The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast

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Who

Gary Milliken, Founder of Vista Map

Recorded on

June 13, 2024

About Vista Map

No matter which region of the country you ski in, you’ve probably seen one of Milliken’s maps (A list captures current clients; B list is past clients):

Here’s a little overview video:

Why I interviewed him

The robots are coming. Or so I hear. They will wash our windows and they will build our cars and they will write our novels. They will do all of our mundane things and then they will do all of our special things. And once they can do all of the things that we can do, they will pack us into shipping containers and launch us into space. And we will look back at earth and say dang it we done fucked up.

That future is either five minutes or 500 years away, depending upon whom you ask. But it’s coming and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. OK. But am I the only one still living in a 2024 in which it takes the assistance of at least three humans to complete a purchase at a CVS self-checkout? The little Google hub talky-thingys scattered around our apartment are often stumped by such seering questions as “Hey Google, what’s the weather today?” I believe 19th century wrenchers invented the internal combustion engine and sent it into mass production faster than I can synch our wireless Nintendo Switch controllers with the console. If the robots ever come for me, I’m going to ask them to list the last five presidents of Ohio and watch them short-circuit in a shower of sparks and blown-off sprockets.

We overestimate machines and underestimate humans. No, our brains can’t multiply a sequence of 900-digit numbers in one millisecond or memorize every social security number in America or individually coordinate an army of 10,000 alien assassins to battle a videogame hero. But over a few billion years, we’ve evolved some attributes that are harder to digitally mimic than Bro.AI seems to appreciate. Consider the ridiculous combination of balance, muscle memory, strength, coordination, spatial awareness, and flexibility that it takes to, like, unpack a bag of groceries. If you’ve ever torn an ACL or a rotator cuff, you can appreciate how strong and capable the human body is when it functions normally. Now multiply all of those factors exponentially as you consider how they fuse so that we can navigate a bicycle through a busy city street or build a house or play basketball. Or, for our purposes, load and unload a chairlift, ski down a mogul field, or stomp a FlipDoodle 470 off of the Raging Rhinoceros run at Mt. Sickness.

To which you might say, “who cares? Robots don’t ski. They don’t need to and they never will. And once we install the First Robot Congress, all of us will be free to ski all of the time.” But let’s bring this back to something very simple that it seems as though the robots could do tomorrow, but that they may not be able to do ever: create a ski area trailmap.

This may sound absurd. After all, mountains don’t move around a lot. It’s easy enough to scan one and replicate it in the digital sphere. Everything is then arranged just exactly as it is in reality. With such facsimiles already possible, ski area operators can send these trailmap artists directly into the recycling bin, right?

Probably not anytime soon. And that’s because what robots don’t understand about trailmaps is how humans process mountains. In a ski area trailmap, we don’t need something that exactly recreates the mountain. Rather, we need a guide that converts a landscape that’s hilly and windy and multi-faced and complicated into something as neat and ordered as stocked aisles in a grocery store. We need a three-dimensional environment to make sense in a two-dimensional rendering. And we need it all to work together at a scale shrunken down hundreds of times and stowed in our pocket. Then we need that scale further distorted to make very big things such as ravines and intermountain traverses to look small and to make very small things like complex, multi-trailed beginner areas look big. We need someone to pull the mountain into pieces that work together how we think they work together, understanding that fidelity to our senses matters more than precisely mirroring reality. 

But robots don’t get this because robots don’t ski. What data, inherent to the human condition, do we upload to these machines to help them understand how we process the high-speed descent of a snow-covered mountain and how to translate that to a piece of paper? How do we make them understand that this east-facing mountain must appear to face north so that skiers understand how to navigate to and from the adjacent peak, rather than worrying about how tectonic plates arranged the monoliths 60 million years ago? How do the robots know that this lift spanning a two-mile valley between separate ski centers must be represented abstractly, rather than at scale, lest it shrinks the ski trails to incomprehensible minuteness?

It’s worth noting that Milliken has been a leader in digitizing ski trailmaps, and that this grounding in the digital is the entire basis of his business model, which flexes to the seasonal and year-to-year realities of ever-changing ski areas far more fluidly than laboriously hand-painted maps. But Milliken’s trailmaps are not simply topographic maps painted cartoon colors. They are, rather, cartography-inspired art, reality translated to the abstract without losing its anchors in the physical. In recreating sprawling, multi-faced ski centers such as Palisades Tahoe or Vail Mountain, Milliken, a skier and a human who exists in a complex and nuanced world, is applying the strange blend of talents gifted him by eons of natural selection to do something that no robot will be able to replicate anytime soon.

What we talked about

How late is too late in the year to ask for a new trailmap; time management when you juggle a hundred projects at once; how to start a trailmap company; life before the internet; the virtues of skiing at an organized ski center; the process of creating a trailmap; whether you need to ski a ski area to create a trailmap; why Vista Map produces digital, rather than painted, trailmaps; the toughest thing to get right on a trailmap; how the Vista Map system simplifies map updates; converting a winter map to summer; why trailmaps are rarely drawn to real-life scale; creating and modifying trailmaps for complex, sprawling mountains like Vail, Stowe, and Killington; updating Loon’s map for the recent South Peak expansion; making big things look small at Mt. Shasta; Mt. Rose and when insets are necessary; why small ski areas “deserve a great map”; and thoughts on the slow death of the paper trailmap.

Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview

Technology keeps eating things that I love. Some of them – CDs, books, event tickets, magazines, newspapers – are easier to accept. Others – childhood, attention spans, the mainstreaming of fringe viewpoints, a non-apocalyptic social and political environment, not having to listen to videos blaring from passengers’ phones on the subway – are harder. We arrived in the future a while ago, and I’m still trying to decide if I like it.

My pattern with new technology is often the same: scoff, resist, accept, forget. But not always. I am still resisting e-bikes. I tried but did not like wireless headphones and smartwatches (too much crap to charge and/or lose). I still read most books in print and subscribe to whatever quality print magazines remain. I grasp these things while knowing that, like manual transmissions or VCRs, they may eventually become so difficult to find that I’ll just give up.

I’m not at the giving-up point yet on paper trailmaps, which the Digital Bro-O-Sphere insists are relics that belong on our Pet Rectangles. But mountains are big. Phones are small. Right there we have a disconnect. Also paper doesn’t stop working in the cold. Also I like the souvenir. Also we are living through the digital equivalent of the Industrial Revolution and sometimes it’s hard to leave the chickens behind and go to work in the sweatshop for five cents a week. I kind of liked life on the farm and I’m not ready to let go of all of it all at once.

There are some positives. In general I do not like owning things and not acquiring them to begin with is a good way to have fewer of them. But there’s something cool about picking up a trailmap of Nub’s Nob that I snagged at the ticket window 30 years ago and saying “Brah we’ve seen some things.”

Ski areas will always need trailmaps. But the larger ones seem to be accelerating away from offering those maps on sizes larger than a smartphone and smaller than a mountaintop billboard. And I think that’s a drag, even as I slowly accept it.

Podcast Notes

On Highmount Ski Center

Milliken grew up skiing in the Catskills, including at the now-dormant Highmount Ski Center:

As it happens, the abandoned ski area is directly adjacent to Belleayre, the state-owned ski area that has long planned to incorporate Highmount into its trail network (the Highmount trails are on the far right, in white):

Here’s Belleayre’s current trailmap for context - the Highmount expansion would sit far looker’s right:

That one is not a Vista Map product, but Milliken designed Belleayre’s pre-gondola-era maps:

Belleayre has long declined to provide a timeline for its Highmount expansion, which hinged on the now-stalled development of a privately run resort at the base of the old ski area. Given the amazing amount of money that the state has been funneling into its trio of ski areas (Whiteface and Gore are the other two), however, I wouldn’t be shocked to see Belleayre move ahead with the project at some point.

On the Unicode consortium

This sounds like some sort of wacky conspiracy theory, but there really is a global overlord dictating a standard set of emoji on our phones. You can learn more about it here.

Maps we talked about

Lookout Pass, Idaho/Montana

Even before Lookout Pass opened a large expansion in 2022, the multi-sided ski area’s map was rather confusing:

For a couple of years, Lookout resorted to an overhead map to display the expansion in relation to the legacy mountain:

That overhead map is accurate, but humans don’t process hills as flats very well. So, for 2024-25, Milliken produced a more traditional trailmap, which finally shows the entire mountain unified within the context of itself:

Mt. Spokane, Washington

Mt. Spokane long relied on a similarly confusing map to show off its 1,704 acres:

Milliken built a new, more intuitive map last year:

Mt. Rose, Nevada

For some mountains, however, Milliken has opted for multiple angles over a single-view map. Mt. Rose is a good example:

Telluride, Colorado

When Milliken decided to become a door-to-door trailmap salesman, his first stop was Telluride. He came armed with this pencil-drawn sketch:

The mountain ended up being his first client:

Gore Mountain, New York

This was one of Milliken’s first maps created with the Vista Map system, in 1994:

Here’s how Vista Map has evolved that map today:

Whiteface, New York

One of Milliken’s legacy trailmaps, Whiteface in 1997:

Here’s how that map had evolved by the time Milliken created the last rendition around 2016:

Sun Valley, Idaho

Sun Valley presented numerous challenges of perspective and scale:

Grand Targhee, Wyoming

Milliken had to design Targhee’s trailmap without the benefit of a site visit:

Vail Mountain, Colorado

Milliken discusses his early trailmaps at Vail Mountain, which he had to manipulate to show the new-ish (at the time) Game Creek Bowl on the frontside:

In recent years, however, Vail asked Milliken to move the bowl into an inset. Here’s the 2021 frontside map:

Here’s a video showing the transformation:

Stowe, Vermont

We use Stowe to discuss the the navigational flourishes of a trailmap compared to real-life geography. Here’s the map:

And here’s Stowe IRL, which shows a very different orientation:

Mt. Hood Meadows, Oregon

Mt. Hood Meadows also required some imagination. Here’s Milliken’s trailmap:

Here’s the real-world overhead view, which looks kind of like a squid that swam through a scoop of vanilla ice cream:

Killington, Vermont

Another mountain that required some reality manipulation was Killington, which, incredibly, Milliken managed to present without insets:

And here is how Killington sits in real life – you could give me a thousand years and I could never make sense of this enough to translate it into a navigable two-dimensional single-view map:

Loon Mountain, New Hampshire

Vista Map has designed Loon Moutnain’s trailmap since around 2019. Here’s what it looked like in 2021:

For the 2023-24 ski season, Loon added a small expansion to its South Peak area, which Milliken had to work into the existing map:

Mt. Shasta Ski Park, California

Sometimes trailmaps need to wildly distort geographic features and scale to realistically focus on the ski experience. The lifts at Mt. Shasta, for example, rise around 2,000 vertical feet. It’s an additional 7,500 or so vertical feet to the mountain’s summit, but the trail network occupies more space on the trailmap than the snowcone above it, as the summit is essentially a decoration for the lift-served skiing public.

Oak Mountain, New York

Milliken also does a lot of work for small ski areas. Here’s 650-vertical-foot Oak Mountain, in New York’s Adirondacks:

Willard Mountain, New York

And little Willard, an 85-acre ski area that’s also in Upstate New York:

Caberfae Peaks, Michigan

And Caberfae, a 485-footer in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula:

On the New York City Subway map

The New York City subway map makes Manhattan look like the monster of New York City:

That, however, is a product of the fact that nearly every line runs through “the city” as we call it. In reality, Manhattan is the smallest of the five boroughs, at just 22.7 square miles, versus 42.2 for The Bronx, 57.5 for Staten Island, 69.4 for Brooklyn, and 108.7 for Queens.

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The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 71/100 in 2024, and number 571 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019.

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Who

Geordie Gillett, Managing Director and General Manager of Grand Targhee, Wyoming

Recorded on

September 30, 2024

About Grand Targhee

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: The Gillett Family

Located in: Alta, Wyoming

Year founded: 1969

Pass affiliations: Mountain Collective: 2 days, no blackouts

Closest neighboring ski areas: Jackson Hole (1:11), Snow King (1:22), Kelly Canyon (1:34) – travel times vary considerably given time of day, time of year, and weather conditions.

Base elevation: 7,650 feet (bottom of Sacajawea Lift)

Summit elevation: 9,862 feet at top of Fred’s Mountain; hike to 9,920 feet on Mary’s Nipple

Vertical drop: 2,212 feet (lift-served); 2,270 feet (hike-to)

Skiable Acres: 2,602 acres

Average annual snowfall: 500 inches

Trail count: 95 (10% beginner, 45% intermediate, 30% advanced, 15% expert)

Lift count: 6 (1 six-pack, 2 high-speed quads, 2 fixed-grip quads, 1 carpet – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Grand Targhee’s lift fleet)

Why I interviewed him

Here are some true facts about Grand Targhee:

* Targhee is the 19th-largest ski area in the United States, with 2,602 lift-served acres.

* That makes Targhee larger than Jackson Hole, Snowbird, Copper, or Sun Valley.

* Targhee is the third-largest U.S. ski area (behind Whitefish and Powder Mountain) that is not a member of the Epic or Ikon passes.

* Targhee is the fourth-largest independently owned and operated ski area in America, behind Whitefish, Powder Mountain, and Alta.

* Targhee is the fifth-largest U.S. ski area outside of Colorado, California, and Utah (following Big Sky, Bachelor, Whitefish, and Schweitzer).

And yet. Who do you know who has skied Grand Targhee who has not skied everywhere? Targhee is not exactly unknown, but it’s a little lost in skiing’s Bermuda Triangle of Jackson Hole, Sun Valley, and Big Sky, a sunken ship loaded with treasure for whoever’s willing to dive a little deeper.

Most ski resort rankings will plant Alta-Snowbird or Whistler or Aspen or Vail at the top. Understandably so – these are all great ski areas. But I appreciate this take on Targhee from skibum.net, a site that hasn’t been updated in a couple of years, but is nonetheless an excellent encyclopedia of U.S. skiing (boldface added by me for emphasis):

You can start easy, then get as wild and remote as you dare. Roughly 20% of the lift-served terrain (Fred’s Mountain) is groomed. The snowcat area (Peaked Mountain) is completely ungroomed, completely powder, totally incredible [Peaked is lift-served as of 2022]. Comparisons to Jackson Hole are inevitable, as GT & JH share the same mountain range. Targhee is on the west side, and receives oodles more snow…and therefore more weather. Not all of it good; a local nickname is Grand Foggy. The locals ski Targhee 9 days out of 10, then shift to Jackson Hole when the forecast is less than promising. (Jackson Hole, on the east side, receives less snow and virtually none of the fog). On days when the weather is good, Targhee beats Jackson for snow quality and shorter liftlines. Some claim Targhee wins on scenery as well. It’s just a much different, less crowded, less commercialized resort, with outstanding skiing. Some will argue the quality of Utah powder…and they’re right, but there are fewer skiers at Targhee, so it stays longer. Some of the runs at Targhee are steep, but not as steep as the couloirs at Jackson Hole. Much more of an intermediate mountain; has a very “open” feel on virtually all of the trails. And when the powder is good, there is none better than Grand Targhee. #1 ski area in the USA when the weather is right. Hotshots, golfcondoskiers and young skiers looking for “action” (I’m over 40, so I don’t remember exactly what that entails) are just about the only people who won’t call Grand Targhee their all-time favorite. For the pure skier, this resort is number one.

Which may lead you to ask: OK Tough Guy then why did it take you five years to talk about this mountain on your podcast? Well I get that question about once a month, and I don’t really have a good answer other than that there are a lot of ski areas and I can only talk about one at a time. But here you go. And from the way this one went, I don’t think it will be my last conversation with the good folks at Grand old Targhee.

What we talked about

Continued refinement of the Colter lift and Peaked Mountain expansion; upgrading cats; “we do put skiing first here”; there’s a reason that finance people “aren’t the only ones in the room making decisions for ski areas”; how the Peaked expansion changed Targhee; the Teton Pass highway collapse; building, and then dismantling, Booth Creek; how ignoring an answering machine message led to the purchase of Targhee; first impressions of Targhee: “How is this not the most popular ski resort in America?”; imagining Booth Creek in an Epkonic alt reality; Targhee’s commitment to independence; could Targhee ever acquire another mountain?; the insane price that the Gilletts paid for Targhee; the first time you see the Rockies; massive expansion potential; corn; fixed-grip versus detach; Targhee’s high percentage of intermediate terrain and whether that matters; being next-door neighbors with “the most aspirational brand in skiing”; the hardest part of expanding a ski area; potential infill lifts; the ski run Gillett would like to eliminate and why; why we’re unlikely to see a lift to the true summit; and why Targhee joined Mountain Collective but hasn’t joined the Ikon Pass (and whether the mountain ever would).

Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview

A few things make Targhee extra relevant to our current ski moment:

* Targhee is the only U.S. ski area aside from Sugar Bowl to join the Mountain Collective pass while staying off of Ikon.

* In 2022, Targhee (sort of) quietly opened one of the largest lift-served North American ski expansions in the past decade, the 600-acre Peaked Mountain pod, served by the six-pack Colter lift.

* The majority of large U.S. ski areas positioned on Forest Service land are bashful about their masterplans, which are publicly available documents that most resort officials wish we didn’t know about. That’s because these plans outline potential future expansions and upgrades that resorts would rather not prematurely acknowledge, lest they piss off the Chipmunk Police. So often when I’m like “Hey tell us about this 500-acre bowl-skiing expansion off the backside,” I get an answer that’s something like, “well we look forward to working with our partners at the Forest Service to maybe consider doing that around the year 3000 after we complete our long-term study of mayfly migration routes.” But Geordie is just like, “Hell yes we want to blow the resort out in every direction like yesterday” (not an exact quote). And I freaking love the energy there.

