ALERT - Wolf Creek Village Development - McCombs Land Swap with USFS to open road!

[Trackhead]

We deal with this sort of thing daily in Utah.

[bodywhomper]

The article I read presented the swap as being a lower impact alternative to billionaire dude developing the land he currently owns. Rationale being that he owns land already and has the legal right to develop access aka putting a road through existing USFS land. Per the article's line of reasoning, since billionaire dude owns wetlands/land that has more ecological value than the land he's seeking to swap (AND he can develop whether or not the swap goes through), it COULD make some sense in a lesser of two evils argument for USFS to consent to the transfer. What's not clear about the situation is the difficulty/hurdles associated with billionaire dude developing his current parcel. If there are substantial hurdles or the public/USFS has a good chance of preventing development of billionaire's existing land, then I'd say the article and USFS consent is ill-conceived.

The overall idea seems foolish to put in residential housing in a remote and incredibly inhospitable mtn pass like WC. Never been there but it's always been on my radar as a must ski/see place. Would be a shame for WC's character to be irreversibly impacted by a single individual. gl

are these items addressed in the USFS's EIS? if not, one could probably craft an argument about how they should be addressed, analysed, and considered in the EIS, resulting in questions about the adequacy of the EIS in the USFS's compliance with NEPA....

[summit]

Bump for awareness and getting people to go to public comments.

[Canada1]

[QUOTE=MiCol;3716622]Any other new lift served terrain will be tracked out quickly. The lack of lodging close by keeps WC off many peoples vacation radar. This will all change once there are ski in ski out options and condo lodging deals. As the dick on the copper forum (now gone) once said, "Them mountains are going to get skied. And, so they will, so they will.

I can just give one guys perspective. We had a family cabin near there as I grew up.

The logistics of skiing there will keep it off the radar. With the closest airport of significance 2+ hours away, it will only be van loads of Texans. Will the church groups from Texas fill expensive new Condo's, or drive the extra hour into durango to hit Purgatory where the lodging will be less? I see this as a development that will follow in the footsteps of so many others. Three bankruptcy's from now, when the party buys it for a nickle on the dollar, a profit will start to be turned.

[rmnpsplitter]

I see this as a development that will follow in the footsteps of so many others. Three bankruptcy's from now, when the party buys it for a nickle on the dollar, a profit will start to be turned.

2nd that. There are so many fucking hoops to jump through just to get to a county commissioners ruling that in all likelihood the old bastard proposing this will be gone by then. I imagine the engineering and surveying costs alone have to be outrageous. Although it sounds like he has the $ to finance his own projects. Hopefully the people who have been voted in as commissioners have some sense. I know around here they are very cautious of public opinion and something like this would prob never fly.

[~mikey b]

Y'all need CW McCall

[Micol]

Y'all need CW McCall

Rubber duck ya got yer ears on? He's still alive I think.

[Micol]

I can just give one guys perspective. We had a family cabin near there as I grew up.

The logistics of skiing there will keep it off the radar. With the closest airport of significance 2+ hours away, it will only be van loads of Texans. Will the church groups from Texas fill expensive new Condo's, or drive the extra hour into durango to hit Purgatory where the lodging will be less? I see this as a development that will follow in the footsteps of so many others. Three bankruptcy's from now, when the party buys it for a nickle on the dollar, a profit will start to be turned.

He's a billionaire with liquid cash. Nothing to stop him. He is a major Texas real estate developer and investor. He founded Clear Channel Communications. Took it public. People like this are virtually unstoppable. His previous WC land holding was not the prime mtn side he wanted. This trade deal gives him ski in ski out RE.

Del Norte has a paved strip airport that can be expanded easily 35 miles away. Telluride , Aspen all grew their airports with the same kind of push. Del Norte strip is 6000' and paved. That already handles most piston and turbine General aviation aircraft. Aint nuthin for a guy like that to add pavement and ILS. He could start his own direct flights with a single regional jet from San Atone, Houston , Dallas operating part 135 without a ton of FAA regulation. He could start his own CME van service from Del Norte 8V1 to WC. CME from Denver to Summit and Eagle is much farther and it is the primary feeder airport for the I70 corridor resorts in addition to Eagle. Del Norte to WC would be a much shorter shuttle. He would almost be vertically integrated. Let the the current owners of WC do their local friendly expansion with usfs and then McCombs buys em out. Done. Bang!

If you don't think that is the plan, yous silly! Mccombs not doing this to ski untracked powder in horseshoe.


