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When I drive into the parking lot at Homewood Mountain Resort—a small, beloved ski area on the California side of Lake Tahoe—on a recent sunny morning, the place is deserted. There’s snow on the slopes, but no skiers in sight. The parking lot is empty, save for a few storage containers and idle construction vehicles. The Madden chair, a relic installed in 1966, five years after the ski area opened, is surrounded by orange ropes with signs that read: closed.

This past October, Homewood announced that the ski resort wouldn’t be opening for this winter, a blow that devastated local skiers who’ve come to call this place home. It’s not what anyone wanted. This winter’s closure is just the latest bad news in a series of bad years for Homewood’s public image. You see, a couple of years ago, word trickled out that Homewood was going to become a private resort for the rich. Think the Yellowstone Club, only with a grand view of Lake Tahoe.

“Had [Homewood’s owners] set in front of our community this member-only concept, there would have been lines out the door in protest,” local resident Renee Koijane wrote in a public comment soon after Homewood’s privatization plan leaked out. “This type of plan is the opposite of what any community should be planning for in the wake of climate change, wildfire, and affordable housing issues.”

The threat of Homewood going private came as other small resorts across the country either adopted the business model or entertained it as a way to compete with the ski industry’s move toward megapasses and consolidation.

In Utah, Powder Mountain has made sections of its terrain accessible only to members of its private ski community. In New York, Windham Mountain Club bills itself as a “public-private mountain community” with skiing for everyone and luxury amenities like access to a private lodge for dues-paying members (memberships start at $200,000). Discovery Land Company has submitted plans to turn a defunct ski area near Steamboat Springs, Colorado, into a private ski and golf resort.

These privatization plans have generated headlines and elicited grumbles in communities across the country. But at Homewood, the prospect prompted a loud and angry response. An outraged group of locals began to put up a fight. They formed a group called Keep Homewood Public and began hanging red signage all over town and holding community meetings to organize a resistance.

Their efforts worked—mostly. As of March 2025, the it will still welcome the general public when the resort reopens hopefully next winter. But there were consequences to all of the town meetings and angry signs: namely, the cancellation of the 2024-25 ski season. Losing a ski season dealt a financial blow to local businesses and was a loss for area skiers who love this place. The setback left even the most ardent activists wondering if the pushback was worth it.

But the ordeal at Homewood represents something much larger than a small ski area shutting down for one season. If feisty stalwarts can save skiing from becoming something only the rich and richer can participate in, then maybe we all still have a chance.

To understand why you should care about the closure of a small ski area that perhaps you’ve never heard of before, first you need to understand the backstory and know that what is happening here could happen anywhere.

The saga of Homewood is bogged down by bureaucracy, but beneath it all is a clear theme: The world of skiing is getting privatized and you’re either in the club, or you’re out of it.

Homewood used to be the kind of place where beginners skied in starter jackets, you could score a $60 lift ticket from the gas station down the road, and passholders were given free breakfast burritos and early lift access on appreciation days. But, apparently, none of that was contributing to the financial well-being of the resort, which has allegedly been in dire straits for years now.

The resort, which sits almost entirely on private land, was purchased in 2006 by a real estate investment firm called JMA Ventures. In 2022, Discovery Land Company, known for its private resorts like Wyoming’s Yellowstone Club and other ultra-luxe private ski, beach, and golf clubs around the world, partnered with JMA. The following year, Mohari Hospitality, an investment company based in Cyprus that funds luxury properties around the world, became the main equity investor in the Homewood development. Mohari is the one that pulled out their subsidy for this winter, forcing Homewood’s hand to close.

“The notion of subsidizing another winter loss without the certainty of the project moving forward caused a lot of ripples,” Andy Buckley, Homewood’s vice president of mountain experience, tells me when I pull into the parking lot. “The closure of the mountain this season is not what we wanted.”

In November 2022, JMA Ventures founder Art Chapman wrote a letter to the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency (TRPA), the local regulatory agency, that indicated a “balance of public and private use” business model. According to JMA Ventures at that time, this exclusive model was needed for the resort to stay afloat.

The letter indicated that Homewood would open to the public several days each month (not on holidays or weekends) as well as on so-called community days, where residents could purchase tickets that would benefit local philanthropic causes. But on all other days, the resort would be exclusively open to property owners. “In doing so, Homewood would still be available to the local community, albeit on a more limited basis,” Chapman wrote at the time.

A former mountain manager at Homewood during that time told business owners in the area that things would soon be changing. “You’re going to start seeing fur coats,” the resort manager said. Locals were outraged at the thought of losing access to their cherished ski hill. So, in February 2023, that prompted the formation of Keep Homewood Public, which organized quickly and fiercely.

