Lutsen Mountain Corporation is proposing to double their footprint by building out on to neighboring public lands. They have been scaring the local community into believing that if they don’t get this expansion, they will go belly up and Lutsen will be no more.
In 2013 and 2015, Lutsen Mountain Corporation made much fanfare with the opening of their high speed lift and new gondola. If you follow their logic of “expand or die” then these two improvements would have made a quantifiable increase in the winter traffic to our area. But this does not show in the data or my own experience. According to MnDOT traffic data, we have seen no increase in winter traffic.
However, backcountry skiing is an actual growth industry, unlike the declining alpine skiing industry. Superior Highland Backcountry submitted a proposal for Moose Mountain that would lightly glade the mountain and make what is already a great spot for making turns into the largest backcountry skiing glade in the Midwest. And it would be the cornerstone of a Hut-to-Hut skiing trail system from Finland to Lutsen that Superior Highland Backcountry is now working on making a reality.
Lutsen Mountain Corporation has no right to take the highest skiable vertical left in the state of Minnesota away from us for their private gain. Lutsen Mountain Corporation has no right to play on locals’ fears of closing, then selling their operation to Vail or Al Terra as soon as the permit is granted. Lutsen Mountain Corporation has no right to poorly manage the ski hill for decades, then ask us, the public land owners, to bail them out. Lutsen Mountain Corporation has no right to shrink treaty lands accorded to the Treaty of 1854. Lutsen Mountain Corporation has no right to put even more of our precious waters at risk after what they did to the Poplar River.
Rory Scoles,
Finland, Minnesota
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