Episódios
-
This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on July 27. It dropped for free subscribers on Aug. 3. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:
Who
Peter Disch, General Manager of Mount Sunapee, New Hampshire (following this interview, Vail Resorts promoted Disch to Vice President of Mountain Operations at its Heavenly ski area in California; he will start that new position on Aug. 5, 2024; as of July 27, Vail had yet to name the next GM of Sunapee.)
Recorded on
June 24, 2024
About Mount Sunapee
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: The State of New Hampshire; operated by Vail Resorts
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), Saskadena Six (1:04), Tenney (1:06)
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 – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Mount Sunapee’s lift fleet.)
History: Read New England Ski History’s overview of Mount Sunapee
View historic Mount Sunapee trailmaps on skimap.org.
Why I interviewed him
New Hampshire state highway 103 gives you nothing. Straight-ish and flattish, lined with trees and the storage-unit detritus of the American outskirts, nothing about the road suggests a ski-area approach. Looping south off the great roundabout-ish junction onto Mt. Sunapee Road still underwhelms. As though you’ve turned into someone’s driveway, or are seeking some obscure historical monument, or simply made a mistake. Because what, really, could be back there to ski?
And then you arrive. All at once. A parking lot. The end of the road. The ski area heaves upward on three sides. Lifts all over. The top is up there somewhere. It’s not quite Silverton-Telluride smash-into-the-backside-of-a-box-canyon dramatic, but maybe it’s as close as you get in New Hampshire, or at least southern New Hampshire, less than two hours north of Boston.
But the true awe waits up high. North off the summit, Lake Sunapee dominates the foreground, deep blue-black or white-over-ice in midwinter, like the flat unfinished center of a puzzle made from the hills and forests that rise and roll from all sides. Thirty miles west, across the lowlands where the Connecticut River marks the frontier with Vermont, stands Okemo, interstate-wide highways of white strafing the two-mile face.
Then you ski. Sunapee does not measure big but it feels big, an Alpine illusion exploding over the flats. Fifteen hundred vertical feet is plenty of vertical feet, especially when it rolls down the frontside like a waterfall. Glades everywhere, when they’re live, which is less often than you’d hope but more often than you’d think. Good runs, cruisers and slashers, a whole separate face for beginners, a 374-vertical-foot ski-area-within-a-ski-area, perfectly spliced from the pitched main mountain.
Southern New Hampshire has a lot of ski areas, and a lot of well-run ski areas, but not a lot of truly great pure ski areas. Sunapee, as both an artwork and a plaything, surpasses them all, the ribeye on the grill stacked with hamburgers, a delightful and filling treat.
What we talked about
Sunapee enhancements ahead of the 2024-25 winter; a new parking lot incoming; whether Sunapee considered paid parking to resolve its post-Covid, post-Northeast Epic Pass launch backups; the differences in Midwest, West, and Eastern ski cultures; the big threat to Mount Sunapee in the early 1900s; the Mueller family legacy and “The Sunapee Difference”; what it means for Vail Resorts to operate a state-owned ski area; how cash flows from Sunapee to Cannon; Sunapee’s masterplan; the long-delayed West Bowl expansion; incredible views from the Sunapee summit; the proposed Sun Bowl-North Peak connection; potential upgrades for the Sunapee Express, North Peak, and Spruce lifts; the South Peak beginner area; why Sunapee built a ski-through lighthouse; why high-speed ropetows rule; the potential for Sunapee night-skiing; whether Sunapee should be unlimited on the Northeast Value Pass (which it currently is); and why Vail’s New Hampshire mountains are on the same Epic Day Pass tier as its Midwest ski areas.
Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview
Should states own ski areas? And if so, should state agencies run those ski areas, or should they be contracted to private operators?
These are fraught questions, especially in New York, where three state-owned ski areas (Whiteface, Gore, and Belleayre) guzzle tens of millions of dollars in new lift, snowmaking, and other infrastructure while competing directly against dozens of tax-paying, family-owned operations spinning Hall double chairs that predate the assassination of JFK. The state agency that operates the three ski areas plus Lake Placid’s competition facilities, the Olympic Regional Development Authority (ORDA), reported a $47.3 million operating loss for the fiscal year ending March 30, following a loss of $29.3 million the prior year. Yet there are no serious proposals at the state-government level to even explore what it would mean to contract a private operator to run the facilities.
If New York state officials were ever so inspired, they could look 100 miles east, where the State of New Hampshire has run a sort of A-B experiment on its two owned ski areas since the late 1990s. New Hampshire’s state parks association has operated Cannon Mountain since North America’s first aerial tram opened on the site in 1938. For a long time, the agency operated Mount Sunapee as well. But in 1998, the state leased the ski area to the Mueller family, who had spent the past decade and a half transforming Okemo from a T-bar-clotted dump into one of Vermont’s largest and most modern resorts.
Twenty-six years later, that arrangement stands: the state owns and operates Cannon, and owns Sunapee but leases it to a private operator (Vail Resorts assumed or renewed the lease when they purchased the Muellers’ Triple Peaks company, which included Okemo and Crested Butte, Colorado, in 2018). As part of that contract, a portion of Sunapee’s revenues each year funnel into a capital fund for Cannon.
So, does this arrangement work? For Vail, for the state, for taxpayers, for Sunapee, and for Cannon? As we consider the future of skiing, these are important questions: to what extent should the state sponsor recreation, especially when that form of recreation competes directly against private, tax-paying businesses who are, essentially, subsidizing their competition? It’s tempting to offer a reflexive ideological answer here, but nuance interrupts us at ground-level. Alterra, for instance, leases and operates Winter Park from the City of Denver. Seems logical, but a peak-day walk-up Winter Park lift ticket will cost you around $260 for the 2024-25 winter. Is this a fair one-day entry fee for a city-owned entity?
The story of Mount Sunapee, a prominent and busy ski area in a prominent and busy ski state, is an important part of that larger should-government-own-ski-areas conversation. The state seems happy to let Vail run their mountain, but equally happy to continue running Cannon. That’s curious, especially in a state with a libertarian streak that often pledges allegiance by hoisting two middle fingers skyward. The one-private-one-public arrangement was a logical experiment that, 26 years later, is starting to feel a bit schizophrenic, illustrative of the broader social and economic complexities of changing who runs a business and how they do that. Is Vail Resorts better at running commercial ski centers than the State of New Hampshire? They sure as hell should be. But are they? And should Sunapee serve as a template for New York and the other states, counties, and cities that own ski areas? To decide if it works, we first have to understand how it works, and we spend a big part of this interview doing exactly that.
What I got wrong
* When listing the Vail Resorts with paid parking lots, I accidentally slipped Sunapee in place of Mount Snow, Vermont. Only the latter has paid parking.
* When asking Disch about Sunapee’s masterplan, I accidentally tossed Sunapee into Vail’s Peak Resorts acquisition in 2019. But Peak never operated Sunapee. The resort entered Vail’s portfolio as part of its acquisition of Triple Peaks – which also included Okemo and Crested Butte – in 2018.
* I neglected to elaborate on what a “chondola” lift is. It’s a lift that alternates (usually six-person) chairs with (usually eight-person) gondola cabins. The only active such lift in New England is at Sunday River, but Arizona Snowbowl, Northstar, Copper Mountain, and Beaver Creek operate six/eight-passenger chondolas in the American West. Telluride runs a short chondola with four-person chairs and four-person gondola cars.
* I said that the six New England states combined covered an area “less than half the size of Colorado.” This is incorrect: the six New England states, combined, cover 71,987 square miles; Colorado is 103,610 square miles.
Why you should ski Mount Sunapee
Ski area rankings are hard. Properly done, they include dozens of inputs, considering every facet of the mountain across the breadth of a season from the point of view of multiple skiers. Sunapee on an empty midweek powder day might be the best day of your life. Sunapee on a Saturday when it hasn’t snowed in three weeks but everyone in Boston shows up anyway might be the worst. For this reason, I largely avoid assembling lists of the best or worst this or that and abstain, mostly, from criticizing mountain ops – the urge to let anecdote stand in for observable pattern and truth is strong.
So when I do stuff ski areas into a hierarchy, it’s generally grounded in what’s objective and observable: Cottonwoods snow really is fluffier and more bounteous than almost all other snow; Tahoe resort density really does make it one of the world’s great ski centers; Northern Vermont really does deliver far deeper snow and better average conditions than the rest of New England. In that same shaky, room-for-caveats manner, I’m comfortable saying this: Mount Sunapee’s South Peak delivers one of the best beginner/novice experiences in the Northeast.
Arrive childless and experienced, and it’s likely you’ll ignore this zone altogether. Which is precisely what makes it so great: almost completely cut off from the main mountain, South Peak is free from high-altitude bombers racing back to the lifts. Three progression carpets offer the perfect ramp-up experience. The 374-vertical-foot quad rises high enough to feel grown-up without stoking the summit lakeview vertigo. The trails are gently tilted but numerous and interesting. Other than potential for an errant turn down Sunnyside toward the Sunapee Express, it’s almost impossible to get lost. It’s as though someone chopped a mid-sized Midwest ski area from the earth, airlifted it east, and stapled it onto the edge of Sunapee:
A few other Northeast ski areas offer this sort of ski-area-within-a-ski-area beginner separation – Burke, Belleayre, Whiteface, and Smugglers’ Notch all host expansive standalone beginner zones. But Sunapee’s is one of the easiest to access for New England’s core Boston market, and, because of the Epic Pass, one of the most affordable.
For everyone else, Sunapee’s main mountain distills everything that is great and terrible about New England skiing: a respectable vertical drop; a tight, complex, and varied trail network; a detached-from-conditions determination to be outdoors in the worst of it. But also impossible weekend crowds, long snow draughts, a tendency to overgroom even when the snow does fall, and an over-emphasis on driving, with nowhere to stay on-mountain. But even when it’s not perfect, which it almost never is, Sunapee is always, objectively, a great natural ski mountain, a fall-line classic, a little outpost of the north suspiciously far south.
Podcast Notes
On Sunapee’s masterplan and West Bowl expansion
As a state park, Mount Sunapee is required to submit an updated masterplan every five years. The most transformative piece of this would be the West Bowl expansion, a 1,082-vertical-foot pod running skiers’ left off the current summit (right in purple on the map below):
The masterplan also proposes upgrades for several of Sunapee’s existing lifts, including the Sunapee Express and the Spruce and North Peak triples:
On past Storm Skiing Podcasts:
Disch mentions a recent podcast that I recorded with Attitash, New Hampshire GM Brandon Schwarz. You can listen to that here. I’ve also recorded pods with the leaders of a dozen other New Hampshire mountains:
* Wildcat GM JD Crichton (May 30, 2024)
* Gunstock President & GM Tom Day (April 15, 2024) – now retired
* Tenney Mountain GM Dan Egan (April 8, 2024) – no longer works at Tenney
* Cranmore President & GM Ben Wilcox (Oct. 16, 2023)
* Dartmouth Skiway GM Mark Adamczyk (June 12, 2023)
* Granite Gorge GM Keith Kreischer (May 30, 2023)
* Loon Mountain President & GM Brian Norton (Nov. 14, 2022)
* Pats Peak GM Kris Blomback (Sept. 26, 2022)
* Ragged Mountain GM Erik Barnes (April 26, 2022)
* Whaleback Mountain Executive Director Jon Hunt (June 16, 2021)
* Waterville Valley President & GM Tim Smith (Feb. 22, 2021)
* Cannon Mountain GM John DeVivo (Oct. 6, 2020) – now GM at Antelope Butte, Wyoming
On New England ski area density
Disch referenced the density of ski areas in New England. With 100 ski areas crammed into six states, this is without question the densest concentration of lift-served skiing in the United States. Here’s an inventory:
On the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)
From 1933 to 1942 – the height of the Great Depression – a federal government agency knows as the Civilian Conservation Corps recruited single men between the ages of 18 and 25 to “improve America’s public lands, forests, and parks.” Some of this work included the cutting of ski trails on then-virgin mountains, including Mount Sunapee. While the CCC trail is no longer in use on Sunapee, that first project sparked the notion of skiing on the mountain and led to the development of the ski area we know today.
On potential Northeast expansions and there being “a bunch that are proposed all over the region”
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but a few of the larger Northeast expansions that are creeping toward reality include a new trailpod at Berkshire East:
This massive, village-connecting expansion that would completely transform Waterville Valley:
The de-facto resurrection of New York’s lost Highmount ski area with an expansion from adjacent Belleayre:
And the monster proposed Western Territories expansion that could double the size of Sunday River. There’s no public map of this one presently available.
On high-speed ropetows
I’ll keep beating the crap out of this horse until you all realize that I’m right:
A high-speed ropetow at Spirit Mountain, Minnesota. Video by Stuart Winchester.
On Crotched proximity and night skiing
We talk briefly about past plans for night-skiing on Sunapee, and Disch argues that, while that may have made sense when the Muellers owned the ski area, it’s no longer likely since Vail also owns Crotched, which hosts one of New England’s largest night-skiing operations less than an hour south. It’s a fantastic little operation, a once-abandoned mountain completely rebuilt from the studs by Peak Resorts:
On the Epic Day Pass
Here’s another thing I don’t plan to stop talking about ever:
The Storm explores the world of North American lift-served skiing year-round. Join us.
The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 48/100 in 2024, and number 548 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 subscribers’ inboxes on July 7. It dropped for free subscribers on July 14. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:
Who
Chip Chase, Founder and Owner of White Grass Ski Touring Center, West Virginia
Recorded on
May 16, 2024
About White Grass Touring Center
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: Chip Chase
Located in: Davis, West Virginia
Year founded: 1979 (at a different location)
Pass affiliations: Indy Pass and Indy+ Pass: 2 days, no blackouts
Closest neighboring ski areas: Canaan Valley (8 minutes), Timberline (11 minutes)
Base elevation: 3,220 feet (below the lodge)
Summit elevation: 4,463 feet (atop Weiss Knob)
Vertical drop: 1,243 feet
Skiable Acres: 2,500
Average annual snowfall: 140 inches
Trail count: 42 (50 km of maintained trails)
Lift count: None
Why I interviewed him
One habit I’ve borrowed from the mostly now-defunct U.S. ski magazines is their unapologetic focus always and only on Alpine skiing. This is not a snowsports newsletter or a wintertime recreation newsletter or a mountain lifestyle newsletter. I’m not interested in ice climbing or snowshoeing or even snowboarding, which I’ve never attempted and probably never will. I’m not chasing the hot fads like Norwegian goat fjording, which is where you paddle around glaciers in an ice canoe, with an assist tow from a swimming goat. And I’ve narrowed the focus much more than my traditionalist antecedents, avoiding even passing references to food, drink, lodging, gear, helicopters, snowcats, whacky characters, or competitions of any kind (one of the principal reasons I ski is that it is an unmeasured, individualistic sport).
Which, way to squeeze all the fun out of it, Stu. But shearing off 90 percent of all possible subject matter allows me to cover the small spectrum of things that I do actually care about – the experience of traveling to and around a lift-served snowsportskiing facility, with a strange side obsession with urban planning and land-use policy – over the broadest possible geographic area (currently the entire United States and Canada, though mostly that’s Western Canada right now because I haven’t yet consumed quantities of ayahuasca sufficient to unlock the intellectual and spiritual depths where the names and statistical profiles of all 412* Quebecois ski areas could dwell).
So that’s why I don’t write about cross-country skiing or cross-country ski centers. Sure, they’re Alpine skiing-adjacent, but so is lift-served MTB and those crazy jungle gym swingy-bridge things and ziplining and, like, freaking ice skating. If I covered everything that existed around a lift-served ski area, I would quickly grow bored with this whole exercise. Because frankly the only thing I care about is skiing.
Downhill skiing. The uphill part, much as it’s fetishized by the ski media and the self-proclaimed hardcore, is a little bit confusing. Because you’re going the wrong way, man. No one shows up at Six Flags and says oh actually I would prefer to walk to the top of Dr. Diabolical’s Cliffhanger. Like do you not see the chairlift sitting right f*****g there?
But here we are anyway: I’m featuring a cross-country skiing center on my podcast that’s stubbornly devoted always and only to Alpine skiing. And not just a cross-country ski center, but one that, by the nature of its layout, requires some uphill travel to complete most loops. Why would I do this to myself, and to my readers/listeners?
Well, several factors collided to interest me in White Grass, including:
* The ski area sits on the site of an abandoned circa-1950s downhill ski area, Weiss Knob. White Grass has incorporated much of the left-over refuse – the lodge, the ropetow engines – into the functioning or aesthetic of the current business. The first thing you see upon arrival at White Grass is a mainline clearcut rising above a huddle of low-slung buildings – Weiss Knob’s old maintrail.
* White Grass sits between two active downhill ski areas: Timberline, a former podcast subject that is among the best-run operations in America, and state-owned Canaan Valley, a longtime Indy Pass partner. It’s possible to ski across White Grass from either direction to connect all three ski areas into one giant odyssey.
* White Grass is itself an Indy Pass partner, one of 43 Nordic ski areas on the pass last year (Indy has yet to finalize its 2024-25 roster).
* White Grass averages 95 days of annual operation despite having no snowmaking. On the East Coast. In the Mid-Atlantic. They’re able to do this because, yes, they sit at a 3,220-foot base elevation (higher than anything in New England; Saddleback, in Maine, is the highest in that region, at 2,460 feet), but also because they have perfected the art of snow-farming. Chase tells me they’ve never missed a season altogether, despite sitting at the same approximate latitude as Washington, D.C.
* While I don’t care about going uphill at a ski area that’s equipped with mechanical lifts, I do find the notion of an uphill-only ski area rather compelling. Because it’s a low-impact, high-vibe concept that may be the blueprint for future new-ski-area development in a U.S. America that’s otherwise allergic to building things because oh that mud puddle over there is actually a fossilized brontosaurus footprint or something. That’s why I covered the failed Bluebird Backcountry. Like what if we had a ski area without the avalanche danger of wandering into the mountains and without the tension with lift-ticket holders who resent the a.m. chewing-up of their cord and pow? While it does not market itself this way, White Grass is in fact such a center, an East Coast Bluebird Backcountry that allows and is seeing growing numbers of people who like to make skiing into work AT Bros.
All of which, I’ll admit, still makes White Grass lift-served-skiing adjacent, somewhere on the spectrum between snowboarding (basically the same experience as far as lifts and terrain are concerned) and ice canoeing (yes I’m just making crap up). But Chase reached out to me and I stopped in and skied around in January completely stupid to the fact that I was about to have a massive heart attack and die, and I just kind of fell in love with the place: its ambling, bucolic setting; its improvised, handcrafted feel; its improbable existence next door to and amid the Industrial Ski Machine.
So here we are: something a little different. Don’t worry, this will not become a cross-country ski podcast, but if I mix one in every 177 episodes or so, I hope you’ll understand.
*The actual number of operating ski areas in Quebec is 412,904.
What we talked about
White Grass’ snow-blowing microclimate; why White Grass’ customers tend to be “easy to please”; “we don’t need a million skiers – we just need a couple hundred”; snow farming – what it is and how it works; White Grass’ double life in the summer; a brief history of the abandoned/eventually repurposed Weiss Knob ski area; considering snowmaking; 280 inches of snow in West Virginia; why West Virginia; the state’s ski culture; where and when Chase founded White Grass, and why he moved it to its current location; how an Alpine skier fell for the XC world; how a ski area electric bill is “about $5 per day”; preserving what remains of Weiss Knob; White Grass’ growing AT community; the mountain’s “incredible” glade skiing; whether Chase ever considered a chairlift at White Grass; is atmosphere made or does it happen?; “the last thing I want to do is retire”; Chip’s favorite ski areas; an argument for slow downhill skiing; the neighboring Timberline and Canaan Valley; why Timberline is “bound for glory”; the Indy Pass; XC grooming; and White Grass’ shelter system.
Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview
I kind of hate the word “authentic,” at least in the context of skiing. It’s a little bit reductive and way too limiting. It implies that nothing planned or designed or industrially scaled can ever achieve a greater cultural resonance than a TGI Friday’s. By this definition, Vail Mountain – with its built-from-the-wilderness walkable base village, high-speed lift fleet, and corporate marquee – fails the banjo-strumming rubric set by the Authenticity Police, despite being one of our greatest ski centers. Real-ass skiers, don’t you know, only ride chairlifts powered from windmills hand-built by 17th Century Dutch immigrants. Everything else is corporate b******t. (Unless those high-speed lifts are at Alta or Wolf Creek or Revelstoke – then they’re real as f**k Brah; do you see how stupid this all is?)
Still, I understand the impulses stoking that sentiment. Roughly one out of every four U.S. skier visits is at a Vail Resort. About one in four is in Colorado. That puts a lot of pressure on a relatively small number of ski centers to define the activity for an enormous percentage of the skiing population. “Authentic,” I think, has become a euphemism for “not standing in a Saturday powder-day liftline that extends down Interstate 70 to Topeka with a bunch of people from Manhattan who don’t know how to ski powder.” Or, in other words, a place where you can ski without a lot of crowding and expense and the associated hassles.
White Grass succeeds in offering that. Here are the prices:
Here is the outside of the lodge:
And the inside:
Here is the rental counter:
And here’s the lost-and-found, in case you lose something (somehow they actually fit skis in there; it’s like one of those magic tents from Harry Potter that looks like a commando bivouac from the outside but expands into King Tut’s palace once you walk in):
The whole operation is simple, approachable, affordable, and relaxed. This is an everyone-in-the-base-lodge-seems-to-know-one-another kind of spot, an improbable backwoods redoubt along those ever-winding West Virginia roads, a snow hole in the map where no snow makes sense, as though driving up the access road rips you through a wormhole to some different, less-complicated world.
What I got wrong
I said the base areas for Stowe, Sugarbush, and Killington sat “closer to 2,000 feet, or even below that.” The actual numbers are: Stowe (1,559 feet), Sugarbush (1,483 feet), Killington (1,165 feet).
I accidentally referred to the old Weiss Knob ski area as “White Knob” one time.
Why you should ski White Grass
There are not a lot of skiing options in the Southeast, which I consider the ski areas seated along the Appalachians running from Cloudmont in Alabama up through Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland. There are only 18 ski areas in the entire region, and most would count even fewer, since Snowshoe Bro gets Very Mad at me when I count Silver Creek as a separate ski area (which it once was until Snowshoe purchased it in 1992, and still is physically until/unless Alterra ever develops this proposed interconnect from 1978):
No one really agrees on what Southeast skiing is. The set of ski states I outline above is the same one that Ski Southeast covers. DC Ski includes Pennsylvania (home to another 20-plus ski areas), which from a cultural, travel, and demographic standpoint makes sense. Things start to feel very different in New York, though Open Snow’s Mid-Atlantic updates include all of the state’s ski areas south of the Adirondacks.
Anyway, the region’s terrain, from a fall line, pure-skiing point of view, is actually quite good, especially in good snow years. The lift infrastructure tends to be far more modern than what you’ll find in, say, the Midwest. And the vertical drops and overall terrain footprints are respectable. Megapass penetration is deep, and you can visit a majority of the region with an Epic, Indy, or Ikon Pass:
However. Pretty much everything from the Poconos on south tends to be mobbed at all times by novice skiers. The whole experience can be tainted by an unruly dynamic of people who don’t understand how liftlines work and ski areas that make no effort to manage liftlines. It kind of sucks, frankly, during busy times. And if this is your drive-to region, you may be in search of an alternative. White Grass, with its absence of lifts and therefore liftlines, can at least deliver a different story for your weekend ski experience.
It's also just kind of an amazing place to behold. I often describe West Virginia as the forgotten state. It’s surrounded by Pennsylvania (sixth in population among the 50 U.S. states, with 13 million residents), Ohio (8th, 11.8 M), Kentucky (27th, 4.5 M), Virginia (13th, 8.7 M), and Maryland (20th, 6.2 M). And yet West Virginia ranks 40th among U.S. states in population, with just 1.8 million people. That fact – despite the state’s size (it’s twice as large as Maryland) and location at the crossroads of busy transcontinental corridors – is explained by the abrupt, fortress-like mountains that have made travel into and through the state slow and inconvenient for centuries. You can crisscross parts of West Virginia on interstate highways and the still-incomplete Corridor H, but much of the state’s natural awe lies down narrow, never-straight roads that punch through a raw and forgotten wilderness, dotted, every so often, with industrial wreckage and towns wherever the flats open up for an acre or 10. Other than the tailgating pickup trucks, it doesn’t feel anything like America. It doesn’t really feel like anything else at all. It’s just West Virginia, a place that’s impossible to imagine until you see it.
Podcast Notes
On Weiss Knob Ski Area (1959)
I can’t find any trailmaps for Weiss Knob, the legacy lift-served ski area that White Grass is built on top of. But Chip and his team have kept the main trail clear:
It rises dramatically over the base area:
Ski up and around, and you’ll find remnants of the ropetows:
West Virginia Snow Sports Museum hall-of-famers Bob and Anita Barton founded Weiss Knob in 1955. From the museum’s website:
While the Ski Club of Washington, DC was on a mission to find an elusive ski drift in West Virginia, Bob was on a parallel mission. By 1955, Bob had installed a 1,200-foot rope tow next door to the Ski Club's Driftland. The original Weiss Knob Ski Area was on what is now the "Meadows" at Canaan Valley Resort. By 1958, Weiss Knob featured two rope tows and a T-bar lift.
In 1959, Bob moved Weiss Knob to the back of Bald Knob (out of the wind) on what is now White Grass Touring Center.
According to Chase, the Bartons went on to have some involvement in a “ski area up at Alpine Lake.” This was, according to DC Ski, a 450-footer with a handful of surface lifts. Here’s a circa 1980 trailmap:
The place is still in business, though they dismantled the downhill ski operation decades ago.
On the three side-by-side ski areas
White Grass sits directly between two lift-served ski areas: state-owned Canaan Valley and newly renovated Timberline. Here’s an overview of each:
Timberline
Base elevation: 3,268 feet
Summit elevation: 4,268 feet
Vertical drop: 1,000 feet
Skiable Acres: 100
Average annual snowfall: 150 inches
Trail count: 20 (2 double-black, 2 black, 6 intermediate, 10 beginner), plus two named glades and two terrain parks
Lift count: 4 (1 high-speed six-pack, 1 fixed-grip quad, 2 carpets - view Lift Blog’s inventory of Timberline’s lift fleet)
Canaan Valley
Base elevation: 3,430 feet
Summit elevation: 4,280 feet
Vertical drop: 850 feet
Skiable Acres: 95
Average annual snowfall: 117 inches
Trail count: 47 (44% advanced/expert, 36% intermediate, 20% beginner)
Lift count: 4 (1 fixed-grip quad, 2 triples, 1 carpet - view Lift Blog’s inventory of Canaan Valley’s lift fleet)
And here’s what they all look like side-by-side IRL:
On other podcast interviews
Chip referenced a couple of previous Storm Skiing Podcasts: SMI Snow Makers President Joe VanderKelen and Snowbasin GM Davy Ratchford. You can view the full archive (as well as scheduled podcasts) here.
On West Virginia statistics
Chase cited a few statistical rankings for West Virginia that I couldn’t quite verify:
* On West Virginia being the only U.S. state that is “100 percent mountains” – I couldn’t find affirmation of this exactly, though I certainly believe it’s more mountainous than the big Western ski states, most of which are more plains than mountains. Vermont can feel like nothing but mountains, with just a handful of north-south routes cut through the state. Maybe Hawaii? I don’t know. Some of these stats are harder to verify than I would have guessed.
* On West Virginia as the “second-most forested U.S. state behind Maine” – sources were a bit more consistent on this: every one confirmed Maine as the most-forested state (with nearly 90 percent of its land covered), then listed New Hampshire as second (~84 percent), and West Virginia as third (79 percent).
* On West Virginia being “the only state in the nation where the population is dropping” – U.S. Census Bureau data suggests that eight U.S. states lost residents last year: New York (-0.52), Louisiana (-0.31%), Hawaii (-0.3%), Illinois (-0.26%), West Virginia (-0.22%), California (-0.19%), Oregon (-0.14%), and Pennsylvania (-0.08%).
On the White Grass documentary
There are a bunch of videos on White Grass’ website. This is the most recent:
On other atmospheric ski areas
Chase mentions a number of ski areas that deliver the same sort of atmospheric charge as White Grass. I’ve featured a number of them on past podcasts, including Mad River Glen, Mount Bohemia, Palisades Tahoe, Snowbird, and Bolton Valley.
On the Soul of Alta movie
Alta also made Chase’s list, and he calls out the recent Soul of Alta movie as being particularly resonant of the mountain’s special vibe:
On resentment and New York State-owned ski areas
I refer briefly to the ongoing resentment between New York’s privately owned, tax-paying ski areas and the trio of heavily subsidized state-owned operations: Gore, Whiteface, and Belleayre. I’ve detailed that conflict numerous times. This interview with the owners of Plattekill, which sits right down the road from Belle, crystalizes the main conflict points.
On White Grass’ little shelters all over the trails
These are just so cool:
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 46/100 in 2024, and number 546 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019.
Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe -
Estão a faltar episódios?
-
This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on June 26. It dropped for free subscribers on July 3. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:
Who
JD Crichton, General Manager of Wildcat Mountain, New Hampshire
Recorded on
May 30, 2024
About Wildcat
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: Vail Resorts
Located in: Gorham, New Hampshire
Year founded: 1933 (lift service began in 1957)
Pass affiliations:
* Epic Pass, Epic Local Pass, Northeast Value Pass – unlimited access
* Northeast Midweek Pass – unlimited weekday access
Closest neighboring ski areas: Black Mountain, New Hampshire (:18), Attitash (:22), Cranmore (:28), Sunday River (:45), Mt. Prospect Ski Tow (:46), Mt. Abram (:48), Bretton Woods (:48), King Pine (:50), Pleasant Mountain (:57), Cannon (1:01), Mt. Eustis Ski Hill (1:01)
Base elevation: 1,950 feet
Summit elevation: 4,062 feet
Vertical drop: 2,112 feet
Skiable Acres: 225
Average annual snowfall: 200 inches
Trail count: 48 (20% beginner, 47% intermediate, 33% advanced)
Lift count: 5 (1 high-speed quad, 3 triples, 1 carpet)
Why I interviewed him
I’ve always been skeptical of acquaintances who claim to love living in New Jersey because of “the incredible views of Manhattan.” Because you know where else you can find incredible views of Manhattan? In Manhattan. And without having to charter a hot-air balloon across the river anytime you have to go to work or see a Broadway play.*
But sometimes views are nice, and sometimes you want to be adjacent-to-but-not-necessarily-a-part-of something spectacular and dramatic. And when you’re perched summit-wise on Wildcat, staring across the street at Mount Washington, the most notorious and dramatic peak on the eastern seaboard, it’s hard to think anything other than “damn.”
Flip the view and the sentiment reverses as well. The first time I saw Wildcat was in summertime, from the summit of Mount Washington. Looking 2,200 feet down, from above treeline, it’s an almost quaint-looking ski area, spare but well-defined, its spiderweb trail network etched against the wild Whites. It feels as though you could reach down and put it in your pocket. If you didn’t know you were looking at one of New England’s most abrasive ski areas, you’d probably never guess it.
Wildcat could feel tame only beside Mount Washington, that open-faced deathtrap hunched against 231-mile-per-hour winds. Just, I suppose, as feisty New Jersey could only seem placid across the Hudson from ever-broiling Manhattan. To call Wildcat the New Jersey of ski areas would seem to imply some sort of down-tiering of the thing, but over two decades on the East Coast, I’ve come to appreciate oft-abused NJ as something other than New York City overflow. Ignore the terrible drivers and the concrete-bisected arterials and the clusters of third-world industry and you have a patchwork of small towns and beach towns, blending, to the west and north, with the edges of rolling Appalachia, to the south with the sweeping Pine Barrens, to the east with the wild Atlantic.
It’s actually pretty nice here across the street, is my point. Even if it’s not quite as cozy as it looks. This is a place as raw and wild and real as any in the world, a thing that, while forever shadowed by its stormy neighbor, stands just fine on its own.
*It’s not like living in New Jersey is some kind of bargain. It’s like paying Club Thump Thump prices for grocery store Miller Lite. Or at least that was my stance until I moved my smug ass to Brooklyn.
What we talked about
Mountain cleanup day; what it took to get back to long seasons at Wildcat and why they were truncated for a handful of winters; post-Vail-acquisition snowmaking upgrades; the impact of a $20-an-hour minimum wage on rural New Hampshire; various bargain-basement Epic Pass options; living through major resort acquisitions; “there is no intention to make us all one and the same”; a brief history of Wildcat; how skiers lapped Wildcat before mechanical lifts; why Wildcat Express no longer transforms from a chairlift to a gondola for summer ops; contemplating Wildcat Express replacements; retroactively assessing the removal of the Catapult lift; the biggest consideration in determining the future of Wildcat’s lift fleet; when a loaded chair fell off the Snowcat lift in 2022; potential base area development; and Attitash as sister resort.
Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview
Since it’s impossible to discuss any Vail mountain without discussing Vail Resorts, I’ll go ahead and start there. The Colorado-based company’s 2019 acquisition of wild Wildcat (along with 16 other Peak resorts), met the same sort of gasp-oh-how-can-corporate-Vail-ever-possibly-manage-a-mountain-that-doesn’t-move-skiers-around-like-the-fat-humans-on-the-space-base-in-Wall-E that greeted the acquisitions of cantankerous Crested Butte (2018), Whistler (2016), and Kirkwood (2012). It’s the same sort of worry-warting that Alterra is up against as it tries to close the acquisition of Arapahoe Basin. But, as I detailed in a recent podcast episode on Kirkwood, the surprising thing is how little can change at these Rad Brah outposts even a dozen years after The Consumption Event.
But, well. At first the Angry Ski Bros of upper New England seemed validated. Vail really didn’t do a great job of running Wildcat from 2019 to 2022-ish. The confluence of Covid, inherited deferred maintenance, unfamiliarity with the niceties of East Coast operations, labor shortages, Wal-Mart-priced passes, and the distractions caused by digesting 20 new ski areas in one year contributed to shortened seasons, limited terrain, understaffed operations, and annoyed customers. It didn’t help when a loaded chair fell off the Snowcat triple in 2022. Vail may have run ski resorts for decades, but the company had never encountered anything like the brash, opinionated East, where ski areas are laced tightly together, comparisons are easy, and migrations to another mountain if yours starts to suck are as easy as a five-minute drive down the road.
But Vail is settling into the Northeast, making major lift upgrades at Stowe, Mount Snow, Okemo, Attitash, and Hunter since 2021. Mandatory parking reservations have helped calm once-unmanageable traffic around Stowe and Mount Snow. The Epic Pass – particularly the northeast-specific versions – has helped to moderate region-wide season pass prices that had soared to well over $1,000 at many ski areas. The company now seems to understand that this isn’t Keystone, where you can make snow in October and turn the system off for 11 months. While Vail still seems plodding in Pennsylvania and the lower Midwest, where seasons are too short and the snowmaking efforts often underwhelming, they appear to have cracked New England – operationally if not always necessarily culturally.
That’s clear at Wildcat, where seasons are once again running approximately five months, operations are fully staffed, and the pitchforks are mostly down. Wildcat has returned to the fringe, where it belongs, to being an end-of-the-road day-trip alternative for people who prefer ski areas to ski resorts (and this is probably the best ski-area-with-no-public-onsite lodging in New England). Locals I speak with are generally happy with the place, which, this being New England, means they only complain about it most of the time, rather than all of the time. Short of moving the mountain out of its tempestuous microclimate and into Little Cottonwood Canyon, there isn’t much Vail could do to change that, so I’d suggest taking the win.
What I got wrong
When discussing the installation of the Wildcat Express and the decommissioning of the Catapult triple, I made a throwaway reference to “whoever owned the mountain in the late ‘90s.” The Franchi family owned Wildcat from 1986 until selling the mountain to Peak Resorts in 2010.
Why you should ski Wildcat
There isn’t much to Wildcat other than skiing. A parking lot, a baselodge, scattered small buildings of unclear utility - all of them weather-beaten and slightly ramshackle, humanity’s sad ornaments on nature’s spectacle.
But the skiing. It’s the only thing there is and it’s the only thing that matters. One high-speed lift straight to the top. There are other lifts but if the 2,041-vertical-foot Wildcat Express is spinning you probably won’t even notice, let alone ride, them. Straight up, straight down. All day long or until your fingers fall off, which will probably take about 45 minutes.
The mountain doesn’t look big but it is big. Just a few trails off the top but these quickly branch infinitely like some wild seaside mangrove, funneling skiers, whatever their intent, into various savage channels of its bell-shaped footprint. Descending the steepness, Mount Washington, so prominent from the top, disappears, somehow too big to be seen, a paradox you could think more about if you weren’t so preoccupied with the skiing.
It's not that the skiing is great, necessarily. When it’s great it’s amazing. But it’s almost never amazing. It’s also almost never terrible. What it is, just about all the time, is a fight, a mottled, potholed, landmine-laced mother-bleeper of a mountain that will not cede a single turn without a little backtalk. This is not an implication of the mountain ops team. Wildcat is about as close to an un-tamable mountain as you’ll find in the over-groomed East. If you’ve ever tried building a sandcastle in a rising tide, you have a sense of what it’s like trying to manage this cantankerous beast with its impossible weather and relentless pitch.
