Four-season getaway | Forget Moosehead, the Berry family's ambitious plan to expand Saddleback is the biggest Maine has seen

Saddleback Ski Area was once one of the big three ski areas in Maine. Opened in 1960, the resort just outside Rangeley was on par with Sunday River and Sugarloaf. But a previous owner's legal problems and the financial black hole those became caused Saddleback to languish while American Skiing Co. grew the other two ski areas into regional powerhouses.

Now, Saddleback's new owners, the Berry family, which bought the ski area and 8,000 surrounding acres in 2003 for an estimated $8 million, have hatched an expansion plan they hope will rejuvenate the ski area after years of neglect and bring it back from the verge of closing.

On July 11, the Land Use Regulation Commission in a unanimous vote awarded preliminary approval to the Berry family's 10-year, $150 million expansion plan, which includes more than 450 condos and timeshares, 160 house lots, a 100-room hotel and a 40-room inn, not to mention plenty of new ski trails, chairlifts and two ski lodges. Bill Berry, the elder Berry and a former geology professor at the University of Maine at Farmington, says the expansion plan not only will make Saddleback a viable ski area again; but with amenities like a swimming pool, tennis courts and a tubing park, the expansion also attempts to create a four-season, outdoors-oriented resort.

The build-up of housing options at the mountain's base is a linchpin to the ski area's expansion. Since 2005, the Berrys and Saddleback have begun construction on 72 condos — all allowed under preexisting LURC permits — but were reaching the limit of what could be done with the property. "We've needed beds on the mountain for a long time," says Tom McAllister, Saddleback's general manager since 1975. "We can't exist by being a day ski area."

Adding slope-side housing options is a trend seen throughout the ski industry, says Michael Berry, president of the National Ski Areas Association in Lakewood, Colo. "The need to build a bed base is more important today then ever," he says.

The short-term benefit to the sale of mountain real estate is the cash flow it creates for the ski area, the NSAA's Berry says. The long-term value of creating those slope-side housing options, however, is it provides a continuous "hot-pillow bed base" — industry-speak for occupied beds.

That's particularly true for a ski area like Saddleback, which for a large number of people is just too far a drive — almost three hours from Portland and nearly five from Boston — to ski for just the day, Bill Berry says. "If we look at the history of Saddleback, a number of people have tried to make a go of it and have not succeeded," he says. "Everybody has more or less said we're just a little bit too far away and we have to provide the housing. Sugarloaf started providing that housing in the 1970s and has been expanding ever since."

But it's not as simple as building condos and timeshares and expecting skiers to flock to your ski area. That's why the Berry family also has been busy making the ski area more attractive to its customers. In the past few years, the family has poured approximately $20 million into the ski area, Bill Berry says, from a new base lodge to new cushions on the chairlifts.

So far, so good: Skier visits are up from a low point of 16,000 in 2002 to 49,000 this past winter, and McAllister says people who gave up skiing at Saddleback have returned. "People want to go where there's something happening," McAllister says.

In its heyday in the late 1980s, Saddleback welcomed up to 50,000 skiers every year. By comparison, Sugarloaf experiences up to 350,000 skier visits every winter and Sunday River has more than 500,000.

But Berry says his goal for Saddleback is not to create a ski area that will compete head-to-head with Sunday River or Sugarloaf — though of course he wouldn't mind stealing some skiers from those resorts. Instead, his goal is to create an affordable, family-oriented ski area that will capture those skiers and their families — many of them local — that can't afford the $65 lift passes at Sugarloaf and Sunday River. A day pass at Saddleback costs $40. "I've talked with many people who have simply hung up their skis and said, 'It's not worth it, we don't have the money,'" Berry says. "With Saddleback prices running roughly 60% of what Sugarloaf and Sunday River are charging, they have come back and are skiing again."

Remaking the mountain
Saddleback was on the verge of shutting down in 2002 when Bill Berry, a Saddleback skier since the early 1970s and owner of a mountainside condo since the early 1990s, received a letter from General Manager Tom McAllister. The letter alerted Berry and the other condo owners at Saddleback that then-owner Donald Breen planned to shut down the mountain after the season if a buyer was not found.

Breen, who bought the ski area in 1978, had big plans for his ski resort, including building a hotel and opening the backside of the mountain to skiing, which would have offered some of the "steepest, meanest" skiing in the east, McAllister says. But he was never able to follow through on any of his development plans because of a heated legal battle that began with the National Park Service, which put the kibosh on his plans because it would have involved traversing the Appalachian Trail, which snakes its way along the summit of Saddleback Mountain. "It sidelined him," McAllister says. "He spent all his money defending his land."

After more than a decade of fighting, Breen was ready to get out of the ski area business, McAllister says.

Bill Berry asked to meet with McAllister. Not long after that meeting Berry and his son Mark drove to Massachusetts for an all-day powwow with Breen to discuss the future of the ski area — a sales agreement soon followed. Bill Berry purchased the ski area in 2003 with his wife, Irene, and his seven children. Berry says the transaction was financed through a series of personal loans. (In 2001, Berry and his family founded the Sandy River Charitable Foundation, one of Maine's largest charitable foundations, with 2005 assets of $38.5 million.)

Apart from the thought of rejuvenating the ski area where he carved turns with his seven children — all of whom are now part-owners of the ski area — Berry says he saw a long-term investment opportunity that hopefully will bring him and his family a modest profit. "But I don't think anybody goes into the skiing industry to get rich," he says. "It just doesn't happen."

