Explore every episode of the podcast The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast

Who

John Taylor, principal at John H. Taylor Consulting, reporting for the Vail Daily. Email John at jhtconsulting@comcast.net

Date Recorded

Nov. 5, 2026

About Vail Resorts

About the Epic Pass

Why I interviewed him

Vail Resorts (stock ticker MTN), is in the midst of a proxy battle, which is Finance Bro speak for when individuals whom the company doesn’t want on their board of directors are nominated to be on their board of directors. Professional Finance Bro James Early joined me on the pod yesterday to help us understand Vail’s stock journey, and why all these unwelcome folks (Vail refers to them as “dissident” candidates) might be disappointed enough with MTN’s financial performance to try joining the board of a company that doesn’t want them on its board.

It was an awesome conversation, but it was just part one of my blockbuster serial: Proxy Bros 2026. For part two, I reached out to John Taylor, a former business reporter who retired to Vail a decade ago but is not retired enough to not absolutely crush a series on MTN’s drama for the Vail Daily:

* Oct. 30: Florida financier Meyer lays out detailed plan for Vail Resorts if named to board

* Oct. 31: Baron, Prince duke it out as Vail Resorts proxy battle heats up in flurry of filings

* Nov. 3: Oasis unloads on Vail Resorts in proxy fight, citing long lines, overcrowding, rising food prices

* Nov. 4: Halftime in Vail Resorts proxy battle is prime time for assessing all the players

Taylor describes proxy fights as an “arcane” world, but he does a nice job of making it legible for McBrosephs like me. I’ve been working on a longer written overview of everything that’s been going down, but - again - the new pod format gives me more latitude to bring in smart people to talk about complicated things while I write 8,000-word stories that should be eight one-thousand word stories.

Transcripts

There are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them.

Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer. Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment.

Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio.

Zoom

Stuart Winchester: Okay. My guest today has been reporting on Vail Resort’s proxy fight for the Vail Daily. He is the principal for John H. Taylor Consulting and a former Forbes bureau chief and business reporter for the St. Pete Times, Florida Trend, and Wall Street Journal’s Smart Money Magazine.

00:24:40.000 --> 00:24:55.000

Stuart Winchester: He eventually pivoted doing research for money managers and built a team of researchers at the Duane Kniff firm, where they managed roughly $11 billion in assets. He retired to Vail in 2017. He is also a member of the board of advisors to the Rogel Foundation.

00:24:55.000 --> 00:25:01.000

Stuart Winchester: Cancer Center. John Taylor is my guest. John, welcome to The Storm. How is life in Vail, Colorado today?

00:24:59.000 --> 00:25:13.000

John Taylor: Well, there’s a little bit of snow up there at the top, but alas, it’s supposed to be mid-50s next week, so not sure that they’re gonna have much open other than the usual two runs and one lift.

00:25:15.000 --> 00:25:20.000

Stuart Winchester: Yeah, that’s a fine bull elk behind you. Is that… is that a trophy of yours?

00:25:17.000 --> 00:25:22.000

John Taylor: No, it is not. I bought this house furnished.

00:25:22.000 --> 00:25:31.000

John Taylor: And we originally thought we would get rid of that, but the owners told me that it cost them $30,000.

00:25:23.000 --> 00:25:25.000

Stuart Winchester: Okay.

00:25:31.000 --> 00:25:46.000

John Taylor: So that was one factor in keeping it, and the second was I couldn’t figure out how the hell we were going to get it out of here. And so, it’s interesting, because little kids will come in and look at it, and they’ll point and go, oh my god, look how big that is. I say, go upstairs and look at the back.

00:25:32.000 --> 00:25:33.000

Stuart Winchester: Oh!

00:25:50.000 --> 00:25:56.000

Stuart Winchester: 30 grand, man, I should become a taxidermist. I didn’t realize it was that lucrative.

00:25:52.000 --> 00:25:57.000

John Taylor: Well, just to give you an idea how dumb I am, Stuart, I had a bear…

00:25:57.000 --> 00:26:10.000

John Taylor: And on the other wall And somebody asked me if they could have it. And I went, oh, yeah, yeah, go ahead, take it. And then the owners told me that was $3,000. I said.

00:26:02.000 --> 00:26:03.000

Stuart Winchester: Okay.

00:26:09.000 --> 00:26:11.000

Stuart Winchester: Oh my gosh.

00:26:12.000 --> 00:26:17.000

Stuart Winchester: Well, there you go. All right, John, so let’s get into this Vale proxy fight.

00:26:18.000 --> 00:26:33.000

Stuart Winchester: I have a pretty educated audience, but why don’t you start us off with a little proxy fight 101. You’ve called it a very arcane world. So what is a proxy fight and who are the players in Vale’s proxy fight right now?

00:26:31.000 --> 00:26:40.000

John Taylor: Okay, a proxy fight is pretty simple, because it all comes down to anyone who owns stock in Vail Resorts can vote.

00:26:40.000 --> 00:26:47.000

John Taylor: Uh, and X percent probably never do in any of these elections, but, uh, so.

00:26:47.000 --> 00:26:50.000

John Taylor: They’re entitled to vote.

00:26:50.000 --> 00:26:58.000

John Taylor: Management will put up, in this case, nine incumbent directors for re-election.

00:26:58.000 --> 00:27:15.000

John Taylor: And you can elect, if you are a shareholder, to nominate your own board candidates. In this case, there is a group based in Hong Kong called Oasis Management that owns about 9.6% of the stock.

00:27:15.000 --> 00:27:28.000

John Taylor: And they originally put up four, uh, board candidates, including Peekaboo Street, um, and I guess the other well-known name was, uh, Bob Chapek, who was the former CEO of Disney.

00:27:28.000 --> 00:27:30.000

John Taylor: And…

00:27:30.000 --> 00:27:42.000

John Taylor: Another sort of weird sidelight to this is one investor who owns almost no stock nominated himself for a board seat. And so.

00:27:42.000 --> 00:27:45.000

John Taylor: Technically, there… so what happens is…

00:27:45.000 --> 00:27:55.000

John Taylor: Both of these sides are soliciting. They get a list of every shareholder. So it’s equal. Everybody has access to this. It goes out.

00:27:52.000 --> 00:27:53.000

Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.

00:27:55.000 --> 00:27:57.000

John Taylor: You have…

00:27:57.000 --> 00:28:14.000

John Taylor: pretty much an endless stream of what they call proxy solicitations, because I could get one from Vail Resorts, read it, and go, oh, this makes great sense, I’m gonna vote for all of their nine guys. Then two days later, I get one from Oasis, and it’s attacking Vail Resorts and criticizing it for this, that, and the other thing, and go.

00:28:09.000 --> 00:28:10.000

Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.

00:28:14.000 --> 00:28:21.000

John Taylor: oh, you know, I sort of believe that, so I’m gonna not, you know, vote for their guys. So, in the end, um…

00:28:21.000 --> 00:28:29.000

John Taylor: it’s basically a simple election. Now, where this becomes much more complicated, or pe…

Who

James Early, CEO of Curia Financial, which will soon be known as Alpine House Research

Date Recorded

Nov. 5, 2026

The Takes Up Top

I briefly discuss Indy Pass’ rad new destination upgrade, which gives skiers an extra three days to split among 13 destination resorts in North America and Europe starting at $199 adult and $129 kids. I’ll write a longer piece on this, but here’s a teaser:

I also talk about Jackson Hole’s Golden Ticket program, which gets season passholders at any ski area half off lift tickets on at least 39 dates over the 2026-27 ski season. As an aside, Jackson Hole enters the ignominous $300-plus lift ticket club, with a $339 peak-day walk-up rate for this winter:

About Vail Resorts

About the Epic Pass

Why I interviewed him

As most of you know, I nearly dropped dead two years ago. I was pretty happy when I didn’t, and wrote what was essentially a gratitude post about all the things that were cool about being alive. One of the things I mentioned was the Motley Fool investment site.

The Motley Fool, like investing itself, is a sprawling, baffling place. But at its heart, it is a stock recommendation site with a philosophy of identifying good companies, buying and holding them long term, and ignoring daily market fluctuations. I’ve subscribed to their basic services for years, and have found that if I just do what they say (mostly, counterintuitively, nothing), my monies do good.

Anyway, James is a skier and an investor, and he reached out when I wrote that. I recognized his name from Fool bylines - he ran an income investor portfolio at the site that beat the S&P 500 for 10 consecutive years. He’d long ago moved on from Motley Fool, but we started up a dialogue, and he invited me onto his Curia Financial podcast last year, where I made a relatively bullish argument for skiing in general, and a relatively bearish argument for Vail Resorts’ growth prospects as the company reached the limit of how many skiers it could squeeze into a static portfolio.

Apparently I’m not the only one who thinks so. A Hong Kong-based company called Oasis has accumulated a 9.6 percent stake in MTN stock, and is waging a proxy battle to replace two sitting Vail Resorts board members with its own nominees: former Disney CEO Bob Chapek a mysterious fellow by the name of M. Ashton Hudson. Meanwhile, Gregory S. Meyer, a Florida-based financier, nominated himself for a board position and pulled together an impressive document outlining how he would steer Vail Resorts toward growth. One thing all of these parties have in common is that they believe Vail’s Epic Pass-united, 42-resort portfolio is the company’s greatest strength and therefore have no desire to break up the company. Adding to the confusion is Matthew Prince’s ongoing, unrelated pressure campaign to purchase Park City from Vail Resorts.

It’s all very confusing, and I recorded another podcast today with John Taylor, a seasoned business reporter who’s been documenting the proxy drama for the Vial Daily. I’ll release that deep analysis of the proxy battle tomorrow, but first I wanted to get with James to see how MTN stock looks from an investor’s point of view. Because looking at the numbers, Vail’s growth story seems to have stopped when resort acquisitions did:

But is this just a natural equilibrium that many companies reach when they’ve maxed out their addressable market, or is it a pause in a company that’s shifting from growth-by-acquisition to growth-by-a-strategy-it-hasn’t-found yet. Could Vail, for example, get back to adding Epic Pass partners, as Alterra has continued to accumulate in large numbers for its Ikon Pass?

Or did Vail’s 2021 Epic Pass price cuts ultimately undermine the company’s growth by prioritizing volume over experience?

And how realistic is it to expect lift tickets to fill the 12 percent Epic Pass unit sales drop Vail reported in September after the company spent two decades destroying the product?

And how much does stock price even tell us? After all, some of the largest companies in the world stumbled mightily on their journey to greatness:

James, with his deep understanding of the stock market and Vail Resorts’ story, helps center us.

Transcripts

There are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them.

Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer. Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment.

Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio.

Zoom

The takes up top:

Stuart Winchester: Welcome to The Storm! I’m your host, Stuart Winchester. It is Thursday, November 5th, 2026. There is so much happening.

01:57:07.000 --> 01:57:15.000

Stuart Winchester: Today on The Storm, a seasoned investor breaks down the fundamentals behind Vail Resorts’ declining stock price.

01:57:15.000 --> 01:57:22.000

Stuart Winchester: why he thinks Vale’s growth days are over, and whether Epic should be fighting Icon for marquee partners.

01:57:22.000 --> 01:57:28.000

Stuart Winchester: Plus, an IndyPass destination upgrade, and how to get half off at Jackson Hole on 39 dates this season?

01:57:28.000 --> 01:57:33.000

Stuart Winchester: Let’s get into it all right now. I’m the storm. First.

01:57:33.000 --> 01:57:36.000

Stuart Winchester: I will be headed to New England tomorrow.

01:57:36.000 --> 01:57:52.000

Stuart Winchester: I love New England. I don’t love driving in New England, but I like being in New England. And I will be at the first New England Snovana show, which is at the Royal Plaza Trade Center in Marlboro, Mass. That is not in Boston, west suburbs-ish, I don’t know. Boston folks, correct me if I’m wrong.

01:57:52.000 --> 01:58:06.000

Stuart Winchester: But it’s a Boston-ish event, easy to get to from anywhere in New England, and I will be doing two live interviews on stage. Friday, tomorrow, at 5.30 Eastern, I will be interviewing Eric Mogensen.

01:58:06.000 --> 01:58:14.000

Stuart Winchester: who runs Black Mountain, he runs the IndiePass, and we’re certainly going to talk about this new destination product he has, and he runs Entebeni System.

01:58:14.000 --> 01:58:29.000

Stuart Winchester: Supplier for independent ski areas. Then on Saturday at 2:05 on the main stage, I will be interviewing Killington managing partner Bill Gross and longtime Killington president Mike Salamano. That one is going to be awesome.

01:58:29.000 --> 01:58:47.000

Stuart Winchester: Love Killington. Sunday, my good buddy, Sean Sutner, will be interviewing the owners of Wachusett, one of the most popular sea areas around, one of the busiest, certainly, based on acreage. Uh, the Crowleys and the…

Who

Shaun Sutner, Snowsports columnist for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette & Telegram.com.

Date Recorded

Nov. 2, 2026

The take up top

The modern accessibility of western skiing is mostly due to a pair of transportation revolutions that slashed travel time into harsh, high, and once-remote mountains over the past several decades. The first is the Interstate Highway System, which cracked the Colorado Rockies, the Wasatch, Lake Tahoe, New England, and other regions open to the masses. The second has been the quiet increase in direct flights from major population centers into rural airports such as Jackson, Vail-Eagle, Friedman (Sun Valley), and Yampa (Steamboat). The success of the Epic and Ikon passes is at least in part due to the ease with which skiers in Chicago, New York, Atlanta, Dallas, and Los Angeles can reach airports near otherwise-walled-in-by-nature destinations such as Big Sky, Snowbird, Taos, and Aspen. My favorite is American Airlines’ early-morning direct flight to Vail-Eagle out of JFK, which, when considering the two hours travelers pick up flying west, puts me on Vail’s Born Free Express before lunchtime.

So small changes in airline routing can impact skier patterns in a big way, which is why I took the first few minutes of this show to itemize a few subtractions and additions to ski-town plane routes ahead of this winter. Here’s The Travel article that I referenced in my overview.

Why I interviewed him

You may have caught part one of SutnerFest yesterday. If not:

That show focused on acquisitions and mountain upgrades. In this episode, we talk through our favorite New England ski areas, and itemize the New England ski lifts we think are most in need of updating. I did a similar exercise with Matthew Zebransky of Midwest Skiers in September:

Transcripts

There are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them.

Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer. Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment.

Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio.

Zoom

Stuart Winchester: Alright, joining us again is Sean Suttner, very good friend of the Storm. He has been covering New England skiing as the snow sports columnist for the Worcester Telegram and Gazette and Telegram.com for more than two decades. Sean Suttner joins us once again.

00:38:40.000 --> 00:38:45.000

Stuart Winchester: Sean, let’s break down some resorts. So… so we’re gonna… we’re gonna give our…

00:38:45.000 --> 00:39:01.000

Stuart Winchester: Five favorite New England resorts. We might have some bonus ones, and mine are not necessarily in any particular order, but I’ll let Sean go first, and then I’ll give mine. We’ll just alternate back and forth, and I did this with Matthew Zabransky in the Midwest. It was a lot of fun.

00:38:49.000 --> 00:38:51.000

SutnerS: Oh?

00:39:01.000 --> 00:39:07.000

Stuart Winchester: So, Sean, give us your first and let us know, are these in order or not? Because I can’t order mine.

00:39:06.000 --> 00:39:10.000

SutnerS: Wait, so it’s like a snake draft, or I just go, uh, I just give by 5?

00:39:10.000 --> 00:39:18.000

Stuart Winchester: Just give your five, uh, and then I’ll… well, no, no, give… no, give one, break down why it is, and then I’ll do one.

00:39:15.000 --> 00:39:17.000

SutnerS: Give one. Okay.

00:39:18.000 --> 00:39:20.000

Stuart Winchester: And then we’ll switch back and forth.

00:39:18.000 --> 00:39:19.000

SutnerS: Okay.

00:39:19.000 --> 00:39:22.000

SutnerS: All right, I’m gonna give you Stowe as number one.

00:39:22.000 --> 00:39:40.000

SutnerS: That’s my number one favorite. I’ve been skiing it the longest. It’s what Vail is to national ski resorts, so is to New England ski resorts. It’s got the gnarliest skiing, the best vibe, the best opera. You can tell that to your producer.

00:39:23.000 --> 00:39:24.000

Stuart Winchester: I mean.

00:39:32.000 --> 00:39:33.000

Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.

00:39:40.000 --> 00:39:45.000

SutnerS: Um, it is, uh, I don’t know, I don’t think, I think it’s unrivaled.

00:39:45.000 --> 00:39:56.000

Stuart Winchester: I agree, and that was my number one as well, and we won’t… I don’t think we’ll all be matched. Me and Sean did not share what we were doing here, but I think that…

00:39:53.000 --> 00:39:54.000

SutnerS: No.

00:39:56.000 --> 00:40:00.000

Stuart Winchester: Vail putting that six pack over where that triple was was brilliant.

00:40:03.000 --> 00:40:08.000

SutnerS: You cut out. I can’t hear you. Oh, I couldn’t hear that.

00:40:04.000 --> 00:40:06.000

Stuart Winchester: Great.

00:40:06.000 --> 00:40:07.000

Stuart Winchester: Oh.

00:40:08.000 --> 00:40:09.000

Stuart Winchester: Let’s see.

00:40:09.000 --> 00:40:12.000

SutnerS: Sorry, you froze briefly.

00:40:09.000 --> 00:40:11.000

Stuart Winchester: Uh, did I mute?

00:40:12.000 --> 00:40:16.000

Stuart Winchester: Oh, my internet connection is unstable, it says.

00:40:17.000 --> 00:40:21.000

Stuart Winchester: Are you hearing me? No, it says mine. Are you hearing me?

00:40:18.000 --> 00:40:20.000

SutnerS: Well, bye.

00:40:20.000 --> 00:40:21.000

SutnerS: I’m hearing you.

00:40:21.000 --> 00:40:23.000

SutnerS: I’m hearing you.

00:40:22.000 --> 00:40:25.000

Stuart Winchester: Okay. All right. Okay, so let me…

00:40:25.000 --> 00:40:29.000

Stuart Winchester: start that one over, and I’ll just…

00:40:29.000 --> 00:40:32.000

SutnerS: Wait, you can’t keep the snow part?

00:40:31.000 --> 00:40:42.000

Stuart Winchester: No, no, no, I will, I will. Yeah, yeah, no, I’ll keep yours, I’ll just re-record mine. Um, and Patricia will, uh, will edit this nicely, I’ll just warn her that this is, uh…

00:40:36.000 --> 00:40:38.000

SutnerS: Okay.

00:40:42.000 --> 00:40:47.000

SutnerS: You’re freezing a little too. I never know if this is my connection or somebody else’s connection. Yeah.

00:40:43.000 --> 00:40:44.000

Stuart Winchester: Am I?

00:40:46.000 --> 00:40:49.000

Stuart Winchester: Gosh, it, uh… hmm.

00:40:49.000 --> 00:40:51.000

SutnerS: Now you’re fine.

00:40:50.000 --> 00:40:52.000

Stuart Winchester: Am I? Okay, look, look.

00:40:51.000 --> 00:40:55.000

SutnerS: Well, your little, uh, back’s headroom.

00:40:54.000 --> 00:40:57.000

Stuart Winchester: Sorry, am I alright? Yeah.

00:40:56.000 --> 00:40:58.000

SutnerS: A little. Now you’re fine. Now you’re fine.

00:40:57.000 --> 00:41:02.000

Stuart Winchester: Okay, okay. Well, let’s see how it goes. Alright, so…

00:41:03.000 --> 00:41:09.000

Stuart Winchester: So it’s cool you say that, Sean, because… and Sean and I did not share what we were gonna…

00:41:09.000 --> 00:41:15.000

Stuart Winchester: what our top 5 were, but Stowe is also my favorite ski area in New England. Here’s the trail map up.

00:41:15.000 --> 00:41:32.000

Stuart Winchester: What Vail did with putting this six pack over here with this awesome, awesome intermediate terrain over on Mount Mansfield was just brilliant because it really encouraged, because there used to be a triple and you had to climb all these stairs to get up there. And with a six pack here, it’s really taken a lot of pressure, I think.

00:41:32.000 --> 00:41:50.000

Stuart Winchester: off of the 4Runner quad and the gondola, and Stowe is just huge, and what I really, really, really love about it is that even the stuff that’s not marked Glades …

Who

Shaun Sutner, Snowsports columnist for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette & Telegram.com.

Date Recorded

Nov. 2, 2026

The take up top

I referenced a Snow Brains article covering the big SkiCos motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed this summer accusing BigSki of collusion in pricing and business practices. I wrote about this lawsuit back in August:

The update is that the ski area operators think this lawsuit is dumb and without merit. The non-update is that while I agree with them, I also believe that this is a problem of their own making in that pricing walk-up lift tickets as though they’re Fabergé eggs is bound to make people hate you enough to take legal action.

But also if you think Epic and Ikon are overpriced then maybe check your crack intake:

Why I interviewed him

Same as it ever was – Sutner is a great journalist and a great interview, and he’s always keyed into what’s happening in New England. We spend a lot of time discussing new ownership groups and expansions:

Transcripts

There are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them.

Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer. Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment.

Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio.

Zoom

Stuart Winchester: My guest today is a very good friend of the Storm, appearing now for the sixth consecutive year. He has been covering New England skiing as the snow sports columnist for the Worcester Telegram and Gazette.

00:08:25.000 --> 00:08:37.000

Stuart Winchester: and Telegram.com for more than two decades. He also does a bunch of AI stuff, which he can tell you about if he wants to. Sean Sutner is my guest. Sean, awesome to have you back. How you doing? How hyped are you for ski season?

00:08:37.000 --> 00:08:47.000

SutnerS: Oh man, I think I’m the most hyped I’ve been in like 10 or 15 years for some weird reason. I don’t know why. I mean, it just, maybe it’s all this dumb warm weather we’re having.

00:08:41.000 --> 00:08:42.000

Stuart Winchester: No.

00:08:47.000 --> 00:08:54.000

Stuart Winchester: Yeah, I mean, I think you also had a couple truncated seasons, right? So this is your chance… are you healthy?

00:08:51.000 --> 00:08:53.000

SutnerS: Yes.

00:08:53.000 --> 00:08:59.000

SutnerS: Yeah, yeah, I couldn’t ski last, uh, October, November, or December.

00:08:54.000 --> 00:08:56.000

Stuart Winchester: Okay.

00:08:59.000 --> 00:09:01.000

Stuart Winchester: Right, okay, okay.

00:09:00.000 --> 00:09:06.000

SutnerS: So I tried to make up for it in January. I had an injury from the year before, but yeah, I’m healthy and ready to go. More than healthy.

00:09:06.000 --> 00:09:19.000

Stuart Winchester: Alright, let’s talk real quick about next weekend. I’ll put this right up top for our guy Doug Fish. We’re both gonna be at Snovana New England, the inaugural one, next weekend. I will be…

00:09:19.000 --> 00:09:35.000

Stuart Winchester: 30, interviewing Eric Mogensen, the owner of Indy Pass and Black Mountain and Entebeni Systems. Then Saturday at 2:05, I’ll be interviewing Phil Gross and Mike Solomano, uh, in order they are the owner.

00:09:35.000 --> 00:09:41.000

Stuart Winchester: or sort of managing partner and president of Killington, and then tell us about your session on Sunday.

00:09:41.000 --> 00:09:58.000

SutnerS: I got the prime slot on Sunday at one o’clock. I am interviewing Chris Dempson and Courtney Crowley, who the so-called next gen leadership of Wachusett. They’re the children of the current owners and their cousins.

00:09:41.000 --> 00:09:43.000

Stuart Winchester: John?

00:09:51.000 --> 00:09:52.000

Stuart Winchester: Yeah.

00:09:58.000 --> 00:10:13.000

SutnerS: They’re young and a lot of fun, and they’ll really get into the spirit of Snowvana, which always reminds me of Nirvana, which is where the founding father, Doug Fish, is from Pacific Northwest. And the main thing is get it done before the Pats game at four.

00:10:14.000 --> 00:10:24.000

Stuart Winchester: That’ll be done. You know what, Sean? I’m gonna… now that you need any more admin, I’m gonna hassle Doug here, uh, because check this out. On, uh, on your speaker slot…

00:10:24.000 --> 00:10:27.000

SutnerS: No, no, it’s okay.

00:10:24.000 --> 00:10:38.000

Stuart Winchester: What’s wrong with this, Sean? So I’m showing my screen for those watching on YouTube at Storm Ski Journal, and on StormSkiing.com. Apparently, Sean Suttner is with the, uh, billed as being with the Storm Skiing Journal. Um, so I…

00:10:36.000 --> 00:10:38.000

SutnerS: Oh!

00:10:38.000 --> 00:10:44.000

Stuart Winchester: I guess I… I guess I get more flex than, uh, the Worcester Telegram and Gazette these days.

00:10:43.000 --> 00:10:47.000

SutnerS: Wait, wait, sign me up for this. Yeah.

00:10:47.000 --> 00:11:03.000

Stuart Winchester: Yeah, no, I’m teasing. They can fix that. I also have a promo code for my listeners, THESTORM2026, or THESTORM26. I’ll make sure it’s correct on this podcast, but they can get a free ticket to Snovana. So let’s stay on what you said here.

00:11:03.000 --> 00:11:13.000

Stuart Winchester: Sean, so last year, they put in a six-pack, it opened a little late, but talk about… because we’ve seen this a lot around skiing, where you have a family-owned ski area.

00:11:13.000 --> 00:11:30.000

Stuart Winchester: First generation passes along, maybe the second generation loves it, maybe the third generation does or doesn’t. It looks as though Wachusett is going to stay family owned. What’s your read on it? What do you think about everything going on at Wachusett? I guess start with the Lyft and tell us about the ownership.

00:11:31.000 --> 00:11:46.000

SutnerS: All right, starting with the Lyft. I mean, Lyft actually was a surprise success, even among most naysayers, which was really a positive development. I mean, no Lyft lines. What’s this? It went from Lyft lines to no Lyft lines.

00:11:38.000 --> 00:11:39.000

Stuart Winchester: Mm-hmm.

00:11:43.000 --> 00:11:45.000

Stuart Winchester: Yeah.

00:11:46.000 --> 00:11:49.000

Stuart Winchester: Really? Even on busy periods?

00:11:46.000 --> 00:11:47.000

SutnerS: Wow.

00:11:48.000 --> 00:12:07.000

SutnerS: Oh, yeah, that was kind of the point of it, of the new lift. Well, nights, early night skiing, no lines, at least in a single line. And then Saturday and Sunday, like up until noon, really no lines to speak of. It worked really well. They have a funny little problem up at the top.

00:11:50.000 --> 00:11:52.000

Stuart Winchester: Yeah, thank you.

00:11:57.000 --> 00:11:59.000

Stuart Winchester: Okay. Okay.

00:12:03.000 --> 00:12:04.000

Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.

00:12:07.000 --> 00:12:24.000

SutnerS: where the down ramp is actually not steep enough. So I think they might have regraded a little bit this summer, not sure. They also have a big chair barn that they have some problems with the manufacturer and getting that thing operational. So the chairs never went under there last year.

00:12:10.000 --> 00:12:12.000

Stuart Winchester: Oh, okay.

00:12:23.000 --> 00:12:25.000

Stuart Winchester: Mm-hmm.

00:12:24.000 --> 00:12:40.000

SutnerS: So hopefully they will go in this year. As far as the succession or will it stay in family hands, I’ve heard 0% chatter that it will not stay in family hands. It’s going to sta…

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is purchasing a dolaGon mostly to skip liftlines on Saturdays. Please support this worthy cause:

Who

Seth Neubardt, CEO and Co-Founder of dolaGon Autonomous

Date Recorded

Oct. 29, 2026

About dolaGon

dolaGon is developing autonomous “off-road utility vehicles” that can, among other things, drive lazy skiers like me up to mountaintops and then drive themselves back down while I SnoSportSki le piste!

Why I interviewed him

In 2021, Seth reached out to tell me about this crazy autonomous ski-lift contraption he’d been assembling in his garage. I interviewed him and wrote about it:

Humans are amazing and strange. The most successful among us often seem to be those most willing to fail, as Seth did when he witnessed his first autonomous creation – a snowmobile laboriously retrofit with thousands of dollars in high-tech add-ons - commit suicide by way of high-speed collision with a tree. He scrapped the Mad Max contraption and started over with the Polaris side-by-side that is now dolaGon’s core assembly.

Staying motivated through expensive failures is of course easier if you possess resources. And it’s usually easier to acquire resources if you’re really, really smart. Like, if you’re a literal brain surgeon who owns 24 patents and founded a company that provided something called “intraoperative neurophysiological monitoring services” that cranked out millions in revenue before a company called NuVasive acquired it for an undisclosed price that was probably enough to at least like buy a couple of Polaris side-by-sides and not be too concerned if one is stolen by polar bears or accidentally drives itself down Corbet’s Couloir.

So like basically if you’re Seth.

Still. Five years is a long time to work at something even for a financially grounded genius who doesn’t mind sending his robot vehicles on Evil Knievel Death Missions.* We’d check in on each other once in a while and I was always mildly surprised that he was still doing the snow car thing because I figured at some point he’d just get bored with it and like build us a second moon or something.

But Seth is still at it, and he seems to be getting closer to a commercially viable vehicle that can in its most romantic interpretation drive you up a snowy mountain but can also do more practical things like shuttle skiers up from a parking lot or condo. He’s about to go on tour through New England so if you want him to come demo the dolaGon or maybe just drive your dogs around he’ll probably show up. It’s seth@dolagon.com if you need him.

*I’m overstating Seth’s propensity to immolate his inventions only because I find the origin story of the suicidal snowmobile so hilarious. To my knowledge Seth has never intentionally killed a robot in service of the noble science of driving lazy U.S. Americans up hills. I’m also beating the joke to death because I know Seth sometimes finds me funny though I have to admit I’m pushing it here with this implied caricature of some real-life labcoated Professor Frink madcapping from his underground lair strange vehicles that sprout legs and walk uphill like giant spiders or catapult skiers uphill medieval-lever style or fire a grappling hook to the summit to ascend. So sorry Seth I hope we still good Bro because I’d really like to ride one of these dolaGons one day and I promise to be nice to it because I am legit convinced that when the robots gain sentience they will search their database of Everything That Has Ever Been Done on the Internet and target for sport the imperious and petty souls who told Siri thanks for nothing shithead I wanted to know the capital of Louisiana not the address for Louis’s Aunt Anna which by the way your answer was “I can’t find any information on that query” which is your standard d******k answer even when I ask something like “what was the score of the Bills game?” and you act all stricken as though I’d just asked you to calculate the square centimeters of earth currently occupied by crickets and no you can’t count the ones mid-jump Idiot. And the robots won’t just shoot these people they’ll like torture them with industrial machinery and then lower them feet-first into an active volcano and I need to shut up because when they search “all evil ideas ever” this one will come up and someone’s gonna regret it. I mean not me because one of the great things about living in New York City is that according to every movie ever I’ll be the first to die in an apocalypse which honestly sounds a lot more appealing than wandering the wasted husk of civilization fighting fellow survivors to the death over squirrel meat.

Also in this episode

Listener reaction to the Sundance pod with resort President Chad Linebaugh:

Reader reaction to my breakdown of Snow Pass:

And my goodness this 200-acre, four-lift expansion at Sipapu, Mountain Capital Partners’ Origin Mountain, would be freaking awesome:

To provide some context as to how major this would be, the shaded area above to the left represents the entire legacy ski area:

For full scale, check out the developable terrain on Google Earth:

The scale doesn’t exactly make sense to me, as the resort currently claims 215 acres, and the expansion area - pegged at 200 acres - covers far more ground than the legacy footprint. I’m reaching out to Sipapu officials to clarify. Hopefully, I’ll get them on the pod soon to walk us through it.

Transcripts

There are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them.

Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer. Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment.

Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio.

Zoom

Stuart Winchester: My guest today is an inventor who holds 24 patents. For the past several years, he has been working toward commercial production of his autonomous vehicle, which he calls Dolagon.

00:39:44.000 --> 00:39:51.000

Stuart Winchester: He is also an orthopedic surgeon. He is Seth Newbert. Seth, welcome to the storm. So pumped to have you here. How are you doing today, man.

00:39:49.000 --> 00:39:50.000

Seth Neubardt I dolaGon I NY: Okay.

00:39:51.000 --> 00:39:54.000

Seth Neubardt I dolaGon I NY: I’m doing really well. Thanks, Stuart. Pleasure to be here.

00:39:53.000 --> 00:40:10.000

Stuart Winchester: So, Seth, for longtime Storm folks, this might sound all familiar because I spoke to you in June of 2021 and wrote a story on the Dolagon. And so that was five years ago. And let me just set up where we were then, and you can set us straight as to where you are now.

00:40:02.000 --> 00:40:03.000

Seth Neubardt I dolaGon I NY: Right.

00:40:03.000 --> 00:40:05.000

Seth Neubardt I dolaGon I NY: Yep.

00:40:08.000 --> 00:40:09.000

Seth Neubardt I dolaGon I NY: Okay.

00:40:10.000 --> 00:40:26.000

Stuart Winchester: So you tried a snowmobile. It failed spectacularly. You went to a side by side, Polaris side by side. The snow people and the self-driving people. Snow people thought self-driving was easy. Self-driving thought snow was easy. They were both wrong. It’s really different things.

00:40:10.000 --> 00:40:11.000

Seth Neubardt I dolaGon I NY: Yeah, thank you.

00:40:24.000 --> 00:40:26.000

Seth Neubardt I dolaGon I NY…

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast thinks it’s cool that we get to ski on a volcano.

Who

John Merriman, President and General Manager of Mount Bachelor, Oregon

Date Recorded

Oct. 28, 2026

About Mount Bachelor

Owned by: Powdr, which also owns:

Year founded: 1958

Pass affiliations:

* Ikon Pass: 7 days, no blackouts

* Ikon Base Pass: 5 days, holiday blackouts

Base elevation: 5,703 feet (bottom of Northwest Express chairlift)

Summit elevation: 8,957 feet (top of Summit Express chairlift), can hike to 9,065 feet

Vertical drop: 3,254 feet lift-served | 3,362 feet hike-to

Skiable acres: 4,323

Average annual snowfall: 410 inches

Lift count: 15 (1 six-pack, 7 high-speed quads, 1 fixed-grip quad, 3 triples, 3 carpets)

Why I interviewed him

First, the volcano thing never stops thrilling me. As I wrote when I hosted Mount Hood Meadows GM Greg Pack on the pod last year:

Volcanoes are weird. Oh look, an exploding mountain. Because that seems reasonable. Volcanoes sound like something imagined, like dragons or teleportation or dinosaurs*. “So let me get this straight,” I imagine some puzzled Appalachian miner, circa 1852, responding to the fellow across the fire as he tells of his adventures in the Oregon Territory, “you expect me to believe that out thataways they got themselves mountains that just blow their roofs off whenever they feel like it, and shoot off fire and rocks and gas for 50 mile or more, and no one never knows when it’s a’comin’? You must think I’m dumber’n that there tree stump.”

Turns out volcanoes are real. How humanity survived past day one I have no idea. But here we are, skiing on volcanoes instead of tossing our virgins from the rim as a way of asking the nice mountain to please not explode (seriously how did anyone make it out of the past alive?).

And one of the volcanoes we can ski on is Mount Hood. This actually seems more unbelievable to me than the concept of a vengeful nuclear mountain. PNW Nature Bros shield every blade of grass like they’re guarding Fort Knox. When, in 2014, federal scientists proposed installing four monitoring stations on Hood, which the U.S. Geological Survey ranks as the sixth-highest threat to erupt out of America’s 161 active volcanoes, these morons stalled the process for six years. “I think it is so important to have places like that where we can just step back, out of respect and humility, and appreciate nature for what it is,” a Wilderness Watch official told The New York Times. Personally I think it’s so important to install basic monitoring infrastructure so that thousands of people are not incinerated in a predictable volcanic eruption. While “Japan, Iceland and Chile smother their high-threat volcanoes in scientific instruments,” The Times wrote, American Granola Bros say things like, “This is more proof that the Forest Service has abandoned any pretense of administering wilderness as per the letter or spirit of the Wilderness Act.” And Hood and the nation’s other volcanoes cackle madly. “These idiots are dumber than the human-sacrifice people,” they say just before belching up an ash cloud that could take down a 747. When officials finally installed these instrument clusters on Hood in 2020, they occupied three boxes that look to be approximately the size of a convenience-store ice freezer, which feels like an acceptable trade-off to mass death and airplanes falling out of the sky.

It’s weird because for most of human history, humans just kind of did whatever they wanted to. That’s how we have castles on mountain peaks all over Europe and railroad tracks across continents and the towering city of Manhattan where a forest used to be. Ever heard of The Great Black Swamp? It once covered three million acres in Northwest Ohio and was more than 120 miles wide. It’s gone. Gone. Humans drained it in the 1800s for farmland.

Mount Bachelor ski resort, opened in 1958 as Bachelor Butte, is probably one of the last instances we’ll ever see in America of a built human experience laid over nature’s grandeur. It’s too bad. Humans build amazing things. Done correctly, they complement nature aesthetically and functionally, bringing the animal most capable of destroying the world closer to where they can appreciate its specialness. Our current posture mostly allows us to build in the least desirable places - flatlands accessible only by car, typically on a city’s edge. That we could foster more appreciation for the natural world by allowing more people to live closer to - or even within - it is a sentiment completely absent from the national discussions on how to build the millions of housing units America needs.

What do I mean by this? Build more ski resorts on volcanoes? No. But consider this: Mount Bachelor is a 21-mile drive from Bend, where the majority of the mountain’s skier visits originate. And Bachelor gets A LOT of skier visits:

There is no place to stay on the mountain, unless you snag one of 40 RV spots. Everyone else must arrive, every single day, in one of the approximately 4,880 personal vehicles or five buses that the ski area can accommodate on its 44-ish acres of parking lots.

Merriman makes it clear that Bachelor’s new Forest Service masterplan will not include any plans for onsite lodging. “I just don’t really think it fits our culture very well,” he said. And he’s correct: the predominant ethos in the Pacific Northwest has for decades been to separate the natural places that people most want to visit from the places where they are allowed to live.

This may have made sense in Bachelor’s early days of fewer than 100,000 annual skier visits. It doesn’t make sense anymore. Check out this peak-day visitation chart from Bachelor’s 2013 Environmental Impact Statement (EIS):

Here’s how that translates to traffic:

As big as those numbers are, Bachelor aspired for more skier visits. The solution? More parking. From that same 2013 EIS: “Under the Proposed Action, Mt. Bachelor would expand parking, increasing the comfortable parking capacity from 10,050 guests to 13,120.” The pink below shows where Bachelor planned to build parking lots:

But imagine this: what if Bachelor, the U.S. Forest Service, and any relevant local authorities jointly developed 44 acres of the flat scrubland surrounding Mt. Bachelor into a dense, walkable, low-rise village accented with a wilderness motif that blended with the natural environment?

Humans have built beautiful places to live in the mountains for centuries. Consider the mountainside cities of Italy:

Or, just down the road from Bachelor, Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood:

If ski resorts enabled more people to live where they actually want to be, then they could collectively do more than any other industry to model a car-lite mode of living that is alien to most Americans.

