Local Group Buys Ragged Mountain NH, Will Assume Operations from Pacific Group Resorts
“We always said that if we could buy our home hill, we would love to do it.”
Tristan Whitman grew up five minutes from Ragged Mountain. So close he could hear snowguns hammering through the night. In the morning he’d ride up to the lifts with his dad and fall in with a ratpack of skiers who built clandestine jumps all over the hill. This was in the age of the “snowboard park,” the no-skiers-allowed, get-your-ticket-ripped-for-jumping 1990s. These air raids forged friendships that would long outlast Ragged’s jumping ban.
The crew – Whitman, Seth Offen, Josh Larkin, Bill Morrison, and Carl Rominger – stayed close as they grew up, moved away, started careers, had families. They skied all over the world together. But they kept coming back to Ragged. Rominger built a career at the mountain as it evolved from a rusty New England afterthought into a many-gladed Ski 93 alternative served by a pair of high-speed lifts. Whitman, who moved to Massachusetts to work in finance, appreciated how Ragged’s two-peaked trail network funneled back to a single base, easing the job of tracking his three kids. But he also like seeing his friends. And while they could now jump all they wanted, the group conspired around a different fantasy.
“We always said that if we could buy our home hill, we would love to do it,” Whitman said in a phone call Thursday morning.
On Tuesday, they did it. Through an entity called “SF Mountain Co.,” (SFM) the five friends – along with a sixth partner, Mike Kettenbach, who joined the ski posse after meeting Whitman in college – purchased Ragged Mountain from longtime owner Doug Anderson.
“We just care a lot about that place and making sure we can preserve it for future generations that can enjoy it like we did growing up,” said Whitman.
Park City-based Pacific Group Resorts (PGRI), which Anderson majority-owns and which has operated Ragged since 2007, will exit its management role after a short transition period. SFM will retain General Manager Erik Barnes, who has led the ski area since 2021. Ragged will honor all previously purchased products through the 2025-26 ski season, including the Indy Pass and reciprocal arrangements with PGRI’s five remaining ski areas.
The sale of Ragged is a pause for a PGRI that has otherwise been in growth mode. The company purchased New England’s snowiest mountain, Jay Peak, just three years ago, and had consolidated ownership of its other U.S. properties – Wisp, Maryland; Wintergreen, Virginia; and Powderhorn, Colorado – in recent years. Reciprocal benefits between Jay and Ragged, which sit just two-and-a-half hours apart, had proven popular for passholders of both resorts.
“It’s bittersweet,” PGRI Chief Marketing Officer Christian Knapp said over the phone earlier this week. “Ragged was the foundational building block for our company. But we’re pleased with the new ownership group.”
Ragged’s sale and exit from PGRI management is the third announced spinoff of a U.S. ski area from a multimountain operator in the past 15 months, following Utah-based Powdr’s planned sale of Eldora to the town of Nederland, Colorado, and sale of Killington and Pico, Vermont to local investors in 2024. While the total number of U.S. ski areas run by multimountain operators continues to edge upward, the sale of three established New England mountains across back-to-back years reveals a continued appetite among skiers for independent, local ownership after a decade of intense consolidation.
So what does this new ownership group have in mind for Ragged? Could we finally see the long-teased (and partly cut), Pinnacle Peak expansion? How about bed-base development that would make the resort more competitive with Loon and Waterville Valley? Will SFM keep season pass prices low in the spirit of PGRI’s Mission Affordable pass program? Will passholders keep their free days at Jay Peak after this winter? Will Ragged stay on Indy Pass? And what does this mean for PGRI? Is the company done growing just three years after triumphantly purchasing the crown jewel of New England skiing? And what does this mean for the consolidation of lift-served skiing as a whole? Is that trend reversing? Let’s explore: