Podcasts about Boyne

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Play Episode Listen Later May 22, 2025 78:17

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication (and my full-time job). To receive new posts and to support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.WhoChris Cushing, Principal of Mountain Planning at SE GroupRecorded onApril 3, 2025About SE GroupFrom the company's website:WE AREMountain planners, landscape architects, environmental analysts, and community and recreation planners. From master planning to conceptual design and permitting, we are your trusted partner in creating exceptional experiences and places.WE BELIEVEThat human and ecological wellbeing forms the foundation for thriving communities.WE EXISTTo enrich people's lives through the power of outdoor recreation.If that doesn't mean anything to you, then this will:Why I interviewed himNature versus nurture: God throws together the recipe, we bake the casserole. A way to explain humans. Sure he's six foot nine, but his mom dropped him into the intensive knitting program at Montessori school 232, so he can't play basketball for s**t. Or identical twins, separated at birth. One grows up as Sir Rutherford Ignacious Beaumont XIV and invents time travel. The other grows up as Buford and is the number seven at Okey-Doke's Quick Oil Change & Cannabis Emporium. The guts matter a lot, but so does the food.This is true of ski areas as well. An earthquake here, a glacier there, maybe a volcanic eruption, and, presto: a non-flat part of the earth on which we may potentially ski. The rest is up to us.It helps if nature was thoughtful enough to add slopes of varying but consistent pitch, a suitable rise from top to bottom, a consistent supply of snow, a flat area at the base, and some sort of natural conduit through which to move people and vehicles. But none of that is strictly necessary. Us humans (nurture), can punch green trails across solid-black fall lines (Jackson Hole), bulldoze a bigger hill (Caberfae), create snow where the clouds decline to (Wintergreen, 2022-23), plant the resort base at the summit (Blue Knob), or send skiers by boat (Eaglecrest).Someone makes all that happen. In North America, that someone is often SE Group, or their competitor, Ecosign. SE Group helps ski areas evolve into even better ski areas. That means helping to plan terrain expansions, lift replacements, snowmaking upgrades, transit connections, parking enhancements, and whatever built environment is under the ski area's control. SE Group is often the machine behind those Forest Service ski area master development plans that I so often spotlight. For example, Vail Mountain:When I talk about Alta consolidating seven slow lifts into four fast lifts; or Little Switzerland carving their mini-kingdom into beginner, parkbrah, and racer domains; or Mount Bachelor boosting its power supply to run more efficiently, this is the sort of thing that SE plots out (I'm not certain if they were involved in any or all of those projects).Analyzing this deliberate crafting of a natural bump into a human playground is the core of what The Storm is. I love, skiing, sure, but specifically lift-served skiing. I'm sure it's great to commune with the raccoons or whatever it is you people do when you discuss “skinning” and “AT setups.” But nature left a few things out. Such as: ski patrol, evacuation sleds, avalanche control, toilet paper, water fountains, firepits, and a place to charge my phone. Oh and chairlifts. And directional signs with trail ratings. And a snack bar.Skiing is torn between competing and contradictory narratives: the misanthropic, which hates crowds and most skiers not deemed sufficiently hardcore; the naturalistic, which mistakes ski resorts with the bucolic experience that is only possible in the backcountry; the preservationist, with its museum-ish aspirations to glasswall the obsolete; the hyperactive, insisting on all fast lifts and groomed runs; the fatalists, who assume inevitable death-of-concept in a warming world.None of these quite gets it. Ski areas are centers of joy and memory and bonhomie and possibility. But they are also (mostly), businesses. They are also parks, designed to appeal to as many skiers as possible. They are centers of organized risk, softened to minimize catastrophic outcomes. They must enlist machine aid to complement natural snowfall and move skiers up those meddlesome but necessary hills. Ski areas are nature, softened and smoothed and labelled by their civilized stewards, until the land is not exactly a representation of either man or God, but a strange and wonderful hybrid of both.What we talked aboutOld-school Cottonwoods vibe; “the Ikon Pass has just changed the industry so dramatically”; how to become a mountain planner for a living; what the mountain-planning vocation looked like in the mid-1980s; the detachable lift arrives; how to consolidate lifts without sacrificing skier experience; when is a lift not OK?; a surface lift resurgence?; how sanctioned glades changed ski areas; the evolution of terrain parks away from mega-features; the importance of terrain parks to small ski areas; reworking trails to reduce skier collisions; the curse of the traverse; making Jackson more approachable; on terrain balance; how megapasses are redistributing skier visits; how to expand a ski area without making traffic worse; ski areas that could evolve into major destinations; and ski area as public park or piece of art.What I got wrong* I blanked on the name of the famous double chair at A-Basin. It is Pallavicini.* I called Crystal Mountain's two-seater served terrain “North Country or whatever” – it is actually called “Northway.”* I said that Deer Valley would become the fourth- or fifth-largest ski resort in the nation once its expansion was finished. It will become the sixth-largest, at 4,926 acres, when the next expansion phase opens for winter 2025-26, and will become the fourth-largest, at 5,726 acres, at full build out.* I estimated Kendall Mountain's current lift-served ski footprint at 200 vertical feet; it is 240 feet.Why now was a good time for this interviewWe have a tendency, particularly in outdoor circles, to lionize the natural and shame the human. Development policy in the United States leans heavily toward “don't,” even in areas already designated for intensive recreation. We mustn't, plea activists: expand the Palisades Tahoe base village; build a gondola up Little Cottonwood Canyon; expand ski terrain contiguous with already-existing ski terrain at Grand Targhee.I understand these impulses, but I believe they are misguided. Intensive but thoughtful, human-scaled development directly within and adjacent to already-disturbed lands is the best way to limit the larger-scale, long-term manmade footprint that chews up vast natural tracts. That is: build 1,000 beds in what is now a bleak parking lot at Palisades Tahoe, and you limit the need for homes to be carved out of surrounding forests, and for hundreds of cars to daytrip into the ski area. Done right, you even create a walkable community of the sort that America conspicuously lacks.To push back against, and gradually change, the Culture of No fueling America's mountain town livability crises, we need exhibits of these sorts of projects actually working. More Whistlers (built from scratch in the 1980s to balance tourism and community) and fewer Aspens (grandfathered into ski town status with a classic street and building grid, but compromised by profiteers before we knew any better). This is the sort of work SE is doing: how do we build a better interface between civilization and nature, so that the former complements, rather than spoils, the latter?All of which is a little tangential to this particular podcast conversation, which focuses mostly on the ski areas themselves. But America's ski centers, established largely in the middle of the last century, are aging with the towns around them. Just about everything, from lifts to lodges to roads to pipes, has reached replacement age. Replacement is a burden, but also an opportunity to create a better version of something. Our ski areas will not only have faster lifts and newer snowguns – they will have fewer lifts and fewer guns that carry more people and make more snow, just as our built footprint, thoughtfully designed, can provide more homes for more people on less space and deliver more skiers with fewer vehicles.In a way, this podcast is almost a canonical Storm conversation. It should, perhaps, have been episode one, as every conversation since has dealt with some version of this question: how do humans sculpt a little piece of nature into a snowy park that we visit for fun? That is not an easy or obvious question to answer, which is why SE Group exists. Much as I admire our rough-and-tumble Dave McCoy-type founders, that improvisational style is trickier to execute in our highly regulated, activist present.And so we rely on artist-architects of the SE sort, who inject the natural with the human without draining what is essential from either. Done well, this crafted experience feels wild. Done poorly – as so much of our legacy built environment has been – and you generate resistance to future development, even if that future development is better. But no one falls in love with a blueprint. Experiencing a ski area as whatever it is you think a ski area should be is something you have to feel. And though there is a sort of magic animating places like Alta and Taos and Mammoth and Mad River Glen and Mount Bohemia, some ineffable thing that bleeds from the earth, these ski areas are also outcomes of a human-driven process, a determination to craft the best version of skiing that could exist for mass human consumption on that shred of the planet.Podcast NotesOn MittersillMittersill, now part of Cannon Mountain, was once a separate ski area. It petered out in the mid-‘80s, then became a sort of Cannon backcountry zone circa 2009. The Mittersill double arrived in 2010, followed by a T-bar in 2016.On chairlift consolidationI mention several ski areas that replaced a bunch of lifts with fewer lifts:The HighlandsIn 2023, Boyne-owned The Highlands wiped out three ancient Riblet triples and replaced them with this glorious bubble six-pack:Here's a before-and-after:Vernon Valley-Great Gorge/Mountain CreekI've called Intrawest's transformation of Vernon Valley-Great Gorge into Mountain Creek “perhaps the largest single-season overhaul of a ski area in the history of lift-served skiing.” Maybe someone can prove me wrong, but just look at this place circa 1989:It looked substantively the same in 1998, when, in a single summer, Intrawest tore out 18 lifts – 15 double chairs, two platters, and a T-bar, plus God knows how many ropetows – and replaced them with two high-speed quads, two fixed-grip quads, and a bucket-style Cabriolet lift that every normal ski area uses as a parking lot transit machine:I discussed this incredible transformation with current Hermitage Club GM Bill Benneyan, who worked at Mountain Creek in 1998, back in 2020:I misspoke on the podcast, saying that Intrawest had pulled out “something like a dozen lifts” and replaced them with “three or four” in 1998.KimberleyBack in the time before social media, Kimberley, British Columbia ran four frontside chairlifts: a high-speed quad, a triple, a double, and a T-bar:Beginning in 2001, the ski area slowly removed everything except the quad. Which was fine until an arsonist set fire to Kimberley's North Star Express in 2021, meaning skiers had no lift-served option to the backside terrain:I discussed this whole strange sequence of events with Andy Cohen, longtime GM of sister resort Fernie, on the podcast last year:On Revelstoke's original masterplanIt is astonishing that Revelstoke serves 3,121 acres with just five lifts: a gondola, two high-speed quads, a fixed quad, and a carpet. Most Midwest ski areas spin three times more lifts for three percent of the terrain.On Priest Creek and Sundown at SteamboatSteamboat, like many ski areas, once ran two parallel fixed-grip lifts on substantively the same line, with the Priest Creek double and the Sundown triple. The Sundown Express quad arrived in 1992, but Steamboat left Priest Creek standing for occasional overflow until 2021. Here's Steamboat circa 1990:Priest Creek is gone, but that entire 1990 lift footprint is nearly unrecognizable. Huge as Steamboat is, every arriving skier squeezes in through a single portal. One of Alterra's first priorities was to completely re-imagine the base area: sliding the existing gondola looker's right; installing an additional 10-person, two-stage gondola right beside it; and moving the carpets and learning center to mid-mountain:On upgrades at A-BasinWe discuss several upgrades at A-Basin, including Lenawee, Beavers, and Pallavicini. Here's the trailmap for context:On moguls on Kachina Peak at TaosYeah I'd say this lift draws some traffic:On the T-bar at Waterville ValleyWaterville Valley opened in 1966. Fifty-two years later, mountain officials finally acknowledged that chairlifts do not work on the mountain's top 400 vertical feet. All it took was a forced 1,585-foot shortening of the resort's base-to-summit high-speed quad just eight years after its 1988 installation and the legacy double chair's continued challenges in wind to say, “yeah maybe we'll just spend 90 percent less to install a lift that's actually appropriate for this terrain.” That was the High Country T-bar, which arrived in 2018. It is insane to look at ‘90s maps of Waterville pre- and post-chop job:On Hyland Hills, MinnesotaWhat an insanely amazing place this is:On Sunrise ParkFrom 1983 to 2017, Sunrise Park, Arizona was home to the most amazing triple chair, a 7,982-foot-long Yan with 352 carriers. Cyclone, as it was known, fell apart at some point and the resort neglected to fix or replace it. A couple of years ago, they re-opened the terrain to lift-served skiing with a low-cost alternative: stringing a ropetow from a green run off the Geronimo lift to where Cyclone used to land.On Woodward Park City and BorealPowdr has really differentiated itself with its Woodward terrain parks, which exist at amazing scale at Copper and Bachelor. The company has essentially turned two of its smaller ski areas – Boreal and Woodward Park City – entirely over to terrain parks.On Killington's tunnelsYou have to zoom in, but you can see them on the looker's right side of the trailmap: Bunny Buster at Great Northern, Great Bear at Great Northern, and Chute at Great Northern.On Jackson Hole traversesJackson is steep. Engineers hacked it so kids like mine could ride there:On expansions at Beaver Creek, Keystone, AspenRecent Colorado expansions have tended to create vast zones tailored to certain levels of skiers:Beaver Creek's McCoy Park is an incredible top-of-the-mountain green zone:Keystone's Bergman Bowl planted a high-speed six-pack to serve 550 acres of high-altitude intermediate terrain:And Aspen – already one of the most challenging mountains in the country – added Hero's – a fierce black-diamond zone off the summit:On Wilbere at SnowbirdWilbere is an example of a chairlift that kept the same name, even as Snowbird upgraded it from a double to a quad and significantly moved the load station and line:On ski terrain growth in AmericaYes, a bunch of ski areas have disappeared since the 1980s, but the raw amount of ski terrain has been increasing steadily over the decades:On White Pine, WyomingCushing referred to White Pine as a “dinky little ski area” with lots of potential. Here's a look at the thousand-footer, which billionaire Joe Ricketts purchased last year:On Deer Valley's expansionYeah, Deer Valley is blowing up:On Schweitzer's growthSchweitzer's transformation has been dramatic: in 1988, the Idaho panhandle resort occupied a large footprint that was served mostly by double chairs:Today: a modern ski area, with four detach quads, a sixer, and two newer triples – only one old chairlift remains:On BC transformationsA number of British Columbia ski areas have transformed from nubbins to majors over the past 30 years:Sun Peaks, then known as Tod Mountain, in 1993Sun Peaks today:Fernie in 1996, pre-upward expansion:Fernie today:Revelstoke, then known as Mount Mackenzie, in 1996:Modern Revy:Kicking Horse, then known as “Whitetooth” in 1994:Kicking Horse today:On Tamarack's expansion potentialTamarack sits mostly on Idaho state land, and would like to expand onto adjacent U.S. Forest Service land. Resort President Scott Turlington discussed these plans in depth with me on the pod a few years back:The mountain's plans have changed since, with a smaller lift footprint:On Central Park as a manmade placeNew York City's fabulous Central Park is another chunk of earth that may strike a visitor as natural, but is in fact a manmade work of art crafted from the wilderness. Per the Central Park Conservancy, which, via a public-private partnership with the city, provides the majority of funds, labor, and logistical support to maintain the sprawling complex:A popular misconception about Central Park is that its 843 acres are the last remaining natural land in Manhattan. While it is a green sanctuary inside a dense, hectic metropolis, this urban park is entirely human-made. It may look like it's naturally occurring, but the flora, landforms, water, and other features of Central Park have not always existed.Every acre of the Park was meticulously designed and built as part of a larger composition—one that its designers conceived as a "single work of art." Together, they created the Park through the practice that would come to be known as "landscape architecture."The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

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11-1 SHOW Thursday 22nd May 2025: 10 YEARS YES // Battle on the Boyne // NATIONAL VOLUNTEER WEEK Girl Guides Louth

LMFM 11-1 Podcasts

Play Episode Listen Later May 22, 2025 45:43

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Podcast #205: Snow Partners CEO Joe Hession

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Play Episode Listen Later May 18, 2025 76:55