FAA INFORMATION EFFECTIVE 26 JULY 2012

Location

FAA Identifier: 8V1
Lat/Long: 37-42-50.0090N / 106-21-06.7074W
37-42.833483N / 106-21.111790W
37.7138914 / -106.3518632
(estimated)
Elevation: 7949 ft. / 2423 m (estimated)
Variation: 12E (1985)
From city: 3 miles N of DEL NORTE, CO
Time zone: UTC -6 (UTC -7 during Standard Time)
Zip code: 81132
Airport Operations

Airport use: Open to the public
Activation date: 05/1947
Sectional chart: DENVER
Control tower: no
ARTCC: DENVER CENTER
FSS: DENVER FLIGHT SERVICE STATION
NOTAMs facility: DEN (NOTAM-D service available)
Attendance: UNATNDD
Wind indicator: yes
Segmented circle: no
Airport Communications

CTAF: 122.9
Nearby radio navigation aids

VOR radial/distance VOR name Freq Var
ALSr298/33.6 ALAMOSA VORTAC 113.90 13E
Airport Services

Parking: tiedowns
Airframe service: NONE
Powerplant service: NONE
Bottled oxygen: NONE
Bulk oxygen: NONE
Runway Information

Runway 6/24

Dimensions: 6050 x 75 ft. / 1844 x 23 m
Surface: asphalt, in excellent condition
RUNWAY 6 RUNWAY 24
Latitude: 37-42.514395N 37-42.892462N
Longitude: 106-21.746177W 106-20.585562W
Elevation: 7955.5 ft. 7889.7 ft.
Gradient: 1.1% UP
Traffic pattern: left left
Markings: basic, in good condition basic, in good condition
Runway 3/21

Dimensions: 4670 x 60 ft. / 1423 x 18 m
Surface: turf/dirt, in good condition
RUNWAY 3 RUNWAY 21
Latitude: 37-42.698308N 37-43.305633N
Longitude: 106-21.338987W 106-20.744477W
Elevation: 7926.0 ft. 7933.6 ft.
Gradient: 0.5% 0.5%
Traffic pattern: left left
Obstructions: none 10 ft. mtn

[Micol]

Easy to expand. Less than 30 minutes away from the new village at Wolf Creek.
8V1 closer to WC than Eagle Airport to Vail. Obviously much closer than DIA/DEN to Summit and Eagle resorts.

Git er done Red !

[Micol]

Might be tight with this one, but there are always options:


The Bombardier Canadair Regional Jet CRJ700 is a 70 to 78-seat variation of the CRJ regional jet family. The CRJ was introduced into service in 1992 and the family also includes the 44-seat CRJ440, 50-seat CRJ200, 86-seat CRJ900 and the latest model the 100-seat CRJ1000

700
Take off run at MTOW (ISA) 1,564 m (5,131 ft)
ER: 1,676 m (5,499 ft)
LR: 1,851 m (6,073 ft)


or see Telluride infor on landing needs for General and Regional
Canadair CRJ 200LR 5900' length is all that is required.
http://www.tellurideairport.com/pdf/...Appendix_B.pdf

[Micol]

2nd that. There are so many fucking hoops to jump through just to get to a county commissioners ruling that in all likelihood the old bastard proposing this will be gone by then. I imagine the engineering and surveying costs alone have to be outrageous. Although it sounds like he has the $ to finance his own projects. Hopefully the people who have been voted in as commissioners have some sense. I know around here they are very cautious of public opinion and something like this would prob never fly.

He's not that old (low 80s~ remember J Howard Marshall kept up with Anna Nichole Smith at 90y.o.) and he has young family (business people too) as I mentioned in an earlier post. They think they've got the next Vail lock stock an barrel. Mineral County commissioners? shiiiiii done deal...

Ever wonder why a depressed dust bowl town (Del Norte) of 1800 population has a 6000' beautiful paved runway and airport with prime open space for cheap hangers and car condos 30 minutes away from Wolf Creek Pass?

Plus SLV regional airport Alamosa is only 68 miles away from Wolf Creek Pass, still shorter distance than DIA to Vail or Breck.

Airport Services
Fuel available: 100LL JET-A
Parking: hangars and tiedowns
Airframe service: MAJOR
Powerplant service: MAJOR
Bottled oxygen: HIGH/LOW
Bulk oxygen: NONE

Runway Information
Runway 2/20

Dimensions: 8519 x 100 ft. / 2597 x 30 m
Surface: asphalt/grooved, in good condition
Weight bearing capacity:
Single wheel: 52.0
Double wheel: 70.0
Runway edge lights: high intensity
RUNWAY 2 RUNWAY 20
Latitude: 37-25.510990N 37-26.703985N
Longitude: 105-52.535780W 105-51.609288W
Elevation: 7539.2 ft. 7539.1 ft.
Gradient: 0.1% 0.1%
Traffic pattern: left left
Runway heading: 023 magnetic, 032 true 203 magnetic, 212 true
Declared distances: TORA:8519 TODA:8519 ASDA:8519 LDA:8519 TORA:8519 TODA:8519 ASDA:8519 LDA:8519
Markings: precision, in fair condition precision, in fair condition
Visual slope indicator: 4-light PAPI on left (3.00 degrees glide path) 4-box VASI on left (3.00 degrees glide path)
Approach lights: MALSR: 1,400 foot medium intensity approach lighting system with runway alignment indicator lights
Runway end identifier lights: yes
Touchdown point: yes, no lights yes, no lights
Instrument approach: ILS
Obstructions: none 36 ft. tree, 1800 ft. from runway, 400 ft. right of centerline, 44:1 slope to clear

[Micol]

Reposted from Friends of Wolf Creek and Rocky Mtn Wild

Please attend these important public meetings about the Village at Wolf Creek access project!

