The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast

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About Camelback Owned by: EPR Properties, managed by Peregrine Hospitality (formerly KSL Resorts) Located in: Tannersville, Pennsylvania Year founded: 1963 Pass affiliations: * Ikon Pass: 7 days, no blackouts * Ikon Base Pass: 5 days, holiday blackouts Closest neighboring ski areas: Shawnee Mountain (:24), Jack Frost (:26), Big Boulder (:27), Skytop Lodge (:29), Saw Creek (:37), Blue Mountain (:41), Pocono Ranchlands (:43), Montage (:44), Hideout (:51), Elk Mountain (1:05), Bear Creek (1:09), Ski Big Bear (1:16) Base elevation: 1,252 feet Summit elevation: 2,079 feet Vertical drop: 827 feet Skiable Acres: 166 Average annual snowfall: 50 inches Trail count: 45, with three new trails for 2026-27 (not on the map below, but discussed on the podcast) Lift count: 12 (1 high-speed six-pack, 1 high-speed quad, 1 fixed-grip quad, 2 triples, 2 doubles, 5 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Camelback’s lift fleet) For reference: The Zoom transcript (click “transcript” above for the Substack transcript, then click on any text block to teleport to the associated point in the video; timestamps below DO NOT MATCH THE VIDEO) 00:03:25.000 --> 00:03:37.000 Stuart Winchester: Welcome to The Storm! I’m your host, Stuart Winchester. Today is Wednesday, September 16th, 2026, and I’ve got a really good show for you today. 00:03:37.000 --> 00:03:45.000 Stuart Winchester: we’re going to talk some Pennsylvania skiing. And Pennsylvania skiing is a really interesting thing. As I travel around the country. 00:03:45.000 --> 00:03:56.000 Stuart Winchester: and ski at all these different places in the Midwest, and out West, and in New England, and in the Mid-Atlantic. Uh, and as I talk to folks who… who don’t ski that much, or only ski at the big mountains. 00:03:56.000 --> 00:04:05.000 Stuart Winchester: I’ll often bring up some experience I had at a Pennsylvania ski area. Pennsylvania has quite a few ski areas as 21. 00:04:05.000 --> 00:04:20.000 Stuart Winchester: public chairlift-served ski areas, and it does 2.6 million skier visits on average per year. That is more than any state except for Colorado, California, Utah, Vermont, and New York. 00:04:20.000 --> 00:04:26.000 Stuart Winchester: It’s more than Washington, it’s more than Oregon, it’s more than Montana, it’s more than New. 00:04:26.000 --> 00:04:39.000 Stuart Winchester: So, Pennsylvania is a really important ski state, which is probably why Vail Resorts owns 8 ski areas there, because it is really close to a lot of population centers. In western PA, you have Pittsburgh. 00:04:39.000 --> 00:04:54.000 Stuart Winchester: and Seven Springs, and Laurel, and Hidden Valley, and then you have Philadelphia on the east side, and you can also draw up from Baltimore and D.C. for Round Top and Whitetail. And uh… 00:04:54.000 --> 00:04:57.000 Stuart Winchester: And Jack Frost’s Big Boulder up in the Poconos. So… 00:04:58.000 --> 00:05:00.000 Stuart Winchester: Vail has a big presence there. 00:05:00.000 --> 00:05:15.000 Stuart Winchester: Icon has a presence there with Camelback and Blue Mountain. Uh, and then Indy Pass just signed their 8th ski area in Pennsylvania with Spring Mountain, uh, down near Philadelphia. So, so it’s, it’s a place where a lot of skiers start. 00:05:15.000 --> 00:05:19.000 Stuart Winchester: And it’s a little bit of a funny place to ski, because… 00:05:19.000 --> 00:05:29.000 Stuart Winchester: it tends to have an outsized number of novice skiers, which is great. They’re very good at doing that. Uh, but it can make it a little chaotic. 00:05:29.000 --> 00:05:38.000 Stuart Winchester: And the lift lines can get a little crazy, and people are all over the hill, and sometimes they’re walking down the hill because they’re frustrated and they’re giving up. 00:05:38.000 --> 00:05:40.000 Stuart Winchester: Uh, and… 00:05:40.000 --> 00:05:44.000 Stuart Winchester: You take that as your baseline in Pennsylvania. 00:05:44.000 --> 00:05:49.000 Stuart Winchester: And you had any sort of complications. 00:05:49.000 --> 00:05:54.000 Stuart Winchester: And things get out of hand really quickly. And in general. 00:05:55.000 --> 00:06:00.000 Stuart Winchester: For that reason, the ski areas that have survived in Pennsylvania. 00:06:00.000 --> 00:06:07.000 Stuart Winchester: are among the best operators in the world, and I would put that up against anyone. 00:06:07.000 --> 00:06:14.000 Stuart Winchester: It’s a very, very challenging environment, not only because you have a high number of novice skiers. 00:06:14.000 --> 00:06:17.000 Stuart Winchester: Uh, but also because you have… 00:06:17.000 --> 00:06:31.000 Stuart Winchester: not a ton of snow, sometimes in the west part of the state, where there’s higher elevation, they do get a lot of snow, but… but not as a rule, you couldn’t count on it for natural snow. Uh, you get a lot of rain, you get a lot of warm-ups. 00:06:31.000 --> 00:06:35.000 Stuart Winchester: Uh, and… and you, in general, have to rely on… 00:06:35.000 --> 00:06:42.000 Stuart Winchester: a very short season, generally mid-December-ish to mid-March-ish. 00:06:42.000 --> 00:06:45.000 Stuart Winchester: And the skiers there… 00:06:47.000 --> 00:06:52.000 Stuart Winchester: They’re they’re accustomed to a pretty high standard, so. 00:06:52.000 --> 00:06:57.000 Stuart Winchester: So when things do get out of control, uh… 00:06:57.000 --> 00:07:04.000 Stuart Winchester: They really rebelled, and they really noticed. So, a couple years ago, this is what happened at Camelback. So, Camelback… 00:07:05.000 --> 00:07:09.000 Stuart Winchester: You know, I don’t generally do ops stories, uh… 00:07:09.000 --> 00:07:10.000 Stuart Winchester: You know. 00:07:10.000 --> 00:07:19.000 Stuart Winchester: ski area didn’t groom this run, or they haven’t opened this lift, or, uh, you know, they usually let this bump up, but they don’t, or, or… 00:07:19.000 --> 00:07:27.000 Stuart Winchester: you know, they… they are trying to save money, or they’re being cheap. I generally don’t bother with those, even though I get a lot of messages. 00:07:27.000 --> 00:07:32.000 Stuart Winchester: Complaining about things like that, because there’s almost always a pretty good reason. 00:07:32.000 --> 00:07:38.000 Stuart Winchester: Uh, and it’s almost always temporary, and it’s really not worth the effort. 00:07:38.000 --> 00:07:48.000 Stuart Winchester: to write the story if I’m just writing about, you know, why Stratton or Mount Snow or Magic Mountain didn’t open a certain lift on a certain day. 00:07:48.000 --> 00:08:04.000 Stuart Winchester: Uh, it’s, it’s a lot to track down and it’s a lot of, uh, this person said this and the other person said that. It’s just not the kind of thing that I’m want to cover with the storm, right? I want to do bigger stories. I want to do trend stories. I want to look at the culture and evolution of skiing. 00:08:04.000 --> 00:08:11.000 Stuart Winchester: And the passes, and all the infrastructure, and all the fun stuff. So I don’t generally cover the day-to-day stuff, just because… 00:08:12.000 --> 00:08:18.000 Stuart Winchester: The ski areas that remain in 2026 are, for the most part, run by really good operators. 00:08:18.000 --> 00:08:32.000 Stuart Winchester: Uh, it… because… and they’ve survived. Most of the bad ski areas that were either mismanaged or were in the wrong places, they went out of business a long time ago, which is why the number of ski areas has been stable for around 25 years now in America. 00:08:32.000 --> 00:08:35.000 Stuart Winchester: So I but I started to notice. 00:08:35.000 --> 00:08:45.000 Stuart Winchester: several years ago that I was getting an outsized number of complaints around one ski area in particular in the Poconos. 00:08:45.000 --> 00:08:47.000 Stuart Winchester: And it was Camelback. 00:08:47.000 --> 00:08:51.000 Stuart Winchester: And Camelback had a long history of being an independent. 00:08:51.000 --> 00:08:52.000 Stuart Winchester: And… 00:08:52.000 --> 00:08:54.000 Stuart Winchester: Really… 00:08:54.000 --> 00:08:59.000 Stuart Winchester: the way it’s been described to me by… by season pass holders, and I’ve skied… 00:08:59.000 --> 00:09:04.000 Stuart Winchester: some at Camelback, but I don’t have that depth of knowledge of having grown up there. 00:09:04.000 --> 00:09:20.000 Stuart Winchester: That Camelback for a long time, for decades, set the standard on snowmaking, on grooming, on just general maintenance of lifts in the ski area in the Poconos. And that was why they had chosen to ski there all those years. 00:09:20.000 --> 00:09:30.000 Stuart Winchester: But things had started to fall apart when a new owner showed up in 2019. It was at the time KSL Capital, who was. 00:09:30.000 --> 00:09:43.000 Stuart Winchester: was managing it for EPR Properties, which is the entity that bought it, and they own a bunch of ski areas, EPR Properties, including a bunch owned by Vail, including North Star, and a lot of the old Peak Resorts in Ohio and such. 00:09:43.000 --> 00:09:50.000 Stuart Winchester: And KSL Resorts was a division of KSL Capital. 00:09:50.000 --> 00:09:53.000 Stuart Winchester: which is a part owner of Altera. 00:09:53.000 --> 00:09:58.000 Stuart Winchester: But for some reason, Altera, which is very good at running ski resorts. 00:09:58.000 --> 00:10:00.000 Stuart Winchester: did not… 00:10:00.000 --> 00:10:15.000 Stuart Winchester: get assigned as the… as the owner of Camelback. And when KSL Resorts purchased Blue Mountain, not in Ontario, the Blue Mountain in Pennsylvania, that’s about 45 minutes from Camelback, two years later, in 2021. 00:10:15.000 --> 00:10:26.000 Stuart Winchester: That ski area also did not fall under Altera’s ownership. And it was an odd choice to make, because Altera’s really good at running ski areas, and they run… 00:10:26.000 --> 00:10:35.000 Stuart Winchester: Mammoth, and Deer Valley, and Steamboat, and Solitude, and Palisades Tahoe, and Stratton, and Sugarbush, and they definitely have. 00:10:35.000 --> 00:10:41.000 Stuart Winchester: the institutional knowledge and internal firepower to be able to run these ski areas in the Poconos. 00:10:41.000 --> 00:10:43.000 Stuart Winchester: Uh, Blue Mountain… 00:10:43.000 --> 00:10:47.000 Stuart Winchester: Had the benefit of a long time tenured management team. 00:10:47.000 --> 00:11:02.000 Stuart Winchester: That kept the place, by all accounts, running pretty well. Camelback, on the other hand, seemed to be falling apart before our eyes, and before the eyes of the loyalist skiers who loved the place so much. And they were really, really concerned, and I started to… 00:11:02.000 --> 00:11:08.000 Stuart Winchester: Because they had put, uh, a management team in place, it seemed. 00:11:08.000 --> 00:11:10.000 Stuart Winchester: that… 00:11:11.000 --> 00:11:22.000 Stuart Winchester: was not familiar with the… with the inner workings of a ski area. Uh, I… I hosted Dave Makarski, the former general manager of Kalenbach, on this podcast. 00:11:22.000 --> 00:11:33.000 Stuart Winchester: and very nice guy. We had a great conversation. Uh, he’s not a skier. And, and, you know, sometimes you can be not a skier and run a great ski resort. Uh, look at Bill Stritzler up at Smuggler’s Notch. 00:11:33.000 --> 00:11:43.000 Stuart Winchester: Bill hasn’t skied in years, and he snowboarded for a little bit, but he’s not a daily skier. Look at Shawnee. 00:11:43.000 --> 00:11:54.000 Stuart Winchester: that where the owner… that’s one of the most modern, nice ski areas in the Poconos, uh, and the owner has not skied in decades. So, so it’s not always necessary, uh, but… 00:11:55.000 --> 00:12:10.000 Stuart Winchester: It does help and it’s certainly a benefit. So everyone I talked to, I was, I was gathering all this stuff for a story and I was gonna write about Camelback and, and it, it really seemed like it was the worst run ski area anywhere that I could find based on the amount of feedback I was getting. 00:12:10.000 --> 00:12:25.000 Stuart Winchester: I was gathering all this feedback from all these long-time pass holders, and then they hired a new general manager, and so I scrapped the story, but I still wanted to get it, and by all accounts, Jason Bays, who I’ll bring on the podcast in a moment. 00:12:25.000 --> 00:12:34.000 Stuart Winchester: has really done a nice job of turning CamelBak around. So, so let’s go to Jason now. 00:14:09.000 --> 00:14:16.000 Stuart Winchester: My guest today is the Vice President and General Manager of Camelback Ski Area in Pennsylvania. 00:14:16.000 --> 00:14:26.000 Stuart Winchester: Camelback runs six chairlifts, or maybe seven. I might have had a typo there. Serving 45 trails on an 827-foot vertical drop. 00:14:26.000 --> 00:14:41.000 Stuart Winchester: Prior to taking the top job at Camelback, he was general manager for Great Wolf Resorts around the United States. He also spent time as chief operating officer and general manager of Mountain Creek Ski Area in New Jersey and director of operations. 00:14:41.000 --> 00:14:54.000 Stuart Winchester: for Jay Peak, Vermont. His very first jobs as a teenager were as a lifeguard and ski instructor at Camelback. Jason Bay is my guest. Jason, welcome to the Storm. Awesome to have you. How you doing today? 00:14:53.000 --> 00:15:00.000 Jason Bays: Thank you, Stuart. Great to be here. I’ve been a listener from day one, so excited to join you. 00:14:59.000 --> 00:15:14.000 Stuart Winchester: I love that. I’m so hyped to hear that. I know I started with a little Northeast focus. You know, you’re the… you probably know this already, but you’re the second straight guest I’ve had on. There was a Mountain Creek alum, Chris Haggerty, on yesterday. Are you acquainted with Chris? 00:15:13.000 --> 00:15:18.000 Jason Bays: Yeah, Chris and I worked together, um, back in our days at Mountain Creek, great guy. 00:15:17.000 --> 00:15:33.000 Stuart Winchester: Yeah, yeah, I’m, uh, I’m not sure, I’m sure you’re aware I’m based in New York City and Mountain Creek is one of my go-tos and, and was my home mountain before I started traveling all over the place for the storm. So, so, you know, Jason, I, I think it’s awesome that you grew up at Camelback. Tal. 00:15:34.000 --> 00:15:41.000 Stuart Winchester: your childhood Camelback. What was the kingdom of Camelback like to you, uh, when you were growing up skiing there? 00:15:40.000 --> 00:16:03.000 Jason Bays: Yeah, look, I, you know, took, I grew up in Pocono Kid, born and raised 10 minutes from the resort. After school ski program was the first, you know, first sort of foray into life at Camelback and was immediately hooked in the summer as a swimming pool and two water slides. I thought that was the most awesome place in the world too. 00:15:44.000 --> 00:15:45.000 Stuart Winchester: Yeah. 00:15:54.000 --> 00:15:55.000 Stuart Winchester: Mmhm. 00:16:03.000 --> 00:16:04.000 Stuart Winchester: Mmhm. 00:16:03.000 --> 00:16:21.000 Jason Bays: And my parents thought it was a great babysitting service, you know, relative to that. So it was just an awesome, awesome place to grow up and, you know, be part of the small but mighty ski community that is Tannersville, Pennsylvania, in this area, in the Poconos. 00:16:21.000 --> 00:16:39.000 Jason Bays: um, you know, when it came to get a first job, uh, there’s no place I was, uh, gonna consider other than Camelback. It’s where all my friends were, it’s where we all hung out all the time, and, um, you know, really just got introduced to, uh, to the sport, and, um, had some freedom. It was the first time I had some freedom, and it was to be at Camelback, so that’s. 00:16:27.000 --> 00:16:29.000 Stuart Winchester: Mmhm. 00:16:39.000 --> 00:16:56.000 Stuart Winchester: So you worked there, and you were part of the machine, so to speak, and I realized you were sort of on the peripheral of the machine, as opposed to in the center of it, as you are now. But, you know, you grew up in the Poconos, and had that experience, and you had this vision of Camelback in your head, right? Then you went off and had a big life, as… 00:16:56.000 --> 00:16:57.000 Jason Bays: Yes. 00:16:56.000 --> 00:17:00.000 Stuart Winchester: as people do, and you went and worked at all these places that I just mentioned. 00:17:00.000 --> 00:17:03.000 Stuart Winchester: And then you came back to Camelback. 00:17:03.000 --> 00:17:06.000 Stuart Winchester: When you, when you arrived. 00:17:06.000 --> 00:17:10.000 Stuart Winchester: How had the place changed? And I just want to tee this up. I, you know. 00:17:10.000 --> 00:17:19.000 Stuart Winchester: before you came on, I was talking about how I don’t generally write operations stories, right? Because it… there’s usually a good reason for why a trail is closed, a lift’s not running. 00:17:19.000 --> 00:17:26.000 Stuart Winchester: Uh, but a few years ago, I started to get an outsized number of complaints about Camelback. 00:17:26.000 --> 00:17:38.000 Stuart Winchester: And so I started to write a story about it, and then when you came along, I shelved it, because honestly, everyone immediately was like, oh, this is so much better. So, you know, how had… 00:17:38.000 --> 00:17:41.000 Stuart Winchester: Camelback changed. 00:17:41.000 --> 00:17:42.000 Stuart Winchester: when you… 00:17:42.000 --> 00:17:44.000 Stuart Winchester: Came back to work there. 00:17:44.000 --> 00:17:51.000 Stuart Winchester: And what were the challenges facing the resort? What did you focus on immediately? 00:17:50.000 --> 00:18:08.000 Jason Bays: Yeah, I’ll just back up to say, you know, just to contextualize, um, from when I was there as a teenager and, um, through college on the ski team, too, I would say that community was a really big word, um, that was used all the time. You, you felt like it was, it was the Camelback community, and there’s a really big emphasis on the ski product. 00:18:08.000 --> 00:18:28.000 Jason Bays: Um, as a ski instructor, like, what we were putting out, how we were doing lessons, how many lessons we could do, and the experience that was surrounding that. And same thing on the water park side. And, you know, I think the, um, you know, some of the observations, um, coming back to Camelback was, um, I think there’s a little bit of focus, um, focus direction for, for, like, to focus on the ski product. 00:18:28.000 --> 00:18:44.000 Jason Bays: and focusing on the water park product, and I sort of look at it as, like, a… as Disney World, right? Whereas we fill out… if we do the ski part well, we do the snow tubing part well, we do the water park well, that puts heads in beds, um, versus trying to put heads in beds. 00:18:44.000 --> 00:19:01.000 Jason Bays: And then have them do the activities. We’re leading with an activity front and centered focus. And that means making the strategic investments in the ski product, in our recreational product, and making that the very best that it can be. 00:19:01.000 --> 00:19:23.000 Jason Bays: back in 2008 when I was here as a teenager, that was all there was. There was no hotel product, right? So the ski product got outsized attention just naturally because it was a 560-acre resort that identified as a ski area and a water park. And I think some of the context that was missing was that while there’s been a great evolution of Camelback as a four-season resort. 00:19:15.000 --> 00:19:16.000 Stuart Winchester: Mmhm. 00:19:23.000 --> 00:19:40.000 Jason Bays: It’s really important that, to me, that each of those business units gets the time and attention that they would deserve if they were stand-alone units, particularly because a cog… it’s a cog in the wheel, and that wheel is… it’s a flywheel. It needs to…

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Welcome to the Storm’s short-form, news-focused podcast. Don’t worry, I still write long-form newsletters. Paid subscribers can leave a comment in the article below, or by joining The Storm’s chat (also below). I’ll respond to some comments in the next episode, which is scheduled for Wednesday, Sept. 16. Transcript update Following up on yesterday’s feedback, there are now two transcripts available for each podcast: * Substack’s transcript: This transcript is auto-generated when I upload the podcast file to Substack, which is the platform that hosts stormskiing.com. This one is cool because you can click on any block of text and the audio will jump to that point in the conversation. Click the “transcript” button above to access. * Zoom’s transcript: Zoom automatically generates this transcript as I record. It should be more or less identical to Substack’s transcript, but with names attached to each quote block. The downside of this transcript is that you can’t teleport to that point in the pod by clicking on the text block, as you can with Substack’s. Another downside: the timestamps are off, since I typically start recording prior to the start of the podcast. I’ll work on cleaning this up. So until the robots get smarter, we’re stuck with two different transcripts. Both are auto-generated, and I don’t proofread either one, as that would be the fastest way to make sure my quick-turnaround, up-to-date podcast turns into a slow-turnaround, out-of-date one. My hope is that Substack will soon hire or invent or weld from raw iron a robot that’s smart enough to know who’s speaking when. I’ll just keep following the robots around and using their hyper-intelligence until they decide to kill me. The Zoom transcript (click “transcript” above for the Substack transcript, which will zoom to any point in the video when you click on the associated text block; timestamps below DO NOT MATCH THE VIDEO) Stuart Winchester: Welcome to The Storm! I’m your host, Stuart Winchester. It is Tuesday, September 15th, 2026, and I am very excited today to bring you a conversation with the General Manager of Monarch Mountain, Colorado, Chris Haggerty. Now, I’ve never featured Monarch either on the long-form pod or on the short-form pod. 00:09:57.000 --> 00:10:11.000 Stuart Winchester: There’s never really a reason behind that, other than this is just kind of when it happened. If you run an area, a ski area anywhere in America, I do want to talk to you. I’ve just never had the opportunity to feature Monarch before, so we will talk about Monarch in just a little bit here. 00:10:11.000 --> 00:10:27.000 Stuart Winchester: Part of the reason why we’re talking about Monarch is because they were one of two Western Mountains to this year join Snow Operating’s Snow Pass. Now, the Snow Pass, if you missed the news, it works a lot like the Indy Pass or the Mountain Collective Pass, where you get two days each. 00:10:27.000 --> 00:10:37.000 Stuart Winchester: at a set number of ski areas. In this case, it’s planned to be 14 ski areas for the 2026-27 ski season. And… 00:10:37.000 --> 00:10:45.000 Stuart Winchester: That product went on sale last Tuesday. I had Snow Operating CEO Joe Heschen on the podcast to talk through it with us. 00:10:45.000 --> 00:11:01.000 Stuart Winchester: Couple days later, I got an email from Snow Operating saying, Hey, guess what? Our first round of Snow Operating and Snow Triple Play, which are two different products, and I’ll explain the difference in a moment, sold out. So we’re taking it off sale. We’re putting it back on sale next Monday, September 21st. 00:11:01.000 --> 00:11:13.000 Stuart Winchester: at 10 a.m. Eastern. It will be $349.99 for Snowpass, and $184.99 for Snow Triple Play. Still a pretty good deal. Those products at full price. 00:11:13.000 --> 00:11:24.000 Stuart Winchester: the prices that Snow Partners gave me, and they anticipate selling both products through Christmas Eve, December 24th, just like they did last year with the first season of the Triple Play. 00:11:24.000 --> 00:11:40.000 Stuart Winchester: They, the final prices they anticipate will be 3 99 99 for snow pass and 1 99 99 for snow triple play. So you get a nice little discount, particularly with the snow pass, $50 off if you buy it in the next round. So let’s talk a little bit about the snow pass because. 00:11:40.000 --> 00:11:43.000 Stuart Winchester: When this product debuted. 00:11:43.000 --> 00:11:53.000 Stuart Winchester: I… I’ve been saying for years, there’s 4 national ski passes, right? There’s obviously Epic and Icon, and those have some season pass unlimited tiers at certain mountains. 00:11:53.000 --> 00:12:08.000 Stuart Winchester: And a limited number of days at other partner mountains. And then you have Indian Mountain Collective, which essentially worked the same way, 2 days at each ski area that is on their roster. Uh, Mountain Collective is more expensive, tends to be your bigger, more high-end resorts, Snowbird, Jackson Hole. 00:12:08.000 --> 00:12:23.000 Stuart Winchester: Uh, Sun Peaks up in Canada. And Indy tended to be the lesser-known ski areas, but still some really dynamite stuff there, and a lot more ski areas. Mountain Collective always has around 30, and Indy is more like 250, not counting their cross-country. 00:12:23.000 --> 00:12:36.000 Stuart Winchester: ski areas. So, I always thought there was probably room for a fifth national pass, but I wasn’t sure, and as time went on, and more and more mountains joined multi-mountain passes. 00:12:36.000 --> 00:12:37.000 Stuart Winchester: I… 00:12:37.000 --> 00:12:41.000 Stuart Winchester: I thought, okay, maybe there’s not room for a fifth national pass. Maybe everyone who’s… 00:12:41.000 --> 00:12:44.000 Stuart Winchester: who wants to join a pass has, because I know Indy, uh. 00:12:44.000 --> 00:12:58.000 Stuart Winchester: Now, I’m not saying they don’t have standards, but they’ll let just about anybody on the pass just to help them get that exposure and that national marketing. But Snow Operating, the outfit that owns Mountain Creek in New Jersey and the indoor big snow ski area in New Jersey, they launched. 00:12:58.000 --> 00:13:15.000 Stuart Winchester: their Snow Pass, and it’s a pretty good roster. Here, I’m gonna share my screen for those of you watching on video, and if you’re not watching on video, don’t worry, I’m gonna talk through it. So, here’s the Snow Triple Play East roster, and here’s the Snow Pass roster. Now, the Snow Pass has 14 ski areas on it. 00:13:15.000 --> 00:13:18.000 Stuart Winchester: And you get 2 days at each ski area. 00:13:18.000 --> 00:13:22.000 Stuart Winchester: The Snow Triple Play has… 00:13:22.000 --> 00:13:27.000 Stuart Winchester: 23 total ski areas on it, and you get 3 days total. 00:13:27.000 --> 00:13:43.000 Stuart Winchester: across all 23 ski areas. That’s why it’s so much less expensive. The most days you can use at any ski area is 2, so you can’t buy this as a 3-pack Force A Gore Mountain, alright? So, that’s the first important. 00:13:43.000 --> 00:13:59.000 Stuart Winchester: distinction is that Snow Triple Play is a much more limited basket of days. You also don’t want to assume that they have the same roster. Just because something’s on Snow Pass doesn’t mean it’s on Snow Triple Play, and vice versa. Snow Triple Play right now has a pretty… 00:13:59.000 --> 00:14:15.000 Stuart Winchester: Big roster that I wish was on the, uh, Snow Pass, because it has Jiminy Peak in, uh, Massachusetts, and also Cranmore in New Hampshire, which is jointly owned. It has Platykill up in the New York Catskills. 00:14:15.000 --> 00:14:30.000 Stuart Winchester: It has all these summit ski areas around Quebec. It has Bromont, one of the great eastern townships ski areas. Uh, so that’s Snow Triple Play. Snow Triple Play does not have anything in the west. It’s all east. It’s all east coast, either eastern Canada or eastern New York. 00:14:30.000 --> 00:14:45.000 Stuart Winchester: Uh, Snow Pass has… it’s a pretty interesting roster, and it’s a great roster for a very particular type of skier. Now, it does have two ski areas in the West, uh, Snow King, which has been controversial, I’m gonna set that aside, and Monarch, which we’ll talk about in a moment. 00:14:45.000 --> 00:15:00.000 Stuart Winchester: The core of the Snow Pass, and the reason why it makes sense, is because of the south to north line of ski areas that it offers. So if you buy the Snow Pass, again, goes back on sale for $349.99 next Monday, September 21st. 00:15:00.000 --> 00:15:05.000 Stuart Winchester: You would get two days each at Bel Air, which is in New York’s Catskills. 00:15:05.000 --> 00:15:07.000 Stuart Winchester: Gore. 00:15:07.000 --> 00:15:16.000 Stuart Winchester: higher up in the Adirondacks, and Whiteface, which are all owned and run and operated by the state, all fantastic ski areas. So it’s 2 days at each of those, that alone would be worth $350. 00:15:16.000 --> 00:15:33.000 Stuart Winchester: Then you add in the fact that you get two days at Mountain Creek, which is right there in New Jersey, uh, two days at the indoor snow dome, big snow American dream. Uh, if you have kids, two days at Butternut and two days at Mount Southington in Connecticut. Uh, Butternut is in Massachusetts. They’re both day drive distance from New York City. 00:15:33.000 --> 00:15:42.000 Stuart Winchester: Let them wander around, let them explore. They’re both, uh, especially Butternut. It’s very up-to-date, very modern lifts, very, very well-run ski area. So… 00:15:42.000 --> 00:15:45.000 Stuart Winchester: You have a really great little, you know. 00:15:46.000 --> 00:16:03.000 Stuart Winchester: 5, 6, 7 ski areas that really make sense. Now, Ski Martok doesn’t really make sense. It’s all the way up in the middle of nowhere in the, in the Atlantic provinces in, in Canada. Uh, and, and Pleasant Mountain makes less sense. It’s, it’s up in Maine and, uh, harder to get to from, from the folks who would likely buy this as. 00:16:03.000 --> 00:16:13.000 Stuart Winchester: But what you have to ask yourself is, okay, the snow pass, that’s a pretty good deal, right? It’s $349.99 for 2 days each of 14 mountains. Then you look at Indy. 00:16:13.000 --> 00:16:16.000 Stuart Winchester: And Indy Pass is 254. 00:16:16.000 --> 00:16:34.000 Stuart Winchester: uh, alpine ski areas, and it just went off sale for $429 for the base pass. So, it would be 2 days each at all of these, and the… the plus pass, the ND plus pass, was $469. It had no blackouts. Now, the other thing to know about Snow Triple Play. 00:16:34.000 --> 00:16:50.000 Stuart Winchester: and snow passes, there are a lot of blackouts, okay? So, a lot of these are holidays, you probably expect that. Uh, you know, here I see Big Snow, Oak Mountain, Plattekill, a lot of holiday blackouts, Butternut holiday blackouts, Gore, uh, Bel Air. Bel Air, though, you want to stop. 00:16:50.000 --> 00:17:06.000 Stuart Winchester: Bel Air is blacked out every Saturday and Sunday. That’s a big deal, because when do you probably want to go to Bel Air if you’re someone skiing around with your little kids? Probably on a Saturday or Sunday. So, you want to be really careful and really look at these, uh, these blackout dates before you pull the trigger. 00:17:06.000 --> 00:17:09.000 Stuart Winchester: on the snow pass. So… 00:17:09.000 --> 00:17:14.000 Stuart Winchester: So if you have a snow pass, I I’m calling it. 00:17:14.000 --> 00:17:18.000 Stuart Winchester: A national pass, kind of, uh… 00:17:18.000 --> 00:17:24.000 Stuart Winchester: out of anticipation, right? It’s more of a, I think they’ll get there, sort of designation, because right now. 00:17:24.000 --> 00:17:40.000 Stuart Winchester: it’s not really a national pass, right? You have one small skier in Wyoming, one small skier in Colorado. Is someone who lives in New York’s metro really going to travel to Colorado just to ski that because they have a snow pass, right? Because it’s not cheap to get up to Colorado. 00:17:40.000 --> 00:17:56.000 Stuart Winchester: And there’s a lot of much bigger mountains out there. So… so I think that Snow Pass, much like Indy did when it started in 2019, will grow into a national… a true national pass. Uh, for now, just based on the reputation of the operators, uh, the fact that I think that they will be able to grow this thing, the fact that I… 00:17:56.000 --> 00:18:11.000 Stuart Winchester: know their relationships with folks all around the country, and how much folks like working with them, I am assuming that this pass will grow up, and if it does, Monarch will be the OG Western partner. So, let’s talk more about Monarch now, and I’m gonna bring. 00:18:11.000 --> 00:18:13.000 Stuart Winchester: Chris Haggerty in. 00:18:14.000 --> 00:18:17.000 Stuart Winchester: And we will, uh… Chris, how you doing? 00:18:17.000 --> 00:18:20.000 Chris Haggerty: I’m doing well today, Stuart. How are you? 00:18:19.000 --> 00:18:37.000 Stuart Winchester: I’m doing great. All right, you passed the sound check, so I’m going to give you an intro here. Joining us now is the general manager of Monarch Mountain, Colorado. Monarch has six chairlifts serving 1,017 acres of terrain, including the 377-acre no-name expansion that opened last winter. 00:18:37.000 --> 00:18:44.000 Stuart Winchester: Monarch’s 10,727-foot base elevation is the third highest in American skiing. 00:18:44.000 --> 00:18:59.000 Stuart Winchester: Prior to taking the top job at Monarch in 2024, he spent 21 years as general manager of Mountain Creek, New Jersey. Chris Haggerty is my guest. Chris, welcome to The Storm. Awesome to connect with you. I’ve really been wanting to spotlight Monarch for a long time now, and I’m so hyped we get to. 00:19:00.000 --> 00:19:10.000 Chris Haggerty: Yeah. Thanks for having me, and I’m excited to be here and chat Monarch. It’s a special place, so excited to share some discussion about it. 00:19:10.000 --> 00:19:23.000 Stuart Winchester: So, the New Jersey to Colorado pipeline is maybe not necessarily a well-trod one, although there are a surprising amount of IntraWest vets working in the ski industry because of its relationship with IntraWest, but talk to us about… 00:19:24.000 --> 00:19:40.000 Stuart Winchester: Getting to Monarch, and you were taking over for Randy Stroud, super experienced guy, he was retiring, uh, he’d been there 23 years, a decade as GM, and he stayed on, I believe, for, for a year. So, talk to us about going from New Jersey, where they have a lot of snowmaking, because they have to. 00:19:39.000 --> 00:19:41.000 Chris Haggerty: Mmhm. 00:19:40.000 --> 00:19:47.000 Stuart Winchester: to Monarch, where they have no snowmaking, and just what that adjustment period was like, and how you settled into the role. 00:19:48.000 --> 00:20:07.000 Chris Haggerty: Yeah, just a quick story is that, you know, as you mentioned, I was at Mountain Creek for a long time, and, you know, really where I found my love for the ski industry, and after college, I had taken a trip out to Colorado and got my first taste of, like. 00:20:07.000 --> 00:20:12.000 Chris Haggerty: the Rockies, right? So it’s always been something in the back of my mind. Um… 00:20:12.000 --> 00:20:28.000 Chris Haggerty: And I ended up stumbling upon Monarch. I hadn’t been to Monarch before, and I was like, oh, this place looks pretty cool. It definitely screamed the ski independent. I definitely wanted to. 00:20:28.000 --> 00:20:50.000 Chris Haggerty: you know, if I was going to relocate, wanted to find an area where the resort and the local community both had that kind of just feeling of community and stuff. So a monarch was it. And I was blessed to step in after Randy Stroud, and we shared a season together. So I got to learn a lot of institutional knowledge from him. 00:20:50.000 --> 00:20:58.000 Chris Haggerty: Um, but also bring my viewpoints coming from New Jersey in an area where, you know, we’re not… 00:20:58.000 --> 00:21:15.000 Chris Haggerty: maybe blessed with natural snow. Um, so last year was, like, a challenging winter, and, um, I was ready for it, because I was like, man, 120 inches, like, if you gave me that in New Jersey, we’d be celebrating for years, right? So, um, you know, just kind of a unique perspective, but… 00:21:15.000 --> 00:21:21.000 Chris Haggerty: um, definitely happy to be here, and just pumped to keep the Monarch kind of spirit going forward. 00:21:21.000 --> 00:21:37.000 Stuart Winchester: So you’ve been there for a couple years, one full year as GM, and one of the… there’s been tons of stuff coming out of Monarch, it’s amazing for a small ski area, which is why I wanted to get you on. So you recently joined the Snow Pass, one of two Western partners to join the Snow Pass, which gives pass holders. 00:21:32.000 --> 00:21:34.000 Chris Haggerty: Thank you. 00:21:37.000 --> 00:21:54.000 Stuart Winchester: Two days at Monarch. I don’t think there’s blackouts on that, but correct me if I’m wrong now. Now, Multimon Pass has been around for years and almost everybody in Colorado is on either Epic or Icon if they’re large and if they’re small, a lot of them have joined Indy. So the option has been there for years. 00:21:54.000 --> 00:22:00.000 Stuart Winchester: Why was it finally time for Monarch to join a multi-mountain pass, and why the snow pass? 00:22:02.000 --> 00:22:15.000 Chris Haggerty: Yeah, two parts there. I think on the, I mentioned it before, we’re ski independent as our tagline, right? Part of independence is like the definition is freedom. 00:22:10.000 --> 00:22:11.000 Stuart Winchester: Mmhm. 00:22:15.000 --> 00:22:19.000 Chris Haggerty: Right? Like, you make your own choices. You do what you wanna do. 00:22:19.000 --> 00:22:31.000 Chris Haggerty: we’ve been approached in the past for IndyPass, and, you know, it wasn’t right for us because it kind of went against our spirit of being independent. Like, we want to be able to work with who we… 00:22:31.000 --> 00:22:43.000 Chris Haggerty: who we choose at any given moment, um, and that just isn’t something that, um, is available through the Unipass, so… so we’ve passed on that. Um, we were even approached about it this year. Um… 00:22:43.000 --> 00:23:00.000 Chris Haggerty: As far as Snowpass goes, they respect that. They’re all about, hey, you want to work with XYZ Pass, go for it. And obviously, I’ve spent some time working with the Snow Partners group. 00:23:00.000 --> 00:23:05.000 Chris Haggerty: You know, from my perspective, that group is all about, um… 00:23:05.000 --> 00:23:17.000 Chris Haggerty: you know, rising tides lifts all boats, right? And, um, you know, for me personally, they’ve opened doors for me, right? And helped me throughout growing in my career, so, um… 00:23:39.000 --> 00:23:40.000 Chris Haggerty: We’re down. 00:23:40.000 --> 00:23:52.000 Stuart Winchester: I want to share, because you’ve sort of created your own… I’m sharing my screen now, if you can see that, and hopefully the folks watching can as well, and if you’re listening, I’ll talk through it. So, Monarch has… 00:23:45.000 --> 00:23:46.000 Chris Haggerty: Thank you. 00:23:52.000 --> 00:24:07.000 Stuart Winchester: not joined a pass, necessarily, but you’ve kind of built your own pass, and what I have on the screen right now is a list of Monarch’s reciprocals, and it’s a pretty amazing pass all in and of itself, so if you buy a Monarch season pass, which I believe now is, what, $6.59, less if you renew. 00:24:07.000 --> 00:24:24.000 Stuart Winchester: It comes with a lot of reciprocal days. Some of the big ones that people probably are really attracted to, 3 days at A-Basin, 3 days at Copper. Now there’s blackouts on that, but still, it’s freaking Copper Mountain. Uh, 3 days at

