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Eskimo pro staff members Scotty Brewer and Kyle Agre discuss ice fishing tips, tricks and destinations.

As this great ice season comes to an end, be sure to clean and air out your shelter and prepare your ice auger for summer storage. In this final episode of ShackTalk for the 2017/18 ice season, Scotty and Kyle speak with Scott Albrecht about ice fishing with palm rods and fishing internationally for the USA Ice Fishing Team.

Season 2 - Episode 10

Some seasons are closing but many are still open, so get out there, and keep enjoying the sport as long as you can find safe ice! In this episode, the guys speak with Eskimo pro staffer Ryan Wieland about ice fishing for bluegills and crappies. In the location/destination segment, we’ll chat with Jim Kalkofen of Target Walleye about Montana and mountain ice fishing.

Season 2 - Episode 9

A lot of anglers will be pulling their permanent shacks off the lakes in the next few weeks, but there’s still a lot of good ice fishing left! As always, remember to leave the ice clean and debris-free. On this episode, Brett McComas takes a break from his highly-popular Target Walleye duties to talk about night fishing for eelpout. Eskimo prostaffer Tim Zwieg checks in after to talk about being successful ice fishing in urban lakes.

Season 2 - Episode 8

There is plenty of winter left! Get out there and catch some fish. In the latest episode of ShackTalk, the Brewer-Agre duo talk to Anthony Kleinwachter of Fish Addictions TV to discuss preparing your catch for a meal. During the destination segment, we’ll learn about visiting and fishing Lake Winnipeg with Travel Manitoba’s Eric Labaupa.

Season 2 - Episode 7

In this episode, Scotty and Kyle reflect on 2017 and share their goals for the 2018 ice season. During the tips and tactics segment, learn how to target suspended walleyes with Mr. Bluegill's Guide Service owner Troy Peterson, and then join Steve Foss of Steve Foss Guide Service to talk about fishing the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in northern Minnesota.

Season 2 - Episode 6

ShackTalk Ice Fishing Podcast

Uncover modern bass fishing tactics, tackle and techniques in high definition video.  You'll discover proven how-to's and shortcuts for taking your bass fishing skills to new heights.  New videos added regularly.

Recent advancements with Virtual Globe software and geospatial mapping are having a profound effect on the bass fishing world. Never before have anglers had access to the depth of information provided by the tools we outline in this production video. You'll learn the latest techniques for lake and river analysis, as well as the many hidden features that offer powerful data for bass fishermen.

The Geospatial Advantage

No matter your skill level or experience, every bass fisherman gets a baitcaster backlash now and then. But when you get a bad backlash, you rarely need to try to pick it out with your fingers or a sharp object. In fact, that often makes it worse. So in this short, we'll give you an incredibly effective trick for getting out even the most tangled backlashes. You will also be amazed at how fast it works too.

Trick For Getting Rid of Backlashes

Kevin and Bryan provide a basic introduction to tying hair jigs for largemouth and smallmouth bass. The goal of this video is to show anglers who are unfamiliar with tying tools and techniques, that the process is quite simple. You'll learn how to paint your own jigheads, what hairs and materials are effective, and great tips and tricks that make hair tying easier.

How To Tie Hair Jigs

In this video, Kevin shares with you a little-known device that will revolutionize how anglers use geospatial applications, like Google Earth and NASA World Wind. The 3dconnexion SpaceNavigator is a 3d mouse that let's you move around in three-dimensional space, like a helicopter, as you explore and do fishing reconnaissance. Kevin provides a full demonstration of SpaceNavigator and tells you why it is so important for bass fishermen. A must see!

SpaceNavigator For Virtual Exploration

Covering all the important jig fishing topics from color selection, using the correct jig trailers, new and innovative jigs on the market, selecting the right type and size fishing line and much more.

Selecting The Right Jig

Bass Fishing Tactics Videos [BassFishin.Com]

Jon's Motorcycle Podcast -- A podcast about a man and his motorcycle experiences and adventures.  Also, ride reports and stories from other motorcyclists.

New to riding? Returning rider? Experienced rider? The best motorcyclists reflect on their skills and techniques. Do you? The streetSkills Motorcycle Safety Podcast offers short and to the point episodes on skill-building topics. Be the best rider you can be. www.streetskills.net

streetSkills Motorcycle Safety Podcast - Episode 1

Check out Episode 12:  Me and a riding buddy check out the riding in the Catskill Mountains of NY.

Episode 12:  Catskill Mountains Trip.

Check out Episode 11:  DelVecchio's Motorcyclist Hall of Fame.  This is the tale of how I came to ride a motorcycle.

Episode 11:  DelVecchio's Motorcyclist Hall of Fame.

Motorcycle Ride Reports -- MotorcyclistPodcast.com

Blue Collar Sailing Podcast about normal people and Chesapeake Bay Sailors enjoying time on the water. Cruising, voyaging, sailing, racing, DIY projects, yacht club, boat club, fireside chats, music, a veritable blend of sailing entertainment with your host Jeffrey S. Wettig.

Welcome to this episode of The Shooting The Breeze Sailing Podcast (STBSP) in which we spend a rainy Saturday in Annapolis at Bacon Sails with Stevie Reeves, in his podcast studio, with alcohol, and Captain Boomies and the Bear crash the Party. This is part two of what ended up being almost a three hour […]

STBSP, Ep. 178, Rummin and Beerin with Stevie Reeves, Capt. Boomies, and the Bear, Part 2

Welcome to this episode of The Shooting The Breeze Sailing Podcast (STBSP) in which we spend a rainy Saturday in Annapolis at Bacon Sails with Stevie Reeves, in his podcast studio, with alcohol, and Captain Boomies and the Bear crash the Party. This is part one of what ended up being almost a three hour […]

STBSP, Ep, 177, Pod Party with Unfurled W/Stevie Reeves, Capt. Boomies, and the Bear, Pt 1.

Welcome to Episode 176 of The Shooting The Breeze Sailing Podcast (STBSP)! This episode we chat with Photographer and Portrait Artist Kristin Rutkowski about her Chesapeake Bay Based project called Her Helm. The Her Helm project got started during the Summer of Covid, and culminated last year with the release of the book, Her Helm […]

STBSP, Ep, 176, Her Helm Photographer Kristin Rutkowski

This episode, representing our 10th Anniversary of the start of the Podcast, we sit down and chat with Josh Davidson of Sailboatparts Dot Com on the Interwebs and Anchors and Oars, a Nautical gift shop and Sailboat parts outlet physically located on the Eastern Shore of the Bay, in Graysonville, MD. Josh had sort of […]

STBSP, Ep, 175, Josh Davidson of Anchors and Oars

Welcome to Episode 174 of The Shooting the Breeze Sailing Podcast (STBSP) with our guest, Annapolis based Sail Racer John Schafer, who with a bunch of military buddies started ministryofsailing.com and also runs a Sailing Rescue Swimmer training program for offshore sailors. When you sit down to watch a big time sailing race on the […]

STBSP, Ep, 174, A fun chat with John Schafer of Ministry of Sailing

The Shooting The Breeze Sailing Podcast

The ManBoys are a mostly sublunar group of friends and professional athletes based out of Whistler, Canada. 

The ManBoys are Mark Sollors, Rusty Ockenden, Jody Wachniak, Robjn Taylor, Matt Belzile, and Chris Rasman.

Rusty joins Jody and Mark to talk about editing Selective Memory, which snowboard movies don't suck, making sourdough bread and life away from Whistler

The Manboys Podcast #15 - Rusty Ockenden with Jody Wachniak & Mark Sollors

Host Jody Wachniak interviews legendary pro snowboarder, Romain De Marchi. They talk about the early days of Romain's career, from Morrow to Airwalk to Burton. Traveling with no budget caps, trips to the Tropics with Terje Hakonsen, Trevor Andrew, and Nicolas Muller. His favourite styles of all time, contests VS. video parts, MFM, filming for Absinthe for 13+ years, UNINC, doing community service in Alaska and YES snowboards. Tune in!

The Manboys Podcast #14 - Romain De Marchi

Jody Wachniak interviews Derek Molinski. Jody and Derek grew up riding the same hill in Winnipeg; Springhill Winter Park. Derek followed the wave of Manitoba boarders and made the full time move to Whistler around 10 years ago. Derek AKA DMO is a DC AM and has been in the Canadian snowboard sense for a minute now. They talk about Kazu's new project, growing up in the prairies, moving to the mountains, the importance of video parts and working hard, the new AMs on the come up, fishing and global warming. Tune in! 

The Manboys Podcast #13 - Derek Molinski with Jody Wachniak

Jody Wachniak and Mark Sollors chat with long time Whistler local and Snow/Skate shop GOD Jon Martin. Jon is the shop nerd of all shop nerds. He grew up with Simon Chamberlain, loved Nomis, big fan of Darrell Mathes, claims Travis Parker has the best indy, friends with Pam Anderson, got Posh Spice from the SPICE girls to buy him a gift and knows every single trick in any skate/snow movie.

The Manboys Podcast #12 - Jon Martin with Jody Wachniak & Mark Sollors

Jody Wachniak and Chris Rasman catch up with Burton super pro Mark Sollors after a busy season/summer! Should you go to Chile and Australia to snowboard?,  Nicolas Muller, Music Festivals, Kevin Jones and much more.

The Manboys Podcast #11 - Mark Sollors, Jody Wachniak & Chris Rasman

The Manboys Podcast

Episode 19 : Former Kauai GMAC Commissioner Robert Cremer Jr.Robert Cremer Jr., the former Kauai representative on the Hawaii State Game Management Advisory Commission ("GMAC"), joins the podcast and we discuss the GMAC.  Issues like loss of hunting areas and challenges to establish game management for public hunting are discussed.

Episode 19 : Former Kauai GMAC Commissioner Robert Cremer Jr.

