SE3:EP13 - Bill Jensen: New Look at Sundance

03/14/22 • 46 min

Visitors to Sundance Mountain Resort this winter have found a wonderful new experience at one of Utah’s great hidden gems. Working with the experienced Sundance team, legendary ski industry leader Bill Jensen has helped them transform the resort with new lifts, terrain, snowmaking and much more. Jensen, a longtime visionary who has led some of North America’s most notable resorts, talked to Ski Utah’s Last Chair about his storied career and the fun he’s having coaching the team at Sundance.

After stewarding Sundance for over a half-century, film legend Robert Redford sold his interest in December 2020 after carefully curating potential buyers to ensure his legacy would remain. The new investors included Broadreach Capital Partners and Cedar Capital Partners. But what was most important for skiers and riders was the inclusion of Jensen as a partner.

While he didn’t discover skiing until he was 19 in southern California, Jensen quickly grew passionate about the sport, starting his career at Mammoth Mountain as a liftie. In the decades since then he’s hopscotched around in leadership roles from Vail to Whistler to Telluride and Intrawest. In 2019, he was inducted into the U.S. Ski & Snowboard Hall of Fame.

In his new role, he fell in love with Sundance the day he hiked up to the top of Ray’s Lift and then up to Mandan Summit. His vision came clear in an instant when he soaked in the view of Mt. Timpanogos from Mandan.

This winter skiers were treated to a host of positive upgrades:

The new high-speed Outlaw Express taking skiers from base to Mandan Summit in just seven minutes.
New beginner and intermediate terrain off Mandan offering stunning new views and options. Check out Broadway!
A new beginner area with three magic carpets.
A new return lift, Stairway, from the back mountain along with a new run allowing Bear Claw to base skiing or riding.
The new Lookout restaurant with stunning views of Timp from the base.
New snow guns as part of an upgraded snowmaking system, including a water holding pond.

While he’s been the top executive of the biggest ski resort companies in North America, he remains a true mountain guy always anxious to take visitors up on the mountain. Here are a few teasers from the interview. Check out the full conversation on Last Chair, available through all podcast platforms.

Bill, you had a bit of a non-traditional introduction to skiing.

Unfortunately, later than most people I know. Born in Hawaii and grew up in Southern California. When I was 19, for some reason I walked into a Sports Ltd. store in Woodland hills. They were showing the K2 Performers video. I saw skiing for the first time and was fascinated. I just went, ‘wow, this is incredible.’ So I went skiing that winter one day, and that was it.

I’ll bet you were pretty excited to get a job as a liftie?

It just connects you to people, and, candidly, it was fun! So that's where it all started. It was all happenstance. I had no idea that a ski area was even a business. I just saw it as some great recreational fun pursuit. And I just - I fell in love. You know, I always say, I love skiing, but I became passionate about the ski industry and the business and that's where things unfolded.

You’ve lived in some great ski towns: Mammoth, Sun Valley, Whistler, Vail, Breckenridge. What has attracted you to those towns?

In small towns, you get to know a lot of people. And I also like the fact that people depend on each other, whether it was helping them split their firewood or snow removal or whatever. You built relationships and,in ski towns, there's a common denominator that everybody loves snow and they love sliding on snow, whether they snowboard or ski now. But, you know, I just felt very comfortable in that environment. Living in a ski town, to me, just fit my ... who I was and my persona. I really like small mountain communities.

What did it mean to be honored in the Hall of Fame?

It's touching. It's gratifying. It wasn't something that you aspire to. I really believe in the sport. I believe that the skier is important and I've worked hard over my career to mentor people and bring new people into the business and see their careers grow. And that has been the most fulfilling part of my career.

When you visited Sundance in 2020, what stood out to you?

You know the word, and I don't want it to be overused, but just the sense of arrival and walking through the base - there's something magical about this resort and part of it is the environment it sits in, Mount Timp and the views. It is truly one of very few unique ski areas that have this setting. And because it was Robert Redford's business, it really was a family business, is what I would call it. And you can sense that in the culture, the staff a...