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is going to cover Midwestern skiing whether you like it or not. Don’t worry, Colorad-Bro, it’s your turn tomorrow. Welcome to the Storm’s short-form, news-focused podcast. Don’t worry, I will still write newsletters too. To browse a (robot-generated) podcast transcript, click the “transcript” button above - click on any block of text and the audio will jump to that point in the conversation. Paid subscribers can leave a comment in the article below, or by joining The Storm’s chat (also below). I’ll respond to some comments in the next episode, which is scheduled for Tuesday, Sept. 15. The Zoom transcript (click “transcript” above for the Substack transcript, which will zoom to any point in the video when you click on the associated text block; timestamps below DO NOT MATCH THE VIDEO) Stuart Winchester: Welcome to the Storm! I’m your host, Stuart Winchester. It is Monday, September 14th, 2026. Welcome to week two of the New Look Storm Skiing Podcast. If you missed last week, I am still doing the longer form pod. 00:15:53.000 --> 00:16:08.000 Stuart Winchester: But I’m cutting way back on the frequency of those. Instead, I am doing a shorter, news-focused pod that I release more often, and whenever possible, that I release the same day that I record it. 00:16:08.000 --> 00:16:11.000 Stuart Winchester: And the reason that I’m doing that is because… 00:16:11.000 --> 00:16:19.000 Stuart Winchester: the world has changed a lot since 2019, when I launched the Storm Skiing podcast, and when I launched it, there really wasn’t anything quite like… 00:16:19.000 --> 00:16:26.000 Stuart Winchester: what I was doing with the long-form audio stories of a ski area’s background. 00:16:27.000 --> 00:16:29.000 Stuart Winchester: I’ve done a couple hundred episodes at this point. 00:16:29.000 --> 00:16:31.000 Stuart Winchester: I feel like… 00:16:31.000 --> 00:16:47.000 Stuart Winchester: They’re evergreen. But what they don’t allow me to do is to really talk about what’s happening in a ski area right now. Uh Especially when there’s a lot of things happening and there’s a lot of pieces and parts shuffling around as there is right now in the Midwest. 00:16:47.000 --> 00:16:51.000 Stuart Winchester: with multi-mountain passes. So, what I’m doing… 00:16:51.000 --> 00:17:06.000 Stuart Winchester: is I’m trying out a little bit of a new format today. The format… we’re gonna experiment, we’re gonna play around with it. Sometimes there’ll be a guest off the top, sometimes I’ll have a take off the top, uh, sometimes I’ll have a guest on for a longer period, and that’s gonna be the case today. 00:17:06.000 --> 00:17:22.000 Stuart Winchester: Because right now there is so much happening in the Midwest with multi mountain passes and different mountains leaving and joining is completely changing the landscape there. So I want to bring in someone to talk to us at length about that. We’ll do a couple other fun things as well. 00:17:22.000 --> 00:17:24.000 Stuart Winchester: Let’s bring… 00:17:25.000 --> 00:17:27.000 Stuart Winchester: I’m in now. 00:17:32.000 --> 00:17:35.000 Stuart Winchester: And there he is. Can you hear me, Matthew? 00:17:32.000 --> 00:17:34.000 Matthew Zabransky: Hey, how’s it going, Stuart? 00:17:34.000 --> 00:17:36.000 Matthew Zabransky: I can. 00:17:35.000 --> 00:17:41.000 Stuart Winchester: Oh, I can’t hear you. All right. This is a flub, and this is why I haven’t heard her. 00:17:40.000 --> 00:17:41.000 Matthew Zabransky: Thank you. 00:17:42.000 --> 00:17:45.000 Stuart Winchester: Because I am not that smart. 00:17:46.000 --> 00:17:49.000 Stuart Winchester: Okay, you there? 00:17:48.000 --> 00:17:50.000 Matthew Zabransky: Can you hear me? 00:17:49.000 --> 00:17:52.000 Stuart Winchester: Oh, yes, I can. Look at that. 00:17:50.000 --> 00:17:54.000 Matthew Zabransky: Okay, perfect. 00:17:52.000 --> 00:18:07.000 Stuart Winchester: The technology known as headphones. Matthew, this is why you’re the production guy, and I generally stick to writing, because I’m an idiot. Alright, I want to introduce today the founder of MidwestSkiers.com. 00:18:07.000 --> 00:18:13.000 Stuart Winchester: He founded that in 2018, and in 2020, founded MWS Productions. 00:18:13.000 --> 00:18:29.000 Stuart Winchester: He is making all the Midwest content that I was dying for in the 1990s when I was a teenager living and skiing in Michigan, and the ski mags would completely ignore the region and maybe mention Boyne Mountain or Luton once per year, but he makes. 00:18:19.000 --> 00:18:20.000 Matthew Zabransky: Okay. 00:18:29.000 --> 00:18:38.000 Stuart Winchester: Top quality content. I link to it all the time in my stuff because no one else quite does it, as well as Matthew Zabranski. Matthew, welcome to The Storm. How you doing today? 00:18:37.000 --> 00:18:56.000 Matthew Zabransky: I am doing fantastic. Stuart, thank you, first of all, for the opportunity, but more importantly, for also repping the Midwest. I think it’s such an important, obviously, region, and you have ties to it, I obviously have ties to it as well, so it’s great that we’re getting recognition, not only, obviously, in our region now, but on the national, even international scale, so… 00:18:56.000 --> 00:19:00.000 Matthew Zabransky: Thank you so much for doing that. I appreciate it. I’m excited to be here. 00:18:59.000 --> 00:19:08.000 Stuart Winchester: Yeah, I love covering the Midwest, Matthew, and I still make it a point to go back and take a Midwest trip every year, because there’s… 00:19:00.000 --> 00:19:01.000 Matthew Zabransky: Thank you. 00:19:08.000 --> 00:19:27.000 Stuart Winchester: when I’m doing this podcast, there’s nothing quite like making relationships, like showing up at, you know, a 200 vertical foothill in the boondocks in Minnesota. People are like, okay, I’ll talk to this guy, even though, you know, I’ve never heard of him. So, but you are 100% Midwest-focused. I cover it where I can and whenever I can. 00:19:20.000 --> 00:19:21.000 Matthew Zabransky: Mm-hmm. 00:19:25.000 --> 00:19:26.000 Matthew Zabransky: Yeah. 00:19:27.000 --> 00:19:37.000 Stuart Winchester: There is so much happening in the Midwest that we could talk about. I really want to focus today on multi-mountain passes. So… 00:19:32.000 --> 00:19:34.000 Matthew Zabransky: Okay. 00:19:36.000 --> 00:19:37.000 Matthew Zabransky: Mm-hmm. 00:19:37.000 --> 00:19:53.000 Stuart Winchester: I’ll start by, I’ll just set this up and then I’ll, and then I’ll, I’ll let you comment on it. So if you go back about 10 years, there was nothing in the Midwest on multi mountain passes. You know, Vale had started to add a few things to Epic Pass and B Brighton and Afton Alps and Wilmot and such. 00:19:53.000 --> 00:20:03.000 Stuart Winchester: But the real inflection point came in 2019, when IndiePass came along. 2018, Icon added a couple things. So, right now, I’ll give you some stats. 00:20:03.000 --> 00:20:09.000 Stuart Winchester: Of the 124 ski areas that I have inventoried in the Midwest, that you might have a different count. 00:20:08.000 --> 00:20:10.000 Matthew Zabransky: Yeah. 00:20:09.000 --> 00:20:15.000 Stuart Winchester: They’re 117 of those are public. 89 of those are public with aerial lifts. 00:20:15.000 --> 00:20:28.000 Stuart Winchester: 58 of those, although there’s a couple that are just surface toes only, so 58 ski areas in the Midwest are now on a national multi-mountain ski pass. 10 on Epic. 00:20:28.000 --> 00:20:32.000 Stuart Winchester: 11 on Icon, 37 for Indy. So, so to start out with, Matthew. 00:20:32.000 --> 00:20:34.000 Stuart Winchester: How has… 00:20:34.000 --> 00:20:47.000 Stuart Winchester: the acceptance of the Midwest by multi-mountain national passes change the calculus for skiers as they’re planning out their winter in the Midwest, compared to what it was for most of history up until just a few years ago? 00:20:47.000 --> 00:21:02.000 Matthew Zabransky: Yeah, it’s changed dramatically. It’s even going back a little bit further. I think the first initial, if you look at the statistics and you obviously know all this offhand, but back when you go back to Vail’s acquisition of Wilmont, Afton. 00:21:02.000 --> 00:21:19.000 Matthew Zabransky: Brighton back in like 2012. I mean, that’s really what started to to kick off this like idea of like. Maybe the Midwest has some legs in it, as far as like developing skiers, and then, you know, bringing them into a pass portfolio that could bring them out west. So that was the very early set, you know, early iteration of this. And then, obviously, as we went along, there wasn’t. 00:21:19.000 --> 00:21:37.000 Matthew Zabransky: too many options outside of just the epic pass. But then, like you mentioned, Indie Pass came in, and I knew, and it’s you know, as we dive into this, I do want to do a little disclosure here, and like Indie Pass was my very 1st client from a production side of things. So Doug and I, because I I saw the opportunity like there was an absolute gold mine here. I’m like. 00:21:31.000 --> 00:21:32.000 Stuart Winchester: Mmhm. 00:21:32.000 --> 00:21:33.000 Stuart Winchester: Mmhm. 00:21:37.000 --> 00:21:55.000 Matthew Zabransky: Because I got to travel around, that’s why I started MidwestGears.com, because we were… we were traveling for my wife’s job all over the Midwest, and every time we’d go to a new city, Columbus, Akron, I’d be a pass holder at one of these little ski areas, and I’d be like, holy crap, there’s a lot of them here, no one’s talking about them. 00:21:55.000 --> 00:22:15.000 Matthew Zabransky: But you know, once you start to realize there was this many, then you’re then you’re starting to think, okay, like, why isn’t somebody coming in here and starting to develop a past that could actually stand on its own. And that’s what we’ve seen the last, I would say, 5 to 10 years. Specifically, we’ve seen more people traveling around in the Midwest. You’ll catch people at any stereo across the Midwest. That’s not their home hill, and that’s not how it used. 00:22:15.000 --> 00:22:27.000 Matthew Zabransky: you go ski or one little local place for the most part, you might do your weekend trip up to Boyne or something, but you would never catch people going to some of these really small places, you know, outside of just the local crew there, so it’s been really cool to watch people. 00:22:27.000 --> 00:22:45.000 Matthew Zabransky: travel and discover, more importantly, the different areas, uh, throughout the Midwest. I think a lot of that had to do with IndyPass’s push in the Midwest, because, as we’re gonna talk about here in a second, it was an absolute auto-buy. Like, there was not even a question about it. From the day it started, when it was, you know, what was that, $99? 00:22:45.000 --> 00:23:02.000 Matthew Zabransky: up until even just the last year. It was like you almost just were gonna if you lived in the Midwest, and you like skiing, and you don’t. You know you like traveling around checking out new things. There was no reason not to buy it. You’d be silly, basically not to, just because how much saturation there was in the Midwest, which I think is going to lead us into our next conversation a little bit here. 00:23:02.000 --> 00:23:04.000 Stuart Winchester: Yeah, so, so the… 00:23:04.000 --> 00:23:15.000 Stuart Winchester: Just being on the ground, before we get to the shuffling around, you know, I’d imagine you’re pretty connected with a lot of pretty hardcore skiers, pretty frequent skiers. 00:23:11.000 --> 00:23:13.000 Matthew Zabransky: Yeah. 00:23:15.000 --> 00:23:17.000 Stuart Winchester: How much has… 00:23:17.000 --> 00:23:24.000 Stuart Winchester: that a… a season… a multi-mountain pass becomes something that the person in the Midwest just… 00:23:24.000 --> 00:23:40.000 Stuart Winchester: considers or, or automatically buys it as compared to several years ago where you might buy your local season pass, but, but you, you probably, like you said, you wouldn’t go around. And when I lived in the Midwest, actually, I always appreciated how close the areas were, so I would just kind of bounce around a lot for. 00:23:34.000 --> 00:23:36.000 Matthew Zabransky: Mm-hmm. 00:23:40.000 --> 00:23:46.000 Stuart Winchester: for deal days or whatever, back when those were still a thing. But how automatic has it become? 00:23:41.000 --> 00:23:42.000 Matthew Zabransky: Yeah. 00:23:46.000 --> 00:24:01.000 Matthew Zabransky: Very. I mean, there’s people that have been buying the IndyPass specifically now. Up until this season, it was like they were probably on their fifth year of doing it and just continue to. And to be honest, there wasn’t any reason not to because the pricing has stayed relatively affordable. 00:24:01.000 --> 00:24:17.000 Matthew Zabransky: they keep they kept strengthening their pro, their their product. I mean, like they just kept adding more ski areas in the Midwest. And so in in a lot of times the pass would pay itself off within a couple of visits based off of some of the redemption rates that you’d be getting at some somewhere like Lutz and Snow River. 00:24:17.000 --> 00:24:34.000 Matthew Zabransky: um, those are all, like, you know, $100 tickets, so you buy… you go there once or twice, you get two days of each of them, and basically that’s already done. So if you already had one of those trips kind of on there, and if you lived in Chicago, you’re going to Granite Peak usually once or twice a year. If you lived in Minnesota, you’re going to Lutz. 00:24:34.000 --> 00:24:52.000 Matthew Zabransky: So it almost became this thing. And then you shuffle in like nubs, knob, and all that. So it it very much was like, yeah, we’re gonna buy it every single year, you know, we might not. And some people are hardcore and going to all the places they could. And some people were just, you know. Hey? I’m gonna buy it because I’m gonna go for a weekend, so I might as well. And then I have this option of going some other places. 00:24:46.000 --> 00:24:47.000 Stuart Winchester: Mmhm. 00:24:52.000 --> 00:25:03.000 Matthew Zabransky: it was huge. I mean, I don’t… of course, I don’t have any of the IndyPass numbers, but I would… I would venture to say that the Midwest had to be a very big portion of their portfolio from the sales and redemption standpoint. 00:25:03.000 --> 00:25:20.000 Stuart Winchester: So the traditional numbers that Indy has given me, and it’s been a couple years since Doug Fish provided these round numbers to me, but he told me about half of their sales came in New England, and 25% came in the Midwest, which is a really big number for a national pass. So you figured the other quarter were coming from somewhere else. 00:25:04.000 --> 00:25:05.000 Matthew Zabransky: Thank you. 00:25:15.000 --> 00:25:16.000 Matthew Zabransky: Cool. 00:25:17.000 --> 00:25:19.000 Matthew Zabransky: For… yeah. 00:25:20.000 --> 00:25:25.000 Stuart Winchester: I always give Doug Fish credit, because he’s a Pacific Northwest guy, and… 00:25:25.000 --> 00:25:40.000 Stuart Winchester: Western skiers just love to hate on the Midwest. Everyone loves to hate on the Midwest. It’s like the national pastime. It’s like the safe thing to make fun of, and you know, I hope you take that personally, because I always do, and I really appreciated that Doug. 00:25:30.000 --> 00:25:32.000 Matthew Zabransky: Is… 00:25:37.000 --> 00:25:38.000 Matthew Zabransky: I do. 00:25:40.000 --> 00:25:55.000 Stuart Winchester: Included the Midwest from the start. That first year in 2019, he had Little Switz, he had Crystal, he had Cabre Fay, he had a bunch of other ski areas. Really got big in 2020 when he added Lutzen and Granite Peak. Now, I always say his insight was… 00:25:44.000 --> 00:25:45.000 Matthew Zabransky: Yeah. 00:25:55.000 --> 00:26:02.000 Stuart Winchester: that Doug’s great insight with the IndyPass was realizing there was value in the mountains that are not. 00:26:02.000 --> 00:26:08.000 Stuart Winchester: super destinations when you put them all together for skiers across the country. He also… 00:26:05.000 --> 00:26:07.000 Matthew Zabransky: Mm-hmm. 00:26:08.000 --> 00:26:23.000 Stuart Winchester: the fact that he extended that to the Midwest is huge, because, yes, I… so, before Icon started adding in into the Midwest, which we’ll talk about in a minute, I would always say, Indy Pass is the pass to go to in the Midwest, no one else has anything, and everyone would always say, oh, wait, Epic has 10 mountains. I was like. 00:26:14.000 --> 00:26:16.000 Matthew Zabransky: Thank you. 00:26:17.000 --> 00:26:18.000 Matthew Zabransky: Okay. 00:26:23.000 --> 00:26:34.000 Stuart Winchester: But the Midwest is gigantic. Unless you live in Ohio, they’re very spread out, and they’re near cities, and there are actually mountains in the Midwest that are more… 00:26:34.000 --> 00:26:44.000 Stuart Winchester: of, of what you would consider, like, regional destinations. And that, that’s your Boyne, Nubs, Lutsen, uh, even, even Spira with the bigger, uh, all the stuff over in the UP. 00:26:37.000 --> 00:26:38.000 Matthew Zabransky: Yeah. 00:26:44.000 --> 00:26:57.000 Stuart Winchester: So Indy really collected them all together, and it was almost too good to be true, because they had over 40 ski areas in the Midwest. Talk about Indy at its peak. 00:26:57.000 --> 00:27:02.000 Stuart Winchester: And how great of a pass that was for the Midwest here. 00:26:58.000 --> 00:26:59.000 Matthew Zabransky: Okay. 00:27:00.000 --> 00:27:17.000 Matthew Zabransky: It was too great. We’re going to get into this, I’m sure, but I think that’s part of the reason for the course correction. There was a moment two or three years ago when I literally turned to Nick, my associate who edits for me and stuff, and I said, with some of the additions they announced at that time, I said. 00:27:05.000 --> 00:27:06.000 Stuart Winchester: Mmhm. 00:27:17.000 --> 00:27:33.000 Matthew Zabransky: this is too saturated like it’s got to fix itself at some point like it’s just. It’s too good of a value, and like for skiers, we like anybody that was buying the passes like this is amazing. It makes it like again. It’s an auto buy like, why wouldn’t you do this? But I knew that this time was going to come at some point. But I’m you know, at least we got to. 00:27:18.000 --> 00:27:20.000 Stuart Winchester: Yeah. 00:27:33.000 --> 00:27:50.000 Matthew Zabransky: to see what it like. The peak of that was for a little while. We got a couple of years. We’ve got to be happy for that, to be honest. We’re starting to see some of those what I’ll call course corrections now and and we’re going to continue to see this. I mean, you know that every every year it’s going to be something new. Someone’s changing. It’s just kind of the nature of the business. But. 00:27:50.000 --> 00:28:02.000 Matthew Zabransky: it was not a shock to me when, um, when these changes were announced, uh, both in the spring and then more recently in the last few weeks and stuff, so it wasn’t… I kind of saw it coming, it was just a matter of, like, when was it gonna happen. 00:28:02.000 --> 00:28:14.000 Stuart Winchester: So everyone left… they seemed as though… Epic and Icon seemed like they were just leaving the Midwest to Indy, to take. And I’ve always thought that Icon’s original sin was when they killed the Max Pass. 00:28:06.000 --> 00:28:08.000 Matthew Zabransky: Yeah. 00:28:14.000 --> 00:28:15.000 Matthew Zabransky: Mm-hmm. 00:28:14.000 --> 00:28:30.000 Stuart Winchester: And launched the Icon Pass. They brought all the Powder Mountains, all the Boyne Mountains, uh, all the Intra West Mountains, but they didn’t bring Granite Peak and Lutzen, which are the biggest ski areas or most modern, however, whatever metric you want to use in Minnesota and, and Wisconsin. 00:28:26.000 --> 00:28:27.000 Matthew Zabransky: Yep. 00:28:30.000 --> 00:28:31.000 Stuart Winchester: So… 00:28:31.000 --> 00:

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast supports bears, quadrangles, and liberal interpretations of The Iliad . Sign up for the free or paid newsletter to get updates on none of these things. Thank you for supporting independent ski journalism. Welcome to the Storm’s short-form, news-focused podcast. Don’t worry, I will still write newsletters too. Paid subscribers can leave a comment in the article below, or by joining The Storm’s chat (also below). I’ll respond to some comments in the next episode, which is scheduled for Monday, Sept. 14. The Zoom transcript (click “transcript” above for the Substack transcript, which will zoom to any point in the video when you click on the associated text block; timestamps below DO NOT MATCH THE VIDEO) Stuart Winchester: Welcome to The Storm! I’m your host, Stuart Winchester. It is September 10th, 2026, and we have some big, big news in Ski World today. 00:06:07.000 --> 00:06:14.000 Stuart Winchester: So one of the things that I focused on since launching the storm in 2019 is the rapid. 00:06:14.000 --> 00:06:30.000 Stuart Winchester: Exponential growth in US based multi mountain ski passes and one of the biggest icon pass today released five new partners for the 2026 to 27 season. So I’m gonna break those down for you. 00:06:30.000 --> 00:06:46.000 Stuart Winchester: I am going to talk a little bit more about IndyPass and some of their partner shuffles. Then we are going to be joined by IndyPass owner, Eric Mogenson, who will give us a breakdown on all things happening with Indy, Black Mountain, and Entebeni Systems. 00:06:46.000 --> 00:07:01.000 Stuart Winchester: reader reaction, but I want to jump right into Icon Pass. Icon hits us today with, as I said, 5 new ski areas, 3 are full partners, and those… which means 7 days on the Icon Pass. 00:07:01.000 --> 00:07:06.000 Stuart Winchester: 5 days on the Icon Base Pass. All 3 are in Asia. 00:07:06.000 --> 00:07:13.000 Stuart Winchester: The first is Matarau, Japan. That will be ICON’s 10th ski resort in Japan. 00:07:13.000 --> 00:07:28.000 Stuart Winchester: And then, Icon, last year, was the first U.S.-based pass to add a ski area in China, and Icon adds two more today, though they’re nowhere near the ski area that it added last year. They are sort of close. 00:07:28.000 --> 00:07:47.000 Stuart Winchester: to each other. So, we’re gonna break those down first, and then ICON added two mountains to its two-day tier, uh, which it calls Bonus Mountains, which ICON insists are not ICON Pass members, uh, but I insist they are, because you can access them with your ICON Pass. Therefore, they are on. 00:07:47.000 --> 00:07:53.000 Stuart Winchester: the Icon Pass, no matter what Altera tells us. So, let’s start with Montreal, Japan, and if you’re on… 00:07:53.000 --> 00:07:55.000 Stuart Winchester: The… 00:07:56.000 --> 00:08:04.000 Stuart Winchester: If you’re on the video, I’m going to share my screen here because we’re going to do a little visual helping. 00:08:04.000 --> 00:08:10.000 Stuart Winchester: All right, so let’s take this away. All right, so the first one I want to break down. 00:08:10.000 --> 00:08:12.000 Stuart Winchester: is… 00:08:12.000 --> 00:08:26.000 Stuart Winchester: Madarao, Japan, and I’ve actually written about this ski area before, because they were an IndiePass member, and this is the article that I wrote back in 2023, when Madarao joined IndiePass, and Indie’s been a big leader in. 00:08:26.000 --> 00:08:27.000 Stuart Winchester: Bye. 00:08:28.000 --> 00:08:40.000 Stuart Winchester: building out a network in Japan. So, the ski resorts in Japan are interesting. I’ve not skied there, but I’ve been there in the summer and ridden the lifts around. 00:08:40.000 --> 00:08:45.000 Stuart Winchester: And the skiing is very much like a mix of… 00:08:46.000 --> 00:08:58.000 Stuart Winchester: The Cottonwoods and New England. And what I mean by that is, if you’re looking at the screen here, you can see the stats on Mattarau. 512 inches of average annual snowfall. 00:08:58.000 --> 00:09:12.000 Stuart Winchester: Uh, but not a lot of vert, 1,444 feet, and as you can see from the trail map, if you’re looking here, it’s not a big trail footprint. So, what I mean when I say Cottonwoods is the snowfall, and when I say… 00:09:12.000 --> 00:09:29.000 Stuart Winchester: New England, I mean the size. They tend to be not huge vert, sort of compact. If they do have a lot of vert, like the Jacuba Valley ski resorts that are on Vail, they tend to go, uh, kind of straight up and be side by side. You don’t have a lot of the mega resorts as you would have. 00:09:29.000 --> 00:09:40.000 Stuart Winchester: in North America, or especially in Europe. So, it’s good that the passes are all building density in Japan, because the ski areas are not… 00:09:40.000 --> 00:09:43.000 Stuart Winchester: This is not a place that you would go to necessarily. 00:09:43.000 --> 00:10:02.000 Stuart Winchester: like Vail Mountain and spend a week, or like Whistler. Another thing I want to note about Japan, you can see here that Matarau has some glade zones marked. In a lot of cases, skiing off-piste or in the trees, even though that’s what Japan is known for, in a lot of cases, my understanding is that that’s pretty heavily policed and forbidden. 00:10:02.000 --> 00:10:17.000 Stuart Winchester: So you really have to research your ski areas before you go over to figure out which ones will actually allow you to go off-piste, which is what most of us want to do, right? If we’re coming from North America, we’re going there for the big powder. Japan is a little more of an on-piste tradition. 00:10:17.000 --> 00:10:21.000 Stuart Winchester: a little bit more like Europe. So, I… 00:10:21.000 --> 00:10:33.000 Stuart Winchester: there’s… to underscore the scope of what we have now available to us in Japan as U.S.-based pass holders. So, with the addition of Madarao today. 00:10:33.000 --> 00:10:49.000 Stuart Winchester: Now, 53 ski areas in Japan have joined the Epic, Icon, Indy, or Mountain Collective Passes. And I actually, I want to show you something I have that’s really cool. So, I have this gigantic chart, and it’s kind of… 00:10:49.000 --> 00:11:04.000 Stuart Winchester: it’s kind of hard to navigate, but I’m slowly making it a little bit better. And so this is a chart that’s variously called a bunch of different things. Right now, I’m calling it the Encyclopedia Britannica. Sometimes it’s been the Passmaster. 00:11:04.000 --> 00:11:17.000 Stuart Winchester: 5,000. And I just kind of change the name whenever I want, but the link is always the same. And what I’ve… it’s a really slow Google Sheet, and I definitely need a better platform, but if you go, there’s all these tabs. 00:11:17.000 --> 00:11:33.000 Stuart Winchester: Down at the bottom, and again, this is where it’s nice to have the video, so you can see what I’m showing you here. So I have all these tabs. One of the tabs is all MegaPass ski areas. So I have this divided up, and these are just little tables that pivot off the main table, so all the stats are up to date. 00:11:33.000 --> 00:11:35.000 Stuart Winchester: So first, I have this… 00:11:35.000 --> 00:11:42.000 Stuart Winchester: chart here with all ski areas that are on any U.S.-based pass, and we’ll talk about that a little bit more in a second. 00:11:42.000 --> 00:11:43.000 Stuart Winchester: Then I have… 00:11:43.000 --> 00:11:59.000 Stuart Winchester: all U.S. ski areas, then I have New England, I have Japan, so let’s pause on Japan for a moment. 53 ski areas, 11 Epic, 10 Icon, 32 Indy, 1 Mountain Collective. You can see all the stats down here. Again, not big. 00:12:00.000 --> 00:12:16.000 Stuart Winchester: skiable acre footprints, and really, Japan measures things differently than North America. They tend to measure snowpack rather than inches of snowfall. I did find a good average annual snowfall chart on Powderhounds, which is a great site that I’ll talk more about. 00:12:16.000 --> 00:12:25.000 Stuart Winchester: for international research of ski areas. But if you see these acreage totals, you know, there’s really nothing much. 00:12:25.000 --> 00:12:35.000 Stuart Winchester: Here’s Niseko United, it’s 2,100 acres, that’s 5 ski resorts combined, right next to each other. Rasutsu is, uh, is 2,000, but most of these are under… 00:12:35.000 --> 00:12:51.000 Stuart Winchester: 500, so you really prepare yourself for that. It’s one place, I think, Japan, where it would help to get a guide. Everything tends to be pretty cheap once you get on the ground. In Japan, the lift tickets are nothing, so having someone to show you around and show you where you can go under the ropes. 00:12:51.000 --> 00:12:57.000 Stuart Winchester: is a good idea. And, you know, I want to jump ahead to reader feedback for a moment. So I had… 00:12:58.000 --> 00:13:14.000 Stuart Winchester: this comment from Allison Wood. She said, I look forward to seeing your future efforts. I know there’s enough in American skiing to discuss, but I’d be curious if you would further discuss European Alps destinations. It seems to be growing in popularity due to competitive pricing versus U.S. 00:13:14.000 --> 00:13:28.000 Stuart Winchester: Western resorts. A week at Big Sky appears to be the same price as a week in Switzerland for those in the Eastern USA. The answer is absolutely yes. I do want to cover the Alps and Japan and all of these international destinations more. 00:13:28.000 --> 00:13:43.000 Stuart Winchester: I don’t have the personal on-the-ground knowledge base with those ski areas that I do with the U.S. ski areas, so I’m reaching out to my contacts in Europe, in Japan, who know these resorts intimately, and I’m gonna bring them on the show to try to help us make sense, because if you go back. 00:13:43.000 --> 00:13:47.000 Stuart Winchester: We go back to the Encyclopedia Britannica for a second. 00:13:47.000 --> 00:13:49.000 Stuart Winchester: You’ll see that… 00:13:49.000 --> 00:13:52.000 Stuart Winchester: The, uh… if I can get to it… 00:13:52.000 --> 00:14:05.000 Stuart Winchester: Okay, so Japan has 53 ski areas, Canada has another 55, and most of us can sort those out easily enough. The harder ones is Europe. I mean, Europe, there’s 61 ski areas, and sometimes a ski area in Europe is, you know. 00:14:05.000 --> 00:14:21.000 Stuart Winchester: 10 ski areas that put together are as big as all the ski areas in Utah. So I really need some help to break those down. But that’s the great thing about this new format is that it will allow me to bring in more voices more frequently since there’s more frequent shows. All right. 00:14:21.000 --> 00:14:38.000 Stuart Winchester: Icon also today added two ski areas in China, and the best site to just get the basics of any ski area in the world is, I’ve found, skiresort.com. They have a profile of every ski area. They tend to keep it up to date. I don’t know who runs the site. 00:14:38.000 --> 00:14:54.000 Stuart Winchester: I would like to connect with them at some point, but this is really my go-to for… so this is Betahu, I’m sure I’m pronouncing that wrong, one of the ski areas that ICON added in China, and they have all the basic information, the elevation, which is not high, it’s all in meters, obviously, out of the U.S. 00:14:54.000 --> 00:15:01.000 Stuart Winchester: Uh, what I really like is the lift breakdown and the trail map. So, the… the thing about the ski areas in China. 00:15:01.000 --> 00:15:07.000 Stuart Winchester: is just like everything else in China, they’re pretty much brand new. I read this really interesting. 00:15:07.000 --> 00:15:13.000 Stuart Winchester: quote in the New York Times several years ago, and the notion. 00:15:13.000 --> 00:15:16.000 Stuart Winchester: was basically China… 00:15:16.000 --> 00:15:31.000 Stuart Winchester: stayed pretty much in the 19th century for all of the 20th century, and then it got to the 21st century in about 10 years. So, you go there, there’s high-speed rail, everything’s new, there’s new buildings. The ski resorts are new as well, and you can see this in their lift fleet. I mean, this… 00:15:31.000 --> 00:15:34.000 Stuart Winchester: You know, they have a… 00:15:34.000 --> 00:15:49.000 Stuart Winchester: six eight-person gondolas, one six-person gondola, two high-speed six-packs, three high-speed detached quads, no fixed grip lifts at all, and then you take a look at the trail map, and again, this is probably a little more like Japan, where these are. 00:15:49.000 --> 00:16:03.000 Stuart Winchester: a little bit smaller ski areas than what we’re used to, uh, as far as the Mountain West. But, you know, it’s all very well interconnected. I would expect a lot of on-piste skiing. You know, with a… with a immature ski culture, I wouldn’t expect a lot of glade stuff. 00:16:03.000 --> 00:16:19.000 Stuart Winchester: to be developed. Kind of talking on my rear end, to be honest, because I’ve not skied in China or even been to China, but these are my perceptions with the different ski cultures I know. I’ll try to track down someone who knows better. Here’s the other Icon Pass resort, Lake Songwa Resort, and I want to make… 00:16:19.000 --> 00:16:30.000 Stuart Winchester: that we kind of have an Aspen-Crested Butte situation going on here, so Sangua and, uh, this other one they added, uh… 00:16:30.000 --> 00:16:49.000 Stuart Winchester: Beidou, there, as you can see on this Google map, they’re 24 miles apart in the mountains, but it looks like about a 4-hour drive, so there’s not really a road through the city. It’s the same kind of deal with Aspen and Crested Butte, where they’re pretty close, but it’s a long drive around. These are seasonal roads that Google doesn’t know about, so it’s about a 5-hour drive in the winter. 00:16:49.000 --> 00:16:51.000 Stuart Winchester: I believe. So… 00:16:51.000 --> 00:17:03.000 Stuart Winchester: We have these, and then, if you want to go to China to experience skiing, Icon gives you the means to do so. And then, Icon added… 00:17:04.000 --> 00:17:16.000 Stuart Winchester: to their 2-day tier, which again, they’re saying is not IconPass. I want to talk about the 2-day tier a little bit in general. So, Icon started this 2-day tier. 00:17:16.000 --> 00:17:23.000 Stuart Winchester: last year, and I think what they were trying to do is mirror what Vail did. 00:17:23.000 --> 00:17:37.000 Stuart Winchester: with its feeder ski areas and all these little places that are bought all over the country, Mount Brighton in Michigan, and Afton Alps in Minnesota, and Wilmot in Wisconsin, and all the resorts around Cleveland. 00:17:37.000 --> 00:17:49.000 Stuart Winchester: and you know, Alpine Valley. And then there’s the names escaping me. Boston Mills, Brandywine. I just skied there and did a write-up on it. So so yeah, they’re. 00:17:49.000 --> 00:18:04.000 Stuart Winchester: Vail bought up all these ski areas. Well, Icon, instead of doing that and buying, has added two days only on the full Icon Pass, which is currently $1,449, uh, two days to 11 different ski areas around the country. 00:18:04.000 --> 00:18:19.000 Stuart Winchester: It’s been growing that list. Silver Star was one last year, and it converted to full Icon, but right now, if you’re on the screen share, you can see the 11 that are currently on the Icon Pass two-day roster. So we… 00:18:19.000 --> 00:18:23.000 Stuart Winchester: had today the additions of Cabarfay Peaks in Michigan. 00:18:23.000 --> 00:18:25.000 Stuart Winchester: And… 00:18:26.000 --> 00:18:37.000 Stuart Winchester: In Wyoming, we had snowy range. So Caberfay Peaks is actually, it’s an awesome ski area. It’s one of my favorite ski areas. I grew up about an hour and 15 minutes from there. 00:18:37.000 --> 00:18:40.000 Stuart Winchester: And with Cabot Fay, it… 00:18:40.000 --> 00:18:55.000 Stuart Winchester: It’s a really fun place. They’re constantly building it up. And what the cabaret you see today is very different than the cabaret that existed a long time ago. It basically used to be a two mile sprawl of rope tows and starting in the 1980s. 00:18:55.000 --> 00:18:59.000 Stuart Winchester: Uh, the families that owned it dug up from the bottom here. 00:18:59.000 --> 00:19:07.000 Stuart Winchester: and added to the top. So they went from a couple hundred vertical feet to 485 vertical feet, and it continued to… 00:19:07.000 --> 00:19:18.000 Stuart Winchester: expand, and they have another expansion in the works over here on Green Mountain. Should be coming 27-28, and I’m gonna have Tim and Pete Meyer from Calgary Fay Peaks on next week to talk about that a little more. 00:19:18.000 --> 00:19:20.000 Stuart Winchester: And then we have… 00:19:20.000 --> 00:19:36.000 Stuart Winchester: Uh, it’s Snowy Range, Wyoming, and Snowy Range might seem like a little bit of a weird one, but Snowy Range is actually very logical. They’ve had a long-standing relationship that’s in southern Wyoming. It’s not, it’s only a couple hours from Steamboat. They have a long-standing relationship with Steamboat. 00:19:36.000 --> 00:19:51.000 Stuart Winchester: to a snowy range season pass for 300 and some dollars this year. They changed that to half off in a 3 day icon session pass, which is good at Steamboat and several other mountains. And now, if you have a full icon, you would also get 2 more days at Steamboat. 00:19:51.000 --> 00:19:54.000 Stuart Winchester: Uh, or you would actually get 2 days at Snowy Range. 00:19:54.000 --> 00:20:00.000 Stuart Winchester: if you were, you know, wanted to escape the crowds at Steamboat one day. So, we are gonna… 00:20:00.000 --> 00:20:03.000 Stuart Winchester: Come back to… 00:20:04.000 --> 00:20:16.000 Stuart Winchester: IndyPass in a moment. Actually, I have one more IndyPass update, then I’m gonna go to Eric. So, Mission Ridge and Blacktail in Washington have left IndyPass. 00:20:16.000 --> 00:20:17.000 Stuart Winchester: And… 00:20:18.000 --> 00:20:19.000 Stuart Winchester: Hold on, let me just… 00:20:23.000 --> 00:20:25.000 Stuart Winchester: So Eric, I’ll be right there. 00:20:26.000 --> 00:20:30.000 Stuart Winchester: We’ll get to Mission to Blacktail in a minute. I’m gonna bring Eric in. 00:20:30.000 --> 00:20:34.000 Stuart Winchester: And I’m going to stop my screen share. 00:20:40.000 --> 00:20:42.000 Stuart Winchester: Uh, Eric? 00:20:42.000 --> 00:20:43.000 Erik Mogensen: What’s up, man? 00:20:43.000 --> 00:20:57.000 Stuart Winchester: How you doing? Joining us now is the director of IndyPass, the founder of Entebeni Systems, and the operator of Black Mountain, New Hampshire. Eric Mogenson is a good friend of the storm, and he joins us now from where? Where are you, Eric? 00:20:57.000 --> 00:21:05.000 Erik Mogensen: I am, uh, calling in from Black Mountain, New Hampshire, our new home, and I’m up at the Alpine Cabin. 00:21:04.000 --> 00:21:18.000 Stuart Winchester: I want to start on the Alpine Cabin. Tell us what the Alpine Cabin was when you arrived at Black Mountain and what it has turned into from what it is and from a revenue standpoint. 00:21:06.000 --> 00:21:07.000 Erik Mogensen: Yep. 00:21:19.000 --> 00:21:34.000 Erik Mogensen: Yeah, so, um, I spend the first 8 to 10 hours of my day working with our engineering and product teams, and most of it is in front of a computer or on the phone, but by 5 PM I try to be up here on the mountain every. 00:21:34.000 --> 00:21:52.000 Erik Mogensen: night. Like, doing trail work, on the excavator, snowmaking, lift work. But I keep a desk up here in the summer. Couldn’t keep a desk here in the winter. Um, but I do keep a desk up here so that when I have an idea, or I want to come write something down, or I want to watch a YouTube video, or do something, this place is super productive for me. 00:21:53.000 --> 00:22:11.000 Erik Mogensen: It’s like my peaceful, happy place in the summer. In the winter, there is nothing peaceful about this place. This,

