Every evening after teaching ski lessons in Aspen, Colorado, Georgie Bremner follows a strict routine. She walks into her home’s mudroom and peels off her clothes. She chucks her base layers into the washing machine—including her hair ties—and turns the dial to the hottest setting. She hangs her bright red uniform in a separate room and plugs in her rechargeable boot warmers, which are essential this year as she rarely goes indoors while on the slopes. Then, she marches into the shower. Only after that can she relax with her two children.
“The kids know not to come anywhere near me and that can be hard because they want hugs straight away,” says Bremner, a single mother who has worked as an Aspen Ski Company instructor for 18 years. “And I say, ‘You’re going to get one, but let’s just wash off the COVID.’”
This after-work routine may seem extreme, but it’s one of the few things Bremner can control to avoid bringing the COVID-19 virus home to her family, including her immunocompromised 12-year-old son. She now pays for parking instead of taking a free bus to Aspen’s four sister mountains. Her hands are cracked and raw from washing them so often.
Bremner and other instructors say they’re happy ski resorts have reopened during the pandemic—many instructors count on ski and snowboard lessons to pay the bills, and their small, often isolated mountain communities rely heavily on winter tourism dollars. But like all workers who interact closely with others, ski instructors are also scared, nervous, and anxious about contracting or spreading the virus on the job. "I really want to be working, but when I'm working, I'm really nervous," says Bremner, who voluntarily gets tested for COVID every two weeks. "I’m just trying to take every day as it comes."
Experts say skiing is a relatively safe activity during the pandemic—it’s outdoors, people are far apart, and skiers already wear facial coverings to keep warm—but they worry about some of the tangential parts of spending the day at a ski resort, like waiting in lift lines, riding in enclosed gondolas and trams, and eating and drinking in crowded lodges. As a result, instructors are getting creative with ways to reduce those risks, like gearing up in the parking lot before work and packing sandwiches to eat quickly outdoors for lunch. "I carry a small hip pouch that has a water bottle and some snacks so I don't need to go inside," says Dave Harvey, an instructor at Squaw Valley Alpine Meadows, a few miles from Lake Tahoe in California. "A lot of times, I will wear my uniform to work so I'm not getting totally dressed in the locker room. I'm not carpooling with friends anymore."
Perhaps the biggest change, though, is that ski instructors are spending less time with their students this year. In a normal season, they functioned much like concierges, spending a week with a visiting family and helping them with everything from equipment rental to lunch reservations. Instructors often ate with their clients and hung out during après-ski drinks. Now, guests are on their own for everything other than the actual skiing. “It’s taken away the ability to personalize the experience and really get to know people,” says Heather Dumas, a long-time instructor at Snowbasin Resort in Utah. She typically loves to stop for a mid-morning coffee or hot chocolate break with her clients, but now, she says, “it feels very transactional.”
Instructors are also reinventing their normally hands-on curriculum to avoid touching guests—but that poses new challenges when it comes to building trust and connecting with students. “Somebody who’s never skied before, they’re in incredibly uncomfortable equipment, they’re in a cold, foreign environment, they’re potentially looking at something that’s intimidating and scary,” says Dumas. “The instructor is their lifeline. And if you can’t smile and high-five them, you can’t develop that trust as quickly and easily. And if they don’t feel safe, they can’t learn.” Depending on the size of the lesson, ski instructors are also riding in separate lift chairs and gondola cars from their students, which further cuts into valuable teaching time.
Because many ski resorts are limiting capacity and fewer people are traveling to ski in general, instructors are also making less money overall this season. They typically earn a higher hourly rate when guests request them for private lessons (and those guests often give them generous tips). But many of those repeat clients are staying home this season. Instructors must now choose between unpaid gaps in their schedules or lower-paying lessons, if that work is even available. "Last year at this time, I was probably double what I am now as far as income," says Dumas.
Of course, not all instructors have been able to return to work at all. Many resorts have laid off ski instructors or transferred them to different departments. At Killington Ski Resort in Vermont, some ski instructors are now on “mask patrol,” during which they wander up and down lift lines to ensure guests keep their facial coverings over their nose and mouth.
Despite all the risks and challenges, ski instructors are trying to stay positive throughout the pandemic. Limited resort capacity means there’s more room for skiers and riders to spread out on the mountain. On-mountain food and beverage operations have gotten more efficient, which means less time spent waiting and more time actually skiing.
And the overall atmosphere at resorts is joyful and appreciative—skiers are happy to be there, enjoying the freedom of being outdoors and the thrill of speeding downhill again. “We’ve all adapted pretty well to planning ahead and making reservations and wearing masks and staying spread out in lift lines,” says Harvey of Squaw Valley. “The general consensus is we just want to stay open and we want to ski.”
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