* Most large Western ski areas fall into one of two categories: big, modern, and busy (Vail, Big Sky, Palisades, Snowbird), or big, somewhat antiquated, and unknown (Discovery, Lost Trail, Silver). But Targhee has split the difference, being big, modern, and lesser-known, that rare oasis that gives you modern infrastructure (like fast lifts), without modern crowds (most of the time). It’s kind of strange and kind of glorious, and probably too awesome to stay true forever, so I wanted to get there before the Brobot Bus unloaded.

* Even 500-inches-in-an-average-winter Targhee has a small snowmaking system. Isn’t that interesting?

What I got wrong

* I said that $20 million “might buy you a couple houses on the slopes at Jackson Hole.” It kind of depends on how you define “on the slopes,” and whether or not you can live without enough acreage for your private hippo zoo. If not, $24.5 million will get you this (I’m not positive that this one is zoned for immediate hippo occupation).

* I said that 70 percent of Targhee’s terrain was intermediate; Geordie indicated that that statistic had likely changed with the addition of the Peaked Mountain expansion. I’m working with Targhee to get updated numbers. [EDIT: Targhee’s updated terrain breakdown is 10% beginner, 45% intermediate, 30% advanced, and 15% expert.)

Why you should ski Grand Targhee

The disconnect between people who write about skiing and what most people actually ski leads to outsized coverage of niche corners of this already niche activity. What percentage of skiers think that skiing uphill is fun? Can accomplish a mid-air backflip? Have ever leapt off a cliff more than four feet high? Commute via helicopter to the summit of their favorite Alaskan powder lines? The answer on all counts is probably a statistically insignificant number. But 99 percent of contemporary ski media focuses on exactly such marginal activities.

In some ways I understand this. Most basketball media devote their attention to the NBA, not the playground knuckleheads at some cracked-concrete, bent-rim Harlem streetball court. It makes sense to look at the best and say wow. No one wants to watch intermediate skiers skiing intermediate terrain. But the magnifying glass hovering over the gnar sometimes clouds consumer choice. An average skier, infected by cliffity-hucking YouTubes and social media Man Bro boasting, thinks they want Corbet’s and KT-22 and The Cirque at Snowbird. Which OK if you zigzag across the fall line yeah you can get down just about anything. But what most skiers need is Grand Targhee, big and approachable, mostly skiable by mostly anyone, with lots of good and light snow and a low chance of descent-by-tomahawk.

Targhee’s stats page puts the mountain’s share of intermediate terrain at 70 percent, likely the highest of any major North American ski area (Northstar, another big-time intermediate-oriented mountain, claims 60 percent blue runs). I suspect this contributes to the resort’s relatively low profile among destination skiers. Broseph Jones and his Brobot buddies examine the statistical breakdown of major resorts and are like “Yo cuz we want some Jackson trammage because we roll hard see.” Even though Targhee is bigger and gets more snow (both true) and offers a more realistic experience for the Brosephs.

That’s not to say that you shouldn’t ski Jackson Hole. Everyone should. But steeps all day are mentally and physically draining. It’s nice most of the time to not be parkouring down an elevator shaft. So go to Targhee too. And you can whoo-hoo through the deep empty trees and say “dang Brah this is hella rad Brah.” And it is.

Podcast Notes

On the Peaked Mountain expansion

The Peaked Mountain terrain has been marked on Targhee’s trailmap for years, but up until 2022, it was accessible mostly via snowcat:

In 2022, the resort dropped a six-pack back there, better defined the trail network, and brought Peaked into the lift-served terrain package:

On Grand Targhee’s masterplan

Here’s the overview of Targhee’s Forest Service master development plan. You can see potential expansions below Blackfoot (left in the image below), looker’s right of Peaked/Colter (upper right), and below Sacajawea (lower right):

Here’s a better look at the so-called South Bowl proposal, which would add a big terrain pod contiguous with the recent Peaked expansion:

Here’s the MDP’s inventory of proposed lifts. These things often change, and the “Peaked DC-4” listed below actualized as the Colter high-speed sixer:

Targhee’s snowmaking system is limited, but long-term aspirations show potential snowmaking stretching toward the top of the Dreamcatcher lift:

On opposition to all of this potential expansion

There are groups of people masquerading as environmental commandos who I suspect oppose everything just to oppose it. Like oh a bobcat pooped next to that tree so we need to fence the area off from human activity for the next thousand years. But Targhee sits within a vast and amazing wilderness, the majority of which is and should be protected forever. But humans need space too, and developing a few hundred acres directly adjacent to already-developed ski terrain is the most sustainable and responsible way to do this. It’s not like Targhee is saying “hey we’re going to build a zipline connecting the resort to the Grand Teton.” But nothing in U.S. America can be achieved without a minimum of 45 lawsuits (it’s in the Constitution), so these histrionic bozos will continue to exist.

On Net Promoter Score and RRC

I’m going to hurt myself if I try to overexplain this, so I’ll just point toward RRC’s Net Promoter Score overview page and the company’s blog archive highlighting various reports. RRC sits quietly behind the ski industry but wields tremendous influence, assembling the annual Kotke end-of-season statistical report, which offers the most comprehensive annual overview of the state of U.S. skiing.

On the reason I couldn’t go to Grand Targhee last year

So I was all set up to hit Targhee for a day last year and then I woke up in the middle of the night thinking “Gee I feel like I’m gonna die soon” and so I did not go skiing that day. Here’s the full story if you are curious how I ended up not dying.

On the Peaked terrain expansion being the hypothetical largest ski area in New Hampshire

I’ll admit that East-West ski area size comparisons are fundamentally flawed. Eastern mountains not named Killington, Smugglers’ Notch, and Sugarloaf tend to measure skiable terrain by acreage of cut trails and maintained glades (Sugarbush, one of the largest ski areas in the East by pure footprint, doesn’t even count the latter). Western mountains generally count everything within their boundary. Fair enough – trying to ski most natural-growth eastern woods is like trying to ski down the stands of a packed football stadium. You’re going to hit something. Western trees tend to be higher altitude, older-growth, less cluttered with undergrowth, and, um, more snow-covered. Meaning it’s not unfair to include even unmarked sectors of the ski area as part of the ski area.

Which is a long way of saying that numbers are hard, and that relying on ski area stats pages for accurate ski area comparisons isn’t going to get you into NASA’s astronaut training academy. Here’s a side-by-side of 464-acre Bretton Woods – New Hampshire’s largest ski area – and Targhee’s 600-acre Peaked Mountain expansion, both at the same scale in Google Maps. Clearly Bretton Woods covers more area, but the majority of those trees are too dense to ski:

And here’s an inventory of all New Hampshire ski areas, if you’re curious:

On the Teton Pass highway collapse

Yeah so this was wild:

On Booth Creek

Grand Targhee was once part of the Booth Creek ski conglomerate, which now exists only as the overlord for Sierra-at-Tahoe. Here’s a little history:

On the ski areas at Snoqualmie Pass being “insane”

We talk a bit about the “insane” terrain at Summit at Snoqualmie, a quirky ski resort now owned by Boyne. The mountain was Frankensteined together out of four legacy ski areas, three of which share a ridge and are interconnected. And then there’s Alpental, marooned across the interstate, much taller and infinitely rowdier than its ho-hum brothers. Alpy, as a brand and as a badass, is criminally unknown outside of its immediate market, despite being on the Ikon Pass since 2018. But, as Gillett notes, it is one of the roughest, toughest mountains going:

On Targhee’s sinkhole

Per Jackson Hole News and Guide in September of last year:

About two weeks ago, a day or so after torrential rain, and a few days after a downhill mountain biking race concluded on the Blondie trail, Targhee ski patrollers noticed that something was amiss. Only feet away from the muddy meander that mountain bikers had zipped down, a mound of earth had disappeared.

In its place, there was a hole of unknown, but concerning, size.

Subsequent investigations — largely, throwing rocks into the hole while the resort waits for more technical tools — indicate that the sinkhole is at least 8 feet wide and about 40 feet deep, if not more. There are layers of ice caking the walls a few feet down, and the abyss is smack dab in the middle of the resort’s prized ski run.

Falling into a sinkhole would be a ridiculous way to go. Like getting crushed by a falling piano or flattened under a steamroller. Imagine your last thought on earth is “Bro are you freaking kidding me with this s**t?”

On the overlap between Mountain Collective and Ikon

Mountain Collective and Ikon share a remarkable 26 partner ski areas. Only Targhee, Sugar Bowl, Marmot Basin, Bromont, Le Massif du Charlevoix, and newly added Megève have joined Mountain Collective while holding out on Ikon.

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 70/100 in 2024, and number 570 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

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Oct. 17. It dropped for free subscribers on Oct. 24. To receive future episodes 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:

When we recorded this podcast, Norway Mountain’s adult season pass rates were set at $289. They have since increased by $100, but Hoppe is offering a $100 discount with the code “storm” through Nov. 1, 2024.

Who

Justin Hoppe, Owner of Norway Mountain, Michigan

Recorded on

September 16, 2024

About Norway Mountain

Owned by: Justin Hoppe

Located in: Norway, Michigan

Year founded: Around 1974, as Norvul ski area; then Vulcan USA; then Briar Mountain; then Mont Brier; and finally Norway Mountain from ~1993 to 2012; then from 2014 to 2017; re-opened 2024

Pass affiliations: Freedom Pass – 3 days each at these ski areas:

Closest neighboring ski areas: Pine Mountain (:22), Keyes Peak (:35), Crystella (:46), Gladstone (:59), Ski Brule (1:04)

Base elevation: 835 feet

Summit elevation: 1,335 feet

Vertical drop: 500 feet

Skiable Acres: 186

Average annual snowfall: 50 inches

Trail count: 15

Lift count: 6 (1 triple, 2 doubles, 3 handle tows)

The map above is what Norway currently displays on its website. Here’s a 2007 map that’s substantively the same, but with higher resolution:

View historic Norway Mountain trailmaps on skimap.org.

Why I interviewed him

What a noble act: to resurrect a dead ski area. I’ll acknowledge that a ski area is just a business. But it’s also a (usually) irreplaceable community asset, an organ without which the body can live but does not function quite right. We read about factories closing up and towns dying along with them. This is because the jobs leave, yes, but there’s an identity piece too. As General Motors pulled out of Saginaw and Flint in the 1980s and ‘90s, I watched, from a small town nearby, those places lose a part of their essence, their swagger and character. People were proud to have a GM factory in town, to have a GM job with a good wage, to be a piece of a global something that everyone knew about.

Something less profound but similar happens when a ski area shuts down. I’ve written before about Apple Mountain, the 200-vertical-foot bump in Freeland, Michigan where I spent my second-ever day on skis:

[Apple Mountain] has been closed since 2017. Something about the snowmaking system that’s either too hard or too expensive to fix. That leaves Michigan’s Tri-Cities – Midland, Bay City, and Saginaw, with a total metro population approaching 400,000 – with no functioning ski area. Snow Snake is only about 40 minutes north of Midland, and Mt. Holly is less than an hour south of Saginaw. But Apple Mountain, tucked into the backwoods behind Freeland, sat dead in the middle of the triangle. It was accessible to almost any schoolkid, and, humble as it was, stoked that fire for thousands of what became lifelong skiers.

What skiing has lost without Apple Mountain is impossible to calculate. I would argue that it was one of the more important ski areas anywhere. Winters in mid-Michigan are long, cold, snowy, and dull. People need something to do. But skiing is not an obvious solution: this is the flattest place you can imagine. To have skiing – any skiing – in the region was a joy and a novelty. There was no redundancy, no competing ski center. And so the place was impossibly busy at all times, minting skiers who would go off to start ski newsletters and run huge resorts on the other side of the country.

When the factory closes, the jobs go, and often nothing replaces them. Losing a ski area is similar. The skiers go, and nothing replaces them. The kids just do other things. They never become skiers.

Children of Men, released in 2006, envisions a world 18 years after women have stopped having babies. Humanity lives on, but has collectively lost its soul. Violence and disorder reign. The movie is heralded for its extended single-shot battle scenes, but Children of Men’s most remarkable moment is when a baby, born in the midst of a firefight, momentarily paralyzes the war as her protectors parade her to sanctuary:

Humanity needs babies like winter needs skiers. But we have to keep making more.

Yes, I’m being hyperbolic about the importance of resurrecting a lost ski area. If you’re new here, that part of My Brand™. A competing, similar-sized ski center, Pine Mountain, is only 20 minutes from Norway. But that’s 13 miles, which for a kid may as well be 1,000. Re-opening Norway is going to seed new skiers. Some of them will ski four times and forget about it and some of them will take spring break trips to Colorado when they get to college and a few of them may wrap their lives around it.

And if they don’t ever ski? Well, who knows. I almost didn’t become a skier. I was 14 when my buddy said “Hey let’s take the bus to Mott Mountain after school,” and I said “OK,” and even though I was Very Bad at it, I went again a few weeks later at Apple Mountain. Both of those hills are closed now. If I were growing up in Central Michigan now, would I have become a skier? What would I be if I wasn’t one? How awful would that be?

What we talked about

Back from the dead; the West Michigan snowbelt; the power of the ski family; Caberfae; Pando’s not for sale; when you decide to buy a lost ski area; how lost Norway was almost lost forever; the small business mindset; surprise bills; what a ski area looks like when it’s sat idle for six years; piecing a sold-off snowmaking system back together; Norway’s very unique lift fleet; glades; the trailmap; Norway’s new logo; the Wild West of websites; the power of social media; where to even begin when you buy a ski area; the ups and downs of living at your ski area; shifting from renovation to operation; Norway’s uneven history and why this time is different; is there enough room for Pine Mountain and Norway in such a small market?; why night skiing won’t return on a regular basis this winter; send the school buses; it doesn’t snow much but at least it stays cold; can Norway revitalize its legendary ski school?; and why Norway joined the Freedom Pass.  

Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview

Hello Mr. Television Network Executive. Thank you for agreeing to hear my pitch. I understand I have 10 minutes with you, which is perfect, because what I’m proposing will take no fewer than five years, while simultaneously taking 10 years off both our lives. Because my show is called Who Wants to Own a Ski Area?

The show works like this: contestants will navigate a series of logic puzzles, challenges, and obstacle courses. These will act as elimination rounds. We can base everyone at an abandoned ski resort, like in The Last of Us, where they will live while games materialize at random. Some examples:

* It’s 3 a.m. Everyone is sleeping. Alarms blare. A large structure has caught fire. The water has been cut off, but somehow you’re standing in a knee-deep flood. Your firefighting arsenal consists of a bucket. You call the local volunteer fire department, which promises you they will “be along whenever Ed gits up here with the gay-rage door keys.” Whoever keeps the building from melting into a pile of ashes wins.

* It’s state inspection day. All machinery must be in working order. We present each contestant with a pile of sprockets, hoses, wires, clips, and metal parts of varying sizes and thickness. Their instructions are to rebuild this machine. We do not tell them what the machine is supposed to be. The good news is that the instruction manual is sitting right there. The bad news is that it’s written in Polish. The pile is missing approximately seven to 20 percent of the machine’s parts, without which the device may operate, but perhaps not in a way compatible with human life. Whoever’s put-together machine leads to the fewest deaths advances to the next round.

* The contestants are introduced to Big Jim. Big Jim has worked at the ski area since 1604. He has been through 45 ownership groups, knows everything about the mountain, and everyone on the mountain. Because of this, Big Jim knows you can’t fire him lest you stoke a rebellion of labor and/or clientele. And he can tell you which pipes are where without you having to dig up half the mountain. But Big Jim keeps as much from getting done as he actually does. He resists the adoption of “fads” such as snowmaking, credit cards, and the internet. The challenge facing contestants is to get Big Jim to send a text message. He asks why the letters are arranged “all stupid” on the keyboard. The appearance of an emoji causes him to punch the phone several times and heave it into the woods.

* Next we introduce the contestants to Fran and Freddy Filmore from Frankenmuth. The Filmores have been season passholders since the Lincoln Administration. They have nine kids in ski school, each of which has special dietary needs. Their phones are loaded with photos of problems: of liftlines, of dirt patches postholing trails, of an unsmiling parking attendant, of abandoned boot bags occupying cafeteria tables, of skis and snowboards and poles scattered across the snow rather than being placed on the racks that are right there for goodness sake. The Filmores want answers. The Filmores also want you to bring back Stray Cat Wednesdays, in which you could trade a stray cat for a lift ticket. But the Filmores are not actually concerned with solutions. No matter the quickness or efficacy of a remedy, they still “have concerns.” Surely you have 90 minutes to discuss this. Then the fire alarm goes off.

* Next, the contestents will meet Hella Henry and his boys Donuts, Doznuts, Deeznuts, Jam Box, and 40 Ounce. HH and the Crushnutz Krew, as they call themselves, are among your most loyal customers. Though they are all under the age of 20, it is unclear how any of them could attend school or hold down a job, since they are at your hill for 10 to 12 hours per day. During that time, the crew typically completes three runs. They spend the rest of their time vaping, watching videos on their phones, and sitting six wide just below a blind lip in the terrain park. The first contestant to elicit a response from the Crushnutz Krew that is anything other than “that’s chill” wins.

