Podcast appearances and mentions of buck hill

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is made in the USA. Thank you for supporting independent ski journalism.About CaberfaeOwned by: The Meyer FamilyYear founded: 1937Pass affiliations:* Ikon Pass: 2 days, blackouts* Freedom Pass: 3 days, no blackouts Base elevation: 1,076 feetSummit elevation: 1,561 feetVertical drop: 485 feetSkiable Acres: 200Average annual snowfall: 120 inchesLift count: 5 (1 fixed-grip quad, 3 triples, 1 carpet – view Lift Blog's inventory of Caberfae's lift fleet)The Zoom transcript (click “transcript” above for the Substack transcript, then click on any text block to teleport to the associated point in the video; timestamps below DO NOT MATCH THE VIDEO; also since Tim and Pete were on one screen, the transcript does not differentiate between them).Stuart Winchester: Welcome to the storm. I'm your host, Stuart Winchester. Today is Thursday, September 17th, 2026, and we are going to mix things up a little bit today. Instead of starting with the takes, we are starting with the guests, and I have some great guests today.00:22:29.000 --> 00:22:40.000Stuart Winchester: They are the general managers of Cabrifay Peaks, Michigan, with over 200 acres of terrain served by 4 chairlifts across 3 peaks, with a 485-foot vertical drop.00:22:40.000 --> 00:22:44.000Stuart Winchester: Cabar Fay is one of the largest ski areas in Michigan's Lower Penins.00:22:44.000 --> 00:22:49.000Stuart Winchester: The ski area averaged 120 inches of lake effect snowfall per winter.00:22:49.000 --> 00:23:06.000Stuart Winchester: Their family has operated Cabaret since 1980. They are co-general managers, with Tim Meyer on the right, handling everything on the mountain, and Pete Meyer on the left, taking care of everything off. Tim and Pete, welcome to the storm. I'm always hyped to talk Cabaret. How are you guys doing today?00:23:07.000 --> 00:23:11.000Pete Meyer: Good. We're doing awesome. Thanks for having us. Yeah.00:23:10.000 --> 00:23:26.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, and trigger warning for any Sparties or Buckeyes out there who want to go to the video version on stormskiing.com or YouTube. Me and Tim are both proudly rocking our Wolverines gear. This is a shirt I wore to the maze out when Michigan blasted Oklahoma in the big house this past weekend. So we're feeling.00:23:26.000 --> 00:23:31.000Stuart Winchester: Although I understand Tim's also got a little Sparty, side loyalty.00:23:31.000 --> 00:23:35.000Pete Meyer: Yes, my children, both my sons are Spartans, so that's…00:23:34.000 --> 00:23:44.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, as soon as my daughter got into college, I bought all the gear for her place. So, you know, there's tons going on at Cabaret, and I want to start…00:23:35.000 --> 00:23:36.000Pete Meyer: It.00:23:44.000 --> 00:23:54.000Stuart Winchester: with this coming expansion, and you, you announced this a while ago, and I'm gonna share my screen here so that everyone can see, uh, see this as we talk through it.00:23:54.000 --> 00:24:13.000Stuart Winchester: And this is where I am never quite as fast as I want to be. Uh, but… okay. So, here is the Cabra Fay trail map. This is the one I took off your website this morning, so it's the most current that I have. Uh, and last time I talked to Tim in, I think, 2021, when you came on the podcast.00:24:13.000 --> 00:24:15.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, it…00:24:15.000 --> 00:24:31.000Stuart Winchester: This East Peak triple chair was still still in a theory phase and you hadn't built yet. Now that's in place and we'll talk about that in a minute and how that's gone. But talk to us about the Green Mountain triple chair, what we're getting and why you're building it.00:24:32.000 --> 00:24:34.000Pete Meyer: Yeah, so, um…00:24:34.000 --> 00:24:40.000Pete Meyer: I'm going to start with why, because it's kind of an interesting story, you know.00:24:40.000 --> 00:24:51.000Pete Meyer: we… when we put in the East Peak lift, we took out the shelter chairlift, the double. They started in almost the same place, but the shelter… the shelter lift.00:24:46.000 --> 00:24:47.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:24:51.000 --> 00:24:54.000Pete Meyer: let off about halfway up the hill.00:24:54.000 --> 00:25:04.000Pete Meyer: And because we we have our dads before us and then and then we also have continued to develop the terrain.00:25:04.000 --> 00:25:13.000Pete Meyer: the terrain changes and the flow changes. And what happened over time, like, especially over the last.00:25:13.000 --> 00:25:16.000Pete Meyer: 25 years or so.00:25:16.000 --> 00:25:23.000Pete Meyer: we kept adding on to Smiling Irishman and making it wider and wider and wider, and it got busier and busier and busier, so…00:25:23.000 --> 00:25:29.000Pete Meyer: The shelter chairlift was essentially letting off these new skiers.00:25:29.000 --> 00:25:33.000Pete Meyer: in the middle of flowing traffic. And…00:25:33.000 --> 00:25:37.000Pete Meyer: We thought when we put in the East Peak lift.00:25:37.000 --> 00:25:41.000Pete Meyer: Now we're gonna take these lower end skiers to the top.00:25:41.000 --> 00:25:55.000Pete Meyer: we're going to give them a longer run, and the new part we're giving them is actually the easier half. They're already negotiating the tougher half, the steeper half, and the narrower half. If we add the upper half, it's easier, it's wider, it should be fine.00:25:50.000 --> 00:25:51.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:25:55.000 --> 00:26:06.000Pete Meyer: And that's what we thought. And so we put it in and then but then what we found and this is the this is the piece that you learn as you go.00:26:06.000 --> 00:26:07.000Pete Meyer: is…00:26:07.000 --> 00:26:15.000Pete Meyer: The new skiers accepted being let off at the lower level, and having to merge into traffic, because.00:26:15.000 --> 00:26:32.000Pete Meyer: They didn't really know any different and that it was the psychological factor. Well, I'm only halfway up the mountain. I can, I can do this. When we took them up to the top, you know, that East Peak lift actually feels like a out, it almost feels like an out West lift. It has.00:26:32.000 --> 00:26:43.000Pete Meyer: like, three rises, you know? So you ride… you go up over a break, and then you… and then you go again for a while, and then up over another break, and then you're coming into the top, and you… you know, you're above…00:26:43.000 --> 00:26:47.000Pete Meyer: Tree line, basically, and you can see the horizon, and it just…00:26:47.000 --> 00:26:51.000Pete Meyer: would kind of psych out that new skier, you know, they would just, they would.00:26:50.000 --> 00:26:51.