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Who

Brett Cook, Vice President and General Manager of Seven Springs, Hidden Valley, and Laurel Mountain, Pennsylvania

Recorded on

January 30, 2023

About Seven Springs

Owned by: Vail Resorts

Pass affiliations: Epic Pass, Epic Local Pass, Northeast Value Epic Pass, Northeast Midweek Epic Pass

Located in: Seven Springs, Pennsylvania

Year opened: 1932

Closest neighboring ski areas: Hidden Valley (17 minutes), Laurel Mountain (45 minutes), Nemacolin (46 minutes), Boyce Park (1 hour), Wisp (1 hour), Blue Knob (1 hour, 30 minutes)

Base elevation: 2,240 feet

Summit elevation: 2,994 feet

Vertical drop: 754 feet

Skiable Acres: 285

Average annual snowfall: 135 inches

Trail count: 48 (5 expert, 6 advanced, 15 intermediate, 16 beginner, 6 terrain parks)

Lift count: 14­­ (2 six-packs, 4 fixed-grip quads, 4 triples, 3 carpets, 1 ropetow)

About Hidden Valley

Owned by: Vail Resorts

Pass affiliations: Epic Pass, Epic Local Pass, Northeast Value Epic Pass, Northeast Midweek Epic Pass

Located in: Hidden Valley, Pennsylvania

Year opened: 1955

Closest neighboring ski areas: Seven Springs (17 minutes), Laurel Mountain (34 minutes), Mystic Mountain (50 minutes), Boyce Park (54 minutes),Wisp (1 hour), Blue Knob (1 hour 19 minutes)

Base elevation: 2,405 feet

Summit elevation: 2,875 feet

Vertical drop: 470 feet

Skiable Acres: 110

Average annual snowfall: 140 inches

Trail count: 32 (9 advanced, 13 intermediate, 8 beginner, 2 terrain parks)

Lift count: 8 (2 fixed-grip quads, 2 triples, 2 carpets, 2 handle tows)

About Laurel Mountain

Owned by: Vail Resorts

Pass affiliations: Epic Pass, Epic Local Pass, Northeast Value Epic Pass, Northeast Midweek Epic Pass

Located in: Boswell, Pennsylvania

Year opened: 1939

Closest neighboring ski areas: Hidden Valley (34 minutes), Seven Springs (45 minutes), Boyce Park (1 hour), Blue Knob (1 hour), Mystic Mountain (1 hour, 15 minutes), Wisp (1 hour, 15 minutes)

Base elevation: 2,005 feet

Summit elevation: 2,766 feet

Vertical drop: 761 feet

Skiable Acres: 70

Average annual snowfall: 41 inches

Trail count: 20 (2 expert, 2 advanced, 6 intermediate, 10 beginner)

Lift count: 2­­ (1 fixed-grip quad, 1 handle tow)

Below the paid subscriber jump: a summary of our podcast conversation, a look at abandoned Hidden Valley expansions, historic Laurel Mountain lift configurations, and much more.

Beginning with podcast 116, the full podcast articles are no longer available on the free content tier. Why? They take between 10 and 20 hours to research and write, and readers have demonstrated that they are willing to pay for content. My current focus with The Storm is to create value for anyone who invests their money into the product. Here are examples of a few past podcast articles, if you would like to see the format: Vail Mountain, Mt. Spokane, Snowbasin, Mount Bohemia, Brundage. To anyone who is supporting The Storm: thank you very much. You have guaranteed that this is a sustainable enterprise for the indefinite future.

Why I interviewed him

I’ve said this before, but it’s worth repeating. Most Vail ski areas fall into one of two categories: the kind skiers will fly around the world for, and the kind skiers won’t drive more than 15 minutes for. Whistler, Park City, Heavenly fall into the first category. Mt. Brighton, Alpine Valley, Paoli Peaks into the latter. I exaggerate a bit on the margins, but when I drive from New York City to Liberty Mountain, I know this is not a well-trod path.

Seven Springs, like Hunter or Attitash, occupies a slightly different category in the Vail empire. It is both a regional destination and a high-volume big-mountain feeder. Skiers will make a weekend of these places, from Pittsburgh or New York City or Boston, then they will use the pass to vacation in Colorado. It’s a better sort of skiing than your suburban knolls, more sprawling and interesting, more repeatable for someone who doesn’t know what a Corky Flipdoodle 560 is.

“Brah that sounds sick!”

Thanks Park Brah. I appreciate you. But you know I just made that up, right?

“Brah have you seen my shoulder-mounted Boombox 5000 backpack speaker? I left it right here beside my weed vitamins.”

Sorry Brah. I have not.

Anyway, I happen to believe that these sorts of in-the-middle resorts are the next great frontier of ski area consolidation. All the big mountains have either folded under the Big Four umbrella or have gained so much megapass negotiating power that the incentive to sell has rapidly evaporated. The city-adjacent bumps such as Boston Mills were a novel and highly effective strategy for roping cityfolk into Epic Passes, but as pure ski areas, those places just are not and never will be terribly compelling experiences. But the middle is huge and mostly untapped, and these are some of the best ski areas in America, mountains that are large enough to give you a different experience each time but contained enough that you don’t feel as though you’ve just wandered into an alternate dimension. There’s enough good terrain to inspire loyalty and repeat visits, but it’s not so good that passholders don’t dream of the hills beyond.

Examples: Timberline, West Virginia; Big Powderhorn, Michigan; Berkshire East and Jiminy Peak in Massachusetts; Plattekill, New York; Elk Mountain, Pennsylvania; Mt. Spokane, Washington; Bear Valley, California; Cascade or Whitecap, Wisconsin; Magic Mountain, Vermont; or Black Mountain, New Hampshire. There are dozens more. Vail’s Midwestern portfolio is expansive but bland, day-ski bumps but no weekend-type spots on the level of Crystal Mountain, Michigan or Lutsen, Minnesota.

If you want to understand the efficacy of this strategy, the Indy Pass was built on it. Ninety percent of its roster is the sorts of mountains I’m referring to above. Jay Peak and Powder Mountain sell passes, but dang it Bluewood and Shanty Creek are kind of nice now that the pass nudged me toward them. Once Vail and Alterra realize how crucial these middle mountains are to filling in the pass blanks, expect them to start competing for the space. Seven Springs, I believe, is a test case in how impactful a regional destination can be both in pulling skiers in and pushing them out across the world. Once this thing gels, look the hell out.

What we talked about

The not-so-great Western Pennsylvania winter so far; discovering skiing as an adult; from liftie to running the largest ski resort in Pennsylvania; the life and death of Snow Time Resorts; joining the Peak Pass; two ownership transitions in less than a year, followed by Covid; PA ski culture; why the state matters to Vail; helping a Colorado ski company understand the existential urgency of snowmaking in the East; why Vail doubled down on PA with the Seven Springs purchase when they already owned five ski areas in the state; breaking down the difference between the Roundtop-Liberty-Whitetail trio and the Seven-Springs-Hidden-Valley-Laurel trio; the cruise ship in the mountains; rugged and beautiful Western PA; dissecting the amazing outsized snowfall totals in Western Pennsylvania; Vail Resorts’ habit of promoting from within; how Vail’s $20-an-hour minimum wage hit in Pennsylvania; the legacy of the Nutting family, the immediate past owners of the three ski areas; the legendary Herman Dupree, founder of Seven Springs and HKD snowguns; Seven Springs amazing sprawling snowmaking system, complete with 49(!) ponds; why the system isn’t automated and whether it ever will be; how planting more trees could change the way Seven Springs skis; connecting the ski area’s far-flung beginner terrain; where we could see additional glades at Seven Springs; rethinking the lift fleet; the importance of redundant lifts; do we still need Tyrol?; why Seven Springs, Hidden Valley, and Laurel share a single general manager; thinking of lifts long-term at Hidden Valley; Hidden Valley’s abandoned expansion plans and whether they could ever be revived; the long and troubled history of state-owned Laurel Mountain; keeping the character at this funky little upside-down boomer; “We love what Laurel Mountain is and we’re going to continue to own that”; building out Laurel’s snowmaking system; expansion potential at Laurel; “Laurel is a hidden gem and we don’t want it to be hidden anymore”; Laurel’s hidden handletow; evolving Laurel’s lift fleet; managing a state-owned ski area; Seven Springs’ new trailmap; the Epic Pass arrives; and this season’s lift-ticket limits.        

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

When Vail bought Peak Resorts in 2019, they suddenly owned nearly a quarter of Pennsylvania’s ski areas: Big Boulder, Jack Frost, Whitetail, Roundtop, and Liberty. That’s a lot of Eagles jerseys. And enough, I thought, that we wouldn’t see VR snooping around for more PA treasures to add to their toybox.

Then, to my surprise, the company bought Seven Springs – which they clearly wanted – along with Hidden Valley and Laurel, which they probably didn’t, in late 2021. Really what they bought was Pittsburgh, metropolitan population 2.3 million, and their large professional class of potentially globe-trotting skiers. All these folks needed was an excuse to buy an Epic Pass. Vail gave them one.

So now what? Vail knows what to do with a large, regionally dominant ski area like Seven Springs. It’s basically Pennsylvania’s version of Stowe or Park City or Heavenly. It was pretty good when you bought it, now you just have to not ruin it and remind everyone that they can now ski Whistler on their season pass. Hidden Valley, with its hundreds of on-mountain homeowners, suburban-demographic profile, and family orientation more or less fit Vail’s portfolio too.

But what to do with Laurel? Multiple locals assured me that Vail would close it. Vail doesn’t do that – close ski areas – but they also don’t buy 761-vertical-foot bumps at the ass-end of nowhere with almost zero built-in customer base and the snowmaking firepower of a North Pole souvenir snowglobe. They got it because it came with Seven Springs, like your really great spouse who came with a dad who thinks lawnmowers are an FBI conspiracy. I know what I think Vail should do with Laurel – dump money into the joint to aggressively route crowds away from the larger ski areas – but I didn’t know whether they would, or had even considered it.

Vail’s had 14 months now to think this over. What are these mountains? How do they fit? What are we going to do with them? I got some answers.

Questions I wish I’d asked

You know, it’s weird that Vail has two Hidden Valleys. Boyne, just last year, changed the name of its “Boyne Highlands” resort to “The Highlands,” partly because, one company executive told me, skiers would occasionally show up to the wrong resort with a condo reservation. I imagine that’s why Earl Holding ultimately backed off on renaming Snowbasin to “Sun Valley, Utah,” as he reportedly considered doing in the leadup to the 2002 Olympics – if you give people an easy way to confuse themselves, they will generally take you up on it.

I realize this is not really the same thing. Boyne Mountain and The Highlands are 40 minutes apart. Vail’s two Hidden Valleys are 10-and-a-half hours from each other by car. Still. I wanted to ask Cook if this weird fact had any hilarious unintended consequences (I desperately wish Holding would have renamed Snowbasin). Perhaps confusion in the Epic Mix app? Or someone purchasing lift tickets for the incorrect resort? An adult lift ticket at Hidden Valley, Pennsylvania for tomorrow is $75 online and $80 in person, but just $59 online/$65 in person for Hidden Valley, Missouri. Surely someone has confused the two?

So, which one should we rename? And what should we call it? Vail has been trying to win points lately with lift names that honor local landmarks – they named their five new lifts at Jack Frost-Big Boulder “Paradise,” “Tobyhanna,” “Pocono,” “Harmony,” and “Blue Heron” (formerly E1 Lift, E2 Lift, B Lift, C Lift, E Lift, F Lift, Merry Widow I, Merry Widow II, and Edelweiss). So how about renaming Hidden Valley PA to something like “Allegheny Forest?” Or call Hidden Valley, Missouri “Mississippi Mountain?” Yes, both of those names are terrible, but so is having two Hidden Valleys in the same company.

What I got wrong

* I guessed in the podcast that Pennsylvania was the “fifth- or sixth-largest U.S. state by population.” It is number five, with an approximate population of 13 million, behind New York (19.6M), Florida (22.2M), Texas (30M), and California (39M).

* I guessed that the base of Keystone is “nine or 10,000 feet.” The River Run base area sits at 9,280 feet.

* I mispronounced the last name of Seven Springs founder Herman Dupre as “Doo-Pree.” It is pronounced “Doo-Prey.”

* I said there were “lots” of thousand-vertical-foot ski areas in Pennsylvania. There are, in fact, just four: Blue Mountain (1,140 feet), Blue Knob (1,073 feet), Elk (1,000 feet), and Montage (1,000 feet).

Why you should ski Seven Springs, Hidden Valley, and Laurel

It’s rugged country out there. Not what you’re thinking. More Appalachian crag than Poconos scratch. Abrupt and soaring. Beautiful. And snowy. In a state where 23 of 28 ski areas average fewer than 50 inches of snow per season, Seven Springs and Laurel bring in 135-plus apiece.

Elevation explains it. A 2,000-plus-foot base is big-time in the East. Killington sits at 1,165 feet. Sugarloaf at 1,417. Stowe at 1,559. All three ski areas sit along the crest of 70-mile-long Laurel Ridge, a storm door on the western edge of the Allegheny Front that rakes southeast-bound moisture from the sky as it trains out of Lake Erie.