Mark your calendars! Get your questions answered! Get your concerns heard!

Let the Forest Service know how you feel about trading public land to allow a commercial development on top of Wolf Creek Pass

Next week, the Forest Service is holding three open house meetings to allow the public to ask questions and talk to Forest Service staff about their concerns with the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for the proposed Village at Wolf Creek land exchange:

Tuesday, August 28 from 5:30-7:30 p.m. at the Creede Community Center, Forest Service Road 503, Creede, CO.
Wednesday, August 29 from 5:30-7:30 p.m. at the Aragon Recreation Center, 451 Hot Springs Boulevard, Pagosa Springs, CO.
Thursday, August 30 from 5:30-7:30 p.m. at the Rio Grande County Annex, 965 6th Street, Del Norte, CO.
The Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) analyzes the Leavell-McCombs Joint Venture (LMJV) land exchange, which seeks to provide access for building the “Village at Wolf Creek” project. The Forest Service will be accepting your comments over the next 45 days.

We encourage everyone to participate and respond to this public comment process including review of the DEIS because it highlights many of the issues that the public has painstakingly brought up over the past decade.

Read the DEIS here: http://www.fs.fed.us/nepa/fs-usda-po...?project=35945

Overview of the DEIS:
The proposed land exchange involves approximately 204 federal acres and 178 non-federal acres within the boundaries of the Rio Grande National Forest. Part of the federal land proposed for exchange would connect the private land to U.S. Highway 160, thus precluding the need for securing access across the national forest.

There are three alternatives considered:
--The NO ACTION alternative,
--the land exchange briefly described below, and
--The Forest Service building an (Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act) ANILCA-compliant road over their own property to provide legal access to the inholding.

The Forest Service believes it is not responsible for and cannot directly analyze development on private property, but they do acknowledge that the point of the proposed land exchange is to facilitate some level of residential/commercial development on private land. Therefore, in order to be able to analyze the indirect impacts, the Forest Service considers three versions of possible development of the so-called “Village at Wolf Creek.”

The range of environmental and social/economic impacts analyzed in the DEIS gives a picture of how broad and far-reaching the effects of a 10,000 or even a 5,000 person city on top of a 10,000 foot mountain pass would be. The DEIS finds measurable impacts from the Village on
endangered lynx and other wildlife
wetlands
water quality and loss of soil
greenhouse gas emissions
long-term population trends in the surrounding region
public safety and emergency services
local schools

The DEIS provides detailed maps of possible development scenarios for the Village at Wolf Creek that would include hotels, condos, and retail stores.

Unfortunately, the Forest Service dismisses many other possible alternatives such as the federal government buying the private land parcel and placing it back into public lands.

Talking Points
a large commercial development on top of Wolf Creek Pass is still a bad idea that doesn’t fit with the character of the local area, even if the Forest Service is required to analyze it
The Forest Service is right to acknowledge that construction of a big commercial development with hotels, condos, and parking garages is the point of the land exchange to begin with
The effects on a critical wildlife corridor—which provides essential linkage for endangered lynx as well as mule deer, elk, and other wildlife—could be serious
Wolf Creek Pass is too important environmentally to be sacrificed to the ambitions of one absentee landowner, whose plan is out of step with the surrounding communities

Your voice is essential!
The Forest Service and elected officials will read a lot into the number of people who show up for the open house meetings and the kinds of questions they are asking about environmental impacts and whether a land exchange like this is in the public interest. So please do 1) show up for one of the open house meetings if you can, and 2) send a written comment to the Forest Service by

Public Comments are to be emailed to: comments-rocky-mountain-rio-grande@fs.fed.us.
Please include “Village at Wolf Creek Access Project DEIS” in the subject line of the e-mail.

Hardcopy comments should be addressed to:
Village at Wolf Creek Access Project
c/o Tom Malecek, Divide District Ranger
Rio Grande National Forest
13308 West Highway 160
Del Norte, CO 81132

Stay tuned for more information at:
http://friendsofwolfcreek.org
http://rockymountainwild.org
http://slvec.org
http://sanjuancitizens.org

[PowTrees]

From the map on friends of wolf creek pass it looks like the ski resort leases land under the Alberta lift from mccomb?

[Micol]

From the map on friends of wolf creek pass it looks like the ski resort leases land under the Alberta lift from mccomb?