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:26:51.000 --> 00:26:55.000Pete Meyer: They'd get up there and kind of freeze and panic, and…00:26:55.000 --> 00:27:06.000Pete Meyer: say, there's no way I'm gonna go down, you know, I'm not gonna go down that hill. And, uh, so we found our ski patrol having to give a lot of lessons just to get people down the hill, and…00:26:59.000 --> 00:27:00.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:27:06.000 --> 00:27:13.000Pete Meyer: And, um, and so we, we just, we kind of knew that we had a, you know, a little bit of an issue that we had to work through.00:27:13.000 --> 00:27:21.000Pete Meyer: And so Pete and I would be talking, you know, and I would say, I think I have it all figured out, you know, I'm saying, um…00:27:21.000 --> 00:27:34.000Pete Meyer: we just need to give them… make sure that all the… every single new skier gets a lesson, and we get them ready to… you know, we get them ready to go. And a lot of the… a lot of this is the school groups, you know, the different groups, and we do offer lessons.00:27:34.000 --> 00:27:40.000Pete Meyer: to everybody, but sometimes they don't take them, and, you know, they slide, they slide through, and…00:27:40.000 --> 00:27:42.000Pete Meyer: And so.00:27:42.000 --> 00:27:50.000Pete Meyer: Pete and I were having a meeting on Green Mountain with our ski patrol director, Katie, and Dennis, one of our top instructors.00:27:50.000 --> 00:27:59.000Pete Meyer: And we think we have it all figured out. You know, we're just we just need to put them through a lesson and then and then problem solved.00:27:59.000 --> 00:28:00.000Pete Meyer: And…00:28:00.000 --> 00:28:12.000Pete Meyer: And Dennis, our ski instructor, was like, almost grabbed right onto my jacket. He's like, you don't understand. I can't get them ready for East Peak on this.00:28:12.000 --> 00:28:23.000Pete Meyer: we need something in between, and I… and… and so it's like, oh, oh, well, what do you need, Dennis? And he pointed up at the Green Mountain, and he said, we need that.00:28:12.000 --> 00:28:14.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, thank you.00:28:23.000 --> 00:28:41.000Pete Meyer: And I… I said, well, I think we have a plan for that on a cocktail napkin somewhere. We could go look at that again. So basically, what… what hap… what it was is we… we had always had this. We… we actually had lift lines staked out, and we hadn't been looking at doing this. We just thought it would be…00:28:41.000 --> 00:28:51.000Pete Meyer: the last thing that we do. We thought we would… we would continue to develop into the… into the backcountry area, and then do the Green Mountain expansion later.00:28:51.000 --> 00:29:06.000Pete Meyer: But what the… what the customer told us was, no, you need the Green Mountain expansion now. So that's the why and the how, that all of a sudden that thing kind of appeared out of nowhere, and why it was a two…00:29:06.000 --> 00:29:14.000Pete Meyer: why it's a two-year construction, because there's nothing over there. No services. Um, so we've had… we had to…00:29:14.000 --> 00:29:18.000Pete Meyer: You know, we had to do the final planning kind of fast.00:29:18.000 --> 00:29:30.000Pete Meyer: so we wanted to take 2 years to do it. Um, and so what are you getting? You're getting about 135 vertical feet, a brand new Doppelmayr triple.00:29:30.000 --> 00:29:38.000Pete Meyer: uh, that's just like East Peak and just like Vista, so it's gonna show this, you know, it's gonna take the new skier, um.00:29:38.000 --> 00:29:43.000Pete Meyer: Uh, and get them going on a lift that's similar to what we have throughout the area.00:29:43.000 --> 00:29:55.000Pete Meyer: it runs a little bit slower, has a bigger chair spacing, so it's going to be a little bit easier to load and unload. And when it's all built out, we should have 4 or 5.00:29:55.000 --> 00:30:00.000Pete Meyer: really, uh, easy trails, but with character. I mean, these aren't just…00:30:00.000 --> 00:30:14.000Pete Meyer: you know, a football field at 10 degrees that doesn't have any character. These are, you know, tree-lined, um, interesting slopes. Uh, the lift itself actually goes through the woods.00:30:14.000 --> 00:30:20.000Pete Meyer: and part of the way, and it's just a really neat development. So we think that.00:30:20.000 --> 00:30:32.000Pete Meyer: You know, even though it's not big vertical, it lifts about a thousand feet long. The terrain has really good character and we think it's going to be really popular.00:30:31.000 --> 00:30:47.000Stuart Winchester: I've always loved that about Cabaret. My favorite section of Cabaret for the folks who are watching is this sort of lower section where all the trails split off. And I've always found it a little confusing and fun. And I like confusing. I like it. I feel like it makes ski areas feel bigger than they are.00:30:47.000 --> 00:30:59.000Stuart Winchester: I want to zoom out a little bit and connect this expansion to some larger ski industry narratives, because the narrative that won't die is that the big corporate consolidation and big passes are killing the independents.00:30:59.000 --> 00:31:15.000Stuart Winchester: here I'm looking at Cabra Fay, family-owned for the last 46 years, and in 2016, you put in a brand new triple chair right here on North Peak. In 2022, you put in the brand new East Peak triple chair, and then you're putting in this brand new Green Mountain triple chair next year, at least that's the plan. I mean…00:31:15.000 --> 00:31:31.000Stuart Winchester: So you're affording three new chairlifts. Uh, you know, Monarch was willing to tell me out in Colorado. Yeah, we, and we paid cash for them. I don't know if you, if you have, you know, theories on debt. I know a lot of scare operators like Platykill in New York, like to stay out of debt, but, but how did Cab.00:31:31.000 --> 00:31:40.000Stuart Winchester: How is Calgary managing all these capital upgrades, and what does it say, do you think, about independents competing in 2026?00:31:41.000 --> 