The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Sept. 11. It dropped for free subscribers on Sept. 19. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:WhoMatt Davies, General Manager of Cypress Mountain, British ColumbiaRecorded onAugust 5, 2024About Cypress MountainClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Boyne ResortsLocated in: West Vancouver, British ColumbiaYear founded: 1970Pass affiliations:* Ikon Pass: 7 days, no blackouts* Ikon Base Pass: 5 days, holiday blackoutsClosest neighboring ski areas: Grouse Mountain (:28), Mt. Seymour (:55) – travel times vary considerably given weather, time of day, and time of yearBase elevation: 2,704 feet/824 meters (base of Raven Ridge quad)Summit elevation: 4,720 feet/1,440 meters (summit of Mt. Strachan)Vertical drop: 2,016 feet/614 meters total | 1,236 feet/377 meters on Black Mountain | 1,720 feet/524 meters on Mt. StrachanSkiable Acres: 600 acresAverage annual snowfall: 245 inches/622 cmTrail count: 53 (13% beginner, 43% intermediate, 44% difficult)Lift count: 7 (2 high-speed quads, 3 fixed-grip quads, 1 double, 1 carpet – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Cypress’ lift fleet)View historic Cypress Mountain trailmaps on skimap.org.Why I interviewed himI’m stubbornly obsessed with ski areas that are in places that seem impractical or improbable: above Los Angeles, in Indiana, in a New Jersey mall. Cypress doesn’t really fit into this category, but it also sort of does. It makes perfect sense that a ski area would sit north of the 49th Parallel, scraping the same snow train that annually buries the mountains from Mt. Bachelor all the way to Whistler. It seems less likely that a 2,000-vertical-foot ski area would rise just minutes outside of Canada’s third-largest city, one known for its moderate climate. But Cypress is exactly that, and offers – along with its neighbors Grouse Mountain and Mt. Seymour – a bite of winter anytime cityfolk want to open the refrigerator door.There’s all kinds of weird stuff going on here, actually. Why is this little locals’ bump – a good ski area, and a beautiful one, but no one’s destination – decorated like a four-star general of skiing? 2010 Winter Olympics host mountain. Gilded member of Alterra’s Ikon Pass. A piece of Boyne’s continent-wide jigsaw puzzle. It’s like you show up at your buddy’s one-room hunting cabin and he’s like yeah actually I built like a Batcave/wave pool/personal zoo with rideable zebras underneath. And you’re like dang Baller who knew?What we talked aboutOffseason projects; snowmaking evolution since Boyne’s 2001 acquisition; challenges of getting to 100 percent snowmaking; useful parking lot snow; how a challenging winter became “a pretty incredible experience for the whole team”; last winter: el nino or climate change?; why working for Whistler was so much fun; what happened when Vail Resorts bought Whistler – “I don’t think there was a full understanding of the cultural differences between Canadians and Americans”; the differences between Cypress and Whistler; working for Vail versus working for Boyne – “the mantra at Boyne Resorts is that ‘we’re a company of ski resorts, not a ski resort company’”; the enormous and potentially enormously transformative Cypress Village development; connecting village to ski area via aerial lift; future  lift upgrades, including potential six-packs; potential night-skiing expansion; paid parking incoming; the Ikon Pass; the 76-day pass guarantee; and Cypress’ Olympic legacy.Why now was a good time for this interviewMountain town housing is most often framed as an intractable problem, ingrown and malignant and impossible to reset or rethink or repair. Too hard to do. But it is not hard to do. It is the easiest thing in the world. To provide more housing, municipalities must allow developers to build more housing, and make them do it in a way that is dense and walkable, that is mixed with commerce, that gives people as many ways to move around without a car as possible.This is not some new or brilliant idea. This is simply how humans built villages for about 10,000 years, until the advent of the automobile. Then we started building our spaces for machines instead of for people. This was a mistake, and is the root problem of every mountain town housing crisis in North America. That and the fact that U.S. Americans make no distinction between the hyper-thoughtful new urbanist impulses described here and the sprawling shitpile of random buildings that are largely the backdrop of our national life. The very thing that would inject humanity into the mountains is recast as a corrupting force that would destroy a community’s already-compromised-by-bad-design character.Not that it will matter to our impossible American brains, but Canada is about to show us how to do this. Over the next 25 years, a pocket of raw forest hard against Cypress’ access road will sprout a city of 3,711 homes that will house thousands of people. It will be a human-scaled, pedestrian-first community, a city neighborhood dropped onto a mountainside. A gondola could connect the complex to Cypress’ lifts thousands of feet up the mountain – more cars off the road. It would look like this (the potential aerial lift is not depicted here):Here’s how the whole thing would set up against the mountain:And here’s what it would be like at ground level:Like wow that actually resembles something that is not toxic to the human soul. But to a certain sort of Mother Earth evangelist, the mere suggestion of any sort of mountainside development is blasphemous. I understand this impulse, but I believe that it is misdirected, a too-late reflex against the subdivision-off-an-exit-ramp Build- A-Bungalow mentality that transformed this country into a car-first sprawlscape. I believe a reset is in order: to preserve large tracts of wilderness, we should intensely develop small pieces of land, and leave the rest alone. This is about to happen near Cypress. We should pay attention.More on Cypress Village:* West Vancouver Approves ‘Transformational’ Plan for Cypress Village Development - North Shore News* West Vancouver Approves Cypress Village Development with Homes for Nearly 7,000 People - UrbanizedWhat I got wrong* I said that Cypress had installed the Easy Rider quad in 2021, rather than 2001 (the correct year).* I also said that certain no-ski zones on Vail Mountain’s trailmap were labelled as “lynx habitat.” They are actually labelled as “wildlife habitat.” My confusion stemmed from the resort’s historical friction with the pro-Lynxers.Why you should ski Cypress MountainYou’ll see it anyway on your way north to Whistler: the turnoff to Cypress Bowl Road. Four switchbacks and you’re there, to a cut in the mountains surrounded by chairlifts, neon-green Olympic rings standing against the pines.This is not Whistler and no one will try to tell you that it is, including the guy running the place, who put in two decades priming the machine just up the road. But Cypress is not just a waystation either, or a curiosity, or a Wednesday evening punchcard for Vancouver Cubicle Bro. Two thousand vertical feet is a lot of vertical feet. It often snows here by the Dumpster load. Off the summits, spectacular views, panoramic, sweeping, a jigsaw interlocking of the manmade and natural worlds. The terrain is varied, playful, plentiful. And when the snow settles and the trees fill in, a bit of an Incredible Hulk effect kicks on, as this mild-mannered Bruce Banner of a ski area flexes into something bigger and beefier, an unlikely superhero of the Vancouver heights.But Cypress is also not a typical Ikon Pass resort: 600 acres, six chairlifts, not a single condo tucked against the hill. It’s a ski area that’s just a ski area. It rains a lot. A busy-day hike up from the most distant parking lot can eat an irrevocable part of your soul (new shuttles this year should help that). Snowmaking, by Boyne standards, is limited, (though punchy for B.C.). The lift fleet, also by Boyne standards, feels merely adequate, rather than the am-I-in-Austria-or-Montana explosive awe that hits you at the base of Big Sky.  To describe a ski area as both spectacular and ordinary feels like a contradiction (or, worse, lazy on my part). But Cypress is in fact both of these things. Lodged in a national park, yet part of Vancouver’s urban fabric. Brown-dirt trails in February and dang-where’d-I-leave-my-giraffe deep 10 days later. Just another urban ski area, but latched onto a pass with Aspen and Alta, a piece of a company that includes Big Sky and Big Cottonwood and a pair of New England ski areas that dwarf their Brother Cypress. A stop on the way north to Whistler, but much more than that as well.Podcast NotesOn the 2010 Winter OlympicsA summary of Cypress’ Olympic timeline, from the mountain’s history page:On Whistler BlackcombWe talk quite a bit about Whistler, where Davies worked for two decades. Here’s a trailmap so you don’t have to go look it up:On animosity between the merger of Whistler and BlackcombI covered this when I hosted Whistler COO Belinda Trembath on the podcast a few months back.On neighborsCypress is one of three ski areas seated just north of Vancouver. The other two are Grouse Mountain and Mt. Seymour, which we allude to briefly in the podcast. Here are some visuals:On Boyne’s building bingeI won’t itemize everything here, but over the past half decade or so, Boyne has leapt ahead of everyone else in North American in adoption of hyper-modern lift technology. The company operates all five eight-place chairlift in the United States, has built four advanced six-packs, just built a rocketship-speedy tram at Big Sky, has rebuilt and repurposed four high-speed quads within its portfolio, and has upgraded a bucketload of aging fixed-grip chairs. And many more lifts, including two super-advanced gondolas coming to Big

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and to support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.WhoChauncy and Kelli Johnson, Founders of the Snow Angel FoundationRecorded onJune 17, 2024About the Snow Angel FoundationFrom their website:Our mission is to prevent ski and snowboard collisions so that everyone can Ride Another Day! We accomplish our mission through education and awareness to promote safe skiing and snowboarding behaviors. The Foundation was started as a result of a life changing collision and a desire to ensure that these types of collisions never happen again. Since 2016, we have been creating a social movement among skiers and snowboarders with the “Ride Another Day” campaign. Snow Angel Foundation, founded in 2023, is the vehicle that will expand this campaign and transform the culture of skiing and snowboarding into a safety-oriented community. Partner with us so we can all Ride Another Day!The “life changing collision” referred to above resulted in the death of this little girl, Elise Johnson, in 2010:Why I interviewed themThe first time I saw this, I felt like I got punched:I was skiing Snowbird, ground zero for aggressive, full-throttle skiing. The things you see there. The terrain invites it. The bottomless snow enables it. The cultish battle cries of packed-full tram cars demand it. Snowbird is a circus, an amphitheater, a place that scares the s**t out of anyone with a pulse. There aren’t many beginners there. Or even intermediates. You’re far more likely to smash your face into a rock than clip some meandering 8-year-old’s tails when you drop into Silver Fox.But the contrast between that mountain and that message was powerful. For a subset of skiers, every ski day must be this sort of ski day, every run a showcase of their buckle-bending, torque-busting snow arcs. “Out of My Path, Mortals. You are all just traffic cones around which I dance. Admire me!” And it’s like damn bro how are you single?That ski behaviors aren’t transferable from High Baldy to Baby Thunder is a memo that too many skiers have yet to receive. Is anyone else tired of this? Of World Cup trials on blue groomers? Of the social media braggadocio and bravado about skiing six times the speed of light? Of knuckleheads conflating speed with skill? When I talk about The Brobots, this is a big part of what I mean: the sense of entitlement to do as they please with shared space, without regard for the impact their actions could have on others.I hope one or two of these people will listen to this podcast. And I hope they will stop threading the Buttercup Runout back to the Carebear Quad as though they were navigating an X-Wing through an asteroid belt. Speed is a big part of skiing’s appeal. The power and adrenaline of it, the thrill. But there are places on the bump where it’s appropriate to tuck and fly, and places where it just isn’t. And I wish more of us knew the difference.What we talked aboutElise just “had a lot of light”; being a ski family; an awful Christmas Eve at Hogadon Basin; waking up six weeks later; recovering from grief; why the family kept skiing; transforming pain into activism; slow the F down Brah; who’s doing a good job on safety; ski industry opposition to injury- and death-reporting regulations; and what we learned from the mass adoption of helmets.Podcast NotesOn couples on the podcastI mentioned I’ve hosted several husband-wife combinations on the podcast, mostly the owners of ski areas:* Plattekill, New York owners Laszlo and Danielle Vajtay* Paul Bunyan, Wisconsin owners TJ and Wendy Kerscher* West Mountain, New York owners Sara and Spencer MontgomeryOn Antelope ButteThe Johnsons’ local is Antelope Butte, a little double-chair bump in northern Wyoming:On Snowy RangeThe Johnsons also spent time skiing Snowy Range, also in Wyoming:On Hogadon BasinThe incident in question went down on the Dreadnaught run at Hogadon Basin, a 600-vertical-foot bump 20 minutes south of Casper, Wyoming:On 50 First DatesBy her own account, Kelli’s life for six weeks went about like this:On the Colorado Sun’s research on industry opposition to safety-reporting requirementsFrom April 8, 2024:[13-year-old] Silas [Luckett] is one of thousands of people injured on Colorado ski slopes every winter. With the state’s ski hills posting record visitation in the past two seasons — reaching 14.8 million in 2022-23 — it would appear that the increasing frequency of injuries coincides with the rising number of visits. We say “appear” because, unlike just about every other industry in the country, the resort industry does not disclose injury data. …Ski resorts do not release injury reports. The ski resort industry keeps a tight grasp on even national injury data. Since 1980, the National Ski Areas Association provides select researchers with injury data for peer-reviewed reports issued every 10 years by the National Ski Areas Association. The most recent 10-year review of ski injuries was published in 2014, looking at 13,145 injury reports from the 2010-11 ski season at resorts that reported 4.6 million visits.The four 10-year reports showed a decline in skier injuries from 3.1 per 1,000 visitors in 1980-81 to 2.7 in 1990-91 to 2.6 in 2000-01 to 2.5 in 2010-11. Snowboarder injuries were 3.3 in 1990, 7.0 in 2000 and 6.1 in 2010.For 1990-91, the nation’s ski areas reported 46.7 million skier visits, 2000-01 was 57.3 million and 2010-11 saw a then all–time high of 60.5 million visits. …The NSAA’s once-a-decade review of injuries from 2020-21 was delayed during the pandemic and is expected to land later this year. But the association’s reports are not available to the public [the NSAA disputes this, and provided a copy of the report to The Storm; I’ll address this in more detail in an upcoming, already-recorded podcast with NSAA president Kelly Pawlak].When Colorado state Sen. Jessie Danielson crafted a bill in 2021 that would have required ski areas to publish annual injury statistics, the industry blasted the plan, arguing it would be an administrative burden and confuse the skiing public. It died in committee.“When we approached the ski areas to work on any of the details in the bill, they refused,” Danielson, a Wheat Ridge Democrat, told The Sun in 2021. “It makes me wonder what it is that they are hiding. It seems to me that an industry that claims to have safety as a top priority would be interested in sharing the information about injuries on their mountains.”The resort industry vehemently rebuffs the notion that ski areas do not take safety seriously.Patricia Campbell, the then-president of Vail Resorts’ 37-resort mountain division and a 35-year veteran of the resort industry, told Colorado lawmakers considering the 2021 legislation that requiring ski resorts to publish safety reports was “not workable” and would create an “unnecessary burden, confusion and distraction.”Requiring resorts to publish public safety plans, she said, would “trigger a massive administrative effort” that could redirect resort work from other safety measures.“Publishing safety plans will not inform skiers about our work or create a safer ski area,” Campbell told the Colorado Senate’s Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee in April 2021.The Sun also compiles an annual report of deaths at Colorado ski areas.On helmet cultureProblems often seem intractable, the world fossilized. But sometimes simple things change so completely, and in such a short period of time, that it’s almost impossible to imagine the world before. I was 19, for example, the first time I used the internet, and 23 when I acquired its evil cousin, the cellphone (which would not be usefully linked to the web for about another decade).In our little ski world, the thing-that-is-now-ubiquitous-that-once-barely-existed is helmets. As recently as the 1990s, you likely weren’t dropping a bucket on your skull unless you were running gates on a World Cup circuit. It’s not that we didn’t know about them – helmets have been around since, like, the Bronze Age. But nobody wore them. Nobody. Then, suddenly, everyone did. Or, well, it seemed sudden, though it’s surprising to see that, as recently as the 2002-03 ski season, only around 25 percent of skiers bothered to strap on a helmet:I was a late adopter when I first wore a helmet in 2016. And when I finally got there, I realized, hey, this thing is warm. It also came in handy when I slammed the back of my head into a downed tree at Jay Peak last March.I don’t have hard stats on helmet usage going back to the 1990s, but check out this circa 1990s casual ski day vid at an unidentified U.S. mountain:I counted one helmet. On a kid. To underscore the point, here’s a circa 1990s promo for Steamboat Ski Patrol, which captures the big-mountain crew rocking knit caps and goggles:The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 54/100 in 2024, and number 554 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on July 27. It dropped for free subscribers on Aug. 3. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:WhoPeter Disch, General Manager of Mount Sunapee, New Hampshire (following this interview, Vail Resorts promoted Disch to Vice President of Mountain Operations at its Heavenly ski area in California; he will start that new position on Aug. 5, 2024; as of July 27, Vail had yet to name the next GM of Sunapee.)Recorded onJune 24, 2024About Mount SunapeeClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: The State of New Hampshire; operated by Vail ResortsLocated in: Newbury, New HampshireYear founded: 1948Pass affiliations:* Epic Pass, Epic Local Pass, Northeast Value Epic Pass: unlimited access* Northeast Midweek Epic Pass: midweek access, including holidaysClosest neighboring (public) ski areas: Pats Peak (:28), Whaleback (:29), Arrowhead (:29), Ragged (:38), Veterans Memorial (:42), Ascutney (:45), Crotched (:48), Quechee (:50), Granite Gorge (:51), McIntyre (:53), Saskadena Six (1:04), Tenney (1:06)Base elevation: 1,233 feetSummit elevation: 2,743 feetVertical drop: 1,510 feetSkiable Acres: 233 acresAverage annual snowfall: 130 inchesTrail count: 67 (29% beginner, 47% intermediate, 24% advanced)Lift count: 8 (2 high-speed quads, 1 fixed-grip quad, 2 triples, 3 conveyors – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Mount Sunapee’s lift fleet.)History: Read New England Ski History’s overview of Mount SunapeeView historic Mount Sunapee trailmaps on skimap.org.Why I interviewed himNew Hampshire state highway 103 gives you nothing. Straight-ish and flattish, lined with trees and the storage-unit detritus of the American outskirts, nothing about the road suggests a ski-area approach. Looping south off the great roundabout-ish junction onto Mt. Sunapee Road still underwhelms. As though you’ve turned into someone’s driveway, or are seeking some obscure historical monument, or simply made a mistake. Because what, really, could be back there to ski?And then you arrive. All at once. A parking lot. The end of the road. The ski area heaves upward on three sides. Lifts all over. The top is up there somewhere. It’s not quite Silverton-Telluride smash-into-the-backside-of-a-box-canyon dramatic, but maybe it’s as close as you get in New Hampshire, or at least southern New Hampshire, less than two hours north of Boston.But the true awe waits up high. North off the summit, Lake Sunapee dominates the foreground, deep blue-black or white-over-ice in midwinter, like the flat unfinished center of a puzzle made from the hills and forests that rise and roll from all sides. Thirty miles west, across the lowlands where the Connecticut River marks the frontier with Vermont, stands Okemo, interstate-wide highways of white strafing the two-mile face.Then you ski. Sunapee does not measure big but it feels big, an Alpine illusion exploding over the flats. Fifteen hundred vertical feet is plenty of vertical feet, especially when it rolls down the frontside like a waterfall. Glades everywhere, when they’re live, which is less often than you’d hope but more often than you’d think. Good runs, cruisers and slashers, a whole separate face for beginners, a 374-vertical-foot ski-area-within-a-ski-area, perfectly spliced from the pitched main mountain.Southern New Hampshire has a lot of ski areas, and a lot of well-run ski areas, but not a lot of truly great pure ski areas. Sunapee, as both an artwork and a plaything, surpasses them all, the ribeye on the grill stacked with hamburgers, a delightful and filling treat.What we talked aboutSunapee enhancements ahead of the 2024-25 winter; a new parking lot incoming; whether Sunapee considered paid parking to resolve its post-Covid, post-Northeast Epic Pass launch backups; the differences in Midwest, West, and Eastern ski cultures; the big threat to Mount Sunapee in the early 1900s; the Mueller family legacy and “The Sunapee Difference”; what it means for Vail Resorts to operate a state-owned ski area; how cash flows from Sunapee to Cannon; Sunapee’s masterplan; the long-delayed West Bowl expansion; incredible views from the Sunapee summit; the proposed Sun Bowl-North Peak connection; potential upgrades for the Sunapee Express, North Peak, and Spruce lifts; the South Peak beginner area; why Sunapee built a ski-through lighthouse; why high-speed ropetows rule; the potential for Sunapee night-skiing; whether Sunapee should be unlimited on the Northeast Value Pass (which it currently is); and why Vail’s New Hampshire mountains are on the same Epic Day Pass tier as its Midwest ski areas.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewShould states own ski areas? And if so, should state agencies run those ski areas, or should they be contracted to private operators?These are fraught questions, especially in New York, where three state-owned ski areas (Whiteface, Gore, and Belleayre) guzzle tens of millions of dollars in new lift, snowmaking, and other infrastructure while competing directly against dozens of tax-paying, family-owned operations spinning Hall double chairs that predate the assassination of JFK. The state agency that operates the three ski areas plus Lake Placid’s competition facilities, the Olympic Regional Development Authority (ORDA), reported a $47.3 million operating loss for the fiscal year ending March 30, following a loss of $29.3 million the prior year. Yet there are no serious proposals at the state-government level to even explore what it would mean to contract a private operator to run the facilities.If New York state officials were ever so inspired, they could look 100 miles east, where the State of New Hampshire has run a sort of A-B experiment on its two owned ski areas since the late 1990s. New Hampshire’s state parks association has operated Cannon Mountain since North America’s first aerial tram opened on the site in 1938. For a long time, the agency operated Mount Sunapee as well. But in 1998, the state leased the ski area to the Mueller family, who had spent the past decade and a half transforming Okemo from a T-bar-clotted dump into one of Vermont’s largest and most modern resorts.Twenty-six years later, that arrangement stands: the state owns and operates Cannon, and owns Sunapee but leases it to a private operator (Vail Resorts assumed or renewed the lease when they purchased the Muellers’ Triple Peaks company, which included Okemo and Crested Butte, Colorado, in 2018). As part of that contract, a portion of Sunapee’s revenues each year funnel into a capital fund for Cannon.So, does this arrangement work? For Vail, for the state, for taxpayers, for Sunapee, and for Cannon? As we consider the future of skiing, these are important questions: to what extent should the state sponsor recreation, especially when that form of recreation competes directly against private, tax-paying businesses who are, essentially, subsidizing their competition? It’s tempting to offer a reflexive ideological answer here, but nuance interrupts us at ground-level. Alterra, for instance, leases and operates Winter Park from the City of Denver. Seems logical, but a peak-day walk-up Winter Park lift ticket will cost you around $260 for the 2024-25 winter. Is this a fair one-day entry fee for a city-owned entity?The story of Mount Sunapee, a prominent and busy ski area in a prominent and busy ski state, is an important part of that larger should-government-own-ski-areas conversation. The state seems happy to let Vail run their mountain, but equally happy to continue running Cannon. That’s curious, especially in a state with a libertarian streak that often pledges allegiance by hoisting two middle fingers skyward. The one-private-one-public arrangement was a logical experiment that, 26 years later, is starting to feel a bit schizophrenic, illustrative of the broader social and economic complexities of changing who runs a business and how they do that. Is Vail Resorts better at running commercial ski centers than the State of New Hampshire? They sure as hell should be. But are they? And should Sunapee serve as a template for New York and the other states, counties, and cities that own ski areas? To decide if it works, we first have to understand how it works, and we spend a big part of this interview doing exactly that.What I got wrong* When listing the Vail Resorts with paid parking lots, I accidentally slipped Sunapee in place of Mount Snow, Vermont. Only the latter has paid parking.* When asking Disch about Sunapee’s masterplan, I accidentally tossed Sunapee into Vail’s Peak Resorts acquisition in 2019. But Peak never operated Sunapee. The resort entered Vail’s portfolio as part of its acquisition of Triple Peaks – which also included Okemo and Crested Butte – in 2018.* I neglected to elaborate on what a “chondola” lift is. It’s a lift that alternates (usually six-person) chairs with (usually eight-person) gondola cabins. The only active such lift in New England is at Sunday River, but Arizona Snowbowl, Northstar, Copper Mountain, and Beaver Creek operate six/eight-passenger chondolas in the American West. Telluride runs a short chondola with four-person chairs and four-person gondola cars.* I said that the six New England states combined covered an area “less than half the size of Colorado.” This is incorrect: the six New England states, combined, cover 71,987 square miles; Colorado is 103,610 square miles.Why you should ski Mount SunapeeSki area rankings are hard. Properly done, they include dozens of inputs, considering every facet of the mountain across the breadth of a season from the point of view of multiple skiers. Sunapee on an empty midweek powder day might be the best day of your life. Sunapee on a Saturday when it hasn’t snowed in three weeks but everyone in Boston shows up anyway might be the worst. For this reaso

