of the facility. Currently the city is subsidizing Howelsen by about $500,000 a year.
Interim city manager Gary Suiter says the word “imperiled” is too strong to describe Howelsen’s status.
“This is an iconic facility, the Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club is a venerable institution, and both are more than a century old,” Suiter said. “I don’t think either one is going anywhere.”
“It cannot go away”
Still, there are real concerns about the future of Howelsen — Colorado’s smallest ski area, but also its oldest.
“You can’t just look at what it is today,” said Kyrill Kretzschmar, the city’s recreation and enterprise manager who will make a presentation to the council this week. “What was it 100 years ago? How has it evolved? Why do we have the situation we have today? If you want to continue, what do we have to do the next 10 years — council wants to know that — just to make it a viable operation?
“One thing is for sure: It cannot go away. This is the heart and soul of Steamboat. I hope everybody understands that.”
Kretzschmar said the value of a legacy asset that has a huge impact on the city’s children is immeasurable.
“You impact a thousand kids each year, you’ve done that for decades, you’ve changed the lives of each of these kids in a positive way,” Kretzschmar said. “How are you going to measure that? It’s enormous.”
Boyne believes the club and the city will be able to work something out.
“This community can’t afford not to make it work,” Boyne said. “This is what Steamboat is all about. Whether it is the winter or the summer, Howelsen is a gathering place for kids. You turn your kids loose and you just feel good.”