Editor's note: Killington Resort celebrates its 50th anniversary on Saturday. Founder Preston Leete Smith opened the ski area with two lifts and seven trails. Today, Killington operates across six mountains with 141 trails and 24 lifts. Herald business reporter Bruce Edwards interviewed Smith this week from his home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Q: Looking back on the 50 years since Killington opened, could you share your thoughts on that accomplishment? What made you successful in taking your vision and making it a reality? Preston Smith: The first thing was to crystallize the vision and very simply I was driven by my love of the sport even though it was quite new to me and also driven by what I was going to do with my life. Those were important factors and the next thing was to find supporters and money. I had to develop an organization and find the people with the skills at the particular time and could see the vision that I had. They had to be highly motivated because we did things the old-fashioned way with just plain hard work whether building the lifts or putting snow on the trails. We were always building within our means and looking back I think I started with $85,000 to build four lifts. We kept our debt-to-equity conservative, approximately .75 to 1. You have to do that because some people think the ski business is highly profitable but we were lucky to make 2 cents on the dollar so there was not a lot of room for mistakes. We built 37 years of profitability and that was because of our consistency. Consistency was developed simply by moving forward from each success. The next element would be exciting the potential customer and learning to advertise and articulate the enjoyment one finds in skiing and of course we touted the snow we had at Killington, the high elevation, the beauty of the winter and so forth. I think we hit an interesting chord in the skier when we began to extend the season with our early opening and late closing. I guess last but not least our understanding of the sport. I think that we had a good perception of what would satisfy the skier and the potential skier and one of those things is the ever-changing variety of terrain. Q: What's your proudest accomplishment? Smith: I guess understanding the sport and providing something for everyone, which culminated in 24 lifts and 141 trails, excluding Pico. The Skye Ship (Route 4 to Skye Peak) was no means low on the list. It was the first heated lift. That replaced the original 3-1/2 mile gondola. The heated cabins and the art in the sky. We really had some interesting artists do the work on those cabins and between that and its being the fastest and most comfortable gondola in the world at that particular time. Again, extending the season, I think Killington lent itself to the long season to begin with. A very well defined bowl (Killington basin) facing northeast, the highest elevation skiing in Vermont, it really was obvious that extending the season would be worthwhile. Q: Was that done for marketing purposes because the number of skiers drop toward the end of the season? Smith: No. Because if you extend the season on both ends you have many more days of income. We had mostly year-round employees to begin with. Every dollar that came in the extended shoulders of the season was a plus on the bottom line. Of course we were especially proud of the pursuit of snowmaking and perfecting snowmaking. Q: What role did the state play in getting Killington up and running? Smith: When Perry Merrill was commissioner of Forest and Parks, and he was guy who had been through World War I and had been in Europe and was well aware of the ski business, he had goals of buying up huge tracts of forestland for the good of Vermonters as well as developing parks for the enjoyment of Vermonters. Somewhere along the way he got it in mind that Vermont also had enough snow in the mountains to make it a really viable ski business. He was determined to get ski areas built in Vermont and when he told me about Killington and I visited Killington I was sold on it right then. It was absolutely spectacular. The basin with the northeast exposure and the high elevation. It was just a perfect potential. He said, 'Well Pres, we'll write up a lease for you and I think we can get a road built in there and I can push that in the Legislature.' I put my faith in Perry Merrill and he put his faith in me without having any experience. He was a very determined kind of gentleman and he knew the ropes in Montpelier and indeed he put together the lease and he put together a package of ski access roads in the Legislature and got it through. As a neophyte, I had to be a lobbyist for myself. I got acquainted with virtually every representative ... plus the senators. It's interesting looking back on that because of the makeup of the House of Representatives and it was just filled with farmers. I tell you if it wasn't for the farmers we would never have been in business. They were just virtually 100 percent supportive as was the administration. Gov. Johnson back then was fully supportive. Vermont definitely needed a shot in the arm economically. Going back to the length of season, I think all the effort we put in to extend the season and then snowmaking on top of that, we ensured Thanksgiving to Memorial Day skiing. People thought I was crazy when I suggested we should be doing snow reporting on Thanksgiving and a couple of years later we had 10,000 people on Thanksgiving. That was the beginning of early season skiing. One other thing I would have to speak about in terms of pride, we had a huge year-round staff. If I recall correctly we were somewhere over 650 year-round employees. Probably the greatest pride is in the complex we put together over time. We not only had the state land but we were fortunate to put together private land with it and ultimately we were able to extend our 1,650 foot vertical drop on the main mountain to 3,100 foot vertical (drop) and developing a scope that covered six major mountains. Q: What if anything would you have done differently in developing Killington? For instance, you had your battles with the Vermont Natural Resources Council, other environmental groups and state regulators. Would you have taken a different approach? Smith: I honestly don't know that we would have done anything differently. From day one, we were in essence a public company and so everything was available to everybody. We bought Camel's Hump and we gave Camel's Hump forest to the state. That was '67 and in '68 we did a master plan of the entire ski area and that was done by Dan Kiley and then we had