It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

The Forest Service and the National Ski Area Association have a long and enduring partnership. For decades, we’ve come together to manage national forest land for the benefit and enjoyment of Americans through outdoor recreation. The Forest Service is deeply committed to connecting all Americans to the outdoors, and we depend on partners like you.

Value of Outdoor Recreation

The lands we manage, the national forests and grasslands, are a great value for the American people for all kinds of benefits and services—for outdoor recreation, for carbon sequestration, for timber and grazing, for clean air and clean water, for fish and wildlife habitat, and for so much more. These lands are part of a broader public trust unmatched anywhere in the world—roughly 635 million acres of federal land, about a third of our nation’s land area. These lands were placed in public trust thanks to visionaries like President Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and others who founded America’s conservation movement.

That public trust carries responsibility. It also brings opportunities to work with partners like you to make investments in the land. Nowhere is the value of those investments more important than when it comes to outdoor recreation. The Forest Service’s latest National Visitor Use Monitoring Program data (for fiscal years 2012–2016) showed about 147 million recreational visits per year on the National Forest System. That was thanks in good part to you—to investments in outdoor recreation infrastructure by NSAA and other Forest Service partners.

In fact, recreation accounts for the greatest use of National Forest System lands and the greatest contribution to the U.S. economy from these lands. As visitor spending ripples through the U.S. economy, it adds roughly $10.3 billion to the gross domestic product. It also sustains about 143,000 full- and part-time jobs, mostly in gateway and rural communities. That $10.3-billion return dwarfs the $2.4 billion it costs each year to manage the National Forest System, including outlays for roads and facilities. Outdoor recreation is a sound national economic investment.

Outdoor recreation also represents an investment in the health and well-being of our citizens, including our children. More than 60 percent of our visitors to the national forests and grasslands come for some kind of physical activity, such as hiking and skiing. America spends trillions of dollars annually on crisis medical health care that is often associated with overweight, obesity, and physical inactivity. By investing in outdoor recreation on the national forests and grasslands, we are lowering the nation’s long-term health care costs.

We are also building knowledge. Every visit to a national forest or grassland is a learning opportunity associated with fun. That’s especially true for children, who account for about one in six visits. Children learn a lot while doing things in the woods; often, they learn about the woods themselves. They learn how ecosystems work, for example; they see the effects of disturbances, such as wildfires and beetle outbreaks. Outdoor recreation can help teach environmental literacy. Recreation is a portal for understanding and caring about natural resources and public lands.

That is why the Forest Service has made it a national priority to enhance outdoor recreation opportunities, improve access, and sustain infrastructure. Year-round recreational use of the National Forest System generates far more jobs and economic activity than any other use, and our ability to meet our goal of serving people depends on partners like you. Partners like the ski areas have skills, equipment, and facilities that allow visitors to experience their public lands in appealing and exciting ways, getting more Americans to enjoy the outdoors. Vail Resort’s “Epic Discovery” program is an excellent example of this.

Value of Ski Areas

Again: the main way that Americans now use their national forests and grasslands is for outdoor recreation, and skiing is one of the most popular physical activities and by far the most popular winter use. Of the 473 ski areas in the United States, 122 are on the national forests, including many of the nation’s largest, most spectacular, and most visited ski areas. We get roughly half of the 57 million skier visits nationwide each year.

All those skier visits generate tremendous economic benefits. Sixteen percent of our visitors each year come for the downhill skiing, and they typically spend more than others, contributing about $2.9 billion to local economies and supporting about 41,200 full- and part-time jobs. That’s comparable to the number of jobs and amount of economic activity generated by forest products on the National Forest System.

So it’s pretty obvious that our partnership with the ski industry contributes tremendous value to the American people. Your activities account for a big part of the way we serve the American people, and the Forest Service is important in turn to the national ski industry.

Taking Home Memories

Whatever we do, we’ve got to make sure that our visitors get what they come for so they keep coming back. In my view, what brings people out into the woods and makes them want to come back are the memories. Most people will always remember catching their first fish or seeing their first bear—or first learning how to ski. Often, ski resorts create the first or the main memories people have of their public lands. People will always remember particular ski trips and ski slopes. People come to the national forests for memories like these.

Our job, as I see it, is to make sure that people take home the memories they come for. That includes furnishing the services they need—the roads, the slopes, the facilities, and everything else. It also includes furnishing reasonable access to all kinds of opportunities for outdoor adventure, and that includes newer sports popular with younger generations. It includes using the infrastructure of ski areas to help meet recreational demand year-round.

