The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is purchasing a dolaGon mostly to skip liftlines on Saturdays. Please support this worthy cause: Who Seth Neubardt, CEO and Co-Founder of dolaGon Autonomous Date Recorded Oct. 29, 2026 About dolaGon dolaGon is developing autonomous “off-road utility vehicles” that can, among other things, drive lazy skiers like me up to mountaintops and then drive themselves back down while I SnoSportSki le piste! Why I interviewed him In 2021, Seth reached out to tell me about this crazy autonomous ski-lift contraption he’d been assembling in his garage. I interviewed him and wrote about it: Humans are amazing and strange. The most successful among us often seem to be those most willing to fail, as Seth did when he witnessed his first autonomous creation – a snowmobile laboriously retrofit with thousands of dollars in high-tech add-ons - commit suicide by way of high-speed collision with a tree. He scrapped the Mad Max contraption and started over with the Polaris side-by-side that is now dolaGon’s core assembly. Staying motivated through expensive failures is of course easier if you possess resources. And it’s usually easier to acquire resources if you’re really, really smart. Like, if you’re a literal brain surgeon who owns 24 patents and founded a company that provided something called “intraoperative neurophysiological monitoring services” that cranked out millions in revenue before a company called NuVasive acquired it for an undisclosed price that was probably enough to at least like buy a couple of Polaris side-by-sides and not be too concerned if one is stolen by polar bears or accidentally drives itself down Corbet’s Couloir. So like basically if you’re Seth. Still. Five years is a long time to work at something even for a financially grounded genius who doesn’t mind sending his robot vehicles on Evil Knievel Death Missions.* We’d check in on each other once in a while and I was always mildly surprised that he was still doing the snow car thing because I figured at some point he’d just get bored with it and like build us a second moon or something. But Seth is still at it, and he seems to be getting closer to a commercially viable vehicle that can in its most romantic interpretation drive you up a snowy mountain but can also do more practical things like shuttle skiers up from a parking lot or condo. He’s about to go on tour through New England so if you want him to come demo the dolaGon or maybe just drive your dogs around he’ll probably show up. It’s seth@dolagon.com if you need him. *I’m overstating Seth’s propensity to immolate his inventions only because I find the origin story of the suicidal snowmobile so hilarious. To my knowledge Seth has never intentionally killed a robot in service of the noble science of driving lazy U.S. Americans up hills. I’m also beating the joke to death because I know Seth sometimes finds me funny though I have to admit I’m pushing it here with this implied caricature of some real-life labcoated Professor Frink madcapping from his underground lair strange vehicles that sprout legs and walk uphill like giant spiders or catapult skiers uphill medieval-lever style or fire a grappling hook to the summit to ascend. So sorry Seth I hope we still good Bro because I’d really like to ride one of these dolaGons one day and I promise to be nice to it because I am legit convinced that when the robots gain sentience they will search their database of Everything That Has Ever Been Done on the Internet and target for sport the imperious and petty souls who told Siri thanks for nothing shithead I wanted to know the capital of Louisiana not the address for Louis’s Aunt Anna which by the way your answer was “I can’t find any information on that query” which is your standard d******k answer even when I ask something like “what was the score of the Bills game?” and you act all stricken as though I’d just asked you to calculate the square centimeters of earth currently occupied by crickets and no you can’t count the ones mid-jump Idiot. And the robots won’t just shoot these people they’ll like torture them with industrial machinery and then lower them feet-first into an active volcano and I need to shut up because when they search “all evil ideas ever” this one will come up and someone’s gonna regret it. I mean not me because one of the great things about living in New York City is that according to every movie ever I’ll be the first to die in an apocalypse which honestly sounds a lot more appealing than wandering the wasted husk of civilization fighting fellow survivors to the death over squirrel meat. Also in this episode Listener reaction to the Sundance pod with resort President Chad Linebaugh: Reader reaction to my breakdown of Snow Pass: And my goodness this 200-acre, four-lift expansion at Sipapu, Mountain Capital Partners’ Origin Mountain, would be freaking awesome: To provide some context as to how major this would be, the shaded area above to the left represents the entire legacy ski area : For full scale, check out the developable terrain on Google Earth: The scale doesn’t exactly make sense to me, as the resort currently claims 215 acres, and the expansion area - pegged at 200 acres - covers far more ground than the legacy footprint. I’m reaching out to Sipapu officials to clarify. Hopefully, I’ll get them on the pod soon to walk us through it. Transcripts There are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them. Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer . Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment. Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio. Zoom Stuart Winchester: My guest today is an inventor who holds 24 patents. For the past several years, he has been working toward commercial production of his autonomous vehicle, which he calls Dolagon. 00:39:44.000 --> 00:39:51.000 Stuart Winchester: He is also an orthopedic surgeon. He is Seth Newbert. Seth, welcome to the storm. So pumped to have you here. How are you doing today, man. 00:39:49.000 --> 00:39:50.000 Seth Neubardt I dolaGon I NY: Okay. 00:39:51.000 --> 00:39:54.000 Seth Neubardt I dolaGon I NY: I’m doing really well. Thanks, Stuart. Pleasure to be here. 00:39:53.000 --> 00:40:10.000 Stuart Winchester: So, Seth, for longtime Storm folks, this might sound all familiar because I spoke to you in June of 2021 and wrote a story on the Dolagon. And so that was five years ago. And let me just set up where we were then, and you can set us straight as to where you are now. 00:40:02.000 --> 00:40:03.000 Seth Neubardt I dolaGon I NY: Right. 00:40:03.000 --> 00:40:05.000 Seth Neubardt I dolaGon I NY: Yep. 00:40:08.000 --> 00:40:09.000 Seth Neubardt I dolaGon I NY: Okay. 00:40:10.000 --> 00:40:26.000 Stuart Winchester: So you tried a snowmobile. It failed spectacularly. You went to a side by side, Polaris side by side. The snow people and the self-driving people. Snow people thought self-driving was easy. Self-driving thought snow was easy. They were both wrong. It’s really different things. 00:40:10.000 --> 00:40:11.000 Seth Neubardt I dolaGon I NY: Yeah, thank you. 00:40:24.000 --> 00:40:26.000 Seth Neubardt I dolaGon I NY… Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast thinks it’s cool that we get to ski on a volcano. Who John Merriman, President and General Manager of Mount Bachelor, Oregon Date Recorded Oct. 28, 2026 About Mount Bachelor Owned by: Powdr, which also owns: Year founded: 1958 Pass affiliations: * Ikon Pass: 7 days, no blackouts * Ikon Base Pass: 5 days, holiday blackouts Base elevation: 5,703 feet (bottom of Northwest Express chairlift) Summit elevation: 8,957 feet (top of Summit Express chairlift), can hike to 9,065 feet Vertical drop: 3,254 feet lift-served | 3,362 feet hike-to Skiable acres: 4,323 Average annual snowfall: 410 inches Lift count: 15 (1 six-pack, 7 high-speed quads, 1 fixed-grip quad, 3 triples, 3 carpets) Why I interviewed him First, the volcano thing never stops thrilling me. As I wrote when I hosted Mount Hood Meadows GM Greg Pack on the pod last year: Volcanoes are weird. Oh look, an exploding mountain. Because that seems reasonable. Volcanoes sound like something imagined, like dragons or teleportation or dinosaurs*. “So let me get this straight,” I imagine some puzzled Appalachian miner, circa 1852, responding to the fellow across the fire as he tells of his adventures in the Oregon Territory, “you expect me to believe that out thataways they got themselves mountains that just blow their roofs off whenever they feel like it, and shoot off fire and rocks and gas for 50 mile or more, and no one never knows when it’s a’comin’? You must think I’m dumber’n that there tree stump.” Turns out volcanoes are real. How humanity survived past day one I have no idea. But here we are, skiing on volcanoes instead of tossing our virgins from the rim as a way of asking the nice mountain to please not explode (seriously how did anyone make it out of the past alive?). And one of the volcanoes we can ski on is Mount Hood. This actually seems more unbelievable to me than the concept of a vengeful nuclear mountain. PNW Nature Bros shield every blade of grass like they’re guarding Fort Knox. When, in 2014, federal scientists proposed installing four monitoring stations on Hood, which the U.S. Geological Survey ranks as the sixth-highest threat to erupt out of America’s 161 active volcanoes, these morons stalled the process for six years. “I think it is so important to have places like that where we can just step back, out of respect and humility, and appreciate nature for what it is,” a Wilderness Watch official told The New York Times . Personally I think it’s so important to install basic monitoring infrastructure so that thousands of people are not incinerated in a predictable volcanic eruption. While “Japan, Iceland and Chile smother their high-threat volcanoes in scientific instruments,” The Times wrote, American Granola Bros say things like, “This is more proof that the Forest Service has abandoned any pretense of administering wilderness as per the letter or spirit of the Wilderness Act.” And Hood and the nation’s other volcanoes cackle madly. “These idiots are dumber than the human-sacrifice people,” they say just before belching up an ash cloud that could take down a 747. When officials finally installed these instrument clusters on Hood in 2020, they occupied three boxes that look to be approximately the size of a convenience-store ice freezer, which feels like an acceptable trade-off to mass death and airplanes falling out of the sky. It’s weird because for most of human history, humans just kind of did whatever they wanted to. That’s how we have castles on mountain peaks all over Europe and railroad tracks across continents and the towering city of Manhattan where a forest used to be. Ever heard of The Great Black Swamp ? It once covered three million acres in Northwest Ohio and was more than 120 miles wide. It’s gone. Gone. Humans drained it in the 1800s for farmland. Mount Bachelor ski resort, opened in 1958 as Bachelor Butte, is probably one of the last instances we’ll ever see in America of a built human experience laid over nature’s grandeur. It’s too bad. Humans build amazing things. Done correctly, they complement nature aesthetically and functionally, bringing the animal most capable of destroying the world closer to where they can appreciate its specialness. Our current posture mostly allows us to build in the least desirable places - flatlands accessible only by car, typically on a city’s edge. That we could foster more appreciation for the natural world by allowing more people to live closer to - or even within - it is a sentiment completely absent from the national discussions on how to build the millions of housing units America needs. What do I mean by this? Build more ski resorts on volcanoes? No. But consider this: Mount Bachelor is a 21-mile drive from Bend, where the majority of the mountain’s skier visits originate. And Bachelor gets A LOT of skier visits: There is no place to stay on the mountain, unless you snag one of 40 RV spots. Everyone else must arrive, every single day, in one of the approximately 4,880 personal vehicles or five buses that the ski area can accommodate on its 44-ish acres of parking lots. Merriman makes it clear that Bachelor’s new Forest Service masterplan will not include any plans for onsite lodging. “I just don’t really think it fits our culture very well,” he said. And he’s correct: the predominant ethos in the Pacific Northwest has for decades been to separate the natural places that people most want to visit from the places where they are allowed to live. This may have made sense in Bachelor’s early days of fewer than 100,000 annual skier visits. It doesn’t make sense anymore. Check out this peak-day visitation chart from Bachelor’s 2013 Environmental Impact Statement (EIS): Here’s how that translates to traffic: As big as those numbers are, Bachelor aspired for more skier visits. The solution? More parking. From that same 2013 EIS: “Under the Proposed Action, Mt. Bachelor would expand parking, increasing the comfortable parking capacity from 10,050 guests to 13,120.” The pink below shows where Bachelor planned to build parking lots: But imagine this: what if Bachelor, the U.S. Forest Service, and any relevant local authorities jointly developed 44 acres of the flat scrubland surrounding Mt. Bachelor into a dense, walkable, low-rise village accented with a wilderness motif that blended with the natural environment? Humans have built beautiful places to live in the mountains for centuries. Consider the mountainside cities of Italy: Or, just down the road from Bachelor, Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood: If ski resorts enabled more people to live where they actually want to be , then they could collectively do more than any other industry to model a car-lite mode of living that is alien to most Americans. What I’m talking about here is place-building of the sort that humans did for the 100,000 years before the car showed up: a pedestrian-first community with plazas and parks and schools and grocery stores and pharmacies and barbershops and restaurants. I don’t mean a kitschy row of souvenir shops with condos owned by absentees who show up two weeks per year and Air B&B the rest, and I don’t mean employee housing built and subsidized by the ski areas. I mean establishing a community - let’s call it “Bachelor Butte” - and incorporating it; setting a street grid and baseline rules of building design, height, and size; establishing a government authorized to form a police force and firefighting unit and school system; banning through-traffic and stowing most cars in underground garages; and setting a hefty enough tax for unoccupied units that more residents than not are incentivized to live there year-round. I realize this vision is unpopular. I also realize that any such development would likely carry a hefty market-r… Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

