The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast

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,...

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...

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...

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...

Who Stephanie Cox, CEO of the National Ski Patrol Recorded on June 3, 2025 About National Ski Patrol From the organization’s website: The National Ski Patrol is a federally-chartered 501(c)(3) nonprofit membership association. As the leading authority of on-mountain safety, the NSP is dedicated to serving the outdoor recreation industry by providing education and accreditation to emergency care and safety service providers. With a primary focus on education and training, the organization includes more than 30,000 members [Cox says 32,000 on the pod] serving 650 patrols in the U.S., Canada, Europe and Asia. Our members work on behalf of local ski/snowboard areas and bike parks to improve the overall experience for outdoor recreationalists. Members include ski and bike patrollers, mountain and bike hosts, alumni, associates, and physician partners. The National Ski Patrol operates as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, deriving its primary financial support from membership dues, donations, user fees, and corporate sponsorships. … The national office is located in Lakewood, Colorado, and is staffed with full-time employees that handle administrative duties. Why I interviewed her The Storm focuses unapologetically on the lift-served variety of skiing. I’ll often reinforce that point by teasing Uphill Bro for skiing in the wrong direction or making fun of myself for being a lazy U.S. American happy to ride a machine up the mountain. That, mostly, is a shtick to express my preference for an ordered ski experience over the wild variety. Acres of glades twisting down the mountainside – yes, please. But I’ll also take that groomed run-out back to the six-pack. This all-you-can-eat variety of skiing feeds the adrenaline monster, stows energy for the bristling explosive down. The fun part. But my hyperbolic preference for the down is also a sort-of cover-up. Because what really glues me to the trail-labeled and lift-laced bumps is that gigantic and ever-present panic button floating alongside me: ski patrol. Oh I just ran into a tree? Well that’s inconvenient because now I can’t remember how to speak English or why I have eight empty Miller Lite cans in my backpack. But no need to fret. Within five minutes a corps of uniformed professionals specifically trained in the idiosyncratic art of piloting an injured moron down an ungroomed hillside on an eight-foot-long sled will materialize with crackling radios and stabilize me. It’s kind of amazing. Like who thought of this? I guess the same person who came up with lifeguards at the beach. When a squirrel misses its branch and falls 75 feet to the forest floor there is no Squirrel 911. Just a variety of bobcats and coyotes who are about to find an easy dinner. Humans are quite amazing animals in this way, setting up systems both highly effective and borderline invisible that grant us wide margins of error to in most cases survive even catastrophic misjudgments. Depending on your view of human nature, the existence of ski patrol is either the most or least predictable miracle layer of organized commercial ski centers. The cynical may interpret this network of makeshift shacks and their occupants as liability shields, a legal hey-we-tried taskforce vaguely taming the chaos inherent in an impossible and awkward activity. But a more generous interpretation might view ski patrol as the most benevolent component of a ski area, the only piece not intended to generate income, an acknowledgement that any one of us, on even the gentlest slope, could in an instant need someone who knows exactly what to do. I prefer that latter interpretation, but the truth is of course a complex blend of the cynical and the generous viewpoints, interlaced with a million other factors. We are all vaguely aware of this, which doesn’t mean we can explain it. I mean, why is ski patrol at every ski area? The question is both simplistic and baffling. Well of course there’s ski patrol because there always is....

This podcast and article are free, but a lot of The Storm lives behind a paywall. I wish I could make everything available to everyone, but an article like this one is the result of 30-plus hours of work. Please consider supporting independent ski journalism with an upgrade to a paid Storm subscription. You can also sign up for the free tier below. Who Rob Katz, Chairperson and Chief Executive Officer, Vail Resorts Recorded on August 8, 2025 About Vail Resorts Vail Resorts owns and operates 42 ski areas in North America, Australia, and Europe. In order of acquisition: The company’s Epic Pass delivers skiers unlimited access to all of these ski areas, plus access to a couple dozen partner resorts: Why I interviewed him How long do you suppose Vail Resorts has been the largest ski area operator by number of resorts? From how the Brobots prattle on about the place, you’d think since around the same time the Mayflower bumped into Plymouth Rock. But the answer is 2018, when Vail surged to 18 ski areas – one more than number two Peak Resorts. Vail wasn’t even a top-five operator until 2007, when the company’s five resorts landed it in fifth place behind Powdr’s eight and 11 each for Peak, Boyne, and Intrawest. Check out the year-by-year resort operator rankings since 2000: Kind of amazing, right? For decades, Vail, like Aspen, was the owner of some great Colorado ski areas and nothing more. There was no reason to assume it would ever be anything else. Any ski company that tried to get too big collapsed or surrendered. Intrawest inflated like a balloon then blew up like a pinata, ejecting trophies like Mammoth, Copper, and Whistler before straggling into the Alterra refugee camp with a half dozen survivors. American Skiing Company (ASC) united eight resorts in 1996 and was 11 by the next year and was dead by 2007. Even mighty Aspen, perhaps the brand most closely associated with skiing in American popular culture, had abandoned a nearly-two-decade experiment in owning ski areas outside of Pitkin County when it sold Blackcomb and Fortress Mountains in 1986 and Breckenridge the following year. But here we are, with Vail Resorts, improbably but indisputably the largest operator in skiing. How did Vail do this when so many other operators had a decades-long head start? And failed to achieve sustainability with so many of the same puzzle pieces? Intrawest had Whistler. ASC owned Heavenly. Booth Creek, a nine-resort upstart launched in 1996 by former Vail owner George Gillett, had Northstar. The obvious answer is the 2008 advent of the Epic Pass, which transformed the big-mountain season pass from an expensive single-mountain product that almost no one actually needed to a cheapo multi-mountain passport that almost anyone could afford. It wasn’t a new idea, necessarily, but the bargain-skiing concept had never been attached to a mountain so regal as Vail, with its sprawling terrain and amazing high-speed lift fleet and Colorado mystique. A multimountain pass had never come with so little fine print – it really was unlimited, at all these great mountains, all the time - but so many asterisks: better buy now, because pretty soon skiing Christmas week is going to cost more than your car. And Vail was the first operator to understand, at scale, that almost everyone who skis at Vail or Beaver Creek or Breckenridge skied somewhere else first, and that the best way to recruit these travelers to your mountain rather than Deer Valley or Steamboat or Telluride was to make the competition inconvenient by bundling the speedbump down the street with the Alpine fantasy across the country. Vail Resorts, of course, didn’t do anything. Rob Katz did these things. And yes, there was a great and capable team around him. But it’s hard to ignore the fact that all of these amazing things started happening shortly after Katz’s 2006 CEO appointment and stopped happening around the time of his 2021 exit. Vail’s stock price: from $33.04 on Feb. 28, 2006...