I'm joined by Jake Brooks on the podcast.  We share a recent hunt for Axis Deer on the island of Lanai.

Episode 18 : Lanai Axis Hunt with Jake Brooks

In this solo episode I touch on public sheep hunting opportunities in Hawaii.  I also go into the situation surrounding efforts to protect wild sheep futures in Hawaii.  I really feel the latter portion of this episode is something all public hunters in Hawaii need to hear as it affects their future.

Episode 17 : Hawaii Sheep Hunting Opportunities and Protecting Futures

I'm joined by Roi Tanimoto on our experience of the 2019 Redding Western Classic Trail Shoot.  It is the largest 3D archery tournament in the world attracting over 1600 archers from across the world annually.  Aside from the archery tourney, I cover some recent events with the Hawaii State Game Management Advisory Commission in seeking a target population management basis.

Episode 16 : Redding Western Classic Trail Shoot

We cover the 2019 Hawaii State Lanai Axis Deer Hunt for does. I’m joined by some of my closest hunting friends, Grant Kow, Riley DeMattos, Jake Silva, and Jeff Malavong.  We all tagged on at least one doe each and had quite the usual annual adventure.  From getting stuck in the mud, me losing something every day there, a recap of each tag taken, and just good banter among the boys.

Episode 15 : Hawaii State Lanai Axis Deer Hunt

HI COUNTRY

Jean-Michel Cousteau and his expedition team set sail to explore dangerous and 
spectacular locales across the globe to reveal the oceans' mysteries in "Jean-Michel Cousteau: Ocean Adventures." Find out 
more about this PBS series at: pbs.org/oceanadventures.

Jean-Michel Cousteau: Ocean Adventures | PBS

WGN Radio’s Mark Carman and Andy Masur talk to WGN Radio’s Sports Director and the voice of the Northwestern Wildcats, Dave Eanet. Dave shares his thoughts on the upcoming college football season, how schools and conferences are approaching a return to play amongst a pandemic, and more.

How should NCAA football programs approach the upcoming season?

WGN Radio’s Mark Carman and Andy Masur talk to James Fegan of The Athletic about Luis Robert falling after hitting a home run, Ricky Renteria managing the team during a shortened season, and Michael Kopech choosing to sit out the 2020 season.

Get the latest from White Sox Summer Camp from James Fegan

WGN Radio’s Mark Carman and Andy Masur talk to Dr Jeffrey Kopin, MD, Chief Medical Officer at Northwestern Medicine Lake Forest Hospital, about sports returning and the latest updates about the coronavirus. This includes a message from the doctor explaining why getting the vaccine, when it’s available, is important.

Here is the reason why you will need to get the coronavirus vaccine when it is available

WGN Radio’s Mark Carman and Jordan Bernfield talk to Kamau Murray, the President of XS Tennis and Education Foundation, about growing up in Chicago, coaching athletes such as Sloane Stephens, and more.

Chicago’s Very Own Kamau Murray describes his journey and career in tennis

WGN Radio’s Mark Carman, Jordan Bernfield and Adam Hoge talk Bears as the NFL season draws closer to the start.

Bears insider Adam Hoge weighs in on if any Chicago Bears games could be cancelled this year

Sports Central

Welcome to The Trap House Podcast.  This show is everything and anything about TRAPPING Furbearers!!! Host Justin Jett is addicted to trapping and works at Hoosier Trapper Supply.  He is heavily involved with Fur Takers of America and travels to several conventions and fur sales across the country. ...

Join us in the fight! A citizen initiative wants to ban certain hunting practices. Let's unite outdoor enthusiasts, dispel fallacies, and support responsible wildlife management through our "Save the Hunt" campaign. Together, we ensure Colorado's wildlife thrives and our outdoor heritage endures for generations.  www.SaveTheHuntColorado.com   Sponsors: www.hoosiertrappersupply.com  www.j3o.com  www.toplotstretcherco.com  www.dukestraps.com  www.wiebeknives.com  www.traplinecoffee.com  www.trappinggirlinc.com  www.furtakersofamerica.com  www.nationaltrappers.com  www.gfwco.com  Click the link below to Donate. Thank you  https://www.paypal.com/donate/?business=7MBMKUYZSRGC2&amp;amp;amp;item_name=Thank+you+for+supporting+the+podcast%21&amp;amp;amp;currency_code=USD

Let's All Save the Future of Hunting and Trapping - Dan Gates (CRWM) - Episode #79

Sponsors: www.hoosiertrappersupply.com  www.j3o.com  www.toplotstretcherco.com  www.dukestraps.com  www.wiebeknives.com  www.traplinecoffee.com  www.trappinggirlinc.com  www.furtakersofamerica.com  www.nationaltrappers.com  www.gfwco.com  Click the link below to Donate. Thank you  https://www.paypal.com/donate/?business=7MBMKUYZSRGC2&amp;amp;amp;item_name=Thank+you+for+supporting+the+podcast%21&amp;amp;amp;currency_code=USD

Handling and Selling Fur - Episode #78

Sponsors: www.hoosiertrappersupply.com  www.j3o.com  www.toplotstretcherco.com  www.dukestraps.com  www.wiebeknives.com  www.traplinecoffee.com  www.trappinggirlinc.com  www.furtakersofamerica.com  www.nationaltrappers.com  www.gfwco.com  Click the link below to Donate. Thank you  https://www.paypal.com/donate/?business=7MBMKUYZSRGC2&amp;amp;amp;item_name=Thank+you+for+supporting+the+podcast%21&amp;amp;amp;currency_code=USD  

Trapping in Texas - Episode #77

Coon Creek Outdoors Stu Miller - Episode #76

Indiana Trappers, Matt Bredeweg and Jarod Shake join us on the show! Sponsors: www.hoosiertrappersupply.com  www.j3o.com  www.toplotstretcherco.com  www.dukestraps.com  www.wiebeknives.com  www.traplinecoffee.com  www.trappinggirlinc.com  www.furtakersofamerica.com  www.nationaltrappers.com  www.gfwco.com  Click the link below to Donate. Thank you  https://www.paypal.com/donate/?business=7MBMKUYZSRGC2&amp;amp;amp;item_name=Thank+you+for+supporting+the+podcast%21&amp;amp;amp;currency_code=USD  

Trappers Talking Trapping - Episode #75

Trap House Podcast

Everyone’s searching for skiing’s soul. I’m trying to find its brains. 

