The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast
Sports & Recreation Podcasts
Everyone’s searching for skiing’s soul. I’m trying to find its brains.
www.stormskiing.com
Location:
United States
Genres:
Sports & Recreation Podcasts
Description:
Everyone’s searching for skiing’s soul. I’m trying to find its brains. www.stormskiing.com
Twitter:
@StormSkiJournal
Language:
English
Contact:
6463191553
Website:
https://skiing.substack.com/
Episodes
Podcast #163: Red Mountain CEO & Chairman Howard Katkov
3/6/2024
This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Feb. 28. It dropped for free subscribers on March 6. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription (on sale at 15% off through March 12, 2024). You can also subscribe to the free tier below:
Who
Howard Katkov, Chairman and CEO of Red Mountain Resort, British Columbia
Recorded on
Feb. 8, 2024
About Red Mountain
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: Red Mountain Ventures
Located in: Rossland, British Columbia, Canada
Year founded: 1947 (beginning of chairlift service)
Pass affiliations:
* Ikon Pass: 7 days, no blackouts
* Ikon Base Pass and Ikon Base Pass Plus: 5 days, holiday blackouts
* Lake Louise Pass (described below)
Closest neighboring ski areas: Salmo (:58), Whitewater (1:22), Phoenix Mountain (1:33), 49 Degrees North (1:53)
Base elevation: 3,887 feet/1,185 meters
Summit elevation: 6,807 feet/2,075 meters
Vertical drop: 2,919 feet/890 meters
Skiable Acres: 3,850
Average annual snowfall: 300 inches/760 cm
Trail count: 119 (17% beginner, 34% intermediate, 23% advanced, 26% expert)
Lift count: 8 (2 fixed-grip quads, 3 triples, 1 double, 1 T-bar, 1 carpet)
View historic Red Mountain trailmaps on skimap.org. Here are some cool video overviews:
Granite Mountain:
Red Mountain:
Grey Mountain:
Rossland:
Why I interviewed him
It’s never made sense to me, this psychological dividing line between Canada and America. I grew up in central Michigan, in a small town closer to Canada (the bridge between Sarnia and Port Huron stood 142 miles away), than the closest neighboring state (Toledo, Ohio, sat 175 miles south). Yet, I never crossed into Canada until I was 19, by which time I had visited roughly 40 U.S. states. Even then, the place felt more foreign than it should, with its aggressive border guards, pizza at McDonald’s, and colored currency. Canada on a map looks easy, but Canada in reality is a bit harder, eh?
Red sits just five miles, as the crow flies, north of the U.S. border. If by some fluke of history the mountain were part of Washington, it would be the state’s greatest ski area, larger than Crystal and Stevens Pass combined. In fact, it would be the seventh-largest ski area in the country, larger than Mammoth or Snowmass, smaller only than Park City, Palisades, Big Sky, Vail, Heavenly, and Bachelor.
But, somehow, the international border acts as a sort of invisibility shield, and skiing Red is a much different experience than visiting any of those giants, with their dense networks of high-speed lifts and destination crowds (well, less so at Bachelor). Sure, Red is an Ikon Pass mountain, and has been for years, but it is not synonymous with the pass, like Jackson or Aspen or Alta-Snowbird. But U.S. skiers – at least those outside of the Pacific Northwest – see Red listed on the Ikon menu and glaze past it like the soda machine at an open bar. It just doesn’t seem relevant.
Which is weird and probably won’t last. And right now Shoosh Emoji Bro is losing his goddamn mind and cursing me for using my platform focused on lift-served snowskiing to hype one of the best and most interesting and most underrated lift-served snowskiing operations in North America. But that’s why this whole deal exists, Brah. Because most people ski at the same 20 places and I really think skiing as an idea and as an experience and as a sustainable enterprise will be much better off if we start spreading people out a bit more.
What we talked about
Red pow days; why Red amped up shuttle service between the ski area and Rossland and made it free; old-school Tahoe; “it is the most interesting mountain I’ve ever skied”; buying a ski area when you’ve never worked at a ski area; why the real-estate crash didn’t bury Red like some other ski areas; why Katkov backed away from a golf course that he spent a year and a half planning at Red; why the 900 lockers at the dead center...
Duration:01:39:11
Podcast #162: Camelback Managing Director David Makarsky
2/19/2024
This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Feb. 12. It dropped for free subscribers on Feb. 19. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:
Who
David Makarsky, General Manager of Camelback Resort, Pennsylvania
Recorded on
February 8, 2024
About Camelback
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: KSL Capital, managed by KSL Resorts
Located in: Tannersville, Pennsylvania
Year founded: 1963
Pass affiliations:
* Ikon Pass: 7 days, no blackouts
* Ikon Base Pass: 5 days, holiday blackouts
Reciprocal partners: None
Closest neighboring ski areas: Shawnee Mountain (:24), Jack Frost (:26), Big Boulder (:27), Skytop Lodge (:29), Saw Creek (:37), Blue Mountain (:41), Pocono Ranchlands (:43), Montage (:44), Hideout (:51), Elk Mountain (1:05), Bear Creek (1:09), Ski Big Bear (1:16)
Base elevation: 1,252 feet
Summit elevation: 2,079 feet
Vertical drop: 827 feet
Skiable Acres: 166
Average annual snowfall: 50 inches
Trail count: 38 (3 Expert Only, 6 Most Difficult, 13 More Difficult, 16 Easiest) + 1 terrain park
Lift count: 13 (1 high-speed six-pack, 1 high-speed quad, 1 fixed-grip quad, 3 triples, 3 doubles, 4 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Camelback’s lift fleet)
View historic Camelback trailmaps on skimap.org.
Why I interviewed him
At night it heaves from the frozen darkness in funhouse fashion, 800 feet high and a mile wide, a billboard for human life and activity that is not a gas station or a Perkins or a Joe’s Vape N’ Puff. The Poconos are a peculiar and complicated place, a strange borderland between the Midwest, the Mid-Atlantic, and the Northeast. Equidistant from New York City and Philadelphia, approaching the northern tip of Appalachia, framed by the Delaware Water Gap to the east and hundreds of miles of rolling empty wilderness to the west, the Poconos are gorgeous and decadent, busyness amid abandonment, cigarette-smoking cement truck drivers and New Jersey-plated Mercedes riding 85 along the pinched lanes of Interstate 80 through Stroudsburg. “Safety Corridor, Speed Limit 50,” read the signs that everyone ignores.
But no one can ignore Camelback, at least not at night, at least not in winter, as the mountain asserts itself over I-80. Though they’re easy to access, the Poconos keeps most of its many ski areas tucked away. Shawnee hides down a medieval access road, so narrow and tree-cloaked that you expect to be ambushed by poetry-spewing bandits. Jack Frost sits at the end of a long access road, invisible even upon arrival, the parking lot seated, as it is, at the top of the lifts. Blue Mountain boasts prominence, rising, as it does, to the Appalachian Trail, but it sits down a matrix of twisting farm roads, off the major highway grid.
Camelback, then, is one of those ski areas that acts not just as a billboard for itself, but for all of skiing. This, combined with its impossibly fortuitous location along one of the principal approach roads to New York City, makes it one of the most important ski areas in America. A place that everyone can see, in the midst of drizzling 50-degree brown-hilled Poconos February, is filled with snow and life and fun. “Oh look, an organized sporting complex that grants me an alternative to hating winter. Let’s go try that.”
The Poconos are my best argument that skiing not only will survive climate change, but has already perfected the toolkit to do so. Skiing should not exist as a sustained enterprise in these wild, wet hills. It doesn’t snow enough and it rains all the time. But Poconos ski area operators invested tens of millions of dollars to install seven brand-new chairlifts in 2022. They didn’t do this in desperate attempts to salvage dying businesses, but as modernization efforts for businesses that are kicking off cash.
In six of the past eight seasons, (excluding 2020), Camelback spun lifts into...
Duration:01:26:58
Podcast #161: Teton Pass, Montana Owner Charles Hlavac
2/16/2024
This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Feb. 9. It dropped for free subscribers on Feb. 16. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:
Who
Charles Hlavac, Owner of Teton Pass, Montana
Recorded on
January 29, 2024
About Teton Pass
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: Charles Hlavac
Located in: Choteau, Montana
Year founded: 1967
Pass affiliations: None
Closest neighboring ski areas: Great Divide (2:44), Showdown (3:03)
Base elevation: 6,200 feet
Summit elevation: 7,200 feet (at the top of the double chair)
Vertical drop: 1,000 feet
Skiable Acres: 400 acres
Average annual snowfall: 300 inches
Lift count: 3 (1 double, 1 platter, 1 carpet – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Teton Pass’ lift fleet)
View historic Teton Pass trailmaps on skimap.org.
Why I interviewed him
There was a time, before the Bubble-Wrap Era, when American bureaucracy believed that the nation’s most beautiful places ought to be made available to citizens. Not just to gawk at from a distance, but to interact with in a way that strikes awe in the soul and roots the place in their psyche.
That’s why so many of our great western ski areas sit on public land. Taos and Heavenly and Mt. Baldy and Alta and Crystal Mountain and Lookout Pass. These places, many of them inaccessible before the advent of the modern highway system, were selected not only because they were snow magnets optimally pitched for skiing, but because they were beautiful.
