Buzz or bust

It is a bright day on chairlift three at Mammoth Mountain, and the sun glares off the bizarre bald stripe running up one side of Mark Finkbiner’s shaggy head when he finally turns to scan the lift ticket of a skier glowering at him from under a Gucci cap.

“I asked my housemate to give me a haircut so I could get a second job as a waiter,” Finkbiner, 23, soberly explains as he glances at the impatient skier’s ticket. “See, I’ve already learned a valuable lesson this winter: Don’t get haircuts when you are drunk.”

For as long as there have been mountain resorts, there have been ski bums. Since the 1960s and 1970s, when recreational skiing exploded, resorts have relied on seasonal employees to serve lunches, sweep floors and help customers on and off lifts.

The work is demeaning, boring and -- with perks such as free ski passes and subsidized housing -- enormously popular among young people who are intensely into snowboarding, partying or, most likely, a lot of both.

But the ski bum is in crisis. Escalating costs in resort towns require most bums to juggle at least two jobs, an affront to the snow-slacker ideal that eschews timecards -- except tallies of hours spent boarding. Latino immigrants, who expect less pay and often prove more reliable than drifters and itinerant college students, increasingly fill entry-level jobs.

Globalization has reached the snowy peaks, and a lifestyle built on avoiding real life for unfettered access to powder, kegs and flirtation is fading.

On busy days, Mammoth Mountain, in the eastern Sierra Nevada, funnels up to 18,000 skiers through the hands of $8.40-an-hour employees such as Finkbiner. After working the lift line from 8 to 5, he and his three housemates retire to their subsidized three-bedroom apartment, one of 500 that the resort constructed amid pricey condos to house seasonal employees. They pay about $650 a month in rent.

Within hours marijuana smoke sweetens the air. As the evening drags on, a sleep-starved neighbor three times stumbles over orphaned snowboards and ski clothes to ask the group to quiet down. Finkbiner, mid-sized and moon-faced, slouches in a chair, sips from a beer can that will soon join dozens of empty cousins on the floor and looks conspiratorially through drooped lids.

“Don’t tell anyone,” he says to a reporter, “but I’ve escaped from the law. I skipped out of Pennsylvania after getting a DUI and swearing at a cop,” he says, then giggles. “I told my mom I was coming here to grow up.”

Vocational aimlessness remains a badge of honor in the mountains. Only one-fifth of Mammoth Mountain’s 2,500 employees work year-round. The National Ski Areas Assn. estimates U.S. resorts hire 150,000 to 200,000 seasonal employees each year. Bums come from as far as Australia and New Zealand to a haven that expects little and promises much in the way of youthful diversions: first descents in virgin snow, nightclubs and, according to a 2003 Skiing magazine article, “lonely divorcees” on the prowl.

Rusty Gregory, Mammoth Mountain’s chief executive and chairman, relishes his bum past. He landed here 26 years ago intending to spend one season as a lift operator before entering law school. Jack Copeland, the resort’s human resources director, stopped by in 1973 to figure out what to do with his life. (And Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean bummed in Aspen.)

Finkbiner’s future, however, is now. Around midnight, he and his crew zip into fleece and pull on poorly laced boots to slog 30 minutes through ice and subfreezing temperatures to a bar where the come-on is “Lingerie Night.” Young women in synthetic wisps and feather boas dance on tables for an overflow crowd of sweaty gawkers.

One dancer awaiting her turn, Cheyenne Hendersched, 21, grasps her boyfriend of two months, Carl Grobner, as if terrified by her decolletage. “This is the seventh most frequent place to find a girl and fall in love,” Grobner says authoritatively, although he is uncertain who certifies such statistics.

“It’s flattering to be asked to dress like this,” Hendersched says. She came from Southern California to Mammoth at the start of the season to get away from her parents, she says, to “be on my own.”

Grobner, also a Southern Californian, warily eyes the men eyeing Hendersched. The next day, he intends to call in sick at his restaurant job and go boarding. But for bums such as Grobner and Finkbiner, who has boarded 50 days this season, the free pass is only a small part of the draw. There are women. And “you can be anyone you want up here,” Grobner says.

Peace, love no more

When Mammoth Lakes business owner Tom Cage, 44, moved to the area in 1976 as a breather between high school and college, he worked part time and skied or partied the rest. Then the baby boom generation rose to financial security during the 1980s and went skiing in droves.

Prices of homes and condos took off in the West’s destination resorts, including Mammoth, where a typical two-bedroom condo goes for $400,000, up from less than $100,000 five years ago. Intrawest Corp., one of the world’s largest resort companies and a minority owner of Mammoth Mountain, attributes 42% of its $1-billion 2003 revenue to real estate.

Meanwhile, the lack of affordable housing for workers who service second-home owners and vacationers has polarized communities from Lake Tahoe to Vail, Colo. Vail’s mayor, Rob Ford, was forced to resign in 1999 after failing to combat escalating property prices. Throughout the West, disagreements over the impact of ski areas and neighboring real estate developments on the environment have sparked backlashes, from lawsuits to arson.