“Public access is our number one, number two, and number three issue,” says Candice Wilmuth, a spokesperson for Keep Homewood Public. “When I talk to Homewood employees and they call us the opposition, I say, we are not the opposition. You have the biggest lovers of Homewood in this group. We do not want to stop the development. We want the resort to be open and thriving. All of us want to go skiing there.”

Homewood’s location on the western shore of Lake Tahoe is both a blessing and a curse. When all the big, flashy ski resorts around Lake Tahoe shut due to wind and blizzards, little old Homewood would keep its eight meager lifts cranking. Some of the deepest powder turns of my life have been on storm days in the trees off Homewood’s painfully slow Ellis chair. Homewood is where old-school powder chasers, families seeking affordable adventure, and anyone who wanted a quiet, uncrowded place to ski escaped to.

But these days, unless you’re coming from the sleepy neighborhoods that dot Lake Tahoe’s west shore, on busy days, you’ll sit in traffic heading to other, bigger ski areas like Palisades Tahoe or Northstar in order to get to Homewood. In recent years, skiers and riders have not been choosing to do that. Even west-shore residents have bypassed Homewood for more amenity-rich mountains. Revenues at the resort have gone down since 2010, and the number of visitors to the ski area has dropped by 70 percent since then. The rising popularity of mega passes like the Ikon Pass and Epic Pass have further driven down profits at Homewood, which is not on a collective pass.

“We saw a lot of Keep Homewood Public stickers and banners, but not a lot of people buying passes or tickets,” one former Homewood employee, who asked not to be named, told me. On a deep powder day in March 2022, this employee said the total skier count at 11 a.m. was 38 people on the mountain. “We were getting face shots after lunch,” he said. “It was amazing. But you can’t run a business with that.”

And as other resorts have built new lodges and faster lifts, Homewood has made few upgrades over the past two decades. The South Lodge, at the base of the Quail chair, burned down in 2016 and in its place sits a row of dilapidated structures and storage sheds. The Ellis lift, a creaky triple chair that notoriously left skiers stranded for hours, got a mechanical update in 2020, but plans to replace Ellis with a detachable quad haven’t happened yet. West Shore Inn and Café, formerly a hotel and restaurant across the street from the ski area that JMA purchased in 2010, has been closed since 2023, allegedly for renovation, and will likely remain a private facility going forward.

Homewood used to offer some of the cheapest lift tickets in the Tahoe Basin, but in recent years, those ticket prices have spiked. In 2022, Homewood set the record for most expensive day lift ticket in the U.S.: $279 for a single-day ticket to a homestyle ski hill with antique chairlifts, a mid-mountain pit toilet, and on-hill dining that requires you to microwave the chili yourself. Some theorize that Homewood was trying to price out skiers ahead of time to show they needed to go private in order to stay afloat.

The resort ownership has lofty goals for a major redevelopment of the mountain and base area, but it’s taking forever for any of that to be implemented. Homewood’s original master plan, which was first passed by the TRPA in 2011, lays out plans for a much improved future Homewood. The master plan—which includes many community improvement benefits ranging from fire protection to workforce housing—has been nearly universally supported, including by those at Keep Homewood Public. (“We want the plan. Stick to the plan,” Wilmuth says.)

In late September, the TRPA regional planning committee met to discuss Homewood’s master plan, which had no real directive regarding public or private access. The KHP crew arrived at the meeting ready for a fight. Over 100 people gathered in the parking lot in red T-shirts with the words Keep Homewood Public emblazoned across their chests. The meeting room filled to capacity and public attendees were relegated to three overflow rooms to await the comment period.

After a lengthy committee discussion, the public comment period opened and one red shirt after another stood in front of the microphone to implore the committee to reject the developers’ application unless they add clear language about public access. Each had their own distinct point to make, but many included the same request: a hard reset on the master plan. “When the developers say anyone can ski at Homewood, what they really mean is anyone with a whole lot of money,” one speaker said. “This is not the general public.”

Toward the end of the public comment period, a speaker named Lynne Hurst got emotional, tearing up at the mic as she said, “I’ve skied at Homewood most of my life. I have Christmas pictures every year at the top of that hill that I treasure. It’s the most beautiful place in the world to ski … Come together with the developer, make it work for everyone … Don’t take it away to only let a few enjoy it.”

But just like that: The chances of anyone skiing at Homewood this winter disappeared. A few weeks after that September meeting, Homewood announced on October 11 via an email to staff and the resort’s mailing list that the ski area wouldn’t be opening at all for this winter. In a statement, the resort declared, “For many years, Homewood Mountain Resort has been subsidizing the community’s ski experience while operating at a deficit … Hypothetical fears and false rumors regarding public access to the mountain from Keep Homewood Public’s leadership have dramatically slowed the pace of the approval process … Without a clear path forward, our financial partner has withdrawn support for this ski season.” It was almost like the resort was saying, you want to put up a fight? Remember who has the upper hand here.