And that’s how we got Teton Pass, Montana, up a Forest Service road at the end of nowhere, hovering over the Rocky Mountain front. Because just look at the place:
Who knew it was there then? Who knows it now? A bald peak screaming “ski me” to a howling wilderness for 50 million years until the Forest Service printed some words on a piece of paper that said someone was allowed to put a chairlift there.
As bold and prescient as the Forest Service was in gifting us ski areas, they didn’t nail them all. Yes, Aspen and Vail and Snowbird and Palisades Tahoe and Stevens Pass, fortuitously positioned along modern highways or growing cities, evolved into icons. But some of these spectacular natural ski sites languished. Mt. Waterman has faltered without snowmaking or competent ownership. Antelope Butte and Sleeping Giant were built in the middle of nowhere and stayed there. Spout Springs is too small to draw skiers across the PNW vastness. Of the four, only Antelope Butte has spun lifts this winter.
Remoteness has been the curse of Teton Pass, a fact compounded by a nasty 11-mile gravel access road. The closest town is Choteau, population 1,719, an hour down the mountain. Great Falls, population 60,000, is only around two hours away, but that city is closer to Showdown, a larger ski area with more vertical drop, three chairlifts, and a parking lot seated directly off a paved federal highway. Teton Pass, gorgeously positioned as a natural wonder, got a crummy draw as a sustainable business.
Which doesn’t mean it can’t work. Unlike the Forest Service ski areas at Cedar Pass or Kratka Ridge in California, Teton Pass hasn’t gone fallow. The lifts still spin. Skiers still ski there. Not many – approximately 7,000 last season, which would be a light day for any Summit County ski facility. This year, it will surely be even fewer, as Hlavic announced 10 days after we recorded this podcast that a lack of snow, among other factors, would force him to call it a season after just four operating days. But Hlavic is young and optimistic and stubborn and aware that he is trying to walk straight up a wall. In our conversation, you can hear his belief in this wild and improbable place, his conviction that there is a business model for Teton Pass that can succeed in spite of the rough access road and the lack of an electrical grid connection and the small and scattered...
Duration:01:43:10
Podcast #160: Buck Hill Chief Operating Officer Nathan Birr
2/15/2024
This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Feb. 8. It dropped for free subscribers on Feb. 15. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:
Who
Nathan Birr, Chief Operating Officer of Buck Hill, Minnesota
Recorded on
January 26, 2024
About Buck Hill
Owned by: David and Corrine (Chip) Solner
Located in: Burnsville, Minnesota
Year founded: 1954
Pass affiliations:
* Indy Base Pass – 2 days with 16 holiday blackouts
* Indy+ Pass – 2 days with no blackouts
Closest neighboring ski areas: Hyland Hills (:21), Como Park (:33), Afton Alps (:41), Elm Creek (:43), Welch Village (:46)
Base elevation: 919 feet
Summit elevation: 1,225 feet
Vertical drop: 306 feet
Skiable Acres: 45
Average annual snowfall: 60 inches
Trail count: 14 (2 most difficult, 6 intermediate, 6 beginner), 4 terrain parks
Lift count: 9 (2 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 4 ropetows, 2 conveyors - view Lift Blog’s inventory of Buck Hill’s lift fleet)
View historic Buck Hill trailmaps on skimap.org.
Why I interviewed him
Buck Hill rises like a ludicrous contraption, impossible there in the Twin Cities flatlands, like the ski resort knotted into Thneedville’s inflatable glades and shirt-sleeve clime (1:25):
How did it get there? What does it do? Did someone build it? At first, I thought someone must have, like Mount Brighton, Michigan. But no. The glaciers made it, a gift to the far future as these ice walls retreated and crumbled. It is the highest point for 200 miles in any direction.
Before skiing, Native Americans used the hill as a vantage to stalk deer drinking from Crystal Lake. Thus the name. It has probably been “Buck Hill” for hundreds of years. Maybe thousands. Now the lake is covered in ice-fishing shanties all winter, and the hill is hemmed in by an interstate on one side and housing developments on all the rest. And the hill, 45 acres of fall line that erupts from seemingly nowhere for seemingly no reason, is covered with skiers.
Good skiers. I am enormously fond of the Midwest’s blue-collar ski scene, its skiers on rental gear in hunter-orange jackets, rat-packing with their buddies as a hootalong thing to do on a Wednesday night. This does not exist everywhere anymore, but in the Midwest skiing is still cheap and so it still does. And these rough fellows dot the slopes of Buck. But they don’t define the place like they do at Spirit or Nub’s Nob or Snowriver. Because what defines Buck Hill is the shin-guard-wearing, speed-suit wrapped, neon-accented-even-though-neon-has-been-over-for-30-years squadrons of velocity-monsters whipping through plastic poles drilled into the snow.
It can be hard to square smallness with might. But England once ruled half the world from a nation roughly the size of Louisiana. Some intangible thing. And tiny Buck Hill, through intention, persistence, and a lack of really anything else to do, has established itself, over the decades, as one of the greatest ski-race-training centers on the planet, sending more than 50 athletes to the U.S. Ski Team. Credit founders Chuck and Nancy Stone for the vision; credit confused-upon-arrival Austrian Erich Sailer (“Where’s the hill?” he supposedly asked), for building the race program; credit whatever stalled that glacier on that one spot long enough to leave us a playground that stuck around for 10,000 years until we invented chairlifts. Buck is a spectacular amalgam of luck and circumstance, an improbable place made essential.
What we talked about
Buck Hill’s brand-new quad; party up top; the tallest point in 200 miles; Chuck and Nancy Stone, who started a ski area on a farmer’s pasture; a glacier’s present to skiers; the hazards of interstate-adjacent snowmaking; why the resort’s founders and long-term owners finally sold the bump in 2015; Erich Sailer and Buck’s incredible ski racing legacy; Lindsay Vonn; a perfect...
Duration:01:22:23
Podcast #159: Big Sky General Manager Troy Nedved
1/23/2024
This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Jan. 16. It dropped for free subscribers on Jan. 23. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:
Who
Troy Nedved, General Manager of Big Sky, Montana
Recorded on
January 11, 2024
About Big Sky
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: Boyne Resorts
Located in: Big Sky, Montana
Year founded: 1973
Pass affiliations:
* 7 days, no blackouts on Ikon Pass (reservations required)
* 5 days, holiday blackouts on Ikon Base and Ikon Base Plus Pass (reservations required)
* 2 days, no blackouts on Mountain Collective (reservations required)
Reciprocal partners: Top-tier Big Sky season passes include three days each at Boyne’s other nine ski areas: Brighton, Summit at Snoqualmie, Cypress, Boyne Mountain, The Highlands, Loon Mountain, Sunday River, Pleasant Mountain, and Sugarloaf.
Closest neighboring ski areas: Yellowstone Club (ski-to connection); Bear Canyon (private ski area for Mount Ellis Academy – 1:20); Bridger Bowl (1:30)
Base elevation: 6,800 feet at Madison Base
Summit elevation: 11,166 feet
Vertical drop: 4,350 feet
Skiable Acres: 5,850
Average annual snowfall: 400-plus inches
Trail count: 300 (18% expert, 35% advanced, 25% intermediate, 22% beginner)
Terrain parks: 6
Lift count: 38 (1 75-passenger tram, 1 high-speed eight-pack, 3 high-speed six-packs, 4 high-speed quads, 3 fixed-grip quads, 9 triples, 5 doubles, 3 platters, 1 ropetow, 8 carpet lifts – Big Sky also recently announced a second eight-pack, to replace the Six Shooter six-pack, next year; and a new, two-stage gondola, which will replace the Explorer double chair for the 2025-26 ski season – View Lift Blog’s inventory of Big Sky’s lift fleet.)
View vintage Big Sky trailmaps on skimap.org.
Why I interviewed him
Big Sky is the closest thing American skiing has to the ever-stacking ski circuses of British Columbia. While most of our western giants labor through Forest Service approvals for every new snowgun and trail sign, BC transforms Revelstoke and Kicking Horse and Sun Peaks into three of the largest ski resorts on the continent in under two decades. These are policy decisions, differences in government and public philosophies of how to use our shared land. And that’s fine. U.S. America does everything in the most difficult way possible, and there’s no reason to believe that ski resort development would be any different.
Except in a few places in the West, it is different. Deer Valley and Park City and Schweitzer sit entirely (or mostly), on private land. New project approvals lie with local entities. Sometimes, locals frustrate ski areas’ ambitions, as is the case in Park City, which cannot, at the moment, even execute simple lift replacements. But the absence of a federal overlord is working just fine at Big Sky, where the mountain has evolved from Really Good to Damn Is This Real in less time than it took Aspen to secure approvals for its 153-acre Hero’s expansion.