The victor will win their very own ski area, complete with a several-thousand person Friends of [Insert Ski Area Name] group where 98 percent of the posts are complaints about the ski area. The ski center will be functional, but one popped bolt away from catastrophe in four dozen locations. The chairlifts will be made by a company that went out of business in 1912. The groomer will be towed by a yak. The baselodge will accommodate four percent of the skiers who show up on a busy day. The snowmaking “system” draws its water from a birdbath. Oh, and it’s in the middle of nowhere in the middle of winter, and they’re going to have to find people to work there.

Oh, you love it Mr. Television Network Executive? That’s so amazing. Now I can quit my job and just watch the money pile up. What do I do for a living? Well, I run a ski area.

Hoppe won the contest. And I wanted to wish him luck.

What I got wrong

I lumped Ski Brule in with Pine Mountain as ski areas that are near Norway. While only 20-ish minutes separate Pine and Norway, Brule is in fact more than an hour away.

Why you should ski Norway Mountain

You can ski every run on Norway Mountain in one visit. There’s something satisfying in that. You can drive off at the end of the day and not feel like you missed anything.

There are hundreds of ski areas in North America like this. Most of them manage, somehow, to stuff the full spectrum of ski experience into an area equal to one corner of one of Vail’s 90 or whatever Legendary Back Bowls. There are easy runs and hard runs. Long runs and short runs. Narrow runs and wide runs. Runs under the lifts and runs twisting through the trees. Some sort of tree-skiing. Some sort of terrain park. A little windlip that isn’t supposed to be a cornice but skis like one, 9-year-olds leaping off it one after the next and turning around to watch each other after they land. Sometimes there is powder. Sometimes there is ice. Sometimes the grooming is magnificent. Sometimes the snow really sucks. Over two to four hours and 20 to 30 chairlift rides, you can fully absorb what a ski area is and why it exists.

This is an experience that is more difficult to replicate at our battleship resorts, with 200 runs scribbled over successive peaks like a medieval war map. I ski these resorts differently. Where are the blacks? Where are the trees? Where are the bumps? I go right for them and I don’t bother with anything else. And that eats up three or four days even at a known-cruiser like Keystone. In a half-dozen trips into Little Cottonwood Canyon, I’ve skied a top-to-bottom groomer maybe twice. Because skiing groomers at Alta-Snowbird is like ordering pizza at a sushi restaurant. Like why did you even come here?

But even after LCC fluff, when I’ve descended back to the terrestrial realm, I still like skiing the Norway Mountains of the land. Big mountains are wonderful, but they come with big hassle, big crowds, big traffic, big attitudes, big egos. At Norway you can pull practically up to the lifts and be skiing seven minutes later, after booting up and buying your lift ticket. You can ski right onto the lift and the guy in the Carhartt will nod at you and if you’re just a little creative and thoughtful every run will feel distinct. And you can roll into the chalet and grab a pastie and bomb the whole mountain again after lunch.

And it will all feel different on that second lap. When there are 25 runs instead of 250, you absorb them differently. The rush to see it all evaporates. You can linger with it, mingle with the mountain, talk to it in a way that’s harder up top. It’s all so awesome in its own way.

Podcast Notes

On Pando Ski Center

I grew up about two hours from the now-lost Pando Ski Center, but I never skied there. When I did make it to that side of Michigan, I opted to ski Cannonsburg, the still-functioning multi-lift ski center seven minutes up the road. Of course, in the Storm Wandering Mode that is my default ski orientation nowadays, I would have simply hit both. But that’s no longer possible, because Cannonsburg purchased Pando in 2015 and subsequently closed it. Probably forever.

Hoppe and I discuss this a bit on the pod. He actually tried to buy the joint. Too many problems with it, he was told. So he bought some of the ski area’s snowguns and other equipment. Better that at least something lives on.

Pando didn’t leave much behind. The only trailmap I can find is part of this Ski write-up from February 1977:

Apparently Pando was a onetime snowboarding hotspot. Here’s a circa 2013 video of a snowboarder doing snowboarderly stuff:

On Cannonsburg

While statistically humble, with just 250 vertical feet, Cannonsburg is the closest skiing to metropolitan Grand Rapids, Michigan, population 1.08 million. That ensures that the parks-oriented bump is busy at all times:

On Caberfae

One of Hoppe’s (and my) favorite ski areas is Caberfae. This was my go-to when I lived in Central Michigan, as it delivered both decent vert (485 feet), and an interesting trail network (the map undersells it):

The Meyer family has owned and operated Caberfae for decades, and they constantly improve the place. GM Tim Meyer joined me on the pod a few years back to tell the story.

On Norway’s proximity to Pine Mountain

Norway sits just 23 minutes down US 2 from Pine Mountain. The two ski areas sport eerily similar profiles: both measure 500 vertical feet and run two double chairs and one triple. Both face the twin challenges of low snowfall (around 60 inches per season), and a relatively thin local population base (Iron Mountain’s metro area is home to around 32,500 people). It’s no great surprise that Norway struggled in previous iterations. Here’s a look at Pine:

On Big Tupper

I mention Big Tupper as a lost ski area that will have an extra hard time coming back since it’s been stripped (I think completely), of snowmaking. This ski area isn’t necessarily totally dead: the lifts are still standing, and the property is going to auction next month, but it will take tens of millions to get the place running again. It was at one time a fairly substantial operation, as this circa 1997 trailmap shows:

On Sneller chairlifts

Norway runs two Sneller double chairs. Only one other Sneller is still spinning, at Ski Sawmill, a short and remote Pennsylvania bump. Lift Blog catalogued the machine here. It wasn’t spinning when I skied Sawmill a couple of years ago, but I did snag some photos:

On Norway’s new logo

In general, animals make good logos. Hoppe designed this one himself:

On social media

Hoppe has done a nice job of updating Norway’s rebuild progress on social media, mostly via the mountain’s Facebook page. Here are links to a few other social accounts we discussed:

* Skiers and Snowboarders of the Midwest is a big champion of ski areas of all sizes throughout the region. The Midwest Skiers group is pretty good too.

* Magic Mountain, Vermont, an underdog for decades, finally dug itself out of the afterthoughts pile at least in part due to the strength of its Instagram and Twitter presence.

* The formerly dumpy Holiday Mountain, New York, has meticulously documented its rebuild under new ownership on Instagram and Facebook.

On Neighbors

My 17-year-old brain could not comprehend the notion that two ski areas operated across the street from – and independent of – one another. But there they were: Nub’s Nob and Boyne Highlands (now The Highlands), each an opposite turn off Pleasantview Road.

We turned right, to Nub’s, because we were in high school and because we all made like $4.50 an hour and because Nub’s probably had like 10-Cent Tuesdays or something.

I’ve since skied both mountains many times, but the novelty has never faded. Having one of something so special as a ski area in your community is marvelous. Having two is like Dang who won the lottery? There are, of course, examples of this all over the country – Sugarbush/Mad River Glen, Stowe/Smugglers’ Notch, Alta/Snowbird, Timberline/Meadows/Skibowl – and it’s incredible how distinct each one’s identity remains even with shared borders and, often, passes.

On UP ski areas

Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is a very particular animal. Only three percent of the state’s 10 million residents live north of the Mackinac (pronounced Mackinaw) Bridge. Lower Peninsula skiers are far more likely to visit Colorado or Vermont than their far-north in-state ski areas, which are a 10-plus hour drive from the more populous southern tiers. While Bohemia’s ultra-cheap pass and rowdy terrain have somewhat upset that equation, the UP remains, for purposes of skiing and ski culture, essentially a separate state.

My point is that it’s worth organizing the state’s ski areas in the way that they practically exist in skiers minds. So I’ve separated the UP from the Lower Peninsula. Since Michigan is also home to an outsized number of town ropetows, I’ve also split surface-lift-only operations into their own categories:

On last winter being very bad with record-low skier visits

Skier visits were down in every region of the United States last winter, but they all but collapsed in the Midwest, with a 26.7 percent plunge, according to the annual Kottke Demographic Report. Michigan alone was down nearly a half million skier visits. Check out these numbers:

For comparison, overall skier numbers dropped just six percent in the Northeast, and five percent in the Rockies.

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Who

Ralph Lewis, General Manager of Pleasant Mountain (formerly Shawnee Peak), Maine

Recorded on

September 9, 2024

About Pleasant Mountain

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Boyne Resorts, which also owns:

Located in: Bridgton, Maine

Year founded: 1938

Pass affiliations: New England Gold Pass: 3 days, no blackouts

Closest neighboring ski areas: Cranmore (:33), King Pine (:39), Attitash (:46), Black Mountain NH (:48), Sunday River (:53), Wildcat (:58), Mt. Abram (:56), Lost Valley (:59)

Base elevation: 600 feet

Summit elevation: 1,900 feet

Vertical drop: 1,300 feet

Skiable Acres: 239

Average annual snowfall: 110 inches

Trail count: 47 (25% advanced, 50% intermediate, 25% beginner)

Lift count: 6 (1 high-speed quad, 1 fixed-grip quad, 2 triple chairs, 2 surface lifts – total includes Summit Express quad, anticipated to open for the 2024-25 ski season; view Lift Blog’s inventory of Pleasant Mountain’s lift fleet)

Why I interviewed him

Pleasant Mountain is loaded with many of the attributes of great - or at least useful - ski areas: bottom-to-top chairlifts, a second base area to hack the crowds, night skiing, a nuanced trail network that includes wigglers through the woods and interstate-width racing chutes, good stuff for  kids, an easy access road that breaks right off a U.S. highway, killer views, a tight community undiluted by destination skiers, and a simpleness that makes you think “yeah this is pretty much what I thought a Maine ski area would be.”

But the place has been around since 1938, which was 15 U.S. presidents ago. Parts of Pleasant feel musty and dated. Core skier services remain smushed between the access road and the bottom of the lifts, squeezed by that kitchen-in-a-camper feeling that everything could use just a bit more space. The baselodge feels improvised, labyrinthian, built for some purpose other than skiing. I would believe that it used to be a dairy barn housing 200 cows or a hideout for bootleggers and bandits or the home of an eccentric grandmother who kept aardvarks for pets before I would believe that anyone built this structure to accommodate hundreds of skiers on a winter weekend.

American skiing, with few exceptions, follows a military/finance-style up-or-out framework. You either advance or face discharge, which in skiing means falling over dead in the snow. Twenty-five years ago, the notion of a high-speed lift at Alta would have been sacrilege. The ski area has four now, including a six-pack, and nobody ever even mentions it. Saddleback rose from the grave partly because they replaced a Napolean-era double chair with a high-speed quad. Taos – Ikon and Mountain Collective partner Taos – held out for eons before installing its first detachable in 2018 (the mountain now has two). One of the new owner’s first acts at tiny Bousquet, Massachusetts was to level the rusty baselodge and build a new one.

Pleasant needed to start moving up. Thirteen hundred vertical feet is too many vertical feet to ascend on a fixed-grip lift in southern New England. There are too many larger options too nearby where skiers don’t have to do that. Sure, Magic, Smuggs, and MRG have fended off ostentatious modernization by tapping nostalgia as a brand, but they are backstopped by the kind of fistfighting terrain and natural snow that Pleasant lacks. To be a successful city-convenient New England ski area in the 2020s, you’re going to have to be a modern ski area.

That’s happening now, at an encouraging clip, under Boyne Resorts’ ownership. Pleasant was fine before, kept in good repair and still relevant even in a crowded market. It could have hung around for decades no matter what. But the big passes aren’t going anywhere and the fast lifts aren’t going anywhere and ski areas need to change along with skier expectations of what a ski area ought to be. That’s happening now at Pleasant Mountain, and it’s damn fun to watch.

What we talked about

At long last, a high-speed lift up Pleasant Mountain; why the new lift won’t have a midstation; why the summit triple had to go; taking out the same lift at two different mountains decades apart; when the mountain will sell old triple chairs, and where the proceeds for those will go; will the new lift overcrowd the mountain?; why Pleasant doesn’t consider this a used lift even though its bones came from Sunday River; being part of Boyne versus being an indie on an island; Pleasant Mountain in the ‘70s; building Bear Peak at Attitash; returning to a childhood place when you’re no longer a child; the Homer family legacy; Boyne buys Shawnee and changes the name back to “Pleasant”; “the big question is, what do we do with the land to the west of us?” as far as potential ski area expansion goes; how Pleasant interacts with Boyne’s other New England ski areas; why Pleasant hasn’t joined the Ikon Pass like all of Boyne’s other ski areas; the evolution and future of Pleasant Mountain on the New England Pass; whether the Sunnyside triple is next in line for a high-speed upgrade; night-skiing; snowmaking; and potential baselodge expansion.

This pod also features some of the coolest background noise ever, as we hear the helicopter flying these towers for the new summit lift:

Lewis sent me some photos after the call:

Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview

Boyne came in and went to work doing Boyne things. That means snowmaking that can bury a brontosaurus. More parking. Food trucks. Tweaks to the trail network. Better grooming. Access to the Maine bigsters with a Pleasant season pass. And a bunch of corporate streamlining that none of us notice but that fortify the bump for long-term stability.

But what we’ve all been waiting for are the new lifts. Or lift. It would always be the Summit Triple that would go first. The other chairs gathered around Big Jim (as he was known around the yard), and delivered their eulogies on that day three years ago when Boyne bought its fourth New England ski area. They all had stories to share. Breakdowns and wind holds. Liftlines and rainy days. Long summers just sitting there, waiting for something to do. Better to hear the tributes before the chairs stopped spinning, before they were auctioned off and sent to sentry backyard firepits from Portsmouth to Farmington, before the towers were scrapped and recycled into steel support beams for a Bangor outlet mall. Then they gathered round to listen.

“What’s it like to have a midstation?” asked Pine Quad.

“Did you have electricity in the ‘90s, or were you powered by a woodstove?” asked Rabbit Run Triple, born in 2014.

“Is it true that from the top of North Peak at Loon, you can see four Canadian states?” asked Sunnyside Triple.

“In Canada, they’re called ‘metric states,’” Summit Express Triple answered sagely. And they all nodded in awe.

And then Boyne sawed the whole thing into pieces and trucked a better lift down from Sunday River to replace it. The whole project probably took a bit longer than Pleasant Mountain locals would have liked, but hey Boyne restored the ski area’s original name in the meantime which was a nifty distraction. And now the new lift is here and it isn’t new but it looks new and was rebuilt like a ‘60s muscle car so that the garaged version you see today is better than anything you would have seen on the street when CCR was new and cool.

I don’t know what Boyne’s going to do when they run out of lifts to upgrade. Right now it’s like 10 every year and each of them sleek as a fighter jet and nearly as expensive. But impactful, meaningfully changing how skiers experience a mountain. The new tram at Big Sky feels like a rocket launch to a moon landing. Camelot 6 at The Highlands – 487 vertical feet with bubbles and heated seats – is so over the top that riders travel from Michigan to Austria on the 42-second ride. Even the International triple chair at Alpental will blow the sidewalls off one of the best pure ski mountains in the Pacific Northwest, humble as a three-person chair sounds in this itemization of megalifts.

Pleasant Mountain’s new Summit Express – which replaces a Summit Express that was actually a Summit Regular-Speed Fixed-Grip Lift – will transform the ski area. It will change how skiers think about the place and how they experience it. It instantly promotes the mountain to the 21st century, where New England skiers expect detachable chairs anytime a lift rises more than a thousand vertical feet. And it assures the locals that yeah Boyne is in this. They’ve got plans. And we’re just getting started here.

What I got wrong

* There were a bunch of times that I called the ski area “Shawnee” or “Shawnee Peak.” Yes I got the memo but I don’t know names are hard.

* I said the six-state New England region was “like half the size of Colorado,” but the difference is not quite that dramatic. New England covers 71,988 square miles (nearly half of which – 30,843 square miles – is Maine), compared to 103,610 square miles for Colorado. I feel like I’ve made this mistake, and this correction, before.

* I made the keen observation that Pleasant Mountains was “Loon’s” fourth ski area in the region and third in the state of Maine. I meant “Boyne’s.”

Why you should ski Pleasant Mountain

Pleasant Mountain fits into this odd category of ski areas that you only visit if you live within an hour of the parking lot, and only if that hour is east-southeast of the ski area. There’s too much Conway competition west. Too much Sunday River north. Too easy to get to Loon if you’re south. Which is another way of saying that Pleasant Mountain is an overlooked member of New England’s ski area roster, a lost-unless-you’re-from-Portland afterthought for skiers distracted by New Hamsphire and Vermont and Sugarloaf.

That’s not the same thing as saying that this is not a very nice ski area. Nothing stays in business for 86 years by accident. Skiers just don’t think about it unless they have to. Pleasant isn’t on any national multimountain pass, isn’t particularly convenient to get to, isn’t a bargain, doesn’t harbor a pocket of secret hardcore terrain.

But you should go anyway. Even if all you do is ride the lift to the summit and stare out at the water below. The views are primo. But the ride down is fun too. Twisty narrow New England fall lines at their playful, unpredictable best. The pitches aren’t overly steep, but they are consistent. This is one of the more approachable thousand-plus-footers in the country. And Maine is one of the more pleasant states in the country (no pun intended). Good people up there. A nice place to break your leg, I’m told. I’ll take any excuse to visit Maine. You can go ahead and see that for yourself.

Podcast Notes

On Pleasant having one of New England’s highest vertical drops with no high-speed lift

Pleasant Mountain is one of the last New England ski areas with more than 1,000 vertical feet to install a detachable lift, but there are still a 11 left. Twelve if you count Dartmouth Skiway, which I will because I suspect their reported vertical drop may be more honest than some of the ski areas claiming 1,000-plus:

On Boyne rebuilding old detach quads

Boyne has rebuilt quite a few high-speed quads over the past half-decade:

Loon GM Brian Norton delivered an excellent breakdown of his mountain’s rebuild of Kanc/Seven Brothers in his 2022 podcast appearance.

