The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication (and my full-time job). To receive new posts and to support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Who

Chris Cushing, Principal of Mountain Planning at SE Group

Recorded on

April 3, 2025

About SE Group

From the company’s website:

WE ARE

Mountain planners, landscape architects, environmental analysts, and community and recreation planners. From master planning to conceptual design and permitting, we are your trusted partner in creating exceptional experiences and places.

WE BELIEVE

That human and ecological wellbeing forms the foundation for thriving communities.

WE EXIST

To enrich people’s lives through the power of outdoor recreation.

If that doesn’t mean anything to you, then this will:

Why I interviewed him

Nature versus nurture: God throws together the recipe, we bake the casserole. A way to explain humans. Sure he’s six foot nine, but his mom dropped him into the intensive knitting program at Montessori school 232, so he can’t play basketball for s**t. Or identical twins, separated at birth. One grows up as Sir Rutherford Ignacious Beaumont XIV and invents time travel. The other grows up as Buford and is the number seven at Okey-Doke’s Quick Oil Change & Cannabis Emporium. The guts matter a lot, but so does the food.

This is true of ski areas as well. An earthquake here, a glacier there, maybe a volcanic eruption, and, presto: a non-flat part of the earth on which we may potentially ski. The rest is up to us.

It helps if nature was thoughtful enough to add slopes of varying but consistent pitch, a suitable rise from top to bottom, a consistent supply of snow, a flat area at the base, and some sort of natural conduit through which to move people and vehicles. But none of that is strictly necessary. Us humans (nurture), can punch green trails across solid-black fall lines (Jackson Hole), bulldoze a bigger hill (Caberfae), create snow where the clouds decline to (Wintergreen, 2022-23), plant the resort base at the summit (Blue Knob), or send skiers by boat (Eaglecrest).

Someone makes all that happen. In North America, that someone is often SE Group, or their competitor, Ecosign. SE Group helps ski areas evolve into even better ski areas. That means helping to plan terrain expansions, lift replacements, snowmaking upgrades, transit connections, parking enhancements, and whatever built environment is under the ski area’s control. SE Group is often the machine behind those Forest Service ski area master development plans that I so often spotlight. For example, Vail Mountain:

When I talk about Alta consolidating seven slow lifts into four fast lifts; or Little Switzerland carving their mini-kingdom into beginner, parkbrah, and racer domains; or Mount Bachelor boosting its power supply to run more efficiently, this is the sort of thing that SE plots out (I’m not certain if they were involved in any or all of those projects).

Analyzing this deliberate crafting of a natural bump into a human playground is the core of what The Storm is. I love, skiing, sure, but specifically lift-served skiing. I’m sure it’s great to commune with the raccoons or whatever it is you people do when you discuss “skinning” and “AT setups.” But nature left a few things out. Such as: ski patrol, evacuation sleds, avalanche control, toilet paper, water fountains, firepits, and a place to charge my phone. Oh and chairlifts. And directional signs with trail ratings. And a snack bar.

Skiing is torn between competing and contradictory narratives: the misanthropic, which hates crowds and most skiers not deemed sufficiently hardcore; the naturalistic, which mistakes ski resorts with the bucolic experience that is only possible in the backcountry; the preservationist, with its museum-ish aspirations to glasswall the obsolete; the hyperactive, insisting on all fast lifts and groomed runs; the fatalists, who assume inevitable death-of-concept in a warming world.

None of these quite gets it. Ski areas are centers of joy and memory and bonhomie and possibility. But they are also (mostly), businesses. They are also parks, designed to appeal to as many skiers as possible. They are centers of organized risk, softened to minimize catastrophic outcomes. They must enlist machine aid to complement natural snowfall and move skiers up those meddlesome but necessary hills. Ski areas are nature, softened and smoothed and labelled by their civilized stewards, until the land is not exactly a representation of either man or God, but a strange and wonderful hybrid of both.

What we talked about

Old-school Cottonwoods vibe; “the Ikon Pass has just changed the industry so dramatically”; how to become a mountain planner for a living; what the mountain-planning vocation looked like in the mid-1980s; the detachable lift arrives; how to consolidate lifts without sacrificing skier experience; when is a lift not OK?; a surface lift resurgence?; how sanctioned glades changed ski areas; the evolution of terrain parks away from mega-features; the importance of terrain parks to small ski areas; reworking trails to reduce skier collisions; the curse of the traverse; making Jackson more approachable; on terrain balance; how megapasses are redistributing skier visits; how to expand a ski area without making traffic worse; ski areas that could evolve into major destinations; and ski area as public park or piece of art.

What I got wrong

* I blanked on the name of the famous double chair at A-Basin. It is Pallavicini.

* I called Crystal Mountain’s two-seater served terrain “North Country or whatever” – it is actually called “Northway.”

* I said that Deer Valley would become the fourth- or fifth-largest ski resort in the nation once its expansion was finished. It will become the sixth-largest, at 4,926 acres, when the next expansion phase opens for winter 2025-26, and will become the fourth-largest, at 5,726 acres, at full build out.

* I estimated Kendall Mountain’s current lift-served ski footprint at 200 vertical feet; it is 240 feet.

Why now was a good time for this interview

We have a tendency, particularly in outdoor circles, to lionize the natural and shame the human. Development policy in the United States leans heavily toward “don’t,” even in areas already designated for intensive recreation. We mustn’t, plea activists: expand the Palisades Tahoe base village; build a gondola up Little Cottonwood Canyon; expand ski terrain contiguous with already-existing ski terrain at Grand Targhee.

I understand these impulses, but I believe they are misguided. Intensive but thoughtful, human-scaled development directly within and adjacent to already-disturbed lands is the best way to limit the larger-scale, long-term manmade footprint that chews up vast natural tracts. That is: build 1,000 beds in what is now a bleak parking lot at Palisades Tahoe, and you limit the need for homes to be carved out of surrounding forests, and for hundreds of cars to daytrip into the ski area. Done right, you even create a walkable community of the sort that America conspicuously lacks.

To push back against, and gradually change, the Culture of No fueling America’s mountain town livability crises, we need exhibits of these sorts of projects actually working. More Whistlers (built from scratch in the 1980s to balance tourism and community) and fewer Aspens (grandfathered into ski town status with a classic street and building grid, but compromised by profiteers before we knew any better). This is the sort of work SE is doing: how do we build a better interface between civilization and nature, so that the former complements, rather than spoils, the latter?

All of which is a little tangential to this particular podcast conversation, which focuses mostly on the ski areas themselves. But America’s ski centers, established largely in the middle of the last century, are aging with the towns around them. Just about everything, from lifts to lodges to roads to pipes, has reached replacement age. Replacement is a burden, but also an opportunity to create a better version of something. Our ski areas will not only have faster lifts and newer snowguns – they will have fewer lifts and fewer guns that carry more people and make more snow, just as our built footprint, thoughtfully designed, can provide more homes for more people on less space and deliver more skiers with fewer vehicles.

In a way, this podcast is almost a canonical Storm conversation. It should, perhaps, have been episode one, as every conversation since has dealt with some version of this question: how do humans sculpt a little piece of nature into a snowy park that we visit for fun? That is not an easy or obvious question to answer, which is why SE Group exists. Much as I admire our rough-and-tumble Dave McCoy-type founders, that improvisational style is trickier to execute in our highly regulated, activist present.

And so we rely on artist-architects of the SE sort, who inject the natural with the human without draining what is essential from either. Done well, this crafted experience feels wild. Done poorly – as so much of our legacy built environment has been – and you generate resistance to future development, even if that future development is better. But no one falls in love with a blueprint. Experiencing a ski area as whatever it is you think a ski area should be is something you have to feel. And though there is a sort of magic animating places like Alta and Taos and Mammoth and Mad River Glen and Mount Bohemia, some ineffable thing that bleeds from the earth, these ski areas are also outcomes of a human-driven process, a determination to craft the best version of skiing that could exist for mass human consumption on that shred of the planet.

Podcast Notes

On Mittersill

Mittersill, now part of Cannon Mountain, was once a separate ski area. It petered out in the mid-‘80s, then became a sort of Cannon backcountry zone circa 2009. The Mittersill double arrived in 2010, followed by a T-bar in 2016.

On chairlift consolidation

I mention several ski areas that replaced a bunch of lifts with fewer lifts:

The Highlands

In 2023, Boyne-owned The Highlands wiped out three ancient Riblet triples and replaced them with this glorious bubble six-pack:

Here’s a before-and-after:

Vernon Valley-Great Gorge/Mountain Creek

I’ve called Intrawest’s transformation of Vernon Valley-Great Gorge into Mountain Creek “perhaps the largest single-season overhaul of a ski area in the history of lift-served skiing.” Maybe someone can prove me wrong, but just look at this place circa 1989:

It looked substantively the same in 1998, when, in a single summer, Intrawest tore out 18 lifts – 15 double chairs, two platters, and a T-bar, plus God knows how many ropetows – and replaced them with two high-speed quads, two fixed-grip quads, and a bucket-style Cabriolet lift that every normal ski area uses as a parking lot transit machine:

I discussed this incredible transformation with current Hermitage Club GM Bill Benneyan, who worked at Mountain Creek in 1998, back in 2020:

I misspoke on the podcast, saying that Intrawest had pulled out “something like a dozen lifts” and replaced them with “three or four” in 1998.

Kimberley

Back in the time before social media, Kimberley, British Columbia ran four frontside chairlifts: a high-speed quad, a triple, a double, and a T-bar:

Beginning in 2001, the ski area slowly removed everything except the quad. Which was fine until an arsonist set fire to Kimberley’s North Star Express in 2021, meaning skiers had no lift-served option to the backside terrain:

I discussed this whole strange sequence of events with Andy Cohen, longtime GM of sister resort Fernie, on the podcast last year:

On Revelstoke’s original masterplan

It is astonishing that Revelstoke serves 3,121 acres with just five lifts: a gondola, two high-speed quads, a fixed quad, and a carpet. Most Midwest ski areas spin three times more lifts for three percent of the terrain.

On Priest Creek and Sundown at Steamboat

Steamboat, like many ski areas, once ran two parallel fixed-grip lifts on substantively the same line, with the Priest Creek double and the Sundown triple. The Sundown Express quad arrived in 1992, but Steamboat left Priest Creek standing for occasional overflow until 2021. Here’s Steamboat circa 1990:

Priest Creek is gone, but that entire 1990 lift footprint is nearly unrecognizable. Huge as Steamboat is, every arriving skier squeezes in through a single portal. One of Alterra’s first priorities was to completely re-imagine the base area: sliding the existing gondola looker’s right; installing an additional 10-person, two-stage gondola right beside it; and moving the carpets and learning center to mid-mountain:

On upgrades at A-Basin

We discuss several upgrades at A-Basin, including Lenawee, Beavers, and Pallavicini. Here’s the trailmap for context:

On moguls on Kachina Peak at Taos

Yeah I’d say this lift draws some traffic:

On the T-bar at Waterville Valley

Waterville Valley opened in 1966. Fifty-two years later, mountain officials finally acknowledged that chairlifts do not work on the mountain’s top 400 vertical feet. All it took was a forced 1,585-foot shortening of the resort’s base-to-summit high-speed quad just eight years after its 1988 installation and the legacy double chair’s continued challenges in wind to say, “yeah maybe we’ll just spend 90 percent less to install a lift that’s actually appropriate for this terrain.” That was the High Country T-bar, which arrived in 2018. It is insane to look at ‘90s maps of Waterville pre- and post-chop job:

On Hyland Hills, Minnesota

What an insanely amazing place this is:

On Sunrise Park

From 1983 to 2017, Sunrise Park, Arizona was home to the most amazing triple chair, a 7,982-foot-long Yan with 352 carriers. Cyclone, as it was known, fell apart at some point and the resort neglected to fix or replace it. A couple of years ago, they re-opened the terrain to lift-served skiing with a low-cost alternative: stringing a ropetow from a green run off the Geronimo lift to where Cyclone used to land.

On Woodward Park City and Boreal

Powdr has really differentiated itself with its Woodward terrain parks, which exist at amazing scale at Copper and Bachelor. The company has essentially turned two of its smaller ski areas – Boreal and Woodward Park City – entirely over to terrain parks.

On Killington’s tunnels

You have to zoom in, but you can see them on the looker’s right side of the trailmap: Bunny Buster at Great Northern, Great Bear at Great Northern, and Chute at Great Northern.

