Can Powder Mountain Go Luxury Without Sacrificing the Rugged Vibes?

Powder Mountain, which was named the #1 ski area by SKI magazine this year, has somehow kept the "good old days" of skiing alive. Unlike hot ski spots like Colorado’s Vail or Breckenridge where long lift lines and crowded slopes color a weekend trip, Powder Mountain (located just outside of Eden, Utah) is known as a skier’s paradise, "a true throwback to how skiing used to be, with uncrowded slopes, great snow, and prices that let everyone in on the fun," reads the SKI write-up. Passes and day tickets are capped, so visitors feel, as many have written, like they own the whole mountain.

Still, Powder hasn’t been immune to hard times, changing many hands over the past decades. In September of last year, Reed Hastings, former Netflix CEO, became a majority owner and he recently released his vision for the resort’s future. Most notably, Hastings plans to transform the winter attraction to a year-round tourist destination for both skiing, hiking, and contemporary art, while also providing new luxury housing. It could present an opportunity to stabilize the country’s largest ski resort, creating a new economic model—an attempt to balance Powder’s retro vibe with the economic stability that only luxury can buy.

As many lifelong skiers might tell you, corporate owners have been killing the old-school resort. Over the past few decades, conglomerates like Alterra or Vail Resorts have purchased ski areas across the country, resulting in sky-high lift tickets and season pass prices, Disney-ficiation, and economic strain on ski towns. It’s explained smartly by YouTube "edutainers" Wendover Productions in "How Corporate Greed is Killing Ski Towns," a 25-minute documentary that speaks to issues of climate change-driven risk avoidance. By purchasing multiple resorts, companies can offset losses between drier resorts and those getting snow; vertical integration—purchasing every point-of-sale, including ski rentals and snack bars—is another strategy. Financial precarity breeds competition to build the most luxurious alpine experience. In the process, we lose the quaint charm of escaping the city to spend a few days on the slopes.

Prior to Hastings, Powder’s most recent owner was Summit Series, a group of millennial entrepreneurs whose ambitions, according to a 2018 Guardian story, were to transform the resort into "a mecca for altruistically minded members of the global elite." They purchased the resort in 2013, backed by venture and celebrity capital, to be developed into 500 homes, as well as cafes, juice bars, and the infrastructure for closed-door, Aspen Ideas Festival-adjacent events. But Summit’s plans went south last year, as Fortune reported in 2023: "In recent years, the original Summit founders have been less and less involved with the mountain and have reduced their ownership stake. Changes in the structure of the group developing the resort leave its future in question." Ninety percent of the 500 promised homes had not been built. Hastings, who constructed and owned one of the homes the mountain, swooped in with a $100 million investment and brought on Alex Zhang, who had previously produced events with Summit, to revamp their plans.

Zhang, now the Chief Creative Officer at Powder Mountain, began conversations with Hastings to decide how they might steward the property into the future. "I think we were feeling like the easy route would be to hire a big development company and build a bunch of shopping and retail and restaurants," says Zhang. But both agreed that the resort’s acclaim comes from its unfussy, "rugged" nature, he continues; a massive new development would disrupt what makes it special, or even unique, from other ski resort experiences. They would continue their housing plan: Zhang notes there are currently 80 multi-million dollar homes on the site—many designed by world-class architects—with capacity for 600 total. They’ve enlisted architects at Johnston Marklee to create the residential design guidelines, which Zhang says will create a new typology for alpine living.

"Typically in alpine architectural destinations, there's either this log cabin, ‘80s classic American Rockies architectural approach, or a faux-Bavarian inspired style, but there's nothing really in between. And then in the last decade, there's been this huge push towards mountain contemporary," Zhang explains. "We believe that there is this really exciting opportunity to create a new vernacular that is specifically suited for an alpine environment." Looking toward places like Sea Ranch for its harmonious, condition-specific aesthetic, he believes these new homes expand on the architectural excellence of the 80 pre-existing homes without feeling "disjointed or ego-driven."

But still, there remains the issue of the off-season, especially when unpredictable weather can mean fewer skiers flocking to the resort even in winter. Part of stewarding the mountain is creating other types of activity. Hastings and Zhang have decided to include a new contemporary art component and 5,000-square foot welcome center that Zhang says will include a cafe as a "hospitality touch-point." From this facility, which Zhang says will open in two years, visitors can head out onto the slopes (or trails) to view the scattered-site artworks across the resort.

The art harkens back to the early land art movement of the 1960s and ‘70s wherein artists would create site-specific installations in remote destinations. The movement’s ripples are seen in places like the Storm King Art Center—an outdoor museum in New Windsor, New York—or Marfa, Texas, where sculptor Donald Judd’s monumental land works established the town as a cultural haven. But a recent resurgence in producing highly-curated cultural spaces—some more a spectacle than others—including Desert X, Luna Luna, Tippet Rise, and even arguably Bentonville, Arkansas’s redevelopment under the Walton family, has spurred greater interest in culture-as-economic engine. "I started to share with [Hastings] that it could be a really great way to fuse art into the core DNA of the place, attract a global audience of like-minded, curious and also down-to-earth people, and create a symbiotic relationship between the art program and development," Zhang says.