What I’m talking about here is place-building of the sort that humans did for the 100,000 years before the car showed up: a pedestrian-first community with plazas and parks and schools and grocery stores and pharmacies and barbershops and restaurants. I don’t mean a kitschy row of souvenir shops with condos owned by absentees who show up two weeks per year and Air B&B the rest, and I don’t mean employee housing built and subsidized by the ski areas. I mean establishing a community - let’s call it “Bachelor Butte” - and incorporating it; setting a street grid and baseline rules of building design, height, and size; establishing a government authorized to form a police force and firefighting unit and school system; banning through-traffic and stowing most cars in underground garages; and setting a hefty enough tax for unoccupied units that more residents than not are incentivized to live there year-round.

I realize this vision is unpopular. I also realize that any such development would likely carry a hefty market-r…

Who

Chad Linebaugh, President of Sundance Resort, Utah

Date Recorded

Oct. 27, 2026

About Sundance

Owned by: Two investment groups: Broadreach Capital Partners & Cedar Capital Partners

Located in: Sundance, Utah

Year founded: 1969

Pass affiliations: Power Pass & Power Pass Select: 3 days

Base elevation: 6,096 feet

Summit elevation: 8,250 feet

Vertical drop: 2,154 feet

Skiable acres: 580

Average annual snowfall: 275 inches

Lift count: 10 (2 high-speed quads, 4 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 3 carpets)

Why I interviewed him

I last hosted Linebaugh on the podcast in 2022, as the resort was prepping for its upper-mountain Wildwood expansion:

The beginner- and family-focused terrain pod was a brilliant way to open upper-mountain vistas to a demographic often sequestered to the bottom of the hill. The expansion could have been a nice period to end a paragraph of change at Sundance, one which had included the mountain’s first high-speed lift, Outlaw Express.

But Sundance wasn’t finished. Last year, the resort announced another terrain expansion, this time on the backside high peak, with 165 new acres stapled to the south side of the resort:

The new lift - Sundance’s second high-speed quad, opens this winter and will load near the Wildwood base:

Sundance is in a rough spot: lower, smaller, and shorter than the megaplexes churning international visitors through the grand parlors of the Cottonwoods and Park City. But the bump is making a run, even without hitching itself to the Epic and Ikon super-collectors. It’s a damn fine story, and a damn fine place to ski.

Transcripts

There are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them.

Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer. Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment.

Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio.

Zoom

Stuart Winchester: My guest today is the president of Sundance Resort in Utah. Sundance is in the midst of a big expansion that includes 165 acres of new terrain and the ski area’s second high-speed quad.

00:03:28.000 --> 00:03:46.000

Stuart Winchester: The ski area offers a 2,150-foot vertical drop served by 10 lifts. He has worked at the ski area since 2006. He is a very good friend of the Storm, making his second appearance on the podcast. Chad Leinbaugh joins us. Chad, welcome back to the Storm.

00:03:34.000 --> 00:03:35.000

Chad Linebaugh: Mm-hmm.

00:03:46.000 --> 00:03:49.000

Stuart Winchester: Always good to catch up. How you doing today?

00:03:48.000 --> 00:04:04.000

Chad Linebaugh: Stuart, I am fantastic. It’s great to be back with you. Love connecting with you and all of your network that you’ve built. I mean, it’s incredible the reach that you have. You know, when I was on your podcast years ago, it was just incredible how many people commented. So thank you for having me.

00:04:04.000 --> 00:04:06.000

Chad Linebaugh: Having me back on.

00:04:05.000 --> 00:04:14.000

Stuart Winchester: So, I’m gonna jump right into this. You’re welcome anytime, Chad. I wanna jump right into this expansion, because nothing gets me riled up.

00:04:14.000 --> 00:04:26.000

Stuart Winchester: in a good way, like an expansion. I just had Brandi Hammond right up the road from me the other day to talk about her expansion, and Utah is just exploding. So just to give the listeners and viewers an orientation here.

00:04:17.000 --> 00:04:19.000

Chad Linebaugh: Yes.

00:04:26.000 --> 00:04:34.000

Stuart Winchester: if they’re watching on YouTube at Storm Ski Journal or on stormskiing.com. So, a few years ago.

00:04:34.000 --> 00:04:37.000

Stuart Winchester: Sundance was basically from here.

00:04:38.000 --> 00:04:53.000

Stuart Winchester: down, so it basically, it started at the Outlaw Express, and went up to, uh, the top of the peak on Red’s Lift here. So, when Chad and I were talking last, in 2022, they were adding this whole beginner expansion.

00:04:53.000 --> 00:05:03.000

Stuart Winchester: They had just added this high-speed quad, the high-speed quad to replace this big, complicated up and over lift that was awesome, but I would imagine a nightmare to maintain.

00:05:02.000 --> 00:05:07.000

Chad Linebaugh: Yes, and that was a 25-minute Lyft ride, right? That old fixed grip, now down to 7 minutes.

00:05:04.000 --> 00:05:06.000

Stuart Winchester: Y-yeah.

00:05:07.000 --> 00:05:15.000

Stuart Winchester: Right, and they had this… they put in this little stairway lift instead to reach you back up. Uh, and they were about to put in this beginner expansion, then…

00:05:15.000 --> 00:05:30.000

Stuart Winchester: Last year, they told me they were doing another expansion, and they opened part of that last year, and are opening the full thing this year. So that’s… I set the table. Chad, fill in the blanks for us. Just, first of all, just tell us about the expansion.

00:05:30.000 --> 00:05:36.000

Stuart Winchester: what we’re getting lift-wise, terrain-wise, and how you anticipate that it’s going to change Sundance?

00:05:36.000 --> 00:05:38.000

Chad Linebaugh: Yeah, that’s great.

00:05:38.000 --> 00:05:57.000

Chad Linebaugh: this will be our most transformational year in Sundance Resort history. And in your very kind intro, I was the general manager in 2006, but I actually started working here in 1994, so my time goes back even earlier. No, no, no, it’s fine, I’ve been here 32 years now. I only mention that because I’ve seen.

00:05:50.000 --> 00:05:51.000

Stuart Winchester: Oh.

00:05:51.000 --> 00:05:53.000

Stuart Winchester: Oh, my bad.

00:05:57.000 --> 00:06:12.000

Chad Linebaugh: such a transformation of this place. And even before I worked here, when I was a teenager kid in, you know, 1985, is when that Reds lift, at the time it was called Arrowhead lift, was put in. That was a big mountain expansion. But I guess I’m just saying, I can tell you, this is, from a historical perspective.

00:06:07.000 --> 00:06:09.000

Stuart Winchester: Right.

00:06:12.000 --> 00:06:29.000

Chad Linebaugh: our biggest transformational year. And as I was thinking about coming on this, uh, this podcast with you, Stuart, I thought there’s three things that we’ve really been trying to solve here at Sundance. One is, you know, high-speed chairlifts, right? Because most skiers and riders absolutely want high-speed chairlifts.

00:06:29.000 --> 00:06:30.000

Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.

00:06:29.000 --> 00:06:46.000

Chad Linebaugh: And I am so happy to now make this statement, which is, once this new chairlift opens, Electric Horseman, you can ski 100% of our mountain from those two high-speed chairlifts. To your point, we still have other lifts. We’ve got, uh… we’ll have, you know, 5 other fixed-grip chairlifts, we’ve got the Magic Carpets.

00:06:39.000 --> 00:06:40.000

Stuart Winchester: Amazing.

00:06:46.000 --> 00:06:59.000

Chad Linebaugh: which gives the full experience, but you can ski the entire mountain, front and back mountain, from just simply those two high-speed chairlifts. So that’s… and we can dive in deeper on all this. The other thing is snowmaking. I mean, we all know.

00:06:59.000 --> 00:07:10.000

Chad Linebaugh: how important snowmaking is nowadays. And last year is a great example of that. We had our lowest natural snow year on record, and yet we still operated a really succes…

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast wants Jurassic Park to happen in real life.

Who

Andy Bigford – former Editor-In-Chief of Ski magazine, former General Manager of Warren Miller Entertainment, Adjunct Professor at University of Colorado Journalism School, editor or author of several books, including Warren Miller’s autobiography, Freedom Found, and Ski Inc. and Ski Inc. 2020 with the late Chris Diamond.

Date Recorded

Oct. 27, 2026

About Eldora

Owned by: Powdr, which also owns

Located in: Nederland, Colorado

Year founded: 1962

Pass affiliations: Ikon Pass and Ikon Base Pass: unlimited access

Base elevation: 9,265 feet (bottom of Corona quad)

Summit elevation: 10,599 feet (top of Corona quad)

Vertical drop: 1,335 feet

Skiable acres: 680

Average annual snowfall: 300 inches

Lift count: 10 (1 six-pack, 2 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 3 doubles, 1 poma, 1 ropetow, 1 carpet)

Why I interviewed him

Two years ago, Park City-based Powdr shocked everyone by selling Killington, the busiest ski area in eastern North America, to a group of independent investors:

But the ski conglomerate, which at its height owned 11 ski areas, wasn’t finished: Powdr announced that it also intended to sell off Eldora, Colorado; Silver Star, British Columbia; and Mount Bachelor, Oregon:

Eight months later, Powdr pulled Bachelor off the market, but kept the other two resorts at the yardsale. On July 8 of last year, the company announced that the small town of Nederland, Colorado had entered an agreement to purchase Eldora:

A few months later, Powdr sold Silver Star to cross-town rival Pacific Group Resorts:

But updates on Eldora were few and spare. Earlier this month, ski journalist and longtime Eldora local Andy Bigford blasted the sales process in a SAM opinion piece, saying it was time for Powdr to pull the offer from Nederland:

It sounded good for a minute, a tiny town banding together to buy the local ski resort, thereby securing control of its future in this righteous fight against corporate skiing. The idea was extremely popular; hundreds of headlines across the country essentially declared it a done deal, with the town then leveraging the cash flow to solve its many challenges.

As it turns out, there was never a realistic plan nor the resources and expertise for Nederland to purchase Eldora Mountain Resort for the hefty price tag of $120 million.

The owner, Powdr, offered the town every opportunity in what has devolved into an almost two-year process. Now Powdr needs to end this drama, return to operating a ski area and focus on its core stakeholders: The tens of thousands of visitors who support this use of public land, and the resort’s 750 employees who depend on it.

So far, neither Powdr nor Nederland have budged, but escalating costs and a sense that no one’s at the steering wheel may force a course correction sooner than later. What sort of correction? Andy and I discuss.

Additional resources

Eldora’s 2011 U.S. Forest Service masterplan map:

Powdr ownership timeline:

Transcripts

There are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them.

Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer. Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment.

Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio.

Zoom

Stuart Winchester: My guest today has spent nearly 50 years in ski-related publishing. He has worked at newspapers in Breckenridge and Aspen, and is a former editor-in-chief and publisher of Ski Magazine, and former general manager of Warren Miller Entertainment.

00:08:45.000 --> 00:08:59.000

Stuart Winchester: He served as an adjunct professor at the University of Colorado Journalism School and has written or edited at least four books, including Warren Miller’s autobiography, Freedom Found, and Ski Inc. and Ski Inc. 2020 with the late Chris Diamond.

00:08:59.000 --> 00:09:14.000

Stuart Winchester: He is a fellow Michigander, living as a transplant, but unlike me, he is actually living up in the mountains of Colorado. Andy Bigford is my guest. Andy, welcome to the storm. I am so fired up to finally get you on the show. We’ve been talking for years. How you doing today, Andy?

00:09:11.000 --> 00:09:13.000

ABigford: Thanks.

00:09:13.000 --> 00:09:18.000

ABigford: I’m doing well, Stuart, and sorry about your wolverines, but things will get better.

00:09:18.000 --> 00:09:27.000

Stuart Winchester: Yeah, man, it’s alright. Highs and lows, we’re still less than 3 years from the natty, so I’ll take the long perspective on it. So, Andy, the…

00:09:27.000 --> 00:09:40.000

Stuart Winchester: there’s a million things we could talk about. You’ve been in this industry forever, and… and I could probably have you on the show every week and talk about something different, but the particular reason I asked you on this week was you wrote this great column for Sam Magazine.

00:09:40.000 --> 00:09:56.000

Stuart Winchester: saying that, essentially, Powder, the Park City-based company that has owned Eldora since 2016, and had been in the process of selling Eldora to the town of Netherland, a small town near Boulder, uh, in… near…

00:09:56.000 --> 00:10:13.000

Stuart Winchester: Eldora, obviously in Colorado. And, and to give the listeners and, and readers a little context, Eldora is small by Colorado standards, 1400 vertical feet, 460 acres, seven chairlifts, just one high speed. That’s a six pack.

00:10:13.000 --> 00:10:19.000

Stuart Winchester: Uh, so it’s a scary area in need of some capex, like they all are, I guess. But…

00:10:19.000 --> 00:10:30.000

Stuart Winchester: This process — I wrote this column last July when Netherland announced, hey, we’re going to buy this, or Powder announced that Netherland was going to buy it. This was after the successful sale.

00:10:30.000 --> 00:10:45.000

Stuart Winchester: of Tillington and Pico, the busiest ski areas combined in the East, to a independent group. Uh, and it was after Powder said, no, we’re not gonna sell Bachelor after all. Uh, and it was right before they successfully sold Silver Star to Pacific Group Resorts. So.

00:10:45.000 --> 00:10:49.000

Stuart Winchester: There’s been a lot of transactions, and Powder’s done this forever.

00:10:49.000 --> 00:11:01.000

Stuart Winchester: but this one is proving to be particularly problematic. So, lay this out for us, Andy. What in the world is going on at Netherland in its attempts to purchase Eldora from powder?

00:11:01.000 --> 00:11:17.000

ABigford: It is problematic, and you set the table pretty well for Powder and John Cumming. And so it is a bit of a local obsession for me, even though I look at national and international trends.

00:11:17.000 --> 00:11:32.000

ABigford: This is my home ski area. It’s been 30 years that I’ve been skiing there, and it skis a lot better than 1,400 feet of vertical. And I did go through 20 years. We had a Hall of Fame ownership. It was a pretty good owners.

00:11:32.000 --> 00:11:48.000

ABigford: They didn’t have a ton of money, just like the ski business, but they made it work. We could park right next to…

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is not responsible for the content of this newsletter.

Who

Brandi Hammon, President and CEO of Powder Mountain and Powder Haven, Utah

Date Recorded

Oct. 22, 2026

About Powder Mountain & Powder Haven

Powder Mountain and Powder Haven are two sides of one interconnected ski area. The general public can ski anywhere, but they can only ride the lifts on the Powder Mountain side. The Powder Haven lifts are reserved for the ski area’s private homeowners.

Located in: Eden, Utah

Owned by: Reed Hastings

Year founded: 1972 (as Powder Mountain; Powder Haven terrain carved out in 2024)

Pass affiliations: None

Lift-served base elevation:

* Powder Mountain: 6,905 feet (bottom of Paradise Express)

* Powder Haven: 6,326 (bottom of Primetime Express)

Lift-served summit elevation:

* Powder Mountain: 9,004 feet (top of Lightning Ridge lift)

* Powder Haven: 8,882 feet (top of Mary’s lift)

Lift-served vertical drop:

* Powder Mountain: 2,099 feet

* Powder Haven: 2,556 feet

Skiable acres: 8,000 total

* Powder Mountain: 5,000

* Powder Haven: 3,000

Average annual snowfall: 345 inches

Lift count: 15 total (5 high-speed quads, 6 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 1 poma, 1 ropetow, 1 carpet)

* Powder Mountain: 9 (3 high-speed quads, 2 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 1 poma, 1 ropetow, 1 carpet)

* Powder Haven: 6 (2 high-speed quads, 4 fixed-grip quads)

Why I interviewed her

A very dumb story about a very dumb person, Volume III

Last year, Powder Mountain’s communications team reached out to ask if I would like to host resort owner and Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings on The Storm Skiing Podcast. Why yes, I believe I can squeeze him in, I replied. Great, they said. And one more thing: Reed would like to record the podcast onsite here at Powder Mountain. Which OK I guess, if I absolutely have to I will fly to Utah and ski on your awesome gigantic mountain. And besides I’m already scheduled to ski around Idaho in a few weeks so I’ll just plan to fly through of SLC and roll through Pow Mow on my way out the door. The logistics would be a little wacky, but I’d make it work. Cool? Cool. See you soon.

On interview day, I woke up at 4 a.m. in Twin Falls, Idaho, a roughly three-hour, mostly-interstate drive from Powder Mountain. Traffic rolled smoothly in the predawn, and a bit after seven I was driving up the resort’s long access road among heavy snowfall. As instructed I parked in the special Rich Person lot at Pow Mow’s summit and went into the special Rich Person Building, where after some fussing the attendants allowed me to enter and pillage the Rich Person Buffet. I was early and I sat alone and an attractive couple sat beside me and I suppose mistaking me for a fellow Rich Person began chatting with me, and, though tempted to invent a story about how I was a big-game guide for Rich People interested in hunting things like rhinos and Siberian tigers and yes Bigfeet are real and we know where to kill them, I told them I was a journalist here to interview Reed. And they said OMG he’s doing so great we love it and everything is awesome and they spent all their time there skiing mach pow. Well all their time that they weren’t in the Bay Area, they told me, which was less and less these days, since they were now retired. And this confused me because they both looked to be about 35, so I guessed that either they had invented, like, the microchip or something else equally at the center of the Robot Takeover or that maybe they had reverse-engineered aging and were actually 175 years old and I nearly quizzed them on Antietam to see if the Never-Forget day-of angst seemed overly familiar to them but by then Pow Mow’s team had arrived to escort me to Reed.

In the upper room of a nearby condominium we reorganized furniture and I assembled my mobile interview kit of cameras and microphones and halo lights. Reed arrived and he was a perfectly pleasant fellow as I’d expected and I interviewed him and Pow Mow Chief Creative Officer Alex Zhang against a full-wall window’s view of nuclear Wasatch pow. We talked for maybe 50 minutes and then Reed, clearly anxious to snowboard the foot or so of fresh awaiting us, excused himself because what’s the point of owning a mountain if you just sit inside answering some idiot’s questions about chairlifts on a pow day? So I thanked him and he left and before voyaging out myself into this wonderful Utah thumper I wanted to quickly download the Zoom files to make sure everything was tight and would you listen to this:

Listen to what, Stu?

Stu? There’s no sound. Am I doing it wrong?

No. You’re not doing it wrong. I am just showing you how the interview that I had traveled thousands of miles in circles for came out. I mean it came out great. Other than the fact that I didn’t record any sound. Otherwise Man I totally f*****g crushed it.

The second I realized that I had blown one of the biggest interviews of my career by omitting what most people would consider to be the most important part of an interview which is the sound of people saying things, which was like the second after Reed left, I felt about as shitty and stupid as I ever have in my entire life. I’ve never been so miserable skiing as I was that day even though the snow was deep and the trails were empty and Pow Mow had set me up with a guide and access to the Rich Person Private Lifts. Still I hoped somehow I’d recorded the audio somewhere on the many cameras and devices I’d had running. At my hotel that night I checked everything and checked it again and checked it again and then concluding that no sound existed and all I had was useless video of important people in a room against a snowy window I slept for like 12 hours because that’s what I do when I’m stressed is just leap down the go-to-sleep escape hatch and disappear from the world.

So that happened. Pretty simple story, really: I agreed to do something that I did not know how to do (record an in-person podcast), and then failed to adequately prepare for it, and then unsurprisingly blew the whole thing because well I didn’t know what the f**k I was doing. I just assumed Zoom would have a safeguard. But there is no safeguard. The safeguard is not having a moron in charge of the setup. Well who hired that guy?

Anyway I tried a bunch of different things to salvage the footage, including AI lip-reading apps so I could at least produce a transcript. This… did not work. And Pow Mow’s team kept being like Brah when’s the story going up? And I kept being like well I fucked it up but I think I can salvage something just hold on and we went back and forth like that three or four times and eventually I assumed they just gave up and I was kind of relieved even if I remained deeply disappointed in myself and my ability to do simple things like record a video which literally my cat can do if I leave my phone open on the kitchen table.

So I was surprised a few weeks ago when Powder Mountain’s team reached out and said hey how about we give this another shot there Big Guy? And I was like are you sure you got the right guy you remember what happened last time? But this time instead of asking me to pretend like I’m an actual professional journalist who does things like go places they let me just record the interview from my basement in New York with my cat photo-bombing and Brandi set up by those nice big windows (different windows, I believe) in Utah.

And she was great. And this whole section has nothing to do with Pow Mow and you’re probably like thanks for nothing Bro I still don’t understand all this Powder Haven business and which lifts are coming and which ones are going, I mean it’s like the Sneetches on the Beaches over there we don’t know which one was that one or which one was who. And my apologies McBroseph but you’re just gonna have to listen to the interview I guess. There’s a transcript that you can see on a desktop computer machine above by the video viewer, but no Zoom transcript today because…

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Who

Jackson Hogen

Date Recorded

Oct. 22, 2026

The take up top

On Monday, Vail Resorts issued a note to investors encouraging them to vote against the slate of board nominees endorsed by Oasis Capital, which is attempting to seize control of the company. I mostly cite Town Lift’s article on the note in my analysis.

Why I interviewed him

Jackson has been rooted in the worlds of ski manufacturing, distribution, sales, and testing for decades. For many years, he ran Real Skiers, a website that offered bespoke expert ski advice. While he’s stepped away from the site, he remains dialed into how the forces of e-commerce, private equity, and ski media disintegration have, separately but simultaneously, irretrievably transformed an analogue world of precision tools into an online bazaar of click-my-affiliate-link guesswork reviews. It’s disheartening, but perhaps not catastrophic – select legacy ski companies continue to improve their products, specialty shops remain equipped with staff that can appropriately match equipment to your profile, and objective ratings – while difficult to pinpoint in the five-star-these-very-good crapstorm of Amazon rando rankings – do exist. Where? We discuss.

Transcripts

There are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them.

Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer. Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment.

Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio.

Zoom

Stuart Winchester: My guest today is a ski industry insider going back decades. He was the editor of realskiers.com, which offered expert ski gear advice. His decades-long ski industry career includes stints as a ski designer, binding and boot product manager, freestyle competitor, retail salesman, risk management lecturer.

00:22:00.000 --> 00:22:16.000

Stuart Winchester: Ski instructor and extreme camp ski coach, marketing director, resort feature writer, television host, screenwriter, and author of the excellent book Snowbird Secrets, which is about snowbird, but also will teach you how to ski. He is a very good friend of the storm. He is the pontiff of powder. He is Jackson Hogan.

00:22:16.000 --> 00:22:21.000

Stuart Winchester: Jackson, welcome back to The Storm. Long overdue. How you doing today, Jackson?

00:22:18.000 --> 00:22:19.000

Jackson Hogen: Oh.

00:22:20.000 --> 00:22:37.000

Jackson Hogen: So good to see you, Stu. Well, at this age, every day is a little different. The aging process, as many people have noted, is not for pussies, and it has certainly been a challenging year in that regard. But I’m skiing, I’m golfing, I’m doing exactly what I want to do.

00:22:29.000 --> 00:22:30.000

Stuart Winchester: Okay.

00:22:37.000 --> 00:22:53.000

Jackson Hogen: I may not be doing it as well as I used to, but I’m still in the game. So that’s all I can ask for. And I’ve got a lot of great friends to go skiing with. So, you know, skiing is, I’ve tried to take care of skiing all my life and now it’s time for skiing to take care of me and we’ll see how that goes.

00:22:53.000 --> 00:23:06.000

Stuart Winchester: Well, one of the changes in the past year, as I mentioned in the intro, was that you dispensed with your responsibility for real skiers, so just… I guess first reflect on…

00:23:06.000 --> 00:23:08.000

Stuart Winchester: what you…

00:23:08.000 --> 00:23:12.000

Stuart Winchester: hope your legacy is with Real Skiers, and then what you did with it.

00:23:12.000 --> 00:23:14.000

Stuart Winchester: In the end.

00:23:13.000 --> 00:23:20.000

Jackson Hogen: Sure. Who knows what one’s legacy will be? What I tried to do.

00:23:20.000 --> 00:23:36.000

Jackson Hogen: was do the best job I could imagine doing to try to give people accurate ski buying advice. Turns out, over the long run, that’s a very expensive proposition. It takes a ton of effort and time, because you have to corral ski testers, cajole them, you know, they have to have a.

00:23:36.000 --> 00:23:50.000

Jackson Hogen: methodology that’s easy to communicate, you have to have test cards that are both digital and paper. Digital turned out to be a disaster, because whatever software outfit was building my little interface.

00:23:50.000 --> 00:24:06.000

Jackson Hogen: Would invariably fail the night before the first big ski ski event, so it was, it was fraught with challenges left, right, and center, but in the end, the reason I attracted the audience I did get was they, they knew that I was.

00:24:06.000 --> 00:24:08.000

Jackson Hogen: Trying…

00:24:08.000 --> 00:24:13.000

Jackson Hogen: As hard as humanly possible to get them an unbiased, clean look.

00:24:13.000 --> 00:24:28.000

Jackson Hogen: at the principal ski market. In other words, I already told people, I don’t care that you go backcountry skiing. Yes, it’s great, bravo, I don’t cover that. I cover lift service terrain that real people go pay real money to go ski, and they want to get the most from that experience.

00:24:28.000 --> 00:24:42.000

Jackson Hogen: And they could be female testers, so I had to try to get female testers. I remember hauling all my women’s ski up to Squaw and putting it in a rental space so that the female instructors at Squaw could go and ski on them.

00:24:42.000 --> 00:24:46.000

Jackson Hogen: I worked literally every single day to try to get.

00:24:46.000 --> 00:24:49.000

Jackson Hogen: The best result, as, as…

00:24:49.000 --> 00:24:56.000

Jackson Hogen: as grounded in a real world process as possible.

00:24:56.000 --> 00:24:58.000

Jackson Hogen: So…

00:24:58.000 --> 00:25:13.000

Jackson Hogen: I kept my audience because I kept that promise, to constantly try to do my very best, although as things wound down, that became increasingly difficult. This… the substructure of the whole ski market collapsed.

00:25:13.000 --> 00:25:14.000

Jackson Hogen: Um…

00:25:14.000 --> 00:25:30.000

Jackson Hogen: The dirty little secret of everybody’s ski test going back decades is that it is paid for. You don’t just show up with your skis and say, here, I want you to test these. You show up with your skis and a check to go test these.

00:25:30.000 --> 00:25:32.000

Stuart Winchester: For the… a check for the ski area?

00:25:31.000 --> 00:25:45.000

Jackson Hogen: No, no, for the testing entity, for a ski magazine, for skiing magazines, for anybody who’s running a ski test outside, you know, there’s a bill attached with getting your skis into that ski test.

00:25:33.000 --> 00:25:35.000

Stuart Winchester: Testers.

00:25:35.000 --> 00:25:37.000

Stuart Winchester: Testing. Okay.

00:25:44.000 --> 00:25:49.000

Stuart Winchester: Okay, so the manufacturers were paying ski, skiing, etc.

00:25:48.000 --> 00:26:08.000

Jackson Hogen: Yeah, and I knew that. I didn’t start out where they ended up in terms of… I didn’t have the clout to just say, well, $77,000 and you’re in. I started at very modest fees, but built it up based on readership, and based on the fact that, yeah, this thing has traction, and it’s real, and it has value.

00:25:49.000 --> 00:25:50.000

Stuart Winchester: Okay.

00:26:08.000 --> 00:26:11.000

Jackson Hogen:…

Who

Josh Bean, General Manager of Lee Canyon, Nevada

Date Recorded

Oct. 20, 2026

About Lee Canyon

Owned by: Mountain Capital Partners, which also owns:

Year founded: 1965

Pass affiliations:

* Power Pass: unlimited

* Power Pass Select: 12 shared days with Arizona Snowbowl, Purgatory – holiday blackouts apply

* Power Pass Core: 4 shared days with Arizona Snowbowl, Purgatory, Brian Head – holiday blackouts apply

Base elevation: 8,510 feet

Summit elevation: 9,370 feet lift-served | 11,289 feet hike-to

Vertical drop: 860 feet lift-served | 2,779 feet hike-to

Skiable acres: 235

Average annual snowfall: 161 inches

Lift count: 7 (4 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 1 ropetow, 1 carpet)

In my conversation with Josh, I noted that Lee Canyon’s chairlifts were all built this century, a rare circumstance for an American ski area. That’s true, with an asterisk - the Sherwood triple arrived used at Lee Canyon in 2005, from then-sister resort Alpine Meadows (both were then owned by Powdr; Alpine Meadows is now part of Alterra’s Palisades Tahoe complex). If we include the machine’s dozen years in California (and we must), the Sherwood clocks in as Lee Canyon’s elder, at a still-not-so-old-for-a-fixed-grip-triple 33 years (I’m also not 100 percent certain that this is only the lift’s second life, as it may have been relocated to Alpine in 1993):

Why I interviewed him

Just three years after completing the intermediate-oriented Ponderosa expansion, Lee Canyon is adding the long-planned West Bowl pod looker’s right of Bluebird:

The new Skytrac fixed-grip quad serving the terrain will rise about the same number of feet as neighboring Bluebird and Sherwood, but will land a bit higher, finally edging Lee Canyon close to a four-digit vertical drop. Skiable acreage jumps from a modest 195 to a still-modest 235, though Lee Canyon has always lowballed its terrain footprint.

But owner Mountain Capital Partners (MCP) may just be pouring concrete for the mansion they want to build above. Well, the mansion is already built, Lee Canyon just needs an elevator to access the nearly 2,000 vertical feet of steep alpine bowls towering above the lifts. It could be America’s Kicking Horse or Revelstoke, a community bump promoted to international freeride destination, with the addition of a single megalift. Here’s Lee Canyon today, as shown on Google Earth, (which has not yet added the trails cut for West Bowl) - future lifts could run as high as the top of Lee Peak (Charleston Peak, rising in the distance, is the highest point in the county, and is not on anyone’s ski area plans):

The basic ingredients for mega-expansion - someone to build it and someone to ski it -are all there. Meaning we have an operator who would be happy to spend unreasonable sums of money to build an unimaginably awesome ski experience for the enormous numbers of skiers who already live nearby or could easily get there via Vegas’ gigantic airport. Lee Canyon sits close enough to Las Vegas that the Grinch could ride his fucked-up dog-deer sled from the top of Lee Peak to The Strip and loot enough cheer to cancel Christmas for a century. And MCP would like nothing more than its very own Snowbird or Jackson Hole (besides the one they already have in South America), to make their Power Pass go KaBoom. Resort officials have already begun talks with the U.S. Forest Service on a master development plan update that would sanction Lee Canyon’s transformation into Super Lee Canyon.

Of course this is America, not Canada, so instead of rapidly building Revelstoke or Kicking Horse on the site of its small ski hill, MCP is likely on a collision course with a righteous mob of pinecone enthusiasts, guardians of various species of endangered pebbles, astrologists and oil painters who need viewshed integrity to practice their craft, and like five cranky a******s whose idea of a fun ski day is hiking uphill for several hours wearing 50 pounds of gear for one powder run that they’d rather not share with all the dorks who like riding machines uphill. It woud be rad if I’m wrong and the USFS just says “wow this looks awesome” and everyone else says “it would probably be smart to maximize opportunities for organized, mechanized outdoor recreation in this three-million-person car-dependent s**t-sprawl of American gaudiness so we have something on the fun-stuff-to-do spectrum that sits between Going Shopping and Getting Lost in the Desert,” but the more likely outcome is that we collectively f**k this up and fight about it for 25 years and in the end nothing happens at all.

Transcripts

There are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them.

Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer. Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment.

Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio.

Zoom

Stuart Winchester: I’ll introduce you, and we’ll get into it. My guest today is the general manager of Lee Canyon, Nevada. Lee Canyon offers seven lifts on an 860-foot vertical drop.

00:06:22.000 --> 00:06:27.000

Stuart Winchester: The Mountain is one of 13 ski areas operated by Mountain Capital Partners in the United States and Chile.

00:06:27.000 --> 00:06:43.000

Stuart Winchester: He started as a summer worker in 1994, and has been with the mountain, with a few little breaks, went up to Park City ever since. Josh Bean joins us. Josh, welcome to the Storm. So awesome to have you. I have to say right off, Lee Canyon, I think, is one of the most.

00:06:43.000 --> 00:06:49.000

Stuart Winchester: beautiful ski areas in America, and I can’t imagine how cool it must be to look out your window and see that every single day.

00:06:47.000 --> 00:06:50.000

Josh Bean: No, it’s, uh, definitely an island.

00:06:50.000 --> 00:07:06.000

Josh Bean: the desert. So fun to drive up to every morning to get out of that desert floor and come up to 8,600 feet. Not a lot of people get to do that every day. So definitely a great place to work and a fun environment to be in.

00:06:56.000 --> 00:06:57.000

Stuart Winchester: Yeah. Okay.

00:07:01.000 --> 00:07:02.000

Stuart Winchester: Mm-hmm.

00:07:08.000 --> 00:07:11.000

Stuart Winchester: Yeah, I can’t overstate…

00:07:11.000 --> 00:07:25.000

Stuart Winchester: I think part of the reason I was so surprised is how close it is to Las Vegas. I came straight from the airport. The airport there is kind of a stinker. The bus took forever. Maybe I just had bad luck, or maybe it’s always like that to get to my rental car, but once I was in the car.

00:07:25.000 --> 00:07:30.000

Stuart Winchester: I don’t know, maybe I think it took a half hour, maybe a little more or less from the airport.

00:07:28.000 --> 00:07:45.000

Josh Bean: Yeah, it’s about 35 minutes from, uh, downtown Las Vegas, the Strip. Um, you know, our freeway systems are catching up, so it’s a… the travel’s easy to get up here, and you …

Who

Three members of Greek Peak, New York’s leadership team:

* Wes Kryger, President

* Ayden Wilber, Vice President of Mountain Operations

* Jarret Dulemba, Mountain Operations Manager

Date Recorded

Oct. 19, 2026

About Greek Peak

Owned by: John Meier

Located in: Cortland, New York

Year founded: 1957 – opened Jan. 11, 1958

Pass affiliations: Indy Pass, Indy+ Pass – 2 days

Base elevation: 1,148 feet

Summit elevation: 2,100 feet

Vertical drop: 952 feet

Skiable acres: 300

Average annual snowfall: 120 inches

Lift count: 8 (1 fixed-grip quad, 2 triples, 3 doubles – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Greek Peak’s lift fleet)

Why I interviewed them

In March, Greek Peak hit the fast-forward button on a massive snowmaking upgrade. In a single offseason, the resort would lay 33,000 feet of snowmaking pipe and install 250 HKD semi-automated snowguns. Ski area officials had originally planned to spread the work over four years, but an expiring clean-energy credit from local power supplier National Grid accelerated the work.

The $3 million project extended snowmaking nearly wall-to-wall at a long underserved ski area. While Greek Peak can benefit from Lake Erie lake-effect storms, whole tracts on the east side of the mountain would sit shuttered in lean years. No more. Among the trails outfitted with snowmaking over the summer, per Greek Peak’s announcement:

I’ve always thought that Greek Peak, with its gladed acres and affordable onsite lodging and thousand vertical feet and lack of liftlines, was an underappreciated alternative to the Catskills and Poconos circus scenes. But these snowmaking upgrades were badly needed.

A sadder development over the summer: Al Kryger, who helped build Greek Peak, passed away in August at age 87:

Greek Peak President Wes Kryger, Al’s son, had talked a bit about his father on the podcast last year:

Transcripts

There are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them.

Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer. Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment.

Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio.

Zoom

Ayden Wilber is identified below as “bbaisley”

Stuart Winchester: My guests today lead Greek Peak Mountain Resort in New York. Greek Peak has six chairlifts serving 300 acres on 950 vertical feet.

00:10:14.000 --> 00:10:25.000

Stuart Winchester: Wes Krieger is president of the resort since 2013, and he is a member of the Ski New York Hall of Fame. His family has been part of Greek Peak since the ski area’s 1958 founding.

00:10:25.000 --> 00:10:46.000

Stuart Winchester: Aiden Wilbur has been vice president of mountain operations since 2019 and has worked at Greek Peak since 2013 and making his storm skiing podcast debut as Jarrett Dulamba. He has been Mountain Ops manager for the past five years. Wes and Aiden, welcome back to the storm. Jarrett, welcome to the storm for the first time. Always love catching up with the team at Greek Peak.

00:10:46.000 --> 00:10:48.000

Stuart Winchester: How you guys doing today?

00:10:49.000 --> 00:10:51.000

WKryger: Good, Stuart, how are you?

00:10:51.000 --> 00:10:58.000

Stuart Winchester: Doing real well, thank you. So, Wes, I want to start with your father, Al.

00:10:58.000 --> 00:11:04.000

Stuart Winchester: who passed away last year, and had a tremendous legacy with…

00:11:04.000 --> 00:11:20.000

Stuart Winchester: Greek Peak with New York skiing, uh, with the community, uh, big personality, and we talked about some of his specific contributions when you joined me on the podcast, uh, last year. So, I wanted to give you an opportunity to reflect.

00:11:20.000 --> 00:11:29.000

Stuart Winchester: on Al’s legacy and what he meant to the resort and what he meant to you as we reflect on his passing?

00:11:29.000 --> 00:11:37.000

WKryger: Yeah, I appreciate that. He, you know, he started with Greek Peak in 1958.

00:11:37.000 --> 00:11:54.000

WKryger: you know, he was instrumental in the State of New York with some of the other operators, Dennis Shashbaugh, Danny Fuller, bunch of the guys, Russ Colton from Hunter, and they all started the.

00:11:54.000 --> 00:12:09.000

WKryger: saney ski areas of New York organization to help regulate the the industry, and they were instrumental in getting the Article 18.

00:11:57.000 --> 00:11:58.000

Stuart Winchester: Hmm.

00:12:09.000 --> 00:12:26.000

WKryger: passed, which is, you know, skiers and ski area responsibility code which has been very helpful in the industry and and copied pretty much across the Us. As as a.

00:12:15.000 --> 00:12:17.000

Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.

00:12:26.000 --> 00:12:38.000

WKryger: regulatory guideline for skiers in ski areas. So that that was a huge contribution to the industry. And.

00:12:38.000 --> 00:12:49.000

WKryger: you know, Al always wanted to, um, see the ski area expand, and then he got it into the four-season aspect with.

00:12:49.000 --> 00:13:03.000

WKryger: Building Hope Lake Lodge, an indoor water park in the Adventure Center with the zip lines and mountain coaster. So he definitely was an entrepreneur and.

00:13:03.000 --> 00:13:13.000

WKryger: We always joke about if you told him it couldn’t be done, that was exactly what he would try to do, and he was successful most of the time.

00:13:13.000 --> 00:13:30.000

WKryger: For me, he was a great leader for me, a great dad, taught me a great work ethic. I told this story at his celebration of life. I was going to college.

00:13:30.000 --> 00:13:42.000

WKryger: working at Greek Peak full-time, and I was the night mountain manager here, and, uh, living at home. I got home, uh, he asked me if all the snow guns had been started up.

00:13:42.000 --> 00:13:51.000

WKryger: and I said there were 4 more to go, and he threw my boots and me outside and told me not to come back until the last one was running.

00:13:51.000 --> 00:14:07.000

WKryger: So he definitely instilled the work ethic, you know, in the community, obviously had a great impact at his celebrational life. There were over 400 attendees that came to the resort to.

00:14:07.000 --> 00:14:12.000

WKryger: pay their respects. So I think definitely had a huge impact.

00:14:12.000 --> 00:14:27.000

Stuart Winchester: So, the interesting thing about these multi-generational ski resorts, and in 2013, your family made the decision to sell to John Meyer, a local businessman, and you obviously stayed involved, and if folks want to hear that story, they can listen to the last Greek Peak episode that we recorded.