Robert Burley (Waitsfield planner) do the master plan of the village. Now there were no state requirements or regulations. Nobody ever talked about planning in those days. We did that and made it public to everybody. We made everything public to everybody so I don't know what we would have done differently. Q: Some environmental groups raised concerns that Killington's plans threatened bear habitat and the expanded snowmaking threatened the area's water resources? Smith: Everything we did was public and it was fact and if people didn't want to buy it, that's way they view it, but I couldn't do anything different because I put everything out there for everybody to see. That's the way it was. That's what I would do again. Q: You also considered yourself as an environmentalist and served on the state Environmental Board. Yet, you took exception at the criticisms leveled at you and Killington and became the poster boy for unfettered ski area development. Smith: I had a bachelor of science degree but I had forestry and agricultural management. We all had great appreciation for the mountains and for conservation. I was a conservationist. I can't qualify as an environmentalist. That's a definition of something different. Q: Was the sale of S-K-I Ltd. to Les Otten and American Skiing Co. absolutely necessary? Killington and the other ASC resorts struggled from the very beginning until the company sold off its resorts, including Killington and Pico. Smith: Was the sale necessary? No, the sale was not necessary but one has to realize we were a public company and growth is expected. I was putting huge effort into growing through consolidation. I may have been the first one to see that the industry was going to have to go through consolidation and you're seeing that more and more and I expect to continue to see that. We were trying to buy Steamboat and Heavenly. I had a list of 50 ski areas around the country that were on our horizon and had visited and made efforts to lease or purchase. The thing is with the ski industry you've got to be able to purchase a ski operation within certain parameters because the profit margins are not big. You can't go out and pay the asking price on the other hand because it's too much. I was not able to grow the company at a rate through acquisition that made it sensible to turn down somebody else's offer because they felt they could do it. In this case, Les Otten, even though what happened there, he paid full price for everything. Q: Because Otten's company was much smaller than S-K-I, didn't he become highly leveraged as a result of the acquisition? Smith: Absolutely. He used every means to show his existing assets in a light that would allow him to finance that. Q: Even though it was a good deal for stockholders, did you have any misgivings about Otten's ability to successfully run Killington? Smith: I don't think I would care to answer that. Q: One thing under your stewardship that Killington never did was get directly involved in investing in real estate development, which got Otten's company into trouble. You let other people take that risk. Smith: We grew according to our successes. At the time we did a master plan of the entire ski area and also a master plan of the village area, which we were supposed to receive as a quid-pro-quo for giving the state Camel's Hump forest. When we had these master plans we had all kinds of real estate involved in the master plan. When we designed the village we had Bob Burley go to Europe and go out west and he visited all these villages around the world and came up with what I thought was a great piece of work. We did this when we really didn't need real estate. We didn't need a huge amount of real estate income and all we wanted to do was balance real estate with the growth of the business not to do real estate as the main thrust of our business. It was just to keep up with our business, which is quite a different philosophy. We sat around and tried to figure out how to build the village in the most logical way and what we came up with was divide the village literally into pieces. We sort of partitioned the village into at least a dozen different sections. The reason we did that is we wanted to bring in developers to actually do the development. We would sell the parcels off to the developers and bring different developers in so they were competing against one another to do better quality and so forth. So many of these places have done real estate and they bring in one operation to do the whole thing and I just think that makes sort of a cookie-cutter approach as opposed to a competitive approach, which we had. But anyway as part of that we would only parcel those out as we needed to do that. We never got to do that because of people pushing against us. We had a slow and methodical approach and we weren't going to do it unless we need it. If I were out to make money in real estate I would have gone to Florida to build condominiums. I had no interest in that. My interest was in the sport of skiing. Skiing can go on and on and on and real estate is pretty much a finite kind of a thing. You can draw your own conclusions there. Q: If Killington was to get the go ahead for a village for selling Camel's Hump forest, what happened? Smith: I have to say I think it's simply a matter of the changing faces on the political scene. If we had gone in and built the village all in one swoop we would have a village today. We didn't choose to do that because it was not our modus operandi. Q: What does Killington/Pico today have to do to remain competitive with resorts around the country? Smith: I think principally it has to have the village. A village provides certain conveniences for a certain portion of the total customer base. Why would I have sent Bob Burley to the west and to Europe to study villages if it weren't ultimately a piece of the entire picture? It's meant to provide a series of amenities or conveniences for a piece of a ski area's market and it's totally missing at Killington. One other thing about what Killington needs. I think Killington really needs that interconnect with Pico and I do hope that somehow they're able to do that. I don't think people fully understand the interconnect. That is not just an interconnect of a trail going cross country on a 6 percent gradient one way and then 6 percent back the other way. It involves a couple of major lifts with beautiful intermediate skiing. Perhaps Pico needs that more than Killington does in the long run.
See Also
Killington acquired by American Skiing Company - Mirus Capital AdvisorsWho Owns Vermont's Ski Resorts? Full List of VT Ski Resort Owners