Destination ski country: resorts resume hunt for out-of-state guests.

• Author: Best, Allen
• Position: Destination Ski Country

In Crested Butte this winter, well-groomed and corduroy is not a dress code, but a new marketing message.

A graphic on the Crested Butte Mountain Resort's Web site shows fresh powder groomed into thin ribbons of packed snow that the company proudly claims as "Colorado's Best Corduroy." It's a boast that some say is the resort's latest gambit in a critical effort to attract destination skiers to Crested Butte Mountain deep in the heart of Colorado.

Located a half-day's drive from metropolitan Denver, the resort and nearby ski town live and die by the patronage of out-of-state visitors, destination skiers and boarders who stay at least several days and hopefully for a full week. Those customers are young and old--sometimes whole families of skiers and snowboarders, of varying skill levels from beginner through expert. They rent expensive condos, eat at local restaurants, drink in local pubs and pay the resort's higher sticker prices for a full day on the slopes.

They drive to Crested Butte from Dallas, Phoenix, or Oklahoma City, or they fly directly from Houston, Dallas, or Newark, N.J. And they make up 85 percent of Crested Butte Mountain Resort's total winter traffic.

But they are also the target of practically every other ski resort in Colorado.

From Steamboat Springs to Telluride, from Durango to Breckenridge, and from Aspen to SolVista, the talk for the last several years in the Colorado resort communities has been about how to return to the glory days of the 1970s and 1980s, when cash-wielding destination customers were so thick in ski villages that locals could afford to derisively dismiss them as "turkeys" or "geeks."

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Since those days, demographics--aging baby boomers with weak knees, and too few X-generation yuppies--have culled that flock of turkeys and have drawn down the numbers of all resorts' most free-spending guests.

Now, resorts across the state want as many young and old turkeys and geeks as they can lure to Colorado. They are grooming slopes to please guests of all ages; they are building new ski villages to serve them. Host towns of the resorts are even turning to new high-rise, high-density construction in town centers in order to keep streets, shops, restaurants and bars filled with paying customers.

ASPEN AS MICROCOSM

Aspen is probably as good an example as any.

No resort has recently cultivated the youth market with as much splash as Aspen. For the past three years the resort has hosted ESPN's Winter X Games, an engagement now committed through 2007. Staged at Buttermilk, one of four ski areas in the Aspen area, the three-day event features snowmobiles flying through the air, motorcycle riders doing flips on snow, girlish snowboarders capturing big, big air.

The events are absurd, amazing, and appealing, altogether different and fun.

But the pairing of Aspen and the Winter X Games at first seems odd--kind of like your 60-year-old mother getting a tattoo of a pit bull on her shoulder. After all, Aspen didn't even allow snowboards at its flagship mountain until three years ago.

Mayor Helen Klanderud credits the Games, and their crowd of 50,000 visitors in January, with having the same kind of excitement that marked the town when she first arrived in 1971--when ski racer Jean Claude Killy thrilled race fans, and Colorado's mountain ski resorts were considered young and hip. "I see this as the same thing, only this is the 21st century," says Klanderud. "This is the same kind of excitement that Aspen enjoyed in the early days of skiing."

But problems in Aspen and other marquee resort towns run deeper than what can be...