The Balsams: Les Otten on the History and Revival of an Iconic New Hampshire Resort (Great Northwoods Region)

The Balsams: Les Otten on the History and Revival of an Iconic New Hampshire Resort

Name: Les Otten

Region: Dixville Notch, Great Northwoods Region

Les Otten is the former CEO of The American Skiing Company with a lifelong career and passion for the New England ski industry. In 1971, Otten’s professional trajectory began as a lift mechanic where he worked his way through the ranks and began a fruitful career in ski area ownership and philanthropy. He has an eye for opportunity and a commitment to quality which has led him to his present day venture in northern New Hampshire.

In 2014, Otten embarked on reopening and reviving The Balsams, a year-round destination in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire. His efforts are pointed towards preserving the history and community of this unique location while creating a recreational hub of accessibility and inclusion. The views aren’t too bad either.

“The community wants to see mountains developed intelligently and doesn't want a giant or an over-expansion,” says Otten.

In this episode of the 603podcast, Otten delves into his trials and triumphs in business and the culmination of his learned process of bringing back The Balsams. His vision plans to revive this rural region and share The Balsams’ unique New England charm with everyone who wishes to experience it.

Why should people visit The Balsams?

There are extensive options of year-round activities for everyone on the 11,000 acres of wilderness. “We can all sleep in the same space, we can all eat in the same restaurants, but we can all go off in our different directions during the day," says Otten, "all without ever leaving the property."

Fun facts about the Balsams

• Largest ski resort on the East Coast

• Access to the US/Canadian 1,000-mile snowmobile “Superhighway”

• Donald Ross designed 18-hole Golf Course

• Mountain lakes for boating, swimming, and fishing

• Miles of maintained trails for biking, hiking, and designated recreational vehicles

• Fitness Center and Balsam Baths Nordic Spa

• Aerial Adventure Park

• Performing Arts Center and festivals

• Marketplace filled with unique local vendors 

For more information, plans, and updates on The Balsams visit https://thebalsamsresort.com/ and tune in to the full episode with Les Otten on the 603podcast.   

Produced by: Sammy Blair
Mixed & Mastered by Logan Watts
Written and Directed by: Dan Egan
Hosted by: Dan Egan

Sponsored by:
Mad River Coffee Roasters, Waterville Valley Resort, Jean's Playhouse and Ski Fanatics 

For more information about the 603podcast visit 603podcast.com

Transcript

Dan Egan • 

Hey, we're back on the 603 podcast, and of course I'm with Les Otten. Les, how are you today?

Les Otten • 

Good man, how are you? 

Dan Egan • 

I'm doing great, man. It's nice to see you. You too. 

Les Otten • 

Uh, which one of us looks older? 

Dan Egan • 

Yeah. It's been a long time, right? Yeah, but no worse for the wear. I mean, the ski industry, it keeps you young, right? 

Les Otten• 

Something does. I think it's the white snow. Yeah, does it? 

Dan Egan • 

How was your season this year? 

Les Otten • 

Good. I had a great season, I had 30-40 days in the East and made it out to Whistler for a week and even made it out to British Columbia for a little of that powder skiing that you get when you ride a helicopter. 

Dan Egan • 

That's pretty sweet. 

Les Otten • 

Gotta love that 

Dan Egan • 

Do you ski here at the Balsams? Do you backcountry here? Do you go up and ski in the wilderness? What's your..? 

Les Otten • 

Take wilderness, you know, skin up, ski down, and of course anxiously anticipating all the new areas that we're going to try and build over here and look forward to skiing that. It snows so much here that it's like, why go to the Balsams? Well, you know, it's like, what was it? Is the snow stupid? Is the economy stupid? It's the snow. I mean it regularly sees 250-300 inches of snow, so it is a nice little pocket of snow that shouldn't be ignored. 

Dan Egan • 

Has its own weather system right here with the notch and everything that's going on. 

Les Otten • 

It does, I mean, we start out with a little bit of an advantage because even when you're at the lake where we are right now, you're at 1,865 feet. That's a decent starting point. We're further inland, we're further north. We get the storms that go up to St. Lawrence, and we get the storms that come through the Mount Washington valley. We're on the cold side of those storms, so when that clear snow falls, sometimes it doesn't happen here. 

Dan Egan • 

And the Balsams, it's an iconic location. How did you end up here at the Balsams? How did that happen Les? 

Les Otten • 

Yeah, that's a story some days that I really enjoy more than others. I was minding my own business, and a couple of gentlemen, one in the construction industry and one in the car industry, had acquired the property and weren't quite sure what they wanted to do with it. They had some plans, and reluctantly they dropped them off at my house a number of years ago and I didn't look at them. I think they dropped them off in September. By the time it got to November, they were still sitting on the dining room table and it was time for Thanksgiving. Somebody said, “Les! You gotta move that stuff because we're having guests for Thanksgiving”. They were my guests and my kids. So I finally have, you know, I suffer from Jewish American guilt so I can't throw it away without looking at it. 

I've known the Balsams. You know, we've all known the Balsams for centuries now, it seems like. It is a nice little ski area, but it’s that nice little ski area that you had to drive the extra 45 minutes to get to. It wasn't that BIG thing that you would drive the extra 45 minutes for… You’ll go to Jay, you’ll go to Stowe, you'll go to Sugarloaf because they're, you know, worth the extra distance because there's really something there. So I unrolled the maps and say, “yep, I know what that is.” Then there was this last map that I unrolled, which was a USGS topographic map, and it had the outline of where the Balsams were. It also showed all the land within four or five miles around the Balsams. I looked at it and my contention is everybody is an idiot savant about something, right? There's something that all of us can do that nobody else can do. At least we like to think that. We’re looking at it, and having designed Sunday River and designed the expansion of the Canyons and built those things out, one of the things I was really good at was reading a topographic map. I can  see what faces northeast and north and west and what the sun angles are and how steep the terrain is and what the contours look like. I can kind of see something in two dimensions and envision it in three dimensions.

I looked at it and I went, who owns all this land around the Balsams? I researched that, found out, made a telephone call and said, would you guys be interested in letting me use that for skiing and can I buy it from you? It turns out that the land is owned by Beirut, but is being managed by Wagner. We made the connections and they were interested in seeing the North Country expand. So we got a yes and then all of a sudden it wasn't the Balsams with this one nice little bump for skiing. It was like this massive thing that had room for 23 lifts. It snows a lot,  and we figured out how to get an inexhaustible supply of water for snowmaking. We worked with the local planning commission and the local county commissioners and rezoned the property so that we could basically build a major year-round destination. 

The place was always great in the summertime. They had an 80-90% occupancy from the 1st of June to the 1st of October until foliage. Every time I was ever at a resort in the ski business, any one of the businesses I ever owned was like, how do we get people here in the summertime? This is the opposite of that. How do we get people here in the wintertime? I think that is one of the things that I do know how to do; make something that people will want to ski, right? Quality snow and what you're looking for in the wintertime. When I opened that map and had that guilt, I can't throw this stuff away unless I look at it. This is what sort of started the process of thinking, yeah, it could be a long haul to get the permits and to build something significant. Now I think we're finally at the point now where we can say that, yeah, we've got just about everything we need in order to go forward. 

Dan Egan • 

That's amazing. You talk about the many things that you're good at Les and I'm sure of that. But one of them is land and land swaps and working through the permits. You've been able to do things in New England that other people have never been able to do, and not just in New England but around other locations as well. That's special. You did it. You did it in Vermont, you've done it in Maine, you've done it in New Hampshire. Now what do you see there? 

How do you figure that all out? 

Les Otten • 

I I think you’ve come at this from the standpoint of saying that the community that wants to see mountains developed intelligently and doesn't want a giant or an over-expansion. They want to know that you're going to behave in a responsible manner with sewer, water, watersheds, and how you're going to manage all that stuff. One of the keys to it has always been the willingness to say, well this is what I want to do, what do you want? If the answer from the other side is we don't want you to do anything, you're like, okay, well that doesn't work. Now that happens sometimes, but more often than not the answer is, well, we would be very happy with you and what you’re doing if you would do this for us. If you look at Sugar Bush and Glen Ellen as a prime example. They have combined with a two mile lift between the two. There was plenty of skiing at Sugar Bush and plenty of skiing at Glen Ellen and you really didn't ever have to ski in Sly Brook in order to have a massive resort. It was okay, so how do we work this so that we can get the ability to develop that? The answer was to donate Sly Brook, which I can't remember, if it was 3,500 or 5,000 acres. Senator Leahy played an instrumental role in making sure that names like Nancy Bell and Les Otten all got into the same room and said, “yes, we can agree on what we want to do here.” The Bears got their piece of space, Sugar Rush North got its piece of space, and there's a large expansion that took place there. 

If we go back to Killington and look at what Killington did. Killington needed water from a wooded reservoir. Killington wanted to be able to connect with Pico. Killington also owned something called Parker’s Gore. Now Parker’s Gore would make a huge ski area expansion, but there are also a lot of beech trees there. There was a lot of evidence that every seven years the bears were thriving in Parker's Gore. There was also evidence that the area between Ramshead and Pico, which is highly desirable for skiing, was a gigantic expansion opportunity. It could take Killington and Pico to well over 2 million skiers a year based on the roads and everything else, that seemed like a reasonably large number to grow to. 

The question surfaced again, “what do you guys want?” This is what we want. We had discussions about the Long Trail. We had discussions about the top of Ramshead. We had discussions about Parker’s Gore, and the bears, and a wooded reservoir. We sat down and we negotiated. I didn't get everything I wanted. They probably didn't get everything that they wanted, but at the end of the day, Killington and Pico could get together. 

