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Who

Pete Sonntag, Chief Operating Officer and General Manager of Sun Valley, Idaho

Recorded on

April 9, 2025

About Sun Valley

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: The R. Earl Holding family, which also owns Snowbasin, Utah

Pass affiliations:

* Ikon Pass – 7 days, no blackouts; no access on Ikon Base or Session passes; days shared between Bald and Dollar mountains

* Mountain Collective – 2 days, no blackouts; days shared between Bald and Dollar mountains

Reciprocal pass partners: Challenger Platinum and Challenger season passes include unlimited access to Snowbasin, Utah

Located in: Ketchum, Idaho

Closest neighboring ski areas: Rotarun (:47), Soldier Mountain (1:10 )

Base elevation | summit elevation | vertical drop:

Bald Mountain: 5,750 feet | 9,150 feet | 3,400 feet

Dollar Mountain: 6,010 feet | 6,638 feet | 628 feet

Skiable Acres: 2,533 acres (Bald Mountain) | 296 acres (Dollar Mountain)

Average annual snowfall: 200 inches

Trail count: 122 (100 on Bald Mountain; 22 on Dollar) – 2% double-black, 20% black, 42% intermediate, 36% beginner

Lift fleet:

Bald Mountain: 12 lifts (8-passenger gondola, 2 six-packs, 6 high-speed quads, 2 triples, 1 carpet - view Lift Blog’s of inventory of Bald Mountain’s lift fleet)

Dollar Mountain: 5 lifts (2 high-speed quads, 1 triple, 1 double, 1 carpet - view Lift Blog’s of inventory of Dollar Mountain’s lift fleet)

Why I interviewed him (again)

Didn’t we just do this? Sun Valley, the Big Groom, the Monster at the End of The Road (or at least way off the interstate)? Didn’t you make All The Points? Pretty and remote and excellent. Why are we back here already when there are so many mountains left to slot onto the podcast?

Fair questions, easy answer: because American lift-served skiing is in the midst of a financial and structural renaissance driven by the advent of the multimountain ski pass. A network of megamountains that 15 years ago had been growing creaky and cranky under aging lift networks has, in the past five years, flung new machines up the mountain with the slaphappy glee of a minor league hockey mascot wielding a T-shirt cannon. And this investment, while widespread, has been disproportionately concentrated on a handful of resorts aiming to headline the next generation of self-important holiday Instagram posts: Deer Valley, Big Sky, Steamboat, Snowbasin, and Sun Valley (among others). It’s going to be worth checking in on these places every few years as they rapidly evolve into different versions of themselves.

And Sun Valley is changing fast. When I hosted Sonntag on the podcast in 2022, Sun Valley had just left Epic for Ikon/Mountain Collective and announced its massive Broadway-Flying Squirrel installation, a combined 14,982 linear feet of high-speed machinery that included a replacement of North America’s tallest chairlift. A new Seattle Ridge sixer followed, and the World Cup spectacle followed that. Meanwhile, Sun Valley had settled into its new pass coalitions and teased more megalifts and improvements to the village. Last December, the resort’s longtime owner, Carol Holding, passed away at age 95. Whatever the ramifications of all that will be, the trajectory and fate of Sun Valley over the next decade is going to set (as much or more than it traces), the arc of the remaining large independents in our consolidating ski world.

What we talked about

The passing and legacy of longtime owner Carol Holding and her late husband Earl – “she was involved with the business right up until the very end”; how the Holdings modernized the Sun Valley ski areas; long-term prospects for Sun Valley and Snowbasin independence following Mrs. Holding’s passing; bringing World Cup Downhill races back to Sun Valley; what it took to prep Bald Mountain for the events; the risks of hosting a World Cup; finish line vibes; the potential for a World Cup return and when and how that could happen; the impact of the Challenger and Flying Squirrel lift upgrades; potential upgrades for the Frenchman’s, River Run, Lookout Express, and Christmas lifts; yes Sun Valley has glades; the impact of the Seattle Ridge chairlift upgrade; why actual lift capacity for Sun Valley’s legacy high-speed quads doesn’t match spec; explaining Sun Valley’s infrastructure upgrade surge; why Mayday and Lookout will likely remain fixed-grip machines; the charm of Dollar Mountain; considering Dollar lift upgrades; what happened to the Silver Dollar carpet; why Sun Valley is likely sticking with Ikon and Mountain Collective long-term after trying both those coalitions and Epic; whether Sun Valley could join Ikon Base now that Alterra ditched Ikon Base Plus; RFID coming at last; whether we could still see a gondola connection between Sun Valley Village and Dollar and Bald mountains; and why Sun Valley isn’t focused on slopeside development at Bald Mountain.

Why now was a good time for this interview

Since I more or less covered interview timing above, let me instead pull out a bit about Sun Valley’s megapass participation that ended up being timely by accident. We recorded this conversation in April, well before Vail Resorts named Rob Katz its CEO for a second time, likely resetting what had become a lopsided (in Alterra’s favor) Epic-versus-Ikon battle. Here’s what Sonntag had to say on the pod in 2022, when Sun Valley had just wrapped its three-year Epic Pass run and was preparing for its first season on Ikon:

… our three-year run with Epic was really, really good. And it brought guests to Sun Valley who have never been here before. I mean, I think we really proved out the value of these multi-resort passes and these partner passes. People aspire to go other places, and when their pass allows them to do that, that sometimes is the impetus. That's all they need to make that decision to do it. So as successful as that was, we looked at Ikon and thought, well, here's an opportunity to introduce ourselves to a whole new group of guests. And why would we not take advantage of that? We're hoping to convert, obviously, a few of these folks to be Sun Valley regulars. And so now we have the opportunity to do that again with Ikon.

When I asked Sonntag during that conversation whether he would consider returning to Epic at some point, he said that “I'm focused on doing a great job of being a great partner with Ikon right now,” and that, “I'm not ready to go there yet.”

With three winters of Ikon and Mountain Collective membership stacked, Sonntag spoke definitively this time (emphasis mine):

We are very very happy with how everything has gone. We feel like we have great partners with both Ikon, which is, you know, partnering with a company, but they’re partners in every sense of the word in terms of how they approach the partnership, and we feel like we have a voice. We have access to data. We can really do right by our customers and our business at the same time.

Should we read that as an Epic diss on Broomfield? Perhaps, though saying you like pizza doesn’t also mean you don’t like tacos. But Sonntag was unambiguous when I asked whether Sun Valley was #TeamIkon long-term: “I would see us staying the course,” he said.

For those inclined to further read into this, Sonntag arrived at Sun Valley after a long career at Vail Resorts, which included several years as president/COO-equivalent of Heavenly and Whistler. And while Sun Valley is part of a larger company that also includes Snowbasin, meaning Sonntag is not the sole decision-maker, it is interesting that an executive who spent so much of his career with a first-hand look inside the Epic Pass would now lead a mountain that stands firmly with the opposition.

What I got wrong

I mischaracterized the comments Sonntag had made on Epic and Ikon when we spoke in 2022, making it sound as though he had suggested that Sun Valley would try both passes and then decide between them. But it was me who asked him whether he would decide between the two after an Ikon trial, and he had declined to answer the question, saying, as noted above, that he wasn’t “ready to go there yet.”

Why you should ski Sun Valley

If I was smarter I’d make some sort of heatmap showing where skier visits are clustered across America. Unfortunately I’m dumb, and even more unfortunately, ski areas began treating skier visit numbers with the secrecy of nuclear launch codes about a decade ago, so an accurate map would be difficult to draw up even if I knew how.

However, I can offer a limited historical view in