www.stormskiing.com

Leisure

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on April 18. It dropped for free subscribers on April 25. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below: Who Pete Korfiatis, General Manager of Bluewood, Washington Recorded on April 4, 2024 About Bluewood Click here for a mountain stats overview Owned by: Local investors Located in: Dayton, Washington Year founded: 1980 Pass affiliations: * Indy Pass and Indy+ Pass: 2 days, no blackouts Closest neighboring ski areas: Cottonwood Butte, Idaho, 3 hours east Base elevation: 4,545 feet Summit elevation: 5,670 feet Vertical drop: 1,125 feet Skiable Acres: 355 Average annual snowfall: 300 inches Trail count: 24 (30% difficult, 45% intermediate, 25% easy) Lift count: 4 (2 triples, 2 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Bluewood’s lift fleet) Why I interviewed him Someday, if it’s not too late, I’m going to track down the old-timers who snowshoed into the wilderness and figured this all out. The American West is filled with crazy little snow pockets, lesser-known mountain ranges spiraling off the vast plateaus. Much of this land falls under the purview of the United States Forest Service. In the decades immediately before and after World War II, the agency established most of our large western ski areas within its 193 million-acre kingdom. That’s a lot of land – approximately the size of Texas – and it’s not all snowy. Where there is snow, there’s not always roads, nor even the realistic possibility of plowing one through. Where there are roads, there aren’t always good exposures or fall lines for skiing. So our ski areas ended up where they are because, mostly, those are the best places nature gave us for skiing. Obviously it snows like hell in the Wasatch and the Tetons and the Sierra Nevadas. Anyone with a covered wagon could have told you that. But the Forest Service’s map of its leased ski areas is dotted with strange little outposts popping out of what most of us assume to be The Flats: What to make of Brian Head, floating alone in southern Utah? Or Mt. Lemmon, rising over Tucson? Or Ski Apache and Cloudcroft, sunk near the bottom of New Mexico? Or the ski areas bunched and floating over Los Angeles? Or Antelope Butte, hanging out in the Wyoming Bighorns? Somewhere, in some government filing cabinet 34 floors deep in a Washington, D.C. bunker, are hand-annotated topo maps and notebooks left behind by the bureaucrat-explorers who determined that these map dots were the very best for snowsportskiing. And somewhere, buried where I’ll probably never find it, is the story of Bluewood. It’s one of our more improbable ski centers. Not because it shouldn’t be there, but because most of us can’t imagine how it could be. Most Washington and Oregon ski areas line up along the Cascades, stacked south to north along the states’ western thirds. The snow smashes into these peaks and then stops. Anyone who’s driven east over the passes has encountered the Big Brown Endless on the other side. It’s surreal, how fast the high alpine falls away. But as Interstate 90 arcs northeast through this rolling country and toward Spokane, it routes most travelers away from the fecund Umatilla National Forest, one of those unexpected islands of peaks and green floating above our American deserts. Here, in this wilderness just to the west of Walla Walla but far from just about everything else, 300 inches of snow stack up in an average winter. And this is where you will find Bluewood. The Umatilla sprawls over two states and 1.4 million acres, and is home to three ski areas (Anthony Lakes and inactive Spouts Springs, both in Oregon, are the other two). Three map dots in the wilderness, random-looking from above, all the final product of years in the field, of hardy folks pushing ever-deeper into the woods to find The Spot. This is the story of one of them. What we talked about Growing up Wenatchee; “the mountains are an addiction”; THE MACHINE at Mammoth; Back-In-The-Day Syndrome; Mammoth’s outsized influence on Alterra Mountain Company; how the Ikon Pass strangely benefited Mammoth; the accidental GM; off the grid; Bluewood and southeast Washington’s unique little weather pattern; “everybody that knows Bluewood comes for the trees”; why the Forest Service is selling a bunch of Bluewood’s trees; massive expansion potential; when your snowline is 50 feet above your base area and you have no snowmaking; the winter with no snow; Skyline Basin and dreams that never happened; ambitious lift-upgrade plans; summer and “trying to eliminate the six-month revenue drought”; “if you take the North American lifts right now, they’re only coming out because they’re pieces of crap”; potential future chairlifts; Bluewood’s owners and their long-term vision; mountaintop lodging potential; whether night skiing could ever happen; power by biomass; the Indy Pass; Southeast Washington ski culture; free buddy tickets with your season pass; Bluewood’s season pass reciprocal program; why Bluewood’s lift ticket prices are so low; and the absolute killer expense for small ski areas. Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview One of the more useful habits I’ve developed is attending offseason media events and consumer ski shows, where ski area managers and marketers tend to congregate. The regional gatherings, where mountain booths are stacked side by side like boxes in a cereal aisle, are particularly useful, allowing me to connect with reps from a dozen or more resorts in an hour. Such was the setup at the Snowvana “stoke event” in Portland, Oregon last November, which I attended both to host a panel of ski area general managers and to lay deeper roots in the rabid Pacific Northwest. Two podcasts emerged directly from connections I made that day: my February conversation with Red Mountain CEO Howard Katkov, and this one, with Korfiatis. So that’s the easy answer: a lot of these podcasts happen simply because I was finally able to connect with whomever runs the mountain. But there’s a certain amount of serendipity at work as well: Bluewood, right now, is on the move. This is a ski area that is slowly emerging from the obscurity I caged it into above. It has big-picture owners, an energetic general manager, a growing nearby population, and megapass membership. True, it also has no snowmaking and outdated, slow chairlifts. But the big, established ski centers to its west are overwhelmed, exhausted, and, with a few exceptions, probably un-expandable. Bluewood could be a big-deal alternative to this mess if they can do what Korfiatis says they want to do. There are a lot of millions standing between vision and reality here. But sometimes crazy s**t happens. And if it goes down at Bluewood, I want to make sure we’re sitting right there watching it happen. What I got wrong I said that Mammoth was an independent mountain when Korfiatis arrived there in 2000. This is incorrect. Intrawest owned a majority stake in Mammoth from 1997 to 2006. Why you should ski Bluewood Usually, when casual skiers ask me where they ought to vacation, their wishlist includes someplace that’s relatively easy to get to, where they can stay slopeside, where the snow will probably be good [whenever their kids’ spring break is], and that is a member of [whatever version of the Epic or Ikon pass they purchased]. I give them a list of places that would not be a surprising list of places to anyone reading this newsletter, always with this qualifier: expect company. I like big destination ski areas. Obviously. I can navigate or navigate around the crowds. And I understand that 24-chairlifts-and-a-sushi-bar is exactly what your contemporary megapass patron is seeking. But if someone were to flip the question around and ask me which ski area characteristics were likely to give them the best ski experience, I’d have a very different answer for them. I’d tell them to seek out a place that’s hard to get to, where you find a motel 40 miles away and drive up in the morning. Make it a weekday morning, as far from school breaks as possible. And the further you get from Epkon branding, the farther you’ll be from anything resembling a liftline. That’s the idea with Bluewood. “Yeah but it’s only 1,100 vertical feet.” Yeah but trust me that’s plenty when most of your runs are off-piste and you can ski all day without stopping except to ride the lift. “But no one’s ever heard of it and they won’t be impressed with my Instastory.” You’ll live. “But it’s not on my Ultimo-Plus Pass.” Lift tickets are like $50. Or $66 on weekends. And it’s on the Indy Pass. “But it’s such a long drive.” No it isn’t. It’s just a little bit farther than the busier places that you usually go to. But it’s not exactly in Kazakhstan. “Now you’re just making things up.” Often, but not that. Podcast Notes On Bluewood’s masterplan Here’s the basic map: And the lift inventory wishlist: On Mission Ridge and Wenatchee Korfiatis grew up in Wenatchee, which sits below Mission Ridge. That mountain, coincidentally, is the subject of an already-recorded and soon-to-be-released podcast, but here’s the trailmap for this surprisingly large mountain in case you’re not familiar with it: On Mission Ridge’s expansion Again, I go deep on this with Mission CEO Josh Jorgensen on our upcoming pod, but here’s a look at the ski area’s big proposed expansion, which Korfiatis and I discuss a bit on the show: And here’s an overhead view: On “The Legend of Dave McCoy” The Dave McCoy that Korfiatis refers to in the pod is the founder of Mammoth Mountain, who passed away in 2020 at the age of 104. Here’s a primer/tribute video: Rusty Gregory, who ran Mammoth for decades, talked us through McCoy’s legacy in a 2021 Storm Skiing Podcast appearance (18:08): On Kim Clark, Bluewood’s last GM In September 2021, Bluewood GM Kim Clark died suddenly on the mountain of a heart attack. From SAM: Longtime industry leader and Bluewood, Wash., general manager Kim Clark died of an apparent heart attack while working on the mountain Tuesday. He was 65. Clark had been the Bluewood GM since 2014. In a statement sharing the news of Clark’s death, Bluewood said, “significant rescue efforts were unsuccessful. Kim passed away doing what he loved, with people he loved, on the mountain he loved.” Clark was an influential leader during his career in the mountain resort industry, much of which was spent at resorts in the Pacific Northwest. He is remembered by his peers as a mentor, a teacher, and a leader with a passion for the industry who cared deeply for the teams he led and the resorts he helped to improve. Prior to becoming GM at Bluewood, Clark led Mt. Ashland, Ore., as its general manager from 2005 to 2014. On the Tri-Cities of Washington Imagine this: I’m 18 years old and some dude on the lift at Copper Mountain asks me where I’m from. I say “Michigan” and he says “where” and I say, “the Tri-Cities area” and he says “what on earth is that?” And I say “Oh you’ve never heard of the Tri-Cities?” as though he’d just told me he’d never heard of Paris. And he’s like “no, have you ever heard of the Quad Cities?” Which apparently are four cities bunched along the Iowa-Illinois border around Interstate 80 and the Mississippi River. It was my first real-time lesson in hyper-regionalism and how oft-repeated information becomes so ingrained that we assume everyone must share it, like the moon or the wind. The Tri-Cities of Michigan are Bay City, Saginaw, and Midland. But no one who doesn’t live there knows this or cares, and so after that chairlift conversation, I started saying that I was from “two hours north of Detroit,” which pretty much every American understands. Anyway imagine my surprise to learn that America had room for a second Tri-Cities, this one in Washington. I asked the robots to tell me about it and this is what they said: The Tri-Cities are three closely linked cities (Kennewick, Pasco, and Richland)[2][3] at the confluence of the Yakima, Snake, and Columbia Rivers in the Columbia Basin of Eastern Washington. The cities border one another, making the Tri-Cities seem like one uninterrupted mid-sized city. The three cities function as the center of the Tri-Cities metropolitan area, which consists of Benton and Franklin counties.[4] The Tri-Cities urban area consists of the city of West Richland, the census-designated places (CDP) of West Pasco, Washington and Finley, as well as the CDP of Burbank, despite the latter being located in Walla Walla County. The official 2016 estimate of the Tri-Cities MSA population is 283,869, a more than 12% increase from 2010. 2016 U.S. MSA estimates show the Tri-Cities population as over 300,000. The combined population of the three principal cities themselves was 220,959 at the 2020 census. As of April 1, 2021, the Washington State Office of Financial Management, Forecasting Division estimates the cities as having a combined population of 224,640.[5] And actually, it turns out that there are tri-cities all over the country. So what the hell do I know? When I moved east to New York in 2002, it took me about five years to figure out what the “Tri-State Area” was. For a long time I thought it must be New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. But it is New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, from which many people commute into NYC daily to work. On Scot Schmidt  For those of you who don’t know who “that guy” Scot Schmidt is: On the Greyhawk lift at Sun Valley Korfiatis refers to the “Greyhawk lift” at Sun Valley as an example of a retiring high-speed quad that is unlikely to have a useful second life. He was referring to this lift, which from 1988 until last year ran parallel to the monster Challenger lift: Last summer, Sun Valley replaced both lifts with one Challenger six-pack with a mid-station, and built a new high-speed quad called Flying Squirrel (which replaced a shorter double chair of the same name that met death-by-fire in 2014): On the number of Washington ski areas Washington, while home to several legendary ski areas, does not have nearly as many as its growing, active population needs. Of the state’s 17 active ski areas, five operate only surface lifts, and I’m not even certain whether one of them – Badger Mountain – operated this past ski season. Sitzmark also failed to spin its lift. There are really only nine volume-capable ski areas in the state: 49 Degrees North, Crystal, Mission Ridge, Baker, Mt. Spokane, Stevens Pass, Summit, Alpental, and White Pass. Here’s an inventory: The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing all year long. Join us. The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 32/100 in 2024, and number 532 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. 

