Skiing’s lone wolf: Davey Pitcher’s family-owned Wolf Creek stands out in an increasingly corporate industry

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WOLF CREEK SKI AREA

“I think I’m going to drive for this stretch,” says Davey Pitcher, wedging in next to the operator in the one-man cab of a snowcat that shuttles skiers into the powdery glades of Horseshoe Bowl. 

Both sides of the 1990s-era LMC 3700 cat’s tracks are hanging over cliffs as Pitcher, the 62-year-old boss and owner whose father took over the bankrupt Wolf Creek Ski Area in 1976, pilots the machine across a narrow spit of snow below Alberta Peak. 

“Well that was fun,” he says minutes later, clicking into his telemark skis and slipping into the powdery forest of beetle-ravaged Engelmann spruce.

Fun is a fundamental priority at Wolf Creek, still family-owned and thriving in the shadow of pass-peddling giants. In an increasingly business-y ski resort industry — with headlines trumpeting labor strikes, share prices, pass sales, $3 billion funds, $105 million acquisitions, record-high traffic and all-time revenues — the Pitcher family has kept a nearly 50-year focus on keeping skiing fun. 

“There’s something about the g-force, the sensation of movement through the forest or a trail, that is intrinsically pretty darn rewarding in itself. It doesn’t have to be where you’re at the top of the heap,” says Pitcher, swinging his Völkl skis from a high-speed chairlift he installed himself. “And there’s a reward from simply seeing people find that sensation. And we’ve really embraced that here. With all of the rules and all of the stress that our society has kind of propagated, when you come to recreate, you want to be left alone as much as you can be. That’s the essence of our long view on skiing.”

Good prices lead to good vibes

Wolf Creek has been hosting skiers for 85 years. Half of those years have been helmed by the Pitchers, who are not followers.

Wolf Creek sells season passes but not the kind that work anywhere else, rebuffing a trend that has reshaped the resort industry with season passes that allow access to dozens of ski areas. (One exception: Wolf Creek pass holders can ski at Discovery Ski Area in western Montana, which is owned by Pitcher’s older brother Peter.) Wolf Creek a few years ago left the Colorado Ski Country trade group, which Pitcher says “is not a trade group that deals with all walks of life.”

Wolf Creek pricing does not follow any of the resort industry’s top trends that swirl around the selling of season passes and lift tickets before the snow falls, savaging skiers who dare to walk up to the window and buy a day ticket. 

The ticket window at Wolf Creek is a bustling scene.

A peak-season day ticket at Wolf Creek costs $103, up 2% from last year. There are no discounts for buying early. Skiers 80 and older ski free. Season passes are $1,300. A couple dozen days a year the ski area offers $68 tickets as a “local appreciation” promotion. 

“I believe that’s a fair price,” Pitcher says. “One of the other mantras my father had was that it is public land and that it’s, you know, meant to be for the use and enjoyment of the public. And to create an exclusionist pricing pushes out people that may not have the financial ability of paying some of these big prices, that just doesn’t sit right. We still make money. We still can afford to do new upgrades and infrastructure and pay everyone.”

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Last year Pitcher spent $300,000 to remove beetle-kill on the north side of his ski area. Next summer he’s got another $1 million set aside for glading.

He won’t need to spike ticket prices to pay for it. The timber work is all part of the long-term plan at Wolf Creek. 

“There’s no real reason to ask for more than you think is fair,” he says.

Before the pandemic Wolf Creek was attracting about 200,000 visits a year. That’s bumped to 260,000 since 2021 and has not waned.

Pricing is only one chapter in the Pitcher-published Wolf Creek playbook, which ignores just about every new-school rule in a consolidating industry dominated by a shrinking group of owners controlling a growing group of ski hills.

Pitcher, an avid airplane, helicopter and canopy pilot, doesn’t measure success by growth. He’s not aiming to impress investors. He’s never pondered the acquisition of another ski area. He says the best model for the industry is individually owned ski areas run by people “who are making the most out of what they have.”

“There is really an idea here that we don’t really have to grow as long as we can continue to operate as we always have,” he says. “You know, my father told me 35 years ago, he said if you start thinking you’re competing with another ski area, you’re really just competing against yourself. If you look at what you got and what you don’t have, and make the most of it, then you can be independent, sustainable and create a good vibe.”