The Storm does not cover athletes or gear or hot tubs or whisky bars or helicopters or bros jumping off things. I’m focused on the lift-served skiing world that 99 percent of skiers actually inhabit, and I’m covering it year-round. To support this mission of independent ski journalism, please subscribe to the free or paid versions of the email newsletter. Who Greg Pack, President and General Manager of Mt. Hood Meadows, Oregon Recorded on April 28, 2025 About Mt. Hood Meadows Click here for a mountain stats overview Owned by: The Drake Family (and other minority shareholders) Located in: Mt. Hood, Oregon Year founded: 1968 Pass affiliations: * Indy Pass – 2 days, select blackouts * Indy+ Pass – 2 days, no blackouts Closest neighboring U.S. ski areas: Summit (:17), Mt. Hood Skibowl (:19), Cooper Spur (:23), Timberline (:26) Base elevation: 4,528 feet Summit elevation: 7,305 feet at top of Cascade Express; 9,000 feet at top of hike-to permit area; 11,249 feet at summit of Mount Hood Vertical drop: 2,777 feet lift-served; 4,472 hike-to inbounds; 6,721 feet from Mount Hood summit Skiable acres: 2,150 Average annual snowfall: 430 inches Trail count: 87 (15% beginner, 40% intermediate, 15% advanced, 30% expert) Lift count: 11 (1 six-pack, 5 high-speed quads, 1 fixed-grip quad, 3 doubles, 1 carpet – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Mount Hood Meadows’ lift fleet) About Cooper Spur Click here for a mountain stats overview Owned by: The Drake Family Located in: Mt. Hood, Oregon Year founded: 1927 Pass affiliations: Indy Pass, Indy+ Pass – 2 days, no blackouts Closest neighboring U.S. ski areas: Mt. Hood Meadows (:22), Summit (:29), Mt. Hood Skibowl (:30), Timberline (:37) Base elevation: 3,969 feet Summit elevation: 4,400 feet Vertical drop: 431 feet Skiable acres: 50 Average annual snowfall: 250 inches Trail count: 9 (1 most difficult, 7 more difficult, 1 easier) Lift count: 2 (1 double, 1 ropetow – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Cooper Spur’s lift fleet) Why I interviewed him 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...

Who Ron Schmalzle, President, Co-Owner, and General Manager of Ski Big Bear operator Recreation Management Corp; and Lori Phillips, General Manager of Ski Big Bear at Masthope Mountain, Pennsylvania Recorded on April 22, 2025 About Ski Big Bear Click here for a mountain stats overview Owned by: Property owners of Masthope Mountain Community; operated by Recreation Management Corporation Located in: Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania Year founded: 1976 as “Masthope Mountain”; changed name to “Ski Big Bear” in 1993 Pass affiliations: * Indy Pass – 2 days, select blackouts * Indy+ Pass – 2 days, no blackouts Closest neighboring ski areas: Villa Roma (:44), Holiday Mountain (:52), Shawnee Mountain (1:04) Base elevation: 550 feet Summit elevation: 1,200 feet Vertical drop: 650 feet Skiable acres: 26 Average annual snowfall: 50 inches Trail count: 18 (1 expert, 5 advanced, 6 intermediate, 6 beginner) Lift count: 7 (4 doubles, 3 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Ski Big Bear’s lift fleet) Why I interviewed them This isn’t really why I interviewed them, but have you ever noticed how the internet ruined everything? Sure, it made our lives easier, but it made our world worse. Yes I can now pay my credit card bill four seconds before its due and reconnect with my best friend Bill who moved away after fourth grade. But it also turns out that Bill believes seahorses are a hoax and that Jesus spoke English because the internet socializes bad ideas in a way that the 45 people Bill knew in 1986 would have shut down by saying “Bill you’re an idiot.” Bill, fortunately, is not real. Nor, as far as I’m aware, is a seahorse hoax narrative (though I’d like to start one). But here’s something that is real: When Schmalzle renamed Masthope Mountain to “Ski Big Bear” in 1993, in honor of the region’s endemic black bears, he had little reason to believe anyone, anywhere, would ever confuse his 550-vertical-foot Pennsylvania ski area with Big Bear Mountain, California, a 39-hour, 2,697-mile drive west. Well, no one used the internet in 1993 except weird proto-gamers and genius movie programmers like the fat evil dude in Jurassic Park. Honestly I didn’t even think the “Information Superhighway” was real until I figured email out sometime in 1996. Like time travel or a human changing into a cat, I thought the internet was some Hollywood gimmick, imagined because wouldn’t it be cool if we could? Well, we can. The internet is real, and it follows us around like oxygen, the invisible scaffolding of existence. And it tricks us into being dumb by making us feel smart. So much information, so immediately and insistently, that we lack a motive to fact check. Thus, a skier in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania (let’s call him “Bill 2”), can Google “Big Bear season pass” and end up with an Ikon Pass, believing this is his season pass not just to the bump five miles up the road, but a mid-winter vacation passport to Sugarbush, Copper Mountain, and Snowbird. Well Bill 2 I’m sorry but you are as dumb as my imaginary friend Bill 1 from elementary school. Because your Ikon Pass will not work at Ski Big Bear, Pennsylvania. And I’m sorry Bill 3 who lives in Riverside, California, but your Ski Big Bear, Pennsylvania season pass will not work at Big Bear Mountain Resort in California. At this point, you’re probably wondering if I have nothing better to do but sit around inventing problems to grumble about. But Phillips tells me that product mix-ups with Big Bear, California happen all the time. I had a similar conversation a few months ago with the owners of Magic Mountain, Idaho, who frequently sell tubing tickets to folks headed to Magic Mountain, Vermont, which has no tubing. Upon discovering this, typically at the hour assigned on their vouchers, these would-be customers call Idaho for a refund, which the owners grant. But since Magic Mountain, Idaho can only sell a limited number of tickets for each tubing timeslot, this internet misfire, impossible in...