We talk a bit, on the podcast, about Wildcat’s better-than-you’d-suppose beginner terrain and top-to-bottom green trail. But no one goes there for that. The easy stuff is a fringe benefit for edgier families, who don’t want to pinch off the rapids just because they’re pontooning on the lake. Anyone who truly wants to coast knows to go to Bretton Woods or Cranmore. Wildcat packs the rowdies like jacket-flask whisky, at hand for the quick hit or the bender, for as dicey a day as you care to make it.
Podcast Notes
On long seasons at Wildcat
Wildcat, both under the Franchi family (1986 to 2010), and Peak Resorts, had made a habit of opening early and closing late. During Vail Resorts’ first three years running the mountain, those traditions slipped, with later-than-normal openings and earlier-than-usual closings. Obviously we toss out the 2020 early close, but fall 2020 to spring 2022 were below historical standards. Per New England Ski History:
On Big Lifts: New England Edition
I noted that the Wildcat Express quad delivered one of the longest continuous vertical rises of any New England lift. I didn’t actually know where the machine ranked, however, so I made this chart. The quad lands at an impressive number five among all lifts, and is third among chairlifts, in the six-state region:
Kind of funny that, even in 2024, two of the 10 biggest vertical drops in New England still belong to fixed-grip chairs (also arguably the two best terrain pods in Vermont, with Madonna at Smuggs and the single at MRG).
The tallest lifts are not always the longest lifts, and Wildcat Express ranks as just the 13th-longest lift in New England. A surprise entrant in the top 15 is Stowe’s humble Toll House double, a 6,400-foot-long chairlift that rises just 890 vertical feet. Another inconspicuous double chair – Sugarloaf’s older West Mountain lift – would have, at 6,968 feet, have made this list (at No. 10) before the resort shortened it last year (to 4,130 feet). It’s worth noting that, as far as I know, Sugarbush’s Slide Brook Express is the longest chairlift in the world.
On Herman Mountain
Crichton grew up skiing at Hermon Mountain, a 300-ish footer outside of Bangor, Maine. The bump still runs the 1966 Poma T-bar that he skied off of as a kid, as well as a Stadeli double moved over from Pleasant Mountain in 1998 (and first installed there, according to Lift Blog, in 1967. The most recent Hermon Mountain trailmap that I can find dates to 2007:
On the Epic Northeast Value Pass versus other New England season passes
Vail’s Epic Northeast Value Pass is a stupid good deal: $613 for unlimited access to the company’s four New Hampshire ski areas (Wildcat, Attitash, Mount Sunapee, Crotched), non-holiday access to Mount Snow and Okemo, and 10 non-holiday days at Stowe (plus access to Hunter and everything Vail operates in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan). Surveying New England’s 25 largest ski areas, the Northeast Value Pass is less-expensive than all but Smugglers’ Notch ($599), Black Mountain of Maine ($465), Pico ($539), and Ragged ($529). All of those save Ragged’s are single-mountain passes.
On the Epic Day Pass
Yes I am still hung up on the Epic Day Pass, and here’s why:
On consolidation
I referenced Powdr’s acquisition of Copper Mountain in 2009 and Vail’s purchase of Crested Butte in 2018. Here’s an inventory all the U.S. ski areas owned by a company with two or more resorts:
On Wildcat’s old Catapult lift
When Wildcat installed its current summit chair in 1997, they removed the Catapult triple, a shorter summit lift (Lift F below) that had provided redundancy to the summit alongside the old gondola (Lift A):
Interestingly, the old gondy, which dated to 1957, remained in place for two more years. Here’s a circa 1999 trailmap, showing both the Wildcat Express and the gondola running parallel from base to summit:
It’s unclear how often both lifts actually ran simultaneously in the winter, but the gondola died with the 20th Century. The Wildcat Express was a novel transformer lift, which converted from a high-speed quad chair in the winter to a four-passenger gondola in the summer. Vail, for reasons Crichton explains in the podcast, abandoned that configuration and appears to have no intentions of restoring it.
On the Snowcat lift incident
A bit more on the January 2022 chairlift accident at Wildcat, per SAM:
On Saturday, Jan. 8, a chair carrying a 22-year-old snowboarder on the Snowcat triple at Wildcat Mountain, N.H., detached from the haul rope and fell nearly 10 feet to the ground. Wildcat The guest was taken to a nearby hospital with serious rib injuries.
According to state fire marshal Sean Toomey, the incident began after the chair was misloaded—meaning the guest was not properly seated on the chair as it continued moving out of the loading area. The chair began to swing as it traveled uphill, struck a lift tower and detached from the haul rope, falling to the ground.
Snowcat is a still-active Riblet triple, and attaches to the haulrope with a device called an “insert clip.” I found this description of these novel devices on a random blog from 2010, so maybe don’t include this in a report to Congress on the state of the nation’s lift fleet:
[Riblet] closed down in 2003. There are still quite a few around; from the three that originally were at The Canyons, only the Golden Eagle chair survives today. Riblet built some 500 lifts. The particularities of the Riblet chair are their grips, which are called insert clips. It is a very ingenious device and it is very safe too. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, You'll see a sketch below showing the detail of the clip.
… One big benefit of the clip is that it provides a very smooth ride over the sheave trains, particularly under the compression sheaves, something that traditional clam/jaw grips cannot match. The drawback is that the clip cannot be visually inspected at it is the case with other grips. Also, the code required to move the grip every 2 years or 2,000 hours, whichever comes first. This is the same with traditional grips.
This is a labor-intensive job and a special tool has been developed: The Riblet "Grip Detensioner." It's showed on a second picture representing the tool in action. You can see the cable in the middle with the strands separated, which allows the insertion of the clip. Also, the fiber or plastic core of the wire rope has to be cut where the clip is inserted. When the clip is moved to another location of the cable, a plastic part has to be placed into the cable to replace the missing piece of the core. Finally, the Riblet clip cannot be placed on the spliced section of the rope.
Loaded chairs utilizing insert clips also detached from lifts at Snowriver (2021) and 49 Degrees North (2020). An unoccupied, moving chair fell from Heavenly’s now-retired North Bowl triple in 2016.
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 44/100 in 2024, and number 544 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 subscribers’ inboxes on June 10. It dropped for free subscribers on June 17. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:
Who
Belinda Trembath, Vice President & Chief Operating Officer of Whistler Blackcomb, British Columbia
Recorded on
June 3, 2024
About Whistler Blackcomb
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: Vail Resorts (majority owners; Nippon Cable owns a 25 percent stake in Whistler Blackcomb)
Located in: Whistler, British Columbia
Year founded: 1966
Pass affiliations:
* Epic Pass: unlimited
* Epic Local Pass: 10 holiday-restricted days, shared with Vail Mountain and Beaver Creek
Closest neighboring ski areas: Grouse Mountain (1:26), Cypress (1:30), Mt. Seymour (1:50) – travel times vary based upon weather conditions, time of day, and time of year
Base elevation: 2,214 feet (675 meters)
Summit elevation: 7,497 feet (2,284 meters)
Vertical drop: 5,283 feet (1,609 meters)
Skiable Acres: 8,171
Average annual snowfall: 408 inches (1,036 centimeters)
Trail count: 276 (20% easiest, 50% more difficult, 30% most difficult)
Lift count: A lot (1 28-passenger gondola, 3 10-passenger gondolas, 1 8-passenger gondola, 1 8-passenger pulse gondola, 8 high-speed quads, 4 six-packs, 1 eight-pack, 3 triples, 2 T-bars, 7 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Whistler Blackcomb’s lift fleet) – inventory includes upgrade of Jersey Cream Express from a quad to a six-pack for the 2024-25 ski season.
Why I interviewed her
Historical records claim that when Lewis and Clark voyaged west in 1804, they were seeking “the most direct and practicable water communication across this continent, for the purposes of commerce.” But they were actually looking for Whistler Blackcomb.
Or at least I think they were. What other reason is there to go west but to seek out these fabulous mountains, rising side by side and a mile* into the sky, where Pacific blow-off splinters into summit blizzards and packed humanity animates the village below?
There is nothing else like Whistler in North America. It is our most complete, and our greatest, ski resort. Where else does one encounter this collision of terrain, vertical, panorama, variety, and walkable life, interconnected with audacious aerial lifts and charged by a pilgrim-like massing of skiers from every piece and part of the world? Europe and nowhere else. Except for here.
Other North American ski resorts offer some of these things, and some of them offer better versions of them than Whistler. But none of them has all of them, and those that have versions of each fail to combine them all so fluidly. There is no better snow than Alta-Snowbird snow, but there is no substantive walkable village. There is no better lift than Jackson’s tram, but the inbounds terrain lacks scale and the town is miles away. There is no better energy than Palisades Tahoe energy, but the Pony Express is still carrying news of its existence out of California.
Once you’ve skied Whistler – or, more precisely, absorbed it and been absorbed by it – every other ski area becomes Not Whistler. The place lingers. You carry it around. Place it into every ski conversation. “Have you been to Whistler?” If not, you try to describe it. But it can’t be done. “Just go,” you say, and that’s as close as most of us can come to grabbing the raw power of the place.
*Or 1.6 Canadian Miles (sometimes referred to as “kilometers”).
What we talked about
Why skier visits dropped at Whistler-Blackcomb this past winter; the new Fitzsimmons eight-passenger express and what it took to modify a lift that had originally been intended for Park City; why skiers can often walk onto that lift with little to no wait; this summer’s Jersey Cream lift upgrade; why Jersey Cream didn’t require as many modifications as Fitzsimmons even though it was also meant for Park City; the complexity of installing a mid-mountain lift; why WB had to cancel 2024 summer skiing and what that means for future summer seasons; could we see a gondola serving the glacier instead?; Vail’s Australian trio of Mt. Hotham, Perisher, and Falls Creek; Whistler’s wild weather; the distinct identities of Blackcomb and Whistler; what WB means to Vail Resorts; WB’s Olympic legacy; Whistler’s surprisingly low base elevation and what that means for the visitor; WB’s relationship with local First Nations; priorities for future lift upgrades and potential changes to the Whistler gondola, Seventh Heaven, Whistler T-bar, Franz’s, Garbanzo; discussing proposed additional lifts in Symphony Bowl and elsewhere on Whistler; potential expansion into a fourth portal; potential new or upgraded lifts sketched out in Blackcomb Mountain’s masterplan; why WB de-commissioned the Hortsman T-Bar; missing the Wizard-to-Solar-Coaster access that the Blackcomb Gondola replaced; WB’s amazing self-managing lift mazes; My Epic App direct-to-lift access is coming to Whistler; employee housing; why Whistler’s season pass costs more than an Epic Pass; and Edge cards.
Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview
Four new major lifts in three years; the cancellation of summer skiing; “materially lower” skier visits at Whistler this past winter, as reported by Vail Resorts – all good topics, all enough to justify a check-in. Oh and the fact that Whistler Blackcomb is the largest ski area in the Western Hemisphere, the crown jewel in Vail’s sprawling portfolio, the single most important ski area on the continent.
And why is that? What makes this place so special? The answer lies only partly in its bigness. Whistler is vast. Whistler is thrilling. Whistler is everything you hope a ski area will be when you plan your winter vacation. But most important of all is that Whistler is proof.
Proof that such a place can exist in North America. U.S. America is stuck in a development cycle that typically goes like this:
* Ski area proposes a new expansion/base area development/chairlift/snowmaking upgrade.
* A small group of locals picks up the pitchforks because Think of the Raccoons/this will gut the character of our bucolic community of car-dependent sprawl/this will disrupt one very specific thing that is part of my personal routine that heavens me I just can’t give up.
* Said group files a lawsuit/formal objection/some other bureaucratic obstacle, halting the project.
* Resort justifies the project/adapts it to meet locals’ concerns/makes additional concessions in the form of land swaps, operational adjustments, infrastructure placement, and the like.
* Group insists upon maximalist stance of Do Nothing.
* Resort makes additional adjustments.
* Group is Still Mad
* Cycle repeats for years
* Either nothing ever gets done, or the project is built 10 to 15 years after its reveal and at considerable extra expense in the form of studies, legal fees, rising materials and labor costs, and expensive and elaborate modifications to accommodate one very specific thing, like you can’t operate the lift from May 1 to April 20 because that would disrupt the seahorse migration between the North and South Poles.
In BC, they do things differently. I’ve covered this extensively, in podcast conversations with the leaders of Sun Peaks, Red Mountain, and Panorama. The civic and bureaucratic structures are designed to promote and encourage targeted, smart development, leading to ever-expanding ski areas, human-scaled and walkable base area infrastructure, and plenty of slopeside or slope-adjacent accommodations.
I won’t exhaust that narrative again here. I bring it up only to say this: Whistler has done all of these things at a baffling scale. A large, vibrant, car-free pedestrian village where people live and work. A gargantuan lift across an unbridgeable valley. Constant infrastructure upgrades. Reliable mass transit. These things can be done. Whistler is proof.
That BC sits directly atop Washington State, where ski areas have to spend 15 years proving that installing a stop sign won’t undermine the 17-year cicada hatching cycle, is instructive. Whistler couldn’t exist 80 miles south. Maybe the ski area, but never the village. And why not? Such communities, so concentrated, require a small footprint in comparison to the sprawl of a typical development of single-family homes. Whistler’s pedestrian base village occupies an area around a half mile long and less than a quarter mile wide. And yet, because it is a walkable, mixed-use space, it cuts down reliance on driving, enlivens the ski area, and energizes the soul. It is proof that human-built spaces, properly conceived, can create something worthwhile in what, 50 years ago, was raw wilderness, even if they replace a small part of the natural world.
A note from Whistler on First Nations
Trembath and I discuss Whistler’s relationship with First Nations extensively, but her team sent me some follow-up information to clarify their role in the mountain’s development:
Belinda didn’t really have time to dive into a very important piece of the First Nations involvement in the operational side of things:
* There was significant engagement with First Nations as a part of developing the masterplans.
* Their involvement and support were critical to the approval of the masterplans and to ensuring that all parties and their respective communities will benefit from the next 60 years of operation.
* This includes the economic prosperity of First Nations – both the Squamish and Líl̓wat Nations will participate in operational success as partners.
* To ensure this, the Province of British Columbia, the Resort Municipality of Whistler, Whistler Blackcomb and the Squamish and Líl̓wat Nations are engaged in agreements on how to work together in the future.
* These agreements, known as the Umbrella Agreement, run concurrently with the Master Development Agreements and masterplans, providing a road map for our relationship with First Nations over the next 60 years of operations and development.
* Key requirements include Revenue Sharing, Real Estate Development, Employment, Contracting & Recreational Opportunities, Marketing and Tourism and Employee Housing. There is an Implementation Committee, which oversees the execution of the agreement.
* This is a landmark agreement and the only one of its kind within the mountain resort industry.
What we got wrong
I mentioned that “I’d never seen anything like” the lift mazes at Whistler, but that’s not quite accurate. Vail Resorts deploys similar setups throughout its western portfolio. What I hadn’t seen before is such choreographed and consistent navigation of these mazes by the skiers themselves. To watch a 500-person liftline squeeze itself into one loading ramp with no personnel direction or signage, and to watch nearly every chair lift off fully loaded, is to believe, at least for seven to nine minutes, in humanity as a worthwhile ongoing experiment.
I said that Edge Cards were available for up to six days of skiing. They’re actually available in two-, five-, or 10-day versions. If you’re not familiar with Edge cards, it’s because they’re only available to residents of Canada and Washington State.
Whistler officials clarified the mountain’s spring skiing dates, which Trembath said started on May 14. The actual dates were April 15 to May 20.
Why you should ski Whistler Blackcomb
You know that thing you do where you step outside and you can breathe as though you didn’t just remove your space helmet on the surface of Mars? You can do that at Whistler too. The village base elevation is 2,214 feet. For comparison’s sake: Salt Lake City’s airport sits at 4,227 feet; Denver’s is at 5,434. It only goes up from there. The first chairlifts sit at 6,800 feet in Park City; 8,100 at Snowbird; 8,120 at Vail; 8,530 at Alta; 8,750 at Brighton; 9,000 at Winter Park; 9,280 at Keystone; 9,600 at Breckenridge; 9,712 at Copper Mountain; and an incredible 10,780 feet at Arapahoe Basin. Taos sits at 9,200 feet. Telluride at 8,750. Adaptation can be brutal when parachuting in from sea level, or some nominal inland elevation above it, as most of us do. At 8,500 feet, I get winded searching my hotel room for a power outlet, let alone skiing, until my body adjusts to the thinner air. That Whistler requires no such reconfiguration of your atomic structure to do things like blink and speak is one of the more underrated features of the place.
Another underrated feature: Whistler Blackcomb is a fantastic family mountain. While Whistler is a flip-doodle factory of Stoke Brahs every bit the equal of Snowbird or Jackson Hole, it is not Snowbird or Jackson Hole. Which is to say, the place offers beginner runs that are more than across-the-fall line cat tracks and 300-vertical-foot beginner pods. While it’s not promoted like the celebrated Peak-to-Creek route, a green trail (or sequence of them), runs nearly 5,000 uninterrupted vertical feet from Whistler’s summit to the base village. In fact, with the exception of Blackcomb’s Glacier Express, every one of the ski area’s 16 chairlifts (even the fearsome Peak Express), and five gondolas offers a beginner route that you can ski all the way back to the base. Yes, some of them shuffle into narrow cat tracks for stretches, but mostly these are wide, approachable trails, endless and effortless, built, it seems, for ski-family safaris of the confidence-building sort.
Those are maybe the things you’re not thinking of. The skiing:
Most skiers start with one of the three out-of-base village gondolas, but the new Fitz eight-seater rarely has a line. Start there:
That’s mostly a transit lift. At the top, head up the Garbanzo quad, where you can start to understand the scale of the thing:
You’re still not quite to the goods. But to get a sense of the mountain, ski down to Big Red:
This will take you to Whistler’s main upper-mountain portal, Roundhouse. From Whistler, you can see Blackcomb strafing the sky:
From Roundhouse, it’s a short ski down to the Peak Express:
Depending upon your route down, you may end up back at Big Red. Ride back up to Roundhouse, then meander from Emerald to Harmony to Symphony lifts. For a moment on the way down Symphony, it feels like Euroski:
Just about everyone sticks to the narrow groomers:
But there are plenty of bumps and trees and wide-open bowls:
Nice as this terrain is, the Peak 2 Peak Gondola summons you from all over the mountain:
Whoosh. To Blackcomb in an instant, crossing the valley, 1,427 feet to the bottom, and out at Blackcomb’s upper-mountain base, Rendezvous. Down to Glacier Express, and up a rolling fantasyland of infinite freeride terrain:
And at the top it’s like damn.
From here, you can transfer to the Showcase T-bar if it’s open. If not, climb Spanky’s Ladder, and, Kaboom out on the other side:
Ride Crystal Ridge or Excelerator back up, and run a lap through bowls and glades:
Then ski back down to the village, ride Jersey Cream back to Rendezvous to connect to the spectacular 7th Heaven lift, or ride the gondy back over to Whistler to repeat the whole cycle. And that’s just a sampling. I’m no Whistler expert - just go have fun and get lost in the whole thing.
Podcast Notes
On the Lost Lifts of Park City
It’s slightly weird and enormously hilarious that the Fitzsimmons eight-seater that Whistler installed last summer and the Jersey Cream sixer that Blackcomb will drop on the mountain this year were originally intended for Park City. As I wrote in 2022:
Last September, Vail Resorts announced what was likely the largest set of single-season lift upgrades in the history of the world: $315-plus million on 19 lifts (later increased to 21 lifts) across 14 ski areas. Two of those lifts would land in Park City: a D-line eight-pack would replace the Silverlode six, and a six-pack would replace the Eagle and Eaglet triples. Two more lifts in a town with 62 of them (Park City sits right next door to Deer Valley). Surely this would be another routine project for the world’s largest ski area operator.
It wasn’t. In June, four local residents – Clive Bush, Angela Moschetta, Deborah Rentfrow, and Mark Stemler – successfully appealed the Park City Planning Commission’s previous approval of the lift projects.
“The upgrades were appealed on the basis that the proposed eight-place and six-place chairs were not consistent with the 1998 development agreement that governs the resort,” SAM wrote at the time. “The planning commission also cited the need for a more thorough review of the resort’s comfortable carrying capacity calculations and parking mitigation plan, finding PCM’s proposed paid parking plan at the Mountain Village insufficient.”
So instead of rising on the mountain, the lifts spent the summer, in pieces, in the parking lot. Vail admitted defeat, at least temporarily. “We are considering our options and next steps based on today's disappointing decision—but one thing is clear—we will not be able to move forward with these two lift upgrades for the 22-23 winter season,” Park City Mountain Resort Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Deirdra Walsh said in response to the decision.
One of the options Vail apparently considered was trucking the lifts to friendlier locales. Last Wednesday, as part of its year-end earnings release, Vail announced that the two lifts would be moved to Whistler and installed in time for the 2023-24 ski season. The eight-pack will replace the 1,129-vertical-foot Fitzsimmons high-speed quad on Whistler, giving the mountain 18 seats (!) out of the village (the lift runs alongside the 10-passenger Whistler Village Gondola). The six-pack will replace the Jersey Cream high-speed quad on Blackcomb, a midmountain lift with a 1,230-foot vertical rise.
The whole episode is still one of the dumber things I’m aware of. There are like 80 lifts in Park City and two more (replacements, not all-new lines), apparently would have knocked the planet off its axis and sent us caterwauling into the sun. It’s enough to make you un-see all the human goodness in Whistler’s magical lift queues. More here.
On Fitzsimmons 8’s complex line
Among the challenges of re-engineering the Fitzsimmons 8 for Whistler was the fact that the lift had to pass under the Whistler Village Gondola:
Trembath and I talk a little about Fitz’s download capability. Team Whistler sent over some additional information following our chat, indicating that the winter download capacity is four riders per chair (part of the original lift design, when it was meant for Park City). Summer download, for bike park operations, is limited to one passenger (a lower capacity than the original design).
On Whistler’s bike park
I’m not Bike Park Bro, though I could probably be talked into it fairly easily if I didn’t already spend half the year wandering around the country in search of novel snowsportskiing operations. I do, however, ride my bike around NYC just about every day from May through October-ish, which in many ways resembles the giant jungle gyms that are downhill mountain bike parks, just with fewer jumps and a higher probability of decapitation by box truck.
Anyway Whistler supposedly has the best bike park this side of Neptune, and we talk about it a bit, and so I’ll include the trailmap even though I’d have a better chance of translating ancient Aramaic runes etched into a cave wall than I would of explaining exactly what’s happening here:
On Jersey Cream “not looking like much” on the trailmap
Because Whistler’s online trailmap is shrunken to fit the same rectangular container that every ski map fills in the Webosphere, it fails to convey the scale of the operation (the paper version, which you can acquire if you slip a bag of gold bars and a map to the Lost City of Atlantis to a clerk at the guest services desk, is aptly called a “mountain atlas” and better captures the breadth of the place). The Jersey Cream lift and pod, for example, presents on the trailmap as an inconsequential connector lift between the Glacier Express and Rendezous station, where three other lifts convene. But this is a 1,230-vertical-foot, 4,647-foot-long machine that could, were you to hack it from the earth and transport it into the wilderness, be a fairly substantial ski area on its own. For context, 1,200 vertical feet is roughly the rise of Eldora or Monarch, or, for Easterners, Cranmore or Black Mountain.
On the Whistler and Blackcomb masterplans
Unlike the U.S. American Forest Service, which often fails to post ski area master development plans on their useless 1990s vintage websites, the British Columbia authorities have neatly organized all of their province’s masterplans on one webpage. Whistler and Blackcomb mountains each file separate plans, last updated in 2013. That predates Vail Resorts’ acquisition by three years, and Trembath and I discuss how closely (or not), these plans align with the company’s current thinking around the resort.
Whistler Mountain:
Blackcomb Mountain:
On Vail’s Australian ski areas
Trembath, at different points, oversaw all three of Vail Resorts’ Australian ski areas. Though much of that tenure predated Vail’s acquisitions (of Hotham and Falls Creek in 2019), she ran Perisher (purchased in 2015), for a year before leaping to the captain’s chair at Whistler. Trembath provides a terrific breakdown of each of the three ski areas, and they look like a lot of fun:
Perisher:
Falls Creek:
Hotham:
On Sugar Bowl Parallels
Trembath’s story follows a similar trajectory to that of Bridget Legnavsky, whose decades-long career in New Zealand included running a pair of that country’s largest ski resorts. She then moved to North America to run a large ski area – in her case, Sugar Bowl near Lake Tahoe’s North Shore. She appeared on the podcast in March.
On Merlin Entertainment
I was unfamiliar with Merlin Entertainment, the former owner of Falls Creek and Hotham. The company is enormous, and owns Legoland Parks, Madame Tussauds, and dozens of other familiar brands.
On Whistler and Blackcomb as formerly separate ski areas
Like Park City (formerly Park City and Canyons) and Palisades Tahoe (formerly Alpine Meadows and Squaw Valley), Whistler and Blackcomb were once separate ski areas. Here’s the stoke version of the mountains’ joint history (“You were either a Whistler skier, or you were a Blackcomb skier”):
On First Nations’ language on lifts and the Gondola Gallery project
As Whistler builds new lifts, the resort tags the lift terminals with names in English and First Nations languages. From Pique Magazine at the opening of the Fitzsimmons eight-pack last December:
Whistler Mountain has a brand-new chairlift ready to ferry keen skiers and snowboarders up to mid-mountain, with the rebuilt Fitzsimmons Express opening to guests early on Dec. 12. …
“Importantly, this project could not have happened without the guidance and counsel of the First Nations partners,” said Trembath.
“It’s so important to us that their culture continues to be represented across these mountains in everything we do.”
In keeping with those sentiments, the new Fitzsimmons Express is emblazoned with First Nations names alongside its English name: In the Squamish language, it is known as Sk_wexwnách, for Valley Creek, and in the Lil’wat language, it is known as Tsíqten, which means Fish Spear.
New chairlifts are given First Nations names at Whistler Blackcomb as they are installed and opened.
Here’s Fitzsimmons:
And Big Red, a sixer installed two years ago:
Whistler also commissioned First Nations artists to wrap two cabins on the Peak 2 Peak Gondola. From Daily Hive:
The Peak 2 Peak gondola, which connects Whistler and Blackcomb mountains, is showing off artwork created by First Nations artists, which can be seen by mountain-goers at BC’s premiere ski resort.
Vail Resorts commissioned local Indigenous artists to redesign two gondola cabins. Levi Nelson of Lil’wat Nation put his stamp on one with “Red,” while Chief Janice George and Buddy Joseph of Squamish Nation have created “Wings of Thunder.” …
“Red is a sacred colour within Indigenous culture, representing the lifeblood of the people and our connection to the Earth,” said Nelson, an artist who excels at contemporary Indigenous art. “These shapes come from and are inspired by my ancestors. To be inside the gondola, looking out through an ovoid or through the Ancestral Eye, maybe you can imagine what it’s like to experience my territory and see home through my eyes.”
“It’s more than just the techniques of weaving. It’s about ways of being and seeing the world. Passing on information that’s meaningful. We’ve done weavings on murals, buildings, reviving something that was put away all those decades ago now,” said Chief Janice George and Buddy Joseph.
“The significance of the Thunderbird being on the gondola is that it brings the energy back on the mountain and watching over all of us.”
A pic:
On Native American issues in the U.S.
I referenced conflicts between U.S. ski resorts and Native Americans, without providing specifics. The Forest Service cited objections from Native American communities, among other factors, in recommending a “no action” alternative to Lutsen Mountains’ planned expansion last year. The Washoe tribe has attempted to “reclaim” land that Diamond Peak operates on. The most prominent dispute, however, has been a decades-long standoff between Arizona Snowbowl and indigenous tribes. Per The Guardian in 2022:
The Arizona Snowbowl resort, which occupies 777 acres (314 hectares) on the mountain’s slope, has attracted skiers during the winter and spring for nearly a century. But its popularity has boomed in recent years thanks to growing populations in Phoenix, a three hour’s drive away, and neighbouring Flagstaff. During peak ski season, the resort draws upwards of 3,000 visitors a day.
More than a dozen Indigenous nations who hold the mountain sacred have fought Snowbowl’s existence since the 1930s. These include the Pueblo of Acoma, Fort McDowell Yavapai; Havasupai; Hopi; Hualapai; Navajo; San Carlos Apache; San Juan Southern Paiute; Tonto Apache; White Mountain Apache; Yavapai Apache, Yavapai Prescott, and Pueblo of Zuni. They say the resort’s presence has disrupted the environment and their spiritual connection to the mountain, and that its use of treated sewage effluent to make snow is akin to baptizing a baby with wastewater.
Now, a proposed $60m expansion of Snowbowl’s facilities has brought simmering tensions to a boil.
The US Forest Service, the agency that manages the national forest land on which Snowbowl is built, is weighing a 15-year expansion proposal that would bulk up operations, increase visitation and add new summer recreational facilities such as mountain biking trails, a zip line and outdoor concerts. A coalition of tribes, meanwhile, is resisting in unprecedented ways.
The battle is emblematic of a vast cultural divide in the American west over public lands and how they should be managed. On one side are mostly financially well-off white people who recreate in national forests and parks; on the other are Indigenous Americans dispossessed from those lands who are struggling to protect their sacred sites.
“Nuva’tukya’ovi is our Mount Sinai. Why can’t the forest service understand that?,” asks Preston.
On the tight load at the 7th Heaven lift
Yikes:
Honestly it’s pretty organized and the wait isn’t that long, but this is very popular terrain and the trails could handle a higher-capacity lift (nearly everyone skis the Green Line trail or one of the blue groomers off this lift, leaving hundreds of acres of off-piste untouched; it’s pretty glorious).
On Wizard and Solar Coaster
Every local I spoke with in Whistler grumped about the Blackcomb Gondola, which replaced the Wizard and Solar Coaster high-speed quads in 2018. While the 10-passenger gondy substantively follows the same lines, it fails to provide the same mid-mountain fast-lap firepower that Solar Coaster once delivered. Both because removing your skis after each lap is a drag, and because many skiers ride the gondola up to Rendezvous, leaving fewer free mid-mountain seats than the empty quad chairs once provided. Here’s a before-and-after:
On Whistler’s season pass
Whistler’s season pass, which is good at Whistler Blackcomb and only Whistler Blackcomb, strangely costs more ($1,047 U.S.) than a full Epic Pass ($1,004 U.S.), which also provides unlimited access to Whistler and Vail’s other 41 ski areas. It’s weird. Trembath explains.
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 42/100 in 2024, and number 542 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 subscribers’ inboxes on June 4. It dropped for free subscribers on June 11. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:
Who
* Scott Bender, operations and business advisor to Blue Knob ownership
* Donna Himes, Blue Knob Marketing Manager
* Sam Wiley, part owner of Blue Knob
* Gary Dietke, Blue Knob Mountain Manager
Recorded on
May 13, 2024
About Blue Knob
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: Majority owned by the Wiley family
Located in: Claysburg, Pennsylvania
Year founded: 1963
Pass affiliations: Indy Pass and Indy+ Pass – 2 days, no blackouts (access not yet set for 2024-25 ski season)
Closest neighboring ski areas: Laurel (1:02), Tussey (1:13), Hidden Valley (1:14), Seven Springs (1:23)
Base elevation: 2,100 feet
Summit elevation: 3,172 feet
Vertical drop: 1,072 feet
Skiable Acres: 100
Average annual snowfall: 120 inches
Trail count: 33 (5 beginner, 10 intermediate, 4 advanced intermediate, 5 advanced, 9 expert) + 1 terrain park
Lift count: 5 (2 triples, 2 doubles, 1 carpet – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Blue Knob’s lift fleet)
Why I interviewed them
I’ve not always written favorably about Blue Knob. In a state where shock-and-awe snowmaking is a baseline operational requirement, the mountain’s system is underwhelming and bogged down by antiquated equipment. The lower-mountain terrain – Blue Knob’s best – opens sporadically, sometimes remaining mysteriously shuttered after heavy local snows. The website at one time seemed determined to set the world record for the most exclamation points in a single place. They may have succeeded (this has since been cleaned up):
I’ve always tried to couch these critiques in a but-damn-if-only context, because Blue Knob, considered purely as a ski area, is an absolute killer. It needs what any Pennsylvania ski area needs – modern, efficient, variable-weather-capable, overwhelming snowmaking and killer grooming. No one, in this temperamental state of freeze-thaws and frequent winter rains, can hope to survive long term without those things. So what’s the holdup?
My goal with The Storm is to be incisive but fair. Everyone deserves a chance to respond to critiques, and offering them that opportunity is a tenant of good journalism. But because this is a high-volume, high-frequency operation, and because my beat covers hundreds of ski areas, I’m not always able to gather reactions to every post in the moment. I counterbalance that reality with this: every ski area’s story is a long-term, ongoing one. What they mess up today, they may get right tomorrow. And reality, while inarguable, does not always capture intentions. Eventually, I need to gather and share their perspective.
And so it was Blue Knob’s turn to talk. And I challenge you to find a more good-natured and nicer group of folks anywhere. I went off format with this one, hosting four people instead of the usual one (I’ve done multiples a few times before, with Plattekill, West Mountain, Bousquet, Boyne Mountain, and Big Sky). The group chat was Blue Knob’s idea, and frankly I loved it. It’s not easy to run a ski area in 2024 in the State of Pennsylvania, and it’s especially not easy to run this ski area, for reasons I outline below. And while Blue Knob has been slower to get to the future than its competitors, I believe they’re at least walking in that direction.
What we talked about
“This was probably one of our worst seasons”; ownership; this doesn’t feel like PA; former owner Dick Gauthier’s legacy; reminiscing on the “crazy fun” of the bygone community atop the ski hill; Blue Knob’s history as an Air Force station and how the mountain became a ski area; Blue Knob’s interesting lease arrangement with the state; the remarkable evolution of Seven Springs and how those lessons could fuel Blue Knob’s growth; competing against Vail’s trio of nearby mountains; should Vail be allowed to own eight ski areas in one state?; Indy Pass sales limits; Indy Pass as customer-acquisition tool; could Blue Knob ever upgrade its top-to-bottom doubles to a high-speed quad?; how one triple chair multiplied into two; why Blue Knob built a mile-long lift and almost immediately shortened it; how Wolf Creek is “like Blue Knob”; beginner lifts; the best ski terrain in Pennsylvania; why Mine Shaft and Boneyard Glades disappeared from Blue Knob’s trailmap, and whether they could ever return; unmarked glades; Blue Knob’s unique microclimate and how that impacts snowmaking; why the mountain isn’t open top-to-bottom more and why it’s important to change that; PA snowmaking and how Blue Knob can catch up; that wild access road and what could be done to improve it; and the surprising amount of housing on Blue Knob’s slopes.
Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview
So here’s something that’s absolutely stupid:
That’s southeastern Pennsylvania. Vail Resorts operates all of the ski areas in blue font. Ski areas in red are independent. Tussey, a local bump serving State College and its armies of sad co-eds who need a distraction because their football team can’t beat Michigan, is not really relevant here. Blue Knob is basically surrounded by ski areas that all draw on the same well of out-of-state corporate resources and are stapled to the gumball-machine-priced Epic Pass. If this were a military map, we’d all say, “Yeah they’re fucked.” Blue Knob is Berlin in 1945, with U.S. forces closing in from the west and the Russians driving from the east. There’s no way they’re winning this war.
How did this happen? Which bureaucrat in sub-basement 17 of Justice Department HQ in D.C. looked at Vail’s 2021 deal to acquire Seven Springs, Hidden Valley, and Laurel and said, “Cool”? This was just two years after Vail had picked up Whitetail, Liberty, and Roundtop, along with Jack Frost and Big Boulder in eastern Pennsylvania, in the Peak Resorts acquisition. How does allowing one company to acquire eight of the 22 public ski resorts in one state not violate some antitrust statute? Especially when six of them essentially surround one independent competitor.
I don’t know. When a similar situation materialized in Colorado in 1997, Justice said, “No, Vail Resorts, you can not buy Keystone and Breckenridge and Arapahoe Basin from this dog food company. Sell one.” And so A-Basin went to a real estate conglomerate out of Toronto, which gut-renovated the mountain and then flipped it, earlier this year, to Vail arch-frenemy Alterra. And an independent ski area operator told me that, at some point during this ongoing sales process, the Justice Department reached out to ask them if they were OK with Alterra – which already operates Winter Park, owns Steamboat, and has wrapped Copper, Eldora, and the four Aspen mountains into its Ikon Pass – owning A-Basin (which has been on the Ikon Pass since 2019). Justice made no such phone call, Blue Knob officials tell me on this podcast, when Vail was purchasing the Seven Springs resorts.
