Can These Locals Buy an Oregon's Largest Ski Resort?

It’s a dream often posed by starry-eyed skiers: what if everyone you knew pooled their money together and bought a ski resort?

Bend, Oregon, area locals Chris Porter and Dan Cochrane want to make a version of that dream a reality. POWDR Corp., Mt. Bachelor’s current owner, announced plans to sell the resort last month. Porter and Cochrane are leading a local group in an effort to buy it.

“Who doesn’t want to own a piece of the mountain of their local ski hill? That’s our idea to have a voice, and we’re trying to avoid private equity. Our goal is [to] create a local community and private ownership with voting rights,” Cochrane told The Bulletin.

When Porter and Cochrane opened an email account for the project—now incorporated as Mount Bachelor Community Inc.—they were inundated. Porter explained that they received so many inbound emails that the Gmail account, buymtbachelor@gmail.com, “broke,” and the emails are still flying—the inbox sees a couple hundred messages daily. For Porter, the email deluge signaled that he and Cochrane were on to something.

“It's been an overwhelming amount of support from people who want to donate their time, donate their money, invest, just pledge their support, or be involved,” said Porter. “So many people have reached out to us.”

The Bend community bid follows a high-profile POWDR exchange that resulted in independent ownership. In August, the resort conglomerate announced that Killington, Vermont, would be sold to a local group led by Phill Gross and Michael Ferri.

That sale is part of a broader resort holding sell-off for POWDR. In addition to Mt. Bachelor, POWDR plans to sell Eldora, Colorado, and SilverStar, British Columbia. “To strategically manage POWDR’s portfolio in alignment with our founder’s and stakeholders’ goals, we aim to balance our ski business with new ventures in the National Parks sector and Woodward,” Stacey Hutchinson, POWDR’s vice president of communications and government affairs, said via email.

Among those resorts, Mt. Bachelor, which boasts unique 360-degree descents from its summit, may be the most sought-after. Stuart Winchester, a well of resort knowledge and author of The Storm Skiing Journal , noted in a recent article that, based on his conversations within the ski industry, Mt. Bachelor is the prized POWDR property.

POWDR is understandably tight-lipped about the status of the Mt. Bachelor sale and wouldn’t name specific groups that are angling to make the purchase. “We have seen some interested parties express interest in buying Mt. Bachelor, and we’ve passed them all along to [JP Morgan Chase], who is running the process,” said Hutchinson. Details are scant, but this much must be true: Porter and Cochrane have competition, and it might be coming from dominant North American ski resort conglomerates.

So, I wondered how Porter felt about the reality that Mount Bachelor Community Inc. could be going up against the big dogs.

“We've really caught lightning in a bottle here,” said Porter of the effort to buy Mt. Bachelor.

“Anyone else who is interested is going to have a whole population to contend with, and that's part of our currency right now is the passion behind this project,” he added. “I really hope that the passion right now turns out that people are willing to put their money where their mouth is. But if there's any indication, these folks are really fired up.”

During our conversations, Porter, a high school business teacher who previously worked in securities, said that Mount Bachelor Community Inc. is striving to become a B Corp.

The B Corp certification would designate Mount Bachelor Community Inc. as what Porter called a “for purpose” corporation with guiding principles that focus on environmental stewardship and the reinvestment of profits into the mountain and local economy—instead of being taken out of state. In the outdoor sports world, popularly known B Corps include Patagonia and Taos Ski Valley.

Mount Bachelor Community Inc. plans to attract various investors, from those with significant financial leverage to more average locals who want to purchase a stake in the mountain. Since the project to acquire Mt. Bachelor began only a few weeks ago, Porter said higher-ticket investors like qualified purchasers—a person or family business with a $5 million or larger investment portfolio—have reached out.

“We have already turned a few folks down who we didn't think aligned with the interests of our community, and they were big-money folks that we turned down,” Porter noted.

Whatever happens in the future, (“We don’t have a timeline for the sale. It will take as long as it takes,” said Hutchinson of POWDR), it seems apparent that the Bend community cares deeply about Mt. Bachelor. Porter, referencing a classic quote from The Big Lebowski , called the resort “the rug that holds the room together, dude.” Only time will tell where that rug lands, and Porter clarified that there are no guarantees.

“We are truly building this plane while it’s in flight,” he said.

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