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OPINION: Investment, at its peak

June 30th 12:17 pm | Lew Freedman Print this article   Email this article   Create a Shortlink for this article

Credit those wacky Austrians, but the next time Alaskans need money they can borrow an idea. Sell mountains.

Recently the community of Tyrol, home to Mt. Grosser Kinigat and Mt. Rosskopf, got a slap on the wrist from ticked-off politicians for actually cutting a deal to sell those mountains to a corporation.

A German software company named Ashampoo invested $176,000 (seems like a pittance to me) in the peaks and renamed them Ashampoo I and Askampoo II. The company said it plans to return the mountains, but keep the new names.

We live in an era of no shame, no sense of decorum, with a limited sense of what's right and what's wrong, and a belief in entitlement without paying for things. So this program should fit right in. OK, maybe not sell the real estate, just the naming rights. If Austria can sell a couple of chunks of the Alps, Alaskans can sell, or rent, really, some hunks of the Alaska Range, or any of its other wide selection of mountains.

After all, Alaska is Mountains Are Us.

I can just see the bucks rolling in. Who wouldn't want to splash its corporate name across Mt. McKinley, clearly the biggest catch?

Obviously, the sale would be what the market would bear, but I'm guessing renaming 20,320-foot McKinley, the tallest mountain in the Northern Hemisphere, would be a $10 million deal. Think Fortune 500 investors, or at least the companies that advertise on NFL games. I can see it now: Cialis Peak, or maybe Mt. Budweiser; perhaps Mt. Cadillac. And make sure you don't let a climber go alone to Mt. Costco.

Clearly, McKinley is the show-stopper, but Alaska has a wide variety of choice mountains that can go on the auction block, and not all are gigantic. Don't forget, in real estate it is location, location, location. That means Mt. Flattop could bring in the next biggest payday.

Flattop is next to Anchorage, except for cloudy days constantly in view, and is considered the most frequently climbed peak in Alaska. It is tradition to scale the mountain on the Saturday closest to the summer solstice and on the Saturday closest to the winter solstice, although attendance does drop off considerably in the winter.

I think we start naming rights bids for Flattop at $5 million. Sky's the limit, or at least the 3,500-foot summit. Sounds like a GoDaddy.com property. Or Mt. Verizon. Can you hear me now? Flattop is definitely a sleeper investment. Talk to your broker, or that baby in his crib.

While we're at it, the near-Chugach Mountain Range, on Anchorage's eastern edge, all fits that location definition. Some 280,000 people look up at them every day, practically all day, as they drive around. Just think how many page views that translates into.

Most any mountain situated in the horizon peaks, O'Malley, Wolverine, and the rest, should be worth $1 million in naming rights. Except North Suicide and South Suicide could present image problems if people remember the old names and identify them with the new names. Or maybe some local funeral home will ante up. After all, I never heard a funeral commercial on the radio backed by rock music until a recent visit to Anchorage.

While purchasers of naming rights to the mountains in the near-Chugach Range will pay a viewer's premium, there are other big-name mountains in Alaska that can command big bucks. Seward's Mt. Marathon, home to the famed July Fourth race, should bring back the big spenders, the ones who lost out on McKinley. Pretty good consolation prize.

Surely, Exxon will jump in on such bidding. So will Wal-Mart, General Electric and Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett's outfit. What do you give the man who has everything? All of the big boys will want in on this unique opportunity.

There are many other potential top sellers sprinkled around the state, from Mt. Saint Elias to Mt. Fairweather, from Mt. Blackburn to Mt. Hunter. Tall ones, short ones, Alaska has a deal for you.

Or Alaska could go in another direction altogether and just decree that Mt. McKinley is Denali. For free.

Lew Freedman is a former long-time Alaska journalist and author of numerous books about the state.

 


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