When the snow doesn’t come, they make it. Now that Big Boulder has given up, Seven Springs is typically the first ski area in the state to open. It fights with Camelback for last-to-close. Twelve hundred snowguns and 49 snowmaking ponds help.

Seven Springs doesn’t have the state’s best pure ski terrain – look to Elk Mountain or, on the rare occasions it’s fully open, Blue Knob for that – but it’s Pennsylvania’s largest, most complete, and, perhaps, most consistent operation. It is, in fact, the biggest ski area in the Mid-Atlantic, a ripping and unpretentious ski region where you know you’ll get turns no matter how atrocious the weather gets.

Hidden Valley is something different. Cozy. Easy. Built for families on parade. Laurel is something different too. Steep and fierce, a one-lift wonder dug out of the graveyard by an owner with more passion, it seems, than foresight. Laurel needs snowmaking. Top to bottom and on every trail. The hill makes no sense in 2023 without it. Vail won’t abandon the place outright, but if they don’t knock $10 million in snowmaking into the dirt, they’ll be abandoning it in principle.

Podcast Notes

The trailmap rabbit hole – Hidden Valley

We discussed the proposed-but-never-implemented expansion at Hidden Valley, which would have sat skier’s right of the Avalanche pod. Here it is on the 2010 trailmap:

The 2002 version actually showed three potential lifts serving this pod:

Unfortunately, this expansion is unlikely. Cook explains why in the pod.

The trailmap rabbit hole – Laurel

Laurel, which currently has just one quad and a handletow, has carried a number of lift configurations over the decades. This circa 1981 trailmap shows a double chair where the quad now sits, and a series of surface lifts climbing the Broadway side of the hill, and another set of them bunched at the summit:

The 2002 version shows a second chairlift – which I believe was a quad – looker’s right, and surface lifts up top to serve beginners, tubers, and the terrain park:

Related: here’s a pretty good history of all three ski areas, from 2014.

The Pennsylvania ski inventory rabbithole

Pennsylvania skiing is hard to get. No one seems to know how many ski areas the state has. The NSAA says there are 26. Cook referenced 24 on the podcast. The 17 that Wikipedia inventories include Alpine Mountain, which has been shuttered for years. Ski Central (22), Visit PA (21), and Ski Resort Info (25) all list different numbers. My count is 28. Most lists neglect to include the six private ski areas that are owned by homeowners’ associations or reserved for resort guests. Cook and I also discussed which ski area owned the state’s highest elevation (it’s Blue Knob), so I included base and summit elevations as well:

The why-is-Vail-allowed-to-own-80-percent-of-Ohio’s-public-ski-areas? rabbithole

Cook said he wasn’t sure how many ski areas there are in Ohio. There are six. One is a private club. Snow Trails is family-owned. Vail owns the other four. I think this shouldn’t be allowed, especially after how poorly Vail managed them last season, and especially how badly Snow Trails stomped them from an operations point of view. But here we are:

The steepest-trail rabbithole

We discuss Laurel’s Wildcat trail, which the ski area bills as the steepest in the state. I generally avoid echoing these sorts of claims, which are hard to prove and not super relevant to the actual ski experience. You’ll rarely see skiers lapping runs like Rumor at Gore or White Lightning at Montage, mostly because they frankly just aren’t that much fun, exercises in ice-rink survival skiing for the Brobot armies. But if you want the best primer I’ve seen on this subject, along with an inventory of some very steep U.S. ski trails, read this one on Skibum.net. The article doesn’t mention Laurel’s Wildcat trail, but the ski area was closed sporadically and this site’s heyday was about a decade ago, so it may have been left out as a matter of circumstance.

The “back in my day” rabbithole

I referenced an old “punchcard program” at Roundtop during our conversation. I was referring to the Night Club Program offered by former-former owner Snow Time Resorts at Roundtop, Liberty, and Whitetail. When Snow Time sold the ski area in 2018 to Peak Resorts, the buyer promptly dropped the evening programs. When Vail purchased the resort in 2019, it briefly re-instated some version of them (I think), but I don’t believe they survived the Covid winter (2020-21). This 5,000-word March 2019 article (written four months before Vail purchased the resorts) from DC Ski distills the rage around this abrupt pass policy change. Four years later, I still get emails about this, and not infrequently. I’m kind of surprised Vail hasn’t offered some kind of Pennsylvania-specific pass, since they have more ski areas in that state (eight) than they have in any other, including Colorado (five). After all, the company sells an Ohio-specific pass that started at just $299 last season. Why not a PA-specific version for, say, $399, for people who want to ski always and only at Roundtop or Liberty or Big Boulder? Or a nights-only pass?

I suppose Vail could do this, and I suspect they won’t. The Northeast Value Pass – good for mostly unlimited access at all of the company’s ski areas from Michigan on east – sold for $514 last spring. A midweek version ran $385. A seven-day Epic Day Pass good at all the Pennsylvania ski areas was just $260 for adults and $132 for kids aged 5 to 12. I understand that there is a particular demographic of skiers who will never ski north of Harrisburg and will never stop blowing up message boards with their disappointment and rage over this. The line between a sympathetic character and a tedious one is thin, however, and eventually we’re all better off focusing our energies on the things we can control.

The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 9/100 in 2023, and number 395 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane, or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email [email protected].

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Feb. 1. It dropped for free subscribers on Feb. 4. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription.

Who

Davy Ratchford, Vice President and General Manager of Snowbasin Resort, Utah

Recorded on

January 31, 2023

About Snowbasin

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: The R. Earl Holding Family

Pass affiliations: Ikon Pass, Mountain Collective

Located in: Huntsville, Utah

Year founded: 1940

Closest neighboring ski areas: Nordic Valley (30 minutes), Powder Mountain (35 minutes), Woodward Park City (1:05), Utah Olympic Park (1:08), Park City (1:15), Deer Valley (1:15), Snowbird (1:15), Alta (1:20), Solitude (1:20), Brighton (1:25), Sundance (1:40), Cherry Peak (1:45), Beaver Mountain (2:00) – travel times vary considerably based upon weather and traffic

Base elevation: 6,450 feet

Summit elevation: 9,350 feet

Vertical drop: 2,900 feet

Skiable Acres: 3,000

Average annual snowfall: 300 inches

Trail count: 111

Lift count: 12­­ (One 15-passenger tram, 2 eight-passenger gondolas, 2 six-packs, 2 high-speed quads, 2 triples, 1 ropetow, 2 carpets) – Snowbasin will add a third six-pack on an all-new line this summer (more on this below).

Why I interviewed him

For 60 years it sat there, empty, enormous, unnoticed. Utah skiing was Park City and Alta; Snowbird in the ‘70s; Deer Valley in the ‘80s; sometimes Solitude and Brighton. No need to ski outside that powder pocket east of SLC: in 1995, an Alta lift ticket cost $25, and the area resorts frequently landed on ski magazine “least-crowded” lists.

The November 2000 issue of Ski distilled Snowbasin’s malaise:

Though skiers were climbing the high ridgeline that overlooks the small city of Ogden as far back as the Thirties, Alta founder Alf Engen officially discovered Snowbasin in 1940. At that time the high, sunny basin was used for cattle range, but it was so overgrazed that eroded topsoil and bloated carcasses of dead cows were tainting Ogden’s water supply. Working with the U.S. Forest Service, Ogden’s town fathers decided that a ski resort would provide income and recreation while also safeguarding the water supply. A deal was struck with the ranch owner, and Snowbasin opened for business.

In the 60 years since, the resort has struggled under five owners, including Vail-founder Pete Seibert, who owned it in the mid-Eighties. The problem was a lack of lodging. Snowbasin was too far from Salt Lake City to attract out-of-state skiers and too far from Ogden to use the city’s aging railroad center as a resort base. Successive owners realized that to succeed, Snowbasin needed a base village, but building one from scratch is a costly proposition. So for half a century, the resort has remained the private powder stash of Ogden locals and the few lucky skiers who have followed rumors of deep snow and empty lifts up Ogden Canyon.

In 1984, Earl Holding, an oil tycoon who had owned Sun Valley since 1978, purchased the resort from Seibert (process the fact that Snowbasin was once part of the Vail portfolio for a moment). For a long time, nothing much changed. Then came the 2002 Olympics. In a single offseason in 1998, the resort added two gondolas, a tram, and a high-speed quad (John Paul), along with the thousand-ish-acre Strawberry terrain pod. A new access road cut 13 miles off the drive from Salt Lake City. Glimmering base lodges rose from the earth.

Still, Snowbasin languished. “But despite the recent addition of modern lifts, it has still failed to attract more than 100,000 skier visits the past two seasons,” Ski wrote in 2000, attributing this volume partly to “the fact that the Olympics, not today’s lift ticket revenue, is the management’s priority.” Holding, the magazine reported, was considering a bizarre name change for the resort to “Sun Valley.” As in, Sun Valley, Utah. Reminder: there was no social media in 2000.

That’s all context, to make this point: the Snowbasin that I’m writing about today – a glimmering end-of-the-road Ikon Pass jewel with a Jetsonian lift fleet – is not the Snowbasin we were destined to have. From backwater to baller in a generation. This is the template, like it or not, for the under-developed big-mountain West. Vail Mountain, Park City, Snowbird, Palisades Tahoe, Breckenridge, Steamboat: these places cannot accommodate a single additional skier. They’re full. The best they can do now is redistribute skiers across the mountain and suck more people out of the base areas with higher-capacity lifts. But with record skier visits and the accelerating popularity of multi-mountain passes that concentrate more of them in fewer places, we’re going to need relief valves. And soon.

There are plenty more potential Snowbasins out there. Mountains with big acreage and big snowfall but underdeveloped lift and lodging infrastructure and various tiers of accessibility issues: White Pass, Mission Ridge, Silver Mountain, Montana Snowbowl, Great Divide, Discovery, Ski Apache, Angel Fire, Ski Santa Fe, Powder Mountain, Sierra-at-Tahoe, Loveland. There are dozens more.

Snowbasin’s story is singular and remarkable, a testament to invested owners and the power of media magnification to alter the fate of a place. But the mountain’s tale is instructive as well, of how skiing can reorient itself around something other than our current version of snowy bunchball, the tendency for novice soccer players to disregard positions and swarm to wherever the ball moves. Snowbasin didn’t matter and now it does. Who’s next?

What we talked about

Utah’s amazing endless 2022-23 snow season; an Irish fairytale; skiing Beaver Mountain in jeans; helping to establish Utah’s Major League Soccer team and then leaving for the ski industry; “if you have a chance to raise your family in the mountains, you should do that”; the unique characteristic of a ski career that helps work-life balance; much love for the Vail Fam; the Holding family legacy; “Snowbasin is a gift to the world”; the family’s commitment to keeping Snowbasin independent long-term; “they’re going to put in the best possible things, all the time”; amazing lodges, bathrooms and all; Snowbasin’s Olympic legacy and potential future involvement in the Games; breaking down the DeMoisy Express six-pack that will go up Strawberry this summer; what the new lift will mean for the Strawberry gondola; soccer fans versus ski fans; managing a resort in the era of knucklehead social media megaphones; “I’ve lost a lot of employees to guests”; taming the rumor machine; reflecting on the Middle Bowl lift upgrade; long-term upgrades for the Becker and Porcupine triples; Snowbasin’s ambitious base-area redevelopment plan, including an all-inclusive Club Med, new lifts and terrain, and upgraded access road; “the amount of desire to own something here is huge”; what happens with parking once the mountain builds a village over it; the curse of easy access; breaking down the new beginner terrain and lifts that will accompany the village; whether future large-scale terrain expansion is possible; and leaving the Epic Pass for Ikon and Mountain Collective.

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

Last month, Snowbasin announced that it will build the DeMoisy Express, a long-awaited six-pack that will run parallel to the Strawberry Gondola on a slightly shorter line, for the 2023-24 ski season. Here’s where it will sit on the current trailmap (highlighted below):

This will be Snowbasin’s second six-pack in just two years, and it follows the resort’s 2021 announcement of an ambitious base-area development plan, which will include new beginner terrain, several new lifts, a mixed-use pedestrian village, access-road improvements, and an all-inclusive Club Med resort. Here’s a rendering of the reconfigured base at full build-out:

Snowbasin, along with sister resort Sun Valley, also stalked off the Epic Pass last year, fleeing for the Mountain Collective and Ikon passes. “Because we’re smart,” Ratchford half-joked when I asked him why the resorts left Epic after just three years. He framed the switch as an opportunity to expose the resorts to new skiers. Snowbasin surely will not be the last resort to change allegiances. Don’t think big indies like Jackson Hole, Taos, and Revelstoke aren’t listening when Vail calls, offering them a blank check to change jerseys.

What I got wrong

I had an on-the-fly moment where I mixed up the Wildcat Express six-pack and the Littlecat Express high-speed quad. I asked Ratchford how they were going to upgrade Little Cat (as suggested in the base-area redevelopment image above), when it was already a six-pack. Dumb stuff happens in the moment during these podcasts, and while I guess I could ask the robots to fix it, I’d rather just own the mistake and keep moving.

Why you should ski Snowbasin

I love skiing Alta and Snowbird, but I don’t love skiing anywhere enough to endure the mass evacuation drill that is a Cottonwoods powder-day commute. Not when there’s a place like Snowbasin where you can just, you know, pull into the parking lot and go skiing.