This is where Colorad-Bro reminds me that Pennsylvania skiing is nothing compared to Colorado. And yes, Colorado is unquestionably the epicenter of American skiing, home to some of our most iconic resorts and responsible for approximately one in four U.S. skier visits each winter. But where do you suppose all those skiers come from? Not solely from Colorado, ranked 21st by U.S. population with just 5.9 million residents. Pennsylvania, with Philly and Pittsburgh and dozens of mid-sized cities in-between, ranks fifth in the nation by population, with nearly 13 million people. And with cold winters, ski areas near every large city, and some of the best snowmaking systems on the planet, PA is a skier printing press, responsible not just for millions of in-state skier visits annually, but for minting skiers that drive the loaded U-Haul west so they can brag about being Summit County locals five minutes after signing their lease. That one company controls more than one-third of the ski areas – which, combined, certainly account for more than half of the state’s skier visits – strikes me as unfair in a nation that supposedly maintains robust antitrust laws.
But whatever. We’re locked in here. Vail Resorts is not Ticketmaster, and no one is coming to dismantle this siege. Blue Knob is surrounded. And it’s worse than it looks on this map, which does not illuminate that Blue Knob sits in a vast wilderness, far from most population centers, and that all of Vail’s resorts scoop up skiers flowing west-northwest from Philadelphia/Baltimore/D.C. and east from Pittsburgh.
So how is Blue Knob not completely screwed? Answering that question was basically the point of this podcast. The mountain’s best argument for continued existence in the maw of this Epic Pass blitzkrieg is that Blue Knob is a better pure ski area than any of the six Vail mountains that surround it (see trailmap above). The terrain is, in fact, the best in the State of Pennsylvania, and arguably in the entire Mid-Atlantic (sorry Elk Mountain partisans, but that ski area, fine as it is, is locked out of the conversation as long as they maintain that stupid tree-skiing ban). But this fact of mountain superiority is no guarantee of long-term resilience, because the truth is that Blue Knob has often, in recent years, been unable to open top to bottom, running only the upper-mountain triple chairs and leaving the best terrain out of reach.
They have to fix that. And they know it. But this is a feisty mountain in a devilish microclimate with some antiquated infrastructure and a beast of an access road. Nothing about this renovation has been, or likely will be, fast or easy.
But it can be done. Blue Knob can survive. I believe it after hosting the team on this podcast. Maybe you will too once you hear it.
What I got wrong
* When describing the trail network, I said that the runs were cut “across the fall line” in a really logical way – I meant, of course, to say they were cut down the fall line.
* I said that I thought the plants that sprouted between the trees in the mothballed Mine Shaft and Boneyard Glades were positioned “to keep people out.” It’s more likely, however, based upon what the crew told us, that those plants are intended to control the erosion that shuttered the glades several years ago.
* I mentioned “six-packs going up in the Poconos at the KSL-owned mountains.” To clarify: those would be Camelback and Blue Mountain, which each added six-packs in 2022, one year before joining the Ikon Pass.
* I also said that high-speed lifts were “becoming the standard” in Pennsylvania. That isn’t quite accurate, as a follow-up inventory clarified. The state is home to just nine high-speed lifts, concentrated at five ski areas. So yeah, not exactly taking over Brah.
* I intimated that Blue Knob shortened the Beginners CTEC triple, built in 1983, and stood up the Expressway triple in 1985 with some of the commandeered parts. This does not appear to be the case, as the longer Beginners lift and Expressway co-exist on several vintage trailmaps, including the one below from circa 1989. The longer lift continues to appear on Blue Knob trailmaps through the mid-1990s, but at some point, the resort shortened the lift by thousands of linear feet. We discuss why in the pod.
Why you should ski Blue Knob
If we took every mountain, fully open, with bomber conditions, I would rank Blue Knob as one of the best small- to mid-sized ski areas in the Northeast. From a rough-and-tumble terrain perspective, it’s right there with Berkshire East, Plattekill, Hickory, Black Mountain of Maine, Ragged, Black Mountain (New Hampshire), Bolton Valley, and Magic Mountain. But with its Pennsylvania address, it never makes that list.
It should. This is a serious mountain, with serious terrain that will thrill and challenge any skier. Each trail is distinct and memorable, with quirk and character. Even the groomers are interesting, winding nearly 1,100 vertical feet through the trees, dipping and banking, crisscrossing one another and the lifts above. Lower Shortway, a steep and narrow bumper cut along a powerline, may be my favorite trail in Pennsylvania. Or maybe it’s Ditch Glades, a natural halfpipe rolling below Stembogan Bowl. Or maybe it’s the unmarked trees of East Wall Traverse down to the marked East Wall Glades. Or maybe it’s Lower Extrovert, a wide but ungroomed and mostly unskied trail where I found wind-blown pow at 3 p.m. Every trail is playful and punchy, and they are numerous enough that it’s difficult to ski them all in a single day.
Which of course takes us to the reality of skiing Blue Knob, which is that the ski area’s workhorse top-to-bottom lift is the 61-year-old Route 66 double chair. The lift is gorgeous and charming, trenched through the forest on a narrow and picturesque wilderness line (until the mid-station, when the view suddenly shifts to that of oddly gigantic houses strung along the hillside). While it runs fast for a fixed-grip lift, the ride is quite long (I didn’t time it; I’ll guess 10 to 12 minutes). It stops a lot because, well, Pennsylvania. There are a lot of novice skiers here. There is a mid-station that will drop expert skiers back at the top of the best terrain, but this portal, where beginners load to avoid the suicidal runs below, contributes to those frequent stops.
And that’s the reality when that lift is running, which it often is not. And that, again, is because the lower-mountain terrain is frequently closed. This is a point of frustration for locals and, I’ll point out, for the mountain operators themselves. A half-open Blue Knob is not the same as, say, a half-open Sugarbush, where you’ll still have access to lots of great terrain. A half-open Blue Knob is just the Expressway (Lift 4) triple chair (plus the beginner zone), mostly groomers, mostly greens and blues. It’s OK, but it’s not what we were promised on the trailmap.
That operational inconsistency is why Blue Knob remains mostly unheralded by the sort of skiers who are most drawn to this newsletter – adventurous, curious, ready for a challenge – even though it is the perfect Storm mountain: raw and wild and secretive and full of guard dog energy. But if you’re anywhere in the region, watch their Instagram account, which usually flashes the emergency lights when Route 66 spins. And go there when that happens. You’re welcome.
Podcast Notes
On crisscrossing chairlifts
Chairlifts are cool. Crisscrossing chairlifts are even cooler. Riding them always gives me the sense of being part of a giant Goldbergian machine. Check out the triple crossing over the doubles at Blue Knob (all videos by Stuart Winchester):
Wiley mentions a similar setup at Attitash, where the Yankee Flyer high-speed quad crosses beneath the summit lift. Here’s a pic I took of the old Summit Triple at the crossover junction in 2021:
Vail Resorts replaced the triple with the Mountaineer high-speed quad this past winter. I intended to go visit the resort in early February, but then I got busy trying not to drop dead, so I cancelled that trip and don’t have any pics of the new lift. Lift Blog made it there, because of course he did, and his pics show the crossover modified but intact. I did, however, discuss the new lift extensively with Attitash GM Brandon Swartz last November.
I also snagged this rad footage of Whistler’s new Fitzsimmons eight-pack flying beneath the Whistler Village Gondola in February:
And the Porcupine triple passing beneath the Needles Gondola at Snowbasin in March:
Oh, and Lift 2 passing beneath the lower Panorama Gondola at Mammoth:
Brah I could do this all day. Here’s Far East six-pack passing beneath the Red Dog sixer at Palisades Tahoe:
Palisades’ Base-to-Base Gondola actually passes over two chairlifts on its way over to Alpine Meadows: the Exhibition quad (foreground), and the KT-22 Express, visible in the distance:
And what the hell, let’s make it a party:
On Blue Knob as Air Force base
It’s wild and wildly interesting that Blue Knob – one of the highest points in Pennsylvania – originally hosted an Air Force radar station. All the old buildings are visible in this undated photo. You can see the lifts carrying skiers on the left. Most of these buildings have since been demolished.
On Ski Denton and Laurel
The State of Pennsylvania owns two ski areas: Laurel Mountain and Ski Denton (Blue Knob is located in a state park, and we discuss how that arrangement works in the podcast). Vail Resorts, of course, operates Laurel, which came packaged with Seven Springs. Denton hasn’t spun the lifts in a decade. Late last year, a group called Denton Go won a bid to re-open and operate the ski area, with a mix of state and private investment.
And it will need a lot of investment. Since this is a state park, it’s open to anyone, and I hiked Denton in October 2022. The lifts – a double, a triple, and a Poma – are intact, but the triple is getting swallowed by fast-growing trees in one spot (top two photos):
I’m no engineer, but these things are going to need a lot of work. The trail network hasn’t grown over too much, and the base lodge looks pristine, the grasses around it mowed. Here’s the old trailmap if you’re curious:
And here’s the proposed upgrade blueprint:
I connected briefly with the folks running Denton GO last fall, but never wrote a story on it. I’ll check in with them soon for an update.
On Herman Dupre and the evolution of Seven Springs
Bender spent much of his career at Seven Springs, and we reminisce a bit about the Dupre family and the ski area’s evolution into one of the finest mountains in the East. You can learn more about Seven Springs’ history in my podcast conversation with the resort’s current GM, Brett Cook, from last year.
On Ski magazine’s top 20 in the East
Ski magazine – which is no longer a physical magazine but a collection of digital bits entrusted to the robots’ care – has been publishing its reader resort rankings for decades. The list in the West is fairly static and predictable, filled largely with the Epkonic monsters you would expect (though Pow Mow won the top place this year). But the East list is always a bit more surprising. This year, for example, Mad River Glen and Smugglers’ Notch claimed the top two spots. They’re both excellent ski areas and personal favorites, with some of the most unique terrain in the country, but neither is on a megapass, and neither owns a high-speed lift, which is perhaps proof that the Colorado Machine hasn’t swallowed our collective souls just yet.
But the context in which we discuss the list is this: each year, three small ski areas punch their way into an Eastern lineup that’s otherwise filled with monsters like Stowe and Sugarbush. Those are: Seven Springs; Holiday Valley, New York; and Wachusett, Massachusetts. These improbable ski centers all make the list because their owners (or former owners, in Seven Springs’ case), worked for decades to transform small, backwater ski areas into major regional destinations.
On Vail’s Northeast Value Epic Passes
The most frightening factor in the abovementioned difficulties that Blue Knob faces in its cagefight with Vail is the introduction, in 2020, of Northeast-specific Epic Passes. There are two versions. The Northeast Value Pass grants passholders unlimited access to all eight Vail Resorts in Pennsylvania and all four in neighboring Ohio, which is a crucial feeder for the Seven Springs resorts. It also includes unlimited access to Vail’s four New Hampshire resorts; unlimited access with holiday blackouts at Hunter, Okemo, and Mount Snow; and 10 non-holiday days at Stowe. And it’s only $613 (early-bird price was $600):
The second version is a midweek pass that includes all the same resorts, with five Stowe days, for just $459 ($450 early-bird):
And you can also, of course, pick up an Epic ($1,004) or Epic Local ($746) pass, which still includes unlimited Pennsylvania access and adds everything in the West and in Europe.
Blue Knob’s season pass costs $465 ($429 early-bird), and is only good at Blue Knob. That’s a very fair price, and skiers who acted early could have added an Indy Pass on at a pretty big discount. But Indy is off sale, and PA skiers weighing their pass options are going to find that Epic Pass awfully tempting.
On comparisons to the liftline at MRG
Erf, I may have activated the Brobots at Mad Brother Glen when I compared the Route 66 liftline with the one beneath their precious single chair. But I mean it’s not the worst comparison you could think of:
Here’s another Blue Knob shot that shows how low the chairs fly over the trail:
And here’s a video that gives a bit more perspective on Blue Knob’s liftline:
I don’t know if I fully buy the comparison myself, but Blue Knob is the closest thing you’ll find to MRG this far south.
On Wolf Creek’s old summit Poma
Himes reminisced on her time working at Wolf Creek, Colorado, and the rattletrap Poma that would carry skiers up a 45-degree face to the summit. I was shocked to discover that the old lift is actually still there, running alongside the Treasure Stoke high-speed quad (the two lifts running parallel up the gut of the mountain). I have no idea how often it actually spins:
Lift Blog has pics, and notes that the lift “very rarely operates for historic purposes.”
On defunct glades
The Mine Shaft and Bone Yard glades disappeared from Blue Knob’s trailmap more than a decade ago, but this sign at the top of Lower Shortway still points toward them:
Then there’s this sign, a little ways down, where the Bone Yard Glade entrance used to be:
And here are the glades, marked on a circa 2007 trailmap, between Deer Run and Lower Shortway:
It would be rad if Blue Knob could resurrect these. We discuss the possibility on the podcast.
On Blue Knob’s base being higher than Killington’s
Somewhat unbelievably, Blue Knob’s 2,100-foot base elevation is higher than that of every ski area in New England save Saddleback, which launches from a 2,460-foot base. The five next highest are Bolton Valley (2,035 feet), Stowe (2,035), Cannon (2,034), Pico (2,000), and Waterville Valley (1,984). Blue Knob’s Vail-owned neighbors would fit right into this group: Hidden Valley sits at 2,405 feet, Seven Springs at 2,240, and Laurel at 2,000. Head south and the bases get even higher: in West Virginia, Canaan Valley sits at 3,430 feet; Snowshoe at 3,348-foot base (skiers have to drive to 4,848, as this is an upside-down ski area); and Timberline at 3,268. But the real whoppers are in North Carolina: Beech Mountain sits at 4,675, Cataloochee at 4,660, Sugar Mountain at 4,100, and Hatley Pointe at 4,000. I probably should have made a chart, but damn it, I have to get this podcast out before I turn 90.
On Blue Knob’s antique snowmaking equipment
Look, I’m no snowmaking expert, but some of the stuff dotting Blue Knob’s slopes looks like straight-up World War II surplus:
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 41/100 in 2024, and number 541 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 subscribers’ inboxes on June 2. It dropped for free subscribers on June 9. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:
Who
Ricky Newberry, Vice President and General Manager of Kirkwood Ski Resort, California
Recorded on
May 20, 2024
About Kirkwood
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: Vail Resorts
Located in: Kirkwood, California
Year founded: 1972
Pass affiliations:
* Epic Pass: unlimited access
* Epic Local Pass: unlimited access with holiday blackouts
* Tahoe Local Epic Pass: unlimited access with holiday blackouts
* Tahoe Value Pass: unlimited access with holiday and Saturday blackouts
* Kirkwood Pass: unlimited access
Closest neighboring ski areas: Heavenly (:43), Sierra-at-Tahoe (:44) – travel times vary significantly given weather conditions, time of day, and time of year.
Base elevation: 7,800 feet
Summit elevation: 9,800 feet
Vertical drop: 2,000 feet
Skiable Acres: 2,300
Average annual snowfall: 354 inches
Trail count: 86 (20% expert, 38% advanced, 30% intermediate, 12% beginner)
Lift count: 13 (2 high-speed quads, 1 fixed-grip quad, 6 triples, 1 double, 1 T-bar, 2 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Kirkwood’s lift fleet).
Why I interviewed him
Imagine this: 1971. Caltrans, the military-grade state agency charged with clearing California’s impossible snows from its high-alpine road network, agrees to maintain an additional wintertime route across the Sierra Crest: Highway 88, over Carson Pass, an east-west route cutting 125 miles from Stockton to US 395.
This is California State Route 88 in the winter:
A ridiculous road, an absurd idea: turn the industrial power of giant machines against a wilderness route whose wintertime deeps had eaten human souls for centuries. An audacious idea, but not an unusual one. Not in that California or in that America. Not in that era of will and muscle. Not in that country that had pushed thousands of miles of interstate across mountains and rivers and deserts in just 15 years. Caltrans would hammer 20-foot-high snow canyons up and over the pass, punching an arctic pathway into and through the howling angry fortress of the Sierra Nevada.
And they did it all to serve a new ski resort.
Imagine that. A California, an America that builds.
Kirkwood, opened in 1972, was part of the last great wave of American ski resort construction. Copper, Northstar, Powder Mountain, 49 Degrees North, and Telluride all opened that year. Keystone (1970), Snowbird (1971), and Big Sky (1973) also cranked to life around this time. Large ski area building stalled by the early ‘80s, though Vail managed to develop Beaver Creek in 1980. Deer Valley opened in 1981. Outliers materialize: Bohemia, in spite of considerable local resistance, in 2000. Tamarack in 2004. But mostly, the ski resorts we have are all the ski resorts we’ll ever have.
But there is a version of America, of California, that dreams and does enormous things, and not so long ago. This institutional memory lives on, even in those who had no part in its happening. Kirkwood is an emblem of this era and its willful collective imagining. The mountain itself is a ludicrous place for a commercial ski resort, steep and wild, an avalanche hazard zone that commands constant vigilant maintenance. Like Alta-Snowbird or Jackson Hole, the ski area offers nominal groomed routes, a comfortable lower-mountain beginner area, just enough accommodation for the intermediate mass-market passholder to say “yes I did this.” This dressing up, too, encapsulates the fading American habit of taming the raw and imposing, of making an unthinkable thing look easy.
But nothing about Kirkwood is easy. Not the in or the out. Not the up or the down. It’s rough and feisty, messy and unpredictable. And that’s the point of the place. As with the airplane or the smartphone, we long ago lost our awe of the ski resort, what a marvelous feat of human ingenuity it is. Kirkwood, lost in the highlands, lift-served on its crazy two-mile ridge, is one of the more improbable organized centers of American skiing. In its very existence the place memorializes and preserves lost impulses to actualize the unbelievable, to transport humans into, up, and down a ferocious mountain in a hostile mountain range. I find glory in Kirkwood, in that way and so many more. Hyperbole, perhaps. But what an incredible place this is, and not just because of the skiing.
What we talked about
Coming down off a 725-inch 2022-23 winter; what’s behind Kirkwood’s big snows and frequent road closures; scenic highway 88; if you’re running Kirkwood, prepare to sleep in your office; employee housing; opening when the road is closed; why Kirkwood doesn’t stay open deep into May even when they have the snowpack; the legacy of retiring Heavenly COO Tom Fortune; the next ski area Vail should buy; watching Vail Resorts move into Tahoe; Vail’s culture of internal promotion; what it means to lead the ski resort where you started your career; avalanche safety; the nuance and complexity of managing Kirkwood’s avy-prone terrain; avy dogs; why is Kirkwood Vail’s last Western mountain to get a new chairlift?; bringing Kirkwood onto the grid; potential lift upgrades (fantasy version); considering Kirkwood’s masterplan; whether a lift could ever serve the upper bowls looker’s right; why Kirkwood shrank the boundary of Reuter Bowl this past season; why the top of The Wall skied different this winter; why Kirkwood put in and then removed surface lifts around Lift 4 (Sunrise); Kirkwood’s fierce terrain; what happens when Vail comes to Rowdy Town; The Cirque and when it opens for competitions; changes coming to Kirkwood parking; why Kirkwood still offers a single-mountain season pass; and the Tahoe Value and Tahoe Local passes.
Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview
Maybe last year, when the stacked snows transformed Tahoe into a Seussian mushroom village, would have been a better moment for this interview. Kirkwood – Kirkwood – beat a 700-inch single-winter snowfall record that had stood for 40 years, with 725 inches of freaking snow. By the time I arrived onsite, in late March, the snowpack was so deep that I could barely see out the windows of my condo – on the second floor:
This winter marked a return to almost exactly average, which at Kirkwood is still better than what some ski areas clock in a decade: 370 inches. Average, in draught-prone Tahoe and closure-prone Kirkwood, is perhaps the best possible outcome. As this season settled from a thing that is to a thing that happened, it felt appropriate to document the contrast: how does 370 feel when it chases 725? Is snow like money, where after a certain amount you really can’t tell the difference? Or does snow, which, like money, occupies that strange space between the material and the ephemeral, ignite with its vanishing form some untamable avarice? More is never enough. Even 725 inches feels stingy in some contexts – Alta stacked 903 last winter; Baker’s 1,140-inch 1998-99 season bests any known season snowfall total on Planet Earth.
But Californians, I’ve found, have little use for comparisons. Perhaps that’s an effect of the horizon-bending desert that chops the state off from the rest of the continent. Perhaps it’s a silent pride in being a resident of America’s most-populous state – more people live in California than in the 21 least-populous U.S. states combined, or in all of Canada. Perhaps its Surf Brah bonhomie drifting up to the mountains. Whatever it is, there seems to be something in Cali’s collective soul that takes whatever it’s given and is content with it.
Or at least it feels that way whenever I go there, and it sure felt that way in this interview. At a moment when it seems as though too many big-mountain skiers at headliner mountains want to staple their home turf’s alpha-dog patch to their forehead and walk around with two thumbs jerking upward repeating “You do realize I’m a season passholder at Alta, right?”, Kirkwood still feels tucked away, quiet in its excellence, a humble pride masking its fierce façade. Even 12 years into Vail Resorts’ ownership, the ski area feels as corporate as a guy selling bootleg purses out of a rolled-out sheet on Broadway. Swaggering but approachable, funky and improvised, something that’s probably going to make a good story when you get back home.
Why you should ski Kirkwood
Oddly, I usually tell people not to go here. And not in that stupid social media way that ever-so-clever (usually) Utah and Colorad-Bros trip over one another to post: “Oh Snowbird/Wolf Creek/Pow Mow sucks, no one should go there.” It’s so funny I forgot to laugh. But Kirkwood can be genuinely tough to explain. Most Epic Pass-toting tourists are frankly going to have a better time at Heavenly or Northstar, with their fast lifts, Tahoe views, vast intermediate trail networks, and easy access roads. Kirkwood is grand. Kirkwood is exceptional. Kirkwood is the maximalist version of what humankind can achieve in taming an angry pocket of wilderness for mass recreation. But Kirkwood is not for everyone.
There. I’ve set expectations. So maybe don’t make this your first Tahoe stop if you’re coming west straight from Paoli Peaks. It’s a bruiser, one of the rowdiest in Vail’s sprawling portfolio, wild and steep and exposed. If you’re looking for a fight, Kirkwood will give you one.
That’s not to say an intermediate couldn’t enjoy themselves here. Just don’t expect Keystone. What’s blue and green at Kirkwood is fine terrain, but it’s limited, and lacks the drama of, say, coming over Ridge Run or Liz’s at Heavenly, with the lake shimmering below and miles of intermediate pitch in front of you.
**This message is not endorsed (or likely appreciated) by the Kirkwood Chamber of Commerce, Vail Resorts, or Kirkwood ski area.
Podcast Notes
On former Kirkwood GMs on the podcast
Sometimes it seems as though everyone in skiing has taken their turn running Kirkwood. An unusual number of past Storm Skiing Podcast guests have done so, and I discussed the resort with all of them: Chip Seamans (now at Windham), Tim Cohee (now at China Peak), and Tom Fortune (recently retired from Heavenly). Apologies if I forgot anyone.
On Apple Mountain
Apple Mountain wasn’t much: 200-ish vertical feet (pushed up from an original 30-footer) with a quad chair and a bunch of ropetows. Here was the 2000 trailmap:
But this little Michigan ski area – where both Newberry and I learned (partially, in my case), to ski – moved nearly 800,000 students through its beginner programs from 1961 to ’94, according to the Michigan Lost Ski Areas Project.
It’s been closed since 2017. Something about the snowmaking system that’s either too hard or too expensive to fix. That leaves Michigan’s Tri-Cities – Midland, Bay City, and Saginaw, with a total metro population approaching 400,000 – 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 – any skiing – 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.
The most frustrating fact about Apple Mountain is that it continues to operate as a conference center, golf course, and apple orchard. The ski lifts are intact, the slopes mowed in summertime. I stopped in two summers ago (I accidentally said “last summer,” implying 2023, on the podcast), and the place was immaculate:
I haven’t given up on Apple Mountain just yet. The hill is there, the market is there, and there is no shortage of people in Michigan – home to the second-most ski areas after New York – who know how to run a ski area. I told Ricky to tell Vail to buy it, which I am certain they will not do. But a solution must exist.
On Mount Shasta and “the big mountain above it”
Newberry references his time at “Mt. Shasta and the big mountain above it.” Here’s what he meant by that: Mt. Shasta Ski Park is a mid-sized ski area seated on the lower portion of 14,179-foot Mt. Shasta. The lifts top out at 7,536 feet, even after an uphill expansion last ski season. The trailmap doesn’t really capture the scale of it all (the ski area’s vert is around 2,000 feet):
Shasta is a temperamental (and potentially active) volcano. A previous ski area called Mt. Shasta Ski Bowl ran chairlifts up to 9,400 feet, but an avalanche wiped out the summit lift in 1978. Ski Bowl never ran again. Here’s a nice history of the lost ski area:
On Vail Resorts’ timeline
We talk a lot about Vail’s growth timeline. Here’s the full roster, in order of acquisition:
On Heavenly
We discuss Heavenly - where Newberry spent a large part of his career - extensively. Here’s the mountain’s trailmap for reference:
On Ted Lasso
If you haven’t watched Ted Lasso yet, you should probably go ahead and do that immediately:
On Ellen at Stevens Pass
Newberry mentioned “Ellen at Stevens Pass.” He was referring to Ellen Galbraith, the ski area’s delightful general manager, who joined me on the podcast last year.
On Vail’s lift installations in the West
Given its outsized presence in the ski zeitgeist, Vail actually operates very few ski areas in Western North America: five in Colorado, three in California, and one each in Utah, Washington, and British Columbia. The company has stood up 44 (mostly) new lifts at these 11 ski areas since 2012, with one puzzling exception: Kirkwood. Check this:
Why is Big K getting stiffed? Newberry and I discuss.
On Kirkwood’s masterplan
As far as I know, Vail hasn’t updated Kirkwood’s Forest Service masterplan since acquiring the resort in 2012. But this 2007 map shows an older version of the plan and where potential lifts could go:
I can’t find a version with the proposed Timber Creek lift, which Newberry describes in the pod as loading near Bunny and TC Express and running up-mountain to the top of the bowls.
On the shrinking border of Reuter Bowl
Kirkwood’s 2023-24 trailmap snuck in a little shrinkage: the border of Reuter Bowl, a hike-in zone on the resort’s far edge, snuck south. Newberry explains why on the pod:
On Kirkwood’s short-lived surface lifts
We discuss a pair of surface lifts that appeared as Lift 15 on the trailmap from around 2008 to 2017. You can see them on this circa 2017 (earlier maps show this as one lift), trailmap:
On The Cirque
The Cirque, a wicked labyrinth of chutes, cliffs, and rocks looming above the ski area, was, somewhat unbelievably, once inbounds terrain. This circa 1976 trailmap even shows a marked trail through this forbidden zone, which is now open only occasionally for freeride comps:
On Kirkwood’s parking changes
Kirkwood will implement the same parking-reservations policy next winter that Northstar and Heavenly began using last year. Here’s a summary from the ski area’s website:
Skiers get pretty lit up about parking. But Vail is fairly generous with the workarounds, and a system that spreads traffic out (because everyone knows they’ll get a spot), across the morning is a smart adjustment so long as we are going to continue insisting on the automobile as our primary mode of transport.
On Saginaw, Michigan
Newberry and I share a moment in which we discover we were both born in the same mid-sized Michigan city: Saginaw. Believe it or not, there’s a song that starts with these very lyrics: “I was born, in Saginaw, Michigan…” The fact that this song exists has long puzzled me. It is kind of stupid but also kind of great.
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 40/100 in 2024, and number 540 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 subscribers’ inboxes on May 20. It dropped for free subscribers on May 27. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:
Who
Nathan McGree, Owner and General Manager of Tyrol Basin, Wisconsin
Recorded on
April 29, 2024
About Tyrol Basin
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: Nathan McGree
Located in: Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin
Year founded: 1958
Pass affiliations: Indy Pass and Indy+ Pass – 2 days, no blackouts
Closest neighboring ski areas: Blackhawk Ski Club (:21), Devil’s Head (:46), Cascade (1:00), Christmas Mountain Village (1:02)
Base elevation: 860 feet
Summit elevation: 1,160 feet
Vertical drop: 300 feet
Skiable Acres: 40
Average annual snowfall: 41 inches
Trail count: 24 (33% beginner, 25% intermediate, 38% advanced, 4% expert)
Lift count: 7 (3 triples, 2 ropetows, 2 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Tyrol Basin’s lift fleet)
Why I interviewed him
When you Google “Tyrol,” the expanse of Italian and Austrian Alps from which this Wisconsin bump draws its name, the robots present you with this image:
That is not Wisconsin.
According to On The Snow, Tyrol Basin recorded two inches of snowfall during the 2021-22 ski season, and 15 inches the following winter. I don’t know if these numbers are accurate. No one runs, like, the Southern Wisconsin Snorkel Dawgs Facebook group as a secondary verification source. The site pegs Tyrol’s average annual snowfall at 30 inches. That’s not even a powder day at Alta. Indy Pass offers a more generous 51. A site called “GottaGoItSnows.com” lists four feet (48 inches), but also offers, as its featured photo of the ski area, this grainy webcam screenshot, which appears to feature two mis-wired AI bots about to zigzag into one another:
But it doesn’t really matter what Tyrol Basin’s average annual snowfall is, or how much snow fell in either of those two winters. The ski area logged a 114-day season during the 2021-22 campaign, and 124 over the winter of 2022-23. That’s an outstanding season, above the NSAA-reported industry averages of 110 and 116 days for those respective campaigns. It’s a particularly respectable number of ski days when a season pass starts at $199.99, as it did last year (McGree told me he expects that price to drop when 2024-25 passes go on sale in July).
No one offers 114 days of skiing on two inches of natural snow by accident. You need what the kids (probably don’t) call “mad skillz ya’ll.” Especially when you offer a terrain park that looks like this:
What’s going on here? How can a snow-light bump 28 miles west of Madison where snowsportskiing ought to be impossible offer nearly four months of something approximating winter? That the answer is obvious (snowmaking) doesn’t make it any less interesting. After all, put me at the controls of a $106-million Boeing 737, and I’m more likely to crash it into a mountain than to safely return it to the airport – having access to technology and equipment is not the same thing as knowing how to use it (not that I have access to an airplane; God help us). Tyrol Basin is the story of a former diesel mechanic who ended up owning a ski area. And doing a hell of a nice job running it. That’s pretty cool, and worth a deeper look.
What we talked about
Coping with a crummy Midwest winter; climate change resilience; a beginner-area expansion; the legend of Dave Usselman; how to create an interesting ski experience; a journey from diesel mechanic to ski area owner; the hardest thing about running a ski area; why ski area owners have to live it; “during winter, it’s a hundred-day war”; why owning a ski area is “a lot like farming”; evolving into a year-round business; why mountain biking isn’t happening at Tyrol; why season pass prices will decrease for next ski season; how snowtubing roiled a Wisconsin town; how a dairy barn became a ski chalet; expansion potential; the hardest part about building terrain parks; high-speed ropetows; the lost ski area that McGree would like to revive; $2 PBRs; and the Indy Pass
Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview
Roughly six years ago, a 33-year-old former diesel-mechanic-turned-haunted-house-purveyor cashed out his retirement account, mortgaged his house, and bought a ski area.
“I have no ski-business background whatsoever,” Nathan McGree told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel at the time. Perhaps an alarming statement, but he followed that with what may be the pithiest five sentences I’ve ever read on how to successfully run a small ski area:
“In order for this place to function well, it needs an on-the-ground owner who is involved in everything,” he said. “I’m the bookkeeper, I’m helping make snow and I can groom the slopes, too. In the past, the general manager would have had to go to the four owners who fought among themselves and were incredibly stingy when it came to running and investing in this place.
“Now, if we need a sump pump or something like that, Andy Amacher, my assistant general manager, and I make a decision and go to Menards or wherever and just get it. The old owners are out of the picture entirely now.”
McGree immediately cut new glades and added more night-skiing lights. He cranked the snowmaking dial to 11. Since then, he’s built a tubing hill, added more runs, refurbished the chairlifts, and added a new carpet. Sometimes there’s even a halfpipe – an enormously expensive and complex feature that even the largest ski areas rarely bother with these days.
Constant improvement and commitment to a great product. If there are two things that will keep fickle skiers with plenty of other options (the larger Cascade and Devil’s Head ski areas are just a touch farther from Madison than Tyrol), it’s those two things. That McGree understood that on Day Zero helped. But it didn’t guarantee anything. Running a ski area is hard. Because of the weather and because of the equipment and because of the costs and, especially, as McGree discovered, because of (a small but irritating percentage) of the professional complainers who show up to ski/hate-post on StreamBook. But you can make it easier, in the same way you can make anything easier: by thinking ahead, fixing things before they’re broken, and embracing creativity over rigidity - and doing all that with a focus that seems unreasonable to observers.
Places like Steamboat and Palisades Tahoe and Jackson Hole and Vail Mountain and Killington are run by something approximating armies: marching soldiers numbering sometimes in the thousands, highly organized and with well-defined roles. But there are hundreds of ski areas across America with no such resources. Highly skilled and capable as they may be, the people running these places summersault through the season with no clear expectation of what the next day will bring. Like Batman, they have to drop in with a loaded utility belt, ready to grapple with any quirk or mishap or crime. Ski areas like Teton Pass, Montana; Great Bear, South Dakota; or Granite Gorge, New Hampshire. And Tyrol Basin, where, six years in, McGree has earned his cape.
Questions I wish I’d asked
Tyrol Basin has a pretty cool four-week kids’ program: at the end of the sessions, the ski area gives participants a free season pass. I’d liked to have talked about that program a bit and how many of those kids kept showing up after the lessons wrapped.
Why you should ski Tyrol Basin
Tyrol Basin’s trailmap undersells the place, presenting you with what looks to be a standard clear-cut Midwestern bump:
In reality, the place is amply treed, with well-defined runs etched into the hill (a feature that McGree and I discuss on the podcast):
Trees help, always. I am not a huge fan of bowl skiing. Such open spaces make big mountains feel small. That’s why I asked Big Sky GM Troy Nedved whether the resort would continue to keep a six-pack running up Powder Seeker (after moving the tram), when it only served two marked runs, and he was like “Bro there’s like more skiable acreage in that bowl than there is in Wisconsin” and I was like “oh.” But trees make small mountains feel big, cutting them up like chapters in a book. Even better when the trees between have been gladed, as many of Tyrol’s have. With such an arrangement, it can take all day to ski every run. This circa 2015 trailmap, in my opinion, better displays the ski area’s depth and variety (even though there are now more runs):
It’s a fun little ski area, is my point here. More fun than maybe it looks glancing at the stats and trailmap. And if you don’t care about trees (or there’s no snow in the trees), the park scene is lights-out (and lighted at night). And the ski area is on the Indy Pass, meaning that, if you’re reading this newsletter, there’s a better-than-average chance that you already own a pair of lift tickets there.
I realize that the majority of readers who are not from the Midwest or who don’t live in the Midwest have no interest in ever skiing there, and even less interest in what skiing there is. But there’s a reason I insist on recording a half-dozen or so pods per year with operators from the region, and it’s not simply because I grew up in Michigan (though that’s part of it). Skiing the Midwest is a singularly uplifting experience. This is not a place where only rich people ski, or where crowds only materialize on powder days, or where mountains compete in the $10-million chairlift arms race. Skiing at Tyrol Basin or Caberfae Peaks or Giants Ridge is pure, illicit-drugs-grade fun. Here, skiing is for everyone. It’s done regardless of conditions or forecast, and with little mind to the 60-year-old chairlifts with no safety bars (though Tyrol’s three triples are modern, and all have bars; the majority of lifts throughout the Midwest are of an older vintage). Skiing is just Something To Do In The Winter, when there is so little else other than tending to your Pet Rectangle or shopping or day-drinking or complaining about the cold. It’s a joyous scene, and I wish everyone could see it at least once.
Podcast Notes
On Afton Alps and Welch Village
McGree skied Afton Alps and Welch Village as a kid. Both offer large, sprawling footprints on tiny vertical drops (350 and 360 feet, respectively), that are incredibly fun to ski.
On Cascade
I mention Cascade, which is Tyrol’s larger competitor and roughly equidistant (in another direction), from Madison. The mountain hits 450 vertical feet in comparison to Tyrol’s 300, and 176 acres to Tyrol’s 40. As with all ski area stats that I cite, these stats are either lifted from the ski area’s website (Cascade), or taken from a reliable secondary source (in this case, the Indy Pass website for Tyrol). I hosted Cascade GM Matt Vohs on the podcast last year. Like Tyrol, it’s a pretty cool operation:
On tubing drama
Just as a reminder that NIMBY-ism isn’t confined to the Mountain West, we discuss the zealous opposition to Tyrol’s tubing operation. Per Channel 3000 in 2018:
Some community members don’t agree with a plan to install lighting on the tubing hill and are pushing against official approval of a conditional use permit.
A Dane County panel postponed its decision after listening to at least five residents speak out against the lighting. Marc Brody, of the Town of Vermont, was one of them. He told the panel that McGree was unclear about what the plans are and said the proposed lighting would cause significant light pollution.
Tyrol eventually built the tubing hill, which, if it didn’t save the business, at least reinforced it. When I last checked, the town was still standing.
