Podcast #178: Mount Sunapee General Manager Peter Disch
Saturday, August 3, 2024 • Duration 01:16:32
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.)
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:
* 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.
Podcast #177: White Grass Ski Touring Center Founder and Owner Chip Chase
Sunday, July 14, 2024 • Duration 01:51:40
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:
Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at
Podcast #169: Panorama Mountain President & CEO Steve Paccagnan
Tuesday, April 23, 2024 • Duration 01:25:21
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
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
Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at
Podcast #81: Big Sky President and Chief Operating Officer Taylor Middleton
Wednesday, April 6, 2022 • Duration 01:37:29
To support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Organizations can email skiing@substack.com to add multiple users on one account at a per-subscriber enterprise rate.
Who
Taylor Middleton, President and Chief Operating Officer of Big Sky Resort, Montana
Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at
Podcast #80: Snow Ridge, New York Co-Owner & GM Nick Mir
Sunday, April 3, 2022 • Duration 01:32:36
To support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Organizations can email skiing@substack.com to add multiple users on one account at a per-subscriber enterprise rate.
Who
Nick Mir, co-owner and general manager of Snow Ridge, New York
If you want western powder, the best place to find it in the east is the Tug Hill Plateau in New York, and upland region east of Lake Ontario. They should coin the phrase “Greatest Snow in the East.” They get tons of lake effect and most of this snow is high quality. Unfortunately, they lack an essential ingredient for powder skiing: mountains! There is, however, one ski area on the Tug Hill Plateau’s steeper eastern face, Snow Ridge, which offers up about [500] vertical feet of skiing. As a kid growing up in upstate NY, my first true deep-powder experiences were at Snow Ridge.
- From a 2015 Washington Post interview with Jim Steenburgh, “professor of atmospheric science at the University of Utah, an expert on mountain weather and climate, and a die-hard skier,” and author of Secrets of the Greatest Snow on Earth: Weather, Climate Change, and Finding Deep Powder in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains and around the World.
Owned by: The mother-son team of Cyndy Sisto and Nick Mir
1,350 feet
Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at
Podcast #79: Beaver Creek Vice President & Chief Operating Officer Nadia Guerriero
Saturday, March 26, 2022 • Duration 01:22:23
To support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Organizations can email skiing@substack.com to add multiple users on one account at a per-subscriber enterprise rate.
Who
Nadia Guerriero, Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Beaver Creek, Colorado
America may or may not have suspected, when Beaver Creek flipped the power on in 1980 with three double chairs and three triples, that we were nearing the end of big-time ski resort construction in the United States. In the previous decade, Keystone (1970), Snowbird (1971), Copper Mountain (1972), Kirkwood (1972), Northstar (1972), Powder Mountain (1972), Telluride (1972), and Big Sky (1973) had all come online. Breckenridge (1961), Crested Butte (1962), Vail (1962), Park City (1963), Schweitzer (1963), Steamboat (1963), Crystal Mountain Washington (1964), Mt. Rose (1964), Purgatory (1965), Diamond Peak (1966), Jackson Hole (1966), Mission Ridge (1966), Snowmass (1967), Sierra-at-Tahoe (1968), and Grand Targhee (1969) had materialized out of the wilderness the decade before. This was a country that thought big and acted big, that crafted the tangible out of the improbable: a high-end ski resort, buffed smooth as an interstate and hemmed in by the faux villages of aspirational America, rising 3,000 feet out of the Colorado wilderness. The resort would be Vail’s answer to Aspen, high-end and straight down, without the drive to the end of the world.
Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at
To support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Organizations can email skiing@substack.com to add multiple users on one account at a per-subscriber enterprise rate.
Who
Travis Seeholzer, Third-Generation Owner and Mountain Operations Manager of Beaver Mountain, Utah
When our son turned 1 year old, my wife and I hosted a small baby-naming ceremony for our families. To prepare for this event, I tapped into my aunt’s extensive ancestry.com research. What I found both surprised me and explained everything: tracing my paternal lineage back for centuries, no one had died in the place where they were born since George Winchester, born in Hemel Hempstead, Herfordshire, England in 1555. George begot Daniell, and his son Daniell edged closer to London until Willoughby jumped the Atlantic and landed in South Carolina sometime in the early 1700s. The pattern continued through William, Francis, Jonathan, Wiley, Edward, Herman, Ken, and then me. Four hundred years of getting the hell out of wherever you were from. I’m sure my kids will leave New York City the second they can program their robocars to fly them to Moonbase Six – my 13-year-old daughter already hates the subway and just wants to live somewhere “where I can look outside and see grass.”
Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at
Podcast #77: Mount Pleasant of Edinboro, Pennsylvania General Manager Andrew Halmi
Friday, March 11, 2022 • Duration 01:58:22
To support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Prices increase and a partial paywall activates on March 14. Organizations can email skiing@substack.com or reply to this email to add multiple users on one account.
The Storm Skiing Podcast is sponsored by Spot and Mountain Gazette - Listen to the podcast for discount codes on subscriptions and merch.
Cold and hilly, with the Appalachian spine slashing southwest-to-northeast across the map, Pennsylvania is a monster ski state, with 28 lift-served mountains. Most of these are bunched across the southern tier, in Vailville from Seven Springs to Roundtop, or along the eastern border with New Jersey, from Spring Mountain up to Elk.
And then there’s Mount Pleasant, drifting alone in the state’s far northwest corner, hundreds of miles and hours of driving from the next-closest in-state ski areas. It’s like one of those nature documentaries with a drone floating over the lone baby buffalo standing apart from the herd, bunched and snorting about the quality of this year’s grass crop. You look for the circling wolves or lions and wait for the poor thing to be transformed into lunch. It’s isn’t entirely clear how any other outcome is possible.
But Mount Pleasant is the Spud Webb of Pennsylvania skiing, the unassuming 5’6” kid who wins the NBA Slam Dunk Contest (that ). The ski area is, first of all, well-positioned, seated less than 17 miles off the shores of the Lake Eerie snow factory. The ski area often leads the state in snowfall, with up to 200 inches in a bomber year. Again, this is in Pennsylvania. Every ski area in the Poconos doesn’t get 200 inches some years.
Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at
Podcast #76: Solitude President & COO Amber Broadaway
Saturday, March 5, 2022 • Duration 01:36:52
To support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Prices increase and a partial paywall activates on March 14. Organizations can email skiing@substack.com or reply to this email to add multiple users on one account.
The Storm Skiing Podcast is sponsored by Spot and Mountain Gazette - Listen to the podcast for discount codes on subscriptions and merch.
Who
Amber Broadaway, President and Chief Operating Officer of Solitude Mountain, Utah
And the most amazing part of all this is after leaping half mad with joy down the snowy majestically treed hillsides through endlessly refilled powder so deep you can’t find the bottom with a pole stuck handle-deep into the incline, you descend from this frozen kingdom thousands of feet but only dozens of minutes to bland and sprawling Salt Lake City, not a snowflake on the ground, the whole of it so jarring and typically American that it’s hard to believe in the majestic land you just left. This is not like driving up to Killington from Rutland on an October or June day and being like, “Cool there’s snow,” which is a novelty and a triumph of technology. This is more Disney, more Tolkien, like a land where there’s realms and each realm is themed and magnificently distinct even though they appear stacked one after another on ancient hand-drawn scroll maps marked with dragons and sailing ships and skulls. And down below is the realm of the Big Box and the interstate wide and flat, and above is the Winter Realm, a triumph of nature, where a snow trap tens of millions of years in the making spins out a microclimate so wild and improbable and brilliant that the only way to believe in it is to go and stand there and say holy f*****g s**t man it’s actually real.
Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at
Podcast #75: Nordic Mountain, Little Switzerland, & The Rock Snowpark Co-Owner Rick Schmitz
Tuesday, February 22, 2022 • Duration 01:46:55
The Storm Skiing Podcast is sponsored by Spot and Mountain Gazette - Listen to the podcast for discount codes on subscriptions and merch.
Because no one cares about small ski areas. At least that’s the conclusion you can come to if, like me, you lurk amid the If-It’s-Not-A-Redwood-It’s-Deadwood Size-Matters Bros that animate Facebook ski groups. Take, for example, the incisive observation of one Mr. Forrest Michael Culp to my announcement in the Colorado Ski and Snowboard group that Sunlight had joined the Indy Pass:
“Looks boring”
Does it?
“I’ll have to try it just don’t like small mountains / short runs”
Sunlight has a 2,000-foot vertical drop and sits on 730 acres. Its summit lift is 7,260 feet long – nearly a mile and a half. The ski area is larger than Aspen Mountain or Sugarbush. If this dude thinks Sunlight is small, then my guess is he’s driving one hell of a pickup truck.
If Mr. Culp looks down on Sunlight, I wonder what his opinion would be of Rick Schmitz’s trio of Wisconsin bumps: 265-vertical-foot Nordic Mountain, 230-foot The Rock Snowpark, and 200-foot Little Switzerland?
Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at
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 Southeastcovers. DC Skiincludes 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
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: everyone 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%).
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.
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 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.
Big Sky opened in 1973, as the American ski industry’s big-mountain land grab was fizzling. Seven years later, Taylor Middleton wandered into town, an Alabama boy wired for adventure. What he found an hour and five minutes south of Bozeman, population 21,645 at the time, was a backwater bump of the sort that still populate the Montana wilds: four or five lifts, 20 or so runs, Lone Peak hovering godlike over it all. A hell of a view and dumptrucks worth of snow and not a whole lot else.
