The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast

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Who

Matt Jones, President and Chief Operating Officer of Stratton Mountain, Vermont

Recorded on

November 11, 2024

About Stratton Mountain

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Alterra Mountain Company, which also owns:

Located in: Winhall, Vermont

Year founded: 1962

Pass affiliations:

* Ikon Pass: Unlimited

* Ikon Base Pass: Unlimited, holiday blackouts

Closest neighboring ski areas: Bromley (:18), Magic (:24), Mount Snow (:28), Hermitage Club (:33), Okemo (:40), Brattleboro (:52)

Base elevation: 1,872 feet

Summit elevation: 3,875 feet

Vertical drop: 2,003 feet

Skiable Acres: 670

Average annual snowfall: 180 inches

Trail count: 99 (40% novice, 35% intermediate, 16% advanced, 9% expert)

Lift count: 14 (1 ten-passenger gondola, 4 six-packs, 1 high-speed quad, 2 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 1 double, 4 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Stratton’s lift fleet)

Why I interviewed him

I don’t know for sure how many skier visits Stratton pulls each winter, or where the ski area ranks among New England mountains for busyness. Historical data suggests a floor around 400,000 visits, likely good for fifth in the region, behind Killington, Okemo, Sunday River, and Mount Snow. But the exact numbers don’t really matter, because the number of skiers that ski at Stratton each winter is many manys. And the number of skiers who have strong opinions about Stratton is that exact same number.

Those numbers make Stratton more important than it should be. This is not the best ski area in Vermont. It’s not even Alterra’s best ski area in Vermont. Jay, MRG, Killington, Smuggs, Stowe, and sister resort Sugarbush are objectively better mountains than Stratton from a terrain point of view (they also get a lot more snow). But this may be one of the most crucial mountains in Alterra’s portfolio, a doorway to the big-money East, a brand name for skiers across the region. Stratton is the only ski area that advertises in the New York City Subway, and has for years.

But Stratton’s been under a bit of stress. The lift system is aging. The gondola is terrible. Stratton was one of those ski areas that was so far ahead of the modernization curve – the mountain had four six-packs by 2001 – that it’s now in the position of having to update all of that expensive stuff all at once. And as meaningful updates have lagged, Stratton’s biggest New England competitors are running superlifts up the incline at a historic pace, while Alterra lobs hundreds of millions at its western megaresorts. Locals feel shafted, picketing an absentee landlord that they view as negligent. Meanwhile, the crowds pile up, as unlimited Ikon Pass access has holstered the mountain in hundreds of thousands of skiers’ wintertime battle belts.

If that all sounds a little dramatic, it only reflects the messages in my inbox. I think Alterra has been cc’d on at least some of those emails, because the company is tossing $20 million at Stratton this season, a sum that Jones tells us is just the beginning of massive long-term investment meant to reinforce the mountain’s self-image as a destination on its own.

What we talked about

Stratton’s $20 million offseason; Act 250 masterplanning versus U.S. Forest Service masterplanning; huge snowmaking upgrades and aspirations; what $8 million gets you in employee housing these days; big upgrades for the Ursa and American Express six-packs; a case for rebuilding lifts rather than doing a tear-down and replace; a Tamarack lift upgrade; when Alterra’s investment firehose could shift east; leaving Tahoe for Vermont; what can be done about that gondola?; the Kidderbrook lift; parking; RFID; Ikon Pass access levels; and $200 to ski Stratton.

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

How pissed do you think the Punisher was when Disney announced that Ant Man would be the 12th installment in Marvel’s cinematic universe? I imagine him seated in his lair, polishing his grenades. “F*****g Ant Man?” He throws a grenade into one of his armored Jeeps, which disintegrates in a supernova of steel parts, tires, and smoke. “Ant Man. Are you f*****g serious with this? I waited through eleven movies. Eleven. Iron Man got three. Thor and Captain f*****g America got two apiece. The Hulk. Two Avengers movies. Something called ‘Guardians of the Galaxy,’ about a raccoon and a talking tree that save the goddamn universe or some s**t. And it was my turn, Man. My. Turn. Do these idiots not know that I had three individual comic lines published concurrently in the 1990s? Do they not know that I’m ranked as the ninth-greatest Marvel superhero of all time on this nerd list? Do you know where Ant Man is ranked on that list? Huh? Well, I’ll tell you: number 131, behind Rocket Raccoon, U-Go Girl, and Spider Man 2099, whatever the hell any of those are.” The vigilante then loads his rocket launcher and several machine guns into a second armored Jeep, and sets off in search of jaywalkers to murder.

Anyway I imagine that’s how Stratton felt as it watched the rest of Alterra’s cinematic universe release one blockbuster after another. “Oh, OK, so Steamboat not only gets a second gondola, but they get a 600-acre terrain expansion served by their eighth high-speed quad? And it wasn’t enough to connect the two sides of Palisades Tahoe with a gondola, but you threw in a brand-new six-pack? And they’re tripling the size of Deer Valley. Tripling. 3,700 acres of new terrain and 16 new lifts and a new base village to go with it. That’s equal to five-and-a-half Strattons. And Winter Park gets a new six-pack, and Big Bear gets a new six-pack, and Mammoth gets two. Do you have any idea how much these things cost? And I can’t even get a gondola that can withstand wind gusts over three miles per hour? Even goddamn Snowshoe – Snowshoe – got a new lift before I did. I didn’t even think West Virginia was actually a real place. I swear if these f*****s announce a new June Mountain out-of-base lift before I get my bling, things are gonna get Epic around here.”

Well, it’s finally Stratton’s turn, with $20 million in upgrades inbound. Alterra wasn’t exactly mining the depths of locals’ dreams to decide where to deploy the cash – snowmaking, employee housing, lift overhauls – and a gondola replacement isn’t coming anytime soon, but they’re pretty smart investments when you dig into them. Which we do.

Questions I wish I’d asked

Among the items that I would have liked to have discussed given more time: the Appalachian Trail’s path across the top of Stratton Mountain, Stratton as birthplace of modern snowboarding, and the Stratton Mountain School.

What I got wrong

* I said that Epic Pass access had remained mostly unchanged for the past decade, which is not quite right. When Vail first added Stowe to the Epic Local Pass for the 2017-18 season, they slotted the resort into the bucket of 10 days shared with Vail, Beaver Creek, and Whistler. At some point, Stowe received its own basket of 10 days, apart from the western resorts.

* I said that Sunday River’s Jordan eight-pack was wind-resistant “because of the weight.” While that is one factor, the lift’s ability to run in high winds relies on a more complex set of anti-sway technology, none of which I really understand, but that Sunday River GM Brian Heon explained on The Storm earlier this year:

Why you should ski Stratton

A silent skiing demarcation line runs roughly along US 4 through Vermont. Every ski area along or above this route – Killington, Pico, Sugarbush, Mad River Glen, Stowe, Smuggs – lets trails bump up, maintains large glade networks, and generally provides you with balanced, diverse terrain. Everything below that line – Okemo, Bromley, Mount Snow – generally don’t do any of these things, or offer them sporadically, and in the most shrunken form possible. There are some exceptions on both sides. Saskadena Six, a bump just north of US 4, operates more like the Southies. Magic, in the south, better mirrors the MRG/Sugarbush model. And then there’s Stratton.

