Becoming Earl

 

 

first saw Earl Holding on a crisp and radiant morning in March 1999.  As I walked toward the base of the new ski lift on the day of the first running of the Snowbasin Women’s Downhill course during the national alpine championships, a tall, distinguished-looking gentleman with thick, carefully barbered white hair stood outside the VIP tent with a smiling older woman with wild curls.  I’d seen a single photograph of Earl again and again, the one press shot he seemed to have released in perpetuity.  I looked at the man and my heart raced.  This had to be Earl.  His wife, Carol, had one arm in a sling; she must have broken her arm—skiing?  I knew she was vital: she ran a marathon at 50.

Though I’m a photographer as well as a writer, I did not pull out a telephoto and begin to shoot portraits.  I did not walk right up and introduce myself.  I’d been trying to interview Earl Holding for almost two years—to ask him to tell the story of Utah’s Snowbasin land exchange in his own words, to urge him to speak about his dreams, his legacy.  People inflamed by his actions had spit words like “evil” and “lies” and “treachery” when they talked about the billionaire businessman’s demand that National Forest land at the base of his ski resort be given to him in trade, to privatize and develop.  His antagonists—schoolteachers and nurses, lawyers and landowners, stay-at-home mothers and Snowbasin ski patrollers—charged that he and his elite political connections had used the coming 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics as an excuse, that the state’s congressional delegation willingly lied to achieve Earl’s ends. 

How could I broach these accusations on casual meeting?

I’ve interviewed hundreds of people over decades of book projects, but they wanted to tell me their stories.  Though I remained as intent as ever on untangling his role in shaping the destiny of my home territory, I didn’t have it in me to confront Earl.  If this reclusive self-made man were so adamant about his privacy, so certain he wanted to be a distant presence, then, by God, I would let him be a myth.  I am conflict-averse.  Try as I might, I am not Michael Moore.

So I walked over to the Forest Service yurt and chatted with my ranger and scientist friends—and watched Earl.  Within moments, he strolled over and began working the crowd.   “Hello, I’m Earl Holding.”  Soft-spoken.  He shook hands with each uniformed ranger type. 

He came to me. 

            He was physically impressive.  Imposingly tall and handsome in a clean, smooth way, he loomed over me.  He had that terrific shock of white hair—considerably more than remains on my own balding head, though Earl is a generation older.  I knew he could be ruthless, but his manner and voice had the same softness as the dinner rolls he serves at his Little America hotels.   His blue eyes were the opposite of penetrating.  They pulled you in, but wherever they took you was private—a still and unreadable pool.

“I’m Earl Holding.” 

“And I’m Steve Trimble.” 

He looked at me quizzically.  “And who are you with?” 

“I’m a freelance writer, and I’m working on a book about the mountain.”

            Did he remember my letters and calls—all unanswered?  Had any of his minions said anything about me?  I couldn’t tell from the slight narrowing of his brows.  I simply may have seen his leeriness of the press.    

He moved on.  When it came time for the ceremonies after the race, a line of dignitaries and elders trooped out into the finish area.  Bernhard Russi, the charismatic Swiss Olympic downhiller and designer of the new Olympic racecourse.  Foresters uniformed in dusky green Gore-Tex, attempting to stand firm for the American people as Earl’s desires crystallized into inevitability.  Ogden businesspeople from the little city below the mountain.  Ski racers, with their athlete’s distillation of goofy youth, jockiness, and smiles that flash with the high voltage of orthodontic triumph and impending celebrity.  Salt Lake Olympics staff humbled by months of international scandal.

And standing before them, Earl Holding, owner of Snowbasin and Sun Valley, a member of the Salt Lake Olympic Committee until just a month before, when he was forced to resign because of his conflicts of interest.  The Big Dreamer in a crowd full of dreamers.  A Taos Indian woman pressed into service by the Ogden Olympic boosters performed a small blessing and gave Earl a pipe and a fistful of multi-colored ribbons.  She moved back; Earl remained, as he grasped this braid of color and delivered a short welcoming speech. 

