Anchor Architect Of Jackson Hole Mountain Resort Retires After 32 Years

For nearly four decades, Jackson Hole’s highest elevation chairlift has been a superstar. Its fans have their own names for it like Space Mountain, Sublette or The Quad.

Few of those fans, however, know the name of the man behind the scenes, the financial wizard behind the curtain who has orchestrated the replacement of this popular lift, and Jackson Hole Mountain Resort’s sixth new lift in the past 10 years.

He's Matt McCreedy, and he’s been a force at Jackson’s famous mountain resort for the past three decades. He started work as JHMR's chief financial officer in 1992, the same year the Kemmerer family bought the property, and he’s been flying under the radar ever since.

“I grew up in Colorado, and I certainly was a skier,” McCreedy told Cowboy State Daily. “And I went to school in Boulder and got an accounting degree.”

His first job as a public accountant led to an opportunity to become CFO at St. John’s Hospital in Jackson in 1990. Through that, he met John Resor, founder of JH Ski Management, who was at the time engineering a four-party transaction that would end five years of litigation and enable the Kemmerers to become JHMR’s new owners.

The Kemmerer family’s wealth dates back to Mahlon S. Kemmerer, after whom Kemmerer, Wyoming, is named. Mahlon Kemmerer made a fortune mining coal and iron in the eastern United States before diversifying into Wyoming, where he founded the Kemmerer Coal Co. in 1897.

Resor went on to serve the Kemmerers as president of JHMR from 1992 through 1995.

“(Resor) was working to find investors to buy the mountain resort that at the time was needing a change of ownership,” McCreedy said. “And so, I met the Kemmerers through that process and when they bought the mountain, I came to work for them in 1992.”

Saving Resort Was Like Climbing A Mountain

McCreedy will be retiring at the end of this month, making the Sublette lift replacement one of his last major financing projects for the resort.

It’s also the last original lift from when the Kemmerers bought JHMR.

McCreedy’s career as CFO has been a little like mountain skiing in its overall arc. There was a tough hill to climb in the beginning — and no lifts to get him to the top.

“In the beginning, when the Kemmerers first came in, the mountain had gotten behind on capital investment,” McCreedy recalled. “And so, we were a much smaller mountain. We had to kind of build up the financial health to find ways to finance the various projects.”

The first five years, JHMR’s focus was creating a master plan. From the outside looking in, that had people questioning whether any real investment into the mountain resort was actually going to occur.

Among the first investments was upgrading the Thunder Chair, taking it from a double to a quad.

That was just the beginning of change for the resort, which at the time, had been a tough sell to most tourists. Hardcore skiers loved it because it was such a wild Wyoming experience. But a resort needed more than a small crowd of hardcore skiers to become economically feasible.

The next upgrades focused on the Teewinot beginner lift and the Aprés Vous chairlift, turning them into high-speed quads as well, and increasing the mountain’s capacity to 2,000 skiers per hour.

“Once (investments) started, the Kemmerers have always allowed us to reinvest in ourselves,” McCreedy said. “So, they didn’t take large dividends out, and we used the money to just kind of keep making improvements along the way.”

Eventually, momentum built, and it was no longer the tough climb it had been to finance projects.

“As the mountain got larger these economies of scale started to occur,” McCreedy said. “That made financing projects a little easier, and then you could also do a lot more just through internal cash flow.”

The real turning point though, was the early 2000s when the Four Seasons Hotel came online.

“They built that on land we contributed for an equity position,” McCreedy said. “And once that building opened, the financial returns for the mountain resort strengthened. It got easier after that because we had broad lodging represented in the valley, from the high end with Four Seasons all the way down to smaller motels and hotels that the valley already had in place.”

The Perks And Then Some

Working for the resort, where the job is to create fun for others, has been a blast, McCreedy said.

There are lots of perks to being employed at a world-class resort like JHMR, and yes, one of them is getting to ski the mountain as part of a lunch break.

“I’d say in a normal year I probably ski the mountain 60 to 80 days,” McCreedy said.

This year, knowing it was his last, he made a ski run on 132 days, a personal record.

But it’s not just the perks that made his job fun.

It’s also all the people he’s met — including his wife, who also works at the resort.

“We raised both kids on this mountain,” McCreedy said. “All my friends and acquaintances all seem to revolve around this resort.”

McCreedy plans to do a lot more traveling in retirement, but he will remain involved with JHMR as a consultant. So he won’t be disappearing from the mountain or the community any time soon.

He’ll also still be involved with JH Air, a 501c6 tax designation utilized by entities like chambers of commerce, which McCreedy helped put together.

JH Air’s member businesses contribute financially to funding guaranteed minimum contracts for airlines, which help bring more airlines to a community.

“That’s been a rewarding experience,” McCreedy said. “It’s been really fun to work with other business owners in the valley, and we’ve built some very good relationships with airlines over the years, and are represented across a lot of cities.”

That’s just another way McCreedy has quietly helped change the shape of tourism in Jackson Hole.

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.