Over the next 42 years, Big Sky would evolve into one of North America’s great ski areas. The Storm, as regular readers know, can be prone to hyperbole. My worldview is tilted toward ennoblement. Even the scraggliest lift-served snowsliding outposts have virtue in their histories, their idiosyncrasies, their improbable continued existence in a world that frustrates such ventures in 10 dozen ways.
That won’t be necessary here. Big Sky is titanic, sprawling, impossible. Alps-like in its scale and above-treeline drama. Mixed into the 300 named trails are two dozen-ish triple black diamonds. They mean it: to ski Big Couloir or North Summit Snowfield off the top of the tram requires an avalanche beacon, a partner, and a sign-out with Patrol.
But this radness is a small part of the experience. At almost 6,000 acres, Big Sky is nearly the same size as Boyne’s other nine resorts combined*. It is the third-largest ski area in the United States, and it took the combination of Park City with neighboring Park West (7,300 acres), and the connection of the Alpine Meadows and Olympic sides of Palisades Tahoe (6,000 acres) to out-big Big Sky (Big Sky is itself the combination of two ski areas, as it absorbed the old Moonlight Basin in 2013). Even when the base-to-base gondola finally cracks open over Tahoe next year, Palisades Tahoe’s terrain will remain fragmented. Endless, nearly boundless skiing of the sort that defines Big Sky is rare in America.
Which takes us back to Middleton. Big Sky could have been a lot of things in underdeveloped Montana. A rugged single-chair backwater like Turner. A teaser that stopped short of the looming snowfields, like Teton Pass. A fun but lost-in-time burner like Lost Trail. A regional hotshot like Bridger Bowl, with slow lifts, rad terrain, and lots of hiking. Instead it’s one of the most complete and up-to-date ski resorts in North America. How did that happen? Most American ski resorts are just old enough that the pioneering generation, the one that actualized a dream out of the wilderness, are long gone. Big Sky will be 50 years old next year, but for a lot of reasons – not the least among them a stable ownership group (Boyne has owned the ski area since 1976) – a lot of the people who helped mold the place into a monster are still around.
Middleton did not just watch all of this happen – he’s a big part of the reason it happened at all. I wanted to hear his story, and the story of the mountain, firsthand.
*Boyne’s nine other ski areas total 7,200 acres: Summit at Snoqualmie (1,981 acres), Sugarloaf (1,230), Brighton (1,050), Sunday River (870), Cypress (600), The Highlands at Harbor Springs (435), Boyne Mountain (415), Loon (370), and Shawnee Peak (249).
What we talked about
The 2021-22 ski season so far at Big Sky; how an Alabama boy ended up running one of the biggest ski resorts in America; yes there is a ski area in Alabama; dusty, cow-town Bozeman and Big Sky circa 1981; how the mountain grew from a backwater bump with five lifts and 20 runs to a sprawling behemoth that sits alongside the best resorts on the continent; the audacity of the Lone Peak Tram; installing a secret summit lift without the knowledge of the company’s CEO; like a glacier the tram base crawls across the valley; how and why the tram has no towers; how Big Sky’s reputation changed when the tram popped open in 1995; the wild terrain hanging off the summit of Lone Peak; “there’s not an easy way down”; how Patrol tamed the mountain to make it skiable; the power of skier self-selection; the inbounds runs that require Patrol check-in and avy equipment; why Big Sky limits Big Couloir to eight skiers an hour; why skiing got so lame in the ‘80s and how the Lone Peak tram helped nudge the industry out of its stupor; John Kircher and putting skiing first; the good old days of walking right onto the tram; the tram reservation system, how it’s worked out, and whether it’s here to stay; going deep on Big Sky’s forthcoming mega-gondola-tram network; the location of the new tram, its terminals, and its single tower; the fate of the current tram’s terminals; characteristics of the new tram cabins; why Big Sky removed its original two gondolas and why it’s bringing that sort of lift back; the fastest lift on the mountain; an overview of the new gondola; the advantages of operating on private land; Big Sky hates liftlines; when we’ll be able to ride these monster new lifts; where we may see new or upgraded lifts; how close we may be to a second out-of-base lift at Moonlight Basin, where it would run, what it might be called, and what sort of lift we could see; “there are little pods of terrain all over our mountain that we haven’t cleared yet”; how Big Sky came to absorb the formerly independent Moonlight Basin and how it changed the ski area as a whole; Big Sky’s 360-degree ski experience; an encomium to James Neuhaus; how the initial Ikon Pass backlash from 2018-19 has aged; why the resort will require Ikon reservations next season; why Big Sky remained on the Ikon Base Pass as Aspen, Jackson Hole, and others fled, and whether leaving that tier for the Base Plus is still a possibility; the power of Boyne’s network and how it’s helped prop the company up from within over the decades; “I’m getting really tired of pulling Sugarloaf stickers off my lifts”; Boyne’s tiered pass products and how they manage crowds while creating options for everyone; and Big Sky’s commitment to building employee housing.
Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview
For most of its existence, Boyne Resorts has made a brand out of statement lifts, inventing, with its partners, the triple chair and the quad in the 1960s. Boyne brought America’s first six-pack in 1992 (at Boyne Mountain), and the country’s first eight-pack in 2018 (at Big Sky), trailing Europe on the latter but soundly stomping its American competitors. Still, compared to its peers, Big Sky doddered along with a rattletrap lift fleet for decades. By the time Big Sky installed its fourth high-speed lift in 2004*, Vail Mountain already had 15 of them (and had since at least 2001).
But over the past half-dozen years, Boyne has gotten aggressive. By next season, four of its 10 ski areas will have the monster eight-packs already in place at Big Sky and Loon – 80 percent of all such lifts on the continent. A major promised component of the company’s 2030 plans is beefed-up lift infrastructure at Sunday River, Sugarloaf, Loon, Boyne Mountain, and The Highlands at Harbor Springs. But the most dramatic changes are coming to Big Sky, Boyne’s flagship.
After rolling out four high-speed lifts in five years (the Powder Seeker six in 2016, Ramcharger 8 and the Shedhorn high-speed quad in 2018, and the Swift Current 6 in 2021), Big Sky recently unveiled a gargantuan base-to-summit lift network that will transform the mountain, (probably) eliminating Mountain Village liftlines and delivering skiers to the high alpine without the zigzagging adventure across the now-scattered lift network. Skiers will board a two-stage out-of-base gondola cresting near the base of Powder Seeker before transferring to a higher-capacity tram within the same building. This second machine will likely be a hauler in the spirit of the school-bus-shaped big-boys at Jackson and Snowbird (though it will, as Boyne Resorts CEO Stephen Kircher told me, have outward-facing seats), and will certainly haul more skiers than the current 15-passenger version, which is a triumph of engineering but one built for a different time. The whole complex will sit like this in relation to the current lift network:
Once this titanic project is finished, Big Sky may be closer to complete than its enormous lift count (39) suggests. Eight of the remaining lifts are carpets. Ten more are designated “real-estate lifts” and are of no consequence to the on-the-mountain ski experience. As the sparkling new out-of-base fleet materialized, once-promised upgrades to Southern Comfort, Iron Horse, and Lone Moose disappeared from the 2025 plan. But none of these feel particularly consequential. Southern Comfort is a detachable quad, not even 20 years old. Iron Horse is a fixed-grip quad, but it was installed in 1994 and probably has plenty of useful life remaining. Lone Moose, a Yan triple that arrived used from Keystone in 1999, suggests the most pressing need for an upgrade, but it’s tucked at the far end of the resort and serves just a handful of runs – there are better places to spend money.
The most obvious place is the Madison Base, above which 2,000 acres of former Moonlight Basin terrain rises toward Lone Peak. Aside from a beginner quad, the Six Shooter six-pack serves this entire area. The possibility of another lift here is tantalizing, and we discuss this in depth on the podcast. Also, terrain expansion could be coming, here and elsewhere around the ski area. “There are little pods of terrain all over the mountain that we haven’t developed yet,” Middleton told me.
There is a logic to this improvisational, discuss-one-thing-and-do-another swagger that Big Sky has: the place sits entirely on private property. This is a rare situation for a large Western U.S. resort, most of which sit on Forest Service land and operate under long-term leases. That means that the master plans, the public comment periods, the endless back-and-forth with the Forest Service, the perpetual scaling back of grand plans – none of that is Big Sky’s problem. As Boyne tips over its Money Bin and empties it into its Montana crown jewel, we are witnessing an interesting real-time experiment in private willfulness versus the public-private model upon which so much of our big-resort infrastructure rests. Don’t tell Free Market Bro, but the more Boyne proves it can act as a responsible mountain steward without turning the place into a set piece from the latter half of The Lorax, the more I like Big Sky’s model.
*When the Six Shooter high-speed six-pack came online in 2003, Moonlight Basin was still a separate resort.
Questions I wish I’d asked
However. I don’t really understand if Boyne is truly in a yeah-let’s-just-build-like-nine-hot tubs-in-a-bear-den free-for-all situation or not. Just because the resort is not subject to Forest Service approvals (which, frankly, have allowed far more ski resort development than they have shut down over the past six decades), does not mean it can just do whatever the hell it wants all the time. Probably. I don’t know because I didn’t ask, and I probably should have. I will say that Boyne has emphasized its role as an environmental steward more and more over the past decade, joining Powdr, Vail, and Alterra last year in a “shared commitment around sustainability and advocacy.”
