It started as a joke on a Facebook forum in August, when news came that Mt. Bachelor, one of the country’s biggest ski areas, was for sale.

“I’ve got $20 and some old boards I can pitch in,” Dan Cochrane, a snowboarder from nearby Bend, Ore, wrote.

Chris Porter, another local snowboarder and a high school business teacher, did not know Cochrane. He responded with a more sober tone.

“If anybody is serious about doing a feasibility study, I’m all in and would love to chat,” Porter wrote.

As so began a quixotic quest, snowballing into winter, cheered by skiers and snowboarders in Oregon and beyond, to raise about $200 million and wrest Mt. Bachelor from the corporate titans of a consolidating industry.

“My first reaction was, ‘We can totally pull this off,’” Porter said recently.

Cochrane, 52, and Porter, 43, turned the breezy online exchange into a what-if conversation. Buzz built around the idea. The men met for the first time when local media interviewed them together. Porter had the foresight to establish a website and an email address for the venture.