Masters of the Universe · Taos Ski Valley, New Mexico
John Kelly takes the helm as chief executive of Taos Ski Valley; David Norden, who steered the mountain through its modern reinvention, moves to board chair. A profile of a leadership change at the most quietly radical resort in America — the first ski mountain in the world to certify as a force for good.
Ernie Blake's mountain · the B Corp bet · Kachina Peak · Si Si in Jetset & Wrangler Living
The view from the top
Tom Wolfe minted the phrase in 1987, in The Bonfire of the Vanities, for the Wall Street traders who genuinely believed they ran the world. Taos Ski Valley happens to be owned by exactly that breed — Louis Bacon, the hedge-fund founder who bought the mountain in 2013. But the interesting question at Taos has never been who owns it. It's what the people running it decided to do with it.
And the people running it have just changed. John Kelly has been promoted to chief executive of Taos Ski Valley. David Norden — who spent the resort's transformative years as CEO — moves up to board chair. At most mountains, a handoff like that is a line in a trade newsletter and nothing more.
At Taos it's worth a longer look, because this is not most mountains. This is the resort that decided, against every instinct of the industry, to measure success in something other than skier visits — and then became the first ski area on earth to put that decision on paper.
The succession
John Kelly steps into the chief executive's chair at a resort in the middle of the most ambitious chapter of its life. David Norden, his predecessor, doesn't so much leave as move one seat over — to board chair — after presiding over the years that remade Taos from a beloved locals' mountain into one of North America's premier destinations.
Successions like this tell you what an organization values. Taos didn't reach outside for a turnaround artist or a brand name; the handoff reads as continuity — a vote for the long, patient project the mountain has been building rather than a hard turn away from it.
Because the project is genuinely unusual. To understand what Kelly inherits and what Norden built, you have to go back — first to the man who started it, a sharp-eyed European émigré who went looking for the steepest, best snow in the Rockies and built a mountain around it, and then to a decision no other ski resort had ever made.
Ernie Blake's mountain, remade
Ernie Blake founded Taos in 1955. The story goes that he scouted the southern Rockies from a small plane and chose this steep, snow-blessed corner of New Mexico for its fall line and its improbable run of sunshine. For decades Taos was the connoisseur's mountain — steep, uncrowded, gloriously stubborn (famously one of the last resorts in America to even allow snowboarding).
When Louis Bacon bought it in 2013, he poured into it. Under Norden's leadership the resort moved through a roughly $300 million renaissance: new lifts, the slopeside arrival of The Blake — the hotel named, fittingly, for Ernie Blake himself — the Taos Air charter service that flies skiers in from California and Texas, and a sustained bet on the experience rather than the footprint.
The numbers Taos likes to quote aren't about real estate. They're about the mountain: more than 300 inches of snow in an average year, more than 300 days of sun, and over 1,200 skiable acres of some of the most honest terrain in the country.
Most resorts count a good season in inches of snow. Taos decided to count it in something harder to fake.Alpine Analytics
The bet that set it apart
In 2017, Taos Ski Valley did something no ski resort had done before: it became a Certified B Corporation — the rigorous third-party standard that holds a company to account for its impact on workers, community, and the environment, not just its margins. Writing for Jetset, Si Si Penaloza called it "the first and only ski resort in the world" to clear that bar.
It is a strange thing for a ski resort to do. The economics of a mountain reward volume — more visits, more beds, more lifts. B Corp certification points the other way, toward living wages, watershed protection, and decisions a spreadsheet wouldn't make on its own. Bacon, the financier who could have run Taos like any other asset, instead let it become the industry's most public argument that a mountain can be a business and a steward at once.
Si Si put the cultural version of it more plainly. Taos, she wrote, is for people "allergic to the haughty airs of Aspen" — a mountain that "doesn't need misbehaving celebrities to confirm its appeal." The certification is just the formal version of a temperament the regulars already knew.
Certification isn't a trophy you keep — it has to be re-earned every few years — but the ethos behind it has been Taos's signature ever since.
The mountain itself
For all the boardroom news, Taos in the end is a feeling, and the feeling has a high point: Kachina Peak, 12,481 feet, the kind of summit that rearranges your sense of scale. For most of the resort's history you earned it on foot — a lung-burning boot-pack up the ridge, skis on your shoulder, for a single perfect run down the other side.
There's a lift to the top now, opened in 2014, but the boot-pack tradition never died, and neither did the culture around it. The photograph above is Alpine Analytics' own Doug Olear at the summit in 2020, with a Taos guide and a handful of locals — all of them grinning the particular grin of people who hiked for their turns. That kinship — Si Si called it Taos's "thriving kinship culture" — is the thing no $300 million can buy and no certificate can mandate. It's just there, at the top, in the thin air.
Drop in off the summit and the Kachina Peak run unspools beneath you: steep, wide-open, the whole Sangre de Cristo range falling away. It is the clearest answer Taos gives to the question of what all the stewardship is actually for.
Further reading
Long before this dispatch, our co-founder Si Si Penaloza was filing from Taos, and her reporting is where much of the texture above comes from — the B Corp milestone, the Taos Air charter, the $300 million renaissance, and the run from a Southern California ranch to the top of Kachina Peak in under three hours.
Read her Taos pieces in full: "From the Ranch to Kachina Peak in Under Three Hours" for Wrangler Living, and her resort portfolio in Jetset, Issue 2, 2021, where The Blake at Taos Ski Valley is counted among the most uplifting hotels in the world.
Both dispatches date to 2020–21, when the B Corp distinction and the mountain's reinvention were fresh news.
What's next
So: a new chief executive, a new board chair, and a mountain that has spent decades insisting it can do this differently. John Kelly inherits something rare in the business — a brand whose values are not a marketing layer but the actual operating thesis, audited and signed.
The test of any succession is whether the thing that made the place worth running survives the people who built it. Taos has a head start. Its identity isn't lodged in one office; it's in the snow record, the B Corp file, the boot-pack tradition, the locals who'll still hike Kachina for one run when the lift line gets too long.
The masters of this particular universe change. The mountain, and what it decided to stand for, does not. ✦