I also would have liked to have gotten more into these “terrain pods all over the mountain.” Which is funny because Big Sky is already like the size of Delaware and I’m all worried about it expanding. But really I started this podcast because I can’t stop thinking about this kind of thing. It’s a form of experiential avarice that I have no other outlet for.
What I got wrong
When I interviewed Jackson Hole President Mary Kate Buckley in November, I accidentally referred to her as the resort’s “CEO.” I then made a correction in the article that accompanied that podcast. And then during this interview I again referred to Buckley as Jackson Hole’s “CEO.” So I’m again printing a correction because apparently I’m a nitwit. I’m sorry Mary Kate you’re doing a great job and you don’t deserve this.
Also, at one point in the interview when we were discussing trailmaps, I referred to “Lone Peak” as “Big Sky.”
Why you should ski Big Sky
Because there are a couple dozen you just have to hit at some point, right? If you’re in North America, it’s these ones. Just about everybody reading this has probably skied some of them, and most of us (outside of Peter Landsman from Lift Blog), have probably not skied all of them. It’s a big list, it’s a big continent, and time and money are not eternal things.
So we all have our calculus on where we go and when. Like a lot of Midwestern- or Eastern-based skiers, my Western travels have been heavily skewed toward whatever is in the orbit of Denver and Salt Lake airports. And why not? The I-70 and Wasatch resorts are enormous, interesting, snowy, and convenient. And, until the advent of the triple-digit walk-up day ticket, affordable (they still are, so long as you plan your ski season like a cicada, securing you earthly access 17 years in advance).
For a long time, Big Sky was the opposite of convenient. Bozeman airport was small, expensive, and hard to reach. The mountain itself was cold and far, with a mostly slow lift fleet. As the mainline Colorado and Utah destinations rapidly modernized in the 80s and 90s, Big Sky took its time.
That time has come. Bozeman airport now welcomes direct flights from 30 markets. Flights are quite affordable. Tens of millions of dollars’ worth of sparkling new lifts strafe Big Sky’s 300 runs. The resort is a headliner on the Ikon Pass. Getting to and skiing Big Sky has never been easier.
And oh yeah the skiing. See trailmap, above. If I need to convince you that Big Sky is worth your time, then what are we even doing here?
More Big Sky
* Middleton and I discuss an excellent history of the Lone Peak Tram written by respected ski journalist Marc Peruzzi. This video tells the story very well, and includes footage of a young Taylor Middleton:
* The news section of Big Sky’s website is, in general, excellent, with stories written by freelance journalists who appear to have quite a bit of editorial leeway. This is rarer than you would imagine.
* We also discussed this letter that Middleton drafted to the Big Sky community in response to Ikon Pass backlash during the 2018-19 season. A response to that.
* Oh, and yes, there is a ski area in Alabama, as Middleton and I discussed on the podcast. No, it’s not indoors. It hasn’t opened in a couple years, mostly becaue of Covid-related things, but you can follow their operations on their Facebook page. Frankly it kind of looks like any little bump outside of Milwaukee or Grand Rapids:
A pictorial history of Big Sky’s development
1975
This is the earliest Big Sky map I could find – four lifts and 18 runs, with parking right at the base.
1978
A few years later, the far side of Andesite was online:
1995
Nearly two decades later, the resort is still relatively contained, but Challenger, Iron Horse, and Southern Comfort add distinct expert, intermediate, and beginner pods on opposite sides of the ski area. Two gondolas now run out of the Mountain Village base in this 1994-95 trailmap:
1997
The tram, installed in summer 1995, changed everything, blowing the resort up to its summit. That same year, Big Sky also ran the Shedhorn double up the backside of the peak:
In 2013, the mountain acquired adjacent Moonlight Basin, giving us the foundation of today’s Big Sky. Boyne CEO Stephen Kircher has told me on numerous occasions that the ski area is committed to keeping its paper trailmaps in perpetuity. Snag one as a memento when you’re there – this place is changing fast, and they won’t be up-to-date for long.
The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 36/100 in 2022. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane). You can also email skiing@substack.com.
The perception is hard-wired and widespread, intractable and exasperating: the East is ice. Inclines paved like a boat launch. Volcanic. Like skiing on the surface of the moon. It is meant as a jab from the high-altitude West, but the East believes it too. The Born from Ice crowds tut-tuts about the internet, “if you can ski the East, you can ski anywhere,” casting the whole of it as a kind of marine-camp proving ground, the bent-rimmed backyard hoop to the glorious Rockies, skiing’s NBA.
This whole story is sort of true and it’s sort of not. Lacking the West’s high alpine, New England and New York are vulnerable to season-long freeze-thaw cycles, to bands of rain and ice storms and sleet and hail. Mix in high skier density, narrow trails, and the impossible predominance of windshield-wiper turns, and you get trails skied off by 11 on weekends, hardboiled moguls, concrete layers set like booby traps at the well of spring slush turns. It can be an amazing mess.
But some regions are tidier than others. The Northeast is like Manhattan, a city of neighborhoods, each one distinct. As with the West, altitude matters, as does aspect and shape of the mountain. And water, or proximity to it. There are two places in the Northeast where some combination of these elements combines to produce outsized snowfall: the Green Mountain Spine in Northern Vermont (especially Sugarbush north to Jay Peak), and the Tug Hill Plateau, seated just east of Lake Ontario in Upstate New York. Snow Ridge hangs off the eastern edge of this geologic feature, in the bullseye of the lake effect snowtrain. Observe:
The result is something special, a microclimate more typical of the world’s high-mountain redoubts. “We could get two feet of snow here, and literally 15 minutes down the road they could have gotten a dusting,” Mir told me in the interview.
Snow Ridge is not the only New York ski area floating in this nirvana zone. McCauley – 633 vertical feet of snow-choked boulder fields and glades parked 32 miles to the east – and 300-foot Dry Hill are also hooked up to nature’s firehose. Woods Valley catches a lot of it as well. It’s a fun little foursome, undersized and overserved, and, for the wily and adventurous among us, fortunately overlooked.
What we talked about
Thoughts on pushing Snow Ridge’s closing date into April if conditions ever allow; I admit I don’t really understand what a rail jam is - sue me; the complexity and expense of building a good terrain park; growing up at Toggenburg; ski racing and its frustrations; fleeing West to ski-bum Colorado and Oregon and the eventual pull of home; how a long-time ski family came to own their own ski area; “we actually did this” – what it felt like to get the keys to the kingdom; the condition of Snow Ridge when Mir arrived in 2015; the intense commitment and effort necessary to run a family ski area; resilience in the maw of a break-even business; how long it took to turn a profit; how much a guy who owns a ski area actually get to ski; why Snow Ridge removed and did not replace the Snowy Meadows double; how much it costs to run a chairlift; possible future consolidation of Ridge Runner and North Chair; the natural-snow, mostly ungroomed hideaway of the Snow Pocket terrain and T-bar; the anomaly of fresh-powder laps at a modern lift-served U.S. ski resort and how Snow Ridge delivers; whether Snow Pocket could ever get a chairlift; whether we could ever see a lift return to South Slope; the eventual fate of the retired top T-bar terminal; where and why Snow Ridge expanded its trail network for the 2021-22 ski season; why Snow Ridge moved the progression park from the carpet area to the top of the mountain; where we can expect to see additional new trails next season; potential future expansion skier’s right off the top of the Pocket T-bar and skier’s left off the top of North; the gnarly existing terrain cut through North; Snow Ridge’s powder bullseye on the edge of the Tug Hill Plateau; the quality of Lake Ontario lake effect snow; plans to amp up the snowmaking system; grooming and the art of crafting an interesting mountain; why Snow Ridge joined the Indy Pass; the mountain’s budget season pass; new reciprocal partners for 2022-23; reaction to Toggenburg closing; whether Mir would have bought the ski area had he had the chance; competing against enormous state-owned ski areas as a family-owned small business; and New York’s rebate program for high-efficiency snowguns.
Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview
It’s too early to say which forces will capsize the next wave of yet-to-be lost ski areas. After nominal or nonexistent snowmaking drove hundreds of mountains to failure in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, the number of lift-served bumps has stayed relatively stable since around 2005, hovering between a high of 485 for the 2006-07 season to a pandemic-induced low of 462 last year (a handful of ski areas voluntarily suspended operations to pass on the complications of socially distant skiing).
With the exception of a few dozen snow-choked Western mountains and some ropetow bumps that survive by the sky, pretty much all of today’s survivors built their way into resilience one mile of pipe and snowgun at a time. That, more than anything, stabilized the ski landscape, giving us the rough U.S. ski area footprint we know today.
But it won’t be enough forever. As well-capitalized standouts such as Holiday Valley, Windham, and state-owned Gore have modernized their lift fleets and snowmaking systems, many of New York’s family-owned ski areas have languished. Dozens of chairlifts that predate the moon landing still spin across the state*. Antique snowguns - electricity hogs that blow marginal snow and under very specific conditions - are still in widespread use. No one’s, like, pulling a snowcat with oxen or anything, but they are really rubberbanding this thing together in many cases.
Fortunately, there is a hack. All you need is an individual with the energy of a nuclear reactor and the patience of tectonic plates. The person has to love owning a ski area more than they love skiing – because they’ll hardly ever get to ski – and be willing to compete against ski areas 10 times their size that their own tax dollars subsidize. And they have to believe in their own vision more than the slaughterhouse of weather gutting their life’s work outside all winter long.
