When Alvin Cobabe fired up the first rickety chairlift on his family’s sheep pastures in 1972, high above the Utah town of Eden, he called his new winter destination Powder Mountain. He rigged up lights for night skiing and put his wife June in charge of ticket sales and a barbecue outside a makeshift lodge.
The resort, which sits in the Wasatch Range an hour’s drive north of Salt Lake City, earned a reputation as a soulful, mom-and-pop ski hill. The snow that Utah markets as the “greatest on Earth” was more plentiful than profits, and lift tickets were as cheap as June’s hot dogs.
More than half a century later, the current owner of Powder Mountain is surveying the same landscape from his modernist cabin. Reed Hastings, the billionaire founder of Netflix, is perched on an Italian leather sofa. Lean and lightly bearded, he wears jeans and a black polo neck.
In 2023, months after he retired as the chief executive of Netflix, Hastings, who is 64, bought a resort that now includes 12,000 acres of skiable terrain, 11 lifts and four restaurants. His log-shaped ski-in, ski-out cedar house on stilts, which is accessed via a steel bridge, stands at 2,700 metres near the top of Powder Mountain.
“I used to snowboard 10 days a winter when I was at Netflix,” says Hastings, who owns shares worth more than $2bn in the TV giant, which he now chairs. He bought the resort for an undisclosed price and made an additional initial investment of $100mn. “Now it’s more like 80 days. When the snow falls, I get to drop right out of here and it’s just magical.”
But it’s what Hastings is doing in the wider resort that is turning heads. Starting this winter, he has carved up Powder Mountain to create a private enclave on the edge of the public resort. It means three chairlifts, including one new one, and more than 2,000 acres of previously accessible terrain are now reserved for residents of Powder Haven, a real estate development and members’ club. The price of entry: a plot of land for a minimum $2mn, plus annual fees of up to $100,000. So far 150 plots have been sold and 50 homes built. A final batch of 500 plots will go on sale this summer.
And so it is that a pioneer of streaming TV finds himself flogging premium subscriptions to a mountain in Utah. It’s an experiment being closely watched by the wider US ski industry as it faces heat this season over clogged car parks, snaking lift lines and striking ski patrollers.
The morning after I meet Hastings, I arrive at the plush yurt-shaped Skylodge clubhouse, a timber-and-glass members’ retreat that feels like a mountaintop business class lounge, to see how the other half skis. A storm is sweeping through the Wasatch, bringing three feet of snow (Hastings is the only mogul I’ll encounter). After breakfast, I’m in the back of a snowcat as it parts deep snow in the woods of Davenport, a bowl reserved for the members to enjoy private guided catskiing.
Colm Foley and Mark Newhall both used to ski at the glitzy Park City resort, above the Utah town that hosts the Sundance Film Festival. “We looked at a bunch of places with a real estate agent and the next morning my kid got run over by a snowboarder,” says Foley, who works in private equity, in the back of the cat. He joined Powder Haven instead.
“Park City definitely felt like more of a mass-market vibe,” adds Newhall, a director at MIT’s business school. “We were looking for something a bit more low-key and unique.” Soon we’re slaloming through undisturbed trees, snow lapping at our knees.
Hastings, who grew up skiing in local resorts near his home in Boston, bought a Park City house in 2002. He also tired of the crowds, which he says only grew when Vail Resorts bought Park City in 2014. It was one of the bigger buyouts by the two Colorado conglomerates that now dominate US skiing. Vail Resorts and Alterra Mountain Company have acquired more than 50 North American ski areas between them over the past decade.
Central to their business models are season “super” passes — Epic at Vail and Ikon at Alterra. For about $1,000, members can ski any resorts in each group, with limited access to dozens of partner resorts. It’s a good deal for regulars but has come with hefty increases in the prices of day tickets (which have reached more than $300 in some resorts), as well as hellish traffic jams and lift lines at peak times.
In 2016, a friend invited Hastings to Powder Mountain. “It just felt like this undiscovered wilderness,” he recalls. He bought his plot weeks later, and sold up in Park City. He was looking forward to retiring a few years later, spending more time with his snowboard and philanthropic work. “Buying the whole place was the last thing on my mind.”
