Snow Business (cont.)

To the Extremes Baldface skiiers go from frigid
vistas to a toasty cat.

Aside from strong demand, the first thing Loughan looks for in a successful company is a good team. He recognized a synergy of skills between Pensiero, the personable, passionate, ideas guy, and his wife, Paula, a top skier in her own right and a details person. “Jeff’s the guy with the vision,” Loughan says. “But Paula’s the one that can make it happen. I’ve seen the same kind of devotion and passion in software companies that succeed.”

The third leg of that tripod was mountain guide John Buffery. Good guides are crucial to insure that back-country skiers go where it’s safe to do so. That’s why “in Canada,” Loughan says, “the mountain guides are the ultimate studs. I talked to a lot of those studs, and they all said that Buff is the best there is.” Though Buffery no longer heads up Baldface’s guide corps, he still trains guides from Canada and Japan.

But when the due diligence was done and the business plan was perfect, something deeper made this Silicon Valley ski bum invest his money in Baldface. “All I’d ever done was build software companies,” Loughan says. “This was a chance to build something fun.”

Today Baldface is enjoying its ninth season. The resort now has five cats and a handsome timber-frame lodge surrounded by chalets, perched on the shoulder of a mountain 6,700 feet above sea level. Each day the three-dozen or so humans fortunate enough to be here get to enjoy eight or 10 of those runs of about 2,000 vertical feet through tubular firs so snow-laden they look like giant upside-down icicles.

The guides train clients in avalanche protection and take them to faces with just the right microclimate to yield the driest snow. Maybe they boot-kick a few minutes from the cat up to Moss Garden, spread out along the cornice, and drop steeply into their own private swaths of dry, face-splashing powder, then down to the warm, waiting cat. Skiers return from a day of virgin powder to appetizers of grilled pizza and hot soup, then dine on crab cakes or filet mignon.

For all this, clients, owners and most of all Rob Loughan are giving a multitude of thanks. “When I’m cruising through trees and powder with people who are so happy they’ve got tears in their eyes,” he says, “that’s an incredible joy for me, because you get to share in their pleasure. You can’t buy the feeling of giving people an experience they’ll remember for the rest of their lives.”

Nathaniel Reade, formerly a contributing editor of Ski and now the features editor of Spirit, wishes someone would send him cat skiing again (hint).

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