Outside Magazine

Free yourself from the shackles of reality for a moment and join me, please, in imagining a utopian ski area. Would there be 450 inches of fresh, fluffy powder each year? Absolutely! Would the lift tickets be free? Sure! And could we accord all lodge workers and hospitality staff commodious slopeside condos replete with tidy little woodstoves?

Certainly we could do that—in an imaginary world. In the real world, there’s freezing rain and boilerplate ice and, worse, the almost inexorable market forces that have caused too many ski areas to become elitist havens where Gucci and Prada stores crowd the base lodge and low-paid employees are obliged to schlep an hour out of town to find affordable housing. But what if somebody tried to create a ski utopia? And what if they waged their campaign in the hardscrabble hinterlands of western Maine?

Arctaris Impact Fund, a Boston investment firm that specializes in shoring up struggling local economies, is doing just that. On January 31, Arctaris spent $6.5 million to purchase a beloved but troubled backwoods ski mountain—Saddleback Maine, which has been shuttered for the past five seasons. Arctaris plans to radically renovate the base lodge this summer. It’ll open the lifts in December and will eventually spend $38 million in hopes of turning Saddleback into a funky and humane nirvana, replete with affordable housing, fair compensation, day care, and bus transport for its workers—and also, yes, crazy-steep trails and a laid-back lodge where the PBR will flow at an amiable people’s price.