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Who

Lonie Glieberman, Founder, Owner, & President of Mount Bohemia, Michigan

Recorded on

November 19, 2025

About Mount Bohemia

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Lonie Glieberman

Located in: Lac La Belle, Michigan

Year founded: 2000, by Lonie

Pass affiliations: None

Reciprocal partners: Boho has developed one of the strongest reciprocal pass programs in the nation, with lift tickets to 34 partner mountains. To protect the mountain’s more distant partners from local ticket-hackers, those ski areas typically exclude in-state and border-state residents from the freebies. Here’s the map:

And here’s the Big Dumb Storm Chart detailing each mountain and its Boho access:

Closest neighboring ski areas: Mont Ripley (:50)

Base elevation: 624 feet

Summit elevation: 1,522 feet

Vertical drop: 898 feet

Skiable acres: 585

Average annual snowfall: 273 inches

Trail count: It’s hard to say exactly, as Boho adds new trails every year, and its map is one of the more confusing ones in American skiing, both as you try analyzing it on this screen, and as you’re actually navigating the mountain. My advice is to not try too hard to make the trailmap make sense. Everything is skiable with enough snow, and no matter what, you’re going to end up back at one of the two chairlifts or the road, where a shuttlebus will come along within a few minutes.

Lift count: 2 (1 triple, 1 double)

Why I interviewed him

For those of us who lived through a certain version of America, Mount Bohemia is a fever dream, an impossible thing, a bantered-about-with-friends-in-a-basement-rec-room-idea that could never possibly be. This is because we grew up in a world in which such niche-cool things never happened. Before the internet spilled from the academic-military fringe into the mainstream around 1996, We The Commoners fed our brains with a subsistence diet of information meted out by institutional media gatekeepers. What I mean by “gatekeepers” is the limited number of enterprises who could afford the broadcast licenses, printing presses, editorial staffs, and building and technology infrastructure that for decades tethered news and information to costly distribution mechanisms.

In some ways this was a better and more reliable world: vetted, edited, fact-checked. Even ostensibly niche media – the Electronic Gaming Monthly and Nintendo Power magazines that I devoured monthly – emerged from this cubicle-in-an-office-tower Process that guaranteed a sober, reality-based information exchange.

But this professionalized, high-cost-of-entry, let’s-get-Bob’s-sign-off-before-we-run-this, don’t-piss-off-the-advertisers world limited options, which in turn limited imaginations – or at least limited the real-world risks anyone with money was willing to take to create something different. We had four national television networks and a couple dozen cable channels and one or two local newspapers and three or four national magazines devoted to niche pursuits like skiing. We had bookstores and libraries and the strange, ephemeral world of radio. We had titanic, impossible-to-imagine-now big-box chain stores ordering the world’s music and movies into labelled bins, from which shoppers could hope – by properly interpreting content from box-design flare or maybe just by luck – to pluck some soul-altering novelty.

There was little novelty. Or at least, not much that didn’t feel like a slightly different version of something you’d already consumed. Everything, no matter how subversive its skin, had to appeal to the masses, whose money was required to support the enterprise of content creation. Pseudo-rebel networks such as ESPN and MTV quickly built global brands by applying the established institutional framework of network television to the mainstream-but-information-poor cultural centerpieces of sports and music.

This cultural sameness expressed itself not just in media, but in every part of life: America’s brand-name sprawl-ture (sprawl culture) of restaurants and clothing stores and home décor emporia; its stuff-freeways-through-downtown ruining of our great cities; its three car companies stamping out nondescript sedans by the millions.

Skiing has long acted as a rebel’s escape from staid American culture, but it has also been hemmed in by it. Yes, said Skiing Incorporated circa 1992, we can allow a photo of some fellow jumping off a cliff if it helps convince Nabisco Bob fly his family out to Colorado for New Year’s, so long as his family is at no risk of actually locating any cliffs to jump off of upon arrival. After all, 1992 Bob has no meaningful outlet through which to highlight this advertising-experience disconnect.

The internet broke this whole system. Everywhere, for everything. If I wanted, say, a Detroit Pistons hoodie in 1995, I had to drive to a dozen stores and choose the least-bad version from the three places that stocked them. Today I have far more choice at far less hassle: I can browse hundreds of designs online without leaving the house. Same for office furniture or shoes or litterboxes or laundry baskets or cars. And especially for media and information. Consumer choice is greater not only because the internet eliminated distance, but also because it largely eliminated the enormous costs required to actualize a tangible thing from the imagination.

There were trade-offs, of course. Our current version of reality has too many options, too many poorly made products, too much bad information. But the internet did a really good job of democratizing preferences and uniting dispersed communities around niche interests. Yes, this means that a global community of morons can assemble over their shared belief that the planet is flat, but it also means that legions of Star Wars or Marvel Comics or football obsessives can unite to demand more of these specific things. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the dormant Star Wars and Marvel franchises rebooted in spectacular, omnipresent fashion within a decade of the .com era’s dawn.

The trajectory was slightly different in skiing. The big-name ski areas today are largely the same set of big-name ski areas that we had 30 years ago, at least in America (Canada is a very different story). But what the internet helped bring to skiing was an awareness that the desire for turns outside of groomed runs was not the hyper-specific desire of the most dedicated, living-in-a-campervan-with-their-dog skiers, but a relatively mainstream preference. Established ski areas adapted, adding glades and terrain parks and ungroomed zones. The major ski areas of 2025 are far more interesting versions of the ski areas that existed under the same names in 1995.

Dramatic and welcome as these additions were, they were just additions. No ski area completely reversed itself and shut out the mainstream skier. No one stopped grooming or eliminated their ski school or stopped renting gear. But they did act as something of a proof-of-concept for minimalist ski areas that would come online later, including avy-gear-required, no-grooming Silverton, Colorado in 2001, and, at the tip-top of the American Midwest, in a place too remote for anyone other than industrial mining interests to bother with, the ungroomed, snowmaking-free Mount Bohemia.

I can’t draw a direct line between the advent of the commercial internet and the rise of Mount Bohemia as a successful niche business within a niche industry. But I find it hard to imagine one without the other. The pre-internet world, the one that gave us shopping malls and laugh-track sitcoms and standard manual transmissions, lacked the institutional imagination to actualize skiing’s most dynamic elements in the form of a wild and remote pilgrimage site. Once the internet ordered fringe freeskiing sentiments into a mainstream coalition, the notion of an extreme ski area seemed inevitable. And Bohemia, without a basically free global megaphone to spread word of its improbable existence, would struggle to establish itself in a ski industry that dismissed the concept as idiotic and with a national ski media that considered the Midwest irrelevant.

Even with the internet, Boho took a while to catch on, as Lonie detailed in his first podcast appearance three years ago. It probably took the mainstreaming of social media, starting around 2008, to really amp up the online echo-sphere and help skiers understand this gladed, lake-effect-bombed kingdom at the end of the world.

Whatever drove Boho’s success, that success happened. This is a good, stable business that proved that ski areas do not have to cater to all skiers to be viable. But those of us who wanted Bohemia before it existed still have a hard time believing that it does. Like superhero movies or video-calls or energy drinks that aren’t coffee, Boho is a thing we could, in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, easily imagine but just as easily dismiss as fantasy.

Fortunately, our modern age of invention and experimentation includes plenty of people who dismiss the dismissers, who see things that don’t exist yet and bring them into our world. And one of the best contributions to skiing to emerge from this age is Mount Bohemia.

What we talked about

Season pass price and access changes; lifetime and two-year season passes; a Disney-ski comparison that isn’t negative; when your day ticket costs as much as your season pass; Lonie’s dog makes a cameo; not selling lift tickets on Saturdays; “too many companies are busy building a brand that no one will hate, versus a brand that someone will love”; why it’s OK to have some people be angry with you; UP skiing’s existential challenge; skiing’s vibe shift from competition to complementary culture; the Midwest’s advanced-skier problem; Boho’s season pass reciprocal program; why ski areas survive; the Keweenaw snow stake and Boho’s snowfall history; recent triple chair improvements and why Boho didn’t fully replace the chair – “it’s basically a brand-new chairlift”; a novel idea for Boho’s next new chairlift; the Nordic spa; proposed rezoning drama; housing at the end of the world; could Mount Bohemia have a Mad River Glen co-op-style future?; why the pass deadline really is the pass deadline; and Mount Bohemia TV.

What I got wrong

* I said that Boho’s one-day lift ticket was “$89 or $92” last time Lonie joined me on the pod, in fall, 2022. The one-day cost for the 2022-23 ski season was $87.

* I said that Powder Mountain, Utah, may extend their no-lift-ticket-sales-on-Saturdays-and-Sundays-in-February policy, which the mountain rolled out last year, to other dates, but their sales calendar shows just eight restricted dates (one of which is Sunday, March 1), which is the same number as last winter.

Why you should ski Mount Bohemia

I can’t add anything useful to this bit that I wrote a few months back:

Or didn’t say three years ago, around my first Boho pod:

Podcast Notes

On Boho’s season pass

On Lonie’s Library

A Boho podcast will always come loaded with some Lonie Library recommendations. In this episode, we get The Power of Cult Branding by Mattew W. Ragas and Bolivar J. Bueno and The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding by Al Ries and Laura Ries.

On Raising Cane’s

Lonie tells us about a restaurant called Raising Cane’s that sells nothing but chicken fingers. Because I have this weird way of sometimes not noticing super-obvious things, I’d never heard of the place. But apparently they have 900-ish locations, including several here in NYC. I’m sure you already know this.

On Jimmy Buffett

Then again I’m sometimes overly attuned to things that I think everyone knows about, like Jimmy Buffett. Probably most people are aware of his Margaritaville-headlined music catalog, but perhaps not the Boomers-Gone-Wild Parrothead energy of his concerts, which were mass demonstrations of a uniquely American weirdness that’s impossible to believe in unless you see it:

I don’t know if I’d classify this spectacle as sports for people who don’t like sports or anthropological proof that mass coordinated niche crowd-dancing predates the advent of TikTok, but I hope this video reaches the aliens first and they decide not to bother.

On “when we spoke in Milwaukee”

This was the second time I’ve interviewed Lonie recently. The first was in front of an audience at the Snowvana ski show in Milwaukee last month. We did record that session, and it was different enough from this pod to justify releasing – I just don’t have a timeline on when I’ll do that yet. Here’s the preview article that outlined the event:

On Lonie operating the Porcupine Mountains ski area

I guess you can make anything look rad. Porcupine Mountains ski area, as presented today under management of the State of Michigan’s Department of Natural Resources:

The same ski area under Lonie’s management, circa 2011:

On the owner of Song and Labrador, New York buying and closing nearby Toggenburg ski area

On Indy’s fight with Ski Cooper

I wrote two stories on this, each of which subtracted five years from my life. The first:

The follow-up:

On Snow Snake, Apple Mountain, and Mott Mountain ski areas

These three Mid-Michigan ski areas were so similar it was frightening – the only thing I can conclude from the fact that Snow Snake is the only one left is that management trumps pretty much everything when it comes to which ski areas survive:

On Crystal Mountain, Michigan versus Sugar Loaf, Michigan

I noted that 1995 Stu viewed Sugar Loaf as a “more interesting” ski area than contemporary Crystal. It’s important to note that this was pre-expansion Crystal, before the ski area doubled in size with backside terrain. Here are the Crystal versus Sugar Loaf trailmaps of that era:

I discussed all of this with Crystal CEO John Melcher last year:

On Thunder Mountain and Walloon Hills

Lonie mentions two additional lost Michigan ski areas: Thunder Mountain and Walloon Hills. The latter, while stripped of its chairlifts, still operates as a nonprofit called Challenge Mountain. Here’s what it looked like just before shuttering as a public ski area in 1978:

The responsible party here was nearby Boyne, which bought both Walloon and Thunder in 1967. They closed the latter in 1984:

The company now known as Boyne Resorts purchased a total of four Michigan ski areas after Everett Kircher founded Boyne Mountain in 1948, starting with The Highlands in 1963. That ski area remains open, but Boyne also owned the 436-vertical foot ski area alternately known as “Barn Mountain” and “Avalanche Peak” from 1972 to ’77. I can’t find a trailmap of this one, but here’s Boyne’s consolidation history:

On Nub’s Nob and The Highlands

When I say that Nub’s Nob and Boyne’s Highlands ski area are right across the street from each other, I mean they really are:

Both are excellent ski areas - two of the best in the entire Midwest.

On Granite Peak’s evolution under Midwest Family Ski Resorts

I’ve written about this a lot, but check out Granite Peak AKA “Rib Mountain” before the company now known as Midwest Family Ski Resorts purchased it in 2000:

And today:

And it’s just like “what you’re allowed to do that?”

On up-and-over chairlifts

Bohemia may replace its double chair with a rare up-and-over machine, which would extend along the current line to the summit, and then continue to the bottom of Haunted Valley, effectively functioning as two chairlifts. Lonie explains the logic in the podcast, but if he succeeds here, this would be the first new up-and-over lift built in the United States since Stevens Pass’ Double Diamond-Southern Cross machine in 1987. I’m only aware of four other such machines in America, all of them in the Midwest:

Little Switzerland recently revealed plans to replace the machine that makes up the 1 and 2 chairlifts with two separate quads next year.

On Boho’s Nordic Spa

I never thought hot tubs and parties and happiness were controversial. Then along came social media. And it turns out that when a ski area that primarily markets itself as a refuge for hardcore skiers also builds a base-area zone for these skiers to sink into another sort of indulgence at day’s end and then promotes these features, it make Angry Ski Bro VERY ANGRY.

For most of human existence we had incentives to prevent ostentatious attention-seeking whining about peripheral things that had no actual impact on your life, and that incentive was Not Wanting To Get Your Ass Kicked. But some people interpreted the distance and anonymity of the internet as a permission slip to become the worst versions of themselves. And so we have a dedicated corps of morons trolling Boho’s socials with chest-thumping proclamations of #RealSkierness that rage against the $18 Nordic Spa fee taped onto each Boho $99 or $112 season pass.

But when you go to Boho, what you see is this:

And these people do not look angry. Because they are doing something fun and cool. Which is one more reason that I stopped reading social media comments several years ago and decided to base reality on living in it rather than observing it through my Pet Rectangle.

On the Mad River Glen Co-Op and Betsy Pratt

So far, the only successful U.S. ski area co-op is Mad River Glen, Vermont. Longtime owner Betsy Pratt orchestrated the transformation in 1995. She passed away in 2023 at age 95, giving her lots of years to watch the model endure. Black Mountain, New Hampshire, is in the midst of a similar transformation.

On Mount Bohemia TV

Boho is a strange, strange universe. Nothing better distills the mountain’s essence than Mount Bohemia TV – I mean that in the literal sense, in that each episode immerses you in this peculiar world, but also in an accidental quirk of its execution. Because the video staff keeps, in Lonie’s words, “losing the password,” Mount Bohemia has at least four official YouTube channels, each of which hosts different episodes of Mount Bohemia TV.

Here’s episodes 1, 2, and 3:

4 through 15:

16 through 20:

And 21 and 22:

If anyone knows how to sort this out, I’m sure they’d appreciate the assist.

Who

Deb Hatley, Owner of Hatley Pointe, North Carolina

Recorded on

July 30, 2025

About Hatley Pointe

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Deb and David Hatley since 2023 - purchased from Orville English, who had owned and operated the resort since 1992

Located in: Mars Hill, North Carolina

Year founded: 1969 (as Wolf Laurel or Wolf Ridge; both names used over the decades)

Pass affiliations: Indy Pass, Indy+ Pass – 2 days, no blackouts

Closest neighboring ski areas: Cataloochee (1:25), Sugar Mountain (1:26)

Base elevation: 4,000 feet

Summit elevation: 4,700 feet

Vertical drop: 700 feet

Skiable acres: 54

Average annual snowfall: 65 inches

Trail count: 21 (4 beginner, 11 intermediate, 6 advanced)

Lift count: 4 active (1 fixed-grip quad, 1 ropetow, 2 carpets); 2 inactive, both on the upper mountain (1 fixed-grip quad, 1 double)

Why I interviewed her

Our world has not one map, but many. Nature drew its own with waterways and mountain ranges and ecosystems and tectonic plates. We drew our maps on top of these, to track our roads and borders and political districts and pipelines and railroad tracks.

Our maps are functional, simplistic. They insist on fictions. Like the 1,260-mile-long imaginary straight line that supposedly splices the United States from Canada between Washington State and Minnesota. This frontier is real so long as we say so, but if humanity disappeared tomorrow, so would that line.

Nature’s maps are more resilient. This is where water flows because this is where water flows. If we all go away, the water keeps flowing. This flow, in turn, impacts the shape and function of the entire world.

One of nature’s most interesting maps is its mountain map. For most of human existence, mountains mattered much more to us than they do now. Meaning: we had to respect these giant rocks because they stood convincingly in our way. It took European settlers centuries to navigate en masse over the Appalachians, which is not even a severe mountain range, by global mountain-range standards. But paved roads and tunnels and gas stations every five miles have muted these mountains’ drama. You can now drive from the Atlantic Ocean to the Midwest in half a day.

So spoiled by infrastructure, we easily forget how dramatically mountains command huge parts of our world. In America, we know this about our country: the North is cold and the South is warm. And we define these regions using battle maps from a 19th Century war that neatly bisected the nation. Another imaginary line. We travel south for beaches and north to ski and it is like this everywhere, a gentle progression, a continent-length slide that warms as you descend from Alaska to Panama.

But mountains disrupt this logic. Because where the land goes up, the air grows cooler. And there are mountains all over. And so we have skiing not just in expected places such as Vermont and Maine and Michigan and Washington, but in completely irrational ones like Arizona and New Mexico and Southern California. And North Carolina.

North Carolina. That’s the one that surprised me. When I started skiing, I mean. Riding hokey-poke chairlifts up 1990s Midwest hills that wouldn’t qualify as rideable surf breaks, I peered out at the world to figure out where else people skied and what that skiing was like. And I was astonished by how many places had organized skiing with cut trails and chairlifts and lift tickets, and by how many of them were way down the Michigan-to-Florida slide-line in places where I thought that winter never came: West Virginia and Virginia and Maryland. And North Carolina.