00:32:05.000Pete Meyer: Yeah, I don't have access to the checkbook, so you have to let me answer that one. No, that's a great question, Stu. And Tim kind of hit on this on his first podcast with you, but when Tim and I got moved back here in 2001, we had what I call like soul crushing debt. You know, it was just crippling, like every dollar we made had to go and service the debt.00:31:48.000 --> 00:31:49.000Stuart Winchester: Yep.00:32:05.000 --> 00:32:08.000Pete Meyer: Uh, we didn't have…00:32:08.000 --> 00:32:18.000Pete Meyer: really any money to even make capital improvements or to do much of anything. So our our main mission early on was try to try to get out of debt and get out of that hole.00:32:18.000 --> 00:32:35.000Pete Meyer: And, you know, our dad's done a nice job developing and building, and they got it out of bankruptcy. So when you get something out of bankruptcy, they've already cut every corner and done all kinds of deferred maintenance, pushed it all off. So we had quite a bit to deal with, and it was a long…00:32:35.000 --> 00:32:36.000Pete Meyer: Um…00:32:36.000 --> 00:32:46.000Pete Meyer: the long slugfest. Tim and I call those the dark days, you know, about 10 years of just really grinding. And then, finally, right, you know.00:32:46.000 --> 00:32:58.000Pete Meyer: about 2015, we were able to, uh, to get out of debt, and then… and then we started to, um, really put capital back into it, and that's why we decided on… on…00:32:58.000 --> 00:33:02.000Pete Meyer: Uh, putting in some new chairlifts, and yes, we have not gone back into debt since.00:33:02.000 --> 00:33:14.000Stuart Winchester: That's fantastic, and as you think to the future, okay, you have this North Peak quad chair, built in, I think, 92, and then you have the South Peak triple, which I think early 80s lift, it's a riblet, which…00:33:14.000 --> 00:33:29.000Stuart Winchester: As you know, is out of business now. I think this one's a SeaTac. So, I don't know if when, you know, you give a really good summary, Tim, of how East Peak changed traffic around the mountain. Uh, I, I've seen a, there's a ton of comments. I was just scrolling through, through Lyft blog for the folks watching.00:33:29.000 --> 00:33:41.000Stuart Winchester: to show Peter's excellent pictures of that lift. And the Cabaret page on there has a ton of comments, and I'm sure you've seen them. So, there's a lot of wondering, it seems, among skiers.00:33:41.000 --> 00:33:44.000Stuart Winchester: Why the quad is still here, because it…00:33:44.000 --> 00:33:57.000Stuart Winchester: they don't seem to think it runs a lot, and they think the triple does the job. Is there any thought of moving the quad, or do you really need 7 seats here? Or, just thinking long-term, what does the lift distribution look like across Cabaret Fay as you look at this map?00:33:57.000 --> 00:34:13.000Pete Meyer: Well, I think that we do need the quad on the busiest days, right? Otherwise, the reason we put the Vista Triple in there is the lines on the quad used to get so long. And it was like, that's the artery. I mean, you know, more people.00:34:01.000 --> 00:34:02.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:34:03.000 --> 00:34:04.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:34:14.000 --> 00:34:17.000Pete Meyer: go through the North Peak complex.00:34:17.000 --> 00:34:34.000Pete Meyer: every day than than the others, you know, because it's the middle. And so it's you go through there on your way to and from South Peak, and a lot of people just ski there because it's really really good inter advanced, intermediate and intermediate type terrain, and even some advanced beginner terrain. So it.00:34:19.000 --> 00:34:20.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:34:34.000 --> 00:34:43.000Pete Meyer: It services a wide range of abilities. So I think you want to have the two lifts.00:34:43.000 --> 00:34:45.000Pete Meyer: Um…00:34:45.000 --> 00:34:58.000Pete Meyer: I think ultimately, though, we want to have more places for people to go, more pods of skiing, so that actually you do run the quad less and less, but you have it there so that on the really busy days.00:34:58.000 --> 00:35:14.000Pete Meyer: you can turn it on and have, you know, a lift that doesn't have a line that somebody can sit on and ride up. But, um, I don't know if that answers the question. Yeah, right now, Stu, we run it 3 days a week, Friday, Saturdays, and Sundays, the busier days, and so…00:35:12.000 --> 00:35:13.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:35:14.000 --> 00:35:24.000Pete Meyer: Uh, we don't run it, uh, Monday through Thursday, just because it's a redundant lift, and we don't need the uphill capacity, um, is… is why people say it's not running some of the time.00:35:24.000 --> 00:35:41.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, I guess what I was getting at is, is there a world where you move the quad over here to serve some of this backcountry terrain and in the top of Green Mountain? As it's, as there's kind of open space on the trail map and, and knowing Gary Milken, how he designs maps, he sometimes leaves that space.00:35:41.000 --> 00:35:57.000Stuart Winchester: for expansion. So, so what's the thought around, you know, and you alluded to it earlier when you were thinking about a lift for backcountry, and Tim, you had mentioned even maybe reviving those halls. I don't know if that's still a possibility. I don't know if they're still sitting at the bottom of the mountain here, but what's the thought on.00:35:57.000 --> 00:36:02.000Stuart Winchester: potential expansion over in this area or lifts in this area long term.00:36:03.000 --> 00:36:17.000Pete Meyer: I think that would be the next frontier. So, somewhere in the bottom… because you've skied here, Stu, you know if you go through the backcountry, you run out of gas, and then you have… and then you have to walk, and that's why we call it backcountry, because it's a…00:36:09.000 --> 00:36:10.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:36:11.000 --> 00:36:12.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah. Okay.00:36:17.000 --> 00:36:27.000Pete Meyer: Because it's a tearful experience for many people coming out of there in the flats. And so somewhere down in that basin.00:36:21.000 --> 00:36:23.