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Who

Eric Clark, President and Chief Operating Officer of Mammoth and June Mountains, California

Recorded on

January 29, 2025

Why I interviewed him

Mammoth is ridiculous, improbable, outrageous. An impossible combination of unmixable things. SoCal vibes 8,000 feet in the sky and 250 miles north of the megalopolis. Rustic old-California alpine clapboard-and-Yan patina smeared with D-Line speed and Ikon energy. But nothing more implausible than this: 300 days of sunshine and 350 inches of snow in an average year. Some winters more: 715 inches two seasons ago, 618 in the 2016-17 campaign, 669 in 2010-11. Those are base-area totals. Nearly 900 inches stacked onto Mammoth’s summit during the 2022-23 ski season. The ski area opened on Nov. 5 and closed on Aug. 6, a 275-day campaign.

Below the paid subscriber jump: why Mammoth stands out even among giants, June’s J1 lift predates the evolution of plant life, Alterra’s investment machine, and more.

That’s nature, audacious and brash. Clouds tossed off the Pacific smashing into the continental crest. But it took a soul, hardy and ungovernable, to make Mammoth Mountain into a ski area for the masses. Dave McCoy, perhaps the greatest of the great generation of American ski resort founders, strung up and stapled together and tamed this wintertime kingdom over seven decades. Ropetows then T-bars then chairlifts all over. One of the finest lift systems anywhere. Chairs 1 through 25 stitching together a trail network sculpted and bulldozed and blasted from the monolithic mountain. A handcrafted playground animated as something wild, fierce, prehuman in its savage ever-down. McCoy, who lived to 104, is celebrated as a businessman, a visionary, and a human, but he was also, quietly, an artist.

Mammoth is not the largest ski area in America (ranking number nine), California (third behind Palisades and Heavenly), Alterra’s portfolio (third behind Palisades and Steamboat), or the U.S. Ikon Pass roster (fifth after Palisades, Big Sky, Bachelor, and Steamboat). But it may be America’s most beloved big ski resort, frantic and fascinating, an essential big-mountain gateway for 39 million Californians, an Ikon Pass icon and the spiritual home of Alterra Mountain Company. It’s impossible to imagine American skiing without Mammoth, just as it’s impossible to imagine baseball without the Yankees or Africa without elephants. To our national ski identity, Mammoth is an essential thing, like a heart to a human body, a part without which the whole function falls apart.

About Mammoth

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Alterra Mountain Company, which also owns:

Located in: Mammoth Lakes, California

Year founded: 1953

Pass affiliations:

* Ikon Pass: unlimited, no blackouts

* Ikon Base Pass: unlimited, holiday blackouts

Closest neighboring ski areas: June Mountain – around half an hour if the roads are clear; to underscore the severity of the Sierra Nevada, China Peak sits just 28 miles southwest of Mammoth, but is a seven-hour, 450-mile drive away – in good weather.

Base elevation: 7,953 feet

Summit elevation: 11,053 feet

Vertical drop: 3,100 feet

Skiable acres: 3,500

Average annual snowfall: 350 inches

Trail count: 178 (13% easiest, 28% slightly difficult, 19% difficult, 25% very difficult, 15% extremely difficult)

Lift count: 25 (1 15-passenger gondola, 1 two-stage, eight-passenger gondola, 4 high-speed six-packs, 8 high-speed quads, 1 fixed-grip quad, 6 triples, 3 doubles, 1 Poma – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Mammoth’s lift fleet) – the ski area also runs some number of non-public carpets

About June

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Alterra Mountain Company (see complete roster above)

Located in: June Lake, California

Year founded: 1963

Pass affiliations:

* Ikon Pass: unlimited, no blackouts

* Ikon Base Pass: unlimited, holiday blackouts

Closest neighboring ski areas: Mammoth Mountain – around half an hour if the roads are clear

Base elevation: 7,545 feet

Summit elevation: 10,090 feet

Vertical drop: 2,590 feet

Skiable acres: 1,500 acres

Average annual snowfall: 250 inches

Trail count: 41

Lift count: 6 (2 high-speed quads, 4 doubles – view Lift Blog’s inventory of June Mountain’s lift fleet)

What we talked about

Mammoth’s new lift 1; D-Line six-packs; deciding which lift to replace on a mountain with dozens of them; how the new lifts 1 and 16 redistributed skier traffic around Mammoth; adios Yan detachables; the history behind Mammoth’s lift numbers; why upgrades to lifts 3 and 6 made more sense than replacements; the best lift system in America, and how to keep this massive fleet from falling apart; how Dave McCoy found and built Mammoth; retaining rowdy West Coast founder’s energy when a mountain goes Colorado corporate; old-time Colorado skiing; Mammoth Lakes in the short-term rental era; potential future Mammoth lift upgrades; a potentially transformative future for the Eagle lift and Village gondola; why Mammoth has no public carpets; Mammoth expansion potential; Mammoth’s baller parks culture, and what it takes to build and maintain their massive features; the potential of June Mountain; connecting to June’s base with snowmaking; why a J1 replacement has taken so long; kids under 12 ski free at June; Ikon Pass access; changes incoming to Ikon Pass blackouts; the new markets that Ikon is driving toward Mammoth; improved flight service for Mammoth skiers; and Mammoth ski patrol.

What I got wrong

* I guessed that Mammoth likely paid somewhere in the neighborhood of $15 million for “Canyon and Broadway.” I meant that the new six-pack D-line lifts likely cost $15 million each.

* I mentioned that Jackson Hole installed a new high-speed quad last year – I was referring to the Sublette chair.

* I said that Steamboat’s Wild Blue Gondola was “close to three miles long” – the full ride is 3.16 miles. Technically, the first and second stages of the gondola are separate machines, but riders experience them as one.

Why now was a good time for this interview

Talk to enough employees of Alterra Mountain Company and a pattern emerges: an outsized number of high-level execs – the people building the mountain portfolio and the Ikon Pass and punching Vail in the face while doing it – came to the mothership, in some way or another, through Mammoth Mountain.

Why is that? Such things can be a coincidence, but this didn’t feel like it. Rusty Gregory, Alterra’s CEO from 2018 to ’23, entered that pilot’s seat as a Mammoth lifer, and it was possible that he’d simply tagged in his benchmates. But Alterra and the Ikon Pass were functioning too smoothly to be the products of nepotism. This California ski factory seemed to be stamping out effective big-ideas people like an Italian plant cranking out Ferraris.

Something about Mammoth just works. And that’s remarkable, considering no one but McCoy thought that the place would work at all as a functional enterprise. A series of contemporary dumbasses told him that Mammoth was “too windy, too snowy, too high, too avalanche-prone, and too isolated” to work as a commercial ski area, according to The Snow Mag. That McCoy made Mammoth one of the most successful ski areas anywhere is less proof that the peanut gallery was wrong than that it took extraordinary will and inventiveness to accomplish the feat.

And when a guy runs a ski area for 52 years, that ski area becomes a manifestation of his character. The people who succeed in working there absorb these same traits, whether of dysfunction or excellence. And Mammoth has long been defined by excellence.

So, how to retain this? How does a ski area stitched so tightly to its founder’s swashbuckling character fully transition to corporate-owned megapass headliner without devolving into an over-groomed volume machine for Los Angeles weekenders? How does a mountain that’s still spinning 10 Yan fixed-grip chairs – the oldest dating to 1969 – modernize while D-Line sixers are running eight figures per install? And how does a set-footprint mountain lodged in remote wilderness continue to attract enough skiers to stay relevant, while making sure they all have a place to stay and ski once they get there?

And then there’s June. Like Pico curled up beside Killington, June, lost in Mammoth’s podium flex, is a tiger dressed up like a housecat. At 1,500 acres, June is larger than Arapahoe Basin, Aspen Highlands, or Taos. It’s 2,590-foot-vertical drop is roughly equal to that of Alta, Alyeska, or Copper (though June’s bottom 1,000-ish vertical feet are often closed due to lack of lower-elevation snow). And while the terrain is not fierce, it’s respectable, with hundreds of acres of those wide-open California glades to roll through.

And yet skiers seem to have forgotten about the place. So, it can appear, has Alterra, which still shuffles skiers out of the base on a 1960 Riblet double chair that is the oldest operating aerial lift in the State of California. The mountain deserves better, and so do Ikon Pass holders, who can fairly expect that the machinery transporting them and their gold-plated pass uphill not predate the founding of the republic. That Alterra has transformed Deer Valley, Steamboat, and Palisades Tahoe with hundreds of millions of dollars of megalifts and terrain expansions over the past five years only makes the lingering presence of June’s claptrap workhorse all the more puzzling.

So in Mammoth and June we package both sides of the great contradiction of corporate ski area ownership: that whoever ends up with the mountain is simultaneously responsible for both its future and its past. Mammoth, fast and busy and modern, must retain the spirit of its restless founder. June, ornamented in quaint museum-piece machinery while charging $189 for a peak-day lift ticket, must justify its Ikon Pass membership by doing something other than saying “Yeah I’m here with Mammoth.” Has one changed too much, and the other not enough? Or can Alterra hit the Alta Goldilocks of fast lifts and big passes with throwback bonhomie undented?

Why you should ski Mammoth and June

If you live in Southern California, go ahead and skip this section, because of course you’ve already skied Mammoth a thousand times, and so has everyone you know, and it will shock you to learn that there is anyone, anywhere, who has never skied this human wildlife park.

But for anyone who’s not in Southern California, Mammoth is remote and inconvenient. It is among the least-accessible big mountains in the country. It lacks the interstate adjacency of Tahoe, the Wasatch, and Colorado; the modernized airports funneling skiers into Big Sky and Jackson and Sun Valley (though this is changing); the cultural cachet that overcomes backwater addresses for Aspen and Telluride. Going to Mammoth, for anyone who can’t point north on 395, just doesn’t seem worth the hassle.

It is worth the hassle. The raw statistical profile validates this. Big vert, big acreage, big snows, and big lift networks always justify the journey, even if Mammoth’s remoteness fails to translate to emptiness in the way it does at, say, Taos or Revelstoke. But there is something to being Not Tahoe, a Sierra Nevada monster throwing off its own gravity rather than orbiting a mother lake with a dozen equals. Lacking the proximity to leave some things to more capable competitors, the way Tahoe resorts cede parks to Boreal or Northstar, or radness to Palisades and Kirkwood, Mammoth is compelled to offer an EveryBro mix of parks and cliffs and groomers and trees and bumps. It’s a motley, magnificent scene, singular and electric, the sort of place that makes all realms beyond feel like a mirage.

Mammoth does have one satellite, of course, and June Mountain fills the mothership’s families-with-kids gap. Unlike Mammoth, June lets you use the carpet without an instructor. Kids 12 and under ski free. June is less crowded, less vodka-Red Bull, less California. And while the dated lifts can puzzle the Ikon tote-bagger who’s last seven trips were through the detachable kingdoms of Utah and Colorado, there is a certain thrill to riding a chairlift that tugged its first passengers uphill during the Eisenhower administration.

Podcast Notes

On Mammoth’s masterplan

On Alterra pumping “a ton of money into its mountains”

Tripling the size of Deer Valley. A massive terrain expansion and transformative infill gondola at Steamboat. The fusing of Palisades Tahoe’s two sides to create America’s second-largest interconnected ski area. New six-packs at Big Bear, Mammoth, Winter Park, and Solitude. Alterra is not messing around, as the Vail-Slayer continues to add mountains, add partners, and transform its portfolio of once-tired giants into dazzling modern megaresorts with billions in investment.

On D-Line lifts “floating over the horizon”

I mean just look at these things (Loon’s Kancamagus eight on opening day, December 10, 2021 – video by Stuart Winchester):

On severe accidents on Yan detachables

In 2023, I wrote about Yan’s detachable lift hellstorm:

Cohee referenced a conversation he’d had with “Yan Kunczynski,” saying that, “obviously he had his issues.” If it’s not obvious to the listener, here’s what he was talking about: Kuncyznski founded Yan chairlifts in 1965. They were sound lifts, and the company built hundreds, many of which are still in operation today. However. Yan’s high-speed lifts turned out to be death traps. Two people died in a 1985 accident at Keystone. A 9-year-old died in a 1993 accident at Sierra-at-Tahoe (then known as Sierra Ski Ranch). Two more died at Whistler in 1995. This is why all three detachable quads at Sierra-at-Tahoe date to 1996 – the mountain ripped out all three Yan machines following the accident, even though the oldest dated only to 1989.

Several Yan high-speed detachables still run, but they have been heavily modified and retrofit. Superstar Express at Killington, for example, was “retrofitted with new Poma grips and sheaves as well as terminal modifications in 1994,” according to Lift Blog. In total, 15 ski areas, including Sun Valley, Schweitzer, Mount Snow, Mammoth, and Palisades Tahoe spent millions upgrading or replacing Yan detachable quads. The company ceased operations in 2001.

Since that writing, many of those Yan detachables have met the scrapyard:

* Killington will replace Superstar Express with a Doppelmayr six-pack this summer.

* Sun Valley removed two of their Yan detachables – Greyhawk and Challenger – in 2023, and replaced them with a single Doppelmayr high-speed six-pack.

* Sun Valley then replaced the Seattle Ridge Yan high-speed quad with a Doppelmayr six-pack in 2024.

* Mammoth has replaced both of its Yan high-speed quads – Canyon and Broadway – with Doppelmayr D-line six-packs.

* Though I didn’t mention Sunday River above, it’s worth noting that the mountain ripped out its Barker Yan detachable quad in 2023 for a D-Line Doppelmayr bubble sixer.

