"Perhaps a compromise could have been reached, but the opposing personalities made that impossible. Snowboarders and skiers represented very different cliques circa 1990. The differences went beyond age, music, clothing, and body art. Young snowboarders were in your face and worshiped anti-heroes like Shaun Palmer. They were rowdy teenagers, just like the teenage ski bums of decades past. But the generation gap annoyed older skiers and the snowboards served as scarlet letters that marked them as the enemy. The boarders felt the single chair policy was unjust and let Pratt know it. For her part, Pratt was an eccentric, determined woman and not one to bow to pressure from, well, anyone, let alone a group of teenagers.
During the '91-'92 season, Pratt was confronted at a local supermarket by some teenage boarders carrying a video camera. Sticking the camera in her face, one teen, in an expletive filled tirade, demanded to know why they couldn't ride the single chair lift. The other used racial epithets and compared the single-chair policy to segregation. "As best as we know," says Bryan Johnston vice president of marketing at Burton Snowboards, "the blowout appeared to be a clash of personalities and cultures at a younger time in the world of snowboarding."
In response to the clash, which wore out her patience on the issue, Pratt eliminated snowboarding completely from Mad River Glen. When she sold the resort to a cooperative of Mad River skiers in 1995, the ban remained intact. At the first cooperative shareholder meeting in April 1996, a non-binding straw poll saw 76 percent of the shareholders vote in favor of upholding it. Since then, the issue has never come to a vote. "All it takes for snowboarding to ever be allowed here is a two-thirds majority of the shareholders to vote in favor of lifting the ban." says Friedman. "Internally it's never been an issue.""
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