Crystal Mountain's new leader ready for the long haul as season comes to an end

CRYSTAL MOUNTAIN RESORT - As Washington's largest ski resort bids farewell to a roller coaster season on Sunday, there's a new face on top of the mountain.

Linnea Hansen, a self-professed weekend warrior-turned ski mom who made her career in the wine industry, became Crystal's new president and chief operating officer last month after two years as vice president of marketing and sales. The promotion makes her the third person to lead the resort in as many years, a high rate of turnover for ski resort management.

This decade's leadership churn came as Crystal wrestled with overcrowding, parking reservations, overpromising on a splashy capital improvement plan and more. This past season was marred by multiday highway closures in December and March that prevented skiers from reaching the resort.

Hansen also fills the vacancy on the heels of a tumultuous time for Denver-based parent Alterra Mountain Company, which bought Crystal in 2018 and made it Washington's only member of the Ikon Pass, a season pass valid at ski resorts around the world. A record snow drought plagued the Western U.S. this winter, likely hurting Alterra's bottom line. The Pacific Northwest also received less snow than an average winter, but late-season snowfall buoyed Washington resorts that stayed open, including Crystal.

Industry observers like Stuart Winchester, founder of the Storm Skiing Journal, see the last eight years of rapid change as evidence that "Alterra has been treating Crystal like a petri dish." When it comes to the new leadership, he said, "Her biggest challenge is: Can she stabilize the experience?"

Here for the long haul

A steady hand is exactly what Hansen promises.

"I'm here for consistency," she said during an interview this month on the Mount Rainier Gondola. "I want to be here for the long haul."

Hansen's pledge follows two uncharacteristically quiet exits from the top job. Ski industry veteran Frank DeBerry led the mountain from Alterra's acquisition until spring 2023. Arriving from a management role at Snowshoe, W.V., he had a front-row seat to Crystal's bumpy transition from locally owned ski resort to a satellite orbiting a multi-resort solar system.

Speaking from New York state, where he is now president of Snow Partners, DeBerry said that any ski area management job comes with a baseline level of wintertime stress. But he described Crystal as "pretty intense" given the amount of avalanche control work required to open most of the resort on powder days, its isolated location and a rabid customer base in the Seattle area that treats skiing and snowboarding as a lifestyle more than a hobby.

"You're going to be in crisis management mode a quarter of your time - can I keep the public and my employees safe? - and that can cause burnout," DeBerry said.

His successor, Matthew Darbous, came from a director role in corporate real estate at T-Mobile and lasted two seasons before departing Crystal last fall without any public announcement.

Historically, ski resort management has been a passion job that leaders hold onto for decades. In Alterra's 19-resort portfolio, only Deer Valley in Utah has also seen a short-tenured president and COO this decade, while every other new leader since 2020 has resulted either from a retirement or a promotion within Alterra.

"When a resort president leaves, we try to learn what factors influenced how and why they won, and how and why they didn't win," Ron Cohen, Alterra's executive vice president for the western mountain division, told The Seattle Times. "Linnea fits a lot of the factors that we think will make someone successful."

Hansen grew up in Puyallup and learned to ski as a child. She dabbled in snowboarding as a young adult and made Crystal her home mountain while studying communications at the University of Washington. As a season pass holder spending as many weekends as possible on the mountain, and later enrolling her kids in ski school, she has firsthand knowledge of the typical skier experience.

But shortly after she took the marketing job, she intuited that colleagues looked askance at her Seattle address - it was viewed as a sign that she was not going to stick around.

"I told my husband: We need to move," she said. In January 2024, the Hansens relocated to Enumclaw, the closest city to Crystal, with their two children.

A willingness to uproot her family spoke volumes to Alterra. "She demonstrated an incredible commitment to Crystal," said Cohen. "It occurred to her that you need to be part of the community to be an effective leader."

Fixing the hard things

Hansen summed up the goal of her tenure in a simple phrase that belies a complex reality.

"I'm here to fix the hard things so we can move on to the shinier things," she said.

Some of the hard things at Crystal have largely been ironed out. Next season will mark the third in a row that Crystal remains on the full Ikon Pass with no changes (there is also a pared-down version, Ikon Base, that provides five days at Crystal). However Seattle-area skiers and snowboarders feel about the resort mega-pass, there is now more consistency on how Crystal fits into the industry's new business model.

Hansen's first test on the ticketing front will come next season. While still in her marketing role, Hansen was the public face defending Crystal's Reserve Pass, which allows skiers and riders to skip certain lift lines for a price. It debuted last season at $1,499, but the lackluster winter made it a nonissue. Hansen did not provide sales figures but said they "slowed" along with the late start to winter. It returns next season, knocked down to $999, and may again raise hackles even as Hansen said market research backs the product.

"The premium consumer is in our market," she said. "The consumer insight was that some people want to save time more than they want to save money, so who are we to tell them how they can spend their money? But my vision continues to be making sure we can grow premium experiences while also growing mountain access for all types of people that want to ski at Crystal."

Parking, a perennial pinch point, has been smoothed out with a reservation system that guarantees a spot as late as noon on weekends and peak days - though the resort's dead-end location means that Highway 410 and Crystal Mountain Boulevard still back up on the busiest mornings, with the worst waits easily adding an hour or more in travel time.