I’m not sure how many of these Yan-detach jalopies remain. Sun Valley still runs four; June, two; and Schweitzer, Mount Snow, and Killington one apiece. There are probably others.

On Mammoth’s aging lift fleet

Mammoth’s lift system is widely considered one of the best designed anywhere, and I have no doubt that it’s well cared for. Still, it is a garage filled with as many classic cars as sparkling-off-the-assembly-line Aston Martins. Seventeen of the mountain’s 24 aerial lifts were constructed before the turn of the century; 10 of those are Yan fixed- grips, the oldest dating to 1969. Per Lift Blog:

On Rusty’s tribute to Dave McCoy

Former Alterra CEO Rusty Gregory delivered an incredible encomium to Mammoth founder Dave McCoy on this podcast four years ago [18:08]:

The audio here is jacked up in 45 different ways. I suppose I can admit now that this was because whatever broke-ass microphone I was using at the time sounded as though it had filtered my audio through a dying air-conditioner. So I had to re-record my questions (I could make out the audio well enough to just repeat what I had said during our actual chat), making the conversation sound like something I had created by going on Open AI and typing “create a podcast where it sounds like I interviewed Rusty Gregory.” Now I probably would have just asked to re-record it, but at the time I just felt lucky to get the interview and so I stapled together this bootleg track that sounds like something Eminem would have sold from the trunk of his Chevy Celebrity in 1994.

More good McCoy stuff here and in the videos below:

On Mammoth buying Bear and Snow Summit

Rusty also broke down Mammoth’s acquisition of Bear Mountain and Snow Summit in that pod, at the 29:18 mark.

On Mammoth super parks

When I was a kid watching the Road Runner dominate Wile E. Coyote in zip-fall-splat canyon hijinks, I assumed it was the fanciful product of some lunatic’s imagination. But now I understand that the whole serial was just an animation of Mammoth Superparks:

I mean can you tell the difference?

I’m admittedly impressed with the coyote’s standing turnaround technique with the roller skis.

On Pico beside Killington

The Pico-Killington dilemma echoes that of June-Mammoth, in which an otherwise good mountain looks like a less-good mountain because it sits next door to a really great mountain. As I wrote in 2023:

Pico is funny. If it were anywhere else other than exactly next door to the largest ski area in New England, Pico might be a major ski area. Its 468 acres would make it the largest ski area in New Hampshire. A 2,000-foot vertical drop is impressive anywhere. The mountain has two high-speed lifts. And, by the way, knockout terrain. There is only one place in the Killington complex where you can run 2,000 vertical feet of steep terrain: Pico.

On the old funitel at June

Compounding the weirdness of J1’s continued existence is the fact that, from 1986 to ’96, a 20-passenger funitels ran on a parallel line:

Clark explains why June removed this lift in the podcast.

On kids under 12 skiing free at June

This is pretty amazing – per June’s website:

The free June Mountain Kids Season Pass gives your children under 12 unlimited access to June Mountain all season long. This replaces day tickets for kids, which are no longer offered. Everyone in your family must have a season pass or lift ticket. Your child's free season pass must be reserved in advance, and picked up in-person at the June Mountain Ticket Office. If your child has a birthday in our system that states they are older than 12 years of age, we will require proof of age to sell you a 12 and under season pass.

I clarified with June officials that adults are not required to buy a season pass or lift ticket in order for their children to qualify for the free season pass.

While it is unlikely that I will make it to June this winter, I signed my 8-year-old son up for a free season pass just to see how easy it was. It took about 12 seconds (he was already in Alterra’s system, saving some time).

On Alterra’s whiplash Ikon Pass access

Alterra has consistently adjusted Ikon Pass access to meter volume and appease its partner mountains:

On Mammoth’s mammoth snowfalls

Mammoth’s annual snowfalls tend to mirror the boom-bust cycles of Tahoe, with big winters burying the Statue of Liberty (715 inches at the base over the 2022-23 winter), and others underperforming the Catskills (94 inches in the winter of 1976-77). Here are the mountain’s official year-by-year and month-by-month tallies.

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Jan. 23. It dropped for free subscribers on Jan. 30. 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

Justin Steck, owner of Steeplechase ski area, Minnesota

Recorded on

January 7, 2025

About Steeplechase

Owned by: Justin Steck

Located in: Mazeppa, Minnesota

Year founded: 1999, by Kevin Kastler; closed around 2007; re-opened Feb. 4, 2023 by Steck

Pass affiliations: Freedom Pass, which offers three days for Steeplechase season passholders at each of these ski areas:

Reciprocal partners

Closest neighboring ski areas: Coffee Mill (:45), Welch Village (:41)

Base elevation: 902 feet

Summit elevation: 1,115 feet

Vertical drop: 213 feet

Skiable acres: 45 acres

Average annual snowfall: N/A

Trail count: 21 (9 easy, 7 intermediate, 5 advanced)

Lift count: 4 (2 triples, 2 doubles – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Steeplechase’s lift fleet)

Why I interviewed him

They seem to be everywhere, once you know where to look. Abandoned ski areas, rusting, fading. Time capsules. Hoses coiled and stacked. Chairs spaced and numbered along the liftline. Paperwork scattered on desks. Doors unlocked. No explanation. No note. As though the world stopped in apocalypse.

America has lost more ski areas than it has kept. Most will stay lost. Many are stripped, almost immediately, of the things that made them commercially viable, of lifts and snowguns and groomers, things purchased at past prices and sold at who-cares discounts and irreplaceable at future rates. But a few ski areas idle as museums, isolated from vandals, forgotten by others, waiting, like ancient crypts, for a great unearthing.

Who knew that Steeplechase stood intact? Who knew, really, that the complex existed in the first place, those four motley cobbled-together chairlifts spinning, as they did, for just eight years in the Minnesota wilderness? As though someone pried open a backlot shed on a house they’d purchased years before and found, whole and rebuilt, a Corvette of antique vintage. Pop in a new battery, change the sparkplugs, inflate the tires, and it’s roaring once again.

Sometimes in the summer I’ll wander around one of these lost ski areas, imagining what it was, what it could be again. There’s one a bit over an hour north of me, Tuxedo Ridge, its four double chairs stilled, its snowguns pointed skyward, holes in the roof and skis scattered about the lodge. To restore a ski area, I sometimes think, is harder than to build one whole from the earth. Most operators I speak with recoil at the very idea.

Which is why, I think, most lost ski area rebuilding or revitalization stories are led by outsiders: Norway Mountain, Holiday Mountain, Tenney, Teton Pass, Paul Bunyan. By the time they realize they’re doing an impossible thing, they’ve done too much to surrender. When Steck acquired the Steeplechase property around 2016, he didn’t really know what he’d do with it. He wanted land, and here was some land. Except the land happened to hold a forgotten-but-intact ski area.

Bit by bit, he rebuilt the business: restoring the chapel for weddings, then the tubing lanes, then the chairlifts. He didn’t ask permission. He didn’t make any big proclamation. Suddenly, one winter day in 2023, a ski area that everyone had forgotten was a ski area reappeared in the world. And isn’t that interesting?

What we talked about

A much stronger start to the 2024-25 Midwestern winter; big expansion potential and when that could happen; the mental march through the rough 2023-24 winter; considering future non-holiday midweek operations; snowmobile racing; how a house-flipping career led Steck to Steeplechase; a snapshot of the ski area lost in time in 2016; rebuilding a ski hill is “a big logistical nightmare on a regular basis,” especially during Covid; the fuzzy origins of Steeplechase’s four chairlifts; Midwest tough; Steeplechase’s founding; Freedom Pass; why Steeplechase isn’t on Indy Pass even though a spring announcement indicated that the ski area would be; and potentially America’s first 2025-26 season pass sale.

What I got wrong

My ski-areas-that-double-as-snowmobile-areas breakdown was not quite right. Cockaigne was, as far as I know, the only New York ski area to explicitly turn a portion of its trails over to snowmobiles, and only during the ski area’s short-lived resurgence (2020 to 2022-ish). Check out the circa 2020 trailmap - all the green-laced trails have been set aside as a snowmobile fun park:

That whole section was once ski trails, and the Hall double that served them is, as far as I know, still standing (lift E below):

Cockaigne is not currently an active ski area.

I also mentioned Snow Ridge, New York as being a snowmobile-friendly ski area, but what I meant by that was that snowmobilers often use the ski area’s parking lot to access trails that happen to connect there. The same dynamic seems to play out at Royal Mountain, which sits a bit farther south in the Adirondacks.

Why now was a good time for this interview

The typical ski area re-opening story is public, incremental, tortuous, and laced with doubt. See: Saddleback, Hatley Pointe, Cuchara, Granite Gorge, Norway. Will they or won’t they? Haters and doubters commandeer the narrative. “Never gonna happen.” Then it happens and I’m all like phew. High fives and headlines.

But Steeplechase just… reappeared. It was the damnedest thing. Like a Japanese ghost ship bumping onto the Oregon shoreline years after its dislodge-by-tsunami. Oh that thing? We’d forgotten all about it. One day Steck just turned two lifts on and said come ski here and people did.

When I spoke to Steck a couple of months after that February 2023 soft opening, he underscored his long-term intention to fully re-open the bump. The following ski season – last winter – was the worst in the recorded history of Midwest skiing. Steck somehow punched his way through the high temps and rain that challenged even the most seasoned operators. He’d restored all the lifts, amped up the snowmaking, cleared the old trails. Steeplechase, a ski area that was barely a ski area to begin with, had, improbably, returned. Permanently, it seemed.

The story doesn’t make a lot of sense in a 2025 U.S. ski world dominated by national ski passes, consolidation, and the exploding cost of everything. But it happened: a guy who’d never worked in skiing and didn’t know much about skiing bought and restored a Midwest ski area with little fuss and fanfare. And now it exists. And there’s a lot we can learn from that.

Why you should ski Steeplechase

Consider the ski-area-as-artwork. One person’s interpretation of wilderness bent in service of ordered recreation, with the caprice of winds and weather intact. Run a lift up one face, hack a trail down another. A twitch and a bend, re-ordered by machines. Trees left over there. Go ahead and ski between them if there’s snow. A logic to it, but bewildering too, the manifestation of a human mind carved into an incline.

Context is important here. Crazy old Merls were hacking trails all over the country in the decades after World War II, stringing inexpensive lifts from valley to summit with little concern for whether the snow would fall. But it’s incredible that Steeplechase opened in 1999, near the end of the Ski Area Extinction Event that began in the mid-70s, with four cobbled-together chairlifts and a surprisingly broad and varied trail network.

Imagine someone doing that today? It’s hard to. At least in North America. That makes Steeplechase one of the last of its kind, the handmade ski area willed into being by good ole’ boys nailing s**t together. That is failed once is unsurprising. That it returned as a second-generation, second-hand relic is a kind of miracle. There aren’t a lot of ski areas left like Steeplechase – unfussy, unfrenzied, improvisational works-in-progress that you can pull up to and ski without planning two election cycles in advance. You’re unlikely to have the best ski day of your life here, but it’s pretty cool that you can ski here at all. And so why not go do it?

Podcast notes

On expansion potential

The Google Earth view of Steeplechase hides the little ski area’s big expansion potential, as it’s hard to tell where the earth rises and dips. Looking at the topo map side-by-side, however, and you can see the ridgelines rising off what may be an ancient riverbed, leaving plenty of hills to build into:

On Midwest tough

I grew up in the Midwest and moved away a couple of decades ago. Transplanted onto the East Coast, I can appreciate some inherent Midwestern character traits that are less prevalent outside the region, including an ability to absorb foul weather. One of the best articulations of this that I’ve read was in this 2006 New York Times piece, on Wyoming industry recruiting workers from Michigan:

Wyoming recruiters say there is another element to their admiration for Michigan. Not only are the people there akin to Wyomingites in the ways and wiles of work, but they also have an inner toughness, they say, that can only come from surviving harsh northern winters.

The state tried a job campaign in the South last fall after Hurricane Katrina, hoping to draw displaced oil industry workers. But the effort largely flopped when people who were used to working on the balmy Gulf Coast got wind of what life can be like in Wyoming in January.

On Steeplechase’s season pass

Steeplechase may have launched America’s first 2025-26 ski season pass: for $300, ski the rest of this winter and next.

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Jan. 22. It dropped for free subscribers on Jan. 29. 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

* Travis Kearney, General Manager

* Aaron Damon, Assistant General Manager, Marketing Director

* Mike Chasse, member of Bigrock Board of Directors

* Conrad Brown, long-time ski patroller

* Neal Grass, Maintenance Manager

Recorded on

December 2, 2024

About Bigrock

Owned by: A 501c(3) community nonprofit overseen by a local board of directors

Located in: Mars Hill, Maine

Pass affiliations: Indy Base Pass, Indy Plus Pass – 2 days, no blackouts

Closest neighboring ski areas: Quoggy Jo (:26), Lonesome Pine (1:08)

Base elevation: 670 feet

Summit elevation: 1,590 feet

Vertical drop: 920 feet

Skiable acres: 90

Average annual snowfall: 94 inches

Trail count: 29 (10% beginner, 66% intermediate, 24% advanced)

Lift count: 4 (1 fixed-grip quad, 1 triple, 1 double, 1 surface lift – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Bigrock’s lift fleet)

Why I interviewed them

Welcome to the tip-top of America, where Saddleback is a ski area “down south” and $60 is considered an expensive lift ticket. Have you ever been to Sugarloaf, stationed four hours north of Boston at what feels like the planet’s end? Bigrock is four hours past that, 26 miles north of the end of I-95, a surveyor’s whim from Canadian citizenship. New England is small, but Maine is big, and Aroostook County is enormous, nearly the size of Vermont, larger than Connecticut, the second-largest county east of the Mississippi, 6,828 square miles of mostly rivers and trees and mountains and moose, but also 67,105 people, all of whom need something to do in the winter.