Yes there are ski areas in more improbable states. But Cloudmont, situated in, of all places, Alabama, spins its ropetow for a few days every other year or so. North Carolina, home to six ski areas spinning a combined 35 chairlifts, allows for no such ambiguity: this is a ski state. And these half-dozen ski centers are not marginal operations: Sugar Mountain and Cataloochee opened for the season last week, and they sometimes open in October. Sugar spins a six-pack and two detach quads on a 1,200-foot vertical drop.

This geographic quirk is a product of our wonderful Appalachian Mountain chain, which reaches its highest points not in New England but in North Carolina, where Mount Mitchell peaks at 6,684 feet, 396 feet higher than the summit of New Hampshire’s Mount Washington. This is not an anomaly: North Carolina is home to six summits taller than Mount Washington, and 12 of the 20-highest in the Appalachians, a range that stretches from Alabama to Newfoundland.

And it’s not just the summits that are taller in North Carolina. The highest ski area base elevation in New England is Saddleback, which measures 2,147 feet at the bottom of the South Branch quad (the mountain more typically uses the 2,460-foot measurement at the bottom of the Rangeley quad). Either way, it’s more than 1,000 feet below the lowest base-area elevation in North Carolina:

Unfortunately, mountains and elevation don’t automatically equal snow. And the Southern Appalachians are not exactly the Kootenays. It snows some, sometimes, but not so much, so often, that skiing can get by on nature’s contributions alone - at least not in any commercially reliable form. It’s no coincidence that North Carolina didn’t develop any organized ski centers until the 1960s, when snowmaking machines became efficient and common enough for mass deployment. But it’s plenty cold up at 4,000 feet, and there’s no shortage of water. Snowguns proved to be skiing’s last essential ingredient.

Well, there was one final ingredient to the recipe of southern skiing: roads. Back to man’s maps. Specifically, America’s interstate system, which steamrolled the countryside throughout the 1960s and passes just a few miles to Hatley Pointe’s west. Without these superhighways, western North Carolina would still be a high-peaked wilderness unknown and inaccessible to most of us.

It’s kind of amazing when you consider all the maps together: a severe mountain region drawn into the borders of a stable and prosperous nation that builds physical infrastructure easing the movement of people with disposable income to otherwise inaccessible places that have been modified for novel uses by tapping a large and innovative industrial plant that has reduced the miraculous – flight, electricity, the internet - to the commonplace. And it’s within the context of all these maps that a couple who knows nothing about skiing can purchase an established but declining ski resort and remake it as an upscale modern family ski center in the space of 18 months.

What we talked about

Hurricane Helene fallout; “it took every second until we opened up to make it there,” even with a year idle; the “really tough” decision not to open for the 2023-24 ski season; “we did not realize what we were getting ourselves into”; buying a ski area when you’ve never worked at a ski area and have only skied a few times; who almost bought Wolf Ridge and why Orville picked the Hatleys instead; the importance of service; fixing up a broken-down ski resort that “felt very old”; updating without losing the approachable family essence; why it was “absolutely necessary” to change the ski area’s name; “when you pulled in, the first thing that you were introduced to … were broken-down machines and school buses”; Bible verses and bare trails and busted-up everything; “we could have spent two years just doing cleanup of junk and old things everywhere”; Hatley Pointe then and now; why Hatley removed the double chair; a detachable six-pack at Hatley?; chairlifts as marketing and branding tools; why the Breakaway terrain closed and when it could return and in what form; what a rebuilt summit lodge could look like; Hatley Pointe’s new trails; potential expansion; a day-ski area, a resort, or both?; lift-served mountain bike park incoming; night-skiing expansion; “I was shocked” at the level of après that Hatley drew, and expanding that for the years ahead; North Carolina skiing is all about the altitude; re-opening The Bowl trail; going to online-only sales; and lessons learned from 2024-25 that will build a better Hatley for 2025-26.

What I got wrong

When we recorded this conversation, the ski area hadn’t yet finalized the name of the new green trail coming off of Eagle – it is Pat’s Way (see trailmap above).

I asked if Hatley intended to install night-skiing, not realizing that they had run night-ski operations all last winter.

Why now was a good time for this interview

Pardon my optimism, but I’m feeling good about American lift-served skiing right now. Each of the past five winters has been among the top 10 best seasons for skier visits, U.S. ski areas have already built nearly as many lifts in the 2020s (246) as they did through all of the 2010s (288), and multimountain passes have streamlined the flow of the most frequent and passionate skiers between mountains, providing far more flexibility at far less cost than would have been imaginable even a decade ago.

All great. But here’s the best stat: after declining throughout the 1980s and ‘90s, the number of active U.S. ski areas stabilized around the turn of the century, and has actually increased for five consecutive winters:

Those are National Ski Areas Association numbers, which differ slightly from mine. I count 492 active ski hills for 2023-24 and 500 for last winter, and I project 510 potentially active ski areas for the 2025-26 campaign. But no matter: the number of active ski operations appears to be increasing.

But the raw numbers matter less than the manner in which this uptick is happening. In short: a new generation of owners is resuscitating lost or dying ski areas. Many have little to no ski industry experience. Driven by nostalgia, a sense of community duty, plain business opportunity, or some combination of those things, they are orchestrating massive ski area modernization projects, funded via their own wealth – typically earned via other enterprises – or by rallying a donor base.

Examples abound. When I launched The Storm in 2019, Saddleback, Maine; Norway Mountain, Michigan; Woodward Park City; Thrill Hills, North Dakota; Deer Mountain, South Dakota; Paul Bunyan, Wisconsin; Quarry Road, Maine; Steeplechase, Minnesota; and Snowland, Utah were all lost ski areas. All are now open again, and only one – Woodward – was the project of an established ski area operator (Powdr). Cuchara, Colorado and Nutt Hill, Wisconsin are on the verge of re-opening following decades-long lift closures. Bousquet, Massachusetts; Holiday Mountain, New York; Kissing Bridge, New York; and Black Mountain, New Hampshire were disintegrating in slow-motion before energetic new owners showed up with wrecking balls and Home Depot frequent-shopper accounts. New owners also re-energized the temporarily dormant Sandia Peak, New Mexico and Tenney, New Hampshire.

One of my favorite revitalization stories has been in North Carolina, where tired, fire-ravaged, investment-starved, homey-but-rickety Wolf Ridge was falling down and falling apart. The ski area’s season ended in February four times between 2018 and 2023. Snowmaking lagged. After an inferno ate the summit lodge in 2014, no one bothered rebuilding it. Marooned between the rapidly modernizing North Carolina ski trio of Sugar Mountain, Cataloochee, and Beech, Wolf Ridge appeared to be rapidly fading into irrelevance.

Then the Hatleys came along. Covid-curious first-time skiers who knew little about skiing or ski culture, they saw opportunity where the rest of us saw a reason to keep driving. Fixing up a ski area turned out to be harder than they’d anticipated, and they whiffed on opening for the 2023-24 winter. Such misses sometimes signal that the new owners are pulling their ripcords as they launch out of the back of the plane, but the Hatleys kept working. They gut-renovated the lodge, modernized the snowmaking plant, tore down an SLI double chair that had witnessed the signing of the Declaration of Independence. And last winter, they re-opened the best version of the ski area now known as Hatley Pointe that locals had seen in decades.

A great winter – one of the best in recent North Carolina history – helped. But what I admire about the Hatleys – and this new generation of owners in general – is their optimism in a cultural moment that has deemed optimism corny and naïve. Everything is supposed to be terrible all the time, don’t you know that? They didn’t know, and that orientation toward the good, tempered by humility and patience, reversed the long decline of a ski area that had in many ways ceased to resonate with the world it existed in.

The Hatleys have lots left to do: restore the Breakaway terrain, build a new summit lodge, knot a super-lift to the frontside. And their Appalachian salvage job, while impressive, is not a very repeatable blueprint – you need considerable wealth to take a season off while deploying massive amounts of capital to rebuild the ski area. The Hatley model is one among many for a generation charged with modernizing increasingly antiquated ski areas before they fall over dead. Sometimes, as in the examples itemized above, they succeed. But sometimes they don’t. Comebacks at Cockaigne and Hickory, both in New York, fizzled. Sleeping Giant, Wyoming and Ski Blandford, Massachusetts both shuttered after valiant rescue attempts. All four of these remain salvageable, but last week, Four Seasons, New York closed permanently after 63 years.

That will happen. We won’t be able to save every distressed ski area, and the potential supply of new or revivable ski centers, barring massive cultural and regulatory shifts, will remain limited. But the protectionist tendencies limiting new ski area development are, in a trick of human psychology, the same ones that will drive the revitalization of others – the only thing Americans resist more than building something new is taking away something old. Which in our country means anything that was already here when we showed up. A closed or closing ski area riles the collective angst, throws a snowy bat signal toward the night sky, a beacon and a dare, a cry and a plea: who wants to be a hero?

Podcast Notes

On Hurricane Helene

Helene smashed inland North Carolina last fall, just as Hatley was attempting to re-open after its idle year.

Here’s what made the storm so bad:

On Hatley’s socials

Follow:

On what I look for at a ski resort

On the Ski Big Bear podcast

In the spirit of the article above, one of the top 10 Storm Skiing Podcast guest quotes ever came from Ski Big Bear, Pennsylvania General Manager Lori Phillips: “You treat everyone like they paid a million dollars to be there doing what they’re doing”

On ski area name changes

I wrote a piece on Hatley’s name change back in 2023:

Ski area name changes are more common than I’d thought. I’ve been slowly documenting past name changes as I encounter them, so this is just a partial list, but here are 93 active U.S. ski areas that once went under a different name. If you know of others, please email me.

On Hatley at the point of purchase and now

Gigantic collections of garbage have always fascinated me. That’s essentially what Wolf Ridge was at the point of sale:

It’s a different place now:

On the distribution of six-packs across the nation

Six-pack chairlifts are rare and expensive enough that they’re still special, but common enough that we’re no longer amazed by them. Mostly - it depends on where we find such a machine. Just 112 of America’s 3,202 ski lifts (3.5 percent) are six-packs, and most of these (75) are in the West (60 – more than half the nation’s total, are in Colorado, Utah, or California). The Midwest is home to a half-dozen six-packs, all at Boyne or Midwest Family Ski Resorts operations, and the East has 31 sixers, 17 of which are in New England, and 12 of which are in Vermont. If Hatley installed a sixer, it would be just the second such chairlift in North Carolina, and the fifth in the Southeast, joining the two at Wintergreen, Virginia and the one at Timberline, West Virginia.

On the Breakaway fire

Wolf Ridge’s upper-mountain lodge burned down in March 2014. Yowza:

On proposed expansions

Wolf Ridge’s circa 2007 trailmap teases a potential expansion below the now-closed Breakaway terrain:

Taking our time machine back to the late ‘80s, Wolf Ridge had envisioned an even more ambitious expansion:

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

Who

Wes Kryger, President and Ayden Wilber, Vice President of Mountain Operations at Greek Peak, New York

Recorded on

June 30, 2025

About Greek Peak

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: John Meier

Located in: Cortland, New York

Year founded: 1957 – opened Jan. 11, 1958

Pass affiliations: Indy Pass, Indy+ Pass – 2 days

Closest neighboring U.S. ski areas: Labrador (:30), Song (:31)

Base elevation: 1,148 feet

Summit elevation: 2,100 feet

Vertical drop: 952 feet

Skiable acres: 300

Average annual snowfall: 120 inches

Trail count: 46 (10 easier, 16 more difficult, 15 most difficult, 5 expert, 4 terrain parks)

Lift count: 8 (1 fixed-grip quad, 2 triples, 3 doubles – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Greek Peak’s lift fleet)

Why I interviewed them

No reason not to just reprint what I wrote about the bump earlier this year:

All anyone wants from a family ski trip is this: not too far, not too crowded, not too expensive, not too steep, not too small, not too Bro-y. Terrain variety and ample grooming and lots of snow, preferably from the sky. Onsite lodging and onsite food that doesn’t taste like it emerged from the ration box of a war that ended 75 years ago. A humane access road and lots of parking. Ordered liftlines and easy ticket pickup and a big lodge to meet up and hang out in. We’re not too picky you see but all that would be ideal.

My standard answer to anyone from NYC making such an inquiry has been “hahaha yeah get on a plane and go out West.” But only if you purchased lift tickets 10 to 16 months in advance of your vacation. Otherwise you could settle a family of four on Mars for less than the cost of a six-day trip to Colorado. But after MLK Weekend, I have a new answer for picky non-picky New Yorkers: just go to Greek Peak.

Though I’d skied here in the past and am well-versed on all ski centers within a six-hour drive of Manhattan, it had not been obvious to me that Greek Peak was so ideally situated for a FamSki. Perhaps because I’d been in Solo Dad tree-skiing mode on previous visits and perhaps because the old trailmap presented the ski area in a vertical fortress motif aligned with its mythological trail-naming scheme:

But here is how we experienced the place on one of the busiest weekends of the year:

1. No lines to pick up tickets. Just these folks standing around in jackets, producing an RFID card from some clandestine pouch and syncing it to the QR code on my phone.

2. Nothing resembling a serious liftline outside of the somewhat chaotic Visions “express” (a carpet-loaded fixed-grip quad). Double and triple chairs, scattered at odd spots and shooting off in all directions, effectively dispersing skiers across a broad multi-faced ridge. The highlight being this double chair originally commissioned by Socrates in 407 B.C.:

3. Best of all: endless, wide-open, uncrowded top-to-bottom true greens – the only sort of run that my entire family can ski both stress-free and together.

Those runs ambled for a thousand vertical feet. The Hope Lake Lodge, complete with waterpark and good restaurant, sits directly across the street. A shuttle runs back and forth all day long. Greek Peak, while deeper inland than many Great Lakes-adjacent ski areas, pulls steady lake-effect, meaning glades everywhere (albeit thinly covered). It snowed almost the entire weekend, sometimes heavily. Greek Peak’s updated trailmap better reflects its orientation as a snowy family funhouse (though it somewhat obscures the mountain’s ever-improving status as a destination for Glade Bro):

For MLK 2024, we had visited Camelback, seeking the same slopeside-hotel-with-waterpark-decent-food-family-skiing combo. But it kinda sucked. The rooms, tinted with an Ikea-by-the-Susquehanna energy, were half the size of those at Greek Peak and had cost three times more. Our first room could have doubled as the smoking pen at a public airport (we requested, and received, another). The hill was half-open and overrun with people who seemed to look up and be genuinely surprised to find themselves strapped to snoskis. Mandatory parking fees even with a $600-a-night room; mandatory $7-per-night, per-skier ski check (which I dodged); and perhaps the worst liftline management I’ve ever witnessed had, among many other factors, added up to “let’s look for something better next year.”

That something was Greek Peak, though the alternative only occurred to me when I attended an industry event at the resort in September and re-considered its physical plant undistracted by ski-day chaos. Really, this will never be a true alternative for most NYC skiers – at four hours from Manhattan, Greek Peak is the same distance as far larger Stratton or Mount Snow. I like both of those mountains, but I know which one I’m driving my family to when our only time to ski together is the same time that everyone else has to ski together.

What we talked about

116,000 skier visits; two GP trails getting snowmaking for the first time; top-to-bottom greens; Greek Peak’s family founding in the 1950s – “any time you told my dad [Al Kryger] he couldn’t do it, he would do it just to prove you wrong”; reminiscing on vintage Greek Peak; why Greek Peak made it when similar ski areas like Scotch Valley went bust; the importance of having “hardcore skiers” run a ski area; does the interstate matter?; the unique dynamics of working in – and continuing – a family business; the saga and long-term impact of building a full resort hotel across the street from the ski area; “a ski area is liking running a small municipality”; why the family sold the ski area more than half a century after its founding; staying on at the family business when it’s no longer a family business; John Meier arrives; why Greek Peak sold Toggenburg; long-term snowmaking ambitions; potential terrain expansion – where and how much; “having more than one good ski season in a row would be helpful” in planning a future expansion; how Greek Peak modernized its snowmaking system and cut its snowmaking hours in half while making more snow; five times more snowguns; Great Lakes lake-effect snow; Greek Peak’s growing glade network and long evolution from a no-jumps-allowed old-school operation to today’s more freewheeling environment; potential lift upgrades; why Greek Peak is unlikely to ever have a high-speed lift; keeping a circa 1960s lift made by an obscure company running; why Greek Peak replaced an old double with a used triple on Chair 3 a few years ago; deciding to renovate or replace a lift; how the Visions 1A quad changed Greek Peak and where a similar lift could make sense; why Greek Peak shortened Chair 2; and the power of Indy Pass for small, independent ski areas.

What I got wrong

On Scotch Valley ski area

I said that Scotch Valley went out of business “in the late ‘90s.” As far as I can tell, the ski area’s last year of operation was 1998. At its peak, the 750-vertical-foot ski area ran a triple chair and two doubles serving a typical quirky-fun New York trail network. I’m sorry I missed skiing this one. Interestingly, the triple chair still appears to operate as part of a summer camp. I wish they would also run a winter camp called “we’re re-opening this ski area”:

On Toggenburg

I paraphrased a quote from Greek Peak owner John Meier, from a story I wrote around the 2021 closing of Toggenburg. Here’s the quote in full:

“Skiing doesn’t have to happen in New York State,” Meier said. “It takes an entrepreneur, it takes a business investor. You gotta want to do it, and you’re not going to make a lot of money doing it. You’re going to wonder why are you doing this? It’s a very difficult business in general. It’s very capital-intensive business. There’s a lot easier ways to make a buck. This is a labor of love for me.”

And here’s the full story, which lays out the full Togg saga:

Podcast Notes

On Hope Lake Lodge and New York’s lack of slopeside lodging

I’ve complained about this endlessly, but it’s strange and counter-environmental that New York’s two largest ski areas offer no slopeside lodging. This is the same oddball logic at work in the Pacific Northwest, which stridently and reflexively opposes ski area-adjacent development in the name of preservation without acknowledging the ripple effects of moving 5,000 day skiers up to the mountain each winter morning. Unfortunately Gore and Whiteface are on Forever Wild land that would require an amendment to the state constitution to develop, and that process is beholden to idealistic downstate voters who like the notion of preservation enough to vote abstractly against development, but not enough to favor Whiteface over Sugarbush when it’s time to book a family ski trip and they need convenient lodging. Which leaves us with smaller mountains that can more readily develop slopeside buildings: Holiday Valley and Hunter are perhaps the most built-up, but West Mountain has a monster development grinding through local permitting processes:

Greek Peak built the brilliant Hope Lake Lodge, a sprawling hotel/waterpark with wood-trimmed, fireplace-appointed rooms directly across the street from the ski area. A shuttle connects the two.