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

Podcast #170: Bluewood, Washington General Manager Pete Korfiatis

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on April 16. It dropped for free subscribers on April 23. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below: Who Steve Paccagnan, President and CEO of Panorama Mountain, British Columbia Recorded on March 27, 2024 About Panorama Click here for a mountain stats overview Owned by: Panorama Mountain Village, Inc., a group of local investors Located in: Panorama, British Columbia, Canada Year founded: 1962 Pass affiliations: * Ikon Pass: 7 days, no blackouts * Ikon Base Pass: 5 days, holiday blackouts * Mountain Collective: 2 days, no blackouts * Lake Louise Pass: view details here Closest neighboring ski areas: Fairmont Hot Springs (:45), Kimberley (1:43), Kicking Horse (1:54) – travel times will vary considerably depending upon road conditions and time of year Base elevation: 3,773 feet/1,150 meters Summit elevation: 8,038 feet/2,450 meters Vertical drop: 4,265 feet/1,300 meters Skiable Acres: 2,975 Average annual snowfall: 204 inches/520 centimeters Trail count: 135 (30% expert, 20% advanced, 35% intermediate, 15% beginner) Lift count: 10 (1 eight-passenger pulse gondola, 2 high-speed quads, 2 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 1 double, 1 platter, 2 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Panorama’s lift fleet) Why I interviewed him U.S. America is making a mistake. In skiing, as in so many other arenas, we prioritize status quo protectionism over measured, holistic development that would reorient our built environments around humans, rather than cars, shrinking our overall impact while easing our access to the mountains and permitting more people to enjoy them. Our cluttered and interminable western approach roads, our mountain-town housing shortages, our liftlines backed up to Kansas are all the result of deliberate generational decisions to prioritize cars over transit, open space over dense walkable communities, and blanket wilderness protection over metered development of new public ski areas in regions where the established businesses - and their surrounding infrastructure - are overwhelmed. I write about these things a lot. This pisses some of you off. I’m OK with that. I’m not here to recycle the broken ideas that have made U.S. skiing into the mess that (in some fundamental ways, in certain regions) it is. I’m here to figure out how it can be better. The skiing itself, mind you, tends to be fabulous. It is everything that surrounds the mountains that can spoil the experience: the cost, the hassle, the sprawl. There are better ways to do this, to get people to the mountains and to house them there, both to live and to vacation. We know this because other countries already do a lot of the things that we ought to be doing. And the most culturally similar and geographically cozy one is so close we can touch it. U.S. America and U.S. Americans are ceding North American skiing’s future to British Columbia. This is where virtually all of the continent’s major resort development has occurred over the past three decades. Why do you suppose so many skiers from Washington State spend so much time at Whistler? Yes, it’s the largest resort in North America, with knockout terrain and lots of snow. But Crystal and Stevens Pass and Baker all get plenty of snow and are large enough to give most skiers just about anything they need. What Whistler has that none of them do is an expansive pedestrian base village with an almost infinite number of ski-in, ski-out beds and places to eat, drink, and shop. A dense community in the mountains. That’s worth driving four or more hours north for, even if you have to deal with the pain-in-the-ass border slowdowns to get there. This is not an accident, and Whistler is not an outlier. Over the past 30-plus years, the province of British Columbia has deliberately shaped its regulatory environment and developmental policies to encourage and lubricate ski resort evolution and growth. While all-new ski resort developments often stall, one small ski area after another has grown from community bump to major resort over the past several decades. Tiny Mount Mackenzie became titanic Revelstoke, which towers over even mighty Whistler. Backwater Whitetooth blew upward and outward into sprawling, ferocious Kicking Horse. Little Tod Mountain evolved into Sun Peaks, now the second-largest ski area in Canada. While the resort has retained its name over the decades, the transformation of Panorama has been just as thorough and dramatic. Meanwhile, in America, we stagnate. Every proposed terrain expansion or transit alternative or housing development crashes headfirst into a shredder of bureaucratic holdups, lawsuits, and citizen campaigns. There are too many ways to stop things, and too many people whose narrow visions of what the world ought to be blockade the sort of wholesale rethinking of community architecture that would make the mountains more livable and accessible. This has worked for a while. It’s still sort of working now. But each year, as the same two companies sell more and more passes to access a relatively stable number of U.S. ski areas, the traffic, liftlines, and cost of visiting these large resorts grows. Locals will find a way, pick their spots. But destination skiers with a menu of big-mountain options will eventually realize that I-70 is not a mandatory obstacle to maneuver on a good ski vacation. They can head north, instead, with the same ski pass they already have, and spend a week at Red or Fernie or Kimberley or Revelstoke or Sun Peaks or Kicking Horse. Or Panorama. Three thousand acres, 4,265 vertical feet, no lines, and no hassle getting there other than summoning the patience to endure long drives down Canadian two-laners. As the U.S. blunders along, Canada kept moving. The story of Panorama shows us how. What we talked about A snowmaking blitz; what happened when Panorama joined the Ikon Pass; how Covid savaged the international skier game; Panorama in the ‘80s; Intrawest arrives; a summit lift at last; village-building; reviving Mt. Baldy, B.C.; Mont Ste. Marie and learning French; why Intrawest sold the ski area; modernizing the lift system; busy busy Copper; leaving for Kicking Horse; Resorts of the Canadian Rockies arrives; who owns Panorama; whether the resort will stay independent; potential lift replacements and terrain expansions; could we ever see a lift in Taynton Bowl?; explaining those big sections of the trailmap that are blocked off with purple borders; and whitebark pine conservation. Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview It wouldn’t be fair to call Panorama a Powder Highway sleeper. The place seems to be doing fine as a business, with plenty of skier traffic to support continuous expansive infrastructure upgrades. But with lower average annual snowfall totals than Revy and Whitewater and Fernie and Red, Panorama does tend to get fewer shout-outs through the media and social media megaphones. It’s Northstar to Palisades Tahoe, Keystone to A-Basin, Park City to the Cottonwoods: the less-snowy, less-intense neighbor that collects families in wholesome Build-A-Bear fashion. But Panorama is wrapping up its second full season on the Ikon Pass, and its second winter since Canada finally unlocked its Covid-era borders. What impact, if any, would those two developments have on Panorama’s famously uncrowded slopes? Even if Colorad-Bro would never deign to turn his Subaru north, would Kansas Karl or North Dakota Norman load the kids into the minivan for something farther but less annoying? Not yet, it turns out. Or at least, not in great enough numbers to wreck the place. But there is another angle to the Panorama story that intrigues me. Like Copper Mountain, Mountain Creek, and Whistler, Panorama once belonged to Intrawest. Unlike Winter Park, Steamboat, Stratton, and Snowshoe, they did not remain part of the enterprise long enough to live second lives as part of Alterra Mountain Company. But what if they had? Our big-mountain coalitions have somewhat ossified over these past half-dozen years, so that we think of ski areas as Ikon mountains or Epic mountains or Indy mountains or independent mountains. But these rosters, like the composition of sports teams or, increasingly, leagues, can fluctuate wildly over time. I do wonder how Whistler would look under Alterra and Ikon, or what impact Mountain Creek-as-unlimited-Ikon mountain would have had on the megapass market in New York City? We don’t really know. But Panorama, as a onetime Intrawest mountain that rejoined the family through the backdoor with Ikon membership, does give us a sort-of in-between case, a kind of What If? episode of skiing. Which would be a fun thought experiment under any circumstances. But how cool to hear about the whole evolution from a guy who saw it all happen first-hand over the course of four decades? Who saw it from all levels and from all angles, who knew the players and who helped push the boulder uphill himself? That’s increasingly rare with big mountains, in this era of executive rotations and promotions, to get access to a top leader in possession of institutional knowledge that he himself helped to draft. It was, I’m happy to say, as good as I’d hoped. What I got wrong I said that Panorama was “one of the closest B.C. ski areas to the United States.” This is not quite right. While the ski area is just 100 or so miles from the international border, more than a dozen ski areas sit closer to the U.S., including majors such as Kimberley, Fernie, Whitewater, and Red Mountain. Why you should ski Panorama Let’s acknowledge, first of all, that Panorama has a few things working against it: it’s more than twice as far from Calgary airport – most skiers’ likely port of entry – than Banff and its trio of excellent ski areas; it’s the least powdery major ski resort on the Powder Highway; and while the skiable acreage and vertical drop are impressive, skiers must ride three lifts and a Snowcat to lap much of the best terrain. But even that extra drive still gets you to the bump in under four hours on good roads – hardly an endurance test. Sure, they get more snow in Utah, but have you ever been in Utah on a powder day? Enjoy that first untracked run, because unless you’re a local who knows exactly where to go, it will probably be your only one. And lapping multiple lifts is more of a psychological exercise than a practical one when there are few to no liftlines. And dang the views when you get there: There are plenty of large, under-trafficked ski resorts remaining in the United States. But they tend to be hundreds of miles past the middle of nowhere, with 60-year-old chairlifts and little or no snowmaking, and nowhere to sleep other than the back of your van. In BC, you can find the best of America’s Big Empties crossed with the modern lift fleets of the sprawling conglomerate-owned pinball machines. And oh by the way you get a hell of a discount off of already low-seeming (compared to the big-mountain U.S.) prices: an American dollar, as of April 16, was worth $1.38 Canadian. Podcast Notes On Intrawest Panorama, as a former Intrawest-owned resort, could easily have been part of Alterra Mountain Company right now. Instead, it was one of several ski areas sold off in the years before the legacy company stuffed its remainders into the Anti-Vail: On Mont Ste. Marie Mont Ste. Marie is one of approximately 45,000 ski areas in Quebec, and the only one, coincidentally, that I’ve actually skied. Paccagnan happened to be GM when I skied there, in 2002: On Kicking Horse It’s incredible how many U.S. Americans remain unaware of Kicking Horse, which offers what is probably the most ferocious inbounds ski terrain in North America, 4,314 vertical feet of straight down: Well, almost straight down. The bottom bit is fairly tame. That’s because Kicking Horse, like many B.C. ski areas, began as a community bump and exploded skyward with an assist from the province. Here’s what the ski area, then known as “Whitetooth,” looked like circa 1994: This sort of transformation happens all the time in British Columbia, and is the result of a deliberate, forward-looking development philosophy that has mostly evaporated in the U.S. American West. On the Powder Highway Panorama lacks the notoriety of its Powder Highway size-peers, mostly because the terrain is overall a bit milder and the volume of natural snow a bit lower than many of the other ski areas. Here’s a basic Powder Highway map: And a statistical breakdown: On the Lake Louise Pass I already covered this one in my podcast with Red Mountain CEO Howard Katkov a couple months back: Katkov mentions the “Lake Louise Pass,” which Red participates in, along with Castle Mountain and Panorama. He’s referring to the Lake Louise Plus Card, which costs $134 Canadian up front. Skiers then get their first, fourth, and seventh days free, and 20 percent off lift tickets for each additional visit. While these sorts of discount cards have been diminished by Epkon domination, versions of them still provide good value across the continent. The Colorado Gems Card, Smugglers’ Notch’s Bash Badge, and ORDA’s frequent skier cards are all solid options for skiers looking to dodge the megapass circus. On Panorama’s masterplan: On Mt. Baldy, B.C. Paccagnan helped revitalize a struggling Mt. Baldy, British Columbia, in the 1990s. Here was the ski area’s 1991 footprint: And here’s what it looks like today – the ski area joined Indy Pass for the 2023-24 ski season: On Panorama’s evolution Panorama, like many B.C. ski areas, has evolved significantly over the past several decades. Here’s what the place looked like in 1990, not long after Paccagnan started and before Intrawest bought the place. A true summit lift was still theoretical, Taynton Bowl remained out of bounds, and the upper-mountain lifts were a mix of double chairs and T-bars: By 1995, just two years after Intrawest had purchased the ski area, the company had installed a summit T-bar and opened huge tracts of advanced terrain off the top of the mountain: The summit T ended up being a temporary solution. By 2005, Intrawest had thoroughly modernized the lift system, with a sequence of high-speed quads out of the base transporting skiers to the fixed-grip Summit Quad. Taynton Bowl became part of the marked and managed terrain: On Whitebark Pine certification A bit of background on Panorama’s certification as a “whitebark pine-friendly ski resort” – from East Kootenay News Online Weekly: The Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation of Canada has certified Panorama Mountain Resort as a Whitebark Pine Friendly Ski Area, the first resort in Canada to receive this designation. The certification recognizes the resort’s long and continued efforts to support the recovery of whitebark pine within its ski area boundary, a threatened tree species that plays a critical role in the biodiversity of mountain ecosystems. ,,, Found across the subalpine of interior B.C., Alberta and parts of the U.S, this slow growing, five needle pine is an integral part of an ecosystem that many other species depend on for survival. The tree’s cones hold some of the most nutritious seeds in the mountains and sustain Grizzly bears and birds, including the Clark’s nutcracker which has a unique symbiotic relationship with the tree. The deep and widespread roots of the whitebark pine contribute to the health of watersheds by stabilizing alpine slopes and regulating snowpack run-off. Over the past decade, whitebark pine numbers have fallen dramatically due in large part to a non-native fungal disease known as white pine blister rust that has been infecting and killing the trees at an alarming rate. Since 2012, the whitebark pine has been listed as endangered under the Government of Canada’s Species at Risk Act (SARA), and was recently added to the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service’s threatened species list. Panorama Mountain Resort has collaborated with the Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation of Canada to facilitate restoration projects including cone collection and tree plantings within the resort’s ski area. The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us. The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 31/100 in 2024, and number 531 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. 

