Jay Peak Owner PGR Purchases Silver Star, B.C. from POWDR
Pacific Group Resorts reorients as a destination player with flagship mountains in East and West
Man, where do they come up with this stuff?
These mountains, I mean. Canada, I mean. It’s like Pacific Rim up there, Man. Only instead of 300-foot-tall robot monsters erupting repeatedly from the ocean depths, B.C. has 3,000-acre ski areas popping out of the hills like dandelions. I keep trying to comprehensively cover Canada only to retreat when I trip over yet another Everest-sized ski area that five years ago spun a single T-bar powered by Uncle Buford’s Ford F-150. I mean look at Silver Star in 1991:
Well they fixed that right up. A sixer, two detach quads, a gondy and some beginner lifts serving a trail footprint that could host the Iditarod. The oldest lifts on the mountain date to 2002.
Things like this don’t happen by accident in British Columbia. The government actually clears bureaucratic hurdles so that small ski areas can evolve into destination resorts. Silver Star, Panorama, Revelstoke, Sun Peaks, Fernie, and Kicking Horse were all the equivalent of community college ski areas 35 years ago. Now, the Powder Highway and its environs are the Ivy Leage of North American skiing. It’s not as though we’re incapable of getting things done in America – we’ll fight to the death to preserve one of our precious parking lots. But in the global battle for the future of ski-tourist dollars, Canada is dunking on us like Shaq on a seven-foot rim.
Guess I kinda buried the lead here.
Ahem: Park City-based Pacific Group Resorts (PGR), owner of Jay Peak and four other ski areas, has acquired Silver Star from also-based-in-Park-City POWDR, which purchased the resort in 2019 and announced its intended sale last year.
The transaction, which followed PGR’s recent sale of Ragged Mountain, New Hampshire, leaves PGR with a half-dozen ski areas:
The acquisition of Silver Star, when stacked onto the company’s 2022 purchase of Jay Peak, Vermont, repositions PGR’s portfolio from a seemingly scattershot collection of unrelated mountains to a destination pipeline that directly links local ski areas (Wisp, Wintergreen, Powderhorn, Washington) to aspirational, mega-snowy, vacation-worthy northern resorts. Jay is the snowiest ski area in eastern North America, while Silver Star is the 19th-largest public ski area by acreage in North America, and the seventh-biggest in Canada. While the company has yet to launch anything as organized as Vail’s Epic Pass, PGR has long granted reciprocity across its portfolio for season passholders at all of its mountains, and will include five non-holiday Silver Star lift tickets for this coming winter. That will, at least for 2025-26, include Ragged.
The shedding of Silver Star (presumably) ends a mass reshuffling for POWDR, which over the past 30 months has also sold Lee Canyon, Nevada; Killington and Pico, Vermont; and Eldora, Colorado (that sales process, to the Town of Nederland, is ongoing). The company reversed its intentions to sell Mount Bachelor, Oregon in April, and is left with a geographically tighter set of ski areas well-balanced between destinations and parks-oriented showcases for their powerful Woodward brand:
POWDR has proven restless in the past, however, selling Alpine Meadows, California in 2007 to finance the purchase of Killington. The company lost Park City to Vail in a contentious 2014 battle of legal footnotes. Another sudden contraction – or a big play back toward consolidation – would not be surprising.
Silver Star will not be following the rest of PGR’s portfolio onto Indy Pass – at least not right away. After holding out for years, POWDR finally dropped the B.C. giant onto Ikon’s two-day “bonus” tier in September. The contract, sources tell me, will forestall a potential Indy partnership for at least three winters. Jay Peak has been Indy’s number one resort by redemption since joining the pass for the 2020-21 winter, and PGR was satisfied enough with the product to plant its other five ski areas on the pass in subsequent seasons. Meaning it’s very possible that Silver Star could join Indy at the expiration of its Ikon deal. That would be huge for Indy, which could then market the resort as a joint destination with nearby – and nearly as large at 2,765 acres – Big White, which once shared ownership with Silver Star and joined Indy in 2023.
This has been a busy year for multi-mountain ski area operator sales transactions, even as 2025 sets up to be the first year since 2020 – and the first non-Covid year since 2011 – during which neither Vail nor Alterra purchased a resort.
Let’s take a deeper look at what this sale means for Silver Star, for PGR, for POWDR, for skiers, and for consolidation trends in North American skiing.