To the disappointment of parents whose child died on one of its rides, Glenwood Caverns Adventure Park above Glenwood Springs will be sold to a Seattle firm for $14.8 million.
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Chief Bankruptcy Judge Kimberly Tyson ruled Tuesday that the only mountaintop amusement park in the U.S. can be sold to an ownership group 80% controlled by the company Gondola Ventures. Steve Beckley, the founder of Glenwood Caverns, will hold a 20% stake.
That is unwelcome news to Estifanos Dagne and Rahel Estifanos, whose daughter Wongel fell 100 feet to her death in 2021 on the park’s Haunted Mine Drop after workers there failed to notice her seat belt was not fastened. A jury awarded $205 million, which is being appealed.
The Estifanoses, who will receive $5 million from the sale of Glenwood Caverns in addition to $7 million from its insurance company, have fought the sale, believing the price is too low and that Beckley kept it that way as a member of both the selling and buying entities. A slower auction process and a sale in 2027 rather than 2026 would net a higher price, they argued.
“This sale is not commercially reasonable and does not capture anywhere near the full value,” Dan Caplis, the injury lawyer representing the Estifanoses, said at an August hearing.
“This is a spectacular place, your honor. This isn’t some carny on a corner.”
The Estifanoses pointed to their own expert’s valuation of Glenwood Caverns, which placed its worth at $35 million, and noted that it sold for $30 million just six years ago, in 2020. Then there was testimony from Robert Kramer, a current Glenwood Caverns board member, who was asked what the park was worth in September 2021, just before the death of Wongel Estifanos.
“Well, as I recall, in 2021, the park did about $5 million of EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization),” he testified. “So we probably would have said, hey, that park would be worth…let’s call it no less than seven and no more than nine or ten multiple.”
“So, let’s call it 35 to — let’s say, 35 to 50 million,” he estimated.
But Tyson was not convinced the park is worth anywhere near that today or even “worth what the investors paid for its ownership in 2020.” Those investors anticipated annual attendance of 300,000 by 2025. In reality, attendance has never topped 251,000 and was 211,000 in 2025. Beckley, the founder, believes Glenwood Springs lacks the hotel space to hit 300,000.
The judge mocked the $35 million valuation by Estifanos expert Baker Loch for relying on data from chain amusement parks, such as Six Flags. She said his calculation “brings to mind Mark Twain’s famous quote: ‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.’”
Tyson’s order Tuesday, which runs 60 pages, repeatedly concludes the $14.8 million that will be paid by the new Gondola Ventures-Steve Beckley ownership group is the highest price possible for Glenwood Caverns. Hilco, which will be paid $666,000 from the sale, reached out to 190 possible buyers, signed non-disclosure agreements with 32, and gave park tours to five. After more than a dozen rounds of bidding, the incoming ownership group won by $100,000.
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As for Beckley, “he went to great lengths to avoid any improper influence on the sale process,” recusing himself from all board votes involving the sale, the judge concluded. Plus, as a 17.5% owner today and just a 20% owner in the incoming ownership group, he controlled very little.
“The park has been a lifelong dream of mine,” Tyson quotes Beckley as testifying, noting he thought up the idea while a Mines student in 1982 and then opened the park in 1999.
“I’ve worked on it for over 45 years,” he testified. “And, you know, I took my wife on one of our first dates here to the park and had her go through the cave. And we’ve spent a lot of years developing the cave. And even though it’s clouded with this unfortunate accident, there’s still a lot of emotional ties with this park, with me and my family. So, I’d still like to stay involved.”
Tyson says that Beckley sat for nearly 10 hours of depositions and produced 19,000 pages of documents for the Estifanoses, yet the couple was “unable to produce any evidence supporting their theories of fraud or collusion.” In the end, the sale to Gondola Ventures and Beckley is fair.
“This is the opposite of a backroom deal improperly controlled by Mr. Beckley,” she wrote.
The current owners of Glenwood Caverns call that “a well-reasoned conclusion.”
“The park looks forward to partnering with our new ownership to continue providing memorable experiences for our guests,” they said in a statement. “We remain committed to preserving 250 local jobs and continuing to be an important part of the Glenwood Springs community.”
Through its lawyers, incoming ownership group GVC Glenwood LLC declined to comment.
“No matter who owns the park, we are going to keep doing everything we can to make the park safer,” Estifanos Dagne and Rahel Estifanos say. “We don’t want any other child to be killed the way our beautiful daughter was. And we don’t want any other parents to suffer this way.”
“We are shocked that even after the $205 million jury verdict, and the judge holding that it was a felonious killing, that Glenwood Caverns still hasn’t announced full criminal background checks and drug testing for all ride operators, including testing for marijuana,” they added. “We will continue to do everything we can to make sure that the jury’s verdict makes this park safer.”
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