Source: Buffalo News (New York)
Forget about going to Ski Tamarack's open house this weekend. The Colden facility is closed.
General Manager Peter Lore was served with papers Sept. 22 ordering him to cease operations at Tamarack and at Hidden Acres Golf Course, a nine-hole, par-3 facility.
The papers were served by attorney Charles Telford and HSBC Bank USA, co-executors of the estate of his father, Dr. John Lore, who died Jan. 12, 2004.
Telford said the property is a drain on the estate and that the executors "aren't in the business of running a ski area. . . . It was a collaborative decision that it was best for the family to do something else with it."
"This is the worst thing I've ever been through," Peter Lore said Wednesday. "I'm still in shock."
Dr. Lore bought what was then a 28-acre private club in 1966 and expanded it to 455 acres. In 1994, he told The Buffalo News he had spent $1.5 million on improvements.
Tamarack's small size and inexpensive lift tickets -- this year's now worthless brochure advertises six hours of skiing Thursday evenings for $11 -- made it popular among beginners and loyal season pass holders.
However, it was never a money maker. Neither was the golf course.
"It lost money every year," Peter Lore said of the ski area. "They (siblings) knew it and my dad knew it."
Peter Lore is the only one of John and Chalis Lore's four children still living in Western New York. His brother, John III, lives in Nova Scotia, and sisters Margaret Harkless and Joan O'Brien live in New England.
Peter Lore was living in New Mexico 14 years ago when his father brought him back to manage Tamarack. He said the club was losing $200,000 a year when he arrived but that he has cut the losses to about $40,000 annually. In its best year, he said the facility lost $10,000.
The ski area is worth about $700,000, Peter Lore estimates, but is not suitable for real estate development because of the pitch of the hill and the lack of public sewer hookups.
Telford said the estate hired a consultant to study the best way to deal with the property and that a plan was presented to the family.
"We are working with a third party to keep it open," he said.
A source at the private Buffalo Ski Club, which at one time shared a T-bar with Tamarack, identified some club members as that third party.
That might be the only chance the facility will open. It has been listed for sale off and on for years and no taker was found.
Mark Halter, president at Kissing Bridge, said he would be interested only in buying some of Tamarack's equipment. "We would be competing against ourselves," he said.
"There is no chance of opening unless somebody comes in to buy it," Peter Lore said.