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.
Today's painting saves money, probably $500 or $600 versus paying a contractor. It probably will save on redos, too, because Davey does it better. "The last professional who did it, the paint failed in a matter of months. If you pay someone, you expect them to take steps to do it correctly," Davey says, freshly aggrieved even though he paid for the bad paint job four years ago.
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.
