Mount Bachelor, one of America’s largest and beloved ski resorts, was put up for sale in August of 2024 after two decades of contentious corporate ownership. Sensing a sliver of opportunity, a high school teacher, a housing appraiser and local home builder launched a community campaign to put this ski hill back in the hands of locals. What started as a Facebook thread, snowballed into a legitimate would-be buyer with $100 million in local backing that collided into Wall Street players, the specter of climate change and the looming reality that the joy of skiing is no longer a simple business to run.
Music: If Walls Could Talk by Jacob Bain & Nis Kotto • Disguise. • White Flowers • Chill Horizons • Truth Be Told • Cold Storage Percussion • Padelm • Fields of Ethera • Holly Hilles • Bredan Burns • Knovic Recordings • Dame Asu, • Our Many Stars.
Tracks provided with permission from the artists or from Track Club
Thanks for this fantastic episode. The best I’ve heard yet from the Dirtbag Diaries!
I absolutely love this story, great job. I do want to point something out though that is really important about how we make the world a better place.
In the episode, you mentioned high-net-worth individuals investing in PE firms — and sure, there are plenty of rich assholes in that mix. But the more I dig into how this stuff actually works, the more obvious it becomes that a huge portion of PE capital isn’t coming from them at all. It’s coming from us (the 50-95%). It’s our pension funds, our university endowments, our savings — big, public/semi-public pools of money that we rarely talk about even though they drive a massive amount of what happens in the real world.
So while it’s easy (and justified) to scapegoat the PE firms themselves, we need to be cognisant that a lot of the shitification of the world — the hollowing-out of things we love, the extraction, the corner-cutting — is happening in service of our (the 50-95%, the skiers and mountabikers who have the moeny and time for these awesome things) retirements. It’s backed by capital pools that are far bigger, far more influential, and far more intertwined with everyday people than we tend to acknowledge.
That doesn’t excuse the behaviour. But it does mean we’re not powerless bystanders. If this is our money, then we have the right — and the responsibility — to demand that the institutions investing on our behalf stop funding the shitification and start funding a world that isn’t worse than the one we inherited.