One of the most unique things that came out of the negotiation was that the effluent generated from Killington, which is in the Connecticut River Valley, was able to go over Pico and get treated in the Rutland treatment facility in the Hudson River Valley. That was precedent setting in the fact that you were moving water from one watershed to another. Now it's not that much water and it is treated, but it was a game changer. Now, even though it's 20 some odd years later, the effluent line is there. They haven't built out the area between the two, but they can. If Killington wants to grow with Pico, that's still an opportunity. Those are the kind of things that you're asking. People kind of don't remember when you're in the midst of this 25 years ago.  It’s sitting down at the table and saying simply, what would you like? This is what I'd like, how can we both leave here with something? 

Dan Egan • 

I mean it's an amazing feat and it's quite a legacy to have negotiated so many deals. When you know environmentalists and all that they were after and how they wanted to stop things. But it's an unbelievable skill that I think is a huge legacy of what you did with American Skiing. When you started in the ski industry in the sixties, did you ever imagine you'd be sitting down and negotiating expansion deals with all these different parties? Was that a dream or were you just like, no, I'm going to go be a ski bum? 

Les Otten• 

No, it was like, I got to college and there was a ski area next door in Virgil, New York called Greek Peak, which most of us in the industry know is still there. It was being run by a fellow named Al Kryger, and Gordon Richardson was running the ski school. They had a booth set up in the fall of 1967 as students were checking into Ithaca college and were asking if we wanted to buy a season’s pass? Then there was a little sign off to the side, which was, “Do you want to be a ski instructor?”, seven bucks an hour or seven bucks a lesson or something like that. You know being broke, and having a car that I had to buy the insurance and the gas for… I do thank my parents. They paid for the car and they paid for my college education, but the spending money was on me. I could go teach skiing, and so I raised my hand and I joined the Gordon Richardson Ski School. I learned all about down on waiting, and that's how you make the skis turn. The names back in that era are, you know, flooding my memory now. Jack Hyde, Pierre, and Monique, Gordon's wife, and all those people. We were all like “oh, you can actually make a living skiing.” We played around with the idea of building a ski area to compete with Greek Peak before we left town. I have to say I spent more time skiing and earning money, having fun. As a “C” student, there wasn't a line at the door in 1971 to hire people. I got lucky and talked my way into a job at Killington and for $2.25 cents an hour, I worked in the sheave room greasing sheave bearings for Wayne Smith. 

Dan Egan • 

So did that bring you into sort of the operations side and you took interest in how ski areas run? For me ski areas are fascinating, right? Because they're 24/7 chaos. I love that. And did you kind of start to feel that and see that? 

Les Otten • 

I think I got a couple great breaks. Okay again, $2.25 cents an hour for 54 hours a week is what you made then. Killington also started a management training program where they paid you $150 a week. If you do the math at time and a half for overtime after 45 hours, that was less than $2.25 an hour, but I took the salary and went through the program and basically learned the industry from the ground up. You did every lousy rotten job there was. One of my first jobs in the summer of ‘72 was to paint all of Killington's yellow lifts and blue lifts to what I call a shit brindle brown. It covered everything. We didn't have airless paint sprayers, we had air sprayers so it got in your hair and you greased up your face so that it didn't stick to your nostrils and the rest of your body. We had a crew that painted all the lifts and that was my crew. That was my first management level job. I was in charge of four other guys and we basically covered ourselves in brown paint for a couple of months as we painted the lifts. That kinda gave me a unique understanding.

Then Preston gave me a couple of really interesting little side jobs to do. I remember one of the things he was really curious about, and this is probably around 1971. He was really curious to see the density of manmade snow compared to the density of natural snow at the end of a winter. So I went up to the commissary, the kitchen in Killington’s Base Lodge or Snowshed maybe and got like 20 number 10 cans. I went around and got core samples all around the mountain, and put them on my window sill. I had a little basement office, it wasn’t really an office but I called it an office because it sounded good. I had a little closet that had a window and all this stuff melted. One of the things that we saw was that there was significantly less density in natural snow. And then we saw from different areas of the mountain where different guns ran, there were different densities of man made snow. The light bulb went off for me back in 1972. Different guns made different densities and the densities that were less dense were still there, but the quality of the snow was better even after a winter. The corn in the natural snow were the smallest pieces and the man made snow had the biggest pieces. Then in between was where you had sort of a mixture creating a better quality snow. There really must be an art to making snow, and that was what sort of stuck with me. 

When I acquired Sunday River that quality thing was important. How do you compete? Can you compete with quality? What does that crystal really look like? What are you making? Are you making an ice ball or are you making a flake? I am not an engineer, I am not into fluidics, and I don't have a hydrology background. But I did have common sense and common sense was saying, if you could make a crystal instead of a round bare ball, you were making something that was closer to a flake, which would be more fun to ski on. That's when I sort of understood that the better the quality of the snow, the better you were as a skier. And I was never a great skier. I can get down the hill without any trouble, but I was never gonna be a racer. I was never really gonna be a ballet or a mogul guy. But I enjoyed it. And one of the things that I saw very quickly was that if the snow quality was better, I was having more fun. I felt like I was getting more out of my day. I felt like I was skiing better. I kind of figured that if I'm of average athletic ability, most everybody is of average athletic ability, they're not like you. Right? So going forward I thought if I make the quality of the snow better and the skiing experience better, people are more likely to remember the ride down than the ride up. 

Dan Egan • 

That's fascinating, right? You go from mountain management in Killington to Sunday River to buying Sunday River. There are a lot of guys that have been lifers in management and mountain management and mountain managers. Your aspiration was to own and to kind of kick it into gear. 

Les Otten • 

Well, yeah. Everybody has a story about what got them to where they are. Yours is amazing, right? Mine started out in 1886 when my father was born. I was born when he was 63. My father made a fortune and lost a fortune because of Hitler. His wisdom to me when I went out the door and graduated from college was to go to work someplace that you someday can own or run. And that's what he said. 

 I went off and got a job as a ski bum, and he immediately just was like, “you don't get it”. You know? Because he thought that I would go to work for an architectural firm or something in regular business, but going off to be a ski bum at $2.25 an hour was not what he had in mind. It was exactly what he did have in mind, because every time I learned something, I sort of put it in the bank. I said, this could be useful for me someday if I have the opportunity to have my own place. 

Dan Egan • 

Nice, so that seed was planted. 

Les Otten • 

That seed was planted. Even though he thought he had mis-planted it or the crop died. 

Dan Egan • 

My parents thought the same thing. Les, my parents thought the same thing. So you get a hold of Sunday River and expansion, you start seeing growth, you start seeing quality, you start making snow, you start dealing with land, right? All that came together at Sunday River. 

Les Otten • 

Yeah, and there were a number of things. One of the things being that Sunday River needed a large piece of land for its expansion so that it had room to grow. International Paper owned a giant chunk of land next to Sunday River and they were divesting themselves of their land ownership and just trying to concentrate on their paper mills. We heard about the fact that they were selling the land and they were selling it at a bargain price. We said, well, if I could get that, then I could be a contender. The guy that was selling it for International Paper was Marty Malone. When he figured out that I wanted it, the price went right up, so I met a guy by the name of Jamie Kaplan. Jamie had been George Mitchell's lead attorney in the Iran Contra hearings. If you wanted to describe Jamie with a compliment, although it might not sound like it, he was the lawyer that you wanted when you wanted a dog to just get into work. He went to International Paper and he said, “it's discriminatory if you're going to charge him five or ten times more for the land that you're selling next door to him just because he's got a use that you can identify”. 

We didn't get it at 200 bucks an acre, but we got it at a reasonable price. That gave Sunday River the ability to expand out towards Jordan Bowl and Aurora Peak and all the rest of the stuff that's back there. It was a huge deal at the time. That's what kind of got me going at Sunday River, was that opportunity to have that land.

Dan Egan • 

When Sunday River becomes successful and you expand, you buy S.K.I, this is a major shift in the ski industry that really takes on its own form. This idea of owning multiple ski areas, so much so that you had to divest some ski areas. It's not happening in a vacuum. There are other ski areas that are starting to expand in this way. What did you see there when multiple ski areas came in and then there were so many that you had to divest of some of the New Hampshire product? 

Les Otten • 

One of the things I think is interesting about that period of time was the idea of building something that was east coast or west coast and had dominance. If you had 10 ski areas, you didn't need 10 marketing departments. If you had 10 ski areas, you didn't need 10 HR departments. You had 10 and you didn't need 10. One of the things that we knew in those days was that if you were doing less than 200,000 skier visits a year, this is just a giant headache. You'd have to be living with more than 200,000 skier visits per year to have somebody in place. If you get to like a million, you could have the luxury of having response teams and the best mechanic on the planet and the best electrician on the planet. You could move them from point A to point B and you could really improve the quality of your product by owning a bunch of resorts. 

We started the $549 East to West Coast pass back then. There are things that we have since learned because we were the first guys to do it. We all know that pieces of the company were sold off. I always like to repeat and remind everybody that there was no bond holder, there was no lender, there was no supplier, there was no employee that lost anything. I did and the common shareholders did, but none of the debtors lost anything. Then when the resources were sold, they were all sold at great profits. It's tough to be first sometimes. I think if I look back on those years and were to do it all over again I would've done things a little bit differently. We learned some valuable concepts, we understood the quality that we were saying needed to be in the industry. We understood the need for detachables, snowmaking on every trail, talking about retail snow quality. Instead of commercially just making it white but making it white and having people enjoy it. 