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication (and my full-time job). To receive new posts and to support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.WhoJoe Hession, CEO of Snow Partners, which owns Mountain Creek, Big Snow American Dream, SnowCloud, and Terrain Based LearningRecorded onMay 2, 2025About Snow PartnersSnow Partners owns and operates Mountain Creek, New Jersey and Big Snow American Dream, the nation's only indoor ski center. The company also developed SnowCloud resort management software and has rolled out its Terrain Based Learning system at more than 80 ski areas worldwide. They do some other things that I don't really understand (there's a reason that I write about skiing and not particle physics), that you can read about on their website.About Mountain CreekLocated in: Vernon Township, New JerseyClosest neighboring public ski areas: Mount Peter (:24); Big Snow American Dream (:50); Campgaw (:51) Pass affiliations: Snow Triple Play, up to two anytime daysBase elevation: 440 feetSummit elevation: 1,480 feetVertical drop: 1,040 feetSkiable Acres: 167Average annual snowfall: 65 inchesTrail count: 46Lift count: 9 (1 Cabriolet, 2 high-speed quads, 2 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 1 double, 2 carpets – view Lift Blog's inventory of Mountain Creek's lift fleet)About Big Snow American DreamLocated in: East Rutherford, New JerseyClosest neighboring public ski areas: Campgaw (:35); Mountain Creek (:50); Mount Peter (:50)Pass affiliations: Snow Triple Play, up to two anytime daysVertical drop: 160 feet Skiable Acres: 4Trail count: 4 (2 green, 1 blue, 1 black)Lift count: 4 (1 quad, 1 poma, 2 carpets - view Lift Blog's of inventory of Big Snow American Dream's lift fleet)Why I interviewed himI read this earlier today:The internet is full of smart people writing beautiful prose about how bad everything is, how it all sucks, how it's embarrassing to like anything, how anything that appears good is, in fact, secretly bad. I find this confusing and tragic, like watching Olympic high-jumpers catapult themselves into a pit of tarantulas.That blurb was one of 28 “slightly rude notes on writing” offered in Adam Mastroianni's Experimental History newsletter. And I thought, “Man this dude must follow #SkiTwitter.” Or Instabook. Of Flexpost. Or whatever. Because online ski content, both short- and long-form, is, while occasionally joyous and evocative, disproportionately geared toward the skiing-is-fucked-and-this-is-why worldview. The passes suck. The traffic sucks. The skiers suck. The prices suck. The parking sucks. The Duopoly sucks. Everyone's a Jerry, chewing up my pow line with their GoPro selfie sticks hoisted high and their Ikon Passes dangling from their zippers. Skiing is corporate and soulless and tourist obsessed and doomed anyway because of climate change. Don't tell me you're having a good time doing this very fun thing. People like you are the reason skiing's soul now shops at Wal-Mart. Go back to Texas and drink a big jug of oil, you Jerry!It's all so… f*****g dumb. U.S. skiing just wrapped its second-best season of attendance. The big passes, while imperfect, are mostly a force for good, supercharging on-hill infrastructure investment, spreading skiers across geographies, stabilizing a once-storm-dependent industry, and lowering the per-day price of skiing for the most avid among us to 1940s levels. Snowmaking has proven an effective bulwark against shifting weather patterns. Lift-served skiing is not a dying pastime, financially or spiritually or ecologically. Yes, modern skiing has problems: expensive food (pack a lunch); mountain-town housing shortages (stop NIMBY-ing everything); traffic (yay car culture); peak-day crowds (don't go then); exploding insurance, labor, utilities, and infrastructure costs (I have no answers). But in most respects, this is a healthy, thriving, constantly evolving industry, and a more competitive one than the Duopoly Bros would admit.Snow Partners proves this. Because what the hell is Snow Partners? It's some company sewn together by a dude who used to park cars at Mountain Creek. Ten years ago this wasn't a thing, and now it's this wacky little conglomerate that owns a bespoke resort tech platform and North America's only snowdome and the impossible, ridiculous Mountain Creek. And they're going to build a bunch more snowdomes that stamp new skiers out by the millions and maybe – I don't know but maybe – become the most important company in the history of lift-served skiing in the process.Could such an outfit possibly have materialized were the industry so corrupted as the Brobot Pundit Bros declare it? Vail is big. Alterra is big. But the two companies combined control just 53 of America's 501 active ski areas. Big ski areas, yes. Big shadows. But neither created: Indy Pass, Power Pass, Woodward Parks, Terrain Based Learning, Mountain Collective, RFID, free skiing for kids, California Mountain Resort Company, or $99 season passes. Neither saved Holiday Mountain or Hatley Pointe or Norway Mountain or Timberline West Virigina from the scrapheap, or transformed a failing Black Mountain into a co-op. Neither has proven they can successfully run a ski area in Indiana (sorry Vail #SickBurn #SellPaoliPeaks #Please).Skiing, at this moment, is a glorious mix of ideas and energy. I realize it makes me uncool to think so, but I signed off on those aspirations the moment I drove the minivan off the Chrysler lot (topped it off with a roofbox, too, Pimp). Anyhow, the entire point of this newsletter is to track down the people propelling change in a sport that most likely predates the written word and ask them why they're doing these novel things to make an already cool and awesome thing even more cool and awesome. And no one, right now, is doing more cool and awesome things in skiing than Snow Partners.**That's not exactly true. Mountain Capital Partners, Alterra, Ikon Pass, Deer Valley, Entabeni Systems, Jon Schaefer, the Perfect Clan, Boyne Resorts, Big Sky, Mt. Bohemia, Powdr, Vail Resorts, Midwest Family Ski Resorts, and a whole bunch more entities/individuals/coalitions are also contributing massively to skiing's rapid-fire rewiring in the maw of the robot takeover digital industrial revolution. But, hey, when you're in the midst of transforming an entire snow-based industry from a headquarters in freaking New Jersey, you get a hyperbolic bump in the file card description.What we talked aboutThe Snow Triple Play; potential partners; “there's this massive piece of the market that's like ‘I don't even understand what you're talking about'” with big day ticket prices and low-priced season passes; why Mountain Creek sells its Triple Play all season long and why the Snow Triple Play won't work that way (at least at first); M.A.X. Pass and why Mountain Creek declined to join successor passes; an argument for Vail, Alterra and other large ski companies to participate on the Snow Triple Play; comparing skiing to hotels, airlines, and Disney World; “the next five years are going to be the most interesting and disruptive time in the ski industry because of technology”; “we don't compete with anybody”; Liftopia's potential, errors, failure, and legacy; skiing on Groupon; considering Breckenridge as an independent ski area; what a “premium” ski area on the Snow Triple Play would be; why megapasses are “selling people a product that will never be used the way it's sold to them”; why people in NYC feel like going to Mountain Creek, an hour over the George Washington Bridge, is “going to Alaska”; why Snow Triple Play will “never” add a fourth day; sticker shock for Big Snow newbs who emerge from the Dome wanting more; SnowCloud and the tech and the guest journey from parking lot to lifts; why Mountain Creek stopped mailing season passes; Bluetooth Low Energy “is certainly the future of passes”; “100 percent we're getting more Big Snows” – but let's justify the $175 million investment first; Big Snow has a “terrible” design; “I don't see why every city shouldn't have a Big Snow” and which markets Snow Partners is talking to; why Mountain Creek didn't get the mega-lift Hession teased on this pod three years ago and when we could see one; “I really believe that the Vernon base of Mountain Creek needs an updated chair”; the impact of automated snowmaking at Mountain Creek; and a huge residential project incoming at Mountain Creek.What I got wrong* I said that Hession wasn't involved in Mountain Creek in the M.A.X. Pass era, but he was an Intrawest employee at the time, and was Mountain Creek's GM until 2012.* I hedged on whether Boyne's Explorer multi-day pass started at two or three days. Skiers can purchase the pass in three- to six-day increments.Why now was a good time for this interviewOkay, so I'll admit that when Snow Partners summarized the Snow Triple Play for me, I wasn't like “Holy crap, three days (total) at up to three different ski areas on a single ski pass? Do you think they have room for another head on Mount Rushmore?” This multi-day pass is a straightforward product that builds off a smart idea (the Mountain Creek Triple Play), that has been a smash hit at the Jersey Snow Jungle since at least 2008. But Snow Triple Play doesn't rank alongside Epic, Ikon, Indy, or Mountain Collective as a seasonlong basher. This is another frequency product in a market already flush with them.So why did I dedicate an entire podcast and two articles (so far) to dissecting this product, which Hession makes pretty clear has no ambitions to grow into some Indy/Ikon/Epic competitor? Because it is the first product to tie Big Snow to the wider ski world. And Big Snow only works if it is step one and there is an obvious step two. Right now, that step two is hard, even in a region ripe with ski areas. The logistics are confounding, the one-off cost hard to justify. Lift tickets, gear rentals, getting your ass to the bump and back, food, maybe a lesson. The Snow Triple Play doesn't solve all of these problems, but it does narrow an impossible choice down to a manageable one by presenting skiers with a go-here-next menu. If Snow Partners can build a compelling (or at least logical) Northeast network and then scale it across the country as the company opens more Big Snows in more cities, then this simple pass could evolve into an effective toolkit for building new skiers.OK, so why not just join Indy or Mountain Collective, or forge some sort of newb-to-novice agreement with Epic or Ikon? That would give Snow Partners the stepladder, without the administrative hassle of owning a ski pass. But that brings us to another roadblock in Ski Revolution 2025: no one wants to share partners. So Hession is trying to flip the narrative. Rather than locking Big Snow into one confederacy or the other, he wants the warring armies to lash their fleets along Snow Partners Pier. Big Snow is just the bullet factory, or the gas station, or the cornfield – the thing that all the armies need but can't supply themselves. You want new skiers? We got ‘em. They're ready. They just need a map to your doorstep. And we're happy to draw you one.Podcast NotesOn the Snow Triple PlayThe basics: three total days, max of two used at any one partner ski area, no blackouts at Big Snow or Mountain Creek, possible blackouts at partner resorts, which are TBD.The pass, which won't be on sale until Labor Day, is fully summarized here:And I speculate on potential partners here:On the M.A.X. PassFor its short, barely noted existence, the M.A.X. Pass was kind of an amazing hack, granting skiers five days each at an impressive blend of regional and destination ski areas:Much of this roster migrated over to Ikon, but in taking their pass' name too literally, the Alterra folks left off some really compelling regional ski areas that could have established a hub-and-spoke network out of the gate. Lutsen and Granite Peak owner Charles Skinner told me on the podcast a few years back that Ikon never offered his ski areas membership (they joined Indy in 2020), cutting out two of the Midwest's best mountains. The omissions of Mountain Creek, Wachusett, and the New York trio of Belleayre, Whiteface, and Gore ceded huge swaths of the dense and monied Northeast to competitors who saw value in smaller, high-end operations that are day-trip magnets for city folks who also want that week at Deer Valley (no other pass signed any of these mountains, but Vail and Indy both assembled better networks of day-drivers and destinations).On my 2022 interview with HessionOn LiftopiaLiftopia's website is still live, but I'm not sure how many ski areas participate in this Expedia-for-lift-tickets. Six years ago, I thought Liftopia was the next bargain evolution of lift-served skiing. I even hosted founder Evan Reece on one of my first 10 podcasts. The whole thing fell apart when Covid hit. An overview here:On various other day-pass productsI covered this in my initial article, but here's how the Snow Triple Play stacks up against other three-day multi-resort products:On Mountain Creek not mailing passesI don't know anything about tech, but I know, from a skier's point of view, when something works well and when it doesn't. Snow Cloud's tech is incredible in at least one customer-facing respect: when you show up at a ski area, a rep standing in a conspicuous place is waiting with an iPhone, with which they scan a QR code on your phone, and presto-magico: they hand you your ski pass. No lines or waiting. One sentimental casualty of this on-site efficiency was the mailed ski pass, an autumn token of coming winter to be plucked gingerly from the mailbox. And this is fine and makes sense, in the same way that tearing down chairlifts constructed of brontosaurus bones and mastodon hides makes sense, but I must admit that I miss these annual mailings in the same way that I miss paper event tickets and ski magazines. My favorite ski mailing ever, in fact, was not Ikon's glossy fold-out complete with a 1,000-piece 3D jigsaw puzzle of the Wild Blue Gondola and name-a-snowflake-after-your-dog kit, but this simple pamphlet dropped into the envelope with my 2018-19 Mountain Creek season pass:Just f*****g beautiful, Man. That hung on my office wall for years. On the CabrioletThis is just such a wackadoodle ski lift:Onetime Mountain Creek owner Intrawest built similar lifts at Winter Park and Tremblant, but as transit lifts from the parking lot. This one at Mountain Creek is the only one that I'm aware of that's used as an open-air gondola. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

Spin on Golf talk with Ken Griffin ~ May 4, 2025

Spin On Golf

Play Episode Listen Later May 4, 2025 11:08

Steve Courtney, Jordan Young and Jeff Goble talk with Ken Griffin, Director of Sales and Marketing in Boyne about the golf season.

This week on The Knock On, KCLR Sport's weekly rugby podcast, Stephen Byrne is joined by Tom Crotty (Carlow Rugby Club), James Blanchfield (Kilkenny RFC), and Paddy Browne (Tullow RFC) to discuss all the latest rugby action.Towns Cup ActionTullow progressed to the Quarter-Finals after Skerries conceded their match. They now face Gorey away on Sunday.Carlow takes on a strong Boyne side, who recently won Division 1B of the league.We have the team sheets for both Tullow and Carlow's upcoming matches.Club UpdatesTullow RFCJ2's face New Ross.Tullow Ladies played their final home league game, falling short against Cooke RFC.Katie Corrigan & Dannah O'Brien are in action with the Irish squad.Carlow RFCJ2's meet Wexford Wanderers.J3's face Longford in the Anderson Cup.Kilkenny RFCJ2's take on Edenderry.J3's battle Portarlington.Silverware success for the Kilkenny youth teams at Foulkstown.Tag Rugby returns this summer—James shares details on how to get involved.Fixtures & Youth Rugby ReviewWe round up all the latest youth rugby results and upcoming fixtures for Tullow, Carlow, and Kilkenny RFCs.

Ep. 416 Boyne Community School, Meath v Monaghan

We Are Meath

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 17, 2025 80:13

* Hurlers Big Win * Monaghan Cooler * County Teams Crucial Ties Next Weekend * Gaa Predictions Leagues * Lottos * Listeners Talking Points

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234. Battle of the Boyne: Clash of Two Kings (Ep 2)

Empire

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 4, 2025 43:12

The Restoration reinstates the monarchy in England, Scotland & Ireland, and Irish Catholics believe that they will get their lands back for their loyalty to the king. And when the openly Catholic King James II succeeds his older brother, they are even more hopeful. But English Protestants fear that his reign will lead to a Catholic dynasty, and invite the Dutch William of Orange to take the throne. James II flees to France and gathers troops to back his cause. He arrives on the coast of Ireland in 1689 to reclaim his crown. When news of this reaches Parliament, William of Orange heads to Ireland to meet his enemy on the battlefield. In the Boyne Valley near Dublin, the two kings clash in a battle that continues to be memorialised in Ireland today. But was it that militarily important? And how did the Battle of the Boyne play into the chessboard of European geopolitics? Listen as Anita and William are joined once again by Professor Jane Ohlmeyer to discuss how the Battle of the Boyne shaped Protestant identity in Ireland. _____________ Empire UK Live Tour: The Booze & Brews live show is going on a UK tour! William and Anita will be discussing the extraordinary history of ordinary drinks such as tea, Indian Pale Ale and gin & tonic, highlighting how interconnected our drinks cabinets are with the British Empire. Tickets are on sale NOW, to buy your tickets head to aegp.uk/EmpireLive2025. Empire Club: Become a member of the Empire Club to receive early access to miniseries, ad-free listening, early access to live show tickets, bonus episodes, book discounts, and a weekly newsletter! Head to empirepoduk.com to sign up or start a free trial on Apple Podcasts. Email: empire@goalhanger.com Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk goalhanger.com Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Anouska Lewis Senior Producer: Callum Hill Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Story Of Ireland's Past In 50 Shades Of Grey” At The Courthouse Gallery In Ennistymon

Clare FM - Podcasts

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 20, 2025 5:44

The North Clare Historical Society will host a talk on Monday, February 24th, at the Courthouse Gallery, Ennistymon. Martina McCarthy, a pioneering expert in archaeological geophysics, will present “The Story of Ireland's Past in 50 Shades of Grey”, exploring the early years of using geophysical surveys to uncover hidden history. The Liscannor native, has worked on major sites like the Hill of Tara, Newgrange, and the Battle of the Boyne. To find out more about her groundbreaking work, Alan Morrissey was joined by her on Morning Focus. Image (c) Michael McInerney

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#111 - EventCatalog Revolutionizes Governance in Event-Driven Architectures | ft. David Boyne

Real World Serverless with theburningmonk

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 17, 2025 51:00

In this episode, I spoke with David Boyne, the creator of EventCatalog, to learn more about the most common challenges with Event-Driven Architectures and how EventCatalog can solve the governance problem - how events are versioned, schema'd, discovered and tested.This episode includes a short demo of EventCatalog, if you want to see the demo in action, then check out the video version on YouTube here.Links from the episode:EventCatalogWinglangOpening theme song:Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-mondayLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.

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Questions over Boyne Bridge demolition, Grand Central Station access, cancellations, delays - Translink front up on Nolan Show

Best of Nolan

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 17, 2025 77:01

Translink Chief Executive Chris Conway spoke to Mark Simpson.

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Nolan Show investigation reveals demolition of Boyne Bridge 'ceased' - and it's not clear when it will start again

Best of Nolan

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 15, 2025 77:59

Former Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams is line for a payday from the tax-payer, why?

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Podcast #194: Worcester Telegram & Gazette Snowsports Columnist Shaun Sutner

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Play Episode Listen Later Jan 7, 2025 87:11

This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on Dec. 31. It dropped for free subscribers on Jan. 7. To receive future episodes as soon as they're live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:WhoShaun Sutner, snowsports columnist for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette and Telegram.comRecorded onNovember 25, 2024About Shaun SutnerSutner is a skier, writer, and journalist based in Worcester, Massachusetts. He's written a snowsports column for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette from Thanksgiving to April for the past several decades. You can follow Shaun on social media to stay locked into his work:Read his recent columns:* On Wildcat, Attitash, and Vail Resorts* Everyone needs a bootfitter* Indy Pass is still kicking assWhy I interviewed himJournalism sounds easy. Go there, talk to people, write about it. It's not easy. The quest for truth is like the Hobbit's quest for the ring: long, circuitous, filled with monsters who want to eat you. Some truth is easy: Wachusett has four chairlifts. Beyond the objective, complications arise: Wachusett's decision to replace its summit quad with a six-pack in 2025 is… what, exactly? Visionary, shortsighted, foolish, clever, pedestrian? Does it prioritize passholders or marketing or profit over experience? Is it necessary? Is it wise? Is it prudent? Is it an answer to locals' frustrations or a compounding factor in it?The journalist's job is to machete through this jungle and sculpt a version of reality that all parties will recognize and that none of them will be entirely happy with. Because people are complex and so is the world, and assembling the truth is less like snapping together a thousand-piece puzzle and more like the A-Team examining a trashheap and saying “OK boys, let's build a helicopter.”Sutner is good at this, as may be expected of someone who's spent decades on his beat. He understands that anecdote is not absolute. He knows how to pull together broad narratives (“New England's outdated lift fleet” of the 2010s), and to acknowledge when they change (“New England operators aggressively modernize lifts” in the 2020s). He is empathetic to locals and operators alike, without being deferential to either. He knows that the best stories are 90 percent what the writer leaves out, and 10 percent identifying the essential bits to frame the larger whole. And he lives the beat, aggressively, joyously, immersively.We need more Sutners, but we are probably getting fewer. As journalism figures out what it is in the 21st century, it is deciding that it is less about community-based entities employing beat-specific writers and more about feeding mastheads to private equity funds that drag the carcass down to entrails and then feed them to the hounds. Thousands of American communities now have no local news organization, let alone one with the resources to hire writers solely devoted to something as niche as skiing. Filling the information void is Angry Ski Bro, firing off 50 dozen monthly Facebook posts about Vail's abominable greed being distilled in a broken snowgun at Wildcat.I started The Storm as an antidote to this global complaint box. And I believe that the future of journalism includes writers tapping Substack and similar platforms to freelance the truth. But I still believe that the traditional news organization – meaning physical newspapers that have evolved into digital-analogue hybrids – can find a sustainable business model that tells a community's essential stories. Sutner, and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, deserve credit for showing us how to do this.What we talked aboutSki South America; how to ski 60 days while working full time; Worcester's legendary Strand's ski shop; Powdr's sale of Killington and Pico and how the new owners can keep from ruining it; how to make Pico more relevant; is this the start of New England ski area deconsolidation?; Smuggs; Black Mountain, New Hampshire's co-op quest; taking stock of New England consolidation; Vail Resorts' New England GM shuffle; New England's chairlift renaissance; what is New England's new most-hated lift?; why New England needs more surface lifts; a new sixer coming to Wachusett; the legacy of Wachusett's David Crowley; why Wachusett works; and what we lose with consolidation.What we got wrongOn whatever that city is calledI probably still can't pronounce “Worcester.” Just congratulate yourself if you can, and keep moving.On South American skiingI said in our conversation that there were “40 or so ski areas” in South America. I've not taken my magnifying glass to the region as I have with Real America, but I made this quick-hitter chart earlier this year that counted just 26 on the continent, all of them in Chile and Argentina:This map on skiresort.info counts 45 South American ski areas, including a sporadically operating area in Bolivia and one indoor and one artificial-turf area in Brazil. Someday I'll do a cross-check with my list, but that day is not today.On which county Killington lives inNeither of us knew which county Killington is in, but he suggested Windham County. The correct answer is Rutland County.On The Man owning our ski centersWhen discussing state-owned ski areas, Sutner didn't remember that New Hampshire owns Cannon and Vail-operated Sunapee, and I didn't remember to remind him.On Black Mountain, New HampshireWe recorded this prior to Black outlining its plans for a transition to co-op ownership. Mountain leadership has since released more details:On Mad River Glen's snowmaking hard stopI noted that Mad River Glen only makes snow up to “2,000-whatever feet.” The actual number, as proclaimed by some past assemblage of the MRG co-op, is 2,200 feet. Though perhaps raising that by a couple hundred feet would have spared them from spending a fat stack to build a double-chair midstation this year.On Vail's GM shuffleWhen we recorded this conversation, Vail-owned Wildcat, Mount Snow, and Crotched had general manager vacancies. The company has since filled all three (click through on the links above).On Sugarloaf's T-barIn our discussion on surface lifts, Sutner references a T-bar to Sugarloaf's summit. The Bateau T-bar does land quite high on the mountain, but it stops short of the summit and snowfields.On Waterville Valley's T-barsWaterville's T-bar game is way ahead of most New England ski areas. Two of them serve lower-mountain race or race-training trails, and one serves the mountain's top 400 vertical feet, replacing the windhold-prone chairlifts that once ran to the summit. While two of the T-bars run parallel to terrain parks, serving them does not appear to be the lifts' direct purpose, as we debated on the podcast.On Vail's high-speed “T-bars”I mixed up my lift types when describing the high-speed surface lifts that Vail runs at its Midwest mountains. They are ropetows, not T-bars. Here they go at Afton Alps, Minnesota:Afton Alps, Minnesota. Video by Stuart Winchester.On Wachusett upgradesSutner noted that Wachusett's coming summit six-pack would be its first big infrastructure upgrade in 20 years, but the mountain installed the 299-vertical-foot Monadnock Express quad in 2011.On Berkshire East's T-Bar ExpressSutner said that last year was Berkshire East's second season running its T-Bar Express high-speed quad, but the lift first spun for the 2023-24 ski season. The current, 2024-25 season is the lift's second.On Sutner's ski daysWe recorded this a while ago, and Sutner had clocked eight ski days before Thanksgiving. As of Dec. 30, he'd hit 21 days, well along to his 60-day goal.Podcast NotesOn Cerro CatedralI'm somewhat obsessed with this 3,773-vertical-foot, 1,500-acre Argentinian monster:On Shaun's Worcester Living articleSutner wrote up his Argentinian ski adventure for Worcester Living magazine. The story starts on page 20.On Powdr's sale of Killington and PicoIn case you missed it:On New England consolidationNew England's 100-ish ski areas are largely independently owned and operated. These 25 are run by an entity that operates at least two ski areas:On Intrawest and American Skiing CompanyIt's impossible to discuss the history of New England ski area consolidation without acknowledging the now-dead Intrawest and American Skiing Company. On Vail's management shuffleI wrote about this recently:I launched The Storm in October 2019, when Vail owned 34 North American ski areas. To the best of my knowledge, just three of those ski areas' general manager-level leaders remain where they were on that date: Vail Mountain VP/COO Beth Howard, Okemo VP/GM Bruce Schmidt, and Boston Mills-Brandywine GM Jake Campbell. Compare this to Boyne, where nine of 10 mountain leaders either remain in their 2019 roles, or have since ascended to them after working at the resort for decades, often replacing legends retiring after long careers. Alterra and Powdr have demonstrated similar stability. Meanwhile, Vail's seven New England Resorts enter this winter with just two mountains – Okemo and Attitash – under the same general manager that ran them in the spring.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 90/100 in 2024, and number 590 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. 2024 will continue until the 100-article threshold is achieved, regardless of what that pesky calendar says. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

