Soon he’s on his belly. Then his back. He slams into several moguls before scraping to a stop, laughing hard.

“You know, I’ve learned more in my life through my mistakes,” Horning says. “And let me tell you, there is nothing I’ve ever done that is more interesting or more frustrating than this.”

More than a year into his tenure as owner of the Telluride Ski & Golf Co., the Southern California commercial real estate mogul admits he has been learning on the job. He’s neck-deep in a maturing industry in which independent operators battle deep-pocketed corporations for a dwindling number of skiers.

“Everything that could be wrong with this business, except for the location, is wrong with this business,” he says. “So why not step up to the challengefi How many chances do you get in life for this kind of challengefi”

Horning’s on-the-job training as owner and operator hasn’t been entirely smooth. He fired the chief executive just 10 months after hiring him, and five other top-tier execs have left the company under his ownership. But a record snow year and skier visits that are running 10 percent ahead of last year have blurred many blunders.

Unlike other resort operators who thump their chests and crow about the strategic planning that fills their ski lodges and chair lifts, Horning is the first to admit he knows little about skiing.

“The credit for our success this year goes to the weather,” he says. “I’m not going to lie to you and say it’s because of what we’ve done. I am an ant on a log, floating down a creek and thinking I’m driving.”

But maybe, Horning says, a fresh perspective in an aging business could remedy a lot of the resort industry’s ailments. At least that’s what he was thinking when he spent $21 million for the resort company and another $23 million for several parcels of Mountain Village real estate — including an 18-hole golf course — in late 2003 as part of a joint venture he created with former owner and Sony scion Hideo “Joe” Morita.

“It’s a different perspective. We need that here,” says John Knowles, Telluride’s mountain manager, who has worked under four owners.

After all, George Gillett had no resort experience when he acquired Vail, and he became one of the most successful resort operators in the history of the business. The well-liked Gillett is credited with elevating Vail to world-class status.

“I don’t think there is a formula for success in this business,” says Ford Frick, a ski industry analyst with BBC Research & Consulting in Denver. “Certainly there are many businesses that could be invigorated with a new set of eyes that can maybe see new ideas.”

Horning’s doctor father helped him develop a chain of nursing homes that he eventually sold before moving into commercial real estate. His Newport Beach-based company, Newport Federal Financial, owns several office parks. Just six months before buying Telluride Ski & Golf, Horning and his son Chad paid $37.5 million for a 270,000-square-foot office park in Newport Beach.

That kind of success will be difficult to replicate in the resort business. Skier visits declined during the 1990s as the baby boomers who built the modern ski industry in the 1970s moved away from the sport. Industry giants like Intrawest and Vail Resorts now thrive by marketing themselves to aging visitors more interested in owning a family gathering place than spending eight hours a day on the slopes.

That’s a game Telluride Ski & Golf can’t really play. The company owns some real estate, but not enough to anchor the kind of village Intrawest is building at Copper Mountain and Winter Park. It owns no lodges, has no plans to develop a village and has no condos, single-family homes or lots for sale. It culls all its revenue from lift-ticket sales, summertime golf fees, ski lessons and on-mountain dining.

It is what the resort industry used to be: an uphill transportation company focused on keeping people happy and on the mountain. It hosted 368,000 visitors last season, making it the ninth-busiest ski area in Colorado.

Horning says his mountain can handle another 200,000 to 300,000, and he wants to lure them by building another 1,000 hotel rooms.

Horning came to his newest career almost by accident. With six California ranches, he was shopping for an Aspen investment home in late 2003 when his Realtor mentioned that Morita was trying to sell the ski area.

Horning remembers saying, “So whatfi” Then he visited Telluride and fell in love with a lifestyle and community unlike anything he has known in Southern California.

Horning tapped Ray Jacobi in April to run the ski area and gave him absolute authority. With almost three decades in the hospitality business, most recently as the chief operating officer for Dallas-based Rosewood Hotels and Resorts, Jacobi was eminently qualified.

But when Horning visited last Christmas, he was not pleased. The chili served in mountain eateries was lousy, he said, and guest services weren’t adequate. He fired Jacobi in February.

Since then, he has rewarded some longtime employees with management positions while ousting others, including Chris Ryman and Betsy Cole, the top executives for Booth Creek Ski Holdings who ran the ski area for Morita.

“I paid a lot of money to get rid of them. I told Joe I’d keep them, but then I found out how much I was paying them to treat this like a stepchild,” Horning says. “They are great, great people. They just have too many other things to worry about.”

While Horning may not know much about the ski industry, he says he knows how he wants his guests to be treated.

This season he says he is focused on safety, a new marketing campaign, better food and a new environmental program. After a 65-year-old woman was struck from behind, for example, Horning initiated a campaign that takes away skiing privileges for skiers and snowboarders who collide with anyone in front of them.

He also killed the resort’s 3-year-old marketing campaign shortly after he arrived. In it, animated storybook-like characters roasted visitors who wore designer outfits or talked on their cell phones. He replaced it with a new campaign that features quotes from actual visitors.

“The message there was wrong. It was a little snobbish,” says Ken Stone, a ski industry and marketing veteran who serves as an adviser to Horning. “Our new plan goes to the people who are our raving fans. They are the ones who will do our advertising.”

Also on Horning’s to-do list is building up his resort’s environmental performance. The company has not fared well in the last few Ski Area Citizen’s environmental scorecards, annual grass-roots evaluations by environmentalists that rank resorts’ ecological sensitivity.

San Miguel County Commissioner Art Goodtimes is among locals who applaud the effort.

“They seem pretty interested in working with the community and trying to develop more of an ecological niche for the ski area,” he says. “I think Telluride is well poised to occupy one of those green marketing niches. It could give us an advantage in the flat ski market.”

On the Net:www.tellurideskiresort.com/

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page D6.