On “Matt Zebransky’s video about high-speeds versus fixed-grips”
McGree mentions Matt Zebransky, who runs midwestskiers.com. Specifically, he references this enlightening video, which illustrates the counterintuitive but irrefutable fact that fixed-grip quads move exactly the same number of skiers per hour as detachable quads (typically 2,400 at full capacity):
And here’s Zebransky’s 2019 interview with McGree:
On that chalet
This circa-late 1800s converted dairy barn is one of the cooler chalets (Midwest code for “baselodge”), anywhere in America:
On Skyline Basin, Wisconsin
McGree’s ambition is to purchase and rehabilitate the lost Skyline Basin ski area, which sits around 90 minutes north of Tyrol. A 1974 Ski magazine article listed a 335-foot vertical drop, with a double and a triple chair (McGree intimates that only the triple is standing, and is likely unusable). Here’s a circa 1999 trailmap, which is delightful:
Don’t confuse this with the lost Skyline ski area in Michigan. That’s in Grayling, only an hour north of where I grew up. It has great intermediate pitch and an improvisational, eclectic trail and lift network, but no snowmaking. This just doesn’t work in Michigan anymore (unless you’re Mount Bohemia). The green line is a chairlift, and all the red lines are ropetows:
Skimap.org says this trailmap dates to 2011, but the place really only ran intermittently since the 1990s, when I last skied there. I took these photos of the ragged-but-intact operation in July 2022. Last I checked (with the current owner), the place is still for sale. It sits directly off an expressway and would be a fun project for someone with $20 million to blow:
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 36/100 in 2024, and number 536 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 subscribers’ inboxes on May 3. It dropped for free subscribers on May 10. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:
Who
Josh Jorgensen, CEO of Mission Ridge, Washington and Blacktail Mountain, Montana
Recorded on
April 15, 2024
About Mission Ridge
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: Larry Scrivanich
Located in: Wenatchee, Washington
Year founded: 1966
Pass affiliations:
* Indy Pass – 2 days with holiday and weekend blackouts (TBD for 2024-25 ski season)
* Indy+ Pass – 2 days with no blackouts
* Powder Alliance – 3 days with holiday and Saturday blackouts
Closest neighboring ski areas: Badger Mountain (:51), Leavenworth Ski Hill (:53) – travel times may vary considerably given weather conditions, time of day, and time of year.
Base elevation: 4,570 feet
Summit elevation: 6,820 feet
Vertical drop: 2,250 feet
Skiable Acres: 2,000
Average annual snowfall: 200 inches
Trail count: 70+ (10% easiest, 60% more difficult, 30% most difficult)
Lift count: 7 (1 high-speed quad, 3 doubles, 2 ropetows, 1 carpet – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Mission Ridge’s lift fleet)
View historic Mission Ridge trailmaps on skimap.org.
About Blacktail
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: Larry Scrivanich
Located in: Lakeside, Montana
Year founded: 1998
Pass affiliations:
* Indy Pass – 2 days with holiday and weekend blackouts (TBD for 2024-25 ski season)
* Indy+ Pass – 2 days with no blackouts
* Powder Alliance – 3 days with holiday blackouts
Closest neighboring ski areas: Whitefish (1:18) - travel times may vary considerably given weather conditions, time of day, and time of year.
Base elevation: 5,236 feet
Summit elevation: 6,780 feet
Vertical drop: 1,544 feet
Skiable Acres: 1,000+
Average annual snowfall: 250 inches
Trail count: (15% easier, 65% more difficult, 20% most difficult)
Lift count: 4 (1 triple, 2 doubles, 1 carpet – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Blacktail’s lift fleet)
View historic Blacktail trailmaps on skimap.org.
Why I interviewed him
So much of Pacific Northwest skiing’s business model amounts to wait-and-pray, hoping that, sometime in November-December, the heaping snowfalls that have spiraled in off the ocean for millennia do so again. It’s one of the few regions in modern commercial skiing, anywhere in the world, where the snow is reliable enough and voluminous enough that this good-ole-boy strategy still works: 460 inches per year at Stevens Pass; 428 at Summit at Snoqualmie; 466 at Crystal; 400 at White Pass; a disgusting 701 at Baker. It’s no wonder that most of these ski areas have either no snowguns, or so few that a motivated scrapper could toss the whole collection in the back of a single U-Haul.
But Mission Ridge possesses no such natural gifts. The place is snowy enough – 200 inches in an average winter – that it doesn’t seem ridiculous that someone thought to run lifts up the mountain. But by Washington State standards, the place is practically Palm Beach. That means the owners have had to work a lot harder, and in a far more deliberate way than their competitors, to deliver a consistent snowsportskiing experience since the bump opened in 1966.
Which is a long way of saying that Mission Ridge probably has more snowmaking than the rest of Washington’s ski areas combined. Which, often, is barely enough to hang at the party. This year, however, as most Washington ski areas spent half the winter thinking “Gee, maybe we ought to have more than zero snowguns,” Mission was clocking its third-best skier numbers ever.
The Pacific Northwest, as a whole, finished the season fairly strong. The snow showed up, as it always does. A bunch of traditional late operators – Crystal, Meadows, Bachelor, Timberline – remain open as of early May. But, whether driven by climate change, rising consumer expectations, or a need to offer more consistent schedules to seasonal employees, the region is probably going to have to build out a mechanical complement to its abundant natural snows at some point. From a regulatory point of view, this won’t be so easy in a region where people worry themselves into a coma about the catastrophic damage that umbrellas inflict upon raindrops. But Mission Ridge, standing above Wenatchee for decades as a place of recreation and employment, proves that using resources to enable recreation is not incompatible with preserving them.
That’s going to be a useful example to have around.
What we talked about
A lousy start to winter; a top three year for Mission anyway; snowmaking in Washington; Blacktail’s worst snowfall season ever and the potential to add snowmaking to the ski area; was this crappy winter an anomaly or a harbinger?; how Blacktail’s “long history of struggle” echoes the history of Mission Ridge; what could Blacktail become?; Blacktail’s access road; how Blacktail rose on Forest Service land in the 1990s; Blacktail expansion potential; assessing Blacktail’s lift fleet; could the company purchase more ski areas?; the evolution of Summit at Snoqualmie; Mission Ridge’s large and transformative proposed expansion; why the expansion probably needs to come before chairlift upgrades; Fantasy Lift Upgrade; and why Mission Ridge replaced a used detachable quad with another used detachable quad.
Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview
Washington skiing is endangered by a pretty basic problem: more people in this ever-richer, ever more-populous state want to ski than there are ski areas for them to visit. Building new ski areas is impossible – you’d have better luck flying an American flag from the roof of the Kremlin than introducing a new mountain to Washington State. That shortage is compounded by the lack of slopeside development, which compels every skier to drive to the hill every day that they want to ski. This circumstance reflects a false commitment to environmental preservation, which mistakes a build-nothing philosophy for watching over Mother Earth, an outmoded way of thinking that fails to appreciate the impacts of sprawl and car culture on the larger natural ecosystem.
Which is where Mission Ridge, with its large proposed ski-and-stay expansion, is potentially so important. If Mission Ridge can navigate the bureaucratic obstacle course that’s been dropped in its path, it could build the first substantial slopeside village in the Pacific Northwest. That could be huge. See, it would say, you can have measured development in the mountains without drowning all the grizzly bears. And since not everyone would have to drive up the mountain every day anymore, it would probably actually reduce traffic overall. The squirrels win and so do the skiers. Or something like that.
And then we have Blacktail. Three-ish years ago, Mission Ridge purchased this little-known Montana bump, one of the West’s few upside-down ski areas, an unlikely late addition to the Forest Service ski area network seated south of Whitefish Mountain and Glacier National Park. I was surprised when Mission bought it. I think everyone else was too. Mission Ridge is a fine ski area, and one with multi-mountain roots – it was once part of the same parent company that owned Schweitzer (now the property of Alterra) – but it’s not exactly Telluride. How did a regional bump that was still running three Riblet doubles from the ‘60s and ‘70s afford another ski area two states away? And why would they want it? And what were they going to do with it?
All of which I discuss, sort of, with Jorgensen. Mission and Blacktail are hardly the strangest duo in American skiing. They make more sense, as a unit, than jointly owned Red Lodge, Montana and Homewood, California. But they’re also not as logical as New York’s Labrador and Song, Pennsylvania’s Camelback and Blue, or Massachusett’s Berkshire East and Catamount, each of which sits within easy driving distance of its sister resort. So how do they fit together? Maybe they don’t need to.
Questions I wish I’d asked
There’s a pretty cool story about a military bomber crashing into the mountain (and some associated relics) that I would have liked to have gotten into. I’d also have liked to talk a bit more about Wenatchee, which Mission’s website calls “Washington’s only true ski town.” I also intended to get a bit more into the particulars of the expansion, including the proposed terrain and lifts, and what sort of shape the bedbase would take. And I didn’t really ask, as I normally do, about the Indy Pass and the reciprocal season pass relationship between the two ski areas.
What I got wrong
I said that Mission Ridge’s first high-speed quad, Liberator Express, came used from Crystal Mountain. The lift actually came used from Winter Park. Jorgensen corrected that fact in the podcast. My mis-statement was the result of crossing my wires while prepping for this interview – the Crystal chairlift at Blacktail moved to Montana from Crystal Mountain, Washington. In the moment, I mixed up the mountains’ lift fleets.
Why you should ski Mission Ridge
Mission Ridge holds echoes of Arapahoe Basin’s East Wall or pre-tram Big Sky: so much damn terrain, just a bit too far above the lifts for most of us to bother with. That, along with the relatively low snowfall and Smithsonian lift fleet, are the main knocks on the place (depending, of course, upon your willingness to hike and love of vintage machinery).
But, on the whole, this is a good, big ski area that, because of its snowmaking infrastructure, is one of the most reliable operators for several hundred miles in any direction. The intermediate masses will find a huge, approachable footprint. Beginners will find their own dedicated lift. Better skiers, once they wear out the blacks off lifts 2 and 4, can hike the ridge for basically endless lines. And if you miss daylight, Mission hosts some of the longest top-to-bottom night-skiing runs in America, spanning the resort’s entire 2,250 vertical feet (Keystone’s Dercum mountain rises approximately 2,300 vertical feet).
If Mission can pull off this expansion, it could ignite a financial ripple effect that would transform the resort quickly: on-site housing and expanded beginner terrain could bring more people (especially families), which would bring more revenue, which would funnel enough cash in to finally upgrade those old Riblets and, maybe, string the long-planned Lift 5 to the high saddle.
That would be amazing. But it would also transform Mission into something different than what it is today. Go see it now, so you can appreciate whatever it becomes.
Why you should ski Blacktail
Blacktail’s original mission, in the words of founder Steve Spencer, was to be the affordable locals’ bump, a downhome alternative to ever-more-expensive Whitefish, a bit more than an hour up the road. That was in 1998, pre-Epic, pre-Ikon, pre-triple-digit single-day lift tickets. Fast forward to 2024, and Whitefish is considered a big-mountain outlier, a monster that’s avoided every pass coalition and offers perhaps the most affordable lift ticket of any large, modern ski area in America (its top 2023-24 lift ticket price was $97).
That has certainly complicated Blacktail’s market positioning. It can’t play Smugglers’ Notch ($106 top lift ticket price) to neighboring Stowe ($220-ish). And while Blacktail’s lift tickets and season passes ($450 early-bird for the 2024-25 ski season), are set at a discount to Whitefish’s, the larger mountain’s season pass goes for just $749, a bargain for a 3,000-acre sprawl served by four high-speed lifts.
So Blacktail has to do what any ski area that’s orbiting a bigger, taller, snowier competitor with more and better terrain does: be something else. There will always be a market for small and local skiing, just like there will always be a market for diners and bars with pool tables and dartboards hanging from the walls.
That appeal is easy enough for locals to understand. For frequent, hassle-free skiing, small is usually better than big. It’s more complicated to pitch a top-of-the-mountain parking lot to you, a probably not-local, who, if you haul yourself all the way to Montana, is probably going to want the fireworks show. But one cool thing about lingering in the small and foreign is that the experience unites the oft-opposed-in-skiing forces of novelty and calm. Typically, our ski travels involve the raucous and the loud and the fast and the enormous. But there is something utterly inspiring about setting yourself down on an unfamiliar but almost empty mountain, smaller than Mt. Megaphone but not necessarily small at all, and just setting yourself free to explore. Whatever Blacktail doesn’t give you, it will at least give you that.
Podcast Notes
On Mission Ridge’s proposed expansion
While we discuss the mountain’s proposed expansion in a general way, we don’t go deep into specifics of lifts and trails. This map gives the best perspective on how the expansion would blow Mission Ridge out into a major ski area - the key here is less the ski expansion itself than the housing that would attend it:
Here’s an overhead view:
Video overviews:
The project, like most ski area expansions in U.S. America, has taken about 700 years longer than it should have. The local radio station published this update in October:
Progress is being made with the long-planned expansion of Mission Ridge Ski & Board Resort.
Chelan County is working with the resort on an Environmental Impact Statement.
County Natural Resources Director Mike Kaputa says it'll be ready in the next eight months or so.
"We are getting closer and closer to having a draft Environmental Impact Statement and I think that's probably, I hate to put a month out there, but I think it's probably looking like May when we'll have a draft that goes out for public comment."
The expansion plan for Mission Ridge has been in the works since 2014, and the resort brought a lawsuit against the county in 2021 over delays in the process.
The lawsuit was dismissed earlier this year.
Kaputa gave an update on progress with the Mission Ridge expansion before county commissioners Monday, where he said they're trying to get the scope of the Environmental Impact Statement right.
"You want to be as thorough as possible," Kaputa said. "You don't want to overdo it. You want to anticipate comments. I'm sure we'll get lots of comments when it comes out."
In 2014, Larry Scrivanich, owner of Mission Ridge, purchased approximately 779 acres of private land adjacent to the current Mission Ridge Ski and Board Resort.
Since then, Mission Ridge has been forging ahead with plans for expansion.
The expansion plans call for onsite lodging and accommodations, which Mission Ridge calls a game changer, which would differentiate the resort from others in the Northwest.
I’m all about process, due diligence, and checks-and-balances, but it’s possible we’ve overcorrected here.
On snowfall totals throughout Washington
Mission gets plenty of snow, but it’s practically barren compared to the rest of Washington’s large ski areas:
On the founding of Blacktail
Blacktail is an outlier in U.S. skiing in that it opened in 1998 on Forest Service land – decades after similarly leased ski areas debuted. Daily Inter Lake summarizes the unusual circumstances behind this late arrival:
Steve Spencer had been skiing and working at Big Mountain [now Whitefish] for many years, starting with ski patrol and eventually rising to mountain manager, when he noticed fewer and fewer locals on the hill.
With 14 years as manager of Big Mountain under his belt, Spencer sought to create an alternative to the famous resort that was affordable and accessible for locals. He got together with several business partners and looked at mountains that they thought would fit the bill.
They considered sites in the Swan Range and Lolo Peak, located in the Bitterroot Range west of Missoula, but they knew the odds of getting a Forest Service permit to build a ski area there were slim to none.
They had their eyes on a site west of Flathead Lake, however, that seemed to check all the right boxes. The mountain they focused on was entirely surrounded by private land, and there were no endangered species in the area that needed protection from development.
Spencer consulted with local environmental groups before he’d spent even “two nickels” on the proposal. He knew that without their support, the project was dead on arrival.
That mountain was known as Blacktail, and when the Forest Service OK’d ski operations there, it was the first ski area created on public land since 1978, when Beaver Creek Resort was given permission to use National Forest land in Colorado.
Blacktail Mountain Ski Area celebrates its 25th anniversary next year, it is still the most recent in the country to be approved through that process.
On Glacier National Park and Flathead Lake
Even if you’ve never heard of Blacktail, it’s stuffed into a dense neighborhood of outdoor legends in northern Montana, including Glacier National Park and Whitefish ski area:
On Whitefish
With 3,000 skiable acres, a 2,353-foot vertical drop, and four high-speed lifts, Whitefish, just up the road from Blacktail, looms enormously over the smaller mountain’s potential:
But while Whitefish presents as an Epkon titan, it acts more like a backwater, with peak-day lift tickets still hanging out below the $100 mark, and no megapass membership on its marquee. I explored this unusual positioning with the mountain’s president, Nick Polumbus, on the podcast last year (and also here).
On “Big Mountain”
For eons, Whitefish was known as “Big Mountain,” a name they ditched in 2007 because, as president and CEO at the time Fred Jones explained, the ski area was “often underestimated and misunderstood” with its “highly generic” name.
On “upside-down” ski areas
Upside-down ski areas are fairly common in the United States, but they’re novel enough that most people feel compelled to explain what they mean when they bring one up: a ski area with the main lodge and parking at the top, rather than the bottom, of the hill.
These sorts of ski areas are fairly common in the Midwest and proliferate in the Mid-Atlantic, but are rare out west. An incomplete list includes Wintergreen, Virginia; Snowshoe, West Virginia; Laurel, Blue Knob, Jack Frost, and Ski Big Bear, Pennsylvania; Otsego, Treetops, and the Jackson Creek Summit side of Snowriver, Michigan; and Spirit Mountain and Afton Alps, Minnesota. A few of these ski areas also maintain lower-level parking lots. Shawnee Mountain, Pennsylvania, debuted as an upside-down ski area, but, through a tremendous engineering effort, reversed that in the 1970s – a project that CEO Nick Fredericks detailed for us in a 2021 Storm Skiing Podcast.
On LIDAR mapping
Jorgensen mentions LIDAR mapping of Mission Ridge’s potential expansion. If you’re unfamiliar with this technology, it’s capable of giving astonishing insights into the past:
On Blacktail’s chairlifts
All three of Blacktail’s chairlifts came used to the ski area for its 1998 opening. The Crystal double is from Crystal Mountain, Washington; the Olympic triple is from Canada Olympic Park in Alberta; and the Thunderhead double migrated from Steamboat, Colorado.
On Riblet chairlifts
For decades, the Riblet double has been the workhorse of Pacific Northwest skiing. Simple, beautiful, reliable, and inexpensive, dozens of these machines still crank up the region’s hills. But the company dissolved more than two decades ago, and its lifts are slowly retiring. Mission Ridge retains three (chairs 1, 3, and 4, which date, respectively, to 1966, 1967, and 1971), and has stated its intent to replace them all, whenever funds are available to do so.
On the history of Summit at Snoqualmie
The Summit at Snoqualmie, where Jorgensen began his career, remains one of America’s most confusing ski areas: the name is convoluted and long, and the campus sprawls over four once-separate ski areas, one of which sits across an interstate with no ski connection to the others. There’s no easy way to understand that Alpental – one of Washington’s best ski areas – is part of, but separate from, the Summit at Snoqualmie complex, and each of the three Summit areas – East, Central, and West - maintains a separate trailmap on the website, in spite of the fact that the three are interconnected by ski trails. It’s all just very confusing. The ski area’s website maintains a page outlining how these four ski areas became one ski area that is still really four ski areas. This 1998 trailmap gives the best perspective on where the various ski nodes sit in relation to one another:
Because someone always gets mad about everything, some of you were probably all pissed off that I referred to the 1990s version of Summit at Snoqualmie as a “primitive” ski area, but the map above demonstrates why: 17 of 24 chairlifts were Riblet doubles; nine ropetows supplemented this system, and the mountain had no snowmaking (it still doesn’t). Call it “retro” or whatever you want, but the place was not exactly Beaver Creek.
On Vail and Alterra’s Washington timeline
I mentioned Washington’s entrance onto the national ski scene over the past decade. What I meant by that was the addition of Summit and Crystal onto the Ikon Pass for the 2018-19 ski season, and Stevens Pass onto the Epic Pass the following winter. But Washington skiing – and Mt. Baker in particular – has always been a staple in the Temple of the Brobots, and Boyne Resorts, pre-Ikon, owned Crystal from 1997 to 2017.
On Anthony Lakes
Jorgensen mentioned that he applied for the general manager position at Anthony Lakes, a little-known 900-footer lodged in the western Oregon hinterlands. One triple chair serves the entire ski area:
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 33/100 in 2024, and number 533 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019.
Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe -
The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and to support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Who
James Coleman, Managing Partner of Mountain Capital Partners
Recorded on
May 7, 2024
About Mountain Capital Partners
About La Parva
Base elevation: 8,704 feet
Summit elevation: 11,722 feet
Vertical drop: 3,022 feet
Skiable Acres: 988 acres
Average annual snowfall: 118 inches
Trail count: 40 (18% expert, 43% advanced, 20% intermediate, 20% beginner)
Lift count: 15 lifts (2 quads, 2 triples, 1 double, 10 surface lifts)
View historic La Parva trailmaps on skimap.org.
What we talked about
MCP puts together the largest ski area in the Southern Hemisphere; how La Parva and Valle Nevado will work as a single ski area while retaining their identity; “something I’ve always taken tremendous pride in is how we respect the unique brand of every resort”; La Parva village; will MCP purchase El Colorado next?; expansion; 10,000-vertical-foot dreams; La Parva Power Pass access; why Valle Nevado is not unlimited on the Power Pass yet; considering Ikon Pass and Mountain Collective access for Valle Nevado, La Parva, and the rest of MCP’s mountains; Valle Nevado’s likely next chairlift; why MCP builds fewer lifts than it would like; the benefits and drawbacks of surface lifts; where a ropetow might make sense at Purgatory; snowmaking in the treeless Andes; why South America; what it means to be the first North American ski area operator to buy in South America; Chile is not as far away as you think; how MCP has grown so large so quickly; why MCP isn’t afraid to purchase ski areas that need work; why MCP bought Sandia Peak and which improvements could be forthcoming; why MCP won’t repair Hesperus’ chairlift until the company can install snowmaking on the hill; why the small ski area is worth saving; drama and resilience at Nordic Valley; should Nordic have upgraded Apollo before installing a brand-new six-pack and expansion?; future Nordic Valley expansion; exploring expansion at Brian Head; and why MCP has never been able to open Elk Ridge, Arizona, and what it would take to do so.
What I got wrong
I said that I saw “an email” that teased lift infrastructure improvements at Valle Nevado. This tidbit actually came from internal talking points that an MCP representative shared with The Storm.
Why the format is so weird
This is the first time I’ve used the podcast to break news, so I thought the simpler “live” format may work better. I’ll write an analysis of what MCP’s purchase of La Parva means in the coming days.
The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 34/100 in 2024, and number 534 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019.
Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe -
This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on April 18. It dropped for free subscribers on April 25. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:
Who
Pete Korfiatis, General Manager of Bluewood, Washington
Recorded on
April 4, 2024
About Bluewood
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: Local investors
Located in: Dayton, Washington
Year founded: 1980
Pass affiliations:
* Indy Pass and Indy+ Pass: 2 days, no blackouts
Closest neighboring ski areas: Cottonwood Butte, Idaho, 3 hours east
Base elevation: 4,545 feet
Summit elevation: 5,670 feet
Vertical drop: 1,125 feet
Skiable Acres: 355
Average annual snowfall: 300 inches
Trail count: 24 (30% difficult, 45% intermediate, 25% easy)
Lift count: 4 (2 triples, 2 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Bluewood’s lift fleet)
Why I interviewed him
Someday, if it’s not too late, I’m going to track down the old-timers who snowshoed into the wilderness and figured this all out. The American West is filled with crazy little snow pockets, lesser-known mountain ranges spiraling off the vast plateaus. Much of this land falls under the purview of the United States Forest Service. In the decades immediately before and after World War II, the agency established most of our large western ski areas within its 193 million-acre kingdom. That’s a lot of land – approximately the size of Texas – and it’s not all snowy. Where there is snow, there’s not always roads, nor even the realistic possibility of plowing one through. Where there are roads, there aren’t always good exposures or fall lines for skiing.
So our ski areas ended up where they are because, mostly, those are the best places nature gave us for skiing. Obviously it snows like hell in the Wasatch and the Tetons and the Sierra Nevadas. Anyone with a covered wagon could have told you that. But the Forest Service’s map of its leased ski areas is dotted with strange little outposts popping out of what most of us assume to be The Flats:
What to make of Brian Head, floating alone in southern Utah? Or Mt. Lemmon, rising over Tucson? Or Ski Apache and Cloudcroft, sunk near the bottom of New Mexico? Or the ski areas bunched and floating over Los Angeles? Or Antelope Butte, hanging out in the Wyoming Bighorns?
Somewhere, in some government filing cabinet 34 floors deep in a Washington, D.C. bunker, are hand-annotated topo maps and notebooks left behind by the bureaucrat-explorers who determined that these map dots were the very best for snowsportskiing. And somewhere, buried where I’ll probably never find it, is the story of Bluewood.
It’s one of our more improbable ski centers. Not because it shouldn’t be there, but because most of us can’t imagine how it could be. Most Washington and Oregon ski areas line up along the Cascades, stacked south to north along the states’ western thirds. The snow smashes into these peaks and then stops. Anyone who’s driven east over the passes has encountered the Big Brown Endless on the other side. It’s surreal, how fast the high alpine falls away.
But as Interstate 90 arcs northeast through this rolling country and toward Spokane, it routes most travelers away from the fecund Umatilla National Forest, one of those unexpected islands of peaks and green floating above our American deserts. Here, in this wilderness just to the west of Walla Walla but far from just about everything else, 300 inches of snow stack up in an average winter. And this is where you will find Bluewood.
The Umatilla sprawls over two states and 1.4 million acres, and is home to three ski areas (Anthony Lakes and inactive Spouts Springs, both in Oregon, are the other two). Three map dots in the wilderness, random-looking from above, all the final product of years in the field, of hardy folks pushing ever-deeper into the woods to find The Spot. This is the story of one of them.
What we talked about
Growing up Wenatchee; “the mountains are an addiction”; THE MACHINE at Mammoth; Back-In-The-Day Syndrome; Mammoth’s outsized influence on Alterra Mountain Company; how the Ikon Pass strangely benefited Mammoth; the accidental GM; off the grid; Bluewood and southeast Washington’s unique little weather pattern; “everybody that knows Bluewood comes for the trees”; why the Forest Service is selling a bunch of Bluewood’s trees; massive expansion potential; when your snowline is 50 feet above your base area and you have no snowmaking; the winter with no snow; Skyline Basin and dreams that never happened; ambitious lift-upgrade plans; summer and “trying to eliminate the six-month revenue drought”; “if you take the North American lifts right now, they’re only coming out because they’re pieces of crap”; potential future chairlifts; Bluewood’s owners and their long-term vision; mountaintop lodging potential; whether night skiing could ever happen; power by biomass; the Indy Pass; Southeast Washington ski culture; free buddy tickets with your season pass; Bluewood’s season pass reciprocal program; why Bluewood’s lift ticket prices are so low; and the absolute killer expense for small ski areas.
Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview
One of the more useful habits I’ve developed is attending offseason media events and consumer ski shows, where ski area managers and marketers tend to congregate. The regional gatherings, where mountain booths are stacked side by side like boxes in a cereal aisle, are particularly useful, allowing me to connect with reps from a dozen or more resorts in an hour. Such was the setup at the Snowvana “stoke event” in Portland, Oregon last November, which I attended both to host a panel of ski area general managers and to lay deeper roots in the rabid Pacific Northwest.
Two podcasts emerged directly from connections I made that day: my February conversation with Red Mountain CEO Howard Katkov, and this one, with Korfiatis.
So that’s the easy answer: a lot of these podcasts happen simply because I was finally able to connect with whomever runs the mountain. But there’s a certain amount of serendipity at work as well: Bluewood, right now, is on the move.
This is a ski area that is slowly emerging from the obscurity I caged it into above. It has big-picture owners, an energetic general manager, a growing nearby population, and megapass membership. True, it also has no snowmaking and outdated, slow chairlifts. But the big, established ski centers to its west are overwhelmed, exhausted, and, with a few exceptions, probably un-expandable. Bluewood could be a big-deal alternative to this mess if they can do what Korfiatis says they want to do.
There are a lot of millions standing between vision and reality here. But sometimes crazy s**t happens. And if it goes down at Bluewood, I want to make sure we’re sitting right there watching it happen.
What I got wrong
I said that Mammoth was an independent mountain when Korfiatis arrived there in 2000. This is incorrect. Intrawest owned a majority stake in Mammoth from 1997 to 2006.
Why you should ski Bluewood
Usually, when casual skiers ask me where they ought to vacation, their wishlist includes someplace that’s relatively easy to get to, where they can stay slopeside, where the snow will probably be good [whenever their kids’ spring break is], and that is a member of [whatever version of the Epic or Ikon pass they purchased]. I give them a list of places that would not be a surprising list of places to anyone reading this newsletter, always with this qualifier: expect company.
I like big destination ski areas. Obviously. I can navigate or navigate around the crowds. And I understand that 24-chairlifts-and-a-sushi-bar is exactly what your contemporary megapass patron is seeking. But if someone were to flip the question around and ask me which ski area characteristics were likely to give them the best ski experience, I’d have a very different answer for them.
I’d tell them to seek out a place that’s hard to get to, where you find a motel 40 miles away and drive up in the morning. Make it a weekday morning, as far from school breaks as possible. And the further you get from Epkon branding, the farther you’ll be from anything resembling a liftline. That’s the idea with Bluewood.
“Yeah but it’s only 1,100 vertical feet.”
Yeah but trust me that’s plenty when most of your runs are off-piste and you can ski all day without stopping except to ride the lift.
“But no one’s ever heard of it and they won’t be impressed with my Instastory.”
You’ll live.
“But it’s not on my Ultimo-Plus Pass.”
Lift tickets are like $50. Or $66 on weekends. And it’s on the Indy Pass.
“But it’s such a long drive.”
No it isn’t. It’s just a little bit farther than the busier places that you usually go to. But it’s not exactly in Kazakhstan.
“Now you’re just making things up.”
Often, but not that.
Podcast Notes
On Bluewood’s masterplan
Here’s the basic map:
And the lift inventory wishlist:
On Mission Ridge and Wenatchee
Korfiatis grew up in Wenatchee, which sits below Mission Ridge. That mountain, coincidentally, is the subject of an already-recorded and soon-to-be-released podcast, but here’s the trailmap for this surprisingly large mountain in case you’re not familiar with it:
On Mission Ridge’s expansion
Again, I go deep on this with Mission CEO Josh Jorgensen on our upcoming pod, but here’s a look at the ski area’s big proposed expansion, which Korfiatis and I discuss a bit on the show:
And here’s an overhead view:
On “The Legend of Dave McCoy”
The Dave McCoy that Korfiatis refers to in the pod is the founder of Mammoth Mountain, who passed away in 2020 at the age of 104. Here’s a primer/tribute video:
Rusty Gregory, who ran Mammoth for decades, talked us through McCoy’s legacy in a 2021 Storm Skiing Podcast appearance (18:08):
On Kim Clark, Bluewood’s last GM
In September 2021, Bluewood GM Kim Clark died suddenly on the mountain of a heart attack. From SAM:
Longtime industry leader and Bluewood, Wash., general manager Kim Clark died of an apparent heart attack while working on the mountain Tuesday. He was 65. Clark had been the Bluewood GM since 2014.
In a statement sharing the news of Clark’s death, Bluewood said, “significant rescue efforts were unsuccessful. Kim passed away doing what he loved, with people he loved, on the mountain he loved.”
Clark was an influential leader during his career in the mountain resort industry, much of which was spent at resorts in the Pacific Northwest. He is remembered by his peers as a mentor, a teacher, and a leader with a passion for the industry who cared deeply for the teams he led and the resorts he helped to improve.
Prior to becoming GM at Bluewood, Clark led Mt. Ashland, Ore., as its general manager from 2005 to 2014.
On the Tri-Cities of Washington
Imagine this: I’m 18 years old and some dude on the lift at Copper Mountain asks me where I’m from. I say “Michigan” and he says “where” and I say, “the Tri-Cities area” and he says “what on earth is that?” And I say “Oh you’ve never heard of the Tri-Cities?” as though he’d just told me he’d never heard of Paris. And he’s like “no, have you ever heard of the Quad Cities?” Which apparently are four cities bunched along the Iowa-Illinois border around Interstate 80 and the Mississippi River.
It was my first real-time lesson in hyper-regionalism and how oft-repeated information becomes so ingrained that we assume everyone must share it, like the moon or the wind. The Tri-Cities of Michigan are Bay City, Saginaw, and Midland. But no one who doesn’t live there knows this or cares, and so after that chairlift conversation, I started saying that I was from “two hours north of Detroit,” which pretty much every American understands.
Anyway imagine my surprise to learn that America had room for a second Tri-Cities, this one in Washington. I asked the robots to tell me about it and this is what they said:
The Tri-Cities are three closely linked cities (Kennewick, Pasco, and Richland)[2][3] at the confluence of the Yakima, Snake, and Columbia Rivers in the Columbia Basin of Eastern Washington. The cities border one another, making the Tri-Cities seem like one uninterrupted mid-sized city. The three cities function as the center of the Tri-Cities metropolitan area, which consists of Benton and Franklin counties.[4] The Tri-Cities urban area consists of the city of West Richland, the census-designated places (CDP) of West Pasco, Washington and Finley, as well as the CDP of Burbank, despite the latter being located in Walla Walla County.
The official 2016 estimate of the Tri-Cities MSA population is 283,869, a more than 12% increase from 2010. 2016 U.S. MSA estimates show the Tri-Cities population as over 300,000. The combined population of the three principal cities themselves was 220,959 at the 2020 census. As of April 1, 2021, the Washington State Office of Financial Management, Forecasting Division estimates the cities as having a combined population of 224,640.[5]
And actually, it turns out that there are tri-cities all over the country. So what the hell do I know? When I moved east to New York in 2002, it took me about five years to figure out what the “Tri-State Area” was. For a long time I thought it must be New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. But it is New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, from which many people commute into NYC daily to work.
On Scot Schmidt
For those of you who don’t know who “that guy” Scot Schmidt is:
On the Greyhawk lift at Sun Valley
Korfiatis refers to the “Greyhawk lift” at Sun Valley as an example of a retiring high-speed quad that is unlikely to have a useful second life. He was referring to this lift, which from 1988 until last year ran parallel to the monster Challenger lift:
Last summer, Sun Valley replaced both lifts with one Challenger six-pack with a mid-station, and built a new high-speed quad called Flying Squirrel (which replaced a shorter double chair of the same name that met death-by-fire in 2014):
On the number of Washington ski areas
Washington, while home to several legendary ski areas, does not have nearly as many as its growing, active population needs. Of the state’s 17 active ski areas, five operate only surface lifts, and I’m not even certain whether one of them – Badger Mountain – operated this past ski season. Sitzmark also failed to spin its lift. There are really only nine volume-capable ski areas in the state: 49 Degrees North, Crystal, Mission Ridge, Baker, Mt. Spokane, Stevens Pass, Summit, Alpental, and White Pass. Here’s an inventory:
The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing all year long. Join us.
The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 32/100 in 2024, and number 532 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 subscribers’ inboxes on April 16. It dropped for free subscribers on April 23. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:
Who
Steve Paccagnan, President and CEO of Panorama Mountain, British Columbia
Recorded on
March 27, 2024
About Panorama
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: Panorama Mountain Village, Inc., a group of local investors
Located in: Panorama, British Columbia, Canada
Year founded: 1962
Pass affiliations:
* Ikon Pass: 7 days, no blackouts
* Ikon Base Pass: 5 days, holiday blackouts
* Mountain Collective: 2 days, no blackouts
* Lake Louise Pass: view details here
Closest neighboring ski areas: Fairmont Hot Springs (:45), Kimberley (1:43), Kicking Horse (1:54) – travel times will vary considerably depending upon road conditions and time of year
Base elevation: 3,773 feet/1,150 meters
Summit elevation: 8,038 feet/2,450 meters
Vertical drop: 4,265 feet/1,300 meters
Skiable Acres: 2,975
Average annual snowfall: 204 inches/520 centimeters
Trail count: 135 (30% expert, 20% advanced, 35% intermediate, 15% beginner)
Lift count: 10 (1 eight-passenger pulse gondola, 2 high-speed quads, 2 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 1 double, 1 platter, 2 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Panorama’s lift fleet)
Why I interviewed him
U.S. America is making a mistake. In skiing, as in so many other arenas, we prioritize status quo protectionism over measured, holistic development that would reorient our built environments around humans, rather than cars, shrinking our overall impact while easing our access to the mountains and permitting more people to enjoy them. Our cluttered and interminable western approach roads, our mountain-town housing shortages, our liftlines backed up to Kansas are all the result of deliberate generational decisions to prioritize cars over transit, open space over dense walkable communities, and blanket wilderness protection over metered development of new public ski areas in regions where the established businesses - and their surrounding infrastructure - are overwhelmed.
I write about these things a lot. This pisses some of you off. I’m OK with that. I’m not here to recycle the broken ideas that have made U.S. skiing into the mess that (in some fundamental ways, in certain regions) it is. I’m here to figure out how it can be better. The skiing itself, mind you, tends to be fabulous. It is everything that surrounds the mountains that can spoil the experience: the cost, the hassle, the sprawl. There are better ways to do this, to get people to the mountains and to house them there, both to live and to vacation. We know this because other countries already do a lot of the things that we ought to be doing. And the most culturally similar and geographically cozy one is so close we can touch it.