Episode 143: Jen Boyne's Wearable Art and Heartfelt Home Life Will Leave You (Be)Dazzled

Mike and Kristen

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 11, 2024 73:35

Meet Jen Boyne, the mastermind behind some of the most dazzling hand-sewn Western and stage wear you've ever seen. From rhinestone-studded suits to capes adorned with album-inspired overlays, her designs are pure showstoppers. Jen's creations have dressed stars like The Trailer Park Boys, Elliott Brood, Christina Martin, and, most recently, Morgan Toney—who shone in her suit at the Boston Tree Lighting! But there's more to Jen than her expert craftsmanship. As a single foster parent, she's weaving more than fabric—she's creating a life filled with generosity, resilience, and love. In this conversation, we explore how fostering has enriched her family and her journey as one of the hardest-working (and funniest) entrepreneurs we've had the pleasure of meeting. (P.S. We're absolutely saving our pennies for a custom fit of our own!) Us on the web: www.mikeandkristen.ca Instagram: www.instagram.com/mike_and_kristen/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mikeandkristencreative Shoot us a message! Say hello, tell us who you think we should have on the podcast, and your deepest and darkest secrets: mikeandkristencreative@gmail.com Review our book "You and Me" on Amazon (it helps a lot!!): https://amzn.to/3qqNCMo Intro song: "The Walk" Outro song: "The Jam" both by Mike's band The Town Heroes - www.thetownheroes.com Mike's site: www.michaelsryan.com Kristen's site: www.kristenherringtonart.com Jen's site: www.jboynewestern.com Jen's IG: https://www.instagram.com/j.boynewesternwear/

Podcast #192: Mount Sunapee GM (and former Crotched GM) Susan Donnelly

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Play Episode Listen Later Dec 6, 2024 76:10

This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on Nov. 29. It dropped for free subscribers on Dec. 6. To receive future episodes as soon as they're live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:WhoSusan Donnelly, General Manager of Mount Sunapee (and former General Manager of Crotched Mountain)Recorded onNovember 4, 2024About CrotchedClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Vail Resorts, which also owns:Located in: Francetown, New HampshireYear founded: 1963 (as Crotched East); 1969 (as Onset, then Onset Bobcat, then Crotched West, now present-day Crotched); entire complex closed in 1990; West re-opened by Peak Resorts in 2003 as Crotched MountainPass affiliations:* Epic Pass, Epic Local Pass, Northeast Value Epic Pass: unlimited access* Northeast Midweek Epic Pass: midweek access, including holidaysClosest neighboring public ski areas: Pats Peak (:34), Granite Gorge (:39), Arrowhead (:41), McIntyre (:50), Mount Sunapee (:51)Base elevation: 1,050 feetSummit elevation: 2,066 feetVertical drop: 1,016Skiable Acres: 100Average annual snowfall: 65 inchesTrail count: 25 (28% beginner, 40% intermediate, 32% advanced)Lift count: 5 (1 high-speed quad, 1 fixed-grip quad, 1 triple, 1 double, 1 surface lift – view Lift Blog's inventory of Crotched's lift fleet)History: Read New England Ski History's overview of Crotched MountainAbout Mount SunapeeClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: The State of New Hampshire; operated by Vail Resorts, which also operates resorts detailed in the chart above.Located in: Newbury, New HampshireYear founded: 1948Pass affiliations:* Epic Pass, Epic Local Pass, Northeast Value Epic Pass: unlimited access* Northeast Midweek Epic Pass: midweek access, including holidaysClosest neighboring public ski areas: Pats Peak (:28), Whaleback (:29), Arrowhead (:29), Ragged (:38), Veterans Memorial (:42), Ascutney (:45), Crotched (:48), Quechee (:50), Granite Gorge (:51), McIntyre (:53)Base elevation: 1,233 feetSummit elevation: 2,743 feetVertical drop: 1,510 feetSkiable Acres: 233 acresAverage annual snowfall: 130 inchesTrail count: 67 (29% beginner, 47% intermediate, 24% advanced)Lift count: 8 (2 high-speed quads, 1 fixed-grip quad, 2 triples, 3 conveyors – view Lift Blog's inventory of Mount Sunapee's lift fleet.)History: Read New England Ski History's overview of Mount SunapeeWhy I interviewed herIt's hard to be small in New England and it's hard to be south in New England. There are 35 New England ski areas with vertical drops greater than 1,100 feet, and Crotched is not one of them. There are 44 New England ski areas that average more than 100 inches of snow per winter, and Crotched is not one of those either. Crotched does have a thousand vertical feet and a high-speed lift and a new baselodge and a snowmaking control room worthy of a nuclear submarine. Which is a pretty good starter kit for a successful ski area. But it's not enough in New England.To succeed as a ski area in New England, you need a Thing. The most common Things are to be really really nice or really really gritty. Stratton or Mad River. Okemo or Magic. Sunday River or Black Mountain of Maine. The pitch is either “you'll think you're at Deer Valley” or “you'll descend the hill on ice skates and you'll like it.” But Crotched's built-along-a-state-highway normalness precludes arrogance, and its mellow terrain lacks the attitude for even modest braggadocio. It's not a small ski area, but it's not big enough to be a mid-sized one, either. The terrain is fine, but it's not the kind of place you need to ski on purpose, or more than once. It's a fine local, but not much else, making Crotched precisely the kind of mountain that you would have expected to be smothered by the numerous larger and better ski areas around it before it could live to see the internet. And that's exactly what happened. Crotched, lacking a clear Thing, went bust in 1990.The ski area, undersized and average, should have melted back into the forest by now. But in 2002, then-budding Peak Resorts crept out of its weird Lower Midwest manmade snowhole on a reverse Lewis & Clark Expedition to explore the strange and murky East. And as they hacked away the brambles around Crotched's boarded-up baselodge, they saw not a big pile of mediocrity, but a portal into the gold-plated New England market. And they said “this could work if we can just find a Thing.” And that Thing was night-skiing with attitude, built on top of $10 million in renovations that included a built-from-scratch snowmaking system.The air above the American mountains is filled with such wild notions. “We're going to save Mt. Goatpath. It's going to be bigger than Vail and deeper than Alta and higher than Telluride.” And everyone around them is saying, “You know this is, like, f*****g Connecticut, right?” But if practical concerns killed all bad ideas, then no one would keep reptiles as pets. Everyone else is happy with cats or dogs, sentient mammals of kindred disposition with humans, but this idiot needs a 12-foot-long boa constrictor that he keeps in a 6x3 fishtank. It helps him get chicks or something. It's his thing. And damned if it doesn't work.What we talked aboutTransitioning from smaller, Vail-owned Crotched to larger, state-owned but Vail-operated Sunapee; “weather-proofing” Sunapee; Crotched and Sunapee – so close but so different; reflecting on the Okemo days under Triple Peaks ownership; longtime Okemo head Bruce Schmidt; reacting to Vail's 2018 purchase of Triple Peaks; living through change; the upside of acquisitions; integrating Peak Resorts; skiing's boys' club; Vail Resorts' culture of women's advancement; why Covid uniquely challenged Crotched among Vail's New England properties; reviving Midnight Madness; Crotched's historic downsizing; whether the lost half of Crotched could ever be re-developed; why Crotched 2.0 is more durable than the version that shut down in 1990; Crotched's baller snowmaking system; southern New Hampshire's wild weather; thoughts on future Crotched infrastructure; and considering a beginner trail from Crotched's summit.Why now was a good time for this interviewAs we swing toward the middle of the 2020s, it's pretty lame to continue complaining about operational malfunctions in the so-called Covid season of 2020-21, but I'm going to do it anyway.Some ski areas did a good job operating that season. For example, Pats Peak. Pats Peak was open seven days per week that winter. Pats Peak offered night skiing on all the days it usually offers night skiing. Pats Peak made the Ross Ice Shelf jealous with its snowmaking firepower. Pats Peak acted like a snosportskiing operation that had operated a snosportskiing operation in previous winters. Pats Peak did a good job.Other ski areas did a bad job operating that season. For example, Crotched. Crotched was open whenever it decided to be open, which was not very often. Crotched, one of the great night-skiing centers in New England, offered almost no night skiing. Crotched's snowmaking looked like what happens when you accidentally keep the garden hose running during an overnight freeze. Crotched did a bad job.This is a useful comparison, because these two ski areas sit just 21 miles and 30 minutes apart. They are dealing with the same crappy weather and the same low-altitude draw. They are both obscured by the shadows of far larger ski areas scraping the skies just to the north. They are both small and unserious places, where the skiing is somewhat beside the point. Kids go there to pole-click one another's skis off of moving chairlifts. College kids go there to alternate two laps with two rounds at the bar. Adults go there to shoo the kids onto the chairlifts and burn down happy hour. No one shows up in either parking lot expecting Jackson Hole.But Crotched Mountain is owned by Vail Resorts. Pats Peak is owned by the same family of good-old boys who built the original baselodge from logs sawed straight off the mountain in 1962. Vail Resorts has the resources to send a container full of sawdust to the moon just to see what happens when it's opened. Most of Pats Peaks' chairlifts came used from other ski areas. These two are not drawing from the same oil tap.And yet, one of them delivered a good product during Covid, and the other did not. And the ones who did are not the ones that their respective pools of resources would suggest. And so the people who skied Pats Peak that year were like “Yeah that was pretty good considering everything else kind of sucks right now.” And the people who skied Crotched that season were like “Well that sucked even worse than everything else does right now, and that's saying something.”And that's the mess that Donnelly inherited when she took the GM job at Crotched in 2021. And it took a while, but she fixed it. And that's harder than it should be when your parent company can deploy sawdust rockets on a whim.What I got wrong* I said that Colorado has 35 active ski areas. The correct number is 34, or 33 if we exclude Hesperus, which did not operate last winter, and is not scheduled to reactivate anytime soon.* I said that Bruce Schmidt was the “president and general manager” of Okemo. His title is “Vice President and General Manager.” Sorry about that, Bruce.* I said that Okemo's season pass was “closing in on $2,000” when Vail came along. According to New England Ski History, Okemo's top season pass price hit $1,375 for the 2017-18 ski season, the last before Vail purchased the resort. This appears to be a big cut from the 2016-17 season, when the top price was $1,619. My best guess is that Okemo dropped their pass prices after Vail purchased Stowe, lowering that mountain's pass price from $2,313 for the 2016-17 ski season to just $899 (an Epic Pass) the next.* I said that 80 percent-plus of my podcasts featured interviews with men. I examined the inventory, and found that of the 210 podcasts I've published (192 Storm Skiing Podcasts, 12 Covid pods, 6 Live pods), only 33, or 15.7 percent, included a female guest. Only 23 of those (11 percent), featured a woman as the only guest. And three of those podcasts were with one person: former NSAA CEO Kelly Pawlak. So either my representation sucks, or the ski industry's representation sucks, but probably it's both.Why you should ski CrotchedUpper New England doesn't have a lot of night skiing, and the night skiing it does have is mostly underwhelming. Most of the large resorts – Killington, Sugarbush, Smuggs, Stowe, Sugarloaf, Waterville, Cannon, Stratton, Mount Snow, Okemo, Attitash, Wildcat, etc. – have no night skiing at all. A few of the big names – Bretton Woods, Sunday River, Cranmore – provide a nominal after-dark offering, a lift and a handful of trails. The bulk of the night skiing in New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine involves surface lifts at community-run bumps with the vertical drop of a Slip N' Slide.But a few exceptions tower into the frosty darkness: Pleasant Mountain, Maine; Pats Peak, New Hampshire; and Bolton Valley, Vermont all deliver big vertical drops, multiple chairlifts, and a spiderweb of trails for night skiers. Boyne-owned Pleasant, with 1,300 vertical feet served by a high-speed quad, is the most extensive of these, but the second-most expansive night-skiing operation in New England lives at Crotched.Parked less than an hour from New Hampshire's four largest cities – Manchester, Nashua, Concord, and Derry – Crotched is the rare northern New England ski area that can sustain an after-hours business (New Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont are ranked numbers 41, 42, and 49 among U.S. states by population, respectively, with a three-state total of just 3.5 million residents). With four chairlifts spinning, every trail lit, Park Brahs on patrol, first-timers lined up at the rental shop, Bomber Bro straightlining Pluto's Plunge in his unzipped Celtics jacket, the parking lots jammed, and the scritch-scratch of edges on ice shuddering across the night, it's an amazing scene, a lantern of New England Yeah Dawg zest floating in the winter night.No, Crotched night skiing isn't what it used to be, when Peak Resorts kept the joint bumping until 3 a.m. And the real jammer, Midnight Madness, hits just a half dozen days per winter. But it's still a uniquely New England scene, a skiing spectacle that can double as a night-cap after a day shredding Cannon or Waterville or Mount Snow.Podcast NotesOn my recent Sunapee podI tend to schedule these interviews several months in advance, and sometimes things change. One of the things that changed between when I scheduled this conversation and when we recorded it was Donnelly's job. She moved from Crotched, which I had never spotlighted on the podcast, to Sunapee, which I just featured a few months ago. Which means, Sunapee Nation, that we don't really talk much about Mount Sunapee on this podcast that has Mount Sunapee in the headline. But pretty much everything I talked about in June with former Sunapee GM Peter Disch (who's now VP of Mountain Ops at Vail's Heavenly), is still relevant:On historic CrotchedCrotched was once a much larger resort forged from two onetime independent side-by-side ski areas. The whole history of it is a bit labyrinthian and involves bad decisions, low snow years, and unpaid taxes (read the full tale at New England Ski History), but the upshot was this interconnected animal, shown here at its 1988-ish peak:The whole Crotched complex dropped dead around 1990, and would have likely stayed that way forever had Missouri-based Peak Resorts not gotten the insane idea to dig a lost New England ski area up from the graveyard. Somewhat improbably, they succeeded, and the contemporary Crotched (minus the summit quad, which came later), opened in 2003. The current ski area sits on what was formerly known as “Crotched West,” and before that “Bobcat,” and before that (or perhaps at the same time), “Onset.” Trails on the original Crotched Mountain, at Crotched East (left on the trailmap above), are still faintly visible from above (on the right below, between the “Crotched Mountain” and “St. John Enterprise” dots):On Triple Peaks and OkemoTriple Peaks was the umbrella company that owned Okemo, Vermont; Mount Sunapee, New Hampshire; and Crested Butte, Colorado. The owners, the Mueller family, sold the whole outfit to Vail Resorts in 2018. Longtime Okemo GM Bruce Schmidt laid out the whole history on the podcast earlier this year:On Crotched's lift fleetPeak got creative building Crotched's lift fleet. The West double, a Hall installed by Jesus himself in 400 B.C., had sat in the woods through Crotched's entire 13-year closure and was somehow reactivated for the revival. The Rover triple and the Valley and Summit quads came from a short-lived 1,000-vertical-foot Virginia ski area called Cherokee.What really nailed Crotched back to the floor, however, was the 2012 acquisition of a used high-speed quad from bankrupt Ascutney, Vermont.Peak flagrantly dubbed this lift the “Crotched Rocket,” a name that Vail seems to have backed away from (the lift is simply “Rocket” on current trailmaps).Fortunately, Ascutney lived on as a surface-lifts-only community bump even after its beheading. You can still skin and ski the top trails if you're one of those people who likes to make skiing harder than it needs to be:On Peak ResortsPeak Resorts started in, of all places, Missouri. The company slowly acquired small-but-busy suburban ski areas, and was on its way to Baller status when Vail purchased the whole operation in 2019. Here's a loose acquisition timeline: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 81/100 in 2024, and number 581 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

New street in Belfast to be named Boyne Bridge Place – is a season of goodwill breaking out at City Hall?

Best of Nolan

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 3, 2024 78:16

Local man Raymond shares story of being diagnosed and living with motor neurone disease.

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River Boyne Fizz in the Lobby Bar! 11/25/2024

Drink the Movies

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 25, 2024 17:10

This week we mix up a few more Chambord cocktails to help ease our way through Thanksgiving! Plus, we take a look at Wicked, try to make time for Moana 2, and ready ourselves to take in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade! Cocktail comes from Chambord! Merch Shop - drinkthemovies.square.site https://www.patreon.com/drinkthemovies https://www.instagram.com/drinkthemovies/ https://www.facebook.com/drinkthemovies https://www.drinkthemovies.com https://discord.gg/fsdW2QqqpS *Please Drink Responsibly*