I'm reading this:

"Background
In 1986, a Decision Notice for the Environmental Assessment of the Proposed Wolf Creek Land Exchange, allowed the conveyance of 300 acres of National Forest System (NFS) land below the Wolf Creek Ski Area (WCSA) in exchange for non-Federal lands located within the Saguache Ranger District."

and

"Both parcels are located at approximately 10,300 feet and are comprised of wooded areas that include aspen, spruce and fir forest, open meadows and wetlands. The non-Federal Parcel adjoins National Forest System lands on three sides and is adjacent to the Wolf Creek Ski Area (WCSA) which operates under a special use permit from the Forest Service. The actual permit map depicts the non-Federal parcel within the permit boundary, but the special use authorization does not affect the private lands."

and

"The Federal Parcel lies north and east of the non-Federal Parcel with the remaining portion of the non-Federal Party‟s land separating the two. It abuts U.S. Highway 160 to the northwest and other federal lands to the east and south. A portion of it lies within the ski area permit boundary."

so, I don't think so

[bodywhomper]

I have skimmed through some of the front end of the DEIS. I do not see how a land exchange addresses the stated purpose and need of allowing "the non-Federal party to access its property". The stated purpose and need implies that the reasonable alternatives would address providing access to the landowner's current property, not its future property. Maybe there's legal precedence, idk, or maybe that is discussed further in the DEIS, but at face value, and with a strict and simple view of NEPA and the CEQ's implementing regs, it does not line up. IMO, the P&N is incorrect. or another way to consider it, the land exchange is not a practicable alternative.

[F.D.V.]

What's worse is Davey seems to be in favor of the development.

[ate'em]

this idea has been floating around for at least a decade, always seemed a bit of a pipe dream.
scary to see just how bought the political system is. not far fetched anymore...

the timining of the land exchange is interesting in the context of all the other public land grabs/swaps occuring around the rockies. along with this WC project, we also have:

-big bullshit out in the wasatch with talisker.
-carbondale BLM exchange at the base of Mt Sopris
-raggeds wilderness access land grab by bill koch in the north fork valley


so, the how-to guide for acuiring desirable public lands-
get the county comissioners in your pocket (gives a false concept of 'local' support)
work top-down through congress to approve your project (this way most of the votes you need come from political cronies that have no connection to the area. then return the favor for them someday.)
ignore everyone else in the process (voters, land managers, state representatives)

i see a feeding frenzy going on right now.

this is the first wave. if these project succeed, just wait.
its all for sale someday soon.

[neckdeep]

This happened at Targhee. The owner aquired an option to purchase some swampy, mosquito infested grizzly habitat a few miles outside of the SW entrance to YNP. Then in return for the purchase and swap of essentially undevelopable lands, the feds gave Targhee 120 acres of USFS land in fee simple absolute to develop at the base of the lifts. It must be noted that the feds could have just bought that cheap-ass inholding themselves and retired it. But, no, it was a thin but necessary cover for the real deal: giving a rich guy tens of millions of dollars potential profit off of public land for only $25,000 an acre because he's an all important job creator and paid off the right federal politicians. So, no, the forest service and dept of interior did not give a rat's ass about the reams of public comment. In hindsight, why would they? Swap? It was a de facto sale of public land and they had not even asked for the fair market value of the land, duh! That game was rigged long before any word of it became public. Good luck with the feds.

The only brakes put on Targhee's insane plan to build the next Vail that nobody wanted came at a much lower level of political power, from Teton County, WY. That county, however, is among the wealthiest counties in the Rockies and it has sophisticated county commisioners who were not awed by and beholden to a rich dude waving some cash and demanding to have his way. Targhee was still fighting with the county when the crash hit. Ironically, the new whisper is that the resort was so fucked up financially from the failed development push that a 49% share was quietly sold to.....ta-daaaa!?!?!?!?!.....VAIL CORP! So now, technically, did the ghee become 49% the next Vail without getting a much needed new lift or even a single shovel full of dirt being moved? D'oh! Be careful what you wish for, I guess....

[bodywhomper]

one avenue to derail this (at least delay things for a while) at the current point of the project approval process is to specifically point out ways that the Draft Environmental Impact Statement does not seem to comply with NEPA. If holes or inadequacy can be found in the NEPA compliance document, then USFS will need to at least address them, potentially drawing out the process, or USFS may need to reconsider its NEPA compliance process in a larger way.

A lot of NEPA compliance can be subjective. Reasonings, methods, and conclusions can (and should) be questioned. My above post (#41) addresses potential inadequacies in the purpose and need and how the alternatives, specifically the preferred alternative, meets the stated purpose and need for Federal action.

I suggest people look at the impact analyses. Do you think they've correct addressed things? Does it make sense to a lay reader? Has an impact been missed, twisted, spun, etc? Do you feel that the "scoping process" was adequate? As a user of public lands of the area, do you feel like you were properly informed of the scoping process? Does the socio economic section make sense and seem adequate? What about the recreation section? Traffic and transportation? Are the indirect impacts (i.e. the development) accurate, effective, etc.? Are the airport ideas described earlier in this thread adequately addressed?

[smmokan]

Wolf Creek is entirely too isolated to become the next Aspen or Telluride... or even the next Crested Butte. A shitty airport 35 miles away from a group of condos at the base of a ski resort in the middle of nowhere doesn't mean that it's going to become a world class ski destination. In my mind, this means that Wolf Creek could end up more like Durango (Purgatory, whatever) or Solitude with a few condo complexes at the base... there's no town infrastructure in place to support much else. Never will be.