U.S. America and U.S. Americans are ceding North American skiing’s future to British Columbia. This is where virtually all of the continent’s major resort development has occurred over the past three decades. Why do you suppose so many skiers from Washington State spend so much time at Whistler? Yes, it’s the largest resort in North America, with knockout terrain and lots of snow. But Crystal and Stevens Pass and Baker all get plenty of snow and are large enough to give most skiers just about anything they need. What Whistler has that none of them do is an expansive pedestrian base village with an almost infinite number of ski-in, ski-out beds and places to eat, drink, and shop. A dense community in the mountains. That’s worth driving four or more hours north for, even if you have to deal with the pain-in-the-ass border slowdowns to get there.
This is not an accident, and Whistler is not an outlier. Over the past 30-plus years, the province of British Columbia has deliberately shaped its regulatory environment and developmental policies to encourage and lubricate ski resort evolution and growth. While all-new ski resort developments often stall, one small ski area after another has grown from community bump to major resort over the past several decades. Tiny Mount Mackenzie became titanic Revelstoke, which towers over even mighty Whistler. Backwater Whitetooth blew upward and outward into sprawling, ferocious Kicking Horse. Little Tod Mountain evolved into Sun Peaks, now the second-largest ski area in Canada. While the resort has retained its name over the decades, the transformation of Panorama has been just as thorough and dramatic.
Meanwhile, in America, we stagnate. Every proposed terrain expansion or transit alternative or housing development crashes headfirst into a shredder of bureaucratic holdups, lawsuits, and citizen campaigns. There are too many ways to stop things, and too many people whose narrow visions of what the world ought to be blockade the sort of wholesale rethinking of community architecture that would make the mountains more livable and accessible.
This has worked for a while. It’s still sort of working now. But each year, as the same two companies sell more and more passes to access a relatively stable number of U.S. ski areas, the traffic, liftlines, and cost of visiting these large resorts grows. Locals will find a way, pick their spots. But destination skiers with a menu of big-mountain options will eventually realize that I-70 is not a mandatory obstacle to maneuver on a good ski vacation. They can head north, instead, with the same ski pass they already have, and spend a week at Red or Fernie or Kimberley or Revelstoke or Sun Peaks or Kicking Horse.
Or Panorama. Three thousand acres, 4,265 vertical feet, no lines, and no hassle getting there other than summoning the patience to endure long drives down Canadian two-laners. As the U.S. blunders along, Canada kept moving. The story of Panorama shows us how.
What we talked about
A snowmaking blitz; what happened when Panorama joined the Ikon Pass; how Covid savaged the international skier game; Panorama in the ‘80s; Intrawest arrives; a summit lift at last; village-building; reviving Mt. Baldy, B.C.; Mont Ste. Marie and learning French; why Intrawest sold the ski area; modernizing the lift system; busy busy Copper; leaving for Kicking Horse; Resorts of the Canadian Rockies arrives; who owns Panorama; whether the resort will stay independent; potential lift replacements and terrain expansions; could we ever see a lift in Taynton Bowl?; explaining those big sections of the trailmap that are blocked off with purple borders; and whitebark pine conservation.
Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview
It wouldn’t be fair to call Panorama a Powder Highway sleeper. The place seems to be doing fine as a business, with plenty of skier traffic to support continuous expansive infrastructure upgrades. But with lower average annual snowfall totals than Revy and Whitewater and Fernie and Red, Panorama does tend to get fewer shout-outs through the media and social media megaphones. It’s Northstar to Palisades Tahoe, Keystone to A-Basin, Park City to the Cottonwoods: the less-snowy, less-intense neighbor that collects families in wholesome Build-A-Bear fashion.
But Panorama is wrapping up its second full season on the Ikon Pass, and its second winter since Canada finally unlocked its Covid-era borders. What impact, if any, would those two developments have on Panorama’s famously uncrowded slopes? Even if Colorad-Bro would never deign to turn his Subaru north, would Kansas Karl or North Dakota Norman load the kids into the minivan for something farther but less annoying?
Not yet, it turns out. Or at least, not in great enough numbers to wreck the place. But there is another angle to the Panorama story that intrigues me. Like Copper Mountain, Mountain Creek, and Whistler, Panorama once belonged to Intrawest. Unlike Winter Park, Steamboat, Stratton, and Snowshoe, they did not remain part of the enterprise long enough to live second lives as part of Alterra Mountain Company. But what if they had? Our big-mountain coalitions have somewhat ossified over these past half-dozen years, so that we think of ski areas as Ikon mountains or Epic mountains or Indy mountains or independent mountains. But these rosters, like the composition of sports teams or, increasingly, leagues, can fluctuate wildly over time. I do wonder how Whistler would look under Alterra and Ikon, or what impact Mountain Creek-as-unlimited-Ikon mountain would have had on the megapass market in New York City? We don’t really know. But Panorama, as a onetime Intrawest mountain that rejoined the family through the backdoor with Ikon membership, does give us a sort-of in-between case, a kind of What If? episode of skiing.
Which would be a fun thought experiment under any circumstances. But how cool to hear about the whole evolution from a guy who saw it all happen first-hand over the course of four decades? Who saw it from all levels and from all angles, who knew the players and who helped push the boulder uphill himself? That’s increasingly rare with big mountains, in this era of executive rotations and promotions, to get access to a top leader in possession of institutional knowledge that he himself helped to draft. It was, I’m happy to say, as good as I’d hoped.
What I got wrong
I said that Panorama was “one of the closest B.C. ski areas to the United States.” This is not quite right. While the ski area is just 100 or so miles from the international border, more than a dozen ski areas sit closer to the U.S., including majors such as Kimberley, Fernie, Whitewater, and Red Mountain.
Why you should ski Panorama
Let’s acknowledge, first of all, that Panorama has a few things working against it: it’s more than twice as far from Calgary airport – most skiers’ likely port of entry – than Banff and its trio of excellent ski areas; it’s the least powdery major ski resort on the Powder Highway; and while the skiable acreage and vertical drop are impressive, skiers must ride three lifts and a Snowcat to lap much of the best terrain.
But even that extra drive still gets you to the bump in under four hours on good roads – hardly an endurance test. Sure, they get more snow in Utah, but have you ever been in Utah on a powder day? Enjoy that first untracked run, because unless you’re a local who knows exactly where to go, it will probably be your only one. And lapping multiple lifts is more of a psychological exercise than a practical one when there are few to no liftlines.
And dang the views when you get there:
There are plenty of large, under-trafficked ski resorts remaining in the United States. But they tend to be hundreds of miles past the middle of nowhere, with 60-year-old chairlifts and little or no snowmaking, and nowhere to sleep other than the back of your van. In BC, you can find the best of America’s Big Empties crossed with the modern lift fleets of the sprawling conglomerate-owned pinball machines. And oh by the way you get a hell of a discount off of already low-seeming (compared to the big-mountain U.S.) prices: an American dollar, as of April 16, was worth $1.38 Canadian.
Podcast Notes
On Intrawest
Panorama, as a former Intrawest-owned resort, could easily have been part of Alterra Mountain Company right now. Instead, it was one of several ski areas sold off in the years before the legacy company stuffed its remainders into the Anti-Vail:
On Mont Ste. Marie
Mont Ste. Marie is one of approximately 45,000 ski areas in Quebec, and the only one, coincidentally, that I’ve actually skied. Paccagnan happened to be GM when I skied there, in 2002:
On Kicking Horse
It’s incredible how many U.S. Americans remain unaware of Kicking Horse, which offers what is probably the most ferocious inbounds ski terrain in North America, 4,314 vertical feet of straight down:
Well, almost straight down. The bottom bit is fairly tame. That’s because Kicking Horse, like many B.C. ski areas, began as a community bump and exploded skyward with an assist from the province. Here’s what the ski area, then known as “Whitetooth,” looked like circa 1994:
This sort of transformation happens all the time in British Columbia, and is the result of a deliberate, forward-looking development philosophy that has mostly evaporated in the U.S. American West.
On the Powder Highway
Panorama lacks the notoriety of its Powder Highway size-peers, mostly because the terrain is overall a bit milder and the volume of natural snow a bit lower than many of the other ski areas. Here’s a basic Powder Highway map:
And a statistical breakdown:
On the Lake Louise Pass
I already covered this one in my podcast with Red Mountain CEO Howard Katkov a couple months back:
Katkov mentions the “Lake Louise Pass,” which Red participates in, along with Castle Mountain and Panorama. He’s referring to the Lake Louise Plus Card, which costs $134 Canadian up front. Skiers then get their first, fourth, and seventh days free, and 20 percent off lift tickets for each additional visit. While these sorts of discount cards have been diminished by Epkon domination, versions of them still provide good value across the continent. The Colorado Gems Card, Smugglers’ Notch’s Bash Badge, and ORDA’s frequent skier cards are all solid options for skiers looking to dodge the megapass circus.
On Panorama’s masterplan:
On Mt. Baldy, B.C.
Paccagnan helped revitalize a struggling Mt. Baldy, British Columbia, in the 1990s. Here was the ski area’s 1991 footprint:
And here’s what it looks like today – the ski area joined Indy Pass for the 2023-24 ski season:
On Panorama’s evolution
Panorama, like many B.C. ski areas, has evolved significantly over the past several decades. Here’s what the place looked like in 1990, not long after Paccagnan started and before Intrawest bought the place. A true summit lift was still theoretical, Taynton Bowl remained out of bounds, and the upper-mountain lifts were a mix of double chairs and T-bars:
By 1995, just two years after Intrawest had purchased the ski area, the company had installed a summit T-bar and opened huge tracts of advanced terrain off the top of the mountain:
The summit T ended up being a temporary solution. By 2005, Intrawest had thoroughly modernized the lift system, with a sequence of high-speed quads out of the base transporting skiers to the fixed-grip Summit Quad. Taynton Bowl became part of the marked and managed terrain:
On Whitebark Pine certification
A bit of background on Panorama’s certification as a “whitebark pine-friendly ski resort” – from East Kootenay News Online Weekly:
The Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation of Canada has certified Panorama Mountain Resort as a Whitebark Pine Friendly Ski Area, the first resort in Canada to receive this designation.
The certification recognizes the resort’s long and continued efforts to support the recovery of whitebark pine within its ski area boundary, a threatened tree species that plays a critical role in the biodiversity of mountain ecosystems. ,,,
Found across the subalpine of interior B.C., Alberta and parts of the U.S, this slow growing, five needle pine is an integral part of an ecosystem that many other species depend on for survival. The tree’s cones hold some of the most nutritious seeds in the mountains and sustain Grizzly bears and birds, including the Clark’s nutcracker which has a unique symbiotic relationship with the tree. The deep and widespread roots of the whitebark pine contribute to the health of watersheds by stabilizing alpine slopes and regulating snowpack run-off.
Over the past decade, whitebark pine numbers have fallen dramatically due in large part to a non-native fungal disease known as white pine blister rust that has been infecting and killing the trees at an alarming rate. Since 2012, the whitebark pine has been listed as endangered under the Government of Canada’s Species at Risk Act (SARA), and was recently added to the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service’s threatened species list.
Panorama Mountain Resort has collaborated with the Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation of Canada to facilitate restoration projects including cone collection and tree plantings within the resort’s ski area.
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 31/100 in 2024, and number 531 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 subscribers’ inboxes on April 15. It dropped for free subscribers on April 22. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:
Who
Tom Day, President and General Manager of Gunstock, New Hampshire
Recorded on
March 14, 2024
About Gunstock
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: Belknap County, New Hampshire
Located in: Gilford, New Hampshire
Year founded: 1937
Pass affiliations: Unlimited access on New Hampshire College Pass (with Cannon, Cranmore, and Waterville Valley)
Closest neighboring ski areas: Abenaki (:34), Red Hill Ski Club (:35), Veterans Memorial (:43), Tenney (:52), Campton (:52), Ragged (:54), Proctor (:56), Powderhouse Hill (:58), McIntyre (1:00)
Base elevation: 904 feet
Summit elevation: 2,244 feet
Vertical drop: 1,340 feet
Skiable Acres: 227
Average annual snowfall: 120 inches
Trail count: 49 (2% double black, 31% black, 52% blue, 15% green)
Lift count: 8 (1 high-speed quad, 2 fixed-grip quads, 2 triples, 3 carpets - view Lift Blog’s inventory of Gunstock’s lift fleet)
Why I interviewed him
In the roughly four-and-a-half years since I launched The Storm, I’ve written a lot more about some ski areas than others. I won’t claim that there’s no personal bias involved, because there are certain ski areas that, due to reputation, convenience, geography, or personal nostalgia, I’m drawn to. But Gunstock is not one of those ski areas. I was only vaguely aware of its existence when I launched this whole project. I’d been drawn, all of my East Coast life, to the larger ski areas in the state’s north and next door in Vermont and Maine. Gunstock, awkwardly located from my New York City base, was one of those places that maybe I’d get to someday, even if I wasn’t trying too hard to actually make that happen.
And yet, I’ve written more about Gunstock than just about any ski area in the country. That’s because, despite my affinity for certain ski areas, I try to follow the news around. And wow has there been news at this mid-sized New Hampshire bump. Nobody knew, going into the summer of 2022, that Gunstock would become the most talked-about ski area in America, until the lid blew off Mount Winnipesaukee in July of that year, when a shallow and ill-planned insurrection failed spectacularly at drawing the ski area into our idiotic and exhausting political wars.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you can read more on the whole surreal episode in the Podcast Notes section below, or just listen to the podcast. But because of that weird summer, and because of an aspirational masterplan launched in 2021, I’ve given Gunstock outsized attention in this newsletter. And in the process, I’ve quite come to like the place, both as a ski area (where I’ve now actually skied), and as a community, and it has become, however improbably, a mountain I keep taking The Storm back to.
What we talked about
Retirement; “my theory is that 10 percent of people that come to a ski area can be a little bit of a problem”; Gunstock as a business in 2019 versus Gunstock today; skier visits surge; cash in the bank; the publicly owned ski area that is not publicly subsidized; Gunstock Nice; the last four years at Gunstock sure were an Asskicker, eh?; how the Gunstock Area Commission works and what went sideways in the summer of 2022; All-Summers Disease; preventing a GAC Meltdown repeat; the time bandits keep coming; should Gunstock be leased to a private operator?; qualities that the next general manager of Gunstock will need to run the place successfully; honesty, integrity, and respect; an updated look at the 2021 masterplan and what actually makes sense to build; could Gunstock ever have a hotel or summit lodge?; why a paved parking lot is a big deal in 2024; Maine skiing in the 1960s; 1970s lift lines; reflecting on the changes over 40-plus years of skiing; rear-wheel-drive Buicks as ski commuter car; competing against Epic and Ikon and why independent ski areas will always have a place in the market; will record skier-visit numbers persist?; a surprising stat about season passes; and how a payphone caused mass confusion in Park City.
Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview
On January 19, Gunstock Marketing Director Bonnie MacPherson (long of Okemo and Bretton Woods), shot me a press release announcing that Day would retire at the conclusion of the 2023-24 ski season.
It was a little surprising. Day hadn’t been at Gunstock long. He’d arrived just a couple months before the March 2020 Covid shutdowns, almost four years to the day before he announced retirement. He was widely liked and respected on the mountain and in the community, a sentiment reinforced during the attempted Kook Coup of summer 2022, when a pair of fundamentalist nutjobs got flung out of the county via catapult after attempting to seize Gunstock from Day and his team.
But Gunstock was a bit of a passion project for Day, a skiing semi-lifer who’d spent three decades at Waterville Valley before fiddling with high-end odd-jobs of the consultancy and project-management sort for 10 years. In four years, he transformed county-owned Gunstock from a seasonal business that tapped bridge loans to survive each summer into a profitable year-round entertainment center with millions in the bank. And he did it all despite Covid, despite the arrival of vending-machine Epic and Ikon passes, despite a couple of imbeciles who’d never worked at a ski area thinking they could do a better job running a ski area than the person they paid $175,000 per year to run the ski area.
I still don’t really get it. How it all worked out. How Gunstock has gotten better as everything about running a ski area has gotten harder and more expensive and more competitive. There’s nothing really special about the place statistically or terrain-wise. It’s not super snowy or extra tall or especially big. It has exactly one high-speed lift, a really nice lodge, and Awe Dag views of Lake Winnipesaukee. It’s nice but not exceptional, just another good mid-sized ski area in a state full of good mid-sized ski areas.
And yet, Gunstock thrives. Day, like most ski area general managers, is allergic to credit, but I have to think he had a lot to do with the mountain’s late resilience. He’s an interesting guy, thoughtful and worldly and adventurous. Talking to him, I always get the sense that this is a person who’s comfortable with who he is, content with his life, a hardcore skier whose interests extend far beyond it. He’s colorful but also plainspoken, an optimist and a pragmatist, a bit of back-office executive and good ole’ boy wrencher melded into your archetype of a ski area manager. Someone who, disposition baked by experience, is perfectly suited to the absurd task of operating a ski area in New Hampshire. It’s too bad he’s leaving, but I guess eventually we all do. The least I could do was get his story one more time before he bounced.
Why you should ski Gunstock
Skiing Knife Fight, New Hampshire Edition, looks like this:
That’s 30 ski areas, the fifth-most of any state, in the fifth-smallest state in America. And oh by the way you’re also right next door to all of this:
And Vermont is barely bigger than New Hampshire. Together, the two states are approximately one-fifth the size of Colorado. “Fierce” as the kids (probably don’t) say.
So, what makes you choose Gunstock as your snowsportskiing destination when you have 56 other choices in a two-state region, plus another half-dozen large ski areas just east in Maine? Especially when you probably own an Indy, Epic, or Ikon pass, which, combined, deliver access to 28 upper New England ski areas, including most of the best ones?
Maybe that’s exactly why. We’ve been collectively enchanted by access, obsessed with driving down per-visit cost to beat inflated day-ticket prices that we simultaneously find absurd and delight in outsmarting. But boot up at any New England ski area with chairlifts, and you’re going to find a capable operation. No one survived this long in this dogfight without crafting an experience worth skiing.
It’s telling that Gunstock has only gotten busier since the Epic and Ikon passes smashed into New England a half dozen years ago. There’s something there, an extra thing worth pursuing. You don’t have to give up your SuperUltimoWinterSki Pass to make Gunstock part of your winter, but maybe work it in there anyway?
Podcast Notes
On Gunstock’s masterplan
Gunstock’s ambitious masterplan, rolled out in 2021, would have blown the ski area out on all sides, added a bunch of new lifts, and plopped a hotel and summit lodge on the property:
Most of it seems improbable now, as Day details in the podcast.
On the GAC conflict
Someone could write a book on the Gunstock Shenanigans of 2022. The best I can give you is a series of article I published as the whole ridiculous saga was unfolding:
* Band of Nitwits Highjacks Gunstock, Ski Area’s Future Uncertain - July 24, 2022
* Walkouts, Resignations, Wild Accusations: A Timeline of Gunstock’s Implosion - July 31, 2022
* Gunstock GM Tom Day & Team Return, Commissioner Ousted – 3 Ways to Protect the Mountain’s Future - Aug. 8, 2022
If nothing else, just watch this remarkable video of Day and his senior staff resigning en masse:
On the Caledonian Canal that “splits Scotland in half”
I’d never heard of the Caledonian Canal, but Day mentions sailing it and that it “splits Scotland in half.” That’s the sort of thing I go nuts for, so I looked it up. Per Wikipedia:
The Caledonian Canal connects the Scottish east coast at Inverness with the west coast at Corpach near Fort William in Scotland. The canal was constructed in the early nineteenth century by Scottish engineer Thomas Telford.
The canal runs some 60 miles (100 kilometres) from northeast to southwest and reaches 106 feet (32 metres) above sea level.[2] Only one third of the entire length is man-made, the rest being formed by Loch Dochfour, Loch Ness, Loch Oich, and Loch Lochy.[3] These lochs are located in the Great Glen, on a geological fault in the Earth's crust. There are 29 locks (including eight at Neptune's Staircase, Banavie), four aqueducts and 10 bridges in the course of the canal.
Here's its general location:
More detail:
On Day’s first appearance on the podcast
This was Day’s second appearance on the podcast. The first was way back in episode 34, recorded in January 2021:
On Hurricane Mountain, Maine
Day mentions skiing a long-gone ropetow bump named Hurricane Mountain, Maine as a child. While I couldn’t find any trailmaps, New England Lost Ski Areas Project houses a nice history from the founder’s daughter:
I am Charlene Manchester now Barton. My Dad started Hurricane Ski Slope with Al Ervin. I was in the second grade, I remember, when I used to go skiing there with him. He and Al did almost everything--cranked the rope tow motor up to get it going, directed traffic, and were the ski patrol. As was noted in your report, accommodations were across road at the Norton farm where we could go to use the rest room or get a cup of hot chocolate and a hamburger. Summers I would go with him and Al to the hill and play while they cleared brush and tried to improve the hill, even opened one small trail to the right of the main slope. I was in the 5th grade when I tore a ligament in my knee skiing there. Naturally, the ski patrol quickly appeared and my Dad carried me down the slope in his arms. I was in contact with Glenn Parkinson who came to interview my mother , who at 96 is a very good source of information although actually, she was not much of a skier. The time I am referring to must have been around 1945 because I clearly recall discussing skiing with my second grade teacher Miss Booth, who skied at Hurricane. This was at DW Lunt School in Falmouth where I grew up. I was in the 5th grade when I hurt my leg.
My Dad, Charles Manchester , was one of the first skiers in the State, beginning on barrel staves in North Gorham where he grew up. He was a racer and skied the White Mountains . We have a picture of him at Tuckerman's when not many souls ventured up there to ski in the spring. As I understand it, the shortage of gas during WWII was a motivator as he had a passion for the sport, but no gas to get to the mountains in N.H. Two of his best ski buddies were Al Ervin, who started Hurricane with him, and Homer Haywood, who was in the ski troopers during WWII, I think. Another ski pal was Chase Thompson. These guys worked to ski--hiking up Cranmore when the lifts were closed due to the gas shortage caused by WWII. It finally got to be too much for my Dad to run Hurricane, as he was spending more time directing traffic for parking than skiing, which after all was why he and Al started the project.
I think my Dad and his ski buddies should be remembered for their love of the sport and their willingness to do whatever it took to ski. Also, they were perfect gentlemen, wonderful manners on the slope, graceful and handsomely dressed, often in neckties. Those were the good old days!
The ski area closed around 1973, according to NELSAP, in response to rising insurance rates.
On old-school Sunday River
I’ve documented the incredible evolution of Sunday River from anthill to Vesuvius many times. But here, to distill the drama of the transformation, is the now-titanic ski area’s 1961 trailmap:
This 60s-era Sunday River was a foundational playground for Day.
On the Epic and Ikon New England timeline
It’s easy to lose track of the fact that the Epic and Ikon Passes didn’t exist in New England until very recently. A brief timeline:
* 2017: Vail Resorts buys Stowe, its first New England property, and adds the mountain to the Epic Pass for the 2017-18 ski season.
* 2018: Vail Resorts buys Triple Peaks, owners of Mount Sunapee and Okemo, and adds them to the Epic Pass for the 2018-19 ski season.
* 2018: The Ikon Pass debuts with five or seven days at five New England destinations for the 2018-19 ski season: Killington/Pico, Sugarbush, and Boyne-owned Loon, Sunday River, and Sugarloaf. Alterra-owned Stratton is unlimited on the Ikon Pass and offers five days on the Ikon Base Pass.
* 2019: Vail buys the 17-mountain Peak Resorts portfolio, which includes four more New England ski areas: Mount Snow in Vermont and Crotched, Wildcat, and Attitash in New Hampshire. All join the Epic Pass for the 2019-20 ski season, bumping the number of New England ski areas on the coalition up to seven.
* 2019: Alterra buys Sugarbush. Amps up the mountain’s Ikon Pass access to unlimited with blackouts on the Ikon Base and unlimited on the full Ikon for the 2020-21 ski season. Alterra also ramps up Stratton Ikon Base access from five days to unlimited with blackouts for the 2020-21 winter.
* 2020: Vail introduces New England-specific Epic Passes. At just $599, the Northeast Value Pass delivers unlimited access to Vail’s four New Hampshire mountains, holiday-restricted unlimited access to Mount Snow and Okemo, and 10 non-holiday days at Stowe. Vail also rolls out a midweek version for just $429.
* 2021: Vail unexpectedly cuts the price of Epic Passes by 20 percent, reducing the cost of the Northeast Value Pass to just $479 and the midweek version to $359. The Epic Local Pass plummets to $583, and even the full Epic Pass is just $783.
All of which is background to our conversation, in which I ask Day a pretty interesting question: how the hell have you grown Gunstock’s business amidst this incredibly challenging competitive marketplace?
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 30/100 in 2024, and number 530 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 subscribers’ inboxes on April 8. It dropped for free subscribers on April 15. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:
Who
Dan Egan, General Manager of Tenney Mountain, New Hampshire
Recorded on
March 14, 2024
About Tenney Mountain
Owned by: North Country Development Group
Located in: Plymouth, New Hampshire
Year founded: 1960 (closed several times; re-opened most recently in 2023)
Pass affiliations:
* No Boundaries Pass: 1-3 days, no blackouts
Closest neighboring ski areas: Campton (:24), Kanc Recreation Area (:33), Loon (:34), Ragged (:34), Waterville Valley (:35), Veteran’s Memorial (:39), Red Hill Ski Club (:42), Cannon (:44), Proctor (:44), Mt. Eustis (:50), Gunstock (:52), Dartmouth Skiway (:54), Whaleback (:55), Storrs (:57), Bretton Woods (:59)
Base elevation: 749 feet
Summit elevation: 2,149 feet
Vertical drop: 1,400 feet
Skiable Acres: 110 acres
Average annual snowfall: 140 inches
Trail count: 47 (14 advanced, 27 intermediate, 6 beginner) + 1 terrain park
Lift count: 3 (1 triple, 1 double, 1 platter - view Lift Blog’s inventory of Tenney’s lift fleet)
View historic Tenney Mountain trailmaps on skimap.org.
Why I interviewed him
Dan Egan is an interesting guy. He seems to have 10 jobs all at once. He’s at Big Sky and he’s at Val-d’Isère and he’s writing books and he’s giving speeches and he’s running Tenney Mountain. He’s a legendary freeskier who didn’t die young and who’s stayed glued to the sport. He loves skiing and it is his whole life and that’s clear in talking to him for 30 seconds.
So he would have been a great and compelling interview even outside of the context of Tenney. But I’m always drawn to people who do particular, peculiar things when they could do anything. There’s no reason that Dan Egan has to bother with Tenney, a mid-sized mountain in a mid-sized ski state far from the ski poles of the Alps and the Rockies. It would be a little like Barack Obama running for drain commissioner of Gladwin County, Michigan. He’d probably do a good job, but why would he bother, when he could do just about anything else in the world?
I don’t know. It’s funny. But Egan is drawn to this place. It’s his second time running Tenney. The guy is Boston-core, his New England roots clear and proud. It makes sense that he would rep the region. But there are New England ski areas that stand up to the West in scope and scale of terrain, and even, in Northern Vermont, snow volume and quality (if not consistency). But Tenney isn’t one of them. It’s like the 50th best ski area in the Northeast, not because it couldn’t be better, but because it’s never been able to figure out how to become the best version of itself.
Egan – who, it’s important to note, will move into an advisory or consultant role for Tenney next winter – seems to know exactly who he is, and that helps. He understands skiing and he understands skiers and he understands where this quirky little mountain could fit into the wide world of skiing. This is exactly what the ski area needs as it chugs into the most recent version of itself, one that, we hope, can defy its own legacy and land, like Egan always seems to, on its skis.
What we talked about
A vision for Tenney; what happened when Egan went skiing in jeans all over New Hampshire; the second comeback season was stronger than the first; where Tenney can fit in a jam-packed New Hampshire ski scene; why this time is different at Tenney; the crazy gene; running a ski area with an extreme skier’s mindset; expansion potential; what’s lost with better snowmaking and grooming and wider trails; why New England breeds kick-ass skiers; Tenney’s quiet renovation; can Tenney thrive long-term with a double chair as its summit lift?; what’s the worst thing about a six-person chair?; where Tenney could build more beginner terrain; expansion opportunities; the future of the triple chair; an endorsement for surface lifts; the potential for night skiing; the difference between running Tenney in 2002 and 2024; the slow death of learn-to-ski; why is skiing discounting to its most avid fans?; the down side of online ticket discounts; warm-weather snowmaking; Tenney’s snowmaking evolution; the best snowmaking system in New Hampshire; “any ski area that’s charging more than $100 for skiing and then asking you to put your boots in a cubby outside in the freezing cold … to me, that’s an insult”; the importance of base lodges; “brown-baggers, please, you’re welcome at Tenney”; potential real estate development and the importance of community; New England ski culture – “It means something to be from the East”; “why aren’t more ski area operators skiing?”; skiing as confidence-builder; the No Boundaries Pass; the Indy Pass; Tenney season pass pricing; and Ragged’s Mission: Affordable pass.
Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview
In late 2022, as Tenney’s social media feeds filled with hyperactive projects to re-open the ski area, I asked a veteran operator – I won’t say which one – what they thought of the ski area’s comeback potential.
“No chance,” they’d said, pointing to lack of water, strained and dated infrastructure, and a mature and modern competitive marketplace. “They’re insane.”
And yet, here we are. Tenney lives.
The longer I do this, the less the project of operating a ski area makes sense to me. Ski areas, in my head, have always been Mount Bohemia: string a lift up the mountain and let the skiers ride. But that model can only work in like four places on the continent, and sometimes, like this year, it barely works there. The capital and labor requirements of running even a modest operation in schizophrenic New England weather are, by themselves, shocking. Add in a summit lift built six decades ago by a defunct company in an analogue world, an already overcrowded New Hampshire ski market, and a decades-long legacy of failure, and you have an impossible-seeming project.
But they’re doing it. For two consecutive winters, lift-served snowskiing has happened at Tenney. The model here echoes the strategy that has worked at Titus and Holiday Mountain and Montage: find an owner who runs other successful, non-ski businesses and let those businesses subsidize the ski area until it can function independently. That could take a while. But Steven Kelly, whose Timberline Construction Company is big-timing it all over New England, seems committed.
Some parts of the country, like Washington, need more ski areas. Others, like New Hampshire, probably have too many. That can be great for skiers: access road death matches are not really a thing out here, and there’s always some uncrowded bump to escape to on peak days. Operators competing for skiers, however, have a tricky story to tell. In Tenney’s case, the puzzle is this: how does a fixed-grip 1,400-footer compete in a crowded ski corridor in a crowded ski state with five-dollar Epic Passes raining from the skies and Octopus lifts rising right outside of town and skiers following habits and rituals formed in childhood? Tenney’s operators have ideas. And some pretty good ones, as it turns out.
Questions I wish I’d asked
I know some of you will be disappointed that I didn’t get into Egan’s career as a pro skier. But this interview could have been nine hours long and we wouldn’t have dented the life of what is a very interesting dude. Anyway here’s Egan skiing and talking about skiing if you were missing that:
What I got wrong
We recorded this before 2024-25 Tenney season passes dropped. Egan teased that they would cost less than 2023-24 passes, and they ended up debuting for $399 adult, down from $449 for this past winter.
When describing the benefits of nearby Ragged Mountain’s $429 season pass, I mention the ski area’s high-speed lifts and extensive glades, but I neglected to mention one very important benefit: the pass comes loaded with five lift tickets to Jay freaking Peak.
Why you should ski Tenney
Before high-speed lifts and Colorado-based owners and Extreme Ultimo Megapasses, there was a lot more weird in New England skiing. There was the Cranmore Skimobile:
And these oil-dripping bubble doubles and rocket-ship tram at Mount Snow:
And whatever the hell is going on here at now-defunct King Ridge, New Hampshire:
I don’t really know if all this was roadside carnival schtick or regional quirk or just a reflection of the contemporary world, but it’s all mostly gone now, a casualty of an industry that’s figured itself out.
Which is why it’s so jarring, but also so novel and so right, to pull into Tenney and to see this:
I don’t really know the story here, and I didn’t ask Egan about it. They call it the Witch’s Hat. It’s Tenney’s ticket office. Perhaps its peculiar shape is a coincidence, the product of some long-gone foreman’s idiosyncratic imagination. I don’t even know why a ski area with a base lodge the size of Rhode Island bothers to maintain a separate building just for selling lift tickets. But they do. And it’s wonderful.
The whole experience of skiing Tenney evokes this kind of time-machine dislocation. There’s the lattice-towered Hornet double, a plodding 60-year-old machine that moves uphill at the pace of a pack mule:
There’s the narrow, twisty trails of Ye Old New England:
And the handmade trail signs:
Of course, modernity intrudes. Tenney now has RFID, trim grooming, a spacious pub with good food. And, as you’ll learn in the podcast, plans to step into the 2020s. The blueprint here is not Mad River Glen redux, or even fixed-grip 4EVA Magic Mountain. It’s transformation into something that can compete in ski area-dense and rapidly evolving New Hampshire. The vision, as Egan lays it out, is compelling. But there will be a cost to it, including, most likely, the old Hornet. That Tenney will be a Tenney worth skiing, but so is this one, and better to see it before it’s gone.
Podcast Notes
On 30 Years in a White Haze
I mentioned Egan’s book, 30 Years In A White Haze, in the intro. I dedicated an entire podcast with his co-author, Eric Wilbur, to this book back in 2021:
On Jackson Hole’s jeans-skiing day
So this happened in December:
On the December washout
Egan references the “December washout” – this is the same storm I went deep on with Sunday River GM Brian Heon recently. Listen here.
On “what I did 20 years ago” and warm-weather snowmaking
This was Egan’s second run as Tenney general manager. His first tenure, near the turn of the century, overlapped with the ski area’s experiments in warm-weather snowmaking. New England Ski History summarizes:
In October of 2002, Tenney was purchased by SnowMagic, a company seeking to showcase its snowmaking technology. The company's origins dated back to the late 1980s, when Japanese skier Yoshio Hirokane developed an idea to make snow in warmer temperatures, called Infinite Crystal Snowmaking. Hirokane later joined forces with Albert Bronander to found the New Jersey-based SnowMagic company. A significant investment was planned at Tenney, rumored to be a choice of either replacing the 1964 Stadeli double chairlift with a high speed detachable quad or installing the high-tech snowmaking system.
In advance of the 2002-2003 ski season, the investment in a SnowMagic system was announced. The system, rumored to cost $1,000,000, would allow the ski area to stay open year round. There was some speculation that the runaway success of this new system would allow for the purchase of a high speed quad shortly thereafter. Famous skier Dan Egan served as General Manager when the area reopened in December 2002.
After dealing with equipment shipping delays reportedly caused by a longshoreman's strike, Tenney was able to open during the summer and fall of 2003 thanks to the system. Numbers were disappointing and costs were high, especially considering it was only covering a small slope. Summer snowmaking operations were cancelled in 2004 and the snowmaking system was sent to Alabama. While summertime snowmaking was expected to return to Tenney in 2005, it was all but forgotten, as the company determined the systems yielded better revenue in warmer climates.
The most recent headline-making experiment in warm-weather snowmaking landed last October, when Ski Ward, Massachusetts beat everyone to open for the 2023-24 ski season with an assist from an expensive but powerful piece of technology:
It cost $600,000. It’s the size of a shipping container. In an August test run, it cranked out a six-foot-tall pile of snow in 83-degree weather.
It’s the L60 snowmaking machine from Quebec-based Latitude 90. And it just helped Ski Ward, Massachusetts beat every other ski area in North America to open for the 2023-24 ski season.
The skiing wasn’t much. A few feet of base a few hundred feet long, served by a carpet lift. Ski Ward stapled the novelty to its fall festival, a kitschy New England kiddie-fest with “a petting zoo, pony rides, kids crafts, pumpkin painting, summer tubing, bounce houses … and more.” Lift tickets cost $5.
On potential Tenney expansions
We discuss several expansion opportunities for Tenney, including a proposed-but-abandoned upper-mountain beginner area. This 1988 trailmap shows where the potential new lift and trails could sit:
On the evolution of Loon
Loon, in recent years, has leapt ahead of its New Hampshire competitors with a series of snowmaking and lift upgrades that are the most sophisticated in the state (Waterville Valley might argue with me on that). I’ve profiled this evolution extensively, including in a conversation with the ski area’s current GM, Brian Norton, in 2022 - listen here.
On Waterville Valley’s summit T-bar
One of the most underrated lifts in New England is Waterville Valley’s summit T-bar. The story behind it is instructive, though I’m not sure if anyone’s paying attention to the lesson. Here’s the background – in 1988, the ski area installed the state’s first high-speed quad, a base-to-summit machine then known as High Country Express (the ski area later changed the name to “White Peaks Express”:
But detachable lifts were new in the ‘80s, and no one really understood that stringing one to the top of White Peak would prove problematic. Wind holds were a constant problem. So, in 1996, Waterville took the extraordinary step of shortening the lift by approximately 400 vertical feet. Skiers could still travel to the summit on the High Country double chair, a Stadeli machine left over from the 1960s:
But that lift was still prone to wind holds. So, in 2018, Waterville GM Tim Smith tried something both simple and brilliant: replacing the double chair with a brand-new T-bar, which cost all of $750,000 and is practically immune from wind holds:
The result is a better ski experience enabled by a lost-cost, low-tech lift. The ski area continued to invest heavily in the rest of the mountain, throwing down $12 million on the Tecumseh Express bubble six-pack – which replaced the old White Peaks Express – in 2022.