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication. The only way to interact with the podcast is to upgrade to The Storm’s paid tier. Thank you for supporting independent ski journalism. Welcome to the Storm’s short-form, news-focused podcast. Don’t worry, I will still write newsletters too (I blasted out this post on Smuggs joining Indy Pass this morning). To browse a podcast transcript, click the “transcript” button above - click on any block of text and the audio will jump to that point in the conversation. Paid subscribers can leave a comment in the article below, or by joining The Storm’s chat (also below). I’ll respond to some comments in the next episode. The Zoom transcript (click “transcript” above for the Substack transcript, which will zoom to any point in the video when you click on the associated text block; timestamps below DO NOT MATCH THE VIDEO) 00:01:40.000 --> 00:01:56.000 Stuart Winchester: Welcome to Storm. It is September 9th, 2026 on a Wednesday. I’ve got a really great show for you today. We are going to visit with Loon President and General Manager, Brian Norton, who has been on the show before. 00:01:56.000 --> 00:02:04.000 Stuart Winchester: But we are going to have him on to talk about the Blackridge expansion that Loon announced last week. 00:02:04.000 --> 00:02:10.000 Stuart Winchester: There’s actually a couple of expansion items in the news today, and I want to hit on those first before we get to Brian. 00:02:10.000 --> 00:02:27.000 Stuart Winchester: Altera today confirmed a couple of things we already knew in their 2026 to 27 capital plan. So unlike Vale who tends to release all their lifts and expansions and projects at once, Vale or Altera lets them leak out. 00:02:27.000 --> 00:02:41.000 Stuart Winchester: and then officially announces them sometime later. So, we had a pretty good idea these were coming. The first one will be up at Mont Tremblant, and Tremblant is… 00:02:41.000 --> 00:02:44.000 Stuart Winchester: If you’ve been there, it’s… 00:02:44.000 --> 00:02:55.000 Stuart Winchester: an IntraWest legacy, so it has one of these really nice walkable villages of the sort that I’m always pushing for, and it has really great ski terrain. Busiest… it’s… 00:02:55.000 --> 00:03:11.000 Stuart Winchester: Traditionally, Intrawest had the three busiest ski areas in Canada. They had, uh, Whistler was number one, obviously. Number two was Tremblant, and number three, surprisingly, was Blue Mountain, Ontario, which we covered on in the podcast. 00:03:11.000 --> 00:03:14.000 Stuart Winchester: Pretty recently, but I want to… 00:03:14.000 --> 00:03:19.000 Stuart Winchester: show you something here. So this is why it’s cool to watch, because you can see… 00:03:19.000 --> 00:03:31.000 Stuart Winchester: some of these things on YouTube or Substack if you’re watching the podcast. So this is Tremblant’s timber expansion that they’re gonna open for 27 to 28. They’re gonna have a new. 00:03:31.000 --> 00:03:46.000 Stuart Winchester: quad, high-speed quad, coming up to the Timber Summit with 8 new trails over here. Uh, and that’s gonna be… let’s see, they gave an acreage on that, 62 acres. So sometimes it’s hard when you see these things, especially if you don’t know the mountain. 00:03:46.000 --> 00:03:57.000 Stuart Winchester: to really know where it fits in. So this one, here’s from the top, you can see the new trails, the timber trails, coming down here off of the new. 00:03:57.000 --> 00:04:09.000 Stuart Winchester: high-speed quad that’ll come out of the Versant-Soleil base. And then here is the existing, if you’re watching, here’s the existing lift that comes up to the current Tremblant Summit. 00:04:09.000 --> 00:04:19.000 Stuart Winchester: And you can see that right here. So the new expansion will go bloop right up here, and we’ll have some new trails over there. And then Altera also announced. 00:04:19.000 --> 00:04:32.000 Stuart Winchester: or not really announced, but reconfirmed, that will be when the Club Med is open, so that all-inclusive experience will be there for Tremblant. So, nice expansion coming for Tremblant. Obviously. 00:04:32.000 --> 00:04:42.000 Stuart Winchester: Altera has had a big expansion ongoing at Deer Valley for years and years. So, Deer Valley, prior to 2023. 00:04:42.000 --> 00:04:46.000 Stuart Winchester: was really just Bald Mountain. 00:04:46.000 --> 00:05:02.000 Stuart Winchester: On over to Empire. Uh, and then here’s the front side, and then this little baldy peak was here. But over the past three seasons, they’ve really blown the place out and added thousands and thousands of acres. Uh, Deer Valley, believe it or not, is now the… 00:05:02.000 --> 00:05:18.000 Stuart Winchester: Sixth largest ski area in America. And, and they’re opening 200 more acres this year. Hale Peak will be another high speed quad. I don’t have a vertical on Hale Peak, but they did confirm today that Hale Peak will be. 00:05:18.000 --> 00:05:29.000 Stuart Winchester: 200 acres, so Deer Valley will now total 4,500 acres. It looks, it sounds pretty big, but right next door to it is Park City, which. 00:05:29.000 --> 00:05:45.000 Stuart Winchester: Combined with the historic canyons is 7,300 acres. That’s the largest ski area in the United States. So those are a couple of the expansions that we have coming up. We’ll talk about another one in a little bit with Loon. And the reason I wanna talk about expansions with you. 00:05:45.000 --> 00:05:47.000 Stuart Winchester: Is… is I… I… 00:05:48.000 --> 00:05:58.000 Stuart Winchester: I write about this over and over again, but sometimes when I write an article, it fritters off into the wilderness, and I’m not able to… 00:05:58.000 --> 00:06:12.000 Stuart Winchester: it doesn’t have the staying power necessarily where people might find it sometime later. So I want to revisit some of these points that I made in the past about expansions and how important they are. So I wrote this article a few years ago. 00:06:12.000 --> 00:06:14.000 Stuart Winchester: And… 00:06:16.000 --> 00:06:18.000 Stuart Winchester: I was looking at… 00:06:18.000 --> 00:06:34.000 Stuart Winchester: So everyone always gets hung up on this active ski ski areas number. And the NSA has tracked this for years and years. And here’s the numbers you can see on the screen if you’re watching in 1991 to 92 season. 00:06:34.000 --> 00:06:46.000 Stuart Winchester: The United States had 546 active ski areas. As of 2023 to 24, it had 486. The number for this season was right around 490. 00:06:46.000 --> 00:06:49.000 Stuart Winchester: So, oftentimes. 00:06:49.000 --> 00:07:04.000 Stuart Winchester: We will see articles usually written by folks who are not ski media, just general media, and they’ll write about this number and they’ll find this statistic and they’ll point to the declining number of ski areas and say, skiing is dying. Climate change is killing skiing. 00:07:05.000 --> 00:07:17.000 Stuart Winchester: But there’s actually a much more nuanced story behind that. So I pulled this number last year when I was reading an article from The Motley Fool, which is an investor site that I use. I love The Motley Fool. 00:07:18.000 --> 00:07:24.000 Stuart Winchester: But it was talking about MTN stock, which a lot of you know is the stock ticker for Vail Resorts. 00:07:24.000 --> 00:07:33.000 Stuart Winchester: And the Motley Fool article pointed out that in 1992, and this was their bear case, their case against buying MTN stock. 00:07:33.000 --> 00:07:44.000 Stuart Winchester: During… I’m gonna quote here, the Motley Fool. During the 1992 ski season, there were 546 ski areas operating in the United States, compared to 486 today. This article’s from 2025. 00:07:44.000 --> 00:07:57.000 Stuart Winchester: Supply, says the fool, is flat to shrinking. On the demand side, 3 of the top 5 busiest ski seasons on record occurred each of the last 3 years. Demand is up. So, they were trying to make the point that. 00:07:58.000 --> 00:08:07.000 Stuart Winchester: Vail Resorts had a very valuable commodity, because the number of ski areas was shrinking. I said, wait a second, this doesn’t really make sense, because… 00:08:08.000 --> 00:08:11.000 Stuart Winchester: How are you having so many fewer? 00:08:11.000 --> 00:08:25.000 Stuart Winchester: ski areas, and so many more skier visits? Well, the answer is pretty simple. We have a lot more ski terrain. In fact, I did an analysis in response to that Fool article. 00:08:25.000 --> 00:08:27.000 Stuart Winchester: And I found, just examining… 00:08:27.000 --> 00:08:30.000 Stuart Winchester: The 11 western ski states. 00:08:30.000 --> 00:08:40.000 Stuart Winchester: that, minus Alaska, that those 11 states had 54,598 more acres of terrain. 00:08:40.000 --> 00:08:50.000 Stuart Winchester: available at their ski areas, their lift service ski areas, than they had in 1994. So, yes, there are fewer ski areas. 00:08:50.000 --> 00:09:00.000 Stuart Winchester: now than there were in the early 90s. There were 546 in 92, 486 today, but there’s a lot more terrain, and so what ended up happening was. 00:09:00.000 --> 00:09:08.000 Stuart Winchester: The ski areas that were successful expanded. It was as simple as that. And when I did this analysis. 00:09:08.000 --> 00:09:10.000 Stuart Winchester: I looked at… 00:09:11.000 --> 00:09:24.000 Stuart Winchester: I looked at 92 ski areas that I had the data for from 1992, and they happen to be some of the biggest ski areas in the West. And I compared their acreage in 1994 according to a guidebook I had from that date that I’d kept. 00:09:24.000 --> 00:09:30.000 Stuart Winchester: 107,671 acres was the total for these ski areas. 00:09:30.000 --> 00:09:45.000 Stuart Winchester: Fast forward to 2025, when I did this analysis, those same 92 ski areas had grown from 107,671 acres to 159,754 acres. 00:09:45.000 --> 00:09:55.000 Stuart Winchester: Then I added in a few ski areas that had opened since then, places like Tamarack in Idaho, Blacktail in Montana. There hasn’t been a lot, but there’s been a few. 00:09:55.000 --> 00:10:11.000 Stuart Winchester: And then I subtracted the lost ski areas. The biggest of them was Ski Rio in New Mexico. But for the most part, the ski areas that closed were small surface tow operations and they were in the region of a much larger area and most likely failed in large part. 00:10:11.000 --> 00:10:29.000 Stuart Winchester: Because they couldn’t compete with that full service area, which could offer folks not only beginner terrain, but a progression up to more interesting terrain. So, there’s a lot more ski terrain than there used to be, and to give you an idea of how much terrain 54,598 acres is. 00:10:29.000 --> 00:10:36.000 Stuart Winchester: Currently in Colorado, the whole state of Colorado, which has a quarter of the ski terrain in the entire United States. 00:10:36.000 --> 00:10:42.000 Stuart Winchester: there’s 45,552 acres of terrain. So we’ve added the equivalent of another Colorado. 00:10:42.000 --> 00:10:45.000 Stuart Winchester: Now, there’s a caveat to that. 00:10:45.000 --> 00:10:48.000 Stuart Winchester: The ski industry has been able to grow by expansion. 00:10:48.000 --> 00:10:58.000 Stuart Winchester: But it hasn’t necessarily been able to grow where it needs to grow, and I made another point, a related point, in another recent article that I wrote. 00:10:58.000 --> 00:11:11.000 Stuart Winchester: for… about the U.S. Forest Service, and how most of the ski areas in the western United States are built on U.S. Forest Service land. They’re leased from the U.S. Forest Service under 40-year terms. 00:11:11.000 --> 00:11:18.000 Stuart Winchester: However, following the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, those permits. 00:11:18.000 --> 00:11:33.000 Stuart Winchester: got almost impossible to obtain new permits. The Forest Service had lots and lots of ski areas proposed, but they were all shut down. Everyone except for Beaver Creek and then Blacktail in 1998 were shut down with. 00:11:33.000 --> 00:11:51.000 Stuart Winchester: court challenges that came out of NEPA in 1969. So, while we have more terrain, skiable terrain, than we had in 1994, the reason it often feels as though the mountains are overcrowded and insufficiently distributed. 00:11:51.000 --> 00:11:57.000 Stuart Winchester: is because they are. Because we’ve only been able to expand the ski areas where they were. 00:11:57.000 --> 00:12:10.000 Stuart Winchester: rather than building new ski areas where people move to. Look at snowy regions like Washington and Oregon, some of the snowiest ski areas in the country. A lot of them still don’t have snowmaking because they get so much snow there. 00:12:10.000 --> 00:12:22.000 Stuart Winchester: Washington in 1980 had 4.1 million people. Today it has 8.2 million people, double the population, but fewer ski areas and some larger. 00:12:22.000 --> 00:12:37.000 Stuart Winchester: Stevens Pass has certainly grown, Crystal has grown, Mission Ridge has grown. Oregon, same thing, went from 2.6 million people in 1980 to 4.3 million today, but has fewer ski areas now than it did in the 1980s. So… 00:12:37.000 --> 00:12:48.000 Stuart Winchester: For better or worse, we are stuck right now with growth through expansion. So, I want to get to an expansion. First, I want to tell you about one of my awesome partners. 00:12:48.000 --> 00:13:00.000 Stuart Winchester: I’ve been working with Bonfire Collective for a long time, and if you run a ski area or an outdoor brand, you should consider hooking up with them as well. 00:13:00.000 --> 00:13:10.000 Stuart Winchester: Bonfire Collective is a fractional marketing team that collaborates with ski areas and outdoor brands to give your marketing a fresh perspective and better storytelling. 00:13:10.000 --> 00:13:16.000 Stuart Winchester: Bonfire can help you rethink your approach in ways that can turbocharge your business. 00:13:16.000 --> 00:13:31.000 Stuart Winchester: Bonfire Collective, for example, took on the marketing at one New Hampshire sea area and doubled revenue in just three years. And when the storm was ready to invest in its first ever digital marketing campaign last year, I worked with Bonfire to make it happen. 00:13:31.000 --> 00:13:36.000 Stuart Winchester: I could not be happier with the results. I think you will love working with them too. 00:13:36.000 --> 00:13:40.000 Stuart Winchester: To get started, you will want to talk to Eric over at Bonfire Collective. 00:13:40.000 --> 00:13:56.000 Stuart Winchester: Eric was a co-founder of Bluebird Backcountry Colorado, the first human powered ski area. He knows the ski business, as many of you know from that episode of the Storm Skiing Podcast that he appeared on last year. Visit bonfirecollective.com or I will be happy. 00:13:56.000 --> 00:14:03.000 Stuart Winchester: to make that connection for you. Alright, with that, let’s go to our guest for today. 00:14:05.000 --> 00:14:08.000 Stuart Winchester: And… 00:14:09.000 --> 00:14:15.000 Stuart Winchester: Here he is, Mr. Brian Norton. Brian, what an awesome background! Where are you at? 00:14:15.000 --> 00:14:19.000 brian norton: Uh, I’m in my office, but that’s hanging outside my office, so… 00:14:18.000 --> 00:14:24.000 Stuart Winchester: Oh, okay, cool, I thought maybe you were in the, uh, the kink barn with the, uh… 00:14:24.000 --> 00:14:27.000 Stuart Winchester: With that, with the cool groomer behind you. 00:14:28.000 --> 00:14:44.000 Stuart Winchester: All right, well, let me give you a proper introduction here. Uh, my guest today is president and general manager of Loon Mountain, New Hampshire since 2022. Loon claims New Hampshire’s tallest vertical drop at 2,190 feet. 00:14:44.000 --> 00:14:58.000 Stuart Winchester: served by 13 lifts. Last week, Loon announced the 272-acre Black Ridge expansion that, when added to the resort’s existing 403-acre footprint. 00:14:58.000 --> 00:15:08.000 Stuart Winchester: will make Lune the largest ski area in New Hampshire, and the sixth largest ski area in the eastern United States at 675 acres. 00:15:08.000 --> 00:15:23.000 Stuart Winchester: He began his Loon career in 2001 as a Lyft attendant, and now he’s running the place. He is Brian Norton. Brian, welcome back to the storm. Always good to see what’s new at Loon, because there is always something new at Loon. How you doing today, Brian? 00:15:23.000 --> 00:15:29.000 brian norton: I’m doing awesome. It’s sweatshirt weather right now, so we’re getting closer. 00:15:29.000 --> 00:15:33.000 Stuart Winchester: Nice. Did you do a snowmaking test yet, or is that Sunday River’s ter. 00:15:32.000 --> 00:15:38.000 brian norton: No, we have not done that yet. Sunday will probably beat us to that one. 00:15:37.000 --> 00:15:54.000 Stuart Winchester: All right, let’s talk about Black Ridge. This is really an amazing project, and I’ve been pretty vocal and frank over the years about what I saw as Loon’s biggest shortcoming, which was not enough real expert terrain, and by that I really meant glades, wild terrain. 00:15:54.000 --> 00:15:58.000 Stuart Winchester: Talk to us about Black Ridge, what it is, and how it’s going to change Loon. 00:15:59.000 --> 00:16:14.000 brian norton: Yeah, I mean, it’s a pivotal project for the ski resort. As you mentioned, it’s almost doubling the size of the ski resort. For those not familiar with it, it’s this kind of secret shoulder glade skiing. It’s been there. 00:16:14.000 --> 00:16:30.000 brian norton: It was developed over time by some locals just kind of going out there, you know, maybe not necessarily following the rules, certainly not at our approval, but people have been skiing there. I mean, I think the first time I went skiing over there, I was in college, like 2001, and it was like you had to kind of find your way over there. You had to commit to it. 00:16:27.000 --> 00:16:28.000 Stuart Winchester: Okay. 00:16:31.000 --> 00:16:42.000 brian norton: beautiful, um, beautiful area. It’s like a big catcher’s mitt off the side of the ski resort that just holds snow really well, and there’s a lot of, um, it’s a mile and a quarter. 00:16:42.000 --> 00:16:51.000 brian norton: hike, uh, across a ridgeline. You can actually ski or skate most of it. There’s a few sections where you have to, you know, unclick and walk and… 00:16:51.000 --> 00:17:09.000 brian norton: um, you just get this incredible glade scheme that brings you right back to the bottom of North Peak, so it’s like this full circle, you’re way the heck out there, there’s a couple viewpoints where you can stand at this cliff and just look back at the ski resort and look into the town of Lincoln, you’re like, whoa, I am way out there, but a completely different view than, you know, most people would. 00:17:09.000 --> 00:17:23.000 brian norton: would ever get to see from Loon. And so, yeah, we’ve been working on it for a couple years with the Forest Service, trying to, like, wrap that into our special use permit. And, um, yeah, super happy to have that announcement, kind of. Like I said, planning. 00:17:23.000 --> 00:17:28.000 brian norton: For a long time, but awesome to have that hit the newsstands the other day. 00:17:27.000 --> 00:17:34.000 Stuart Winchester: So help us understand Loon’s Forest Service footprint. This is a conversation I’m accustomed to having with. 00:17:34.000 --> 00:17:53.000 Stuart Winchester: your partners who run western ski areas. There’s very few, just 7 in New England, that touch Forest Service land. My understanding is that Loon is not entirely on Forest Service land. I believe it’s Kissing Cousins Lift. You’re riding up, and you see a sign, welcome to the White Mountains National Forest. So, where are those boundaries at? 00:17:53.000 --> 00:17:55.000 Stuart Winchester: at Loon. 00:17:54.000 --> 00:18:05.000 brian norton: Yeah, it’s really just the bottom. I mean, like, pretty much if you can hit

Welcome to the Storm’s short-form, news-focused podcast. Don’t worry, I will still write newsletters too. To browse a podcast transcript, click the “transcript” button above - click on any block of text and the audio will jump to that point in the conversation. Paid subscribers can leave a comment below - I’ll respond to some in the next episode. Thank you for supporting independent ski journalism. /: The Zoom transcript (click “transcript” above for the Substack transcript, which will zoom to any point in the video when you click on the associated text block; timestamps below DO NOT MATCH THE VIDEO) 00:01:51.000 --> 00:02:02.000 Stuart Winchester: Welcome to the Storm! It is September 8th, 2026, and if you are a Storm regular, you are probably wondering what in the heck is going on here. 00:02:02.000 --> 00:02:09.000 Stuart Winchester: Today, we are launching an all-new format for the Storm Skiing Podcast. 00:02:09.000 --> 00:02:22.000 Stuart Winchester: It is shorter, it is news-focused, it will be more frequent, and it will publish the same day that I record it in just about every instance. 00:02:22.000 --> 00:02:23.000 Stuart Winchester: So. 00:02:24.000 --> 00:02:28.000 Stuart Winchester: It’s gonna have a lot of different elements. Uh, takes just… 00:02:28.000 --> 00:02:31.000 Stuart Winchester: on whatever’s happening in the news. 00:02:32.000 --> 00:02:34.000 Stuart Winchester: Okay, let’s scrap that and let’s start again. 00:02:38.000 --> 00:02:41.000 Stuart Winchester: Okay, starting from the top. 00:02:41.000 --> 00:02:42.000 Stuart Winchester: 3. 00:02:42.000 --> 00:02:44.000 Stuart Winchester: Q. 00:02:44.000 --> 00:02:45.000 Stuart Winchester: One. 00:02:45.000 --> 00:02:59.000 Stuart Winchester: Welcome to the Storm! I’m your host, Stuart Winchester. It is September 8th, 2026, and I would like to welcome you all to a brand new version of the Storm Skiing Podcast. 00:02:59.000 --> 00:03:02.000 Stuart Winchester: So, the long-form podcast… 00:03:02.000 --> 00:03:09.000 Stuart Winchester: has been the default of the Storm Skiing Podcast since I launched in 2019. 00:03:09.000 --> 00:03:12.000 Stuart Winchester: Very proud of the Storm Skiing podcast. 00:03:12.000 --> 00:03:16.000 Stuart Winchester: We’re at episode 227. 00:03:16.000 --> 00:03:26.000 Stuart Winchester: I have interviewed the leaders of nearly every large ski area in America, and the leaders of most of the large ski companies in America. 00:03:26.000 --> 00:03:29.000 Stuart Winchester: But something started to feel a little bit off. 00:03:29.000 --> 00:03:35.000 Stuart Winchester: And, you know, I started to think about the kind of podcasts that I consume. 00:03:35.000 --> 00:03:44.000 Stuart Winchester: And those are mostly, frankly, around Michigan football, uh, which is my other obsession besides ski-ski-ski-ski-ski-ski-ski-ski-s. 00:03:44.000 --> 00:04:02.000 Stuart Winchester: tend to be much more news-focused. They tend to be much shorter than the Storm Skiing Podcast. They tend to publish the same day that they record them, and they tend to break down current events. For example, I just went to a Michigan football game. 00:04:02.000 --> 00:04:21.000 Stuart Winchester: on Saturday in Ann Arbor. If you’re even remotely a sports fan, you probably saw the controversial ending to that game when Michigan got an extra second added on, and Bryce Underwood, the quarterback, tossed a Hail Mary to win the game when JJ Buchanan, our transfer receiver, came down with the ball. 00:04:21.000 --> 00:04:36.000 Stuart Winchester: That’s never happened in the history of Michigan football, to have a Hail Mary ending that Michigan wins. So, on the way home, it’s a 10-hour drive back to New York, my wife and I listened to all the different Michigan podcasts that were breaking down that moment. And I realized that… 00:04:36.000 --> 00:04:54.000 Stuart Winchester: as much as I like the Storm Skiing Podcast, and as much as a lot of other people like it, I was not really making the kind of podcast that I actually listen to. And that’s a problem, because in our current media environment, people have a lot of choice. 00:04:54.000 --> 00:04:58.000 Stuart Winchester: They have a lot of of. 00:04:58.000 --> 00:05:13.000 Stuart Winchester: different things they can give their attention to, and it’s hard to get and keep their attention. So, I want to say right off, I am not killing the long-form storm skiing podcast. It will not end with episode 227. In fact, I have about 5 or 6 in the can that I’ve been sitting on. 00:05:13.000 --> 00:05:30.000 Stuart Winchester: for this news, and I will release those soon, and my thanks to the folks who participated in those podcasts for their everlasting patience as I got this together. So, I’m still gonna make the Storm Skiing Podcast. The frequency will go from about 45 a year at its peak. 00:05:30.000 --> 00:05:47.000 Stuart Winchester: It’s probably about a dozen a year or so, and sometimes there will just be a time when the long form is the more appropriate form for telling the story of a mountain. If I have someone new on, for example, so for example, I’ve never had. 00:05:47.000 --> 00:06:02.000 Stuart Winchester: Uh, the GM or owner of Sierra at Tahoe in California, an important mountain on the podcast. Never had Wolf Creek on the podcast, never had Mount Baker. If I were to get one of those folks, I would want to do a long form, tell the story of the ski area. But it’s not always necessary to. 00:06:02.000 --> 00:06:18.000 Stuart Winchester: Tell the entire story of the ski area and its history and its culture when you just want to talk about a new lift or you just want to talk about the fact that it joined a new pass. So this shorter podcast will be more frequent. 00:06:18.000 --> 00:06:35.000 Stuart Winchester: It will have different segments, segments with takes when I just talk about what’s going on. It will still have interviews, much shorter interviews. Today we have an interview with an awesome guest, Snow Partner CEO Joe Heschen, one of the smartest guys in skiing. 00:06:35.000 --> 00:06:45.000 Stuart Winchester: But before, Joe and I went on for two hours. This time, we’ll be able to condense it down. And then at the end of each episode, my intent. 00:06:45.000 --> 00:07:02.000 Stuart Winchester: and hope is to have reader interaction, and this will be a feature available only to paid supporters of the Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast, and you can upgrade to a paid subscription at stormskiing.com anytime. The podcast will be for everyone, as it’s always been. 00:07:02.000 --> 00:07:18.000 Stuart Winchester: But only paid subscribers will be able to interact with the podcast. And the way that they will be able to do that is that they will be able to write a comment on the article that accompanies the newsletter on stormskiing.com. 00:07:18.000 --> 00:07:32.000 Stuart Winchester: And the next day, I will read some of those comments and react to them as appropriate. And I’ll talk a little bit more about that later and why I’m doing it that way. But for now, I want to assure you. 00:07:32.000 --> 00:07:48.000 Stuart Winchester: This podcast is going to come to you the same way your podcasts always have. Now, there is a video version. You can watch that on YouTube, will be our primary channel, as well as Substack, which is where the newsletter is published. There will always, always, always be an audio version. 00:07:48.000 --> 00:07:58.000 Stuart Winchester: And it will always come to the same places that you have always gotten the podcast. If that’s Apple, if that’s Spotify, there’s some that I don’t even know. 00:07:58.000 --> 00:08:11.000 Stuart Winchester: how the podcast got on there, or why it’s on there. There’s an RSS feed that spits this out from Substack. That will not change. The storm will be… when you go looking for it, you’re going to find the storm. 00:08:12.000 --> 00:08:13.000 Stuart Winchester: So. 00:08:13.000 --> 00:08:24.000 Stuart Winchester: This is something I’m super excited about because I think it will allow me to have a lot more guests a lot more often. 00:08:24.000 --> 00:08:35.000 Stuart Winchester: there are so many great minds in skiing right now, and I feel like there’s a lot of negative sentiment around skiing and the way it’s evolving. There’s a lot of talk of a duopoly. 00:08:35.000 --> 00:08:39.000 Stuart Winchester: But from my point of view. 00:08:39.000 --> 00:08:54.000 Stuart Winchester: there’s not a duopoly in a way that is dominating all consumer choice. And the reason I have that point of view is I’m having conversations every single day with smart people. 00:08:54.000 --> 00:09:10.000 Stuart Winchester: thinking far ahead and doing great things to change skiing in ways that make skiing better, that make skiing access better. People like Joe Hesham, my guest today, people like Eric Mogenson, who runs the Indy Pass, people like John Schaefer, who runs a handful of mountains. 00:09:10.000 --> 00:09:28.000 Stuart Winchester: in the East, people like Rick Schmitz, who runs three ski areas in the Midwest. Small ski area operators like Tim Meyer at Caber Fay in Michigan, who we’ll talk about a little bit later. So, I’m talking to these people all the time, and I’m seeing the independent ski areas are really, for the most part, doing fine. I’m seeing. 00:09:28.000 --> 00:09:33.000 Stuart Winchester: Huge investment. I’m seeing huge innovation and. 00:09:33.000 --> 00:09:43.000 Stuart Winchester: Because of the frequency of the podcast, and because of the laborious nature of turning interviews into written content. 00:09:43.000 --> 00:10:00.000 Stuart Winchester: I don’t think that I’m getting that to you in the way that I would like, in, in, in the way that you deserve. I want you to be part of this conversation. I want you to see why I’m so optimistic about skiing right now. I want you to know why I feel that skiing is in its best. 00:10:00.000 --> 00:10:05.000 Stuart Winchester: place, historically, that it has ever been, at least in America. 00:10:05.000 --> 00:10:10.000 Stuart Winchester: Now, it certainly has problems, and we will get into those as well. 00:10:10.000 --> 00:10:21.000 Stuart Winchester: I don’t answer to anyone. I don’t answer to the operators. I don’t have a boss. I answer to my subscribers, and that’s it. The only thing I care about is the truth. 00:10:21.000 --> 00:10:28.000 Stuart Winchester: Uh, and my optimism does not come from any desire to have access or anything else. My… my… 00:10:28.000 --> 00:10:31.000 Stuart Winchester: My content and my commitment to the truth. 00:10:31.000 --> 00:10:50.000 Stuart Winchester: comes from wanting to deliver a great journalistic product. Uh, and there’s gonna be opinion and analysis. You’re not always going to agree with what I say, and that’s good! I wanna remind people that. That’s good. If you agree with everything I say, I have no value. I can tell you that all of my guests. 00:10:50.000 --> 00:10:54.000 Stuart Winchester: disagree with things I say, but the reason they keep coming back. 00:10:54.000 --> 00:11:03.000 Stuart Winchester: And the reason that I hope they will keep coming back is because I’m trying to be fair, I’m trying to work within the bounds of the truth, and I’m not… 00:11:03.000 --> 00:11:08.000 Stuart Winchester: Jumping to these huge accusatory. 00:11:08.000 --> 00:11:25.000 Stuart Winchester: narratives that we see so often with the Mega Passes and with the big consolidators, Vale and Altera. So, I want to give a different perspective, I want to give it more frequently. The newsletter, one more point, the newsletter will stay the same. There will always be written content. 00:11:25.000 --> 00:11:34.000 Stuart Winchester: I am still a writer with a podcast, not a podcaster with a newsletter, though I kind of have to admit at this point that I am. 00:11:34.000 --> 00:11:42.000 Stuart Winchester: a podcaster, even though that sounds… I don’t know, it sounds a little… pretentious, or juvenile, or uh… like I’m… 00:11:42.000 --> 00:11:58.000 Stuart Winchester: you know, doing this as a side hustle while I drive for Uber, but… but no, this is my full-time job. The Storm is and has been my full-time job for a couple of years. Now, the reason I want to switch to a news-based podcast is for days like today, because today we have. 00:11:58.000 --> 00:12:00.000 Stuart Winchester: Huge news. 00:12:00.000 --> 00:12:04.000 Stuart Winchester: One of my favorite ski areas. 00:12:04.000 --> 00:12:09.000 Stuart Winchester: One of the best ski areas in the eastern United States. 00:12:09.000 --> 00:12:14.000 Stuart Winchester: Uh, depending on your point of view, maybe one of the best ski areas in the United States. 00:12:15.000 --> 00:12:20.000 Stuart Winchester: is joining a Malta Mountain Pass for the first time. 00:12:20.000 --> 00:12:27.000 Stuart Winchester: That is Smuggler’s Notch, Vermont. Smuggs is an incredible place. 00:12:27.000 --> 00:12:40.000 Stuart Winchester: For a lot of reasons. Number one, if you don’t live in the East, and you’re under the impression that the East is an ice ball, and the vertical drops are short, and the mountains are small. 00:12:41.000 --> 00:12:56.000 Stuart Winchester: You’re wrong. You’re just wrong. And there is a snow. There’s plenty of big mountains in the east. First of all, there’s plenty of good snow pockets in the east. One of the best snow pockets is in northern Vermont, and you have a line of resorts. 