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on July 7. It dropped for free subscribers on July 14. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:WhoChip Chase, Founder and Owner of White Grass Ski Touring Center, West VirginiaRecorded onMay 16, 2024About White Grass Touring CenterClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Chip ChaseLocated in: Davis, West VirginiaYear founded: 1979 (at a different location)Pass affiliations: Indy Pass and Indy+ Pass: 2 days, no blackoutsClosest neighboring ski areas: Canaan Valley (8 minutes), Timberline (11 minutes)Base elevation: 3,220 feet (below the lodge)Summit elevation: 4,463 feet (atop Weiss Knob)Vertical drop: 1,243 feetSkiable Acres: 2,500Average annual snowfall: 140 inchesTrail count: 42 (50 km of maintained trails)Lift count: NoneWhy I interviewed himOne habit I’ve borrowed from the mostly now-defunct U.S. ski magazines is their unapologetic focus always and only on Alpine skiing. This is not a snowsports newsletter or a wintertime recreation newsletter or a mountain lifestyle newsletter. I’m not interested in ice climbing or snowshoeing or even snowboarding, which I’ve never attempted and probably never will. I’m not chasing the hot fads like Norwegian goat fjording, which is where you paddle around glaciers in an ice canoe, with an assist tow from a swimming goat. And I’ve narrowed the focus much more than my traditionalist antecedents, avoiding even passing references to food, drink, lodging, gear, helicopters, snowcats, whacky characters, or competitions of any kind (one of the principal reasons I ski is that it is an unmeasured, individualistic sport).Which, way to squeeze all the fun out of it, Stu. But shearing off 90 percent of all possible subject matter allows me to cover the small spectrum of things that I do actually care about – the experience of traveling to and around a lift-served snowsportskiing facility, with a strange side obsession with urban planning and land-use policy – over the broadest possible geographic area (currently the entire United States and Canada, though mostly that’s Western Canada right now because I haven’t yet consumed quantities of ayahuasca sufficient to unlock the intellectual and spiritual depths where the names and statistical profiles of all 412* Quebecois ski areas could dwell).So that’s why I don’t write about cross-country skiing or cross-country ski centers. Sure, they’re Alpine skiing-adjacent, but so is lift-served MTB and those crazy jungle gym swingy-bridge things and ziplining and, like, freaking ice skating. If I covered everything that existed around a lift-served ski area, I would quickly grow bored with this whole exercise. Because frankly the only thing I care about is skiing.Downhill skiing. The uphill part, much as it’s fetishized by the ski media and the self-proclaimed hardcore, is a little bit confusing. Because you’re going the wrong way, man. No one shows up at Six Flags and says oh actually I would prefer to walk to the top of Dr. Diabolical’s Cliffhanger. Like do you not see the chairlift sitting right f*****g there?But here we are anyway: I’m featuring a cross-country skiing center on my podcast that’s stubbornly devoted always and only to Alpine skiing. And not just a cross-country ski center, but one that, by the nature of its layout, requires some uphill travel to complete most loops. Why would I do this to myself, and to my readers/listeners?Well, several factors collided to interest me in White Grass, including:* The ski area sits on the site of an abandoned circa-1950s downhill ski area, Weiss Knob. White Grass has incorporated much of the left-over refuse – the lodge, the ropetow engines – into the functioning or aesthetic of the current business. The first thing you see upon arrival at White Grass is a mainline clearcut rising above a huddle of low-slung buildings – Weiss Knob’s old maintrail.* White Grass sits between two active downhill ski areas: Timberline, a former podcast subject that is among the best-run operations in America, and state-owned Canaan Valley, a longtime Indy Pass partner. It’s possible to ski across White Grass from either direction to connect all three ski areas into one giant odyssey.* White Grass is itself an Indy Pass partner, one of 43 Nordic ski areas on the pass last year (Indy has yet to finalize its 2024-25 roster).* White Grass averages 95 days of annual operation despite having no snowmaking. On the East Coast. In the Mid-Atlantic. They’re able to do this because, yes, they sit at a 3,220-foot base elevation (higher than anything in New England; Saddleback, in Maine, is the highest in that region, at 2,460 feet), but also because they have perfected the art of snow-farming. Chase tells me they’ve never missed a season altogether, despite sitting at the same approximate latitude as Washington, D.C.* While I don’t care about going uphill at a ski area that’s equipped with mechanical lifts, I do find the notion of an uphill-only ski area rather compelling. Because it’s a low-impact, high-vibe concept that may be the blueprint for future new-ski-area development in a U.S. America that’s otherwise allergic to building things because oh that mud puddle over there is actually a fossilized brontosaurus footprint or something. That’s why I covered the failed Bluebird Backcountry. Like what if we had a ski area without the avalanche danger of wandering into the mountains and without the tension with lift-ticket holders who resent the a.m. chewing-up of their cord and pow? While it does not market itself this way, White Grass is in fact such a center, an East Coast Bluebird Backcountry that allows and is seeing growing numbers of people who like to make skiing into work AT Bros.All of which, I’ll admit, still makes White Grass lift-served-skiing adjacent, somewhere on the spectrum between snowboarding (basically the same experience as far as lifts and terrain are concerned) and ice canoeing (yes I’m just making crap up). But Chase reached out to me and I stopped in and skied around in January completely stupid to the fact that I was about to have a massive heart attack and die, and I just kind of fell in love with the place: its ambling, bucolic setting; its improvised, handcrafted feel; its improbable existence next door to and amid the Industrial Ski Machine.So here we are: something a little different. Don’t worry, this will not become a cross-country ski podcast, but if I mix one in every 177 episodes or so, I hope you’ll understand.*The actual number of operating ski areas in Quebec is 412,904.What we talked aboutWhite Grass’ snow-blowing microclimate; why White Grass’ customers tend to be “easy to please”; “we don’t need a million skiers – we just need a couple hundred”; snow farming – what it is and how it works; White Grass’ double life in the summer; a brief history of the abandoned/eventually repurposed Weiss Knob ski area; considering snowmaking; 280 inches of snow in West Virginia; why West Virginia; the state’s ski culture; where and when Chase founded White Grass, and why he moved it to its current location; how an Alpine skier fell for the XC world; how a ski area electric bill is “about $5 per day”; preserving what remains of Weiss Knob; White Grass’ growing AT community; the mountain’s “incredible” glade skiing; whether Chase ever considered a chairlift at White Grass; is atmosphere made or does it happen?; “the last thing I want to do is retire”; Chip’s favorite ski areas; an argument for slow downhill skiing; the neighboring Timberline and Canaan Valley; why Timberline is “bound for glory”; the Indy Pass; XC grooming; and White Grass’ shelter system.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewI kind of hate the word “authentic,” at least in the context of skiing. It’s a little bit reductive and way too limiting. It implies that nothing planned or designed or industrially scaled can ever achieve a greater cultural resonance than a TGI Friday’s. By this definition, Vail Mountain – with its built-from-the-wilderness walkable base village, high-speed lift fleet, and corporate marquee – fails the banjo-strumming rubric set by the Authenticity Police, despite being one of our greatest ski centers. Real-ass skiers, don’t you know, only ride chairlifts powered from windmills hand-built by 17th Century Dutch immigrants. Everything else is corporate b******t. (Unless those high-speed lifts are at Alta or Wolf Creek or Revelstoke – then they’re real as f**k Brah; do you see how stupid this all is?)Still, I understand the impulses stoking that sentiment. Roughly one out of every four U.S. skier visits is at a Vail Resort. About one in four is in Colorado. That puts a lot of pressure on a relatively small number of ski centers to define the activity for an enormous percentage of the skiing population. “Authentic,” I think, has become a euphemism for “not standing in a Saturday powder-day liftline that extends down Interstate 70 to Topeka with a bunch of people from Manhattan who don’t know how to ski powder.” Or, in other words, a place where you can ski without a lot of crowding and expense and the associated hassles.White Grass succeeds in offering that. Here are the prices:Here is the outside of the lodge:And the inside:Here is the rental counter:And here’s the lost-and-found, in case you lose something (somehow they actually fit skis in there; it’s like one of those magic tents from Harry Potter that looks like a commando bivouac from the outside but expands into King Tut’s palace once you walk in):The whole operation is simple, approachable, affordable, and relaxed. This is an everyone-in-the-base-lodge-seems-to-know-one-another kind of spot, an improbable backwoods redoubt along those ever-winding West Virginia roads, a snow hole in the map where no snow makes sense, as though driving up the acce

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on June 26. It dropped for free subscribers on July 3. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:WhoJD Crichton, General Manager of Wildcat Mountain, New HampshireRecorded onMay 30, 2024About WildcatClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Vail ResortsLocated in: Gorham, New HampshireYear founded: 1933 (lift service began in 1957)Pass affiliations:* Epic Pass, Epic Local Pass, Northeast Value Pass – unlimited access* Northeast Midweek Pass – unlimited weekday accessClosest neighboring ski areas: Black Mountain, New Hampshire (:18), Attitash (:22), Cranmore (:28), Sunday River (:45), Mt. Prospect Ski Tow (:46), Mt. Abram (:48), Bretton Woods (:48), King Pine (:50), Pleasant Mountain (:57), Cannon (1:01), Mt. Eustis Ski Hill (1:01)Base elevation: 1,950 feetSummit elevation: 4,062 feetVertical drop: 2,112 feetSkiable Acres: 225Average annual snowfall: 200 inchesTrail count: 48 (20% beginner, 47% intermediate, 33% advanced)Lift count: 5 (1 high-speed quad, 3 triples, 1 carpet)Why I interviewed himI’ve always been skeptical of acquaintances who claim to love living in New Jersey because of “the incredible views of Manhattan.” Because you know where else you can find incredible views of Manhattan? In Manhattan. And without having to charter a hot-air balloon across the river anytime you have to go to work or see a Broadway play.* But sometimes views are nice, and sometimes you want to be adjacent-to-but-not-necessarily-a-part-of something spectacular and dramatic. And when you’re perched summit-wise on Wildcat, staring across the street at Mount Washington, the most notorious and dramatic peak on the eastern seaboard, it’s hard to think anything other than “damn.”Flip the view and the sentiment reverses as well. The first time I saw Wildcat was in summertime, from the summit of Mount Washington. Looking 2,200 feet down, from above treeline, it’s an almost quaint-looking ski area, spare but well-defined, its spiderweb trail network etched against the wild Whites. It feels as though you could reach down and put it in your pocket. If you didn’t know you were looking at one of New England’s most abrasive ski areas, you’d probably never guess it.Wildcat could feel tame only beside Mount Washington, that open-faced deathtrap hunched against 231-mile-per-hour winds. Just, I suppose, as feisty New Jersey could only seem placid across the Hudson from ever-broiling Manhattan. To call Wildcat the New Jersey of ski areas would seem to imply some sort of down-tiering of the thing, but over two decades on the East Coast, I’ve come to appreciate oft-abused NJ as something other than New York City overflow. Ignore the terrible drivers and the concrete-bisected arterials and the clusters of third-world industry and you have a patchwork of small towns and beach towns, blending, to the west and north, with the edges of rolling Appalachia, to the south with the sweeping Pine Barrens, to the east with the wild Atlantic.It’s actually pretty nice here across the street, is my point. Even if it’s not quite as cozy as it looks. This is a place as raw and wild and real as any in the world, a thing that, while forever shadowed by its stormy neighbor, stands just fine on its own.*It’s not like living in New Jersey is some kind of bargain. It’s like paying Club Thump Thump prices for grocery store Miller Lite. Or at least that was my stance until I moved my smug ass to Brooklyn.What we talked aboutMountain cleanup day; what it took to get back to long seasons at Wildcat and why they were truncated for a handful of winters; post-Vail-acquisition snowmaking upgrades; the impact of a $20-an-hour minimum wage on rural New Hampshire; various bargain-basement Epic Pass options; living through major resort acquisitions; “there is no intention to make us all one and the same”; a brief history of Wildcat; how skiers lapped Wildcat before mechanical lifts; why Wildcat Express no longer transforms from a chairlift to a gondola for summer ops; contemplating Wildcat Express replacements; retroactively assessing the removal of the Catapult lift; the biggest consideration in determining the future of Wildcat’s lift fleet; when a loaded chair fell off the Snowcat lift in 2022; potential base area development; and Attitash as sister resort.   Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewSince it’s impossible to discuss any Vail mountain without discussing Vail Resorts, I’ll go ahead and start there. The Colorado-based company’s 2019 acquisition of wild Wildcat (along with 16 other Peak resorts), met the same sort of gasp-oh-how-can-corporate-Vail-ever-possibly-manage-a-mountain-that-doesn’t-move-skiers-around-like-the-fat-humans-on-the-space-base-in-Wall-E that greeted the acquisitions of cantankerous Crested Butte (2018), Whistler (2016), and Kirkwood (2012). It’s the same sort of worry-warting that Alterra is up against as it tries to close the acquisition of Arapahoe Basin. But, as I detailed in a recent podcast episode on Kirkwood, the surprising thing is how little can change at these Rad Brah outposts even a dozen years after The Consumption Event.But, well. At first the Angry Ski Bros of upper New England seemed validated. Vail really didn’t do a great job of running Wildcat from 2019 to 2022-ish. The confluence of Covid, inherited deferred maintenance, unfamiliarity with the niceties of East Coast operations, labor shortages, Wal-Mart-priced passes, and the distractions caused by digesting 20 new ski areas in one year contributed to shortened seasons, limited terrain, understaffed operations, and annoyed customers. It didn’t help when a loaded chair fell off the Snowcat triple in 2022. Vail may have run ski resorts for decades, but the company had never encountered anything like the brash, opinionated East, where ski areas are laced tightly together, comparisons are easy, and migrations to another mountain if yours starts to suck are as easy as a five-minute drive down the road.But Vail is settling into the Northeast, making major lift upgrades at Stowe, Mount Snow, Okemo, Attitash, and Hunter since 2021. Mandatory parking reservations have helped calm once-unmanageable traffic around Stowe and Mount Snow. The Epic Pass – particularly the northeast-specific versions – has helped to moderate region-wide season pass prices that had soared to well over $1,000 at many ski areas. The company now seems to understand that this isn’t Keystone, where you can make snow in October and turn the system off for 11 months. While Vail still seems plodding in Pennsylvania and the lower Midwest, where seasons are too short and the snowmaking efforts often underwhelming, they appear to have cracked New England – operationally if not always necessarily culturally.That’s clear at Wildcat, where seasons are once again running approximately five months, operations are fully staffed, and the pitchforks are mostly down. Wildcat has returned to the fringe, where it belongs, to being an end-of-the-road day-trip alternative for people who prefer ski areas to ski resorts (and this is probably the best ski-area-with-no-public-onsite lodging in New England). Locals I speak with are generally happy with the place, which, this being New England, means they only complain about it most of the time, rather than all of the time. Short of moving the mountain out of its tempestuous microclimate and into Little Cottonwood Canyon, there isn’t much Vail could do to change that, so I’d suggest taking the win.What I got wrongWhen discussing the installation of the Wildcat Express and the decommissioning of the Catapult triple, I made a throwaway reference to “whoever owned the mountain in the late ‘90s.” The Franchi family owned Wildcat from 1986 until selling the mountain to Peak Resorts in 2010.Why you should ski WildcatThere isn’t much to Wildcat other than skiing. A parking lot, a baselodge, scattered small buildings of unclear utility - all of them weather-beaten and slightly ramshackle, humanity’s sad ornaments on nature’s spectacle.But the skiing. It’s the only thing there is and it’s the only thing that matters. One high-speed lift straight to the top. There are other lifts but if the 2,041-vertical-foot Wildcat Express is spinning you probably won’t even notice, let alone ride, them. Straight up, straight down. All day long or until your fingers fall off, which will probably take about 45 minutes.The mountain doesn’t look big but it is big. Just a few trails off the top but these quickly branch infinitely like some wild seaside mangrove, funneling skiers, whatever their intent, into various savage channels of its bell-shaped footprint. Descending the steepness, Mount Washington, so prominent from the top, disappears, somehow too big to be seen, a paradox you could think more about if you weren’t so preoccupied with the skiing.It's not that the skiing is great, necessarily. When it’s great it’s amazing. But it’s almost never amazing. It’s also almost never terrible. What it is, just about all the time, is a fight, a mottled, potholed, landmine-laced mother-bleeper of a mountain that will not cede a single turn without a little backtalk. This is not an implication of the mountain ops team. Wildcat is about as close to an un-tamable mountain as you’ll find in the over-groomed East. If you’ve ever tried building a sandcastle in a rising tide, you have a sense of what it’s like trying to manage this cantankerous beast with its impossible weather and relentless pitch.We talk a bit, on the podcast, about Wildcat’s better-than-you’d-suppose beginner terrain and top-to-bottom green trail. But no one goes there for that. The easy stuff is a fringe benefit for edgier families, who don’t want to pinch off the rapids just because they’re pontooning on the lake. Anyone who truly wants to coast

