PURGATORY —James Coleman is standing thigh-deep in snow amid a web of pressurized snowmaking hoses. He’s leaning over a homemade manifold, part of an improvised snowmaking system he helped design.

Wet snow from an array of guns has encased his weathered shell in rime. His Carhartt dungarees are soaked. The tangle of blond hair spilling from his beanie is frosted white.

The snow guns start to roar louder. The air grows thick with lighter flakes. Quality snow. His system is working.

“This is so awesome!” he says. “So awesome!”

The snowmakers — hardy, behind-the-scene workers who spend long, cold hours pulling hoses, throttling snowmobiles and turning wrenches through the night — don’t seem to know what to make of Coleman.

He’s nothing like the Florida real estate developer who was their last boss.

“Night and day, man. Night and day,” says Josh Hamill, the 15-year head of snowmaking and the terrain park at Purgatory ski area outside Durango. “He makes it a lot easier for us to work as hard as we do.”

Coleman finalized his purchase of Durango Mountain Resort in February. That same day, the Texas-bred Durango resident changed the name of the hill he has skied regularly since 1983 back to Purgatory. But just like most Durango locals who ignored Chuck Cobb’s adoption of the Durango Mountain Resort moniker when he acquired the hill in 2000, Coleman had never stopped calling it Purgatory.

“Response to that name change, it’s just been unequivocal,” says Coleman, 48, noting the grief he has gotten from a couple of locals because he hasn’t gotten around to changing the sign that spans the resort’s driveway.

“I’m like, do you want me to do that or this new chairlift? I have to prioritize,” he says.

If the name change didn’t win locals over, Coleman’s work on the hill soon will. Since even before the deal was finalized, Coleman has been trudging across every inch of the 1,360-acre area. Growing up in Austin, Texas, he first skied Purgatory as a sophomore in high school, sparking a lifelong pursuit of powder.

“We saw him the other day in a flannel shirt with a chain saw. That’s what any skier would want for their ski area. He’s one of us. He’s a skier and he’s doing what he loves. It’s so refreshing,” says Bubba Iudice, who since 1995 has owned Bubba’s Boards shop a couple of miles down from the ski area.

Ask enough Durango locals about the lanky, long-haired new owner up at the ski hill and that word comes up a lot: refreshing.

“Who can be better sales people than the people who live there? We want each of our communities to be the first ambassadors for our resorts,” says Coleman, who moved his family — wife Tonia and two now-teenage kids — to Durango in 2005.

Coleman has owned New Mexico’s 200-acre Sipapu ski area since 2000. In early 2014, he bought the struggling Parajito Mountain in New Mexico, where he quickly and singlehandedly expanded the tree skiing with his long-barred Stihl chain saw.

“After skiing, one of my favorite things to do is run my chain saw,” he says.

Last fall, he and his team of investors stepped from the shadows of rural New Mexico with a big plan. They were buying Purgatory and the 777-acre Arizona Snowbowl and tying it into the team’s Sipapu and Parajito Mountain, creating a collective of Southwestern ski areas. (The deal for 100 percent of Snowbowl never reached fruition, so Coleman is a shareholder and partner at the resort.)

Three-state region

Targeting the drive-up market and thrilling skiers in the three-state region, Coleman offered a pass that delivers unlimited skiing at all four resorts.

It’s a page from the playbook of Vail Resorts, which has dominated the season-pass game for the past decade with its industry-changing Epic Pass delivering unlimited skiing at now 12 resorts.

To sell the four-resort Power Pass, Coleman and his team — a group of seven investors from Texas, Colorado and Arizona — are pumping up the ski experience. For the 2015-16 season, Coleman is spending $10 million at the four ski areas.

The improvements include the first new quad chairlift at Sipapu — the third new chairlift there in the past five years — and a new quad at Snowbowl, the first new chair there in 30 years.

About 60 percent of the sum is being spent at Purgatory, including the trophy of the season: a new high-speed quad Coleman installed over the summer on the backside of Purgatory. The chair climbs 1,500 vertical feet in about a mile and trims the 13-minute ride time on the old fixed-grip Legends Lift 8 triple to five minutes.

“This is such an amazing machine. It just hums,” says Coleman, climbing up the ladder to tour the innards of the high-speed, detachable quad chairlift, built by Grand Junction’s Leitner-Poma. (The previous night, at the Purgatory tent in downtown Durango, Coleman regaled visitors to the city’s busy annual Noel Night with hot chocolate and phone videos showing the yet-to-open chair rolling above the snowy Blackburn’s Bash run.)

There are a couple of new runs at Purgatory and upgraded snowmaking, including a mile of temporary hose running to the far western boundary — an engineering marvel that Coleman spent hours helping to design, build and install.

It all adds up to one of the largest one-time investments in the ski area in recent memory. The previous owners, Cobb and the Duncan family that founded Purgatory in 1965, had spent most of the past decade investing heavily on real estate improvements and the base village.

“My constant mantra is that the skiing comes first. That’s why we are here. You can stay at condos at a ski mountain, … but the skiing is the reason those condos are here,” Coleman says. “All the lodges and restaurants, those things are all important, but the skiing has got to be first.”

Courted by buyers

That’s a big shift from the Cobb ownership team. Cobb was courted by about a dozen potential buyers when he announced plans to sell last year. The offering included the resort, a utility company that powers the ski area and about 360 acres zoned for 1,365 residential units and 400,000 square feet of commercial space.

The mountain was profitable, with annual revenue climbing — throughout the country’s economic downturn — from $19.4 million in 2010 to $21.3 million in 2014. The resort’s earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization on that revenue increased from $3.6 million to $5.2 million in the same time frame.

Still, the confidential prospectus Cobb sent to potential buyers — and obtained by The Denver Post — emphasized the real estate play at the resort, noting a 2002 25-year development agreement to develop 1,649 homes and 410,000 square feet of commercial space on 600 acres of land near the base. More than 360 acres, most of the commercial space, and 1,300 units — including one of the largest collections of ski-in, ski-out homes — remain undeveloped

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Cobb had labored to secure that developable land and had big plans to evolve the low-cost day ski area into a major destination, like Telluride, the resort two hours away he helped establish as an early investor.

Cobb had an “outside-in view,” says Bob Kunkel, a former Vail executive who was vice president at Purgatory when Cobb bought his majority stake in 2000.

“He thought he bought another Telluride,” says Kunkel, who now directs the Durango Area Tourism Office. “He was promoting it with East Coasters and Californians, … hoping to sell them ski homes. Coleman, he is like the polar opposite. He seems to be starting with the local skiers and letting the word grow from there. He’s focusing on an inside-out view.”

Coleman bought only the resort and utility company. He left the real estate with the Cobb team. He might want it later, he said. But first, he wants to build a network of the Southwest’s best ski areas. And he wants to do most of that work himself.

Coleman is not unlike ski area founders Aaron and Jenny Brill at Silverton Mountain and Davey Pitcher at Wolf Creek, all of whom are heavily involved in every aspect of their operations.

The Brills and Pitcher spend most of their time on snow, using radios to reign. Same for Coleman. If there’s a tree down across a run or a snowmaking problem, Coleman is there. The radio in his pocket cackles with all the resort channels, from snowmaking to lift ops to ski patrol.

The return on his labor is selling lift tickets and season passes. The resort is busy. In 2014, Purgatory counted 319,000 skier visits, up from 301,000 in 2013 but down from 322,000 in 2010.

Maybe he’ll dabble in real estate at some point — his father was a prominent real estate developer in Austin — but for now, skiing is his highest priority.

“Getting their soul back”

“In a lot of ways it’s a return to our roots. It’s like these ski areas are getting their soul back,” says Scott Price, a longtime friend of Coleman’s who is part of his resort network’s investment team.

Coleman’s approach is to target the skiers overlooked by the Epic Pass: the drive-up vacationers who will be coming from cities across Texas, Oklahoma and the Southwest. They might not be the jet-setters Vail Resorts is aiming for, but they ski and spend enough to float a network of connected ski resorts in their region.

Coleman’s attention to skiing is another page from the Vail Resorts’ playbook: Elevate the mountain experience, and the side gigs — such as dining, lessons, lodging and real estate — will follow. That’s a fundamental shift from the late 1990s and early 2000s, when real estate revenue began to mirror ski revenue for resort titans such as Intrawest Corp. and skiers feared their sport would become an amenity for condo sales and a backdrop for Disney-esque villages.

That never happened. The real estate market crashed. Intrawest collapsed. And Vail Resorts, the largest player in the ski resort world today, harvests a vast majority of its revenue from skiing, selling passes, lessons and lunches. Vail Resorts last year logged a record $1.4 billion in revenue, and only 3 percent of that came from selling fancy homes. The company’s stock price soars to all-time highs almost daily, reaching more than $127 a share last week.

“The ski resorts are not that cyclical as far as the economy goes,” Coleman says. “The real estate at ski resorts is highly cyclical.”

That’s not to say it’s easy to just focus on skiing. In the 16 years he has owned Sipapu, the resort has never had an above-average snow year. That bothered him a lot in those first years.

“Now, I just don’t care. It’s weather. It’s a challenge. At some level, in a weird way, it’s more fun when it’s lean and you are figuring it all out and making it work anyway and you are making a great experience and you hear people say what a great time they had,” Coleman says. “We deal with weather and make it great no matter what. The reward is better that way.”

The radio in his hand cackles with a jubilant holler. The water has traveled more than mile through a rubber pipe in a hand-hewn ditch in the snow to the base of his new lift. The snow guns are screaming.

“I love that sound,” he says.

Jason Blevins: 303-954-1374, jblevins@denverpost.com or @jasonblevins