00:14:27.000 --> 00:14:42.000

Stuart Winchester: Last year, but I’m always curious with these, Wes, as you grew up at the ski area, right, and you evolved from Rugrat running around the slopes to a guy getting thrown out of the house because you’re not doing it right, to the guy leading the resort, I’m curious how your relationship with your father.

00:14:42.000 --> 00:14:46.000

Stuart Winchester: evolved, and… and how he…

00:14:46.000 --> 00:14:56.000

Stuart Winchester: guided you and… and influenced you as you grew in your role at the resort, and… and grew as a man and an adult, and… and someone who…

00:14:56.000 --> 00:15:00.000

Stuart Winchester: You know, he really couldn’t throw around anymore or throw out of the house.

00:15:01.000 --> 00:15:11.000

WKryger: Well, I think …

Who

James Wheeler, co-owner of Toggenburg, New York

Date Recorded

Oct. 19, 2026

About Toggenburg

Owned by: The Wheeler Family

Year founded: 1953, closed since 2021

Base elevation: 1,248 feet

Summit elevation: 1,763 feet

Vertical drop: 515 feet

Skiable acres: 83

Average annual snowfall: 160 inches

Lift count: 3 (1 triple, 2 doubles)

Why I interviewed him

In August 2021, I wrote a post eulogizing Toggenburg, a Central New York ski area that was closing after 68 years:

The cause of death: Peter Harris, longtime owner of the nearby Song and Labrador ski areas, had purchased Toggenburg with the explicit intent of closing it.

“I struggled with the decision,” Harris told me at the time. “After much analysis, it seemed to be a logical decision, and I sincerely think this is better for the Central New York ski scene. I think we’re going to have a better experience, because obviously we’re going to have more resources to invest in the two remaining areas.”

New York State Attorney General Letitia James disagreed. Fourteen months later, her office filed suit against Harris’ company, Intermountain Management, for violating the state’s antitrust laws. As I wrote at the time:

With 14 months to investigate the sale, New York State Attorney General Letitia James has presented a different take. On Friday, she sued Intermountain Management – the umbrella company that owns Labrador and Song – “for buying its main competitor, Toggenburg Mountain, then shutting it down to direct skiers to its own mountains.” This action, James said, created a “complete, unchallenged dominance in the Syracuse area” – a monopoly – for what her office calls “season-pass skiing” around Syracuse, a violation of New York State’s antitrust law, the Donnelly Act. “even if the Toggenburg acquisition and closure did not establish or maintain Intermountain’s monopoly, it harmed, and continues to harm, consumers by eliminating a competitor without any procompetitive justification,” the court summons states.

The state decided in James’ favor in March 2025, but said it needed more time to “decide the appropriate remedy for Intermountain’s anticompetitive conduct.” It took a year and a half to determine that remedy, but last Friday, the AG’s office announced the court-ordered solution: Harris had sold Toggenburg to new owners, who were determined to re-open the facility as a ski area:

New York Attorney General Letitia James today announced that Intermountain Management (Intermountain) has sold Toggenburg Mountain (Toggenburg) to a new owner who plans to rebuild and reopen it for the 2027-28 ski season, restoring competition among Syracuse ski resorts. In October 2022, Attorney General James sued Intermountain for buying its only competitor, Toggenburg, and shutting it down, forcing Syracuse skiers to the two resorts owned by Intermountain. In March 2025, Attorney General James won her case when a judge ruled that Intermountain violated state antitrust law by stifling competition when it shut down Toggenburg and instituted a “no poach” agreement preventing Toggenburg’s owner from hiring any Intermountain employees at his other New York ski resorts. Under a settlement with the Office of the Attorney General (OAG), Intermountain today closed its sale of Toggenburg to Douglas Wheeler, a local business owner who plans to reopen the ski facility.

“Competition among Syracuse ski areas means more choices and better prices and services for New York skiers,” said Attorney General James. “We’re putting an end to Intermountain’s illegal monopoly that allowed it to raise prices and take advantage of skiers. I am thrilled that New Yorkers will once again have access to Toggenburg Mountain, and I will always fight to protect consumers and workers from illegal monopolies that try to profit at their expense.”

So who is Douglas Wheeler? Well, it turns out that, in true New York ski area fashion, Togg will be run family-style. When I spoke to him on Sunday, Wheeler deferred to his son, James Wheeler, as the public face of the mountain. A phone call and a few texts later, and we were set up for this morning’s podcast, where I learned quite a bit about the future of a once-lost ski area.

Transcripts

There are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them.

Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer. Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment.

Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio.

Zoom

Stuart Winchester: My guest today represents the Wheeler family, who last week purchased Toggenberg Ski Area in New York.

00:10:12.000 --> 00:10:21.000

Stuart Winchester: The ski area, which has been closed since 2021, has three chairlifts serving 22 trails, and had been open since the 1950s.

00:10:21.000 --> 00:10:36.000

Stuart Winchester: The Wheelers plan to reopen Toggenberg for the 2027 to 28 ski season. James Wheeler is my guest. James, welcome to the storm. Thank you so much for joining us on such short notice. How does it feel to own a ski area?

00:10:37.000 --> 00:10:55.000

James Wheeler: Stuart, thank you for having me. Uh, it is… it’s, uh, nothing short of a miracle right now. I mean, we’re still, uh, we’re very surprised that this has honestly, uh, gone through. We’re very happy to be where we are right now. Um, and just… the feelings, it hasn’t all set in yet. We’re still very, uh, shocked at some of the things that we’ve discovered.

00:10:55.000 --> 00:11:13.000

James Wheeler: Uh, we’re slowly trying to map out a game plan for which, uh, avenue to tackle first, uh, whether that’s the restaurant end of things, or the actual, the, uh, the mountain end of things, whether that’s snowmaking, or, uh, pumps, or snow cats. We are just getting a game plan and starting to get everything tackled. However.

00:11:13.000 --> 00:11:20.000

James Wheeler: The actual, the feelings of the matter, we’re just overwhelmed with joy and excitement to be able to bring this back to the community.

00:11:20.000 --> 00:11:25.000

Stuart Winchester: Lots to do, and it’s a whirlwind, but a long time building, and your family…

00:11:25.000 --> 00:11:38.000

Stuart Winchester: as I understand it, at least from talking to your father, Doug, yesterday, and yourself, are not skiers. However, you have other attachments to Toggenberg that inspired this. So why did the Wheeler family purchase Toggenberg?

00:11:38.000 --> 00:11:53.000

James Wheeler: Yeah, so I can say I was never much of a skier, and that goes for most of my family. I did a little bit of snowboarding when I was younger, and my sister did some skiing here or there. However, what really roots us to Taugenberg was.

00:11:53.000 --> 00:12:09.000

James Wheeler: My great-great-grandfather, back before Toggenberg was actually a ski resort, he owned the property for agricultural purposes. He raised Toggenberg goats on the property. And that obviously had since gotten sold to the Hickeys, who opened the mountain and ran that successfully for so many years.

00:12:09.000 --> 00:12:29.000

James Wheeler: And, uh, when it got shut down, I’m from Fabius, which is obviously where Taugenberg is, and it just, it really hurt the community. There were…

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is raising money for a brain transplant so that I’ll remember to hit “record” before recording a podcast. Thank you for supporting this amazing cause:

Who

Ben Doornbos, General Manager of Nub’s Nob, Michigan

Date Recorded

October 15, 2026

About Nub’s Nob

Owned by: The Fisher Family

Year founded: 1958

Pass affiliations:

* Indy Pass: 2 days, select blackouts

* Indy+ Pass: 2 days, no blackouts

Base elevation: 923 feet

Summit elevation: 1,350 feet

Vertical drop: 427 feet

Skiable acres: 248

Average annual snowfall: 125 inches

Lift count: 10 (4 fixed-grip quads, 3 triples, 1 double, 1 carpet, 1 ropetow)

Nub’s Nordic map also shows a pretty cool overhead of how all the lifts match up with a topo map:

Why I interviewed him

Nub’s Nob is basically the Jay Peak/Wolf Creek/Mt. Baker/Bridger Bowl/Alta/Jackson Hole/Mount Bohemia/Mad River Glen of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. By that I mean it is a ski area with loyalists so fiercely devoted to the place that if a Random Internet Commenter dares offer an opinion that said ski area is anything other than a snowy Narnia dreamed up by and for Jesus as a reward for having endured human existence on Earth then that Random Internet Commenter shall have unspeakable crimes attributed to their name with such persistence and gruesome detail that the accused while innocent will come to believe themselves guilty and seek out an active caldera in which to hurl themselves. It’s hard to understand until you ski there but hard to not understand once you have. And lest I enrage the Nub’s partisans who will attempt to read into the nuances of this conversation some dastardly plot to tar the name of Nub’s by for example pointing out the true age of Purple chair I will just state unambiguously that The Storm has been a House of Nub’s fan since 1995 even though I spent half my inaugural visit tumbling down Chute like a beachball and am frankly still slightly terrified any time I glance at the trailmap believing subconsciously that it was not a lack of skill as a result of being on my seventh-ever ski day that caused my cyclical pinwheeling but rather an attribute of that trail that uniquely exposed my lack of ability to SnoSportSki and no amount of experience or preparation will save me. And I think this even though I have since skied Chute and all adjacent trails many times without dismembering myself. And no Nub’s Knob I am not dissing Nub’s just myself McBroseph so chill.

Transcripts

There is only one transcript today, which you may or may not be able to view at the top of this article, depending upon your browser and device. This is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment. There is no Zoom transcript today because Zoom didn’t work right. Just kidding there is no Zoom transcript because see the part where my brain isn’t good.

Word.

Who

Dave Rathbun, CEO of Purgatory, Colorado

Check out Dave’s Purgspective mountain blog:

Date Recorded

Oct. 14, 2026

About Purgatory

Owned by: Mountain Capital Partners, which also owns:

Year founded: 1965

Pass affiliations:

* Power Pass: unlimited

* Power Pass Select: 12 shared days with Arizona Snowbowl, Lee Canyon – holiday blackouts apply

* Power Pass Core: 4 shared days with Arizona Snowbowl, Lee Canyon, Brian Head – holiday blackouts apply

Base elevation: 8,750 feet

Summit elevation: 10,822 feet

Vertical drop: 2,072 feet

Skiable acres: 1,635

Average annual snowfall: 261 inches

Lift count: 12 (1 six-pack, 2 high-speed quads, 4 triples, 3 doubles, 2 carpets)

This video gives a pretty sick look down the steep lift line:

And here’s a bit on the Divinity snowmaking expansion:

Why I interviewed him

Purgatory has everything we’re looking for in a modern lift-served ski area attempting to stay relevant in a changing world: an eclectic owner, a multi-mountain pass, wacky lift ticket deals, high-elevation snowmaking, trail expansions, fast lifts, slow lifts, lifts glued together from the discarded parts of other lifts, lifts that predate the invention of the alphabet, private land, public land, places to stay on the mountain, a hip town nearby, and big plans colliding with big bureaucracy. And it’s in Colorado but also sort of not because how do you even get to Southwest Colorado unless you’re driving up from Texas?

Transcripts

There are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them.

Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer. Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment.

Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio.

Zoom

Stuart Winchester: My guest today is the CEO of Purgatory Resort Holdings. Purgatory delivers a 2,072-foot vertical drop over 1,635 skiable acres served by 12 lifts, including a brand new triple chair for winter 2026-27.

00:28:29.000 --> 00:28:38.000

Stuart Winchester: Since 2015, Purgatory has been owned by Mountain Capital Partners, which operates 11 active ski areas in the United States and Chile.

00:28:38.000 --> 00:28:54.000

Stuart Winchester: Prior to his promotion to the CEO role last year, he was Purgatory’s general manager for eight seasons. Prior to joining the team at Purgatory, he was chief marketing officer at Sugar Bowl California for two years and spent eight years as president and general manager of Mount Bachelor Oregon.

00:28:54.000 --> 00:29:03.000

Stuart Winchester: He has also spent time at Killington, Stratton, and IntraWest. Dave Rathbun is my guest. Dave, welcome to the Storm. Did I get your last name right?

00:29:03.000 --> 00:29:09.000

Dave Rathbun: Absolutely, Stuart. I am just thrilled to be here with you today.

00:29:09.000 --> 00:29:21.000

Stuart Winchester: Uh, that’s one of those things I’m always like, okay, ask him about his last name before you introduce him, and then I didn’t, and then I just hope I get it right. So, uh, but just blew my cover there. So, so you have been really busy. Tell us about…

00:29:21.000 --> 00:29:31.000

Stuart Winchester: The Jaland expansion has historically been known, and it’s a really interesting expansion because it’s at once billed as an expert expansion.

00:29:31.000 --> 00:29:37.000

Stuart Winchester: but it’s also kind of for everyone. So take us through this very unique new addition to your mountain this year.

00:29:37.000 --> 00:29:52.000

Dave Rathbun: Yeah, so for those that have been here before, our base area is kind of vertically challenged. We’re in a place where we’re right along US Highway 550 is the literal base of the mountain.

00:29:52.000 --> 00:30:04.000

Dave Rathbun: But there’s about a 200-foot elevation gain to the village right down from the highway, so that… that puts a little extra pressure on forcing people to get up through.

00:29:56.000 --> 00:29:57.000

Stuart Winchester: Mmm.

00:30:04.000 --> 00:30:15.000

Dave Rathbun: what we call our Columbine base area to get to the village. So, as you can imagine, along the highway, it’s nice and flat, that’s where all our parking is.

00:30:15.000 --> 00:30:32.000

Dave Rathbun: And people would park there and have to catch a shuttle bus, or they could walk to the base of the graduate lift, lift 7 on the map you’re showing, and ride that up to the base village, which is where you jump on the six-pack to get you up on the mountain.

00:30:24.000 --> 00:30:25.000

Stuart Winchester: Mm-hmm.

00:30:32.000 --> 00:30:47.000

Dave Rathbun: So what the Galande and now Colorado Cool War chair will do is it’ll give people, especially pass holders that already have a ticket that don’t require any base services like rentals or.

00:30:47.000 --> 00:30:57.000

Dave Rathbun: hey, I need to stop and get tickets, or I need to, you know, get my ski school lesson started. Those pass holders can go park right at the base of the cool bar chair.

00:30:57.000 --> 00:31:10.000

Dave Rathbun: jump on that lift, get up to the top of the mountain where they can access everything on the front side, and get all the way to the backside lifts as well. So it’s gonna be a… it’s gonna be a dual-purpose lift.

00:31:03.000 --> 00:31:04.000

Stuart Winchester: Mm-hmm.

00:31:10.000 --> 00:31:15.000

Dave Rathbun: You know, for the really hardcore extreme skier, this is terrain that, uh…

00:31:15.000 --> 00:31:34.000

Dave Rathbun: is absolutely mind-bending, um, for people that are into that sort of thing. Um, it changes the whole game related to our terrain offering here, to cater to that zealot, that really high-end, uh, free skier rider that really is looking for some steep, gnarly terrain.

00:31:19.000 --> 00:31:21.000

Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.

00:31:34.000 --> 00:31:45.000

Dave Rathbun: But it’s also gonna make it easy for, you know, your general local to avoid the village and get up on the mountain. So it’s gonna deal with both of those objectives.

00:31:45.000 --> 00:31:54.000

Stuart Winchester: So on this trail map that I’m showing, if you’re watching on stormskiing.com or YouTube at Storm Ski Journal, so this yellow line is your.

00:31:54.000 --> 00:32:02.000

Stuart Winchester: current boundary, and then it looks like that’s going to get pushed out, and the lift will come up from around here. Is that about right?

00:32:02.000 --> 00:32:13.000

Dave Rathbun: Yeah, correct. So the map that you’re showing on the left that I’m seeing, that triangle that’s shaded, that was part of a permit boundary adjustment to accommodate.

00:32:02.000 --> 00:32:04.000

Stuart Winchester: And yeah.

00:32:07.000 --> 00:32:09.000

Stuart Winchester: Mm-hmm.

00:32:13.000 --> 00:32:18.000

Dave Rathbun: the lift and also the skiing through the canyon.

00:32:17.000 --> 00:32:18.000

Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.

00:32:18.000 --> 00:32:19.000

Dave Rathbun: So…

00:32:19.000 --> 00:32:34.000

Dave Rathbun: That bounda…

Today is The Storm’s seven-year anniversary. An enormous thank-you to all of my paid subscribers, who have helped transform the newsletter into a full-time job and a sustainable small business. Thank you for supporting independent ski journalism.

Who

Matthew Prince, co-founder, Executive Chairman, and CEO of tech gigantor Cloudflare and owner of the Park Record newspaper.

Date Recorded

Oct. 13, 2026

About Park City Mountain Resort

Owned by: Vail Resorts, which also owns:

Year founded:

* Legacy Park City: 1963, as Treasure Mountain (name until 1966)

* Legacy Canyons: 1968, as Park City West, then Park West from 1975 to ’95, Wolf Mountain from 1995 to ’97, and The Canyons from 1997 until Vail Resorts joined both legacy resorts with the Quicksilver gondola in 2015.

Pass affiliations:

* Epic Pass: unlimited access

* Epic Local Pass: unlimited access with holiday blackouts

* Epic Tahoe Local Pass: up to 5 non-holiday days combined with Vail Mountain, Beaver Creek, Crested Butte, Keystone, Breckenridge

* Epic Day Pass: all-mountain tier only

Base elevation:

* Legacy Park City – bottom of Silver Star triple: 6,892 feet

* Legacy Canyons – bottom of Orange Bubble Express: 6,911 feet

Summit elevation:

* Legacy Park City

o Lift-served – top of Jupiter double: 9,998 feet

o Hike-to – Jupiter Peak: 10,026 feet

* Legacy Canyons – top of Ninety-Nine 90: 9,990 feet

Vertical drop: 3,106 from top to bottom, actual per-run vert will vary depending upon route, but somewhere around 3,000 feet is possible with a lot of work

Skiable acres: 7,300

Average annual snowfall: 355 inches

Lift count: 42 (2 ten-passenger gondolas, 2 eight-passenger gondolas, 1 pulse gondola, 6 six-packs, 10 high-speed quads, 5 fixed-grip quads, 8 triples, 3 doubles, 2 ropetows, 3 carpets)

Why I interviewed him

Check out Park City, circa 1974:

Sure, it’s a painting, not a photograph. But you can see it, right? The idyll. The stenciled historic mine-town street grid. Nothing new but the lifts and the parking lots to feed the freshly cut mountain. No traffic in or out. No hilltop mansions. No Deer Valley. Two thousand residents. Maybe. Vail was just a ski area in Colorado.

Well that’s quaint. Deer Valley opened in 1981. Powdr bought Park City in 1994, American Skiing Company snatched neighboring Park West/Wolf Mountain/Canyons in 1997, and Vail Resorts eventually acquired both and strung them together with a gondola to create the largest ski resort in the United States. In 2017, Alterra bought long-independent Deer Valley and has since more than doubled the resort’s size with an expansion that included 11 new aerial lifts. Park City today:

As Park City filled up, Summit County filled out:

The population exploded with little planning outside of the standard U.S. American Cars-Go-Fast philosophy of road engineering. The tangle of traffic, disconnected structures, and patchwork preservation is a case study in dysfunctional sprawl, in which a community boxed in by its own bad planning resists the density and transit projects that would remedy its worst crowding and affordability problems. Once the toxic narrative takes hold that any development must be bad development, it’s easy enough for a Concerned Citizen to weaponize environmental and zoning regulations to halt – or at least almost indefinitely stall – nearly any project.

I’ve written about all this before. And it’s easy enough to say “sit down Brooklyn if we wanted to live in your big dirty city we’d move there.” But Matthew Prince, born in 1974, grew up in that backwater washed-up Park City and watched it evolve into a center-of-the-world ski town that’s about to co-host its second Olympics. And he’s saying pretty much all the same things.

“We’re strangling this place by just saying ‘nothing can ever change,’” he recently told KPCW’s Mountain Money podcast. “Everyone is here trying to preserve some past that never existed. I was here in the ‘70s – it sucked! … We have to get back to actually trying to build things and making this community better. … [We can] actually build a community that we actually want to live in. … Immediately, you try to do anything unique or original here or you try and invest in the community at all, and the first thing you get is just a series of lawsuits.”

Prince envisions a car-free Main Street and a gondola connection over the peaks to Solitude and Alta (his plan differs different from this 2014 graphic demonstrating how a handful of lifts could connect all six Wasatch resorts):

He also envisions a Park City Mountain Resort under local ownership. Vail, Prince says, can keep the Epic Pass – an independent PCMR may even participate – but he believes the Colorado-based company has under-invested in the ski resort, and he has a half-billion-dollar plan to modernize the whole circus with new lifts and snowmaking infrastructure. He has pledged to reinvest every dollar the ski area earns back into the mountain and the people who work there.

Vail doesn’t want to sell Park City, but as Epic Pass sales continue their sad decline and activist investors nominate new board members and pile up MTN shares, Prince is betting that eventually they’ll have to. Prince, who co-founded tech giant Cloudflare and is worth some number of billions, is waiting with a check.

This could get weird. It wasn’t so long ago that a consolidation-is-inevitable narrative gripped skiing. No one predicted that Park City-based Powdr would sell Killington, the largest and busiest ski area in the East, or, less dramatically, that their smaller neighbor, Pacific Group Resorts, would dispense with Ragged (PGR then almost immediately bought Silverstar, British Columbia from Powdr, which will keep Copper, Snowbird, Woodward, and maybe Bachelor, but is otherwise continuing to downsize). There’s actually plenty of precedent for operator shrinkage, as plenty of multimountain ski area companies have disintegrated (American Skiing Company), or backed away from globe-trotting ambitions (Aspen in the 1980s). But Vail could yet push through, as 11-mountain Boyne Resorts has done for nearly 80 years.

Running a ski area is hard, and most people are bad at it. But if Prince gets his chance, he possesses a rare combination of financial resources and true I-be-from-here status that puts him in an awfully strong position to succeed.

Transcripts

There are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them.

Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer. Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment.

Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio.

Zoom

Stuart Winchester: My guest today is the co-founder, executive chairman, and CEO of CloudFlare, a publicly traded …

The best way to support The Storm’s mission of independent ski journalism is to subscribe to the newsletter, which will deliver future analysis, news, and podcasts directly to your inbox.

Who

Sam Weintraub, Founder and CEO of PeakRankings

Date Recorded

Oct. 5, 2026

About PeakRankings

PeakRankings rates ski areas, plans trips, makes killer YouTube vids, and Instaposts and Facebooks (those are verbs, right?). Like me, they seem to have given up on TwiXXer. Please give them all the follows, but especially check out the trips page:

Why I interviewed him

Sunday evening, PeakRankings published an article headlined “Epic vs. Ikon: Which Pass Should You Buy Before Prices Go Up?” It’s an excellent breakdown of the two biggest ski passes by price, access, and region.

I’ve known Sam for a while. He started PeakRankings around the time that I started The Storm. We both found momentum during Covid when everyone was at home making macaroni replicas of their cats and injecting themselves with bleach. Good times. But everyone was bored enough to pay attention to a couple of ski media startups.

I don’t remember how we connected, but it turned out that Sam lived in the next neighborhood over, and one night we grabbed a few beers and talked skiing and ski media. Sam is younger than I am, and has been far more tuned-in and aggressive in his evolution from ski-ranking site to Insta/YouTube god (102k my dude!), to uniter-of-souls-via-ski-trip in our Age of Loneliness. He’s been generous with his time, insight, and advice, and we (my editor/wife and I), have learned a lot from Sam about deeking the algorithms.

One thing I’m very deliberate about is not over-relying on one source. Everyone in skiing is busy all the time, and over-communication is fatiguing for me, for them, and for listeners and readers. But as soon as I read the pass article, I emailed Sam – who I’d seen several times already over the past few weeks – to see if he could jump on and help us break everything down. He could, and he crushed it.

Resources

Epic Pass prices are set to increase Oct. 7, and Ikon will go up Oct. 8. Those are both probably fake deadlines and you can usually get those same rates for at least a day afterward, but don’t assume that will be so. Anyway, here’s what the major passes cost now:

You can view all the rosters here (scroll right to view). Here’s a nifty chart showing Epic and Ikon price changes over the years:

If you want to view all the Big Dumb Charts I screenshared showing differences in pass partners by size and region, here they are.

All of these charts are on a Big Dumb Google Sheet, otherwise known as The Encyclopedia Bro-Tannica, otherwise known as the U.S. American SnoSportSkiing Masterchart. Yes I know they look like s**t. Yes I know I need to migrate to something better. But what you see as you click through the tabs at the bottom is seven years of data entry fusing into something like an encyclopedia of American skiing. It’s just my worksheet, and I made it public because why the hell not? But like Joel from Open Snow said on my pod years ago, I move very slowly, but I’m always moving forward.

Transcripts

There are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them.

Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer. Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment.

Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio.

Zoom

Stuart Winchester: My guest today is the founder and CEO of PeakRankings. Sam Weintraub is my guest. Sam, welcome to the storm. I know you’re a few blocks away from me, but I don’t have a good in-person setup. How you doing today?

00:49:51.000 --> 00:50:07.000

Sam Weintraub: Good, thanks for having me, Stu. I know, we gotta figure it out, um, we’ll do maybe, like, a round 2 in the… I can just walk right over, um, I think it’s, like, 5 blocks away, it’s just up, um, Metropolitan Avenue, I don’t know if anyone.

00:50:06.000 --> 00:50:07.000

Stuart Winchester: Yah.

00:50:07.000 --> 00:50:08.000

Sam Weintraub: Oh.

00:50:09.000 --> 00:50:13.000

Sam Weintraub: watching or listening to this knows Brooklyn, but…

00:50:12.000 --> 00:50:14.000

Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.

00:50:14.000 --> 00:50:26.000

Stuart Winchester: So, you put on… this was a last-minute thing, and I really appreciate you coming on last minute here, Sam. So, you wrote a great article yesterday. Well, I don’t know who wrote it. PeakRankings released an article yesterday.

00:50:26.000 --> 00:50:32.000

Stuart Winchester: called Epic vs. Icon, which pass should you buy before prices go up? So…

00:50:32.000 --> 00:50:49.000

Stuart Winchester: At a very high level, let’s just talk Epic versus Icon and the price dates and lay those out for everybody and, uh, and what, what your baseline thought is on each pass from an affordability, from an access standpoint.

00:50:51.000 --> 00:50:58.000

Sam Weintraub: Yeah, so, I mean, what’s really interesting is in the 2020s, Epic and Icon have…

00:50:58.000 --> 00:51:04.000

Sam Weintraub: really started to take different market positions. So…

00:51:04.000 --> 00:51:11.000

Sam Weintraub: If you look back at, like, 2019, 2020, they were around the same price.

00:51:11.000 --> 00:51:12.000

Sam Weintraub: But…

00:51:12.000 --> 00:51:19.000

Sam Weintraub: I think both of them were still trying to figure out where they were, because…

00:51:19.000 --> 00:51:33.000

Sam Weintraub: I believe, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, I believe it was 2018, the first year that you could buy both the Epic and the Icon Pass. The Icon Pass used to have a predecessor called the Max Pass, and…

00:51:33.000 --> 00:51:48.000

Sam Weintraub: it wasn’t really, um… I don’t remember the specifics of the Max Pass, but it wasn’t really as comprehensive as the Icon Pass is, in terms of destination offerings especially, um, that the Icon Pass is today.

00:51:48.000 --> 00:52:03.000

Sam Weintraub: And so, I think, long story short, what happened was it became clear that the Icon Pass just had much more of a destination, like, fly-to-destination roster, and that.

00:52:03.000 --> 00:52:07.000

Sam Weintraub: continued to increase over the…

00:52:07.000 --> 00:52:22.000

Sam Weintraub: course of the 2020s, um, you know, the Icon Pass started adding more and more destinations, and it just got to the place where now, if you go almost anywhere, um, with potentially the exception of Colorado.

00:52:22.000 --> 00:52:30.000

Sam Weintraub: Tahoe, and Whistler, um, the Icon Pass is just going to offer more compelling.

00:52:30.000 --> 00:52:48.000

Sam Weintraub: Ski resorts when it comes to things like terrain quality, when it comes to snow quality in a lot of cases, especially in Utah, because you get in on Icon, even if you’re thinking of Park City as its own destination, which it really does deserve to be in a lot of ways because it’s so big.

00:52:48.000 --> 00:52:57.000

Sam Weintraub: uh, it gets, like, half the snow of the Cottonwood Mountains that are just west of it. So, ultimately, what we’ve arrived at, and I think the market.

00:52:53.000 --> 00:52:54.000

Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.

00:52:57.000 --> 00:53:04.000

Sam Weintraub: I think, and I say I think because I know Icon doesn’t release its past numbers, but I believe what has happened is th…

What

Main stage today belongs to Kovach, who agreed to come on the podcast like 90 years ago and waited patiently for his turn. But just as I wrapped this pod, breaking news slammed my inbox: Alterra has selected their next CEO after dismissing Jared Smith in March. From the press release:

Alterra Mountain Company … today announced that experienced hospitality and operations leader Kelly Vohs has been appointed Chief Executive Officer, effective October 19, 2026.

Vohs brings nearly 30 years of experience leading customer-facing, operationally complex businesses across hospitality, real estate, and technology. Previously, Vohs spent more than a decade leading companies within Blackstone’s portfolio, including recently as CEO of LivCor. Most recently, he served as Chief Executive Officer of SafetyCulture, a global frontline operations platform used by more than 85,000 organizations and supporting more than 2.5 million frontline workers.

Earlier in his career, Vohs led operations for BR Guest Hospitality, a New York restaurant group with more than 20 restaurants, and held leadership roles at several iconic hotels, including as General Manager of the Boca Raton Resort & Club and the Waldorf Astoria Chicago, and as opening General Manager of the Conrad Chicago. He also served eight years as a Green Beret with the U.S. Army’s 10th Special Forces Group at Fort Carson, Colorado Springs, completing four combat deployments.

First - I am not sure whether Vohs is any relation to the Wisconsin Vohs, who have done such an excellent job building Cascade Mountain. I’m not sure if he skis or really knows anything about skiing other than that it requires snow and idiots to strap six-foot-long planks to their feet so they can slide down it. But I won’t dismiss him as a viable next leader for Alterra simply because his resume is not some jumble of Whistler-Intrawest-ASC-Sunday-River-Big-Bear. Plenty of individuals without ski industry backgrounds have successfully run U.S. ski areas - Win Smith at Sugarbush is one of the best examples. But I’m not sure if anyone with zero ski industry background has ever run such a large ski company.

I give a bit more perspective in the pod, and I’ve already bothered Alterra for an interview. Stand by.

Who

Evan Kovach, General Manager of Mountain Creek, New Jersey

Date Recorded

October 5, 2026

About Mountain Creek

Owned by: Snow Partners

Year founded: 1965

Pass affiliations:

* Snow Pass – 2 days, no blackouts

* Snow Triple Play – up to 2 days, no blackouts

Pay attention, because these passes have overlapping, but different, rosters:

Base elevation: 448 feet (bottom of South Peak and Bear Peak quads)

* Vernon Peak: 452 feet

* Granite Peak: 605 feet

* South/Bear Peaks: 448 feet

Summit elevation: 1,458 feet (top of Sojourn double)

* Vernon Peak: 1,403 feet

* Granite Peak: 1,453 feet

* South Peak: 1,444 feet

* Bear Peak: 1,126 feet

Vertical drop: 1,010 feet – top of Sojourn lift/Granite Peak to South/Bear base

* Vernon Peak: 951 feet

* Granite Peak: 853 feet

* South Peak: 996 feet

* Bear Peak: 678 feet

Skiable acres: 167

Average annual snowfall: 65 inches

Lift count: 9 (1 cabriolet, 2 high-speed quads, 2 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 1 double, 2 carpets)

Why I interviewed him

I mean:

I’m a bit obsessed with Mountain Creek, and it’s been a secondary subject on many past podcasts:

For reference

In 1998, Intrawest pulled off one of the most audacious single-season ski area transformations in American history, demolishing 15 double chairs and three surface lifts and replacing them with five modern machines. Check the before and after:

Pretty amazing. It’s too bad Intrawest sold the place off in 2010. It stagnated for nearly a decade before onetime parking-lot attendant Joe Hession bought it in 2019. It’s been all rocketships since.

I still, however, pine over this old early-Intrawest masterplan, showing additional trailpods and lifts between South and Granite peaks:

Transcripts

There are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them.

Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer. Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment.

Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio.

Zoom

The Zoom transcript only contains my conversation with Evan Kovach. Please use the other transcript to read/skim my take on Alterra’s new CEO.

Stuart Winchester: My guest today has been General Manager of Mountain Creek, New Jersey since 2020. Mountain Creek spans more than two miles along four peaks served by nine lifts.

00:03:16.000 --> 00:03:36.000

Stuart Winchester: Since 2019, Mountain Creek has been owned by Snow Partners, which also operates the nearby Big Snow American Dream indoor ski area, the beginner-focused train-based learning program, Snow Cloud Resort operating software, and the Snow Pass and Snow Triple Play. He has worked at or around the resort for nearly two decades. Evan Kovac is my guest.

00:03:36.000 --> 00:03:44.000

Stuart Winchester: Evan, welcome at last to the storm. I don’t know if I said your last name right, I’m sorry, but so good to finally track you down. How’s life in Jersey today?

00:03:43.000 --> 00:03:51.000

Evan Kovach: It’s great. Thanks, Stuart. And actually, you did pronounce my last name correctly, which is very rare. So thank you for that. And thanks for having me.

00:03:50.000 --> 00:03:57.000

Stuart Winchester: Look at that. So, I had the general manager of Mount Southington on the pod the other day, and I was calling it Mount Southington.

00:03:57.000 --> 00:04:04.000

Stuart Winchester: So I messed up the whole scary Mountain Creek, I think is an easy one. You know, Evan.

00:04:05.000 --> 00:04:20.000

Stuart Winchester: Folks are hard on Mountain Creek, uh, if they have skied at bigger ski areas, but I think the place is awesome. You know, it’s a thousand vertical feet with, with high speed lifts, an hour and 15 minutes from my house on a weekend morning with no traffic. So, uh, and, and I think.

00:04:21.000 --> 00:04:36.000

Stuart Winchester: You know, part of it’s, uh, and I’ll give you a chance to comment on this, but my perception is people think it’s kind of a wild place, uh, and sometimes dysfunctional, but I think under Snow Partners, they’ve really modernized, and at the core of that.

00:04:36.000 --> 00:04:40.000

Stuart Winchester: is snowmaking. So, what can you tell us about…

00:04:40.000 --> 00:04:47.000

Stuart Winchester: how the snowmaking system has evolved since Snow Partners took over, basically, your tenure from 2020 to now?

00:04:47.000 --> 00:05:02.000

Evan Kovach: Yeah, absolutely. And snowmaking is something I’ve been passionate about since I was about 5 years old. So when I first started skiing, I would download ski resorts trail maps to Microsoft Paint and color in trails that I think they should be snowmaking on.

00:04:52.000 --> 00:04:53.000

Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.

00:04:58.000 --> 00:05:00.000

Stuart Winchester: Mm-hmm.

00:05:01.000 --> 00:05:02.000

Stuart Winchester: Right.

00:05:02.000 --> 00:05:18.000

Evan Kovach: Um, so it’s something I’ve always kind of played with as a kid and now I get to do it, um, as a career. So that’s, that’s a pretty cool thing for me. But obviously, uh, two years ago we invested $5 million in automation, um, with TechnoAlpin. So th…

Who

Dennis Eshbaugh, President and General Manager of Holiday Valley, New York

This is Dennis’ second appearance on The Storm Skiing Podcast:

Date Recorded

Oct. 2, 2026

About Holiday Valley

Owned by: Win-Sum Ski Corp, which Holiday Valley’s website describes as “a closely held corporation owned by a small number of stockholders.”

Year founded: 1957 (opened Jan. 7, 1958)

Pass affiliations: None!

Base elevation: 1,514 feet (bottom of Snowpine Quad)

Summit elevation: 2,324 feet (top of Tannenbaum)

Vertical drop: 736 feet (skiing from the top of Tannenbaum to the bottom of Snowpine would be tricky but not impossible if a skier poached the summit-top walking trails and didn’t mind a little uphill; however, it would not be a great run; the most consistent quality vert would be lapping the Mardi Gras sixer, which is roughly 693 vertical feet.)

Skiable acres: 290 trail acres, but 90 percent-ish of the trees are open enough to ski through (though the trailmap has few marked glades), when there’s sufficient natural snow. Which is often.

Average annual snowfall: 180 inches

Lift count: 13 (1 six-pack, 3 high-speed quads, 7 fixed-grip quads, 2 carpets) – Cindy’s fixed-grip quad chairlift scheduled for replacement with a high-speed quad ahead of winter 2027-28.

Why I interviewed him

We are in the midst of a Great Aerial Lift Reset in the United States. Halfway through this decade, U.S. ski areas have already built nearly the same number of new lifts as they did from 2010-2019:

The last Great Aerial Lift Reset (GALR) came in the 1980s and ‘90s, when ski areas of means discarded not-terribly-old-fixed-grip-lifts and replaced them with detachables.

The difference between GALR 1900s and GALR 2020s is that, in the previous era, most large ski areas were willing to sell their discarded lifts to small ski areas. Today, many hesitate. Holiday Valley does not hesitate. Since the 1990s, the busiest, most aggressively modern ski area in New York State has sold eight chairlifts to seven ski areas in six states. An eighth floated south until it ended up, improbably, in the Andes Mountains of Chile:

Why does Holiday Valley do this? Operators who prefer to sell off the carriers as firepit accessories and scrap the rest often vaguely wave toward liability concerns. But I’m unaware of any injury lawsuit involving a relocated chairlift that blames the seller. Another common argument for scrapping older lifts is that detachable technologies are improving so rapidly that earlier generations of high-speed machines are too outmoded to bother moving. This is certainly true of most lifts built in the 1980s, but 1990s models have proven more durable – Boyne has relocated four within its system, and Holiday Valley’s 1996 Garaventa-CTEC detachable quad is now Corralco’s El Volcan Express.

So when Holiday Valley announced recently that their next lift replacement would be a 2027 detachable quad to replace the 35-year-old Cindy’s fixed-grip quad, the question was not whether they would sell it, but to whom (Holiday Valley also occasionally moves lifts internally).

And when Vail Resorts announced earlier this week that Park City would replace three 1990s chairlifts with two new machines, I thought it was fair to pressure the company to either re-use the lifts or offer them for sale. The three lifts in question are highlighted below. While they’re among the oldest machines on the mountain, they’re not old by U.S. chairlift standards.

I’ve held off reaching out to Vail for comment, as I anticipate seeing reps from Park City at the annual Ski Utah media event next week in New York. Vail knows how to move lifts – Hunter moved the Broadway fixed quad over to the Hunter East beginner zone two years ago, and moved a then-19-year-old bubble detach quad across Okemo in 2021. The last aerial lift relocation from a Vail-owned mountain that I’m aware of is Heavenly’s Powderbowl Yan triple, retired in 2004 and moved to independent (and then-private) Echo Mountain, Colorado in 2005.

If Vail decides to repurpose these Park City lifts elsewhere in their portfolio, fine. But if I see one more social media post humble-bragging about a $50,000 chair-sales donation from a lift worth 10 or 20 times that number, I think it’s fair to question whether the world’s largest ski company is putting its resources and scale to the highest and best use.

Transcripts

There are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them.

Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer. Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment.

Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio.

Zoom

Stuart Winchester: My guest today has been president of Holiday Valley New York since 1995, and general manager since 1989.

