EDEN — Snowbasin isn’t the only Weber County resort where ambitious expansion plans seem to be facing obstacles.

A new report in Fortune magazine on Powder Mountain’s plans to create a $1 billion development consisting of a ski village and 500 homes around it indicates things haven’t quite panned out as expected. Efforts started chugging ahead back in 2013 when Weber County officials approved a special $17.6 million bond, alongside a community development plan that paved the way for development to proceed.

Since then, though, development of the Summit Mountain Holding Group project in the Eden area has slowed down according to the lengthy report — titled “Trouble at the Summit” — in the April/May edition of the magazine.

Photo supplied, Powder Mountain

The development, as envisioned early on, was meant to draw entrepreneurs, innovators, thought leaders and artists. But a decade later, “the investors and the county are still waiting for the promised utopia to materialize,” the report reads. It goes on: “The plans for a bustling, beautifully designed playground for the creative and socially conscious have simply not come to pass. How did things go so very wrong?”

Snowbasin, closer to Huntsville, is a completely different ski resort with different owners. But it too has seemingly encountered hitches in the road in its expansion efforts.

Just last month, the resort operator announced without much explanation that plans to build a 300-room Club Med hotel on Snowbasin grounds had been shelved. It’s not clear what the announcement means for other elements of the vision, unveiled in 2021, that included the Club Med plans — for a “resort village” around Earl’s Lodge featuring restaurants, shops and lodging.

Getting back to Powder Mountain, Fortune points to several factors that may figure in the plans evolving at a slower pace than anticipated. There’s the logistic difficulty of building so high up — Powder Mountain sits at some 9,000 feet — and the difficulty of accommodating the sort of large conferences originally envisioned at such a high altitude.

Then there are the legal issues involving the landowners and some of the project investors, previously reported on by the Standard-Examiner. Fortune further cites the “culture clash” between the project boosters and some of the area locals in Eden — “a mostly Mormon town in a squarely Republican county” — and “constant changes” and “organizational dysfunction” among resort leadership.

BRIAN NICHOLSON, Special to the Standard-Examiner

Weber County Treasurer John Bond previously told the Standard-Examiner that the bond arrangement between the county and Summit is running smoothly and hasn’t been affected by the legal issues with investors. The Fortune report echoes that.

Moreover, Reed Hastings, the Netflix co-founder and a Powder Mountain landowner, indicated in the Fortune report that, yes, the project may be morphing, but that doesn’t mean the sky is falling.

He said in a Zoom call from his cabin on the mountain that the project “has shed its ‘we’re going to change the world with our interactions’ ethos, and has become just ‘a normal real estate development thing,'” reads Fortune.

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