On early-70s Pleasant Mountain

Lewis recalls his 1970s childhood days skiing Pleasant Mountain. The place was a fairly simple operation in 1970:

Within a couple of years, however, the trail footprint had evolved into something remarkably similar to modern-day Pleasant Mountain:

On Pleasant’s claim to having the first chairlift in the state of Maine

Pleasant appears to be home to Maine’s first double chair, a Constam make named “Old Blue,” that ran from 1955 to ‘84. According to New England Ski History, a now-defunct operation named Michaud Hill installed a single-person chairlift for the 1945-46 ski season. The lift only lasted for a couple of years, however, before being “possibly removed following 1947-48 season, with parts possibly used at [also now defunct] Thorn Mountain, New Hampshire.”

On Sunday River as a backwater

I’ve covered this extensively, but it’s still a trip to look at 1980s trailmaps of a teeny-tiny Sunday River:

On ASC’s roster

Lewis spent time as part of American Skiing Company, which at its height had collected a now widely distributed bundle of mountains:

On Bear Peak at Attitash

Lewis helped build two of the largest modern ski expansions in New Hampshire. Bear Peak, installed between 1994 and ’95 on the proposed-but-never-developed Big Bear development next door to Attitash, more or less doubled the size of the ski area. Here’s a before-and-after look at the American Skiing Company mega-project:

On Sugarbush’s Lift-tacular summer

Those American Skiing Company days were wild in New England, marking the last major investment surge until the one we’re witnessing over the past five years. One of the most incredible single-summer efforts unfolded at Sugarbush in 1995, when the company installed six chairlifts: Super Bravo Express, Gatehouse Express, and the North Lynx Triple on the Lincoln side; North Ridge Express and the Green Mountain Quad on the Mt. Ellen side; and the two-mile-long Slide Brook Express (still the longest chairlift in the world), linking the two.

Current Sugarbush GM John Hammond, who occupied a much more junior role at the mountain in the mid-90s, recalled that summer when he joined the podcast in 2020.

On vintage Loon

Lewis eventually moved from Attitash to Loon, where he found himself part of his second generational expansion: South Peak. Here’s Loon around 2003:

Expansion unfolded in phases, beginning in 2007. By 2011, the new peak was mostly built out:

Loon actually expanded it again in 2022:

On Loon busyness

While it’s difficult to verify skier visit numbers exactly, since ski areas, for reasons I don’t understand, lock them up as though they were the nuclear launch codes, they occasionally slip out. And all available evidence suggests that Loon is, by far, New Hampshire’s busiest ski area. Here’s a dated snapshot gathered by New England Ski History:

On Loon being the best of New Hampshire

I claim, without really qualifying it, that Loon is New Hampshire’s “premier ski area.” What I meant by that was that the ski area owns the state’s most sophisticated snowmaking and lift system. That assessment is a bit subjective, and Bretton Woods Nation could fight me about it and I wouldn’t really have much of a counterargument.

However, there is another way to look at the “best,” and that is in terms of pure ski terrain. Among the state’s ski areas, Cannon and Wildcat generally split this category. Again, it’s subjective, but on a powder day, those two are going to give you the most interesting terrain when you consider glades, steeps, bumps, etc.

And then you have a bunch of ski areas in Vermont, and a handful in Maine, that are right in this fight. And since New England states are roughly the size of suburban Atlanta Costcos, it makes sense to consider them as a whole. Which means this is a good place to re-insert my standard Ski Areas of New England Inventory:

On Booth Creek’s roster

Loon was, for a time, one of eight ski areas owned by Booth Creek:

Today, the company’s only ski area is Sierra-at-Tahoe.

On the Homer family and “Shawnee Peak”

Pleasant Mountain’s somewhat bizarre history includes its purchase by the owners of Shawnee Mountain, Pennsylvania in 1988. Per New England Ski History:

Following the 1987-88 season, the owners of Pleasant Mountain found themselves in financial trouble. That off season, they sold the ski area to Shawnee Mountain Corp. for $1.4 million. Pleasant Mountain was subsequently renamed to "Shawnee Peak," the name of the owners' Pennsylvania ski area.

Current Shawnee Mountain CEO Nick Fredericks, who has worked at that Pennsylvania ski area for its entire existence, recalled the whole episode in detail when he joined me on the podcast three years ago.

Out-of-state ownership didn’t last long. New England Ski History:

Circa 1992, the parent company decided to divest its skiing holdings, resulting in banks taking control of Shawnee Peak. After a couple of season on the bubble, Shawnee Peak was purchased by Tom's of Maine executive Chet Homer in September of 1994. Though Homer considered restoring the ski area's original name, he opted to keep the Shawnee Peak identity due to the brand that had been established.

In 2021, Homer sold the ski area to Boyne Resorts, who changed the name back to “Pleasant Mountain” in 2022. Chet’s son, Geoff, recently acquired the operating lease for the small Blue Hills, Massachusetts ski area:

On expansion potential to Pleasant Mountain’s west

Pleasant Mountain owns a large parcel skier’s left off the summit that could substantially expand the mountain’s skiable terrain:

Boyne has been aggressive with New England expansions over the past several years, opening a massive new terrain pod at Sugarloaf, expanding South Peak at Loon, and adding the family-friendly Merrill Hill at Sunday River. Boyne has the resources, organizational knowhow, and will to pull off a similar project at Pleasant. I’d expect the new terrain to be included whenever the company puts together the sort of long-term visions it’s articulated for Sugarloaf, Sunday River, Loon, Boyne Mountain, The Highlands, Summit at Snoqualmie, and Big Sky.

That expansion will not include these trails teased skier’s right of the current Sunnyside pod in this 52-year-old trailmap – Pleasant either donated or sold this land to a nature conservancy some years ago.

On Pleasant’s slow expansion onto the New England Pass

Here’s how access has evolved between Pleasant Mountain and the remainder of Boyne’s portfolio since the company’s 2021 acquisition:

* 2021-22: Boyne purchased Pleasant in September, 2021 – too late to include the ski area on any of the company’s pass products for the coming winter.

* 2022-23: New England Pass excludes Pleasant as a full partner, but top-tier passes include three days each at Pleasant and Boyne’s other ski areas across North America; top-tier Pleasant passes included three days to split between Sugarloaf, Sunday River, and Loon, but no access to Boyne’s other resorts.

* 2023-24: New England Pass access remains same as 2022-23; top-tier Pleasant Mountain passes now include three days each at Boyne’s non-New England resorts, including Big Sky.

* 2024-25: New England Pass holders can now add a Pleasant Mountain night-skiing pass at a substantial discount; Pleasant Mountain access to remainder of Boyne’s portfolio remains unchanged.

Since Pleasant Mountain’s season pass remains so heavily discounted against top-tier New England Passes ($849 early-bird versus $1,389), it seems unlikely that adding Pleasant as a full pass partner would do much to overcrowd the smaller mountain. Most skiers who lay out that much for their big-time pass will probably want to spend their weekends at the bigger mountains up north. Pleasant’s expansion, whenever it happens, will also increase the chances that Pleasant could join the New England or Ikon Passes.

The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us.

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Who

Andy Cohen, General Manager of Fernie Alpine Resort, British Columbia

Recorded on

September 3, 2024

About Fernie

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Resorts of the Canadian Rockies, which also owns:

Located in: Fernie, British Columbia

Pass affiliations:

* Epic Pass: 7 days, shared with Kicking Horse, Kimberley, Nakiska, Stoneham, and Mont-Sainte Anne

* RCR Rockies Season Pass: unlimited access, along with Kicking Horse, Kimberley, and Nakiska

Closest neighboring ski areas: Fairmont Hot Springs (1:15), Kimberley (1:27), Panorama (1:45) – travel times vary considerably given time of year and weather conditions

Base elevation: 3,450 feet/1,052 meters

Summit elevation: 7,000 feet/2,134 meters

Vertical drop: 3,550 feet/1,082 meters

Skiable Acres: 2,500+

Average annual snowfall: 360 inches/914 Canadian inches (also called centimeters)

Trail count: 145 named runs plus five alpine bowls and tree skiing (4% extreme, 21% expert, 32% advanced, 30% intermediate, 13% novice)

Lift count: 10 (2 high-speed quads, 2 fixed-grip quads, 3 triples, 1 T-bar, 1 Poma, 1 conveyor - view Lift Blog’s inventory of Fernie’s lift fleet)

Why I interviewed him

One of the most irritating dwellers of the #SkiInternet is Shoosh Emoji Bro. This Digital Daniel Boone, having boldly piloted his Subaru beyond the civilized bounds of Interstate 70, considers all outlying mountains to be his personal domain. So empowered, he patrols the digital sphere, dropping shoosh emojis on any poster that dares to mention Lost Trail or White Pass or Baker or Wolf Creek. Like an overzealous pamphleteer, he slings his brand haphazardly, toward any mountain kingdom he deems worthy of his forcefield. Shoosh Emoji Bro once Shoosh Emoji-ed me over a post about Alta. 🤫 Shoosh Emoji Bro may want to admit when he’s been beat.

He's not quite been beat yet on the Powder Highway, but I’m pushing all my most powerful weapons to the front lines. Because f**k you Shoosh Emoji Bro. The skiers of the world ought to know that a string of gigantic, snowy, rowdy-riding, and mostly empty mountains sits just north of Montana and Washington. Red, Whitewater, Revy, Kicking Horse, Fernie, and their tamer cousins Sun Peaks, Silver Star, Kimberley, Big White, and Panorama. These are ski areas with Keystone-to-Mammoth acreage but Discovery, Montana crowds.

But here’s the crucial difference between the Big Empties of the American West and the Canadian South: those south of the 49th Parallel tend to be old, remote, ragtag and improbable, served by two-mile-long double chairs staked up through the pines before The Beatles were a thing. BC’s large ski areas, by contrast, mostly sprouted from the nubs of town bumps over the past three decades, sprawling up and out with chains of high-speed (or at least modern) lifts. As a group, they are, from an infrastructure point of view, as modern as anything owned by Vail or Alterra or Boyne.

Lift-served skiing is hamstrung by a set of cultural codes that are well past their expiration date: the fetishization of speed, the lionization of the dirtbag fringe, the outsized distribution of media resources to covering the .01 percent of skiers who can stunt an aerial backflip, the Brobot toughguys hostile to chairlift safety bars. I like skiing, frankly, a lot more than I like ski culture, or at least as it’s defined by this micro-sect of cool kids who have decided that their version of skiing is the realist, and that the rest of us either need to rekognize or stay the hell away.

Shoosh Emoji Bro distills much of what is juvenile and counterproductive about contemporary ski culture. But Shoosh Emoji Bro is a buffoon. Because if skiing is ever going to grow, it’s going to be at least in part because Philadelphia Fred and Tampa Bay Tim realize there are places to ski other than Breckenridge. And one of those places, huge and often overlooked, if not exactly unknown, is Fernie, the southeast anchor of the Powder Highway, a glorious set of bowls perched at the top of the Canadian Rockies, a ski area above an actual ski town. So get the hell out of the way, Shoosh Emoji Bro, because I’m setting off the fireworks, and they’re going to be visible all the way to Corpus Christi.

What we talked about

Skiing wall-to-wall from opening day to closing; how Fernie started opening its trickiest lift faster after storms; weeds that grow like weeds; why the ski area had to rebuild a chairlift offramp this summer; Summit County, Colorado in the 1970s; living and working through ski industry consolidation; why RCR joined the Epic Pass in 2018; why the Epic Pass didn’t hit Fernie like an asteroid; why more U.S. Americans don’t ski BC; the X factor that may be driving Epic and Ikon’s massive success; why Fernie pairs well with Whitefish; skiing the Powder Highway; Kimberley and Fernie in 2000; why Kimberley went from four frontside lifts to one, and the unforeseen long-term consequences of that; “when that chair burned down in Kimberley, everyone realized what the engine was there in the winter”; why Kimberley never built this expansion teased on its circa 2002 trailmap:

On Fernie still being an active mining town; housing; the massive potential expansions outlined in Fernie’s masterplan; avy control when you build a ski area beneath five massive alpine bowls; “what do you have to do in yield and volume to pay off a $22 million lift?”; managing Polar Peak; “Covid changed Fernie”; it’s an intermediates game really; yes even Fernie has a little snowmaking; and “La Nina is back!”

Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview

It’s curious that Fernie is on the Epic Pass and nobody seems Really Mad about it. “Ikon Pass” is a four-letter word in Little Cottonwood Canyon. Sun Valley locals were reportedly thrilled to ditch Epic. But the general reaction to Fernie being on the Epic Pass seems to be “oh I didn’t know that Fernie was on the Epic Pass.”

Well it is. And has been. For six years. Perhaps it is the configuration of this partnership – seven days split across all six RCR resorts, and only on the full Epic Pass (or four-plus day Epic Day Pass) – that dampens the outrage. Perhaps the ease of accessing Vail’s brand-name flagships pulls would-be Fern-A-Maniacs away from Powder Highway fantasies. Or perhaps Vail is just underselling the partnership, sticking RCR off in a corner with Paoli Peaks and waving vaguely in its direction. “Your Epic Pass delivers access to more than 9,000 EPTAKULAR RESORTS, including VAIL, PARK CITY, WHISTLER, BRECKENRIDGE, and a bunch of other crap like Crested Summit or Stalking Horse whatever.”

I wrote a story earlier this year headlined Is Skiing Too Expensive, Or Are You Just Bad at Shopping? My point was that yes you can spend the equivalent of three year’s tuition at Harvard on a ski trip if you’re an idiot, but there are in fact ways for a family with a steady income and lack of oxycodone addictions to ski for a reasonable price. The story here is similar: Is Skiing Too Crowded, Or Are You Just Bad at Picking Out Which Ski Resorts to Visit? It’s fashionable to post noontime photos of Vail Mountain liftlines stretching to Jupiter, freighted with the unspoken assumption that this is Bad Vail doing Bad Vail things. But all of those skiers made a choice to ski at Vail, and they all know what Vail is: a very big and good but also very easy-to-access ski area.

There is another conclusion one could draw from these dramatic-but-somewhat-misleading photos: maybe we should find someplace to snosportski where that doesn’t happen. According to Cohen, you can most often “ski right onto our lifts” at Fernie. So yeah think about that.

Questions I wish I’d asked

Up until around 2007, Fernie ran a surface lift called “Face Lift” up into Lizard Bowl. I didn’t notice this T-bar (I’m assuming), until after the interview, but I’d like to know the logic behind removing it.

What I got wrong

* I said that Copper Mountain “had only been open a couple of years” in 1976. The resort opened in 1972.

* I noted that Kimberley’s Black Forest Expansion was “teased” on old trailmaps, but that terrain has in fact been live in its current form since the 1990s. What I meant was that circa early-2000s trailmaps teased new terrain adjacent to Black Forest (see Kimberley trailmap above).

* Sometimes I get overly doctrinaire on how much better Canadians – and especially British Columbians (or whatever) – are at facilitating the expansion of ski areas and building out of associated infrastructure. While I still believe this is true, Cohen checks me on this, saying (in essence) “actually things are a real pain in the ass up here too.” But both things can be true, and I believe that they are.

Why you should ski Fernie

When I decided that I wanted to be a skier, I did what anyone who wanted to be anything did in the 1990s: I went to the drugstore and bought a magazine on the topic. Skiing, December 1994. It only took a few pages to begin absorbing the jargon and the zeitgeist, and to conclude that the unnamable glee that unwound as I free-fell down a mountain was not a singular experience, but a profound force running invisibly through the world that, like radio waves, transformed existence once tapped.

And I learned, quickly, the places to be. A big profile on Squaw. A big profile on Whiteface. And a 12-page spread entitled Inside B.C. – A radical road trip into the unknown heart of one powder-rich province. It began:

British Columbia is best known for Whistler/Blackcomb and CMH heli-skiing, but neither of these drew me up there. Instead it was the stories from my ski-bum friends. Having ventured into the snow-blessed boonies of B.C., skiing places with names I’d never heard of, my friends had come back from Canada practically rabid with glee. I had never been to British Columbia, except for a weekend at Whistler. I had to see what was going on.

Late last March I decided to find out. My plan was ambitious: a nine-day, 2,200-mile loop alone the back roads of southeastern B.C. The trip would encompass seven distinctly different and seldom-publicized ski experiences, ranging from lift-served to backcountry to snowcat and heli-skiing. My transportation for this road trip would be my pickup truck, a weak, four-cylinder vehicle that would lose a race to a canned ham.

The first stop was Fernie:

We left my house in southern Montana before dawn on a Tuesday morning. We followed the northern Rockies, on U.S. 93, crossed the Canadian border, and continued 40 miles north to Fernie, an old mining town wedged into a narrow valley encircled by rock-crested peaks. Drop-dead gorgeous like Jackson, snow-flooded like Alta, and entirely tourist-trap free, Fernie is a ski-bum’s paradise. …

Fernie Snow Valley, Fernie’s local hill, looms over the town like a 3,500-foot tsunami. The area’s bottom third is treed – including stands of old-growth cedars big as grain silos – the next third is dominated by two immense bowls, and the top section, beyond the lift system, is insane: a shockingly vertical face stretched like a rippled curtain between Fernie’s two mountains, Polar Peak and Grizzly Peak. The runs on this face – an hour’s climb from Fernie’s upper lift – make Corbet’s Couloir look like a gentle cruiser. If there weren’t tracks on it, you’d never believe anybody skied it.