Good luck finding bumps at Stratton. Maybe you’ll stumble onto the remains of a short competition course here or there, but, generally, this is a groom-it-all-every-day kind of ski area. Which would typically make it a token stop on my annual rounds. But Stratton has one great strength that has long made it a quasi-home mountain for me: glades.

The glade network is expansive and well-maintained. The lines are interesting and, in places, challenging. You wouldn’t know this from the trailmap, which portrays the tree-skiing areas as little islands lodged onto Stratton’s hulk. But there are lots of them, and they are plenty long. On a typical pow day, I’ll park at Sun Bowl and ski all the glades from Test Pilot over to West Pilot and back. It takes all day and I barely touch a groomer.

And the glades are open more often than you’d think. While northern Vermont is the undisputed New England snow king, with everything from Killington north counting 250-plus inches in an average winter, the so-called Golden Triangle of Stratton, Bromley, and Magic sits in a nice little micro-snow-pocket. And Stratton, the skyscraping tallest peak in that region of the state, devours a whole bunch (180 inches on average) to fill in those glades.

And if you are Groomer Greg, you’re in luck: Stratton has 99 of them. And the grooming is excellent. Just start early, because they get scraped off by the NYC hordes who camp out there every weekend. The obsessive grooming does make this a good family spot, and the long green trail from the top down to the base is one of the best long beginner runs anywhere.

Podcast Notes

On Act 250

This is the 20th Vermont-focused Storm Skiing Podcast, and I think we’ve referenced Act 250 in all of them. If you’re unfamiliar with this law, it is, according to the official state website:

…Vermont’s land use and development law, enacted in 1970 at a time when Vermont was undergoing significant development pressure. The law provides a public, quasi-judicial process for reviewing and managing the environmental, social and fiscal consequences of major subdivisions and developments in Vermont. It assures that larger developments complement Vermont’s unique landscape, economy and community needs. One of the strengths of Act 250 is the access it provides to neighbors and other interested parties to participate in the development review process. Applicants often work with neighbors, municipalities, state agencies and other interested groups to address concerns raised by a proposed development, resolving issues and mitigating impacts before a permit application is filed.

On Stratton’s masterplan

Stratton is currently updating its masterplan. It will retain some elements of this 2013 version. Some elements of this – most notably a new Snow Bowl lift in 2018 – have been completed:

One curious element of this masterplan is the proposed lift up the Kidderbrook trail – around 2007, Stratton removed a relatively new (installed 1989) Poma fixed-grip quad from that location. Here it is on the far left-hand side of the 2005 trailmap:

On Stratton’s ownership history

Stratton’s history mirrors that of many large New England ski areas: independent founders run the ski area for decades; founders fall into financial peril and need private equity/banking rescue; bank sells to a giant out-of-state conglomerate; which then sells to another giant out-of-state conglomerate; which eventually turns into something else. In Stratton’s case, Robert Wright/Frank Snyder -> Moore and Munger -> Japanese company Victoria USA -> Intrawest -> Alterra swallows the carcass of Intrawest. You can read all about it on New England Ski History.

Here was Intrawest’s roster, if you’re curious:

On Alterra’s building binge

Since its 2018 founding, Alterra has invested aggressively in its properties: a 2.4-mile-long, $65 million gondola connecting Alpine Meadows to the Olympic side of Palisades Tahoe; $200 million in the massive Mahogany Ridge expansion and a three-mile-long gondola at Steamboat; and an untold fortune on Deer Valley’s transformation into what will be the fourth-largest ski area in the United States. Plus new lifts all over the place, new snowmaking all over the place, new lodges all over the place. Well, all over the place except for at Stratton, until now.

On Boyne and Vail’s investments in New England

Amplifying Stratton Nation’s pain is the fact that Alterra’s two big New England competitors – Vail Resorts and Boyne Resorts – have built a combined 16 new lifts in the region over the past five years, including eight-place chairs at Loon and Sunday River (Boyne), and six-packs at Stowe, Okemo, and Mount Snow (Vail). They’ve also replaced highly problematic legacy chairs at Attitash (Vail) and Pleasant Mountain (Boyne). Boyne has also expanded terrain at Loon, Sunday River, and, most notably – by 400 acres – Sugarloaf. And it’s worth noting that independents Waterville Valley and Killington have also dropped new sixers in recent years (Killington will build another next year). Meanwhile, Alterra’s first chairlift just landed this summer, at Sugarbush, which is getting a fixed-grip quad to replace the Heaven’s Gate triple.

On gondola wind holds

Just in case you want to blame windholds on some nefarious corporate meddling, here’s a video I took of Kirkwood’s Cornice Express spinning in 50-mile-per-hour winds when Jones was running the resort last year. Every lift has its own distinct profile that determines how it manages wind.

On shifting Ikon Pass access

When Alterra launched the Ikon Pass in 2018, the company limited Base Pass holders to five days at Stratton, with holiday blackouts. Ahead of the 2020-21 season, the company updated Base Pass access to unlimited days with those same holiday blackouts. Alterra and its partners have made several such changes in Ikon’s seven years. I’ve made this nifty chart that tracks them all (if you missed the memo, Solitude just upgraded Ikon Base pass access to eliminate holiday blackouts):

On historic Stratton lift ticket prices

Again, New England Ski History has done a nice job documenting Stratton’s year-to-year peak lift ticket rates:

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

The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 76/100 in 2024, and number 576 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019.

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

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Nov. 12. It dropped for free subscribers on Nov. 19. To receive future episodes as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:

Who

Fred Seymour, General Manager of Giants Ridge, Minnesota

Recorded on

October 28, 2024

About Giants Ridge

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board, a State of Minnesota economic development agency

Located in: Biwabik, Minnesota

Year founded: 1958/59

Closest neighboring ski areas: Mt. Itasca (1:14), Cloquet Ski Club (1:11), Chester Bowl (1:13), Spirit Mountain (1:18), Mont du Lac (1:27)

Base elevation: 1,472 feet

Summit elevation: 1,972 feet

Vertical drop: 500 feet

Skiable Acres: 202

Average annual snowfall: 62 inches

Trail count: 35 (33% beginners, 50% “confident skiers”; 17% expert)

Lift count: 7 (1 high-speed quad, 1 fixed-grip quad, 1 triple, 2 doubles, 2 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Giants Ridge’s lift fleet)

Why I interviewed him

Sometimes a thing surprises me. Like I think New York City is a giant honking mess and then I walk 60 blocks through Manhattan and say “actually I can see this.” Or I decide that I hate country music because it’s lame in my adolescent rock-and-roll world, but once it goes mainstream I’m like okay actually this is catchy. Or I think I hate cottage cheese until I try it around age 19 and I realize it’s my favorite thing ever.