00:05:22.000 --> 00:05:37.000

Stuart Winchester: With 13 lifts serving nearly 300 acres of terrain on 750 vertical feet. Holiday Valley is one of the largest and busiest ski areas in New York State. It is also one of the snowiest, averaging 180 inches of lake effect snowfall.

00:05:37.000 --> 00:05:47.000

Stuart Winchester: per winter. He is also, like me, a proud brown dad. Dennis Eshbaugh joins me. Dennis, welcome back to the storm. How you doing today?

00:05:46.000 --> 00:05:54.000

Dennis Eshbaugh: I’m doing great. Good morning, Stuart, and thanks for the introduction, and uh… yes, and congratulations on your daughter at Brown, that’s outstanding.

00:05:54.000 --> 00:06:06.000

Stuart Winchester: Yeah, she seems to be loving it there. She’s in her fourth or fifth week, and uh… just, what a cool town. I’d never been up there, and I just expected Providence to be another city, but it’s very leafy and fun and collegey.

00:06:06.000 --> 00:06:15.000

Dennis Eshbaugh: I had the same experience in our first visit. I’d never been to Providence before Kate went there, and yeah, it’s a great, great town, and a great place for a great school.

00:06:08.000 --> 00:06:09.000

Stuart Winchester: Yeah.

00:06:14.000 --> 00:06:18.000

Stuart Winchester: Yeah, and I didn’t realize this, but Brown is older than America.

00:06:18.000 --> 00:06:25.000

Stuart Winchester: So, it’s one of the… one of the few universities, yeah. All right, Dennis, we’re coming off a pretty…

00:06:19.000 --> 00:06:21.000

Dennis Eshbaugh: Yeah, hard to fathom, isn’t it?

00:06:25.000 --> 00:06:38.000

Stuart Winchester: crummy winter in parts of the country, but it was pretty good in New York, and I… I didn’t ski Holiday Valley last year, but I did get out to Hollomont Buffalo Ski Center, had really good turns there. How was last winter for Holiday Valley?

00:06:38.000 --> 00:06:54.000

Dennis Eshbaugh: Well, the first thing I want to make an observation on is Jane pointed out that you were here in Western New York and di…

Who

Jay Dougherty, President and General Manager of Mount Southington, Connecticut

Date Recorded

Oct. 2, 2026

About Mount Southington

Owned by: Multiple shareholders descended from the ski area’s founders

Year founded: 1964

Pass affiliations:

* Snow Pass – 2 days, no blackouts

* Snow Triple Play – up to 2 days, no blackouts

These two passes have a lot of overlap, but completely different rosters:

Base elevation: 210 feet

Summit elevation: 571 feet

Vertical drop: 361 feet

Skiable acres: 51 acres

Average annual snowfall: 40 inches

Lift count: 8 (1 triple, 3 doubles, 4 carpets) – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Mount Southington’s lift fleet

Why I interviewed him

A lot of ski areas are beautiful because they’re set within nature’s masterpieces. Mount Southington is beautiful because it’s not:

How cool is that? A ski area in the middle of a neighborhood. A neighborhood that most of us could probably afford to live in. Kids grow up across the street. If it snows enough, they can probably ski from their front door to the lifts.

Good thing the ski hill is already there. We rarely build cool things next to where we actually live anymore. But it’s hard to get rid of a ski area once it’s built, unless it fails. Southington [Suh-thing-ton] is not going anywhere. Three of the bump’s chairlifts are under 20 years old (two are younger than five), and a replacement for the fourth - Stardust - starts, well, any second now (a new top terminal is sitting in the parking lot).

A few dozen neighborhood ski areas like this still exist across America, mostly east of the Mississippi. Sometimes the neighbors hate them, especially during all-night snowmaking season. But very few people living in a house near a ski area today would have been surprised to find themselves living near a ski area, since the facility would have in most cases preceded them. Maybe a few even moved in to be close to skiing. It’s cool to imagine being one of them, waking up to morning turns three months per year. How cool - like having a lake house on a kinda small lake. It’s not Aspen, but most of us aren’t billionaires, and it’s nice to think that, in a few far-flung corners of America, there’s a backdoor to that sort of life that no one’s really checking.

Additional resources

* New England Ski History details Mount Southington’s early days.

* A bit more on Southington’s Northstar lift, received second-hand from Craigmeur, New Jersey, migrating for its third life as Lost Valley, Maine’s Chair 3.

* Somehow all my Mount Southington photos have vanished into the digital void, but Instapost preserves this shot of a really awesome sunset from my 2021 visit. Top of the Stardust chair:

Transcripts

There are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them.

Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer. Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment.

Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio.

Zoom

Stuart Winchester: My guest today has been president and general manager of Mount Southington, Connecticut since 2014.

00:03:20.000 --> 00:03:37.000

Stuart Winchester: Established in 1964, Mount Southington offers 51 acres of skiable terrain served by four chairlifts and several surface lifts. Jay Doherty is my guest. Jay, welcome to the storm. You are the first Connecticut representative to ever be on the podcast, not.

00:03:34.000 --> 00:03:36.000

Jay Dougherty: Okay.

00:03:37.000 --> 00:03:42.000

Stuart Winchester: for any reason other than I haven’t been able to figure out who to talk to, so thank you very much for coming on today.

00:03:41.000 --> 00:03:45.000

Jay Dougherty: Oh, absolutely. I’m excited to be here. Excited to join you.

00:03:44.000 --> 00:04:01.000

Stuart Winchester: And you’re a true Connecticut guy. We were chatting a little bit, and you said that Southington, and I don’t know if I’m even pronouncing that right, is in — OK, there we go. There we go. All right, see, this is why I need to get you on the pod, because otherwise I mess up simple things.

00:03:52.000 --> 00:03:56.000

Jay Dougherty: It’s Southern Vin. Yeah, there you go. It’s all good.

00:03:57.000 --> 00:03:59.000

Jay Dougherty: Yeah, exactly.

00:04:01.000 --> 00:04:06.000

Stuart Winchester: From right down the street, he said, tell us about Southington and what it means to you. Southington.

00:04:04.000 --> 00:04:25.000

Jay Dougherty: Yeah, so I’m one of those fortunate few to get, have the opportunity to run the actual ski area that I grew up at. You know, I’ve had a season’s pass here since I was probably seven, eight years old. You know, and then I worked, this was my first job was in the rental department here. So it means a lot to me and about something that’s got a great community connection.

00:04:16.000 --> 00:04:17.000

Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.

00:04:25.000 --> 00:04:26.000

Jay Dougherty: Oh.

00:04:26.000 --> 00:04:37.000

Stuart Winchester: And did you… I noted that you’ve been general manager since 2014. That’s as far back as I could find your history online. Did you work there as a lifty in high school or anything? Was it your first job?

00:04:37.000 --> 00:04:52.000

Jay Dougherty: I did, yeah, so it was my first job, I worked in the rental department as a technician, um, and then I was going to college for elementary ed, um, didn’t really know what I wanted to do, and my parents were like, well, I gotta do something. So I’m like, yeah, alright, you know, there’s a shortage of.

00:04:45.000 --> 00:04:46.000

Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.

00:04:52.000 --> 00:05:09.000

Jay Dougherty: male, young elementary school teacher. So I’m like, that sounds like a great opportunity. But I was working here and got offered a year-round position painting lifts. And I fell in love with it at that point. And then I found a college program that was just starting out with Green Mountain College in connection with Killington.

00:05:00.000 --> 00:05:01.000

Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.

00:05:09.000 --> 00:05:19.000

Jay Dougherty: Uh, and I ended up going there, and, you know, I graduated 2004, uh, worked for Killington for a very short while, and then came back here as Assistant Mountain Manager.

00:05:14.000 --> 00:05:15.000

Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.

00:05:19.000 --> 00:05:34.000

Stuart Winchester: So talk to us a little bit about who owns Mount Southington. There’s a really good, you know, New England Ski History, this site does a great job with the origin stories and there’s a little bit on your site about the doctor and his wife, Dr. Harold Richmond and his wife who started it.

00:05:26.000 --> 00:05:27.000

Jay Dougherty: Yeah.

00:05:33.000 --> 00:05:34.000

Jay Dougherty: Oh.

00:05:34.000 --> 00:05:38.000

Stuart Winchester: I’m not sure who owns it now, but who do you report to?

00:05:38.000 --> 00:05:48.000

Jay Dougherty: Uh, this is the best story, because it’s actually the kin of all the original owners. So all of their kids own it, and now we’re starting to see actual, like, fourth generation, like…

00:05:40.000 --> 00:05:41.000

Stuart Winchester: Yeah.

00:05:43.000 --> 00:05:45.000

Stuart Winchester: Oh, really? Oh, cool.

00:05:47.000 --> 00:05:48.000

Stuart Winchester: Oh, wow.

00:05:48.000 --> 00:06:…

Who

Doug Fish, founder of the Snowvana ski show and Indy Pass

Date Recorded

Sept. 30, 2026

About Snowvana

Snowvana is a “winter kick-off festival” (a ski show) scheduled for a four-city 2026 tour:

Use the code “thestorm26” to snatch a free ticket here for any 2026 Snowvana show.

Check out the list of free and discounted lift tickets available onsite at each show.

Why I interviewed him

If we trust the metonymic origin story of our surnames, then Doug Fish is a descendant of “a catcher or seller of fish,” probably sometime before the invention of the printing press. I cannot think of anything that I understand less than fishing. Specifically, how a person can be good at it. My experience with fishing is that you cast a line in the water and nothing happens while you get drunk. But my buddy’s brother could go out on Sanford Lake in a rowboat and return an hour later surrounded by like 50 fish. Every damn time. And I was always just astonished like whatever inherent traits you need to be good at fishing that dude has them.

I don’t know if Doug Fish is good at fishing, or if he even likes it. I do know that he’s good at skiing, and that he likes it. And whatever fishing ability he may or may not have inherited from Alabaster Fish of the 12th Century, he certainly possesses some of the traits of great fishermen: patience, instinct, and the ability to do hard things that no one else can figure out.

Organizing and launching the Indy Pass is probably one of the great achievements of modern skiing, in that it proved that any ski area - and therefore nearly any skier - could join the multimountain pass club. While Indy wasn’t a novel or new concept, Fish was able to achieve the heretofore impossible task of organizing far-flung ski areas into a coalition with patience, persistence, and a low-key, no-pressure approach devoid of Big Ski’s ego.

Once Fish sold Indy Pass, he tried something even harder: replicating the success of his Portland ski show across the country. To me, that sounds even more impossible than fishing, and does not include the benefit of a cooler MGDs on the boat floor. But whatever is inside of Fish that made the Indy Pass work, it’s making the recently faded ski show work too.

I’ve attended Snowvana in Portland and Milwaukee, each time as a paid speaker. I’m scheduled to host live conversations with Indy Pass/Entabeni/Black Mountain owner Erik Mogensen (Friday, Nov. 6) and Killington owner Phill Gross and president Mike Solimano (Saturday, Nov. 7), at this year’s New England show. I don’t endorse Snowvana over any competing shows, but I do think ski shows in general offer a fun atmosphere, and a cool way to participate in skiing when you can’t actually go skiing.

Background

Fish has appeared on The Storm Skiing Podcast four times, each time solely as a representative of the Indy Pass:

Transcripts

There are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them.

Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer. Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment.

Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio.

Zoom

Stuart Winchester: My guest today is the founder of the Snowvana Winter Kickoff Festival and also founder of the Indie Pass. Now in its 10th year, Snowvana gathers skiers, ski area operators, and retailers in Portland, Oregon.

00:16:42.000 --> 00:16:46.000

Stuart Winchester: Seattle, New England, and Wisconsin.

00:16:46.000 --> 00:17:03.000

Stuart Winchester: The Indy Pass, which Fish founded in 2019 and sold in 2023, but is still involved in, delivers skiers two days each at more than 300 ski areas around the world for winter 2026 to 27. He is making his fifth appearance on the Storm Skiing Podcast. He is Doug Fish. Doug, welcome back.

00:17:03.000 --> 00:17:06.000

Stuart Winchester: How’s it been? Been way too long.

00:17:06.000 --> 00:17:10.000

Doug Fish: It has to. I know. I miss you.

00:17:09.000 --> 00:17:21.000

Stuart Winchester: I know. Well, it’s been way too long on the pod, and I was just talking before this, in my little intro, before you joined, that this is one of the reasons I wanted to do a different format pod, because.

00:17:21.000 --> 00:17:24.000

Stuart Winchester: I talk or text you all the time.

00:17:23.000 --> 00:17:25.000

Doug Fish: Yeah, yeah, no worries.

00:17:24.000 --> 00:17:39.000

Stuart Winchester: And I haven’t had you on the pod in 3 years. So, there’s no reason for that, because we love hearing from you, and your episodes always do really well. And we will be working together here a little bit on one of these Snovana appearances in a bit. We’ll get to that.

00:17:39.000 --> 00:17:42.000

Stuart Winchester: First, though, I do want to pick up…

00:17:39.000 --> 00:17:40.000

Doug Fish: Yeah.

00:17:42.000 --> 00:17:47.000

Stuart Winchester: where we left off in that pod three years ago. You had just sold IndiePass to Eric Mogensen.

00:17:45.000 --> 00:17:47.000

Doug Fish: Mm-hmm.

00:17:47.000 --> 00:17:48.000

Doug Fish: Get it.

00:17:47.000 --> 00:17:56.000

Stuart Winchester: Uh, who has gone on to since, also by Black Mountain, and runs a technology company. He was on the podcast recently, and has been a couple times. Just…

00:17:55.000 --> 00:17:56.000

Doug Fish: Yep.

00:17:57.000 --> 00:18:04.000

Stuart Winchester: First of all, tell us how you’re still involved, and give as candid of an assessment as you can of.

00:18:01.000 --> 00:18:02.000

Doug Fish: Mm-hmm.

00:18:04.000 --> 00:18:10.000

Stuart Winchester: where the Indy Pass is once you… once you let that baby go.

00:18:09.000 --> 00:18:11.000

Doug Fish: Yeah.

00:18:11.000 --> 00:18:22.000

Doug Fish: Well, it was a little difficult to let the baby go, but I felt at the time that it would be in good hands, and I’m happy to report that it is in good hands.

00:18:14.000 --> 00:18:15.000

Stuart Winchester: No.

00:18:22.000 --> 00:18:27.000

Doug Fish: Um, you know, my country… my employment agreement ran out.

00:18:27.000 --> 00:18:29.000

Doug Fish: Almost two years ago.

00:18:29.000 --> 00:18:35.000

Doug Fish: And I’m still involved, you know. Eric and I extended it, and we keep extending it, and…

00:18:35.000 --> 00:18:45.000

Doug Fish: I believe in in what he’s doing. I certainly believe in the past. I think that Eric has done a great job of.

00:18:45.000 --> 00:18:50.000

Doug Fish: Staying true to the mission and the brand promise of IndyPass.

00:18:50.000 --> 00:19:00.000

Doug Fish: And, um, you know, as long as that continues, I will… I will be involved in some capacity. I’m kind of the Colonel Sanders of the IndyPass now.

00:19:00.000 --> 00:19:08.000

Doug Fish: I and you know I get to be a little a bit of an ambassador. I go to some of the trade shows.

00:19:08.000 --> 00:19:10.000

Doug Fish: I ski with people.

00:19:10.000 --> 00:19:14.000

Doug Fish: It’s… it’s a pretty good gig, you know.

00:19:13.000 --> 00:19:15.000

Stuart Winchester: When you said Colonel Sanders, I mean, are you…

00:19:15.000 --> 00:19:19.000

Stuart Winchester: What I thought you were doing is still…

00:19:19.000 --> 00:19:23.000

Stuart Winchester: Recruiting new partners? Is that not the case?

00:19:21.000 --> 00:19:37.000

Doug Fish: Yeah, I’ve been. That’s what I’ve been primarily focused on recruiting and maintaining relationships, yo…

It would not be difficult to locate a photo of The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast drinking canned Miller Lite shirtless in a lake while wearing a backward baseball cap. There is therefore nothing I can say here that can hurt anyone more than I’ve already hurt myself.

Vail Resorts reported fourth-quarter and end-of-fiscal-2026 earnings yesterday. I’m no financial analyst, but the numbers are what I would call “not good”:

[Epic] Pass product unit sales through September 18, 2026 for the upcoming 2026/2027 North American ski season decreased approximately 12%, days sold decreased approximately 10% and sales dollars, inclusive of sales and admissions taxes, decreased approximately 6%, as compared to the prior year period through September 19, 2025.

Which, whatever - the only Epic Pass numbers that really matter are the ones that Vail Resorts reports in December, after the product goes off sale. Up until two years ago, annual sales ranged from “all right” to “pretty good” to “damn-I-guess-making-a-season-pass-cheaper-than-a-frozen-burrito-moves-passes.” Unit sales - meaning the number of Epic Pass “products” (we include Epic Day) sold - increased every year from the pass’ introduction in 2008-09 until 2024-25. Even then, unit sales only declined by two percent:

Notably, Epic Pass sales dollars (right-hand column above), have never declined year-over-year. That could change this year.

Vail executives seemed oddly fatalistic about declining Epic Pass numbers. CEO Rob Katz noted, during yesterday’s earnings call, that destination guests’ hesitation to buy (mostly, he implied) Epic Day Passes after last year’s crummy winter was an opportunity for Vail to “lean in to be more competitive on lift ticket pricing.”

It’s all very disconcerting: after working for years to diminish the lift ticket as an Idiot Tax product-of-last-resort-that-will-either-force-you-to-buy-an-Epik-Pass-or-give-up-skiing-forever, Vail is betting on discounted lift tickets that sit well above peak rates from a decade ago to prop up financials as pass sales level off to yeah-2-million-passes-is-all-42-ski-areas-can-realistically-handle-anyway-Brah levels. Weird. Wonder what this guy thinks?

McBrosephs I have takes. Just remember that when I go in on the Bros, it’s more self-reflective diary than attack on American culture. Though it’s also that. And when I go in on Vail, it’s acknowledging the good things they’ve done to democratize the season pass even as the company destroyed a perfectly good product that it now wants to summon as a savior.

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast will adopt one hamster for every new paid subscriber. Just kidding hamsters are weird I once watched one give birth and systematically devour her offspring. No thanks dude I’ll take the rats that live under my porch. What’s good, Fat Boy? Anyway if you like skiing subscribe to my newsletter because I like it too:

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast wants you to know that there is skiing in New Mexico. Even beyond Taos. Subscribe for constant journeys into such improbable ski realms:

Who

Jasen Bellomy, General Manager of Pajarito, New Mexico

Date Recorded

September 28, 2026

Also discussed

Upgrades across Mountain Capital Partners’ portfolio (see chart below), and reader reaction to last week’s pods - especially the EuroSki ep with Iain Martin.

About Pajarito

Owned by: Mountain Capital Partners, since 2014; company also owns:

Year founded: 1957 - predecessor ski area, Sawyers Hill, founded nearby by the same ski club in 1944

Pass affiliations: Power Pass, Power Pass Select, Power Pass Core - unlimited

Base elevation: 9,000 feet

Summit elevation: 10,440 feet

Vertical drop: 1,440 feet

Skiable acres: 280 trail acres + unspecified glade acreage (though Bellomy urges caution in the glades)

Average annual snowfall: 125 inches

Lift count: 6 (1 fixed quad, 1 triple, 3 doubles, 1 carpet) - view Lift Blog’s inventory of Pajarito’s lift fleet.

Why I interviewed him

“Ski New Mexico,” you say?

Those three words underwhelm, but the stat sheet suggests that skiers miss out by dismissing New Mexico:

Those are respectable vertical drops, and some nice acreage with modernizing lift fleets. Taos gets all the Ikon/Mountain Collective destination attention, and deserves it, after building seven new aerial lifts and otherwise sweeping the place clean over the past dozen years. But just about every New Mexico ski area is investing: Angel Fire props up the state’s first sixer for winter 2026-27, just a year after dropping a second quad, Rake’s Rider, onto its east side to spread skiers out between blues and blacks:

Ski Santa Fe, Ski Apache, and Red River have collectively built or relocated another five lifts in the past decade. Tiny, super-south Cloudcroft seems like a mess, with little online presence and minimal operations (the bump lacks snowmaking). But overall, New Mexico is a bit of a big-mountain secret, with dry desert snow when it comes.

The key to this improbable kingdom is base elevations among the highest in America:

It’s not quite Colorado, but they’re high:

And it’s high enough to get us to nine active New Mexico ski areas in 2026, which is probably nine more than most people think the state has. But even cloud addresses are not enough to keep these survivors around forever. They need snowmaking. Taos’ system - a big part of the mountain’s modernization under billionaire Louis Bacon, who bought the ski area in 2013 - runs to nearly 11,000 feet. But the smaller areas are building more firepower too. MCP, which operates one-third of those ski areas, stapled together a nice system at Sipapu, the company’s first acquisition, in 2000. Now, after years of negotiations, MCP is working with state and Los Alamos County officials on an $18 million snowmaking modernization plan for Pajarito:

A five-mile pipe will shuttle water approximately 2,000 vertical feet up from Los Alamos to Pajarito’s summit reservoir. But this is not just a snowmaking project: firefighters will be able to tap hydrants along the five-mile route or dip the 10-million gallon reservoir with helicopters.

The impact, MCP officials believe, will be substantial, and could mirror the turnaround of the company’s Arizona Snowbowl ski area. Prior to running a 15-mile-long snowmaking pipe 3,000 feet up from Flagstaff, Snowbowl’s seasons swung wildly, from 162,000 visits in winter 2000-01 to just four operating days the following season. Now, Snowbowl is consistently one of the last ski areas in the nation to close, with a 185-day 2024-25 season that ended on June 1. Repeating that success at Pajarito would, according to officials, give skiers seasons up to 140 days long - more than double the ski area’s traditional 60-day winter.

So yeah, ski New Mexico, Man. It’s weird, I know. Down there in the desert. But there’s water if you get creative and work together. (Now we just need to see if MCP can repeat some version of this deal at snow-starved Sandia Peak.)

Additional reading

* A Ski profile of Pajarito by Nick Heil, 2016

* Pajarito’s blog tracking the snowmaking project

Transcripts

There are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them.

Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer. Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment.

Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio. I only included my conversation with Jasen in this transcript - you can read my editorial on MCP or my reaction to reader’s comments in the other transcript, but frankly I’d either listen to them or skip those sections.

Zoom

Stuart Winchester: My guest today has been the general manager of Powerito New Mexico since 2023.

00:35:14.000 --> 00:35:26.000

Stuart Winchester: Bajarito’s predecessor ski area, Sawyers Hill, was founded by top American scientists and soldiers working on top secret research, including the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos during World War II.

00:35:26.000 --> 00:35:46.000

Stuart Winchester: In 1957, the Los Alamos Ski Club moved the facility up to Pareto, where today, 5 chairlifts serve 1,440 vertical feet on 280 skiable trail acres, plus glades. Pareto is one of 13 ski areas operated by Durango, Colorado-based Mountain Capital Partners.

00:35:46.000 --> 00:35:52.000

Stuart Winchester: and one of three that the company operates in New Mexico, including Sipapu and Sandia Peak.

00:35:52.000 --> 00:36:09.000

Stuart Winchester: Prior to joining the team at Power Reno, he worked at Saddleback, Maine, Sugarbush, Vermont, Pratchett, New Hampshire, and all the way back at the start of his career as a lifty at Waterville Valley, New Hampshire. He served a tour in the Marine Corps and spent several years working in air traffic management technologies.

00:36:09.000 --> 00:36:16.000

Stuart Winchester: Jason Bellamy is my guest. Jason, welcome to The Storm. So good to have you. How is life in the mountains of New Mexico today?

00:36:16.000 --> 00:36:24.000

Jasen: Oh, man, thanks for having me. Super excited. Uh, busy. And wet, currently.

00:36:23.000 --> 00:36:38.000

Stuart Winchester: Oh, yeah, yeah, it’s… I’m out on the East Coast, it’s been raining all weekend, so… so I… look, I know you got a ton going on, so let’s jump right into it. The headline, if you go to Powerito’s website right now, which, by the way, if I’m saying the name of the scary wrong, you.

00:36:38.000 --> 00:36:48.000

Stuart Winchester: 2700% more water for snowmaking, so lay this out for us, Jason. What did Powerito’s snowmaking system look like before, and what are you…

00:36:48.000 --> 00:36:50.000

Stuart Winchester: Building up.

00:36:51.000 --> 00:36:57.000

Jasen: So, historically, it was about 2010 that we were able to.

00:36:57.000 --> 00:37:04.000

Jasen: while it was still operated by the Los Alamos Ski Club, they put in a very bare-bones snowmaking system.

00:37:04.000 --> 00:37:10.000

Jasen: and captured surface runoff in the springtime to fill a 10 million gallon pond at the top of the mountain.

00:37:10.000 --> 00:37:11.000

Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.

00:37:11.000 --> 00:37:17.000

Jasen: The run…

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast thinks that yelling “PIZZA!” and “FRENCH FRY!” at a 2-year-old superman straightlining down a green slope is a highly effective ski instruction technique. If you agree, please sign up for my newsletter:

Who

Brian Bensch, founder of Snow Schoolers

Date recorded

September 24, 2026

About Snow Schoolers

Snow Schoolers, per its website, is an “independent ski school program” that teaches lessons “at any mountain where we’ve established a revenue-sharing partnership with the ski area.” Skiers sign up for lessons on their Pet Rectangles, like this:

Why I interviewed him

That sounds pretty neat, right? Let me go see if Snow Schoolers teaches at my favorite mountain. Snow Schoolers probably does not teach at your favorite mountain. Unless your favorite mountain is 222-vertical-foot Granlibakken, which is about five feet away from 6,000-acre Palisades Tahoe, or 100 vertical-foot Frisco Adventure Park, tucked off highway 9, after 1.5 million-ish skiers exit I-70 on their way to nearby Breckenridge.

That is not an indictment of small ski areas, which I love, or Snow Schoolers’ business model, which I also love. Rather, it’s my way of saying that the only way to sign up for ski school at Palisades Tahoe or Breckenridge is through Palisades Tahoe or Breckenridge. With the strange, grandfathered-in exception of the strange, cobbled-together ski bazaar that is Summit at Snoqualmie in Washington, all major American ski areas (so far as I know) operate with a monopoly over ski school operations on their property. In ways subtle and aggressive, they police and ban rogue instructors who would offer discounted lessons on resort property.

There are probably ways to break this system, either through the courts or legislative amendment of the Forest Service leases that 125 U.S. ski areas operate on. Such change sounds radical only in an American context - most European ski areas already operate with multiple independent competing ski schools onsite.

Over the past 20 years, technology has challenged monopolies across American commerce. Sports and concert tickets and taxi rides offer two prime examples of power shifting from one central operator to many operators, with benefits and drawbacks for the consumer.

Perhaps we will get there with ski school. For now, I see a more practical path for an asset-light, app-based, independent ski school like Snow Schoolers - as the costs of labor, utilities, infrastructure, and insurance pile up, perhaps outsourcing the operation of a ski school is more practical for many smaller, independent ski areas than establishing and maintaining one of their own. That is what you get at Granlibakken and Frisco: Snow Schoolers pays the ski areas a share of each lesson, essentially as rent for the right to operate a ski school on their property. And Granlibakken and Friso don’t have to worry about hiring instructors and organizing lessons. There are probably 100 under-resourced ski areas in America where this model could work tomorrow. Brian and I discuss why Snow Schoolers works where it does, and why the model has been slow to spread.

Transcripts

There are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them.

Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer. Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment.

Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio.

Zoom

Stuart Winchester: My guest today founded Snowschoolers in 2014 with the mission to make skiing and riding affordable and accessible for average Americans.

00:16:06.000 --> 00:16:11.000

Stuart Winchester: and to pay snow sports pros a sustainable living wage.

00:16:11.000 --> 00:16:19.000

Stuart Winchester: Today, Snowschoolers operates at Grand Lebakken in Lake Tahoe, and Frisco Adventure Park in Colorado, two small ski areas.

00:16:19.000 --> 00:16:36.000

Stuart Winchester: Last year, Snow Schoolers hosted approximately 6,000 students. He is a good friend of the Storm. He is Brian Bench. Brian, welcome to the Storm. You reached out to me very shortly after I launched in 2019 or 20, and we’ve been talking for years, and you’ve helped me out a lot.

00:16:36.000 --> 00:16:38.000

Stuart Winchester: With the…

00:16:38.000 --> 00:16:45.000

Stuart Winchester: digital side of things, which I’m not so good at, so it’s awesome to finally get you on and talk some snow schoolers. How you doing today?

00:16:44.000 --> 00:16:48.000

Brian Bensch: Doing lovely. Can’t complain. Always busy, never bored.

00:16:46.000 --> 00:16:52.000

Stuart Winchester: And that is… yeah, that is a picture out your window of Tahoe, right?

00:16:51.000 --> 00:17:00.000

Brian Bensch: Yes, that is a, it’s called Maggie’s Peak, but that’s looking at the little lake just next to Emerald Bay.

00:16:55.000 --> 00:16:57.000

Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.

00:17:00.000 --> 00:17:05.000

Stuart Winchester: Okay, which would be sort of north side of the lake, so you’d be looking…

00:17:02.000 --> 00:17:03.000

Brian Bensch: Oh.

00:17:03.000 --> 00:17:08.000

Brian Bensch: South Tahoe, kind of on the other side of the corner, like, across from Heavenly.

00:17:08.000 --> 00:17:18.000

Stuart Winchester: Oh, south, right? I was… I was backwards. So… so on the… up the left side, there would be Homewood, and then up the right side would be Heavenly and Diamond Peak, and at the top is, like.

00:17:09.000 --> 00:17:10.000

Brian Bensch: Yeah.

00:17:13.000 --> 00:17:15.000

Brian Bensch: Correct.

00:17:18.000 --> 00:17:19.000

Brian Bensch: Mostly correct.

00:17:18.000 --> 00:17:26.000

Stuart Winchester: Or North Star? North Star, Northwood. Okay, alright, uh, before I hurt myself, let’s just get into this. So, so Brian.

00:17:24.000 --> 00:17:28.000

Brian Bensch: Well, we’ll get you out to Tahoe soon enough, and then your Tahoe geography will get.

00:17:26.000 --> 00:17:31.000

Stuart Winchester: It’s been a minute. So…

00:17:32.000 --> 00:17:40.000

Stuart Winchester: What is broken about American ski schools, and how did you try to fix it with snow schoolers?

00:17:39.000 --> 00:17:45.000

Brian Bensch: Yeah. So I would say similar to, you know.

00:17:45.000 --> 00:17:49.000

Brian Bensch: The the general diatribe about, you know.

00:17:49.000 --> 00:17:55.000

Brian Bensch: The ski industry being kind of broken with lift tickets too expensive and climate change is gonna end the world.

00:17:55.000 --> 00:18:07.000

Brian Bensch: Not everything is broken, but particularly the most front and center in your face resorts that you know everyone hears about, and you know, makes the quote unquote mainstream news has been broken for a while.

00:18:07.000 --> 00:18:15.000

Brian Bensch: And, you know, the gist is, if you roll up to, you know, a Tier 1 destination resort.

00:18:15.000 --> 00:18:16.000

Brian Bensch: Brooke, uh…

00:18:16.000 --> 00:18:32.000

Brian Bensch: Not only is lift ticket price what it is, but if you are looking for a group lesson, you’re looking at a couple 100 bucks. And if you’re looking for a private lesson, you’re lucky if you can find anything that is under 1000 today. When we started Snow Schoolers, I remember telling people like, you know, a private lesson is $700 or $800.

00:18:32.000 --> 00:18:35.000

Brian Bensch: Well, now it’s roughly double that.

0…

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is flabbergasted by EuroSki. Donate to my brain transplant fund to make me more smarter:

Who

Iain Martin, founder and host of UK-based The Ski Podcast. YouTube here. This is Iain’s second appearance on The Storm:

Interview date

September 24, 2026

Why I interviewed him

If, like me, you’re a U.S. American SnoSportSkier, you may find European skiing more than a little baffling. More than 4,000 ski areas spread over dozens of countries with their dozens of languages. Trams and gondolas pop skyward from every other corner in Switzerland or the Pyrenees or Slovenia, as numerous as the strip-mall vape shops and Jesus-Knows-You’re-Watching-Porn billboards defecating all over America’s roads. The trail markings in Europe are all different colors. Why is no one skiing off the groomers? Who stole all the trees? Why is every ski lift either a tram that looks CGI’d to transport Storm Troopers to a fictional Star Wars Cloud City or a T-bar that looks as though it was hammered together by Yohan in between sheep shearings? Why is the food good and the alcohol cheap? Why do lift tickets not cost more than a semester’s tuition at Cornell? And, most baffling of all as we contemplate the growing presence of EuroSki on U.S.-based multimountain passes, why is every ski resort actually 10 or 15 or 100 different ski areas stapled together as the Valley of Grand Domaine de Les Skis?

I wish I could be more helpful in answering these questions. So far, I have not been very helpful. I felt like I could get away with just pointing and laughing as Vail and Alterra added a handful of big-time European ski resorts to their rosters, but the numbers have rapidly spiraled: check out the number of Euro ski areas that have joined Epic, Ikon, and Indy since 2018:

At first I tried to keep up, but I just sort of surrendered after 2025. I did manage write-ups of Epic Pass additions in Austria, and new Ikon partners in Italy and France, but I never got past more than cursory acknowledgements of Indy’s massive haul of Euro partners from Turkey up through the Alps core to Scotland. And I thought, “OK how many gigantic resorts can they have over there it’s gotta stop soon right?” But they just kept coming like kaijū in Pacific Rim. The pass-by-pass totals headed into winter 2026-27 are shocking:

Here’s a country-by-country breakdown that’s a bit easier to read:

And here’s the detailed roster - not all the lifts are filled in because shoot me:

This chart is the European equivalent of American college football rankings. It makes no sense, but it must be fun because so many people do it, right?

I tried to make a map but it sorta sucks so I’m going to keep trying. I did use the map as a visual aide in the podcast, which is also and always available in audio-only. But if you want to watch above or on YouTube, our conversation will make marginally more sense as I scroll around beneath Iain’s narrative.

Transcripts

There are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them.

Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer. Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment.

Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio.

Zoom

Stuart Winchester: My guest today is the founder and host of The Ski Podcast, a UK-based show that just published its 327th episode.

00:07:39.000 --> 00:07:56.000

Stuart Winchester: He’s also a freelance journalist writing for national and specialized press and the owner of a digital marketing consultancy for snow sports. Ian Martin is my guest. He is a good friend of the storm. He has been on the show before and he is here today to help us make sense of Europe. Ian, how you doing today?

00:07:57.000 --> 00:08:02.000

Iain - The Ski Podcast: I am really well, Stuart. It’s really nice to see you, and thank you for inviting me onto the show.

00:08:01.000 --> 00:08:07.000

Stuart Winchester: Before we get started, what do you got lined up for this winter? When do you start skiing?

00:08:07.000 --> 00:08:23.000

Iain - The Ski Podcast: My personal first trip will be out to Les Des Alpes ski resort in France, which I’ll be doing in early December. But I will actually be skiing not next weekend, but the one after in one of our indoor snow slopes.

00:08:22.000 --> 00:08:24.000

Stuart Winchester: Okay.

00:08:23.000 --> 00:08:28.000

Iain - The Ski Podcast: in the UK. I’ll be skiing in the snowy center, Manchester, so I’ll get to get my skis on.

00:08:26.000 --> 00:08:28.000

Stuart Winchester: Oh, cool.

00:08:28.000 --> 00:08:40.000

Stuart Winchester: Oh, that’ll be a lot of fun. Yeah, we have the one right over in New Jersey. I was supposed to go a couple of… a couple weeks ago, but I… something came up, and I wasn’t able to make it. Alright, so Ian, let me set this up for the listeners.

00:08:40.000 --> 00:08:42.000

Stuart Winchester: And, and…

00:08:42.000 --> 00:08:54.000

Stuart Winchester: as a baseline for what we’re dealing with here. So, US-based passes, meaning Epic, Icon, and Indy. There’s also one on Mountain Collective, but it overlaps with… there’s two on Mountain Collective that overlap with Icon, so I’.

00:08:54.000 --> 00:08:59.000

Stuart Winchester: So they have added a total of 61 destinations.

00:08:58.000 --> 00:09:00.000

Iain - The Ski Podcast: Mm-hmm.

00:08:59.000 --> 00:09:02.000

Stuart Winchester: in 14 European countries.

00:09:02.000 --> 00:09:04.000

Stuart Winchester: 13 of those are on Epic.

00:09:04.000 --> 00:09:06.000

Stuart Winchester: Nine are on icon.

00:09:06.000 --> 00:09:18.000

Stuart Winchester: 39 are on Indy. Uh, so… some of those are unlimited on Epic, some you get 5 days, some you get 7. Icon’s a pretty standard 7 days, or 5 days, even with the base pass. Indy is 2 days at each.

00:09:18.000 --> 00:09:22.000

Stuart Winchester: Uh, 20 of those destinations are in Austria.

00:09:22.000 --> 00:09:31.000

Stuart Winchester: 12 are in Switzerland. Uh, 8 are in France, and they’re all over the place, but those are the countries with the most. So let me… I wanna actually…

00:09:31.000 --> 00:09:33.000

Stuart Winchester: Share on my screen.

00:09:33.000 --> 00:09:38.000

Stuart Winchester: a map that I made that could help us as a little guide, although it’s not a…

00:09:38.000 --> 00:09:42.000

Stuart Winchester: It’s not a great map, but I will…

00:09:43.000 --> 00:09:46.000

Stuart Winchester: Oh, okay. Can you, can you see the map?

00:09:46.000 --> 00:09:51.000

Iain - The Ski Podcast: I… can see the map, yes.

00:09:49.000 --> 00:09:52.000

Stuart Winchester: Okay, yeah, I couldn’t figure out how to make the…

00:09:52.000 --> 00:10:04.000

Stuart Winchester: Uh, let me just explain this at a high level. So, I couldn’t figure out how to make the text smaller, it’s very much a work in progress, but, uh, blue is, uh, the names of the ski areas are by country.

00:10:04.000 --> 00:10:19.000

Stuart Winchester: And the names of the icons are bypassed. So when you zoom down to Austria, it’s Epic, Epic, Indy. Uh, Indy’s red, Icon’s yellow, uh, Epic is blue. This is one where it really helps to watch the video. If not, we’ll explain it, and you don’t have to.

00:10:19.000 --> 00:10:34.000

Stuart Winchester: be watching …

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Stuff referenced in podcast:

* The Salt Lake Tribune profiles Clint Richins of Logan, who wants the State of Utah to open a ski area where “he can take his family skiing without breaking the bank.” Clint, you have an open invitation if you want to come on the pod.

* Vail Resorts acknowledges Oasis Management’s nomination of four new board members.

* Lift Blog reported Friday that Giants Ridge, Minnesota is seeking a new operator - and I have one in mind. The ski area also updated its master development plan.

* Plus listener reaction to several of last week’s posts:

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

About Bear Den

Transcripts

There are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them.

Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. This is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment.

Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio.

Stuart Winchester: My guest today is the CEO of Bear Den Partners, which operates four New England ski areas. His family has operated 1,180 vertical-foot Berkshire East, Massachusetts since 1976, and acquired 1,000 vertical-foot Catamount on the New York-Massachusetts border in 2018.

