Dear Powder Community,
I’m writing to you today with an update on how we are staying uncrowded and unspoiled.
While many of you have been skiing here for generations, I joined this wonderful community only five years ago, and have quickly come to appreciate the soul and natural beauty of Powder Mountain. Sadly, Powder has been struggling financially, so I stepped in a few months ago to invest and find a sustainable path for staying uncrowded and independent.
Our approach is going to be a blend of public and private skiing, where real estate sales help fund lifts and lodges for everyone, and some of our public guests buy real estate to access private skiing. We are fortunate that we can improve our public resort next year and also offer private skiing to help real estate sales.
This summer we will be investing $20 million in three public lifts:
- A hi-speed detachable quad upgrade on Paradise, replacing a fixed-grip quad
- A fixed-grip quad upgrade on Timberline, replacing a 50-year-old fixed-grip double
- A new fixed-grip quad from the base of Timberline to the top of Lightning Ridge, opening up vast new lift-served intermediate and expert terrain, and enabling people to ski from Timberline down to Sundown. We’ll look to move our in-bounds cat route to somewhere else nearby.
In order to pay our bills, we need to sell more real estate, and to do that we are introducing private homeowner-only skiing a year from now. We will be designating the Village and Mary’s lifts, which serve beginner and intermediate terrain, plus a new lift on Raintree, for this private skiing, starting a year from now.
We believe this blend of public and private skiing secures us decades of exceptional uncrowded skiing for all, funded partially by real estate. To stay independent and uncrowded, we needed to change, and we didn’t want to join the successful but crowded multi-resort pass model (ie, Snowbasin) or sell to a conglomerate (ie, Vail).
We are dedicated to running a sustainable business, supporting our wonderful team, and contributing to this incredible community. Thank you for your support in Powder’s next chapter, which kicks off with the three new lifts!
Of course we are keeping the Powder Country bus service, we’ve upgraded the Timberline bathrooms, and we reduced the price of night skiing from $39 to $19 to make it more accessible for our community. Come on up!
See you on the mountain.
-Reed
Reed Hastings
CEO Powder Mountain