Boyne has pulled similar stunts at its similarly situated resorts across the country: Boyne Mountain and The Highlands in Michigan and Sunday River in Maine, each of them transforming in Hollywood montage-scene fashion. Progress has lagged more at Brighton and Alpental, both of which sit at least partly on Forest Service land (though change has been rapid at Loon Mountain in New Hampshire, whose land is a public-private hybrid). But the evolution at Big Sky has been particularly comprehensive. And, because of the ski area’s inherent drama and prominence, compelling. It’s America’s look-what-we-can-do-if-we-can-just-do mountain. The on-mountain product is better for skiers and better for skiing, a modern mountain that eases chokepoints and upgrades facilities and spreads everyone around.
Winter Park, seated on Forest Service land, owned by the City of Denver, and operated by...
Duration:01:18:26
Podcast #158: Whiteface General Manager Aaron Kellett
1/6/2024
This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Dec. 30. It dropped for free subscribers on Jan. 6. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:
Who
Aaron Kellett, General Manager of Whiteface, New York
Recorded on
December 4, 2023
About Whiteface
View the mountain stats overview
Owned by: The State of New York
Located in: Wilmington, New York
Year founded: 1958
Pass affiliations: NY Ski3 Pass: Unlimited, along with Gore and Belleayre
Closest neighboring ski areas: Mt. Pisgah (:34), Beartown (:55), Dynamite Hill (1:05), Rydin-Hy Ranch (1:12), Titus (1:15), Gore (1:21)
Base elevation: 1,220 feet
Summit elevation:
* 4,386 feet (top of Summit Quad)
* 4,650 feet (top of The Slides)
* 4,867 feet (mountain summit)
Vertical drop: 3,166 feet lift-served; 3,430 feet hike-to
Skiable Acres: 299 + 35 acres in The Slides
Average annual snowfall: 183 inches
Trail count: 94 (30% expert, 46% intermediate, 24% beginner)
Lift count: 12 (1 eight-passenger gondola, 2 high-speed quads, 3 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 3 doubles, 2 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Whiteface’s lift fleet)
View historic Whiteface trailmaps on skimap.org.
Why I interviewed him
Whiteface, colloquially “Iceface,” rises, from base to summit, a greater height than any ski area in the Northeast. That may not impress the Western chauvinists, who refuse to acknowledge any merit to east-of-the-Mississippi skiing, but were we to airlift this monster to the West Coast, it would tower over all but two ski areas in the three-state region:
The International Olympic Committee does not select Winter Games host mountains by tossing darts at a world map. Consider the other U.S. ski areas that have played host: Palisades Tahoe, Park City, Snowbasin, Deer Valley. All naturally blessed with more and more consistent snow than this gnarly Adirondacks skyscraper, but Whiteface, from a pure fall-line skiing point of view, is the equal of any mountain in the country.
Still not convinced? Fine. Whiteface will do just fine without you. This state-owned, heavily subsidized-by-public-funds monster seated in the heart of the frozen Adirondacks has just about the most assured future of any ski area anywhere. With an ever-improving monster of a snowmaking system and no great imperative to raise the cannons against Epkon invaders, the place is as close to climate-proof and competition-proof as a modern ski area can possibly be.
There’s nothing else quite like Whiteface. Most publicly owned ski areas are ropetow bumps that sell lift tickets out of a woodshed on the edge of town. They lean on public funds because they couldn’t exist without them. The big ski areas can make their own way. But New York State, enamored of its Olympic legacy and eager to keep that flame burning, can’t quite let this one go. The result is this glimmering, grinning monster of a mountain, a boon for the skier, bane for the tax-paying family-owned ski areas in its orbit who are left to fight this colossus on their own. It’s not exactly fair and it’s not exactly right, but it exists, in all its glory and confusion, and it was way past time to highlight Whiteface on this podcast.
What we talked about
Whiteface’s strong early December (we recorded this before the washout); recent snowmaking enhancements; why Empire still doesn’t have snowmaking; May closings at Whiteface; why Whiteface built The Notch, an all-new high-speed quad, to serve existing terrain; other lines the ski area considered for the lift; Whiteface’s extensive transformation of the beginner experience over the past few years; remembering “snowboard parks” and the evolution of Whiteface’s terrain parks; Whiteface’s immense legacy and importance to Northeast skiing; could New York host another Winter Olympics?; potential upper-mountain lift upgrades; the etymology of recent Whiteface lift...
Duration:01:37:22
Podcast #157: Berkshire East & Catamount Owner & GM Jon Schaefer
1/4/2024
This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Dec. 28. It dropped for free subscribers on Jan. 4. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:
Who
Jon Schaefer, Owner and General Manager of Berkshire East, Massachusetts and Catamount, straddling the border of Massachusetts and New York
Recorded on
December 6, 2023
About the mountains
Berkshire East
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: The Schaefer family
Located in: Charlemont, Massachusetts
Year founded: 1960
Pass affiliations:
* Berkshire Summit Pass: Unlimited Access
* Indy Base Pass: 2 days with blackouts (reservations required)
* Indy+ Pass: 2 days, no blackouts (reservations required)
Closest neighboring ski areas: Eaglebrook School (:36), Brattleboro (:48), Hermitage Club (:48), Mt. Greylock Ski Club (:52), Mount Snow (:55), Jiminy Peak (:56), Bousquet (:56); Catamount is approximately 90 minutes south of Berkshire East
Base elevation: 660 feet
Summit elevation: 1,840 feet
Vertical drop: 1,180 feet
Skiable Acres: 180
Average annual snowfall: 110 inches
Trail count: 45
Lift count: 7 (1 high-speed quad, 2 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 1 double, 2 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Berkshire East’s lift fleet)
View historic Berkshire East trailmaps on skimap.org.
Catamount
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: The Schaefer family
Located in: Hillsdale, New York and South Egremont, Massachusetts (the resort straddles the state line, and generally seems to use the New York address as its location of record)
Year founded: 1939
Pass affiliations:
* Berkshire Summit Pass: Unlimited Access
* Indy Base Pass and Indy+ Pass: 2 days, no blackouts (reservations required)
Closest neighboring ski areas: Butternut (:19), Otis Ridge (:35), Bousquet (:40), Mohawk Mountain (:46), Jiminy Peak (:50), Mount Lakeridge (:55), Mt. Greylock Ski Club (1:02); Berkshire East sits approximately 90 minutes north of Catamount
Base elevation: 1,000 feet
Summit elevation: 2,000 feet
Vertical drop: 1,000 feet
Skiable Acres: 133 acres
Average annual snowfall: 108 inches
Trail count: 44 (35% green, 42% blue, 23% black/double-black)
Lift count: 8 (2 fixed-grip quads, 3 triples, 3 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Catamount’s lift fleet)
View historic Catamount trailmaps on skimap.org.
Why I interviewed him
Might I nominate Massachusetts as America’s most underappreciated ski state? It’s easy to understand the oversight. Bordered by three major ski states that are home to a combined 107 ski areas (50 in New York, 27 in Vermont, and 30 in New Hampshire), Massachusetts contains just 13 active lift-served mountains. Two (Easton School and Mount Greylock Ski Club) are private. Five of the remainder deliver vertical drops of 400 feet or fewer. The state’s entire lift-served skiable area clocks in at around 1,300 acres, which is smaller than Killington and just a touch larger than Solitude.
But the code and character of those 11 public ski areas is what I’m interested in here. Winnowed from some 200 bumps that once ran ropetows up the incline, these survivors are super-adapters, the Darwinian capstones to a century-long puzzle: how to consistently offer skiing in a hostile world that hates you.
New England is a rumbler, and always has been. Outside of northern Vermont’s Green Mountain Spine (Sugarbush, MRG, Bolton, Stowe, Smuggs, Jay), which snags 200-plus inches of almost automatic annual snowfall, the region’s six states can, on any given day from November to April, stage double as Santa’s Village or serve as props for sad brown Christmas pining. Immersive reading of the New England Ski History website suggests this contemporary reality reflects historical norms: prior to the widespread introduction of snowmaking, ski areas could sometimes offer just a single-digit number of ski days in...
Duration:01:39:32
Podcast #156: Mt. Rose General Manager Greg Gavrilets
1/2/2024
This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Dec. 26. It dropped for free subscribers on Jan. 2. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:
Who
Greg Gavrilets, General Manager of Mt. Rose, Nevada
Recorded on
November 27, 2023
About Mt. Rose
View the mountain stats overview
Owned by: The Buser family
Located in: Incline Village, Nevada
Year founded: 1964
Pass affiliations: None
Reciprocal partners: None
Closest neighboring ski areas: Sky Tavern (:03), Diamond Peak (:15), Northstar (:28), Homewood (:44), Palisades Tahoe (:45), Tahoe Donner (:48), Boreal (:49), Donner Ski Ranch (:51), Sugar Bowl (:52), Soda Springs (:53), Heavenly (:56). Travel times vary considerably given weather conditions, time of day, and time of year.
Base elevation: 7,900 feet (bottom of Chuter lift)
Summit elevation: 9,700 feet
Vertical drop: 1,800 feet
Skiable Acres: 1,200+
Average annual snowfall: 350 inches
Trail count: 70+ (10% expert double black, 40% black, 30% intermediate blue, 20% beginner green)
Lift count: 8 (2 six-packs, 1 high-speed quad, 2 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 1 carpet, 1 “Little Mule”)
View historic Mt. Rose trailmaps on skimap.org.
