In 2019, the Boyd family sold its $264 million Peak Resorts ski empire to Vail Resorts. Now three Boyd brothers are staging a return, and it’s happening in Wyoming.
Jesse Boyd confirmed to Cowboy State Daily that he, his brothers Jason and Joshua, and his best friend Brendan Ryan are buying Snowy Range Ski Area west of Laramie.
The agreement has not been finalized, current owners Aaron and Becky Maddox told Cowboy State Daily on Wednesday.
They declined to disclose the sale price.
The prospective sale is almost as much a surprise to the Maddoxes as to anyone else. They weren’t looking to sell the mountain they bought in 2010 and spent years bringing back to life.
Then the Boyd group approached them.
Given their ski industry experience, it was an offer the Maddoxes couldn’t refuse.
“That experience is why we felt so comfortable saying yes,” Becky Maddox told Cowboy State Daily. “We knew it would be in good hands.”
For the Boyds, the purchase is a chance to return to the smaller ski areas where they learned the business.
Jesse Boyd said he could foresee buying a couple more resorts, but they aren’t out to rebuild the 17-resort public company they once helped run before its sale to Vail Resorts.
“No more empire building,” Boyd said. “To be honest with you, we just love the ski industry. We love to ski, and we just miss being around it.”
Back To Smaller Mountains
Boyd was en route to Wyoming when he spoke with Cowboy State Daily on Wednesday, and said he is excited about the prospect of getting back into ski-area operations.
After the Peak sale in 2019, Boyd said he and his brothers welcomed the break. But they soon began to miss the ski industry.
Finding Snowy Range wasn’t planned, though. Boyd was driving around the West when he spotted it and decided to try it out.
“It’s one of the few places I’ve never skied before,” he said. “I’ve skied most places in the United States, but I’m an East Coast skier, so I’ve always been on direct trips to places. I haven’t done a lot of driving around out West.”
After that, Boyd decided to bring his group to Wyoming so they could check out the ski area together.
They met the Maddox family and just “fell in love” with the mountain and decided the Snowy Range was the right ski area for their return to the industry.
“We grew up working at smaller ski resorts,” he said. “That’s how we got started.”
About That $264 Million Ski Empire
Snowy Range offers familiar territory for the Boyds and Ryan, given all the smaller regional hills in Peak Resorts’ portfolio.
The Boyd brothers’ father, Tim, started his company with just such a resort in 1982 — Hidden Valley in Wildwood, Missouri, just outside of St. Louis.
Tim Boyd was working as a groundskeeper at a struggling golf course. In 1977, he convinced the owner to sell it to him, using owner financing.
The following year, skiing in Lake Tahoe, he had an epiphany. It was pouring rain on the bunny slope at Homewood Mountain, yet thousands were still eagerly paying to ski — despite such miserable weather.
The hill back home in Missouri at the golf course he’d just bought was about the same size, he thought. So he decided to bring skiing to St. Louis.
Local bankers didn’t think much of this idea and repeatedly laughed him out of their offices, he said. He finally secured an industrial revenue bond through St. Louis County with help from a banker who just happened to be an avid skier.
Hidden Valley Ski Area officially opened in December 1982. For young people who had never imagined skiing in Missouri, the idea seemed either ridiculous or pretty cool. Some 1,000 people showed up for opening day.
After that success, Boyd duplicated the same business model with Snow Creek Ski Resort near Kansas City, Missouri, in 1985, ultimately rolling those properties into a new corporation called Peak Resorts in 1997.
By 2019, the company’s portfolio had grown to 17 ski areas across the Midwest, Northeast, and Mid-Atlantic. Vail acquired Peak in a deal announced at roughly $264 million, which closed on Sept. 24 of that year.
The acquisition included Mount Snow in Vermont, Hunter Mountain in New York, Attitash and Wildcat in New Hampshire, and Missouri’s Hidden Valley and Snow Creek.
Working Their Way Up
The Boyd brothers didn’t start out at the top. They had to work their way into leadership roles at the company, learning the ski resort business from the bottom up.
Jesse Boyd eventually managed Pennsylvania’s Jack Frost and Big Boulder before becoming a corporate operations executive. In late 2018, Jason Boyd was appointed senior vice president of operations for Peak’s five Pennsylvania properties.
Josh Boyd took responsibility for seven ski areas in Ohio, Missouri, and Indiana.
Their experience included the practical work of improving mountains. Josh oversaw snowmaking improvements at Attitash and Mount Snow before becoming general manager of Wildcat.
Ryan, the fourth member of the Snowy Range buying group, worked for Peak Resorts as the Northeast project manager from 2014 through 2020, according to his LinkedIn profile. He supervised a $30 million snowmaking upgrade at Mount Snow before working for Boyne Resorts.
He now operates a consulting firm.
Bringing Snowy Range Back
For the Maddoxes, buying Snowy Range in 2010 was a leap into a business they knew only as skiers.
Becky grew up skiing the mountain and raced for Laramie’s high school team. Aaron grew up skiing and racing in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.
Neither had operated a ski area.
“I think our mistake then was assuming that because we knew how to ski, we knew something about how to run a ski area,” Aaron said with a chuckle.
The couple bought the ski area from the bank, with help from an investment group that included family and close friends. Aaron’s parents, Bob and the late Cindy, were instrumental in helping the young couple get their operation going.
Aaron and Becky both kept their day jobs because they still had a mortgage and no guarantee the ski business would succeed. Becky said Bob and Cindy’s business experience was invaluable, helping them to answer questions the younger couple didn’t even know to ask.
Snowy Range Ski Area was in poor shape. All four chairlifts had to be rebuilt. The family refurbished the lodge and invested in snowmaking equipment and snowcats.
Before it was all said and done, the improvements cost more than $1 million, including wages.
Snowy Range was drawing about 27,000 skier visits a season when the family bought it in 2010, Aaron told the Steamboat Pilot & Today in 2018. By the time of that interview, skier visits had grown to 70,000.
Aaron received a SAMMY leadership award from Ski Area Management in 2018 for his work at Snowy Range — an honor that, in a twist of industry fate, Jesse Boyd also shares. Jesse won the same leadership award in 2009 during his tenure with Peak Resorts.
But Aaron told Cowboy State Daily his proudest achievement was not any one project.
“It was the more subtle reviving, and making people love it again, and making it what it should be,” he said.
More Than A Business
Becky grew emotional as she talked about what Snowy Range means to her.
Generations of her family skied there, and so did she. When the mountain went through foreclosure and uncertainty, she wanted to save it.
“For me, my heart called us to do it,” she said. “And then Aaron has the business sense to know that it was something we could accomplish.”
In many ways, it worked out better than the couple anticipated.
“We were able to do it as a married couple,” she said.
They raised their children there, and lived at the mountain virtually around the clock. This winter would have been their 17th season, Aaron added.
“It was all-consuming,” he said. “And I think, to a degree, it ended up consuming us.”
The sale would give the couple room to breathe. They aren’t retirement age yet and don’t plan to leave Laramie.
But they want to take a step back, help their children through high school, and think about what should come next.
Their immediate focus is supporting their daughter’s opportunity with the winter sports club in Steamboat Springs.
Finding buyers they trust has made that step easier, the couple said.
The Boyds are “the perfect people to come in and step into our shoes here,” Aaron said.
Jesse, in turn, praised the Maddoxes for bringing Snowy Range back to life.
“They’ve done an amazing job getting it built up,” he said. “We think it’s a great resort and we look forward to following in their footsteps. We’re excited to be operating a ski area in Wyoming.”
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