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:36:27.000 --> 00:36:40.000Pete Meyer: there could, there could be a lift someday that goes up to east of the top of East Peak. And Stu, what Tim had alluded to earlier in his first answer is that that was our original plan, so that would have been.00:36:32.000 --> 00:36:34.000Stuart Winchester: Mm-hmm.00:36:40.000 --> 00:36:58.000Pete Meyer: Uh, that was the plan to be our next chairlift, was to service that area. But due to the reaction and the response of our skiers, you know, we deviated and focused on… and moved to Green Mountain. Um, and, you know, one thing we found is that transition from the magic carpet, right there on the trail map, you can see, to the East Peak chair.00:36:55.000 --> 00:36:57.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:36:57.000 --> 00:36:59.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah. Okay.00:36:58.000 --> 00:37:15.000Pete Meyer: was just too much for most of our skiers. And not only were we not doing Cabaret any favors, but we're not doing the industry any favors. You know, it's just, it was asking them to do too much, too big of a, make too much of a jump. So by putting in this East Peak.00:37:01.000 --> 00:37:03.000Stuart Winchester: Right.00:37:15.000 --> 00:37:30.000Pete Meyer: chair, and then we'll have all green runs that'll all be, um, varying degrees of difficulty of a green run, but all of them will be in between the Magic Carpet slope and the Smiling Irishman slope, so it'll be a really nice.00:37:17.000 --> 00:37:18.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:37:30.000 --> 00:37:43.000Pete Meyer: transition, and quite frankly, we think a lot of school groups and a lot of skiers are going to come out, um, and never get off that chair, and stay on Green Mountain all day, and have a wildly successful day, and want to return, um, to not only Cabaret Fay, but to other ski.00:37:43.000 --> 00:37:48.000Stuart Winchester: I love it, and I can confidently say, because I ski all over, uh, that Cabaret is now…00:37:48.000 --> 00:38:04.000Stuart Winchester: And, and especially once you put in this new lift, it's one of the most modern up to date ski areas in the entire region. And, and that wasn't always true. When I first skied at Cabaret in the nineties, it was a lot of haul double chairs. I mean, these, these guys were over here, the, the quad and the, and the triple, but.00:38:04.000 --> 00:38:11.000Stuart Winchester: that, that throwback feel to it. And I know, Tim, when you were on last time, uh, you, you talked, you lamented a little bit.00:38:11.000 --> 00:38:23.000Stuart Winchester: getting rid of the last rope toe for the carpet, and just sort of the emotion of it, even though you knew it was logically the right thing. What if you could bring back a little throwback by putting a little rope toe right here to bring people out of the backcountry?00:38:24.000 --> 00:38:27.000Pete Meyer: Well, you know, it's funny, I…00:38:27.000 --> 00:38:36.000Pete Meyer: I was kind of slow to warm up to getting rid of that rope toe. I guess, you know, I always had that old school…00:38:36.000 --> 00:38:52.000Pete Meyer: you know, I learned on a rope toe, my kids learned on a rope toe, your kids are going to learn on a rope toe, which is just backwards thinking, right, for a for a ski area manager to have that kind of thought process. I'm not sure. I know where you're going. I mean, no one knows what the future holds.00:38:40.000 --> 00:38:41.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:38:42.000 --> 00:38:43.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:38:52.000 --> 00:39:09.000Pete Meyer: I do see ski areas having a lot of success with train parks with fast tows that service them. Again, another cocktail napkin plan that we have that we're not going to get into in this interview is something like that on our property down the road.00:38:58.000 --> 00:38:59.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah. Okay.00:39:09.000 --> 00:39:16.000Pete Meyer: Um, so there, you know, I could see that kind of a thing, but, um…00:39:16.000 --> 00:39:26.000Pete Meyer: And… but I think… I don't know if we would ever want to put a surface tow out of the backcountry area unless, for some reason, we weren't going to lift serve it.00:39:25.000 --> 00:39:27.000Stuart Winchester: Got it.00:39:26.000 --> 00:39:31.000Pete Meyer: But, you know, I guess, you know, no one knows for sure.00:39:30.000 --> 00:39:31.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, thank you.00:39:31.000 --> 00:39:37.000Pete Meyer: Um, but I wanna… I wanna back up on the Green Mountain expansion a little bit, if… if you'll let me.00:39:34.000 --> 00:39:36.000Stuart Winchester: Sure.00:39:36.000 --> 00:39:38.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, do it. Let's do it.00:39:37.000 --> 00:39:44.000Pete Meyer: When we were at the Midwest, uh, show this year, there was a, there was a fireside chat, and we were talking about.00:39:44.000 --> 00:39:54.000Pete Meyer: We're talking about, you know, turning first-time skiers into second-time skiers, and making the experience the best it can be.00:39:54.000 --> 00:40:06.000Pete Meyer: And so that we have… we have success in that arena. And the Green Mountain… the Green Mountain is… is really a missing piece, because you're looking at our trail map, and you see how the parking lot is laid out.00:40:06.000 --> 00:40:07.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:40:06.000 --> 00:40:12.000Pete Meyer: Um, so if you're, you know, trying to make it as easy as possible for somebody who's never skied before.00:40:12.000 --> 00:40:17.000Pete Meyer: You can park on pavement right in front of our ticket office.00:40:17.000 --> 00:40:18.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:40:17.000 --> 00:40:24.000Pete Meyer: Get out of your car, walk a short distance on heated sidewalks to the ticket office.00:40:22.000 --> 00:40:23.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:40:24.000 --> 00:40:36.000Pete Meyer: Get… pay for everything you need. Pay for your skis, pay for your ticket, pay for your rentals, pay for your lesson, and then walk up to the… walk up to the, um…00:40:36.000 --> 00:40:37.000Pete Meyer: Rental.00:40:37.000 --> 00:40:38.