Then the whole shape ski revolution came and that in itself was one of the most fun things that I ever got involved with. Remember a couple minutes ago, I said, I'm not the greatest skier in the world. There was a ski that came out in Aspen in the early ‘80s called the S Ski. It was black and it looked like  an old Head ski, except it looked like a clown foot, it didn't have the camber, it didn't have the stability, and the side to side wasn't there. But when you were on really soft snow, it would carve, you didn't have to turn. You just had to understand that all you needed to do is shift your knees and lean. Well, I saw that, and Elan had obviously seen that. Elan had gotten to the point where they said, wow, this is a great beginner ski, learn to ski ski. They had it at 120 centimeters maybe, or maybe 130 centimeters and thought we got this great learning ski, but they didn't think that anybody would want to keep skiing on that. They thought this is just a way to get you going. 

We were sitting there, and by that time we had a bunch of skiers and were thinking this is amazing. We built snow features so that you would glide down the hill and the snow would force you just by almost thinking about it to just change your weight a little bit. The ski would turn and you would turn, and it made learning to ski really, really easy. People criticized us and said most people aren't really skiing. We'll teach you to learn to ski in a day. And we did, okay. They were skiing 3,000 feet with 500 feet of vertical in a day, with these skis, on the terrain features that we made. PSIA said, well, they're not really skiing. You’re short circuiting. You haven’t taught them how to herringbone, and you haven't taught them down, up, down, and you haven't taught… Excuse me, but they're skiing. So we coached them rather than taught them. That was sort of a change in the vernacular that was really helpful. 

Tens of thousands of people now were using these old Elan skis. We went to Elan and said, okay, we want to put these in our rental shop. This is really cool. We'll just fill our rental shop with these skis. Everybody thought I was nuts. No one's going to rent here, they're going to leave your rental shop and they're gonna go back down the access road and they're gonna pick up a pair of straight skis, skinny skis.  I'm like, okay, but I don't think so. I think they're here. They'll put them on and we'll give them a guided demo for free. We'll show you how the ski works, a guided demo. Take your skis, go outside, and do a guided demo with 15-20 people in the class. We had people that attended the guided demos and then they came back inside and wanted to buy the ski. We went to Elan and said, listen, we need a lot of these skis. Elan said, we think it’s just a fad, we don't think it's really gonna go anywhere. 

I called up Rossignol, I think [Mike] Kilchenstein was at Rossignol in those days, and he got a hold of Jacque Rodet and he was the head of Rossignol International. He came to my office and I said I want 10,000 pairs of these skis. He looked at me like I was from Mars and I said no seriously. He said, that's a million bucks. I said I want 10,000 pairs of skis. We had Killington, Pico, Sugarbush, Glen Ellen, Mount Snow, Sunday River, Sugarloaf and at the time I think we also had Waterville, Attitash, and Cranmore until we had to get rid of those guys. I wanted an entire rental fleet for the whole company, as well as some on the shelves to sell. Jacques calls up his guy in Italy in June, and he says, I need 10,000 pairs of skis mounted and ready to go by October or November. The guy on the end of the phone says you're crazy, it's a fad, it'll destroy the company, I don't want to do it. Jacques asked me to leave the room so I leave my office and there's some loud conversation in a language that I don't understand. Then the door opens and he says, come on in, we're all set. I never know what really happened on that telephone call, but what I do know is that the following spring all those resorts were all skiing on these shaped skis and the guided demo was going great. Sprint was helping us build these centers where we would bring people in for their first time and teach them to ski in a day. Now we're using Rossignol product instead of Elan product. [Shaped skis] were kickstarted and in our minds that’s what was going on in skiing.

Every company started putting out a shaped ski. That was the way to go. It was arrogant of us to do that, and it was pushy. It all stemmed from that basically good intermediate skier, like me, that puts on this ski and is performing better and enjoying it more. We rewrote the book on how we would teach skiing, and we got rid of a lot of the stuff that was in the PSIA manual. A couple years later, PSIA seemed to drift towards a lot of the stuff that we were doing. 

Dan Egan • 

This was a major moment in the ski industry for sure. There was a shift from teaching to coaching. There was the fact that you had so many resorts and were able to put these products on skiers in retail shops and send them out the door. You're also talking about corporate sponsorship. You had corporate sponsors, you had Sprint and others that were helping all of this go because you've got above critical mass for skier visits. It all comes back to that idea that you've got above critical mass, and now you are actually shifting the industry in terms of how we ski, how we learn to ski,  the companies that are promoting skiing, and the combination of all the resorts. 

Les Otten • 

We can’t ever go backwards. You have to look forward and sort of understand that you're doing it for the first time. You're not going to do it all right. Sunday River sort of formed that beginning and was a building block for everything. I used to look at Sunday River and once I understood the topography and its landmass, I kind of understood. Preston Smith looked at Sunday River in 1969 or 70 for the first time. Over in Vermont, the environmental community was trying to stop ski areas from doing anything. They didn’t want another flushing toilet to the extent that they could stop him. Press was like, well, we'll just go elsewhere. For a very few bucks, he was able to acquire a 51% interest in Sunday River [in Maine], which had one broken chairlift, and made his point. Things loosened up. They had a bunch of free cash flow and they went and bought Mount Snow in 1977. They didn't even need Sunday River anymore, so Sunday River was sort of left by itself on an island. 

I was at Sunday River running the place and I could see what was there. In the spring of 1980, I called up my boss, whose name was Marty Wilson (I think he lives in the Hanover area in New Hampshire now), and said, it's been a nice seven years to be with the company, but I'm moving on because you're not doing anything with this. The place is screaming for somebody to do something and I'm leaving. He called me back the next day and he said, well how about if we sold it to you? I said the company owes you $856,000, it owes the bank $250,000 and it probably has accounts payable you know $30,000 - $40,000 bucks. I said there's nothing to buy. He said, if you can figure out how to take care of the accounts payable, which was like $37,000, and find a way of getting us $100,000 dollars, we'll take a note for all the rest of it. I was 30 years old at the time and I didn't know enough to say no. I had more testosterone than I needed. How do I come up with a hundred grand and what property do we have that we could sell? How can I make this work and possibly succeed?

The company had just come off of a year where it lost $250,000, exclusive of depreciation. The interest rate was really low, I didn't have to make any principal payments for I think five or six years. Of course I couldn't do anything. I couldn't make any investments without their permission or until I had them paid off. I considered his offer and thought why not [buy Sunday River]? There was probably a little bit more to it than that, but it basically was a two or three day process. I said if I sell the house that the company owns, sell these three lots that have never been sold, and sell all the scrap and you know do all this stuff, I can raise potentially enough money to buy this place. I went to my father, who we talked about earlier, and he thought I was nuts. I was like, can you kick in a little? And he did. Between what I had, what my dad gave me, and selling off these other assets I came up with $134,000 bucks. Then I ran it the way I wanted to run it. It built itself to the point where when it acquired Killington, 100% of the equity was still mine. When we acquired Killington, the company was doing well enough to support the debt to acquire Killington. 

Dan Egan • 

That's amazing. 

Les Otten • 

You would never be able to do that again. It was the timing of all that stuff that came together and that's how it ramped up from where it was. It paid off Killington in 1983 or ‘84 and was debt free. 

Dan Egan • 

I mean it is an amazing story. To do that as a ski bum and as a kid from Ithaca College who saw an opportunity to teach skiing and then to take it all the way there. We touched on some of the changes for the ski industry that you were involved with, but one is the multiple pass. The pass that you… what was the name of that pass when you first came out with the idea, was it the American Ski Pass? The idea that you could buy one pass and ski multiple resorts. That's amazing, and when you extrapolate that all the way now to the Epic and the Ikon, that philosophy changed the ski industry forever. 

Les Otten • 

Yeah, it did. The interesting thing was that no one really understood that. My partners, the preferred investor partners that I had in 1998 when we were doing that, didn't understand that that was going to be the key to massive growth. They really stopped us from pushing that forward and just selling that across the board from east to west. I remember Chris Brink and I were 100% convinced that this pass was going to make us famous. We didn't get there.

Dan Egan • 

It's ground shattering when you look at it today.

Les Otten • 

Today when you look at it, yeah. Somebody once said to me, you can always tell who the settlers are because when they're walking away from you, the other guys with the arrow was in their backs. They say, okay I'm sorry, that didn't work out quite the way you think it could've worked out now on Monday morning. At the time this is what we thought was the right thing to do.

Dan Egan • 

What do you say to that? The idea that it changed the price at the ticket window for the day ticket. When you look at day tickets today that are over $200 and getting close to $300, yet there's a $900 season’s pass. How do you reconcile that for the five time skier? And, and what's your…

Les Otten • 

Ski six times. It's about frequency. One of the things that we've always known in the industry is that there are lapsed skiers and there are people that leave the sport. Then you have to really understand why did they leave the sport? They weren't having as good a time as they wanted. It was too icy. Somebody in the family wasn't doing what they wanted to do. You have to take all of the factors and put them together and say, look, the average skier's only going to go seven times a year. If I'm going to sell a thousand dollar pass, it's $150 bucks a day. You better ski seven days, and that's how I'll justify it. If that person doesn't want to ski seven days, I'll bet you there is somebody that does. There are a lot more people that will say, I'd be happy skiing 10 or 15 or 20 days. At 10 days, that's a hundred dollars a day.

Dan Egan • 

It’s the ones on the side of the road that don't want to do it. Just move on.

Les Otten • 

Those are not gonna be your long-term customers. Anyway, move on. When they just want to ski for five days, or four days, or three days, they'll pay. When they go up to the ticket window and see it's $250 per day, hopefully they’ll realize if they go to a different window and pay $1,000 they can get unlimited skiing. The chances are that is what they're going to do. We all know in the industry that is what's happening. The guy that really wins in all this is the person that skis 30 days a year.