But above all, it means protecting the air and water, the habitat for wildlife, the splendid scenery, and the naturalness of the landscape. When people get what they come for … when they take home good memories … part of what they remember are the outdoor settings, including the naturalness of the ski areas on national forest land. They will cherish those settings and want to protect them. On some level, at least, they will come to support conservation.

So, as I see it, our conservation job is directly connected to our job of delivering opportunities for outdoor recreation. Both the Forest Service and the NSAA are in the people and visitor experience business.

At the Forest Service, we put it this way: We are values based … purpose driven … and relationship focused. Our core values are conservation … service to the American people … and interdependence with partners like you. Another core value is diversity … diversity of people and cultures … diversity of perspectives and ideas … diversity of experiences and ecosystems. And safety underpins everything we do, both in our ski areas and across the National Forest System.

Relationships are at the core of who we are, where we are experienced by our partners and by the people we serve as trustworthy, caring, respectful, inclusive, curious, and responsive.

Opportunities Ahead

All this gives us opportunities to work together in the years ahead. This is an exciting time for the ski industry, a time of expanding recreational opportunities through new four-season activities. The Forest Service is working with ski areas to go beyond snow. Through year-round recreation, we can give the people we serve more recreational choices while also creating additional jobs. We can expand our pool of visitors by offering new kinds of recreation activities in all four seasons.

However, the ski industry faces challenges such as the replacement of aging infrastructure, as well as corporate consolidation. It is also a challenging time for the Forest Service. Our budgets do not allow us to fully meet the demand for the services we provide, and our current administrative capacity does not fully support ski area permit administration. I understand that some ski areas do not have a dedicated permit administrator. The permit administrators we have are experiencing high turnover rates and would benefit from increased training.

You rely on Forest Service staff to administer permits, process proposals, and take them through the NEPA process. Retaining part of ski area fees would go a long way toward improving our capacity to administer ski area permits, and the Forest Service fully supports the Ski Area Fee Retention Act.

However, the outcome of fee retention legislation is uncertain. We have therefore moved to make capacity improvements by modernizing our special uses program to create a more predictable business environment and a more efficient workforce.

The Mountain Resort Team in the Rocky Mountain Region is one such effort—a strategic investment in planning capacity for ski area projects. The MRT piloted a new model of centralized service within the ski area program. The team’s processes reduced the number of days to decision by 69 percent over the national average. The concept is now proven, and we are evaluating how best to extend it to other regions.

In the absence of nationally available funds, other regions are moving to establish winter sports teams of their own, following the example of the Mountain Resort Team. These other teams are meeting local needs for administrative capacity beyond planning. The teams are being funded locally and through partnership with the industry.

These advances collectively represent a shift towards greater agency capacity within the ski area program. Through our partnership, we can work together to meet our mutual needs. I welcome and invite the industry’s thoughts on this, and I look forward to further discussion.

Another way of increasing our administrative capacity is by improving our processes. As part of that, we have proposed a revised rule for meeting our obligations under NEPA.

Make no mistake: the Forest Service remains firmly committed to abiding by the letter and the spirit of all environmental laws, including NEPA.

But we periodically review the way we carry out the law. The last such review and revision took place in 2008. After more than 10 years, another revision is due.

Among other reforms, our proposed new rule would:

• focus our environmental assessments on their core purpose in accordance with NEPA, saving us time in accomplishing our work, including issuing special use permits;
• tailor the amount of our environmental analysis to the scope of our projects, reducing redundancy in our analysis for similar work under similar conditions—and again saving time;
• adopt proven practices and apply lessons learned from our own experiences and those of other agencies, for even more time saved; and
• add new categorical exclusions to improve our ability to maintain and repair the roads, trails, campgrounds, and other facilities that people use to enjoy their national forests and grasslands, including ski areas. 

As we published the proposed new rule last June and received more than 100,000 comments. The comment period closed last August, and we are working to finalize the rule based on those inputs. The federal Council on Environmental Quality has just proposed an update to its own rule for carrying out NEPA. It is consistent with our own proposed rule, and we are finalizing our rule accordingly.

Another opportunity for ski areas is to lease additional administrative sites. The 2018 Farm Bill grants the Forest Service the authority to lease certain administrative sites. The ski areas could benefit from the new leasing authority by adding acreage in support of their operations, and the Forest Service could benefit from leasing the sites to provide additional public services. The agency has drafted a proposed rule that is currently under review. We anticipate publishing the proposed rule this summer.