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:40:37.000 --> 00:40:52.000Pete Meyer: In your, in your regular boots, so it's easy walking, go inside, take your stuff off, take your boots off, get your boots, get your skis and come and then, and then secure your lesson at the end and then walk out the door.00:40:52.000 --> 00:41:09.000Pete Meyer: And you're 30, you know, you're 30 feet from where the ski school meets and you're right at the bottom of the conveyor. So it's really easy to start out and we can get you going on the conveyor. We can virtually get anybody that can stand up on skis or snowboard up to the top.00:41:08.000 --> 00:41:10.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:41:09.000 --> 00:41:13.000Pete Meyer: And then put, you know, all their energy into getting them down the hill.00:41:13.000 --> 00:41:28.000Pete Meyer: And then once you outgrow that, you just get off the conveyor and you ski down a little slope right onto the East Peak lift. Or, I'm sorry, onto the Green Mountain lift. So now you're right there, and you have this real easy area.00:41:22.000 --> 00:41:24.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:41:28.000 --> 00:41:37.000Pete Meyer: to learn to ski, and then when you, when you're ready, you just ski down, just ski down the hill to the east peak lift. So the, the flow.00:41:37.000 --> 00:41:42.000Pete Meyer: for that never ever in the in the ah, the the.00:41:42.000 --> 00:41:51.000Pete Meyer: possibility of getting them to come a second and third and fourth time is really real, and I think… I think we're in, like, a new stratosphere for getting…00:41:51.000 --> 00:41:59.000Pete Meyer: you know, getting people, uh, skiing. And then as it flows, you know, the next step, the next place to ski is East Peak.00:41:59.000 --> 00:42:10.000Pete Meyer: And then as you get a little more daring, you work your way into the North Peak complex, and then eventually over to South Peak. So the flow is really natural, and I think it's going to work out extremely well.00:42:08.000 --> 00:42:21.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, it's like a mini, uh, Copper Mountain. I know you're a Winter Park guy, but it, you know, the, the, the viability… You know what, the exciting thing, I think, for skiers who are not novices, who know Cabaret Faye well.00:42:10.000 --> 00:42:12.000Pete Meyer: Yeah.00:42:21.000 --> 00:42:38.000Stuart Winchester: starts to creep back into old Caber Fay. And, and when we've talked a while ago, Tim, I, I didn't have a good perspective, but some new maps have popped up on ski map.org, which is my go to for old trail maps. And this one I think shows the old terrain really well. So here's the road looping around, here's the parking lot.00:42:38.000 --> 00:42:47.000Stuart Winchester: And then here's all the terrain. And so I… Google Earth also makes it really easy. So as I go here…00:42:47.000 --> 00:43:02.000Stuart Winchester: I am, for those who are watching, I am zooming in on… so this is what you were talking about, you kind of just park on pavement, you get out here, for those watching on YouTube or StormSkiing.com, the carpet's right around here, and then this will be green, is that right?00:43:01.000 --> 00:43:07.000Pete Meyer: No, if you go, if you, if you go back to that old, old trail map, like you can see right to there, there's a.00:43:04.000 --> 00:43:06.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:43:07.000 --> 00:43:14.000Pete Meyer: A rope toe — there's two rope toes right there, right up that line, top of that peak. There was two rope toes.00:43:10.000 --> 00:43:12.000Stuart Winchester: Right there? Okay.00:43:12.000 --> 00:43:13.000Stuart Winchester: Okay.00:43:14.000 --> 00:43:19.000Pete Meyer: Uh, heading up that way, and another rope tow coming out at 90 degrees from… from the top.00:43:17.000 --> 00:43:19.000Stuart Winchester: Okay.00:43:19.000 --> 00:43:20.000Stuart Winchester: Mm-hmm.00:43:19.000 --> 00:43:37.000Pete Meyer: And that shack still is up there to this day. It's a two-story tow shack where we had three different rope tows coming in. So it's going to come right up to the top of that. And that area was always called practice area. That was the old name of it. So if you look at old trail maps, you'll see that word practice area.00:43:23.000 --> 00:43:24.000Stuart Winchester: That's cool.00:43:25.000 --> 00:43:26.000Stuart Winchester: Mm-hmm.00:43:37.000 --> 00:43:41.000Pete Meyer: It's a great name for a learn to ski area.00:43:40.000 --> 00:43:54.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, here's another map, the 1971 map has it as practice area. Okay, so I was assuming that you were digging that up, but I guess you're taking earth from there for the other… is that where you took it for East Peak? Is that what this big sandpit is?00:43:53.000 --> 00:44:07.000Pete Meyer: Oh, that's more of the West Ridge area out into that area. So we're actually off to the left. It's all still green. Up into there, yeah, so it'll be a nice natural hilltop with big mature trees, tree line runs. It's gonna be really, it's gonna be really nice.00:43:55.000 --> 00:43:57.000Stuart Winchester: Okay.00:43:59.000 --> 00:44:00.000Stuart Winchester: Okay.00:44:01.000 --> 00:44:02.000Stuart Winchester: Okay.00:44:07.000 --> 00:44:18.000Stuart Winchester: So as you… so you can see, for those watching, this is old cab buffet. These are… this is all abandoned, right? I… do you still own this? I mean, it… because once you put the lift up here.00:44:18.000 --> 00:44:37.000Stuart Winchester: It seems like it could potentially open some of this backside terrain. I know people would love that. It also makes you very big. I don't know if that's on your radar as Cabaret continues to grow and succeed, but what are the thoughts on this really cool abandoned terrain that you have back here? And Tim, I know we talked about this a few years ago, but I also know that thoughts evolve over time.00:44:38.000 --> 00:44:44.000Pete Meyer: So we do still own all of that. So that area you're looking at, we do own it.00:44:40.000 --> 00:44:41.000Stuart Winchester: Okay.00:44:45.000 --> 00:44:55.000Pete Meyer: I think that we don't have any plans to go back into that area at this time, but you never know.00:44:50.000 --> 00:44:52.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:44:53.000 --> 00:44:54.