What you’ll find when you arrive is as good as anything you’ll hunt down in U.S. skiing. Maybe not from a total snowfall perspective – though 300 inches is impressive anywhere outside of Utah – but from a lift-and-lodge infrastructure point of view. Four – soon to be five – high-speed chairlifts, a tram and two gondolas, and a couple old triple chairs that Ratchford tells me will be replaced fairly soon, and probably with high-speed quads. The lodges are legendary, palaces of excess and overbuild, welcome in an industry that makes Lunch-Table Death-Match a core piece of the experience. If you need to take your pet elephant to the bathroom, plug Snowbasin into your GPS – I assure you the stalls can accommodate them.

But, really, you ski Snowbasin because Snowbasin is easy to get to and easy to access, with the Ikon Pass that most people reading this probably already have, and with terrain that’s as good as just about anything else you’re going to find in U.S. America.

Podcast Notes

On Park City: Ratchford referred obliquely to the ownership change at Park City in 2014, saying, “if you know the history there…” Well, if you don’t know the history there, longtime resort owner Powdr Corp made the biggest oopsie in the history of lift-served skiing when it, you know, forgot to renew its lease on the mountain. Vail, in what was the most coldblooded move in the history of lift-served skiing, installed itself as the new lessee in what I can imagine was a fit of cackling glee. It was amazing. You can read more about it here and here. If only The Storm had existed back then.

On the Olympics: While I don’t cover the Olympics at all (I completely ignored them last year, the first Winter Games in which The Storm existed), I do find their legacy at U.S. ski resorts interesting. Only five U.S. ski areas have hosted events: Whiteface (1980), Palisades Tahoe (1960), and, in 2002, Deer Valley, Park City, and Snowbasin. Ratchford and I talk a bit about this legacy, and the potential role of his resort in the upcoming 2030 or 2034 Games – Salt Lake City is bidding to host one or the other. Read more here.

On megapasses: Snowbasin has been all over the place with megapasses. Here’s its history, as best I can determine:

* 2013: Snowbasin joins the Powder Alliance reciprocal coalition (it is unclear when Snowbasin left this coalition)

* 2017: Snowbasin joins Mountain Collective for 2017-18 ski season

* 2019: Snowbasin joins Epic Pass, leaves Mountain Collective for 2019-20 ski season

* 2022: Snowbasin leaves Epic Pass, re-joins Mountain Collective and joins Ikon Pass for 2022-23 ski season

The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 8/100 in 2023, and number 394 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane, or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email [email protected].

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

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Jan. 31. It dropped for free subscribers on Feb. 3. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription.

Who

Jeremy Clark, Founder of New England Ski History and contributor to New England Ski Industry News

Recorded on

December 6, 2022

About New England Ski History

New England Ski History has two main components:

1) NewEnglandSkiHistory.com

This is HQ. Each New England state gets a landing page, which in turn links out to profiles of all its active ski areas, its major lost ski areas, and many planned-but-never built ski areas:

* Connecticut

* Maine

* Massachusetts

* New Hampshire

* Rhode Island

* Vermont

There are also pages devoted to expansions (both realized and cancelled), lifts (sorted by type, brand, or year installed or removed), and trailmaps. One of my favorite features is the inventory of historic lift ticket and season pass prices (select the drop-downs at the top to change the state or season).

The site, like its subject matter, is a little retro, but the information is, in general, very current. For New England podcast prep, this site is gold.

2) NewEnglandSkiIndustry.com

This is a news site, focused always and only on New England. The subject matter is expansive and often esoteric: updates on chairlift construction or obscure ski area re-openings – topics few other outlets would cover, but of clear interest to the typical Storm reader. I never send out a news update without checking this site for tidbits that I would otherwise miss. Clark recently launched a Substack newsletter that pushes these headlines right to your email inbox - subscribe below:

Why I interviewed him

There has been organized skiing in New England for at least 100 years. Rolling terrain, half-year-long winters, and population density made that inevitable. As soon as machines tiptoed their way into Earth’s timeline, New Englanders began flinging them up hillsides. Some stuck. Most didn’t. Today, New England skiing is a couple dozen monsters, a few dozen locals, and a scattering of surface-lift bumps where a lift ticket costs less than a pack of smokes.

As rich as this history is, there are few reliable sources of historical information on New England skiing. New England Lost Ski Areas Project has documented more than 600 lost ski areas across the region – the site’s founder, Jeremy Davis, was one of my first guests on The Storm Skiing Podcast back in 2019 (it’s still one of my favorite episodes). The New England Ski Museum has put together timelines on the development of lifts, snowmaking, grooming, and more. But current information on still-operating ski areas is hard to find outside of the ski area sites themselves, and even those are often unhelpful for anything more in-depth than pulling up the current trailmap.

New England Ski History hosts the best and most comprehensive library of information not just on the region’s major lost ski areas, but on the 90-ish active ones. One thing that has frustrated me in the internet age is how difficult it can be to find what should be the most basic information. What year did Jay Peak open? What is the vertical drop of Veterans Memorial ski hill in New Hampshire? Why did Mt. Tom, Massachusetts, close despite its popularity?

For the past 15 to 20 years, Jeremy Clark, who as a tech-brained 1990s teenager built Berkshire East’s first website, has been organizing all of this information in one place. The site is free for all, but it has been invaluable to me as a reliable information source on all things New England skiing. I never knew who ran it – unlike The Storm, there is no name adjacent to the masthead - until late last year, when I fired off an email to the anonymous address posted on the site. Clark answered right away, and here we are.

What we talked about

New England snowmaking superpowers; New England Ski History HQ; the rotation theory of skiing; unsung but interesting small ski areas; growing up at atmospheric and primitive Berkshire East; the power plant that changed weather in the entire valley; Roy Schaefer, savior of Berkshire East; building the ski area’s first website for $180 in the ‘90s; the annual continent-wide hunt for used equipment; the evolution of Berkshire East from backwater to four-seasons resort that’s a top-10 draw on the Indy Pass; the 100-year-old but little-known Eaglebrook ski area; Proctor Academy ski area; “I realized I’d be able to ski a lot more if I didn’t work in the ski business”; how and why Jeremy created New England Ski History; building the site’s tremendous ski area profiles; the value of showing up; the potential to scale the site up; assembling the jigsaw puzzle of a decades-long ski-area history; “the goal of the site is to get the history right”; sorting out Berkshire East’s complicated history; the role of the interstates in building New England skiing; keeping the site updated; New England Ski Industry News and its corresponding Substack newsletter; why Clark shut down the New England Ski History Facebook page, even though it had approximately 10,000 followers; lost ski areas; the devastating loss of Mt. Tom and why it will likely never return; the value of small ski areas; Brodie; “intermediate terrain is great for business”; the rise and fall of Ski Blandford; Woodbury, Connecticut and whether it could ever come back; assessing Saddleback two years in; the attempted comebacks of Granite Gorge and Tenney; what it would take to make The Balsams happen; what it takes to bring a lost ski area back from the dead; the drama at Big Squaw and whether the upper mountain will ever re-open; whether Big Squaw’s minimalist model would work to keep other lost ski areas alive; potential lost ski areas that could re-emerge from the dead; Mt. Prospect; the comeback potential of Plymouth Ski Area in Vermont; New England expansion plans; Ragged; the good and bad of multi-mountain passes; what skiing and smoking have in common; reaction to Pacific Group Resorts purchasing Jay Peak; Vail and New Hampshire – “I hope they’ve learned that New Hampshire is a lot different than Vermont”; and upgrades at Attitash.          

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

One of The Storm’s animating principles is the celebration of excellence. Who is doing things right in the ski world? Sometimes that’s Jay Peak and Whitefish middle-fingering astronomical big-mountain walk-up lift ticket prices. Sometimes that’s Alterra assembling the greatest ski area lineup in the history of multi-mountain passes. And sometimes it’s someone who has quietly built a damn good website that enriches the world of lift-served skiing in a way that no one else has managed to do. That’s why I’ve hosted the owners of Lift Blog, Real Skiers, and Seniors Skiing on the pod. And that’s why I invited Clark onto the show.

Industrialized skiing is evolving at an insane pace. It was just six years ago that Vail purchased its first New England ski area. At the time – 2017 – there was no Ikon Pass, no Alterra Mountain Company, no Indy Pass, no Covid, no eight-place chairlifts (in America). The more debris there is blowing around in the storm, the harder it can be to remember the world before it floated in. We all need centering mechanisms, places where we can draw context and anchor our understandings. For New England skiing – one of the most vibrant wintertime cultures on the planet – there is really no better or more comprehensive source than New England Ski History. As we all try to make sense of our ever-changing megapass-dominated ski world of 2023 together, I thought that it would be valuable to point out that the region’s past, at least, was already capably organized.

What I got wrong

* I said that I couldn’t think of any New England ski areas that remain under their original ownership, and Clark quickly pointed out that Pats Peak has been under the stewardship of the Patenaude family since it opened in 1962, which of course: I had just discussed that very point with Pats Peak GM Kris Blomback on the podcast a few months before.

* I said offhand that Killington and Sugarbush’s max 2022-23 lift tickets were in the $180 range, and that I would confirm those prices. Both are hitting closer to $200.

Podcast Notes

We discussed quite a few active-but-lesser-known ski areas on the podcast – I’ve linked to their New England Ski History profile pages below:

* Eaglebrook, a 440-vertical-footer in Massachusetts served by a double chair. This is the second-oldest ski area in the country, and serves the students at the private Eaglebrook School. I just love their trailmap:

* Proctor is another private-academy bump, a 436-footer in Andover, New Hampshire. This one has occasionally opened to the public in the past, but I haven’t been able to find any information on open ski days since the pandemic hit in 2020.

We talked a lot about Berkshire East, which Clark worked at for more than a decade:

* Clark referenced a cancelled but partially built expansion for the ski area in the 1970s – read the full history here.

* Clark designed Berkshire East’s first website. The earliest screenshot I could find was from April 18, 1998, and it’s a beauty:

We also discussed several lost ski areas, including:

* Chickley Alps, Massachusetts rose 300 vertical feet and operated from 1937 to 1979.

* Mt. Tom, Massachusetts, a fairly successful ski area whose sudden closing in 1998 is still a bit mystifying. This 680-vertical-foot ski area ran on four double chairs and a collection of surface lifts.

* Brodie, which the owners of neighboring Jiminy Peak bought and shuttered around the beginning of the century.

I asked Clark which lost ski areas had the best chance of a comeback:

* Monteau in northern New Hampshire, which rose 650 vertical feet and was served by a double chair and some surface lifts, and has been closed since 1990.

* Farr’s Hill, Vermont. This 160-foot bump has been closed since the 1960s. A couple years back, however, a new owner purchased a used T-bar from Oak Mountain, New York, with the intention of re-opening the ski area. I haven’t heard any updates in a while, and the ski area’s Facebook page is now inactive.

* Plymouth Notch/Roundtop/Bear Creek – this is the most recent lost chairlift-served ski area in Vermont. It operated as a private club as recently as 2018, and has a fairly extensive trail network. The problem? It’s sandwiched between Killington and Okemo.

Clark and I discussed the upcoming expansion plans at:

* Waterville Valley – the resort hopes to finally link the village to the ski area with a gondola up the back side of Green Peak:

* Sunday River, where the recently opened Jordan 8 chairlift will act as the gateway to the massive Western Reserve territory, which could double the size of the resort. Unfortunately, there are no renderings of the expansion to share yet.

* Sugarloaf – West Mountain, which is scheduled to open in early 2024 (I did a full write-up on this one a few weeks back):

We also discussed abandoned or suspended potential expansions at:

* Ragged Mountain – Pinnacle Peak, where the ski area cut trails years ago; owner Pacific Group Resorts confirmed to me last year that they do not intend to proceed with the expansion.

* Killington – the proposed but cancelled Parker’s Gore project would have added 1,500 acres with a sustained 3,000 foot vertical drop, served by up to 10 lifts.

* Cranmore – Black Cap, which would boost the ski area’s vertical drop from 1,200 to 1,800 feet.

* Bolton Valley, which was originally proposed as a far larger resort than the three-peak operation you can ski today. Clark said he found this masterplan, which shows chairlifts running all the way down to Interstate 89 – 1,800 feet below where the current Vista base area sits:

We discussed the Hall double chair that once acted as a redundant lift to the Attitash Summit Triple, which Peak Resorts removed without explanation around 2018. This turned out to be the worst possible decision, as the triple then conked out for months at the end of the 2018-19 ski season. Vail Resorts will finally replace the triple with a high-speed quad this summer, making the decision to remove the double moot. It’s the Top Notch Double on the map below:

The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 7/100 in 2023, and number 393 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane, or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email [email protected].

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

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Jan. 13. It dropped for free subscribers on Jan. 16. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription.

