They came to ski. Now they’re saving the resort
THERE is an old joke in the ski industry that a resort needs to go bankrupt three times before it can be profitable. Tamarack is hoping to get away with just once.
About 15 years ago, a tech executive named Jean-Pierre Boespflug came to this town of 150 with a vision to build the nation’s first new major destination ski resort since the early 1980s. Then the recession hit and development stopped, and Boespflug disappeared.
Today the resort looks like the physical manifestation of an idea never executed. There is a huge crane that hasn’t moved anything in years. The ski shop and restaurants are open, but sit in dome-shaped buildings the original investors intended to be temporary. The permanent village sits nearby, half-built, as it has been since 2008.
And instead of chill vacations on the slopes, the group of mostly part-time residents who bought homes and condos around the resort have spent the years since Boespflug’s dis- appearance trying to save their mountain from creditors.
But now, after a decade of springs that began with a question of whether the resort would open the following winter, Tamarack has some semblance of stability. The debt pile has been cleared, and in October homeowners banded together to buy the resort’s operations. Brad Larsen, the resort’s general manager, described his job as “putting Humpty Dumpty back together”. Doing that task requires a steely disposition he called “Tamitude”.
Tamitude means things like accepting everyone who works here will have more than one job. Larsen is also the resort’s marketing director, food and beverage manager, staff photographer, videographer and wedding salesman. Sometimes he buses tables at restaurants.
Tamitude also seems to mean keeping a guarded sense of humour. Take the hotel. It has a fancy restaurant and had a patio with wide mountain views. But since it’s not uncommon for there to be just one or two guests on weeknights, there is a running joke that it feels like the hotel in The Shining.
But it seems unlikely Tamarack will fulfil the original idea of a high-end resort for skiers.
Still, like so many projects stalled by the financial crisis and Great Recession, the resort has re-emerged to find value in sense of self. Real estate agents like Trisha Sears are talking up the value of $350,000 condos that are largely bought by locals instead of the out-of-towners who used to pay $1 million. In place of celebrity sightings and an ambition to be the next Vail, Colorado, there is talk about a family-friendly vibe and the absence of crowds.
Mostly there is a sense of comfort that whatever the resort ends up being, its destiny belongs to people who live and ski here.
“You now have owners who have a vested interest in seeing it being successful,” said Ken Roberts, chairman of the Idaho Tax Commission and a farmer whose family has been in Donnelly for more than a century. “You now have owners who have a vested interest in seeing it being successful.”