| Welcome to Bw Daily, the Bloomberg Businessweek newsletter, where we'll bring you interesting voices, great reporting and the magazine's usual charm every weekday. Let us know what you think by emailing our editor here. If this has been forwarded to you, click here to sign up. With just four weeks until the start of the ski season, Attitash Mountain is still without a chairlift to its summit. At the base of the rural New Hampshire resort, pieces of a new high-speed quad—tall steel towers, stacks of chairs—lie in a parking lot as a construction crew mills about in the 26F (-3C) November cold. Attitash senior mountain operations manager Deirdre Riley is trying to get word from her helicopter pilots on whether they can fly in the gusty, cloudy conditions to begin hauling the parts up the craggy slopes. The airdrop was already scrapped the previous two days because of ugly weather, and the forecast looks uglier tomorrow. "Delays like this make us really nervous," Riley says. The quad's predecessor, the Summit Triple, a rickety three-seat lift dismantled last spring, dated to 1986 and was a 17-minute lug to the top, where it dispensed frigid riders like an ice machine. Industry newsletter the Storm Skiing Journal called it "the most hated lift in New Hampshire, and possibly in America." After seven months of foundational work to replace it, missing this season's installation window would be a disaster, cutting off access to a large chunk of the already compact ski area and further infuriating locals who've been complaining about pretty much everything—poor snowmaking, understaffing, overcrowding, infrastructure breakdowns—at Attitash, now owned by the snow-sports behemoth Vail Resorts Inc.  Illustration: Fromm Studio Vail is known for destination properties such as Park City in Utah, Whistler Blackcomb in British Columbia and its flagship Colorado namesake, where $1,000-a-night hotels and slope-side restaurants teeming with Moncler jackets are the norm. Après-ski at Attitash, by contrast, is chicken fingers at a school-cafeteria-like lodge and a performance by funk cover band Motor Booty Affair. A good vibe, but not quite the chalet lifestyle Vail markets with its Epic Pass. The blockbuster subscription upended the US ski industry in the late aughts, with its unlimited access to a bunch of famed mountains in the West, and helped usher in an era of consolidation as rivals sought to build out their own multiresort packages. Then the Colorado-based company ventured into the Northeast, a bastion of schuss culture sneered at by the Aspen crowd for its shorter, oft-frozen peaks. In 2017, Vail acquired Vermont's Stowe Mountain Resort for $50 million. It gobbled up two more New England mountains the following year, then spent $264 million in 2019 on 17 resorts, including Attitash and other locations in New Hampshire, New York and Pennsylvania. (The company has since purchased three more in the Keystone State.) About two-thirds of Vail's North American properties are now east of the Rockies, with the highest concentration in the Northeast. The bet was that these tinier footprints would create what Vail executives refer to as a "feeder" network for the Epic Pass, which now has more than 2 million members and starts at $909 at its top tier for season-long access to all its locations. (A cheaper version for $676 comes with blackout dates or geographic restrictions.) A skiing addiction rarely begins atop a Lake Tahoe double black diamond; newcomers tend to learn on smaller mountains and eventually graduate to an expensive trip out West, where Vail can upsell them on food and lodging. "Local and regional ski areas in the East are a big part of how the passion for this sport begins," says Kirsten Lynch, Vail's chief executive officer. Vail promised serious investments upfront to "elevate the guest experience," but it didn't exactly deliver a deluxe overhaul to these old-timey getaways. In recent years there's been carping about the eroding conditions at Northeast properties ranging from Crotched to Hunter to Wildcat. Even at higher-end Stowe there's been a backlash about traffic jams at the base and abysmal parking. Things got so dire at New Hampshire's Mount Sunapee that Governor Chris Sununu weighed in, publicly accusing Vail of overselling passes and griping that its customer service "stinks." With guests livid on social media about trail closures and chairlift dysfunction, Attitash came to symbolize Vail's struggles in the East. (A Vail spokesperson says that these criticisms are specific to one extremely challenging ski season during the pandemic and global labor shortage, and that the company has invested significantly to resolve the issues and has since seen a tremendous increase in positive guest surveys.) But if the millions of skiers and snowboarders in the region aren't convinced Vail is as committed to the East as it is to the West, its feeder strategy risks turning them into haters. Lynch has initiated major infrastructure and hiring projects to combat perceptions that Vail is treating these Epic members like second-class citizens, but there's a sense that executives may have underestimated what it would take to win over the market. "The East Coast execution has been mixed at best," says Patrick Scholes, managing director for lodging and leisure research at Truist Securities, noting climate change will only make the challenge harder as snowfall declines. "I question if it's worth the aggravation for Vail for the New Hampshire resorts." The momentum began to shift in 2022. Vail announced a new minimum wage of $20 an hour—a 53% increase for its New Hampshire resorts—and by then had completed or was moving ahead on 11 lift upgrades in the Northeast, including the replacement of a Nixon-era chair at Attitash. That June the company at long last said it would replace the dreaded Summit Triple, too. For more on the celebration when the new Mountaineer lift opened, read the whole juicy story here. | 
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