Bear Valley, CA…Owners of Southern California ski area Mountain High and Central Sierra areas China Peak and Dodge Ridge have now bought the Bear Valley Ski area and the Village.   Backed by Invision Capital of Chicago, ski industry investors Karl Kapuscinski and Tim Cohee have purchased Skyline Bear Valley, including the Village holdings. The name of their company is the California Mountain Resort Company. This comes about a year after the group successfully purchased China Peak Mountain Resort.

The group has added Bear Valley Mountain Resort to their Cali Pass https://www.thecalipass.com/ski pass which gives pass holders access to all four of their mountain resorts plus additional passes to Powder Alliance resorts worldwide. https://www.powderalliance.com/#view-partner-resorts . Skiers will be able to still purchase a Bear Valley-only pass or the Cali Pass.

The sale closed today, November 1. After an 18-year period of Bear Valley being owned by two different Canadian commercial real estate companies, ownership now is in the hands of California local professional ski area managers.

The new ownership group recently met with the working group proposing the Village Lift project. Both sides came away optimistic about the future of Bear Valley in general and the Village Lift specifically. During his 17 years managing Kirkwood, Tim Cohee oversaw the development of Kirkwood including the Kirkwood Lodge, condos, as well as the development of single-family home lots. However, CMRC are not developers and have no plans on building out the Village development. The cost of new construction currently outweighs the market value for new units.

The group has many stated goals for the ski area including expanding snow-making, expanded grooming of the slopes, and extensive summer vegetation management of the ski area. There is a new bar being added to the sunroom. And, the top lift station of the Grizzly chair has been rebuilt to accept a future quad chair. In addition, the group wants a consistent opening of the Grizzly Bowl, including grooming of an intermediate path to the bottom.

Many here in Bear Valley are very excited and are looking forward to a possible brighter future for both the ski area and the Village.