100-year-old owner bet big on Alta when he bought the Peruvian Lodge — and won

When John Cahill considered buying the Alta Peruvian Lodge in 1968, the gossip around the tiny town of less than 400 was that he was a fool.

A bigger, more modern ski resort called Snowbird was being built just down State Route 210. With fewer miles and fewer avalanche paths between it and the growing number of skiers settling in the Salt Lake Valley, the thinking went, why would they keep driving up to Alta Ski Area?

“I think that many people in Alta thought that Snowbird was going to be the end of Alta,” Cahill told The Tribune. “But this one guy I know said, ‘Snowbird is going to be the beginning of Alta.’ So I bought the Peruvian Lodge in the summer of 1970.”

That one guy? It was Cahill.

“It was,” he said, “the best thing I ever bought.”

Fifty-four years later, Cahill still owns the joint. On April 11, he celebrated his 100th birthday there with a prime rib dinner for 143 of some of his closest, and probably also youngest, friends.

Cahlll wasn’t an experienced hotelier when he purchased the Peruvian. He was a tax attorney living in Milwaukee. He wasn’t even a very good skier, he admits. He picked up the sport later in life and made most of his turns at ski hills in Wisconsin.

Then again, the Peruvian wasn’t much of a lodge when it came into Cahill’s hands, either. It was the conglomeration of a couple World War II Army barracks shoved together with a pool attached. The barracks had been shipped by the lodge’s original owner, Ed Gibbs of Salt Lake City, from Brigham City up Little Cottonwood Canyon Road to the entrance to Alta in 1948.

More than a dozen years after Gibbs established the Peruvian, one of Cahill’s clients dragged him to the lodge to ski during a lull in a business trip to Idaho. On their first morning there, as the young lawyer stood on the deck gazing up at a sunbathed and snow-covered Alf’s High Rustler, the steepest run in the ski area, he felt an emotion akin to what overtook the settlers when they looked down on the Salt Lake Valley a hundred years earlier: “This is the place.”

“It was stunningly beautiful,” he said. “Alta is a magical place.”

Cahill made the lodge his place shortly after he and his wife Rosemary separated. He gave it an Austrian theme and expanded the kitchen, pantry and office. In the ‘80s, he added waterfall glass windows in the dining room, where visitors still receive three meals a day. Perhaps most notably, he transformed a tiny, corner bar into the P-Dog — a lively, locals’ favorite for apres ski.

“The lodge I bought,” Cahill said, “is not the lodge that is there today.”

Cahill cops to having had no idea how to run a lodge when he bought the Peruvian. It appealed to him, though, as a man who enjoys both mental and physical challenges. For example, he went back to college at age 60, while still running the Peruvian, and got his master’s degree in Spanish at the University of Utah. He also took up running around that time and finished his first marathon at age 65. In that race, the St. George Marathon, he set an age-group record by 40 minutes. For years afterward, he would run nearly a race a week up until his final marathon, back in St. George, at age 85.

Part of the allure of racing was experiencing new places and cultures. For most of the past 30 years he has taken his family — which includes nine children and their spouses, kids and grandkids — on trips to “interesting places.” That includes Machu Picchu in Peru, the Galápagos Islands, the Dominican Republic and, last year at age 99, to the pyramids in Egypt. This spring he wanted to take them to Ethiopia — one of his favorite countries — but organizing it became too much for him, he said. Plus, Rosemary, with whom he was still close, died last month at age 98.

Cahill has bought and sold numerous lodging properties since moving to Utah, including what is now the Peaks Lodge in Park City and a bed-and-breakfast in Mexico. He’s received several offers on the Peruvian, he said, but never seriously entertained any of them.

“I think he’s afraid of what would happen to it if he sold it,” said Todd Collins, Cahill’s son-in-law and the general manager of the lodge.

Instead, Cahill tries to keep his family involved in the business. Tom Cahill is the president of the Alta Hotel Group, which includes the Peruvian as well as a hotel in Taos, New Mexico, and another in Ketchum, Idaho. A daughter-in-law is an accountant for the collective, and all nine of Cahill’s children serve on its board. Collins has been the manager for 27 years and his son, Evan, worked the front desk this year.

The Peruvian may have been the best thing he ever bought. In the last century, however, Cahill said nothing has brought him more pride than his children.

“That’s,” he said, “without any doubt, my legacy.”