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ENVIRONMENT Best National Environmental Awards @E;LJKIPËJ Honor Resorts and New )'(*$)'(+ J<8JFE ‘Hero of Sustainability’ BY GREG DITRINCO, EDITOR, SKI MAGAZINE KI Magazine has honored three ski areas— Award, designed to honor a person Steamboat, Colorado; Arapahoe Basin, making a difference. Here is a closer SColorado; and Proctor Academy, New look at the recipients of the awards. Hampshire—with the 2014 Golden Eagle Awards for Proctor Academy, a private Environmental Excellence. Additionally, SKI named school in New Hampshire, won Maura Olivos of Alta Ski Area in Utah as the inaugural the Golden Eagle Award in the small ski area category. Proctor “Hero of Sustainability” honoree for 2014. has adopted a school-wide Environmental Mission Statement, The Golden Eagle Awards, overseen in a partnership between which includes purchasing all of its electricity from renewable SKI and NSAA, are the ski industry’s most prestigious honor for energy sources. The Academy aggressively applied its mission recognizing resort environmental programs and projects. to the operation of its competition-oriented Proctor Ski Area, “When SKI founded this program in 1993, we wanted to which includes alpine, Nordic jumping, and cross-country trails. encourage sustainability and recognize resorts for their com- Proctor invested $376,000 in upgrades, including a switch from mitment and proven results to environmental programs,” said diesel to electric powered compressors, the purchase and installa- Andy Bigford, SKI’s publisher and the general manager of Active tion of 21 HKD SV10 Impulse Tower Guns and a Turbocristal Interest Media’s Mountain Group. “It’s gratifying to see how far Fan Gun, and the addition of six additional GE PF400 Power the industry has come in 20 years, particularly with today’s col- Flood Lights, bringing the total to 42. The result was a total lective focus on addressing climate change.” reduction of 140 tons of CO e, equivalent to the annual emis- 2 The resort awards are divided into three categories: small sions from 26.5 passenger cars. (fewer than 200,000 annual skier/boarder visits), medium Arapahoe Basin in Colorado took the top environmen- (200,000 to 500,000 visits) and large (more than 500,000 tal honors in the medium-sized ski area category for its signif- visits). For 2014, SKI also launched the Hero of Sustainability icant waste reduction efforts. Arapahoe Basin is a founding member of the ski industry’s Climate HALLEY O’BRIEN Challenge, and has set a goal of reducing its overall GHG emissions by 3 percent below 2009/10 baseline levels by 2020. While A-Basin has implemented signif- icant energy-savings initiatives to help meet that goal, it has also demonstrated that its robust waste-reduction program made a huge difference in reducing its carbon footprint. As a direct result of the ski area’s composting and recycling pro- grams, A-Basin has kept 115,000 pounds of waste out of landfills, resulting in a Accepting the 2014 Golden Eagle Awards on behalf of their resorts are, from left, greenhouse gas emission reduction of 57 Doug Allen, Steamboat; Alan Henceroth, Arapahoe Basin; and Charles Santry, HKD MTCO e (metric tons of carbon dioxide Snowmakers, who accepted the award for Proctor Academy. Maura Olivos, right, of 2 the Alta Environmental Center, is the first recipient of SKI Magazine’s new Hero of equivalent emissions), or nearly a third Sustainability Award based on her significant contributions to the ski area’s envi- of the ski area’s reduction target for the ronmental practices. Climate Challenge. 26 | NSAA Journal | SUMMER 2014 w w w.nsaa. org NSAA Summer 2014 prepressed v6a.indd 26 7/3/14 4:19 PM