wolf creek fighting back against developer
Wolf Creek fights for territory
Offbeat ski area opposes plan for resort in its midst
By Electa Draper
Denver Post Four Corners Bureau
Post / Shaun Stanley
Davey Pitcher, President and area manager of Wolf Creek Ski Area, climbs a steep slope on the ski mountain with Alberta Peak in the background. The Pitchers, operators of the ski area for years, feel the character of the ski area will be changed by a proposed development at the base of the mounatin.
WOLF CREEK PASS - A Texas business legend is stepping on the toes of a Colorado mountain legend.
The Pitcher family, which owns Wolf Creek Ski Area, has bucked industry trend after trend: declining to support Ski Country USA marketing efforts, paying above-average wages and stubbornly keeping Wolf Creek as simple and undeveloped as possible in the wildest, snowiest corner of the state.
It sets them apart from central-Colorado resorts surrounded by seas of cloned condos and look-alike shops.
But the Pitchers, descendants of the San Juan Mountains' heroic pathfinder, Otto Mears, now find themselves stuck in an unhappy dance with Texas billionaire Billy Joe "Red" McCombs.
McCombs and partners are proposing to construct the biggest ski resort village in Colorado at 10,000 feet and smack in the middle of Wolf Creek Ski Area - something the Pitchers say would hurt the essence of the place they worked hard to build.
"It's a mess," Wolf Creek Ski Area president Davey Pitcher says. "Our credibility is at stake. What lives on in southwestern Colorado is at stake.
"Fifty years from now, Colorado will be a better place if this meadow is just left alone."
The issue has set up a clash of titans.
McCombs, born in Spur, Texas, in 1927, is an automobile, oil, communications and sports magnate, part of the nation's corporate elite.
He started his business life as the country's youngest Edsel dealer and one of the few to turn a profit on a model now synonymous with "dud."
In 1972, McCombs co-founded Clear Channel Communications Inc., now the nation's biggest owner of radio stations, biggest concert promoter and biggest outdoor advertising company.
He owns pro football's Minnesota Vikings and has owned pro basketball's San Antonio Spurs and Denver Nuggets.
Bob Honts, McCombs' venture partner and spokesman for the Wolf Creek project, says the 76- year-old McCombs will not be available to comment on the flap with the Pitcher family.
For their part, the Pitchers are San Juan Mountain aristocracy.
Kingsbury "Pitch" Pitcher is the grandson of Mears, a Russian immigrant who rode with Kit Carson during the Civil War and Navajo campaigns and later befriended Ute Chief Ouray. Mears penetrated the formidable San Juan Mountains with roads and rails that made commerce possible and earned him the epitaph "Pathfinder of the San Juans."
Pitch Pitcher is a vertical pathfinder. He seemed to have Mears' uncanny knack for survival and success when it came to slopes, of which he has designed many. He owned the Santa Fe Ski Area until the mid-1980s.
Pitch Pitcher acquired Wolf Creek in 1976. A thousand vertical feet is not a big ski mountain. But Wolf Creek is a meteorological fluke. It lies where two branches of the San Juan Mountains intersect to form a giant "L." It is also a snow trap, the snowiest place in the state.
Thirty to 40 feet of snow fall there most winters over terrain that is naturally varied and not a collection of cookie-cutter runs, says Davey Pitcher.
This season just ending was the ski area's best ever. Skier visits, 210,000, were up 17.5 percent over the previous season.
But the place had humble beginnings. It was born in the 1950s when potato farmers from the San Luis Valley cut a few runs into the mountain, strung a towrope and turned it into their weekend club.
In the 1960s, a group of Texans, including members of the Dallas Cowboys football team, tried to make a real enterprise of the ski area, but they floundered.
Pitch Pitcher stepped in. He and his sons have run it ever since.
Davey Pitcher is not just president but chief construction worker, a nondivision of labor underscored by his attire, brown Carhartt farm pants and a Ralph Lauren long- sleeved pink cotton Oxford shirt.