That’s not all. If you’re willing to do a good bit of slogging, Fernie’s out-of-bounds options include eight more powder bowls, hundreds more chutes, and countless additional tree lines. You can’t even see all the skiable terrain in one day. If Fernie were in the States, it would probably eclipse Jackson Hole or Taos or Squaw as America’s hard-core hangout.

You can find the full story on the Google machine, filed under “books” (the link is too long to fit here). In its rich descriptions (when you couldn’t just look up trailmaps online), and immense energy, this was probably the article that made me want to be a ski writer, that absurd-sounding thing that is now my job. The B.C. of that 30-year-old story, of course, no longer exists as it did in those pages. The skiing and the ski areas and the towns are more polished and developed and visited. But the Powder Highway is still an amazing thing, and far, far different from the big-mountain experience of the mainline U.S. Rockies. If you haven’t gone yet, you should probably go ahead and do that soon.

Podcast Notes

On Fernie’s masterplan

So much potential terrain, none of which we’re likely to see anytime soon:

On Ski Roundtop

Cohen learned to ski at Roundtop, Pennsylvania, a 600-vertical-foot bump that’s now owned (along with seemingly everything else in the state), by Vail Resorts. The ski area only averages 30 inches of snow per winter, making it a case study in snowmaking’s potential to push skiing through the weather apocalypse. Roundtop delivers some terrific fall line runs, and it skis bigger than this trailmap makes it look:

On Spademan bindings

I’m not much of a gear aficionado, and I sort of just nodded along when Cohen was describing his history peddling Spademan bindings in his Summit County yesteryears. But I looked them up afterwards and gosh these things sound pretty great – per Retro Skiing:

The Spademan binding was radical. There was no toe piece or heel piece for that matter. A small metal plate attached mid-sole of the ski boot clipped into the binding. The concept was that the plate and binding aligned with the tibial axis of the lower leg and would release in the event of an excessive twisting force. One adjustment controlled the release tension of the binding.

The binding caught on with rental shops since it shortened set-up time significantly. And it was a safe binding. Spademan rental statistics showed an injury rate of 1 fracture in 50,000 skier days versus an average 1 in 20,000 skier days for other types of rentals. …

Then Spademan would suffer a setback. Ski boot soles were changing and it took negotiating a standard that would assure compatibility with the Spademan binding. The standard also involved changes to the bindings. Re-tooling meant that Spademan was late getting the new bindings to market for the next season which impacted sales significantly. As more conventional bindings improved, Spademan sales continued to drop and in 1983 Spademan bindings went out of business. 

Hmmm maybe these things would have come in handy when I twisted my lower leg bones into cornmeal.

On Whitefish/Big Mountain

Cohen refers to one of his past jobs at “Whitefish,” then corrects it to “Big Mountain.” These are in fact the same ski area, before and after a 2007 rebranding, as covered in last year’s podcast with Whitefish President Nick Polumbus.

On Poley Mountain in New Brunswick

For a time, Cohen owned Poley Mountain, New Brunswick. This is a 660-footer served by a triple and a fixed-grip quad:

On Kicking Horse

Fernie’s Powder Highway sister resort, Kicking Horse, is generally considered to have some of the nastiest inbounds terrain in North America. The place also rocks a 4,314-foot vertical drop, roughly equal to Big Sky:

On Kimberley’s lift evolution and the fire

In late 2021, an arsonist set fire to Kimberley’s North Star Express, knocking the high-speed quad out of operation for the remainder of the winter. The problem, as you can see on the resort’s trailmap, is that North Star acts as Kimberley’s sole out-of-base connector lift to the ski area’s extensive backside terrain:

In North Star’s absence, mountain officials acquired extra snowcats to move skiers to Tamarack Ridge and beyond for the remainder of the winter. It wasn’t a terrible stopgap, but the mountain may have found it handy to have been able to flip on one of the three redundant lifts that once served Kimberley’s frontside:

But after stringing North Star to the summit in 1999, Kimberley methodically removed the double, T-bar, and triple. Cohen, who also long oversaw this Fernie sister resort, explains why.

On Fernie’s terrain evolution

Like so many B.C. ski areas, Fernie was, for decades, a relatively small operation crowded at the base of a huge mountain. Here’s a 1996 snapshot of the resort boundaries and rustic lift network:

Two monster lifts – the 8,616-foot-long, 2,154-vertical-foot Timber Bowl Express quad and the White Pass fixed-grip quad – blew out Fernie’s borders substantially in 1998:

The 2011 addition of Polar Peak set the basic modern resort footprint.

On the “Squamish Gondola”

Cohen refers to another act of lift sabotage: in 2019, and again in 2020, a yet-to-be-identified individual cut the cable on the Sea-to-Sky Gondola, a sightseeing attraction that soars over the water in Squamish, a town between Vancouver and Whistler. The vandalism cost $10 million in total damage, and the reward for information leading to the arrest of the individual responsible sits at $500,000 (Canadian, which I think converts to one Vail Mountain lift ticket in American money).

On the town of Fernie

Fernie Alpine Resort doesn’t rise directly over town in that walk-to-the-lifts Aspen or Telluride kind of way, but it looms over town, and does sit just down the road:

On tragedy

Cohen refers to a “tragic accident where three guys died at the ice arena.” CBC News on the 2017 accident:

Three arena workers died in Fernie, B.C., due to the failure of aging equipment and poor operational and management decisions, according to a report by Technical Safety B.C.

In its investigation, TSBC — the independent body that oversees the installation and operation of arena ice-making machinery — found that a small ammonia leak in the equipment at the Fernie Memorial Arena curling rink escalated into "a rapid release of ammonia" into the mechanical room.

Lloyd Smith, Fernie's director of leisure services, Wayne Hornquist, Fernie's chief facility operator and Jason Podloski, a refrigeration technician with contractor CIMCO Refrigeration in Calgary, were trying to fix the ice-maker on Oct. 17, 2017, when the ammonia burst from the unit, and likely suffered a "rapid death," according to Jeff Coleman, lead investigator with TSBC.

Exposure to acute levels of ammonia causes trauma to the respiratory system, essentially suffocating a person to death.

On the relationship between Rossland and Red Mountain

Canadian ski towns seem to be weathering the various pressures of short-term rentals, digital nomads, and general lack of new housing inventory somewhat better than their American counterparts. I discuss this dynamic with Cohen, and used my podcast conversation earlier this year with Red Mountain CEO Howard Katkov on his mountain’s relationship with Rossland as context.

WARNING: Pretty much everyone who listens to the Red Mountain episode has already decided to move there, so expect disruptions to the local housing markets over the long-term (still hating on you, Shoosh Emoji Bro. Go shoosh yourself 🤫).

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 63/100 in 2024, and number 563 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

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Who

Kelly Pawlak, President & CEO of the National Ski Areas Association (NSAA)

Recorded on

August 19, 2024

About the NSAA

From the association’s website:

The National Ski Areas Association is the trade association for ski area owners and operators. It represents over 300 alpine resorts that account for more than 90% of the skier/snowboarder visits nationwide. Additionally, it has several hundred supplier members that provide equipment, goods and services to the mountain resort industry.

NSAA analyzes and distributes ski industry statistics; produces annual conferences and tradeshows; produces a bimonthly industry publication and is active in state and federal government affairs. The association also provides educational programs and employee training materials on industry issues including OSHA, ADA and NEPA regulations and compliance; environmental laws and regulations; state regulatory requirements; aerial tramway safety; and resort operations and guest service.

NSAA was established in 1962 and was originally headquartered in New York, NY. In 1989 NSAA merged with SIA (Snowsports Industries America) and moved to McLean, Va. The merger was dissolved in 1992 and NSAA was relocated to Lakewood, Colo., because of its central geographic location. NSAA is located in the same office building as the Professional Ski Instructors of America and the National Ski Patrol in Lakewood, Colo., a suburb west of Denver.

Why I interviewed her

A pervasive sub-narrative in American skiing’s ongoing consolidation is that it’s tough to be alone. A bad winter at a place like Magic Mountain, Vermont or Caberfae Peaks, Michigan or Bluewood, Washington means less money, because a big winter at Partner Mountain X across the country isn’t available to keep the bank accounts stable. Same thing if your hill gets chewed up by a tornado or a wildfire or a flood. Operators have to just hope insurance covers it.

This story is not entirely incorrect. It’s just incomplete. It is harder to be independent, whether you’re Jackson Hole or Bolton Valley or Mount Ski Gull, Minnesota. But few, if any, ski areas are entirely and truly alone, fighting on the mountaintop for survival. Financially, yes (though many independent ski areas are owned by families or individuals who operate one or more additional businesses, which can and sometimes do subsidize ski areas in lean or rebuilding years). But in the realm of ideas, ski areas have a lot of help.

That’s because, layered over the vast network of 500-ish U.S. mountains is a web of state and national associations that help sort through regulations, provide ideas, and connect ski areas to one another. Not every state with ski areas has one. Nevada’s handful of ski areas, for example, are part of Ski California. New Jersey’s can join Ski Areas of New York, which often joins forces with Ski Pennsylvania. Ski Idaho counts Grand Targhee, Wyoming, as a member. Some of these associations (Ski Utah), enjoy generous budgets and large staffs. Others (Ski New Hampshire), accomplish a remarkable amount with just a handful of people.

But layered over them all – in reach but not necessarily hierarchy – is the National Ski Areas Association. The NSAA helps ski areas where state associations may lack the scale, resources, or expertise. The NSAA organized the united, nationwide approach to Covid-era operations ahead of the 2020-21 ski season; developed and maintained the omnipresent Skier Responsibility Code; and help ski areas do everything from safely operate chairlifts and terrain parks to fend off climate change. Their regional and national shows are energetic, busy, and productive. Top representatives – the sorts of leaders who appear on this podcast - from every major national or regional ski area are typically present.

This support layer, mostly invisible to consumers, is in some ways the concrete holding the nation’s ski areas together. Most of even the most staunchly independent operators are members. If U.S. skiing were really made up of 500 ski areas trying to figure out snowmaking in 500 different ways, then we wouldn’t have 500 ski areas. They need each other more than you might think. And the NSAA helps pull them all together.

What we talked about

Low natural snow, strong skier visits – the paradox of the 2023-24 ski season; ever-better snowmaking; explaining the ski industry’s huge capital investments over recent years; European versus American lift fleets; lift investments across America; when it’s time to move on from your dream job; 2017 sounds like yesterday but it may as well have been 1,000 years ago; the disappearing climate-change denier; can ski areas adapt to climate change?; the biggest challenges facing the NSAA’s next leader, and what qualities that leader will need to deal with them; should ski areas be required to report injuries?; operators who are making progress on safety; are ski area liability waivers in danger?; the wild cost of liability insurance; how drones could help ski area safety; why is skiing still so white, even after all the DE&I?; why youth skier participation as a percentage of overall skier visits has been declining; and the enormous potential for indoor skiing to grow U.S. participation.

Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview

First, Pawlak announced, in May, that she would step down from her NSAA role whenever the board could identify a capable replacement. She explains why on the podcast, but hers has been a by-all-accounts successful seven-year run amidst and through rapid and irreversible industry change – Covid, consolidation, multi-mountain passes, climate change, skyrocketing costs, the digitization of everything – and it was worth pausing to reflect on all that the NSAA had accomplished and all of the challenges waiting ahead.

Second, our doomsday instincts keep running up against this stat: despite a fairly poor winter, snow-wise, the U.S. ski industry racked up the fifth-most skier visits of all time during its 2023-24 campaign. How is that possible, and what does it mean? I’ve explored this a little myself, but Pawlak has access to data that I don’t, and she adds an extra dimension to our analysis.

And this is true of so many of the topics that I regularly cover in this newsletter: capital investment, regulation, affordability, safety, diversity. This overlap is not surprising, given my stated focus on lift-served skiing in North America. Most of my podcasts bore deeply into the operations of a single mountain, then zoom out to center those ski areas within the broader ski universe. When I talk with the NSAA, I can do the opposite – analyze the larger forces driving the evolution of lift-served skiing, and see how the collective is approaching them. It’s a point of view that very few possess, and even fewer are able to articulate.

Questions I wish I’d asked

We recorded this conversation before POWDR announced that it had sold Killington and Pico, and would look to sell Bachelor, Eldora, and Silver Star in the coming months. I would have loved to have gotten Pawlak’s take on what was a surprise twist in skiing’s long-running consolidation.

I didn’t ask Pawlak about the Justice Department’s investigation into Alterra’s proposed acquisition of Arapahoe Basin. I wish I would have.

What I got wrong

I said that Hugh Reynolds was “Big Snow’s head of marketing.” His actual role is Chief Marketing Officer for all of Snow Partners, which operates the indoor Big Snow ski area, the outdoor Mountain Creek ski area, and a bunch of other stuff.

Podcast Notes

On specific figures from the Kotke Report:

Pretty much all of the industry statistics that I cite in this interview come from the Kotke Demographic Report, an annual end-of-season survey that aggregates anonymized data from hundreds of U.S. ski areas. Any numbers that I reference in this conversation either refer to the 2022-23 study, or include historical data up to that year. I did not have access to the 2023-24 report until after our conversation.

Capital expenditures

Per the 2023-24 Kotke Report:

Definitions of ski resort sizes

Also from Kotke:

On European lift fleets versus American

Comparing European skiing to American skiing is a bit like comparing futbol to American football – two different things entirely. Europe is home to at least five times as many ski areas as North America and about six times as many skiers. There are ski areas there that make Whistler look like Wilmot Mountain. The food is not only edible, but does not cost four times your annual salary. Lift tickets are a lot cheaper, in general. But it snows more, and more consistently, in North America; our liftlines are more organized; and you don’t need a guide here to ski five feet off piste. Both are great and annoying in their own way. But our focus of difference-ness in this podcast was between the lift fleets on each continent. In brief, you’re far more likely to stumble across a beefcaker on a random Austrian trail than you are here in U.S. America. Take a look at skiresort.info’s (not entirely accurate but close enough), inventory of eight-place chairlifts around the world:

On “Waterville with the MND lift”

Pawlak was referring to Waterville Valley’s Tecumseh Express, built in 2022 by France-based MND. It was the first and only lift that the manufacturer built in the United States prior to the dissolution of a joint venture with Bartholet. While MND may be sidelined, Pawlak’s point remains valid: there is room in the North American market for manufacturers other than Leitner-Poma and Doppelmayr, especially as lift prices continue to escalate at amazing rates.

On my crankiness with “the mainstream media” and climate change

I kind of hate the term “mainstream media,” particularly when it’s used as a de facto four-letter word to describe some Power Hive of brainwashing elitists conspiring to cover up the government’s injection of Anthrax into our Honey Combs. I regret using the term in our conversation, but sometimes in the on-the-mic flow of an interview I default to stupid. Anyway, once or twice per year I get particularly bent about some non-ski publication framing lift-served skiing as an already-doomed industry because the climate is changing. I’m not some denier kook who’s stockpiling dogfood for the crocodile apocalypse, but I find this narrative stupid because it’s reductive and false. The real story is this: as the climate changes, the ski industry is adapting in amazing and inventive ways; ski areas are, as I often say, Climate Change Super Adapters. You can read an example that I wrote here.

On the NSAA’s Covid response

There’s no reason to belabor the NSAA’s Covid response – which was comprehensive and excellent, and is probably the reason the 2020-21 American ski season happened – here. I already broke the whole thing down with Pawlak back in April 2021. She also joined me – somewhat remarkably, given the then-small reach of the podcast – at the height of Covid confusion in April 2020 to talk through what in the world could possibly happen next.

On The Colorado Sun’s reporting on ski area safety and the NSAA’s safety report

The Colorado Sun consistently reports on ski area safety, and the ski industry’s resistance to laws that would compel them to make injury reports public. I asked Pawlak about this, citing, specifically, this Sun article From April 8, 2024:

[13-year-old] Silas [Luckett] is one of thousands of people injured on Colorado ski slopes every winter. With the state’s ski hills posting record visitation in the past two seasons — reaching 14.8 million in 2022-23 — it would appear that the increasing frequency of injuries coincides with the rising number of visits. We say “appear” because, unlike just about every other industry in the country, the resort industry does not disclose injury data. …

Ski resorts do not release injury reports. The ski resort industry keeps a tight grasp on even national injury data. Since 1980, the National Ski Areas Association provides select researchers with injury data for peer-reviewed reports issued every 10 years by the National Ski Areas Association. The most recent 10-year review of ski injuries was published in 2014, looking at 13,145 injury reports from the 2010-11 ski season at resorts that reported 4.6 million visits.

The four 10-year reports showed a decline in skier injuries from 3.1 per 1,000 visitors in 1980-81 to 2.7 in 1990-91 to 2.6 in 2000-01 to 2.5 in 2010-11. Snowboarder injuries were 3.3 in 1990, 7.0 in 2000 and 6.1 in 2010.

For 1990-91, the nation’s ski areas reported 46.7 million skier visits, 2000-01 was 57.3 million and 2010-11 saw a then all–time high of 60.5 million visits. …

The NSAA’s once-a-decade review of injuries from 2020-21 was delayed during the pandemic and is expected to land later this year. But the association’s reports are not available to the public [Pawlak disputes this, and provided a copy of the report to The Storm – you can view it here].

When Colorado state Sen. Jessie Danielson crafted a bill in 2021 that would have required ski areas to publish annual injury statistics, the industry blasted the plan, arguing it would be an administrative burden and confuse the skiing public. It died in committee.