That something is Bigrock. Ramble this far north and you probably expect ascent-by-donkey or centerpole double chairs powered by butter churns. But here we have a sparkling new Doppelmayr fixed quad summiting at a windfarm. Shimmering new snowguns hammering across the night. America’s eastern-most ski area, facing west across the continent, a white-laced arena edging the endless wilderness.

Bigrock is a fantastic thing, but also a curious one. Its origin story is a New England yarn that echoes all the rest – a guy named Wendell, shirtsleeves-in-the-summertime hustle and surface lifts, let’s hope the snow comes, finally some snowguns and a chairlift just in time. But most such stories end with “and that’s how it became a housing development.” Not this one. The residents of this state-sized county can ski Bigrock in 2025 because the folks in charge of the bump made a few crucial decisions at a few opportune times. In that way, the ski area is a case study not only of the improbable survivor, but a blueprint for how today’s on-the-knife-edge independent bumps can keep spinning lifts in the uncertain decades to come.

What we talked about

Huge snowmaking upgrades; a new summit quad for the 2024-25 ski season; why the new lift follows a different line from the old summit double; why the Gemini summit double remains in place; how the new chair opens up the mountain’s advanced terrain; why the lift is called “Sunrise”; a brief history of moving the Gemini double from Maine’s now-defunct Evergreen ski area; the “backyard engineering degree”; how this small, remote ski area could afford a brand-new $4 million Doppelmayr quad; why Bigrock considered, but ultimately decided against, repurposing a used lift to replace Gemini; why the new lift is a fixed-grip, rather than a detachable, machine; the windfarm at Bigrock’s summit; Bigrock in the 1960s; the Pierce family legacy; how Covid drove certain skiers to Bigrock while keeping other groups away; how and why Bigrock became a nonprofit; what nearly shuttered the ski area; “I think there was a period in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s where it became not profitable to own a ski area of this size”; why Bigrock’s nonprofit board of directors works; the problem with volunteers; “every kid in town, if they wanted to ski, they were going to ski”; the decline of meatloaf culture; and where and when Bigrock could expand the trail footprint.

Why now was a good time for this interview

In our high-speed, jet-setting, megapass-driven, name-brand, social-media-fueled ski moment, it is fair to ask this question of any ski area that does not run multiple lifts equipped with tanning beds and bottle service: why do you still exist, and how?

I often profile ski areas that have no business being in business in 2025: Plattekill, Magic Mountain, Holiday Mountain, Norway Mountain, Bluewood, Teton Pass, Great Bear, Timberline, Mt. Baldy, Whitecap, Black Mountain of Maine. They are, in most cases, surrounded both by far more modernized facilities and numerous failed peers. Some of them died and punched their way out of the grave. How? Why are these hills the ones who made it?

I keep telling these stories because each is distinct, though common elements persist: great natural ski terrain, stubborn owners, available local skiers, and persistent story-building that welds a skier’s self-image to the tale of mountain-as-noble-kingdom. But those elements alone are not enough. Every improbably successful ski area has a secret weapon. Black Mountain of Maine has the Angry Beavers, a group of chainsaw-wielding volunteers who have quietly orchestrated one of New England’s largest ski area expansions over the past decade, making it an attractive busy-day alternative to nearby Sunday River. Great Bear, South Dakota is a Sioux Falls city park, insulating the business from macro-economic pressures and enabling it to buy things like new quad chairlifts. Magic, surrounded by Epkon megaships, is the benefactor of marketing and social-media mastermind Geoff Hatheway, who has crafted a rowdy downhome story that people want to be a part of.

And Bigrock? Well, that’s what we’re here for. How on earth did this little ski area teetering on the edge of the continental U.S. afford a brand-new $4 million chairlift? And a bunch of new snowmaking? And how did it not just go splat-I’m-dead years ago as destination ski areas to the north and south added spiderwebs of fast lifts and joined national mass-market passes? And how is it weathering the increasing costs of labor, utilities, infrastructure, and everything else?

The answer lies, in part, in Bigrock’s shift, 25 years or so ago, to a nonprofit model, which I believe many more community ski areas will have to adopt to survive this century. But that is just the foundation. What the people running the bump do with it matters. And the folks running Bigrock have found a way to make a modern ski area far from the places where you’d expect to find one.

What I got wrong

I said that “hundreds of lifts” had “come out in America over the past couple of years.” That’s certainly an overcount. But I really had in mind the post-Covid period that began in 2021, so the past three to four years, which has seen a significant number of lift replacements. The best place to track these is Lift Blog’s year-by-year new lifts databases: 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 (anticipated).

I noted that there were two “nearby” ski areas in New Brunswick, the Canadian province bordering Maine. I was referring to 800-vertical-foot Crabbe Mountain, an hour and 20 minutes southeast of Bigrock, and Mont Farlagne, a 600-ish-footer an hour and a half north (neither travel time considers border-crossing delays). Whether these are “near” Bigrock is subjective, I suppose. Here are their trailmaps:

Why you should ski Bigrock

First, ski Maine. Because it’s gorgeous and remote and, because it takes work to get there, relatively uncrowded on the runs (Sunday River and Pleasant Mountain peak days excepted). Because the people are largely good and wholesome and kind. And because it’s winter the way we all think winter should be, violently and unapologetically cold, bitter and endless, overcast and ornery, fierce in that way that invigorates and tortures the soul.

“OK,” you say. “Saddleback and Sugarloaf look great.” And they are. But to drive four hours past them for something smaller? Unlikely. I’m a certain kind of skier that I know most others are not. I like to ramble and always have. I relish, rather than endure, long drives. Particularly in unknown and distant parts. I thrive on newness and novelty. Bigrock, nearly a thousand feet of vert nine hours north of my apartment by car, presents to me a chance for no liftlines and long, empty runs; uncrowded highways for the last half of the drive; probably heaping diner plates on the way out of town. My mission is to hit every lift-served ski area in America and this is one of them, so it will happen at some point.

But what of you, Otherskier? Yes, an NYC-based skier can drive 30 to 45 minutes past Hunter and Belleayre and Windham to try Plattekill for a change-up, but that equation fails for remote Bigrock. Like Pluto, it orbits too far from the sun of New England’s cities to merit inclusion among the roster of viable planets. So this appeal, I suppose, ought to be directed at those skiers who live in Presque Isle (population 8,797), Caribou (7,396), and Houlton (6,055). Maybe you live there but don’t ski Bigrock, shuttling on weekends to the cabin near Sugarloaf or taking a week each year to the Wasatch. But I’m a big proponent of the local, of five runs after work on a Thursday, of an early-morning Sunday banger to wake up on the weekend. To have such a place in your backyard – even if it isn’t Alta-Snowbird (because nothing is) or Stowe or Killington – is a hell of an asset.

But even that is likely a small group of people. What Bigrock is for – or should be for – is every kid growing up along US 1 north of I-95. Every single school district along this thoroughfare ought to be running weekly buses to the base of the lifts from December through March, for beginner lessons, for race programs, for freeride teams. There are trad-offs to remoteness, to growing up far from things. Yes, the kids are six or seven hours away from a Patriots game or Fenway. But they have big skiing, good skiing, modern skiing, reliable skiing, right freaking there, and they should all be able to check it out.

Podcast notes

On Evergreen Valley ski area

Bigrock’s longtime, still-standing-but-now-mothballed Mueller summit double lift came from the short-lived Evergreen Valley, which operated from around 1972 to 1982.

The mountain stood in the ski-dense Conway region along the Maine-New Hampshire border, encircled by present-day Mt. Abram, Sunday River, Wildcat, Black Mountain NH, Bretton Woods, Cranmore, and Pleasant Mountain. Given that competition, it may seem logical that Evergreen failed, but Sunday River wasn’t much larger than this in 1982.

On Saddleback’s Rangeley double

Saddleback’s 2020 renaissance relied in large part on the installation of a new high-speed quad to replace the ancient Rangeley Mueller double. Here’s an awesome video of a snowcat tugging the entire lift down in one movement.

On Libra Foundation and Maine Winter Sports

Backed with Libra Foundation grants, the Maine Winter Sports Center briefly played an important role in keeping Bigrock, Quoggy Jo, and Black Mountain of Maine ski areas operational. All three managed to survive the organization’s abrupt exit from the Alpine ski business in 2013, a story that I covered in previous podcasts with Saddleback executive and onetime Maine Winter Sports head Andy Shepard, and with the leadership of Black Mountain of Maine.

On Bigrock’s masterplan

We discuss a potential future expansion that would substantially build out Bigrock’s beginner terrain. Here’s where that new terrain - and an additional lift - could sit in relation to the existing trails (labeled “A01” and A03”):

On Maine ski areas on Indy

Indy has built a stellar Indy Pass roster, which includes every thousand-ish-footer in the state that’s not owned by Boyne:

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Who

Max Magill, President of United Mountain Workers and ski patroller at Park City Mountain Resort, Utah

Recorded on

January 11, 2025

About United Mountain Workers

United Mountain Workers (UMW) is a labor union representing 16 distinct employee groups across more than a dozen U.S. ski resorts:

UMW is organized under Communication Workers of America, which represents more than 700,000 workers across media, healthcare, manufacturing, and other sectors.

Why I interviewed him

In case you missed it (New York Times):

Ski patrollers at Park City Mountain in Utah triumphantly returned to the slopes on Thursday, after ending a nearly two-week strike over union wages and benefits. The strike hobbled the largest U.S. ski resort during a busy holiday period and sparked online fury about deepening economic inequality in rural mountain areas.

Late Wednesday, the Park City Professional Ski Patrollers Association ratified a contract with Vail Resorts, which owns Park City and more than 40 other ski areas, that raises the starting pay of ski patrollers and other mountain safety workers $2 an hour, to $23. The most experienced patrollers will receive an average increase of $7.75 per hour. The agreement also expands parental leave policies for the workers, and provides “industry-leading educational opportunities,” according to the union. …

Accusing Vail Resorts of unfair labor practices, the Ski Patrollers Association, which represents 204 ski patrollers and mountain safety personnel, went on strike on Dec. 27. The strike received national attention as a fight between the haves and have-nots — a global corporation valued at nearly $10 billion against the vital workers who aid and protect skiers on its properties.

With few ski patrollers to open trails, respond to accidents and perform avalanche mitigation, only about one fourth of Park City Mountain’s terrain was open during the strike.

Irate skiers and snowboarders at Park City soon pilloried Vail, taking to social media and national news organizations to denounce lengthy lift lines and contrast the high salaries of Vail leadership and expensive ticket prices with the relatively low pay of resort workers.

This is a big deal, and it’s probably just getting started.

What we talked about

Back to work; support in unexpected corners; I hear tell of flying pizzas and donuts and I want in on this magical world; a brief timeline of contract negotiations; what Vail Resorts offered and why the union said no; “we had no choice but to play our final and most powerful card, knowing that our strike would cause massive disruption”; deconstructing the vast Vail management machine; what UMW won in the new contract; “the raises we won are life-changing for a ton of our members, including me”; a rapidly changing Utah; how the patrollers’ union was challenged when Vail merged Park City and Canyons; “a malicious union-busting campaign is the best way to organize workers”; organizing a union in a “right to work” state; the amazing complexity of Park City Mountain Resort; the complexities of importing patrollers from one resort to another; skier volumes at Park City over time; the pluses and minuses of more skiers; “this movement will continue to grow”; the patrol union vote at A-Basin (it passed); could the various patrol unions combine?; whether ski industry unions could spread to other worker groups and regions; “all workers, ski industry or not, deserve respect”; and Vail’s big 2022 pay raises.

Questions I wish I’d asked

I was surprised to hear Magill describe new patrol uniforms as “pretty substandard.” With every lift op rocking a Helly jacket, I figured the squad up top would get primo stuff. Why don’t they?

What I got wrong

Real-world facts for numbers that I roughly guessed at mid-talk:

* Park City population: 8,254 (I said “a little over 8,000”)

* 2024-25 Epic Pass sales: approximately 2.3 million (I said “2 million”)

* Early-bird price of a 2024-25 Epic Local Pass: $739 (I said “seven-thirty-something”)

* Size of Park City Mountain Resort: 7,300 acres, 350 trails (I actually got these right, but tagged them with a “or whatever they are” on the pod)

* On the number of active U.S. ski areas: 509, by my own count (I said “500-some,” but it changes almost weekly, so I hedged)

On words being hard

* I kept saying “exasperate” when I meant to say “exacerbate,” a word that my idiot brain cannot pronounce. But I know the difference so please stop sending me that email.

* I said that “most” U.S. ski areas were in the Midwest and East, when I meant to say that the “majority” were. This is true. Only 189 of the 509 active U.S. ski areas (37%) sit in the 11 western ski states.

On things changing fast

Magill and I discussed the pending unionization vote among Arapahoe Basin patrollers. Shortly after our conversation concluded, he informed me that they had officially voted to organize.

On sourcing

I cited the AP (Associated Press), as my source for some summary points from the Park City patrollers’ contract with Vail Resorts. Most of what I cited actually came from High Country News.

Corrected mid-flow

* Contract negotiations began in March (not May, as I suggested) of 2024

* Patrollers at the then-independent Canyons ski area established the union that now represents all of Park City Mountain Resort in 2001, not 2002. Vail purchased Canyons in 2013 and Park City in 2014, and combined the side-by-side ski areas into one with the Quicksilver Gondola in 2015.