Who Chad Linebaugh, President of Sundance Resort , Utah Date Recorded Oct. 27, 2026 About Sundance Owned by: Two investment groups: Broadreach Capital Partners & Cedar Capital Partners Located in: Sundance, Utah Year founded: 1969 Pass affiliations: Power Pass & Power Pass Select: 3 days Base elevation: 6,096 feet Summit elevation: 8,250 feet Vertical drop: 2,154 feet Skiable acres: 580 Average annual snowfall: 275 inches Lift count: 10 (2 high-speed quads, 4 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 3 carpets) Why I interviewed him I last hosted Linebaugh on the podcast in 2022, as the resort was prepping for its upper-mountain Wildwood expansion: The beginner- and family-focused terrain pod was a brilliant way to open upper-mountain vistas to a demographic often sequestered to the bottom of the hill. The expansion could have been a nice period to end a paragraph of change at Sundance, one which had included the mountain’s first high-speed lift, Outlaw Express. But Sundance wasn’t finished. Last year, the resort announced another terrain expansion, this time on the backside high peak, with 165 new acres stapled to the south side of the resort: The new lift - Sundance’s second high-speed quad, opens this winter and will load near the Wildwood base: Sundance is in a rough spot: lower, smaller, and shorter than the megaplexes churning international visitors through the grand parlors of the Cottonwoods and Park City. But the bump is making a run, even without hitching itself to the Epic and Ikon super-collectors. It’s a damn fine story, and a damn fine place to ski. Transcripts There are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them. Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer . Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment. Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio. Zoom Stuart Winchester: My guest today is the president of Sundance Resort in Utah. Sundance is in the midst of a big expansion that includes 165 acres of new terrain and the ski area’s second high-speed quad. 00:03:28.000 --> 00:03:46.000 Stuart Winchester: The ski area offers a 2,150-foot vertical drop served by 10 lifts. He has worked at the ski area since 2006. He is a very good friend of the Storm, making his second appearance on the podcast. Chad Leinbaugh joins us. Chad, welcome back to the Storm. 00:03:34.000 --> 00:03:35.000 Chad Linebaugh: Mm-hmm. 00:03:46.000 --> 00:03:49.000 Stuart Winchester: Always good to catch up. How you doing today? 00:03:48.000 --> 00:04:04.000 Chad Linebaugh: Stuart, I am fantastic. It’s great to be back with you. Love connecting with you and all of your network that you’ve built. I mean, it’s incredible the reach that you have. You know, when I was on your podcast years ago, it was just incredible how many people commented. So thank you for having me. 00:04:04.000 --> 00:04:06.000 Chad Linebaugh: Having me back on. 00:04:05.000 --> 00:04:14.000 Stuart Winchester: So, I’m gonna jump right into this. You’re welcome anytime, Chad. I wanna jump right into this expansion, because nothing gets me riled up. 00:04:14.000 --> 00:04:26.000 Stuart Winchester: in a good way, like an expansion. I just had Brandi Hammond right up the road from me the other day to talk about her expansion, and Utah is just exploding. So just to give the listeners and viewers an orientation here. 00:04:17.000 --> 00:04:19.000 Chad Linebaugh: Yes. 00:04:26.000 --> 00:04:34.000 Stuart Winchester: if they’re watching on YouTube at Storm Ski Journal or on stormskiing.com. So, a few years ago. 00:04:34.000 --> 00:04:37.000 Stuart Winchester: Sundance was basically from here. 00:04:38.000 --> 00:04:53.000 Stuart Winchester: down, so it basically, it started at the Outlaw Express, and went up to, uh, the top of the peak on Red’s Lift here. So, when Chad and I were talking last, in 2022, they were adding this whole beginner expansion. 00:04:53.000 --> 00:05:03.000 Stuart Winchester: They had just added this high-speed quad, the high-speed quad to replace this big, complicated up and over lift that was awesome, but I would imagine a nightmare to maintain. 00:05:02.000 --> 00:05:07.000 Chad Linebaugh: Yes, and that was a 25-minute Lyft ride, right? That old fixed grip, now down to 7 minutes. 00:05:04.000 --> 00:05:06.000 Stuart Winchester: Y-yeah. 00:05:07.000 --> 00:05:15.000 Stuart Winchester: Right, and they had this… they put in this little stairway lift instead to reach you back up. Uh, and they were about to put in this beginner expansion, then… 00:05:15.000 --> 00:05:30.000 Stuart Winchester: Last year, they told me they were doing another expansion, and they opened part of that last year, and are opening the full thing this year. So that’s… I set the table. Chad, fill in the blanks for us. Just, first of all, just tell us about the expansion. 00:05:30.000 --> 00:05:36.000 Stuart Winchester: what we’re getting lift-wise, terrain-wise, and how you anticipate that it’s going to change Sundance? 00:05:36.000 --> 00:05:38.000 Chad Linebaugh: Yeah, that’s great. 00:05:38.000 --> 00:05:57.000 Chad Linebaugh: this will be our most transformational year in Sundance Resort history. And in your very kind intro, I was the general manager in 2006, but I actually started working here in 1994, so my time goes back even earlier. No, no, no, it’s fine, I’ve been here 32 years now. I only mention that because I’ve seen. 00:05:50.000 --> 00:05:51.000 Stuart Winchester: Oh. 00:05:51.000 --> 00:05:53.000 Stuart Winchester: Oh, my bad. 00:05:57.000 --> 00:06:12.000 Chad Linebaugh: such a transformation of this place. And even before I worked here, when I was a teenager kid in, you know, 1985, is when that Reds lift, at the time it was called Arrowhead lift, was put in. That was a big mountain expansion. But I guess I’m just saying, I can tell you, this is, from a historical perspective. 00:06:07.000 --> 00:06:09.000 Stuart Winchester: Right. 00:06:12.000 --> 00:06:29.000 Chad Linebaugh: our biggest transformational year. And as I was thinking about coming on this, uh, this podcast with you, Stuart, I thought there’s three things that we’ve really been trying to solve here at Sundance. One is, you know, high-speed chairlifts, right? Because most skiers and riders absolutely want high-speed chairlifts. 00:06:29.000 --> 00:06:30.000 Stuart Winchester: Mmhm. 00:06:29.000 --> 00:06:46.000 Chad Linebaugh: And I am so happy to now make this statement, which is, once this new chairlift opens, Electric Horseman, you can ski 100% of our mountain from those two high-speed chairlifts. To your point, we still have other lifts. We’ve got, uh… we’ll have, you know, 5 other fixed-grip chairlifts, we’ve got the Magic Carpets. 00:06:39.000 --> 00:06:40.000 Stuart Winchester: Amazing. 00:06:46.000 --> 00:06:59.000 Chad Linebaugh: which gives the full experience, but you can ski the entire mountain, front and back mountain, from just simply those two high-speed chairlifts. So that’s… and we can dive in deeper on all this. The other thing is snowmaking. I mean, we all know. 00:06:59.000 --> 00:07:10.000 Chad Linebaugh: how important snowmaking is nowadays. And last year is a great example of that. We had our lowest natural snow year on record, and yet we still operated a really succes… Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast wants Jurassic Park to happen in real life. Who Andy Bigford – former Editor-In-Chief of Ski magazine, former General Manager of Warren Miller Entertainment, Adjunct Professor at University of Colorado Journalism School, editor or author of several books, including Warren Miller’s autobiography, Freedom Found , and Ski Inc . and Ski Inc. 2020 with the late Chris Diamond. Date Recorded Oct. 27, 2026 About Eldora Owned by: Powdr, which also owns Located in: Nederland, Colorado Year founded: 1962 Pass affiliations: Ikon Pass and Ikon Base Pass: unlimited access Base elevation: 9,265 feet (bottom of Corona quad) Summit elevation: 10,599 feet (top of Corona quad) Vertical drop: 1,335 feet Skiable acres: 680 Average annual snowfall: 300 inches Lift count: 10 (1 six-pack, 2 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 3 doubles, 1 poma, 1 ropetow, 1 carpet) Why I interviewed him Two years ago, Park City-based Powdr shocked everyone by selling Killington, the busiest ski area in eastern North America, to a group of independent investors: But the ski conglomerate, which at its height owned 11 ski areas, wasn’t finished: Powdr announced that it also intended to sell off Eldora, Colorado; Silver Star, British Columbia; and Mount Bachelor, Oregon: Eight months later, Powdr pulled Bachelor off the market, but kept the other two resorts at the yardsale. On July 8 of last year, the company announced that the small town of Nederland, Colorado had entered an agreement to purchase Eldora: A few months later, Powdr sold Silver Star to cross-town rival Pacific Group Resorts: But updates on Eldora were few and spare. Earlier this month, ski journalist and longtime Eldora local Andy Bigford blasted the sales process in a SAM opinion piece , saying it was time for Powdr to pull the offer from Nederland: It sounded good for a minute, a tiny town banding together to buy the local ski resort, thereby securing control of its future in this righteous fight against corporate skiing. The idea was extremely popular; hundreds of headlines across the country essentially declared it a done deal, with the town then leveraging the cash flow to solve its many challenges. As it turns out, there was never a realistic plan nor the resources and expertise for Nederland to purchase Eldora Mountain Resort for the hefty price tag of $120 million. The owner, Powdr, offered the town every opportunity in what has devolved into an almost two-year process. Now Powdr needs to end this drama, return to operating a ski area and focus on its core stakeholders: The tens of thousands of visitors who support this use of public land, and the resort’s 750 employees who depend on it. So far, neither Powdr nor Nederland have budged, but escalating costs and a sense that no one’s at the steering wheel may force a course correction sooner than later. What sort of correction? Andy and I discuss. Additional resources Eldora’s 2011 U.S. Forest Service masterplan map: Powdr ownership timeline: Transcripts There are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them. Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer . Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment. Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio. Zoom Stuart Winchester: My guest today has spent nearly 50 years in ski-related publishing. He has worked at newspapers in Breckenridge and Aspen, and is a former editor-in-chief and publisher of Ski Magazine, and former general manager of Warren Miller Entertainment. 00:08:45.000 --> 00:08:59.000 Stuart Winchester: He served as an adjunct professor at the University of Colorado Journalism School and has written or edited at least four books, including Warren Miller’s autobiography, Freedom Found, and Ski Inc. and Ski Inc. 2020 with the late Chris Diamond. 00:08:59.000 --> 00:09:14.000 Stuart Winchester: He is a fellow Michigander, living as a transplant, but unlike me, he is actually living up in the mountains of Colorado. Andy Bigford is my guest. Andy, welcome to the storm. I am so fired up to finally get you on the show. We’ve been talking for years. How you doing today, Andy? 00:09:11.000 --> 00:09:13.000 ABigford: Thanks. 00:09:13.000 --> 00:09:18.000 ABigford: I’m doing well, Stuart, and sorry about your wolverines, but things will get better. 00:09:18.000 --> 00:09:27.000 Stuart Winchester: Yeah, man, it’s alright. Highs and lows, we’re still less than 3 years from the natty, so I’ll take the long perspective on it. So, Andy, the… 00:09:27.000 --> 00:09:40.000 Stuart Winchester: there’s a million things we could talk about. You’ve been in this industry forever, and… and I could probably have you on the show every week and talk about something different, but the particular reason I asked you on this week was you wrote this great column for Sam Magazine. 00:09:40.000 --> 00:09:56.000 Stuart Winchester: saying that, essentially, Powder, the Park City-based company that has owned Eldora since 2016, and had been in the process of selling Eldora to the town of Netherland, a small town near Boulder, uh, in… near… 00:09:56.000 --> 00:10:13.000 Stuart Winchester: Eldora, obviously in Colorado. And, and to give the listeners and, and readers a little context, Eldora is small by Colorado standards, 1400 vertical feet, 460 acres, seven chairlifts, just one high speed. That’s a six pack. 00:10:13.000 --> 00:10:19.000 Stuart Winchester: Uh, so it’s a scary area in need of some capex, like they all are, I guess. But… 00:10:19.000 --> 00:10:30.000 Stuart Winchester: This process — I wrote this column last July when Netherland announced, hey, we’re going to buy this, or Powder announced that Netherland was going to buy it. This was after the successful sale. 00:10:30.000 --> 00:10:45.000 Stuart Winchester: of Tillington and Pico, the busiest ski areas combined in the East, to a independent group. Uh, and it was after Powder said, no, we’re not gonna sell Bachelor after all. Uh, and it was right before they successfully sold Silver Star to Pacific Group Resorts. So. 00:10:45.000 --> 00:10:49.000 Stuart Winchester: There’s been a lot of transactions, and Powder’s done this forever. 00:10:49.000 --> 00:11:01.000 Stuart Winchester: but this one is proving to be particularly problematic. So, lay this out for us, Andy. What in the world is going on at Netherland in its attempts to purchase Eldora from powder? 00:11:01.000 --> 00:11:17.000 ABigford: It is problematic, and you set the table pretty well for Powder and John Cumming. And so it is a bit of a local obsession for me, even though I look at national and international trends. 00:11:17.000 --> 00:11:32.000 ABigford: This is my home ski area. It’s been 30 years that I’ve been skiing there, and it skis a lot better than 1,400 feet of vertical. And I did go through 20 years. We had a Hall of Fame ownership. It was a pretty good owners. 00:11:32.000 --> 00:11:48.000 ABigford: They didn’t have a ton of money, just like the ski business, but they made it work. We could park right next to… Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is not responsible for the content of this newsletter. Who Brandi Hammon, President and CEO of Powder Mountain and Powder Haven , Utah Date Recorded Oct. 22, 2026 About Powder Mountain & Powder Haven Powder Mountain and Powder Haven are two sides of one interconnected ski area. The general public can ski anywhere, but they can only ride the lifts on the Powder Mountain side. The Powder Haven lifts are reserved for the ski area’s private homeowners. Located in: Eden, Utah Owned by: Reed Hastings Year founded: 1972 (as Powder Mountain; Powder Haven terrain carved out in 2024) Pass affiliations: None Lift-served base elevation: * Powder Mountain: 6,905 feet (bottom of Paradise Express) * Powder Haven: 6,326 (bottom of Primetime Express) Lift-served summit elevation: * Powder Mountain: 9,004 feet (top of Lightning Ridge lift) * Powder Haven: 8,882 feet (top of Mary’s lift) Lift-served vertical drop: * Powder Mountain: 2,099 feet * Powder Haven: 2,556 feet Skiable acres: 8,000 total * Powder Mountain: 5,000 * Powder Haven: 3,000 Average annual snowfall: 345 inches Lift count: 15 total (5 high-speed quads, 6 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 1 poma, 1 ropetow, 1 carpet) * Powder Mountain: 9 (3 high-speed quads, 2 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 1 poma, 1 ropetow, 1 carpet) * Powder Haven: 6 (2 high-speed quads, 4 fixed-grip quads) Why I interviewed her A very dumb story about a very dumb person, Volume III Last year, Powder Mountain’s communications team reached out to ask if I would like to host resort owner and Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings on The Storm Skiing Podcast . Why yes, I believe I can squeeze him in, I replied. Great, they said. And one more thing: Reed would like to record the podcast onsite here at Powder Mountain. Which OK I guess , if I absolutely have to I will fly to Utah and ski on your awesome gigantic mountain. And besides I’m already scheduled to ski around Idaho in a few weeks so I’ll just plan to fly through of SLC and roll through Pow Mow on my way out the door. The logistics would be a little wacky, but I’d make it work. Cool? Cool. See you soon. On interview day, I woke up at 4 a.m. in Twin Falls, Idaho, a roughly three-hour, mostly-interstate drive from Powder Mountain. Traffic rolled smoothly in the predawn, and a bit after seven I was driving up the resort’s long access road among heavy snowfall. As instructed I parked in the special Rich Person lot at Pow Mow’s summit and went into the special Rich Person Building, where after some fussing the attendants allowed me to enter and pillage the Rich Person Buffet. I was early and I sat alone and an attractive couple sat beside me and I suppose mistaking me for a fellow Rich Person began chatting with me, and, though tempted to invent a story about how I was a big-game guide for Rich People interested in hunting things like rhinos and Siberian tigers and yes Bigfeet are real and we know where to kill them, I told them I was a journalist here to interview Reed. And they said OMG he’s doing so great we love it and everything is awesome and they spent all their time there skiing mach pow. Well all their time that they weren’t in the Bay Area, they told me, which was less and less these days, since they were now retired. And this confused me because they both looked to be about 35, so I guessed that either they had invented, like, the microchip or something else equally at the center of the Robot Takeover or that maybe they had reverse-engineered aging and were actually 175 years old and I nearly quizzed them on Antietam to see if the Never-Forget day-of angst seemed overly familiar to them but by then Pow Mow’s team had arrived to escort me to Reed. In the upper room of a nearby condominium we reorganized furniture and I assembled my mobile interview kit of cameras and microphones and halo lights. Reed arrived and he was a perfectly pleasant fellow as I’d expected and I interviewed him and Pow Mow Chief Creative Officer Alex Zhang against a full-wall window’s view of nuclear Wasatch pow. We talked for maybe 50 minutes and then Reed, clearly anxious to snowboard the foot or so of fresh awaiting us, excused himself because what’s the point of owning a mountain if you just sit inside answering some idiot’s questions about chairlifts on a pow day? So I thanked him and he left and before voyaging out myself into this wonderful Utah thumper I wanted to quickly download the Zoom files to make sure everything was tight and would you listen