Dan Egan • 

No, it's unbelievable. Huge winner. You know Les, I was in London with you in the UK at the press conference when the speakers were yourself and Adam from Vail. Do you remember that? 

Les Otten • 

I do, it would’ve been 1998

Dan Egan • 

Yeah, it was right around then. 

Les Otten • 

There's a story to tell about that, but…

Dan Egan • 

Well, I'll never forget it because the president of Vail stood up and talked about how they wanted to be Disney and skiing was for everybody. Then they gave you the floor. Do you remember how you opened that talk that night? 

Les Otten • 

Gloria Estefan… 

Dan Egan • 

I don't know what you had been talking about at your tables, but at my table we had been talking about sex, drugs, rock and roll and skiing. That kicked off this rant that I've never forgotten because you painted a picture of skiing that was adventurous, that was for the adventure spirit, and it wasn't for everybody. You went through this description of thumbing up the mountain road at Killington, skiing under the lift, strutting through the base lodge, and that feeling of what that felt like and why it was important. Touch on that feeling of skiing and the adventure of it all. 

Les Otten • 

There is a certain portion of the population that is not risk averse, or they're not risk averse to the extent where going down a hill at 30-40 miles an hour on a pair of skis would scare the hell out of a lot of people but they're comfortable with it. That's the segment of the population that needs to be served. That's the segment of the population that the industry needs to talk to. I'll give you the opportunity in an environment that's sort of a semi-controlled risk for you to scare yourself and survive. Anybody that has scared themselves a little bit and survives gets a dopamine high immediately. When we were thinking about what skiing meant and how to grow the sport, it was to identify with the people that said, I am happy taking a risk. I love the high that I got, the natural high that I got. What's the most fun two people could have standing up with their clothes on? That was sort of the driving force behind all that. The people that were into that identified with the music of the day, with the energy of the day, they identified with what we're talking about in that period of time. We're talking about the industry trying to find itself within this campaign called, “ski it to believe it”, and not understanding that only seven out of every hundred people that are exposed to the sport are going to be in it. 

What you really have to do is get to those seven people and open the sport up so that a hundred people show up at your door and learn to ski for a day. 

Only seven of them become real skiers. But if you do the math, which was what drove all of this and there was always math behind everything we do, those seven people that stayed with the sport would ski 20 days a year. If they kept at it and they skied at your resorts, you had multiple resorts that they could go to, they stayed inside your system and they were your people for 10 years. You were getting a multiple of 10 times that, you were getting 200. If you got $100 a day out of them, you were getting $20,000 out of that one person in the seven out of the original hundred. From that one person who stayed with you, you were getting a return of $20,000 over 10 years. Let's stop thinking about how to get the person that really doesn't like the sport to like it. Let's just mass market. Throw out the 93 people that don't want the sport, keep the seven that do want it, and then understand that every one of the skiers that you keep is worth $20,000 to you. The cash flow that came out of that was dramatic. That's what helped fuel the company.

 Adam [from Vail] was looking at the industry from the viewpoint of Delta Airlines. I was looking at it from the viewpoint of people. $49 bucks to get everybody on the plane. Some people are not going to like the experience, some people are. Those that like the experience, man, they were lifelong. Then if you gave them the skis that they wanted… I'm going to segue because now I'm going to do a little advertisement. That's where the industry was, that's where the industry actually still could be if it wanted to market itself that way. 

If you're at an individual resort that you want to have as a destination, which is what I love about the Balsams, you have to think about who's the decision maker for the vacation and what else do they want to do? I have sort of developed my own thinking going forward, and this is where the Balsams is such a remarkable opportunity. If there's a family of five, one person may want to be you or me and go alpine [skiing], and they want to push it and have that bump run. If you remember, I played Gloria Estefan’s music and asked everybody to close their eyes and listen to the music and put themselves on a bump run going down the hill, actually doing it and feeling it. What I want to do now is allow somebody to spend three days snowmobiling from New Hampshire to Vermont into Canada. Somebody that wants to have an experience, a dining experience that will last three days. Someone that is interested in yoga, someone that wants to spend three days in a spa, someone that wants to ride a four wheeler, someone that wants to go zip lining, someone that wants something other than riding a lift and going down. I want to give the decision maker the ability to say to everybody in their family, you can go to yoga, you can go eat, you can go to the hot spring spa, you can go snowmobiling, you can go snowshoeing, you can go four-wheeling, you can go grouse hunting, you can do all these other activities. We can all sleep in the same space, we can all eat in the same restaurants, but we can all go off in our different directions during the day. That's what I wanted to accomplish with the Balsams. I want to compete with Loon and Waterville and Sunday River and Killington and all those places from a ski standpoint. We've got all that snow that falls out of the sky right here. But I also want you to be able to walk over to your snowmobile and ride up to Canada without having to get back in your car and drive to the snowmobile place or have to get in your car to go to the hot spring spa.. Steamboat has the great Strawberry Springs but you have to get in the car, you have to drive over there. At the Balsams, you just walk through a bunch of tunnels and walk out the end of the door and you're in the hot spring spa at the Balsams. 

Dan Egan • 

That's amazing. And that's one of the really unique things about the Balsams. It has those new unique things. One, because it snows and the snowmobiling is great up here. Two, the ATVing and the trail network is amazing. Now are you going against the trends that you were so involved with when you started with the multiple [mountain] pass and all those economics? Or are you just offering a viable alternative for people that want to recreate as a family and not do the same thing? 

Les Otten • 

It's taking something that we now know that works, and adding some things to it that we also understand can work. If you look at the way ski areas were developed in the northeast of the United States there was always an access road. Sometimes it was steep, sometimes it was flat, but an access road led to a parking lot. You walked up the parking lot, you walked up the stairs into the base lodge, you walked through the mud on the other side of the base lodge to the stowe, and then you walked up to the lift. Everything followed those contours, and that was the way everything was built. If you wanted to add things on, you were always getting in the way. Where could you put a hotel? The bottom of the ski area is on federal land or it's on state land, and you have to go down the access road. Even at Killington, there's no ski in ski out housing at Killington. On Roaring Brook Road on the backside where you've got the Great Eastern, you've got some houses, but at the Grand Summit Hotel you have to walk across a 400 foot bridge to get to the bottom of Snowshed. [Ski in ski out] couldn't exist there because of the way the resort was developed, because of the environmental constraints, and the way things are. If you say skiing is prominent, but I want to get on a gondola next to a lake, 50 feet from an adventure center, I'm going to go up the gondola and I'm going to go downhill skiing, I have to go alpine skiing. Or I'm gonna walk into the adventure center, I'm gonna take the cross country skis, or I'm gonna walk over to the snowmobile headquarters, which is just at the other end of the village, and I'm gonna leave on a snowmobile. 

This idea translates into the summertime. I'm gonna do windsurfing on the lake, versus I'm gonna go zip lining versus I'm gonna go up to the restaurant on top of the mountain, or I'm gonna go play golf on the Donald Ross course on the other side of the property. My car gets parked, I'm here, and I can create enough beds so that I can feed the ski area. You can bring everybody in your family that has no interest in alpine skiing, and they've got plenty of places to spend money and have a vacation without compromising anyone’s interest. 

Dan Egan • 

Yeah, that's amazing. It’s  a perfect spot for that. People will remember The Balsams, the Grand Hotel, and the food. You mentioned the food, what will become of the Grand Hotel? Will it still be a hotel? Is this going to be as we remembered it just refurbished like the Mount Washington or what do you see?

Les Otten • 

So there's the original Hampshire House and Dix house. The Dix house is being rebuilt to its original, it will look and feel and taste exactly the way it did. It was a small building, I think we all remember it bigger than it actually was. But right next door to that there are about 150 rooms in the Dix and Hale house buildings. There'll be something new called the Gloriette. The Gloriette Hotel has 252 rooms or 256 rooms and it has the same view of the notch, the view that we're looking at right now. It will always be there. It's like owning your own picture window of the view. That building will give us the ability to then have about 800 beds as we open the resort. It will look and feel as though it fits in. If you look at the pictures of it, it's got the same sort of New England style, the dark red roof with parapets and some of  the typical clapboards that we tend to associate with the style. There are  balconies and bay windows that will look at the notch on one side and have the western sunset on the other. We’re going to stay true to the way the place looks, the great lawn that everybody's looked at, the view that you're looking at right now, there's never going to be anything in the way of that view. We think we are in a unique position to understand the past and move it forward without selling out, without ruining the view, without electric poles or ski lifts or whatever. A lot of people don't want any of that. Yes, one gondola whisks you away and one trail skis you back, but it's like getting on the monorail at your hotel and ending up in Disney. The food is great, there’s a nice pool for the kids to play in. I want to go recreate and just leave my hotel room and I have the whole world in front of me.

Dan Egan • 

Earlier, we spoke a little bit about the differences between Vermont and Maine and New Hampshire. Here in New Hampshire, there’s all this development and it’s business friendly. Are you finding it? How are you finding it in New Hampshire? Is New Hampshire a good spot to do all this? 

Les Otten • 

Well, I don't think there's a good spot to do any of this anywhere in the United States anymore. I don't want to get overly political, but I think we have gone a little bit overboard on how we regulate and how we allow people to use their land. With that said, you've got to work with the system as it is. We have put a whole lot of years and a whole lot of time into working with the system. At the end of the day it has taken too long and it costs too much. I think it would discourage a lot of people that don't have a real passion or vision for what they see. If someone told me it was going to take this long to get to the point where I would finally have the permits that were necessary and the parts and pieces to go forward with the project, I never would have started. At the beginning it seemed like it was going to be something that could happen relatively quickly. Now I think, at the end of the day, it will be a nine year project from concept to shovel in the ground. That's a long period of time. 