On the “really, really bad” 2015 season

Wilber referred to the “really, really bad” 2015 season. Here’s the Kottke end-of-season stats comparing 2015-16 snowfall to the previous three winters, where you can see the Northeast just collapse into an abyss:

Month-by-month (also from Kottke):

Fast forward to Kottke’s 2022-23 report, and you can see just how terrible 2015-16 was in terms of skier visits compared to the seasons immediately before and after:

On Greek Peak’s old masterplan with a chair 6

I couldn’t turn up the masterplan that Kryger referred to with a Chair 6 on it, but the trailmap did tease a potential expansion from around 2006 to 2012, labelled as “Greek Peak East”:

On Great Lakes lake-effect snow

This is maybe the best representation I’ve found of the Great Lakes’ lake-effect snowbands:

On Greek Peak’s Lift 2

What a joy this thing is to ride:

An absolute time machine:

The lift, built in 1963, looks rattletrap and bootleg, but it hums right along. It is the second-oldest operating chairlift in New York State, after Snow Ridge’s 1960 North Hall double chair, and the fourth-oldest in the Northeast (Mad River Glen’s single, dating to 1948, is King Gramps of the East Coast). It’s one of the 20-oldest operating chairlifts in America:

As Wilber says, this lift once ran all the way to the base. They shortened the lift sometime between 1995 and ’97 to scrape out a larger base-area novice zone. Greek Peak’s circa 1995 trailmap shows the lift extending to its original load position:

Following Pico’s demolition of the Bonanza double this offseason, Greek Peak’s Chair 2 is one of just three remaining Carlevaro-Savio lifts spinning in the United States:

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

Who

Barry Owens, General Manager of Treetops, Michigan

Recorded on

June 13, 2025

About Treetops

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Treetops Acquisition Company LLC

Located in: Gaylord, Michigan

Year founded: 1954

Pass affiliations: Indy Pass, Indy+ Pass – 2 days

Closest neighboring ski areas: Otsego (:07), Boyne Mountain (:34), Hanson Hills (:39), Shanty Creek (:51), The Highlands (:58), Nub’s Nob (1:00)

Base elevation: 1,110 feet

Summit elevation: 1,333 feet

Vertical drop: 223 feet

Skiable acres: 80

Average annual snowfall: 140 inches

Trail count: 25 (30% beginner, 40% intermediate, 30% advanced)

Lift count: 5 (3 triples, 2 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Treetops’ lift fleet)

Why I interviewed him

The first 10 ski areas I ever skied, in order, were:

* Mott Mountain, Michigan

* Apple Mountain, Michigan

* Snow Snake, Michigan

* Caberfae, Michigan

* Crystal Mountain, Michigan

* Nub’s Nob, Michigan

* Skyline, Michigan

* Treetops, Michigan

* Sugar Loaf, Michigan

* Shanty Creek – Schuss Mountain, Michigan

And here are the first 10 ski areas I ever skied that are still open, with anything that didn’t make it crossed out:

* Mott Mountain, Michigan

* Apple Mountain, Michigan

* Snow Snake, Michigan

* Caberfae, Michigan

* Crystal Mountain, Michigan

* Nub’s Nob, Michigan

* Skyline, Michigan

* Treetops, Michigan

* Sugar Loaf, Michigan

* Shanty Creek – Schuss Mountain, Michigan

* Shanty Creek – Summit, Michigan

* Boyne Mountain, Michigan

* Searchmont, Ontario

* Nebraski, Nebraska

* Copper Mountain, Colorado

* Keystone, Colorado

Six of my first 16. Poof. That’s a failure rate of 37.5 percent. I’m no statistician, but I’d categorize that as “not good.”

Now, there’s some nuance to this list. I skied all of these between 1992 and 1995. Most had faded officially or functionally by 2000, around the time that America’s Great Ski Area Die-Off concluded (Summit lasted until around Covid, and could still re-open, resort officials tell me). Their causes of death are varied, some combination, usually, of incompetence, indifference, and failure to adapt. To climate change, yes, but more of the cultural kind of adaptation than the environmental sort.

The first dozen ski areas on this list are tightly bunched, geographically, in the upper half of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. They draw from the same general population centers and suffer from the same stunted Midwest verticals. None are naturally or automatically great ski areas. None are or were particularly remote or tricky to access, and most sit alongside or near a major state or federal highway. And they (mostly) all benefit from the same Lake Michigan lake-effect snow machine, the output of which appears to be increasing as the Great Lakes freeze more slowly and less often (cold air flowing over warm water = lake-effect snow).

Had you presented this list of a dozen Michigan ski areas to me in 1995 and said, “five of these will drop dead in the next 30 years,” I would not have chosen those five, necessarily, to fail. These weren’t ropetow backwaters. All but Apple had chairlifts (and they soon installed one), and most sat close to cities or were attached to a larger resort.

Sugar Loaf, in particular, was one of Michigan’s better ski areas, with five chairlifts and the largest in-state vertical drop on this list.

My guess for most-likely-to-die probably would have been Treetops, especially if you’d told me that then-private Otsego ski area, right next door and with twice its neighbor’s skiable acreage, vertical drop, and number of chairlifts, would eventually open to the public. Especially if you’d told me that Boyne Mountain, the monster down the road, would continue to expand its lodging and village, and would add a Treetops-sized cluster of greens to its ferocious ridge of blacks. Especially if you’d told me that Treetops’ trail footprint, never substantial, would remain more or less the same size 30 years later. In fact, just about every surviving Michigan ski area on that list - Crystal, Nub’s, Caberfae, Shanty Schuss - greatly expanded its terrain footprint. Except Treetops.

But here we are, in the future, and I just skied Treetops 10 months ago with my 8-year-old son. It was, in some ways, more or less as I’d left it on my last visit, in 1995: small vert, small trail network, a slightly confusing parking situation, no chairlift restraint bars. A few improvements were obvious: the beginner ropetows had made way for a carpet, the last double chair had been upgraded to a triple, terrain park features dotted the east side, and a dozen or so glades and short steep shots had been hacked from the woods of the legacy trail footprint.

That’s all nice. But what was not obvious to me was this: why, and how, does Treetops the ski area still exist? Sugar Loaf was a better ski area. Apple Mountain was closer to large population centers. Summit was attached to ski-in-ski-out accommodations and shared a lift ticket with the larger Schuss mountain a couple miles away. Was modern Treetops some sort of money-losing ski area hobby horse for whomever owned the larger resort, which is better known for its five golf courses? Was it just an amenity to keep the second homeowners who mostly lived in Southeast Michigan invested year-round? Had the ski area cemented itself as the kind of high-volume schoolkids training ground that explained the resilience of ski areas in metro Detroit, Minneapolis, and Milwaukee?

There is never, or rarely, one easy or obvious explanation for why similar businesses thrive or fail. This is why I resist pinning the numerical decline in America’s ski area inventory solely to climate change. We may have fewer ski areas in America than we had in 1995, but we have a lot more good ski areas now than we did 30 years ago (and, as I wrote in March, a lot more overall ski terrain). Yes, Skyline, 40 minutes south of Treetops, failed because it never installed snowmaking, but that is only part of the sentence. Skyline failed because it never installed snowmaking while its competitors aggressively expanded and continually updated their snowmaking systems, raising the floor on the minimal ski experience acceptable to consumers.

That takes us back to culture. What do you reckon has changed more over the past 30 to 40 years: America’s weather patterns, or its culture? For anyone who remembers ashtrays at McDonald’s or who rode in the bed of a pickup truck from Michigan to Illinois or who ran feral and unsupervised outdoors from toddlerhood or who somehow fumbled through this vast world without the internet or a Pet Rectangle or their evil offspring social media, the answer seems obvious. The weather feels a little different. Our culture feels airlifted from another planet. Americans accepted things 30 years ago that would seem outrageous today – like smoking adjacent to a children’s play area ornamented with a demented smiling clown. But this applies to skiing as well. My Treetops day in 1995 was memorably horrible, the snow groomed but fossilized, unturnable. A few weeks earlier, I’d skied Skyline on perhaps a three-inch base, grass poking through the trails. Modern skiers, armed with the internet and its Hubble connection to every ski area on the planet, would not accept either set of conditions today. But one of those ski areas adapted and the other did not. That’s the “why” of Treetops survival. It was the “how” that I needed Barry Owens to help me understand.

What we talked about

Last winter’s ice storm – “it provides great insight into human character when you go through that stuff”; record snowfall (204 inches!) to chase the worst winter ever; the Lake Michigan snowbelt; a golf resort with a ski area attached; building a ski culture when “we didn’t have enough people dedicated to ski… and it showed”; competing with nearby ski areas many times Treetops’ size “we don’t shy away from… who we are and what we are”; what happened when next-door-neighbor Otsego Resort switched from a private to a public model in 2017 – “neither one of us is going to get rich seeing who can get the most $15 lift tickets on a Wednesday”; I attempt to talk about golf and why Michigan is a golf mecca; moving on from something you’ve spent decades building; Treetops’ rough financial period and why Owens initially turned down the GM job; how Owens convinced ownership not to close the ski area; fixing a “can’t-do staff” by “doing things that created the freedom to be able to act”; Treetops’ strange 2014 bankruptcy and rebuilding from there; “right now we’re happy” with the lift fleet; how much it would cost to retrofit Treetops’ lifts with restraint bars; timeline for potential ski expansion at Treetops; bargain season passes (as low as $125); and Indy Pass’ network power.

What I got wrong

* I said “Gaylord County,” but the city of Gaylord is in Otsego County.

* I said that Boyne Resorts, operator of 11 ski areas, also runs “10 or 11 golf resorts.” The company operates 14 golf courses.

* I said that Michigan had a “very good” road network and that there was “not a lot of traffic,” and if you live there, you’re reaction is probably, “you’re dumb.” What I meant by “very good road network” is this: compared to most ski regions, which have, um, mountains, Michigan’s bumplets sit more or less directly alongside the state’s straight, flat, almost perfectly gridded highway network. Also, the “not a lot of traffic” thing does not apply to special situations like, say, northbound I-75 on a July Friday evening.

* I said that Crystal, Nub’s, Caberfae, and Shanty Creek were “close” – while they’re not necessarily all close to one another, they are all roughly equidistant for folks coming to them from downstate.

* I said that Treetops was “the fifth or sixth place I ever skied at,” but upon further review, it was number eight (which is reflected in the list above).

Podcast Notes

On the ice storm

An ice storm hammered Northern Michigan in late March of this year:

On the lightning strike on Treetops’ golf course

On the Midwest’s terrible 2023-24 ski season

Skier visits cratered in the Midwest during the 2023-24 ski season, the region’s worst on record from a snowfall point of view. Weather - and skier visits - settled back into normal ranges last winter:

This is a bit hard to see with any sort of precision, but this 10-year chart gives a nice sense of just how abnormal 2023-24 was for the Midwest:

On Michigan’s ski areas

Michigan is home to 44 active ski areas - more than any state other than New York. Many of them are quite small, operate sporadically, and run only surface lifts, but Treetops is close to a bunch of the better lift-served outfits, including Boyne Mountain, Nub’s Nob, and The Highlands (the UP ski areas may as well be in another state). It helps Treetops that so many of the state’s ski areas have also joined Indy Pass:

On Otsego Resort

For decades - I’m not certain how long, exactly - Otsego Resort, right next door to Treetops and with roughly double the vertical drop and skiable acreage, was private. In 2017, the bump opened to the public, considerably amping up competition.

Complicating the matter further, Otsego sits a bit closer to Michigan’s Main Street - I-75 - than Treetops.

On Snow Operating

Owens mentioned working with “TBL” – he was referring to Terrain Based Learning, Snow Partners’ learn-to-ski program. That company also runs the Snow Cloud operating system that Owens refers to at the end.

On Treetops’ rough period

I quoted this Detroit Business News article at length in the interview. It goes deep on Treetops’ precarious early 2000s history and the resort’s broken employee culture at the time.

On people being nice at ski areas

Yeah I’m super into this:

On the hedgehog concept

Owens mentions “the hedgehog concept,” which I wasn’t familiar with. It sounded like a business-book thing, and it is, adapted by author Jim Collins for his book Good to Great and described in this way on his website:

The Hedgehog Concept is developed in the book Good to Great. A simple, crystalline concept that flows from deep understanding about the intersection of three circles: 1) what you are deeply passionate about, 2) what you can be the best in the world at, and 3) what best drives your economic or resource engine. Transformations from good to great come about by a series of good decisions made consistently with a Hedgehog Concept, supremely well executed, accumulating one upon another, over a long period of time.

More:

On safety-bar requirements in New York and New England

This is kind of funny…

That’s my 8-year-old son, who’s skied in a dozen states, taking his first ride on a lift with no safety bar, at Treetops last December. Why such machines still exist in 2025, I have no idea - this lift rises about 30 feet off the ground. In the East, all chairlifts are equipped with bars, and state law mandates their use in New York, Massachusetts, and Vermont (and perhaps elsewhere). I don’t advocate for rider mandates, but I do think all chairlifts ought to have bars available for those who want them. Owens and I discuss the resort’s plans to retrofit Treetops’ three chairlifts - CTEC machines installed between 1984 and 1995 - with bars. The cost would be roughly $250,000. That’s a significant number, but probably a lot less than the figure if, say, someone has a heart attack or seizure on the lift, falls off, then sues the resort. Besides, as Owens points out, chairlifts must be equipped with restraint bars for summer use, which would open new revenue streams. Why are bars required for summer activities, but not winter? It’s a strange anachronism, unique among the ski world to America.

On “Joe from SMI”

I mentioned “Joe from SMI” offhand. I was referring to SMI Snowmakers President Joe VanderKelen, who appeared on the podcast back in 2022:

On potential expansion

Owens discusses a potential expansion looker’s left of Chair 1, which would restore lost terrain and built upon that. This 1988 trailmap shows a couple of the trails that Treetops eliminated to make way for its current top-to-bottom access road (trails 1 through 4):

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

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Who

Jared Smith, Chief Executive Officer of Alterra Mountain Company

Recorded on

October 22, 2025

About Alterra Mountain Company

Alterra is skiing’s Voltron, a collection of super-bots united to form one super-duper bot. Only instead of gigantic robot lions the bots are gigantic ski areas and instead of fighting the evil King Zarkon they combined to battle Vail Resorts and its cackling mad Epic Pass. Here is Alterra’s current ski-bot stable:

Alterra of course also owns the Ikon Pass, which for the 2025-26 winter gives skiers all of this:

Ikon launched in 2018 as a more-or-less-even competitor to Epic Pass, both in number and stature of ski areas and price, but long ago blew past its mass-market competitor in both:

Those 89 total ski areas include nine that Alterra added last week in Japan, South Korea, and China. Some of these 89 partners, however, are so-called “bonus mountains,” which are Alterra’s Cinderellas. And not Cinderella at the end of the story when she rules the kingdom and dines on stag and hunts peasants for sport but first-scene Cinderella when she lives in a windowless tower and wears a burlap dress and her only friends are talking mice. Meaning skiers can use their Ikon Pass to ski at these places but they are not I repeat NOT on the Ikon Pass so don’t you dare say they are (they are).

While the Ikon Pass is Alterra’s Excalibur, many of its owned mountains offer their own season passes (see Alterra chart above). And many now offer their own SUPER-DUPER season passes that let skiers do things like cut in front of the poors and dine on stag in private lounges:

These SUPER-DUPER passes don’t bother me though a lot of you want me to say they’re THE END OF SKIING. I won’t put a lot of effort into talking you off that point so long as you’re all skiing for $17 per day on your Ikon Passes. But I will continue to puzzle over why the Ikon Session Pass is such a very very bad and terrible product compared to every other day pass including those sold by Alterra’s own mountains. I am also not a big advocate for peak-day lift ticket prices that resemble those of black-market hand sanitizer in March 2020:

Fortunately Vail and Alterra seem to have launched a lift ticket price war, the first battle of which is The Battle of Give Half Off Coupons to Your Dumb Friends Who Don’t Buy A Ski Pass 10 Months Before They Plan to Ski:

Alterra also runs some heli-ski outfits up in B.C. but I’m not going to bother decoding all that because one reason I started The Storm was because I was over stories of Bros skiing 45 feet of powder at the top of the Chugach while the rest of us fretted over parking reservations and the $5 replacement cost of an RFID card. I know some of you are like Bro how many stories do you think the world needs about chairlifts but hey at least pretty much anyone reading this can go ride them.

Oh and also I probably lost like 95 percent of you with Voltron because unless you were between the ages of 7 and 8 in the mid-1980s you probably missed this:

One neat thing about skiing is that if someone ran headfirst into a snowgun in 1985 and spent four decades in a coma and woke up tomorrow they’d still know pretty much all the ski areas even if they were confused about what’s a Palisades Tahoe and why all of us future wussies wear helmets. “Damn it, Son in my day we didn’t bother and I’m just fine. Now grab $20 and a pack of smokes and let’s go skiing.”

Why I interviewed him

For pretty much the same reason I interviewed this fellow:

I mean like it or not these two companies dominate modern lift-served skiing in this country, at least from a narrative point of view. And while I do everything I can to demonstrate that between the Indy Pass and ski areas not in Colorado or Utah or Tahoe plenty of skier choice remains, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that Alterra’s 17 U.S. ski areas and Vail’s 36 together make up around 30 percent of the skiable terrain across America’s 509 active ski areas:

And man when you add in all U.S. Epic and Ikon mountains it’s like dang:

We know publicly traded Vail’s Epic Pass sales numbers and we know those numbers have softened over the past couple of years, but we don’t have similar access to Alterra’s numbers. A source with direct knowledge of Ikon Pass sales recently told me that unit sales had increased every year. Perhaps some day someone will anonymously message me a screenshot code-named Alterra’s Big Dumb Chart documenting unit and dollar sales since Ikon’s 2018 launch. In the meantime, I’m just going to have to keep talking to the guy running the company and asking extremely sly questions like, “if you had to give us a ballpark estimate of exactly how many Ikon Passes you sold and how much you paid each partner mountain and which ski area you’re going to buy next, what would you say?”

