Four years after he rescued the Sleeping Giant ski area from a potential closure, Cody businessman Nick Piazza put the facility up for sale on Tuesday.

The property, which is located just outside the East Entrance to Yellowstone National Park, sits on property owned by the U.S. Forest Service. The sale is solely for structures and ski infrastructure on the leased property. The asking price is $500,000.

Despite being closed last season and remaining shuttered this winter, there is a lot of early interest in the business, said Jake Ivanoff, the listing agent and owner of 307 Real Estate.

“My phone has been ringing off the hook,” Ivanoff said Wednesday, “and we’ve had some very good feedback, too.”

“I’ve had calls from investment groups, including from an investment group out of Billings. I’ve had some calls from local ski hill guys that are out of southern Wyoming,” he said. “I mean, it’s been people that have real interest in ski hills that have been calling.”

Ivanoff stressed that Piazza isn’t just dumping the property after five years of ownership. Piazza would consider a partnership — anything to ensure Sleepy G (as locals call the facility) stays open.

“I think his biggest interest is to have it open and running for the community,” Ivanoff said.

A rich history

Piazza took over the operation in 2020, when it was on the verge of closing for the second time in two decades.

Sleeping Giant was established back in 1936, but the for-profit operation was shuttered in the spring of 2004. It remained closed for several years, until the late Cody businessman and philanthropist Jim Nielson led an effort to purchase the ski hill and revive it as a nonprofit.

The Yellowstone Recreations Foundation raised roughly $1.8 million — including $500,000 worth of state funds from the Wyoming Business Council — to upgrade and expand the ski area. That allowed Sleeping Giant to reopen in late 2009 with a new triple chair lift, a magic carpet lift and snowmaking equipment.

Park County commissioners also awarded $132,820 worth of federal funds to the foundation between 2009 and 2010, drawing the money from a pot of funds that had to be spent within the Shoshone National Forest on projects like fire suppression. The majority of those federal dollars paid crews to clear deadfall and thin tree stands. A portion went toward snowmaking equipment, but Piazza has said the system was in poor shape by the time he took over.

Between 2010 and 2020, Yellowstone Recreations Foundation provided an average of 4,000 skier days each season, but the operation also lost upwards of $200,000 each year. In January 2020, the foundation announced it would finish out the ski season and then only offer summer zip line tours.

“... the number of skiers and snowboarders we currently attract does not make winter operations financially feasible,” the foundation said at the time.

Later that year, however, Piazza and his for-profit Community Mountain LLC stepped up and took over the operations. He purchased its assets from Yellowstone Recreations Foundation for essentially nothing.

Foundation board member Jay Nielson later told Park County commissioners that, “I asked if anybody wants to buy this for $1, raise your hand.”

“Nobody did,” he said.

Piazza was the exception, being willing to take on what Jay Nielson described as “the epitome of a community project.”

After some discussion, the commissioners voted to relinquish whatever public interest remained in Sleeping Giant’s infrastructure in late 2021. Forward Cody CEO James Klessens had warned the commission that, “if we don’t make this conveyance, there’s a chance that nobody would operate it.”

Making an investment

When Piazza went into ownership, he thought he could assemble a team to change the mindset of the business from a nonprofit to a for-profit venture. In the years that followed, he said he invested roughly $1.5 million in the mountain’s infrastructure.

Piazza has said his efforts also included getting a Ukrainian investor to put an additional $800,000 into the operation over the past two years through the U.S. government’s EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program; the program allows foreign investors, their spouses and children to obtain permanent residence if they create or preserve 10 permanent full-time jobs for qualified U.S. workers.

The Park County Travel Council also provided aid last year, awarding the ski hill a $57,500 grant. Most of those dollars went toward a new maintenance road, with the remainder going toward what was intended to be a year-round tubing hill. However, with the past two seasons of closures, it has yet to be used.

Piazza and his team are primarily investors, including in a variety of Ukrainian interests. During a July appearance on KODI-AM’s Speak Your Piece, he acknowledged that running Sleeping Giant had proven to be a new challenge.

“We never go in and, like, run something. We always say, ‘Hey, like, this is your dream. Let us finance it with you and let’s make money together,’” Piazza said on Speak Your Piece. “And I think that’s where I sometimes struggle, because I’m not an operator.”

Not running away

In a Wednesday interview, Piazza said that turning a profit is tough — even with good business over students’ Christmas break. But without enough snow for holiday break recreationists, the investment doesn’t pay off. And a string of warm winters has created problems.

However, the lack of fluffy, white flakes is just part of a perfect storm that has seen the lodge struggle.

Another issue has been finding employees to run the labor-intensive enterprise; staffing is one reason why the facility didn’t open this winter. 

During his July appearance on KODI, Piazza said that after some initial turnover, he and his team debated “whether to hire a bunch of Ukrainians that we knew.” They decided such a move “would change the vibe of Sleeping Giant” and opted to stick with local hires, but “we had very mixed success with that,” he said.

Piazza told the Tribune he’s seen labor issues cause problems for other businesses in town, especially as the cost of housing has increased. 

In the past, when Piazza went out to grab a drink or sing karaoke, most of the people he saw at those establishments were restaurant staff, hotel staff and younger people. Now, he said, “those numbers have been decimated.”

Updating equipment, purchasing lights for night skiing, adding freezer space to decrease the number of expensive winter deliveries, a spring flood at the lodge and recent vandalism have also added to the list of woes the team has had to work through. Still, at the end of his fifth year of ownership, Piazza said the facility is in much better shape than it was when he took over. And he stressed he isn’t just dumping the property and moving on.

“What Jake [Ivanoff] and I really talked about was finding a strategic partner — maybe somebody that wants to develop summer activities, somebody that really wants to live it and be up there day-in and day-out,” he said, adding, “We are saying now that, ‘Hey, if you can help us find somebody that wants to kind of invest with us, we’re not running away from the project.’”

(Zac Taylor contributed reporting.)

(Editor's note: This version has been updated to make clear that the $800,000 put into Sleeping Giant by a Ukrainian investor was in addition to the $1.5 million invested by Piazza.)