The news of the closure was a blow, but it wasn’t all that surprising. “The writing was on the wall,” one Homewood resident told me. Season passes typically go on sale in the spring for the following winter, but by September, Homewood still hadn’t opened up season pass sales. In a presentation to a Homewood homeowner’s association last fall, resort execs said that they reserved the right to not open for the season if the approval for the new gondola didn’t come through. And in September, Homewood canceled its J-1 visa contracts, the hiring of foreign workers that the resort has relied on in past winters to perform seasonal jobs.

Around 200 people work at Homewood, with roughly 40 of those employed year-round in managerial or administrative positions. The rest are seasonal employees—lift operators, ski instructors, food and beverage staff—who were laid off or not hired for this winter. The trickle-down impact of the closure on Tahoe’s west shore is already being felt.

“Our winter business relies heavily on Homewood being open and that day-to-day visitor, which has dwindled year after year due to their increasing rates,” says Trevor Larkins, owner of West Shore Sports, a ski shop located down the road from Homewood ski area. “It’s been a progression of price increases pushing their customers away.” Last year, profits at his shop were down 35 percent.

But still, after all of this, the questions remain: Who will be allowed to ski at Homewood in the near and distant future? Everyone? And for a reasonable price? Or just private members paying six-digit dues? Homewood’s execs have kept mostly mum on the subject of privatization, but that’s changing now, as they’ve switched gears with more open communication and  promises to remain committed to public access. “We recognize that it’s been a mistake to remain silent for so long,” Buckley tells me.

This winter, Homewood management unveiled a plan that represents a compromise. Under a part of its website titled Community Access, the vision lays out future day ticket and season pass offerings that ensure that anyone with a valid ski pass or ticket will be able to access the mountain during operating hours. It also lays out discounted passes for west-shore residents that will remain 35 percent below the cost of a pass or ticket to nearby Palisades Tahoe or Northstar. “People ask us to define public,” Buckley says. “Without being flippant, it’s everybody.”

He says public access has been there all along, it’s just changed in scope. “There was always going to be a component of private membership in the plan, but upon really reviewing the plan documents, it became absolutely clear that the mountain had to have public access,” Buckley tells me. “From that day forward, that is what the partners have been saying.”

Residential property owners will be able to access members’ lounges in the base area and at mid-mountain, but the lifts and ski runs will be open to everyone. “Yes, there’s going to be an HOA with member amenities like many places,” Buckley says. “But the public component of the whole business plan is critical.”

The promise to stay public is now on a banner hanging over the parking lot of the closed ski area that reads, “Smile! Homewood will always be public.” But getting that in legal writing has been a long time coming. “They closed the resort, then they started this PR campaign around public access. But it’s still not effectively written into their documents. Without that, we’re worried it’ll be public for a few years and then they’ll start restricting access or pricing everyone out,” Wilmuth, from KHP, says. “A lot of people are saying, ‘Oh, we won. This is good enough.’ Which means people are so desperate to have this ski resort open that they’re willing to believe the developers. But we don’t think that the job is done until it’s documented.”

Wilmuth says nothing was gained by having the mountain closed this winter. “We never wanted or expected that to happen. That was Homewood’s decision. There is still nothing stopping Homewood from operating right now and season passes have yet to go on sale for next year,” she says. “Our community had to get vocal to ensure what was always part of the plan—public access—was followed through on.”

In late January, the TRPA governing board finally voted to approve Homewood’s master plan amendments as long as the resort includes a clearly-defined community access plan. With that approval, the ski area and its new gondola could be up and running by next winter.

Dave Powell, who’s 86 and skis with just sunglasses, no hat, is holding out hope that his treasured ski area will reopen—for everyone—next year. For five decades, Powell has clicked into his skis on the deck of the cabin he built in 1974, nestled into a grove of pine trees near Homewood’s base area, and glided through the forest to the Madden lift. This mountain is deeply personal to him, just like it is to many people in Tahoe. He used to work on ski patrol with his late wife, and he taught his now-grown daughters to ski here. “I would not be surprised if there’s some kind of deal where those who buy into the new real estate get primo access to the mountain,” Powell says. “And that doesn’t bother me, as long as the rest of us can still enjoy the place.”

Megan Michelson lives in Tahoe City, California, five miles down the road from Homewood. She’s had some incredibly deep powder days at Homewood in the past.