On Jackson Hole traverses

Jackson is steep. Engineers hacked it so kids like mine could ride there:

On expansions at Beaver Creek, Keystone, Aspen

Recent Colorado expansions have tended to create vast zones tailored to certain levels of skiers:

Beaver Creek’s McCoy Park is an incredible top-of-the-mountain green zone:

Keystone’s Bergman Bowl planted a high-speed six-pack to serve 550 acres of high-altitude intermediate terrain:

And Aspen – already one of the most challenging mountains in the country – added Hero’s – a fierce black-diamond zone off the summit:

On Wilbere at Snowbird

Wilbere is an example of a chairlift that kept the same name, even as Snowbird upgraded it from a double to a quad and significantly moved the load station and line:

On ski terrain growth in America

Yes, a bunch of ski areas have disappeared since the 1980s, but the raw amount of ski terrain has been increasing steadily over the decades:

On White Pine, Wyoming

Cushing referred to White Pine as a “dinky little ski area” with lots of potential. Here’s a look at the thousand-footer, which billionaire Joe Ricketts purchased last year:

On Deer Valley’s expansion

Yeah, Deer Valley is blowing up:

On Schweitzer’s growth

Schweitzer’s transformation has been dramatic: in 1988, the Idaho panhandle resort occupied a large footprint that was served mostly by double chairs:

Today: a modern ski area, with four detach quads, a sixer, and two newer triples – only one old chairlift remains:

On BC transformations

A number of British Columbia ski areas have transformed from nubbins to majors over the past 30 years:

Sun Peaks, then known as Tod Mountain, in 1993

Sun Peaks today:

Fernie in 1996, pre-upward expansion:

Fernie today:

Revelstoke, then known as Mount Mackenzie, in 1996:

Modern Revy:

Kicking Horse, then known as “Whitetooth” in 1994:

Kicking Horse today:

On Tamarack’s expansion potential

Tamarack sits mostly on Idaho state land, and would like to expand onto adjacent U.S. Forest Service land. Resort President Scott Turlington discussed these plans in depth with me on the pod a few years back:

The mountain’s plans have changed since, with a smaller lift footprint:

On Central Park as a manmade place

New York City’s fabulous Central Park is another chunk of earth that may strike a visitor as natural, but is in fact a manmade work of art crafted from the wilderness. Per the Central Park Conservancy, which, via a public-private partnership with the city, provides the majority of funds, labor, and logistical support to maintain the sprawling complex:

A popular misconception about Central Park is that its 843 acres are the last remaining natural land in Manhattan. While it is a green sanctuary inside a dense, hectic metropolis, this urban park is entirely human-made. It may look like it's naturally occurring, but the flora, landforms, water, and other features of Central Park have not always existed.

Every acre of the Park was meticulously designed and built as part of a larger composition—one that its designers conceived as a "single work of art." Together, they created the Park through the practice that would come to be known as "landscape architecture."

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

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication (and my full-time job). To receive new posts and to support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Who

Joe Hession, CEO of Snow Partners, which owns Mountain Creek, Big Snow American Dream, SnowCloud, and Terrain Based Learning

Recorded on

May 2, 2025

About Snow Partners

Snow Partners owns and operates Mountain Creek, New Jersey and Big Snow American Dream, the nation’s only indoor ski center. The company also developed SnowCloud resort management software and has rolled out its Terrain Based Learning system at more than 80 ski areas worldwide. They do some other things that I don’t really understand (there’s a reason that I write about skiing and not particle physics), that you can read about on their website.

About Mountain Creek

Located in: Vernon Township, New Jersey

Closest neighboring public ski areas: Mount Peter (:24); Big Snow American Dream (:50); Campgaw (:51)

Pass affiliations: Snow Triple Play, up to two anytime days

Base elevation: 440 feet

Summit elevation: 1,480 feet

Vertical drop: 1,040 feet

Skiable Acres: 167

Average annual snowfall: 65 inches

Trail count: 46

Lift count: 9 (1 Cabriolet, 2 high-speed quads, 2 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 1 double, 2 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Mountain Creek’s lift fleet)

About Big Snow American Dream

Located in: East Rutherford, New Jersey

Closest neighboring public ski areas: Campgaw (:35); Mountain Creek (:50); Mount Peter (:50)

Pass affiliations: Snow Triple Play, up to two anytime days

Vertical drop: 160 feet

Skiable Acres: 4

Trail count: 4 (2 green, 1 blue, 1 black)

Lift count: 4 (1 quad, 1 poma, 2 carpets - view Lift Blog’s of inventory of Big Snow American Dream’s lift fleet)

Why I interviewed him

I read this earlier today:

The internet is full of smart people writing beautiful prose about how bad everything is, how it all sucks, how it’s embarrassing to like anything, how anything that appears good is, in fact, secretly bad. I find this confusing and tragic, like watching Olympic high-jumpers catapult themselves into a pit of tarantulas.

That blurb was one of 28 “slightly rude notes on writing” offered in Adam Mastroianni’s Experimental History newsletter. And I thought, “Man this dude must follow #SkiTwitter.” Or Instabook. Of Flexpost. Or whatever. Because online ski content, both short- and long-form, is, while occasionally joyous and evocative, disproportionately geared toward the skiing-is-fucked-and-this-is-why worldview. The passes suck. The traffic sucks. The skiers suck. The prices suck. The parking sucks. The Duopoly sucks. Everyone’s a Jerry, chewing up my pow line with their GoPro selfie sticks hoisted high and their Ikon Passes dangling from their zippers. Skiing is corporate and soulless and tourist obsessed and doomed anyway because of climate change. Don’t tell me you’re having a good time doing this very fun thing. People like you are the reason skiing’s soul now shops at Wal-Mart. Go back to Texas and drink a big jug of oil, you Jerry!

It's all so… f*****g dumb. U.S. skiing just wrapped its second-best season of attendance. The big passes, while imperfect, are mostly a force for good, supercharging on-hill infrastructure investment, spreading skiers across geographies, stabilizing a once-storm-dependent industry, and lowering the per-day price of skiing for the most avid among us to 1940s levels. Snowmaking has proven an effective bulwark against shifting weather patterns. Lift-served skiing is not a dying pastime, financially or spiritually or ecologically. Yes, modern skiing has problems: expensive food (pack a lunch); mountain-town housing shortages (stop NIMBY-ing everything); traffic (yay car culture); peak-day crowds (don’t go then); exploding insurance, labor, utilities, and infrastructure costs (I have no answers). But in most respects, this is a healthy, thriving, constantly evolving industry, and a more competitive one than the Duopoly Bros would admit.

Snow Partners proves this. Because what the hell is Snow Partners? It’s some company sewn together by a dude who used to park cars at Mountain Creek. Ten years ago this wasn’t a thing, and now it’s this wacky little conglomerate that owns a bespoke resort tech platform and North America’s only snowdome and the impossible, ridiculous Mountain Creek. And they’re going to build a bunch more snowdomes that stamp new skiers out by the millions and maybe – I don’t know but maybe – become the most important company in the history of lift-served skiing in the process.

Could such an outfit possibly have materialized were the industry so corrupted as the Brobot Pundit Bros declare it? Vail is big. Alterra is big. But the two companies combined control just 53 of America’s 501 active ski areas. Big ski areas, yes. Big shadows. But neither created: Indy Pass, Power Pass, Woodward Parks, Terrain Based Learning, Mountain Collective, RFID, free skiing for kids, California Mountain Resort Company, or $99 season passes. Neither saved Holiday Mountain or Hatley Pointe or Norway Mountain or Timberline West Virigina from the scrapheap, or transformed a failing Black Mountain into a co-op. Neither has proven they can successfully run a ski area in Indiana (sorry Vail #SickBurn #SellPaoliPeaks #Please).

Skiing, at this moment, is a glorious mix of ideas and energy. I realize it makes me uncool to think so, but I signed off on those aspirations the moment I drove the minivan off the Chrysler lot (topped it off with a roofbox, too, Pimp). Anyhow, the entire point of this newsletter is to track down the people propelling change in a sport that most likely predates the written word and ask them why they’re doing these novel things to make an already cool and awesome thing even more cool and awesome. And no one, right now, is doing more cool and awesome things in skiing than Snow Partners.*

*That’s not exactly true. Mountain Capital Partners, Alterra, Ikon Pass, Deer Valley, Entabeni Systems, Jon Schaefer, the Perfect Clan, Boyne Resorts, Big Sky, Mt. Bohemia, Powdr, Vail Resorts, Midwest Family Ski Resorts, and a whole bunch more entities/individuals/coalitions are also contributing massively to skiing’s rapid-fire rewiring in the maw of the robot takeover digital industrial revolution. But, hey, when you’re in the midst of transforming an entire snow-based industry from a headquarters in freaking New Jersey, you get a hyperbolic bump in the file card description.

What we talked about

The Snow Triple Play; potential partners; “there’s this massive piece of the market that’s like ‘I don’t even understand what you’re talking about’” with big day ticket prices and low-priced season passes; why Mountain Creek sells its Triple Play all season long and why the Snow Triple Play won’t work that way (at least at first); M.A.X. Pass and why Mountain Creek declined to join successor passes; an argument for Vail, Alterra and other large ski companies to participate on the Snow Triple Play; comparing skiing to hotels, airlines, and Disney World; “the next five years are going to be the most interesting and disruptive time in the ski industry because of technology”; “we don’t compete with anybody”; Liftopia’s potential, errors, failure, and legacy; skiing on Groupon; considering Breckenridge as an independent ski area; what a “premium” ski area on the Snow Triple Play would be; why megapasses are “selling people a product that will never be used the way it’s sold to them”; why people in NYC feel like going to Mountain Creek, an hour over the George Washington Bridge, is “going to Alaska”; why Snow Triple Play will “never” add a fourth day; sticker shock for Big Snow newbs who emerge from the Dome wanting more; SnowCloud and the tech and the guest journey from parking lot to lifts; why Mountain Creek stopped mailing season passes; Bluetooth Low Energy “is certainly the future of passes”; “100 percent we’re getting more Big Snows” – but let’s justify the $175 million investment first; Big Snow has a “terrible” design; “I don’t see why every city shouldn’t have a Big Snow” and which markets Snow Partners is talking to; why Mountain Creek didn’t get the mega-lift Hession teased on this pod three years ago and when we could see one; “I really believe that the Vernon base of Mountain Creek needs an updated chair”; the impact of automated snowmaking at Mountain Creek; and a huge residential project incoming at Mountain Creek.

What I got wrong

* I said that Hession wasn’t involved in Mountain Creek in the M.A.X. Pass era, but he was an Intrawest employee at the time, and was Mountain Creek’s GM until 2012.

* I hedged on whether Boyne’s Explorer multi-day pass started at two or three days. Skiers can purchase the pass in three- to six-day increments.

Why now was a good time for this interview

Okay, so I’ll admit that when Snow Partners summarized the Snow Triple Play for me, I wasn’t like “Holy crap, three days (total) at up to three different ski areas on a single ski pass? Do you think they have room for another head on Mount Rushmore?” This multi-day pass is a straightforward product that builds off a smart idea (the Mountain Creek Triple Play), that has been a smash hit at the Jersey Snow Jungle since at least 2008. But Snow Triple Play doesn’t rank alongside Epic, Ikon, Indy, or Mountain Collective as a seasonlong basher. This is another frequency product in a market already flush with them.

So why did I dedicate an entire podcast and two articles (so far) to dissecting this product, which Hession makes pretty clear has no ambitions to grow into some Indy/Ikon/Epic competitor? Because it is the first product to tie Big Snow to the wider ski world. And Big Snow only works if it is step one and there is an obvious step two. Right now, that step two is hard, even in a region ripe with ski areas. The logistics are confounding, the one-off cost hard to justify. Lift tickets, gear rentals, getting your ass to the bump and back, food, maybe a lesson. The Snow Triple Play doesn’t solve all of these problems, but it does narrow an impossible choice down to a manageable one by presenting skiers with a go-here-next menu. If Snow Partners can build a compelling (or at least logical) Northeast network and then scale it across the country as the company opens more Big Snows in more cities, then this simple pass could evolve into an effective toolkit for building new skiers.

OK, so why not just join Indy or Mountain Collective, or forge some sort of newb-to-novice agreement with Epic or Ikon? That would give Snow Partners the stepladder, without the administrative hassle of owning a ski pass. But that brings us to another roadblock in Ski Revolution 2025: no one wants to share partners. So Hession is trying to flip the narrative. Rather than locking Big Snow into one confederacy or the other, he wants the warring armies to lash their fleets along Snow Partners Pier. Big Snow is just the bullet factory, or the gas station, or the cornfield – the thing that all the armies need but can’t supply themselves. You want new skiers? We got ‘em. They’re ready. They just need a map to your doorstep. And we’re happy to draw you one.

Podcast Notes

On the Snow Triple Play

The basics: three total days, max of two used at any one partner ski area, no blackouts at Big Snow or Mountain Creek, possible blackouts at partner resorts, which are TBD.

The pass, which won’t be on sale until Labor Day, is fully summarized here:

And I speculate on potential partners here:

On the M.A.X. Pass

For its short, barely noted existence, the M.A.X. Pass was kind of an amazing hack, granting skiers five days each at an impressive blend of regional and destination ski areas:

Much of this roster migrated over to Ikon, but in taking their pass’ name too literally, the Alterra folks left off some really compelling regional ski areas that could have established a hub-and-spoke network out of the gate. Lutsen and Granite Peak owner Charles Skinner told me on the podcast a few years back that Ikon never offered his ski areas membership (they joined Indy in 2020), cutting out two of the Midwest’s best mountains. The omissions of Mountain Creek, Wachusett, and the New York trio of Belleayre, Whiteface, and Gore ceded huge swaths of the dense and monied Northeast to competitors who saw value in smaller, high-end operations that are day-trip magnets for city folks who also want that week at Deer Valley (no other pass signed any of these mountains, but Vail and Indy both assembled better networks of day-drivers and destinations).

