Niles: New book details the inside story of Disney’s California ski resort plans

What is the most egregious omission in Disney theme park history?

Fans of Disney could probably name a few candidates. Many Disneyland visitors may wonder what the resort would look like today if management had chosen Westcot over Disney California Adventure for the resort’s second gate. What if, instead, Disney developed the land around the Queen Mary in Long Beach and built a version of Tokyo DisneySea in Japan?

Many Disney fans on the East Coast may be nostalgic for the proposed Disney’s America park, which would have brought a history-themed Disney park to Virginia.

The biggest “what if?” for me at Disney was the company’s failed attempt to enter the ski resort business in California’s Mineral King Valley. “Disneyland on the Mountain,” a new book by Colorado authors Greg Glasgow and Kathryn Mayer, is about that missed opportunity.

Glasgow and Mayer have written one of the best Disney histories I’ve read in a long time. It provides a fair recap of the contentious battle over Disney’s proposal to transform Mineral King into an innovative resort destination — one that would have set a new standard for what a ski resort could be.

The story of Mineral King begins with Walt Disney’s participation in the 1960 Winter Olympics at what is now known as Palisades Tahoe. While the Games piqued Walt’s interest in developing a European-style ski resort in California, his interest in nature and the environment predated the Games by decades, as evidenced by his company’s True-Life Adventures documentaries.

Walt’s death in 1966 took away the project’s most ardent supporter, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that Congress finally killed it. Glasgow and Mayer explain how the Mineral King case inspired the Sierra Club to seek new legal avenues for protecting natural areas. But was Mineral King’s demise truly beneficial to the environment?

I have no doubt that Disney would have built a commercially successful resort at Mineral King, assisting the company financially in the years following Walt’s death. I also believe that Disney’s Mineral King would have aided in the expansion of the ski industry, spawning a surge in popularity for winter and mountain sports, similar to what Disneyland did for theme parks.

However, people need to see the nature that they are protecting from time to time to remind them why it needs to be protected. Otherwise, public support for that safeguard may dwindle. “Disneyland on the Mountain” is a bit of a Rorschach test in terms of title. Disneyland, to me, represents thoughtful design and innovation, not a haphazard and crowded eyesore.

Mineral King provided an opportunity for Disney’s talented designers to create a new way for the public to interact with and appreciate nature without destroying it. As anyone who has sat in Yosemite Valley traffic can attest, we still need that. Reading “Disneyland on the Mountain” made me appreciate what we have in Mineral King today while also leaving me wondering what could have been.