Don't get me wrong, I'm entirely against the development plan. But the people having thoughts of grandeur and a Vail-like takeover are just ridiculous.

[Micol]

Wolf Creek is entirely too isolated to become the next Aspen or Telluride... or even the next Crested Butte. A shitty airport 35 miles away from a group of condos at the base of a ski resort in the middle of nowhere doesn't mean that it's going to become a world class ski destination. In my mind, this means that Wolf Creek could end up more like Durango (Purgatory, whatever) or Solitude with a few condo complexes at the base... there's no town infrastructure in place to support much else. Never will be.

Don't get me wrong, I'm entirely against the development plan. But the people having thoughts of grandeur and a Vail-like takeover are just ridiculous.

I disagree with you. I said Vail as a joke. What defines World class is subjective. But, if you think McCoomb's group are a bunch of hacks that are going to end up with some missed attempt like the lodge at Monarch Pass you are sadly mistaken.

If you underestimate the tenacity or greed of those who want to see the real estate component of this development flourish you are sadly kidding yourself. I wish it weren't so...think Ghekko on steroids.

On another note you obviously are not an esteemed AOPA member or or you would never call 8V1 a "shitty airport". Shitty is a grass or dirt strip....with potholes. And once again, Alamosa is ILS equipped with 8,500 paved which will handle commercial and closer to WC than KDEN to Summit County.

Steve, I would like to know the basis of your theory. I have told you mine. What do you know about the developer? I would also like to remind you that Wolf Creek is closer to Texas than Summit or Eagle counties and that does not prevent them from having 23,000 people skiing per day per ski area on weekends. DIA (KDEN) appears to be a larger feeder than KEGE. The WC ski experience will change for the worse from what it is now if there are 2000+ people skiing on a powder day or the subsequent days.

[Micol]

Interesting article on ownership of Wolf Creek Ski Area. Not the land but the assets and the current usfs permit.

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20110301...-business.html

I did not repost the comments from article because some were not kind.

The 24-7 Family Business (from Inc Mag)

To really get the Pitchers and the strange and striking success of their Wolf Creek Ski Area in the high lonesome of Colorado's San Juan Range, you need to spend some time with a man born 170 years ago and 6,000 miles from Wolf Creek.

This, at any rate, is the belief of the 91-year-old family patriarch, Kingsbury ("Pitch") Pitcher. Before he says a word about Wolf Creek, Pitch wants to speak of his ancestry—"I can do it in about one minute."

He takes 10 minutes, but nobody's counting. The man, who skied regularly through his mid-80s, is a wonder of nonagenarian focus and vigor. And it's as if he reads from a book, a good one, about the life and deeds of his maternal grandfather, Otto Mears.

Mears, a Russian-born orphan, landed in San Francisco all on his own and penniless at age 11. Pitch waxes biblical: "He worked ever since then...and the years passed." Mears went to Colorado and remade the southwestern part of the state by building toll roads, which he upgraded to railroads networking wilderness settlements and mining towns. A stained-glass portrait of Mears, still widely known as the Pathfinder of the San Juans, adorns the rotunda of Colorado's state capitol.

Mears became a regional omnimagnate, but by the time Pitch was born, much of the great man's empire was lost or on the skids. "I had kind of a strange upbringing," says Pitch, who spent his summers in rough-tough Silverton, Colorado, a mining town in which his family still had business interests, and his school years at the family home in Pasadena, California. Pitch discovered skiing, for which he had a gift, on Mount Baldy in Los Angeles County. He ski-raced for Stanford University, where he earned a business degree, and then taught skiing at Sun Valley in Idaho, reportedly the first non-European to do so. In the U.S., skiing was then a tiny, marginal exotic; it was mainstreamed and Americanized only after World War II.

Pitch briefly operated a ski club's rope tow near Santa Fe, New Mexico—"Being brash and foolish, I said, 'Oh, I know how to splice ropes. I can run it.' " He fibbed about splicing but figured it out and found his professional path. "I learned a lot of the ins and outs of the ski business right then," says Pitch. "I had to do everything myself."

Radical self-reliance—running/fixing/building everything you possibly can—remains a Pitcher First Principle.

Why all the backstory? Well, Pitch thinks we should know it. And, though the Mears fortune vanished, there is a legacy. Pitch become one of skiing's pathfinders.

Pitch, who had learned to fly before World War II, trained fliers in the Army Air Corps. After the war, he taught skiing in Aspen, Colorado, where he also ranched and had a small ski shop. All members of his family—his wife, Jane, and six kids born over a spread of 17 years—helped out as soon as they could. Pitch and Jane's daughter Noël recalls, fondly, doing chores at age 6 and lessons learned from her father: "He taught all of us frugality and just how much you can do without a whole lot."

