Well, the sale I mentioned did happen, Hesperus sold to MCP. The unimpeachable source was the former owner, who told somebody in my presence that James Coleman (owner of MCP) was going to buy the ski area once he had sorted out a land lease or purchase (the land the ski area is on is owned by a rancher that uses it for cattle in summer, rumor is that the previous owner didn’t even have a written lease. Not sure if Coleman bought the land or leased, but cows are still on it in Summer).
Has the purchase been positive or negative? Kind of neutral. Coleman promised some capital improvements, namely snowmaking and even hinted Purg’s chair 8 would be installed. Basically none of those have come to pass. The only notable capital improvement is replacement of the Riblet chair clips, and that only because the tramway board shut the ski area down until it was done.
For a few years Hesperus was getting a longer season and was staying open as long as there was snow on the ground, but that stopped. Last year they closed in Mid March and had great snow deep into April.
There is a TON of deferred maintenance. They regularly have major issues with their lights, at one visit we had last season we had to skip it because their lighting system was down, when we came back a few weeks later half the system was down, other times we have come they got it going right at dusk by frantically digging out electrical boxes and patching stuff. Even worse is the on-mountain staff isn’t empowered to price accordingly, like heavily discount tickets for folks that drove an hour to find they could only ski an hour till dusk because the lights were broke. Nope, full price.
Their groomer broke, and for weeks last season, zero grooming. Remember Purg is 40 minutes away- you can’t load a Purg groomer up on a trailer and bring it down? They still do not groom anything on the upper mountain (would be nice for most to have one groomed top to bottom run) and word is because they don’t pay the hours to get it groomed and have it be part of another job at the ski area- and usually the person grooming doesn’t have the skill to groom the steeper terrain up top.
Lots of grumbling from the ski patrol and staff that the mountain is treated as a red headed stepchild, and the above examples are definitely a part of that grumbling. The parking lot is another, it has needed more gravel for years and at this point is a bog where even AWD/4WD vehicles get regularly stuck. They “addressed” this by putting “park at your own risk” signs up.
The positives are that the ski areas future is more secure, and the reality is that all of the infrastructure issues I mentioned would almost certainly be as bad or worse if the ski area hadn’t sold. It is still an awesome throwback place to ski, but I still feel with modest money it could be so much more…
Coleman strikes me as an executive with ADHD. Says and does a lot of impulsive things, namely buying up marginal ski areas, showering them with love and attention for 1-2 seasons, then getting bored and doing the same with another. The current infatuation seems to be Nordic Valley with huge expansion promises, but he’s also done that at Sipapu (expansion plan tripling the size of the ski area, I haven’t heard a peep about in years…) and at Purgatory, he stated that the old chair 8 would be installed going up from Gelande and Styx “next year” like 5 years ago to alleviate mountain access issues. Note that is two places he stated the old chair 8 would be used. He installed the old chair 8 mid load station on chair 6 to make the terrain park lappable, regularly ran it for 1 season, and then went back to mothballing the lift. Now he is talking about the Ice Creek expansion lift using a FIXED GRIP TRIPLE (which again sounds like the old chair 8 in its third promised reuse). Basically you need to take everything Coleman says with a grain of salt.