Podcast #191: Stratton Mountain President & COO Matt Jones

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 20, 2024 82:00

This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on Nov. 13. It dropped for free subscribers on Nov. 20. To receive future episodes as soon as they're live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:WhoMatt Jones, President and Chief Operating Officer of Stratton Mountain, VermontRecorded onNovember 11, 2024About Stratton MountainClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Alterra Mountain Company, which also owns:Located in: Winhall, VermontYear founded: 1962Pass affiliations:* Ikon Pass: Unlimited* Ikon Base Pass: Unlimited, holiday blackoutsClosest neighboring ski areas: Bromley (:18), Magic (:24), Mount Snow (:28), Hermitage Club (:33), Okemo (:40), Brattleboro (:52)Base elevation: 1,872 feetSummit elevation: 3,875 feetVertical drop: 2,003 feetSkiable Acres: 670Average annual snowfall: 180 inchesTrail count: 99 (40% novice, 35% intermediate, 16% advanced, 9% expert)Lift count: 14 (1 ten-passenger gondola, 4 six-packs, 1 high-speed quad, 2 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 1 double, 4 carpets – view Lift Blog's inventory of Stratton's lift fleet)Why I interviewed himI don't know for sure how many skier visits Stratton pulls each winter, or where the ski area ranks among New England mountains for busyness. Historical data suggests a floor around 400,000 visits, likely good for fifth in the region, behind Killington, Okemo, Sunday River, and Mount Snow. But the exact numbers don't really matter, because the number of skiers that ski at Stratton each winter is many manys. And the number of skiers who have strong opinions about Stratton is that exact same number.Those numbers make Stratton more important than it should be. This is not the best ski area in Vermont. It's not even Alterra's best ski area in Vermont. Jay, MRG, Killington, Smuggs, Stowe, and sister resort Sugarbush are objectively better mountains than Stratton from a terrain point of view (they also get a lot more snow). But this may be one of the most crucial mountains in Alterra's portfolio, a doorway to the big-money East, a brand name for skiers across the region. Stratton is the only ski area that advertises in the New York City Subway, and has for years.But Stratton's been under a bit of stress. The lift system is aging. The gondola is terrible. Stratton was one of those ski areas that was so far ahead of the modernization curve – the mountain had four six-packs by 2001 – that it's now in the position of having to update all of that expensive stuff all at once. And as meaningful updates have lagged, Stratton's biggest New England competitors are running superlifts up the incline at a historic pace, while Alterra lobs hundreds of millions at its western megaresorts. Locals feel shafted, picketing an absentee landlord that they view as negligent. Meanwhile, the crowds pile up, as unlimited Ikon Pass access has holstered the mountain in hundreds of thousands of skiers' wintertime battle belts.If that all sounds a little dramatic, it only reflects the messages in my inbox. I think Alterra has been cc'd on at least some of those emails, because the company is tossing $20 million at Stratton this season, a sum that Jones tells us is just the beginning of massive long-term investment meant to reinforce the mountain's self-image as a destination on its own.What we talked aboutStratton's $20 million offseason; Act 250 masterplanning versus U.S. Forest Service masterplanning; huge snowmaking upgrades and aspirations; what $8 million gets you in employee housing these days; big upgrades for the Ursa and American Express six-packs; a case for rebuilding lifts rather than doing a tear-down and replace; a Tamarack lift upgrade; when Alterra's investment firehose could shift east; leaving Tahoe for Vermont; what can be done about that gondola?; the Kidderbrook lift; parking; RFID; Ikon Pass access levels; and $200 to ski Stratton.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewHow pissed do you think the Punisher was when Disney announced that Ant Man would be the 12th installment in Marvel's cinematic universe? I imagine him seated in his lair, polishing his grenades. “F*****g Ant Man?” He throws a grenade into one of his armored Jeeps, which disintegrates in a supernova of steel parts, tires, and smoke. “Ant Man. Are you f*****g serious with this? I waited through eleven movies. Eleven. Iron Man got three. Thor and Captain f*****g America got two apiece. The Hulk. Two Avengers movies. Something called ‘Guardians of the Galaxy,' about a raccoon and a talking tree that save the goddamn universe or some s**t. And it was my turn, Man. My. Turn. Do these idiots not know that I had three individual comic lines published concurrently in the 1990s? Do they not know that I'm ranked as the ninth-greatest Marvel superhero of all time on this nerd list? Do you know where Ant Man is ranked on that list? Huh? Well, I'll tell you: number 131, behind Rocket Raccoon, U-Go Girl, and Spider Man 2099, whatever the hell any of those are.” The vigilante then loads his rocket launcher and several machine guns into a second armored Jeep, and sets off in search of jaywalkers to murder.Anyway I imagine that's how Stratton felt as it watched the rest of Alterra's cinematic universe release one blockbuster after another. “Oh, OK, so Steamboat not only gets a second gondola, but they get a 600-acre terrain expansion served by their eighth high-speed quad? And it wasn't enough to connect the two sides of Palisades Tahoe with a gondola, but you threw in a brand-new six-pack? And they're tripling the size of Deer Valley. Tripling. 3,700 acres of new terrain and 16 new lifts and a new base village to go with it. That's equal to five-and-a-half Strattons. And Winter Park gets a new six-pack, and Big Bear gets a new six-pack, and Mammoth gets two. Do you have any idea how much these things cost? And I can't even get a gondola that can withstand wind gusts over three miles per hour? Even goddamn Snowshoe – Snowshoe – got a new lift before I did. I didn't even think West Virginia was actually a real place. I swear if these f*****s announce a new June Mountain out-of-base lift before I get my bling, things are gonna get Epic around here.”Well, it's finally Stratton's turn, with $20 million in upgrades inbound. Alterra wasn't exactly mining the depths of locals' dreams to decide where to deploy the cash – snowmaking, employee housing, lift overhauls – and a gondola replacement isn't coming anytime soon, but they're pretty smart investments when you dig into them. Which we do.Questions I wish I'd askedAmong the items that I would have liked to have discussed given more time: the Appalachian Trail's path across the top of Stratton Mountain, Stratton as birthplace of modern snowboarding, and the Stratton Mountain School.What I got wrong* I said that Epic Pass access had remained mostly unchanged for the past decade, which is not quite right. When Vail first added Stowe to the Epic Local Pass for the 2017-18 season, they slotted the resort into the bucket of 10 days shared with Vail, Beaver Creek, and Whistler. At some point, Stowe received its own basket of 10 days, apart from the western resorts.* I said that Sunday River's Jordan eight-pack was wind-resistant “because of the weight.” While that is one factor, the lift's ability to run in high winds relies on a more complex set of anti-sway technology, none of which I really understand, but that Sunday River GM Brian Heon explained on The Storm earlier this year:Why you should ski StrattonA silent skiing demarcation line runs roughly along US 4 through Vermont. Every ski area along or above this route – Killington, Pico, Sugarbush, Mad River Glen, Stowe, Smuggs – lets trails bump up, maintains large glade networks, and generally provides you with balanced, diverse terrain. Everything below that line – Okemo, Bromley, Mount Snow – generally don't do any of these things, or offer them sporadically, and in the most shrunken form possible. There are some exceptions on both sides. Saskadena Six, a bump just north of US 4, operates more like the Southies. Magic, in the south, better mirrors the MRG/Sugarbush model. And then there's Stratton.Good luck finding bumps at Stratton. Maybe you'll stumble onto the remains of a short competition course here or there, but, generally, this is a groom-it-all-every-day kind of ski area. Which would typically make it a token stop on my annual rounds. But Stratton has one great strength that has long made it a quasi-home mountain for me: glades.The glade network is expansive and well-maintained. The lines are interesting and, in places, challenging. You wouldn't know this from the trailmap, which portrays the tree-skiing areas as little islands lodged onto Stratton's hulk. But there are lots of them, and they are plenty long. On a typical pow day, I'll park at Sun Bowl and ski all the glades from Test Pilot over to West Pilot and back. It takes all day and I barely touch a groomer.And the glades are open more often than you'd think. While northern Vermont is the undisputed New England snow king, with everything from Killington north counting 250-plus inches in an average winter, the so-called Golden Triangle of Stratton, Bromley, and Magic sits in a nice little micro-snow-pocket. And Stratton, the skyscraping tallest peak in that region of the state, devours a whole bunch (180 inches on average) to fill in those glades.And if you are Groomer Greg, you're in luck: Stratton has 99 of them. And the grooming is excellent. Just start early, because they get scraped off by the NYC hordes who camp out there every weekend. The obsessive grooming does make this a good family spot, and the long green trail from the top down to the base is one of the best long beginner runs anywhere.Podcast NotesOn Act 250This is the 20th Vermont-focused Storm Skiing Podcast, and I think we've referenced Act 250 in all of them. If you're unfamiliar with this law, it is, according to the official state website:…Vermont's land use and development law, enacted in 1970 at a time when Vermont was undergoing significant development pressure. The law provides a public, quasi-judicial process for reviewing and managing the environmental, social and fiscal consequences of major subdivisions and developments in Vermont. It assures that larger developments complement Vermont's unique landscape, economy and community needs. One of the strengths of Act 250 is the access it provides to neighbors and other interested parties to participate in the development review process. Applicants often work with neighbors, municipalities, state agencies and other interested groups to address concerns raised by a proposed development, resolving issues and mitigating impacts before a permit application is filed.On Stratton's masterplanStratton is currently updating its masterplan. It will retain some elements of this 2013 version. Some elements of this – most notably a new Snow Bowl lift in 2018 – have been completed:One curious element of this masterplan is the proposed lift up the Kidderbrook trail – around 2007, Stratton removed a relatively new (installed 1989) Poma fixed-grip quad from that location. Here it is on the far left-hand side of the 2005 trailmap:On Stratton's ownership historyStratton's history mirrors that of many large New England ski areas: independent founders run the ski area for decades; founders fall into financial peril and need private equity/banking rescue; bank sells to a giant out-of-state conglomerate; which then sells to another giant out-of-state conglomerate; which eventually turns into something else. In Stratton's case, Robert Wright/Frank Snyder -> Moore and Munger -> Japanese company Victoria USA -> Intrawest -> Alterra swallows the carcass of Intrawest. You can read all about it on New England Ski History.Here was Intrawest's roster, if you're curious:On Alterra's building bingeSince its 2018 founding, Alterra has invested aggressively in its properties: a 2.4-mile-long, $65 million gondola connecting Alpine Meadows to the Olympic side of Palisades Tahoe; $200 million in the massive Mahogany Ridge expansion and a three-mile-long gondola at Steamboat; and an untold fortune on Deer Valley's transformation into what will be the fourth-largest ski area in the United States. Plus new lifts all over the place, new snowmaking all over the place, new lodges all over the place. Well, all over the place except for at Stratton, until now.On Boyne and Vail's investments in New EnglandAmplifying Stratton Nation's pain is the fact that Alterra's two big New England competitors – Vail Resorts and Boyne Resorts – have built a combined 16 new lifts in the region over the past five years, including eight-place chairs at Loon and Sunday River (Boyne), and six-packs at Stowe, Okemo, and Mount Snow (Vail). They've also replaced highly problematic legacy chairs at Attitash (Vail) and Pleasant Mountain (Boyne). Boyne has also expanded terrain at Loon, Sunday River, and, most notably – by 400 acres – Sugarloaf. And it's worth noting that independents Waterville Valley and Killington have also dropped new sixers in recent years (Killington will build another next year). Meanwhile, Alterra's first chairlift just landed this summer, at Sugarbush, which is getting a fixed-grip quad to replace the Heaven's Gate triple.On gondola wind holdsJust in case you want to blame windholds on some nefarious corporate meddling, here's a video I took of Kirkwood's Cornice Express spinning in 50-mile-per-hour winds when Jones was running the resort last year. Every lift has its own distinct profile that determines how it manages wind.On shifting Ikon Pass accessWhen Alterra launched the Ikon Pass in 2018, the company limited Base Pass holders to five days at Stratton, with holiday blackouts. Ahead of the 2020-21 season, the company updated Base Pass access to unlimited days with those same holiday blackouts. Alterra and its partners have made several such changes in Ikon's seven years. I've made this nifty chart that tracks them all (if you missed the memo, Solitude just upgraded Ikon Base pass access to eliminate holiday blackouts):On historic Stratton lift ticket pricesAgain, New England Ski History has done a nice job documenting Stratton's year-to-year peak lift ticket rates:The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 76/100 in 2024, and number 576 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

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Podcast #188: Crystal Mountain, Michigan CEO John Melcher

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 17, 2024 72:06

This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on Nov. 10. It dropped for free subscribers on Nov. 17. To receive future episodes as soon as they're live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:WhoJohn Melcher, CEO of Crystal Mountain, MichiganRecorded onOctober 14, 2024About Crystal Mountain, MichiganClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: The Petritz FamilyLocated in: Thompsonville, MichiganYear founded: 1956Pass affiliations: Indy Pass & Indy+ Pass: 2 days, no blackoutsReciprocal partners: 1 day each at Caberfae and Mount Bohemia, with blackoutsClosest neighboring ski areas: Caberfae (:37), Hickory Hills (:45), Mt. Holiday (:50), Missaukee Mountain (:52), Homestead (:51)Base elevation: 757 feetSummit elevation: 1,132 feetVertical drop: 375 feetSkiable Acres: 103Average annual snowfall: 132 inchesTrail count: 59 (30% black diamond, 48% blue square, 22% green circle) + 7 glades + 3 terrain parksLift count: 8 (1 high-speed quad, 3 fixed-grip quads, 2 triples, 2 carpets – view Lift Blog's inventory of Crystal Mountain's lift fleet)Why I interviewed himThe biggest knock on Midwest skiing is that the top of the hill is not far enough away from the bottom of the hill, and this is generally true. Two or three or four hundred vertical feet is not a lot of vertical feet. It is enough to hold little pockets of trees or jumps or a racer's pitch that begs for a speed check. But no matter how fun the terrain, too soon the lift maze materializes and it's another slow roll up to more skiing.A little imagination helps here. Six turns in a snowy Michigan glade feel the same as six turns in Blue Sky Basin trees (minus the physiological altitude strain). And the skillset transfers well. I learned to ski bumps on a 200-vertical-foot section of Boyne Mountain and now I can ski bumps anywhere. But losing yourself in a 3,000-vertical-foot Rocky Mountain descent is not the same thing as saying “Man I can almost see it” as you try to will a 300-footer into something grander. We all know this.Not everything about the lift-served skiing experience shrinks down with the same effect, is my point here. With the skiing itself, scale matters. But the descent is only part of the whole thing. The lift maze matters, and the uphill matters, and the parking matters, and the location of the lift ticket pick-up matters, and the availability of 4 p.m. beers matters, and the arrangement base lodge seating matters. And when all of these things are knotted together into a ski day that is more fun than stressful, it is because you are in the presence of one thing that scales down in any context: excellence.The National Ski Areas Association splits ski areas into four size categories, calculated by “vertical transportation feet per hour.” In other words: how many skiers your lifts can push uphill in an ideal hour. This is a useful metric for many reasons, but I'd like to see a more qualitative measurement, one based not just on size, but on consistent quality of experience.I spend most of my winter bouncing across America, swinging into ski areas of all sizes and varieties. Excellence lives in unexpected places. One-hundred-and-sixty-vertical-foot Boyce Park, Pennsylvania blows thick slabs of snow with modern snowguns, grooms it well, and seems to double-staff every post with local teenagers. Elk Mountain, on the other side of Pennsylvania, generally stitches together a better experience than its better-known neighbors just south, in the Poconos. Royal Mountain, a 550-vertical-foot, weekends-only locals' bump in New York's southern Adirondacks, alternates statuesque grooming with zippy glades across its skis-bigger-than-it-is face.These ski areas, by combining great order and reliable conditions with few people, are delightful. But perhaps more impressive are ski areas that deliver consistent excellence while processing enormous numbers of visitors. Here you have places like Pats Peak, New Hampshire; Wachusett, Massachusetts; Holiday Valley, New York; and Mt. Rose, Nevada. These are not major tourist destinations, but they run with the welcoming efficiency of an Aspen or a Deer Valley. A good and ordered ski day, almost no matter what.Crystal Mountain, Michigan is one of these ski areas. Everything about the ski experience is well-considered. Expansion, upgrades, and refinement of existing facilities have been constant for decades. The village blends with the hill. The lifts are where the lifts should be. The trail network is interesting and thoughtfully designed. The parks are great. The grooming is great. The glades are plentiful. The prices are reasonable. And, most important of all, despite being busy at all times, Crystal Mountain is tamed by order. This is excellence, that thing that all ski areas should aspire to, whatever else they lack.What we talked aboutWhat's new for Crystal skiers in 2024; snowmaking; where Crystal draws its snowmaking water; Peek'n Peak, New York; why Crystal is a good business in addition to being a good ski area; four-seasons business; skiing as Mother; what makes a great team (and why Crystal has one); switching into skiing mid-career; making trails versus clearcutting the ski slope; ownership decided via coinflip; Midwest destination skiing's biggest obstacle; will Crystal remain independent?; room to expand; additional glading opportunities; why many of Crystal's trails are named after people; considering the future of Crystal's lift fleet; why Crystal built a high-speed lift that rises just 314 vertical feet; why the ghost of the Cheers lift lives on as part of Crystal's trailmap; where Crystal has considered adding a lift to the existing terrain; that confusing trailmap; a walkable village; changes inbound at the base of Loki; pushing back parking; more carpets for beginners; Crystal's myriad bargain lift ticket options; the Indy Pass; why Crystal dropped Indy Pass blackouts; the Mt. Bohemia-Crystal relationship; Caberfae; Indy's ultimatum to drop Ski Cooper reciprocals or leave the pass; and why Crystal joined Freedom Pass last year and left for this coming winter. Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewThe Storm's mission is to serve all of American lift-served skiing. That means telling the stories of ski areas in every part of the country. I do this not because I have to, but because I want to. This newsletter would probably work just fine if it focused always and only on the great ski centers of the American West. That is, after all, the only part of U.S. ski country that outsiders travel to and that locals never leave. The biggest and best skiing is out there, at the top of our country, high and snowy and with a low chance of rain.But I live in the East and I grew up in the Midwest. Both regions are cluttered with ski areas. Hundreds of them, each distinct, each its own little frozen kingdom, each singular in atmosphere and arrangement and orientation toward the world. Most remain family-owned, and retain the improvisational quirk synonymous with such a designation. But more interesting is that these ski areas remain tethered to their past in a way that many of the larger western destination resorts, run by executives cycled in via corporate development programs, never will be again.I want to tell these stories. I'm aware that my national audience has a limited tolerance for profiles of Midwest ski centers they will never ski. But they seem to be okay with about a half-dozen per year, which is about enough to remind the wider ski community that this relatively flat but cold and hardy region is home to one of the world's great ski cultures. The Midwest is where night-skiing rules, where blue-collar families still ski, where hunting clothes double as ski clothes, where everything is a little less serious and a little more fun.There's no particular big development or project that threw the spotlight on Crystal here. I've been trying to arrange this interview for years. Because this is a very good ski area and a very well-run ski area, even if it is not a very large ski area in the grand landscape of American ski areas. It is one of the finest ski areas in the Midwest, and one worthy of our attention.What I got wrong* I said that “I forget if it's seven or nine different tree areas” at Crystal. The number of glades labeled on the trailmap is seven.* I said Crystal had been part of Indy Pass “since the beginning or near the beginning.” The mountain joined the pass in May, 2020, ahead of the 2020-21 ski season, Indy's second.Why you should ski Crystal Mountain, MichiganCrystal's Loki pod rises above the parking lots, 255 vertical feet, eight trails down, steep on the front, gentler toward the back. These days I would ski each of the eight in turn and proceed next door to the Clipper lift. But I was 17 and just learning to ski and to me at the time that meant bombing as fast as possible without falling. For this, Wipeout was the perfect trail, a sweeping crescent through the trees, empty even on that busy day, steep but only for a bit, just enough to ignite a long sweeping tuck back to the chairs. We lapped this run for hours. Speed and adrenaline through the falling snow. The cold didn't bother us and the dozens of alternate runs striped over successive hills didn't tempt us. We'd found what we'd wanted and what we'd wanted is this.I packed that day in the mental suitcase that holds my ski memories and I've carried it around for decades. Skiing bigger mountains hasn't tarnished it. Becoming a better skier hasn't diminished it. Tuck and bomb, all day long. Something so pure and simple in it, a thing that bundles those Loki laps together with Cottonwoods pow days and Colorado bump towers and California trees. Indelible. Part of what I think of when I think about skiing and part of who I am when I consider myself as a skier.I don't know for sure what Crystal Mountain, Michigan can give you. I can't promise transformation of the impressionable teenage sort. I can't promise big terrain or long runs because those don't have them. I'm not going to pitch Crystal as a singular pilgrimage of the sort that draws western Brobots to Bohemia. This is a regional ski area that is most attractive to skiers who live in Michigan or the northern portions of the states to its immediate south. Read: it is a ski area that the vast majority of you will never experience. And the best endorsement I can make of Crystal is that I think that's too bad, because I think you would really like it, even if I can't exactly explain why.Podcast NotesOn Peek'n PeakThe most difficult American ski area name to spell is not “Summit at Snoqualmie” or “Granlibakken” or “Pomerelle” or “Sipapu” or “Skaneateles” or “Bottineau Winter Park” or “Trollhaugen,” all of which I memorized during the early days of The Storm. The most counterintuitive, frustrating, and frankly stupid ski area name in all the land is “Peek'n Peak,” New York, which repeats the same word spelled two different ways for no goddamn reason. And then there's the apostrophe-“n,” lodged in there like a bar of soap crammed between the tomato and lettuce in your hamburger, a thing that cannot possibly justify or explain its existence. Five years into this project, I can't get the ski area's name correct without looking it up.Anyway, it is a nice little ski area, broad and varied and well-lifted, lodged in a consistent little Lake Erie snowbelt. They don't show glades on the trailmap, but most of the trees are skiable when filled in. The bump claims 400 vertical feet; my Slopes app says 347. Either way, this little Indy Pass hill, where Melcher learned to ski, is a nice little stopover:On Crystal's masterplanCrystal's masterplan leaves room for potential future ski development – we discuss where, specifically, in the podcast. The ski area is kind of lost in the sprawl of Crystal's masterplan, so I've added the lift names for context:On Sugar Loaf, MichiganMichigan, like most ski states, has lost more ski areas than it's kept. The most frustrating of these loses was Sugar Loaf, a 500-footer parked in the northwest corner of the Lower Peninsula, outside of Traverse City. Sunday afternoon lift tickets were like $12 and my high school buddies and I would drive up through snowstorms and ski until the lifts closed and drive home. The place went bust around 2000, but the lifts were still standing until some moron ripped them out five years ago with fantasies of rebuilding the place as some sort of boutique “experience.” Then he ran away and now it's just a lonely, empty hill.On Michigan being “littered with lost ski areas”Michigan is home to the second-most active or semi-active ski areas of any state in the country, with 44 (New York checks in around 50). Still, the Midwest Lost Ski Areas project counts more than 200 lost ski areas in the state.On Crystal's backside evolution and confusing trailmapBy building pod after pod off the backside of the mountain, Crystal has nearly doubled in size since I first skied there in the mid-90s. The Ridge appeared around 2000; North Face came online in 2003; and Backyard materialized in 2015. These additions give Crystal a sprawling, adventurous feel on par with The Highlands or Nub's Nob. But the trailmap, while aesthetically pleasant, is one of the worst I've seen, as it's very unclear how the three pods link to one another, and in turn to the front of the mountain:This is a fixable problem, as I outlined in my last podcast, with Vista Map founder Gary Milliken, who untangled similarly confusing trailmaps for Mt. Spokane, Washington and Lookout Pass, Idaho over the past couple of years. Here's Lookout Pass' old and new maps side-by-side:And here's Mt. Spokane:Crystal – if you'd like an introduction to Gary, I'm happy to make that happen.On resort consolidation in the MidwestThe Midwest has not been sheltered from the consolidation wave that's rolled over much of the West and New England over the past few decades. Of the region's 123 active ski areas, 25 are owned by entities that operate two or more ski areas: Vail Resorts owns 10; Wisconsin Resorts, five; Midwest Family Ski Resorts, four; the Schmitz Brothers, three; Boyne, two; and the Perfect Family, which also owns Timberline in West Virginia, one. But 98 of the region's ski areas remain independently owned and operated. While a couple dozen of those are tiny municipal ropetow bumps with inconsistent operations and little or no snowmaking, most of those that run at least one chairlift are family-owned ski areas that, last winter notwithstanding, are doing very well on a formula of reasonable prices + a focus on kids and night-skiing. Here's the present landscape of Midwest skiing:On the consolidation of Crystal's lift fleetCrystal once ran five frontside chairlifts:Today, the mountain has consolidated that to just five, despite a substantively unchanged trail footprint. While Crystal stopped running the Cheers lift around 2016, its shadowy outline still appears along the Cheers To Lou run.Crystal is way out ahead of the rest of the Midwest, which built most of its ski areas in the age of cheap fixed-grip lifts and never bothered to replace them. The king of these dinosaurs may be Afton Alps, Minnesota, with 15 Hall chairlifts (it was, until recently, 17) lined up along the ridge, the newest of them dating to 1979:It's kind of funny that Vail owns this anachronism, which, despite its comic-book layout, is actually a really fun little ski area.On Crystal's many discounted lift ticket optionsWhile Crystal is as high-end as any resort you'll find in Michigan, the ski area still offers numerous loveably kitschy discounts of the sort that every ski area in the country once sold:Browse these and more on their website.On Indy Pass' dispute with Ski CooperLast year, Indy Pass accused Ski Cooper of building a reciprocal resort network that turned the ski area's discount season pass into a de facto national ski pass that competed directly with Indy. Indy then told its partners to ditch Cooper or leave Indy. Crystal was one of those resorts, and found a workaround by joining the Freedom Pass, which maintained the three Cooper days for their passholders without technically violating Indy Pass' mandate. You can read the full story here:On Bohemia and CaberfaeCrystal left Freedom Pass for this winter, but has retained reciprocal deals with Mount Bohemia and Caberfae. I've hosted leaders of both ski areas on the podcast, and they are two of my favorite episodes:The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 73/100 in 2024, and number 573 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

