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.