Moneymen harnessed Pitch's blended expertise—skiing and business—by hiring him to scout mountains that were right for building profitable ski areas. He pointed a developer toward the peaks near Aspen that became the giant area Snowmass. He also explored and backed a surprising winner, given how far south it was: Sierra Blanca (now Ski Apache), in the White Mountains near Ruidoso, New Mexico. A developer had decided to build there, and Pitch scouted to satisfy himself that he ought to accept a job offer to design and oversee construction of the new area. Pitch said yes, and Sierra Blanca opened in 1961.


Davey Pitcher, his father's successor as head of the family business and at 48 the youngest of his siblings, says all that followed depended on Pitch's eye for mountains with commercial potential: "He understood slope and aspect—it's a hard thing for someone who's not a real mountain person to understand." A successful ski mountain must have three things. One, terrain right for trails to accommodate skiers of all levels, plus off-trail steeps and bowls for new-style adventure snow sports. Two, north-facing slopes to catch and hold more snow. Three, good road access. And a mountain can meet those basic requirements but still not work. It takes both imagination and a special knowledge of skiing to perceive how a wild mountain might be cleared and graded to create a successful area. Davey likens the process to an artist seeing a sculpture in raw marble. And he says that the Colorado Rockies, which can look like skiable infinity, are pretty much built out: "If you went out and had a trunkload of money and wanted to build a new ski area, you'd be hard-pressed to find a place to put it."

In 1962, Pitch got his own operation on the same spot, more or less, where he debuted in the ski business circa 1941. He purchased, for an amount so small he can't remember it, Ski Santa Fe, a moribund business with a nonworking lift adapted from mine machinery brought down from Colorado. "I bought Santa Fe on a note, unsecured except by the property, which was junk," says Pitch. Junk as a ski area, but it had good topography and faced north, with access via a newly improved state road. Basically, the owners of the Santa Fe area had given up on it, and Pitch's effort could do as much as the cash and lines of credit he didn't have. "He did all the work, or an awful lot of it," says Davey. "He would run the bulldozer, he'd run the lift, he'd figure out how to haul the equipment up, to build the lift. He didn't rely on financing and hiring specialists." He did, however, rely on his wife and children, the oldest of whom were out of high school when he bought Ski Santa Fe. "There was no money, so if you have six kids, there's your labor force," says Noël, who began work at the Santa Fe area as a teen and later ran support businesses at the base of the lifts—rental, restaurants, children's program, and so on—at Wolf Creek, where she ended a 30-year career in her family's business.

[Micol]

part 2
Pitch sold his first area a quarter-century ago, but he and Jane still live in Santa Fe, in the same lovely old adobe in which they raised their youngest children. It's here that Pitch tells me his story. He shows off a daily receipts report from Wolf Creek that includes the day's count of skiers, sales from ski operations, and sales from support businesses. "I've been running this for 40 years," he says. "I invented it way back at the start of Santa Fe." According to Pitch, daily point-of-sale bookkeeping was unusual in the 1960s, when the ski business had yet to become businesslike. These days, the system also keeps the Pitchers from Millennial foolishness: "It starts with these sharp-pencils boys thinking about market share. Market share—not money share but market share." Pitch sneers out the last two words.

Money share management, as the Pitchers lay it out, means gradual, cautious, organic expansion based on broadening the existing clientele. "It's not, 'Build it, they will come,' " says Davey. "It's all about servicing the needs of the existing business clientele that you have, trying to visualize the things you can do in the future that will expand that visitorship, with an eye toward having it be financially doable."

However cautious, the Pitchers are in a risky business. The dollars they make must first fall from the sky. No snow, no money. In New Mexico, the Pitchers sometimes came up short on both. "We had periods in Santa Fe, dry spells, particularly in November and December," Pitch says.

Wanting no-snow insurance, he looked northward at a failed, hell-and-gone, but fabulously snowy little ski area in Colorado, 160 miles from Santa Fe. For years, says Pitch, "Wolf Creek was chugging along in the most primitive way...It was in constant default, because you couldn't charge enough. You couldn't deal with the heavy snow and so forth." In 1975, the owner tried to sell to Pitch, who declined but agreed to join the board. Pitch also asked his firstborn, Todd, to take a position at Wolf Creek. Thus father and son test-drove the area. "Needless to say, it had some problems," observes Todd, now 65 and decelerating toward retirement. Lifts and buildings were sketchy. The area had been open only on weekends, and the owner had no clue how to broaden the market and make weeklong operations pay. On the upside, Wolf Creek got average annual snowfall of about 465 inches, making it the snowiest ski area in Colorado. It also had highway access, though it was a lonely highway, particularly back then. Pitch looked and weighed—"I saw all the problems and the solutions, and he [the owner] said, 'Why don't you just buy it?' "

In 1978, Pitch and his clan had new junk in Colorado.

Even knowing who he is, his official position and his accomplishments at Wolf Creek, it causes perceptual strain to look at Davey Pitcher and see the CEO of an $11 million family business. Davey comes across as this tool-swingin', bulldozer-drivin' fixer and builder who makes all the big crunchy stuff happen for somebody in the corner office. But then, when he needs to, Davey taps into a white-collar self and communicates in business-speak.

