Hospitality jobs account for the largest job market in Summit County, according to Utah’s Department of Workforce Services, making up 36% of employment or 11,235 jobs as of March 2025.
These workers, whose salaries rank second lowest in the county at $4,120 per month, make up the backbone of the tourism industry. Without people to fold laundry, work kitchens, scrub toilets, wash dishes, deliver room service, design itineraries, guide hikes, teach skiing, all with a friendly disposition, who would pay thousands of dollars to visit?
At The Lodge at Blue Sky, Auberge Collection, the importance of top-tier employees is paramount, especially with hotel price tags hovering around $5,000 for minimum two-night stays. It’s unique, from a hospitality industry standpoint, because along with usual hotel, restaurant and spa operations, The Lodge’s connection with Blue Sky Utah connects guests with a swath of adventure options like horse rides, garden dinners, hikes, 4×4 rides, axe throwing, fly fishing excursions and even sporting clay shooting.
As a small hotel, it’s a small team, and behind the recurring faces that keep The Lodge running are the stories that led them to their roles — and keep them passionate about what they do.
A former Army private
Take sporting clay instructor Nick Erickson, one of the longest-running employees for Blue Sky Utah. His is a recognizable face: big, red mustache twisted at the tips, also red hair cut in a mullet. In his shooting uniform — a brown vest, long sleeve collared shirt and pants — he brings in his unique character with a turquoise bolo tie and tattoos across his forearms.
“If I’m up here by myself, I am in the shortest pair of cut offs I own, Crocs and a tank top,” he said.
When Erickson started in May 2015, he was fresh out of a four-year stint in the Army infantry.
“I found out that anywhere there’s an Army base, in particular, is probably the ugliest part of the state that they can put it in,” he said with a laugh.
He’d been stationed in Kansas, mostly, and as a Heber City native, as soon as he got out in April 2015: “I needed my mountains back.”
So he started working for Blue Sky taking any jobs they’d give him.
“When I first started, I was just building fences for the ranch. So all the fencing, as you saw, as you come in from one ship, I built most of it,” he said.
At that point, the ranch was working to expand its sporting clay program, and they went from having one clay thrower and some horse hitching posts as stations, to installing 18 clay throwers, building six stations and a five-stand structure.
Erickson, of course, helped with all that work and quickly talked his way into becoming a shooting instructor.
That was nine and a half years ago, he said, and while there’s been plenty of changes — like the construction of The Lodge at Blue Sky and collaboration with Auberge Collection in 2019 — it’s still the best job.
The sporting clay program at Blue Sky is designed for all skill levels, with guides like Erickson assigned to each party for a more one-on-one session. He said in most cases, people have very little experience with clay shooting, some having never shot a gun before. While it’s fun to go out with avid shooters, Erickson said he enjoys the challenge of introducing the sport and seeing guests hit their first clay.
“I find it worthwhile, valuable to myself — as someone who’s fairly liberal leaning, owns a lot of guns, goes hunting and all that — being able to introduce it in a way that is … a little bit more comfortable, a little bit safer,” he said. “We try to make it as easy as relaxing as we can because putting a gun in someone’s hands is a little stressful most of the time.”
As an instructor, Erickson and all sporting clay guides are trained in the Percy Stanbury method, created by the renowned coach at the West London Shooting Grounds, which emphasizes a stable stance and grip.
Erickson said the course and targets are also designed to translate to actual duck hunting, acknowledging the tradition of the sport as a way to hone the muscle memory that applies to real-world hunting.
He drives a 4×4 up to a shooting spot with a view of the valley, one of 24 stands now part of their clay shooting course. There’s three clay shooters here, each throwing in different directions, one white to stand out against the dark green hillside. They repositioned the throwers recently, so he takes a few practice shots, programming the throwers to pull simultaneously.
“This is one of my favorite spots up here,” Erickson said, gesturing south across the valley. “We have the I-80 corridor through here. You have Rockport there. You can see a little bit of Peoa. And then out that way, you have Kamas, Oakley, Browns Canyon, Smith and Morehouse, Mirror Lake Highway.”
It’s all land he grew up exploring, home not just for him, but for his family.