Keeping the ski pioneer’s vision alive

Spend a day skiing with Pitcher and you are going to hear a lot about his dad, Kingsbury Pitcher. Everyone called him “Pitch.” He grew up in Silverton, chasing his granddad, Otto Mears, the railroad-tracking, road-building entrepreneur known as the “Pathfinder of the San Juans.”

Back in the early 1970s, Pitch consulted for a Texas investment group that owned Wolf Creek. Those investors — including a bunch of football players such as Chicago Bears linebacker Dick Butkus, as well as Dallas Cowboys Danny White and Ed “Too Tall” Jones — installed the first chairlift at Wolf Creek, which up to then had moved skiers on surface lifts.  

“They all bought into this dream that to run a ski area, you turn the lift on, you make money, turn the lift off and go play golf,” Pitcher says. “That is a dream.”

But they failed to recognize that you need three things to run a remote ski area atop the snowiest pass in Colorado, Pitcher says. First you need big machines to clear snow out of the parking lot. Then you need a solid fleet of snowcats to groom snow. And third, he says, “you need really good lift staff who know how to work on old, funky lifts. 

“But they, they had a terrible time, because whenever they got to their holidays, they either had too much snow and they couldn’t park the cars, or they got everybody on the lift, and their lift broke for two hours and they’d have to evacuate. And so it had a terrible reputation back then,” Pitcher says. 

Pitch, who was a minority owner of Wolf Creek with the Texas group, by the mid-’70s had decades of experience running and developing ski areas. He helped design and build Snowmass in the 1960s. He developed Ski Apache in New Mexico. He worked with Chet Huntley to build Big Sky up in Montana. He owned Ski Santa Fe in New Mexico for more than 20 years. By the mid-1980s, he sold the Santa Fe ski hill and bought all of Wolf Creek from the Texas investors and turned it into his family’s legacy operation. Pitch died in late 2017 at the age of 98. He skied into his 90s. 

With all of the rules and all of the stress that our society has kind of propagated, when you come to recreate, you want to be left alone as much as you can be.

— Davey Pitcher, on his view of skiing

Like father, like son, says Mike Kaplan, who honed his resort operations chops at Taos Ski Valley before moving to Aspen, where he worked more than 30 years at Aspen Skiing Co., 17 of them as CEO.

Kaplan remembers a young Davey Pitcher dashing around Taos, typically leaving the resort boundary to plunder forbidden powder while dodging irked ski patrollers. 

“Kingsbury was a ski pioneer. One of the last of his generation. And Davey is carrying on that ski pioneer attitude and way of doing things, with his fierce independence and self-sufficiency,” says Kaplan, who retired from Aspen Skiing in 2023. 

“In the old days, ski area operators weren’t just in the ski business. They built roads. Cleared snow. They ran construction projects and a fabrication shop. Great skiing isn’t easy, so the fact Davey has stayed his course and persevered to keep that pioneer’s vision alive and well, is really cool and inspiring.”

Pitcher — like his great-grandfather, his dad, his five siblings, his wife, son and daughter — is a born-and-bred DIYer. There are 10 chairlifts at Wolf Creek, and Pitcher’s own Wolf Creek crew installed all of them. His lift team clocks about 11,000 hours a season working on the lifts.

Most recently, Pitcher and his team designed and installed the Tumbler between September and February last winter. It’s a four-person lift — the second-hand towers and sheaves came from the Northstar ski area in California — with new Doppelmayr chairs that services terrain for first-time skiers.

Pitcher said he built the four-tower Tumbler and the new beginner terrain to ease the learning process for a growing number of new skiers who are trying resort skiing without taking a lesson. 

Used to be that most every new skier at a ski area came out of ski school, where they had learned the basics of resort skiing. But fewer skiers are entering the sport through ski school. That poses a challenge for not just resort operators, whose snowy mountains mingle experts, intermediates and never-evers, but an entire industry that needs newcomers to replace aging customers.  

“Now there’s no way to help those first-timers learn the ropes, you know,” Pitcher says. 