On my 2022 interview with Hession

On Liftopia

Liftopia’s website is still live, but I’m not sure how many ski areas participate in this Expedia-for-lift-tickets. Six years ago, I thought Liftopia was the next bargain evolution of lift-served skiing. I even hosted founder Evan Reece on one of my first 10 podcasts. The whole thing fell apart when Covid hit. An overview here:

On various other day-pass products

I covered this in my initial article, but here’s how the Snow Triple Play stacks up against other three-day multi-resort products:

On Mountain Creek not mailing passes

I don’t know anything about tech, but I know, from a skier’s point of view, when something works well and when it doesn’t. Snow Cloud’s tech is incredible in at least one customer-facing respect: when you show up at a ski area, a rep standing in a conspicuous place is waiting with an iPhone, with which they scan a QR code on your phone, and presto-magico: they hand you your ski pass. No lines or waiting. One sentimental casualty of this on-site efficiency was the mailed ski pass, an autumn token of coming winter to be plucked gingerly from the mailbox. And this is fine and makes sense, in the same way that tearing down chairlifts constructed of brontosaurus bones and mastodon hides makes sense, but I must admit that I miss these annual mailings in the same way that I miss paper event tickets and ski magazines. My favorite ski mailing ever, in fact, was not Ikon’s glossy fold-out complete with a 1,000-piece 3D jigsaw puzzle of the Wild Blue Gondola and name-a-snowflake-after-your-dog kit, but this simple pamphlet dropped into the envelope with my 2018-19 Mountain Creek season pass:

Just f*****g beautiful, Man. That hung on my office wall for years.

On the Cabriolet

This is just such a wackadoodle ski lift:

Onetime Mountain Creek owner Intrawest built similar lifts at Winter Park and Tremblant, but as transit lifts from the parking lot. This one at Mountain Creek is the only one that I’m aware of that’s used as an open-air gondola.

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and to support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Who

Trent Poole, Vice President and General Manager of Hunter Mountain, New York

Recorded on

March 19, 2025

About Hunter Mountain

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Vail Resorts

Located in: Hunter, New York

Year founded: 1959

Pass affiliations:

* Epic Pass, Epic Local Pass – unlimited access

* Epic Northeast Value Pass – unlimited access with holiday blackouts

* Epic Northeast Midweek Pass – unlimited access with holiday and midweek blackouts

* Epic Day Pass – All Resorts, 32 Resorts tiers

Closest neighboring ski areas: Windham (:16), Belleayre (:35), Plattekill (:49)

Base elevation: 1,600 feet

Summit elevation: 3,200 feet

Vertical drop: 1,600 feet

Skiable acres: 320

Average annual snowfall: 120 inches

Trail count: 67 (25% beginner, 30% intermediate, 45% advanced)

Lift count: 13 (3 six-packs, 1 high-speed quad, 2 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 2 doubles, 1 platter, 3 carpets)

Why I interviewed him

Ski areas are like political issues. We all feel as though we need to have an opinion on them. This tends to be less a considered position than an adjective. Tariffs are _______. Killington is _______. It’s a bullet to shoot when needed. Most of us aren’t very good shots.

Hunter tends to draw a particularly colorful basket of adjectives: crowded, crazy, frantic, dangerous, icy, frozen, confusing, wild. Hunter, to the weekend visitor, appears to be teetering at all times on the brink of collapse. So many skiers on the lifts, so many skiers in the liftlines, so many skiers on the trails, so many skiers in the parking lots, so many skiers in the lodge pounding shots and pints. Whether Hunter is a ski area with a bar attached or a bar with a ski area attached is debatable. The lodge stretches on and on and up and down in disorienting and disconnected wings, a Winchester Mansion of the mountains, stapled together over eons to foil the alien hordes (New Yorkers). The trails run in a splintered, counterintuitive maze, an impossible puzzle for the uninitiated. Lifts fly all over, 13 total, of all makes and sizes and vintage, but often it feels as though there is only one lift and that lift is the Kaatskill Flyer, an overwhelmed top-to-bottom six-pack that replaced an overwhelmed top-to-bottom high-speed quad on a line that feels as though it would be overwhelmed with a high-speed 85-pack. It is, in other words, exactly the kind of ski area you would expect to find two hours north of a 20-million-person megacity world famous for its blunt, abrasive, and bare-knuckled residents.

That description of Hunter is accurate enough, but incomplete. Yes, skiing there can feel like riding a swinging wrecking ball through a tenement building. And I would probably suggest that as a family activity before I would recommend Hunter on, say, MLK Saturday. But Hunter is also a glorious hunk of ski history, a last-man-standing of the once-skiing-flush Catskills, a nature-bending prototype of a ski mountain built in a place that lacks both consistent natural snow and fall lines to ski on. It may be a corporate cog now, but the Hunter hammered into the mountains over nearly six decades was the dream and domain of the Slutzky family, many of whom still work for the ski area. And Hunter, on a midweek, when all those fast lifts are 10 times more capacity than you need, can be a dream. Fast up, fast down. And once you learn the trail network, the place unfolds like a picnic blanket: easy, comfortable, versatile, filled with delicious options (if occasionally covered with ants).

There’s no one good way to describe Hunter Mountain. It’s different every day. All ski areas are different every day, but Hunter is, arguably, more more different along the spectrum of its extremes than just about any other ski area anywhere. You won’t get it on your first visit. You will show up on the wrong day, at the wrong time, in the wrong parking lot, and the whole thing will feel like playing lasertag with hyenas. Alien hyenas. Who will for some reason all be wearing Jets jerseys. But if you push through for that second visit, you’ll start to get it. Maybe. I promise. And you’ll understand why one-adjective Hunter Mountain descriptions are about as useful as the average citizen’s take on NATO.

What we talked about

Sixty-five years of Hunter; a nice cold winter at last; big snowmaking upgrades; snowmaking on Annapurna and Westway; the Otis and Broadway lift upgrades; Broadway ripple effects on the F and Kaatskill Flyer lifts; supervising the installation of seven new lifts at three Vail Resorts over a two-year period; better liftline management; moving away from lettered lift names; what Otis means for H lift; whether the Hunter East mountaintop Poma could ever spin again; how much of Otis is re-used from the old Broadway lift; ski Ohio; landing at Vail Resorts pre-Epic Pass and watching the pass materialize and grow; taking over for a GM who had worked at Hunter for 44 years; understanding and appreciating Hunter madness; Hunter locals mixed with Vail Resorts; Hunter North and the potential for an additional base area; disappearing trailmap glades; expansion potential; a better ski connection to Hunter East; and Epic Local as Hunter’s season pass.

Questions I wish I’d asked

I’d wanted to ask Poole about the legacy of the Slutzky family, given their founding role at Hunter. We just didn’t have time. New York Ski Blog has a nice historical overview.

I actually did ask Poole about D lift, the onetime triple-now-double parallel to Kaatskill Flyer, but we cut that segment in edit. A summary: the lift didn’t run at all this past season, and Poole told me that, “we’re keeping our options open,” when I asked him if D lift was a good candidate to be removed at some near-future point.

Why now was a good time for this interview

The better question is probably why I waited five-and-a-half years to feature the leader of the most prominent ski area in New York City’s orbit on the podcast. Hunter was, after all, the first mountain I hit after moving to the city in 2002. But who does and does not appear on the podcast is grounded in timing more than anything. Vail announced its acquisition of Hunter parent company Peak Resorts just a couple of months before I launched The Storm, in 2019. No one, including me, really likes doing podcast interviews during transitions, which can be filled with optimism and energy, but also uncertainty and instability. The Covid asteroid then transformed what should have been a one-year transition period into more like a three-year transition period, which was followed by a leadership change at Hunter.

But we’re finally here. And, as it turns out, this was a pretty good time to arrive. Part of the perpetual Hunter mess tied back to the problem I alluded to above: the six-pack-Kaatskill-Flyer-as-alpha-lift muted the impact of the lesser contraptions around it. By dropping a second superlift right next door, Vail appears to have finally solved the problem of the Flyer’s ever-exploding liftline.

That’s one part of the story, and the most obvious. But the snowmaking upgrades on key trails signal Hunter’s intent to reclaim its trophy as Snow God of the New York Thruway. And the shuffling of lifts on Hunter East reconfigured the ski area’s novice terrain into a more logical progression (true green-circle skiers, however, will be better off at nearby Belleayre, where the Lightning Quad serves an incredible pod of long and winding beginner runs).

These 2024 improvements build on considerable upgrades from the Peak and Slutzky eras, including the 2018 Hunter North expansion and the massive learning center at Hunter East. If Hunter is to remain a cheap and accessible Epic Pass fishing net to funnel New Yorkers north to Stowe and west to Park City, even as neighboring Windham tilts ever more restrictive and expensive, then Vail is going to have to be creative and aggressive in how the mountain manages all those skiers. These upgrades are a promising start.

Why you should ski Hunter Mountain

Think of a thing that is a version of a familiar thing but hits you like a completely different thing altogether. Like pine trees and palm trees are both trees, but when I first encountered the latter at age 19, they didn’t feel like trees at all, but like someone’s dream of a tree who’d had one described to them but had never actually seen one. Or horses and dolphins: both animals, right? But one you can ride like a little vehicle, and the other supposedly breathes air but lives beneath the sea plotting our extinction in a secret indecipherable language. Or New York-style pizza versus Domino’s, which, as Midwest stock, I prefer, but which my locally born wife can only describe as “not pizza.”

This is something like the experience you will have at Hunter Mountain if you show up knowing a good lot about ski areas, but not much about this ski area. Because if I had to make a list of ski areas similar to Hunter, it would include “that Gwar concert I attended at Harpos in Detroit when I was 18” and “a high-tide rescue scene in a lifeguard movie.” And then I would run out of ideas. Because there is no ski area anywhere remotely like Hunter Mountain.

I mean that as spectacle, as a way to witness New York City’s id manifest into corporeal form. Your Hunter Mountain Bingo card will include “Guy straightlining Racer’s Edge with unzipped Starter jacket and backward baseball cap” and “Dude rocking short-sleeves in 15-degree weather.” The vibe is atomic and combustible, slightly intimidating but also riotously fun, like some snowy Woodstock:

And then there’s the skiing. I have never skied terrain like Hunter’s. The trails swoop and dive and wheel around endless curves, as though carved into the Tower of Babel, an amazing amount of terrain slammed into an area that looks and feels constrained, like a bound haybale that, twine cut, explodes across your yard. Trails crisscross and split and dig around blind corners. None of it feels logical, but it all comes together somehow. Before the advent of Google Maps, I could not plot an accurate mental picture of how Hunter East, West, North, and whatever the hell they call the front part sat in relation to one another and formed a coherent single entity.

I don’t always like being at Hunter. And yet I’ve skied there more than I’ve skied just about anywhere. And not just because it’s close. It’s certainly not cheap, and the road in from the Thruway is a real pain in the ass. But they reliably spin the lifts from November to April, and fast lifts on respectable vert can add up quick. And the upside of crazy? Everyone is welcome.

Podcast Notes

On Hunter’s lift upgrades

Hunter orchestrated a massive offseason lift upgrade last year, moving the old Broadway (B) lift over to Hunter East, where the mountain demolished a 1968 Hall Double named “E,” and planted its third six-pack on a longer Broadway line. Check the old lines versus the new ones:

On six-packs in New York State

New York is home to more ski areas than any other state, but only eight of them run high-speed lifts, and only three host six-packs: Holiday Valley has one, Windham, next door to Hunter, has another, and Hunter owns the other three.

On five new lifts at Jack Frost Big Boulder

Part of Vail Resorts’ massive 2022 lift upgrades was to replace eight old chairlifts at Jack Frost and Big Boulder with five modern fixed-grip quads.

At Jack Frost, Paradise replaced the E and F doubles; Tobyhanna replaced the B and C triples; and Pocono replaced the E and F doubles:

Over at Big Boulder, the Merry Widow I and II double-doubles made way for the Harmony quad. Vail also demolished the parallel Black Forest double, which had not run in a number of years. Blue Heron replaced an area once served by the Little Boulder double and Edelweiss Triple – check the side-by-side with Big Boulder’s 2008 trailmap:

Standing up so many lifts in such a short time is rare, but we do have other examples:

* In 1998, Intrawest tore down up to a dozen legacy lifts and replaced them with five new ones: two high-speed quads, two fixed-grip quads, and the Cabriolet bucket lift (basically a standing gondola). A full discussion on that here.

