What bothers Dan Harris the most, he said, on a rickety chair on the porch of his 90-year-old, 800ft “cracker box farm house”, is how the owners of the mountain across the street don’t seem to feel the same devotion to it that he does.
As he described it, they have turned “a near-pristine” Utah mountain top where he hiked, hunted and skied as a youth into a landscape studded with holiday homes for high-profile business and media tycoons. “If you want a second vacation home, why use all those resources and space, all this potential wildlife habitat for a place you’re going to visit a couple of times a year?” he said. “It just seems kind of arrogant.”
The five co-founders of Summit Series, which promotes events for wealthy entrepreneurs aimed at inspiring progressive values, and several venture capitalists bought the 8,500-acres-plus of skiable terrain in 2013. That purchase was partly to save it from “over-development”, according to recently appointed Powder Mountain CEO Gary S Derck.
For locals who have lived in the rural, largely Mormon community for decades, the sudden presence of millionaires has meant an influx of jobs and money, and better access to skiing slopes. But some worry about an influx of BMWs, Land Rovers and a dollar-drenched cultural shift.
Driving along the roads at the top of the mountain, visitors encounter ski-in, ski-out mansions going for upwards of $1.5m. One $2.05m, six-bed mansion comes with a Toyota Rav4 and a snowmobile.
Wood frames jut from craggy slopes, the bones of 105 homes that will enjoy stunning views across Utah, Wyoming and Colorado. Powder Mountain promises an exclusive community, where the wealthy and the privileged live so close to the bright blue alpine sky, the real estate promo videos seem to suggest, that they can truly own the top of the world.
In an email, Derck, a three-decade veteran of resort developments, was keen to separate the ski resort and its mountain housing developments from Summit Series, long-touted as “Davos for millennials”. Nevertheless, the owners are in large part the same.
“The locals request from the beginning has been to preserve the unique character of the mountain by not overcrowding it,” Derck wrote, and that request has been “honored”. He touted jobs in construction and the service-industry generated by Powder Mountain, along with donations and support for local non-profit initiatives. Powder Mountain has spent $700,000 on bike trails open to the public and donated 631 acres of land for wildlife habitat protection.
Terry Murphy, the chair of the Ogden Valley Balloon and Artist festival, says she “can’t go along with” those who say Summit’s impact has been overwhelmingly negative. “I’ve seen things they’ve done that are really amazing. They’ve brought in cool programs into the elementary school.” She sees them as “forward thinkers, they’re young, they have money, they are young entrepreneurs, they think out of the box”.
Utahns like Jason Carter, who grew up just 20 minutes from Powder Mountain, and learned to snowboard there, are resigned to the fact that what made it so special may be eroded. The Summit founders’ extensive social network in Silicon Valley and beyond, and Powder Mountain’s slick real estate marketing, are attracting an affluent crowd to its slopes, where an adult can ski the season for $880.
Carter used to drive 80 miles one way to snowboard at Powder Mountain. “I loved how quiet it was. You usually get the most snow with the least amount of people. It’s still the only place I’d want to go to now.”
But since the Summit purchase, he says he has encountered people on the ski lift from every state except Utah. The last time Carter stopped by, he got to the parking lot and found it was overflowing. He stood among the seething crowd, sighed, fought back tears, and drove back home.
“Our teeny tiny little mountain is the place to be now. It’s kind of neat. But it’s hard to share.”
A few issues in particular have riled some residents of Eden, a 600-strong community at the base of the mountain.
Contractor Jeffrey Guthrie said he’s been “fighting a one-man crusade, David taking on Goliath”, having mounted four or five one-man protests several years ago. “I know if I give up, they’ve won.” He is concerned that local children will get sucked into what he sees as Summit’s party-culture lifestyle.
He also charges that the owners have been neglectful of the landscape. In June 2013, he visited a wooded grove on the mountain. Along with a manmade pond, there were stations for massages and a cloth-draped metal frame, set up, he believed for yoga or meditation. When a reporter returned to the site five years later, in fall 2018, the pond contained stagnant water, concrete slabs and large pieces of rotting wood. Ropes hung from trees and the rusted climbing frame.
Derck said that “plans are in motion to remove the constructed pond”, and the company has hired a retired professor from local Utah State University with a background in forest ecology and environmental science to ensure the firm is operating sustainably. Guthrie “never engaged us in any dialogue”, Derck said, and he alleged that Guthrie threatened staff. (Guthrie denies making any threats. He says he once wore a Toy Story costume to a protest, going as Sheriff Woody, and had an empty holster. But a witness claimed he was carrying a gun.)
Graver concerns abound over the region’s lifeblood. “Everybody’s fear in the west is that somebody’s going to intercept their water,” said Harris, a self-described “redneck environmentalist”.
Rights to specific quantities of water can be traced back to the arrival of pioneers in the area in the late 1850s, said Dee Staples, a five-generation resident. Staples is also president of Wolf Creek Irrigation Water company, a protagonist in a three-year water rights dispute with Summit Mountain Holding Group, the joint venture company that owns the mountain. Staples and other local water interests protested to the state over the developer’s plans to pull water from a well drilled down from the top of the mountain, amid concerns it would interfere with the preexisting water rights.
An agreement was reached in 2016. “We’ve put all our disagreements behind us and we’re moving ahead with a positive attitude so everyone can succeed,” Staples said. As part of the agreement, Summit purchased 15 “shares”, at $10,000 a share, of water from Staples’ firm. None of the 150 shareholders wanted to sell the shares to Summit, Staples said, so in the end he did it himself, “because I recognized if we’re going to be partners in the mountain we need to participate in a friendly manner”.
But the cost of hiring a hydrologist and attorneys to defend their water rights, which Staples estimated in the “hundreds of thousands of dollars”, and the shadow of that struggle, lingers.
“You have two different cultures trying to mesh into the same community, and that presents some challenges,” Staples said.
The incongruities of a rural, agricultural Mormon culture being reshaped by wealth and power are never far from view.
On a late Friday afternoon, as locals parked their trucks by the market and headed inside for their weekend groceries, some watched with bemusement. Struggling to maneuver out of the lot, inching back and then forward, was an interloper from another world: a white stretched limo with tinted windows.