Q&A: The future of Hoodoo Ski Area, 'doing more with less snow' and focus on families
It’s been a rollercoaster ride of highs and lows at Hoodoo Ski Area the past few years.
The pandemic boom and snowy winters brought some of the best seasons to the slopes of the Santiam Pass resort. But this year, that flipped and the ski area struggled through its latest opening in the 21st century and losses in the millions.
Now the ski area is open and running, using grooming techniques similar to golf courses to keep ski runs open even with less snow. Hoodoo also expanded the resort's “ski free” age up to 10 years old this season, from 7 in the past, and are focused on bringing families onto the slopes.
Hoodoo general manager Matthew McFarland joined the Explore Oregon Podcast last week to talk about the rough start to the season, why affordable skiing is so important and how the ski area grooms trails to do more with less and less snow.
Questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.
Zach Urness: One of the things I heard a lot from ski families — and felt myself — was the big gap when the more affordable places like Hoodoo were closed this year and only the more expensive resorts like Bachelor and Meadows were open. It was tough. Is that something you heard a lot early this season when it was December when you weren’t able to open due to a lack of snow?
Matthew McFarland: Oh yeah. We hear it over and over and over again: to make skiing accessible to families. Skiing is one of those amazing things where if it's done right, you pick it up for life and join a new community. It really can grow families close together and bring friendships and change your life for forever. But if you can't afford it, if the barrier to entry is that it's going to cost me a thousand dollars to get a rentals and tickets, who even wants to do that? Who can afford to go more than that first time that you went?
Urness: Does Hoodoo see its mission to be that affordable place?
McFarland: Our mission is to bring people together and have a good time doing it. We're a feeder area because what we do is we feed the ski community lots of people. People come here, they learn to ski at Hoodoo, and after they feel like maybe they've outgrown it, that maybe somewhere else is cooler. ‘Let's go ski in Idaho, Utah, Colorado.’ It's amazing how cheap you can fly to France and go skiing. We teach people to ski and we offer an affordable product so that we can feed expensive areas so that you can go experience big mountains at Bachelor (or) up on Mount Hood.
So what we really do is train people, send 'em onto to bigger areas. Now eventually they're going to want to bring their family skiing and it's pretty dang expensive. They come back here. You'll see lots of families here learning. Maybe young adults are gone off doing their own thing and then once they're starting to have kids with their own families are back.
Urness: You also brought the age of kids skiing free from 7 up to 10 this year. What's the upside in doing that?
McFarland: When I got here, kids skied free at 5. I wanted to make that number 12. I want 12 and under to ski free. It makes it so much easier to bring a family here and teach kids. And when the kids are begging, 'Hey mom, let's go skiing this weekend, dad, let's go ski this weekend.' Hey, they're free. You take 'em. I mean, I used to take my kids skiing at a couple of different places. We would go on a ski vacation. There's three resorts. This one offers kids 10 and under free. Man, I'm going there. I'm going to go to all of 'em. But if I go to one twice, I'm going to the 10 and under free one twice, right?
It saves 50 bucks, a hundred bucks, 200 bucks, it all adds up. But so we try to do that to keep the prices in line with what expenses are so that we can cover it. It becomes tough in a year like this.
Urness: Tell me about the challenge of this season.
McFarland: This was the latest start we've ever had. (In the past), we have had starts Jan. 1, Dec. 31 and Dec. 27. This is the first time we have opened after Jan. 1 since I started here in 2000.
(Hoodoo opened on Jan. 10 this year).
Urness: What does that mean for you guys economically?
McFarland: Economically, it's terrible. We bring in roughly a quarter of our yearly income over that two week period around Christmas. That's when you can have 3,000 people a day show up buying tickets. That subsidizes the days where only 60, 70 people show up. So it's pretty devastating as far as that's concerned. Luckily we have private financing to cover that on the back end. But I mean it could take three years to pay off that debt. But that's assuming we're going to have three good years coming up.
Urness: The last three years have been a pretty good stretch, though, right?