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Podcast #169: Panorama Mountain President & CEO Steve Paccagnan

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on April 15. It dropped for free subscribers on April 22. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below: Who Tom Day, President and General Manager of Gunstock, New Hampshire Recorded on March 14, 2024 About Gunstock Click here for a mountain stats overview Owned by: Belknap County, New Hampshire Located in: Gilford, New Hampshire Year founded: 1937 Pass affiliations: Unlimited access on New Hampshire College Pass (with Cannon, Cranmore, and Waterville Valley) Closest neighboring ski areas: Abenaki (:34), Red Hill Ski Club (:35), Veterans Memorial (:43), Tenney (:52), Campton (:52), Ragged (:54), Proctor (:56), Powderhouse Hill (:58), McIntyre (1:00) Base elevation: 904 feet Summit elevation: 2,244 feet Vertical drop: 1,340 feet Skiable Acres: 227  Average annual snowfall: 120 inches Trail count: 49 (2% double black, 31% black, 52% blue, 15% green) Lift count: 8 (1 high-speed quad, 2 fixed-grip quads, 2 triples, 3 carpets - view Lift Blog’s inventory of Gunstock’s lift fleet) Why I interviewed him In the roughly four-and-a-half years since I launched The Storm, I’ve written a lot more about some ski areas than others. I won’t claim that there’s no personal bias involved, because there are certain ski areas that, due to reputation, convenience, geography, or personal nostalgia, I’m drawn to. But Gunstock is not one of those ski areas. I was only vaguely aware of its existence when I launched this whole project. I’d been drawn, all of my East Coast life, to the larger ski areas in the state’s north and next door in Vermont and Maine. Gunstock, awkwardly located from my New York City base, was one of those places that maybe I’d get to someday, even if I wasn’t trying too hard to actually make that happen. And yet, I’ve written more about Gunstock than just about any ski area in the country. That’s because, despite my affinity for certain ski areas, I try to follow the news around. And wow has there been news at this mid-sized New Hampshire bump. Nobody knew, going into the summer of 2022, that Gunstock would become the most talked-about ski area in America, until the lid blew off Mount Winnipesaukee in July of that year, when a shallow and ill-planned insurrection failed spectacularly at drawing the ski area into our idiotic and exhausting political wars. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you can read more on the whole surreal episode in the Podcast Notes section below, or just listen to the podcast. But because of that weird summer, and because of an aspirational masterplan launched in 2021, I’ve given Gunstock outsized attention in this newsletter. And in the process, I’ve quite come to like the place, both as a ski area (where I’ve now actually skied), and as a community, and it has become, however improbably, a mountain I keep taking The Storm back to. What we talked about Retirement; “my theory is that 10 percent of people that come to a ski area can be a little bit of a problem”; Gunstock as a business in 2019 versus Gunstock today; skier visits surge; cash in the bank; the publicly owned ski area that is not publicly subsidized; Gunstock Nice; the last four years at Gunstock sure were an Asskicker, eh?; how the Gunstock Area Commission works and what went sideways in the summer of 2022; All-Summers Disease; preventing a GAC Meltdown repeat; the time bandits keep coming; should Gunstock be leased to a private operator?; qualities that the next general manager of Gunstock will need to run the place successfully; honesty, integrity, and respect; an updated look at the 2021 masterplan and what actually makes sense to build; could Gunstock ever have a hotel or summit lodge?; why a paved parking lot is a big deal in 2024; Maine skiing in the 1960s; 1970s lift lines; reflecting on the changes over 40-plus years of skiing; rear-wheel-drive Buicks as ski commuter car; competing against Epic and Ikon and why independent ski areas will always have a place in the market; will record skier-visit numbers persist?; a surprising stat about season passes; and how a payphone caused mass confusion in Park City.   Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview On January 19, Gunstock Marketing Director Bonnie MacPherson (long of Okemo and Bretton Woods), shot me a press release announcing that Day would retire at the conclusion of the 2023-24 ski season. It was a little surprising. Day hadn’t been at Gunstock long. He’d arrived just a couple months before the March 2020 Covid shutdowns, almost four years to the day before he announced retirement. He was widely liked and respected on the mountain and in the community, a sentiment reinforced during the attempted Kook Coup of summer 2022, when a pair of fundamentalist nutjobs got flung out of the county via catapult after attempting to seize Gunstock from Day and his team. But Gunstock was a bit of a passion project for Day, a skiing semi-lifer who’d spent three decades at Waterville Valley before fiddling with high-end odd-jobs of the consultancy and project-management sort for 10 years. In four years, he transformed county-owned Gunstock from a seasonal business that tapped bridge loans to survive each summer into a profitable year-round entertainment center with millions in the bank. And he did it all despite Covid, despite the arrival of vending-machine Epic and Ikon passes, despite a couple of imbeciles who’d never worked at a ski area thinking they could do a better job running a ski area than the person they paid $175,000 per year to run the ski area.   I still don’t really get it. How it all worked out. How Gunstock has gotten better as everything about running a ski area has gotten harder and more expensive and more competitive. There’s nothing really special about the place statistically or terrain-wise. It’s not super snowy or extra tall or especially big. It has exactly one high-speed lift, a really nice lodge, and Awe Dag views of Lake Winnipesaukee. It’s nice but not exceptional, just another good mid-sized ski area in a state full of good mid-sized ski areas.   And yet, Gunstock thrives. Day, like most ski area general managers, is allergic to credit, but I have to think he had a lot to do with the mountain’s late resilience. He’s an interesting guy, thoughtful and worldly and adventurous. Talking to him, I always get the sense that this is a person who’s comfortable with who he is, content with his life, a hardcore skier whose interests extend far beyond it. He’s colorful but also plainspoken, an optimist and a pragmatist, a bit of back-office executive and good ole’ boy wrencher melded into your archetype of a ski area manager. Someone who, disposition baked by experience, is perfectly suited to the absurd task of operating a ski area in New Hampshire. It’s too bad he’s leaving, but I guess eventually we all do. The least I could do was get his story one more time before he bounced. Why you should ski Gunstock Skiing Knife Fight, New Hampshire Edition, looks like this: That’s 30 ski areas, the fifth-most of any state, in the fifth-smallest state in America. And oh by the way you’re also right next door to all of this: And Vermont is barely bigger than New Hampshire. Together, the two states are approximately one-fifth the size of Colorado. “Fierce” as the kids (probably don’t) say. So, what makes you choose Gunstock as your snowsportskiing destination when you have 56 other choices in a two-state region, plus another half-dozen large ski areas just east in Maine? Especially when you probably own an Indy, Epic, or Ikon pass, which, combined, deliver access to 28 upper New England ski areas, including most of the best ones? Maybe that’s exactly why. We’ve been collectively enchanted by access, obsessed with driving down per-visit cost to beat inflated day-ticket prices that we simultaneously find absurd and delight in outsmarting. But boot up at any New England ski area with chairlifts, and you’re going to find a capable operation. No one survived this long in this dogfight without crafting an experience worth skiing. It’s telling that Gunstock has only gotten busier since the Epic and Ikon passes smashed into New England a half dozen years ago. There’s something there, an extra thing worth pursuing. You don’t have to give up your SuperUltimoWinterSki Pass to make Gunstock part of your winter, but maybe work it in there anyway? Podcast Notes On Gunstock’s masterplan Gunstock’s ambitious masterplan, rolled out in 2021, would have blown the ski area out on all sides, added a bunch of new lifts, and plopped a hotel and summit lodge on the property: Most of it seems improbable now, as Day details in the podcast. On the GAC conflict Someone could write a book on the Gunstock Shenanigans of 2022. The best I can give you is a series of article I published as the whole ridiculous saga was unfolding: * Band of Nitwits Highjacks Gunstock, Ski Area’s Future Uncertain - July 24, 2022 * Walkouts, Resignations, Wild Accusations: A Timeline of Gunstock’s Implosion - July 31, 2022 * Gunstock GM Tom Day & Team Return, Commissioner Ousted – 3 Ways to Protect the Mountain’s Future - Aug. 8, 2022 If nothing else, just watch this remarkable video of Day and his senior staff resigning en masse: On the Caledonian Canal that “splits Scotland in half” I’d never heard of the Caledonian Canal, but Day mentions sailing it and that it “splits Scotland in half.” That’s the sort of thing I go nuts for, so I looked it up. Per Wikipedia: The Caledonian Canal connects the Scottish east coast at Inverness with the west coast at Corpach near Fort William in Scotland. The canal was constructed in the early nineteenth century by Scottish engineer Thomas Telford. The canal runs some 60 miles (100 kilometres) from northeast to southwest and reaches 106 feet (32 metres) above sea level.[2] Only one third of the entire length is man-made, the rest being formed by Loch Dochfour, Loch Ness, Loch Oich, and Loch Lochy.[3] These lochs are located in the Great Glen, on a geological fault in the Earth's crust. There are 29 locks (including eight at Neptune's Staircase, Banavie), four aqueducts and 10 bridges in the course of the canal. Here's its general location: More detail: On Day’s first appearance on the podcast This was Day’s second appearance on the podcast. The first was way back in episode 34, recorded in January 2021: On Hurricane Mountain, Maine Day mentions skiing a long-gone ropetow bump named Hurricane Mountain, Maine as a child. While I couldn’t find any trailmaps, New England Lost Ski Areas Project houses a nice history from the founder’s daughter: I am Charlene Manchester now Barton. My Dad started Hurricane Ski Slope with Al Ervin. I was in the second grade, I remember, when I used to go skiing there with him. He and Al did almost everything--cranked the rope tow motor up to get it going, directed traffic, and were the ski patrol. As was noted in your report, accommodations were across road at the Norton farm where we could go to use the rest room or get a cup of hot chocolate and a hamburger. Summers I would go with him and Al to the hill and play while they cleared brush and tried to improve the hill, even opened one small trail to the right of the main slope. I was in the 5th grade when I tore a ligament in my knee skiing there. Naturally, the ski patrol quickly appeared and my Dad carried me down the slope in his arms. I was in contact with Glenn Parkinson  who came to interview my mother , who at 96 is a very good source of information although actually, she was not much of a skier. The time I am referring to must have been around 1945 because I clearly recall discussing skiing with my second grade teacher Miss Booth, who skied at Hurricane. This was at DW Lunt School in Falmouth where I grew up. I was in the 5th grade when I hurt my leg. My Dad, Charles Manchester , was one of the first skiers in the State, beginning on barrel staves in North Gorham where he grew up. He was a racer and skied the White Mountains . We have a picture of him at Tuckerman's when not many souls ventured up there to ski in the spring. As I understand it, the shortage of gas during WWII was a motivator as he had a passion for the sport, but no gas to get to the mountains in N.H. Two of his best ski buddies were Al Ervin, who started Hurricane with him, and Homer Haywood, who was in the ski troopers during WWII, I think. Another ski pal was Chase Thompson. These guys worked to ski--hiking up Cranmore when the lifts were closed due to the gas shortage caused by WWII. It finally got to be too much for my Dad to run Hurricane, as he was spending more time directing traffic for parking than skiing, which after all was why he and Al started the project. I think my Dad and his ski buddies should be remembered for their love of the sport and their willingness to do whatever it took to ski. Also, they were perfect gentlemen, wonderful manners on the slope, graceful and handsomely dressed, often in neckties. Those were the good old days! The ski area closed around 1973, according to NELSAP, in response to rising insurance rates. On old-school Sunday River I’ve documented the incredible evolution of Sunday River from anthill to Vesuvius many times. But here, to distill the drama of the transformation, is the now-titanic ski area’s 1961 trailmap: This 60s-era Sunday River was a foundational playground for Day. On the Epic and Ikon New England timeline It’s easy to lose track of the fact that the Epic and Ikon Passes didn’t exist in New England until very recently. A brief timeline: * 2017: Vail Resorts buys Stowe, its first New England property, and adds the mountain to the Epic Pass for the 2017-18 ski season. * 2018: Vail Resorts buys Triple Peaks, owners of Mount Sunapee and Okemo, and adds them to the Epic Pass for the 2018-19 ski season. * 2018: The Ikon Pass debuts with five or seven days at five New England destinations for the 2018-19 ski season: Killington/Pico, Sugarbush, and Boyne-owned Loon, Sunday River, and Sugarloaf. Alterra-owned Stratton is unlimited on the Ikon Pass and offers five days on the Ikon Base Pass. * 2019: Vail buys the 17-mountain Peak Resorts portfolio, which includes four more New England ski areas: Mount Snow in Vermont and Crotched, Wildcat, and Attitash in New Hampshire. All join the Epic Pass for the 2019-20 ski season, bumping the number of New England ski areas on the coalition up to seven. * 2019: Alterra buys Sugarbush. Amps up the mountain’s Ikon Pass access to unlimited with blackouts on the Ikon Base and unlimited on the full Ikon for the 2020-21 ski season. Alterra also ramps up Stratton Ikon Base access from five days to unlimited with blackouts for the 2020-21 winter. * 2020: Vail introduces New England-specific Epic Passes. At just $599, the Northeast Value Pass delivers unlimited access to Vail’s four New Hampshire mountains, holiday-restricted unlimited access to Mount Snow and Okemo, and 10 non-holiday days at Stowe. Vail also rolls out a midweek version for just $429. * 2021: Vail unexpectedly cuts the price of Epic Passes by 20 percent, reducing the cost of the Northeast Value Pass to just $479 and the midweek version to $359. The Epic Local Pass plummets to $583, and even the full Epic Pass is just $783. All of which is background to our conversation, in which I ask Day a pretty interesting question: how the hell have you grown Gunstock’s business amidst this incredibly challenging competitive marketplace? The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us. The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 30/100 in 2024, and number 530 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. 