“My great, great grandfather, on both sides, migrated here, moved from Ellis Island straight here,” Erickson said. “They’ve been living in the area for decades, almost a century.”
Coming from the military, Erickson said working at Blue Sky has been “a breath of fresh air,” and right now, he has no plans to leave.
Blue Sky is working to expand their Sporting Clay program, with a membership club opening to the public and a new member lounge in the works as The Lodge expands, Erickson said, meaning he should stay plenty busy.
A dog and his adventure guide
On certain days, walking through the doors at The Lodge at Blue Sky, a red-and-white Britney Spaniel is the designated greeter, his small body wiggling with excitement. That’s Wesson, the unofficial mascot of The Lodge, who joined the Blue Sky staff in 2020 with his owner, Carter Kuehn.
Kuehn is an activities guide who now works as the guide operation manager. But when he and his wife, both from the state of Georgia, stopped in Utah for a ski season on their way to Montana, he never expected he’d stay.
“I was just going to get a part-time seasonal job, and I called Blue Sky, got a hold of Tommy, our director, and was like, ‘You’d love me,’” he said with a laugh.
That was five years ago, and his part-time seasonal role evolved into a full-time gig and his first summer he basically was the adventure department.
“I took 99% of the hikes, axe throwings, any of the 4×4 tours,” Kuehn remembers. “I was the only one.”
Now, he manages a full staff across the ranch’s 26 miles of hiking trails, with a knack for pairing guides best equipped to meet a guest’s own needs and goals.
He never expected guiding to become a career that allows him to settle down — he and his wife are in the process of building a home in Tollgate with a baby on the way — but looking back, Kuehn said he feels like he has a natural talent for the work.
“I get a lot of my personality from my family. We’re all very talkative and very friendly. At family occasions, whoever talks the loudest gets to get their story out. And so I’ve always already been a very talkative and outgoing person,” he said.
Being outgoing is a necessary skill in guiding, especially at the hospitality standards of The Lodge at Blue Sky. In many cases, people visit The Lodge to experience new adventures, which can be scary and technically challenging — like snowmobiling or rappelling off cliffs. Kuehn said helping make activities approachable, while setting realistic expectations, are important elements to guiding adventures.
As for managing expectations, Kuehn jokes they have it a little easier than other hospitality roles.
“Most people know how they like their bed that they sleep in. Most people know how they like their food,” he said. “But when it comes to these adventures, a lot of people don’t know how they like their adventures, and it’s something that they don’t experience in their day to day life.”
It’s one of the reasons his staff works to personalize experiences, like knowing what a person finds beautiful can help determine which view to prioritize while hiking, what Kuehn describes as being a “water or dirt person.”
Whatever those goals are, making them come true, that’s the best part, he said.
“A lot of the times when you see that — like somebody catching that fish that they’ve just been thinking about their whole life, fly fishing, something that’s very romantic — when you meet those expectations, that’s what reminds you (that) you can bring out the best in somebody, no matter their personality, no matter their background, no matter wherever they’re coming from,” Kuehn said.
He said that feeling is intoxicating and one of the main reasons he still loves what he does. The other reason he’s stayed with Blue Sky? Getting to bring Wesson with him to work.
“I always thought to myself, ‘I want to do something I love. I want to provide a living for myself and family,’” he said. “And then my third thing was I want to be able to bring my dog.”
Kuehn said he began taking Wesson along on his guiding assignments, and over time, he’s become somewhat famous.
“He gets posted a lot on our social media, and these random people are just like, ‘Oh, I just love Wesson so much,’” Kuehn said with a laugh. “We always say he’s our most requested guide on property.”
Wesson sits at Kuehn’s feet in the lobby, snapping at a fly, stub tail wagging at the attention. This year he turned 8, still a bundle of energy.
“He’s gone on the helicopter rides with us; he’s repelled off cliffs,” Kuehn said. “He’s aging pretty fast, but he’s lived a pretty long life, lived a very full life.”
A mountain lion conservationist
On Kuehn’s team of activities guides is Mike Poremba, a Kamas resident who’s relatively new to the adventures program, but as a self-proclaimed “animal geek,” he fits right in.