* Art Tebo, Past COO Boyne USA

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 15, 2024 7:31

* Art Tebo, Past COO Boyne USA

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 11, 2024 9:01

Podcast #186: Grand Targhee Managing Director & General Manager Geordie Gillett

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Play Episode Listen Later Nov 7, 2024 74:19

This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on Oct. 31. It dropped for free subscribers on Nov. 7. To receive future episodes as soon as they're live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:WhoGeordie Gillett, Managing Director and General Manager of Grand Targhee, WyomingRecorded onSeptember 30, 2024About Grand TargheeClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: The Gillett FamilyLocated in: Alta, WyomingYear founded: 1969Pass affiliations: Mountain Collective: 2 days, no blackoutsClosest neighboring ski areas: Jackson Hole (1:11), Snow King (1:22), Kelly Canyon (1:34) – travel times vary considerably given time of day, time of year, and weather conditions.Base elevation: 7,650 feet (bottom of Sacajawea Lift)Summit elevation: 9,862 feet at top of Fred's Mountain; hike to 9,920 feet on Mary's NippleVertical drop: 2,212 feet (lift-served); 2,270 feet (hike-to)Skiable Acres: 2,602 acresAverage annual snowfall: 500 inchesTrail count: 95 (10% beginner, 70% intermediate, 15% advanced, 5% expert)Lift count: 6 (1 six-pack, 2 high-speed quads, 2 fixed-grip quads, 1 carpet – view Lift Blog's inventory of Grand Targhee's lift fleet)Why I interviewed himHere are some true facts about Grand Targhee:* Targhee is the 19th-largest ski area in the United States, with 2,602 lift-served acres.* That makes Targhee larger than Jackson Hole, Snowbird, Copper, or Sun Valley.* Targhee is the third-largest U.S. ski area (behind Whitefish and Powder Mountain) that is not a member of the Epic or Ikon passes.* Targhee is the fourth-largest independently owned and operated ski area in America, behind Whitefish, Powder Mountain, and Alta.* Targhee is the fifth-largest U.S. ski area outside of Colorado, California, and Utah (following Big Sky, Bachelor, Whitefish, and Schweitzer).And yet. Who do you know who has skied Grand Targhee who has not skied everywhere? Targhee is not exactly unknown, but it's a little lost in skiing's Bermuda Triangle of Jackson Hole, Sun Valley, and Big Sky, a sunken ship loaded with treasure for whoever's willing to dive a little deeper.Most ski resort rankings will plant Alta-Snowbird or Whistler or Aspen or Vail at the top. Understandably so – these are all great ski areas. But I appreciate this take on Targhee from skibum.net, a site that hasn't been updated in a couple of years, but is nonetheless an excellent encyclopedia of U.S. skiing (boldface added by me for emphasis):You can start easy, then get as wild and remote as you dare. Roughly 20% of the lift-served terrain (Fred's Mountain) is groomed. The snowcat area (Peaked Mountain) is completely ungroomed, completely powder, totally incredible [Peaked is lift-served as of 2022]. Comparisons to Jackson Hole are inevitable, as GT & JH share the same mountain range. Targhee is on the west side, and receives oodles more snow…and therefore more weather. Not all of it good; a local nickname is Grand Foggy. The locals ski Targhee 9 days out of 10, then shift to Jackson Hole when the forecast is less than promising. (Jackson Hole, on the east side, receives less snow and virtually none of the fog). On days when the weather is good, Targhee beats Jackson for snow quality and shorter liftlines. Some claim Targhee wins on scenery as well. It's just a much different, less crowded, less commercialized resort, with outstanding skiing. Some will argue the quality of Utah powder…and they're right, but there are fewer skiers at Targhee, so it stays longer. Some of the runs at Targhee are steep, but not as steep as the couloirs at Jackson Hole. Much more of an intermediate mountain; has a very “open” feel on virtually all of the trails. And when the powder is good, there is none better than Grand Targhee. #1 ski area in the USA when the weather is right. Hotshots, golfcondoskiers and young skiers looking for “action” (I'm over 40, so I don't remember exactly what that entails) are just about the only people who won't call Grand Targhee their all-time favorite. For the pure skier, this resort is number one.Which may lead you to ask: OK Tough Guy then why did it take you five years to talk about this mountain on your podcast? Well I get that question about once a month, and I don't really have a good answer other than that there are a lot of ski areas and I can only talk about one at a time. But here you go. And from the way this one went, I don't think it will be my last conversation with the good folks at Grand old Targhee.What we talked aboutContinued refinement of the Colter lift and Peaked Mountain expansion; upgrading cats; “we do put skiing first here”; there's a reason that finance people “aren't the only ones in the room making decisions for ski areas”; how the Peaked expansion changed Targhee; the Teton Pass highway collapse; building, and then dismantling, Booth Creek; how ignoring an answering machine message led to the purchase of Targhee; first impressions of Targhee: “How is this not the most popular ski resort in America?”; imagining Booth Creek in an Epkonic alt reality; Targhee's commitment to independence; could Targhee ever acquire another mountain?; the insane price that the Gilletts paid for Targhee; the first time you see the Rockies; massive expansion potential; corn; fixed-grip versus detach; Targhee's high percentage of intermediate terrain and whether that matters; being next-door neighbors with “the most aspirational brand in skiing”; the hardest part of expanding a ski area; potential infill lifts; the ski run Gillett would like to eliminate and why; why we're unlikely to see a lift to the true summit; and why Targhee joined Mountain Collective but hasn't joined the Ikon Pass (and whether the mountain ever would).Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewA few things make Targhee extra relevant to our current ski moment:* Targhee is the only U.S. ski area aside from Sugar Bowl to join the Mountain Collective pass while staying off of Ikon.* In 2022, Targhee (sort of) quietly opened one of the largest lift-served North American ski expansions in the past decade, the 600-acre Peaked Mountain pod, served by the six-pack Colter lift.* The majority of large U.S. ski areas positioned on Forest Service land are bashful about their masterplans, which are publicly available documents that most resort officials wish we didn't know about. That's because these plans outline potential future expansions and upgrades that resorts would rather not prematurely acknowledge, lest they piss off the Chipmunk Police. So often when I'm like “Hey tell us about this 500-acre bowl-skiing expansion off the backside,” I get an answer that's something like, “well we look forward to working with our partners at the Forest Service to maybe consider doing that around the year 3000 after we complete our long-term study of mayfly migration routes.” But Geordie is just like, “Hell yes we want to blow the resort out in every direction like yesterday” (not an exact quote). And I freaking love the energy there.* Most large Western ski areas fall into one of two categories: big, modern, and busy (Vail, Big Sky, Palisades, Snowbird), or big, somewhat antiquated, and unknown (Discovery, Lost Trail, Silver). But Targhee has split the difference, being big, modern, and lesser-known, that rare oasis that gives you modern infrastructure (like fast lifts), without modern crowds (most of the time). It's kind of strange and kind of glorious, and probably too awesome to stay true forever, so I wanted to get there before the Brobot Bus unloaded.* Even 500-inches-in-an-average-winter Targhee has a small snowmaking system. Isn't that interesting?What I got wrong* I said that $20 million “might buy you a couple houses on the slopes at Jackson Hole.” It kind of depends on how you define “on the slopes,” and whether or not you can live without enough acreage for your private hippo zoo. If not, $24.5 million will get you this (I'm not positive that this one is zoned for immediate hippo occupation).* I said that 70 percent of Targhee's terrain was intermediate; Geordie indicated that that statistic had likely changed with the addition of the Peaked Mountain expansion. I'm working with Targhee to get updated numbers.Why you should ski Grand TargheeThe disconnect between people who write about skiing and what most people actually ski leads to outsized coverage of niche corners of this already niche activity. What percentage of skiers think that skiing uphill is fun? Can accomplish a mid-air backflip? Have ever leapt off a cliff more than four feet high? Commute via helicopter to the summit of their favorite Alaskan powder lines? The answer on all counts is probably a statistically insignificant number. But 99 percent of contemporary ski media focuses on exactly such marginal activities.In some ways I understand this. Most basketball media devote their attention to the NBA, not the playground knuckleheads at some cracked-concrete, bent-rim Harlem streetball court. It makes sense to look at the best and say wow. No one wants to watch intermediate skiers skiing intermediate terrain. But the magnifying glass hovering over the gnar sometimes clouds consumer choice. An average skier, infected by cliffity-hucking YouTubes and social media Man Bro boasting, thinks they want Corbet's and KT-22 and The Cirque at Snowbird. Which OK if you zigzag across the fall line yeah you can get down just about anything. But what most skiers need is Grand Targhee, big and approachable, mostly skiable by mostly anyone, with lots of good and light snow and a low chance of descent-by-tomahawk.Targhee's stats page puts the mountain's share of intermediate terrain at 70 percent, likely the highest of any major North American ski area (Northstar, another big-time intermediate-oriented mountain, claims 60 percent blue runs). I suspect this contributes to the resort's relatively low profile among destination skiers. Broseph Jones and his Brobot buddies examine the statistical breakdown of major resorts and are like “Yo cuz we want some Jackson trammage because we roll hard see.” Even though Targhee is bigger and gets more snow (both true) and offers a more realistic experience for the Brosephs.That's not to say that you shouldn't ski Jackson Hole. Everyone should. But steeps all day are mentally and physically draining. It's nice most of the time to not be parkouring down an elevator shaft. So go to Targhee too. And you can whoo-hoo through the deep empty trees and say “dang Brah this is hella rad Brah.” And it is.Podcast NotesOn the Peaked Mountain expansionThe Peaked Mountain terrain has been marked on Targhee's trailmap for years, but up until 2022, it was accessible mostly via snowcat:In 2022, the resort dropped a six-pack back there, better defined the trail network, and brought Peaked into the lift-served terrain package:On Grand Targhee's masterplanHere's the overview of Targhee's Forest Service master development plan. You can see potential expansions below Blackfoot (left in the image below), looker's right of Peaked/Colter (upper right), and below Sacajawea (lower right):Here's a better look at the so-called South Bowl proposal, which would add a big terrain pod contiguous with the recent Peaked expansion:Here's the MDP's inventory of proposed lifts. These things often change, and the “Peaked DC-4” listed below actualized as the Colter high-speed sixer:Targhee's snowmaking system is limited, but long-term aspirations show potential snowmaking stretching toward the top of the Dreamcatcher lift:On opposition to all of this potential expansionThere are groups of people masquerading as environmental commandos who I suspect oppose everything just to oppose it. Like oh a bobcat pooped next to that tree so we need to fence the area off from human activity for the next thousand years. But Targhee sits within a vast and amazing wilderness, the majority of which is and should be protected forever. But humans need space too, and developing a few hundred acres directly adjacent to already-developed ski terrain is the most sustainable and responsible way to do this. It's not like Targhee is saying “hey we're going to build a zipline connecting the resort to the Grand Teton.” But nothing in U.S. America can be achieved without a minimum of 45 lawsuits (it's in the Constitution), so these histrionic bozos will continue to exist.On Net Promoter Score and RRCI'm going to hurt myself if I try to overexplain this, so I'll just point toward RRC's Net Promoter Score overview page and the company's blog archive highlighting various reports. RRC sits quietly behind the ski industry but wields tremendous influence, assembling the annual Kotke end-of-season statistical report, which offers the most comprehensive annual overview of the state of U.S. skiing.On the reason I couldn't go to Grand Targhee last yearSo I was all set up to hit Targhee for a day last year and then I woke up in the middle of the night thinking “Gee I feel like I'm gonna die soon” and so I did not go skiing that day. Here's the full story if you are curious how I ended up not dying.On the Peaked terrain expansion being the hypothetical largest ski area in New HampshireI'll admit that East-West ski area size comparisons are fundamentally flawed. Eastern mountains not named Killington, Smugglers' Notch, and Sugarloaf tend to measure skiable terrain by acreage of cut trails and maintained glades (Sugarbush, one of the largest ski areas in the East by pure footprint, doesn't even count the latter). Western mountains generally count everything within their boundary. Fair enough – trying to ski most natural-growth eastern woods is like trying to ski down the stands of a packed football stadium. You're going to hit something. Western trees tend to be higher altitude, older-growth, less cluttered with undergrowth, and, um, more snow-covered. Meaning it's not unfair to include even unmarked sectors of the ski area as part of the ski area.Which is a long way of saying that numbers are hard, and that relying on ski area stats pages for accurate ski area comparisons isn't going to get you into NASA's astronaut training academy. Here's a side-by-side of 464-acre Bretton Woods – New Hampshire's largest ski area – and Targhee's 600-acre Peaked Mountain expansion, both at the same scale in Google Maps. Clearly Bretton Woods covers more area, but the majority of those trees are too dense to ski:And here's an inventory of all New Hampshire ski areas, if you're curious:On the Teton Pass highway collapseYeah so this was wild:On Booth CreekGrand Targhee was once part of the Booth Creek ski conglomerate, which now exists only as the overlord for Sierra-at-Tahoe. Here's a little history:On the ski areas at Snoqualmie Pass being “insane”We talk a bit about the “insane” terrain at Summit at Snoqualmie, a quirky ski resort now owned by Boyne. The mountain was Frankensteined together out of four legacy ski areas, three of which share a ridge and are interconnected. And then there's Alpental, marooned across the interstate, much taller and infinitely rowdier than its ho-hum brothers. Alpy, as a brand and as a badass, is criminally unknown outside of its immediate market, despite being on the Ikon Pass since 2018. But, as Gillett notes, it is one of the roughest, toughest mountains going:On Targhee's sinkholePer Jackson Hole News and Guide in September of last year:About two weeks ago, a day or so after torrential rain, and a few days after a downhill mountain biking race concluded on the Blondie trail, Targhee ski patrollers noticed that something was amiss. Only feet away from the muddy meander that mountain bikers had zipped down, a mound of earth had disappeared.In its place, there was a hole of unknown, but concerning, size.Subsequent investigations — largely, throwing rocks into the hole while the resort waits for more technical tools — indicate that the sinkhole is at least 8 feet wide and about 40 feet deep, if not more. There are layers of ice caking the walls a few feet down, and the abyss is smack dab in the middle of the resort's prized ski run.Falling into a sinkhole would be a ridiculous way to go. Like getting crushed by a falling piano or flattened under a steamroller. Imagine your last thought on earth is “Bro are you freaking kidding me with this s**t?”On the overlap between Mountain Collective and IkonMountain Collective and Ikon share a remarkable 26 partner ski areas. Only Targhee, Sugar Bowl, Marmot Basin, Bromont, Le Massif du Charlevoix, and newly added Megève have joined Mountain Collective while holding out on Ikon.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 70/100 in 2024, and number 570 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

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76: The Drowning of Boann - Ireland's River Goddess

Connected Communication

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 22, 2024 62:26

This week, I talk about water, and tell you the story of Boann, Ireland's river Goddess who created the River Boyne which nurtures the land around the site of the Battle of the Boyne, Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Podcast #184: Pleasant Mountain General Manager Ralph Lewis

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 21, 2024 65:29

This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on Oct. 14. It dropped for free subscribers on Oct. 21. To receive future episodes as soon as they're live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:WhoRalph Lewis, General Manager of Pleasant Mountain (formerly Shawnee Peak), MaineRecorded onSeptember 9, 2024About Pleasant MountainClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Boyne Resorts, which also owns:Located in: Bridgton, MaineYear founded: 1938Pass affiliations: New England Gold Pass: 3 days, no blackoutsClosest neighboring ski areas: Cranmore (:33), King Pine (:39), Attitash (:46), Black Mountain NH (:48), Sunday River (:53), Wildcat (:58), Mt. Abram (:56), Lost Valley (:59)Base elevation: 600 feetSummit elevation: 1,900 feetVertical drop: 1,300 feetSkiable Acres: 239Average annual snowfall: 110 inchesTrail count: 47 (25% advanced, 50% intermediate, 25% beginner)Lift count: 6 (1 high-speed quad, 1 fixed-grip quad, 2 triple chairs, 2 surface lifts – total includes Summit Express quad, anticipated to open for the 2024-25 ski season; view Lift Blog's inventory of Pleasant Mountain's lift fleet)Why I interviewed himPleasant Mountain is loaded with many of the attributes of great - or at least useful - ski areas: bottom-to-top chairlifts, a second base area to hack the crowds, night skiing, a nuanced trail network that includes wigglers through the woods and interstate-width racing chutes, good stuff for kids, an easy access road that breaks right off a U.S. highway, killer views, a tight community undiluted by destination skiers, and a simpleness that makes you think “yeah this is pretty much what I thought a Maine ski area would be.”But the place has been around since 1938, which was 15 U.S. presidents ago. Parts of Pleasant feel musty and dated. Core skier services remain smushed between the access road and the bottom of the lifts, squeezed by that kitchen-in-a-camper feeling that everything could use just a bit more space. The baselodge feels improvised, labyrinthian, built for some purpose other than skiing. I would believe that it used to be a dairy barn housing 200 cows or a hideout for bootleggers and bandits or the home of an eccentric grandmother who kept aardvarks for pets before I would believe that anyone built this structure to accommodate hundreds of skiers on a winter weekend.American skiing, with few exceptions, follows a military/finance-style up-or-out framework. You either advance or face discharge, which in skiing means falling over dead in the snow. Twenty-five years ago, the notion of a high-speed lift at Alta would have been sacrilege. The ski area has four now, including a six-pack, and nobody ever even mentions it. Saddleback rose from the grave partly because they replaced a Napolean-era double chair with a high-speed quad. Taos – Ikon and Mountain Collective partner Taos – held out for eons before installing its first detachable in 2018 (the mountain now has two). One of the new owner's first acts at tiny Bousquet, Massachusetts was to level the rusty baselodge and build a new one.Pleasant needed to start moving up. Thirteen hundred vertical feet is too many vertical feet to ascend on a fixed-grip lift in southern New England. There are too many larger options too nearby where skiers don't have to do that. Sure, Magic, Smuggs, and MRG have fended off ostentatious modernization by tapping nostalgia as a brand, but they are backstopped by the kind of fistfighting terrain and natural snow that Pleasant lacks. To be a successful city-convenient New England ski area in the 2020s, you're going to have to be a modern ski area.That's happening now, at an encouraging clip, under Boyne Resorts' ownership. Pleasant was fine before, kept in good repair and still relevant even in a crowded market. It could have hung around for decades no matter what. But the big passes aren't going anywhere and the fast lifts aren't going anywhere and ski areas need to change along with skier expectations of what a ski area ought to be. That's happening now at Pleasant Mountain, and it's damn fun to watch.What we talked aboutAt long last, a high-speed lift up Pleasant Mountain; why the new lift won't have a midstation; why the summit triple had to go; taking out the same lift at two different mountains decades apart; when the mountain will sell old triple chairs, and where the proceeds for those will go; will the new lift overcrowd the mountain?; why Pleasant doesn't consider this a used lift even though its bones came from Sunday River; being part of Boyne versus being an indie on an island; Pleasant Mountain in the ‘70s; building Bear Peak at Attitash; returning to a childhood place when you're no longer a child; the Homer family legacy; Boyne buys Shawnee and changes the name back to “Pleasant”; “the big question is, what do we do with the land to the west of us?” as far as potential ski area expansion goes; how Pleasant interacts with Boyne's other New England ski areas; why Pleasant hasn't joined the Ikon Pass like all of Boyne's other ski areas; the evolution and future of Pleasant Mountain on the New England Pass; whether the Sunnyside triple is next in line for a high-speed upgrade; night-skiing; snowmaking; and potential baselodge expansion. This pod also features some of the coolest background noise ever, as we hear the helicopter flying these towers for the new summit lift:Lewis sent me some photos after the call:Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewBoyne came in and went to work doing Boyne things. That means snowmaking that can bury a brontosaurus. More parking. Food trucks. Tweaks to the trail network. Better grooming. Access to the Maine bigsters with a Pleasant season pass. And a bunch of corporate streamlining that none of us notice but that fortify the bump for long-term stability.But what we've all been waiting for are the new lifts. Or lift. It would always be the Summit Triple that would go first. The other chairs gathered around Big Jim (as he was known around the yard), and delivered their eulogies on that day three years ago when Boyne bought its fourth New England ski area. They all had stories to share. Breakdowns and wind holds. Liftlines and rainy days. Long summers just sitting there, waiting for something to do. Better to hear the tributes before the chairs stopped spinning, before they were auctioned off and sent to sentry backyard firepits from Portsmouth to Farmington, before the towers were scrapped and recycled into steel support beams for a Bangor outlet mall. Then they gathered round to listen.“What's it like to have a midstation?” asked Pine Quad.“Did you have electricity in the ‘90s, or were you powered by a woodstove?” asked Rabbit Run Triple, born in 2014.“Is it true that from the top of North Peak at Loon, you can see four Canadian states?” asked Sunnyside Triple.“In Canada, they're called ‘metric states,'” Summit Express Triple answered sagely. And they all nodded in awe.And then Boyne sawed the whole thing into pieces and trucked a better lift down from Sunday River to replace it. The whole project probably took a bit longer than Pleasant Mountain locals would have liked, but hey Boyne restored the ski area's original name in the meantime which was a nifty distraction. And now the new lift is here and it isn't new but it looks new and was rebuilt like a ‘60s muscle car so that the garaged version you see today is better than anything you would have seen on the street when CCR was new and cool.I don't know what Boyne's going to do when they run out of lifts to upgrade. Right now it's like 10 every year and each of them sleek as a fighter jet and nearly as expensive. But impactful, meaningfully changing how skiers experience a mountain. The new tram at Big Sky feels like a rocket launch to a moon landing. Camelot 6 at The Highlands – 487 vertical feet with bubbles and heated seats – is so over the top that riders travel from Michigan to Austria on the 42-second ride. Even the International triple chair at Alpental will blow the sidewalls off one of the best pure ski mountains in the Pacific Northwest, humble as a three-person chair sounds in this itemization of megalifts.Pleasant Mountain's new Summit Express – which replaces a Summit Express that was actually a Summit Regular-Speed Fixed-Grip Lift – will transform the ski area. It will change how skiers think about the place and how they experience it. It instantly promotes the mountain to the 21st century, where New England skiers expect detachable chairs anytime a lift rises more than a thousand vertical feet. And it assures the locals that yeah Boyne is in this. They've got plans. And we're just getting started here.What I got wrong* There were a bunch of times that I called the ski area “Shawnee” or “Shawnee Peak.” Yes I got the memo but I don't know names are hard.* I said the six-state New England region was “like half the size of Colorado,” but the difference is not quite that dramatic. New England covers 71,988 square miles (nearly half of which – 30,843 square miles – is Maine), compared to 103,610 square miles for Colorado. I feel like I've made this mistake, and this correction, before.* I made the keen observation that Pleasant Mountains was “Loon's” fourth ski area in the region and third in the state of Maine. I meant “Boyne's.”Why you should ski Pleasant MountainPleasant Mountain fits into this odd category of ski areas that you only visit if you live within an hour of the parking lot, and only if that hour is east-southeast of the ski area. There's too much Conway competition west. Too much Sunday River north. Too easy to get to Loon if you're south. Which is another way of saying that Pleasant Mountain is an overlooked member of New England's ski area roster, a lost-unless-you're-from-Portland afterthought for skiers distracted by New Hamsphire and Vermont and Sugarloaf.That's not the same thing as saying that this is not a very nice ski area. Nothing stays in business for 86 years by accident. Skiers just don't think about it unless they have to. Pleasant isn't on any national multimountain pass, isn't particularly convenient to get to, isn't a bargain, doesn't harbor a pocket of secret hardcore terrain.But you should go anyway. Even if all you do is ride the lift to the summit and stare out at the water below. The views are primo. But the ride down is fun too. Twisty narrow New England fall lines at their playful, unpredictable best. The pitches aren't overly steep, but they are consistent. This is one of the more approachable thousand-plus-footers in the country. And Maine is one of the more pleasant states in the country (no pun intended). Good people up there. A nice place to break your leg, I'm told. I'll take any excuse to visit Maine. You can go ahead and see that for yourself.Podcast NotesOn Pleasant having one of New England's highest vertical drops with no high-speed liftPleasant Mountain is one of the last New England ski areas with more than 1,000 vertical feet to install a detachable lift, but there are still a 11 left. Twelve if you count Dartmouth Skiway, which I will because I suspect their reported vertical drop may be more honest than some of the ski areas claiming 1,000-plus:On Boyne rebuilding old detach quadsBoyne has rebuilt quite a few high-speed quads over the past half-decade:Loon GM Brian Norton delivered an excellent breakdown of his mountain's rebuild of Kanc/Seven Brothers in his 2022 podcast appearance.On early-70s Pleasant MountainLewis recalls his 1970s childhood days skiing Pleasant Mountain. The place was a fairly simple operation in 1970:Within a couple of years, however, the trail footprint had evolved into something remarkably similar to modern-day Pleasant Mountain:On Pleasant's claim to having the first chairlift in the state of MainePleasant appears to be home to Maine's first double chair, a Constam make named “Old Blue,” that ran from 1955 to ‘84. According to New England Ski History, a now-defunct operation named Michaud Hill installed a single-person chairlift for the 1945-46 ski season. The lift only lasted for a couple of years, however, before being “possibly removed following 1947-48 season, with parts possibly used at [also now defunct] Thorn Mountain, New Hampshire.”On Sunday River as a backwaterI've covered this extensively, but it's still a trip to look at 1980s trailmaps of a teeny-tiny Sunday River:On ASC's rosterLewis spent time as part of American Skiing Company, which at its height had collected a now widely distributed bundle of mountains:On Bear Peak at AttitashLewis helped build two of the largest modern ski expansions in New Hampshire. Bear Peak, installed between 1994 and '95 on the proposed-but-never-developed Big Bear development next door to Attitash, more or less doubled the size of the ski area. Here's a before-and-after look at the American Skiing Company mega-project:On Sugarbush's Lift-tacular summerThose American Skiing Company days were wild in New England, marking the last major investment surge until the one we're witnessing over the past five years. One of the most incredible single-summer efforts unfolded at Sugarbush in 1995, when the company installed six chairlifts: Super Bravo Express, Gatehouse Express, and the North Lynx Triple on the Lincoln side; North Ridge Express and the Green Mountain Quad on the Mt. Ellen side; and the two-mile-long Slide Brook Express (still the longest chairlift in the world), linking the two.Current Sugarbush GM John Hammond, who occupied a much more junior role at the mountain in the mid-90s, recalled that summer when he joined the podcast in 2020.On vintage LoonLewis eventually moved from Attitash to Loon, where he found himself part of his second generational expansion: South Peak. Here's Loon around 2003:Expansion unfolded in phases, beginning in 2007. By 2011, the new peak was mostly built out:Loon actually expanded it again in 2022:On Loon busynessWhile it's difficult to verify skier visit numbers exactly, since ski areas, for reasons I don't understand, lock them up as though they were the nuclear launch codes, they occasionally slip out. And all available evidence suggests that Loon is, by far, New Hampshire's busiest ski area. Here's a dated snapshot gathered by New England Ski History:On Loon being the best of New HampshireI claim, without really qualifying it, that Loon is New Hampshire's “premier ski area.” What I meant by that was that the ski area owns the state's most sophisticated snowmaking and lift system. That assessment is a bit subjective, and Bretton Woods Nation could fight me about it and I wouldn't really have much of a counterargument.However, there is another way to look at the “best,” and that is in terms of pure ski terrain. Among the state's ski areas, Cannon and Wildcat generally split this category. Again, it's subjective, but on a powder day, those two are going to give you the most interesting terrain when you consider glades, steeps, bumps, etc.And then you have a bunch of ski areas in Vermont, and a handful in Maine, that are right in this fight. And since New England states are roughly the size of suburban Atlanta Costcos, it makes sense to consider them as a whole. Which means this is a good place to re-insert my standard Ski Areas of New England Inventory:On Booth Creek's rosterLoon was, for a time, one of eight ski areas owned by Booth Creek:Today, the company's only ski area is Sierra-at-Tahoe.On the Homer family and “Shawnee Peak”Pleasant Mountain's somewhat bizarre history includes its purchase by the owners of Shawnee Mountain, Pennsylvania in 1988. Per New England Ski History:Following the 1987-88 season, the owners of Pleasant Mountain found themselves in financial trouble. That off season, they sold the ski area to Shawnee Mountain Corp. for $1.4 million. Pleasant Mountain was subsequently renamed to "Shawnee Peak," the name of the owners' Pennsylvania ski area.Current Shawnee Mountain CEO Nick Fredericks, who has worked at that Pennsylvania ski area for its entire existence, recalled the whole episode in detail when he joined me on the podcast three years ago.Out-of-state ownership didn't last long. New England Ski History:Circa 1992, the parent company decided to divest its skiing holdings, resulting in banks taking control of Shawnee Peak. After a couple of season on the bubble, Shawnee Peak was purchased by Tom's of Maine executive Chet Homer in September of 1994. Though Homer considered restoring the ski area's original name, he opted to keep the Shawnee Peak identity due to the brand that had been established.In 2021, Homer sold the ski area to Boyne Resorts, who changed the name back to “Pleasant Mountain” in 2022. Chet's son, Geoff, recently acquired the operating lease for the small Blue Hills, Massachusetts ski area:On expansion potential to Pleasant Mountain's westPleasant Mountain owns a large parcel skier's left off the summit that could substantially expand the mountain's skiable terrain:Boyne has been aggressive with New England expansions over the past several years, opening a massive new terrain pod at Sugarloaf, expanding South Peak at Loon, and adding the family-friendly Merrill Hill at Sunday River. Boyne has the resources, organizational knowhow, and will to pull off a similar project at Pleasant. I'd expect the new terrain to be included whenever the company puts together the sort of long-term visions it's articulated for Sugarloaf, Sunday River, Loon, Boyne Mountain, The Highlands, Summit at Snoqualmie, and Big Sky.That expansion will not include these trails teased skier's right of the current Sunnyside pod in this 52-year-old trailmap – Pleasant either donated or sold this land to a nature conservancy some years ago.On Pleasant's slow expansion onto the New England PassHere's how access has evolved between Pleasant Mountain and the remainder of Boyne's portfolio since the company's 2021 acquisition:* 2021-22: Boyne purchased Pleasant in September, 2021 – too late to include the ski area on any of the company's pass products for the coming winter.* 2022-23: New England Pass excludes Pleasant as a full partner, but top-tier passes include three days each at Pleasant and Boyne's other ski areas across North America; top-tier Pleasant passes included three days to split between Sugarloaf, Sunday River, and Loon, but no access to Boyne's other resorts.* 2023-24: New England Pass access remains same as 2022-23; top-tier Pleasant Mountain passes now include three days each at Boyne's non-New England resorts, including Big Sky.* 2024-25: New England Pass holders can now add a Pleasant Mountain night-skiing pass at a substantial discount; Pleasant Mountain access to remainder of Boyne's portfolio remains unchanged.Since Pleasant Mountain's season pass remains so heavily discounted against top-tier New England Passes ($849 early-bird versus $1,389), it seems unlikely that adding Pleasant as a full pass partner would do much to overcrowd the smaller mountain. Most skiers who lay out that much for their big-time pass will probably want to spend their weekends at the bigger mountains up north. Pleasant's expansion, whenever it happens, will also increase the chances that Pleasant could join the New England or Ikon Passes.The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 65/100 in 2024, and number 565 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

Podcast #183: Fernie Alpine Resort General Manager Andy Cohen

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 18, 2024 73:50

This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on Oct. 11. It dropped for free subscribers on Oct. 18. To receive future episodes as soon as they're live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:WhoAndy Cohen, General Manager of Fernie Alpine Resort, British ColumbiaRecorded onSeptember 3, 2024About FernieClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Resorts of the Canadian Rockies, which also owns:Located in: Fernie, British ColumbiaPass affiliations:* Epic Pass: 7 days, shared with Kicking Horse, Kimberley, Nakiska, Stoneham, and Mont-Sainte Anne* RCR Rockies Season Pass: unlimited access, along with Kicking Horse, Kimberley, and NakiskaClosest neighboring ski areas: Fairmont Hot Springs (1:15), Kimberley (1:27), Panorama (1:45) – travel times vary considerably given time of year and weather conditionsBase elevation: 3,450 feet/1,052 metersSummit elevation: 7,000 feet/2,134 metersVertical drop: 3,550 feet/1,082 metersSkiable Acres: 2,500+Average annual snowfall: 360 inches/914 Canadian inches (also called centimeters)Trail count: 145 named runs plus five alpine bowls and tree skiing (4% extreme, 21% expert, 32% advanced, 30% intermediate, 13% novice)Lift count: 10 (2 high-speed quads, 2 fixed-grip quads, 3 triples, 1 T-bar, 1 Poma, 1 conveyor - view Lift Blog's inventory of Fernie's lift fleet)Why I interviewed himOne of the most irritating dwellers of the #SkiInternet is Shoosh Emoji Bro. This Digital Daniel Boone, having boldly piloted his Subaru beyond the civilized bounds of Interstate 70, considers all outlying mountains to be his personal domain. So empowered, he patrols the digital sphere, dropping shoosh emojis on any poster that dares to mention Lost Trail or White Pass or Baker or Wolf Creek. Like an overzealous pamphleteer, he slings his brand haphazardly, toward any mountain kingdom he deems worthy of his forcefield. Shoosh Emoji Bro once Shoosh Emoji-ed me over a post about Alta.

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* Art Tebo, Past COO Boyne USA

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 8, 2024 10:21

harvest festival boyne city harvest

From Boyne City Harvest Festival

217 Recovery

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 28, 2024 15:18

Corey & Cori broadcast from the Boyne City Harvest Festival.

* Art Tebo, Past COO Boyne USA

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 20, 2024 9:01

Podcast #180: Cypress Mountain President & General Manager Matt Davies

VfB x STR - Der Podcast des VfB Stuttgart

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 19, 2024 80:41

This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on Sept. 11. It dropped for free subscribers on Sept. 19. To receive future pods as soon as they're live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:WhoMatt Davies, General Manager of Cypress Mountain, British ColumbiaRecorded onAugust 5, 2024About Cypress MountainClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Boyne ResortsLocated in: West Vancouver, British ColumbiaYear founded: 1970Pass affiliations:* Ikon Pass: 7 days, no blackouts* Ikon Base Pass: 5 days, holiday blackoutsClosest neighboring ski areas: Grouse Mountain (:28), Mt. Seymour (:55) – travel times vary considerably given weather, time of day, and time of yearBase elevation: 2,704 feet/824 meters (base of Raven Ridge quad)Summit elevation: 4,720 feet/1,440 meters (summit of Mt. Strachan)Vertical drop: 2,016 feet/614 meters total | 1,236 feet/377 meters on Black Mountain | 1,720 feet/524 meters on Mt. StrachanSkiable Acres: 600 acresAverage annual snowfall: 245 inches/622 cmTrail count: 53 (13% beginner, 43% intermediate, 44% difficult)Lift count: 7 (2 high-speed quads, 3 fixed-grip quads, 1 double, 1 carpet – view Lift Blog's inventory of Cypress' lift fleet)View historic Cypress Mountain trailmaps on skimap.org.Why I interviewed himI'm stubbornly obsessed with ski areas that are in places that seem impractical or improbable: above Los Angeles, in Indiana, in a New Jersey mall. Cypress doesn't really fit into this category, but it also sort of does. It makes perfect sense that a ski area would sit north of the 49th Parallel, scraping the same snow train that annually buries the mountains from Mt. Bachelor all the way to Whistler. It seems less likely that a 2,000-vertical-foot ski area would rise just minutes outside of Canada's third-largest city, one known for its moderate climate. But Cypress is exactly that, and offers – along with its neighbors Grouse Mountain and Mt. Seymour – a bite of winter anytime cityfolk want to open the refrigerator door.There's all kinds of weird stuff going on here, actually. Why is this little locals' bump – a good ski area, and a beautiful one, but no one's destination – decorated like a four-star general of skiing? 2010 Winter Olympics host mountain. Gilded member of Alterra's Ikon Pass. A piece of Boyne's continent-wide jigsaw puzzle. It's like you show up at your buddy's one-room hunting cabin and he's like yeah actually I built like a Batcave/wave pool/personal zoo with rideable zebras underneath. And you're like dang Baller who knew?What we talked aboutOffseason projects; snowmaking evolution since Boyne's 2001 acquisition; challenges of getting to 100 percent snowmaking; useful parking lot snow; how a challenging winter became “a pretty incredible experience for the whole team”; last winter: el nino or climate change?; why working for Whistler was so much fun; what happened when Vail Resorts bought Whistler – “I don't think there was a full understanding of the cultural differences between Canadians and Americans”; the differences between Cypress and Whistler; working for Vail versus working for Boyne – “the mantra at Boyne Resorts is that ‘we're a company of ski resorts, not a ski resort company'”; the enormous and potentially enormously transformative Cypress Village development; connecting village to ski area via aerial lift; future lift upgrades, including potential six-packs; potential night-skiing expansion; paid parking incoming; the Ikon Pass; the 76-day pass guarantee; and Cypress' Olympic legacy.Why now was a good time for this interviewMountain town housing is most often framed as an intractable problem, ingrown and malignant and impossible to reset or rethink or repair. Too hard to do. But it is not hard to do. It is the easiest thing in the world. To provide more housing, municipalities must allow developers to build more housing, and make them do it in a way that is dense and walkable, that is mixed with commerce, that gives people as many ways to move around without a car as possible.This is not some new or brilliant idea. This is simply how humans built villages for about 10,000 years, until the advent of the automobile. Then we started building our spaces for machines instead of for people. This was a mistake, and is the root problem of every mountain town housing crisis in North America. That and the fact that U.S. Americans make no distinction between the hyper-thoughtful new urbanist impulses described here and the sprawling shitpile of random buildings that are largely the backdrop of our national life. The very thing that would inject humanity into the mountains is recast as a corrupting force that would destroy a community's already-compromised-by-bad-design character.Not that it will matter to our impossible American brains, but Canada is about to show us how to do this. Over the next 25 years, a pocket of raw forest hard against Cypress' access road will sprout a city of 3,711 homes that will house thousands of people. It will be a human-scaled, pedestrian-first community, a city neighborhood dropped onto a mountainside. A gondola could connect the complex to Cypress' lifts thousands of feet up the mountain – more cars off the road. It would look like this (the potential aerial lift is not depicted here):Here's how the whole thing would set up against the mountain:And here's what it would be like at ground level:Like wow that actually resembles something that is not toxic to the human soul. But to a certain sort of Mother Earth evangelist, the mere suggestion of any sort of mountainside development is blasphemous. I understand this impulse, but I believe that it is misdirected, a too-late reflex against the subdivision-off-an-exit-ramp Build- A-Bungalow mentality that transformed this country into a car-first sprawlscape. I believe a reset is in order: to preserve large tracts of wilderness, we should intensely develop small pieces of land, and leave the rest alone. This is about to happen near Cypress. We should pay attention.More on Cypress Village:* West Vancouver Approves ‘Transformational' Plan for Cypress Village Development - North Shore News* West Vancouver Approves Cypress Village Development with Homes for Nearly 7,000 People - UrbanizedWhat I got wrong* I said that Cypress had installed the Easy Rider quad in 2021, rather than 2001 (the correct year).* I also said that certain no-ski zones on Vail Mountain's trailmap were labelled as “lynx habitat.” They are actually labelled as “wildlife habitat.” My confusion stemmed from the resort's historical friction with the pro-Lynxers.Why you should ski Cypress MountainYou'll see it anyway on your way north to Whistler: the turnoff to Cypress Bowl Road. Four switchbacks and you're there, to a cut in the mountains surrounded by chairlifts, neon-green Olympic rings standing against the pines.This is not Whistler and no one will try to tell you that it is, including the guy running the place, who put in two decades priming the machine just up the road. But Cypress is not just a waystation either, or a curiosity, or a Wednesday evening punchcard for Vancouver Cubicle Bro. Two thousand vertical feet is a lot of vertical feet. It often snows here by the Dumpster load. Off the summits, spectacular views, panoramic, sweeping, a jigsaw interlocking of the manmade and natural worlds. The terrain is varied, playful, plentiful. And when the snow settles and the trees fill in, a bit of an Incredible Hulk effect kicks on, as this mild-mannered Bruce Banner of a ski area flexes into something bigger and beefier, an unlikely superhero of the Vancouver heights.But Cypress is also not a typical Ikon Pass resort: 600 acres, six chairlifts, not a single condo tucked against the hill. It's a ski area that's just a ski area. It rains a lot. A busy-day hike up from the most distant parking lot can eat an irrevocable part of your soul (new shuttles this year should help that). Snowmaking, by Boyne standards, is limited, (though punchy for B.C.). The lift fleet, also by Boyne standards, feels merely adequate, rather than the am-I-in-Austria-or-Montana explosive awe that hits you at the base of Big Sky. To describe a ski area as both spectacular and ordinary feels like a contradiction (or, worse, lazy on my part). But Cypress is in fact both of these things. Lodged in a national park, yet part of Vancouver's urban fabric. Brown-dirt trails in February and dang-where'd-I-leave-my-giraffe deep 10 days later. Just another urban ski area, but latched onto a pass with Aspen and Alta, a piece of a company that includes Big Sky and Big Cottonwood and a pair of New England ski areas that dwarf their Brother Cypress. A stop on the way north to Whistler, but much more than that as well.Podcast NotesOn the 2010 Winter OlympicsA summary of Cypress' Olympic timeline, from the mountain's history page:On Whistler BlackcombWe talk quite a bit about Whistler, where Davies worked for two decades. Here's a trailmap so you don't have to go look it up:On animosity between the merger of Whistler and BlackcombI covered this when I hosted Whistler COO Belinda Trembath on the podcast a few months back.On neighborsCypress is one of three ski areas seated just north of Vancouver. The other two are Grouse Mountain and Mt. Seymour, which we allude to briefly in the podcast. Here are some visuals:On Boyne's building bingeI won't itemize everything here, but over the past half decade or so, Boyne has leapt ahead of everyone else in North American in adoption of hyper-modern lift technology. The company operates all five eight-place chairlift in the United States, has built four advanced six-packs, just built a rocketship-speedy tram at Big Sky, has rebuilt and repurposed four high-speed quads within its portfolio, and has upgraded a bucketload of aging fixed-grip chairs. And many more lifts, including two super-advanced gondolas coming to Big Sky, are on their way.On Sunday River's progression carpetsThis is how carpets ought to be stacked – as a staircase from easiest to hardest, letting beginners work up their confidence with short bursts of motion:On side-by-side carpetsBoyne has two of these bad boys, as far as I know – one at Big Sky, and one at Summit at Snoqualmie, both installed last year. Here's the Big Sky lift:On Ikon resorts in B.C. and proximity to CypressWhile British Columbia is well-stocked with Ikon Pass partners – Revelstoke, Red Mountain, Panorama, Sun Peaks – none of them is anywhere near Cypress. The closest, Sun Peaks, is four to five hours under the best conditions. The next closest Ikon Pass partner is The Summit at Snoqualmie, four hours and an international border south – so more than twice the distance as that little place north of Cypress called Whistler. 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 56/100 in 2024, and number 556 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

Folge 59 - Im Gespräch mit Holger Boyne (Direktor Kommunikation und Medien des VfB Stuttgart)

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 15, 2024 122:57 Transcription Available

Hoher Besuch bei STR: Wir sprechen mit dem Direktor Kommunikation und Medien des VfB Stuttgart. Holger Boyne erzählt uns, wie er vom Psychiatrie-Pfleger in den Profifußball gekommen ist, warum er nach sieben erfolgreichen Jahren bei Eintracht Frankfurt wieder beim VfB Stuttgart gelandet ist und was er in Cannstatt bewegen möchte. Wir sprechen mit ihm über die großen Herausforderungen, die anstehenden Projekte, über die Positionierung unseres Podcasts im VfB-Kosmos und vor allem über eins: Liebe!

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*"The Long Drive" w/ Tom Lang presented by BOYNE featuring Steve Brady & Tony Mancilla

The Drive with Jack

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 22, 2024 29:29

long drive boyne mancilla steve brady tom lang

*"The Long Drive" w/ Tom Lang presented by BOYNE featuring 2024 Jr. Golf Amateur Champ, Connor Fox & hear comments from PGA Golfer Jim Furyk

The Drive with Jack

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 17, 2024 27:30

champ amateur golfer long drive boyne jim furyk tom lang

MGL Radio - Michigan Am + Island Resort C'Ship - June 22

Fore Golfers Network Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 22, 2024 81:42

This is the Michigan Golf Live Radio June 22 edition featuring the 113th Michigan Amateur Championship at Boyne Golf Resorts and coverage of the Island Resort Championship, the Epson Tour event in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. You'll hear from players, officials, and those who help make these special events happen. June is championship month in Michigan and we love bringing the stories behind the competitions as we celebrate this great game in Pure Michigan! ---------------- MGL 24/7 Listener Hotline - (989) 272-2383 - we want to hear from you! Subscribe to the MGL/FGN Podcast Watch our videos on YouTube

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JIN 1000 Hugs kiss/assault|NAYEON crotch grab & BAMBAMs 1-sided Love|ROSE signs Solo|STRAY KIDS ATE Signed Versions|Weverse Con or JYP Con:TXT BEOMGYU & ENHYPEN JAY play Guitar for JYP & dance w/ ILLIT|NEWJEANS Right Now & PUBG HANNI|BOYNE

Permission to Stan Podcast: KPOP Multistans

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 20, 2024 76:07

@PermissionToStanPodcast on Instagram (DM us here) & TikTok!NEW Podcast Episodes every THURSDAY! Please support us by 'Following' & 'Subscribing' for more K-POP talk!June 2024 ComebacksFIFTY FIFTY making a comeback with 4 new membersMV reviews for RIIZE, SEVENTEEN, NEWJEANS, NAYEONROSE signs with The Black Label: All 4 BLACKPINK members have solo agencies nowBAMBAM & NAYEON talk about his crush on herWEVERSE CON Recap: Was it actually JYP CON?TRIPLES "fans" banned after petty attitude at fanmeetBOYNEXTDOOR JAEHYUN behind the scenes of a music showBTS JIN hugs 1000 fans and gets kissed/assaulted by 2 & also puts on a great show for ARMYJIMIN 2nd solo album comeback "MUSE" announcedSTRAY KIDS comeback "ATE" teaser drop which means Signed Album Inclusion dropsBANGCHAN with DAY6 YOUNG K: shows what he would pack in his survival bag & FENDI Fashion WeekAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Podcast #168: Gunstock Mountain President & GM Tom Day

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Play Episode Listen Later Apr 22, 2024 80:15

This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on April 15. It dropped for free subscribers on April 22. To receive future pods as soon as they're live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:WhoTom Day, President and General Manager of Gunstock, New HampshireRecorded onMarch 14, 2024About GunstockClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Belknap County, New HampshireLocated in: Gilford, New HampshireYear founded: 1937Pass affiliations: Unlimited access on New Hampshire College Pass (with Cannon, Cranmore, and Waterville Valley)Closest neighboring ski areas: Abenaki (:34), Red Hill Ski Club (:35), Veterans Memorial (:43), Tenney (:52), Campton (:52), Ragged (:54), Proctor (:56), Powderhouse Hill (:58), McIntyre (1:00)Base elevation: 904 feetSummit elevation: 2,244 feetVertical drop: 1,340 feetSkiable Acres: 227 Average annual snowfall: 120 inchesTrail count: 49 (2% double black, 31% black, 52% blue, 15% green)Lift count: 8 (1 high-speed quad, 2 fixed-grip quads, 2 triples, 3 carpets - view Lift Blog's inventory of Gunstock's lift fleet)Why I interviewed himIn the roughly four-and-a-half years since I launched The Storm, I've written a lot more about some ski areas than others. I won't claim that there's no personal bias involved, because there are certain ski areas that, due to reputation, convenience, geography, or personal nostalgia, I'm drawn to. But Gunstock is not one of those ski areas. I was only vaguely aware of its existence when I launched this whole project. I'd been drawn, all of my East Coast life, to the larger ski areas in the state's north and next door in Vermont and Maine. Gunstock, awkwardly located from my New York City base, was one of those places that maybe I'd get to someday, even if I wasn't trying too hard to actually make that happen.And yet, I've written more about Gunstock than just about any ski area in the country. That's because, despite my affinity for certain ski areas, I try to follow the news around. And wow has there been news at this mid-sized New Hampshire bump. Nobody knew, going into the summer of 2022, that Gunstock would become the most talked-about ski area in America, until the lid blew off Mount Winnipesaukee in July of that year, when a shallow and ill-planned insurrection failed spectacularly at drawing the ski area into our idiotic and exhausting political wars.If you don't know what I'm talking about, you can read more on the whole surreal episode in the Podcast Notes section below, or just listen to the podcast. But because of that weird summer, and because of an aspirational masterplan launched in 2021, I've given Gunstock outsized attention in this newsletter. And in the process, I've quite come to like the place, both as a ski area (where I've now actually skied), and as a community, and it has become, however improbably, a mountain I keep taking The Storm back to.What we talked aboutRetirement; “my theory is that 10 percent of people that come to a ski area can be a little bit of a problem”; Gunstock as a business in 2019 versus Gunstock today; skier visits surge; cash in the bank; the publicly owned ski area that is not publicly subsidized; Gunstock Nice; the last four years at Gunstock sure were an Asskicker, eh?; how the Gunstock Area Commission works and what went sideways in the summer of 2022; All-Summers Disease; preventing a GAC Meltdown repeat; the time bandits keep coming; should Gunstock be leased to a private operator?; qualities that the next general manager of Gunstock will need to run the place successfully; honesty, integrity, and respect; an updated look at the 2021 masterplan and what actually makes sense to build; could Gunstock ever have a hotel or summit lodge?; why a paved parking lot is a big deal in 2024; Maine skiing in the 1960s; 1970s lift lines; reflecting on the changes over 40-plus years of skiing; rear-wheel-drive Buicks as ski commuter car; competing against Epic and Ikon and why independent ski areas will always have a place in the market; will record skier-visit numbers persist?; a surprising stat about season passes; and how a payphone caused mass confusion in Park City. Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewOn January 19, Gunstock Marketing Director Bonnie MacPherson (long of Okemo and Bretton Woods), shot me a press release announcing that Day would retire at the conclusion of the 2023-24 ski season.It was a little surprising. Day hadn't been at Gunstock long. He'd arrived just a couple months before the March 2020 Covid shutdowns, almost four years to the day before he announced retirement. He was widely liked and respected on the mountain and in the community, a sentiment reinforced during the attempted Kook Coup of summer 2022, when a pair of fundamentalist nutjobs got flung out of the county via catapult after attempting to seize Gunstock from Day and his team.But Gunstock was a bit of a passion project for Day, a skiing semi-lifer who'd spent three decades at Waterville Valley before fiddling with high-end odd-jobs of the consultancy and project-management sort for 10 years. In four years, he transformed county-owned Gunstock from a seasonal business that tapped bridge loans to survive each summer into a profitable year-round entertainment center with millions in the bank. And he did it all despite Covid, despite the arrival of vending-machine Epic and Ikon passes, despite a couple of imbeciles who'd never worked at a ski area thinking they could do a better job running a ski area than the person they paid $175,000 per year to run the ski area. I still don't really get it. How it all worked out. How Gunstock has gotten better as everything about running a ski area has gotten harder and more expensive and more competitive. There's nothing really special about the place statistically or terrain-wise. It's not super snowy or extra tall or especially big. It has exactly one high-speed lift, a really nice lodge, and Awe Dag views of Lake Winnipesaukee. It's nice but not exceptional, just another good mid-sized ski area in a state full of good mid-sized ski areas. And yet, Gunstock thrives. Day, like most ski area general managers, is allergic to credit, but I have to think he had a lot to do with the mountain's late resilience. He's an interesting guy, thoughtful and worldly and adventurous. Talking to him, I always get the sense that this is a person who's comfortable with who he is, content with his life, a hardcore skier whose interests extend far beyond it. He's colorful but also plainspoken, an optimist and a pragmatist, a bit of back-office executive and good ole' boy wrencher melded into your archetype of a ski area manager. Someone who, disposition baked by experience, is perfectly suited to the absurd task of operating a ski area in New Hampshire. It's too bad he's leaving, but I guess eventually we all do. The least I could do was get his story one more time before he bounced.Why you should ski GunstockSkiing Knife Fight, New Hampshire Edition, looks like this:That's 30 ski areas, the fifth-most of any state, in the fifth-smallest state in America. And oh by the way you're also right next door to all of this:And Vermont is barely bigger than New Hampshire. Together, the two states are approximately one-fifth the size of Colorado. “Fierce” as the kids (probably don't) say.So, what makes you choose Gunstock as your snowsportskiing destination when you have 56 other choices in a two-state region, plus another half-dozen large ski areas just east in Maine? Especially when you probably own an Indy, Epic, or Ikon pass, which, combined, deliver access to 28 upper New England ski areas, including most of the best ones?Maybe that's exactly why. We've been collectively enchanted by access, obsessed with driving down per-visit cost to beat inflated day-ticket prices that we simultaneously find absurd and delight in outsmarting. But boot up at any New England ski area with chairlifts, and you're going to find a capable operation. No one survived this long in this dogfight without crafting an experience worth skiing.It's telling that Gunstock has only gotten busier since the Epic and Ikon passes smashed into New England a half dozen years ago. There's something there, an extra thing worth pursuing. You don't have to give up your SuperUltimoWinterSki Pass to make Gunstock part of your winter, but maybe work it in there anyway?Podcast NotesOn Gunstock's masterplanGunstock's ambitious masterplan, rolled out in 2021, would have blown the ski area out on all sides, added a bunch of new lifts, and plopped a hotel and summit lodge on the property:Most of it seems improbable now, as Day details in the podcast.On the GAC conflictSomeone could write a book on the Gunstock Shenanigans of 2022. The best I can give you is a series of article I published as the whole ridiculous saga was unfolding:* Band of Nitwits Highjacks Gunstock, Ski Area's Future Uncertain - July 24, 2022* Walkouts, Resignations, Wild Accusations: A Timeline of Gunstock's Implosion - July 31, 2022* Gunstock GM Tom Day & Team Return, Commissioner Ousted – 3 Ways to Protect the Mountain's Future - Aug. 8, 2022If nothing else, just watch this remarkable video of Day and his senior staff resigning en masse:On the Caledonian Canal that “splits Scotland in half”I'd never heard of the Caledonian Canal, but Day mentions sailing it and that it “splits Scotland in half.” That's the sort of thing I go nuts for, so I looked it up. Per Wikipedia:The Caledonian Canal connects the Scottish east coast at Inverness with the west coast at Corpach near Fort William in Scotland. The canal was constructed in the early nineteenth century by Scottish engineer Thomas Telford.The canal runs some 60 miles (100 kilometres) from northeast to southwest and reaches 106 feet (32 metres) above sea level.[2] Only one third of the entire length is man-made, the rest being formed by Loch Dochfour, Loch Ness, Loch Oich, and Loch Lochy.[3] These lochs are located in the Great Glen, on a geological fault in the Earth's crust. There are 29 locks (including eight at Neptune's Staircase, Banavie), four aqueducts and 10 bridges in the course of the canal.Here's its general location:More detail:On Day's first appearance on the podcastThis was Day's second appearance on the podcast. The first was way back in episode 34, recorded in January 2021:On Hurricane Mountain, MaineDay mentions skiing a long-gone ropetow bump named Hurricane Mountain, Maine as a child. While I couldn't find any trailmaps, New England Lost Ski Areas Project houses a nice history from the founder's daughter:I am Charlene Manchester now Barton. My Dad started Hurricane Ski Slope with Al Ervin. I was in the second grade, I remember, when I used to go skiing there with him. He and Al did almost everything--cranked the rope tow motor up to get it going, directed traffic, and were the ski patrol. As was noted in your report, accommodations were across road at the Norton farm where we could go to use the rest room or get a cup of hot chocolate and a hamburger. Summers I would go with him and Al to the hill and play while they cleared brush and tried to improve the hill, even opened one small trail to the right of the main slope. I was in the 5th grade when I tore a ligament in my knee skiing there. Naturally, the ski patrol quickly appeared and my Dad carried me down the slope in his arms. I was in contact with Glenn Parkinson who came to interview my mother , who at 96 is a very good source of information although actually, she was not much of a skier. The time I am referring to must have been around 1945 because I clearly recall discussing skiing with my second grade teacher Miss Booth, who skied at Hurricane. This was at DW Lunt School in Falmouth where I grew up. I was in the 5th grade when I hurt my leg.My Dad, Charles Manchester , was one of the first skiers in the State, beginning on barrel staves in North Gorham where he grew up. He was a racer and skied the White Mountains . We have a picture of him at Tuckerman's when not many souls ventured up there to ski in the spring. As I understand it, the shortage of gas during WWII was a motivator as he had a passion for the sport, but no gas to get to the mountains in N.H. Two of his best ski buddies were Al Ervin, who started Hurricane with him, and Homer Haywood, who was in the ski troopers during WWII, I think. Another ski pal was Chase Thompson. These guys worked to ski--hiking up Cranmore when the lifts were closed due to the gas shortage caused by WWII. It finally got to be too much for my Dad to run Hurricane, as he was spending more time directing traffic for parking than skiing, which after all was why he and Al started the project.I think my Dad and his ski buddies should be remembered for their love of the sport and their willingness to do whatever it took to ski. Also, they were perfect gentlemen, wonderful manners on the slope, graceful and handsomely dressed, often in neckties. Those were the good old days!The ski area closed around 1973, according to NELSAP, in response to rising insurance rates.On old-school Sunday RiverI've documented the incredible evolution of Sunday River from anthill to Vesuvius many times. But here, to distill the drama of the transformation, is the now-titanic ski area's 1961 trailmap:This 60s-era Sunday River was a foundational playground for Day.On the Epic and Ikon New England timelineIt's easy to lose track of the fact that the Epic and Ikon Passes didn't exist in New England until very recently. A brief timeline:* 2017: Vail Resorts buys Stowe, its first New England property, and adds the mountain to the Epic Pass for the 2017-18 ski season.* 2018: Vail Resorts buys Triple Peaks, owners of Mount Sunapee and Okemo, and adds them to the Epic Pass for the 2018-19 ski season.* 2018: The Ikon Pass debuts with five or seven days at five New England destinations for the 2018-19 ski season: Killington/Pico, Sugarbush, and Boyne-owned Loon, Sunday River, and Sugarloaf. Alterra-owned Stratton is unlimited on the Ikon Pass and offers five days on the Ikon Base Pass.* 2019: Vail buys the 17-mountain Peak Resorts portfolio, which includes four more New England ski areas: Mount Snow in Vermont and Crotched, Wildcat, and Attitash in New Hampshire. All join the Epic Pass for the 2019-20 ski season, bumping the number of New England ski areas on the coalition up to seven.* 2019: Alterra buys Sugarbush. Amps up the mountain's Ikon Pass access to unlimited with blackouts on the Ikon Base and unlimited on the full Ikon for the 2020-21 ski season. Alterra also ramps up Stratton Ikon Base access from five days to unlimited with blackouts for the 2020-21 winter.* 2020: Vail introduces New England-specific Epic Passes. At just $599, the Northeast Value Pass delivers unlimited access to Vail's four New Hampshire mountains, holiday-restricted unlimited access to Mount Snow and Okemo, and 10 non-holiday days at Stowe. Vail also rolls out a midweek version for just $429.* 2021: Vail unexpectedly cuts the price of Epic Passes by 20 percent, reducing the cost of the Northeast Value Pass to just $479 and the midweek version to $359. The Epic Local Pass plummets to $583, and even the full Epic Pass is just $783.All of which is background to our conversation, in which I ask Day a pretty interesting question: how the hell have you grown Gunstock's business amidst this incredibly challenging competitive marketplace?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 30/100 in 2024, and number 530 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

Islas Británicas: Escocia I

DianaUribe.fm

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 12, 2024 53:12

Atravesamos el mar y nos dirigimos a la isla de Gran Bretaña. Allí nuestro primer destino es un país con un carácter tan único que destaca entre muchas naciones. Al norte de Gran Bretaña se encuentra Escocia, territorio de leyendas, criaturas fantásticas, bosques, montañas, Highlanders y marcado por una profunda densidad histórica. En dos capítulos haremos un recorrido por la cultura y la historia de la nación escocesa. Notas del episodio: Escocia en la geografía y la cultura Leyendas del lago Ness y el monstruo que ha acaparado la atención del mundo William Wallace y Robert Bruce: héroes de Escocia Los Estuardo: la dinastía real escocesa La batalla del Boyne: un hecho que definió el destino de Irlanda y Escocia Una guía para entender las rebeliones jacobitas ¡Síguenos en nuestras Redes Sociales! Facebook: / dianauribe.fm Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dianauribef... Twitter: https://twitter.com/dianauribefm?lang=es Pagina web: https://www.dianauribe.fm

Podcast #164: Sunday River General Manager Brian Heon

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 2, 2024 74:09

This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on March 26. It dropped for free subscribers on April 2. To receive future pods as soon as they're live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:WhoBrian Heon, General Manager of Sunday River, MaineRecorded onJanuary 30, 2024About Sunday RiverClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Boyne ResortsLocated in: Newry, MaineYear founded: 1959Pass affiliations:* Ikon Pass: 7 days, no blackouts* Ikon Base Pass: 5 days, holiday blackouts* New England Pass: unlimited access on Gold tierReciprocal partners:* New England Pass holders get equal access to Sunday River, Sugarloaf, and Loon* New England Gold passholders get three days each at Boyne's other seven ski areas: Pleasant Mountain, Maine; Boyne Mountain and The Highlands, Michigan; Big Sky, Montana; Brighton, Utah; Summit at Snoqualmie, Washington; and Cypress, B.C.Closest neighboring ski areas: Mt. Abram (:17); Black Mountain of Maine (:34); Wildcat (:46); Titcomb (1:05); Attitash (1:05); Cranmore (1:11)Base elevation: 800 feetSummit elevation: 3,150 feet (at Oz Peak)Vertical drop: 2,350 feetSkiable Acres: 884 trail acres + 300 acres of gladesAverage annual snowfall: 167 inchesTrail count: 139 (16% expert, 18% advanced, 36% intermediate, 30% beginner)Lift count: 19 (1 eight-pack, 1 six-pack, 1 6/8-passenger chondola, 2 high-speed quads, 5 fixed-grip quads, 4 triples, 1 double, 1 T-bar, 3 carpets – Sunday River also built an additional triple chair on Merrill Hill, which is complete but not yet open; it is scheduled to open for the 2024-25 ski season – view Lift Blog's inventory of Sunday River's lift fleet.)View historic Sunday River trailmaps on skimap.org.Why I interviewed himWhat an interesting time this is in the North American ski industry. It's never been easier or cheaper for avid skiers to sample different mountains, across different regions, within the span of a single season. And, in spite of the sorry shape of the stoke-obsessed ski media, there has never been more raw information readily available about those ski areas, whether that's Lift Blog's exhaustive databases or OpenSnow's snowfall comparisons and histories.What that gives all of us is perspective and context. When I learned to ski in the ‘90s, pre-commercial internet, you could scarcely find a trailmap without visiting a resort's ticket window. Skimap.org now houses more than 10,000 historic trailmaps for North America alone. That means you can understand, without visiting, what a ski area was, how it's evolved, and how it compares to its neighbors.That makes Sunday River's story both easier and harder to tell. Easier because anyone can now see how this monster, seated up there beyond the Ski 93 and North Conway corridors, is worth the drive past all of that to get to this. The ski area is more than twice the size of anything in New Hampshire. But the magical internet can also show skiers just how much snowier it is in Vermont, how much emptier it is at Saddleback, and that my gosh actually it doesn't take so much longer to just fly to Utah.Sunday River, self-aware of its place in the ski ecosystem, has responded by building a better mountain. Boyne has, so far, under-promised and over-delivered on the resort's 2030 plan, which, when launched four years ago, didn't mention either of the two D-Line megalifts that now anchor both ends of the resort. The snowmaking is getting better, even as the mountain grows larger and more complex. The teased Western Reserve expansion would, given Sunday River's reliance on snowmaking, be truly audacious, transforming an already huge ski area into a gigantic one.Cynics will see echoes of ASC's largess, of the expansion frenzy of the 1990s that ended in the company's (though fortunately not the individual ski areas') extinction. But Boyne Resorts is not some upstart. The narrative of ski-consolidation-doesn't-work always overlooks this Michigan-based company, founded by a scrappy fellow named Everett Kircher in 1947 – nearly 80 years ago. Boyne officials assure me that their portfolio-wide infrastructure investment is both considered and sustainable. If you've been to Big Sky in the past couple of years, it's clear what the company is trying to achieve, even if they won't explicitly say it (and I've tried to get them to say it): Boyne Resorts is resetting the standard for the North American ski experience by building the most modern ski resorts on the continent. They're doing what I wish Vail, which continues to disappoint me in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic, would do: ensuring that, wherever they operate, they are delivering the best possible version of skiing in that region. And while that's a tough draw in the Cottonwoods (with Brighton, stacked, as it is, against the Narnia known as Alta-Snowbird), they're doing it in Michigan, they're doing it in the Rockies (at Big Sky), and they're doing it in New England, where Loon and Sunday River, especially, are transforming at superspeed.What we talked aboutRain, rain, go away; deciding to close down a ski resort; “seven inches of rain and 40-degree temperatures will eat snowpack pretty quick”; how Sunday River patched the resort back in only four days; the story behind the giant igloo at the base of Jordan; is this proof of climate change or proof of ski industry resilience?; one big advantage of resort consolidation; the crazy New England work ethic; going deep on the new Barker 6 lift; why Sunday River changed plans after announcing that the old Jordan high-speed quad would replace Barker; automatic restraint bars; the second Merrill Hill triple and why it won't spin until the 2024-25 ski season; the best part about skiing Merrill Hill; how Jordan 8 has transformed Sunday River; why that lift is so wind-resistant; the mountain's evolving season-opening plan; the potential Western Reserve expansion; potential future lift upgrades; carpet-bombing; 2030 progress beyond the on-snow ski experience; whether the summer bike park could return; the impact of the Ikon Pass on skier visits; Mountain Collective; the New England Pass; and making sure local kids can ski. Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewJordan 8. Barker 6. Merrill Hill. A December rainstorm fit to raise Noah's Ark. There is always something happening at Sunday River. Or, to frame it in the appropriate active voice: Sunday River is always doing things.New England, in its ASC/Intrawest late 1980s/1990s/early 2000s frenzy, built and built and built. Sugarbush installed five lifts, including the two-mile-long Slide Brook Express, in a single summer (1995). Killington built two gondolas and two high-speed quads in a three-year span from 1994 to '97. Stratton sprouted two six-packs and two fixed-grip quads in the summer of 2001. And Sunday River, the most earnest manifestation of Les Otten's ego and ambitions, multiplied across the wilderness, a new peak each year it seemed, until a backwater with a skiable footprint roughly equal to modern Black Mountain, New Hampshire had sprawled into a videogame ski kingdom at the chest-thumping pinnacle of Northeast skiing.And then not a lot happened for a really long time. ASC fell apart. Intrawest curdled. Most of the ski area infrastructure investment fled west. Stowe, then owned by AIG, kept building lifts, as did the Muellers (Okemo), and Peak Resorts (at least at Mount Snow and Crotched). One-offs would materialize as strange experiments, like the inexplicable six-pack at Ragged (2001) and the Mid-Burke Express at remote and little-known Burke Mountain (2011). But the region's on-mountain ski infrastructure, so advanced in the 1990s, began to tire out.Then, since 2018 or so, rapid change, propelled by numerous catalysts: the arrival of western megapasses, a Covid adrenaline boost, and, most crucially, two big companies willing to build big-time lifts at big-time ski areas. Vail, since kicking New England's doors open in 2017, has built a half-dozen major lifts, including three six-packs, across four ski areas. And Boyne Resorts, flexing a blueprint they first deployed at western crown jewel Big Sky, has built three D-line bubble lifts, installed two refurbished high-speed quads (with another on the way this summer), unveiled two expansions, and teased at least two more across its four New England ski areas. It doesn't hurt that, despite a tighter regulatory culture in general, there is little Forest Service bureaucracy to fuss with in the East, meaning that (Vermont's Act 250 notwithstanding), it's often easier to replace infrastructure.Which takes us back to Sunday River. Big and bustling, secure in its Ikon Pass membership, “SR,” as the Boyne folks call it, didn't really have to do anything to keep being busy and important. The old lifts would have kept on turning, even if rickety old Barker set the message boards on fire once every two to three weeks. Instead, the place is, through platinum-plated lifts and immense snowmaking upgrades, rapidly evolving into one of the country's most sophisticated ski areas. If that sounds like hyperbole, try riding one of Boyne's D-line bubble lifts. Quick and quiet, smooth as a shooting star, appointed like a high-end cigar lounge, these lifts inspire a sort of giddiness, an awe in the up-the-mountain ride that will reprogram the way you think about your ski day (even if you're too cynical to admit it).But it's not just what Sunday River is building that defines the place – it is also how the girth of the operation, backed by a New England hardiness, has fortified it against the almost constant weather events that make Northeast ski area operation such a suicidal juggling act. The December rainstorm that tore the place into pieces ended up shutting down the mountain for all of four days. Then they were like, “What?” And the lifts were spinning again.What I got wrongOn the old Jordan quadHeon mentioned that the future of the old Jordan high-speed quad was “to be determined.” We recorded this in January, before Pleasant Mountain announced that they would use the bones of Jordan as their new summit lift, replacing a fixed-grip triple chair that was starting to get moldy.On relative sizeI said that Merrill Hill was Sunday River's smallest peak by vertical drop. But the new Merrill Hill lift rises 750 vertical feet, while Little Whitecap sports a 602-foot vertical drop.On the New England PassThe prices I gave for New England Gold Passes ($1,350 early-bird, $1,619 final price), were for the 2023-24 ski season. Since then, 2024-25 passes debuted at $1,389 early-bird ($1,329 renewal), and currently sell for $1,439 ($1,389 renewal).I also said that the New England Pass didn't include Pleasant Mountain access. What I meant was that the pass only provides unlimited access to Sunday River, Sugarloaf, and Loon. But the full pass does in fact include three days at Pleasant Mountain, along with each of Boyne's other six ski areas (Boyne Mountain, The Highlands, Big Sky, Brighton, Summit at Snoqualmie, and Cypress). Skiers can also add on a Pleasant Mountain night pass for $99 for the 2024-25 ski season.We also refer to the Platinum New England Pass, which the company discontinued this year in favor of a kind-of build-your-own-pass structure – skiers can add an Ikon Base Pass onto the Gold Pass for $299 and the Pleasant Mountain night pass for $99.Why you should ski Sunday RiverThe most interesting ski areas, to me, present themselves as an adventure. Wild romps up and over, each new lift opening a new set of trails, which tease yet another chairlift poking over the horizon. Little unexpected pockets carved out from the whole, places to disappear into, not like one ski area but like several, parallel but distinct, the journey seamless but slightly confusing.This is the best way I can describe Sunday River. The trailmap doesn't really capture the scale and complexity of it. It's a good map, accurate enough, but it flattens the perspective and erases the drama, makes the mountain look easy. But almost the first thing that will happen at Sunday River is that you will get lost. The seven side-by-side peaks, so distinct on the map, blend into one another on the ground. Endless forests bisect your path. You can start on Locke and end, almost inexplicably, at the tucked-out-of-sight North Ridge quad. Or take off from the Barker summit and land at the junction of Aurora and the Jordan double, two lifts seemingly planted in raw wilderness that will transport you to two very different worlds. Or you can exit Jordan 8 and find yourself, several miles later, past a condo city and over a sequence of bridges, at the White Cap lodge, wondering where you are and how you got there.It's bizarre and brilliant, like a fully immersive game of Mouse Trap, a wild machine to lose yourself in. While it's smaller and shorter than Sugarloaf, its massive sister resort to the north, Sunday River, with its girth and its multiple base areas, can feel bigger, especially when the whole joint's open. That also means that, if you're not careful, you can spend all day traversing from one lift to the next, going across, rather than down, the fall lines. But ski with purpose and focus – and a map in your pocket – and Sunday River can deliver you one hell of a ski day.Podcast NotesOn Sunday River 2030Boyne is intentionally a little cagey on its 2030 plans, versions of which are in place for Loon, Sugarloaf, Summit at Snoqualmie, Boyne Mountain, The Highlands, and Sunday River. The exact content and commitments of the plans changes quite a bit, so I won't try to outline them here. Elsewhere in the portfolio, Big Sky has a nearly-wrapped 2025 plan. Brighton, entirely on Forest Service land, has a masterplan (which I can't find), but no 2030 commitment. Pleasant Mountain is still relatively new to the company. Cypress is in Canada, so who knows what's going on up there. I'll talk about that with the mountain's GM, Matt Davies, in June.On the December stormHeon and I discuss the December rainstorm that brought up to seven inches of rain to Sunday River and nearby Bethel. That's, like, an incredible amount of water:Heon spoke to local reporters shortly after the resort re-opened.On the AlpinigluSomehow, this party igloo that Sunday River flew a team of Euro-sculptors in to create survived the insane flooding.On Hurricane Irene and self-sufficiency in VermontNew England has a way of shrugging off catastrophic storm damage that is perhaps unequaled on planet Earth. From The New York Times, just a few months after Hurricane Irene blasted the state in 2011:Yet what is truly impressive about the work here is not the amount of damage, or even the size of the big boy toys involved in the repair. Instead, it is that 107 is the last stretch of state road that Vermont has not finished repairing. In the three months since Hurricane Irene, the state repaired and reopened some 500 miles of damaged road, replaced a dozen bridges with temporary structures and repaired about 200 altogether.Vermont's success in repairing roads while keeping the state open for tourism is a story of bold action and high-tech innovation. The state closed many damaged highways to speed repairs and it teamed with Google to create frequently updated maps_ showing which routes were open. Vermont also worked in cooperation with other states, legions of contractors and local citizens.While many Americans have come to wonder whether the nation has lost the ability to fix its ailing infrastructure or do big things, “they haven't been to Vermont,” said Megan Smith, the state's commissioner of tourism and marketing.State roads, which are the routes used most by tourists, are ready for the economically crucial winter skiing season. But Vermont had many of those roads open in time for many of the fall foliage visitors, who pump $332 million into the state's economy each year, largely through small businesses like bed and breakfasts, gift shops and syrup stands. Within a month of the storm, 84 of the 118 closed sections of state roads were reopened, and 28 of the 34 state highway bridges that had been closed were reopened. …How did they get so much done so quickly? Within days after the storm hit on Aug. 28, the state had moved to emergency footing, drawing together agencies to coordinate the construction plans and permits instead of letting communications falter. National Guard units from eight states showed up, along with road crews from the Departments of Transportation from Maine and New Hampshire, and armies of private contractors. The attitude, said Sue Minter, Vermont's deputy secretary of transportation, was, “We'll do the work and we'll figure out how we're paying for it, but we're not waiting.”On Barker 6When Sunday River announced that they would build the Jordan 8 chair in 2021, they planned to move the existing Jordan high-speed quad over to replace the POS Barker detach, a Yan relic from the late ‘80s. Eventually, they changed their minds and pivoted to a sixer for Barker. The old Jordan lift will now replace the summit triple at Pleasant Mountain next year.On Kircher and redistributionWhen Boyne Resorts CEO Stephen Kircher joined me on the podcast in November 2022, he explained the logic behind replacing the Jordan quad with an eight-pack, even though that wasn't a traditionally super busy part of the resort (14:06):On the expansions at Loon and SugarloafSunday River sister resorts Loon and Sugarloaf both opened expansions this ski season. Loon's was a small beginner-focused pod, a 500-vertical-foot add-on served by a carpet-loaded fixed quad that mainly served to unite the resort with a set of massive parking lots on the mountain's west end:Sugarloaf's West Mountain expansion was enormous – the largest in New England in decades. Pretty impressive for what was already the second-largest ski area in the East:On the Mountain Collective in the NortheastHere's the Mountain Collective's current roster:Sunday River would make a lot of sense in there. While the coalition is mostly centered on the West, Stowe and Sugarbush are past members. Each mountain's parent company (Vail and Alterra, respectively), eventually yanked them off the coalition, leaving Sugarloaf as the sole New England mountain (Bromont and La Massif de Charlevoix have since joined as eastern complements). I ask Heon on the podcast whether Sunday River has considered joining the collective.On the Community Access PassWe discuss Sunday River's Community Access Pass, which is:“a season pass scholarship for students that reside and attend school in the MSAD 17, SAD 44, and RSU 10 School Districts. Students grades Pre-K through 12 are eligible to apply. This pass will offer free daily access to the Sunday River slopes, and also comes with a complimentary membership to the Sunday River Ski and Snowboard Club. Students must meet certain economic qualifiers to apply; further details about the criteria are available on the pass application. Students have until November 15 to apply for the program.”Apply here.On Brian's last appearance on the podcastHeon last appeared on the podcast in January 2021:Current Sunday River President Dana Bullen has also been on the pod, way back on episode 13:On Merrill Hill and the new lift locationHere's an approximate location of the new Merrill Hill lift, which is built but not yet operational, and not yet on Sunday River's trailmap: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 21/100 in 2024, and number 521 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

Podcast #163: Red Mountain CEO & Chairman Howard Katkov