Dan Egan • 

And where are we on that timeline? 

Les Otten • 

We're almost at the end of it. 

Dan Egan • 

So shovels are going in the ground. 

Les Otten • 

Yeah. I think we will see shovels going in the ground in the near future. 

Dan Egan • 

Nice. In this long history of development and skiing and making a difference in the winter sports industry and beyond, what are you most proud of? You've done so much. Is this it? Is it what you've done? Is it a mix of it? What are you most proud of? 

Les Otten • 

Well, yeah, that's interesting. I think the first thing is I've got three kids and a whole bunch of adopted kids, nieces, nephews, grandnieces, nephews, and grandchildren. Then I look at my life. One of the happiest places that I can find myself is July 4th weekend or whatever with 70 or 80 of my closest relatives and friends. You can't beat that. That’s it. If I look beyond my family, I've done two things that I'm really proud of that I think will outlast any of the material stuff that we're doing. The first one is Maine Adaptive Sports Recreation, which was called Maine Handicapped Skiing that I started with a co-founder, Chip Crothers, who was an orthopedic surgeon, and was my best friend, sadly he passed. We're the largest and also free adaptive sports program in the United States. It's all free. It has been running out of Sunday River for many years. Sunday River still supports it and has made the biggest difference in the most number of lives of anything that I'm aware of. So that's probably number one. Number two is something called the Cromwell Center for Disabilities Awareness where we teach third graders anti-bullying, acceptance, how to live and be with the rest of society, and understand how people that need inclusion can be included. It's a very simple program. We raise money, we teach instructors, they go into classrooms for free with sponsorship money that we find, and they teach third graders about inclusion and how somebody that's having an epileptic seizure in an airport on the ground needs their help not their pity. Children can understand how harmful bullying is through some simple exercises. The Cromwell Center teaches kids to do that. So at the end of the day, I don't know that I need to be remembered for those things, but at the end of the day, those are the things that make a difference in my life. 

All of this comes from an experience that I had back in the nineties, the real estate industry flew me out to Chicago to be a keynote speaker. The same way I went to London. I was seated in first class and I have a big macher right? I was sitting in first class and next to me in first class was a woman probably in her mid to late teens who had cerebral palsy and had very difficult time communicating. At that point in time she had lost her speech ability. We were getting on an airplane and she was so nervous. The flight attendant came up to me and said, Mr. Otten, if you'd like, we'll move you. We'll give you a complete row in the back of the cabin and bring you all your first class stuff so you don't have to sit here. I mean not to berate them in any way or belittle them, but they were trying to do something. The young lady was drooling and she had a napkin around her neck and she was fidgety and whatever. I said, no, no, no, that's okay. I looked at her and they said she takes this flight once a month and I'm guessing it's from one relative to another. Visit here and then go back to there. 

I knew a little bit about flying at that point in time, because I had access to an aircraft. I had realized that maybe this young lady didn't know what was going on and was nervous because of the sounds? Check the flaps out, the hydraulic motor starts up and down, gear up, gear down, engine start, engine stop, all the different sounds that you hear. I decided that what I would do is I’d just start talking to her. I didn't know how she could communicate with me. I just spent the flight to Chicago, which from Portland to Chicago was like two hours, describing everything that was going on in the aircraft the entire time. I explained lift, and I explained flaps, and I explained everything to her. I was running the conversation, I did all the talking for two hours. I’ve been talking to you for an hour, I know how to talk. She was very calm for the whole trip and I couldn't really tell if she was looking at me because her neck was in a brace kind of thing. We get to the other end and the flight attendant comes up and says, I don't know what you did, but that's the first time she's flown from Portland to Chicago and it hasn't been a horror show. It was simply that no one had taken the time to think that she could hear, understand, and process and talk to her, and she wasn't frightened. 

These are the opportunities that if you're sort of paying attention to what's going on in your life, you can appreciate. That really made me understand what we were doing at Maine Adaptive and what we would do at the Cromwell Center. We had the ability to make extraordinary differences to people. It was a simple act of Les just talking about flying to his seatmate. You look at those things and you ask me a provocative question, what am I going to remember? I'm going to remember this story that I'm telling you and I'm going to remember Maine Adaptive, and I'm going to remember the Cromwell Center for Disabilities Awareness. I’m going to remember those things and realize that whether I die wealthy or poor, I can sit back and go, I don't really care what it is that you say or think about me. I got that. I did that. I know that at the end of the day. Shaped skis, yeah, it was a great idea. The snow gun that we invented, great idea. Learning to ski in a day, a great idea. I mean, those are all things that ended up materially. 

Angus King, senator from Maine, loves to remind me that he and Mary Herman showed up at Sunday River to try and learn to ski for a day.  At the end of that, we tried to sell him a condo. He ended up loving the sport and they ended up getting some residence up at Sugarloaf. These things about paying it forward and just getting people excited about skiing. Think of all the people that we know and have met because of skiing. What a great group of people. Did you ever meet a skier you didn't like? You know, amazing. I mean, there've been a couple of guys that we know that are a little over the edge.

Dan Egan • 

Let’s say they couldn’t keep up. That's beautiful. I know that adaptive program changed my nephew's life at Sunday River and he taught there. He got a lot out of it and it has changed his whole perspective and everything. My hat is off to you for that, that is huge. How do people find you here at the Balsams? What should they do if they want to get involved? 

Les Otten • 

Thebalsamsresort.com, we have a website and they're welcome to leave a message or contact through info@thebalsams.com. If they want to be involved, we're happy to have them involved. In the context of what The Balsams could mean for Northern New Hampshire, let's just close with understanding where we are. This view is almost incomparable, right? Coos County, Northern Hampshire, and its corresponding sisters across the river in Vermont. Bose left. Ethan Allen left. The Groveton Mill left. Brown Paper Company is gone from Berlin. The population of Coos County has shrunk. The number of people working is like 5 or 6 thousand people smaller, out of a population of 30 or 33 thousand people. I mean, dramatically different. This is probably one of the poorest counties blighted to the extent that all the big business and industry including the Balsams left. 

This is an extraordinary opportunity to take a recreational product that just puts people's lives into the smile zone. I'm going there because the food is great, the skiing is great, and the biking is great. I can go snowmobiling,  I can do all these great wonderful things and it’s a place for people who love to work in the resort industry. They can be really proud of where they're working and say this is a great place. I love to get up every day. I love to deal with people and be where people can be happy and recreate. When I first started getting into this industry people would ask why I wanted to work in the ski industry? I said, because I like everybody else. I really like to go on a vacation. They go, what do you mean? I said, well, the average bloke works 50 weeks a year and gets two weeks off. They’re going to spend a lot of money in those two weeks, and they don't even really care how much they spend in those two weeks. They're going to spend what they've got, and if it was fun, they're not going to remember that they spent all that money. The opportunity that you have when you're in the recreation business is to always understand that the people who park their car and walk into your building are there because they're on vacation. It's their experience. It's how their day goes, and that's what you're there for. You want them to leave happy. If  you want to know why Sunday River went from 30,000 skier visits to 560,000 skier visits in a really short period of time? It was because we made it a priority that when guests leave here, they're going to be happy. 

Jim Ess, who ran food service for us for many years used to say, they don't come here for the food. They come for the skiing experience, but if the food surprises them, they feel doubly great. You have to remember that every aspect of everything that somebody does while they're in your house is a reason why they may want to come back. That was a great cheeseburger. It was five ounces, not four. Yeah I paid 50 cents more for it, but man that was a great cheeseburger. They're on vacation. The key to success in this industry is to understand why the person that's giving you their money is there and what your role is. The difference between me and Adam Aron in that discussion in London 40 years ago was simply the fact that he was talking about butts in seats. I was talking about people suntanning and lounge chairs. The difference in how we were thinking about our companies was that I just wanted to make sure that when you leave here, you say that your experience was extraordinary. I still have that sort of same philosophy. 

There are three things in life that for me have been extraordinary opportunities. The first one was Sunday River. I told you the story about Marty Malone and International Paper Company, and me seeing this ski area. I needed that land at Sunday River to go big time. The second time I saw something like that was when I led the group to buy the Boston Red Sox. The Boston Red Sox is as much about Fenway Park as it is about baseball. It's a shrine for all of baseball. Dan Duquette was a friend, and he was a GM of the Boston Red Sox in the late nineties and into the early two thousands. I was sitting with him watching a game, and if you're smart and you're watching what's going around you, sometimes somebody gives you the answer. You don't have to think of it yourself. We're watching people on a tour, on the warning track, walking around the park, looking at the scoreboard. We were watching this one guy who had his hands in his pockets, and he was rattling his hands in his pockets, gyrating his pants. I go, Dan you have a wacko out there in left field. He goes, nah, you don't understand. I said, what do you mean? He said, have you ever seen the movie The Great Escape? I go, you mean Steve McQueen? He said, yeah, do you remember what they did with the dirt from the tunnels? They dug the tunnels, put the dirt in socks in their pants, and walked around the door yard. Everybody got rid of their gallon of dirt every day, and that's how they got rid of the dirt. I said okay, well what do you mean? They're leaving grandma, grandpa, mom, dad's ashes on the warning track. He said, it's the shrine. That's when the bell goes off and this is like 1998. That's when the bell goes off. That’s what Fenway Park is all about. 