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication. Whether you sign up for the free or paid tier, I appreciate your support for independent ski journalism. Who Erik Lambert, Co-Founder of Bluebird Backcountry, Colorado and founder of Bonfire Collective Recorded on April 8, 2025 About Bluebird Backcountry Located in: Just east of the junction of US 40 and Colorado 14, 20-ish miles southwest of Steamboat Springs, Colorado Years active: 2020 to 2023 Closest neighboring U.S. ski areas: Steamboat (:39), Howelsen Hill (:45), Base elevation: 8,600 feet Summit elevation: 9,845 feet Vertical drop: 1,245 feet Skiable acres: 4,200-plus acres (3,000 acres guided; 1,200-plus acres avalanche-managed and ski-patrolled) Average annual snowfall: 196 inches Lift fleet: None! Why I interviewed him First question: why is the ski newsletter that constantly reminds readers that it’s concerned always and only with lift-served skiing devoting an entire podcast episode to a closed ski area that had no lifts at all? Didn’t I write this when Indy Pass added Bluebird back in 2022?: Wait a minute, what the f**k exactly is going on here? I have to walk to the f*****g top? Like a person from the past? Before they invented this thing like a hundred years ago called a chairlift? No? You actually ski up? Like some kind of weird humanoid platypus Howard the Duck thing? Bro I so did not sign up for this s**t. I am way too lazy and broken. Yup, that was me. But if you’ve been here long enough, you know that making fun of things that are hard is my way of making fun of myself for being Basic Ski Bro. Really I respected the hell out of Bluebird, its founders, and its skiers, and earnestly believed for a moment that the ski area could offer a new model for ski area development in a nation that had mostly stopped building them: Bluebird has a lot of the trappings of a lift-served ski area, with 28 marked runs and 11 marked skin tracks, making it a really solid place to dial your uphill kit and technique before throwing yourself out into the wilderness. I haven’t really talked about this yet, but I think Bluebird may be the blueprint for re-igniting ski-area development in the vast American wilderness. The big Colorado resorts – other than Crested Butte and Telluride – have been at capacity for years. They keep building more and bigger lifts, but skiing needs a relief valve. One exists in the smaller ski areas that populate Colorado and are posting record business results, but in a growing state in a finally-growing sport, Bluebird shows us another way to do skiing. More specifically, I wrote in a post the following year: Bluebird fused the controlled environment and relative safety of a ski area with the grit and exhilaration of the uphill ski experience. The operating model, stripped of expensive chairlifts and resource-intensive snowmaking and grooming equipment, appeared to suit the current moment of reflexive opposition to mechanized development in the wilderness. For a moment, this patrolled, avalanche-controlled, low-infrastructure startup appeared to be a model for future ski area development in the United States. … If Bluebird could establish a beachhead in Colorado, home to a dozen of America’s most-developed ski resorts and nearly one in every four of the nation’s skier visits, then it could act as proof-of-concept for a new sort of American ski area. One that provided a novel experience in relative safety, sure, but, more important, one that could actually proceed as a concept in a nation allergic to new ski area development: no chairlifts, no snowmaking, no grooming, no permanent buildings. Dozens of American ski markets appeared to have the right ingredients for such a business: ample snow, empty wilderness, and too many skiers jamming too few ski areas that grow incrementally in size but never in number. If indoor ski areas are poised to become the nation’s next-generation incubators, then liftless...

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us. Who Pete Sonntag, Chief Operating Officer and General Manager of Sun Valley, Idaho Recorded on April 9, 2025 About Sun Valley Click here for a mountain stats overview Owned by: The R. Earl Holding family, which also owns Snowbasin, Utah Pass affiliations: * Ikon Pass – 7 days, no blackouts; no access on Ikon Base or Session passes; days shared between Bald and Dollar mountains * Mountain Collective – 2 days, no blackouts; days shared between Bald and Dollar mountains Reciprocal pass partners: Challenger Platinum and Challenger season passes include unlimited access to Snowbasin, Utah Located in: Ketchum, Idaho Closest neighboring ski areas: Rotarun (:47), Soldier Mountain (1:10) Base elevation | summit elevation | vertical drop: Bald Mountain: 5,750 feet | 9,150 feet | 3,400 feet Dollar Mountain: 6,010 feet | 6,638 feet | 628 feet Skiable Acres: 2,533 acres (Bald Mountain) | 296 acres (Dollar Mountain) Average annual snowfall: 200 inches Trail count: 122 (100 on Bald Mountain; 22 on Dollar) – 2% double-black, 20% black, 42% intermediate, 36% beginner Lift fleet: Bald Mountain: 12 lifts (8-passenger gondola, 2 six-packs, 6 high-speed quads, 2 triples, 1 carpet - view Lift Blog’s of inventory of Bald Mountain’s lift fleet) Dollar Mountain: 5 lifts (2 high-speed quads, 1 triple, 1 double, 1 carpet - view Lift Blog’s of inventory of Dollar Mountain’s lift fleet) Why I interviewed him (again) Didn’t we just do this? Sun Valley, the Big Groom, the Monster at the End of The Road (or at least way off the interstate)? Didn’t you make All The Points? Pretty and remote and excellent. Why are we back here already when there are so many mountains left to slot onto the podcast? Fair questions, easy answer: because American lift-served skiing is in the midst of a financial and structural renaissance driven by the advent of the multimountain ski pass. A network of megamountains that 15 years ago had been growing creaky and cranky under aging lift networks has, in the past five years, flung new machines up the mountain with the slaphappy glee of a minor league hockey mascot wielding a T-shirt cannon. And this investment, while widespread, has been disproportionately concentrated on a handful of resorts aiming to headline the next generation of self-important holiday Instagram posts: Deer Valley, Big Sky, Steamboat, Snowbasin, and Sun Valley (among others). It’s going to be worth checking in on these places every few years as they rapidly evolve into different versions of themselves. And Sun Valley is changing fast. When I hosted Sonntag on the podcast in 2022, Sun Valley had just left Epic for Ikon/Mountain Collective and announced its massive Broadway-Flying Squirrel installation, a combined 14,982 linear feet of high-speed machinery that included a replacement of North America’s tallest chairlift. A new Seattle Ridge sixer followed, and the World Cup spectacle followed that. Meanwhile, Sun Valley had settled into its new pass coalitions and teased more megalifts and improvements to the village. Last December, the resort’s longtime owner, Carol Holding, passed away at age 95. Whatever the ramifications of all that will be, the trajectory and fate of Sun Valley over the next decade is going to set (as much or more than it traces), the arc of the remaining large independents in our consolidating ski world. What we talked about The passing and legacy of longtime owner Carol Holding and her late husband Earl – “she was involved with the business right up until the very end”; how the Holdings modernized the Sun Valley ski areas; long-term prospects for Sun Valley and Snowbasin independence following Mrs. Holding’s passing; bringing World Cup Downhill races back to Sun Valley; what it took to prep Bald Mountain for the events; the risks of hosting a World Cup; finish line vibes; the potential for a World Cup return and...