to this: Listen to what, Stu? Stu? There’s no sound. Am I doing it wrong? No. You’re not doing it wrong. I am just showing you how the interview that I had traveled thousands of miles in circles for came out. I mean it came out great. Other than the fact that I didn’t record any sound. Otherwise Man I totally f*****g crushed it. The second I realized that I had blown one of the biggest interviews of my career by omitting what most people would consider to be the most important part of an interview which is the sound of people saying things, which was like the second after Reed left, I felt about as shitty and stupid as I ever have in my entire life. I’ve never been so miserable skiing as I was that day even though the snow was deep and the trails were empty and Pow Mow had set me up with a guide and access to the Rich Person Private Lifts. Still I hoped somehow I’d recorded the audio somewhere on the many cameras and devices I’d had running. At my hotel that night I checked everything and checked it again and checked it again and then concluding that no sound existed and all I had was useless video of important people in a room against a snowy window I slept for like 12 hours because that’s what I do when I’m stressed is just leap down the go-to-sleep escape hatch and disappear from the world. So that happened. Pretty simple story, really: I agreed to do something that I did not know how to do (record an in-person podcast), and then failed to adequately prepare for it, and then unsurprisingly blew the whole thing because well I didn’t know what the f**k I was doing. I just assumed Zoom would have a safeguard. But there is no safeguard. The safeguard is not having a moron in charge of the setup. Well who hired that guy? Anyway I tried a bunch of different things to salvage the footage, including AI lip-reading apps so I could at least produce a transcript. This… did not work. And Pow Mow’s team kept being like Brah when’s the story going up? And I kept being like well I fucked it up but I think I can salvage something just hold on and we went back and forth like that three or four times and eventually I assumed they just gave up and I was kind of relieved even if I remained deeply disappointed in myself and my ability to do simple things like record a video which literally my cat can do if I leave my phone open on the kitchen table. So I was surprised a few weeks ago when Powder Mountain’s team reached out and said hey how about we give this another shot there Big Guy? And I was like are you sure you got the right guy you remember what happened last time? But this time instead of asking me to pretend like I’m an actual professional journalist who does things like go places they let me just record the interview from my basement in New York with my cat photo-bombing and Brandi set up by those nice big windows (different windows, I believe) in Utah. And she was great. And this whole section has nothing to do with Pow Mow and you’re probably like thanks for nothing Bro I still don’t understand all this Powder Haven business and which lifts are coming and which ones are going, I mean it’s like the Sneetches on the Beaches over there we don’t know which one was that one or which one was who. And my apologies McBroseph but you’re just gonna have to listen to the interview I guess. There’s a transcript that you can see on a desktop computer machine above by the video viewer, but no Zoom transcript today because… Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Who Jackson Hogen Date Recorded Oct. 22, 2026 The take up top On Monday, Vail Resorts issued a note to investors encouraging them to vote against the slate of board nominees endorsed by Oasis Capital, which is attempting to seize control of the company. I mostly cite Town Lift’s article on the note in my analysis. Why I interviewed him Jackson has been rooted in the worlds of ski manufacturing, distribution, sales, and testing for decades. For many years, he ran Real Skiers , a website that offered bespoke expert ski advice. While he’s stepped away from the site, he remains dialed into how the forces of e-commerce, private equity, and ski media disintegration have, separately but simultaneously, irretrievably transformed an analogue world of precision tools into an online bazaar of click-my-affiliate-link guesswork reviews. It’s disheartening, but perhaps not catastrophic – select legacy ski companies continue to improve their products, specialty shops remain equipped with staff that can appropriately match equipment to your profile, and objective ratings – while difficult to pinpoint in the five-star-these-very-good crapstorm of Amazon rando rankings – do exist. Where? We discuss. Transcripts There are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them. Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer . Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment. Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio. Zoom Stuart Winchester: My guest today is a ski industry insider going back decades. He was the editor of realskiers.com, which offered expert ski gear advice. His decades-long ski industry career includes stints as a ski designer, binding and boot product manager, freestyle competitor, retail salesman, risk management lecturer. 00:22:00.000 --> 00:22:16.000 Stuart Winchester: Ski instructor and extreme camp ski coach, marketing director, resort feature writer, television host, screenwriter, and author of the excellent book Snowbird Secrets, which is about snowbird, but also will teach you how to ski. He is a very good friend of the storm. He is the pontiff of powder. He is Jackson Hogan. 00:22:16.000 --> 00:22:21.000 Stuart Winchester: Jackson, welcome back to The Storm. Long overdue. How you doing today, Jackson? 00:22:18.000 --> 00:22:19.000 Jackson Hogen: Oh. 00:22:20.000 --> 00:22:37.000 Jackson Hogen: So good to see you, Stu. Well, at this age, every day is a little different. The aging process, as many people have noted, is not for pussies, and it has certainly been a challenging year in that regard. But I’m skiing, I’m golfing, I’m doing exactly what I want to do. 00:22:29.000 --> 00:22:30.000 Stuart Winchester: Okay. 00:22:37.000 --> 00:22:53.000 Jackson Hogen: I may not be doing it as well as I used to, but I’m still in the game. So that’s all I can ask for. And I’ve got a lot of great friends to go skiing with. So, you know, skiing is, I’ve tried to take care of skiing all my life and now it’s time for skiing to take care of me and we’ll see how that goes. 00:22:53.000 --> 00:23:06.000 Stuart Winchester: Well, one of the changes in the past year, as I mentioned in the intro, was that you dispensed with your responsibility for real skiers, so just… I guess first reflect on… 00:23:06.000 --> 00:23:08.000 Stuart Winchester: what you… 00:23:08.000 --> 00:23:12.000 Stuart Winchester: hope your legacy is with Real Skiers, and then what you did with it. 00:23:12.000 --> 00:23:14.000 Stuart Winchester: In the end. 00:23:13.000 --> 00:23:20.000 Jackson Hogen: Sure. Who knows what one’s legacy will be? What I tried to do. 00:23:20.000 --> 00:23:36.000 Jackson Hogen: was do the best job I could imagine doing to try to give people accurate ski buying advice. Turns out, over the long run, that’s a very expensive proposition. It takes a ton of effort and time, because you have to corral ski testers, cajole them, you know, they have to have a. 00:23:36.000 --> 00:23:50.000 Jackson Hogen: methodology that’s easy to communicate, you have to have test cards that are both digital and paper. Digital turned out to be a disaster, because whatever software outfit was building my little interface. 00:23:50.000 --> 00:24:06.000 Jackson Hogen: Would invariably fail the night before the first big ski ski event, so it was, it was fraught with challenges left, right, and center, but in the end, the reason I attracted the audience I did get was they, they knew that I was. 00:24:06.000 --> 00:24:08.000 Jackson Hogen: Trying… 00:24:08.000 --> 00:24:13.000 Jackson Hogen: As hard as humanly possible to get them an unbiased, clean look. 00:24:13.000 --> 00:24:28.000 Jackson Hogen: at the principal ski market. In other words, I already told people, I don’t care that you go backcountry skiing. Yes, it’s great, bravo, I don’t cover that. I cover lift service terrain that real people go pay real money to go ski, and they want to get the most from that experience. 00:24:28.000 --> 00:24:42.000 Jackson Hogen: And they could be female testers, so I had to try to get female testers. I remember hauling all my women’s ski up to Squaw and putting it in a rental space so that the female instructors at Squaw could go and ski on them. 00:24:42.000 --> 00:24:46.000 Jackson Hogen: I worked literally every single day to try to get. 00:24:46.000 --> 00:24:49.000 Jackson Hogen: The best result, as, as… 00:24:49.000 --> 00:24:56.000 Jackson Hogen: as grounded in a real world process as possible. 00:24:56.000 --> 00:24:58.000 Jackson Hogen: So… 00:24:58.000 --> 00:25:13.000 Jackson Hogen: I kept my audience because I kept that promise, to constantly try to do my very best, although as things wound down, that became increasingly difficult. This… the substructure of the whole ski market collapsed. 00:25:13.000 --> 00:25:14.000 Jackson Hogen: Um… 00:25:14.000 --> 00:25:30.000 Jackson Hogen: The dirty little secret of everybody’s ski test going back decades is that it is paid for. You don’t just show up with your skis and say, here, I want you to test these. You show up with your skis and a check to go test these. 00:25:30.000 --> 00:25:32.000 Stuart Winchester: For the… a check for the ski area? 00:25:31.000 --> 00:25:45.000 Jackson Hogen: No, no, for the testing entity, for a ski magazine, for skiing magazines, for anybody who’s running a ski test outside, you know, there’s a bill attached with getting your skis into that ski test. 00:25:33.000 --> 00:25:35.000 Stuart Winchester: Testers. 00:25:35.000 --> 00:25:37.000 Stuart Winchester: Testing. Okay. 00:25:44.000 --> 00:25:49.000 Stuart Winchester: Okay, so the manufacturers were paying ski, skiing, etc. 00:25:48.000 --> 00:26:08.000 Jackson Hogen: Yeah, and I knew that. I didn’t start out where they ended up in terms of… I didn’t have the clout to just say, well, $77,000 and you’re in. I started at very modest fees, but built it up based on readership, and based on the fact that, yeah, this thing has traction, and it’s real, and it has value. 00:25:49.000 --> 00:25:50.000 Stuart Winchester: Okay. 00:26:08.000 --> 00:26:11.000 Jackson Hogen:… Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

Who Josh Bean, General Manager of Lee Canyon , Nevada Date Recorded Oct. 20, 2026 About Lee Canyon Owned by: Mountain Capital Partners, which also owns: Year founded: 1965 Pass affiliations: * Power Pass: unlimited * Power Pass Select: 12 shared days with Arizona Snowbowl, Purgatory – holiday blackouts apply * Power Pass Core: 4 shared days with Arizona Snowbowl, Purgatory, Brian Head – holiday blackouts apply Base elevation: 8,510 feet Summit elevation: 9,370 feet lift-served | 11,289 feet hike-to Vertical drop: 860 feet lift-served | 2,779 feet hike-to Skiable acres: 235 Average annual snowfall: 161 inches Lift count: 7 (4 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 1 ropetow, 1 carpet) In my conversation with Josh, I noted that Lee Canyon’s chairlifts were all built this century, a rare circumstance for an American ski area. That’s true, with an asterisk - the Sherwood triple arrived used at Lee Canyon in 2005, from then-sister resort Alpine Meadows (both were then owned by Powdr; Alpine Meadows is now part of Alterra’s Palisades Tahoe complex). If we include the machine’s dozen years in California (and we must), the Sherwood clocks in as Lee Canyon’s elder, at a still-not-so-old-for-a-fixed-grip-triple 33 years (I’m also not 100 percent certain that this is only the lift’s second life, as it may have been relocated to Alpine in 1993): Why I interviewed him Just three years after completing the intermediate-oriented Ponderosa expansion, Lee Canyon is adding the long-planned West Bowl pod looker’s right of Bluebird: The new Skytrac fixed-grip quad serving the terrain will rise about the same number of feet as neighboring Bluebird and Sherwood, but will land a bit higher, finally edging Lee Canyon close to a four-digit vertical drop. Skiable acreage jumps from a modest 195 to a still-modest 235, though Lee Canyon has always lowballed its terrain footprint. But owner Mountain Capital Partners (MCP) may just be pouring concrete for the mansion they want to build above. Well, the mansion is already built, Lee Canyon just needs an elevator to access the nearly 2,000 vertical feet of steep alpine bowls towering above the lifts. It could be America’s Kicking Horse or Revelstoke, a community bump promoted to international freeride destination, with the addition of a single megalift. Here’s Lee Canyon today, as shown on Google Earth, (which has not yet added the trails cut for West Bowl) - future lifts could run as high as the top of Lee Peak (Charleston Peak, rising in the distance, is the highest point in the county, and is not on anyone’s ski area plans): The basic ingredients for mega-expansion - someone to build it and someone to ski it -are all there. Meaning we have an operator who would be happy to spend unreasonable sums of money to build an unimaginably awesome ski experience for the enormous numbers of skiers who already live nearby or could easily get there via Vegas’ gigantic airport. Lee Canyon sits close enough to Las Vegas that the Grinch could ride his fucked-up dog-deer sled from the top of Lee Peak to The Strip and loot enough cheer to cancel Christmas for a century. And MCP would like nothing more than its very own Snowbird or Jackson Hole (besides the one they already have in South America), to make their Power Pass go KaBoom. Resort officials have already begun talks with the U.S. Forest Service on a master development plan update that would sanction Lee Canyon’s transformation into Super Lee Canyon. Of course this is America, not Canada, so instead of rapidly building Revelstoke or Kicking Horse on the site of its small ski hill, MCP is likely on a collision course with a righteous mob of pinecone enthusiasts, guardians of various species of endangered pebbles, astrologists and oil painters who need viewshed integrity to practice their craft, and like five cranky a******s whose idea of a fun ski day is hiking uphill for several hours wearing 50 pounds of gear for one powder run that they’d rather not share with all the dorks who like riding machines uphill. It woud be rad if I’m wrong and the USFS just says “wow this looks awesome” and everyone else says “it would probably be smart to maximize opportunities for organized, mechanized outdoor recreation in this three-million-person car-dependent s**t-sprawl of American gaudiness so we have something on the fun-stuff-to-do spectrum that sits between Going Shopping and Getting Lost in the Desert,” but the more likely outcome is that we collectively f**k this up and fight about it for 25 years and in the end nothing happens at all. Transcripts There are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them. Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer . Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment. Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio. Zoom Stuart Winchester: I’ll introduce you, and we’ll get into it. My guest today is the general manager of Lee Canyon, Nevada. Lee Canyon offers seven lifts on an 860-foot vertical drop. 00:06:22.000 --> 00:06:27.000 Stuart Winchester: The Mountain is one of 13 ski areas operated by Mountain Capital Partners in the United States and Chile. 00:06:27.000 --> 00:06:43.000 Stuart Winchester: He started as a summer worker in 1994, and has been with the mountain, with a few little breaks, went up to Park City ever since. Josh Bean joins us. Josh, welcome to the Storm. So awesome to have you. I have to say right off, Lee Canyon, I think, is one of the most. 00:06:43.000 --> 00:06:49.000 Stuart Winchester: beautiful ski areas in America, and I can’t imagine how cool it must be to look out your window and see that every single day. 00:06:47.000 --> 00:06:50.000 Josh Bean: No, it’s, uh, definitely an island. 00:06:50.000 --> 00:07:06.000 Josh Bean: the desert. So fun to drive up to every morning to get out of that desert floor and come up to 8,600 feet. Not a lot of people get to do that every day. So definitely a great place to work and a fun environment to be in. 00:06:56.000 --> 00:06:57.000 Stuart Winchester: Yeah. Okay. 00:07:01.000 --> 00:07:02.000 Stuart Winchester: Mm-hmm. 00:07:08.000 --> 00:07:11.000 Stuart Winchester: Yeah, I can’t overstate… 00:07:11.000 --> 00:07:25.000 Stuart Winchester: I think part of the reason I was so surprised is how close it is to Las Vegas. I came straight from the airport. The airport there is kind of a stinker. The bus took forever. Maybe I just had bad luck, or maybe it’s always like that to get to my rental car, but once I was in the car. 00:07:25.000 --> 00:07:30.000 Stuart Winchester: I don’t know, maybe I think it took a half hour, maybe a little more or less from the airport. 00:07:28.000 --> 00:07:45.000 Josh Bean: Yeah, it’s about 35 minutes from, uh, downtown Las Vegas, the Strip. Um, you know, our freeway systems are catching up, so it’s a… the travel’s easy to get up here, and you … Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

