It started as a joke on a Facebook forum in August, when news came that Mt. Bachelor, one of the country’s biggest ski areas, was for sale.
“I’ve got $20 and some old boards I can pitch in,” Dan Cochrane, a snowboarder from nearby Bend, Ore, wrote.
Chris Porter, another local snowboarder and a high school business teacher, did not know Cochrane. He responded with a more sober tone.
“If anybody is serious about doing a feasibility study, I’m all in and would love to chat,” Porter wrote.
As so began a quixotic quest, snowballing into winter, cheered by skiers and snowboarders in Oregon and beyond, to raise about $200 million and wrest Mt. Bachelor from the corporate titans of a consolidating industry.
“My first reaction was, ‘We can totally pull this off,’” Porter said recently.
Cochrane, 52, and Porter, 43, turned the breezy online exchange into a what-if conversation. Buzz built around the idea. The men met for the first time when local media interviewed them together. Porter had the foresight to establish a website and an email address for the venture.
There were 2,000 messages of support within two days. Some people wanted to share memories — about Mt. Bachelor’s opening day in 1958, about epic powder days with friends, about spreading the ashes of loved ones on the summit. Some offered money, from a few bucks to six figures. Some volunteered time and expertise, among them pro bono lawyers, well-connected financial experts and social media influencers.
Call it an awakening, part of a ski bum uprising. Cochrane and Porter called it Mt. Bachelor Community, Inc. and assembled a loose team. Powdr, a Utah-based outdoor-recreation company that has owned Mt. Bachelor since 2001, did not reveal an asking price, but the local group began securing major donors.
But this is not really a story about a potential business deal. It’s not about how it could be done, but why it would be.
“Mt. Bachelor is the center stone of our community,” Cochrane said. He is a real estate appraiser with a Brillo-pad tuft on his chin and a flat-brimmed cap on his head. Like so many others in Bend, he looks like he either just returned from the mountain, or is planning to head there as soon as he can.
He spoke about culture, community and identity. Nostalgia. Connection. The need to preserve all of it.
“It’s why we live here,” he said. “It’s why my kids were born in Bend. Without that mountain, we wouldn’t be here.”
A couple of nights later, Porter was at a brewpub, his gray-faced dog sleeping nearby. He spent years working for wealth management and private equity companies in Portland before moving to Bend in 2018 to recalibrate his work-life balance and be close to Mt. Bachelor.
“I want this to be a place that the average Northwest family and their golden retriever can come visit and still have enough money for a second family vacation that year,” he said. Around the country, daily tickets at some areas have soared past $300. Mountain resorts are trending toward exclusivity. Some are going private.
It was suggested that maybe, just maybe, Porter and Cochrane were part of an anti-corporate, take-it-back revolution, in skiing and beyond. After all, when was the last time somebody said that the skiing and snowboard experience at a resort was better than it used to be?
“I’ve never heard that,” Porter said. “Nobody’s said that, because resorts have lost touch with their local communities. Maybe this is the pendulum swinging back.”
In a globalized, corporate, shifting world that can feel unkind to consumers, the fight for Mt. Bachelor is about the desire to capture something cherished and put it back in the hands of the people who love it most. It’s about regaining control of something before it becomes unrecognizable. It’s about the fraying strands of local connections, the fear of regret and the unease over the future.
Porter took a sip of beer, brewed just a few feet away. He knew most of the people around him, and they knew his dog’s name was Pepper. The mountain where they all worked, skied and snowboarded was 20 miles in one direction, while the people who owned it were 700 miles in the other.
“Why not make the enthusiast the owner?” Porter asked.
The next morning, Porter and Cochrane were in a meeting with lawyers and big-money investors, preparing an offer to take the mountain back.
‘Locals Are Your Culture’
Mt. Bachelor Community, Inc. (motto: Powder to the People) is not trying to buy an actual mountain. Mt. Bachelor is public land. What’s at stake are things like lifts and lodges and permits to operate. What the group wants, really, is a stronger say.
“We’re not saying what’s best for Mt. Bachelor,” said Ryan Andrews, 41, a Bend real estate investor who is serving as a chief financial officer for the local ownership push. “But let’s let the users and community decide, not a board room in Vail or anywhere else.”