00:12:56.000 --> 00:13:12.000 Stuart Winchester: We call it the spine of the Green Mountains. Starts at Killington Pico, goes up to Sugarbush, which is in Alterra Mountain. Right next door is Mad River Glen, the famous Indy with the single chair. North of that is Bolton Valley, which is on Indy Pass. North of that is Stowe, which is owned by V. 00:13:12.000 --> 00:13:23.000 Stuart Winchester: On the backside of Stowe is Smuggler’s Notch, and then north of that is Jay Peak. Smuggler’s Notch joins IndyPass today, and here are the stats. 00:13:23.000 --> 00:13:39.000 Stuart Winchester: It is a 2610 foot vertical drop that is the fourth tallest in the east. It has one smug says 1060 skiable acres that they claim there’s actually more in the woods. If you count the back bowls and some of the secret stashes. 00:13:39.000 --> 00:13:54.000 Stuart Winchester: Off of the Sterling lift. So that makes it the fourth largest ski area in the east. It is the second snowiest ski area in the east after Jay Peak, which is also an IndyPass partner with 322in of snowfall. 00:13:54.000 --> 00:14:10.000 Stuart Winchester: On average per winter. Yes, that’s a lot. That’s those are Vail numbers. Those are Colorado numbers. No, it’s not Cottonwoods, but it’s deep enough that those ski areas almost always have tree skiing from the beginning. 00:14:10.000 --> 00:14:22.000 Stuart Winchester: from around Christmas through the end of the season. I’ve skied Glades at Stowe in April many times. I’ve done the same at Jay Peak. So, the snow coverage really. 00:14:22.000 --> 00:14:38.000 Stuart Winchester: comes and it really falls. Mount Mansfield, which is where Stowe is, right next to Smuggs, is the tallest mountain in Vermont, and they have a snow stake there that consistently builds up to around 60 inches or so for the season. So, Smuggs joins Indy Pass. 00:14:38.000 --> 00:14:56.000 Stuart Winchester: today. It is the… and, and, and, and… No Blackouts on Indie Bass Pass, which goes on sale today to the general public, or actually maybe tomorrow it goes on sale, for… $419. 00:14:56.000 --> 00:14:57.000 Stuart Winchester: The ND… 00:14:57.000 --> 00:15:13.000 Stuart Winchester: Plus is 469. So I’ll give you a few stats here. So Indy with adding smugs, that is the 43rd Alpine lift serve ski area that Indy has added for the 2026 to 2027. 00:15:13.000 --> 00:15:14.000 Stuart Winchester: Winter. 00:15:14.000 --> 00:15:30.000 Stuart Winchester: That gives them a total. Now, my totals are going to be a little different than Indy’s because they’re counting cross-country ski areas. And I’m leaving those off. And I also count sometimes two ski areas, as one when they’re when they’re separate entities. But but they share days. 00:15:30.000 --> 00:15:45.000 Stuart Winchester: So Indy now has 256 ski areas, lift-served alpine downhill ski areas, which get two days each. So they have more than you could possibly use. That includes 148 ski areas in the United States. 00:15:45.000 --> 00:15:57.000 Stuart Winchester: 32 in Canada, 39 in Europe, and 32 in Japan. You can ski 30% of all ski areas in America on Indy. 00:15:57.000 --> 00:16:14.000 Stuart Winchester: Now, on the flip side, Indy also had some important losses this winter. They lost, and they’re all in the Midwest, and Indy’s lost mountains before, and with a roster that big, you’re gonna have some turnover. Uh, but the first wave of losses came back. 00:16:14.000 --> 00:16:24.000 Stuart Winchester: in past release season in March, when the three areas owned by Midwest Family Ski Resorts, some of the best operators in the country, uh, they own Lutzen Mountain in Minnesota. 00:16:24.000 --> 00:16:39.000 Stuart Winchester: one of the largest ski areas in the Midwest, uh, Granite Peak in Wisconsin, which has 3 high-speed lifts, and Snow River, which is really 2 side-by-side ski areas and a nice snow belt in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. They left for Icon Pass. 00:16:39.000 --> 00:16:53.000 Stuart Winchester: Now, there’s a little bit of a historical precedent there, because those three ski areas had been on the Max Pass, which had been the immediate predecessor, along with the Rocky Mountain Super Pass, to the Icon Pass. Uh, the… 00:16:53.000 --> 00:17:10.000 Stuart Winchester: Icon Pass, when it debuted in 2018, left off Snow River, Granite Peak, and Lutzen. And I always thought, well, Snow River wasn’t a part of Midwest Family at the time, but I always thought that was a mistake. So I’m not surprised to see them go, but those were big drivers of Indy Pass sales. 00:17:10.000 --> 00:17:16.000 Stuart Winchester: Because those are marquee mountains in the Midwest. They also recently lost… 00:17:16.000 --> 00:17:34.000 Stuart Winchester: Another three mountains run by another great operator in Wisconsin, Little Switzerland, Crystal Ridge, and Nordic Mountain. Now, these are small ski areas. They’re feeder ski areas, but they’re important ski areas because Rick is a very smart guy. He’s very influential. 00:17:34.000 --> 00:17:50.000 Stuart Winchester: And he has a lot of influence in the ski business, including being part of the board of directors of the National Skiers Association. Everyone respects him. They also lost Cabar Fay, one of my favorite mountains in Michigan. It was my pseudo-home mountain when I lived in Michigan as a teenager. 00:17:50.000 --> 00:17:57.000 Stuart Winchester: I have a lot of respect for Tim and Pete Meyer, who run that over there. So, I’ll talk a little bit more… 00:17:57.000 --> 00:18:10.000 Stuart Winchester: about that with Joe, because I think there’s going to be some crossover with the snow pass. So, quickly, before we get to our guest, I want to tell you about Profile Search International. 00:18:10.000 --> 00:18:15.000 Stuart Winchester: A lot of you come to this podcast to hear from the best minds in skiing. 00:18:15.000 --> 00:18:20.000 Stuart Winchester: But what if you want to find one of these great leaders for your own mountain team? 00:18:20.000 --> 00:18:35.000 Stuart Winchester: Well, let me introduce you to the folks at Profile Search International. They are the ski industry talent acquisition experts, and are the only executive search and recruitment firm in the world that is 100% focused on the ski industry. 00:18:35.000 --> 00:18:48.000 Stuart Winchester: They have used their intimate understanding of skiing and related industries and available candidates worldwide to place hundreds of transformatio

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast still has a podcast. Get new episodes the moment they’re live by subscribing to the email newsletter: Who John Kelly, CEO of Taos Ski Valley , New Mexico Recorded on November 13, 2025 About Taos Ski Valley Click here for a mountain stats overview Owned by: Louis Bacon (since December 2013) Located in: Taos Ski Valley, New Mexico Year founded: 1955 Pass affiliations: * Ikon Pass – 7 days, no blackouts * Ikon Base Pass – 5 days, holiday blackouts * Ikon Session Pass – 1-4 days, holiday blackouts * Mountain Collective – 2 days, no blackouts * Ski New Mexico True Pass – 2 days, holiday blackouts Base elevation: 9,350 feet Summit elevation: 12,450 feet lift-served, 12,481 hike-to Vertical drop: 3,100 feet lift-served, 3,131 hike-to. Skiable acres: 1,294 (some hike-to) Average annual snowfall: 300 inches claimed on website; calculated 36-year average using data sourced from Taos’ 2010 master development plan, Ski New Mexico tallies, and media reports is 233 inches. The 10-year average falls to 166 inches. Here’s the year-by-year breakdown: Trail count: 110 (24% beginner, 25% intermediate, 51% expert) Lift count: 13 (1 pulse gondola, 2 high-speed quads, 2 fixed-grip quads, 4 triples, 1 double, 3 carpets) Why I interviewed him Let’s start with a superficially troubling number: Taos’ long, steady decline in average annual skier visits: That doesn’t look so good, especially when laid alongside the long-term increase in national skier visits: Taos not only declined in the context of national skier visits, but also among its peers. In winter 1983-84, Taos drew more skiers (241,000) than Telluride (132,460), Big Sky (136,000), Jackson Hole (177,000), Whitefish (I’m lacking an estimate for that winter, but the ski area then known as “Big Mountain” logged 209,000 skiers in 1980-81 and 170,581 in 1985-86). Taos (dark blue line below), continued to out-duel this group through about the mid-90s before falling off a cliff: So what happened? 1995 Taos, a freeride mecca before freeride was cool, should have been perfectly suited to flourish in a cultural moment when skiers began demanding more interesting terrain than the groomed superhighways that had become the industry’s default setting. Sure, Taos was remote and a bit harder to access than, say, Keystone or Park City, but so were Jackson and Whitefish and Big Sky and Telluride. A partial explanation: Taos stopped modernizing. After replacing the Lift 2 double with a fixed-grip quad in 1994, Taos didn’t install another new chairlift for 19 years. The first detachable didn’t arrive until 2018. The resort banned snowboards until 2008. Meanwhile, Big Sky laced a tram to the summit of Lone Peak in 1995 and started pushing detachable quads up the mountain; the first high-speed quads arrived at Telluride in 1986 and Whitefish in 1989. It’s not a perfect narrative – while Jackson Hole rolled out its short Sublette detach in the mid-90s, the mountain didn’t install an upper-mountain high-speed chairlift until Casper in 2012. Skier visits went up and up and up all that time, probably due in large part to aggressive improvements at the Jackson Hole airport. Maybe, though, it’s as simple as this: banger snow years descended upon Taos – and New Mexico in general – from the late ‘80s through mid-‘90s. It’s little surprise that attendance ups-and-downs largely mirror snowfall patterns: But, as the corresponding trendlines show, Taos’ skier visits have not declined at the same rate as the mountain’s average annual snowfall. And while Jackson’s long-term average snowfall has remained relatively constant, attendance has crept steadily upward. Attendance spiked at both mountains when the 2018-19 season brought both plentiful snow and the introduction of the Ikon Pass: Unfortunately, Taos stopped reporting skier visits after the Covid-shortened 2019-20 season, so we have less concrete insight into whether the mountain’s recent investments in a reconfigured beginner area and a second detachable on the backside have insulated it from two historically poor snow years. This is why it’s nice to have basic visitation data, and why I’m pushing the ski industry to again publicize annual attendance for ski areas occupying public lands (since going live with a chart of 2,406 years of skier visit data for 97 ski areas with 10 or more years of attendance available, I’m up to 2,822 years across 108 ski areas, and I have a total of 3,802 years of data across 184 active U.S. ski areas for which I could find at least one year of attendance). We do know this: Taos doesn’t want to return to the world of 300,000-plus skier visits. Somewhere between 250,000 and 275,000 is the “right number for the experience we want Taos to have,” Kelly tells us on the pod. Meaning: fewer skiers spread via a modern lift network is a better business than 364,000 skiers funneling onto double chairs. This flips the busiest-equals-best narrative that made skier-visit counts a 20th-century bragging point. I’ve heard the same logic articulated by the leaders of Killington , Waterville Valley , and other ski areas that have created a better business even with fewer skiers on their mountains. Jackson Hole, too, halted its relentless upward surge – that 2020-21 dip was deliberate, as the mountain exited Ikon Base and implemented a reservation system. This approach makes sense to me. With U.S. skier visits surging (until this year) and an Ikon or Epic pass in every pocket, no one wants to brag about being busy anymore. Space is the new volume. Social media can still transform one bad liftline into an eternal meme, but at least most skiers on the ground will have a better day most of the time than they probably would have 30 years ago. What doesn’t make sense to me is why, in a less-is-more era, ski area operators have suddenly decided that skier visits should be guarded like Fort Knox. If fewer skiers is a good thing and a stated goal, why hide the numbers? The resorts ought to just say “Hey we’ve deliberately reduced our annual skier count from 300,000 to 250,000 [or whatever] to create a better mountain for you.” Instead, this secrecy around volume just looks cagey - if national skier visit numbers are up, then why should skiers just believe ski areas when they say “trust us, it’s better now,” and offer no data to support it? Perception is reality, and today’s skiing zeitgeist, as channeled by social media, tells us that American skiers perceive busier mountains today than they did a decade ago. But I’m getting off track. Since Louis Bacon bought Taos in 2013, he’s funded an almost-complete renovation of what had become America’s most decrepit destination ski resort. I don’t think any mountain operating on U.S. Forest Service lands has more completely remade itself in the past decade (rapidly changing Big Sky, Deer Valley, and Powder Mountain operate on private property). Glimmering new but reset to 1970s volume, Taos is beautifully positioned to tap a skiing public that’s burned-out on Colorado and Utah crowds but accustomed to modern lifts and snowmaking. What we talked about Taos as a family ski mountain; last winter’s Chair 7 upgrade and custom terminals; owner Louis Bacon’s mission to “improve everything without changing a thing”; why Taos changed from Skytrac to parent company Leitner-Poma for its newer lifts; Taos’ great base-area reorganization; the story behind the Free Tacos run; a green run from the top of every lift other than the fierce Kachina triple; Taos’ massive evolution since 2015; whether the mountain is committed to long-term independence; the founding Blake family’s legacy and presence at Taos today; executing rapid development on Forest Service land; [VIDEO BONUS: Cat photobombing]; running Taos with the context of having worked at also-independent Telluride; becoming a skier growing up in Nashville, Tennessee; Telluride’s evolution from semi-affordable to gigantic housing puzzle; employee housing at Taos; the logic behind the proposed base-to-base gondola and navigating local opposition; thoughts on the evolution of lifts 2 and 8; preserving parts of the hike-to ski experience; Taos’ evolution after the Kachina Peak lift; lift 7A; the Minnesotas glades from the masterplan; avalanche mitigation; old-school boot-packing; parking lot evolutions; an ideal annual skier visit number and why that number is below historic highs; and getting to Taos. What I got wrong * When we discuss the wood-paneled terminals on Taos’ new Lift 7, I ask if they’re thematically related to the “wood RFID gates.” This is a reference to an earlier conversation that I cut, about Taos finally installing RFID for the 2025-26 ski season (the gates carry a wood theme). * I said that the trees skier’s left of the Pioneer chair were not a named run, but they in fact are, and “Free Tacos” has a pretty awesome story behind it. * I accidentally asked Kelly to, “lay out the housing landscape for Telluride ” but meant to say “ Taos .” I didn’t catch this in real time, but Kelly – who spent several years at Telluride before moving to Taos in 2015 – caught it and course-corrected. Questions I wished I’d asked Taos’ 2010 USFS masterplan proposed a 7,045-foot-long, 2,363-vertical-foot detach quad that would have run parallel to Lift 1 to the top of Lift 2: We did, however, discuss the proposed 545-vertical-foot, 991-foot-long Ridge Lift off of Lift 8, and why Taos nixed that machine from its latest MDP: Why you should (or shouldn’t) ski Taos Taos, like Jackson Hole or Snowbird or Palisades Tahoe, has a toughguy reputation. The place ripples with hike-to chutes and glades. To calm visitors shocked by the vertical bump run rocketing skyward beneath Chair 1, Taos to erected this base-area sign decades ago: The sign refers to the infamous Al’s Run, which typically ripples with moguls, but was closed on my last visit, in March 2025 (Lift 1 was open): Taos certainly has plenty of nasty. The terrain ripping off the Kachina Peak triple is among the steepest inbounds terrain I’m aware of in America. But what shocked me about the place was how approachable it was for my then-8-year-old son, a solid but very intermediate skier. Every chair other than Kachina offers a top-to-bottom green – and some mostly mellow blues – making Taos one of the better family mountains in America. A lot of the solid-black terrain sits above the lifts, and requires a short, easy hike. If you’ve ever humped up Catherine’s at Alta or Spanky’s Ladder on Blackcomb, the ascent off of Lift 2 over to Highline Ridge or West Basin Ridge isn’t much longer, and it flattens out considerably after the short incline. Unlike East Wall at A-Basin or Highlands Bowl at Aspen Highlands, this is hike-up terrain that’s approachable for people who (like me), live at sea level and only like going up the mountain on machines. The runs are steep, and solo missions are discouraged, but the easy-in and proximity to lifts means a strong skier could reasonably expect to tuck a half-dozen hike-up laps into an afternoon. Here I am huffing and puffing right off Chair 2: Dang those trees are steep even right off the jump. Crunch crunch crunch: Go up a bit higher, and things get Lord of The Rings pretty fast: Taos’ only real buyer-beware statistic is its insane base elevation of 9,350 feet, which makes everything, especially sleep, a bit more challenging. That altitude is actually a bit lower than the bases at Copper (9,712) or Breck (9,600). I start to have trouble functioning around 8,000 feet, which is the Vail (8,120), Snowmass (8,110), Snowbird (7,760), and Mammoth (7,953) range. So maybe see how you do at one of those burners before leveling up above 9,000 feet. Or at least arrive knowing that Taos will try punching you in the face. Hydrate and lay off the beer bongs for a day or two. You’ll be fine. Podcast Notes On Stadeli lifts We’ve got 16 of these guys left across 10 U.S. ski areas, including Lift 7A at Taos: On the character of old chairlifts I wrote last year that U.S. ski lifts’ overall design aesthetic has deteriorated with the decline in number of manufacturers and a tacit emphasis on technology over beauty. And I love old Riblets and Halls and Yans, but sentimentalism that locks skiing in a time capsule ultimately stalls long-term growth and invites disaster-by-disintegration. Rather than fight to live in a museum, I’ve adopted a quest mentality to ride as many of these dinosaurs as I can before they go extinct: On Taos’ base-area fliparound On Taos’ current masterplan Here’s the conceptual overview of Taos’ 2021 U.S. Forest Service master development plan: The major unrealized part of this is the base-to-base gondola - here’s the most recent plan for that lift: On “class A avalanche mountains” with more than 200 slidepaths Kelly mentioned that Taos’ more than 200 slidepaths earn it the designation of a Class A avalanche mountain. I of course went looking for a list of U.S. ski areas so classified, and of course did not find one. In a rare exercise in self-restraint, however, I also did not create one. A quick Google search suggests that that such a list would include Alta, Kirkwood, and Stevens Pass alongside Taos. I would also assume that Alpine Meadows, Palisades, Mammoth, Snowbird, Big Sky, Silverton, and Crested Butte are among the most avy prone. That is not a complete list or an attempt at one so please don’t write that I “forgot about” some particularly avalanche-prone mountain that I’m not trying very hard to remember. On The Storm’s first Taos podcast 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 Dan Skelton, President and Chief Operating Officer of Blue Mountain, Ontario Recorded on October 27, 2025 About Blue Mountain, Ontario Click here for a mountain stats overview Owned by: Alterra Mountain Company Located in: The Blue Mountains, Ontario, Canada Year founded: 1941 Pass affiliations: Unlimited on Ikon and Ikon Base Base elevation: 229 feet/750 meters Summit elevation: 1,480 feet/451 meters Vertical drop: 730 feet/223 meters Skiable acres: 364 acres/147 hectares Average annual snowfall: 154 inches/391 centimeters Trail count: 43 Lift count: 11 (5 six-packs, 1 fixed-grip quad, 1 triple, 4 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Blue Mountain , Ontario’s lift fleet) Why I interviewed him: A Very Dumb Story About a Very Dumb Person, Volume I In the winter of 1995-96, I developed Vertical Fever, a syndrome in which the afflicted believes, in a way that is beyond reason and immune from contrary arguments, that the skiing will be better if the ski hill is taller. This was a problem. Because in 1995, I lived, as I had all my life up to that point, in Michigan. Specifically, Sanford, a flat town in a flat county in what may be the flattest region of the country, the Tri-Cities area of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. Fortunately for a skier, Michigan is cold and full of ski areas. Unfortunately, these ski areas are small or short or both. The tallest of the 33 ski areas inventoried on the 1995 Michigan Downhill Skiing Guide is Boyne Highlands, which then and today promotes a probably made-up vertical drop of 550 feet. Right across the street was 427-vertical-foot Nub’s Nob, one of six Lower Peninsula ski areas to exceed 400 vertical, along with Caberfae (485 feet), Shanty Creek Schuss Mountain (450 feet), Sugar Loaf (500 feet), and Boyne Mountain (495 feet). I’d skied all of these and I’d skied them all many times since my first real ski season, which was the previous winter, 1994-95. But once I’d stopped summersaulting down the hill and learned to carve and to land jumps, I grew bored. Skiing in 1995 was not like skiing in 2026. Terrain parks were rare and, anyway, off limits to skiers. Jumping was forbidden. There were signs all over saying so. Everything was groomed and everything was about carving turns, even though grooming was inconsistent and the shaped skis that would transform the average skier into a carver were years away from mass market distribution. So I scoured maps and guidebooks for ski areas of any size in any direction that I could reasonably drive to. To the south lay Ohio and Indiana. Useless. To the north, at the far western end of the Upper Peninsula, lay several 600-ish footers (Mount Bohemia did not open until 2000), but Michigan is a deceptively large state made larger by the inconvenience of driving around gigantic lakes – those UP ski areas were 10 hours away. But also to the north, east instead of west and just over the Canadian border, lay Searchmont: 750 vertical feet of ungladed bananas skiing, with little cliffs and rocks and glades all over. It was a glorious real-life validation of the less-stuffy Canadian ski-area management culture that I’d read about in Skiing and Powder . And it was only a four-hour drive each way, an easy daytrip on the cruise-control-empty interstates of northern Michigan. This is what a Canadian 700-plus-footer is like, I decided, and I searched for more of them. That’s when I became obsessed with Blue Mountain, this mysterious guidebook mapdot floating south of Lake Huron. Stat-line, as listed in contemporary guide books: 720 vertical feet, 13 chairlifts and two T-bars, 920 skiable acres (this was, um, not accurate). A Midwest hack, a backdoor to a secret mini-New England unknown to Michiganders. As with Searchmont, I would rise at 4 and arrive by lifts-on and soar all day among the woodsy wide-open drop-step terrain of Ontario yahoo skiing. Yeah it didn’t work out like that. The first time I tried to drive to Blue Mountain, I wound up at Mount Brighton, 273 miles away in Southeast Michigan. A blizzard had forced course correction to a more achievable destination. But the second time, I made it. Here’s how it went, per a journal entry I wrote few days later: Monday, March 25th, 1996 – 11:53 p.m. Let’s just call Friday the day that didn’t quite flow. In fact, it didn’t flow like no day on skis ever hasn’t. First off, I only slept four hours. Normally , I wouldn’t give a f**k, but that was directly following three hours the night before, which didn’t help my status in an already exhausting week. Then there was the drive. I figured four, maybe five hours at the most, 250 miles, give or take. Wrong. I only realized this somewhere well over the Canadian border. Six hours, 350 miles. Then there’s the mountain. I knew Blue was big, but I was not, I’ll admit, in any way, shape, or form prepared for what I found Friday. The place is enormous by Midwest standards, though not as mammoth as I’d originally thought coming up the road, scoping out the two private resorts. Notice I said “enormous,” not necessarily “good.” Which is sad, cause, for one thing, they’re trying pretty hard to make a good hill, and, #2, I drove a long f****n’ way to get there. The whole thing bore a striking resemblance to western skiing – enormous base lodges, hugely wide runs, high-speed chairs. Which I suppose makes it ideal for families. Then there’s the fifty miles or so of safety fence, zero ungroomed runs, and as many jumps as a Fat Albert convention. This, I surmise, makes it extremely unideal for Stuarts. In fact, I really didn’t enjoy it at all. It was bland, repetitive, and almost sickening in its nature. I was tired, pissed, and lonely. The highlight of the day was jumping off the cornice which was the subject of much inner conflict. But I did it, and I’m glad, and then I drove home, and I’m glad for that too. I only skied four-and-a-half hours. My ticket was good til’ ten, but I considered a lot of things. For starters, it only cost me twenty bucks; second, I told Clint I was gonna make it a point to get out of there by four [to hang out], so I sorta tried; third, I’d skied the whole f****n’ place anyhow, and I really didn’t feel like getting home at four AM. It’s not like I didn’t ski well, cause I was actually carving and reacting magnificently (to the terrain, not the carving). I was fluid, but I needed more variety, and they just didn’t deliver. It would have been nice to have the internet in 1996 (it existed, but almost no one used it, partly because there was almost nothing on it, including driving directions, maps, or trailmaps). Great endorsement of Blue Mountain, Stu. You managed to convince people not to go and make the people who do ski there feel bad about it all at once. Slow clap for aggressive transparency. But my message here is hardly “Blue Mountain sucks don’t go.” Blue Mountain is, as it was 30 years ago, exactly what it needs to be: a rapid-fire lap machine optimized to provide a consistent ski experience to the residents of Canada’s densest metro area, Toronto. Blue is, historically and probably still, the third-busiest ski area in Canada after Tremblant and Whistler. It is a low-altitude, variable-weather, high-volume business tasked with the twin burdens of being the sole public outpost for recreational skiing in a ridgeline of upscale private clubs and being a profitable enterprise. It is, from a dollar-generating and Ikon Pass-dispersal-to-the-West point of view, probably one of Alterra’s most important ski areas. The problem, then, is not that every ski area isn’t like Searchmont. The problem is that, in 1996, I thought every ski area should be like Searchmont. It was like walking into a pizza parlor and complaining that they didn’t sell tacos. I was young and dumb, and it didn’t occur to me until arrival that a 700-ish-vertical-foot ski area dangling off the far eastern end of the Lake Superior wilderness (Searchmont), would, by custom and by necessity, offer a far different ski experience than a 700-ish-vertical-foot satellite orbiting metro Toronto (Blue). I thought every ski area should be for me and for people like me, like the people I read about in ski magazines who toured B.C. in rusty pickup trucks and never took bathroom breaks and who viewed skiing as a constant level-up challenge. Thirty years later, I view Blue Mountain differently, for two reasons. The first is that I’m sure that Blue, like nearly all North American ski areas, is a more interesting mountain in 2026 than it was in 1996. Freeski culture and snowboarding really did loosen up skiing’s stodgier tendencies, most visibly with the widespread building of come-one-come-all terrain parks. The second is that I no longer approach ski areas by asking if they are the best possible experience for me, but if they are the best possible version of themselves for the demographic of skiers who are most likely to ski there. And with Blue – which I will admit, I never visited again - the answer appears to be, always and ever upward, yes. What we talked about Oh Ontario; being a Canadian ski area owned by a U.S. company; “one of the beauties of being part of Alterra is our emphasis on honoring and preserving the uniqueness of each resort and each mountain community”; Blue Mountain’s Reserve Pass; fixing up Blue’s disordered lift mazes; growing up at the base of Blue Mountain; the amazing evolution of ski area technology; Blue’s wacky, charismatic founder; preserving the mountain’s independent character after it’s been absorbed by a conglomerate; Blue in the ‘70s; building Blue’s snowmaking system; big leaps forward in snowmaking during the 1990s; the rise of HKD; Alterra’s point of view on snowmaking; the hit-or-miss Lake Huron and Georgian Bay lake-effect snowbelts; snowmaking in the era of climate change; how snow-depth technology impacts snowmaking volumes; living through the transition from independence to Intrawest and ultimately to Alterra; how the village transformed Blue; “we come to the table scrappy, inventive, entrepreneurial” to this company of mega-resort destinations; the impact of the Ikon Pass; Blue’s amazing lift fleet and how the six-pack became the mountain’s workhorse; building chairlifts in-house; 15,000 skiers on Blue’s busiest days; “we’re not going to cut any new trails, so we gotta squeeze every little bit out and make sure we have a balanced experience”; whether Blue could upgrade to an eight-place lift; operating as the only substantial public ski area amid a huge number of private ski areas; and Blue’s history owning and operating the neighboring Georgian Peaks ski area. What I got wrong I mentioned that HKD President Charles Santry had told the same side of a story that Skelton shared on a previous podcast recording, which he had. The problem is that as of now, I still haven’t released that pod with Santry. Stand by. Podcast Notes On Intrawest A brief history of Intrawest: On “Rusty” in the Alterra/Ikon transition Skelton was referring to Rusty Gregory, Alterra CEO from 2018 to ’22. On Blue’s 1980 trailmap 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 Tim Smith, President and General Manager of Waterville Valley , New Hampshire Recorded on November 12, 2025 About Waterville Valley Click here for a mountain stats overview Owned by: The Sununu Family Located in: Waterville Valley, New Hampshire Year founded: 1966 Pass affiliations: * Indy Pass, Indy+ Pass: 2 days, no blackouts * White Mountain Super Pass: unlimited, no blackouts * Indy Learn-to-Turn: 3 days, includes rentals, lesson, lift ticket; limited lift access * Ski New Hampshire Kids Passport: 1 day with holiday blackouts * Uphill New England: no lift access Base elevation: 1,984 feet (highest in New Hampshire, 3rd in New England) Summit elevation: 4,004 feet (2nd-highest in New Hampshire, 5th in New England) Vertical drop: 2,020 feet (4th-highest in New Hampshire, 14th in New England) Skiable acres: 265 Average annual snowfall: 148 inches Trail count: 62 (14% novice, 64% intermediate, 22% advanced) Lift count: 10 (1 six-pack, 1 high-speed quad, 2 triples, 2 doubles, 2 T-bars, 2 carpets) Why I interviewed him Well no one wants to hear this but we got to $300 lift tickets the same way we got to $80,000 pickup trucks. We’re Americans Goddamnit and we just can’t do stickshifts and we sure as s**t ain’t standin’ up on our skis to ride back up the mountain. It’s pure agony you see. We need us a nine-pack chairlift with a bubble and a breakroom and a minibar and surround sound and Lazy-Boy seats and hell no we ain’t ridin’ it with eight strangers we’ll hold back and take a whole chair to our ownselves. And it needs to move fast , Son. Like embarrass-the-Concord fast because God help us we spend more than 90 seconds with our own thoughts. I’m not aiming to get kicked out of America here, but if I may submit a few requests regarding our self-inflicted false price floors. I would like the option of purchasing a brand-new car with a manual transmission and windows rolled up and down with a hand-crank. I would like to keep pedaling my bicycle. I would like to cut the number of holidays with commercial mandates by 80 percent. I would prefer that we not set the air-conditioners to 60 when it’s 65 degrees outside. This doesn’t mean I want to get rid of all the air-conditioners but could we maybe take it easy on the frostbite-in-July overkill of it all? My Heretic Wishlist for American Skiing includes but is not limited to: more surface lifts, especially to serve terrain parks, high-altitude exposed terrain, and expert pods; on-resort lodging that does not still require a commute-by-personal-vehicle to reach the lifts; and thoughtful terrain management that retains ungroomed sections for skiers who like things about skiing other than going fast. Waterville Valley is doing all of these things. It is perhaps the only major American ski area in decades to replace a chairlift with a surface lift on a non-beginner terrain pod, and the only one to build two new T-bars this century. A planned gondola would connect Waterville Valley the town with Waterville Valley the ski area, correcting an only-in-America setup that separates these inseparable places by two miles of road. The glade network grows annually in both subtle and obvious ways. This is not a ski area going in reverse. Waterville is modern and keeps modernizing. The four-year-old Tecumseh bubble six-pack, though bookended with T-bars, is one of the nicest chairlifts in America. Skiers still go groomer-kaboom on morning cord. Suburban office-park dads with interstate commutes and a habit of lecturing the Facebook Commons about the virtues of snow tires can still park their 42-wheel-drive Abrams-Caterpillar-F-15,000 Tanktruck in sub-parking lot 42Z and walk uphill to the lifts. But Waterville Valley is one of a handful of American ski areas, along with Killington and Deer Valley and Winter Park , that is embracing all of our luxe cultural excesses while pursuing the very un-American ambition of putting more skiers close to skiing. No ski area is perfect. For all the cash saved on those T-bars, peak-day Waterville lift tickets still hit $145. The mountain’s season pass is the second-most expensive single-mountain season passes in New England – more than a top-line Epic Pass (an adult WV pass includes a free pass for a kid age 6 to 12, which is great if you have one of those). That’s bold pricing for the 22nd-largest ski area in New England, especially one that still spins three Stadeli chairlifts that predate the extinction of the dinosaurs. And two high-speed chairlifts is not a lot of high-speed chairlifts for a 2,000-vertical-foot ski area (though about half of New England’s 2,000-footers run just two or fewer detaches). Yeah I know. Sick burn from someone who was waxing about surface lifts four paragraphs ago. I may have collected too many ski area Lego blocks in my mental bucket, and they don’t always click together back here on planet Earth. “More villages,” I say while dismissing Aspen as a subsidized simulacrum of itself. “Big fast lifts rule,” I say while setting off fire alarms as first-generation chairlifts disintegrate and the cost of their most basic replacements escalates. “No-grooming, all-glades makes the best ski area,” I say , while condemning resort operators for $356 lift tickets that dam the masses. “Vail is too expensive,” I say . “Vail is too cheap,” I also say . “Modernize our chairlifts,” I say while celebrating the joy of riding an antique Riblet double. I endorse ski areas splitting off from conglomerates and ski areas joining them . These narratives can feel contradictory at best and schizophrenic at worst. But that tension is part of what draws me to lift-served ski areas, where two things central to my worldview – wild nature and human invention – merge. Or perhaps more accurately, collide. Both forces act at all times not only to extinguish one another, but themselves: above-freezing temps trash two feet of new snow; bad liftline management cancels out the capacity benefits of a $12 million lift upgrade. Making a ski area function, then, requires continual tweaking, of both the nuanced and look-at-us-press-release variety. A ski area is a business, sure, but that’s almost a coincidence. The act of building and running a ski area is foremost an art, architecture, and engineering project that requires a somewhat madcap conductor to succeed. As with any artform, there is no one correct and final way to build a ski area. The variety is central to skiing’s appeal. But there are operator/artist attributes - flexibility, inventiveness, consistency tempered by openness to change - that contribute to the overall quality and cohesion of the individual ski area experience in the context of competing ski areas. In the current version of Waterville Valley, we find one of our best contemporary examples of a ski area evolving toward the best version of itself under the stewardship of owners and managers possessing exactly these traits. What we talked about The return of World Cup training and events to Waterville; drifting away from and back toward freeskiing culture; the best terrain parks in New England; why terrain parks are drifting away from mega-features; what happened to all the halfpipes?; and ramps?; no really no one wore helmets in the ‘90s; building terrain parks before institutional knowledge and the internet; the lost Hidden Valley, Wisconsin ski area; the rise of the high-speed ropetow; why Waterville replaced one T-bar and one Poma with a new T-bar (rather than a chairlift); why Waterville installed night skiing; the return of the Exhibition terrain park; self-installing the World Cup T-bar; Waterville’s ops blog ; why the Tecumseh Express sixer needed new bubbles after just a couple of seasons; why bubbles cost so much and how Waterville manufactured a less expensive one; Tecumseh’s incredible wind resistance; MND lifts as an alternative to the two large U.S.