Poremba is originally from the Chicago suburbs, which couldn’t be further in spirit from the Wasatch Back.
“The best thing you could get stuck behind is a tractor and look around at this,” he said of his commute to Blue Sky, gesturing to the mountains. “Chicago, it’s, ‘Oh, I’m stuck behind 47 semi.’”
But Poremba said just because he grew up in a metropolis doesn’t mean he didn’t spend most of his childhood in nature.
“The world I grew up in — catching frogs and turtles, making forts and all that kind of stuff, just being out — it was the suburbs, but it was still wilderness to me,” he said.
A love of nature and wilderness has been his guiding light through his 50 years of life, first in a career of dog training — specifically, training border collies to herd geese.
“I just kind of stumbled upon that and went, ‘This is way better than working in an office.’ So I started just kind of working my way up through it,” he said.
He lived in Oregon for a while and began volunteering with a mountain lion conservation group, which is what eventually led him to Utah for a more full-time role.
“The group has since decided to be more filmmakers — it’s more lucrative, I get it — but I wanted to do education and outreach and tell people about places,” Poremba said. “So I just started looking for other things.”
When he first heard about Blue Sky from a friend, he wasn’t sure “resort” work was the right direction, but he decided to look into it.
“The first thing I did was went online and I looked for any conservation groups that had an issue with Blue Sky, because if there was something environmentally unethical, I wouldn’t be able to do it. I know it would drive me nuts,” he said. “I went, ‘OK, everything looks good on paper. Let me go check it out.’”
Poremba said that first visit to the property was incredible, mostly because of the wildlife tracks and trails he could see on the drive in. So, he got a job driving the ski shuttle for the winter, and when summer came around, he begged to join the adventures team.
“‘I’ll do the trail work. I’ll do whatever you guys need. I just want to be out here,’” he said.
As an animal enthusiast and classic extrovert, Poremba is one of the guides Kuehn will match to guests interested in wildlife sightings or facts. It was the frequent animal questions that led Poremba to start Wildlife Wednesdays, a weekly email that highlights one of the animals that can be found on property.
“I’d get questions that, to me, were common knowledge. And I realized, ‘Oh, somebody who hasn’t grown up outside since they were little, this isn’t something they know, or they’re from a completely different part of the world,’” he said.
His first email had facts about moose, and since then, there’s been facts about resident golden eagles, herds of elk, the Least Chipmunk — the world’s smallest chipmunk — or northern Goshawk, which is the largest forest Hawk in North America, and of course, one of his favorites, mountain lions.
One of the parts about guiding that he loves is the personalization, whether its quite walks along the rushing creek, or full-day hikes to try and glimpse herds of elk.
“I always tell guests, this is your experience. We’re just leading it for you, whether it’s in the vehicle, on horseback, or out on the trail. What did you want out of this place? What were you looking for?” he said. “I can’t guarantee the wildlife, but I know what to look and listen for, so if we can spot something, let’s do it.”
Poremba uses his walking stick to point out a few tracks in the sandy dirt along one of the ranch’s trails. That’s why he carries a walking stick, he said, this one a broken off branch from a cherry tree somewhere on property.
As a guide, Poremba said he’s game for anything, hiking, axe throwing, horse riding — whatever the guest wants. Having just recovered from knee surgery, he said being out on the Blue Sky property is his mental health.
“I tell everybody my job’s cool. I love my job every day. The worst day I’ve ever had, I still left here with a big smile on my face,” he said. “Being 50 years old now, I really believe things happen for a reason. I couldn’t have dreamt this up.”
A retired U.S. mogulist
While Poremba, Kuehn and Erickson are out riding around on 4x4s and guiding activities, someone has to make sure everything runs smoothly inside The Lodge — which is what Director of Rooms Lane Marnin does best.
Marnin is another staffer who’s been working on the Blue Sky since forever it seems. She joked that she’s worked at practically every entity on the property.
Another Chicago native, Marnin said her path to Utah wasn’t for hospitality originally, but through skiing.
