The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast

Who Tim Smith, President and General Manager of Waterville Valley, New Hampshire Recorded on November 12, 2025 About Waterville Valley Click here for a mountain stats overview Owned by: The Sununu Family Located in: Waterville Valley, New Hampshire Year founded: 1966 Pass affiliations: * Indy Pass, Indy+ Pass: 2 days, no blackouts * White Mountain Super Pass: unlimited, no blackouts * Indy Learn-to-Turn: 3 days, includes rentals, lesson, lift ticket; limited lift access * Ski New Hampshire Kids Passport: 1 day with holiday blackouts * Uphill New England: no lift access Base elevation: 1,984 feet (highest in New Hampshire, 3rd in New England) Summit elevation: 4,004 feet (2nd-highest in New Hampshire, 5th in New England) Vertical drop: 2,020 feet (4th-highest in New Hampshire, 14th in New England) Skiable acres: 265 Average annual snowfall: 148 inches Trail count: 62 (14% novice, 64% intermediate, 22% advanced) Lift count: 10 (1 six-pack, 1 high-speed quad, 2 triples, 2 doubles, 2 T-bars, 2 carpets) Why I interviewed him Well no one wants to hear this but we got to $300 lift tickets the same way we got to $80,000 pickup trucks. We’re Americans Goddamnit and we just can’t do stickshifts and we sure as s**t ain’t standin’ up on our skis to ride back up the mountain. It’s pure agony you see. We need us a nine-pack chairlift with a bubble and a breakroom and a minibar and surround sound and Lazy-Boy seats and hell no we ain’t ridin’ it with eight strangers we’ll hold back and take a whole chair to our ownselves. And it needs to move fast, Son. Like embarrass-the-Concord fast because God help us we spend more than 90 seconds with our own thoughts. I’m not aiming to get kicked out of America here, but if I may submit a few requests regarding our self-inflicted false price floors. I would like the option of purchasing a brand-new car with a manual transmission and windows rolled up and down with a hand-crank. I would like to keep pedaling my bicycle. I would like to cut the number of holidays with commercial mandates by 80 percent. I would prefer that we not set the air-conditioners to 60 when it’s 65 degrees outside. This doesn’t mean I want to get rid of all the air-conditioners but could we maybe take it easy on the frostbite-in-July overkill of it all? My Heretic Wishlist for American Skiing includes but is not limited to: more surface lifts, especially to serve terrain parks, high-altitude exposed terrain, and expert pods; on-resort lodging that does not still require a commute-by-personal-vehicle to reach the lifts; and thoughtful terrain management that retains ungroomed sections for skiers who like things about skiing other than going fast. Waterville Valley is doing all of these things. It is perhaps the only major American ski area in decades to replace a chairlift with a surface lift on a non-beginner terrain pod, and the only one to build two new T-bars this century. A planned gondola would connect Waterville Valley the town with Waterville Valley the ski area, correcting an only-in-America setup that separates these inseparable places by two miles of road. The glade network grows annually in both subtle and obvious ways. This is not a ski area going in reverse. Waterville is modern and keeps modernizing. The four-year-old Tecumseh bubble six-pack, though bookended with T-bars, is one of the nicest chairlifts in America. Skiers still go groomer-kaboom on morning cord. Suburban office-park dads with interstate commutes and a habit of lecturing the Facebook Commons about the virtues of snow tires can still park their 42-wheel-drive Abrams-Caterpillar-F-15,000 Tanktruck in sub-parking lot 42Z and walk uphill to the lifts. But Waterville Valley is one of a handful of American ski areas, along with Killington and Deer Valley and Winter Park, that is embracing all of our luxe cultural excesses while pursuing the very un-American ambition of putting more skiers close to skiing. No ski area is perfect....