* American Skiing Company installed at least four chairlifts at Sugarbush in the summer of 1995, including the Slide Brook Express, a two-mile-long lift connection between its two mountains. More here.

* Powder Mountain installed four chairlifts last summer.

* Deer Valley built five chairlifts last summer, including a bubble six-pack, and is constructing eight more lifts this year.

On Mad River Mountain, Ohio

Mad River is about as prototypical a Midwest ski area as you can imagine: 300 vertical feet, 144 acres, 36 inches of average annual snowfall, and an amazing (for that size) nine ski lifts shooting all over the place:

On Vail Resorts’ acquisition timeline

Hunter is one of 17 U.S. ski areas that Vail purchased as part of its 2019 acquisition of Peak Resorts.

On Hunter’s 2018 expansion

When Peak opened the Hunter West expansion for the 2018-19 ski season, a number of new glades appeared on the map:

Most of those glades disappeared from the map. Why? We discuss.

On Epic Pass access

Hunter sits on the same unlimited Epic Local Pass tier as Okemo, Mount Snow, Breckenridge, Keystone, Crested Butte, and Stevens Pass. Here’s an Epic Pass overview:

You can also ski Hunter on the uber-cheap 32 Resorts version of the Epic Day Pass:

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

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and to support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Who

Jeff Colburn, General Manager of Silver Mountain, Idaho

Recorded on

February 12, 2025

About Silver Mountain

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: CMR Lands, which also owns 49 Degrees North, Washington

Located in: Kellogg, Idaho

Year founded: 1968 as Jackass ski area, later known as Silverhorn, operated intermittently in the 1980s before its transformation into Silver in 1990

Pass affiliations:

* Indy Pass – 2 days, select blackouts

* Indy+ Pass – 2 days, no blackouts

* Powder Alliance – 3 days, select blackouts

Closest neighboring ski areas: Lookout Pass (:26)

Base elevation: 4,100 feet (lowest chairlift); 2,300 feet (gondola)

Summit elevation: 6,297 feet

Vertical drop: 2,200 feet

Skiable acres: 1,600+

Average annual snowfall: 340 inches

Trail count: 80

Lift count: 7 (1 eight-passenger gondola, 1 fixed-grip quad, 2 triples, 2 doubles, 1 carpet – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Silver Mountain’s lift fleet)

Why I interviewed him

After moving to Manhattan in 2002, I would often pine for an extinct version of New York City: docks thrust into the Hudson, masted ships, ornate brickwork factories, carriages, open windows, kids loose in the streets, summer evening crowds on stoops and patios. Modern New York, riotous as it is for an American city, felt staid and sterile beside the island’s explosively peopled black-and-white past.

Over time, I’ve developed a different view: New York City is a triumph of post-industrial reinvention, able to shed and quickly replace obsolete industries with those that would lead the future. And my idealized New York, I came to realize, was itself a snapshot of one lost New York, but not the only lost New York, just my romanticized etching of a city that has been in a constant state of reinvention for 400 years.

It's through this same lens that we can view Silver Mountain. For more than a century, Kellogg was home to silver mines that employed thousands. When the Bunker Hill Mine closed in 1981, it took the town’s soul with it. The city became a symbol of industrial decline, of an America losing its rough-and-ragged hammer-bang grit.

And for a while, Kellogg was a denuded and dusty crater pockmarking the glory-green of Idaho’s panhandle. The population collapsed. Suicide rates, Colburn tells us on the podcast, were high.

But within a decade, town officials peered toward the skeleton of Jackass ski area, with its intact centerpole Riblet double, and said, “maybe that’s the thing.” With help from Von Roll, they erected three chairlifts on the mountain and taxed themselves $2 million to string a three-mile-long gondola from town to mountain, opening the ski area to the masses by bypassing the serpentine seven-mile-long access road. (Gosh, can you think of anyplace else where such a contraption would work?)

Silver rose above while the Environmental Protection Agency got to work below, cleaning up what had been designated a massive Superfund site. Today, Kellogg, led by Silver, is a functional, modern place, a post-industrial success story demonstrating how recreation can anchor an economy and a community.

The service sector lacks the fiery valor of industry. Bouncing through snow, gifted from above, for fun, does not resonate with America’s self-image like the gutsy miner pulling metal from the earth to feed his family. Town founder/mining legend Noah Kellogg and his jackass companion remain heroic local figures. But across rural America, ski areas have stepped quietly into the vacuum left by vacated factories and mines, where they become a source of community identity and a stabilizing agent where no other industry makes sense.

What we talked about

Ski Idaho; what it will take to transform Idaho into a ski destination; the importance of Grand Targhee to Idaho; old-time PNW skiing; Schweitzer as bellwether for Idaho ski area development; Kellogg, Idaho’s mining history, Superfund cleanup, and renaissance as a resort town; Jackass ski area and its rebirth as Silver Mountain; the easiest big mountain access in America; taking a gondola to the ski area; the Jackass Snack Shack; an affordable mountain town?; Silver’s destination potential; 49 Degrees North; these obscenely, stupidly low lift ticket prices:

Potential lift upgrades, including Chair 4; snowmaking potential; baselodge expansion; Indy Pass; and the Powder Alliance.

What I got wrong

I mentioned that Telluride’s Mountain Village Gondola replacement would cost $50 million. The actual estimates appear to be $60 million. The two stages of that gondola total 10,145 feet, more than a mile shorter than Silver’s astonishing 16,350 feet (3.1 miles).

Why now was a good time for this interview

In the ‘90s, before the advent of the commercial internet, I learned about skiing from magazines. They mostly wrote about the American West and their fabulous, over-hill-and-dale ski complexes: Vail and Sun Valley and Telluride and the like. But these publications also exposed the backwaters where you could mainline pow and avoid liftlines, and do it all for less than the price of a bologna sandwich. It was in Skiing’s October 1994 Favorite Resorts issue that I learned about this little slice of magnificence:

Snow, snow, snow, steep, steep, steep, cheap, cheap, cheap, and a feeling you’ve gone back to a special time and place when life, and skiing, was uncomplicated – those are the things that make [NAME REDACTED] one of our favorite resorts. It’s the ultimate pure skiing experience. This was another surprise choice, even to those who named [REDACTED] to their lists. We knew people liked [REDACTED], but we weren’t prepared for how many, or how create their affections were. This is the one area that broke the “Great Skiing + Great Base Area + Amenities = Favorite Resort” equation. [REDACTED] has minimal base development, no shopping, no nightlife, no fancy hotels or eateries, and yet here it is on our list, a tribute to the fact that in the end, really great skiing matters more than any other single resort feature.

OK, well this sounds amazing. Tell me more…

…[REDACTED] has one of the cheapest lift tickets around.

…One of those rare places that hasn’t been packaged, streamlined, suburbanized. There’s also that delicious atmosphere of absolute remoteness from the everyday world.

…The ski area for traditionalists, ascetics, and cheapskates. The lifts are slow and creaky, the accommodations are spartan, but the lift tickets are the best deal in skiing.

This super-secret, cheaper-than-Tic-Tacs, Humble Bro ski center tucked hidden from any sign of civilization, the Great Skiing Bomb Shelter of 1994, is…

Alta.

Yes, that Alta.

The Alta with four high-speed lifts.

The Alta with $199 peak-day walk-up lift tickets.

The Alta that headlines the Ikon Pass and Mountain Collective.

The Alta with an address at the top of America’s most over-burdened access road.

Alta is my favorite ski area. There is nothing else like it anywhere (well, except directly next door). And a lot remains unchanged since 1994: there still isn’t much to do other than ski, the lodges are still “spartan,” it is still “steep” and “deep.” But Alta blew past “cheap” a long time ago, and it feels about as embedded in the wilderness as an exit ramp Chuck E. Cheese. Sure, the viewshed is mostly intact, but accessing the ski area requires a slow-motion up-canyon tiptoe that better resembles a civilization-level evacuation than anything we would label “remote.” Alta is still Narnia, but the Alta described above no longer exists.

Well, no s**t? Aren’t we talking about Idaho here? Yes, but no one else is. And that’s what I’m getting at: the Alta of 2025, the place where everything is cheap and fluffy and empty, is Idaho. Hide behind your dumb potato jokes all you want, but you can’t argue with this lineup:

“Ummm, Grand Targhee is in Wyoming, D*****s.”

Thank you, Geography Bro, but the only way to access GT is through Idaho, and the mountain has been a member of Ski Idaho for centuries because of it.

Also: Lost Trail and Lookout Pass both straddle the Montana-Idaho border.

Anyway, check that roster, those annual snowfall totals. Then look at how difficult these ski areas are to access. The answer, mostly, is “Not Very.” You couldn’t make Silver Mountain easier to get to unless you moved it to JFK airport: exit the interstate, drive seven feet, park, board the gondola.

Finally, let’s compare that group of 15 Idaho ski areas to the 15 public, aerial-lift-served ski areas in Utah. Even when you include Targhee and all of Lost Trail and Lookout, Utah offers 32 percent more skiable terrain than Idaho:

But Utah tallies three times more annual skier visits than Idaho:

No, Silver Mountain is not Alta, and Brundage is not Snowbird. But Silver and Brundage don’t get skied out in under 45 seconds on a powder day. And other than faster lifts and more skiers, there’s not much separating the average Utah ski resort from the average Idaho ski resort.

That won’t be true forever. People are dumb in the moment, but smart in slow-motion. We are already seeing meaningful numbers of East Coast ski families reorient their ski trips east, across the Atlantic (one New York-based reader explained to me today how they flew their family to Norway for skiing over President’s weekend because it was cheaper than Vermont). Soon enough, Planet California and everyone else is going to tire of the expense and chaos of Colorado and Utah, and they’ll Insta-sleuth their way to this powdery Extra-Rockies that everyone forgot about. No reason to wait for all that.

Why you should ski Silver Mountain

I have little to add outside of what I wrote above: go to Silver because it’s big and cheap and awesome. So I’ll add this pinpoint description from Skibum.net:

It’s hard to find something negative about Silver Mountain; the only real drawback is that you probably live nowhere near it. On the other hand, if you live within striking distance, you already know that this is easily the best kept ski secret in Idaho and possibly the entire western hemisphere. If not, you just have to convince the family somehow that Kellogg Idaho — not Vail, not Tahoe, not Cottonwood Canyon — is the place you ought to head for your next ski trip. Try it, and you’ll see why it’s such a well-kept secret. All-around fantastic skiing, terrific powder, virtually no liftlines, reasonable pricing. Layout is kind of quirky; almost like an upside-down mountain due to gondola ride to lodge…interesting place. Emphasis on expert skiing but all abilities have plenty of terrain. Experts will find a ton of glades … One of the country’s great underrated ski areas.

Some of you will just never bother traveling for a mountain that lacks high-speed lifts. I understand, but I think that’s a mistake. Slow lifts don’t matter when there are no liftlines. And as Skiing wrote about Alta in 1994, “Really great skiing matters more than any other single resort feature.”

Podcast Notes

On Schweitzer’s transformation

If we were to fast-forward 30 years, I think we would find that most large Idaho ski areas will have undergone a renaissance of the sort that Schweitzer, Idaho did over the previous 30 years. Check the place out in 1988, a big but backwoods ski area covered in double chairs:

Compare that to Schweitzer today: four high-speed quads, a sixer, and two triples that are only fixed-grip because the GM doesn’t like exposed high-elevation detaches.

On Silver’s legacy ski areas

Silver was originally known as Jackass, then Silverhorn. That original chairlift, installed in 1967, stands today as Chair 4:

On the Jackass Snack Shack

This mid-mountain building, just off Chair 4, is actually a portable structure moved north from Tamarack:

On 49 Degrees North

CMR Lands also owns 49 Degrees North, an outstanding ski area two-and-a-half hours west and roughly equidistant from Spokane as Silver is (though in opposite directions). In 2021, the mountain demolished a top-to-bottom, 1972 SLI double for a brand-new, 1,851-vertical-foot high-speed quad, from which you can access most of the resort’s 2,325 acres.

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

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and to support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Who

Tyler Fairbank, General Manager of Jiminy Peak, Massachusetts and CEO of Fairbank Group

Recorded on

February 10, 2025 and March 7, 2025

About Fairbank Group

From their website:

The Fairbank Group is driven to build things to last – not only our businesses but the relationships and partnerships that stand behind them. Since 2008, we have been expanding our eclectic portfolio of businesses. This portfolio includes three resorts—Jiminy Peak Mountain Resort, Cranmore Mountain Resort, and Bromley Mountain Ski Resort—and real estate development at all three resorts, in addition to a renewable energy development company, EOS Ventures, and a technology company, Snowgun Technology.