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

Podcast #168: Gunstock Mountain President & GM Tom Day

Podcast #167: Tenney Mountain GM Dan Egan

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on April 5. It dropped for free subscribers on April 12. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below: Who Bruce Schmidt, Vice President and General Manager at Okemo Mountain Resort, Vermont Recorded on Feb. 27, 2024 (apologies for the delay) About Okemo Click here for a mountain stats overview Owned by: Vail Resorts Located in: Ludlow, Vermont Year founded: 1956 Pass affiliations: * Epic Pass: unlimited access * Epic Local Pass: unlimited access * Epic Northeast Value Pass: unlimited access with holiday blackouts * Epic Northeast Midweek Pass: unlimited weekday access with holiday blackouts * Epic Day Pass: access on “all resorts” and “32 resorts” tiers Closest neighboring ski areas: Killington (:22), Magic (:26), Bromley (:31), Pico (:32), Ascutney (:33), Bellows Falls (:37), Stratton (:41), Saskadena Six (:44), Ski Quechee (:48), Storrs Hill (:52), Whaleback (:56), Mount Snow (1:04), Hermitage Club (1:10) Base elevation: 1,144 feet Summit elevation: 3,344 feet Vertical drop: 2,200 feet Skiable Acres: 632 Average annual snowfall: 120 inches per On The Snow; Vail claims 200. Trail count: 121 (30% advanced, 37% intermediate, 33% beginner) + 6 terrain parks Lift count: 20 (2 six-packs, 4 high-speed quads, 5 fixed-grip quads, 2 triples, 1 platter, 6 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Okemo’s lift fleet) View historic Okemo trailmaps on skimap.org. Why I interviewed him Whether by plan or by happenstance, Vail ended up with a nearly perfect mix of Vermont ski areas. Stowe is the beater, with the big snows and the nasty trails and the amazing skiers and the Uphill Bros and the glades and the Front Four. Mount Snow is the sixth borough of New York City (but so is Florida and so is Stratton), big and loud and busy and bursting and messy, with a whole mountain carved out for a terrain park and big-drinking, good-timing crowds, as many skiers at the après, it can seem, as on the mountain. And Okemo is something that’s kind of in-between and kind of totally different, at once tame and lively, a placid family redoubt that still bursts with that frantic Northeast energy. It's a hard place to define, and statistics won’t do it. Line up Vermont’s ski areas on a table, and Okemo looks bigger and better than Sugarbush or Stowe or Jay Peak. It isn’t, of course, as anyone in the region will tell you. The place doesn’t require the guts that its northern neighbors demand. It’s big but not bossy. More of a stroll than a run, a good-timer cruising the Friday night streets in a drop-top low-rider, in no hurry at all to do anything other than this. It’s like skiing Vermont without having to tangle with Vermont, like boating on a lake with no waves. Because of this unusual profile, New England skiers either adore Okemo or won’t go anywhere near it. It is a singular place in a dense ski state that is the heart of a dense ski region. Okemo isn’t particularly convenient to get to, isn’t particularly snowy by Vermont standards, and isn’t particularly interesting from a terrain point of view. And yet, it is, historically, the second-busiest ski area in the Northeast (after Killington). There is something there that works. Or at least, that has worked historically, as the place budded and flourished in the Mueller family’s 36-year reign. But it’s Vail’s mountain now, an Epic Pass anchor that’s shuffling and adding lifts for the crowds that that membership brings. While the season pass price has dropped, skier expectations have ramped up at Okemo, as they have everywhere in the social-media epoch. The grace that passholders granted the growing family-owned mountain has evaporated. Everyone’s pulling the pins on their hand grenades and flinging them toward Broomfield every time a Saturday liftline materializes. It’s not really fair, but it’s how the world is right now. The least I can do is get their side of it. What we talked about Summer storm damage to Ludlow and Okemo; the resort helping the town; Vermont’s select boards; New England resilience; Vail’s My Epic Promise fund and how it helped employees post-storm; reminiscing on old-school Okemo and its Poma forest; the Muellers arrive; the impact of Jackson-Gore; how and why Okemo grew from inconsequential local bump to major New England ski hill; how Okemo expanded within the confines of Vermont’s Act 250; Vail buys the mountain, along with Sunapee and Crested Butte; the Muellers’ legacy; a Sunapee interlude; Vail adjusting to New England operations; mythbusters: snowmaking edition; the Great Chairlift Switcheroo of 2021; why Okemo didn’t place bubbles on the Quantum 6; why Okemo’s lift fleet is entirely made up of Poma machines; where Okemo could add a lift to the existing trail network; expansion potential; does Okemo groom too much?; glade expansion?; that baller snowmaking system; what happened when Okemo’s season pass price dropped by more than $1,000; is Epic Pass access too loose at Okemo?; how to crowd-dodge; the Epic Northeast Midweek Pass; limiting lift ticket sales; and skyrocketing lift ticket prices. Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview Bruce Schmidt first collected a paycheck from Okemo in the late 1970s. That was a different mountain, a different ski industry, a different world. Pomas and double chairs and primitive snowmaking and mountain-man gear and no internet. It was grittier and colder, in the sense that snowpants and ski coats and heated gloves and socks were not so ubiquitous and affordable and high-quality as they are today. Skiing, particularly in New England, required a hardiness, a tolerance for cold and subtle pain that modernity has slowly shuffled out of the skier profile. Different as it was, that age of 210s and rear-wheel drive rigs was not that long ago, and Schmidt has experienced it as one continuous story. That sort of institutional and epochal tenure is rare, especially at one ski area, especially at one that has evolved as much as Okemo. Imagine if you showed up at surface-lift Hickory and watched it transform, over four decades, into sprawling Gore. That’s essentially what Schmidt lived – and helped drive – at Okemo. That hardly ever happens. Small ski areas tend to stay small. Expansion is hard and expensive and, in Vermont especially, bureaucratically challenging. And yet little Okemo, wriggling in Killington’s shadow, lodged between the state’s southern and northern snow pockets, up past Mount Snow and Stratton but not so far from might-as-well-keep-driving Sugarbush and Mad River Glen, became, somehow, the fourth-largest ski area in America’s fourth-largest ski state by skier visits (after Colorado, California, and Utah, typically). The Mueller family, which owned the ski area from 1982 until they sold it to Vail Resorts in 2018, were, of course, the visionaries and financiers behind that growth, the likes of which we will probably never witness in New England again. But as Vail’s roots grow deeper and they make these mountains their own, that legacy will fade, if not necessarily dim. It was important, then, to download that part of Schmidt’s brain to the internet, to make sure that story survived the big groom of time. What I got wrong I said in the intro that Bruce started at Okemo in 1987. He actually started in the late ‘70s and worked there on and off for several years, as he explains in the conversation. I said that Okemo’s lift fleet was “100 percent Poma.” This is not exactly right, as some of the lifts are officially branded Leitner-Poma. I’m also not certain of the make of Okemo’s carpets. I noted in the intro that Okemo was Vail’s second-largest eastern mountain. It is actually their largest by skiable acreage (though Stowe feels larger to me, given the expansive unmarked but very skiable glades stuffed between nearly every trail). Here’s a snapshot of Vail’s entire portfolio for reference: Why you should ski Okemo The first time I skied Okemo was 2007. I rode a 3:45 a.m. ski bus north from Manhattan. I remember thinking three things: 1) wow, this place is big; 2) wow, there are a lot of kids here; and 3) do they seriously groom every goddamn trail every single night? This was at the height of my off-piste mania. I’m not a great carver, especially after the cord gets chopped up and scratchy sublayers emerge. I prefer to maneuver, at a moderate pace, over terrain, meaning bumps or glades (which are basically bumps in the trees, at least on a typical Vermont day). It’s more fun and interesting than blasting down wide-open, beaten-up groomers filled with New Yorkers. But wide-open, beaten-up groomers filled with New Yorkers is what Okemo is. At the time, I had no understanding of freeze-thaw cycles, of subtle snowfall differentials between nearby ski areas, of the demographic profile that drove such tight slope management (read: mediocre