-based lift manufacturers; a chairlift’s “infancy” and how different 2020s lift technology is from early detachable tech; how Waterville’s masterplan would reorient the mountain and skier traffic with an expansion and new lifts; Waterville’s declining skier visits and whether that’s a bad thing; how the resort’s 1994 bankruptcy changed Waterville’s trajectory; what stoked the Green Peak expansion; “we’ve been on a track to try to rebuild that energy we saw in the 1990s”; why Waterville turned away from discounting; “the right quantity of skiers on the right amount of surface”; building more terrain diversity; and a gondola connection from town to mountain. Should someone tell them they’re running it backwards? Video by Stuart Winchester. What I got wrong * I said that the “High Country double chair was still standing” – what I meant was that parts of it were still in place. The top terminal remains, sans bullwheel, and the base terminal and motor room remain as a patrol shack: * I said that Waterville hadn’t been known for terrain parks until recently, but Smith recalled that the ski area was more freestyle-centric from the ‘70s through the ‘90s, before pulling back during the first part of this century. * I said that 1,100 skiers per hour was “a little less than what a double chair would move,” thinking standard capacity for a double was 1,200 per hour. Smith says it is 900. Exact capacity varies from lift-to-lift, however. Lift Blog itemizes hourly capacities of between 800 and 1,200 for four of Smugglers’ Notch’s double chairs , between 1,000 and 1,200 for four of Mt. Spokane’s fleet of Riblet doubles, and 1,000 for Waterville’s Lower Meadows double. We all know, however, that the hourly capacity for a double chair is however many people are in line minus the number not paying attention minus singles who refuse to ride with anyone. So I don’t know maybe 50. Podcast Notes On other mentioned podcasts * World Cup competition returning to Sun Valley: * Heavenly backing out of mega-parks features: * Killington and the cost of bubbles: * Waterville part 1, from 2021: On Partek and each lift being different On Waterville’s ownership history Founder Tom Corcoran owned Waterville Valley from 1966 until 1994, when he sold to American Skiing Company (ASC) antecedent S-K-I. The feds made ASC dispense with Waterville and Cranmore when they merged with LBO Enterprises in 1996. Booth Creek (more on them below), bought the ski area and held it until 2010, when they sold it to the Sununu family. This makes Waterville one of just a handful of ski areas to ever enter a multi-mountain pass portfolio and then exit to independence - though Killington and Ragged recently did exactly that, and Eldora may follow. On Mt. Holiday, Michigan This is just a little 200-footer, but it’s still around on the outskirts of Traverse City, Michigan: That trailmap doesn’t really communicate the ski area’s essence. A little better are these pics I took on a summertime swing-through a few years back: I never skied there though, always preferring the far-larger Sugar Loaf, right down the road (which Smith and I also discussed): Until it was abandoned around 2000, this was one of the better ski areas in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. After a succession of owners - one of whom stripped all the chairlifts off the bump - failed to bring skiing back, the Leelanau Conservancy recently took ownership of the property. Skiing will return as an officially sanctioned activity, though unfortunately without a lift or snowmaking. I would have at least liked to have seen a ropetow. Here’s their vision: On midwestskier.com Yes, Kids, the internet really did used to look like this: On Hidden Valley, Wisconsin Here’s a little ski hill that didn’t make it. Smith spent time at Hidden Valley, Wisconsin, which opened in 1956 and closed forever in 2013. The chairlift appears to have been moved to nearby, county-run Kewaunee Winter Park, where it awaits installation. On high-speed ropetows I am a huge fan of high-speed ropetows, which are a cheap and effective means to isolate users of terrain parks or other specialized, intensive-use zones from the broader ski area. Here’s one at Spirit Mountain, Minnesota in 2023 (video by Stuart Winchester): On Waterville Valley’s masterplan This is perhaps the best angle of how Waterville’s expansion would connect the legacy trail network to the town: Here’s the Forest Service masterplan slide: Neither of these images, however, show how the gondola would eventually connect down into town, which is the crucial element of transforming Waterville Valley from a ski-area-that-says-it’s-a-ski-resort into an actual ski resort. Here’s a look at that connection: Waterville set up an excellent microsite detailing the hoped-for evolution. On Booth Creek At the mid-90s height of American Skiing Company dominance, a former Vail executive assembled a cross-country ski area portfolio with ambitions of creating a hub-and-spoke network: Booth Creek ultimately sold off most of its properties, but still own Sierra-at-Tahoe. Grand Targhee GM Geordie Gillett was involved in the whole saga and broke it down for us in 2024: On Waterville going from one of the oldest lift fleets in New England to one of the most modern While Waterville runs some of the last Stadeli lifts in America (I count 16), the ski area has modernized extensively over the past decade: On U.S. Forest Service ski areas in the East Most (109) of the 119 active U.S. ski areas on United States Forest Service leases sit in the West; two are in the Midwest, and eight are in the East: Bromley, Mount Snow, and Sugarbush, Vermont; Waterville Valley, Loon, Attitash, and Wildcat, New Hampshire; and Timberline, West Virginia. None, as far as I know, sit entirely within the boundaries of a national forest, but even partial overlap triggers the requirement to submit an updated masterplan each decade. 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 Susan Cross, Vice President of Operations at Aspen Skiing Company (and former Mountain Manager of Snowmass) Recorded on November 14, 2025 - which was well before I traveled to Snowmass and chased Cross around a bit in the pow. There she is tiny in the distance: About Aspen Skiing Company Aspen Skiing Company (Skico) is part of something called Aspen One. Don’t ask me what that is because even though they rolled it out two years ago I still have no idea what they’re talking about. All I know or care about is that they own four ski areas and here is what I know about them: Don’t be fooled by the scale of the map above - at 3,342 acres, Snowmass is larger than Aspen Mountain, Buttermilk, and Aspen Highlands combined. The monster 4,400-foot vert means these lifts are massively shrunken to fit the map - Snowmass operates three of the 10 longest chairlifts in America, and seven chairlifts over one mile long : You can’t ski or ride a lift between the four mountains, but free shuttles connect them all. Aspen Mountain, Highlands, and Buttermilk are all bunched together near town, and Snowmass is a short drive (15 to 20 minutes if traffic is clear and dependent upon which base area you want to hit): Why I interviewed her American ski areas will often re-use chairlifts or snowcats that other operators have outgrown. Aspen Mountain re-used a whole town. In 1879, Aspen the city didn’t exist, and by 1890 more than 5,000 people lived there. They came for silver, not snow. In less than a decade they laid out the Victorian street grid of brick and wood-framed buildings using hand tools and horses, with the Roaring Fork River as their supply road. Aspen’s population collapsed in the economic depressions of the 1890s and didn’t rebound to 5,000 for 100 years. The 1940 Census counted 777 residents. That was 16 years before the first chairlift rose up Ajax, a perfect ski mountain above an intact but semi-abandoned town made pointless by history. It was an amazing coincidence, really. Americans would never build a ski town on purpose. That’s where the parking lots go. But hey it all worked out: Aspen evolved into a ski town that offset its European walk-to-the-chairlifts sensibility with a hard-coded American refusal to expand the historic street grid in favor of protectionism and mansion-building. The contemporary result is one of the world’s most expensive real estate markets cosplaying as a quaint ski town, a lively and walkable mixed-use community of the sort that we idealize but refuse to build more of. Aspen’s population is now around 7,000, most of whom live there by benefit of longevity, subsidy, inheritance, or extreme wealth. The city’s median household income is just over $50,000. The median home price is $9.5 million. Anyone clinging to the illusion that Aspen is an actual ski town should consider that it took 25 years to approve and build the Hero’s chairlift. Imagine what the fellows who built this whole city in half a decade without the benefit of electricity or cement trucks or paved roads would make of that. The illusory city, however, is a dynamic separate from the skiing. Aspen, despite its somewhat dated lift fleet, remains one of America’s best small ski mountains. But it is small, and, with no green terrain and barely any blues, the ski area lacks the substance and scale to draw tourists west of Summit County and Vail. Sister mountain Snowmass does that. And while Snowmass did not benefit from an already-built town at its base, it did benefit from not having one, in that the mountain could evolve with a purpose and speed that Ajax, boxed in by geography and politics, never could. Snowmass has built 13 new aerial lifts this century, including the two-station, mountain-redefining Elk Camp Gondola; the Village Express six-pack, which is the fourth-longest chairlift in America; and, in just the past two years, a considerably lengthened Coney high-speed quad and a new six-pack to replace the Elk Camp chairlift. I’ve focused on Aspen’s story a bit over the years (including this 2021 podcast with former Skico CEO Mike Kaplan), but probably not enough. The four Aspen mountains are some of the most important in American skiing, even if visitation doesn’t quite match their status as skiing word-association champion among non-skiers (more on that below). Aspen, a leader not just in skiing but in housing, the environment, and culture, carries narrative heft, and the company’s status as favored property of Alterra part-owner Henry Crown hints at deeper influence than Skico likely takes credit for. Aspen, like Big Sky and Deer Valley and Sun Valley, is rapidly emerging as one of the new titans of American skiing, unleashing a modernization drive that should lead, as Cross says in our conversation, to an average of at least one new lift per year across the portfolio. Snowmass’ 2023 U.S. Forest Service masterplan envisions a fully modern mountain with snowmaking to the summit. Necessary and exciting as that all is, forthcoming updates to the dated masterplans at Aspen Highlands (2013) and Buttermilk (2008), could, Skico officials tell me, offer a complete rethinking of what Aspen-Snowmass is and how the ski areas orbit one another as a unit. And they do need to rethink the whole package. Challenging Skico’s pre-eminence in the Circle of American Ski Gods are many obstacles, including but not limited to: an address that’s just a bit remote for Denver to bother with or tourists to comprehend; a rinky-dink airport that can’t land a paper plane; an only-come-if-you-have-nine-houses rap on the affordability matrix; a toxic combination of one of America’s most expensive season passes and most expensive walk-up lift tickets; and national pass partners who do a poor job making it clear that Aspen is not one ski area but four. A lot to overcome, but I think they’ll figure it out. The skiing is too good not to. What we talked about “I thought I had found Heaven” upon arrival in Aspen; Aspen in the 1990s; $200 a month to live in Carbondale; “as soon as you go up on the lifts, the mountain hasn’t changed”; when Skico purchased formerly independent Aspen Highlands; Highlands pre-detachable lifts; four ski areas working (and not), as one ski resort; why there is “minimal sharing” of employees between the four mountains; why “two winter seasons, and then I was going back to Boston” didn’t quite work out; why “total guilt sets in” if Cross misses a day of skiing and how she “deliberately” makes “at least a couple of runs” happen every day of the winter and encourages everyone else to do the same; Long Shot in the morning; the four pods of Snowmass; why tourists tend to lock onto one section of the mountain; “a lot of people don’t realize their lift ticket is good for the four mountains”; “there’s plenty of room to spread out and have a blast” even at busy Snowmass; defining the four mountains without typecasting them; no seriously there are no green runs on Aspen Mountain; the new Elk Camp six-pack; why Elk Camp doesn’t terminate at the top of Burnt Mountain; why Elk Camp doesn’t have the fancy carriers that came with 2024’s new Coney Express lift; why Snowmass opted not to add bubbles to its six-packs; how Coney Express changed how skiers use Snowmass; why Coney is a quad rather than a six; why skiers can’t unload at the Coney Express mid-station (and couldn’t load last season); how Coney ended up with a mid-station and two bends along the liftline; the hazards of bending chairlifts and lessons learned from Alta’s Supreme debacle; why Snowmass replaced the Cirque Poma with a T-bar (and not a chairlift); which mountain purchased the old Poma; Aspen’s history of selling lifts and how the old Elk Camp wound up at Powderhorn ski area; where Skico had considered moving the Elk Camp quad; “we want everybody to stay in business”; why Snowmass didn’t sell or relocate the Coney Glade lift; prioritizing future chairlift upgrades; the debate over whether to replace Elk Camp or Alpine Springs first, and why Elk Camp won; “what we’re trying to do is at least one lift a year across the four mountains”; a photobomb from my cat; why the relatively new Village Express lift is a replacement candidate and where that lift could move; why we’re unlikely to see the proposed Burnt Mountain chairlift anytime soon; and the new megalift that could rise on Aspen Mountain this summer. What I got wrong * I said that Breck had “T-bars serving their high peaks,” which is incorrect. In fact, Breck runs chairlifts close to the summits of Peak 8 (Imperial Superchair, the highest chairlift in North America), and Peak 6 (Kensho Superchair). I was thinking, however, of the Horseshoe T-Bar, an incredible high-alpine machine that I rode recently (it lands below Imperial Superchair on Peak 8). * I said that Maverick Mountain, Montana, was running a “1960-something” Riblet double. The lift dates to 1969, and is slated for replacement by Aspen Mountain’s old Gent’s Ridge fixed-grip quad, which Skico removed in 2024. * I referred to the Sheer Bliss chairlift as “Super Bliss,” which I think was fallout from over-exposure to Breck, where 12 of the chairlifts are named [SOMETHING] Superchair or some similar name. Why you should ski Aspen-Snowmass Why do we ski Colorado? In some ways, it’s a dumb question. We ski Colorado because everyone skis Colorado: the state’s resorts account for 20 to 25 percent of annual U.S. skier visits, inbounds skiable acreage, and detachable chairlifts. Colorado is so synonymous with skiing that the state basically is skiing from the point of view of the outside world, especially to non-skiers who, challenged to name a ski resort, would probably come up with Vail or Aspen. But among well-traveled skiers, Colorado is Taylor Swift. Talented, yes, but a bit too obvious and sell-your-kidneys expensive. There’s a lot more music out there: Utah gets more snow, Idaho and Montana have fewer people, B.C.’s Powder Highway has both of those things. Europe is cheaper (well, everywhere is cheaper). Colorado is only home to 26 public, lift-served ski areas, and only two of the 10 largest in America. Only seven Colorado ski areas rank among the nation’s 50 snowiest by average annual snowfall. Getting there is a hassle. That awful airport. That stupid road. So many Texans. So many New Yorkers. Alternate , Man! But we all go anyway. And here’s why: Colorado ski areas claim 14 of the 20 highest base areas in North America, and 16 of the 20 highest summits. What that means is that, unlike in Tahoe or Park City or Idaho, it never rains. Temperatures rarely top freezing. That means the snow that falls stays, and stays nice. Even in a mediocre Rocky Mountain winter – like this one – Colorado is able to deliver a consistent and predictable trail footprint in a way that no other U.S. ski state can match. Add in an abundance of approachable, intermediate-oriented ski terrain, and it’s clear why America’s two largest ski area operators center their multi-mountain pass empires in Colorado. Which brings us back to the thing most skiers hate the most about Colorado skiing: other skiers. There are just so many of them. And they all planned the same vacation. For the same time. But there is a back door. Around half of Colorado’s 12 to 14 million annual skier visits occur at just five ski areas: Vail Mountain, Breck, Keystone, Copper, and Steamboat – often but not always strictly in that order. Next comes Winter Park, then Beaver Creek. And all the way down at number eight for Colorado annual skier visits is Snowmass. Snowmass’ 771,259 skier visits is still a lot of skier visits. But consider some additional stats: Snowmass is the third-largest ski area in Colorado and the 11th-largest in America. From a skier visits-to-skiable-acreage ratio, it comes in way below the state’s other 2,000-plus-acre ski areas (save Telluride, which is even more remote than Aspen): Why is that? The map explains it: Snowmass, and Aspen in general, lost the I-70 sweepstakes. They’re too far west, too far off the interstate (so is Steamboat, but at least they have a real airport). Snowmass is worth the extra drive time. I-70 through Glenwood Canyon is slow-going but gorgeous, and the 40 miles of Colorado 82 after the interstate turnoff barely qualify as mountain driving – four lanes most of the way, no tight turns, some congestion but only if you’re arriving in the morning. A roundabout or two and there you are at Snowmass. And here’s what that extra two hours of driving gets you: all the benefits of Colorado skiing absent most of its drawbacks. Goldilocks Mountain. Here you’ll find the fourth-highest lift-served summit in American skiing, the second-tallest vertical drop, and a dizzying, dazzling modern lift fleet spinning 20 lifts, including 9 detachables and a gondola. You’ll find glorious ever-cruisers, tree-dotted and infinite; long bumpers twisting off High Alpine; comically approachable green zones at the village and mid-mountain. If Campground double is open, you can sample Colorado skiing circa 1975, alone in the big empty lapping the long, slow lift. And since the Brobots hate Snowmass, the high-altitude Hanging Valley and Cirque Headwall expert zones are always empty. That’s one of four mountains. Towering, no-greens-for-real Aspen Mountain and Aspen Highlands are as rugged and wicked as anything a Colorado chairlift can drop you onto. And Buttermilk is just delightful – 2,000 vertical feet of no-stress-with-the-9-year-old, with fast lifts back to the top all day long. Podcast Notes On Sugarbush and Mad River Glen I always like to make this point for western partisans: there is eastern skiing that stacks up well against the average western ski experience. Most of it is in northern Vermont, and two of the best, terrain-wise, are Alterra-owned Sugarbush - home of the longest chairlift in the world - and co-op-owned Mad River Glen, which still spins the only single chair in the lower 48. Here’s Sugarbush: Mad River Glen is right next door. Just keep going looker’s right off Mt. Ellen: On pre-Skico Highlands Whoa that’s a lot of lifts. And they’re almost all doubles and Pomas. On Joe Hession Hession is founder and CEO of Snow Partners, which owns Mountain Creek ski area, the Big Snow indoor ski ramp in New Jersey, Snow Cloud resort-management software, the Snow Triple Play Pass, and the Terrain Based Learning concept that you see in beginner areas all over America. He’s been on the pod a few times, and he’s a huge fan of Susan’s. On Timberline’s wonky vert Measuring vertical drop is a somewhat hazardous game. Potential asterisks include the clandestine inclusion of hike-up terrain (Aspen Highlands), ski-down terrain with no return lift access (Sunlight), or both (Arapahoe Basin). Generally, I refer to lift-served vert, meaning what you can ski down and ride back up without walking. But even that gets tricky, as in the case of Timberline Lodge, Oregon, home to the tallest vertical drop in American lift-served skiing. We have to get mighty creative with the definition of “lift” however, since Timberline includes a 557-vertical-foot lift-served gap between the top of the Summit chairlift (4,290 feet) and the bottom of the Jeff Flood high-speed quad (4,847 feet). This is the result of two historically separate ski areas combining in 2018: Timberline’s masterplan calls for a gondola from the base of Summit up to the top of Jeff Flood: For now, skiers can ski all the way down, but have to ride back up to Timberline from the Summit base via shuttle. To further complicate the calculus here, the hyper-exposed Palmer high-speed summit quad rarely runs in winter, acting mostly as a summer workhorse for camp kids. When Palmer’s not running, a snowcat will sometimes shuttle skiers close to the unload point. Anyway , that’s the fine print annotating our biggest lift-served vertical drop list: On Big Sky’s new lifts and pod-sticking Snowmass’ recent lift upgrade splurges are impressive, but Big Sky has built an incredible 12 aerial lifts in the past decade, 11 of them brand-new. These are some of the most sophisticated lifts in the world and include two six-packs, two eight-packs, a tram, and two gondolas. This reverse chronology of Big Sky’s active lifts doubles as a neat history of the mountain’s evolution from striver importing other resorts’ leftovers to one of the top ski areas on the continent: Big Sky still has some older chairs spinning along its margins, but plenty of tourists spend their entire vacation just lapping the out-of-base super lifts (according to on-the-ground staff). The only peer Big Sky has in the recent American lift upgrade game is Deer Valley, which has erected nearly a dozen aerial lifts in just the past two years to feed its mega-expansion. On the Ikon Pass site being confusing as to mountain access I just find the classification of four separate and distinct ski areas as one “destination” confusing, especially for skiers who aren’t familiar with the place: On the new Elk Camp chairlift The upside of taking nine years to distribute this podcast is that I was able to go ride Snowmass’ gorgeous new Elk Camp sixer: On my Superstar lift discussion with Killington On Aspen’s history of selling lifts I somewhat overstated Aspen’s history of selling lifts to smaller mountains. It seemed like a lot, though these are the only ones I can find records of: However, given Skico’s enormous number of retired Riblets (28, all but two of which were doubles), and the durability and ubiquity of these machines, I suspect that pieces – and perhaps wholes – of Aspen’s retired chairlifts are scattered in boneyards across the West. On the small number of relocated detachable lifts Given that the world’s first modern detachable chairlift debuted at Breckenridge 45 years ago, it’s astonishing how few have been relocated. Only 19 U.S. detaches that started life within the U.S. are now operating elsewhere in the country, and only nine moved to a different ski area: On Powderhorn’s West End chair The number of relocated detachables is set to increase to 10 next year, when Powderhorn, Colorado repurposes Snowmass’ old Elk Camp quad to replace this amazing, 7,000-foot-long double chair, a 1972 Heron-Poma machine: Elk Camp is already sitting in a pile beside the load station (Powderhorn officials tell me the carriers are also onsite, but elsewhere): Powderhorn’s existing high-speed quad, the Flat Top Flyer, also came used, from Marble Mountain in Canada. On Snowmass’ masterplan and the proposed Burnt Mountain lift Snowmass’ most recent U.S. Forest Service masterplan, released in 2022, shows the approximate location of a future hypothetical Burnt Mountain chairlift (the left-most red dotted line below): Unfortunately, Cross and the rest of Skico’s leadership seem fairly unenthusiastic about actually building this lift. Right now, skiers can hike from the top of Elk Camp chair to access this terrain. On Aspen’s Nell-Bell Proposal Oh man how freaking cool would it be to ride one chairlift from Aspen’s base to the top of Bell? Cross and I discuss Aspen Mountain’s Forest Service application to do exactly that, with a machine along roughly this line parallel to the gondola: The new detachable would replace two rarely-used chairs: the Nell fixed-grip quad and the Bell Mountain double chair, which, incredibly, dates to 1957 (with heavy modifications in the 1980s), making it the fourth-oldest standing chairlift in the nation (after Mt. Spokane’s 1956 Vista Cruiser Riblet, Mad River Glen’s 1946 American Steel & Wire single chair, and Boyne Mountain’s Hemlock Riblet double, moved to Michigan in 1948 after starting life circa 1936 as America’s first chairlift – a single standing at Sun Valley). I lucked out with a gondola wind hold when I was in Aspen a few weeks back, meaning Nell was spinning: Sadly, Bell was idle, but I skied the liftline and loaded up on photos: On the original Lift 1 at Aspen Behold Lift 1 on Aspen Mountain, a 1

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 Connecticut-born transplant who has been living the upside-down life for more than 50 years, is probably better suited than anyone on the planet to give us that intro. What we talked about Reverse ski seasons; why Corralco draws (and retains) so much more snow than any other ski area in Chile; no snowmaking; Corralco as training ground for national ski teams; the logistics of moving a high-speed quad from Holiday Valley, New York to the Chilean Andes; rebuilding a lift as a longer machine; how that lift transformed Corralco; new lift, new alignment; the business impact of replacing a double chair with a high-speed quad; how a dude who grew up in Connecticut with non-skiing parents ended up running a ski area in South America; Chile’s allure; Portillo; Chilean skiing past and present; Corralco’s founding and evolution; shrinking South American ski areas; Mountain Capital Partners (MCP) buying four more ski areas in Chile after purchasing Valle Nevado in 2023 and La Parva in 2024; the Americans are coming; why La Parva, Valle Nevado, and El Colorado “have to be consolidated” for the benefit of future skiing in Chile; MCP’s impact on Chilean skiing so far; “the culture is very different here” both on the hill and off; MCP’s challenges as they settle into Chilean skiing; why Corralco joined Indy Pass; a potential Indy Pass network in South America; and getting to Corralco from the U.S., from airplane to access road – “we have no switchbacks.” What I got wrong * In the intro, I said that it was the “heart of ski season in South America.” This was true when we recorded this conversation in July 2025. It’s not true in January 2026, when the Chilean ski season is long over. * I said the highest peak in Chile only received a few inches of snow per year and didn’t retain it, but I couldn’t remember the name of the peak – it is 22,615-foot Ojos del Salado. * I gave new stats for Corralco’s high-speed quad, but did not mention where those stats came from – my source was skiresort.info , which catalogues a 4,921-foot length and 1,148-foot vertical drop for the lift, both substantially longer than the 4,230-foot length and 688-foot vertical rise that Lift Blog documents for the antecedent Mardi Gras lift at Holiday Valley, New York. We discuss the logistics and mechanics of moving this machine from North to South America and extending it in the pod. Here are a few pics of this machine I took in New York in January 2022: Podcast Notes On Corralco’s evolving footprint Corralco is a new-ish ski area, at least insofar as public access goes. The 2008 trailmap shows a modest vertical drop served by surface lifts: But growth has been rapid, and by 2022, the ski area resembled modern Corralco, which is now an international training center for athletes: On Camp Jewel, Connecticut Ackerson learned to ski on a two-tow bump called Camp Jewell, a YMCA center in Connecticut. NELSAP has some fun info on this defunct ski area, including photos of what’s left of the lifts. On Sigi Grottendorder Ackerson’s conduit to South American skiing came in the form of Austrian-born Sigi Grottendorfer, who led the ski schools at both Sugarbush, Vermont and Portillo, Chile. He passed away in 2023 – The Valley Reporter ran an obituary with more info on Grottendorfer’s expansive and colorful life. On Chile “five years after the coup had occurred” We reference past political instability in Chile, referring to the 1973 coup that launched the military dictatorship of the notorious Augusto Pinochet. The nation transitioned back to democracy in 1990 and is considered safe and stable for tourists by the U.S. State Department. On Portillo We discuss Portillo, a Chilean ski area whose capacity limits and weeklong ski-and-stay packages result in Windham-is-private-style ( it’s not ) confusion. Skiers can visit Portillo on a day pass. Lift tickets are all of $68. Still, the hotel experience is, by all accounts, pretty rad. Here’s the bump: On previous podcasts We mention a few previous podcast guests who had parallels to Ackerson’s story. Bogus Basin GM Brad Wilson also left skiing for several years to run a non-ski resort: Longtime Valle Nevado GM Ricardo Margolis appeared on this podcast in 2023: On the shrinking of Volcán Osorno and Pillán I won’t reset the entire history here, but I broke down the slow shrinkage of Volcán Osorno and Pillán ski areas when Mountain Capital Partners bid to purchase them last year: On Kamori Kankō buying Heavenly For a brief period, Japanese company Kamori Kankō owned Steamboat and Heavenly. The company sold both to American Skiing Company in 1997, and they eventually split owners, with Heavenly joining Vail’s roster in 2002, and Steamboat now part of Alterra by way of Intrawest. Today, Kamori Kankō appears to operate five ski areas in Japan, all in Hokkaido, most notably Epic Pass partner Rusutsu: On MCP’s free season passes for kids 12 and under One pretty cool thing that Mountain Capital Partners has brought to Chile from its U.S. HQ is free season passes for kids 12 and under. It’s pretty incredible: On Sugarbush Ackerson worked for a long time at Sugarbush, an Alterra staple and one of the best overall ski areas in New England. It’s a fully modern resort, with the exception of the knockout Castle Rock terrain, which still spins a double chair on all-natural snow: On skiing El Colorado We discuss the insane, switchbacking access road up to El Colorado/La Parva/Valle Nevado from Santiago: The route up to Corralco is far more suited to mortals: 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 Ryan Brown, Director of Golf & Ski at The Mountaintop at Grand Geneva, Wisconsin Recorded on June 17, 2025 About the Mountaintop at Grand Geneva Click here for a mountain stats overview Owned by: Marcus Hotels Located in: Lake Geneva, Wisconsin Year founded: 1968 Pass affiliations: None Closest neighboring U.S. ski areas: Alpine Valley (:23), Wilmot Mountain (:29), Crystal Ridge (:48), Alpine Hills Adventure Park (1:04) Base elevation: 847 feet Summit elevation: 962 feet Vertical drop: 115 feet Skiable acres: 30 Average annual snowfall: 34 inches Trail count: 21 (41% beginner, 41% intermediate, 18% advanced) Lift count: 6 (3 doubles, 1 ropetow, 2 carpets) Why I interviewed him Of America’s various mega-regions, the Midwest is the quietest about its history. It lacks the quaint-town Colonialism and Revolutionary pride of the self-satisfied East, the cowboy wildness and adobe earthiness of the West, the defiant resentment of the Lost Glory South. Our seventh-grade Michigan History class stapled together the state’s timeline mostly as a series of French explorers passing through on their way to somewhere more interesting. They were followed by a wave of industrial loggers who mowed the primeval forests into pancakes. Then the factories showed up. And so the state’s legacy was framed not as one of political or cultural or military primacy, but of brand, the place that stamped out Chevys and Fords by the tens of millions. To understand the Midwest, then, we must look for what’s permanent. The land itself won’t do. It’s mostly soil, mostly flat. Great for farming, bad for vistas. Dirt doesn’t speak to the soul like rock, like mountains. What humans built doesn’t tell us a much better story. Everything in the Midwest feels too new to conceal ghosts. The largest cities rose late, were destroyed in turn by fires and freeways, eventually recharged with arenas and glass-walled buildings that fail to echo or honor the past. Nothing lasts: the Detroit Pistons built the Palace of Auburn Hills in 1988 and developers demolished it 32 years later; the Detroit Lions (and, for a time, the Pistons) played at the Pontiac Silverdome, a titanic, 82,600-spectator stadium that opened in 1976 and came down in 2013 (37 years old). History seemed to bypass the region, corralling the major wars to the east and shooing the natural disasters to the west and south. Even shipwrecks lose their doubloons-and-antique-cannons romance in the Midwest: the Great Lakes most famous downed vessel, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald , sank into Lake Superior in 1975. Her cargo was 26,535 tons of taconite ore pellets. A sad story, but not exactly the sinking of the Titanic . Our Midwest ancestors did leave us one legacy that no one has yet demolished: names. Place names are perhaps the best cultural relics of the various peoples who occupied this land since the glaciers retreated 12,000-ish years ago. Thousands of Midwest cities, towns, and counties carry Native American names. “Michigan” is derived from the Algonquin “Mishigamaw,” meaning “big lake”; “Minnesota” from the Sioux word meaning “cloudy water.” The legacies of French explorers and missionaries live on in “Detroit” (French for “strait”), “Marquette” (17th century French missionary Jacques Marquette), and “Eau Claire” (“clear water”). But one global immigration funnel dominated what became the modern Midwest: 50 percent of Wisconsin’s population descends from German, Nordic, or Scandinavian countries, who arrived in waves from the Colonial era through the early 1900s. The surnames are everywhere: Schmitz and Meyer and Webber and Schultz and Olson and Hanson. But these Old-Worlders came a bit late to name the cities and towns. So they named what they built instead. And they built a lot of ski areas. Ten of Wisconsin’s 34 ski areas carry names evocative of Europe’s cold regions, Scandinavia and the Alps: I wonder what it must have been like, in 18-something-or-other, to leave a place where the Alps stood high on the horizon, where your family had lived in the same stone house for centuries, and sail for God knows how many weeks or months across an ocean, and slow roll overland by oxen cart or whatever they moved about in back then, and at the end of this great journey find yourself in… Wisconsin? They would have likely been unprepared for the landscape aesthetic. Tourism is a modern invention. “The elite of ancient Egypt spent their fortunes building pyramids and having their corpses mummified, but none of them thought of going shopping in Babylon or taking a skiing holiday in Phoenicia [partly in present-day Lebanon, which is home to as many as seven ski areas],” Yuval Noah Harari writes in Sapiens his 2015 “brief history of humankind.” Imagine old Friedrich, who