When the Cushing family sold Squaw Valley USA to Colorado-based private equity firm KSL Capital Partners a decade ago, a ripple of skepticism mashed up with a wave of relief (yes, relief!) hit the Tahoe Basin like a late-afternoon squall barreling down from the Pacific Northwest to blanket the valley floor with three inches of heavy, wet stuff in late April—making everything seem a little new, a little OK, and a little treacherous.
Yes, the Cushings were that bad—but things, as we've learned almost daily since 2011—can always get worse.
Founder and owner Alex Cushing enlisted in the Navy after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and retired as a Lieutenant Commander after serving in the Pacific and South America for a half-decade. He then became an attorney who worked for the DOJ and argued a case before the US Supreme Court—all before turning thirty. How did you spend your twenties?
On a trip to the Sierra Nevada, Alex found himself in love with a swath of undeveloped land seven miles from the shores of Lake Tahoe. Back then, there was a lot more literal and metaphorical real estate for a young, motivated, ornery cuss to make his outsized dreams come true, and Cushing was just the connected sort to make something happen.
Along with his partner Wayne Poulsen, a pilot and a skier, Cushing purchased 640 acres in 1948 from Union Pacific Railroad, chipping in $145,000 of his own money, along with $275,000 from other investors, including Laurence Rockefeller.
Squaw Valley officially opened in the winter of 1949 in the shadow of an imposing granite cliff three times the size of any hotel you’ve ever stayed at and used a pair of emptied-out Union Pacific boxcars as the ski resort’s “lodge,” making way for the hearty few with a single snowplow.
In his lifetime at Squaw, Cushing was married thrice to East Coast partners whose pedigrees read like a who’s who of old American wealth: from a descendent of one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence to a Vanderbilt, to finally Nancy, one of Squaw’s many attorneys who later became its CEO.
He summered in Rhode Island and traveled with an elite pack that belied his resort’s egalitarian reputation as a place where anyone could go to define themselves through a growing sport in the Wild West.
Cushing died in 2006 at his home in Newport.
Cushing’s Squaw famously cut corners till the very end. They shorted workers' pay or didn’t pay them at all. Benefits were limited to a season pass if that. College kids taking a semester off to be liftees or bar backs in the winter would die from carbon monoxide poising because they were living in their cars, and an overnight storm would block their tailpipes.
Consistently understaffed and under pressure, patrollers would often mitigate risk by taking risks themselves, and some died too. Squaw was notorious for structures mysteriously burning down in the middle of the night or lifts not running on days when the entire resort reported itself as green-lit.
But that was how the Cushings did business—from threadbare High Camp to the sticky-floor Chammy at the mountain base, a lot of it was small-time and run down seemingly by design.
Its crumbling midcentury veneer became a kind of marker of a hard-nosed capitalist who really ...just didn’t give a fuck about the end user. So its patrons followed suit and therein lied the tiny sliver on the Venn Diagram where rogues and rebels found one another.
It would only be a matter of time before it sold following Cushing's death. The whole Basin knew it. Alex's three daughters all took up with the East Coast bloodline and didn’t look back. Nancy did her part and hung around Tahoe to be feted at local Chamber of Commerce luncheons, handing out checks to local orgs and acting as Squaw CEO for four years before bringing on clown prince industry veteran Andy Wirth who combined an older Gen-X ski bro goatee aesthetic with mendacity and harassment for a while proclaiming himself king of the mountain and left the resorts’ charm in his wake.
KSL continued to stack its chips following its Squaw acquisition, leveraging the resort to pick off formerly family-owned or privately held resorts in the West from Deer Valley in Park City, to Mammoth on the Eastern side of the Sierra, to Squaw’s neighbor to the west Alpine Meadows.
In 2018 the company scooped up Intrawest, the embattled developer of Whistler, and operator of Winter Park and Steamboat in Colorado. They changed their name to something that sounds like a Nissan—the Alterra Mountain Company—after merging with Henry Crown/the Aspen Skiing Co to become the other big player in snow biz.
It’s now Alterra vs. Vail Resorts in a battle for the aspirational skier dollar in the gross mega-pass game in the time of rapidly burning forests and disappearing snow. The bell for the final lap has rung; it’s now time to see who limps to the finish first. The loser, of course—if you didn’t already know—is you.
1462 Sandy Way Olympic Valley, CA 96146
I had to smile at the drop of predictably anemic marketing effort put forth by Alterra in their Squaw name change yesterday. (Private Equity LOVES to follow the Nazi playbook and change names and tear down artifacts btw, it erases history, including their own bad behavior.)
Yes, the name Squaw Valley had to go. It’s a lazy, racist slur and kind of a crumbling relic of a brand anyway. But don't just change the name to atone; give the fucker back to the Washoe. Hahahahaha, nope. Not in this millennia, buddy.
More shocking in this milieu was the disappearance of Alpine Meadows. That resort’s logo and imagery were synonymous with comfortable West Shore-bound Bay Area residents for four or five generations running. Alpine was THEIR hill, steeped in blue groomers but with enough sweet hidden stashes to challenge even the most avid weekender and hero lines like the one underneath Scott chair to square the shoulders of salty locals.
There was nary a nod to Alpine in this teaser trailer for the new mega-resort Palisades Tahoe (which would go well with a Town Centre stapled at the end), a name dryer than breakfast buffet toast; so mediocre it could’ve only been thinktified in a conference room of 40-something ski bro marketing flacks, someone on the Dell laptop making sure the URL p a l i s a d e s t a h o e .com was available on GoDaddy for $11.99 for sure.
The trailer is literally whitewashed in nostalgia. Jonny Moseley does the VO, Shane and his front flip makes a grand entrance in the middle, shaky Wonder Years stock footie of back in the day holds it all together.
Squaw is filled with local assholes, ripping pieces of shit transplanted from the Northeast, and the occasional Olympian, all of whom Don’t. Want. You. Skiing. There. Go to the base and get a cookie fucking gaper.
IMO they should’ve blown it the fuck out and just leaned into that. Call it Ski-Fuck-Asshole Mountain for all I care and show Hot Dog the movie on a loop on tiny screens on every lift . There are only five years left of snow, might as well make it one big hot tub, cocaine, beer-bong in a thong paradise.
Here it is, losers, the Melanie Griffith in Working Girl version of a mountain chalet, a roofline built for snow and an interior built for sin.
Woodburning stove, Formica countertops, a range that has been ground zero to many a ramen meal (with the egg cracked in!), or disastrous date-night with a Tahoe Ten stir frys.
Turn it into a museum where former tenants can tell their bong-water and morning-after pill before grabbing the best pow of their young and invincible lives' tall tales.
It’s all here for the end times fun—grab what you can from the quiver in the garage, stick your thumb out, and you’ll be getting high on the Funi shoving a half-frozen Eggo In your maw queuing up for Light Towers in no time.
All for under a million! Here’s to the ‘Sades Tahoe. May it live forever or at least till 2030, when we’re all gonna be dead anyway.