Souers, who attended Oregon State after graduating from Madras High School, had a long career in tech and startups all over the country but primarily Silicon Valley. Back in the Portland area as that phase of his career wound down, he was already interested in helping the place he grew up in in some way. Then he saw a job posting for Warm Springs’ economic development CEO. It seemed meant to be, as did the return of Kah-Nee-Ta. It was Souers who took the lead in discussing Kah-Nee-Ta with Kirk Hanna. “I said, ‘I think this can open and be successful again, what do you think?’” Souers remembers. “I do too,” Kirk replied. Coming Back When word got out of the reopening, old visitors started clamoring to come back, and former employees were able to come back to work. During one visit by Oregon Business, the order taker at the restaurant during breakfast had previously been a housekeeper. At another, right when the resort reopened, tribal member Starla Green was the kitchen manager while her teenage daughter (and then-reigning Miss Warm Springs), Kahmussa Green, was working at the customer service desk. Their family is also directly descended from Xanita, the 19th-century tribal woman from whom Kah-Nee-Ta takes its name. The rejuvenated resort is employing as many as 100 people (full- and part-time), though a lot of jobs are also seasonal (there’s no better time than winter for a hot spring, but summer is still peak). Skibowl handles the HR and also point-of-sale devices (it’s a cashless resort); 70% of the staff — including 50% of managers — are tribal members, according to Souers. It’s both a paying job and one that provides work experience for teenage tribal members who can’t otherwise find jobs right on the reservation; there just aren’t very many food- service or retail businesses in Warm Springs itself. There’s also a tribal bathhouse, and discounts and monthly free days for members. “They’re the owners,” Souers says. “Quite often I’ll run into a tribal member, and we get introduced, and I say, ‘Well, I work for you.’” Souers remembers going to Kah-Nee-Ta for a soak after playing in high school football games. Back then you might leave smelling of chlorine, and the water wasn’t very hot. Now the water in the pools comes out of the rocks at a temperature of 130 degrees Fahrenheit. “That’s too hot to put your pinky in, much less your tush,” says Jackson with a laugh. The water is mixed to be between 85 degrees and 110 degrees and contains 32 minerals. There are five hot springs (three for soaking, plus a heated pool and a heated “lazy river”), two separate ones for children (one hut tub, one heated pool), plus three cold-plunge tubs and 20 cabanas with private tubs (an idea they got from visiting the wildly successful Great Wolf Lodge chain of water-park resorts, which is also a tribal business). And the water also no longer reeks of chlorine. According to Kirk, Kah-Nee-Ta is one of just two hot-springs resorts in America — the other is in Durango, Colo. — to use a purification system called Aqua Fusion, which infuses ozone bubbles into the water. A Four-Season Destination The previous iteration of the resort didn’t really emphasize the sacred, healing nature of the waters. It was more of a family “fun in the sun” experience, as Souers calls it. In that sense, while the casino’s departure helped kill Kah-Nee-Ta Version 1, its distance from the casino has allowed for Version 2. “We’ve now made this a hot-springs resort from a business standpoint,” Souers says. But it’s a hot-springs resort that also offers cultural tourism: Anyone who gets into the water at Kah-Nee-Ta is both explicitly and implicitly taking in the heritage, history and culture of the tribe, and the meaning of the land. Plus, they are also meeting and talking to members of the tribe while there. There are also salmon bakes with actual local fish, whether it’s wild or farmed (the hatchery is just upstream). The tipi accommodations feature work by local artists. One depicts “she who watched over the water,” a petroglyph/story from Celilo Falls, except now the water she is watching over is Kah-Nee-Ta. There are also plans for more storyboards and interpretive trails. They want people to see the Museum at Warm Springs and Tananawit Art Gallery, too (both off of Highway 26, near the casino). They want more than just people from Portland and the Northwest. Kahmussa Green said the resort had already hosted visitors from around the U.S. — as far away as Minnesota — with most saying they remembered visiting in its previous iteration. The goal is to reach a national base of customers who might embrace eco/cultural tourism and see it as a four-season region, an entire Cascade mountain range vacation week that could stretch from Kah-Nee-Ta to Hood River, including several of Skibowl’s other properties (Lake Simtustus, in particular, is only 10 miles from Warm Springs). More expansion at KahNee-Ta is hoped for, including a nine-hole golf course (it was previously 18), a bigger RV park, an outdoor amphitheater/event venue and an indoor water park. All of which is ultimately mean to benefit the tribe and tribal members. “The tribe has an expectation that enterprises are going to employ people but also contribute back money into the tribe,” says Souers. When Skibowl made its pitch to partner up, he says it projected revenue that he found to be overly ambitious, which could have led to both unrealistic expectations and missed targets. Instead, Kah-Nee-Ta hit it in 45 days. Kah-Nee-Ta in its later years was not making enough money to declare a dividend and put money back into the tribal coffers. When it was time to approve the new venture, the tribal council naturally wanted to know when they might expect that. But instead of having to wait for actual bottom-line profitability, Kah-Nee-Ta came up with a structure that essentially means the customers are paying the dividend directly — a tribal-development fee, which is kind of like a cross between a resort fee and a hospitality tax. Guests don’t strictly see it on their bill, but 8.5% of every dollar in revenue is set aside for it, and 80% of that becomes a quarterly dividend distributed to tribal members. “We’re going to be able to achieve the kind of success that we wanted while employing a large number of tribal members and culturally connecting people [to the tribe],” says Souers. The renovated resort reopened in July 2024. 44
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