“When we approached the ski areas to work on any of the details in the bill, they refused,” Danielson, a Wheat Ridge Democrat, told The Sun in 2021. “It makes me wonder what it is that they are hiding. It seems to me that an industry that claims to have safety as a top priority would be interested in sharing the information about injuries on their mountains.”

The resort industry vehemently rebuffs the notion that ski areas do not take safety seriously.

Patricia Campbell, the then-president of Vail Resorts’ 37-resort mountain division and a 35-year veteran of the resort industry, told Colorado lawmakers considering the 2021 legislation that requiring ski resorts to publish safety reports was “not workable” and would create an “unnecessary burden, confusion and distraction.”

Requiring resorts to publish public safety plans, she said, would “trigger a massive administrative effort” that could redirect resort work from other safety measures.

“Publishing safety plans will not inform skiers about our work or create a safer ski area,” Campbell told the Colorado Senate’s Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee in April 2021.

On ASTM International

Pawlak refers to “ASTM International” in the podcast. That is an acronym for “American Society for Testing and Materials,” an organization that sets standards for various industries. Here’s an overview video that most of you will find fairly boring (I do, however, find it fascinating that these essentially invisible boards operate in the background to introduce some consistency into our highly confusing industrialized world):

On Mammoth and Deer Valley’s “everyone gets 15 feet” campaign

There’s a cool video of this on Deer Valley’s Instapost that won’t embed on this page for some reason. Since Alterra owns both resorts, I will assume Mammoth’s campaign is similar.

On Heavenly’s collision prevention program

More on this program, from NSAA’s Safety Awards website:

Heavenly orchestrated a complex collision prevention strategy to address a very specific situation and need arising from instances of skier density in certain areas. The ski area’s unique approach leveraged detailed incident data and distinct geographic features, guest dynamics and weather patterns to identify and mitigate high-risk areas effectively. Among its efforts to redirect people in a congested area, Heavenly reintroduced the Lakeview Terrain Park, added a rest area and groomed a section through the trees to attract guests to an underutilized run. Most impressively, these innovative interventions resulted in a 52% year-over-year reduction of person-on-person collisions. Judges also appreciated that the team successfully incorporated creative thinking from a specialist-level employee. For its effective solutions to reduce collision risk through thoughtful terrain management, NSAA awarded Heavenly Mountain Resort with the win for Best Collision Prevention Program.

On the Crested Butte accident

Pawlak and I discuss a 2022 accident at Crested Butte that could end up having lasting consequences on the ski industry. Per The Colorado Sun:

It was toward the end of the first day of a ski vacation with their church in March 2022 when Mike Miller and his daughter Annie skied up to the Paradise Express lift at Crested Butte Mountain Resort. 

The chair spun around and Annie couldn’t settle into the seat. Mike grabbed her. The chair kept climbing out of the lift terminal. He screamed for the lift operator to stop the chair. So did people in the line. The chair kept moving. 

Annie tried to hold on to the chair. Mike tried to hold his 16-year-old daughter. The fall from 30 feet onto hard-packed snow shattered her C7 vertebrae, bruised her heart, lacerated her liver and injured her lungs. She will not walk again. 

The Miller family claims the lift operators were not standing at the lift controls and “consciously and recklessly disregarded the safety of Annie” when they failed to stop the Paradise chair. In a lawsuit the family filed in December 2022 in Broomfield County District Court, they accused Crested Butte Mountain Resort and its owner, Broomfield-based Vail Resorts, of gross negligence and “willful and wanton conduct.”

In May, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled on the incident, per SAM:

In a 5-2 ruling, the Colorado Supreme Court found that liability waivers cannot be used to protect ski areas from negligence claims related to chairlift accidents. The decision will allow a negligence per se claim brought against Vail Resorts to proceed in the district courts.

The decision, however, did not invalidate all waivers, as the NSAA clarified in the same SAM article:

There was concern among outdoor activity operators in Colorado that the case might void liability waivers altogether, but the narrow scope of the decision has largely upheld the use of liability waivers to protect against claims pertaining to inherent risks.

“While the Supreme Court carved out a narrow path where releases of liability cannot be enforced in certain, unique chairlift incidents, the media downplayed, if not ignored, a critical part of the ruling,” explained Dave Byrd, the National Ski Areas Association’s (NSAA) director of risk and regulatory affairs.

 “Plaintiffs’ counsel had asked the [Colorado] Supreme Court to overturn decades of court precedent enforcing the broader use of ALL releases in recreation incidents, and the court unanimously declined to make such a radical change with Colorado’s long-standing law on releases and waivers—and that was the more important part of the court’s decision from my perspective.”

The Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling “express[es] no view as to the ultimate merit of the claim,” rather it allows the Millers’ claim to proceed to trial in the lower courts. It could be month or years before the lawsuit is concluded.

On me knowing “all too well what it’s like to be injured on a ski trip”

Boy do I ever:

Yeah that’s my leg. Ouch.

Don’t worry. I’ve skied 102 days since that mangling.

Here’s the full story.

On “Jerry of the Day”

I have conflicted feelings on Jerry of the Day. Some of their posts are hilarious, capturing what are probably genuinely good and seasoned skiers whiffing in incredible fashion:

Some are just mean-spirited and stupid:

Funny I guess if you rip and wear it ironically. But it’s harder to be funny than you may suppose. See The New Yorker’s cloying and earnest (and never-funny), Shouts & Murmurs column.

On state passport programs

State passport programs are one of the best hacks to make skiing affordable for families. Run by various state ski associations, they provide between one and three lift tickets to every major ski area in the state for some grade range between third and fifth. A small administrative fee typically applies, but otherwise, the lift tickets are free. In most, if not all, cases, kids do not need to live in the state to be eligible. Check out the programs in New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, and Utah. Other states have them too – use the Google machine to find them.

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 58/100 in 2024, and number 558 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

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Who

Chip Seamans, President of Windham Mountain Club, New York

Recorded on

August 12, 2024

About Windham Mountain Club

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Majority owned by Beall Investment Partners and Kemmons Wilson Hospitality Partners, majority led by Sandy Beall

Located in: Windham, New York

Year founded: 1960

Pass affiliations:

* Ikon Pass: 7 days

* Ikon Base Pass: 5 days, holiday blackouts

Closest neighboring ski areas: Hunter (:17), Belleayre (:35), Plattekill (:48)

Base elevation: 1,500 feet

Summit elevation: 3,100 feet

Vertical drop: 1,600 feet

Skiable Acres: 285

Average annual snowfall: 100 inches

Lift count: 11 (1 six-pack, 3 high-speed quads, 1 triple, 1 double, 5 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Windham’s lift fleet)

Why I interviewed him

The Catskills are the closest thing to big-mountain skiing in my immediate orbit. Meaning the ski areas deliver respectable vertical drops, reasonably consistent snowfall, and an address reachable for first chair with a 6 to 7 a.m. departure time. The four big ski areas off I-87 – Belleayre, Plattekill, Hunter, and Windham – are a bit farther from my launchpad than the Poconos, than Mountain Creek, than Catamount or Butternut or the smaller ski areas in Connecticut. But on the right day, the Catskills mountains ski like a proto-Vermont, a sampler that settles more like a main course than an appetizer.

I’m tremendously fond of the Catskills, is my point here. And I’m not the only one. As the best skiing within three hours of New York City, this relatively small region slings outsized influence over North American ski culture. Money drives skiing, and there’s a lot of it flowing north from the five boroughs (OK maybe two of the boroughs and the suburbs, but whatever). There’s a reason that three Catskills ski areas (Belleayre, Hunter, and Windham), rock nearly as many high-speed chairlifts (nine) as the other 40-some ski areas in New York combined (12). These ski areas are cash magnets that prime the 20-million-ish metro region for adventures north to New England, west to the West, and east to Europe.

I set this particular podcast up this way because it’s too easy for Colorad-Bro or Lake Ta-Bro or Canyon Bro to look east and scoff. Of course I could focus this whole enterprise on the West, as every ski publication since the invention of snow has done. I know the skiing is better out there. Everyone does. But that doesn’t mean it’s the only skiing that matters. The Storm is plenty immersed in the West, but I can also acknowledge this reality: the West needs the East more than the East needs the West. After all, there’s plenty of good skiing out here, with a lot more options, and without the traffic hassles (not to mention the far smaller Brobot:Not Brobot ratio). And while it’s true that New England ski areas have lately benefitted from capital airdrops launched by their western overlords, a lot of that western money is just bouncing back east after being dropped off by tourists from Boston, New York, Philly, and D.C. Could Colorado have skiing without eastern tourism? Yes, but would Summit and Eagle counties be dripping with high-speed lifts and glimmering base villages without that cash funnel, or would you just have a bunch of really big Monarch Mountains?

None of which tells you much about Windham Mountain Windham Mountain Club, which I’ve featured on the podcast before. But if you want to understand, rather than simply scoff at, the New Yorkers sharing a chair with you at Deer Valley or Snowmass or Jackson, that journey starts here, in the Catskills, a waystation on many skiers’ pathway to higher altitudes.

What we talked about

Chip is the new board chairman of the National Ski Areas Association; searching for a new NSAA head; the difference between state and national ski organizations; the biggest challenge of running a ski area in New York; could New York State do more to help independent ski areas?; how the ski area’s rebrand to Windham Mountain Club “created some confusion in the market, no doubt”; the two-day weekend lift ticket minimum is dead; “our plan has always been to stay open to the public and to sell passes and tickets”; defining “premium”; what should a long liftline look like at WMC?; lift ticket and Ikon Pass redemption limits for 2024-25; the future of Windham on the Ikon Pass; rising lift ticket prices; free season passes for local students; who owns WMC, and what do they want to do with it?; defining the “club” in WMC; what club membership will cost you and whether just having the cash is enough to get you in; is Windham for NYC or for everyone?; how about a locals’ pass?; a target number of skiers on a busy day at Windham; comparing Windham to Vermont’s all-private Hermitage Club; how about the Holimont private-on-weekends-only model?; some people just want to be angry; the new owners have already plowed $70 million into the bump; snowmaking updates; a badass Cat fleet; a more or less complete lift fleet; the story behind K lift; the Windham village and changes to parking; and the dreaded gatehouse.   

Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview

Rather than right now, maybe the best time for this interview would have been a year ago, or six months ago, or maybe all three. It’s been a confusing time at Windham, for skiers, for employees, for the people running the place. No one seems to understand exactly what the bump is, what it plans to be, and what it wants to be.

Which doesn’t stop anyone from having an opinion, most of them wildly misinformed. Over the past year, I’ve been told, definitively, by a Saturday liftline’s worth of casual skiers that Windham had “gone private.” The notion is pervasive, stubborn, immune to explanations or evidence to the contrary. So, very on brand for our cultural moment.

Which doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try. I’m more than willing to bang on ski areas for their faults. In Windham’s case, I’ve always thought that they groom too much, that the season is too short, that the season pass price (currently $2,000!), is beyond insane. But it’s not really fair to invent a problem and then harangue the operators about it. Windham is not a private ski area, it is not shut off from locals, it does not require a $200,000 handshake to pass through the RFID gates. Inventing a non-existent problem and then taking offense to it is a starter kit for social media virtue signaling, but it’s a poor way to conduct real life.

But honestly, what the hell is going on up there? How can Windham Mountain Club justify a larger initiation fee than Vermont’s truly private Hermitage Club for a ski experience that still involves half of Manhattan? Why is it so hard to make a weekend Ikon Pass reservation? Does anyone really go to the Catskills in search of the “rarified reality” that WMC insists it is somehow providing? What is the long-term vision here?

All fair questions, all spun from WMC’s self-inflicted PR tornado. But the answers are crystalizing, and we have them here.

What I got wrong

* I said that “Gore’s triple chair,” which was only a “12, 13-year-old lift” was going to McCauley. I was referring to the Hudson triple, a 2010 Partek (so 14 years old), which will replace nearby but much smaller McCauley’s 1973 Hall double, known as “Big Chair,” for the coming ski season.  

* I said that the club fees for Windham were roughly the same as Hermitage Club. This is drastically untrue. WMC’s $200,000 initiation fee is double Hermitage Club’s $100,000 number. Windham’s annual dues, however, are much lower than HC’s $18,500.

* I said that Windham was automating its first snowmaking trail this year. That is incorrect, as Seamans points out in our conversation. Windham is installing its first automated snowmaking on the east side of the mountain this year, meaning that 40 percent of the mountain’s snowmaking system will now be automated.

* I said that Windham had a water-supply-challenge, which is not accurate. I was confusing water supply (adequate), with snowmaking system pumping capacity (room for improvement). I think I am covering too many mountains and sometimes the narratives cross. Sorry about that.

Why you should ski Windham Mountain Club

If you really want an uncrowded Catskills ski experience, you have exactly one option: go to family-owned Plattekill, 40 minutes down the road. It has less vert (1,100 feet), and half Windham’s acreage on paper, but when the glades fill in (which they often do), the place feels enormous, and you can more or less walk onto either of the mountain’s two chairlifts any day of the season.

But Plattekill doesn’t have high-speed lifts, it’s not on the Ikon Pass, and it’s not basically one turn off the thruway. Windham has and is all of those things. And so that’s where more skiers will go.

Not as many, of course, as will go to Hunter, Windham’s Vail-owned archnemesis 15 minutes away, with its unlimited Epic Pass access, Sahara-sized parking lots, and liftlines that disappear over the curvature of the Earth. And that has been Windham’s unspoken selling point for decades: Hey, at least we’re not Hunter. That’s true not only in relative crowd size, but in attitude and aesthetic; Hunter carries at least a 10:1 ratio* over Windham in number of LongIsland Bros straightlining its double-blacks in baseball caps and Jets jerseys.

In that context, Windham’s rebrand is perfectly logical – as Hunter grows ever more populist, with a bargain season pass price and no mechanism to limit visitors outside of parking lot capacity (they ski area does limit lift ticket sales, but not Epic Pass visits), the appeal of a slightly less-chaotic, more or less equally scaled option grows. That’s Windham. Or, hey, the much more exclusive sounding “Windham Mountain Club.”

And Windham is a good ski area. It’s one of the better ones in New York, actually, with two peaks and nice fall line skiing and an excellent lift system. It doesn’t sprawl like Gore or tower like Whiteface, and those fall lines do level off a bit too abruptly from the summit, but it feels big, especially when that Catskills snowbelt fires. On a weekday, it really can feel like a private ski area. And you can probably score an Ikon Pass slot without issue. So go now, before WMC jumps off that mainstream pass, and the only way in the door is a triple-digit lift ticket.

*Not an actual statistic^

^Probably though it’s accurate.

Podcast Notes

On New York having more ski areas than any other state in the country

It’s true. New York has 51. The next closest state is Michigan, with 44 (only 40 of which operated last winter). Here’s a list:

On the three New York state-owned ski areas that “have been generously funded by the state”

It’s basically impossible to have any honest conversation about any New York ski area without acknowledging the Godzilla-stomping presence of the state’s three owned ski areas: Belleayre, Gore, and Whiteface. These are all terrific ski areas, in large part because they benefit from a firehose of taxpayer money that no privately owned, for-profit ski area could ever justify. As the Adirondack Explorer reported in July:

The public authority in charge of the state’s skiing, sliding and skating facilities saw expenses and losses jump in the past year, its annual financial report shows.

The Lake Placid-based Olympic Regional Development Authority [ORDA], whose big-ticket sites are the Belleayre Mountain, Gore Mountain and Whiteface Mountain alpine centers, disclosed operating losses of $47.3 million for the last fiscal year. That compared with losses of $29.3 million for the same period a year earlier.

It’s important to acknowledge that this budget also covers a fun park’s worth of skating rinks, ski jumps, luge chutes (or whatever), and a bunch of other expensive, unprofitable crap that you need if you ever want to host an Olympics (which New York State has done twice and hopes to do again). Still, the amount of cash funneled into ORDA in recent years is incredible. As the Adirondack Explorer reported last year:

“The last six years, the total capital investment in the Olympic Authority was $552 million,” [now-fomer ORDA President and CEO Mike] Pratt told me proudly. “These are unprecedented investments in our facilities, no question about it. But the return on investment is immediate.”

Half a billion dollars is a hell of a lot of money. The vast majority of it, more than $400 million, went to projects in the Lake Placid region, home to some 20,000 year-round residents—and it turns out, that breathtaking sum is only part of the story.

Adirondack Life found New York State has actually pumped far more taxpayer dollars into ORDA since Pratt took the helm than previously reported, including a separate infusion of subsidies needed to cover the Olympic Authority’s annual operating losses. Total public spending during Pratt’s six-year tenure now tops $620 million.

… Taken together that’s more money than New York spent hosting the 1980 Winter Olympics. It’s also more money than the state committed, amid growing controversy, to help build a new NFL stadium in Buffalo, a city with a population more than 10 times that of the Lake Placid region.

There’s also no sign ORDA’s hunger for taxpayer cash will shrink anytime soon. In fact, it appears to be growing. The Olympic Authority is already slated to receive operating subsidies and capital investments next year that total another $119 million.

To put that amount in context, the entire Jay Peak Resort in Vermont sold last year for $76 million. Which means New York State’s spending on the Olympic Authority in 2024 would be enough to buy an entire new ski mountain, with tens of millions of dollars left over.

It now appears certain the total price tag for Pratt’s vision of a new, revitalized ORDA will top $1 billion. He said that’s exactly what the organization needed to finally fulfill its mission as keeper of New York’s Olympic flame.

More context: Vail resorts, which owns and operates 42 ski areas – more than a dozen of which are several times larger than Belleayre, Gore, and Whiteface combined – is allocating between $189 and $194 million for 2024 capital improvements. You can see why New York is one of the few states where Vail isn’t the Big Bad Guy. The state’s tax-paying, largely family-owned ski areas funnels 95 percent of their resentment toward ORDA, and it’s easy enough to understand why.