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on June 10. It dropped for free subscribers on June 17. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:WhoBelinda Trembath, Vice President & Chief Operating Officer of Whistler Blackcomb, British ColumbiaRecorded onJune 3, 2024About Whistler BlackcombClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Vail Resorts (majority owners; Nippon Cable owns a 25 percent stake in Whistler Blackcomb)Located in: Whistler, British ColumbiaYear founded: 1966Pass affiliations:* Epic Pass: unlimited* Epic Local Pass: 10 holiday-restricted days, shared with Vail Mountain and Beaver CreekClosest neighboring ski areas: Grouse Mountain (1:26), Cypress (1:30), Mt. Seymour (1:50) – travel times vary based upon weather conditions, time of day, and time of yearBase elevation: 2,214 feet (675 meters)Summit elevation: 7,497 feet (2,284 meters)Vertical drop: 5,283 feet (1,609 meters)Skiable Acres: 8,171Average annual snowfall: 408 inches (1,036 centimeters)Trail count: 276 (20% easiest, 50% more difficult, 30% most difficult)Lift count: A lot (1 28-passenger gondola, 3 10-passenger gondolas, 1 8-passenger gondola, 1 8-passenger pulse gondola, 8 high-speed quads, 4 six-packs, 1 eight-pack, 3 triples, 2 T-bars, 7 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Whistler Blackcomb’s lift fleet) – inventory includes upgrade of Jersey Cream Express from a quad to a six-pack for the 2024-25 ski season.Why I interviewed herHistorical records claim that when Lewis and Clark voyaged west in 1804, they were seeking “the most direct and practicable water communication across this continent, for the purposes of commerce.” But they were actually looking for Whistler Blackcomb.Or at least I think they were. What other reason is there to go west but to seek out these fabulous mountains, rising side by side and a mile* into the sky, where Pacific blow-off splinters into summit blizzards and packed humanity animates the village below?There is nothing else like Whistler in North America. It is our most complete, and our greatest, ski resort. Where else does one encounter this collision of terrain, vertical, panorama, variety, and walkable life, interconnected with audacious aerial lifts and charged by a pilgrim-like massing of skiers from every piece and part of the world? Europe and nowhere else. Except for here.Other North American ski resorts offer some of these things, and some of them offer better versions of them than Whistler. But none of them has all of them, and those that have versions of each fail to combine them all so fluidly. There is no better snow than Alta-Snowbird snow, but there is no substantive walkable village. There is no better lift than Jackson’s tram, but the inbounds terrain lacks scale and the town is miles away. There is no better energy than Palisades Tahoe energy, but the Pony Express is still carrying news of its existence out of California.Once you’ve skied Whistler – or, more precisely, absorbed it and been absorbed by it – every other ski area becomes Not Whistler. The place lingers. You carry it around. Place it into every ski conversation. “Have you been to Whistler?” If not, you try to describe it. But it can’t be done. “Just go,” you say, and that’s as close as most of us can come to grabbing the raw power of the place.*Or 1.6 Canadian Miles (sometimes referred to as “kilometers”).What we talked aboutWhy skier visits dropped at Whistler-Blackcomb this past winter; the new Fitzsimmons eight-passenger express and what it took to modify a lift that had originally been intended for Park City; why skiers can often walk onto that lift with little to no wait; this summer’s Jersey Cream lift upgrade; why Jersey Cream didn’t require as many modifications as Fitzsimmons even though it was also meant for Park City; the complexity of installing a mid-mountain lift; why WB had to cancel 2024 summer skiing and what that means for future summer seasons; could we see a gondola serving the glacier instead?; Vail’s Australian trio of Mt. Hotham, Perisher, and Falls Creek; Whistler’s wild weather; the distinct identities of Blackcomb and Whistler; what WB means to Vail Resorts; WB’s Olympic legacy; Whistler’s surprisingly low base elevation and what that means for the visitor; WB’s relationship with local First Nations; priorities for future lift upgrades and potential changes to the Whistler gondola, Seventh Heaven, Whistler T-bar, Franz’s, Garbanzo; discussing proposed additional lifts in Symphony Bowl and elsewhere on Whistler; potential expansion into a fourth portal; potential new or upgraded lifts sketched out in Blackcomb Mountain’s masterplan; why WB de-commissioned the Hortsman T-Bar; missing the Wizard-to-Solar-Coaster access that the Blackcomb Gondola replaced; WB’s amazing self-managing lift mazes; My Epic App direct-to-lift access is coming to Whistler; employee housing; why Whistler’s season pass costs more than an Epic Pass; and Edge cards.   Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewFour new major lifts in three years; the cancellation of summer skiing; “materially lower” skier visits at Whistler this past winter, as reported by Vail Resorts – all good topics, all enough to justify a check-in. Oh and the fact that Whistler Blackcomb is the largest ski area in the Western Hemisphere, the crown jewel in Vail’s sprawling portfolio, the single most important ski area on the continent.And why is that? What makes this place so special? The answer lies only partly in its bigness. Whistler is vast. Whistler is thrilling. Whistler is everything you hope a ski area will be when you plan your winter vacation. But most important of all is that Whistler is proof.Proof that such a place can exist in North America. U.S. America is stuck in a development cycle that typically goes like this:* Ski area proposes a new expansion/base area development/chairlift/snowmaking upgrade.* A small group of locals picks up the pitchforks because Think of the Raccoons/this will gut the character of our bucolic community of car-dependent sprawl/this will disrupt one very specific thing that is part of my personal routine that heavens me I just can’t give up.* Said group files a lawsuit/formal objection/some other bureaucratic obstacle, halting the project.* Resort justifies the project/adapts it to meet locals’ concerns/makes additional concessions in the form of land swaps, operational adjustments, infrastructure placement, and the like.* Group insists upon maximalist stance of Do Nothing.* Resort makes additional adjustments.* Group is Still Mad* Cycle repeats for years* Either nothing ever gets done, or the project is built 10 to 15 years after its reveal and at considerable extra expense in the form of studies, legal fees, rising materials and labor costs, and expensive and elaborate modifications to accommodate one very specific thing, like you can’t operate the lift from May 1 to April 20 because that would disrupt the seahorse migration between the North and South Poles.In BC, they do things differently. I’ve covered this extensively, in podcast conversations with the leaders of Sun Peaks, Red Mountain, and Panorama. The civic and bureaucratic structures are designed to promote and encourage targeted, smart development, leading to ever-expanding ski areas, human-scaled and walkable base area infrastructure, and plenty of slopeside or slope-adjacent accommodations.I won’t exhaust that narrative again here. I bring it up only to say this: Whistler has done all of these things at a baffling scale. A large, vibrant, car-free pedestrian village where people live and work. A gargantuan lift across an unbridgeable valley. Constant infrastructure upgrades. Reliable mass transit. These things can be done. Whistler is proof.That BC sits directly atop Washington State, where ski areas have to spend 15 years proving that installing a stop sign won’t undermine the 17-year cicada hatching cycle, is instructive. Whistler couldn’t exist 80 miles south. Maybe the ski area, but never the village. And why not? Such communities, so concentrated, require a small footprint in comparison to the sprawl of a typical development of single-family homes. Whistler’s pedestrian base village occupies an area around a half mile long and less than a quarter mile wide. And yet, because it is a walkable, mixed-use space, it cuts down reliance on driving, enlivens the ski area, and energizes the soul. It is proof that human-built spaces, properly conceived, can create something worthwhile in what, 50 years ago, was raw wilderness, even if they replace a small part of the natural world.A note from Whistler on First NationsTrembath and I discuss Whistler’s relationship with First Nations extensively, but her team sent me some follow-up information to clarify their role in the mountain’s development:Belinda didn’t really have time to dive into a very important piece of the First Nations involvement in the operational side of things:* There was significant engagement with First Nations as a part of developing the masterplans.* Their involvement and support were critical to the approval of the masterplans and to ensuring that all parties and their respective communities will benefit from the next 60 years of operation.* This includes the economic prosperity of First Nations – both the Squamish and Líl̓wat Nations will participate in operational success as partners.* To ensure this, the Province of British Columbia, the Resort Municipality of Whistler, Whistler Blackcomb and the Squamish and Líl̓wat Nations are engaged in agreements on how to work together in the future.* These agreements, known as the Umbrella Agreement, run concurrently with the Master Development Agreements and masterplans, providing a road map for our relationship with First Nations over the next 60 years of operations and deve

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on June 4. It dropped for free subscribers on June 11. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:Who* Scott Bender, operations and business advisor to Blue Knob ownership* Donna Himes, Blue Knob Marketing Manager* Sam Wiley, part owner of Blue Knob* Gary Dietke, Blue Knob Mountain ManagerRecorded onMay 13, 2024About Blue KnobClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Majority owned by the Wiley familyLocated in: Claysburg, PennsylvaniaYear founded: 1963Pass affiliations: Indy Pass and Indy+ Pass – 2 days, no blackouts (access not yet set for 2024-25 ski season)Closest neighboring ski areas: Laurel (1:02), Tussey (1:13), Hidden Valley (1:14), Seven Springs (1:23)Base elevation: 2,100 feetSummit elevation: 3,172 feetVertical drop: 1,072 feetSkiable Acres: 100Average annual snowfall: 120 inchesTrail count: 33 (5 beginner, 10 intermediate, 4 advanced intermediate, 5 advanced, 9 expert) + 1 terrain parkLift count: 5 (2 triples, 2 doubles, 1 carpet – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Blue Knob’s lift fleet)Why I interviewed themI’ve not always written favorably about Blue Knob. In a state where shock-and-awe snowmaking is a baseline operational requirement, the mountain’s system is underwhelming and bogged down by antiquated equipment. The lower-mountain terrain – Blue Knob’s best – opens sporadically, sometimes remaining mysteriously shuttered after heavy local snows. The website at one time seemed determined to set the world record for the most exclamation points in a single place. They may have succeeded (this has since been cleaned up):I’ve always tried to couch these critiques in a but-damn-if-only context, because Blue Knob, considered purely as a ski area, is an absolute killer. It needs what any Pennsylvania ski area needs – modern, efficient, variable-weather-capable, overwhelming snowmaking and killer grooming. No one, in this temperamental state of freeze-thaws and frequent winter rains, can hope to survive long term without those things. So what’s the holdup?My goal with The Storm is to be incisive but fair. Everyone deserves a chance to respond to critiques, and offering them that opportunity is a tenant of good journalism. But because this is a high-volume, high-frequency operation, and because my beat covers hundreds of ski areas, I’m not always able to gather reactions to every post in the moment. I counterbalance that reality with this: every ski area’s story is a long-term, ongoing one. What they mess up today, they may get right tomorrow. And reality, while inarguable, does not always capture intentions. Eventually, I need to gather and share their perspective.And so it was Blue Knob’s turn to talk. And I challenge you to find a more good-natured and nicer group of folks anywhere. I went off format with this one, hosting four people instead of the usual one (I’ve done multiples a few times before, with Plattekill, West Mountain, Bousquet, Boyne Mountain, and Big Sky). The group chat was Blue Knob’s idea, and frankly I loved it. It’s not easy to run a ski area in 2024 in the State of Pennsylvania, and it’s especially not easy to run this ski area, for reasons I outline below. And while Blue Knob has been slower to get to the future than its competitors, I believe they’re at least walking in that direction.What we talked about“This was probably one of our worst seasons”; ownership; this doesn’t feel like PA; former owner Dick Gauthier’s legacy; reminiscing on the “crazy fun” of the bygone community atop the ski hill; Blue Knob’s history as an Air Force station and how the mountain became a ski area; Blue Knob’s interesting lease arrangement with the state; the remarkable evolution of Seven Springs and how those lessons could fuel Blue Knob’s growth; competing against Vail’s trio of nearby mountains; should Vail be allowed to own eight ski areas in one state?; Indy Pass sales limits; Indy Pass as customer-acquisition tool; could Blue Knob ever upgrade its top-to-bottom doubles to a high-speed quad?; how one triple chair multiplied into two; why Blue Knob built a mile-long lift and almost immediately shortened it; how Wolf Creek is “like Blue Knob”; beginner lifts; the best ski terrain in Pennsylvania; why Mine Shaft and Boneyard Glades disappeared from Blue Knob’s trailmap, and whether they could ever return; unmarked glades; Blue Knob’s unique microclimate and how that impacts snowmaking; why the mountain isn’t open top-to-bottom more and why it’s important to change that; PA snowmaking and how Blue Knob can catch up; that wild access road and what could be done to improve it; and the surprising amount of housing on Blue Knob’s slopes.    Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewSo here’s something that’s absolutely stupid:That’s southeastern Pennsylvania. Vail Resorts operates all of the ski areas in blue font. Ski areas in red are independent. Tussey, a local bump serving State College and its armies of sad co-eds who need a distraction because their football team can’t beat Michigan, is not really relevant here. Blue Knob is basically surrounded by ski areas that all draw on the same well of out-of-state corporate resources and are stapled to the gumball-machine-priced Epic Pass. If this were a military map, we’d all say, “Yeah they’re fucked.” Blue Knob is Berlin in 1945, with U.S. forces closing in from the west and the Russians driving from the east. There’s no way they’re winning this war.How did this happen? Which bureaucrat in sub-basement 17 of Justice Department HQ in D.C. looked at Vail’s 2021 deal to acquire Seven Springs, Hidden Valley, and Laurel and said, “Cool”? This was just two years after Vail had picked up Whitetail, Liberty, and Roundtop, along with Jack Frost and Big Boulder in eastern Pennsylvania, in the Peak Resorts acquisition. How does allowing one company to acquire eight of the 22 public ski resorts in one state not violate some antitrust statute? Especially when six of them essentially surround one independent competitor.I don’t know. When a similar situation materialized in Colorado in 1997, Justice said, “No, Vail Resorts, you can not buy Keystone and Breckenridge and Arapahoe Basin from this dog food company. Sell one.” And so A-Basin went to a real estate conglomerate out of Toronto, which gut-renovated the mountain and then flipped it, earlier this year, to Vail arch-frenemy Alterra. And an independent ski area operator told me that, at some point during this ongoing sales process, the Justice Department reached out to ask them if they were OK with Alterra – which already operates Winter Park, owns Steamboat, and has wrapped Copper, Eldora, and the four Aspen mountains into its Ikon Pass – owning A-Basin (which has been on the Ikon Pass since 2019). Justice made no such phone call, Blue Knob officials tell me on this podcast, when Vail was purchasing the Seven Springs resorts.This is where Colorad-Bro reminds me that Pennsylvania skiing is nothing compared to Colorado. And yes, Colorado is unquestionably the epicenter of American skiing, home to some of our most iconic resorts and responsible for approximately one in four U.S. skier visits each winter. But where do you suppose all those skiers come from? Not solely from Colorado, ranked 21st by U.S. population with just 5.9 million residents. Pennsylvania, with Philly and Pittsburgh and dozens of mid-sized cities in-between, ranks fifth in the nation by population, with nearly 13 million people. And with cold winters, ski areas near every large city, and some of the best snowmaking systems on the planet, PA is a skier printing press, responsible not just for millions of in-state skier visits annually, but for minting skiers that drive the loaded U-Haul west so they can brag about being Summit County locals five minutes after signing their lease. That one company controls more than one-third of the ski areas – which, combined, certainly account for more than half of the state’s skier visits – strikes me as unfair in a nation that supposedly maintains robust antitrust laws.But whatever. We’re locked in here. Vail Resorts is not Ticketmaster, and no one is coming to dismantle this siege. Blue Knob is surrounded. And it’s worse than it looks on this map, which does not illuminate that Blue Knob sits in a vast wilderness, far from most population centers, and that all of Vail’s resorts scoop up skiers flowing west-northwest from Philadelphia/Baltimore/D.C. and east from Pittsburgh.  So how is Blue Knob not completely screwed? Answering that question was basically the point of this podcast. The mountain’s best argument for continued existence in the maw of this Epic Pass blitzkrieg is that Blue Knob is a better pure ski area than any of the six Vail mountains that surround it (see trailmap above). The terrain is, in fact, the best in the State of Pennsylvania, and arguably in the entire Mid-Atlantic (sorry Elk Mountain partisans, but that ski area, fine as it is, is locked out of the conversation as long as they maintain that stupid tree-skiing ban). But this fact of mountain superiority is no guarantee of long-term resilience, because the truth is that Blue Knob has often, in recent years, been unable to open top to bottom, running only the upper-mountain triple chairs and leaving the best terrain out of reach.They have to fix that. And they know it. But this is a feisty mountain in a devilish microclimate with some antiquated infrastructure and a beast of an access road. Nothing about this renovation has been, or likely will be, fast or easy.But it can be done. Blue Knob can survive. I believe it after hosting the team on this podcast. Maybe you will too once you hear it.What I got wrong* When describing the trail network, I said that the runs were cut “across the fall line” in a really logical way – I meant, of