This winter skiers were treated to a host of positive upgrades:

The new high-speed Outlaw Express taking skiers from base to Mandan Summit in just seven minutes.
New beginner and intermediate terrain off Mandan offering stunning new views and options. Check out Broadway!
A new beginner area with three magic carpets.
A new return lift, Stairway, from the back mountain along with a new run allowing Bear Claw to base skiing or riding.
The new Lookout restaurant with stunning views of Timp from the base.
New snow guns as part of an upgraded snowmaking system, including a water holding pond.

Bill, you had a bit of a non-traditional introduction to skiing.

I’ll bet you were pretty excited to get a job as a liftie?

You’ve lived in some great ski towns: Mammoth, Sun Valley, Whistler, Vail, Breckenridge. What has attracted you to those towns?

What did it mean to be honored in the Hall of Fame?

When you visited Sundance in 2020, what stood out to you?

Previous Episode

SE3:EP12 - Lexi Dowdall: Utah Snow in Watercolors

Utah’s 15 resorts paint a majestic portrait amidst the winter landscape. So what if someone painted them all, with watercolors based in snow melt from each resort. That’s what passionate Utah skier Lexi Dowdall has set out to do with her Paint by Powder Project!

Dowdall is a snow-loving outdoor enthusiast who actively seeks out the Greatest Snow on Earth in every corner of the state. But her skiing career got off to a rocky start. At her first lesson as a little girl, she became frightened of a yeti-like skier with a snow-encrusted beard. So she watched Sleeping Beauty in the lodge at Solitude instead. Not so today as she crushes the powder every chance she can - all with a big smile on her face.

The artist in her came from her grandmother, a sculptor and painter in Sedona. She says today, “Art is in my nature. But I spent a long time ignoring that fact.” Her grandmother focused her art on her surroundings, the towering vermillion monoliths in Sedona. So Lexi looked around herself at the Utah ski resorts she loved and decided to make that her palette.

In 2019, she took a rudimentary watercolor kit along on a rafting trip through the Gates of Lodore. A year later, she used the platform of COVID to start focusing on painting Utah’s ski areas. Looking out to the street one day, she saw her boyfriend’s pickup truck bed filled with fresh Alta snowfall he had trucked down to the valley after a huge snowstorm. And the idea struck her - why not blend her watercolor paints using snowmelt from each resort.

And the Paint by Powder Project was launched!

This episode of Last Chair is a really fun podcast with an exuberant powder-loving artist, Lexi Dowdall. She’ll win your heart with her stories of her continual discovery of the outdoor world around her, and how she’s sharing it with others.

She also personifies the ‘support a cause’ energy that is ingrained in all of us as skiers and snowboarders. And, she’s doing something about it. She is a passionate volunteer with Wasatch Adaptive Sports at Snowbird, and she’s donating proceeds of the Paint by Powder Project to Protect Our Winters.

In her day job, she’s the director of freeride for the International Freeskiers and Snowboarders Association (IFSA), helping young freeride skiers overseeing event series’.

Here’s a little teaser of the Last Chair episode with Lexi Dowdall.

Lexi, how did skiing get in your blood?

I'm a fourth or fifth generation Utahn. I grew up here. My parents were big skiers. My dad was a ski bum who came here after college and never really left. So my mom always says we never had a choice and being skiers, it was that worked out so well.

What has inspired you growing up in Utah?

I come from a very creative family and we're always doing stuff yet scrapbooking or making terrariums, or we were just crafting all the time. And I may be biased, but I think Utah is the most beautiful state. We have just such an amazing diversity of landscapes and vistas and state parks and national parks. It's hard not to be inspired by the vistas that we're surrounded by out here.

Why watercolors?

It's an enigma. It's very simple, but it's difficult to master. And I would say I'm very much a type A kind of control freak kind of person. So watercolor has helped me to be a lot more open to outcome. You literally have to go with the flow. So that's a neat thing about watercolor is you can have an idea of what you want to accomplish. But in the end, the water and the paint are going to force your destiny and you don't have as much control over it as the acrylic or oil.

And why mountains?

I just knew I wanted to paint mountains - that's where I'm happiest, that's where my soul is alive. So it's funny. I still feel like I don't really know how to paint mountains or snow, but you know, I'm practicing as much as I can, and it's just going to be a work in progress.

And why snow?

Snow is water. I thought I could incorporate snow from each mountain into my watercolor painting, and you know, I'm really working on my technique with painting mountains. I thought, ‘oh, maybe this snow will make the painting a little bit better, and I can channel the energy of the mountain as I paint with its snow.’ So that was kind of how it got started.