Who Susan Cross, Vice President of Operations at Aspen Skiing Company (and former Mountain Manager of Snowmass) Recorded on November 14, 2025 - which was well before I traveled to Snowmass and chased Cross around a bit in the pow. There she is tiny in the distance: About Aspen Skiing Company Aspen Skiing Company (Skico) is part of something called Aspen One. Don’t ask me what that is because even though they rolled it out two years ago I still have no idea what they’re talking about. All I know or care about is that they own four ski areas and here is what I know about them: Don’t be fooled by the scale of the map above - at 3,342 acres, Snowmass is larger than Aspen Mountain, Buttermilk, and Aspen Highlands combined. The monster 4,400-foot vert means these lifts are massively shrunken to fit the map - Snowmass operates three of the 10 longest chairlifts in America, and seven chairlifts over one mile long: You can’t ski or ride a lift between the four mountains, but free shuttles connect them all. Aspen Mountain, Highlands, and Buttermilk are all bunched together near town, and Snowmass is a short drive (15 to 20 minutes if traffic is clear and dependent upon which base area you want to hit): Why I interviewed her American ski areas will often re-use chairlifts or snowcats that other operators have outgrown. Aspen Mountain re-used a whole town. In 1879, Aspen the city didn’t exist, and by 1890 more than 5,000 people lived there. They came for silver, not snow. In less than a decade they laid out the Victorian street grid of brick and wood-framed buildings using hand tools and horses, with the Roaring Fork River as their supply road. Aspen’s population collapsed in the economic depressions of the 1890s and didn’t rebound to 5,000 for 100 years. The 1940 Census counted 777 residents. That was 16 years before the first chairlift rose up Ajax, a perfect ski mountain above an intact but semi-abandoned town made pointless by history. It was an amazing coincidence, really. Americans would never build a ski town on purpose. That’s where the parking lots go. But hey it all worked out: Aspen evolved into a ski town that offset its European walk-to-the-chairlifts sensibility with a hard-coded American refusal to expand the historic street grid in favor of protectionism and mansion-building. The contemporary result is one of the world’s most expensive real estate markets cosplaying as a quaint ski town, a lively and walkable mixed-use community of the sort that we idealize but refuse to build more of. Aspen’s population is now around 7,000, most of whom live there by benefit of longevity, subsidy, inheritance, or extreme wealth. The city’s median household income is just over $50,000. The median home price is $9.5 million. Anyone clinging to the illusion that Aspen is an actual ski town should consider that it took 25 years to approve and build the Hero’s chairlift. Imagine what the fellows who built this whole city in half a decade without the benefit of electricity or cement trucks or paved roads would make of that. The illusory city, however, is a dynamic separate from the skiing. Aspen, despite its somewhat dated lift fleet, remains one of America’s best small ski mountains. But it is small, and, with no green terrain and barely any blues, the ski area lacks the substance and scale to draw tourists west of Summit County and Vail. Sister mountain Snowmass does that. And while Snowmass did not benefit from an already-built town at its base, it did benefit from not having one, in that the mountain could evolve with a purpose and speed that Ajax, boxed in by geography and politics, never could. Snowmass has built 13 new aerial lifts this century, including the two-station, mountain-redefining Elk Camp Gondola; the Village Express six-pack, which is the fourth-longest chairlift in America; and, in just the past two years, a considerably lengthened Coney high-speed quad and a new six-pack to replace the Elk Camp...