About Jiminy Peak

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Fairbank Group, which also owns Cranmore and operates Bromley (see breakdowns below)

Located in: Hancock, Massachusetts

Year founded: 1948

Pass affiliations:

* Ikon Pass: 2 days, with blackouts

* Uphill New England

Closest neighboring ski areas: Bousquet (:27), Catamount (:49), Butternut (:51), Otis Ridge (:54), Berkshire East (:58), Willard (1:02)

Base elevation: 1,230 feet

Summit elevation: 2,380 feet

Vertical drop: 1,150 feet

Skiable acres: 167.4

Average annual snowfall: 100 inches

Trail count: 42

Lift count: 9 (1 six-pack, 2 fixed-grip quads, 3 triples, 1 double, 2 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Jiminy Peak’s lift fleet)

About Cranmore

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: The Fairbank Group

Located in: North Conway, New Hampshire

Year founded: 1937

Pass affiliations:

* Ikon Pass: 2 days, with blackouts

* Uphill New England

Closest neighboring ski areas: Attitash (:16), Black Mountain (:18), King Pine (:28), Wildcat (:28), Pleasant Mountain (:33), Bretton Woods (:42)

Base elevation: 800 feet

Summit elevation: 2,000 feet

Vertical drop: 1,200 feet

Skiable Acres: 170

Average annual snowfall: 80 inches

Trail count: 56 (15 most difficult, 25 intermediate, 16 easier)

Lift count: 7 (1 high-speed quad, 1 fixed-grip quad, 2 triples, 1 double, 2 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Cranmore’s lift fleet)

About Bromley

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: The estate of Joseph O'Donnell

Operated by: The Fairbank Group

Pass affiliations: Uphill New England

Located in: Peru, Vermont

Closest neighboring ski areas: Magic Mountain (14 minutes), Stratton (19 minutes)

Base elevation: 1,950 feet

Summit elevation: 3,284 feet

Vertical drop: 1,334 feet

Skiable Acres: 300

Average annual snowfall: 145 inches

Trail count: 47 (31% black, 37% intermediate, 32% beginner)

Lift count: 9 (1 high-speed quad, 1 fixed-grip quad, 4 doubles, 1 T-bar, 2 carpets - view Lift Blog’s of inventory of Bromley’s lift fleet)

Why I interviewed him

I don’t particularly enjoy riding six-passenger chairlifts. Too many people, up to five of whom are not me. Lacking a competent queue-management squad, chairs rise in loads of twos and threes above swarming lift mazes. If you’re skiing the West, lowering the bar is practically an act of war. It’s all so tedious. Given the option – Hunter, Winter Park, Camelback – I’ll hop the parallel two-seater just to avoid the drama.

I don’t like six-packs, but I sure am impressed by them. Sixers are the chairlift equivalent of a two-story Escalade, or a house with its own private Taco Bell, or a 14-lane expressway. Like damn there’s some cash floating around this joint.

Sixers are common these days: America is home to 107 of them. But that wasn’t always so. Thirty-two of these lifts came online in just the past three years. Boyne Mountain, Michigan built the first American six-pack in 1992, and for three years, it was the only such lift in the nation (and don’t think they didn’t spend every second reminding us of it). The next sixer rose at Stratton, in 1995, but 18 of the next 19 were built in the West. In 2000, Jiminy Peak demolished a Riblet double and dropped the Berkshire Express in its place.

For 26 years, Jiminy Peak has owned the only sixer in the State of Massachusetts (Wachusett will build the second this summer). Even as they multiply, the six-pack remains a potent small-mountain status symbol: Vail owns 31 or them, Alterra 30. Only 10 independents spin one. Sixers are expensive to build, expensive to maintain, difficult to manage. To build such a machine is to declare: we are different, we can handle this, this belongs here and so does your money.

Sixty years ago, Jiminy Peak was a rump among a hundred poking out of the Berkshires. It would have been impossible to tell, in 1965, which among these many would succeed. Plenty of good ski areas failed since. Jiminy is among the last mountains standing, a survival-of-the-fittest tale punctuated, at the turn of the century, by the erecting of a super lift that was impossible to look away from. That neighboring Brodie, taller and equal-ish in size to Jiminy, shuttered permanently two years later, after a 62-year run as a New England staple, was probably not a coincidence (yes, I’m aware that the Fairbanks themselves bought and closed Brodie). Jiminy had planted its 2,800-skier-per-hour flag on the block, and everyone noticed and no one could compete.

The Berkshire Express is not the only reason Jiminy Peak thrives in a 21st century New England ski scene defined by big companies, big passes, and big crowds. But it’s the best single emblem of a keep-moving philosophy that, over many decades, transformed a rust-bucket ski area into a glimmering ski resort. That meant snowmaking before snowmaking was cool, building places to stay on the mountain in a region of day-drivers, propping a wind turbine on the ridge to offset dependence on the energy grid.

Non-ski media are determined to describe America’s lift-served skiing evolution in terms of climate change, pointing to the shrinking number of ski areas since the era when any farmer with a backyard haystack and a spare tractor engine could run skiers uphill for a nickel. But this is a lazy narrative (America offers a lot more skiing now than it did 30 years ago). Most American ski areas – perhaps none – have failed explicitly because of climate change. At least not yet. Most failed because running a ski area is hard and most people are bad at it. Jiminy, once surrounded by competitors, now stands alone. Why? That’s what the world needs to understand.

What we talked about

The impact of Cranmore’s new Fairbank Lodge; analyzing Jiminy’s village-building past to consider Cranmore’s future; Bromley post-Joe O’Donnell (RIP); Joe’s legacy – “just an incredible person, great guy”; taking the long view; growing up at Jiminy Peak in the wild 1970s; Brian Fairbank’s legacy building Jiminy Peak – with him, “anything is possible”; how Tyler ended up leading the company when he at one time had “no intention of coming back into the ski business”; growing Fairbank Group around Jiminy; surviving and recovering from a stroke – “I had this thing growing in me my entire life that I didn’t realize”; carrying on the family legacy; why Jiminy and Cranmore joined the Ikon Pass as two-day partners, and whether either mountain could join as full partners; why Bromley didn’t join Ikon; the importance of New York City to Jiminy Peak and Boston to Cranmore; why the ski areas won’t be direct-to-lift with Ikon right away; are the Fairbank resorts for sale?; would Fairbank buy more?; the competitive advantage of on-mountain lodging; potential Jiminy lift upgrades; why the Berkshire Express sixer doesn’t need an upgrade of the sort that Cranmore and Bromley’s high-speed quads received; why Jiminy runs a fixed-grip triple parallel to its high-speed six; where the mountain’s next high-speed lift could run; and Jiminy Peak expansion potential.

What I got wrong

* I said that I didn’t know which year Jiminy Peak installed their wind turbine – it was 2007. Berkshire East built its machine in 2010 and activated it in 2011.

* When we recorded the Ikon addendum, Cranmore and Jiminy Peak had not yet offered any sort of Ikon Pass discount to their passholders, but Tyler promised details were coming. Passholders can now find offers for a discounted ($229) three-day Ikon Session pass on either ski area’s website.

Why now was a good time for this interview

For all the Fairbanks’ vision in growing Jiminy from tumbleweed into redwood, sprinting ahead on snowmaking and chairlifts and energy, the company has been slow to acknowledge the largest shift in the consumer-to-resort pipeline this century: the shift to multi-mountain passes. Even their own three mountains share just one day each for sister resort passholders.

That’s not the same thing as saying they’ve been wrong to sit and wait. But it’s interesting. Why has this company that’s been so far ahead for so long been so reluctant to take part in what looks to be a permanent re-ordering of the industry? And why have they continued to succeed in spite of this no-thanks posture?

Or so my thinking went when Tyler and I scheduled this podcast a couple of months ago. Then Jiminy, along with sister resort Cranmore, joined the Ikon Pass. Yes, just as a two-day partner in what Alterra is labeling a “bonus” tier, and only on the full Ikon Pass, and with blackout dates. But let’s be clear about this: Jiminy Peak and Cranmore joined the Ikon Pass.

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), for me and my Pangea-paced editing process, we’d recorded the bulk of this conversation several weeks before the Ikon announcement. So we recorded a post-Ikon addendum, which explains the mid-podcast wardrobe change.

It will be fascinating to observe, over the next decade, how the remaining holdouts manage themselves in the Epkon-atronic world that is not going away. Will big indies such as Jackson Hole and Alta eventually eject the pass masses as a sort of high-class differentiator? Will large regional standouts like Whitefish and Bretton Woods and Baker and Wolf Creek continue to stand alone in a churning sea of joiners? Or will some economic cataclysm force a re-ordering of the companies piloting these warships, splintering them into woodchips and resetting us back to some version of 1995, where just about every ski area was its own ski area doing battle against every other ski area?

I have guesses, but no answers, and no power to do anything, really, other than to watch and ask questions of the Jiminy Peaks of the world as they decide where they fit, and how, and when, into this bizarre and rapidly changing lift-served skiing world that we’re all gliding through.

Why you should ski Jiminy Peak

There are several versions of each ski area. The trailmap version, cartoonish and exaggerated, designed to be evocative as well as practical, a guide to reality that must bend it to help us understand it. There’s the Google Maps version, which straightens out the trailmap but ditches the order and context – it is often difficult to tell, from satellite view, which end of the hill is the top or the bottom, where the lifts run, whether you can walk to the lifts from the parking lot or need to shuttlebus it. There is the oral version, the one you hear from fellow chairlift riders at other resorts, describing their home mountain or an epic day or a secret trail, a vibe or a custom, the thing that makes the place a thing.

But the only version of a ski area that matters, in the end, is the lived one. And no amount of research or speculation or YouTube-Insta vibing can equal that. Each mountain is what each mountain is. Determining why they are that way and how that came to be is about 80 percent of why I started this newsletter. And the best mountains, I’ve found, after skiing hundreds of them, are the ones that surprise you.

On paper, Jiminy Peak does not look that interesting: a broad ridge, flat across, a bunch of parallel lifts and runs, a lot of too-wide-and-straight-down. But this is not how it skis. Break left off the sixer and it’s go-forever, line after line dropping steeply off a ridge. Down there, somewhere, the Widow White’s lift, a doorway to a mini ski area all its own, shooting off, like Supreme at Alta, into a twisting little realm with the long flat runout. Go right off the six-pack and skiers find something else, a ski area from a different time, a trunk trail wrapping gently above a maze of twisting, tangled snow-streets, dozens of potential routes unfolding, gentle but interesting, long enough to inspire a sense of quest and journey.

This is not the mountain for everyone. I wish Jiminy had more glades, that they would spin more lifts more often as an alternative to Six-Pack City. But we have Berkshire East for cowboy skiing. Jiminy, an Albany backyarder that considers itself worthy of a $1,051 adult season pass, is aiming for something more buffed and burnished than a typical high-volume city bump. Jiminy doesn’t want to be Mountain Creek, NYC’s hedonistic free-for-all, or Wachusett, Boston’s high-volume, low-cost burner. It’s aiming for a little more resort, a little more country club, a little more it-costs-what-it-costs sorry-not-sorry attitude (with a side of swarming kids).

Podcast Notes

On other Fairbank Group podcasts

On Joe O’Donnell

A 2005 Harvard Business School profile of O’Donnell, who passed away on Jan. 7, 2024 at age 79, gives a nice overview of his character and career:

When Joe O'Donnell talks, people listen. Last spring, one magazine ranked him the most powerful person in Boston-head of a privately held, billion-dollar company he built practically from scratch; friend and advisor to politicians of both parties, from Boston's Democratic Mayor Tom Menino to the Bay State's Republican Governor Mitt Romney (MBA '74); member of Harvard's Board of Overseers; and benefactor to many good causes. Not bad for a "cop's kid" who grew up nearby in the blue-collar city of Everett.

Read the rest…

On Joe O’Donnell “probably owning more ski areas than anyone alive”

I wasn’t aware of the extent of Joe O’Donnell’s deep legacy of ski area ownership, but New England Ski History documents his stints as at least part owner of Magic Mountain VT, Timber Ridge (now defunct, next-door to and still skiable from Magic), Jiminy, Mt. Tom (defunct), and Brodie (also lost). He also served Sugar Mountain, North Carolina as a vendor for years.

On stroke survival

Know how to BE FAST by spending five second staring at this:

More, from the CDC.

On Jiminy joining the Ikon Pass

I covered this extensively here:

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Who

Iain Martin, Host of The Ski Podcast

Recorded on

January 30, 2025

About The Ski Podcast

From the show’s website:

Want to [know] more about the world of skiing? The Ski Podcast is a UK-based podcast hosted by Iain Martin.

With different guests every episode, we cover all aspects of skiing and snowboarding from resorts to racing, Ski Sunday to slush.

In 2021, we were voted ‘Best Wintersports Podcast‘ in the Sports Podcast Awards. In 2023, we were shortlisted as ‘Best Broadcast Programme’ in the Travel Media Awards.

Why I interviewed him

We did a swap. Iain hosted me on his show in January (I also hosted Iain in January, but since The Storm sometimes moves at the pace of mammal gestation, here we are at the end of March; Martin published our episode the day after we recorded it).

But that’s OK (according to me), because our conversation is evergreen. Martin is embedded in EuroSki the same way that I cycle around U.S. AmeriSki. That we wander from similarly improbable non-ski outposts – Brighton, England and NYC – is a funny coincidence. But what interested me most about a potential podcast conversation is the Encyclopedia EuroSkiTannica stored in Martin’s brain.

