Saddle Sore: An end of a legendary crew

Reasonably sure I was on the last official Aspen Mountain Trail Crew when internal talk turned to purchasing the then Aspen Ski Corporation. There may have been a hint in the air that our jobs were soon to be eliminated, and maybe we thought we’d do an end-around the powers that be and secure lifetimes of doing what we loved — skiing every day, mostly out of sight, on blacks, double blacks, and unsupervised. We’d outsmart them.  

The two or three of us who thought it was a good idea had done our due diligence and roughly structured our pro forma while riding the lifts during the day and into the evening hours along the old bar at the Red Onion. It was the 1970s — writing tablets, pencils, and pens don’t survive chair lift rides very well, and we worked with what we had: memory. We were working from inside the box, so to speak.

D.R.C. Brown, esteemed president of said corporation was, in fact, a family friend, not so much because of skiing, but rather from being another one of the cattle ranchers and horse enthusiasts in the valley. Horse shows and rodeos were always good for shooting the bull and catching up on valley news. Perrys, Browns, Fenders, Smiths, Arbaneys, Vagneurs, and a bunch more. You get the idea.

Maybe that’s why I had the ill-conceived notion to hurriedly and unofficially become our company spokesperson as I saw Darcy coming my direction down the sidewalk, close to Ski Corp. headquarters.

(Let me say here that despite beliefs to the contrary that the company was called the Aspen Skiing Company, or the Aspen Ski Company in those days, it was, in fact, not named that at all. It was the Aspen Ski Corporation, fondly referred to by locals and local imposters alike as the Ski Corp. The “p” at the end of Corp. was always pronounced by those in the know.)

In any case, as Darcy approached, I turned a quick 180, made a short salutary greeting and fell in lockstep. By the way, Mr. Brown, “Do you think the Ski Corp. would have any interest in selling to a local group of investors?”

“We’re always open to discussions,” he replied.  

“Let me run something by you. Some friends and I would like to buy the Ski Corp. We are prepared to offer you $25 million for the operation,” I said with somewhat of a wince in my voice, if not also in my face. And, I might add, with no real idea of where we would get the money, but we just knew we could. It’s laughable now, the smoothness (directness?) with which I put the offer in front of him, but ever the gentleman, he replied, without laughing, “It might take considerably more than that.” There was no “Tell me more.”  

It was a mistake, I later thought, to not lowball him some, so that when he thought it would take more money, I could come up and up until I reached our top dollar offer of $25 mil. Yeah, right. Debriefing one’s self can be torturous.

To shorten this story some, let me say that our offer was proffered sometime in January — about the middle of February that same year we were summarily extinguished from the company rolls. After having no alternative but to hike up the mountain for a couple of weeks, if we wanted to ski, our ski passes were finally reinstated. That was welcome and took some of the sting out of it. Still, it was the end of an era, the end of a legendary Aspen Mountain crew.

After our magnanimous offer, Darcy and his team kept things in order until 1978 when they sold the company to 20^th Century Fox. Hard to say what the purchase price was, but it may have been a little bit north of what my compatriots and I laid out.

There were some rough years after that, new owners and new management trying to get the handle in a new age, although the skiing remained good. Until, at last, and fortunately, the Crown family took over total ownership and management of the company in 1987.

Tony Vagneur writes here on Saturdays and welcomes your comments at ajv@sopris.net.