Dec. 18--ASPEN, Colo.--It's early. It's dark. It's below zero and snowing. 

Pat O'Donnell, the 63-year-old CEO of Aspen Skiing Co., is ready to sweat. 

Twice weekly, the leader of the ski resort company most famous for being famous begins his day by snowshoeing through the frigid dawn to the top of Snowmass Mountain. 

It's a grueling two-hour hike and he's always back in his office before 8 a.m. 

On this day, he leaves at 5:30 a.m., hiking in darkness through powder-caked aspen groves. 

"This is more about the peace and serenity and just getting away from the maddening world," he says. "That's why I do it. Once I get back down, I'm on the treadmill." 

The "treadmill" is a day of perpetual meetings, phone calls and the myriad requirements that come with running a four-mountain ski resort company. And O'Donnell runs at breakneck speed, saddling himself with additional tasks such as chairing the Colorado Ski Country board of directors and infusing his company with a rigid environmental ethos that rates SkiCo as one of the greenest companies in the country. 

"It's more of a mental exhaustion than physical," he says at the end of a day that included the predawn climb, six meetings -- including a mid-slope decision to open more of Aspen Mountain -- 14 phone messages, two hours of snowboarding and a rousing pep talk to 500 of SkiCo's 3,400 employees. "Just don't try to call me past 8 p.m." 

O'Donnell is probably the most influential player in today's Colorado ski industry. As head of Ski Country, he was instrumental in luring David Perry from his position as head of marketing for Intrawest's famed Whistler-Blackcomb ski area -- the largest and most popular in North America -- to run the trade group that represents all of Colorado's ski hills. 

"I'm probably the only person in history to leave Intrawest twice," says Perry, noting that it was O'Donnell who lured him from Intrawest's Blackcomb to rival mountain Whistler in the late '80s, when O'Donnell was president of Whistler and a decade before the two mountains merged. 

As one of the oldest members on the Ski Country board, O'Donnell is also the only snowboarder and the main organizer of a band of 20-something snowriders, called Return of Colorado Cool, which has two voting members on the Ski Country board. 

"He's been really supportive and open to our new ideas," says Chad Chapman, a 29-year-old snowboarding pal of O'Donnell's who serves on Ski Country's youth board as well as a youth board O'Donnell created to advise SkiCo. "He's tuned in to the younger set." 

Tuning in to the younger set included O'Donnell picking up snowboarding a few years ago. He now is certified to instruct snowboarding and eagerly gleans tips and secrets from local riders, most of whom profess a strong respect for the man who opened Aspen to snowboards. 

O'Donnell's personal life is just as focused as his professional life. When colleagues and friends talk about O'Donnell, the words inspirational, committed, demanding, principled, dedicated, energetic and balanced are often heard. Never heard are relaxed or easy-going. 

His intensity occasionally gets him in trouble. In 1997, he was charged with misdemeanor harassment in a traffic altercation in Snowmass Village. Last week, the Aspen Daily News asked its readers if O'Donnell, who recently fired a longtime and popular ski instructor for cutting down trees on Aspen Mountain, had displayed a double standard by firing the instructor since SkiCo did not reprimand him for pushing the 23-year-old man after the traffic dispute. 

The response was overwhelmingly in favor of O'Donnell. 

Despite his stern demeanor and his intimidating lifestyle, O'Donnell does have a soft side. 

Last April, his favorite canine companion fell ill with cancer, so O'Donnell drove from Aspen to Fort Collins every weekend for six weeks to, as he put it, "sit with her under a tree in the park" during breaks in her chemotherapy. His pal is now cancer-free. 

O'Donnell was on the first American team to attempt the 26,700-foot Annapurna in the Himalyas in the mid-'70s. Three of the six climbers in O'Donnell's group were swept to their deaths when an avalanche tore through the last camp, only 40 minutes after O'Donnell left his tent. The 16-day march back to civilization left him questioning everything. 

"I tried for three, four months to get back into the job," he says of his tenure as vice president of operations at Keystone ski area. "I became a real fatalist at that point. I really just wanted to stop the world and get off." 