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on June 2. It dropped for free subscribers on June 9. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:WhoRicky Newberry, Vice President and General Manager of Kirkwood Ski Resort, CaliforniaRecorded onMay 20, 2024About KirkwoodClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Vail ResortsLocated in: Kirkwood, CaliforniaYear founded: 1972Pass affiliations:* Epic Pass: unlimited access* Epic Local Pass: unlimited access with holiday blackouts* Tahoe Local Epic Pass: unlimited access with holiday blackouts* Tahoe Value Pass: unlimited access with holiday and Saturday blackouts* Kirkwood Pass: unlimited accessClosest neighboring ski areas: Heavenly (:43), Sierra-at-Tahoe (:44) – travel times vary significantly given weather conditions, time of day, and time of year.Base elevation: 7,800 feetSummit elevation: 9,800 feetVertical drop: 2,000 feetSkiable Acres: 2,300Average annual snowfall: 354 inchesTrail count: 86 (20% expert, 38% advanced, 30% intermediate, 12% beginner)Lift count: 13 (2 high-speed quads, 1 fixed-grip quad, 6 triples, 1 double, 1 T-bar, 2 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Kirkwood’s lift fleet).Why I interviewed himImagine this: 1971. Caltrans, the military-grade state agency charged with clearing California’s impossible snows from its high-alpine road network, agrees to maintain an additional wintertime route across the Sierra Crest: Highway 88, over Carson Pass, an east-west route cutting 125 miles from Stockton to US 395. This is California State Route 88 in the winter:A ridiculous road, an absurd idea: turn the industrial power of giant machines against a wilderness route whose wintertime deeps had eaten human souls for centuries. An audacious idea, but not an unusual one. Not in that California or in that America. Not in that era of will and muscle. Not in that country that had pushed thousands of miles of interstate across mountains and rivers and deserts in just 15 years. Caltrans would hammer 20-foot-high snow canyons up and over the pass, punching an arctic pathway into and through the howling angry fortress of the Sierra Nevada.And they did it all to serve a new ski resort.Imagine that. A California, an America that builds.Kirkwood, opened in 1972, was part of the last great wave of American ski resort construction. Copper, Northstar, Powder Mountain, 49 Degrees North, and Telluride all opened that year. Keystone (1970), Snowbird (1971), and Big Sky (1973) also cranked to life around this time. Large ski area building stalled by the early ‘80s, though Vail managed to develop Beaver Creek in 1980. Deer Valley opened in 1981. Outliers materialize: Bohemia, in spite of considerable local resistance, in 2000. Tamarack in 2004. But mostly, the ski resorts we have are all the ski resorts we’ll ever have.But there is a version of America, of California, that dreams and does enormous things, and not so long ago. This institutional memory lives on, even in those who had no part in its happening. Kirkwood is an emblem of this era and its willful collective imagining. The mountain itself is a ludicrous place for a commercial ski resort, steep and wild, an avalanche hazard zone that commands constant vigilant maintenance. Like Alta-Snowbird or Jackson Hole, the ski area offers nominal groomed routes, a comfortable lower-mountain beginner area, just enough accommodation for the intermediate mass-market passholder to say “yes I did this.” This dressing up, too, encapsulates the fading American habit of taming the raw and imposing, of making an unthinkable thing look easy.But nothing about Kirkwood is easy. Not the in or the out. Not the up or the down. It’s rough and feisty, messy and unpredictable. And that’s the point of the place. As with the airplane or the smartphone, we long ago lost our awe of the ski resort, what a marvelous feat of human ingenuity it is. Kirkwood, lost in the highlands, lift-served on its crazy two-mile ridge, is one of the more improbable organized centers of American skiing. In its very existence the place memorializes and preserves lost impulses to actualize the unbelievable, to transport humans into, up, and down a ferocious mountain in a hostile mountain range. I find glory in Kirkwood, in that way and so many more. Hyperbole, perhaps. But what an incredible place this is, and not just because of the skiing.What we talked aboutComing down off a 725-inch 2022-23 winter; what’s behind Kirkwood’s big snows and frequent road closures; scenic highway 88; if you’re running Kirkwood, prepare to sleep in your office; employee housing; opening when the road is closed; why Kirkwood doesn’t stay open deep into May even when they have the snowpack; the legacy of retiring Heavenly COO Tom Fortune; the next ski area Vail should buy; watching Vail Resorts move into Tahoe; Vail’s culture of internal promotion; what it means to lead the ski resort where you started your career; avalanche safety; the nuance and complexity of managing Kirkwood’s avy-prone terrain; avy dogs; why is Kirkwood Vail’s last Western mountain to get a new chairlift?; bringing Kirkwood onto the grid; potential lift upgrades (fantasy version); considering Kirkwood’s masterplan; whether a lift could ever serve the upper bowls looker’s right; why Kirkwood shrank the boundary of Reuter Bowl this past season; why the top of The Wall skied different this winter; why Kirkwood put in and then removed surface lifts around Lift 4 (Sunrise); Kirkwood’s fierce terrain; what happens when Vail comes to Rowdy Town; The Cirque and when it opens for competitions; changes coming to Kirkwood parking; why Kirkwood still offers a single-mountain season pass; and the Tahoe Value and Tahoe Local passes.  Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewMaybe last year, when the stacked snows transformed Tahoe into a Seussian mushroom village, would have been a better moment for this interview. Kirkwood – Kirkwood – beat a 700-inch single-winter snowfall record that had stood for 40 years, with 725 inches of freaking snow. By the time I arrived onsite, in late March, the snowpack was so deep that I could barely see out the windows of my condo – on the second floor:This winter marked a return to almost exactly average, which at Kirkwood is still better than what some ski areas clock in a decade: 370 inches. Average, in draught-prone Tahoe and closure-prone Kirkwood, is perhaps the best possible outcome. As this season settled from a thing that is to a thing that happened, it felt appropriate to document the contrast: how does 370 feel when it chases 725? Is snow like money, where after a certain amount you really can’t tell the difference? Or does snow, which, like money, occupies that strange space between the material and the ephemeral, ignite with its vanishing form some untamable avarice? More is never enough. Even 725 inches feels stingy in some contexts – Alta stacked 903 last winter; Baker’s 1,140-inch 1998-99 season bests any known season snowfall total on Planet Earth.But Californians, I’ve found, have little use for comparisons. Perhaps that’s an effect of the horizon-bending desert that chops the state off from the rest of the continent. Perhaps it’s a silent pride in being a resident of America’s most-populous state – more people live in California than in the 21 least-populous U.S. states combined, or in all of Canada. Perhaps its Surf Brah bonhomie drifting up to the mountains. Whatever it is, there seems to be something in Cali’s collective soul that takes whatever it’s given and is content with it.Or at least it feels that way whenever I go there, and it sure felt that way in this interview. At a moment when it seems as though too many big-mountain skiers at headliner mountains want to staple their home turf’s alpha-dog patch to their forehead and walk around with two thumbs jerking upward repeating “You do realize I’m a season passholder at Alta, right?”, Kirkwood still feels tucked away, quiet in its excellence, a humble pride masking its fierce façade. Even 12 years into Vail Resorts’ ownership, the ski area feels as corporate as a guy selling bootleg purses out of a rolled-out sheet on Broadway. Swaggering but approachable, funky and improvised, something that’s probably going to make a good story when you get back home.Why you should ski KirkwoodOddly, I usually tell people not to go here. And not in that stupid social media way that ever-so-clever (usually) Utah and Colorad-Bros trip over one another to post: “Oh Snowbird/Wolf Creek/Pow Mow sucks, no one should go there.” It’s so funny I forgot to laugh. But Kirkwood can be genuinely tough to explain. Most Epic Pass-toting tourists are frankly going to have a better time at Heavenly or Northstar, with their fast lifts, Tahoe views, vast intermediate trail networks, and easy access roads. Kirkwood is grand. Kirkwood is exceptional. Kirkwood is the maximalist version of what humankind can achieve in taming an angry pocket of wilderness for mass recreation. But Kirkwood is not for everyone.There. I’ve set expectations. So maybe don’t make this your first Tahoe stop if you’re coming west straight from Paoli Peaks. It’s a bruiser, one of the rowdiest in Vail’s sprawling portfolio, wild and steep and exposed. If you’re looking for a fight, Kirkwood will give you one.That’s not to say an intermediate couldn’t enjoy themselves here. Just don’t expect Keystone. What’s blue and green at Kirkwood is fine terrain, but it’s limited, and lacks the drama of, say, coming over Ridge Run or Liz’s at Heavenly, with the lake shimmering below and miles of intermediate pitch in front of you. **This message is not endorsed (or likely appreciated) by the Kirkwood Chamber of Commerce, Vail Resorts, or Kirkwood ski area.Podcast NotesOn former Kirkwood GMs on the podcast Sometimes it seems as though e

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on May 20. It dropped for free subscribers on May 27. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:WhoNathan McGree, Owner and General Manager of Tyrol Basin, WisconsinRecorded onApril 29, 2024About Tyrol BasinClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Nathan McGreeLocated in: Mt. Horeb, WisconsinYear founded: 1958Pass affiliations: Indy Pass and Indy+ Pass – 2 days, no blackoutsClosest neighboring ski areas: Blackhawk Ski Club (:21), Devil’s Head (:46), Cascade (1:00), Christmas Mountain Village (1:02)Base elevation: 860 feetSummit elevation: 1,160 feetVertical drop: 300 feetSkiable Acres: 40Average annual snowfall: 41 inchesTrail count: 24 (33% beginner, 25% intermediate, 38% advanced, 4% expert)Lift count: 7 (3 triples, 2 ropetows, 2 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Tyrol Basin’s lift fleet)Why I interviewed himWhen you Google “Tyrol,” the expanse of Italian and Austrian Alps from which this Wisconsin bump draws its name, the robots present you with this image:That is not Wisconsin.According to On The Snow, Tyrol Basin recorded two inches of snowfall during the 2021-22 ski season, and 15 inches the following winter. I don’t know if these numbers are accurate. No one runs, like, the Southern Wisconsin Snorkel Dawgs Facebook group as a secondary verification source. The site pegs Tyrol’s average annual snowfall at 30 inches. That’s not even a powder day at Alta. Indy Pass offers a more generous 51. A site called “GottaGoItSnows.com” lists four feet (48 inches), but also offers, as its featured photo of the ski area, this grainy webcam screenshot, which appears to feature two mis-wired AI bots about to zigzag into one another:But it doesn’t really matter what Tyrol Basin’s average annual snowfall is, or how much snow fell in either of those two winters. The ski area logged a 114-day season during the 2021-22 campaign, and 124 over the winter of 2022-23. That’s an outstanding season, above the NSAA-reported industry averages of 110 and 116 days for those respective campaigns. It’s a particularly respectable number of ski days when a season pass starts at $199.99, as it did last year (McGree told me he expects that price to drop when 2024-25 passes go on sale in July).No one offers 114 days of skiing on two inches of natural snow by accident. You need what the kids (probably don’t) call “mad skillz ya’ll.” Especially when you offer a terrain park that looks like this:What’s going on here? How can a snow-light bump 28 miles west of Madison where snowsportskiing ought to be impossible offer nearly four months of something approximating winter? That the answer is obvious (snowmaking) doesn’t make it any less interesting. After all, put me at the controls of a $106-million Boeing 737, and I’m more likely to crash it into a mountain than to safely return it to the airport – having access to technology and equipment is not the same thing as knowing how to use it (not that I have access to an airplane; God help us). Tyrol Basin is the story of a former diesel mechanic who ended up owning a ski area. And doing a hell of a nice job running it. That’s pretty cool, and worth a deeper look.What we talked aboutCoping with a crummy Midwest winter; climate change resilience; a beginner-area expansion; the legend of Dave Usselman; how to create an interesting ski experience; a journey from diesel mechanic to ski area owner; the hardest thing about running a ski area; why ski area owners have to live it; “during winter, it’s a hundred-day war”; why owning a ski area is “a lot like farming”; evolving into a year-round business; why mountain biking isn’t happening at Tyrol; why season pass prices will decrease for next ski season; how snowtubing roiled a Wisconsin town; how a dairy barn became a ski chalet; expansion potential; the hardest part about building terrain parks; high-speed ropetows; the lost ski area that McGree would like to revive; $2 PBRs; and the Indy PassWhy I thought that now was a good time for this interviewRoughly six years ago, a 33-year-old former diesel-mechanic-turned-haunted-house-purveyor cashed out his retirement account, mortgaged his house, and bought a ski area.“I have no ski-business background whatsoever,” Nathan McGree told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel at the time. Perhaps an alarming statement, but he followed that with what may be the pithiest five sentences I’ve ever read on how to successfully run a small ski area:“In order for this place to function well, it needs an on-the-ground owner who is involved in everything,” he said. “I’m the bookkeeper, I’m helping make snow and I can groom the slopes, too. In the past, the general manager would have had to go to the four owners who fought among themselves and were incredibly stingy when it came to running and investing in this place.“Now, if we need a sump pump or something like that, Andy Amacher, my assistant general manager, and I make a decision and go to Menards or wherever and just get it. The old owners are out of the picture entirely now.”McGree immediately cut new glades and added more night-skiing lights. He cranked the snowmaking dial to 11. Since then, he’s built a tubing hill, added more runs, refurbished the chairlifts, and added a new carpet. Sometimes there’s even a halfpipe – an enormously expensive and complex feature that even the largest ski areas rarely bother with these days.Constant improvement and commitment to a great product. If there are two things that will keep fickle skiers with plenty of other options (the larger Cascade and Devil’s Head ski areas are just a touch farther from Madison than Tyrol), it’s those two things. That McGree understood that on Day Zero helped. But it didn’t guarantee anything. Running a ski area is hard. Because of the weather and because of the equipment and because of the costs and, especially, as McGree discovered, because of (a small but irritating percentage) of the professional complainers who show up to ski/hate-post on StreamBook. But you can make it easier, in the same way you can make anything easier: by thinking ahead, fixing things before they’re broken, and embracing creativity over rigidity - and doing all that with a focus that seems unreasonable to observers.Places like Steamboat and Palisades Tahoe and Jackson Hole and Vail Mountain and Killington are run by something approximating armies: marching soldiers numbering sometimes in the thousands, highly organized and with well-defined roles. But there are hundreds of ski areas across America with no such resources. Highly skilled and capable as they may be, the people running these places summersault through the season with no clear expectation of what the next day will bring. Like Batman, they have to drop in with a loaded utility belt, ready to grapple with any quirk or mishap or crime. Ski areas like Teton Pass, Montana; Great Bear, South Dakota; or Granite Gorge, New Hampshire. And Tyrol Basin, where, six years in, McGree has earned his cape.Questions I wish I’d askedTyrol Basin has a pretty cool four-week kids’ program: at the end of the sessions, the ski area gives participants a free season pass. I’d liked to have talked about that program a bit and how many of those kids kept showing up after the lessons wrapped.Why you should ski Tyrol BasinTyrol Basin’s trailmap undersells the place, presenting you with what looks to be a standard clear-cut Midwestern bump:In reality, the place is amply treed, with well-defined runs etched into the hill (a feature that McGree and I discuss on the podcast):Trees help, always. I am not a huge fan of bowl skiing. Such open spaces make big mountains feel small. That’s why I asked Big Sky GM Troy Nedved whether the resort would continue to keep a six-pack running up Powder Seeker (after moving the tram), when it only served two marked runs, and he was like “Bro there’s like more skiable acreage in that bowl than there is in Wisconsin” and I was like “oh.” But trees make small mountains feel big, cutting them up like chapters in a book. Even better when the trees between have been gladed, as many of Tyrol’s have. With such an arrangement, it can take all day to ski every run. This circa 2015 trailmap, in my opinion, better displays the ski area’s depth and variety (even though there are now more runs):It’s a fun little ski area, is my point here. More fun than maybe it looks glancing at the stats and trailmap. And if you don’t care about trees (or there’s no snow in the trees), the park scene is lights-out (and lighted at night). And the ski area is on the Indy Pass, meaning that, if you’re reading this newsletter, there’s a better-than-average chance that you already own a pair of lift tickets there.I realize that the majority of readers who are not from the Midwest or who don’t live in the Midwest have no interest in ever skiing there, and even less interest in what skiing there is. But there’s a reason I insist on recording a half-dozen or so pods per year with operators from the region, and it’s not simply because I grew up in Michigan (though that’s part of it). Skiing the Midwest is a singularly uplifting experience. This is not a place where only rich people ski, or where crowds only materialize on powder days, or where mountains compete in the $10-million chairlift arms race. Skiing at Tyrol Basin or Caberfae Peaks or Giants Ridge is pure, illicit-drugs-grade fun. Here, skiing is for everyone. It’s done regardless of conditions or forecast, and with little mind to the 60-year-old chairlifts with no safety bars (though Tyrol’s three triples are modern, and all have bars; the majority of lifts throughout the Midwest are of an older vintage). Skiing is just Something To Do In The Winter, when there is so little else other than tending to your Pet Rectangle or shopping or day-drinking or

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on May 3. It dropped for free subscribers on May 10. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:WhoJosh Jorgensen, CEO of Mission Ridge, Washington and Blacktail Mountain, MontanaRecorded onApril 15, 2024About Mission RidgeClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Larry ScrivanichLocated in: Wenatchee, WashingtonYear founded: 1966Pass affiliations:* Indy Pass – 2 days with holiday and weekend blackouts (TBD for 2024-25 ski season)* Indy+ Pass – 2 days with no blackouts* Powder Alliance – 3 days with holiday and Saturday blackoutsClosest neighboring ski areas: Badger Mountain (:51), Leavenworth Ski Hill (:53) – travel times may vary considerably given weather conditions, time of day, and time of year.Base elevation: 4,570 feetSummit elevation: 6,820 feetVertical drop: 2,250 feetSkiable Acres: 2,000Average annual snowfall: 200 inchesTrail count: 70+ (10% easiest, 60% more difficult, 30% most difficult)Lift count: 7 (1 high-speed quad, 3 doubles, 2 ropetows, 1 carpet – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Mission Ridge’s lift fleet)View historic Mission Ridge trailmaps on skimap.org.About BlacktailClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Larry ScrivanichLocated in: Lakeside, MontanaYear founded: 1998Pass affiliations:* Indy Pass – 2 days with holiday and weekend blackouts (TBD for 2024-25 ski season)* Indy+ Pass – 2 days with no blackouts* Powder Alliance – 3 days with holiday blackoutsClosest neighboring ski areas: Whitefish (1:18) - travel times may vary considerably given weather conditions, time of day, and time of year.Base elevation: 5,236 feetSummit elevation: 6,780 feetVertical drop: 1,544 feetSkiable Acres: 1,000+Average annual snowfall: 250 inchesTrail count: (15% easier, 65% more difficult, 20% most difficult)Lift count: 4 (1 triple, 2 doubles, 1 carpet – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Blacktail’s lift fleet)View historic Blacktail trailmaps on skimap.org.Why I interviewed himSo much of Pacific Northwest skiing’s business model amounts to wait-and-pray, hoping that, sometime in November-December, the heaping snowfalls that have spiraled in off the ocean for millennia do so again. It’s one of the few regions in modern commercial skiing, anywhere in the world, where the snow is reliable enough and voluminous enough that this good-ole-boy strategy still works: 460 inches per year at Stevens Pass; 428 at Summit at Snoqualmie; 466 at Crystal; 400 at White Pass; a disgusting 701 at Baker. It’s no wonder that most of these ski areas have either no snowguns, or so few that a motivated scrapper could toss the whole collection in the back of a single U-Haul.But Mission Ridge possesses no such natural gifts. The place is snowy enough – 200 inches in an average winter – that it doesn’t seem ridiculous that someone thought to run lifts up the mountain. But by Washington State standards, the place is practically Palm Beach. That means the owners have had to work a lot harder, and in a far more deliberate way than their competitors, to deliver a consistent snowsportskiing experience since the bump opened in 1966.Which is a long way of saying that Mission Ridge probably has more snowmaking than the rest of Washington’s ski areas combined. Which, often, is barely enough to hang at the party. This year, however, as most Washington ski areas spent half the winter thinking “Gee, maybe we ought to have more than zero snowguns,” Mission was clocking its third-best skier numbers ever.The Pacific Northwest, as a whole, finished the season fairly strong. The snow showed up, as it always does. A bunch of traditional late operators – Crystal, Meadows, Bachelor, Timberline – remain open as of early May. But, whether driven by climate change, rising consumer expectations, or a need to offer more consistent schedules to seasonal employees, the region is probably going to have to build out a mechanical complement to its abundant natural snows at some point. From a regulatory point of view, this won’t be so easy in a region where people worry themselves into a coma about the catastrophic damage that umbrellas inflict upon raindrops. But Mission Ridge, standing above Wenatchee for decades as a place of recreation and employment, proves that using resources to enable recreation is not incompatible with preserving them.That’s going to be a useful example to have around.What we talked aboutA lousy start to winter; a top three year for Mission anyway; snowmaking in Washington; Blacktail’s worst snowfall season ever and the potential to add snowmaking to the ski area; was this crappy winter an anomaly or a harbinger?; how Blacktail’s “long history of struggle” echoes the history of Mission Ridge; what could Blacktail become?; Blacktail’s access road; how Blacktail rose on Forest Service land in the 1990s; Blacktail expansion potential; assessing Blacktail’s lift fleet; could the company purchase more ski areas?; the evolution of Summit at Snoqualmie; Mission Ridge’s large and transformative proposed expansion; why the expansion probably needs to come before chairlift upgrades; Fantasy Lift Upgrade; and why Mission Ridge replaced a used detachable quad with another used detachable quad.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewWashington skiing is endangered by a pretty basic problem: more people in this ever-richer, ever more-populous state want to ski than there are ski areas for them to visit. Building new ski areas is impossible – you’d have better luck flying an American flag from the roof of the Kremlin than introducing a new mountain to Washington State. That shortage is compounded by the lack of slopeside development, which compels every skier to drive to the hill every day that they want to ski. This circumstance reflects a false commitment to environmental preservation, which mistakes a build-nothing philosophy for watching over Mother Earth, an outmoded way of thinking that fails to appreciate the impacts of sprawl and car culture on the larger natural ecosystem.Which is where Mission Ridge, with its large proposed ski-and-stay expansion, is potentially so important. If Mission Ridge can navigate the bureaucratic obstacle course that’s been dropped in its path, it could build the first substantial slopeside village in the Pacific Northwest. That could be huge. See, it would say, you can have measured development in the mountains without drowning all the grizzly bears. And since not everyone would have to drive up the mountain every day anymore, it would probably actually reduce traffic overall. The squirrels win and so do the skiers. Or something like that.And then we have Blacktail. Three-ish years ago, Mission Ridge purchased this little-known Montana bump, one of the West’s few upside-down ski areas, an unlikely late addition to the Forest Service ski area network seated south of Whitefish Mountain and Glacier National Park. I was surprised when Mission bought it. I think everyone else was too. Mission Ridge is a fine ski area, and one with multi-mountain roots – it was once part of the same parent company that owned Schweitzer (now the property of Alterra) – but it’s not exactly Telluride. How did a regional bump that was still running three Riblet doubles from the ‘60s and ‘70s afford another ski area two states away? And why would they want it? And what were they going to do with it?All of which I discuss, sort of, with Jorgensen. Mission and Blacktail are hardly the strangest duo in American skiing. They make more sense, as a unit, than jointly owned Red Lodge, Montana and Homewood, California. But they’re also not as logical as New York’s Labrador and Song, Pennsylvania’s Camelback and Blue, or Massachusett’s Berkshire East and Catamount, each of which sits within easy driving distance of its sister resort. So how do they fit together? Maybe they don’t need to.Questions I wish I’d askedThere’s a pretty cool story about a military bomber crashing into the mountain (and some associated relics) that I would have liked to have gotten into. I’d also have liked to talk a bit more about Wenatchee, which Mission’s website calls “Washington’s only true ski town.” I also intended to get a bit more into the particulars of the expansion, including the proposed terrain and lifts, and what sort of shape the bedbase would take. And I didn’t really ask, as I normally do, about the Indy Pass and the reciprocal season pass relationship between the two ski areas.What I got wrongI said that Mission Ridge’s first high-speed quad, Liberator Express, came used from Crystal Mountain. The lift actually came used from Winter Park. Jorgensen corrected that fact in the podcast. My mis-statement was the result of crossing my wires while prepping for this interview – the Crystal chairlift at Blacktail moved to Montana from Crystal Mountain, Washington. In the moment, I mixed up the mountains’ lift fleets.Why you should ski Mission RidgeMission Ridge holds echoes of Arapahoe Basin’s East Wall or pre-tram Big Sky: so much damn terrain, just a bit too far above the lifts for most of us to bother with. That, along with the relatively low snowfall and Smithsonian lift fleet, are the main knocks on the place (depending, of course, upon your willingness to hike and love of vintage machinery).But, on the whole, this is a good, big ski area that, because of its snowmaking infrastructure, is one of the most reliable operators for several hundred miles in any direction. The intermediate masses will find a huge, approachable footprint. Beginners will find their own dedicated lift. Better skiers, once they wear out the blacks off lifts 2 and 4, can hike the ridge for basically endless lines. And if you miss daylight, Mission hosts some of the longest top-to-bottom night-skiing runs in America, spanning the resort’s entire 2,250 vertical feet (Keystone’s D

