Small But Thriving Monarch Will Pay Cash for No Name Expansion
In a Colorado jammed along I-70 and bogged down by Epic and Ikon, independents still have a place.
“It really was an attempt to grow business initially, and now it's really just an attempt to make the skiing more pleasurable, to spread people out.” – Monarch GM Randy Stroud
Monarch Mountain is a bit of an anachronism in hyper-modern Colorado, one of two chairlift-served ski areas in the state (along with Ski Cooper) that still lacks snowmaking. Four vintage Hall double chairs and a 1999 Garaventa CTEC quad serve 769 acres on 1,162 vertical feet:
It's a nice little ski area. With an average annual snowfall of 350 inches, Monarch is one of Colorado’s snowiest mountains, sitting comfortably in the Vail Mountain (354 inches)/Breck (355)/A-Basin (350) tier. Yet most Colorado skiers remain unaware of or uninterested in this top-of-the-world powder stash, waving as they blow past on U.S. 50 en route to Crested Butte (if they bother wandering off the I-70 corridor at all). This could be due to the ski area’s modest-by-Colorado-standards size, its relatively remote location, or Epkon hegemony in America’s largest ski state by skier visits.
Modest stature aside, Monarch is doing well enough to pay for a large backside expansion in cash. Earlier this month, the ski area announced Forest Service approval of the long-in-the-works No Name Basin project off the ski area’s backside:
The MOA has been finalized and the USFS just signed the Decision Notice. This now officially approves the No Name Basin terrain expansion project to move forward! This project will add 377 acres to our existing Special Use permit along with ten cut trails, additional gladed terrain, a fixed-grip triple carrier lift, a warming house, and restrooms at the bottom terminal. Official work will now begin on this project. We are SO excited to actually get started on this project after years of planning and project review by multiple entities. This project will involve two summers of construction (2024 & 2025) with the No Name Basin terrain scheduled to open for the 2025-26 winter season.
Here’s the conceptual map of the new terrain, which will rise approximately 960 vertical feet:
And here’s where it will sit in relation to the current trail footprint:
The new lift will land adjacent to Breezeway, a 1968 Hall double. Skiers will enter the new pod from the top of the Shagnasty trail. Monarch plans to rework the transition from Breezeway’s unload to Shagnasty, transforming the current skating-required flat into a steady decline. Skiers will also be able to enter the expansion off of the intermediate Great Divide trail, which runs off the top of the Panorama lift, a 1980 Hall double. They can then ski back to the frontside from the top of the new lift.
The final liftline leaves access to the hike-to Mirkwood terrain unchanged. Monarch officials never considered running a lift into the area, Monarch General Manager Randy Stroud told The Storm.
“We didn't consider it because our ownership is pretty adamant about keeping Mirkwood the way it is,” said Stroud. “[Monarch principal Owner] Bob Nicolls himself hikes up it and skis every day. And that sort of organic and natural feel to it is what he likes the most.”
Initial scoping documents suggested that a fixed-grip quad could serve the new terrain, but real-world ski area build-outs often differ slightly from masterplan documents, and a triple chair made more sense operationally, Stroud said.
“Ownership doesn’t like the way quads function per se, especially a fixed-grip quad,” said Stroud. “They kind of slow things down when too many people are trying to get on. So in their experience, and mine too, is as long as it's fixed-grip, you could probably be more efficient with a double or a triple instead of families and kids trying to pack onto a quad. It needed to be at least a triple so that we could do patrol evacuations and things back out of there.”
Skytrac, which modernized Monarch’s Garfield and Breezeway lifts in 2010 and 2014, respectively, will build the new lift, Stroud confirmed.
Monarch’s current trail network primarily faces east, but the expansion sits on the west-facing backside. Snowfall totals and retention are “equal to, if not moreso,” in the new terrain, Stroud said, noting that the mountain has long used the No Name area for cat skiing.
Monarch’s expansion will be the 10th at a Colorado ski area since 2012. Together, these projects have added 3,512 acres of lift-served terrain to the nation’s busiest ski state. That’s a combined area larger than Breckenridge (2,908 acres), Winter Park (3,081), Keystone (3,149), or Snowmass (3,342):
When Monarch officials sketched out the expansion as part of their 2011 Forest Service Master Development Plan, they envisioned No Name as a business booster, Stroud says. But in the intervening years, Monarch has blown past their annual skier visit goal, putting them between 200,000 and 300,000 per winter.
“It really was an attempt to grow business initially, and now it's really just an attempt to make the skiing more pleasurable, to spread people out,” said Stroud, who anticipates the expansion could lead to “maybe a 15 percent” increase in business.
Stroud credits Monarch’s growth to better digital and social-media marketing, implementation of Siriusware point-of-sale software, the Covid outdoor boom, and “all the people freaking out about I-70 and the big-box store battle between the Epic and Ikon passes.”
Monarch’s season pass sales have exploded, growing 25 to 30 percent annually over the past five years, Stroud says (Monarch is a three-day member of MCP’s Power Pass, and has assembled one of America’s best reciprocal programs, with three days each at, among many others, Copper Mountain and Arapahoe Basin; the pass is just $569 and $529 for any past season passholder). The mountain’s bank accounts are flush enough that officials plan to pay cash for the expansion. That’s especially impressive given Nicolls’ commitment to keeping enough cash accessible to cover what he calls a “nuclear winter” that would prevent the ski area from opening. That total includes, Stroud says, “how much it would take to keep paying employees so that they would come back the following year even if we didn’t open.”
“No Name” is not just a placeholder, but is eponymous for No Name Creek, which flows west off the Continental Divide from Monarch’s summit.
The Continental Divide, which Monarch straddles, also happens to act as the border between the Gunnison and Pike-San Isabel national forests, doubling the ski area’s bureaucratic hurdles in what can already be a tortuous project-approval process. Monarch officials worked with the two agencies to streamline approvals, but “probably the biggest challenge was the way those two Forest Service districts communicated with each other,” Stroud said.
In a Colorado that increasingly hosts skiing on an industrial scale, accounting for approximately one in every four U.S. skier visits, Monarch does not aspire to rack up Summit County numbers, says Stroud.
“We're still this little guy compared to everybody else, but we like where we're at,” Stroud said. “We're financially successful right now and we don't plan on ever being not independent. So at least as long as this ownership's around, that's what they say.”
Not everyone wants the Stagecoach path paved
Discovery Land Company is the opaque entity behind the high-profile-even-though-it-would-rather-be-invisible Yellowstone Club, the 2,700-acre, 2,700-vertical-foot private ski area that abuts Big Sky, Montana. Company reps reached out to me a few years ago for a general ski industry chat, and I was like “we should do a Yellowstone Club pod,” and they were like “hahahahaha good one, Bud but we’re going to go ahead and keep pretending like we’re not real if that’s OK with you.”
But Yellowstone Club is real, as anyone who has looked east of Big Sky’s Lone Peak knows. An undated fact sheet on The Luxury Vacation Guide website pegs initiation fees at $400,000, plus an investment in a new or used on-mountain home of at least $3 million (which, I can’t imagine anything anywhere near the mountain selling for less than three times that number at this point; the club’s real-estate pages simply says “price upon request” for its various homesites and existing homes). Then it’s $40,000 per year for membership dues.
It must be a good business model, because Discovery aims to build YC 2.0 in Colorado, on the site of the long-defunct Stagecoach ski area.