FASTPASS TO THE PAST: THE THEME PARK HISTORY PODCAST Season 2 Episode #12: Lost Resorts: Disney’s Mineral King Ski Village Opening: Welcome to Fastpass to the Past. The Theme Park History Podcast. Episode 12. Have you ever wondered what is the origin story behind your favorite attractions and theme parks? Well, you’re in the right place. However, today, as is often the case, we’re going to talk about things you’ve likely never even heard of in a new take on our ‘Lost Lands’ series – where we discuss the Lost Resorts of Disney history. Introduce Yourself: Hello I’m your host, Austin Carroll. I am a history nerd a former Disneyland Cast Member And a current annual pass holder at the Disneyland Resort. Episode Introduction Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. I hope you enjoy learning about resorts that may have only briefly existed or never existed at all. As you all know, I really enjoy sharing these fun bits of theme park history and trivia with you listeners. Now that it is December, it is officially skiing season. So today we are going to hit the slopes and take a Double Black Diamond run into the Walt Disney Company Archives with a look at a ‘lost resort’ of the Disney empire. Today we’ll be talking about Disney’s Mineral King Ski Village. Disney’s rarely-remembered and disatorious foray into creating a skiing destination within California's Sequoia National Park. Originally envisioned as a five-story resort with over a thousand rooms, surrounded by a movie theater, general store, pools, ice rinks, tennis courts, a golf course, and 22 lifts to the slopes, we’ll take a gander at what would have been a Disney vacation like no other - if it ever came to fruition. Teaser: So, without further ado, let’s take a look into the lost land that goes down in history as one of Disney’s most ambitious and well-publicized failures– Disney’s Mineral King Ski Village. Part #2: Alpine Dreams Nowadays, Mineral King Valley is a remote hideaway within California's Sequoia National Park, accessible only by foot-trail or a winding, treacherous automobile road. Surrounded by the southern Sierra Nevada mountains, you would be hard pressed to find anything besides hiking- much less a meet and greet with a famous mouse or two. But in the late 1960s this mountain glacial valley paradise of snowmelt streams, white-fir forests, and hulking granite peaks nearly became home to a massive ski resort developed by, who else, than Walt Disney Productions. Of course, later renamed the Walt Disney Company. How is that even possible? Well, in February 1965, the U.S. Forest Service issued a call inviting proposals for a ski resort in the valley, then part of Sequoia National Forest - note this is before it became a protected national park. In fact, Congress would have likely already incorporated Mineral King into the park by 1965 if not for the area's history as a mining district. When Congress enlarged the national park's boundaries in 1926, a doctrine of "worthless lands" still governed the preservation of national parkland — in other words, areas that could be exploited as farmland or for their mineral resources were excluded from protection. Because mining might someday return to Mineral King, Congress left the area in the hands of the Forest Service, which largely managed public lands as economic rather than as scenic or biological resources. Six proposals were ultimately submitted. And one a Friday, about a week before Christmas, they announced their decision. The right to develop the Mineral King area of Sequoia National Forest was awarded to Walt Disney Productions in 1965. An avid skier, Walt Disney had served as director of pageantry at the 1960 Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, California. An earlier trip to the Swiss Alps for the production of "Third Man on the Mountain" inspired Disney to install a steel-and-fiberglass, 1:100-scale replica of the Matterhorn at Disneyland. Now he would build an alpine village among real snow-capped mountains in the Sierra Nevada. A wire service article quoted Walt Disney: “When I first saw Mineral King five years ago, I thought it was one of the most beautiful spots I had ever seen and we want to keep it that way.” To Walt Disney, that meant a self-contained “Alpine Village” designed to preserve the natural beauty of valley. The headline in that appeared on Dec 18, 1965 on page 11 of the Los Angeles Times read: “US Chooses Disney to Develop Sequoia Resort. Firm’s Big Accepted to Build and Operate a $35 Million Alpine Village in High Sierra.” According to the article, the U.S. Forest Service awarded a preliminary permit to Walt Disney Productions giving the company three years to complete a satisfactory plan. The next step would be a permanent 30-year permit. Which, of course means the landscape would be permanently altered if Disney was to succeed. I keep harping on this, but this was December 1965 just one month after Walt Disney had announced they had completed the purchase of 27,000 acres south of Orlando, Florida for a project earmarked as “Disneyland East.” Of course, this massive $70 million project would come to be Walt Disney World. However, despite this sizable investment on the east coast, the Walt Disney Company was confident that both projects would be a success. According to the Los Angeles Times article that ran that fateful day, “The Disney firm in its winning bid estimated that the new facility, 227 miles northeast of Los Angeles, would attract 2.5 million visitors annually—800,000 of them from out of state—by 1976, the first full year of operation.” Part #3: Redefine the Ski Resort Walt Disney envisioned that at visitors would find an Alpine resort that would redefine ski resorts, just as Disneyland had redefined amusement parks. The Spring 1966 issue of Disney News, official publication of the Magic Kingdom Club, included a description of what Mineral King Ski Village would include. Ideally located equidistant from Los Angeles and San Francisco, Walt Disney hoped to provide year-round recreational activities for people of all ages and athletic abilities. He was excited to open up this inaccessible picturesque area to skiers in the winer and hikers, campers, and sightseers in the warm months with 22 planned ski lifts and gondolas up the surrounding 12,400-foot mountains and eight glacial cirques above the village. Ski runs would be epic, up to four miles long with drops of 3,700 feet. Disney realized that ski operations alone were rarely profitable, but visitor services would produce projected revenues of an estimated $600 million over the resort's first decade. Ten restaurants and cafes would feed the hungry crowds — including a 150-seat coffee shop perched atop Eagle's Crest Ridge, 11,090 feet above sea level. In the basin, the completely self-contained village will accommodate visitors with a chapel, ice-skating rink, convenience shops, restaurants, conference center, and low-cost lodging facilities. There also will be two large hotels and even a heliport. The magazine described how a snow survey group was already spending the winter at Mineral King to study snow conditions and collect data for construction. Much of the resort was to be car-free; day-use visitors and hotel guests would park downslope in an 8-10 story garage with room for 3,600 automobiles. From there, a cog railway would transport them to the main resort area. The Disney plan also called for extensive support infrastructure, including water storage tanks and a sewage treatment facility. The resort's price tag: $35 million. (By comparison, Disneyland had cost only $17 million in 1955.) Of course, being a Disney resort - there had to be some kind of entertainment! I’m sure many listeners will be surprised to learn that the Country Bear Jamboree, later to appear at Disneyland and still found at Disney World’s Magic Kingdom, was originally designed for Mineral King Ski Village. The Audio-Animatronic bears were planned as entertainers for one of the restaurants. Think.. Chuck E Cheese. The company’s entire approach has been based on the absolute necessity to preserve the site’s natural beauty and alpine character. Excluding automobiles helped with this, but Disney also planned to preserve the area’s natural character by camouflaging ski lifts, situating the village so that it will not be seen from the valley entrance, and putting service areas in a 60,000 square foot underground facility beneath the village. The grandiose plans of EPCOT, Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom, and Mineral King were moving right along when, on December 15, 1966, Walt Disney’s death shook the company to its core. Now, The Mineral King Ski resort was destined be one of many lasting reminders of his great vision and creativity when it opened—in fact, it was likely to be the final one. Or so it seemed at the time. However, the Walt Disney Company just had to contend with the little matter of how these visitors would even reach the Mineral King basin to partake in the last great rement of Walt Disney’s creativity. Afterall, Mineral King was a place surrounded by mountains on all sides, accessible only with inadequate mostly dirt road prone to avalanches and icy conditions. Part #4: The Rocky Road In 1966, the existing road was narrow, partially paved and only usable in months free from snowfall—not what you want for a ski resort. In fact, this treacherous road had already killed another ski resort proposal in the Mineral King basin in 1948. Recognizing this, the U.S. Forest Service made the up-in-the-air 30-year permit contingent on an all-weather, 25-mile highway. The route would go through Sequoia National Park, which then surrounded the Mineral King basin in Sequoia National Forest on three sides. However, while the national forest was under the jurisdiction of the U.S Department of Agriculture, Sequoia National Park, was under the jurisdiction of the U.S Department of the Interior. With beucractic pressure and the idea that Mineral King had possibly the greatest potential for winter sports anywhere in the Sierra Nevada mountains, there was some movement towards a road earlier in 1958. Tulare County asked the State of California to put in an all-weather road. There was finally progress in 1965 when the state legislature transferred the county road into the state highway system in anticipation of a new road. However, if you thought 2,500 permanent jobs would be enough to ensure the road would move forward - you clearly don’t know the U.S. Department of the Interior. For a time, things looked to be on track. As 1966 progressed, plans for the highway moved ahead. In October, California Governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown announced a $3 million Federal grant toward the $25 million price tag for the road. His next step would be to apply for a $9 million Federal loan and to seek the balance from the California legislature. With such strong support from the governor, it seemed almost certain that the road would be built. In the following years after Walt’s death, the Imagineers at WED Enterprises refined their plans. Early drawings showing modern, 1960s-style structures gave way to renderings showing a more