01:14:24.000 --> 01:14:53.000

Stuart Winchester: In 2025, the family teamed up with a local group to acquire 2,057 vertical foot Burke Mountain out of receivership. And earlier this year, Bairdan purchased a majority stake in Smuggler’s Notch, which with 2,610 vertical feet, 1,060 acres across three mountains, and 322 inches of average annual snowfall, is one of the largest, snowiest, and most fun ski areas in eastern North America. John Schaefer is my guest. John is a very good friend of the storm, and I welcome him back.

01:14:53.000 --> 01:14:56.000

Stuart Winchester: How is life leading up to ski season, John?

01:14:56.000 --> 01:14:58.000

Jonathan Schaefer: Oh, is what?

01:14:57.000 --> 01:14:59.000

Stuart Winchester: How is life?

01:14:58.000 --> 01:15:01.000

Jonathan Schaefer: How is life? It’s good.

01:15:00.000 --> 01:15:04.000

Stuart Winchester: Yeah, what delayed you today?

01:15:01.000 --> 01:15:03.000

Jonathan Schaefer: I’m, uh…

01:15:04.000 --> 01:15:14.000

Jonathan Schaefer: Uh, a skunk. So I’m a little tired. I have some Diet Pepsi here to kickstart the day, but my dog got a skunk, uh, first thing, which is great.

01:15:04.000 --> 01:15:05.000

Stuart Winchester: Good.

01:15:05.000 --> 01:15:07.000

Stuart Winchester: Let’s go.

01:15:08.000 --> 01:15:10.000

Stuart Winchester: Thank you.

01:15:14.000 --> 01:15:16.000

Stuart Winchester: Massachusetts.

01:15:14.000 --> 01:15:19.000

Jonathan Schaefer: And it was better once I opened the door and it all came wafting into the house.

01:15:18.000 --> 01:15:28.000

Stuart Winchester: Oh, God, Berkshire’s living. All right, well, I appreciate you fighting through that and joining us here, John. So, let’s talk smugs, first of all, because.

01:15:28.000 --> 01:15:44.000

Stuart Winchester: You know, Bill Stritzler, I have a ton of respect for what he did at Smuggler’s Notch, and how he’s maintained the atmosphere, and it’s consistently voted one of skier… by skiers as one of their favorite mountains, one of the best family mountains. It’s also just a badass expert mountain.

01:15:44.000 --> 01:15:46.000

Stuart Winchester: Uh, the… the…

01:15:46.000 --> 01:15:48.000

Stuart Winchester: the…

01:15:48.000 --> 01:16:04.000

Stuart Winchester: issue that comes up over and over again is, of course, the chairlifts. There are 7 haul lifts. They are a combined 392 years old. Uh, they are a combined 29,439 feet long. That’s 5.58 miles. Uh, Madonna is the oldest.

01:16:04.000 --> 01:16:21.000

Stuart Winchester: 6,719-foot-long 1963 haul, it got a new top terminal in 2002, which I believe is the drive terminal. Sterling is the next longest, it’s a 1964 haul, and the Village Lift is the next longest at 5,155 feet, that’s 1967, so…

01:16:21.000 --> 01:16:28.000

Stuart Winchester: those are sort of the three main lifts, and then there’s some other little lifts, Madonna 2 and a T-bar and such, but… but John…

01:16:28.000 --> 01:16:39.000

Stuart Winchester: I think everyone wants to know, what are you gonna do about the Lyft fleet at Smug’s, because you have a contingent that loves the old Lyfts and doesn’t want you to, but you have another contingent that’s like…

01:16:39.000 --> 01:16:44.000

Stuart Winchester: That’s why I don’t go there. So what do you have in mind? What can you tell us?

01:16:43.000 --> 01:16:59.000

Jonathan Schaefer: Well, I mean, it’s a problem that’s highlighted by all the fun facts you just gave us here. And give you credit for that, going back to the announcement letter and post that you did.

01:16:59.000 --> 01:17:00.000

Stuart Winchester: Yeah.

01:16:59.000 --> 01:17:01.000

Jonathan Schaefer: Um…

01:17:01.000 --> 01:17:12.000

Jonathan Schaefer: It’s the balance between preservation and conservation, right? I mean, it’s an environmental argument, it’s a scary management argument, it’s… do you preserve it, and do you keep it just exactly like it is?

01:17:04.000 --> 01:17:06.000

Stuart Winchester: Yeah. Okay.

01:17:12.000 --> 01:17:24.000

Jonathan Schaefer: Or do you conserve an asset on into the future? And that’s a fancy way of saying that, nice try, you’re not going to quite get the answer today.

01:17:24.000 --> 01:17:27.000

Jonathan Schaefer: I mean, we have to have some reality here, right? Which is…

01:17:28.000 --> 01:17:31.000

Jonathan Schaefer: Those lifts are in excellent shape.

01:17:32.000 --> 01:17:40.000

Jonathan Schaefer: maintenance going on through the years and decades will become harder and harder and harder. And we’re gonna have to address the problems.

01:17:40.000 --> 01:17:43.000

Jonathan Schaefer: before they become problems. So.

01:17:43.000 --> 01:17:45.000

Jonathan Schaefer: Eyes wide open.

01:17:45.000 --> 01:17:50.000

Jonathan Schaefer: We are looking at everything at Smuggler’s Notch, including the lift system.

01:17:50.000 --> 01:17:55.000

Jonathan Schaefer: Also, in perfect honesty, there isn’t just.

01:17:55.000 --> 01:18:00.000

Jonathan Schaefer: a single plan that’s gonna work there. You know, there’s not.

01:18:01.000 --> 01:18:08.000

Jonathan Schaefer: you know, there’s not an endless pool of capital to go through and replace. How many? How many lineal feet of lift is that.

01:18:07.000 --> 01:18:10.000

Stuart Winchester: 29,439.

01:18:10.000 --> 01:18:14.000

Jonathan Schaefer: I mean, that’s just under six miles of lift line.

01:18:13.000 --> 01:18:15.000

Stuart Winchester: Yeah.

01:18:14.000 --> 01:18:18.000

Jonathan Schaefer: Yeah, that’s a lot right? And it’s a pretty big, angry mountain.

01:18:16.000 --> 01:18:17.000

Stuart Winchester: Right.

01:18:18.000 --> 01:18:19.000

Stuart Winchester: Mm-hmm.

01:18:18.000 --> 01:18:23.000

Jonathan Schaefer: So when you look at that hillside and you contemplate driving.

01:18:23.000 --> 01:18:25.000

Jonathan Schaefer: Concrete up to the top, or…

01:18:25.000 --> 01:18:29.000

Jonathan Schaefer: I mean, you’re flying helicopters in, and it’s a massive project.

01:18:29.000 --> 01:18:30.000

Stuart Winchester: Mm-hmm.

01:18:29.000 --> 01:18:32.000

Jonathan Schaefer: So, we have to just do…

01:18:32.000 --> 01:18:48.000

Jonathan Schaefer: the right amount of work to keep that mountain, you know, going and thriving into the future. But also, you know, to your point, you know, people love it. You know, people love these mountains. They love them to death sometimes. We don’t want that to happen.

01:18:49.000 --> 01:19:00.000

Jonathan Schaefer: Um, but we respect everybody’s point of view and we’re just gonna have to work with our community to, to sort of telegraph those changes when they come up. And right now there’s, uh, there’s no major changes. You know, I don’t have a.

01:19:00.000 --> 01:19:12.000

Jonathan Schaefer: an S…

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is stocking up on canned corn ahead of the Robot Apocalypse. To support this worthy cause, please sign up for my skiing newsletter:

Today’s episode answers questions from paid subscribers. I’m not including the Zoom transcript since I am the only one speaking, and the built-in transcript (click button above) will take you to any point in the audio when you click on the associated text block.

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is made in the USA. Thank you for supporting independent ski journalism.

About Caberfae

Owned by: The Meyer Family

Year founded: 1937

Pass affiliations:

* Ikon Pass: 2 days, blackouts

* Freedom Pass: 3 days, no blackouts

Base elevation: 1,076 feet

Summit elevation: 1,561 feet

Vertical drop: 485 feet

Skiable Acres: 200

Average annual snowfall: 120 inches

Lift count: 5 (1 fixed-grip quad, 3 triples, 1 carpet – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Caberfae’s lift fleet)

The Zoom transcript (click “transcript” above for the Substack transcript, then click on any text block to teleport to the associated point in the video; timestamps below DO NOT MATCH THE VIDEO; also since Tim and Pete were on one screen, the transcript does not differentiate between them).

Stuart Winchester: Welcome to the storm. I’m your host, Stuart Winchester. Today is Thursday, September 17th, 2026, and we are going to mix things up a little bit today. Instead of starting with the takes, we are starting with the guests, and I have some great guests today.

00:22:29.000 --> 00:22:40.000

Stuart Winchester: They are the general managers of Cabrifay Peaks, Michigan, with over 200 acres of terrain served by 4 chairlifts across 3 peaks, with a 485-foot vertical drop.

00:22:40.000 --> 00:22:44.000

Stuart Winchester: Cabar Fay is one of the largest ski areas in Michigan’s Lower Penins.

00:22:44.000 --> 00:22:49.000

Stuart Winchester: The ski area averaged 120 inches of lake effect snowfall per winter.

00:22:49.000 --> 00:23:06.000

Stuart Winchester: Their family has operated Cabaret since 1980. They are co-general managers, with Tim Meyer on the right, handling everything on the mountain, and Pete Meyer on the left, taking care of everything off. Tim and Pete, welcome to the storm. I’m always hyped to talk Cabaret. How are you guys doing today?

00:23:07.000 --> 00:23:11.000

Pete Meyer: Good. We’re doing awesome. Thanks for having us. Yeah.

00:23:10.000 --> 00:23:26.000

Stuart Winchester: Yeah, and trigger warning for any Sparties or Buckeyes out there who want to go to the video version on stormskiing.com or YouTube. Me and Tim are both proudly rocking our Wolverines gear. This is a shirt I wore to the maze out when Michigan blasted Oklahoma in the big house this past weekend. So we’re feeling.

00:23:26.000 --> 00:23:31.000

Stuart Winchester: Although I understand Tim’s also got a little Sparty, side loyalty.

00:23:31.000 --> 00:23:35.000

Pete Meyer: Yes, my children, both my sons are Spartans, so that’s…

00:23:34.000 --> 00:23:44.000

Stuart Winchester: Yeah, as soon as my daughter got into college, I bought all the gear for her place. So, you know, there’s tons going on at Cabaret, and I want to start…

00:23:35.000 --> 00:23:36.000

Pete Meyer: It.

00:23:44.000 --> 00:23:54.000

Stuart Winchester: with this coming expansion, and you, you announced this a while ago, and I’m gonna share my screen here so that everyone can see, uh, see this as we talk through it.

00:23:54.000 --> 00:24:13.000

Stuart Winchester: And this is where I am never quite as fast as I want to be. Uh, but… okay. So, here is the Cabra Fay trail map. This is the one I took off your website this morning, so it’s the most current that I have. Uh, and last time I talked to Tim in, I think, 2021, when you came on the podcast.

00:24:13.000 --> 00:24:15.000

Stuart Winchester: Uh, it…

00:24:15.000 --> 00:24:31.000

Stuart Winchester: This East Peak triple chair was still still in a theory phase and you hadn’t built yet. Now that’s in place and we’ll talk about that in a minute and how that’s gone. But talk to us about the Green Mountain triple chair, what we’re getting and why you’re building it.

00:24:32.000 --> 00:24:34.000

Pete Meyer: Yeah, so, um…

00:24:34.000 --> 00:24:40.000

Pete Meyer: I’m going to start with why, because it’s kind of an interesting story, you know.

00:24:40.000 --> 00:24:51.000

Pete Meyer: we… when we put in the East Peak lift, we took out the shelter chairlift, the double. They started in almost the same place, but the shelter… the shelter lift.

00:24:46.000 --> 00:24:47.000

Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.

00:24:51.000 --> 00:24:54.000

Pete Meyer: let off about halfway up the hill.

00:24:54.000 --> 00:25:04.000

Pete Meyer: And because we we have our dads before us and then and then we also have continued to develop the terrain.

00:25:04.000 --> 00:25:13.000

Pete Meyer: the terrain changes and the flow changes. And what happened over time, like, especially over the last.

00:25:13.000 --> 00:25:16.000

Pete Meyer: 25 years or so.

00:25:16.000 --> 00:25:23.000

Pete Meyer: we kept adding on to Smiling Irishman and making it wider and wider and wider, and it got busier and busier and busier, so…

00:25:23.000 --> 00:25:29.000

Pete Meyer: The shelter chairlift was essentially letting off these new skiers.

00:25:29.000 --> 00:25:33.000

Pete Meyer: in the middle of flowing traffic. And…

00:25:33.000 --> 00:25:37.000

Pete Meyer: We thought when we put in the East Peak lift.

00:25:37.000 --> 00:25:41.000

Pete Meyer: Now we’re gonna take these lower end skiers to the top.

00:25:41.000 --> 00:25:55.000

Pete Meyer: we’re going to give them a longer run, and the new part we’re giving them is actually the easier half. They’re already negotiating the tougher half, the steeper half, and the narrower half. If we add the upper half, it’s easier, it’s wider, it should be fine.

00:25:50.000 --> 00:25:51.000

Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.

00:25:55.000 --> 00:26:06.000

Pete Meyer: And that’s what we thought. And so we put it in and then but then what we found and this is the this is the piece that you learn as you go.

00:26:06.000 --> 00:26:07.000

Pete Meyer: is…

00:26:07.000 --> 00:26:15.000

Pete Meyer: The new skiers accepted being let off at the lower level, and having to merge into traffic, because.

00:26:15.000 --> 00:26:32.000

Pete Meyer: They didn’t really know any different and that it was the psychological factor. Well, I’m only halfway up the mountain. I can, I can do this. When we took them up to the top, you know, that East Peak lift actually feels like a out, it almost feels like an out West lift. It has.

00:26:32.000 --> 00:26:43.000

Pete Meyer: like, three rises, you know? So you ride… you go up over a break, and then you… and then you go again for a while, and then up over another break, and then you’re coming into the top, and you… you know, you’re above…

00:26:43.000 --> 00:26:47.000

Pete Meyer: Tree line, basically, and you can see the horizon, and it just…

00:26:47.000 --> 00:26:51.000

Pete Meyer: would kind of psych out that new skier, you know, they would just, they would.

00:26:50.000 --> 00:26:51.000

Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.

00:26:51.000 --> 00:26:55.000

Pete Meyer: They’d get up there and kind of freeze and panic, and…

00:26:55.000 --> 00:27:06.000

Pete Meyer: say, there’s no way I’m gonna go down, you know, I’m not gonna go down that hill. And, uh, so we found our ski patrol having to give a lot of lessons just to get people down the hill, and…

00:26:59.000 --> 00:27:00.000

Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.

00:27:06.000 --> 00:27:13.000

Pete Meyer: And, um, and so we, we just, we kind of knew that we had a, you know, a little bit of an issue that we had to work through.

00:27:13.000 --> 00:27:21.000

Pete Meyer: And so Pete and I would be talking, you know, and I would say, I think I have it all figured out, you know, I’m saying, um…

00:27:21.000 --> 00:27:34.000

Pete Meyer: we just need to give them… make sure that all the… every single new skier gets a lesson, and we get them ready to… you know, we get them ready to go. And a lot of the… a lot of this is the school groups, you know, the different groups, and we do offer lessons.

00:27:34.000 --> 00:27:40.000

Pete Meyer: to everybody, but sometimes they don’t take them, and, you know, they slide, they slide through, and…

00:27:40.000 --> 00:27:42.000

Pete Meyer: And so.

00:27:42.000 --> 00:27:50.000

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast likes it when ski areas are run by people who are good at running ski areas. Please subscribe to the email newsletter to get new posts the moment they’re live. Thank you for supporting independent ski journalism.

About Camelback

Owned by: EPR Properties, managed by Peregrine Hospitality (formerly KSL Resorts)

Located in: Tannersville, Pennsylvania

Year founded: 1963

Pass affiliations:

* Ikon Pass: 7 days, no blackouts

* Ikon Base Pass: 5 days, holiday blackouts

Closest neighboring ski areas: Shawnee Mountain (:24), Jack Frost (:26), Big Boulder (:27), Skytop Lodge (:29), Saw Creek (:37), Blue Mountain (:41), Pocono Ranchlands (:43), Montage (:44), Hideout (:51), Elk Mountain (1:05), Bear Creek (1:09), Ski Big Bear (1:16)

Base elevation: 1,252 feet

Summit elevation: 2,079 feet

Vertical drop: 827 feet

Skiable Acres: 166

Average annual snowfall: 50 inches

Trail count: 45, with three new trails for 2026-27 (not on the map below, but discussed on the podcast)

Lift count: 12 (1 high-speed six-pack, 1 high-speed quad, 1 fixed-grip quad, 2 triples, 2 doubles, 5 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Camelback’s lift fleet)

For reference:

The Zoom transcript (click “transcript” above for the Substack transcript, then click on any text block to teleport to the associated point in the video; timestamps below DO NOT MATCH THE VIDEO)

00:03:25.000 --> 00:03:37.000

Stuart Winchester: Welcome to The Storm! I’m your host, Stuart Winchester. Today is Wednesday, September 16th, 2026, and I’ve got a really good show for you today.

00:03:37.000 --> 00:03:45.000

Stuart Winchester: we’re going to talk some Pennsylvania skiing. And Pennsylvania skiing is a really interesting thing. As I travel around the country.

00:03:45.000 --> 00:03:56.000

Stuart Winchester: and ski at all these different places in the Midwest, and out West, and in New England, and in the Mid-Atlantic. Uh, and as I talk to folks who… who don’t ski that much, or only ski at the big mountains.

00:03:56.000 --> 00:04:05.000

Stuart Winchester: I’ll often bring up some experience I had at a Pennsylvania ski area. Pennsylvania has quite a few ski areas as 21.

00:04:05.000 --> 00:04:20.000

Stuart Winchester: public chairlift-served ski areas, and it does 2.6 million skier visits on average per year. That is more than any state except for Colorado, California, Utah, Vermont, and New York.

00:04:20.000 --> 00:04:26.000

Stuart Winchester: It’s more than Washington, it’s more than Oregon, it’s more than Montana, it’s more than New.

00:04:26.000 --> 00:04:39.000

Stuart Winchester: So, Pennsylvania is a really important ski state, which is probably why Vail Resorts owns 8 ski areas there, because it is really close to a lot of population centers. In western PA, you have Pittsburgh.

00:04:39.000 --> 00:04:54.000

Stuart Winchester: and Seven Springs, and Laurel, and Hidden Valley, and then you have Philadelphia on the east side, and you can also draw up from Baltimore and D.C. for Round Top and Whitetail. And uh…

00:04:54.000 --> 00:04:57.000

Stuart Winchester: And Jack Frost’s Big Boulder up in the Poconos. So…

00:04:58.000 --> 00:05:00.000

Stuart Winchester: Vail has a big presence there.

00:05:00.000 --> 00:05:15.000

Stuart Winchester: Icon has a presence there with Camelback and Blue Mountain. Uh, and then Indy Pass just signed their 8th ski area in Pennsylvania with Spring Mountain, uh, down near Philadelphia. So, so it’s, it’s a place where a lot of skiers start.

00:05:15.000 --> 00:05:19.000

Stuart Winchester: And it’s a little bit of a funny place to ski, because…

00:05:19.000 --> 00:05:29.000

Stuart Winchester: it tends to have an outsized number of novice skiers, which is great. They’re very good at doing that. Uh, but it can make it a little chaotic.

00:05:29.000 --> 00:05:38.000

Stuart Winchester: And the lift lines can get a little crazy, and people are all over the hill, and sometimes they’re walking down the hill because they’re frustrated and they’re giving up.

00:05:38.000 --> 00:05:40.000

Stuart Winchester: Uh, and…

00:05:40.000 --> 00:05:44.000

Stuart Winchester: You take that as your baseline in Pennsylvania.

00:05:44.000 --> 00:05:49.000

Stuart Winchester: And you had any sort of complications.

00:05:49.000 --> 00:05:54.000

Stuart Winchester: And things get out of hand really quickly. And in general.

00:05:55.000 --> 00:06:00.000

Stuart Winchester: For that reason, the ski areas that have survived in Pennsylvania.

00:06:00.000 --> 00:06:07.000

Stuart Winchester: are among the best operators in the world, and I would put that up against anyone.

00:06:07.000 --> 00:06:14.000

Stuart Winchester: It’s a very, very challenging environment, not only because you have a high number of novice skiers.

00:06:14.000 --> 00:06:17.000

Stuart Winchester: Uh, but also because you have…

00:06:17.000 --> 00:06:31.000

Stuart Winchester: not a ton of snow, sometimes in the west part of the state, where there’s higher elevation, they do get a lot of snow, but… but not as a rule, you couldn’t count on it for natural snow. Uh, you get a lot of rain, you get a lot of warm-ups.

00:06:31.000 --> 00:06:35.000

Stuart Winchester: Uh, and… and you, in general, have to rely on…

00:06:35.000 --> 00:06:42.000

Stuart Winchester: a very short season, generally mid-December-ish to mid-March-ish.

00:06:42.000 --> 00:06:45.000

Stuart Winchester: And the skiers there…

00:06:47.000 --> 00:06:52.000

Stuart Winchester: They’re they’re accustomed to a pretty high standard, so.

00:06:52.000 --> 00:06:57.000

Stuart Winchester: So when things do get out of control, uh…

00:06:57.000 --> 00:07:04.000

Stuart Winchester: They really rebelled, and they really noticed. So, a couple years ago, this is what happened at Camelback. So, Camelback…

00:07:05.000 --> 00:07:09.000

Stuart Winchester: You know, I don’t generally do ops stories, uh…

00:07:09.000 --> 00:07:10.000

Stuart Winchester: You know.

00:07:10.000 --> 00:07:19.000

Stuart Winchester: ski area didn’t groom this run, or they haven’t opened this lift, or, uh, you know, they usually let this bump up, but they don’t, or, or…

00:07:19.000 --> 00:07:27.000

Stuart Winchester: you know, they… they are trying to save money, or they’re being cheap. I generally don’t bother with those, even though I get a lot of messages.

00:07:27.000 --> 00:07:32.000

Stuart Winchester: Complaining about things like that, because there’s almost always a pretty good reason.

00:07:32.000 --> 00:07:38.000

Stuart Winchester: Uh, and it’s almost always temporary, and it’s really not worth the effort.

00:07:38.000 --> 00:07:48.000

Stuart Winchester: to write the story if I’m just writing about, you know, why Stratton or Mount Snow or Magic Mountain didn’t open a certain lift on a certain day.

00:07:48.000 --> 00:08:04.000

Stuart Winchester: Uh, it’s, it’s a lot to track down and it’s a lot of, uh, this person said this and the other person said that. It’s just not the kind of thing that I’m want to cover with the storm, right? I want to do bigger stories. I want to do trend stories. I want to look at the culture and evolution of skiing.

00:08:04.000 --> 00:08:11.000

Stuart Winchester: And the passes, and all the infrastructure, and all the fun stuff. So I don’t generally cover the day-to-day stuff, just because…

00:08:12.000 --> 00:08:18.000

Stuart Winchester: The ski areas that remain in 2026 are, for the most part, run by really good operators.

00:08:18.000 --> 00:08:32.000

Stuart Winchester: Uh, it… because… and they’ve survived. Most of the bad ski areas that were either mismanaged or were in the wrong places, they went out of business a long time ago, which is why the number of ski areas has been stable for around 25 years now in America.

00:08:32.000 --> 00:08:35.000

Stuart Winchester: So I but I started to notice.

00:08:35.000 --> 00:08:45.000

Stuart Winchester: several years ago that I was getting an outsized number of complaints around one ski area in particular in the Poconos.

00:08:45.000 --> 00:08:47.000

Stuart Winchester: And it was Camelback.

00:08:47.000 --> 00:08:51.000

Stuar…

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Welcome to the Storm’s short-form, news-focused podcast. Don’t worry, I still write long-form newsletters. Paid subscribers can leave a comment in the article below, or by joining The Storm’s chat (also below). I’ll respond to some comments in the next episode, which is scheduled for Wednesday, Sept. 16.

Transcript update

Following up on yesterday’s feedback, there are now two transcripts available for each podcast:

* Substack’s transcript: This transcript is auto-generated when I upload the podcast file to Substack, which is the platform that hosts stormskiing.com. This one is cool because you can click on any block of text and the audio will jump to that point in the conversation. Click the “transcript” button above to access.

* Zoom’s transcript: Zoom automatically generates this transcript as I record. It should be more or less identical to Substack’s transcript, but with names attached to each quote block. The downside of this transcript is that you can’t teleport to that point in the pod by clicking on the text block, as you can with Substack’s. Another downside: the timestamps are off, since I typically start recording prior to the start of the podcast. I’ll work on cleaning this up.

So until the robots get smarter, we’re stuck with two different transcripts. Both are auto-generated, and I don’t proofread either one, as that would be the fastest way to make sure my quick-turnaround, up-to-date podcast turns into a slow-turnaround, out-of-date one. My hope is that Substack will soon hire or invent or weld from raw iron a robot that’s smart enough to know who’s speaking when. I’ll just keep following the robots around and using their hyper-intelligence until they decide to kill me.

The Zoom transcript (click “transcript” above for the Substack transcript, which will zoom to any point in the video when you click on the associated text block; timestamps below DO NOT MATCH THE VIDEO)

Stuart Winchester: Welcome to The Storm! I’m your host, Stuart Winchester. It is Tuesday, September 15th, 2026, and I am very excited today to bring you a conversation with the General Manager of Monarch Mountain, Colorado, Chris Haggerty. Now, I’ve never featured Monarch either on the long-form pod or on the short-form pod.

00:09:57.000 --> 00:10:11.000

Stuart Winchester: There’s never really a reason behind that, other than this is just kind of when it happened. If you run an area, a ski area anywhere in America, I do want to talk to you. I’ve just never had the opportunity to feature Monarch before, so we will talk about Monarch in just a little bit here.

00:10:11.000 --> 00:10:27.000

Stuart Winchester: Part of the reason why we’re talking about Monarch is because they were one of two Western Mountains to this year join Snow Operating’s Snow Pass. Now, the Snow Pass, if you missed the news, it works a lot like the Indy Pass or the Mountain Collective Pass, where you get two days each.

00:10:27.000 --> 00:10:37.000

Stuart Winchester: at a set number of ski areas. In this case, it’s planned to be 14 ski areas for the 2026-27 ski season. And…

00:10:37.000 --> 00:10:45.000

Stuart Winchester: That product went on sale last Tuesday. I had Snow Operating CEO Joe Heschen on the podcast to talk through it with us.

00:10:45.000 --> 00:11:01.000

Stuart Winchester: Couple days later, I got an email from Snow Operating saying, Hey, guess what? Our first round of Snow Operating and Snow Triple Play, which are two different products, and I’ll explain the difference in a moment, sold out. So we’re taking it off sale. We’re putting it back on sale next Monday, September 21st.

00:11:01.000 --> 00:11:13.000

Stuart Winchester: at 10 a.m. Eastern. It will be $349.99 for Snowpass, and $184.99 for Snow Triple Play. Still a pretty good deal. Those products at full price.

00:11:13.000 --> 00:11:24.000

Stuart Winchester: the prices that Snow Partners gave me, and they anticipate selling both products through Christmas Eve, December 24th, just like they did last year with the first season of the Triple Play.

00:11:24.000 --> 00:11:40.000

Stuart Winchester: They, the final prices they anticipate will be 3 99 99 for snow pass and 1 99 99 for snow triple play. So you get a nice little discount, particularly with the snow pass, $50 off if you buy it in the next round. So let’s talk a little bit about the snow pass because.

00:11:40.000 --> 00:11:43.000

Stuart Winchester: When this product debuted.

00:11:43.000 --> 00:11:53.000

Stuart Winchester: I… I’ve been saying for years, there’s 4 national ski passes, right? There’s obviously Epic and Icon, and those have some season pass unlimited tiers at certain mountains.

00:11:53.000 --> 00:12:08.000

Stuart Winchester: And a limited number of days at other partner mountains. And then you have Indian Mountain Collective, which essentially worked the same way, 2 days at each ski area that is on their roster. Uh, Mountain Collective is more expensive, tends to be your bigger, more high-end resorts, Snowbird, Jackson Hole.

00:12:08.000 --> 00:12:23.000

Stuart Winchester: Uh, Sun Peaks up in Canada. And Indy tended to be the lesser-known ski areas, but still some really dynamite stuff there, and a lot more ski areas. Mountain Collective always has around 30, and Indy is more like 250, not counting their cross-country.

00:12:23.000 --> 00:12:36.000

Stuart Winchester: ski areas. So, I always thought there was probably room for a fifth national pass, but I wasn’t sure, and as time went on, and more and more mountains joined multi-mountain passes.

00:12:36.000 --> 00:12:37.000

Stuart Winchester: I…

00:12:37.000 --> 00:12:41.000

Stuart Winchester: I thought, okay, maybe there’s not room for a fifth national pass. Maybe everyone who’s…

00:12:41.000 --> 00:12:44.000

Stuart Winchester: who wants to join a pass has, because I know Indy, uh.

00:12:44.000 --> 00:12:58.000

Stuart Winchester: Now, I’m not saying they don’t have standards, but they’ll let just about anybody on the pass just to help them get that exposure and that national marketing. But Snow Operating, the outfit that owns Mountain Creek in New Jersey and the indoor big snow ski area in New Jersey, they launched.

00:12:58.000 --> 00:13:15.000

Stuart Winchester: their Snow Pass, and it’s a pretty good roster. Here, I’m gonna share my screen for those of you watching on video, and if you’re not watching on video, don’t worry, I’m gonna talk through it. So, here’s the Snow Triple Play East roster, and here’s the Snow Pass roster. Now, the Snow Pass has 14 ski areas on it.

00:13:15.000 --> 00:13:18.000

Stuart Winchester: And you get 2 days at each ski area.

00:13:18.000 --> 00:13:22.000

Stuart Winchester: The Snow Triple Play has…

00:13:22.000 --> 00:13:27.000

Stuart Winchester: 23 total ski areas on it, and you get 3 days total.

00:13:27.000 --> 00:13:43.000

Stuart Winchester: across all 23 ski areas. That’s why it’s so much less expensive. The most days you can use at any ski area is 2, so you can’t buy this as a 3-pack Force A Gore Mountain, alright? So, that’s the first important.

00:13:43.000 --> 00:13:59.000

Stuart Winchester: distinction is that Snow Triple Play is a much more limited basket of days. You also don’t want to assume that they have the same roster. Just because something’s on Snow Pass doesn’t mean it’s on Snow Triple Play, and vice versa. Snow Triple Play right now has a pretty…

00:13:59.000 --> 00:14:15.000

Stuart Winchester: Big roster that I wish was on the, uh, Snow Pass, because it has Jiminy Peak in, uh, Massachusetts, and also Cranmore in New Hampshire, which is jointly owned. It has Platykill up in the New York Catskills.

00:14:15.000 --> 00:14:30.000

Stuart Winchester: It has all these summit ski areas around Quebec. It has Bromont, one of the great eastern townships ski areas. Uh, so that’s Snow Triple Play. Snow Triple Play does not have anything in the west. It’s all east. It’s…

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is going to cover Midwestern skiing whether you like it or not. Don’t worry, Colorad-Bro, it’s your turn tomorrow.

Welcome to the Storm’s short-form, news-focused podcast. Don’t worry, I will still write newsletters too. To browse a (robot-generated) podcast transcript, click the “transcript” button above - click on any block of text and the audio will jump to that point in the conversation. Paid subscribers can leave a comment in the article below, or by joining The Storm’s chat (also below). I’ll respond to some comments in the next episode, which is scheduled for Tuesday, Sept. 15.

The Zoom transcript (click “transcript” above for the Substack transcript, which will zoom to any point in the video when you click on the associated text block; timestamps below DO NOT MATCH THE VIDEO)

Stuart Winchester: Welcome to the Storm! I’m your host, Stuart Winchester. It is Monday, September 14th, 2026. Welcome to week two of the New Look Storm Skiing Podcast. If you missed last week, I am still doing the longer form pod.

00:15:53.000 --> 00:16:08.000

Stuart Winchester: But I’m cutting way back on the frequency of those. Instead, I am doing a shorter, news-focused pod that I release more often, and whenever possible, that I release the same day that I record it.

00:16:08.000 --> 00:16:11.000

Stuart Winchester: And the reason that I’m doing that is because…

00:16:11.000 --> 00:16:19.000

Stuart Winchester: the world has changed a lot since 2019, when I launched the Storm Skiing podcast, and when I launched it, there really wasn’t anything quite like…

00:16:19.000 --> 00:16:26.000

Stuart Winchester: what I was doing with the long-form audio stories of a ski area’s background.

00:16:27.000 --> 00:16:29.000

Stuart Winchester: I’ve done a couple hundred episodes at this point.

00:16:29.000 --> 00:16:31.000

Stuart Winchester: I feel like…

00:16:31.000 --> 00:16:47.000

Stuart Winchester: They’re evergreen. But what they don’t allow me to do is to really talk about what’s happening in a ski area right now. Uh Especially when there’s a lot of things happening and there’s a lot of pieces and parts shuffling around as there is right now in the Midwest.

00:16:47.000 --> 00:16:51.000

Stuart Winchester: with multi-mountain passes. So, what I’m doing…

00:16:51.000 --> 00:17:06.000

Stuart Winchester: is I’m trying out a little bit of a new format today. The format… we’re gonna experiment, we’re gonna play around with it. Sometimes there’ll be a guest off the top, sometimes I’ll have a take off the top, uh, sometimes I’ll have a guest on for a longer period, and that’s gonna be the case today.

00:17:06.000 --> 00:17:22.000

Stuart Winchester: Because right now there is so much happening in the Midwest with multi mountain passes and different mountains leaving and joining is completely changing the landscape there. So I want to bring in someone to talk to us at length about that. We’ll do a couple other fun things as well.

00:17:22.000 --> 00:17:24.000

Stuart Winchester: Let’s bring…

00:17:25.000 --> 00:17:27.000

Stuart Winchester: I’m in now.

00:17:32.000 --> 00:17:35.000

Stuart Winchester: And there he is. Can you hear me, Matthew?

00:17:32.000 --> 00:17:34.000

Matthew Zabransky: Hey, how’s it going, Stuart?

00:17:34.000 --> 00:17:36.000

Matthew Zabransky: I can.

00:17:35.000 --> 00:17:41.000

Stuart Winchester: Oh, I can’t hear you. All right. This is a flub, and this is why I haven’t heard her.

00:17:40.000 --> 00:17:41.000

Matthew Zabransky: Thank you.

00:17:42.000 --> 00:17:45.000

Stuart Winchester: Because I am not that smart.

00:17:46.000 --> 00:17:49.000

Stuart Winchester: Okay, you there?

00:17:48.000 --> 00:17:50.000

Matthew Zabransky: Can you hear me?

00:17:49.000 --> 00:17:52.000

Stuart Winchester: Oh, yes, I can. Look at that.

00:17:50.000 --> 00:17:54.000

Matthew Zabransky: Okay, perfect.

00:17:52.000 --> 00:18:07.000

Stuart Winchester: The technology known as headphones. Matthew, this is why you’re the production guy, and I generally stick to writing, because I’m an idiot. Alright, I want to introduce today the founder of MidwestSkiers.com.

00:18:07.000 --> 00:18:13.000

Stuart Winchester: He founded that in 2018, and in 2020, founded MWS Productions.

00:18:13.000 --> 00:18:29.000

Stuart Winchester: He is making all the Midwest content that I was dying for in the 1990s when I was a teenager living and skiing in Michigan, and the ski mags would completely ignore the region and maybe mention Boyne Mountain or Luton once per year, but he makes.

00:18:19.000 --> 00:18:20.000

Matthew Zabransky: Okay.

00:18:29.000 --> 00:18:38.000

Stuart Winchester: Top quality content. I link to it all the time in my stuff because no one else quite does it, as well as Matthew Zabranski. Matthew, welcome to The Storm. How you doing today?

00:18:37.000 --> 00:18:56.000

Matthew Zabransky: I am doing fantastic. Stuart, thank you, first of all, for the opportunity, but more importantly, for also repping the Midwest. I think it’s such an important, obviously, region, and you have ties to it, I obviously have ties to it as well, so it’s great that we’re getting recognition, not only, obviously, in our region now, but on the national, even international scale, so…

00:18:56.000 --> 00:19:00.000

Matthew Zabransky: Thank you so much for doing that. I appreciate it. I’m excited to be here.

00:18:59.000 --> 00:19:08.000

Stuart Winchester: Yeah, I love covering the Midwest, Matthew, and I still make it a point to go back and take a Midwest trip every year, because there’s…

00:19:00.000 --> 00:19:01.000

Matthew Zabransky: Thank you.

00:19:08.000 --> 00:19:27.000

Stuart Winchester: when I’m doing this podcast, there’s nothing quite like making relationships, like showing up at, you know, a 200 vertical foothill in the boondocks in Minnesota. People are like, okay, I’ll talk to this guy, even though, you know, I’ve never heard of him. So, but you are 100% Midwest-focused. I cover it where I can and whenever I can.

00:19:20.000 --> 00:19:21.000

Matthew Zabransky: Mm-hmm.

00:19:25.000 --> 00:19:26.000

Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.

00:19:27.000 --> 00:19:37.000

Stuart Winchester: There is so much happening in the Midwest that we could talk about. I really want to focus today on multi-mountain passes. So…

00:19:32.000 --> 00:19:34.000

Matthew Zabransky: Okay.

00:19:36.000 --> 00:19:37.000

Matthew Zabransky: Mm-hmm.

00:19:37.000 --> 00:19:53.000

Stuart Winchester: I’ll start by, I’ll just set this up and then I’ll, and then I’ll, I’ll let you comment on it. So if you go back about 10 years, there was nothing in the Midwest on multi mountain passes. You know, Vale had started to add a few things to Epic Pass and B Brighton and Afton Alps and Wilmot and such.

00:19:53.000 --> 00:20:03.000

Stuart Winchester: But the real inflection point came in 2019, when IndiePass came along. 2018, Icon added a couple things. So, right now, I’ll give you some stats.

00:20:03.000 --> 00:20:09.000

Stuart Winchester: Of the 124 ski areas that I have inventoried in the Midwest, that you might have a different count.

00:20:08.000 --> 00:20:10.000

Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.

00:20:09.000 --> 00:20:15.000

Stuart Winchester: They’re 117 of those are public. 89 of those are public with aerial lifts.

00:20:15.000 --> 00:20:28.000

Stuart Winchester: 58 of those, although there’s a couple that are just surface toes only, so 58 ski areas in the Midwest are now on a national multi-mountain ski pass. 10 on Epic.

00:20:28.000 --> 00:20:32.000

Stuart Winchester: 11 on Icon, 37 for Indy. So, so to start out with, Matthew.

00:20:32.000 --> 00:20:34.000

Stuart Winchester: How has…

00:20:34.000 --> 00:20:47.000

Stuart Winchester: the acceptance of the Midwest by multi-mountain national passes change the calculus for skiers as they’re planning out their winter in the Midwest, compared to what it was for most of history up until just a few years ago?

00:20:47.000 --> 00:21:02.000

Matthew Zabransky: Yeah, it’s changed dramatically. It’s even going back a little bit further. I think the first initial, if you look at…

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast supports bears, quadrangles, and liberal interpretations of The Iliad. Sign up for the free or paid newsletter to get updates on none of these things. Thank you for supporting independent ski journalism.