This is the reality at Snow Ridge. The lift fleet was installed before the breakup of Pangea. When Mir and his mother arrived in 2015, pretty much everything was gassed out: those lifts, the snowmaking, the buildings, the groomer. The place was a museum. And not in the way that Mad River Glen is a museum, intentionally funky and camouflaging newness beneath a vintage sheen. Snow Ridge was falling apart.
Seven years later, those lifts are still there, but they’ve been overhauled and fixed up. Much of the snowmaking plant is new. Two modern groomers buff the slopes. The bar is beautiful, and Mir and Sisto and the rest of their family are rehabbing the rest of the buildings room by room – when I stopped by in January, the ski area had re-opened a remodeled bathroom that day.
Mir is young, outspoken, determined, smart. And he saved Snow Ridge. Not every back-of-the-woods bump is going to survive the great modernization, with its rush to ecommerce and D-line detachables and snowguns activated from an app. But many will, and those that do are going to have leaders like him to guide them through it.
*Don’t do it, Identifies-Solutions-In-Need-Of-A-Problem-Bro. New York is one of the most highly regulated states in the country, and these lifts are inspected by a state agency annually. Ski Areas of New York also runs one of the most well-regarded lift-safety programs in the country, and serious chairlift accidents are remarkably rare here, in spite of more than 4 million annual skier visits.
Why you should ski Snow Ridge
New York has a lot of ski areas. It does not have a lot of wild ski areas, with the sort of yeah-maybe-this-was-a-terrible-idea runs that slug you like a car crash. Snow Ridge is an exception, with a little slice of madness christened North Ridge that will smash your face in without asking permission. Think Paradise at Mad River Glen, but without the vert or the waterfall, a half-dozen tangled lines spiraling in and around a matrix of drainages. Amazing Grace is the truly feral one, a Pinocchio-down-the-whale’s-throat plunge into the bristling abyss.
Snow Ridge only gives you 500 vertical feet, but it’s a big 500. It’s all fall-line, for starters, like skiing the edge of a pyramid. The terrain tames out in the evacuation from North Ridge, but it’s still straight down, expansive, and empty. On MLK Day last year I lapped the Snow Pocket T-bar nine times as foot-deep powder stood in untouched fields visible from the lift line. I feasted. In and out of the glades, along the tree-lined plunge of Kuersteiner off the top of South, down the narrow swordfight of the unmarked abandoned South T-bar line. All day long like this, 34 runs and no liftlines, lapping that New York natural to exhaustion.
Snow Ridge is one of six Indy Pass partners scattered across New York. It floats in a Bermuda Triangle between Greek Peak to the south, Titus to the north, and Catamount to the east. While, as Mir told me in our conversation, it’s getting busier, Snow Ridge is still a hideaway, the back-pocket secret you can save for a holiday powder day, when the masses throttle the Northeast giants with the kind of meme-spawning liftlines their big-time marketing and megapass affiliations bring. Or watch the weather and sneak up when everyone else gets skunked and that little circle of pink hovers near the top of America.
The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 35/100 in 2022. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer. You can also email skiing@substack.com.
But after Deer Valley cranked to life the following year, big-mountain ski area development mostly broke down in the United States. The mammoth Yellowstone Club – all private, exclusively for individuals who consider automobiles to be single-use disposables – didn’t open until 1997. Tamarack, Idaho, was the next entrant, in 2004. The private Wasatch Peaks should open soon, and Mayflower may follow. But for the most part, this is a nation that, for better or worse, has decided to make do with the ski resorts it has.
So what? Well, I lay this history out to make a simple point: Beaver Creek is about the best illustration we have of how and where we would build a ski resort if we still built ski resorts, with all our modern technology and understanding. The fall lines are incredible. The lift network sprawls and hums. The little walkable villages excise vehicles at exactly the right points. The place is just magnificent.
The aversion to large-scale mountain construction did not, fortunately, temper Beaver Creek’s ambition. That simple half-dozen lifts multiplied to the west until the network overran and absorbed the formerly independent Arrowhead ski area. In 1991, Beaver Creek ran a high-speed quad up Grouse Mountain, one of the best pure black-diamond pods in Colorado. This year, the ski area added McCoy Park, a terrific high-altitude beginner pod, which complements the green-circle paradise off the Red Buffalo Express, already some of the most expansive top-of-the-world beginner terrain in America.
Not that Beaver Creek got everything it wanted. A long-imagined 3.8-mile gondola connection to Vail, with a waystation at the long-abandoned Meadow Mountain ski area in Minturn, has been stalled for years. A lift up from Eagle-Vail would also be nice (and would eliminate a lot of traffic). But this isn’t the Alps, and the notion of lifts-as-transit is a tough sell to U.S. Americans, even in a valley already served by 55 of them (Vail Mountain has 31 lifts on top of Beaver Creek’s 24). They’d rather just drive around in the snow.
Whatever. It’s a pretty fine complex just the way it is. And it’s one with a big, bold, ever-changing present. Beaver Creek is, along with Whistler and Vail Mountain, one of Vail Resorts’ three flagships, a standard-setter and an aspirational end-point for all those Epic Pass buyers around Milwaukee and Minneapolis and Detroit and Cleveland. This one has been on my list since the day I launched The Storm, and I was happy to finally lock it down.
What we talked about
Why Beaver Creek is closing a bit later than usual this season; Guerriero’s early career as an agent for snowsports athletes, including Picabo Street and Johnny Moseley; night skiing at Eldora; working at pre-Vail Northstar; reactions to Vail buying Northstar; taking the lead at Beaver Creek; the differences between running a ski resort in Colorado versus Tahoe; what it means to get 600-plus inches of snow in a season; what elevates Beaver Creek to alpha status along with Vail Mountain and Whistler among Vail’s 40 resorts; going deep on the evolution and opening of McCoy Park, Beaver Creek’s top-of-the-mountain gladed beginner oasis; why the mountain converted McCoy to downhill terrain when it already had the excellent Red Buffalo pod on the summit of Beaver Creek Mountain; once again, I go on and on about green-circle glades; thoughts on the mountain’s lift fleet and where we could see upgrades next; why Beaver Creek doesn’t tend to see monster liftlines and the weird un-business of the ski area in general; the status of the long-discussed Vail Mountain-to-Beaver Creek gondola; thoughts on the rolling disaster that is Colorado’s Interstate 70; how Arrowhead, once an independent ski area, became part of Beaver Creek; the surprising sprawl and variety of Beaver Creek; potential future terrain expansions; the mountain’s high-end and rapidly evolving on-mountain food scene; cookies!; watching the evolution of the Epic Pass from the inside; whether Vail would ever build another ski area from scratch; Vail’s deliberate efforts to create leadership opportunities for women within its network; the mountain-town housing crisis; thoughts on Vail’s massive employee and housing investment; and Guerriero’s efforts to address the mountain-town mental health crisis.
Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview
Two words: McCoy Park. I recall skiing past this oddly wide-open and empty bowl, perched atop the mountain like some snowy pit-mine, years ago and wondering what was going on in there. The trailmap explained. For a long time, it was a Nordic and snowshoeing center. But this year, Beaver Creek finally finished a long-planned project to drop a new beginner center into the bowl. Two lifts and a clutch of blues and greens, some ungroomed, a contained adventure center for the graduated-from-the-carpet set that’s craving top-of-the-mountain adventure without the whooshing crowds or oops-I-just-skied-into-a-mogul-field regrets. Reviews have been solid.
There’s one more thing: Vail has quietly built a very deep roster of women mountain leaders. Four of the company’s five Colorado resorts, and eight of its 40*, are led by women. Women hold approximately 45 percent of Vail’s corporate leadership roles, and half of its 10 board of directors members are women. Also, according to a Vail spokeswoman, CEO Kirsten Lynch is the only female CEO among travel and leisure companies listed on the 2021 Fortune 100 list.
These gender-diversity efforts are, Vail Resorts’ Director of Corporate Communications Jamie Alvarez told me, “intentional and explicit. The ski industry has traditionally been male-dominated, particularly in senior leadership roles. As a company, Vail Resorts has prioritized creating an environment that encourages and enables growth opportunities for women at all levels of the company. This isn’t just in corporate, but also throughout our operations. We are proud of our industry-leading accomplishments and are committed to continuing to accelerate women at our company and in our industry.”
They should be.
*The eight current women heads of Vail Resorts are: Jody Churich at Breckenridge, Nadia Guerriero at Beaver Creek, Beth Howard at Vail, Tara Schoedinger at Crested Butte, Dierdra Walsh at Northstar, Belinda Trembath at Perisher, Sue Donnelly at Crotched, and Robin Kisiel at Whitetail. Vail recently promoted Mount Snow GM Tracy Bartels to VP of mountain planning, projects, and maintenance, overseeing maintenance and mountain-planning efforts across the portfolio.
Questions I wish I’d asked
I’ve always found it interesting that Alterra chose to leave Deer Valley off the unlimited tier of the Ikon Pass, while Vail granted unlimited Beaver Creek access on its comparatively cheap Epic Pass (Deer Valley’s season pass is $2,675). Both ski areas have similar philosophies around grooming, on-mountain food, and delivering a high-end experience. My guess is that this model works at Beaver Creek because it’s just a little bit harder to get to, while you can fall off your patio in Salt Lake City and end up at the top of Deer Valley’s Empire Express. Since Alterra just limited Deer Valley access even more, yanking it off the Ikon Base Pass, I’m guessing they’re fairly committed to that model, but it’s still an interesting contrast that I’d like to explore more at some point.