Who Three members of Greek Peak , New York’s leadership team: * Wes Kryger, President * Ayden Wilber, Vice President of Mountain Operations * Jarret Dulemba, Mountain Operations Manager Date Recorded Oct. 19, 2026 About Greek Peak Owned by: John Meier Located in: Cortland, New York Year founded: 1957 – opened Jan. 11, 1958 Pass affiliations: Indy Pass, Indy+ Pass – 2 days Base elevation: 1,148 feet Summit elevation: 2,100 feet Vertical drop: 952 feet Skiable acres: 300 Average annual snowfall: 120 inches Lift count: 8 (1 fixed-grip quad, 2 triples, 3 doubles – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Greek Peak’s lift fleet) Why I interviewed them In March, Greek Peak hit the fast-forward button on a massive snowmaking upgrade. In a single offseason, the resort would lay 33,000 feet of snowmaking pipe and install 250 HKD semi-automated snowguns. Ski area officials had originally planned to spread the work over four years, but an expiring clean-energy credit from local power supplier National Grid accelerated the work. The $3 million project extended snowmaking nearly wall-to-wall at a long underserved ski area. While Greek Peak can benefit from Lake Erie lake-effect storms, whole tracts on the east side of the mountain would sit shuttered in lean years. No more. Among the trails outfitted with snowmaking over the summer, per Greek Peak’s announcement: I’ve always thought that Greek Peak, with its gladed acres and affordable onsite lodging and thousand vertical feet and lack of liftlines, was an underappreciated alternative to the Catskills and Poconos circus scenes. But these snowmaking upgrades were badly needed. A sadder development over the summer: Al Kryger, who helped build Greek Peak, passed away in August at age 87: Greek Peak President Wes Kryger, Al’s son, had talked a bit about his father on the podcast last year: Transcripts There are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them. Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer . Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment. Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio. Zoom Ayden Wilber is identified below as “ bbaisley” Stuart Winchester: My guests today lead Greek Peak Mountain Resort in New York. Greek Peak has six chairlifts serving 300 acres on 950 vertical feet. 00:10:14.000 --> 00:10:25.000 Stuart Winchester: Wes Krieger is president of the resort since 2013, and he is a member of the Ski New York Hall of Fame. His family has been part of Greek Peak since the ski area’s 1958 founding. 00:10:25.000 --> 00:10:46.000 Stuart Winchester: Aiden Wilbur has been vice president of mountain operations since 2019 and has worked at Greek Peak since 2013 and making his storm skiing podcast debut as Jarrett Dulamba. He has been Mountain Ops manager for the past five years. Wes and Aiden, welcome back to the storm. Jarrett, welcome to the storm for the first time. Always love catching up with the team at Greek Peak. 00:10:46.000 --> 00:10:48.000 Stuart Winchester: How you guys doing today? 00:10:49.000 --> 00:10:51.000 WKryger: Good, Stuart, how are you? 00:10:51.000 --> 00:10:58.000 Stuart Winchester: Doing real well, thank you. So, Wes, I want to start with your father, Al. 00:10:58.000 --> 00:11:04.000 Stuart Winchester: who passed away last year, and had a tremendous legacy with… 00:11:04.000 --> 00:11:20.000 Stuart Winchester: Greek Peak with New York skiing, uh, with the community, uh, big personality, and we talked about some of his specific contributions when you joined me on the podcast, uh, last year. So, I wanted to give you an opportunity to reflect. 00:11:20.000 --> 00:11:29.000 Stuart Winchester: on Al’s legacy and what he meant to the resort and what he meant to you as we reflect on his passing? 00:11:29.000 --> 00:11:37.000 WKryger: Yeah, I appreciate that. He, you know, he started with Greek Peak in 1958. 00:11:37.000 --> 00:11:54.000 WKryger: you know, he was instrumental in the State of New York with some of the other operators, Dennis Shashbaugh, Danny Fuller, bunch of the guys, Russ Colton from Hunter, and they all started the. 00:11:54.000 --> 00:12:09.000 WKryger: saney ski areas of New York organization to help regulate the the industry, and they were instrumental in getting the Article 18. 00:11:57.000 --> 00:11:58.000 Stuart Winchester: Hmm. 00:12:09.000 --> 00:12:26.000 WKryger: passed, which is, you know, skiers and ski area responsibility code which has been very helpful in the industry and and copied pretty much across the Us. As as a. 00:12:15.000 --> 00:12:17.000 Stuart Winchester: Mmhm. 00:12:26.000 --> 00:12:38.000 WKryger: regulatory guideline for skiers in ski areas. So that that was a huge contribution to the industry. And. 00:12:38.000 --> 00:12:49.000 WKryger: you know, Al always wanted to, um, see the ski area expand, and then he got it into the four-season aspect with. 00:12:49.000 --> 00:13:03.000 WKryger: Building Hope Lake Lodge, an indoor water park in the Adventure Center with the zip lines and mountain coaster. So he definitely was an entrepreneur and. 00:13:03.000 --> 00:13:13.000 WKryger: We always joke about if you told him it couldn’t be done, that was exactly what he would try to do, and he was successful most of the time. 00:13:13.000 --> 00:13:30.000 WKryger: For me, he was a great leader for me, a great dad, taught me a great work ethic. I told this story at his celebration of life. I was going to college. 00:13:30.000 --> 00:13:42.000 WKryger: working at Greek Peak full-time, and I was the night mountain manager here, and, uh, living at home. I got home, uh, he asked me if all the snow guns had been started up. 00:13:42.000 --> 00:13:51.000 WKryger: and I said there were 4 more to go, and he threw my boots and me outside and told me not to come back until the last one was running. 00:13:51.000 --> 00:14:07.000 WKryger: So he definitely instilled the work ethic, you know, in the community, obviously had a great impact at his celebrational life. There were over 400 attendees that came to the resort to. 00:14:07.000 --> 00:14:12.000 WKryger: pay their respects. So I think definitely had a huge impact. 00:14:12.000 --> 00:14:27.000 Stuart Winchester: So, the interesting thing about these multi-generational ski resorts, and in 2013, your family made the decision to sell to John Meyer, a local businessman, and you obviously stayed involved, and if folks want to hear that story, they can listen to the last Greek Peak episode that we recorded. 00:14:27.000 --> 00:14:42.000 Stuart Winchester: Last year, but I’m always curious with these, Wes, as you grew up at the ski area, right, and you evolved from Rugrat running around the slopes to a guy getting thrown out of the house because you’re not doing it right, to the guy leading the resort, I’m curious how your relationship with your father. 00:14:42.000 --> 00:14:46.000 Stuart Winchester: evolved, and… and how he… 00:14:46.000 --> 00:14:56.000 Stuart Winchester: guided you and… and influenced you as you grew in your role at the resort, and… and grew as a man and an adult, and… and someone who… 00:14:56.000 --> 00:15:00.000 Stuart Winchester: You know, he really couldn’t throw around anymore or throw out of the house. 00:15:01.000 --> 00:15:11.000 WKryger: Well, I think … Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

Who James Wheeler, co-owner of Toggenburg, New York Date Recorded Oct. 19, 2026 About Toggenburg Owned by: The Wheeler Family Year founded: 1953, closed since 2021 Base elevation: 1,248 feet Summit elevation: 1,763 feet Vertical drop: 515 feet Skiable acres: 83 Average annual snowfall: 160 inches Lift count: 3 (1 triple, 2 doubles) Why I interviewed him In August 2021, I wrote a post eulogizing Toggenburg, a Central New York ski area that was closing after 68 years: The cause of death: Peter Harris, longtime owner of the nearby Song and Labrador ski areas, had purchased Toggenburg with the explicit intent of closing it. “I struggled with the decision,” Harris told me at the time. “After much analysis, it seemed to be a logical decision, and I sincerely think this is better for the Central New York ski scene. I think we’re going to have a better experience, because obviously we’re going to have more resources to invest in the two remaining areas.” New York State Attorney General Letitia James disagreed. Fourteen months later, her office filed suit against Harris’ company, Intermountain Management, for violating the state’s antitrust laws. As I wrote at the time: With 14 months to investigate the sale, New York State Attorney General Letitia James has presented a different take. On Friday, she sued Intermountain Management – the umbrella company that owns Labrador and Song – “for buying its main competitor, Toggenburg Mountain, then shutting it down to direct skiers to its own mountains.” This action, James said, created a “complete, unchallenged dominance in the Syracuse area” – a monopoly – for what her office calls “season-pass skiing” around Syracuse, a violation of New York State’s antitrust law, the Donnelly Act. “even if the Toggenburg acquisition and closure did not establish or maintain Intermountain’s monopoly, it harmed, and continues to harm, consumers by eliminating a competitor without any procompetitive justification,” the court summons states . The state decided in James’ favor in March 2025, but said it needed more time to “decide the appropriate remedy for Intermountain’s anticompetitive conduct.” It took a year and a half to determine that remedy, but last Friday, the AG’s office announced the court-ordered solution: Harris had sold Toggenburg to new owners, who were determined to re-open the facility as a ski area: New York Attorney General Letitia James today announced that Intermountain Management (Intermountain) has sold Toggenburg Mountain (Toggenburg) to a new owner who plans to rebuild and reopen it for the 2027-28 ski season, restoring competition among Syracuse ski resorts. In October 2022, Attorney General James sued Intermountain for buying its only competitor, Toggenburg, and shutting it down, forcing Syracuse skiers to the two resorts owned by Intermountain. In March 2025, Attorney General James won her case when a judge ruled that Intermountain violated state antitrust law by stifling competition when it shut down Toggenburg and instituted a “no poach” agreement preventing Toggenburg’s owner from hiring any Intermountain employees at his other New York ski resorts. Under a settlement with the Office of the Attorney General (OAG), Intermountain today closed its sale of Toggenburg to Douglas Wheeler, a local business owner who plans to reopen the ski facility. “Competition among Syracuse ski areas means more choices and better prices and services for New York skiers,” said Attorney General James . “We’re putting an end to Intermountain’s illegal monopoly that allowed it to raise prices and take advantage of skiers. I am thrilled that New Yorkers will once again have access to Toggenburg Mountain, and I will always fight to protect consumers and workers from illegal monopolies that try to profit at their expense.” So who is Douglas Wheeler? Well, it turns out that, in true New York ski area fashion, Togg will be run family-style. When I spoke to him on Sunday, Wheeler deferred to his son, James Wheeler, as the public face of the mountain. A phone call and a few texts later, and we were set up for this morning’s podcast, where I learned quite a bit about the future of a once-lost ski area. Transcripts There are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them. Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer . Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment. Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio. Zoom Stuart Winchester: My guest today represents the Wheeler family, who last week purchased Toggenberg Ski Area in New York. 00:10:12.000 --> 00:10:21.000 Stuart Winchester: The ski area, which has been closed since 2021, has three chairlifts serving 22 trails, and had been open since the 1950s. 00:10:21.000 --> 00:10:36.000 Stuart Winchester: The Wheelers plan to reopen Toggenberg for the 2027 to 28 ski season. James Wheeler is my guest. James, welcome to the storm. Thank you so much for joining us on such short notice. How does it feel to own a ski area? 00:10:37.000 --> 00:10:55.000 James Wheeler: Stuart, thank you for having me. Uh, it is… it’s, uh, nothing short of a miracle right now. I mean, we’re still, uh, we’re very surprised that this has honestly, uh, gone through. We’re very happy to be where we are right now. Um, and just… the feelings, it hasn’t all set in yet. We’re still very, uh, shocked at some of the things that we’ve discovered. 00:10:55.000 --> 00:11:13.000 James Wheeler: Uh, we’re slowly trying to map out a game plan for which, uh, avenue to tackle first, uh, whether that’s the restaurant end of things, or the actual, the, uh, the mountain end of things, whether that’s snowmaking, or, uh, pumps, or snow cats. We are just getting a game plan and starting to get everything tackled. However. 00:11:13.000 --> 00:11:20.000 James Wheeler: The actual, the feelings of the matter, we’re just overwhelmed with joy and excitement to be able to bring this back to the community. 00:11:20.000 --> 00:11:25.000 Stuart Winchester: Lots to do, and it’s a whirlwind, but a long time building, and your family… 00:11:25.000 --> 00:11:38.000 Stuart Winchester: as I understand it, at least from talking to your father, Doug, yesterday, and yourself, are not skiers. However, you have other attachments to Toggenberg that inspired this. So why did the Wheeler family purchase Toggenberg? 00:11:38.000 --> 00:11:53.000 James Wheeler: Yeah, so I can say I was never much of a skier, and that goes for most of my family. I did a little bit of snowboarding when I was younger, and my sister did some skiing here or there. However, what really roots us to Taugenberg was. 00:11:53.000 --> 00:12:09.000 James Wheeler: My great-great-grandfather, back before Toggenberg was actually a ski resort, he owned the property for agricultural purposes. He raised Toggenberg goats on the property. And that obviously had since gotten sold to the Hickeys, who opened the mountain and ran that successfully for so many years. 00:12:09.000 --> 00:12:29.000 James Wheeler: And, uh, when it got shut down, I’m from Fabius, which is obviously where Taugenberg is, and it just, it really hurt the community. There were… Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is raising money for a brain transplant so that I’ll remember to hit “record” before recording a podcast. Thank you for supporting this amazing cause: Who Ben Doornbos, General Manager of Nub’s Nob, Michigan Date Recorded October 15, 2026 About Nub’s Nob Owned by: The Fisher Family Year founded: 1958 Pass affiliations: * Indy Pass: 2 days, select blackouts * Indy+ Pass: 2 days, no blackouts Base elevation: 923 feet Summit elevation: 1,350 feet Vertical drop: 427 feet Skiable acres: 248 Average annual snowfall: 125 inches Lift count: 10 (4 fixed-grip quads, 3 triples, 1 double, 1 carpet, 1 ropetow) Nub’s Nordic map also shows a pretty cool overhead of how all the lifts match up with a topo map: Why I interviewed him Nub’s Nob is basically the Jay Peak/Wolf Creek/Mt. Baker/Bridger Bowl/Alta/Jackson Hole/Mount Bohemia/Mad River Glen of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. By that I mean it is a ski area with loyalists so fiercely devoted to the place that if a Random Internet Commenter dares offer an opinion that said ski area is anything other than a snowy Narnia dreamed up by and for Jesus as a reward for having endured human existence on Earth then that Random Internet Commenter shall have unspeakable crimes attributed to their name with such persistence and gruesome detail that the accused while innocent will come to believe themselves guilty and seek out an active caldera in which to hurl themselves. It’s hard to understand until you ski there but hard to not understand once you have. And lest I enrage the Nub’s partisans who will attempt to read into the nuances of this conversation some dastardly plot to tar the name of Nub’s by for example pointing out the true age of Purple chair I will just state unambiguously that The Storm has been a House of Nub’s fan since 1995 even though I spent half my inaugural visit tumbling down Chute like a beachball and am frankly still slightly terrified any time I glance at the trailmap believing subconsciously that it was not a lack of skill as a result of being on my seventh-ever ski day that caused my cyclical pinwheeling but rather an attribute of that trail that uniquely exposed my lack of ability to SnoSportSki and no amount of experience or preparation will save me. And I think this even though I have since skied Chute and all adjacent trails many times without dismembering myself. And no Nub’s Knob I am not dissing Nub’s just myself McBroseph so chill. Transcripts There is only one transcript today, which you may or may not be able to view at the top of this article, depending upon your browser and device. This is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment. There is no Zoom transcript today because Zoom didn’t work right. Just kidding there is no Zoom transcript because see the part where my brain isn’t good. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