All of these things surprised me because I assumed they were something different from what they actually were. And so, in the same way, Giants Ridge surprised me. I did not expect to dislike the place, but I did not expect to be blown away by it, either. I drove up thinking I’d have a nice little downhill rush and drove away thinking that if all ski areas were like this ski area there would be a lot more skiers in the world.

I could, here, repeat all the things I recently wrote about Crystal, another model Midwest ski area. But I wrote plenty on Giants Ridge’s many virtues below, and there’s a lot more in the podcast. For now, I’ll just say that this is as solid a ski operation as you’ll find anywhere, and one that’s worth learning more about.

What we talked about

Rope splicing day for one of Giants Ridge’s classic lifts; a massive snowmaking upgrade; when all the water comes out of the sky after winter’s done; the slowest Midwest ski season on record; how Giants Ridge skied into April in spite of the warm winter; learning to ski with an assist from Sears (the store); skiing Colorado before I-70; the amazing Hyland Hills, Minnesota; why Seymour didn’t go all Colorad-Bro on Midwest skiing – “skiing is special in different places”; some founder’s history of the high-speed ropetow; where Giants Ridge will install its first new high-speed ropetow; the virtues of high-speed tows; Hidden Valley, Missouri and working for Peak Resorts; reaction to Vail purchasing Peak Resorts in 2019; the government agency that owns Giants Ridge; the story of the ski area’s founding and purpose; how and why the ski area is so well-funded; how the ski area funded its latest giant capital project; where Giants Ridge envisions planting a second detachable chairlift; potential for far greater lodging capacity; expansion potential; where to hunt glades at Giants Ridge; the mountain’s trail-naming theme; why the ski area’s grooming is so good; why Giants Ridge offers fourth-graders unlimited access on the Minnesota Ski Areas Association Passport, rather than the standard two days; and why Giants Ridge left the Indy Pass after just one year.   

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

Lazy non-ski journalists often pull out some version of this stat to prove that lift-served skiing is a dying industry: America once had more than 700 ski areas, but that number has plummeted to fewer than 500, according to the NSAA (and 505 according to The Storm Skiing Journal). The culprit, they immediately conclude, is climate change, because what else could it possibly be?

The truth is less sinister. Most of these lost ski areas were killed by the same thing that ended the horse and buggy and the landline and the butter churn: capitalism. The simpler story of ski area shrinkage is this: a post-World War II building boom flooded the market with ski areas, many of which were built in questionable locations (like Georgia and Arkansas). As some ski areas modernized, especially with snowmaking, their competitors that failed to do so, um, failed. That great weed-out reached its height from the mid-70s to the mid-90s. The number of active U.S. ski areas has remained more or less stable for the past 20 years.

I fear, however, that we are on the edge of the next great weed-out. If the last one targeted ski areas that failed to invest in snowmaking, this next one will bullseye ski areas that fail to invest in technology. Consumers live in their Pet Rectangles. Ski areas need to meet them there or they may as well not exist. Swipe, tap, bink is the dance of modern commerce. Cash-only, on-site only – the default for centuries – now just annoys people.

Technology does not just mean computer stuff, however. It also means energy-efficient, automated snowmaking to cut down on utilities and labor. It means grooming your hill like Sun Valley even if you are not in fact Sun Valley. It means modern (not necessarily high-speed) chairlifts with safety bars. And in some cases it means rediscovering old technology that can be re-applied in a modern context – high-speed ropetows, for example, are dirt cheap, move more skiers per hour than a high-speed eight-person chairlift, and are the perfect complement to terrain parks and the skiers who want to lap them 100 times in an afternoon.

Unfortunately, a lot of that technology is very expensive. The majority of ski areas are themselves worth less than the cost of a brand-new high-speed quad. Those Riblets and Halls are holding together for now, but they won’t last forever. So what to do?

I don’t know, and Giants Ridge is, I’ll admit, a curious example to use here. The ski area benefits from enormous state-sponsored subsidies. But through this arrangement, Giants Ridge acts as a best-case-scenario case study in how a small ski area can fortify itself against a technological revolution, a changing climate, and a social media-saturated consumer base in search of something novel and fun. Not all small ski areas will be able to do all of the things that Giants Ridge does, but most of them can achieve some version of some of them. Third-party companies like Entabeni and White Peaks can tug small ski areas into the digital sphere. A modern chairlift doesn’t have to mean a new chairlift. The one state subsidy that private ski areas have occasionally been able to access is one to purchase energy-efficient snowguns. Inexpensive high-speed ropetows (Giants Ridge is installing its first this year), should be serving almost every terrain park in the country.

The Midwest suffered its worst winter on record last ski season. Many ski areas shut down in February or early March. Had a skier been plucked from the Rockies and dropped onto the summit of Giants Ridge, however, they would not have suspected this regional catastrophe. I visited on March 10 – wall-to-wall snow, every trail open, not even a bare patch. The ski area stayed open until April 7. The future holds plenty of challenges for skiing. Giants Ridge is working on answers.

Questions I wish I’d asked

The largess on display at Giants Ridge introduces the same set of issues that frustrate private ski area owners in New York, who have to compete directly against three ski areas (Whiteface, Gore, Belleayre) that have benefitted from hundreds of millions of dollars in state investment. The dynamic is a bit different here, as the money funnels to Giants Ridge via mining companies who support the ski area en lieu of paying certain taxes. But the result is the same: ski areas that have to pay for capital upgrades out of their profits versus a ski area that gets capital upgrades essentially for free. The massive snowmaking system that Giants Ridge is installing this year is, in Seymour’s words, “on the taxpayer.”

While we discuss these funding mechanisms and the history of Giants Ridge as economic-development machine, we don’t explore how this impacts private, competing ski areas. I avoided this for the same reason that I wouldn’t ask a football coach why the taxpayers ought to have funded his team’s $500 million stadium – that wasn’t his choice, and he just works there. His job, like the job of any ski area manager, is to do the best he can with the resources he’s given.

But I’ll acknowledge that this setup grates on a lot of private operators in the region. That’s a fight worth talking about, but with the appropriate officials, and in a different context, and with the time it takes to tell the story properly.

What I got wrong

* When discussing the rope-splicing project underway at Giants Ridge on the day of our conversation, I referred to “the chair you’re replacing the ‘ropetow’ on.” I meant the “haulrope.”

* I said I visited Giants Ridge, “in mid-February, or maybe it was early March.” I skied Giants Ridge on March 10 of this year.

Why you should ski Giants Ridge

This is one of the nicest ski areas I’ve ever skied. Full stop. No asterisk. The slopes are immaculate. The lodge is spotless. The pitch is excellent. The runs are varied. Giants Ridge has a high-speed quad and RFID gates and a paved parking lot. If you need a helper, there are helpers everywhere. Gorgeous views from the top. That may just sound like any other modern ski area, but this is a) the Midwest, where “modern” means the lifts don’t run on diesel fuel, and, b) rural rural Minnesota, which is like regular rural Minnesota, but a lot farther away. To drive out of the range of cell service into the far reaches of a forest within which Google Maps labels human settlements of which no traces can be found, and at the end of this road find not just a ski area but a ski area that looks like it was built yesterday is a rather remarkable experience.

