When he was growing up in Easthampton, Chris Diamond enjoyed downhill skiing. He liked other things as well, like ice skating, hockey and reading: He would later study English at Middlebury College in Vermont and complete most of the coursework for a master’s degree in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
He imagined at one time he’d go on to get a doctorate and find a life in academia. A career in skiing? That didn’t exactly figure.
But Diamond, who now lives in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, retired a little over a year ago after spending more than 40 years in the ski industry, first in Vermont and then in Colorado, during which he witnessed dramatic changes in the business and faced any number of challenges in a series of jobs.
And after spending the last 16 years of that career at the helm of Steamboat Ski & Resort Corp., Diamond, now 70, decided to write about his experience. In “Ski Inc.,” he describes the unlikely way he ended up working on the slopes — and how it turned out to be an ideal career for him.
“It was almost by accident that I ended up doing this,” Diamond said in a recent phone call from Colorado, after he’d spent the morning skiing at Steamboat. “There certainly was no plan. … But it ended up being a great fit.”
For one thing, he says, his enjoyment of skiing eventually morphed into what he calls “aspiring to the lifestyle” — living in a skiing community, where snow is the main source of recreation a good chunk of the year and much of a town’s general life revolves around that.
And as an outgoing, social person, he says, he felt at home in a job that put him in contact with many people, from visitors at ski resorts, to others in the industry, to local businesspeople.
“I realized at some point that I probably wasn’t that suited to academia,” he said with a laugh. “I think I would have been a good teacher but a lousy researcher.”
And as he describes in his book, skiing can also be a somewhat perilous business, in which the vagaries of weather, economic downturns, and poor business planning can all make for seasons in the red. “Ski Inc.” has some detailed history of the economics of the industry that may be of more interest to insiders, but which also outlines the depth of planning needed to make ski resorts successful — and how things can blow up with poor planning.
In its own way, though, that kind of volatility appealed to him, Diamond said.
“I have a pretty big tolerance for risk,” he noted. “Life’s too short to be worrying all the time.”
His work could also require a fair amount of diplomacy. When he first arrived at Steamboat Springs in 1999 to take over the operation, he got less than a warm reception. Les Otten, the CEO of American Skiing Company, the resort’s owner at the time, had alienated many people in town for a number of reasons, Diamond notes, and some at Steamboat viewed him merely as Otten’s “lackey.”
For instance, when Diamond took his daughter, Elizabeth, to Steamboat Springs High School that fall to get her settled in her new school, the assistant principal greeted them by saying, “So, you’re the family everyone hates.”
Born in Connecticut in 1946, Diamond grew up in Easthampton on Park Street, where his mother, Mary, now 96, still lives, as does his sister, Barbara, who’s retired from a career at Northampton’s Cooley Dickinson Hospital.
He says he was probably more drawn to ice hockey than skiing as a youth. But as he got older, he also got “the bug” for downhill skiing at places like the former Berkshire Basin in Cummington and on Mount Tom in Holyoke, as well as places further afield in New England.
As a student at Middlebury College in the mid-1960s, he worked as a bartender at the nearby Killington ski resort. Then, through a chance meeting a few years later with a Killington executive, he spent much of 1970 working in the ski company’s marketing department, getting valuable business experience.
After a stint as a second lieutenant and platoon leader in Vietnam, Diamond, unsure about whether he wanted to finish his master’s degree at UMass, ended up back in Killington in 1972. It was in a new position: assistant to the ski center’s hard-charging, iconoclastic president, Pres Smith.
Smith, he writes, was an innovator in the ski industry in many ways, such as the changes he introduced at Killington in teaching skiing to beginners, but he was also an intense and somewhat “intimidating” figure. Diamond says he never got an exact job description from Smith but rather simply learned by following his lead.
He learned enough that Smith tapped him in the late 1970s to be general manager and then president of one of his newer properties, Mount Snow in Vermont. Diamond would spend 17 years there, and the New England ski scene of that era makes for one of the more interesting chapters in “Ski Inc.” It was a time of smaller, more individual resorts with sometimes quirky owners and features: Mount Snow, for instance, at one time had an outdoor heated pool.
And at a time when snowmaking “was still in its infancy,” he writes, the freeze-and-thaw cycles of New England winters provided no shortage of challenges to operators like himself. Yet, he says, skiing in the region gained increasing popularity all through his time there — at least, he notes, before more people began discovering resorts in the western United States.
Diamond, who says he long ago won the acceptance of the Steamboat Springs community, admits he’s become a bit spoiled skiing in the West. The drier climate, higher elevation and heavier snowfall in places like Colorado, Utah and northern New Mexico make for conditions “that are hard to beat” compared to the eastern United States, he says.
That said, in “Ski Inc.” he makes the case that U.S. skiing overall has come a long way since he started in the industry. Equipment is better, snowmaking technology is much more efficient and sophisticated, and lift lines are faster and safer. Prices are also much more reasonable than may be imagined, he says, if skiers commit to buying tickets in advance.
As one industry veteran said to him, “If you’re nostalgic for the good old days, you were not there.”
“It’s true,” Diamond said. “We didn’t think things were tough at the time because we just didn’t know — we didn’t have anything to compare it to.”
He also suggests ski operators are very aware of the challenges posed by climate change and are taking steps now to insure they have adequate water supplies for future snowmaking, as well as factoring possible drier, shorter winters into things like real estate decisions.
“The business is definitely on the edge of” climate change, he said.
Skiing will survive, he believes, because of its appeal as a family activity. His son, Keenen, and daughter, Elizabeth, both now in their 30s, grew up skiing with him and his wife, Eileen, from an early age.
“You can’t play golf or tennis with your 4 year old,” he said. “But you can sure go skiing with them.”
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.
Chris Diamond’s website is skidiamondconsulting.com.