On skier visit numbers

I noted that ski resorts operating on Forest Service lands had successfully lobbied against requirements to report annual skier visit numbers. That probably seemed irrelevant in the case of Park City Mountain Resort, which does not operate on Forest Service land, but I was trying to get to the larger point that Vail Resorts is secretive with its resort-by-resort skier visits.

Podcast Notes

On Right to Work

Many states have passed “right to work” laws, meaning that employees are not compelled to join a labor union, even if one represents their workplace. From the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation:

Nuances exist from state to state. Magill notes in our conversation that Colorado is a right-to-work state, but the Colorado Sun describes the state as a “modified right-to-work state”:

But the Labor Peace Act is a law that unions find to be a challenge.

Enacted in 1943, the state law was seen as a compromise between unions and business owners. That’s why Colorado is considered a modified right-to-work state, which means that new hires don’t have to join a union if one exists, though they can if they want to. But if a union wins its Labor Peace Act election, then union membership is required.

The Peace Act rules require three-quarters of eligible workers to participate in a second vote, if they already successfully voted in an NLRB election. Without it, the union has less bite since it doesn’t represent all eligible workers and cannot collect dues from those who don’t join. The NLRB’s vote needs just a simple majority.

On Park City Mountain Resort

Yeah it’s freaking huge:

On the “Knowledge”

I compared the master patroller’s understanding of gigantic, rollicking Park City - with its 350 trails, 7,300 acres, and dozens of lifts - to the “Knowledge,” an exam that requires would-be London taxi drivers to memorize every cobblestone in the city to earn their license. Per The New York Times:

McCabe had spent the last three years of his life thinking about London’s roads and landmarks, and how to navigate between them. In the process, he had logged more than 50,000 miles on motorbike and on foot, the equivalent of two circumnavigations of the Earth, nearly all within inner London’s dozen boroughs and the City of London financial district. He was studying to be a London taxi driver, devoting himself full-time to the challenge that would earn him a cabbie’s “green badge” and put him behind the wheel of one of the city’s famous boxy black taxis.

Actually, “challenge” isn’t quite the word for the trial a London cabbie endures to gain his qualification. It has been called the hardest test, of any kind, in the world. Its rigors have been likened to those required to earn a degree in law or medicine. It is without question a unique intellectual, psychological and physical ordeal, demanding unnumbered thousands of hours of immersive study, as would-be cabbies undertake the task of committing to memory the entirety of London, and demonstrating that mastery through a progressively more difficult sequence of oral examinations — a process which, on average, takes four years to complete, and for some, much longer than that. The guidebook issued to prospective cabbies by London Taxi and Private Hire (LTPH), which oversees the test, summarizes the task like this:

To achieve the required standard to be licensed as an “All London” taxi driver you will need a thorough knowledge, primarily, of the area within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross. You will need to know: all the streets; housing estates; parks and open spaces; government offices and departments; financial and commercial centres; diplomatic premises; town halls; registry offices; hospitals; places of worship; sports stadiums and leisure centres; airline offices; stations; hotels; clubs; theatres; cinemas; museums; art galleries; schools; colleges and universities; police stations and headquarters buildings; civil, criminal and coroner’s courts; prisons; and places of interest to tourists. In fact, anywhere a taxi passenger might ask to be taken.

If anything, this description understates the case. The six-mile radius from Charing Cross, the putative center-point of London marked by an equestrian statue of King Charles I, takes in some 25,000 streets. London cabbies need to know all of those streets, and how to drive them — the direction they run, which are one-way, which are dead ends, where to enter and exit traffic circles, and so on. But cabbies also need to know everything on the streets. Examiners may ask a would-be cabbie to identify the location of any restaurant in London. Any pub, any shop, any landmark, no matter how small or obscure — all are fair game. Test-takers have been asked to name the whereabouts of flower stands, of laundromats, of commemorative plaques. One taxi driver told me that he was asked the location of a statue, just a foot tall, depicting two mice sharing a piece of cheese. It’s on the facade of a building in Philpot Lane, on the corner of Eastcheap, not far from London Bridge.

Surely hyperbole, I thought, upon reading this 2014 article. But when I stepped into a London black cab some years later and gave the driver my address, he said “Quite good Old Fellow”* and piloted his gigantic car from the train station down an impossible tangle of narrow streets and dropped us at the doorstep of the very building I’d requested. It appears that the robots have yet to kill this requirement.

*He probably didn’t actually say this, but I jolly well wish he had.

On Vail’s 2022 pay raises

On different skillsets and jobs

I think I came off as a bit of an a-hole at the end when I was asking about Vail paying unskilled jobs like ticket-checker and lift attendant $20 an hour while setting the minimum for more skilled jobs like ski patrol at $21. Look, I know all jobs have nuances and challenges and ways to do them well and ways to do them poorly. I’ve done all sorts of “unskilled” jobs, from bagging groceries to pushing shopping carts to stocking shelves to waiting tables. I know the work can be challenging, tiring, and thankless, and I believe good workers should be paid good wages. If you’re loading a fixed-grip double chair on a beginner run for eight hours in four-degree weather, well, you’re awesome. But it does take more training and a larger skillset to step onto a big-mountain patrol than to manage a big-mountain liftline, and I believe the compensation for the more rigorous role ought to reflect that skills gap.

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

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Who

Shaun Sutner, snowsports columnist for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette and Telegram.com

Recorded on

November 25, 2024

About Shaun Sutner

Sutner is a skier, writer, and journalist based in Worcester, Massachusetts. He’s written a snowsports column for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette from Thanksgiving to April for the past several decades. You can follow Shaun on social media to stay locked into his work:

Read his recent columns:

* On Wildcat, Attitash, and Vail Resorts

* Everyone needs a bootfitter

* Indy Pass is still kicking ass

Why I interviewed him

Journalism sounds easy. Go there, talk to people, write about it. It’s not easy. The quest for truth is like the Hobbit’s quest for the ring: long, circuitous, filled with monsters who want to eat you. Some truth is easy: Wachusett has four chairlifts. Beyond the objective, complications arise: Wachusett’s decision to replace its summit quad with a six-pack in 2025 is… what, exactly? Visionary, shortsighted, foolish, clever, pedestrian? Does it prioritize passholders or marketing or profit over experience? Is it necessary? Is it wise? Is it prudent? Is it an answer to locals’ frustrations or a compounding factor in it?

The journalist’s job is to machete through this jungle and sculpt a version of reality that all parties will recognize and that none of them will be entirely happy with. Because people are complex and so is the world, and assembling the truth is less like snapping together a thousand-piece puzzle and more like the A-Team examining a trashheap and saying “OK boys, let’s build a helicopter.”

Sutner is good at this, as may be expected of someone who’s spent decades on his beat. He understands that anecdote is not absolute. He knows how to pull together broad narratives (“New England’s outdated lift fleet” of the 2010s), and to acknowledge when they change (“New England operators aggressively modernize lifts” in the 2020s). He is empathetic to locals and operators alike, without being deferential to either. He knows that the best stories are 90 percent what the writer leaves out, and 10 percent identifying the essential bits to frame the larger whole. And he lives the beat, aggressively, joyously, immersively.

We need more Sutners, but we are probably getting fewer. As journalism figures out what it is in the 21st century, it is deciding that it is less about community-based entities employing beat-specific writers and more about feeding mastheads to private equity funds that drag the carcass down to entrails and then feed them to the hounds. Thousands of American communities now have no local news organization, let alone one with the resources to hire writers solely devoted to something as niche as skiing. Filling the information void is Angry Ski Bro, firing off 50 dozen monthly Facebook posts about Vail’s abominable greed being distilled in a broken snowgun at Wildcat.

I started The Storm as an antidote to this global complaint box. And I believe that the future of journalism includes writers tapping Substack and similar platforms to freelance the truth. But I still believe that the traditional news organization – meaning physical newspapers that have evolved into digital-analogue hybrids – can find a sustainable business model that tells a community’s essential stories. Sutner, and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, deserve credit for showing us how to do this.

What we talked about

Ski South America; how to ski 60 days while working full time; Worcester’s legendary Strand’s ski shop; Powdr’s sale of Killington and Pico and how the new owners can keep from ruining it; how to make Pico more relevant; is this the start of New England ski area deconsolidation?; Smuggs; Black Mountain, New Hampshire’s co-op quest; taking stock of New England consolidation; Vail Resorts’ New England GM shuffle; New England’s chairlift renaissance; what is New England’s new most-hated lift?; why New England needs more surface lifts; a new sixer coming to Wachusett; the legacy of Wachusett’s David Crowley; why Wachusett works; and what we lose with consolidation.

What we got wrong

On whatever that city is called

I probably still can’t pronounce “Worcester.” Just congratulate yourself if you can, and keep moving.

On South American skiing

I said in our conversation that there were “40 or so ski areas” in South America. I’ve not taken my magnifying glass to the region as I have with Real America, but I made this quick-hitter chart earlier this year that counted just 26 on the continent, all of them in Chile and Argentina:

This map on skiresort.info counts 45 South American ski areas, including a sporadically operating area in Bolivia and one indoor and one artificial-turf area in Brazil. Someday I’ll do a cross-check with my list, but that day is not today.

On which county Killington lives in

Neither of us knew which county Killington is in, but he suggested Windham County. The correct answer is Rutland County.

On The Man owning our ski centers

When discussing state-owned ski areas, Sutner didn’t remember that New Hampshire owns Cannon and Vail-operated Sunapee, and I didn’t remember to remind him.

On Black Mountain, New Hampshire

We recorded this prior to Black outlining its plans for a transition to co-op ownership. Mountain leadership has since released more details:

On Mad River Glen’s snowmaking hard stop

I noted that Mad River Glen only makes snow up to “2,000-whatever feet.” The actual number, as proclaimed by some past assemblage of the MRG co-op, is 2,200 feet. Though perhaps raising that by a couple hundred feet would have spared them from spending a fat stack to build a double-chair midstation this year.

On Vail’s GM shuffle

When we recorded this conversation, Vail-owned Wildcat, Mount Snow, and Crotched had general manager vacancies. The company has since filled all three (click through on the links above).

On Sugarloaf’s T-bar

In our discussion on surface lifts, Sutner references a T-bar to Sugarloaf’s summit. The Bateau T-bar does land quite high on the mountain, but it stops short of the summit and snowfields.

On Waterville Valley’s T-bars

Waterville’s T-bar game is way ahead of most New England ski areas. Two of them serve lower-mountain race or race-training trails, and one serves the mountain’s top 400 vertical feet, replacing the windhold-prone chairlifts that once ran to the summit. While two of the T-bars run parallel to terrain parks, serving them does not appear to be the lifts’ direct purpose, as we debated on the podcast.

On Vail’s high-speed “T-bars”

I mixed up my lift types when describing the high-speed surface lifts that Vail runs at its Midwest mountains. They are ropetows, not T-bars. Here they go at Afton Alps, Minnesota:

Afton Alps, Minnesota. Video by Stuart Winchester.

On Wachusett upgrades

Sutner noted that Wachusett’s coming summit six-pack would be its first big infrastructure upgrade in 20 years, but the mountain installed the 299-vertical-foot Monadnock Express quad in 2011.

On Berkshire East’s T-Bar Express

Sutner said that last year was Berkshire East’s second season running its T-Bar Express high-speed quad, but the lift first spun for the 2023-24 ski season. The current, 2024-25 season is the lift’s second.

On Sutner’s ski days

We recorded this a while ago, and Sutner had clocked eight ski days before Thanksgiving. As of Dec. 30, he’d hit 21 days, well along to his 60-day goal.

Podcast Notes

On Cerro Catedral

I’m somewhat obsessed with this 3,773-vertical-foot, 1,500-acre Argentinian monster:

On Shaun’s Worcester Living article

Sutner wrote up his Argentinian ski adventure for Worcester Living magazine. The story starts on page 20.

On Powdr’s sale of Killington and Pico

In case you missed it:

On New England consolidation

New England’s 100-ish ski areas are largely independently owned and operated. These 25 are run by an entity that operates at least two ski areas:

On Intrawest and American Skiing Company

It’s impossible to discuss the history of New England ski area consolidation without acknowledging the now-dead Intrawest and American Skiing Company.

On Vail’s management shuffle

I wrote about this recently:

I launched The Storm in October 2019, when Vail owned 34 North American ski areas. To the best of my knowledge, just three of those ski areas’ general manager-level leaders remain where they were on that date: Vail Mountain VP/COO Beth Howard, Okemo VP/GM Bruce Schmidt, and Boston Mills-Brandywine GM Jake Campbell. Compare this to Boyne, where nine of 10 mountain leaders either remain in their 2019 roles, or have since ascended to them after working at the resort for decades, often replacing legends retiring after long careers. Alterra and Powdr have demonstrated similar stability. Meanwhile, Vail’s seven New England Resorts enter this winter with just two mountains – Okemo and Attitash – under the same general manager that ran them in the spring.

The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 90/100 in 2024, and number 590 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. 2024 will continue until the 100-article threshold is achieved, regardless of what that pesky calendar says.

