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Who

Chip Chase, Founder and Owner of White Grass Ski Touring Center, West Virginia

Recorded on

May 16, 2024

About White Grass Touring Center

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Chip Chase

Located in: Davis, West Virginia

Year founded: 1979 (at a different location)

Pass affiliations: Indy Pass and Indy+ Pass: 2 days, no blackouts

Closest 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 feet

Skiable Acres: 2,500

Average annual snowfall: 140 inches

Trail count: 42 (50 km of maintained trails)

Lift count: None

Why I interviewed him

One 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 about

White 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 interview

I 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 i