McFarland: Overall, yeah. When COVID occurred, then everybody had to stay home and could no longer do anything. The one thing they could do was go skiing. And so you saw every ski area across the nation just have a huge increase in business. Wednesdays started to pay for themselves. But of course once you start bringing in more money, then you find ways to spend that money doing maintenance. Things like carpeting, fixing walls, things in lodges, a boiler for $100,000. And it was 'hey, we can fix it. Boom, boom, boom. No big deal.' And so you catch up a lot of stuff like that. So I mean it's great because we have put ourselves in a really good position coming into this year as far as equipment and maintenance and things like that. So yeah, we've had a great three years and this year if we'd had snow, this would've been another good year.
Urness: So right now the snowpack is about 33 inches or something. I mean that's low and you've been joking about it, about your mighty snowpack hanging on and fighting back against the warm rain trying to destroy it and all that.
A few years ago, you talked about doing more with less, that you had looked at ski areas in Australia and looked at how you make a go of it, even when the snowpack isn't as big as it used to be. So can you talk a little bit about that, how you do that?
McFarland: What you have to do is a lot of summer work. When I got here in 2000, there was brush in the existing runs that was taller than me standing there with my hands stretched up. Maybe it was 8 feet tall? The brush was taller than that. Well, that means that the place was having a hard time opening until they got 5, 6, 7 feet of snow enough to smash and compact and push all that down. So you’ve got to cut that down and mow where all the ski corridors are, where all the runs are, and also remove rock. So there's a lot of tractor work that you can do. This mountain's made of sand. So it's got to be really delicate. You can't just go drive in a big old dozer or anything. Things have to literally be picked and winched and crane things out of there. You just think about building more of a golf course, kind of a contour with nice rolling smooth hills so that when you have 2 feet of snow compacted by a 20,000 pound snow cat, now your 2 feet of snow becomes 4 to 5 inches. So you were skiing around today and it's all covered and it's good and it's nice. Right now, there's parts out there where, I'm telling you, it was literally 3 inches deep where we wanted to put the beginner rails and it's like we can't even put it in 3 inches (but you can still ski on it).
Urness: That's cool though. It almost sounds like a science between cutting down brush, removing the rocks and you can do more with less, right? You can be open longer with less snow.
McFarland: Right. I mean, so when I started in the ski industry, it was 1991 and we would never even consider opening with less than 80 inches of snow. And things have had to change drastically since then because of lack of snow. Now we're dealing with having that foot or 2 feet of packed snow on the runs at all times and having to be able to be open and deal with that. So all day long people ski and push snow down the hill. So all night long snow cats, while they do leave you a nice cordy surface that you think is for you, the reality is the reason the snowcat is there is because pushing the snow from the bottom of the hill back up to where it was skied off, that's the real function of the snowcat. The benefit is the corduroy that's there and the fact that everybody thinks, yeah, they did it for me. Yeah, we did it for you so you could ski it. But it was really pushing the snow back. So the snow I skied off today, put it back up so I can ski it off tomorrow.
Urness: Long term, what's the future of Hoodoo? Is it what you guys are doing now? Do you feel good about this business model, about targeting families, about having the events like the New Year's celebrations and doing more with less snow? Is that Hoodoo for the next X amount of years?
McFarland: Yeah, I mean that's it for the next decade for sure. Only Mother Nature can tell what's going to happen and she's not sending us any future reports. We have to do more with less as far as the snow is concerned. When we don't have snow, it's not due to lack of precipitation — snow guns won't help. People have said ‘Put in snowmaking system.’ And it's like, ‘OK, can't make snow at 45 degrees. If I could, all that rain would be snow.’ So that is not the answer for where we are. It really is doing more with less and then the activities, the families, are the future. That's the future of skiing is the kids and the people that we're bringing up here.
Zach Urness has been an outdoors reporter in Oregon for 15 years and is host of the Explore Oregon Podcast. Urness is the author of “Best Hikes with Kids: Oregon” and “Hiking Southern Oregon.” He can be reached at zurness@StatesmanJournal.com or (503) 399-6801. Find him on Twitter at @ZachsORoutdoors.
This article originally appeared on Salem Statesman Journal: How Oregon's Hoodoo Ski Area is adapting to less snow