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Nov. 30. It dropped for free subscribers on Dec. 7. 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

Mike Taylor, Owner of Holiday Mountain, New York

Recorded on

November 18, 2024

About Holiday Mountain

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Mike Taylor

Located in: Monticello, New York

Year founded: 1957

Pass affiliations: None

Closest neighboring ski areas: Villa Roma (:37), Ski Big Bear (:56), Mt. Peter (:48), Mountain Creek (:52), Victor Constant (:54)

Base elevation: 900 feet

Summit elevation: 1,300 feet

Vertical drop: 400 feet

Skiable acres: 60

Average annual snowfall: 66 inches

Trail count: 9 (5 beginner, 2 intermediate, 2 advanced)

Lift count: 3 (1 fixed-grip quad, 1 triple, 1 carpet - view Lift Blog’s inventory of Holiday Mountain’s lift fleet)

Why I interviewed him

Not so long ago, U.S. ski areas swung wrecking ball-like from the necks of founders who wore them like amulets. Mountain and man fused as one, each anchored to and propelled by the other, twin forces mirrored and set aglow, forged in some burbling cauldron and unleashed upon the public as an Experience. This was Killington and this was Mammoth and this was Vail and this was Squaw and this was Taos, each at once a mountain and a manifestation of psyche and soul, as though some god’s hand had scooped from Pres and Dave and Pete and Al and Ernie their whimsy and hubris and willfulness and fashioned them into a cackling live thing on this earth. The men were the mountains and the mountains were the men. Everybody knew this and everybody felt this and that’s why we named lifts and trails after them.

This is what we’ve lost in the collect-them-all corporate roll-up of our current moment. I’m skeptical of applying an asteroid-ate-the-dinosaurs theory to skiing, but even I’ll acknowledge this bit. When the caped founder, who stepped into raw wilderness and said “here I will build an organized snowskiing facility” and proceeded to do so, steps aside or sells to SnowCo or dies, some essence of the mountain evaporates with him. The snow still hammers and the skiers still come and the mountain still lets gravity run things. The trails remain and the fall lines still fall. The mountain is mostly the same. But nobody knows why it is that way, and the ski area becomes a disembodied thing, untethered from a human host.

This, I think, is a big part of the appeal of Michigan’s Mount Bohemia. Ungroomed, untamed, absent green runs and snowguns, accessible all winter on a $109 season pass, Boho is the impossible storybook of the maniac who willed it into existence against all advice and instinct: Lonie Glieberman, who hacked this thing from the wilderness not in some lost postwar decade, but in 2000. He lives there all winter and everybody knows him and they all know that this place that is the place would not exist had he not insisted that it be so. For the purposes of how skiers consider the joint, Lonie is Mount Bohemia. And someday when he goes away the mountain will make less sense than it does right now.

I could write a similar paragraph about Chip Chase at White Grass Touring Center in West Virginia. But there aren’t many of those fellas left. Since most of our ski areas are old, most of our founders are gone. They’re not coming back, and we’re not getting more ski areas. But that doesn’t mean the era of the owner-soul keeper is finished. They just need to climb a different set of monkey bars to get there. Rather than trekking into the mountains to stake out and transform a raw wilderness into a piste digestible to the masses, the modern mountain incarnate needs to drive up to the ski area with a dump truck full of hundred dollar bills, pour it out onto the ground, and hope the planted seeds sprout money trees.

And this is Mike Taylor. He has resources. He has energy. He has manpower. And he’s going to transform this dysfunctional junkpile of a ski area into something modern, something nice, something that will last. And everyone knows it wouldn’t be happening without him.

What we talked about

The Turkey Trot chairlift upgrade; why Taylor re-engineered and renovated a mothballed double chair just to run it for a handful of days last winter before demolishing it this summer; Partek and why skiing needs an independent lift manufacturer; a gesture from Massanutten; how you build a chairlift when your chairlift doesn’t come with a bottom terminal; Holiday Mountain’s two new ski trails for this winter; the story behind Holiday Mountain’s trail names; why a rock quarry is “the greatest neighbors we could ever ask for”; big potential future ski expansion opportunities; massive snowmaking upgrades; snowmaking is hard; how a state highway spurred the development of Holiday Mountain; “I think we’ve lost a generation of skiers”; vintage Holiday Mountain; the ski area’s long, sad decline; pillage by flood; restoring abandoned terrain above the Fun Park; the chairlift you see from Route 17 is not actually a chairlift; considering a future when 17 converts into Interstate 86; what would have happened to Holiday had the other bidders purchased it; “how do we get kids off their phones and out recreating again?”; advice from Plattekill; buying a broken ski area in May and getting it open by Christmas (or trying); what translates well from the business world into running a ski area; how to finance the rebuild and modernization of a failing ski area; “when you talk to a bank and use the word ‘ski area,’ they want nothing to do with it”; how to make a ski area make money; why summer business is hard; Holiday’s incredible social media presence; “I always thought good grooming was easy, like mowing a lawn”; how to get big things done quickly but well; ski racing returns; “I don’t want to do things half-assed and pay for it in the long run”; why season two should be better than season one; “you can’t make me happier than to see busloads of kids, improving their skills, and enjoying something they’re going to do for the rest of their life”; why New York State has a challenging business environment, and how to get things done anyway; the surprise labor audit that shocked New York skiing last February – “we didn’t realize the mistakes we were making”; kids these days; the State of New York owns and subsidizes three ski areas – how does that complicate things?; why the state subsidizing independent ski areas isn’t the answer; the problem with bussing kids to ski areas; and why Holiday Mountain doesn’t feel ready to join the Indy Pass.

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

I met Taylor in a Savannah bar last year, five minutes after he’d bought a ski area and seven months before he needed to turn that ski area into a functional business. Here was the new owner of Holiday Mountain, rolling with the Plattekill gang, more or less openly saying, “I have no idea what the hell I’m doing, but I’m going to do it. I’m going to save Holiday Mountain.”

The National Ski Areas Association’s annual show, tucked across the river that week, seemed like a good place to start. Here were hundreds of people who could tell Taylor exactly how hard it was to run a ski area, and why. And here was this guy, accomplished in so many businesses, ready to learn. And all I could think, having skied the disaster that was Holiday Mountain in recent years, was thank God this dude is here. Here’s my card. Let’s talk.

I connected with Taylor the next month and wrote a story about his grand plans for Holiday. Then I stepped back and let that first winter happen. It was, by Taylor’s own account, humbling. But it did not seem to be humiliating, which is key. Pride is the quickest path to failure in skiing. Instead of kicking things, Taylor seemed to regard the whole endeavor as a grand and amusing puzzle. “Well let’s see here, turns out snowmaking is hard, grooming is hard, managing teenagers is hard… isn’t that interesting and how can I make this work even though I already had too much else to do at my other 10 jobs?”

Life may be attitude above all else. And when I look at ski area operators who have recycled garbage into gold, this is the attribute that seems to steer all others. That’s people like Rick Schmitz, who talked two Wisconsin ski areas off the ledge and brought another back from its grave; Justin Hoppe, who just traded his life in to save a lost UP ski area; James Coleman, whose bandolier of saved ski areas could fill an egg carton; and Danielle and Laszlo Vajtay, who for 31 years have modernized their ridiculously steep and remote Catskills ski area one snowgun at a time.

There are always plenty of people who will tell you why a thing is impossible. These people are boring. They lack creativity or vision, an ability to see the world as something other than what it is. Taylor is the opposite. All he does is envision how things can be better, and then work to make them that way. That was clear to me immediately. It just took him a minute to prove he could do it. And he did.

What I got wrong

* Mike said he needed a chairlift with “about 1,000 feet of vertical rise” to replace the severed double chair visible from Route 17. He meant length. According to Lift Blog, the legacy lift rose 232 vertical feet over 1,248 linear feet.

* We talk a bit about New York’s declining population, but the real-world picture is fuzzier. While the state’s population did fall considerably, from 20.1 million to 19.6 million over the past four years, those numbers include a big pandemic-driven population spike in 2020, when the state’s population rose 3.3 percent, from 19.5 million to that 20.1 million number (likely from city refugees camping out in New York’s vast and bucolic rural reaches). The state’s current population of 19,571,216 million is still larger than it was at any point before 2012, and not far off its pre-pandemic peak of 19,657,321.

* I noted that Gore’s new Hudson high-speed quad cost “about $10 million.” That is probably a fair estimate based upon the initial budget between $8 and $9 million, but an ORDA representative did not immediately respond to a request for the final number.

Why you should ski Holiday Mountain

I’ve been reconsidering my television pitch for Who Wants to Own a Ski Area? Not because the answer is probably “everybody reading this newsletter except for the ones that already own a ski area, because they are smart enough to know better.” But because I think the follow-up series, Ski Resort Rebuild, would be even more entertaining. It would contain all the elements of successful unscripted television: a novel environment, large and expensive machinery, demolition, shouting, meddlesome authorities, and an endless sequence of puzzles confronting a charismatic leader and his band of chain-smoking hourlies.

The rainbow arcing over all of this would of course be reinvention. Take something teetering on apocalyptic set-piece and transform it into an ordered enterprise that makes the kids go “wheeeeee!” Raw optimism and self-aware naivete would slide into exasperation and despair, the launchpad for stubborn triumphalism tempered by humility. Cut to teaser for season two.

Though I envision a six- or eight-episode season, the template here is the concise and satisfying Hoarders, which condenses a days-long home dejunking into a half-hour of television. One minute, Uncle Frank’s four-story house is filled with his pizza box collection and every edition of the Tampa Bay Bugle dating back to 1904. But as 15 dumpster trucks from TakeMyCrap.com drive off in convoy, the home that could only be navigated with sonar and wayfinding canines has been transformed into a Flintstones set piece, a couch and a wooly mammoth rug accenting otherwise empty rooms. I can watch these chaos-into-order transformations all day long.

Roll into Holiday Mountain this winter, and you’ll essentially be stepping into episode four of this eight-part series. The ski area’s most atrocious failures have been bulldozed, blown-up, regraded, covered in snow. The two-seater chairlift that Columbus shipped in pieces on the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria has finally been scrapped and replaced with a machine that does not predate modern democracy. The snowguns are no longer powered by hand-cranks. A ski area that, just 18 months ago, was shrinking like an island in rising water is actually debuting two brand-new trails this winter.

But the job’s not finished. On your left as you drive in is a wide abandoned ridge where four ski lifts once spun. On the open hills, new snowguns glimmer and new-used chairlifts and cats hum, but by Taylor’s own admission, his teams are still figuring out how to use all these fancy gadgets. Change is the tide climbing up the beach, but we haven’t fully smoothed out the tracked sand yet, and it will take a few more hours to get there.

It's fun to be part of something like this, even as an observer. I’ll tell you to visit Holiday Mountain this winter for the same reason I’ll tell you to go ride Chair 2 at Alpental or the triple at Bluewood or the Primo and Segundo Riblet doubles at Sunlight. By next autumn, each of these lifts, which have dressed their mountains for decades, will make way for modern machines. This is good, and healthy, and necessary for skiing’s long-term viability. But experiencing the same place in different forms offers useful lessons in imagination, evolution, and the utility of persistence and willpower. It’s already hard to picture that Holiday Mountain that teetered on the edge of collapse just two years ago. In two more years, it could be impossible, so thorough is the current renovation. So go. Bonus: they have skiing.

Podcast Notes

On indies sticking together

Despite the facile headlines, conglomerates are not taking over American skiing. As of my last count, about 73 percent of U.S. ski areas are still independently operated. And while these approximately three-quarters of active ski areas likely account for less than half of all skier visits, consumers do still have plenty of choice if they don’t want to go Epkonic.

New York, in particular, is a redoubt of family-owned and -operated mountains. Other than Vail-owned Hunter and state-owned Belleayre, Gore, and Whiteface, every single one of the state’s 51 ski areas is under independent management. Taylor calls out several of these New York owners in our conversation, including many past podcast guests. These are all tremendous conversations, all streaked with the same sincere determination and grit that’s obvious in Taylor’s pod.

Massachusetts is also a land of independent ski areas, including the Swiss watch known as Wachusett:

On Partek

Partek is one of the delightful secrets of U.S. skiing. The company, founded in 1993 by Hagen Schulz, son of the defunct Borvig lifts President Gary Schulz, installs one or two or zero new chairlifts in a typical year. Last year, it was a fixed-grip quad at Trollhaugen, Wisconsin and a triple at Mt. Southington, Connecticut. The year before, it was the new Sandy quad at Saddleback. Everyone raves about the quality of the lifts and the experience of working with Partek’s team. Saddleback GM Jim Quimby laid this out for us in detail when he joined me on the podcast last year:

Trollhaugen owner and GM Jim Rochford, Jr. was similarly effusive:

I’m underscoring this point because if you visit Partek’s website, you’ll be like “I hope they have this thing ready for Y2K.” But this is your stop if you need a new SKF 6206-2RS1, which is only $17!

On the old Catskills resort hotels with ski areas

New York is home to more ski areas (51) than any state in America, but there are still far more lost ski areas here than active ones. The New York Lost Ski Areas Project estimates that the ghosts of up to 350 onetime ski hills haunt the state. This is not so tragic as it sounds, as the vast majority of these operations consisted of a goat pulling a toboggan up 50 vertical feet beside Fiesty Pete’s dairy barn. These operated for the lifespan of a housefly and no one missed them when they disappeared. On the opposite end were a handful of well-developed, multi-lift ski areas that have died in modernity: Scotch Valley (1988), Shu Maker (1999), Cortina (mid-90s), and Big Tupper (2012). But in the middle sat dozens of now-defunct surface-tow bumps, some with snowmaking, some attached to the famous and famously extinct Borsch Belt Catskills resorts.

It is this last group that Taylor and I discuss in the podcast. He estimates that “probably a dozen” ski areas once operated in Sullivan County. Some of these were standalone operations like Holiday, but many were stapled to large resort hotels like The Nevele and Grossingers. I couldn’t find a list of the extinct Catskills resorts that once offered skiing, and none appeared to have bothered drawing a trailmap.