Who Shaun Sutner, snowsports columnist for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette and Telegram.com Recorded on November 24, 2025 Why I interviewed him Hey Man, we do this every year: What we talked about The psychology of injury recovery; the power of being there; the “gladiatorial atmosphere” of ski racing; the East’s strong winter; a Canadian facepalm; the Black Mountain, New Hampshire co-op; Hermon Mountain, Maine for sale; how to make a crappy old ski area into a modern-seeming ski area without big infrastructure upgrades; is every ski area closing a tragedy?; Lost Valley, Maine; lost Berkshires ski areas that make great backcountry ski spots; new owners at Ragged, New Hampshire; Magic Mountain, Vermont and the four-year lift installation; would Vail Resorts purchase Smugglers’ Notch, Vermont?; assessing Killington’s independent owners one year in; the Super Star six-pack upgrade at Killington; is it worth buying a new lift if it doesn’t improve capacity?; why Loveland, Colorado’s only detachable lift is also one of its shortest; expectations and potential from Berkshire East buying Burke, Vermont; is the demise of the good ol’ boy overstated?; Wachusett’s new six-pack; locals hate everything; priorities for New England lift upgrades; will Cannon ever replace its decommissioned tram (and should it be with a gondola)?; should New Hampshire lease out Cannon?; Whaleback’s chairlift woes; thoughts on the Boston Ski Show moving to Connecticut; and BOA boot buckles. What I got wrong Most of these aren’t “wrong,” so much as outdated: * We recorded this as Sutner was still recovering from an injury, and he said he wouldn’t be able to get back to skiing until, um, February. Which is now I guess. * We talked about the “budding winter,” which started strong in November, but has kept banging away to be one of the best ski seasons in recent New England history. * We discuss since-resolved drama at Black Mountain around a withheld liquor license for the mid-mountain champagne shack. * Sutner didn’t get this wrong – he was prescient, however, in saying Pacific Group Resorts would do something “big” after selling Ragged – the company purchased Silver Star, British Columbia shortly after we spoke: Then there were these: * I didn’t really understand the point of Hermon Mountain, but between recording and releasing this episode, I was able to visit it. Stand by for that write-up, which helped me understand it as a teen holding pen for Bangor Maine. * I said that Pacific Group Resorts “may have” purchased Powderhorn after its Flat Top Flyer high-speed quad installation – that is the case; the lift arrived in 2015, and PGR bought the ski area in 2018. * Sure enough, Burke joined the Berkshire Summit Pass - a season pass for sister resorts Berkshire East and Catamount, as well as Bousquet. Here are the details: I said the Mohegan Sun Arena held 6,000 to 8,000 people – it’s about 8,000 for basketball games, which is what I was referring to. Podcast Notes On the closing of Four Seasons ski area in New York On the new owners at Ragged and Killington On Geoff Hatheway at Magic Mountain, Vermont My pods with Geoff are both a bit dated, but you can keep up with Magic by subscribing to Hatheway’s Alpine Update emails, which is one of the most transparently honest ski area newsletters in America. On Wachusett’s Clueless Construction Updates Well done, Stimpson: On other pods mentioned The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

Who Jimmy Ackerson, General Manager of Corralco, Chile Recorded on July 24, 2025 About Corralco Click here for a mountain stats overview Located in: Curacautín, Araucanía, Chile Year founded: 2003, by Enrique Bascur Pass affiliations: Indy Pass, Indy+ Pass – 2 days, no blackouts Base elevation: 4,724 feet (1,440 meters) Summit elevation: 7,874 feet (2,400 meters) top of lifts; 9,400 feet (2,865 meters) hike-to Vertical drop: 3,150 feet (960 meters) lift-served; 4,676 feet (1,425 meters) hike-to Skiable acres: 2,475 acres lift served; 4,448 acres (1,800 hectares), including hike-to terrain Average annual snowfall: 354 inches (899 cm) Trail count: 34 Lift count: 7 (1 high-speed quad, 1 double, 5 J-bars) Why I interviewed him The Andes run the length of South America, 4,300 miles from the southern tip of Argentina north to Venezuela. It is the longest continental mountain range on Earth, nearly six times the length of the Alps and 1,300 miles longer than the Rockies. It is the highest mountain range outside of Asia, topping out at 22,841 feet on Mount Aconcagua, more than a mile higher than the tallest point in the Rockies (14,439-foot Mount Elbert) or Alps (15,772-foot Mont Blanc). So this ought to be one hell of a ski region, right? If the Alps house more than 500 ski areas and the Rockies several hundred, then the Andes ought to at