I’m not saying cancel your trip to Whistler. I am saying that this is worth driving to if you’re anywhere within driving range (which for a Midwesterner is roughly 90 hours). Giants Ridge is not sprawling like Lutsen or thrilling like Bohemia or snowy like Powderhorn. There are no Granite Peak six-packs or Highlands bubble lifts. But for what it has and what it is, Giants Ridge is as close to a perfect ski area as any I’ve ever encountered.

It's not a perfect ski area, of course. None of them are. If I have to nitpick: the hill still runs three old chairlifts with no safety bars; it lacks even a token mogul run; there are no marked glades; loading the Helsinki chair can require an annoying uphill shuffle. And there are signs all over the place referring to something called “golf.” All fixable issues, none considerations for skipping the joint. If you want skiing featuring the best technology of 1984, the Midwest still has plenty of that. If you prefer to ski in 2024, check this place out.

Podcast Notes

On the Midwest’s weakest winter on record

I ran through this on the article accompanying the recent Norway Mountain podcast, but it’s worth reposting what I wrote here:

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

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

On Hyland Hills

Hyland Hills is a 180-vertical-foot volcano, packing 180,000 skier visits into its tiny footprint every winter. The ski area is a model of why small municipal hills should be oriented around terrain parks.

The bump is perhaps the birthplace of the high-speed ropetow, which can move up to 4,000 (some estimates claim as many as 8,200), skiers per hour. You can see the tows working in this video:

Midwest Skiers tells the full high-speed ropetow story:

On the Three Rivers Park District

The Three Rivers Park District manages 27,000 acres of parkland across the seven-county Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area, including Hyland Hills and Elm Creek, an even smaller, beginner-focused hill on the north side of town:

On Hidden Valley, Missouri

An odd fact of American skiing is that Missouri is home to two ski areas, both of which are owned by Vail Resorts. Seymour worked for a time at Hidden Valley, seated a few miles outside of St. Louis. The stats: 320 vertical feet on 65 acres, with 19 inches of snowfall in an average winter.

On Peak Resorts

Hidden Valley was the OG resort in Peak Resorts’ once-sprawling portfolio. After growing to 19 ski areas scattered from New Hampshire to Missouri, Peak sold its entire operation to Vail Resorts in 2019.

On expansion potential into the Superior National Forest

Seymour explains that there’s “not a whole lot of potential” to expand the ski area into the Superior National Forest, which Giants Ridge backs into. That may sound odd to folks in the West, where the majority of ski areas operate on Forest Service leases. There’s little precedent for such arrangements in the Midwest, however, and Lutsen’s plans to expand into the same forest slammed into the Pinecone Police last year. As I wrote in my podcast episode with Lutsen GM Jim Vick:

Over the summer, Lutsen withdrew the plan, and Superior National Forest Supervisor Thomas Hall recommended a “no action” alternative, citing “irreversible damage” to mature white cedar and sugar maple stands, displacement of backcountry skiers, negative impacts to the 300-mile-long Superior hiking trail, objections from Native American communities, and water-quality concerns. Lutsen had until Oct. 10 to file an objection to the decision, and they did.

The expansion would have developed 500-ish acres. Superior National Forest covers 3.9 million acres. Million. With an “M.”

On the Minnesota state 4th-grade ski passport

Like many state ski associations, the Minnesota Ski Areas Association offers fourth-graders a $39.99 “passport” good for at least two lift tickets to each of the state’s ski areas. While many ski areas stick to the two-day offering and black out many peak periods, Afton Alps, Chester Bowl, Detroit Mountain, Giants Ridge, Mount Ski Gull, and Wild Mountain offer unlimited redemptions (Ski Gull blacks out the Christmas holidays).

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

The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 75/100 in 2024, and number 575 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019.

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

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Nov. 11. It dropped for free subscribers on Nov. 18. To receive future episodes as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:

Who

Dustin Lyman, President and General Manager of Copper Mountain, Colorado

Recorded on

October 21, 2024

About Copper Mountain

Owned by: Powdr, which also owns:

Located in: Frisco, Colorado

Year founded: 1972

Pass affiliations: Ikon Pass and Ikon Base Pass: unlimited access, no blackouts

Closest neighboring ski areas: Frisco Adventure Park (:15), Keystone (:19), Vail Mountain (:21), Breckenridge (:23), Loveland (:23), Arapahoe Basin (:30), Beaver Creek (:32), Ski Cooper (:34) – travel times vary considerably depending upon time of day, time of year, and apocalypse level on I-70

Base elevation: 9,738 feet

Summit elevation: 12,441 feet

Vertical drop: 2,703 feet

Skiable Acres: 2,538

Average annual snowfall: 305 inches

Trail count: 178

Lift count: 25 (1 6/8-passenger chondola, 3 high-speed six-packs, 3 high-speed quads, 5 triples, 4 doubles, 2 platters, 1 T-bar, 6 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Copper Mountain’s lift fleet)

Why I interviewed him

Imagine if, rather than finding an appropriate mountain upon which to build ski area, we just identified the best possible location for a ski area and built a mountain there. You would want to find a reliable snow pocket, preferably at elevation. You would want a location close to a major highway, with no access road drama. There should be a large population base nearby. Then you would build a hill with a great variety of green, blue, and black runs, and bunch them together in little ability-based kingdoms. The ski area would be big but not too big. It would be tall but not too tall. It would snow often, but rarely too much. It would challenge you without trying to kill you. You may include some pastoral touches, like tree islands to break up the interstate-wide groomers. You’d want to groom a lot but not too much. You’d want some hella good terrain parks. You’d want to end up with something pretty similar to Copper Mountain.

Because Copper is what we end up with when we lop off all the tryhard marketing meth that attempts to make ski resorts more than what they are. Copper is not Gladiator on skis, you against the notorious Batshit Chutes. But Copper is not one big groomer, either. Copper is not fur shawls in the hotel lobby. But Copper is also not duct tape around a pants leg. Copper does not serve passenger pigeon eggs in its mountaintop eateries. But Copper is also not frozen burritos and a plastic sleeve of powdered donuts. Copper is not angry, or haughty, or cloying, or righteous, or overwrought. Copper does not call you “Sir.” Copper fixes your refrigerator without having to come back with another part. Copper, quietly and without a lot of hassle, just works.