Davey walks into his office in a building near the base of the lifts at Wolf Creek, wearing his morning's work in the form of a big, throbbing-blue blot of paint on his work pants. He has been painting bathroom doors.


Behind his desk, the john-door painter becomes Executive Davey. He begins a long phone meeting with an insurance agent, going point by point through the complete coverage package and costs—about $500,000 for buildings, equipment, liability, workers' comp, and all. He speaks in clear, flattish, accent-neutral tones, while his reddish, weather-worn face sparks off intensity. There's a pretty good resemblance to Christopher Lloyd's Doc Brown character in Back to the Future prime.

It's still a few weeks ahead of the first snow. Wolf Creek's base buildings, lift machinery, and trails poodle-cut into a forested mountain have the raw and derelict look of all ski areas off-season. By Colorado standards, this is a modest operation. Vertical relief, from the top of the highest lift to lowermost skiing, is about 1,600 feet, more of a Catskill-size drop than alpine West, where major areas have verticals in the 3,000s and up. On a big day during either of the seasonal peaks—Christmastime and spring break—Wolf Creek sometimes entertains upward of 6,000 skiers and snowboarders, but most days many fewer. Last season's skier days totaled about 198,000, some 10 percent less than the record 223,000 skier days in the 2006–07 season. By comparison, Colorado's mighty Breckenridge Resort once reported 1.63 million skier days in a single season.

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Part 3
But of course, Breckenridge and other household-name mountain resorts in the state—Vail, Aspen, Steamboat—are situated and set up to pull in mobs of skiers. You earn your Wolf Creek, pilgrim. This hits home on the drive up from Santa Fe, culminating in a climb to the Continental Divide on U.S. Route 160. Trucker bard C.W. McCall versified about coming down this same road in a 1975 talkin'-country number called "Wolf Creek Pass": "It just wasn't real purdy/ It was hairpin county and switchback city." In truth, doing the pass on dry pavement is real purdy but also devoid of roadside commercial offerings. Up on the pass, you are where God lost his shoes. And there sits Wolf Creek Ski Area, base elevation 10,300 feet above sea level.

The nearest hotel rooms are about 18 miles to the east. You drive 25 miles westward and drop 3,000 feet to get to the closest town worthy of the name, Pagosa Springs, population 1,815. You commute to ski, and you don't get exciting resort experiences.

There is only one reason such a bare-bones recreational outpost can survive, much less prosper: snow. Wolf Creek can have skiable snow weeks earlier than big-name areas to the north, and it is some of the best snow in North America. Conditions favor deep falls of powder snow. Relatively light crowds up the odds of finding untracked powder, the burgundy truffle of snow sport.

But snow isn't the whole story. The Pitchers know just what to do—and not do—with Wolf Creek. The mission, per Pitch: "Selling ski tickets...That's where the money comes from." More than 80 percent of last year's receipts came from skiing. All sub-businesses—restaurants, shops, bar—are not run as profit centers but, as Pitch says, as "amenities to the public."

Kent Sharp, a principal of SE Group (the SE stands for snow engineering), which works closely with Davey as a consultant on new projects and preparation of required government documentation, says this attitude sets his client apart. Sharp once was amazed by what Davey said about the great but cheap food (green chili stew $5.25, cheeseburger $6) at Wolf Creek. "First thing out of his mouth about the food and beverage operation is, 'We're not really doing it to make money. Our guests are hungry, and we need to find them something good to eat.'...Davey does it differently than anybody else." The difference goes straight to the bottom line. "You could do everything in the world to squeeze more money out of food," Davey says, "and you'd probably alienate a certain amount of customers and then lose the ticket revenue. We're not in the hamburger-selling business."

Given that more than 90 percent of ticket sales comes, if the snow gods smile, in a five-and-a-half-month season, with the Christmas holidays and spring break accounting for half of the total, pure skiing seems like a slender thread on which to hang a business. And Wolf Creek is relatively cheap. A one-day adult lift ticket retails for $52, weekday or weekend, about $30 down from a Rocky Mountain average of $81.69 for weekend tickets at big areas, as reported in the industry's benchmark Kottke National End of Season Survey 2009/10. The spread, however, shrinks in a comparison of yields, i.e., how much skiers really pay for lift tickets. Aggressive discounting knocks the big areas' yield down to about $39, less than half price. Davey, quickly figuring Wolf Creek's yield in his head, gives me a number in the low $30s. Wolf Creek asks skiers for less and keeps more.


Looking at the 2009–10 season's revenue, which came to just more than $11 million, Davey does more number crunching and comes up with another figure. He begins speaking mournfully about what a marginal business this is. The mood goes with the time of year, six months since last ski season ended—"No money comin' in. But money going out!" Then, having led me through some of the heavy expenditures—payroll ($4 million plus), maintenance ($2 million-ish), the half a million for insurance, $200,000 or so to lease the area's land from the U.S. Forest Service—he figures what is left, to be divided among the seven shareholders in the family-held corporation that owns Wolf Creek. "Ummm, so let me just run a number here for a minute," Davey says, then comes back seeming pleasantly surprised. "It's actually a bit more than 20 percent for this last season."