Why I interviewed him
There’s something so damn dramatic about skiing around Tahoe. The lake, yes, but it’s also the Sierra Nevada, heaving and brutal, pitched as though crafted for skiing, evergreens loper-spaced apart. It’s the snow, piled like pizza boxes in a hoarder’s apartment, ever-higher, too much to count or comprehend (well, some years). It’s the density, the always knowing that, like some American Alps, there is always another ski center past the one you’re riding and the one you can see from there and the one you can see beyond that.
Mt. Rose is one of just three Tahoe ski areas that sits fully on the Nevada side of the lake (the other two are Diamond Peak and Sky Tavern; Heavenly straddles the California-Nevada border). That whole Nevada thing can sap some of the Tahoe mystique. What is Nevada, after all, to most of us, but desert, dry, wide-open, and empty? I once slipped into a hallucinogenic state of borderline psychosis on a 122-degree drive Vegas-bound across Interstate 15. I was dead sober but sleep-deprived and in a truck with no air-conditioning the rippling distances tore my soul into potpourri and scattered it about the alien planet I became convinced I was crossing.
But Nevada is a ski state, and Mt. Rose is its finest ski area. As the truest locals’ bump on the block, it is a crucial piece of the Tahoe Zeitgeist, the place that tourists don’t bother with, and that locals bother with specifically because of that fact.
There are a handful of communities in America that count as their home bump a big, thrilling ski area that is not also a major tourist attraction. Bogus Basin, outside of Boise; Mt. Spokane, Washington; Montana Snowbowl, looming over Missoula. Where you can mainline the big-mountain experience sans the enervation of crowds. Mt. Rose is one of those places, a good, big ski area without all the overwhelm we’ve come to associate with them.
What we talked about
Early-season openings; assessing the Lakeview chairlift upgrade after year one; why Mt. Rose doesn’t operate into May; extending the ski day after Daylight Savings; could night skiing ever work at Mt. Rose?; living through 668 inches of snow; Ober Mountain; the upside of starting your career at a small ski area; the brilliance of Peak Resorts; where Vail went right and wrong in their acquisition of Peak; the existential challenges of Paoli Peaks; the Very Bad 2021-22 ski season at Attitash; fortress mentality; convincing Vail to upgrade the Attitash Summit Triple; what Gavrilets found when he showed up at Mt. Rose on Saturday of President’s Weekend; how the Busers built Mt. Rose into a first-rate ski area; why the family considered selling Mt....
Duration:01:44:25
The Storm Live #2: On The Ground for the Opening of Big Sky’s New Lone Peak Tram
12/20/2023
The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and to support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Who
Boyne Resorts CEO Stephen Kircher, Big Sky President Taylor Middleton, Big Sky GM Troy Nedved, and Garaventa Chief Rigger Cédric Aellig
Where
Big Sky invited media to attend the opening of their new Lone Peak tram, the first all-new tram at a U.S. ski resort since Jackson Hole opened theirs in 2008.
Recorded on
December 19, 2023
About Big Sky
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: Boyne Resorts
Base elevation: 6,800 feet at Madison Base
Summit elevation: 11,166 feet
Vertical drop: 4,350 feet
Skiable Acres: 5,850
Average annual snowfall: 400-plus inches
Trail count: 300 (18% expert, 35% advanced, 25% intermediate, 22% beginner)
Terrain parks: 6
Lift count: 40 (1 75-passenger tram, 1 high-speed eight-pack, 3 high-speed six-packs, 4 high-speed quads, 3 fixed-grip quads, 9 triples, 5 doubles, 3 platters, 2 ropetows, 9 carpet lifts) – View Lift Blog’s inventory of Big Sky’s lift fleet.
About the new Lone Peak Tram
It may seem like the most U.S. American thing ever to spend tens of millions of dollars to replace a lift that was only 28 years old (remember when the Detroit Lions dropped half a billion to replace the 26-year-old Pontiac Silverdome?), but the original tram cost just $1 million to build, and it served a very different ski resort and a very different ski world. It was, besides, a bit of a proof of concept, built against the wishes of the company’s own CEO, Boyne Resorts founder Everett Kircher. If they could just string a lift to the top, it would, the younger Kirchers knew, transform Big Sky forever.
It did. Then all sorts of other things happened. The Ikon Pass. Montana’s transformation into a hipster’s Vermont West. Social media and the quest for something different. The fun slowly draining from Utah and Colorado as both suffocated under their own convenience. Big Sky needed a new tram.
The first thing to understand about the new tram is that it does not simply replace the old tram. It runs on a different line, loading between the top of Swift Current and the bottom of Powder Seeker; the old tram loaded off the top of the latter lift. Here’s the old versus the new line:
The new line boosts the vertical drop from 1,450 feet to 2,135. Larger cabins can accommodate 75 passengers, a 500 percent increase from 15 in the old tram (Big Sky officials insist that the cars will rarely, if ever, carry that many skiers, with capacity metered to conditions and seats set aside for sightseers).
One dramatic difference between the old and the new lines is a tower (the old tram had none), perched dramatically below the summit:
It’s a trip to ride through:
But the most astonishing thing about riding the new Lone Peak tram is the sheer speed. It moves at up to 10 meters per second, which, when I first heard that, meant about as much to me as when my high school chemistry teacher tried to explain the concept of moles with a cigar-box analogy. But then I was riding up and the down-bound cabin passed me like someone just tossed a piano off the roof of a skyscraper:
Here’s the down-bound view:
The top sits at 11,166 feet, which is by no means the highest lift in America, but it is the most prominent point for an amazing distance around, granting you stunning views of three states and two national parks, plus the Yellowstone Club ski area and Big Sky itself:
The peak is fickle as hell though – an hour after I took those photos, I walked into a cloud bank on a second trip to the summit.
Right now, the only way to access the tram is by riding the Swift Current 6 (itself an extraordinary lift, like borrowing someone’s Porsche for a ride around the block), and skiing or walking a few hundred vertical feet down. But a two-stage, 10-passenger gondola is already under construction. This will load where the Explorer double currently does,...
Duration:00:50:12
Podcast #155: Worcester Telegram & Gazette Snowsports Columnist Shaun Sutner
12/18/2023
This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Dec. 11. It dropped for free subscribers on Dec. 18. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:
Who
Shaun Sutner, snowsports columnist for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette and Telegram.com
Recorded on
November 20, 2023
About Shaun Sutner
Shaun is a skier, a writer, and a journalist based in Worcester, Massachusetts. For the past 19 years, he’s written a snowsports column from Thanksgiving to April. For the past three years, he’s joined me on The Storm Skiing Podcast to discuss that column, but also to talk all things New England skiing (and beyond). You should follow Shaun on social media to stay locked into his work:
Why I interviewed him
Last month, I clicked open a SNOWBOARDER email newsletter and found this headline slotted under “trending news”:
Yikes, I thought. Not again. I clicked through to the story. In full:
Tensions simmered as disgruntled Stevens Pass skiers, clutching their "Epic Passes," rallied against Vail Resorts' alleged mismanagement. The discontent echoed through an impassioned petition, articulating a litany of grievances: excessive lift lines, scant open terrain, inadequate staffing, and woeful parking, painting a dismal portrait of a beloved winter haven.
Fueled by a sense of betrayal, the signatories lamented a dearth of ski-ready slopes despite ample snowfall, bemoaning Vail Resorts' purported disregard for both patrons and employees. Their frustration soared at the stark contrast to neighboring ski areas, thriving under similar conditions.
The petition's fervor escalated, challenging the ethics of selling passes without delivering promised services, highlighting derisory wages juxtaposed against corporate profiteering. The collective call-to-action demanded reparation, invoking consumer protection laws and even prodding the involvement of the Attorney General and the U.S. Forest Service.
Yet, amidst their resolve, a poignant melancholy pervaded—the desire to relish the slopes overshadowed by a battle for justice. The signatories yearned for equitable winter joys, dreaming of swift resolutions and an end to the clash with corporate giants, vowing to safeguard the legacy of snow sports for generations to come.
As the petition gathered momentum, a snowstorm of change loomed on the horizon, promising either reconciliation or a paradigm shift in the realm of winter recreation.
The “impassioned petition” in question is dated Dec. 28, 2021. In the nearly two intervening years, Vail Resorts has fired Stevens Pass’ GM, brought in a highly respected local (Tom Fortune) who had spent decades at the ski area to stabilize things (Fortune and I discussed this at length on the podcast), and installed a new, young GM (Ellen Galbraith), with deep roots in the area (I also hosted Galbraith on the podcast). Last ski season (2022-23), was a smooth one at Stevens Pass. And while Skier Mob is never truly happy with anything, the petition in question flared, faded, and went into hibernation approximately 18 months before Snowboarder got around to this story. Yes, there were issues at Stevens Pass. Vail fixed them. The end.
The above-cited story is also overwritten, under-contextualized, and borderline slanderous. “Derisory wages?” Vail has since raised its minimum wage to $20 an hour. To stand there and aim a scanny-beepy thing at skiers as they approach the lift queue. Sounds like hell on earth.