big-city skiers with no interest in anything other than getting to the bottom still breathing). All I knew was that for me, at the time, this wasn’t what I was looking for. But what you want as a skier evolves over time. I still like terrain, and Okemo still doesn’t have as much as I’d like. If that’s what you need, take your Epic Pass to Stowe – they have plenty. But what I also like is skiing with my kids, skiing with my wife, morning cord laps off fast lifts, long meandering scenic routes to rest up between bumpers, exploring mountains border to border, getting a little lost among multiple base areas, big views, moderate pitches, and less-aggressive skiers (ride the K1 gondy or Superstar chair at Killington and then take the Sunburst Six at Okemo; the toning down of energy and attitude is palpable). Okemo not only has all that – it is all that. If that makes sense. This is one of the best family ski areas in the country. It feels like – it is – a supersized version of the busy ski areas in Massachusetts or Connecticut, a giant Wachusett or Catamount or Mohawk Mountain: unintimidating, wide-open, freewheeling, and quirky in its own overgroomed, overbusy way. If you hit it right, Okemo will give you bumps and glades and even, on a weekday, wide-open trails all to yourself. But that’s not the typical Okemo experience, and it’s not the point of the place. This is New England’s friendly giant, a meandering mass of humanity, grinning and gripping and slightly frazzled, a disjointed but united-by-snow collective that, together, define Okemo as much as the mountain itself. Okemo on a stormy day in November 2021. Video by Stuart Winchester. Podcast Notes On last summer’s flooding in Okemo and Ludlow I mean yowza: I hate to keep harping on New Englander’s work ethic, but… I reset the same “dang New England you’re badass” narrative that I brought up with Sunday River GM Brian Heon on the podcast a few weeks ago. I’m not from New England and I’ve never even lived there, and I’m from a region with the same sort of get-after-it problem-solver mentality and work ethic. But I’m still amazed at how every time New England gets smashed over the head with a frying pan, they just look annoyed for five minutes, put on a Band-Aid, and keep moving. On the fate of Plymouth, Bromley, Ascutney, and Plymouth/Roundtop Schmidt and I discuss several Vermont ski areas whose circa-1980s size rivaled that of Okemo’s at the time. Here, for context, was Okemo before the Muellers arrived in 1982: It’s hard to tell from the trailmap, but only four of the 10 or so lifts shown above were chairlifts. Today, Okemo has grown into Vermont’s fourth-largest ski area by skiable acres (though I have reason to doubt the accuracy of the ski resort’s self-reported tallies; Stowe, Sugarbush, and Jay all ski at least as big as Okemo, but officially report fewer skiable acres). Anyway, in the early ‘80s, Magic, Bromley, Ascutney, and Plymouth/Roundtop were approximate peers to Okemo.  Bromley ran mostly chairlifts, and has evolved the most of this group, but it is far smaller than Okemo today.  The mountain has always been well-managed, so it wasn’t entirely fair to stick it in with this group, but the context is important here: Bromley today is roughly the same size that it was 40 years ago: Ascutney sold a 1,400-plus-foot vertical drop and a thick trail network in this 1982 trailmap. But the place went bust and sold its high-speed quad in 2012 (it’s now the main lift at Vail-owned Crotched).  Today, Ascutney consists of a lower-mountain ropetow and T-bar that rises just 450 vertical feet (you can still skin or hike the upper mountain trails). Magic, in the early ‘80s, was basically the same size it is today: A merger with now-private and liftless (but still skiable from Magic), Timber Ridge briefly supersized the place before it went out of business for a large part of the ‘90s: When Magic recovered from its long shutdown, it reverted to its historic footprint (with extensive glade skiing that either didn’t exist or went unmarked in the ‘80s): And then there was Round Top, a 1,300-foot sometime private ski area also known as Bear Creek and Plymouth Notch. The area has sat idle since 2018, though the chairlifts are, last I checked, intact, and it can be yours for $6.5 million. Seriously you can buy it: On Okemo’s expansion progression The Muellers’ improbable transformation of Okemo into a New England Major happened in big chunks. First, they opened the Solitude area for the 1987-88 ski season: In 1994, South Face, far looker’s left, opened a new pod of steeper runs toward the summit: The small Morningstar pod, located in the lower-right-hand corner of the trailmap, opened in 1995, mostly to serve a real estate development: The most dramatic change came in 2003, when Okemo opened the sprawling Jackson Gore complex: On Vermont Act 250 It’s nearly impossible to discuss Vermont skiing without referencing the infamous Act 250, which is, according to the official state website: …Vermont’s land use and development law, enacted in 1970 at a time when Vermont was undergoing significant development pressure. The law provides a public, quasi-judicial process for reviewing and managing the environmental, social and fiscal consequences of major subdivisions and developments in Vermont. It assures that larger developments complement Vermont’s unique landscape, economy and community needs. One of the strengths of Act 250 is the access it provides to neighbors and other interested parties to participate in the development review process. Applicants often work with neighbors, municipalities, state agencies and other interested groups to address concerns raised by a proposed development, resolving issues and mitigating impacts before a permit application is filed. As onerous as navigating Act 250 can seem, there is significantly more slopeside development in Vermont than in any other Northeastern state, and its large resorts are certainly more developed than anything in build-nothing New York. On the CNL lease structure Schmidt refers to “the CNL lease structure.” Here’s what he was talking about: a company called CNL Lifestyle Properties once had a slick sideline in purchasing ski areas and leasing them back to the former owners. New England Ski History explains the historical context: As the banking crisis unfolded, many ski areas across the country transferred their debt into Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs). On December 5, 2008, Triple Peaks transferred its privately held Mt. Sunapee assets to CNL Lifestyle Properties, Inc.. Triple Peaks then entered into a long agreement with CNL to maintain operational control. The site put together a timeline of the various resorts CNL once owned, including, from 2008 to ’17, Okemo: On the proximity of Okemo to Mount Sunapee  Though Okemo and Sunapee sit in different states, they’re only an hour apart: I snapped this pic of Okemo from the Sunapee summit a couple years ago (super zoomed in): On Mount Sunapee’s ownership The State of New Hampshire owns two ski areas: Cannon Mountain and Mount Sunapee. In 1998, after decades of debate on the subject, the state leased the latter to the Muellers. When Vail acquired Triple Peaks (Okemo, Sunapee, and Crested Butte), in 2019, they either inherited or renegotiated the lease. For whatever reason, the state continues to manage Cannon as part of Franconia Notch State Park. A portion of the lease revenue that Vail pays the state each year is earmarked for capital improvements at Cannon. On glades at Stratton and Killington Okemo’s trail footprint is light on glades compared to many of the large Vermont ski areas. I point to Killington and Stratton, in particular, in the podcast, mostly due to their proximity to Okemo (every Vermont ski area from Sugarbush on north has a vast glade network). Though it’s just 20 minutes away, Killington rakes in around double Okemo’s snowfall in an average winter, and the ski area maintains glades all over the mountain: Stratton, 40 minutes south, also averages more snow than Okemo and is a sneaky good glade mountain. It’s easy to spend all day in the trees there when the snow’s deep (and it’s deep more often than you might think): On Okemo’s historic pass prices We can have mountain-to-mountain debates over the impact Vail Resorts has on the resorts it purchases, but one thing that’s inarguable: season pass prices typically plummet when the company acquires ski areas. Check out New England Ski History’s itemization of Okemo pass prices over the years – that huge drop in 2018-19 represents the ownership shift and that year’s cost of an Epic Local Pass (lift ticket and pass prices listed below are the maximum for that season): But, yeah, those day-ticket prices. Yikes. The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing all year long. Join us. The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 25/100 in 2024, and number 525 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. 

