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SNOWASIS
A Canadian architect is building the impossible: a ski resort in the middle of the desert.

Text: PHILIP PREVILLE

If you were to build a ski hill for Las Vegas, where would you put it? You could put it smack in the middle of the Strip, but that would require excessive amounts of refrigeration. Better off to find the shortest distance between Las Vegas and real winter.

The drive north from Vegas is lined on either side with an endless succession of mountain peaks, but through Nevada and into southern Utah the scenery is an endless sepia monochrome. The summits are the same sandy colour as the desert floor. You have to drive for almost two hours to see a tree. You have to drive for 2 1/2 hours to see snow. And as soon as you see snow, you’ve arrived in Beaver, Utah. Population: 2,454.

Mind you, there’s no actual snow on the ground in Beaver because this is still a desert – the snow is only up on the surrounding peaks. From Beaver, you must head west and drive through 30 minutes worth of switchbacks, simultaneously breathtaking and treacherous, to get from the desert floor up to the idyllic mountaintop valley that is home to the Elk Meadows Ski Resort.

Well, the "resort" moniker is a bit of a stretch. The place has 36 runs, six chairlifts and two small chalets serving fries and hot chocolate. It is the job of the Montreal architecture firm of Smith & Koenka to turn it into a capital "R" Resort, a Vegas-worthy luxury getaway with hotels, condos, restaurants, an expanded ski area and an 18-hole golf course. "Essentially, we’re building a Disney-esque winter theme park," says David Smith, 46, the project’s lead architect. "The kind of theme park that skiers would want to live in year-round."

Why make Las Vegas a ski destination? Because Vegas exists to satisfy your every whim – from gambling and golf to sex and spaceships. Only if you ask for skiing does Vegas’ answer come back "no." So David Smith has his work cut out for him: to build a ski resort atop the southern Utah desert, a place known for its striking scenery and truly bizarre climate. There’s no shortage of snow, but a critical shortage of water. It’s a pretty big problem for a ski resort, one of the most water-intensive developments imaginable. But the desert has never stopped Las Vegas before, so a ski hill is no reason to start with the excuses now.

The path that led David Smith to Elk Meadows began in the late 1970s when he was a teenage ski bum at Whistler, partying hardy with Roger McCarthy, then head of Whistler’s ski patrol. Smith moved on to architecture school in Ottawa, while McCarthy became an executive with Intrawest, the company that would transform Whistler-Blackcomb from a nice ski hill into a year-round luxury resort. When Intrawest purchased Quebec’s Mont-Tremblant in 1991, Smith went in for an interview – and was stunned to find McCarthy at the other end of the boardroom table. "It was very awkward for the first half-hour or so," Smith recalls. "Those years hadn’t been the proudest moments of our lives. I wasn’t sure if it would work to my advantage or not." In the end, it did. McCarthy hired Smith to build Tremblant’s Grand Manitou Lodge and administration building. The resort’s ensuing success rubbed off on Smith, who has since been in constant demand as a ski resort specialist.

When the Elk Meadows brain trust approached him to build a winter wonderland in the desert, Smith immediately saw potential in the site. Elk Meadows is located halfway between Vegas and Salt Lake City, but Salt Lake was already well served for skiers. It was Vegas that needed a ski hill, and the main lesson Smith learned at Tremblant was that people will travel vast distances to be in a beautiful place with their feet clamped to sticks. "The three-hour drive from Las Vegas seems long at first until you realize that Vegas is a five-hour desert drive from anywhere," Smith says.

Located at 3,000 metres, Elk Meadows reaches the same elevation as northern Utah ski hills and gets the same amount of natural snowfall – 10 metres annually. Its vertical drop is about two-thirds the size of Deer Valley or Park City, but a planned lift expansion would extend its vertical to 640 metres. The ski area features long, winding beginner hills (including one that runs beneath the road to the village) and steep bursts for experts. The hidden location, in a high-altitude valley akin to Banff’s Sunshine Village, has the secluded feel skiers crave. Plus a view of a desert – a worthy "cool factor."

The ski bum in David Smith loves it here, but the architect in him is already pulling his hair out. "The people there know nothing about Nordic architecture," Smith says. "They live in a desert, so the sun is normally a problem for them. They have very, very strange ideas about insulation that just won’t work at high altitudes like this." New ski lifts were installed last summer; construction on the hotel, begun last spring, is almost complete; the condos start going up next year. By the time the project is completed, Elk Meadows will have accommodations for up to 8,000 people.

