Oct. 30, 2003 - Vermont resort developer Tim Mueller has finally found a piece of Colorado.

He bested former Dallas Cowboy Roger Staubach's real estate investment company in the race to buy Crested Butte Mountain ski area.

Details of the purchase were not revealed Wednesday, but a short-lived bid by a local community group to buy the area reported that it needed to raise $52 million.

Tim and Diane Mueller tried unsuccessfully to revive a massive ski-area project outside Steamboat in the late 1990s, and their attempts to develop Winter Park in 2001 were denied.

Now the couple who transformed Vermont's Okemo ski area from a humble hummock to the second busiest in New England are buying the struggling Gunnison County ski hill known for its expert skiing and funky vibe.

"Crested Butte has so much potential," said Tim Mueller, whose Triple Peaks investment group announced it had signed a letter of intent with Crested Butte owner Edward Callaway. "The previous owners have done a great job, but it needs to take the next step."

Mueller's purchase marks the end of an era for Crested Butte, which had been owned by the Walton-Callaway clan since 1970. Ralph Walton and Bo Callaway are ski industry pioneers lauded for forging the model for ski-area ownership, but as the industry changed, their model wilted.

Corporately owned areas have eclipsed the family-owned, 1,058- acre Crested Butte hill. In 33 years, the Callaway-Walton team invested $100 million in the mountain, about the same amount invested in the past five years at Vail Mountain, or one-fifth of the value of the new village at Copper Mountain.

The new reality is billion-dollar build-outs, cruise-ship villages and stockholder value.

Skier visits at Crested Butte have plunged from a high of 550,000 in 1997-98 -- the first year of the discount season-pass war among Interstate 70 resorts -- to 342,000 last season. Sales-tax revenue in nearby Crested Butte has fallen 25 percent in that time.

Edward Callaway, son of Bo and the remaining remnant of the scattered ownership team, struggled to make ends meet. He sold his family's 261-room Marriott to Club Med in 2001. Last spring, he handed over his 242-room Sheraton hotel to creditors, five years after he spent $10 million on a renovation.

"The last three years have been extraordinarily difficult for us, and we are glad to be putting it into Tim's hands," Edward Callaway said. "We are ready to move on and do other things in this family."

Despite launching an aggressive real estate project that took almost a decade to come to fruition, the Callaway company fell behind on its bills in the past two seasons. Creditors were held off by the promise of new ownership around the corner.

"The previous ownership was just so broke. They owed us a lot of money," said Ed Ryberg, winter sports coordinator for the Forest Service, noting the resort's inability to make annual rent payments to the guardian of the public land the resort occupies. "We were going to have to make some really tough decisions if this (sale) didn't happen."

The Muellers have forged their own model for success, merging a corporate ability to invest and reinvest with the down-home, rolled-up-sleeves work ethic of family ownership.

When they bought Okemo in 1982, the 520-acre area was nearing bankruptcy with 95,000 skier visits. The Muellers pumped millions into new snowmaking, new lodges, lifts and a golf course. Last season that area boasted more than 604,000 skier visits.

The duo is in the midst of a massive $55 million expansion that will add 160 acres of new skiing, five new lifts and a time-share hotel.

To the town of Ludlow, Vt., the Muellers are saviors. The 250-year-old former mill town was barren when the Muellers arrived.

Today, Ludlow is home to 2,800 people and boasts the seventh-highest lodging revenue in Vermont.

"That is primarily because of what Tim and Diane have produced up at Okemo: a consistent ski product," said Ed Eagan, executive director of the Okemo Valley Regional Chamber of Commerce.

The Muellers also own Mount Sunapee ski area in New Hampshire, where they are developing real estate on private land surrounding the 230-acre ski area.

Since 1996, the Muellers have fought to work in Colorado. They bought a flailing project outside Steamboat in 1996. Eventually, they whittled plans for a 3,500-acre ski resort with 3,800 homes, two golf courses, 1,000 hotel rooms and a sprawling village down to 40 homes engulfed in conservation easements.

Four years later they returned with a group of investors to buy Steamboat. The $91.4 million deal crumbled at the last minute when Steamboat owner American Skiing Co. decided to sell its Heavenly ski area along the border of California and Nevada to Vail for $99 million instead.

Mueller unsuccessfully courted the city of Denver for a long-term lease at the city's Winter Park ski area, promising an immediate $10 million to $15 million investment.

Now he's got his chance in Colorado. But Mueller plans to tap Crested Butte's remoteness and the town's funkiness when sculpting plans for the area's future.

"If we can retain the unique qualities and amenities without becoming a sprawling area, it will become unique in the market's eyes," he said, noting the potential to remold the aging village in Mount Crested Butte to augment the inimitable feel of Crested Butte.

"One thing we've learned out (East) is to work with the local community to create a vision for the resort and not jam things down people's throats; moderate growth in a slow-growth manner."

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(c) 2003, The Denver Post. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.