What we talked about

The new Timberline six-pack chairlift; why Copper upgraded T-Rex before the mountain’s much older lifts; how much better a 2024 detachable lift is from a 1994 detachable lift; why Copper didn’t sell the lift to another ski area; that one summer that Copper installed two gargantuan frontside lifts; why new chairlift installations are so challenging; Leitner-Poma; the challenges of installing mid-mountain versus base-area lifts; installing American Eagle, American Flyer, and Three Bears; how Copper quietly offered skiing for 12 consecutive months from October 2023 to September 2024, despite an official May closing date; whether year-round skiing will become an official Copper activity; why Copper builds its halfpipe entirely from snow each season rather than constructing an earthwork base; The Athlete’s Mountain; why Copper continues to build bigger and more advanced terrain parks even as many big mountains back out of the space; Woodward parks; how many crew members and snowcats Copper devotes to maintaining its enormous terrain park network; why the Union Creek high-speed quad became Woodward Express; why Copper doesn’t compete with Keystone and A-Basin as first-to-open for the skiing public; Copper’s World Cup ambitions; how to get a job running a ski resort when you’ve never worked at a ski resort; why it’s so important for a ski area manager to ski every day; counting ski days; mad love for ski areas; potential candidates for lift replacements; how to get a ski trail named after you; retrofitting old lifts with safety bars; expansion opportunities; $99 Thursday lift tickets and whether that program could expand to additional weekdays; Copper’s amazing season pass benefit; why Copper Mountain access is unlimited with no blackouts on the Ikon and Ikon Base passes; and why Copper continues to sell its own season pass that doesn’t cost much less than the Ikon Base Pass.  

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

Copper is a curious bloke. Copper sits within 30 minutes of four Vail Resorts, one of the toughest draws in North American skiing. So Copper is an unlimited-access member of Alterra’s Ikon Pass even though Copper is not owned by Alterra. Copper also sells its own season pass that only costs $60 less than an Ikon Base Pass. Copper sells $99 lift tickets on Thursdays, but $264 walk-up lift tickets if you show up on certain Wednesdays or Fridays. Copper sits atop I-70, observing the antlines of inbound vehicles and saying “I’m flattered.” Copper greets its guests with a halfpipe that could launch an intercontinental ballistic missile. Copper just offered year-round skiing and didn’t bother bragging about it until the whole thing was over. Copper lets you cut the line. Copper has quietly become some ninjitsu November training ground for the global ski-race community. Copper is parked in the middle of the most important ski county in the most important ski state in America.

If anything is happening in skiing, Copper is dealing with it: expensive lift tickets, cheap season passes, easy access that may be a little too easy, ferocious competition in every direction. Because of its naturally divided terrain, ordered black to green as you sweep west across the mountain, Copper is often referred to as a nearly perfect ski area. And it is. But because of where it is and what it’s chosen to become, the resort also happens to be the perfect thermometer for taking skiing’s temperature. How we doing up there past 10,000? What’s your story? What makes you special? Why should I drive past Keystone to ski here? Why shouldn’t I just keep driving 20 minutes to Vail instead? Why, I’m asking, do you even exist?

What I got wrong

I said that certain old chairlifts had not yet been retrofit with safety bars; Lyman clarified that Copper had in fact updated the carriers on all of those lifts.

I also said that Lyman was the first former NFL player that I’d hosted on the pod. He’s actually at least the third: Vail East Region VP and COO Tim Baker played for the Chargers, Panthers, and Steelers; and three-time guest Rusty Gregory played on the Chiefs’ practice squad.

Why you should ski Copper Mountain

Here are some things I remember about skiing Copper Mountain in 1995:

* Riding a high-speed quad. Probably American Flyer but I can’t say for sure. Four of us on the lift. My buddy Andy and two middle-aged fellows of indeterminant provenance. “My cat sleeps 22 hours a day and can catch a bird out of the air,” one says to the other. And I’ve never been able to stop thinking about the truth of that and how it’s possible.

* My room at the Foxpine Inn came with an underground parking space, which I declined to use until a New Year’s snowstorm buried my poor little four-cylinder Ford Probe beneath an igloo. Rather than clean the car off, I leaned my head out the window and drove down the ramp to my parking spot below. Then all the snow melted. Easiest snow removal job ever.

* Near the terminus of the long-gone B lift, a double chair displaced by Super Bee, a lightly treed knoll stood above the trails. I watched, awestruck, as a skier materialized from the forest depths above and trenched the newfallen snow and blasted down the fall-line with superhero poise and ease.

* My first attempted powder turn, three minutes later, ended in a yardsale. This was in the flat just off of the lift unload. That ended up being a very long run.

Modern Copper is more polished, better-lifted, more expensive, better known than the version I encountered on my first western ski trip 29 years ago. There’s more ski terrain and a little pedestrian base village. I’m not certain that two eighteen-year-olds could still afford a room at the base of the chairlifts (Foxpine rates are not listed online). But what struck me on a return visit last winter, as much as the six-packs and the terrain parks and the base village that used to be a parking lot was how much Copper, despite all that investment, had retained a coziness that still makes it feel more like a ski area than a ski resort.

Some of this humility, I suppose, is anchored in the mountain’s profile. Copper doesn’t have Breck’s big exposed peaks or Vail’s endless bowls or Beaver Creek’s Grey Poupon trim. Copper doesn’t give you cookies or promise you The Experience of a Lifetime. The mountain’s core lifts are fast and modern, but Copper runs nearly as many fixed-grip chairs (9) as Vail (3), Beaver Creek (3), and Keystone (4), combined (10).  

But it works. Rather wonderfully, really. Go see for yourself.

Podcast Notes

On Copper’s masterplan

Copper’s most recent comprehensive Forest Service masterplan dates to 2011. A 2015 addendum focused mostly on summer activities. Here’s an overview of what the 2011 plan imagined:

A 2021 addendum added a new trail, which we discuss on the pod:

On Copper Mountain’s halfpipe

I mean this thing is just so damn extra:

On Summit County ski areas by size

The four Summit County ski areas compare favorably to one another, stats-wise. I’m going to go ahead and throw Loveland in there as an honorary member, since it’s like two feet from Summit County:

On the Slopes App

Being Stats Tracker Bro, I am a loyalist to the Slopes app, which recently updated their static map with a zoomable version:

Slopes is also handy in real-time, when I want to ensure that I’ve hit every trail on a mountain. Here’s my map from Giants Ridge, Minnesota last winter (the big unskied trails in the middle were closed for racing):

On Silverton

While I would expect Elvis to rise from the dead before we see another Breckenridge-style megaresort built in Colorado, developers have had some luck creating low-impact, low-infrastructure ski areas. The now-defunct Bluebird Backcountry, near Steamboat, operated with no lifts on private land. Silverton, in the state’s southwest corner, operates out of a small parcel of private land and runs one double chair, which in turn opens up huge swaths of land under permit from the Bureau of Land Management. Any future big-mountain western developments will likely hinge on some version of a Silverton/Bluebird model. Here’s Silverton’s trailmap:

And here’s Bluebird’s:

On expansions

Colorado ski areas have had great success expanding existing operations in recent years. Since 2012, nine large expansions have added more than 3,000 acres of high-quality terrain to the state’s ski resorts. That’s the equivalent of opening another Breckenridge, without all the outrage.

On Snowbird’s Freeloader Pass

Copper’s adult season pass includes a free season pass for one child up to 15 years old. Sister resort Snowbird one-upped them last year by rolling out the same benefit and raising the age to 18. Lyman and I discuss Snowbird’s move, and whether it will inspire a similar deal at Copper.