least be in the triple digits? Surprisingly, no. Of the seven nations transected by the Andes, only Argentina and Chile host outdoor, lift-served ski areas. Between the two countries, I’m only able to assemble a list of 37 ski areas, 33 of which skiresort.info categorizes as “temporarily closed” – a designation the site typically reserves for outfits that have not operated over the past several seasons. For skiers hoping to live eternal winter by commuting to the Upside Down each May through October, this roster may be a bit of a record scratch. There just aren’t that many ski areas in the Southern Hemisphere. Outside of South America, the balance – another few dozen total - sit in Australia and New Zealand, with scattered novelties such as Afriski lodged at the top of Lesotho. There are probably more ski areas in New England than there are south of the equator. That explains why the U.S.-based multimountain ski passes have been slow to move into the Southern Hemisphere – there isn’t much there to move into. Ikon and Mountain Collective each have just one destination on the continent, and it’s the same destination: Valle Nevado. Epic offers absolutely nothing in South America. Even with few options, Vail moved south a decade ago with its purchase of Perisher, Australia’s largest ski area. That English-speaking nation was a logical first pass frontier, but the five Kangaroo resorts claimed by the Epic and Ikon passes are by far the five largest in the country, and they’re a 45-year flight from America. New Zealand is similarly remote, with more but generally less-developed ski areas, and Ikon has established a small presence there. But South America remains mostly wide open, despite its obvious appeal to North Americans: the majesty of the Andes, the novelty of summer skiing, and direct flights with no major timezone hopping required. Mountain Capital Partners has dropped anchor in Chile, purchasing Valle Nevado in 2023, neighboring La Parva the following year, and bidding for also-neighboring El Colorado in 2025 (that sale is pending regulatory review). But perhaps it’s time for a broader invasion. Last March, Indy Pass added Corralco as its first South American – and first Southern Hemisphere – ski area. That, as Ackerson and I discuss in the podcast, could be just the start of Indy’s ambitions for a continent-spanning (or at least, Argentina- and Chile-spanning) resort network. So this is a good time to start getting to know Chilean skiing. And Ackerson, longtime head of the Chilean Ski Areas Association, former leader of Chilean giants Portillo and Valle Nevado, and a...

Who Ryan Brown, Director of Golf & Ski at The Mountaintop at Grand Geneva, Wisconsin Recorded on June 17, 2025 About the Mountaintop at Grand Geneva Click here for a mountain stats overview Owned by: Marcus Hotels Located in: Lake Geneva, Wisconsin Year founded: 1968 Pass affiliations: None Closest neighboring U.S. ski areas: Alpine Valley (:23), Wilmot Mountain (:29), Crystal Ridge (:48), Alpine Hills Adventure Park (1:04) Base elevation: 847 feet Summit elevation: 962 feet Vertical drop: 115 feet Skiable acres: 30 Average annual snowfall: 34 inches Trail count: 21 (41% beginner, 41% intermediate, 18% advanced) Lift count: 6 (3 doubles, 1 ropetow, 2 carpets) Why I interviewed him Of America’s various mega-regions, the Midwest is the quietest about its history. It lacks the quaint-town Colonialism and Revolutionary pride of the self-satisfied East, the cowboy wildness and adobe earthiness of the West, the defiant resentment of the Lost Glory South. Our seventh-grade Michigan History class stapled together the state’s timeline mostly as a series of French explorers passing through on their way to somewhere more interesting. They were followed by a wave of industrial loggers who mowed the primeval forests into pancakes. Then the factories showed up. And so the state’s legacy was framed not as one of political or cultural or military primacy, but of brand, the place that stamped out Chevys and Fords by the tens of millions. To understand the Midwest, then, we must look for what’s permanent. The land itself won’t do. It’s mostly soil, mostly flat. Great for farming, bad for vistas. Dirt doesn’t speak to the soul like rock, like mountains. What humans built doesn’t tell us a much better story. Everything in the Midwest feels too new to conceal ghosts. The largest cities rose late, were destroyed in turn by fires and freeways, eventually recharged with arenas and glass-walled buildings that fail to echo or honor the past. Nothing lasts: the Detroit Pistons built the Palace of Auburn Hills in 1988 and developers demolished it 32 years later; the Detroit Lions (and, for a time, the Pistons) played at the Pontiac Silverdome, a titanic, 82,600-spectator stadium that opened in 1976 and came down in 