Video by Stuart Winchester.
On JP Auclair
Egan mentions JP Auclair, a Canadian freeskier who died in an avalanche in 2014. Here’s a nice tribute to JP from Chris O’Connell, who cofounded Armada Skis with Auclair:
There are a million things that can be said about JP as a skier—how he pioneered and transcended genres, and the indelible mark he has made on the sport. But there is so much more: he was a genuinely good human; he was my favorite person to be around because he was hilarious and because he was kind.
In the summer of 1997 I watched a VHS tape of JP Auclair and JF Cusson skiing the park at Mt. Hood. It was a time when snowboarding was peaking and, in many places, skiers weren’t even allowed in the park. Skiers certainly weren’t doing tricks that rivaled snowboarders—in difficulty or in style. To see JP and JF doing cork 720s blew my mind, and, as a snow sports photographer, I wanted to meet them. At the time, I was a senior photographer at Snowboarder Magazine and I had begun contributing with a start-up ski magazine called Freeze. The following spring the photo editor of Freeze blew out his knee and in his place, I was sent to the Nordic jib land, Riksgransen, Sweden to meet these guys.
JP and I hit it off and that’s how it began – 16 years of traveling and shooting with him. Often, those travels were the kind which involved appearances, autograph sessions and less than ideal ski situations. He would put on a smile and give it 100 percent at an awkward press conference in China when we knew Interior BC was getting hammered. He would shred the icy slopes of Quebec when duty called, or log long hours in the Armada office to slam out a product video. JP was a champion no matter how adverse or inane. That was part of what made him so good.
Ironically, JP and I had a shared sense that what we were doing, while fulfilling in context, at times seemed frivolous. We spent our lives traveling to the far ends of the earth, and we weren’t doing it to build bridges or irrigations systems or to help people have clean drinking water. Instead, we were doing it for skiing. Read the rest…
On Crotched and Peak Resorts
Egan is right, Crotched is often overlooked and under-appreciated in New England skiing. While much of the region fell behind the West, from a technology point of view, in the 2000s, Peak Resorts rebuilt Crotched almost from scratch in 2003, relocating three lifts from Virginia and installing a new snowmaking system. Per New England Ski History:
At the turn of the millennium, Midwestern ski operator Peak Resorts started looking into either acquiring an operational mid-sized area or reopening a defunct area in New England. Though Temple Mountain was heavily considered, Peak Resorts opted to invest in defunct Crotched Mountain. According to Peak Resorts' Margrit Wurmli-Kagi, "It's the kind of small area that we specialize in, but it skis like a larger mountain. It has some nice glades and some nice steeps, but also some outlying areas that are perfect for the beginners."In September 2002, Peak Resorts formed S N H Development, Inc. as a New Hampshire corporation to begin rebuilding the former western side of the ski area. In terms of vertical feet, the prospective ski area was three times larger than any of Peak Resorts' current portfolio. After a 50 year lease of the property was procured in May 2003, a massive reconstruction project subsequently took place, including reclearing the trails, constructing a new snowmaking system, building a new base lodge, and installing rebuilt lifts from Ski Cherokee, Virginia. A reported ten million dollars later, Crotched Mountain reopened as essentially a new ski area on December 20, 2003. Though most of the terrain followed the former western footprint, the trails were given a new science fiction naming scheme.While the reopened ski area initially did not climb to the top of the former quad chairlift, additional trails were reclaimed in subsequent years. In February of 2012, it was announced that Crotched would be acquiring Ascutney's detachable quad, reopening the upper mountain area. The lift, dubbed the Crotched Rocket, opened on December 1, 2012.
On “Rusty” in the hall of fame
Egan refers to “Rusty’s” U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame induction speech. He was referring to Rusty Gregory, former CEO of Alterra Mountain Company and three-time Storm Skiing Podcast guest. Here’s the speech (with an intro by Egan):
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 26/100 in 2024, and number 526 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 subscribers’ inboxes on April 5. It dropped for free subscribers on April 12. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:
Who
Bruce Schmidt, Vice President and General Manager at Okemo Mountain Resort, Vermont
Recorded on
Feb. 27, 2024 (apologies for the delay)
About Okemo
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: Vail Resorts
Located in: Ludlow, Vermont
Year founded: 1956
Pass affiliations:
* Epic Pass: unlimited access
* Epic Local Pass: unlimited access
* Epic Northeast Value Pass: unlimited access with holiday blackouts
* Epic Northeast Midweek Pass: unlimited weekday access with holiday blackouts
* Epic Day Pass: access on “all resorts” and “32 resorts” tiers
Closest neighboring ski areas: Killington (:22), Magic (:26), Bromley (:31), Pico (:32), Ascutney (:33), Bellows Falls (:37), Stratton (:41), Saskadena Six (:44), Ski Quechee (:48), Storrs Hill (:52), Whaleback (:56), Mount Snow (1:04), Hermitage Club (1:10)
Base elevation: 1,144 feet
Summit elevation: 3,344 feet
Vertical drop: 2,200 feet
Skiable Acres: 632
Average annual snowfall: 120 inches per On The Snow; Vail claims 200.
Trail count: 121 (30% advanced, 37% intermediate, 33% beginner) + 6 terrain parks
Lift count: 20 (2 six-packs, 4 high-speed quads, 5 fixed-grip quads, 2 triples, 1 platter, 6 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Okemo’s lift fleet)
View historic Okemo trailmaps on skimap.org.
Why I interviewed him
Whether by plan or by happenstance, Vail ended up with a nearly perfect mix of Vermont ski areas. Stowe is the beater, with the big snows and the nasty trails and the amazing skiers and the Uphill Bros and the glades and the Front Four. Mount Snow is the sixth borough of New York City (but so is Florida and so is Stratton), big and loud and busy and bursting and messy, with a whole mountain carved out for a terrain park and big-drinking, good-timing crowds, as many skiers at the après, it can seem, as on the mountain. And Okemo is something that’s kind of in-between and kind of totally different, at once tame and lively, a placid family redoubt that still bursts with that frantic Northeast energy.
It's a hard place to define, and statistics won’t do it. Line up Vermont’s ski areas on a table, and Okemo looks bigger and better than Sugarbush or Stowe or Jay Peak. It isn’t, of course, as anyone in the region will tell you. The place doesn’t require the guts that its northern neighbors demand. It’s big but not bossy. More of a stroll than a run, a good-timer cruising the Friday night streets in a drop-top low-rider, in no hurry at all to do anything other than this. It’s like skiing Vermont without having to tangle with Vermont, like boating on a lake with no waves.
Because of this unusual profile, New England skiers either adore Okemo or won’t go anywhere near it. It is a singular place in a dense ski state that is the heart of a dense ski region. Okemo isn’t particularly convenient to get to, isn’t particularly snowy by Vermont standards, and isn’t particularly interesting from a terrain point of view. And yet, it is, historically, the second-busiest ski area in the Northeast (after Killington). There is something there that works. Or at least, that has worked historically, as the place budded and flourished in the Mueller family’s 36-year reign.
But it’s Vail’s mountain now, an Epic Pass anchor that’s shuffling and adding lifts for the crowds that that membership brings. While the season pass price has dropped, skier expectations have ramped up at Okemo, as they have everywhere in the social-media epoch. The grace that passholders granted the growing family-owned mountain has evaporated. Everyone’s pulling the pins on their hand grenades and flinging them toward Broomfield every time a Saturday liftline materializes. It’s not really fair, but it’s how the world is right now. The least I can do is get their side of it.
What we talked about
Summer storm damage to Ludlow and Okemo; the resort helping the town; Vermont’s select boards; New England resilience; Vail’s My Epic Promise fund and how it helped employees post-storm; reminiscing on old-school Okemo and its Poma forest; the Muellers arrive; the impact of Jackson-Gore; how and why Okemo grew from inconsequential local bump to major New England ski hill; how Okemo expanded within the confines of Vermont’s Act 250; Vail buys the mountain, along with Sunapee and Crested Butte; the Muellers’ legacy; a Sunapee interlude; Vail adjusting to New England operations; mythbusters: snowmaking edition; the Great Chairlift Switcheroo of 2021; why Okemo didn’t place bubbles on the Quantum 6; why Okemo’s lift fleet is entirely made up of Poma machines; where Okemo could add a lift to the existing trail network; expansion potential; does Okemo groom too much?; glade expansion?; that baller snowmaking system; what happened when Okemo’s season pass price dropped by more than $1,000; is Epic Pass access too loose at Okemo?; how to crowd-dodge; the Epic Northeast Midweek Pass; limiting lift ticket sales; and skyrocketing lift ticket prices.
Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview
Bruce Schmidt first collected a paycheck from Okemo in the late 1970s. That was a different mountain, a different ski industry, a different world. Pomas and double chairs and primitive snowmaking and mountain-man gear and no internet. It was grittier and colder, in the sense that snowpants and ski coats and heated gloves and socks were not so ubiquitous and affordable and high-quality as they are today. Skiing, particularly in New England, required a hardiness, a tolerance for cold and subtle pain that modernity has slowly shuffled out of the skier profile.
Different as it was, that age of 210s and rear-wheel drive rigs was not that long ago, and Schmidt has experienced it as one continuous story. That sort of institutional and epochal tenure is rare, especially at one ski area, especially at one that has evolved as much as Okemo. Imagine if you showed up at surface-lift Hickory and watched it transform, over four decades, into sprawling Gore. That’s essentially what Schmidt lived – and helped drive – at Okemo.
That hardly ever happens. Small ski areas tend to stay small. Expansion is hard and expensive and, in Vermont especially, bureaucratically challenging. And yet little Okemo, wriggling in Killington’s shadow, lodged between the state’s southern and northern snow pockets, up past Mount Snow and Stratton but not so far from might-as-well-keep-driving Sugarbush and Mad River Glen, became, somehow, the fourth-largest ski area in America’s fourth-largest ski state by skier visits (after Colorado, California, and Utah, typically).
The Mueller family, which owned the ski area from 1982 until they sold it to Vail Resorts in 2018, were, of course, the visionaries and financiers behind that growth, the likes of which we will probably never witness in New England again. But as Vail’s roots grow deeper and they make these mountains their own, that legacy will fade, if not necessarily dim. It was important, then, to download that part of Schmidt’s brain to the internet, to make sure that story survived the big groom of time.
What I got wrong
I said in the intro that Bruce started at Okemo in 1987. He actually started in the late ‘70s and worked there on and off for several years, as he explains in the conversation.
I said that Okemo’s lift fleet was “100 percent Poma.” This is not exactly right, as some of the lifts are officially branded Leitner-Poma. I’m also not certain of the make of Okemo’s carpets.
I noted in the intro that Okemo was Vail’s second-largest eastern mountain. It is actually their largest by skiable acreage (though Stowe feels larger to me, given the expansive unmarked but very skiable glades stuffed between nearly every trail). Here’s a snapshot of Vail’s entire portfolio for reference:
Why you should ski Okemo
The first time I skied Okemo was 2007. I rode a 3:45 a.m. ski bus north from Manhattan. I remember thinking three things: 1) wow, this place is big; 2) wow, there are a lot of kids here; and 3) do they seriously groom every goddamn trail every single night?
This was at the height of my off-piste mania. I’m not a great carver, especially after the cord gets chopped up and scratchy sublayers emerge. I prefer to maneuver, at a moderate pace, over terrain, meaning bumps or glades (which are basically bumps in the trees, at least on a typical Vermont day). It’s more fun and interesting than blasting down wide-open, beaten-up groomers filled with New Yorkers.
But wide-open, beaten-up groomers filled with New Yorkers is what Okemo is. At the time, I had no understanding of freeze-thaw cycles, of subtle snowfall differentials between nearby ski areas, of the demographic profile that drove such tight slope management (read: mediocre big-city skiers with no interest in anything other than getting to the bottom still breathing). All I knew was that for me, at the time, this wasn’t what I was looking for.
But what you want as a skier evolves over time. I still like terrain, and Okemo still doesn’t have as much as I’d like. If that’s what you need, take your Epic Pass to Stowe – they have plenty. But what I also like is skiing with my kids, skiing with my wife, morning cord laps off fast lifts, long meandering scenic routes to rest up between bumpers, exploring mountains border to border, getting a little lost among multiple base areas, big views, moderate pitches, and less-aggressive skiers (ride the K1 gondy or Superstar chair at Killington and then take the Sunburst Six at Okemo; the toning down of energy and attitude is palpable).
Okemo not only has all that – it is all that. If that makes sense. This is one of the best family ski areas in the country. It feels like – it is – a supersized version of the busy ski areas in Massachusetts or Connecticut, a giant Wachusett or Catamount or Mohawk Mountain: unintimidating, wide-open, freewheeling, and quirky in its own overgroomed, overbusy way.
If you hit it right, Okemo will give you bumps and glades and even, on a weekday, wide-open trails all to yourself. But that’s not the typical Okemo experience, and it’s not the point of the place. This is New England’s friendly giant, a meandering mass of humanity, grinning and gripping and slightly frazzled, a disjointed but united-by-snow collective that, together, define Okemo as much as the mountain itself.
Okemo on a stormy day in November 2021. Video by Stuart Winchester.
Podcast Notes
On last summer’s flooding in Okemo and Ludlow
I mean yowza:
I hate to keep harping on New Englander’s work ethic, but…
I reset the same “dang New England you’re badass” narrative that I brought up with Sunday River GM Brian Heon on the podcast a few weeks ago. I’m not from New England and I’ve never even lived there, and I’m from a region with the same sort of get-after-it problem-solver mentality and work ethic. But I’m still amazed at how every time New England gets smashed over the head with a frying pan, they just look annoyed for five minutes, put on a Band-Aid, and keep moving.
On the fate of Plymouth, Bromley, Ascutney, and Plymouth/Roundtop
Schmidt and I discuss several Vermont ski areas whose circa-1980s size rivaled that of Okemo’s at the time. Here, for context, was Okemo before the Muellers arrived in 1982:
It’s hard to tell from the trailmap, but only four of the 10 or so lifts shown above were chairlifts. Today, Okemo has grown into Vermont’s fourth-largest ski area by skiable acres (though I have reason to doubt the accuracy of the ski resort’s self-reported tallies; Stowe, Sugarbush, and Jay all ski at least as big as Okemo, but officially report fewer skiable acres).
Anyway, in the early ‘80s, Magic, Bromley, Ascutney, and Plymouth/Roundtop were approximate peers to Okemo.
Bromley ran mostly chairlifts, and has evolved the most of this group, but it is far smaller than Okemo today.
The mountain has always been well-managed, so it wasn’t entirely fair to stick it in with this group, but the context is important here: Bromley today is roughly the same size that it was 40 years ago:
Ascutney sold a 1,400-plus-foot vertical drop and a thick trail network in this 1982 trailmap. But the place went bust and sold its high-speed quad in 2012 (it’s now the main lift at Vail-owned Crotched).
Today, Ascutney consists of a lower-mountain ropetow and T-bar that rises just 450 vertical feet (you can still skin or hike the upper mountain trails).
Magic, in the early ‘80s, was basically the same size it is today:
A merger with now-private and liftless (but still skiable from Magic), Timber Ridge briefly supersized the place before it went out of business for a large part of the ‘90s:
When Magic recovered from its long shutdown, it reverted to its historic footprint (with extensive glade skiing that either didn’t exist or went unmarked in the ‘80s):
And then there was Round Top, a 1,300-foot sometime private ski area also known as Bear Creek and Plymouth Notch. The area has sat idle since 2018, though the chairlifts are, last I checked, intact, and it can be yours for $6.5 million.
Seriously you can buy it:
On Okemo’s expansion progression
The Muellers’ improbable transformation of Okemo into a New England Major happened in big chunks. First, they opened the Solitude area for the 1987-88 ski season:
In 1994, South Face, far looker’s left, opened a new pod of steeper runs toward the summit:
The small Morningstar pod, located in the lower-right-hand corner of the trailmap, opened in 1995, mostly to serve a real estate development:
The most dramatic change came in 2003, when Okemo opened the sprawling Jackson Gore complex:
On Vermont Act 250
It’s nearly impossible to discuss Vermont skiing without referencing the infamous Act 250, which is, according to the official state website:
…Vermont’s 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 Vermont’s 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.
As onerous as navigating Act 250 can seem, there is significantly more slopeside development in Vermont than in any other Northeastern state, and its large resorts are certainly more developed than anything in build-nothing New York.
On the CNL lease structure
Schmidt refers to “the CNL lease structure.” Here’s what he was talking about: a company called CNL Lifestyle Properties once had a slick sideline in purchasing ski areas and leasing them back to the former owners. New England Ski History explains the historical context:
As the banking crisis unfolded, many ski areas across the country transferred their debt into Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs). On December 5, 2008, Triple Peaks transferred its privately held Mt. Sunapee assets to CNL Lifestyle Properties, Inc.. Triple Peaks then entered into a long agreement with CNL to maintain operational control.
The site put together a timeline of the various resorts CNL once owned, including, from 2008 to ’17, Okemo:
On the proximity of Okemo to Mount Sunapee
Though Okemo and Sunapee sit in different states, they’re only an hour apart:
I snapped this pic of Okemo from the Sunapee summit a couple years ago (super zoomed in):
On Mount Sunapee’s ownership
The State of New Hampshire owns two ski areas: Cannon Mountain and Mount Sunapee. In 1998, after decades of debate on the subject, the state leased the latter to the Muellers. When Vail acquired Triple Peaks (Okemo, Sunapee, and Crested Butte), in 2019, they either inherited or renegotiated the lease. For whatever reason, the state continues to manage Cannon as part of Franconia Notch State Park. A portion of the lease revenue that Vail pays the state each year is earmarked for capital improvements at Cannon.
On glades at Stratton and Killington
Okemo’s trail footprint is light on glades compared to many of the large Vermont ski areas. I point to Killington and Stratton, in particular, in the podcast, mostly due to their proximity to Okemo (every Vermont ski area from Sugarbush on north has a vast glade network). Though it’s just 20 minutes away, Killington rakes in around double Okemo’s snowfall in an average winter, and the ski area maintains glades all over the mountain:
Stratton, 40 minutes south, also averages more snow than Okemo and is a sneaky good glade mountain. It’s easy to spend all day in the trees there when the snow’s deep (and it’s deep more often than you might think):
On Okemo’s historic pass prices
We can have mountain-to-mountain debates over the impact Vail Resorts has on the resorts it purchases, but one thing that’s inarguable: season pass prices typically plummet when the company acquires ski areas. Check out New England Ski History’s itemization of Okemo pass prices over the years – that huge drop in 2018-19 represents the ownership shift and that year’s cost of an Epic Local Pass (lift ticket and pass prices listed below are the maximum for that season):
But, yeah, those day-ticket prices. Yikes.
The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing all year long. Join us.
The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 25/100 in 2024, and number 525 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 subscribers’ inboxes on March 30. It dropped for free subscribers on April 6. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:
Who
Bridget Legnavsky, President & CEO of Sugar Bowl, California
Recorded on
March 13, 2024
About Sugar Bowl
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: A group of shareholders
Located in: Donner, California
Year founded: 1939
Pass affiliations: Mountain Collective: 2 days, no blackouts
Closest neighboring ski areas: Donner Ski Ranch (:02), Soda Springs (:07), Boreal (:10), Kingvale (:14), Tahoe Donner (:24), Northstar (:27), Palisades Tahoe (:30), Homewood (:44), Diamond Peak (:52), Mt. Rose (:58), Sky Tavern (1:03) - travel times vary considerably given time of day, time of year, and weather conditions.
Base elevation: 6,883 feet
Summit elevation: 8,383 feet
Vertical drop: 1,500 feet
Skiable Acres: 1,650 acres
Average annual snowfall: 500 inches
Trail count: 103 (38% advanced, 45% intermediate, 17% beginner)
Lift count: 12 (1 four-passenger gondola, 5 high-speed quads, 3 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 1 platter, 1 carpet) - view Lift Blog’s inventory of Sugar Bowl’s lift fleet.
View historic Sugar Bowl trailmaps on skimap.org.
Why I interviewed her
Lagnavsky muses, toward the end of our interview, that Lake Tahoe in general is home to “the best skiing I’ve ever had in my life,” and that she can’t fathom why it’s not more of a national and international ski destination. This is coming from someone who has spent 30-plus years in the industry; who’s worked in Europe, Colorado, and New Zealand; who has freeskier credentials etched on her resume. She knows what she’s talking about.
And I agree with her. More or less**. Tahoe is spectacular. The views, the snow, the terrain, the vibe, the energy, the variety, the sheer audacity of it all. Sixteen ski areas rung around a 191-square-mile lake at the top of California*^. An improbable wintertime circus, one of the greatest concentrations of ski areas on the continent.
And no one would say there is any lack of people there. This is, again, California, home to 39 million Americans. Traffic and housing are big problems. But, being based in the East, I’m dialed into the way that much of the country thinks about Tahoe as a destination ski region. Which is to say, they mostly don’t.
And I don’t quite get why. It’s not hard to get to. Reno’s airport is closer to the major Tahoe ski areas than Denver’s is to Summit County. It’s not a huge facility, but it’s served by direct flights from 24 airports, including New York City and Chicago. While the roads can get nasty mid-storm, they’re mostly well-maintained federal and state highways. There are plenty of accommodations on or near the larger resorts. But anytime I ask an Epic- or Ikon-Pass wielding East Coast city skier where they’re going out west, they say the Wasatch or Colorado or Big Sky or Jackson Hole. And if I’m like “what about Tahoe,” they’re usually like, “there’s skiing in California? How strange.”
Not that the Epic and Ikon Tahoe mountains need more skiers. The San Francisco Chronicle ran a story a couple weeks ago about how fed-up Bay Area skiers were jetting to Utah and Colorado to outsmart the crowds (slow clap for that hack, Fellas). But there is a lot more to this sprawling, captivating ski region than Palisades, Heavenly, Northstar, and Kirkwood. And one of the most overlooked but also magical pieces of it is Sugar Bowl. And the fact that it’s not, for whatever reason, a destination to anyone outside of a 250-mile radius might make it exactly the kind of place that a lot of you are searching for.
**Settle down, Utah.
*and Nevada
^”Ummmm, the highest point in California is Mt. Whitney, which is nowhere near Lake Tahoe.” Thanks Doesn’t-Understand-Intentional-Hyperbole Bro. P.S. I hate you.
What we talked about
127 inches in one storm and yes that’s real; how do you even measure that?; the “storm troopers” living at Sugar Bowl; storm mode in Tahoe; adjustable lifts; this crazy door:
A season extension; how late Sugar Bowl could stay open and why it usually shuts down before that; ski New Zealand; Treble Cone; Cardrona; the global seasonal ski resort work cycle; never-summer; the biggest cultural adjustment coming to America after running resorts in New Zealand; who owns Sugar Bowl and how committed they are to independence; “We’re an independent resort surrounded by Ikon and Epic, and that’s making it really hard for Sugar Bowl to survive”; could Sugar Bowl join the Ikon Pass?; joining Mountain Collective; “part of the beauty of Sugar Bowl is that it’s uncrowded”; Shhhhhh-ugar Bowl; the three things that set Sugar Bowl apart in a crowded ski market; operating below comfortable carrying capacity; the village gondola; what happens when you live in a car-free village; considering a gondola upgrade; considering the lift fleet; why the Crow’s Peak lift is a triple chair, rather than a high-speed quad; “I do believe we could have the best beginner’s experience in the U.S.”; Sugar Bowl’s masterplan; village evolution; the curiosity of the small ski areas surrounding Sugar Bowl; “it’s got the best skiing I’ve ever had in my life here”; why isn’t California a destination ski market?; yes snowmaking is still helpful in Tahoe, and not just in the winter.
Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview
As far as mid-to-large-sized ski areas go, Sugar Bowl is about as well placed as any in the world. Its four peaks sit walking distance from Interstate 80, which mainlines Bay Area skiers into the mountains in under three hours (without traffic; yes, I know, there’s always traffic). Sugar Bowl is the first big ski area you hit riding east, and arguably the easiest to access. And it gets clobbered with 500 inches of average annual snowfall. Those are Alta-Snowbird numbers (keep moving, Canyon Bro; yes, it’s heavier snow, in general; I already told you LCC delivers the best skiing in America, so stop arguing about something we agree on).
And yet, skiing circa 2024 has set up a challenging obstacle course for Sugar Bowl to navigate. At least as a business. Legnavsky is frank in the podcast, telling us that, “we’re an independent resort surrounded by Ikon and Epic, and that’s making it really hard for Sugar Bowl to survive.” To underscore just how fierce competition for skiers is in Lake Tahoe, look how close Sugar Bowl is to Northstar, an Epic resort that is more than twice its size, and Palisades Tahoe, the 6,000-acre Ikon Pass monster just to its south:
It’s a tough draw. Though not as tough as that of the pass’ namesake Donner Party, who spent what would have been the bomber ski winter of 1846-47 snowbound at a nearby lake eating each other (reading the fevered history of this ordeal derailed me for half an hour while writing this article; I will just say that I’ve never been happier to live in the future). Still, for a business trying to make a go in the U.S. America of 2024, Megapass Monopoly is a tough game to play.
So if Sugar Bowl can’t beat them, why not join them? The mountain has, after all, already jumped on the Mountain Collective train. Why not just join Ikon and be done with it?
The answer, as you can imagine, is nuanced and considered. How does a ski area shape and retain an identity and remain a sustainable business in a vibrant ski region that is stuffed with snow and skiers, but also plenty of larger – and, frankly, less expensive (Sugar Bowl’s season pass is $1,099, more than the $982 Epic Pass) – ski areas? That, for now, is Sugar Bowl’s biggest challenge.
Questions I wish I’d asked
Sugar Bowl also owns the expansive Royal Gorge cross-country ski center, which they claim is North America’s largest, with more than 140 kilometers of trails. And while this trailmap resembles a Rorschach test slide (I see a bat, or maybe a volcano, or maybe a volcanic bat) more than any sort of guide I would be capable of following in and out of the wilderness, I can only assume this is impressive:
What I got wrong
I lumped Boreal in with Soda Springs, Tahoe Donner, and Donner Ski Ranch as a “small, family-oriented ski area.” That’s not really accurate. While Boreal, which, like Soda Springs, is owned by big bad Powdr Corp, is small by Tahoe standards, it’s really been transformed into a giant terrain park in line with the company’s Woodward Brand. It’s the only night-skiing operation in Tahoe, so the Park Brahs can Park Out Brah.
Why you should ski Sugar Bowl
“Part of the beauty of Sugar Bowl is that it’s uncrowded,” Legnavsky tells us in the podcast.
I’m sold.
To access the best version of modern U.S. skiing, you have to, I believe, find the ski areas with all the attributes of the destination resorts, minus their cost, congestion and Instapost-braggy name recognition. Places like Saddleback (a high-speed lift, lots of snow, great terrain, no people), Loveland (easy access, huge terrain, everyone sitting in their cars on the highway below, waiting to go skiing), or Sundance (modern lifts, great snow and scenery, minus the huge crowds just north; this also happens to be where I’m posted up at the moment, writing this article).
Sugar Bowl is one of these places. Five high-speed lifts and craptons of snow, without an access road that looks like the first draft of a caveman rollercoaster. While its 1,500-foot vertical drop ranks ninth among Tahoe ski areas, it clocks in at sixth in skiable acreage, with 1,650. Both numbers, in any context, are respectable, and will give an average skier more than enough to work with for a few days.
Vail has sold more Epic Passes every year since 2008. While new mountain acquisitions surely drove much of that growth, the company’s last new domestic pickup was Seven Springs and its sister resorts in 2021. That suggests that more Epic Pass holders are visiting the same number of ski areas each winter. I don’t know how many Ikon Passes Alterra sells, but no one at Palisades Tahoe is looking around and saying, “Man, Alterra really needs to spread the word about this place.”
I get it. The Epic and Ikon Passes are fabulous deals and fantastic products, granting Californians access to the big four Tahoe resorts and destinations far beyond. If you want to put skiing at the center of your winter, it’s hard not to buy one or the other or both. But there’s a tradeoff for everything. Every year, more people (probably; I’m speculating on Ikon) buy those passes. And every year, those resorts stay more or less the same size (with occasional expansions, like the sizeable expansions at Steamboat, Aspen, and Keystone this winter), implementing chessboard parking plans and building bigger lifts to keep the cauldron just at a boil. But you can turn down the heat yourself. Here’s the hack: exit Interstate 80 eastbound at exit 174, Donner Pass Road, drive three miles, park, and ski while everyone else is waiting to cash in their cheap Ikon Passes down highway 89.
Podcast Notes
On Cardrona and Treble Cone
Legnavsky spent a large chunk of her career running Cardrona and Treble Cone, a pair of large ski areas 40 road miles apart on New Zealand’s South Island. Both sit largely above treeline. Treble Cone rises around 2,300 vertical feet:
Cardrona’s vert is just shy of 2,000 feet on 1,149 acres. While New Zealand is known for “nutcracker” surface lifts, Cardrona runs a legit lift fleet, with a chondola, two high-speed quads, two fixed-grip quads, a platter, and three conveyors:
If you do happen onto a nutcracker, here are some tips:
On the dense concentration of ski areas around Lake Tahoe
Resetting ye’ old Tahoe ski areas inventory:
And here’s how close Sugar Bowl sits to its four small neighbors – Donner Ski Ranch is right across the street; Soda Springs and Boreal are right up the road; and Tahoe Donner is just a few miles east off Interstate 80:
On the Sugar Bowl gondola
Sugar Bowl runs what I believe is the last classic four-passenger gondola in the United States (Loon’s four-person gondola sports a more modern design):
On the old Crow’s Peak lift
Prior to expanding skier’s left into Crow’s Nest Peak in 2013, a Heron double chair that was also known as Crow’s Nest ran parallel to the Disney chair. Here’s the 2012 trailmap:
After the new triple chair opened, Sugar Bowl changed the double’s name to “Pony Express,” and eventually removed the lift around 2018.
On The Art of Skiing
We don’t discuss this in the pod, but here’s a Disney short from like 1702 or something that shows Goofy crushing it at Sugar Bowl:
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 22/100 in 2024, and number 522 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 subscribers’ inboxes on March 26. It dropped for free subscribers on April 2. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:
Who
Brian Heon, General Manager of Sunday River, Maine
Recorded on
January 30, 2024
About Sunday River
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: Boyne Resorts
Located in: Newry, Maine
Year founded: 1959
Pass affiliations:
* Ikon Pass: 7 days, no blackouts
* Ikon Base Pass: 5 days, holiday blackouts
* New England Pass: unlimited access on Gold tier
Reciprocal partners:
* New England Pass holders get equal access to Sunday River, Sugarloaf, and Loon
* New England Gold passholders get three days each at Boyne’s other seven ski areas: Pleasant Mountain, Maine; Boyne Mountain and The Highlands, Michigan; Big Sky, Montana; Brighton, Utah; Summit at Snoqualmie, Washington; and Cypress, B.C.
Closest neighboring ski areas: Mt. Abram (:17); Black Mountain of Maine (:34); Wildcat (:46); Titcomb (1:05); Attitash (1:05); Cranmore (1:11)
Base elevation: 800 feet
Summit elevation: 3,150 feet (at Oz Peak)
Vertical drop: 2,350 feet
Skiable Acres: 884 trail acres + 300 acres of glades
Average annual snowfall: 167 inches
Trail count: 139 (16% expert, 18% advanced, 36% intermediate, 30% beginner)
Lift count: 19 (1 eight-pack, 1 six-pack, 1 6/8-passenger chondola, 2 high-speed quads, 5 fixed-grip quads, 4 triples, 1 double, 1 T-bar, 3 carpets – Sunday River also built an additional triple chair on Merrill Hill, which is complete but not yet open; it is scheduled to open for the 2024-25 ski season – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Sunday River’s lift fleet.)
View historic Sunday River trailmaps on skimap.org.
Why I interviewed him
What an interesting time this is in the North American ski industry. It’s never been easier or cheaper for avid skiers to sample different mountains, across different regions, within the span of a single season. And, in spite of the sorry shape of the stoke-obsessed ski media, there has never been more raw information readily available about those ski areas, whether that’s Lift Blog’s exhaustive databases or OpenSnow’s snowfall comparisons and histories.
What that gives all of us is perspective and context. When I learned to ski in the ‘90s, pre-commercial internet, you could scarcely find a trailmap without visiting a resort’s ticket window. Skimap.org now houses more than 10,000 historic trailmaps for North America alone. That means you can understand, without visiting, what a ski area was, how it’s evolved, and how it compares to its neighbors.
That makes Sunday River’s story both easier and harder to tell. Easier because anyone can now see how this monster, seated up there beyond the Ski 93 and North Conway corridors, is worth the drive past all of that to get to this. The ski area is more than twice the size of anything in New Hampshire. But the magical internet can also show skiers just how much snowier it is in Vermont, how much emptier it is at Saddleback, and that my gosh actually it doesn’t take so much longer to just fly to Utah.
Sunday River, self-aware of its place in the ski ecosystem, has responded by building a better mountain. Boyne has, so far, under-promised and over-delivered on the resort’s 2030 plan, which, when launched four years ago, didn’t mention either of the two D-Line megalifts that now anchor both ends of the resort. The snowmaking is getting better, even as the mountain grows larger and more complex. The teased Western Reserve expansion would, given Sunday River’s reliance on snowmaking, be truly audacious, transforming an already huge ski area into a gigantic one.
Cynics will see echoes of ASC’s largess, of the expansion frenzy of the 1990s that ended in the company’s (though fortunately not the individual ski areas’) extinction. But Boyne Resorts is not some upstart. The narrative of ski-consolidation-doesn’t-work always overlooks this Michigan-based company, founded by a scrappy fellow named Everett Kircher in 1947 – nearly 80 years ago. Boyne officials assure me that their portfolio-wide infrastructure investment is both considered and sustainable. If you’ve been to Big Sky in the past couple of years, it’s clear what the company is trying to achieve, even if they won’t explicitly say it (and I’ve tried to get them to say it): Boyne Resorts is resetting the standard for the North American ski experience by building the most modern ski resorts on the continent. They’re doing what I wish Vail, which continues to disappoint me in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic, would do: ensuring that, wherever they operate, they are delivering the best possible version of skiing in that region. And while that’s a tough draw in the Cottonwoods (with Brighton, stacked, as it is, against the Narnia known as Alta-Snowbird), they’re doing it in Michigan, they’re doing it in the Rockies (at Big Sky), and they’re doing it in New England, where Loon and Sunday River, especially, are transforming at superspeed.
What we talked about
Rain, rain, go away; deciding to close down a ski resort; “seven inches of rain and 40-degree temperatures will eat snowpack pretty quick”; how Sunday River patched the resort back in only four days; the story behind the giant igloo at the base of Jordan; is this proof of climate change or proof of ski industry resilience?; one big advantage of resort consolidation; the crazy New England work ethic; going deep on the new Barker 6 lift; why Sunday River changed plans after announcing that the old Jordan high-speed quad would replace Barker; automatic restraint bars; the second Merrill Hill triple and why it won’t spin until the 2024-25 ski season; the best part about skiing Merrill Hill; how Jordan 8 has transformed Sunday River; why that lift is so wind-resistant; the mountain’s evolving season-opening plan; the potential Western Reserve expansion; potential future lift upgrades; carpet-bombing; 2030 progress beyond the on-snow ski experience; whether the summer bike park could return; the impact of the Ikon Pass on skier visits; Mountain Collective; the New England Pass; and making sure local kids can ski.
Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview
Jordan 8. Barker 6. Merrill Hill. A December rainstorm fit to raise Noah’s Ark. There is always something happening at Sunday River. Or, to frame it in the appropriate active voice: Sunday River is always doing things.
New England, in its ASC/Intrawest late 1980s/1990s/early 2000s frenzy, built and built and built. Sugarbush installed five lifts, including the two-mile-long Slide Brook Express, in a single summer (1995). Killington built two gondolas and two high-speed quads in a three-year span from 1994 to ’97. Stratton sprouted two six-packs and two fixed-grip quads in the summer of 2001. And Sunday River, the most earnest manifestation of Les Otten’s ego and ambitions, multiplied across the wilderness, a new peak each year it seemed, until a backwater with a skiable footprint roughly equal to modern Black Mountain, New Hampshire had sprawled into a videogame ski kingdom at the chest-thumping pinnacle of Northeast skiing.
And then not a lot happened for a really long time. ASC fell apart. Intrawest curdled. Most of the ski area infrastructure investment fled west. Stowe, then owned by AIG, kept building lifts, as did the Muellers (Okemo), and Peak Resorts (at least at Mount Snow and Crotched). One-offs would materialize as strange experiments, like the inexplicable six-pack at Ragged (2001) and the Mid-Burke Express at remote and little-known Burke Mountain (2011). But the region’s on-mountain ski infrastructure, so advanced in the 1990s, began to tire out.