On Copper’s unlimited Ikon Pass access

One of the strangest alliances in all of Megapass-dom is Copper’s status as a stowaway unlimited Ikon Pass partner. Alterra has transformed the Ikon Pass into a season pass for all of its owned mountains except for Deer Valley and Arapahoe Basin, but it’s also a de facto season pass for Powdr-owned Copper and Eldora. To confuse things further, Copper sells its own season pass that isn’t much less expensive than an Ikon Base Pass. We discuss this whole dynamic on the pod, but here’s where Alterra-owned mountains sit with Ikon Pass access, with Eldora and Copper slotted in for comparison:

On Powdr owning Eldora “at least for now”

Park City-based Powdr has owned Eldora, just under two hours northeast of Copper, since 2016. In August, the company announced that it had sold its Killington and Pico resorts to a group of local Vermont investors, and would soon put Eldora – along with Mt. Bachelor, Oregon and Silver Star, B.C. – up for sale as well.

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Who

John Melcher, CEO of Crystal Mountain, Michigan

Recorded on

October 14, 2024

About Crystal Mountain, Michigan

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: The Petritz Family

Located in: Thompsonville, Michigan

Year founded: 1956

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

Reciprocal partners: 1 day each at Caberfae and Mount Bohemia, with blackouts

Closest neighboring ski areas: Caberfae (:37), Hickory Hills (:45), Mt. Holiday (:50), Missaukee Mountain (:52), Homestead (:51)

Base elevation: 757 feet

Summit elevation: 1,132 feet

Vertical drop: 375 feet

Skiable Acres: 103

Average annual snowfall: 132 inches

Trail count: 59 (30% black diamond, 48% blue square, 22% green circle) + 7 glades + 3 terrain parks

Lift count: 8 (1 high-speed quad, 3 fixed-grip quads, 2 triples, 2 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Crystal Mountain’s lift fleet)

Why I interviewed him

The biggest knock on Midwest skiing is that the top of the hill is not far enough away from the bottom of the hill, and this is generally true. Two or three or four hundred vertical feet is not a lot of vertical feet. It is enough to hold little pockets of trees or jumps or a racer’s pitch that begs for a speed check. But no matter how fun the terrain, too soon the lift maze materializes and it’s another slow roll up to more skiing.

A little imagination helps here. Six turns in a snowy Michigan glade feel the same as six turns in Blue Sky Basin trees (minus the physiological altitude strain). And the skillset transfers well. I learned to ski bumps on a 200-vertical-foot section of Boyne Mountain and now I can ski bumps anywhere. But losing yourself in a 3,000-vertical-foot Rocky Mountain descent is not the same thing as saying “Man I can almost see it” as you try to will a 300-footer into something grander. We all know this.

Not everything about the lift-served skiing experience shrinks down with the same effect, is my point here. With the skiing itself, scale matters. But the descent is only part of the whole thing. The lift maze matters, and the uphill matters, and the parking matters, and the location of the lift ticket pick-up matters, and the availability of 4 p.m. beers matters, and the arrangement of base lodge seating matters. And when all of these things are knotted together into a ski day that is more fun than stressful, it is because you are in the presence of one thing that scales down in any context: excellence.

The National Ski Areas Association splits ski areas into four size categories, calculated by “vertical transportation feet per hour.” In other words: how many skiers your lifts can push uphill in an ideal hour. This is a useful metric for many reasons, but I’d like to see a more qualitative measurement, one based not just on size, but on consistent quality of experience.

I spend most of my winter bouncing across America, swinging into ski areas of all sizes and varieties. Excellence lives in unexpected places. One-hundred-and-sixty-vertical-foot Boyce Park, Pennsylvania blows thick slabs of snow with modern snowguns, grooms it well, and seems to double-staff every post with local teenagers. Elk Mountain, on the other side of Pennsylvania, generally stitches together a better experience than its better-known neighbors just south, in the Poconos. Royal Mountain, a 550-vertical-foot, weekends-only locals’ bump in New York’s southern Adirondacks, alternates statuesque grooming with zippy glades across its skis-bigger-than-it-is face.

These ski areas, by combining great order and reliable conditions with few people, are delightful. But perhaps more impressive are ski areas that deliver consistent excellence while processing enormous numbers of visitors. Here you have places like Pats Peak, New Hampshire; Wachusett, Massachusetts; Holiday Valley, New York; and Mt. Rose, Nevada. These are not major tourist destinations, but they run with the welcoming efficiency of an Aspen or a Deer Valley. A good and ordered ski day, almost no matter what.

Crystal Mountain, Michigan is one of these ski areas. Everything about the ski experience is well-considered. Expansion, upgrades, and refinement of existing facilities have been constant for decades. The village blends with the hill. The lifts are where the lifts should be. The trail network is interesting and thoughtfully designed. The parks are great. The grooming is great. The glades are plentiful. The prices are reasonable. And, most important of all, despite being busy at all times, Crystal Mountain is tamed by order. This is excellence, that thing that all ski areas should aspire to, whatever else they lack.

What we talked about

What’s new for Crystal skiers in 2024; snowmaking; where Crystal draws its snowmaking water; Peek’n Peak, New York; why Crystal is a good business in addition to being a good ski area; four-seasons business; skiing as Mother; what makes a great team (and why Crystal has one); switching into skiing mid-career; making trails versus clearcutting the ski slope; ownership decided via coinflip; Midwest destination skiing’s biggest obstacle; will Crystal remain independent?; room to expand; additional glading opportunities; why many of Crystal’s trails are named after people; considering the future of Crystal’s lift fleet; why Crystal built a high-speed lift that rises just 314 vertical feet; why the ghost of the Cheers lift lives on as part of Crystal’s trailmap; where Crystal has considered adding a lift to the existing terrain; that confusing trailmap; a walkable village; changes inbound at the base of Loki; pushing back parking; more carpets for beginners; Crystal’s myriad bargain lift ticket options; the Indy Pass; why Crystal dropped Indy Pass blackouts; the Mt. Bohemia-Crystal relationship; Caberfae; Indy’s ultimatum to drop Ski Cooper reciprocals or leave the pass; and why Crystal joined Freedom Pass last year and left for this coming winter.  

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

The Storm’s mission is to serve all of American lift-served skiing. That means telling the stories of ski areas in every part of the country. I do this not because I have to, but because I want to. This newsletter would probably work just fine if it focused always and only on the great ski centers of the American West. That is, after all, the only part of U.S. ski country that outsiders travel to and that locals never leave. The biggest and best skiing is out there, at the top of our country, high and snowy and with a low chance of rain.

But I live in the East and I grew up in the Midwest. Both regions are cluttered with ski areas. Hundreds of them, each distinct, each its own little frozen kingdom, each singular in atmosphere and arrangement and orientation toward the world. Most remain family-owned, and retain the improvisational quirk synonymous with such a designation. But more interesting is that these ski areas remain tethered to their past in a way that many of the larger western destination resorts, run by executives cycled in via corporate development programs, never will be again.

I want to tell these stories. I’m aware that my national audience has a limited tolerance for profiles of Midwest ski centers they will never ski. But they seem to be okay with about a half-dozen per year, which is about enough to remind the wider ski community that this relatively flat but cold and hardy region is home to one of the world’s great ski cultures. The Midwest is where night-skiing rules, where blue-collar families still ski, where hunting clothes double as ski clothes, where everything is a little less serious and a little more fun.