“I was on the U.S. Ski Team for moguls, so I was between here and Steamboat for a long time when I was skiing because the U.S. Ski Team is based out of here,” she said, explaining that her family moved to Colorado when she was 10. “Once I retired from skiing, I had met my now-husband, then-boyfriend, and decided that I was pretty interested in staying here.”
She retired from skiing at a whopping 26, which was a difficult decision to make, she wrote in a blog post titled “What it means to retire at age 26.” There, Marnin described her life training as a high-level moguls skier, 6:30 a.m. starts and -22 degree mornings on the hill. When it came time to decide on another career, Marnin said event management was her initial goal.
“When I was little, I used to tell my mom that I wanted to be a ‘logisticsist,’ which is not a real thing,” she said with a laugh, but over the years, said she’d started to create that role for herself.
She started with a position at High West Distillery, then worked in an events management position for Blue Sky Utah. Once The Lodge at Blue Sky opened, she started working more in hospitality roles, finding events work too repetitive. At The Lodge, she went from front office supervisor to assistant front office manager to front office manager, then operations manager and, now, director of rooms.
Essentially, being the director of rooms at The Lodge at Blue Sky is being a logisticsist, Marnin said.
“Being that we are a pretty small hotel, that encompasses a lot,” she explained. “Anything that’s not food and beverage or spa related, I probably have my hands on in some way.”
That’s anything guest facing: pre-arrival, gate house, transportation, ski lounge, front desk, bellmen, itinerary design, housekeeping, you name it. A better question: What doesn’t she do?
But what she loves most about her guest-facing role — and about The Lodge in general — is finding what she calls “gold nuggets.”
“I like to get to know the guests and be nosy and hear the little tidbits and find fun ways to interact with our guests,” she said. “The more of those little golden nuggets that we can find out, or the more preemptive we can be in our service, the better we can be. … (It’s) almost like creating what the guest wants before they know they want it.”
She told the story of a guest who enjoyed sitting by the fire pit in the mornings, and while they don’t usually light the fire pit, Marnin anticipated his request the next morning.
“I radioed engineering and said, ‘Hey, can you light the fire pit again?’ And then, sure enough, 30 minutes later, he came by and was like, ‘Hey, they lit the fire pit for me yesterday. Do you think we could do that again?’ And we already had it lit,” she said.
Her favorite is when guests book private yurt dinners, usually to celebrate their anniversary. The best golden nuggets for those events are to find out their first dance wedding song and surprise them with the song cued as they pull up to the venue.
Another story she told was of a family that visits regularly with their two daughters who love horses.
“One of the times that they came — they stayed in one of our two bedroom suites — we just decked out the girls room like a teenage girl’s room, with horse pictures everywhere and their names on the bedroom doors,” Marnin said. “They thought it was so cool because (it was like) they were coming home.”
She said with The Lodge, she’s been able to experiment with these surprise moments, thinking of little touches that would mean the most to her, a skill she’s honed through her various hospitality roles.
Another important element to running a hotel like The Lodge at Blue Sky is cross training, Marnin said, in which she ensures all her staff can fill in other roles.
“When somebody goes and learns what the gatehouse actually does, they have to see the property from a whole different light. They have to understand the directions of where they’re going. They have to greet the guests with a warm smile, communicate with High West or Blue Sky as to what’s going on, and those little pieces are what make us so special,” she said.
That attentive leadership eventually got her an invitation as one of 12 people in Forbes’ Rising Star program in France designed to foster global collaboration with hoteliers.
“Getting to interact and collaborate with and learn about different regions of hospitality and how different things are seen across the world … it was really cool,” Marnin said. “We are so focused on our area and our offerings and our competitors, but looking even wider, and embracing that and striving to be one of the best across the world, is figuring out what that looks like.”
Through the Auberge brand, Marnin has been able to work short stints at their various hotels though a task force program, but she said Blue Sky is family, the staff and the guests. It’s where she’s been able to grow, and there’s still so much to explore, she said.
“I always still love coming back to Blue Sky and the camaraderie, as well as the true passion that all of our employees have. Nobody is here just because they need a job,” she said. “Everybody’s here because they truly believe in what Blue Sky has to offer.”