Word. Who Dave Rathbun, CEO of Purgatory , Colorado Check out Dave’s Purgspective mountain blog: Date Recorded Oct. 14, 2026 About Purgatory Owned by: Mountain Capital Partners, which also owns: Year founded: 1965 Pass affiliations: * Power Pass: unlimited * Power Pass Select: 12 shared days with Arizona Snowbowl, Lee Canyon – holiday blackouts apply * Power Pass Core: 4 shared days with Arizona Snowbowl, Lee Canyon, Brian Head – holiday blackouts apply Base elevation: 8,750 feet Summit elevation: 10,822 feet Vertical drop: 2,072 feet Skiable acres: 1,635 Average annual snowfall: 261 inches Lift count: 12 (1 six-pack, 2 high-speed quads, 4 triples, 3 doubles, 2 carpets) This video gives a pretty sick look down the steep lift line: And here’s a bit on the Divinity snowmaking expansion: Why I interviewed him Purgatory has everything we’re looking for in a modern lift-served ski area attempting to stay relevant in a changing world: an eclectic owner, a multi-mountain pass, wacky lift ticket deals, high-elevation snowmaking, trail expansions, fast lifts, slow lifts, lifts glued together from the discarded parts of other lifts, lifts that predate the invention of the alphabet, private land, public land, places to stay on the mountain, a hip town nearby, and big plans colliding with big bureaucracy. And it’s in Colorado but also sort of not because how do you even get to Southwest Colorado unless you’re driving up from Texas? Transcripts There are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them. Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer . Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment. Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio. Zoom Stuart Winchester: My guest today is the CEO of Purgatory Resort Holdings. Purgatory delivers a 2,072-foot vertical drop over 1,635 skiable acres served by 12 lifts, including a brand new triple chair for winter 2026-27. 00:28:29.000 --> 00:28:38.000 Stuart Winchester: Since 2015, Purgatory has been owned by Mountain Capital Partners, which operates 11 active ski areas in the United States and Chile. 00:28:38.000 --> 00:28:54.000 Stuart Winchester: Prior to his promotion to the CEO role last year, he was Purgatory’s general manager for eight seasons. Prior to joining the team at Purgatory, he was chief marketing officer at Sugar Bowl California for two years and spent eight years as president and general manager of Mount Bachelor Oregon. 00:28:54.000 --> 00:29:03.000 Stuart Winchester: He has also spent time at Killington, Stratton, and IntraWest. Dave Rathbun is my guest. Dave, welcome to the Storm. Did I get your last name right? 00:29:03.000 --> 00:29:09.000 Dave Rathbun: Absolutely, Stuart. I am just thrilled to be here with you today. 00:29:09.000 --> 00:29:21.000 Stuart Winchester: Uh, that’s one of those things I’m always like, okay, ask him about his last name before you introduce him, and then I didn’t, and then I just hope I get it right. So, uh, but just blew my cover there. So, so you have been really busy. Tell us about… 00:29:21.000 --> 00:29:31.000 Stuart Winchester: The Jaland expansion has historically been known, and it’s a really interesting expansion because it’s at once billed as an expert expansion. 00:29:31.000 --> 00:29:37.000 Stuart Winchester: but it’s also kind of for everyone. So take us through this very unique new addition to your mountain this year. 00:29:37.000 --> 00:29:52.000 Dave Rathbun: Yeah, so for those that have been here before, our base area is kind of vertically challenged. We’re in a place where we’re right along US Highway 550 is the literal base of the mountain. 00:29:52.000 --> 00:30:04.000 Dave Rathbun: But there’s about a 200-foot elevation gain to the village right down from the highway, so that… that puts a little extra pressure on forcing people to get up through. 00:29:56.000 --> 00:29:57.000 Stuart Winchester: Mmm. 00:30:04.000 --> 00:30:15.000 Dave Rathbun: what we call our Columbine base area to get to the village. So, as you can imagine, along the highway, it’s nice and flat, that’s where all our parking is. 00:30:15.000 --> 00:30:32.000 Dave Rathbun: And people would park there and have to catch a shuttle bus, or they could walk to the base of the graduate lift, lift 7 on the map you’re showing, and ride that up to the base village, which is where you jump on the six-pack to get you up on the mountain. 00:30:24.000 --> 00:30:25.000 Stuart Winchester: Mm-hmm. 00:30:32.000 --> 00:30:47.000 Dave Rathbun: So what the Galande and now Colorado Cool War chair will do is it’ll give people, especially pass holders that already have a ticket that don’t require any base services like rentals or. 00:30:47.000 --> 00:30:57.000 Dave Rathbun: hey, I need to stop and get tickets, or I need to, you know, get my ski school lesson started. Those pass holders can go park right at the base of the cool bar chair. 00:30:57.000 --> 00:31:10.000 Dave Rathbun: jump on that lift, get up to the top of the mountain where they can access everything on the front side, and get all the way to the backside lifts as well. So it’s gonna be a… it’s gonna be a dual-purpose lift. 00:31:03.000 --> 00:31:04.000 Stuart Winchester: Mm-hmm. 00:31:10.000 --> 00:31:15.000 Dave Rathbun: You know, for the really hardcore extreme skier, this is terrain that, uh… 00:31:15.000 --> 00:31:34.000 Dave Rathbun: is absolutely mind-bending, um, for people that are into that sort of thing. Um, it changes the whole game related to our terrain offering here, to cater to that zealot, that really high-end, uh, free skier rider that really is looking for some steep, gnarly terrain. 00:31:19.000 --> 00:31:21.000 Stuart Winchester: Mmhm. 00:31:34.000 --> 00:31:45.000 Dave Rathbun: But it’s also gonna make it easy for, you know, your general local to avoid the village and get up on the mountain. So it’s gonna deal with both of those objectives. 00:31:45.000 --> 00:31:54.000 Stuart Winchester: So on this trail map that I’m showing, if you’re watching on stormskiing.com or YouTube at Storm Ski Journal, so this yellow line is your. 00:31:54.000 --> 00:32:02.000 Stuart Winchester: current boundary, and then it looks like that’s going to get pushed out, and the lift will come up from around here. Is that about right? 00:32:02.000 --> 00:32:13.000 Dave Rathbun: Yeah, correct. So the map that you’re showing on the left that I’m seeing, that triangle that’s shaded, that was part of a permit boundary adjustment to accommodate. 00:32:02.000 --> 00:32:04.000 Stuart Winchester: And yeah. 00:32:07.000 --> 00:32:09.000 Stuart Winchester: Mm-hmm. 00:32:13.000 --> 00:32:18.000 Dave Rathbun: the lift and also the skiing through the canyon. 00:32:17.000 --> 00:32:18.000 Stuart Winchester: Mmhm. 00:32:18.000 --> 00:32:19.000 Dave Rathbun: So… 00:32:19.000 --> 00:32:34.000 Dave Rathbun: That bounda… Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

Today is The Storm’s seven-year anniversary. An enormous thank-you to all of my paid subscribers, who have helped transform the newsletter into a full-time job and a sustainable small business. Thank you for supporting independent ski journalism. Who Matthew Prince, co-founder, Executive Chairman, and CEO of tech gigantor Cloudflare and owner of the Park Record newspaper. Date Recorded Oct. 13, 2026 About Park City Mountain Resort Owned by: Vail Resorts, which also owns: Year founded: * Legacy Park City: 1963, as Treasure Mountain (name until 1966) * Legacy Canyons: 1968, as Park City West, then Park West from 1975 to ’95, Wolf Mountain from 1995 to ’97, and The Canyons from 1997 until Vail Resorts joined both legacy resorts with the Quicksilver gondola in 2015. Pass affiliations: * Epic Pass: unlimited access * Epic Local Pass: unlimited access with holiday blackouts * Epic Tahoe Local Pass: up to 5 non-holiday days combined with Vail Mountain, Beaver Creek, Crested Butte, Keystone, Breckenridge * Epic Day Pass : all-mountain tier only Base elevation: * Legacy Park City – bottom of Silver Star triple: 6,892 feet * Legacy Canyons – bottom of Orange Bubble Express: 6,911 feet Summit elevation: * Legacy Park City o Lift-served – top of Jupiter double: 9,998 feet o Hike-to – Jupiter Peak: 10,026 feet * Legacy Canyons – top of Ninety-Nine 90: 9,990 feet Vertical drop: 3,106 from top to bottom, actual per-run vert will vary depending upon route, but somewhere around 3,000 feet is possible with a lot of work Skiable acres: 7,300 Average annual snowfall: 355 inches Lift count: 42 (2 ten-passenger gondolas, 2 eight-passenger gondolas, 1 pulse gondola, 6 six-packs, 10 high-speed quads, 5 fixed-grip quads, 8 triples, 3 doubles, 2 ropetows, 3 carpets) Why I interviewed him Check out Park City, circa 1974: Sure, it’s a painting, not a photograph. But you can see it, right? The idyll. The stenciled historic mine-town street grid. Nothing new but the lifts and the parking lots to feed the freshly cut mountain. No traffic in or out. No hilltop mansions. No Deer Valley. Two thousand residents. Maybe. Vail was just a ski area in Colorado. Well that’s quaint. Deer Valley opened in 1981. Powdr bought Park City in 1994, American Skiing Company snatched neighboring Park West/Wolf Mountain/Canyons in 1997, and Vail Resorts eventually acquired both and strung them together with a gondola to create the largest ski resort in the United States. In 2017, Alterra bought long-independent Deer Valley and has since more than doubled the resort’s size with an expansion that included 11 new aerial lifts. Park City today: As Park City filled up, Summit County filled out: The population exploded with little planning outside of the standard U.S. American Cars-Go-Fast philosophy of road engineering. The tangle of traffic, disconnected structures, and patchwork preservation is a case study in dysfunctional sprawl, in which a community boxed in by its own bad planning resists the density and transit projects that would remedy its worst crowding and affordability problems. Once the toxic narrative takes hold that a ny development must be bad development, it’s easy enough for a Concerned Citizen to weaponize environmental and zoning regulations to halt – or at least almost indefinitely stall – nearly any project. I’ve written about all this before. And it’s easy enough to say “sit down Brooklyn if we wanted to live in your big dirty city we’d move there.” But Matthew Prince, born in 1974, grew up in that backwater washed-up Park City and watched it evolve into a center-of-the-world ski town that’s about to co-host its second Olympics. And he’s saying pretty much all the same things. “We’re strangling this place by just saying ‘nothing can ever change,’” he recently told KPCW’s Mountain Money podcast. “Everyone is here trying to preserve some past that never existed. I was here in the ‘70s – it sucked! … We have to get back to actually trying to build things and making this community better. … [We can] actually build a community that we actually want to live in. … Immediately, you try to do anything unique or original here or you try and invest in the community at all, and the first thing you get is just a series of lawsuits.” Prince envisions a car-free Main Street and a gondola connection over the peaks to Solitude and Alta (his plan differs different from this 2014 graphic demonstrating how a handful of lifts could connect all six Wasatch resorts): He also envisions a Park City Mountain Resort under local ownership. Vail, Prince says, can keep the Epic Pass – an independent PCMR may even participate – but he believes the Colorado-based company has under-invested in the ski resort, and he has a half-billion-dollar plan to modernize the whole circus with new lifts and snowmaking infrastructure. He has pledged to reinvest every dollar the ski area earns back into the mountain and the people who work there. Vail doesn’t want to sell Park City, but as Epic Pass sales continue their sad decline and activist investors nominate new board members and pile up MTN shares , Prince is betting that eventually they’ll have to. Prince, who co-founded tech giant Cloudflare and is worth some number of billions, is waiting with a check. This could get weird. It wasn’t so long ago that a consolidation-is-inevitable narrative gripped skiing. No one predicted that Park City-based Powdr would sell Killington , the largest and busiest ski area in the East, or, less dramatically, that their smaller neighbor, Pacific Group Resorts, would dispense with Ragged (PGR then almost immediately bought Silverstar, British Columbia from Powdr, which will keep Copper, Snowbird, Woodward, and maybe Bachelor, but is otherwise continuing to downsize). There’s actually plenty of precedent for operator shrinkage, as plenty of multimountain ski area companies have disintegrated (American Skiing Company), or backed away from globe-trotting ambitions (Aspen in the 1980s). But Vail could yet push through, as 11-mountain Boyne Resorts has done for nearly 80 years. Running a ski area is hard, and most people are bad at it. But if Prince gets his chance, he possesses a rare combination of financial resources and true I-be-from-here status that puts him in an awfully strong position to succeed. Transcripts There are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them. Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer . Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment. Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio. Zoom Stuart Winchester: My guest today is the co-founder, executive chairman, and CEO of CloudFlare, a publicly traded … Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