Ski areas are a tough business. Mountain ranges are graveyards of ghost areas, abandoned by skittish investors or undone by the fickleness of weather gods. Those operating today are at the frontline of climate change, mostly losing. As mom-and-pop areas struggle, corporations like Vail Resorts, Alterra Mountain Company and Powdr have spent the past few decades buying and trading larger ski areas, consolidating them through balance sheets and multi-resort season passes.
The resort effect has not always been kind to locals. Some towns have become seasonal playgrounds for the rich, with workers unable to afford to live anywhere close. A ski patrol strike this winter at Utah’s Park City Mountain, owned by Vail Resorts, lasted nearly two weeks, disrupting vacations and highlighting the frazzled connection between resort owners and those on the slopes.
Mike Rogge, the editor and publisher of the outdoor magazine Mountain Gazette, summed up collective feelings in a social media post.
“The ski industry, specifically the resort side, I fear is losing the narrative,” he wrote. “Guests are your lifeblood. Locals are your culture. Without either of them you’re an empty theme park.”
Locals are suddenly snapping at the chance to buy nearby resorts. Powdr recently sold Killington, in Vermont, to a Boston-based group for an undisclosed amount. The small town of Nederland, Colo., is negotiating with Powdr to buy nearby Eldora Mountain.
But there’s no playground quite like Mt. Bachelor. It is both the name of a conical volcano that pokes its bald peak into the sky above the Cascades, demanding to be noticed, and the sprawling ski area around it.
From the summit, skiers and snowboarders have 360 degrees of options below them. Mt. Bachelor has more than 4,300 acres of lift-accessed terrain, on U.S. Forest Service land, making it the seventh-largest ski area in North America. With a more dependable winter snowpack than most places, it is relatively climate-proof, for now, and is usually open through May.
Mt. Bachelor, originally called Bachelor Butte, was founded as a local ski hill by Bend’s Bill Healy and others in 1958. For decades, the ski area was an insider’s secret, but the resort consolidation of the 1990s came for Mt. Bachelor. Powdr bought a majority stake in 2001 for a reported $28 million.
It still feels like a throwback. There are no mountainside accommodations. The humble base lodges were built decades ago, as were most of the lifts. Most parking is still free, and, except for the few who sleep in campers and vans in the parking lot, skiers and snowboarders drive each day from the booming town of Bend, where the population has surged past 100,000. About 80 percent of Mt. Bachelor’s customers are local.
The resort confirms that Mt. Bachelor is profitable; locals presume that Powdr feeds the money to other resorts and pieces of its portfolio. (Powdr will not comment on financial numbers.) They complain about old lifts and frequent malfunctions (some call the place “Mt. Brokenchair”). On a recent sunny Tuesday, the area lost power, shutting down lifts for hours.
Josh Suran, a 30-year-old with a big red beard, spends about 170 days skiing each season, enthusiastically reporting Mt. Bachelor conditions on his Instagram page. Online, he speaks as if stuck on fast-forward. In person, thankfully, he slows down.
“There’s a general sense locally that Powdr pulls a lot of money from the community and doesn’t give a lot back,” Suran said. “There’s an us-versus-them mentality.”
A few years ago, Powdr installed “fast pass” lanes for those willing to pay a premium to cut lift lines. Many locals thought doing so contradicted the democratic spirit of skiing, where strangers sharing a lift chair might include both billionaires with second homes in Bend and ski bums living in vans. Cochrane started an online petition in 2021 to stop the program. He got more than 13,000 signatures, but you can still go to the front of the line for a price.
“That’s the backpiece for this effort to buy Mt. Bachelor,” Cochrane said. “We saw that the fire is here, for local control over corporate ownership.”
Yearning for Connection
During the winter, Bend feels like a waiting room of flannel-clad, hair-tousled, puffer-jacket-wearing people with sun-kissed cheeks, prepared to drive up to Mt. Bachelor the moment they learn the Summit lift is open. Success is gauged by the number of days spent on the mountain each season.
At Bend’s City Hall, the walls are lined with panels and photographs detailing the area’s historical link to skiing. Mayor Melanie Kebler is used to having meetings postponed because of sudden midday rushes to the mountain. Her family came to Bend when she was 4. Now 42, she would love for locals to buy the mountain back.
“We already feel like we have ownership, emotionally,” she said. “Why not make it real?”
The question is complicated, and not just financially. No one is proposing shutting the place down. Other owners might turn out to be great. Among the stakes are 1,100 jobs at Mt. Bachelor during the winter.
