Today, the local public radio station's Colorado Matters program broadcast an interview with author Hal Clifford, whose most recent work is Downhill Slide: Why the Corporate Ski Industry is Bad for Skiing, Ski Towns and the Environment.  Though that title pretty well tells you where he's coming from, Hal made an interesting point that the Ski industry has been in an "arms race" since the early '80s: about all the ski areas that will be created had been created and the number of skiiers has stayed pretty flat, and since then, the story has been about consolidation of ownership and stealing customers from each other.  This is typical of a stagnant industry.  Hal made a point that I thought was pretty interesting: while it's obvious that a ski area requires a lot of capital for ski lifts, buildings, equipment, etc; what I didn't know is that ski areas finance this capital through real estate sales.  That is, the ski company owns the land surrounding the ski area, and builds and sells liftside condos as the real money making part of the operation.  Clifford's point was that with Gen X being a great deal smaller than the Baby Boom, we're likely to see a collapse of the real estate market in the Colorado high country in the future.  He drew a comparison to what happened in upstate New York and New England in the early 1900s, where there had been a huge proliferation of resorts that have basically disappeared.  Like half the population of Colorado, I like to dream about having a mountain getaway.  Maybe that's not such a great idea.