Company plans to sell two Eastern ski resorts

SALT LAKE CITY – American Skiing Co. said Friday it agreed to sell Vermont’s Mount Snow and New Hampshire’s Attitash ski areas to Peak Resorts Inc., of Missouri.

American Skiing will sell the two resorts along with Grand Summit Hotels at both locations for $73.5 million, said David Hirasawa, the company’s investor-relations manager.

Peak Resorts also will assume $2 million in debt and other liabilities at Mount Snow and Attitash, the company said.

The purchase will give Eureka, Mo.-based Peak Resorts its first major ski areas. That company operates half a dozen tiny ski areas in Missouri, Ohio, Kentucky and New Hampshire.

American Skiing, based in Park City, Utah, said it will use the money to reduce debt and for working capital.

The sale is set for the end of April and will leave American Skiing with five resorts in the Northeast and Utah.

American Skiing has already agreed to sell Colorado’s Steamboat Springs resort to Canadian resort operator Intrawest Corp. for $265 million. Hirasawa said Steamboat is expected to change hands by March.

American Skiing has been investing heavily in The Canyons, its flagship 3,700-acre resort in Park City, which added terrain and lifts this winter. It also owns Killington and Pico, neighbors in central Vermont, and Maine’s Sunday River and Sugarloaf/USA.

The company said Mount Snow, the closest major Vermont resort to the New York City metro area, is the fifth most popular ski area in the East. It has an 18-hole golf course.

Attitash is a smaller, 280-acre ski hill in the heart of New Hampshire’s Mount Washington Valley. It has a water park and alpine slide.

Both resorts sit partly on national forest land, and the sale will require the consent of the U.S. Forest Service. Stockholder approval also will be required.

Hirasawa said the sale also is subject to an antitrust review by the U.S. Justice Department.

Executives at Peak Resorts Inc. didn’t immediately return a phone message seeking comment.

•AOL said Friday that its chief financial officer, Stephen Swad, plans to leave the firm for a position at a private-equity firm.

In an e-mail memo to employees, AOL chief executive Randy Falco said Swad was “ready for new and different challenges” after four years at the Dulles, Va., company. AOL declined to name Swad’s new employer. Falco said in the memo that AOL planned to name a replacement for Swad soon.

Separately, AOL has begun to trim its work force further by laying off a few dozen employees within different divisions at its Dulles headquarters, according to a source familiar with AOL’s plans, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the layoffs had not been made public. The source said these layoffs had begun and would continue for the next several weeks but that the company had no plans for any larger reductions.

Swad, 45, follows a number of longtime AOL executives who left shortly after former chief executive Jonathan Miller was abruptly replaced by Falco late last year.

In addition to the ongoing layoffs, AOL completed a major layoff of nearly 600 employees locally and 5,000 worldwide in December as part of a major restructuring.

Swad has spent the past nine years of his career at Time Warner, parent company of AOL. Before joining AOL, Swad served as executive vice president of finance and administration at Turner Entertainment Group. He also worked as vice president of financial planning and analysis at AOL Time Warner.