But the locals worry about what some other buyer might dream up. Will new owners ignore the mountain, squeeze profits and flip it again? Will they conjure a Vail-style village of high-end hotels and condos, restaurants, and luxury shops where the free parking is now?
What will Mt. Bachelor become? And for whom?
Around Bend, people are not quite sure what they want from the mountain. Mostly, they are seeking to preserve the connection that they have always had, though that tie has felt frayed in recent years.
Connection. The word came up in almost every interview, in town and on the mountain. What does it mean?
Zoom out from Bend and Mt. Bachelor. It’s easy to connect with anyone — as easy as the Facebook page that linked Cochrane and Porter — but hard to feel connected. The country is fractured, society fissured. Even Bend feels changed, its population surging, its character shifting, the way humble towns do when they are discovered by outsiders.
Maybe Mt. Bachelor is not a place, but an idea. A chance to hold onto something and nurture it, to keep it from getting away from us, like everything else.
John Merriman, a 53-year-old father of three, was named general manager of Mt. Bachelor in 2023. He moved his family from Colorado to Bend. He soon learned that Powdr wanted to sell the ski area.
He is in a strange spot, living in Bend as the local face of Powdr and wondering what his job will be after a sale goes through. But Merriman is fluent in the language of locals, about culture and soul and community. He has become friendly with Cochrane and others leading the effort to buy Mt. Bachelor.
Over morning coffee at a downtown hotel, before driving up to the mountain for work, Merriman considered the “feeling” that people want from a ski area. They want it to feel like it belongs to them, even as it is shared with strangers. They want it to grow and become better, but it should do so almost imperceptibly, so that locals and longtime users think it’s the same place it’s always been. There’s a trick to that.
Merriman grew up in Maine. He occasionally went to Boston Red Sox games at Fenway Park, a stadium that is more than 100 years old. In a way, it is not unlike Mt. Bachelor — a place built on memories, shared by generations, trying to maintain a delicate harmony between yesterday and tomorrow.
“I went to Fenway before they built the Monster seats and the bar in right field,” Merriman said, pointing out a couple of controversial upgrades at the stadium. “And I’ve gone after. And it still brings me back to when I was 7 years old.”
It was an interesting echo, a sign that people of different sides might just want the same thing. The afternoon before, across the street at a different coffee shop, Andrews, from the local buying group, had put the sentiment succinctly: “You want to grow,” he said, “but you don’t want to outgrow your roots.”
Bidding Against the Giants
It is unclear whether Mt. Bachelor Community, Inc. has a viable chance at overseeing that growth. Things are moving quickly. Others are making bids, though Powdr officials declined to name interested parties.
Mt. Bachelor Community Inc. believes there are at least two other potential suitors: Vail, the industry behemoth, and Mountain Capital Partners, which owns about 15 ski areas, mostly midsize ones in the West. Both companies declined to comment.
“Over the past few months, we’ve conducted due diligence and walk-throughs, and we are now accepting offers from selected parties,” said Stacey Hutchinson, a vice president of Powdr.
Mt. Bachelor Community Inc. is on the outside. It has not been granted a walk-through or access to the “data room” to conduct due diligence. Group members said they had meetings with Powdr’s brokers this fall, and that they believed that they had met every financial requirement. They sent an overnight letter directly to Powdr in December, they said, to reiterate their interest. They have heard nothing since.
“We have never been told that we are not a candidate, and we remain steadfast that there is an opportunity here,” Cochrane said.
The group said that it had secured multiple high-dollar investors, with ties to the area and tens of millions of dollars to spend, who hope to sell smaller shares to community members. It has powerful people, including Oregon’s two United States senators, vouching for the veracity of its bid and the desire for local ownership. It would like a chance to beat any other offer.
Mt. Bachelor Community, Inc. plans to submit a formal bid to Powdr any day now, probably in the neighborhood of $200 million. Will it be in time? Will it be enough? Will it be considered?
“We will diligently review all submitted offers and take the time to carefully assess each prospective buyer,” Hutchinson said.
Optimism around Bend varies like the daily snow report. Most think the locals’ bid is a long shot, largely on a belief that big companies always win.
Around Bend, there is pride in Mt. Bachelor and anxiety over what outsiders might do to it. There aren’t many parts of this world that you can trust will still be there tomorrow and yet still feel a bit like yesterday. Even the mountains aren’t immune to change.
“We just want to buy our backyard back,” Andrews said.