While these add-on ski areas are a footnote in the overall story of U.S. skiing, an activity-laying-around-to-do-at-a-resort can have a powerful multiplier effect. Here are some things that I only do if I happen across a readymade setup: shoot pool, ice skate, jet ski, play basketball, fish, play minigolf, toss cornhole bags. I enjoy all of these things, but I won’t plan ahead to do them on purpose. I imagine skiing acted in this fashion for much of the Bortsch Belt crowd, like “oh let’s go try that snowskiing thing between breakfast and our 11:00 baccarat game.” And with some of these folks, skiing probably became something they did on purpose.

The closest thing modernity delivers to this is indoor skiing, which, attached to a mall – as Big Snow is in New Jersey – presents itself as Something To Do. Which is why I believe we need a lot more such centers, and soon.

On shrinking Holiday Mountain

Some ski areas die all at once. Holiday Mountain curdled over decades, to the husk Taylor purchased last year. Check the place out in 2000, with lifts zinging all over the place across multiple faces:

A 2003 flood smashed the terrain near the entrance, and by 2007, Holiday ran just two lifts:

At some indeterminant point, the ski area also abandoned the Turkey Trot double. This 2023 trailmap shows the area dedicated to snowtubing, though to my knowledge no such activity was ever conducted there at scale.

On the lift you see from Route 17

Anyone cruising NY State 17 can see this chairlift rising off the northwest corner of the ski area:

This is essentially a billboard, as Taylor left the terminal in place after demolishing the lower part of the long-inactive lift.

Taylor intends to run a lift back up this hill and re-open all the old terrain. But first he has to restore the slopes, which eroded significantly in their last life as a Motocross course. There is no timeline for this, but Taylor works fast, and I wouldn’t be shocked to see the terrain come back online as soon as 2025.

On NY 17’s transformation into I-86

New York 17 is in the midst of a decades-long evolution into Interstate 86, with long stretches of the route that spans southern New York already signed as such. But the interstate designation comes with standards that define lane number and width, bridge height, shoulder dimensions, and maximum grade, among many other particulars, including the placement and length of exit and entrance ramps. Exit 108, which provides direct eastbound access to and egress from Holiday Mountain, is fated to close whenever the highway gods close the gap that currently splits I-86 into segments.

On Norway Mountain

Holiday is the second ski area comeback story featured on the pod in recent months, following the tale of dormant-since-2017 Norway Mountain, Michigan:

On Holiday’s high-energy social media accounts

Taylor has breathlessly documented Holiday’s comeback on the ski area’s Instagram and Facebook accounts. They’re incredible. Follow recommended.

On Tuxedo Ridge

This place frustrates me. Once a proud beginners-oriented ski center with four chairlifts and a 450-foot vertical drop, the bump dropped dead around 2014 without warning or explanation, despite a prime location less than an hour from New York City.

I hiked the place in 2020, and wrote about it:

On Ski Areas of New York

Ski Areas of New York, or SANY, is one of America’s most effective state ski area organizations. I’ve hosted the organization’s president, Scott Brandi, on the podcast a couple of times:

Compulsory mention of ORDA

The Olympic Regional Development Authority, which manages New York State-owned Belleayre, Gore, and Whiteface mountains, lost $47.3 million in its last fiscal year. One ORDA board member, in response to the report, said that it’s “amazing how well we are doing,” according to the Adirondack Explorer. Which makes a lot of the state’s independent ski area operators say things like, “Huh?” That’s probably a fair response, since $47.3 million would likely be sufficient for the state to simply purchase every ski area in New York other than Hunter, Windham, Holiday Valley, and Bristol.

On high-speed ropetows

I’ll keep writing about these forever because they are truly amazing and there should be 10 of them at every ski area in America:

Welch Village, Minnesota. Video by Stuart Winchester.

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Who

Susan Donnelly, General Manager of Mount Sunapee (and former General Manager of Crotched Mountain)

Recorded on

November 4, 2024

About Crotched

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Vail Resorts, which also owns:

Located in: Francetown, New Hampshire

Year founded: 1963 (as Crotched East); 1969 (as Onset, then Onset Bobcat, then Crotched West, now present-day Crotched); entire complex closed in 1990; West re-opened by Peak Resorts in 2003 as Crotched Mountain

Pass affiliations:

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

* Northeast Midweek Epic Pass: midweek access, including holidays

Closest neighboring public ski areas: Pats Peak (:34), Granite Gorge (:39), Arrowhead (:41), McIntyre (:50), Mount Sunapee (:51)

Base elevation: 1,050 feet

Summit elevation: 2,066 feet

Vertical drop: 1,016

Skiable Acres: 100

Average annual snowfall: 65 inches

Trail count: 25 (28% beginner, 40% intermediate, 32% advanced)

Lift count: 5 (1 high-speed quad, 1 fixed-grip quad, 1 triple, 1 double, 1 surface lift – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Crotched’s lift fleet)

History: Read New England Ski History’s overview of Crotched Mountain

About Mount Sunapee

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: The State of New Hampshire; operated by Vail Resorts, which also operates resorts detailed in the chart above.

Located in: Newbury, New Hampshire

Year founded: 1948

Pass affiliations:

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

* Northeast Midweek Epic Pass: midweek access, including holidays

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

Base elevation: 1,233 feet

Summit elevation: 2,743 feet

Vertical drop: 1,510 feet

Skiable Acres: 233 acres

Average annual snowfall: 130 inches

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

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

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

Why I interviewed her

It’s hard to be small in New England and it’s hard to be south in New England. There are 35 New England ski areas with vertical drops greater than 1,100 feet, and Crotched is not one of them. There are 44 New England ski areas that average more than 100 inches of snow per winter, and Crotched is not one of those either. Crotched does have a thousand vertical feet and a high-speed lift and a new baselodge and a snowmaking control room worthy of a nuclear submarine. Which is a pretty good starter kit for a successful ski area. But it’s not enough in New England.

To succeed as a ski area in New England, you need a Thing. The most common Things are to be really really nice or really really gritty. Stratton or Mad River. Okemo or Magic. Sunday River or Black Mountain of Maine. The pitch is either “you’ll think you’re at Deer Valley” or “you’ll descend the hill on ice skates and you’ll like it.” But Crotched’s built-along-a-state-highway normalness precludes arrogance, and its mellow terrain lacks the attitude for even modest braggadocio. It’s not a small ski area, but it’s not big enough to be a mid-sized one, either. The terrain is fine, but it’s not the kind of place you need to ski on purpose, or more than once. It’s a fine local, but not much else, making Crotched precisely the kind of mountain that you would have expected to be smothered by the numerous larger and better ski areas around it before it could live to see the internet. And that’s exactly what happened. Crotched, lacking a clear Thing, went bust in 1990.

The ski area, undersized and average, should have melted back into the forest by now. But in 2002, then-budding Peak Resorts crept out of its weird Lower Midwest manmade snowhole on a reverse Lewis & Clark Expedition to explore the strange and murky East. And as they hacked away the brambles around Crotched’s boarded-up baselodge, they saw not a big pile of mediocrity, but a portal into the gold-plated New England market. And they said “this could work if we can just find a Thing.” And that Thing was night-skiing with attitude, built on top of $10 million in renovations that included a built-from-scratch snowmaking system.

The air above the American mountains is filled with such wild notions. “We’re going to save Mt. Goatpath. It’s going to be bigger than Vail and deeper than Alta and higher than Telluride.” And everyone around them is saying, “You know this is, like, f*****g Connecticut, right?” But if practical concerns killed all bad ideas, then no one would keep reptiles as pets. Everyone else is happy with cats or dogs, sentient mammals of kindred disposition with humans, but this idiot needs a 12-foot-long boa constrictor that he keeps in a 6x3 fishtank. It helps him get chicks or something. It’s his thing. And damned if it doesn’t work.

What we talked about

Transitioning from smaller, Vail-owned Crotched to larger, state-owned but Vail-operated Sunapee; “weather-proofing” Sunapee; Crotched and Sunapee – so close but so different; reflecting on the Okemo days under Triple Peaks ownership; longtime Okemo head Bruce Schmidt; reacting to Vail’s 2018 purchase of Triple Peaks; living through change; the upside of acquisitions; integrating Peak Resorts; skiing’s boys’ club; Vail Resorts’ culture of women’s advancement; why Covid uniquely challenged Crotched among Vail’s New England properties; reviving Midnight Madness; Crotched’s historic downsizing; whether the lost half of Crotched could ever be re-developed; why Crotched 2.0 is more durable than the version that shut down in 1990; Crotched’s baller snowmaking system; southern New Hampshire’s wild weather; thoughts on future Crotched infrastructure; and considering a beginner trail from Crotched’s summit.

Why now was a good time for this interview

As we swing toward the middle of the 2020s, it’s pretty lame to continue complaining about operational malfunctions in the so-called Covid season of 2020-21, but I’m going to do it anyway.

Some ski areas did a good job operating that season. For example, Pats Peak. Pats Peak was open seven days per week that winter. Pats Peak offered night skiing on all the days it usually offers night skiing. Pats Peak made the Ross Ice Shelf jealous with its snowmaking firepower. Pats Peak acted like a snosportskiing operation that had operated a snosportskiing operation in previous winters. Pats Peak did a good job.

Other ski areas did a bad job operating that season. For example, Crotched. Crotched was open whenever it decided to be open, which was not very often. Crotched, one of the great night-skiing centers in New England, offered almost no night skiing. Crotched’s snowmaking looked like what happens when you accidentally keep the garden hose running during an overnight freeze. Crotched did a bad job.

This is a useful comparison, because these two ski areas sit just 21 miles and 30 minutes apart. They are dealing with the same crappy weather and the same low-altitude draw. They are both obscured by the shadows of far larger ski areas scraping the skies just to the north. They are both small and unserious places, where the skiing is somewhat beside the point. Kids go there to pole-click one another’s skis off of moving chairlifts. College kids go there to alternate two laps with two rounds at the bar. Adults go there to shoo the kids onto the chairlifts and burn down happy hour. No one shows up in either parking lot expecting Jackson Hole.

But Crotched Mountain is owned by Vail Resorts. Pats Peak is owned by the same family of good-old boys who built the original baselodge from logs sawed straight off the mountain in 1962. Vail Resorts has the resources to send a container full of sawdust to the moon just to see what happens when it’s opened. Most of Pats Peaks’ chairlifts came used from other ski areas. These two are not drawing from the same oil tap.

And yet, one of them delivered a good product during Covid, and the other did not. And the ones who did are not the ones that their respective pools of resources would suggest. And so the people who skied Pats Peak that year were like “Yeah that was pretty good considering everything else kind of sucks right now.” And the people who skied Crotched that season were like “Well that sucked even worse than everything else does right now, and that’s saying something.”

And that’s the mess that Donnelly inherited when she took the GM job at Crotched in 2021. And it took a while, but she fixed it. And that’s harder than it should be when your parent company can deploy sawdust rockets on a whim.

What I got wrong

* I said that Colorado has 35 active ski areas. The correct number is 34, or 33 if we exclude Hesperus, which did not operate last winter, and is not scheduled to reactivate anytime soon.

* I said that Bruce Schmidt was the “president and general manager” of Okemo. His title is “Vice President and General Manager.” Sorry about that, Bruce.

* I said that Okemo’s season pass was “closing in on $2,000” when Vail came along. According to New England Ski History, Okemo’s top season pass price hit $1,375 for the 2017-18 ski season, the last before Vail purchased the resort. This appears to be a big cut from the 2016-17 season, when the top price was $1,619. My best guess is that Okemo dropped their pass prices after Vail purchased Stowe, lowering that mountain’s pass price from $2,313 for the 2016-17 ski season to just $899 (an Epic Pass) the next.

* I said that 80 percent-plus of my podcasts featured interviews with men. I examined the inventory, and found that of the 210 podcasts I’ve published (192 Storm Skiing Podcasts, 12 Covid pods, 6 Live pods), only 33, or 15.7 percent, included a female guest. Only 23 of those (11 percent), featured a woman as the only guest. And three of those podcasts were with one person: former NSAA CEO Kelly Pawlak. So either my representation sucks, or the ski industry’s representation sucks, but probably it’s both.

Why you should ski Crotched

Upper New England doesn’t have a lot of night skiing, and the night skiing it does have is mostly underwhelming. Most of the large resorts – Killington, Sugarbush, Smuggs, Stowe, Sugarloaf, Waterville, Cannon, Stratton, Mount Snow, Okemo, Attitash, Wildcat, etc. – have no night skiing at all. A few of the big names – Bretton Woods, Sunday River, Cranmore – provide a nominal after-dark offering, a lift and a handful of trails. The bulk of the night skiing in New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine involves surface lifts at community-run bumps with the vertical drop of a Slip N’ Slide.

But a few exceptions tower into the frosty darkness: Pleasant Mountain, Maine; Pats Peak, New Hampshire; and Bolton Valley, Vermont all deliver big vertical drops, multiple chairlifts, and a spiderweb of trails for night skiers. Boyne-owned Pleasant, with 1,300 vertical feet served by a high-speed quad, is the most extensive of these, but the second-most expansive night-skiing operation in New England lives at Crotched.

