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By
Craig
Dostie
In the last few years, backcountry skiing
has basked in the limelight of ski in-
dustry attention. Unlike the worldwide
ski industry that has been reporting no
growth for the past decade, based on
participation surveys and products
sold, sales of equipment used for
earning your turns has continued to grow.
If backcountry skiers are a subset of the
overall skier and snowboarder populations,
and there is essentially no growth, how much
longer can interest in backcountry skiing
and associated equipment sales grow? Put
another way, what percentage of the overall
skier and rider population will be willing to
pay for their fun with sweat?
Back when the idea of creating a magazine
devoted to backcountry skiing first entered
my mind, the foundation of my business
plan was a simple but unproven belief that
at least 10 percent of all skiers would be
willing to hike for their turns. At the time,
the mid-1980s, there were 14 million skiers in
the United States, according to the
Wall Street
Journal
. In my mind that meant the poten-
tial market size was more than one million
strong, and in the near term I guessed there
were around 100,000 active or easily convert-
ed backcountry skiers. That was all the justifi-
cation I needed to pursue their attention.
Thirty years later the number of backcoun-
try skiers has swollen to nearly double my
original estimate of potential participants,
depending on how you interpret the data. Ac-
cording to SIA’s “Downhill Consumer Intel-
ligence Report,” in the preliminary Discovery
Phase they make clear the size of the U.S.
ski market, which includes snowboarders, is
“remarkably static” during the past 35 years.
In the last 16 years, the average number of
annual sliders was 12 million. Two years ago
SIA had numbers indicating there were 2.7
million telemarkers, and while I know that
isn’t true, if one equates telemark with back-
country, then the number is probably as true
as the average 12 million downhillers. In that
case, backcountry skiers comprise close to 20
percent of slope dopes in America.
Whether or not that is the actual number
isn’t really the issue being raised here. Rather,
when the worldwide ski market is more or
less flat, how much longer can we expect to
see growth in a segment that is but a subset
of the larger whole, which hasn’t significantly
How long can interest in backcountry skiing
keep growing?
I
Inside
Outdoor
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Winter
2015
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