I think the trip that you're talking about, where I spoke, I happened to ride home from England, sitting next to a guy by the name of Chad Gifford. Chad Gifford was the president of Bank Boston. Chad said, so whatcha gonna do with the rest of your life? This was probably ‘98 or ‘99, because I bought all these ski areas and was doing all that stuff. I said, man, I'd really like to get into baseball. I've always loved baseball. He said, well I have a hint for you. In about 18 months, John Harrington is going to announce that the Red Sox are for sale. I want to be your bank. 

Dan Egan • 

Wow. Amazing. 

Les Otten • 

When the bidding started, I was the poorest guy, the lowest guy on the totem pole. I was going against Dolan, Comcast, Frank McCourt and all these big guys. I was a little guy on the totem pole. This is now 2000. I'm remembering the conversation and I call up and he said, yep, I'll be your back. He's still there and he's still willing to help me. I said, I need to understand what is special about the Red Sox. I understood what was special about Sunday River. It had the inexhaustible water supply, giant terrain expansion, and a lot of snow close to the market. But what can make you win at Fenway Park? Well, Bud Selig had been on a rampage in the late nineties to tear down all the old stadiums and build new ones, new cookie cutters. Philly and everywhere. The only two that hadn't been torn down and rebuilt were Wrigley Field and Fenway Park. After this experience that I had with Fenway Park, I was like all the other bidders are being asked by the State and Major League Baseball, what are your plans for a new ballpark? This thing is no good, it's falling apart. Somebody even did a study that said that Fenway Park was sinking into the fences. Every once in a while you hear a line and you go like, wait a minute, there's something not quite right with this. 

I found a guy by the name of Ben Wood, who owned an architectural firm in Boston. He incidentally  had saved Soldier Field. I went to him and I said, can this place be saved? He said, I don't know, but I'm intrigued. That would be a fun thing if we could save Fenway Park. He called up a guy by the name of Bill Fashion who was at Leslie Roberts Associates in New York City, one of the major engineering firms in the world. When the World Trade Center was bombed the first time, it was Leslie Roberts Associates that had come up with a fix to make sure that it wouldn't fall down. The Red Sox wouldn't allow us to bring our engineers in to look at the ballpark. We could bid. We had to pay $25,000 to get the bidding package right but we weren't allowed to go into the ballpark unless it was during a ballgame. They said we were gonna have to build a new ballpark. I'm like, I don't wanna build a new ballpark. Everybody else was. Frank McCourt was going to put it in the seaport. Somebody was gonna put it out at the racetrack. It was going all over the place. They were gonna take land next to Fenway Park in the landmark area and just tear everything down and build a new replica of Fenway Park next door to Fenway Park. I'm going like, nah, I kind of like this ballpark. 

Somebody tell me that it's really sinking into the fence. Well, we're not allowed to take our engineers in there, but nobody said we couldn't buy tickets and go to a ball game with our engineers. So we took Leslie Roberts Associates and their team, our architects, and we bought tickets to a couple games. They walked in with their testing stuff, and nobody paid attention to us. Who were these weirdos that are pounding on the concrete looking at stuff, and we found out that Fenway Park indeed was not sinking into the fence. So we produced a plan that would save Fenway Park after my group was taken over. I stayed in it, of course, but I was taken over by John Henry. John Henry bought into the plan and we were able to save Fenway Park. That's how Fenway Park got saved. Everybody was gonna tear it down except Les got these guys to say, no, this engineering data is false, and this is not sinking into the fence and it can be expanded. I understood that owning the Red Sox was as much about owning Fenway Park. It was about owning the history of number seven and number nine and number six, and everything that's been retired. All the, you know, Yaz and Ted and all that stuff. Yes, those guys were important, but the fact that you were standing and sitting in the same place, this is the spot, that's fricking home plate, right? That's the same scoreboard that Babe Ruth signed his name on. Click. That's the value. We could then support more debt. We had the highest ticket and the best attendance in baseball, a hundred consecutive sellout days in a row. I mean, all that stuff came about by saving Fenway Park. 

Fast forward, okay, I saw it at Sunday River, I saw it at Fenway Park. I came here and I looked at this place, the Balsams, and I said, this is the third time. The Balsams have the same historical background. Landon, who used to own this place, owned the Red Sox and signed Babe Ruth's contract. Babe Ruth used to come here to have his haircut and hang out, when he wasn't playing. You look at the fact that Frank Sinatra was here and the Ringling Brothers Circus would march up from Colbrook all the way up and set up tents right outside our window here. You think about the fact that this is the first golf course that Donald Ross personally supervised the construction of back in 1914 to build as a links course. And you go like, wait a minute, that's Fenway Park. Right? That's another iteration of something that is just there. I didn't do it. All I did was recognize it. It’s just amazing that [The Balsams] have been able to survive. 

Dan Egan • 

Somehow it didn't get demolished to the point that it can't come back. It's still here to be resurrected with the scenery. 

Les Otten • 

Everybody that stays in one of these hotel rooms, this view that we're looking at, it never changes. Nothing gets in the way of us. A thousand people having the ability to have that view standing in front of their windows. It's right here. They talk about Old Man on the Mountain and Table Rock, you know? Stand up there if you can 

Dan Egan • 

It's amazing, it’s important. Three times the charm, congratulations, what a great thing. 

Les Otten • 

This is the third incredible opportunity that I've sort of bumped into in my life, which is like, I didn't do this. I just found it. Right. And I didn't put Ted Williams in the outfield…

Dan Egan • 

Are people responding as they did to those other projects? Are consumers equally excited? 

Les Otten • 

Yeah. Consumers are excited. I mean this is a very difficult time with interest rates the way they are and the fed's interest in cooling the economy down. But yeah, we've got a lot of real estate interest and a lot of people can see and feel and taste this. There are more and more families every day that are talking about diversity in general, and we touched on that when we talk about the Cromwell Center and Maine Adaptive Sports and recreation. We talk about inclusion and diversity. Every family unit comes and it's not everybody in the family that wants to do all the same things all the time. Yet they want to be together and they want to be a family together. But somebody wants to go shoot skeet and somebody wants to ride a four wheeler and somebody wants to go mountain biking and somebody wants to go zip lining. They can all do it in the same place. You don't need to get into your car and drive to the next place.

Dan Egan • 

Will that diversity inclusion be a legacy as well for the adaptive community and their access to all these activities? 

Les Otten • 

Yeah, I think the gondola from the village gets you access up into the mountain where there's a wheelchair accessible path that will get you to table rock. Now, I don't know how many people in a wheelchair want to wheel out to the end of table rock. I know I don’t but I bet you there's a lot to do. It's the ability to create an asset that can appeal to everybody in the family. That’s sort of like the next level. 

We were talking earlier about how the original ski areas in the northeast got built, with the access road up to the parking lot, then up to base lodge, and up to the lift. Then where do you put the ski in ski out real estate. Now all of a sudden, because this place has been left alone since 1966, you've got the ability to connect it and put it all together and create. You can have everybody live in the hub, and you wake up in the morning and say, which spoke am I gonna go out today? 

Dan Egan • 

Amazing. Amazing. Well, I'm looking forward to it, Les, as I know so many people are. Thanks. I really appreciate it. Thanks for joining us on the 603. 

Les Otten • 

Hey, it's been my pleasure. Nice to see an old friend. 

Dan Egan • 

Oh, it's great. We gotta go skiing.

Les Otten • 

We know how to do that. I know a guy. 

Dan Egan •

I know a couple guys. Wow, Les. That's amazing. You know, I love that. You know, as you get older do you find this idea that this idea whether it's wisdom or whatever, but now you can identify the three things and the connection between them? When you said earlier you were too young to know you shouldn't have done it, but now you know that it was kind of meant to be. 

Les Otten •

Yeah. I think that is really kind of a deep question. They say wisdom comes with age. No, what really comes with age is if you have a little bit of a memory, I can remember what I did wrong. That didn't work. And you know when somebody's bullshitting you. You know that's not right. And you get sort of a sixth sense when you're onto something that nobody else sees. Then you've gotta be willing to do what you did when you were 18, which is you gotta battle. It's a battle. You gotta find a way to get this done. You gotta hold people to their commitments and say, this is what you said you were gonna do. Now do it. 

Dan Egan • 

That's a big one. 

Les Otten • 

That's the big one. Because everybody says oh we'd love to have you do that. Okay, well now do it. We're off now. Right?

Dan Egan • 

We can be.

Les Otten • 

Well, we don't have to be off, but whatever our jobs are, we impact people around us. The question is, do we wanna take responsibility for the impact that we have on other people? Whether you're a government employee or you're a private employee, you have that same responsibility. All too often we give people a pass. You know say we had constructive reliance on what you said. You didn't say, oh by the way, don't believe what I'm telling you or believe what you're telling me. What I'm telling you is at your risk. We don't communicate with caveats that say, what I might be telling you is all bullshit. Constructive reliance is a legal term, but it's also a term that we've sort of forgotten that our parents ingrained in us. If you say something to somebody, don't just say it to get where you need to go. Say it because when you get to where you need to go, you're going to remember what you said, and you're gonna bring that person with you. 

Dan Egan •

So how do you bring that forward in a negotiation when somebody doesn't do what they said they were gonna do? What do you do then? 

Les Otten •

It's hard. 

Dan Egan •

Do you remind them of that or what? 