Then, since 2018 or so, rapid change, propelled by numerous catalysts: the arrival of western megapasses, a Covid adrenaline boost, and, most crucially, two big companies willing to build big-time lifts at big-time ski areas. Vail, since kicking New England’s doors open in 2017, has built a half-dozen major lifts, including three six-packs, across four ski areas. And Boyne Resorts, flexing a blueprint they first deployed at western crown jewel Big Sky, has built three D-line bubble lifts, installed two refurbished high-speed quads (with another on the way this summer), unveiled two expansions, and teased at least two more across its four New England ski areas. It doesn’t hurt that, despite a tighter regulatory culture in general, there is little Forest Service bureaucracy to fuss with in the East, meaning that (Vermont’s Act 250 notwithstanding), it’s often easier to replace infrastructure.
Which takes us back to Sunday River. Big and bustling, secure in its Ikon Pass membership, “SR,” as the Boyne folks call it, didn’t really have to do anything to keep being busy and important. The old lifts would have kept on turning, even if rickety old Barker set the message boards on fire once every two to three weeks. Instead, the place is, through platinum-plated lifts and immense snowmaking upgrades, rapidly evolving into one of the country’s most sophisticated ski areas. If that sounds like hyperbole, try riding one of Boyne’s D-line bubble lifts. Quick and quiet, smooth as a shooting star, appointed like a high-end cigar lounge, these lifts inspire a sort of giddiness, an awe in the up-the-mountain ride that will reprogram the way you think about your ski day (even if you’re too cynical to admit it).
But it’s not just what Sunday River is building that defines the place – it is also how the girth of the operation, backed by a New England hardiness, has fortified it against the almost constant weather events that make Northeast ski area operation such a suicidal juggling act. The December rainstorm that tore the place into pieces ended up shutting down the mountain for all of four days. Then they were like, “What?” And the lifts were spinning again.
What I got wrong
On the old Jordan quad
Heon mentioned that the future of the old Jordan high-speed quad was “to be determined.” We recorded this in January, before Pleasant Mountain announced that they would use the bones of Jordan as their new summit lift, replacing a fixed-grip triple chair that was starting to get moldy.
On relative size
I said that Merrill Hill was Sunday River’s smallest peak by vertical drop. But the new Merrill Hill lift rises 750 vertical feet, while Little Whitecap sports a 602-foot vertical drop.
On the New England Pass
The prices I gave for New England Gold Passes ($1,350 early-bird, $1,619 final price), were for the 2023-24 ski season. Since then, 2024-25 passes debuted at $1,389 early-bird ($1,329 renewal), and currently sell for $1,439 ($1,389 renewal).
I also said that the New England Pass didn’t include Pleasant Mountain access. What I meant was that the pass only provides unlimited access to Sunday River, Sugarloaf, and Loon. But the full pass does in fact include three days at Pleasant Mountain, along with each of Boyne’s other six ski areas (Boyne Mountain, The Highlands, Big Sky, Brighton, Summit at Snoqualmie, and Cypress). Skiers can also add on a Pleasant Mountain night pass for $99 for the 2024-25 ski season.
We also refer to the Platinum New England Pass, which the company discontinued this year in favor of a kind-of build-your-own-pass structure – skiers can add an Ikon Base Pass onto the Gold Pass for $299 and the Pleasant Mountain night pass for $99.
Why you should ski Sunday River
The most interesting ski areas, to me, present themselves as an adventure. Wild romps up and over, each new lift opening a new set of trails, which tease yet another chairlift poking over the horizon. Little unexpected pockets carved out from the whole, places to disappear into, not like one ski area but like several, parallel but distinct, the journey seamless but slightly confusing.
This is the best way I can describe Sunday River. The trailmap doesn’t really capture the scale and complexity of it. It’s a good map, accurate enough, but it flattens the perspective and erases the drama, makes the mountain look easy. But almost the first thing that will happen at Sunday River is that you will get lost. The seven side-by-side peaks, so distinct on the map, blend into one another on the ground. Endless forests bisect your path. You can start on Locke and end, almost inexplicably, at the tucked-out-of-sight North Ridge quad. Or take off from the Barker summit and land at the junction of Aurora and the Jordan double, two lifts seemingly planted in raw wilderness that will transport you to two very different worlds. Or you can exit Jordan 8 and find yourself, several miles later, past a condo city and over a sequence of bridges, at the White Cap lodge, wondering where you are and how you got there.
It's bizarre and brilliant, like a fully immersive game of Mouse Trap, a wild machine to lose yourself in. While it’s smaller and shorter than Sugarloaf, its massive sister resort to the north, Sunday River, with its girth and its multiple base areas, can feel bigger, especially when the whole joint’s open. That also means that, if you’re not careful, you can spend all day traversing from one lift to the next, going across, rather than down, the fall lines. But ski with purpose and focus – and a map in your pocket – and Sunday River can deliver you one hell of a ski day.
Podcast Notes
On Sunday River 2030
Boyne is intentionally a little cagey on its 2030 plans, versions of which are in place for Loon, Sugarloaf, Summit at Snoqualmie, Boyne Mountain, The Highlands, and Sunday River. The exact content and commitments of the plans changes quite a bit, so I won’t try to outline them here. Elsewhere in the portfolio, Big Sky has a nearly-wrapped 2025 plan. Brighton, entirely on Forest Service land, has a masterplan (which I can’t find), but no 2030 commitment. Pleasant Mountain is still relatively new to the company. Cypress is in Canada, so who knows what’s going on up there. I’ll talk about that with the mountain’s GM, Matt Davies, in June.
On the December storm
Heon and I discuss the December rainstorm that brought up to seven inches of rain to Sunday River and nearby Bethel. That’s, like, an incredible amount of water:
Heon spoke to local reporters shortly after the resort re-opened.
On the Alpiniglu
Somehow, this party igloo that Sunday River flew a team of Euro-sculptors in to create survived the insane flooding.
On Hurricane Irene and self-sufficiency in Vermont
New England has a way of shrugging off catastrophic storm damage that is perhaps unequaled on planet Earth. From The New York Times, just a few months after Hurricane Irene blasted the state in 2011:
Yet what is truly impressive about the work here is not the amount of damage, or even the size of the big boy toys involved in the repair. Instead, it is that 107 is the last stretch of state road that Vermont has not finished repairing. In the three months since Hurricane Irene, the state repaired and reopened some 500 miles of damaged road, replaced a dozen bridges with temporary structures and repaired about 200 altogether.
Vermont’s success in repairing roads while keeping the state open for tourism is a story of bold action and high-tech innovation. The state closed many damaged highways to speed repairs and it teamed with Google to create frequently updated maps_ showing which routes were open. Vermont also worked in cooperation with other states, legions of contractors and local citizens.
While many Americans have come to wonder whether the nation has lost the ability to fix its ailing infrastructure or do big things, “they haven’t been to Vermont,” said Megan Smith, the state’s commissioner of tourism and marketing.
State roads, which are the routes used most by tourists, are ready for the economically crucial winter skiing season. But Vermont had many of those roads open in time for many of the fall foliage visitors, who pump $332 million into the state’s economy each year, largely through small businesses like bed and breakfasts, gift shops and syrup stands. Within a month of the storm, 84 of the 118 closed sections of state roads were reopened, and 28 of the 34 state highway bridges that had been closed were reopened. …
How did they get so much done so quickly? Within days after the storm hit on Aug. 28, the state had moved to emergency footing, drawing together agencies to coordinate the construction plans and permits instead of letting communications falter. National Guard units from eight states showed up, along with road crews from the Departments of Transportation from Maine and New Hampshire, and armies of private contractors. The attitude, said Sue Minter, Vermont’s deputy secretary of transportation, was, “We’ll do the work and we’ll figure out how we’re paying for it, but we’re not waiting.”
On Barker 6
When Sunday River announced that they would build the Jordan 8 chair in 2021, they planned to move the existing Jordan high-speed quad over to replace the POS Barker detach, a Yan relic from the late ‘80s. Eventually, they changed their minds and pivoted to a sixer for Barker. The old Jordan lift will now replace the summit triple at Pleasant Mountain next year.
On Kircher and redistribution
When Boyne Resorts CEO Stephen Kircher joined me on the podcast in November 2022, he explained the logic behind replacing the Jordan quad with an eight-pack, even though that wasn’t a traditionally super busy part of the resort (14:06):
On the expansions at Loon and Sugarloaf
Sunday River sister resorts Loon and Sugarloaf both opened expansions this ski season. Loon’s was a small beginner-focused pod, a 500-vertical-foot add-on served by a carpet-loaded fixed quad that mainly served to unite the resort with a set of massive parking lots on the mountain’s west end:
Sugarloaf’s West Mountain expansion was enormous – the largest in New England in decades. Pretty impressive for what was already the second-largest ski area in the East:
On the Mountain Collective in the Northeast
Here’s the Mountain Collective’s current roster:
Sunday River would make a lot of sense in there. While the coalition is mostly centered on the West, Stowe and Sugarbush are past members. Each mountain’s parent company (Vail and Alterra, respectively), eventually yanked them off the coalition, leaving Sugarloaf as the sole New England mountain (Bromont and La Massif de Charlevoix have since joined as eastern complements). I ask Heon on the podcast whether Sunday River has considered joining the collective.
On the Community Access Pass
We discuss Sunday River’s Community Access Pass, which is:
“a season pass scholarship for students that reside and attend school in the MSAD 17, SAD 44, and RSU 10 School Districts. Students grades Pre-K through 12 are eligible to apply. This pass will offer free daily access to the Sunday River slopes, and also comes with a complimentary membership to the Sunday River Ski and Snowboard Club. Students must meet certain economic qualifiers to apply; further details about the criteria are available on the pass application. Students have until November 15 to apply for the program.”
Apply here.
On Brian’s last appearance on the podcast
Heon last appeared on the podcast in January 2021:
Current Sunday River President Dana Bullen has also been on the pod, way back on episode 13:
On Merrill Hill and the new lift location
Here’s an approximate location of the new Merrill Hill lift, which is built but not yet operational, and not yet on Sunday River’s trailmap:
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 21/100 in 2024, and number 521 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 subscribers’ inboxes on Feb. 28. It dropped for free subscribers on March 6. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription (on sale at 15% off through March 12, 2024). You can also subscribe to the free tier below:
Who
Howard Katkov, Chairman and CEO of Red Mountain Resort, British Columbia
Recorded on
Feb. 8, 2024
About Red Mountain
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: Red Mountain Ventures
Located in: Rossland, British Columbia, Canada
Year founded: 1947 (beginning of chairlift service)
Pass affiliations:
* Ikon Pass: 7 days, no blackouts
* Ikon Base Pass and Ikon Base Pass Plus: 5 days, holiday blackouts
* Lake Louise Pass (described below)
Closest neighboring ski areas: Salmo (:58), Whitewater (1:22), Phoenix Mountain (1:33), 49 Degrees North (1:53)
Base elevation: 3,887 feet/1,185 meters
Summit elevation: 6,807 feet/2,075 meters
Vertical drop: 2,919 feet/890 meters
Skiable Acres: 3,850
Average annual snowfall: 300 inches/760 cm
Trail count: 119 (17% beginner, 34% intermediate, 23% advanced, 26% expert)
Lift count: 8 (2 fixed-grip quads, 3 triples, 1 double, 1 T-bar, 1 carpet)
View historic Red Mountain trailmaps on skimap.org. Here are some cool video overviews:
Granite Mountain:
Red Mountain:
Grey Mountain:
Rossland:
Why I interviewed him
It’s never made sense to me, this psychological dividing line between Canada and America. I grew up in central Michigan, in a small town closer to Canada (the bridge between Sarnia and Port Huron stood 142 miles away), than the closest neighboring state (Toledo, Ohio, sat 175 miles south). Yet, I never crossed into Canada until I was 19, by which time I had visited roughly 40 U.S. states. Even then, the place felt more foreign than it should, with its aggressive border guards, pizza at McDonald’s, and colored currency. Canada on a map looks easy, but Canada in reality is a bit harder, eh?
Red sits just five miles, as the crow flies, north of the U.S. border. If by some fluke of history the mountain were part of Washington, it would be the state’s greatest ski area, larger than Crystal and Stevens Pass combined. In fact, it would be the seventh-largest ski area in the country, larger than Mammoth or Snowmass, smaller only than Park City, Palisades, Big Sky, Vail, Heavenly, and Bachelor.
But, somehow, the international border acts as a sort of invisibility shield, and skiing Red is a much different experience than visiting any of those giants, with their dense networks of high-speed lifts and destination crowds (well, less so at Bachelor). Sure, Red is an Ikon Pass mountain, and has been for years, but it is not synonymous with the pass, like Jackson or Aspen or Alta-Snowbird. But U.S. skiers – at least those outside of the Pacific Northwest – see Red listed on the Ikon menu and glaze past it like the soda machine at an open bar. It just doesn’t seem relevant.
Which is weird and probably won’t last. And right now Shoosh Emoji Bro is losing his goddamn mind and cursing me for using my platform focused on lift-served snowskiing to hype one of the best and most interesting and most underrated lift-served snowskiing operations in North America. But that’s why this whole deal exists, Brah. Because most people ski at the same 20 places and I really think skiing as an idea and as an experience and as a sustainable enterprise will be much better off if we start spreading people out a bit more.
What we talked about
Red pow days; why Red amped up shuttle service between the ski area and Rossland and made it free; old-school Tahoe; “it is the most interesting mountain I’ve ever skied”; buying a ski area when you’ve never worked at a ski area; why the real-estate crash didn’t bury Red like some other ski areas; why Katkov backed away from a golf course that he spent a year and a half planning at Red; why the 900 lockers at the dead center of the base area aren’t going anywhere; housing and cost of living in Rossland; “we look at our neighborhood as an extension of our community of Rossland”; base area development plans; balancing parking with people; why and how Red Mountain still sells affordable ski-in, ski-out real estate; “our ethos is to be accessible for everybody”; whether we could ever see a lift from Rossland to Red; why Red conducted a crowd-funding ownership campaign and what they did with the money; Red’s newest ownership partners; the importance of independence; “the reality is that the pass, whether it’s the Epic or the Ikon Pass, has radically changed the way that consumers experience skiing”; why Red joined the Ikon Pass and why it’s been good for the mountain; the Mountain Collective; why Red has no high-speed lifts and whether we could ever see one; no stress on a powder day; Red’s next logical lift upgrades; potential lift-served expansions onto Kirkup, White Wolf, and Mt. Roberts; and the Powder Highway.
Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview
My full-scale assault of Canada, planned for 2023, has turned into more of an old-person’s bus tour. I’m stopping at all the big sites, but I sure am taking my time, and I’m not certain that I’m really getting the full experience.
Part of this echoes the realization centuries’ of armies have had when invading Russia: damn this place is big. I’d hoped to quickly fold the whole country into the newsletter, as I’d been able to do with the Midwest and West when I expanded The Storm’s coverage out of the Northeast in 2021. But I’d grown up in the Midwest and been skiing the West annually for decades. I’d underestimated how much that had mattered. I’d skied a bit in Canada, but not consistently enough to kick the door down in the manner I’d hoped. I started counting ski areas in Quebec and stopped when I got to 4,000*, 95 percent of which were named “Mont [some French word with numerous squiggly marks above the letters].” The measurements are different. The money is different. The language, in Quebec, is different. I needed to slow down.
So I’m starting with western Canada. Well, I started there last year, when I hosted the leaders of SkiBig3 and Sun Peaks on the podcast. This is the easiest Canadian region for a U.S. American to grasp: Epic, Ikon, Mountain Collective, and Indy Pass penetration is deep, especially in British Columbia. Powdr, Boyne, Vail, and Pacific Group Resorts all own ski areas in the province. There is no language barrier.
So, Red today, Panorama next month, Whistler in June. That’s the way the podcast calendar sets up now, anyway. I’ll move east as I’m able.
But Red, in particular, has always fascinated me. If you’re wondering what the largest ski area in North America is that has yet to install a high-speed lift, this is your answer. For many of you, that may be a deal-breaker. But I see a time-machine, an opportunity to experience a different sort of skiing, but with modern gear. Like if aliens were to land on today’s Earth with their teleportation devices and language-translation brain chips and standard-issue post-industro-materialist silver onesies. Like wow look how much easier the past is when you bring the future with you.
Someday, Red will probably build a high-speed lift or two or four, and enough skiers who are burned out on I-70 and LCC but refuse to give up their Ikon Passes will look north and say, “oh my, what’s this all about?” And Red will become some version of Jackson Hole or Big Sky or Whistler, beefy but also busy, remote but also accessible. But I wanted to capture Red, as it is today, before it goes away.
*Just kidding, there are actually 12,000.^
^OK, OK, there are like 90. Or 90,000.
Why you should ski Red Mountain
Let’s say you’ve had an Ikon Pass for the past five or six ski seasons. You’ve run through the Colorado circuit, navigated the Utah canyons, circled Lake Tahoe. The mountains are big, but so are the crowds. The Ikon Pass, for a moment, was a cool little hack, like having an iPhone in 2008. But then everyone got them, and now the world seems terrible because of it.
But let’s examine ye ‘ole Ikon partner chart more closely, to see what else may be on offer:
What’s this whole “Canada” section about? Perhaps, during the pandemic, you resigned yourself to U.S. American travel. Perhaps you don’t have a passport. Perhaps converting centimeters to inches ignites a cocktail of panic and confusion in your brain. But all of these are solvable dilemmas. Take a deeper look at Canada.
In particular, take a deeper look at Red. Those stats are in American. Meaning this is a ski area bigger than Mammoth, taller than Palisades, snowy as Aspen. And it’s just one stop on a stacked Ikon BC roster that also includes Sun Peaks (Canada’s second-largest ski area), Revelstoke (the nation’s tallest by vertical drop), and Panorama.
We are not so many years removed from the age of slow-lift, empty American icons. Alta’s first high-speed lift didn’t arrive until 1999 (they now have four). Big Sky’s tin-can tram showed up in 1995. A 1994 Skiing magazine article described the then-Squaw Valley side of what is now Palisades Tahoe as a pokey and remote fantasyland:
…bottomless steeps, vast acreage, 33 lifts and no waiting. America’s answer to the wide-open ski circuses of Europe. After all these years the mountain is still uncrowded, except on weekends when people pile in from the San Francisco Bay area in droves. Squaw is unflashy, underbuilt, and seems entirely indifferent to success. The opposite of what you would expect one of America’s premier resorts to be.
Well that’s cute. And it’s all gone now. America still holds its secrets, vast, affordable fixed-grip ski areas such as Lost Trail and Discovery and Silver Mountain. But none of them have joined the Ikon Pass, and none gives you the scale of Red, this glorious backwater with fixed-grip lifts that rise 2,400 vertical feet to untracked terrain. Maybe it will stay like this forever, but it probably won’t. So go there now.
Podcast Notes
On Red’s masterplan
Red’s masterplan outlines potential lift-served expansions onto Kirkup, White Wolf, and Mount Roberts. We discuss the feasibility of each. Here’s what the mountain could look like at full build-out:
On Jane Cosmetics
An important part of Katkov’s backstory is his role as founder of Jane cosmetics, a ‘90s bargain brand popular with teenagers. He built the company into a smash success and sold it to Estée Lauder, who promptly tanked it. Per Can’t Hardly Dress:
Lauder purchased the company in 1997. Jane was a big deal for Lauder because it was the company’s first mass market drugstore brand. Up until that point, Lauder only owned prestige brands like MAC, Clinique, Jo Malone and more. Jane was a revolutionary move for the company and a quick way to enter the drugstore mass market.
Lauder had no clue what do with Jane and sales plummeted from $50 million to $25 million by 2004.
Several successive sales and relaunches also failed, and, according to the article above, “As it stands today, the brand is dunzo. Leaving behind a default Shopify site, an Instagram unupdated for 213 weeks and a Facebook last touched three years ago.”
On Win Smith and Sugarbush
Katkov’s story shares parallels with that of Win Smith, the Wall-Streeter-turned-resort-operator who nurtured Sugarbush between its days as part of the American Skiing Company shipwreck and its 2019 purchase by Alterra. Smith joined me on the podcast four years ago, post-Alterra sale, to share the whole story.
On housing in Banff and Sun Peaks
Canadian mountain towns are not, in general, backed up against the same cliff as their American counterparts. This is mostly the result of more deliberate regional planning policies that either regulate who’s allowed to live where, or allow for smart growth over time (meaning they can build things without 500 lawsuits). I discussed the former model with SkiBig3 (Banff) President Pete Woods here, and the latter with Sun Peaks GM Darcy Alexander here. U.S. Americans could learn a lot from looking north.
On not being able to buy slopeside real estate in Oregon, Washington, or California
The Pacific Northwest is an extremely weird ski region. The resorts are big and snowy, but unless you live there, you’ve probably never visited any of them. As I wrote a few weeks back:
Last week, Peak Rankings analyzed the matrix of factors that prevent Oregon and Washington ski areas, despite their impressive acreage and snowfall stats, from becoming destination resorts. While the article suggests the mountains’ proximity to cities, lousy weather, and difficult access roads as blockers, just about every prominent ski area in America fights some combination of these circumstances. The article’s most compelling argument is that, with few exceptions, there’s really nowhere to stay on most of the mountains. I’ve written about this a number of times myself, with this important addendum: There’s nowhere to stay on most of the mountains, and no possibility of building anything anytime soon.
The reasons for this are many and varied, but can be summarized in this way: U.S. Americans, in thrall to an environmental vision that prizes pure wilderness over development of any kind, have rejected the notion that building dense, human-scaled, walkable mountainside communities would benefit the environment far more than making everyone drive to skiing every single day. Nowhere has this posture taken hold more thoroughly than in the Pacific Northwest.
Snowy and expansive British Columbia, perhaps sensing a business opportunity, has done the opposite, streamlining ski resort development through a set of policies known as the B.C. Commercial Alpine Ski Policy. As a result, ski areas in the province have rapidly expanded over the past 30 years…
California is a very different market, with plenty of legacy slopeside development. It tends to be expensive, however, as building anything new requires a United Nations treaty, an act of Jesus, and a total eclipse of the sun in late summer of a Leap Year. Perhaps 2024 will be it.
On “Fight The Man, Own the Mountain”
Red ran a crowd-funding campaign a few years back called “Fight the Man, Own the Mountain.” We discuss this on the pod, but here is a bit more context from a letter Katkov wrote on the subject:
Investing in RED means investing in history, independence, and in this growing family that shares the same importance on lifestyle and culture. RED is the oldest ski resort in Western Canada and it has always been fiercely independent. There are not many, if any ski resorts left in North America like Red and the success of our campaign demonstrates a desire by so many of you to, help, in a small way, to protect the lifestyle, soul and ski culture that emanates from Red.
RED is a place I’ve been beyond proud to co-own and captain since 2004 and the door is still open to share that feeling and be a part of our family. But please note that despite the friendly atmosphere, this is one of the Top 20 resorts in North America in terms of terrain. The snow’s unreal and the people around here are some of the coolest, most down-to-earth folks you’re ever likely to meet. (Trying to keep up with them on the hill is another thing entirely…)
With $2 million so far already committed and invested, we wasted no time acting on promised improvements. These upgrades included a full remodel of fan favorite Paradise Lodge (incl. flush toilets!) as well as the expansion of RED’s retail and High Performance centres. This summer we’ll see the construction of overnight on-mountain cabins and the investor clubhouse (friends welcome!) as well as continued parking expansion. We’ve heard from a number of early investors that they were beyond stoked to enjoy the new Paradise Lodge so soon after clicking the BUY button. Hey, ownership has its privileges…
On the Lake Louise Pass
Katkov mentions the “Lake Louise Pass,” which Red participates in, along with Castle Mountain and Panorama. He’s referring to the Lake Louise Plus Card, which costs $134 Canadian up front. Skiers then get their first, fourth, and seventh days free, and 20 percent off lift tickets for each additional visit. While these sorts of discount cards have been diminished by Epkon domination, versions of them still provide good value across the continent. The Colorado Gems Card, Smugglers’ Notch’s Bash Badge, and ORDA’s frequent skier cards are all solid options for skiers looking to dodge the megapass circus.
On the Powder Highway
Red is the closest stop on the Powder Highway to U.S. America. This is what the Powder Highway is:
And here’s the circuit:
Fairmont is just a little guy, but Kicking Horse, Kimberley, and Fernie are Epic Pass partners owned by Resorts of the Canadian Rockies, and Revy, Red, and Panorama are all on Ikon. Whitewater used to be on M.A.X. Pass, but is now pass-less. Just to the west of this resort cluster sits Big White (Indy), Silver Star (Ikon), and Sun Peaks (Ikon). To their east is Sunshine, Lake Louise, Norquay (all Ikon), and Castle (Indy). There are also Cat and heli-ski operations all over the place. You could lose a winter here pretty easily.
On Katkov’s business background
In this episode of the Fident Capital Podcast, Katkov goes in-depth on his business philosophy and management style.
Here’s another:
On bringing the city to the mountains
While this notion, rashly interpreted, could summon ghastly visions of Aspen-esque infestations of Fendi stores in downtown Rossland, it really just means building things other than slopeside mansions with 19 kitchens and a butler’s wing. From a 2023 resort press release:
Red Development Company, the real estate division of RED Mountain Resort (RED), in conjunction with ACE Project Marketing Group (ACE), recently reported the sell-out of the resort's latest real estate offering during the season opening of the slopes. On offer was The Crescent at RED, a collection of 102 homes, ranging from studio to one bedrooms and lofts featuring a prime ski in – ski out location. Howard Katkov, CEO of RED, and Don Thompson, RED President, first conceived of bringing the smaller urban living model to the alpine slopes in January 2021. ACE coined the concept as "everything you need and nothing you don't" …
An important component was ensuring that the price point for The Crescent was accessible to locals and those who know and love the destination. With prices starting mid $300s – an excellent price when converted to USD – and with an achievable 5% deposit down, The Crescent at RED was easily one of the best value propositions in real estate for one of the best ranked ski resorts in North America. Not surprisingly, over 50% of the Crescent buyers were from the United States, spurred on by the extraordinary lifestyle and value offered by The Crescent, but also the new sparsity of Canadian property available to foreign buyers.
As a good U.S. American, I ask Katkov why he didn’t simply price these units for the one-percenters, and how he managed the House-Flipping Henries who would surely interpret these prices as opportunity. His answers might surprise you, and may give you hope that a different sort of ski town is possible.
The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 15/100 in 2024, and number 515 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 subscribers’ inboxes on Feb. 12. It dropped for free subscribers on Feb. 19. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:
Who
David Makarsky, General Manager of Camelback Resort, Pennsylvania
Recorded on
February 8, 2024
About Camelback
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: KSL Capital, managed by KSL Resorts
Located in: Tannersville, Pennsylvania
Year founded: 1963
Pass affiliations:
* Ikon Pass: 7 days, no blackouts
* Ikon Base Pass: 5 days, holiday blackouts
Reciprocal partners: None
Closest neighboring ski areas: Shawnee Mountain (:24), Jack Frost (:26), Big Boulder (:27), Skytop Lodge (:29), Saw Creek (:37), Blue Mountain (:41), Pocono Ranchlands (:43), Montage (:44), Hideout (:51), Elk Mountain (1:05), Bear Creek (1:09), Ski Big Bear (1:16)
Base elevation: 1,252 feet
Summit elevation: 2,079 feet
Vertical drop: 827 feet
Skiable Acres: 166
Average annual snowfall: 50 inches
Trail count: 38 (3 Expert Only, 6 Most Difficult, 13 More Difficult, 16 Easiest) + 1 terrain park
Lift count: 13 (1 high-speed six-pack, 1 high-speed quad, 1 fixed-grip quad, 3 triples, 3 doubles, 4 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Camelback’s lift fleet)
View historic Camelback trailmaps on skimap.org.
Why I interviewed him
At night it heaves from the frozen darkness in funhouse fashion, 800 feet high and a mile wide, a billboard for human life and activity that is not a gas station or a Perkins or a Joe’s Vape N’ Puff. The Poconos are a peculiar and complicated place, a strange borderland between the Midwest, the Mid-Atlantic, and the Northeast. Equidistant from New York City and Philadelphia, approaching the northern tip of Appalachia, framed by the Delaware Water Gap to the east and hundreds of miles of rolling empty wilderness to the west, the Poconos are gorgeous and decadent, busyness amid abandonment, cigarette-smoking cement truck drivers and New Jersey-plated Mercedes riding 85 along the pinched lanes of Interstate 80 through Stroudsburg. “Safety Corridor, Speed Limit 50,” read the signs that everyone ignores.
But no one can ignore Camelback, at least not at night, at least not in winter, as the mountain asserts itself over I-80. Though they’re easy to access, the Poconos keeps most of its many ski areas tucked away. Shawnee hides down a medieval access road, so narrow and tree-cloaked that you expect to be ambushed by poetry-spewing bandits. Jack Frost sits at the end of a long access road, invisible even upon arrival, the parking lot seated, as it is, at the top of the lifts. Blue Mountain boasts prominence, rising, as it does, to the Appalachian Trail, but it sits down a matrix of twisting farm roads, off the major highway grid.
Camelback, then, is one of those ski areas that acts not just as a billboard for itself, but for all of skiing. This, combined with its impossibly fortuitous location along one of the principal approach roads to New York City, makes it one of the most important ski areas in America. A place that everyone can see, in the midst of drizzling 50-degree brown-hilled Poconos February, is filled with snow and life and fun. “Oh look, an organized sporting complex that grants me an alternative to hating winter. Let’s go try that.”
The Poconos are my best argument that skiing not only will survive climate change, but has already perfected the toolkit to do so. Skiing should not exist as a sustained enterprise in these wild, wet hills. It doesn’t snow enough and it rains all the time. But Poconos ski area operators invested tens of millions of dollars to install seven brand-new chairlifts in 2022. They didn’t do this in desperate attempts to salvage dying businesses, but as modernization efforts for businesses that are kicking off cash.
In six of the past eight seasons, (excluding 2020), Camelback spun lifts into April. That’s with season snowfall totals of (counting backwards from the 2022-23 season), 23 inches, 58 inches, 47 inches, 29 inches, 35 inches, 104 inches (in the outlier 2017-18 season), 94 inches, 24 inches, and 28 inches. Mammoth gets more than that from one atmospheric river. But Camelback and its Poconos brothers have built snowmaking systems so big and effective, even in marginal temperatures, that skiing is a fixture in a place where nature would have it be a curiosity.
What we talked about
Camelback turns 60; shooting to ski into April; hiding a waterpark beneath the snow; why Camelback finally joined the Ikon Pass; why Camelback decided not to implement Ikon reservations; whether Camelback season passholders will have access to a discounted Ikon Base Pass; potential for a Camelback-Blue Mountain season pass; fixing the $75 season pass reprint fee (they did); when your job is to make sure other people have fun; rethinking the ski school and season-long programs; yes I’m obsessed with figuring out why KSL Capital owns Camelback and Blue Mountain rather than Alterra (of which KSL Capital is part-owner); much more than just a ski area; rethinking the base lodge deck; the transformative impact of Black Bear 6; what it would take to upgrade Stevenson Express; why and how Camelback aims to improve sky-high historic turnover rates (and why that should matter to skiers); internal promotions within KSL Resorts; working with sister resort Blue Mountain; rethinking Camelback’s antique lift fleet; why terrain expansion is unlikely; Camelback’s baller snowmaking system; everybody hates the paid parking; and long-term plans for the Summit House.
Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview
A survey of abandoned ski areas across the Poconos underscores Camelback’s resilience and adaptation. Like sharks or alligators, hanging on through mass extinctions over hundreds of millions of years, Camelback has found a way to thrive even as lesser ski centers have surrendered to the elements. The 1980 edition of The White Book of Ski Areas names at least 11 mountains – Mt. Tone, Hickory Ridge, Tanglwood, Pocono Manor, Buck Hill, Timber Hill (later Alpine Mountain), Tamiment Resort Hotel, Mt. Airy, Split Rock, Mt. Heidelberg, and Hahn Mountain – within an hour of Camelback that no longer exist as organized ski areas.
Camelback was larger than all of those, but it was also smarter, aggressively expanding and modernizing snowmaking, and installing a pair of detachable chairlifts in the 1990s. It offered the first window into skiing modernity in a region where the standard chairlift configuration was the slightly ridiculous double-double.
Still, as recently as 10 years ago, Camelback needed a refresh. It was crowded and chaotic, sure, but it also felt dumpy and drab, with aged buildings, overtaxed parking lots, wonky access roads, long lines, and bad food. The vibe was very second-rate oceanfront boardwalk, very take-it-or-leave-it, a dour self-aware insouciance that seemed to murmur, “hey, we know this ain’t the Catskills, but if they’re so great why don’chya go there?”
Then, in 2015, a spaceship landed. A 453-room hotel with a water park the size of Lake George, it is a ridiculous building, a monstrosity on a hill, completely out of proportion with its surroundings. It looks like something that fell off the truck on its way to Atlantic City. And yet, that hotel ignited Camelback’s renaissance. In a region littered with the wrecks of 1960s heart-shaped-hottub resorts, here was something vital and modern and clean. In a redoubt of day-ski facilities, here was a ski-in-ski-out option with decent restaurants and off-the-hill entertainment for the kids. In a drive-through region that felt forgotten and tired, here was something new that people would stop for.
The owners who built that monstrosity/business turbo-booster sold Camelback to KSL Capital in 2019. KSL Capital also happens to be, along with Aspen owner Henry Crown, part owner of Alterra Mountain Company. I’ve never really understood why KSL outsourced the operation of Camelback and, subsequently, nearby Blue Mountain, to its hotel-management outfit KSL Resorts, rather than just bungee-cording both to Alterra’s attack squadron of ski resorts, which includes Palisades Tahoe, Winter Park, Mammoth, Steamboat, Sugarbush, and 14 others, including, most recently, Arapahoe Basin and Schweitzer. It was as if the Ilitch family, which owns both the Detroit Tigers and Red Wings, had drafted hockey legend Steve Yzerman and then asked him to bat clean-up at Comerica Park.
While I’m still waiting on a good answer to this question even as I annoy long lines of Alterra executives and PR folks by persisting with it, KSL Resorts has started to resemble a capable ski area operator. The company dropped new six-packs onto both Camelback and nearby Blue Mountain (which it also owns), for last ski season. RFID finally arrived and it works seamlessly, and mostly eliminates the soul-crushing ticket lines by installing QR-driven kiosks. Both ski areas are now on the Ikon Pass.
But there is work to do. Liftlines – particularly at Stevenson and Sunbowl, where skiers load from two sides and no one seems interested in refereeing the chaos – are borderline anarchic; carriers loaded with one, two, three guests cycle up quad chairs all day long while liftlines stretch for 20 minutes. A sense of nickeling-and-diming follows you around the resort: a seven-dollar mandatory ski check for hotel guests; bags checked for outside snacks before entering the waterpark, where food lines on a busy day stretch dozens deep; and, of course, the mandatory paid parking.
Camelback’s paid-parking policy is, as far as I can tell, the biggest PR miscalculation in Northeast skiing. Everyone hates it. Everyone. As you can imagine, locals write to me all the time to express their frustrations with ski areas around the country. By far the complaint I see the most is about Camelback parking (the second-most-complained about resort, in case you’re wondering, is Stratton, but for reasons other than parking). It’s $12 minimum to park, every day, in every lot, for everyone except season passholders, with no discount for car-pooling. There is no other ski area east of the Mississippi (that I am aware of), that does this. Very few have paid parking at all, and even the ones that do (Stowe, Mount Snow), restrict it to certain lots on certain days, include free carpooling incentives, and offer large (albeit sometimes far), free parking lot options.
I am not necessarily opposed to paid parking as a concept. It has its place, particularly as a crowd-control tool on very busy days. But imagine being the only bar on a street with six bars that requires a cover charge. It’s off-putting when you encounter that outlier. I imagine Camelback makes a bunch of money on parking. But I wonder how many people roll up to redeem their Ikon Pass, pay for parking that one time, and decide to never return. Based on the number of complaints I get, it’s not immaterial.
There will always be an element of chaos to Pennsylvania skiing. It is like the Midwest in this way, with an outsized proportion of first-timers and overly confident Kamikaze Bros and busloads of kids from all over. But a very well-managed ski area, like, for instance, Elk Mountain, an hour north of Camelback, can at least somewhat tame these herds. I sense that Camelback can do this, even if it’s not necessarily consistently doing it now. It has, in KSL Resorts, a monied owner, and it has, in the Ikon Pass, a sort of gold-stamp seal-of-approval. But that membership also gives it a standard to live up to. They know that. How close are they to doing it? That was the purpose of this conversation.
What I got wrong
I noted that the Black Bear 6 lift had a “750/800-foot” vertical drop. The lift actually rises 667 vertical feet.
I accidentally said “setting Sullivan aside,” when asking Makarsky about upgrade plans for the rest of the lift fleet. I’d meant to say, “Stevenson.” Sullivan was the name of the old high-speed quad that Black Bear 6 replaced.