traditional Swiss Alpine village. In 1969 Disney News quoted Robert B. Hicks, Mineral King Project manager: “Although structures will appear to be placed in random formation, their location will be dictated by natural land contours and appropriate architectural relationships, which will contribute to scenic harmony.” The U.S. Forest Service was convinced and approved Walt Disney Productions’ final master plan for Mineral King on January 27, 1969. Skiers could expect the resort to open for the Winter 1973 ski season, when the new highway would also be built. However… not everyone was so convinced. From 1965, when the project was announced, to 1969 when it was approved, opposition to the Mineral King plans and the all-weather road had been growing. Afterall, Mineral King’s official name was the Sequoia National Game Refuge - wouldn’t the construction of a massive resort ruin the fragile ecosystem? Enter The Sierra Club. They had still approved a Mineral King recreational development as recently as 1965 and had even pitched the failed 1948 project for a similar resort, but by 1965, the club's national board of directors had reversed its stance — but only by a split vote of seven to four. They spent the next decade attempting to use the courts to stop the project. Their change of heart was likely at the bequest of wilderness activists who were appalled by this massive development. At the time, only 33 campsites dotted the Mineral King Valley, which attracted 24,000 annual visitors, most of them arriving in the summer. The Disney proposal projected annual visitation of at least one million. These activists weren't alone, much of the nation had embraced a new, preservation-oriented wilderness ethic — a change that culminated in the landmark Wilderness Act of 1964, which created the legal definition of wilderness in the United States and protected 9.1 million acres of federal land. As far back as March 1967, U.S. Secretary of Interior Stewart Udall expressed opposition to the road, suggesting that an electric railway or monorail would be better. Afterall, the governor-backed road would still have go through the now-protected Sequoia National Park. Bumper stickers suddenly appeared in California with the message “Keep Mineral King Natural.” And… just like that - the Walt Disney Company, still struggling internally after their founder’s death, had one of its first and biggest PR disasters in the company's history on their hands. Part #5: Challenges, Challenges, Challenges With growing opposition, Walt Disney Productions announced a major revision to its Mineral King plans in May of 1972. For those keeping track, this is about a year-and-a-half before the projected opening. The $35 million resort with as many as 22 ski lifts shrank to a $15 million resort with 10 ski lifts. However, the scaled-down plans probably had more to do with financial considerations than with any attempt to reduce the project’s environmental footprint. Walt Disney Productions had opened Walt Disney World a half year before; the cost of that project, initially anticipated to be $70 million, had risen to $400 million. Besides the smaller footprint, the biggest change in the new plans was that access to the resort would primarily involve a 15-mile cog railway to be financed with a $20 million Tulare County bond and operated by Disney without a profit. The railway would be non polluting, follow the old road, and require a much narrower right-of-way than the proposed all-weather road. This turned out to be a necessary change as later that year, on August 18, 1972, California Gov. Ronald Reagan signed legislation removing a segment of the all-weather road from the state’s highway system. The Los Angeles Times quoted the governor: I am convinced that proper development will not be hampered by the lack of a high-speed road. Alternate access methods will suffice and, in the end, better serve the needs of both conservation and recreation.” However, road or no road, despite the governor’s support, Walt Disney’s dying wish, and the urgent need for California recreational areas, nothing seemed like enough to save this project. Part #6: The End of the Road On October 23, 1973, the Los Angeles Times published an article titled “Planned Mineral King Resort Appears Doomed.” This is mostly due to The Sierra Club, and lead environmental activist Jean Koch, who mounted an enduring legal and public relations battle against the project that lasted over 10 years. As richly documented in the USC Libraries' Mineral King Development Records collection, this army of nature-lovers, led by the Sierra Club, who petitioned federal officials, penned letters to the editors, and staged "hike-ins" to save the solitude of "the King" from the planned resort. At first, The Sierra Club centered on the fact that six miles of the proposed all-weather access road would cut through Sequoia National Park. They lobbied the National Park Service to block the highway project. But once the park service and its supervisor, interior secretary Stewart Udall, approved the road, the club resorted to litigation. On June 5, 1969, the club sued the heads of Sequoia National Park and Sequoia National Forest and the interior and agriculture secretaries in federal court, arguing that the project improperly handed control of too much national forest land to Disney and that the highway through the national park was illegal. A trial judge issued a preliminary injunction, halting work until the case reached the Supreme Court. The high court struck the Sierra Club a blow on April 19, 1972, when it ruled against the organization on