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Who
Justin Steck, owner of Steeplechase ski area, Minnesota
Recorded on
January 7, 2025
About Steeplechase
Owned by: Justin Steck
Located in: Mazeppa, Minnesota
Year founded: 1999, by Kevin Kastler; closed around 2007; re-opened Feb. 4, 2023 by Steck
Pass affiliations: Freedom Pass, which offers three days for Steeplechase season passholders at each of these ski areas:
Reciprocal partners
Closest neighboring ski areas: Coffee Mill (:45), Welch Village (:41)
Base elevation: 902 feet
Summit elevation: 1,115 feet
Vertical drop: 213 feet
Skiable acres: 45 acres
Average annual snowfall: N/A
Trail count: 21 (9 easy, 7 intermediate, 5 advanced)
Lift count: 4 (2 triples, 2 doubles â view Lift Blogâs inventory of Steeplechaseâs lift fleet)
Why I interviewed him
They seem to be everywhere, once you know where to look. Abandoned ski areas, rusting, fading. Time capsules. Hoses coiled and stacked. Chairs spaced and numbered along the liftline. Paperwork scattered on desks. Doors unlocked. No explanation. No note. As though the world stopped in apocalypse.
America has lost more ski areas than it has kept. Most will stay lost. Many are stripped, almost immediately, of the things that made them commercially viable, of lifts and snowguns and groomers, things purchased at past prices and sold at who-cares discounts and irreplaceable at future rates. But a few ski areas idle as museums, isolated from vandals, forgotten by others, waiting, like ancient crypts, for a great unearthing.
Who knew that Steeplechase stood intact? Who knew, really, that the complex existed in the first place, those four motley cobbled-together chairlifts spinning, as they did, for just eight years in the Minnesota wilderness? As though someone pried open a backlot shed on a house theyâd purchased years before and found, whole and rebuilt, a Corvette of antique vintage. Pop in a new battery, change the sparkplugs, inflate the tires, and itâs roaring once again.
Sometimes in the summer Iâll wander around one of these lost ski areas, imagining what it was, what it could be again. Thereâs one a bit over an hour north of me, Tuxedo Ridge, its four double chairs stilled, its snowguns pointed skyward, holes in the roof and skis scattered about the lodge. To restore a ski area, I sometimes think, is harder than to build one whole from the earth. Most operators I speak with recoil at the very idea.
Which is why, I think, most lost ski area rebuilding or revitalization stories are led by outsiders: Norway Mountain, Holiday Mountain, Tenney, Teton Pass, Paul Bunyan. By the time they realize theyâre doing an impossible thing, theyâve done too much to surrender. When Steck acquired the Steeplechase property around 2016, he didnât really know what heâd do with it. He wanted land, and here was some land. Except the land happened to hold a forgotten-but-intact ski area.
Bit by bit, he rebuilt the business: restoring the chapel for weddings, then the tubing lanes, then the chairlifts. He didnât ask permission. He didnât make any big proclamation. Suddenly, one winter day in 2023, a ski area that everyone had forgotten was a ski area reappeared in the world. And isnât that interesting?
What we talked about
A much stronger start to the 2024-25 Midwestern winter; big expansion potential and when that could happen; the mental march through the rough 2023-24 winter; considering future non-holiday midweek operations; snowmobile racing; how a house-flipping career led Steck to Steeplechase; a snapshot of the ski area lost in time in 2016; rebuilding a ski hill is âa big logistical nightmare on a regular basis,â especially during Covid; the fuzzy origins of Steeplechaseâs four chairlifts; Midwest tough; Steeplechaseâs founding; Freedom Pass; why Steeplechase isnât on Indy Pass even though a spring announcement indicated that the ski area would be; and potentially Americaâs first 2025-26 season pass sale.
What I got wrong
My ski-areas-that-double-as-snowmobile-areas breakdown was not quite right. Cockaigne was, as far as I know, the only New York ski area to explicitly turn a portion of its trails over to snowmobiles, and only during the ski areaâs short-lived resurgence (2020 to 2022-ish). Check out the circa 2020 trailmap - all the green-laced trails have been set aside as a snowmobile fun park:
That whole section was once ski trails, and the Hall double that served them is, as far as I know, still standing (lift E below):
Cockaigne is not currently an active ski area.
I also mentioned Snow Ridge, New York as being a snowmobile-friendly ski area, but what I meant by that was that snowmobilers often use the ski areaâs parking lot to access trails that happen to connect there. The same dynamic seems to play out at Royal Mountain, which sits a bit farther south in the Adirondacks.
Why now was a good time for this interview
The typical ski area re-opening story is public, incremental, tortuous, and laced with doubt. See: Saddleback, Hatley Pointe, Cuchara, Granite Gorge, Norway. Will they or wonât they? Haters and doubters commandeer the narrative. âNever gonna happen.â Then it happens and Iâm all like phew. High fives and headlines.
But Steeplechase just⊠reappeared. It was the damnedest thing. Like a Japanese ghost ship bumping onto the Oregon shoreline years after its dislodge-by-tsunami. Oh that thing? Weâd forgotten all about it. One day Steck just turned two lifts on and said come ski here and people did.
When I spoke to Steck a couple of months after that February 2023 soft opening, he underscored his long-term intention to fully re-open the bump. The following ski season â last winter â was the worst in the recorded history of Midwest skiing. Steck somehow punched his way through the high temps and rain that challenged even the most seasoned operators. Heâd restored all the lifts, amped up the snowmaking, cleared the old trails. Steeplechase, a ski area that was barely a ski area to begin with, had, improbably, returned. Permanently, it seemed.
The story doesnât make a lot of sense in a 2025 U.S. ski world dominated by national ski passes, consolidation, and the exploding cost of everything. But it happened: a guy whoâd never worked in skiing and didnât know much about skiing bought and restored a Midwest ski area with little fuss and fanfare. And now it exists. And thereâs a lot we can learn from that.
Why you should ski Steeplechase
Consider the ski-area-as-artwork. One personâs interpretation of wilderness bent in service of ordered recreation, with the caprice of winds and weather intact. Run a lift up one face, hack a trail down another. A twitch and a bend, re-ordered by machines. Trees left over there. Go ahead and ski between them if thereâs snow. A logic to it, but bewildering too, the manifestation of a human mind carved into an incline.
Context is important here. Crazy old Merls were hacking trails all over the country in the decades after World War II, stringing inexpensive lifts from valley to summit with little concern for whether the snow would fall. But itâs incredible that Steeplechase opened in 1999, near the end of the Ski Area Extinction Event that began in the mid-70s, with four cobbled-together chairlifts and a surprisingly broad and varied trail network.
Imagine someone doing that today? Itâs hard to. At least in North America. That makes Steeplechase one of the last of its kind, the handmade ski area willed into being by good oleâ boys nailing s**t together. That is failed once is unsurprising. That it returned as a second-generation, second-hand relic is a kind of miracle. There arenât a lot of ski areas left like Steeplechase â unfussy, unfrenzied, improvisational works-in-progress that you can pull up to and ski without planning two election cycles in advance. Youâre unlikely to have the best ski day of your life here, but itâs pretty cool that you can ski here at all. And so why not go do it?
Podcast notes
On expansion potential
The Google Earth view of Steeplechase hides the little ski areaâs big expansion potential, as itâs hard to tell where the earth rises and dips. Looking at the topo map side-by-side, however, and you can see the ridgelines rising off what may be an ancient riverbed, leaving plenty of hills to build into:
On Midwest tough
I grew up in the Midwest and moved away a couple of decades ago. Transplanted onto the East Coast, I can appreciate some inherent Midwestern character traits that are less prevalent outside the region, including an ability to absorb foul weather. One of the best articulations of this that Iâve read was in this 2006 New York Times piece, on Wyoming industry recruiting workers from Michigan:
Wyoming recruiters say there is another element to their admiration for Michigan. Not only are the people there akin to Wyomingites in the ways and wiles of work, but they also have an inner toughness, they say, that can only come from surviving harsh northern winters.
The state tried a job campaign in the South last fall after Hurricane Katrina, hoping to draw displaced oil industry workers. But the effort largely flopped when people who were used to working on the balmy Gulf Coast got wind of what life can be like in Wyoming in January.
On Steeplechaseâs season pass
Steeplechase may have launched Americaâs first 2025-26 ski season pass: for $300, ski the rest of this winter and next.
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Who
* Travis Kearney, General Manager
* Aaron Damon, Assistant General Manager, Marketing Director
* Mike Chasse, member of Bigrock Board of Directors
* Conrad Brown, long-time ski patroller
* Neal Grass, Maintenance Manager
Recorded on
December 2, 2024
About Bigrock
Owned by: A 501c(3) community nonprofit overseen by a local board of directors
Located in: Mars Hill, Maine
Pass affiliations: Indy Base Pass, Indy Plus Pass â 2 days, no blackouts
Closest neighboring ski areas: Quoggy Jo (:26), Lonesome Pine (1:08)
Base elevation: 670 feet
Summit elevation: 1,590 feet
Vertical drop: 920 feet
Skiable acres: 90
Average annual snowfall: 94 inches
Trail count: 29 (10% beginner, 66% intermediate, 24% advanced)
Lift count: 4 (1 fixed-grip quad, 1 triple, 1 double, 1 surface lift â view Lift Blogâs inventory of Bigrockâs lift fleet)
Why I interviewed them
Welcome to the tip-top of America, where Saddleback is a ski area âdown southâ and $60 is considered an expensive lift ticket. Have you ever been to Sugarloaf, stationed four hours north of Boston at what feels like the planetâs end? Bigrock is four hours past that, 26 miles north of the end of I-95, a surveyorâs whim from Canadian citizenship. New England is small, but Maine is big, and Aroostook County is enormous, nearly the size of Vermont, larger than Connecticut, the second-largest county east of the Mississippi, 6,828 square miles of mostly rivers and trees and mountains and moose, but also 67,105 people, all of whom need something to do in the winter.
That something is Bigrock. Ramble this far north and you probably expect ascent-by-donkey or centerpole double chairs powered by butter churns. But here we have a sparkling new Doppelmayr fixed quad summiting at a windfarm. Shimmering new snowguns hammering across the night. Americaâs eastern-most ski area, facing west across the continent, a white-laced arena edging the endless wilderness.
Bigrock is a fantastic thing, but also a curious one. Its origin story is a New England yarn that echoes all the rest â a guy named Wendell, shirtsleeves-in-the-summertime hustle and surface lifts, letâs hope the snow comes, finally some snowguns and a chairlift just in time. But most such stories end with âand thatâs how it became a housing development.â Not this one. The residents of this state-sized county can ski Bigrock in 2025 because the folks in charge of the bump made a few crucial decisions at a few opportune times. In that way, the ski area is a case study not only of the improbable survivor, but a blueprint for how todayâs on-the-knife-edge independent bumps can keep spinning lifts in the uncertain decades to come.
What we talked about
Huge snowmaking upgrades; a new summit quad for the 2024-25 ski season; why the new lift follows a different line from the old summit double; why the Gemini summit double remains in place; how the new chair opens up the mountainâs advanced terrain; why the lift is called âSunriseâ; a brief history of moving the Gemini double from Maineâs now-defunct Evergreen ski area; the âbackyard engineering degreeâ; how this small, remote ski area could afford a brand-new $4 million Doppelmayr quad; why Bigrock considered, but ultimately decided against, repurposing a used lift to replace Gemini; why the new lift is a fixed-grip, rather than a detachable, machine; the windfarm at Bigrockâs summit; Bigrock in the 1960s; the Pierce family legacy; how Covid drove certain skiers to Bigrock while keeping other groups away; how and why Bigrock became a nonprofit; what nearly shuttered the ski area; âI think there was a period in the late â70s, early â80s where it became not profitable to own a ski area of this sizeâ; why Bigrockâs nonprofit board of directors works; the problem with volunteers; âevery kid in town, if they wanted to ski, they were going to skiâ; the decline of meatloaf culture; and where and when Bigrock could expand the trail footprint.
Why now was a good time for this interview
In our high-speed, jet-setting, megapass-driven, name-brand, social-media-fueled ski moment, it is fair to ask this question of any ski area that does not run multiple lifts equipped with tanning beds and bottle service: why do you still exist, and how?
I often profile ski areas that have no business being in business in 2025: Plattekill, Magic Mountain, Holiday Mountain, Norway Mountain, Bluewood, Teton Pass, Great Bear, Timberline, Mt. Baldy, Whitecap, Black Mountain of Maine. They are, in most cases, surrounded both by far more modernized facilities and numerous failed peers. Some of them died and punched their way out of the grave. How? Why are these hills the ones who made it?
I keep telling these stories because each is distinct, though common elements persist: great natural ski terrain, stubborn owners, available local skiers, and persistent story-building that welds a skierâs self-image to the tale of mountain-as-noble-kingdom. But those elements alone are not enough. Every improbably successful ski area has a secret weapon. Black Mountain of Maine has the Angry Beavers, a group of chainsaw-wielding volunteers who have quietly orchestrated one of New Englandâs largest ski area expansions over the past decade, making it an attractive busy-day alternative to nearby Sunday River. Great Bear, South Dakota is a Sioux Falls city park, insulating the business from macro-economic pressures and enabling it to buy things like new quad chairlifts. Magic, surrounded by Epkon megaships, is the benefactor of marketing and social-media mastermind Geoff Hatheway, who has crafted a rowdy downhome story that people want to be a part of.
And Bigrock? Well, thatâs what weâre here for. How on earth did this little ski area teetering on the edge of the continental U.S. afford a brand-new $4 million chairlift? And a bunch of new snowmaking? And how did it not just go splat-Iâm-dead years ago as destination ski areas to the north and south added spiderwebs of fast lifts and joined national mass-market passes? And how is it weathering the increasing costs of labor, utilities, infrastructure, and everything else?
The answer lies, in part, in Bigrockâs shift, 25 years or so ago, to a nonprofit model, which I believe many more community ski areas will have to adopt to survive this century. But that is just the foundation. What the people running the bump do with it matters. And the folks running Bigrock have found a way to make a modern ski area far from the places where youâd expect to find one.
What I got wrong
I said that âhundreds of liftsâ had âcome out in America over the past couple of years.â Thatâs certainly an overcount. But I really had in mind the post-Covid period that began in 2021, so the past three to four years, which has seen a significant number of lift replacements. The best place to track these is Lift Blogâs year-by-year new lifts databases: 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 (anticipated).
I noted that there were two ânearbyâ ski areas in New Brunswick, the Canadian province bordering Maine. I was referring to 800-vertical-foot Crabbe Mountain, an hour and 20 minutes southeast of Bigrock, and Mont Farlagne, a 600-ish-footer an hour and a half north (neither travel time considers border-crossing delays). Whether these are ânearâ Bigrock is subjective, I suppose. Here are their trailmaps:
Why you should ski Bigrock
First, ski Maine. Because itâs gorgeous and remote and, because it takes work to get there, relatively uncrowded on the runs (Sunday River and Pleasant Mountain peak days excepted). Because the people are largely good and wholesome and kind. And because itâs winter the way we all think winter should be, violently and unapologetically cold, bitter and endless, overcast and ornery, fierce in that way that invigorates and tortures the soul.
âOK,â you say. âSaddleback and Sugarloaf look great.â And they are. But to drive four hours past them for something smaller? Unlikely. Iâm a certain kind of skier that I know most others are not. I like to ramble and always have. I relish, rather than endure, long drives. Particularly in unknown and distant parts. I thrive on newness and novelty. Bigrock, nearly a thousand feet of vert nine hours north of my apartment by car, presents to me a chance for no liftlines and long, empty runs; uncrowded highways for the last half of the drive; probably heaping diner plates on the way out of town. My mission is to hit every lift-served ski area in America and this is one of them, so it will happen at some point.
But what of you, Otherskier? Yes, an NYC-based skier can drive 30 to 45 minutes past Hunter and Belleayre and Windham to try Plattekill for a change-up, but that equation fails for remote Bigrock. Like Pluto, it orbits too far from the sun of New Englandâs cities to merit inclusion among the roster of viable planets. So this appeal, I suppose, ought to be directed at those skiers who live in Presque Isle (population 8,797), Caribou (7,396), and Houlton (6,055). Maybe you live there but donât ski Bigrock, shuttling on weekends to the cabin near Sugarloaf or taking a week each year to the Wasatch. But Iâm a big proponent of the local, of five runs after work on a Thursday, of an early-morning Sunday banger to wake up on the weekend. To have such a place in your backyard â even if it isnât Alta-Snowbird (because nothing is) or Stowe or Killington â is a hell of an asset.
But even that is likely a small group of people. What Bigrock is for â or should be for â is every kid growing up along US 1 north of I-95. Every single school district along this thoroughfare ought to be running weekly buses to the base of the lifts from December through March, for beginner lessons, for race programs, for freeride teams. There are trad-offs to remoteness, to growing up far from things. Yes, the kids are six or seven hours away from a Patriots game or Fenway. But they have big skiing, good skiing, modern skiing, reliable skiing, right freaking there, and they should all be able to check it out.
Podcast notes
On Evergreen Valley ski area
Bigrockâs longtime, still-standing-but-now-mothballed Mueller summit double lift came from the short-lived Evergreen Valley, which operated from around 1972 to 1982.
The mountain stood in the ski-dense Conway region along the Maine-New Hampshire border, encircled by present-day Mt. Abram, Sunday River, Wildcat, Black Mountain NH, Bretton Woods, Cranmore, and Pleasant Mountain. Given that competition, it may seem logical that Evergreen failed, but Sunday River wasnât much larger than this in 1982.
On Saddlebackâs Rangeley double
Saddlebackâs 2020 renaissance relied in large part on the installation of a new high-speed quad to replace the ancient Rangeley Mueller double. Hereâs an awesome video of a snowcat tugging the entire lift down in one movement.
On Libra Foundation and Maine Winter Sports
Backed with Libra Foundation grants, the Maine Winter Sports Center briefly played an important role in keeping Bigrock, Quoggy Jo, and Black Mountain of Maine ski areas operational. All three managed to survive the organizationâs abrupt exit from the Alpine ski business in 2013, a story that I covered in previous podcasts with Saddleback executive and onetime Maine Winter Sports head Andy Shepard, and with the leadership of Black Mountain of Maine.
On Bigrockâs masterplan
We discuss a potential future expansion that would substantially build out Bigrockâs beginner terrain. Hereâs where that new terrain - and an additional lift - could sit in relation to the existing trails (labeled âA01â and A03â):
On Maine ski areas on Indy
Indy has built a stellar Indy Pass roster, which includes every thousand-ish-footer in the state thatâs not owned by Boyne:
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Who
Max Magill, President of United Mountain Workers and ski patroller at Park City Mountain Resort, Utah
Recorded on
January 11, 2025
About United Mountain Workers
United Mountain Workers (UMW) is a labor union representing 16 distinct employee groups across more than a dozen U.S. ski resorts:
UMW is organized under Communication Workers of America, which represents more than 700,000 workers across media, healthcare, manufacturing, and other sectors.
Why I interviewed him
In case you missed it (New York Times):
Ski patrollers at Park City Mountain in Utah triumphantly returned to the slopes on Thursday, after ending a nearly two-week strike over union wages and benefits. The strike hobbled the largest U.S. ski resort during a busy holiday period and sparked online fury about deepening economic inequality in rural mountain areas.
Late Wednesday, the Park City Professional Ski Patrollers Association ratified a contract with Vail Resorts, which owns Park City and more than 40 other ski areas, that raises the starting pay of ski patrollers and other mountain safety workers $2 an hour, to $23. The most experienced patrollers will receive an average increase of $7.75 per hour. The agreement also expands parental leave policies for the workers, and provides âindustry-leading educational opportunities,â according to the union. âŠ
Accusing Vail Resorts of unfair labor practices, the Ski Patrollers Association, which represents 204 ski patrollers and mountain safety personnel, went on strike on Dec. 27. The strike received national attention as a fight between the haves and have-nots â a global corporation valued at nearly $10 billion against the vital workers who aid and protect skiers on its properties.
With few ski patrollers to open trails, respond to accidents and perform avalanche mitigation, only about one fourth of Park City Mountainâs terrain was open during the strike.
Irate skiers and snowboarders at Park City soon pilloried Vail, taking to social media and national news organizations to denounce lengthy lift lines and contrast the high salaries of Vail leadership and expensive ticket prices with the relatively low pay of resort workers.
This is a big deal, and itâs probably just getting started.
What we talked about
Back to work; support in unexpected corners; I hear tell of flying pizzas and donuts and I want in on this magical world; a brief timeline of contract negotiations; what Vail Resorts offered and why the union said no; âwe had no choice but to play our final and most powerful card, knowing that our strike would cause massive disruptionâ; deconstructing the vast Vail management machine; what UMW won in the new contract; âthe raises we won are life-changing for a ton of our members, including meâ; a rapidly changing Utah; how the patrollersâ union was challenged when Vail merged Park City and Canyons; âa malicious union-busting campaign is the best way to organize workersâ; organizing a union in a âright to workâ state; the amazing complexity of Park City Mountain Resort; the complexities of importing patrollers from one resort to another; skier volumes at Park City over time; the pluses and minuses of more skiers; âthis movement will continue to growâ; the patrol union vote at A-Basin (it passed); could the various patrol unions combine?; whether ski industry unions could spread to other worker groups and regions; âall workers, ski industry or not, deserve respectâ; and Vailâs big 2022 pay raises.
Questions I wish Iâd asked
I was surprised to hear Magill describe new patrol uniforms as âpretty substandard.â With every lift op rocking a Helly jacket, I figured the squad up top would get primo stuff. Why donât they?
What I got wrong
Real-world facts for numbers that I roughly guessed at mid-talk:
* Park City population: 8,254 (I said âa little over 8,000â)
* 2024-25 Epic Pass sales: approximately 2.3 million (I said â2 millionâ)
* Early-bird price of a 2024-25 Epic Local Pass: $739 (I said âseven-thirty-somethingâ)
* Size of Park City Mountain Resort: 7,300 acres, 350 trails (I actually got these right, but tagged them with a âor whatever they areâ on the pod)
* On the number of active U.S. ski areas: 509, by my own count (I said â500-some,â but it changes almost weekly, so I hedged)
On words being hard
* I kept saying âexasperateâ when I meant to say âexacerbate,â a word that my idiot brain cannot pronounce. But I know the difference so please stop sending me that email.
* I said that âmostâ U.S. ski areas were in the Midwest and East, when I meant to say that the âmajorityâ were. This is true. Only 189 of the 509 active U.S. ski areas (37%) sit in the 11 western ski states.
On things changing fast
Magill and I discussed the pending unionization vote among Arapahoe Basin patrollers. Shortly after our conversation concluded, he informed me that they had officially voted to organize.
On sourcing
I cited the AP (Associated Press), as my source for some summary points from the Park City patrollersâ contract with Vail Resorts. Most of what I cited actually came from High Country News.
Corrected mid-flow
* Contract negotiations began in March (not May, as I suggested) of 2024
* Patrollers at the then-independent Canyons ski area established the union that now represents all of Park City Mountain Resort in 2001, not 2002. Vail purchased Canyons in 2013 and Park City in 2014, and combined the side-by-side ski areas into one with the Quicksilver Gondola in 2015.
On skier visit numbers
I noted that ski resorts operating on Forest Service lands had successfully lobbied against requirements to report annual skier visit numbers. That probably seemed irrelevant in the case of Park City Mountain Resort, which does not operate on Forest Service land, but I was trying to get to the larger point that Vail Resorts is secretive with its resort-by-resort skier visits.
Podcast Notes
On Right to Work
Many states have passed âright to workâ laws, meaning that employees are not compelled to join a labor union, even if one represents their workplace. From the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation:
Nuances exist from state to state. Magill notes in our conversation that Colorado is a right-to-work state, but the Colorado Sun describes the state as a âmodified right-to-work stateâ:
But the Labor Peace Act is a law that unions find to be a challenge.
Enacted in 1943, the state law was seen as a compromise between unions and business owners. Thatâs why Colorado is considered a modified right-to-work state, which means that new hires donât have to join a union if one exists, though they can if they want to. But if a union wins its Labor Peace Act election, then union membership is required.
The Peace Act rules require three-quarters of eligible workers to participate in a second vote, if they already successfully voted in an NLRB election. Without it, the union has less bite since it doesnât represent all eligible workers and cannot collect dues from those who donât join. The NLRBâs vote needs just a simple majority.
On Park City Mountain Resort
Yeah itâs freaking huge:
On the âKnowledgeâ
I compared the master patrollerâs understanding of gigantic, rollicking Park City - with its 350 trails, 7,300 acres, and dozens of lifts - to the âKnowledge,â an exam that requires would-be London taxi drivers to memorize every cobblestone in the city to earn their license. Per The New York Times:
McCabe had spent the last three years of his life thinking about Londonâs roads and landmarks, and how to navigate between them. In the process, he had logged more than 50,000 miles on motorbike and on foot, the equivalent of two circumnavigations of the Earth, nearly all within inner Londonâs dozen boroughs and the City of London financial district. He was studying to be a London taxi driver, devoting himself full-time to the challenge that would earn him a cabbieâs âgreen badgeâ and put him behind the wheel of one of the cityâs famous boxy black taxis.
Actually, âchallengeâ isnât quite the word for the trial a London cabbie endures to gain his qualification. It has been called the hardest test, of any kind, in the world. Its rigors have been likened to those required to earn a degree in law or medicine. It is without question a unique intellectual, psychological and physical ordeal, demanding unnumbered thousands of hours of immersive study, as would-be cabbies undertake the task of committing to memory the entirety of London, and demonstrating that mastery through a progressively more difficult sequence of oral examinations â a process which, on average, takes four years to complete, and for some, much longer than that. The guidebook issued to prospective cabbies by London Taxi and Private Hire (LTPH), which oversees the test, summarizes the task like this:
To achieve the required standard to be licensed as an âAll Londonâ taxi driver you will need a thorough knowledge, primarily, of the area within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross. You will need to know: all the streets; housing estates; parks and open spaces; government offices and departments; financial and commercial centres; diplomatic premises; town halls; registry offices; hospitals; places of worship; sports stadiums and leisure centres; airline offices; stations; hotels; clubs; theatres; cinemas; museums; art galleries; schools; colleges and universities; police stations and headquarters buildings; civil, criminal and coronerâs courts; prisons; and places of interest to tourists. In fact, anywhere a taxi passenger might ask to be taken.
If anything, this description understates the case. The six-mile radius from Charing Cross, the putative center-point of London marked by an equestrian statue of King Charles I, takes in some 25,000 streets. London cabbies need to know all of those streets, and how to drive them â the direction they run, which are one-way, which are dead ends, where to enter and exit traffic circles, and so on. But cabbies also need to know everything on the streets. Examiners may ask a would-be cabbie to identify the location of any restaurant in London. Any pub, any shop, any landmark, no matter how small or obscure â all are fair game. Test-takers have been asked to name the whereabouts of flower stands, of laundromats, of commemorative plaques. One taxi driver told me that he was asked the location of a statue, just a foot tall, depicting two mice sharing a piece of cheese. Itâs on the facade of a building in Philpot Lane, on the corner of Eastcheap, not far from London Bridge.
Surely hyperbole, I thought, upon reading this 2014 article. But when I stepped into a London black cab some years later and gave the driver my address, he said âQuite good Old Fellowâ* and piloted his gigantic car from the train station down an impossible tangle of narrow streets and dropped us at the doorstep of the very building Iâd requested. It appears that the robots have yet to kill this requirement.
*He probably didnât actually say this, but I jolly well wish he had.
On Vailâs 2022 pay raises
On different skillsets and jobs
I think I came off as a bit of an a-hole at the end when I was asking about Vail paying unskilled jobs like ticket-checker and lift attendant $20 an hour while setting the minimum for more skilled jobs like ski patrol at $21. Look, I know all jobs have nuances and challenges and ways to do them well and ways to do them poorly. Iâve done all sorts of âunskilledâ jobs, from bagging groceries to pushing shopping carts to stocking shelves to waiting tables. I know the work can be challenging, tiring, and thankless, and I believe good workers should be paid good wages. If youâre loading a fixed-grip double chair on a beginner run for eight hours in four-degree weather, well, youâre awesome. But it does take more training and a larger skillset to step onto a big-mountain patrol than to manage a big-mountain liftline, and I believe the compensation for the more rigorous role ought to reflect that skills gap.
The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us.
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Who
Shaun Sutner, snowsports columnist for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette and Telegram.com
Recorded on
November 25, 2024
About Shaun Sutner
Sutner is a skier, writer, and journalist based in Worcester, Massachusetts. Heâs written a snowsports column for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette from Thanksgiving to April for the past several decades. You can follow Shaun on social media to stay locked into his work:
Read his recent columns:
* On Wildcat, Attitash, and Vail Resorts
* Everyone needs a bootfitter
* Indy Pass is still kicking ass
Why I interviewed him
Journalism sounds easy. Go there, talk to people, write about it. Itâs not easy. The quest for truth is like the Hobbitâs quest for the ring: long, circuitous, filled with monsters who want to eat you. Some truth is easy: Wachusett has four chairlifts. Beyond the objective, complications arise: Wachusettâs decision to replace its summit quad with a six-pack in 2025 is⊠what, exactly? Visionary, shortsighted, foolish, clever, pedestrian? Does it prioritize passholders or marketing or profit over experience? Is it necessary? Is it wise? Is it prudent? Is it an answer to localsâ frustrations or a compounding factor in it?
The journalistâs job is to machete through this jungle and sculpt a version of reality that all parties will recognize and that none of them will be entirely happy with. Because people are complex and so is the world, and assembling the truth is less like snapping together a thousand-piece puzzle and more like the A-Team examining a trashheap and saying âOK boys, letâs build a helicopter.â
Sutner is good at this, as may be expected of someone whoâs spent decades on his beat. He understands that anecdote is not absolute. He knows how to pull together broad narratives (âNew Englandâs outdated lift fleetâ of the 2010s), and to acknowledge when they change (âNew England operators aggressively modernize liftsâ in the 2020s). He is empathetic to locals and operators alike, without being deferential to either. He knows that the best stories are 90 percent what the writer leaves out, and 10 percent identifying the essential bits to frame the larger whole. And he lives the beat, aggressively, joyously, immersively.
We need more Sutners, but we are probably getting fewer. As journalism figures out what it is in the 21st century, it is deciding that it is less about community-based entities employing beat-specific writers and more about feeding mastheads to private equity funds that drag the carcass down to entrails and then feed them to the hounds. Thousands of American communities now have no local news organization, let alone one with the resources to hire writers solely devoted to something as niche as skiing. Filling the information void is Angry Ski Bro, firing off 50 dozen monthly Facebook posts about Vailâs abominable greed being distilled in a broken snowgun at Wildcat.
I started The Storm as an antidote to this global complaint box. And I believe that the future of journalism includes writers tapping Substack and similar platforms to freelance the truth. But I still believe that the traditional news organization â meaning physical newspapers that have evolved into digital-analogue hybrids â can find a sustainable business model that tells a communityâs essential stories. Sutner, and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, deserve credit for showing us how to do this.