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:44:55.000 --> 00:45:04.000Pete Meyer: Going back, though, a little bit, we don't want to get too far into the weeds. Unless you want to get into the weeds, we can go. Um, I brought my machete, so we can…00:45:03.000 --> 00:45:06.000Stuart Winchester: I live in the weeds, man, that's, uh, my…00:45:04.000 --> 00:45:22.000Pete Meyer: we can do what we need to do. But when… way back, going way back to 1982, 83, when South Peak opened, you know, South Peak was redeveloped, all that… a lot of that terrain was still running back then. We were riding T-bars and rope tows on the North Ridge, and West Ridge was alive, and.00:45:07.000 --> 00:45:09.000Stuart Winchester: Yes.00:45:12.000 --> 00:45:13.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:45:16.000 --> 00:45:18.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:45:20.000 --> 00:45:21.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:45:22.000 --> 00:45:31.000Pete Meyer: The practice area tow was still running. So I remember that stuff, you know, as a kid, all happening. And when South Peak was built.00:45:31.000 --> 00:45:43.000Pete Meyer: it was so much bigger than all that, you know, vertical-wise. It was, like, twice, you know, twice the vertical, um, real snowmaking, real grooming.00:45:36.000 --> 00:45:37.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:45:43.000 --> 00:45:56.000Pete Meyer: people just abandoned the back… the back hills. They just went… they left that. They left that area, and they went to Salt Peak. And that's really why it all closed, is people just stopped going back there. It just wasn't as good. So…00:45:45.000 --> 00:45:46.000Stuart Winchester: Or did they?00:45:56.000 --> 00:46:00.000Pete Meyer: I often think maybe it just is better to be a memory.00:46:00.000 --> 00:46:05.000Pete Meyer: But but who knows? You know, down the road it could be what it could be.00:46:04.000 --> 00:46:16.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, I think between opening the backcountry and that, uh, the Green Mountain expansion, I think you excited some folks. Alright, that, that's, uh, that's, that's all really cool. I appreciate you taking me inside that. Let's talk passes now, and I'm.00:46:16.000 --> 00:46:19.000Stuart Winchester: the screen share here. So, uh…00:46:19.000 --> 00:46:36.000Stuart Winchester: Cabrefe joined IndyPass as an inaugural member in 2019, and has been on that pass every season since, for the 2026-27 season. Cabrefe has, and I'm just laying this out for the listeners, uh, Cabrefe has departed the IndyPass and has joined.00:46:36.000 --> 00:46:51.000Stuart Winchester: The full icon pass, uh, on their two day tier, which is only on the full icon pass, not on the icon base, there's no access, and there's also holiday blackout, so the only mountains that are holiday blacked out on the full icon are the, the two day mountains, of which.00:46:51.000 --> 00:46:55.000Stuart Winchester: Cabaret is now one. So, so talk us through.00:46:55.000 --> 00:47:03.000Stuart Winchester: your experience with IndiePass and the decision, ultimately, to leave that partnership and to join up with ICON.00:47:04.000 --> 00:47:09.000Pete Meyer: Yeah, sure, Stu, we have a feeling this might be a topic of conversation today, so…00:47:07.000 --> 00:47:08.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:47:09.000 --> 00:47:11.000Pete Meyer: So we.00:47:10.000 --> 00:47:11.000Stuart Winchester: Okay.00:47:11.000 --> 00:47:22.000Pete Meyer: There's a lot of layers to this answer, and this decision was not made quickly or lightly, and a lot of analysis and discussion went into it.00:47:22.000 --> 00:47:37.000Pete Meyer: To be quite honest, we were… we've been frustrated with the IndyPass a little bit for a couple years, and we kind of… we kind of laid out a bunch of, um, the pros and cons list, and the cons list was a lot longer than the pros, and so we… we ultimately kind of came to this decision to exit, and um…00:47:37.000 --> 00:47:53.000Pete Meyer: We're going to talk about — I'll talk about a couple of those reasons now. But before I do, I think it's important to provide some history and some context with Cadbury and IndyPass. So as you mentioned, Indy launched in 2019. We were an early adopter. We had some great conversations with Doug Fish that summer.00:47:39.000 --> 00:47:41.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:47:45.000 --> 00:47:46.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:47:53.000 --> 00:48:10.000Pete Meyer: Doug worked really hard to get this pass going. We really enjoyed our conversations. He kind of could answer the questions that nobody could answer. He knew things that nobody else knew. And I still remember to this day, I'm like, Doug, how do you know all this? And he's like in his raspy voice.00:48:10.000 --> 00:48:21.000Pete Meyer: I just know, you know, so it's like, it was kind of cool. So we had confidence that, uh, that he could implement this pass and make it successful, um, because he knew what it took. So we…00:48:19.000 --> 00:48:26.000Stuart Winchester: I'm sorry to interrupt. I may have been the first ever Cabaret Redemption on the Indie Pass since November 2019.00:48:22.000 --> 00:48:25.000Pete Meyer: You know what? That's this.00:48:25.000 --> 00:48:30.000Pete Meyer: It wasn't, it was December 5th, 2019.00:48:29.000 --> 00:48:31.000Stuart Winchester: Okay. It…00:48:30.000 --> 00:48:39.000Pete Meyer: So, I was gonna get into that in a little bit, but now I'll hit on that. So then, um, in digging through all these redemptions, which I was gonna get into.00:48:31.000 --> 00:48:34.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, yeah, okay, go ahead.00:48:37.000 --> 00:48:40.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah. Sorry, I spoiled it.00:48:39.000 --> 00:48:56.000Pete Meyer: And pouring this data, I was like, Stuart Winchester, you were redemption number one for us. I don't know if you knew that. And I remember it to this day because I never heard your name. I never heard of your podcast. I don't even know if you had it going then.00:48:41.000 --> 00:48:42.000Stuart Winchester: Yep.00:48:47.000 --> 00:48:49.000Stuart Winchester: Wow, that's cool.00:48:52.000 --> 00:48:53.000Stuart Winchester: Yah.00:48:55.000 --> 00:48:59.000Stuart Winchester: It launched, uh, that October, so it was brand new. Mm-hmm.00:48:57.000 --> 00:48:59.000Pete Meyer: That October? Okay.00:48:59.000 --> 00:49:14.000Pete Meyer: So the… our… my office is right behind the ticket window, and the ticket teller… our office… the ticket manager wasn't in there, so the ticket teller came and got me when he came to the window. I have this, uh, IndiePass, I don't know what to do with it. So I was showing her how to…00:49:03.000 --> 00:49:04.