Les Otten •

Yeah. The first thing you do is you remind them. A lot of times people will say, well, I'm building this thing and if you help me, I'll help you. Then the guy building the thing, the tower or whatever it is, he puts a lot of money into it and you go out of your way to help him build his tower, and he doesn't build his tower. Then you go knock on their door and say, hey, you said if I helped you build your tower, you'd help me. And the guy goes, well, my tower didn't get built, so I'm not gonna help you. But you expended your political capital, your economic capital, whatever, to try to help this guy succeed. We forget too often that when we make a commitment and ask somebody to help, if what we're doing along the way doesn't happen to work, we still have a due bill to the guy that was willing to help us. That's one of my biggest complaints about the way big business operates. It's like, yeah, if you help me, I'll help you. Well, you helped me, but my thing didn't succeed so now I don't have any responsibility to help you. Woe is me. My tower didn't get built. You sort of sit there and you go like, well, how does this work in the long term? If everybody behaves like that, then no one ever does anything for anybody because I'm not gonna do it unless you guarantee me the quid pro quo.

Dan Egan •

It's short term memory. It’s selfish.

Les Otten • 

Very short. In a project like this, we've had our share of people that have had short memories and have gotten something and then have said, well you know... sue me! 

Dan Egan •

Can I ask you a question about.. we're a ski friendly state. We are a ski area friendly state. 

Les Otten •

We are. 

Dan Egan •

And we have a governor that basically oversees two ski areas, Cannon and Waterville. Has Concord been helpful? 

Les Otten • 

There have been a lot of entities in government that have helped, and there have been those that have been less than helpful. With the ones that were less than helpful, we went back to the legislature, and the legislature became helpful. If you're going to rely on the government for anything, you have to realize that there's a constantly changing cast of characters and just buyer beware. It's government. It doesn't play by the same rules that you play by.

Dan Egan •

By its nature.

Les Otten •

I think  when we look at Vermont and New Hampshire, especially Vermont, and we look at the environmental community, I think the end result of the environmental community's impact in Vermont is a positive one. A lot of the battles didn't need to be had. We had some really great deals that we made to create Bear Peak at Attitash, which really sort of put Attitash on the map as being a player in the state. But it's really up to you as an individual to try and figure out how do I navigate the landscape. More often than not, I found that the government is willing to work with you. 

More often than not, I found that the bigger assets come from the big multinational companies who have more lawyers than they know what to do with. There's a whole floor full of lawyers. I know one company recently said to me, I'm on this floor and the floor below me is filled with lawyers so I can lawyer you forever. I go like, well, that's really productive. In a lot of cases, I think New Hampshire has done a good job of working with our company to get us where we need to go. If I was gonna cast dispersions, first of all it’s not helpful to do that, but I think the business community sometimes shoots its own.

Dan Egan •

That's a strange thing, but it's common. 

Les Otten • 

Yeah, It is. And it is hard to understand because the number of jobs that The Balsams could create in this region is into the thousands. This region lost 5-6,000 jobs, and it's got the worst economy of any county, I think in the northeast of the United States. The OBGYN has gone and the orthopedic surgeon has gone. You look at that and we've got a health system that is surviving because of the number of hospitals that are associated with one another. Right now, if you or I needed extraordinary care, we'd have to get shipped someplace. We look at the number of kids in school in Berlin and Gorham, and  it has declined dramatically. The age of the population has increased and the overall tax base hasn't grown. You look at all these things and say, how do we get around that? Well, I ran into the same thing in 1980 when I was at Sunday River. The paper company in Rumford was shutting down due to mills closing, the lumber mills were closing, unemployment was sky high, and recreation could save the community. But recreation was what? The benefits that came along with it made it attractive for new money to come into town. People that had home businesses could survive. Buildings got repainted and Main Street was turned into something nice. Restaurants were built and a movie theater appeared. 

Dan Egan •

But all these skiers are creatures of habit. They're getting off at Exit 32. They're going to Bretton Woods. Herb Boyton used to say at Bretton Woods when he owned it that he lost the battle to make Franconia Notch two lanes by 12 feet, and the impacts that had on his business. How do you see those habits changing in your favor? 

Les Otten •

Well, history is a great teacher. When I got to Sunday River, they were doing less than 30,000 skier visits a year, which can't even get you a full-time maintenance guy. It was like that in 1980. Everybody said, no one's gonna go because you gotta go past Attitash, Wildcat, Cranmore, Black, Pleasant. Okay. And you're competing to the North with Sugarloaf, no one's who's gonna go visit you? 

Dan Egan • 

Not an easy drive. 

Les Otten • 

Not an easy drive, crummy roads, blah, blah, blah, blah. But people aren't coming here because of the drive, or not because of the drive, they're coming or not coming here because of the skiing, the snow, whatever else is at the end of the line. Why is anybody going to Jay Peak, or Stowe, or Sugarloaf? From the very beginning, it was about if the quality of the product is better, if the line is shorter, if the food is surprisingly good, if the staff is well trained, if all these things. If you feel like when you get out of your car, you've arrived where somebody really cares about the fact that you're gonna spend $50, or $100, or $200 and you're treated like you're landed gentry, okay, you're gonna drive the extra half hour. You're not even gonna think about it. 

Dan Egan • 

It's true. I want to touch on one point that you said that's interesting to me. The fact that you took the management course at Killington. So often, you know, those management courses for employees at that level are scoffed at, they’re like, what is this gonna get me? How did that affect the programs you put in place for your employees to educate them and retain them? Was that in your mind that you had done it and the importance of it? 

Les Otten • 

You know, I'd like to say that yes, it was in my mind and I understood the impact. But a lot of this is like impressions that you have that you don't ever have to verbalize or vocalize. It's easy for me to say yeah now. I had a slight deformity of my left thumb which I left in the slicing machine at Snowshed, the base lodge, when I was slicing meat in the cafeteria, which of course I had to clean everything and all that stuff. But Henry Bithro, who was the head of grooming outside, stuck me in an old snowcat and when the universal goes in that the only thing you can do is steer the thing because you’ve got no braking. All you can do is aim it down the hill. You learn those experiences firsthand, hanging off a tower, changing a sheave with the wind blowing 40 miles an hour and it's zero degrees outside. Understanding that in those days, understanding the industry from that viewpoint, I think gave me something that was invaluable. There were five guys that were in that, call it a pledge class, that were in that first original management training program. We learned the industry the hard way. You loaded chairs. They stuck you on Snowshed and loaded every chair from nine o'clock in the morning till four o'clock in the afternoon during the weekend. Every chair got loaded. You got 15 minutes off at nine o'clock, and you got half an hour off at lunch, and that was your day. Your arms felt like they were gonna fall off. Every piece of what they did was like really cheap labor for them, for us to do this stuff. But they took for granted the fact that we had taken business in college, and we knew accounting, and we had some management skills. They wanted to see how we would react as an everyday employee. 

Dan Egan •

One of my beefs with the industry now, one of my many I would say, is that the old timers in the shop are gone. The guy that would fix something before it broke, the one who kept inventory and looked at that sort of thing. I was at a ski area this year where they hadn't started the auxiliaries until the day the entire resort lost power. There's a shift there. We’ve lost a knowledge base of guys that were puttering and now we're relying on computers and other things. Am I just getting old? 

Les Otten • 

No, and I've got those stories too. I know of one ski area that had a drive that was programmed with floppy discs and the drive was still fine, but somebody had thrown out the floppy discs. When the drive went down and needed to be reprogrammed, it was like a week before the lift started to run again. How do we do this? Somebody knows Fortran and Cobol so that when everything else gets done, we can start all over again. That's the guy that you want to take into the cave with you. Fortran, Cobol, you know how to program, that's underneath every language that's ever been written. So yeah, there is some of that. There's an opportunity to improve the product that's in the ski industry right now. There's an opportunity to notch it up. There's a lot of us that argue that the art of snowmaking, which kept the East alive so that it could be competitive with the West, has been lost. The snow that's now being made is not right. 

Dave McCoy was one of the best mentors that I ever had in the business. I visited him at Mammoth many years ago and  got to know him, his staff, and his guys Cliff Mann, Hy Mo, Bill, and Pam Murphy. They were really interested in what we were doing back east to make it snow. As Dave was saying, one of these days it's not going to snow at Mammoth. They're like, when's that gonna be Dave? He's standing there with 35 foot high snow walls and just to get to the place you had to create a tunnel. He was going back into the sixties when it happened once maybe and he said, I need to learn about snowmaking. I hear that Sunday River makes the best snow. To Dave McCoy, I'm a little shit, running a ski area in the East. He sends his entire team out and he says, will you share with me? One of the things that I learned early on just in business was if you think that what you know is so important that you won't tell anybody, you've locked yourself in a box and you're gonna find out how fast what you know becomes irrelevant. So share what you know. That was one of my principles, I'll tell you everything there is I know about a subject. You're gonna figure it out eventually anyway and we're all probably better off if you succeed before you fail. I'm not here to put you out of business. I was more than happy to help Dave understand what we were doing with snowmaking. We had invented a gun, and we were using it, and the skiing was fantastic. 

Dave Wilcox, who was at Killington, once came over to Sunday River after the acquisition of Killington. We had just made champagne. In five days we had completely remade the mountain after a major snowstorm. Our skiing was fantastic. Wilcox said, you did that on purpose. Yeah, that's what we want you to be doing at Killington. Then the light bulb goes off that it's about the quality. Well, I showed Dave, and Dave called me out a couple of years later and said there's this guy named Jan Kozinski who's building the next generation detachable ski lift. 1987 or 1986, is when I met Jan and saw what he was doing. I said we'll take two. Killington also said they'd take two. Mine started first so I get to say I had the first high speed detachable running in the East.