What I got wrong
Nadia and I discussed one of the more tedious meta-critiques of Vail, which is that the company makes all its resorts the same. I don’t agree with this narrative, but the example I gave on the podcast was, to be honest, pretty lame, as I couched my counterpoint in a discussion of how Beaver Creek and Northstar differ operations-wise. Which, of course. No one is comparing Kirkwood to Mad River, Ohio from a snowfall and terrain point of view. What I should have done instead is to ask Guerriero what makes each resort culturally distinct. That’s on me.
I also made the assertion that skiers could drop into McCoy Park from the top of the Bachelor Gulch lift, which is untrue. The three lifts with McCoy access (aside from the two lifts within the bowl intself) are Strawberry Express, Larkspur Express, and Upper Beaver Creek Express. I made a bad assumption based on the trailmap.
Why you should ski Beaver Creek
Living in New York, I find myself in a lot of casual conversation with skiers pointed west for a week at Vail. I don’t know why (actually I do know why), but New Yorkers are drawn to the place like cows to grass. Like hipsters to $9 coffee drinks. Like U.S. Americans to 18-wheel-drive pickups. Like… well, they really like Vail, OK? And every time someone tells me about their long-planned trip to Vail, I ask them how many days they plan on spending at Beaver Creek, and (just about) every time, their answer is the same:
Zero.
This, to me, is flabbergasting. A Storm reader, Chris Stebbins, articulated this phenomenon in an email to me recently:
“Beaver Creek is the single biggest mystery in skidom in my humble opinion. On Epic. On I-70. Just 12 minutes past Vail. 15 high-speed lifts strung across six pods, suiting every ability. A huge bed base, with a mountain ‘village.’ And I’m making 15-minute laps on Centennial. On a perfect blue-bird day. After 16 inches of snow. On a Saturday. During Presidents’ Week.”
I don’t get it either, Chris. But there it is. I’ve been having similar experiences at Beaver Creek for almost 20 years. Enormous powder days, lapping Birds of Prey and Grouse Mountain, no liftlines all day. Maybe here and there on Centennial. Once or twice on Larkspur or Rose Bowl. The entirety of the Arrowhead and Bachelor Gulch side deserted, always, like some leftover idyll intact and functional after an apocalyptic incineration of mankind. Once, on Redtail, or maybe it was Harrier, I crested the drop-off at mid-day to catch the growling hulks of half a dozen Snowcats drifting out of my siteline. Ahead of me a corduroy carpet, woven and royal, the union of all that is best in nature and best in technology. And no one to fight for it. I stood there perched over the Rockies just staring. Like I’m in a museum and contemplating something improbably manmade and ancient. Glorious. And 18 years later I still think about those turns, the large arcing sort born of absolute confidence in the moment, those Rossi hourglass twin-tips bought at an Ann Arbor ski shop and buried, for an ecstatic instant, in the test-lab best-case-scenario of their design.
Look, I love Vail Mountain as much as anyone. It’s titanic and frenetic and pitch-perfect for hero turns on one of the most unintimidating big mountains in North America. I could spend the rest of my life skiing there and only there and be like, “OK well if it has to be one place I’m just relieved it’s not Ski Ward.” But the dismissive attitude toward 2,082-acre Beaver Creek, with its 3,340-foot vertical drop and zippidy-doo lift fleet and endless sprawling trail network, is amazing. The terrain, especially on Grouse, is steep and fall-line beautiful. My last trip to Beaver Creek – a midwinter pow-day Sunday where I never so much as shared a chair with another skier – was a dozen runs off Grouse, eight of those in the tangled wilds of Royal Elk Glades.
All of which is a long way of suggesting that you work at least one Beaver Creek day into your next Vail run. It may be right down the road from Vail and an Epic Pass headliner, but Beaver Creek feels like it’s on another planet, or at least lodged within another decade.
Oh yeah, and the cookies. Just trust me on this one. Go there.
A pictorial history of Beaver Creek’s development
Beaver Creek opened with six chairlifts, all on the main mountain, in 1980. By the next season, a triple ran up Strawberry Park. McCoy Park is a named section of the ski area more than four decades before it would enter the downhill system:
The Larkspur triple came online in 1983. Two years later, McCoy Park is defined on the trailmap as a Nordic center:
In 1991, Grouse Mountain opened:
In 1997, Beaver Creek as we know it today came together, with lift connections from Rose Bowl all the way to Arrowhead, which was once an independent ski area. Beaver Creek purchased the small mountain in 1993 and eventually connected it to the rest of the resort via the Bachelor Gulch terrain expansion. Here’s what the mountain looked like in 1998:
The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 31/100 in 2022. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer. You can also email skiing@substack.com.
Perhaps because of this generational wanderlust, I’ve always been interested in the multi-generational clans who unite around place and purpose. I was in awe of kids in my grade school whose grandparents lived across the street from them, amazed by my neighbor who had attended my high school in the ancient 1960s, astonished to realize that local landmarks or roads were named after families whose children I knew well.
Many – probably most – ski areas started as family concerns. Gramps and the boys went up-mountain with some chainsaws and a tractor, and the next thing you knew you had a ski area. Over the generations, most of these went bust, and most of the rest grew and grew until the grandkids said to Big Ski Company X, “Wait, you’ll give me how much money to just go sit on my ass for the rest of my life?”
That never happened at Beaver Mountain. Harry Seeholzer hacked the joint out of the wilderness in 1939, and the Seeholzers are still running it 83 years later. That alone makes this a good story. A family could be running a petting zoo for eight decades and I’d want to host them on the podcast to talk about it. But add in 400 inches of Utah pow, a tie-in with the comet-across-the-night-sky Indy Pass, and a bursting-at-the-seams ski area acting as Exhibit A for why Vail and the Epic Pass may be the best thing to ever happen to independent skiing, and this is a conversation I couldn’t book fast enough.
What we talked about
Utah’s not-so-snowy (for Utah) season so far; Remembrances of Travis’ grandpa, Harry Seeholzer, who was born in 1902 and founded Beaver Mountain in 1939; a bygone America where hardscrabble ancestors lived off the land; the big change in Logan Canyon management that allowed Beaver to open for skiing; the ski area’s different locations over time; what inspired Seeholzer’s grandfather to found a ski area long before the sport had entered the American mainstream; what saved Beaver Mountain in the 1960s; how a group of good-old boys hand-built a parking lot, baselodge, and chairlift in the course of a single summer; the transformational installation of the Harry’s Dream chairlift; the vagaries of running a ski area with no snowmaking; growing up and raising your family at a ski area; the old days of driving through Utah snowstorms that would close canyons today; how rapidly and profoundly Utah skiing has changed in recent years; how the megapass scene has transformed Beaver; who really runs Beaver Mountain; the story behind the woman who will hand you your Beaver Mountain lift ticket; the pride and pressure of maintaining an 83-year-old family business; whether the Seeholzer family is destined to continue managing the ski area; “there’s definitely no motivation to sell the ski area”; deciding what’s next as the megapass refugees roll in off the horizon; Beaver’s massive forthcoming base area expansion; tech’s place in the future of small ski areas; why Beaver Mountain still has RFID season passes but metal sticky-wickets for day passes; the downside of technology; the kids just don’t get the wicket tickets; reaction to nearby Cherry Peak, one of the newest ski areas in the country, opening in 2015; where we could see expansion and what it would take to make it happen; how Beaver Mountain shifted from federal to state land; where Beaver may drop a new chairlift and which chairs are priority for upgrades; the story behind the 20-year-old Marge’s terrain expansion and how that transformed Beaver Mountain; musings on being the new home of Keystone’s Ruby lift and Alta’s Germania; why Germania was such a great lift and what made it unique; why Beaver Mountain doesn’t have snowmaking and whether it ever could; why Beaver Mountain was one of the first to adopt the discount volume season-pass strategy and why they have persisted with it; how Beaver Mountain joined the Indy Pass; why the ski area blacked out weekends and holidays this season and why that’s likely to continue; and why Beaver still maintains reciprocal partnerships with a number of mid-sized regional ski areas.
Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview
The West is dotted with ski areas like Beaver Mountain, three- or four-lift outposts serving a hyper-local population of families and school groups and the unexpectedly hardcore, the retiree or the stay-at-homer racking up 100 days a year while the rest of us are yelling at each other on Facebook.
For decades, many of us have treated these bumps like the bounce house at Six Flags. “Yeah, that’s cute, but I’m moving right along past it to crush the Triple Upside Down Tyrannosaurus Rexicoaster. On the fourth loop they have a Siberian tiger fighting a white rhino in a 10-foot cage!” So tourists drive right past places like Homewood or Sunlight or Diamond Peak or Monarch or Sundance or Bridger Bowl. They didn’t fly across the country to ski at some rinky-dink place that’s five times the size of their local and gets 10 times the snow – they’re here to wait an hour on the Snowbird tram line and post about it on Instagram. Many locals have a more nuanced view - enough of them that Beaver Mountain lasted eight decades with little help from the outside world. But for a lot of people, ski area choice was a pretty simple equation of size + snowfall + reputation = where I’m going.