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:49:08.000 --> 00:49:09.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:49:14.000 --> 00:49:18.000Pete Meyer: redeem it in in Brooklyn.00:49:18.000 --> 00:49:43.000Pete Meyer: New York pops up. Oh, I got to talk to this guy. I go, you mean that you drove all the way here just to ski at Cabra Faith in Brooklyn, New York? And you're like, yeah, I did. And I thought, I'm like, this pass is awesome, right? It's great, guys. But then we talked a little bit more and you said you had family in the area and we're in the area for a while. So I was really high for a long time on the UniPass because of that. But I didn't know it was you until I was digging through the data. I'm like, oh, that's.00:49:19.000 --> 00:49:20.000Stuart Winchester: Right.00:49:34.000 --> 00:49:36.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:49:36.000 --> 00:49:37.000Stuart Winchester: Mm-hmm.00:49:39.000 --> 00:49:40.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, so.00:49:42.000 --> 00:49:44.000Stuart Winchester: Oh, that's cool.00:49:43.000 --> 00:49:58.000Pete Meyer: That's that's so. So anyways, anyways, we'll where was I? So okay, so then we were the first as part of that. Then we were the 1st ski resort in the Lower Peninsula to to commit to the to Indy Pass, and I'm not sure about.00:49:44.000 --> 00:49:46.000Stuart Winchester: Love that.00:49:59.000 --> 00:50:01.000Pete Meyer: Um, the UP, uh.00:50:01.000 --> 00:50:16.000Pete Meyer: But the only one in the Lower Peninsula. And so we knew at that time, well, this isn't going to do anything unless we get a couple more ski resorts to join. So we had reached out to a few. And Pete Bigford was interested. And he was the CEO and president of Shanty Creek at the time.00:50:16.000 --> 00:50:30.000Pete Meyer: And Pete had said, yeah, we'll do it, but we need a couple of downstate resorts to join as well. So then we reached out to Jamie at Swiss Valley, she said yes, and Doug at Cannonsburg, and he said yes. So that first year, we had four.00:50:30.000 --> 00:50:33.000Pete Meyer: Um, resorts on the Indy Pass. And…00:50:33.000 --> 00:50:45.000Pete Meyer: During that time he that 1st year he charged resorts a thousand dollars to get in. So we we had conversations. We're like, well, let's let's try it. The worst we can do is be out a thousand dollars right? So we had these.00:50:45.000 --> 00:51:00.000Pete Meyer: 4 ski areas in, and we did… I think we did 44 redemptions that first year. It was… it was virtually nothing. I don't even think it covered the… the $1,000. It might have come… but… but we liked the concept, it was neat, and the word got out, and then… and then Crystal Mountain joined, um, the next year.00:50:52.000 --> 00:50:53.000Stuart Winchester: Oh, wow. Okay.00:51:00.000 --> 00:51:06.000Pete Meyer: Uh, and then, so we kind of hit a critical mass there, and then it was a really good pass, um.00:51:06.000 --> 00:51:16.000Pete Meyer: for a long time, for a while, for several years. And one thing that Doug had said, and during that first year, I think in 2019, they had about 50.00:51:16.000 --> 00:51:32.000Pete Meyer: ski resorts on the pass, if I remember. And he said, I really hope to get it to 80 to maybe 100 passes. Um, and you as an early adopter, um, Cabaret will have say who gets in, in, in your particular region, because I really want to keep it, do just a couple ski resorts per region.00:51:32.000 --> 00:51:37.000Pete Meyer: not to not to oversaturate the market. Like, yeah, great. This sounds sounds really good.00:51:37.000 --> 00:51:40.000Pete Meyer: So then as we go on, um…00:51:40.000 --> 00:51:50.000Pete Meyer: he sells the pass to, uh, Entebani and Eric. Um, and great for Doug, we're happy for Doug, he worked really hard to make that pass, good for him for selling it. Um, can't fault him.00:51:50.000 --> 00:52:05.000Pete Meyer: Um, and then we like to say, like, Eric, Eric took the pass and put it on steroids. You know, it's just, he, he's, he's done a wonderful job with it. You know, he's obviously very, very intelligent, very successful, running three different businesses, um, um, and doing well at all of them.00:51:56.000 --> 00:51:57.000Stuart Winchester: Okay.00:52:05.000 --> 00:52:09.000Pete Meyer: But he's blown it up. He just had a different mission.00:52:09.000 --> 00:52:13.000Pete Meyer: than than Doug had. Right? So what did that evolve into?00:52:12.000 --> 00:52:14.000Stuart Winchester: Blowing it up, you mean making bigger, right?00:52:14.000 --> 00:52:22.000Pete Meyer: Yeah, making it bigger. Like, Doug was gonna keep it small and couple to each region, and we were gonna have an input on, you know.00:52:14.000 --> 00:52:15.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:52:16.000 --> 00:52:17.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:52:23.000 --> 00:52:35.000Pete Meyer: to try to prevent it from being oversaturated. So, I know the Midwest has a lot of ski areas on the pass, but, like, our world is Michigan and our, more specifically, northern Michigan.00:52:26.000 --> 00:52:27.000Stuart Winchester: Yep.00:52:35.000 --> 00:52:36.000Stuart Winchester: Okay.00:52:35.000 --> 00:52:38.000Pete Meyer: So it got down to where we had 6.00:52:38.000 --> 00:52:56.000Pete Meyer: um, ski resorts within a 60-mile radius in northern Michigan, right? So if you drop a pin, you can drive within, within 60 miles, you can get to six resorts on it. Um, that density just became too much for us, because that's 12 visits, right? If a skier buys an Andy Pass, they can ski 12 times, two at each place. It's great for them, they get a lot of.00:52:42.000 --> 00:52:43.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:52:57.000 --> 00:53:12.000Pete Meyer: Um, the problem is, is what we're seeing, and we're watching the numbers every year, um, and it was easy to do because there's not a ton of redemptions, but how many of those people were former Passovers, right? And that percentage kept rising every year.00:53:11.000 --> 00:53:12.000Stuart Winchester: Mmm.00:53:12.000 --> 00:53:25.000Pete Meyer: So what it became and evolved into is just a direct competitor of our own season pass product. And that's ultimately reason number one why we — it just oversaturated.00:53:23.000 --> 00:53:25.