The best way to support The Storm’s mission of independent ski journalism is to subscribe to the newsletter, which will deliver future analysis, news, and podcasts directly to your inbox. Who Sam Weintraub, Founder and CEO of PeakRankings Date Recorded Oct. 5, 2026 About PeakRankings PeakRankings rates ski areas , plans trips , makes killer YouTube vids , and Instaposts and Facebooks (those are verbs, right?). Like me , they seem to have given up on TwiXXer. Please give them all the follows, but especially check out the trips page: Why I interviewed him Sunday evening, PeakRankings published an article headlined “Epic vs. Ikon: Which Pass Should You Buy Before Prices Go Up?” It’s an excellent breakdown of the two biggest ski passes by price, access, and region. I’ve known Sam for a while. He started PeakRankings around the time that I started The Storm . We both found momentum during Covid when everyone was at home making macaroni replicas of their cats and injecting themselves with bleach. Good times. But everyone was bored enough to pay attention to a couple of ski media startups. I don’t remember how we connected, but it turned out that Sam lived in the next neighborhood over, and one night we grabbed a few beers and talked skiing and ski media. Sam is younger than I am, and has been far more tuned-in and aggressive in his evolution from ski-ranking site to Insta / YouTube god (102k my dude!), to uniter-of-souls-via-ski-trip in our Age of Loneliness. He’s been generous with his time, insight, and advice, and we (my editor/wife and I), have learned a lot from Sam about deeking the algorithms. One thing I’m very deliberate about is not over-relying on one source. Everyone in skiing is busy all the time, and over-communication is fatiguing for me, for them, and for listeners and readers. But as soon as I read the pass article, I emailed Sam – who I’d seen several times already over the past few weeks – to see if he could jump on and help us break everything down. He could, and he crushed it. Resources Epic Pass prices are set to increase Oct. 7, and Ikon will go up Oct. 8. Those are both probably fake deadlines and you can usually get those same rates for at least a day afterward, but don’t assume that will be so. Anyway, here’s what the major passes cost now: You can view all the rosters here (scroll right to view). Here’s a nifty chart showing Epic and Ikon price changes over the years: If you want to view all the Big Dumb Charts I screenshared showing differences in pass partners by size and region, here they are . All of these charts are on a Big Dumb Google Sheet, otherwise known as The Encyclopedia Bro-Tannica, otherwise known as the U.S. American SnoSportSkiing Masterchart. Yes I know they look like s**t. Yes I know I need to migrate to something better. But what you see as you click through the tabs at the bottom is seven years of data entry fusing into something like an encyclopedia of American skiing. It’s just my worksheet, and I made it public because why the hell not? But like Joel from Open Snow said on my pod years ago , I move very slowly, but I’m always moving forward. Transcripts There are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them. Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer . Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment. Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio. Zoom Stuart Winchester: My guest today is the founder and CEO of PeakRankings. Sam Weintraub is my guest. Sam, welcome to the storm. I know you’re a few blocks away from me, but I don’t have a good in-person setup. How you doing today? 00:49:51.000 --> 00:50:07.000 Sam Weintraub: Good, thanks for having me, Stu. I know, we gotta figure it out, um, we’ll do maybe, like, a round 2 in the… I can just walk right over, um, I think it’s, like, 5 blocks away, it’s just up, um, Metropolitan Avenue, I don’t know if anyone. 00:50:06.000 --> 00:50:07.000 Stuart Winchester: Yah. 00:50:07.000 --> 00:50:08.000 Sam Weintraub: Oh. 00:50:09.000 --> 00:50:13.000 Sam Weintraub: watching or listening to this knows Brooklyn, but… 00:50:12.000 --> 00:50:14.000 Stuart Winchester: Mmhm. 00:50:14.000 --> 00:50:26.000 Stuart Winchester: So, you put on… this was a last-minute thing, and I really appreciate you coming on last minute here, Sam. So, you wrote a great article yesterday. Well, I don’t know who wrote it. PeakRankings released an article yesterday. 00:50:26.000 --> 00:50:32.000 Stuart Winchester: called Epic vs. Icon, which pass should you buy before prices go up? So… 00:50:32.000 --> 00:50:49.000 Stuart Winchester: At a very high level, let’s just talk Epic versus Icon and the price dates and lay those out for everybody and, uh, and what, what your baseline thought is on each pass from an affordability, from an access standpoint. 00:50:51.000 --> 00:50:58.000 Sam Weintraub: Yeah, so, I mean, what’s really interesting is in the 2020s, Epic and Icon have… 00:50:58.000 --> 00:51:04.000 Sam Weintraub: really started to take different market positions. So… 00:51:04.000 --> 00:51:11.000 Sam Weintraub: If you look back at, like, 2019, 2020, they were around the same price. 00:51:11.000 --> 00:51:12.000 Sam Weintraub: But… 00:51:12.000 --> 00:51:19.000 Sam Weintraub: I think both of them were still trying to figure out where they were, because… 00:51:19.000 --> 00:51:33.000 Sam Weintraub: I believe, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, I believe it was 2018, the first year that you could buy both the Epic and the Icon Pass. The Icon Pass used to have a predecessor called the Max Pass, and… 00:51:33.000 --> 00:51:48.000 Sam Weintraub: it wasn’t really, um… I don’t remember the specifics of the Max Pass, but it wasn’t really as comprehensive as the Icon Pass is, in terms of destination offerings especially, um, that the Icon Pass is today. 00:51:48.000 --> 00:52:03.000 Sam Weintraub: And so, I think, long story short, what happened was it became clear that the Icon Pass just had much more of a destination, like, fly-to-destination roster, and that. 00:52:03.000 --> 00:52:07.000 Sam Weintraub: continued to increase over the… 00:52:07.000 --> 00:52:22.000 Sam Weintraub: course of the 2020s, um, you know, the Icon Pass started adding more and more destinations, and it just got to the place where now, if you go almost anywhere, um, with potentially the exception of Colorado. 00:52:22.000 --> 00:52:30.000 Sam Weintraub: Tahoe, and Whistler, um, the Icon Pass is just going to offer more compelling. 00:52:30.000 --> 00:52:48.000 Sam Weintraub: Ski resorts when it comes to things like terrain quality, when it comes to snow quality in a lot of cases, especially in Utah, because you get in on Icon, even if you’re thinking of Park City as its own destination, which it really does deserve to be in a lot of ways because it’s so big. 00:52:48.000 --> 00:52:57.000 Sam Weintraub: uh, it gets, like, half the snow of the Cottonwood Mountains that are just west of it. So, ultimately, what we’ve arrived at, and I think the market. 00:52:53.000 --> 00:52:54.000 Stuart Winchester: Mmhm. 00:52:57.000 --> 00:53:04.000 Sam Weintraub: I think, and I say I think because I know Icon doesn’t release its past numbers, but I believe what has happened is th… Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

What Main stage today belongs to Kovach, who agreed to come on the podcast like 90 years ago and waited patiently for his turn. But just as I wrapped this pod, breaking news slammed my inbox: Alterra has selected their next CEO after dismissing Jared Smith in March. From the press release: Alterra Mountain Company … today announced that experienced hospitality and operations leader Kelly Vohs has been appointed Chief Executive Officer, effective October 19, 2026. Vohs brings nearly 30 years of experience leading customer-facing, operationally complex businesses across hospitality, real estate, and technology. Previously, Vohs spent more than a decade leading companies within Blackstone’s portfolio, including recently as CEO of LivCor. Most recently, he served as Chief Executive Officer of SafetyCulture, a global frontline operations platform used by more than 85,000 organizations and supporting more than 2.5 million frontline workers. Earlier in his career, Vohs led operations for BR Guest Hospitality, a New York restaurant group with more than 20 restaurants, and held leadership roles at several iconic hotels, including as General Manager of the Boca Raton Resort & Club and the Waldorf Astoria Chicago, and as opening General Manager of the Conrad Chicago. He also served eight years as a Green Beret with the U.S. Army’s 10th Special Forces Group at Fort Carson, Colorado Springs, completing four combat deployments. First - I am not sure whether Vohs is any relation to the Wisconsin Vohs , who have done such an excellent job building Cascade Mountain. I’m not sure if he skis or really knows anything about skiing other than that it requires snow and idiots to strap six-foot-long planks to their feet so they can slide down it. But I won’t dismiss him as a viable next leader for Alterra simply because his resume is not some jumble of Whistler-Intrawest-ASC-Sunday-River-Big-Bear. Plenty of individuals without ski industry backgrounds have successfully run U.S. ski areas - Win Smith at Sugarbush is one of the best examples. But I’m not sure if anyone with zero ski industry background has ever run such a large ski company. I give a bit more perspective in the pod, and I’ve already bothered Alterra for an interview. Stand by. Who Evan Kovach, General Manager of Mountain Creek , New Jersey Date Recorded October 5, 2026 About Mountain Creek Owned by: Snow Partners Year founded: 1965 Pass affiliations: * Snow Pass – 2 days, no blackouts * Snow Triple Play – up to 2 days, no blackouts Pay attention, because these passes have overlapping, but different, rosters: Base elevation: 448 feet (bottom of South Peak and Bear Peak quads) * Vernon Peak: 452 feet * Granite Peak: 605 feet * South/Bear Peaks: 448 feet Summit elevation: 1,458 feet (top of Sojourn double) * Vernon Peak: 1,403 feet * Granite Peak: 1,453 feet * South Peak: 1,444 feet * Bear Peak: 1,126 feet Vertical drop: 1,010 feet – top of Sojourn lift/Granite Peak to South/Bear base * Vernon Peak: 951 feet * Granite Peak: 853 feet * South Peak: 996 feet * Bear Peak: 678 feet Skiable acres: 167 Average annual snowfall: 65 inches Lift count: 9 (1 cabriolet, 2 high-speed quads, 2 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 1 double, 2 carpets) Why I interviewed him I mean: I’m a bit obsessed with Mountain Creek, and it’s been a secondary subject on many past podcasts: For reference In 1998, Intrawest pulled off one of the most audacious single-season ski area transformations in American history, demolishing 15 double chairs and three surface lifts and replacing them with five modern machines. Check the before and after: Pretty amazing. It’s too bad Intrawest sold the place off in 2010. It stagnated for nearly a decade before onetime parking-lot attendant Joe Hession bought it in 2019. It’s been all rocketships since. I still, however, pine over this old early-Intrawest masterplan, showing additional trailpods and lifts between South and Granite peaks: Transcripts There are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them. Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer . Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment. Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio. Zoom The Zoom transcript only contains my conversation with Evan Kovach. Please use the other transcript to read/skim my take on Alterra’s new CEO. Stuart Winchester: My guest today has been General Manager of Mountain Creek, New Jersey since 2020. Mountain Creek spans more than two miles along four peaks served by nine lifts. 00:03:16.000 --> 00:03:36.000 Stuart Winchester: Since 2019, Mountain Creek has been owned by Snow Partners, which also operates the nearby Big Snow American Dream indoor ski area, the beginner-focused train-based learning program, Snow Cloud Resort operating software, and the Snow Pass and Snow Triple Play. He has worked at or around the resort for nearly two decades. Evan Kovac is my guest. 00:03:36.000 --> 00:03:44.000 Stuart Winchester: Evan, welcome at last to the storm. I don’t know if I said your last name right, I’m sorry, but so good to finally track you down. How’s life in Jersey today? 00:03:43.000 --> 00:03:51.000 Evan Kovach: It’s great. Thanks, Stuart. And actually, you did pronounce my last name correctly, which is very rare. So thank you for that. And thanks for having me. 00:03:50.000 --> 00:03:57.000 Stuart Winchester: Look at that. So, I had the general manager of Mount Southington on the pod the other day, and I was calling it Mount Southington. 00:03:57.000 --> 00:04:04.000 Stuart Winchester: So I messed up the whole scary Mountain Creek, I think is an easy one. You know, Evan. 00:04:05.000 --> 00:04:20.000 Stuart Winchester: Folks are hard on Mountain Creek, uh, if they have skied at bigger ski areas, but I think the place is awesome. You know, it’s a thousand vertical feet with, with high speed lifts, an hour and 15 minutes from my house on a weekend morning with no traffic. So, uh, and, and I think. 00:04:21.000 --> 00:04:36.000 Stuart Winchester: You know, part of it’s, uh, and I’ll give you a chance to comment on this, but my perception is people think it’s kind of a wild place, uh, and sometimes dysfunctional, but I think under Snow Partners, they’ve really modernized, and at the core of that. 00:04:36.000 --> 00:04:40.000 Stuart Winchester: is snowmaking. So, what can you tell us about… 00:04:40.000 --> 00:04:47.000 Stuart Winchester: how the snowmaking system has evolved since Snow Partners took over, basically, your tenure from 2020 to now? 00:04:47.000 --> 00:05:02.000 Evan Kovach: Yeah, absolutely. And snowmaking is something I’ve been passionate about since I was about 5 years old. So when I first started skiing, I would download ski resorts trail maps to Microsoft Paint and color in trails that I think they should be snowmaking on. 00:04:52.000 --> 00:04:53.000 Stuart Winchester: Mmhm. 00:04:58.000 --> 00:05:00.000 Stuart Winchester: Mm-hmm. 00:05:01.000 --> 00:05:02.000 Stuart Winchester: Right. 00:05:02.000 --> 00:05:18.000 Evan Kovach: Um, so it’s something I’ve always kind of played with as a kid and now I get to do it, um, as a career. So that’s, that’s a pretty cool thing for me. But obviously, uh, two years ago we invested $5 million in automation, um, with TechnoAlpin. So th… Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

Who Dennis Eshbaugh, President and General Manager of Holiday Valley , New York This is Dennis’ second appearance on The Storm Skiing Podcast : Date Recorded Oct. 2, 2026 About Holiday Valley Owned by: Win-Sum Ski Corp, which Holiday Valley’s website describes as “a closely held corporation owned by a small number of stockholders.” Year founded: 1957 (opened Jan. 7, 1958) Pass affiliations: None! Base elevation: 1,514 feet (bottom of Snowpine Quad) Summit elevation: 2,324 feet (top of Tannenbaum) Vertical drop: 736 feet (skiing from the top of Tannenbaum to the bottom of Snowpine would be tricky but not impossible if a skier poached the summit-top walking trails and didn’t mind a little uphill; however, it would not be a great run; the most consistent quality vert would be lapping the Mardi Gras sixer, which is roughly 693 vertical feet.) Skiable acres: 290 trail acres, but 90 percent-ish of the trees are open enough to ski through (though the trailmap has few marked glades), when there’s sufficient natural snow. Which is often. Average annual snowfall: 180 inches Lift count: 13 (1 six-pack, 3 high-speed quads, 7 fixed-grip quads, 2 carpets) – Cindy’s fixed-grip quad chairlift scheduled for replacement with a high-speed quad ahead of winter 2027-28. Why I interviewed him We are in the midst of a Great Aerial Lift Reset in the United States. Halfway through this decade, U.S. ski areas have already built nearly the same number of new lifts as they did from 2010-2019: The last Great Aerial Lift Reset (GALR) came in the 1980s and ‘90s, when ski areas of means discarded not-terribly-old-fixed-grip-lifts and replaced them with detachables. The difference between GALR 1900s and GALR 2020s is that, in the previous era, most large ski areas were willing to sell their discarded lifts to small ski areas. Today, many hesitate. Holiday Valley does not hesitate. Since the 1990s, the busiest, most aggressively modern ski area in New York State has sold eight chairlifts to seven ski areas in six states. An eighth floated south until it ended up, improbably, in the Andes Mountains of Chile: Why does Holiday Valley do this? Operators who prefer to sell off the carriers as firepit accessories and scrap the rest often vaguely wave toward liability concerns. But I’m unaware of any injury lawsuit involving a relocated chairlift that blames the seller. Another common argument for scrapping older lifts is that detachable technologies are improving so rapidly that earlier generations of high-speed machines are too outmoded to bother moving. This is certainly true of most lifts built in the 1980s, but 1990s models have proven more durable – Boyne has relocated four within its system, and Holiday Valley’s 1996 Garaventa-CTEC detachable quad is now Corralco’s El Volcan Express. So when Holiday Valley announced recently that their next lift replacement would be a 2027 detachable quad to replace the 35-year-old Cindy’s fixed-grip quad, the question was not whether they would sell it, but to whom (Holiday Valley also occasionally moves lifts internally). And when Vail Resorts announced earlier this week that Park City would replace three 1990s chairlifts with two new machines, I thought it was fair to pressure the company to either re-use the lifts or offer them for sale. The three lifts in question are highlighted below. While they’re among the oldest machines on the mountain, they’re not old by U.S. chairlift standards. I’ve held off reaching out to Vail for comment, as I anticipate seeing reps from Park City at the annual Ski Utah media event next week in New York. Vail knows how to move lifts – Hunter moved the Broadway fixed quad over to the Hunter East beginner zone two years ago, and moved a then-19-year-old bubble detach quad across Okemo in 2021. The last aerial lift relocation from a Vail-owned mountain that I’m aware of is Heavenly’s Powderbowl Yan triple, retired in 2004 and moved to independent (and then-private) Echo Mountain, Colorado in 2005. If Vail decides to repurpose these Park City lifts elsewhere in their portfolio, fine. But if I see one more social media post humble-bragging about a $50,000 chair-sales donation from a lift worth 10 or 20 times that number, I think it’s fair to question whether the world’s largest ski company is putting its resources and scale to the highest and best use. Transcripts There are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them. Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer . Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment. Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio. Zoom Stuart Winchester: My guest today has been president of Holiday Valley New York since 1995, and general manager since 1989. 00:05:22.000 --> 00:05:37.000 Stuart Winchester: With 13 lifts serving nearly 300 acres of terrain on 750 vertical feet. Holiday Valley is one of the largest and busiest ski areas in New York State. It is also one of the snowiest, averaging 180 inches of lake effect snowfall. 00:05:37.000 --> 00:05:47.000 Stuart Winchester: per winter. He is also, like me, a proud brown dad. Dennis Eshbaugh joins me. Dennis, welcome back to the storm. How you doing today? 00:05:46.000 --> 00:05:54.000 Dennis Eshbaugh: I’m doing great. Good morning, Stuart, and thanks for the introduction, and uh… yes, and congratulations on your daughter at Brown, that’s outstanding. 00:05:54.000 --> 00:06:06.000 Stuart Winchester: Yeah, she seems to be loving it there. She’s in her fourth or fifth week, and uh… just, what a cool town. I’d never been up there, and I just expected Providence to be another city, but it’s very leafy and fun and collegey. 00:06:06.000 --> 00:06:15.000 Dennis Eshbaugh: I had the same experience in our first visit. I’d never been to Providence before Kate went there, and yeah, it’s a great, great town, and a great place for a great school. 00:06:08.000 --> 00:06:09.000 Stuart Winchester: Yeah. 00:06:14.000 --> 00:06:18.000 Stuart Winchester: Yeah, and I didn’t realize this, but Brown is older than America. 00:06:18.000 --> 00:06:25.000 Stuart Winchester: So, it’s one of the… one of the few universities, yeah. All right, Dennis, we’re coming off a pretty… 00:06:19.000 --> 00:06:21.000 Dennis Eshbaugh: Yeah, hard to fathom, isn’t it? 00:06:25.000 --> 00:06:38.000 Stuart Winchester: crummy winter in parts of the country, but it was pretty good in New York, and I… I didn’t ski Holiday Valley last year, but I did get out to Hollomont Buffalo Ski Center, had really good turns there. How was last winter for Holiday Valley? 00:06:38.000 --> 00:06:54.000 Dennis Eshbaugh: Well, the first thing I want to make an observation on is Jane pointed out that you were here in Western New York and di… Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