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and to support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.WhoJames Coleman, Managing Partner of Mountain Capital PartnersRecorded onMay 7, 2024About Mountain Capital PartnersAbout La ParvaBase elevation: 8,704 feetSummit elevation: 11,722 feetVertical drop: 3,022 feetSkiable Acres: 988 acresAverage annual snowfall: 118 inchesTrail count: 40 (18% expert, 43% advanced, 20% intermediate, 20% beginner)Lift count: 15 lifts (2 quads, 2 triples, 1 double, 10 surface lifts)View historic La Parva trailmaps on skimap.org.What we talked aboutMCP puts together the largest ski area in the Southern Hemisphere; how La Parva and Valle Nevado will work as a single ski area while retaining their identity; “something I’ve always taken tremendous pride in is how we respect the unique brand of every resort”; La Parva village; will MCP purchase El Colorado next?; expansion; 10,000-vertical-foot dreams; La Parva Power Pass access; why Valle Nevado is not unlimited on the Power Pass yet; considering Ikon Pass and Mountain Collective access for Valle Nevado, La Parva, and the rest of MCP’s mountains; Valle Nevado’s likely next chairlift; why MCP builds fewer lifts than it would like; the benefits and drawbacks of surface lifts; where a ropetow might make sense at Purgatory; snowmaking in the treeless Andes; why South America; what it means to be the first North American ski area operator to buy in South America; Chile is not as far away as you think; how MCP has grown so large so quickly; why MCP isn’t afraid to purchase ski areas that need work; why MCP bought Sandia Peak and which improvements could be forthcoming; why MCP won’t repair Hesperus’ chairlift until the company can install snowmaking on the hill; why the small ski area is worth saving; drama and resilience at Nordic Valley; should Nordic have upgraded Apollo before installing a brand-new six-pack and expansion?; future Nordic Valley expansion; exploring expansion at Brian Head; and why MCP has never been able to open Elk Ridge, Arizona, and what it would take to do so.What I got wrongI said that I saw “an email” that teased lift infrastructure improvements at Valle Nevado. This tidbit actually came from internal talking points that an MCP representative shared with The Storm.Why the format is so weirdThis is the first time I’ve used the podcast to break news, so I thought the simpler “live” format may work better. I’ll write an analysis of what MCP’s purchase of La Parva means in the coming days.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 34/100 in 2024, and number 534 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on April 18. It dropped for free subscribers on April 25. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:WhoPete Korfiatis, General Manager of Bluewood, WashingtonRecorded onApril 4, 2024About BluewoodClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Local investorsLocated in: Dayton, WashingtonYear founded: 1980Pass affiliations:* Indy Pass and Indy+ Pass: 2 days, no blackoutsClosest neighboring ski areas: Cottonwood Butte, Idaho, 3 hours eastBase elevation: 4,545 feetSummit elevation: 5,670 feetVertical drop: 1,125 feetSkiable Acres: 355Average annual snowfall: 300 inchesTrail count: 24 (30% difficult, 45% intermediate, 25% easy)Lift count: 4 (2 triples, 2 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Bluewood’s lift fleet)Why I interviewed himSomeday, if it’s not too late, I’m going to track down the old-timers who snowshoed into the wilderness and figured this all out. The American West is filled with crazy little snow pockets, lesser-known mountain ranges spiraling off the vast plateaus. Much of this land falls under the purview of the United States Forest Service. In the decades immediately before and after World War II, the agency established most of our large western ski areas within its 193 million-acre kingdom. That’s a lot of land – approximately the size of Texas – and it’s not all snowy. Where there is snow, there’s not always roads, nor even the realistic possibility of plowing one through. Where there are roads, there aren’t always good exposures or fall lines for skiing.So our ski areas ended up where they are because, mostly, those are the best places nature gave us for skiing. Obviously it snows like hell in the Wasatch and the Tetons and the Sierra Nevadas. Anyone with a covered wagon could have told you that. But the Forest Service’s map of its leased ski areas is dotted with strange little outposts popping out of what most of us assume to be The Flats:What to make of Brian Head, floating alone in southern Utah? Or Mt. Lemmon, rising over Tucson? Or Ski Apache and Cloudcroft, sunk near the bottom of New Mexico? Or the ski areas bunched and floating over Los Angeles? Or Antelope Butte, hanging out in the Wyoming Bighorns?Somewhere, in some government filing cabinet 34 floors deep in a Washington, D.C. bunker, are hand-annotated topo maps and notebooks left behind by the bureaucrat-explorers who determined that these map dots were the very best for snowsportskiing. And somewhere, buried where I’ll probably never find it, is the story of Bluewood.It’s one of our more improbable ski centers. Not because it shouldn’t be there, but because most of us can’t imagine how it could be. Most Washington and Oregon ski areas line up along the Cascades, stacked south to north along the states’ western thirds. The snow smashes into these peaks and then stops. Anyone who’s driven east over the passes has encountered the Big Brown Endless on the other side. It’s surreal, how fast the high alpine falls away.But as Interstate 90 arcs northeast through this rolling country and toward Spokane, it routes most travelers away from the fecund Umatilla National Forest, one of those unexpected islands of peaks and green floating above our American deserts. Here, in this wilderness just to the west of Walla Walla but far from just about everything else, 300 inches of snow stack up in an average winter. And this is where you will find Bluewood.The Umatilla sprawls over two states and 1.4 million acres, and is home to three ski areas (Anthony Lakes and inactive Spouts Springs, both in Oregon, are the other two). Three map dots in the wilderness, random-looking from above, all the final product of years in the field, of hardy folks pushing ever-deeper into the woods to find The Spot. This is the story of one of them.What we talked aboutGrowing up Wenatchee; “the mountains are an addiction”; THE MACHINE at Mammoth; Back-In-The-Day Syndrome; Mammoth’s outsized influence on Alterra Mountain Company; how the Ikon Pass strangely benefited Mammoth; the accidental GM; off the grid; Bluewood and southeast Washington’s unique little weather pattern; “everybody that knows Bluewood comes for the trees”; why the Forest Service is selling a bunch of Bluewood’s trees; massive expansion potential; when your snowline is 50 feet above your base area and you have no snowmaking; the winter with no snow; Skyline Basin and dreams that never happened; ambitious lift-upgrade plans; summer and “trying to eliminate the six-month revenue drought”; “if you take the North American lifts right now, they’re only coming out because they’re pieces of crap”; potential future chairlifts; Bluewood’s owners and their long-term vision; mountaintop lodging potential; whether night skiing could ever happen; power by biomass; the Indy Pass; Southeast Washington ski culture; free buddy tickets with your season pass; Bluewood’s season pass reciprocal program; why Bluewood’s lift ticket prices are so low; and the absolute killer expense for small ski areas.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewOne of the more useful habits I’ve developed is attending offseason media events and consumer ski shows, where ski area managers and marketers tend to congregate. The regional gatherings, where mountain booths are stacked side by side like boxes in a cereal aisle, are particularly useful, allowing me to connect with reps from a dozen or more resorts in an hour. Such was the setup at the Snowvana “stoke event” in Portland, Oregon last November, which I attended both to host a panel of ski area general managers and to lay deeper roots in the rabid Pacific Northwest.Two podcasts emerged directly from connections I made that day: my February conversation with Red Mountain CEO Howard Katkov, and this one, with Korfiatis.So that’s the easy answer: a lot of these podcasts happen simply because I was finally able to connect with whomever runs the mountain. But there’s a certain amount of serendipity at work as well: Bluewood, right now, is on the move.This is a ski area that is slowly emerging from the obscurity I caged it into above. It has big-picture owners, an energetic general manager, a growing nearby population, and megapass membership. True, it also has no snowmaking and outdated, slow chairlifts. But the big, established ski centers to its west are overwhelmed, exhausted, and, with a few exceptions, probably un-expandable. Bluewood could be a big-deal alternative to this mess if they can do what Korfiatis says they want to do.There are a lot of millions standing between vision and reality here. But sometimes crazy s**t happens. And if it goes down at Bluewood, I want to make sure we’re sitting right there watching it happen.What I got wrongI said that Mammoth was an independent mountain when Korfiatis arrived there in 2000. This is incorrect. Intrawest owned a majority stake in Mammoth from 1997 to 2006.Why you should ski BluewoodUsually, when casual skiers ask me where they ought to vacation, their wishlist includes someplace that’s relatively easy to get to, where they can stay slopeside, where the snow will probably be good [whenever their kids’ spring break is], and that is a member of [whatever version of the Epic or Ikon pass they purchased]. I give them a list of places that would not be a surprising list of places to anyone reading this newsletter, always with this qualifier: expect company.I like big destination ski areas. Obviously. I can navigate or navigate around the crowds. And I understand that 24-chairlifts-and-a-sushi-bar is exactly what your contemporary megapass patron is seeking. But if someone were to flip the question around and ask me which ski area characteristics were likely to give them the best ski experience, I’d have a very different answer for them.I’d tell them to seek out a place that’s hard to get to, where you find a motel 40 miles away and drive up in the morning. Make it a weekday morning, as far from school breaks as possible. And the further you get from Epkon branding, the farther you’ll be from anything resembling a liftline. That’s the idea with Bluewood.“Yeah but it’s only 1,100 vertical feet.”Yeah but trust me that’s plenty when most of your runs are off-piste and you can ski all day without stopping except to ride the lift.“But no one’s ever heard of it and they won’t be impressed with my Instastory.”You’ll live.“But it’s not on my Ultimo-Plus Pass.”Lift tickets are like $50. Or $66 on weekends. And it’s on the Indy Pass.“But it’s such a long drive.”No it isn’t. It’s just a little bit farther than the busier places that you usually go to. But it’s not exactly in Kazakhstan.“Now you’re just making things up.”Often, but not that.Podcast NotesOn Bluewood’s masterplanHere’s the basic map:And the lift inventory wishlist:On Mission Ridge and WenatcheeKorfiatis grew up in Wenatchee, which sits below Mission Ridge. That mountain, coincidentally, is the subject of an already-recorded and soon-to-be-released podcast, but here’s the trailmap for this surprisingly large mountain in case you’re not familiar with it:On Mission Ridge’s expansionAgain, I go deep on this with Mission CEO Josh Jorgensen on our upcoming pod, but here’s a look at the ski area’s big proposed expansion, which Korfiatis and I discuss a bit on the show:And here’s an overhead view:On “The Legend of Dave McCoy”The Dave McCoy that Korfiatis refers to in the pod is the founder of Mammoth Mountain, who passed away in 2020 at the age of 104. Here’s a primer/tribute video:Rusty Gregory, who ran Mammoth for decades, talked us through McCoy’s legacy in a 2021 Storm Skiing Podcast appearance (18:08):On Kim Clark, Bluewood’s last GMIn September 2021, Bluewood GM Kim Clark died suddenly on the mountain of a heart attack. From SAM:Longtime industry leader and Bluewood, Wash., general manag

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on April 16. It dropped for free subscribers on April 23. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:WhoSteve Paccagnan, President and CEO of Panorama Mountain, British ColumbiaRecorded onMarch 27, 2024About PanoramaClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Panorama Mountain Village, Inc., a group of local investorsLocated in: Panorama, British Columbia, CanadaYear founded: 1962Pass affiliations:* Ikon Pass: 7 days, no blackouts* Ikon Base Pass: 5 days, holiday blackouts* Mountain Collective: 2 days, no blackouts* Lake Louise Pass: view details hereClosest neighboring ski areas: Fairmont Hot Springs (:45), Kimberley (1:43), Kicking Horse (1:54) – travel times will vary considerably depending upon road conditions and time of yearBase elevation: 3,773 feet/1,150 metersSummit elevation: 8,038 feet/2,450 metersVertical drop: 4,265 feet/1,300 metersSkiable Acres: 2,975Average annual snowfall: 204 inches/520 centimetersTrail count: 135 (30% expert, 20% advanced, 35% intermediate, 15% beginner)Lift count: 10 (1 eight-passenger pulse gondola, 2 high-speed quads, 2 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 1 double, 1 platter, 2 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Panorama’s lift fleet)Why I interviewed himU.S. America is making a mistake. In skiing, as in so many other arenas, we prioritize status quo protectionism over measured, holistic development that would reorient our built environments around humans, rather than cars, shrinking our overall impact while easing our access to the mountains and permitting more people to enjoy them. Our cluttered and interminable western approach roads, our mountain-town housing shortages, our liftlines backed up to Kansas are all the result of deliberate generational decisions to prioritize cars over transit, open space over dense walkable communities, and blanket wilderness protection over metered development of new public ski areas in regions where the established businesses - and their surrounding infrastructure - are overwhelmed.I write about these things a lot. This pisses some of you off. I’m OK with that. I’m not here to recycle the broken ideas that have made U.S. skiing into the mess that (in some fundamental ways, in certain regions) it is. I’m here to figure out how it can be better. The skiing itself, mind you, tends to be fabulous. It is everything that surrounds the mountains that can spoil the experience: the cost, the hassle, the sprawl. There are better ways to do this, to get people to the mountains and to house them there, both to live and to vacation. We know this because other countries already do a lot of the things that we ought to be doing. And the most culturally similar and geographically cozy one is so close we can touch it.U.S. America and U.S. Americans are ceding North American skiing’s future to British Columbia. This is where virtually all of the continent’s major resort development has occurred over the past three decades. Why do you suppose so many skiers from Washington State spend so much time at Whistler? Yes, it’s the largest resort in North America, with knockout terrain and lots of snow. But Crystal and Stevens Pass and Baker all get plenty of snow and are large enough to give most skiers just about anything they need. What Whistler has that none of them do is an expansive pedestrian base village with an almost infinite number of ski-in, ski-out beds and places to eat, drink, and shop. A dense community in the mountains. That’s worth driving four or more hours north for, even if you have to deal with the pain-in-the-ass border slowdowns to get there.This is not an accident, and Whistler is not an outlier. Over the past 30-plus years, the province of British Columbia has deliberately shaped its regulatory environment and developmental policies to encourage and lubricate ski resort evolution and growth. While all-new ski resort developments often stall, one small ski area after another has grown from community bump to major resort over the past several decades. Tiny Mount Mackenzie became titanic Revelstoke, which towers over even mighty Whistler. Backwater Whitetooth blew upward and outward into sprawling, ferocious Kicking Horse. Little Tod Mountain evolved into Sun Peaks, now the second-largest ski area in Canada. While the resort has retained its name over the decades, the transformation of Panorama has been just as thorough and dramatic.Meanwhile, in America, we stagnate. Every proposed terrain expansion or transit alternative or housing development crashes headfirst into a shredder of bureaucratic holdups, lawsuits, and citizen campaigns. There are too many ways to stop things, and too many people whose narrow visions of what the world ought to be blockade the sort of wholesale rethinking of community architecture that would make the mountains more livable and accessible.This has worked for a while. It’s still sort of working now. But each year, as the same two companies sell more and more passes to access a relatively stable number of U.S. ski areas, the traffic, liftlines, and cost of visiting these large resorts grows. Locals will find a way, pick their spots. But destination skiers with a menu of big-mountain options will eventually realize that I-70 is not a mandatory obstacle to maneuver on a good ski vacation. They can head north, instead, with the same ski pass they already have, and spend a week at Red or Fernie or Kimberley or Revelstoke or Sun Peaks or Kicking Horse.Or Panorama. Three thousand acres, 4,265 vertical feet, no lines, and no hassle getting there other than summoning the patience to endure long drives down Canadian two-laners. As the U.S. blunders along, Canada kept moving. The story of Panorama shows us how.What we talked aboutA snowmaking blitz; what happened when Panorama joined the Ikon Pass; how Covid savaged the international skier game; Panorama in the ‘80s; Intrawest arrives; a summit lift at last; village-building; reviving Mt. Baldy, B.C.; Mont Ste. Marie and learning French; why Intrawest sold the ski area; modernizing the lift system; busy busy Copper; leaving for Kicking Horse; Resorts of the Canadian Rockies arrives; who owns Panorama; whether the resort will stay independent; potential lift replacements and terrain expansions; could we ever see a lift in Taynton Bowl?; explaining those big sections of the trailmap that are blocked off with purple borders; and whitebark pine conservation.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewIt wouldn’t be fair to call Panorama a Powder Highway sleeper. The place seems to be doing fine as a business, with plenty of skier traffic to support continuous expansive infrastructure upgrades. But with lower average annual snowfall totals than Revy and Whitewater and Fernie and Red, Panorama does tend to get fewer shout-outs through the media and social media megaphones. It’s Northstar to Palisades Tahoe, Keystone to A-Basin, Park City to the Cottonwoods: the less-snowy, less-intense neighbor that collects families in wholesome Build-A-Bear fashion.But Panorama is wrapping up its second full season on the Ikon Pass, and its second winter since Canada finally unlocked its Covid-era borders. What impact, if any, would those two developments have on Panorama’s famously uncrowded slopes? Even if Colorad-Bro would never deign to turn his Subaru north, would Kansas Karl or North Dakota Norman load the kids into the minivan for something farther but less annoying?Not yet, it turns out. Or at least, not in great enough numbers to wreck the place. But there is another angle to the Panorama story that intrigues me. Like Copper Mountain, Mountain Creek, and Whistler, Panorama once belonged to Intrawest. Unlike Winter Park, Steamboat, Stratton, and Snowshoe, they did not remain part of the enterprise long enough to live second lives as part of Alterra Mountain Company. But what if they had? Our big-mountain coalitions have somewhat ossified over these past half-dozen years, so that we think of ski areas as Ikon mountains or Epic mountains or Indy mountains or independent mountains. But these rosters, like the composition of sports teams or, increasingly, leagues, can fluctuate wildly over time. I do wonder how Whistler would look under Alterra and Ikon, or what impact Mountain Creek-as-unlimited-Ikon mountain would have had on the megapass market in New York City? We don’t really know. But Panorama, as a onetime Intrawest mountain that rejoined the family through the backdoor with Ikon membership, does give us a sort-of in-between case, a kind of What If? episode of skiing.Which would be a fun thought experiment under any circumstances. But how cool to hear about the whole evolution from a guy who saw it all happen first-hand over the course of four decades? Who saw it from all levels and from all angles, who knew the players and who helped push the boulder uphill himself? That’s increasingly rare with big mountains, in this era of executive rotations and promotions, to get access to a top leader in possession of institutional knowledge that he himself helped to draft. It was, I’m happy to say, as good as I’d hoped.What I got wrongI said that Panorama was “one of the closest B.C. ski areas to the United States.” This is not quite right. While the ski area is just 100 or so miles from the international border, more than a dozen ski areas sit closer to the U.S., including majors such as Kimberley, Fernie, Whitewater, and Red Mountain.Why you should ski PanoramaLet’s acknowledge, first of all, that Panorama has a few things working against it: it’s more than twice as far from Calgary airport – most skiers’ likely port of entry – than Banff and its trio of excellent ski areas; it’s the least powdery major ski resort on the Powder Highway; and while the skiable acreage and vertical drop are i