What we talked about
Ski South America; how to ski 60 days while working full time; Worcesterâs legendary Strandâs ski shop; Powdrâs sale of Killington and Pico and how the new owners can keep from ruining it; how to make Pico more relevant; is this the start of New England ski area deconsolidation?; Smuggs; Black Mountain, New Hampshireâs co-op quest; taking stock of New England consolidation; Vail Resortsâ New England GM shuffle; New Englandâs chairlift renaissance; what is New Englandâs new most-hated lift?; why New England needs more surface lifts; a new sixer coming to Wachusett; the legacy of Wachusettâs David Crowley; why Wachusett works; and what we lose with consolidation.
What we got wrong
On whatever that city is called
I probably still canât pronounce âWorcester.â Just congratulate yourself if you can, and keep moving.
On South American skiing
I said in our conversation that there were â40 or so ski areasâ in South America. Iâve not taken my magnifying glass to the region as I have with Real America, but I made this quick-hitter chart earlier this year that counted just 26 on the continent, all of them in Chile and Argentina:
This map on skiresort.info counts 45 South American ski areas, including a sporadically operating area in Bolivia and one indoor and one artificial-turf area in Brazil. Someday Iâll do a cross-check with my list, but that day is not today.
On which county Killington lives in
Neither of us knew which county Killington is in, but he suggested Windham County. The correct answer is Rutland County.
On The Man owning our ski centers
When discussing state-owned ski areas, Sutner didnât remember that New Hampshire owns Cannon and Vail-operated Sunapee, and I didnât remember to remind him.
On Black Mountain, New Hampshire
We recorded this prior to Black outlining its plans for a transition to co-op ownership. Mountain leadership has since released more details:
On Mad River Glenâs snowmaking hard stop
I noted that Mad River Glen only makes snow up to â2,000-whatever feet.â The actual number, as proclaimed by some past assemblage of the MRG co-op, is 2,200 feet. Though perhaps raising that by a couple hundred feet would have spared them from spending a fat stack to build a double-chair midstation this year.
On Vailâs GM shuffle
When we recorded this conversation, Vail-owned Wildcat, Mount Snow, and Crotched had general manager vacancies. The company has since filled all three (click through on the links above).
On Sugarloafâs T-bar
In our discussion on surface lifts, Sutner references a T-bar to Sugarloafâs summit. The Bateau T-bar does land quite high on the mountain, but it stops short of the summit and snowfields.
On Waterville Valleyâs T-bars
Watervilleâs T-bar game is way ahead of most New England ski areas. Two of them serve lower-mountain race or race-training trails, and one serves the mountainâs top 400 vertical feet, replacing the windhold-prone chairlifts that once ran to the summit. While two of the T-bars run parallel to terrain parks, serving them does not appear to be the liftsâ direct purpose, as we debated on the podcast.
On Vailâs high-speed âT-barsâ
I mixed up my lift types when describing the high-speed surface lifts that Vail runs at its Midwest mountains. They are ropetows, not T-bars. Here they go at Afton Alps, Minnesota:
Afton Alps, Minnesota. Video by Stuart Winchester.
On Wachusett upgrades
Sutner noted that Wachusettâs coming summit six-pack would be its first big infrastructure upgrade in 20 years, but the mountain installed the 299-vertical-foot Monadnock Express quad in 2011.
On Berkshire Eastâs T-Bar Express
Sutner said that last year was Berkshire Eastâs second season running its T-Bar Express high-speed quad, but the lift first spun for the 2023-24 ski season. The current, 2024-25 season is the liftâs second.
On Sutnerâs ski days
We recorded this a while ago, and Sutner had clocked eight ski days before Thanksgiving. As of Dec. 30, heâd hit 21 days, well along to his 60-day goal.
Podcast Notes
On Cerro Catedral
Iâm somewhat obsessed with this 3,773-vertical-foot, 1,500-acre Argentinian monster:
On Shaunâs Worcester Living article
Sutner wrote up his Argentinian ski adventure for Worcester Living magazine. The story starts on page 20.
On Powdrâs sale of Killington and Pico
In case you missed it:
On New England consolidation
New Englandâs 100-ish ski areas are largely independently owned and operated. These 25 are run by an entity that operates at least two ski areas:
On Intrawest and American Skiing Company
Itâs impossible to discuss the history of New England ski area consolidation without acknowledging the now-dead Intrawest and American Skiing Company.
On Vailâs management shuffle
I wrote about this recently:
I launched The Storm in October 2019, when Vail owned 34 North American ski areas. To the best of my knowledge, just three of those ski areasâ general manager-level leaders remain where they were on that date: Vail Mountain VP/COO Beth Howard, Okemo VP/GM Bruce Schmidt, and Boston Mills-Brandywine GM Jake Campbell. Compare this to Boyne, where nine of 10 mountain leaders either remain in their 2019 roles, or have since ascended to them after working at the resort for decades, often replacing legends retiring after long careers. Alterra and Powdr have demonstrated similar stability. Meanwhile, Vailâs seven New England Resorts enter this winter with just two mountains â Okemo and Attitash â under the same general manager that ran them in the spring.
The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 90/100 in 2024, and number 590 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. 2024 will continue until the 100-article threshold is achieved, regardless of what that pesky calendar says.
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This podcast hit paid subscribersâ inboxes on Nov. 30. It dropped for free subscribers on Dec. 7. To receive future episodes as soon as theyâre 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
Mike Taylor, Owner of Holiday Mountain, New York
Recorded on
November 18, 2024
About Holiday Mountain
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: Mike Taylor
Located in: Monticello, New York
Year founded: 1957
Pass affiliations: None
Closest neighboring ski areas: Villa Roma (:37), Ski Big Bear (:56), Mt. Peter (:48), Mountain Creek (:52), Victor Constant (:54)
Base elevation: 900 feet
Summit elevation: 1,300 feet
Vertical drop: 400 feet
Skiable acres: 60
Average annual snowfall: 66 inches
Trail count: 9 (5 beginner, 2 intermediate, 2 advanced)
Lift count: 3 (1 fixed-grip quad, 1 triple, 1 carpet - view Lift Blogâs inventory of Holiday Mountainâs lift fleet)
Why I interviewed him
Not so long ago, U.S. ski areas swung wrecking ball-like from the necks of founders who wore them like amulets. Mountain and man fused as one, each anchored to and propelled by the other, twin forces mirrored and set aglow, forged in some burbling cauldron and unleashed upon the public as an Experience. This was Killington and this was Mammoth and this was Vail and this was Squaw and this was Taos, each at once a mountain and a manifestation of psyche and soul, as though some godâs hand had scooped from Pres and Dave and Pete and Al and Ernie their whimsy and hubris and willfulness and fashioned them into a cackling live thing on this earth. The men were the mountains and the mountains were the men. Everybody knew this and everybody felt this and thatâs why we named lifts and trails after them.
This is what weâve lost in the collect-them-all corporate roll-up of our current moment. Iâm skeptical of applying an asteroid-ate-the-dinosaurs theory to skiing, but even Iâll acknowledge this bit. When the caped founder, who stepped into raw wilderness and said âhere I will build an organized snowskiing facilityâ and proceeded to do so, steps aside or sells to SnowCo or dies, some essence of the mountain evaporates with him. The snow still hammers and the skiers still come and the mountain still lets gravity run things. The trails remain and the fall lines still fall. The mountain is mostly the same. But nobody knows why it is that way, and the ski area becomes a disembodied thing, untethered from a human host.
This, I think, is a big part of the appeal of Michiganâs Mount Bohemia. Ungroomed, untamed, absent green runs and snowguns, accessible all winter on a $109 season pass, Boho is the impossible storybook of the maniac who willed it into existence against all advice and instinct: Lonie Glieberman, who hacked this thing from the wilderness not in some lost postwar decade, but in 2000. He lives there all winter and everybody knows him and they all know that this place that is the place would not exist had he not insisted that it be so. For the purposes of how skiers consider the joint, Lonie is Mount Bohemia. And someday when he goes away the mountain will make less sense than it does right now.
I could write a similar paragraph about Chip Chase at White Grass Touring Center in West Virginia. But there arenât many of those fellas left. Since most of our ski areas are old, most of our founders are gone. Theyâre not coming back, and weâre not getting more ski areas. But that doesnât mean the era of the owner-soul keeper is finished. They just need to climb a different set of monkey bars to get there. Rather than trekking into the mountains to stake out and transform a raw wilderness into a piste digestible to the masses, the modern mountain incarnate needs to drive up to the ski area with a dump truck full of hundred dollar bills, pour it out onto the ground, and hope the planted seeds sprout money trees.
And this is Mike Taylor. He has resources. He has energy. He has manpower. And heâs going to transform this dysfunctional junkpile of a ski area into something modern, something nice, something that will last. And everyone knows it wouldnât be happening without him.
What we talked about
The Turkey Trot chairlift upgrade; why Taylor re-engineered and renovated a mothballed double chair just to run it for a handful of days last winter before demolishing it this summer; Partek and why skiing needs an independent lift manufacturer; a gesture from Massanutten; how you build a chairlift when your chairlift doesnât come with a bottom terminal; Holiday Mountainâs two new ski trails for this winter; the story behind Holiday Mountainâs trail names; why a rock quarry is âthe greatest neighbors we could ever ask forâ; big potential future ski expansion opportunities; massive snowmaking upgrades; snowmaking is hard; how a state highway spurred the development of Holiday Mountain; âI think weâve lost a generation of skiersâ; vintage Holiday Mountain; the ski areaâs long, sad decline; pillage by flood; restoring abandoned terrain above the Fun Park; the chairlift you see from Route 17 is not actually a chairlift; considering a future when 17 converts into Interstate 86; what would have happened to Holiday had the other bidders purchased it; âhow do we get kids off their phones and out recreating again?â; advice from Plattekill; buying a broken ski area in May and getting it open by Christmas (or trying); what translates well from the business world into running a ski area; how to finance the rebuild and modernization of a failing ski area; âwhen you talk to a bank and use the word âski area,â they want nothing to do with itâ; how to make a ski area make money; why summer business is hard; Holidayâs incredible social media presence; âI always thought good grooming was easy, like mowing a lawnâ; how to get big things done quickly but well; ski racing returns; âI donât want to do things half-assed and pay for it in the long runâ; why season two should be better than season one; âyou canât make me happier than to see busloads of kids, improving their skills, and enjoying something theyâre going to do for the rest of their lifeâ; why New York State has a challenging business environment, and how to get things done anyway; the surprise labor audit that shocked New York skiing last February â âwe didnât realize the mistakes we were makingâ; kids these days; the State of New York owns and subsidizes three ski areas â how does that complicate things?; why the state subsidizing independent ski areas isnât the answer; the problem with bussing kids to ski areas; and why Holiday Mountain doesnât feel ready to join the Indy Pass.
Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview
I met Taylor in a Savannah bar last year, five minutes after heâd bought a ski area and seven months before he needed to turn that ski area into a functional business. Here was the new owner of Holiday Mountain, rolling with the Plattekill gang, more or less openly saying, âI have no idea what the hell Iâm doing, but Iâm going to do it. Iâm going to save Holiday Mountain.â
The National Ski Areas Associationâs annual show, tucked across the river that week, seemed like a good place to start. Here were hundreds of people who could tell Taylor exactly how hard it was to run a ski area, and why. And here was this guy, accomplished in so many businesses, ready to learn. And all I could think, having skied the disaster that was Holiday Mountain in recent years, was thank God this dude is here. Hereâs my card. Letâs talk.
I connected with Taylor the next month and wrote a story about his grand plans for Holiday. Then I stepped back and let that first winter happen. It was, by Taylorâs own account, humbling. But it did not seem to be humiliating, which is key. Pride is the quickest path to failure in skiing. Instead of kicking things, Taylor seemed to regard the whole endeavor as a grand and amusing puzzle. âWell letâs see here, turns out snowmaking is hard, grooming is hard, managing teenagers is hard⊠isnât that interesting and how can I make this work even though I already had too much else to do at my other 10 jobs?â
Life may be attitude above all else. And when I look at ski area operators who have recycled garbage into gold, this is the attribute that seems to steer all others. Thatâs people like Rick Schmitz, who talked two Wisconsin ski areas off the ledge and brought another back from its grave; Justin Hoppe, who just traded his life in to save a lost UP ski area; James Coleman, whose bandolier of saved ski areas could fill an egg carton; and Danielle and Laszlo Vajtay, who for 31 years have modernized their ridiculously steep and remote Catskills ski area one snowgun at a time.
There are always plenty of people who will tell you why a thing is impossible. These people are boring. They lack creativity or vision, an ability to see the world as something other than what it is. Taylor is the opposite. All he does is envision how things can be better, and then work to make them that way. That was clear to me immediately. It just took him a minute to prove he could do it. And he did.
What I got wrong
* Mike said he needed a chairlift with âabout 1,000 feet of vertical riseâ to replace the severed double chair visible from Route 17. He meant length. According to Lift Blog, the legacy lift rose 232 vertical feet over 1,248 linear feet.
* We talk a bit about New Yorkâs declining population, but the real-world picture is fuzzier. While the stateâs population did fall considerably, from 20.1 million to 19.6 million over the past four years, those numbers include a big pandemic-driven population spike in 2020, when the stateâs population rose 3.3 percent, from 19.5 million to that 20.1 million number (likely from city refugees camping out in New Yorkâs vast and bucolic rural reaches). The stateâs current population of 19,571,216 million is still larger than it was at any point before 2012, and not far off its pre-pandemic peak of 19,657,321.
* I noted that Goreâs new Hudson high-speed quad cost âabout $10 million.â That is probably a fair estimate based upon the initial budget between $8 and $9 million, but an ORDA representative did not immediately respond to a request for the final number.
Why you should ski Holiday Mountain
Iâve been reconsidering my television pitch for Who Wants to Own a Ski Area? Not because the answer is probably âeverybody reading this newsletter except for the ones that already own a ski area, because they are smart enough to know better.â But because I think the follow-up series, Ski Resort Rebuild, would be even more entertaining. It would contain all the elements of successful unscripted television: a novel environment, large and expensive machinery, demolition, shouting, meddlesome authorities, and an endless sequence of puzzles confronting a charismatic leader and his band of chain-smoking hourlies.
The rainbow arcing over all of this would of course be reinvention. Take something teetering on apocalyptic set-piece and transform it into an ordered enterprise that makes the kids go âwheeeeee!â Raw optimism and self-aware naivete would slide into exasperation and despair, the launchpad for stubborn triumphalism tempered by humility. Cut to teaser for season two.
Though I envision a six- or eight-episode season, the template here is the concise and satisfying Hoarders, which condenses a days-long home dejunking into a half-hour of television. One minute, Uncle Frankâs four-story house is filled with his pizza box collection and every edition of the Tampa Bay Bugle dating back to 1904. But as 15 dumpster trucks from TakeMyCrap.com drive off in convoy, the home that could only be navigated with sonar and wayfinding canines has been transformed into a Flintstones set piece, a couch and a wooly mammoth rug accenting otherwise empty rooms. I can watch these chaos-into-order transformations all day long.
Roll into Holiday Mountain this winter, and youâll essentially be stepping into episode four of this eight-part series. The ski areaâs most atrocious failures have been bulldozed, blown-up, regraded, covered in snow. The two-seater chairlift that Columbus shipped in pieces on the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria has finally been scrapped and replaced with a machine that does not predate modern democracy. The snowguns are no longer powered by hand-cranks. A ski area that, just 18 months ago, was shrinking like an island in rising water is actually debuting two brand-new trails this winter.
But the jobâs not finished. On your left as you drive in is a wide abandoned ridge where four ski lifts once spun. On the open hills, new snowguns glimmer and new-used chairlifts and cats hum, but by Taylorâs own admission, his teams are still figuring out how to use all these fancy gadgets. Change is the tide climbing up the beach, but we havenât fully smoothed out the tracked sand yet, and it will take a few more hours to get there.
It's fun to be part of something like this, even as an observer. Iâll tell you to visit Holiday Mountain this winter for the same reason Iâll tell you to go ride Chair 2 at Alpental or the triple at Bluewood or the Primo and Segundo Riblet doubles at Sunlight. By next autumn, each of these lifts, which have dressed their mountains for decades, will make way for modern machines. This is good, and healthy, and necessary for skiingâs long-term viability. But experiencing the same place in different forms offers useful lessons in imagination, evolution, and the utility of persistence and willpower. Itâs already hard to picture that Holiday Mountain that teetered on the edge of collapse just two years ago. In two more years, it could be impossible, so thorough is the current renovation. So go. Bonus: they have skiing.
Podcast Notes
On indies sticking together
Despite the facile headlines, conglomerates are not taking over American skiing. As of my last count, about 73 percent of U.S. ski areas are still independently operated. And while these approximately three-quarters of active ski areas likely account for less than half of all skier visits, consumers do still have plenty of choice if they donât want to go Epkonic.
New York, in particular, is a redoubt of family-owned and -operated mountains. Other than Vail-owned Hunter and state-owned Belleayre, Gore, and Whiteface, every single one of the stateâs 51 ski areas is under independent management. Taylor calls out several of these New York owners in our conversation, including many past podcast guests. These are all tremendous conversations, all streaked with the same sincere determination and grit thatâs obvious in Taylorâs pod.
Massachusetts is also a land of independent ski areas, including the Swiss watch known as Wachusett:
On Partek
Partek is one of the delightful secrets of U.S. skiing. The company, founded in 1993 by Hagen Schulz, son of the defunct Borvig lifts President Gary Schulz, installs one or two or zero new chairlifts in a typical year. Last year, it was a fixed-grip quad at Trollhaugen, Wisconsin and a triple at Mt. Southington, Connecticut. The year before, it was the new Sandy quad at Saddleback. Everyone raves about the quality of the lifts and the experience of working with Partekâs team. Saddleback GM Jim Quimby laid this out for us in detail when he joined me on the podcast last year:
Trollhaugen owner and GM Jim Rochford, Jr. was similarly effusive:
Iâm underscoring this point because if you visit Partekâs website, youâll be like âI hope they have this thing ready for Y2K.â But this is your stop if you need a new SKF 6206-2RS1, which is only $17!
On the old Catskills resort hotels with ski areas
New York is home to more ski areas (51) than any state in America, but there are still far more lost ski areas here than active ones. The New York Lost Ski Areas Project estimates that the ghosts of up to 350 onetime ski hills haunt the state. This is not so tragic as it sounds, as the vast majority of these operations consisted of a goat pulling a toboggan up 50 vertical feet beside Fiesty Peteâs dairy barn. These operated for the lifespan of a housefly and no one missed them when they disappeared. On the opposite end were a handful of well-developed, multi-lift ski areas that have died in modernity: Scotch Valley (1988), Shu Maker (1999), Cortina (mid-90s), and Big Tupper (2012). But in the middle sat dozens of now-defunct surface-tow bumps, some with snowmaking, some attached to the famous and famously extinct Borsch Belt Catskills resorts.
It is this last group that Taylor and I discuss in the podcast. He estimates that âprobably a dozenâ ski areas once operated in Sullivan County. Some of these were standalone operations like Holiday, but many were stapled to large resort hotels like The Nevele and Grossingers. I couldnât find a list of the extinct Catskills resorts that once offered skiing, and none appeared to have bothered drawing a trailmap.
While these add-on ski areas are a footnote in the overall story of U.S. skiing, an activity-laying-around-to-do-at-a-resort can have a powerful multiplier effect. Here are some things that I only do if I happen across a readymade setup: shoot pool, ice skate, jet ski, play basketball, fish, play minigolf, toss cornhole bags. I enjoy all of these things, but I wonât plan ahead to do them on purpose. I imagine skiing acted in this fashion for much of the Bortsch Belt crowd, like âoh letâs go try that snowskiing thing between breakfast and our 11:00 baccarat game.â And with some of these folks, skiing probably became something they did on purpose.
The closest thing modernity delivers to this is indoor skiing, which, attached to a mall â as Big Snow is in New Jersey â presents itself as Something To Do. Which is why I believe we need a lot more such centers, and soon.
On shrinking Holiday Mountain
Some ski areas die all at once. Holiday Mountain curdled over decades, to the husk Taylor purchased last year. Check the place out in 2000, with lifts zinging all over the place across multiple faces:
A 2003 flood smashed the terrain near the entrance, and by 2007, Holiday ran just two lifts:
At some indeterminant point, the ski area also abandoned the Turkey Trot double. This 2023 trailmap shows the area dedicated to snowtubing, though to my knowledge no such activity was ever conducted there at scale.
On the lift you see from Route 17
Anyone cruising NY State 17 can see this chairlift rising off the northwest corner of the ski area:
This is essentially a billboard, as Taylor left the terminal in place after demolishing the lower part of the long-inactive lift.
Taylor intends to run a lift back up this hill and re-open all the old terrain. But first he has to restore the slopes, which eroded significantly in their last life as a Motocross course. There is no timeline for this, but Taylor works fast, and I wouldnât be shocked to see the terrain come back online as soon as 2025.
On NY 17âs transformation into I-86
New York 17 is in the midst of a decades-long evolution into Interstate 86, with long stretches of the route that spans southern New York already signed as such. But the interstate designation comes with standards that define lane number and width, bridge height, shoulder dimensions, and maximum grade, among many other particulars, including the placement and length of exit and entrance ramps. Exit 108, which provides direct eastbound access to and egress from Holiday Mountain, is fated to close whenever the highway gods close the gap that currently splits I-86 into segments.
On Norway Mountain
Holiday is the second ski area comeback story featured on the pod in recent months, following the tale of dormant-since-2017 Norway Mountain, Michigan:
On Holidayâs high-energy social media accounts
Taylor has breathlessly documented Holidayâs comeback on the ski areaâs Instagram and Facebook accounts. Theyâre incredible. Follow recommended.
On Tuxedo Ridge
This place frustrates me. Once a proud beginners-oriented ski center with four chairlifts and a 450-foot vertical drop, the bump dropped dead around 2014 without warning or explanation, despite a prime location less than an hour from New York City.
I hiked the place in 2020, and wrote about it:
On Ski Areas of New York
Ski Areas of New York, or SANY, is one of Americaâs most effective state ski area organizations. Iâve hosted the organizationâs president, Scott Brandi, on the podcast a couple of times:
Compulsory mention of ORDA
The Olympic Regional Development Authority, which manages New York State-owned Belleayre, Gore, and Whiteface mountains, lost $47.3 million in its last fiscal year. One ORDA board member, in response to the report, said that itâs âamazing how well we are doing,â according to the Adirondack Explorer. Which makes a lot of the stateâs independent ski area operators say things like, âHuh?â Thatâs probably a fair response, since $47.3 million would likely be sufficient for the state to simply purchase every ski area in New York other than Hunter, Windham, Holiday Valley, and Bristol.
On high-speed ropetows
Iâll keep writing about these forever because they are truly amazing and there should be 10 of them at every ski area in America:
Welch Village, Minnesota. Video by Stuart Winchester.
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 82/100 in 2024, and number 582 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019.
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Who
Susan Donnelly, General Manager of Mount Sunapee (and former General Manager of Crotched Mountain)
Recorded on
November 4, 2024
About Crotched
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: Vail Resorts, which also owns:
Located in: Francetown, New Hampshire
Year founded: 1963 (as Crotched East); 1969 (as Onset, then Onset Bobcat, then Crotched West, now present-day Crotched); entire complex closed in 1990; West re-opened by Peak Resorts in 2003 as Crotched Mountain
Pass affiliations:
* Epic Pass, Epic Local Pass, Northeast Value Epic Pass: unlimited access
* Northeast Midweek Epic Pass: midweek access, including holidays
Closest neighboring public ski areas: Pats Peak (:34), Granite Gorge (:39), Arrowhead (:41), McIntyre (:50), Mount Sunapee (:51)
Base elevation: 1,050 feet
Summit elevation: 2,066 feet
Vertical drop: 1,016
Skiable Acres: 100
Average annual snowfall: 65 inches
Trail count: 25 (28% beginner, 40% intermediate, 32% advanced)
Lift count: 5 (1 high-speed quad, 1 fixed-grip quad, 1 triple, 1 double, 1 surface lift â view Lift Blogâs inventory of Crotchedâs lift fleet)
History: Read New England Ski Historyâs overview of Crotched Mountain
About Mount Sunapee
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: The State of New Hampshire; operated by Vail Resorts, which also operates resorts detailed in the chart above.
Located in: Newbury, New Hampshire
Year founded: 1948
Pass affiliations:
* Epic Pass, Epic Local Pass, Northeast Value Epic Pass: unlimited access
* Northeast Midweek Epic Pass: midweek access, including holidays
Closest 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)
Base elevation: 1,233 feet
Summit elevation: 2,743 feet
Vertical drop: 1,510 feet
Skiable Acres: 233 acres
Average annual snowfall: 130 inches
Trail count: 67 (29% beginner, 47% intermediate, 24% advanced)
Lift count: 8 (2 high-speed quads, 1 fixed-grip quad, 2 triples, 3 conveyors â view Lift Blogâs inventory of Mount Sunapeeâs lift fleet.)
History: Read New England Ski Historyâs overview of Mount Sunapee
Why I interviewed her
Itâs hard to be small in New England and itâs hard to be south in New England. There are 35 New England ski areas with vertical drops greater than 1,100 feet, and Crotched is not one of them. There are 44 New England ski areas that average more than 100 inches of snow per winter, and Crotched is not one of those either. Crotched does have a thousand vertical feet and a high-speed lift and a new baselodge and a snowmaking control room worthy of a nuclear submarine. Which is a pretty good starter kit for a successful ski area. But itâs not enough in New England.
To succeed as a ski area in New England, you need a Thing. The most common Things are to be really really nice or really really gritty. Stratton or Mad River. Okemo or Magic. Sunday River or Black Mountain of Maine. The pitch is either âyouâll think youâre at Deer Valleyâ or âyouâll descend the hill on ice skates and youâll like it.â But Crotchedâs built-along-a-state-highway normalness precludes arrogance, and its mellow terrain lacks the attitude for even modest braggadocio. Itâs not a small ski area, but itâs not big enough to be a mid-sized one, either. The terrain is fine, but itâs not the kind of place you need to ski on purpose, or more than once. Itâs a fine local, but not much else, making Crotched precisely the kind of mountain that you would have expected to be smothered by the numerous larger and better ski areas around it before it could live to see the internet. And thatâs exactly what happened. Crotched, lacking a clear Thing, went bust in 1990.
The ski area, undersized and average, should have melted back into the forest by now. But in 2002, then-budding Peak Resorts crept out of its weird Lower Midwest manmade snowhole on a reverse Lewis & Clark Expedition to explore the strange and murky East. And as they hacked away the brambles around Crotchedâs boarded-up baselodge, they saw not a big pile of mediocrity, but a portal into the gold-plated New England market. And they said âthis could work if we can just find a Thing.â And that Thing was night-skiing with attitude, built on top of $10 million in renovations that included a built-from-scratch snowmaking system.
The air above the American mountains is filled with such wild notions. âWeâre going to save Mt. Goatpath. Itâs going to be bigger than Vail and deeper than Alta and higher than Telluride.â And everyone around them is saying, âYou know this is, like, f*****g Connecticut, right?â But if practical concerns killed all bad ideas, then no one would keep reptiles as pets. Everyone else is happy with cats or dogs, sentient mammals of kindred disposition with humans, but this idiot needs a 12-foot-long boa constrictor that he keeps in a 6x3 fishtank. It helps him get chicks or something. Itâs his thing. And damned if it doesnât work.
What we talked about
Transitioning from smaller, Vail-owned Crotched to larger, state-owned but Vail-operated Sunapee; âweather-proofingâ Sunapee; Crotched and Sunapee â so close but so different; reflecting on the Okemo days under Triple Peaks ownership; longtime Okemo head Bruce Schmidt; reacting to Vailâs 2018 purchase of Triple Peaks; living through change; the upside of acquisitions; integrating Peak Resorts; skiingâs boysâ club; Vail Resortsâ culture of womenâs advancement; why Covid uniquely challenged Crotched among Vailâs New England properties; reviving Midnight Madness; Crotchedâs historic downsizing; whether the lost half of Crotched could ever be re-developed; why Crotched 2.0 is more durable than the version that shut down in 1990; Crotchedâs baller snowmaking system; southern New Hampshireâs wild weather; thoughts on future Crotched infrastructure; and considering a beginner trail from Crotchedâs summit.
Why now was a good time for this interview
As we swing toward the middle of the 2020s, itâs pretty lame to continue complaining about operational malfunctions in the so-called Covid season of 2020-21, but Iâm going to do it anyway.
Some ski areas did a good job operating that season. For example, Pats Peak. Pats Peak was open seven days per week that winter. Pats Peak offered night skiing on all the days it usually offers night skiing. Pats Peak made the Ross Ice Shelf jealous with its snowmaking firepower. Pats Peak acted like a snosportskiing operation that had operated a snosportskiing operation in previous winters. Pats Peak did a good job.
Other ski areas did a bad job operating that season. For example, Crotched. Crotched was open whenever it decided to be open, which was not very often. Crotched, one of the great night-skiing centers in New England, offered almost no night skiing. Crotchedâs snowmaking looked like what happens when you accidentally keep the garden hose running during an overnight freeze. Crotched did a bad job.
This is a useful comparison, because these two ski areas sit just 21 miles and 30 minutes apart. They are dealing with the same crappy weather and the same low-altitude draw. They are both obscured by the shadows of far larger ski areas scraping the skies just to the north. They are both small and unserious places, where the skiing is somewhat beside the point. Kids go there to pole-click one anotherâs skis off of moving chairlifts. College kids go there to alternate two laps with two rounds at the bar. Adults go there to shoo the kids onto the chairlifts and burn down happy hour. No one shows up in either parking lot expecting Jackson Hole.
But Crotched Mountain is owned by Vail Resorts. Pats Peak is owned by the same family of good-old boys who built the original baselodge from logs sawed straight off the mountain in 1962. Vail Resorts has the resources to send a container full of sawdust to the moon just to see what happens when itâs opened. Most of Pats Peaksâ chairlifts came used from other ski areas. These two are not drawing from the same oil tap.
And yet, one of them delivered a good product during Covid, and the other did not. And the ones who did are not the ones that their respective pools of resources would suggest. And so the people who skied Pats Peak that year were like âYeah that was pretty good considering everything else kind of sucks right now.â And the people who skied Crotched that season were like âWell that sucked even worse than everything else does right now, and thatâs saying something.â
And thatâs the mess that Donnelly inherited when she took the GM job at Crotched in 2021. And it took a while, but she fixed it. And thatâs harder than it should be when your parent company can deploy sawdust rockets on a whim.
What I got wrong
* I said that Colorado has 35 active ski areas. The correct number is 34, or 33 if we exclude Hesperus, which did not operate last winter, and is not scheduled to reactivate anytime soon.
* I said that Bruce Schmidt was the âpresident and general managerâ of Okemo. His title is âVice President and General Manager.â Sorry about that, Bruce.
* I said that Okemoâs season pass was âclosing in on $2,000â when Vail came along. According to New England Ski History, Okemoâs top season pass price hit $1,375 for the 2017-18 ski season, the last before Vail purchased the resort. This appears to be a big cut from the 2016-17 season, when the top price was $1,619. My best guess is that Okemo dropped their pass prices after Vail purchased Stowe, lowering that mountainâs pass price from $2,313 for the 2016-17 ski season to just $899 (an Epic Pass) the next.
* I said that 80 percent-plus of my podcasts featured interviews with men. I examined the inventory, and found that of the 210 podcasts Iâve published (192 Storm Skiing Podcasts, 12 Covid pods, 6 Live pods), only 33, or 15.7 percent, included a female guest. Only 23 of those (11 percent), featured a woman as the only guest. And three of those podcasts were with one person: former NSAA CEO Kelly Pawlak. So either my representation sucks, or the ski industryâs representation sucks, but probably itâs both.
Why you should ski Crotched
Upper New England doesnât have a lot of night skiing, and the night skiing it does have is mostly underwhelming. Most of the large resorts â Killington, Sugarbush, Smuggs, Stowe, Sugarloaf, Waterville, Cannon, Stratton, Mount Snow, Okemo, Attitash, Wildcat, etc. â have no night skiing at all. A few of the big names â Bretton Woods, Sunday River, Cranmore â provide a nominal after-dark offering, a lift and a handful of trails. The bulk of the night skiing in New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine involves surface lifts at community-run bumps with the vertical drop of a Slip Nâ Slide.
But a few exceptions tower into the frosty darkness: Pleasant Mountain, Maine; Pats Peak, New Hampshire; and Bolton Valley, Vermont all deliver big vertical drops, multiple chairlifts, and a spiderweb of trails for night skiers. Boyne-owned Pleasant, with 1,300 vertical feet served by a high-speed quad, is the most extensive of these, but the second-most expansive night-skiing operation in New England lives at Crotched.
Parked less than an hour from New Hampshireâs four largest cities â Manchester, Nashua, Concord, and Derry â Crotched is the rare northern New England ski area that can sustain an after-hours business (New Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont are ranked numbers 41, 42, and 49 among U.S. states by population, respectively, with a three-state total of just 3.5 million residents). With four chairlifts spinning, every trail lit, Park Brahs on patrol, first-timers lined up at the rental shop, Bomber Bro straightlining Plutoâs Plunge in his unzipped Celtics jacket, the parking lots jammed, and the scritch-scratch of edges on ice shuddering across the night, itâs an amazing scene, a lantern of New England Yeah Dawg zest floating in the winter night.
No, Crotched night skiing isnât what it used to be, when Peak Resorts kept the joint bumping until 3 a.m. And the real jammer, Midnight Madness, hits just a half dozen days per winter. But itâs still a uniquely New England scene, a skiing spectacle that can double as a night-cap after a day shredding Cannon or Waterville or Mount Snow.
Podcast Notes
On my recent Sunapee pod
I tend to schedule these interviews several months in advance, and sometimes things change. One of the things that changed between when I scheduled this conversation and when we recorded it was Donnellyâs job. She moved from Crotched, which I had never spotlighted on the podcast, to Sunapee, which I just featured a few months ago. Which means, Sunapee Nation, that we donât really talk much about Mount Sunapee on this podcast that has Mount Sunapee in the headline. But pretty much everything I talked about in June with former Sunapee GM Peter Disch (whoâs now VP of Mountain Ops at Vailâs Heavenly), is still relevant:
On historic Crotched
Crotched was once a much larger resort forged from two onetime independent side-by-side ski areas. The whole history of it is a bit labyrinthian and involves bad decisions, low snow years, and unpaid taxes (read the full tale at New England Ski History), but the upshot was this interconnected animal, shown here at its 1988-ish peak:
The whole Crotched complex dropped dead around 1990, and would have likely stayed that way forever had Missouri-based Peak Resorts not gotten the insane idea to dig a lost New England ski area up from the graveyard. Somewhat improbably, they succeeded, and the contemporary Crotched (minus the summit quad, which came later), opened in 2003. The current ski area sits on what was formerly known as âCrotched West,â and before that âBobcat,â and before that (or perhaps at the same time), âOnset.â Trails on the original Crotched Mountain, at Crotched East (left on the trailmap above), are still faintly visible from above (on the right below, between the âCrotched Mountainâ and âSt. John Enterpriseâ dots):
On Triple Peaks and Okemo
Triple Peaks was the umbrella company that owned Okemo, Vermont; Mount Sunapee, New Hampshire; and Crested Butte, Colorado. The owners, the Mueller family, sold the whole outfit to Vail Resorts in 2018. Longtime Okemo GM Bruce Schmidt laid out the whole history on the podcast earlier this year:
On Crotchedâs lift fleet
Peak got creative building Crotchedâs lift fleet. The West double, a Hall installed by Jesus himself in 400 B.C., had sat in the woods through Crotchedâs entire 13-year closure and was somehow reactivated for the revival. The Rover triple and the Valley and Summit quads came from a short-lived 1,000-vertical-foot Virginia ski area called Cherokee.
What really nailed Crotched back to the floor, however, was the 2012 acquisition of a used high-speed quad from bankrupt Ascutney, Vermont.
Peak flagrantly dubbed this lift the âCrotched Rocket,â a name that Vail seems to have backed away from (the lift is simply âRocketâ on current trailmaps).
Fortunately, Ascutney lived on as a surface-lifts-only community bump even after its beheading. You can still skin and ski the top trails if youâre one of those people who likes to make skiing harder than it needs to be:
On Peak Resorts
Peak Resorts started in, of all places, Missouri. The company slowly acquired small-but-busy suburban ski areas, and was on its way to Baller status when Vail purchased the whole operation in 2019. Hereâs a loose acquisition timeline:
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What
Indy Pass is a newcomer to the NYC media circuit, hosting their inaugural gathering at an airy venue hard by the Hudson River. Part of the agenda was this short panel that I moderated, featuring the leaders of four Indy Pass partner mountains.
Who
* Erik Mogensen, Director, Indy Pass
* Steve Wright, President & General Manager, Jay Peak, Vermont
* Rob Goodell, Senior Vice President & Chief Operating Officer, Loveland, Colorado
* David Severn, Owner, White Pass, Washington
* Geoff Hatheway, Owner & President, Magic Mountain, Vermont
Recorded on
October 23, 2024
About Indy Pass
Indy Pass has collected 230 partners. The pass gets you two days each at 222 of them and discounts at the other eight. The pass is no longer on sale for the 2024-25 ski season, but there are baseball-game hotdogs that cost more than this thing.
About the ski areas
JAY PEAK, VERMONT
Stats: 2,153 vertical feet | 385 skiable acres | 347 inches average annual snowfall
LOVELAND, COLORADO
Stats: 2,210 vertical feet | 1,800 skiable acres | 422 inches average annual snowfall
WHITE PASS, WASHINGTON
Stats: 2,050 vertical feet | 1,402 skiable acres | 400 inches average annual snowfall
MAGIC MOUNTAIN, VERMONT
Stats: 1,500 vertical feet | 205 skiable acres | 130 inches average annual snowfall
What we talked about
Jay isnât remote for everyone; Magicâs black quad odyssey; PNW snow quality; why youâve probably seen Loveland even if youâve never skied it; Loveland Valleyâs origin story; why Jay joined Indy Pass when it could have joined any pass; why White Passâ new owners stayed on Indy Pass after purchasing it; and what finally convinced Loveland to join Indy.
Podcast Notes
On the original Indy Pass announcement
Indy Passâ website popped live sometime in March 2019, with a list of under-appreciated mid-sized ski areas concentrated around the Pacific Northwest. The roster grew rapidly prior to the start of the season, but even this would have been a hell of an offering for $199:
On Loveland Valley
Loveland is home to a little-noticed terrain pod known as Loveland Valley. With a quad, a double, and a set of carpets, this segmented zone essentially serves as a separate, beginners-oriented ski area.
On The Stormâs Indy Pass/Jay Peak exclusive
Somehow, I scored an exclusive on the news that Jay Peak would join Indy Pass in 2020. I was also able to record a podcast with Wright in advance of the announcement. This was a huge moment for The Storm, turning hundreds of new subscribers onto the newsletter and forging a relationship with one of the most important mountains in New England.
On Hatheway being one of my first interviews
Hatheway was one of the first guests on The Storm Skiing Podcast, and one of the first to agree to join me on the show. That was an incredible gesture, as I had published zero episodes when I made the request. Hereâs the conversation:
What I got wrong
* I said that Magic âfailed a couple of timesâ before current ownership acquired it. The ski area only completely closed once, from 1991 to 1997. The ski area then fumbled through two decades of near-failures, including a derailed attempt to form a co-op, until Ski Magic LLC took the keys in 2016. Read the full saga at New England Ski History.
* I said that it took Magic âfour or fiveâ years to install the Black Quad. The full timeline is closer to six years. Stratton removed their Snow Bowl fixed-grip quad following the 2017-18 ski season (replacing it with a high-speed quad). Iâm not sure when exactly Magic, just 13.6 road miles from Stratton, took delivery of the lift, but the goal was to get it spinning as the new Black lift by the 2019-20 ski season. After a series of construction delays, engineering problems, and global emergencies, the quad finally started spinning in February of this year.
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What
Thereâs a good reason that the Ikon Pass, despite considerable roster overlap and a more generous bucket of days, failed to kill Mountain Collective. Itâs not because Mountain Collective has established itself as a sort of bargain Ikon Junior, or because itâs scored a few exclusive partners in Canada and the Western U.S. Rather, the Mountain Collective continues to exist because the member mountains like their little country club, and theyâre not about to let Alterra force a mass exodus. Not that Alterra has tried, necessarily (I frankly have no idea), but the company did pull its remaining mountains (Mammoth, Palisades, Sugarbush), out of the coalition in 2022. Mountain Collective survived that, just as it weathered the losses of Stowe and Whistler and Telluride (all to the Epic Pass) before it. As of 2024, six years after the introduction of the Ikon Pass that was supposed to kill it, the Mountain Collective, improbably, floats its largest roster ever.
And dang, that roster. Monsters, all. Best case, you can go ski them. But the next best thing, for The Storm at least, is when these mountain leaders assemble for their annual meeting in New York City, which includes a night out with the media. Despite a bit of ambient noise, I set up in a corner of the bar and recorded a series of conversations with the leaders of some of the biggest, baddest mountains on the continent.
Who
* Stephen Kircher, President & CEO, Boyne Resorts
* Dave Fields, President & General Manager, Snowbird, Utah
* Brandon Ott, Marketing Director, Alta, Utah
* Steve Paccagnan, President & CEO, Panorama, British Columbia
* Geoff Buchheister, CEO, Aspen Skiing Company, Colorado
* Pete Sonntag, VP & General Manager, Sun Valley, Idaho
* Davy Ratchford, General Manager, Snowbasin, Utah
* Aaron MacDonald, Chief Marketing Officer, Sun Peaks, British Columbia
* Geordie Gillett, GM, Grand Targhee, Wyoming
* Bridget Legnavsky, President & CEO, Sugar Bowl, California
* Marc-André Meunier, Executive Marketing Director, Bromont, Quebec
* Pete Woods, President, Ski Big 3, Alberta
* Kendra Scurfield, VP of Brand & Communications, Sunshine, Alberta
* Norio Kambayashi, director and GM, Niseko Hanazono, Japan
* James Coleman, Managing Partner, Mountain Capital Partners
* Mary Kate Buckley, CEO, Jackson Hole, Wyoming
Recorded on
October 29, 2024
About Mountain Collective
Mountain Collective gives you two days each at some badass mountains. There is a ton of overlap with the Ikon Pass, which I note below, but Mountain Collective is cheaper has no blackout dates.
What we talked about
BOYNE RESORTS
The Portfolio
Big Sky
Sunday River
Sugarloaf
Topics
Yes a second eight-pack comes to Big Sky and itâs a monster; why Sunday River joined the Mountain Collective; Sugarloafâs massive West Mountain expansion; and could more Boyne Resorts join Mountain Collective?
More Boyne Resorts
SNOWBIRD
Stats: 3,240 vertical feet | 2,500 skiable acres | 500 inches average annual snowfall
Topics
The new Wilbere lift; why fixed-grip; why 600 inches of snow is better than 900 inches; and how Snowbird and Alta access differ on the Ikon versus the Mountain Collective passes.
Wilbereâs new alignment
More Snowbird
ALTA
Stats: 2,538 vertical feet | 2,614 skiable acres | 540 inches average annual snowfall
Topics
Not 903 inches but still a hell of a lot; why Altaâs aiming for 612 inches this season; and plotting Mountain Collective trips in LCC.
PANORAMA
Stats: 4,265 vertical feet | 2,975 skiable acres | 204 inches average annual snowfall
Topics
Panorama opens earlier than most skiers think, but not for the reasons they think; opening wall-to-wall last winter; Tantum Bowl Cats; and the impact of Mountain Collective and Ikon on Panorama.
More Panorama
ASPEN SKIING COMPANY
Stats
Aspen Mountain
Aspen Highlands
Buttermilk
Snowmass
Topics
Last yearâs Heroes expansion; ongoing improvements to the new terrain for 2024-25; why Aspen finally removed The Couch; who Aspen donated that lift to, and why; why the new Coney lift at Snowmass loads farther down the mountain; âwe intend to replace a lift a year probably for the next 10 yearsâ; where the next lift could be; and using your two Mountain Collective days to ski four Aspen resorts.
On Maverick Mountain, Montana
Despite megapass high-tides swarming mountains throughout the West, there are still dozens of ski areas like Maverick Mountain, tucked into the backwoods, 2,020 vertical feet of nothing but you and a pair of sticks. Aspenâs old Gentâs Ridge quad will soon replace the top-to-bottom 1969 Riblet double chair that serves Maverick now:
On the Snowmass masterplan
Aspenâs plan is, according to Buchheister, install a lift per year for the next decade. Here are some of the improvements the company has in mind at Snowmass:
On the Mountain Collective Pass starting at Aspen
Christian Knapp, who is now with Pacific Group Resorts, played a big part in developing the Mountain Collective via Aspen-Snowmass in 2012. He recounted that story on The Storm last year:
More Aspen
SUN VALLEY
Stats
* Bald Mountain: 3,400 vertical feet | 2,054 skiable acres | 200 inches average annual snowfall
* Dollar Mountain: 628 vertical feet
Topics
Last seasonâs massive Challenger/Flying Squirrel lift updates; a Seattle Ridge lift update; World Cup Finals inbound; and Mountain Collective logistics between Bald and Dollar mountains.
More Sun Valley
SNOWBASIN
Stats: 3,015 vertical feet | 3,000 skiable acres | 300 inches average annual snowfall
Topics
The Olympics return to Utah and Snowbasin; how Snowbasinâs 2034 Olympic slate could differ from 2002; ski the downhill; how the DeMoisy six-pack changed the mountain; a lift upgrade for Becker; Porcupine on deck; and explaining the holdup on RFID.
More Snowbasin
SUN PEAKS
Stats: 2,894 vertical feet | 4,270 skiable acres | 237 inches average annual snowfall
Topics
The second-largest ski area in Canada; the new West Bowl quad; snow quality at the summit; and Ikon and Mountain Collective impact on the resort.
The old versus new West Bowl lifts
More Sun Peaks
GRAND TARGHEE
Stats: 2,270 vertical feet | 2,602 skiable acres | 500 inches average annual snowfall
Topics
Maintaining that Targhee vibe in spite of change; the meaning of Mountain Collective; and combining your MC trip with other badass powder dumps.
More Grand Targhee
SUGAR BOWL
Stats: 1,500 vertical feet | 1,650 skiable acres | 500 inches average annual snowfall
Topics
Big-time parks incoming; how those parks will differ from the ones at Boreal and Northstar; and reaction to Homewood closing.
More Sugar Bowl
BROMONT
Stats: 1,175 vertical feet | 450 skiable acres | 210 inches average annual snowfall
Topics
Why this low-rise eastern bump was good enough for the Mountain Collective; grooming three times per day; the richness of Eastern Townships skiing; and where to stay for a Bromont trip.
SKI BIG 3
Stats
* Banff Sunshine: 3,514 vertical feet | 3,358 skiable acres | 360 inches average annual snowfall
* Lake Louise: 3,250 vertical feet | 4,200 skiable acres | 179 inches average annual snowfall
Sunshine
Lake Louise
Topics
The new Super Angel Express sixer at Sunshine; the all-new Pipestone Express infill six-pack at Lake Louise; how Mountain Collective access is different from Ikon access at Lake Louise and Sunshine; why Norquay isnât part of Mountain Collective; and the long season at all three ski areas.
SUNSHINE
Stats & map: see above
Topics
Sunshineâs novel access route; why the mountain replaced Angel; the calculus behind installing a six-person chair; and growing up at Sunshine.
NISEKO UNITED
Stats: 3,438 vertical feet | 2,889 skiable acres | 590 inches average annual snowfall
Topics
How the various Niseko ski areas combine for one experience; so.much.snow; the best way to reach Niseko; car or no car?; getting your lift ticket; and where to stay.
VALLE NEVADO
Stats: 2,658 vertical feet | 2,400 skiable acres | 240 inches average annual snowfall
Topics
An excellent winter in Chile; heli-skiing; buying the giant La Parva ski area, right next door; âour plan is to make it one of the biggest ski resorts in the worldâ; and why Mountain Capital Partners maintains its Ikon Pass and Mountain Collective partnerships even though the company has its own pass.
More Valle/La Parva
JACKSON HOLE
Stats: 4,139 vertical feet | 2,500 skiable acres | 459 inches average annual snowfall
Topics
The Sublette lift upgrade; why the new lift has fewer chairs; comparisons to the recent Thunder lift upgrade; venturing beyond the tram; and managing the skier experience in the Ikon/Mountain Collective era.
More Jackson Hole
What I got wrong
* I said that Wilbere would be Snowbirdâs sixth quad. Wilbere will be Snowbirdâs seventh quad, and first fixed-grip quad.
* I said Snowbird got â900-some inchesâ during the 2022-23 ski season. The final tally was 838 inches, according to Snowbirdâs website.
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 79/100 in 2024, and number 579 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019.
Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe -
This podcast hit paid subscribersâ inboxes on Nov. 23. It dropped for free subscribers on Nov. 30. To receive future episodes as soon as theyâre live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:
What is this?
Every autumn, ski associations and most of the large pass coalitions host media events in New York City. They do this because a) NYC is the media capital of the world; b) the city is a lot of fun; and, c) sometimes mountain folks like something different too, just like us city folks (meaning me), like to get to the mountains as much as possible. But I spend all winter traveling the country in search of ski areas of all sizes and varieties. This is the one time of year skiing comes to me. And itâs pretty cool.
One of the associations that consistently hosts an NYC event is Ski Utah. This year, they set up at the Arlo Soho, a chic Manhattan hotel. Longtime President Nathan Rafferty asked if I would be interested in setting up an interview station, talking to resort reps, and stringing them together into a podcast. It was a terrific idea, so here you go.
Who
* Nathan Rafferty, President of Ski Utah
* Sara Huey, Senior Manager of Communications at Park City Mountain Resort
* Sarah Sherman, Communications Manager at Snowbird
* Nick Como, VP of Marketing at Sundance
* Rosie OâGrady, President and Innkeeper of Alta Lodge
* Jessica Turner, PR Manager for Go Heber Valley
* Taylor Hartman, Director of Marketing and Communications at Visit Ogden
* Brooks Rowe, Brand Manager at Snowbasin
* Riley Elliott, Communications Specialist at Deer Valley
* Andria Huskinson, Communications and PR Manager at Solitude
* Anna Loughridge, PR Manager for Visit Utah
* Courtney Ryan, Communications Manager for Visit Park City
* Ryan Mack, VP of Communications for Visit Salt Lake
Recorded on
October 3, 2024
About Ski Utah
Most large ski states have a statewide trade group that represents its ski areasâ interests. One of the best of these is Ski Utah, which is armed with a large staff, a generous budget, and some pretty good freaking skiing to promote (Buckskin, Utah Olympic Park, and Wasatch Peaks Ranch are not members of Ski Utah):
What we talked about
SKI UTAH
Topics
Why NYC; the Olympics return to Utah; why the state is such a great place to host the games (besides, you know, the awesome skiing); where we could potentially see future ski area development in Utah; Pow Mowâs shift toward public-private hybrid; Deer Valleyâs expansion and ongoing snowboard ban; and the proposed LCC Gondola â âLittle Cottonwood Canyon is not a great place for rubber-wheeled vehicles.â
On Utah skier visits and population growth over time
On chairlifts planned in Utah over the next three years
Utah is on a chairlift-building binge, with the majority slated for Deer Valleyâs massive expansion (11) and Powder Mountain (4 this year; 1 in 2025). But Snowbird (Wilbere quad), Park City (Sunrise Gondola), and Snowbasin (Becker high-speed quad) are also scheduled to install new machines this year or next. The private Wasatch Peaks Ranch will also add two lifts (a gondola and a high-speed quad) this year. And Sundance is likely to install what resort officials refer to as the âFlathead liftâ some time within the next two years. The best place to track scheduled lift installations is Lift Blogâs new lifts databases for 2024, 2025, and 2026.
On expansion potential at Brian Head and Nordic Valley
Utahâs two largest expansion opportunities are at Brian Head and Nordic Valley, both operated by Mountain Capital Partners. Hereâs Brian Head today:
The masterplan could blow out the borders - the existing ski area is in the lower-right-hand corner:
And hereâs Nordic Valley:
And the masterplan, which could supersize the ski area to 3,000-ish acres. The small green blob represents part of the existing ski area, though this plan predates the six-pack installation in 2020:
PARK CITY MOUNTAIN RESORT
Stats: 3,226 vertical feet | 7,300 skiable acres | 355 inches average annual snowfall
Topics
Snowmaking upgrades; the forthcoming Sunrise Gondola on the Canyons side; why this gondola didnât face the opposition that Park Cityâs last lift upgrades did; Olympic buzz in Park City; and which events PCMR could host in the 2034 Olympics.
On the Great Lift Shutdown of 2022
Long story short: Vail tried to upgrade two lifts in Park City a couple of years ago. Locals got mad. The lifts went to Whistler. Hereâs the longer version:
More Park City Mountain Resort
SNOWBIRD
Stats: 3,240 vertical feet | 2,500 skiable acres | 500 inches average annual snowfall
Topics
The new Wilbere lift; why Snowbird shifted the chairlift line; the upside of abandoning the old liftline; riding on top of the new tram; and more LCC gondola talk.
On the new Wilbere lift alignment
Hereâs where the new Wilbere lift sits (right) in comparison to the old lift (left):
On inter-lodge
If you happen to be at the top of Little Cottonwood Canyon when avalanche danger spikes, you may be subject to something called âinter-lodge.â Which means you stay in whatever building youâre in, with no option to leave. Itâs scary and thrilling all at once.
Inter-lodge can last anywhere from under an hour to several days.
On the LCC gondola and phase-in plan
Another long story short: UDOT wants to build a gondola up Little Cottonwood Canyon. A lot of people would prefer to spend four hours driving seven miles to the ski areas. Hereâs a summary of UDOTâs chosen configuration:
As multiple lawsuits seeking to shut the project down work through the courts, UDOT has outlined a phased traffic-mitigation approach:
More Snowbird
SUNDANCE
Stats: 2,150 vertical feet | 450 skiable acres | 300 inches average annual snowfall
Topics
The importance of NYC to the wider skiing world; how the Wildwood terrain helped evolve Sundance; Epkon refugees headed south; parking improvements; options for the coming Flathead terrain expansion; and potential lift switcheroos.
More Sundance
Sundanceâs new owners have been rapidly modernizing this once-dusty ski area, replacing most of the lifts, expanding terrain, and adding parking. I talked through the grand arc of these changes with the mountainâs GM, Chad Linebaugh, a couple of years ago:
ALTA LODGE
Alta stats: 3,240 vertical feet | 2,500 skiable acres | 500 inches average annual snowfall
Topics
65 years of Levitt family ownership; Altaâs five lodges; inter-lodge; how Alta has kept its old-school spirit even as itâs modernized; and an upcoming womenâs ski event.
On Altaâs lift evolution
It wasnât so long ago that Alta was known for its pokey lift fleet. As recently as the late â90s, the mountain was a chutes-and-ladders powder playground:
Bit by bit, Alta consolidated and updated its antique lift fleet, beginning with the Sugarloaf high-speed quad in 2001. The two-stage Collins high-speed quad arrived three years later, replacing the legacy Collins double and Germania triple lines. The Supreme high-speed quad similarly displaced the old Supreme triple and Cecret double in 2017, and the Sunnyside sixer replaced the Albion double and Sunnyside high-speed triple in 2022. As of 2024, the only clunker left, aside from the short hotel lifts and the long transfer tow, is the Wildcat double.
GO HEBER VALLEY
Topics
Why Heber Valley makes sense as a place to crash on a ski trip; walkable sections of Heber; ease of access to Deer Valley; and elevation.
VISIT OGDEN
Considering âuntamed and untouchedâ Ogden as ski town; âitâs like skiing in 2005â; Pow Mow, Snowbasin; accessing the mountains from Ogden; Pow Mowâs partial privatization; art on the mountain; and Nordic Valley as localsâ bump.
On Powder Mountain size claims
Pow Mow has long claimed 8,000-ish acres of terrain, which would make it the largest ski area in the United States. I typically only count lift-served skiable acreage, however, bringing the mountain down to a more average-for-the-Wasatch 3,000-ish acres. A new lift in Wolf Canyon next year will add another 900 lift-served acres (shaded with stripes on the right-hand side below).
On Nordic Valleyâs fire and the broken Apollo lift
Last December, Nordic Valleyâs Apollo chairlift, a 1970 Hall double, fell over dead, isolating the mountainâs glorious expansion from the base area. The next month, a fire chewed up the baselodge, a historic haybarn left over from the propertyâs ranching days. Owner MCP renovated the chairlift over the summer, but Nordic will operate out of âtemporary structures,â GM Pascal Begin told KSL.com in June, until they can build a new baselodge, which could be 2026 or â27.
SNOWBASIN
Stats: 3,015 vertical feet | 3,000 skiable acres | 300 inches average annual snowfall
Topics
Breaking down the coming Becker lift upgrade; why Becker before Porcupine; last yearâs DeMoisy six-pack installation; where is everyone?; where to ski at Snowbasin; the 2034 Olympics plan; when will on-mountain lodging arrive?; and RFID.
More Snowbasin
DEER VALLEY
Stats: 3,040 vertical feet | 2,342 skiable acres | 300 inches average annual snowfall
Topics
Massive expansion; avoiding Park City; and snowmaking in the Wasatch Back.
On Expanded Excellence
Deer Valleyâs expansion plans are insane. Hereâs a summary:
More Deer Valley
SOLITUDE
Stats: 2,030 vertical feet | 1,200 skiable acres | 500 inches average annual snowfall
Topics
Alterra; Big versus Little Cottonwood Canyons; and Alta.
More Solitude
VISIT UTAH
Topics
Watching the stateâs population explode; the Olympics; comparing 2002 to 2034; RIP three percent beer; potential infrastructure upgrades to prepare for the Olympics; and SLC airport upgrades.
VISIT PARK CITY
Topics
Park City 101; Main Street; the National Ability Center; mining history everywhere; Deer Valleyâs trail names; Silver to Slopes at Park City; Deer Valleyâs East Village; public transit evolution; Park City Mountain Resort lift drama; paid parking; and why âyou donât need a carâ in Park City.
On Silver to Slopes
The twice-daily guided ski tour of on-mountain mining relics that we discuss on the podcast is free. Details here.
On Park City and Deer Valleyâs shared border
Park City Mountain Resort and Deer Valley share a border, but you are forbidden to cross it, on penalty of death.* Alta and Snowbird share a crossable border, as do Solitude and Brighton. All four have different operators. Iâm not sure why PCMR and Deer Valley canât figure this one out.
*This is not true.^
^Though actually it might be true.
VISIT SALT LAKE
Topics
The easiest ski access in the world; why stay in SLC during a ski trip; walkable downtown; free transit; accessing the ski areas without a car; Olympic buzz; and Olympic events outside of the ski areas.
What I got wrong
* I said that former mayor Michael Bloomberg tried to bring the Olympics to NYC âaround 2005 or 2006.â The cityâs bid was for the 2012 Summer Olympics (ultimately held in London). I also said that local opposition shut down the bid, but I confused that with the proposed stadium on what is now Manhattanâs Hudson Yards development.
* I said you had to drive through Park City to access Deer Valley, but the ski area has long maintained a small parking lot at the base of the Jordanelle Gondola off of US 40.
The robots arenât ready
Everyone keeps telling me that the robots will eat our souls, but every time I try to use them, they botch something that no human would ever miss. In this case, I tried using my editing programâs AI to chop out the dead space and âums,â and proceeded to lose bits of the conversation that in some cases confuse the narrative. So it sounds a little choppy in places. You can blame the robots. Or me for not re-doing the edit once I figured out what was happening.
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Who
Matt Jones, President and Chief Operating Officer of Stratton Mountain, Vermont
Recorded on
November 11, 2024
About Stratton Mountain
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: Alterra Mountain Company, which also owns:
Located in: Winhall, Vermont
Year founded: 1962
Pass affiliations:
* Ikon Pass: Unlimited
* Ikon Base Pass: Unlimited, holiday blackouts
Closest neighboring ski areas: Bromley (:18), Magic (:24), Mount Snow (:28), Hermitage Club (:33), Okemo (:40), Brattleboro (:52)
Base elevation: 1,872 feet
Summit elevation: 3,875 feet
Vertical drop: 2,003 feet
Skiable Acres: 670
Average annual snowfall: 180 inches
Trail count: 99 (40% novice, 35% intermediate, 16% advanced, 9% expert)
Lift count: 14 (1 ten-passenger gondola, 4 six-packs, 1 high-speed quad, 2 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 1 double, 4 carpets â view Lift Blogâs inventory of Strattonâs lift fleet)
Why I interviewed him
I donât know for sure how many skier visits Stratton pulls each winter, or where the ski area ranks among New England mountains for busyness. Historical data suggests a floor around 400,000 visits, likely good for fifth in the region, behind Killington, Okemo, Sunday River, and Mount Snow. But the exact numbers donât really matter, because the number of skiers that ski at Stratton each winter is many manys. And the number of skiers who have strong opinions about Stratton is that exact same number.
Those numbers make Stratton more important than it should be. This is not the best ski area in Vermont. Itâs not even Alterraâs best ski area in Vermont. Jay, MRG, Killington, Smuggs, Stowe, and sister resort Sugarbush are objectively better mountains than Stratton from a terrain point of view (they also get a lot more snow). But this may be one of the most crucial mountains in Alterraâs portfolio, a doorway to the big-money East, a brand name for skiers across the region. Stratton is the only ski area that advertises in the New York City Subway, and has for years.
But Strattonâs been under a bit of stress. The lift system is aging. The gondola is terrible. Stratton was one of those ski areas that was so far ahead of the modernization curve â the mountain had four six-packs by 2001 â that itâs now in the position of having to update all of that expensive stuff all at once. And as meaningful updates have lagged, Strattonâs biggest New England competitors are running superlifts up the incline at a historic pace, while Alterra lobs hundreds of millions at its western megaresorts. Locals feel shafted, picketing an absentee landlord that they view as negligent. Meanwhile, the crowds pile up, as unlimited Ikon Pass access has holstered the mountain in hundreds of thousands of skiersâ wintertime battle belts.
If that all sounds a little dramatic, it only reflects the messages in my inbox. I think Alterra has been ccâd on at least some of those emails, because the company is tossing $20 million at Stratton this season, a sum that Jones tells us is just the beginning of massive long-term investment meant to reinforce the mountainâs self-image as a destination on its own.
What we talked about
Strattonâs $20 million offseason; Act 250 masterplanning versus U.S. Forest Service masterplanning; huge snowmaking upgrades and aspirations; what $8 million gets you in employee housing these days; big upgrades for the Ursa and American Express six-packs; a case for rebuilding lifts rather than doing a tear-down and replace; a Tamarack lift upgrade; when Alterraâs investment firehose could shift east; leaving Tahoe for Vermont; what can be done about that gondola?; the Kidderbrook lift; parking; RFID; Ikon Pass access levels; and $200 to ski Stratton.
Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview
How pissed do you think the Punisher was when Disney announced that Ant Man would be the 12th installment in Marvelâs cinematic universe? I imagine him seated in his lair, polishing his grenades. âF*****g Ant Man?â He throws a grenade into one of his armored Jeeps, which disintegrates in a supernova of steel parts, tires, and smoke. âAnt Man. Are you f*****g serious with this? I waited through eleven movies. Eleven. Iron Man got three. Thor and Captain f*****g America got two apiece. The Hulk. Two Avengers movies. Something called âGuardians of the Galaxy,â about a raccoon and a talking tree that save the goddamn universe or some s**t. And it was my turn, Man. My. Turn. Do these idiots not know that I had three individual comic lines published concurrently in the 1990s? Do they not know that Iâm ranked as the ninth-greatest Marvel superhero of all time on this nerd list? Do you know where Ant Man is ranked on that list? Huh? Well, Iâll tell you: number 131, behind Rocket Raccoon, U-Go Girl, and Spider Man 2099, whatever the hell any of those are.â The vigilante then loads his rocket launcher and several machine guns into a second armored Jeep, and sets off in search of jaywalkers to murder.
Anyway I imagine thatâs how Stratton felt as it watched the rest of Alterraâs cinematic universe release one blockbuster after another. âOh, OK, so Steamboat not only gets a second gondola, but they get a 600-acre terrain expansion served by their eighth high-speed quad? And it wasnât enough to connect the two sides of Palisades Tahoe with a gondola, but you threw in a brand-new six-pack? And theyâre tripling the size of Deer Valley. Tripling. 3,700 acres of new terrain and 16 new lifts and a new base village to go with it. Thatâs equal to five-and-a-half Strattons. And Winter Park gets a new six-pack, and Big Bear gets a new six-pack, and Mammoth gets two. Do you have any idea how much these things cost? And I canât even get a gondola that can withstand wind gusts over three miles per hour? Even goddamn Snowshoe â Snowshoe â got a new lift before I did. I didnât even think West Virginia was actually a real place. I swear if these f*****s announce a new June Mountain out-of-base lift before I get my bling, things are gonna get Epic around here.â
Well, itâs finally Strattonâs turn, with $20 million in upgrades inbound. Alterra wasnât exactly mining the depths of localsâ dreams to decide where to deploy the cash â snowmaking, employee housing, lift overhauls â and a gondola replacement isnât coming anytime soon, but theyâre pretty smart investments when you dig into them. Which we do.
Questions I wish Iâd asked
Among the items that I would have liked to have discussed given more time: the Appalachian Trailâs path across the top of Stratton Mountain, Stratton as birthplace of modern snowboarding, and the Stratton Mountain School.
What I got wrong
* I said that Epic Pass access had remained mostly unchanged for the past decade, which is not quite right. When Vail first added Stowe to the Epic Local Pass for the 2017-18 season, they slotted the resort into the bucket of 10 days shared with Vail, Beaver Creek, and Whistler. At some point, Stowe received its own basket of 10 days, apart from the western resorts.
* I said that Sunday Riverâs Jordan eight-pack was wind-resistant âbecause of the weight.â While that is one factor, the liftâs ability to run in high winds relies on a more complex set of anti-sway technology, none of which I really understand, but that Sunday River GM Brian Heon explained on The Storm earlier this year:
Why you should ski Stratton
A silent skiing demarcation line runs roughly along US 4 through Vermont. Every ski area along or above this route â Killington, Pico, Sugarbush, Mad River Glen, Stowe, Smuggs â lets trails bump up, maintains large glade networks, and generally provides you with balanced, diverse terrain. Everything below that line â Okemo, Bromley, Mount Snow â generally donât do any of these things, or offer them sporadically, and in the most shrunken form possible. There are some exceptions on both sides. Saskadena Six, a bump just north of US 4, operates more like the Southies. Magic, in the south, better mirrors the MRG/Sugarbush model. And then thereâs Stratton.
Good luck finding bumps at Stratton. Maybe youâll stumble onto the remains of a short competition course here or there, but, generally, this is a groom-it-all-every-day kind of ski area. Which would typically make it a token stop on my annual rounds. But Stratton has one great strength that has long made it a quasi-home mountain for me: glades.
The glade network is expansive and well-maintained. The lines are interesting and, in places, challenging. You wouldnât know this from the trailmap, which portrays the tree-skiing areas as little islands lodged onto Strattonâs hulk. But there are lots of them, and they are plenty long. On a typical pow day, Iâll park at Sun Bowl and ski all the glades from Test Pilot over to West Pilot and back. It takes all day and I barely touch a groomer.
And the glades are open more often than youâd think. While northern Vermont is the undisputed New England snow king, with everything from Killington north counting 250-plus inches in an average winter, the so-called Golden Triangle of Stratton, Bromley, and Magic sits in a nice little micro-snow-pocket. And Stratton, the skyscraping tallest peak in that region of the state, devours a whole bunch (180 inches on average) to fill in those glades.
And if you are Groomer Greg, youâre in luck: Stratton has 99 of them. And the grooming is excellent. Just start early, because they get scraped off by the NYC hordes who camp out there every weekend. The obsessive grooming does make this a good family spot, and the long green trail from the top down to the base is one of the best long beginner runs anywhere.
Podcast Notes
On Act 250
This is the 20th Vermont-focused Storm Skiing Podcast, and I think weâve referenced Act 250 in all of them. If youâre unfamiliar with this law, it is, according to the official state website:
âŠVermontâs land use and development law, enacted in 1970 at a time when Vermont was undergoing significant development pressure. The law provides a public, quasi-judicial process for reviewing and managing the environmental, social and fiscal consequences of major subdivisions and developments in Vermont. It assures that larger developments complement Vermontâs unique landscape, economy and community needs. One of the strengths of Act 250 is the access it provides to neighbors and other interested parties to participate in the development review process. Applicants often work with neighbors, municipalities, state agencies and other interested groups to address concerns raised by a proposed development, resolving issues and mitigating impacts before a permit application is filed.
On Strattonâs masterplan
Stratton is currently updating its masterplan. It will retain some elements of this 2013 version. Some elements of this â most notably a new Snow Bowl lift in 2018 â have been completed:
One curious element of this masterplan is the proposed lift up the Kidderbrook trail â around 2007, Stratton removed a relatively new (installed 1989) Poma fixed-grip quad from that location. Here it is on the far left-hand side of the 2005 trailmap:
On Strattonâs ownership history
Strattonâs history mirrors that of many large New England ski areas: independent founders run the ski area for decades; founders fall into financial peril and need private equity/banking rescue; bank sells to a giant out-of-state conglomerate; which then sells to another giant out-of-state conglomerate; which eventually turns into something else. In Strattonâs case, Robert Wright/Frank Snyder -> Moore and Munger -> Japanese company Victoria USA -> Intrawest -> Alterra swallows the carcass of Intrawest. You can read all about it on New England Ski History.
Here was Intrawestâs roster, if youâre curious:
On Alterraâs building binge
Since its 2018 founding, Alterra has invested aggressively in its properties: a 2.4-mile-long, $65 million gondola connecting Alpine Meadows to the Olympic side of Palisades Tahoe; $200 million in the massive Mahogany Ridge expansion and a three-mile-long gondola at Steamboat; and an untold fortune on Deer Valleyâs transformation into what will be the fourth-largest ski area in the United States. Plus new lifts all over the place, new snowmaking all over the place, new lodges all over the place. Well, all over the place except for at Stratton, until now.
On Boyne and Vailâs investments in New England
Amplifying Stratton Nationâs pain is the fact that Alterraâs two big New England competitors â Vail Resorts and Boyne Resorts â have built a combined 16 new lifts in the region over the past five years, including eight-place chairs at Loon and Sunday River (Boyne), and six-packs at Stowe, Okemo, and Mount Snow (Vail). Theyâve also replaced highly problematic legacy chairs at Attitash (Vail) and Pleasant Mountain (Boyne). Boyne has also expanded terrain at Loon, Sunday River, and, most notably â by 400 acres â Sugarloaf. And itâs worth noting that independents Waterville Valley and Killington have also dropped new sixers in recent years (Killington will build another next year). Meanwhile, Alterraâs first chairlift just landed this summer, at Sugarbush, which is getting a fixed-grip quad to replace the Heavenâs Gate triple.
On gondola wind holds
Just in case you want to blame windholds on some nefarious corporate meddling, hereâs a video I took of Kirkwoodâs Cornice Express spinning in 50-mile-per-hour winds when Jones was running the resort last year. Every lift has its own distinct profile that determines how it manages wind.
On shifting Ikon Pass access
When Alterra launched the Ikon Pass in 2018, the company limited Base Pass holders to five days at Stratton, with holiday blackouts. Ahead of the 2020-21 season, the company updated Base Pass access to unlimited days with those same holiday blackouts. Alterra and its partners have made several such changes in Ikonâs seven years. Iâve made this nifty chart that tracks them all (if you missed the memo, Solitude just upgraded Ikon Base pass access to eliminate holiday blackouts):
On historic Stratton lift ticket prices
Again, New England Ski History has done a nice job documenting Strattonâs year-to-year peak lift ticket rates:
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Who
Fred Seymour, General Manager of Giants Ridge, Minnesota
Recorded on
October 28, 2024
About Giants Ridge
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board, a State of Minnesota economic development agency
Located in: Biwabik, Minnesota
Year founded: 1958/59
Closest neighboring ski areas: Mt. Itasca (1:14), Cloquet Ski Club (1:11), Chester Bowl (1:13), Spirit Mountain (1:18), Mont du Lac (1:27)
Base elevation: 1,472 feet
Summit elevation: 1,972 feet
Vertical drop: 500 feet
Skiable Acres: 202
Average annual snowfall: 62 inches
Trail count: 35 (33% beginners, 50% âconfident skiersâ; 17% expert)
Lift count: 7 (1 high-speed quad, 1 fixed-grip quad, 1 triple, 2 doubles, 2 carpets â view Lift Blogâs inventory of Giants Ridgeâs lift fleet)
Why I interviewed him
Sometimes a thing surprises me. Like I think New York City is a giant honking mess and then I walk 60 blocks through Manhattan and say âactually I can see this.â Or I decide that I hate country music because itâs lame in my adolescent rock-and-roll world, but once it goes mainstream Iâm like okay actually this is catchy. Or I think I hate cottage cheese until I try it around age 19 and I realize itâs my favorite thing ever.
All of these things surprised me because I assumed they were something different from what they actually were. And so, in the same way, Giants Ridge surprised me. I did not expect to dislike the place, but I did not expect to be blown away by it, either. I drove up thinking Iâd have a nice little downhill rush and drove away thinking that if all ski areas were like this ski area there would be a lot more skiers in the world.
I could, here, repeat all the things I recently wrote about Crystal, another model Midwest ski area. But I wrote plenty on Giants Ridgeâs many virtues below, and thereâs a lot more in the podcast. For now, Iâll just say that this is as solid a ski operation as youâll find anywhere, and one thatâs worth learning more about.
What we talked about
Rope splicing day for one of Giants Ridgeâs classic lifts; a massive snowmaking upgrade; when all the water comes out of the sky after winterâs done; the slowest Midwest ski season on record; how Giants Ridge skied into April in spite of the warm winter; learning to ski with an assist from Sears (the store); skiing Colorado before I-70; the amazing Hyland Hills, Minnesota; why Seymour didnât go all Colorad-Bro on Midwest skiing â âskiing is special in different placesâ; some founderâs history of the high-speed ropetow; where Giants Ridge will install its first new high-speed ropetow; the virtues of high-speed tows; Hidden Valley, Missouri and working for Peak Resorts; reaction to Vail purchasing Peak Resorts in 2019; the government agency that owns Giants Ridge; the story of the ski areaâs founding and purpose; how and why the ski area is so well-funded; how the ski area funded its latest giant capital project; where Giants Ridge envisions planting a second detachable chairlift; potential for far greater lodging capacity; expansion potential; where to hunt glades at Giants Ridge; the mountainâs trail-naming theme; why the ski areaâs grooming is so good; why Giants Ridge offers fourth-graders unlimited access on the Minnesota Ski Areas Association Passport, rather than the standard two days; and why Giants Ridge left the Indy Pass after just one year.
Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview
Lazy non-ski journalists often pull out some version of this stat to prove that lift-served skiing is a dying industry: America once had more than 700 ski areas, but that number has plummeted to fewer than 500, according to the NSAA (and 505 according to The Storm Skiing Journal). The culprit, they immediately conclude, is climate change, because what else could it possibly be?
The truth is less sinister. Most of these lost ski areas were killed by the same thing that ended the horse and buggy and the landline and the butter churn: capitalism. The simpler story of ski area shrinkage is this: a post-World War II building boom flooded the market with ski areas, many of which were built in questionable locations (like Georgia and Arkansas). As some ski areas modernized, especially with snowmaking, their competitors that failed to do so, um, failed. That great weed-out reached its height from the mid-70s to the mid-90s. The number of active U.S. ski areas has remained more or less stable for the past 20 years.
I fear, however, that we are on the edge of the next great weed-out. If the last one targeted ski areas that failed to invest in snowmaking, this next one will bullseye ski areas that fail to invest in technology. Consumers live in their Pet Rectangles. Ski areas need to meet them there or they may as well not exist. Swipe, tap, bink is the dance of modern commerce. Cash-only, on-site only â the default for centuries â now just annoys people.
Technology does not just mean computer stuff, however. It also means energy-efficient, automated snowmaking to cut down on utilities and labor. It means grooming your hill like Sun Valley even if you are not in fact Sun Valley. It means modern (not necessarily high-speed) chairlifts with safety bars. And in some cases it means rediscovering old technology that can be re-applied in a modern context â high-speed ropetows, for example, are dirt cheap, move more skiers per hour than a high-speed eight-person chairlift, and are the perfect complement to terrain parks and the skiers who want to lap them 100 times in an afternoon.
Unfortunately, a lot of that technology is very expensive. The majority of ski areas are themselves worth less than the cost of a brand-new high-speed quad. Those Riblets and Halls are holding together for now, but they wonât last forever. So what to do?
I donât know, and Giants Ridge is, Iâll admit, a curious example to use here. The ski area benefits from enormous state-sponsored subsidies. But through this arrangement, Giants Ridge acts as a best-case-scenario case study in how a small ski area can fortify itself against a technological revolution, a changing climate, and a social media-saturated consumer base in search of something novel and fun. Not all small ski areas will be able to do all of the things that Giants Ridge does, but most of them can achieve some version of some of them. Third-party companies like Entabeni and White Peaks can tug small ski areas into the digital sphere. A modern chairlift doesnât have to mean a new chairlift. The one state subsidy that private ski areas have occasionally been able to access is one to purchase energy-efficient snowguns. Inexpensive high-speed ropetows (Giants Ridge is installing its first this year), should be serving almost every terrain park in the country.
The Midwest suffered its worst winter on record last ski season. Many ski areas shut down in February or early March. Had a skier been plucked from the Rockies and dropped onto the summit of Giants Ridge, however, they would not have suspected this regional catastrophe. I visited on March 10 â wall-to-wall snow, every trail open, not even a bare patch. The ski area stayed open until April 7. The future holds plenty of challenges for skiing. Giants Ridge is working on answers.
Questions I wish Iâd asked
The largess on display at Giants Ridge introduces the same set of issues that frustrate private ski area owners in New York, who have to compete directly against three ski areas (Whiteface, Gore, Belleayre) that have benefitted from hundreds of millions of dollars in state investment. The dynamic is a bit different here, as the money funnels to Giants Ridge via mining companies who support the ski area en lieu of paying certain taxes. But the result is the same: ski areas that have to pay for capital upgrades out of their profits versus a ski area that gets capital upgrades essentially for free. The massive snowmaking system that Giants Ridge is installing this year is, in Seymourâs words, âon the taxpayer.â
While we discuss these funding mechanisms and the history of Giants Ridge as economic-development machine, we donât explore how this impacts private, competing ski areas. I avoided this for the same reason that I wouldnât ask a football coach why the taxpayers ought to have funded his teamâs $500 million stadium â that wasnât his choice, and he just works there. His job, like the job of any ski area manager, is to do the best he can with the resources heâs given.
But Iâll acknowledge that this setup grates on a lot of private operators in the region. Thatâs a fight worth talking about, but with the appropriate officials, and in a different context, and with the time it takes to tell the story properly.
What I got wrong
* When discussing the rope-splicing project underway at Giants Ridge on the day of our conversation, I referred to âthe chair youâre replacing the âropetowâ on.â I meant the âhaulrope.â
* I said I visited Giants Ridge, âin mid-February, or maybe it was early March.â I skied Giants Ridge on March 10 of this year.
Why you should ski Giants Ridge
This is one of the nicest ski areas Iâve ever skied. Full stop. No asterisk. The slopes are immaculate. The lodge is spotless. The pitch is excellent. The runs are varied. Giants Ridge has a high-speed quad and RFID gates and a paved parking lot. If you need a helper, there are helpers everywhere. Gorgeous views from the top. That may just sound like any other modern ski area, but this is a) the Midwest, where âmodernâ means the lifts donât run on diesel fuel, and, b) rural rural Minnesota, which is like regular rural Minnesota, but a lot farther away. To drive out of the range of cell service into the far reaches of a forest within which Google Maps labels human settlements of which no traces can be found, and at the end of this road find not just a ski area but a ski area that looks like it was built yesterday is a rather remarkable experience.
Iâm not saying cancel your trip to Whistler. I am saying that this is worth driving to if youâre anywhere within driving range (which for a Midwesterner is roughly 90 hours). Giants Ridge is not sprawling like Lutsen or thrilling like Bohemia or snowy like Powderhorn. There are no Granite Peak six-packs or Highlands bubble lifts. But for what it has and what it is, Giants Ridge is as close to a perfect ski area as any Iâve ever encountered.
It's not a perfect ski area, of course. None of them are. If I have to nitpick: the hill still runs three old chairlifts with no safety bars; it lacks even a token mogul run; there are no marked glades; loading the Helsinki chair can require an annoying uphill shuffle. And there are signs all over the place referring to something called âgolf.â All fixable issues, none considerations for skipping the joint. If you want skiing featuring the best technology of 1984, the Midwest still has plenty of that. If you prefer to ski in 2024, check this place out.
Podcast Notes
On the Midwestâs weakest winter on record
I ran through this on the article accompanying the recent Norway Mountain podcast, but itâs worth reposting what I wrote here:
Skier visits were down in every region of the United States last winter, but they all but collapsed in the Midwest, with a 26.7 percent plunge, according to the annual Kottke Demographic Report. Michigan alone was down nearly a half million skier visits. Check out these numbers:
For comparison, overall skier numbers dropped just six percent in the Northeast, and five percent in the Rockies.
On Hyland Hills
Hyland Hills is a 180-vertical-foot volcano, packing 180,000 skier visits into its tiny footprint every winter. The ski area is a model of why small municipal hills should be oriented around terrain parks.
The bump is perhaps the birthplace of the high-speed ropetow, which can move up to 4,000 (some estimates claim as many as 8,200), skiers per hour. You can see the tows working in this video:
Midwest Skiers tells the full high-speed ropetow story:
On the Three Rivers Park District
The Three Rivers Park District manages 27,000 acres of parkland across the seven-county Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area, including Hyland Hills and Elm Creek, an even smaller, beginner-focused hill on the north side of town:
On Hidden Valley, Missouri
An odd fact of American skiing is that Missouri is home to two ski areas, both of which are owned by Vail Resorts. Seymour worked for a time at Hidden Valley, seated a few miles outside of St. Louis. The stats: 320 vertical feet on 65 acres, with 19 inches of snowfall in an average winter.
On Peak Resorts
Hidden Valley was the OG resort in Peak Resortsâ once-sprawling portfolio. After growing to 19 ski areas scattered from New Hampshire to Missouri, Peak sold its entire operation to Vail Resorts in 2019.
On expansion potential into the Superior National Forest
Seymour explains that thereâs ânot a whole lot of potentialâ to expand the ski area into the Superior National Forest, which Giants Ridge backs into. That may sound odd to folks in the West, where the majority of ski areas operate on Forest Service leases. Thereâs little precedent for such arrangements in the Midwest, however, and Lutsenâs plans to expand into the same forest slammed into the Pinecone Police last year. As I wrote in my podcast episode with Lutsen GM Jim Vick:
Over the summer, Lutsen withdrew the plan, and Superior National Forest Supervisor Thomas Hall recommended a âno actionâ alternative, citing âirreversible damageâ to mature white cedar and sugar maple stands, displacement of backcountry skiers, negative impacts to the 300-mile-long Superior hiking trail, objections from Native American communities, and water-quality concerns. Lutsen had until Oct. 10 to file an objection to the decision, and they did.
The expansion would have developed 500-ish acres. Superior National Forest covers 3.9 million acres. Million. With an âM.â
On the Minnesota state 4th-grade ski passport
Like many state ski associations, the Minnesota Ski Areas Association offers fourth-graders a $39.99 âpassportâ good for at least two lift tickets to each of the stateâs ski areas. While many ski areas stick to the two-day offering and black out many peak periods, Afton Alps, Chester Bowl, Detroit Mountain, Giants Ridge, Mount Ski Gull, and Wild Mountain offer unlimited redemptions (Ski Gull blacks out the Christmas holidays).
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Who
Dustin Lyman, President and General Manager of Copper Mountain, Colorado
Recorded on
October 21, 2024
About Copper Mountain
Owned by: Powdr, which also owns:
Located in: Frisco, Colorado
Year founded: 1972
Pass affiliations: Ikon Pass and Ikon Base Pass: unlimited access, no blackouts
Closest neighboring ski areas: Frisco Adventure Park (:15), Keystone (:19), Vail Mountain (:21), Breckenridge (:23), Loveland (:23), Arapahoe Basin (:30), Beaver Creek (:32), Ski Cooper (:34) â travel times vary considerably depending upon time of day, time of year, and apocalypse level on I-70
Base elevation: 9,738 feet
Summit elevation: 12,441 feet
Vertical drop: 2,703 feet
Skiable Acres: 2,538
Average annual snowfall: 305 inches
Trail count: 178
Lift count: 25 (1 6/8-passenger chondola, 3 high-speed six-packs, 3 high-speed quads, 5 triples, 4 doubles, 2 platters, 1 T-bar, 6 carpets â view Lift Blogâs inventory of Copper Mountainâs lift fleet)
Why I interviewed him
Imagine if, rather than finding an appropriate mountain upon which to build ski area, we just identified the best possible location for a ski area and built a mountain there. You would want to find a reliable snow pocket, preferably at elevation. You would want a location close to a major highway, with no access road drama. There should be a large population base nearby. Then you would build a hill with a great variety of green, blue, and black runs, and bunch them together in little ability-based kingdoms. The ski area would be big but not too big. It would be tall but not too tall. It would snow often, but rarely too much. It would challenge you without trying to kill you. You may include some pastoral touches, like tree islands to break up the interstate-wide groomers. Youâd want to groom a lot but not too much. Youâd want some hella good terrain parks. Youâd want to end up with something pretty similar to Copper Mountain.
Because Copper is what we end up with when we lop off all the tryhard marketing meth that attempts to make ski resorts more than what they are. Copper is not Gladiator on skis, you against the notorious Batshit Chutes. But Copper is not one big groomer, either. Copper is not fur shawls in the hotel lobby. But Copper is also not duct tape around a pants leg. Copper does not serve passenger pigeon eggs in its mountaintop eateries. But Copper is also not frozen burritos and a plastic sleeve of powdered donuts. Copper is not angry, or haughty, or cloying, or righteous, or overwrought. Copper does not call you âSir.â Copper fixes your refrigerator without having to come back with another part. Copper, quietly and without a lot of hassle, just works.
What we talked about
The new Timberline six-pack chairlift; why Copper upgraded T-Rex before the mountainâs much older lifts; how much better a 2024 detachable lift is from a 1994 detachable lift; why Copper didnât sell the lift to another ski area; that one summer that Copper installed two gargantuan frontside lifts; why new chairlift installations are so challenging; Leitner-Poma; the challenges of installing mid-mountain versus base-area lifts; installing American Eagle, American Flyer, and Three Bears; how Copper quietly offered skiing for 12 consecutive months from October 2023 to September 2024, despite an official May closing date; whether year-round skiing will become an official Copper activity; why Copper builds its halfpipe entirely from snow each season rather than constructing an earthwork base; The Athleteâs Mountain; why Copper continues to build bigger and more advanced terrain parks even as many big mountains back out of the space; Woodward parks; how many crew members and snowcats Copper devotes to maintaining its enormous terrain park network; why the Union Creek high-speed quad became Woodward Express; why Copper doesnât compete with Keystone and A-Basin as first-to-open for the skiing public; Copperâs World Cup ambitions; how to get a job running a ski resort when youâve never worked at a ski resort; why itâs so important for a ski area manager to ski every day; counting ski days; mad love for ski areas; potential candidates for lift replacements; how to get a ski trail named after you; retrofitting old lifts with safety bars; expansion opportunities; $99 Thursday lift tickets and whether that program could expand to additional weekdays; Copperâs amazing season pass benefit; why Copper Mountain access is unlimited with no blackouts on the Ikon and Ikon Base passes; and why Copper continues to sell its own season pass that doesnât cost much less than the Ikon Base Pass.
Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview
Copper is a curious bloke. Copper sits within 30 minutes of four Vail Resorts, one of the toughest draws in North American skiing. So Copper is an unlimited-access member of Alterraâs Ikon Pass even though Copper is not owned by Alterra. Copper also sells its own season pass that only costs $60 less than an Ikon Base Pass. Copper sells $99 lift tickets on Thursdays, but $264 walk-up lift tickets if you show up on certain Wednesdays or Fridays. Copper sits atop I-70, observing the antlines of inbound vehicles and saying âIâm flattered.â Copper greets its guests with a halfpipe that could launch an intercontinental ballistic missile. Copper just offered year-round skiing and didnât bother bragging about it until the whole thing was over. Copper lets you cut the line. Copper has quietly become some ninjitsu November training ground for the global ski-race community. Copper is parked in the middle of the most important ski county in the most important ski state in America.
If anything is happening in skiing, Copper is dealing with it: expensive lift tickets, cheap season passes, easy access that may be a little too easy, ferocious competition in every direction. Because of its naturally divided terrain, ordered black to green as you sweep west across the mountain, Copper is often referred to as a nearly perfect ski area. And it is. But because of where it is and what itâs chosen to become, the resort also happens to be the perfect thermometer for taking skiingâs temperature. How we doing up there past 10,000? Whatâs your story? What makes you special? Why should I drive past Keystone to ski here? Why shouldnât I just keep driving 20 minutes to Vail instead? Why, Iâm asking, do you even exist?
What I got wrong
I said that certain old chairlifts had not yet been retrofit with safety bars; Lyman clarified that Copper had in fact updated the carriers on all of those lifts.
I also said that Lyman was the first former NFL player that Iâd hosted on the pod. Heâs actually at least the third: Vail East Region VP and COO Tim Baker played for the Chargers, Panthers, and Steelers; and three-time guest Rusty Gregory played on the Chiefsâ practice squad.
Why you should ski Copper Mountain
Here are some things I remember about skiing Copper Mountain in 1995:
* Riding a high-speed quad. Probably American Flyer but I canât say for sure. Four of us on the lift. My buddy Andy and two middle-aged fellows of indeterminant provenance. âMy cat sleeps 22 hours a day and can catch a bird out of the air,â one says to the other. And Iâve never been able to stop thinking about the truth of that and how itâs possible.
* My room at the Foxpine Inn came with an underground parking space, which I declined to use until a New Yearâs snowstorm buried my poor little four-cylinder Ford Probe beneath an igloo. Rather than clean the car off, I leaned my head out the window and drove down the ramp to my parking spot below. Then all the snow melted. Easiest snow removal job ever.
* Near the terminus of the long-gone B lift, a double chair displaced by Super Bee, a lightly treed knoll stood above the trails. I watched, awestruck, as a skier materialized from the forest depths above and trenched the newfallen snow and blasted down the fall-line with superhero poise and ease.
* My first attempted powder turn, three minutes later, ended in a yardsale. This was in the flat just off of the lift unload. That ended up being a very long run.
Modern Copper is more polished, better-lifted, more expensive, better known than the version I encountered on my first western ski trip 29 years ago. Thereâs more ski terrain and a little pedestrian base village. Iâm not certain that two eighteen-year-olds could still afford a room at the base of the chairlifts (Foxpine rates are not listed online). But what struck me on a return visit last winter, as much as the six-packs and the terrain parks and the base village that used to be a parking lot was how much Copper, despite all that investment, had retained a coziness that still makes it feel more like a ski area than a ski resort.
Some of this humility, I suppose, is anchored in the mountainâs profile. Copper doesnât have Breckâs big exposed peaks or Vailâs endless bowls or Beaver Creekâs Grey Poupon trim. Copper doesnât give you cookies or promise you The Experience of a Lifetime. The mountainâs core lifts are fast and modern, but Copper runs nearly as many fixed-grip chairs (9) as Vail (3), Beaver Creek (3), and Keystone (4), combined (10).
But it works. Rather wonderfully, really. Go see for yourself.
Podcast Notes
On Copperâs masterplan
Copperâs most recent comprehensive Forest Service masterplan dates to 2011. A 2015 addendum focused mostly on summer activities. Hereâs an overview of what the 2011 plan imagined:
A 2021 addendum added a new trail, which we discuss on the pod:
On Copper Mountainâs halfpipe
I mean this thing is just so damn extra:
On Summit County ski areas by size
The four Summit County ski areas compare favorably to one another, stats-wise. Iâm going to go ahead and throw Loveland in there as an honorary member, since itâs like two feet from Summit County:
On the Slopes App
Being Stats Tracker Bro, I am a loyalist to the Slopes app, which recently updated their static map with a zoomable version:
Slopes is also handy in real-time, when I want to ensure that Iâve hit every trail on a mountain. Hereâs my map from Giants Ridge, Minnesota last winter (the big unskied trails in the middle were closed for racing):
On Silverton
While I would expect Elvis to rise from the dead before we see another Breckenridge-style megaresort built in Colorado, developers have had some luck creating low-impact, low-infrastructure ski areas. The now-defunct Bluebird Backcountry, near Steamboat, operated with no lifts on private land. Silverton, in the stateâs southwest corner, operates out of a small parcel of private land and runs one double chair, which in turn opens up huge swaths of land under permit from the Bureau of Land Management. Any future big-mountain western developments will likely hinge on some version of a Silverton/Bluebird model. Hereâs Silvertonâs trailmap:
And hereâs Bluebirdâs:
On expansions
Colorado ski areas have had great success expanding existing operations in recent years. Since 2012, nine large expansions have added more than 3,000 acres of high-quality terrain to the stateâs ski resorts. Thatâs the equivalent of opening another Breckenridge, without all the outrage.
On Snowbirdâs Freeloader Pass
Copperâs adult season pass includes a free season pass for one child up to 15 years old. Sister resort Snowbird one-upped them last year by rolling out the same benefit and raising the age to 18. Lyman and I discuss Snowbirdâs move, and whether it will inspire a similar deal at Copper.
On Copperâs unlimited Ikon Pass access
One of the strangest alliances in all of Megapass-dom is Copperâs status as a stowaway unlimited Ikon Pass partner. Alterra has transformed the Ikon Pass into a season pass for all of its owned mountains except for Deer Valley and Arapahoe Basin, but itâs also a de facto season pass for Powdr-owned Copper and Eldora. To confuse things further, Copper sells its own season pass that isnât much less expensive than an Ikon Base Pass. We discuss this whole dynamic on the pod, but hereâs where Alterra-owned mountains sit with Ikon Pass access, with Eldora and Copper slotted in for comparison:
On Powdr owning Eldora âat least for nowâ
Park City-based Powdr has owned Eldora, just under two hours northeast of Copper, since 2016. In August, the company announced that it had sold its Killington and Pico resorts to a group of local Vermont investors, and would soon put Eldora â along with Mt. Bachelor, Oregon and Silver Star, B.C. â up for sale as well.
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 74/100 in 2024, and number 574 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019.
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This podcast hit paid subscribersâ inboxes on Nov. 10. It dropped for free subscribers on Nov. 17. To receive future episodes as soon as theyâre 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
John Melcher, CEO of Crystal Mountain, Michigan
Recorded on
October 14, 2024
About Crystal Mountain, Michigan
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: The Petritz Family
Located in: Thompsonville, Michigan
Year founded: 1956
Pass affiliations: Indy Pass & Indy+ Pass: 2 days, no blackouts
Reciprocal partners: 1 day each at Caberfae and Mount Bohemia, with blackouts
Closest neighboring ski areas: Caberfae (:37), Hickory Hills (:45), Mt. Holiday (:50), Missaukee Mountain (:52), Homestead (:51)
Base elevation: 757 feet
Summit elevation: 1,132 feet
Vertical drop: 375 feet
Skiable Acres: 103
Average annual snowfall: 132 inches
Trail count: 59 (30% black diamond, 48% blue square, 22% green circle) + 7 glades + 3 terrain parks
Lift count: 8 (1 high-speed quad, 3 fixed-grip quads, 2 triples, 2 carpets â view Lift Blogâs inventory of Crystal Mountainâs lift fleet)
Why I interviewed him
The biggest knock on Midwest skiing is that the top of the hill is not far enough away from the bottom of the hill, and this is generally true. Two or three or four hundred vertical feet is not a lot of vertical feet. It is enough to hold little pockets of trees or jumps or a racerâs pitch that begs for a speed check. But no matter how fun the terrain, too soon the lift maze materializes and itâs another slow roll up to more skiing.
A little imagination helps here. Six turns in a snowy Michigan glade feel the same as six turns in Blue Sky Basin trees (minus the physiological altitude strain). And the skillset transfers well. I learned to ski bumps on a 200-vertical-foot section of Boyne Mountain and now I can ski bumps anywhere. But losing yourself in a 3,000-vertical-foot Rocky Mountain descent is not the same thing as saying âMan I can almost see itâ as you try to will a 300-footer into something grander. We all know this.
Not everything about the lift-served skiing experience shrinks down with the same effect, is my point here. With the skiing itself, scale matters. But the descent is only part of the whole thing. The lift maze matters, and the uphill matters, and the parking matters, and the location of the lift ticket pick-up matters, and the availability of 4 p.m. beers matters, and the arrangement of base lodge seating matters. And when all of these things are knotted together into a ski day that is more fun than stressful, it is because you are in the presence of one thing that scales down in any context: excellence.
The National Ski Areas Association splits ski areas into four size categories, calculated by âvertical transportation feet per hour.â In other words: how many skiers your lifts can push uphill in an ideal hour. This is a useful metric for many reasons, but Iâd like to see a more qualitative measurement, one based not just on size, but on consistent quality of experience.
I spend most of my winter bouncing across America, swinging into ski areas of all sizes and varieties. Excellence lives in unexpected places. One-hundred-and-sixty-vertical-foot Boyce Park, Pennsylvania blows thick slabs of snow with modern snowguns, grooms it well, and seems to double-staff every post with local teenagers. Elk Mountain, on the other side of Pennsylvania, generally stitches together a better experience than its better-known neighbors just south, in the Poconos. Royal Mountain, a 550-vertical-foot, weekends-only localsâ bump in New Yorkâs southern Adirondacks, alternates statuesque grooming with zippy glades across its skis-bigger-than-it-is face.
These ski areas, by combining great order and reliable conditions with few people, are delightful. But perhaps more impressive are ski areas that deliver consistent excellence while processing enormous numbers of visitors. Here you have places like Pats Peak, New Hampshire; Wachusett, Massachusetts; Holiday Valley, New York; and Mt. Rose, Nevada. These are not major tourist destinations, but they run with the welcoming efficiency of an Aspen or a Deer Valley. A good and ordered ski day, almost no matter what.
Crystal Mountain, Michigan is one of these ski areas. Everything about the ski experience is well-considered. Expansion, upgrades, and refinement of existing facilities have been constant for decades. The village blends with the hill. The lifts are where the lifts should be. The trail network is interesting and thoughtfully designed. The parks are great. The grooming is great. The glades are plentiful. The prices are reasonable. And, most important of all, despite being busy at all times, Crystal Mountain is tamed by order. This is excellence, that thing that all ski areas should aspire to, whatever else they lack.
What we talked about
Whatâs new for Crystal skiers in 2024; snowmaking; where Crystal draws its snowmaking water; Peekân Peak, New York; why Crystal is a good business in addition to being a good ski area; four-seasons business; skiing as Mother; what makes a great team (and why Crystal has one); switching into skiing mid-career; making trails versus clearcutting the ski slope; ownership decided via coinflip; Midwest destination skiingâs biggest obstacle; will Crystal remain independent?; room to expand; additional glading opportunities; why many of Crystalâs trails are named after people; considering the future of Crystalâs lift fleet; why Crystal built a high-speed lift that rises just 314 vertical feet; why the ghost of the Cheers lift lives on as part of Crystalâs trailmap; where Crystal has considered adding a lift to the existing terrain; that confusing trailmap; a walkable village; changes inbound at the base of Loki; pushing back parking; more carpets for beginners; Crystalâs myriad bargain lift ticket options; the Indy Pass; why Crystal dropped Indy Pass blackouts; the Mt. Bohemia-Crystal relationship; Caberfae; Indyâs ultimatum to drop Ski Cooper reciprocals or leave the pass; and why Crystal joined Freedom Pass last year and left for this coming winter.
Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview
The Stormâs mission is to serve all of American lift-served skiing. That means telling the stories of ski areas in every part of the country. I do this not because I have to, but because I want to. This newsletter would probably work just fine if it focused always and only on the great ski centers of the American West. That is, after all, the only part of U.S. ski country that outsiders travel to and that locals never leave. The biggest and best skiing is out there, at the top of our country, high and snowy and with a low chance of rain.
But I live in the East and I grew up in the Midwest. Both regions are cluttered with ski areas. Hundreds of them, each distinct, each its own little frozen kingdom, each singular in atmosphere and arrangement and orientation toward the world. Most remain family-owned, and retain the improvisational quirk synonymous with such a designation. But more interesting is that these ski areas remain tethered to their past in a way that many of the larger western destination resorts, run by executives cycled in via corporate development programs, never will be again.
I want to tell these stories. Iâm aware that my national audience has a limited tolerance for profiles of Midwest ski centers they will never ski. But they seem to be okay with about a half-dozen per year, which is about enough to remind the wider ski community that this relatively flat but cold and hardy region is home to one of the worldâs great ski cultures. The Midwest is where night-skiing rules, where blue-collar families still ski, where hunting clothes double as ski clothes, where everything is a little less serious and a little more fun.
Thereâs no particular big development or project that threw the spotlight on Crystal here. Iâve been trying to arrange this interview for years. Because this is a very good ski area and a very well-run ski area, even if it is not a very large ski area in the grand landscape of American ski areas. It is one of the finest ski areas in the Midwest, and one worthy of our attention.
What I got wrong
* I said that âI forget if itâs seven or nine different tree areasâ at Crystal. The number of glades labeled on the trailmap is seven.
* I said Crystal had been part of Indy Pass âsince the beginning or near the beginning.â The mountain joined the pass in May, 2020, ahead of the 2020-21 ski season, Indyâs second.
Why you should ski Crystal Mountain, Michigan
Crystalâs Loki pod rises above the parking lots, 255 vertical feet, eight trails down, steep on the front, gentler toward the back. These days I would ski each of the eight in turn and proceed next door to the Clipper lift. But I was 17 and just learning to ski and to me at the time that meant bombing as fast as possible without falling. For this, Wipeout was the perfect trail, a sweeping crescent through the trees, empty even on that busy day, steep but only for a bit, just enough to ignite a long sweeping tuck back to the chairs. We lapped this run for hours. Speed and adrenaline through the falling snow. The cold didnât bother us and the dozens of alternate runs striped over successive hills didnât tempt us. Weâd found what weâd wanted and what weâd wanted is this.
I packed that day in the mental suitcase that holds my ski memories and Iâve carried it around for decades. Skiing bigger mountains hasnât tarnished it. Becoming a better skier hasnât diminished it. Tuck and bomb, all day long. Something so pure and simple in it, a thing that bundles those Loki laps together with Cottonwoods pow days and Colorado bump towers and California trees. Indelible. Part of what I think of when I think about skiing and part of who I am when I consider myself as a skier.
I donât know for sure what Crystal Mountain, Michigan can give you. I canât promise transformation of the impressionable teenage sort. I canât promise big terrain or long runs because they donât have them. Iâm not going to pitch Crystal as a singular pilgrimage of the sort that draws western Brobots to Bohemia. This is a regional ski area that is most attractive to skiers who live in Michigan or the northern portions of the states to its immediate south. Read: it is a ski area that the vast majority of you will never experience. And the best endorsement I can make of Crystal is that I think thatâs too bad, because I think you would really like it, even if I canât exactly explain why.
Podcast Notes
On Peekân Peak
The most difficult American ski area name to spell is not âSummit at Snoqualmieâ or âGranlibakkenâ or âPomerelleâ or âSipapuâ or âSkaneatelesâ or âBottineau Winter Parkâ or âTrollhaugen,â all of which I memorized during the early days of The Storm. The most counterintuitive, frustrating, and frankly stupid ski area name in all the land is âPeekân Peak,â New York, which repeats the same word spelled two different ways for no goddamn reason. And then thereâs the apostrophe-ân,â lodged in there like a bar of soap crammed between the tomato and lettuce in your hamburger, a thing that cannot possibly justify or explain its existence. Five years into this project, I canât get the ski areaâs name correct without looking it up.
Anyway, it is a nice little ski area, broad and varied and well-lifted, lodged in a consistent little Lake Erie snowbelt. They donât show glades on the trailmap, but most of the trees are skiable when filled in. The bump claims 400 vertical feet; my Slopes app says 347. Either way, this little Indy Pass hill, where Melcher learned to ski, is a nice little stopover:
On Crystalâs masterplan
Crystalâs masterplan leaves room for potential future ski development â we discuss where, specifically, in the podcast. The ski area is kind of lost in the sprawl of Crystalâs masterplan, so Iâve added the lift names for context:
On Sugar Loaf, Michigan
Michigan, like most ski states, has lost more ski areas than itâs kept. The most frustrating of these losses was Sugar Loaf, a 500-footer parked in the northwest corner of the Lower Peninsula, outside of Traverse City. Sunday afternoon lift tickets were like $12 and my high school buddies and I would drive up through snowstorms and ski until the lifts closed and drive home. The place went bust around 2000, but the lifts were still standing until some moron ripped them out five years ago with fantasies of rebuilding the place as some sort of boutique âexperience.â Then he ran away and now itâs just a lonely, empty hill.
On Michigan being âlittered with lost ski areasâ
Michigan is home to the second-most active or semi-active ski areas of any state in the country, with 44 (New York checks in around 50). Still, the Midwest Lost Ski Areas project counts more than 200 lost ski areas in the state.
On Crystalâs backside evolution and confusing trailmap
By building pod after pod off the backside of the mountain, Crystal has nearly doubled in size since I first skied there in the mid-90s. The Ridge appeared around 2000; North Face came online in 2003; and Backyard materialized in 2015. These additions give Crystal a sprawling, adventurous feel on par with The Highlands or Nubâs Nob. But the trailmap, while aesthetically pleasant, is one of the worst Iâve seen, as itâs very unclear how the three pods link to one another, and in turn to the front of the mountain:
This is a fixable problem, as I outlined in my last podcast, with Vista Map founder Gary Milliken, who untangled similarly confusing trailmaps for Mt. Spokane, Washington and Lookout Pass, Idaho over the past couple of years. Hereâs Lookout Passâ old and new maps side-by-side:
And hereâs Mt. Spokane:
Crystal â if youâd like an introduction to Gary, Iâm happy to make that happen.
On resort consolidation in the Midwest
The Midwest has not been sheltered from the consolidation wave thatâs rolled over much of the West and New England over the past few decades. Of the regionâs 123 active ski areas, 25 are owned by entities that operate two or more ski areas: Vail Resorts owns 10; Wisconsin Resorts, five; Midwest Family Ski Resorts, four; the Schmitz Brothers, three; Boyne, two; and the Perfect Family, which also owns Timberline in West Virginia, one. But 98 of the regionâs ski areas remain independently owned and operated. While a couple dozen of those are tiny municipal ropetow bumps with inconsistent operations and little or no snowmaking, most of those that run at least one chairlift are family-owned ski areas that, last winter notwithstanding, are doing very well on a formula of reasonable prices + a focus on kids and night-skiing. Hereâs the present landscape of Midwest skiing:
On the consolidation of Crystalâs lift fleet
Crystal once ran five frontside chairlifts:
Today, the mountain has consolidated that to just three, despite a substantively unchanged trail footprint. While Crystal stopped running the Cheers lift around 2016, its shadowy outline still appears along the Cheers To Lou run.
Crystal is way out ahead of the rest of the Midwest, which built most of its ski areas in the age of cheap fixed-grip lifts and never bothered to replace them. The king of these dinosaurs may be Afton Alps, Minnesota, with 15 Hall chairlifts (it was, until recently, 17) lined up along the ridge, the newest of them dating to 1979:
Itâs kind of funny that Vail owns this anachronism, which, despite its comic-book layout, is actually a really fun little ski area.
On Crystalâs many discounted lift ticket options
While Crystal is as high-end as any resort youâll find in Michigan, the ski area still offers numerous loveably kitschy discounts of the sort that every ski area in the country once sold:
Browse these and more on their website.
On Indy Passâ dispute with Ski Cooper
Last year, Indy Pass accused Ski Cooper of building a reciprocal resort network that turned the ski areaâs discount season pass into a de facto national ski pass that competed directly with Indy. Indy then told its partners to ditch Cooper or leave Indy. Crystal was one of those resorts, and found a workaround by joining the Freedom Pass, which maintained the three Cooper days for their passholders without technically violating Indy Passâ mandate. You can read the full story here:
On Bohemia and Caberfae
Crystal left Freedom Pass for this winter, but has retained reciprocal deals with Mount Bohemia and Caberfae. Iâve hosted leaders of both ski areas on the podcast, and they are two of my favorite episodes:
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Who
Gary Milliken, Founder of Vista Map
Recorded on
June 13, 2024
About Vista Map
No matter which region of the country you ski in, youâve probably seen one of Millikenâs maps (A list captures current clients; B list is past clients):
Hereâs a little overview video:
Why I interviewed him
The robots are coming. Or so I hear. They will wash our windows and they will build our cars and they will write our novels. They will do all of our mundane things and then they will do all of our special things. And once they can do all of the things that we can do, they will pack us into shipping containers and launch us into space. And we will look back at earth and say dang it we done fucked up.
That future is either five minutes or 500 years away, depending upon whom you ask. But itâs coming and thereâs nothing we can do to stop it. OK. But am I the only one still living in a 2024 in which it takes the assistance of at least three humans to complete a purchase at a CVS self-checkout? The little Google hub talky-thingys scattered around our apartment are often stumped by such seering questions as âHey Google, whatâs the weather today?â I believe 19th century wrenchers invented the internal combustion engine and sent it into mass production faster than I can synch our wireless Nintendo Switch controllers with the console. If the robots ever come for me, Iâm going to ask them to list the last five presidents of Ohio and watch them short-circuit in a shower of sparks and blown-off sprockets.
We overestimate machines and underestimate humans. No, our brains canât multiply a sequence of 900-digit numbers in one millisecond or memorize every social security number in America or individually coordinate an army of 10,000 alien assassins to battle a videogame hero. But over a few billion years, weâve evolved some attributes that are harder to digitally mimic than Bro.AI seems to appreciate. Consider the ridiculous combination of balance, muscle memory, strength, coordination, spatial awareness, and flexibility that it takes to, like, unpack a bag of groceries. If youâve ever torn an ACL or a rotator cuff, you can appreciate how strong and capable the human body is when it functions normally. Now multiply all of those factors exponentially as you consider how they fuse so that we can navigate a bicycle through a busy city street or build a house or play basketball. Or, for our purposes, load and unload a chairlift, ski down a mogul field, or stomp a FlipDoodle 470 off of the Raging Rhinoceros run at Mt. Sickness.
To which you might say, âwho cares? Robots donât ski. They donât need to and they never will. And once we install the First Robot Congress, all of us will be free to ski all of the time.â But letâs bring this back to something very simple that it seems as though the robots could do tomorrow, but that they may not be able to do ever: create a ski area trailmap.
This may sound absurd. After all, mountains donât move around a lot. Itâs easy enough to scan one and replicate it in the digital sphere. Everything is then arranged just exactly as it is in reality. With such facsimiles already possible, ski area operators can send these trailmap artists directly into the recycling bin, right?
Probably not anytime soon. And thatâs because what robots donât understand about trailmaps is how humans process mountains. In a ski area trailmap, we donât need something that exactly recreates the mountain. Rather, we need a guide that converts a landscape thatâs hilly and windy and multi-faced and complicated into something as neat and ordered as stocked aisles in a grocery store. We need a three-dimensional environment to make sense in a two-dimensional rendering. And we need it all to work together at a scale shrunken down hundreds of times and stowed in our pocket. Then we need that scale further distorted to make very big things such as ravines and intermountain traverses to look small and to make very small things like complex, multi-trailed beginner areas look big. We need someone to pull the mountain into pieces that work together how we think they work together, understanding that fidelity to our senses matters more than precisely mirroring reality.
But robots donât get this because robots donât ski. What data, inherent to the human condition, do we upload to these machines to help them understand how we process the high-speed descent of a snow-covered mountain and how to translate that to a piece of paper? How do we make them understand that this east-facing mountain must appear to face north so that skiers understand how to navigate to and from the adjacent peak, rather than worrying about how tectonic plates arranged the monoliths 60 million years ago? How do the robots know that this lift spanning a two-mile valley between separate ski centers must be represented abstractly, rather than at scale, lest it shrinks the ski trails to incomprehensible minuteness?
Itâs worth noting that Milliken has been a leader in digitizing ski trailmaps, and that this grounding in the digital is the entire basis of his business model, which flexes to the seasonal and year-to-year realities of ever-changing ski areas far more fluidly than laboriously hand-painted maps. But Millikenâs trailmaps are not simply topographic maps painted cartoon colors. They are, rather, cartography-inspired art, reality translated to the abstract without losing its anchors in the physical. In recreating sprawling, multi-faced ski centers such as Palisades Tahoe or Vail Mountain, Milliken, a skier and a human who exists in a complex and nuanced world, is applying the strange blend of talents gifted him by eons of natural selection to do something that no robot will be able to replicate anytime soon.
What we talked about
How late is too late in the year to ask for a new trailmap; time management when you juggle a hundred projects at once; how to start a trailmap company; life before the internet; the virtues of skiing at an organized ski center; the process of creating a trailmap; whether you need to ski a ski area to create a trailmap; why Vista Map produces digital, rather than painted, trailmaps; the toughest thing to get right on a trailmap; how the Vista Map system simplifies map updates; converting a winter map to summer; why trailmaps are rarely drawn to real-life scale; creating and modifying trailmaps for complex, sprawling mountains like Vail, Stowe, and Killington; updating Loonâs map for the recent South Peak expansion; making big things look small at Mt. Shasta; Mt. Rose and when insets are necessary; why small ski areas âdeserve a great mapâ; and thoughts on the slow death of the paper trailmap.
Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview
Technology keeps eating things that I love. Some of them â CDs, books, event tickets, magazines, newspapers â are easier to accept. Others â childhood, attention spans, the mainstreaming of fringe viewpoints, a non-apocalyptic social and political environment, not having to listen to videos blaring from passengersâ phones on the subway â are harder. We arrived in the future a while ago, and Iâm still trying to decide if I like it.
My pattern with new technology is often the same: scoff, resist, accept, forget. But not always. I am still resisting e-bikes. I tried but did not like wireless headphones and smartwatches (too much crap to charge and/or lose). I still read most books in print and subscribe to whatever quality print magazines remain. I grasp these things while knowing that, like manual transmissions or VCRs, they may eventually become so difficult to find that Iâll just give up.
Iâm not at the giving-up point yet on paper trailmaps, which the Digital Bro-O-Sphere insists are relics that belong on our Pet Rectangles. But mountains are big. Phones are small. Right there we have a disconnect. Also paper doesnât stop working in the cold. Also I like the souvenir. Also we are living through the digital equivalent of the Industrial Revolution and sometimes itâs hard to leave the chickens behind and go to work in the sweatshop for five cents a week. I kind of liked life on the farm and Iâm not ready to let go of all of it all at once.
There are some positives. In general I do not like owning things and not acquiring them to begin with is a good way to have fewer of them. But thereâs something cool about picking up a trailmap of Nubâs Nob that I snagged at the ticket window 30 years ago and saying âBrah weâve seen some things.â
Ski areas will always need trailmaps. But the larger ones seem to be accelerating away from offering those maps on sizes larger than a smartphone and smaller than a mountaintop billboard. And I think thatâs a drag, even as I slowly accept it.
Podcast Notes
On Highmount Ski Center
Milliken grew up skiing in the Catskills, including at the now-dormant Highmount Ski Center:
As it happens, the abandoned ski area is directly adjacent to Belleayre, the state-owned ski area that has long planned to incorporate Highmount into its trail network (the Highmount trails are on the far right, in white):
Hereâs Belleayreâs current trailmap for context - the Highmount expansion would sit far lookerâs right:
That one is not a Vista Map product, but Milliken designed Belleayreâs pre-gondola-era maps:
Belleayre has long declined to provide a timeline for its Highmount expansion, which hinged on the now-stalled development of a privately run resort at the base of the old ski area. Given the amazing amount of money that the state has been funneling into its trio of ski areas (Whiteface and Gore are the other two), however, I wouldnât be shocked to see Belleayre move ahead with the project at some point.
On the Unicode consortium
This sounds like some sort of wacky conspiracy theory, but there really is a global overlord dictating a standard set of emoji on our phones. You can learn more about it here.
Maps we talked about
Lookout Pass, Idaho/Montana
Even before Lookout Pass opened a large expansion in 2022, the multi-sided ski areaâs map was rather confusing:
For a couple of years, Lookout resorted to an overhead map to display the expansion in relation to the legacy mountain:
That overhead map is accurate, but humans donât process hills as flats very well. So, for 2024-25, Milliken produced a more traditional trailmap, which finally shows the entire mountain unified within the context of itself:
Mt. Spokane, Washington
Mt. Spokane long relied on a similarly confusing map to show off its 1,704 acres:
Milliken built a new, more intuitive map last year:
Mt. Rose, Nevada
For some mountains, however, Milliken has opted for multiple angles over a single-view map. Mt. Rose is a good example:
Telluride, Colorado
When Milliken decided to become a door-to-door trailmap salesman, his first stop was Telluride. He came armed with this pencil-drawn sketch:
The mountain ended up being his first client:
Gore Mountain, New York
This was one of Millikenâs first maps created with the Vista Map system, in 1994:
Hereâs how Vista Map has evolved that map today:
Whiteface, New York
One of Millikenâs legacy trailmaps, Whiteface in 1997:
Hereâs how that map had evolved by the time Milliken created the last rendition around 2016:
Sun Valley, Idaho
Sun Valley presented numerous challenges of perspective and scale:
Grand Targhee, Wyoming
Milliken had to design Targheeâs trailmap without the benefit of a site visit:
Vail Mountain, Colorado
Milliken discusses his early trailmaps at Vail Mountain, which he had to manipulate to show the new-ish (at the time) Game Creek Bowl on the frontside:
In recent years, however, Vail asked Milliken to move the bowl into an inset. Hereâs the 2021 frontside map:
Hereâs a video showing the transformation:
Stowe, Vermont
We use Stowe to discuss the the navigational flourishes of a trailmap compared to real-life geography. Hereâs the map:
And hereâs Stowe IRL, which shows a very different orientation:
Mt. Hood Meadows, Oregon
Mt. Hood Meadows also required some imagination. Hereâs Millikenâs trailmap:
Hereâs the real-world overhead view, which looks kind of like a squid that swam through a scoop of vanilla ice cream:
Killington, Vermont
Another mountain that required some reality manipulation was Killington, which, incredibly, Milliken managed to present without insets:
And here is how Killington sits in real life â you could give me a thousand years and I could never make sense of this enough to translate it into a navigable two-dimensional single-view map:
Loon Mountain, New Hampshire
Vista Map has designed Loon Moutnainâs trailmap since around 2019. Hereâs what it looked like in 2021:
For the 2023-24 ski season, Loon added a small expansion to its South Peak area, which Milliken had to work into the existing map:
Mt. Shasta Ski Park, California
Sometimes trailmaps need to wildly distort geographic features and scale to realistically focus on the ski experience. The lifts at Mt. Shasta, for example, rise around 2,000 vertical feet. Itâs an additional 7,500 or so vertical feet to the mountainâs summit, but the trail network occupies more space on the trailmap than the snowcone above it, as the summit is essentially a decoration for the lift-served skiing public.
Oak Mountain, New York
Milliken also does a lot of work for small ski areas. Hereâs 650-vertical-foot Oak Mountain, in New Yorkâs Adirondacks:
Willard Mountain, New York
And little Willard, an 85-acre ski area thatâs also in Upstate New York:
Caberfae Peaks, Michigan
And Caberfae, a 485-footer in Michiganâs Lower Peninsula:
On the New York City Subway map
The New York City subway map makes Manhattan look like the monster of New York City:
That, however, is a product of the fact that nearly every line runs through âthe cityâ as we call it. In reality, Manhattan is the smallest of the five boroughs, at just 22.7 square miles, versus 42.2 for The Bronx, 57.5 for Staten Island, 69.4 for Brooklyn, and 108.7 for Queens.
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Who
Geordie Gillett, Managing Director and General Manager of Grand Targhee, Wyoming
Recorded on
September 30, 2024
About Grand Targhee
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: The Gillett Family
Located in: Alta, Wyoming
Year founded: 1969
Pass affiliations: Mountain Collective: 2 days, no blackouts
Closest neighboring ski areas: Jackson Hole (1:11), Snow King (1:22), Kelly Canyon (1:34) â travel times vary considerably given time of day, time of year, and weather conditions.
Base elevation: 7,650 feet (bottom of Sacajawea Lift)
Summit elevation: 9,862 feet at top of Fredâs Mountain; hike to 9,920 feet on Maryâs Nipple
Vertical drop: 2,212 feet (lift-served); 2,270 feet (hike-to)
Skiable Acres: 2,602 acres
Average annual snowfall: 500 inches
Trail count: 95 (10% beginner, 45% intermediate, 30% advanced, 15% expert)
Lift count: 6 (1 six-pack, 2 high-speed quads, 2 fixed-grip quads, 1 carpet â view Lift Blogâs inventory of Grand Targheeâs lift fleet)
Why I interviewed him
Here are some true facts about Grand Targhee:
* Targhee is the 19th-largest ski area in the United States, with 2,602 lift-served acres.
* That makes Targhee larger than Jackson Hole, Snowbird, Copper, or Sun Valley.
* Targhee is the third-largest U.S. ski area (behind Whitefish and Powder Mountain) that is not a member of the Epic or Ikon passes.
* Targhee is the fourth-largest independently owned and operated ski area in America, behind Whitefish, Powder Mountain, and Alta.
* Targhee is the fifth-largest U.S. ski area outside of Colorado, California, and Utah (following Big Sky, Bachelor, Whitefish, and Schweitzer).
And yet. Who do you know who has skied Grand Targhee who has not skied everywhere? Targhee is not exactly unknown, but itâs a little lost in skiingâs Bermuda Triangle of Jackson Hole, Sun Valley, and Big Sky, a sunken ship loaded with treasure for whoeverâs willing to dive a little deeper.
Most ski resort rankings will plant Alta-Snowbird or Whistler or Aspen or Vail at the top. Understandably so â these are all great ski areas. But I appreciate this take on Targhee from skibum.net, a site that hasnât been updated in a couple of years, but is nonetheless an excellent encyclopedia of U.S. skiing (boldface added by me for emphasis):
You can start easy, then get as wild and remote as you dare. Roughly 20% of the lift-served terrain (Fredâs Mountain) is groomed. The snowcat area (Peaked Mountain) is completely ungroomed, completely powder, totally incredible [Peaked is lift-served as of 2022]. Comparisons to Jackson Hole are inevitable, as GT & JH share the same mountain range. Targhee is on the west side, and receives oodles more snowâŠand therefore more weather. Not all of it good; a local nickname is Grand Foggy. The locals ski Targhee 9 days out of 10, then shift to Jackson Hole when the forecast is less than promising. (Jackson Hole, on the east side, receives less snow and virtually none of the fog). On days when the weather is good, Targhee beats Jackson for snow quality and shorter liftlines. Some claim Targhee wins on scenery as well. Itâs just a much different, less crowded, less commercialized resort, with outstanding skiing. Some will argue the quality of Utah powderâŠand theyâre right, but there are fewer skiers at Targhee, so it stays longer. Some of the runs at Targhee are steep, but not as steep as the couloirs at Jackson Hole. Much more of an intermediate mountain; has a very âopenâ feel on virtually all of the trails. And when the powder is good, there is none better than Grand Targhee. #1 ski area in the USA when the weather is right. Hotshots, golfcondoskiers and young skiers looking for âactionâ (Iâm over 40, so I donât remember exactly what that entails) are just about the only people who wonât call Grand Targhee their all-time favorite. For the pure skier, this resort is number one.
Which may lead you to ask: OK Tough Guy then why did it take you five years to talk about this mountain on your podcast? Well I get that question about once a month, and I donât really have a good answer other than that there are a lot of ski areas and I can only talk about one at a time. But here you go. And from the way this one went, I donât think it will be my last conversation with the good folks at Grand old Targhee.
What we talked about
Continued refinement of the Colter lift and Peaked Mountain expansion; upgrading cats; âwe do put skiing first hereâ; thereâs a reason that finance people âarenât the only ones in the room making decisions for ski areasâ; how the Peaked expansion changed Targhee; the Teton Pass highway collapse; building, and then dismantling, Booth Creek; how ignoring an answering machine message led to the purchase of Targhee; first impressions of Targhee: âHow is this not the most popular ski resort in America?â; imagining Booth Creek in an Epkonic alt reality; Targheeâs commitment to independence; could Targhee ever acquire another mountain?; the insane price that the Gilletts paid for Targhee; the first time you see the Rockies; massive expansion potential; corn; fixed-grip versus detach; Targheeâs high percentage of intermediate terrain and whether that matters; being next-door neighbors with âthe most aspirational brand in skiingâ; the hardest part of expanding a ski area; potential infill lifts; the ski run Gillett would like to eliminate and why; why weâre unlikely to see a lift to the true summit; and why Targhee joined Mountain Collective but hasnât joined the Ikon Pass (and whether the mountain ever would).
Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview
A few things make Targhee extra relevant to our current ski moment:
* Targhee is the only U.S. ski area aside from Sugar Bowl to join the Mountain Collective pass while staying off of Ikon.
* In 2022, Targhee (sort of) quietly opened one of the largest lift-served North American ski expansions in the past decade, the 600-acre Peaked Mountain pod, served by the six-pack Colter lift.
* The majority of large U.S. ski areas positioned on Forest Service land are bashful about their masterplans, which are publicly available documents that most resort officials wish we didnât know about. Thatâs because these plans outline potential future expansions and upgrades that resorts would rather not prematurely acknowledge, lest they piss off the Chipmunk Police. So often when Iâm like âHey tell us about this 500-acre bowl-skiing expansion off the backside,â I get an answer thatâs something like, âwell we look forward to working with our partners at the Forest Service to maybe consider doing that around the year 3000 after we complete our long-term study of mayfly migration routes.â But Geordie is just like, âHell yes we want to blow the resort out in every direction like yesterdayâ (not an exact quote). And I freaking love the energy there.
* Most large Western ski areas fall into one of two categories: big, modern, and busy (Vail, Big Sky, Palisades, Snowbird), or big, somewhat antiquated, and unknown (Discovery, Lost Trail, Silver). But Targhee has split the difference, being big, modern, and lesser-known, that rare oasis that gives you modern infrastructure (like fast lifts), without modern crowds (most of the time). Itâs kind of strange and kind of glorious, and probably too awesome to stay true forever, so I wanted to get there before the Brobot Bus unloaded.
* Even 500-inches-in-an-average-winter Targhee has a small snowmaking system. Isnât that interesting?
What I got wrong
* I said that $20 million âmight buy you a couple houses on the slopes at Jackson Hole.â It kind of depends on how you define âon the slopes,â and whether or not you can live without enough acreage for your private hippo zoo. If not, $24.5 million will get you this (Iâm not positive that this one is zoned for immediate hippo occupation).
* I said that 70 percent of Targheeâs terrain was intermediate; Geordie indicated that that statistic had likely changed with the addition of the Peaked Mountain expansion. Iâm working with Targhee to get updated numbers. [EDIT: Targheeâs updated terrain breakdown is 10% beginner, 45% intermediate, 30% advanced, and 15% expert.)
Why you should ski Grand Targhee
The disconnect between people who write about skiing and what most people actually ski leads to outsized coverage of niche corners of this already niche activity. What percentage of skiers think that skiing uphill is fun? Can accomplish a mid-air backflip? Have ever leapt off a cliff more than four feet high? Commute via helicopter to the summit of their favorite Alaskan powder lines? The answer on all counts is probably a statistically insignificant number. But 99 percent of contemporary ski media focuses on exactly such marginal activities.
In some ways I understand this. Most basketball media devote their attention to the NBA, not the playground knuckleheads at some cracked-concrete, bent-rim Harlem streetball court. It makes sense to look at the best and say wow. No one wants to watch intermediate skiers skiing intermediate terrain. But the magnifying glass hovering over the gnar sometimes clouds consumer choice. An average skier, infected by cliffity-hucking YouTubes and social media Man Bro boasting, thinks they want Corbetâs and KT-22 and The Cirque at Snowbird. Which OK if you zigzag across the fall line yeah you can get down just about anything. But what most skiers need is Grand Targhee, big and approachable, mostly skiable by mostly anyone, with lots of good and light snow and a low chance of descent-by-tomahawk.
Targheeâs stats page puts the mountainâs share of intermediate terrain at 70 percent, likely the highest of any major North American ski area (Northstar, another big-time intermediate-oriented mountain, claims 60 percent blue runs). I suspect this contributes to the resortâs relatively low profile among destination skiers. Broseph Jones and his Brobot buddies examine the statistical breakdown of major resorts and are like âYo cuz we want some Jackson trammage because we roll hard see.â Even though Targhee is bigger and gets more snow (both true) and offers a more realistic experience for the Brosephs.
Thatâs not to say that you shouldnât ski Jackson Hole. Everyone should. But steeps all day are mentally and physically draining. Itâs nice most of the time to not be parkouring down an elevator shaft. So go to Targhee too. And you can whoo-hoo through the deep empty trees and say âdang Brah this is hella rad Brah.â And it is.
Podcast Notes
On the Peaked Mountain expansion
The Peaked Mountain terrain has been marked on Targheeâs trailmap for years, but up until 2022, it was accessible mostly via snowcat:
In 2022, the resort dropped a six-pack back there, better defined the trail network, and brought Peaked into the lift-served terrain package:
On Grand Targheeâs masterplan
Hereâs the overview of Targheeâs Forest Service master development plan. You can see potential expansions below Blackfoot (left in the image below), lookerâs right of Peaked/Colter (upper right), and below Sacajawea (lower right):
Hereâs a better look at the so-called South Bowl proposal, which would add a big terrain pod contiguous with the recent Peaked expansion:
Hereâs the MDPâs inventory of proposed lifts. These things often change, and the âPeaked DC-4â listed below actualized as the Colter high-speed sixer:
Targheeâs snowmaking system is limited, but long-term aspirations show potential snowmaking stretching toward the top of the Dreamcatcher lift:
On opposition to all of this potential expansion
There are groups of people masquerading as environmental commandos who I suspect oppose everything just to oppose it. Like oh a bobcat pooped next to that tree so we need to fence the area off from human activity for the next thousand years. But Targhee sits within a vast and amazing wilderness, the majority of which is and should be protected forever. But humans need space too, and developing a few hundred acres directly adjacent to already-developed ski terrain is the most sustainable and responsible way to do this. Itâs not like Targhee is saying âhey weâre going to build a zipline connecting the resort to the Grand Teton.â But nothing in U.S. America can be achieved without a minimum of 45 lawsuits (itâs in the Constitution), so these histrionic bozos will continue to exist.
On Net Promoter Score and RRC
Iâm going to hurt myself if I try to overexplain this, so Iâll just point toward RRCâs Net Promoter Score overview page and the companyâs blog archive highlighting various reports. RRC sits quietly behind the ski industry but wields tremendous influence, assembling the annual Kotke end-of-season statistical report, which offers the most comprehensive annual overview of the state of U.S. skiing.
On the reason I couldnât go to Grand Targhee last year
So I was all set up to hit Targhee for a day last year and then I woke up in the middle of the night thinking âGee I feel like Iâm gonna die soonâ and so I did not go skiing that day. Hereâs the full story if you are curious how I ended up not dying.
On the Peaked terrain expansion being the hypothetical largest ski area in New Hampshire
Iâll admit that East-West ski area size comparisons are fundamentally flawed. Eastern mountains not named Killington, Smugglersâ Notch, and Sugarloaf tend to measure skiable terrain by acreage of cut trails and maintained glades (Sugarbush, one of the largest ski areas in the East by pure footprint, doesnât even count the latter). Western mountains generally count everything within their boundary. Fair enough â trying to ski most natural-growth eastern woods is like trying to ski down the stands of a packed football stadium. Youâre going to hit something. Western trees tend to be higher altitude, older-growth, less cluttered with undergrowth, and, um, more snow-covered. Meaning itâs not unfair to include even unmarked sectors of the ski area as part of the ski area.
Which is a long way of saying that numbers are hard, and that relying on ski area stats pages for accurate ski area comparisons isnât going to get you into NASAâs astronaut training academy. Hereâs a side-by-side of 464-acre Bretton Woods â New Hampshireâs largest ski area â and Targheeâs 600-acre Peaked Mountain expansion, both at the same scale in Google Maps. Clearly Bretton Woods covers more area, but the majority of those trees are too dense to ski:
And hereâs an inventory of all New Hampshire ski areas, if youâre curious:
On the Teton Pass highway collapse
Yeah so this was wild:
On Booth Creek
Grand Targhee was once part of the Booth Creek ski conglomerate, which now exists only as the overlord for Sierra-at-Tahoe. Hereâs a little history:
On the ski areas at Snoqualmie Pass being âinsaneâ
We talk a bit about the âinsaneâ terrain at Summit at Snoqualmie, a quirky ski resort now owned by Boyne. The mountain was Frankensteined together out of four legacy ski areas, three of which share a ridge and are interconnected. And then thereâs Alpental, marooned across the interstate, much taller and infinitely rowdier than its ho-hum brothers. Alpy, as a brand and as a badass, is criminally unknown outside of its immediate market, despite being on the Ikon Pass since 2018. But, as Gillett notes, it is one of the roughest, toughest mountains going:
On Targheeâs sinkhole
Per Jackson Hole News and Guide in September of last year:
About two weeks ago, a day or so after torrential rain, and a few days after a downhill mountain biking race concluded on the Blondie trail, Targhee ski patrollers noticed that something was amiss. Only feet away from the muddy meander that mountain bikers had zipped down, a mound of earth had disappeared.
In its place, there was a hole of unknown, but concerning, size.
Subsequent investigations â largely, throwing rocks into the hole while the resort waits for more technical tools â indicate that the sinkhole is at least 8 feet wide and about 40 feet deep, if not more. There are layers of ice caking the walls a few feet down, and the abyss is smack dab in the middle of the resortâs prized ski run.
Falling into a sinkhole would be a ridiculous way to go. Like getting crushed by a falling piano or flattened under a steamroller. Imagine your last thought on earth is âBro are you freaking kidding me with this s**t?â
On the overlap between Mountain Collective and Ikon
Mountain Collective and Ikon share a remarkable 26 partner ski areas. Only Targhee, Sugar Bowl, Marmot Basin, Bromont, Le Massif du Charlevoix, and newly added MegĂšve have joined Mountain Collective while holding out on Ikon.
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When we recorded this podcast, Norway Mountainâs adult season pass rates were set at $289. They have since increased by $100, but Hoppe is offering a $100 discount with the code âstormâ through Nov. 1, 2024.
Who
Justin Hoppe, Owner of Norway Mountain, Michigan
Recorded on
September 16, 2024
About Norway Mountain
Owned by: Justin Hoppe
Located in: Norway, Michigan
Year founded: Around 1974, as Norvul ski area; then Vulcan USA; then Briar Mountain; then Mont Brier; and finally Norway Mountain from ~1993 to 2012; then from 2014 to 2017; re-opened 2024
Pass affiliations: Freedom Pass â 3 days each at these ski areas:
Closest neighboring ski areas: Pine Mountain (:22), Keyes Peak (:35), Crystella (:46), Gladstone (:59), Ski Brule (1:04)
Base elevation: 835 feet
Summit elevation: 1,335 feet
Vertical drop: 500 feet
Skiable Acres: 186
Average annual snowfall: 50 inches
Trail count: 15
Lift count: 6 (1 triple, 2 doubles, 3 handle tows)
The map above is what Norway currently displays on its website. Hereâs a 2007 map thatâs substantively the same, but with higher resolution:
View historic Norway Mountain trailmaps on skimap.org.
Why I interviewed him
What a noble act: to resurrect a dead ski area. Iâll acknowledge that a ski area is just a business. But itâs also a (usually) irreplaceable community asset, an organ without which the body can live but does not function quite right. We read about factories closing up and towns dying along with them. This is because the jobs leave, yes, but thereâs an identity piece too. As General Motors pulled out of Saginaw and Flint in the 1980s and â90s, I watched, from a small town nearby, those places lose a part of their essence, their swagger and character. People were proud to have a GM factory in town, to have a GM job with a good wage, to be a piece of a global something that everyone knew about.
Something less profound but similar happens when a ski area shuts down. Iâve written before about Apple Mountain, the 200-vertical-foot bump in Freeland, Michigan where I spent my second-ever day on skis:
[Apple Mountain] has been closed since 2017. Something about the snowmaking system thatâs either too hard or too expensive to fix. That leaves Michiganâs Tri-Cities â Midland, Bay City, and Saginaw, with a total metro population approaching 400,000 â with no functioning ski area. Snow Snake is only about 40 minutes north of Midland, and Mt. Holly is less than an hour south of Saginaw. But Apple Mountain, tucked into the backwoods behind Freeland, sat dead in the middle of the triangle. It was accessible to almost any schoolkid, and, humble as it was, stoked that fire for thousands of what became lifelong skiers.
What skiing has lost without Apple Mountain is impossible to calculate. I would argue that it was one of the more important ski areas anywhere. Winters in mid-Michigan are long, cold, snowy, and dull. People need something to do. But skiing is not an obvious solution: this is the flattest place you can imagine. To have skiing â any skiing â in the region was a joy and a novelty. There was no redundancy, no competing ski center. And so the place was impossibly busy at all times, minting skiers who would go off to start ski newsletters and run huge resorts on the other side of the country.
When the factory closes, the jobs go, and often nothing replaces them. Losing a ski area is similar. The skiers go, and nothing replaces them. The kids just do other things. They never become skiers.
Children of Men, released in 2006, envisions a world 18 years after women have stopped having babies. Humanity lives on, but has collectively lost its soul. Violence and disorder reign. The movie is heralded for its extended single-shot battle scenes, but Children of Menâs most remarkable moment is when a baby, born in the midst of a firefight, momentarily paralyzes the war as her protectors parade her to sanctuary:
Humanity needs babies like winter needs skiers. But we have to keep making more.
Yes, Iâm being hyperbolic about the importance of resurrecting a lost ski area. If youâre new here, that part of My Brandâą. A competing, similar-sized ski center, Pine Mountain, is only 20 minutes from Norway. But thatâs 13 miles, which for a kid may as well be 1,000. Re-opening Norway is going to seed new skiers. Some of them will ski four times and forget about it and some of them will take spring break trips to Colorado when they get to college and a few of them may wrap their lives around it.
And if they donât ever ski? Well, who knows. I almost didnât become a skier. I was 14 when my buddy said âHey letâs take the bus to Mott Mountain after school,â and I said âOK,â and even though I was Very Bad at it, I went again a few weeks later at Apple Mountain. Both of those hills are closed now. If I were growing up in Central Michigan now, would I have become a skier? What would I be if I wasnât one? How awful would that be?
What we talked about
Back from the dead; the West Michigan snowbelt; the power of the ski family; Caberfae; Pandoâs not for sale; when you decide to buy a lost ski area; how lost Norway was almost lost forever; the small business mindset; surprise bills; what a ski area looks like when itâs sat idle for six years; piecing a sold-off snowmaking system back together; Norwayâs very unique lift fleet; glades; the trailmap; Norwayâs new logo; the Wild West of websites; the power of social media; where to even begin when you buy a ski area; the ups and downs of living at your ski area; shifting from renovation to operation; Norwayâs uneven history and why this time is different; is there enough room for Pine Mountain and Norway in such a small market?; why night skiing wonât return on a regular basis this winter; send the school buses; it doesnât snow much but at least it stays cold; can Norway revitalize its legendary ski school?; and why Norway joined the Freedom Pass.
Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview
Hello Mr. Television Network Executive. Thank you for agreeing to hear my pitch. I understand I have 10 minutes with you, which is perfect, because what Iâm proposing will take no fewer than five years, while simultaneously taking 10 years off both our lives. Because my show is called Who Wants to Own a Ski Area?
The show works like this: contestants will navigate a series of logic puzzles, challenges, and obstacle courses. These will act as elimination rounds. We can base everyone at an abandoned ski resort, like in The Last of Us, where they will live while games materialize at random. Some examples:
* Itâs 3 a.m. Everyone is sleeping. Alarms blare. A large structure has caught fire. The water has been cut off, but somehow youâre standing in a knee-deep flood. Your firefighting arsenal consists of a bucket. You call the local volunteer fire department, which promises you they will âbe along whenever Ed gits up here with the gay-rage door keys.â Whoever keeps the building from melting into a pile of ashes wins.
* Itâs state inspection day. All machinery must be in working order. We present each contestant with a pile of sprockets, hoses, wires, clips, and metal parts of varying sizes and thickness. Their instructions are to rebuild this machine. We do not tell them what the machine is supposed to be. The good news is that the instruction manual is sitting right there. The bad news is that itâs written in Polish. The pile is missing approximately seven to 20 percent of the machineâs parts, without which the device may operate, but perhaps not in a way compatible with human life. Whoeverâs put-together machine leads to the fewest deaths advances to the next round.
* The contestants are introduced to Big Jim. Big Jim has worked at the ski area since 1604. He has been through 45 ownership groups, knows everything about the mountain, and everyone on the mountain. Because of this, Big Jim knows you canât fire him lest you stoke a rebellion of labor and/or clientele. And he can tell you which pipes are where without you having to dig up half the mountain. But Big Jim keeps as much from getting done as he actually does. He resists the adoption of âfadsâ such as snowmaking, credit cards, and the internet. The challenge facing contestants is to get Big Jim to send a text message. He asks why the letters are arranged âall stupidâ on the keyboard. The appearance of an emoji causes him to punch the phone several times and heave it into the woods.
* Next we introduce the contestants to Fran and Freddy Filmore from Frankenmuth. The Filmores have been season passholders since the Lincoln Administration. They have nine kids in ski school, each of which has special dietary needs. Their phones are loaded with photos of problems: of liftlines, of dirt patches postholing trails, of an unsmiling parking attendant, of abandoned boot bags occupying cafeteria tables, of skis and snowboards and poles scattered across the snow rather than being placed on the racks that are right there for goodness sake. The Filmores want answers. The Filmores also want you to bring back Stray Cat Wednesdays, in which you could trade a stray cat for a lift ticket. But the Filmores are not actually concerned with solutions. No matter the quickness or efficacy of a remedy, they still âhave concerns.â Surely you have 90 minutes to discuss this. Then the fire alarm goes off.
* Next, the contestents will meet Hella Henry and his boys Donuts, Doznuts, Deeznuts, Jam Box, and 40 Ounce. HH and the Crushnutz Krew, as they call themselves, are among your most loyal customers. Though they are all under the age of 20, it is unclear how any of them could attend school or hold down a job, since they are at your hill for 10 to 12 hours per day. During that time, the crew typically completes three runs. They spend the rest of their time vaping, watching videos on their phones, and sitting six wide just below a blind lip in the terrain park. The first contestant to elicit a response from the Crushnutz Krew that is anything other than âthatâs chillâ wins.
The victor will win their very own ski area, complete with a several-thousand person Friends of [Insert Ski Area Name] group where 98 percent of the posts are complaints about the ski area. The ski center will be functional, but one popped bolt away from catastrophe in four dozen locations. The chairlifts will be made by a company that went out of business in 1912. The groomer will be towed by a yak. The baselodge will accommodate four percent of the skiers who show up on a busy day. The snowmaking âsystemâ draws its water from a birdbath. Oh, and itâs in the middle of nowhere in the middle of winter, and theyâre going to have to find people to work there.
Oh, you love it Mr. Television Network Executive? Thatâs so amazing. Now I can quit my job and just watch the money pile up. What do I do for a living? Well, I run a ski area.
Hoppe won the contest. And I wanted to wish him luck.
What I got wrong
I lumped Ski Brule in with Pine Mountain as ski areas that are near Norway. While only 20-ish minutes separate Pine and Norway, Brule is in fact more than an hour away.
Why you should ski Norway Mountain
You can ski every run on Norway Mountain in one visit. Thereâs something satisfying in that. You can drive off at the end of the day and not feel like you missed anything.
There are hundreds of ski areas in North America like this. Most of them manage, somehow, to stuff the full spectrum of ski experience into an area equal to one corner of one of Vailâs 90 or whatever Legendary Back Bowls. There are easy runs and hard runs. Long runs and short runs. Narrow runs and wide runs. Runs under the lifts and runs twisting through the trees. Some sort of tree-skiing. Some sort of terrain park. A little windlip that isnât supposed to be a cornice but skis like one, 9-year-olds leaping off it one after the next and turning around to watch each other after they land. Sometimes there is powder. Sometimes there is ice. Sometimes the grooming is magnificent. Sometimes the snow really sucks. Over two to four hours and 20 to 30 chairlift rides, you can fully absorb what a ski area is and why it exists.
This is an experience that is more difficult to replicate at our battleship resorts, with 200 runs scribbled over successive peaks like a medieval war map. I ski these resorts differently. Where are the blacks? Where are the trees? Where are the bumps? I go right for them and I donât bother with anything else. And that eats up three or four days even at a known-cruiser like Keystone. In a half-dozen trips into Little Cottonwood Canyon, Iâve skied a top-to-bottom groomer maybe twice. Because skiing groomers at Alta-Snowbird is like ordering pizza at a sushi restaurant. Like why did you even come here?
But even after LCC fluff, when Iâve descended back to the terrestrial realm, I still like skiing the Norway Mountains of the land. Big mountains are wonderful, but they come with big hassle, big crowds, big traffic, big attitudes, big egos. At Norway you can pull practically up to the lifts and be skiing seven minutes later, after booting up and buying your lift ticket. You can ski right onto the lift and the guy in the Carhartt will nod at you and if youâre just a little creative and thoughtful every run will feel distinct. And you can roll into the chalet and grab a pastie and bomb the whole mountain again after lunch.
And it will all feel different on that second lap. When there are 25 runs instead of 250, you absorb them differently. The rush to see it all evaporates. You can linger with it, mingle with the mountain, talk to it in a way thatâs harder up top. Itâs all so awesome in its own way.
Podcast Notes
On Pando Ski Center
I grew up about two hours from the now-lost Pando Ski Center, but I never skied there. When I did make it to that side of Michigan, I opted to ski Cannonsburg, the still-functioning multi-lift ski center seven minutes up the road. Of course, in the Storm Wandering Mode that is my default ski orientation nowadays, I would have simply hit both. But thatâs no longer possible, because Cannonsburg purchased Pando in 2015 and subsequently closed it. Probably forever.
Hoppe and I discuss this a bit on the pod. He actually tried to buy the joint. Too many problems with it, he was told. So he bought some of the ski areaâs snowguns and other equipment. Better that at least something lives on.
Pando didnât leave much behind. The only trailmap I can find is part of this Ski write-up from February 1977:
Apparently Pando was a onetime snowboarding hotspot. Hereâs a circa 2013 video of a snowboarder doing snowboarderly stuff:
On Cannonsburg
While statistically humble, with just 250 vertical feet, Cannonsburg is the closest skiing to metropolitan Grand Rapids, Michigan, population 1.08 million. That ensures that the parks-oriented bump is busy at all times:
On Caberfae
One of Hoppeâs (and my) favorite ski areas is Caberfae. This was my go-to when I lived in Central Michigan, as it delivered both decent vert (485 feet), and an interesting trail network (the map undersells it):
The Meyer family has owned and operated Caberfae for decades, and they constantly improve the place. GM Tim Meyer joined me on the pod a few years back to tell the story.
On Norwayâs proximity to Pine Mountain
Norway sits just 23 minutes down US 2 from Pine Mountain. The two ski areas sport eerily similar profiles: both measure 500 vertical feet and run two double chairs and one triple. Both face the twin challenges of low snowfall (around 60 inches per season), and a relatively thin local population base (Iron Mountainâs metro area is home to around 32,500 people). Itâs no great surprise that Norway struggled in previous iterations. Hereâs a look at Pine:
On Big Tupper
I mention Big Tupper as a lost ski area that will have an extra hard time coming back since itâs been stripped (I think completely), of snowmaking. This ski area isnât necessarily totally dead: the lifts are still standing, and the property is going to auction next month, but it will take tens of millions to get the place running again. It was at one time a fairly substantial operation, as this circa 1997 trailmap shows:
On Sneller chairlifts
Norway runs two Sneller double chairs. Only one other Sneller is still spinning, at Ski Sawmill, a short and remote Pennsylvania bump. Lift Blog catalogued the machine here. It wasnât spinning when I skied Sawmill a couple of years ago, but I did snag some photos:
On Norwayâs new logo
In general, animals make good logos. Hoppe designed this one himself:
On social media
Hoppe has done a nice job of updating Norwayâs rebuild progress on social media, mostly via the mountainâs Facebook page. Here are links to a few other social accounts we discussed:
* Skiers and Snowboarders of the Midwest is a big champion of ski areas of all sizes throughout the region. The Midwest Skiers group is pretty good too.
* Magic Mountain, Vermont, an underdog for decades, finally dug itself out of the afterthoughts pile at least in part due to the strength of its Instagram and Twitter presence.
* The formerly dumpy Holiday Mountain, New York, has meticulously documented its rebuild under new ownership on Instagram and Facebook.
On Neighbors
My 17-year-old brain could not comprehend the notion that two ski areas operated across the street from â and independent of â one another. But there they were: Nubâs Nob and Boyne Highlands (now The Highlands), each an opposite turn off Pleasantview Road.
We turned right, to Nubâs, because we were in high school and because we all made like $4.50 an hour and because Nubâs probably had like 10-Cent Tuesdays or something.
Iâve since skied both mountains many times, but the novelty has never faded. Having one of something so special as a ski area in your community is marvelous. Having two is like Dang who won the lottery? There are, of course, examples of this all over the country â Sugarbush/Mad River Glen, Stowe/Smugglersâ Notch, Alta/Snowbird, Timberline/Meadows/Skibowl â and itâs incredible how distinct each oneâs identity remains even with shared borders and, often, passes.
On UP ski areas
Michiganâs Upper Peninsula is a very particular animal. Only three percent of the stateâs 10 million residents live north of the Mackinac (pronounced Mackinaw) Bridge. Lower Peninsula skiers are far more likely to visit Colorado or Vermont than their far-north in-state ski areas, which are a 10-plus hour drive from the more populous southern tiers. While Bohemiaâs ultra-cheap pass and rowdy terrain have somewhat upset that equation, the UP remains, for purposes of skiing and ski culture, essentially a separate state.
My point is that itâs worth organizing the stateâs ski areas in the way that they practically exist in skiers minds. So Iâve separated the UP from the Lower Peninsula. Since Michigan is also home to an outsized number of town ropetows, Iâve also split surface-lift-only operations into their own categories:
On last winter being very bad with record-low skier visits
Skier visits were down in every region of the United States last winter, but they all but collapsed in the Midwest, with a 26.7 percent plunge, according to the annual Kottke Demographic Report. Michigan alone was down nearly a half million skier visits. Check out these numbers:
For comparison, overall skier numbers dropped just six percent in the Northeast, and five percent in the Rockies.
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Who
Ralph Lewis, General Manager of Pleasant Mountain (formerly Shawnee Peak), Maine
Recorded on
September 9, 2024
About Pleasant Mountain
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: Boyne Resorts, which also owns:
Located in: Bridgton, Maine
Year founded: 1938
Pass affiliations: New England Gold Pass: 3 days, no blackouts
Closest neighboring ski areas: Cranmore (:33), King Pine (:39), Attitash (:46), Black Mountain NH (:48), Sunday River (:53), Wildcat (:58), Mt. Abram (:56), Lost Valley (:59)
Base elevation: 600 feet
Summit elevation: 1,900 feet
Vertical drop: 1,300 feet
Skiable Acres: 239
Average annual snowfall: 110 inches
Trail count: 47 (25% advanced, 50% intermediate, 25% beginner)
Lift count: 6 (1 high-speed quad, 1 fixed-grip quad, 2 triple chairs, 2 surface lifts â total includes Summit Express quad, anticipated to open for the 2024-25 ski season; view Lift Blogâs inventory of Pleasant Mountainâs lift fleet)
Why I interviewed him
Pleasant Mountain is loaded with many of the attributes of great - or at least useful - ski areas: bottom-to-top chairlifts, a second base area to hack the crowds, night skiing, a nuanced trail network that includes wigglers through the woods and interstate-width racing chutes, good stuff for kids, an easy access road that breaks right off a U.S. highway, killer views, a tight community undiluted by destination skiers, and a simpleness that makes you think âyeah this is pretty much what I thought a Maine ski area would be.â
But the place has been around since 1938, which was 15 U.S. presidents ago. Parts of Pleasant feel musty and dated. Core skier services remain smushed between the access road and the bottom of the lifts, squeezed by that kitchen-in-a-camper feeling that everything could use just a bit more space. The baselodge feels improvised, labyrinthian, built for some purpose other than skiing. I would believe that it used to be a dairy barn housing 200 cows or a hideout for bootleggers and bandits or the home of an eccentric grandmother who kept aardvarks for pets before I would believe that anyone built this structure to accommodate hundreds of skiers on a winter weekend.
American skiing, with few exceptions, follows a military/finance-style up-or-out framework. You either advance or face discharge, which in skiing means falling over dead in the snow. Twenty-five years ago, the notion of a high-speed lift at Alta would have been sacrilege. The ski area has four now, including a six-pack, and nobody ever even mentions it. Saddleback rose from the grave partly because they replaced a Napolean-era double chair with a high-speed quad. Taos â Ikon and Mountain Collective partner Taos â held out for eons before installing its first detachable in 2018 (the mountain now has two). One of the new ownerâs first acts at tiny Bousquet, Massachusetts was to level the rusty baselodge and build a new one.
Pleasant needed to start moving up. Thirteen hundred vertical feet is too many vertical feet to ascend on a fixed-grip lift in southern New England. There are too many larger options too nearby where skiers donât have to do that. Sure, Magic, Smuggs, and MRG have fended off ostentatious modernization by tapping nostalgia as a brand, but they are backstopped by the kind of fistfighting terrain and natural snow that Pleasant lacks. To be a successful city-convenient New England ski area in the 2020s, youâre going to have to be a modern ski area.
Thatâs happening now, at an encouraging clip, under Boyne Resortsâ ownership. Pleasant was fine before, kept in good repair and still relevant even in a crowded market. It could have hung around for decades no matter what. But the big passes arenât going anywhere and the fast lifts arenât going anywhere and ski areas need to change along with skier expectations of what a ski area ought to be. Thatâs happening now at Pleasant Mountain, and itâs damn fun to watch.
What we talked about
At long last, a high-speed lift up Pleasant Mountain; why the new lift wonât have a midstation; why the summit triple had to go; taking out the same lift at two different mountains decades apart; when the mountain will sell old triple chairs, and where the proceeds for those will go; will the new lift overcrowd the mountain?; why Pleasant doesnât consider this a used lift even though its bones came from Sunday River; being part of Boyne versus being an indie on an island; Pleasant Mountain in the â70s; building Bear Peak at Attitash; returning to a childhood place when youâre no longer a child; the Homer family legacy; Boyne buys Shawnee and changes the name back to âPleasantâ; âthe big question is, what do we do with the land to the west of us?â as far as potential ski area expansion goes; how Pleasant interacts with Boyneâs other New England ski areas; why Pleasant hasnât joined the Ikon Pass like all of Boyneâs other ski areas; the evolution and future of Pleasant Mountain on the New England Pass; whether the Sunnyside triple is next in line for a high-speed upgrade; night-skiing; snowmaking; and potential baselodge expansion.
This pod also features some of the coolest background noise ever, as we hear the helicopter flying these towers for the new summit lift:
Lewis sent me some photos after the call:
Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview
Boyne came in and went to work doing Boyne things. That means snowmaking that can bury a brontosaurus. More parking. Food trucks. Tweaks to the trail network. Better grooming. Access to the Maine bigsters with a Pleasant season pass. And a bunch of corporate streamlining that none of us notice but that fortify the bump for long-term stability.
But what weâve all been waiting for are the new lifts. Or lift. It would always be the Summit Triple that would go first. The other chairs gathered around Big Jim (as he was known around the yard), and delivered their eulogies on that day three years ago when Boyne bought its fourth New England ski area. They all had stories to share. Breakdowns and wind holds. Liftlines and rainy days. Long summers just sitting there, waiting for something to do. Better to hear the tributes before the chairs stopped spinning, before they were auctioned off and sent to sentry backyard firepits from Portsmouth to Farmington, before the towers were scrapped and recycled into steel support beams for a Bangor outlet mall. Then they gathered round to listen.
âWhatâs it like to have a midstation?â asked Pine Quad.
âDid you have electricity in the â90s, or were you powered by a woodstove?â asked Rabbit Run Triple, born in 2014.
âIs it true that from the top of North Peak at Loon, you can see four Canadian states?â asked Sunnyside Triple.
âIn Canada, theyâre called âmetric states,ââ Summit Express Triple answered sagely. And they all nodded in awe.
And then Boyne sawed the whole thing into pieces and trucked a better lift down from Sunday River to replace it. The whole project probably took a bit longer than Pleasant Mountain locals would have liked, but hey Boyne restored the ski areaâs original name in the meantime which was a nifty distraction. And now the new lift is here and it isnât new but it looks new and was rebuilt like a â60s muscle car so that the garaged version you see today is better than anything you would have seen on the street when CCR was new and cool.
I donât know what Boyneâs going to do when they run out of lifts to upgrade. Right now itâs like 10 every year and each of them sleek as a fighter jet and nearly as expensive. But impactful, meaningfully changing how skiers experience a mountain. The new tram at Big Sky feels like a rocket launch to a moon landing. Camelot 6 at The Highlands â 487 vertical feet with bubbles and heated seats â is so over the top that riders travel from Michigan to Austria on the 42-second ride. Even the International triple chair at Alpental will blow the sidewalls off one of the best pure ski mountains in the Pacific Northwest, humble as a three-person chair sounds in this itemization of megalifts.
Pleasant Mountainâs new Summit Express â which replaces a Summit Express that was actually a Summit Regular-Speed Fixed-Grip Lift â will transform the ski area. It will change how skiers think about the place and how they experience it. It instantly promotes the mountain to the 21st century, where New England skiers expect detachable chairs anytime a lift rises more than a thousand vertical feet. And it assures the locals that yeah Boyne is in this. Theyâve got plans. And weâre just getting started here.
What I got wrong
* There were a bunch of times that I called the ski area âShawneeâ or âShawnee Peak.â Yes I got the memo but I donât know names are hard.
* I said the six-state New England region was âlike half the size of Colorado,â but the difference is not quite that dramatic. New England covers 71,988 square miles (nearly half of which â 30,843 square miles â is Maine), compared to 103,610 square miles for Colorado. I feel like Iâve made this mistake, and this correction, before.
* I made the keen observation that Pleasant Mountains was âLoonâsâ fourth ski area in the region and third in the state of Maine. I meant âBoyneâs.â
Why you should ski Pleasant Mountain
Pleasant Mountain fits into this odd category of ski areas that you only visit if you live within an hour of the parking lot, and only if that hour is east-southeast of the ski area. Thereâs too much Conway competition west. Too much Sunday River north. Too easy to get to Loon if youâre south. Which is another way of saying that Pleasant Mountain is an overlooked member of New Englandâs ski area roster, a lost-unless-youâre-from-Portland afterthought for skiers distracted by New Hamsphire and Vermont and Sugarloaf.
Thatâs not the same thing as saying that this is not a very nice ski area. Nothing stays in business for 86 years by accident. Skiers just donât think about it unless they have to. Pleasant isnât on any national multimountain pass, isnât particularly convenient to get to, isnât a bargain, doesnât harbor a pocket of secret hardcore terrain.
But you should go anyway. Even if all you do is ride the lift to the summit and stare out at the water below. The views are primo. But the ride down is fun too. Twisty narrow New England fall lines at their playful, unpredictable best. The pitches arenât overly steep, but they are consistent. This is one of the more approachable thousand-plus-footers in the country. And Maine is one of the more pleasant states in the country (no pun intended). Good people up there. A nice place to break your leg, Iâm told. Iâll take any excuse to visit Maine. You can go ahead and see that for yourself.
Podcast Notes
On Pleasant having one of New Englandâs highest vertical drops with no high-speed lift
Pleasant Mountain is one of the last New England ski areas with more than 1,000 vertical feet to install a detachable lift, but there are still a 11 left. Twelve if you count Dartmouth Skiway, which I will because I suspect their reported vertical drop may be more honest than some of the ski areas claiming 1,000-plus:
On Boyne rebuilding old detach quads
Boyne has rebuilt quite a few high-speed quads over the past half-decade:
Loon GM Brian Norton delivered an excellent breakdown of his mountainâs rebuild of Kanc/Seven Brothers in his 2022 podcast appearance.
On early-70s Pleasant Mountain
Lewis recalls his 1970s childhood days skiing Pleasant Mountain. The place was a fairly simple operation in 1970:
Within a couple of years, however, the trail footprint had evolved into something remarkably similar to modern-day Pleasant Mountain:
On Pleasantâs claim to having the first chairlift in the state of Maine
Pleasant appears to be home to Maineâs first double chair, a Constam make named âOld Blue,â that ran from 1955 to â84. According to New England Ski History, a now-defunct operation named Michaud Hill installed a single-person chairlift for the 1945-46 ski season. The lift only lasted for a couple of years, however, before being âpossibly removed following 1947-48 season, with parts possibly used at [also now defunct] Thorn Mountain, New Hampshire.â
On Sunday River as a backwater
Iâve covered this extensively, but itâs still a trip to look at 1980s trailmaps of a teeny-tiny Sunday River:
On ASCâs roster
Lewis spent time as part of American Skiing Company, which at its height had collected a now widely distributed bundle of mountains:
On Bear Peak at Attitash
Lewis helped build two of the largest modern ski expansions in New Hampshire. Bear Peak, installed between 1994 and â95 on the proposed-but-never-developed Big Bear development next door to Attitash, more or less doubled the size of the ski area. Hereâs a before-and-after look at the American Skiing Company mega-project:
On Sugarbushâs Lift-tacular summer
Those American Skiing Company days were wild in New England, marking the last major investment surge until the one weâre witnessing over the past five years. One of the most incredible single-summer efforts unfolded at Sugarbush in 1995, when the company installed six chairlifts: Super Bravo Express, Gatehouse Express, and the North Lynx Triple on the Lincoln side; North Ridge Express and the Green Mountain Quad on the Mt. Ellen side; and the two-mile-long Slide Brook Express (still the longest chairlift in the world), linking the two.
Current Sugarbush GM John Hammond, who occupied a much more junior role at the mountain in the mid-90s, recalled that summer when he joined the podcast in 2020.
On vintage Loon
Lewis eventually moved from Attitash to Loon, where he found himself part of his second generational expansion: South Peak. Hereâs Loon around 2003:
Expansion unfolded in phases, beginning in 2007. By 2011, the new peak was mostly built out:
Loon actually expanded it again in 2022:
On Loon busyness
While itâs difficult to verify skier visit numbers exactly, since ski areas, for reasons I donât understand, lock them up as though they were the nuclear launch codes, they occasionally slip out. And all available evidence suggests that Loon is, by far, New Hampshireâs busiest ski area. Hereâs a dated snapshot gathered by New England Ski History:
On Loon being the best of New Hampshire
I claim, without really qualifying it, that Loon is New Hampshireâs âpremier ski area.â What I meant by that was that the ski area owns the stateâs most sophisticated snowmaking and lift system. That assessment is a bit subjective, and Bretton Woods Nation could fight me about it and I wouldnât really have much of a counterargument.
However, there is another way to look at the âbest,â and that is in terms of pure ski terrain. Among the stateâs ski areas, Cannon and Wildcat generally split this category. Again, itâs subjective, but on a powder day, those two are going to give you the most interesting terrain when you consider glades, steeps, bumps, etc.
And then you have a bunch of ski areas in Vermont, and a handful in Maine, that are right in this fight. And since New England states are roughly the size of suburban Atlanta Costcos, it makes sense to consider them as a whole. Which means this is a good place to re-insert my standard Ski Areas of New England Inventory:
On Booth Creekâs roster
Loon was, for a time, one of eight ski areas owned by Booth Creek:
Today, the companyâs only ski area is Sierra-at-Tahoe.
On the Homer family and âShawnee Peakâ
Pleasant Mountainâs somewhat bizarre history includes its purchase by the owners of Shawnee Mountain, Pennsylvania in 1988. Per New England Ski History:
Following the 1987-88 season, the owners of Pleasant Mountain found themselves in financial trouble. That off season, they sold the ski area to Shawnee Mountain Corp. for $1.4 million. Pleasant Mountain was subsequently renamed to "Shawnee Peak," the name of the owners' Pennsylvania ski area.
Current Shawnee Mountain CEO Nick Fredericks, who has worked at that Pennsylvania ski area for its entire existence, recalled the whole episode in detail when he joined me on the podcast three years ago.
Out-of-state ownership didnât last long. New England Ski History:
Circa 1992, the parent company decided to divest its skiing holdings, resulting in banks taking control of Shawnee Peak. After a couple of season on the bubble, Shawnee Peak was purchased by Tom's of Maine executive Chet Homer in September of 1994. Though Homer considered restoring the ski area's original name, he opted to keep the Shawnee Peak identity due to the brand that had been established.
In 2021, Homer sold the ski area to Boyne Resorts, who changed the name back to âPleasant Mountainâ in 2022. Chetâs son, Geoff, recently acquired the operating lease for the small Blue Hills, Massachusetts ski area:
On expansion potential to Pleasant Mountainâs west
Pleasant Mountain owns a large parcel skierâs left off the summit that could substantially expand the mountainâs skiable terrain:
Boyne has been aggressive with New England expansions over the past several years, opening a massive new terrain pod at Sugarloaf, expanding South Peak at Loon, and adding the family-friendly Merrill Hill at Sunday River. Boyne has the resources, organizational knowhow, and will to pull off a similar project at Pleasant. Iâd expect the new terrain to be included whenever the company puts together the sort of long-term visions itâs articulated for Sugarloaf, Sunday River, Loon, Boyne Mountain, The Highlands, Summit at Snoqualmie, and Big Sky.
That expansion will not include these trails teased skierâs right of the current Sunnyside pod in this 52-year-old trailmap â Pleasant either donated or sold this land to a nature conservancy some years ago.
On Pleasantâs slow expansion onto the New England Pass
Hereâs how access has evolved between Pleasant Mountain and the remainder of Boyneâs portfolio since the companyâs 2021 acquisition:
* 2021-22: Boyne purchased Pleasant in September, 2021 â too late to include the ski area on any of the companyâs pass products for the coming winter.
* 2022-23: New England Pass excludes Pleasant as a full partner, but top-tier passes include three days each at Pleasant and Boyneâs other ski areas across North America; top-tier Pleasant passes included three days to split between Sugarloaf, Sunday River, and Loon, but no access to Boyneâs other resorts.
* 2023-24: New England Pass access remains same as 2022-23; top-tier Pleasant Mountain passes now include three days each at Boyneâs non-New England resorts, including Big Sky.
* 2024-25: New England Pass holders can now add a Pleasant Mountain night-skiing pass at a substantial discount; Pleasant Mountain access to remainder of Boyneâs portfolio remains unchanged.
Since Pleasant Mountainâs season pass remains so heavily discounted against top-tier New England Passes ($849 early-bird versus $1,389), it seems unlikely that adding Pleasant as a full pass partner would do much to overcrowd the smaller mountain. Most skiers who lay out that much for their big-time pass will probably want to spend their weekends at the bigger mountains up north. Pleasantâs expansion, whenever it happens, will also increase the chances that Pleasant could join the New England or Ikon Passes.
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Who
Andy Cohen, General Manager of Fernie Alpine Resort, British Columbia
Recorded on
September 3, 2024
About Fernie
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: Resorts of the Canadian Rockies, which also owns:
Located in: Fernie, British Columbia
Pass affiliations:
* Epic Pass: 7 days, shared with Kicking Horse, Kimberley, Nakiska, Stoneham, and Mont-Sainte Anne
* RCR Rockies Season Pass: unlimited access, along with Kicking Horse, Kimberley, and Nakiska
Closest neighboring ski areas: Fairmont Hot Springs (1:15), Kimberley (1:27), Panorama (1:45) â travel times vary considerably given time of year and weather conditions
Base elevation: 3,450 feet/1,052 meters
Summit elevation: 7,000 feet/2,134 meters
Vertical drop: 3,550 feet/1,082 meters
Skiable Acres: 2,500+
Average annual snowfall: 360 inches/914 Canadian inches (also called centimeters)
Trail count: 145 named runs plus five alpine bowls and tree skiing (4% extreme, 21% expert, 32% advanced, 30% intermediate, 13% novice)
Lift count: 10 (2 high-speed quads, 2 fixed-grip quads, 3 triples, 1 T-bar, 1 Poma, 1 conveyor - view Lift Blogâs inventory of Fernieâs lift fleet)
Why I interviewed him
One of the most irritating dwellers of the #SkiInternet is Shoosh Emoji Bro. This Digital Daniel Boone, having boldly piloted his Subaru beyond the civilized bounds of Interstate 70, considers all outlying mountains to be his personal domain. So empowered, he patrols the digital sphere, dropping shoosh emojis on any poster that dares to mention Lost Trail or White Pass or Baker or Wolf Creek. Like an overzealous pamphleteer, he slings his brand haphazardly, toward any mountain kingdom he deems worthy of his forcefield. Shoosh Emoji Bro once Shoosh Emoji-ed me over a post about Alta. đ€« Shoosh Emoji Bro may want to admit when heâs been beat.
He's not quite been beat yet on the Powder Highway, but Iâm pushing all my most powerful weapons to the front lines. Because f**k you Shoosh Emoji Bro. The skiers of the world ought to know that a string of gigantic, snowy, rowdy-riding, and mostly empty mountains sits just north of Montana and Washington. Red, Whitewater, Revy, Kicking Horse, Fernie, and their tamer cousins Sun Peaks, Silver Star, Kimberley, Big White, and Panorama. These are ski areas with Keystone-to-Mammoth acreage but Discovery, Montana crowds.
But hereâs the crucial difference between the Big Empties of the American West and the Canadian South: those south of the 49th Parallel tend to be old, remote, ragtag and improbable, served by two-mile-long double chairs staked up through the pines before The Beatles were a thing. BCâs large ski areas, by contrast, mostly sprouted from the nubs of town bumps over the past three decades, sprawling up and out with chains of high-speed (or at least modern) lifts. As a group, they are, from an infrastructure point of view, as modern as anything owned by Vail or Alterra or Boyne.
Lift-served skiing is hamstrung by a set of cultural codes that are well past their expiration date: the fetishization of speed, the lionization of the dirtbag fringe, the outsized distribution of media resources to covering the .01 percent of skiers who can stunt an aerial backflip, the Brobot toughguys hostile to chairlift safety bars. I like skiing, frankly, a lot more than I like ski culture, or at least as itâs defined by this micro-sect of cool kids who have decided that their version of skiing is the realist, and that the rest of us either need to rekognize or stay the hell away.
Shoosh Emoji Bro distills much of what is juvenile and counterproductive about contemporary ski culture. But Shoosh Emoji Bro is a buffoon. Because if skiing is ever going to grow, itâs going to be at least in part because Philadelphia Fred and Tampa Bay Tim realize there are places to ski other than Breckenridge. And one of those places, huge and often overlooked, if not exactly unknown, is Fernie, the southeast anchor of the Powder Highway, a glorious set of bowls perched at the top of the Canadian Rockies, a ski area above an actual ski town. So get the hell out of the way, Shoosh Emoji Bro, because Iâm setting off the fireworks, and theyâre going to be visible all the way to Corpus Christi.
What we talked about
Skiing wall-to-wall from opening day to closing; how Fernie started opening its trickiest lift faster after storms; weeds that grow like weeds; why the ski area had to rebuild a chairlift offramp this summer; Summit County, Colorado in the 1970s; living and working through ski industry consolidation; why RCR joined the Epic Pass in 2018; why the Epic Pass didnât hit Fernie like an asteroid; why more U.S. Americans donât ski BC; the X factor that may be driving Epic and Ikonâs massive success; why Fernie pairs well with Whitefish; skiing the Powder Highway; Kimberley and Fernie in 2000; why Kimberley went from four frontside lifts to one, and the unforeseen long-term consequences of that; âwhen that chair burned down in Kimberley, everyone realized what the engine was there in the winterâ; why Kimberley never built this expansion teased on its circa 2002 trailmap:
On Fernie still being an active mining town; housing; the massive potential expansions outlined in Fernieâs masterplan; avy control when you build a ski area beneath five massive alpine bowls; âwhat do you have to do in yield and volume to pay off a $22 million lift?â; managing Polar Peak; âCovid changed Fernieâ; itâs an intermediates game really; yes even Fernie has a little snowmaking; and âLa Nina is back!â
Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview
Itâs curious that Fernie is on the Epic Pass and nobody seems Really Mad about it. âIkon Passâ is a four-letter word in Little Cottonwood Canyon. Sun Valley locals were reportedly thrilled to ditch Epic. But the general reaction to Fernie being on the Epic Pass seems to be âoh I didnât know that Fernie was on the Epic Pass.â
Well it is. And has been. For six years. Perhaps it is the configuration of this partnership â seven days split across all six RCR resorts, and only on the full Epic Pass (or four-plus day Epic Day Pass) â that dampens the outrage. Perhaps the ease of accessing Vailâs brand-name flagships pulls would-be Fern-A-Maniacs away from Powder Highway fantasies. Or perhaps Vail is just underselling the partnership, sticking RCR off in a corner with Paoli Peaks and waving vaguely in its direction. âYour Epic Pass delivers access to more than 9,000 EPTAKULAR RESORTS, including VAIL, PARK CITY, WHISTLER, BRECKENRIDGE, and a bunch of other crap like Crested Summit or Stalking Horse whatever.â
I wrote a story earlier this year headlined Is Skiing Too Expensive, Or Are You Just Bad at Shopping? My point was that yes you can spend the equivalent of three yearâs tuition at Harvard on a ski trip if youâre an idiot, but there are in fact ways for a family with a steady income and lack of oxycodone addictions to ski for a reasonable price. The story here is similar: Is Skiing Too Crowded, Or Are You Just Bad at Picking Out Which Ski Resorts to Visit? Itâs fashionable to post noontime photos of Vail Mountain liftlines stretching to Jupiter, freighted with the unspoken assumption that this is Bad Vail doing Bad Vail things. But all of those skiers made a choice to ski at Vail, and they all know what Vail is: a very big and good but also very easy-to-access ski area.
There is another conclusion one could draw from these dramatic-but-somewhat-misleading photos: maybe we should find someplace to snosportski where that doesnât happen. According to Cohen, you can most often âski right onto our liftsâ at Fernie. So yeah think about that.
Questions I wish Iâd asked
Up until around 2007, Fernie ran a surface lift called âFace Liftâ up into Lizard Bowl. I didnât notice this T-bar (Iâm assuming), until after the interview, but Iâd like to know the logic behind removing it.
What I got wrong
* I said that Copper Mountain âhad only been open a couple of yearsâ in 1976. The resort opened in 1972.
* I noted that Kimberleyâs Black Forest Expansion was âteasedâ on old trailmaps, but that terrain has in fact been live in its current form since the 1990s. What I meant was that circa early-2000s trailmaps teased new terrain adjacent to Black Forest (see Kimberley trailmap above).
* Sometimes I get overly doctrinaire on how much better Canadians â and especially British Columbians (or whatever) â are at facilitating the expansion of ski areas and building out of associated infrastructure. While I still believe this is true, Cohen checks me on this, saying (in essence) âactually things are a real pain in the ass up here too.â But both things can be true, and I believe that they are.
Why you should ski Fernie
When I decided that I wanted to be a skier, I did what anyone who wanted to be anything did in the 1990s: I went to the drugstore and bought a magazine on the topic. Skiing, December 1994. It only took a few pages to begin absorbing the jargon and the zeitgeist, and to conclude that the unnamable glee that unwound as I free-fell down a mountain was not a singular experience, but a profound force running invisibly through the world that, like radio waves, transformed existence once tapped.
And I learned, quickly, the places to be. A big profile on Squaw. A big profile on Whiteface. And a 12-page spread entitled Inside B.C. â A radical road trip into the unknown heart of one powder-rich province. It began:
British Columbia is best known for Whistler/Blackcomb and CMH heli-skiing, but neither of these drew me up there. Instead it was the stories from my ski-bum friends. Having ventured into the snow-blessed boonies of B.C., skiing places with names Iâd never heard of, my friends had come back from Canada practically rabid with glee. I had never been to British Columbia, except for a weekend at Whistler. I had to see what was going on.
Late last March I decided to find out. My plan was ambitious: a nine-day, 2,200-mile loop alone the back roads of southeastern B.C. The trip would encompass seven distinctly different and seldom-publicized ski experiences, ranging from lift-served to backcountry to snowcat and heli-skiing. My transportation for this road trip would be my pickup truck, a weak, four-cylinder vehicle that would lose a race to a canned ham.
The first stop was Fernie:
We left my house in southern Montana before dawn on a Tuesday morning. We followed the northern Rockies, on U.S. 93, crossed the Canadian border, and continued 40 miles north to Fernie, an old mining town wedged into a narrow valley encircled by rock-crested peaks. Drop-dead gorgeous like Jackson, snow-flooded like Alta, and entirely tourist-trap free, Fernie is a ski-bumâs paradise. âŠ
Fernie Snow Valley, Fernieâs local hill, looms over the town like a 3,500-foot tsunami. The areaâs bottom third is treed â including stands of old-growth cedars big as grain silos â the next third is dominated by two immense bowls, and the top section, beyond the lift system, is insane: a shockingly vertical face stretched like a rippled curtain between Fernieâs two mountains, Polar Peak and Grizzly Peak. The runs on this face â an hourâs climb from Fernieâs upper lift â make Corbetâs Couloir look like a gentle cruiser. If there werenât tracks on it, youâd never believe anybody skied it.
Thatâs not all. If youâre willing to do a good bit of slogging, Fernieâs out-of-bounds options include eight more powder bowls, hundreds more chutes, and countless additional tree lines. You canât even see all the skiable terrain in one day. If Fernie were in the States, it would probably eclipse Jackson Hole or Taos or Squaw as Americaâs hard-core hangout.
You can find the full story on the Google machine, filed under âbooksâ (the link is too long to fit here). In its rich descriptions (when you couldnât just look up trailmaps online), and immense energy, this was probably the article that made me want to be a ski writer, that absurd-sounding thing that is now my job. The B.C. of that 30-year-old story, of course, no longer exists as it did in those pages. The skiing and the ski areas and the towns are more polished and developed and visited. But the Powder Highway is still an amazing thing, and far, far different from the big-mountain experience of the mainline U.S. Rockies. If you havenât gone yet, you should probably go ahead and do that soon.
Podcast Notes
On Fernieâs masterplan
So much potential terrain, none of which weâre likely to see anytime soon:
On Ski Roundtop
Cohen learned to ski at Roundtop, Pennsylvania, a 600-vertical-foot bump thatâs now owned (along with seemingly everything else in the state), by Vail Resorts. The ski area only averages 30 inches of snow per winter, making it a case study in snowmakingâs potential to push skiing through the weather apocalypse. Roundtop delivers some terrific fall line runs, and it skis bigger than this trailmap makes it look:
On Spademan bindings
Iâm not much of a gear aficionado, and I sort of just nodded along when Cohen was describing his history peddling Spademan bindings in his Summit County yesteryears. But I looked them up afterwards and gosh these things sound pretty great â per Retro Skiing:
The Spademan binding was radical. There was no toe piece or heel piece for that matter. A small metal plate attached mid-sole of the ski boot clipped into the binding. The concept was that the plate and binding aligned with the tibial axis of the lower leg and would release in the event of an excessive twisting force. One adjustment controlled the release tension of the binding.
The binding caught on with rental shops since it shortened set-up time significantly. And it was a safe binding. Spademan rental statistics showed an injury rate of 1 fracture in 50,000 skier days versus an average 1 in 20,000 skier days for other types of rentals. âŠ
Then Spademan would suffer a setback. Ski boot soles were changing and it took negotiating a standard that would assure compatibility with the Spademan binding. The standard also involved changes to the bindings. Re-tooling meant that Spademan was late getting the new bindings to market for the next season which impacted sales significantly. As more conventional bindings improved, Spademan sales continued to drop and in 1983 Spademan bindings went out of business.
Hmmm maybe these things would have come in handy when I twisted my lower leg bones into cornmeal.
On Whitefish/Big Mountain
Cohen refers to one of his past jobs at âWhitefish,â then corrects it to âBig Mountain.â These are in fact the same ski area, before and after a 2007 rebranding, as covered in last yearâs podcast with Whitefish President Nick Polumbus.
On Poley Mountain in New Brunswick
For a time, Cohen owned Poley Mountain, New Brunswick. This is a 660-footer served by a triple and a fixed-grip quad:
On Kicking Horse
Fernieâs Powder Highway sister resort, Kicking Horse, is generally considered to have some of the nastiest inbounds terrain in North America. The place also rocks a 4,314-foot vertical drop, roughly equal to Big Sky:
On Kimberleyâs lift evolution and the fire
In late 2021, an arsonist set fire to Kimberleyâs North Star Express, knocking the high-speed quad out of operation for the remainder of the winter. The problem, as you can see on the resortâs trailmap, is that North Star acts as Kimberleyâs sole out-of-base connector lift to the ski areaâs extensive backside terrain:
In North Starâs absence, mountain officials acquired extra snowcats to move skiers to Tamarack Ridge and beyond for the remainder of the winter. It wasnât a terrible stopgap, but the mountain may have found it handy to have been able to flip on one of the three redundant lifts that once served Kimberleyâs frontside:
But after stringing North Star to the summit in 1999, Kimberley methodically removed the double, T-bar, and triple. Cohen, who also long oversaw this Fernie sister resort, explains why.
On Fernieâs terrain evolution
Like so many B.C. ski areas, Fernie was, for decades, a relatively small operation crowded at the base of a huge mountain. Hereâs a 1996 snapshot of the resort boundaries and rustic lift network:
Two monster lifts â the 8,616-foot-long, 2,154-vertical-foot Timber Bowl Express quad and the White Pass fixed-grip quad â blew out Fernieâs borders substantially in 1998:
The 2011 addition of Polar Peak set the basic modern resort footprint.
On the âSquamish Gondolaâ
Cohen refers to another act of lift sabotage: in 2019, and again in 2020, a yet-to-be-identified individual cut the cable on the Sea-to-Sky Gondola, a sightseeing attraction that soars over the water in Squamish, a town between Vancouver and Whistler. The vandalism cost $10 million in total damage, and the reward for information leading to the arrest of the individual responsible sits at $500,000 (Canadian, which I think converts to one Vail Mountain lift ticket in American money).
On the town of Fernie
Fernie Alpine Resort doesnât rise directly over town in that walk-to-the-lifts Aspen or Telluride kind of way, but it looms over town, and does sit just down the road:
On tragedy
Cohen refers to a âtragic accident where three guys died at the ice arena.â CBC News on the 2017 accident:
Three arena workers died in Fernie, B.C., due to the failure of aging equipment and poor operational and management decisions, according to a report by Technical Safety B.C.
In its investigation, TSBC â the independent body that oversees the installation and operation of arena ice-making machinery â found that a small ammonia leak in the equipment at the Fernie Memorial Arena curling rink escalated into "a rapid release of ammonia" into the mechanical room.
Lloyd Smith, Fernie's director of leisure services, Wayne Hornquist, Fernie's chief facility operator and Jason Podloski, a refrigeration technician with contractor CIMCO Refrigeration in Calgary, were trying to fix the ice-maker on Oct. 17, 2017, when the ammonia burst from the unit, and likely suffered a "rapid death," according to Jeff Coleman, lead investigator with TSBC.
Exposure to acute levels of ammonia causes trauma to the respiratory system, essentially suffocating a person to death.
On the relationship between Rossland and Red Mountain
Canadian ski towns seem to be weathering the various pressures of short-term rentals, digital nomads, and general lack of new housing inventory somewhat better than their American counterparts. I discuss this dynamic with Cohen, and used my podcast conversation earlier this year with Red Mountain CEO Howard Katkov on his mountainâs relationship with Rossland as context.
WARNING: Pretty much everyone who listens to the Red Mountain episode has already decided to move there, so expect disruptions to the local housing markets over the long-term (still hating on you, Shoosh Emoji Bro. Go shoosh yourself đ€«).
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The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 63/100 in 2024, and number 563 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019.
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Who
Kelly Pawlak, President & CEO of the National Ski Areas Association (NSAA)
Recorded on
August 19, 2024
About the NSAA
From the associationâs website:
The National Ski Areas Association is the trade association for ski area owners and operators. It represents over 300 alpine resorts that account for more than 90% of the skier/snowboarder visits nationwide. Additionally, it has several hundred supplier members that provide equipment, goods and services to the mountain resort industry.