But this attitude is evolving, for a lot of reasons. One, the Epic Pass worked too well. Not only did it hyper-activate capacity at most Vail-owned mountains, but it spawned the Ikon Pass, which also worked too well. Trying to ski a weekend powder day in the Wasatch is like trying to catch the last lifeboat off the Titanic. You have a lot of competition. People, especially locals, need a break, and they’re seeing what else is out there. Beaver Mountain is not Alta (nothing is), but on a mid-winter Saturday, it’s not a bad stand-in if you can skip the canyon traffic and not spend much of the day plotting a Wile E. Coyote network of fake “to Little Cottonwood Canyon” signs that send unsuspecting tourists sailing off a cliff.
The second reason is the Indy Pass, which arrived at the perfect historical moment, when both the Epic and the Ikon passes had corralled the continent’s biggest butt-kickers onto a pair of thousand-dollar-ish products and everyone else was sitting around going, “huh, would you look at that?” And Indy Pass was sitting there like, “Oh, you want a lesser-known ski area with comparable terrain and maybe one or two fewer four-horse chariot lifts? Well here’s like 80 of them.” But while Indy raised the general awareness of these back-of-the-canyon outposts, it never overran them – passholders only get two days at each mountain. And the blackout dates can be insane – there are more full moons in an average month than days you can use your Indy Pass at Beaver Mountain. Nonetheless, the ski area’s presence on the Indy Pass has worked as an attention-grabber - Seeholzer told me on the podcast that Beaver Mountain was the most-searched resort on the Indy coalition during its first year.
The final reason is a mix of things, rising from our current cultural fixations on the local, the family-owned, the “authentic,” and the relatively unknown. In this arena, social media helps. “Oh, you took a vacation to Park City? Nice job tracking down the busiest ski resort in Utah, Inspector Gadget. Hey how about this gorgeous powder dump I found in the back of a canyon a couple hours away?”
Eighty-three years ago, Travis Seeholzer’s grandfather staked out a ski center on the fringes of the Utah wilderness. Word just now got out to the rest of us. It’s time to give these places the love they deserve.
Why you should ski Beaver Mountain
Utah has fewer ski areas than you probably think: just 15, less than half the number of Colorado or, gulp, Wisconsin. The state is tied with Montana for 12th in total number of ski areas, according to the National Ski Areas Association. And yet, Utah finished third in skier visits last year, with 5.3 million. That’s behind only California’s 6.8 million and Colorado’s astonishing 12 million.
The reason is that Utah has some seriously kick-ass mountains, most of them are on some megapass or another, and all of them are exceedingly easy to access. Park City is an Epic Pass headliner. More than a third of the state’s ski areas – Alta, Snowbird, Brighton, Solitude, Deer Valley, and Snowbasin – have lined up on the Ikon Pass. Beaver joins Powder Mountain and Eagle Point on the Indy Pass, and MCP’s Power Pass claims Brian Head and Nordic Valley. That really just leaves Sundance and Cherry Peak as true independents (the remainder are specialized facilities like Woodward or the Olympic training center, or surface-lift bumps out in the hinterlands).
All of that is a long way of saying that it can be hard to find your own little bit of lift-served Utah. Even out-of-the-way Beaver Mountain is facing some volume concerns, as Seeholzer points out in the podcast. But crowding means different things at different places, and while you may be looking at some weekend liftlines at Beaver, the low-capacity, fixed-grip fleet keeps the trails relatively empty.
And while you’re waiting in line, you can think about this: you’re part of a pretty cool story, of a single family whose story echoes across generations and up Logan Canyon to the end of the road.
The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 30/100 in 2022. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer. You can also email skiing@substack.com.
Second, while it’s separated from its in-state ski-area homeboys by at least three hours of highway, Mount Pleasant is quite well-positioned from a business point of view. Eerie, population 97,000-ish, is just 20 miles away. The county has around 270,000 residents altogether. Other than Peek’n Peak, stationed 32 miles away across the New York state line, Mount Pleasant has those skiers all to itself.
But neither of those things is the essential ingredient to Mount Pleasant’s improbable survival amid the graveyard of lost ski areas haunting Pennsylvania’s mountains. Cliché alert: the secret is the people. Launched as a notion in the 70s and crushed by the snow droughts and changing economy of the 80s, Mount Pleasant hung on through the 90s, barely solvent as a ski club running on the clunky machinery of faded decades. When the current owners bought the joint in the mid-2000s, it was a time machine at best and a hospice patient at worst, waiting to be guided toward the light.
Since then, the place has punched its way out of the grave, and it’s now a thriving little ski area, with a modern triple chair and improving snowmaking. The owners, Doug and Laura Sinsabaugh, are local school teachers who have poured every dollar of profit back into the ski area. They have invested millions and, according to Halmi, never put a cent in their own pockets. They’ve shown remarkable resilience and ingenuity, installing the chairlift – which came used from Granite Peak, Wisconsin – themselves and slowly, methodically upgrading the snowmaking plant.
The place still has a long way to go. Only half the trails have snowmaking. The lodge – a repurposed dairy barn – is perhaps the most remarkable building in Northeast skiing, but it’s roughly the size of an F-350 truckbed. The beginner area is still served by a J-bar that makes the VCR look like a miracle of modern machinery.
Improvements for all of these elements are underway, as we discuss in the podcast. Last year’s Covid-driven outdoor boom accelerated Mount Pleasant’s renaissance, re-introducing the little ski area to a jaded local population who had, not unfairly, dismissed it as a relic. When they showed up in 2021 for their first visit in seven or 10 or 15 years, they found the formerly problematic T-bar sitting in a pile in the parking lot and a glimmering chairlift staggering up the incline and a place with a spark and a future. It’s really an incredible story, and I’m as excited to share this one as any I’ve ever recorded.
What we talked about
Mount Pleasant’s strong Instagram account; I told Halmi to get Mount Pleasant onto Twitter and then he got it onto Twitter so give the joint a follow; how hard it is for someone who works at a ski area to ski sometimes; Mount Pleasant in its member-owned, ragtag days under the Mountain View name; how close the ski area came to not opening for the 2020-21 ski season and how that season re-ignited Mount Pleasant’s business; when and why the ski area failed and what resurrected it; puttering through 28-day operating seasons; the couple who saved the ski area and hauled it into modernity; “this was as close as you could get to starting a ski area from scratch”; why the owners have returned 100 percent of the ski area’s profit back into rebuilding it; Pennsylvania as a ski state; why Mount Pleasant survived as so many small ski areas across the state went extinct; the Lone Ranger of Pennsylvania skiing; the enormous challenge of moving a used triple chair from Granite Peak, Wisconsin, to Mount Pleasant; how a team of people from a ski area that had never had a chairlift demolished their old T-bar and installed a new lift over the course of one offseason; getting the lift towers installed with a crew of “three or four,” and without a helicopter; oops the chairs arrived with no safety bars; the vagaries of safety-bar cultures across the United States; how the chairlift changed the character and energy of the ski area; pouring one out for the T-bar; how many people you can get on a single T-bar; where the old T-bar is today and the inventive way Mount Pleasant may repurpose it; what kind of chairlift Mount Pleasant would like next and where that would go; the other upgrades that have to happen before a new chair is a possibility; how much it costs to install snowmaking on a single trail; how the ski area’s beginner area could evolve; why Mount Pleasant has a carpet lift sitting in its parking lot; yes there is such a thing as 200 inches of snow in a single Pennsylvania ski season; the mountain’s long-term snowmaking plans; Mount Pleasant’s threaded-through-the-forest trail network and border-to-border ski philosophy; why the ski area has minimal terrain park features and whether that could change; what happened to the old Minute Man trail and whether it could ever come back into the trail network; how Mount Pleasant managed to stay open seven nights per week in a challenging labor market; what would happen to the ski area were it to change its operating schedule after its season-pass sale; what happened when Vail moved into nearby Ohio; Mount Pleasant’s unique baselodge; whether we could see Mount Pleasant on the Indy Pass or any other pass coalitions; and season passes.
Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview
Small ski areas, I think, are having a moment. I don’t have any data to prove that, but everywhere I look, megapass burnout it palpable. I love the rambling adventure of big ski areas. The sport could not be mainstream without them. But that doesn’t mean that a big ski area is the best ski area for every ski day. Sometimes a slowpoke day through the slowpoke woods is all you need. You don’t have to fight for your life to find a parking spot or line up for the chairlift or buy a Rice Krispy Treat. You just ski. It’s a different enough kind of skiing that it feels like a different sport altogether.
There’s a bit of a positive feedback loop going on here. Skiers – especially skiers with kids – seek out an experience that isn’t defined by Times-Square-on-New-Year’s-Eve crowds. They find little back-of-the-woods bumps like Mount Pleasant or Maple Ski Ridge, New York or Whaleback, New Hampshire. They like it. They tell their friends. The incremental revenue generated from this word-of-mouth uptick in visits goes straight back into the mountain. A place like Mount Pleasant trades a Roman-era T-bar for a modern chairlift. That baseline experience in place, its future becomes more certain, and all of skiing benefits from a healthier beginner mountain.
Mount Pleasant is pretty much exactly all of this. It’s just big enough to not bore a seasoned skier while remaining approachable enough for someone who’s never clicked in. It’s not an easy balance to achieve. Halmi, the owners, everyone involved with this place have accomplished something pretty cool: saved a dying ski area without a huge airdrop of cash. It’s a story that others who want to do the same could surely benefit from hearing.
Why you should ski Mount Pleasant of Edinboro
I said this to Halmi on the podcast, and I’ll repeat it here: I liked Mount Pleasant a lot more than I was expecting to. Not that I thought I would dislike it. I am a huge fan of small ski areas. But many of them, admirable as their mission is, are not super compelling from a terrain point of view, with a clear-cut hillside stripped of the deadly obstacles (read: trees), that their first-timer clientele may have a habit of smashing into.