I don’t understand skiing in Europe. It is too big, too rambling, too interconnected, too above-treeline, too transit-oriented, too affordable, too absent the Brobot ‘tude that poisons so much of the American ski experience. The fact that some French idiot is facing potential jail time for launching a snowball into a random grandfather’s skull (filming the act and posting it on TikTok, of course) only underscores my point: in America, we would cancel the grandfather for not respecting the struggle so obvious in the boy’s act of disobedience.

In a weird twist for a ski writer, I am much more familiar with summer Europe than winter Europe. I’ve skied the continent a couple of times, but warm-weather cross-continental EuroTreks by train and by car have occupied months of my life. When I try to understand EuroSki, my brain short-circuits. I tease the Euros because each European ski area seems to contain between two and 27 distinct ski areas, because the trail markings are the wrong color, because they speak in the strange code of the “km” and “cm” - but I’m really making fun of myself for Not Getting It.

Martin gets it. And he good-naturedly walks me through a series of questions that follow this same basic pattern: “In America, we charge $109 for a hamburger that tastes like it’s been pulled out of a shipping container that went overboard in 1944. But I hear you have good and cheap food in Europe – true?” I don’t mind sounding like a d*****s if the result is good information for all of us, and thankfully I achieved both of those things on this podcast.

What we talked about

The European winter so far; how a UK-based skier moves back and forth to the Alps; easy car-free travel from the U.S. directly to Alps ski areas; is ski traffic a thing in Europe?; EuroSki 101; what does “ski area” mean in Europe; Euro snow pockets; climate change realities versus media narratives in Europe; what to make of ski areas closing around the Alps; snowmaking in Europe; comparing the Euro stereotype of the leisurely skier to reality; an aging skier population; Euro liftline queuing etiquette and how it mirrors a nation’s driving culture; “the idea that you wouldn’t bring the bar down is completely alien to me; I mean everybody brings the bar down on the chairlift”; why an Epic or Ikon Pass may not be your best option to ski in Europe; why lift ticket prices are so much cheaper in Europe than in the U.S.; Most consumers “are not even aware” that Vail has started purchasing Swiss resorts; ownership structure at Euro resorts; Vail to buy Verbier?; multimountain pass options in Europe; are Euros buying Epic and Ikon to ski locally or to travel to North America?; must-ski European ski areas; Euro ski-guide culture; and quirky ski areas.

What I got wrong

We discussed Epic Pass’ lodging requirement for Verbier, which is in effect for this winter, but which Vail removed for the 2025-26 ski season.

Why now was a good time for this interview

I present to you, again, the EuroSki Chart – a list of all 26 European ski areas that have aligned themselves with a U.S.-based multi-mountain pass:

The large majority of these have joined Ski NATO (a joke, not a political take Brah), in the past five years. And while purchasing a U.S. megapass is not necessary to access EuroHills in the same way it is to ski the Rockies – doing so may, in fact, be counterproductive – just the notion of having access to these Connecticut-sized ski areas via a pass that you’re buying anyway is enough to get people considering a flight east for their turns.

And you know what? They should. At this point, a mass abandonment of the Mountain West by the tourists that sustain it is the only thing that may drive the region to seriously reconsider the robbery-by-you-showed-up-here-all-stupid lift ticket prices, car-centric transit infrastructure, and sclerotic building policies that are making American mountain towns impossibly expensive and inconvenient to live in or to visit.

In many cases, a EuroSkiTrip costs far less than an AmeriSki trip - especially if you’re not the sort to buy a ski pass in March 2025 so that you can ski in February 2026. And though the flights will generally cost more, the logistics of airport-to-ski-resort-and-back generally make more sense. In Europe they have trains. In Europe those trains stop in villages where you can walk to your hotel and then walk to the lifts the next morning. In Europe you can walk up to the ticket window and trade a block of cheese for a lift ticket. In Europe they put the bar down. In Europe a sandwich, brownie, and a Coke doesn’t cost $152. And while you can spend $152 on a EuroLunch, it probably means that you drank seven liters of wine and will need a sled evac to the village.

“Oh so why don’t you just go live there then if it’s so perfect?”

Shut up, Reductive Argument Bro. Everyplace is great and also sucks in its own special way. I’m just throwing around contrasts.

There are plenty of things I don’t like about EuroSki: the emphasis on pistes, the emphasis on trams, the often curt and indifferent employees, the “injury insurance” that would require a special session of the European Union to pay out a claim. And the lack of trees. Especially the lack of trees. But more families are opting for a week in Europe over the $25,000 Experience of a Lifetime in the American West, and I totally understand why.

A quote often attributed to Winston Churchill reads, “You can always trust the Americans to do the right thing, after they have exhausted all the alternatives.” Unfortunately, it appears to be apocryphal. But I wish it wasn’t. Because it’s true. And I do think we’ll eventually figure out that there is a continent-wide case study in how to retrofit our mountain towns for a more cost- and transit-accessible version of lift-served skiing. But it’s gonna take a while.

Podcast Notes

On U.S. ski areas opening this winter that haven’t done so “in a long time”

A strong snow year has allowed at least 11 U.S. ski areas to open after missing one or several winters, including:

* Cloudmont, Alabama (yes I’m serious)

* Pinnacle, Maine

* Covington and Sault Seal, ropetows outfit in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula

* Norway Mountain, Michigan – resurrected by new owner after multi-year closure

* Tower Mountain, a ropetow bump in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula

* Bear Paw, Montana

* Hatley Pointe, North Carolina opened under new ownership, who took last year off to gut-renovate the hill

* Warner Canyon, Oregon, an all-natural-snow, volunteer-run outfit, opened in December after a poor 2023-24 snow year.

* Bellows Falls ski tow, a molehill run by the Rockingham Recreation in Vermont, opened for the first time in five years after a series of snowy weeks across New England

* Lyndon Outing Club, another volunteer-run ropetow operation in Vermont, sat out last winter with low snow but opened this year

On the “subway map” of transit-accessible Euro skiing

I mean this is just incredible:

The map lives on Martin’s Ski Flight Free site, which encourages skiers to reduce their carbon footprints. I am not good at doing this, largely because such a notion is a fantasy in America as presently constructed.

But just imagine a similar system in America. The nation is huge, of course, and we’re not building a functional transcontinental passenger railroad overnight (or maybe ever). But there are several areas of regional density where such networks could, at a minimum, connect airports or city centers with destination ski areas, including:

* Reno Airport (from the east), and the San Francisco Bay area (to the west) to the ring of more than a dozen Tahoe resorts (or at least stops at lake- or interstate-adjacent Sugar Bowl, Palisades, Homewood, Northstar, Mt. Rose, Diamond Peak, and Heavenly)

* Denver Union Station and Denver airport to Loveland, Keystone, Breck, Copper, Vail, Beaver Creek, and - a stretch - Aspen and Steamboat, with bus connections to A-Basin, Ski Cooper, and Sunlight

* SLC airport east to Snowbird, Alta, Solitude, Brighton, Park City, and Deer Valley, and north to Snowbasin and Powder Mountain

* Penn Station in Manhattan up along Vermont’s Green Mountain Spine: Mount Snow, Stratton, Bromley, Killington, Pico, Sugarbush, Mad River Glen, Bolton Valley, Stowe, Smugglers’ Notch, Jay Peak, with bus connections to Magic and Middlebury Snowbowl

* Boston up the I-93 corridor: Tenney, Waterville Valley, Loon, Cannon, and Bretton Woods, with a spur to Conway and Cranmore, Attitash, Wildcat, and Sunday River; bus connections to Black New Hampshire, Sunapee, Gunstock, Ragged, and Mount Abram

Yes, there’s the train from Denver to Winter Park (and ambitions to extend the line to Steamboat), which is terrific, but placing that itsy-bitsy spur next to the EuroSystem and saying “look at our neato train” is like a toddler flexing his toy jet to the pilots as he boards a 757. And they smile and say, “Whoa there, Shooter! Now have a seat while we burn off 4,000 gallons of jet fuel accelerating this f****r to 500 miles per hour.”

On the number of ski areas in Europe

I’ve detailed how difficult it is to itemize the 500-ish active ski areas in America, but the task is nearly incomprehensible in Europe, which has as many as eight times the number of ski areas. Here are a few estimates:

* Skiresort.info counts 3,949 ski areas (as of today; the number changes daily) in Europe: list | map

* Wikipedia doesn’t provide a number, but it does have a very long list

* Statista counts a bit more than 2,200, but their list excludes most of Eastern Europe

On Euro non-ski media and climate change catastrophe

Of these countless European ski areas, a few shutter or threaten to each year. The resulting media cycle is predictable and dumb. In The Snow concisely summarizes how this pattern unfolds by analyzing coverage of the recent near loss of L’Alpe du Grand Serre, France (emphasis mine):

A ski resort that few people outside its local vicinity had ever heard of was the latest to make headlines around the world a month ago as it announced it was going to cease ski operations.

‘French ski resort in Alps shuts due to shortage of snow’ reported The Independent, ‘Another European ski resort is closing due to lack of snow’ said Time Out, The Mirror went for ”Devastation” as another European ski resort closes due to vanishing snow‘ whilst The Guardian did a deeper dive with, ‘Fears for future of ski tourism as resorts adapt to thawing snow season.’ The story also appeared in dozens more publications around the world.

The only problem is that the ski area in question, L’Alpe du Grand Serre, has decided it isn’t closing its ski area after all, at least not this winter.

Instead, after the news of the closure threat was publicised, the French government announced financial support, as did the local municipality of La Morte, and a number of major players in the ski industry. In addition, a public crowdfunding campaign raised almost €200,000, prompting the officials who made the original closure decision to reconsider. Things will now be reassessed in a year’s time.

There has not been the same global media coverage of the news that L’Alpe du Grand Serre isn’t closing after all.

It’s not the first resort where money has been found to keep slopes open after widespread publicity of a closure threat. La Chapelle d’Abondance was apparently on the rocks in 2020 but will be fully open this winter and similarly Austria’s Heiligenblut which was said to be at risk of permanently closure in the summer will be open as normal.

Of course, ski areas do permanently close, just like any business, and climate change is making the multiple challenges that smaller, lower ski areas face, even more difficult. But in the near-term bigger problems are often things like justifying spends on essential equipment upgrades, rapidly increasing power costs and changing consumer habits that are the bigger problems right now. The latter apparently exacerbated by media stories implying that ski holidays are under severe threat by climate change.

These increasingly frequent stories always have the same structure of focusing on one small ski area that’s in trouble, taken from the many thousands in the Alps that few regular skiers have heard of. The stories imply (by ensuring that no context is provided), that this is a major resort and typical of many others. Last year some reports implied, again by avoiding giving any context, that a ski area in trouble that is actually close to Rome, was in the Alps.

This is, of course, not to pretend that climate change does not pose an existential threat to ski holidays, but just to say that ski resorts have been closing for many decades for multiple reasons and that most of these reports do not give all the facts or paint the full picture.

On no cars in Zermatt

If the Little Cottonwood activists really cared about the environment in their precious canyon, they wouldn’t be advocating for alternate rubber-wheeled transit up to Alta and Snowbird – they’d be demanding that the road be closed and replaced by a train or gondola or both, and that the ski resorts become a pedestrian-only enclave dotted with only as many electric vehicles as it took to manage the essential business of the towns and the ski resorts.

If this sounds improbable, just look to Zermatt, which has banned gas cars for decades. Skiers arrive by train. Nearly 6,000 people live there year-round. It is amazing what humans can build when the car is considered as an accessory to life, rather than its central organizing principle.

On driving in Europe

Driving in Europe is… something else. I’ve driven in, let’s see: Iceland, Portugal, Spain, France, Switzerland, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, and Montenegro. That last one is the scariest but they’re all a little scary. Drivers’ speeds seem to be limited by nothing other than physics, passing on blind curves is common even on mountain switchbacks, roads outside of major arterials often collapse into one lane, and Euros for some reason don’t believe in placing signs at intersections to indicate street names. Thank God for GPS. I’ll admit that it’s all a little thrilling once the disorientation wears off, and there are things to love about driving in Europe: roundabouts are used in place of traffic lights wherever possible, the density of cars tends to be less (likely due to the high cost of gas and plentiful mass transit options), sprawl tends to be more contained, the limited-access highways are extremely well-kept, and the drivers on those limited-access highways actually understand what the lanes are for (slow, right; fast, left).

It may seem contradictory that I am at once a transit advocate and an enthusiastic road-tripper. But I’ve lived in New York City, home of the United States’ best mass-transit system, for 23 years, and have owned a car for 19 of them. There is a logic here: in general, I use the subway or my bicycle to move around the city, and the car to get out of it (this is the only way to get to most ski areas in the region, at least midweek). I appreciate the options, and I wish more parts of America offered a better mix.