Who

Jim van Löben Sels, General Manager of Mt. Spokane, Washington

Recorded on

January 9, 2023

About Mt. Spokane

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Mt. Spokane 2000, a nonprofit group

Pass affiliations: Freedom Pass – 3 days each at these 20 ski areas

Reciprocal partners: 3 days each at Mt. Ashland, Mount Bohemia, Great Divide, Loup Loup, Lee Canyon, Snow King, White Pass, Ski Cooper

Located in: Mt. Spokane State Park, Washington

Year opened: 1938

Closest neighboring ski areas: 49 Degrees North (1 hour, 45 minutes), Silver Mountain (1 hour, 45 minutes), Schweitzer (2 hours, 10 minutes) – travel times may vary considerably in winter

Base elevation: 3,818 feet

Summit elevation: 5,889 feet

Vertical drop: 2,071 feet

Skiable Acres: 1,704

Average annual snowfall: 300 inches

Trail count: 52 (15% advanced/expert, 62% intermediate, 23% beginner)

Lift count: 7­­ (1 triple, 5 doubles, 1 carpet)

Why I interviewed him

Perception is a funny thing. In my Michigan-anchored teenage ski days any bump rolling more than one chairlift uphill seemed impossibly complex and interesting. Caberfae (200 acres), Crystal (103), Shanty Creek (80), and Nub’s Nob (248 acres today, much smaller at the time) hit as vast and interesting worlds. That set my bar low. It’s stayed there. Living now within two and a half hours of a dozen thousand-plus-footers feels extraordinary. In less than an instant I can be there, lost in it. Teleportation by minivan.

Go west and they think different. By the millions skiers pound up I-70 through an Eisenhower Tunnel framed by Loveland, to ski over the pass. Breck, Keystone, Copper, A-Basin, Vail, Beaver Creek – all amazing. But Loveland covers 1,800 acres standing on 2,210 vertical feet – how many Colorado tourists have never touched the place? How many locals?

It seems skiers often confuse size with infrastructure. Loveland has one high-speed chairlift. Beaver Creek has 13. But the ski area’s footprint is only 282 acres larger than Loveland’s. Are fast lift rides worth an extra 50 miles of interstate evacuation drills? It seems that, for many people, they are.

We could repeat that template all over the West. But Washington is the focus today. And Mt. Spokane. At 1,704 acres, it’s larger than White Pass (1,402 acres), Stevens Pass (1,125), or Mt. Baker (1,000), and just a touch smaller than Summit at Snoqualmie (1,996). But outside of Spokane (metro population, approximately 600,000), who skis it? Pretty much no one.

Why is that? Maybe it’s the lift fleet, anchored by five centerpole Riblet doubles built between 1956(!) and 1977. Maybe it’s the ski area’s absence from the larger megapasses. Maybe it’s proximity to 2,900-acre Schweitzer and its four high-speed lifts. Probably it’s a little bit of each those things.

Which is fine. People can ski wherever they want. But what is this place, lodged in the wilderness just an hour north of Washington’s second-largest city? And why hadn’t I heard of it until I made it my job to hear about everyplace? And how is Lift 1 spinning into its 67th winter? There just wasn’t a lot of information out there about Mt. Spokane. And part of The Storm’s mission is to seek these places out and figure out what the hell is going on. And so here you go.

What we talked about

Fully staffed and ready to roll in 2023; night skiing; what happened when Mt. Spokane shifted from a five-day operating week to a seven-day one; a winding career path that involved sheep shearing, Ski Patrol at Bear Valley, running a winery, and ultimately taking over Mt. Spokane; the family ski routine; entering the ski industry in the maw of Covid; life is like Lombard Street; Spokane’s long-term year-round business potential; who owns and runs Mt. Spokane; why and how the ski area switched from a private ownership model to a not-for-profit model; looking to other nonprofit ski areas for inspiration; a plan to replace Spokane’s ancient lift fleet and why they will likely stick with fixed-grip chairlifts; the Skytrac-Riblet hybrid solution; sourcing parts for a 67-year-old chairlift; how much of Lift 1 is still original parts; which lift the mountain will replace first, what it will replace it with, and when; the virtues of Skytrac lifts; parking; the Day-1-on-the-job problem that changed how Jim runs the mountain; why Northwood lift was down for part of January; what it took to bring the Northwood expansion online and how it changed the mountain; whether future expansions are possible; Nordic opportunities; working with Washington State Parks, upon whose land the ski area sits, and how that compares to the U.S. Forest Service; whether Mt. Spokane could ever introduce snowmaking; how eastern Washington snow differs from what falls on the west side of the state; glading is harder than you think; where we could see more glades on the mountain; the evolution of Spokane’s beginner terrain; why Mt. Spokane tore out its tubing lanes; expanding parking; which buildings could be updated or replaced and when; whether we could ever see lodging at the mountain; why the mountain sets its top lift ticket price at $75; why Mt. Spokane joined Freedom Pass; exploring the mountain’s reciprocal pass partnerships and whether that network will continue to grow; and the possibility of joining the Indy Pass.

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

In August, Troy Hawks, the marketing mastermind at Sunlight and the administrator of the Freedom Pass, emailed to tell me that Mt. Spokane was joining the Freedom Pass. I asked him to connect me with the ski area’s marketing team for some context on why they joined (which I included in this story). Then I asked if Jim would like to join me on the podcast. And he did.

That’s the straight answer. But Mt. Spokane fits this very interesting profile that matches that of many ski areas across the country: a nonprofit community hill with dated infrastructure and proximity to larger resorts that’s been pushed to the brink not of insolvency but doors-bursting capacity despite successive waves of macro-challenges, including Covid and EpKon Mania. Weren’t these places supposed to be toast? As a proxy for the health of independents nationwide, Mt. Spokane seemed like as good a place as any to check in.

There’s another interesting problem here: what are you going to do with a Riblet double built in 1956? The thing is gorgeous, tapering low and elegant up the hillside, a machine with stories to tell. But machines don’t last forever, and new ones cost more than some whole ski areas. Mt. Spokane also has no snowmaking and dated lodges and too little parking. Will it modernize? If so, how? Does it need to? What is that blend of funk and shine that will ensure a mountain’s future without costing its soul?

In this way, too, Mt. Spokane echoes the story of contemporary independent American skiing: how, and how much, to update the bump? Jim, many will be happy to learn, has no ambitions of transforming Mt. Spokane into Schweitzer Jr. But he does have a vision and a plan, a way to make the mountain a little less 1950s and a little more 2020s. And he lays it all out in a matter-of-fact way that anyone who loves skiing will appreciate.

Questions I wish I’d asked

I’m so confused by Mt. Spokane’s trailmap. Older versions show the Hidden Treasure area flanking the main face:

While new versions portray Hidden Treasure as a distinct peak. Again:

Meanwhile, Google Maps doesn’t really line up with what I’m seeing above:

While I love the aesthetic of Mt. Spokane’s trailmap, it seems wildly out of scale and oddly cut off at the bottom of Hidden Treasure. The meanings of the various arrows and the flow of the mountain aren’t entirely clear to me either.

Really, this is more a problem of experience and immersion than anything I can learn through a knowledge transfer. A smart professor made this point in journalism school: go there. I really should be skiing these places before I do these interviews, and for a long time, I wouldn’t record a podcast about a ski area I hadn’t visited. But I realized, a year and a half in, that that would be impractical if I wanted to keep banging these things out, particularly as I reached farther into the western hinterlands. Sometimes I have to do the best I can with whatever’s out there, and what’s out there can be confusing as hell. So I guess I just need to go ski it to figure it out.

What I got wrong

* I intimated that Gunstock was a nonprofit ski area, but that is not the case. The mountain contributes revenue to its owner, Belknap County, each season.

* I stated that Mt. Spokane didn’t have any beginner surface lifts. In fact, it has a carpet lift.

* Jim and I discussed whether Vista Cruiser was the longest contiguously operating chairlift in the United States. It’s not – Hemlock has been serving Boyne Mountain, Michigan, since 1948. It’s a double that was converted from a single that originally served Sun Valley as America’s first chairlift in the 1930s. Still, Vista Cruiser may be the most intact 1950s vintage lift in America. I really don’t know, and these things can be very hard to verify what with all the forgotten upgrades over the years, but it really doesn’t matter: a 67-year-old chairlift is a hell of an impressive thing in any context.

* While discussing reciprocal agreements, I said, rather hilariously, that Mt. Ashland was “right there in Oregon.” The ski area is, in fact, an 11-hour drive from Mt. Spokane. I was vaguely aware of how dumb this was as I said it, but you must remember that I grew up in the Midwest, meaning an 11-hour drive is like going out to the mailbox.

Why you should ski Mt. Spokane

Let’s start here:

How many 2,000-vertical-foot mountains post those kind of rack rates? A few, but fewer each year. And if you happen to have a season pass to any other Freedom Pass ski area, you can cash in one of your Mt. Spokane lift tickets as you’re floating through.

As for the skiing itself, I can only speculate. It looks like typical PNW wide-open: wide runs, big treed meadows, bowls, glades all over. Three hundred inches per winter to open it all up. I mean there’s really not much else that’s necessary on my have-a-good-time checklist.

Podcast Notes

* Jim mentioned that Schweitzer was working on adding parking. More details on their plan to plug 1,400 more spaces into the mountain here.

* I was shocked when Jim said that Mt. Spokane’s $75 lift tickets ($59 midweek) were the second-most expensive in the region after Schweitzer’s, which run $110 for a full-day adult pass. But he’s correct: 49 Degrees North runs $72 on weekends and holidays and $49 midweek. Silver Mountain is $71 on weekends (but $65 midweek). And Lookout Pass is $66 on weekends and $55 midweek. I guess the memo about $250 lift tickets hasn’t made its way up I-90 just yet.

* The best way to support Mt. Spokane, which is a nonprofit ski area, is to go buy a lift ticket. But you can also donate here.

* Here’s a bit more Mt. Spokane history.

* And some stoke Brah:

The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 4/100 in 2023, and number 390 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane, or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email [email protected].

To support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Dec. 29. It dropped for free subscribers on Jan. 1. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription.

Who

Rob Clark, CEO of Aspenware, an e-commerce and software company   

Recorded on

December 12, 2022

About Aspenware

Aspenware’s website declares that it’s time to “modernize your mountain.” As far as corporate sloganeering goes, this is a pretty good one. Skiers – like everyone – live on their phones. Ski areas need to meet them there – to sell them lift tickets, process their lunch order, sign their liability waivers, and rent them skis. This is what Aspenware does. “Close your ticket windows,” one of the company’s ad campaigns insists, “you don’t need them.” Alterra and Aspen Skiing Company agree. Earlier this year, the companies formed a joint venture to purchase Aspenware.

Why I interviewed him

I spend a lot of time rambling about lifts and terrain and passes – the meat of the lift-served skiing world; how resorts shape an interesting experience, and how skiers access it and move through it. But a modern ski experience does not just mean fast lifts and great snowmaking and diverse terrain offerings and passes that include the nine moons of Endor. It also means mitigating the ski day’s many built-in points of misery, which mostly have to do with lines. Everything we need to do that is already built into your smartphone. Ski areas just have to figure out how to tap that technology to streamline the experience. Aspenware is doing that.

What we talked about

Relocating to New England after nearly two decades in Colorado; Peek’N Peak; Holiday Valley; an Ohio boy goes West; 1-800-SKI-VAIL; running the Vail Mountain ticket windows in the pre-Epic Pass, everyone-buys-a-walk-up-ticket days; the Epic Pass debuts; RFID debuts; RTP in its heyday; a brief history of Aspenware and its evolution into a ski industry technology powerhouse; one of the largest organisms in the world; what it means to modernize a ski area with technology; how United Airlines inspired a pivot at Aspenware; how the ski industry went from an early tech adopter to a laggard; the problem with legacy tech systems; what happens when people ask me where they should go skiing; what happened when Covid hit; why some resorts ticket windows “will never open again”; tech resistance; “I’m on a mission to get technology considered in the same breath as lifts and snowmaking”; do ski areas need tech to survive?; what skiing is competing against; why Alterra and Aspen formed a joint venture to purchase Aspenware; which bits of tech it makes sense to develop in-house; the Shopify of skiing?; which tech skiers should expect in the future; Vail’s decision to move Epic Passes to phones next year; I still don’t think trailmaps belong on phones (exclusively); interactive trailmaps are terrible; why skiers should own their resort data; the evolution of dynamic pricing; and the one thing that actually makes skiers purchase lift tickets.        

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

As we all know, Covid supercharged the skiing tech cycle. In the eight months between the March 2020 shutdowns and the November-ish re-openings, the nation’s 470-odd ski areas had to figure out how to keep people as far away from each other as possible without blowing up the entire industry. The answer, largely, was by digitizing as much of the experience as possible. Aspenware met that moment, and its momentum has continued in the two years since.

Podcast Notes

* Rob and I guessed a bit at the debut price of the Epic Pass back in 2008 – it was $579 for adults and $279 for children.

* Rob referenced Start with Why, a business leadership book by Simon Sinek – you can buy it here.

* I’ll make the same disclaimer with Aspenware as I did with OpenSnow: while Aspenware is a Storm advertising partner, this podcast was not part of, and is not related to, that partnership. Aspenware did not have any editorial input into the content or editing of this podcast - which is true of any guest on any episode (Rob did request one non-material cut in our conversation, which I obliged). I don’t do sponsored content. The Storm is independent ski media, based on reporting and independently verified facts - any opinion is synthesized through that lens, as it is with any good journalism outlet.

The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 139/100 in 2022, and number 385 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane, or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email [email protected].

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

To support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Dec. 27. It dropped for free subscribers on Dec. 30. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription.