There’s no particular big development or project that threw the spotlight on Crystal here. I’ve been trying to arrange this interview for years. Because this is a very good ski area and a very well-run ski area, even if it is not a very large ski area in the grand landscape of American ski areas. It is one of the finest ski areas in the Midwest, and one worthy of our attention.

What I got wrong

* I said that “I forget if it’s seven or nine different tree areas” at Crystal. The number of glades labeled on the trailmap is seven.

* I said Crystal had been part of Indy Pass “since the beginning or near the beginning.” The mountain joined the pass in May, 2020, ahead of the 2020-21 ski season, Indy’s second.

Why you should ski Crystal Mountain, Michigan

Crystal’s Loki pod rises above the parking lots, 255 vertical feet, eight trails down, steep on the front, gentler toward the back. These days I would ski each of the eight in turn and proceed next door to the Clipper lift. But I was 17 and just learning to ski and to me at the time that meant bombing as fast as possible without falling. For this, Wipeout was the perfect trail, a sweeping crescent through the trees, empty even on that busy day, steep but only for a bit, just enough to ignite a long sweeping tuck back to the chairs. We lapped this run for hours. Speed and adrenaline through the falling snow. The cold didn’t bother us and the dozens of alternate runs striped over successive hills didn’t tempt us. We’d found what we’d wanted and what we’d wanted is this.

I packed that day in the mental suitcase that holds my ski memories and I’ve carried it around for decades. Skiing bigger mountains hasn’t tarnished it. Becoming a better skier hasn’t diminished it. Tuck and bomb, all day long. Something so pure and simple in it, a thing that bundles those Loki laps together with Cottonwoods pow days and Colorado bump towers and California trees. Indelible. Part of what I think of when I think about skiing and part of who I am when I consider myself as a skier.

I don’t know for sure what Crystal Mountain, Michigan can give you. I can’t promise transformation of the impressionable teenage sort. I can’t promise big terrain or long runs because they don’t have them. I’m not going to pitch Crystal as a singular pilgrimage of the sort that draws western Brobots to Bohemia. This is a regional ski area that is most attractive to skiers who live in Michigan or the northern portions of the states to its immediate south. Read: it is a ski area that the vast majority of you will never experience. And the best endorsement I can make of Crystal is that I think that’s too bad, because I think you would really like it, even if I can’t exactly explain why.

Podcast Notes

On Peek’n Peak

The most difficult American ski area name to spell is not “Summit at Snoqualmie” or “Granlibakken” or “Pomerelle” or “Sipapu” or “Skaneateles” or “Bottineau Winter Park” or “Trollhaugen,” all of which I memorized during the early days of The Storm. The most counterintuitive, frustrating, and frankly stupid ski area name in all the land is “Peek’n Peak,” New York, which repeats the same word spelled two different ways for no goddamn reason. And then there’s the apostrophe-“n,” lodged in there like a bar of soap crammed between the tomato and lettuce in your hamburger, a thing that cannot possibly justify or explain its existence. Five years into this project, I can’t get the ski area’s name correct without looking it up.

Anyway, it is a nice little ski area, broad and varied and well-lifted, lodged in a consistent little Lake Erie snowbelt. They don’t show glades on the trailmap, but most of the trees are skiable when filled in. The bump claims 400 vertical feet; my Slopes app says 347. Either way, this little Indy Pass hill, where Melcher learned to ski, is a nice little stopover:

On Crystal’s masterplan

Crystal’s masterplan leaves room for potential future ski development – we discuss where, specifically, in the podcast. The ski area is kind of lost in the sprawl of Crystal’s masterplan, so I’ve added the lift names for context:

On Sugar Loaf, Michigan

Michigan, like most ski states, has lost more ski areas than it’s kept. The most frustrating of these losses was Sugar Loaf, a 500-footer parked in the northwest corner of the Lower Peninsula, outside of Traverse City. Sunday afternoon lift tickets were like $12 and my high school buddies and I would drive up through snowstorms and ski until the lifts closed and drive home. The place went bust around 2000, but the lifts were still standing until some moron ripped them out five years ago with fantasies of rebuilding the place as some sort of boutique “experience.” Then he ran away and now it’s just a lonely, empty hill.

On Michigan being “littered with lost ski areas”

Michigan is home to the second-most active or semi-active ski areas of any state in the country, with 44 (New York checks in around 50). Still, the Midwest Lost Ski Areas project counts more than 200 lost ski areas in the state.

On Crystal’s backside evolution and confusing trailmap

By building pod after pod off the backside of the mountain, Crystal has nearly doubled in size since I first skied there in the mid-90s. The Ridge appeared around 2000; North Face came online in 2003; and Backyard materialized in 2015. These additions give Crystal a sprawling, adventurous feel on par with The Highlands or Nub’s Nob. But the trailmap, while aesthetically pleasant, is one of the worst I’ve seen, as it’s very unclear how the three pods link to one another, and in turn to the front of the mountain:

This is a fixable problem, as I outlined in my last podcast, with Vista Map founder Gary Milliken, who untangled similarly confusing trailmaps for Mt. Spokane, Washington and Lookout Pass, Idaho over the past couple of years. Here’s Lookout Pass’ old and new maps side-by-side:

And here’s Mt. Spokane:

Crystal – if you’d like an introduction to Gary, I’m happy to make that happen.

On resort consolidation in the Midwest

The Midwest has not been sheltered from the consolidation wave that’s rolled over much of the West and New England over the past few decades. Of the region’s 123 active ski areas, 25 are owned by entities that operate two or more ski areas: Vail Resorts owns 10; Wisconsin Resorts, five; Midwest Family Ski Resorts, four; the Schmitz Brothers, three; Boyne, two; and the Perfect Family, which also owns Timberline in West Virginia, one. But 98 of the region’s ski areas remain independently owned and operated. While a couple dozen of those are tiny municipal ropetow bumps with inconsistent operations and little or no snowmaking, most of those that run at least one chairlift are family-owned ski areas that, last winter notwithstanding, are doing very well on a formula of reasonable prices + a focus on kids and night-skiing. Here’s the present landscape of Midwest skiing:

On the consolidation of Crystal’s lift fleet

Crystal once ran five frontside chairlifts:

Today, the mountain has consolidated that to just three, despite a substantively unchanged trail footprint. While Crystal stopped running the Cheers lift around 2016, its shadowy outline still appears along the Cheers To Lou run.

Crystal is way out ahead of the rest of the Midwest, which built most of its ski areas in the age of cheap fixed-grip lifts and never bothered to replace them. The king of these dinosaurs may be Afton Alps, Minnesota, with 15 Hall chairlifts (it was, until recently, 17) lined up along the ridge, the newest of them dating to 1979:

It’s kind of funny that Vail owns this anachronism, which, despite its comic-book layout, is actually a really fun little ski area.

On Crystal’s many discounted lift ticket options

While Crystal is as high-end as any resort you’ll find in Michigan, the ski area still offers numerous loveably kitschy discounts of the sort that every ski area in the country once sold:

Browse these and more on their website.