had never left Bavaria, reconstituting his world in the hillocks and flats of the Midwest. Nothing against Wisconsin, but fast-forward 200 years, when the robots can give us a side-by-side of the upper Midwest and the European Alps, and it’s pretty clear why one is a global tourist destination and the other is known mostly as a place that makes a lot of cheese. And well you can imagine why Friedrich might want to summon a little bit of the old country to the texture of his life in the form of a ski area name. That these two worlds - the glorious Alps and humble Wisconsin skiing - overlap, even in a handful of place names, suggests a yearning for a life abandoned, a natural act of pining by a species that was not built to move their life across timezones. This is not a perfect analysis. Most – perhaps none – of these ski areas was founded by actual immigrants, but by their descendants. The Germanic languages spoken by these immigrant waves did not survive assimilation. But these little cultural tokens did. The aura of ancestral place endured when even language fell away. These little ski areas honor that. And by injecting grandiosity into the everyday, they do something else. In coloring some of the world’s most compact ski centers with the aura of some of its most iconic, their founders left us a message: these ski areas, humble as they are, matter. They fuse us to the past and they fuse us to the majesty of the up-high, prove to us that skiing is worth doing anywhere that it can be done, ensure that the ability to move like that and to feel the things that movement makes you feel are not exclusive realms fenced into the clouds, somewhere beyond means and imagination. Which brings us to Grand Geneva, a ski area name that evokes the great Swiss gateway city to the Alps. Too bad reality rarely matches up with the easiest narrative. The resort draws its name from the nearby town of Lake Geneva, which a 19th-century surveyor named not after the Swiss city, but after Geneva, New York, a city (that is apparently named after Geneva, Switzerland), on the shores of Seneca Lake, the largest of the state’s 11 finger lakes. Regardless, the lofty name was the fifth choice for a ski area originally called “Indian Knob.” That lasted three years, until the ski area shuttered and re-opened as the venerable Playboy Ski Area in 1968. More regrettable names followed – Americana Resort from 1982 to ’93, Hotdog Mountain from 1992 to ’94 – before going with the most obvious and least-questionable name, though its official moniker, “The Mountaintop at Grand Geneva” is one of the more awkward names in American skiing. None of which explains the principal question of this sector: why I interviewed Mr. Brown. Well, I skied a bunch of Milwaukee bumps on my drive up to Bohemia from Chicago last year, this was one of them, and I thought it was a cute little place. I also wondered how, with its small-even-for-Wisconsin vertical drop and antique lift collection, the place had endured in a state littered with abandoned ski areas. Consider it another entry into my ongoing investigation into why the ski areas that you would not always expect to make it are often the ones that do. What we talked about Fighting the backyard effect – “our customer base – they don’t really know” that the ski areas are making snow; a Chicago-Milwaukee-Madison bullseye; competing against the Vail-owned mountain to the south and the high-speed-laced ski area to the north; a golf resort with a ski area tacked on; “you don’t need a big hill to have a great park”; brutal Midwest winters and the escape of skiing; I attempt to talk about golf again and we’re probably done with that for a while; Boyne Resorts as a “top golf destination”; why Grand Geneva moved its terrain park; whether the backside park could re-open; “we’ve got some major snowmaking in the works”; potential lift upgrades; no bars on the lifts; the ever-tradeoff between terrain parks and beginner terrain; the ski area’s history as a Playboy Club and how the ski hill survived into the modern era; how the resort moves skiers to the hill with hundreds of rooms and none of them on the trails; thoughts on Indy Pass; and Lake Geneva lake life. What I got wrong We recorded this conversation prior to Sunburst’s joining Indy Pass, so I didn’t mention the resort when discussing Wisconsin ski areas on the product. Podcast Notes On the worst season in the history of the Midwest I just covered this in the article that accompanied the podcast on Treetops, Michigan, but I’ll summarize it this way: the 2023-24 ski season almost broke the Midwest. Fortunately, last winter was better, and this year is off to a banging start. On steep terrain beneath lift A I just thought this was a really unexpected and cool angle for such a little hill. On the Playboy Club From SKI magazine, December 1969 : It is always interesting when giants merge. Last winter Playboy magazine (5.5 million readers) and the Playboy Club (19 swinging nightclubs from Hawaii to New York to Jamaica, with 100,000 card-carrying members) in effect joined the sport of skiing, which is also a large, but less formal, structure of 3.5 million lift-ticket-carrying members. The resulting conglomerate was the Lake Geneva Playboy Club-Hotel, Playboy’s ski resort on the rolling plains of Wisconsin. The Playboy Club people must have borrowed the idea of their costumed Bunny Waitress from the snow bunny of skiing fame, and since Playboy and skiing both manifestly devote themselves to the pleasures of the body, some sort of merger was inevitable. Out of this union, obviously, issued the Ultimate Ski Bunny – one able to ski as well as sport the scanty Bunny costume to lustrous perfection. That’s a bit different from how the resort positions its ski facilities today: Enjoy southern Wisconsin’s gem - our skiing and snow resort in the countryside of Lake Geneva, with the best ski hills in Wisconsin. The Mountain Top at Grand Geneva Resort & Spa boasts 20 downhill ski runs and terrain designed for all ages, groups and abilities, making us one of the best ski resorts in Wisconsin. Just an hour from Milwaukee and Chicago, our ski resort in Lake Geneva is close enough to home for convenience, but far enough for you and your family to have an adventure. Our ultimate skier’s getaway offers snowmaking abilities that allow our ski resort to stay open even when there is no snow falling. The Mountain Top offers ski and snow accommodations, such as trolley transportation available from guest rooms at Grand Geneva and Timber Ridge Lodge , three chairlifts, two carpet lifts, a six-acre terrain park, excellent group rates, food and drinks at Leinenkugel’s Mountain Top Lodge and even night skiing. We have more than just skiing! Enjoy Lake Geneva sledding, snowshoeing and cross-country skiing too. Truly something for everyone at The Mountain Top ski resort in Lake Geneva. No ski equipment? No problem with the Learn to Ride rentals . Come experience The Mountain Top at Grand Geneva and enjoy the best skiing around Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. On lost Wisconsin and Midwest ski areas The Midwest Lost Ski Areas Project counts 129 lost ski areas in Wisconsin. I’ve yet to order these Big Dumb Chart-style , but there are lots of cool links in here that can easily devour your day. The Storm explores the world of North American lift-served skiing year-round. Join us. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

Who Mike Giorgio, Vice President and General Manager of Stowe Mountain , Vermont Recorded on October 8, 2025 About Stowe Click here for a mountain stats overview Owned by: Vail Resorts, which also owns: Located in: Stowe, Vermont Year founded: 1934 Pass affiliations: * Epic Pass: unlimited access * Epic Local Pass: unlimited access with holiday blackouts * Epic Northeast Value Pass: 10 days with holiday blackouts * Epic Northeast Midweek Pass: 5 midweek days with holiday blackouts * Access on Epic Day Pass All and 32 Resort tiers * Ski Vermont 4 Pass – up to one day, with blackouts * Ski Vermont Fifth Grade Passport – 3 days, with blackouts Closest neighboring U.S. ski areas: Smugglers’ Notch (ski-to or 40-ish-minute drive in winter, when route 108 is closed over the notch), Bolton Valley (:45), Cochran’s (:50), Mad River Glen (:55), Sugarbush (:56) Base elevation: 1,265 feet (at Toll House double) Summit elevation: 3,625 feet (top of the gondola), 4,395 feet at top of Mt. Mansfield Vertical drop: 2,360 feet lift-served, 3,130 feet hike-to Skiable acres: 485 Average annual snowfall: 314 inches Trail count: 116 (16% beginner, 55% intermediate, 29% advanced) Lift count: 12 (1 eight-passenger gondola, 1 six-passenger gondola, 1 six-pack, 3 high-speed quads, 1 fixed-grip quad, 1 triple, 2 doubles, 2 carpets) Why I interviewed him There is no Aspen of the East, but if I had to choose an Aspen of the East, it would be Stowe. And not just because Aspen Mountain and Stowe offer a similar fierce-down, with top-to-bottom fall-line zippers and bumpy-bumps spliced by massive glade pockets. Not just because each ski area rises near the far end of densely bunched resorts that the skier must drive past to reach them. Not just because the towns are similarly insular and expensive and tucked away. Not just because the wintertime highway ends at both places, an anachronistic act of surrender to nature from a mechanized world accustomed to fencing out the seasons. And not just because each is a cultural stand-in for mechanized skiing in a brand-obsessed, half-snowy nation that hates snow and is mostly filled with non-skiers who know nothing about the activity other than the fact that it exists. Everyone knows about Aspen and Stowe even if they’ll never ski, in the same way that everyone knows about LeBron James even if they’ve never watched basketball. All of that would be sufficient to make the Stowe-is-Aspen-East argument. But the core identity parallel is one that threads all these tensions while defying their assumed outcome. Consider the remoteness of 1934 Stowe and 1947 Aspen, two mountains in the pre-snowmaking, pre-interstate era, where cutting a ski area only made sense because that’s where it snowed the most. Both grew in similar fashion. First slowly toward the summit with surface lifts and mile-long single chairs crawling up the incline. Then double chairs and gondolas and snowguns and detachable chairlifts. A ski area for the town evolves into a ski area for the world. Hotels a la luxe at the base, traffic backed up to the interstate, corporate owners and $261 lift tickets. That sounds like a formula for a ruined world. But Stowe the ski area, like Aspen Mountain the ski area, has never lost its wild soul. Even buffed out and six-pack equipped and Epic Pass-enabled, Stowe remains a hell of a mountain, one of the best in New England, one of my favorite anywhere. With its monster snowfalls, its endless and perfectly spaced glades, its never-groomed expert zones, its sprawling footprint tucked beneath the Mansfield summit, its direct access to rugged and forbidding backcountry, Stowe, perhaps the most western-like mountain in the East, remains a skier’s mountain, a fierce and humbling proving ground, an any-skier’s destination not because of its trimmings, but because of the Christmas tree itself. Still, Stowe will never be Aspen, because Stowe does not sit at 8,000 feet and Stowe does not have three accessory ski areas and Stowe the Town does not grid from the lift base like Aspen the Town but rather lies eight miles down the road. Also Stowe is owned by Vail Resorts, and can you just imagine? But in a cultural moment that assumes ski area ruination-by-the-consolidation-modernization-mega-passification axis-of-mainstreaming, Aspen and Stowe tell mirrored versions of a more nuanced story. Two ski areas, skinned in the digital-mechanical infrastructure that modernity demands, able to at once accommodate the modern skier and the ancient mountain, with all of its quirks and character. All of its amazing skiing. What we talked about Stowe the Legend; Vail Resorts’ leadership carousel; ascending to ski area leadership without on-mountain experience; Mount Brighton, Michigan and Midwest skiing; struggles at Paoli Peaks, Indiana; how the Sunrise six-pack upgrade of the old Mountain triple changed the mountain; whether the Four Runner quad could ever become a six-pack; considering the future of the Lookout Double and Mansfield Gondola; who owns the land in and around the ski area; whether Stowe has terrain expansion potential; the proposed Smugglers’ Notch gondola connection and whether Vail would ever buy Smuggs; “you just don’t understand how much is here until you’re here”; why Stowe only claims 485 acres of skiable terrain; protecting the Front Four; extending Stowe’s season last spring; snowmaking in a snowbelt; the impact and future of paid parking; on-mountain bed-base potential; Epic Friend 50 percent off lift tickets; and Stowe locals and the Epic Pass. What I got wrong On details I noted that one of my favorite runs was not a marked run at all: the terrain beneath the Lookout double chair. In fact, most of the trail beneath this mile-plus-long lift is a market run called, uh, “Lookout.” So I stand corrected. However, the trailmap makes this full-throttle, narrow bumper – which feels like skiing on a rising tide – look wide, peaceful, and groomable. It is none of those things, at least for its first third or so. On skiable acres * I said that Killington claimed “like 1,600 acres” of terrain – the exact claimed number is 1,509 acres. * I said that Mad River Glen claimed far fewer skiable acres than it probably could, but I was thinking of an out-of-date stat. The mountain claims just 115 acres of trails – basically nothing for a 2,000-vertical-foot mountain, but also “800 acres of tree-skiing access.” The number listed on the Pass Smasher Deluxe is 915 acres. On season closings I intimated that Stowe had always closed the third weekend in April. That appears to be mostly true for the past two-ish decades, which is as far back as New England Ski History has records. The mountain did push late once, however, in 2007, and closed early during the horrible no-snow winter of 2011-12 (April 1), and the Covid-is-here-to-kill-us-all shutdown of 2020 (March 14). On doing better prep I asked whether Stowe had considered making its commuter bus free, but it, um, already is. That’s called Reeserch, Folks. On lift ticket rates I claimed that Stowe’s top lift ticket price would drop from $239 last year to $235 this coming season, but that’s inaccurate. Upon further review, the peak walk-up rate appears to be increasing to $261 this coming winter: Which means Vail’s record of cranking Stowe lift ticket rates up remains consistent: On opening hours I said that the lifts at Stowe sometimes opened at “7:00 or 7:30,” but the earliest ski lift currently opens at 8:00 most mornings (the Over Easy transit gondola opens at 7:30). The Fourrunner quad used to open at 7:30 a.m. on weekends and holidays. I’m not sure when mountain ops changed that. Here’s the lift schedule clipped from the circa 2018 trailmap: On Mount Brighton, Michigan’s supposed trashheap legacy I’d read somewhere, sometime, that Mount Brighton had been built on dirt moved to make way for Interstate 96, which bores across the state about a half mile north of the ski area. The timelines match, as this section of I-96 was built between 1956 and ’57, just before Brighton opened in 1960. This circa 1962 article from The Livingston Post , a local paper, fails to mention the source of the dirt, leaving me uncertain as to whether or not the hill is related to the highway: Why you should ski Stowe From my April 10 visit last winter, just cruising mellow, low-angle glades nearly to the base: I mean, the place is just: I love it, Man. My top five New England mountains, in no particular order, are Sugarbush, Stowe, Jay, Smuggs, and Sugarloaf. What’s best on any given day depends on conditions and crowding, but if you only plan to ski the East once, that’s your list. Podcast Notes On Stowe being the last 1,000-plus-vertical-foot Vermont ski area that I featured on the pod You can view the full podcast catalogue here . But here are the past Vermont eps: * Killington & Pico – 2019 | 2023 | 2025 * Stratton 2024 * Okemo 2023 * Middlebury Snowbowl 2023 * Mount Snow 2020 | 2023 * Bromley 2022 * Jay Peak 2022 | 2020 * Smugglers’ Notch 2021 * Bolton Valley 2021 * Hermitage Club 2020 * Sugarbush 2020 with current president John Hammond | 2020 with past owner Win Smith * Mad River Glen 2020 * Magic Mountain 2019 | 2020 * Burke 2019 On Stowe having “peers, but no betters” in New England While Stowe doesn’t stand out in any one particular statistical category, the whole of the place stacks up really well to the rest of New England - here’s a breakdown of the 63 public ski areas that spin chairlifts across the six-state region: On the Front Four ski runs The “Front Four” are as synonymous with Stowe as the Back Bowls are with Vail Mountain or Corbet’s Couloir is with Jackson Hole. These Stowe trails are steep, narrow, double-plus-fall-line bangers that, along with Castlerock at Sugarbush and Paradise at Mad River Glen, are among the most challenging runs in New England. The problem is determining which of the double-blacks spiderwebbing off the top of Fourrunner are part of the Front Four. Officially, the designation has always bucketed National, Liftline, Goat, and Starr together, but Bypass, Haychute, and Lookout could sub in most days. Credit to Stowe for keeping these wild trails intact for going on a century, but what I said about them “not being for the masses” on the podcast wasn’t quite accurate, as the lower portions of many - especially Liftline - are wide, often groomed, and not particularly treacherous. The best end-to-end trail is Goat, which is insanely steep and narrow up top. Here’s part of Goat’s middle-to-lower section, which is mellower but a good portrayal of New England bumpy, exposed-dirt-and-rocks gnar, especially at the :19 mark: The most glorious ego boost (or ego check) is the few hundred vertical feet of Liftline directly below Fourrunner. Sound on for scrapey-scrape: When the cut trails get icy, you can duck into the adjacent glades, most of which are unmarked but skiable. Here, I bailed into the trees skier’s left of Starr to escape the ice rink: On Vail Resorts’ leadership shuffles Twelve of Vail’s 37 North American ski areas began the 2024-25 ski season with a different leader than they ended the 2023-24 ski season with. This included five of the company’s New England resorts, including Stowe. Giorgio, in fact, became the ski area’s third general manager in three winters, and the fourth since Vail acquired the ski area in 2017. I asked Giorgio about this, as a follow up to a similar set of questions I’d laid out for Vail Resorts CEO Rob Katz in August: I may be overthinking this, but check this out: between 2017 and 2024, Vail Resorts changed leadership at its North American ski areas more than 70 times - the yellow boxes below mark a new president-general-manager equivalent (red boxes indicate that Vail did not yet own the ski area): To reset my thinking here: I can’t say that this constant leadership shuffle is inherently dysfunctional, and most Vail Resorts employees I speak with appreciate the company’s upward-mobility culture. And I consistently find Vail’s mountain leaders - dozens of whom I have hosted on this podcast - to be smart, earnest, and caring. However, it’s hard to imagine that the constant turnover in top management isn’t at least somewhat related to Vail Resorts’ on-the-ground reputational issues, truncated seasons at non-core ski areas (see Paoli Peaks section below), and general sense that the company’s arc of investment bends toward its destination resorts. On Peak Resorts Vail purchased all of Peak Resorts, including Mount Snow, where Giorgio worked, in 2019. Here’s that company’s growth timeline: On Vernon Valley-Great Gorge The ski area now known as Mountain Creek was Vernon Valley-Great Gorge until 1997. Anyone who grew up in the area still calls the joint by its legacy name. On Paoli Peaks versus Perfect North My hope is that if I complain enough about Paoli Peaks, Vail will either invest enough in snowmaking to tranform it into a functional ski area or sell it. Here are the differences between Paoli’s season lengths since 2013 as compared to Perfect North, its competitor that is the only other active ski area in the state: What explains this longstanding disparity, which certainly predates Vail’s 2019 acquisition of the ski area? Paoli does sit southwest of Perfect North, but its base is 200 feet higher (600 feet, versus 400 for Perfect), so elevation doesn’t explain it. Perfect does benefit from a valley location, which, longtime GM Jonathan Davis told me a few years back, locks in the cold air and supercharges snowmaking. The simplest answer, however, is probably the correct one: Perfect North has built one of the most impressive snowmaking systems on the planet, and they use it aggressively, cranking more than 200 guns at once. At peak operations, Perfect can transform from green grass to skiable terrain in just a couple of days. So yes, Perfect has always been a better operation than Paoli. But check this out: Paoli’s performance as compared to Perfect’s has been considerably worse in the five full seasons of Vail Resorts’ ownership (excluding 2019-20), than in the six seasons before, with Perfect besting Paoli to open by an average of 21 days before Vail arrived, and by 31 days after. Perfect’s seasons lasted an average of 25 days longer than Paoli’s before Vail arrived, and 38 days longer after: Yes, Paoli is a uniquely challenged ski area, but I’m confident that someone can do a better job running this place than Vail has been doing since 2019. Certainly, that someone could be Vail, which has the resources and institutional knowledge to transform this, or any ski area, into a center of SnoSportSkiing excellence. So far, however, they have declined to do so, and I keep thinking of what Davis, Perfect North’s longtime GM, said on the pod in 2022: “If Vail doesn’t want [its ski areas in Indiana and Ohio], we’ll take them!” On the 2022 Sunrise Six replacement for the triple In 2022, Stowe replaced the Mountain triple chair, which sat up a flight of steep steps from the parking lot, with the at-grade Sunrise six-pack. It was the kind of big-time lift upgrade that transforms the experience of an entire ski area for everyone, whether they use the new lift or not, by pulling skiers toward a huge pod of underutilized terrain and away from longtime alpha lifts Fourrunner and the Mansfield Gondola. On Fourrunner as a vert machine Stowe’s Fourruner high-speed quad is one of the most incredible lifts in American skiing, a lightspeed-fast base-to-summit, 2,040-vertical-foot monster with direct access to some of the best terrain east of A-Basin. The highest vert total in my 54-day 2024-25 ski season came (largely) courtesy of this lift - and I only skied five-and-a-half hours: On Stowe-Smuggs proximity and the proposed gondola and a long drive in winter Adventurous skiers can skin or hike across the top of Stowe’s Spruce Peak and ski down into the Smugglers’ Notch ski area. An official ski trail once connected them, and Smuggs proposed a gondola connector a couple of years back. If Vail were to purchase sprawling Smuggs, a Canyons-Park City mega-connection – while improbable given local environmental lobbies -could instantly transform Stowe into one of the largest ski areas in the East. On Jay Peak’s big snowmaking upgrades I referenced big offseason snowmaking upgrades for water-challenged (but natural-snow blessed), Jay Peak. I was referring to this : This season brings an over $1.5M snowmaking upgrade that’s less about muscle and more about brains. We’ve added 49 brand new HKD Low E air-water snowmaking guns—32 on Queen’s Highway and 17 on Perry Merrill. These aren’t your drag-’em-out, hook-’em-up, hope-it’s-cold-enough kind of guns. They’re fixed in place for the season and far more efficient, using much less compressed air than the ones they replace. Translation: better snow, less energy. On Perry Merrill, things get even slicker. We’ve installed HKD Klik automated hydrants that come with built-in weather stations. The second temps hit 28 degrees wetbulb, these hydrants kick on automatically and adjust the flow as the mercury drops. No waiting, no guesswork, no scrambling the crew. The end result? Those key connecting trails between Tramside and Stateside get covered faster, which means you can ski from one side to the other—or straight back to your condo—without having to hop on a shuttle with your boots still buckled. … It’s all part of a bigger 10-year snowmaking plan we’re rolling out—more automation, better efficiency, and ultimately, better snow for you to ski and ride on. 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

The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us. Who Lonie Glieberman, Founder, Owner, & President of Mount Bohemia , Michigan Recorded on November 19, 2025 About Mount Bohemia Click here for a mountain stats overview Owned by: Lonie Glieberman Located in: Lac La Belle, Michigan Year founded: 2000, by Lonie Pass affiliations: None Reciprocal partners: Boho has developed one of the strongest reciprocal pass programs in the nation, with lift tickets to 34 partner mountains. To protect the mountain’s more distant partners from local ticket-hackers, those ski areas typically exclude in-state and border-state residents from the freebies. Here’s the map: And here’s the Big Dumb Storm Chart detailing each mountain and its Boho access: Closest neighboring ski areas: Mont Ripley (:50) Base elevation: 624 feet Summit elevation: 1,522 feet Vertical drop: 898 feet Skiable acres: 585 Average annual snowfall: 273 inches Trail count: It’s hard to say exactly, as Boho adds new trails every year, and its map is one of the more confusing ones in American skiing, both as you try analyzing it on this screen, and as you’re actually navigating the mountain. My advice is to not try too hard to make the trailmap make sense. Everything is skiable with enough snow, and no matter what, you’re going to end up back at one of the two chairlifts or the road, where a shuttlebus will come along within a few minutes. Lift count: 2 (1 triple, 1 double) Why I interviewed him For those of us who lived through a certain version of America, Mount Bohemia is a fever dream, an impossible thing, a bantered-about-with-friends-in-a-basement-rec-room-idea that could never possibly be. This is because we grew up in a world in which such niche-cool things never happened. Before the internet spilled from the academic-military fringe into the mainstream around 1996, We The Commoners fed our brains with a subsistence diet of information meted out by institutional media gatekeepers. What I mean by “gatekeepers” is the limited number of enterprises who could afford the broadcast licenses, printing presses, editorial staffs, and building and technology infrastructure that for decades tethered news and information to costly distribution mechanisms. In some ways this was a better and more reliable world: vetted, edited, fact-checked. Even ostensibly niche media – the Electronic Gaming Monthly and Nintendo Power magazines that I devoured monthly – emerged from this cubicle-in-an-office-tower Process that guaranteed a sober, reality-based information exchange. But this professionalized, high-cost-of-entry, let’s-get-Bob’s-sign-off-before-we-run-this, don’t-piss-off-the-advertisers world limited options, which in turn limited imaginations – or at least limited the real-world risks anyone with money was willing to take to create something different. We had four national television networks and a couple dozen cable channels and one or two local newspapers and three or four national magazines devoted to niche pursuits like skiing. We had bookstores and libraries and the strange, ephemeral world of radio. We had titanic, impossible-to-imagine-now big-box chain stores ordering the world’s music and movies into labelled bins, from which shoppers could hope – by properly interpreting content from box-design flare or maybe just by luck – to pluck some soul-altering novelty. There was little novelty. Or at least, not much that didn’t feel like a slightly different version of something you’d already consumed. Everything, no matter how subversive its skin, had to appeal to the masses, whose money was required to support the enterprise of content creation. Pseudo-rebel networks such as ESPN and MTV quickly built global brands by applying the established institutional framework of network television to the mainstream-but-information-poor cultural centerpieces of sports and music. This cultural sameness expressed itself not just in media, but in every part of life: America’s brand-name sprawl-ture (sprawl culture) of restaurants and clothing stores and home décor emporia; its stuff-freeways-through-downtown ruining of our great cities; its three car companies stamping out nondescript sedans by the millions. Skiing has long acted as a rebel’s escape from staid American culture, but it has also been hemmed in by it. Yes, said Skiing Incorporated circa 1992, we can allow a photo of some fellow jumping off a cliff if it helps convince Nabisco Bob fly his family out to Colorado for New Year’s, so long as his family is at no risk of actually locating any cliffs to jump off of upon arrival. After all, 1992 Bob has no meaningful outlet through which to highlight this advertising-experience disconnect. The internet broke this whole system. Everywhere, for everything. If I wanted, say, a Detroit Pistons hoodie in 1995, I had to drive to a dozen stores and choose the least-bad version from the three places that stocked them. Today I have far more choice at far less hassle: I can browse hundreds of designs online without leaving the house. Same for office furniture or shoes or litterboxes or laundry baskets or cars. And especially for media and information. Consumer choice is greater not only because the internet eliminated distance, but also because it largely eliminated the enormous costs required to actualize a tangible thing from the imagination. There were trade-offs, of course. Our current version of reality has too many options, too many poorly made products, too much bad information. But the internet did a really good job of democratizing preferences and uniting dispersed communities around niche interests. Yes, this means that a global community of morons can assemble over their shared belief that the planet is flat, but it also means that legions of Star Wars or Marvel Comics or football obsessives can unite to demand more of these specific things. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the dormant Star Wars and Marvel franchises rebooted in spectacular, omnipresent fashion within a decade of the .com era’s dawn. The trajectory was slightly different in skiing. The big-name ski areas today are largely the same set of big-name ski areas that we had 30 years ago, at least in America (Canada is a very different story). But what the internet helped bring to skiing was an awareness that the desire for turns outside of groomed runs was not the hyper-specific desire of the most dedicated, living-in-a-campervan-with-their-dog skiers, but a relatively mainstream preference. Established ski areas adapted, adding glades and terrain parks and ungroomed zones. The major ski areas of 2025 are far more interesting versions of the ski areas that existed under the same names in 1995. Dramatic and welcome as these additions were, they were just additions. No ski area completely reversed itself and shut out the mainstream skier. No one stopped grooming or eliminated their ski school or stopped renting gear. But they did act as something of a proof-of-concept for minimalist ski areas that would come online later, including avy-gear-required, no-grooming Silverton, Colorado in 2001, and, at the tip-top of the American Midwest, in a place too remote for anyone other than industrial mining interests to bother with, the ungroomed, snowmaking-free Mount Bohemia. I can’t draw a direct line between the advent of the commercial internet and the rise of Mount Bohemia as a successful niche business within a niche industry. But I find it hard to imagine one without the other. The pre-internet world, the one that gave us shopping malls and laugh-track sitcoms and standard manual transmissions, lacked the institutional imagination to actualize skiing’s most dynamic elements in the form of a wild and remote pilgrimage site. Once the internet ordered fringe freeskiing sentiments into a mainstream coalition, the notion of an extreme ski area seemed inevitable. And Bohemia, without a basically free global megaphone to spread word of its improbable existence, would struggle to establish itself in a ski industry that dismissed the concept as idiotic and with a national ski media that considered the Midwest irrelevant. Even with the internet, Boho took a while to catch on, as Lonie detailed in his first podcast appearance three years ago. It probably took the mainstreaming of social media, starting around 2008, to really amp up the online echo-sphere and help skiers understand this gladed, lake-effect-bombed kingdom at the end of the world. Whatever drove Boho’s success, that success happened. This is a good, stable business that proved that ski areas do not have to cater to all skiers to be viable. But those of us who wanted Bohemia before it existed still have a hard time believing that it does. Like superhero movies or video-calls or energy drinks that aren’t coffee, Boho is a thing we could, in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, easily imagine but just as easily dismiss as fantasy. Fortunately, our modern age of invention and experimentation includes plenty of people who dismiss the dismissers, who see things that don’t exist yet and bring them into our world. And one of the best contributions to skiing to emerge from this age is Mount Bohemia. What we talked about Season pass price and access changes; lifetime and two-year season passes; a Disney-ski comparison that isn’t negative; when your day ticket costs as much as your season pass; Lonie’s dog makes a cameo; not selling lift tickets on Saturdays; “too many companies are busy building a brand that no one will hate, versus a brand that someone will love”; why it’s OK to have some people be angry with you; UP skiing’s existential challenge; skiing’s vibe shift from competition to complementary culture; the Midwest’s advanced-skier problem; Boho’s season pass reciprocal program; why ski areas survive; the Keweenaw snow stake and Boho’s snowfall history; recent triple chair improvements and why Boho didn’t fully replace the chair – “it’s basically a brand-new chairlift”; a novel idea for Boho’s next new chairlift; the Nordic spa; proposed rezoning drama; housing at the end of the world; could Mount Bohemia have a Mad River Glen co-op-style future?; why the pass deadline really is the pass deadline; and Mount Bohemia TV. What I got wrong * I said that Boho’s one-day lift ticket was “$89 or $92” last time Lonie joined me on the pod, in fall, 2022. The one-day cost for the 2022-23 ski season was $87. * I said that Powder Mountain, Utah, may extend their no-lift-ticket-sales-on-Saturdays-and-Sundays-in-February policy, which the mountain rolled out last year, to other dates, but their sales calendar shows just eight restricted dates (one of which is Sunday, March 1), which is the same number as last winter. Why you should ski Mount Bohemia I can’t add anything useful to this bit that I wrote a few months back: Or didn’t say three years ago, around my first Boho pod: Podcast Notes On Boho’s season pass On Lonie’s Library A Boho podcast will always come loaded with some Lonie Library recommendations. In this episode, we get The Power of Cult Branding by Mattew W. Ragas and Bolivar J. Bueno and The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding by Al Ries and Laura Ries. On Raising Cane’s Lonie tells us about a restaurant called Raising Cane’s that sells nothing but chicken fingers. Because I have this weird way of sometimes not noticing super-obvious things, I’d never heard of the place. But apparently they have 900-ish locations , including several here in NYC. I’m sure you already know this. On Jimmy Buffett Then again I’m sometimes overly attuned to things that I think everyone knows about, like Jimmy Buffett. Probably most people are aware of his Margaritaville -headlined music catalog, but perhaps not the Boomers-Gone-Wild Parrothead energy of his concerts, which were mass demonstrations of a uniquely American weirdness that’s impossible to believe in unless you see it: I don’t know if I’d classify this spectacle as sports for people who don’t like sports or anthropological proof that mass coordinated niche crowd-dancing predates the advent of TikTok, but I hope this video reaches the aliens first and they decide not to bother. On “when we spoke in Milwaukee” This was the second time I’ve interviewed Lonie recently. The first was in front of an audience at the Snowvana ski show in Milwaukee last month. We did record that session, and it was different enough from this pod to justify releasing – I just don’t have a timeline on when I’ll do that yet. Here’s the preview article that outlined the event: On Lonie operating the Porcupine Mountains ski area I guess you can make anything look rad. Porcupine Mountains ski area, as presented today under management of the State of Michigan’s Department of Natural Resources: The same ski area under Lonie’s management, circa 2011: On the owner of Song and Labrador, New York buying and closing nearby Toggenburg ski area On Indy’s fight with Ski Cooper I wrote two stories on this, each of which subtracted five years from my life. The first: The follow-up: On Snow Snake, Apple Mountain, and Mott Mountain ski areas These three Mid-Michigan ski areas were so similar it was frightening – the only thing I can conclude from the fact that Snow Snake is the only one left is that management trumps pretty much everything when it comes to which ski areas survive: On Crystal Mountain, Michigan versus Sugar Loaf, Michigan I noted that 1995 Stu viewed Sugar Loaf as a “more interesting” ski area than contemporary Crystal. It’s important to note that this was pre-expansion Crystal, before the ski area doubled in size with backside terrain. Here are the Crystal versus Sugar Loaf trailmaps of that era: I discussed all of this with Crystal CEO John Melcher last year: On Thunder Mountain and Walloon Hills Lonie mentions two additional lost Michigan ski areas: Thunder Mountain and Walloon Hills. The latter, while stripped of its chairlifts, still operates as a nonprofit called Challenge Mountain. Here’s what it looked like just before shuttering as a public ski area in 1978: The responsible party here was nearby Boyne, which bought both Walloon and Thunder in 1967. They closed the latter in 1984: The company now known as Boyne Resorts purchased a total of four Michigan ski areas after Everett Kircher founded Boyne Mountain in 1948, starting with The Highlands in 1963. That ski area remains open, but Boyne also owned the 436-vertical foot ski area alternately known as “Barn Mountain” and “Avalanche Peak” from 1972 to ’77. I can’t find a trailmap of this one, but here’s Boyne’s consolidation history: On Nub’s Nob and The Highlands When I say that Nub’s Nob and Boyne’s Highlands ski area are right across the street from each other, I mean they really are: Both are excellent ski areas - two of the best in the entire Midwest. On Granite Peak’s evolution under Midwest Family Ski Resorts I’ve written about this a lot, but check out Granite Peak AKA “Rib Mountain” before the company now known as Midwest Family Ski Resorts purchased it in 2000: And today: And it’s just like “what you’re allowed to do that?” On up-and-over chairlifts Bohemia may replace its double chair with a rare up-and-over machine, which would extend along the current line to the summit, and then continue to the bottom of Haunted Valley, effectively functioning as two chairlifts. Lonie explains the logic in the podcast, but if he succeeds here, this would be the first new up-and-over lift built in the United States since Stevens Pass’ Double Diamond-Southern Cross machine in 1987. I’m only aware of four other such machines in America, all of them in the Midwest: Little Switzerland recently revealed plans to replace the machine that makes up the 1 and 2 chairlifts with two separate quads next year. On Boho’s Nordic Spa I never thought hot tubs and parties and happiness were controversial. Then along came social media. And it turns out that when a ski area that primarily markets itself as a refuge for hardcore skiers also builds a base-area zone for these skiers to sink into another sort of indulgence at day’s end and then promotes these features, it make Angry Ski Bro VERY ANGRY. For most of human existence we had incentives to prevent ostentatious attention-seeking whining about peripheral things that had no actual impact on your life, and that incentive was Not Wanting To Get Your Ass Kicked. But some people interpreted the distance and anonymity of the internet as a permission slip to become the worst versions of themselves. And so we have a dedicated corps of morons trolling Boho’s socials with chest-thumping proclamations of #RealSkierness that rage against the $18 Nordic Spa fee taped onto each Boho $99 or $112 season pass. But when you go to Boho, what you see is this: And these people do not look angry. Because they are doing something fun and cool. Which is one more reason that I stopped reading social media comments several years ago and decided to base reality on living in it rather than observing it through my Pet Rectangle. On the Mad River Glen Co-Op and Betsy Pratt So far, the only successful U.S. ski area co-op is Mad River Glen , Vermont. Longtime owner Betsy Pratt orchestrated the transformation in 1995. She passed away in 2023 at age 95, giving her lots of years to watch the model endure. Black Mountain, New Hampshire, is in the midst of a similar transformation. On Mount Bohemia TV Boho is a strange, strange universe. Nothing better distills the mountain’s essence than Mount Bohemia TV – I mean that in the literal sense, in that each episode immerses you in this peculiar world, but also in an accidental quirk of its execution. Because the video staff keeps, in Lonie’s words, “losing the password,” Mount Bohemia has at least four official YouTube channels, each of which hosts different episodes of Mount Bohemia TV . Here’s episodes 1, 2, and 3 : 4 through 15 : 16 through 20 : And 21 and 22 : If anyone knows how to sort this out, I’m sure they’d appreciate the assist. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

