Opening Keynote Address by Kelly Pawlak, NSAA CEO

Lift Safety Boot Camp – Parts 1,2,3,4
This educational program provides a full day of critical education for lift operators, lift maintenance staff and mountain operations employees. This class provides a mix of indoor and outdoor sessions covering a range of operational topics that can immediately impact your ski area’s lift safety programming. Mike Lane will lead this session and will be joined by other notable folks from around the industry, including some of your fellow mountain operations professionals. All Day Tuesday, Sept. 10
Module 1 – Lift Operations, Setting your guests up for success
Module 2 – The what, Why and How of creating unseated passenger plans
Module 3 – Root Cause Analysis and the five Why’s
Module 4 – Breaking the Cycle:  A Lift Operations Roundtable

Fall Education Series (NSAA FES)

Session 1:

 Marking, Padding, Hazard Awareness, and Duties to Warn: 

  The issue of padding and marking is rapidly evolving, with growing claims including one of the largest plaintiff’s demand in any ski lawsuit ever—$97 million!—resulting in a crucial defense verdict in a padding trial.  This session is a timely and important follow-up to last year’s discussion on padding.  We will discuss the latest efforts from proposed ASTM and ISO padding standards, and their impact on resort operations, the next steps in standards development and industry best practices.  As padding and marking claims grow, we’ll provide new helpful risk management tools regarding padding about guest education, signage, and releases of liability.  Also,  we will look at recent skier collision litigation and the impacts of these verdicts on the ski industry.  This is a must-attend session for owners, mountain operations, risk, and ski patrol.

 Session 2:

 Ski Area Operations, Accessibility, and the Americans with Disabilities Act

 Ski area operations are highly unique compared to other businesses, but accessibility challenges and exposure risks from the ADA still remain for our recreational businesses.  While the ADA is significantly broad in application, we want to lead an industry conversation about what approaches work best for accommodating families with disabilities, and mitigating potential legal exposure.  Given the breadth of our operations at ski areas, this discussion will include ski school operations, lifts, F&B and restaurants, weddings, rentals, parking lots, alternative sliding devices, lodging, summer attractions, and importantly, the importance of expanded guest education.  Expanding overall accessibility is a smart business model, and will also serve to mitigate confusion, family stress, and ADA claims—and we will provide some tools to help achieve these goals. 

 Session 3:

 Safety and Operations after the Miller vs. Crested Butte Ruling:  New Risks and Exposures for Lifts and Unseated Passengers?

 This summer, the Colorado Supreme Court released an unprecedented ruling in Miller vs. Crested Butte limiting the enforceability of releases of liability involving chairlift incidents and unseated passengers.  This ruling will be closely analyzed in other ski states, even though ski areas do an impressive job with training, we will need expand our guest education efforts, and consider smarter operations and technology solutions like video surveillance.  Despite recent regulations from ANSI B-77 addressing unseated passengers, this session will compare which devices and approaches are more effective for unseated passengers, and share best practices on education and training, particularly with ski patrol, lift departments, and ski school operations.  With our ASDA counsel, we will discuss how this ruling impacts releases overall, and we will examine the best industry strategies to limit these incidents and mitigate falls. 

 Session 4:

 Risk Management Grab Bag:  Quick Hits, Fast Takes, and the Best of New Risk Management Strategies

 This session will end our program with a fast-paced variety of unique risk management strategies from around the industry, with some helpful tools to implement over the next season or two—and we’ll incorporate clever ideas from ski areas as we hit each FES stop.  This will include new technologies and practices regarding incident investigation, mountain operations, vehicle safety, construction contracts, employee safety, and NSP’s new Outdoor Risk Management modules, to name just a few.  These strategies cross a variety of ski area departments, but as the last session, Ryan and Dave will keep this fast-paced with important take-aways!

Marketing vs. Risk Management?  No, Marketing AND Risk Management

Stew Jensen, nxtConcepts

Dave Byrd, NSAA

Too often safety and risk are viewed as necessary burdens, or some type of vague insurance compliance headache—an obstacle to creating fun experiences, events, or compelling marketing and branding.  But we need both of these important departments to work more collaboratively.  It’s not us vs. them, it’s us AND them.  This session will look at how we can connect marketing, operations and risk management to provide a great guest experience that also achieves a workable balance with risk management, operations, and special events.  With examples from around the industry, we will discuss how areas can develop narratives that promote safety, showcasing fun, and effectively leveraging social media that achieve important risk management goals, but also underscore some of the gaps when communication or understanding is lacking between the departments.  When departments works together to promote safety the result will be expanded guest education, and mitigate injuries and claims.  This session will be geared toward marketing professionals.

General Managers Roundtable.

For Senior Level Managers only.  Join this always lively discussion about what is affecting your operations and how others may help you with the always evolving challenges.

Coming Together To Protect What We Love

 Flexing our muscles – Citizens’ Climate Lobby (CCL) members will use a short film to focus a group discussion on our collective strength and opportunity as an Outdoor community to be part of a solution to warming winters.  What do we love that we want to protect from an overheating planet?  The Teton Gravity Research film presented by Sierra Nevada and Atomic in association with Protect Our Winters gives us hope and lays out actions we can take. CCLers will expand upon the themes of hope and action with specific examples of solutions that are proven to work at scale. None of us is alone nor expected to solve this by ourselves nor give up what we love. Together, people working and playing in the Outdoors are a potent political force.  Please join us to protect what we love!

 With Laurie Manos, Michael Jones and Dodie Jones, Citizens’ Climate Lobby

Ski Resort Leadership with Bob Ackland, Steep Management

Leadership plays an important role in all areas of ski resort operations. Your participation in this course is crucial. The course will be interactive, with the audience providing much of the input. We will explore examples of good and bad leadership and discuss who is a leader. Is it a manager, the owner of the ski resort, or your coworker on the tower with you as you change sheaves? The goal of the course is to have all who participate understand what it takes to become a leader, the different types of leadership, and to inspire leadership. An engaging session with attendees to dissect what makes a good leader and how one can achieve leadership without it being appointed. It is relevant in all mountain operation departments.

“Reviving Enthusiasm: Strategies for a Successful Ski Season After a Low-Snow Year”
Stew Jensen, nxt Concepts

Join us for an interactive deep dive into how to rebound from an off season.  We will start by getting into the mind of your customer, where we’ll combine the power of consumer psychology, data analysis, and predictive modeling to craft a winning marketing plan for 2024-25.

We’re rolling up our sleeves and diving deep into:

• Step into Your Customer’s Ski Boots: Learn proven psychological tactics to uncover your customers’ deepest desires and turn them into loyal guests.
• Become a Data Detective: Decode the hidden patterns in your sales data to predict future customer behavior and tailor your marketing with pinpoint accuracy.
• Ignite the Anticipation: Discover the hottest marketing trends to create a buzz around your ski area and build unstoppable momentum for the winter season.
• Go Back to Basics, But Better: Rediscover the fundamental principles of marketing that never go out of style and integrate them seamlessly with cutting-edge new strategies.
• Leave Last Season in the Dust: Develop a game-changing marketing plan that focuses on the future.”

 Snowsports Roundtable

This roundtable discussion led by Kathy Brennan will address many topics important to snowsports management and instructors. It will include, but is not limited to, wins/learns from 23-24 season, improving the guest experience, techniques for recruiting and retaining staff, staff development and PSIA-AASI certification, and more. Bring your own questions and ideas to the discussion

Kathy is preparing for her fourth winter as the CEO of the Eastern Region of PSIA-AASI. The largest of the PSIA-AASI regions, the East runs from Maine to North Carolina with more than 10,000 members and 119 member schools. Throughout her career she has been a ski instructor, trainer, or supervisor at various resorts in MA and NH.  

Identifying and using your resorts key snowmaking metrics.

HKD Snowmakers will lead a discussion on best practices for monitoring and recording key resource data such as energy, water, temperature, and time. Learn how to collect and use this data at your resort to improve snowmaking operations and become more sustainable.  The goal is to identify and implement tools that will allow managers to easily view, validate real-time business decisions, and share these metrics with their team … in just one click.

Fiber Optics….the future of ski resort infrastructure
Scott Schroeder – Ski Comm

Tim Smith – Waterville Valley
“Fiber Optics….the future of ski resort infrastructure”

Conductivity is king, for internal and external guest. Copper won’t cut it for today’s data needs, let alone tomorrow.

Scott Schroeder of SkiComm and the Waterville Valley team discuss how they conquered the hurdles of new lift data needs, cell site connections / management, internal systems, meeting guest expectations, and the installation of the backbone that makes it all possible. 

Guest Education: An Integrated Systems Approach to Communicating with your Guests More Effectively – Mark Petrozzi, ARM – Founder and President, AlpenRisk Safety Advisors, LLC Co-Founder and Principal, LVL✭UP Academy, LLC
This session will address how you can communicate more effectively with your guests with a focus on Safety and Wayfinding.  We’ll explore the 7 Communications Basics and the 6 Critical Components of Effective Communications, Methods of Delivery and take a deep dive into Signage, inside and outside.  Come prepared to brainstorm and with lots of questions.

 Enforcing the Rules: What to do When Things go Sideways with Your Guests – Confrontational Techniques and Conflict Resolution – Mark Petrozzi, ARM – Founder and President, AlpenRisk Safety Advisors, LLC Co-Founder and Principal, LVL✭UP Academy, LLC
Someone ducks a trail closure or is skiing too fast in a SLOW zone and barely avoids a collision.  How you can prepare your employees to effectively interact with your guests (who are NOT always right) and achieve the desired outcome? 

Pisten Bully Blade Maze
Test your blade skills on this unique set up using an actual Pisten Bully on site.  

Bearings, Lubrication and Belt Basics – how they work and some technical insights.
Steve Greene, Action Bearings
This seminar will continue to emphasize an understanding of how bearings and lubrication are related. We will also delve into some energy saving strategies with belts.