What we talked about

A first-to-open competition between A-Basin and Winter Park (A-Basin won); the allure of skiing Japan; Ikon as first-to-market in South Korea and China; continued Ikon expansion in Europe; who’s buying Ikon?; bonus mountains; half-off friends tickets; reserve passes; “one of the things we’ve struggled with as an industry are the dynamics between purchasing a pass and the daily lift ticket price”; “we’ve got to find ways to make it more accessible, more affordable, more often for more people”; Europe as a cheaper ski alternative to the West; “we are focused every day on … what is the right price for the right consumer on the right day?”; “there’s never been more innovation” in the ski ticket space; Palisades Tahoe’s 14-year-village-expansion approval saga; America’s “increasingly complex” landscape of community stakeholders; and Deer Valley’s massive expansion.

What I got wrong

* We didn’t get this wrong, but when we recorded this pod on Wednesday, Smith and I discussed which of Alterra’s ski areas would open first. Arapahoe Basin won that fight, opening today (Sunday, Oct. 26).

* I said that 40 percent of all Epic, Ikon, and Indy pass partners were outside of North America. This is inaccurate: 40 percent (152) of those three passes’ combined 383 partners is outside the United States. Subtracting their 49 Canadian ski areas gives us 103 mountains outside of North America, or 27 percent of the total.

* I claimed that a ski vacation to Europe is “a quarter of the price” of a similar trip to the U.S. This was hyperbole, and obviously the available price range of ski vacations is enormous, but in general, prices for everything from lift tickets to hotels to food tend to be lower in the Alps than in the Rocky Mountain core.

* It probably seems strange that I said that Deer Valley’s East Village was great because you could drive there from the airport without hitting a spotlight and also said that the resort would be less car-dependent. What I meant by that was that once you arrive at East Village, it is – or will be, when complete – a better slopeside pedestrian village experience than the car-oriented Snow Park that has long served as the resort’s principal entry point. Snow Park itself is scheduled to evolve from parking-lot-and-nothing-else to secondary pedestrian village. The final version of Deer Valley should reduce the number of cars within Park City proper and create a more vibrant atmosphere at the ski area.

Questions I wish I’d asked

The first question you’re probably asking is “Bro why is this so short aren’t your podcasts usually longer than a Superfund cleanup?” Well I take what I can get and if there’s a question you can think of related to Ikon or Alterra or any of the company’s mountains, it was on my list. But Smith had either 30 minutes or zero minutes so I took the win.

Podcast Notes

On Deer Valley

I was talking to the Deer Valley folks the other day and we agreed that they’re doing so much so fast that it’s almost impossible to tell the story. I mean this was Deer Valley two winters ago:

And this will be Deer Valley this winter:

Somehow it’s easier to write 3,000 words on Indy Pass adding a couple of Northeast backwaters than it is to frame up the ambitions of a Utah ski area expanding by as much skiable acreage as all 30 New Hampshire ski areas combined in just two years. Anyway Deer Valley is about to be the sixth-largest ski area in America and when this whole project is done in a few years it will be number four at 5,700 acres, behind only Vail Resorts’ neighboring Park City (7,300 acres), Alterra’s own Palisades Tahoe (6,000 acres), and Boyne Resorts’ Big Sky (5,850 acres).

On recent Steamboat upgrades

Yes the Wild Blue Gondola is cool and I’m sure everyone from Baton-Tucky just loves it. But everything I’m hearing out of Steamboat over the past couple of winters indicates that A) the 650-acre Mahogany Ridge expansion adds a fistfighting dimension to what had largely been an intermediate ski resort, and that, B) so far, no one goes over there, partially because they don’t know about it and partially because the resort only cut one trail in the whole amazing zone (far looker’s left):

I guess just go ski this one while everyone else still thinks Steamboat is nothing but gondolas and Sunshine Peak.

On Winter Park being “on deck”

After stringing the two sides of Palisades Tahoe together with a $75 trillion gondola and expanding Steamboat and nearly tripling the size of Deer Valley, all signs point to Alterra next pushing its resources into actualizing Winter Park’s ambitious masterplan, starting with the gondola connection to town (right side of map):

On new Ikon Pass partners for 2025-26

You can read about the bonus partners above, but here are the write-ups on Ikon’s full seven/five-day partners:

On previous Alterra podcasts

This was Smith’s second appearance on the pod. Here’s number one, from 2023:

His predecessor, Rusty Gregory, appeared on the show three times:

I’ve also hosted the leaders of a bunch of Alterra leaders on the pod, most recently A-Basin and Mammoth:

And the heads of many Ikon Pass partners – most recently Killington and Sun Valley:

On U.S. passes in Japan

Epic, Ikon, Indy, and Mountain Collective are now aligned with 48 ski areas in Japan – nearly as many as the four passes have signed in Canada:

On Europe

And here are the European ski areas aligned with Epic, Ikon, Indy, and Mountain Collective – the list is shorter than the Japanese list, but since each European ski area is made up of between one and 345 ski areas, the actual skiable acreage here is likely equal to the landmass of Greenland:

On skier and ski area growth in China

China’s ski industry appears to be developing rapidly - I’m not sure what to make of the difference between “ski resorts” and “ski resorts with aerial ropeways.” Normally I’d assume that means with or without lifts, but that doesn’t make a lot of sense and sometimes nations frame things in very different ways.

On the village at Palisades Tahoe

The approval process for a village expansion on the Olympic side of Palisades Tahoe was a very convoluted one. KCRA sums the outcome up well (I’ll note that “Alterra” did not call for anything in 2011, as the company didn’t exist until 2017):

Under the initial 2011 application, Alterra had called for the construction of 2,184 bedrooms. That was reduced to 1,493 bedrooms in a 2014 revised proposal where 850 housing units — a mix of condominiums, hotel rooms and timeshares — were planned. The new agreement calls for a total of 896 bedrooms.

The groups that pushed this downsizing were primarily Keep Tahoe Blue and Sierra Watch. Smith is very diplomatic in discussing this project on the podcast, pointing to the “collaboration, communication, and a little bit of compromise” that led to the final agreement.

I’m not going to be so diplomatic. Fighting dense, pedestrian-oriented development that could help reconfigure traffic patterns and housing availability in a region that is choking on ski traffic and drowning in housing costs is dumb. The systems for planning, approving, and building anything that is different from what already exists in this nation are profoundly broken. The primary issue is this: these anti-development crusaders position themselves as environmental defenders without acknowledging (or, more likely, realizing), that the existing traffic, blight, and high costs driving their resistance is a legacy of haphazard development in past decades, and that more thoughtful, human-centric projects could mitigate, rather than worsen, these concerns. The only thing an oppose-everything stance achieves is to push development farther out into the hinterlands, exacerbating sprawl and traffic.

British Columbia is way ahead of us here. I’ve written about this extensively in the past, and won’t belabor the point here except to cite what I wrote last year about the 3,711-home city sprouting from raw wilderness below Cypress Mountain, a Boyne-owned Ikon Pass partner just north of Vancouver:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Given the environmental community’s reflexive and vociferous opposition to a recent proposal to repurpose tracts of not-necessarily-majestic wilderness for housing, I’m not optimistic that we possess the cultural brainpower to improve our own lives through policy. Which is why I’ve been writing more about passes and less about our collective ambitions to make everything from the base of the lifts outward as inconvenient and expensive as possible.

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Who

Phill Gross, owner, and Mike Solimano, CEO of Killington and Pico, Vermont

Recorded on

July 10, 2025

About Killington

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Phill Gross and team

Located in: Killington, Vermont

Year founded: 1958

Pass affiliations: Ikon Pass: 5 or 7 combined days with Pico

Reciprocal partners: Pico access is included on all Killington passes

Closest neighboring ski areas: Pico (:12), Saskadena Six (:39), Okemo (:40), Quechee (:44), Ascutney (:55), Storrs (:59), Harrington Hill (:59), Magic (1:00), Whaleback (1:02), Sugarbush (1:04), Bromley (1:04), Middlebury Snowbowl (1:08), Arrowhead (1:10), Mad River Glen (1:11)

Base elevation: 1,165 feet at Skyeship Base

Summit elevation: 4,142 feet at top of K-1 gondola (hike-to summit of Killington Peak at 4,241 feet)

Vertical drop: 2,977 feet lift-served, 3,076 hike-to

Skiable Acres: 1,509

Average annual snowfall: 250 inches

Trail count: 155 (43% advanced/expert, 40% intermediate, 17% beginner)

Lift count: 20 (2 gondolas, 2 six-packs, 4 high-speed quads, 5 fixed-grip quads, 2 triples, 1 double, 1 platter, 3 carpets - view Lift Blog’s inventory of Killington’s lift fleet; Killington plans to replace the Snowdon triple with a fixed-grip quad for the 2026-27 ski season)

History: from New England Ski History

About Pico

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Phill Gross and team

Located in: Mendon, Vermont

Year founded: 1934

Pass affiliations: Ikon Pass: 5 or 7 combined days with Killington

Reciprocal partners: Pico access is included on all Killington passes; four days Killington access included on Pico K.A. Pass

Closest neighboring ski areas: Killington (:12), Saskadena Six (:38), Okemo (:38), Quechee (:42), Ascutney (:53), Storrs (:57), Harrington Hill (:55), Magic (:58), Whaleback (1:00), Sugarbush (1:01), Bromley (1:00), Middlebury Snowbowl (1:01), Mad River Glen (1:07), Arrowhead (1:09)

Base elevation: 2,000 feet

Summit elevation: 3,967 feet

Vertical drop: 1,967 feet

Skiable Acres: 468

Average annual snowfall: 250 inches

Trail count: 58 (36% advanced/expert, 46% intermediate, 18% beginner)

Lift count: 7 (2 high-speed quads, 2 triples, 1 doubles, 2 carpets - view Lift Blog’s inventory of Pico’s lift fleet)

History: from New England Ski History

Why I interviewed them

The longest-tenured non-government ski area operator in America, as far as I know, is the Seeholzer family, owner-operators of Beaver Mountain, Utah since 1939. Third-generation owner Travis Seeholzer came on the pod a few years back to trace the eight-decade arc from this dude flexing 10-foot-long kamikaze boards to the present:

Just about every ski area in America was hacked out of the wilderness by Some Guy Who Looked Like That. Dave McCoy at Mammoth or Ernie Blake at Taos or Everett Kircher at Boyne Mountain, swarthy, willful fellows who flew airplanes and erected rudimentary chairlifts in impossible places and hammered together their own baselodges. Over decades they chiseled these mountains into their personal Rushmores, a life’s work, a human soul knotted to nature in a built place that would endure for generations.

It’s possible that they all imagined their family name governing those generations. In the remarkable case of Boyne, they still do. But the Kirchers and the Seeholzers are ski-world exceptions. Successive generations are often uninterested in the chore of legacy building. Or they try and say wow this is expensive. Or bad weather leads to bad financial choices by our cigar-smoking, backhoe-driving, machete-wielding founder and his sons and daughters never get their chance. The ski area’s deed shuffles into the portfolio of a Colorado Skico and McCoy fades a little each year and at some point Mammoth is just another ski area owned by Alterra Mountain Company.

It’s tempting to sentimentalize the past, to lament skiing’s macro-transition from gritty network of founder-kingpin fifes to set of corporate brands, to conclude that “this generation” just doesn’t have the tenacity of a Blake or a McCoy. But the America where a fellow could turn up with a dump truck and a chainsaw and flatten raw forest into a for-profit business with minimal protest is gone. Every part of the ski ecosystem is more regulated, complicated, and expensive than it’s ever been. The appeal of running such a machine - and the skillset necessary to do so - is entirely different from that of sculpting your own personal snow Narnia from scratch.

We will always have family-owned ski areas (we still have hundreds), and an occasional modern founder-disruptor like Mount Bohemia’s Lonie Glieberman will materialize like a new X-man. But ski conglomerates have probably always been inevitable, and are probably largely the industry’s future. They are best suited, in most cases, to manage, finance, and maintain the vast machinery of our largest ski centers (and also to create a ski landscape in which not all ski area operators are Some Guy Who Looked Like That).

Killington demonstrates this arc from rambunctious founder to corporate vassal as well as any mountain in the country. Founded in 1958 by the wily and wild Pres Smith, the ski area’s parent company, Sherburne Corp., bought Sunday River, Maine in 1973 and Mount Snow, Vermont in 1977. The two Vermont mountains became S-K-I in 1984, bought five more ski areas, and merged with four-resort LBO in 1996 to become the titanic American Skiing Company. Unfortunately ASC turned out to be skiing’s Titanic, and one of the company’s last acts before dissolution was to sell Killington and Pico to Utah-based Powdr in 2007.

The Beast had been tamed, at least on paper. Corporate ownership of some sort felt as stapled to the mountain as Killington’s 3,000 snowguns. And mostly, well, it didn’t matter. Other than Powdr’s disastrous attempts to shorten the resort’s famously long seasons, Killington never lost its feisty edge. Over the decades the ski area modernized, masterplanned, and shed skier volume while increasing its viability as a business. Modern Killington wasn’t the kingdom of a charismatic and ever-present founder, but it was a pretty good ski area.

And then, suddenly, shockingly, Powdr sold both Killington and Pico last August. And they didn’t sell the ski areas to Vail or Alterra or Boyne or to anyone who owned any ski areas at all. Instead, a group of local investors - led by Phill Gross and Michael Ferri, longtime Killington homeowners who ran a variety of non-ski-related businesses - bought the mountains. After 51 years as part of a multi-mountain ownership group, Killington (its relationship to neighboring Pico notwithstanding), was once again independent.

It was all so improbable. Out-of-state operators had purchased five of Vermont’s large ski areas in recent years: Colorado-based Vail Resorts bought Stowe in 2017, Okemo in 2018, and Mount Snow in 2019; Denver-based Alterra claimed Sugarbush in 2019; and Utah-based Pacific Group Resorts added Jay Peak to their small portfolio in 2022. Very few ski areas have ever entered the corporate matrix and re-emerged as independents. Grand Targhee, Wyoming; Waterville Valley, New Hampshire; and Mountain Creek, New Jersey (technically owned by multimountain operator Snow Partners) are exceptions spun off from larger companies. But mostly, once a larger entity absorbed a ski area, it stays locked in the multimountain universe forever.

So what would this mean? For the largest and busiest mountain in the eastern United States to be independent? Did this, along with Powdr’s intentions to sell Mount Bachelor (since rescinded), Eldora (sale in process), and Silver Star (no update), mark a reversal in the consolidation trend that had gathered 30 percent of America’s ski areas under the umbrella of a multi-mountain operator? Did Killington’s group of wealthy-but-not-Bezos-wealthy investors set an alternate blueprint for large-mountain ownership, especially when considered alongside the sale of Jackson Hole to a similar group the year before? Had the Ikon Pass – that harbinger of mass-market pass domination that had forced the we-better-join-them sales of Crystal Mountain, Washington and Sugarbush – inadvertently become a reliable revenue pipeline that made independence more viable? And would Killington, well-managed and constantly improving, backslide under cowboy owners who want to Q-Burke the place in their image?

We’re a year in now, and we have some clarity on these questions, along with two new chairlifts (Superstar this year, Snowdon next), 1,000 new snowguns, a revitalized Skyeship Gondola, and progressing plans on the East’s first true ski village. Locals seem happy, management seems happy, the owners seem happy. Easy enough, Gross points out in our interview, when winter hits deep like the last one did. But can we keep the party going indefinitely? It was time for a check-in.

What we talked about

A strong first winter under independent ownership; what spring skiing off Canyon lift told us about the importance of Superstar; “it’s an incredibly complex operation”; letting the smart people do their jobs; Killington’s surprise spin-off from a multi-mountain operator; “our job is to keep the honeymoon going”; Superstar’s six-pack upgrade; why six-packs are probably Killington’s lift-upgrade future; why Pico is demolishing the Bonanza lift for a covered carpet; why Superstar won’t have bubbles; where bubbles might make sense in a future lift; why ski areas can no longer run snowmaking under newly constructed chairlifts; why Superstar is a Doppelmayr machine after Killington installed a brand-new Leitner-Poma six at Snowdon in 2018; long- and short-term Superstar impacts to Killington’s long season; long-term thoughts around early-season walkway access to North Ridge; Skyeship Gondola upgrades, including $5 million in new cabins; what 1,000 new snowguns means in practice; why Killington sold the Wobbly Barn; considering Killington as a business and investment; how Killington is a different financial beast from other Vermont ski areas; how close Killington was to going unlimited on Ikon Pass; Phill’s journey to buying Killington; Devil’s Fiddle and why sometimes things that don’t make sense financially make sense anyway; “we want to own this for generations to come”; a village layout and timeline update – “we want to make sure that this is something that’s additive to the ski experience” even if you don’t own within it; “Great Gulf wants this [village] to be competitive for the western resorts”; “we don’t want to change what Pico is”; how piping water over from Killington has reinvigorated and stabilized Pico; why Killington and Pico remained on Ikon Pass post-sale and probably will for the foreseeable future; is Ikon helping big ski areas stay independent?; Killington’s steady rise in lift ticket prices; future lift upgrades and why the Snowdon Triple is next up for a replacement.

What I got wrong

* File “opinionation” under LOL I’m Dumb Talking Is Hard

* I said that former Killington owner Powdr had “just sold” Eldora, but that’s not accurate: in July, the town of Nederland, Colorado, announced their intent to purchase the ski area. The sales process is ongoing.

Podcast Notes

On previous Killington pods

On Gross’ purchase of Killington and Pico

On ANSI chairlift standards

We get a bit in the weeds with a reference to “ANSI standards” for chairlifts. ANSI is the American National Standards Institute, a nonprofit organization that sets voluntary but widely adopted standards for everything from office furniture to electrical systems to safety signage in the United States. The ANSI standard for lifts, according to a blog post describing the code’s 2022 update, is “developed by the National Ski Areas Association (NSAA), [and] establishes standard requirements for the design, manufacture, construction, operation, and maintenance of passenger ropeways.”