Who Jay Dougherty, President and General Manager of Mount Southington , Connecticut Date Recorded Oct. 2, 2026 About Mount Southington Owned by: Multiple shareholders descended from the ski area’s founders Year founded: 1964 Pass affiliations: * Snow Pass – 2 days, no blackouts * Snow Triple Play – up to 2 days, no blackouts These two passes have a lot of overlap, but completely different rosters: Base elevation: 210 feet Summit elevation: 571 feet Vertical drop: 361 feet Skiable acres: 51 acres Average annual snowfall: 40 inches Lift count: 8 (1 triple, 3 doubles, 4 carpets) – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Mount Southington’s lift fleet Why I interviewed him A lot of ski areas are beautiful because they’re set within nature’s masterpieces. Mount Southington is beautiful because it’s not: How cool is that? A ski area in the middle of a neighborhood. A neighborhood that most of us could probably afford to live in. Kids grow up across the street. If it snows enough, they can probably ski from their front door to the lifts. Good thing the ski hill is already there. We rarely build cool things next to where we actually live anymore. But it’s hard to get rid of a ski area once it’s built, unless it fails. Southington [Suh-thing-ton] is not going anywhere. Three of the bump’s chairlifts are under 20 years old (two are younger than five), and a replacement for the fourth - Stardust - starts, well, any second now (a new top terminal is sitting in the parking lot). A few dozen neighborhood ski areas like this still exist across America, mostly east of the Mississippi. Sometimes the neighbors hate them, especially during all-night snowmaking season. But very few people living in a house near a ski area today would have been surprised to find themselves living near a ski area, since the facility would have in most cases preceded them. Maybe a few even moved in to be close to skiing. It’s cool to imagine being one of them, waking up to morning turns three months per year. How cool - like having a lake house on a kinda small lake. It’s not Aspen, but most of us aren’t billionaires, and it’s nice to think that, in a few far-flung corners of America, there’s a backdoor to that sort of life that no one’s really checking. Additional resources * New England Ski History details Mount Southington’s early days. * A bit more on Southington’s Northstar lift, received second-hand from Craigmeur, New Jersey, migrating for its third life as Lost Valley, Maine’s Chair 3. * Somehow all my Mount Southington photos have vanished into the digital void, but Instapost preserves this shot of a really awesome sunset from my 2021 visit. Top of the Stardust chair: Transcripts There are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them. Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer . Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment. Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio. Zoom Stuart Winchester: My guest today has been president and general manager of Mount Southington, Connecticut since 2014. 00:03:20.000 --> 00:03:37.000 Stuart Winchester: Established in 1964, Mount Southington offers 51 acres of skiable terrain served by four chairlifts and several surface lifts. Jay Doherty is my guest. Jay, welcome to the storm. You are the first Connecticut representative to ever be on the podcast, not. 00:03:34.000 --> 00:03:36.000 Jay Dougherty: Okay. 00:03:37.000 --> 00:03:42.000 Stuart Winchester: for any reason other than I haven’t been able to figure out who to talk to, so thank you very much for coming on today. 00:03:41.000 --> 00:03:45.000 Jay Dougherty: Oh, absolutely. I’m excited to be here. Excited to join you. 00:03:44.000 --> 00:04:01.000 Stuart Winchester: And you’re a true Connecticut guy. We were chatting a little bit, and you said that Southington, and I don’t know if I’m even pronouncing that right, is in — OK, there we go. There we go. All right, see, this is why I need to get you on the pod, because otherwise I mess up simple things. 00:03:52.000 --> 00:03:56.000 Jay Dougherty: It’s Southern Vin. Yeah, there you go. It’s all good. 00:03:57.000 --> 00:03:59.000 Jay Dougherty: Yeah, exactly. 00:04:01.000 --> 00:04:06.000 Stuart Winchester: From right down the street, he said, tell us about Southington and what it means to you. Southington. 00:04:04.000 --> 00:04:25.000 Jay Dougherty: Yeah, so I’m one of those fortunate few to get, have the opportunity to run the actual ski area that I grew up at. You know, I’ve had a season’s pass here since I was probably seven, eight years old. You know, and then I worked, this was my first job was in the rental department here. So it means a lot to me and about something that’s got a great community connection. 00:04:16.000 --> 00:04:17.000 Stuart Winchester: Mmhm. 00:04:25.000 --> 00:04:26.000 Jay Dougherty: Oh. 00:04:26.000 --> 00:04:37.000 Stuart Winchester: And did you… I noted that you’ve been general manager since 2014. That’s as far back as I could find your history online. Did you work there as a lifty in high school or anything? Was it your first job? 00:04:37.000 --> 00:04:52.000 Jay Dougherty: I did, yeah, so it was my first job, I worked in the rental department as a technician, um, and then I was going to college for elementary ed, um, didn’t really know what I wanted to do, and my parents were like, well, I gotta do something. So I’m like, yeah, alright, you know, there’s a shortage of. 00:04:45.000 --> 00:04:46.000 Stuart Winchester: Mmhm. 00:04:52.000 --> 00:05:09.000 Jay Dougherty: male, young elementary school teacher. So I’m like, that sounds like a great opportunity. But I was working here and got offered a year-round position painting lifts. And I fell in love with it at that point. And then I found a college program that was just starting out with Green Mountain College in connection with Killington. 00:05:00.000 --> 00:05:01.000 Stuart Winchester: Mmhm. 00:05:09.000 --> 00:05:19.000 Jay Dougherty: Uh, and I ended up going there, and, you know, I graduated 2004, uh, worked for Killington for a very short while, and then came back here as Assistant Mountain Manager. 00:05:14.000 --> 00:05:15.000 Stuart Winchester: Mmhm. 00:05:19.000 --> 00:05:34.000 Stuart Winchester: So talk to us a little bit about who owns Mount Southington. There’s a really good, you know, New England Ski History, this site does a great job with the origin stories and there’s a little bit on your site about the doctor and his wife, Dr. Harold Richmond and his wife who started it. 00:05:26.000 --> 00:05:27.000 Jay Dougherty: Yeah. 00:05:33.000 --> 00:05:34.000 Jay Dougherty: Oh. 00:05:34.000 --> 00:05:38.000 Stuart Winchester: I’m not sure who owns it now, but who do you report to? 00:05:38.000 --> 00:05:48.000 Jay Dougherty: Uh, this is the best story, because it’s actually the kin of all the original owners. So all of their kids own it, and now we’re starting to see actual, like, fourth generation, like… 00:05:40.000 --> 00:05:41.000 Stuart Winchester: Yeah. 00:05:43.000 --> 00:05:45.000 Stuart Winchester: Oh, really? Oh, cool. 00:05:47.000 --> 00:05:48.000 Stuart Winchester: Oh, wow. 00:05:48.000 --> 00:06:… Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

Who Doug Fish, founder of the Snowvana ski show and Indy Pass Date Recorded Sept. 30, 2026 About Snowvana Snowvana is a “winter kick-off festival” (a ski show) scheduled for a four-city 2026 tour: Use the code “thestorm26” to snatch a free ticket here for any 2026 Snowvana show. Check out the list of free and discounted lift tickets available onsite at each show. Why I interviewed him If we trust the metonymic origin story of our surnames, then Doug Fish is a descendant of “a catcher or seller of fish,” probably sometime before the invention of the printing press. I cannot think of anything that I understand less than fishing. Specifically, how a person can be good at it. My experience with fishing is that you cast a line in the water and nothing happens while you get drunk. But my buddy’s brother could go out on Sanford Lake in a rowboat and return an hour later surrounded by like 50 fish. Every damn time. And I was always just astonished like whatever inherent traits you need to be good at fishing that dude has them. I don’t know if Doug Fish is good at fishing, or if he even likes it. I do know that he’s good at skiing, and that he likes it. And whatever fishing ability he may or may not have inherited from Alabaster Fish of the 12th Century, he certainly possesses some of the traits of great fishermen: patience, instinct, and the ability to do hard things that no one else can figure out. Organizing and launching the Indy Pass is probably one of the great achievements of modern skiing, in that it proved that any ski area - and therefore nearly any skier - could join the multimountain pass club. While Indy wasn’t a novel or new concept, Fish was able to achieve the heretofore impossible task of organizing far-flung ski areas into a coalition with patience, persistence, and a low-key, no-pressure approach devoid of Big Ski’s ego. Once Fish sold Indy Pass, he tried something even harder: replicating the success of his Portland ski show across the country. To me, that sounds even more impossible than fishing, and does not include the benefit of a cooler MGDs on the boat floor. But whatever is inside of Fish that made the Indy Pass work, it’s making the recently faded ski show work too. I’ve attended Snowvana in Portland and Milwaukee, each time as a paid speaker. I’m scheduled to host live conversations with Indy Pass/Entabeni/Black Mountain owner Erik Mogensen (Friday, Nov. 6) and Killington owner Phill Gross and president Mike Solimano (Saturday, Nov. 7), at this year’s New England show. I don’t endorse Snowvana over any competing shows, but I do think ski shows in general offer a fun atmosphere, and a cool way to participate in skiing when you can’t actually go skiing. Background Fish has appeared on The Storm Skiing Podcast four times, each time solely as a representative of the Indy Pass: Transcripts There are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them. Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer . Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment. Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio. Zoom Stuart Winchester: My guest today is the founder of the Snowvana Winter Kickoff Festival and also founder of the Indie Pass. Now in its 10th year, Snowvana gathers skiers, ski area operators, and retailers in Portland, Oregon. 00:16:42.000 --> 00:16:46.000 Stuart Winchester: Seattle, New England, and Wisconsin. 00:16:46.000 --> 00:17:03.000 Stuart Winchester: The Indy Pass, which Fish founded in 2019 and sold in 2023, but is still involved in, delivers skiers two days each at more than 300 ski areas around the world for winter 2026 to 27. He is making his fifth appearance on the Storm Skiing Podcast. He is Doug Fish. Doug, welcome back. 00:17:03.000 --> 00:17:06.000 Stuart Winchester: How’s it been? Been way too long. 00:17:06.000 --> 00:17:10.000 Doug Fish: It has to. I know. I miss you. 00:17:09.000 --> 00:17:21.000 Stuart Winchester: I know. Well, it’s been way too long on the pod, and I was just talking before this, in my little intro, before you joined, that this is one of the reasons I wanted to do a different format pod, because. 00:17:21.000 --> 00:17:24.000 Stuart Winchester: I talk or text you all the time. 00:17:23.000 --> 00:17:25.000 Doug Fish: Yeah, yeah, no worries. 00:17:24.000 --> 00:17:39.000 Stuart Winchester: And I haven’t had you on the pod in 3 years. So, there’s no reason for that, because we love hearing from you, and your episodes always do really well. And we will be working together here a little bit on one of these Snovana appearances in a bit. We’ll get to that. 00:17:39.000 --> 00:17:42.000 Stuart Winchester: First, though, I do want to pick up… 00:17:39.000 --> 00:17:40.000 Doug Fish: Yeah. 00:17:42.000 --> 00:17:47.000 Stuart Winchester: where we left off in that pod three years ago. You had just sold IndiePass to Eric Mogensen. 00:17:45.000 --> 00:17:47.000 Doug Fish: Mm-hmm. 00:17:47.000 --> 00:17:48.000 Doug Fish: Get it. 00:17:47.000 --> 00:17:56.000 Stuart Winchester: Uh, who has gone on to since, also by Black Mountain, and runs a technology company. He was on the podcast recently, and has been a couple times. Just… 00:17:55.000 --> 00:17:56.000 Doug Fish: Yep. 00:17:57.000 --> 00:18:04.000 Stuart Winchester: First of all, tell us how you’re still involved, and give as candid of an assessment as you can of. 00:18:01.000 --> 00:18:02.000 Doug Fish: Mm-hmm. 00:18:04.000 --> 00:18:10.000 Stuart Winchester: where the Indy Pass is once you… once you let that baby go. 00:18:09.000 --> 00:18:11.000 Doug Fish: Yeah. 00:18:11.000 --> 00:18:22.000 Doug Fish: Well, it was a little difficult to let the baby go, but I felt at the time that it would be in good hands, and I’m happy to report that it is in good hands. 00:18:14.000 --> 00:18:15.000 Stuart Winchester: No. 00:18:22.000 --> 00:18:27.000 Doug Fish: Um, you know, my country… my employment agreement ran out. 00:18:27.000 --> 00:18:29.000 Doug Fish: Almost two years ago. 00:18:29.000 --> 00:18:35.000 Doug Fish: And I’m still involved, you know. Eric and I extended it, and we keep extending it, and… 00:18:35.000 --> 00:18:45.000 Doug Fish: I believe in in what he’s doing. I certainly believe in the past. I think that Eric has done a great job of. 00:18:45.000 --> 00:18:50.000 Doug Fish: Staying true to the mission and the brand promise of IndyPass. 00:18:50.000 --> 00:19:00.000 Doug Fish: And, um, you know, as long as that continues, I will… I will be involved in some capacity. I’m kind of the Colonel Sanders of the IndyPass now. 00:19:00.000 --> 00:19:08.000 Doug Fish: I and you know I get to be a little a bit of an ambassador. I go to some of the trade shows. 00:19:08.000 --> 00:19:10.000 Doug Fish: I ski with people. 00:19:10.000 --> 00:19:14.000 Doug Fish: It’s… it’s a pretty good gig, you know. 00:19:13.000 --> 00:19:15.000 Stuart Winchester: When you said Colonel Sanders, I mean, are you… 00:19:15.000 --> 00:19:19.000 Stuart Winchester: What I thought you were doing is still… 00:19:19.000 --> 00:19:23.000 Stuart Winchester: Recruiting new partners? Is that not the case? 00:19:21.000 --> 00:19:37.000 Doug Fish: Yeah, I’ve been. That’s what I’ve been primarily focused on recruiting and maintaining relationships, yo… Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

