November 17, 2006 Chris Peterson Email

From: Christian Peterson [mailto:xxxxxx@yahoo.com]
Sent: Friday, November 17, 2006 7:12 PM
To: 'Kristen Moulton'
Cc: Godfrey, Matthew; 'Curt Geiger'; 'Bob Geiger';
'Ellison, Thomas A.';
ahowell@standard.net
Subject: RE: Don Wilson's letter to council

Hi Kristen,

Thanks for sending me a copy of Don Wilson's Resort Feasibility Study letter to the Ogden City Council. I appreciate your interest in the issues raised by Mr. Wilson.

Although I've never met him, Don Wilson sounds like a reasonable man who apparently headed up resort planning at Snowbasin from 1978 until 1981, a 3 year period, 25 years ago, during which time very little changed at Snowbasin.

Don has made a number of understandable but incorrect assumptions about my resort plans, and he's at a further disadvantage because he has been using maps with poor granularity (10 meter contours) and he's been out of the resort business for 25 years.

I, on the other hand, headed up resort planning at Snowbasin for 17 years, ending 2 years ago, a period during which Snowbasin was radically transformed and expanded, and during which dozens of millions of dollars were invested.

I'll just touch on a couple of incorrect assumptions in what Mr. Wilson calls his "informal analysis".

First, resort size: "Skier capacity is a factor in resort profitability and is in direct relation to the physical size of a development" Mr. Wilson got this partly right, but skier capacity is rarely a relevant constraint in Utah. For example, Snowbasin Resort has a SAOT (skiers at one time) capacity of about 14,000 skiers. On the busiest holidays and weekends at Snowbasin, the crowd totals between 4,000 and 5,000 skiers and snowboarders.

If you are closer to your customers than your competitors, and you provide a good product, you can do lots of business in a modestly sized ski and snowboard area. An example: Mountain High Resort in Southern California. They just expanded by purchasing a nearby area, but for years and years Mountain High Resort has generated over 500,000 skier days annually on a 220 acre ski mountain with 1600 ft. of vertical drop. That is more skier days than all but a handful of resorts nationwide. I am familiar with the numbers because I ws part of an investor group bidding for Mountain High when it was recently put on the market. Our group was eventually outbid, by the way.

Second, resort services: Mr. Wilson lectures the city council about the back-of-house and front-of-house facilities needed to successfully service a winter resort. It is entirely appropriate for Mr. Wilson to suggest to the city council some of the things they should look for, when the time comes, in resort service facilities design. To assume, however, that vital facilities have been overlooked or can't be provided within my proposed resort, is not appropriate. In addition to having a hand in planning the built environment at Snowbasin and Sun Valley, I also headed up Human Resources at Sinclair Oil for 7 years, and was responsible for the employee training programs that, in combination with fine facilities and great employees, led the readers of SKI Magazine this year to vote Snowbasin and Sun Valley the #2 and #3 resorts in North America for On Mountain Food and the #3 and #4 resorts in North America in skier services (pg. 184, Ski Magazine, October 2006)

Third, lift and run layout. Mr. Wilson correctly ascertains that a large portion of the skiing in Malan's Basin will consist of a beginner ridge run, a beginner valley run, and numerous steeper intermediate and advanced runs connecting the two gentle runs. This is a matter of personal taste, but I simply disagree with Mr. Wilson that "the overall skiing experience would be greatly diminished" because an intermediate or advanced ski run starts and/or ends with some beginner terrain. The types of grading and skier traffic problems to which Mr. Wilson alludes in his City Council letter have been resolved many times before at Snowbasin and Sun Valley. I am surprised, in fact, that some of the more obvious and inexpensive-to-fix earth-moving and skier traffic problems at Snowbasin were not solved in the years before Mr. Holding purchased Snowbasin in 1984. I hope you're beginning to get at least the faint impression that Malan's Basin is not my first rodeo. On the topic of lifts, over the last 15 years, three of the most respected ski-area planning firms in the world created development and lift plans for Snowbasin. Only two people in the Snowbasin organization disagreed with the lift plans: Earl Holding (the final decision maker) and me. Earl and I thought that the John Paul quad lift would be much better if the bottom terminal was near the main plaza instead of across from the Porcupine bottom terminal a third of the way up the mountain. Also against the advice of the best ski area planners, Earl and I favored a single gondola from the bottom of Strawberry bowl to the top instead of an upper plus a lower chairlift. At Sinclair Oil, Earl Holding fosters an environment where important issues are vigorously examined and attacked from all angles before a final decision is made. Nothing is off-limits in those private meetings. The arguments over the John Paul lift and Strawberry Gondola filled more than one 12 hour meeting. It is the same process that was followed to decide on the configuration of 11 new high-speed lifts, 14 elegant new log buildings, and numerous other projects carried out at Sun Valley and Snowbasin over the last 18 years. In the end, Mr. Holding overruled the professional planners who didn't have as much operating experience and labor-cost sensitivity as us, and the John Paul and Strawberry cableways were built the way Earl Holding and I wanted them. Skiers clearly agree: this year they voted Snowbasin's lift system #1 in North America (SKI Magazine, page 182, October 2006)

In summary, Don Wilson seems like a reasonable man who, by drawing on some accurate and some inaccurate information, has made some understandable but incorrect assumptions about my proposed resort. I look forward to meeting him someday to compare notes about Snowbasin and Malan's Basin.

Best Regards,
Chris Peterson

PS Kristen, I hope you don't mind if I send a copy of this email to some of the people in Ogden who are following the Malan'sBasin issue. I hope my letter adds more light than heat to the community discussion, but I'm told that heat seems to have been winning that battle lately.