Not a bad margin for a niche business in serious boondocks that depends on people coming many miles in the wintertime to put boards on their feet and have fun. Davey declines to make broader, comparative claims about Wolf Creek's performance. "I don't know what the industry standard is," he says. "I've only got one business."

Davey, the first post-Pitch CEO of the family business, was not an obvious heir apparent. For a while, he jokes, the family must have wondered if he would survive young manhood. He got a GED, because spotty attendance disqualified him from a normal high school diploma. He worked in building trades and seasonally at Ski Santa Fe and Wolf Creek, and he amassed expertise matching the demands of the ski area, which combines elements of building and road construction, stationary machinery operation, hospitality, restaurant management, and especially—because the business is so labor intensive and dependent on weather—farming. Davey and his wife, Rosanne, now the company's marketing director, came on board permanently at Wolf Creek in 1984.

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part 4
Davey says a love of skiing motivates the entire family, but he is obviously crazy about the hardhat stuff and all the big things that go with it. On a long drive across Colorado, he suddenly slows to eye a road grader on an auction lot, which also has storage units and a couple of tractors. "Mmmmm," he says. "I'm not saying I'd go back and bid on any of those, but it's always good to look." His brothers share his thing for heavy equipment, and the pleasure seems a little bit guilty. All three have bought big machines and tried to hide them from their spouses. Todd once bought an enormous front-end loader and tried to hide it in plain sight, moving it around Pagosa Springs in hopes that his wife, Jann, wouldn't notice. Davey did much the same with a used snowmaking machine that he bought and spirited from place to place around the area last ski season. "It was a twin of one that we had," he says, "And then nobody knows whether it's a new one or the same machine...It took everybody close to six months to figure out there were two of them."

But the Pitchers also wring maximal work and value out of their great big toys. "We probably purchase one new piece of equipment a decade," Davey says. Everything else comes used, to be maintained and fixed in-house. Davey, who has a particular liking for snowcats, says Wolf Creek has machines older than he is. He babies the most recent unit, a 2003 model, so it still looks new.

The Pitchers don't own their mountain. In the West, practically all the slopes on which ski areas operate are public land leased to operators. Very often, though, the mountains rise from private land held by skiing companies heavily invested in resort real estate—development, sales to developers, condos, hotels, commercial ski villages, and every other way to cash in on property in paradise. The real estate crash brought highly publicized debt crises at major winter resort companies. But even in the gravy days, when players raked in money, real estate changed the business in ways Davey did not like. "It's bed-based," he says. "They're no longer in the skiing business." With beds to fill with guests/renters/buyers, skiing isn't enough, because winter isn't enough. But skiing is all the Pitchers want.

Lately, it's what the public wants, too. The Kottke survey showed last season's skier visits to be up nationwide, to 59.8 million, a 4.2 percent annual increase in spite of the hard times and a so-so snow year. Skiing, as skiing, isn't such a bad business to be in, a point proved by Wolf Creek.

That doesn't mean the Pitchers have never been tempted by the notion of beds at their place. Twenty-five years ago, Pitch got into a business relationship with the Texas billionaire Red McCombs, who acquired land neighboring Wolf Creek Ski Area with an eye toward development. The project lay dormant for 13 years, but then McCombs's development venture moved toward building a 2,000-unit resort on its property. The Pitchers wanted no part of a scheme on that scale, and Davey spent many years and some $4 million in legal fees to bring clarity to the situation. It pains both father and son to tell the story. Pitch ruefully explains what originally beguiled him: "A lot of people say, 'Gee, if you just had accommodations up here...' " And he has words of caution about getting out of your financial league: "A billionaire is a very difficult fellow to deal with." Colorado's high, wild country, however, and regulations governing development on it, might be more difficult. The plans have been scaled back, and nothing has been built.


The son surpasses his father, does things the father would not do because he lived and worked in a different world. Davey says the high-priced lawyering and maneuvering against the McCombs enterprise, in which he took the point, was not his father's style. Men of the previous generation did deals on napkins, handshakes. They worked things out between themselves.

Davey's long and expensive preparation to expand Wolf Creek is more new-gen ski business that would not appeal. In Pitch's day, you just talked to a Fed or two to get approval to expand your area and make changes. Davey has hired SE Group to consult on plans and prepare preliminary documents to present to the U.S. Forest Service. Davey can imagine Pitch saying, "Holy moly, you're paying these guys what?" and calling the back-and-forth with a consultant to put ink on paper "gobbledygook." But, Davey says, Pitch also understands the necessity, because things are no longer straightforward and simple.

The working draft of the 2010 Master Plan for Wolf Creek prepared by SE Group runs a hundred pages, and it isn't a plan so much as it is a template for planning. Actual improvements and expansions will require separate applications and review that probably will take years. All told, Davey expects to pay consultants at least $250,000 to prepare paperwork to apply to make improvements who knows how many years from now. Among other things, he is thinking of a new lift in superb snowy high country.

More untracked powder for Wolf Creek.