On chairs without bars

It’s a strange anachronism that the United States is still home to hundreds of chairlifts that lack safety bars. ANSI standards now require them on new lift builds (as far as I can tell), but many chairlifts built without bars from the 1990s and earlier appear to have been grandfathered into our contemporary system. This is not the case in the Eastern U.S. where, as far as I’m aware, every chairlift with the exception of a handful in Pennsylvania have safety bars – New York and many New England states require them by law (and require riders to use them). Things get dicey in the Midwest, which has, as a region, been far slower to upgrade its lift fleets than bigger mountains in the East and West. Many ski areas, however, have retrofit their old lifts with bars – I was surprised to find them on the lifts at Sundown, Iowa; Chestnut, Illinois; and Mont du Lac, Wisconsin, for example. Vail and Alterra appear to retrofit all chairlifts with safety bars once they purchase a ski area. But many ski areas across the Mountain West still spin old chairs, including, surprisingly, dozens of mountains in California, Oregon, and Washington, states that tends to have more East Coast-ish outlooks on safety and regulation.

On Compagnie des Alpes

According to Martin, the closest thing Europe has to a Vail- or Alterra-style conglomerate is Compagnie des Alpes, which operates (but does not appear to own) 10 ski areas in the French Alps, and holds ownership stakes in five more. It’s kind of an amazing list:

Here’s the company’s acquisition timeline, which includes the ski areas, along with a bunch of amusement parks and hotels:

Clearly the path of least resistance to a EuroVail conflagration would be to shovel this pile of coal into the furnace. Martin referenced Tignes’ forthcoming exit from the group, to join forces with ski resort Sainte-Foy on June 1, 2026 – teasing a smaller potential EuroVail acquisition. Tignes, however, would not be the first resort to exit CdA’s umbrella – Les 2 Alpes left in 2020.

On EuroSkiPasses

The EuroMegaPass market is, like EuroSkiing itself, unintelligible to Americans (at least to this American). There are, however, options. Martin offers the Swiss-centric Magic Pass as perhaps the most prominent. It offers access to 92 ski areas (map).

You are probably expecting me to make a chart.

I will not be making a chart.

S**t I need to publish this article before I cave to my irrepressible urge to make a chart.

OK this podcast is already 51 days old do not make a chart you moron.

I think we’re good here.

I hope.

I will also not be making a chart to track the 12 ski resorts accessible on Austria’s Ski Plus City Pass Stubai Innsbruck Unlimited Freedom Pass.

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

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Who

Stuart Winchester, Founder, Editor & Host of The Storm Skiing Journal & Podcast

Recorded on

March 4, 2025

Editor’s note

1) The headline was not my idea; 2) Erik said he would join me as the guest for episode 199 if he could interview me for episode 200; 3) I was like “sure Brah”; 4) since he did the interview, I asked Erik to write the “Why I interviewed him” section; 5) this episode is now available to stream on Disney+; 6) but no really you can watch it on YouTube (please subscribe); 7) if you don’t care about this episode that’s OK because there are 199 other ones that are actually about snosportskiing; 8) and I have a whole bunch more recorded that I’ll drop right after this one; 9) except that one that I terminally screwed up; 10) “which one?” you ask. Well I’ll tell that humiliating story when I’m ready.

Why I interviewed him, by Erik Mogensen

I met Stuart when he was skiing at Copper Mountain with his family. At lunch that day I made a deal. I would agree to do the first podcast of my career, but only if I had the opportunity reverse the role and interview him. I thought both my interview, and his, would be at least five years away. 14 months later, you are reading this.

As an accomplished big-city corporate PR guy often [occasionally] dressed in a suit, he got tired of listening to the biggest, tallest, snowiest, ski content that was always spoon-fed to his New York City self. Looking for more than just “Stoke,” Stu has built the Storm Skiing Journal into a force that I believe has assumed an important stewardship role for skiing. Along the way he has occasionally made us cringe, and has always made us laugh.

Many people besides myself apparently agree. Stuart has eloquently mixed an industry full of big, type-A egos competing for screentime on the next episode of Game of Thrones, with consumers that have been overrun with printed magazines that show up in the mail, or social media click-bate, but nothing in between. He did it by being as authentic and independent as they come, thus building trust with everyone from the most novice ski consumer to nearly all of the expert operators and owners on the continent.

But don’t get distracted by the “Winchester Style” of poking fun of ski bro and his group of bro brahs like someone took over your mom’s basement with your used laptop, and a new nine-dollar website. Once you get over the endless scrolling required to get beyond the colorful spreadsheets, this thing is fun AND worthwhile to read and listen to. This guy went to Columbia for journalism and it shows. This guy cares deeply about what he does, and it shows.

Stuart has brought something to ski journalism that we didn’t even know was missing, Not only did Stuart find out what it was, he created and scaled a solution. On his 200th podcast I dig into why and how he did it.

What we talked about

How Erik talked me into being a guest on my own podcast; the history of The Storm Skiing Podcast and why I launched with Northeast coverage; why the podcast almost didn’t happen; why Killington was The Storm’s first pod; I didn’t want to go to college but it happened anyway; why I moved to New York; why a ski writer lives in Brooklyn; “I started The Storm because I wanted to read it”; why I have no interest in off-resort skiing; why pay-to-play isn’t journalism; the good and the awful about social media; I hate debt; working at the NBA; the tech innovation that allowed me to start The Storm; activating The Storm’s paywall; puzzling through subscriber retention; critical journalism as an alien concept to the ski industry; Bro beef explained; what’s behind skiing’s identity crisis; why I don’t read my social media comments; why I couldn’t get ski area operators to do podcasts online in 2019; how the digital world has reframed how we think about skiing; why I don’t write about weather; what I like about ski areas; ski areas as art; why the Pass Tracker 5001 looks like a piece of crap and probably always will; “skiing is fun, reading about it should be too”; literary inspirations for The Storm; being critical without being a tool; and why readers should trust me.

Podcast notes

On The New England Lost Ski Areas Project

The New England Lost Ski Areas Project is still very retro looking.

Storm Skiing Podcast episode number three, with site founder Jeremy Davis, is still one of my favorites:

On my sled evac at Black Mountain of Maine

Yeah I talk about this all the time but in case you missed the previous five dozen reminders:

On my timeline

My life, in brief (we reference all of these things on the pod):

* 1992 – Try skiing on a school bus trip to now-defunct Mott Mountain, Michigan; suck at it

* 1993 – Try skiing again, at Snow Snake, Michigan; don’t suck as much

* 1993 - Invent Doritos

* 1994 – Receive first pair of skis for Christmas

* 1995 – Graduate high school

* 1995 - Become first human to live on Saturn for one month without the aid of oxygen

* 1995-98 – Attend Delta College

* 1997 - Set MLB homerun record, with 82 regular-season bombs, while winning Cy Young Award with .04 ERA and 743 batters struck out

* 1998-00 – Attend University of Michigan

* 1998-2007 - Work various restaurant server jobs in Michigan and NYC

* 2002 – Move to Manhattan

* 2003 - Invent new phone/computer hybrid with touchscreen; changes modern life instantly

* 2003-07 – Work as English teacher at Cascade High School on Manhattan’s Lower East Side

* 2003-05 – Participate in New York City Teaching Fellows program via Pace University

* 2004 - Successfully clone frozen alien cells that fell to Earth via meteorite; grows into creature that levels San Antonio with fire breath

* 2006-08 – Columbia Journalism School

* 2007-12 – Work at NBA league office

* 2008 – Daughter is born

* 2010 - Complete the 10-10-10 challenge, mastering 10 forms of martial arts and 10 non-human languages in 2010

* 2013 – Work at AIG

* 2014-2024 – Work at Viacom/Paramount

* 2015 - Formally apologize to the people of Great Britain for my indecencies at the Longminster Day Victory Parade in 1947

* 2016 – Son is born; move to Brooklyn

* 2019 – Launch The Storm

* 2022 – Take The Storm paid

* 2023 - Discover hidden sea-floor city populated by talking alligators

* 2024 – The Storm becomes my full-time job

* 2025 - Take Storm sabbatical to qualify for the 50-meter hurdles at the 2028 Summer Olympics

On LeBron’s “Decision”

After spending his first several seasons playing for the Cleveland Cavaliers, LeBron announced his 2010 departure for the Miami Heat in his notorious The Decision special.

On MGoBlog and other influences

I’ve written about MGoBlog’s influence on The Storm in the past:

The University of Michigan’s official athletic site is mgoblue.com. Thus, MGoBlog – get it? Clever, right? The site is, actually, brilliant. For Michigan sports fans, it’s a cultural touchstone and reference point, comprehensive and hilarious. Everyone reads it. Everyone. It’s like it’s 1952 and everyone in town reads the same newspaper, only the paper is always and only about Michigan sports and the town is approximately three million ballsports fans spread across the planet. We don’t all read it because we’re all addicted to sports. We all read MGoBlog because the site is incredibly fun, with its own culture, vocabulary, and inside jokes born of the shared frustrations and particulars of Michigan (mostly football, basketball, and hockey) fandom.

Brian Cook is the site’s founder and best writer (I also recommend BiSB, who writes the hysterical Opponent Watch series). Here is a recent and random sample – sportsballtalk made engaging:

It was 10-10 and it was stupid. Like half the games against Indiana, it was stupid and dumb. At some point I saw a highlight from that Denard game against Indiana where IU would score on a 15-play march and then Denard would immediately run for a 70 yard touchdown. "God, that game was stupid," I thought. Flinging the ball in the general direction of Junior Hemingway and hoping something good would happen, sort of thing. Charting 120 defensive plays, sort of thing. Craig Roh playing linebacker, sort of thing.

Don't get me started about #chaosteam, or overtimes, or anything else. My IQ is already dropping precipitously. Any more exposure to Michigan-Indiana may render me unable to finish this column. (I would still be able to claim that MSU was defeated with dignity, if that was my purpose in life.)

I had hoped that a little JJ McCarthy-led mediation in the locker room would straighten things out. Michigan did suffer through a scary event when Mike Hart collapsed on the sideline. This is a completely valid reason you may not be executing football with military precision, even setting aside whatever dorfy bioweapon the Hoosiers perfected about ten years ago.

Those hopes seemed dashed when Michigan was inexplicably offsides on a short-yardage punt on which they didn't even bother to rush. A touchback turned into a punt downed at the two, and then Blake Corum committed a false start and Cornelius Johnson dropped something that was either a chunk play or a 96-yard touchdown. Johnson started hopping up and down near the sideline, veritably slobbering with self-rage. The slope downwards to black pits became very slippery.

JJ McCarthy said "namaste."

Cook is consistent. I knew I could simply grab the first thing from his latest post and it would be excellent, and it was. Even if you know nothing about football, you know that’s strong writing.

In The Storm’s early days, I would often describe my ambitions – to those familiar with both sites – as wanting “to create MGoBlog for Northeast skiing.” What I meant was that I wanted something that would be consistent, engaging, and distinct from competing platforms. Skiing has enough stoke machines and press-release reprint factories. It needed something different. MGoBlog showed me what that something could be.

On being critical without being a tool

This is the Burke example Erik was referring to:

The town of Burke, named for Sir Edmund Burke of the English Parliament, was chartered in 1782. That was approximately the same year that court-appointed receiver Michael Goldberg began seeking a buyer for Burke Mountain, after an idiot named Ariel Quiros nearly sent the ski area (along with Jay Peak) to the graveyard in an $80 million EB-5 visa scandal.

Now, several industrial revolutions and world wars later, Goldberg says he may finally have a buyer for the ski area. But he said the same thing in 2024. And in 2023. And also, famously, in 1812, though the news was all but lost amid that year’s war headlines.

Whether or not Burke ever finds a permanent owner (Goldberg has actually been in charge since 2016), nothing will change the fact that this is one hell of a ski area. While it’s not as snowy as its neighbors stacked along the Green Mountain Spine to its west, Burke gets its share of the white and fluffy. And while the mountain is best-known as the home of racing institution Burke Mountain Academy, the everyskier’s draw here is the endless, tangled, spectacular glade network, lappable off of the 1,581-vertical-foot Mid-Burke Express Quad.

Corrections

* I worked for a long time in corporate communications, HR, and marketing, but not ever exactly in “PR,” as Erik framed it. But I also didn’t really describe it to him very well because I don’t really care and I’m just glad it’s all over.

* I made a vague reference to the NBA pulling its All-Star game out of Atlanta. I was thinking of the league’s 2016 decision to move the 2017 All-Star game out of Charlotte over the state’s “bathroom bill.” This is not a political take I’m just explaining what I was thinking about.

* I said that Jiminy Peak’s season pass cost $1,200. The current early-bird price for a 2025-26 pass is $1,051 for an adult unlimited season pass. The pass is scheduled to hit $1,410 after Oct. 15.