Who Deb Hatley, Owner of Hatley Pointe , North Carolina Recorded on July 30, 2025 About Hatley Pointe Click here for a mountain stats overview Owned by: Deb and David Hatley since 2023 - purchased from Orville English, who had owned and operated the resort since 1992 Located in: Mars Hill, North Carolina Year founded: 1969 (as Wolf Laurel or Wolf Ridge; both names used over the decades) Pass affiliations: Indy Pass, Indy+ Pass – 2 days, no blackouts Closest neighboring ski areas: Cataloochee (1:25), Sugar Mountain (1:26) Base elevation: 4,000 feet Summit elevation: 4,700 feet Vertical drop: 700 feet Skiable acres: 54 Average annual snowfall: 65 inches Trail count: 21 (4 beginner, 11 intermediate, 6 advanced) Lift count: 4 active (1 fixed-grip quad, 1 ropetow, 2 carpets); 2 inactive, both on the upper mountain (1 fixed-grip quad, 1 double) Why I interviewed her Our world has not one map, but many. Nature drew its own with waterways and mountain ranges and ecosystems and tectonic plates. We drew our maps on top of these, to track our roads and borders and political districts and pipelines and railroad tracks. Our maps are functional, simplistic. They insist on fictions. Like the 1,260-mile-long imaginary straight line that supposedly splices the United States from Canada between Washington State and Minnesota. This frontier is real so long as we say so, but if humanity disappeared tomorrow, so would that line. Nature’s maps are more resilient. This is where water flows because this is where water flows. If we all go away, the water keeps flowing. This flow, in turn, impacts the shape and function of the entire world. One of nature’s most interesting maps is its mountain map. For most of human existence, mountains mattered much more to us than they do now. Meaning: we had to respect these giant rocks because they stood convincingly in our way. It took European settlers centuries to navigate en masse over the Appalachians, which is not even a severe mountain range, by global mountain-range standards. But paved roads and tunnels and gas stations every five miles have muted these mountains’ drama. You can now drive from the Atlantic Ocean to the Midwest in half a day. So spoiled by infrastructure, we easily forget how dramatically mountains command huge parts of our world. In America, we know this about our country: the North is cold and the South is warm. And we define these regions using battle maps from a 19th Century war that neatly bisected the nation. Another imaginary line. We travel south for beaches and north to ski and it is like this everywhere, a gentle progression, a continent-length slide that warms as you descend from Alaska to Panama. But mountains disrupt this logic. Because where the land goes up, the air grows cooler. And there are mountains all over. And so we have skiing not just in expected places such as Vermont and Maine and Michigan and Washington, but in completely irrational ones like Arizona and New Mexico and Southern California. And North Carolina. North Carolina. That’s the one that surprised me. When I started skiing, I mean. Riding hokey-poke chairlifts up 1990s Midwest hills that wouldn’t qualify as rideable surf breaks, I peered out at the world to figure out where else people skied and what that skiing was like. And I was astonished by how many places had organized skiing with cut trails and chairlifts and lift tickets, and by how many of them were way down the Michigan-to-Florida slide-line in places where I thought that winter never came: West Virginia and Virginia and Maryland. And North Carolina. Yes there are ski areas in more improbable states. But Cloudmont, situated in, of all places, Alabama, spins its ropetow for a few days every other year or so. North Carolina, home to six ski areas spinning a combined 35 chairlifts, allows for no such ambiguity: this is a ski state. And these half-dozen ski centers are not marginal operations: Sugar Mountain and Cataloochee opened for the season last week, and they sometimes open in October. Sugar spins a six-pack and two detach quads on a 1,200-foot vertical drop. This geographic quirk is a product of our wonderful Appalachian Mountain chain, which reaches its highest points not in New England but in North Carolina, where Mount Mitchell peaks at 6,684 feet, 396 feet higher than the summit of New Hampshire’s Mount Washington. This is not an anomaly: North Carolina is home to six summits taller than Mount Washington, and 12 of the 20-highest in the Appalachians, a range that stretches from Alabama to Newfoundland. And it’s not just the summits that are taller in North Carolina. The highest ski area base elevation in New England is Saddleback, which measures 2,147 feet at the bottom of the South Branch quad (the mountain more typically uses the 2,460-foot measurement at the bottom of the Rangeley quad). Either way, it’s more than 1,000 feet below the lowest base-area elevation in North Carolina: Unfortunately, mountains and elevation don’t automatically equal snow. And the Southern Appalachians are not exactly the Kootenays. It snows some, sometimes, but not so much, so often, that skiing can get by on nature’s contributions alone - at least not in any commercially reliable form. It’s no coincidence that North Carolina didn’t develop any organized ski centers until the 1960s, when snowmaking machines became efficient and common enough for mass deployment. But it’s plenty cold up at 4,000 feet, and there’s no shortage of water. Snowguns proved to be skiing’s last essential ingredient. Well, there was one final ingredient to the recipe of southern skiing: roads. Back to man’s maps. Specifically, America’s interstate system, which steamrolled the countryside throughout the 1960s and passes just a few miles to Hatley Pointe’s west. Without these superhighways, western North Carolina would still be a high-peaked wilderness unknown and inaccessible to most of us. It’s kind of amazing when you consider all the maps together: a severe mountain region drawn into the borders of a stable and prosperous nation that builds physical infrastructure easing the movement of people with disposable income to otherwise inaccessible places that have been modified for novel uses by tapping a large and innovative industrial plant that has reduced the miraculous – flight, electricity, the internet - to the commonplace. And it’s within the context of all these maps that a couple who knows nothing about skiing can purchase an established but declining ski resort and remake it as an upscale modern family ski center in the space of 18 months. What we talked about Hurricane Helene fallout; “it took every second until we opened up to make it there,” even with a year idle; the “really tough” decision not to open for the 2023-24 ski season; “we did not realize what we were getting ourselves into”; buying a ski area when you’ve never worked at a ski area and have only skied a few times; who almost bought Wolf Ridge and why Orville picked the Hatleys instead; the importance of service; fixing up a broken-down ski resort that “felt very old”; updating without losing the approachable family essence; why it was “absolutely necessary” to change the ski area’s name; “when you pulled in, the first thing that you were introduced to … were broken-down machines and school buses”; Bible verses and bare trails and busted-up everything; “we could have spent two years just doing cleanup of junk and old things everywhere”; Hatley Pointe then and now; why Hatley removed the double chair; a detachable six-pack at Hatley?; chairlifts as marketing and branding tools; why the Breakaway terrain closed and when it could return and in what form; what a rebuilt summit lodge could look like; Hatley Pointe’s new trails; potential expansion; a day-ski area, a resort, or both?; lift-served mountain bike park incoming; night-skiing expansion; “I was shocked” at the level of après that Hatley drew, and expanding that for the years ahead; North Carolina skiing is all about the altitude; re-opening The Bowl trail; going to online-only sales; and lessons learned from 2024-25 that will build a better Hatley for 2025-26. What I got wrong When we recorded this conversation, the ski area hadn’t yet finalized the name of the new green trail coming off of Eagle – it is Pat’s Way (see trailmap above). I asked if Hatley intended to install night-skiing, not realizing that they had run night-ski operations all last winter. Why now was a good time for this interview Pardon my optimism, but I’m feeling good about American lift-served skiing right now. Each of the past five winters has been among the top 10 best seasons for skier visits, U.S. ski areas have already built nearly as many lifts in the 2020s (246) as they did through all of the 2010s (288), and multimountain passes have streamlined the flow of the most frequent and passionate skiers between mountains, providing far more flexibility at far less cost than would have been imaginable even a decade ago. All great. But here’s the best stat: after declining throughout the 1980s and ‘90s, the number of active U.S. ski areas stabilized around the turn of the century, and has actually increased for five consecutive winters : Those are National Ski Areas Association numbers, which differ slightly from mine. I count 492 active ski hills for 2023-24 and 500 for last winter , and I project 510 potentially active ski areas for the 2025-26 campaign. But no matter: the number of active ski operations appears to be increasing. But the raw numbers matter less than the manner in which this uptick is happening. In short: a new generation of owners is resuscitating lost or dying ski areas. Many have little to no ski industry experience. Driven by nostalgia, a sense of community duty, plain business opportunity, or some combination of those things, they are orchestrating massive ski area modernization projects, funded via their own wealth – typically earned via other enterprises – or by rallying a donor base. Examples abound. When I launched The Storm in 2019, Saddleback , Maine; Norway Mountain , Michigan; Woodward Park City; Thrill Hills, North Dakota; Deer Mountain , South Dakota; Paul Bunyan , Wisconsin; Quarry Road, Maine; Steeplechase , Minnesota; and Snowland, Utah were all lost ski areas. All are now open again, and only one – Woodward – was the project of an established ski area operator (Powdr). Cuchara, Colorado and Nutt Hill, Wisconsin are on the verge of re-opening following decades-long lift closures. Bousquet , Massachusetts; Holiday Mountain , New York; Kissing Bridge , New York; and Black Mountain , New Hampshire were disintegrating in slow-motion before energetic new owners showed up with wrecking balls and Home Depot frequent-shopper accounts. New owners also re-energized the temporarily dormant Sandia Peak , New Mexico and Tenney , New Hampshire. One of my favorite revitalization stories has been in North Carolina, where tired, fire-ravaged, investment-starved, homey-but-rickety Wolf Ridge was falling down and falling apart. The ski area’s season ended in February four times between 2018 and 2023. Snowmaking lagged. After an inferno ate the summit lodge in 2014, no one bothered rebuilding it. Marooned between the rapidly modernizing North Carolina ski trio of Sugar Mountain, Cataloochee, and Beech, Wolf Ridge appeared to be rapidly fading into irrelevance. Then the Hatleys came along. Covid-curious first-time skiers who knew little about skiing or ski culture, they saw opportunity where the rest of us saw a reason to keep driving. Fixing up a ski area turned out to be harder than they’d anticipated, and they whiffed on opening for the 2023-24 winter. Such misses sometimes signal that the new owners are pulling their ripcords as they launch out of the back of the plane, but the Hatleys kept working. They gut-renovated the lodge, modernized the snowmaking plant, tore down an SLI double chair that had witnessed the signing of the Declaration of Independence. And last winter, they re-opened the best version of the ski area now known as Hatley Pointe that locals had seen in decades. A great winter – one of the best in recent North Carolina history – helped. But what I admire about the Hatleys – and this new generation of owners in general – is their optimism in a cultural moment that has deemed optimism corny and naïve. Everything is supposed to be terrible all the time, don’t you know that? They didn’t know, and that orientation toward the good, tempered by humility and patience, reversed the long decline of a ski area that had in many ways ceased to resonate with the world it existed in. The Hatleys have lots left to do: restore the Breakaway terrain, build a new summit lodge, knot a super-lift to the frontside. And their Appalachian salvage job, while impressive, is not a very repeatable blueprint – you need considerable wealth to take a season off while deploying massive amounts of capital to rebuild the ski area. The Hatley model is one among many for a generation charged with modernizing increasingly antiquated ski areas before they fall over dead. Sometimes, as in the examples itemized above, they succeed. But sometimes they don’t. Comebacks at Cockaigne and Hickory, both in New York, fizzled. Sleeping Giant, Wyoming and Ski Blandford, Massachusetts both shuttered after valiant rescue attempts. All four of these remain salvageable, but last week, Four Seasons, New York closed permanently after 63 years. That will happen. We won’t be able to save every distressed ski area, and the potential supply of new or revivable ski centers, barring massive cultural and regulatory shifts, will remain limited. But the protectionist tendencies limiting new ski area development are, in a trick of human psychology, the same ones that will drive the revitalization of others – the only thing Americans resist more than building something new is taking away something old. Which in our country means anything that was already here when we showed up. A closed or closing ski area riles the collective angst, throws a snowy bat signal toward the night sky, a beacon and a dare, a cry and a plea: who wants to be a hero? Podcast Notes On Hurricane Helene Helene smashed inland North Carolina last fall, just as Hatley was attempting to re-open after its idle year. Here’s what made the storm so bad: On Hatley’s socials Follow: On what I look for at a ski resort On the Ski Big Bear podcast In the spirit of the article above, one of the top 10 Storm Skiing Podcast guest quotes ever came from Ski Big Bear, Pennsylvania General Manager Lori Phillips: “You treat everyone like they paid a million dollars to be there doing what they’re doing” On ski area name changes I wrote a piece on Hatley’s name change back in 2023: Ski area name changes are more common than I’d thought. I’ve been slowly documenting past name changes as I encounter them, so this is just a partial list, but here are 93 active U.S. ski areas that once went under a different name. If you know of others, please email me . On Hatley at the point of purchase and now Gigantic collections of garbage have always fascinated me. That’s essentially what Wolf Ridge was at the point of sale: It’s a different place now: On the distribution of six-packs across the nation Six-pack chairlifts are rare and expensive enough that they’re still special, but common enough that we’re no longer amazed by them. Mostly - it depends on where we find such a machine. Just 112 of America’s 3,202 ski lifts (3.5 percent) are six-packs, and most of these (75) are in the West (60 – more than half the nation’s total, are in Colorado, Utah, or California). The Midwest is home to a half-dozen six-packs, all at Boyne or Midwest Family Ski Resorts operations, and the East has 31 sixers, 17 of which are in New England, and 12 of which are in Vermont. If Hatley installed a sixer, it would be just the second such chairlift in North Carolina, and the fifth in the Southeast, joining the two at Wintergreen, Virginia and the one at Timberline, West Virginia. On the Breakaway fire Wolf Ridge’s upper-mountain lodge burned down in March 2014. Yowza: On proposed expansions Wolf Ridge’s circa 2007 trailmap teases a potential expansion below the now-closed Breakaway terrain: Taking our time machine back to the late ‘80s, Wolf Ridge had envisioned an even more ambitious expansion: 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 Wes Kryger, President and Ayden Wilber, Vice President of Mountain Operations at Greek Peak , New York Recorded on June 30, 2025 About Greek Peak Click here for a mountain stats overview Owned by: John Meier Located in: Cortland, New York Year founded: 1957 – opened Jan. 11, 1958 Pass affiliations: Indy Pass, Indy+ Pass – 2 days Closest neighboring U.S. ski areas: Labrador (:30), Song (:31) Base elevation: 1,148 feet Summit elevation: 2,100 feet Vertical drop: 952 feet Skiable acres: 300 Average annual snowfall: 120 inches Trail count: 46 (10 easier, 16 more difficult, 15 most difficult, 5 expert, 4 terrain parks) Lift count: 8 (1 fixed-grip quad, 2 triples, 3 doubles – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Greek Peak’s lift fleet) Why I interviewed them No reason not to just reprint what I wrote about the bump earlier this year : All anyone wants from a family ski trip is this: not too far, not too crowded, not too expensive, not too steep, not too small, not too Bro-y. Terrain variety and ample grooming and lots of snow, preferably from the sky. Onsite lodging and onsite food that doesn’t taste like it emerged from the ration box of a war that ended 75 years ago. A humane access road and lots of parking. Ordered liftlines and easy ticket pickup and a big lodge to meet up and hang out in. We’re not too picky you see but all that would be ideal. My standard answer to anyone from NYC making such an inquiry has been “hahaha yeah get on a plane and go out West.” But only if you purchased lift tickets 10 to 16 months in advance of your vacation. Otherwise you could settle a family of four on Mars for less than the cost of a six-day trip to Colorado. But after MLK Weekend, I have a new answer for picky non-picky New Yorkers: just go to Greek Peak. Though I’d skied here in the past and am well-versed on all ski centers within a six-hour drive of Manhattan, it had not been obvious to me that Greek Peak was so ideally situated for a FamSki. Perhaps because I’d been in Solo Dad tree-skiing mode on previous visits and perhaps because the old trailmap presented the ski area in a vertical fortress motif aligned with its mythological trail-naming scheme: But here is how we experienced the place on one of the busiest weekends of the year: 1. No lines to pick up tickets. Just these folks standing around in jackets, producing an RFID card from some clandestine pouch and syncing it to the QR code on my phone. 2. Nothing resembling a serious liftline outside of the somewhat chaotic Visions “express” (a carpet-loaded fixed-grip quad). Double and triple chairs, scattered at odd spots and shooting off in all directions, effectively dispersing skiers across a broad multi-faced ridge. The highlight being this double chair originally commissioned by Socrates in 407 B.C.: 3. Best of all: endless, wide-open, uncrowded top-to-bottom true greens – the only sort of run that my entire family can ski both stress-free and together. Those runs ambled for a thousand vertical feet. The Hope Lake Lodge, complete with waterpark and good restaurant, sits directly across the street. A shuttle runs back and forth all day long. Greek Peak, while deeper inland than many Great Lakes-adjacent ski areas, pulls steady lake-effect, meaning glades everywhere (albeit thinly covered). It snowed almost the entire weekend, sometimes heavily. Greek Peak’s updated trailmap better reflects its orientation as a snowy family funhouse (though it somewhat obscures the mountain’s ever-improving status as a destination for Glade Bro): For MLK 2024, we had visited Camelback, seeking the same slopeside-hotel-with-waterpark-decent-food-family-skiing combo. But it kinda sucked. The rooms, tinted with an Ikea-by-the-Susquehanna energy, were half the size of those at Greek Peak and had cost three times more. Our first room could have doubled as the smoking pen at a public airport (we requested, and received, another). The hill was half-open and overrun with people who seemed to look up and be genuinely surprised to find themselves strapped to snoskis. Mandatory parking fees even with a $600-a-night room; mandatory $7-per-night, per-skier ski check (which I dodged); and perhaps the worst liftline management I’ve ever witnessed had, among many other factors, added up to “let’s look for something better next year.” That something was Greek Peak, though the alternative only occurred to me when I attended an industry event at the resort in September and re-considered its physical plant undistracted by ski-day chaos. Really, this will never be a true alternative for most NYC skiers – at four hours from Manhattan, Greek Peak is the same distance as far larger Stratton or Mount Snow. I like both of those mountains, but I know which one I’m driving my family to when our only time to ski together is the same time that everyone else has to ski together. What we talked about 116,000 skier visits; two GP trails getting snowmaking for the first time; top-to-bottom greens; Greek Peak’s family founding in the 1950s – “any time you told my dad [Al Kryger] he couldn’t do it, he would do it just to prove you wrong”; reminiscing on vintage Greek Peak; why Greek Peak made it when similar ski areas like Scotch Valley went bust; the importance of having “hardcore skiers” run a ski area; does the interstate matter?; the unique dynamics of working in – and continuing – a family business; the saga and long-term impact of building a full resort hotel across the street from the ski area; “a ski area is liking running a small municipality”; why the family sold the ski area more than half a century after its founding; staying on at the family business when it’s no longer a family business; John Meier arrives; why Greek Peak sold Toggenburg; long-term snowmaking ambitions; potential terrain expansion – where and how much; “having more than one good ski season in a row would be helpful” in planning a future expansion; how Greek Peak modernized its snowmaking system and cut its snowmaking hours in half while making more snow; five times more snowguns; Great Lakes lake-effect snow; Greek Peak’s growing glade network and long evolution from a no-jumps-allowed old-school operation to today’s more freewheeling environment; potential lift upgrades; why Greek Peak is unlikely to ever have a high-speed lift; keeping a circa 1960s lift made by an obscure company running; why Greek Peak replaced an old double with a used triple on Chair 3 a few years ago; deciding to renovate or replace a lift; how the Visions 1A quad changed Greek Peak and where a similar lift could make sense; why Greek Peak shortened Chair 2; and the power of Indy Pass for small, independent ski areas. What I got wrong On Scotch Valley ski area I said that Scotch Valley went out of business “in the late ‘90s.” As far as I can tell, the ski area’s last year of operation was 1998. At its peak, the 750-vertical-foot ski area ran a triple chair and two doubles serving a typical quirky-fun New York trail network. I’m sorry I missed skiing this one. Interestingly, the triple chair still appears to operate as part of a summer camp . I wish they would also run a winter camp called “we’re re-opening this ski area”: On Toggenburg I paraphrased a quote from Greek Peak owner John Meier, from a story I wrote around the 2021 closing of Toggenburg. Here’s the quote in full: “Skiing doesn’t have to happen in New York State,” Meier said. “It takes an entrepreneur, it takes a business investor. You gotta want to do it, and you’re not going to make a lot of money doing it. You’re going to wonder why are you doing this? It’s a very difficult business in general. It’s very capital-intensive business. There’s a lot easier ways to make a buck. This is a labor of love for me.” And here’s the full story, which lays out the full Togg saga: Podcast Notes On Hope Lake Lodge and New York’s lack of slopeside lodging I’ve complained about this endlessly, but it’s strange and counter-environmental that New York’s two largest ski areas offer no slopeside lodging. This is the same oddball logic at work in the Pacific Northwest, which stridently and reflexively opposes ski area-adjacent development in the name of preservation without acknowledging the ripple effects of moving 5,000 day skiers up to the mountain each winter morning. Unfortunately Gore and Whiteface are on Forever Wild land that would require an amendment to the state constitution to develop, and that process is beholden to idealistic downstate voters who like the notion of preservation enough to vote abstractly against development, but not enough to favor Whiteface over Sugarbush when it’s time to book a family ski trip and they need convenient lodging. Which leaves us with smaller mountains that can more readily develop slopeside buildings: Holiday Valley and Hunter are perhaps the most built-up, but West Mountain has a monster development grinding through local permitting processes: Greek Peak built the brilliant Hope Lake Lodge, a sprawling hotel/waterpark with wood-trimmed, fireplace-appointed rooms directly across the street from the ski area. A shuttle connects the two. On the “really, really bad” 2015 season Wilber referred to the “really, really bad” 2015 season. Here’s the Kottke end-of-season stats comparing 2015-16 snowfall to the previous three winters, where you can see the Northeast just collapse into an abyss: Month-by-month (also from Kottke): Fast forward to Kottke’s 2022-23 report, and you can see just how terrible 2015-16 was in terms of skier visits compared to the seasons immediately before and after: On Greek Peak’s old masterplan with a chair 6 I couldn’t turn up the masterplan that Kryger referred to with a Chair 6 on it, but the trailmap did tease a potential expansion from around 2006 to 2012, labelled as “Greek Peak East”: On Great Lakes lake-effect snow This is maybe the best representation I’ve found of the Great Lakes’ lake-effect snowbands: On Greek Peak’s Lift 2 What a joy this thing is to ride: An absolute time machine: The lift, built in 1963, looks rattletrap and bootleg, but it hums right along. It is the second-oldest operating chairlift in New York State, after Snow Ridge’s 1960 North Hall double chair, and the fourth-oldest in the Northeast (Mad River Glen’s single, dating to 1948, is King Gramps of the East Coast). It’s one of the 20-oldest operating chairlifts in America: As Wilber says, this lift once ran all the way to the base. They shortened the lift sometime between 1995 and ’97 to scrape out a larger base-area novice zone. Greek Peak’s circa 1995 trailmap shows the lift extending to its original load position: Following Pico’s demolition of the Bonanza double this offseason, Greek Peak’s Chair 2 is one of just three remaining Carlevaro-Savio lifts spinning in the United States: 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 Barry Owens, General Manager of Treetops, Michigan Recorded on June 13, 2025 About Treetops Click here for a mountain stats overview Owned by: Treetops Acquisition Company LLC Located in: Gaylord, Michigan Year founded: 1954 Pass affiliations: Indy Pass, Indy+ Pass – 2 days Closest neighboring ski areas: Otsego (:07), Boyne Mountain (:34), Hanson Hills (:39), Shanty Creek (:51), The Highlands (:58), Nub’s Nob (1:00) Base elevation: 1,110 feet Summit elevation: 1,333 feet Vertical drop: 223 feet Skiable acres: 80 Average annual snowfall: 140 inches Trail count: 25 (30% beginner, 40% intermediate, 30% advanced) Lift count: 5 (3 triples, 2 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Treetops’ lift fleet) Why I interviewed him The first 10 ski areas I ever skied, in order, were: * Mott Mountain, Michigan * Apple Mountain, Michigan * Snow Snake, Michigan * Caberfae, Michigan * Crystal Mountain, Michigan * Nub’s Nob, Michigan * Skyline, Michigan * Treetops, Michigan * Sugar Loaf, Michigan * Shanty Creek – Schuss Mountain, Michigan And here are the first 10 ski areas I ever skied that are still open , with anything that didn’t make it crossed out: * Mott Mountain, Michigan * Apple Mountain, Michigan * Snow Snake, Michigan * Caberfae, Michigan * Crystal Mountain, Michigan * Nub’s Nob, Michigan * Skyline, Michigan * Treetops, Michigan * Sugar Loaf, Michigan * Shanty Creek – Schuss Mountain, Michigan * Shanty Creek – Summit, Michigan * Boyne Mountain, Michigan * Searchmont, Ontario * Nebraski, Nebraska * Copper Mountain, Colorado * Keystone, Colorado Six of my first 16. Poof. That’s a failure rate of 37.5 percent. I’m no statistician, but I’d categorize that as “not good.” Now, there’s some nuance to this list. I skied all of these between 1992 and 1995. Most had faded officially or functionally by 2000, around the time that America’s Great Ski Area Die-Off concluded (Summit lasted until around Covid, and could still re-open, resort officials tell me). Their causes of death are varied, some combination, usually, of incompetence, indifference, and failure to adapt. To climate change, yes, but more of the cultural kind of adaptation than the environmental sort. The first dozen ski areas on this list are tightly bunched, geographically, in the upper half of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. They draw from the same general population centers and suffer from the same stunted Midwest verticals. None are naturally or automatically great ski areas. None are or were particularly remote or tricky to access, and most sit alongside or near a major state or federal highway. And they (mostly) all benefit from the same Lake Michigan lake-effect snow machine, the output of which appears to be increasing as the Great Lakes freeze more slowly and less often (cold air flowing over warm water = lake-effect snow). Had you presented this list of a dozen Michigan ski areas to me in 1995 and said, “five of these will drop dead in the next 30 years,” I would not have chosen those five, necessarily, to fail. These weren’t ropetow backwaters. All but Apple had chairlifts (and they soon installed one), and most sat close to cities or were attached to a larger resort. Sugar Loaf, in particular, was one of Michigan’s better ski areas, with five chairlifts and the largest in-state vertical drop on this list. My guess for most-likely-to-die probably would have been Treetops, especially if you’d told me that then-private Otsego ski area, right next door and with twice its neighbor’s skiable acreage, vertical drop, and number of chairlifts, would eventually open to the public. Especially if you’d told me that Boyne Mountain, the monster down the road, would continue to expand its lodging and village, and would add a Treetops-sized cluster of greens to its ferocious ridge of blacks. Especially if you’d told me that Treetops’ trail footprint, never substantial, would remain more or less the same size 30 years later. In fact, just about every surviving Michigan ski area on that list - Crystal, Nub’s, Caberfae, Shanty Schuss - greatly expanded its terrain footprint. Except Treetops. But here we are, in the future, and I just skied Treetops 10 months ago with my 8-year-old son. It was, in some ways, more or less as I’d left it on my last visit, in 1995: small vert, small trail network, a slightly confusing parking situation, no chairlift restraint bars. A few improvements were obvious: the beginner ropetows had made way for a carpet, the last double chair had been upgraded to a triple, terrain park features dotted the east side, and a dozen or so glades and short steep shots had been hacked from the woods of the legacy trail footprint. That’s all nice. But what was not obvious to me was this: why, and how, does Treetops the ski area still exist? Sugar Loaf was a better ski area. Apple Mountain was closer to large population centers. Summit