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication (and my full-time job). To receive new posts and to support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Who Chris Cushing, Principal of Mountain Planning at SE Group Recorded on April 3, 2025 About SE Group From the company’s website: WE ARE Mountain planners, landscape architects, environmental analysts, and community and recreation planners. From master planning to conceptual design and permitting, we are your trusted partner in creating exceptional experiences and places. WE BELIEVE That human and ecological wellbeing forms the foundation for thriving communities. WE EXIST To enrich people’s lives through the power of outdoor recreation. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, then this will: Why I interviewed him Nature versus nurture: God throws together the recipe, we bake the casserole. A way to explain humans. Sure he’s six foot nine, but his mom dropped him into the intensive knitting program at Montessori school 232, so he can’t play basketball for s**t. Or identical twins, separated at birth. One grows up as Sir Rutherford Ignacious Beaumont XIV and invents time travel. The other grows up as Buford and is the number seven at Okey-Doke’s Quick Oil Change & Cannabis Emporium. The guts matter a lot, but so does the food. This is true of ski areas as well. An earthquake here, a glacier there, maybe a volcanic eruption, and, presto: a non-flat part of the earth on which we may potentially ski. The rest is up to us. It helps if nature was thoughtful enough to add slopes of varying but consistent pitch, a suitable rise from top to bottom, a consistent supply of snow, a flat area at the base, and some sort of natural conduit through which to move people and vehicles. But none of that is strictly necessary. Us humans (nurture), can punch green trails across solid-black fall lines (Jackson Hole), bulldoze a bigger hill (Caberfae), create snow where the clouds decline to (Wintergreen, 2022-23), plant the resort base at the summit (Blue Knob), or send skiers by boat (Eaglecrest). Someone makes all that happen. In North America, that someone is often SE Group, or their competitor, Ecosign. SE Group helps ski areas evolve into even better ski areas. That means helping to plan terrain expansions, lift replacements, snowmaking upgrades, transit connections, parking enhancements, and whatever built environment is under the ski area’s control. SE Group is often the machine behind those Forest Service ski area master development plans that I so often spotlight. For example, Vail Mountain: When I talk about Alta consolidating seven slow lifts into four fast lifts; or Little Switzerland carving their mini-kingdom into beginner, parkbrah, and racer domains; or Mount Bachelor boosting its power supply to run more efficiently, this is the sort of thing that SE plots out (I’m not certain if they were involved in any or all of those projects). Analyzing this deliberate crafting of a natural bump into a human playground is the core of what The Storm is. I love, skiing, sure, but specifically lift-served skiing. I’m sure it’s great to commune with the raccoons or whatever it is you people do when you discuss “skinning” and “AT setups.” But nature left a few things out. Such as: ski patrol, evacuation sleds, avalanche control, toilet paper, water fountains, firepits, and a place to charge my phone. Oh and chairlifts. And directional signs with trail ratings. And a snack bar. Skiing is torn between competing and contradictory narratives: the misanthropic, which hates crowds and most skiers not deemed sufficiently hardcore; the naturalistic, which mistakes ski resorts with the bucolic experience that is only possible in the backcountry; the preservationist, with its museum-ish aspirations to glasswall the obsolete; the hyperactive, insisting on all fast lifts and groomed runs; the fatalists, who assume inevitable...

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication (and my full-time job). To receive new posts and to support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Who Joe Hession, CEO of Snow Partners, which owns Mountain Creek, Big Snow American Dream, SnowCloud, and Terrain Based Learning Recorded on May 2, 2025 About Snow Partners Snow Partners owns and operates Mountain Creek, New Jersey and Big Snow American Dream, the nation’s only indoor ski center. The company also developed SnowCloud resort management software and has rolled out its Terrain Based Learning system at more than 80 ski areas worldwide. They do some other things that I don’t really understand (there’s a reason that I write about skiing and not particle physics), that you can read about on their website. About Mountain Creek Located in: Vernon Township, New Jersey Closest neighboring public ski areas: Mount Peter (:24); Big Snow American Dream (:50); Campgaw (:51) Pass affiliations: Snow Triple Play, up to two anytime days Base elevation: 440 feet Summit elevation: 1,480 feet Vertical drop: 1,040 feet Skiable Acres: 167 Average annual snowfall: 65 inches Trail count: 46 Lift count: 9 (1 Cabriolet, 2 high-speed quads, 2 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 1 double, 2 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Mountain Creek’s lift fleet) About Big Snow American Dream Located in: East Rutherford, New Jersey Closest neighboring public ski areas: Campgaw (:35); Mountain Creek (:50); Mount Peter (:50) Pass affiliations: Snow Triple Play, up to two anytime days Vertical drop: 160 feet Skiable Acres: 4 Trail count: 4 (2 green, 1 blue, 1 black) Lift count: 4 (1 quad, 1 poma, 2 carpets - view Lift Blog’s of inventory of Big Snow American Dream’s lift fleet) Why I interviewed him I read this earlier today: The internet is full of smart people writing beautiful prose about how bad everything is, how it all sucks, how it’s embarrassing to like anything, how anything that appears good is, in fact, secretly bad. I find this confusing and tragic, like watching Olympic high-jumpers catapult themselves into a pit of tarantulas. That blurb was one of 28 “slightly rude notes on writing” offered in Adam Mastroianni’s Experimental History newsletter. And I thought, “Man this dude must follow #SkiTwitter.” Or Instabook. Of Flexpost. Or whatever. Because online ski content, both short- and long-form, is, while occasionally joyous and evocative, disproportionately geared toward the skiing-is-fucked-and-this-is-why worldview. The passes suck. The traffic sucks. The skiers suck. The prices suck. The parking sucks. The Duopoly sucks. Everyone’s a Jerry, chewing up my pow line with their GoPro selfie sticks hoisted high and their Ikon Passes dangling from their zippers. Skiing is corporate and soulless and tourist obsessed and doomed anyway because of climate change. Don’t tell me you’re having a good time doing this very fun thing. People like you are the reason skiing’s soul now shops at Wal-Mart. Go back to Texas and drink a big jug of oil, you Jerry! It's all so… f*****g dumb. U.S. skiing just wrapped its second-best season of attendance. The big passes, while imperfect, are mostly a force for good, supercharging on-hill infrastructure investment, spreading skiers across geographies, stabilizing a once-storm-dependent industry, and lowering the per-day price of skiing for the most avid among us to 1940s levels. Snowmaking has proven an effective bulwark against shifting weather patterns. Lift-served skiing is not a dying pastime, financially or spiritually or ecologically. Yes, modern skiing has problems: expensive food (pack a lunch); mountain-town housing shortages (stop NIMBY-ing everything); traffic (yay car culture); peak-day crowds (don’t go then); exploding insurance, labor, utilities, and infrastructure costs (I have no answers). But in most respects, this is a healthy, thriving, constantly evolving...

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and to support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Who Trent Poole, Vice President and General Manager of Hunter Mountain, New York Recorded on March 19, 2025 About Hunter Mountain Click here for a mountain stats overview Owned by: Vail Resorts Located in: Hunter, New York Year founded: 1959 Pass affiliations: * Epic Pass, Epic Local Pass – unlimited access * Epic Northeast Value Pass – unlimited access with holiday blackouts * Epic Northeast Midweek Pass – unlimited access with holiday and midweek blackouts * Epic Day Pass – All Resorts, 32 Resorts tiers Closest neighboring ski areas: Windham (:16), Belleayre (:35), Plattekill (:49) Base elevation: 1,600 feet Summit elevation: 3,200 feet Vertical drop: 1,600 feet Skiable acres: 320 Average annual snowfall: 120 inches Trail count: 67 (25% beginner, 30% intermediate, 45% advanced) Lift count: 13 (3 six-packs, 1 high-speed quad, 2 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 2 doubles, 1 platter, 3 carpets) Why I interviewed him Ski areas are like political issues. We all feel as though we need to have an opinion on them. This tends to be less a considered position than an adjective. Tariffs are _______. Killington is _______. It’s a bullet to shoot when needed. Most of us aren’t very good shots. Hunter tends to draw a particularly colorful basket of adjectives: crowded, crazy, frantic, dangerous, icy, frozen, confusing, wild. Hunter, to the weekend visitor, appears to be teetering at all times on the brink of collapse. So many skiers on the lifts, so many skiers in the liftlines, so many skiers on the trails, so many skiers in the parking lots, so many skiers in the lodge pounding shots and pints. Whether Hunter is a ski area with a bar attached or a bar with a ski area attached is debatable. The lodge stretches on and on and up and down in disorienting and disconnected wings, a Winchester Mansion of the mountains, stapled together over eons to foil the alien hordes (New Yorkers). The trails run in a splintered, counterintuitive maze, an impossible puzzle for the uninitiated. Lifts fly all over, 13 total, of all makes and sizes and vintage, but often it feels as though there is only one lift and that lift is the Kaatskill Flyer, an overwhelmed top-to-bottom six-pack that replaced an overwhelmed top-to-bottom high-speed quad on a line that feels as though it would be overwhelmed with a high-speed 85-pack. It is, in other words, exactly the kind of ski area you would expect to find two hours north of a 20-million-person megacity world famous for its blunt, abrasive, and bare-knuckled residents. That description of Hunter is accurate enough, but incomplete. Yes, skiing there can feel like riding a swinging wrecking ball through a tenement building. And I would probably suggest that as a family activity before I would recommend Hunter on, say, MLK Saturday. But Hunter is also a glorious hunk of ski history, a last-man-standing of the once-skiing-flush Catskills, a nature-bending prototype of a ski mountain built in a place that lacks both consistent natural snow and fall lines to ski on. It may be a corporate cog now, but the Hunter hammered into the mountains over nearly six decades was the dream and domain of the Slutsky family, many of whom still work for the ski area. And Hunter, on a midweek, when all those fast lifts are 10 times more capacity than you need, can be a dream. Fast up, fast down. And once you learn the trail network, the place unfolds like a picnic blanket: easy, comfortable, versatile, filled with delicious options (if occasionally covered with ants). There’s no one good way to describe Hunter Mountain. It’s different every day. All ski areas are different every day, but Hunter is, arguably, more more different along the spectrum of its extremes than just about any other ski area anywhere. You won’t get it on your...

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and to support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Who Jeff Colburn, General Manager of Silver Mountain, Idaho Recorded on February 12, 2025 About Silver Mountain Click here for a mountain stats overview Owned by: CMR Lands, which also owns 49 Degrees North, Washington Located in: Kellogg, Idaho Year founded: 1968 as Jackass ski area, later known as Silverhorn, operated intermittently in the 1980s before its transformation into Silver in 1990 Pass affiliations: * Indy Pass – 2 days, select blackouts * Indy+ Pass – 2 days, no blackouts * Powder Alliance – 3 days, select blackouts Closest neighboring ski areas: Lookout Pass (:26) Base elevation: 4,100 feet (lowest chairlift); 2,300 feet (gondola) Summit elevation: 6,297 feet Vertical drop: 2,200 feet Skiable acres: 1,600+ Average annual snowfall: 340 inches Trail count: 80 Lift count: 7 (1 eight-passenger gondola, 1 fixed-grip quad, 2 triples, 2 doubles – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Silver Mountain’s lift fleet) Why I interviewed him After moving to Manhattan in 2002, I would often pine for an extinct version of New York City: docks thrust into the Hudson, masted ships, ornate brickwork factories, carriages, open windows, kids loose in the streets, summer evening crowds on stoops and patios. Modern New York, riotous as it is for an American city, felt staid and sterile beside the island’s explosively peopled black-and-white past. Over time, I’ve developed a different view: New York City is a triumph of post-industrial reinvention, able to shed and quickly replace obsolete industries with those that would lead the future. And my idealized New York, I came to realize, was itself a snapshot of one lost New York, but not the only lost New York, just my romanticized etching of a city that has been in a constant state of reinvention for 400 years. It's through this same lens that we can view Silver Mountain. For more than a century, Kellogg was home to silver mines that employed thousands. When the Bunker Hill Mine closed in 1981, it took the town’s soul with it. The city became a symbol of industrial decline, of an America losing its rough-and-ragged hammer-bang grit. And for a while, Kellogg was a denuded and dusty crater pockmarking the glory-green of Idaho’s panhandle. The population collapsed. Suicide rates, Colburn tells us on the podcast, were high. But within a decade, town officials peered toward the skeleton of Jackass ski area, with its intact centerpole Riblet double, and said, “maybe that’s the thing.” With help from Von Roll, they erected three chairlifts on the mountain and taxed themselves $2 million to string a three-mile-long gondola from town to mountain, opening the ski area to the masses by bypassing the serpentine seven-mile-long access road. (Gosh, can you think of anyplace else where such a contraption would work?) Silver rose above while the Environmental Protection Agency got to work below, cleaning up what had been designated a massive Superfund site. Today, Kellogg, led by Silver, is a functional, modern place, a post-industrial success story demonstrating how recreation can anchor an economy and a community. The service sector lacks the fiery valor of industry. Bouncing through snow, gifted from above, for fun, does not resonate with America’s self-image like the gutsy miner pulling metal from the earth to feed his family. Town founder/mining legend Noah Kellogg and his jackass companion remain heroic local figures. But across rural America, ski areas have stepped quietly into the vacuum left by vacated factories and mines, where they become a source of community identity and a stabilizing agent where no other industry makes sense. What we talked about Ski Idaho; what it will take to transform Idaho into a ski destination; the importance of Grand Targhee to Idaho; old-time PNW skiing;...

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and to support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Who Tyler Fairbank, General Manager of Jiminy Peak, Massachusetts and CEO of Fairbank Group Recorded on February 10, 2025 and March 7, 2025 About Fairbank Group From their website: The Fairbank Group is driven to build things to last – not only our businesses but the relationships and partnerships that stand behind them. Since 2008, we have been expanding our eclectic portfolio of businesses. This portfolio includes three resorts—Jiminy Peak Mountain Resort, Cranmore Mountain Resort, and Bromley Mountain Ski Resort—and real estate development at all three resorts, in addition to a renewable energy development company, EOS Ventures, and a technology company, Snowgun Technology. About Jiminy Peak Click here for a mountain stats overview Owned by: Fairbank Group, which also owns Cranmore and operates Bromley (see breakdowns below) Located in: Hancock, Massachusetts Year founded: 1948 Pass affiliations: * Ikon Pass: 2 days, with blackouts * Uphill New England Closest neighboring ski areas: Bousquet (:27), Catamount (:49), Butternut (:51), Otis Ridge (:54), Berkshire East (:58), Willard (1:02) Base elevation: 1,230 feet Summit elevation: 2,380 feet Vertical drop: 1,150 feet Skiable acres: 167.4 Average annual snowfall: 100 inches Trail count: 42 Lift count: 9 (1 six-pack, 2 fixed-grip quads, 3 triples, 1 double, 2 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Jiminy Peak’s lift fleet) About Cranmore Click here for a mountain stats overview Owned by: The Fairbank Group Located in: North Conway, New Hampshire Year founded: 1937 Pass affiliations: * Ikon Pass: 2 days, with blackouts * Uphill New England Closest neighboring ski areas: Attitash (:16), Black Mountain (:18), King Pine (:28), Wildcat (:28), Pleasant Mountain (:33), Bretton Woods (:42) Base elevation: 800 feet Summit elevation: 2,000 feet Vertical drop: 1,200 feet Skiable Acres: 170 Average annual snowfall: 80 inches Trail count: 56 (15 most difficult, 25 intermediate, 16 easier) Lift count: 7 (1 high-speed quad, 1 fixed-grip quad, 2 triples, 1 double, 2 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Cranmore’s lift fleet) About Bromley Click here for a mountain stats overview Owned by: The estate of Joseph O'Donnell Operated by: The Fairbank Group Pass affiliations: Uphill New England Located in: Peru, Vermont Closest neighboring ski areas: Magic Mountain (14 minutes), Stratton (19 minutes) Base elevation: 1,950 feet Summit elevation: 3,284 feet Vertical drop: 1,334 feet Skiable Acres: 300 Average annual snowfall: 145 inches Trail count: 47 (31% black, 37% intermediate, 32% beginner) Lift count: 9 (1 high-speed quad, 1 fixed-grip quad, 4 doubles, 1 T-bar, 2 carpets - view Lift Blog’s of inventory of Bromley’s lift fleet) Why I interviewed him I don’t particularly enjoy riding six-passenger chairlifts. Too many people, up to five of whom are not me. Lacking a competent queue-management squad, chairs rise in loads of twos and threes above swarming lift mazes. If you’re skiing the West, lowering the bar is practically an act of war. It’s all so tedious. Given the option – Hunter, Winter Park, Camelback – I’ll hop the parallel two-seater just to avoid the drama. I don’t like six-packs, but I sure am impressed by them. Sixers are the chairlift equivalent of a two-story Escalade, or a house with its own private Taco Bell, or a 14-lane expressway. Like damn there’s some cash floating around this joint. Sixers are common these days: America is home to 107 of them. But that wasn’t always so. Thirty-two of these lifts came online in just the past three years. Boyne Mountain, Michigan built the first American six-pack in 1992, and for three years, it was the only such lift in the nation (and don’t think they didn’t spend every second reminding us of it)....

For a limited time, upgrade to ‘The Storm’s’ paid tier for $5 per month or $55 per year. You’ll also receive a free year of Slopes Premium, a $29.99 value - valid for annual subscriptions only. Monthly subscriptions do not qualify for free Slopes promotion. Valid for new subscriptions only. Who Iain Martin, Host of The Ski Podcast Recorded on January 30, 2025 About The Ski Podcast From the show’s website: Want to [know] more about the world of skiing? The Ski Podcast is a UK-based podcast hosted by Iain Martin. With different guests every episode, we cover all aspects of skiing and snowboarding from resorts to racing, Ski Sunday to slush. In 2021, we were voted ‘Best Wintersports Podcast‘ in the Sports Podcast Awards. In 2023, we were shortlisted as ‘Best Broadcast Programme’ in the Travel Media Awards. Why I interviewed him We did a swap. Iain hosted me on his show in January (I also hosted Iain in January, but since The Storm sometimes moves at the pace of mammal gestation, here we are at the end of March; Martin published our episode the day after we recorded it). But that’s OK (according to me), because our conversation is evergreen. Martin is embedded in EuroSki the same way that I cycle around U.S. AmeriSki. That we wander from similarly improbable non-ski outposts – Brighton, England and NYC – is a funny coincidence. But what interested me most about a potential podcast conversation is the Encyclopedia EuroSkiTannica stored in Martin’s brain. I don’t understand skiing in Europe. It is too big, too rambling, too interconnected, too above-treeline, too transit-oriented, too affordable, too absent the Brobot ‘tude that poisons so much of the American ski experience. The fact that some French idiot is facing potential jail time for launching a snowball into a random grandfather’s skull (filming the act and posting it on TikTok, of course) only underscores my point: in America, we would cancel the grandfather for not respecting the struggle so obvious in the boy’s act of disobedience. In a weird twist for a ski writer, I am much more familiar with summer Europe than winter Europe. I’ve skied the continent a couple of times, but warm-weather cross-continental EuroTreks by train and by car have occupied months of my life. When I try to understand EuroSki, my brain short-circuits. I tease the Euros because each European ski area seems to contain between two and 27 distinct ski areas, because the trail markings are the wrong color, because they speak in the strange code of the “km” and “cm” - but I’m really making fun of myself for Not Getting It. Martin gets it. And he good-naturedly walks me through a series of questions that follow this same basic pattern: “In America, we charge $109 for a hamburger that tastes like it’s been pulled out of a shipping container that went overboard in 1944. But I hear you have good and cheap food in Europe – true?” I don’t mind sounding like a d*****s if the result is good information for all of us, and thankfully I achieved both of those things on this podcast. What we talked about The European winter so far; how a UK-based skier moves back and forth to the Alps; easy car-free travel from the U.S. directly to Alps ski areas; is ski traffic a thing in Europe?; EuroSki 101; what does “ski area” mean in Europe; Euro snow pockets; climate change realities versus media narratives in Europe; what to make of ski areas closing around the Alps; snowmaking in Europe; comparing the Euro stereotype of the leisurely skier to reality; an aging skier population; Euro liftline queuing etiquette and how it mirrors a nation’s driving culture; “the idea that you wouldn’t bring the bar down is completely alien to me; I mean everybody brings the bar down on the chairlift”; why an Epic or Ikon Pass may not be your best option to ski in Europe; why lift ticket prices are so much cheaper in Europe than in the U.S.; Most consumers “are not even aware” that Vail has started purchasing Swiss resorts;...