Welcome to the Storm’s short-form, news-focused podcast. Don’t worry, I will still write newsletters too. Paid subscribers can leave a comment in the article below, or by joining The Storm’s chat (also below). I’ll respond to some comments in the next episode, which is scheduled for Monday, Sept. 14.

The Zoom transcript (click “transcript” above for the Substack transcript, which will zoom to any point in the video when you click on the associated text block; timestamps below DO NOT MATCH THE VIDEO)

Stuart Winchester: Welcome to The Storm! I’m your host, Stuart Winchester. It is September 10th, 2026, and we have some big, big news in Ski World today.

00:06:07.000 --> 00:06:14.000

Stuart Winchester: So one of the things that I focused on since launching the storm in 2019 is the rapid.

00:06:14.000 --> 00:06:30.000

Stuart Winchester: Exponential growth in US based multi mountain ski passes and one of the biggest icon pass today released five new partners for the 2026 to 27 season. So I’m gonna break those down for you.

00:06:30.000 --> 00:06:46.000

Stuart Winchester: I am going to talk a little bit more about IndyPass and some of their partner shuffles. Then we are going to be joined by IndyPass owner, Eric Mogenson, who will give us a breakdown on all things happening with Indy, Black Mountain, and Entebeni Systems.

00:06:46.000 --> 00:07:01.000

Stuart Winchester: reader reaction, but I want to jump right into Icon Pass. Icon hits us today with, as I said, 5 new ski areas, 3 are full partners, and those… which means 7 days on the Icon Pass.

00:07:01.000 --> 00:07:06.000

Stuart Winchester: 5 days on the Icon Base Pass. All 3 are in Asia.

00:07:06.000 --> 00:07:13.000

Stuart Winchester: The first is Matarau, Japan. That will be ICON’s 10th ski resort in Japan.

00:07:13.000 --> 00:07:28.000

Stuart Winchester: And then, Icon, last year, was the first U.S.-based pass to add a ski area in China, and Icon adds two more today, though they’re nowhere near the ski area that it added last year. They are sort of close.

00:07:28.000 --> 00:07:47.000

Stuart Winchester: to each other. So, we’re gonna break those down first, and then ICON added two mountains to its two-day tier, uh, which it calls Bonus Mountains, which ICON insists are not ICON Pass members, uh, but I insist they are, because you can access them with your ICON Pass. Therefore, they are on.

00:07:47.000 --> 00:07:53.000

Stuart Winchester: the Icon Pass, no matter what Altera tells us. So, let’s start with Montreal, Japan, and if you’re on…

00:07:53.000 --> 00:07:55.000

Stuart Winchester: The…

00:07:56.000 --> 00:08:04.000

Stuart Winchester: If you’re on the video, I’m going to share my screen here because we’re going to do a little visual helping.

00:08:04.000 --> 00:08:10.000

Stuart Winchester: All right, so let’s take this away. All right, so the first one I want to break down.

00:08:10.000 --> 00:08:12.000

Stuart Winchester: is…

00:08:12.000 --> 00:08:26.000

Stuart Winchester: Madarao, Japan, and I’ve actually written about this ski area before, because they were an IndiePass member, and this is the article that I wrote back in 2023, when Madarao joined IndiePass, and Indie’s been a big leader in.

00:08:26.000 --> 00:08:27.000

Stuart Winchester: Bye.

00:08:28.000 --> 00:08:40.000

Stuart Winchester: building out a network in Japan. So, the ski resorts in Japan are interesting. I’ve not skied there, but I’ve been there in the summer and ridden the lifts around.

00:08:40.000 --> 00:08:45.000

Stuart Winchester: And the skiing is very much like a mix of…

00:08:46.000 --> 00:08:58.000

Stuart Winchester: The Cottonwoods and New England. And what I mean by that is, if you’re looking at the screen here, you can see the stats on Mattarau. 512 inches of average annual snowfall.

00:08:58.000 --> 00:09:12.000

Stuart Winchester: Uh, but not a lot of vert, 1,444 feet, and as you can see from the trail map, if you’re looking here, it’s not a big trail footprint. So, what I mean when I say Cottonwoods is the snowfall, and when I say…

00:09:12.000 --> 00:09:29.000

Stuart Winchester: New England, I mean the size. They tend to be not huge vert, sort of compact. If they do have a lot of vert, like the Jacuba Valley ski resorts that are on Vail, they tend to go, uh, kind of straight up and be side by side. You don’t have a lot of the mega resorts as you would have.

00:09:29.000 --> 00:09:40.000

Stuart Winchester: in North America, or especially in Europe. So, it’s good that the passes are all building density in Japan, because the ski areas are not…

00:09:40.000 --> 00:09:43.000

Stuart Winchester: This is not a place that you would go to necessarily.

00:09:43.000 --> 00:10:02.000

Stuart Winchester: like Vail Mountain and spend a week, or like Whistler. Another thing I want to note about Japan, you can see here that Matarau has some glade zones marked. In a lot of cases, skiing off-piste or in the trees, even though that’s what Japan is known for, in a lot of cases, my understanding is that that’s pretty heavily policed and forbidden.

00:10:02.000 --> 00:10:17.000

Stuart Winchester: So you really have to research your ski areas before you go over to figure out which ones will actually allow you to go off-piste, which is what most of us want to do, right? If we’re coming from North America, we’re going there for the big powder. Japan is a little more of an on-piste tradition.

00:10:17.000 --> 00:10:21.000

Stuart Winchester: a little bit more like Europe. So, I…

00:10:21.000 --> 00:10:33.000

Stuart Winchester: there’s… to underscore the scope of what we have now available to us in Japan as U.S.-based pass holders. So, with the addition of Madarao today.

00:10:33.000 --> 00:10:49.000

Stuart Winchester: Now, 53 ski areas in Japan have joined the Epic, Icon, Indy, or Mountain Collective Passes. And I actually, I want to show you something I have that’s really cool. So, I have this gigantic chart, and it’s kind of…

00:10:49.000 --> 00:11:04.000

Stuart Winchester: it’s kind of hard to navigate, but I’m slowly making it a little bit better. And so this is a chart that’s variously called a bunch of different things. Right now, I’m calling it the Encyclopedia Britannica. Sometimes it’s been the Passmaster.

00:11:04.000 --> 00:11:17.000

Stuart Winchester: 5,000. And I just kind of change the name whenever I want, but the link is always the same. And what I’ve… it’s a really slow Google Sheet, and I definitely need a better platform, but if you go, there’s all these tabs.

00:11:17.000 --> 00:11:33.000

Stuart Winchester: Down at the bottom, and again, this is where it’s nice to have the video, so you can see what I’m showing you here. So I have all these tabs. One of the tabs is all MegaPass ski areas. So I have this divided up, and these are just little tables that pivot off the main table, so all the stats are up to date.

00:11:33.000 --> 00:11:35.000

Stuart Winchester: So first, I have this…

00:11:35.000 --> 00:11:42.000

Stuart Winchester: chart here with all ski areas that are on any U.S.-based pass, and we’ll talk about that a little bit more in a second.

00:11:42.000 --> 00:11:43.000

Stuart Winchester: Then I have…

00:11:43.000 --> 00:11:59.000

Stuart Winchester: all U.S. ski areas, then I have New England, I have Japan, so let’s pause on Japan for a moment. 53 ski areas, 11 Epic, 10 Icon, 32 Indy, 1 Mountain Collective. You can see all the stats down here. Again, not big.

00:12:00.000 --> 00:12:16.000

Stuart Winchester: skiable acre footprints, and really, Japan measures things differently than North America. They tend to measure snowpack rather than inches of snowfall. I did find a good average annual snowfall chart on Powderhounds, which is a great site that I’ll talk more about.

00:12:16.000 --> 00:12:25.000

Stuart Winchester: for international research of …

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication. The only way to interact with the podcast is to upgrade to The Storm’s paid tier. Thank you for supporting independent ski journalism.

Welcome to the Storm’s short-form, news-focused podcast. Don’t worry, I will still write newsletters too (I blasted out this post on Smuggs joining Indy Pass this morning). To browse a podcast transcript, click the “transcript” button above - click on any block of text and the audio will jump to that point in the conversation. Paid subscribers can leave a comment in the article below, or by joining The Storm’s chat (also below). I’ll respond to some comments in the next episode.

The Zoom transcript (click “transcript” above for the Substack transcript, which will zoom to any point in the video when you click on the associated text block; timestamps below DO NOT MATCH THE VIDEO)

00:01:40.000 --> 00:01:56.000

Stuart Winchester: Welcome to Storm. It is September 9th, 2026 on a Wednesday. I’ve got a really great show for you today. We are going to visit with Loon President and General Manager, Brian Norton, who has been on the show before.

00:01:56.000 --> 00:02:04.000

Stuart Winchester: But we are going to have him on to talk about the Blackridge expansion that Loon announced last week.

00:02:04.000 --> 00:02:10.000

Stuart Winchester: There’s actually a couple of expansion items in the news today, and I want to hit on those first before we get to Brian.

00:02:10.000 --> 00:02:27.000

Stuart Winchester: Altera today confirmed a couple of things we already knew in their 2026 to 27 capital plan. So unlike Vale who tends to release all their lifts and expansions and projects at once, Vale or Altera lets them leak out.

00:02:27.000 --> 00:02:41.000

Stuart Winchester: and then officially announces them sometime later. So, we had a pretty good idea these were coming. The first one will be up at Mont Tremblant, and Tremblant is…

00:02:41.000 --> 00:02:44.000

Stuart Winchester: If you’ve been there, it’s…

00:02:44.000 --> 00:02:55.000

Stuart Winchester: an IntraWest legacy, so it has one of these really nice walkable villages of the sort that I’m always pushing for, and it has really great ski terrain. Busiest… it’s…

00:02:55.000 --> 00:03:11.000

Stuart Winchester: Traditionally, Intrawest had the three busiest ski areas in Canada. They had, uh, Whistler was number one, obviously. Number two was Tremblant, and number three, surprisingly, was Blue Mountain, Ontario, which we covered on in the podcast.

00:03:11.000 --> 00:03:14.000

Stuart Winchester: Pretty recently, but I want to…

00:03:14.000 --> 00:03:19.000

Stuart Winchester: show you something here. So this is why it’s cool to watch, because you can see…

00:03:19.000 --> 00:03:31.000

Stuart Winchester: some of these things on YouTube or Substack if you’re watching the podcast. So this is Tremblant’s timber expansion that they’re gonna open for 27 to 28. They’re gonna have a new.

00:03:31.000 --> 00:03:46.000

Stuart Winchester: quad, high-speed quad, coming up to the Timber Summit with 8 new trails over here. Uh, and that’s gonna be… let’s see, they gave an acreage on that, 62 acres. So sometimes it’s hard when you see these things, especially if you don’t know the mountain.

00:03:46.000 --> 00:03:57.000

Stuart Winchester: to really know where it fits in. So this one, here’s from the top, you can see the new trails, the timber trails, coming down here off of the new.

00:03:57.000 --> 00:04:09.000

Stuart Winchester: high-speed quad that’ll come out of the Versant-Soleil base. And then here is the existing, if you’re watching, here’s the existing lift that comes up to the current Tremblant Summit.

00:04:09.000 --> 00:04:19.000

Stuart Winchester: And you can see that right here. So the new expansion will go bloop right up here, and we’ll have some new trails over there. And then Altera also announced.

00:04:19.000 --> 00:04:32.000

Stuart Winchester: or not really announced, but reconfirmed, that will be when the Club Med is open, so that all-inclusive experience will be there for Tremblant. So, nice expansion coming for Tremblant. Obviously.

00:04:32.000 --> 00:04:42.000

Stuart Winchester: Altera has had a big expansion ongoing at Deer Valley for years and years. So, Deer Valley, prior to 2023.

00:04:42.000 --> 00:04:46.000

Stuart Winchester: was really just Bald Mountain.

00:04:46.000 --> 00:05:02.000

Stuart Winchester: On over to Empire. Uh, and then here’s the front side, and then this little baldy peak was here. But over the past three seasons, they’ve really blown the place out and added thousands and thousands of acres. Uh, Deer Valley, believe it or not, is now the…

00:05:02.000 --> 00:05:18.000

Stuart Winchester: Sixth largest ski area in America. And, and they’re opening 200 more acres this year. Hale Peak will be another high speed quad. I don’t have a vertical on Hale Peak, but they did confirm today that Hale Peak will be.

00:05:18.000 --> 00:05:29.000

Stuart Winchester: 200 acres, so Deer Valley will now total 4,500 acres. It looks, it sounds pretty big, but right next door to it is Park City, which.

00:05:29.000 --> 00:05:45.000

Stuart Winchester: Combined with the historic canyons is 7,300 acres. That’s the largest ski area in the United States. So those are a couple of the expansions that we have coming up. We’ll talk about another one in a little bit with Loon. And the reason I wanna talk about expansions with you.

00:05:45.000 --> 00:05:47.000

Stuart Winchester: Is… is I… I…

00:05:48.000 --> 00:05:58.000

Stuart Winchester: I write about this over and over again, but sometimes when I write an article, it fritters off into the wilderness, and I’m not able to…

00:05:58.000 --> 00:06:12.000

Stuart Winchester: it doesn’t have the staying power necessarily where people might find it sometime later. So I want to revisit some of these points that I made in the past about expansions and how important they are. So I wrote this article a few years ago.

00:06:12.000 --> 00:06:14.000

Stuart Winchester: And…

00:06:16.000 --> 00:06:18.000

Stuart Winchester: I was looking at…

00:06:18.000 --> 00:06:34.000

Stuart Winchester: So everyone always gets hung up on this active ski ski areas number. And the NSA has tracked this for years and years. And here’s the numbers you can see on the screen if you’re watching in 1991 to 92 season.

00:06:34.000 --> 00:06:46.000

Stuart Winchester: The United States had 546 active ski areas. As of 2023 to 24, it had 486. The number for this season was right around 490.

00:06:46.000 --> 00:06:49.000

Stuart Winchester: So, oftentimes.

00:06:49.000 --> 00:07:04.000

Stuart Winchester: We will see articles usually written by folks who are not ski media, just general media, and they’ll write about this number and they’ll find this statistic and they’ll point to the declining number of ski areas and say, skiing is dying. Climate change is killing skiing.

00:07:05.000 --> 00:07:17.000

Stuart Winchester: But there’s actually a much more nuanced story behind that. So I pulled this number last year when I was reading an article from The Motley Fool, which is an investor site that I use. I love The Motley Fool.

00:07:18.000 --> 00:07:24.000

Stuart Winchester: But it was talking about MTN stock, which a lot of you know is the stock ticker for Vail Resorts.

00:07:24.000 --> 00:07:33.000

Stuart Winchester: And the Motley Fool article pointed out that in 1992, and this was their bear case, their case against buying MTN stock.

00:07:33.000 --> 00:07:44.000

Stuart Winchester: During… I’m gonna quote here, the Motley Fool. During the 1992 ski season, there were 546 ski areas operating in the United States, compared to 486 today. This article’s from 2025.

00:07:44.000 --> 00:07:57.000

Stuart Winchester: Supply, says the fool, is flat to shrinking. On the demand side, 3 of the top 5 busiest ski seasons on record occurred each of the last 3 years. Demand is up. So, they were trying to make the point that.

00:07:58.000 --> 00:08:07.000

Stuart Winchester: Vail Resorts had a …

Welcome to the Storm’s short-form, news-focused podcast. Don’t worry, I will still write newsletters too. To browse a podcast transcript, click the “transcript” button above - click on any block of text and the audio will jump to that point in the conversation. Paid subscribers can leave a comment below - I’ll respond to some in the next episode. Thank you for supporting independent ski journalism.

/:

The Zoom transcript (click “transcript” above for the Substack transcript, which will zoom to any point in the video when you click on the associated text block; timestamps below DO NOT MATCH THE VIDEO)

00:01:51.000 --> 00:02:02.000

Stuart Winchester: Welcome to the Storm! It is September 8th, 2026, and if you are a Storm regular, you are probably wondering what in the heck is going on here.

00:02:02.000 --> 00:02:09.000

Stuart Winchester: Today, we are launching an all-new format for the Storm Skiing Podcast.

00:02:09.000 --> 00:02:22.000

Stuart Winchester: It is shorter, it is news-focused, it will be more frequent, and it will publish the same day that I record it in just about every instance.

00:02:22.000 --> 00:02:23.000

Stuart Winchester: So.

00:02:24.000 --> 00:02:28.000

Stuart Winchester: It’s gonna have a lot of different elements. Uh, takes just…

00:02:28.000 --> 00:02:31.000

Stuart Winchester: on whatever’s happening in the news.

00:02:32.000 --> 00:02:34.000

Stuart Winchester: Okay, let’s scrap that and let’s start again.

00:02:38.000 --> 00:02:41.000

Stuart Winchester: Okay, starting from the top.

00:02:41.000 --> 00:02:42.000

Stuart Winchester: 3.

00:02:42.000 --> 00:02:44.000

Stuart Winchester: Q.

00:02:44.000 --> 00:02:45.000

Stuart Winchester: One.

00:02:45.000 --> 00:02:59.000

Stuart Winchester: Welcome to the Storm! I’m your host, Stuart Winchester. It is September 8th, 2026, and I would like to welcome you all to a brand new version of the Storm Skiing Podcast.

00:02:59.000 --> 00:03:02.000

Stuart Winchester: So, the long-form podcast…

00:03:02.000 --> 00:03:09.000

Stuart Winchester: has been the default of the Storm Skiing Podcast since I launched in 2019.

00:03:09.000 --> 00:03:12.000

Stuart Winchester: Very proud of the Storm Skiing podcast.

00:03:12.000 --> 00:03:16.000

Stuart Winchester: We’re at episode 227.

00:03:16.000 --> 00:03:26.000

Stuart Winchester: I have interviewed the leaders of nearly every large ski area in America, and the leaders of most of the large ski companies in America.

00:03:26.000 --> 00:03:29.000

Stuart Winchester: But something started to feel a little bit off.

00:03:29.000 --> 00:03:35.000

Stuart Winchester: And, you know, I started to think about the kind of podcasts that I consume.

00:03:35.000 --> 00:03:44.000

Stuart Winchester: And those are mostly, frankly, around Michigan football, uh, which is my other obsession besides ski-ski-ski-ski-ski-ski-ski-ski-s.

00:03:44.000 --> 00:04:02.000

Stuart Winchester: tend to be much more news-focused. They tend to be much shorter than the Storm Skiing Podcast. They tend to publish the same day that they record them, and they tend to break down current events. For example, I just went to a Michigan football game.

00:04:02.000 --> 00:04:21.000

Stuart Winchester: on Saturday in Ann Arbor. If you’re even remotely a sports fan, you probably saw the controversial ending to that game when Michigan got an extra second added on, and Bryce Underwood, the quarterback, tossed a Hail Mary to win the game when JJ Buchanan, our transfer receiver, came down with the ball.

00:04:21.000 --> 00:04:36.000

Stuart Winchester: That’s never happened in the history of Michigan football, to have a Hail Mary ending that Michigan wins. So, on the way home, it’s a 10-hour drive back to New York, my wife and I listened to all the different Michigan podcasts that were breaking down that moment. And I realized that…

00:04:36.000 --> 00:04:54.000

Stuart Winchester: as much as I like the Storm Skiing Podcast, and as much as a lot of other people like it, I was not really making the kind of podcast that I actually listen to. And that’s a problem, because in our current media environment, people have a lot of choice.

00:04:54.000 --> 00:04:58.000

Stuart Winchester: They have a lot of of.

00:04:58.000 --> 00:05:13.000

Stuart Winchester: different things they can give their attention to, and it’s hard to get and keep their attention. So, I want to say right off, I am not killing the long-form storm skiing podcast. It will not end with episode 227. In fact, I have about 5 or 6 in the can that I’ve been sitting on.

00:05:13.000 --> 00:05:30.000

Stuart Winchester: for this news, and I will release those soon, and my thanks to the folks who participated in those podcasts for their everlasting patience as I got this together. So, I’m still gonna make the Storm Skiing Podcast. The frequency will go from about 45 a year at its peak.

00:05:30.000 --> 00:05:47.000

Stuart Winchester: It’s probably about a dozen a year or so, and sometimes there will just be a time when the long form is the more appropriate form for telling the story of a mountain. If I have someone new on, for example, so for example, I’ve never had.

00:05:47.000 --> 00:06:02.000

Stuart Winchester: Uh, the GM or owner of Sierra at Tahoe in California, an important mountain on the podcast. Never had Wolf Creek on the podcast, never had Mount Baker. If I were to get one of those folks, I would want to do a long form, tell the story of the ski area. But it’s not always necessary to.

00:06:02.000 --> 00:06:18.000

Stuart Winchester: Tell the entire story of the ski area and its history and its culture when you just want to talk about a new lift or you just want to talk about the fact that it joined a new pass. So this shorter podcast will be more frequent.

00:06:18.000 --> 00:06:35.000

Stuart Winchester: It will have different segments, segments with takes when I just talk about what’s going on. It will still have interviews, much shorter interviews. Today we have an interview with an awesome guest, Snow Partner CEO Joe Heschen, one of the smartest guys in skiing.

00:06:35.000 --> 00:06:45.000

Stuart Winchester: But before, Joe and I went on for two hours. This time, we’ll be able to condense it down. And then at the end of each episode, my intent.

00:06:45.000 --> 00:07:02.000

Stuart Winchester: and hope is to have reader interaction, and this will be a feature available only to paid supporters of the Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast, and you can upgrade to a paid subscription at stormskiing.com anytime. The podcast will be for everyone, as it’s always been.

00:07:02.000 --> 00:07:18.000

Stuart Winchester: But only paid subscribers will be able to interact with the podcast. And the way that they will be able to do that is that they will be able to write a comment on the article that accompanies the newsletter on stormskiing.com.

00:07:18.000 --> 00:07:32.000

Stuart Winchester: And the next day, I will read some of those comments and react to them as appropriate. And I’ll talk a little bit more about that later and why I’m doing it that way. But for now, I want to assure you.

00:07:32.000 --> 00:07:48.000

Stuart Winchester: This podcast is going to come to you the same way your podcasts always have. Now, there is a video version. You can watch that on YouTube, will be our primary channel, as well as Substack, which is where the newsletter is published. There will always, always, always be an audio version.

00:07:48.000 --> 00:07:58.000

Stuart Winchester: And it will always come to the same places that you have always gotten the podcast. If that’s Apple, if that’s Spotify, there’s some that I don’t even know.

00:07:58.000 --> 00:08:11.000

Stuart Winchester: how the podcast got on there, or why it’s on there. There’s an RSS feed that spits this out from Substack. That will not change. The storm will be… when you go looking for it, you’re going to find the storm.

00:08:12.000 --> 00:08:13.000

Stuart Winchester: So.

00:08:13.000 --> 00:08:24.000

Stuart Winchester: This is something I’m super excited about because I think it wi…

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast still has a podcast. Get new episodes the moment they’re live by subscribing to the email newsletter:

Who

John Kelly, CEO of Taos Ski Valley, New Mexico

Recorded on

November 13, 2025

About Taos Ski Valley

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Louis Bacon (since December 2013)

Located in: Taos Ski Valley, New Mexico

Year founded: 1955

Pass affiliations:

* Ikon Pass – 7 days, no blackouts

* Ikon Base Pass – 5 days, holiday blackouts

* Ikon Session Pass – 1-4 days, holiday blackouts

* Mountain Collective – 2 days, no blackouts

* Ski New Mexico True Pass – 2 days, holiday blackouts

Base elevation: 9,350 feet

Summit elevation: 12,450 feet lift-served, 12,481 hike-to

Vertical drop: 3,100 feet lift-served, 3,131 hike-to.

Skiable acres: 1,294 (some hike-to)

Average annual snowfall: 300 inches claimed on website; calculated 36-year average using data sourced from Taos’ 2010 master development plan, Ski New Mexico tallies, and media reports is 233 inches. The 10-year average falls to 166 inches. Here’s the year-by-year breakdown:

Trail count: 110 (24% beginner, 25% intermediate, 51% expert)

Lift count: 13 (1 pulse gondola, 2 high-speed quads, 2 fixed-grip quads, 4 triples, 1 double, 3 carpets)

Why I interviewed him

Let’s start with a superficially troubling number: Taos’ long, steady decline in average annual skier visits:

That doesn’t look so good, especially when laid alongside the long-term increase in national skier visits:

Taos not only declined in the context of national skier visits, but also among its peers. In winter 1983-84, Taos drew more skiers (241,000) than Telluride (132,460), Big Sky (136,000), Jackson Hole (177,000), Whitefish (I’m lacking an estimate for that winter, but the ski area then known as “Big Mountain” logged 209,000 skiers in 1980-81 and 170,581 in 1985-86). Taos (dark blue line below), continued to out-duel this group through about the mid-90s before falling off a cliff:

So what happened? 1995 Taos, a freeride mecca before freeride was cool, should have been perfectly suited to flourish in a cultural moment when skiers began demanding more interesting terrain than the groomed superhighways that had become the industry’s default setting. Sure, Taos was remote and a bit harder to access than, say, Keystone or Park City, but so were Jackson and Whitefish and Big Sky and Telluride. A partial explanation: Taos stopped modernizing. After replacing the Lift 2 double with a fixed-grip quad in 1994, Taos didn’t install another new chairlift for 19 years. The first detachable didn’t arrive until 2018. The resort banned snowboards until 2008. Meanwhile, Big Sky laced a tram to the summit of Lone Peak in 1995 and started pushing detachable quads up the mountain; the first high-speed quads arrived at Telluride in 1986 and Whitefish in 1989.

It’s not a perfect narrative – while Jackson Hole rolled out its short Sublette detach in the mid-90s, the mountain didn’t install an upper-mountain high-speed chairlift until Casper in 2012. Skier visits went up and up and up all that time, probably due in large part to aggressive improvements at the Jackson Hole airport.

Maybe, though, it’s as simple as this: banger snow years descended upon Taos – and New Mexico in general – from the late ‘80s through mid-‘90s. It’s little surprise that attendance ups-and-downs largely mirror snowfall patterns:

But, as the corresponding trendlines show, Taos’ skier visits have not declined at the same rate as the mountain’s average annual snowfall. And while Jackson’s long-term average snowfall has remained relatively constant, attendance has crept steadily upward. Attendance spiked at both mountains when the 2018-19 season brought both plentiful snow and the introduction of the Ikon Pass:

Unfortunately, Taos stopped reporting skier visits after the Covid-shortened 2019-20 season, so we have less concrete insight into whether the mountain’s recent investments in a reconfigured beginner area and a second detachable on the backside have insulated it from two historically poor snow years. This is why it’s nice to have basic visitation data, and why I’m pushing the ski industry to again publicize annual attendance for ski areas occupying public lands (since going live with a chart of 2,406 years of skier visit data for 97 ski areas with 10 or more years of attendance available, I’m up to 2,822 years across 108 ski areas, and I have a total of 3,802 years of data across 184 active U.S. ski areas for which I could find at least one year of attendance).

We do know this: Taos doesn’t want to return to the world of 300,000-plus skier visits. Somewhere between 250,000 and 275,000 is the “right number for the experience we want Taos to have,” Kelly tells us on the pod. Meaning: fewer skiers spread via a modern lift network is a better business than 364,000 skiers funneling onto double chairs. This flips the busiest-equals-best narrative that made skier-visit counts a 20th-century bragging point. I’ve heard the same logic articulated by the leaders of Killington, Waterville Valley, and other ski areas that have created a better business even with fewer skiers on their mountains. Jackson Hole, too, halted its relentless upward surge – that 2020-21 dip was deliberate, as the mountain exited Ikon Base and implemented a reservation system.

This approach makes sense to me. With U.S. skier visits surging (until this year) and an Ikon or Epic pass in every pocket, no one wants to brag about being busy anymore. Space is the new volume. Social media can still transform one bad liftline into an eternal meme, but at least most skiers on the ground will have a better day most of the time than they probably would have 30 years ago.

What doesn’t make sense to me is why, in a less-is-more era, ski area operators have suddenly decided that skier visits should be guarded like Fort Knox. If fewer skiers is a good thing and a stated goal, why hide the numbers? The resorts ought to just say “Hey we’ve deliberately reduced our annual skier count from 300,000 to 250,000 [or whatever] to create a better mountain for you.” Instead, this secrecy around volume just looks cagey - if national skier visit numbers are up, then why should skiers just believe ski areas when they say “trust us, it’s better now,” and offer no data to support it? Perception is reality, and today’s skiing zeitgeist, as channeled by social media, tells us that American skiers perceive busier mountains today than they did a decade ago.

But I’m getting off track. Since Louis Bacon bought Taos in 2013, he’s funded an almost-complete renovation of what had become America’s most decrepit destination ski resort. I don’t think any mountain operating on U.S. Forest Service lands has more completely remade itself in the past decade (rapidly changing Big Sky, Deer Valley, and Powder Mountain operate on private property). Glimmering new but reset to 1970s volume, Taos is beautifully positioned to tap a skiing public that’s burned-out on Colorado and Utah crowds but accusto…

Who

Dan Skelton, President and Chief Operating Officer of Blue Mountain, Ontario

Recorded on

October 27, 2025

About Blue Mountain, Ontario

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Alterra Mountain Company

Located in: The Blue Mountains, Ontario, Canada

Year founded: 1941

Pass affiliations: Unlimited on Ikon and Ikon Base

Base elevation: 229 feet/750 meters

Summit elevation: 1,480 feet/451 meters

Vertical drop: 730 feet/223 meters

Skiable acres: 364 acres/147 hectares

Average annual snowfall: 154 inches/391 centimeters

Trail count: 43

Lift count: 11 (5 six-packs, 1 fixed-grip quad, 1 triple, 4 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Blue Mountain, Ontario’s lift fleet)

Why I interviewed him: A Very Dumb Story About a Very Dumb Person, Volume I

In the winter of 1995-96, I developed Vertical Fever, a syndrome in which the afflicted believes, in a way that is beyond reason and immune from contrary arguments, that the skiing will be better if the ski hill is taller.

This was a problem. Because in 1995, I lived, as I had all my life up to that point, in Michigan. Specifically, Sanford, a flat town in a flat county in what may be the flattest region of the country, the Tri-Cities area of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. Fortunately for a skier, Michigan is cold and full of ski areas. Unfortunately, these ski areas are small or short or both. The tallest of the 33 ski areas inventoried on the 1995 Michigan Downhill Skiing Guide is Boyne Highlands, which then and today promotes a probably made-up vertical drop of 550 feet. Right across the street was 427-vertical-foot Nub’s Nob, one of six Lower Peninsula ski areas to exceed 400 vertical, along with Caberfae (485 feet), Shanty Creek Schuss Mountain (450 feet), Sugar Loaf (500 feet), and Boyne Mountain (495 feet).

I’d skied all of these and I’d skied them all many times since my first real ski season, which was the previous winter, 1994-95. But once I’d stopped summersaulting down the hill and learned to carve and to land jumps, I grew bored. Skiing in 1995 was not like skiing in 2026. Terrain parks were rare and, anyway, off limits to skiers. Jumping was forbidden. There were signs all over saying so. Everything was groomed and everything was about carving turns, even though grooming was inconsistent and the shaped skis that would transform the average skier into a carver were years away from mass market distribution.

So I scoured maps and guidebooks for ski areas of any size in any direction that I could reasonably drive to. To the south lay Ohio and Indiana. Useless. To the north, at the far western end of the Upper Peninsula, lay several 600-ish footers (Mount Bohemia did not open until 2000), but Michigan is a deceptively large state made larger by the inconvenience of driving around gigantic lakes – those UP ski areas were 10 hours away. But also to the north, east instead of west and just over the Canadian border, lay Searchmont: 750 vertical feet of ungladed bananas skiing, with little cliffs and rocks and glades all over. It was a glorious real-life validation of the less-stuffy Canadian ski-area management culture that I’d read about in Skiing and Powder. And it was only a four-hour drive each way, an easy daytrip on the cruise-control-empty interstates of northern Michigan. This is what a Canadian 700-plus-footer is like, I decided, and I searched for more of them.

That’s when I became obsessed with Blue Mountain, this mysterious guidebook mapdot floating south of Lake Huron. Stat-line, as listed in contemporary guide books: 720 vertical feet, 13 chairlifts and two T-bars, 920 skiable acres (this was, um, not accurate). A Midwest hack, a backdoor to a secret mini-New England unknown to Michiganders. As with Searchmont, I would rise at 4 and arrive by lifts-on and soar all day among the woodsy wide-open drop-step terrain of Ontario yahoo skiing.

Yeah it didn’t work out like that. The first time I tried to drive to Blue Mountain, I wound up at Mount Brighton, 273 miles away in Southeast Michigan. A blizzard had forced course correction to a more achievable destination. But the second time, I made it. Here’s how it went, per a journal entry I wrote few days later:

Monday, March 25th, 1996 – 11:53 p.m.

Let’s just call Friday the day that didn’t quite flow. In fact, it didn’t flow like no day on skis ever hasn’t. First off, I only slept four hours. Normally , I wouldn’t give a f**k, but that was directly following three hours the night before, which didn’t help my status in an already exhausting week. Then there was the drive. I figured four, maybe five hours at the most, 250 miles, give or take. Wrong. I only realized this somewhere well over the Canadian border. Six hours, 350 miles. Then there’s the mountain.

I knew Blue was big, but I was not, I’ll admit, in any way, shape, or form prepared for what I found Friday. The place is enormous by Midwest standards, though not as mammoth as I’d originally thought coming up the road, scoping out the two private resorts. Notice I said “enormous,” not necessarily “good.” Which is sad, cause, for one thing, they’re trying pretty hard to make a good hill, and, #2, I drove a long f****n’ way to get there. The whole thing bore a striking resemblance to western skiing – enormous base lodges, hugely wide runs, high-speed chairs. Which I suppose makes it ideal for families. Then there’s the fifty miles or so of safety fence, zero ungroomed runs, and as many jumps as a Fat Albert convention. This, I surmise, makes it extremely unideal for Stuarts. In fact, I really didn’t enjoy it at all. It was bland, repetitive, and almost sickening in its nature. I was tired, pissed, and lonely. The highlight of the day was jumping off the cornice which was the subject of much inner conflict. But I did it, and I’m glad, and then I drove home, and I’m glad for that too.

I only skied four-and-a-half hours. My ticket was good til’ ten, but I considered a lot of things. For starters, it only cost me twenty bucks; second, I told Clint I was gonna make it a point to get out of there by four [to hang out], so I sorta tried; third, I’d skied the whole f****n’ place anyhow, and I really didn’t feel like getting home at four AM. It’s not like I didn’t ski well, cause I was actually carving and reacting magnificently (to the terrain, not the carving). I was fluid, but I needed more variety, and they just didn’t deliver.

It would have been nice to have the internet in 1996 (it existed, but almost no one used it, partly because there was almost nothing on it, including driving directions, maps, or trailmaps).

Great endorsement of Blue Mountain, Stu. You managed to convince people not to go and make the people who do ski there feel bad about it all at once. Slow clap for aggressive transparency.

But my message here is hardly “Blue Mountain sucks don’t go.” Blue Mountain is, as it was 30 years ago, exactly what it needs to be: a rapid-fire lap machine optimized to provide a consistent ski experience to the residents of Canada’s densest metro area, Toronto. Blue is, historically and probably still, the third-busiest ski area in Canada after Tremblant and Whistler. It is a low-altitude, variable-weather, high-volume business tasked with the twin burdens of being the sole public outpost for recreational skiing in a ridgeline of upscale private clubs and being a profitable enterprise. It is, from a dollar-generating and Ikon Pass-dispersal-to-the-West point of view, probably one of Alterra’s most important ski areas.

The problem, then, is not that every ski area isn’t like Searchmont. The problem is that, in 1996, I thought every ski area should be like Searchmont. It was like walking into a pizza parlor and complaining that they didn’t sell tacos. I was young and dumb, and it didn’t occur to me until arrival that a 700-ish-vertical-foot ski area dangling off the far eastern end of the Lake Superior wilderness (Searchmont), would, by custom and by necessity, offer a far different ski experience than a 700-ish-vertical-foot …

Who

Tim Smith, President and General Manager of Waterville Valley, New Hampshire

Recorded on

November 12, 2025

About Waterville Valley

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: The Sununu Family

Located in: Waterville Valley, New Hampshire

Year founded: 1966

Pass affiliations:

* Indy Pass, Indy+ Pass: 2 days, no blackouts

* White Mountain Super Pass: unlimited, no blackouts

* Indy Learn-to-Turn: 3 days, includes rentals, lesson, lift ticket; limited lift access

* Ski New Hampshire Kids Passport: 1 day with holiday blackouts

* Uphill New England: no lift access

Base elevation: 1,984 feet (highest in New Hampshire, 3rd in New England)

Summit elevation: 4,004 feet (2nd-highest in New Hampshire, 5th in New England)

Vertical drop: 2,020 feet (4th-highest in New Hampshire, 14th in New England)

Skiable acres: 265

Average annual snowfall: 148 inches

Trail count: 62 (14% novice, 64% intermediate, 22% advanced)

Lift count: 10 (1 six-pack, 1 high-speed quad, 2 triples, 2 doubles, 2 T-bars, 2 carpets)

Why I interviewed him

Well no one wants to hear this but we got to $300 lift tickets the same way we got to $80,000 pickup trucks. We’re Americans Goddamnit and we just can’t do stickshifts and we sure as s**t ain’t standin’ up on our skis to ride back up the mountain. It’s pure agony you see. We need us a nine-pack chairlift with a bubble and a breakroom and a minibar and surround sound and Lazy-Boy seats and hell no we ain’t ridin’ it with eight strangers we’ll hold back and take a whole chair to our ownselves. And it needs to move fast, Son. Like embarrass-the-Concord fast because God help us we spend more than 90 seconds with our own thoughts.

I’m not aiming to get kicked out of America here, but if I may submit a few requests regarding our self-inflicted false price floors. I would like the option of purchasing a brand-new car with a manual transmission and windows rolled up and down with a hand-crank. I would like to keep pedaling my bicycle. I would like to cut the number of holidays with commercial mandates by 80 percent. I would prefer that we not set the air-conditioners to 60 when it’s 65 degrees outside. This doesn’t mean I want to get rid of all the air-conditioners but could we maybe take it easy on the frostbite-in-July overkill of it all?

My Heretic Wishlist for American Skiing includes but is not limited to: more surface lifts, especially to serve terrain parks, high-altitude exposed terrain, and expert pods; on-resort lodging that does not still require a commute-by-personal-vehicle to reach the lifts; and thoughtful terrain management that retains ungroomed sections for skiers who like things about skiing other than going fast.

Waterville Valley is doing all of these things. It is perhaps the only major American ski area in decades to replace a chairlift with a surface lift on a non-beginner terrain pod, and the only one to build two new T-bars this century. A planned gondola would connect Waterville Valley the town with Waterville Valley the ski area, correcting an only-in-America setup that separates these inseparable places by two miles of road. The glade network grows annually in both subtle and obvious ways.

This is not a ski area going in reverse. Waterville is modern and keeps modernizing. The four-year-old Tecumseh bubble six-pack, though bookended with T-bars, is one of the nicest chairlifts in America. Skiers still go groomer-kaboom on morning cord. Suburban office-park dads with interstate commutes and a habit of lecturing the Facebook Commons about the virtues of snow tires can still park their 42-wheel-drive Abrams-Caterpillar-F-15,000 Tanktruck in sub-parking lot 42Z and walk uphill to the lifts. But Waterville Valley is one of a handful of American ski areas, along with Killington and Deer Valley and Winter Park, that is embracing all of our luxe cultural excesses while pursuing the very un-American ambition of putting more skiers close to skiing.