Last winter he spent $50,000 to pay ski instructors to staff the Tumbler terrain all day, helping skiers load the chairs and learn fundamental techniques for skiing. 

“So we always have someone there and that’s our kind of attempt to work on educating the incoming novice skier that falls through the cracks by not buying a lesson,” he says. 

“When you think about the industry … the people that are testing the waters and deciding if they’re going to join the sport, we have got to do everything we can to bring them into the sport. So we see this added cost (of ski instructors staffing beginner terrain) as really investing in the future. Because if they have a good experience, they’ll maybe decide to buy a lesson.”

But even if they don’t take a lesson, Pitcher says, “they move into the rest of the ski area with some level of confidence and competence.”

Kaplan says Aspen Skiing Co. kicked around a similar idea, maybe dedicating the entire Buttermilk ski hill as a learner’s paradise. He remembers Ernie Blake, the founder of Taos, chasing down first-time skiers on his mountain and forcing them into lessons. 

“Lots of people have talked about doing something like that. The fact Davey has actually done that is incredible,” Kaplan says. 

Homemade avalanche mitigation system

Pitcher has a deep stable of mechanics who keep a fleet of new and old lifts and snowcats humming. He’s even designed and developed his own remote-controlled avalanche mitigation system, not unlike the French-made Gazex exploders he installed more than 20 years ago in his alpine bowls. (His was the first ski area in Colorado to install remote avalanche control systems, similar to those that the Colorado Department of Transportation has now installed to mitigate some 278 of the 522 avalanche paths above the state’s highways, including along U.S. 160 over Wolf Creek pass.)

After a recent short hike up Alberta Peak, Pitcher pauses to show off his homemade avalanche mitigation system. 

The gizmo has two pipes — one delivering compressed oxygen and the other propane — that spurt quick clouds of the mixed gases above hanging snowfields. A wireless connection puffs the gases and sparks an explosion.

“It’s pretty fun to sit at your laptop and press a button and boom!” Pitcher says. “We’ve tested it in up to 40 mile-an-hour upslope winds and it works pretty well.”

Pitcher’s son Keith, who started working at Wolf Creek at age 5 and now wrangles lifts, spent the summer tweaking the design to work better in even stronger winds. 

“My son has worked pretty hard to get all the electronics on it dialed in,” Pitcher says. “We could get them working in up to 60-miles-per-hour wind. That’s what I’m shooting for.”

Pitcher’s wife, Rosanne, runs marketing and sales. His daughter Erika helps with marketing and retail. The two are behind an insightful social media campaign this winter celebrating 85 years of skiing at Wolf Creek with a historical trove of old photos and news clippings. It’s the only promotion the ski area has this winter.

“In the ski business, you can figure out a lot of different ways to spend money,” Pitcher says. “We look at how we spend our money and look for ways to continue to do what we want improvement wise and to some degree, the pricing we have makes it so we don’t have to advertise. We don’t have to really rely on anything other than social media.”

When it’s time to set the annual budget and lift ticket prices, the Pitchers start with payroll. There are about 400 workers at Wolf Creek, although 120 of them are ski instructors and 80 of those are very part-time. 

“When we budget for capital improvements, we make sure we have the payroll to start the season on Nov. 1, even without any snow so we can carry our staff into January even if we have a true disaster year like we did in 1999 when we got only 13 inches until January first,” Pitcher says. “Good thing, too. This year we were the first in the nation to open” on Oct. 22.

Pitcher does not pay much attention to ski resort news. (Part of his “focus on yourself” approach.) But he did watch the ski patroller strike fiasco at Vail Resorts’ Park City Mountain Resort, which made international headlines, none of them good for the country’s largest ski resort operator.

“We spend $350,000 a week on payroll in the winter. It’s our most important expense,” he says. “It makes no sense at all to not pay a livable wage. This is a service industry. There is a clear connection between your customers and your employees and you should protect that connection at all times.”

An expert terrain expansion plan that would grow Wolf Creek by 50%

While there are a few more projects on the books, Pitcher’s biggest dream is a roughly 750-acre expansion into a steep forest outside his existing permit boundary. The push to offer more expert terrain in the so-called Matchless Pod on the southeastern corner of the 1,581-acre ski area was forged in the ski area’s 2012 Master Development Plan. At first, Pitcher envisioned a low-capacity tram ferrying skiers over terrain with no roads and no cut runs. Then he switched over to a low-capacity chairlift. 