The Berry family immediately began investing in the ski area. A new base lodge was completed in 2005, the halls of which still smell of fresh pine; a two-mile pipeline was laid to Saddleback Lake to increase the ski area's snow-making capabilities; three new groomers, each of which cost between $150,000 to $180,000, were purchased; a new chairlift that cost more than $1 million was installed; and 20 new ski trails were opened.

And since 2005, more than 50 condos have been built at two condo sites near the base lodge — South Branch and Rock Pond — under permits obtained by Breen in the 1980s and 1990s. Foundations are being built for another 22 timeshare condos that will arrive prefabricated the first week of August.

The condos are selling quickly, according to John Cannizarro, Saddleback's planning and development manager. The price for a new three-bedroom condo in the Rock Pond development has increased 15% over the last nine months, to $324,000, Cannizarro says. Meanwhile, prices for a similar three-bedroom condo at Sugarloaf have remained "flat" over the past year, according to Jeffrey Kennedy, a broker at Mountainside Real Estate in Carrabassett Valley. Kennedy says prices for a three-bedroom condo on the mountain — which boasts roughly 1,500 condos — range between $240,000 to $450,000.

One of the attractions to Saddleback for Herman and Gail Holpp — a Florida couple that purchased a four-bedroom condo in Rock Pond in February for less than $300,000 — was the year-round attractiveness of the area. "We really loved the mountains and love to ski, love to hike, love wildlife watching," Gail Holpp says. "We just fell madly in love with this place."

And the ski area caters to its summer residents. A café in the lodge is open year-round. Condo owners like the Holpps have access to kayaks and canoes to use on Saddleback Lake. There are trails cut around the mountain open to hikers.

And there's Rangeley, a western Maine tourist spot famous for its fishing and hunting. (More recently, it's become a snowmobiler's paradise with a 150-mile network of trails that connect to other systems throughout Maine and into Canada.)

The Holpps had looked at condos at Sugarloaf, but figured the mountain and Carrabassett Valley seemed too dead during the summer. Instead, they "fell in love" with Rangeley. "Rangeley is a town. It has a library. It has a movie theater. It has a hardware store," she says. "Anything you want they have there."

One step at a time
Saddleback, which is the largest development in the Unorganized Territory, is in what's known as a planned development district, a zone that LURC creates for developments that are reliant on a resource. In Saddleback's case, the resource is the mountain, but in other cases a planned development district could be created around a wind farm project that depends on the steady breeze a certain peak experiences.

The Berry family's 10-year development plan asks LURC to expand the current planned development district from 1,960 acres to 3,848 acres. "It is the largest project we've ever seen," says Catherine Carroll, director of LURC. And with more than 450 condos and timeshares, 160 house lots, and two hotels, the proposal rivals the more publicized Plum Creek development plan for Moosehead Lake. Saddleback has flown under the radar, however, because the project is "virtually unopposed," Carroll says.

That's not a surprise, says Mary Henderson, vice president of the Rangeley Lakes Chamber of Commerce. "I'm sure you're going to have a hard time finding anybody opposed to it," she says. "It's doing a lot for the area."

The 10-year plan is split into 51 separate projects in four phases, each of which will have to receive final approval from LURC before Saddleback begins. (For more on each phase, see "Saddleback's 10-year plan", this page.) The July 11 approval "is not the end of the story," Carroll says. "It's just the beginning."

One reason housing is so important is that Rangeley is a destination in itself. During the winter the available hotel rooms in the area are populated with snowmobilers. Housing, especially the timeshare condos, will give skiers options and bring to the mountain during the middle of the week in winter, Berry says. And Saddleback is partnering with InnSeason Resorts, a West Yarmouth, Mass.-based company that manages resorts and a network of condos and timeshares throughout the northeast that allows owners at one participating resort to trade time at another — "a little perk we have to sell our condos," Cannizzaro says.

While the expansion plan is ambitious, Berry says it's not a development binge: Each phase will fund the next phase. "There isn't a bankroll that could do these things," Berry says of the plan. "This is our plan, but it depends on the success of the projects that come before."

Before drafting the expansion plan, Saddleback conducted two market surveys and had discussions with local real estate agents to make sure the demand was there for the amount of housing they were proposing, says Cannizzaro. "The Rangeley market is very big in the area of housing," he says, adding that demand for housing "will be reevaluated at various points along the way."

The LURC process has been a challenge for Saddleback, whose LURC application was 1,300 pages long. "It's a very, very, very cumbersome process," says Cannizarro, who notes that a lot of the plan is subject to change since its hard to know what the needs might be eight or nine years from now when they would build the 100-room hotel.

Another challenge Saddleback will face is the short building season. Last summer was so wet construction that was scheduled to begin in June had to be postponed until September. "Skiing itself is weather dependent and construction is just as weather dependent," Berry says.

And people have to be convinced to come to their mountain. One way Berry is trying to set Saddleback apart from the other ski areas is by creating a traditional New England ski experience. The new lodge is made of wood — not a hint of metal sheeting or bright color on it. The trails are cut narrow, which Berry says doesn't impact the view of the mountain as much, and take advantage of the "humps and bumps that nature provided."

Michael Berry of the NSAA says that kind of niche marketing can work, but the challenge is marketing to the right crowd. "There are a significant number of people — especially in the East — who are nostalgic for that experience," he says. "It's a matter of finding those people, communicating with them and building loyalty so they come back again and again."

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