He thanked God and Bernhard Russi.  Then, he quickly moved into his more comfortable realm of numbers, reverting to his engineer’s soul, telling us how many towers the new lifts had, how much construction had been accomplished.  I photographed, burning through film, trying to capture the soul of the man in my camera, exhilarated to see him in the flesh at last.  Slightly crazed, frustrated by how many things I wanted to do at once, as Earl finished speaking I set aside my camera and took out my journal.

 

The Snowbasin land exchange has become an emblematic story of power and land in America.  Earl Holding holds the power.  Citizens band together to fight him.  In theory, the mountain—Mount Ogden—stands above the fray, but privatization can destroy the wildness of the place, corporatize the charm of the beloved recreational paradise, compromise its ecological integrity, and limit access to what once were public lands.

            In 1984, Earl bought Snowbasin, the bankrupt ski area above Ogden, Utah.  He already owned Sun Valley Ski Resort in Idaho.  He owned the oil company, Sinclair, that generated the money required to follow his dreams wherever they led.  In truth, Earl had everything he needed to begin turning the old-fashioned ski area into a mega-resort.  Enormous wealth to bankroll development, political connections from a lifetime of insider status in his home state, drive and ambition.   He lacked one thing: full ownership, for though he acquired nearly 10,000 acres of land around the mountain, the ski area base and the ski runs themselves lay within Wasatch-Cache National Forest.  Earl wanted that land to develop, to control, to own.

And so Snowbasin became the scene for a dozen years of conflict when Earl asked the Forest Service to trade him the base of the mountain; in exchange, he would buy land elsewhere to add to the forest.  This wasn’t just a line drawn around random, anonymous woods.  Earl was asking to privatize public land held dear by the citizens who had saved this high mountain basin from overgrazing in the 1930s.  Utah’s business community and politicians supported him—but the people rose up in anguish to fight him. The grassroots communities surrounding the mountain fought the loss of their common heritage.  The national environmental community fought Earl’s certainty that the mountain was his to subdivide.  The Clinton administration fought his easy assumption that money and privilege entitled him to special treatment and exemption from regulatory oversight. 

When Salt Lake City became the designated host for the 2002 Winter Olympics, with Snowbasin the venue for the alpine speed events, the stakes increased sharply.  Earl Holding used the Olympics as his hook.  The Utah congressional delegation, led by Congressman Jim Hansen and Senator Orrin Hatch, began legislative maneuvers to give Earl what he wanted.  These elected officials serving the billionaire’s whims attracted national attention, a satellite story to the bribery scandals exposed as the Olympics approached.  The Snowbasin Land Exchange Bill became one nut in the legislative shell game played in Congress in the months leading up to the 1996 presidential election.

As I followed this story, tracing how power determines the fate of land we love, doing my best to penetrate behind closed doors into murky decision space, I found myself in a surprising place.  My wife and I fell in love with a redrock mesa in southern Utah—a mesa for sale.  We concocted a scheme that allowed us to purchase the land by splitting the acreage—becoming land developers ourselves on a small scale.

I’d never owned land—except for a tiny urban lot beneath our Salt Lake City home—and the notion of owning a wild mesa made me uncomfortable.  I began to look for ways to live up to this new relationship I had with a landscape I had always loved fiercely.  How could I—a newly invested taxpaying citizen in Wayne County, Utah—engage with my community within the realities of small-town America?  How do any of us engage with our neighbors—to successfully plan for change and wisely welcome the future?

Caught between dreams, we are all greedy, and we all are generous.  How do we create a structure for our communities that expresses our altruism more than our self-interest?   How do we give each other the benefit of the doubt—offer at least a moment of grace before we move on to assumptions and judgments and dismissal? 

In Wayne County, locals dismiss me first as a wealthy outsider, a second-home owner, a second-rate citizen.  It takes years to get past that, and it takes consistent open-hearted behavior and good listening on my part to make much progress.

As a lifelong environmentalist, I still hold my beliefs fiercely.  But in telling Earl’s story and in confronting my new identity as a property owner, I’ve found cracks in the armor of my assumptions.  I have been startled.  I have been horrified.