NSAA analyzes and distributes ski industry statistics; produces annual conferences and tradeshows; produces a bimonthly industry publication and is active in state and federal government affairs. The association also provides educational programs and employee training materials on industry issues including OSHA, ADA and NEPA regulations and compliance; environmental laws and regulations; state regulatory requirements; aerial tramway safety; and resort operations and guest service.
NSAA was established in 1962 and was originally headquartered in New York, NY. In 1989 NSAA merged with SIA (Snowsports Industries America) and moved to McLean, Va. The merger was dissolved in 1992 and NSAA was relocated to Lakewood, Colo., because of its central geographic location. NSAA is located in the same office building as the Professional Ski Instructors of America and the National Ski Patrol in Lakewood, Colo., a suburb west of Denver.
Why I interviewed her
A pervasive sub-narrative in American skiingâs ongoing consolidation is that itâs tough to be alone. A bad winter at a place like Magic Mountain, Vermont or Caberfae Peaks, Michigan or Bluewood, Washington means less money, because a big winter at Partner Mountain X across the country isnât available to keep the bank accounts stable. Same thing if your hill gets chewed up by a tornado or a wildfire or a flood. Operators have to just hope insurance covers it.
This story is not entirely incorrect. Itâs just incomplete. It is harder to be independent, whether youâre Jackson Hole or Bolton Valley or Mount Ski Gull, Minnesota. But few, if any, ski areas are entirely and truly alone, fighting on the mountaintop for survival. Financially, yes (though many independent ski areas are owned by families or individuals who operate one or more additional businesses, which can and sometimes do subsidize ski areas in lean or rebuilding years). But in the realm of ideas, ski areas have a lot of help.
Thatâs because, layered over the vast network of 500-ish U.S. mountains is a web of state and national associations that help sort through regulations, provide ideas, and connect ski areas to one another. Not every state with ski areas has one. Nevadaâs handful of ski areas, for example, are part of Ski California. New Jerseyâs can join Ski Areas of New York, which often joins forces with Ski Pennsylvania. Ski Idaho counts Grand Targhee, Wyoming, as a member. Some of these associations (Ski Utah), enjoy generous budgets and large staffs. Others (Ski New Hampshire), accomplish a remarkable amount with just a handful of people.
But layered over them all â in reach but not necessarily hierarchy â is the National Ski Areas Association. The NSAA helps ski areas where state associations may lack the scale, resources, or expertise. The NSAA organized the united, nationwide approach to Covid-era operations ahead of the 2020-21 ski season; developed and maintained the omnipresent Skier Responsibility Code; and help ski areas do everything from safely operate chairlifts and terrain parks to fend off climate change. Their regional and national shows are energetic, busy, and productive. Top representatives â the sorts of leaders who appear on this podcast - from every major national or regional ski area are typically present.
This support layer, mostly invisible to consumers, is in some ways the concrete holding the nationâs ski areas together. Most of even the most staunchly independent operators are members. If U.S. skiing were really made up of 500 ski areas trying to figure out snowmaking in 500 different ways, then we wouldnât have 500 ski areas. They need each other more than you might think. And the NSAA helps pull them all together.
What we talked about
Low natural snow, strong skier visits â the paradox of the 2023-24 ski season; ever-better snowmaking; explaining the ski industryâs huge capital investments over recent years; European versus American lift fleets; lift investments across America; when itâs time to move on from your dream job; 2017 sounds like yesterday but it may as well have been 1,000 years ago; the disappearing climate-change denier; can ski areas adapt to climate change?; the biggest challenges facing the NSAAâs next leader, and what qualities that leader will need to deal with them; should ski areas be required to report injuries?; operators who are making progress on safety; are ski area liability waivers in danger?; the wild cost of liability insurance; how drones could help ski area safety; why is skiing still so white, even after all the DE&I?; why youth skier participation as a percentage of overall skier visits has been declining; and the enormous potential for indoor skiing to grow U.S. participation.
Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview
First, Pawlak announced, in May, that she would step down from her NSAA role whenever the board could identify a capable replacement. She explains why on the podcast, but hers has been a by-all-accounts successful seven-year run amidst and through rapid and irreversible industry change â Covid, consolidation, multi-mountain passes, climate change, skyrocketing costs, the digitization of everything â and it was worth pausing to reflect on all that the NSAA had accomplished and all of the challenges waiting ahead.
Second, our doomsday instincts keep running up against this stat: despite a fairly poor winter, snow-wise, the U.S. ski industry racked up the fifth-most skier visits of all time during its 2023-24 campaign. How is that possible, and what does it mean? Iâve explored this a little myself, but Pawlak has access to data that I donât, and she adds an extra dimension to our analysis.
And this is true of so many of the topics that I regularly cover in this newsletter: capital investment, regulation, affordability, safety, diversity. This overlap is not surprising, given my stated focus on lift-served skiing in North America. Most of my podcasts bore deeply into the operations of a single mountain, then zoom out to center those ski areas within the broader ski universe. When I talk with the NSAA, I can do the opposite â analyze the larger forces driving the evolution of lift-served skiing, and see how the collective is approaching them. Itâs a point of view that very few possess, and even fewer are able to articulate.
Questions I wish Iâd asked
We recorded this conversation before POWDR announced that it had sold Killington and Pico, and would look to sell Bachelor, Eldora, and Silver Star in the coming months. I would have loved to have gotten Pawlakâs take on what was a surprise twist in skiingâs long-running consolidation.
I didnât ask Pawlak about the Justice Departmentâs investigation into Alterraâs proposed acquisition of Arapahoe Basin. I wish I would have.
What I got wrong
I said that Hugh Reynolds was âBig Snowâs head of marketing.â His actual role is Chief Marketing Officer for all of Snow Partners, which operates the indoor Big Snow ski area, the outdoor Mountain Creek ski area, and a bunch of other stuff.
Podcast Notes
On specific figures from the Kotke Report:
Pretty much all of the industry statistics that I cite in this interview come from the Kotke Demographic Report, an annual end-of-season survey that aggregates anonymized data from hundreds of U.S. ski areas. Any numbers that I reference in this conversation either refer to the 2022-23 study, or include historical data up to that year. I did not have access to the 2023-24 report until after our conversation.
Capital expenditures
Per the 2023-24 Kotke Report:
Definitions of ski resort sizes
Also from Kotke:
On European lift fleets versus American
Comparing European skiing to American skiing is a bit like comparing futbol to American football â two different things entirely. Europe is home to at least five times as many ski areas as North America and about six times as many skiers. There are ski areas there that make Whistler look like Wilmot Mountain. The food is not only edible, but does not cost four times your annual salary. Lift tickets are a lot cheaper, in general. But it snows more, and more consistently, in North America; our liftlines are more organized; and you donât need a guide here to ski five feet off piste. Both are great and annoying in their own way. But our focus of difference-ness in this podcast was between the lift fleets on each continent. In brief, youâre far more likely to stumble across a beefcaker on a random Austrian trail than you are here in U.S. America. Take a look at skiresort.infoâs (not entirely accurate but close enough), inventory of eight-place chairlifts around the world:
On âWaterville with the MND liftâ
Pawlak was referring to Waterville Valleyâs Tecumseh Express, built in 2022 by France-based MND. It was the first and only lift that the manufacturer built in the United States prior to the dissolution of a joint venture with Bartholet. While MND may be sidelined, Pawlakâs point remains valid: there is room in the North American market for manufacturers other than Leitner-Poma and Doppelmayr, especially as lift prices continue to escalate at amazing rates.
On my crankiness with âthe mainstream mediaâ and climate change
I kind of hate the term âmainstream media,â particularly when itâs used as a de facto four-letter word to describe some Power Hive of brainwashing elitists conspiring to cover up the governmentâs injection of Anthrax into our Honey Combs. I regret using the term in our conversation, but sometimes in the on-the-mic flow of an interview I default to stupid. Anyway, once or twice per year I get particularly bent about some non-ski publication framing lift-served skiing as an already-doomed industry because the climate is changing. Iâm not some denier kook whoâs stockpiling dogfood for the crocodile apocalypse, but I find this narrative stupid because itâs reductive and false. The real story is this: as the climate changes, the ski industry is adapting in amazing and inventive ways; ski areas are, as I often say, Climate Change Super Adapters. You can read an example that I wrote here.
On the NSAAâs Covid response
Thereâs no reason to belabor the NSAAâs Covid response â which was comprehensive and excellent, and is probably the reason the 2020-21 American ski season happened â here. I already broke the whole thing down with Pawlak back in April 2021. She also joined me â somewhat remarkably, given the then-small reach of the podcast â at the height of Covid confusion in April 2020 to talk through what in the world could possibly happen next.
On The Colorado Sunâs reporting on ski area safety and the NSAAâs safety report
The Colorado Sun consistently reports on ski area safety, and the ski industryâs resistance to laws that would compel them to make injury reports public. I asked Pawlak about this, citing, specifically, this Sun article From April 8, 2024:
[13-year-old] Silas [Luckett] is one of thousands of people injured on Colorado ski slopes every winter. With the stateâs ski hills posting record visitation in the past two seasons â reaching 14.8 million in 2022-23 â it would appear that the increasing frequency of injuries coincides with the rising number of visits. We say âappearâ because, unlike just about every other industry in the country, the resort industry does not disclose injury data. âŠ
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 nationâs ski areas reported 46.7 million skier visits, 2000-01 was 57.3 million and 2010-11 saw a then allâtime high of 60.5 million visits. âŠ
The NSAAâs once-a-decade review of injuries from 2020-21 was delayed during the pandemic and is expected to land later this year. But the associationâs reports are not available to the public [Pawlak disputes this, and provided a copy of the report to The Storm â you can view it here].
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.
âWhen we approached the ski areas to work on any of the details in the bill, they refused,â Danielson, a Wheat Ridge Democrat, told The Sun in 2021. âIt 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.â
The resort industry vehemently rebuffs the notion that ski areas do not take safety seriously.
Patricia Campbell, the then-president of Vail Resortsâ 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 ânot workableâ and would create an âunnecessary burden, confusion and distraction.â
Requiring resorts to publish public safety plans, she said, would âtrigger a massive administrative effortâ that could redirect resort work from other safety measures.
âPublishing safety plans will not inform skiers about our work or create a safer ski area,â Campbell told the Colorado Senateâs Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee in April 2021.
On ASTM International
Pawlak refers to âASTM Internationalâ in the podcast. That is an acronym for âAmerican Society for Testing and Materials,â an organization that sets standards for various industries. Hereâs an overview video that most of you will find fairly boring (I do, however, find it fascinating that these essentially invisible boards operate in the background to introduce some consistency into our highly confusing industrialized world):
On Mammoth and Deer Valleyâs âeveryone gets 15 feetâ campaign
Thereâs a cool video of this on Deer Valleyâs Instapost that wonât embed on this page for some reason. Since Alterra owns both resorts, I will assume Mammothâs campaign is similar.
On Heavenlyâs collision prevention program
More on this program, from NSAAâs Safety Awards website:
Heavenly orchestrated a complex collision prevention strategy to address a very specific situation and need arising from instances of skier density in certain areas. The ski areaâs unique approach leveraged detailed incident data and distinct geographic features, guest dynamics and weather patterns to identify and mitigate high-risk areas effectively. Among its efforts to redirect people in a congested area, Heavenly reintroduced the Lakeview Terrain Park, added a rest area and groomed a section through the trees to attract guests to an underutilized run. Most impressively, these innovative interventions resulted in a 52% year-over-year reduction of person-on-person collisions. Judges also appreciated that the team successfully incorporated creative thinking from a specialist-level employee. For its effective solutions to reduce collision risk through thoughtful terrain management, NSAA awarded Heavenly Mountain Resort with the win for Best Collision Prevention Program.
On the Crested Butte accident
Pawlak and I discuss a 2022 accident at Crested Butte that could end up having lasting consequences on the ski industry. Per The Colorado Sun:
It was toward the end of the first day of a ski vacation with their church in March 2022 when Mike Miller and his daughter Annie skied up to the Paradise Express lift at Crested Butte Mountain Resort.
The chair spun around and Annie couldnât settle into the seat. Mike grabbed her. The chair kept climbing out of the lift terminal. He screamed for the lift operator to stop the chair. So did people in the line. The chair kept moving.
Annie tried to hold on to the chair. Mike tried to hold his 16-year-old daughter. The fall from 30 feet onto hard-packed snow shattered her C7 vertebrae, bruised her heart, lacerated her liver and injured her lungs. She will not walk again.
The Miller family claims the lift operators were not standing at the lift controls and âconsciously and recklessly disregarded the safety of Annieâ when they failed to stop the Paradise chair. In a lawsuit the family filed in December 2022 in Broomfield County District Court, they accused Crested Butte Mountain Resort and its owner, Broomfield-based Vail Resorts, of gross negligence and âwillful and wanton conduct.â
In May, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled on the incident, per SAM:
In a 5-2 ruling, the Colorado Supreme Court found that liability waivers cannot be used to protect ski areas from negligence claims related to chairlift accidents. The decision will allow a negligence per se claim brought against Vail Resorts to proceed in the district courts.
The decision, however, did not invalidate all waivers, as the NSAA clarified in the same SAM article:
There was concern among outdoor activity operators in Colorado that the case might void liability waivers altogether, but the narrow scope of the decision has largely upheld the use of liability waivers to protect against claims pertaining to inherent risks.
âWhile the Supreme Court carved out a narrow path where releases of liability cannot be enforced in certain, unique chairlift incidents, the media downplayed, if not ignored, a critical part of the ruling,â explained Dave Byrd, the National Ski Areas Associationâs (NSAA) director of risk and regulatory affairs.
âPlaintiffsâ counsel had asked the [Colorado] Supreme Court to overturn decades of court precedent enforcing the broader use of ALL releases in recreation incidents, and the court unanimously declined to make such a radical change with Coloradoâs long-standing law on releases and waiversâand that was the more important part of the courtâs decision from my perspective.â
The Colorado Supreme Courtâs ruling âexpress[es] no view as to the ultimate merit of the claim,â rather it allows the Millersâ claim to proceed to trial in the lower courts. It could be month or years before the lawsuit is concluded.
On me knowing âall too well what itâs like to be injured on a ski tripâ
Boy do I ever:
Yeah thatâs my leg. Ouch.
Donât worry. Iâve skied 102 days since that mangling.
Hereâs the full story.
On âJerry of the Dayâ
I have conflicted feelings on Jerry of the Day. Some of their posts are hilarious, capturing what are probably genuinely good and seasoned skiers whiffing in incredible fashion:
Some are just mean-spirited and stupid:
Funny I guess if you rip and wear it ironically. But itâs harder to be funny than you may suppose. See The New Yorkerâs cloying and earnest (and never-funny), Shouts & Murmurs column.
On state passport programs
State passport programs are one of the best hacks to make skiing affordable for families. Run by various state ski associations, they provide between one and three lift tickets to every major ski area in the state for some grade range between third and fifth. A small administrative fee typically applies, but otherwise, the lift tickets are free. In most, if not all, cases, kids do not need to live in the state to be eligible. Check out the programs in New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, and Utah. Other states have them too â use the Google machine to find them.
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Who
Chip Seamans, President of Windham Mountain Club, New York
Recorded on
August 12, 2024
About Windham Mountain Club
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: Majority owned by Beall Investment Partners and Kemmons Wilson Hospitality Partners, majority led by Sandy Beall
Located in: Windham, New York
Year founded: 1960
Pass affiliations:
* Ikon Pass: 7 days
* Ikon Base Pass: 5 days, holiday blackouts
Closest neighboring ski areas: Hunter (:17), Belleayre (:35), Plattekill (:48)
Base elevation: 1,500 feet
Summit elevation: 3,100 feet
Vertical drop: 1,600 feet
Skiable Acres: 285
Average annual snowfall: 100 inches
Lift count: 11 (1 six-pack, 3 high-speed quads, 1 triple, 1 double, 5 carpets â view Lift Blogâs inventory of Windhamâs lift fleet)
Why I interviewed him
The Catskills are the closest thing to big-mountain skiing in my immediate orbit. Meaning the ski areas deliver respectable vertical drops, reasonably consistent snowfall, and an address reachable for first chair with a 6 to 7 a.m. departure time. The four big ski areas off I-87 â Belleayre, Plattekill, Hunter, and Windham â are a bit farther from my launchpad than the Poconos, than Mountain Creek, than Catamount or Butternut or the smaller ski areas in Connecticut. But on the right day, the Catskills mountains ski like a proto-Vermont, a sampler that settles more like a main course than an appetizer.
Iâm tremendously fond of the Catskills, is my point here. And Iâm not the only one. As the best skiing within three hours of New York City, this relatively small region slings outsized influence over North American ski culture. Money drives skiing, and thereâs a lot of it flowing north from the five boroughs (OK maybe two of the boroughs and the suburbs, but whatever). Thereâs a reason that three Catskills ski areas (Belleayre, Hunter, and Windham), rock nearly as many high-speed chairlifts (nine) as the other 40-some ski areas in New York combined (12). These ski areas are cash magnets that prime the 20-million-ish metro region for adventures north to New England, west to the West, and east to Europe.
I set this particular podcast up this way because itâs too easy for Colorad-Bro or Lake Ta-Bro or Canyon Bro to look east and scoff. Of course I could focus this whole enterprise on the West, as every ski publication since the invention of snow has done. I know the skiing is better out there. Everyone does. But that doesnât mean itâs the only skiing that matters. The Storm is plenty immersed in the West, but I can also acknowledge this reality: the West needs the East more than the East needs the West. After all, thereâs plenty of good skiing out here, with a lot more options, and without the traffic hassles (not to mention the far smaller Brobot:Not Brobot ratio). And while itâs true that New England ski areas have lately benefitted from capital airdrops launched by their western overlords, a lot of that western money is just bouncing back east after being dropped off by tourists from Boston, New York, Philly, and D.C. Could Colorado have skiing without eastern tourism? Yes, but would Summit and Eagle counties be dripping with high-speed lifts and glimmering base villages without that cash funnel, or would you just have a bunch of really big Monarch Mountains?
None of which tells you much about Windham Mountain Windham Mountain Club, which Iâve featured on the podcast before. But if you want to understand, rather than simply scoff at, the New Yorkers sharing a chair with you at Deer Valley or Snowmass or Jackson, that journey starts here, in the Catskills, a waystation on many skiersâ pathway to higher altitudes.
What we talked about
Chip is the new board chairman of the National Ski Areas Association; searching for a new NSAA head; the difference between state and national ski organizations; the biggest challenge of running a ski area in New York; could New York State do more to help independent ski areas?; how the ski areaâs rebrand to Windham Mountain Club âcreated some confusion in the market, no doubtâ; the two-day weekend lift ticket minimum is dead; âour plan has always been to stay open to the public and to sell passes and ticketsâ; defining âpremiumâ; what should a long liftline look like at WMC?; lift ticket and Ikon Pass redemption limits for 2024-25; the future of Windham on the Ikon Pass; rising lift ticket prices; free season passes for local students; who owns WMC, and what do they want to do with it?; defining the âclubâ in WMC; what club membership will cost you and whether just having the cash is enough to get you in; is Windham for NYC or for everyone?; how about a localsâ pass?; a target number of skiers on a busy day at Windham; comparing Windham to Vermontâs all-private Hermitage Club; how about the Holimont private-on-weekends-only model?; some people just want to be angry; the new owners have already plowed $70 million into the bump; snowmaking updates; a badass Cat fleet; a more or less complete lift fleet; the story behind K lift; the Windham village and changes to parking; and the dreaded gatehouse.
Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview
Rather than right now, maybe the best time for this interview would have been a year ago, or six months ago, or maybe all three. Itâs been a confusing time at Windham, for skiers, for employees, for the people running the place. No one seems to understand exactly what the bump is, what it plans to be, and what it wants to be.
Which doesnât stop anyone from having an opinion, most of them wildly misinformed. Over the past year, Iâve been told, definitively, by a Saturday liftlineâs worth of casual skiers that Windham had âgone private.â The notion is pervasive, stubborn, immune to explanations or evidence to the contrary. So, very on brand for our cultural moment.
Which doesnât mean I shouldnât try. Iâm more than willing to bang on ski areas for their faults. In Windhamâs case, Iâve always thought that they groom too much, that the season is too short, that the season pass price (currently $2,000!), is beyond insane. But itâs not really fair to invent a problem and then harangue the operators about it. Windham is not a private ski area, it is not shut off from locals, it does not require a $200,000 handshake to pass through the RFID gates. Inventing a non-existent problem and then taking offense to it is a starter kit for social media virtue signaling, but itâs a poor way to conduct real life.
But honestly, what the hell is going on up there? How can Windham Mountain Club justify a larger initiation fee than Vermontâs truly private Hermitage Club for a ski experience that still involves half of Manhattan? Why is it so hard to make a weekend Ikon Pass reservation? Does anyone really go to the Catskills in search of the ârarified realityâ that WMC insists it is somehow providing? What is the long-term vision here?
All fair questions, all spun from WMCâs self-inflicted PR tornado. But the answers are crystalizing, and we have them here.
What I got wrong
* I said that âGoreâs triple chair,â which was only a â12, 13-year-old liftâ was going to McCauley. I was referring to the Hudson triple, a 2010 Partek (so 14 years old), which will replace nearby but much smaller McCauleyâs 1973 Hall double, known as âBig Chair,â for the coming ski season.
* I said that the club fees for Windham were roughly the same as Hermitage Club. This is drastically untrue. WMCâs $200,000 initiation fee is double Hermitage Clubâs $100,000 number. Windhamâs annual dues, however, are much lower than HCâs $18,500.
* I said that Windham was automating its first snowmaking trail this year. That is incorrect, as Seamans points out in our conversation. Windham is installing its first automated snowmaking on the east side of the mountain this year, meaning that 40 percent of the mountainâs snowmaking system will now be automated.
* I said that Windham had a water-supply-challenge, which is not accurate. I was confusing water supply (adequate), with snowmaking system pumping capacity (room for improvement). I think I am covering too many mountains and sometimes the narratives cross. Sorry about that.
Why you should ski Windham Mountain Club
If you really want an uncrowded Catskills ski experience, you have exactly one option: go to family-owned Plattekill, 40 minutes down the road. It has less vert (1,100 feet), and half Windhamâs acreage on paper, but when the glades fill in (which they often do), the place feels enormous, and you can more or less walk onto either of the mountainâs two chairlifts any day of the season.
But Plattekill doesnât have high-speed lifts, itâs not on the Ikon Pass, and itâs not basically one turn off the thruway. Windham has and is all of those things. And so thatâs where more skiers will go.
Not as many, of course, as will go to Hunter, Windhamâs Vail-owned archnemesis 15 minutes away, with its unlimited Epic Pass access, Sahara-sized parking lots, and liftlines that disappear over the curvature of the Earth. And that has been Windhamâs unspoken selling point for decades: Hey, at least weâre not Hunter. Thatâs true not only in relative crowd size, but in attitude and aesthetic; Hunter carries at least a 10:1 ratio* over Windham in number of LongIsland Bros straightlining its double-blacks in baseball caps and Jets jerseys.
In that context, Windhamâs rebrand is perfectly logical â as Hunter grows ever more populist, with a bargain season pass price and no mechanism to limit visitors outside of parking lot capacity (they ski area does limit lift ticket sales, but not Epic Pass visits), the appeal of a slightly less-chaotic, more or less equally scaled option grows. Thatâs Windham. Or, hey, the much more exclusive sounding âWindham Mountain Club.â
And Windham is a good ski area. Itâs one of the better ones in New York, actually, with two peaks and nice fall line skiing and an excellent lift system. It doesnât sprawl like Gore or tower like Whiteface, and those fall lines do level off a bit too abruptly from the summit, but it feels big, especially when that Catskills snowbelt fires. On a weekday, it really can feel like a private ski area. And you can probably score an Ikon Pass slot without issue. So go now, before WMC jumps off that mainstream pass, and the only way in the door is a triple-digit lift ticket.
*Not an actual statistic^
^Probably though itâs accurate.
Podcast Notes
On New York having more ski areas than any other state in the country
Itâs true. New York has 51. The next closest state is Michigan, with 44 (only 40 of which operated last winter). Hereâs a list:
On the three New York state-owned ski areas that âhave been generously funded by the stateâ
Itâs basically impossible to have any honest conversation about any New York ski area without acknowledging the Godzilla-stomping presence of the stateâs three owned ski areas: Belleayre, Gore, and Whiteface. These are all terrific ski areas, in large part because they benefit from a firehose of taxpayer money that no privately owned, for-profit ski area could ever justify. As the Adirondack Explorer reported in July:
The public authority in charge of the stateâs skiing, sliding and skating facilities saw expenses and losses jump in the past year, its annual financial report shows.
The Lake Placid-based Olympic Regional Development Authority [ORDA], whose big-ticket sites are the Belleayre Mountain, Gore Mountain and Whiteface Mountain alpine centers, disclosed operating losses of $47.3 million for the last fiscal year. That compared with losses of $29.3 million for the same period a year earlier.
Itâs important to acknowledge that this budget also covers a fun parkâs worth of skating rinks, ski jumps, luge chutes (or whatever), and a bunch of other expensive, unprofitable crap that you need if you ever want to host an Olympics (which New York State has done twice and hopes to do again). Still, the amount of cash funneled into ORDA in recent years is incredible. As the Adirondack Explorer reported last year:
âThe last six years, the total capital investment in the Olympic Authority was $552 million,â [now-fomer ORDA President and CEO Mike] Pratt told me proudly. âThese are unprecedented investments in our facilities, no question about it. But the return on investment is immediate.â
Half a billion dollars is a hell of a lot of money. The vast majority of it, more than $400 million, went to projects in the Lake Placid region, home to some 20,000 year-round residentsâand it turns out, that breathtaking sum is only part of the story.
Adirondack Life found New York State has actually pumped far more taxpayer dollars into ORDA since Pratt took the helm than previously reported, including a separate infusion of subsidies needed to cover the Olympic Authorityâs annual operating losses. Total public spending during Prattâs six-year tenure now tops $620 million.
⊠Taken together thatâs more money than New York spent hosting the 1980 Winter Olympics. Itâs also more money than the state committed, amid growing controversy, to help build a new NFL stadium in Buffalo, a city with a population more than 10 times that of the Lake Placid region.
Thereâs also no sign ORDAâs hunger for taxpayer cash will shrink anytime soon. In fact, it appears to be growing. The Olympic Authority is already slated to receive operating subsidies and capital investments next year that total another $119 million.
To put that amount in context, the entire Jay Peak Resort in Vermont sold last year for $76 million. Which means New York Stateâs spending on the Olympic Authority in 2024 would be enough to buy an entire new ski mountain, with tens of millions of dollars left over.
It now appears certain the total price tag for Prattâs vision of a new, revitalized ORDA will top $1 billion. He said thatâs exactly what the organization needed to finally fulfill its mission as keeper of New Yorkâs Olympic flame.
More context: Vail resorts, which owns and operates 42 ski areas â more than a dozen of which are several times larger than Belleayre, Gore, and Whiteface combined â is allocating between $189 and $194 million for 2024 capital improvements. You can see why New York is one of the few states where Vail isnât the Big Bad Guy. The stateâs tax-paying, largely family-owned ski areas funnels 95 percent of their resentment toward ORDA, and itâs easy enough to understand why.
On New Yorkâs âincreasingly antiquated chairlift fleetâ
Despite the glimmer-glammer of the lift fleets at ORDA resorts, around the Catskills, and at Holiday Valley, New York is mostly a state of family-owned ski areas whose mountains are likely worth less than the cost of even a new fixed-grip chairlift. Greek Peakâs longest chairlift is a Carlevaro-Savio double chair installed in 1963. Snow Ridge runs lifts dating to 1964, â60, and â58(!). Woods Valley installed its three lifts in 1964, â73, and â75 (owner Tim Woods told me last year that the ski area has purchased at least two used chairlifts, and hopes to install them at some future point). Intermittently open (and currently non-operational) Cockaigneâs two double chairs and T-bar date to 1965. These lifts are, of course, maintained and annually inspected, and I have no fear of riding any of them, but in the war for customers, lifts that predate human space travel do make your story a bit trickier to tell.
On Holiday Valley selling a chairlift to Catamount
I noted that a lift had moved from Holiday Valley to Catamount â that is the Catamount quad, Holiday Valleyâs old Yodeler quad. Catamount installed the new lift in 2022, the year after Holiday Valley pulled out the 20-year-old, 500-vertical-foot fixed-grip lift to replace it with a new high-speed quad.
On Windhamâs pass price in comparison to others
Windhamâs season pass price is the eighth most expensive in America, and the most expensive in the East by an enormous amount (Windham also offers a Monday through Friday, non-holiday season pass for $750, and a Sunday through Friday, non-holiday pass for $1,300). Hereâs how WMC compares nationally:
And hereâs how it stacks up in the East:
On WMCâs ownership
We talk a bit about Windhamâs ownership in the pod. I dug into that a bit more last year, when they bought the place in April and again when the mountain rebranded in October.
On Blackberry Farms
Lodged between Windham and New York City is a hilltop resort called Mohonk Mountain House. In its aesthetic and upscale cuisine, it resembles Blackberry Farm, the Tennessee resort owned by Windham majority owner Sandy Beall, which The New York Times describes as âbuilt on a foundation of simple Tennessee country life as reinterpreted for guests willing to pay a premium to taste its pleasures without any of its hardships.â In other words, an incredibly expensive step into a version of nature that resembles but sidesteps its wild form. I think this is what WMC is going for, but on snow.
On the location of Windhamâs tubing hill
I frankly never even realized that Windham had a tubing hill until Seamans mentioned it. Even though itâs marked on the trailmap, the complex sits across the access road, well removed from the actual ski area. Tubing is not really something I give a damn about (sorry #TubeNation), other than to acknowledge that itâs probably the reason many small ski areas can continue to exist, but I usually at least notice it if itâs there. Circled in red below:
On Hermitage Club
We talk a bit about how Hermitage Club is similar in size to Windham. The southern Vermont ski area sports a slightly smaller vertical drop (1,400 feet to Windhamâs 1,600), and skiable acreage (200 to Windhamâs 285). Hereâs the trailmap:
On Holimont, Buffalo Ski Club, and Hunt Hollow
New York is home to three private, chairlift-served ski areas that all follow a similar business model: the general public is welcome on weekdays, but weekends and holidays are reserved for members. Holimont, right next door to Holiday Valley, is the largest and most well-known:
Hunt Hollow is smaller and less-renowned, but itâs a nice little bump (my favorite fact about HH is that the double chair â the farthest lookerâs left â is Snowbirdâs old Little Cloud lift):
Buffalo Ski Center is the agglomeration of three side-by-side, formerly separate ski areas: Sitzmarker Ski Club, Ski Tamarack and Buffalo Ski Club. The trail network is dense and super interesting:
On Windham in The New York Times
I referred to a feature story that The Times ran on Windham last December. Read that here.
On Vailâs pay bump
When Vail Resorts raised its minimum wage to $20 an hour in 2022, that presented a direct challenge to every competing resort, including Windham, just down the road from Vail-owned Hunter.
On Windhamâs village expansion
Windham will build a new condominium village over some portion of its current parking lots. Hereâs a concept drawing:
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 57/100 in 2024, and number 557 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019.
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