And while he calls his plans for Elk Meadows "Disney-esque," there won’t be any people dressed up in Mickey Mouse costumes. Why bother when you’ve got snowboarders? He plans to build a Starbucks-style coffee house with a balcony looking down over the half-pipe, where onlookers can take in the tricks and the wipeouts. "Theme parks are really about idealism," Smith explains. "All you see is people having fun. You never see the trucks moving in and out. The streets are always clean. The infrastructure is completely hidden." Smith’s plans for Elk Meadows tie in perfectly with this ideal; hotels and condos offer mountain views, and a central pedestrian village offers no view whatsoever of the service road.

Still, it’s easier to hide infrastructure in sunny Florida than in wintry climes, where blowers, mini-bulldozers, salt, sand and grit are all part of the never-ending snow removal mess. Smith’s idealistic theme-park solution: hot-water heating beneath all the village’s walkways, a welcome innovation for anyone who’s ever walked on slippery sidewalks in ski boots. Smith clearly relishes the thought of making snow shovels obsolete. "Those hot-water pipes will simply melt the snow away," he says.

Provided, of course, that he can fill those pipes with water. And those aren’t the only water pipes that need filling. Elk Meadows will eventually have dozens of restaurants washing dishes, a hotel washing linen around the clock, 18 fairways to soak and 8,000 people taking showers, flushing toilets and drinking hot chocolate. To look at the place in winter, covered in natural snow, you wouldn’t think water is a problem. But Elk Meadows cannot even lay claim to the snow on its slopes. Technically, that snow belongs to the Utah state government.

Since the mid-19th century, Utah has administered a Byzantine system of water rights, apportioned by the state engineer. Most of Elk Meadows’ snow, once melted, can only be consumed by the ranchers, businesses and other residents in the downstream town of Beaver. Utah Power also has rights to that water because it flows through its dam’s turbines on the way down to Beaver. Under Utah’s water-rights system, Utah Power can even calculate the amount of water that leaves the area – such as the water in the cup of coffee someone buys for the drive back to Las Vegas – and charge Elk Meadows for the inconvenience.

As if building a desert ski resort wasn’t already difficult enough. But in Utah, America’s second driest state, controlling the number of water rights prevents the pillaging of a scarce resource – for example, the kind of water theft that might happen to a town like Beaver if some upstart ski resort started sucking all the water from its streams before it ever trickled down the hill.

The bottom line: Elk Meadows does not own enough water rights to complete its development. To make up the difference, the resort will recycle its waste water and pump it back into the system. "Engineers call it pink pipe," Smith explains. "The water from the springs will run through the taps and down the drain to the filtration plant. From there, it will be pumped back up through pink-coloured plumbing and re-used in the toilets." It will also be reused to water the golf course and make snow on the hill, two jobs with an endless thirst for water. The filtration system is efficient enough that the snow won’t be yellow and should be harmless to eat.

Despite the state’s chronic water shortage, officials were leery of reusing waste water and had to be convinced of the system’s benefits. But if any major city could be rebuilt from scratch today, they’d probably use pink pipe. Municipalities spend millions making water drinkable. As a former City of Montreal employee once told me, it’s a crime to flush it all down the toilet every time our bodies produce 10 ccs of pee.

David Smith’s will be done, Las Vegas will soon have a ski resort to call its own. The question remains whether the idea will fly. More than 30 million tourists visit Las Vegas annually to huddle indoors in massive betting halls. Exercise and fresh air are the furthest things from their minds.

No matter, say David Smith and his Elk Meadows partners. The trick, they say, is to think beyond the tourists. With 1.3 million residents, Vegas is the fastest growing city in America. The bright lights may put smiles on tourists’ faces, but they lose their lustre quickly for those who live there year-round. The desert is stifling in summer and drab in winter. The casinos are claustrophobic; the gridlock annoying; the arcade-like cityscape dizzying. Las Vegas has always been a place people come to, but now it’s becoming one of those places that’s nice to get away from. Even for tourists, but especially for residents.

And if those residents like to ski, then David Smith has some desert condos he’d like to sell them.