Perhaps I missed the joke here, and this is some sort of snowy Onion. I do hate to call out other writers. But this is a particularly lazy exhibit of the core problem with modern snowsports writing: most of it is not very good. The non-ski media will humor us with the occasional piece, but these tend to be dumbed down for a general audience. The legacy ski media as a functioning editorial entity no longer exists. There are...
Duration:01:33:12
Podcast #154: Snowriver General Manager Benjamin Bartz
12/15/2023
This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Dec. 8. It dropped for free subscribers on Dec. 15. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:
Who
Benjamin Bartz, General Manager of Snowriver, Michigan
Recorded on
November 13, 2023
About Snowriver
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: Midwest Family Ski Resorts
Located in: Wakefield (Jackson Creek Summit) and Bessemer (Black River Basin), Michigan
Year founded: 1959 (Jackson Creek, as Indianhead) and 1977 (Black River Basin, as Blackjack)
Pass affiliations:
Legendary Pass (also includes varying access to Lutsen Mountains, Minnesota and Granite Peak, Wisconsin)
* Gold: unlimited access
* Silver: unlimited access
* Bronze: unlimited midweek access with holiday blackouts
The Indy Base Pass and Indy+ Pass also include two Snowriver days with no blackouts
Closest neighboring ski areas: Big Powderhorn (:14), Mt. Zion Ski Hill (:17), Whitecap Mountains (:39); Porkies Winter Sports Complex (:48)
Base elevation:
* Jackson Creek: 1,212 feet
* Black River Basin: 1,185 feet
Summit elevation:
* Jackson Creek: 1,750 feet
* Black River Basin: 1,675 feet
Vertical drop:
* Jackson Creek: 538 feet
* Black River Basin: 490 feet
Skiable Acres: 400 (both ski areas combined)
* Jackson Creek: 230
* Black River Basin: 170
Average annual snowfall: 200 inches
Trail count: 71 trails, 17 glades, 3 terrain parks
* Jackson Creek: 43 trails, 11 glades, 2 terrain parks
* Black River Basin: 28 trails, 6 glades, 1 terrain park
Lift count: 11 (1 six-pack, 6 doubles, 1 T-bar, 2 ropetows, 1 carpet)
* Jackson Creek Summit: 6 (1 six-pack, 2 doubles, 1 T-bar, 1 ropetow, 1 carpet)
* Black River Basin: 5 (4 doubles, 1 ropetow)
View historic Snowriver trailmaps on skimap.org.
Why I interviewed him
I could tell this story as a Michigan story, as a young skier still awed by the far-off Upper Peninsula, that remote and wild and snowy realm Up North and Over the Bridge. I could tell it as a weather story, of glacial bumps bullseyed in the greatest of the Great Lakes snowbelts. Or as a story of a run-down complex tumbling into hyper-change, or one that activated the lifts in 1978 and just left them spinning. It’s an Indy Pass story, a ski area with better skiing than infrastructure that will give you a where’s-everyone-else kind of ski day. And it’s a Midwest Family Ski Resorts (MFSR) story, skiing’s version of a teardown, where nothing is sacred and everything will change and all you can do is stand back and watch the wrecking ball swing and the scaffolding go up the sides.
Each of these is tempting, and the podcast is inevitably a mash-up. Writing about the Midwest will always be personal to me. The UP is that Great Otherplace, where the snow is bottomless and everything is cheap and everyone is somewhere else. Snowriver is both magnificently retro and badly in need of updating. And it is a good ski area and a solid addition to the Indy Pass.
But, more than anything, the story of Snowriver is the story of MFSR and the Skinner family. There is no better ski area operator. They have equals but no betters. You know how when a certain actor or director gets involved in something, or when a certain athlete moves to a new team, you think, “Man, that’s gonna be good.” They project excellence. Everything they touch absorbs it. Did you know that one man, Shigeru Miyamoto, invented, among others, the Donkey Kong, Mario Brothers, Legend of Zelda, and Star Fox franchises, and has directed or produced every sequel of every game for four decades? Time calls him “the Spielberg of video games.” Well, the Skinners are the Spielberg – or perhaps the Miyamoto – of Midwest skiing. Everything they touch becomes the best version of that thing that it can achieve.
What we talked about
Snowriver’s new six-pack lift; why Snowriver removed three...
Duration:01:31:29
Podcast #153: Attitash Mountain General Manager Brandon Swartz
11/28/2023
This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Nov. 21. It dropped for free subscribers on Nov. 28. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:
Who
Brandon Swartz, General Manager of Attitash Mountain Resort, New Hampshire
Recorded on
November 6, 2023
About Attitash
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: Vail Resorts
Located in: Bartlett, New Hampshire
Year founded: 1964
Pass affiliations:
* Epic Pass: unlimited access
* Epic Local Pass: unlimited access
* Northeast Value Pass: unlimited access
* Northeast Midweek Pass: unlimited midweek access
* Epic Day Pass: 1 to 7 days of access with all resorts, 32-resorts, and 22-resorts tiers
Closest neighboring ski areas: Black Mountain (:14), Cranmore (:16), Wildcat (:23), Bretton Woods (:28), King Pine (:35), Pleasant Mountain (:45), Mt. Eustis (:49), Cannon (:49), Loon (1:04), Sunday River (1:04), Mt. Abram (1:07)
Base elevation: 600 feet
Summit elevation: 2,350 feet at the top of Attitash Peak
Vertical drop: 1,750 feet
Skiable Acres: 311-plus
Average annual snowfall: 120 inches
Trail count: 68 (27% most difficult, 44% intermediate, 29% novice)
Lift count: 8 (3 high-speed quads, 2 fixed-grip quads, 2 triples, 1 surface lift – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Attitash’s lift fleet)
View historic Attitash trailmaps on skimap.org.
Why I interviewed him
Ask any casual NBA fan which player won the most championships in the modern era, and they will probably give you Michael and Scottie. Six titles, two threepeats, ’91 to ’93 and ’96 to ’98. And it would’ve been eight in a row had MJ not followed his spirit animal onto the baseball diamond for two summers, they might add.
But they’re wrong. The non-1950s-to-‘60s player with the most NBA titles is Robert Horry, Big Shot Bob, who played an important role in seven title runs with three teams: the 1994 and ’95 Houston Rockets; the 2000, 2001, and 2002 Lakers; and the 2005 and ’07 San Antonio Spurs. While he’s not in the hall of fame (Shaq thinks he should be), and doesn’t make The Athletic or Hoops Hype’s top 75 lists, Stadium Talk lists Horry as one of the 25 most clutch players of all time.
Attitash might be skiing’s Robert Horry. Always in the halo of greatness, never the superstar. Vail Resorts is the ski area’s third consecutive conglomerate owner, and the third straight that doesn’t quite seem to know what to do with the place. LBO Resort Enterprises opened Bear Peak in 1994, but then seemed to forget about Attitash after the merger with American Skiing Company two years later (ASC did install the Flying Yankee detachable quad in 1998). Peak Resorts picked Attitash out of ASC’s rubbish bin in 2007, then mostly let the place languish for a decade before chopping down the Top Notch double chair in 2018 with no explanation. That left no redundant route to the top of Attitash peak, which became a problem when the Summit Triple dropped dead for most of the 2018-19 ski season. Rather than replace the lift, Peak repaired it, then handed the spruced-up-but-still-hated machine off to Vail Resorts, along with the rest of its portfolio, that summer.
Like someone who inherits a jam-packed storage bin from a distant strange relative, Vail spent a couple of years just staring at all the boxes, uncertain what was in them and kind of afraid to look. Those first few winters, which corresponded with Covid, labor shortages, and supply-chain issues, weren’t great ones at Attitash. A general sense of dysfunction reigned: snowmaking lagged, lifts opened late in the season or not at all, generic corporate statements thanked the hardworking teams without acknowledging the mountain’s many urgent shortcomings. As it was picking through the storage unit, Vail made the strange decision of stacking the New Hampshire box next to the Midwest boxes, effectively valuing Attitash and...
Duration:01:19:24
Podcast #152: Lutsen Mountains GM Jim Vick
11/21/2023
This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Nov. 14. It dropped for free subscribers on Nov. 21. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:
Who
Jim Vick, General Manager of Lutsen Mountains, Minnesota
Recorded on
October 30, 2023
About Lutsen Mountains
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: Midwest Family Ski Resorts
Located in: Lutsen, Minnesota
Year founded: 1948
Pass affiliations:
* Legendary Gold Pass – unlimited access, no blackouts
* Legendary Silver Pass – unlimited with 12 holiday and peak Saturday blackouts
* Legendary Bronze Pass – unlimited weekdays with three Christmas week blackouts
* Indy Pass – 2 days with 24 holiday and Saturday blackouts
* Indy Plus Pass – 2 days with no blackouts
Closest neighboring ski areas: Chester Bowl (1:44), Loch Lomond (1:48), Spirit Mountain (1:54), Giants Ridge (1:57), Mt. Baldy (2:11)
Base elevation: 800 feet
Summit elevation: 1,688 feet
Vertical drop: 1,088 feet (825 feet lift-served)
Skiable Acres: 1,000
Average annual snowfall: 120 inches
Trail count: 95 (10% expert, 25% most difficult, 47% more difficult, 18% easiest)
Lift count: 7 (1 eight-passenger gondola, 2 high-speed six-packs, 3 double chairs, 1 carpet)
View historic Lutsen Mountains trailmaps on skimap.org.
