Snow Business

IF YOU HAD A PILE OF MONEY, AND COULD DO ANYTHING YOU WANTED, WHAT WOULD YOU DO? FOR SOFTWARE MILLIONAIRE ROB LOUGHAN, IT’S FLYING KNEE-HIGH IN POWDER.

By Nathaniel Reade / Photography By Dave Thomas

For the powdery wonder that is Baldface Lodge, let us first give thanks to a very smart waiter. Back in the spring of 2001, Rob Loughan was eating at a restaurant in Lake Tahoe when his favorite server mentioned that a friend of his had a business that Loughan would want to buy. And he wouldn’t let up; he kept mentioning this great opportunity.

The same waiter also did electrical work, so once when he was working at Loughan’s house he left a business plan behind, sure that no one could resist.
Loughan could resist. He’d been seeing a lot business plans lately. The year before, he and his partners had sold their company, Octane Software, for a record $3.2 billion. At the tender age of 37, Loughan was now worth many hundreds of millions and could do whatever the heck he wanted. And right then, what this stocky, self-described “white trash” man wanted to do more than anything else was to spend his days snowboarding and his nights hanging out at the private Yellowstone Club in Big Sky, Montana. So what could make him change his mind?

First of all, Loughan liked the photo on the front of the business plan. It came from Jeff Pensiero, then 31, a big-eyed, warm, slightly hyper, snowboard fanatic. He and his business partner, Jim Fraps, had just created one of the world’s largest cat-ski operations in the Kootenays, near Nelson, British Columbia, in Canada. This is not a place that teaches cats to ski; it’s a place that takes skiers and boarders to untracked, deep, fluffy powder via a large snowcat with a heated cabin on the back. It’s called Baldface, and it is beautiful, more than 32,000 acres of widely spaced trees, open bowls, and stony peaks with an average snowfall of 500 annual inches. Yes, 500 inches. That’s the kind of snowfall you can practically drown in. It’s just across the lake from Nelson and about 150 miles north of Spokane, Washington. Dan Egan, skiing legend and star of many Warren Miller movies, once described Nelson to me as “the last best ski town in North America.” Baldface has so much terrain that even in snow-drought years that have ruined other cat and heli operations, they never lack for untracked runs.

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