When you collect snow in milk jugs at resorts, do people look at you strangely?

I had this very awkward interaction with a Powder Mountain patroller. I tried to explain what I was doing, and he was just very confused. But I will say the fastest response time was Deer Valley. They were on the scene in probably 34 seconds. ‘Ma'am, are you OK? Do you need assistance?’ I was fine. But again, I needed to explain what the...

Next Episode

SE3:EP14 - SOS Outreach: Diversity and Inclusion in Sport

Visit any western resort town and you’ll find a robust LatinX community, sometimes making up 30% of the population. It’s a robust part of community culture. But oftentimes, it’s a segment that doesn’t ski. SOS Outreach, a nonprofit serving 15 resort and urban communities nationwide including Utah, is seeking to change that. Today, Last Chair will visit an SOS Outreach ski day at Park City Mountain to speak with leaders, mentors and participants about the engaging program.

SOS Outreach was formed nearly 30 years ago and has operated in Utah since 2015. Its mission is to bring together underserved youth under a mentorship program and get them on snow, with supporting partnerships for equipment and lifts. And while the program introduces youth to the joy of the sport, it also brings life lessons of character and values.

Central to its cause is inclusivity - ensuring that underserved youth in resort towns have a pathway to the sport. It’s especially important for the LatinX community where their parents and most of their peers have little or no past engagement in the sport.

SOS Outreach event manager Abbey Eddy recalls a story of a 12 year old Mexican boy who was driving with his father and admiring the mountains. “‘Those mountains, they’re not for us, son,’” said Eddy of the father’s reply. “You just hear that and you realize that there's a whole population moving here for a different reason than most people think. And traditionally, like myself, it's white people that move here to ski. But there's a large population. It's about 20 percent of our Park City community that moves, not necessarily to ski, but to work and for other opportunities that primarily is our LatinX population.”

On the March Saturday, Last Chair visited an SOS Outreach program at Park City Mountain, it was an industry day where representatives of the mountain and other businesses were there to introduce youth to potential career opportunities in the sport they loved. Earlier in the season, Olympians Steven Nyman and Brita Sigourney were a big hit with SOS participants.

At the base of the First Time lift, the group of around 100 skiers, riders and mentors gathered for a briefing. Some of it was the logistics of the day. But more was focused on life skills and leadership as program manager Palmer Daniels deftly brought the group together with volunteer mentors to talk about values.

This episode of Last Chair takes us inside a segment of our population that is a vital part of our resort communities. Listen in to learn more about SOS Outreach from leader Abbey Eddy, and especially mentor Justin and program participant E. And as you listen, imagine the big smiles on their faces as they headed up the mountain.

Here’s a sample of the conversations. Listen in to the full Last Chair podcast to learn more. <>

Abbey Eddy, Individual Giving & Events Manager

We ski because it’s fun. But SOS Outreach brings more than fun, doesn’t it?

It's really an incredible organization that we can have this national reach with the same mission across the board to make sure that we're increasing diversity in our snowsports communities, increasing access and also being really intentional with our programming and our curriculum so that we're helping kids to transition the life skills that they naturally learn from being on the mountain into using them into their everyday lives and strengthening our mountain communities as a result.

What’s fascinating to me is that SOS Outreach works in both mountain communities and metro areas.

It's an incredible scene. We have these more rural mountain community programs, but then our urban locations are powerful and impactful. It's really a different challenge. In mountain communities, kids are looking at the mountains every day but might not be able to access them. And then in a place like Detroit, you're working with kids that have never seen skis before. And so opening their eyes to even the sport of skiing and snowboarding, it's opening their world into something totally new, different, exciting and impactful.

How is this population different within the community?

For a lot of our Latinx families that have moved here - their parents don't ski. Then you don't have that same comfort level with the sport of walking through the village. How do you carry your skis and what equipment do you need? There's a lot that goes into skiing. It's more than just having a lift ticket, but having to have all the right clothes and the right boots and socks and. And again, this clunky gear and how you're managing all of those different pieces just to get to the base of the lift can be challenging. And when your parents aren't helping you with that process of getting from the parking lot to the lift because they haven't done it before. We're really intentional with making sure t...