Why I interviewed him
I often claim that Vail and Alterra have failed to appreciate Midwest skiing. I realize that this can be confusing. Vail Resorts owns 10 ski areas from Missouri to Ohio. Alterra’s Ikon Pass includes a small but meaningful presence in Northern Michigan. What the hell am I talking about here?
Lutsen, while a regional standout and outlier, illuminates each company’s blind spots. In 2018, the newly formed Alterra Mountain Company looted the motley M.A.X. Pass roster for its best specimens, adding them to its Ikon Pass. Formed partly from the ashes of Intrawest, Alterra kept all of their own mountains and cherry-picked the best of Boyne and Powdr, leaving off Boyne’s Michigan mountains, Brighton, Summit at Snoqualmie, and Cypress (which Ikon later added); and Powdr’s Boreal, Lee Canyon, Pico, and Bachelor (Pico and Bachelor eventually made the team). Alterra also added Solitude and Crystal after purchasing them later in 2018, and, over time, Windham and Alyeska. Vail bought Triple Peaks (Crested Butte, Okemo, Sunapee), later that year, and added Resorts of the Canadian Rockies to its Epic Pass. But that left quite a few orphans, including Lutsen and sister mountain Granite Peak, which eventually joined the Indy Pass (which didn’t debut until 2019).
All of which is technocratic background to set up this question: what the hell was Alterra thinking? In Lutsen and Granite Peak, Alterra had, ready to snatch, two of the largest, most well-cared-for, most built-up resorts between Vermont and Colorado. Midwest Family Ski Resorts CEO Charles Skinner is one of the most aggressive and capable ski area operators anywhere. These mountains, with their 700-plus-foot vertical drops, high-speed lifts, endless glade networks, and varied terrain deliver a big-mountain experience that has more in common with a mid-sized New England ski area than anything within several hundred miles in any direction. It’s like someone in a Colorado boardroom and a stack of spreadsheets didn’t bother looking past the ZIP Codes when deciding what to keep and what to discard.
This is one of the great miscalculations in the story of skiing’s shift to multimountain pass hegemony. By overlooking Lutsen Mountains and Granite Peak in its earliest days, Alterra missed an opportunity to snatch enormous volumes of Ikon Pass sales across the Upper Midwest. Any Twin Cities skier (and there are a lot of them), would easily be able to calculate the value of an Ikon Pass that could deliver 10 or 14 days between Skinner’s two resorts, and additional days on that...
Duration:01:18:52
Podcast #151: Schweitzer Mountain President and CEO Tom Chasse
11/13/2023
This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Nov. 6. It dropped for free subscribers on Nov. 13. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:
Who
Tom Chasse, President and CEO of Schweitzer Mountain, Idaho
Recorded on
October 23, 2023
About Schweitzer
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: Alterra Mountain Company
Located in: Sandpoint, Idaho
Year founded: 1963
Pass affiliations:
* Ikon Pass: unlimited
* Ikon Base Pass, Ikon Base Plus Pass: 5 days with holiday blackouts
Closest neighboring ski areas: 49 Degrees North (1:30), Silver Mountain (1:42), Mt. Spokane (2:00), Lookout Pass (2:06), Turner Mountain (2:17) – travel times vary considerably depending upon weather, time of day, and time of year
Base elevation: 3,960 feet (at Outback Inn)
Summit elevation: 6,389 feet
Vertical drop: 2,429 feet
Skiable Acres: 2,900
Average annual snowfall: 300 inches
Trail count: 92 (10% Beginner, 40% Intermediate, 35% Advanced, 15% Expert)
Lift count: 10 (1 six-pack, 4 high-speed quads, 2 triples, 1 double, 1 T-bar, 1 carpet)
View historic Schweitzer trailmaps on skimap.org.
Why I interviewed him
Chasse first appeared on the podcast in January 2021, for what would turn out to be the penultimate episode in the Covid-19 & Skiing miniseries. Our focus was singular: to explore the stress and irritation shoved onto resort employees charged with mask-police duty. As I wrote at the time:
One of the biggest risks to the reconstituted-for-Covid ski season was always going to be that large numbers of knuckleheads would treat mask requirements as the first shots fired in Civil War II. Schweitzer, an enormous ski Narnia poking off the tip of the Idaho panhandle, became the most visible instance of this phenomenon when General Manager Tom Chasse chopped three days of twilight skiing after cantankerous Freedom Bros continually threw down with exhausted staff over requests to mask up. While violations of mask mandates haven’t ignited widespread resort shutdowns and the vast majority of skiers seem resigned to them, Schweitzer’s stand nonetheless distills the precarious nature of lift-served skiing amidst a still-raging pandemic. Skiers, if they grow careless and defiant, can shut down mountains. And so can the ski areas themselves, if they feel they can’t safely manage the crowds descending upon them in this winter of there’s-nothing-else-to-do. While it’s unfortunate that a toxic jumble of misinformation, conspiracy theories, political chest-thumping, and ignorance has so thoroughly infected our population that even something as innocuous as riding a chairlift has become a culture war flashpoint, it has. And it’s worth investigating the full story at Schweitzer to gauge how big the problem is and how to manage it in a way that allows us to all keep skiing.
We did talk about the mountain for a few minutes at the end, but I’d always meant to get back to Idaho’s largest ski area. In 2022, I hosted the leaders of Tamarack, Bogus Basin, Brundage, and Sun Valley on the podcast. Now, I’m finally back at the top of the panhandle, to go deep on the future of Alterra Mountain Company’s newest lift-served toy.
What we talked about
The new Creekside Express lift; a huge new parking lot incoming for the 2024-25 ski season; the evolution of the 2018 masterplan; why and how Schweitzer sold to Alterra; the advantages of joining a conglomerate versus remaining independent; whether Schweitzer could ever evolve into a destination resort; reflecting on the McCaw family legacy as Alterra takes control; thoughts on the demise-and-revival of Black Mountain, New Hampshire; the biggest difference between running a ski resort in New England versus the West; the slow, complete transformation of Schweitzer over the past two decades; the rationale behind the Outback Bowl lift upgrades; why Schweitzer’s...
Duration:01:06:38
Podcast #150: Park City Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Deirdra Walsh
11/9/2023
This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Nov. 2. It dropped for free subscribers on Nov. 9. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:
Who
Deirdra Walsh, Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Park City, Utah
Recorded on
October 18, 2023
About Park City
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: Vail Resorts
Located in: Park City, Utah
Year founded: 1963
Pass affiliations:
* Epic Pass: unlimited
* Epic Local Pass: unlimited with holiday blackouts
* Tahoe Local: five non-holiday days combined with Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, Crested Butte, Keystone
* Epic Day Pass: access with All Resorts tier
Closest neighboring ski areas: Deer Valley (:04), Utah Olympic Park (:09), Woodward Park City (:11), Snowbird (:50), Alta (:55), Solitude (1:00), Brighton (1:08) – or just ski between them all; travel times vary massively pending weather, traffic, and time of year
Base elevation: 6,800 feet
Summit elevation: 9,998 feet at the top of Jupiter (can hike to 10,026 on Jupiter Peak)
Vertical drop: 3,226 feet
Skiable Acres: 7,300 acres
Average annual snowfall: 355 inches
Trail count: 330+ (50% advanced/expert, 42% intermediate, 8% beginner)
Lift count: 41 (2 eight-passenger gondolas, 1 pulse gondola, 1 cabriolet, 6 high-speed six-packs, 10 high-speed quads, 5 fixed-grip quads, 7 triples, 4 doubles, 3 carpets, 2 ropetows – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Park City’s lift fleet)
View historic Park City trailmaps on skimap.org.
Why I interviewed her
An unfortunate requirement of this job is concocting differentiated verbiage to describe a snowy hill equipped with chairlifts. Most often, I revert to the three standbys: ski area, mountain, and resort/ski resort. I use them interchangeably, as one may use couch/sofa or dinner/supper (for several decades, I thought oven/stove to be a similar pairing; imagine my surprise to discover that these words described two separate parts of one familiar machine). But that is problematic, of course, because while every enterprise that I describe is some sort of ski area, only around half of them are anywhere near an actual mountain. And an even smaller percentage of those are resorts. Still, I swap the trio around like T-shirts in the world’s smallest wardrobe, hoping my readers value the absence of repetition more than they resent the mental gymnastics required to consider 210-vertical-foot Snow Snake, Michigan a “ski resort.”
But these equivalencies introduce a problem when I get to Park City. At 7,300 acres, Park City sprawls over 37 percent more terrain than Vail Mountain, Vail Resorts’ second-largest U.S. ski area, and the fourth-biggest in the nation overall. To call this a “ski area” seems inadequate, like describing an aircraft carrier as a “boat.” Even “mountain” feels insubstantial, as Park City’s forty-some-odd lifts shoots-and-ladder their way over at least a dozen separate summits. “Ski resort” comes closest to capturing the grandeur of the whole operation, but even that undersells the experience, given that the ski runs are directly knotted to the town below them – a town that is a ski town but is also so much more.