“There is a new anger around here,” Ford says. “Thirty years ago, college graduates came here and put up with menial jobs because the future held enormous potential. The potential isn’t as great now, and people moving here are working two menial jobs a day just to make rent. It’s not as much fun.”

The search for workers who, unlike Grobner, won’t call in sick after a big snowfall inspires resorts to aggressively recruit English-speaking employees from abroad. According to the National Ski Areas Assn., four-month visas issued to Australian and New Zealand university students, who are on summer break during the U.S. ski season, have increased more than 300% since 1998, to nearly 8,000 in 2002.

Many of the them work alongside Americans, interacting with customers; a growing number of Latinos without such documents work out of sight -- and live out of town.

“Many of these immigrants have to live over an hour away from where they work,” says Jeff Berman of the Colorado-based Ski Area Citizens Coalition, a group fighting ski area expansion. “Subsidized housing is reserved for college students taking a winter off.”

The out-of-towners

Mammoth Mountain strives for a diverse workforce, says Laurey Carlson, who oversees international recruitment. “But we are also looking for the most qualified workforce.” In addition to Australia and New Zealand, the resort targets Eastern Europe and Latin America.

The Latino immigrant influx has radically changed the cultures of ski towns, longtime residents say. Community newspapers in Vail and other snowy burgs regularly print letters urging authorities to arrest and deport undocumented workers. Angry rebuttals decry racism.

“A real disillusionment has leached some of the glamour out of the ski bum lifestyle,” says Sarah Hautzinger, an anthropology professor at Colorado College who studies ski resort towns. “ ‘Peace and love’ has been replaced by ‘get out of my town.’ ”

As North Lake Boulevard passes through King’s Beach, Calif., along the northern shore of Lake Tahoe, restaurants with menus in Spanish jostle with ski shops and stores selling crystals to tourists.

The town is 70% Latino, up from a few families 15 years ago, says Christine Ballin, executive director of a local immigrant-rights group. As many as 10,000 Latino immigrants live in the Tahoe area, 95% of them illegally, drawn by jobs in construction and at the half-dozen resorts dotting the area.

Roberto Salazar, 26, arrived a month ago, leaving his wife in Oaxaca, Mexico, and paying $4,000 for help to illegally enter the country. He earns about $850 a month as a construction worker and spends about $350 on rent and food.

Every morning he and about 30 other men gather at a convenience store, waiting for day-job offers to frame homes and tend yards. Salazar’s hands are huge and hard, and when he uses them to explain his dream -- to earn enough money to build a restaurant in Mexico -- they appear old against his baby-cheeked face. The men would prefer warm indoor jobs at the ski areas, Salazar says, but such opportunities are rare. The resorts pursue immigrants for janitorial and kitchen work because they stay put, says Salazar, and because undocumented workers are afraid to ask for time off or make any other demands.

“I get calls from the resorts all the time,” says Martha Gomez, who provides volunteer legal services for illegal immigrants in the Tahoe area. “Even if you have white college students coming to work, they don’t stick around.”

And most of the local Latinos don’t call in sick after a big snowfall, at least in part because they don’t ski. “Oh, no,” Salazar says in Spanish, laughing. “That’s for gringos. Rich gringos.”

Always a bum?

Tom CAGE never left Mammoth Lakes and never attended college. Instead, he eventually bought a small ski shop with a friend, then some property and then another store. Now he’s a multimillionaire, as are many of the ski bums from the ‘60s and ‘70s who stuck around and snatched up real estate. “I bought my house in 1982 for $114,000,” Cage says. “Today, you couldn’t get a storage unit here for $114,000.”

He skis only about 10 days a year, down from an annual high of 100-plus. But he owns four ski equipment and clothing stores, helps raise two children, and knows everyone in town.

“There is a real community here,” he says. “I think that’s why I came in the first place. This mountain has never disappointed me.”

If clueless young adults eventually become the responsible, mature people they pretend to be on job applications, is the time spent bumming wasted?

Finkbiner’s new haircut has apparently proven insufficient motivation to actually apply for a second job that might cut into his play time. The night after “Lingerie Night,” he goes to a different bar and offers to buy a drink for every girl he passes before confiding: “I gave the bartender a credit card that’s not going to work when they swipe it. What happens when you do that?” He says later that he will return home in March to deal with his DUI.

A few doors away, Hendersched is dancing again, this time just for fun, in a miniskirt and knee-high pleather boots. Her boyfriend is nowhere to be seen. She sways to the music, then suddenly falters, as if her party girl persona has slipped like an ill-fitting mask. For a beat, she freezes and stares at the writhing masses, all bums, convincing herself that she belongs here. Then, slowly, she begins to dance again.

Charles Duhigg is a Times staff writer. He can be reached at [email protected].