<aside> <img src="/icons/info-alternate_green.svg" alt="/icons/info-alternate_green.svg" width="40px" /> I served as President of the Mad River Glen Cooperative Board of Trustees during our 75th year in business. What follows is excerpted from the Board Report that I presented to the Shareholders at the Annual Shareholder Meeting, April 6, 2024.

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We’re celebrating our 75th year in business.

And we’re also celebrating our 29th year as a cooperative.

The number 29 doesn’t strike a particularly memorable note and yet here in our 75th year and at the annual shareholder meeting of the Cooperative, I bring your attention to it.

Not the number itself, but what it means.

As a community, we celebrate our icons

We celebrate Roland Palmedo, and we celebrate Betsy Pratt.

We do so for good reason because they were visionaries who created and doggedly preserved what we inherited and now enjoy.

We are forever in their debt, but we do pay them back. We pay them back not only with gratitude but also, and moreso, by doing the work.

Slide: Roland Palmedo and Betsy Pratt

We, the people of the Cooperative, have been doing the work for 29 years.

Longer than either of our iconic forebears.

Slide: years of ownership, per owner

Our Cooperative is an experiment in the power of community and communal ownership over the long haul. Like the mountain itself, the Cooperative is a living reminder to us all that what is easy is not always what is good, and that being the best means doing the work.

Despite long odds and industry trends that suggest we would be doing it wrong, I submit to you that we are doing it right.

Slide: Photo of attendees of the Annual Shareholder Meeting, April 2023

It’s high time we pause and celebrate the success of this experiment, and our achievement as a Cooperative.

And since we’re talking about icons, there is, of course our most recognizable icon, the Single Chair

In many ways, and obviously, the Single is the perfect symbol for Mad River Glen.

Slide: image of a Single Chair sticker

It represents our history.

It communicates immediately what makes us different.

It also represents the very personal, individual relationship each of us has with Mad River Glen.

On the Single, each of us gets to experience the place on our own terms. It offers a solitary ride on the way up, and an uncrowded run on the way down.

It also represents our fierce independence as a cooperative.

But that the Cooperative is represented by a Single Chair is paradoxical, isn’t it? The Cooperative is all of us, after all. How strange that the Single Chair could so aptly represent a community of people.

Would this do a better job?