On Killington’s long seasons

Killington often opens in October (though it has not done so since 2018), and closes in June (three straight years before a deliberately truncated 2024-25 season to begin demolition of the Superstar chair). List of Killington open and close dates since 1987-88.

On Win Smith and Killington and Sugarbush

On Killington’s village

The East needs more of this:

On Killington’s peak lift ticket prices

Per New England Ski History:

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Who

Alan Henceroth, President and Chief Operating Officer of Arapahoe Basin, Colorado – Al runs the best ski area-specific executive blog in America – check it out:

Recorded on

May 19, 2025

About Arapahoe Basin

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Alterra Mountain Company, which also owns:

Pass access

* Ikon Pass: unlimited

* Ikon Base Pass: unlimited access from opening day to Friday, Dec. 19, then five total days with no blackouts from Dec. 20 until closing day 2026

Base elevation

* 10,520 feet at bottom of Steep Gullies

* 10,780 feet at main base

Summit elevation

* 13,204 feet at top of Lenawee Mountain on East Wall

* 12,478 feet at top of Lazy J Tow (connector between Lenawee Express six-pack and Zuma quad)

Vertical drop

* 1,695 feet lift-served – top of Lazy J Tow to main base

* 1,955 feet lift-served, with hike back up to lifts – top of Lazy J Tow to bottom of Steep Gullies

* 2,424 feet hike-to – top of Lenawee Mountain to Main Base

Skiable Acres: 1,428

Average annual snowfall:

* Claimed: 350 inches

* Bestsnow.net: 308 inches

Trail count: 147 – approximate terrain breakdown: 24% double-black, 49% black, 20% intermediate, 7% beginner

Lift count: 9 (1 six-pack, 1 high-speed quad, 3 fixed-grip quads, 1 double, 2 carpets, 1 ropetow)

Why I interviewed him

We can generally splice U.S. ski centers into two categories: ski resort and ski area. I’ll often use these terms interchangeably to avoid repetition, but they describe two very different things. The main distinction: ski areas rise directly from parking lots edged by a handful of bunched utilitarian structures, while ski resorts push parking lots into the next zipcode to accommodate slopeside lodging and commerce.

There are a lot more ski areas than ski resorts, and a handful of the latter present like the former, with accommodations slightly off-hill (Sun Valley) or anchored in a near-enough town (Bachelor). But mostly the distinction is clear, with the defining question being this: is this a mountain that people will travel around the world to ski, or one they won’t travel more than an hour to ski?

Arapahoe Basin occupies a strange middle. Nothing in the mountain’s statistical profile suggests that it should be anything other than a Summit County locals hang. It is the 16th-largest ski area in Colorado by skiable acres, the 18th-tallest by lift-served vertical drop, and the eighth-snowiest by average annual snowfall. The mountain runs just six chairlifts and only two detachables. Beginner terrain is limited. A-Basin has no base area lodging, and in fact not much of a base area at all. Altitude, already an issue for the Colorado ski tourist, is amplified here, where the lifts spin from nearly 11,000 feet. A-Basin should, like Bridger Bowl in Montana (upstream from Big Sky) or Red River in New Mexico (across the mountain from Taos) or Sunlight in Colorado (parked between Aspen and I-70), be mostly unknown beside its heralded big-name neighbors (Keystone, Breck, Copper).

And it sort of is, but also sort of isn’t. Like tiny (826-acre) Aspen Mountain, A-Basin transcends its statistical profile. Skiers know it, seek it, travel for it, cross it off their lists like a snowy Eiffel Tower. Unlike Aspen, A-Basin has no posse of support mountains, no grided downtown spilling off the lifts, no Kleenex-level brand that stands in for skiing among non-skiers. And yet Vail tried buying the bump in 1997, and Alterra finally did in 2024. Meanwhile, nearby Loveland, bigger, taller, snowier, higher, easier to access with its trip-off-the-interstate parking lots, is still ignored by tourists and conglomerates alike.

Weird. What explains A-Basin’s pull? Onetime and future Storm guest Jackson Hogen offers, in his Snowbird Secrets book, an anthropomorphic explanation for that Utah powder dump’s aura:

As it turns out, everyone has a story for how they came to discover Snowbird, but no one knows the reason. Some have the vanity to think they picked the place, but the wisest know the place picked them.

That is the secret that Snowbird has slipped into our subconscious; deep down, we know we were summoned here. We just have to be reminded of it to remember, an echo of the Platonic notion that all knowledge is remembrance. In the modern world we are so divorced from our natural selves that you would think we’d have lost the power to hear a mountain call us. And indeed we have, but such is the enormous reach of this place that it can still stir the last seed within us that connects us to the energy that surrounds us every day yet we do not see. The resonance of that tiny, vibrating seed is what brings us here, to this extraordinary place, to stand in the heart of the energy flow.

Yeah I don’t know, Man. We’re drifting into horoscope territory here. But I also can’t explain why we all like to do This Dumb Thing so much that we’ll wrap our whole lives around it. So if there is some universe force, what Hogen calls “vibrations” from Hidden Peak’s quartz, drawing skiers to Snowbird, could there also be some proton-kryptonite-laserbeam s**t sucking us all toward A-Basin? If there’s a better explanation, I haven’t found it.

What we talked about

The Beach; keeping A-Basin’s whole ski footprint open into May; Alterra buys the bump – “we really liked the way Alterra was doing things… and letting the resorts retain their identity”; the legacy of former owner Dream; how hardcore, no-frills ski area A-Basin fits into an Alterra portfolio that includes high-end resorts such as Deer Valley and Steamboat; “you’d be surprised how many people from out of state ski here too”; Ikon as Colorado sampler pack (or not); local reaction to Alterra’s purchase – “I think it’s fair that there was anxiety”; balancing the wild ski cycle of over-the-top peak days and soft periods; parking reservations; going unlimited on the full Ikon Pass and how parking reservations play in – “we spent a ridiculous amount of time talking about it”; the huge price difference between Epic and Ikon and how that factors into the access calculus; why A-Basin still sells a single-mountain season pass; whether reciprocal partnerships with Monarch and Silverton will remain in place; “I’ve been amazed at how few things I’ve been told to do” by Alterra; A-Basin’s dirt-cheap early-season pass; why early season is “a more competitive time” than it used to be; why A-Basin left Mountain Collective; Justice Department anti-trust concerns around Alterra’s A-Basin purchase – “it never was clear to me what the concerns were”; breaking down A-Basin’s latest U.S. Forest Service masterplan – “everything in there, we hope to do”; a parking lot pulse gondola and why that makes sense over shuttles; why A-Basin plans a two-lift system of beginner machines; why should A-Basin care about beginner terrain?; is beginner development is related to Ikon Pass membership?; what it means that the MDP designs for 700 more skiers per day; assessing the Lenawee Express sixer three seasons in; why A-Basin sold the old Lenawee lift to independent Sunlight, Colorado; A-Basin’s patrol unionizing; and 100 percent renewable energy.

What I got wrong

* I said that A-Basin was the only mountain that had been caught up in antitrust issues, but that’s inaccurate: when S-K-I and LBO Enterprises merged into American Skiing Company in 1996, the U.S. Justice Department compelled the combined company to sell Cranmore and Waterville Valley, both in New Hampshire. Waterville Valley remains independent. Cranmore stayed independent for a while, and has since 2010 been owned by Fairbank Group, which also owns Jiminy Peak in Massachusetts and operates Bromley, Vermont.

* I said that A-Basin’s $259 early-season pass, good for unlimited access from opening day through Dec. 25, “was like one day at Vail,” which is sort of true and sort of not. Vail Mountain’s day-of lift ticket will hit $230 from Nov. 14 to Dec. 11, then increase to $307 or $335 every day through Christmas. All Resorts Epic Day passes, which would get skiers on the hill for any of those dates, currently sell for between $106 and $128 per day. Unlimited access to Vail Mountain for that full early-season period would require a full Epic Pass, currently priced at $1,121.

* This doesn’t contradict anything we discussed, but it’s worth noting some parking reservations changes that A-Basin implemented following our conversation. Reservations will now be required on weekends only, and from Jan. 3 to May 3, a reduction from 48 dates last winter to 36 for this season. The mountain will also allow skiers to hold four reservations at once, doubling last year’s limit of two.

Why now was a good time for this interview

One of the most striking attributes of modern lift-served skiing is how radically different each ski area is. Panic over corporate hegemony power-stamping each child mountain into snowy McDonald’s clones rarely survives past the parking lot. Underscoring the point is neighboring ski areas, all over America, that despite the mutually intelligible languages of trail ratings and patrol uniforms and lift and snowgun furniture, and despite sharing weather patterns and geologic origins and local skier pools, feel whole-cut from different eras, cultures, and imaginations. The gates between Alta and Snowbird present like connector doors between adjoining hotel rooms but actualize as cross-dimensional Mario warpzones. The 2.4-mile gondola strung between the Alpine Meadows and Olympic sides of Palisades Tahoe may as well connect a baseball stadium with an opera house. Crossing the half mile or so between the summits of Sterling at Smugglers’ Notch and Spruce Peak at Stowe is a journey of 15 minutes and five decades. And Arapahoe Basin, elder brother of next-door Keystone, resembles its larger neighbor like a bat resembles a giraffe: both mammals, but of entirely different sorts. Same with Sugarbush and Mad River Glen, Vermont; Sugar Bowl, Donner Ski Ranch, and Boreal, California; Park City and Deer Valley, Utah; Killington and Pico, Vermont; Highlands and Nub’s Nob, Michigan; Canaan Valley and Timberline and Nordic-hybrid White Grass, West Virginia; Aspen’s four Colorado ski areas; the three ski areas sprawling across Mt. Hood’s south flank; and Alpental and its clump of Snoqualmie sisters across the Washington interstate. Proximity does not equal sameness.

One of The Storm’s preoccupations is with why this is so. For all their call-to-nature appeal, ski areas are profoundly human creations, more city park than wildlife preserve. They are sculpted, managed, manicured. Even the wildest-feeling among them – Mount Bohemia, Silverton, Mad River Glen – are obsessively tended to, ragged by design.

A-Basin pulls an even neater trick: a brand curated for rugged appeal, scaffolded by brand-new high-speed lifts and a self-described “luxurious European-style bistro.” That the Alterra Mountain Company-owned, megapass pioneer floating in the busiest ski county in the busiest ski state in America managed to retain its rowdy rap even as the onetime fleet of bar-free double chairs toppled into the recycling bin is a triumph of branding.

But also a triumph of heart. A-Basin as Colorado’s Alta or Taos or Palisades is a title easily ceded to Telluride or Aspen Highlands, similarly tilted high-alpiners. But here it is, right beside buffed-out Keystone, a misunderstood mountain with its own wild side but a fair-enough rap as an approachable landing zone for first-time Rocky Mountain explorers westbound out of New York or Ohio. Why are A-Basin and Keystone so different? The blunt drama of A-Basin’s hike-in terrain helps, but it’s more enforcer than explainer. The real difference, I believe, is grounded in the conductor orchestrating this mad dance.

Since Henceroth sat down in the COO chair 20 years ago, Keystone has had nine president-general manager equivalents. A-Basin was already 61 years old in 2005, giving it a nice branding headstart on younger Keystone, born in 1970. But both had spent nearly two decades, from 1978 to 1997, co-owned by a dogfood conglomerate that often marketed them as one resort, and the pair stayed glued together on a multimountain pass for a couple of decades afterward.

Henceroth, with support and guidance from the real-estate giant that owned A-Basin in the Ralston-Purina-to-Alterra interim, had a series of choices to make. A-Basin had only recently installed snowmaking. There was no lift access to Zuma Bowl, no Beavers. The lift system consisted of three double chairs and two triples. Did this aesthetic minimalism and pseudo-independence define A-Basin? Or did the mountain, shaped by the generations of leaders before Henceroth, hold some intangible energy and pull, that thing we recognize as atmosphere, culture, vibe? Would The Legend lose its duct-taped edge if it:

* Expanded 400 mostly low-angle acres into Zuma Bowl (2007)

* Joined Vail Resorts’ Epic Pass (2009)

* Installed the mountain’s first high-speed lift (Black Mountain Express in 2010)

* Expand 339 additional acres into the Beavers (2018), and service that terrain with an atypical-for-Colorado 1,501-vertical-foot fixed-grip lift

* Exit the Epic Pass following the 2018-19 ski season

* Immediately join Mountain Collective and Ikon as a multimountain replacement (2019)

* Ditch a 21-year-old triple chair for the mountain’s first high-speed six-pack (2022)

* Sell to Alterra Mountain Company (2024)

* Require paid parking reservations on high-volume days (2024)

* Go unlimited on the Ikon Pass and exit Mountain Collective (2025)

* Release an updated USFS masterplan that focuses largely on the novice ski experience (2025)

That’s a lot of change. A skier booted through time from Y2K to October 2025 would examine that list and conclude that Rad Basin had been tamed. But ski a dozen laps and they’d say well not really. Those multimillion upgrades were leashed by something priceless, something human, something that kept them from defining what the mountain is. There’s some indecipherable alchemy here, a thing maybe not quite as durable as the mountain itself, but rooted deeper than the lift towers strung along it. It takes a skilled chemist to cook this recipe, and while they’ll never reveal every secret, you can visit the restaurant as many times as you’d like.

Why you should ski Arapahoe Basin

We could do a million but here are nine:

1) $: Two months of early-season skiing costs roughly the same as A-Basin’s neighbors charge for a single day. A-Basin’s $259 fall pass is unlimited from opening day through Dec. 25, cheaper than a Dec. 20 day-of lift ticket at Breck ($281), Vail ($335), Beaver Creek ($335), or Copper ($274), and not much more than Keystone ($243).

2) Pali: When A-Basin tore down the 1,329-vertical-foot, 3,520-foot-long Pallavicini double chair, a 1978 Yan, in 2020, they replaced it with a 1,325-vertical-foot, 3,512-foot-long Leitner-Poma double chair. It’s one of just a handful of new doubles installed in America over the past decade, underscoring a rare-in-modern-skiing commitment to atmosphere, experience, and snow preservation over uphill capacity.

3) The newest lift fleet in the West: The oldest of A-Basin’s six chairlifts, Zuma, arrived brand-new in 2007.

4) Wall-to-wall: when I flew into Colorado for a May 2025 wind-down, five ski areas remained open. Despite solid snowpack, Copper, Breck, and Winter Park all spun a handful of lifts on a constrained footprint. But A-Basin and Loveland still ran every lift, even over the Monday-to-Thursday timeframe of my visit.

5) The East Wall: It’s like this whole extra ski area. Not my deal as even skiing downhill at 12,500 feet hurts, but some of you like this s**t:

6) May pow: I mean yeah I did kinda just get lucky but damn these were some of the best turns I found all year (skiing with A-Basin Communications Manager Shayna Silverman):

7) The Beach: the best ski area tailgate in North America (sorry, no pet dragons allowed - don’t shoot the messenger):

8) The Beavers: Just glades and glades and glades (a little crunchy on this run, but better higher up and the following day):

9) It’s a ski area first: In a county of ski resorts, A-Basin is a parking-lots-at-the-bottom-and-not-much-else ski area. It’s spare, sparse, high, steep, and largely exposed. Skiers are better at self-selecting than we suppose, meaning the ability level of the average A-Basin skier is more Cottonwoods than Connecticut. That impacts your day in everything from how the liftlines flow to how the bumps form to how many zigzaggers you have to dodge on the down.

Podcast Notes

On the dates of my visit

We reference my last A-Basin visit quite a bit – for context, I skied there May 6 and 7, 2025. Both nice late-season pow days.

On A-Basin’s long seasons

It’s surprisingly difficult to find accurate open and close date information for most ski areas, especially before 2010 or so, but here’s what I could cobble together for A-Basin - please let me know if you have a more extensive list, or if any of this is wrong:

On A-Basin’s ownership timeline

Arapahoe Basin probably gets too much credit for being some rugged indie. Ralston-Purina, then-owners of Keystone, purchased A-Basin in 1978, then added Breckenridge to the group in 1993 before selling the whole picnic basket to Vail in 1997. The U.S. Justice Department wouldn’t let the Eagle County operator have all three, so Vail flipped Arapahoe to a Canadian real estate empire, then called Dundee, some months later. That company, which at some point re-named itself Dream, pumped a zillion dollars into the mountain before handing it off to Alterra last year.

On A-Basin leaving Epic Pass

A-Basin self-ejected from Epic Pass in 2019, just after Vail maxed out Colorado by purchasing Crested Butte and before they fully invaded the East with the Peak Resorts purchase. Arapahoe Basin promptly joined Mountain Collective and Ikon, swapping unlimited-access on four varieties of Epic Pass for limited-days products. Henceroth and I talked this one out during our 2022 pod, and it’s a fascinating case study in building a better business by decreasing volume.

On the price difference between Ikon and Epic with A-Basin access

Concerns about A-Basin hurdling back toward the overcrowded Epic days by switching to Ikon’s unlimited tier tend to overlook this crucial distinction: Vail sold a 2018-19 version of the Epic Pass that included unlimited access to Keystone and A-Basin for an early-bird rate of $349. The full 2025-26 Ikon Pass debuted at nearly four times that, retailing for $1,329, and just ramped up to $1,519.

On Alterra mountains with their own season passes

While all Alterra-owned ski areas (with the exception of Deer Valley), are unlimited on the full Ikon Pass and nine are unlimited with no blackouts on Ikon Base, seven of those sell their own unlimited season pass that costs less than Base. The sole unlimited season pass for Crystal, Mammoth, Palisades Tahoe, Steamboat, Stratton, and Sugarbush is a full Ikon Pass, and the least-expensive unlimited season pass for Solitude is the Ikon Base. Deer Valley leads the nation with its $4,100 unlimited season pass. See the Alterra chart at the top of this article for current season pass prices to all of the company’s mountains.

On A-Basin and Schweitzer pass partnerships

Alterra has been pretty good about permitting its owned ski areas to retain historic reciprocal partners on their single-mountain season passes. For A-Basin, this means three no-blackout days at Monarch and two unguided days at Silverton. Up at Schweitzer, passholders get three midweek days each at Whitewater, Mt. Hood Meadows, Castle Mountain, Loveland, and Whitefish. None of these ski areas are on Ikon Pass, and the benefit is only stapled to A-Basin- or Schweitzer-specific season passes.

