Homewood Mountain Resort Reopening in 2025
After a year of silence, Homewood Mountain Resort prepares to reopen December 12. But the real story isn’t the lifts spinning again – it’s what happens when a ski town refuses to let a mountain become a country club.
The gondola equipment sits in a warehouse in Sparks, Nevada – cabins, towers, generators, all the expensive machinery of vertical transport. It was supposed to be spinning by now, ferrying skiers up the west shore of Lake Tahoe. Instead, it waits. The mountain it was meant to serve has other plans.
On December 12, Homewood Mountain Resort will open for the 2025-26 season after sitting dormant for an entire winter. The lifts that will run are the same lifts that ran before – 1960s infrastructure, reliable and slow. No gondola. No mid-mountain lodge. No parking garage or boutique hotel. Just Homewood, stubbornly itself, temporarily saved from a future it never asked for.
The reopening marks a peculiar kind of victory. On January 22 of this year, the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency approved amendments to Homewood’s Master Plan with language that ensures the resort remains open to the public. The approval came after four hours of testimony, months of community organizing, and a reckoning over what happens when a ski resort decides access should be a privilege, not a right.
The Fight for Access
The story begins in late 2022, when Homewood’s ownership signaled a shift toward a members-only model in communications with the TRPA. By early 2023, as word spread through the west shore community, the implications became clear. Think Jackson Hole’s $10,000 Solitude pass. Or Mt. Waterman’s Waterman100, where access to powder days comes with helipad privileges and country-club exclusivity. The future of skiing, the message suggested, was private.
The response was immediate. Red-and-white signs appeared along Highway 89: “Keep Homewood Public.” A coalition formed around that simple mandate – locals, second homeowners, families who had learned to ski on these slopes. Throughout 2023, they showed up to planning meetings. They drafted petitions. They testified.
Candice Wilmuth, a steering committee member of Keep Homewood Public, stood before the TRPA board with a warning. “These decisions impact not just Homewood, but the entire basin,” she said. “And even ski resorts around the country.” The implication was clear: If Homewood could be privatized, any mountain could.
By September 2024, as Homewood’s revised Master Plan wound through bureaucratic review, the coalition demanded what they called a “hard reset.” Public access needed to be guaranteed in writing, not promised in press releases. The developers – JMA Ventures, Discovery Land Company, and Mohari Hospitality – had submitted plans for 122 residential units, a boutique hotel, and that gondola. The community wanted guarantees.
“All commitments within this Plan are made in the spirit of assuring the public that HMR will not convert Homewood to a ‘member’s only’ ski resort.”
What emerged was the Community Access Plan, a document with teeth. Season passes and day tickets would be available to anyone on a first-come, first-served basis. The True Local Pass – reserved for full-time residents between Tahoe City and Rubicon – could never cost more than 65 percent of Palisades or Northstar pricing. A recreational deed restriction would guarantee open space above the north base development. And unlike other resorts, which report to TRPA annually, Homewood would file monthly winter reports.
If TRPA determined the resort was trying to circumvent these commitments “in bad faith,” the agency would have enforcement options. The language was bureaucratic, but the message was sharp: We’re watching.
The Cost of Victory
The approval came with costs. Most immediately, an entire season lost. When Mohari Hospitality, the lead capital partner, put operational funding “on hold” pending TRPA review in October 2024, the mountain went dark. No ski patrol swept the runs. No groomers carved early-morning corduroy. The west shore was quieter for it.
The gondola, too, became a casualty of timing. The project had been approved by the California State Tramway Board and received substantial conformance from Placer County. But permitting delays and missed deadlines with lift manufacturers pushed construction timelines. General Manager Andy Buckley confirmed in April that the gondola wouldn’t be ready for the 2025-26 season. Now it’s targeted for 2026-27, assuming everything aligns.
In the meantime, Homewood has been preparing. A 250-acre forest fuel reduction project continues, treating 50 acres in 2024 alone. An agreement with the North Tahoe Fire Protection District to expand fire services and assist with emergency response is being finalized. Season passes went on sale in April – Unlimited Pass, Value Pass, and the True Local Pass, each calibrated to balance access with the economic realities of running a mid-sized ski resort in the age of Epic and Ikon.
The math is stark. Operating a ski area has never been more expensive. Labor, insurance, snowmaking, lift maintenance – all costs that don’t care whether your mountain is public or private. Discovery Land Company’s original argument for privatization wasn’t entirely cynical. It was economic. The status quo, they said, was unsustainable.
Their revised model splits the difference. Public access remains, enforced by deed restrictions and monthly reporting. But revenue gets a boost from 122 residential units – homeowners who pay HOA fees and presumably spend money on the mountain. It’s a hybrid approach: half ski resort, half real estate development, wholly dependent on whether skiers and homeowners can coexist without one group pricing out the other.
What It All Means
What Homewood represents is larger than one mountain. Across the West, skiing is undergoing a slow-motion transformation. Day passes at major resorts routinely exceed $200. Epic and Ikon passes consolidate access across dozens of mountains but tether skiers to corporate ecosystems. Meanwhile, boutique resorts – places like Homewood, or Mt. Waterman, or smaller operations hanging on by a financial thread – are forced to choose: chase the mega-pass model, go private, or close.
Homewood chose a fourth option: negotiate. The Community Access Plan is neither pure public access nor full privatization. It’s a carefully worded truce, one that assumes good faith from developers and vigilance from the community. The question is whether the model can work, whether a resort can remain financially viable without sacrificing the access that makes it meaningful.
Keep Homewood Public isn’t declaring victory. Their signs remain along Highway 89. The coalition continues to monitor TRPA filings, parse master plan amendments, and prepare for the possibility that loopholes exist. They know the deed restriction guaranteeing recreational use is only as strong as the agency willing to enforce it. And they know that 122 residential units, once built and sold, will create their own constituency – one that might push for quieter slopes, reserved parking, and all the small exclusions that add up to privatization by another name.
“The mountain doesn’t care about master plans or community access agreements. It just reflects whatever stands above it.”
But for now, December 12 approaches. The Madden Chair will spin. The Ellis Chair will carry skiers to familiar terrain. Families will return to slopes they thought they’d lost. And Homewood, for at least one more season, will remain what it has always been: a place where the view of the lake matters as much as the snow, where access isn’t gated by wealth or membership, where skiing is still something more than a luxury commodity.
The gondola sits in Sparks, waiting for permits and timelines to align. The residential units remain unbuilt. The master plan stretches years into a future no one can predict. What’s certain is this: a community fought for public access to a mountain and won – not permanently, not completely, but enough to keep the lifts running and the slopes open to anyone willing to buy a ticket.
Lake Tahoe reflects what stands above it. This winter, it will reflect a mountain that belongs, for now, to everyone.
