winter seasonal experience.

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Permalink Reply by Dan on October 11, 2007 at 5:43am

You are correct. The best places aren't shown by the best ads. I have worked many of the major resorts and although no two are alike, some are way better than others.

Lots of jobs are fun. Not all the fun jobs pay any money.

Personally, I try to get some word-of-mouth feeback from current or former employees before I take a job. Resorts in the most beautiful of places can be terribly run with horrible morale and no returning employees.

That said, I like Telluride CO where I now work the best. After that I like Jackson WY, followed by Vail CO.

If I knew a little about what you liked I could be more helpful. If you want to have fun with no thougt of money, I would steer you one way.

If you wanted money and didn't really care so much about the fun, I would steer you another. The highest pay is in Aspen.

The most fun is in Telluride. For a balance, I have found working in upscale, upbeat hotels to be the most dependable source of quality seasonal jobs.

That said, each property in a resort has its own morale and ambiance and culture. Year after year, you will find the same reports coming from a property or an entire resort - good or bad.

If you hear nothing but bad about a resort, don't bother checking it out yourself. I do know of a handful that get good press.

The Snake River Lodge at the foot of the gondola in Jackson Hole is very well run and has very high morale. The drawback is it doesn't offer employee housing and is located a ways away from where you can live. That said, I know there is a little motel in town, the Anvil, that offers rooms with fridge, microwave, HBO, weekly maid service and local phone for just $600 and it is on the local bus route. I believe the Lodge will pay for your bus pass. Tipped jobs as a rule pay more. The front desk, though, is a good one and it is a skill that transfers easily.

Another Wyoming property that gets good press is Dornan's. It is a kind of funky Western resort right at one of the entrances to Grand Teton National Park open year around. They are just 10 miles or less outside the Jackson town limits and have a variety of jobs. Dorm-style housing has individual rooms in the winter. The pay is lower but it is very laid back at Dornan's in the winter and might be a good place to get your feet wet.

In Colorado, the Victorian mining town of Breckenridge is now the nation's #1 or #2 ski resort in terms of lift ticket sales. A really great time-share comdominium hotel named the Valdoro Lodge is another spot praised highly by its employees. Housing is tight in Summit County and sometimes the inexpensive stuff runs pretty highly to undocumented aliens so look at the Summit Daily newspaper online and see if you can stand the rents on a wage of probably $10-12 or so.

In Telluride, there's more reasonable rents and I recommend two properties - the Hotel Telluride and the Fairmont Franz Klammer Lodge. They both pay quite well and with a very convenient free transportation system here, the money goes quite far.

In Vail, the venerable Lodge at Vail has some of the finest coworkers you'll ever find and you get the feel being lucky to be able to work there. It has housing although it is a ways away and do anything you can to avoid their Timber Ridge units as they have zero soundproofing.

If you are a nature freak, there is nowhere like Yellowstone Park and the scenery itself is and has to be pretty good payment. They keep the Snow Lodge in the Park and Mammoth at an entrance open. It is run by the mega-manager Xanterra so you know it is somewhat corporate but how unfunky can a place accessed only by snowcoach, snowmobile, cross country skis and snowshoes be? You can drive to Mammoth but it is not the experience that being in the Park is. Money is not too good but the experience kind of changes you.

Those are the handful of places I look at first when I am looking for a job. They are the places I tell anyone to check first when they are looking for a job.

You can look up their websites and most have on-line lists of current openings and applications. Otherwise, just google up the local newspaper and look at the classifieds.

Front desk personnel usually have good experiences, especially at nice properties like those mentioned above. Food servers usually make a bit more money. Oftentimes, retail - although paying a little less - can be a nice backwater in a busy place so don't ignore the gift shop.

If you are a little more independent, bus driving is a job among the highest paying for entry-level work. A great thing about the ski resorts is that they will usually pay you while you study under them for the CDL that is then useful lots of other places where they won't train you.

If you are tempted to drive, I would pick Beaver Creek. They have almost brand new 21-passenger people movers, a nice drivers' lounge, pay well and - of course since you are working for the mountain company - you get free skiiing at both Vail and Beaver Creek.

Vail Resorts has great employee housing but think about how well you tolerate living with others. If you come alone, there's very little single housing so a typical deal is three people in a two-bedroom apartment.

I like the Tarnes in Beaver Creek but with the exception of Timber Ridge, all Vail Resorts' housing is above average. All of it is on bus service that you won't have to pay for as parking even if you bring a car is sometimes impossible or expensive.

A few last provisos. If you are very urban and like it, there is only one place remotely urban in the ski world and that's Aspen.

The Stonebridge Inn in the Snowmas sub-resort 10 miles out of Aspen proper has good pay, management and housing. If you really want to be in the center of things, the Hotel Jerome was just taken over by Vail Resorts' subcorp, the Rock Resorts chain, and has housing, decent wages and a variety of jobs.

Well, there you go. The results of working in 45 or more hotels in 25 years in a nutshell.

From lonesome, haunting beauty and coyotes howling on the edge of Grand Teton to the Jerome where the Comedy Festival and Forstmann-Little conference will have your head spinning with stars.

Don't be afraid to ask anyone connected with any place you want to go how it is. The dishwasher or night auditor will tell you what Human Resources won't or can't.

Think ahead so you don't get boxed in. Do you want to make a certain amount of money?

Can you deal with living with others, others who might work another shift or have a different level of social life? A great job can be spoiled by rotten room mates and vice versus.

Finally, err on the side of caution about what exact duties you apply for unless you're prepared for the not always welcome adventure of changing jobs. For your first resort job, try to pick something you are at least pretty sure you can do albeit not the most adventuresome, glamorous or remunerative.

It doesn't help to get a super high-paying serving job that you won over lots of competition when you're fired the second week. You'll soon find out what level of supervision you like.

A night auditor virtually never sees a supervisor. A food server sees the guest at one end of a short walk and the cook at another and probably has a supervisor somewhere on the floor - lots of bosses and no need to be too self-pacing.

There are also lots of little niche jobs that aren't too common but have certain things going for them. For example, often the most fun jobs are the tubing hill type jobs where you rent large truck-sized inner tubes to kids to ride down a small side hill away from the main ski runs.

Not every resort has them and they don't pay too well, but everyone reports they are just a barrel of laughs. Another niche is the snowmaking world.

The cold is brutal at night on the tops of the mountains and you are working with water lines and sprinklers so as a rule very young and determined young men go for this - the Marines of the ski world- job.

Money is good in Beaver Creek and Bachelor Gulch Security. $13 per hour or more to start and lots of overtime usually.

Have a good one! If you find yourself looking for another gig come Easter, check out Signal Moutain Lodge on Jackson Lake in Grand Teton National Park and Glacier National Park.

They are both just summer gigs but among the premier summer jobs. Neither pays too well but both have housing and higher morale and unbelievable beauty.

If you aren't into skiing or cold, the Florida Keys are still somewhat laid back and "conchy". A number of the larger properties there have housing but I wouldn't compare the experience to the good winter resorts out West personally - that is, unless you got to have warmth!

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