On the Mountain Collective event

I talk about Mountain Collective as skiing’s most exclusive country club. Nothing better demonstrates that characterization than this podcast I recorded at the event last fall, when in around 90 minutes I had conversations with the top leaders of Boyne Resorts, Snowbird, Aspen, Jackson Hole, Sun Valley, Snowbasin, Grand Targhee, and many more.

On Mountain Collective and Ikon overlap

The Mountain Collective-Ikon overlap is kinda nutso:

On Pennsylvania skiing

In regards to the U.S. Justice Department grilling Alterra on its A-Basin acquisition, it’s still pretty stupid that the agency allowed Vail Resorts to purchase eight of the 19 public chairlift-served ski areas in Pennsylvania without a whisper of protest. These eight ski areas almost certainly account for more than half of all skier visits in a state that typically ranks sixth nationally for attendance. Last winter, the state’s 2.6 million skier visits accounted for more days than vaunted ski states New Hampshire (2.4 million), Washington (2.3), Montana (2.2), Idaho (2.1). or Oregon (2.0). Only New York (3.4), Vermont (4.2), Utah (6.5), California (6.6), and Colorado (13.9) racked up more.

On A-Basin’s USFS masterplan

Nothing on the scale of Zuma or Beavers inbound, but the proposed changes would tap novice terrain that has always existed but never offered a good access point for beginners:

On pulse gondolas

A-Basin’s proposed pulse gondola, should it be built, would be just the sixth such lift in America, joining machines at Taos, Northstar, Steamboat, Park City, and Snowmass. Loon plans to build a pulse gondola in 2026.

On mid-mountain beginner centers

Big bad ski resorts have attempted to amp up family appeal in recent years with gondola-serviced mid-mountain beginner centers, which open gentle, previously hard-to-access terrain to beginners. This was the purpose of mid-stations off Jackson Hole’s Sweetwater Gondola and Big Sky’s new-for-this-year Explorer Gondola. A-Basin’s gondy (not the parking lot pulse gondola, but the one terminating at Sawmill Flats in the masterplan image above), would provide up and down lift access allowing greenies to lap the new detach quad above it.

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

Who

Stephanie Cox, CEO of the National Ski Patrol

Recorded on

June 3, 2025

About National Ski Patrol

From the organization’s website:

The National Ski Patrol is a federally-chartered 501(c)(3) nonprofit membership association. As the leading authority of on-mountain safety, the NSP is dedicated to serving the outdoor recreation industry by providing education and accreditation to emergency care and safety service providers.

With a primary focus on education and training, the organization includes more than 30,000 members [Cox says 32,000 on the pod] serving 650 patrols in the U.S., Canada, Europe and Asia. Our members work on behalf of local ski/snowboard areas and bike parks to improve the overall experience for outdoor recreationalists. Members include ski and bike patrollers, mountain and bike hosts, alumni, associates, and physician partners.

The National Ski Patrol operates as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, deriving its primary financial support from membership dues, donations, user fees, and corporate sponsorships. …

The national office is located in Lakewood, Colorado, and is staffed with full-time employees that handle administrative duties.

Why I interviewed her

The Storm focuses unapologetically on the lift-served variety of skiing. I’ll often reinforce that point by teasing Uphill Bro for skiing in the wrong direction or making fun of myself for being a lazy U.S. American happy to ride a machine up the mountain. That, mostly, is a shtick to express my preference for an ordered ski experience over the wild variety. Acres of glades twisting down the mountainside – yes, please. But I’ll also take that groomed run-out back to the six-pack. This all-you-can-eat variety of skiing feeds the adrenaline monster, stows energy for the bristling explosive down. The fun part. But my hyperbolic preference for the down is also a sort-of cover-up. Because what really glues me to the trail-labeled and lift-laced bumps is that gigantic and ever-present panic button floating alongside me: ski patrol.

Oh I just ran into a tree? Well that’s inconvenient because now I can’t remember how to speak English or why I have eight empty Miller Lite cans in my backpack. But no need to fret. Within five minutes a corps of uniformed professionals specifically trained in the idiosyncratic art of piloting an injured moron down an ungroomed hillside on an eight-foot-long sled will materialize with crackling radios and stabilize me. It’s kind of amazing. Like who thought of this? I guess the same person who came up with lifeguards at the beach. When a squirrel misses its branch and falls 75 feet to the forest floor there is no Squirrel 911. Just a variety of bobcats and coyotes who are about to find an easy dinner. Humans are quite amazing animals in this way, setting up systems both highly effective and borderline invisible that grant us wide margins of error to in most cases survive even catastrophic misjudgments.

Depending on your view of human nature, the existence of ski patrol is either the most or least predictable miracle layer of organized commercial ski centers. The cynical may interpret this network of makeshift shacks and their occupants as liability shields, a legal hey-we-tried taskforce vaguely taming the chaos inherent in an impossible and awkward activity. But a more generous interpretation might view ski patrol as the most benevolent component of a ski area, the only piece not intended to generate income, an acknowledgement that any one of us, on even the gentlest slope, could in an instant need someone who knows exactly what to do.

I prefer that latter interpretation, but the truth is of course a complex blend of the cynical and the generous viewpoints, interlaced with a million other factors. We are all vaguely aware of this, which doesn’t mean we can explain it. I mean, why is ski patrol at every ski area? The question is both simplistic and baffling. Well of course there’s ski patrol because there always is. OK. But shouldn’t there be some live-free-or-die exception in the rowdy ski world of backwoods trails axe-cut by misanthropic good ole’ boys putting two middle fingers to society’s nine-to-five, collared-shirt expectations? Like “hey man, look at the waiver, if you break your leg it’s not my goddamned problem.” But there they are, anyplace there’s a ski lift, wearing that same plus-symbol uniform, enforcing that same yellow-signed skier code, blanketed with that same aura of stoic unsurprise and readiness: ski patrol. Is this omnipresence simply custom and tradition? State or federal law? Insurance requirement? Do patrollers work for the ski area or for some agency or entity? An imposition like restaurant food inspectors? Enforcers like a city’s police department? Attendants like stadium ushers? It’s hard to say without asking, so I asked.

What we talked about

Touring ski patrols across America; #SkiVirginia; Ski Patrol’s philosophical evolution over time; patrol saving my butt in Maine; how NSP ensures that patrollers are prepared to deal with the worst injuries at even the smallest ski areas; evolving and adapting over time; “this organization is by and large run by volunteers”; Avy dogs; why ski patrol is everywhere; organizational history; the relationship between NSP and individual ski areas; who funds NSP; paid versus volunteer patrollers; “one of my big goals for the organization is to make sure that all patrols fall under the NSP shield”; a couple of major ski area patrols that are not part of NSP; the general public “is not going to notice the difference” between a paid and volunteer patroller; where most of the paid patrollers work, and why; the amazing number of years the average volunteer patroller commits to the work; the rising cost of living in mountain towns; why NSP does not involve itself in pay or benefits conversations between patrollers and resorts; staying neutral on unionization drives; what it means to modernize NSP; and applying tech to help police on-mountain collisions.

What I got wrong

* I referenced a recent snowless winter at Wintergreen, Virginia, and said it was “in 21/22 or 22/23.” It was the winter of 2022-23, which, according to Snow Brains, was the ski area’s third snowless winter in a decade, after the 2016-17 and 2018-19 campaigns.

* At one point in our conversation, I mentioned “voluntary volunteers.” Which I don’t know Man talking is hard I guess.

Why now was a good time for this interview

I’d initially reached out to Cox as a follow-up to my podcast conversation with United Mountain Workers union President Max Magill, conducted in the wake of the December-to-January Park City patrol strike that leveled the ski area and sent owner Vail Resorts spiraling:

National Ski Patrol, it turns out, has no involvement in or position on unionization. That was a bit of a record scratch but also clarifying: patrol union drives, at least for now, lack a national sponsor that could propel the movement to critical mass. Still, it seemed odd that a national organization’s most visible umbrella would stand neutral on the trajectory of a tectonic movement flexing against consolidating, ever-more-distant management and escalating mountain-town affordability crises. So we talked about it a bit anyway.

What I’ve learned, 212 episodes into The Storm, is that organizations and entities are rarely – maybe never – what you expect them or want them to be. In episode 11, recorded in January 2020, just a few months after The Storm’s launch, I asked Win Smith, then National Ski Areas Association board chair and onetime owner of Sugarbush, the now very-innocent-seeming question of what the organization was doing to subsidize small or independent ski areas. Smith patiently explained that the NSAA was a trade organization, not a charity (I’m paraphrasing), and that their mission was education, lobbying, and helping to establish uniform operating standards and best practices, not a U.N.-style stabilizing force money-cannoning resources where necessary. I get that now, and have developed, through extensive interaction with the group, a deep appreciation for what the NSAA is and does, even if it is not the thing 2020 Stu thought it was or should be.

I guess that’s the point of The Storm Skiing Podcast: a dumb guy asking dumb questions like “so when are you going to build a gondola over Interstate 90 to connect Alpental to the rest of Summit at Snoqualmie?” and letting the nice smart people say “well wouldn’t that be nice but we have other priorities,” when they mean, “sure let me pull $100 million out of my back pocket to build a more-or-less useless lift that would also spark two decades of environmental litigation and has as much chance of clearing airspace over a federal road as a Russian stealth bomber.” Luckily I don’t mind asking dumb questions. They emerge from an impulse to sort reality from fiction, to tell the story of modern lift-served skiing by tapping the brains who understand some little corner of it.

Podcast Notes

On recent Ski Patrol leadership

This could maybe go under the sometimes-included “questions I wish I’d asked” section, but really I don’t wish I’d asked about it, as I have inherently little interest in organizational human drama, or the appearance of such. In this case, that maybe-drama is the rapid recent turnover in NSP leadership, aptly described by Jason Blevins last year in The Colorado Sun:

The former executive director of the nonprofit World Child Cancer heath organization arrived at the National Ski Patrol two years ago, becoming the fourth director of the organization in only five years. The former bosses reported conflicts with the group’s member-elected board of directors. An online petition was calling for an overhaul of the venerable organization that formed in 1938. Staff were bailing after years of turmoil that included board members twice suing their own organization. The group was losing its relevance in a quickly shifting ski resort industry.

Cox landed with a plan. She started visiting ski patrols across the country. She shepherded an overhaul of the organization’s training programs. She enlisted staff and kept them onboard. She mended fences with her board.

Whatever happened before, Cox just hit her third anniversary with the organization, and I was mostly interested in her efforts to modernize the 87-year-old NSP.

On skier visit numbers nationally and in Colorado

Colorado annually accounts for nearly one in four U.S. skier visits. Here’s the breakdown from last winter, according to the Kotke end-of-year survey, the definitive statistical ski industry report published annually by the NSAA:

On breaking my leg at Black Mountain of Maine

Most of you are tired of hearing about this, but if you’re new here, this is my big ski-patrol-saves-my-ass story:

On federal charters

An important piece of the NSP why-does-it-exist puzzle is its status, since 1980, as a federally chartered nonprofit organization. Congress charters such organizations “to carry out some regional or national public purpose,” according to a 2022 report on congress.gov. As with just about anything, a comprehensive list is frustratingly difficult to find (that’s why I moonlight as ski area spreadsheet mad scientist), but federally chartered organizations include such vaunted entities as the American Red Cross, the Boy and Girl Scouts of America, and Disabled American Veterans. Here’s a probably-not-entirely-accurate list on Wikipedia, and a government list from 1994.

On “14 patrols unionizing across the west”

Here’s a list I compiled of unionized ski area groups back in January. I haven’t updated it, so there may be a few additions since:

On Snow Angels

This is a pretty good gut-check conversation for the Speed Gods among us:

On Wachusett’s anti-theft system

Ski theft sucks, and some ski areas are better at fighting it than others. One of the best I’m aware of is Wachusett, Massachusetts, which has installed a comprehensive system of ski-rack-to-parking-lot cameras that has reduced thieves’ success rate to near zero. “A lot of times, the police will be waiting for them when they get home with the stolen board,” longtime Wachusett President Jeff Crowley told me on a 2022 visit to the ski area.

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

Who

Rob Katz, Chairperson and Chief Executive Officer, Vail Resorts

Recorded on

August 8, 2025

About Vail Resorts

Vail Resorts owns and operates 42 ski areas in North America, Australia, and Europe. In order of acquisition:

The company’s Epic Pass delivers skiers unlimited access to all of these ski areas, plus access to a couple dozen partner resorts:

Why I interviewed him

How long do you suppose Vail Resorts has been the largest ski area operator by number of resorts? From how the Brobots prattle on about the place, you’d think since around the same time the Mayflower bumped into Plymouth Rock. But the answer is 2018, when Vail surged to 18 ski areas – one more than number two Peak Resorts. Vail wasn’t even a top-five operator until 2007, when the company’s five resorts landed it in fifth place behind Powdr’s eight and 11 each for Peak, Boyne, and Intrawest. Check out the year-by-year resort operator rankings since 2000:

Kind of amazing, right? For decades, Vail, like Aspen, was the owner of some great Colorado ski areas and nothing more. There was no reason to assume it would ever be anything else. Any ski company that tried to get too big collapsed or surrendered. Intrawest inflated like a balloon then blew up like a pinata, ejecting trophies like Mammoth, Copper, and Whistler before straggling into the Alterra refugee camp with a half dozen survivors. American Skiing Company (ASC) united eight resorts in 1996 and was 11 by the next year and was dead by 2007. Even mighty Aspen, perhaps the brand most closely associated with skiing in American popular culture, had abandoned a nearly-two-decade experiment in owning ski areas outside of Pitkin County when it sold Blackcomb and Fortress Mountains in 1986 and Breckenridge the following year.

But here we are, with Vail Resorts, improbably but indisputably the largest operator in skiing. How did Vail do this when so many other operators had a decades-long head start? And failed to achieve sustainability with so many of the same puzzle pieces? Intrawest had Whistler. ASC owned Heavenly. Booth Creek, a nine-resort upstart launched in 1996 by former Vail owner George Gillett, had Northstar. The obvious answer is the 2008 advent of the Epic Pass, which transformed the big-mountain season pass from an expensive single-mountain product that almost no one actually needed to a cheapo multi-mountain passport that almost anyone could afford. It wasn’t a new idea, necessarily, but the bargain-skiing concept had never been attached to a mountain so regal as Vail, with its sprawling terrain and amazing high-speed lift fleet and Colorado mystique. A multimountain pass had never come with so little fine print – it really was unlimited, at all these great mountains, all the time - but so many asterisks: better buy now, because pretty soon skiing Christmas week is going to cost more than your car. And Vail was the first operator to understand, at scale, that almost everyone who skis at Vail or Beaver Creek or Breckenridge skied somewhere else first, and that the best way to recruit these travelers to your mountain rather than Deer Valley or Steamboat or Telluride was to make the competition inconvenient by bundling the speedbump down the street with the Alpine fantasy across the country.

Vail Resorts, of course, didn’t do anything. Rob Katz did these things. And yes, there was a great and capable team around him. But it’s hard to ignore the fact that all of these amazing things started happening shortly after Katz’s 2006 CEO appointment and stopped happening around the time of his 2021 exit. Vail’s stock price: from $33.04 on Feb. 28, 2006 to $354.76 to Nov. 1, 2021. Epic Pass sales: from zero to 2.1 million. Owned resort portfolio: from five in three states to 37 in 15 states and three countries. Epic Pass portfolio: from zero ski areas to 61. The company’s North American skier visits: from 6.3 million for the 2005-06 ski season to 14.9 million in 2020-21. Those same VR metrics after three-and-a-half years under his successor, Kirsten Lynch: a halving of the stock price to $151.50 on May 27, 2025, her last day in charge; a small jump to 2.3 million Epic Passes sold for 2024-25 (but that marked the product’s first-ever unit decline, from 2.4 million the previous winter); a small increase to 42 owned resorts in 15 states and four countries; a small increase to 65 ski areas accessible on the Epic Pass; and a rise to 16.9 million North American skier visits (actually a three percent slump from the previous winter and the company’s second consecutive year of declines, as overall U.S. skier visits increased 1.6 percent after a poor 2023-24).

I don’t want to dismiss the good things Lynch did ($20-an-hour minimum wage; massively impactful lift upgrades, especially in New England; a best-in-class day pass product; a better Pet Rectangle app), or ignore the fact that Vail’s 2006-to-2019 trajectory would have been impossible to replicate in a world that now includes the Ikon Pass counterweight, or understate the tense community-resort relationships that boiled under Katz’s do-things-and-apologize-later-maybe leadership style. But Vail Resorts became an impossible-to-ignore globe-spanning goliath not because it collected great ski areas, but because a visionary leader saw a way to transform a stale, weather-dependent business into a growing, weather-agnostic(-ish) one.

You may think that “visionary” is overstating it, that merely “transformational” would do. But I don’t think I appreciated, until the rise of social media, how deeply cynical America had become, or the seemingly outsized proportion of people so eager to explain why new ideas were impossible. Layer, on top of this, the general dysfunction inherent to corporate environments, which can, without constant schedule-pruning, devolve into pseudo-summits of endless meetings, in which over-educated and well-meaning A+ students stamped out of elite university assembly lines spend all day trotting between conference rooms taking notes they’ll never look at and trying their best to sound brilliant but never really accomplishing anything other than juggling hundreds of daily Slack and email messages. Perhaps I am the cynical one here, but my experience in such environments is that actually getting anything of substance done with a team of corporate eggheads is nearly impossible. To be able to accomplish real, industry-wide, impactful change in modern America, and to do so with a corporate bureaucracy as your vehicle, takes a visionary.

Why now was a good time for this interview

And the visionary is back. True, he never really left, remaining at the head of Vail’s board of directors for the duration of Lynch’s tenure. But the board of directors doesn’t have to explain a crappy earnings report on the investor conference call, or get yelled at on CNBC, or sit in the bullseye of every Saturday morning liftline post on Facebook.