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on April 15. It dropped for free subscribers on April 22. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:WhoTom Day, President and General Manager of Gunstock, New HampshireRecorded onMarch 14, 2024About GunstockClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Belknap County, New HampshireLocated in: Gilford, New HampshireYear founded: 1937Pass affiliations: Unlimited access on New Hampshire College Pass (with Cannon, Cranmore, and Waterville Valley)Closest neighboring ski areas: Abenaki (:34), Red Hill Ski Club (:35), Veterans Memorial (:43), Tenney (:52), Campton (:52), Ragged (:54), Proctor (:56), Powderhouse Hill (:58), McIntyre (1:00)Base elevation: 904 feetSummit elevation: 2,244 feetVertical drop: 1,340 feetSkiable Acres: 227 Average annual snowfall: 120 inchesTrail count: 49 (2% double black, 31% black, 52% blue, 15% green)Lift count: 8 (1 high-speed quad, 2 fixed-grip quads, 2 triples, 3 carpets - view Lift Blog’s inventory of Gunstock’s lift fleet)Why I interviewed himIn the roughly four-and-a-half years since I launched The Storm, I’ve written a lot more about some ski areas than others. I won’t claim that there’s no personal bias involved, because there are certain ski areas that, due to reputation, convenience, geography, or personal nostalgia, I’m drawn to. But Gunstock is not one of those ski areas. I was only vaguely aware of its existence when I launched this whole project. I’d been drawn, all of my East Coast life, to the larger ski areas in the state’s north and next door in Vermont and Maine. Gunstock, awkwardly located from my New York City base, was one of those places that maybe I’d get to someday, even if I wasn’t trying too hard to actually make that happen.And yet, I’ve written more about Gunstock than just about any ski area in the country. That’s because, despite my affinity for certain ski areas, I try to follow the news around. And wow has there been news at this mid-sized New Hampshire bump. Nobody knew, going into the summer of 2022, that Gunstock would become the most talked-about ski area in America, until the lid blew off Mount Winnipesaukee in July of that year, when a shallow and ill-planned insurrection failed spectacularly at drawing the ski area into our idiotic and exhausting political wars.If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you can read more on the whole surreal episode in the Podcast Notes section below, or just listen to the podcast. But because of that weird summer, and because of an aspirational masterplan launched in 2021, I’ve given Gunstock outsized attention in this newsletter. And in the process, I’ve quite come to like the place, both as a ski area (where I’ve now actually skied), and as a community, and it has become, however improbably, a mountain I keep taking The Storm back to.What we talked aboutRetirement; “my theory is that 10 percent of people that come to a ski area can be a little bit of a problem”; Gunstock as a business in 2019 versus Gunstock today; skier visits surge; cash in the bank; the publicly owned ski area that is not publicly subsidized; Gunstock Nice; the last four years at Gunstock sure were an Asskicker, eh?; how the Gunstock Area Commission works and what went sideways in the summer of 2022; All-Summers Disease; preventing a GAC Meltdown repeat; the time bandits keep coming; should Gunstock be leased to a private operator?; qualities that the next general manager of Gunstock will need to run the place successfully; honesty, integrity, and respect; an updated look at the 2021 masterplan and what actually makes sense to build; could Gunstock ever have a hotel or summit lodge?; why a paved parking lot is a big deal in 2024; Maine skiing in the 1960s; 1970s lift lines; reflecting on the changes over 40-plus years of skiing; rear-wheel-drive Buicks as ski commuter car; competing against Epic and Ikon and why independent ski areas will always have a place in the market; will record skier-visit numbers persist?; a surprising stat about season passes; and how a payphone caused mass confusion in Park City.  Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewOn January 19, Gunstock Marketing Director Bonnie MacPherson (long of Okemo and Bretton Woods), shot me a press release announcing that Day would retire at the conclusion of the 2023-24 ski season.It was a little surprising. Day hadn’t been at Gunstock long. He’d arrived just a couple months before the March 2020 Covid shutdowns, almost four years to the day before he announced retirement. He was widely liked and respected on the mountain and in the community, a sentiment reinforced during the attempted Kook Coup of summer 2022, when a pair of fundamentalist nutjobs got flung out of the county via catapult after attempting to seize Gunstock from Day and his team.But Gunstock was a bit of a passion project for Day, a skiing semi-lifer who’d spent three decades at Waterville Valley before fiddling with high-end odd-jobs of the consultancy and project-management sort for 10 years. In four years, he transformed county-owned Gunstock from a seasonal business that tapped bridge loans to survive each summer into a profitable year-round entertainment center with millions in the bank. And he did it all despite Covid, despite the arrival of vending-machine Epic and Ikon passes, despite a couple of imbeciles who’d never worked at a ski area thinking they could do a better job running a ski area than the person they paid $175,000 per year to run the ski area.  I still don’t really get it. How it all worked out. How Gunstock has gotten better as everything about running a ski area has gotten harder and more expensive and more competitive. There’s nothing really special about the place statistically or terrain-wise. It’s not super snowy or extra tall or especially big. It has exactly one high-speed lift, a really nice lodge, and Awe Dag views of Lake Winnipesaukee. It’s nice but not exceptional, just another good mid-sized ski area in a state full of good mid-sized ski areas.  And yet, Gunstock thrives. Day, like most ski area general managers, is allergic to credit, but I have to think he had a lot to do with the mountain’s late resilience. He’s an interesting guy, thoughtful and worldly and adventurous. Talking to him, I always get the sense that this is a person who’s comfortable with who he is, content with his life, a hardcore skier whose interests extend far beyond it. He’s colorful but also plainspoken, an optimist and a pragmatist, a bit of back-office executive and good ole’ boy wrencher melded into your archetype of a ski area manager. Someone who, disposition baked by experience, is perfectly suited to the absurd task of operating a ski area in New Hampshire. It’s too bad he’s leaving, but I guess eventually we all do. The least I could do was get his story one more time before he bounced.Why you should ski GunstockSkiing Knife Fight, New Hampshire Edition, looks like this:That’s 30 ski areas, the fifth-most of any state, in the fifth-smallest state in America. And oh by the way you’re also right next door to all of this:And Vermont is barely bigger than New Hampshire. Together, the two states are approximately one-fifth the size of Colorado. “Fierce” as the kids (probably don’t) say.So, what makes you choose Gunstock as your snowsportskiing destination when you have 56 other choices in a two-state region, plus another half-dozen large ski areas just east in Maine? Especially when you probably own an Indy, Epic, or Ikon pass, which, combined, deliver access to 28 upper New England ski areas, including most of the best ones?Maybe that’s exactly why. We’ve been collectively enchanted by access, obsessed with driving down per-visit cost to beat inflated day-ticket prices that we simultaneously find absurd and delight in outsmarting. But boot up at any New England ski area with chairlifts, and you’re going to find a capable operation. No one survived this long in this dogfight without crafting an experience worth skiing.It’s telling that Gunstock has only gotten busier since the Epic and Ikon passes smashed into New England a half dozen years ago. There’s something there, an extra thing worth pursuing. You don’t have to give up your SuperUltimoWinterSki Pass to make Gunstock part of your winter, but maybe work it in there anyway?Podcast NotesOn Gunstock’s masterplanGunstock’s ambitious masterplan, rolled out in 2021, would have blown the ski area out on all sides, added a bunch of new lifts, and plopped a hotel and summit lodge on the property:Most of it seems improbable now, as Day details in the podcast.On the GAC conflictSomeone could write a book on the Gunstock Shenanigans of 2022. The best I can give you is a series of article I published as the whole ridiculous saga was unfolding:* Band of Nitwits Highjacks Gunstock, Ski Area’s Future Uncertain - July 24, 2022* Walkouts, Resignations, Wild Accusations: A Timeline of Gunstock’s Implosion - July 31, 2022* Gunstock GM Tom Day & Team Return, Commissioner Ousted – 3 Ways to Protect the Mountain’s Future - Aug. 8, 2022If nothing else, just watch this remarkable video of Day and his senior staff resigning en masse:On the Caledonian Canal that “splits Scotland in half”I’d never heard of the Caledonian Canal, but Day mentions sailing it and that it “splits Scotland in half.” That’s the sort of thing I go nuts for, so I looked it up. Per Wikipedia:The Caledonian Canal connects the Scottish east coast at Inverness with the west coast at Corpach near Fort William in Scotland. The canal was constructed in the early nineteenth century by Scottish engineer Thomas Telford.The canal runs some 60 miles (100 kilometres) from northeast to southwest and reaches 106 feet (32 metres) above sea level.[2] Only one third of the entire length is man-made, the rest being

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on April 8. It dropped for free subscribers on April 15. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:WhoDan Egan, General Manager of Tenney Mountain, New HampshireRecorded onMarch 14, 2024About Tenney MountainOwned by: North Country Development GroupLocated in: Plymouth, New HampshireYear founded: 1960 (closed several times; re-opened most recently in 2023)Pass affiliations:* No Boundaries Pass: 1-3 days, no blackoutsClosest neighboring ski areas: Campton (:24), Kanc Recreation Area (:33), Loon (:34), Ragged (:34), Waterville Valley (:35), Veteran’s Memorial (:39), Red Hill Ski Club (:42), Cannon (:44), Proctor (:44), Mt. Eustis (:50), Gunstock (:52), Dartmouth Skiway (:54), Whaleback (:55), Storrs (:57), Bretton Woods (:59)Base elevation: 749 feetSummit elevation: 2,149 feetVertical drop: 1,400 feetSkiable Acres: 110 acresAverage annual snowfall: 140 inchesTrail count: 47 (14 advanced, 27 intermediate, 6 beginner) + 1 terrain parkLift count: 3 (1 triple, 1 double, 1 platter - view Lift Blog’s inventory of Tenney’s lift fleet)View historic Tenney Mountain trailmaps on skimap.org.Why I interviewed himDan Egan is an interesting guy. He seems to have 10 jobs all at once. He’s at Big Sky and he’s at Val-d’Isère and he’s writing books and he’s giving speeches and he’s running Tenney Mountain. He’s a legendary freeskier who didn’t die young and who’s stayed glued to the sport. He loves skiing and it is his whole life and that’s clear in talking to him for 30 seconds.So he would have been a great and compelling interview even outside of the context of Tenney. But I’m always drawn to people who do particular, peculiar things when they could do anything. There’s no reason that Dan Egan has to bother with Tenney, a mid-sized mountain in a mid-sized ski state far from the ski poles of the Alps and the Rockies. It would be a little like Barack Obama running for drain commissioner of Gladwin County, Michigan. He’d probably do a good job, but why would he bother, when he could do just about anything else in the world?I don’t know. It’s funny. But Egan is drawn to this place. It’s his second time running Tenney. The guy is Boston-core, his New England roots clear and proud. It makes sense that he would rep the region. But there are New England ski areas that stand up to the West in scope and scale of terrain, and even, in Northern Vermont, snow volume and quality (if not consistency). But Tenney isn’t one of them. It’s like the 50th best ski area in the Northeast, not because it couldn’t be better, but because it’s never been able to figure out how to become the best version of itself.Egan – who, it’s important to note, will move into an advisory or consultant role for Tenney next winter – seems to know exactly who he is, and that helps. He understands skiing and he understands skiers and he understands where this quirky little mountain could fit into the wide world of skiing. This is exactly what the ski area needs as it chugs into the most recent version of itself, one that, we hope, can defy its own legacy and land, like Egan always seems to, on its skis.What we talked aboutA vision for Tenney; what happened when Egan went skiing in jeans all over New Hampshire; the second comeback season was stronger than the first; where Tenney can fit in a jam-packed New Hampshire ski scene; why this time is different at Tenney; the crazy gene; running a ski area with an extreme skier’s mindset; expansion potential; what’s lost with better snowmaking and grooming and wider trails; why New England breeds kick-ass skiers; Tenney’s quiet renovation; can Tenney thrive long-term with a double chair as its summit lift?; what’s the worst thing about a six-person chair?; where Tenney could build more beginner terrain; expansion opportunities; the future of the triple chair; an endorsement for surface lifts; the potential for night skiing; the difference between running Tenney in 2002 and 2024; the slow death of learn-to-ski; why is skiing discounting to its most avid fans?; the down side of online ticket discounts; warm-weather snowmaking; Tenney’s snowmaking evolution; the best snowmaking system in New Hampshire; “any ski area that’s charging more than $100 for skiing and then asking you to put your boots in a cubby outside in the freezing cold … to me, that’s an insult”; the importance of base lodges; “brown-baggers, please, you’re welcome at Tenney”; potential real estate development and the importance of community; New England ski culture – “It means something to be from the East”; “why aren’t more ski area operators skiing?”; skiing as confidence-builder; the No Boundaries Pass; the Indy Pass; Tenney season pass pricing; and Ragged’s Mission: Affordable pass.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewIn late 2022, as Tenney’s social media feeds filled with hyperactive projects to re-open the ski area, I asked a veteran operator – I won’t say which one – what they thought of the ski area’s comeback potential.“No chance,” they’d said, pointing to lack of water, strained and dated infrastructure, and a mature and modern competitive marketplace. “They’re insane.”And yet, here we are. Tenney lives.The longer I do this, the less the project of operating a ski area makes sense to me. Ski areas, in my head, have always been Mount Bohemia: string a lift up the mountain and let the skiers ride. But that model can only work in like four places on the continent, and sometimes, like this year, it barely works there. The capital and labor requirements of running even a modest operation in schizophrenic New England weather are, by themselves, shocking. Add in a summit lift built six decades ago by a defunct company in an analogue world, an already overcrowded New Hampshire ski market, and a decades-long legacy of failure, and you have an impossible-seeming project.But they’re doing it. For two consecutive winters, lift-served snowskiing has happened at Tenney. The model here echoes the strategy that has worked at Titus and Holiday Mountain and Montage: find an owner who runs other successful, non-ski businesses and let those businesses subsidize the ski area until it can function independently. That could take a while. But Steven Kelly, whose Timberline Construction Company is big-timing it all over New England, seems committed.Some parts of the country, like Washington, need more ski areas. Others, like New Hampshire, probably have too many. That can be great for skiers: access road death matches are not really a thing out here, and there’s always some uncrowded bump to escape to on peak days. Operators competing for skiers, however, have a tricky story to tell. In Tenney’s case, the puzzle is this: how does a fixed-grip 1,400-footer compete in a crowded ski corridor in a crowded ski state with five-dollar Epic Passes raining from the skies and Octopus lifts rising right outside of town and skiers following habits and rituals formed in childhood? Tenney’s operators have ideas. And some pretty good ones, as it turns out.Questions I wish I’d askedI know some of you will be disappointed that I didn’t get into Egan’s career as a pro skier. But this interview could have been nine hours long and we wouldn’t have dented the life of what is a very interesting dude. Anyway here’s Egan skiing and talking about skiing if you were missing that:What I got wrongWe recorded this before 2024-25 Tenney season passes dropped. Egan teased that they would cost less than 2023-24 passes, and they ended up debuting for $399 adult, down from $449 for this past winter.When describing the benefits of nearby Ragged Mountain’s $429 season pass, I mention the ski area’s high-speed lifts and extensive glades, but I neglected to mention one very important benefit: the pass comes loaded with five lift tickets to Jay freaking Peak.Why you should ski TenneyBefore high-speed lifts and Colorado-based owners and Extreme Ultimo Megapasses, there was a lot more weird in New England skiing. There was the Cranmore Skimobile:And these oil-dripping bubble doubles and rocket-ship tram at Mount Snow:And whatever the hell is going on here at now-defunct King Ridge, New Hampshire:I don’t really know if all this was roadside carnival schtick or regional quirk or just a reflection of the contemporary world, but it’s all mostly gone now, a casualty of an industry that’s figured itself out.Which is why it’s so jarring, but also so novel and so right, to pull into Tenney and to see this:I don’t really know the story here, and I didn’t ask Egan about it. They call it the Witch’s Hat. It’s Tenney’s ticket office. Perhaps its peculiar shape is a coincidence, the product of some long-gone foreman’s idiosyncratic imagination. I don’t even know why a ski area with a base lodge the size of Rhode Island bothers to maintain a separate building just for selling lift tickets. But they do. And it’s wonderful.The whole experience of skiing Tenney evokes this kind of time-machine dislocation. There’s the lattice-towered Hornet double, a plodding 60-year-old machine that moves uphill at the pace of a pack mule:There’s the narrow, twisty trails of Ye Old New England:And the handmade trail signs:Of course, modernity intrudes. Tenney now has RFID, trim grooming, a spacious pub with good food. And, as you’ll learn in the podcast, plans to step into the 2020s. The blueprint here is not Mad River Glen redux, or even fixed-grip 4EVA Magic Mountain. It’s transformation into something that can compete in ski area-dense and rapidly evolving New Hampshire. The vision, as Egan lays it out, is compelling. But there will be a cost to it, including, most likely, the old Hornet. That Tenney will be a Tenney worth skiing, but so is this one, and better to see it before it’s gone.Podcast NotesOn 30 Years in a White HazeI mentioned Egan’s