procedural grounds in Sierra Club v. Morton. In a 4-3 decision, the court held that the organization, founded by John Muir in 1892, lacked standing to sue because it had not shown how the proposed ski resort would injure any individuals, as opposed to the collective interests of the club's membership. Even as the Supreme Court handed Disney and the Forest Service a victory, another legal obstacle stalled construction. On Jan. 1, 1970, as the litigation was wending its way through the federal court system, President Richard Nixon had signed the National Environmental Policy Act, which required federal agencies to study the environmental effects of proposed actions in detail. Despite the high court ruling, then, work could not begin in Mineral King until the Forest Service analyzed the ski resort’s impact and published its results. As the Sierra Club amended its lawsuit to conform to the Supreme Court's standing doctrine, the Forest Service prepared several drafts of its environmental impact statement. It released the final draft, a 285-page tome (nearly 600 pages, including appendices), in February 1976. By then, Disney's proposal was more than a decade old, and the company's executive leadership — along with skiing enthusiasts and many in government — had lost interest in Mineral King. In 1977, the U.S. Forest Service attempted to revive the resort plan, but by then Walt Disney Productions had walked away from the Mineral King environmental fight in favor of an entirely different ski resort location on private land at Independence Lake, north of Lake Tahoe. Part #7: Good Riddance / The Legacy This turned out to be for the best. Congress finally killed the project with the National Parks and Recreation Act of 1978. With President Carter's signature on Nov. 10, 1978, the Mineral King area officially became part of Sequoia National Park. Today, Mineral King Valley is still accessible by the old mining-era wagon path — now a one-lane automobile road — but most of the land once destined to become a mountain Disneyland is now federally designated wilderness. The Sierra Club left the Mineral King war as winners, firmly established with activist credentials. The Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, founded in 1971 to fight the Mineral King resort in court, lives on today as Earthjustice. Walt Disney Productions was not as fortunate. The company had continued to fight at the expense of its public image. In 1969, a company executive admitted to the Los Angeles Times that if Walt Disney were still at the company’s helm, he likely would have pulled out in deference to environmentalists' concerns. Regardless, The Mineral King controversy left Walt Disney Productions with a so-called public-relations black eye. A illustration that appeared in the November 1971 issue of Ramparts showed Mickey Mouse stopping Smokey Bear from entering next to a sign with Mineral scratched out and ‘Magic Kingdom pay up’ written in. For Disney, the failed Mineral King project was not only the company's first public controversy but also one that tarnished its nature-friendly reputation, built on its successful “True Life Adventures” franchise of nature films. Before the Mineral King war broke out, Walt Disney Productions had earned 37 awards for its work with nature conservation, and the Sierra Club ironically had made Walt Disney himself an honorary life member in 1955. As for secondary planned ski resort location at Independence Lake, north of Lake Tahoe, it also never came to fruition. Although the land was privately and not federally owned, that project was also fraught with environmental challengers. Peter Klaussen, the project lead for Disney’s Independence Lake Ski Village, is quoted as saying "There was always some environmental activism against the project by the townspeople of Truckee. I always thought it was short sighted. They were worried about Truckee being overrun, just like it is today.” Accompanying the cartoon in Ramparts, Roger Rapoport concluded. "It is the end to all our childhood fantasies: Mickey Mouse and Smokey the Bear conspiring to tear up the wilderness." With press like that, it’s easy to see why the project was eventually abandoned. The ‘Thanks for listening’ close. I hope you enjoyed this look into one of Disney’s most distressing public relations battles and what would have been an epic lost land and resort. It is so interesting to think there may have been a Disney ski resort right here in California similar in scope to a Disney Cruise Ship. Can you imagine Mickey skiing down the mountain to open the slopes every morning? I would pay good money to see that. Drop me a message to let me know what you think. Whose side are you on? Disney or The Sierra Club? Thank you so much for listening and your continued support of Fastpass to the Past! Make sure you check out our brand new store on Teepublic for all of your theme park history expert merch- you can find the link at themeparkhistorypodcast.com. Email me at fastpasstothepast@gmail.com if you have show ideas, disagree with anything I said, or just want to say hi. I love that. You can also message on Facebook - if that’s easier. I love to read some of these responses on air. Where they can find the Shownotes - http://www.themeparkhistorypodcast.com/ The ‘Please leave an iTunes review’ if you enjoyed the podcast and want to learn more TeePublic Ad A Word From Our Sponsors: We are incredibly excited to announce Fastpass to the Past has a new TeePublic online store filled to the brim with theme park history-inspired designs! 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