He says his father and mother, Jane, still run the business to some extent.
"My father's love of skiing is what's always driven the business," he says.
Pitch Pitcher is in Hawaii and couldn't be reached for comment.
Now, for the first time, the Pitchers are publicly saying that the McCombs venture and their Wolf Creek are a terrible mismatch.
McCombs owns 288-acre Alberta Park, a vast wood-ringed meadow that is surrounded by the Pitchers' 1,300 acres of federally permitted ski area. Both places lie within millions of acres of Rio Grande National Forest and two wilderness areas.
Here, McCombs proposes to build "the highest-quality mountain resort village in the U.S." - a billion-dollar project, says venture partner Honts of Austin.
Honts says he has contracts signed by the Pitchers as late as 2000 promising their support.
"We're puzzled," Honts says. "We've always liked the Pitchers."
All that is needed now for work to begin, Honts says, is Forest Service approval for construction of 250 feet of road across public lands into Alberta Park. The Forest Service can't really deny access, he says.
Davey Pitcher says he will no longer be pressured into going along with a project that has ballooned from a few hundred units when first proposed in 1986 to potentially 2,172 units tucked in next to the Pitchers' slopes.
"During that 18 years, we've carved out a personality, a niche," Pitcher says. "It is the antithesis of the big developed ski area."
Pitcher shuns even the word "resort."
In mid-March, the Forest Service began its review of the McCombs-Honts application to build a short stretch of road across public land to Alberta Park.
The entire environmental impact statement will take nine months to a year to complete, Forest Service coordinator Stephen Brigham says. The agency is still studying what its review will encompass.
"The (village) plans are not compatible with Wolf Creek's ski permit at this time," Davey Pitcher says. "There was never adequate Forest Service analysis that speaks to 2,100 units or 5,000 cars - a city on a mountain. We welcome with open arms the chance to revisit the proposal."
The village plans also describe more than 4,000 underground parking spaces, a natural-gas-powered antique-replica train and more than 222,000 square feet of commercial space, including a dozen restaurants, a few hotels and acres of shopping.
Honts says there would be litigation if the Forest Service were to try to block development at this point. He says the agency over the years has twice approved the concept of the village.
In August 2000, Mineral County commissioners approved a preliminary plat. The commissioners have land-use authority, not the Forest Service, Honts says.
He points out the enormous tax and other financial benefits for three poor counties, Mineral, Archuleta and Rio Grande.
The Pitchers already have benefited from the venture granting them an easement in the park for the family's Alberta Lift, built in 1999.
"A rising tide will lift all boats," Honts says.
Chris Gerlach, president of the Pagosa Springs Lodging Association, disagrees, saying the competing beds would be disastrous for many local businesses.
Moreover, Gerlach says, "the Pitchers have done a fantastic job with Wolf Creek. The ski area here has preserved the natural beauty and splendor of the environment. It is in balance and in tune with our region and does not cater to the rich and the ski elite."
Pitcher says he worries that a politically well-connected McCombs could push his family off the mountain. After all, he says, McCombs acquired Alberta Park in a 1986 land swap with the Forest Service that was denied by local foresters but approved in Washington.
Colorado Wild spokesman Jeff Berman says that override meant pristine acres in the wildest corner of the state were wrongly traded out of public ownership.
It is land between the South San Juan Wilderness, the most unspoiled tract from Wyoming to New Mexico, and the state's biggest wilderness, the Weminuche. It is an important corridor for wildlife, including the Canada lynx, introduced there over the past five years.
Honts says he and McCombs got there before the lynx.
Re: wolf creek fighting back against developer
Quote:
Pitch Pitcher is in Hawaii and couldn't be reached for comment.
[/B]
If I run into the guy, he'll get a cold beer and a pat on the back from me for staving off those assholes from Texas. Why can't they just got to Vail and be happy, leaving Wolf Creek for us the way it has been and always should be?