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on April 5. It dropped for free subscribers on April 12. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:WhoBruce Schmidt, Vice President and General Manager at Okemo Mountain Resort, VermontRecorded onFeb. 27, 2024 (apologies for the delay)About OkemoClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Vail ResortsLocated in: Ludlow, VermontYear founded: 1956Pass affiliations:* Epic Pass: unlimited access* Epic Local Pass: unlimited access* Epic Northeast Value Pass: unlimited access with holiday blackouts* Epic Northeast Midweek Pass: unlimited weekday access with holiday blackouts* Epic Day Pass: access on “all resorts” and “32 resorts” tiersClosest neighboring ski areas: Killington (:22), Magic (:26), Bromley (:31), Pico (:32), Ascutney (:33), Bellows Falls (:37), Stratton (:41), Saskadena Six (:44), Ski Quechee (:48), Storrs Hill (:52), Whaleback (:56), Mount Snow (1:04), Hermitage Club (1:10)Base elevation: 1,144 feetSummit elevation: 3,344 feetVertical drop: 2,200 feetSkiable Acres: 632Average annual snowfall: 120 inches per On The Snow; Vail claims 200.Trail count: 121 (30% advanced, 37% intermediate, 33% beginner) + 6 terrain parksLift count: 20 (2 six-packs, 4 high-speed quads, 5 fixed-grip quads, 2 triples, 1 platter, 6 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Okemo’s lift fleet)View historic Okemo trailmaps on skimap.org.Why I interviewed himWhether by plan or by happenstance, Vail ended up with a nearly perfect mix of Vermont ski areas. Stowe is the beater, with the big snows and the nasty trails and the amazing skiers and the Uphill Bros and the glades and the Front Four. Mount Snow is the sixth borough of New York City (but so is Florida and so is Stratton), big and loud and busy and bursting and messy, with a whole mountain carved out for a terrain park and big-drinking, good-timing crowds, as many skiers at the après, it can seem, as on the mountain. And Okemo is something that’s kind of in-between and kind of totally different, at once tame and lively, a placid family redoubt that still bursts with that frantic Northeast energy.It's a hard place to define, and statistics won’t do it. Line up Vermont’s ski areas on a table, and Okemo looks bigger and better than Sugarbush or Stowe or Jay Peak. It isn’t, of course, as anyone in the region will tell you. The place doesn’t require the guts that its northern neighbors demand. It’s big but not bossy. More of a stroll than a run, a good-timer cruising the Friday night streets in a drop-top low-rider, in no hurry at all to do anything other than this. It’s like skiing Vermont without having to tangle with Vermont, like boating on a lake with no waves.Because of this unusual profile, New England skiers either adore Okemo or won’t go anywhere near it. It is a singular place in a dense ski state that is the heart of a dense ski region. Okemo isn’t particularly convenient to get to, isn’t particularly snowy by Vermont standards, and isn’t particularly interesting from a terrain point of view. And yet, it is, historically, the second-busiest ski area in the Northeast (after Killington). There is something there that works. Or at least, that has worked historically, as the place budded and flourished in the Mueller family’s 36-year reign.But it’s Vail’s mountain now, an Epic Pass anchor that’s shuffling and adding lifts for the crowds that that membership brings. While the season pass price has dropped, skier expectations have ramped up at Okemo, as they have everywhere in the social-media epoch. The grace that passholders granted the growing family-owned mountain has evaporated. Everyone’s pulling the pins on their hand grenades and flinging them toward Broomfield every time a Saturday liftline materializes. It’s not really fair, but it’s how the world is right now. The least I can do is get their side of it.What we talked aboutSummer storm damage to Ludlow and Okemo; the resort helping the town; Vermont’s select boards; New England resilience; Vail’s My Epic Promise fund and how it helped employees post-storm; reminiscing on old-school Okemo and its Poma forest; the Muellers arrive; the impact of Jackson-Gore; how and why Okemo grew from inconsequential local bump to major New England ski hill; how Okemo expanded within the confines of Vermont’s Act 250; Vail buys the mountain, along with Sunapee and Crested Butte; the Muellers’ legacy; a Sunapee interlude; Vail adjusting to New England operations; mythbusters: snowmaking edition; the Great Chairlift Switcheroo of 2021; why Okemo didn’t place bubbles on the Quantum 6; why Okemo’s lift fleet is entirely made up of Poma machines; where Okemo could add a lift to the existing trail network; expansion potential; does Okemo groom too much?; glade expansion?; that baller snowmaking system; what happened when Okemo’s season pass price dropped by more than $1,000; is Epic Pass access too loose at Okemo?; how to crowd-dodge; the Epic Northeast Midweek Pass; limiting lift ticket sales; and skyrocketing lift ticket prices.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewBruce Schmidt first collected a paycheck from Okemo in the late 1970s. That was a different mountain, a different ski industry, a different world. Pomas and double chairs and primitive snowmaking and mountain-man gear and no internet. It was grittier and colder, in the sense that snowpants and ski coats and heated gloves and socks were not so ubiquitous and affordable and high-quality as they are today. Skiing, particularly in New England, required a hardiness, a tolerance for cold and subtle pain that modernity has slowly shuffled out of the skier profile.Different as it was, that age of 210s and rear-wheel drive rigs was not that long ago, and Schmidt has experienced it as one continuous story. That sort of institutional and epochal tenure is rare, especially at one ski area, especially at one that has evolved as much as Okemo. Imagine if you showed up at surface-lift Hickory and watched it transform, over four decades, into sprawling Gore. That’s essentially what Schmidt lived – and helped drive – at Okemo.That hardly ever happens. Small ski areas tend to stay small. Expansion is hard and expensive and, in Vermont especially, bureaucratically challenging. And yet little Okemo, wriggling in Killington’s shadow, lodged between the state’s southern and northern snow pockets, up past Mount Snow and Stratton but not so far from might-as-well-keep-driving Sugarbush and Mad River Glen, became, somehow, the fourth-largest ski area in America’s fourth-largest ski state by skier visits (after Colorado, California, and Utah, typically).The Mueller family, which owned the ski area from 1982 until they sold it to Vail Resorts in 2018, were, of course, the visionaries and financiers behind that growth, the likes of which we will probably never witness in New England again. But as Vail’s roots grow deeper and they make these mountains their own, that legacy will fade, if not necessarily dim. It was important, then, to download that part of Schmidt’s brain to the internet, to make sure that story survived the big groom of time.What I got wrongI said in the intro that Bruce started at Okemo in 1987. He actually started in the late ‘70s and worked there on and off for several years, as he explains in the conversation.I said that Okemo’s lift fleet was “100 percent Poma.” This is not exactly right, as some of the lifts are officially branded Leitner-Poma. I’m also not certain of the make of Okemo’s carpets.I noted in the intro that Okemo was Vail’s second-largest eastern mountain. It is actually their largest by skiable acreage (though Stowe feels larger to me, given the expansive unmarked but very skiable glades stuffed between nearly every trail). Here’s a snapshot of Vail’s entire portfolio for reference:Why you should ski OkemoThe first time I skied Okemo was 2007. I rode a 3:45 a.m. ski bus north from Manhattan. I remember thinking three things: 1) wow, this place is big; 2) wow, there are a lot of kids here; and 3) do they seriously groom every goddamn trail every single night?This was at the height of my off-piste mania. I’m not a great carver, especially after the cord gets chopped up and scratchy sublayers emerge. I prefer to maneuver, at a moderate pace, over terrain, meaning bumps or glades (which are basically bumps in the trees, at least on a typical Vermont day). It’s more fun and interesting than blasting down wide-open, beaten-up groomers filled with New Yorkers.But wide-open, beaten-up groomers filled with New Yorkers is what Okemo is. At the time, I had no understanding of freeze-thaw cycles, of subtle snowfall differentials between nearby ski areas, of the demographic profile that drove such tight slope management (read: mediocre big-city skiers with no interest in anything other than getting to the bottom still breathing). All I knew was that for me, at the time, this wasn’t what I was looking for.But what you want as a skier evolves over time. I still like terrain, and Okemo still doesn’t have as much as I’d like. If that’s what you need, take your Epic Pass to Stowe – they have plenty. But what I also like is skiing with my kids, skiing with my wife, morning cord laps off fast lifts, long meandering scenic routes to rest up between bumpers, exploring mountains border to border, getting a little lost among multiple base areas, big views, moderate pitches, and less-aggressive skiers (ride the K1 gondy or Superstar chair at Killington and then take the Sunburst Six at Okemo; the toning down of energy and attitude is palpable).Okemo not only has all that – it is all that. If that makes sense. This is one of the best family ski areas in the country. It feels like – it is – a supersized version of the busy ski areas in Massachusetts or Connecticut, a giant Wachusett

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on March 30. It dropped for free subscribers on April 6. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:WhoBridget Legnavsky, President & CEO of Sugar Bowl, CaliforniaRecorded onMarch 13, 2024About Sugar BowlClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: A group of shareholdersLocated in: Donner, CaliforniaYear founded: 1939Pass affiliations: Mountain Collective: 2 days, no blackoutsClosest neighboring ski areas: Donner Ski Ranch (:02), Soda Springs (:07), Boreal (:10), Kingvale (:14), Tahoe Donner (:24), Northstar (:27), Palisades Tahoe (:30), Homewood (:44), Diamond Peak (:52), Mt. Rose (:58), Sky Tavern (1:03) - travel times vary considerably given time of day, time of year, and weather conditions.Base elevation: 6,883 feetSummit elevation: 8,383 feetVertical drop: 1,500 feetSkiable Acres: 1,650 acresAverage annual snowfall: 500 inchesTrail count: 103 (38% advanced, 45% intermediate, 17% beginner)Lift count: 12 (1 four-passenger gondola, 5 high-speed quads, 3 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 1 platter, 1 carpet) - view Lift Blog’s inventory of Sugar Bowl’s lift fleet.View historic Sugar Bowl trailmaps on skimap.org.Why I interviewed herLagnavsky muses, toward the end of our interview, that Lake Tahoe in general is home to “the best skiing I’ve ever had in my life,” and that she can’t fathom why it’s not more of a national and international ski destination. This is coming from someone who has spent 30-plus years in the industry; who’s worked in Europe, Colorado, and New Zealand; who has freeskier credentials etched on her resume. She knows what she’s talking about.And I agree with her. More or less**. Tahoe is spectacular. The views, the snow, the terrain, the vibe, the energy, the variety, the sheer audacity of it all. Sixteen ski areas rung around a 191-square-mile lake at the top of California*^. An improbable wintertime circus, one of the greatest concentrations of ski areas on the continent.And no one would say there is any lack of people there. This is, again, California, home to 39 million Americans. Traffic and housing are big problems. But, being based in the East, I’m dialed into the way that much of the country thinks about Tahoe as a destination ski region. Which is to say, they mostly don’t.And I don’t quite get why. It’s not hard to get to. Reno’s airport is closer to the major Tahoe ski areas than Denver’s is to Summit County. It’s not a huge facility, but it’s served by direct flights from 24 airports, including New York City and Chicago. While the roads can get nasty mid-storm, they’re mostly well-maintained federal and state highways. There are plenty of accommodations on or near the larger resorts. But anytime I ask an Epic- or Ikon-Pass wielding East Coast city skier where they’re going out west, they say the Wasatch or Colorado or Big Sky or Jackson Hole. And if I’m like “what about Tahoe,” they’re usually like, “there’s skiing in California? How strange.”Not that the Epic and Ikon Tahoe mountains need more skiers. The San Francisco Chronicle ran a story a couple weeks ago about how fed-up Bay Area skiers were jetting to Utah and Colorado to outsmart the crowds (slow clap for that hack, Fellas). But there is a lot more to this sprawling, captivating ski region than Palisades, Heavenly, Northstar, and Kirkwood. And one of the most overlooked but also magical pieces of it is Sugar Bowl. And the fact that it’s not, for whatever reason, a destination to anyone outside of a 250-mile radius might make it exactly the kind of place that a lot of you are searching for.**Settle down, Utah.*and Nevada^”Ummmm, the highest point in California is Mt. Whitney, which is nowhere near Lake Tahoe.” Thanks Doesn’t-Understand-Intentional-Hyperbole Bro. P.S. I hate you.What we talked about127 inches in one storm and yes that’s real; how do you even measure that?; the “storm troopers” living at Sugar Bowl; storm mode in Tahoe; adjustable lifts; this crazy door:A season extension; how late Sugar Bowl could stay open and why it usually shuts down before that; ski New Zealand; Treble Cone; Cardrona; the global seasonal ski resort work cycle; never-summer; the biggest cultural adjustment coming to America after running resorts in New Zealand; who owns Sugar Bowl and how committed they are to independence; “We’re an independent resort surrounded by Ikon and Epic, and that’s making it really hard for Sugar Bowl to survive”; could Sugar Bowl join the Ikon Pass?; joining Mountain Collective; “part of the beauty of Sugar Bowl is that it’s uncrowded”; Shhhhhh-ugar Bowl; the three things that set Sugar Bowl apart in a crowded ski market; operating below comfortable carrying capacity; the village gondola; what happens when you live in a car-free village; considering a gondola upgrade; considering the lift fleet; why the Crow’s Peak lift is a triple chair, rather than a high-speed quad; “I do believe we could have the best beginner’s experience in the U.S.”; Sugar Bowl’s masterplan; village evolution; the curiosity of the small ski areas surrounding Sugar Bowl; “it’s got the best skiing I’ve ever had in my life here”; why isn’t California a destination ski market?; yes snowmaking is still helpful in Tahoe, and not just in the winter.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewAs far as mid-to-large-sized ski areas go, Sugar Bowl is about as well placed as any in the world. Its four peaks sit walking distance from Interstate 80, which mainlines Bay Area skiers into the mountains in under three hours (without traffic; yes, I know, there’s always traffic). Sugar Bowl is the first big ski area you hit riding east, and arguably the easiest to access. And it gets clobbered with 500 inches of average annual snowfall. Those are Alta-Snowbird numbers (keep moving, Canyon Bro; yes, it’s heavier snow, in general; I already told you LCC delivers the best skiing in America, so stop arguing about something we agree on).And yet, skiing circa 2024 has set up a challenging obstacle course for Sugar Bowl to navigate. At least as a business. Legnavsky is frank in the podcast, telling us that, “we’re an independent resort surrounded by Ikon and Epic, and that’s making it really hard for Sugar Bowl to survive.” To underscore just how fierce competition for skiers is in Lake Tahoe, look how close Sugar Bowl is to Northstar, an Epic resort that is more than twice its size, and Palisades Tahoe, the 6,000-acre Ikon Pass monster just to its south:It’s a tough draw. Though not as tough as that of the pass’ namesake Donner Party, who spent what would have been the bomber ski winter of 1846-47 snowbound at a nearby lake eating each other (reading the fevered history of this ordeal derailed me for half an hour while writing this article; I will just say that I’ve never been happier to live in the future). Still, for a business trying to make a go in the U.S. America of 2024, Megapass Monopoly is a tough game to play.So if Sugar Bowl can’t beat them, why not join them? The mountain has, after all, already jumped on the Mountain Collective train. Why not just join Ikon and be done with it?The answer, as you can imagine, is nuanced and considered. How does a ski area shape and retain an identity and remain a sustainable business in a vibrant ski region that is stuffed with snow and skiers, but also plenty of larger – and, frankly, less expensive (Sugar Bowl’s season pass is $1,099, more than the $982 Epic Pass) – ski areas? That, for now, is Sugar Bowl’s biggest challenge.Questions I wish I’d askedSugar Bowl also owns the expansive Royal Gorge cross-country ski center, which they claim is North America’s largest, with more than 140 kilometers of trails. And while this trailmap resembles a Rorschach test slide (I see a bat, or maybe a volcano, or maybe a volcanic bat) more than any sort of guide I would be capable of following in and out of the wilderness, I can only assume this is impressive:What I got wrongI lumped Boreal in with Soda Springs, Tahoe Donner, and Donner Ski Ranch as a “small, family-oriented ski area.” That’s not really accurate. While Boreal, which, like Soda Springs, is owned by big bad Powdr Corp, is small by Tahoe standards, it’s really been transformed into a giant terrain park in line with the company’s Woodward Brand. It’s the only night-skiing operation in Tahoe, so the Park Brahs can Park Out Brah.Why you should ski Sugar Bowl“Part of the beauty of Sugar Bowl is that it’s uncrowded,” Legnavsky tells us in the podcast.I’m sold.To access the best version of modern U.S. skiing, you have to, I believe, find the ski areas with all the attributes of the destination resorts, minus their cost, congestion and Instapost-braggy name recognition. Places like Saddleback (a high-speed lift, lots of snow, great terrain, no people), Loveland (easy access, huge terrain, everyone sitting in their cars on the highway below, waiting to go skiing), or Sundance (modern lifts, great snow and scenery, minus the huge crowds just north; this also happens to be where I’m posted up at the moment, writing this article).Sugar Bowl is one of these places. Five high-speed lifts and craptons of snow, without an access road that looks like the first draft of a caveman rollercoaster. While its 1,500-foot vertical drop ranks ninth among Tahoe ski areas, it clocks in at sixth in skiable acreage, with 1,650. Both numbers, in any context, are respectable, and will give an average skier more than enough to work with for a few days.Vail has sold more Epic Passes every year since 2008. While new mountain acquisitions surely drove much of that growth, the company’s last new domestic pickup was Seven Springs and its sister resorts in 2021. That suggests that more Epic Pass holders are visiting the same number of ski areas each winter. I don’t know how many Ikon Passes Alterra sells

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on March 26. It dropped for free subscribers on April 2. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:WhoBrian Heon, General Manager of Sunday River, MaineRecorded onJanuary 30, 2024About Sunday RiverClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Boyne ResortsLocated in: Newry, MaineYear founded: 1959Pass affiliations:* Ikon Pass: 7 days, no blackouts* Ikon Base Pass: 5 days, holiday blackouts* New England Pass: unlimited access on Gold tierReciprocal partners:* New England Pass holders get equal access to Sunday River, Sugarloaf, and Loon* New England Gold passholders get three days each at Boyne’s other seven ski areas: Pleasant Mountain, Maine; Boyne Mountain and The Highlands, Michigan; Big Sky, Montana; Brighton, Utah; Summit at Snoqualmie, Washington; and Cypress, B.C.Closest neighboring ski areas: Mt. Abram (:17); Black Mountain of Maine (:34); Wildcat (:46); Titcomb (1:05); Attitash (1:05); Cranmore (1:11)Base elevation: 800 feetSummit elevation: 3,150 feet (at Oz Peak)Vertical drop: 2,350 feetSkiable Acres: 884 trail acres + 300 acres of gladesAverage annual snowfall: 167 inchesTrail count: 139 (16% expert, 18% advanced, 36% intermediate, 30% beginner)Lift count: 19 (1 eight-pack, 1 six-pack, 1 6/8-passenger chondola, 2 high-speed quads, 5 fixed-grip quads, 4 triples, 1 double, 1 T-bar, 3 carpets – Sunday River also built an additional triple chair on Merrill Hill, which is complete but not yet open; it is scheduled to open for the 2024-25 ski season – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Sunday River’s lift fleet.)View historic Sunday River trailmaps on skimap.org.Why I interviewed himWhat an interesting time this is in the North American ski industry. It’s never been easier or cheaper for avid skiers to sample different mountains, across different regions, within the span of a single season. And, in spite of the sorry shape of the stoke-obsessed ski media, there has never been more raw information readily available about those ski areas, whether that’s Lift Blog’s exhaustive databases or OpenSnow’s snowfall comparisons and histories.What that gives all of us is perspective and context. When I learned to ski in the ‘90s, pre-commercial internet, you could scarcely find a trailmap without visiting a resort’s ticket window. Skimap.org now houses more than 10,000 historic trailmaps for North America alone. That means you can understand, without visiting, what a ski area was, how it’s evolved, and how it compares to its neighbors.That makes Sunday River’s story both easier and harder to tell. Easier because anyone can now see how this monster, seated up there beyond the Ski 93 and North Conway corridors, is worth the drive past all of that to get to this. The ski area is more than twice the size of anything in New Hampshire. But the magical internet can also show skiers just how much snowier it is in Vermont, how much emptier it is at Saddleback, and that my gosh actually it doesn’t take so much longer to just fly to Utah.Sunday River, self-aware of its place in the ski ecosystem, has responded by building a better mountain. Boyne has, so far, under-promised and over-delivered on the resort’s 2030 plan, which, when launched four years ago, didn’t mention either of the two D-Line megalifts that now anchor both ends of the resort. The snowmaking is getting better, even as the mountain grows larger and more complex. The teased Western Reserve expansion would, given Sunday River’s reliance on snowmaking, be truly audacious, transforming an already huge ski area into a gigantic one.Cynics will see echoes of ASC’s largess, of the expansion frenzy of the 1990s that ended in the company’s (though fortunately not the individual ski areas’) extinction. But Boyne Resorts is not some upstart. The narrative of ski-consolidation-doesn’t-work always overlooks this Michigan-based company, founded by a scrappy fellow named Everett Kircher in 1947 – nearly 80 years ago. Boyne officials assure me that their portfolio-wide infrastructure investment is both considered and sustainable. If you’ve been to Big Sky in the past couple of years, it’s clear what the company is trying to achieve, even if they won’t explicitly say it (and I’ve tried to get them to say it): Boyne Resorts is resetting the standard for the North American ski experience by building the most modern ski resorts on the continent. They’re doing what I wish Vail, which continues to disappoint me in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic, would do: ensuring that, wherever they operate, they are delivering the best possible version of skiing in that region. And while that’s a tough draw in the Cottonwoods (with Brighton, stacked, as it is, against the Narnia known as Alta-Snowbird), they’re doing it in Michigan, they’re doing it in the Rockies (at Big Sky), and they’re doing it in New England, where Loon and Sunday River, especially, are transforming at superspeed.What we talked aboutRain, rain, go away; deciding to close down a ski resort; “seven inches of rain and 40-degree temperatures will eat snowpack pretty quick”; how Sunday River patched the resort back in only four days; the story behind the giant igloo at the base of Jordan; is this proof of climate change or proof of ski industry resilience?; one big advantage of resort consolidation; the crazy New England work ethic; going deep on the new Barker 6 lift; why Sunday River changed plans after announcing that the old Jordan high-speed quad would replace Barker; automatic restraint bars; the second Merrill Hill triple and why it won’t spin until the 2024-25 ski season; the best part about skiing Merrill Hill; how Jordan 8 has transformed Sunday River; why that lift is so wind-resistant; the mountain’s evolving season-opening plan; the potential Western Reserve expansion; potential future lift upgrades; carpet-bombing; 2030 progress beyond the on-snow ski experience; whether the summer bike park could return; the impact of the Ikon Pass on skier visits; Mountain Collective; the New England Pass; and making sure local kids can ski.  Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewJordan 8. Barker 6. Merrill Hill. A December rainstorm fit to raise Noah’s Ark. There is always something happening at Sunday River. Or, to frame it in the appropriate active voice: Sunday River is always doing things.New England, in its ASC/Intrawest late 1980s/1990s/early 2000s frenzy, built and built and built. Sugarbush installed five lifts, including the two-mile-long Slide Brook Express, in a single summer (1995). Killington built two gondolas and two high-speed quads in a three-year span from 1994 to ’97. Stratton sprouted two six-packs and two fixed-grip quads in the summer of 2001. And Sunday River, the most earnest manifestation of Les Otten’s ego and ambitions, multiplied across the wilderness, a new peak each year it seemed, until a backwater with a skiable footprint roughly equal to modern Black Mountain, New Hampshire had sprawled into a videogame ski kingdom at the chest-thumping pinnacle of Northeast skiing.And then not a lot happened for a really long time. ASC fell apart. Intrawest curdled. Most of the ski area infrastructure investment fled west. Stowe, then owned by AIG, kept building lifts, as did the Muellers (Okemo), and Peak Resorts (at least at Mount Snow and Crotched). One-offs would materialize as strange experiments, like the inexplicable six-pack at Ragged (2001) and the Mid-Burke Express at remote and little-known Burke Mountain (2011). But the region’s on-mountain ski infrastructure, so advanced in the 1990s, began to tire out.Then, since 2018 or so, rapid change, propelled by numerous catalysts: the arrival of western megapasses, a Covid adrenaline boost, and, most crucially, two big companies willing to build big-time lifts at big-time ski areas. Vail, since kicking New England’s doors open in 2017, has built a half-dozen major lifts, including three six-packs, across four ski areas. And Boyne Resorts, flexing a blueprint they first deployed at western crown jewel Big Sky, has built three D-line bubble lifts, installed two refurbished high-speed quads (with another on the way this summer), unveiled two expansions, and teased at least two more across its four New England ski areas. It doesn’t hurt that, despite a tighter regulatory culture in general, there is little Forest Service bureaucracy to fuss with in the East, meaning that (Vermont’s Act 250 notwithstanding), it’s often easier to replace infrastructure.Which takes us back to Sunday River. Big and bustling, secure in its Ikon Pass membership, “SR,” as the Boyne folks call it, didn’t really have to do anything to keep being busy and important. The old lifts would have kept on turning, even if rickety old Barker set the message boards on fire once every two to three weeks. Instead, the place is, through platinum-plated lifts and immense snowmaking upgrades, rapidly evolving into one of the country’s most sophisticated ski areas. If that sounds like hyperbole, try riding one of Boyne’s D-line bubble lifts. Quick and quiet, smooth as a shooting star, appointed like a high-end cigar lounge, these lifts inspire a sort of giddiness, an awe in the up-the-mountain ride that will reprogram the way you think about your ski day (even if you’re too cynical to admit it).But it’s not just what Sunday River is building that defines the place – it is also how the girth of the operation, backed by a New England hardiness, has fortified it against the almost constant weather events that make Northeast ski area operation such a suicidal juggling act. The December rainstorm that tore the place into pieces ended up shutting down the mountain for all of four days. Then they were like, “What?” And the lifts were spinning again.What I got wrongOn the old Jordan quadHeon mentioned that the