On New York’s “increasingly antiquated chairlift fleet”

Despite the glimmer-glammer of the lift fleets at ORDA resorts, around the Catskills, and at Holiday Valley, New York is mostly a state of family-owned ski areas whose mountains are likely worth less than the cost of even a new fixed-grip chairlift. Greek Peak’s longest chairlift is a Carlevaro-Savio double chair installed in 1963. Snow Ridge runs lifts dating to 1964, ’60, and ’58(!). Woods Valley installed its three lifts in 1964, ’73, and ’75 (owner Tim Woods told me last year that the ski area has purchased at least two used chairlifts, and hopes to install them at some future point). Intermittently open (and currently non-operational) Cockaigne’s two double chairs and T-bar date to 1965. These lifts are, of course, maintained and annually inspected, and I have no fear of riding any of them, but in the war for customers, lifts that predate human space travel do make your story a bit trickier to tell.

On Holiday Valley selling a chairlift to Catamount

I noted that a lift had moved from Holiday Valley to Catamount – that is the Catamount quad, Holiday Valley’s old Yodeler quad. Catamount installed the new lift in 2022, the year after Holiday Valley pulled out the 20-year-old, 500-vertical-foot fixed-grip lift to replace it with a new high-speed quad.

On Windham’s pass price in comparison to others

Windham’s season pass price is the eighth most expensive in America, and the most expensive in the East by an enormous amount (Windham also offers a Monday through Friday, non-holiday season pass for $750, and a Sunday through Friday, non-holiday pass for $1,300). Here’s how WMC compares nationally:

And here’s how it stacks up in the East:

On WMC’s ownership

We talk a bit about Windham’s ownership in the pod. I dug into that a bit more last year, when they bought the place in April and again when the mountain rebranded in October.

On Blackberry Farms

Lodged between Windham and New York City is a hilltop resort called Mohonk Mountain House. In its aesthetic and upscale cuisine, it resembles Blackberry Farm, the Tennessee resort owned by Windham majority owner Sandy Beall, which The New York Times describes as “built on a foundation of simple Tennessee country life as reinterpreted for guests willing to pay a premium to taste its pleasures without any of its hardships.” In other words, an incredibly expensive step into a version of nature that resembles but sidesteps its wild form. I think this is what WMC is going for, but on snow.

On the location of Windham’s tubing hill

I frankly never even realized that Windham had a tubing hill until Seamans mentioned it. Even though it’s marked on the trailmap, the complex sits across the access road, well removed from the actual ski area. Tubing is not really something I give a damn about (sorry #TubeNation), other than to acknowledge that it’s probably the reason many small ski areas can continue to exist, but I usually at least notice it if it’s there. Circled in red below:

On Hermitage Club

We talk a bit about how Hermitage Club is similar in size to Windham. The southern Vermont ski area sports a slightly smaller vertical drop (1,400 feet to Windham’s 1,600), and skiable acreage (200 to Windham’s 285). Here’s the trailmap:

On Holimont, Buffalo Ski Club, and Hunt Hollow

New York is home to three private, chairlift-served ski areas that all follow a similar business model: the general public is welcome on weekdays, but weekends and holidays are reserved for members. Holimont, right next door to Holiday Valley, is the largest and most well-known:

Hunt Hollow is smaller and less-renowned, but it’s a nice little bump (my favorite fact about HH is that the double chair – the farthest looker’s left – is Snowbird’s old Little Cloud lift):

Buffalo Ski Center is the agglomeration of three side-by-side, formerly separate ski areas: Sitzmarker Ski Club, Ski Tamarack and Buffalo Ski Club. The trail network is dense and super interesting:

On Windham in The New York Times

I referred to a feature story that The Times ran on Windham last December. Read that here.

On Vail’s pay bump

When Vail Resorts raised its minimum wage to $20 an hour in 2022, that presented a direct challenge to every competing resort, including Windham, just down the road from Vail-owned Hunter.

On Windham’s village expansion

Windham will build a new condominium village over some portion of its current parking lots. Here’s a concept drawing:

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 57/100 in 2024, and number 557 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

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Sept. 11. It dropped for free subscribers on Sept. 19. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:

Who

Matt Davies, General Manager of Cypress Mountain, British Columbia

Recorded on

August 5, 2024

About Cypress Mountain

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Boyne Resorts

Located in: West Vancouver, British Columbia

Year founded: 1970

Pass affiliations:

* Ikon Pass: 7 days, no blackouts

* Ikon Base Pass: 5 days, holiday blackouts

Closest neighboring ski areas: Grouse Mountain (:28), Mt. Seymour (:55) – travel times vary considerably given weather, time of day, and time of year

Base elevation: 2,704 feet/824 meters (base of Raven Ridge quad)

Summit elevation: 4,720 feet/1,440 meters (summit of Mt. Strachan)

Vertical drop: 2,016 feet/614 meters total | 1,236 feet/377 meters on Black Mountain | 1,720 feet/524 meters on Mt. Strachan

Skiable Acres: 600 acres

Average annual snowfall: 245 inches/622 cm

Trail count: 53 (13% beginner, 43% intermediate, 44% difficult)

Lift count: 7 (2 high-speed quads, 3 fixed-grip quads, 1 double, 1 carpet – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Cypress’ lift fleet)

View historic Cypress Mountain trailmaps on skimap.org.

Why I interviewed him

I’m stubbornly obsessed with ski areas that are in places that seem impractical or improbable: above Los Angeles, in Indiana, in a New Jersey mall. Cypress doesn’t really fit into this category, but it also sort of does. It makes perfect sense that a ski area would sit north of the 49th Parallel, scraping the same snow train that annually buries the mountains from Mt. Bachelor all the way to Whistler. It seems less likely that a 2,000-vertical-foot ski area would rise just minutes outside of Canada’s third-largest city, one known for its moderate climate. But Cypress is exactly that, and offers – along with its neighbors Grouse Mountain and Mt. Seymour – a bite of winter anytime cityfolk want to open the refrigerator door.

There’s all kinds of weird stuff going on here, actually. Why is this little locals’ bump – a good ski area, and a beautiful one, but no one’s destination – decorated like a four-star general of skiing? 2010 Winter Olympics host mountain. Gilded member of Alterra’s Ikon Pass. A piece of Boyne’s continent-wide jigsaw puzzle. It’s like you show up at your buddy’s one-room hunting cabin and he’s like yeah actually I built like a Batcave/wave pool/personal zoo with rideable zebras underneath. And you’re like dang Baller who knew?

What we talked about

Offseason projects; snowmaking evolution since Boyne’s 2001 acquisition; challenges of getting to 100 percent snowmaking; useful parking lot snow; how a challenging winter became “a pretty incredible experience for the whole team”; last winter: el nino or climate change?; why working for Whistler was so much fun; what happened when Vail Resorts bought Whistler – “I don’t think there was a full understanding of the cultural differences between Canadians and Americans”; the differences between Cypress and Whistler; working for Vail versus working for Boyne – “the mantra at Boyne Resorts is that ‘we’re a company of ski resorts, not a ski resort company’”; the enormous and potentially enormously transformative Cypress Village development; connecting village to ski area via aerial lift; future  lift upgrades, including potential six-packs; potential night-skiing expansion; paid parking incoming; the Ikon Pass; the 76-day pass guarantee; and Cypress’ Olympic legacy.

Why now was a good time for this interview

Mountain town housing is most often framed as an intractable problem, ingrown and malignant and impossible to reset or rethink or repair. Too hard to do. But it is not hard to do. It is the easiest thing in the world. To provide more housing, municipalities must allow developers to build more housing, and make them do it in a way that is dense and walkable, that is mixed with commerce, that gives people as many ways to move around without a car as possible.

This is not some new or brilliant idea. This is simply how humans built villages for about 10,000 years, until the advent of the automobile. Then we started building our spaces for machines instead of for people. This was a mistake, and is the root problem of every mountain town housing crisis in North America. That and the fact that U.S. Americans make no distinction between the hyper-thoughtful new urbanist impulses described here and the sprawling shitpile of random buildings that are largely the backdrop of our national life. The very thing that would inject humanity into the mountains is recast as a corrupting force that would destroy a community’s already-compromised-by-bad-design character.

Not that it will matter to our impossible American brains, but Canada is about to show us how to do this. Over the next 25 years, a pocket of raw forest hard against Cypress’ access road will sprout a city of 3,711 homes that will house thousands of people. It will be a human-scaled, pedestrian-first community, a city neighborhood dropped onto a mountainside. A gondola could connect the complex to Cypress’ lifts thousands of feet up the mountain – more cars off the road. It would look like this (the potential aerial lift is not depicted here):

Here’s how the whole thing would set up against the mountain:

And here’s what it would be like at ground level:

Like wow that actually resembles something that is not toxic to the human soul. But to a certain sort of Mother Earth evangelist, the mere suggestion of any sort of mountainside development is blasphemous. I understand this impulse, but I believe that it is misdirected, a too-late reflex against the subdivision-off-an-exit-ramp Build- A-Bungalow mentality that transformed this country into a car-first sprawlscape. I believe a reset is in order: to preserve large tracts of wilderness, we should intensely develop small pieces of land, and leave the rest alone. This is about to happen near Cypress. We should pay attention.

More on Cypress Village:

* West Vancouver Approves ‘Transformational’ Plan for Cypress Village Development - North Shore News

* West Vancouver Approves Cypress Village Development with Homes for Nearly 7,000 People - Urbanized

What I got wrong

* I said that Cypress had installed the Easy Rider quad in 2021, rather than 2001 (the correct year).

* I also said that certain no-ski zones on Vail Mountain’s trailmap were labelled as “lynx habitat.” They are actually labelled as “wildlife habitat.” My confusion stemmed from the resort’s historical friction with the pro-Lynxers.

Why you should ski Cypress Mountain

You’ll see it anyway on your way north to Whistler: the turnoff to Cypress Bowl Road. Four switchbacks and you’re there, to a cut in the mountains surrounded by chairlifts, neon-green Olympic rings standing against the pines.

This is not Whistler and no one will try to tell you that it is, including the guy running the place, who put in two decades priming the machine just up the road. But Cypress is not just a waystation either, or a curiosity, or a Wednesday evening punchcard for Vancouver Cubicle Bro. Two thousand vertical feet is a lot of vertical feet. It often snows here by the Dumpster load. Off the summits, spectacular views, panoramic, sweeping, a jigsaw interlocking of the manmade and natural worlds. The terrain is varied, playful, plentiful. And when the snow settles and the trees fill in, a bit of an Incredible Hulk effect kicks on, as this mild-mannered Bruce Banner of a ski area flexes into something bigger and beefier, an unlikely superhero of the Vancouver heights.

But Cypress is also not a typical Ikon Pass resort: 600 acres, six chairlifts, not a single condo tucked against the hill. It’s a ski area that’s just a ski area. It rains a lot. A busy-day hike up from the most distant parking lot can eat an irrevocable part of your soul (new shuttles this year should help that). Snowmaking, by Boyne standards, is limited, (though punchy for B.C.). The lift fleet, also by Boyne standards, feels merely adequate, rather than the am-I-in-Austria-or-Montana explosive awe that hits you at the base of Big Sky.  

To describe a ski area as both spectacular and ordinary feels like a contradiction (or, worse, lazy on my part). But Cypress is in fact both of these things. Lodged in a national park, yet part of Vancouver’s urban fabric. Brown-dirt trails in February and dang-where’d-I-leave-my-giraffe deep 10 days later. Just another urban ski area, but latched onto a pass with Aspen and Alta, a piece of a company that includes Big Sky and Big Cottonwood and a pair of New England ski areas that dwarf their Brother Cypress. A stop on the way north to Whistler, but much more than that as well.

Podcast Notes

On the 2010 Winter Olympics

A summary of Cypress’ Olympic timeline, from the mountain’s history page:

On Whistler Blackcomb

We talk quite a bit about Whistler, where Davies worked for two decades. Here’s a trailmap so you don’t have to go look it up:

On animosity between the merger of Whistler and Blackcomb

I covered this when I hosted Whistler COO Belinda Trembath on the podcast a few months back.

On neighbors

Cypress is one of three ski areas seated just north of Vancouver. The other two are Grouse Mountain and Mt. Seymour, which we allude to briefly in the podcast. Here are some visuals:

On Boyne’s building binge

I won’t itemize everything here, but over the past half decade or so, Boyne has leapt ahead of everyone else in North American in adoption of hyper-modern lift technology. The company operates all five eight-place chairlift in the United States, has built four advanced six-packs, just built a rocketship-speedy tram at Big Sky, has rebuilt and repurposed four high-speed quads within its portfolio, and has upgraded a bucketload of aging fixed-grip chairs. And many more lifts, including two super-advanced gondolas coming to Big Sky, are on their way.

On Sunday River’s progression carpets

This is how carpets ought to be stacked – as a staircase from easiest to hardest, letting beginners work up their confidence with short bursts of motion:

On side-by-side carpets

Boyne has two of these bad boys, as far as I know – one at Big Sky, and one at Summit at Snoqualmie, both installed last year. Here’s the Big Sky lift:

On Ikon resorts in B.C. and proximity to Cypress

While British Columbia is well-stocked with Ikon Pass partners – Revelstoke, Red Mountain, Panorama, Sun Peaks – none of them is anywhere near Cypress. The closest, Sun Peaks, is four to five hours under the best conditions. The next closest Ikon Pass partner is The Summit at Snoqualmie, four hours and an international border south – so more than twice the distance as that little place north of Cypress called Whistler.

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Who

Chauncy and Kelli Johnson, Founders of the Snow Angel Foundation

Recorded on

June 17, 2024

About the Snow Angel Foundation

From their website:

Our mission is to prevent ski and snowboard collisions so that everyone can Ride Another Day! We accomplish our mission through education and awareness to promote safe skiing and snowboarding behaviors. The Foundation was started as a result of a life changing collision and a desire to ensure that these types of collisions never happen again. Since 2016, we have been creating a social movement among skiers and snowboarders with the “Ride Another Day” campaign. Snow Angel Foundation, founded in 2023, is the vehicle that will expand this campaign and transform the culture of skiing and snowboarding into a safety-oriented community. Partner with us so we can all Ride Another Day!

The “life changing collision” referred to above resulted in the death of this little girl, Elise Johnson, in 2010:

Why I interviewed them

The first time I saw this, I felt like I got punched:

I was skiing Snowbird, ground zero for aggressive, full-throttle skiing. The things you see there. The terrain invites it. The bottomless snow enables it. The cultish battle cries of packed-full tram cars demand it. Snowbird is a circus, an amphitheater, a place that scares the s**t out of anyone with a pulse. There aren’t many beginners there. Or even intermediates. You’re far more likely to smash your face into a rock than clip some meandering 8-year-old’s tails when you drop into Silver Fox.

But the contrast between that mountain and that message was powerful. For a subset of skiers, every ski day must be this sort of ski day, every run a showcase of their buckle-bending, torque-busting snow arcs. “Out of My Path, Mortals. You are all just traffic cones around which I dance. Admire me!” And it’s like damn bro how are you single?

That ski behaviors aren’t transferable from High Baldy to Baby Thunder is a memo that too many skiers have yet to receive. Is anyone else tired of this? Of World Cup trials on blue groomers? Of the social media braggadocio and bravado about skiing six times the speed of light? Of knuckleheads conflating speed with skill? When I talk about The Brobots, this is a big part of what I mean: the sense of entitlement to do as they please with shared space, without regard for the impact their actions could have on others.

I hope one or two of these people will listen to this podcast. And I hope they will stop threading the Buttercup Runout back to the Carebear Quad as though they were navigating an X-Wing through an asteroid belt. Speed is a big part of skiing’s appeal. The power and adrenaline of it, the thrill. But there are places on the bump where it’s appropriate to tuck and fly, and places where it just isn’t. And I wish more of us knew the difference.

What we talked about

Elise just “had a lot of light”; being a ski family; an awful Christmas Eve at Hogadon Basin; waking up six weeks later; recovering from grief; why the family kept skiing; transforming pain into activism; slow the F down Brah; who’s doing a good job on safety; ski industry opposition to injury- and death-reporting regulations; and what we learned from the mass adoption of helmets.

Podcast Notes

On couples on the podcast

I mentioned I’ve hosted several husband-wife combinations on the podcast, mostly the owners of ski areas:

* Plattekill, New York owners Laszlo and Danielle Vajtay

* Paul Bunyan, Wisconsin owners TJ and Wendy Kerscher

* West Mountain, New York owners Sara and Spencer Montgomery

On Antelope Butte

The Johnsons’ local is Antelope Butte, a little double-chair bump in northern Wyoming:

On Snowy Range

The Johnsons also spent time skiing Snowy Range, also in Wyoming:

On Hogadon Basin

The incident in question went down on the Dreadnaught run at Hogadon Basin, a 600-vertical-foot bump 20 minutes south of Casper, Wyoming:

On 50 First Dates

By her own account, Kelli’s life for six weeks went about like this:

On the Colorado Sun’s research on industry opposition to safety-reporting requirements

From April 8, 2024:

[13-year-old] Silas [Luckett] is one of thousands of people injured on Colorado ski slopes every winter. With the state’s ski hills posting record visitation in the past two seasons — reaching 14.8 million in 2022-23 — it would appear that the increasing frequency of injuries coincides with the rising number of visits. We say “appear” because, unlike just about every other industry in the country, the resort industry does not disclose injury data. …

Ski resorts do not release injury reports. The ski resort industry keeps a tight grasp on even national injury data. Since 1980, the National Ski Areas Association provides select researchers with injury data for peer-reviewed reports issued every 10 years by the National Ski Areas Association. The most recent 10-year review of ski injuries was published in 2014, looking at 13,145 injury reports from the 2010-11 ski season at resorts that reported 4.6 million visits.