In recent years, “megaresort” has settled into the ski lexicon, usually as a pejorative describing a thing to be avoided, a tourist magnet that has swapped its soul for a Disney-esque welcome mat. “Your estimated wait time to board the Ultimate Super Summit Interactive 4D 8K Turbo Gondola is [one hour and 45 minutes]”. The “megas,” freighted with the existential burden of Epic and Ikon flagships, carry just a bit too much cruise ship mass-escapism and Cheesecake Factory illusions of luxe to truly capture that remote wilderness fantasy that is at least half the point of skiing. Right?
Not really. Not any more than Times Square captures the essence of New York City or the security lines outside...
Duration:01:03:31
Podcast #149: Cranmore President and General Manager Ben Wilcox
11/2/2023
This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Oct. 26. It dropped for free subscribers on Nov. 2. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:
Who
Ben Wilcox, President and General Manager of Cranmore Mountain Resort, New Hampshire
Recorded on
October 16, 2023
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: None
Reciprocal partners: 1 day each at Jiminy Peak and Bromley
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 acres
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)
Why I interviewed him
Nowhere does a high-speed quad transform the texture and fate of a mountain so much as in New England. Western mountains, geographically dispersed and disposed to sunshine, can still sell you a ride on a 1,700-vertical-foot fixed grip triple, as Montana Snowbowl did with their new Transporter lift last year, and which Mt. Spokane has promised to do should the ski area ever upgrade its Jurassic Riblets. Midwest hills are too short for lift speed to matter as anything other than a novelty.
But in the blustery, frenetic East, a single detachable lift can profoundly alter a ski area’s reach and rap. Such lifts have proven to be stabilizing mechanisms at Burke, Gunstock, Ragged, Bromley, and Saddleback – mountains without the terrain or marketing heft of their much-larger neighbors. In each case, one high-speed quad (and a sixer at Ragged), cracked the mountain open to the masses, uniting all or most of the terrain with one six-minute lift ride and, often, stabilizing operations that had struggled for decades.
Cranmore is one such mountain. Had the Skimobile Express quad not gone up in 1995, Wilcox tells us on the podcast, he’s not so sure that the ski area hanging over North Conway would have gotten out of the last century alive. A “dark period” followed the Skimobile’s 1990 demolition, Wilcox says, during which Cranmore, tottering along on a double chair strung to the summit, fell behind its high-dollar, high-energy, rapidly consolidating competitors. The Skimobile had been pokey and inefficient, but at least it was freighted with nostalgia. At least it was novel. At least it was cool. An old double chair was just an old double chair, and local skiers had lost interest in those when high-speed lifts started rising up the New England mountainsides in the late 1980s.
It’s true that a handful of New England ski areas continue to rely on antique doubles: Smugglers’ Notch, Magic, Black Mountain in New Hampshire, Mt. Abram. But Smuggs delivers 300 inches of snow per winter and a unique, sprawling terrain network. The rest are improbable survivors. Magic sat idle for half the ‘90s. We nearly lost Black earlier this month. All anybody knows about Mt. Abram is that it’s not Sunday River.
The Skimobile Express did not, by itself, save Cranmore. If such a lift were such a magic trick, then we’d still be skiing the top of Ascutney today (yes Uphill Bro I know you still are). But the lift helped. A lot.
There is a tendency among skiers to conflate history with essence. As though a ski area, absent the trappings of its 1930s or ‘40s or ‘50s origins, loses something. These same skiers, however, do not rip around on 240s clapped to beartrap bindings or ski in top hats and mink shawls. Cranmore could not simply be The Ski Area With The Skimobile forever and ever. Not after every other ski area in New England, including Cranmore, had erected multiple...
Duration:01:31:20
Podcast #148: Cascade Mountain, Wisconsin General Manager Matt Vohs
10/30/2023
This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Oct. 23. It dropped for free subscribers on Oct. 30. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:
Who
Matt Vohs, General Manager of Cascade Mountain, Wisconsin
Recorded on
October 10, 2023
About Cascade Mountain
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: The Walz family
Located in: Portage, Wisconsin
Year founded: 1962
Pass affiliations: None
Reciprocal partners: None
Closest neighboring ski areas: Devil’s Head (:20), Christmas Mountain Village (:30), Tyrol Basin (1:00)
Base elevation: 820 feet
Summit elevation: 1,280 feet
Vertical drop: 460 feet
Skiable Acres: 176
Average annual snowfall: 50-60 inches
Trail count: 48 (23% advanced, 40% intermediate, 37% beginner)
Lift count: 10 (2 high-speed quads, 3 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 2 doubles, 1 ropetow, 1 carpet – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Cascade’s lift fleet)
Why I interviewed him
Contrary to what you may imagine, Midwesterners do not pass their winters staring wistfully at the western horizon, daydreaming only of the Back Bowls and Wasatch tram rides. They’re not, God help us, New Yorkers. Because unlike the high-dollar Manhattanite with weeks booked at Deer Valley and Aspen, Midwesterners ski even when they’re not on vacation. Sure, they’ll tag that week in Summit County or Big Sky (driving there, most likely, from Grand Rapids or Cincinnati or Des Moines), but they’ll fill in the calendar in between. They’ll ski on weekends. They’ll ski after work. They’ll ski with their kids and with their buddies and with their cousins. They’ll ski in hunter orange and in Vikings jerseys and in knit caps of mysterious vintage. They’ll ski with a backpack full of High Life and a crockpot tucked beneath each arm and a pack of jerky in their coat pocket. “Want some,” they’ll offer as you meet them for the first time on the chairlift, a 55-year-old Hall double with no safety bar. “My buddy got an elk permit this year.”
They ski because it’s fun and they ski because it’s cold and they ski because winter is 16 months long. But mostly they ski because there are ski areas everywhere, and because they’re pretty affordable. Even Vail doesn’t break double digits at its Midwest bumps, with peak-day lift tickets reaching between $69 and $99 at the company’s 10 ski areas spread between Missouri and Ohio.
Because of this affordable density, the Midwest is still a stronghold for the blue-collar ski culture that’s been extinguished in large parts of the big-mountain West. You may find that notion offensive - that skiing, in this rustic form, could be more approachable. If so, you’re probably not from the Midwest. These people are hard to offend. Michigan-born Rabbit, AKA Eminem, channels this stubborn regional pride in 8 Mile’s closing rap battle, when he obliterates nemesis Papa Doc by flagrantly itemizing his flaws.
“I know everything he’s got to say against me” may as well be the mantra of the Midwest skier. In the U.S. ski universe, Colorad-Bro is Papa Doc, standing dumbfounded after Wisco Bro just turned his sword around on himself:
This guy ain’t no m***********g MC
I know everything he’s got to say against me
My hill is short, It snows 30 inches per year
I do ski with a coffee Thermos filled with beer
My boys do ski in camouflage
I do ride Olin 210s I found in my Uncle Jack’s garage
I did hit an icy jump
And biff like a chump
And my last chairlift ride was 45 seconds long
I’m still standing here screaming “Damn let’s do it again!”
You can’t point out the idiosyncratic shortcomings of Midwest skiing better than a Midwest skier. They know. And they love the whole goddamn ball of bologna.
But that enthusiasm wouldn’t track if Wisconsin’s 33 ski areas were 33 hundred-foot ropetow bumps. As in any big ski state to its east or west, Wisco has a hierarchy, a half-dozen...
Duration:01:08:23
The Storm Live #1: Ski New York President Scott Brandi
10/27/2023
The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and to support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
What is this?
A new, occasional podcast series capturing on-the-ground conversations with prominent ski industry leaders. All 148 Storm Skiing Podcasts have been recorded via phone or an internet recording service (mostly Zencastr). That is partly because it’s easier, and partly because I had the misfortune to launch this podcast five months before Covid shin-kicked the world into hibernation. But over the past year, I’ve led panels or one-on-one interviews with industry execs in Boston, Banff, Savannah, and Lake Placid. In many cases, these are confidential sessions for the benefit of the folks in the room. However, sometimes I’m allowed to record them. And when I do, I’ll share them here.
In this case, Ski Areas of New York and Ski PA invited me to their annual joint expo to moderate a panel of five ski area general managers. That session was off the record, but I spoke with Ski NY President Scott Brandi afterward. We sat down in a room bristling with camaraderie and positive energy, ski people enjoying one last inhale before ratcheting into turbo mode and the ramp-up to winter.
Who
Scott Brandi, President of Ski Areas of New York
Recorded on
September 26, 2023
About Ski Areas of New York (and Ski PA)
Ski Areas of New York is a trade group representing, well, the ski areas of New York. According to their website, SKI/NY works “on behalf of its membership to promote fair legislation, develop marketing programs, create educational opportunities, and enhance the public awareness of snow sports throughout the State and region.” Most large ski states have some version of Ski New York, but as far as organization and effectiveness, this is one of the best.
Ski NY co-hosts this annual session with Ski PA, the smaller state association to its south. The two organizations share a lot of challenges: crummy weather, dated infrastructure, and legislatures that are not always aligned with the industry’s interests. But their ski areas are also national leaders in crafting a viable ski experience from marginal weather, in high-volume operations, in hacking the improbable from the impossible.
