Utah-based resort operator Powdr last week pulled its Mt. Bachelor ski area in Oregon off the market. The company in a statement cited “numerous factors involved in evaluating a sale” in its decision to keep the ski area it acquired in 2001.
“After considering all facts and circumstances, Powdr has decided to retain ownership of Mt. Bachelor, indefinitely,” the company’s statement reads. “We’re excited to continue our stewardship of the resort and serve the Central Oregon community with truly one-of-a-kind skiing.”
A Powdr spokeswoman said the company’s Eldora Mountain Resort — which Powdr bought in 2016 — remains on the market, as does the SilverStar ski area in British Columbia it acquired in 2019. Powdr also owns Copper Mountain in Summit County.
That’s good news for the town of Nederland, which has enlisted “veterans of the ski industry” in an effort to buy Eldora Mountain Resort from Powdr is weighing a bid for the 680-acre Boulder County ski area.
The town is “currently in conversations with private entities, philanthropists and impact investors” to build a partnership to buy Eldora, reads a January update on the town’s website. The town is telling residents it could use Enterprise Bond Funds to help raise the estimated $100 million to $200 million needed to acquire the ski area and revenues from operations “can be used for a variety of municipal needs.”
“This project is a bold opportunity for Nederland to reimagine its economic future while preserving the values that make our community unique,” the update reads. “By pursuing this acquisition, we can serve as a model for innovative town growth — balancing economic vitality with sustainability and community resilience.”
Powdr announced Mt. Bachelor, Eldora and SilverStar were for sale last year, after it sold its Killington ski area in Vermont to a group of local investors. Powdr, which bills itself as an “Adventure Lifestyle Company,” last year moved into park concessions, taking over federal management contracts at Utah’s Zion National Park and Death Valley National Park in California.
Nederland Town Administrator Jonathan Cain said the town has not heard anything from Powdr recently. Eldora president and general manager Brent Tregaskis this week announced he was retiring after 10 years at the ski area. The company declined to comment on the sale process beyond confirming that the Eldora ski area was still for sale.
Chris Porter, who led the effort in Bend, Oregon, to buy Mt. Bachelor suspects that the federal budget tightening at the National Park Service may have triggered “some recalibration” at Powdr as the company questioned an over-reliance on federal contracts.
Porter said his group, Mt. Bachelor Community Inc., had pledges from investors large and small that would have enabled the Bend group to buy the 4,300-acre ski area. The group was ready to spend as much as $200 million to buy Mt. Bachelor and invest in overdue maintenance. The community group enlisted institutional investors to put down as much as $75 million in escrow while they studied the resort and lined up funding through the 2012 Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act — known as the JOBS Act — which would have including selling public shares of the ski area to buyers who could get discounted lift tickets and season passes.
The community group was competing against major resort operators and private equity investors, Porter said.
“Those big players we talked to, they were interested in our model,” Porter said.
The community group mirrored its proposed shareholder benefits off the cruise industry, which provides owners of stock special deals and credits on cruise trips.
The “enthusiast shareholder model” can bolster the sense of community around local ski areas, Porter said.
“It’s not just about the stock market and share prices. It’s about how communities can share in the economic viability of the ski areas next to them,” Porter said. “I think a lot of companies across the industry are seeing that communities need to play a larger role in their local ski resorts.”
“Communities need to be at the table”
But is the Forest Service ready to accept an untested operator at a ski area on public land? The Forest Service assesses the financial capability and technical expertise of an operator when it issues long-term ski area permits.
“That could be an interesting process in this case,” said Jim Bedwell, a four-decade Forest Service official who retired in 2017 as the head of recreation for the agency’s Rocky Mountain Region, a job that put him in charge of Colorado’s ski areas on public land.
Bedwell said the agency is not averse to community-based ownership of ski areas “if the capability exists.”
“I was disappointed to see the group at Bachelor fall out, but there is a long history of groups and individuals taking on Forest Service concessions without knowing what they are getting into,” said Bedwell, noting that the closure of the Berthoud Pass ski area in the early 2000s “was a pretty good example of that.”
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Porter, a high school business teacher and accountant who previously built and sold businesses, said his group still hopes to work with Powdr on a joint venture that would give the company funding for capital improvements “and the company can focus on growth and recalibrating their exit plan.”
Porter and other members of Mt. Bachelor Community Inc., are planning to meet with Nederland officials in a couple weeks to share insights into how communities can negotiate for buying a ski resort.
“Communities need to be at the table in the ski resort industry and I think Nederland and Bend can build a new table, with a community-owned investment model that lets community members — not just institutional investors — buy in and have a say in their treasured ski areas,” Porter said. “I really see this as the next evolution for the resort industry.”