So we’ll see, now that VR is once again and indisputably Katz’s company, whether Vail’s 2006-to-2021 rise from fringe player to industry kingpin was an isolated case of right-place-at-the-right-time first-mover big-ideas luck or the masterwork of a business musician blending notes of passion, aspiration, consumer pocketbook logic, the mystique of irreplaceable assets, and defiance of conventional industry wisdom to compose a song that no one can stop singing. Will Katz be Steve Jobs returning to Apple and re-igniting a global brand? Or MJ in a Wizards jersey, his double threepeat with the Bulls untarnished but his legacy otherwise un-enhanced at best and slightly diminished at worst?

I don’t know. I lean toward Jobs, remaining aware that the ski industry will never achieve the scale of the Pet Rectangle industry. But Vail Resorts owns 42 ski areas out of like 6,000 on the planet, and only about one percent of them is associated with the Epic Pass. Even if Vail grew all of these metrics tenfold, it would still own just a fraction of the global ski business. Investors call this “addressable market,” meaning the size of your potential customer base if you can make them aware of your existence and convince them to use your services, and Vail’s addressable market is far larger than the neighborhood it now occupies.

Whether Vail can get there by deploying its current operating model is irrelevant. Remember when Amazon was an online bookstore and Netflix a DVD-by-mail outfit? I barely do either, because visionary leaders (Jeff Bezos, Reed Hastings) shaped these companies into completely different things, tapping a rapidly evolving technological infrastructure capable of delivering consumers things they don’t know they need until they realize they can’t live without them. Like never going into a store again or watching an entire season of TV in one night. Like the multimountain ski pass.

Being visionary is not the same thing as being omniscient. Amazon’s Fire smartphone landed like a bag of sand in a gastank. Netflix nearly imploded after prematurely splitting its DVD and digital businesses in 2011. Vail’s decision to simultaneously chop 2021-22 Epic Pass prices by 20 percent and kill its 2020-21 digital reservation system landed alongside labor shortages, inflation, and global supply chain woes, resulting in a season of inconsistent operations that may have turned a generation off to the company. Vail bullied Powdr into selling Park City and Arapahoe Basin into leaving the Epic Pass and Colorado’s state ski trade association into having to survive without four (then five) of its biggest brands. The company alienated locals everywhere, from Stowe (traffic) to Sunapee (same) to Ohio (truncated seasons) to Indiana (same) to Park City (everything) to Whistler (same) to Stevens Pass (just so many people man). The company owns 99 percent of the credit for the lift-tickets-brought-to-you-by-Tiffany pricing structure that drives the popular perception that skiing is a sport accessible only to people who rent out Yankee Stadium for their dog’s birthday party.

We could go on, but the point is this: Vail has messed up in the past and will mess up again in the future. You don’t build companies like skyscrapers, straight up from ground to sky. You build them, appropriately for Vail, like mountains, with an earthquake here and an eruption there and erosion sometimes and long stable periods when the trees grow and the goats jump around on the rocks and nothing much happens except for once in a while a puma shows up and eats Uncle Toby. Vail built its Everest by clever and novel and often ruthless means, but in doing so made a Balkanized industry coherent, mainstreamed the ski season pass, reshaped the consumer ski experience around adventure and variety, united the sprawling Park City resorts, acknowledged the Midwest as a lynchpin ski region, and forced competitors out of their isolationist stupor and onto the magnificent-but-probably-nonexistent-if-not-for-the-existential-need-to-compete-with Vail Ikon, Indy, and Mountain Collective passes.

So let’s not confuse the means for the end, or assume that Katz, now 58 and self-assured, will act with the same brash stop-me-if-you-can bravado that defined his first tenure. I mean, he could. But consumers have made it clear that they have alternatives, communities have made it clear that they have ways to stop projects out of spite, Alterra has made it clear that empire building is achieved just as well through ink as through swords, and large independents such as Jackson Hole have made it clear that the passes that were supposed to be their doom instead guaranteed indefinite independence via dependable additional income streams. No one’s afraid of Vail anymore.

That doesn’t mean the company can’t grow, can’t surprise us, can’t reconfigure the global ski jigsaw puzzle in ways no one has thought of. Vail has brand damage to repair, but it’s repairable. We’re not talking about McDonald’s here, where the task is trying to convince people that inedible food is delicious. We’re talking about Vail Mountain and Whistler and Heavenly and Stowe – amazing places that no one needs convincing are amazing. What skiers do need to be convinced of is that Vail Resorts is these ski areas’ best possible steward, and that each mountain can be part of something much larger without losing its essence.

You may be surprised to hear Katz acknowledge as much in our conversation. You will probably be surprised by a lot of things he says, and the way he projects confidence and optimism without having to fully articulate a vision that he’s probably still envisioning. It’s this instinctual lean toward the unexpected-but-impactful that powered Vail’s initial rise and will likely reboot the company. Perhaps sooner than we expect.

What we talked about

The CEO job feels “both very familiar and very new at the same time”; Vail Resorts 2025 versus Vail Resorts 2006; Ikon competition means “we have to get better”; the Epic Friends program that replaces Buddy Tickets: 50 percent off plus skiers can apply that cost to next year’s Epic Pass; simplifying the confusing; “we’re going to have to get a little more creative and a little more aggressive” when it comes to lift ticket pricing; why Vail will “probably always have a window ticket”; could we see lower lift ticket prices?; a response to lower-than-expected lift ticket sales in 2024-25; “I think we need to elevate the resort brands themselves”; thoughts on skier-visit drops; why Katz returned as CEO; evolving as a leader; a morale check for a company “that was used to winning” but had suffered setbacks; getting back to growth; competing for partners and “how do we drive thoughtful growth”; is Vail an underdog now?; Vail’s big advantage; reflecting on the 20 percent 2021 Epic Pass price cut and whether that was the right decision; is the Epic Pass too expensive or too cheap?; reacting to the first ever decline in Epic Pass unit sales numbers; why so many mountains are unlimited on Epic Local; “who are you going to kick out of skiing” if you tighten access?; protecting the skier experience; how do you make skiers say “wow?”; defending Vail’s ongoing resort leadership shuffle; and why the volume of Vail’s lift upgrades slowed after 2022’s Epic Lift Upgrade.

What I got wrong

* I said that the Epic Pass now offered access to “64 or 65” ski areas, but I neglected to include the six new ski areas that Vail partnered with in Austria for the 2025-26 ski season. The correct number of current Epic Pass partners is 71 (see chart above).

* I said that Vail Resorts’ skier visits declined by 1.5 percent from the 2023-24 to 2024-25 winters, and that national skier visits grew by three percent over that same timeframe. The numbers are actually reversed: Vail’s skier visits slumped by approximately three percent last season, while national visits increased by 1.7 percent, per the National Ski Areas Association.

* I said that the $1,429 Ikon Pass cost “40% more” than the $799 Epic Local – but I was mathing on the fly and I mathed dumb. The actual increase from Epic Local to Ikon is roughly 79 percent.

* I claimed that Park City Mountain Resort was charging $328 for a holiday week lift ticket when it was “30 percent-ish open” and “the surrounding resorts were 70-ish percent open.” Unfortunately, I was way off on the dollar amount and the timeframe, as I was thinking of this X post I made on Wednesday, Jan. 8, when day-of tickets were selling for $288:

* I said I didn’t know what “Alterra” means. Alterra Mountain Company defines it as “a fusion of the words altitude and terrain/terra, paying homage to the mountains and communities that form the backbone of the company.”

* I said that Vail’s Epic Lift Upgrade was “22 or 23 lifts.” I was wrong, but the number is slippery for a few reasons. First, while I was referring specifically to Vail’s 2021 announcement that 19 new lifts were inbound in 2022, the company now uses “Epic Lift Upgrade” as an umbrella term for all years’ new lift installs. Second, that 2022 lift total shot up to 21, then down to 19 when Park City locals threw a fit and blocked two of them (both ultimately went to Whistler), then 18 after Keystone bulldozed an illegal access road in the high Alpine (the new lift and expansion opened the following year).

Questions I wish I’d asked

There is no way to do this interview in a way that makes everyone happy. Vail is too big, and I can’t talk about everything. Angry Mountain Bro wants me to focus on community, Climate Bro on the environment, Finance Bro on acquisitions and numbers, Subaru Bro on liftlines and parking lots. Too many people who already have their minds made up about how things are will come here seeking validation of their viewpoint and leave disappointed.

I will say this: just because I didn’t ask about something doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have liked to. Acquisitions and Europe, especially. But some preliminary conversations with Vail folks indicated that Katz had nothing new to say on either of these topics, so I let it go for another day.

Podcast Notes

On various metrics

Here’s a by-the-numbers history of the Epic Pass:

Here’s Epic’s year-by-year partner history:

On the percent of U.S. skier visits that Vail accounts for

We don’t know the exact percentage of U.S. skier visits belong to Vail Resorts, since the company’s North American numbers include Whistler, which historically accounts for approximately 2 million annual skier visits. But let’s call Vail’s share of America’s skier visits 25 percent-ish:

On ski season pass participation in America

The rise of Epic and Ikon has correlated directly with a decrease in lift ticket visits and an increase in season pass visits. Per Kotke’s End-of-Season Demographic Report for 2023-24:

On capital investment

Similarly, capital investment has mostly risen over the past decade, with a backpedal for Covid. Kotke:

The NSAA’s preliminary numbers suggest that the 2024-25 season numbers will be $624.4 million, a decline from the previous two seasons, but still well above historic norms.

On the mystery of the missing skier visits

I jokingly ask Katz for resort-by-resort skier visits in passing. Here’s what I meant by that - up until the 2010-11 ski season, Vail, like all operators on U.S. Forest Service land, reported annual skier visits per ski area:

And then they stopped, winning a legal argument that annual skier visits are proprietary and therefore protected from public records disclosure. Or something like that. Anyway most other large ski area operators followed this example, which mostly just serves to make my job more difficult.

On that ski trip where Timberline punched out Vail in a one-on-five fight

I don’t want to be the Anecdote King, but in 2023 I toured 10 Mid-Atlantic ski areas the first week of January, which corresponded with a horrendous warm-up. The trip included stops at five Vail Resorts: Liberty, Whitetail, Seven Springs, Laurel, and Hidden Valley, all of which were underwhelming. Fine, I thought, the weather sucks. But then I stopped at Timberline, West Virginia:

After three days of melt-out tiptoe, I was not prepared for what I found at gut-renovated Timberline. And what I found was 1,000 vertical feet of the best version of warm-weather skiing I’ve ever seen. Other than the trail footprint, this is a brand-new ski area. When the Perfect Family – who run Perfect North, Indiana like some sort of military operation – bought the joint in 2020, they tore out the lifts, put in a brand-new six-pack and carpet-loaded quad, installed all-new snowmaking, and gut-renovated the lodge. It is remarkable. Stunning. Not a hole in the snowpack. Coming down the mountain from Davis, you can see Timberline across the valley beside state-run Canaan Valley ski area – the former striped in white, the latter mostly barren.

I skied four fast laps off the summit before the sixer shut at 4:30. Then a dozen runs off the quad. The skier level is comically terrible, beginners sprawled all over the unload, all over the green trails. But the energy is level 100 amped, and everyone I talked to raved about the transformation under the new owners. I hope the Perfect family buys 50 more ski areas – their template works.

I wrote up the full trip here.

On the megapass timeline

I’ll work on a better pass timeline at some point, but the basics are this:

* 2008: Epic Pass debuts - unlimited access to all Vail Resorts

* 2012: Mountain Collective debuts - 2 days each at partner resorts

* 2015: M.A.X. Pass debuts - 5 days each at partner resorts, unlimited option for home resort

* 2018: Ikon Pass debuts, replaces M.A.X. - 5, 7, or unlimited days at partner resorts

* 2019: Indy Pass debuts - 2 days each at partner resorts

On Epic Day vs. Ikon Session

I’ve long harped on the inadequacy of the Ikon Session Pass versus the Epic Day Pass:

On Epic versus Ikon pricing

Epic Passes mostly sell at a big discount to Ikon:

On Vail’s most recent investor conference call

This podcast conversation delivers Katz’s first public statements since he hosted Vail Resorts’ investor conference call on June 5. I covered that call extensively at the time:

On Epic versus Ikon access tweaks

Alterra tweaks Ikon Pass access for at least one or two mountains nearly every year – more than two dozen since 2020, by my count. Vail rarely makes any changes. I broke down the difference between the two in the article linked directly above this one. I ask Katz about this in the pod, and he gives us a very emphatic answer.

On the Park City strike

No reason to rehash the whole mess in Park City earlier this year. Here’s a recap from The New York Times. The Storm’s best contribution to the whole story was this interview with United Mountain Workers President Max Magill:

On Vail’s leadership shuffle

I’ll write more about this at some point, but if you scroll to the right on Vail’s roster, you’ll see the yellow highlights whenever Vail has switched a president/general manager-level employee over the past several years. It’s kind of a lot. A sample from the resorts the company has owned since 2016:

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Who

Greg Pack, President and General Manager of Mt. Hood Meadows, Oregon

Recorded on

April 28, 2025

About Mt. Hood Meadows

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: The Drake Family (and other minority shareholders)

Located in: Mt. Hood, Oregon

Year founded: 1968

Pass affiliations:

* Indy Pass – 2 days, select blackouts

* Indy+ Pass – 2 days, no blackouts

Closest neighboring U.S. ski areas: Summit (:17), Mt. Hood Skibowl (:19), Cooper Spur (:23), Timberline (:26)

Base elevation: 4,528 feet

Summit elevation: 7,305 feet at top of Cascade Express; 9,000 feet at top of hike-to permit area; 11,249 feet at summit of Mount Hood

Vertical drop: 2,777 feet lift-served; 4,472 hike-to inbounds; 6,721 feet from Mount Hood summit

Skiable acres: 2,150

Average annual snowfall: 430 inches

Trail count: 87 (15% beginner, 40% intermediate, 15% advanced, 30% expert)

Lift count: 11 (1 six-pack, 5 high-speed quads, 1 fixed-grip quad, 3 doubles, 1 carpet – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Mount Hood Meadows’ lift fleet)

About Cooper Spur

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: The Drake Family

Located in: Mt. Hood, Oregon

Year founded: 1927

Pass affiliations: Indy Pass, Indy+ Pass – 2 days, no blackouts

Closest neighboring U.S. ski areas: Mt. Hood Meadows (:22), Summit (:29), Mt. Hood Skibowl (:30), Timberline (:37)

Base elevation: 3,969 feet

Summit elevation: 4,400 feet

Vertical drop: 431 feet

Skiable acres: 50

Average annual snowfall: 250 inches

Trail count: 9 (1 most difficult, 7 more difficult, 1 easier)

Lift count: 2 (1 double, 1 ropetow – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Cooper Spur’s lift fleet)

Why I interviewed him

Volcanoes are weird. Oh look, an exploding mountain. Because that seems reasonable. Volcanoes sound like something imagined, like dragons or teleportation or dinosaurs*. “So let me get this straight,” I imagine some puzzled Appalachian miner, circa 1852, responding to the fellow across the fire as he tells of his adventures in the Oregon Territory, “you expect me to believe that out thataways they got themselves mountains that just blow their roofs off whenever they feel like it, and shoot off fire and rocks and gas for 50 mile or more, and no one never knows when it’s a’comin’? You must think I’m dumber’n that there tree stump.”

Turns out volcanoes are real. How humanity survived past day one I have no idea. But here we are, skiing on volcanoes instead of tossing our virgins from the rim as a way of asking the nice mountain to please not explode (seriously how did anyone make it out of the past alive?).

And one of the volcanoes we can ski on is Mount Hood. This actually seems more unbelievable to me than the concept of a vengeful nuclear mountain. PNW Nature Bros shield every blade of grass like they’re guarding Fort Knox. When, in 2014, federal scientists proposed installing four monitoring stations on Hood, which the U.S. Geological Survey ranks as the sixth-highest threat to erupt out of America’s 161 active volcanoes, these morons stalled the process for six years. “I think it is so important to have places like that where we can just step back, out of respect and humility, and appreciate nature for what it is,” a Wilderness Watch official told The New York Times. Personally I think it’s so important to install basic monitoring infrastructure so that thousands of people are not incinerated in a predictable volcanic eruption. While “Japan, Iceland and Chile smother their high-threat volcanoes in scientific instruments,” The Times wrote, American Granola Bros say things like, “This is more proof that the Forest Service has abandoned any pretense of administering wilderness as per the letter or spirit of the Wilderness Act.” And Hood and the nation’s other volcanoes cackle madly. “These idiots are dumber than the human-sacrifice people,” they say just before belching up an ash cloud that could take down a 747. When officials finally installed these instrument clusters on Hood in 2020, they occupied three boxes that look to be approximately the size of a convenience-store ice freezer, which feels like an acceptable trade-off to mass death and airplanes falling out of the sky.

I know that as an outdoor writer I’m supposed to be all pissed off if anyone anywhere suggests any use of even a centimeter of undeveloped land other than giving it back to the deer in a treaty printed on recycled Styrofoam and signed with human blood to symbolize the life we’ve looted from nature by commandeering 108 square feet to potentially protect millions of lives from volcanic eruption, but this sort of trivial protectionism and willful denial that humans ought to have rights too is the kind of brainless uncompromising overreach that I fear will one day lead to a massive over-correction at the other extreme, in which a federal government exhausted with never being able to do anything strips away or massively dilutes land protections that allow anyone to do anything they can afford. And that’s when we get Monster Pete’s Arctic Dune Buggies setting up a casino/coal mine/rhinoceros-hunting ranch on the Eliot Glacier and it’s like thanks Bros I hope that was worth it to stall the placement of gardenshed-sized public safety infrastructure for six years.

Anyway, given the trouble U.S. officials have with installing necessary things on Mount Hood, it’s incredible how many unnecessary ones our ancestors were able to build. But in 1927 the good old boys hacked their way into the wilderness and said, “by gum what a spot for snoskiing” and built a bunch of ski areas. And today 31 lifts serve four Mt. Hood ski areas covering a combined 4,845 acres:

Which I’m just like, do these Wilderness Watch people not know about this? Perhaps if this and similar groups truly cared about the environmental integrity of Mount Hood they would invest their time, energy, and attention into a long-term regional infrastructure plan that identified parcels for concentrated mixed-use development and non-personal-car-based transit options to mitigate the impact of thousands of skiers traveling up the mountain daily from Portland, rather than in delaying the installation of basic monitoring equipment that notifies humanity of a civilization-shattering volcanic eruption before it happens. But then again I am probably not considering how this would impact the integrity of squirrel poop decomposition below 6,000 feet and the concomitant impacts on pinestand soil erosion which of course would basically end life as we know it on planet Earth.