No ski area is perfect. For all the cash saved on those T-bars, peak-day Waterville lift tickets still hit $145. The mountain’s season pass is the second-most expensive single-mountain season passes in New England – more than a top-line Epic Pass (an adult WV pass includes a free pass for a kid age 6 to 12, which is great if you have one of those). That’s bold pricing for the 22nd-largest ski area in New England, especially one that still spins three Stadeli chairlifts that predate the extinction of the dinosaurs. And two high-speed chairlifts is not a lot of high-speed chairlifts for a 2,000-vertical-foot ski area (though about half of New England’s 2,000-footers run just two or fewer detaches).

Yeah I know. Sick burn from someone who was waxing about surface lifts four paragraphs ago. I may have collected too many ski area Lego blocks in my mental bucket, and they don’t always click together back here on planet Earth. “More villages,” I say while dismissing Aspen as a subsidized simulacrum of itself. “Big fast lifts rule,” I say while setting off fire alarms as first-generation chairlifts disintegrate and the cost of their most basic replacements escalates. “No-grooming, all-glades makes the best ski area,” I say, while condemning resort operators for $356 lift tickets that dam the masses. “Vail is too expensive,” I say. “Vail is too cheap,” I also say. “Modernize our chairlifts,” I say while celebrating the joy of riding an antique Riblet double. I endorse ski areas splitting off from conglomerates and ski areas joining them. These narratives can feel contradictory at best and schizophrenic at worst.

But that tension is part of what draws me to lift-served ski areas, where two things central to my worldview – wild nature and human invention – merge. Or perhaps more accurately, collide. Both forces act at all times not only to extinguish one another, but themselves: above-freezing temps trash two feet of new snow; bad liftline management cancels out the capacity benefits of a $12 million lift upgrade. Making a ski area function, then, requires continual tweaking, of both the nuanced and look-at-us-press-release variety. A ski area is a business, sure, but that’s almost a coincidence. The act of building and running a ski area is foremost an art, architecture, and engineering project that requires a somewhat madcap conductor to succeed.

As with any artform, there is no one correct and final way to build a ski area. The variety is central to skiing’s appeal. But there are operator/artist attributes - flexibility, inventiveness, consistency tempered by openness to change - that contribute to the overall quality and cohesion of the individual ski area experience in the context of competing ski areas. In the current version of Waterville Valley, we find one of our best contemporary examples of a ski area evolving toward the best version of itself under the stewardship of owners and managers possessing exactly these traits.

What we talked about

The return of World Cup training and events to Waterville; drifting away from and back toward freeskiing culture; the best terrain parks in New England; why terrain parks are drifting away from mega-features; what happened to all the halfpipes?; and ramps?; no really no one wore helmets in the ‘90s; building terrain parks before institutional knowledge and the internet; the lost Hidden Valley, Wisconsin ski area; the rise of the high-speed ropetow; why Waterville replaced one T-bar and one Poma with a new T-bar (rather than a chairlift); why Waterville installed night skiing; the return …

Who

Susan Cross, Vice President of Operations at Aspen Skiing Company (and former Mountain Manager of Snowmass)

Recorded on

November 14, 2025 - which was well before I traveled to Snowmass and chased Cross around a bit in the pow. There she is tiny in the distance:

About Aspen Skiing Company

Aspen Skiing Company (Skico) is part of something called Aspen One. Don’t ask me what that is because even though they rolled it out two years ago I still have no idea what they’re talking about. All I know or care about is that they own four ski areas and here is what I know about them:

Don’t be fooled by the scale of the map above - at 3,342 acres, Snowmass is larger than Aspen Mountain, Buttermilk, and Aspen Highlands combined. The monster 4,400-foot vert means these lifts are massively shrunken to fit the map - Snowmass operates three of the 10 longest chairlifts in America, and seven chairlifts over one mile long:

You can’t ski or ride a lift between the four mountains, but free shuttles connect them all. Aspen Mountain, Highlands, and Buttermilk are all bunched together near town, and Snowmass is a short drive (15 to 20 minutes if traffic is clear and dependent upon which base area you want to hit):

Why I interviewed her

American ski areas will often re-use chairlifts or snowcats that other operators have outgrown. Aspen Mountain re-used a whole town.

In 1879, Aspen the city didn’t exist, and by 1890 more than 5,000 people lived there. They came for silver, not snow. In less than a decade they laid out the Victorian street grid of brick and wood-framed buildings using hand tools and horses, with the Roaring Fork River as their supply road.

Aspen’s population collapsed in the economic depressions of the 1890s and didn’t rebound to 5,000 for 100 years. The 1940 Census counted 777 residents. That was 16 years before the first chairlift rose up Ajax, a perfect ski mountain above an intact but semi-abandoned town made pointless by history.

It was an amazing coincidence, really. Americans would never build a ski town on purpose. That’s where the parking lots go. But hey it all worked out: Aspen evolved into a ski town that offset its European walk-to-the-chairlifts sensibility with a hard-coded American refusal to expand the historic street grid in favor of protectionism and mansion-building. The contemporary result is one of the world’s most expensive real estate markets cosplaying as a quaint ski town, a lively and walkable mixed-use community of the sort that we idealize but refuse to build more of. Aspen’s population is now around 7,000, most of whom live there by benefit of longevity, subsidy, inheritance, or extreme wealth. The city’s median household income is just over $50,000. The median home price is $9.5 million. Anyone clinging to the illusion that Aspen is an actual ski town should consider that it took 25 years to approve and build the Hero’s chairlift. Imagine what the fellows who built this whole city in half a decade without the benefit of electricity or cement trucks or paved roads would make of that.

The illusory city, however, is a dynamic separate from the skiing. Aspen, despite its somewhat dated lift fleet, remains one of America’s best small ski mountains. But it is small, and, with no green terrain and barely any blues, the ski area lacks the substance and scale to draw tourists west of Summit County and Vail.

Sister mountain Snowmass does that. And while Snowmass did not benefit from an already-built town at its base, it did benefit from not having one, in that the mountain could evolve with a purpose and speed that Ajax, boxed in by geography and politics, never could. Snowmass has built 13 new aerial lifts this century, including the two-station, mountain-redefining Elk Camp Gondola; the Village Express six-pack, which is the fourth-longest chairlift in America; and, in just the past two years, a considerably lengthened Coney high-speed quad and a new six-pack to replace the Elk Camp chairlift.

I’ve focused on Aspen’s story a bit over the years (including this 2021 podcast with former Skico CEO Mike Kaplan), but probably not enough. The four Aspen mountains are some of the most important in American skiing, even if visitation doesn’t quite match their status as skiing word-association champion among non-skiers (more on that below). Aspen, a leader not just in skiing but in housing, the environment, and culture, carries narrative heft, and the company’s status as favored property of Alterra part-owner Henry Crown hints at deeper influence than Skico likely takes credit for.

Aspen, like Big Sky and Deer Valley and Sun Valley, is rapidly emerging as one of the new titans of American skiing, unleashing a modernization drive that should lead, as Cross says in our conversation, to an average of at least one new lift per year across the portfolio. Snowmass’ 2023 U.S. Forest Service masterplan envisions a fully modern mountain with snowmaking to the summit. Necessary and exciting as that all is, forthcoming updates to the dated masterplans at Aspen Highlands (2013) and Buttermilk (2008), could, Skico officials tell me, offer a complete rethinking of what Aspen-Snowmass is and how the ski areas orbit one another as a unit.

And they do need to rethink the whole package. Challenging Skico’s pre-eminence in the Circle of American Ski Gods are many obstacles, including but not limited to: an address that’s just a bit remote for Denver to bother with or tourists to comprehend; a rinky-dink airport that can’t land a paper plane; an only-come-if-you-have-nine-houses rap on the affordability matrix; a toxic combination of one of America’s most expensive season passes and most expensive walk-up lift tickets; and national pass partners who do a poor job making it clear that Aspen is not one ski area but four.

A lot to overcome, but I think they’ll figure it out. The skiing is too good not to.

What we talked about

“I thought I had found Heaven” upon arrival in Aspen; Aspen in the 1990s; $200 a month to live in Carbondale; “as soon as you go up on the lifts, the mountain hasn’t changed”; when Skico purchased formerly independent Aspen Highlands; Highlands pre-detachable lifts; four ski areas working (and not), as one ski resort; why there is “minimal sharing” of employees between the four mountains; why “two winter seasons, and then I was going back to Boston” didn’t quite work out; why “total guilt sets in” if Cross misses a day of skiing and how she “deliberately” makes “at least a couple of runs” happen every day of the winter and encourages everyone else to do the same; Long Shot in the morning; the four pods of Snowmass; why tourists tend to lock onto one section of the mountain; “a lot of people don’t realize their lift ticket is good for the four mountains”; “there’s plenty of room to spread out and have a blast” even at busy Snowmass; defining the four mountains without typecasting them; no seriously there are no green runs on Aspen Mountain; the new Elk Camp six-pack; why Elk Camp doesn’t terminate at the top of Burnt Mountain; why Elk Camp d…

Who

Shaun Sutner, snowsports columnist for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette and Telegram.com

Recorded on

November 24, 2025

Why I interviewed him

Hey Man, we do this every year:

What we talked about

The psychology of injury recovery; the power of being there; the “gladiatorial atmosphere” of ski racing; the East’s strong winter; a Canadian facepalm; the Black Mountain, New Hampshire co-op; Hermon Mountain, Maine for sale; how to make a crappy old ski area into a modern-seeming ski area without big infrastructure upgrades; is every ski area closing a tragedy?; Lost Valley, Maine; lost Berkshires ski areas that make great backcountry ski spots; new owners at Ragged, New Hampshire; Magic Mountain, Vermont and the four-year lift installation; would Vail Resorts purchase Smugglers’ Notch, Vermont?; assessing Killington’s independent owners one year in; the Super Star six-pack upgrade at Killington; is it worth buying a new lift if it doesn’t improve capacity?; why Loveland, Colorado’s only detachable lift is also one of its shortest; expectations and potential from Berkshire East buying Burke, Vermont; is the demise of the good ol’ boy overstated?; Wachusett’s new six-pack; locals hate everything; priorities for New England lift upgrades; will Cannon ever replace its decommissioned tram (and should it be with a gondola)?; should New Hampshire lease out Cannon?; Whaleback’s chairlift woes; thoughts on the Boston Ski Show moving to Connecticut; and BOA boot buckles.

What I got wrong

Most of these aren’t “wrong,” so much as outdated:

* We recorded this as Sutner was still recovering from an injury, and he said he wouldn’t be able to get back to skiing until, um, February. Which is now I guess.

* We talked about the “budding winter,” which started strong in November, but has kept banging away to be one of the best ski seasons in recent New England history.

* We discuss since-resolved drama at Black Mountain around a withheld liquor license for the mid-mountain champagne shack.

* Sutner didn’t get this wrong – he was prescient, however, in saying Pacific Group Resorts would do something “big” after selling Ragged – the company purchased Silver Star, British Columbia shortly after we spoke:

Then there were these:

* I didn’t really understand the point of Hermon Mountain, but between recording and releasing this episode, I was able to visit it. Stand by for that write-up, which helped me understand it as a teen holding pen for Bangor Maine.

* I said that Pacific Group Resorts “may have” purchased Powderhorn after its Flat Top Flyer high-speed quad installation – that is the case; the lift arrived in 2015, and PGR bought the ski area in 2018.

* Sure enough, Burke joined the Berkshire Summit Pass - a season pass for sister resorts Berkshire East and Catamount, as well as Bousquet. Here are the details:

I said the Mohegan Sun Arena held 6,000 to 8,000 people – it’s about 8,000 for basketball games, which is what I was referring to.

Podcast Notes

On the closing of Four Seasons ski area in New York

On the new owners at Ragged and Killington

On Geoff Hatheway at Magic Mountain, Vermont

My pods with Geoff are both a bit dated, but you can keep up with Magic by subscribing to Hatheway’s Alpine Update emails, which is one of the most transparently honest ski area newsletters in America.

On Wachusett’s Clueless Construction Updates

Well done, Stimpson:

On other pods mentioned

The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us.

Who

Jimmy Ackerson, General Manager of Corralco, Chile

Recorded on

July 24, 2025

About Corralco

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Located in: Curacautín, Araucanía, Chile

Year founded: 2003, by Enrique Bascur

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

Base elevation: 4,724 feet (1,440 meters)

Summit elevation: 7,874 feet (2,400 meters) top of lifts; 9,400 feet (2,865 meters) hike-to

Vertical drop: 3,150 feet (960 meters) lift-served; 4,676 feet (1,425 meters) hike-to

Skiable acres: 2,475 acres lift served; 4,448 acres (1,800 hectares), including hike-to terrain

Average annual snowfall: 354 inches (899 cm)

Trail count: 34

Lift count: 7 (1 high-speed quad, 1 double, 5 J-bars)

Why I interviewed him

The Andes run the length of South America, 4,300 miles from the southern tip of Argentina north to Venezuela. It is the longest continental mountain range on Earth, nearly six times the length of the Alps and 1,300 miles longer than the Rockies. It is the highest mountain range outside of Asia, topping out at 22,841 feet on Mount Aconcagua, more than a mile higher than the tallest point in the Rockies (14,439-foot Mount Elbert) or Alps (15,772-foot Mont Blanc).

So this ought to be one hell of a ski region, right? If the Alps house more than 500 ski areas and the Rockies several hundred, then the Andes ought to at least be in the triple digits?

Surprisingly, no. Of the seven nations transected by the Andes, only Argentina and Chile host outdoor, lift-served ski areas. Between the two countries, I’m only able to assemble a list of 37 ski areas, 33 of which skiresort.info categorizes as “temporarily closed” – a designation the site typically reserves for outfits that have not operated over the past several seasons.

For skiers hoping to live eternal winter by commuting to the Upside Down each May through October, this roster may be a bit of a record scratch. There just aren’t that many ski areas in the Southern Hemisphere. Outside of South America, the balance – another few dozen total - sit in Australia and New Zealand, with scattered novelties such as Afriski lodged at the top of Lesotho. There are probably more ski areas in New England than there are south of the equator.

That explains why the U.S.-based multimountain ski passes have been slow to move into the Southern Hemisphere – there isn’t much there to move into. Ikon and Mountain Collective each have just one destination on the continent, and it’s the same destination: Valle Nevado. Epic offers absolutely nothing in South America.

Even with few options, Vail moved south a decade ago with its purchase of Perisher, Australia’s largest ski area. That English-speaking nation was a logical first pass frontier, but the five Kangaroo resorts claimed by the Epic and Ikon passes are by far the five largest in the country, and they’re a 45-year flight from America. New Zealand is similarly remote, with more but generally less-developed ski areas, and Ikon has established a small presence there.

But South America remains mostly wide open, despite its obvious appeal to North Americans: the majesty of the Andes, the novelty of summer skiing, and direct flights with no major timezone hopping required. Mountain Capital Partners has dropped anchor in Chile, purchasing Valle Nevado in 2023, neighboring La Parva the following year, and bidding for also-neighboring El Colorado in 2025 (that sale is pending regulatory review).

But perhaps it’s time for a broader invasion. Last March, Indy Pass added Corralco as its first South American – and first Southern Hemisphere – ski area. That, as Ackerson and I discuss in the podcast, could be just the start of Indy’s ambitions for a continent-spanning (or at least, Argentina- and Chile-spanning) resort network.

So this is a good time to start getting to know Chilean skiing. And Ackerson, longtime head of the Chilean Ski Areas Association, former leader of Chilean giants Portillo and Valle Nevado, and a Connecticut-born transplant who has been living the upside-down life for more than 50 years, is probably better suited than anyone on the planet to give us that intro.

What we talked about

Reverse ski seasons; why Corralco draws (and retains) so much more snow than any other ski area in Chile; no snowmaking; Corralco as training ground for national ski teams; the logistics of moving a high-speed quad from Holiday Valley, New York to the Chilean Andes; rebuilding a lift as a longer machine; how that lift transformed Corralco; new lift, new alignment; the business impact of replacing a double chair with a high-speed quad; how a dude who grew up in Connecticut with non-skiing parents ended up running a ski area in South America; Chile’s allure; Portillo; Chilean skiing past and present; Corralco’s founding and evolution; shrinking South American ski areas; Mountain Capital Partners (MCP) buying four more ski areas in Chile after purchasing Valle Nevado in 2023 and La Parva in 2024; the Americans are coming; why La Parva, Valle Nevado, and El Colorado “have to be consolidated” for the benefit of future skiing in Chile; MCP’s impact on Chilean skiing so far; “the culture is very different here” both on the hill and off; MCP’s challenges as they settle into Chilean skiing; why Corralco joined Indy Pass; a potential Indy Pass network in South America; and getting to Corralco from the U.S., from airplane to access road – “we have no switchbacks.”

What I got wrong

* In the intro, I said that it was the “heart of ski season in South America.” This was true when we recorded this conversation in July 2025. It’s not true in January 2026, when the Chilean ski season is long over.

* I said the highest peak in Chile only received a few inches of snow per year and didn’t retain it, but I couldn’t remember the name of the peak – it is 22,615-foot Ojos del Salado.

* I gave new stats for Corralco’s high-speed quad, but did not mention where those stats came from – my source was skiresort.info, which catalogues a 4,921-foot length and 1,148-foot vertical drop for the lift, both substantially longer than the 4,230-foot length and 688-foot vertical rise that Lift Blog documents for the antecedent Mardi Gras lift at Holiday Valley, New York. We discuss the logistics and mechanics of moving this machine from North to South America and extending it in the pod. Here are a few pics of this machine I took in New York in January 2022:

Podcast Notes

On Corralco’s evolving footprint

Corralco is a new-ish ski area, at least insofar as public access goes. The 2008 trailmap shows a modest vertical drop served by surface lifts:

But growth has been rapid, and by 2022, the ski area resembled modern Corralco, which is now an international training center for athletes:

On Camp Jewel, Connecticut

Ackerson learned to ski on a two-tow bump called Camp Jewell, a YMCA center in Connecticut. NELSAP has some fun info on this defunct ski area, including photos of what’s left of the lifts.

On Sigi Grottendorder

Ackerson’s conduit to South American skiing came in the form of Austrian-born Sigi Grottendorfer, who led the ski schools at both Sugarbush, Vermont and Portillo, Chile. He passed away in 2023 – The Valley Reporter ran an obituary with more info on Grottendorfer’s expansive and colorful life.

On Chile “five years after the coup had occurred”

We reference past political instability in Chile, referring to the 1973 coup that launched the military dictatorship of the notorious Augusto Pinochet. The nation transitioned back to democracy in 1990 and is considered safe and s…

Who

Ryan Brown, Director of Golf & Ski at The Mountaintop at Grand Geneva, Wisconsin

Recorded on

June 17, 2025

About the Mountaintop at Grand Geneva

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Marcus Hotels

Located in: Lake Geneva, Wisconsin

Year founded: 1968

Pass affiliations: None

Closest neighboring U.S. ski areas: Alpine Valley (:23), Wilmot Mountain (:29), Crystal Ridge (:48), Alpine Hills Adventure Park (1:04)

Base elevation: 847 feet

Summit elevation: 962 feet

Vertical drop: 115 feet

Skiable acres: 30

Average annual snowfall: 34 inches

Trail count: 21 (41% beginner, 41% intermediate, 18% advanced)

Lift count: 6 (3 doubles, 1 ropetow, 2 carpets)

Why I interviewed him

Of America’s various mega-regions, the Midwest is the quietest about its history. It lacks the quaint-town Colonialism and Revolutionary pride of the self-satisfied East, the cowboy wildness and adobe earthiness of the West, the defiant resentment of the Lost Glory South. Our seventh-grade Michigan History class stapled together the state’s timeline mostly as a series of French explorers passing through on their way to somewhere more interesting. They were followed by a wave of industrial loggers who mowed the primeval forests into pancakes. Then the factories showed up. And so the state’s legacy was framed not as one of political or cultural or military primacy, but of brand, the place that stamped out Chevys and Fords by the tens of millions.

To understand the Midwest, then, we must look for what’s permanent. The land itself won’t do. It’s mostly soil, mostly flat. Great for farming, bad for vistas. Dirt doesn’t speak to the soul like rock, like mountains. What humans built doesn’t tell us a much better story. Everything in the Midwest feels too new to conceal ghosts. The largest cities rose late, were destroyed in turn by fires and freeways, eventually recharged with arenas and glass-walled buildings that fail to echo or honor the past. Nothing lasts: the Detroit Pistons built the Palace of Auburn Hills in 1988 and developers demolished it 32 years later; the Detroit Lions (and, for a time, the Pistons) played at the Pontiac Silverdome, a titanic, 82,600-spectator stadium that opened in 1976 and came down in 2013 (37 years old). History seemed to bypass the region, corralling the major wars to the east and shooing the natural disasters to the west and south. Even shipwrecks lose their doubloons-and-antique-cannons romance in the Midwest: the Great Lakes most famous downed vessel, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, sank into Lake Superior in 1975. Her cargo was 26,535 tons of taconite ore pellets. A sad story, but not exactly the sinking of the Titanic.

Our Midwest ancestors did leave us one legacy that no one has yet demolished: names. Place names are perhaps the best cultural relics of the various peoples who occupied this land since the glaciers retreated 12,000-ish years ago. Thousands of Midwest cities, towns, and counties carry Native American names. “Michigan” is derived from the Algonquin “Mishigamaw,” meaning “big lake”; “Minnesota” from the Sioux word meaning “cloudy water.” The legacies of French explorers and missionaries live on in “Detroit” (French for “strait”), “Marquette” (17th century French missionary Jacques Marquette), and “Eau Claire” (“clear water”).

But one global immigration funnel dominated what became the modern Midwest: 50 percent of Wisconsin’s population descends from German, Nordic, or Scandinavian countries, who arrived in waves from the Colonial era through the early 1900s. The surnames are everywhere: Schmitz and Meyer and Webber and Schultz and Olson and Hanson. But these Old-Worlders came a bit late to name the cities and towns. So they named what they built instead. And they built a lot of ski areas. Ten of Wisconsin’s 34 ski areas carry names evocative of Europe’s cold regions, Scandinavia and the Alps:

I wonder what it must have been like, in 18-something-or-other, to leave a place where the Alps stood high on the horizon, where your family had lived in the same stone house for centuries, and sail for God knows how many weeks or months across an ocean, and slow roll overland by oxen cart or whatever they moved about in back then, and at the end of this great journey find yourself in… Wisconsin? They would have likely been unprepared for the landscape aesthetic. Tourism is a modern invention. “The elite of ancient Egypt spent their fortunes building pyramids and having their corpses mummified, but none of them thought of going shopping in Babylon or taking a skiing holiday in Phoenicia [partly in present-day Lebanon, which is home to as many as seven ski areas],” Yuval Noah Harari writes in Sapiens his 2015 “brief history of humankind.” Imagine old Friedrich, who had never left Bavaria, reconstituting his world in the hillocks and flats of the Midwest.

Nothing against Wisconsin, but fast-forward 200 years, when the robots can give us a side-by-side of the upper Midwest and the European Alps, and it’s pretty clear why one is a global tourist destination and the other is known mostly as a place that makes a lot of cheese. And well you can imagine why Friedrich might want to summon a little bit of the old country to the texture of his life in the form of a ski area name. That these two worlds - the glorious Alps and humble Wisconsin skiing - overlap, even in a handful of place names, suggests a yearning for a life abandoned, a natural act of pining by a species that was not built to move their life across timezones.

This is not a perfect analysis. Most – perhaps none – of these ski areas was founded by actual immigrants, but by their descendants. The Germanic languages spoken by these immigrant waves did not survive assimilation. But these little cultural tokens did. The aura of ancestral place endured when even language fell away. These little ski areas honor that.

And by injecting grandiosity into the everyday, they do something else. In coloring some of the world’s most compact ski centers with the aura of some of its most iconic, their founders left us a message: these ski areas, humble as they are, matter. They fuse us to the past and they fuse us to the majesty of the up-high, prove to us that skiing is worth doing anywhere that it can be done, ensure that the ability to move like that and to feel the things that movement makes you feel are not exclusive realms fenced into the clouds, somewhere beyond means and imagination.

Which brings us to Grand Geneva, a ski area name that evokes the great Swiss gateway city to the Alps. Too bad reality rarely matches up with the easiest narrative. The resort draws its name from the nearby town of Lake Geneva, which a 19th-century surveyor named not after the Swiss city, but after Geneva, New York, a city (that is apparently named after Geneva, Switzerland), on the shores of Seneca Lake, the largest of the state’s 11 finger lakes. Regardless, the lofty name was the fifth choice for a ski area originally called “Indian Knob.” That lasted three years, until the ski area shuttered and re-opened as the venerable Playboy Ski Area in 1968. More regrettable names followed – Americana Resort from 1982 to ’93, Hotdog Mountain from 1992 to ’94 – before going with the most obvious and least-questionable name, though its official moniker, “The Mountaintop at Grand Geneva” is one of the more awkward names in American skiing.

None of which explains the principal question of this sector: why I interviewed Mr. Brown. Well, I skied a bunch of Milwaukee bumps on my drive up to Bohemia from Chicago last year, this was one of them, and I thought it was a cute little place. I also wondered how, with its small-even-for-W…

Who

Mike Giorgio, Vice President and General Manager of Stowe Mountain, Vermont

Recorded on

October 8, 2025

About Stowe

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Vail Resorts, which also owns:

Located in: Stowe, Vermont

Year founded: 1934

Pass affiliations:

* Epic Pass: unlimited access

* Epic Local Pass: unlimited access with holiday blackouts

* Epic Northeast Value Pass: 10 days with holiday blackouts

* Epic Northeast Midweek Pass: 5 midweek days with holiday blackouts

* Access on Epic Day Pass All and 32 Resort tiers

* Ski Vermont 4 Pass – up to one day, with blackouts

* Ski Vermont Fifth Grade Passport – 3 days, with blackouts

Closest neighboring U.S. ski areas: Smugglers’ Notch (ski-to or 40-ish-minute drive in winter, when route 108 is closed over the notch), Bolton Valley (:45), Cochran’s (:50), Mad River Glen (:55), Sugarbush (:56)

Base elevation: 1,265 feet (at Toll House double)

Summit elevation: 3,625 feet (top of the gondola), 4,395 feet at top of Mt. Mansfield

Vertical drop: 2,360 feet lift-served, 3,130 feet hike-to

Skiable acres: 485

Average annual snowfall: 314 inches

Trail count: 116 (16% beginner, 55% intermediate, 29% advanced)

Lift count: 12 (1 eight-passenger gondola, 1 six-passenger gondola, 1 six-pack, 3 high-speed quads, 1 fixed-grip quad, 1 triple, 2 doubles, 2 carpets)

Why I interviewed him

There is no Aspen of the East, but if I had to choose an Aspen of the East, it would be Stowe. And not just because Aspen Mountain and Stowe offer a similar fierce-down, with top-to-bottom fall-line zippers and bumpy-bumps spliced by massive glade pockets. Not just because each ski area rises near the far end of densely bunched resorts that the skier must drive past to reach them. Not just because the towns are similarly insular and expensive and tucked away. Not just because the wintertime highway ends at both places, an anachronistic act of surrender to nature from a mechanized world accustomed to fencing out the seasons. And not just because each is a cultural stand-in for mechanized skiing in a brand-obsessed, half-snowy nation that hates snow and is mostly filled with non-skiers who know nothing about the activity other than the fact that it exists. Everyone knows about Aspen and Stowe even if they’ll never ski, in the same way that everyone knows about LeBron James even if they’ve never watched basketball.

All of that would be sufficient to make the Stowe-is-Aspen-East argument. But the core identity parallel is one that threads all these tensions while defying their assumed outcome. Consider the remoteness of 1934 Stowe and 1947 Aspen, two mountains in the pre-snowmaking, pre-interstate era, where cutting a ski area only made sense because that’s where it snowed the most. Both grew in similar fashion. First slowly toward the summit with surface lifts and mile-long single chairs crawling up the incline. Then double chairs and gondolas and snowguns and detachable chairlifts. A ski area for the town evolves into a ski area for the world. Hotels a la luxe at the base, traffic backed up to the interstate, corporate owners and $261 lift tickets.

That sounds like a formula for a ruined world. But Stowe the ski area, like Aspen Mountain the ski area, has never lost its wild soul. Even buffed out and six-pack equipped and Epic Pass-enabled, Stowe remains a hell of a mountain, one of the best in New England, one of my favorite anywhere. With its monster snowfalls, its endless and perfectly spaced glades, its never-groomed expert zones, its sprawling footprint tucked beneath the Mansfield summit, its direct access to rugged and forbidding backcountry, Stowe, perhaps the most western-like mountain in the East, remains a skier’s mountain, a fierce and humbling proving ground, an any-skier’s destination not because of its trimmings, but because of the Christmas tree itself.

Still, Stowe will never be Aspen, because Stowe does not sit at 8,000 feet and Stowe does not have three accessory ski areas and Stowe the Town does not grid from the lift base like Aspen the Town but rather lies eight miles down the road. Also Stowe is owned by Vail Resorts, and can you just imagine? But in a cultural moment that assumes ski area ruination-by-the-consolidation-modernization-mega-passification axis-of-mainstreaming, Aspen and Stowe tell mirrored versions of a more nuanced story. Two ski areas, skinned in the digital-mechanical infrastructure that modernity demands, able to at once accommodate the modern skier and the ancient mountain, with all of its quirks and character. All of its amazing skiing.

What we talked about

Stowe the Legend; Vail Resorts’ leadership carousel; ascending to ski area leadership without on-mountain experience; Mount Brighton, Michigan and Midwest skiing; struggles at Paoli Peaks, Indiana; how the Sunrise six-pack upgrade of the old Mountain triple changed the mountain; whether the Four Runner quad could ever become a six-pack; considering the future of the Lookout Double and Mansfield Gondola; who owns the land in and around the ski area; whether Stowe has terrain expansion potential; the proposed Smugglers’ Notch gondola connection and whether Vail would ever buy Smuggs; “you just don’t understand how much is here until you’re here”; why Stowe only claims 485 acres of skiable terrain; protecting the Front Four; extending Stowe’s season last spring; snowmaking in a snowbelt; the impact and future of paid parking; on-mountain bed-base potential; Epic Friend 50 percent off lift tickets; and Stowe locals and the Epic Pass.

What I got wrong

On details

I noted that one of my favorite runs was not a marked run at all: the terrain beneath the Lookout double chair. In fact, most of the trail beneath this mile-plus-long lift is a market run called, uh, “Lookout.” So I stand corrected. However, the trailmap makes this full-throttle, narrow bumper – which feels like skiing on a rising tide – look wide, peaceful, and groomable. It is none of those things, at least for its first third or so.

On skiable acres

* I said that Killington claimed “like 1,600 acres” of terrain – the exact claimed number is 1,509 acres.

* I said that Mad River Glen claimed far fewer skiable acres than it probably could, but I was thinking of an out-of-date stat. The mountain claims just 115 acres of trails – basically nothing for a 2,000-vertical-foot mountain, but also “800 acres of tree-skiing access.” The number listed on the Pass Smasher Deluxe is 915 acres.

On season closings

I intimated that Stowe had always closed the third weekend in April. That appears to be mostly true for the past two-ish decades, which is as far back as New England Ski History has records. The mountain did push late once, however, in 2007, and closed early during the horrible no-snow winter of 2011-12 (April 1), and the Covid-is-here-to-kill-us-all shutdown of 2020 (March 14).

On doing better prep

I asked whether Stowe had considered making its commuter bus free, but it, um, already is. That’s called Reeserch, Folks.

On lift ticket rates

I claimed that Stowe’s top lift ticket price would drop from $239 last year to $235 this coming season, but that’s inaccurate. Upon further review, the peak walk-up rate appears to be increasing to $261 this coming winter:

Which means Vail’s record of cranking Stowe lift ticket rates up remains consistent:

On opening hours

I said that the lifts at Stowe sometimes opened at “7:00 or 7:30,” but the earliest ski lift currently opens at 8:00 most mornings (the Over Easy transit gondola opens at 7:30). The Fourrunner quad used to open at 7:30 a.m. on weekends and holidays. I’m not sure when mountain ops changed that. Here’s the lift schedule clipped from the circa 2018 trailmap:

…

The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us.

Who

Lonie Glieberman, Founder, Owner, & President of Mount Bohemia, Michigan

Recorded on

November 19, 2025

About Mount Bohemia

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Lonie Glieberman

Located in: Lac La Belle, Michigan

Year founded: 2000, by Lonie

Pass affiliations: None

Reciprocal partners: Boho has developed one of the strongest reciprocal pass programs in the nation, with lift tickets to 34 partner mountains. To protect the mountain’s more distant partners from local ticket-hackers, those ski areas typically exclude in-state and border-state residents from the freebies. Here’s the map:

And here’s the Big Dumb Storm Chart detailing each mountain and its Boho access:

Closest neighboring ski areas: Mont Ripley (:50)

Base elevation: 624 feet

Summit elevation: 1,522 feet

Vertical drop: 898 feet

Skiable acres: 585

Average annual snowfall: 273 inches

Trail count: It’s hard to say exactly, as Boho adds new trails every year, and its map is one of the more confusing ones in American skiing, both as you try analyzing it on this screen, and as you’re actually navigating the mountain. My advice is to not try too hard to make the trailmap make sense. Everything is skiable with enough snow, and no matter what, you’re going to end up back at one of the two chairlifts or the road, where a shuttlebus will come along within a few minutes.

Lift count: 2 (1 triple, 1 double)

Why I interviewed him

For those of us who lived through a certain version of America, Mount Bohemia is a fever dream, an impossible thing, a bantered-about-with-friends-in-a-basement-rec-room-idea that could never possibly be. This is because we grew up in a world in which such niche-cool things never happened. Before the internet spilled from the academic-military fringe into the mainstream around 1996, We The Commoners fed our brains with a subsistence diet of information meted out by institutional media gatekeepers. What I mean by “gatekeepers” is the limited number of enterprises who could afford the broadcast licenses, printing presses, editorial staffs, and building and technology infrastructure that for decades tethered news and information to costly distribution mechanisms.

In some ways this was a better and more reliable world: vetted, edited, fact-checked. Even ostensibly niche media – the Electronic Gaming Monthly and Nintendo Power magazines that I devoured monthly – emerged from this cubicle-in-an-office-tower Process that guaranteed a sober, reality-based information exchange.

But this professionalized, high-cost-of-entry, let’s-get-Bob’s-sign-off-before-we-run-this, don’t-piss-off-the-advertisers world limited options, which in turn limited imaginations – or at least limited the real-world risks anyone with money was willing to take to create something different. We had four national television networks and a couple dozen cable channels and one or two local newspapers and three or four national magazines devoted to niche pursuits like skiing. We had bookstores and libraries and the strange, ephemeral world of radio. We had titanic, impossible-to-imagine-now big-box chain stores ordering the world’s music and movies into labelled bins, from which shoppers could hope – by properly interpreting content from box-design flare or maybe just by luck – to pluck some soul-altering novelty.

There was little novelty. Or at least, not much that didn’t feel like a slightly different version of something you’d already consumed. Everything, no matter how subversive its skin, had to appeal to the masses, whose money was required to support the enterprise of content creation. Pseudo-rebel networks such as ESPN and MTV quickly built global brands by applying the established institutional framework of network television to the mainstream-but-information-poor cultural centerpieces of sports and music.

This cultural sameness expressed itself not just in media, but in every part of life: America’s brand-name sprawl-ture (sprawl culture) of restaurants and clothing stores and home décor emporia; its stuff-freeways-through-downtown ruining of our great cities; its three car companies stamping out nondescript sedans by the millions.

Skiing has long acted as a rebel’s escape from staid American culture, but it has also been hemmed in by it. Yes, said Skiing Incorporated circa 1992, we can allow a photo of some fellow jumping off a cliff if it helps convince Nabisco Bob fly his family out to Colorado for New Year’s, so long as his family is at no risk of actually locating any cliffs to jump off of upon arrival. After all, 1992 Bob has no meaningful outlet through which to highlight this advertising-experience disconnect.

The internet broke this whole system. Everywhere, for everything. If I wanted, say, a Detroit Pistons hoodie in 1995, I had to drive to a dozen stores and choose the least-bad version from the three places that stocked them. Today I have far more choice at far less hassle: I can browse hundreds of designs online without leaving the house. Same for office furniture or shoes or litterboxes or laundry baskets or cars. And especially for media and information. Consumer choice is greater not only because the internet eliminated distance, but also because it largely eliminated the enormous costs required to actualize a tangible thing from the imagination.

There were trade-offs, of course. Our current version of reality has too many options, too many poorly made products, too much bad information. But the internet did a really good job of democratizing preferences and uniting dispersed communities around niche interests. Yes, this means that a global community of morons can assemble over their shared belief that the planet is flat, but it also means that legions of Star Wars or Marvel Comics or football obsessives can unite to demand more of these specific things. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the dormant Star Wars and Marvel franchises rebooted in spectacular, omnipresent fashion within a decade of the .com era’s dawn.

The trajectory was slightly different in skiing. The big-name ski areas today are largely the same set of big-name ski areas that we had 30 years ago, at least in America (Canada is a very different story). But what the internet helped bring to skiing was an awareness that the desire for turns outside of groomed runs was not the hyper-specific desire of the most dedicated, living-in-a-campervan-with-their-dog skiers, but a relatively mainstream preference. Established ski areas adapted, adding glades and terrain parks and ungroomed zones. The major ski areas of 2025 are far more interesting versions of the ski areas that existed under the same names in 1995.

Dramatic and welcome as these additions were, they were just additions. No ski area completely reversed itself and shut out the mainstream skier. No one stopped grooming or eliminated their ski school or stopped renting gear. But they did act as something of a proof-of-concept for minimalist ski areas that would…

Who

Deb Hatley, Owner of Hatley Pointe, North Carolina

Recorded on

July 30, 2025

About Hatley Pointe

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Deb and David Hatley since 2023 - purchased from Orville English, who had owned and operated the resort since 1992

Located in: Mars Hill, North Carolina

Year founded: 1969 (as Wolf Laurel or Wolf Ridge; both names used over the decades)

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

Closest neighboring ski areas: Cataloochee (1:25), Sugar Mountain (1:26)

Base elevation: 4,000 feet

Summit elevation: 4,700 feet

Vertical drop: 700 feet

Skiable acres: 54

Average annual snowfall: 65 inches

Trail count: 21 (4 beginner, 11 intermediate, 6 advanced)

Lift count: 4 active (1 fixed-grip quad, 1 ropetow, 2 carpets); 2 inactive, both on the upper mountain (1 fixed-grip quad, 1 double)

Why I interviewed her

Our world has not one map, but many. Nature drew its own with waterways and mountain ranges and ecosystems and tectonic plates. We drew our maps on top of these, to track our roads and borders and political districts and pipelines and railroad tracks.

Our maps are functional, simplistic. They insist on fictions. Like the 1,260-mile-long imaginary straight line that supposedly splices the United States from Canada between Washington State and Minnesota. This frontier is real so long as we say so, but if humanity disappeared tomorrow, so would that line.

Nature’s maps are more resilient. This is where water flows because this is where water flows. If we all go away, the water keeps flowing. This flow, in turn, impacts the shape and function of the entire world.

