"The Big Breakup" or "Ski Life After ASC"

If your attention strayed early this Spring from skiing to tennis or golf or maybe your long neglected garden, you might have missed one of the biggest events to affect Eastern skiing since the heated gondola cabin.

The American Skiing Company, or ASC, as it was known with either grudging admiration or outright loathing depending on your point of view, basically ceased to exist late this Spring, as each resort in the ASC family was sold off to complete the dissolution of the company. For those of you may have come in late, here is a brief synopsis of what transpired.

It all began with the December announcement that ASC was selling Steamboat Resort in Colorado for $265 million to Intrawest, that other giant of resort ownership.

On February 16th, it was announced that Mount Snow and Attitash were being sold for $73.5 million to Peak Resorts, Inc., a resort operator with ski resorts in Missouri, Indiana, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Ohio. Included in the sale were the commercial cores of the Grand Summit hotels located at each resort. What is interesting here, is that this will be Peaks first foray into managing resort lodging. The sale was completed in late April.

Just four days later came the news that the big enchilada, Killington/Pico, was being sold for $83.5 million to a joint venture between SP Land Co., a Killington-based real estate development company, and Powdr Corp., a Utah ski resort company that owns several Western resorts, including Park City. The sale was completed in mid-May.

This left Sunday River and Sugarloaf as ASC's only remaining East Coast resorts, and for a good little while rumors were flying about what might happen, including Les Otten's possible interest in getting back into the ski game. Talk about things coming full circle! Les was, after all, the father of ASC back in the 1980's when he purchased Sunday River. When the dust finally settled, Sunday River and the Loaf were sold in early June to Boyne USA, Inc. for $77 million in cash. Boyne operates or has interests in seven other resorts in North America.

The final shoe dropped in late July with the sale of ASC's lone remaining resort, the Canyons, in Utah to the Toronto-based Talisker Corp. For the purchase price of $100 million, Talisker, which is developing a luxury residential community at nearby Deer Valley, will also assume about $600,000 in ASC debt. The sale is expected to close before the end of September. ASC has notified the SEC of its intention to dissolve the company and delist its stock.

Out of the ashes of ASC we now have the rebirth of six major resorts in New England under new management this winter. Interestingly, all of them were acquired by companies that have experience in ski resort operations elsewhere in the US and Canada. So what does this mean to you, the skier? We'll take that up on a resort-by-resort basis in a series of posts that will begin in early September. First up, will be, Putting the "snow" back in Mount Snow.