In October 2024, Angeles Mountain Partners LLC issued a news release with a shocking announcement: The company had quietly purchased the long-shuttered and historic Mount Waterman ski resort, “assuming full management and operations” of the closest ski resort to Los Angeles.
Angeles Mountain Partners promised to usher in a new, more exclusive era for the once-public ski resort, with the tagline “More Powder. Less People.” The group touted an “inheritable ‘country-club style’” membership for anyone wealthy and powerful enough to make it into the so-called Waterman100, which would confer “private powder days, helipad access, preferred event entry and a limited ownership position in the project,” along with “unlimited, lifetime access” to the slopes for members and their immediate families.
The limited liability company even promised that Mount Waterman, which at that point had only opened a handful of weekends each season (if at all) for the better part of 25 years, would reopen for the 2024-2025 winter season.
FILE: Skiers ride the lift at the Mount Waterman ski resort in California’s Angeles National Forest.
FILE: Skiers ride the lift at the Mount Waterman ski resort in California’s Angeles National Forest.
If that sounds too good (or at least too ostentatious) to be true, that’s because it was. Angeles Mountain Partners never actually closed escrow on Mount Waterman and put out marketing materials announcing the purchase before it was final, according to Marc Ramirez, the listing agent who has now spent over three years looking for a new steward for Southern California’s first ski resort.
“That is incorrect,” Ramirez told SFGATE by phone when asked about Angeles Mountain Partners’ announcement that it had bought the property, and the company’s still-active website. “They did not. They went ahead and were a little gung-ho and did a marketing plan before it closed escrow.”
“Good old Mount Waterman is listed for sale again,” added Ramirez, who also worked as a Mount Waterman employee back in the 1990s.
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Ramirez said a number of factors caused the deal to fall through: lagging timelines from the U.S. Forest Service, the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires and the death of one of the sellers. “But what it really comes down to is, they didn’t have the money,” Ramirez said of the buyers (whom he does not represent).
FILE: Skiers cheer as they head to an upper lift at the Mount Waterman ski resort in California’s Angeles National Forest.
FILE: Skiers cheer as they head to an upper lift at the Mount Waterman ski resort in California’s Angeles National Forest.
In 2024, the Mount Waterman ski resort was listed for $2,275,000. After sitting in escrow with Angeles Mountain Partners for months, the deal was canceled, and the property was taken off the market this January, according to Ramirez. It was just relisted last month, with a new $3,275,000 price tag. (Ramirez said the listing price increased in line with the offers that they’d received when it was last listed).
However, that price doesn’t actually include any land. Instead, Mount Waterman’s new buyers would receive a 20-year special permit from the U.S. Forest Service to operate the ski area, along with existing infrastructure such as chair lifts, a warming hut with a full kitchen and bar and lounge area, a ski patrol building and two mobile trailers that can be used for employee housing. Mount Waterman relies on only natural snowfall — which makes it impossible to open during drier winters — but potential buyers could invest in snowmaking machines with approval from the Forest Service, according to Ramirez.
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Mount Waterman was owned by the same family from its 1939 founding through the 1990s, when it was sold to a group of businessmen. But the resort later closed from July 2001 through February 2009 due to the group’s “failure to meet the U.S. Forest Service Operating requirements,” according to the Mount Waterman website (created by the area’s current owners and sellers). At the time, the U.S. Forest Service was considering revoking the permit entirely, which would have permanently closed the ski hill.
The view from the parking lot at the Mount Waterman ski resort in California’s Angeles National Forest.
The view from the parking lot at the Mount Waterman ski resort in California’s Angeles National Forest.
Instead, Rick Metcalf, who grew up skiing at Mount Waterman, gathered a group of friends to purchase the ski area, which reopened to much excitement in 2008. Metcalf died last year.
The years after Mount Waterman’s reopening were plagued by wildfires, winters without enough snow and winters with too much snow, when heavy storms closed Angeles Crest Highway, the only route to Mount Waterman. All in all, Mount Waterman was only open to the public on weekends for an average of 12 to 25 days a year. The stretch of Angeles Crest Highway leading to Mount Waterman is currently closed at least until 2028.
Angeles Mountain Partners, meanwhile, hoped to “exploit” these road closures by using them as a method to further limit access to Mount Waterman.
“The big storms bring the best snow, and the best snow closes almost everything for at least a few days. Roads included. This is a special window of time we hope to exploit,” states the Waterman100 website.
Waterman100 members would be ferried to the mountain via chartered helicopters, and even on the rare post-storm days when the road was open, “all post-storm bluebird days” would be limited to Waterman100 members only.
Skiers ride the lift at the Mount Waterman ski resort in Angeles National Forest, Calif., in 2008.
Skiers ride the lift at the Mount Waterman ski resort in Angeles National Forest, Calif., in 2008.
“We can’t control the weather, but we can manage how many people gain access to the absolute best conditions our resort will have to offer, and that’s an honor we reserve for the Waterman100,” Joshua Shelton, the co-founder of Angeles Mountain Partners, said in the October 2024 news release.
Many of the company’s promised new amenities, such as on-site cabins and an outdoor special events venue, would require new approvals from the U.S. Forest Service. Whether Angeles Mountain Partners could severely curtail public access to a ski area that operates on public land with permission from the U.S. Forest Service was also an open question.
“My phone rang off the hook with the Forest Service asking, ‘What the heck is going on?’” Ramirez said.
Meanwhile, the process of transferring the special-use permit to a new name stretched on for nearly all of last year, according to Ramirez, who said he believes the staff shuffling that occurred during the Trump administration’s DOGE cuts may have slowed the process down, as “people we’d started working with were no longer there.” The special-use permit was approved in December 2025, but the buyers ultimately pulled out of the process.
And so now, the search continues. “I’m trying to find the right individual or group who will utilize it most effectively and have it open to the public as much as possible, and not someone who will go ahead and make it a private resort,” Ramirez said.