2013 (37 years old). History seemed to bypass the region, corralling the major wars to the east and shooing the natural disasters to the west and south. Even shipwrecks lose their doubloons-and-antique-cannons romance in the Midwest: the Great Lakes most famous downed vessel, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, sank into Lake Superior in 1975. Her cargo was 26,535 tons of taconite ore pellets. A sad story, but not exactly the sinking of the Titanic. Our Midwest ancestors did leave us one legacy that no one has yet demolished: names. Place names are perhaps the best cultural relics of the various peoples who occupied this land since the glaciers retreated 12,000-ish years ago. Thousands of Midwest cities, towns, and counties carry Native American names. “Michigan” is derived from the Algonquin “Mishigamaw,” meaning “big lake”; “Minnesota” from the Sioux word meaning “cloudy water.” The legacies of French explorers and missionaries live on in “Detroit” (French for “strait”), “Marquette” (17th century French missionary Jacques Marquette), and “Eau Claire” (“clear water”). But one global immigration funnel dominated what became the modern Midwest: 50 percent of Wisconsin’s population descends from German, Nordic, or Scandinavian countries, who arrived in waves from the Colonial era through the early 1900s. The surnames are everywhere: Schmitz and Meyer and Webber and Schultz and Olson and Hanson. But these Old-Worlders came a bit late to name the cities and towns. So they named what they built instead. And they built a lot of ski areas. Ten of Wisconsin’s 34 ski areas carry names evocative of Europe’s cold regions, Scandinavia and the Alps: I wonder what it must have been like, in 18-something-or-other, to leave a place where the...

Who Mike Giorgio, Vice President and General Manager of Stowe Mountain, Vermont Recorded on October 8, 2025 About Stowe Click here for a mountain stats overview Owned by: Vail Resorts, which also owns: Located in: Stowe, Vermont Year founded: 1934 Pass affiliations: * Epic Pass: unlimited access * Epic Local Pass: unlimited access with holiday blackouts * Epic Northeast Value Pass: 10 days with holiday blackouts * Epic Northeast Midweek Pass: 5 midweek days with holiday blackouts * Access on Epic Day Pass All and 32 Resort tiers * Ski Vermont 4 Pass – up to one day, with blackouts * Ski Vermont Fifth Grade Passport – 3 days, with blackouts Closest neighboring U.S. ski areas: Smugglers’ Notch (ski-to or 40-ish-minute drive in winter, when route 108 is closed over the notch), Bolton Valley (:45), Cochran’s (:50), Mad River Glen (:55), Sugarbush (:56) Base elevation: 1,265 feet (at Toll House double) Summit elevation: 3,625 feet (top of the gondola), 4,395 feet at top of Mt. Mansfield Vertical drop: 2,360 feet lift-served, 3,130 feet hike-to Skiable acres: 485 Average annual snowfall: 314 inches Trail count: 116 (16% beginner, 55% intermediate, 29% advanced) Lift count: 12 (1 eight-passenger gondola, 1 six-passenger gondola, 1 six-pack, 3 high-speed quads, 1 fixed-grip quad, 1 triple, 2 doubles, 2 carpets) Why I interviewed him There is no Aspen of the East, but if I had to choose an Aspen of the East, it would be Stowe. And not just because Aspen Mountain and Stowe offer a similar fierce-down, with top-to-bottom fall-line zippers and bumpy-bumps spliced by massive glade pockets. Not just because each ski area rises near the far end of densely bunched resorts that the skier must drive past to reach them. Not just because the towns are similarly insular and expensive and tucked away. Not just because the wintertime highway ends at both places, an anachronistic act of surrender to nature from a mechanized world accustomed to fencing out the seasons. And not just because each is a cultural stand-in for mechanized skiing in a brand-obsessed, half-snowy nation that hates snow and is mostly filled with non-skiers who know nothing about the activity other than the fact that it exists. Everyone knows about Aspen and Stowe even if they’ll never ski, in the same way that everyone knows about LeBron James even if they’ve never watched basketball. All of that would be sufficient to make the Stowe-is-Aspen-East argument. But the core identity parallel is one that threads all these tensions while defying their assumed outcome. Consider the remoteness of 1934 Stowe and 1947 Aspen, two mountains in the pre-snowmaking, pre-interstate era, where cutting a ski area only made sense because that’s where it snowed the most. Both grew in similar fashion. First slowly toward the summit with surface lifts and mile-long single chairs crawling up the incline. Then double chairs and gondolas and snowguns and detachable chairlifts. A ski area for the town evolves into a ski area for the world. Hotels a la luxe at the base, traffic backed up to the