BOISE, Idaho — For Dallas retiree Richard Snyder, the thrill of his central Idaho getaway is gone.

Snyder built his 3,500-square-foot vacation retreat at Tamarack Resort four years ago, in an era marked by frenetic construction and new lifts whisking skiers to the 7,660-foot summit.

This week, he learned the lifts will be idle this winter — another casualty of the deepest recession since the Great Depression.

“It’s gone from, ‘I can’t wait to get out there, it’s so great,’ to ‘Why go?’” Snyder said.

Tamarack has come to a standstill as a Credit Suisse Group-led lending syndicate fights to recover at least a share of the $300 million the resort’s owners owe from a construction loan.

Tamarack’s majority owner Jean-Pierre Boespflug didn’t return a phone call seeking comment. Credit Suisse declined to comment.

Other Western ski resorts have also been hit by the recession. Southwestern Montana’s Moonlight Basin, near Big Sky, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection this month. In addition, the owners of the swanky members-only Yellowstone Club, also near Big Sky, liquidated opulent furniture in November. But Moonlight Basin and the Yellowstone Club will still fire up their lifts this month.

Before Tamarack’s Christmas 2004 opening, Boespflug billed the place as America’s newest four-season getaway.

Tennis star Andre Agassi pledged to build a luxury hotel. President George W. Bush visited in 2005, fishing on nearby Lake Cascade with then-Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne, the man who would soon become Bush’s U.S. Interior secretary.

Then came 2008 and the real-estate crash. Agassi double-faulted on his hotel plans and workers laid down their hammers as Tamarack’s owners ran into trouble with their bankers. A court-appointed receiver running operations shuttered the resort in March, as Credit Suisse refused to cover mounting losses. Now, Bank of America is fighting in court to repossess the ski lifts.

In a sign of just how far it’s fallen, Tamarack has become a target for bargain hunters. One chalet that sold for $900,000 in 2005 recently changed hands for just $200,000.

Matthew Castrigno, whose Idaho Resort Rentals in nearby Donnelly manages about 30 Tamarack properties for owners, said his business has been brisk as rental prices plunged by half, to $200 nightly for a three-bedroom chalet.

In the latest setback, a homeowners group pushing to fire up lifts by Christmas said their proposal failed when Mexico-based Inmobiliaria Las Fuentes, S.A. withdrew its $7.9 million loan offer.

Inmobiliaria had demanded to be repaid before the lenders led by Credit Suisse. The Zurich-based bank vowed to fight the plan, and the Mexican company’s appetite for a costly legal battle simply wore thin, according to the West Mountain Preservation Management Association homeowners group.

William Brown, a retiree in Portland who bought his Tamarack cottage in 2006, is now banking on the foreclosure trial in March pitting Credit Suisse against Tamarack over the defaulted construction loan to resolve the nearly two-year legal fight and provide an opening for new investors to save the resort.

“I think it will reopen, but I have no idea when,” Brown said. “There is a lot of investment that’s gone into the ground there. So when the world recovers in a couple of years, someone might step up and decide to move it forward.”