You’ve Seen the Hints. Here Comes the Story.
A mountain I could not name, a plan I could not share, and the build that starts this winter.
By Daniel Kaufman | Dan Ski & Build
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ve probably noticed the breadcrumbs.
Back in May I wrote about a place I visited that called itself a resort community, and I told you I couldn’t say where I was. Not yet. In June I wrote about the mountain that got away, the kind of distressed asset with a story that makes my brain light up. In between, I’ve written thousands of words about ski areas that never got built, plans that stalled in permitting, and towns that the big operators forgot the moment the demographics stopped penciling.
Here’s what I haven’t said until now. None of that was idle analysis. It was homework.
The pattern behind the posts.
Go back through the archive and the through line is hard to miss. Record skier visits sitting next to broken business models. Independent mountains outperforming while corporate ski pulls the plug on spring demand. Nine million visits evaporating in the West while overlooked hills in overlooked places quietly print loyalty. Real estate value hiding inside stories everyone else reads as culture pieces.
Every one of those posts was me working through a question in public: if the industry’s biggest players are managing spreadsheets instead of mountains, what does the opportunity look like for someone willing to actually build?
I’ve spent a lot of time developing in the housing and hospitality markets. I’ve spent the last stretch of my life putting that experience up against the ski industry, on this blog, in trip reports, in deal analysis, and in a lot of conversations I couldn’t write about. At some point you either keep writing about the ones that never got built, or you go build one.
I’m going to build one.
What I can tell you
Not the name. Not the location. Not yet, and if you’ve followed how these deals actually come together, you know why. Quiet phases exist for a reason, and I intend to respect this one.
What I can tell you is what it’s built around. Where the mountain meets the job site isn’t a tagline I picked because it sounded good. It’s the entire plan. A mountain project designed around how these towns actually live and work, not just how they photograph in a listing. The kind of project I’ve been arguing for in post after post, where the housing, the hill, and the community get treated as one system instead of three competing land uses.
If you saw a teaser video in your feed this week from @danskiandbuild, that’s this. Coming Winter 2027.
What happens next, and why here
Over the coming months, this blog gets the whole story first. The site selection and what I saw that others walked past. The underwriting, in real numbers, the way I wish more developers would show their work. The capital stack. The design decisions and the tradeoffs behind them. The permitting fights, if there are permitting fights, and there are always permitting fights.
Social media gets the highlights. Subscribers get the job site view, not the press release.
That’s been the promise of Dan Ski & Build since the first post, and this project is where the promise gets tested.
If you’re new here, this is the moment to subscribe. It’s free, it lands in your inbox, and you’ll be able to say you followed this one from the first teaser.
Boots on. Hard hat on. More soon.