interstate, corporate owners and $261 lift tickets. That sounds like a formula for a ruined world. But Stowe the ski area, like Aspen Mountain the ski area, has never lost its wild soul. Even buffed out and six-pack equipped and Epic Pass-enabled, Stowe remains a hell of a mountain, one of the best in New England, one of my favorite anywhere. With its monster snowfalls, its endless and perfectly spaced glades, its never-groomed expert zones, its sprawling footprint tucked beneath the Mansfield summit, its direct access to rugged and forbidding backcountry, Stowe, perhaps the most western-like mountain in the East, remains a skier’s mountain, a fierce and humbling proving ground, an any-skier’s destination not because of its trimmings, but because of the Christmas tree itself. Still, Stowe will never be Aspen, because Stowe does not sit at 8,000 feet and Stowe does not have three...

The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us. Who Lonie Glieberman, Founder, Owner, & President of Mount Bohemia, Michigan Recorded on November 19, 2025 About Mount Bohemia Click here for a mountain stats overview Owned by: Lonie Glieberman Located in: Lac La Belle, Michigan Year founded: 2000, by Lonie Pass affiliations: None Reciprocal partners: Boho has developed one of the strongest reciprocal pass programs in the nation, with lift tickets to 34 partner mountains. To protect the mountain’s more distant partners from local ticket-hackers, those ski areas typically exclude in-state and border-state residents from the freebies. Here’s the map: And here’s the Big Dumb Storm Chart detailing each mountain and its Boho access: Closest neighboring ski areas: Mont Ripley (:50) Base elevation: 624 feet Summit elevation: 1,522 feet Vertical drop: 898 feet Skiable acres: 585 Average annual snowfall: 273 inches Trail count: It’s hard to say exactly, as Boho adds new trails every year, and its map is one of the more confusing ones in American skiing, both as you try analyzing it on this screen, and as you’re actually navigating the mountain. My advice is to not try too hard to make the trailmap make sense. Everything is skiable with enough snow, and no matter what, you’re going to end up back at one of the two chairlifts or the road, where a shuttlebus will come along within a few minutes. Lift count: 2 (1 triple, 1 double) Why I interviewed him For those of us who lived through a certain version of America, Mount Bohemia is a fever dream, an impossible thing, a bantered-about-with-friends-in-a-basement-rec-room-idea that could never possibly be. This is because we grew up in a world in which such niche-cool things never happened. Before the internet spilled from the academic-military fringe into the mainstream around 1996, We The Commoners fed our brains with a subsistence diet of information meted out by institutional media gatekeepers. What I mean by “gatekeepers” is the limited number of enterprises who could afford the broadcast licenses, printing presses, editorial staffs, and building and technology infrastructure that for decades tethered news and information to costly distribution mechanisms. In some ways this was a better and more reliable world: vetted, edited, fact-checked. Even ostensibly niche media – the Electronic Gaming Monthly and Nintendo Power magazines that I devoured monthly – emerged from this cubicle-in-an-office-tower Process that guaranteed a sober, reality-based information exchange. But this professionalized, high-cost-of-entry, let’s-get-Bob’s-sign-off-before-we-run-this, don’t-piss-off-the-advertisers world limited options, which in turn limited imaginations – or at least limited the real-world risks anyone with money was willing to take to create something different. We had four national television networks and a couple dozen cable channels and one or two local newspapers and three or four national magazines devoted to niche pursuits like skiing. We had bookstores and libraries and the strange, ephemeral world of radio. We had titanic, impossible-to-imagine-now big-box chain stores ordering the world’s music and movies into labelled bins, from which shoppers could hope – by properly interpreting content from box-design flare or maybe just by luck – to pluck some soul-altering novelty. There was little novelty. Or at least, not much that didn’t feel like a slightly different version of something you’d already consumed. Everything, no matter how subversive its skin, had to appeal to the masses, whose money was required to support the enterprise of content creation. Pseudo-rebel networks such as ESPN and MTV quickly built global brands by applying the established institutional framework of network television to the mainstream-but-information-poor cultural centerpieces of sports and music. This cultural sameness expressed itself not just in media, but in...