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Feb. 28. It dropped for free subscribers on March 6. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription (on sale at 15% off through March 12, 2024). You can also subscribe to the free tier below:WhoHoward Katkov, Chairman and CEO of Red Mountain Resort, British ColumbiaRecorded onFeb. 8, 2024About Red MountainClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Red Mountain VenturesLocated in: Rossland, British Columbia, CanadaYear founded: 1947 (beginning of chairlift service)Pass affiliations:* Ikon Pass: 7 days, no blackouts* Ikon Base Pass and Ikon Base Pass Plus: 5 days, holiday blackouts* Lake Louise Pass (described below)Closest neighboring ski areas: Salmo (:58), Whitewater (1:22), Phoenix Mountain (1:33), 49 Degrees North (1:53)Base elevation: 3,887 feet/1,185 metersSummit elevation: 6,807 feet/2,075 metersVertical drop: 2,919 feet/890 metersSkiable Acres: 3,850Average annual snowfall: 300 inches/760 cmTrail count: 119 (17% beginner, 34% intermediate, 23% advanced, 26% expert)Lift count: 8 (2 fixed-grip quads, 3 triples, 1 double, 1 T-bar, 1 carpet)View historic Red Mountain trailmaps on skimap.org. Here are some cool video overviews:Granite Mountain:Red Mountain:Grey Mountain:Rossland:Why I interviewed himIt’s never made sense to me, this psychological dividing line between Canada and America. I grew up in central Michigan, in a small town closer to Canada (the bridge between Sarnia and Port Huron stood 142 miles away), than the closest neighboring state (Toledo, Ohio, sat 175 miles south). Yet, I never crossed into Canada until I was 19, by which time I had visited roughly 40 U.S. states. Even then, the place felt more foreign than it should, with its aggressive border guards, pizza at McDonald’s, and colored currency. Canada on a map looks easy, but Canada in reality is a bit harder, eh?Red sits just five miles, as the crow flies, north of the U.S. border. If by some fluke of history the mountain were part of Washington, it would be the state’s greatest ski area, larger than Crystal and Stevens Pass combined. In fact, it would be the seventh-largest ski area in the country, larger than Mammoth or Snowmass, smaller only than Park City, Palisades, Big Sky, Vail, Heavenly, and Bachelor.But, somehow, the international border acts as a sort of invisibility shield, and skiing Red is a much different experience than visiting any of those giants, with their dense networks of high-speed lifts and destination crowds (well, less so at Bachelor). Sure, Red is an Ikon Pass mountain, and has been for years, but it is not synonymous with the pass, like Jackson or Aspen or Alta-Snowbird. But U.S. skiers – at least those outside of the Pacific Northwest – see Red listed on the Ikon menu and glaze past it like the soda machine at an open bar. It just doesn’t seem relevant.Which is weird and probably won’t last. And right now Shoosh Emoji Bro is losing his goddamn mind and cursing me for using my platform focused on lift-served snowskiing to hype one of the best and most interesting and most underrated lift-served snowskiing operations in North America. But that’s why this whole deal exists, Brah. Because most people ski at the same 20 places and I really think skiing as an idea and as an experience and as a sustainable enterprise will be much better off if we start spreading people out a bit more.What we talked aboutRed pow days; why Red amped up shuttle service between the ski area and Rossland and made it free; old-school Tahoe; “it is the most interesting mountain I’ve ever skied”; buying a ski area when you’ve never worked at a ski area; why the real-estate crash didn’t bury Red like some other ski areas; why Katkov backed away from a golf course that he spent a year and a half planning at Red; why the 900 lockers at the dead center of the base area aren’t going anywhere; housing and cost of living in Rossland; “we look at our neighborhood as an extension of our community of Rossland”; base area development plans; balancing parking with people; why and how Red Mountain still sells affordable ski-in, ski-out real estate; “our ethos is to be accessible for everybody”; whether we could ever see a lift from Rossland to Red; why Red conducted a crowd-funding ownership campaign and what they did with the money; Red’s newest ownership partners; the importance of independence; “the reality is that the pass, whether it’s the Epic or the Ikon Pass, has radically changed the way that consumers experience skiing”; why Red joined the Ikon Pass and why it’s been good for the mountain; the Mountain Collective; why Red has no high-speed lifts and whether we could ever see one; no stress on a powder day; Red’s next logical lift upgrades; potential lift-served expansions onto Kirkup, White Wolf, and Mt. Roberts; and the Powder Highway.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewMy full-scale assault of Canada, planned for 2023, has turned into more of an old-person’s bus tour. I’m stopping at all the big sites, but I sure am taking my time, and I’m not certain that I’m really getting the full experience.Part of this echoes the realization centuries’ of armies have had when invading Russia: damn this place is big. I’d hoped to quickly fold the whole country into the newsletter, as I’d been able to do with the Midwest and West when I expanded The Storm’s coverage out of the Northeast in 2021. But I’d grown up in the Midwest and been skiing the West annually for decades. I’d underestimated how much that had mattered. I’d skied a bit in Canada, but not consistently enough to kick the door down in the manner I’d hoped. I started counting ski areas in Quebec and stopped when I got to 4,000*, 95 percent of which were named “Mont [some French word with numerous squiggly marks above the letters].” The measurements are different. The money is different. The language, in Quebec, is different. I needed to slow down.So I’m starting with western Canada. Well, I started there last year, when I hosted the leaders of SkiBig3 and Sun Peaks on the podcast. This is the easiest Canadian region for a U.S. American to grasp: Epic, Ikon, Mountain Collective, and Indy Pass penetration is deep, especially in British Columbia. Powdr, Boyne, Vail, and Pacific Group Resorts all own ski areas in the province. There is no language barrier.So, Red today, Panorama next month, Whistler in June. That’s the way the podcast calendar sets up now, anyway. I’ll move east as I’m able.But Red, in particular, has always fascinated me. If you’re wondering what the largest ski area in North America is that has yet to install a high-speed lift, this is your answer. For many of you, that may be a deal-breaker. But I see a time-machine, an opportunity to experience a different sort of skiing, but with modern gear. Like if aliens were to land on today’s Earth with their teleportation devices and language-translation brain chips and standard-issue post-industro-materialist silver onesies. Like wow look how much easier the past is when you bring the future with you.Someday, Red will probably build a high-speed lift or two or four, and enough skiers who are burned out on I-70 and LCC but refuse to give up their Ikon Passes will look north and say, “oh my, what’s this all about?” And Red will become some version of Jackson Hole or Big Sky or Whistler, beefy but also busy, remote but also accessible. But I wanted to capture Red, as it is today, before it goes away.*Just kidding, there are actually 12,000.^^OK, OK, there are like 90. Or 90,000.Why you should ski Red MountainLet’s say you’ve had an Ikon Pass for the past five or six ski seasons. You’ve run through the Colorado circuit, navigated the Utah canyons, circled Lake Tahoe. The mountains are big, but so are the crowds. The Ikon Pass, for a moment, was a cool little hack, like having an iPhone in 2008. But then everyone got them, and now the world seems terrible because of it.But let’s examine ye ‘ole Ikon partner chart more closely, to see what else may be on offer:What’s this whole “Canada” section about? Perhaps, during the pandemic, you resigned yourself to U.S. American travel. Perhaps you don’t have a passport. Perhaps converting centimeters to inches ignites a cocktail of panic and confusion in your brain. But all of these are solvable dilemmas. Take a deeper look at Canada.In particular, take a deeper look at Red. Those stats are in American. Meaning this is a ski area bigger than Mammoth, taller than Palisades, snowy as Aspen. And it’s just one stop on a stacked Ikon BC roster that also includes Sun Peaks (Canada’s second-largest ski area), Revelstoke (the nation’s tallest by vertical drop), and Panorama.We are not so many years removed from the age of slow-lift, empty American icons. Alta’s first high-speed lift didn’t arrive until 1999 (they now have four). Big Sky’s tin-can tram showed up in 1995. A 1994 Skiing magazine article described the then-Squaw Valley side of what is now Palisades Tahoe as a pokey and remote fantasyland:…bottomless steeps, vast acreage, 33 lifts and no waiting. America’s answer to the wide-open ski circuses of Europe. After all these years the mountain is still uncrowded, except on weekends when people pile in from the San Francisco Bay area in droves. Squaw is unflashy, underbuilt, and seems entirely indifferent to success. The opposite of what you would expect one of America’s premier resorts to be.Well that’s cute. And it’s all gone now. America still holds its secrets, vast, affordable fixed-grip ski areas such as Lost Trail and Discovery and Silver Mountain. But none of them have joined the Ikon Pass, and none gives you the scale of Red, this glorious backwater with fixed-grip lifts that rise 2,400 vertical feet to untracked terrain. Maybe it will stay like this forever, but it probably won’t. So go there now.Podcast NotesOn Red’s masterplan

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Feb. 12. It dropped for free subscribers on Feb. 19. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:WhoDavid Makarsky, General Manager of Camelback Resort, PennsylvaniaRecorded onFebruary 8, 2024About CamelbackClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: KSL Capital, managed by KSL ResortsLocated in: Tannersville, PennsylvaniaYear founded: 1963Pass affiliations:* Ikon Pass: 7 days, no blackouts* Ikon Base Pass: 5 days, holiday blackoutsReciprocal partners: NoneClosest neighboring ski areas: Shawnee Mountain (:24), Jack Frost (:26), Big Boulder (:27), Skytop Lodge (:29), Saw Creek (:37), Blue Mountain (:41), Pocono Ranchlands (:43), Montage (:44), Hideout (:51), Elk Mountain (1:05), Bear Creek (1:09), Ski Big Bear (1:16)Base elevation: 1,252 feetSummit elevation: 2,079 feetVertical drop: 827 feetSkiable Acres: 166Average annual snowfall: 50 inchesTrail count: 38 (3 Expert Only, 6 Most Difficult, 13 More Difficult, 16 Easiest) + 1 terrain parkLift count: 13 (1 high-speed six-pack, 1 high-speed quad, 1 fixed-grip quad, 3 triples, 3 doubles, 4 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Camelback’s lift fleet)View historic Camelback trailmaps on skimap.org.Why I interviewed himAt night it heaves from the frozen darkness in funhouse fashion, 800 feet high and a mile wide, a billboard for human life and activity that is not a gas station or a Perkins or a Joe’s Vape N’ Puff. The Poconos are a peculiar and complicated place, a strange borderland between the Midwest, the Mid-Atlantic, and the Northeast. Equidistant from New York City and Philadelphia, approaching the northern tip of Appalachia, framed by the Delaware Water Gap to the east and hundreds of miles of rolling empty wilderness to the west, the Poconos are gorgeous and decadent, busyness amid abandonment, cigarette-smoking cement truck drivers and New Jersey-plated Mercedes riding 85 along the pinched lanes of Interstate 80 through Stroudsburg. “Safety Corridor, Speed Limit 50,” read the signs that everyone ignores.But no one can ignore Camelback, at least not at night, at least not in winter, as the mountain asserts itself over I-80. Though they’re easy to access, the Poconos keeps most of its many ski areas tucked away. Shawnee hides down a medieval access road, so narrow and tree-cloaked that you expect to be ambushed by poetry-spewing bandits. Jack Frost sits at the end of a long access road, invisible even upon arrival, the parking lot seated, as it is, at the top of the lifts. Blue Mountain boasts prominence, rising, as it does, to the Appalachian Trail, but it sits down a matrix of twisting farm roads, off the major highway grid.Camelback, then, is one of those ski areas that acts not just as a billboard for itself, but for all of skiing. This, combined with its impossibly fortuitous location along one of the principal approach roads to New York City, makes it one of the most important ski areas in America. A place that everyone can see, in the midst of drizzling 50-degree brown-hilled Poconos February, is filled with snow and life and fun. “Oh look, an organized sporting complex that grants me an alternative to hating winter. Let’s go try that.”The Poconos are my best argument that skiing not only will survive climate change, but has already perfected the toolkit to do so. Skiing should not exist as a sustained enterprise in these wild, wet hills. It doesn’t snow enough and it rains all the time. But Poconos ski area operators invested tens of millions of dollars to install seven brand-new chairlifts in 2022. They didn’t do this in desperate attempts to salvage dying businesses, but as modernization efforts for businesses that are kicking off cash.In six of the past eight seasons, (excluding 2020), Camelback spun lifts into April. That’s with season snowfall totals of (counting backwards from the 2022-23 season), 23 inches, 58 inches, 47 inches, 29 inches, 35 inches, 104 inches (in the outlier 2017-18 season), 94 inches, 24 inches, and 28 inches. Mammoth gets more than that from one atmospheric river. But Camelback and its Poconos brothers have built snowmaking systems so big and effective, even in marginal temperatures, that skiing is a fixture in a place where nature would have it be a curiosity.What we talked aboutCamelback turns 60; shooting to ski into April; hiding a waterpark beneath the snow; why Camelback finally joined the Ikon Pass; why Camelback decided not to implement Ikon reservations; whether Camelback season passholders will have access to a discounted Ikon Base Pass; potential for a Camelback-Blue Mountain season pass; fixing the $75 season pass reprint fee (they did); when your job is to make sure other people have fun; rethinking the ski school and season-long programs; yes I’m obsessed with figuring out why KSL Capital owns Camelback and Blue Mountain rather than Alterra (of which KSL Capital is part-owner); much more than just a ski area; rethinking the base lodge deck; the transformative impact of Black Bear 6; what it would take to upgrade Stevenson Express; why and how Camelback aims to improve sky-high historic turnover rates (and why that should matter to skiers); internal promotions within KSL Resorts; working with sister resort Blue Mountain; rethinking Camelback’s antique lift fleet; why terrain expansion is unlikely; Camelback’s baller snowmaking system; everybody hates the paid parking; and long-term plans for the Summit House.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewA survey of abandoned ski areas across the Poconos underscores Camelback’s resilience and adaptation. Like sharks or alligators, hanging on through mass extinctions over hundreds of millions of years, Camelback has found a way to thrive even as lesser ski centers have surrendered to the elements. The 1980 edition of The White Book of Ski Areas names at least 11 mountains – Mt. Tone, Hickory Ridge, Tanglwood, Pocono Manor, Buck Hill, Timber Hill (later Alpine Mountain), Tamiment Resort Hotel, Mt. Airy, Split Rock, Mt. Heidelberg, and Hahn Mountain – within an hour of Camelback that no longer exist as organized ski areas.Camelback was larger than all of those, but it was also smarter, aggressively expanding and modernizing snowmaking, and installing a pair of detachable chairlifts in the 1990s. It offered the first window into skiing modernity in a region where the standard chairlift configuration was the slightly ridiculous double-double.Still, as recently as 10 years ago, Camelback needed a refresh. It was crowded and chaotic, sure, but it also felt dumpy and drab, with aged buildings, overtaxed parking lots, wonky access roads, long lines, and bad food. The vibe was very second-rate oceanfront boardwalk, very take-it-or-leave-it, a dour self-aware insouciance that seemed to murmur, “hey, we know this ain’t the Catskills, but if they’re so great why don’chya go there?”Then, in 2015, a spaceship landed. A 453-room hotel with a water park the size of Lake George, it is a ridiculous building, a monstrosity on a hill, completely out of proportion with its surroundings. It looks like something that fell off the truck on its way to Atlantic City. And yet, that hotel ignited Camelback’s renaissance. In a region littered with the wrecks of 1960s heart-shaped-hottub resorts, here was something vital and modern and clean. In a redoubt of day-ski facilities, here was a ski-in-ski-out option with decent restaurants and off-the-hill entertainment for the kids. In a drive-through region that felt forgotten and tired, here was something new that people would stop for.The owners who built that monstrosity/business turbo-booster sold Camelback to KSL Capital in 2019. KSL Capital also happens to be, along with Aspen owner Henry Crown, part owner of Alterra Mountain Company. I’ve never really understood why KSL outsourced the operation of Camelback and, subsequently, nearby Blue Mountain, to its hotel-management outfit KSL Resorts, rather than just bungee-cording both to Alterra’s attack squadron of ski resorts, which includes Palisades Tahoe, Winter Park, Mammoth, Steamboat, Sugarbush, and 14 others, including, most recently, Arapahoe Basin and Schweitzer. It was as if the Ilitch family, which owns both the Detroit Tigers and Red Wings, had drafted hockey legend Steve Yzerman and then asked him to bat clean-up at Comerica Park.While I’m still waiting on a good answer to this question even as I annoy long lines of Alterra executives and PR folks by persisting with it, KSL Resorts has started to resemble a capable ski area operator. The company dropped new six-packs onto both Camelback and nearby Blue Mountain (which it also owns), for last ski season. RFID finally arrived and it works seamlessly, and mostly eliminates the soul-crushing ticket lines by installing QR-driven kiosks. Both ski areas are now on the Ikon Pass.But there is work to do. Liftlines – particularly at Stevenson and Sunbowl, where skiers load from two sides and no one seems interested in refereeing the chaos – are borderline anarchic; carriers loaded with one, two, three guests cycle up quad chairs all day long while liftlines stretch for 20 minutes. A sense of nickeling-and-diming follows you around the resort: a seven-dollar mandatory ski check for hotel guests; bags checked for outside snacks before entering the waterpark, where food lines on a busy day stretch dozens deep; and, of course, the mandatory paid parking.Camelback’s paid-parking policy is, as far as I can tell, the biggest PR miscalculation in Northeast skiing. Everyone hates it. Everyone. As you can imagine, locals write to me all the time to express their frustrations with ski areas around the country. By far the complaint I see the most is about Camelback parking (the second-most-complained about resort, in case you’re wondering, is Stra