Who

Joe VanderKelen, President of SMI Snow Makers  

Recorded on

November 28, 2022

About SMI Snow Makers

SMI is the largest U.S.-based snowmaking manufacturer, and one of the biggest such outfits in the world. Their guns sit at more than 1,000 facilities – mostly, but not exclusively, ski areas – all over the world. The company is based in Midland, Michigan, a place so flat that, if you turned it on its side, you’d roll forever and then simply tumble off the edge of the planet. An odd-seeming locale, perhaps, for a snowmaking manufacturer, until you’ve spent a winter there on those windy, frozen plains.

SMI is not what we’d call a “consumer-facing brand,” but you’ll see their product markings - V2, Axis, Grizzly, FreedomX, Puma, PoleCat, Wizzard - as you ski around. Super Puma is the one I seem to see most often, a stocky cannon with adjustable footings, perched hill-wise like a medieval defense. SMI’s various guns have served eight Olympic venues, a point of immense pride for what is still a family-run operation. Joe’s parents founded the company back in the ‘70s. He’s been running it since 1991. You can learn more about them here:

If you’re ever driving US 10 through central Michigan, you can’t miss the SMI factory and HQ, seated off the freeway just past the junction with Business 10 as you head west:

Why I interviewed him

A few weeks back, I wrote about the heroic efforts of ski areas throughout the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic, and Northeast to open in November in spite of abnormally warm early-season weather. After nodding to the usual aggressive corporate-owned badasses such as Sunday River and Killington, I called out some of the smaller operations that cracked open around the same time:

More impressive, however, was New York State-owned Belleayre, seated just over two hours north of New York City, which opened the same day as Sugarloaf, beating most of New England to launch. Sister resort Gore also opened that day. Whiteface went live the following day, delivering its first-ever opening on the mountain’s full 3,166-foot vertical drop. Vail Resorts’ Hunter Mountain opened that day as well. Windham, five miles away (as the crow flies), opened Monday, Nov. 21. Further south, Bousquet, Massachusetts; Wisp, Maryland; and Massanutten, Virginia opened Nov. 25. In never-snowy Indiana, Perfect North opened Nov. 22, the mountain’s third-earliest opening in its 43-season history.

These sudden openings were not, I continued, spontaneous:

These ski areas are not anomalies. They did not get lucky. Their rapid openings under marginal conditions across vast and varied geographic regions are the direct result of yearslong investments in better and more efficient snowmaking. They are the best-case present, yes, showcases of the most technologically advanced snowmaking equipment. But they also represent the future. One in which ski area operators are not passive victims of climate change, but active combatants against it, making more snow than ever in spite of less-than-ideal conditions, and doing so with equipment that uses a fraction of the energy of previous generations of snowmaking machinery.

Much of that machinery comes from SMI, including nearly the entire system at Perfect North:

Perhaps the most improbable get-open-and-stay-open outfit in the country is Perfect North. The ski area’s base sits at just 400 feet. Of the 108 operating Midwest ski areas, only two sit farther south (Vail-owned Paoli Peaks, Indiana and Hidden Valley, Missouri). And yet, the ski area opened on just four partial days of snowmaking, which Perfect North General Manager Jonathan Davis characterized as “two mediocre nights, one fantastic night, and one good night.” Despite having just six additional snowmaking windows since, the ski area now sits at just over 50 percent open.

Davis credits a few factors for this quick ramp-up: a 12,000-gallon-per-minute pumphouse feeding 260 snowguns, a seat on a valley floor that traps cold air, and institutional knowledge that can often predict snowmaking windows that the local weather forecasters miss.

Again, this ski area sits in Indiana, where it snows like four inches per decade. There should not be skiing there. But there is. Because of SMI.

Lift-served skiing in the United States does not exist without snowmaking. At least not as a commercial enterprise. Maybe it’s something a few Bear-Trap Billys do, tromping off into the Cascades in their Army surplus jackets and skinny skis. Perhaps there are even a few ski areas. But without the big-city bases of voyaging tourists, who learn and practice on locals like Mountain Creek, New Jersey and Wachusett, Massachusetts and Afton Alps, Minnesota and Alpine Valley in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio, the economic superstructure to support large-scale Rocky Mountain operations simply isn’t there.

What we talked about

The SMI story; Michigan skiing; a life of adventure running a global company; breaking down the company’s footprint; how one of the flattest places on the planet became one of the global epicenters of snowmaking; Made in the USA pride; getting ahead of supply-chain problems and heading off future shortages; the company’s one-of-a-kind snowmaking facility and why it’s special; a primer on the global snowmaking industry and SMI’s place in it; Snowmaking 101; why resorts blow snow into piles; the evolution of snow machines over time into more efficient, higher-capacity, simpler machines that make better snow and work in more variable temperatures; wet bulb temperature; making snow at the extremes; what snowmaking automation is and what it means; the amazing weather variability on a single mountain; “automated doesn’t mean unattended”; ongoing resistance to automation and whether SMI will continue to offer manual snowmaking equipment; where snowmaking tech is headed in the future; swapping mechanical problems for tech problems as equipment grows more sophisticated; breaking down SMI’s product lines; all-weather snowmaking; the lifecycle of a snowgun and how long the best of them can last; maintaining guns after install; creating a new system from scratch; a snowmaking system is like “a golf course irrigation system on a mountain,” but one that requires “really expensive sprinkler heads”; returning snowmaking water to the watershed; responding to the reductive environmental complaints about snowmaking as an energy and resource drain; [yes that’s an NYC car alarm blaring in the background]; energy efficiency as a mission; creative energy-saving strategies; the amazing snowmaking installation that modernized Arizona Snowbowl; snowmaking as wildfire mitigation tool; how the ski industry can push back against the narrative that it’s an energy hog and environmental liability; creating a new wonder of the world to pump snow onto the Olympic venues in Sochi; the resilience of skiing in the age of climate change; whether every ski area will eventually need snowmaking; intel on the next potential great ski regions; and skiing in Ukraine.      

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

Listeners constantly write to me suggesting this or that interview. I appreciate this, and respond even when the suggestion is some version of “my cousin skied every ski area in Ohio in a single season and he has a great story and you should feature him on your podcast.” And I’m like thanks Bro but if I wanted to do podcasts with people my listeners wouldn’t care about, I know plenty of them in real life. The Storm interviewee profile is not so much exclusive as it is well-defined: to qualify for this seat, you really either need to run a mountain, be in charge of people who do, write about lift-served skiing for a living, run some kind of website that’s materially additive to the knowledge base around the sport, or make something that’s fundamental to the enterprise, such as chairlifts or trailmaps.

Joe, obviously, falls into the latter category. And he also holds the unofficial title of most-requested interview by my listeners/readers. Skiers really, really want to hear about snowmaking. Many – especially those who work in skiing – called out Joe in particular. So here you go.

So why did I wait so long if this one was so obvious? Well, I tend to favor subjects I understand. And snowmaking, despite its relative simplicity from a mechanical point of view, has always seemed a bit intimidating as a discussion point. This matters when I’m shaping the questions that guide the interview.

But, last summer, I finally toured the SMI factory and met Joe and his team in person. I grilled him for a couple hours and he showed me around and I was like yeah let’s do this. Joe was an outstanding guest, who’s lived his craft for decades, and I probably should have done it a lot sooner.

What I got wrong

I said that Taos was protected from wildfires because it sat at the end of a “valley.” I meant to say “canyon.” I discussed this at length with Taos CEO David Norden on the podcast last year:

Podcast Notes

* I mentioned that various folks claim to have invented snowmaking. Was it a Hollywood technical director in 1934? Was it a trio of Connecticut inventors? Grossinger’s Resort in the Catskills? Mohawk Mountain? A Toronto ski club? It seems as though half the ski area websites in America include some tale about Old Cyrus Jenkins III creating the world’s first snowgun with a hose and a ceiling fan strapped to a modified table saw. There’s a reason for that: from a mechanical and physics point of view, snow is not that hard to make. What’s hard is doing it well, which is why there are so few industrial-grade snowmaking companies today. Who made the first snowgun? I don’t really know or, frankly, care, and I’ll let the historians fight it out.

* I actually grew up in Midland County, Michigan, where SMI’s headquarters is located. There are no ski areas there. The closest, when I grew up in the small town of Sanford, were Apple Mountain in Freeland (now closed), Mott Mountain in Farwell (closed), and Snow Snake up in Harrison (still, thankfully, operating). All were less than an hour away, but SMI was the closest ski-related landmark. The factory sits directly off the US 10 expressway, the most important road in the area, and its multi-colored mural, rows of snowguns, and piles of manmade snow are impossible to miss while driving past.

The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 137/100 in 2022, and number 383 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email [email protected].

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

To support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Dec. 24. It dropped for free subscribers on Dec. 27. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription.

Who

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

Recorded on

November 21, 2022

About Shaun Sutner

Shaun is a skier, a writer, and a journalist based in Worcester, Massachusetts. For the past 18 years, he’s been pumping out a snowsports column from Thanksgiving to April. For the past two years, he’s joined me on The Storm Skiing Podcast to rap about it. You should follow Shaun on social media to stay locked into his work:

Why I interviewed him

I’ve often said that the best interviews are with people who don’t have bosses. That’s true. Mostly. But not exclusively. Because journalists are just as good. And that’s because they possess many attributes crucial to holding an interesting conversation: on-the-ground experience, the ability to tell a story, and a commitment to truth. Really. That is the whole point of the job. Listen to the Storm Skiing Podcasts with Eric Wilbur, Jackson Hogen, or Jason Blevins. They are among the best of the 122 episodes I’ve published before today. It’s a different gig from the running-a-mountain-and-making-you-want-to-ski-that-mountain post that 75 percent of my guests hold. And these writers deliver a different kind of conversation, and one that enriches The Storm immensely.

I’d like to host more ski journalists, but there just aren’t that many of them. It’s a weird fact of America and skiing that there are far more ski areas than there are American ski journalists. The NSAA lists 473 active ski areas. NASJA (the North American Snowsports Journalists Association) counts far fewer active members. The NBA, by contrast, has 30 teams and perhaps thousands of reporters covering them around the world. There’s a lot more happening in skiing than there are paid observers to keep track of it all, is my point here.

But there are a few. And Sutner is one of the real pros – one who’s been skiing New England for most of his life, and writing about it for decades. His column is enlightened and interesting, essential reading for the entire Northeast. We had a great conversation last year, and we agreed to make it an annual thing.

What we talked about

Well I still can’t pronounce “Worcester,” but we didn’t discuss it this time which thank God; opening day vibes at Mount Snow; comparing last year’s days-skied goal to reality; that Uphill Bro life and chewing up all our pow Brah; surveying the different approaches to New England uphill access; cross-country skiing and the opportunity of the Indy Pass; skiing in NYC; the countless ski areas of Quebec; Tremblant, overrated?; Le Massif; pass quivers; the importance of racing and race leagues to recreational skiing; why the rise of freeskiing hasn’t killed ski racing; Sutner’s long-running snowsports column; the importance of relationships in journalism; the Wachusett MACHINE; Sutner defends the honor of Ski Ward, my least-favorite ski area; the legacy of Sutner’s brother Adam, former executive at Vail, Jackson Hole, and Crystal, who passed away suddenly last year; reaction to PGRI purchasing Jay Peak; what’s next for Burke?; the future of Gunstock; Mount Sunapee crowding; Crotched, Attitash, and Wildcat’s 2021-22 struggles; what the Epic Day Pass says about Vail’s understanding of New Hampshire; whether Vail’s pay increases and lift ticket sales limits will be enough to fix the company’s operational issues in New Hampshire; the impact of Kanc 8 on Loon and what that could mean for new lifts at Stowe and Mount Snow; New England’s lift renaissance; eight-packs and redistributing skiers; let’s play Fantasy Ski Resort owner with Sugarloaf; the investment binge at Loon; high-speed double chairs; will Magic ever get Black Quad live?; the rebuilding of Catamount; a New England lift wishlist; Berkshire East; fake vertical; Smuggs’ lift fleet; the future of Big Squaw; The Balsams; Whaleback; Granite Gorge; and Tenney.

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

Well the intent was to push this podcast out alongside the debut of Sutner’s first column of the year, on Thanksgiving Day. I, uh, missed that target. But I’ll fix that whole timing bit, and you can expect a Sutner appearance on The Storm Skiing Podcast every Thanksgiving week for as long as he’s interested in doing it.

What I got wrong

* I noted in the podcast that it was a 15-minute drive from Mountain Creek to High Point Cross Country Ski Center in New Jersey – it’s closer to half an hour.

* Sutner and I referenced Seven Brothers at Loon as an unfinished lift. That was true when we recorded this podcast on Nov. 21, but the lift opened on Dec. 17.

* Sutner referenced a New England lift project that he knew about but that was not public yet – it’s public now, and you can read about it here.

* Shaun referred to a “little-known” summit T-bar at Sugarloaf. It must be a really well-kept secret, because I can’t find any reference to it, now or in the past.

Why you should read Sutner’s column

Because what I wrote last year is still true:

Because it’s focused, intelligent, researched, fact-checked, spell-checked, and generally just the sort of professional-level writing that is increasingly subsumed by the LOLing babble of the emojisphere. That’s fine – everyone is lost in the scroll. But as the pillars of ski journalism burn and topple around us, it’s worth supporting whatever’s left. Gannett, the parent company of the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, has imposed fairly stringent paywalls on his work. While I think these local papers are best served by offering a handful of free articles per month, the paper is worth supporting if it’s your local – in the same way you might buy a local ski pass to complement your Epkon Pass. Good, consistent writing is not so easy to find. Sutner delivers. Support his craft.

I wish there was one place where all of Sutner’s columns were collected, but the reality of being part of a larger entity is that your work gets mashed together with everything else. Here are direct links to Sutner’s columns so far this season:

* Skiing Vail Remains a Treasured Rocky Mountain Experience

* Plenty of Updates and Upgrades have Crotched Mountain Resort Thriving in New Hampshire

* Key Improvements Signal Strong Seasons Ahead for Attitash, Wildcat Ski Areas

* World Cup Ski Racing Continues to Thrive at Killington

Sutner’s column tends to be less-newsy, more focused on the long-term than the what-just-happened? But, thanks to decades of experience and a deep well of sources, he can fire off a breaking news story in a hurry when he needs to. Earlier this month, for example, he turned around this dispatch about Wachusett’s sudden cancellation of its volunteer Ski Patrol program – known locally as “Rangers” – in just a few hours:

Wachusett Mountain Ski Area ended its volunteer Ranger program at the start of the ski and snowboard season last month in an unexpected move that could have safety consequences on the mountain's busy slopes, at least in the short term. 

The ski area apparently was forced into ending or suspending the program due to an investigation by the state attorney general's office into whether treating the Rangers as volunteers violates state labor laws. 

A spokeswoman for the AG's office declined to comment on whether the office is investigating Wachusett.

The case could have national ramifications in the ski industry, where more than 600 ski areas across the country use volunteer ski patrollers under the umbrella of the nonprofit National Ski Patrol, as well as volunteers similar to Rangers. 

Read the full story here:

Podcast Notes

* Sutner and I discussed Wachusett quite a bit, and specifically my podcast interview with resort President Jeff Crowley from last year:

* We also had a long discussion about Ski Ward, which stemmed from this write-up I published in February:

Ski Ward, 25 miles southwest, makes Nashoba Valley look like Aspen. A single triple-chair rising 220 vertical feet. A T-bar beside that. Some beginner surface lifts lower down. Off the top three narrow trails that are steep for approximately six feet before leveling off for the run-out back to the base. It was no mystery why I was the only person over the age of 14 skiing that evening.

Normally my posture at such community- and kid-oriented bumps is to trip all over myself to say every possible nice thing about its atmosphere and mission and miraculous existence in the maw of the EpKonasonics. But this place was awful. Like truly unpleasant. My first indication that I had entered a place of ingrained dysfunction was when I lifted the safety bar on the triple chair somewhere between the final tower and the exit ramp and the liftie came bursting out of his shack like he’d just caught me trying to steal his chickens. “The sign is there,” he screamed, pointing frantically at the “raise bar here” sign jutting up below the top station just shy of unload. At first I didn’t realize he was talking to me and so I ignored him and this offended him to the point where he – and this actually happened – stopped the chairlift and told me to come back up the ramp so he could show me the sign. I declined the opportunity and skied off and away and for the rest of the evening I waited until I was exactly above his precious sign before raising the safety bar.

All night, though, I saw this b******t. Large, aggressive, angry men screaming – screaming – at children for this or that safety-bar violation. The top liftie laid off me once he realized I was a grown man, but it was too late. Ski Ward has a profoundly broken customer-service culture, built on bullying little kids on the pretext of lift safety. Someone needs to fix this. Now.

Look, I am not anti-lift bar. I put it down every time, unless I am out West and riding with some version of Studly Bro who is simply too f*****g cool for such nonsense. But that was literally my 403rd chairlift ride of the season and my 2,418th since I began tracking ski stats on my Slopes app in 2018. Never have I been lectured over the timing of my safety-bar raise. So I was surprised. But if Ski Ward really wants to run their chairlifts with the rulebook specificity of a Major League Baseball game, all they have to do is say, “Excuse me, Sir, can you please wait to get to the sign before raising your bar next time?” That would have worked just as well, and would have saved them this flame job. For a place that caters to children, they need to do much, much better.

As I’m wont to do, I followed that write-up with casual Ward-bashing on Twitter. Sutner took exception to this, saying that I was oversimplifying it and working on too small a sample size. Which, fair enough. He further defends the ski area’s honor in our pod, though frankly I remain salty about the place.

* Sutner spoke at length about his brother Adam, a member of Crystal Mountain, Washington’s executive team, who died suddenly in April. Shaun wrote his younger brother’s obituary, which reads in part:

Adam lived and worked overseas in the advertising and tech business in Amsterdam, Brussels, London, Paris, Tokyo and Melbourne. He also lived and worked in advertising and the ski industry in New York City, Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and in Vail, Colo., Jackson Hole, Wyo., and Greenwater, Wash.

He lived the life he wanted to live.

He was widely known for working hard and being a leader in the ski industry profession he loved, often starting work before dawn.

Adam loved French Martinis, fast cars and motorcycles, high-speed skiing, music, reading literature and non-fiction, wok cooking, James Bond and art heist caper movies and smoking his beloved cigarillos. He was an ardent fan of international soccer and rugby.

He liked to pick up and drop off at the airport the steady stream of visitors who he accommodated, with utmost hospitality, at his various well-appointed homes. He collected watches, fine art and mid-century modern furniture and accessories.

He was a witty storyteller, entertaining family and friends with tales of his lifelong travels and adventures. He had an acerbic sense of humor and keen intellect.

Read the full obit here:

The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 136/100 in 2022, and number 382 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email [email protected].

To support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Dec. 10. It dropped for free subscribers on Dec. 13. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription.

Who

Joel Gratz, Founding Meteorologist and CEO of OpenSnow

Recorded on

November 17, 2022

About OpenSnow

OpenSnow is a snow and weather forecasting service. It gives you all this, depending on whether or not you want to pay for it:

Gratz founded OpenSnow 11 years ago with an email list of 37 people. The company’s list now numbers 3 million. Or so. It’s like counting flakes in a storm. There are lots of them. The service pinpoints snowfall everywhere on the planet. So Backcountry Bro, you’re covered. Lift-Served Larry (that’s me), you’re covered too. Uphill Harvey – we really wish you’d just pick a side and stop f*****g up the grooming before the lifts open.

Anyway, if you love snow and want to know how much of it is going to fall, and where and when, then this app should be your Excalibur. Wield it wisely, Fellow Snowbum.  

Why I interviewed him

You know how some people want to live in Florida and make exasperated sounds when more snow materializes on the radar and plan wintertime vacations to places like Aruba? Well I am not one of those people. And neither is Joel Gratz. Wintertime is for skiing. And to enjoy skiing as much as possible, it helps to follow the snow around. That’s what Joel, and his brilliant website/app/service, OpenSnow, do.

Everyone reading this newsletter is programmed in a different way from Human V1.0. We run toward storms that most humans flee. With urgency. Like some snowy version of a firefighter. Like insane people. Because we know what the genuflecting and hysterical weatherman does not: that snow is potent and intoxicating; that it changes the world and everything in it, including the people who immerse themselves within. If an adult charges into a sandbox or waterpark or ballpit, we regard them suspiciously. That stuff is for kids. But if they spend the day bouncing through snow and enter the bar boot-clicking and semi-dazed and white-draped and grinning madly and asking for a tallboy, we ask them to stand up at our wedding.

No one gets this but skiers. And so no one could make a truly ski-centric weather app other than a skier. Someone whose headline, upon analyzing an incoming storm, isn’t DEAR GOD DO NOT STEP OUTSIDE STOCK UP ON AMMUNITION AND DRY RATIONS BECAUSE THIS IS IT PEOPLE, but rather DEAR GOD IT’S ABOUT TO SNOW 90 INCHES IN TAHOE GET THERE AS FAST AS POSSIBLE!

There are plenty of ways to track the weather, of course. Lots of apps, lots of weather services, lots of social media groups. I haven’t found one better than OpenSnow, where I can look up any specific ski area and see an hour-by-hour and day-by-day snowfall and weather forecast for 10 days into the future. And that’s all I really care about: where will it snow, how much, and when? With a meteorology degree on his wall and a couple decades in his mad-scientist’s snow lab, Gratz is as well-equipped to deliver this information as anyone on the planet.

What we talked about

How early a ski weather guy wakes up; Joel’s wintertime and powder-day routine; the secrets of good powder skiing; how a meteorologist was born; Shawnee, Pennsylvania; do they even want snow in the Poconos?; Penn State meteorology; skiing Tussey; an Alpine Meadows powder day on racing skis; Boulder as innovation incubator; how a Vail old-timer outsmarted the guy with the fancy meteorology degree; the mystery of mountain microclimates; the missed Steamboat powder day that inspired the creation of OpenSnow; an email goes out to 37 people on a Tuesday night; a fortuitous conversation with Chris Davenport; how long it took OpenSnow to really establish itself; “a lot of your good fortune is just being born when and where you were”; the several simultaneous tech innovations that enabled widespread online weather forecasting; breaking down the various global weather services (GFS, Euro, etc.), and how they work; “modern meteorology is a miracle of cooperation and funding from taxpayers like us all around the world”; translating raw data and forecasts into the thing skiers most care about: how much is it going to snow, when, and where?; removing the human from the forecasting equation; why and how OpenSnow scaled from Colorado to the rest of the world; why OpenSnow doesn’t capture every ski area in the world (yet); snow forecasts for any mapdot on the planet; why OpenSnow shifted to a subscription model and what it meant for the business; La Niña; breaking down the strong early start for the West and the weak weather in New England; dumb meteorology jokes; the two things you need to make snow; breaking down the unique weather systems that determine snowfall for the Cottonwoods, Mt. Baker, Keystone, Tahoe, the Great Lakes, and northern Vermont; how wind impacts snow quality; and America’s snowiest places.

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

The image in the “About OpenSnow” section above distills the benefits of the paid subscription tier succinctly: to tap the service’s best features, you need to pay. It’s worth it. I subscribed long before our partnership, and I continue to.

But OpenSnow wasn’t always so arranged. For years, Gratz and his team lived on advertising. At some point, they activated a paywall to access certain features, but much of the site remained free.

That changed last year, when OpenSnow migrated the majority of its content to its paid tier. Gratz explains why in the podcast, but this business decision resonated with me for obvious reasons. To remain relevant and useful, most digital ski-focused media platforms require an intense and consistent focus. That requires time, energy, passion, and commitment – all attributes that our capitalist society has deemed worth paying for in the form of labor. Labor, we decided a long time ago, cannot be free. Thus, products produced with labor – and media is a product – require a pricetag to access.

This is easier to understand when you’re purchasing a toaster or a car than when you’re buying access to a podcast or a snow forecast. It helps to remember that, in the scope of history, the internet is still pretty new. I grew up without it, and I’m not that old. We’re still figuring out how to price the considerable volume of information that we find there. Most of it, I’ll admit, is worthless, but some of it is worth quite a bit. But several generations of Americans arrived at the internet with the understanding that it was a frivolous add-on, a place to waste time and get in trouble, a soul vacuum that was the domain of creeps and morons. They have a hard time acknowledging the evolution of the web into a utility, an essential pipeline of connection and information, a place of intangible things with tangible value.

That was the challenge OpenSnow faced in finding a path to long-term sustainability. And it is the challenge I face with The Storm. I did it for free for as long as I could. The first 2,076 hours of labor were on me. Then I asked for money. The transition went beyond my expectations. Hundreds of people upgraded their subscriptions right away, and hundreds more have upgraded since. New paid subscribers join just about every day. The Storm is now a sustainable operation. And so, having made the same decision – on a much larger scale – is OpenSnow.

I’m sure you’ve read about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a rat’s nest of floating plastic refuse covering more than 600,000-square-miles of the Pacific Ocean. Most of its contents are microplastics – the smashed-up bits of water bottles and medicine containers and candy-bar wrappers. You just know that floating somewhere in there is a Yeti cooler and fully intact G.I. Joe hovercraft (I keep waiting for Disney to release: Toy Story: Tales of the Garbage Patch, featuring a scrappy band of discarded toys who A-Team their way back to the mainland), but most of it is useless garbage.

The internet is a lot like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch: an unfathomable well of junk, sprinkled with a few treasures. There’s a reason I occasionally step out of my ski-area-manager lane to interview journalists or individuals running ski-related websites: I want to help you find the G.I. Joe Killer W.H.A.L.E.s, the things worth scooping out of the water and taking home.

Why you should use OpenSnow

While OpenSnow is a Storm advertising partner, this podcast was not part of, and is not related to, that partnership. OpenSnow did not have any editorial input into the content or editing of this podcast - which is true of any guest on any episode. I don’t do sponsored content. The Storm is independent ski media, based on reporting and independently verified facts - any opinion is synthesized through that lens, as it is with any good journalism outlet.

That said, it’s a great service, and one that I use every day of the winter – that’s why I partnered with them. And part of our partnership is this special link where you can get two free months of OpenSnow. So you should probably take advantage of that so they want to keep working with me:

Podcast Notes

Joel references Baker’s record snowfall year – it was 1,140 inches from 1998 to ’99. You can read about that and some other big snow totals here.

The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 133/100 in 2022, and number 379 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane, or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email [email protected].

The Storm is exploring the world of lift-served skiing year-round - join us.

To support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Nov. 28. It dropped for free subscribers on Dec. 1. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription.

Who

Beth Howard, Vice President and General Manager of Vail Mountain, Colorado

Recorded on

November 14, 2022

About Vail Mountain

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Vail Resorts

Pass affiliations: Epic Pass

Located in: Vail, Colorado

Closest neighboring ski areas: Beaver Creek (20 minutes), Copper Mountain (23 minutes), Ski Cooper (42 minutes), Keystone (42 minutes), Loveland (43 minutes), Arapahoe Basin (47 minutes), Breckenridge (50 minutes) - travel times may vary considerably in winter and heavy traffic.

Base elevation: 8,120 feet

Summit elevation: 11,570 feet

Vertical drop: 3,450 feet

Skiable Acres: 5,317

* Front Side: 1,655 Acres

* Back Bowls: 3,017 Acres

* Blue Sky Basin: 645 Acres

Average annual snowfall: 354 inches

Trail count: 276 (53% advanced/expert, 29% intermediate, 18% beginner)

Lift count: 32­­ (one 12-passenger gondola, one 10-passenger gondola, 4 six-packs, 14 high-speed quads, 1 fixed-grip quad, 2 triples, 1 T-bar, 3 platters, 5 carpets)

Why I interviewed her

I articulated this as well as I could a couple months ago, in an article about Vail Resorts’ decision to limit lift ticket sales for the coming ski season:

It was a notion quaint and earnest. Simplistic but no less authentic. To start with Vail would have seemed presumptuous. This American place most synonymous with skiing. Three-sided and endless, galloping back into valleys, super-fast lifts shooting in all directions. I wanted to be ready. To feel as though I’d earned it.

My first trip West was in 1995. But I did not ski Vail until 2004. In our megapass-driven, social-media-fueled moshpit of a present, I doubt anyone thinks this way anymore. Vail is a social-media trophy – go seize it. But I proceeded slowly to the big time. Primed on Midwest bumps, anything would have seemed enormous. First, the rounds of Summit County. Then Winter Park. As though skiing were a videogame and I could not pass to the higher levels until I’d completed those that came before.  

And then there it was. That first time standing over Sun Down Bowl, the single groomed path winding toward High Noon below. Eleven thousand feet over Colorado. Sliding down the ridges. Powder everywhere. Back to Blue Sky. Laps all day through unmarked glades. Refills from the sky even though it was April. Three thousand feet of up and down. The enormous complexity of it all. The energy. That impossible blend of wild and approachable.

Vail Mountain and – on that same trip – Beaver Creek, were exactly what I needed them to be: the aspirational summit of America’s lift-served skiing food chain. The best mountains I’d ever skied. I won’t say it was The Experience of a Lifetime. But it was the best five days of skiing that I had, up to that point, ever done.

I’m not sure what else I can add to that. Vail Mountain sits at the summit of American lift-served skiing. Yes I know, Backflip Bro: the terrain is not as Rad-Gnar as Snowbird or Jackson Hole or Taos or Palisades Tahoe or Big Sky. It does not get as much snow as Alta or Baker or Wolf Creek or Kirkwood. It does not minimize and mitigate crowds like Telluride or Aspen or Sun Valley.

But Vail Mountain stands out even on that hall-of-fame lineup. Five thousand-plus acres of approachable terrain seated directly off the interstate. The Big Endless: 18 high-speed chairlifts, the Back Bowls™, a bit of rowdy and wild back in Blue Sky, a frenetic base village. If any mountain in Vail Resorts’ sprawling, intercontinental empire is almost guaranteed to deliver The Experience of a Lifetime™, it’s the namesake OG of them all: Vail Mountain. Even after all the growth and change and the Epic Pass atom bomb, Vail Mountain remains one of the greatest ski areas in North America.

It’s also a personal favorite of mine, and one that I’ve been eager to feature on the podcast since I expanded The Storm’s focus from the Northeast to the entire country last year.

What we talked about

Opening weekend at Vail Mountain; staying open until May in 2022 and whether the ski area could do it again; marking Vail’s 60th anniversary; Vail’s founders; building the mountain and the town from raw wilderness; Vail in the ‘80s; Afton Alps; transitioning from food-and-bev to resort leadership; a Colorado-Tahoe comparison; what it means for Vail Mountain to share the Vail Resorts masthead with Whistler; going deep on the Game Creek Express upgrade and the new Sun Down Express lift; how Vail decides between a four- or six-place lift, and why Game Creek got the promotion to sixer; the future of fixed-grip lifts on Vail Mountain; why it was finally time to build the long-proposed Sun Down lift, and how that will change the ski experience and flow around the mountain; how this happened at High Noon Express (in February 2020), and how unusual it was:

How Sun Down may help prevent a repeat; why Vail built Sun Down before the proposed Mongolia Express outlined in the resort’s master plan (see below); thinking through the future of the Eagle Bahn gondola; a potential future portal at West Lionshead and the sorts of lifts we could see there; how Pride Express could evolve up and down the mountain; how the Cascade Village lift could better serve day skiers; the potential for terrain expansion in Blue Sky Basin; the growth and future of snowmaking on Vail Mountain; housing drama with the town at East Vail; why Vail rejected the town’s $12 million offer for the land; how Vail’s housing market has devolved to crisis levels over the decades; what other towns are doing to fix housing and whether any of that could work at Vail; the evolution of two housing markets – one for locals and one at market rate; the potential for Ever Vail; reaction to $275 walk-up lift tickets; and the factors that will go into setting lift ticket limits each day this season.   

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

I’ve already written extensively about the valiant and courageous VAIL SHEEP DEFENDERS, an elite squadron whose mission is to ensure that local bighorns only have to poop next to rich people. In May, this group of nincompoops – the Vail Town Council – voted to condemn land where Vail Resorts planned to build 165 beds of worker housing on six acres of a 23-acre parcel (the remainder was to be set aside for bighorn habitat). Vail, which had already spent years permitting the project with the previous council, pushed back, and now the whole disaster has been swallowed by the courts, where it will likely remain for years.

Meanwhile, the VAIL SHEEP DEFENDERS somehow missed the groundbreaking on, among other properties, a nearly $8 million, 5,700-square-foot mansion rising on that same bighorn habitat. This image – provided by Vail Resorts – distills the absurdity of the whole thing pretty well:

In September, I chatted about this with Colorado Sun reporter Jason Blevins, who has lived in Eagle County for decades. He had a much more nuanced view:

“Both sides have completely valid arguments here. Vail Resorts needs housing. They have the property, they went through three years of planning with the previous council to win all the approvals to develop this thing. They created a bighorn sheep management plan … Election came, new council came in, and that new council is more inclined to protect that herd than accommodate with housing. They’ve offered the company different spots in the valley where they could build. But the process has progressed, and it’s along, and Vail is ready to pretty much break ground right now …

“Yes, this is about bighorn. That council 100 percent supports the bighorn herd, and in their heart of hearts they are working to protect the bighorn. … And those bighorn have been there longer than us, and this is their winter habitat. They unquestionably come down in the winter … along the highway there.”

The whole situation, Blevins told me, is reminiscent of the Telluride Valley Floor drama in the late ‘90s, in which the town and a developer took a land dispute all the way to the Colorado Supreme Court (read the court’s full decision here). The town ended up paying $50 million to acquire the land. “Think of all the housing you could have build with $50 million in the early 2000s,” Blevins said.

Unfortunately, Blevins said, “this one is lining up to follow that track. Could this fight go all the way to the Supreme Court? Could the town of Vail end up having a public fundraising campaign with rich residents giving money to support sheep habitat? Will it go that far? With the complaint filed last week, it certainly appears as though this is going to be a protracted legal battle that will end up costing the town millions and millions of dollars if they buy it from Vail Resorts. And the end result is no more new housing. So the true losers on this are the people in this town who need a place to sleep and live in that town.”  

You can listen to our full exchange on this topic, including a long discussion of the elusive NIMBY, starting at 56:50:

So the housing drama made the pod timely. But so did the fact that Vail is installing two new chairlifts and celebrating its 60th anniversary. So did the fact that its peak-day lift tickets just hit $275. Really though, I wasn’t sitting around waiting for an excuse to talk about Vail. It’s Vail. One of the greatest ski areas in America. It’s always interesting, always relevant. It’s one of a handful of ski areas that evokes skiing whether you ski 100 days a year or never. Aspen, Telluride, Vail. The podcast was built to score interviews like this: a big-time mountain seated at the heart of our collective lift-served skiing experience. Enjoy.

Questions I wish I’d asked

I would have liked to have explored the impacts of the mountain town housing crisis on employees and the environment a bit more deeply. What does it mean to have a 50- or 60-mile commute through one of America’s most extreme wintertime environments? How does such a setup further exacerbate the I-70 traffic that everyone so loathes? How sustainable and safe is this whole ecosystem?

Last year, Vail Resorts, Alterra, Boyne Resorts, and Powdr – America’s four largest ski area operators – launched “the ski industry’s first unified effort to combat climate change with shared commitments around sustainability and advocacy.” These efforts include portfolio-wide shifts to renewable energy sources, climate advocacy, and “responsible” stewardship of the environment. All admirable and necessary steps toward creating sustainable 21st century businesses.

However. I would propose an additional pillar to this joint pledge: these operators must commit to working with local, state, and national governments to encourage building density, expand mass transit, and limit individual car use wherever possible within the mountains.

It is not just the ski area operators that are missing this. We built modern U.S. America on the premise of unlimited land and unlimited individual, anytime mobility. But this model does not scale up very well. When Congress passed the Interstate Highway Act in 1956, the nation had 156 million residents. It now has around 338 million. Interstate 70 through the Colorado Rockies is a miracle of engineering and one of the most beautiful roads in the world. But this thoroughfare, combined with poor regional planning and a U.S. American mentality that thinks you can shape the Colorado High Country in the same fashion as suburban Atlanta, have delivered Los Angeles-caliber traffic to the otherwise pristine high alpine.

This is not sustainable. It was a dumb way to build a country. Sprawl and our car-centric culture are environmental and human disasters, the invisible antagonists to all our high-minded climate goals. Ski area operators and the municipalities they operate in have an incredible opportunity to showcase a different sort of America: a transit-oriented, weather-resilient, human-centered built ecosystem in which employees walk or ride a bus (or, God help us, a gondola) to work from hubs close to or on the mountain; the great mass of skiers arrive via transport other than a personal vehicle; and a Saturday on Interstate 70 does not resemble a wartime evacuation.

For those of you fearful that this means Manhattan-in-the-mountains, that’s not what I’m proposing here. Nor am I suggesting a Zermatt-style ban on individual automobiles. Just a better transit and housing mix so people who don’t want the expense and hassle of wintertime commuting can avoid it. We actually have a pretty good model for this: the college town. Most students live, without cars, in dorms on or close to campus. Free and frequent shuttlebuses port them around town. A dense and walkable university center gives way to successive waves of less-dense housing, for more established employees or those with families. Some commuting occurs, but it is minimal. The university is a self-contained world that absorbs as much impact as it can from the problems it creates by concentrating many humans on a small footprint.

The fact that the Town of Vail cannot accommodate 165 humans on 23 acres of land is pathetic. Their willingness to invest $12 million into ensuring people cannot live on this parcel crystalizes how unserious they are, long term, about creating a more sustainable, livable Vail. Rather than fighting Vail Resorts, the town ought to be partnering with them – as the previous council did on permitting this project – to see if the company could shrink the six acres down to three or four, and bump the 165 beds up 30 or 40 percent, with select units reserved for employees who agree to live car-free and use a shuttle system instead. The town’s current, combative posture is only going to push the employees that could have lived in East Vail farther out into the mountains and into daily, likely solo commutes in a car, all of which will further degrade the mountain environment the town claims to treasure. This project could have been a model for cooperation and imaginative development. Instead, it’s turned into a spectacle, a disappointment, the most predictable and U.S. American thing imaginable.   

What I got wrong

I pronounced Vail Mountain founder Pete Siebert’s name as “See-bert,” rather than “Cy-ber.” We also discussed Vail Mountain’s remaining fixed-grip lifts, putting that total at just one. However, the ski area still has three fixed-grip chairlifts: the Cascade Village quad, the Gopher Hill triple rising out of Vail Village, and the Little Eagle triple at the top of Eagle’s Nest.

Why you should ski Vail Mountain

There’s a lot of pressure on Vail Resorts’ flagship. While it’s fairly easy to get to and navigate, Vail Mountain, for most skiers, is big, far, and exotic; a thing of myth, considered with reverence; less vacation destination than fantasy. It’s work to get there, and no one wants to work without reward. Ride to your New England or Wisconsin or North Carolina local on a Saturday, and you’ll cope with whatever mess they came up with. Arrive at Vail, and you expect the best skiing of your life.

Vail can give you that. Yes, I know, Wasatch Bro, “Vail is great. Everyone should go there.” Sick burn, Bro. Original and hilarious. I’m not saying it’s better than Utah or Tahoe or Aspen or Winter Park, but I am saying that the skiing at Vail Mountain is usually very good, often spectacular, rarely bad. It is big enough that there are always uncrowded bits somewhere. And since such a large percentage of the skiers here are tourists, and since most tourists are allergic to anything off-piste – and since only a small percentage of a 5,317-acre resort can be groomed at any one time – you can ride the ungroomed all day, most days, in relative isolation (meaning you’re not speed-checking every four seconds at Fort Meyers Freddy arcs edge-to-edge turns over the fall line).

I’ve often wondered how many skiers there are on Vail Mountain on any given Saturday. They won’t tell me, but I’m guessing it’s the population of a small city – 30,000 people? While the sorts of liftline nightmares profiled above do occasionally happen, they are, as Blevins (a Vail local) said in our interview, pretty rare, and pretty short-lived. The ski area moves people around really well.

Everyone should ski Vail Mountain at least once. There is a sense of awe in being there. It is one of the best pure ski areas on the continent. Great terrain for (nearly) all abilities (sorry Backflip Bro, but you can hike over to East Vail). A terrific little town. Easy to get into and out of (off peak, at least). Affordable if you have enough sense to purchase an Epic Pass in advance. There are bigger and emptier and snowier ski areas out there, but Vail is going to give most skiers just about everything they want and a lot more than they need. The high expectations are earned, and, nearly always, met.

Podcast Notes

Howard and I talked quite a bit about elements of Vail Mountain’s 2018 masterplan. Here’s where new lifts could run on the frontside:

And here’s where they could run on the backside. You can also see potential new trails in Blue Sky Basin and Teacup Bowl:

Vail is also aggressively building out snowmaking on the front of the mountain. Here’s what that system could look like at full build-out:

The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 127/100 in 2022, and number 373 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane). You can also email [email protected].

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

To support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Nov. 23. It dropped for free subscribers on Nov. 26. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription.

Who

Daren Cole, President of Leitner-Poma of America

Recorded on

November 10, 2022

About Leitner-Poma of America

Here’s the website boilerplate:

Leitner-Poma of America offers a complete line of cable transport systems, including surface lifts, chairlifts, gondolas, MiniMetro® urban transport, trams, inclined elevators, and industrial trams.

And this, which makes me go cross-eyed:

Leitner-Poma of America, Inc. is a North American subsidiary of Poma S.A., a corporation with headquarters in Voreppe, France and a sister company of Leitner AG, a corporation with headquarters in Sterzing, Italy. Leitner–Poma of America engineers, manufactures, installs and services all types of ropeway systems for the ski industry, amusement parks, and urban transport.

Cole and I sort through all of this on the podcast. What you need to understand though is that Leitner-Poma is basically one half of the U.S. ski-lift industry. The company also owns Skytrac, which only builds fixed-grip lifts.

The other half of the industry is Doppelmayr, though saying “half” is not exactly correct: Doppelmayr claims more market share than Leitner-Poma. Other companies also claim a handful of lift projects most years - MND is building Waterville Valley’s new six-pack, for example, and Partek is building the new Sandy quad at Saddleback.

Why I interviewed him

The Storm is built around a very specific ethos: that machines are good, and that we should allow them to transport us to mountaintops. I respect and admire Uphill Bro. If I lived in the mountains, perhaps I would be him. But I do not and I am not. I am a tourist. Always and everywhere. I want to arrive to an organized experience. Uphilling is too much work, too much gear, too much risk for my coddled city soul.

And so I ride lifts, and I’ve very specifically focused this newsletter and podcast on the world of lift-served skiing. This is the disconnect between 99 percent of skiers and 99 percent of ski writers. The former live in cities and suburbs and ski Seven Springs three to eight days per year and take a weeklong trip to Park City in February. The latter live in ski towns and hunt the novel by trade, normalizing the fringe. And while I enjoy the occasional Assault Mission recap of the skin up Mount Tahoe Grizzly Ridge, I don’t really care (though I do enjoy following - and highly recommend - the WFG on Twitter or simpleskiing.com).

What I care about is The Machine: how is this sprawling, tangled world of lift-served skiing continuously morphing into the wintertime realms of the 21st century, in which a relatively unchanging number of ski areas must accommodate a megapass-driven increase in skiers armed with rectangular megaphones capable of instantly broadcasting #LiftFails to Planet Earth’s 5 billion internet users? How will an industry still spinning a not-immaterial number of Borvig, Hall, Riblet, and Yan lifts that pre-date the invention of written language modernize without bankrupting the hundreds of family-owned ski areas that still dot the continent? How far can technology push these simple but essential machines, and how high can that technology push their pricetags? How far can ski areas tap them to suck skiers out of the base before they multiply, Midwest cityhill-style, like ants across the mountain and create something more dangerous than congested liftlines – congested, and perilous, trails?

This podcast does not really answer any of those questions, though all are recurring themes within The Storm. Instead, it acts as a primer on what is essentially one half of the U.S. ski industry: what is Leitner-Poma (and how, for God’s sake, do you pronounce it)? What do they build, and where and how? Why are ski areas building so many lifts all of a sudden, and why are those projects encountering so many and so varied delays, from labor shortages to supply chain knots to permitting issues to locals rocking their pitchfork-and-bag-of-rotten-tomatoes NIMBY starter kits to town meetings? Is all this construction sustainable, and can Leitner-Poma and their main competitor, Doppelmayr, adapt to this demand and streamline their processes to forestall future construction delays?

Lift design, construction, and installation is a fascinating, complicated world tucked into - and a fundamental component of - the fascinating, complicated world of lift-served skiing. And it is evolving as fast as skiing itself. Here’s a peek inside.

What we talked about

The wild and unexpected travel routes of an old-school salesman for Purgatory-Durango ski resort; working for Vail Associates in the Arrowhead/pre-Summit County days; Wild West days at Crested Butte; the insane, rapid evolution of the U.S. lift industry; the days when you could order a lift in August and have it spinning by Christmas; how Covid changed the lift game; when you take over a giant company just before a global pandemic; U.S.A.!; the legacies Leitner and Poma, and why the companies merged in 2000; Grand Junction as old-school ski hub and why it’s a great place for manufacturing; how the Leitner-Poma subsidiary-parent company relationship works between Europe and America; Direct Drive; U.S. America hates mass transit; “a chairlift or a gondola is essentially an electric vehicle”; what it will take to spur greater urban lift development in America; what Leitner-Poma of America (LPOA) builds in Grand Junction, and what’s imported from Europe; why LPOA bought Skytrac; expansion time; why the fixed-grip lift persists in our era of bigger-faster-better; how long can America’s antique lift fleet last?; what may finally push independent ski areas rocking ancient Halls and Riblets to upgrade; a record year for LPOA; the changing culture around chairlift permits; breaking down the delays in Jackson Hole’s Thunder lift as a mirror for lift-installation delays around the country; why haul ropes aren’t made in America, and whether they could be; “at the end of the day, I own those delays”; building a better supply chain; are two-year lift builds the future?; labor shortages and building a better place to work; examining the lifts that are on time and why; building the Palisades Tahoe Base-to-Base Gondola; the differences between building on an all-new liftline versus building a replacement lift; how LPOA, the ski area, and the ski area planner work together to decide which lifts to put where; the return of the high-speed quad; and designing a better 2023 lift-construction season.

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

We are witnessing one of the busiest lift-construction seasons in modern times: 66 new or relocated lifts are rising across North America, according to Lift Blog. Some monsters, too: new gondolas at Palisades Tahoe, Whistler, and Steamboat; eight-packs at Boyne Mountain and Sunday River; 13 high-speed six-packs. Here’s an overview of the 25 (or 26, if you insist) lifts that Leitner-Poma of America and its subsidiary, fixed-grip specialists Skytrac, are building:

Cole joined Leitner-Poma of America in 2014. The company built six lifts that year (Skytrac, then an independent company, built another six). Scaling up any business is challenging, but scaling up amidst a re-ordering of the global economy and geopolitical environment, and in the midst of a pandemic, is flipping the game to MAXIMUM CHALLENGE mode.

The modern world is both miraculous and mysterious. Where does all this crap come from? An incomprehensible network of mines and foundries and factories and warehouses and tools and vehicles and fuel and laborers and engineers and designers transform the raw materials of planet Earth into medicine and chairs and soccer balls and televisions and Broncos and yard furniture and suitcases and Thule boxes and Hanukkah candles and plastic dinosaurs and Optimus Prime toys. And chairlifts. A book documenting that journey would be an atlas of modern life and this spinning ball it occupies. It would also expose the enormous risks and faults in this impossibly far-flung system, and how a haul rope spun out of a European factory can impact construction on a lift rising up a Wyoming mountainside.

Questions I wish I’d asked

Cole said that LPOA had re-sourced all the materials it had been getting in China to U.S. suppliers. I should have followed up to get a clearer understanding of why the company pulled out of China, and which parts had been flowing from that country.

What I got wrong

* In our discussion of urban gondola networks and whether we could ever see one in the United States, I pointed to how well existing systems had worked in “South America, Central America, and Mexico.” While such networks exist throughout South America (in Colombia, Bolivia, and Venezuela), and Mexico, none yet exist in Central America, as far as I can tell. While such systems have been proposed for Panama and Honduras, the one that appears closest to approval is an 8.9-kilometer, 11-station network in Guatemala City that would be built by Doppelmayr.

* I stated that only seven of New York’s 51 ski areas ran high-speed chairlifts. The correct number is eight: Belleayre (1), Windham (4), Hunter (3), Gore (2), Whiteface (1), Holiday Valley (4), Bristol (2), and Holimont (1).

* I pronounced the name of the company as “Lee-tner-Poma” several times throughout the interview. I actually butchered it so bad that I re-recorded Cole’s introduction – during which I included the name four times – after we spoke. Sorry dudes.

Podcast Notes

Cole, in discussing his time with what was then known as “Vail Associates,” referred to the “Arrowhead days.” This is a reference to what is now the Arrowhead section of Beaver Creek, but was for a short time in the 1980s and ‘90s a separate ski area. Here’s the 1988 trailmap:

The modern Beaver Creek retains some of the old trailnames on what tends to be a very empty part of the resort:

Additional thoughts on urban gondolas

It took about four seconds from the invention of the chairlift for engineers to realize they could attach a little house to the overhead cable instead of a chair. Tada: the gondola. Let’s go skiing.

But a gondola, it turns out, is a pretty efficient means of transit just about anywhere. It just took the world a while to realize it. Since 2014, La Paz, the high-altitude (12,000 feet!) Bolivian capital city, has built a massive gondola network stringing together its far-flung districts:

While Mi Teleférico – as the system is known – was not the world’s first urban gondola system, it is the first to consist solely of cable cars – other systems complement trains or buses. It is also the longest and most extensive. And it is getting longer – at full buildout, the system could consist of 11 lines and 30 stations. The only thing more astonishing than the speed with which this network has materialized is how incredibly inexpensive it has been to build: gondolaproject.com puts the total cost of the 11-line network at around $1.4 billion. For comparison’s sake, New York City’s three-station expansion of the Q subway line, which opened in 2017, ran $4.5 billion.

Gondolas are relatively cheap, efficient, environmentally friendly, and insanely easy to build compared to new roads or rails. Which of course means U.S. Americans are terrified of them. It’s true that the nation, as a whole, is allergic to mass transit, preferring to tool around in 18-wheel-drive F-950s. Fighting anything new is the U.S. American way (where were these NIMBYs when we were punching interstate highways through city centers in the 1950s?). But generations raised in the backs of minivans seem especially horrified by gondolas. The hysteria around the proposed Little Cottonwoods gondola – which would substantially mitigate atrocious powder-day and weekend traffic on a road that probably never should have been built to begin with – is indicative of U.S. American reaction toward non-ski gondolas in general. Everywhere such systems – or even simple, two-station lines – are proposed, they meet instant and widespread resistance.

There are practical reasons why the U.S. has not yet developed an urban gondola network: most of our cities are too sprawling to tie together with anything other than surface transportation (i.e. buses). La Paz, the Bolivian model city cited above, is hilly and tight, laced with narrow webs of centuries-old roads that would be difficult to widen. But there are places such systems would make sense, either as standalone networks or as complements to existing train-and-bus lines: Chicago, Portland (Oregon), New York City, many college towns. A forthcoming gondola connecting a Paris suburb to the city’s metro, soaring over a “hellish carscape” of highways, demonstrates the potential here.

Any such proposal in U.S. America, however, will have to overcome the reflexive opposition that will attend it. In Utah, Little Cottonwood gondola proponents are fighting a basket of idiotic arguments ranging from aesthetic concerns over the height of the towers (as though a car-choked paved road is not atrocious) to indignance over taxpayer funding for the machine (as though tax dollars don’t build roads) to warped arguments that mass transit is somehow elitist (instead insisting that we all need personal vehicles equipped with $1,000 sets of winter tires). It’s all a little pathetic. And that’s for a simple, three-station line way up in the mountains. Just wait until some Portland resident launches a Save Our Cats campaign because a rider in a passing gondola car might glimpse Fluffy pissing in her litterbox.

I’m cynical, but Cole, fortunately, is far more optimistic and diplomatic, suggesting that it will really only take one successful instance of a non-ski, non-tourist-attraction gondola for the notion to take hold in America. I hope he’s right.

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

The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 126/100 in 2022, and number 372 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane, which, given the Little Cottonwood take above, I fully expect). You can also email [email protected].