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

Podcast #166: Okemo Vice President & General Manager Bruce Schmidt

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast

Interested in the neuro-biology of how you can become more resilient to stress? Listen in. Episode 032: #mc_embed_signup{background:clear; clear:left; 18px font: courier,Arial,sans-serif; } Ready to get out of the comfort zone and thrive? Join us! Get in touch if you want some citations to the research that went into this episode - I'd be happy to send out the citations. As a great, readable reference, check out 'The Hour Between Dog and Wolf' - it's a great [...]

032 | A Neurological Basis for Stress Resilience

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031 | The Vertical Mind Interview with Don and Jeff

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030 | Biological Reactivity and Adventure

Whether or not you believe in climate change, the world is undoubtedly changing rapidly, and disasters that come in and shake our world up (sometimes literally) seem to be happening more often. Earthquakes aside, though, in 2011 insurance companies were disappointed when after just 6 months, the year proved to be the costliest year on record - a statistic that their research tied unambiguously to climate change. I’ve seen it first hand this year in California, where a record drought has broug [...]

029 | Resilience

“The essence of socialization is to make people dependent on social controls, to have them respond predictably to rewards and punishment. And the most effective form of socialization is achieved when people identify so thoroughly with social order that they no longer can imagine themselves breaking any of its rules.” -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyl in is national bestseller, Flow: the psychology of optimal experience.     I know we’re all in a minority, but I think I speak for a [...]

028 | A Broken Odometer and 5 Tips for Balance

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Outdoor Acumen is owned and operated by a Navy SEAL Combat Veteran. We discuss anything that has to do the with the outdoors to include: hunting, fishing, camping, public lands initiatives and anything else that has to do with the outdoor lifestyle. We will also cover interesting people in the outdo...

Hey everyone welcome to episode 7 of Outdoor Acumen with Greg Miller. I wanted to start out with telling every one that I am going to be shifting gears as we approach hunting season and as a result I will be having more people on from the hunting industry as we approach hunting season. That's not to say I may be interjecting special guests here and there but for time being I will be shifting focus to hunting in coming episodes and I promise you won't be dissappointed. Greg made his bones in the big woods of northern Wisconsin long before GPS and all the other hunting applications that are availalbe today. For years Greg was killing absolute Giants Whitetails with a map and compass and boots on the gound and he's still doing it today. Greg Miller is an absolute legend in the hunting world. You may have recognized some of his work on the hunting show and the magazine, North American Whitetail. His latest show The Hunt with Greg and Jake is an absolute must see Greg is not only a guest, he's a friend and colleague and I'm elated he found time in his busy schedule. . So thanks for listening to Outdoor Acumen and here is part two with my special guest Greg Miller. And as Greg says on his show......He we go. And as always I truly appreciate every single one of my listeners. Go and check out the new website www.outdooracumen.com It's still a work in progress but we're getting there. You can also find us on Instagram @outdooracumen and on Facebook as always. After episode 8 stay tuned for future episoes with Hunter Spencer Nuharth,, Retired SEAL Master Chief and Hunter Ron Bellan, and expert DIY Hunter Bernie Barringer, and much much more. Talk soon...

Outdoor Acumen Episode 7: Greg Miller (Part 2)

Hey everyone welcome to episode 7 of Outdoor Acumen with Greg Miller. I wanted to start out with telling every one that I am going to be shifting gears as we approach hunting season and as a result I will be having more people on from the hunting industry as we approach hunting season. That's not to say I may be interjecting special guests here and there but for time being I will be shifting focus to hunting in coming episodes and I promise you won't be dissappointed. 

Greg made his bones in the big woods of northern Wisconsin long before GPS and all the other hunting applications that are availalbe today. For years Greg was killing absolute Giants Whitetails with a map and compass and boots on the gound and he's still doing it today. Greg Miller is an absolute legend in the hunting world. You may have recognized some of his work on the hunting show and the magazine, North American Whitetail. His latest show The Hunt with Greg and Jake is an absolute must see Greg is not only a guest, he's a friend and colleague and I'm elated he found time in his busy schedule. . So thanks for listening to Outdoor Acumen and here is part two with my special guest Greg Miller. And as Greg says on his show......He we go.

And as always I truly appreciate every single one of my listeners. Go and check out the new website www.outdooracumen.com It's still a work in progress but we're getting there. You can also find us on Instagram @outdooracumen and on Facebook as always. After episode 8  stay tuned for future episoes with Hunter Spencer Nuharth,, Retired SEAL Master Chief and Hunter Ron Bellan, and expert DIY Hunter Bernie Barringer, and much much more. Talk soon....

Outdoor Acumen Episode 6: Professional Hunter & Friend Greg Miller Part: 1

Welcome to Episode 5 of Outdoor Acumen. Today my guest is a close friend of mine, the one and only JJ Racaza. Perhaps the best modern day competition shooters in the world. To day JJ tells us about his humble beginnings in shooting  where his father taught him the strict discipline it takes to become a competition shooter. JJ and I delve futher into his past life along with bringing his current happenings up to date. We touch on topics ranging from a day in the life of one of the best competition shooters in the world and how he juggles it all to what he likes to do in his off time outdoors. So now lets get to the show and again, Thanks for listening.

Outdoor Acumen Episode 5: World Champion Competition Shooter JJ Racaza

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Outdoor Acumen Episode 4: Photographer and Hunter Sam Soholt

Sam Soholt: Photographer and Hunter who converted a school bus into a camper to support public land initiatives.

Episode 4: Photographer and Hunter Sam Soholt

Outdoor Acumen

Episode #50 is a review 2019. We have Matt Bos on the founder of Lumberjack Planet to give out awards in twelve categories. Enjoy!!

Episode #50: The Bosey Awards

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Episode #49: TV meets Radio

On episode 48 Dave and Jason discuss the 2019 Stihl Timbersports World Championships in Prague. The 2020 US Stihl Timbersports Athlete Applications are out and new changes are coming in this upcoming season. Enjoy! Whistle Punk Podcast Shirt https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07B8JXBB3/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_KfdUAbJ2TXANP Lumberjack Planet T Shirt https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079HLNYMB/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_chdUAbKS5WCSJ Shockwaves t shirt for the woodchopper the hits hard https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079DK1ZM1/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_igdUAbVPTTHZX Johnsonite...

Episode #48: Letters and Reviews

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