One of nature’s most interesting maps is its mountain map. For most of human existence, mountains mattered much more to us than they do now. Meaning: we had to respect these giant rocks because they stood convincingly in our way. It took European settlers centuries to navigate en masse over the Appalachians, which is not even a severe mountain range, by global mountain-range standards. But paved roads and tunnels and gas stations every five miles have muted these mountains’ drama. You can now drive from the Atlantic Ocean to the Midwest in half a day.

So spoiled by infrastructure, we easily forget how dramatically mountains command huge parts of our world. In America, we know this about our country: the North is cold and the South is warm. And we define these regions using battle maps from a 19th Century war that neatly bisected the nation. Another imaginary line. We travel south for beaches and north to ski and it is like this everywhere, a gentle progression, a continent-length slide that warms as you descend from Alaska to Panama.

But mountains disrupt this logic. Because where the land goes up, the air grows cooler. And there are mountains all over. And so we have skiing not just in expected places such as Vermont and Maine and Michigan and Washington, but in completely irrational ones like Arizona and New Mexico and Southern California. And North Carolina.

North Carolina. That’s the one that surprised me. When I started skiing, I mean. Riding hokey-poke chairlifts up 1990s Midwest hills that wouldn’t qualify as rideable surf breaks, I peered out at the world to figure out where else people skied and what that skiing was like. And I was astonished by how many places had organized skiing with cut trails and chairlifts and lift tickets, and by how many of them were way down the Michigan-to-Florida slide-line in places where I thought that winter never came: West Virginia and Virginia and Maryland. And North Carolina.

Yes there are ski areas in more improbable states. But Cloudmont, situated in, of all places, Alabama, spins its ropetow for a few days every other year or so. North Carolina, home to six ski areas spinning a combined 35 chairlifts, allows for no such ambiguity: this is a ski state. And these half-dozen ski centers are not marginal operations: Sugar Mountain and Cataloochee opened for the season last week, and they sometimes open in October. Sugar spins a six-pack and two detach quads on a 1,200-foot vertical drop.

This geographic quirk is a product of our wonderful Appalachian Mountain chain, which reaches its highest points not in New England but in North Carolina, where Mount Mitchell peaks at 6,684 feet, 396 feet higher than the summit of New Hampshire’s Mount Washington. This is not an anomaly: North Carolina is home to six summits taller than Mount Washington, and 12 of the 20-highest in the Appalachians, a range that stretches from Alabama to Newfoundland.

And it’s not just the summits that are taller in North Carolina. The highest ski area base elevation in New England is Saddleback, which measures 2,147 feet at the bottom of the South Branch quad (the mountain more typically uses the 2,460-foot measurement at the bottom of the Rangeley quad). Either way, it’s more than 1,000 feet below the lowest base-area elevation in North Carolina:

Unfortunately, mountains and elevation don’t automatically equal snow. And the Southern Appalachians are not exactly the Kootenays. It snows some, sometimes, but not so much, so often, that skiing can get by on nature’s contributions alone - at least not in any commercially reliable form. It’s no coincidence that North Carolina didn’t develop any organized ski centers until the 1960s, when snowmaking machines became efficient and common enough for mass deployment. But it’s plenty cold up at 4,000 feet, and there’s no shortage of water. Snowguns proved to be skiing’s last essential ingredient.

Well, there was one final ingredient to the recipe of southern skiing: roads. Back to man’s maps. Specifically, America’s interstate system, which steamrolled the countryside throughout the 1960s and passes just a few miles to Hatley Pointe’s west. Without these superhighways, western North Carolina would still be a high-peaked wilderness unknown and inaccessible to most of us.

It’s kind of amazing when you consider all the maps together: a severe mountain region drawn into the borders of a stable and prosperous nation that builds physical infrastructure easing the movement of people with disposable income to otherwise inaccessible places that have been modified for novel uses by tapping a large and innovative industrial plant that has reduced the miraculous – flight, electricity, the internet - to the commonplace. And it’s within the context of all these maps that a couple who knows nothing about skiing can purchase an established but declining ski resort and remake it as an upscale modern family ski center in the space of 18 months.

What we talked about

Hurricane Helene fallout; “it took every second until we opened up to make it there,” even with a year idle; the “really tough” decision not to open for the 2023-24 ski season; “we did not realize what we were getting ourselves into”; buying a ski area when you’ve never worked at a ski area and have only skied a few times; who almost bought Wolf Ridge and why Orville picked the Hatleys instead; the importance of service; fixing up a broken-down ski resort that “felt very old”; updating without losing the approachable family essence; why it was “absolutely necessary” to change the ski area’s name; “when you pulled in, the first thing that you were introduced to … were broken-down machines and school buses”; Bible verses and bare trails and busted-up everything; “we could have spent two years just doing cleanup of junk and old things everywhere”; Hatley Pointe then and now; why Hatley removed the double chair; a detachable six-pack at Hatley?; chairlifts as marketing and branding tools; why the Breakaway terrain closed and when it could return and in what form; what a rebuilt summit lodge could look like; Hatley Pointe’s new trails; potential expansion; a day-ski area, a resort, or both?; lift-served mountain bike park incoming; night-skiing expansion; “I was shocked” at the level of après…

Who

Wes Kryger, President and Ayden Wilber, Vice President of Mountain Operations at Greek Peak, New York

Recorded on

June 30, 2025

About Greek Peak

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: John Meier

Located in: Cortland, New York

Year founded: 1957 – opened Jan. 11, 1958

Pass affiliations: Indy Pass, Indy+ Pass – 2 days

Closest neighboring U.S. ski areas: Labrador (:30), Song (:31)

Base elevation: 1,148 feet

Summit elevation: 2,100 feet

Vertical drop: 952 feet

Skiable acres: 300

Average annual snowfall: 120 inches

Trail count: 46 (10 easier, 16 more difficult, 15 most difficult, 5 expert, 4 terrain parks)

Lift count: 8 (1 fixed-grip quad, 2 triples, 3 doubles – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Greek Peak’s lift fleet)

Why I interviewed them

No reason not to just reprint what I wrote about the bump earlier this year:

All anyone wants from a family ski trip is this: not too far, not too crowded, not too expensive, not too steep, not too small, not too Bro-y. Terrain variety and ample grooming and lots of snow, preferably from the sky. Onsite lodging and onsite food that doesn’t taste like it emerged from the ration box of a war that ended 75 years ago. A humane access road and lots of parking. Ordered liftlines and easy ticket pickup and a big lodge to meet up and hang out in. We’re not too picky you see but all that would be ideal.

My standard answer to anyone from NYC making such an inquiry has been “hahaha yeah get on a plane and go out West.” But only if you purchased lift tickets 10 to 16 months in advance of your vacation. Otherwise you could settle a family of four on Mars for less than the cost of a six-day trip to Colorado. But after MLK Weekend, I have a new answer for picky non-picky New Yorkers: just go to Greek Peak.

Though I’d skied here in the past and am well-versed on all ski centers within a six-hour drive of Manhattan, it had not been obvious to me that Greek Peak was so ideally situated for a FamSki. Perhaps because I’d been in Solo Dad tree-skiing mode on previous visits and perhaps because the old trailmap presented the ski area in a vertical fortress motif aligned with its mythological trail-naming scheme:

But here is how we experienced the place on one of the busiest weekends of the year:

1. No lines to pick up tickets. Just these folks standing around in jackets, producing an RFID card from some clandestine pouch and syncing it to the QR code on my phone.

2. Nothing resembling a serious liftline outside of the somewhat chaotic Visions “express” (a carpet-loaded fixed-grip quad). Double and triple chairs, scattered at odd spots and shooting off in all directions, effectively dispersing skiers across a broad multi-faced ridge. The highlight being this double chair originally commissioned by Socrates in 407 B.C.:

3. Best of all: endless, wide-open, uncrowded top-to-bottom true greens – the only sort of run that my entire family can ski both stress-free and together.

Those runs ambled for a thousand vertical feet. The Hope Lake Lodge, complete with waterpark and good restaurant, sits directly across the street. A shuttle runs back and forth all day long. Greek Peak, while deeper inland than many Great Lakes-adjacent ski areas, pulls steady lake-effect, meaning glades everywhere (albeit thinly covered). It snowed almost the entire weekend, sometimes heavily. Greek Peak’s updated trailmap better reflects its orientation as a snowy family funhouse (though it somewhat obscures the mountain’s ever-improving status as a destination for Glade Bro):

For MLK 2024, we had visited Camelback, seeking the same slopeside-hotel-with-waterpark-decent-food-family-skiing combo. But it kinda sucked. The rooms, tinted with an Ikea-by-the-Susquehanna energy, were half the size of those at Greek Peak and had cost three times more. Our first room could have doubled as the smoking pen at a public airport (we requested, and received, another). The hill was half-open and overrun with people who seemed to look up and be genuinely surprised to find themselves strapped to snoskis. Mandatory parking fees even with a $600-a-night room; mandatory $7-per-night, per-skier ski check (which I dodged); and perhaps the worst liftline management I’ve ever witnessed had, among many other factors, added up to “let’s look for something better next year.”

That something was Greek Peak, though the alternative only occurred to me when I attended an industry event at the resort in September and re-considered its physical plant undistracted by ski-day chaos. Really, this will never be a true alternative for most NYC skiers – at four hours from Manhattan, Greek Peak is the same distance as far larger Stratton or Mount Snow. I like both of those mountains, but I know which one I’m driving my family to when our only time to ski together is the same time that everyone else has to ski together.

What we talked about

116,000 skier visits; two GP trails getting snowmaking for the first time; top-to-bottom greens; Greek Peak’s family founding in the 1950s – “any time you told my dad [Al Kryger] he couldn’t do it, he would do it just to prove you wrong”; reminiscing on vintage Greek Peak; why Greek Peak made it when similar ski areas like Scotch Valley went bust; the importance of having “hardcore skiers” run a ski area; does the interstate matter?; the unique dynamics of working in – and continuing – a family business; the saga and long-term impact of building a full resort hotel across the street from the ski area; “a ski area is liking running a small municipality”; why the family sold the ski area more than half a century after its founding; staying on at the family business when it’s no longer a family business; John Meier arrives; why Greek Peak sold Toggenburg; long-term snowmaking ambitions; potential terrain expansion – where and how much; “having more than one good ski season in a row would be helpful” in planning a future expansion; how Greek Peak modernized its snowmaking system and cut its snowmaking hours in half while making more snow; five times more snowguns; Great Lakes lake-effect snow; Greek Peak’s growing glade network and long evolution from a no-jumps-allowed old-school operation to today’s more freewheeling environment; potential lift upgrades; why Greek Peak is unlikely to ever have a high-speed lift; keeping a circa 1960s lift made by an obscure company running; why Greek Peak replaced an old double with a used triple on Chair 3 a few years ago; deciding to renovate or replace a lift; how the Visions 1A quad changed Greek Peak and where a similar lift could make sense; why Greek Peak shortened Chair 2; and the power of Indy Pass for small, independent ski areas.

What I got wrong

On Scotch Valley ski area

I said that Scotch Valley went out of business “in the late ‘90s.” As far as I can tell, the ski area’s last year of operation was 1998. At its peak, the 750-vertical-foot ski area ran a triple chair and two doubles serving a typical quirky-fun New York trail network. I’m sorry I missed skiing this one. Interestingly, the triple chair still appears to operate as part of a summer camp. I wish they would also run a winter camp called “we’re re-opening this ski area”:

On Toggenburg

I paraphrased a quote from Greek Peak owner John Meier, from a story I wrote around the 2021 closing of Toggenburg. Here’s the quote in full:

“Skiing doesn’t have to happen in New York State,” Meier said. “It takes an entrepreneur, it takes a business investor. You gotta want to do it, and you’re not going to make a lot of money doing it. You’re going to wonder why are you doing this? It’s a very difficult business in general. It’s very capital-intensive business. There’s a lot easier ways to make a buck. This is a labor of love for me.”

And here’s the full story, which lays out the full Togg saga:

Podcast Notes

On Hope Lake Lodge and New York’s lack of slopeside lodging

I’ve complained about this endlessly, but it’s strange and counter-environmental that New York’s two largest ski areas offer no slopeside lodging. …

Who

Barry Owens, General Manager of Treetops, Michigan

Recorded on

June 13, 2025

About Treetops

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Treetops Acquisition Company LLC

Located in: Gaylord, Michigan

Year founded: 1954

Pass affiliations: Indy Pass, Indy+ Pass – 2 days

Closest neighboring ski areas: Otsego (:07), Boyne Mountain (:34), Hanson Hills (:39), Shanty Creek (:51), The Highlands (:58), Nub’s Nob (1:00)

Base elevation: 1,110 feet

Summit elevation: 1,333 feet

Vertical drop: 223 feet

Skiable acres: 80

Average annual snowfall: 140 inches

Trail count: 25 (30% beginner, 40% intermediate, 30% advanced)

Lift count: 5 (3 triples, 2 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Treetops’ lift fleet)

Why I interviewed him

The first 10 ski areas I ever skied, in order, were:

* Mott Mountain, Michigan

* Apple Mountain, Michigan

* Snow Snake, Michigan

* Caberfae, Michigan

* Crystal Mountain, Michigan

* Nub’s Nob, Michigan

* Skyline, Michigan

* Treetops, Michigan

* Sugar Loaf, Michigan

* Shanty Creek – Schuss Mountain, Michigan

And here are the first 10 ski areas I ever skied that are still open, with anything that didn’t make it crossed out:

* Mott Mountain, Michigan

* Apple Mountain, Michigan

* Snow Snake, Michigan

* Caberfae, Michigan

* Crystal Mountain, Michigan

* Nub’s Nob, Michigan

* Skyline, Michigan

* Treetops, Michigan

* Sugar Loaf, Michigan

* Shanty Creek – Schuss Mountain, Michigan

* Shanty Creek – Summit, Michigan

* Boyne Mountain, Michigan

* Searchmont, Ontario

* Nebraski, Nebraska

* Copper Mountain, Colorado

* Keystone, Colorado

Six of my first 16. Poof. That’s a failure rate of 37.5 percent. I’m no statistician, but I’d categorize that as “not good.”

Now, there’s some nuance to this list. I skied all of these between 1992 and 1995. Most had faded officially or functionally by 2000, around the time that America’s Great Ski Area Die-Off concluded (Summit lasted until around Covid, and could still re-open, resort officials tell me). Their causes of death are varied, some combination, usually, of incompetence, indifference, and failure to adapt. To climate change, yes, but more of the cultural kind of adaptation than the environmental sort.

The first dozen ski areas on this list are tightly bunched, geographically, in the upper half of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. They draw from the same general population centers and suffer from the same stunted Midwest verticals. None are naturally or automatically great ski areas. None are or were particularly remote or tricky to access, and most sit alongside or near a major state or federal highway. And they (mostly) all benefit from the same Lake Michigan lake-effect snow machine, the output of which appears to be increasing as the Great Lakes freeze more slowly and less often (cold air flowing over warm water = lake-effect snow).

Had you presented this list of a dozen Michigan ski areas to me in 1995 and said, “five of these will drop dead in the next 30 years,” I would not have chosen those five, necessarily, to fail. These weren’t ropetow backwaters. All but Apple had chairlifts (and they soon installed one), and most sat close to cities or were attached to a larger resort.

Sugar Loaf, in particular, was one of Michigan’s better ski areas, with five chairlifts and the largest in-state vertical drop on this list.

My guess for most-likely-to-die probably would have been Treetops, especially if you’d told me that then-private Otsego ski area, right next door and with twice its neighbor’s skiable acreage, vertical drop, and number of chairlifts, would eventually open to the public. Especially if you’d told me that Boyne Mountain, the monster down the road, would continue to expand its lodging and village, and would add a Treetops-sized cluster of greens to its ferocious ridge of blacks. Especially if you’d told me that Treetops’ trail footprint, never substantial, would remain more or less the same size 30 years later. In fact, just about every surviving Michigan ski area on that list - Crystal, Nub’s, Caberfae, Shanty Schuss - greatly expanded its terrain footprint. Except Treetops.

But here we are, in the future, and I just skied Treetops 10 months ago with my 8-year-old son. It was, in some ways, more or less as I’d left it on my last visit, in 1995: small vert, small trail network, a slightly confusing parking situation, no chairlift restraint bars. A few improvements were obvious: the beginner ropetows had made way for a carpet, the last double chair had been upgraded to a triple, terrain park features dotted the east side, and a dozen or so glades and short steep shots had been hacked from the woods of the legacy trail footprint.

That’s all nice. But what was not obvious to me was this: why, and how, does Treetops the ski area still exist? Sugar Loaf was a better ski area. Apple Mountain was closer to large population centers. Summit was attached to ski-in-ski-out accommodations and shared a lift ticket with the larger Schuss mountain a couple miles away. Was modern Treetops some sort of money-losing ski area hobby horse for whomever owned the larger resort, which is better known for its five golf courses? Was it just an amenity to keep the second homeowners who mostly lived in Southeast Michigan invested year-round? Had the ski area cemented itself as the kind of high-volume schoolkids training ground that explained the resilience of ski areas in metro Detroit, Minneapolis, and Milwaukee?

There is never, or rarely, one easy or obvious explanation for why similar businesses thrive or fail. This is why I resist pinning the numerical decline in America’s ski area inventory solely to climate change. We may have fewer ski areas in America than we had in 1995, but we have a lot more good ski areas now than we did 30 years ago (and, as I wrote in March, a lot more overall ski terrain). Yes, Skyline, 40 minutes south of Treetops, failed because it never installed snowmaking, but that is only part of the sentence. Skyline failed because it never installed snowmaking while its competitors aggressively expanded and continually updated their snowmaking systems, raising the floor on the minimal ski experience acceptable to consumers.

That takes us back to culture. What do you reckon has changed more over the past 30 to 40 years: America’s weather patterns, or its culture? For anyone who remembers ashtrays at McDonald’s or who rode in the bed of a pickup truck from Michigan to Illinois or who ran feral and unsupervised outdoors from toddlerhood or who somehow fumbled through this vast world without the internet or a Pet Rectangle or their evil offspring social media, the answer seems obvious. The weather feels a little different. Our culture feels airlifted from another planet. Americans accepted things 30 years ago that would seem outrageous today – like smoking adjacent to a children’s play area ornamented with a demented smiling clown. But this applies to skiing as well. My Treetops day in 1995 was memorably horrible, the snow groomed but fossilized, unturnable. A few weeks earlier, I’d skied Skyline on perhaps a three-inch base, grass poking through the trails. Modern skiers, armed with the internet and its Hubble connection to every ski area on the planet, would not accept either set of conditions today. But one of those ski areas adapted and the other did not. That’s the “why” of Treetops survival. It was the “how” that I needed Barry Owens to help me understand.

What we talked about

Last winter’s ice storm – “it provides great insight into human character when you go through that stuff”; record snowfall (204 inches!) to chase the worst winter ever; the Lake Michigan snowbelt; a golf resort with a ski area attached; building a ski culture when “we didn’t have enough people dedicated to ski… and it showed”; competing with nearby ski areas many times Treetops’ size “we don’t shy away from… who we are and what we are”…

Take 20% off a paid annual ‘Storm’ subscription through Monday, Oct. 27, 2025.

Who

Jared Smith, Chief Executive Officer of Alterra Mountain Company

Recorded on

October 22, 2025

About Alterra Mountain Company

Alterra is skiing’s Voltron, a collection of super-bots united to form one super-duper bot. Only instead of gigantic robot lions the bots are gigantic ski areas and instead of fighting the evil King Zarkon they combined to battle Vail Resorts and its cackling mad Epic Pass. Here is Alterra’s current ski-bot stable:

Alterra of course also owns the Ikon Pass, which for the 2025-26 winter gives skiers all of this:

Ikon launched in 2018 as a more-or-less-even competitor to Epic Pass, both in number and stature of ski areas and price, but long ago blew past its mass-market competitor in both:

Those 89 total ski areas include nine that Alterra added last week in Japan, South Korea, and China. Some of these 89 partners, however, are so-called “bonus mountains,” which are Alterra’s Cinderellas. And not Cinderella at the end of the story when she rules the kingdom and dines on stag and hunts peasants for sport but first-scene Cinderella when she lives in a windowless tower and wears a burlap dress and her only friends are talking mice. Meaning skiers can use their Ikon Pass to ski at these places but they are not I repeat NOT on the Ikon Pass so don’t you dare say they are (they are).

While the Ikon Pass is Alterra’s Excalibur, many of its owned mountains offer their own season passes (see Alterra chart above). And many now offer their own SUPER-DUPER season passes that let skiers do things like cut in front of the poors and dine on stag in private lounges:

These SUPER-DUPER passes don’t bother me though a lot of you want me to say they’re THE END OF SKIING. I won’t put a lot of effort into talking you off that point so long as you’re all skiing for $17 per day on your Ikon Passes. But I will continue to puzzle over why the Ikon Session Pass is such a very very bad and terrible product compared to every other day pass including those sold by Alterra’s own mountains. I am also not a big advocate for peak-day lift ticket prices that resemble those of black-market hand sanitizer in March 2020:

Fortunately Vail and Alterra seem to have launched a lift ticket price war, the first battle of which is The Battle of Give Half Off Coupons to Your Dumb Friends Who Don’t Buy A Ski Pass 10 Months Before They Plan to Ski:

Alterra also runs some heli-ski outfits up in B.C. but I’m not going to bother decoding all that because one reason I started The Storm was because I was over stories of Bros skiing 45 feet of powder at the top of the Chugach while the rest of us fretted over parking reservations and the $5 replacement cost of an RFID card. I know some of you are like Bro how many stories do you think the world needs about chairlifts but hey at least pretty much anyone reading this can go ride them.

Oh and also I probably lost like 95 percent of you with Voltron because unless you were between the ages of 7 and 8 in the mid-1980s you probably missed this:

One neat thing about skiing is that if someone ran headfirst into a snowgun in 1985 and spent four decades in a coma and woke up tomorrow they’d still know pretty much all the ski areas even if they were confused about what’s a Palisades Tahoe and why all of us future wussies wear helmets. “Damn it, Son in my day we didn’t bother and I’m just fine. Now grab $20 and a pack of smokes and let’s go skiing.”

Why I interviewed him

For pretty much the same reason I interviewed this fellow:

I mean like it or not these two companies dominate modern lift-served skiing in this country, at least from a narrative point of view. And while I do everything I can to demonstrate that between the Indy Pass and ski areas not in Colorado or Utah or Tahoe plenty of skier choice remains, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that Alterra’s 17 U.S. ski areas and Vail’s 36 together make up around 30 percent of the skiable terrain across America’s 509 active ski areas:

And man when you add in all U.S. Epic and Ikon mountains it’s like dang:

We know publicly traded Vail’s Epic Pass sales numbers and we know those numbers have softened over the past couple of years, but we don’t have similar access to Alterra’s numbers. A source with direct knowledge of Ikon Pass sales recently told me that unit sales had increased every year. Perhaps some day someone will anonymously message me a screenshot code-named Alterra’s Big Dumb Chart documenting unit and dollar sales since Ikon’s 2018 launch. In the meantime, I’m just going to have to keep talking to the guy running the company and asking extremely sly questions like, “if you had to give us a ballpark estimate of exactly how many Ikon Passes you sold and how much you paid each partner mountain and which ski area you’re going to buy next, what would you say?”

What we talked about

A first-to-open competition between A-Basin and Winter Park (A-Basin won); the allure of skiing Japan; Ikon as first-to-market in South Korea and China; continued Ikon expansion in Europe; who’s buying Ikon?; bonus mountains; half-off friends tickets; reserve passes; “one of the things we’ve struggled with as an industry are the dynamics between purchasing a pass and the daily lift ticket price”; “we’ve got to find ways to make it more accessible, more affordable, more often for more people”; Europe as a cheaper ski alternative to the West; “we are focused every day on … what is the right price for the right consumer on the right day?”; “there’s never been more innovation” in the ski ticket space; Palisades Tahoe’s 14-year-village-expansion approval saga; America’s “increasingly complex” landscape of community stakeholders; and Deer Valley’s massive expansion.

What I got wrong

* We didn’t get this wrong, but when we recorded this pod on Wednesday, Smith and I discussed which of Alterra’s ski areas would open first. Arapahoe Basin won that fight, opening today (Sunday, Oct. 26).

* I said that 40 percent of all Epic, Ikon, and Indy pass partners were outside of North America. This is inaccurate: 40 percent (152) of those three passes’ combined 383 partners is outside the United States. Subtracting their 49 Canadian ski areas gives us 103 mountains outside of North America, or 27 percent of the total.

* I claimed that a ski vacation to Europe is “a quarter of the price” of a similar trip to the U.S. This was hyperbole, and obviously the available price range of ski vacations is enormous, but in general, prices for everything from lift tickets to hotels to food tend to be lower in the Alps than in the Rocky Mountain core.

* It probably seems strange that I said that Deer Valley’s East Village was great because you could drive there from the airport without hitting a spotlight and also said that the resort would be less car-dependent. What I meant by that was that once you arrive at East Village, it is – or will be, when complete – a better slopeside pedestrian village experience than the car-oriented Snow Park that has long served as the resort’s principal entry point. Snow Park itself is scheduled to evolve from parking-lot-and-nothing-else to secondary pedestrian village. The final version of Deer Valley should reduce the number of cars within Park City proper and create a more vibrant atmosphere at the ski area.

Questions I wish I’d asked

The first question you’re probably asking is “Bro why is this so short aren’t your podcasts usually longer than a Superfund cleanup?” Well I take what I can get and if there’s a question you can think of related to Ikon or Alterra or any of the company’s mountains, it was on my list. But Smith had either 30 minutes or zero minutes so I took the win.

Podc…

Take 20% off an annual Storm subscription through 10/22/2025 to receive 100% of the newsletter’s content. Thank you for your support of independent ski journalism.

Who

Phill Gross, owner, and Mike Solimano, CEO of Killington and Pico, Vermont

Recorded on

July 10, 2025

About Killington

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Phill Gross and team

Located in: Killington, Vermont

Year founded: 1958

Pass affiliations: Ikon Pass: 5 or 7 combined days with Pico

Reciprocal partners: Pico access is included on all Killington passes

Closest neighboring ski areas: Pico (:12), Saskadena Six (:39), Okemo (:40), Quechee (:44), Ascutney (:55), Storrs (:59), Harrington Hill (:59), Magic (1:00), Whaleback (1:02), Sugarbush (1:04), Bromley (1:04), Middlebury Snowbowl (1:08), Arrowhead (1:10), Mad River Glen (1:11)

Base elevation: 1,165 feet at Skyeship Base

Summit elevation: 4,142 feet at top of K-1 gondola (hike-to summit of Killington Peak at 4,241 feet)

Vertical drop: 2,977 feet lift-served, 3,076 hike-to

Skiable Acres: 1,509

Average annual snowfall: 250 inches

Trail count: 155 (43% advanced/expert, 40% intermediate, 17% beginner)

Lift count: 20 (2 gondolas, 2 six-packs, 4 high-speed quads, 5 fixed-grip quads, 2 triples, 1 double, 1 platter, 3 carpets - view Lift Blog’s inventory of Killington’s lift fleet; Killington plans to replace the Snowdon triple with a fixed-grip quad for the 2026-27 ski season)

History: from New England Ski History

About Pico

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Phill Gross and team

Located in: Mendon, Vermont

Year founded: 1934

Pass affiliations: Ikon Pass: 5 or 7 combined days with Killington

Reciprocal partners: Pico access is included on all Killington passes; four days Killington access included on Pico K.A. Pass

Closest neighboring ski areas: Killington (:12), Saskadena Six (:38), Okemo (:38), Quechee (:42), Ascutney (:53), Storrs (:57), Harrington Hill (:55), Magic (:58), Whaleback (1:00), Sugarbush (1:01), Bromley (1:00), Middlebury Snowbowl (1:01), Mad River Glen (1:07), Arrowhead (1:09)

Base elevation: 2,000 feet

Summit elevation: 3,967 feet

Vertical drop: 1,967 feet

Skiable Acres: 468

Average annual snowfall: 250 inches

Trail count: 58 (36% advanced/expert, 46% intermediate, 18% beginner)

Lift count: 7 (2 high-speed quads, 2 triples, 1 doubles, 2 carpets - view Lift Blog’s inventory of Pico’s lift fleet)

History: from New England Ski History

Why I interviewed them

The longest-tenured non-government ski area operator in America, as far as I know, is the Seeholzer family, owner-operators of Beaver Mountain, Utah since 1939. Third-generation owner Travis Seeholzer came on the pod a few years back to trace the eight-decade arc from this dude flexing 10-foot-long kamikaze boards to the present:

Just about every ski area in America was hacked out of the wilderness by Some Guy Who Looked Like That. Dave McCoy at Mammoth or Ernie Blake at Taos or Everett Kircher at Boyne Mountain, swarthy, willful fellows who flew airplanes and erected rudimentary chairlifts in impossible places and hammered together their own baselodges. Over decades they chiseled these mountains into their personal Rushmores, a life’s work, a human soul knotted to nature in a built place that would endure for generations.

It’s possible that they all imagined their family name governing those generations. In the remarkable case of Boyne, they still do. But the Kirchers and the Seeholzers are ski-world exceptions. Successive generations are often uninterested in the chore of legacy building. Or they try and say wow this is expensive. Or bad weather leads to bad financial choices by our cigar-smoking, backhoe-driving, machete-wielding founder and his sons and daughters never get their chance. The ski area’s deed shuffles into the portfolio of a Colorado Skico and McCoy fades a little each year and at some point Mammoth is just another ski area owned by Alterra Mountain Company.

It’s tempting to sentimentalize the past, to lament skiing’s macro-transition from gritty network of founder-kingpin fifes to set of corporate brands, to conclude that “this generation” just doesn’t have the tenacity of a Blake or a McCoy. But the America where a fellow could turn up with a dump truck and a chainsaw and flatten raw forest into a for-profit business with minimal protest is gone. Every part of the ski ecosystem is more regulated, complicated, and expensive than it’s ever been. The appeal of running such a machine - and the skillset necessary to do so - is entirely different from that of sculpting your own personal snow Narnia from scratch.

We will always have family-owned ski areas (we still have hundreds), and an occasional modern founder-disruptor like Mount Bohemia’s Lonie Glieberman will materialize like a new X-man. But ski conglomerates have probably always been inevitable, and are probably largely the industry’s future. They are best suited, in most cases, to manage, finance, and maintain the vast machinery of our largest ski centers (and also to create a ski landscape in which not all ski area operators are Some Guy Who Looked Like That).

Killington demonstrates this arc from rambunctious founder to corporate vassal as well as any mountain in the country. Founded in 1958 by the wily and wild Pres Smith, the ski area’s parent company, Sherburne Corp., bought Sunday River, Maine in 1973 and Mount Snow, Vermont in 1977. The two Vermont mountains became S-K-I in 1984, bought five more ski areas, and merged with four-resort LBO in 1996 to become the titanic American Skiing Company. Unfortunately ASC turned out to be skiing’s Titanic, and one of the company’s last acts before dissolution was to sell Killington and Pico to Utah-based Powdr in 2007.

The Beast had been tamed, at least on paper. Corporate ownership of some sort felt as stapled to the mountain as Killington’s 3,000 snowguns. And mostly, well, it didn’t matter. Other than Powdr’s disastrous attempts to shorten the resort’s famously long seasons, Killington never lost its feisty edge. Over the decades the ski area modernized, masterplanned, and shed skier volume while increasing its viability as a business. Modern Killington wasn’t the kingdom of a charismatic and ever-present founder, but it was a pretty good ski area.

And then, suddenly, shockingly, Powdr sold both Killington and Pico last August. And they didn’t sell the ski areas to Vail or Alterra or Boyne or to anyone who owned any ski areas at all. Instead, a group of local investors - led by Phill Gross and Michael Ferri, longtime Killington homeowners who ran a variety of non-ski-related businesses - bought the mountains. After 51 years as part of a multi-mountain ownership group, Killington (its relationship to neighboring Pico notwithstanding), was once again independent.

It was all so improbable. Out-of-state operators had purchased five of Vermont’s large ski areas in recent years: Colorado-based Vail Resorts bought Stowe in 2017, Okemo in 2018, and Mount Snow in 2019; Denver-based Alterra claimed Sugarbush in 2019; and Utah-based Pacific Group Resorts added Jay Peak to their small portfolio in 2022. Very few ski areas have ever entered the corporate matrix and re-emerged as independents. Grand Targhee, Wyoming; Waterville Valley, New Hampshire; and Mountain Creek, New Jersey (technically owned by multimountain operator Snow Partners) are exceptions spun off from larger companies. But mostly, once a larger entity absorbed a ski area, it stays locked in the multimountain universe forever.

So what would this mean? For the largest and busiest mountain in the eastern United States to be independent? Did this, along with …

Who

Alan Henceroth, President and Chief Operating Officer of Arapahoe Basin, Colorado – Al runs the best ski area-specific executive blog in America – check it out:

Recorded on

May 19, 2025

About Arapahoe Basin

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Alterra Mountain Company, which also owns:

Pass access

* Ikon Pass: unlimited

* Ikon Base Pass: unlimited access from opening day to Friday, Dec. 19, then five total days with no blackouts from Dec. 20 until closing day 2026

Base elevation

* 10,520 feet at bottom of Steep Gullies

* 10,780 feet at main base

Summit elevation

* 13,204 feet at top of Lenawee Mountain on East Wall

* 12,478 feet at top of Lazy J Tow (connector between Lenawee Express six-pack and Zuma quad)

Vertical drop

* 1,695 feet lift-served – top of Lazy J Tow to main base

* 1,955 feet lift-served, with hike back up to lifts – top of Lazy J Tow to bottom of Steep Gullies

* 2,424 feet hike-to – top of Lenawee Mountain to Main Base

Skiable Acres: 1,428

Average annual snowfall:

* Claimed: 350 inches

* Bestsnow.net: 308 inches

Trail count: 147 – approximate terrain breakdown: 24% double-black, 49% black, 20% intermediate, 7% beginner

Lift count: 9 (1 six-pack, 1 high-speed quad, 3 fixed-grip quads, 1 double, 2 carpets, 1 ropetow)

Why I interviewed him

We can generally splice U.S. ski centers into two categories: ski resort and ski area. I’ll often use these terms interchangeably to avoid repetition, but they describe two very different things. The main distinction: ski areas rise directly from parking lots edged by a handful of bunched utilitarian structures, while ski resorts push parking lots into the next zipcode to accommodate slopeside lodging and commerce.

There are a lot more ski areas than ski resorts, and a handful of the latter present like the former, with accommodations slightly off-hill (Sun Valley) or anchored in a near-enough town (Bachelor). But mostly the distinction is clear, with the defining question being this: is this a mountain that people will travel around the world to ski, or one they won’t travel more than an hour to ski?

Arapahoe Basin occupies a strange middle. Nothing in the mountain’s statistical profile suggests that it should be anything other than a Summit County locals hang. It is the 16th-largest ski area in Colorado by skiable acres, the 18th-tallest by lift-served vertical drop, and the eighth-snowiest by average annual snowfall. The mountain runs just six chairlifts and only two detachables. Beginner terrain is limited. A-Basin has no base area lodging, and in fact not much of a base area at all. Altitude, already an issue for the Colorado ski tourist, is amplified here, where the lifts spin from nearly 11,000 feet. A-Basin should, like Bridger Bowl in Montana (upstream from Big Sky) or Red River in New Mexico (across the mountain from Taos) or Sunlight in Colorado (parked between Aspen and I-70), be mostly unknown beside its heralded big-name neighbors (Keystone, Breck, Copper).

And it sort of is, but also sort of isn’t. Like tiny (826-acre) Aspen Mountain, A-Basin transcends its statistical profile. Skiers know it, seek it, travel for it, cross it off their lists like a snowy Eiffel Tower. Unlike Aspen, A-Basin has no posse of support mountains, no grided downtown spilling off the lifts, no Kleenex-level brand that stands in for skiing among non-skiers. And yet Vail tried buying the bump in 1997, and Alterra finally did in 2024. Meanwhile, nearby Loveland, bigger, taller, snowier, higher, easier to access with its trip-off-the-interstate parking lots, is still ignored by tourists and conglomerates alike.

Weird. What explains A-Basin’s pull? Onetime and future Storm guest Jackson Hogen offers, in his Snowbird Secrets book, an anthropomorphic explanation for that Utah powder dump’s aura:

As it turns out, everyone has a story for how they came to discover Snowbird, but no one knows the reason. Some have the vanity to think they picked the place, but the wisest know the place picked them.

That is the secret that Snowbird has slipped into our subconscious; deep down, we know we were summoned here. We just have to be reminded of it to remember, an echo of the Platonic notion that all knowledge is remembrance. In the modern world we are so divorced from our natural selves that you would think we’d have lost the power to hear a mountain call us. And indeed we have, but such is the enormous reach of this place that it can still stir the last seed within us that connects us to the energy that surrounds us every day yet we do not see. The resonance of that tiny, vibrating seed is what brings us here, to this extraordinary place, to stand in the heart of the energy flow.

Yeah I don’t know, Man. We’re drifting into horoscope territory here. But I also can’t explain why we all like to do This Dumb Thing so much that we’ll wrap our whole lives around it. So if there is some universe force, what Hogen calls “vibrations” from Hidden Peak’s quartz, drawing skiers to Snowbird, could there also be some proton-kryptonite-laserbeam s**t sucking us all toward A-Basin? If there’s a better explanation, I haven’t found it.

What we talked about

The Beach; keeping A-Basin’s whole ski footprint open into May; Alterra buys the bump – “we really liked the way Alterra was doing things… and letting the resorts retain their identity”; the legacy of former owner Dream; how hardcore, no-frills ski area A-Basin fits into an Alterra portfolio that includes high-end resorts such as Deer Valley and Steamboat; “you’d be surprised how many people from out of state ski here too”; Ikon as Colorado sampler pack (or not); local reaction to Alterra’s purchase – “I think it’s fair that there was anxiety”; balancing the wild ski cycle of over-the-top peak days and soft periods; parking reservations; going unlimited on the full Ikon Pass and how parking reservations play in – “we spent a ridiculous amount of time talking about it”; the huge price difference between Epic and Ikon and how that factors into the access calculus; why A-Basin still sells a single-mountain season pass; whether reciprocal partnerships with Monarch and Silverton will remain in place; “I’ve been amazed at how few things I’ve been told to do” by Alterra; A-Basin’s dirt-cheap early-season pass; why early season is “a more competitive time” than it used to be; why A-Basin left Mountain Collective; Justice Department anti-trust concerns around Alterra’s A-Basin purchase – “it never was clear to me what the concerns were”; breaking down A-Basin’s latest U.S. Forest Service masterplan – “everything in there, we hope to do”; a parking lot pulse gondola and why that makes sense over shuttles; why A-Basin plans a two-lift system of beginner machines; why should A-Basin care about beginner terrain?; is beginner development is related to Ikon Pass membership?; what it means that the MDP designs for 700 more skiers per day; assessing the Lenawee Express sixer three seasons in; why A-Basin sold the old Lenawee lift to independent Sunlight, Colorado; A-Basin’s patrol unionizing; and 100 percent renewable energy.

What I got wrong

* I said that A-Basin was the only mountain that had been caught up in antitrust issues, but that’s inaccurate: when S-K-I and LBO Enterprises merged into American Skiing Company in 1996, the U.S. Justice Department compelled the combined company to sell Cranmore and Waterville Valley, both in New Hampshire. Waterville Valley remains independent. Cranmore stayed independent for a while, and has since 2010 been owned by Fairbank Group, which also owns Jiminy Peak in Massachusetts and operates Bromley, Vermont.

* I said that A-Basin’s $259 early-season pass, good for unlimi…