Though a locals’ favourite, Powder Mountain — or PowMow for short — was struggling financially. “It was uncrowded and inexpensive, which is a bad quadrant to be in,” Hastings says. In 2006, a consortium had bought the resort from Cobabe, but plans for a megaresort stalled in the face of local protest and the 2008 crash.
Enter the “Summit bros” — four entrepreneurs who bought the resort for $40mn in 2013. High on the success of Summit Series, an elite events company described as “TED meets Burning Man”, they planned to build a “new urbanist” community of tech visionaries, celebrities and progressive billionaires. Ashton Kutcher was involved early on, as was Richard Branson.
Hastings says he was drawn to the mountain more than the Summit dream. Either way, beyond a few dozen homes, some infrastructure and the Skylodge, the plans fizzled out. “I hoped it would work and in hindsight I was a sucker,” Hastings says.
He felt like he had no choice when the Summit guys invited him to step in, and believes the resort would likely otherwise have been bought up by one of the Colorado giants. Instead he has guaranteed its independence by tying its fortunes to his own. “Whenever the Netflix stock goes up 100 bucks, my team here are like, ‘that’s another lift we can buy!’” he says.
Whether he can preserve its soul is a bigger question. He says a public-private model is the only way to sustain the resort without crowds. But that carries a cost on the public side of the resort, too, where season passes are now up to $1,700 (or up to $1,150 for weekdays only), and day passes can rise to about $250 (they vary daily). There is a new charge for weekend parking, and the busy February weekends are reserved for season pass holders.
Morgan Turner, who grew up in Eden and works in the military, is typical of middle-class American skiers who form deep ties to local hills. He loves the lack of crowds but says he’s very close to being priced out. “Watching this place gentrify and privatise . . . I feel like it goes away from the heart and soul of the sport,” he tells me on a chairlift. The changes are also personal; Turner says the ashes of his friend and skiing mentor are scattered in what is now private terrain. “It’s heartbreaking knowing I can’t visit him,” he says.
Hastings knows that success depends on justifying price hikes with investment. Of four new chairlifts this winter, three are public, including the Lightning Ridge quad, which opens new advanced terrain. At least two more lifts are in the pipeline. Families can still go night skiing after school for $19 under the Sundown lift, where the lodge that hosted June Cobabe’s barbecue now sells very good $6 pizza slices.
It’s hard to argue with the lack of crowds. As jubilant hordes descend on new snow across Utah on the Presidents’ Day holiday weekend, I never queue for more than a minute while doing laps of Paradise, a high-speed replacement for an existing chair, in the best snow I can remember skiing at a resort. Another great tradition Hastings has preserved is a free shuttle bus to collect skiers from the road at the bottom of a 1,200-acre area of advanced off-piste terrain known as Powder Country and Woody’s World (named for the bus’s former driver).
Hastings predicts the model will spread. “I know that in Europe the idea of private skiing is just awful but there’s no social stigma here and the market is so underserved,” he says. And the market in Utah is only growing as Salt Lake City booms as a tech and finance hub. I meet two remote workers who moved there from Denver, Colorado, where the I-70 highway has become a notorious chokepoint for access to the ski resorts west of the city. The effects are rippling out to surrounding towns, where most visiting skiers stay in rented apartments, including in Eden itself. “More park, less city” is the slogan at the Wolf Creek Resort.
Hastings hopes to attract hotel companies to Powder Mountain. In the meantime the only option is the delightful Compass Rose Lodge in Huntsville, a small town on a reservoir, 30 minutes’ drive down the valley. Jeff Hyde and his family opened it in 2019 to serve the skiers who dip in and out of local resorts, which also include Snowbasin and Nordic Valley. “We wanted to honour the history and romance of skiing because it’s getting so corporate,” Hyde says. The walls of the hotel’s First Lift Coffee shop are full of ski memorabilia and photos of Dean Perkins, Jeff’s uncle and a Utah ski racing legend.
Hyde, who’s 67, skied at Powder Mountain as a teenager in the 1970s. His son Dakota, 36, says he’s glad the “Summit chaos” is over. “It’s big money now and you don’t know what any individual is going to do, but we need investment here,” he adds. Right now the only other spot in town is the Shooting Star Saloon, a ramshackle bar that opened in 1879. Hyde plans to extend the hotel and open a restaurant. Property prices are soaring in the town, where Powder Haven also owns a summer clubhouse on the waterfront.
