MRG Coop : $1500/share when the started the Coop if I remember correctly.
You are right - $1500 initially. I assume the Co-op purchased MRG from Betsy Pratt for $2.5M when they sold their 1,667th share. One thing, you are on the hook for an annual spend of $200/year/share - not difficult if you are a loyalist. But it's not a one-and-done sign of support.
Some interesting stories concerning MRG and Betsy Pratt were shared in her obituaries at her passing in March 2023.
“Betsy Pratt, our previous owner and visionary behind the Co-op, passed away peacefully today, Friday, March 17th, 2023 at the age of 95. Surrounded by loved ones, Betsy spent her final days watching snow fall on the Single Chair webcam. We owe Betsy a great deal of gratitude for protecting and preserving our paradise. Thank you, Betsy. If you don’t know her story, we welcome you to it here.
Betsy Pratt, born March 12th, 1928, began skiing Mad River Glen while attending Vassar College. It was on one fateful ski trip in 1954 that she met Truxton Pratt, a New York banker. At the time Betsy worked as assistant treasurer of the Ford Foundation. Betsy and Truxton soon married and had four children Polly, Amanda, Liz, and Truxton. They all learned to ski at Mad River Glen and the family had a ski home in Fayston.
Betsy considered herself a steward of the mountain and dedicated herself to maintaining Roland’s vision. She always saw Mad River as a place that offered a challenging outdoor adventure in a pristine, natural setting. A place with an ethos that developed organically, and a firm foundation based on the idea that love for the sport outweighed financial considerations. She was always concerned about keeping Mad River in its natural state as much as possible.
In 1995, Les Otten, who’d just started building his resort empire with the American Skiing Company, made an offer to buy out Mad River Glen, which Pratt had presided over during the previous 20 years. As legend has it, when Otten approached her at the bar, Betsy took a drag off her big corncob pipe, blew the smoke in his face, and told him where he could stick the check. Then she sold it to skiers for half the price and financed it interest-free until she sold enough shares.
In December of 1995 the Mad River Glen Co-op bought Mad River Glen from Betsy Pratt."
Another interesting article from Outside Magazine:
Come ski Mad River Glen, where it is resolved that progress is not a good thing—and that man-made snow is for sissies
www.outsideonline.com
People associated with the mountain say Betsy alienated practically everyone over the years, but even her harshest critics are grateful that she used family money to keep the resort going. Betsy claims that Les Otten, who owns the American Skiing Company, tried to buy Mad River in 1994 but that she refused to even hear the offer—a tale that nobody from Otten’s office in Newry, Maine, will confirm. She did, however, want to sell, and she said she wanted the owners to be the skiers themselves. (Who else would buy at the price she had in mind?) They formed a cooperative, and in December 1995 Betsy transferred ownership to the group for $2.5 million. The co-op needed to sell 1,667 shares at $1,500 each by June 1998 to bring off the deal, and it did. Well over half of the shareholders are from out of state; many of them had skied Mad River a few times, fallen in love with the place, and decided it was a cause eminently worth supporting.
The Mad River Glen co-op is one of the world’s few functioning socialist utopias. No one can own more than four shares or cast more than one vote. No significant change to the mountain can be made without a two-thirds majority, and it is widely recognized that two-thirds of the shareholders never would agree to so much as flatten a mogul. The co-op meets once a month, and it votes on everything—including whether to serve veggie burgers at the Base Box (it passed). The goal of the co-op is to keep Mad River as is, consistent with not going out of business. It is thus one of six resorts in the country that don’t permit snowboarding, a policy that’s intended to protect the scant snow cover but that also happens to reduce revenue by about 20 percent.
However, MRG's connection to Mt. Ellen came close to fruition. Even a liftline was cut from Mt. Ellen's Inverness area to almost the summit of General Stark at MRG. Pretty visible years later - upper right.
Of course, the single chair at MRG would have likely needed to be upgraded if a connection went thorugh. Stowe lost its single chair - with blankets on cold days - back in the mid-1980s. Riding it was fun, but I am not sure anyone misses it.
hese gems were all over the place, but slowly most of the them were stripped of their character. I'm pretty certain that if someone else would have bought the area, some trails would have been widen, snowmaking seriously expended and the single chair would be no more.
Some are mostly intact but with minor modernizations to remain viable/competitive: Saddleback, Wildcat, Cannon, Magic, Smugglers, Jay, etc.