Parked less than an hour from New Hampshire’s four largest cities – Manchester, Nashua, Concord, and Derry – Crotched is the rare northern New England ski area that can sustain an after-hours business (New Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont are ranked numbers 41, 42, and 49 among U.S. states by population, respectively, with a three-state total of just 3.5 million residents). With four chairlifts spinning, every trail lit, Park Brahs on patrol, first-timers lined up at the rental shop, Bomber Bro straightlining Pluto’s Plunge in his unzipped Celtics jacket, the parking lots jammed, and the scritch-scratch of edges on ice shuddering across the night, it’s an amazing scene, a lantern of New England Yeah Dawg zest floating in the winter night.

No, Crotched night skiing isn’t what it used to be, when Peak Resorts kept the joint bumping until 3 a.m. And the real jammer, Midnight Madness, hits just a half dozen days per winter. But it’s still a uniquely New England scene, a skiing spectacle that can double as a night-cap after a day shredding Cannon or Waterville or Mount Snow.

Podcast Notes

On my recent Sunapee pod

I tend to schedule these interviews several months in advance, and sometimes things change. One of the things that changed between when I scheduled this conversation and when we recorded it was Donnelly’s job. She moved from Crotched, which I had never spotlighted on the podcast, to Sunapee, which I just featured a few months ago. Which means, Sunapee Nation, that we don’t really talk much about Mount Sunapee on this podcast that has Mount Sunapee in the headline. But pretty much everything I talked about in June with former Sunapee GM Peter Disch (who’s now VP of Mountain Ops at Vail’s Heavenly), is still relevant:

On historic Crotched

Crotched was once a much larger resort forged from two onetime independent side-by-side ski areas. The whole history of it is a bit labyrinthian and involves bad decisions, low snow years, and unpaid taxes (read the full tale at New England Ski History), but the upshot was this interconnected animal, shown here at its 1988-ish peak:

The whole Crotched complex dropped dead around 1990, and would have likely stayed that way forever had Missouri-based Peak Resorts not gotten the insane idea to dig a lost New England ski area up from the graveyard. Somewhat improbably, they succeeded, and the contemporary Crotched (minus the summit quad, which came later), opened in 2003. The current ski area sits on what was formerly known as “Crotched West,” and before that “Bobcat,” and before that (or perhaps at the same time), “Onset.” Trails on the original Crotched Mountain, at Crotched East (left on the trailmap above), are still faintly visible from above (on the right below, between the “Crotched Mountain” and “St. John Enterprise” dots):

On Triple Peaks and Okemo

Triple Peaks was the umbrella company that owned Okemo, Vermont; Mount Sunapee, New Hampshire; and Crested Butte, Colorado. The owners, the Mueller family, sold the whole outfit to Vail Resorts in 2018. Longtime Okemo GM Bruce Schmidt laid out the whole history on the podcast earlier this year:

On Crotched’s lift fleet

Peak got creative building Crotched’s lift fleet. The West double, a Hall installed by Jesus himself in 400 B.C., had sat in the woods through Crotched’s entire 13-year closure and was somehow reactivated for the revival. The Rover triple and the Valley and Summit quads came from a short-lived 1,000-vertical-foot Virginia ski area called Cherokee.

What really nailed Crotched back to the floor, however, was the 2012 acquisition of a used high-speed quad from bankrupt Ascutney, Vermont.

Peak flagrantly dubbed this lift the “Crotched Rocket,” a name that Vail seems to have backed away from (the lift is simply “Rocket” on current trailmaps).

Fortunately, Ascutney lived on as a surface-lifts-only community bump even after its beheading. You can still skin and ski the top trails if you’re one of those people who likes to make skiing harder than it needs to be:

On Peak Resorts

Peak Resorts started in, of all places, Missouri. The company slowly acquired small-but-busy suburban ski areas, and was on its way to Baller status when Vail purchased the whole operation in 2019. Here’s a loose acquisition timeline:

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What

Indy Pass is a newcomer to the NYC media circuit, hosting their inaugural gathering at an airy venue hard by the Hudson River. Part of the agenda was this short panel that I moderated, featuring the leaders of four Indy Pass partner mountains.

Who

* Erik Mogensen, Director, Indy Pass

* Steve Wright, President & General Manager, Jay Peak, Vermont

* Rob Goodell, Senior Vice President & Chief Operating Officer, Loveland, Colorado

* David Severn, Owner, White Pass, Washington

* Geoff Hatheway, Owner & President, Magic Mountain, Vermont

Recorded on

October 23, 2024

About Indy Pass

Indy Pass has collected 230 partners. The pass gets you two days each at 222 of them and discounts at the other eight. The pass is no longer on sale for the 2024-25 ski season, but there are baseball-game hotdogs that cost more than this thing.

About the ski areas

JAY PEAK, VERMONT

Stats: 2,153 vertical feet | 385 skiable acres | 347 inches average annual snowfall

LOVELAND, COLORADO

Stats: 2,210 vertical feet | 1,800 skiable acres | 422 inches average annual snowfall

WHITE PASS, WASHINGTON

Stats: 2,050 vertical feet | 1,402 skiable acres | 400 inches average annual snowfall

MAGIC MOUNTAIN, VERMONT

Stats: 1,500 vertical feet | 205 skiable acres | 130 inches average annual snowfall

What we talked about

Jay isn’t remote for everyone; Magic’s black quad odyssey; PNW snow quality; why you’ve probably seen Loveland even if you’ve never skied it; Loveland Valley’s origin story; why Jay joined Indy Pass when it could have joined any pass; why White Pass’ new owners stayed on Indy Pass after purchasing it; and what finally convinced Loveland to join Indy.

Podcast Notes

On the original Indy Pass announcement

Indy Pass’ website popped live sometime in March 2019, with a list of under-appreciated mid-sized ski areas concentrated around the Pacific Northwest. The roster grew rapidly prior to the start of the season, but even this would have been a hell of an offering for $199:

On Loveland Valley

Loveland is home to a little-noticed terrain pod known as Loveland Valley. With a quad, a double, and a set of carpets, this segmented zone essentially serves as a separate, beginners-oriented ski area.

On The Storm’s Indy Pass/Jay Peak exclusive

Somehow, I scored an exclusive on the news that Jay Peak would join Indy Pass in 2020. I was also able to record a podcast with Wright in advance of the announcement. This was a huge moment for The Storm, turning hundreds of new subscribers onto the newsletter and forging a relationship with one of the most important mountains in New England.

On Hatheway being one of my first interviews

Hatheway was one of the first guests on The Storm Skiing Podcast, and one of the first to agree to join me on the show. That was an incredible gesture, as I had published zero episodes when I made the request. Here’s the conversation:

What I got wrong

* I said that Magic “failed a couple of times” before current ownership acquired it. The ski area only completely closed once, from 1991 to 1997. The ski area then fumbled through two decades of near-failures, including a derailed attempt to form a co-op, until Ski Magic LLC took the keys in 2016. Read the full saga at New England Ski History.

* I said that it took Magic “four or five” years to install the Black Quad. The full timeline is closer to six years. Stratton removed their Snow Bowl fixed-grip quad following the 2017-18 ski season (replacing it with a high-speed quad). I’m not sure when exactly Magic, just 13.6 road miles from Stratton, took delivery of the lift, but the goal was to get it spinning as the new Black lift by the 2019-20 ski season. After a series of construction delays, engineering problems, and global emergencies, the quad finally started spinning in February of this year.

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What

There’s a good reason that the Ikon Pass, despite considerable roster overlap and a more generous bucket of days, failed to kill Mountain Collective. It’s not because Mountain Collective has established itself as a sort of bargain Ikon Junior, or because it’s scored a few exclusive partners in Canada and the Western U.S. Rather, the Mountain Collective continues to exist because the member mountains like their little country club, and they’re not about to let Alterra force a mass exodus. Not that Alterra has tried, necessarily (I frankly have no idea), but the company did pull its remaining mountains (Mammoth, Palisades, Sugarbush), out of the coalition in 2022. Mountain Collective survived that, just as it weathered the losses of Stowe and Whistler and Telluride (all to the Epic Pass) before it. As of 2024, six years after the introduction of the Ikon Pass that was supposed to kill it, the Mountain Collective, improbably, floats its largest roster ever.

And dang, that roster. Monsters, all. Best case, you can go ski them. But the next best thing, for The Storm at least, is when these mountain leaders assemble for their annual meeting in New York City, which includes a night out with the media. Despite a bit of ambient noise, I set up in a corner of the bar and recorded a series of conversations with the leaders of some of the biggest, baddest mountains on the continent.

Who

* Stephen Kircher, President & CEO, Boyne Resorts

* Dave Fields, President & General Manager, Snowbird, Utah

* Brandon Ott, Marketing Director, Alta, Utah

* Steve Paccagnan, President & CEO, Panorama, British Columbia

* Geoff Buchheister, CEO, Aspen Skiing Company, Colorado

* Pete Sonntag, VP & General Manager, Sun Valley, Idaho

* Davy Ratchford, General Manager, Snowbasin, Utah

* Aaron MacDonald, Chief Marketing Officer, Sun Peaks, British Columbia

* Geordie Gillett, GM, Grand Targhee, Wyoming

* Bridget Legnavsky, President & CEO, Sugar Bowl, California

* Marc-André Meunier, Executive Marketing Director, Bromont, Quebec

* Pete Woods, President, Ski Big 3, Alberta

* Kendra Scurfield, VP of Brand & Communications, Sunshine, Alberta

* Norio Kambayashi, director and GM, Niseko Hanazono, Japan

* James Coleman, Managing Partner, Mountain Capital Partners

* Mary Kate Buckley, CEO, Jackson Hole, Wyoming

Recorded on

October 29, 2024

About Mountain Collective

Mountain Collective gives you two days each at some badass mountains. There is a ton of overlap with the Ikon Pass, which I note below, but Mountain Collective is cheaper has no blackout dates.

What we talked about

BOYNE RESORTS

The Portfolio

Big Sky

Sunday River

Sugarloaf

Topics

Yes a second eight-pack comes to Big Sky and it’s a monster; why Sunday River joined the Mountain Collective; Sugarloaf’s massive West Mountain expansion; and could more Boyne Resorts join Mountain Collective?

More Boyne Resorts

SNOWBIRD

Stats: 3,240 vertical feet | 2,500 skiable acres | 500 inches average annual snowfall

Topics

The new Wilbere lift; why fixed-grip; why 600 inches of snow is better than 900 inches; and how Snowbird and Alta access differ on the Ikon versus the Mountain Collective passes.

Wilbere’s new alignment

More Snowbird

ALTA

Stats: 2,538 vertical feet | 2,614 skiable acres | 540 inches average annual snowfall

Topics

Not 903 inches but still a hell of a lot; why Alta’s aiming for 612 inches this season; and plotting Mountain Collective trips in LCC.

PANORAMA

Stats: 4,265 vertical feet | 2,975 skiable acres | 204 inches average annual snowfall

Topics

Panorama opens earlier than most skiers think, but not for the reasons they think; opening wall-to-wall last winter; Tantum Bowl Cats; and the impact of Mountain Collective and Ikon on Panorama.

More Panorama

ASPEN SKIING COMPANY

Stats

Aspen Mountain

Aspen Highlands

Buttermilk

Snowmass

Topics

Last year’s Heroes expansion; ongoing improvements to the new terrain for 2024-25; why Aspen finally removed The Couch; who Aspen donated that lift to, and why; why the new Coney lift at Snowmass loads farther down the mountain; “we intend to replace a lift a year probably for the next 10 years”; where the next lift could be; and using your two Mountain Collective days to ski four Aspen resorts.   

On Maverick Mountain, Montana

Despite megapass high-tides swarming mountains throughout the West, there are still dozens of ski areas like Maverick Mountain, tucked into the backwoods, 2,020 vertical feet of nothing but you and a pair of sticks. Aspen’s old Gent’s Ridge quad will soon replace the top-to-bottom 1969 Riblet double chair that serves Maverick now:

On the Snowmass masterplan

Aspen’s plan is, according to Buchheister, install a lift per year for the next decade. Here are some of the improvements the company has in mind at Snowmass:

On the Mountain Collective Pass starting at Aspen

Christian Knapp, who is now with Pacific Group Resorts, played a big part in developing the Mountain Collective via Aspen-Snowmass in 2012. He recounted that story on The Storm last year:

More Aspen

SUN VALLEY

Stats

* Bald Mountain: 3,400 vertical feet | 2,054 skiable acres | 200 inches average annual snowfall

* Dollar Mountain: 628 vertical feet

Topics

Last season’s massive Challenger/Flying Squirrel lift updates; a Seattle Ridge lift update; World Cup Finals inbound; and Mountain Collective logistics between Bald and Dollar mountains.

More Sun Valley

SNOWBASIN

Stats: 3,015 vertical feet | 3,000 skiable acres | 300 inches average annual snowfall

Topics

The Olympics return to Utah and Snowbasin; how Snowbasin’s 2034 Olympic slate could differ from 2002; ski the downhill; how the DeMoisy six-pack changed the mountain; a lift upgrade for Becker; Porcupine on deck; and explaining the holdup on RFID.

More Snowbasin

SUN PEAKS

Stats: 2,894 vertical feet | 4,270 skiable acres | 237 inches average annual snowfall

Topics

The second-largest ski area in Canada; the new West Bowl quad; snow quality at the summit; and Ikon and Mountain Collective impact on the resort.

The old versus new West Bowl lifts

More Sun Peaks

GRAND TARGHEE

Stats: 2,270 vertical feet | 2,602 skiable acres | 500 inches average annual snowfall

Topics

Maintaining that Targhee vibe in spite of change; the meaning of Mountain Collective; and combining your MC trip with other badass powder dumps.