Back up on the mountain, Hastings has signed off on a larger replacement for the members’ Skylodge that will include a spa and climbing wall. He is also funding an art foundation that is installing works on the mountain. On one chairlift, a mournful Appalachian folk hymn sung by Turner Prize-winning Scottish sound artist Susan Philipsz streams out of a speaker hidden in the woods.
I can see why the resort got its reputation — and visitors will find some of the best off-piste tree runs you’ll reach from a chairlift. My advice: rent a 4×4 with snow tires, stay at the Compass Rose and ski Powder Mountain for three or four days as part of a multi-resort Utah trip.
I ask Hastings if he worries that skiing is getting less accessible for the families Cobabe set out to serve. “There are still the small resorts like Nordic Valley down here where it’s, like, $39 a ticket,” he says, gesturing through his windows. “But there’s a big market for higher-end options.”
The man from Netflix is walking a gentrification tightrope and a ski industry in flux is watching every step. But he has no regrets. His favourite run of the season came the day before our meeting. Boarding with some neighbours, he ducked into a pocket of unfamiliar trees. “I’ve been skiing here for years and there’s still this thrill of discovery,” he says.
Simon Usborne was a guest of Powder Mountain (powdermountain.com), Visit Ogden (visitogden.com) and Ski Utah (skiutah.com). The Compass Rose Lodge (compassroselodge.com) has doubles from $299
Is the Epic Pass coming for the Alps?
When Vail Resorts launched its Epic Pass in 2008, the Colorado-based company simply hoped the idea might leave it less at the mercy of the weather, writes Tom Robbins. Rather than booming in good snow years and slumping in bad, by selling a cheaper season-long lift pass that had to be bought before the winter even began, they could bank their income in advance.
In fact, the pass proved so popular it caused a revolution in the US ski industry, prompting a wave of acquisitions and partnership deals as battle lines were drawn between resorts that were part of the Epic Pass scheme and those aligned to its key rival, the Ikon. Vail went from having five resorts in 2008 to 42 today, plus partnerships with another 38.
With users encouraged to ski as much as possible, given they’d already paid for their passes, concerns about peak-time overcrowding grew — clips of vast lift lines stretching into the distance were shared on social media, along with complaints about a creeping “corporatisation” of the ski experience and the soaring price of day tickets for those unwilling to buy into the season-pass model. In December, patrollers at Vail-owned Park City, the biggest resort in the US went on strike over low pay. The following month, Late Apex Partners, an investor in Vail, issued an open letter to its board complaining that its marketing had “cut out the heart of each mountain” and seen it become known as “the evil empire”.
Skiers in Europe, then, might be forgiven for anxiety when they learn that Vail is now planning to expand into the Alps and, eventually, to launch an Epic Pass-style product there. “I think Europe is absolutely the ideal place for this type of multi resort pass,” Mike Goar, chief operating officer of Vail Resorts in Switzerland, told the FT.
Vail has already acquired two Swiss resorts — Andermatt in 2022 and Crans Montana last year — adding them to the Epic Pass. Many observers assumed the intention was to tempt US skiers to take European holidays but in fact the company sees the resorts as bridgeheads to more growth in the region. “Really the grand plan is not only to continue to build the Epic Pass network but ultimately to create a network in Europe that would function similarly in terms of providing great value and access to multiple resorts,” says Goar, 67, who previously managed Park City, and started his career as a ski patroller at Sunrise Park, Arizona.
Swiss newspapers have suggested possible acquisition targets might include Verbier and Flims-Laax, though Vail has yet to name any resorts, nor provide a timeframe for expansion.
However Goar is anxious to allay fears that Vail will attempt to import the US’s more vertically integrated model (in which one company owns lifts, restaurants, hotels and ski schools). “We’ve really set the focus on our core business as a cable car company. I think about the experience of walking through a historic Alpine village, going to small restaurants for a long lunch, the little hotel that is fourth-generation, the family-owned sports shop — all of that. I just think we should do everything we can to maintain that experience.”
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