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Who

Erik Mogensen, Director of Indy Pass, founder of Entabeni Systems, and temporary owner and General Manager of Black Mountain, New Hampshire

Recorded on

February 25, 2025

About Entabeni Systems

Entabeni provides software and hardware engineering exclusively for independent ski areas. Per the company’s one-page website:

Entabeni: noun; meaning: zulu - "the mountain"

We take pride in providing world class software and hardware engineering in true ski bum style.

About Indy Pass

Indy Pass delivers two days each at 181 Alpine and 44 cross-country ski areas, plus discounts at eight Allied resorts and four Cat-skiing outfits for the 2024-25 ski season. Indy has announced several additional partners for the 2025-26 ski season. Here is the probable 2025-26 Alpine roster as of March 2, 2025 (click through for most up-to-date roster):

Doug Fish, who has appeared on this podcast four times, founded Indy Pass in 2019. Mogensen, via Entabeni, purchased the pass in 2023.

About Black Mountain, New Hampshire

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Indy Pass

Located in: Jackson, New Hampshire

Year founded: 1935

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

Closest neighboring ski areas: Attitash (:14), Wildcat (:19), Cranmore (:19), Bretton Woods (:40), King Pine (:43), Pleasant Mountain (:48), Sunday River (1:00), Cannon (1:02), Mt. Abram (1:03)

Base elevation: 1,250 feet

Summit elevation: 2,350 feet

Vertical drop: 1,100 feet

Skiable acres: 140

Average annual snowfall: 125 inches

Trail count: 45

Lift count: 5 (1 triple, 1 double, 1 J-bar, 1 platter pull, 1 handletow – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Black Mountain’s lift fleet)

Why I interviewed him

I first spoke to Mogensen in the summer of 2020. He was somewhere out west, running something called Entabeni Systems, and he had insight into a story that I was working on. Indy Pass founder and owner-at-the-time Doug Fish had introduced us. The conversation was helpful. I wrote the story and moved on.

Mogensen didn’t. He kept calling. Kept emailing. There was something he wanted me to understand. Not about any particular story that I was writing, but about skiing as a whole. Specifically, about non-megapass skiing. It wasn’t working, he insisted. It couldn’t work without sweeping and fundamental changes. And he knew how to make those changes. He was already making them, via Entabeni, by delivering jetpack technology to caveman ski areas. They’d been fighting with sticks and rocks but now they had machine guns. But they needed more weapons, and faster.

I still didn’t get it. Not when Mogensen purchased Indy Pass in March 2023, and not when he joined the board at teetering-on-the-edge-of-existence Antelope Butte, Wyoming the following month. I may not have gotten it until Mogensen assembled, that October, a transcontinental coalition to reverse a New Hampshire mountain’s decision to drop dead or contributed, several weeks later, vital funds to help re-open quirky and long-shuttered Hickory, New York.

But in May of that year I had a late-night conversation with Doug Fish in a Savannah bar. He’d had no shortage of Indy Pass suitors, he told me. Fish had chosen Erik, he said, not because his longtime tech partner would respect Indy’s brand integrity or would refuse to sell to Megaski Inc – though certainly both were true – but because in Mogensen, Fish saw a figure messianic in his conviction that family-owned, crockpots-on-tabletops, two-for-Tuesday skiing must not be in the midst of an extinction event.

Mogensen, Fish said, had transformed his world into a laboratory for preventing such a catastrophe, rising before dawn and working all day without pause, focused always and only on skiing. More specifically, on positioning lunch-bucket skiing for a fair fight in the world of Octopus Lifts and $329 lift tickets and suspender-wearing Finance Bros who would swallow the mountains whole if they could poop gold coins out afterward. In service of this vision, Mogensen had created Entabeni from nothing. Indy Pass never would have worked without it, Fish said. “Elon Musk on skis,” Fish called* him. A visionary who would change this thing forever.

Fish was, in a way, mediating. I’d written something - who knows what at this point – that Mogensen hadn’t been thrilled with. Fish counseled us both against dismissiveness. I needed time to appreciate the full epic; Erik to understand the function of media. We still disagree often, but we understand and appreciate one another’s roles. Mogensen is, increasingly, a main character in the story of modern skiing, and I – as a chronicler of such – owe my audience an explanation for why I think so.

*This quote hit different two years ago, when Musk was still primarily known as the tireless disruptor who had mainstreamed electric cars.

What we talked about

Why Indy Pass stepped up to save Black Mountain, New Hampshire; tripling Black’s best revenue year ever in one season; how letting skiers brown bag helped increase revenue; how a beaten-up, dated ski area can compete directly with corporate-owned mountains dripping with high-speed lifts and riding cheap mass-market passes; “I firmly believe that skiing is in a bit of an identity crisis”; free cookies as emotional currency; Black’s co-op quest; Black’s essential elements; skiing’s multi-tiered cost crisis; why the fanciest option is often the only option for lifts, snowcats, and snowguns; what ski areas are really competing against (it isn’t other ski areas); bringing big tech to small skiing with Entabeni; what happened when teenage Mogensen’s favorite ski area closed; “we need to spend 90 percent of our time understanding the problem we’re trying to solve, and 10 percent of our time solving it”; why data matters; where small skiing is in the technology curve; “I think it’s become very, very obvious that where you can level the playing field very quickly is with technology”; why Entabeni purchased Indy Pass; the percent of day-ticket sales that Indy accounts for at partner ski areas; limiting Indy Pass sales and keeping prices low; is Indy Pass a business?; and why Indy will never add a third day.

Questions I wish I’d asked

Mogensen’s tenure at Indy Pass has included some aggressive moves to fend off competition and hold market share. I wrote this series of stories on Indy’s showdown with Ski Cooper over its cheap reciprocal pass two years ago:

These are examples of headlines that Indy Pass HQ were not thrilled with, but I have a job to do. We could have spent an entire podcast re-hashing this, but the story has already been told, and I’d rather move forward than back.

Also, I’d have liked to discuss Antelope Butte, Wyoming and Hickory, New York at length. We glancingly discuss Antelope Butte, and don’t mention Hickory at all, but these are both important stories that I intend to explore more deeply in the future.

Why now was a good time for this interview

Here’s an interesting fact: since 2000, the Major League Baseball team with the highest payroll has won the World Series just three times (the 2018 Red Sox, and the 2000 and ’09 Yankees), and made the series but lost it three additional times (the 2017 Dodgers and 2001 and ’03 Yankees). Sure, the world champ rocks a top-five payroll about half the time, and the vast majority of series winners sit in the top half of the league payroll-wise, but recent MLB history suggests that the dudes with the most resources don’t always win.

Which isn’t to say it’s easy to fight against Epic and Ikon and ski areas with a thousand snowguns and chairlifts that cost more than a fighter jet. But a little creativity helps a lot. And Mogensen has assembled a creative toolkit that independent ski area operators can tap to help them spin-kick their way through the maelstrom:

* When ski areas join Indy Pass, they join what amounts to a nationally marketed menu for hungry skiers anxious for variety and novelty. “Why yes, I’ll have two servings of the Jay Peak and two Cannon Mountains, but I guess I’ll try a side of this Black Mountain so long as I’m here.” Each resulting Indy Pass visit also delivers a paycheck, often from first-time visitors who say, “By gum let’s do it again.”

* Many ski areas, such as Nub’s Nob and Jiminy Peak, build their own snowguns. Some, like Holiday Valley, install their own lifts. The manly man manning machines has been a ski industry trope since the days of Model T-powered ropetows and nine-foot-long skis. But ever so rare is the small ski area that can build, from scratch, a back-end technology system that actually works at scale. Entabeni says “yeah actually let me get this part, Bro.” Tech, as Mogensen says in our interview, is the fastest way for the little dude to catch up with the big dude.

* Ski areas can be good businesses. But they often aren’t. Costs are high, weather is unpredictable, and skiing is hard, cold, and, typically, far away from where the people live. To avoid the inconvenience of having to turn a profit, many ski areas – Bogus Basin, Mad River Glen, Bridger Bowl – have stabilized themselves under alternate business models, in which every dollar the ski area makes funnels directly back into improving the ski area. Black Mountain is attempting to do the same.

I’m an optimist. Ask me about skiing’s future, and I will not choose “death by climate change.” It is, instead, thriving through adaptation, to the environment, to technological shifts, to societal habits. Just watch if you don’t believe me.

Why you should ski Black Mountain

There’s no obvious answer to this question. Black is surrounded by bangers. Twin-peaked Attitash looms across the valley. Towering Wildcat faces Mt. Washington a dozen miles north. Bretton Woods and Sunday River, glimmering and modern, hoteled and mega-lifted and dripping with snowgun bling, rise to the west and to the east, throwing off the gravity and gravitas to haul marching armies of skiers into their kingdoms. Cranmore gives skiers a modern lift and a big new baselodge. Even formerly beat-up Pleasant Mountain now spins a high-speeder up its 1,200 vertical feet. And to even get to Black from points south, skiers have to pass Waterville, Loon, Cannon, Gunstock, and Ragged, all of which offer more terrain, more vert, faster lifts, bigger lodges, and an easier access road.

That’s a tough draw. And it didn’t help that, until recently, Black was, well, a dump. Seasons were short, investment was limited. When things broke, they stayed broken – Mogensen tells me that Black hadn’t made snow above the double chair midstation in 20 years before this winter. When I last showed up to ski at Black, two years ago, I found an empty parking lot and stilled lifts, in spite of assurances on social media and the ski area’s website that this was a normal operating day.

Mogensen fixed all that. The double now spins to the top every day the ski area is open. New snowguns line many trunk trails. A round of explosives tamed Upper Maple Slalom, transforming the run from what was essentially a cliff into an offramp-smooth drag-racer. The J-bar – America’s oldest continuously operating overhead cable lift, in service since 1935 – spins regularly. A handle tow replaced the old rope below the triple. Black has transformed the crippled and sad little mid-mountain lodge into a boisterous party deck with music and champagne and firepits roaring right beneath the double chair. Walls and don’t-do-this-or-that signs came down all over the lodge, which, while still crowded, is now stuffed with families and live music and beer glasses clinking in the dusk.

And this is year one. Mogensen can’t cross five feet of Black’s campus without someone stopping him to ask if he’s “the Indy Pass guy” and hoisting their phone for selfie-time. They all say some version of “thank you for what you’re doing.” They all want in on the co-op. They all want to be part of whatever this crazy, quirky little hill is, which is the opposite of all the zinger lifts and Epkon overload that was supposed to kill off creaky little outfits like this one.

Before I skied Black for three days over Presidents’ weekend, I was skeptical that Mogensen could summon the interest to transform the mountain into a successful co-op. Did New England really have the appetite for another large throwback ski outfit on top of MRG and Smuggs and Magic? All my doubt evaporated as I watched Mogensen hand out free hot cookies like some orange-clad Santa Claus, as I tailed my 8-year-old son into the low-angle labyrinths of Sugar Glades and Rabbit Run, as I watched the busiest day in the mountain’s recorded history fail to produce lift lines longer than three minutes, as Mt. Washington greeted me each time I slid off the Summit double.

Black Mountain is a special place, and this is a singular time to go and be a part of it. So do that.

Podcast Notes

On Black Mountain’s comeback

In October 2023, Black Mountain’s longtime owner, John Fichera, abruptly announced that the ski area would close, probably forever. An alarmed Mogensen rolled in with an offer to help: keep the ski area open, and Indy and Entabeni will help you find a buyer. Fichera agreed. I detailed the whole rapid-fire saga here:

A year and dozens of perspective buyers later, Black remained future-less heading into the 2024-25 winter. So Mogensen shifted tactics, buying the mountain via Indy Pass and promising to transform the ski area into a co-op:

On the Mad River Glen co-op

As of this writing, Mad River Glen, the feisty, single-chair-accessed 2,000-footer that abuts Alterra’s Sugarbush, is America’s only successful ski co-op. Here’s how it started and how it works, per MRG’s website:

Mad River Glen began a new era in 1995 when its skiers came together to form the Mad River Glen Cooperative. The Cooperative works to fulfill a simple mission;

“… to forever protect the classic Mad River Glen skiing experience by preserving low skier density, natural terrain and forests, varied trail character, and friendly community atmosphere for the benefit of shareholders, area personnel and patrons.” …

A share in the Mad River Cooperative costs $2,000. Shares may be purchased through a single payment or in 40 monthly installments of $50 with a $150 down payment. The total cost for an installment plan is $2,150 (8.0% Annual Percentage Rate). The installment option enables anyone who loves and appreciates Mad River Glen to become an owner for as little as $50 per month. Either way, you start enjoying the benefits immediately! The only other cost is the annual Advance Purchase Requirement (APR) of $200. Since advance purchases can be applied to nearly every product and service on the mountain, including season passes, tickets, ski school and food, the advance purchase requirement does not represent an additional expense for most shareholders. In order to remain in good standing as a shareholder and receive benefits, your full APR payment must be met each year by September 30th.

Black is still working out the details of its co-op. I can’t share what I already know, other than to say that Black’s organizational structure will be significantly different from MRG’s.

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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: 7 (2 high-speed quads, 4 doubles, 1 carpet – 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.

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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.