OK this went sideways let me try to salvage it.

*Whoops I know dinosaurs were real; I meant to write “the moon landing.” How embarrassing.

What we talked about

A strong 2024-25; recruiting employees in mountains with little nearby housing; why Meadows doesn’t compete with Timberline for summer skiing; bye-bye Blue double, Meadows’ last standing opening-year chairlift; what it takes to keep an old Riblet operating; the reliability of old versus new chairlifts; Blue’s slow-motion demolition and which relics might remain long term; the logic of getting a free anytime buddy lift ticket with your season pass; thoughts on ski area software providers that take a percentage of all sales; why Meadows and Cooper Spur have no pass reciprocity; the ongoing Cooper Spur land exchange; the value of Cooper Spur and Summit on a volcano with three large ski areas; why Meadows hasn’t backed away from reciprocal agreements; why Meadows chose Indy over Epic, Ikon, or Mountain Collective; becoming a ski kid when you’re not from a ski family; landing at Mountain Creek, New Jersey after a Colorado ski career; how Moonlight Basin started as an independent ski area and eventually became part of Big Sky; the tension underlying Telluride; how the Drake Family, who has managed the ski area since inception, makes decisions; a board that reinvests 100 percent of earnings back into the mountain; why we need large independents in a consolidating world; being independent is “our badge of honor”; whether ownership wants to remain independent long term; potential next lift upgrades; a potential all-new lift line and small expansion; thoughts on a better Heather lift; wild Hood weather and the upper limits of lift service; considering surface lifts on the upper mountain; the challenges of running Cascade Express; the future of the Daisy and Easy Rider doubles; more potential future expansion; and whether we could ever see a ski connection with Timberline Lodge.

Why now was a good time for this interview

It’s kind of dumb that 210 episodes into this podcast I’ve only recorded one Oregon ep: Timberline Lodge President Jeff Kohnstamm, more than three years ago. While Oregon only has 11 active ski areas, and the state ranks 11th-ish in skier visits, it’s an important ski state. PNW skiers treat skiing like the Northeast treats baseball or the Midwest treats football or D.C. treats politics: rabid beyond reason. That explains the eight Idaho pods and half dozen each in Washington and B.C. These episodes hit like a hash stand at a Dead show. So why so few Oregon eps?

Eh, no reason in particular. There isn’t a ski area in North America that I don’t want to feature on the podcast, but I can’t just order them online like a pizza. Relationships, more than anything, drive the podcast, and The Storm’s schedule is primarily opportunity driven. I invite folks on as I meet them or when they do something cool. And sometimes we can connect right away and sometimes it takes months or even years, even if they want to do it. Sometimes we’re waiting on contracts or approvals so we can discuss some big project in depth. It can take time to build trust, or to convince a non-podcast person that they have a great story to tell.

So we finally get to Meadows. Not to be It-Must-Be-Nice Bro about benefits that arise from clear deliberate life choices, but It must be nice to live in the PNW, where every city sits within 90 minutes of a ripping, open-until-Memorial-Day skyscraper that gets carpet bombed with 400 annual inches but receives between one and four out-of-state visitors per winter. Yeah the ski areas are busy anyway because they don’t have enough of them, but busy with Subaru-driving Granola Bros is different than busy with Subaru-driving Granola Bros + Texas Bro whose cowboy boots aren’t clicking in right + Florida Bro who bought a Trans Am for his boa constrictor + Midwest Bro rocking Olin 210s he found in Gramp’s garage + Hella Rad Cali Bro + New Yorker Bro asking what time they groom Corbet’s + Aussie Bro touring the Rockies on a seven-week long weekend + Euro Bro rocking 65 cm underfoot on a two-foot powder day. I have no issue with tourists mind you because I am one but there is something amazing about a ski area that is gigantic and snowy and covered in modern infrastructure while simultaneously being unknown outside of its area code.

Yes this is hyperbole. But while everyone in Portland knows that Meadows has the best parking lot views in America and a statistical profile that matches up with Beaver Creek and as many detachable chairlifts as Snowbasin or Snowbird and more snow than Steamboat or Jackson or Palisades or Pow Mow, most of the rest of the world doesn’t, and I think they should.

Why you should ski Mt. Hood Meadows and Cooper Spur

It’s interesting that the 4,845 combined skiable acres of Hood’s four ski areas are just a touch larger than the 4,323 acres at Mt. Bachelor, which as far as I know has operated as a single interconnected facility since its 1958 founding. Both are volcanoes whose ski areas operate on U.S. Forest Service land a commutable distance from demographically similar markets, providing a case study in distributed versus centralized management.

Bachelor in many ways delivers a better experience. Bachelor’s snow is almost always drier and better, an outlier in the kingdom of Cascade Concrete. Skiers can move contiguously across its full acreage, an impossible mission on Balkanized Hood. The mountain runs an efficient, mostly modern 15 lifts to Hood’s wild 31, which includes a dozen detachables but also a half dozen vintage Riblet doubles with no safety bars. Bachelor’s lifts scale the summit, rather than stopping thousands of feet short as they do on Hood. While neither are Colorado-grade destination ski areas, metro Portland is stuffed with 25 times more people than Bend, and Hood ski areas have an everbusy feel that skiers can often outrun at Bachelor. Bachelor is closer to its mothership – just 26 minutes from Bend to Portland’s hour-to-two-hour commutes up to the ski areas. And Bachelor, accessible on all versions of the Ikon Pass and not hamstrung by the confusing counter-branding of multiple ski areas with similar names occupying the same mountain, presents a more clearcut target for the mainstream skier.

But Mount Hood’s quirky scatterplot ski centers reward skiers in other ways. Four distinct ski areas means four distinct ski cultures, each with its own pace, purpose, customs, traditions, and orientation to the outside world. Timberline Lodge is a funky mix of summertime Bro parks, Government Camp greens, St. Bernards, and its upscale landmark namesake hotel. Cooper Spur is tucked-away, low-key, low-vert family resort skiing. Meadows sprawls, big and steep, with Hood’s most interesting terrain. And low-altitude, closest-to-the-city Skibowl is night-lit slowpoke with a vintage all-Riblet lift fleet. Your Epic and Ikon passes are no good here, though Indy gets you Meadows and Cooper Spur. Walk-up lift tickets (still the only way to buy them at Skibowl), are more tier-varied and affordable than those at Bachelor, which can exceed $200 on peak days (though Bachelor heavily discounts access to its beginner lifts, with free access to select novice areas). Bachelor’s $1,299 season pass is 30 percent more expensive than Meadows’.

This dynamic, of course, showcases single-entity efficiency and market capture versus the messy choice of competition. Yes Free Market Bro you are right sometimes. Hood’s ski areas have more inherent motivators to fight on price, forge allegiances like the Timberline-Skibowl joint season pass, invest in risks like night and summer skiing, and run wonky low-tide lift ticket deals. Empowering this flexibility: all four Hood ski areas remain locally owned – Meadows and T-Line by their founding families. Bachelor, of course, is a fiefdom of Park City, Utah-based Powdr, which owns a half-dozen other ski areas across the West.

I don’t think that Hood is better than Bachelor or that Bachelor is better than Hood. They’re different, and you should ski both. But however you dissect the niceties of these not-really-competing-but-close-enough-that-a-comarison-makes-sense ski centers, the on-the-ground reality adds up to this: Hood locals, in general, are a far more contented gang than Bachelor Bros. I don’t have any way to quantify this, and Bachelor has its partisans. But I talk to skiers all over the country, all the time. Skiers will complain about anything, and online guttings of even the most beloved mountains exist. But talk to enough people and strong enough patterns emerge to understand that, in general, locals are happy with Mammoth and Alpine Meadows and Sierra-at-Tahoe and A-Basin and Copper and Bridger Bowl and Nub’s Nob and Perfect North and Elk and Plattekill and Berkshire East and Smuggs and Loon and Saddleback and, mostly, the Hood ski areas. And locals are generally less happy with Camelback and Seven Springs and Park City and Sunrise and Shasta and Stratton and, lately, former locals’ faves Sugarbush and Wildcat. And, as far as I can tell, Bachelor.

Potential explanations for Hood happiness versus Bachelor blues abound, all of them partial, none completely satisfactory, all asterisked with the vagaries of skiing and skiers and weather and luck. But my sense is this: Meadows, Timberline, and Skibowl locals are generally content not because they have better skiing than everyplace else or because their ski areas are some grand bargain or because they’re not crowded or because they have the best lift systems or terrain parks or grooming or snow conditions, but because Hood, in its haphazard and confounding-to-outsiders borders and layout, has forced its varied operators to hyper-adapt to niche needs in the local market while liberating them from the all-things-to-everyone imperative thrust on isolated operations like Bachelor. They have to decide what they’re good at and be good at that all the time, because they have no other option. Hood operators can’t be Vail-owned Paoli Peaks, turning in 25-day ski seasons and saying well it’s Indiana what do you expect? They have to be independent Perfect North, striving always for triple-digit operating days and saying it’s Indiana and we’re doing this anyway because if we don’t you’ll stop coming and we’ll all be broke.

In this way Hood is a snapshot of old skiing, pre-consolidation, pre-national pass, pre-social media platforms that flung open global windows onto local mountains. Other than Timberline summer parks no one is asking these places to be anything other than very good local ski areas serving rabid local skiers. And they’re doing a damn good job.

Podcast Notes

On Meadows and Timberline Lodge opening and closing dates

One of the most baffling set of basic facts to get straight in American skiing is the number of ski areas on Mount Hood and the distinction between them. Part of the reason for this is the volcano’s famous summer skiing, which takes place not at either of the eponymous ski areas – Mt. Hood Meadows or Mt. Hood Skibowl – but at the awkwardly named Timberline Lodge, which sounds more like a hipster cocktail lounge with a 19th-century fur-trapper aesthetic than the name of a ski resort (which is why no one actually calls it “Timberline Lodge”; I do so only to avoid confusion with the ski area in West Virginia, because people are constantly getting Appalachian ski areas mixed up with those in the Cascades). I couldn’t find a comprehensive list of historic closing dates for Meadows and Timberline, but the basic distinction is this: Meadows tends to wrap winter sometime between late April and late May. Timberline goes into August and beyond when it can. Why doesn’t Meadows push its season when it is right next door and probably could? We discuss in the pod.

On Riblet clips

Fun fact about defunct-as-a-company-even-though-a-couple-hundred-of-their-machines-are-still-spinning Riblet chairlifts: rather than clamping on like a vice grip, the end of each chair is woven into the rope via something called an “insert clip.” I wrote about this in my Wildcat pod last year:

On Alpental Chair 2

A small but vocal segment of Broseph McBros with nothing better to do always reflexively oppose the demolition of legacy fixed-grip lifts to make way for modern machines. Pack does a great job laying out why it’s harder to maintain older chairlifts than many skiers may think. I wrote about this here:

On Blue’s breakover towers and unload ramp

We also dropped photos of this into the video version of the pod:

On the Cooper Spur land exchange

Here’s a somewhat-dated and very biased-against-the-ski-area infographic summarizing the proposed land swap between Meadows and the U.S. Forest Service, from the Cooper Spur Wild & Free Coalition, an organization that “first came together in 2002 to fight Mt. Hood Meadows’ plans to develop a sprawling destination resort on the slopes of Mt. Hood near Cooper Spur”:

While I find the sanctimonious language in this timeline off-putting, I’m more sympathetic to Enviro Bro here than I was with the eruption-detection controversy discussed up top. Opposing small-footprint, high-impact catastrophe-monitoring equipment on an active volcano to save five bushes but potentially endanger millions of human lives is foolish. But checking sprawling wilderness development by identifying smaller parcels adjacent to already-disturbed lands as alternative sites for denser, hopefully walkable, hopefully mixed-use projects is exactly the sort of thing that every mountain community ought to prioritize.

On the combination of Summit and Timberline Lodge

The small Summit Pass ski area in Government Camp operated as an independent entity from its 1927 founding until Timberline Lodge purchased the ski area in 2018. In 2021, the owners connected the two – at least in one direction. Skiers can move 4,540 vertical feet from the top of Timberline’s Palmer chair to the base of Summit. While Palmer tends to open late in the season and Summit tends to close early, and while skiers will have to ride shuttles back up to the Timberline lifts until the resort builds a much anticipated gondola connecting the full height, this is technically America’s largest lift-served vertical drop.

On Meadows’ reciprocals

Meadows only has three season pass reciprocal partners, but they’re all aspirational spots that passholders would actually travel for: Baker, Schweitzer, and Whitefish. I ask Pack why he continues to offer these exchanges even as larger ski areas such as Brundage and Tamarack move away from them. One bit of context I neglected to include, however, is that neighboring Timberline Lodge and Mount Hood Skibowl not only offer a joint pass, but are longtime members of Powder Alliance, which is an incredible regional reciprocal pass that’s free for passholders at any of these mountains:

On Ski Broadmoor, Colorado

Colorado Springs is less convenient to skiing than the name implies – skiers are driving a couple of hours, minimum, to access Monarch or the Summit County ski areas. So I was surprised, when I looked up Pack’s original home mountain of Ski Broadmoor, to see that it sat on the city’s outskirts:

This was never a big ski area, with 600 vertical feet served by an “America The Beautiful Lift” that sounds as though it was named by Donald Trump:

The “famous” Broadmoor Hotel built and operated the ski area, according to Colorado Ski History. They sold the hotel in 1986 to the city, which promptly sold it to Vail Associates (now Vail Resorts), in 1988. Vail closed the ski area in 1991 – the only mountain they ever surrendered on. I’ll update all my charts and such to reflect this soon.

On pre-high-speed Keystone

It’s kind of amazing that Keystone, which now spins seven high-speed chairlifts, didn’t install its first detachable until 1990, nearly a decade after neighboring Breckenridge installed the world’s first, in 1981. As with many resorts that have aggressively modernized, this means that Keystone once ran more chairlifts than it does today. When Pack started his ski career at the mountain in 1989, Keystone ran 10 frontside aerial lifts (8 doubles, 1 triple, 1 gondola) compared to just six today (2 doubles, 2 sixers, a high-speed quad, and a higher-capacity gondy).

On Mountain Creek

I’ve talked about the bananas-ness of Mountain Creek many times. I love this unhinged New Jersey bump in the same way I loved my crazy late uncle who would get wasted at the Bay City fireworks and yell at people driving Toyotas to “Buy American!” (This was the ‘80s in Michigan, dudes. I don’t know what to tell you. The auto industry was falling apart and everybody was tripping, especially dudes who worked in – or, in my uncle’s case, adjacent to (steel) – the auto industry.)

On Intrawest

One of the reasons I did this insane timeline project was so that I would no longer have to sink 30 minutes into Google every time someone said the word “Intrawest.” The timeline was a pain in the ass, but worth it, because now whenever I think “wait exactly what did Intrawest own and when?” I can just say “oh yeah I already did that here you go”:

On Moonlight Basin and merging with Big Sky

It’s kind of weird how many now-united ski areas started out as separate operations: Beaver Creek and Arrowhead (merged 1997), Canyons and Park City (2014), Whistler and Blackcomb (1997), Alpine Meadows and Squaw Valley (connected via gondola in 2022), Carinthia and Mount Snow (1986), Sugarbush and Mount Ellen (connected via chairlift in 1995). Sometimes – Beaver Creek, Mount Snow – the terrain and culture mergers are seamless. Other times – Alpine and the Palisades side of what is now Palisades Tahoe – the connection feels like opening a store that sells four-wheelers and 74-piece high-end dinnerware sets. Like, these things don’t go together, Man. But when Big Sky absorbed Moonlight Basin and Spanish Peaks in 2013, everyone immediately forgot that it was ever any different. This suggests that Big Sky’s 2032 Yellowstone Club acquisition will be seamless.*

*Kidding, Brah. Maybe.

On Lehman Brothers

Nearly two decades later, it’s still astonishing how quickly Lehman Brothers, in business for 158 years, collapsed in 2008.

On the “mutiny” at Telluride

Every now and then, a reader will ask the very reasonable question about why I never pay any attention to Telluride, one of America’s great ski resorts, and one that Pack once led. Mostly it’s because management is unstable, making long-term skier experience stories of the sort I mostly focus on hard to tell. And management is mostly unstable because the resort’s owner is, by all accounts, willful and boorish and sort of unhinged. Blevins, in The Colorado Sun’s “Outsider” newsletter earlier this week:

A few months ago, locals in Telluride and Mountain Village began publicly blasting the resort’s owner, a rare revolt by a community that has grown weary of the erratic Chuck Horning.

For years, residents around the resort had quietly lamented the antics and decisions of the temperamental Horning, the 81-year-old California real estate investor who acquired Telluride Ski & Golf Resort in 2004. It’s the only resort Horning has ever owned and over the last 21 years, he has fired several veteran ski area executives — including, earlier this year, his son, Chad.

Now, unnamed locals have launched a website, publicly detailing the resort owner’s messy management of the Telluride ski area and other businesses across the country.

“For years, Chuck Horning has caused harm to us all, both individually and collectively,” reads the opening paragraph of ChuckChuck.ski — which originated when a Telluride councilman in March said that it was “time to chuck Chuck.” “The community deserves something better. For years, we’ve whispered about the stories, the incidents, the poor decisions we’ve witnessed. Those stories should no longer be kept secret from everyone that relies on our ski resort for our wellbeing.”

The chuckchuck.ski site drags skeletons out of Horning’s closet. There are a lot of skeletons in there. The website details a long history of lawsuits across the country accusing Horning and the Newport Federal Financial investment firm he founded in 1970 of fraud.

It’s a pretty amazing site.

On Bogus Basin

I was surprised that ostensibly for-profit Meadows regularly re-invests 100 percent of profits into the ski area. Such a model is more typical for explicitly nonprofit outfits such as Bogus Basin, Idaho. Longtime GM Brad Wilson outlined how that ski area functions a few years back:

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