Jul. 22--WINTER PARK, Colo.--The future of Denver's Winter Park ski area may be uncertain, but that has not deterred Arun Agarwal from envisioning a grand resort community in Grand County. 

The Agarwal family from Nebraska sees Winter Park as the next big thing in Colorado, and officially launched the second phase of a multimillion-dollar development at its hotel across from the Winter Park ski area last week. 
 

The expansion at the family's 179-room Winter Park Mountain Lodge will create the largest conference center and meeting facility in the region.  "We are making large bets," Agarwal said.  But he said it's a safe bet in Winter Park.

Winter Park Mountain Lodge

Fueling the call for private investors to join the city of Denver in building up the Winter Park resort is a recognized need to transform the bustling wintertime ski hill into a year-round facility. That's the name of the game in today's resort world, where publicly owned resort operators such as Vail and Intrawest, which owns Copper Mountain, are pouring more and more money into fancy villages that can attract year-round vacationers. 

In Winter Park, one step toward creating the year-round playground is building facilities that can host large groups. 

It's working for Vail's Keystone and Intrawest's Copper Mountain, where large conference centers are packing the resorts in the months before and after ski season, when visitor traffic historically slows to a trickle. 

The Agarwal family bought the hotel several years ago, when the 69-room inn was in bankruptcy. The family immediately launched a $10 million expansion, adding 110 rooms, refurbishing the old rooms and adding the county's only brewpub. 

Now comes the second round of development, with 9,500 square feet of meeting space designed to attract large groups. 

"What we've learned is that the need for group business is pretty incredible in order to survive the seasonality of this business," said Jeff McIntyre, president of Gemstone Resorts, the Breckenridge-based resort management company that is overseeing the expansion at the Winter Park Mountain Lodge. 

Even though vacation home sales continue to be brisk in Grand County and large-scale developments are underway, small commercial development in the north end of the county has slowed. That's partly due to a lagging economy as well as the uncertainty surrounding the ski area, said Catherine Ross, executive director of the Winter Park-Fraser Valley Chamber of Commerce. 

"There is a growing sense of confidence here," Ross said. "This is an example of people building on that growing confidence. They obviously have a lot of confidence in this region to be doing this." 

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