Owners advance Summit Powder Mountain plans

By Brice Wallace

A few years from now, what is currently a relatively quiet ski resort could be a bustling village featuring lodges, homes and businesses, populated and visited by people focused on the environment, innovation, business and the arts.

That’s the plan for Summit Powder Mountain, above Eden in Ogden Valley.

“The key being that there’s a plateau here, about a 40-acre plateau, where you can do a town about the size of historic Telluride, and that’s what we’re doing,” Greg Mauro, founder and managing partner of Learn Capital, a global education technology fund, recently told the Governor’s Office of Economic Development board.

A few year ago, Mauro approached the founders of the Summit Series events about saving Powder Mountain from overdevelopment. The group bought Powder Mountain in 2013, and their plans call for the site to be the permanent home of the Summit gatherings, a recreational hotspot expanding beyond skiing, a cluster of more than 150 homesites in the development’s first phase, and the mixed-use village.

In a news release last fall, Powder Mountain said its new town “will feature a main street with pop-up stores, micro-apartments, farm-to-table restaurants, yoga boot-camps, public art, media labs and educational outlets offering training in everything from transcendental meditation, software development and athletic performance. It will embody a next-generation urbanism that nourishes social entrepreneurship, connection and collaboration, and responsible living.”

A New York Times writer cast the plans this way: “A mash-up of postmillennial civic and lifestyle ideas, with an ethos of social entrepreneurism: Telluride meets the Mission District, perhaps.”

“We’re keeping the character of it,” Mauro said of Powder Mountain, “but if we can create ‘Telluride meets the Mission District,’ we think Ogden can become the next Portland. It’s got the bones for it. It’s got the people for it.”

Summit Powder Mountain’s website says the project “aims to rethink the great American mountain town around a community focused on innovation, entrepreneurship, arts and altruism” and that it will be “a new kind of neighborhood, where friends, family, and the change makers of today and tomorrow gather in an environment created to catalyze personal and collective growth.”

The website indicates the development will eventually have more than 500 ski accessible mountain homesites connected to a village core, surrounded by cultural amenities and miles of walking, biking and Nordic trails.

Mauro described the overall project as “reasonably ambitious.” Already in place is a Skylodge with two yurt-style rooms with breathtaking views, which Mauro said will be used for “next-generation convening.” The Summit Institute and its worldwide 15,000-person Summit community of thought leaders and innovators already have three buildings and another is under construction.

“We think we’ve got an amazing opportunity as part of the Summit Institute, which is really to convene innovators — people leading in art and innovation — and host them in a really compelling environment,” he said.

The new homes will be limited to 4,500 square feet above ground, with modern architecture heavy on wood and glass. Already, 130 families have purchased homesites, with the group including current and former corporate leaders and a few Hollywood types. “It’s a diverse community of really interesting folks, and it’s just a subset,” Mauro said.

The vision for the 4.5-acre village includes 224,000 square feet of condos, a boutique hotel, commercial operations, a conference center, educational facilities, and affordable housing with a focus on artists, social entrepreneurs and accelerators. Organizers are working to create a technology cluster to foster regenerative and sustainable technologies, as well as an “innovation zone,” with hopes that seven universities will be involved, and that at least three innovative companies will be willing to move their headquarters into the development.

The regenerative villages essentially will use the output of one system as the input of another. “People really want to live in a next-generation community where they know that it’s a fully sustainable, regenerative loop that they’re living in,” Mauro said.

The “new urbanism” development will have conservation as a main thrust. “Rather than have it [the mountain] be purchased by a large corporate interest and blow it out to its full potential, which could have been 10,000-plus [housing] units, we want to do something much more appropriate and conserve open space,” Mauro said.

Summit Powder Mountain has certainly generated some media buzz. The New York Times described the village as “a next-generation alpine town.” Alpine Modern said the owners are “building a pioneering alpine village” “with the vision to fundamentally reimagine and experiment with how people live together, shelter themselves, and converge for the greater good.” Town & Country said it will be “a private utopia for the digital elite.” Curbed Ski said the “idealistic” owners are “a group of young entrepreneurs with big goals of changing the world.”

James Ebert, a member of the Weber County Commission, told the GOED board that the county supports the changes at Powder Mountain.

“Weber County has always been kind of a blue-collar [area], and there’s been a process of change over the last five to 10 years as our cluster of aerospace has really started to take hold, and having a vision like this and bringing high-net individuals in to see our communities, to help bring the capital and the vision, is something that we’re committed to,” Ebert said. “We’re extremely excited about the project.”