What I found was a neat little trail system woven through the woods. It’s a layout that encourages exploration and find-your-own lines inventiveness. I’ll admit I hit it after a storm cycle, when the snow stood deep in the trees and the old T-bar line was skiable. That did favorably color my impression of the place – snow makes everything better. But the overall trail-management approach resonated with me in a way that’s rare for sub-400-vertical-foot ski areas. It felt like a ski area run by skiers, which is not as universal as you may suppose.
It also just feels cool to be there. The dairy barn/lodge alone would be an attraction even if you had no interest in anything above it. The fact that the ski area not only still has, but still uses a 1976 Tucker Sno-Cat is one of the raddest things in America (the mountain also has modern groomers). The place bristles with life and energy, a real kids-and-families joint materializing out of the Pennsylvania backroads.
The place has some quirks. The steepest part of the main slope is near the bottom – a nightmare for a beginner’s-oriented hill. If you follow the abandoned T-bar all the way down, you find yourself on the far side of the tubing hill, and it’s an adventure in poling, a ride up the J-bar, and a duck-walk back up to the chairlift to find your way home. But it’s all part of the adventure, and all part of the character of this fabulous little ski area. It feels well-loved and well-cared-for, and that is clear the minute you arrive.
More Mount Pleasant of Edinboro
* Lift Blog’s inventory of Mount Pleasant’s lift fleet
* A trailmap and brochure from Mount Pleasant’s inaugural season, 1970-71:
* Here’s a photo of the lodge prior to its conversion from a dairy barn:
The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication. Please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Prices increase and a partial paywall goes up on March 14.
I skied Alta and Snowbird, in Little Cottonwood, on that trip, but no matter. Brighton and Solitude, right next door in Big Cottonwood Canyon, are smaller and get slightly less snow, but that’s like pointing out that a tiger is bigger and stronger than a leopard: true but irrelevant. Both are pretty good at killing things. And the four resorts seated at the top of the Wasatch are absolute killers.
With Solitude, that’s easy to overlook. It doesn’t have that flip-to-the-magazine-centerfold rep as a jaw-dropper, but look at the trailmap:
Plenty of good stuff in there. Link it together with Brighton, right next door (the two are connected), and you have 2,700 acres of Wasatch featherbeds. That’s more skiable terrain than Sun Valley or Jackson Hole.
That’s a pretty good story, and it’s one I wanted in on.
What we talked about
Solitude’s 2021-22 snow whiplash; growing up skiing at Ascutney, Vermont and thoughts on the state of the ski area today; living through the mountain’s two bankruptcies; finding a new home at Sugarbush when Ascutney shut down; the vast differences in snowfall and ski-terrain quality between Northern Vermont and the rest of New England; the characters that populate the Mad River Valley and Sugarbush; working with and learning from Win Smith, who brought Sugarbush back from the American Skiing Company abyss; how Broadaway reacted when Smith sold Sugarbush, one of the largest independent ski areas in New England, to Alterra; why she now believes that was the right decision; moving from the frozen East to the sunny West; an update on Solitude’s master plan; the vast differences in snowmaking between the East and West and the future of snowmaking at Solitude; the next candidate for lift replacement; thoughts on the current issues navigating between Solitude’s base areas; why the mountain changed its base-to-base shuttle route this season; whether Solitude is considering six- or eight-passenger lifts; Whether there’s room or need for a lift in Honeycomb Canyon or elsewhere within the current mountain footprint; whether Solitude could expand; why Solitude doesn’t have terrain parks and whether it ever could; the Solitude-Brighton interconnect and the relationship between the two mountains; the impossible matrix of Big Cottonwood Canyon parking, mass transit, and traffic and long-term plans to improve the whole mess; how much Cottonwoods shuttle service costs Solitude each year; why the Cottonwoods public transit buses don’t have ski racks; thoughts on the proposed Little Cottonwood gondola; and whether Solitude will continue to sit on the unlimited-with-blackouts Ikon Base Pass tier.
Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview
For decades, Solitude just sort of sat there. On one side, rollicking and enormous Park City and rollercoaster-smooth Deer Valley. On the other side, Alta and Snowbird, the greatest skiing in America. Being a slightly smaller version of the best thing ever isn’t a bad thing to be, and locals and savvy tourists had the joint to themselves. Brighton too.
Yeah that’s over. Blame the Ikon Pass. Blame the fact that Utah’s population has doubled in 30 years. Blame social media for blowing its cover. Blame whatever you want. The universe doesn’t care. Here’s a fact: the hokey-pokey Solitude of the Vanilla Ice era is gone, and it’s not coming back. The place has to evolve. Step one was taming traffic, in part by adopting a paid parking plan two years ago. That landed like a Prius at a monster truck rally: with intense ridicule and indignation from long-time skiers. Step two was more buses and easier access to them. Step three is the big, broad future, and what comes next is up to Alterra. It’s time to get creative.
Unfortunately, I conducted this interview a few days before Alterra dropped its 2022-23 Ikon Pass suite. Not that it would have substantively changed our conversation, because Solitude’s positioning on the pass remains unchanged from previous years: unlimited access on the full pass; unlimited access less blackouts on the Base Pass. But knowledge of the radical access changes in Ikon this season versus Ikon next season would have allowed us to focus on the pass release’s meta-narrative: Alterra is deeply committed to creating a quality ski experience. That’s why Alta and Deer Valley jumped off the Ikon Base Pass and up to the Base Plus pass. That’s why Crystal followed Deer Valley off of the unlimited tier even on the full-priced Ikon Pass. And that’s why prices continued to tick up even as Alterra’s main competitor dropped its prices significantly.
Empowered by this philosophy, Solitude, it appears, will continue to evolve to meet the moment. They probably won’t get every detail right. No one ever does. But in skiing, trying counts for a lot. By making us buy our passes before the lifts start spinning, the big ski areas of U.S. America have us in a corner. They don’t really have to fix traffic or liftlines or base-lodge flow or grooming or snowmaking in hopes that we’ll show up next weekend and buy a lift ticket. They could just cross their fingers that the season nets more good days than bad, and that that one untracked first-chair run we snagged with GoPro footage and that earned us a million WhatsUps on Ho-Down will erase the misery of a ski day that feels more like a commute on the New York City subway than an escape into the wilderness. Solitude – and sister resort Crystal, which is facing similar population pressures – have earned our faith that the status quo won’t stand when it stops being fun, even if that means hard or unpopular changes.
Questions I wish I’d asked
Alterra’s last two mountain-manager appointments have been women (the other is Dee Byrne at Palisades Tahoe), and I wanted to ask her about how Alterra cultivates leaders who may have formerly been shut out of the long-male-dominated ski industry. I also really like Solitude’s new habit of keeping the lifts spinning for an extra hour after daylight-savings time, which I assume she imported from Sugarbush, which has long done that to beat spring freeze-thaws and enjoy the longer days. Finally, I wanted to ask her about the ski area’s reduced-price lift tickets for Moonbeam Express, the Link double, and the magic carpet – I wish more ski areas would discount tickets for beginner areas instead of charging full freight for someone who’s still deciding if they even like snowsports-sliding.
What I got wrong
I mentioned to Broadaway that Solitude had a great “November and December.” I was mis-remembering: the mountain, like much of the West, had snow in October, followed by a dry November, followed by a December from the Siberian Ice Age.
Why you should ski Solitude
Most of us don’t need much more than this: 500 inches of snow, 2,500 feet of vert, ribbons of tree-studded pitches rippling off the summit ridgelines. Throw in four high-speed quads, a pass that you probably already own, and the fact that you practically step out of the airport terminal and onto the lift, and the place is pretty much an automatic stop on any Utah tour. And if you get lucky, you might catch a day like this:
* Inspired by Win’s Word, the frequent blog penned by former Sugarbush owner Win Smith, Broadaway launched the biweekly Amber’s Updates. Most posts also include a video component. Here, she discusses the possibility of terrain parks at Solitude and the ski area’s first-ever pond skim:
More Vermont
Broadaway and I talked at length about her childhood ski area, the much-bedeviled Ascutney, Vermont. This recent New York Times article catalogues the ski area’s woes and eventual triumph:
In its heyday, the Ascutney ski resort boasted 1,800 vertical feet of skiing on over 50 trails, and included a high-speed quad chairlift, three triple chairlifts and a double chairlift. But when it closed in 2010 because of scant snow and mismanagement (twin killers of small ski resorts), it threatened to take with it the nearby community of West Windsor, Vt., population 1,099.
“Property values plummeted, condos on the mountain saw their value decrease by more than half, and taxes went up,” recalled Glenn Seward, who worked at the resort for 18 years, once as the director of mountain operations. The town’s general store, the gathering place of the community, also went broke and closed.
“We were desperate,” said Mr. Seward, who at the time was chair of the West Windsor Selectboard, a Vermont town’s equivalent of a city council.
That desperation led the community to hitch its fortune to the mountain, becoming a model for how a small ski area and its community can thrive in the era of climate change. Working with the state of Vermont as well as the nonprofit Trust for Public Land, the town bought the failed ski area in 2015. But instead of allowing a private company to run the mountain, contracting out its operations, the local residents themselves would chart a sustainable, volunteer-driven path for the ski area.
Full read recommended.