On Indy Pass’ dispute with Ski Cooper

Last year, Indy Pass accused Ski Cooper of building a reciprocal resort network that turned the ski area’s discount season pass into a de facto national ski pass that competed directly with Indy. Indy then told its partners to ditch Cooper or leave Indy. Crystal was one of those resorts, and found a workaround by joining the Freedom Pass, which maintained the three Cooper days for their passholders without technically violating Indy Pass’ mandate. You can read the full story here:

On Bohemia and Caberfae

Crystal left Freedom Pass for this winter, but has retained reciprocal deals with Mount Bohemia and Caberfae. I’ve hosted leaders of both ski areas on the podcast, and they are two of my favorite episodes:

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

The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 73/100 in 2024, and number 573 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019.

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

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Who

Gary Milliken, Founder of Vista Map

Recorded on

June 13, 2024

About Vista Map

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

Here’s a little overview video:

Why I interviewed him

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What we talked about

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Podcast Notes

On Highmount Ski Center

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

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

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

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

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

On the Unicode consortium

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

Maps we talked about

Lookout Pass, Idaho/Montana

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

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

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

Mt. Spokane, Washington

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

Milliken built a new, more intuitive map last year:

Mt. Rose, Nevada

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

Telluride, Colorado

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

The mountain ended up being his first client:

Gore Mountain, New York

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

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

Whiteface, New York

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

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

Sun Valley, Idaho

Sun Valley presented numerous challenges of perspective and scale:

Grand Targhee, Wyoming

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

Vail Mountain, Colorado

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

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

Here’s a video showing the transformation:

Stowe, Vermont

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

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

Mt. Hood Meadows, Oregon

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

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

Killington, Vermont

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

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

Loon Mountain, New Hampshire

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

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

Mt. Shasta Ski Park, California

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

Oak Mountain, New York

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

Willard Mountain, New York

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

Caberfae Peaks, Michigan

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

On the New York City Subway map

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

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

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Who

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

Recorded on

September 30, 2024

About Grand Targhee

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: The Gillett Family

Located in: Alta, Wyoming

Year founded: 1969

Pass affiliations: Mountain Collective: 2 days, no blackouts

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

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

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

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

Skiable Acres: 2,602 acres

Average annual snowfall: 500 inches

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

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

Why I interviewed him

Here are some true facts about Grand Targhee:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What we talked about

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I got wrong

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

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

Why you should ski Grand Targhee

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

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

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

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

Podcast Notes

On the Peaked Mountain expansion

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

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

On Grand Targhee’s masterplan

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

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

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

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

On opposition to all of this potential expansion

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

On Net Promoter Score and RRC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the Teton Pass highway collapse

Yeah so this was wild:

On Booth Creek

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

On the ski areas at Snoqualmie Pass being “insane”

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

On Targhee’s sinkhole

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

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

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

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

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

On the overlap between Mountain Collective and Ikon

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

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

Who

Justin Hoppe, Owner of Norway Mountain, Michigan

Recorded on

September 16, 2024

About Norway Mountain

Owned by: Justin Hoppe

Located in: Norway, Michigan

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

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

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

Base elevation: 835 feet

Summit elevation: 1,335 feet

Vertical drop: 500 feet

Skiable Acres: 186

Average annual snowfall: 50 inches

Trail count: 15

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

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

View historic Norway Mountain trailmaps on skimap.org.

Why I interviewed him

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What we talked about

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I got wrong

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

Why you should ski Norway Mountain

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

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

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

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

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

Podcast Notes

On Pando Ski Center

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

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

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

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

On Cannonsburg

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

On Caberfae

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

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

On Norway’s proximity to Pine Mountain

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

On Big Tupper

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

On Sneller chairlifts

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

On Norway’s new logo

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

On social media

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

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

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

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

On Neighbors

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

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

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

On UP ski areas

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

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

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

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

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

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Who

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

Recorded on

September 9, 2024

About Pleasant Mountain

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Boyne Resorts, which also owns:

Located in: Bridgton, Maine

Year founded: 1938

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

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

Base elevation: 600 feet

Summit elevation: 1,900 feet

Vertical drop: 1,300 feet

Skiable Acres: 239

Average annual snowfall: 110 inches

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

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

Why I interviewed him

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

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

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

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

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

What we talked about

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

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

Lewis sent me some photos after the call:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I got wrong

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

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

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

Why you should ski Pleasant Mountain

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

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

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

Podcast Notes

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

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

On Boyne rebuilding old detach quads

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

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

On early-70s Pleasant Mountain

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

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

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

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

On Sunday River as a backwater

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

On ASC’s roster

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

On Bear Peak at Attitash

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

On Sugarbush’s Lift-tacular summer

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

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

On vintage Loon

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

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

Loon actually expanded it again in 2022:

On Loon busyness

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

On Loon being the best of New Hampshire

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

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

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

On Booth Creek’s roster

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

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

On the Homer family and “Shawnee Peak”

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

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

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

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

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

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

On expansion potential to Pleasant Mountain’s west

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

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

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

On Pleasant’s slow expansion onto the New England Pass

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 65/100 in 2024, and number 565 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019.

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

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Who

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

Recorded on

September 3, 2024

About Fernie

Click here for a mountain stats overview

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

Located in: Fernie, British Columbia

Pass affiliations:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Skiable Acres: 2,500+

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

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

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

Why I interviewed him

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

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

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

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

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

What we talked about

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Questions I wish I’d asked

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

What I got wrong

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

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

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

Why you should ski Fernie

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

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

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

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

The first stop was Fernie:

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

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

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

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

Podcast Notes

On Fernie’s masterplan

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

On Ski Roundtop

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

On Spademan bindings

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

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

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

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

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

On Whitefish/Big Mountain

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

On Poley Mountain in New Brunswick

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

On Kicking Horse

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

On Kimberley’s lift evolution and the fire

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

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

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

On Fernie’s terrain evolution

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

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

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

On the “Squamish Gondola”

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

On the town of Fernie

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

On tragedy

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

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

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

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

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

On the relationship between Rossland and Red Mountain

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

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

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

The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 63/100 in 2024, and number 563 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019.

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

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Who

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

Recorded on

August 19, 2024

About the NSAA

From the association’s website:

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

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

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

Why I interviewed her

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

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

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

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

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

What we talked about

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

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

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

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

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

Questions I wish I’d asked

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

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

What I got wrong

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

Podcast Notes

On specific figures from the Kotke Report:

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

Capital expenditures

Per the 2023-24 Kotke Report:

Definitions of ski resort sizes

Also from Kotke:

On European lift fleets versus American

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

On “Waterville with the MND lift”

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

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

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

On the NSAA’s Covid response

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On ASTM International

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

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

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

On Heavenly’s collision prevention program

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

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

On the Crested Butte accident

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boy do I ever:

Yeah that’s my leg. Ouch.

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

Here’s the full story.

On “Jerry of the Day”

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

Some are just mean-spirited and stupid:

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

On state passport programs

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

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