For a limited time, upgrade to ‘The Storm’s’ paid tier for $5 per month or $55 per year. You’ll also receive a free year of Slopes Premium, a $29.99 value - valid for annual subscriptions only. Monthly subscriptions do not qualify for free Slopes promotion. Valid for new subscriptions only. Who Stuart Winchester, Founder, Editor & Host of The Storm Skiing Journal & Podcast Recorded on March 4, 2025 Editor’s note 1) The headline was not my idea; 2) Erik said he would join me as the guest for episode 199 if he could interview me for episode 200; 3) I was like “sure Brah”; 4) since he did the interview, I asked Erik to write the “Why I interviewed him” section; 5) this episode is now available to stream on Disney+; 6) but no really you can watch it on YouTube (please subscribe); 7) if you don’t care about this episode that’s OK because there are 199 other ones that are actually about snosportskiing; 8) and I have a whole bunch more recorded that I’ll drop right after this one; 9) except that one that I terminally screwed up; 10) “which one?” you ask. Well I’ll tell that humiliating story when I’m ready. Why I interviewed him, by Erik Mogensen I met Stuart when he was skiing at Copper Mountain with his family. At lunch that day I made a deal. I would agree to do the first podcast of my career, but only if I had the opportunity reverse the role and interview him. I thought both my interview, and his, would be at least five years away. 14 months later, you are reading this. As an accomplished big-city corporate PR guy often [occasionally] dressed in a suit, he got tired of listening to the biggest, tallest, snowiest, ski content that was always spoon-fed to his New York City self. Looking for more than just “Stoke,” Stu has built the Storm Skiing Journal into a force that I believe has assumed an important stewardship role for skiing. Along the way he has occasionally made us cringe, and has always made us laugh. Many people besides myself apparently agree. Stuart has eloquently mixed an industry full of big, type-A egos competing for screentime on the next episode of Game of Thrones, with consumers that have been overrun with printed magazines that show up in the mail, or social media click-bate, but nothing in between. He did it by being as authentic and independent as they come, thus building trust with everyone from the most novice ski consumer to nearly all of the expert operators and owners on the continent. But don’t get distracted by the “Winchester Style” of poking fun of ski bro and his group of bro brahs like someone took over your mom’s basement with your used laptop, and a new nine-dollar website. Once you get over the endless scrolling required to get beyond the colorful spreadsheets, this thing is fun AND worthwhile to read and listen to. This guy went to Columbia for journalism and it shows. This guy cares deeply about what he does, and it shows. Stuart has brought something to ski journalism that we didn’t even know was missing, Not only did Stuart find out what it was, he created and scaled a solution. On his 200th podcast I dig into why and how he did it. What we talked about How Erik talked me into being a guest on my own podcast; the history of The Storm Skiing Podcast and why I launched with Northeast coverage; why the podcast almost didn’t happen; why Killington was The Storm’s first pod; I didn’t want to go to college but it happened anyway; why I moved to New York; why a ski writer lives in Brooklyn; “I started The Storm because I wanted to read it”; why I have no interest in off-resort skiing; why pay-to-play isn’t journalism; the good and the awful about social media; I hate debt; working at the NBA; the tech innovation that allowed me to start The Storm; activating The Storm’s paywall; puzzling through subscriber retention; critical journalism as an alien concept to the ski industry; Bro beef explained; what’s behind skiing’s identity crisis; why I don’t read my social media comments; why I...

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and to support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Who Erik Mogensen, Director of Indy Pass, founder of Entabeni Systems, and temporary owner and General Manager of Black Mountain, New Hampshire Recorded on February 25, 2025 About Entabeni Systems Entabeni provides software and hardware engineering exclusively for independent ski areas. Per the company’s one-page website: Entabeni: noun; meaning: zulu - "the mountain" We take pride in providing world class software and hardware engineering in true ski bum style. About Indy Pass Indy Pass delivers two days each at 181 Alpine and 44 cross-country ski areas, plus discounts at eight Allied resorts and four Cat-skiing outfits for the 2024-25 ski season. Indy has announced several additional partners for the 2025-26 ski season. Here is the probable 2025-26 Alpine roster as of March 2, 2025 (click through for most up-to-date roster): Doug Fish, who has appeared on this podcast four times, founded Indy Pass in 2019. Mogensen, via Entabeni, purchased the pass in 2023. About Black Mountain, New Hampshire Click here for a mountain stats overview Owned by: Indy Pass Located in: Jackson, New Hampshire Year founded: 1935 Pass affiliations: Indy Pass and Indy+ Pass – 2 days, no blackouts Closest neighboring ski areas: Attitash (:14), Wildcat (:19), Cranmore (:19), Bretton Woods (:40), King Pine (:43), Pleasant Mountain (:48), Sunday River (1:00), Cannon (1:02), Mt. Abram (1:03) Base elevation: 1,250 feet Summit elevation: 2,350 feet Vertical drop: 1,100 feet Skiable acres: 140 Average annual snowfall: 125 inches Trail count: 45 Lift count: 5 (1 triple, 1 double, 1 J-bar, 1 platter pull, 1 handletow – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Black Mountain’s lift fleet) Why I interviewed him I first spoke to Mogensen in the summer of 2020. He was somewhere out west, running something called Entabeni Systems, and he had insight into a story that I was working on. Indy Pass founder and owner-at-the-time Doug Fish had introduced us. The conversation was helpful. I wrote the story and moved on. Mogensen didn’t. He kept calling. Kept emailing. There was something he wanted me to understand. Not about any particular story that I was writing, but about skiing as a whole. Specifically, about non-megapass skiing. It wasn’t working, he insisted. It couldn’t work without sweeping and fundamental changes. And he knew how to make those changes. He was already making them, via Entabeni, by delivering jetpack technology to caveman ski areas. They’d been fighting with sticks and rocks but now they had machine guns. But they needed more weapons, and faster. I still didn’t get it. Not when Mogensen purchased Indy Pass in March 2023, and not when he joined the board at teetering-on-the-edge-of-existence Antelope Butte, Wyoming the following month. I may not have gotten it until Mogensen assembled, that October, a transcontinental coalition to reverse a New Hampshire mountain’s decision to drop dead or contributed, several weeks later, vital funds to help re-open quirky and long-shuttered Hickory, New York. But in May of that year I had a late-night conversation with Doug Fish in a Savannah bar. He’d had no shortage of Indy Pass suitors, he told me. Fish had chosen Erik, he said, not because his longtime tech partner would respect Indy’s brand integrity or would refuse to sell to Megaski Inc – though certainly both were true – but because in Mogensen, Fish saw a figure messianic in his conviction that family-owned, crockpots-on-tabletops, two-for-Tuesday skiing must not be in the midst of an extinction event. Mogensen, Fish said, had transformed his world into a laboratory for preventing such a catastrophe, rising before dawn and working all day without pause, focused always and only on skiing. More specifically, on positioning lunch-bucket skiing for a...