And yes, Utah, I know 99 percent of you have no interest in ever skiing east of the Rockies, and you may have found our 20-minute discussion of Vermont and Sugarbush tedious. But just because a ski area is not Snowbird does not mean it isn’t worth skiing. Sugarbush is an amazing place (and that Slide Brook Express Quad that connects the two sides of the mountain - once separate ski areas - is scaled down to fit the map; it is the longest chairlift in the world, at 11,012 feet, or more than two miles):
And despite what you’ve no doubt heard about the East Coast’s reputation as a Zamboni proving ground, northern Vermont is different. Sugarbush, Mad River Glen, Bolton Valley, Stowe, Smugglers’ Notch, and Jay Peak can get up to twice the snowfall of their New England brothers. The terrain is steep, technical, narrow, expansive, and interesting. If you ever deign to, as we say, Ski the East, start with Sugarbush and work your way north to Jay. You might actually like it.
It really doesn’t matter. What interested me was why someone had built a mini-conglomerate of such ski areas, and how he had transformed them into what were by all accounts highly successful businesses.
Turns out that small ski areas are cash registers on an incline. At least if you do it right. My first tip-off to this was my podcast interview last year with current Granite Peak and former Mad River, Ohio General Manager Greg Fisher. He described a frantic 12-week season of 12-hour-plus days, a Columbus-area bump mobbed by school kids, teenage parksters, and Ohio State party people, an absolute tidal wave for the brief winter. And 300-foot Mad River is hardly a special case – mountainvertical.com counts at least 42 ski areas with 300 vertical feet or fewer across the United States, and I know of several dozen more not inventoried on the site. My guess is that around 20 percent of America’s 462 active ski areas fit into this micro-hill category.
Not all of them are great businesses – many of them, especially in New England, barely scratch out a dozen operating days in a good year and are run mostly by volunteers. But Schmitz’s hills are great businesses. This was not pre-ordained. When Schmitz bought Nordic Mountain in 2005 at age 22, the ski area had lost money in each of the previous five seasons. Little Switzerland had been closed for five years when he and his brothers hooked up the respirator and saved it from an alternate future as a real-estate development. And The Rock Snowpark sat mostly ignored among an entertainment megaplex outside Milwaukee for years before Schmitz stepped in as operator.
Schmitz turned them all around. Adding a twist to the story, Schmitz for several years ran Blackjack, a 638-vertical-foot romper in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula that averages more than 200 inches of snow per year. He learned, he told me, that “the better ski hill is not always the better business.” He sold his stake in the UP bomber several years ago and has been focused on his Wisconsin resorts ever since.
Yes, small ski areas are vital to the health of the industry, as incubators of future I-70 vacationers and Whistler cliff-jumpers who hone their aerials with endless ropetow park laps. Yes, they are vital community gathering places that transform brutal winter from endurance test to celebration. Yes, they provide a humbling reprieve for the EpKon hoppers who’ve become enamored with high-speed terrarium lifts that each come with their own raccoon or marsupial for your personal entertainment.
But that’s not all they are. They’re also, with the right leader, damn good businesses. I wanted to find out how.
What we talked about
Keeping the momentum from last year’s Covid outdoor boom; how often the owner of three ski areas skis; the intensity of working the short Midwest dawn-to-dusk ski season; growing up in a middle-class ski family and how that sets the culture for Schmitz’s ski areas today; balancing affordability with rising costs; how Schmitz came to own Nordic Mountain at age 22 as a flat-broke business student; how to ignore the haters when you’re taking a risk; how someone who’s never worked at a ski area learns how to run a ski area that he’s just purchased; why snowmaking has to come before everything and why that means much more than just guns; the evolution of Nordic Mountain from a run-down, barely-break-even operation in 2005 to a successful business today; how Schmitz became part-owner and manager of burly Blackjack, Michigan; why the better ski hill is not always the better business; why Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is the bomber sweet spot of Midwest skiing; how Schmitz bought and re-opened Little Switzerland, his childhood ski hill; “you don’t hire someone to do something you can do yourself”; why Schmitz ultimately sold Blackjack and focused his efforts on his smaller Wisconsin ski areas; why small ski areas fail; how Little Switzerland nearly became a real estate development and what saved it from the bulldozer; what remained after Little Switzerland sold itself off for parts and how Schmitz and his family got it running again after a five-year closure; assembling a ski-area staff from scratch; the incredible value in a name; a deep look at Little Switzerland’s antique up-and-over Riblet doubles, which each serve both sides of the ski area:
How Schmitz came to run The Rock Snowpark; “the model is people, population, and location, location, location”; the enormous challenges required to reinvigorate the ski area; why Schmitz replaced a chairlift with a high-speed ropetow; the vastly different personalities of Schmitz’s two Milwaukee-adjacent, 200-ish-vertical-foot bumps; “our ultimate goal is to change peoples lives with the sport of skiing or snowboarding”; Milwaukee as a ski market; the importance of night-skiing in the Midwest; a wishlist of upgrades at all three ski areas; new buildings incoming; whether Schmitz would ever buy another ski area; why he no longer believes every ski area can be saved; why Schmitz’s three ski areas require an upgrade for a multi-mountain pass; and why all three ski areas joined the Indy Pass (and why The Rock held off on joining).
Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview
When Indy Pass debuted in 2019 with a selection of Wisconsin ski areas, I thought Little Switzerland and Nordic Mountain were odd choices. After all, the state has a number of well-appointed 500-ish footers with robust trailmaps: Devil’s Head, Cascade, La Crosse, and Whitecap. Granite Peak – which Indy later added – towers over them all at 700 feet. In general, Indy was aiming for tier-two resorts like Brundage or Berkshire East or Black Mountain – good-sized ski areas that were just a little less well-capitalized and a bit smaller than the corporate big boys in their neighborhoods. What was with the Wisconsin molehills?
The molehills, as it turns out, are run by one of a new generation of ski area operators that is aggressively reshaping what a ski area is and how it should operate. Schmitz is the Midwest version of Jon Schaefer, the second-generation owner of Berkshire East who is one of the most original minds in American skiing. I first read about him in Chris Diamond’s Ski Inc. 2020, as a case study of how regional mini-conglomerates were quickly becoming an alternate model for a sustainable skiing future. When I asked Indy Pass founder Doug Fish which of his partners would make a good podcast interview, Schmitz was among his top suggestions.
Good call. This was one of my favorite podcast conversations yet. There’s a reason it’s nearly two hours long. Schmitz has a lot of ideas, a ton of positive energy, and an incredibly captivating backstory. Even if you have no interest in Midwest skiing, I’d encourage you to check this one out. Hell, even if you have no interest in skiing whatsoever, you ought to listen. Schmitz’s story is one we can all learn from, an inspiring lesson in how to chase and create a fulfilling life, how to cede your dreams with grace when they don’t work out, and how to ignore the negative people around you and make the improbable into the inevitable. It sounds clichéd, but everything he talks about really happens, and it’s powerful stuff.
Why you should ski Little Switzerland, Nordic Mountain, and The Rock Snowpark
In my relentless romp around the ski world, I’ve come to appreciate the salutary effects of small ski areas. The energy at a place like Killington or Sunday River or Steamboat or Snowbird is infectious, the terrain amazing, the sheer scale impossible, mesmerizing. However, a good ski season, for me, is like a good movie. It can’t all be tension and drama. It needs some levity, some lulls, some unexpected and novel moments. At Snowbird I feel the need to throw myself through vertical forests over and over again. I’ve been there 10 times and have never skied Chip’s run or any other blue unless I was traversing or funneling down to a lift. The place is a proving ground, rowdy and relentless. To cruise Snowbird groomers is a waste, like going to Paris and eating at McDonald’s.
But sometimes I do just want to cruise. Or do fast laps on a modest pitch with big fast turns. Or lap a subdued terrain park and take a little air. Just ski without stress or expectation or the gnawing sense that I need to challenge myself.
Enter small ski areas. Skiing this year at Nashoba Valley or Mount Pleasant or Cockaigne or Sawmill or Otis Ridge was delightful. Relaxed skiing. No pressure to burrow into the hard stuff because there is no hard stuff. Cruise along, enjoy the forest, find interesting lines and side hits. Then I would go to Smugglers’ Notch and ski stuff like this:
Balance.
Another rad thing about small ski areas: they tend to be close to lots and lots of people, including, likely, you. And since the season passes tend to be inexpensive, you can tack one onto your EpKon Pass and crush night turns after work for an hour or two. Who cares if it’s only 200 feet of vert? Do you drink 12 beers every time you crack one open? Sometimes one or two is enough, and sometimes a few laps on a bump is enough to get your fix between weekend runs to Mount Radness. If I lived in Milwaukee, I can guarantee you I’d own a Granite Peak season pass and one at one of the eight local bumps orbiting the city.
As far as skiing these ski areas, specifically, Schmitz lays it out: Little Switzerland draws families, The Rock is the spot for park laps. Nordic is a bit farther out, but if you live anywhere nearby, the pass is a no-brainer: seven days a week of night skiing. Hit it for a couple hours two or three nights per week, and suddenly skiing isn’t something you do when you can get away – it’s your gym, your zone-out time. It’s part of your routine. Something you do, and not something you wait for.
More Little Switzerland, Nordic Mountain, and The Rock Snowpark
* Lift Blog’s inventory of Little Switzerland’s lift fleet
Discover shows related to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast, based on actual content similarities. Explore podcasts with similar topics, themes, and formats, backed by real data.