So O'Donnell quit his job and bought a 37-foot sailboat. He and his wife, Jennifer, sailed from their home in San Francisco to South America on an 18-month voyage. 

"One thing I learned from Annapurna is that you just have to live for the moment, in the moment," he says. 

That, for O'Donnell, means focusing intently on every encounter. Whether meeting a fellow executive from another resort or a parking attendant, O'Donnell is fully there. 

"He is the same in temperament and candor whether he's speaking with us back here in Chicago or with an interview candidate for a lift operator position," says Jim Crown, whose family has owned Aspen Skiing Co. for almost two decades. "With Pat, what you see is what you get." 

He's also a notorious "close-talker." A simple handshake usually ends with O'Donnell pulling his co-shaker within an inch or so of his nose and staring into their eyes. It's as if he's about to share a secret, when he says something like "You ready for breakfast?" 

After finding some peace on the high waters of the Pacific, O'Donnell returned to San Francisco and took a job as president of the Yosemite Institute, a nonprofit environmental education organization. 

Yosemite National Park has a special allure for O'Donnell, who ditched his Bay Area engineering job in 1968 to move to the park and rock climb full-time. During his few years at the park, O'Donnell honed his climbing skills to a near-professional level while he also moved from bellman at the 1,600-room Yosemite Lodge to desk clerk to food and beverage manager to manager of the park's Badger Pass Ski Area. 

From Yosemite Lodge, O'Donnell went to Kirkwood ski area, where he spent one season cutting runs, building lifts and a day lodge. At the end of that season, O'Donnell was tapped to handle operations at Keystone. 

In 1981, O'Donnell got a call from Yvon Chouinard, the climbing guru whose 8-year-old Patagonia Clothing Co. was becoming a model for environmental responsibility and now distributes millions of dollars every year to environmental causes. He wanted O'Donnell to run his company. 

"I didn't know anything about making clothes, but (Chouinard) said he wanted to use Patagonia as a tool for social and environmental change," says O'Donnell. At the Yosemite Institute, O'Donnell had developed a reputation as an environmental leader, guiding the institute's board, which included Robert Redford and Caspar Weinberger, through the opening of several new campuses that taught environmental awareness to 60,000 school kids a year. 

For six years, O'Donnell traveled between Patagonia's Southern California home and Japan and Europe, launching the brand abroad. The travel took its toll and he stepped down in 1987. 

Shortly thereafter, O'Donnell took a job as president and CEO of Whistler ski area, which was in a cutthroat, capital-spending battle for market share with its neighbor, the Intrawest-owned Blackcomb. In 18 months, O'Donnell had stopped Whistler's 12-year record of fiscal hemorrhaging and put the company in the black. 

He left Whistler in 1994, three years before the mountain merged with Blackcomb under the Intrawest umbrella, to join Aspen Skiing Co. as chief operating officer. 

"We found a number of strengths in Pat when we hired him away from Whistler," Crown says. "He's a good listener and very oriented toward guest services and very oriented toward being a good citizen in the community." 

O'Donnell cajoled Crown for years at almost every meeting to consider dropping the snowboarding ban at Aspen Mountain. Crown said his longtime thinking was that there was a niche market in providing a ski-only product. 

"That isn't how it worked out," says Crown, who dropped the ban in April. 

After two years under the tutelage of Aspen SkiCo's longtime leader Bob Maynard, O'Donnell was tapped as president of the company in 1996. 

Since then, the snowboarding chief has fostered an increasingly amicable relationship with the community, infused a youthful stream of executives into the company, and pushed for hard-line environmental policies. 

He's formed a community advisory committee and stocked it with SkiCo's most vocal adversaries, established an employee foundation that allows workers to give a portion of their payroll to local environmental projects, with SkiCo matching the gifts, and found creative ways to fund green development at SkiCo. 

"Pat walks the talk," says John Frew, the former president of Ski Country, who worked with O'Donnell to bring Aspen back into the Ski Country fold it had left in the early '90s. "He has a conscience and a backbone. That's an unusual combination in a single person." 

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