Anyway, it really became clear to me that the industry stopped dictating to the manufacturer what they wanted for a product. The manufacturer said, I'm gonna give you something that's sufficient to run, it makes a lot of white stuff, and then you can figure out what to do with it after that. I think that there's something to learn from the past that maybe you need to spend a little bit more money on energy to make a little bit better quality product that lasts a little better. Remember the density thing that I was talking about earlier that lasts a little longer, and sort of reset what quality is about in the East. Dave McCoy comes into my office with his guys and says, I didn't know you could make snow like that. I'll take some. Dave was 30 years older than I am at least, and that started a friendship. Sadly he's passed, but you know, he was one of the greats. He and Darcy Brown, and Preston Smith, and a lot of these guys that did some really great things. If you kind of remember where you came from and what made you successful, I think that's part of the key to the industry going forward. 

Dan Egan • 

You talked about how sort of getting to a certain level, you could eliminate certain jobs. Not eliminate, but do more efficiently. We see that happening now, but It's not more efficient in the end. Particularly the way some companies are doing that. 

Les Otten • 

Every ski area has a unique set of criteria that makes it special. The first thing you have to do is maybe something that we didn't really do a great job with when I built American skiing was understanding the individuality of the different companies. The one thing that they did have in common was the need for high quality snow. Whether you were at Heavenly, or the Canyons, or Steamboat, or Killington, they all benefited from our knowledge and technology that we brought to them as far as the quality of snow. They all benefited from what we did with shaped skis. We didn't talk about it, but we were the first ski area in the East that said if you’ve got a snowboard you can go anywhere you want. I had a line of people outside my doorstep saying I'm never skiing in your resort again. I had a longer line of people at my door saying, hey thanks for letting us in. We used to skip King, and I used to really laugh about this. Which is a longer line? The people saying thank you for letting us snowboard or the people saying I'm never coming back.

Dan Egan •

With Skip King, talk about the marketing of White Heat and the brass.

Les Otten • 

Yeah. We just took a pair of round brass balls and put them on a white background, and that was the ad. This was the steepest, longest, widest lift service trail in the East. Right. And it was completely on purpose. The only way that the words worked was because you had to modify all three adjectives. You didn't need to win it individually, but when you added them up, you had something to win. It drove Foster Chandler nuts. He got so pissed when we did that. But again, it was, can we find a position for ourselves and how do we sell it? Skip was like, you can't do that. I said, no I know I think we can. I remember talking to Ski Magazine, we can't do that. I said, well you can, I didn't say anything untoward, it was just two brass balls and it said white heat and worked. It was like magic. It was magic. It made a statement and it sort of allowed us to almost laugh at ourselves. It allowed us to have a really good time with something. It allowed everybody to laugh a little bit, because we never had to say the words. I haven't said them.

Dan Egan • 

I mean that attitude, again, going back to adventure, going back to a spirit, a belonging, feeling special, dopamine, you want it again. I mean that's the industry and that's worth selling, and that's what you're doing here at The Balsams. 

Les Otten • 

Yeah. And then just add that audience. Remember I said 7 out of every 100 people could be a skier. 33 out of every 100 people would try it for a day. Out of that 33, you kept seven. So you spent the money necessary to take care of 33 people. You’ve got 7. But those 7 would ski 20 times for 10 years, which is 200. Do the math at a $100 there, you’ve got $20,000 out of each one of those dudes as compared to the little bit of money that you need to spend for the 25 that wouldn't. And just carry that forward. 

Dan Egan •

They haven't even bought hamburgers yet. 

Les Otten •

Just carry it forward. You have the rest of that group. They came to your resort, but there was nothing there for them. Well, how about if they came to your resort and they could get on an electric snowmobile and go to Canada for lunch. While you and I go out and ski the bumps, or I don't wanna ski the bumps anymore, but I do occasionally and then I pay for it the next day. You’re probably the same. 

Dan Egan •

It feels good though, doesn't it? 

Les Otten •

Yeah, it does. It really does. The rush that you get in that. It’s still the same thing. Remember now if I could have gone back to where I was then and not felt threatened by having a snowmobile center. I didn't feel threatened by having snowboarders, but I felt threatened by having a snowmobile center. 

Dan Egan •

Interesting. Yeah.

Les Otten •

Now I understand that was silly. I felt threatened by anything that was going to take somebody off the mountain. So I've gotta keep them here. That's sort of the mentality that I think is missing at some ski resorts, just to understand the larger community. Embrace them. Give them a ski ticket. You hear the stories about ski areas that have all the shops on the access road, everybody that works in the shop, those people have to pay full price because the ski area would really like that shop to go out of business so they can rent those pieces of skis. I mean, isn't there enough for everybody at some point, do you have to put them out of business? They form the fabric of your community. 

They're showing up at Turkey Tuesday, the two days before Thanksgiving, to have Turkey for all the employees. They’re the people that are in the Chamber of Commerce. They're the people that are on the school board. They're the rest of your community and they work in a ski shop and you're making them pay full price for their skiing. It really would be very nice if they didn't have to do that. It’s all for what purpose? 

Dan Egan •

That's the culture.That's the culture you want to cultivate, and you want people to be the ski bum you were to sell it at that level, at the shop, at the restaurants all around you. 

Les Otten •

We stayed at a place called Pike's Lodge on the Killington Access Road, which is probably long gone. You'd walk down from your dorm bed, you'd walk down to the access road. You didn't have to stick out your finger, you just stood there with a pair of skis and somebody would stop. That's who skiing was in 1967. It was like this really unique club of people. We have this in common. There's an 18 year old standing on the road in 1967 with a pair of skis that wants to get a ride up the hill. You didn't have to stick your thumb out, someone would stop,  and throw 'em in.

John Okolovitch. Okay. Do you know that name? John Okolovitch worked for Leo Dennis and John Okolovitch was eventually the head of the ski school at Killington. He taught me one of the other things that is really important about being a ski instructor. It's your birthday, your class is there for five days, and it is a five day ski week. Wednesday is your birthday. They're all going take you to dinner. People wanted it to be your birthday, so it was a harmless thing. Your ski school class would take you to dinner and there was a nine o'clock, a 10 o'clock, an 11 o'clock, I think you had three hours a day and you had three separate classes. Your birthday is on Tuesday, your birthday is on Wednesday, your birthday is on Thursday, you got three dinners. Absolutely. I mean we didn't make enough money in those days but that was part and parcel. That is this piece we were talking about earlier, inclusion. So to the extent that you can include everybody in what you're doing. 

This place, the Balsams, it's got something called the marketplace. We don't have a retail village planned for the Balsams. We have an initial marketplace that's going to have 16x16 or 16x20 foot booths. If you know what the Philadelphia market is like, or if have you ever been to Granville Island in British Columbia where anybody and everybody in the community that wants to rent the space can be in that piece of space. If they want to make donuts they can make donuts. They can sell smoked fish if they want to sell smoked fish. They can sell quilts, they can sell maple syrup, all of that stuff. Retail doesn't have to be Louis Vuitton. That isn't what it needs. You can have just as much fun spending money on a beautiful quilt or on a carving that's made locally or a piece of local food that is being sold and made in the region. April's Maple is local

Dan Egan •

It doesn't have to be a cookie cutter waffle cabin. It could be something a little bit different. 

Les Otten •

But you could still go over there and it could be somebody that is like hey, I wanna make waffles inside. There's a really cool restaurant in Bethel right now called Le Mu Eats. It's Laotian American, well I have no idea what it is, but it's shrimp sometimes with grits and some kind of greens that have some spice to them and onions that are like pickled and it comes together and you have no idea what it is. You get a pair of chopsticks and you try to eat grits with chopsticks and it's fantastic. Or they have another dish that's made out of rice noodles called hot noods. I mean, it's amazingly good food. You do that for people and you give them an opportunity to say, hey, I've got something really unique that I want to sell to your guests. I'm happy to have you do that, but here's the deal, I don't want them getting in their car to drive away, but I'll give you a spot right here. You gotta give me a little bit and I get a taste, because I'm in business. But you have a chance to sell your stuff in an environment that's different from the retail Tyrolian village that we're so used to seeing. Maybe there's a guy that makes fresh bagels in there. We'll go over, get a fresh bagel in. 

Dan Egan • 

Nice. I love it. This is awesome, Les. We could go all day my friend.  I'd do it, but I know you would too. It's great. I think that this is a big part of what we're not seeing in corporate skiing today and sort of the idea that everything is a real estate play and everything is driving the price up, and the community can't participate. That's a big missing piece in so many of the ski towns that I lived in as a ski bum. 

Les Otten • 

Yeah, you're right. And I mean, there are some great folks that came before you and I. There was a fellow by the name of Jim Branch that started Snow Engineering. Yeah. Jim Branch said that skiing is the goose that lays the golden egg. If you translate that forward to 2023, everything that you do at a destination resort that your day guest, or your one night, or two night guest likes and thinks is amazing, is the goose that lays the golden egg. All those activities. The golden egg is the fact that they'll want to buy real estate and be there for the long term. Then you build loyalty, you build a relationship. You have everybody that buys a piece of real estate and actually becomes invested in the resort and what's here and wants to see it succeed. All these wonderful things that we talked about, that we have planned to do and to build here, that's the goose. That's Jim Branch's goose. The golden egg then becomes the fact that you can buy a piece of real estate that has that view for you and for your kids forever. 

Dan Egan • 

Nice. Yeah. Which you just can't touch anywhere else. It's nice. 

Les Otten • 

The sun in deep January crests right through the notch and so does the moon.

Dan Egan • 

Love that. It's great. 

Les Otten •

And when they do, they're oversized. You know how the refraction kind of makes the position…

Dan Egan •

Yeah. Well, Les Otten this has been amazing. Thanks for your time. 

Les Otten •

Damn. How can I say my pleasure other than to say my pleasure. It was so good.

Dan Egan •

Thanks Les, really. Thanks so much.