was attached to ski-in-ski-out accommodations and shared a lift ticket with the larger Schuss mountain a couple miles away. Was modern Treetops some sort of money-losing ski area hobby horse for whomever owned the larger resort, which is better known for its five golf courses? Was it just an amenity to keep the second homeowners who mostly lived in Southeast Michigan invested year-round? Had the ski area cemented itself as the kind of high-volume schoolkids training ground that explained the resilience of ski areas in metro Detroit, Minneapolis, and Milwaukee? There is never, or rarely, one easy or obvious explanation for why similar businesses thrive or fail. This is why I resist pinning the numerical decline in America’s ski area inventory solely to climate change. We may have fewer ski areas in America than we had in 1995, but we have a lot more good ski areas now than we did 30 years ago (and, as I wrote in March, a lot more overall ski terrain). Yes, Skyline, 40 minutes south of Treetops, failed because it never installed snowmaking, but that is only part of the sentence. Skyline failed because it never installed snowmaking while its competitors aggressively expanded and continually updated their snowmaking systems, raising the floor on the minimal ski experience acceptable to consumers . That takes us back to culture. What do you reckon has changed more over the past 30 to 40 years: America’s weather patterns, or its culture? For anyone who remembers ashtrays at McDonald’s or who rode in the bed of a pickup truck from Michigan to Illinois or who ran feral and unsupervised outdoors from toddlerhood or who somehow fumbled through this vast world without the internet or a Pet Rectangle or their evil offspring social media, the answer seems obvious. The weather feels a little different. Our culture feels airlifted from another planet. Americans accepted things 30 years ago that would seem outrageous today – like smoking adjacent to a children’s play area ornamented with a demented smiling clown. But this applies to skiing as well. My Treetops day in 1995 was memorably horrible, the snow groomed but fossilized, unturnable. A few weeks earlier, I’d skied Skyline on perhaps a three-inch base, grass poking through the trails. Modern skiers, armed with the internet and its Hubble connection to every ski area on the planet, would not accept either set of conditions today. But one of those ski areas adapted and the other did not. That’s the “why” of Treetops survival. It was the “how” that I needed Barry Owens to help me understand. What we talked about Last winter’s ice storm – “it provides great insight into human character when you go through that stuff”; record snowfall (204 inches!) to chase the worst winter ever; the Lake Michigan snowbelt; a golf resort with a ski area attached; building a ski culture when “we didn’t have enough people dedicated to ski… and it showed”; competing with nearby ski areas many times Treetops’ size “we don’t shy away from… who we are and what we are”; what happened when next-door-neighbor Otsego Resort switched from a private to a public model in 2017 – “neither one of us is going to get rich seeing who can get the most $15 lift tickets on a Wednesday”; I attempt to talk about golf and why Michigan is a golf mecca; moving on from something you’ve spent decades building; Treetops’ rough financial period and why Owens initially turned down the GM job; how Owens convinced ownership not to close the ski area; fixing a “can’t-do staff” by “doing things that created the freedom to be able to act”; Treetops’ strange 2014 bankruptcy and rebuilding from there; “right now we’re happy” with the lift fleet; how much it would cost to retrofit Treetops’ lifts with restraint bars; timeline for potential ski expansion at Treetops; bargain season passes (as low as $125); and Indy Pass’ network power. What I got wrong * I said “Gaylord County,” but the city of Gaylord is in Otsego County. * I said that Boyne Resorts, operator of 11 ski areas , also runs “10 or 11 golf resorts.” The company operates 14 golf courses . * I said that Michigan had a “very good” road network and that there was “not a lot of traffic,” and if you live there, you’re reaction is probably, “you’re dumb.” What I meant by “very good road network” is this: compared to most ski regions, which have, um, mountains, Michigan’s bumplets sit more or less directly alongside the state’s straight, flat, almost perfectly gridded highway network. Also, the “not a lot of traffic” thing does not apply to special situations like, say, northbound I-75 on a July Friday evening. * I said that Crystal, Nub’s, Caberfae, and Shanty Creek were “close” – while they’re not necessarily all close to one another, they are all roughly equidistant for folks coming to them from downstate. * I said that Treetops was “the fifth or sixth place I ever skied at,” but upon further review, it was number eight (which is reflected in the list above). Podcast Notes On the ice storm An ice storm hammered Northern Michigan in late March of this year: On the lightning strike on Treetops’ golf course On the Midwest’s terrible 2023-24 ski season Skier visits cratered in the Midwest during the 2023-24 ski season, the region’s worst on record from a snowfall point of view. Weather - and skier visits - settled back into normal ranges last winter: This is a bit hard to see with any sort of precision, but this 10-year chart gives a nice sense of just how abnormal 2023-24 was for the Midwest: On Michigan’s ski areas Michigan is home to 44 active ski areas - more than any state other than New York. Many of them are quite small, operate sporadically, and run only surface lifts, but Treetops is close to a bunch of the better lift-served outfits, including Boyne Mountain, Nub’s Nob, and The Highlands (the UP ski areas may as well be in another state). It helps Treetops that so many of the state’s ski areas have also joined Indy Pass: On Otsego Resort For decades - I’m not certain how long, exactly - Otsego Resort, right next door to Treetops and with roughly double the vertical drop and skiable acreage, was private. In 2017, the bump opened to the public, considerably amping up competition. Complicating the matter further, Otsego sits a bit closer to Michigan’s Main Street - I-75 - than Treetops. On Snow Operating Owens mentioned working with “TBL” – he was referring to Terrain Based Learning, Snow Partners’ learn-to-ski program. That company also runs the Snow Cloud operating system that Owens refers to at the end. On Treetops’ rough period I quoted this Detroit Business News article at length in the interview. It goes deep on Treetops’ precarious early 2000s history and the resort’s broken employee culture at the time. On people being nice at ski areas Yeah I’m super into this: On the hedgehog concept Owens mentions “the hedgehog concept,” which I wasn’t familiar with. It sounded like a business-book thing, and it is, adapted by author Jim Collins for his book Good to Great and described in this way on his website : The Hedgehog Concept is developed in the book Good to Great. A simple, crystalline concept that flows from deep understanding about the intersection of three circles: 1) what you are deeply passionate about, 2) what you can be the best in the world at, and 3) what best drives your economic or resource engine. Transformations from good to great come about by a series of good decisions made consistently with a Hedgehog Concept, supremely well executed, accumulating one upon another, over a long period of time. More: On safety-bar requirements in New York and New England This is kind of funny… That’s my 8-year-old son, who’s skied in a dozen states, taking his first ride on a lift with no safety bar, at Treetops last December. Why such machines still exist in 2025, I have no idea - this lift rises about 30 feet off the ground. In the East, all chairlifts are equipped with bars, and state law mandates their use in New York, Massachusetts, and Vermont (and perhaps elsewhere). I don’t advocate for rider mandates, but I do think all chairlifts ought to have bars available for those who want them. Owens and I discuss the resort’s plans to retrofit Treetops’ three chairlifts - CTEC machines installed between 1984 and 1995 - with bars. The cost would be roughly $250,000. That’s a significant number, but probably a lot less than the figure if, say, someone has a heart attack or seizure on the lift, falls off, then sues the resort. Besides, as Owens points out, chairlifts must be equipped with restraint bars for summer use, which would open new revenue streams. Why are bars required for summer activities, but not winter? It’s a strange anachronism, unique among the ski world to America. On “Joe from SMI” I mentioned “Joe from SMI” offhand. I was referring to SMI Snowmakers President Joe VanderKelen, who appeared on the podcast back in 2022: On potential expansion Owens discusses a potential expansion looker’s left of Chair 1, which would restore lost terrain and built upon that. This 1988 trailmap shows a couple of the trails that Treetops eliminated to make way for its current top-to-bottom access road (trails 1 through 4): 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

Take 20% off a paid annual ‘Storm’ subscription through Monday, Oct. 27, 2025. Who Jared Smith, Chief Executive Officer of Alterra Mountain Company Recorded on October 22, 2025 About Alterra Mountain Company Alterra is skiing’s Voltron, a collection of super-bots united to form one super-duper bot. Only instead of gigantic robot lions the bots are gigantic ski areas and instead of fighting the evil King Zarkon they combined to battle Vail Resorts and its cackling mad Epic Pass. Here is Alterra’s current ski-bot stable: Alterra of course also owns the Ikon Pass, which for the 2025-26 winter gives skiers all of this: Ikon launched in 2018 as a more-or-less-even competitor to Epic Pass, both in number and stature of ski areas and price, but long ago blew past its mass-market competitor in both: Those 89 total ski areas include nine that Alterra added last week in Japan, South Korea, and China. Some of these 89 partners, however, are so-called “bonus mountains,” which are Alterra’s Cinderellas. And not Cinderella at the end of the story when she rules the kingdom and dines on stag and hunts peasants for sport but first-scene Cinderella when she lives in a windowless tower and wears a burlap dress and her only friends are talking mice. Meaning skiers can use their Ikon Pass to ski at these places but they are not I repeat NOT on the Ikon Pass so don’t you dare say they are (they are). While the Ikon Pass is Alterra’s Excalibur, many of its owned mountains offer their own season passes (see Alterra chart above). And many now offer their own SUPER-DUPER season passes that let skiers do things like cut in front of the poors and dine on stag in private lounges: These SUPER-DUPER passes don’t bother me though a lot of you want me to say they’re THE END OF SKIING. I won’t put a lot of effort into talking you off that point so long as you’re all skiing for $17 per day on your Ikon Passes. But I will continue to puzzle over why the Ikon Session Pass is such a very very bad and terrible product compared to every other day pass including those sold by Alterra’s own mountains . I am also not a big advocate for peak-day lift ticket prices that resemble those of black-market hand sanitizer in March 2020: Fortunately Vail and Alterra seem to have launched a lift ticket price war, the first battle of which is The Battle of Give Half Off Coupons to Your Dumb Friends Who Don’t Buy A Ski Pass 10 Months Before They Plan to Ski: Alterra also runs some heli-ski outfits up in B.C. but I’m not going to bother decoding all that because one reason I started The Storm was because I was over stories of Bros skiing 45 feet of powder at the top of the Chugach while the rest of us fretted over parking reservations and the $5 replacement cost of an RFID card. I know some of you are like Bro how many stories do you think the world needs about chairlifts but hey at least pretty much anyone reading this can go ride them. Oh and also I probably lost like 95 percent of you with Voltron because unless you were between the ages of 7 and 8 in the mid-1980s you probably missed this: One neat thing about skiing is that if someone ran headfirst into a snowgun in 1985 and spent four decades in a coma and woke up tomorrow they’d still know pretty much all the ski areas even if they were confused about what’s a Palisades Tahoe and why all of us future wussies wear helmets. “Damn it, Son in my day we didn’t bother and I’m just fine. Now grab $20 and a pack of smokes and let’s go skiing.” Why I interviewed him For pretty much the same reason I interviewed this fellow: I mean like it or not these two companies dominate modern lift-served skiing in this country, at least from a narrative point of view. And while I do everything I can to demonstrate that between the Indy Pass and ski areas not in Colorado or Utah or Tahoe plenty of skier choice remains, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that Alterra’s 17 U.S. ski areas and Vail’s 36 together make up around 30 percent of the skiable terrain across America’s 509 active ski areas: And man when you add in all U.S. Epic and Ikon mountains it’s like dang: We know publicly traded Vail’s Epic Pass sales numbers and we know those numbers have softened over the past couple of years, but we don’t have similar access to Alterra’s numbers. A source with direct knowledge of Ikon Pass sales recently told me that unit sales had increased every year. Perhaps some day someone will anonymously message me a screenshot code-named Alterra’s Big Dumb Chart documenting unit and dollar sales since Ikon’s 2018 launch. In the meantime, I’m just going to have to keep talking to the guy running the company and asking extremely sly questions like, “if you had to give us a ballpark estimate of exactly how many Ikon Passes you sold and how much you paid each partner mountain and which ski area you’re going to buy next, what would you say?” What we talked about A first-to-open competition between A-Basin and Winter Park (A-Basin won); the allure of skiing Japan; Ikon as first-to-market in South Korea and China; continued Ikon expansion in Europe; who’s buying Ikon?; bonus mountains; half-off friends tickets; reserve passes; “one of the things we’ve struggled with as an industry are the dynamics between purchasing a pass and the daily lift ticket price”; “we’ve got to find ways to make it more accessible, more affordable, more often for more people”; Europe as a cheaper ski alternative to the West; “we are focused every day on … what is the right price for the right consumer on the right day?”; “there’s never been more innovation” in the ski ticket space; Palisades Tahoe’s 14-year-village-expansion approval saga; America’s “increasingly complex” landscape of community stakeholders; and Deer Valley’s massive expansion. What I got wrong * We didn’t get this wrong, but when we recorded this pod on Wednesday, Smith and I discussed which of Alterra’s ski areas would open first. Arapahoe Basin won that fight, opening today (Sunday, Oct. 26). * I said that 40 percent of all Epic, Ikon, and Indy pass partners were outside of North America. This is inaccurate: 40 percent (152) of those three passes’ combined 383 partners is outside the United States . Subtracting their 49 Canadian ski areas gives us 103 mountains outside of North America, or 27 percent of the total. * I claimed that a ski vacation to Europe is “a quarter of the price” of a similar trip to the U.S. This was hyperbole, and obviously the available price range of ski vacations is enormous, but in general, prices for everything from lift tickets to hotels to food tend to be lower in the Alps than in the Rocky Mountain core. * It probably seems strange that I said that Deer Valley’s East Village was great because you could drive there from the airport without hitting a spotlight and also said that the resort would be less car-dependent. What I meant by that was that once you arrive at East Village, it is – or will be, when complete – a better slopeside pedestrian village experience than the car-oriented Snow Park that has long served as the resort’s principal entry point. Snow Park itself is scheduled to evolve from parking-lot-and-nothing-else to secondary pedestrian village. The final version of Deer Valley should reduce the number of cars within Park City proper and create a more vibrant atmosphere at the ski area. Questions I wish I’d asked The first question you’re probably asking is “Bro why is this so short aren’t your podcasts usually longer than a Superfund cleanup?” Well I take what I can get and if there’s a question you can think of related to Ikon or Alterra or any of the company’s mountains, it was on my list. But Smith had either 30 minutes or zero minutes so I took the win. Podcast Notes On Deer Valley I was talking to the Deer Valley folks the other day and we agreed that they’re doing so much so fast that it’s almost impossible to tell the story. I mean this was Deer Valley two winters ago : And this will be Deer Valley this winter: Somehow it’s easier to write 3,000 words on Indy Pass adding a couple of Northeast backwaters than it is to frame up the ambitions of a Utah ski area expanding by as much skiable acreage as all 30 New Hampshire ski areas combined in just two years. Anyway Deer Valley is about to be the sixth-largest ski area in America and when this whole project is done in a few years it will be number four at 5,700 acres, behind only Vail Resorts’ neighboring Park City (7,300 acres), Alterra’s own Palisades Tahoe (6,000 acres), and Boyne Resorts’ Big Sky (5,850 acres). On recent Steamboat upgrades Yes the Wild Blue Gondola is cool and I’m sure everyone from Baton-Tucky just loves it. But everything I’m hearing out of Steamboat over the past couple of winters indicates that A) the 650-acre Mahogany Ridge expansion adds a fistfighting dimension to what had largely been an intermediate ski resort, and that, B) so far, no one goes over there, partially because they don’t know about it and partially because the resort only cut one trail in the whole amazing zone (far looker’s left): I guess just go ski this one while everyone else still thinks Steamboat is nothing but gondolas and Sunshine Peak. On Winter Park being “on deck” After stringing the two sides of Palisades Tahoe together with a $75 trillion gondola and expanding Steamboat and nearly tripling the size of Deer Valley, all signs point to Alterra next pushing its resources into actualizing Winter Park’s ambitious masterplan , starting with the gondola connection to town (right side of map): On new Ikon Pass partners for 2025-26 You can read about the bonus partners above, but here are the write-ups on Ikon’s full seven/five-day partners: On previous Alterra podcasts This was Smith’s second appearance on the pod. Here’s number one, from 2023: His predecessor, Rusty Gregory, appeared on the show three times: I’ve also hosted the leaders of a bunch of Alterra leaders on the pod, most recently A-Basin and Mammoth: And the heads of many Ikon Pass partners – most recently Killington and Sun Valley: On U.S. passes in Japan Epic, Ikon, Indy, and Mountain Collective are now aligned with 48 ski areas in Japan – nearly as many as the four passes have signed in Canada: On Europe And here are the European ski areas aligned with Epic, Ikon, Indy, and Mountain Collective – the list is shorter than the Japanese list, but since each European ski area is made up of between one and 345 ski areas, the actual skiable acreage here is likely equal to the landmass of Greenland: On skier and ski area growth in China China’s ski industry appears to be developing rapidly - I’m not sure what to make of the difference between “ski resorts” and “ski resorts with aerial ropeways.” Normally I’d assume that means with or without lifts, but that doesn’t make a lot of sense and sometimes nations frame things in very different ways. On the village at Palisades Tahoe The approval process for a village expansion on the Olympic side of Palisades Tahoe was a very convoluted one. KCRA sums the outcome up well (I’ll note that “Alterra” did not call for anything in 2011, as the company didn’t exist until 2017): Under the initial 2011 application, Alterra had called for the construction of 2,184 bedrooms. That was reduced to 1,493 bedrooms in a 2014 revised proposal where 850 housing units — a mix of condominiums, hotel rooms and timeshares — were planned. The new agreement calls for a total of 896 bedrooms. The groups that pushed this downsizing were primarily Keep Tahoe Blue and Sierra Watch. Smith is very diplomatic in discussing this project on the podcast, pointing to the “collaboration, communication, and a little bit of compromise” that led to the final agreement. I’m not going to be so diplomatic. Fighting dense, pedestrian-oriented development that could help reconfigure traffic patterns and housing availability in a region that is choking on ski traffic and drowning in housing costs is dumb. The systems for planning, approving, and building anything that is different from what already exists in this nation are profoundly broken. The primary issue is this: these anti-development crusaders position themselves as environmental defenders without acknowledging (or, more likely, realizing), that the existing traffic, blight, and high costs driving their resistance is a legacy of haphazard development in past decades, and that more thoughtful, human-centric projects could mitigate, rather than worsen, these concerns. The only thing an oppose-everything stance achieves is to push development farther out into the hinterlands, exacerbating sprawl and traffic. British Columbia is way ahead of us here. I’ve written about this extensively in the past, and won’t belabor the point here except to cite what I wrote last year about the 3,711-home city sprouting from raw wilderness below Cypress Mountain, a Boyne-owned Ikon Pass partner just north of Vancouver: Mountain town housing is most often framed as an intractable problem, ingrown and malignant and impossible to reset or rethink or repair. Too hard to do. But it is not hard to do. It is the easiest thing in the world. To provide more housing, municipalities must allow developers to build more housing, and make them do it in a way that is dense and walkable, that is mixed with commerce, that gives people as many ways to move around without a car as possible. This is not some new or brilliant idea. This is simply how humans built villages for about 10,000 years, until the advent of the automobile. Then we started building our spaces for machines instead of for people. This was a mistake, and is the root problem of every mountain town housing crisis in North America. That and the fact that U.S. Americans make no distinction between the hyper-thoughtful new urbanist impulses described here and the sprawling shitpile of random buildings that are largely the backdrop of our national life. The very thing that would inject humanity into the mountains is recast as a corrupting force that would destroy a community’s already-compromised-by-bad-design character. Not that it will matter to our impossible American brains, but Canada is about to show us how to do this. Over the next 25 years, a pocket of raw forest hard against Cypress’ access road will sprout a city of 3,711 homes that will house thousands of people. It will be a human-scaled, pedestrian-first community, a city neighborhood dropped onto a mountainside. A gondola could connect the complex to Cypress’ lifts thousands of feet up the mountain – more cars off the road. It would look like this (the potential aerial lift is not depicted here): Here’s how the whole thing would set up against the mountain: And here’s what it would be like at ground level: Like wow that actually resembles something that is not toxic to the human soul. But to a certain sort of Mother Earth evangelist, the mere suggestion of any sort of mountainside development is blasphemous. I understand this impulse, but I believe that it is misdirected, a too-late reflex against the subdivision-off-an-exit-ramp Build-A-Bungalow mentality that transformed this country into a car-first sprawlscape. I believe a reset is in order: to preserve large tracts of wilderness, we should intensely develop small pieces of land, and leave the rest alone. This is about to happen near Cypress. We should pay attention. Given the environmental community’s reflexive and vociferous opposition to a recent proposal to repurpose tracts of not-necessarily-majestic wilderness for housing, I’m not optimistic that we possess the cultural brainpower to improve our own lives through policy. Which is why I’ve been writing more about passes and less about our collective ambitions to make everything from the base of the lifts outward as inconvenient and expensive as possible. The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us for 20% off the annual rate through Monday, Oct. 27, 2025. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

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Who Phill Gross, owner, and Mike Solimano, CEO of Killington and Pico , Vermont Recorded on July 10, 2025 About Killington Click here for a mountain stats overview Owned by: Phill Gross and team Located in: Killington, Vermont Year founded: 1958 Pass affiliations: Ikon Pass: 5 or 7 combined days with Pico Reciprocal partners: Pico access is included on all Killington passes Closest neighboring ski areas: Pico (:12), Saskadena Six (:39), Okemo (:40), Quechee (:44), Ascutney (:55), Storrs (:59), Harrington Hill (:59), Magic (1:00), Whaleback (1:02), Sugarbush (1:04), Bromley (1:04), Middlebury Snowbowl (1:08), Arrowhead (1:10), Mad River Glen (1:11) Base elevation: 1,165 feet at Skyeship Base Summit elevation: 4,142 feet at top of K-1 gondola (hike-to summit of Killington Peak at 4,241 feet) Vertical drop: 2,977 feet lift-served, 3,076 hike-to Skiable Acres: 1,509 Average annual snowfall: 250 inches Trail count: 155 (43% advanced/expert, 40% intermediate, 17% beginner) Lift count: 20 (2 gondolas, 2 six-packs, 4 high-speed quads, 5 fixed-grip quads, 2 triples, 1 double, 1 platter, 3 carpets - view Lift Blog’s inventory of Killington’s lift fleet; Killington plans to replace the Snowdon triple with a fixed-grip quad for the 2026-27 ski season) History: from New England Ski History About Pico Click here for a mountain stats overview Owned by: Phill Gross and team Located in: Mendon, Vermont Year founded: 1934 Pass affiliations: Ikon Pass: 5 or 7 combined days with Killington Reciprocal partners: Pico access is included on all Killington passes; four days Killington access included on Pico K.A. Pass Closest neighboring ski areas: Killington (:12), Saskadena Six (:38), Okemo (:38), Quechee (:42), Ascutney (:53), Storrs (:57), Harrington Hill (:55), Magic (:58), Whaleback (1:00), Sugarbush (1:01), Bromley (1:00), Middlebury Snowbowl (1:01), Mad River Glen (1:07), Arrowhead (1:09) Base elevation: 2,000 feet Summit elevation: 3,967 feet Vertical drop: 1,967 feet Skiable Acres: 468 Average annual snowfall: 250 inches Trail count: 58 (36% advanced/expert, 46% intermediate, 18% beginner) Lift count: 7 (2 high-speed quads, 2 triples, 1 doubles, 2 carpets - view Lift Blog’s inventory of Pico’s lift fleet) History: from New England Ski History Why I interviewed them The longest-tenured non-government ski area operator in America, as far as I know, is the Seeholzer family, owner-operators of Beaver Mountain, Utah since 1939. Third-generation owner Travis Seeholzer came on the pod a few years back to trace the eight-decade arc from this dude flexing 10-foot-long kamikaze boards to the present: Just about every ski area in America was hacked out of the wilderness by Some Guy Who Looked Like That. Dave McCoy at Mammoth or Ernie Blake at Taos or Everett Kircher at Boyne Mountain , swarthy, willful fellows who flew airplanes and erected rudimentary chairlifts in impossible places and hammered together their own baselodges. Over decades they chiseled these mountains into their personal Rushmores, a life’s work, a human soul knotted to nature in a built place that would endure for generations. It’s possible that they all imagined their family name governing those generations. In the remarkable case of Boyne, they still do. But the Kirchers and the Seeholzers are ski-world exceptions. Successive generations are often uninterested in the chore of legacy building. Or they try and say wow this is expensive. Or bad weather leads to bad financial choices by our cigar-smoking, backhoe-driving, machete-wielding founder and his sons and daughters never get their chance. The ski area’s deed shuffles into the portfolio of a Colorado Skico and McCoy fades a little each year and at some point Mammoth is just another ski area owned by Alterra Mountain Company. It’s tempting to sentimentalize the past, to lament skiing’s macro-transition from gritty network of founder-kingpin fifes to set of corporate brands, to conclude that “this generation” just doesn’t have the tenacity of a Blake or a McCoy. But the America where a fellow could turn up with a dump truck and a chainsaw and flatten raw forest into a for-profit business with minimal protest is gone. Every part of the ski ecosystem is more regulated, complicated, and expensive than it’s ever been. The appeal of running such a machine - and the skillset necessary to do so - is entirely different from that of sculpting your own personal snow Narnia from scratch. We will always have family-owned ski areas (we still have hundreds), and an occasional modern founder-disruptor like Mount Bohemia’s Lonie Glieberman will materialize like a new X-man. But ski conglomerates have probably always been inevitable, and are probably largely the industry’s future. They are best suited, in most cases, to manage, finance, and maintain the vast machinery of our largest ski centers (and also to create a ski landscape in which not all ski area operators are Some Guy Who Looked Like That). Killington demonstrates this arc from rambunctious founder to corporate vassal as well as any mountain in the country. Founded in 1958 by the wily and wild Pres Smith, the ski area’s parent company, Sherburne Corp., bought Sunday River, Maine in 1973 and Mount Snow, Vermont in 1977. The two Vermont mountains became S-K-I in 1984, bought five more ski areas, and merged with four-resort LBO in 1996 to become the titanic American Skiing Company. Unfortunately ASC turned out to be skiing’s Titanic, and one of the company’s last acts before dissolution was to sell Killington and Pico to Utah-based Powdr in 2007. The Beast had been tamed, at least on paper. Corporate ownership of some sort felt as stapled to the mountain as Killington’s 3,000 snowguns. And mostly, well, it didn’t matter. Other than Powdr’s disastrous attempts to shorten the resort’s famously long seasons, Killington never lost its feisty edge. Over the decades the ski area modernized, masterplanned, and shed skier volume while increasing its viability as a business. Modern Killington wasn’t the kingdom of a charismatic and ever-present founder, but it was a pretty good ski area. And then, suddenly, shockingly, Powdr sold both Killington and Pico last August. And they didn’t sell the ski areas to Vail or Alterra or Boyne or to anyone who owned any ski areas at all. Instead, a group of local investors - led by Phill Gross and Michael Ferri, longtime Killington homeowners who ran a variety of non-ski-related businesses - bought the mountains. After 51 years as part of a multi-mountain ownership group, Killington (its relationship to neighboring Pico notwithstanding), was once again independent. It was all so improbable. Out-of-state operators had purchased five of Vermont’s large ski areas in recent years: Colorado-based Vail Resorts bought Stowe in 2017, Okemo in 2018, and Mount Snow in 2019; Denver-based Alterra claimed Sugarbush in 2019; and Utah-based Pacific Group Resorts added Jay Peak to their small portfolio in 2022. Very few ski areas have ever entered the corporate matrix and re-emerged as independents. Grand Targhee, Wyoming; Waterville Valley, New Hampshire; and Mountain Creek, New Jersey (technically owned by multimountain operator Snow Partners) are exceptions spun off from larger companies. But mostly, once a larger entity absorbed a ski area, it stays locked in the multimountain universe forever. So what would this mean? For the largest and busiest mountain in the eastern United States to be independent? Did this, along with Powdr’s intentions to sell Mount Bachelor (since rescinded ), Eldora (sale in process ), and Silver Star (no update), mark a reversal in the consolidation trend that had gathered 30 percent of America’s ski areas under the umbrella of a multi-mountain operator? Did Killington’s group of wealthy-but-not-Bezos-wealthy investors set an alternate blueprint for large-mountain ownership, especially when considered alongside the sale of Jackson Hole to a similar group the year before? Had the Ikon Pass – that harbinger of mass-market pass domination that had forced the we-better-join-them sales of Crystal Mountain, Washington and Sugarbush – inadvertently become a reliable revenue pipeline that made independence more viable? And would Killington, well-managed and constantly improving, backslide under cowboy owners who want to Q-Burke the place in their image? We’re a year in now, and we have some clarity on these questions, along with two new chairlifts (Superstar this year, Snowdon next), 1,000 new snowguns, a revitalized Skyeship Gondola, and progressing plans on the East’s first true ski village. Locals seem happy, management seems happy, the owners seem happy. Easy enough, Gross points out in our interview, when winter hits deep like the last one did. But can we keep the party going indefinitely? It was time for a check-in. What we talked about A strong first winter under independent ownership; what spring skiing off Canyon lift told us about the importance of Superstar; “it’s an incredibly complex operation”; letting the smart people do their jobs; Killington’s surprise spin-off from a multi-mountain operator; “our job is to keep the honeymoon going”; Superstar’s six-pack upgrade; why six-packs are probably Killington’s lift-upgrade future; why Pico is demolishing the Bonanza lift for a covered carpet; why Superstar won’t have bubbles; where bubbles might make sense in a future lift; why ski areas can no longer run snowmaking under newly constructed chairlifts; why Superstar is a Doppelmayr machine after Killington installed a brand-new Leitner-Poma six at Snowdon in 2018; long- and short-term Superstar impacts to Killington’s long season; long-term thoughts around early-season walkway access to North Ridge; Skyeship Gondola upgrades, including $5 million in new cabins; what 1,000 new snowguns means in practice; why Killington sold the Wobbly Barn; considering Killington as a business and investment; how Killington is a different financial beast from other Vermont ski areas; how close Killington was to going unlimited on Ikon Pass; Phill’s journey to buying Killington; Devil’s Fiddle and why sometimes things that don’t make sense financially make sense anyway; “we want to own this for generations to come”; a village layout and timeline update – “we want to make sure that this is something that’s additive to the ski experience” even if you don’t own within it; “Great Gulf wants this [village] to be competitive for the western resorts”; “we don’t want to change what Pico is”; how piping water over from Killington has reinvigorated and stabilized Pico; why Killington and Pico remained on Ikon Pass post-sale and probably will for the foreseeable future; is Ikon helping big ski areas stay independent?; Killington’s steady rise in lift ticket prices; future lift upgrades and why the Snowdon Triple is next up for a replacement. What I got wrong * File “opinionation” under LOL I’m Dumb Talking Is Hard * I said that former Killington owner Powdr had “just sold” Eldora, but that’s not accurate: in July, the town of Nederland, Colorado, announced their intent to purchase the ski area. The sales process is ongoing. Podcast Notes On previous Killington pods On Gross’ purchase of Killington and Pico On ANSI chairlift standards We get a bit in the weeds with a reference to “ANSI standards” for chairlifts. ANSI is the American National Standards Institute, a nonprofit organization that sets voluntary but widely adopted standards for everything from office furniture to electrical systems to safety signage in the United States. The ANSI standard for lifts, according to a blog post describing the code’s 2022 update, is “developed by the National Ski Areas Association (NSAA), [and] establishes standard requirements for the design, manufacture, construction, operation, and maintenance of passenger ropeways.” On Killington’s long seasons Killington often opens in October (though it has not done so since 2018), and closes in June (three straight years before a deliberately truncated 2024-25 season to begin demolition of the Superstar chair). List of Killington open and close dates since 1987-88. On Win Smith and Killington and Sugarbush On Killington’s village The East needs more of this: On Killington’s peak lift ticket prices Per New England Ski History : 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