On some levels, I am Earl—we all are Earl.

 

You know these places we cherish—the fields, the lakeshore, the park, the riverway.  The homey local ski area.  They ground our lives and give our communities everyday moments of beauty.  You know these threats.  You know the hunger to speak out, to save the countryside that we remember from childhood or the wild places we discovered in times of need.

            Last night, your city council voted to turn over the last woods along the creek to developers.   There’s a heron rookery in those cottonwoods, but there is also money to be made.   And your beach?  New owners have closed access to South Cove, where families from both sides of town have picnicked and played for three generations.  The largest coal company in the world wants to strip-mine Long Ridge—that precious public land on your horizon shielding critical winter range for the healthiest deer herd in the state.  The farm that softens the views of marching subdivisions where the highway leaves town—the one with the fading mural of the black cat on an old barn?   It’s for sale. 

            Each year, land trusts work frantically to preserve open space, wildlife habitat, historic sites, farmland, and rural lifestyles as these scenarios play out, as sprawl slides shut our windows of opportunity—at the rate of one square mile of America lost to development every 2 1/2 hours.  Their preservation tool of choice is the perpetual conservation easement, allowing private landowners to permanently restrict development while continuing to own and use their land in ways consistent with conservation values.

            Each year, conservation organizations inventory America’s most endangered landscapes.  The celebrity wildlands lead their lists: Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; Greater Yellowstone; Utah’s Redrock Canyonlands; Minnesota’s Boundary Waters; Florida’s Everglades and Big Cypress Swamp—all perennially threatened with incremental or catastrophic loss.   Fragile rivers follow—overextended or achingly pristine: major watersheds like the Rio Grande, the Susquehanna, the Tennessee, and neighborhood streams like the Little Miami in Ohio, the Trinity in Texas, the Big Sunflower in Mississippi.

            Vernacular landscapes groan under the weight of haphazard development:  historic Concord and Lexington outside of Boston; the corridor along State Highway 99 in California’s San Joaquin Valley; the Blue Ridge Parkway viewshed in Virginia; Philadelphia’s Schuylkill Marsh; Lower Marks Creek in North Carolina.

            Each of us chooses our place, our issue.  My stories in this book come from Utah, but the challenge turns up everywhere in America as our open spaces shrink under the combined weight of avarice, inattention, and denial.  How do we live ethically on land as it shifts underneath us—values changing, growth exploding, money and politics wielding brute force?  I’m looking for answers.

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We can feel these tensions in values thrumming across America as we fill in our open space while the Twenty-First Century begins to reel away behind us. 

In southern Utah, in redrock canyons etched into the earth in every direction from the mesa where my family and I have sunk our roots, the drama lags by a beat, for so much country remains wild.  Old-timers and newcomers squabble about wilderness and sneer at each other—while corporate multinationals swoop in backstage and hijack the story and the land. 

While we fiddle, we trade “community” for “property.”  We trade “home” and “neighborhood” for “resort,” “relationship” for “recreation.”  I fear for what such wholesale trading across America will do to the spirits of our communities, to the richness of our lives.  We know we all are a little corrupt; we mistrust and resent the Other; we fear change.   Rome is burning—the vitality of natural landscapes diminishing daily—and we must confront the crisis.

Where do we draw lines?  How do we find common ground and work together?

What can we do?

This book—the story of a tycoon and of how we create and use power, the story of how we choose to place ourselves as individuals, as pilgrims, in a community, on the Earth—begins with an Olympic race on a ski mountain in northern Utah, with a man of immense wealth telling Americans what he was going to do with their land and proceeding to do it.  The story ends in the redrock canyons of southern Utah, in Wayne County, with a community of citizens pondering together how to respond to change.

We draw our lines, Earl Holding and I, making choices determined by everything we believe, our stories shaped by the full arcs of our lives.  The stakes are high, and the land’s future will rest on these choices that balance ownership and citizenship, desire and restraint—choices made by us all.