lotsoskiing;c-66347 wroteI wish this were a case like Sunday River: small area gets bought by ambitious developer who builds it out and makes it a real resort. Sadly, I see BT as just too far from major population, and what skier there are who would be high-end customers are gobbled up by Whiteface, Catskills, and Vermont resorts.
There is nothing to build out.
The town of Altamont built (along with some help from the Oval Wood Dish Co) and operated Big Tupper for about 25 years until Altamont sold it for $550k in Oct, 1986, to a guy named Roger Jakubowski. That sale included the radio station in Tupper Lake. During the last 7 years that the town owned BT they rang up a $600,000 deficit.
Roger Jakubowski ran BT for 2 years and then entered a lease -purchase agreement with Patrick Cunningham of Cunningham's Ski Barn, Sept, 1988. The Cunningham family had multiple ski shops in the Adirondacks. They also cut the trails and added the tbars at Gore in the area now known as the Ski Bowl. In the late 1980s he was running the ski shop at BT. They might have had 7 or more ski shops in this time frame.
https://www.cunninghamsskibarn.com/about-us
Even with Cunningham's expertise and updating, BT went bankrupt under Jakubowski's ownership in 1991. Jakubowski's main RE business in NJ also went bankrupt as did the Tupper Lake radio station which owned.
The ski area and the radio station were bought out from bankruptcy by communications specialist Earl Svendsen and surveyor John Deming. They then sold the ski area to Peter Day and Leroy Pickering. Svendsen and Demming kept the radio station and the communications equipment and site at the top of Big Tupper. Day and Pickering added snowmaking and generally improved the ski area. They eventually closed Big Tupper after the 1998-1999 season.
The ACR developers took over in about 2003 and sold off the snowmaking equipment (that Day and Pickering had installed) for basically nothing. BT operated a handful of days in the 2003-2016 time frame. It was run by volunteers. The last time it was open, Chair 2 (a double ), the only chair operating, had a pretty bad rollback and the area has not operated since.
As we can see, from about 1980 to 1999 Big Tupper never made enough money to operate as a successful business. Even after it was updated in the 1990s with decent snowmaking, it still went under. Like I said earlier in the thread, nobody is ever going to dump the amount of money needed to get this place open and running.