More Grand Targhee

SUGAR BOWL

Stats: 1,500 vertical feet | 1,650 skiable acres | 500 inches average annual snowfall

Topics

Big-time parks incoming; how those parks will differ from the ones at Boreal and Northstar; and reaction to Homewood closing.

More Sugar Bowl

BROMONT

Stats: 1,175 vertical feet | 450 skiable acres | 210 inches average annual snowfall

Topics

Why this low-rise eastern bump was good enough for the Mountain Collective; grooming three times per day; the richness of Eastern Townships skiing; and where to stay for a Bromont trip.

SKI BIG 3

Stats

* Banff Sunshine: 3,514 vertical feet | 3,358 skiable acres | 360 inches average annual snowfall

* Lake Louise: 3,250 vertical feet | 4,200 skiable acres | 179 inches average annual snowfall

Sunshine

Lake Louise

Topics

The new Super Angel Express sixer at Sunshine; the all-new Pipestone Express infill six-pack at Lake Louise; how Mountain Collective access is different from Ikon access at Lake Louise and Sunshine; why Norquay isn’t part of Mountain Collective; and the long season at all three ski areas.

SUNSHINE

Stats & map: see above

Topics

Sunshine’s novel access route; why the mountain replaced Angel; the calculus behind installing a six-person chair; and growing up at Sunshine.

NISEKO UNITED

Stats: 3,438 vertical feet | 2,889 skiable acres | 590 inches average annual snowfall

Topics

How the various Niseko ski areas combine for one experience; so.much.snow; the best way to reach Niseko; car or no car?; getting your lift ticket; and where to stay.

VALLE NEVADO

Stats: 2,658 vertical feet | 2,400 skiable acres | 240 inches average annual snowfall

Topics

An excellent winter in Chile; heli-skiing; buying the giant La Parva ski area, right next door; “our plan is to make it one of the biggest ski resorts in the world”; and why Mountain Capital Partners maintains its Ikon Pass and Mountain Collective partnerships even though the company has its own pass.

More Valle/La Parva 

JACKSON HOLE

Stats: 4,139 vertical feet | 2,500 skiable acres | 459 inches average annual snowfall

Topics

The Sublette lift upgrade; why the new lift has fewer chairs; comparisons to the recent Thunder lift upgrade; venturing beyond the tram; and managing the skier experience in the Ikon/Mountain Collective era.

More Jackson Hole

What I got wrong

* I said that Wilbere would be Snowbird’s sixth quad. Wilbere will be Snowbird’s seventh quad, and first fixed-grip quad.

* I said Snowbird got “900-some inches” during the 2022-23 ski season. The final tally was 838 inches, according to Snowbird’s website.

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 79/100 in 2024, and number 579 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019.

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Nov. 23. It dropped for free subscribers on Nov. 30. 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:

What is this?

Every autumn, ski associations and most of the large pass coalitions host media events in New York City. They do this because a) NYC is the media capital of the world; b) the city is a lot of fun; and, c) sometimes mountain folks like something different too, just like us city folks (meaning me), like to get to the mountains as much as possible. But I spend all winter traveling the country in search of ski areas of all sizes and varieties. This is the one time of year skiing comes to me. And it’s pretty cool.

One of the associations that consistently hosts an NYC event is Ski Utah. This year, they set up at the Arlo Soho, a chic Manhattan hotel. Longtime President Nathan Rafferty asked if I would be interested in setting up an interview station, talking to resort reps, and stringing them together into a podcast. It was a terrific idea, so here you go.

Who

* Nathan Rafferty, President of Ski Utah

* Sara Huey, Senior Manager of Communications at Park City Mountain Resort

* Sarah Sherman, Communications Manager at Snowbird

* Nick Como, VP of Marketing at Sundance

* Rosie O’Grady, President and Innkeeper of Alta Lodge

* Jessica Turner, PR Manager for Go Heber Valley

* Taylor Hartman, Director of Marketing and Communications at Visit Ogden

* Brooks Rowe, Brand Manager at Snowbasin

* Riley Elliott, Communications Specialist at Deer Valley

* Andria Huskinson, Communications and PR Manager at Solitude

* Anna Loughridge, PR Manager for Visit Utah

* Courtney Ryan, Communications Manager for Visit Park City

* Ryan Mack, VP of Communications for Visit Salt Lake

Recorded on

October 3, 2024

About Ski Utah

Most large ski states have a statewide trade group that represents its ski areas’ interests. One of the best of these is Ski Utah, which is armed with a large staff, a generous budget, and some pretty good freaking skiing to promote (Buckskin, Utah Olympic Park, and Wasatch Peaks Ranch are not members of Ski Utah):

What we talked about

SKI UTAH

Topics

Why NYC; the Olympics return to Utah; why the state is such a great place to host the games (besides, you know, the awesome skiing); where we could potentially see future ski area development in Utah; Pow Mow’s shift toward public-private hybrid; Deer Valley’s expansion and ongoing snowboard ban; and the proposed LCC Gondola – “Little Cottonwood Canyon is not a great place for rubber-wheeled vehicles.”

On Utah skier visits and population growth over time

On chairlifts planned in Utah over the next three years

Utah is on a chairlift-building binge, with the majority slated for Deer Valley’s massive expansion (11) and Powder Mountain (4 this year; 1 in 2025). But Snowbird (Wilbere quad), Park City (Sunrise Gondola), and Snowbasin (Becker high-speed quad) are also scheduled to install new machines this year or next. The private Wasatch Peaks Ranch will also add two lifts (a gondola and a high-speed quad) this year. And Sundance is likely to install what resort officials refer to as the “Flathead lift” some time within the next two years. The best place to track scheduled lift installations is Lift Blog’s new lifts databases for 2024, 2025, and 2026.

On expansion potential at Brian Head and Nordic Valley

Utah’s two largest expansion opportunities are at Brian Head and Nordic Valley, both operated by Mountain Capital Partners. Here’s Brian Head today:

The masterplan could blow out the borders - the existing ski area is in the lower-right-hand corner:

And here’s Nordic Valley:

And the masterplan, which could supersize the ski area to 3,000-ish acres. The small green blob represents part of the existing ski area, though this plan predates the six-pack installation in 2020:

PARK CITY MOUNTAIN RESORT

Stats: 3,226 vertical feet | 7,300 skiable acres | 355 inches average annual snowfall

Topics

Snowmaking upgrades; the forthcoming Sunrise Gondola on the Canyons side; why this gondola didn’t face the opposition that Park City’s last lift upgrades did; Olympic buzz in Park City; and which events PCMR could host in the 2034 Olympics.

On the Great Lift Shutdown of 2022

Long story short: Vail tried to upgrade two lifts in Park City a couple of years ago. Locals got mad. The lifts went to Whistler. Here’s the longer version:

More Park City Mountain Resort

SNOWBIRD

Stats: 3,240 vertical feet | 2,500 skiable acres | 500 inches average annual snowfall

Topics

The new Wilbere lift; why Snowbird shifted the chairlift line; the upside of abandoning the old liftline; riding on top of the new tram; and more LCC gondola talk.

On the new Wilbere lift alignment

Here’s where the new Wilbere lift sits (right) in comparison to the old lift (left):

On inter-lodge

If you happen to be at the top of Little Cottonwood Canyon when avalanche danger spikes, you may be subject to something called “inter-lodge.” Which means you stay in whatever building you’re in, with no option to leave. It’s scary and thrilling all at once.

Inter-lodge can last anywhere from under an hour to several days.

On the LCC gondola and phase-in plan

Another long story short: UDOT wants to build a gondola up Little Cottonwood Canyon. A lot of people would prefer to spend four hours driving seven miles to the ski areas. Here’s a summary of UDOT’s chosen configuration:

As multiple lawsuits seeking to shut the project down work through the courts, UDOT has outlined a phased traffic-mitigation approach:

More Snowbird

SUNDANCE 

Stats: 2,150 vertical feet | 450 skiable acres | 300 inches average annual snowfall

Topics

The importance of NYC to the wider skiing world; how the Wildwood terrain helped evolve Sundance; Epkon refugees headed south; parking improvements; options for the coming Flathead terrain expansion; and potential lift switcheroos. 

More Sundance

Sundance’s new owners have been rapidly modernizing this once-dusty ski area, replacing most of the lifts, expanding terrain, and adding parking. I talked through the grand arc of these changes with the mountain’s GM, Chad Linebaugh, a couple of years ago:

ALTA LODGE

Alta stats: 3,240 vertical feet | 2,500 skiable acres | 500 inches average annual snowfall

Topics

65 years of Levitt family ownership; Alta’s five lodges; inter-lodge; how Alta has kept its old-school spirit even as it’s modernized; and an upcoming women’s ski event.

On Alta’s lift evolution

It wasn’t so long ago that Alta was known for its pokey lift fleet. As recently as the late ‘90s, the mountain was a chutes-and-ladders powder playground:

Bit by bit, Alta consolidated and updated its antique lift fleet, beginning with the Sugarloaf high-speed quad in 2001. The two-stage Collins high-speed quad arrived three years later, replacing the legacy Collins double and Germania triple lines. The Supreme high-speed quad similarly displaced the old Supreme triple and Cecret double in 2017, and the Sunnyside sixer replaced the Albion double and Sunnyside high-speed triple in 2022. As of 2024, the only clunker left, aside from the short hotel lifts and the long transfer tow, is the Wildcat double.

GO HEBER VALLEY

Topics

Why Heber Valley makes sense as a place to crash on a ski trip; walkable sections of Heber; ease of access to Deer Valley; and elevation.

VISIT OGDEN

Considering “untamed and untouched” Ogden as ski town; “it’s like skiing in 2005”; Pow Mow, Snowbasin; accessing the mountains from Ogden; Pow Mow’s partial privatization; art on the mountain; and Nordic Valley as locals’ bump.  

On Powder Mountain size claims

Pow Mow has long claimed 8,000-ish acres of terrain, which would make it the largest ski area in the United States. I typically only count lift-served skiable acreage, however, bringing the mountain down to a more average-for-the-Wasatch 3,000-ish acres. A new lift in Wolf Canyon next year will add another 900 lift-served acres (shaded with stripes on the right-hand side below).

On Nordic Valley’s fire and the broken Apollo lift

Last December, Nordic Valley’s Apollo chairlift, a 1970 Hall double, fell over dead, isolating the mountain’s glorious expansion from the base area. The next month, a fire chewed up the baselodge, a historic haybarn left over from the property’s ranching days. Owner MCP renovated the chairlift over the summer, but Nordic will operate out of “temporary structures,” GM Pascal Begin told KSL.com in June, until they can build a new baselodge, which could be 2026 or ’27.

SNOWBASIN

Stats: 3,015 vertical feet | 3,000 skiable acres | 300 inches average annual snowfall

Topics

Breaking down the coming Becker lift upgrade; why Becker before Porcupine; last year’s DeMoisy six-pack installation; where is everyone?; where to ski at Snowbasin; the 2034 Olympics plan; when will on-mountain lodging arrive?; and RFID.

More Snowbasin

DEER VALLEY

Stats: 3,040 vertical feet | 2,342 skiable acres | 300 inches average annual snowfall

Topics

Massive expansion; avoiding Park City; and snowmaking in the Wasatch Back.

On Expanded Excellence

Deer Valley’s expansion plans are insane. Here’s a summary:

More Deer Valley

SOLITUDE

Stats: 2,030 vertical feet | 1,200 skiable acres | 500 inches average annual snowfall

Topics

Alterra; Big versus Little Cottonwood Canyons; and Alta.

More Solitude

VISIT UTAH

Topics

Watching the state’s population explode; the Olympics; comparing 2002 to 2034; RIP three percent beer; potential infrastructure upgrades to prepare for the Olympics; and SLC airport upgrades.

VISIT PARK CITY

Topics

Park City 101; Main Street; the National Ability Center; mining history everywhere; Deer Valley’s trail names; Silver to Slopes at Park City; Deer Valley’s East Village; public transit evolution; Park City Mountain Resort lift drama; paid parking; and why “you don’t need a car” in Park City.

On Silver to Slopes

The twice-daily guided ski tour of on-mountain mining relics that we discuss on the podcast is free. Details here.

On Park City and Deer Valley’s shared border

Park City Mountain Resort and Deer Valley share a border, but you are forbidden to cross it, on penalty of death.* Alta and Snowbird share a crossable border, as do Solitude and Brighton. All four have different operators. I’m not sure why PCMR and Deer Valley can’t figure this one out.

*This is not true.^

^Though actually it might be true.

VISIT SALT LAKE

Topics

The easiest ski access in the world; why stay in SLC during a ski trip; walkable downtown; free transit; accessing the ski areas without a car; Olympic buzz; and Olympic events outside of the ski areas.

What I got wrong

* I said that former mayor Michael Bloomberg tried to bring the Olympics to NYC “around 2005 or 2006.” The city’s bid was for the 2012 Summer Olympics (ultimately held in London). I also said that local opposition shut down the bid, but I confused that with the proposed stadium on what is now Manhattan’s Hudson Yards development.

* I said you had to drive through Park City to access Deer Valley, but the ski area has long maintained a small parking lot at the base of the Jordanelle Gondola off of US 40.

The robots aren’t ready

Everyone keeps telling me that the robots will eat our souls, but every time I try to use them, they botch something that no human would ever miss. In this case, I tried using my editing program’s AI to chop out the dead space and “ums,” and proceeded to lose bits of the conversation that in some cases confuse the narrative. So it sounds a little choppy in places. You can blame the robots. Or me for not re-doing the edit once I figured out what was happening.

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 78/100 in 2024, and number 578 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019.