Who Deb Hatley, Owner of Hatley Pointe, North Carolina Recorded on July 30, 2025 About Hatley Pointe Click here for a mountain stats overview Owned by: Deb and David Hatley since 2023 - purchased from Orville English, who had owned and operated the resort since 1992 Located in: Mars Hill, North Carolina Year founded: 1969 (as Wolf Laurel or Wolf Ridge; both names used over the decades) Pass affiliations: Indy Pass, Indy+ Pass – 2 days, no blackouts Closest neighboring ski areas: Cataloochee (1:25), Sugar Mountain (1:26) Base elevation: 4,000 feet Summit elevation: 4,700 feet Vertical drop: 700 feet Skiable acres: 54 Average annual snowfall: 65 inches Trail count: 21 (4 beginner, 11 intermediate, 6 advanced) Lift count: 4 active (1 fixed-grip quad, 1 ropetow, 2 carpets); 2 inactive, both on the upper mountain (1 fixed-grip quad, 1 double) Why I interviewed her Our world has not one map, but many. Nature drew its own with waterways and mountain ranges and ecosystems and tectonic plates. We drew our maps on top of these, to track our roads and borders and political districts and pipelines and railroad tracks. Our maps are functional, simplistic. They insist on fictions. Like the 1,260-mile-long imaginary straight line that supposedly splices the United States from Canada between Washington State and Minnesota. This frontier is real so long as we say so, but if humanity disappeared tomorrow, so would that line. Nature’s maps are more resilient. This is where water flows because this is where water flows. If we all go away, the water keeps flowing. This flow, in turn, impacts the shape and function of the entire world. One of nature’s most interesting maps is its mountain map. For most of human existence, mountains mattered much more to us than they do now. Meaning: we had to respect these giant rocks because they stood convincingly in our way. It took European settlers centuries to navigate en masse over the Appalachians, which is not even a severe mountain range, by global mountain-range standards. But paved roads and tunnels and gas stations every five miles have muted these mountains’ drama. You can now drive from the Atlantic Ocean to the Midwest in half a day. So spoiled by infrastructure, we easily forget how dramatically mountains command huge parts of our world. In America, we know this about our country: the North is cold and the South is warm. And we define these regions using battle maps from a 19th Century war that neatly bisected the nation. Another imaginary line. We travel south for beaches and north to ski and it is like this everywhere, a gentle progression, a continent-length slide that warms as you descend from Alaska to Panama. But mountains disrupt this logic. Because where the land goes up, the air grows cooler. And there are mountains all over. And so we have skiing not just in expected places such as Vermont and Maine and Michigan and Washington, but in completely irrational ones like Arizona and New Mexico and Southern California. And North Carolina. North Carolina. That’s the one that surprised me. When I started skiing, I mean. Riding hokey-poke chairlifts up 1990s Midwest hills that wouldn’t qualify as rideable surf breaks, I peered out at the world to figure out where else people skied and what that skiing was like. And I was astonished by how many places had organized skiing with cut trails and chairlifts and lift tickets, and by how many of them were way down the Michigan-to-Florida slide-line in places where I thought that winter never came: West Virginia and Virginia and Maryland. And North Carolina. Yes there are ski areas in more improbable states. But Cloudmont, situated in, of all places, Alabama, spins its ropetow for a few days every other year or so. North Carolina, home to six ski areas spinning a combined 35 chairlifts, allows for no such ambiguity: this is a ski state. And these half-dozen ski centers are not marginal operations: Sugar Mountain and Cataloochee...

Who Wes Kryger, President and Ayden Wilbur, Vice President of Mountain Operations at Greek Peak, New York Recorded on June 30, 2025 About Greek Peak Click here for a mountain stats overview Owned by: John Meier Located in: Cortland, New York Year founded: 1957 – opened Jan. 11, 1958 Pass affiliations: Indy Pass, Indy+ Pass – 2 days Closest neighboring U.S. ski areas: Labrador (:30), Song (:31) Base elevation: 1,148 feet Summit elevation: 2,100 feet Vertical drop: 952 feet Skiable acres: 300 Average annual snowfall: 120 inches Trail count: 46 (10 easier, 16 more difficult, 15 most difficult, 5 expert, 4 terrain parks) Lift count: 8 (1 fixed-grip quad, 2 triples, 3 doubles – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Greek Peak’s lift fleet) Why I interviewed them No reason not to just reprint what I wrote about the bump earlier this year: All anyone wants from a family ski trip is this: not too far, not too crowded, not too expensive, not too steep, not too small, not too Bro-y. Terrain variety and ample grooming and lots of snow, preferably from the sky. Onsite lodging and onsite food that doesn’t taste like it emerged from the ration box of a war that ended 75 years ago. A humane access road and lots of parking. Ordered liftlines and easy ticket pickup and a big lodge to meet up and hang out in. We’re not too picky you see but all that would be ideal. My standard answer to anyone from NYC making such an inquiry has been “hahaha yeah get on a plane and go out West.” But only if you purchased lift tickets 10 to 16 months in advance of your vacation. Otherwise you could settle a family of four on Mars for less than the cost of a six-day trip to Colorado. But after MLK Weekend, I have a new answer for picky non-picky New Yorkers: just go to Greek Peak. Though I’d skied here in the past and am well-versed on all ski centers within a six-hour drive of Manhattan, it had not been obvious to me that Greek Peak was so ideally situated for a FamSki. Perhaps because I’d been in Solo Dad tree-skiing mode on previous visits and perhaps because the old trailmap presented the ski area in a vertical fortress motif aligned with its mythological trail-naming scheme: But here is how we experienced the place on one of the busiest weekends of the year: 1. No lines to pick up tickets. Just these folks standing around in jackets, producing an RFID card from some clandestine pouch and syncing it to the QR code on my phone. 2. Nothing resembling a serious liftline outside of the somewhat chaotic Visions “express” (a carpet-loaded fixed-grip quad). Double and triple chairs, scattered at odd spots and shooting off in all directions, effectively dispersing skiers across a broad multi-faced ridge. The highlight being this double chair originally commissioned by Socrates in 407 B.C.: 3. Best of all: endless, wide-open, uncrowded top-to-bottom true greens – the only sort of run that my entire family can ski both stress-free and together. Those runs ambled for a thousand vertical feet. The Hope Lake Lodge, complete with waterpark and good restaurant, sits directly across the street. A shuttle runs back and forth all day long. Greek Peak, while deeper inland than many Great Lakes-adjacent ski areas, pulls steady lake-effect, meaning glades everywhere (albeit thinly covered). It snowed almost the entire weekend, sometimes heavily. Greek Peak’s updated trailmap better reflects its orientation as a snowy family funhouse (though it somewhat obscures the mountain’s ever-improving status as a destination for Glade Bro): For MLK 2024, we had visited Camelback, seeking the same slopeside-hotel-with-waterpark-decent-food-family-skiing combo. But it kinda sucked. The rooms, tinted with an Ikea-by-the-Susquehanna energy, were half the size of those at Greek Peak and had cost three times more. Our first room could have doubled as the smoking pen at a public airport (we requested, and received, another). The hill was half-open and overrun with people who...

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...