Here’s the combined inventory of active ski areas from both states – not all of which are necessarily members of the state organization (mostly, the little ropetow joints and private neighborhood ski areas don’t bother or can’t afford the membership dues):
What we talked about
What’s the point of this whole thing?; why should skiers care what happens here?; why independent ski areas are more connected to one another than you may think; the grind of working in skiing; how events like the SANY convention benefit family-owned ski areas; how SANY helps its ski areas from a regulatory point of view; why Pennsylvania and New York combine this annual event; the detrimental impact of ski industry consolidation on the event; what killed Ski PA’s kids’ passport program; and reasons for optimism in skiing;
Podcast Notes
On Kelly Pawlak, head of the National Ski Areas Association (NSAA)
Brandi mentions Kelly Pawlak, CEO of the National Ski Areas Association (NSAA). The NSAA is the national version of the state associations, and it works closely with all of them. Pawlak has appeared on The Storm Skiing Podcast a couple of times, most recently in 2021:
On my “What Keeps You Up At Night” panel
My conversation followed a panel that I hosted with five ski area general managers:
* Ski Big Bear, Pennsylvania GM Lori Phillips
* Mount Pleasant of Edinboro, Pennsylvania GM Andrew Halmi
* Whiteface, New York GM Aaron Kellett
* Woods Valley, New York owner and GM Tim Woods
* Mountain Creek, New Jersey GM Evan Kovac
That session was not recorded, and the context of it was meant to be kept to the room we held it in. However, my intention is to host each of these folks on The Storm Skiing...
Duration:00:26:30
Podcast #147: Northstar Vice President and General Manager Amy Ohran
10/20/2023
This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Oct. 13. It dropped for free subscribers on Oct. 20. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:
Who
Amy Ohran, Vice President and General Manager of Northstar, California
Recorded on
October 2, 2023
About Northstar
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: EPR Properties, operated by Vail Resorts
Located in: Truckee, California
Year founded: 1972
Pass affiliations:
* Epic Pass: unlimited
* Epic Local Pass: unlimited with holiday blackouts
* Tahoe Local: unlimited with holiday blackouts
* Tahoe Value: unlimited with holiday and Saturday blackouts
* Epic Day Pass: access with all resorts and 32-resorts tiers
Closest neighboring ski areas: Boreal (:21), Tahoe Donner (:22), Palisades Tahoe (:25), Diamond Peak (:25), Soda Springs (:25), Kingvale (:27), Sugar Bowl (:28), Donner Ski Ranch (:29), Mt. Rose (:30), Homewood (:35), Heavenly (:57) - travel times vary considerably pending traffic, weather, and time of year.
Base elevation: 6,330 feet (at the village)
Summit elevation: 8,610 feet (top of Mt. Pluto)
Vertical drop: 2,280 feet
Skiable Acres: 3,170 acres
Average annual snowfall: 350 inches
Trail count: 100 (27% advanced, 60% intermediate, 13% beginner)
Lift count: 20 (1 six-passenger gondola, 1 pulse gondola, 1 six/eight-passenger chondola, 1 high-speed six pack, 6 high-speed quads, 1 fixed-grip quad, 2 triples, 1 platter, 1 ropetow, 5 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Northstar’s lift fleet)
Why I interviewed her
I am slowly working my way through the continent’s great ski regions. Aspen, Vail, Beaver Creek, Ski Cooper, Keystone, Breckenridge, and A-Basin along the I-70 corridor (Copper is coming). Snowbird, Solitude, Deer Valley, Sundance, and Snowbasin in the Wasatch (Park City is next). Jay Peak, Smugglers’ Notch, Bolton Valley, Mad River Glen, Sugarbush, and Killington in Northern Vermont.
I’m a little behind in Tahoe. Before today, the only entrants into this worthy tome have been with the leaders of Palisades Tahoe and Heavenly. But I’m working my way around the lake. Northstar today. Mount Rose in November. I’ll get to the rest as soon as I’m able (you can always access the full podcast archive, and view the upcoming schedule, here or from the stormskiing.com homepage).
I don’t only cover megaresorts, of course, and the episodes with family-owned ski area operators always resonate deeply with my listeners. Many of you would prefer that I focus my energies solely on these under-covered gems. But corporate megaresorts matter a lot. They are where the vast majority of skier visits occur, and therefore are the backdrop to most skiers’ wintertime stories. I personally love skiing them. They tend to be vast and varied, with excellent lift networks and gladed kingdoms mostly ignored by the masses. The “corporate blandness” so abhorred by posturing Brobots is, in practice, a sort of urban myth of the mountains. Vail Mountain and Stowe have as much quirk and character as Alta and Mad River Glen. Anyone who tells you different either hasn’t skied them all, or is confusing popularity with soullessness.
Every ski area guards terrain virtues that no amount of marketing can beat out of it. Northstar has plenty: expansive glades, big snowfalls, terrific park, long fall-line runs. Unfortunately, the mountain is the LA Clippers of Lake Tahoe, overshadowed, always, by big Palisades, the LA Lakers of big-time Cali skiing.
But Northstar is a hella good ski area, as any NoCal shredder who’s honest with themselves will admit. It’s not KT-22, but it isn’t trying to be. Most skier fantasize about lapping the Mothership, just as, I suppose, many playground basketball players fantasize about dunking from the freethrow line. In truth, most are better off lobbing shots from 15 feet out, just as most skiers are going...
Duration:01:15:11
Podcast #146: Great Bear, South Dakota General Manager Dan Grider
10/9/2023
This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Oct. 2. It dropped for free subscribers on Oct. 9. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:
Who
Dan Grider, General Manager of Great Bear, South Dakota
Recorded on
September 25, 2023
About Great Bear Ski Valley
Owned by: The City of Sioux Falls
Located in: Sioux Falls, South Dakota
Year founded: 1966
Pass affiliations: None
Reciprocal partners:
* 3 days at Seven Oaks
* 2 days at Mont du Lac
* 1 day each at Buck Hill, Powder Ridge MN, Snowstar
* Discounts at several other local ski areas
Closest neighboring ski areas: Mt. Crescent (2:37), Mount Kato (2:16)
Base elevation: 1,352 feet
Summit elevation: 1,534 feet
Vertical drop: 182 feet
Skiable Acres: 20
Average annual snowfall: 49 inches
Trail count: 15 (7 most difficult, 5 more difficult, 3 easiest)
Lift count: 3 (1 fixed-grip quad, 1 ropetow, 1 carpet – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Great Bear’s lift fleet)
Why I interviewed him
Frequent Storm readers have probably started to notice the pattern: every fourth or fifth podcast swerves off Megapass Boulevard and takes four state highways, a gravel path, a Little Caesars pit-stop, and ends in the Wal-Mart-sized parking lot of a Midwest ski area. Which often sits next to a Wal-Mart. Or a car dealership. Or, in the case of Great Bear, between a construction supply depot and the Sioux Falls chapter of the Izaak Walton League, a conservation society.
Why do I do this? My last three podcasts featured the leaders of Killington, Keystone, and Snowbird. The next one to drop into your inbox will be Northstar, a Vail Resorts staple that is the ninth-largest ski area in America. If you’re reading this newsletter, there is a high probability that you either already have skied all four of those, or plan to at some future point. Most of you will probably never ski Great Bear or anywhere else in South Dakota. Many of you will never ski the Midwest at all.
Which I understand. But there are several reasons I’ve worked Midwest ski areas into the podcast rotation, and why I will continue to do so for as long as The Storm exists:
* The episodes with the leaders of Caberfae, Boyne Mountain, The Highlands, and Nub’s Nob are for 18-year-old me. Or whatever version of 18-year-old me currently sits restlessly in the ski-mad but ignored flatlands between Ohio and the Dakotas. I devoured every ski magazine on the drugstore shelves of the 1990s, but if I could scrub 500 words of Midwest content from their combined catalogue each winter, I was lucky. I was dying – dying – for someone, anyone, to say something, anything, about the Midwest or Midwest skiing. Even a list of the top 10 ski areas in Michigan, with 50 words on each, would have made my year. But the ski mags, great as they were in those days, barely covered the rich and varied ski culture of New England, let alone the Midwest. I would have lost my goddamn mind had someone published a 90-minute conversation with the owner of the mysterious (to me at the time) Caberfae, with its hills upon hills of abandoned lifts and ever-changing footprint.
* The Midwest is home to one of the world’s great ski cultures. If you don’t believe me, go ski there. The region hosts 122 ski areas across 10 states, most of them in Michigan (43), Wisconsin (33), and Minnesota (21). But the volume matters less than the attitude: Midwest skiers are absolutely unpretentious. They’ll ski in hunting gear and Carhartts. They’ll ski on 25-year-old sticks they found at a yard sale for five dollars. They’ll ski when it’s 25 below zero. They’ll ski at night, in the rain, on a 200-vertical-foot bump running 60-year-old chairlifts. These are skiers, Man. They do it because it’s fun, because it’s right there, and because this is one of the few regions where skiing is still accessible to the masses. If you want to...
Duration:01:16:20