Now, he’s thinking the best bet to baby-step into his bold expansion plan is to offer guided skiing for a few seasons, with expert skiers venturing into the new terrain under the watchful eye of guides.

He imagines a few thousand skiers a season spending an additional $40 to $60 to access the steep terrain, which will require hiking to reach the top of the slopes and then a good hour-plus of skinning to leave. 

It’s been a dozen years since Pitcher first floated the expert-terrain expansion. It’s a bold plan that would require adjusting Wolf Creek’s Forest Service ski area permit boundary. Most expansions at ski areas are inside established boundaries. 

But boundary adjustments do happen, especially when ski areas can show demand for additional terrain. Monarch ski area next winter will open a 377-acre expansion that expanded its permit boundary. The Forest Service studied Monarch’s expansion into No Name Basin and found it would have no significant impact. The agency issued a similar decision in 2019 that expanded Aspen Mountain by 153 acres.

It makes no sense at all to not pay a livable wage. This is a service industry. There is a clear connection between your customers and your employees and you should protect that connection at all times.

— Davey Pitcher, on Wolf Creek’s $350,000 per year payroll

Those Monarch and Aspen expansions are the only two that sought Forest Service approval to grow beyond special-use permit boundaries. In the past 15 years, expansions at Steamboat, Keystone, Arapahoe Basin, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, Copper Mountain, Crested Butte, Eldora, Loveland, Purgatory, Ski Cooper, Snowmass, Sunlight, Vail and Winter Park ski areas all have been inside permitted boundary lines. 

It’s important to note that the 40-year plan by the late Texas investor Red McCombs to build a massive village on Wolf Creek Pass does not involve the Pitcher family. Pitcher has long opposed the proposal to develop hundreds of homes in a resort village adjacent to his family’s ski hill. He said he recently urged McCombs’ family to consider donating their land to create a new state park. He didn’t hear back. 

Pitcher calls the Forest Service permit expansion approval process “byzantine” but he understands the careful approach by federal land managers around his ski area.

The Rio Grande National Forest has slowed its National Environmental Policy Act review of the expansion plan to give officials time to hammer out a new winter travel management plan that would address the increasing use of snow machines atop Wolf Creek pass. For years Pitcher has struggled with motorized users from the pass coming into his ski area. A new plan by the Forest Service proposes limiting motorized access in areas around the pass and ski area. 

“In a lot of ways, I’m fairly upset with the double standard that’s been going on with snowmobiles,” says Pitcher, an avid backcountry skier who says the newer go-anywhere Timbersled motorcycle snow machines leave “deep hard ruts that if you cross them on skis, they will take you down hard.”

“There’s all this scrutiny on ski areas and lynx and the impacts to threatened and endangered species, but snowmobile use is growing exponentially with all these new technologies and there’s no accountability,” he says. “So I agree with the Forest Service that this travel plan needs to be dealt with first.”

In the next couple years, Pitcher plans to overhaul his base area, with an expanded ski school, easier access from the parking lots and more outdoor seating around an outdoor grill on a spacious deck. 

“People really like to sit outside at a ski area,” he says.

After a long overdue powder day, James Harman and his dad, Dale, are giddy. They are shedding powdery parkas at their rumbling van with Texas plates. This is the 14th year in a row the Fort Worth residents have vacationed at Wolf Creek. They have a bunch of family and friends lodged down the road in Pagosa Springs.

When Harman finished grad school five years ago, he came up to Wolf Creek and spent a month skiing every day.

“That was a dream,” says the skier with a big Texas belt buckle. “We love it here. The snow is great and the prices are good, too, but really it’s about the atmosphere up here. It’s one of a kind. It’s a big mountain that feels small. A big mountain with a small-hill vibe.”

Dale says he dangled young James between his skis shortly after his son learned to walk. 

He starts to share his favorite thing about Wolf Creek but stops short when he sees a reporter’s notebook. 

“Wait a second, James,” he says. “We need to tell this man that this is the last place you would ever want to ski.”