POWDR Brand Guidelines: A 1994 Park City Buy, Snowbird, Woodward & National-Park Lodges

A family of skiers buys a mountain.

POWDR, a name the company writes in capitals, is a privately held operator of ski resorts and outdoor businesses based in Park City, Utah. English Wikipedia says it was founded in 1994 by John Cumming, who with his father Ian had been an early investor in the outdoor-clothing company Mountain Hardwear. A 2019 article in The Park Record describes John, David and Ian Cumming as “Powdr’s founding family,” and recalls that the family spent weekends skiing at Snowbird, the Utah resort the Cummings would later buy.

The company began with a single mountain. According to English Wikipedia, it opened in 1994 by buying Park City Mountain Resort, about 30 miles from Salt Lake City, followed later that year by Alpine Meadows near Lake Tahoe. In August 1995 it added Boreal Mountain Resort and the small Soda Springs area near Donner Summit in California. Alpine Meadows was sold in July 2007. Park City Mountain passed to Vail Resorts in 2014, The Park Record noted in 2018, after a long dispute over a lease on part of its terrain, English Wikipedia says.

The growth years followed. English Wikipedia lists Mt. Bachelor in central Oregon in April 2001; Killington and Pico Mountain in Vermont, bought from American Skiing Company in May 2007; Copper Mountain in Colorado, bought from Intrawest in December 2009; and Eldora Mountain Resort near Boulder in June 2016. In July 2011 POWDR took a majority share of Camp Woodward, a youth action-sports camp business established in 1970, and in December 2019 it bought SilverStar in British Columbia, taking the company into Canada. Copper Mountain’s Three Bears chairlift, built in 2019 to reach new expert terrain on Tucker Mountain, is named after the nickname the Cumming father and sons used for themselves, The Park Record reported.

Resorts, camps and park lodges.

POWDR calls itself an “Adventure Lifestyle Company,” a phrase it prints with a registered-trademark sign, and says its vision is to “inspire every human being with cool experiences in awesome places.” In November 2026 its website said it runs seven mountain resorts, and grouped its “Adventure Lifestyle Brands” as Boreal and Soda Springs in California, Copper Mountain and Eldora in Colorado, Mt. Bachelor in Oregon, Snowbird in Utah, the Powderbird helicopter-skiing service and the Woodward action-sports business.

Snowbird came to the group through the family. English Wikipedia says an ownership change announced on 12 May 2014 made Ian Cumming the resort’s majority owner; the 2019 Park Record article called Snowbird “still a part of the Powdr family,” and a May 2024 report in the same paper named it among the destinations POWDR manages. Snowbird opened in December 1971 in Little Cottonwood Canyon and has its own guide.

Woodward is the second strand. POWDR’s website calls it “an experiential action sports company” and counts 55 years of action sports; English Wikipedia lists Woodward sites as of 2022 at Mt. Bachelor, Tahoe, Park City, Copper, Eldora, Killington and in Pennsylvania. In 2018 The Park Record reported plans for a Woodward Park City complex near the Gorgoza tubing hill, and English Wikipedia says it opened in December 2019.

The third strand is national parks. In January 2024 POWDR took over concessions and lodging at Stovepipe Wells Village in California, and in May 2024 the National Park Service awarded it the concession contract for Zion National Park, a ten-year contract from January 2025 run through its subsidiary Destination Zion Lodge, The Park Record reported. The company said its Zion plans include upgrading lodging and widening food and drink options, in line with its Play Forever programme. Its website now counts three national-park destinations.

Design and documentation.

Ski resort operators sell a place before they sell a product, so much of their public image is built from the mountain itself: lifts, groomed runs and snow-covered peaks, photographed and published by the companies themselves. The corporate site of Alterra Mountain Company goes a step further, printing map coordinates beside its mountain images. Each resort’s own pages carry the practical layer — lift and run status, webcams and a trail map. When Deer Valley added 200 acres and seven runs for its 2026/27 season, Alterra announced them by acreage and by the name of the new lift.

Naming is a large part of the work. Trails, lifts and bowls carry their own names, and new lifts are announced by name: Deer Valley’s Keetley Express and Hail Peak Express are two from its recent expansion. Above the resorts sit pass products. Vail Resorts’ Epic Pass and Alterra’s Ikon Pass, launched in January 2018, group many mountains under one season pass, and Alterra says the Ikon Pass now reaches more than 70 destinations. Pass tiers, partner days and reservation rules become part of the vocabulary skiers learn.

Digital tools extend that system. Resort websites invite visitors to download a mobile app, and some groups have bought the technology behind their sales: Alterra says it acquired Aspenware, a resort e-commerce and technology business, in May 2022. At Alterra, loyalty is framed through pass benefits, such as an extra night for pass holders who stay three nights at Deer Valley and discounted lift tickets for friends and family.

Behind the resort names sits a quieter corporate layer of pages on owners, leadership, values and portfolios. When Alterra was named in 2018, The Denver Post reported that the aim was not to forge a new brand but to build a platform that would elevate the individuality of each resort. Deer Valley’s own website keeps its name up front and links to Alterra Mountain Company in its footer.

A smaller map after 2024.

Leadership changed in 2018. The Park Record reported in June that year that John Cumming was stepping down as chief executive, with Wade Martin and Justin Sibley named co-presidents; at that point the company owned eight mountain resorts, the paper said. By May 2024 the same paper named Sibley as POWDR’s chief executive. In 2018 there were also four other Woodward camps in the United States and one in Mexico, the paper said.

The portfolio then narrowed. In August 2024 POWDR announced it would sell Killington and Pico, Eldora, Mt. Bachelor and SilverStar, English Wikipedia says. The sale of Killington and Pico to a group of local investors closed on 27 September 2024, the resort announced in Vermont Business Magazine, with POWDR and the developer Great Gulf staying on as minority investors. Pacific Group Resorts, the Park City owner of Jay Peak, bought SilverStar from POWDR, The Storm Skiing Journal reported in November 2025. Mt. Bachelor was later kept, English Wikipedia says.

Eldora is still in play. The town of Nederland signed a letter of intent to buy the resort from POWDR, The Denver Post reported in July 2025; the purchase was agreed in July 2025 and was not completed at the time of writing, and POWDR’s website still listed Eldora among its brands in November 2026.

The corporate identity is plain. The website pairs the capitalised name with four short verbs — play, inspire, empower and engage — and uses the name Play Forever for its environmental programme. Each resort and Woodward appears under its own name in the company’s brand list.

For a design guide, POWDR shows how a parent company can stay quiet while its resorts carry their own names. Compare Vail, whose owner bought Park City Mountain from POWDR in 2014, and Alterra Mountain Company, another multi-resort group. For this guide we use a basalt charcoal, snow white, glacier blue and an ember orange with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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