Powder Mountain — "PowMow" to its devotees — is the largest ski resort in the United States by skiable acreage, sprawling across more than 8,000 acres above the little town of Eden in the Ogden Valley, which it shares with nearby Snowbasin, about an hour north of Salt Lake City. For most of its life it has also been one of the least crowded big mountains in the country: it caps daily ticket sales, gets as much snow as the resorts near Park City with a fraction of the traffic, and historically left much of its enormous terrain to snowcats and hike-to lines rather than chairlifts. The access road, State Route 158, climbs so steeply out of the valley — a sustained 14 percent grade — that it is reckoned one of the steepest highways in America.
The mountain started as a sheep ranch. Frederick Cobabe accumulated thousands of acres of high range above Eden in the early twentieth century, and his son, the physician and rancher Alvin Cobabe, turned the family land into a ski area, opening Powder Mountain on February 19, 1972, with a single chairlift, night skiing, and food cooked on an outdoor barbecue. The Cobabes ran it as an unpretentious local's hill for decades — it was an early haven for snowboarders, and the vintage Powder Keg bar still nods to that era — before selling in 2006. In 2013 the founders of the Summit Series, a traveling ideas conference, crowd-funded the purchase of the mountain and began building a community of homes near its summit.
The biggest change came in 2023, when Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings acquired a majority stake and became the resort's CEO, pouring more than a hundred million dollars into it. Hastings has pursued a deliberately divisive idea: a hybrid public-private mountain, where a members-only enclave called Powder Haven — with its own lifts, terrain, and luxury real estate — occupies part of the mountain, while ticket revenue and land sales fund a wave of new public lifts and lodges. The plan drew sharp local backlash when it was announced, though added public terrain has since cooled some of it. Hastings has also begun installing large-scale land art across the slopes, describing the vision as a sculpture park spread over a ski resort. What Powder Mountain becomes is still being written; for now it remains, improbably, both the biggest ski area in the country and one of the quietest.
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