Why you should ski Camelback
Let’s start by acknowledging that Camelback is ridiculous. This is not because it is not a good ski area, because it is a very good ski area. The pitch is excellent, the fall lines sustained, the variety appealing, the vertical drop acceptable, the lift system (disorganized riders aside), quite good. But Camelback is ridiculous because of the comically terrible skill level of 90 percent of the people who ski there, and their bunchball concentrations on a handful of narrow green runs that cut across the fall line and intersect with cross-trails in alarmingly hazardous ways. Here is a pretty typical scene:
I am, in general, more interested in making fun of very good skiers than very bad ones, as the former often possess an ego and a lack of self-awareness that transforms them into caricatures of themselves. I only point out the ineptitude of the average Camelback skier because navigating them is an inescapable fact of skiing there. They yardsale. They squat mid-trail. They take off their skis and walk down the hill. I observe these things like I observe deer poop lying in the woods – without judgement or reaction. It just exists and it’s there and no one can say that it isn’t (yes, there are plenty of fantastic skiers in the Poconos as well, but they are vastly outnumbered and you know it).
So it’s not Jackson Hole. Hell, it’s not even Hunter Mountain. But Camelback is one of the few ski-in, ski-out options within two hours of New York City. It is impossibly easy to get to. The Cliffhanger trail, when it’s bumped up, is one of the best top-to-bottom runs in Pennsylvania. Like all these ridge ski areas, Camelback skis a lot bigger than its 166 acres. And, because it exists in a place that it shouldn’t – where natural snow would rarely permit a season exceeding 10 or 15 days – Camelback is often one of the first ski areas in the Northeast to approach 100 percent open. The snowmaking is unbelievably good, the teams ungodly capable.
Go on a weekday if you can. Go early if you can. Prepare to be a little frustrated with the paid parking and the lift queues. But if you let Camelback be what it is – a good mid-sized ski area in a region where no such thing should exist – rather than try to make it into something it isn’t, you’ll have a good day.
Podcast Notes
On Blue Mountain, Pennsylvania
Since we mention Camelback’s sister resort, Blue Mountain, Pennsylvania, quite a bit, here’s a little overview of that hill:
Owned by: KSL Capital, managed by KSL Resorts
Located in: Palmerton, Pennsylvania
Year founded: 1977
Pass access:
* Ikon Pass: 7 days, no blackouts
* Ikon Base Plus and Ikon Base Pass: 5 days, holiday blackouts
Base elevation: 460 feet
Summit elevation: 1,600 feet
Vertical drop: 1,140 feet
Skiable Acres: 164 acres
Average annual snowfall: 33 inches
Trail count: 40 (10% expert, 35% most difficult, 15% more difficult, 40% easiest)
Lift count: 12 (2 high-speed six-packs, 1 high-speed quad, 1 triple, 1 double, 7 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Blue Mountain’s lift fleet)
On bugging Rusty about Ikon Pass
It’s actually kind of hilarious how frequently I used to articulate my wishes that Camelback and Blue would join Alterra and the Ikon Pass. It must have seemed ridiculous to anyone peering east over the mountains. But I carried enough conviction about this that I brought it up to former Alterra CEO Rusty Gregory in back-to-back years. I wrote a whole bunch of articles about it too. But hey, some of us fight for rainforests and human rights and cancer vaccines, and some of us stand on the plains, wrapped in wolf furs and banging our shields until The System bows to our demands of five or seven days on the Ikon Pass at Camelback and Blue Mountain, depending upon your price point.
On Ikon Pass reservations
Ikon Pass reservations are poorly communicated, hard to find and execute, and not actually real. But the ski areas that “require” them for the 2023-24 ski season are Aspen Snowmass (all four mountains), Jackson Hole, Deer Valley, Big Sky, The Summit at Snoqualmie, Loon, and Windham. If you’re not aware of this requirement or they’re “sold out,” you’ll be able to skate right through the RFID gates without issue. You may receive a tisk-tisk email afterward. You may even lose your pass (I’m told). Either way, it’s a broken system in need of a technology solution both for the consumer (easy reservations directly on an Ikon app, rather than through the partner resort’s website), and the resort (RFID technology that recognizes the lack of a reservation and prevents the skier from accessing the lift).
On Ikon Pass Base season pass add-ons
We discuss the potential for Camelback 2024-25 season passholders to be able to add a discounted Ikon Base Pass onto their purchase. Most, but not all, non-Alterra-owned Ikon Pass partner mountains offered this option for the 2023-24 ski season. A non-exhaustive inventory that I conducted in September found the discount offered for season passes at Sugarloaf, Sunday River, Loon, Killington, Windham, Aspen, Big Sky, Taos, Alta, Snowbasin, Snowbird, Brighton, Jackson Hole, Sun Valley, Mt. Bachelor, and Boyne Mountain. Early-bird prices for those passes ranged from as low as $895 at Boyne Mountain to $2,890 for Deer Valley. Camelback’s 2023-24 season pass debuted at just $649. Alterra requires partner passes to meet certain parameters, including a minimum price, in order to qualify passholders for the discounted Base pass. A simple fix here would be to offer a premium “Pennsylvania Pass” that’s good for unlimited access at both Camelback and Blue, and that’s priced at the current add-on rate ($849), to open access to the discounted Ikon Base for passholders.
On conglomerates doing shared passes
In November, I published an analysis of every U.S.-based entity that owns or operates two or more ski areas. I’ve continued to revise my list, and I currently count 26 such operators. All but eight of them – Powdr, Fairbank Group, the Schoonover Family, the Murdock Family, Snow Partners, Omni Hotels, the Drake Family, and KSL Capital either offer a season pass that accesses all of their properties, or builds limited amounts of cross-mountain reciprocity into top-tier season passes. The robots aren’t cooperating with me right now, but you can view the most current list here.
On KSL Resorts
KSL Resorts’ property list looks more like a destination menu for deciding honeymooners than a company that happens to run two ski areas in the Pennsylvania Poconos. Mauritius, Fiji, The Maldives, Maui, Thailand… Tannersville, PA. It feels like a trap for the robots, who in their combing of our digital existence to piece together the workings of the human psyche, will simply short out when attempting to identify the parallels between the Outrigger Reef Waikiki Beach Resort and Camelback.
On ski investment in the Poconos
Poconos ski areas, once backwaters, have rapidly modernized over the past decade. As I wrote in 2022:
Montage, Camelback, and Elk all made the expensive investment in RFID ticketing last offseason. Camelback and Blue are each getting brand-new six-packs this summer. Vail is clear-cutting its Poconos lift museum and dropping a total of five new fixed-grip quads across Jack Frost and Big Boulder (replacing a total of nine existing lifts). All of them are constantly upgrading their snowmaking plants.
On Camelback’s ownership history
For the past 20 years, Camelback has mostly been owned by a series of uninteresting Investcos and property-management firms. But the ski area’s founder, Jim Moore, was an interesting fellow. From his July 22, 2006 Pocono Record obituary:
James "Jim" Moore, co-founder of Camelback Ski Area, died Thursday at age 90 at his home — at Camelback.
Moore, a Kentucky-born, Harvard-trained tax attorney who began a lifelong love of skiing when he went to boarding school in Switzerland as a teenager, served as Camelback's president and CEO from 1963, when it was founded, to 1986.
"Jim Moore was a great man and an important part of the history of the Poconos," said Sam Newman, who succeeded Moore as Camelback's president. "He was a guiding force behind the building of Camelback."
In 1958, Moore was a partner in the prominent Philadelphia law firm Pepper, Hamilton and Scheetz.
He joined a small group of investors who partnered with East Stroudsburg brothers Alex and Charles Bensinger and others to turn the quaint Big Pocono Ski Area — open on weekends when there was enough natural snow — into Camelback Ski Area.
Camelback developed one of the most advanced snowmaking systems in the country and diversified into a year-round destination for family recreation.
"He was one of the first people to use snowmaking," said Kathleen Marozzi, Moore's daughter. "It had never been done in the Poconos before. ... I remember the first year we opened we had no snow on the mountain."
Marozzi said her father wanted to develop Camelback as a New England-type ski resort, with winding, scenic trails.
"He wanted a very pretty ski area," she said. "I remember when the mountain had nothing but trees on it; it had no trails.
I also managed to find a circa 1951 trailmap of Big Pocono ski area on skimap.org:
On Rival Racer at Camelbeach
Here’s a good overview of the “Rival Racer” waterslide that Makarsky mentions in our conversation:
On the Stevenson Express
Hopefully KSL Resorts replaces Stevenson with another six-pack, like they did with Sullivan, and hopefully they can reconfigure it to load from one side (like Doppelmayr just did with Barker at Sunday River). Multi-directional loading is just the worst – the skiers don’t know what to do with it, and you end up with a lot of half-empty chairs when no one is managing the line, which seems to be the case more often than not at Camelback.
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 11/100 in 2024, and number 511 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 subscribers’ inboxes on Feb. 9. It dropped for free subscribers on Feb. 16. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:
Who
Charles Hlavac, Owner of Teton Pass, Montana
Recorded on
January 29, 2024
About Teton Pass
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: Charles Hlavac
Located in: Choteau, Montana
Year founded: 1967
Pass affiliations: None
Closest neighboring ski areas: Great Divide (2:44), Showdown (3:03)
Base elevation: 6,200 feet
Summit elevation: 7,200 feet (at the top of the double chair)
Vertical drop: 1,000 feet
Skiable Acres: 400 acres
Average annual snowfall: 300 inches
Lift count: 3 (1 double, 1 platter, 1 carpet – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Teton Pass’ lift fleet)
View historic Teton Pass trailmaps on skimap.org.
Why I interviewed him
There was a time, before the Bubble-Wrap Era, when American bureaucracy believed that the nation’s most beautiful places ought to be made available to citizens. Not just to gawk at from a distance, but to interact with in a way that strikes awe in the soul and roots the place in their psyche.
That’s why so many of our great western ski areas sit on public land. Taos and Heavenly and Mt. Baldy and Alta and Crystal Mountain and Lookout Pass. These places, many of them inaccessible before the advent of the modern highway system, were selected not only because they were snow magnets optimally pitched for skiing, but because they were beautiful.
And that’s how we got Teton Pass, Montana, up a Forest Service road at the end of nowhere, hovering over the Rocky Mountain front. Because just look at the place:
Who knew it was there then? Who knows it now? A bald peak screaming “ski me” to a howling wilderness for 50 million years until the Forest Service printed some words on a piece of paper that said someone was allowed to put a chairlift there.
As bold and prescient as the Forest Service was in gifting us ski areas, they didn’t nail them all. Yes, Aspen and Vail and Snowbird and Palisades Tahoe and Stevens Pass, fortuitously positioned along modern highways or growing cities, evolved into icons. But some of these spectacular natural ski sites languished. Mt. Waterman has faltered without snowmaking or competent ownership. Antelope Butte and Sleeping Giant were built in the middle of nowhere and stayed there. Spout Springs is too small to draw skiers across the PNW vastness. Of the four, only Antelope Butte has spun lifts this winter.
Remoteness has been the curse of Teton Pass, a fact compounded by a nasty 11-mile gravel access road. The closest town is Choteau, population 1,719, an hour down the mountain. Great Falls, population 60,000, is only around two hours away, but that city is closer to Showdown, a larger ski area with more vertical drop, three chairlifts, and a parking lot seated directly off a paved federal highway. Teton Pass, gorgeously positioned as a natural wonder, got a crummy draw as a sustainable business.
Which doesn’t mean it can’t work. Unlike the Forest Service ski areas at Cedar Pass or Kratka Ridge in California, Teton Pass hasn’t gone fallow. The lifts still spin. Skiers still ski there. Not many – approximately 7,000 last season, which would be a light day for any Summit County ski facility. This year, it will surely be even fewer, as Hlavic announced 10 days after we recorded this podcast that a lack of snow, among other factors, would force him to call it a season after just four operating days. But Hlavic is young and optimistic and stubborn and aware that he is trying to walk straight up a wall. In our conversation, you can hear his belief in this wild and improbable place, his conviction that there is a business model for Teton Pass that can succeed in spite of the rough access road and the lack of an electrical grid connection and the small and scattered local population.
The notion of intensive recreational land use is out of favor. When we lose a Teton Pass, the Forest Service doesn’t replace it with another ski area in a better location. We just get more wilderness. I am not against wild places and sanctuaries from human scything. But if Teton Pass were not a ski area, almost no one would ever see it, would ever experience this singular peak pasted against the sky. It’s a place worth preserving, and I’m glad there’s someone crazy enough to try.
What we talked about
When your ski area can’t open until Jan. 19; the tight-knit Montana Ski Areas Association; staffing up in the middle of nowhere; a brief history of a troubled remote ski area; the sneaky math of purchasing a ski area; the “incredibly painful” process of obtaining a new Forest Service operating permit after the ownership transfer; restarting the machine after several years idle; how Montana regulates chairlifts without a state tramway board; challenges of operating off the grid; getting by on 7,000 skier visits; potential for Teton Pass’ dramatic upper-mountain terrain; re-imagining the lift fleet; the beautiful logic of surface lifts; collecting lifts in the parking lot and dreaming about where they could go; why Teton Pass’ last expansion doesn’t quite work; where Teton Pass’ next chairlifts could sit; the trouble with mid-stations; the potential to install snowmaking; the most confusing ski area name in America, and why it’s unlikely to change anytime soon; a problematic monster access road; why Teton Pass hasn’t joined the Indy Pass; and mid-week mountain rentals.
Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview
This may have actually been the worst possible time in the past several years to conduct this interview, as the ski area is already closed for the winter, leaving inspired listeners with no realistic method of converting their interest into immediate support. And that’s too bad. Unfortunately, I tend to schedule these interviews months in advance (we locked this date in on July 24). Yes, I could’ve rescheduled, but I try to avoid doing that. So we went ahead.
I’m still glad we did, though I wish I’d been able to turn this around faster (it wouldn’t have mattered, Teton Pass’ four operating days all occurred pre-recording). But there’s a gritty honesty to this conversation, taking place, as it does, in the embers of a dying season. Running a ski area is hard. People write to me all the time, fired up with dreams of running their own mountain, maybe even re-assembling one from the scrap heap. I would advise them to listen to this episode for a reality-check.
I would also ask anyone convinced of the idea that Vail and Alterra are killing skiing to reconsider that narrative in the context of Teton Pass. Skiing needs massive, sustained investment to prepare for and to weather climate change. It also needs capable marketing entities to convince people living in Texas and Florida that, yes, skiing is still happening in spite of a non-ski media obsessed with twisting every rain shower into a winter-is-disappearing doomsday epic.
That doesn’t mean that I think Vail should (or would), buy Teton Pass, or that there’s no room for independent ski area operators in our 505-resort ecosystem. What I am saying is that unless you bring a messianic sense of purpose, a handyman’s grab-bag of odd and eclectic skills, the patience of a rock, and, hopefully, one or more independent income streams, the notion of running an independent ski area is a lot more romantic than the reality.
What I got wrong
I said that “Teton Pass’ previous owner” had commissioned SE Group for a feasibility study. A local community volunteer group actually commissioned that project, as Hlavac clarifies.
Also, in discussing Hlavic’s purchase of the ski area, I cited some sales figures that I’d sourced from contemporary news reports. From a Sept. 11, 2019 report in the Choteau Acantha:
Wood listed the ski area for sale, originally asking $3 million for the resort, operated on a 402-acre forest special-use permit. The resort includes three lifts, a lodge with a restaurant and liquor license, a ski gear rental shop and several outbuildings. Wood later dropped his asking price to $375,000.
Then, from SAM on Sept. 17, 2019:
Former Teton Pass Ski Resort general manager Charles Hlavac has purchased the resort from Nick Wood for $375,000 after it had been on the market for two years.
Wood, a New Zealand native, bought the ski area back in 2010. He and his partners invested in substantial upgrades, including three new lifts, a lodge renovation, and improvements to maintenance facilities. The resort’s electrical generator failed in 2016-17, though, and Wood closed the hill in December 2017, citing financial setbacks.
While the original asking price for Teton Pass was $3 million, Wood dropped the price down to $375,000. Hlavac, who served as the GM for the resort under Wood’s ownership, confirmed on Sept. 6 that he had purchased the 402-acre ski area, located on Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest land, through a contract-for-deed with Wood’s company.
Hlavic disputes the accuracy of these figures in our conversation.
Why you should ski Teton Pass
There’s liberty in distance, freedom in imagining a different version of a thing. For so many of us, skiing is Saturdays, skiing is holidays, skiing is Breckenridge, skiing is a powder day in Little Cottonwood Canyon. Traffic is just part of it. Liftlines are just part of it. Eating on the cafeteria floor is just part of it. Groomers scraped off by 9:45 is just part of it. It’s all just part of it, but skiing is skiing because skiing is dynamic and fun and thrilling and there’s a cost to everything, Man, and the cost to skiing is dealing with all that other b******t.
But none of this is true. Skiing does not have to include compromises of the soul. You can trade these for compromises of convenience. And by this I mean that you can find a way to ski and a place to ski when and where others can’t and won’t ski. If you drive to the ass-end of Montana to ski, you are going to find a singular ski experience, because most people are not willing to do this. Not to ski a thousand-footer served by a double chair that’s older than Crocodile Rock. Not to spend $55 rather than drive down the per-visit cost of their precious Ikon Pass by racking up that 16th day at Schweitzer.
Among my best ski days in the past five winters have been a midweek powder day at 600-vertical-foot McCauley, New York; an empty bluebird weekday at Mt. Baldy, hanging out above Los Angeles; and a day spent ambling the unassumingly labyrinthian terrain of Whitecap Mountains, Wisconsin. Teton Pass is a place of this same roguish nature, out there past everything, but like absolutely nothing else in skiing.
Podcast Notes
On closing early for the season
Here is Hlavac’s Feb. 8 letter, addressed to “friends and patrons,” announcing his decision to close for the season (click through to read):
On Sleeping Giant
And here’s a similar letter that Sleeping Giant, Wyoming owner Nick Piazza sent to his passholders on Jan. 12:
We are disappointed to announce that this latest winter storm mostly missed us. Unfortunately, we are no closer to being able to open the mountain than we were 2-3 weeks ago. We have reached a point where the loss of seasonal staff would make it difficult to open the mountain, even if we got snow tomorrow. For these reasons, we feel that the responsible thing to do is to pull the plug on this season.
With a heavy heart we are announcing that Sleeping Giant will not be opening for the 23/24 winter season.
We would like to thank everyone for their support and patience as we battled this terrible weather year.
We will be refunding all season pass holders their money at the end of January. This will happen automatically, and the funds will be returned to the payment method used when purchasing your season pass.
***For those that would like to roll over their season pass to the 24/25 Winter Season, we will announce instructions early next week.***
We have heard from some of our Season Pass Partner Mountains who have shared that they will be honoring our season pass perks, for those of you choosing to rollover your pass to 24/25. Snow King, 3 Free Day Lift Tickets with either a season pass or their receipt; Ski Cooper, 3 Free Day lift tickets; Bogus Basin, 3 Free Day lift tickets; and Soldier Mountain, 3 Free Day lift tickets.
Additionally, please note that if you received any complimentary passes for the 23/24 season, they automatically carry over to next season. The same applies for passes that were part of any promotion, charity give away, or raffle.
Should you have any questions about season passes please email [email protected].
While we are extremely disappointed to have to make this announcement, we will go lick our wounds, and - I am confident - come back stronger.
Our team will still be working at Sleeping Giant and I think everyone is ready to use this down time to get to work on several long-standing projects that we could not get to when operating. Moreover, we are in discussions with our friends at the USFS and Techno Alpine to get paperwork done so we can jump on improvements to our snow making system in the spring.
I would like to thank the whole Sleeping Giant team for the hard work they have put in over the last three months. You had some really unlucky breaks, but you stuck together and found ways to hold things together to the very end. To our outdoor team, you did more in the last 9 months than has been done at SG in a generation. Powered mainly with red bull and grit. Thank you!
It’s never pleasant to have to admit a big public defeat, but as we say in Ukrainian only people that do nothing enjoy infallibility. We did a lot of great things this year and fought like hell to get open.
After we get season pass refunds processed, we plan to sit down and explore options to keep some of the mountain’s basic services open and groomed, so snowshoers and those that wish can still enjoy Sleeping Giant’s beauty and resources.
We hope this will include a spring ski day for season pass holders that rollover into next year, but there are several legal hurdles that we need to overcome to make that a possibility. Stay tuned.
Sincerely,
Nick
On Montana ski areas
We discuss Montana’s scattered collection of ski areas. Here’s a complete list:
On “some of the recent things that have happened in the state” with chairlifts in Montana
While most chairlift mishaps go unreported, everyone noticed when a moving Riblet double chair loaded with a father and son disintegrated at Montana Snowbowl in March. From the Missoulian:
Nathan McLeod keeps having flashbacks of watching helplessly as his 4-year-old son, Sawyer, slipped through his hands and fell off a mangled, malfunctioning chairlift after it smashed into a tower and broke last Sunday at Montana Snowbowl, the ski hill just north of Missoula.
“This is a parent’s worst nightmare,” McLeod recalled. “I’m just watching him fall and he’s looking at me. There’s nothing I can do and he’s screaming. I just have this mental image of his whole body slipping out of my arms and it's terrible.”
McLeod, a Missoula resident, was riding the Snow Park chairlift, which was purchased used from a Colorado ski resort and installed in 2019. The chairlift accesses beginner and intermediate terrain, and McLeod was riding on the outside seat of the lift so that his young son could be helped up on the inside by the lift attendant, who was the only person working at the bottom of the lift. McLeod’s other 6-year-old son, Cassidy, was riding a chair ahead with a snowboarder. McLeod recalled the lift operator had a little trouble loading his older son, so the chair was swinging. Then he and his younger son got loaded.
“We’re going and I’m watching Cassidy’s chair in front of me and it’s just, like, huge, violent swings and in my mind, I don’t know what to do about that, because I’m a chair behind him,” McLeod recalled. “I’m worried he’s gonna hit that next tower. And it’s like 40 feet off the ground at that point. As that’s going through my head, all of a sudden, our chair smashes into the tower, the first one, as it starts going up.”
He described the impact as “super strong.”
“And just like that, I reach for my son and he just slips from my arms,” McLeod said.
He estimates the boy fell 12-15 feet to the snow below, which at least one other witness agreed with.
“I’m yelling like ‘someone help us’ and the lift stops a few seconds later,” he said. “But at the same time, as Sawyer is falling, the lift chair just breaks apart and it just flips backwards. Like the backrest just falls off the back and so I’m like clinging on to the center bar while the chair is swinging. My son is screaming and I don’t know what to do. I’m like, ‘Do I jump right now?’'”
The full article is worth a read. It’s absurd. McLeod describes the Snowbowl staff as callous and dismissive. The Forest Service later ordered the ski area to repair that lift and others before opening for the season. The ski area complied.
On Marx and Lenin at Big Sky
Hlavic compares Teton Pass’ upper-mountain avalanche chutes to Marx and Lenin at Big Sky. These are two well-known runs off Lone Peak (pictured below). Lenin is where a 1996 Christmas Day avalanche that I recently discussed with Big Sky GM Troy Nedved took place.
On the evolution of Bridger Bowl
Hlavic compares Teton Pass to vintage Bridger Bowl, before that ski area had the know-how and resources to tame the upper-mountain steeps. Here’s Bridger in 1973:
And here it is today. It’s still pretty wild – skiers have to wear an avy beacon just to ski the Schlasman’s chair, but the upper mountain is accessible and well-managed:
On Holiday Mountain and Titus
I compared Hlavic’s situation to that of Mike Taylor at Holiday Mountain and Bruce Monette Jr. at Titus Mountain, both in New York. Like Hlavic, both have numerous other businesses that allowed them to run the ski area at a loss until they could modernize operations. I wrote about Taylor’s efforts last year, and hosted Monette on the podcast in 2021.
On Hyland Hills
Hlavic talks about growing up skiing at Hyland Hills, Minnesota. What a crazy little place this is, eight lifts, including some of the fastest ropetows in the world, lined up along a 175-vertical-foot ridge in a city park.
Man those ropetows:
On Teton Pass, Wyoming
The Teton Pass with which most people are familiar is a high-altitude twister of a highway that runs between Wyoming and Idaho. It’s a popular and congested backcountry skiing spot. When I drove over the pass en route from Jackson Hole to Big Sky in December, the hills were tracked out and bumped up like a ski resort.
On Rocky Mountain High
Hlavic notes that former Teton Pass owners had changed the ski area’s name to “Rocky Mountain High” for several years. Here’s a circa 1997 trailmap with that branding:
It’s unclear when the name reverted to “Teton Pass.”
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 10/100 in 2024, and number 510 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 subscribers’ inboxes on Feb. 8. It dropped for free subscribers on Feb. 15. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:
Who
Nathan Birr, Chief Operating Officer of Buck Hill, Minnesota
Recorded on
January 26, 2024
About Buck Hill
Owned by: David and Corrine (Chip) Solner
Located in: Burnsville, Minnesota
Year founded: 1954
Pass affiliations:
* Indy Base Pass – 2 days with 16 holiday blackouts
* Indy+ Pass – 2 days with no blackouts
Closest neighboring ski areas: Hyland Hills (:21), Como Park (:33), Afton Alps (:41), Elm Creek (:43), Welch Village (:46)
Base elevation: 919 feet
Summit elevation: 1,225 feet
Vertical drop: 306 feet
Skiable Acres: 45
Average annual snowfall: 60 inches
Trail count: 14 (2 most difficult, 6 intermediate, 6 beginner), 4 terrain parks
Lift count: 9 (2 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 4 ropetows, 2 conveyors - view Lift Blog’s inventory of Buck Hill’s lift fleet)
View historic Buck Hill trailmaps on skimap.org.
Why I interviewed him
Buck Hill rises like a ludicrous contraption, impossible there in the Twin Cities flatlands, like the ski resort knotted into Thneedville’s inflatable glades and shirt-sleeve clime (1:25):
How did it get there? What does it do? Did someone build it? At first, I thought someone must have, like Mount Brighton, Michigan. But no. The glaciers made it, a gift to the far future as these ice walls retreated and crumbled. It is the highest point for 200 miles in any direction.
Before skiing, Native Americans used the hill as a vantage to stalk deer drinking from Crystal Lake. Thus the name. It has probably been “Buck Hill” for hundreds of years. Maybe thousands. Now the lake is covered in ice-fishing shanties all winter, and the hill is hemmed in by an interstate on one side and housing developments on all the rest. And the hill, 45 acres of fall line that erupts from seemingly nowhere for seemingly no reason, is covered with skiers.
Good skiers. I am enormously fond of the Midwest’s blue-collar ski scene, its skiers on rental gear in hunter-orange jackets, rat-packing with their buddies as a hootalong thing to do on a Wednesday night. This does not exist everywhere anymore, but in the Midwest skiing is still cheap and so it still does. And these rough fellows dot the slopes of Buck. But they don’t define the place like they do at Spirit or Nub’s Nob or Snowriver. Because what defines Buck Hill is the shin-guard-wearing, speed-suit wrapped, neon-accented-even-though-neon-has-been-over-for-30-years squadrons of velocity-monsters whipping through plastic poles drilled into the snow.
It can be hard to square smallness with might. But England once ruled half the world from a nation roughly the size of Louisiana. Some intangible thing. And tiny Buck Hill, through intention, persistence, and a lack of really anything else to do, has established itself, over the decades, as one of the greatest ski-race-training centers on the planet, sending more than 50 athletes to the U.S. Ski Team. Credit founders Chuck and Nancy Stone for the vision; credit confused-upon-arrival Austrian Erich Sailer (“Where’s the hill?” he supposedly asked), for building the race program; credit whatever stalled that glacier on that one spot long enough to leave us a playground that stuck around for 10,000 years until we invented chairlifts. Buck is a spectacular amalgam of luck and circumstance, an improbable place made essential.
What we talked about
Buck Hill’s brand-new quad; party up top; the tallest point in 200 miles; Chuck and Nancy Stone, who started a ski area on a farmer’s pasture; a glacier’s present to skiers; the hazards of interstate-adjacent snowmaking; why the resort’s founders and long-term owners finally sold the bump in 2015; Erich Sailer and Buck’s incredible ski racing legacy; Lindsay Vonn; a perfect competition center sitting just outside of 3 million front doors; experiments in year-round skiing; the lift fleet; taming the electric bills; Buck’s Great Parking Puzzle; the Indy Pass; why Buck chose Indy Pass over Ski Cooper; and $49 for a weekend lift ticket.
Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview
A skier dropping into Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport can find skiing within half an hour in any direction. East to Vail-owned Afton Alps, north to city-owned Como Park, west to Hyland Hills and what are perhaps the fastest ropetows in America. I chose south, to Buck Hill, on a sunny Sunday last February.
It was a mistake. I circled the parking lot, then circled the neighborhood beside the parking lot, then circled the parking lot again. Nothing. So I drove to Welch Village, where people on the chairlift kept asking, in a borderline accusatory way, why I would travel to Minnesota from New York, on purpose, to ski.
The answer is that I value novelty and quirk more than brand-name and stoke (at least when it comes to ski areas; as an adherent of both Taco Bell and Miller Lite, I have a Basic Bro Deluxe side as well). But also because I have this ski newsletter and podcast, whose vitality is based at least in part on a commitment to examining the entirety of American skiing.
I made it back to Buck Hill on Thursday, my last stop before I boarded my flight home to LaGuardia. This time, I parked without issue. I was in no mood for a challenge, and Buck Hill was in no position to offer one. Sightseer skiing. I cruised around and watched the park kids and the racer kids and the little kids trickling in after school. It felt like stumbling into a gymnasium with basketball practice on one court and volleyball practice on the next one and track practice on the elevated lanes above. In other words, not like any version of skiing I had ever seen before. It felt purposeful, focused, deliberate; the opposite of the improvisational exploratory sort of wandering that anchors my own skiing.
All of which makes complete sense to anyone indoctrinated to the Buck Hill Way. But I’d gone in blind, poking the nearest ski hill into the GPS and seeing what turned up. It turned up something pretty special, and I wanted to get the full story.
Questions I wish I’d asked
I’d meant to get into Birr’s new blog, “Notes from Nate.” Check it out here.
What I got wrong
I suggested that Wilmot, Wisconsin was a manufactured hill, like Mount Brighton, Michigan (which is made of landfill from the construction of two nearby freeways, I-96 and US 23). This is incorrect: Wilmot’s 194 vertical feet are the result of the same glaciation process that formed Buck Hill.
Why you should ski Buck Hill
I have never seen anything like Buck Hill. I have seen ski areas with race courses and terrain parks and mogul fields, of course, because most ski areas have most of these things. But until I pulled into Buck’s parking lot last February, I had never seen these things stacked side-by-side, end-to-end, with such deliberate precision, like crops rowed along a hillside. The halfpipe has its own lift. The terrain park has its own lift. The race course has its own lift. The mogul run has its own lift. These are a combination of chairlifts and high-speed ropetows, utilitarian machines with a workmanlike purpose: pump athletes up the hill hundreds of times in a row.
It’s less mechanized than I’m making it sound. Like a coffee shop that can sometimes host evening concerts, Buck Hill takes many forms. And despite the racer troops constantly bunching around all parts of the hill, Buck is often just a bunch of people sitting around drinking lattes. I free-skied there for a few hours without getting yelled at, which frankly is less common than you would think, given my general curiosity and willingness to loosely interpret ambiguous signage. But the fall lines are steady and consistent. Looker’s right hosts a fabulous beginner area, with an incomprehensibly long carpet that rides into a tunnel and over a bridge. I rode it just for fun.
I can’t say that the skiing is terribly interesting. Buck lacks the rollicking nooks and crannies of nearby Afton Alps and Welch Village. It’s so small that I imagine it being a first-hand-up candidate if we ever start panic-converting our outdoor ski areas into indoor ones. There’s just not a lot to do or explore. But one of the most common mistakes we make as skiers is trying to wish a ski area into something it can never be. This is why so many New Yorkers refuse to ski New England after taking that first trip west. But they’re missing so much of what Vermont is by obsessing over what it is not.
Buck, rote, repetitive, and tiny, is exactly perfect for the market it serves: beginners, racers, freestylers, and their families. All the on-hill hubbub can make it hard to hang out, but find a moment to linger at the summit, to gaze at the frozen lake below, at the placid Midwest rolling off into forever. It’s not the greatest ski area you’ll ever find, but it is a singular, spectacular place in a very specific way. If you can find a parking spot.
Podcast Notes
Here’s a little feature on Buck Hill from Minnesota Bound
Another from Midwest skiers
On the Solners
I kept referring to “things the Solners said they wanted to do” when they bought Buck Hill back in 2015. I mined that info from various sources, but this article from Hometown Source is a good overview:
[The Solners] envision a year-round business with plastic slopes for warm weather, an indoor training center, a mixed-use entertainment and retail development beneath floors of hotel rooms, and a hilltop restaurant and banquet center reached via “chondola.”
“It’s a combination of chairlift and gondola,” said Don McClure, who’s worked at Buck Hill for 40 years. …
The first piece may be laying a plastic “dry slope” product called Neveplast on part of the hill. Lessons, clinics, team training and general recreational use could be extended year-round.
Solner said dry slopes haven’t caught on widely in North America, though he skied on a plastic jump in his hometown of Middleton, Wisconsin.
A training gym with indoor ramps and foam pits is also envisioned. Solner said he saw one a couple of years ago in Colorado. He later approached McClure with the idea, and “conversations led to where we are today,” Solner said.
The owners also envision a microbrewery, coffee shop and retail stores, with a hotel above the ground-level uses.
Outdoor concerts are part of the plan, with an amphitheater of about 1,500 seats — the size of the Minnesota Zoo’s.
On Erich Sailer
While transforming Buck Hill into an internationally renowned racing center was the vision of founders Chuck and Nancy Stone, it was Erich Sailer who actually executed the transformation. Here’s an excellent video on his legacy:
On the M.A.X. Pass
I’ve written often about the M.A.X. Pass, which Ikon mercilessly crushed beneath its Godzilla feet in 2018. The partner list was just terrific:
On founder Nancy Stone’s Buck Hill history book
Mrs. Stone’s book is called Buck Hill: A History, Let’s Give It a Whirl. I can’t find a print edition for sale anywhere (perhaps they sell it at Buck Hill).
On snowmaking and proximity to the freeway
Birr sent me this photo of the warning signs MDOT lights up on Interstate 35 when Buck Hill is making snow:
On Lindsay Vonn
The Olympic gold medalist’s fondness for Buck Hill is well-documented. The feeling is mutual – the ski area dedicated a ropetow to its most famous alum in 2019:
The world may know her as Lindsey Vonn, but the Minnesota community that watched her grow into one of the greatest ski racers in history still remembers little Lindsey Caroline Kildow climbing up Buck Hill’s simple rope tow. Vonn, the daughter of a local ski racer Alan Kildow, got her own racing start at the Burnsville ski area at a young age. Patrons remember seeing her soaring down the hill when she was only 2 years old, and just five years later she began riding up the rope that will now bear her name.
On September 23rd, at her home hill of Buck Hill, in Burnsville, Minn., Lindsey's ascent to the top of her sport was recognized formally, with the official naming of "Kildow's Climb" rope tow. "All of us at Buck Hill are very happy and excited to honor Lindsey by renaming our lift on the race training hill in her name," said Dave Solner, owner of Buck Hill.
September 23 was also declared “Lindsey Vonn Day” in Burnsville, Minn.
"Obviously being from Buck is not the most likely of paths to become Olympic downhill champion, but I think I proved that anything is possible" said Vonn at the ceremony. "So, for all of you kids that are still racing here, just keep believing in yourself and anything is possible. And listen to Erich (Sailer), even though he's not always around anymore, but he's probably still yelling from somewhere. I wanted to name the rope tow after my family. My grandfather was the one who taught us how to ski. He built a rope tow in Wisconsin, and started my dad skiing, and the whole family. Then my dad taught me, and Erich taught my father and taught me. Kildow is my family name, and I wanted my family name to stay here at Buck, so 'Kildow's Climb' is here to show you that anything's possible."
On that long magic carpet
Man this thing is so cool:
On the concentration of ski areas around the Twin Cities
I’ll reset this chart I put together for the Trollhaugen podcast last year, which shows how densely clustered ski areas are around the Twin Cities:
On warm-weather outdoor skiing
We talk a bit about Buck’s experiments with warm-weather skiing. There’s actually a whole year-round ski area at Liberty University in Virginia that’s built on something called Snowflex. I don’t count it in my official ski areas inventory because there’s no snow involved, but it’s pretty neat looking. Kinda like a big skate park:
On energy efficiency
We talk a bit about Buck Hill’s energy-efficiency initiatives. This Dakota Energy profile breaks down the different elements of that, including snowmaking and lighting efficiency.
On In Pursuit of Soul II
Produced by Teton Gravity Research, In Pursuit of Soul II features Buck Hill and seven other Midwest ski areas: Lutsen, Granite Peak, Nordic Mountain, Tyrol Basin, Little Switzerland, The Rock Snowpark, and Caberfae Peaks. It’s awesome:
On the Ski Cooper controversy
Birr and I briefly discuss Buck Hill getting caught in the crossfire of an Indy Pass/Ski Cooper dispute. I’m not going to reset the whole thing here, but I wrote two long articles detailing the whole fiasco over the summer.
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 9/100 in 2024, and number 509 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019.
Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe - Mostrar mais