Wildland Fire Management

The Forest Service has safety as one of our five core values, and I know that ski areas share safety as a core value. Safety applies to fire preparedness for ski areas, especially given the growing severity of wildfires and the rising longevity of fire seasons in the West.

As you know, our wildland firefighters in the United States are world-class—there are no better. In managing wildfires, safety is out first priority—safety of responders and safety of the people we serve, followed by protecting homes, communities, businesses, infrastructure, and natural resources. We deeply appreciate your shared concern for public safety and resource protection.

One way of protecting people and resources from wildfire is by working together for the health of the land. Our obligation as an agency is to maintain and restore healthy, resilient ecosystems that can deliver a full range of goods, values, and services from the nation’s forests and grasslands. Many of these lands are healthy, but many are not.

Many forests are unhealthy because they are overgrown and overly homogeneous. That makes them more susceptible to catastrophic fires and outbreaks of insects and disease. We are working to improve forest conditions through active management so that forests can resist rising levels of stresses and disturbances in the decades to come. We are using all the tools of active management, including mechanical thinning and prescribed fire.

The ski areas have been a big part of that. As you know, temporary fire closures affect recreation opportunities and local economies. We appreciate the ski industry’s efforts to address the issue of summer operations in connection with fire preparedness and mitigation projects like hazardous fuels treatments.

The Forest Service values the opportunity to work with you on these issues. We have opportunities to work together on forest health projects that protect ski area facilities and nearby communities from the risk of fire and that minimize the effects of insect attack. We also have opportunities to plan together to protect ski area facilities in the event of a wildfire. Together, I am confident that we can take measures and apply operational standards to support local decisions to maintain continuity of operations for four-season outdoor recreation.

One growing area of opportunity is called Shared Stewardship. Shared Stewardship builds on authorities we obtained under the 2018 omnibus bill, such as new categorical exclusions for treatments to improve forest conditions. Our expanded Good Neighbor Authority lets us incorporate roadwork into our good neighbor agreements, allowing for road maintenance and reconstruction.

The omnibus bill also includes a long-term “fire funding fix” that will stop the long-term shifting of resources from nonfire programs like outdoor recreation to wildland fire management. By stabilizing our budgets and our operating environment for outdoor recreation, the fire funding fix will eventually give us more capacity for special use permit administration.

Shared Stewardship builds on all this by giving us an opportunity to match the scale of our work to the scale of the fire risks we face. Today’s megafires can travel for many miles to threaten homes, communities, and other values. The entire area at risk is called a fireshed, and scientists can now map entire firesheds, including all the federal, state, private, and other parcels of land that make up a fireshed, all of which contribute to fire risk.

We can use that information to forecast what might happen if we put various kinds of treatments here or there. By planning at the right scale based on outcomes we all want for shared landscapes, we can place cost-effective treatments to achieve shared goals. The same Shared Stewardship principle can be applied to nonfire risks, such as bark beetle epidemics or the spread of insects and disease.

Every state has a forest action plan that can help us coordinate fuels and forest health treatments across planning areas that span jurisdictional boundaries. The state is positioned to convene stakeholders across broad landscapes to evaluate resources and to agree on cross-jurisdictional planning areas. Working in collaboration with the states, these stakeholder groups can use our tools to assess risks and alternatives for managing the risk, and they can then set priorities for investments that will bring the most bang for the buck.

Through Shared Stewardship agreements with the states, we can engage communities and stakeholders in using the right tools at the right time in the right places at the right scale. We have signed more than a dozen such agreements, with more still to come, and we invite the ski areas and the entire winter sports community to get involved.

Value of Partnership

In closing, I want to stress the value of our partnership with the ski industry. We share core values like service, conservation, interdependence, diversity, and safety. We share a belief in the value of developed outdoor recreation … in physical fitness for the people we serve … in public/private partnerships … in multiple-use management and sustainable communities … in viable local economies and ecosystem health. The values we share are the basis for our partnership—for working together to create recreational settings for people to use and enjoy.

The foundation for our partnership is set forth in our memorandum of understanding, a framework for cooperation and communication beneficial to us all. Our MOU expired last September, but we have been working with NSAA to update the MOU to reflect current programs and policies. The MOU awaits finalization and signatures.

Meetings like this are wonderful opportunities for me and Forest Service staff to engage directly with you. I am grateful for your longstanding partnership and your commitment to offering excellent recreational opportunities to the people we serve. Thank you for inviting me!