This story by Tommy Gardner first appeared in Stowe Reporter on May 11.
The public face of Vail Corporation in Stowe since the Colorado ski company came to town six years ago is heading back west.
Bobby Murphy, vice president and general manager of Stowe Mountain Resort, has been named the vice president and chief operating officer for Beaver Creek Resort in Colorado. He starts June 1.
Murphy’s replacement has not been named yet. Tim Baker, senior vice president and chief operating officer for Vail’s eastern region, said in an email last week to the Stowe leadership team that he will run the Stowe ship and work with the team until the new general manager is in place.
“During his time in the East, Bobby has played a critical role in integrating Stowe Mountain Resort, Attitash and Wildcat into our network of resorts,” Baker wrote. “At Stowe, Bobby was a driving force behind the installation of the new Sunrise Six Lift, expanding free public transit to the resort, and partnering with the community to improve access to and from the resort.”
Welcome to Stowe
Murphy started in Stowe in June 2017, coming from Vail Mountain as the local face for the new corporation in town.
Among other locals, he credits Walter Frame and Kristina von Trapp of Trapp Family Lodge for introducing Murphy and his family to other Stowe families.
“They have kids similar in age to ours, and they were super welcoming,” he said. “I’ll never forget the first multifamily welcome party they threw for us, which was really cool.”
Murphy, along with wife Jenny and daughters Ella and Anja, quickly became part of the Stowe community, participating in the myriad social and recreational offerings in town — the former Chicago hockey player was a fixture on the ice at Stowe Arena — and engaging in that tight-knit community of parents with kids in the local schools.
“Stowe is a small town and it’s a social town, and when you have kids in the school system, you’re going be out in the community, not only for your job but for community events,” Frame said this week.
Murphy’s oldest daughter, Ella, graduated from Stowe High School last year — she was the class of 2022’s salutatorian and, during her speech, talked about being upset when her parents moved her to Stowe from Colorado ahead of her eighth grade year only to discover she “was welcomed into this community like I had been here my whole life.”
Murphy said the most difficult part of moving back out West is how much his younger daughter Anja — now a sophomore at Stowe High — will miss the friends she made over the past half-decade.
“It’s bittersweet to be leaving the town of Stowe, because our kids developed here during a real formative time in their lives,” he said. “We came closer together as a family during that time, and we’ve got such great friends and relationships here.”
Busy Beaver
Vail-operated Beaver Creek is perhaps best known for its annual Birds of Prey downhill race, which is held in early December, one of the first stops on the men’s World Cup circuit.
With five mountains and two bowls, the place dwarfs Stowe, and boasts a 3,340-foot vertical from its highest summit, which tops out at 11,440 feet.
It’s not exactly Stowe when it comes to being a ski town, but it does have a village with homes and other non-ski recreational amenities, and there’s Avon, a town off Interstate 70 with a similar population to Stowe and scads of hotels, and a vibrant nightlife and shopping scene.
Murphy and the family lived in Avon for seven years before moving to Stowe but sold their house before moving back, and the real estate market in Eagle County is as tight or tighter than the Vermont market.
“Now, we’re figuring out how to get back in,” he said.
Murphy was vice president of skier services at Vail Mountain, which is only seven miles from Beaver Creek, so he knows the resort well, or at least well enough: he spent most of his time there chaperoning his daughter’s school ski program, which was like the Friday Program partnership between Stowe schools and Stowe Mountain Resort.
“I think I know the kids’ tree trails better than I know the rest of the terrain,” he said. “But there’s some amazing terrain at Beaver Creek and I’m looking forward to it.”
Long career
Murphy is 54 years old and has worked in the ski industry for 36 years. His career has been one of rising through the ranks, getting his start in that bastion of alpine skiing, northern Illinois — little Chestnut Mountain Resort is situated on the banks of the Mississippi River.
He said it’s more of an “upside down mountain,” where skiers and riders start at the top on the Mississippi bluffs and make their way down to the river basin. He started working at the resort as a ski instructor at 18, after discovering the resort would house him and his buddies in dorms on the weekends. He did that for all four years of college.
“I think it wasn’t until my first day that I found out that I actually got paid to do it,” he laughed.
Teaching skiing prompted Murphy to switch his major at the University of Iowa to focus less on business and more on commercial recreation and head for the hills — starting with an internship at Crested Butte.
From there, he worked his way up the ranks, with a long stint at Telluride and a short stop at Keystone before making his way to Vail Mountain Resort.
During seven years at Vail, Murphy transitioned into higher management roles, starting as senior director of the ski and snowboard school and then vice president of ski services, which oversaw ski school, guest services and ticket sales.
By the time he landed in Stowe, he had acquired nearly three decades’ worth of industry know-how — what the skiing experience should feel like, how food and beverage should run, how mountain ops operates, how people get to and from the hill.
But he said he also understood all the people at Stowe knew their mountain best, and he could lean on them.
“I needed to seek to understand, before being understood,” he said. “That’s a big, important part of my leadership — I want to learn.”
Downhill from here
Becoming a general manager is a steep learning curve, and Murphy’s new job at Stowe was in some ways akin to moving from a blue trail to a double black diamond.
There was already some built-in trepidation locally about Vail taking over operations at Stowe, before a single flake fell on the 2017-18 season — some people began using the portmanteau “Stail” during the summer before that first season under Vail.
Not only has Murphy and his team had to navigate the politics of corporate ownership in a Vermont ski town, but they had to do it during a pandemic and a post-pandemic skier surge that brought long lines of traffic to town.
He’s heard all the complaints, read all the stories in the paper, and even gotten hostile, borderline threatening, emails. He said he leans into those conversations when he meets people face to face in the community, and he avoids social media, where he said it’s hard to have a conversation.
“It’s a little frustrating that it’s so easy to blame a faceless, nameless person by just using our company’s name,” he said. “It’s impactful to us as leaders, but also to our frontline employees that are giving their heart and soul and all their efforts to put out a great experience. We want to blame somebody, so we blame somebody we don’t know.”
Frame said Murphy has been an accessible fixture in town the whole time he’s been here, whether at his kids’ soccer games or at selectboard meetings.
He said Stowe could do well by hiring a new general manager like Murphy.
“Before Vail entered, people saw it as a corporation, and I think Bobby really humanized Vail,” he said.