Building a foundation

Hansen also takes the reins as Crystal figures out how to grow. In March 2022, Crystal announced a $100 million capital plan called "Reimagine Crystal" with an aggressive timeline of just three years for new or upgraded lifts, terrain, buildings and parking lots.

Crystal ticked a few items off the list - a new parking lot, the first phase of the Flying Raven Adventure Course and a replacement for the Rainier Express Chairlift, among other tweaks. The most ambitious proposals - from a larger Summit House to a 100-room hotel to terrain expansion - remain unfinished business, with runaway inflation, spiraling construction costs and a slowing Seattle-area economy taking center stage soon after the plan was announced.

Crystal's goal is to continually elevate the guest experience, but not necessarily to fit a single label like 'destination resort,'" Hansen said. "What Reimagine Crystal represented, and still represents, is a commitment to thoughtful, sustainable investment that aligns with Crystal's unique character, world-class terrain, and incredible community.

The biggest completion thus far is the Mountain Commons Lodge, which has been dogged with size complaints since its 2024 opening. "Does it have enough seating today? No, but it was never meant to be the only part of the plan," Hansen said. "Mountain Commons Lodge is part of a bigger picture we will continue to build out."

In the interim, Hansen sees potential for nearer-term on-hill improvements like adding snow-making to Gold Hills and lighting for night skiing on Forest Queen.

Building out, however, has been constrained by under-the-hood infrastructure problems. Alterra inherited an aging wastewater treatment system in worse shape than expected, prompting a yearslong compliance saga with the Washington State Department of Ecology over effluent discharge exceeding state regulations.

Crystal's power source is also a vulnerability, as evidenced by March's multiday resort closure. Downed trees blocked Highway 410 and knocked out power intermittently over four days. Puget Sound Energy completed a backup generating station for Crystal Mountain last year and plans to move underground an additional 10 miles of power lines along Highway 410 next year.

Cohen said infrastructure hardening, work projected at least through summer 2027, is a necessary "foundation" to avoid repeating mistakes that occurred in the planning and construction of the Mountain Commons Lodge.

"We didn't have that foundation, but we were already building the lodge," he said. "Fool me once, right? We can't operate a modern hotel in a place where the power goes out."

Deep pockets or belt-tightening?

Fixing the hard things and building the shiny things alike both cost money. As a private-equity-backed company, Alterra is known for having deep pockets. In 2023, the company announced it had invested $1 billion in its resorts in just five years, then pledged an additional $500 million over the next year.

At Crystal, that includes $26 million for the Mountain Commons Lodge and $10 million to replace the REX Chairlift. Most recently, Alterra approved the $4.1 million purchase of the former Rodeway Inn motel in Enumclaw, slated to house 80 employees next winter.

Hansen described the current relationship with Alterra as give-and-take based on demonstrated need and return on investment, rather than operating with a fixed capital improvement budget like the $100 million figure attached to Reimagine Crystal. The company declined to specify how much it has invested in Crystal.

But after the Intermountain West's worst season in decades, there are concerns about belt-tightening.

While the industry's new model incentivizing season pass purchases before winter insulates Alterra financially, the bad taste of a lackluster winter may linger and reduce pass sales heading into next season. "You're instantly facing headwinds," said DeBerry.

Adding to those headwinds, in March, Alterra CEO Jared Smith announced he was stepping down. That same month, four skiers filed a class-action lawsuit against Alterra (and rival Vail Resorts, which owns Stevens Pass) for "unlawfully inflated prices." (Crystal was not singled out in the lawsuit.)

In addition, industry analysts have speculated that recent massive investments in marquee destinations - a Deer Valley expansion that could run over $1 billion and $220 million into upgrading Steamboat in Colorado - will put a squeeze on capital improvements at other Alterra resorts.

"There is competition for resources," said DeBerry. "When Deer Valley gets that amount of money, there is less money available to spread in other areas."

Alterra's leadership disputes that these investment decisions and macroeconomic forces will have a knockdown effect on Crystal.

"We're going to keep putting the investment in even if this year's returns aren't as good," said Cohen. "Being part of a larger company helps a place like Crystal minimize the impacts of a bad year. When investments like Deer Valley become mature, they put out the return that makes it possible for us to continue to invest in all of our resorts."

Don't forget fun

Hansen is not Pollyannish about the challenge of running Crystal Mountain. "We are a very gritty and wild place," she said.

March's closure, teasing Seattle-area skiers and riders desperate for powder after a lean season, was an early stress test. It taught Hansen how frequently Crystal's customers expect updates when something goes wrong - even when the resort itself doesn't have much information to give.

Outside of those crisis moments, she describes her overall management style as "doing what you say you're going to do on the timeline you said you were going to do it, and then delivering it to people with communication."

Despite all the potential headaches that come from running an operation in a remote setting exposed to harsh Cascades winter weather, Hansen is still a keen participant in the lighthearted side of a business that exists to provide its customers with good times.

"We're going to have fun - we run a ski resort," she said. "When there's a DJ, I'm going to dance."

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