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and to support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. As of episode 198, you can now watch The Storm Skiing Podcast on YouTube. Please click over to follow the channel. The podcast will continue to stream on all audio platforms. Who Eric Clark, President and Chief Operating Officer of Mammoth and June Mountains, California Recorded on January 29, 2025 Why I interviewed him Mammoth is ridiculous, improbable, outrageous. An impossible combination of unmixable things. SoCal vibes 8,000 feet in the sky and 250 miles north of the megalopolis. Rustic old-California alpine clapboard-and-Yan patina smeared with D-Line speed and Ikon energy. But nothing more implausible than this: 300 days of sunshine and 350 inches of snow in an average year. Some winters more: 715 inches two seasons ago, 618 in the 2016-17 campaign, 669 in 2010-11. Those are base-area totals. Nearly 900 inches stacked onto Mammoth’s summit during the 2022-23 ski season. The ski area opened on Nov. 5 and closed on Aug. 6, a 275-day campaign. Below the paid subscriber jump: why Mammoth stands out even among giants, June’s J1 lift predates the evolution of plant life, Alterra’s investment machine, and more. That’s nature, audacious and brash. Clouds tossed off the Pacific smashing into the continental crest. But it took a soul, hardy and ungovernable, to make Mammoth Mountain into a ski area for the masses. Dave McCoy, perhaps the greatest of the great generation of American ski resort founders, strung up and stapled together and tamed this wintertime kingdom over seven decades. Ropetows then T-bars then chairlifts all over. One of the finest lift systems anywhere. Chairs 1 through 25 stitching together a trail network sculpted and bulldozed and blasted from the monolithic mountain. A handcrafted playground animated as something wild, fierce, prehuman in its savage ever-down. McCoy, who lived to 104, is celebrated as a businessman, a visionary, and a human, but he was also, quietly, an artist. Mammoth is not the largest ski area in America (ranking number nine), California (third behind Palisades and Heavenly), Alterra’s portfolio (third behind Palisades and Steamboat), or the U.S. Ikon Pass roster (fifth after Palisades, Big Sky, Bachelor, and Steamboat). But it may be America’s most beloved big ski resort, frantic and fascinating, an essential big-mountain gateway for 39 million Californians, an Ikon Pass icon and the spiritual home of Alterra Mountain Company. It’s impossible to imagine American skiing without Mammoth, just as it’s impossible to imagine baseball without the Yankees or Africa without elephants. To our national ski identity, Mammoth is an essential thing, like a heart to a human body, a part without which the whole function falls apart. About Mammoth Click here for a mountain stats overview Owned by: Alterra Mountain Company, which also owns: Located in: Mammoth Lakes, California Year founded: 1953 Pass affiliations: * Ikon Pass: unlimited, no blackouts * Ikon Base Pass: unlimited, holiday blackouts Closest neighboring ski areas: June Mountain – around half an hour if the roads are clear; to underscore the severity of the Sierra Nevada, China Peak sits just 28 miles southwest of Mammoth, but is a seven-hour, 450-mile drive away – in good weather. Base elevation: 7,953 feet Summit elevation: 11,053 feet Vertical drop: 3,100 feet Skiable acres: 3,500 Average annual snowfall: 350 inches Trail count: 178 (13% easiest, 28% slightly difficult, 19% difficult, 25% very difficult, 15% extremely difficult) Lift count: 25 (1 15-passenger gondola, 1 two-stage, eight-passenger gondola, 4 high-speed six-packs, 8 high-speed quads, 1 fixed-grip quad, 6 triples, 3 doubles, 1 Poma – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Mammoth’s lift fleet) – the ski area also runs some number of non-public carpets About June Click...

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Jan. 23. It dropped for free subscribers on Jan. 30. To receive future episodes as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below: Who Justin Steck, owner of Steeplechase ski area, Minnesota Recorded on January 7, 2025 About Steeplechase Owned by: Justin Steck Located in: Mazeppa, Minnesota Year founded: 1999, by Kevin Kastler; closed around 2007; re-opened Feb. 4, 2023 by Steck Pass affiliations: Freedom Pass, which offers three days for Steeplechase season passholders at each of these ski areas: Reciprocal partners Closest neighboring ski areas: Coffee Mill (:45), Welch Village (:41) Base elevation: 902 feet Summit elevation: 1,115 feet Vertical drop: 213 feet Skiable acres: 45 acres Average annual snowfall: N/A Trail count: 21 (9 easy, 7 intermediate, 5 advanced) Lift count: 4 (2 triples, 2 doubles – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Steeplechase’s lift fleet) Why I interviewed him They seem to be everywhere, once you know where to look. Abandoned ski areas, rusting, fading. Time capsules. Hoses coiled and stacked. Chairs spaced and numbered along the liftline. Paperwork scattered on desks. Doors unlocked. No explanation. No note. As though the world stopped in apocalypse. America has lost more ski areas than it has kept. Most will stay lost. Many are stripped, almost immediately, of the things that made them commercially viable, of lifts and snowguns and groomers, things purchased at past prices and sold at who-cares discounts and irreplaceable at future rates. But a few ski areas idle as museums, isolated from vandals, forgotten by others, waiting, like ancient crypts, for a great unearthing. Who knew that Steeplechase stood intact? Who knew, really, that the complex existed in the first place, those four motley cobbled-together chairlifts spinning, as they did, for just eight years in the Minnesota wilderness? As though someone pried open a backlot shed on a house they’d purchased years before and found, whole and rebuilt, a Corvette of antique vintage. Pop in a new battery, change the sparkplugs, inflate the tires, and it’s roaring once again. Sometimes in the summer I’ll wander around one of these lost ski areas, imagining what it was, what it could be again. There’s one a bit over an hour north of me, Tuxedo Ridge, its four double chairs stilled, its snowguns pointed skyward, holes in the roof and skis scattered about the lodge. To restore a ski area, I sometimes think, is harder than to build one whole from the earth. Most operators I speak with recoil at the very idea. Which is why, I think, most lost ski area rebuilding or revitalization stories are led by outsiders: Norway Mountain, Holiday Mountain, Tenney, Teton Pass, Paul Bunyan. By the time they realize they’re doing an impossible thing, they’ve done too much to surrender. When Steck acquired the Steeplechase property around 2016, he didn’t really know what he’d do with it. He wanted land, and here was some land. Except the land happened to hold a forgotten-but-intact ski area. Bit by bit, he rebuilt the business: restoring the chapel for weddings, then the tubing lanes, then the chairlifts. He didn’t ask permission. He didn’t make any big proclamation. Suddenly, one winter day in 2023, a ski area that everyone had forgotten was a ski area reappeared in the world. And isn’t that interesting? What we talked about A much stronger start to the 2024-25 Midwestern winter; big expansion potential and when that could happen; the mental march through the rough 2023-24 winter; considering future non-holiday midweek operations; snowmobile racing; how a house-flipping career led Steck to Steeplechase; a snapshot of the ski area lost in time in 2016; rebuilding a ski hill is “a big logistical nightmare on a regular basis,” especially during Covid; the fuzzy origins of Steeplechase’s four...