The four 10-year reports showed a decline in skier injuries from 3.1 per 1,000 visitors in 1980-81 to 2.7 in 1990-91 to 2.6 in 2000-01 to 2.5 in 2010-11. Snowboarder injuries were 3.3 in 1990, 7.0 in 2000 and 6.1 in 2010.

For 1990-91, the nation’s ski areas reported 46.7 million skier visits, 2000-01 was 57.3 million and 2010-11 saw a then all–time high of 60.5 million visits. …

The NSAA’s once-a-decade review of injuries from 2020-21 was delayed during the pandemic and is expected to land later this year. But the association’s reports are not available to the public [the NSAA disputes this, and provided a copy of the report to The Storm; I’ll address this in more detail in an upcoming, already-recorded podcast with NSAA president Kelly Pawlak].

When Colorado state Sen. Jessie Danielson crafted a bill in 2021 that would have required ski areas to publish annual injury statistics, the industry blasted the plan, arguing it would be an administrative burden and confuse the skiing public. It died in committee.

“When we approached the ski areas to work on any of the details in the bill, they refused,” Danielson, a Wheat Ridge Democrat, told The Sun in 2021. “It makes me wonder what it is that they are hiding. It seems to me that an industry that claims to have safety as a top priority would be interested in sharing the information about injuries on their mountains.”

The resort industry vehemently rebuffs the notion that ski areas do not take safety seriously.

Patricia Campbell, the then-president of Vail Resorts’ 37-resort mountain division and a 35-year veteran of the resort industry, told Colorado lawmakers considering the 2021 legislation that requiring ski resorts to publish safety reports was “not workable” and would create an “unnecessary burden, confusion and distraction.”

Requiring resorts to publish public safety plans, she said, would “trigger a massive administrative effort” that could redirect resort work from other safety measures.

“Publishing safety plans will not inform skiers about our work or create a safer ski area,” Campbell told the Colorado Senate’s Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee in April 2021.

The Sun also compiles an annual report of deaths at Colorado ski areas.

On helmet culture

Problems often seem intractable, the world fossilized. But sometimes simple things change so completely, and in such a short period of time, that it’s almost impossible to imagine the world before. I was 19, for example, the first time I used the internet, and 23 when I acquired its evil cousin, the cellphone (which would not be usefully linked to the web for about another decade).

In our little ski world, the thing-that-is-now-ubiquitous-that-once-barely-existed is helmets. As recently as the 1990s, you likely weren’t dropping a bucket on your skull unless you were running gates on a World Cup circuit. It’s not that we didn’t know about them – helmets have been around since, like, the Bronze Age. But nobody wore them. Nobody.

Then, suddenly, everyone did. Or, well, it seemed sudden, though it’s surprising to see that, as recently as the 2002-03 ski season, only around 25 percent of skiers bothered to strap on a helmet:

I was a late adopter when I first wore a helmet in 2016. And when I finally got there, I realized, hey, this thing is warm. It also came in handy when I slammed the back of my head into a downed tree at Jay Peak last March.

I don’t have hard stats on helmet usage going back to the 1990s, but check out this circa 1990s casual ski day vid at an unidentified U.S. mountain:

I counted one helmet. On a kid. To underscore the point, here’s a circa 1990s promo for Steamboat Ski Patrol, which captures the big-mountain crew rocking knit caps and goggles:

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Who

Peter Disch, General Manager of Mount Sunapee, New Hampshire (following this interview, Vail Resorts promoted Disch to Vice President of Mountain Operations at its Heavenly ski area in California; he will start that new position on Aug. 5, 2024; as of July 27, Vail had yet to name the next GM of Sunapee.)

Recorded on

June 24, 2024

About Mount Sunapee

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: The State of New Hampshire; operated by Vail Resorts

Located in: Newbury, New Hampshire

Year founded: 1948

Pass affiliations:

* Epic Pass, Epic Local Pass, Northeast Value Epic Pass: unlimited access

* Northeast Midweek Epic Pass: midweek access, including holidays

Closest neighboring (public) ski areas: Pats Peak (:28), Whaleback (:29), Arrowhead (:29), Ragged (:38), Veterans Memorial (:42), Ascutney (:45), Crotched (:48), Quechee (:50), Granite Gorge (:51), McIntyre (:53), Saskadena Six (1:04), Tenney (1:06)

Base elevation: 1,233 feet

Summit elevation: 2,743 feet

Vertical drop: 1,510 feet

Skiable Acres: 233 acres

Average annual snowfall: 130 inches

Trail count: 67 (29% beginner, 47% intermediate, 24% advanced)

Lift count: 8 (2 high-speed quads, 1 fixed-grip quad, 2 triples, 3 conveyors – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Mount Sunapee’s lift fleet.)

History: Read New England Ski History’s overview of Mount Sunapee

View historic Mount Sunapee trailmaps on skimap.org.

Why I interviewed him

New Hampshire state highway 103 gives you nothing. Straight-ish and flattish, lined with trees and the storage-unit detritus of the American outskirts, nothing about the road suggests a ski-area approach. Looping south off the great roundabout-ish junction onto Mt. Sunapee Road still underwhelms. As though you’ve turned into someone’s driveway, or are seeking some obscure historical monument, or simply made a mistake. Because what, really, could be back there to ski?

And then you arrive. All at once. A parking lot. The end of the road. The ski area heaves upward on three sides. Lifts all over. The top is up there somewhere. It’s not quite Silverton-Telluride smash-into-the-backside-of-a-box-canyon dramatic, but maybe it’s as close as you get in New Hampshire, or at least southern New Hampshire, less than two hours north of Boston.

But the true awe waits up high. North off the summit, Lake Sunapee dominates the foreground, deep blue-black or white-over-ice in midwinter, like the flat unfinished center of a puzzle made from the hills and forests that rise and roll from all sides. Thirty miles west, across the lowlands where the Connecticut River marks the frontier with Vermont, stands Okemo, interstate-wide highways of white strafing the two-mile face.

Then you ski. Sunapee does not measure big but it feels big, an Alpine illusion exploding over the flats. Fifteen hundred vertical feet is plenty of vertical feet, especially when it rolls down the frontside like a waterfall. Glades everywhere, when they’re live, which is less often than you’d hope but more often than you’d think. Good runs, cruisers and slashers, a whole separate face for beginners, a 374-vertical-foot ski-area-within-a-ski-area, perfectly spliced from the pitched main mountain.

Southern New Hampshire has a lot of ski areas, and a lot of well-run ski areas, but not a lot of truly great pure ski areas. Sunapee, as both an artwork and a plaything, surpasses them all, the ribeye on the grill stacked with hamburgers, a delightful and filling treat.

What we talked about

Sunapee enhancements ahead of the 2024-25 winter; a new parking lot incoming; whether Sunapee considered paid parking to resolve its post-Covid, post-Northeast Epic Pass launch backups; the differences in Midwest, West, and Eastern ski cultures; the big threat to Mount Sunapee in the early 1900s; the Mueller family legacy and “The Sunapee Difference”; what it means for Vail Resorts to operate a state-owned ski area; how cash flows from Sunapee to Cannon; Sunapee’s masterplan; the long-delayed West Bowl expansion; incredible views from the Sunapee summit; the proposed Sun Bowl-North Peak connection; potential upgrades for the Sunapee Express, North Peak, and Spruce lifts; the South Peak beginner area; why Sunapee built a ski-through lighthouse; why high-speed ropetows rule; the potential for Sunapee night-skiing; whether Sunapee should be unlimited on the Northeast Value Pass (which it currently is); and why Vail’s New Hampshire mountains are on the same Epic Day Pass tier as its Midwest ski areas.

Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview

Should states own ski areas? And if so, should state agencies run those ski areas, or should they be contracted to private operators?

These are fraught questions, especially in New York, where three state-owned ski areas (Whiteface, Gore, and Belleayre) guzzle tens of millions of dollars in new lift, snowmaking, and other infrastructure while competing directly against dozens of tax-paying, family-owned operations spinning Hall double chairs that predate the assassination of JFK. The state agency that operates the three ski areas plus Lake Placid’s competition facilities, the Olympic Regional Development Authority (ORDA), reported a $47.3 million operating loss for the fiscal year ending March 30, following a loss of $29.3 million the prior year. Yet there are no serious proposals at the state-government level to even explore what it would mean to contract a private operator to run the facilities.

If New York state officials were ever so inspired, they could look 100 miles east, where the State of New Hampshire has run a sort of A-B experiment on its two owned ski areas since the late 1990s. New Hampshire’s state parks association has operated Cannon Mountain since North America’s first aerial tram opened on the site in 1938. For a long time, the agency operated Mount Sunapee as well. But in 1998, the state leased the ski area to the Mueller family, who had spent the past decade and a half transforming Okemo from a T-bar-clotted dump into one of Vermont’s largest and most modern resorts.

Twenty-six years later, that arrangement stands: the state owns and operates Cannon, and owns Sunapee but leases it to a private operator (Vail Resorts assumed or renewed the lease when they purchased the Muellers’ Triple Peaks company, which included Okemo and Crested Butte, Colorado, in 2018). As part of that contract, a portion of Sunapee’s revenues each year funnel into a capital fund for Cannon.

So, does this arrangement work? For Vail, for the state, for taxpayers, for Sunapee, and for Cannon? As we consider the future of skiing, these are important questions: to what extent should the state sponsor recreation, especially when that form of recreation competes directly against private, tax-paying businesses who are, essentially, subsidizing their competition? It’s tempting to offer a reflexive ideological answer here, but nuance interrupts us at ground-level. Alterra, for instance, leases and operates Winter Park from the City of Denver. Seems logical, but a peak-day walk-up Winter Park lift ticket will cost you around $260 for the 2024-25 winter. Is this a fair one-day entry fee for a city-owned entity?

The story of Mount Sunapee, a prominent and busy ski area in a prominent and busy ski state, is an important part of that larger should-government-own-ski-areas conversation. The state seems happy to let Vail run their mountain, but equally happy to continue running Cannon. That’s curious, especially in a state with a libertarian streak that often pledges allegiance by hoisting two middle fingers skyward. The one-private-one-public arrangement was a logical experiment that, 26 years later, is starting to feel a bit schizophrenic, illustrative of the broader social and economic complexities of changing who runs a business and how they do that. Is Vail Resorts better at running commercial ski centers than the State of New Hampshire? They sure as hell should be. But are they? And should Sunapee serve as a template for New York and the other states, counties, and cities that own ski areas? To decide if it works, we first have to understand how it works, and we spend a big part of this interview doing exactly that.

What I got wrong

* When listing the Vail Resorts with paid parking lots, I accidentally slipped Sunapee in place of Mount Snow, Vermont. Only the latter has paid parking.

* When asking Disch about Sunapee’s masterplan, I accidentally tossed Sunapee into Vail’s Peak Resorts acquisition in 2019. But Peak never operated Sunapee. The resort entered Vail’s portfolio as part of its acquisition of Triple Peaks – which also included Okemo and Crested Butte – in 2018.

* I neglected to elaborate on what a “chondola” lift is. It’s a lift that alternates (usually six-person) chairs with (usually eight-person) gondola cabins. The only active such lift in New England is at Sunday River, but Arizona Snowbowl, Northstar, Copper Mountain, and Beaver Creek operate six/eight-passenger chondolas in the American West. Telluride runs a short chondola with four-person chairs and four-person gondola cars.

* I said that the six New England states combined covered an area “less than half the size of Colorado.” This is incorrect: the six New England states, combined, cover 71,987 square miles; Colorado is 103,610 square miles.

Why you should ski Mount Sunapee

Ski area rankings are hard. Properly done, they include dozens of inputs, considering every facet of the mountain across the breadth of a season from the point of view of multiple skiers. Sunapee on an empty midweek powder day might be the best day of your life. Sunapee on a Saturday when it hasn’t snowed in three weeks but everyone in Boston shows up anyway might be the worst. For this reason, I largely avoid assembling lists of the best or worst this or that and abstain, mostly, from criticizing mountain ops – the urge to let anecdote stand in for observable pattern and truth is strong.

So when I do stuff ski areas into a hierarchy, it’s generally grounded in what’s objective and observable: Cottonwoods snow really is fluffier and more bounteous than almost all other snow; Tahoe resort density really does make it one of the world’s great ski centers; Northern Vermont really does deliver far deeper snow and better average conditions than the rest of New England. In that same shaky, room-for-caveats manner, I’m comfortable saying this: Mount Sunapee’s South Peak delivers one of the best beginner/novice experiences in the Northeast.

Arrive childless and experienced, and it’s likely you’ll ignore this zone altogether. Which is precisely what makes it so great: almost completely cut off from the main mountain, South Peak is free from high-altitude bombers racing back to the lifts. Three progression carpets offer the perfect ramp-up experience. The 374-vertical-foot quad rises high enough to feel grown-up without stoking the summit lakeview vertigo. The trails are gently tilted but numerous and interesting. Other than potential for an errant turn down Sunnyside toward the Sunapee Express, it’s almost impossible to get lost. It’s as though someone chopped a mid-sized Midwest ski area from the earth, airlifted it east, and stapled it onto the edge of Sunapee:

A few other Northeast ski areas offer this sort of ski-area-within-a-ski-area beginner separation – Burke, Belleayre, Whiteface, and Smugglers’ Notch all host expansive standalone beginner zones. But Sunapee’s is one of the easiest to access for New England’s core Boston market, and, because of the Epic Pass, one of the most affordable.

For everyone else, Sunapee’s main mountain distills everything that is great and terrible about New England skiing: a respectable vertical drop; a tight, complex, and varied trail network; a detached-from-conditions determination to be outdoors in the worst of it. But also impossible weekend crowds, long snow draughts, a tendency to overgroom even when the snow does fall, and an over-emphasis on driving, with nowhere to stay on-mountain. But even when it’s not perfect, which it almost never is, Sunapee is always, objectively, a great natural ski mountain, a fall-line classic, a little outpost of the north suspiciously far south.  

Podcast Notes

On Sunapee’s masterplan and West Bowl expansion

As a state park, Mount Sunapee is required to submit an updated masterplan every five years. The most transformative piece of this would be the West Bowl expansion, a 1,082-vertical-foot pod running skiers’ left off the current summit (right in purple on the map below):

The masterplan also proposes upgrades for several of Sunapee’s existing lifts, including the Sunapee Express and the Spruce and North Peak triples:

On past Storm Skiing Podcasts:

Disch mentions a recent podcast that I recorded with Attitash, New Hampshire GM Brandon Schwarz. You can listen to that here. I’ve also recorded pods with the leaders of a dozen other New Hampshire mountains:

* Wildcat GM JD Crichton (May 30, 2024)

* Gunstock President & GM Tom Day (April 15, 2024) – now retired

* Tenney Mountain GM Dan Egan (April 8, 2024) – no longer works at Tenney

* Cranmore President & GM Ben Wilcox (Oct. 16, 2023)

* Dartmouth Skiway GM Mark Adamczyk (June 12, 2023)

* Granite Gorge GM Keith Kreischer (May 30, 2023)

* Loon Mountain President & GM Brian Norton (Nov. 14, 2022)

* Pats Peak GM Kris Blomback (Sept. 26, 2022)

* Ragged Mountain GM Erik Barnes (April 26, 2022)

* Whaleback Mountain Executive Director Jon Hunt (June 16, 2021)

* Waterville Valley President & GM Tim Smith (Feb. 22, 2021)

* Cannon Mountain GM John DeVivo (Oct. 6, 2020) – now GM at Antelope Butte, Wyoming

On New England ski area density

Disch referenced the density of ski areas in New England. With 100 ski areas crammed into six states, this is without question the densest concentration of lift-served skiing in the United States. Here’s an inventory:

On the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)

From 1933 to 1942 – the height of the Great Depression – a federal government agency knows as the Civilian Conservation Corps recruited single men between the ages of 18 and 25 to “improve America’s public lands, forests, and parks.” Some of this work included the cutting of ski trails on then-virgin mountains, including Mount Sunapee. While the CCC trail is no longer in use on Sunapee, that first project sparked the notion of skiing on the mountain and led to the development of the ski area we know today.

On potential Northeast expansions and there being “a bunch that are proposed all over the region”

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but a few of the larger Northeast expansions that are creeping toward reality include a new trailpod at Berkshire East:

This massive, village-connecting expansion that would completely transform Waterville Valley:

The de-facto resurrection of New York’s lost Highmount ski area with an expansion from adjacent Belleayre:

And the monster proposed Western Territories expansion that could double the size of Sunday River. There’s no public map of this one presently available.

On high-speed ropetows

I’ll keep beating the crap out of this horse until you all realize that I’m right:

A high-speed ropetow at Spirit Mountain, Minnesota. Video by Stuart Winchester.

On Crotched proximity and night skiing

We talk briefly about past plans for night-skiing on Sunapee, and Disch argues that, while that may have made sense when the Muellers owned the ski area, it’s no longer likely since Vail also owns Crotched, which hosts one of New England’s largest night-skiing operations less than an hour south. It’s a fantastic little operation, a once-abandoned mountain completely rebuilt from the studs by Peak Resorts:

On the Epic Day Pass

Here’s another thing I don’t plan to stop talking about ever:

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