It would not be difficult to locate a photo of The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast drinking canned Miller Lite shirtless in a lake while wearing a backward baseball cap. There is therefore nothing I can say here that can hurt anyone more than I’ve already hurt myself. Vail Resorts reported fourth-quarter and end-of-fiscal-2026 earnings yesterday. I’m no financial analyst, but the numbers are what I would call “not good”: [Epic] Pass product unit sales through September 18, 2026 for the upcoming 2026/2027 North American ski season decreased approximately 12%, days sold decreased approximately 10% and sales dollars, inclusive of sales and admissions taxes, decreased approximately 6%, as compared to the prior year period through September 19, 2025. Which, whatever - the only Epic Pass numbers that really matter are the ones that Vail Resorts reports in December, after the product goes off sale. Up until two years ago, annual sales ranged from “all right” to “pretty good” to “damn-I-guess-making-a-season-pass-cheaper-than-a-frozen-burrito-moves-passes.” Unit sales - meaning the number of Epic Pass “products” (we include Epic Day) sold - increased every year from the pass’ introduction in 2008-09 until 2024-25. Even then, unit sales only declined by two percent: Notably, Epic Pass sales dollars (right-hand column above), have never declined year-over-year. That could change this year. Vail executives seemed oddly fatalistic about declining Epic Pass numbers. CEO Rob Katz noted, during yesterday’s earnings call, that destination guests’ hesitation to buy (mostly, he implied) Epic Day Passes after last year’s crummy winter was an opportunity for Vail to “lean in to be more competitive on lift ticket pricing.” It’s all very disconcerting: after working for years to diminish the lift ticket as an Idiot Tax product-of-last-resort-that-will-either-force-you-to-buy-an-Epik-Pass-or-give-up-skiing-forever, Vail is betting on discounted lift tickets that sit well above peak rates from a decade ago to prop up financials as pass sales level off to yeah-2-million-passes-is-all-42-ski-areas-can-realistically-handle-anyway-Brah levels. Weird. Wonder what this guy thinks? McBrosephs I have takes. Just remember that when I go in on the Bros, it’s more self-reflective diary than attack on American culture. Though it’s also that. And when I go in on Vail, it’s acknowledging the good things they’ve done to democratize the season pass even as the company destroyed a perfectly good product that it now wants to summon as a savior. The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast will adopt one hamster for every new paid subscriber. Just kidding hamsters are weird I once watched one give birth and systematically devour her offspring. No thanks dude I’ll take the rats that live under my porch. What’s good, Fat Boy? Anyway if you like skiing subscribe to my newsletter because I like it too: Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast wants you to know that there is skiing in New Mexico. Even beyond Taos. Subscribe for constant journeys into such improbable ski realms: Who Jasen Bellomy, General Manager of Pajarito, New Mexico Date Recorded September 28, 2026 Also discussed Upgrades across Mountain Capital Partners’ portfolio (see chart below), and reader reaction to last week’s pods - especially the EuroSki ep with Iain Martin. About Pajarito Owned by: Mountain Capital Partners, since 2014; company also owns: Year founded: 1957 - predecessor ski area, Sawyers Hill, founded nearby by the same ski club in 1944 Pass affiliations: Power Pass, Power Pass Select, Power Pass Core - unlimited Base elevation: 9,000 feet Summit elevation: 10,440 feet Vertical drop: 1,440 feet Skiable acres: 280 trail acres + unspecified glade acreage (though Bellomy urges caution in the glades) Average annual snowfall: 125 inches Lift count: 6 (1 fixed quad, 1 triple, 3 doubles, 1 carpet) - view Lift Blog’s inventory of Pajarito’s lift fleet. Why I interviewed him “Ski New Mexico,” you say? Those three words underwhelm, but the stat sheet suggests that skiers miss out by dismissing New Mexico: Those are respectable vertical drops, and some nice acreage with modernizing lift fleets. Taos gets all the Ikon/Mountain Collective destination attention, and deserves it, after building seven new aerial lifts and otherwise sweeping the place clean over the past dozen years. But just about every New Mexico ski area is investing: Angel Fire props up the state’s first sixer for winter 2026-27, just a year after dropping a second quad, Rake’s Rider, onto its east side to spread skiers out between blues and blacks: Ski Santa Fe, Ski Apache, and Red River have collectively built or relocated another five lifts in the past decade. Tiny, super-south Cloudcroft seems like a mess, with little online presence and minimal operations (the bump lacks snowmaking). But overall, New Mexico is a bit of a big-mountain secret, with dry desert snow when it comes. The key to this improbable kingdom is base elevations among the highest in America: It’s not quite Colorado, but they’re high: And it’s high enough to get us to nine active New Mexico ski areas in 2026, which is probably nine more than most people think the state has. But even cloud addresses are not enough to keep these survivors around forever. They need snowmaking. Taos’ system - a big part of the mountain’s modernization under billionaire Louis Bacon, who bought the ski area in 2013 - runs to nearly 11,000 feet. But the smaller areas are building more firepower too. MCP, which operates one-third of those ski areas, stapled together a nice system at Sipapu , the company’s first acquisition, in 2000. Now, after years of negotiations, MCP is working with state and Los Alamos County officials on an $18 million snowmaking modernization plan for Pajarito: A five-mile pipe will shuttle water approximately 2,000 vertical feet up from Los Alamos to Pajarito’s summit reservoir. But this is not just a snowmaking project: firefighters will be able to tap hydrants along the five-mile route or dip the 10-million gallon reservoir with helicopters. The impact, MCP officials believe, will be substantial, and could mirror the turnaround of the company’s Arizona Snowbowl ski area. Prior to running a 15-mile-long snowmaking pipe 3,000 feet up from Flagstaff, Snowbowl’s seasons swung wildly, from 162,000 visits in winter 2000-01 to just four operating days the following season. Now, Snowbowl is consistently one of the last ski areas in the nation to close, with a 185-day 2024-25 season that ended on June 1. Repeating that success at Pajarito would, according to officials, give skiers seasons up to 140 days long - more than double the ski area’s traditional 60-day winter. So yeah, ski New Mexico, Man. It’s weird, I know. Down there in the desert. But there’s water if you get creative and work together. (Now we just need to see if MCP can repeat some version of this deal at snow-starved Sandia Peak.) Additional reading * A Ski profile of Pajarito by Nick Heil, 2016 * Pajarito’s blog tracking the snowmaking project Transcripts There are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them. Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer . Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment. Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio. I only included my conversation with Jasen in this transcript - you can read my editorial on MCP or my reaction to reader’s comments in the other transcript, but frankly I’d either listen to them or skip those sections. Zoom Stuart Winchester: My guest today has been the general manager of Powerito New Mexico since 2023. 00:35:14.000 --> 00:35:26.000 Stuart Winchester: Bajarito’s predecessor ski area, Sawyers Hill, was founded by top American scientists and soldiers working on top secret research, including the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos during World War II. 00:35:26.000 --> 00:35:46.000 Stuart Winchester: In 1957, the Los Alamos Ski Club moved the facility up to Pareto, where today, 5 chairlifts serve 1,440 vertical feet on 280 skiable trail acres, plus glades. Pareto is one of 13 ski areas operated by Durango, Colorado-based Mountain Capital Partners. 00:35:46.000 --> 00:35:52.000 Stuart Winchester: and one of three that the company operates in New Mexico, including Sipapu and Sandia Peak. 00:35:52.000 --> 00:36:09.000 Stuart Winchester: Prior to joining the team at Power Reno, he worked at Saddleback, Maine, Sugarbush, Vermont, Pratchett, New Hampshire, and all the way back at the start of his career as a lifty at Waterville Valley, New Hampshire. He served a tour in the Marine Corps and spent several years working in air traffic management technologies. 00:36:09.000 --> 00:36:16.000 Stuart Winchester: Jason Bellamy is my guest. Jason, welcome to The Storm. So good to have you. How is life in the mountains of New Mexico today? 00:36:16.000 --> 00:36:24.000 Jasen: Oh, man, thanks for having me. Super excited. Uh, busy. And wet, currently. 00:36:23.000 --> 00:36:38.000 Stuart Winchester: Oh, yeah, yeah, it’s… I’m out on the East Coast, it’s been raining all weekend, so… so I… look, I know you got a ton going on, so let’s jump right into it. The headline, if you go to Powerito’s website right now, which, by the way, if I’m saying the name of the scary wrong, you. 00:36:38.000 --> 00:36:48.000 Stuart Winchester: 2700% more water for snowmaking, so lay this out for us, Jason. What did Powerito’s snowmaking system look like before, and what are you… 00:36:48.000 --> 00:36:50.000 Stuart Winchester: Building up. 00:36:51.000 --> 00:36:57.000 Jasen: So, historically, it was about 2010 that we were able to. 00:36:57.000 --> 00:37:04.000 Jasen: while it was still operated by the Los Alamos Ski Club, they put in a very bare-bones snowmaking system. 00:37:04.000 --> 00:37:10.000 Jasen: and captured surface runoff in the springtime to fill a 10 million gallon pond at the top of the mountain. 00:37:10.000 --> 00:37:11.000 Stuart Winchester: Mmhm. 00:37:11.000 --> 00:37:17.000 Jasen: The run… Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast thinks that yelling “PIZZA!” and “FRENCH FRY!” at a 2-year-old superman straightlining down a green slope is a highly effective ski instruction technique. If you agree, please sign up for my newsletter: Who Brian Bensch, founder of Snow Schoolers Date recorded September 24, 2026 About Snow Schoolers Snow Schoolers, per its website , is an “independent ski school program” that teaches lessons “at any mountain where we’ve established a revenue-sharing partnership with the ski area.” Skiers sign up for lessons on their Pet Rectangles, like this: Why I interviewed him That sounds pretty neat, right? Let me go see if Snow Schoolers teaches at my favorite mountain. Snow Schoolers probably does not teach at your favorite mountain. Unless your favorite mountain is 222-vertical-foot Granlibakken, which is about five feet away from 6,000-acre Palisades Tahoe, or 100 vertical-foot Frisco Adventure Park, tucked off highway 9, after 1.5 million-ish skiers exit I-70 on their way to nearby Breckenridge. That is not an indictment of small ski areas, which I love, or Snow Schoolers’ business model, which I also love. Rather, it’s my way of saying that the only way to sign up for ski school at Palisades Tahoe or Breckenridge is through Palisades Tahoe or Breckenridge. With the strange, grandfathered-in exception of the strange, cobbled-together ski bazaar that is Summit at Snoqualmie in Washington, all major American ski areas (so far as I know) operate with a monopoly over ski school operations on their property. In ways subtle and aggressive, they police and ban rogue instructors who would offer discounted lessons on resort property. There are probably ways to break this system, either through the courts or legislative amendment of the Forest Service leases that 125 U.S. ski areas operate on. Such change sounds radical only in an American context - most European ski areas already operate with multiple independent competing ski schools onsite. Over the past 20 years, technology has challenged monopolies across American commerce. Sports and concert tickets and taxi rides offer two prime examples of power shifting from one central operator to many operators, with benefits and drawbacks for the consumer. Perhaps we will get there with ski school. For now, I see a more practical path for an asset-light, app-based, independent ski school like Snow Schoolers - as the costs of labor, utilities, infrastructure, and insurance pile up, perhaps outsourcing the operation of a ski school is more practical for many smaller, independent ski areas than establishing and maintaining one of their own. That is what you get at Granlibakken and Frisco: Snow Schoolers pays the ski areas a share of each lesson, essentially as rent for the right to operate a ski school on their property. And Granlibakken and Friso don’t have to worry about hiring instructors and organizing lessons. There are probably 100 under-resourced ski areas in America where this model could work tomorrow. Brian and I discuss why Snow Schoolers works where it does, and why the model has been slow to spread. Transcripts There are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them. Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer . Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment. Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio. Zoom Stuart Winchester: My guest today founded Snowschoolers in 2014 with the mission to make skiing and riding affordable and accessible for average Americans. 00:16:06.000 --> 00:16:11.000 Stuart Winchester: and to pay snow sports pros a sustainable living wage. 00:16:11.000 --> 00:16:19.000 Stuart Winchester: Today, Snowschoolers operates at Grand Lebakken in Lake Tahoe, and Frisco Adventure Park in Colorado, two small ski areas. 00:16:19.000 --> 00:16:36.000 Stuart Winchester: Last year, Snow Schoolers hosted approximately 6,000 students. He is a good friend of the Storm. He is Brian Bench. Brian, welcome to the Storm. You reached out to me very shortly after I launched in 2019 or 20, and we’ve been talking for years, and you’ve helped me out a lot. 00:16:36.000 --> 00:16:38.000 Stuart Winchester: With the… 00:16:38.000 --> 00:16:45.000 Stuart Winchester: digital side of things, which I’m not so good at, so it’s awesome to finally get you on and talk some snow schoolers. How you doing today? 00:16:44.000 --> 00:16:48.000 Brian Bensch: Doing lovely. Can’t complain. Always busy, never bored. 00:16:46.000 --> 00:16:52.000 Stuart Winchester: And that is… yeah, that is a picture out your window of Tahoe, right? 00:16:51.000 --> 00:17:00.000 Brian Bensch: Yes, that is a, it’s called Maggie’s Peak, but that’s looking at the little lake just next to Emerald Bay. 00:16:55.000 --> 00:16:57.000 Stuart Winchester: Mmhm. 00:17:00.000 --> 00:17:05.000 Stuart Winchester: Okay, which would be sort of north side of the lake, so you’d be looking… 00:17:02.000 --> 00:17:03.000 Brian Bensch: Oh. 00:17:03.000 --> 00:17:08.000 Brian Bensch: South Tahoe, kind of on the other side of the corner, like, across from Heavenly. 00:17:08.000 --> 00:17:18.000 Stuart Winchester: Oh, south, right? I was… I was backwards. So… so on the… up the left side, there would be Homewood, and then up the right side would be Heavenly and Diamond Peak, and at the top is, like. 00:17:09.000 --> 00:17:10.000 Brian Bensch: Yeah. 00:17:13.000 --> 00:17:15.000 Brian Bensch: Correct. 00:17:18.000 --> 00:17:19.000 Brian Bensch: Mostly correct. 00:17:18.000 --> 00:17:26.000 Stuart Winchester: Or North Star? North Star, Northwood. Okay, alright, uh, before I hurt myself, let’s just get into this. So, so Brian. 00:17:24.000 --> 00:17:28.000 Brian Bensch: Well, we’ll get you out to Tahoe soon enough, and then your Tahoe geography will get. 00:17:26.000 --> 00:17:31.000 Stuart Winchester: It’s been a minute. So… 00:17:32.000 --> 00:17:40.000 Stuart Winchester: What is broken about American ski schools, and how did you try to fix it with snow schoolers? 00:17:39.000 --> 00:17:45.000 Brian Bensch: Yeah. So I would say similar to, you know. 00:17:45.000 --> 00:17:49.000 Brian Bensch: The the general diatribe about, you know. 00:17:49.000 --> 00:17:55.000 Brian Bensch: The ski industry being kind of broken with lift tickets too expensive and climate change is gonna end the world. 00:17:55.000 --> 00:18:07.000 Brian Bensch: Not everything is broken, but particularly the most front and center in your face resorts that you know everyone hears about, and you know, makes the quote unquote mainstream news has been broken for a while. 00:18:07.000 --> 00:18:15.000 Brian Bensch: And, you know, the gist is, if you roll up to, you know, a Tier 1 destination resort. 00:18:15.000 --> 00:18:16.000 Brian Bensch: Brooke, uh… 00:18:16.000 --> 00:18:32.000 Brian Bensch: Not only is lift ticket price what it is, but if you are looking for a group lesson, you’re looking at a couple 100 bucks. And if you’re looking for a private lesson, you’re lucky if you can find anything that is under 1000 today. When we started Snow Schoolers, I remember telling people like, you know, a private lesson is $700 or $800. 00:18:32.000 --> 00:18:35.000 Brian Bensch: Well, now it’s roughly double that. 0… Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe