Grouse Mountain sold

Glacier Park Inc. purchased Grouse Mountain Lodge in Whitefish on Wednesday, according to a press release from the company.

“We’re very pleased about it,” President and General Manager Cindy Ognjanov said Thursday. She was stranded at an airport in Colorado, trying to reach Montana from her office in Phoenix.

“Part of our business plan is growth. ... It’s an opportunity for us to have a year-round presence” in the Flathead Valley, she added. “We feel very fortunate.”

Glacier Park Inc. and its parent company, Phoenix-based Viad Corp., reportedly paid $10.5 million for the upscale lodge.

Ognjanov said the lodge’s acquisition will allow Glacier Park Inc. to build on the community presence it already has. “GPI is in Columbia Falls and has been for a number of years,” she said. “We have been in the local community for quite some time.”

Glacier Park Inc. operates the major lodges in and near Glacier National Park, including Many Glacier Hotel, Lake McDonald Lodge and Glacier Park Lodge, as well as the Prince of Wales Hotel in Waterton Lakes National Park.

Buzz Crutcher, who has co-owned the lodge with Tim Grattan since it opened July 1, 1984, said selling was not on the radar until Glacier Park Inc. approached them.

“We were not really interested in selling, and then they came along as a perfect apparition,” Crutcher said. “It was too good an opportunity to pass up.”

Crutcher said he had three criteria while negotiating with Glacier Park Inc., all of which the company met.

He wanted “to get the price I wanted, to place Grouse Mountain Lodge in the hands of someone that would respect it and help it grow even from where we had it, and provide additional corporate opportunities for a very, very long-ter\m staff,” he said.

Of Grouse Mountain’s approximately 90 employees, 20 to 25 have been there longer than 12 to 15 years, Crutcher added. Two have been at the lodge since its beginning.

Crutcher said no employees will lose their jobs as the lodge changes hands.

“Definitely part of the negotiations dealt with [helping] my employees have an opportunity to show their talents and their work ethic,” he said. “I’m very comfortable that’s going to happen.”

Built on U.S. 93 in Whitefish adjacent to the Whitefish Lake Golf Club, Grouse Mountain has 145 guest rooms. Depending on the time of year, rooms rent from $109 in the fall to $205 in the peak summer season.

Crutcher said Grattan was responsible for getting Grouse Mountain built in the first place.

In the late 1970s, Grattan built nine holes on the south side of the Whitefish Lake Golf Course.

When he leased it to the city of Whitefish for five years at $1 a year, the city voted to incorporate the golf course.

“It gave him the resort zoning he wanted,” Crutcher said. “He’d always had a dream to put a resort hotel on that golf course.”

With help from Crutcher and other investors, Grattan got the lodge built. Crutcher’s family bought out every partner but Grattan in 2004.

“We started out as business associates and ended up brothers,” Crutcher said.

Crutcher, who lives part of the year in Dallas, kept up with the business year-round via e-mail and monthly visits. After 26 1/2 years of owning the hotel, he said he didn’t know what he was going to do with his unexpected free time.

He and his wife will keep their house in Whitefish, he said, and he will devote more time to charity work.

Reporter Kristi Albertson may be reached at 758-4438 or at kalbertson@dailyinterlake.com.