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah. Okay.00:53:25.000 --> 00:53:26.000Pete Meyer: And.00:53:25.000 --> 00:53:27.000Stuart Winchester: So, go ahead.00:53:26.000 --> 00:53:28.000Pete Meyer: And, you know, so…00:53:28.000 --> 00:53:34.000Pete Meyer: I and I think the the Indy Pass really for a lot of ski resorts.00:53:34.000 --> 00:53:51.000Pete Meyer: doesn't move the needle a ton, um, financially. Uh, for… for us, it really didn't, and I felt like we were… did a reasonable number of redemptions, so we could… we could take it… take it or leave it. It doesn't have a big impact. It affects the customer more. Like, that decision was hard, the person who bought it in the past.00:53:51.000 --> 00:53:56.000Pete Meyer: Um, but I think Eric's a stand-up guy. He'll let anybody who…00:53:56.000 --> 00:54:07.000Pete Meyer: who bought an E-Pass, and their favorite resort is not on that, they'll give a refund to anybody who wants one. So the Cabaret listeners know that, and I think that's nice of him to do. Also, for those.00:54:01.000 --> 00:54:02.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, thank you.00:54:07.000 --> 00:54:19.000Pete Meyer: um, Cabaret, uh, listeners who bought an Indy add-on. He'll honor that for this year, from what I understand. So, it's a couple of really good things that he's doing there, so we're thankful, thankful for that. But, um.00:54:19.000 --> 00:54:28.000Pete Meyer: through conversations, and we just decided it was time to get out. So that's reason number one. I got a couple more reasons if you've got time.00:54:25.000 --> 00:54:26.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, thank you.00:54:26.000 --> 00:54:41.000Stuart Winchester: Well, let's linger on that for a second. I mean, for me, it just comes down to good old-fashioned free market competition, right? Where there's another pass available that is looking for smaller mountains like Caber Fay. It also signed mountains like Buck Hill and.00:54:41.000 --> 00:54:58.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, and uh… Wild Mountain over in Minnesota, just small areas near populations that are popular. I saw you catching some heat in comments to me, you know, on my platforms and social media, because you go from the Indy Pass, which maxed out at $419.00:54:58.000 --> 00:55:16.000Stuart Winchester: to the full Icon, which is $1,449 right now, and I know you can upgrade and buy a discounted Icon session pass, but I don't want to overstate it. What's the reaction been like from your pass holders, and how have you handled that?00:55:16.000 --> 00:55:24.000Stuart Winchester: The fact that you're no longer available on the cheap discounted pass, multi-mountain pass, but you are available on the very expensive one.00:55:24.000 --> 00:55:27.000Pete Meyer: Great question, great question, because we've been getting…00:55:27.000 --> 00:55:42.000Pete Meyer: Uh, we've been getting both, uh, good and, and bad feedback from it. So, what, what it comes down to is the, is the decision to, to, uh, leave Indy and, and join OCCON. Those, those decisions were, were mutually exclusive. Like, like, we had made the decision to.00:55:42.000 --> 00:55:43.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:55:42.000 --> 00:55:52.000Pete Meyer: to leave Indy, um, before we even started to Icon. And we had a lot of conversations of, hey, let's just… let's just be… let's just be independent and not on any… any, uh…00:55:52.000 --> 00:56:08.000Pete Meyer: Multi resort pass, you know, there's a lot of really successful and really nice ski resorts that have that model, like Perfect North Slopes, Cascade in Wisconsin. We always go out and ski somewhere every spring and I went out to the Tahoe area this year and skied at Mount Rose, you know, that place is.00:55:58.000 --> 00:55:59.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah. Okay.00:56:01.000 --> 00:56:03.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:56:08.000 --> 00:56:09.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:56:08.000 --> 00:56:18.000Pete Meyer: that place is phenomenal. They're not on any, any, um, any pants. And, um, it was neat to ski there, and just see they had a similar vibe and feel that, um, Cabaret had, right?00:56:10.000 --> 00:56:11.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah. Okay.00:56:11.000 --> 00:56:13.000Stuart Winchester: Right. That's right.00:56:17.000 --> 00:56:18.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:56:18.000 --> 00:56:23.000Pete Meyer: So quite a bit more, quite a bit more. Yeah, yeah.00:56:18.000 --> 00:56:21.000Stuart Winchester: Just a little more elevation.00:56:21.000 --> 00:56:24.000Stuart Winchester: They're at, like, 9,000 feet.00:56:23.000 --> 00:56:27.000Pete Meyer: Absolutely, but it was great terrain. So.00:56:24.000 --> 00:56:25.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:56:25.000 --> 00:56:26.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:56:27.000 --> 00:56:29.000Pete Meyer: After we left the Indy Pass.00:56:29.000 --> 00:56:31.000Pete Meyer: Then we, um…00:56:31.000 --> 00:56:46.000Pete Meyer: Started talking to the folks at ICON, and I want to give a shout out to Aaron Keene and Caitlin Windauer, those girls are really sharp and would answer all the questions. It kind of reminded me of the early DuckFish days where they were all knowing and knew a lot of answers to everything.00:56:46.000 --> 00:56:53.000Pete Meyer: We talked to them for a long time. We weren't in any rush to make a decision to go down this road.00:56:52.000 --> 00:56:54.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:56:53.000 --> 00:56:57.000Pete Meyer: And you know what ultimately decided for us is.00:56:57.000 --> 00:57:10.000Pete Meyer: We want to do what's best for our core customer, and our core customer is our season pass holder, okay? And this IndyPass or this IconPass brought on this reciprocal benefit of a three-day.00:57:10.000 --> 00:57:27.000Pete Meyer: 3 day session pass you can get for 50% off. Right? And that adds a lot of value. To our pass holders. And so we've been hit as much as the negativity that you've seen online for leaving any pass, we've been getting messages from our pass holders saying, hey, thank you for this benefit. This is great.00:57:12.000 --> 00:57:13.000Stuart Winchester: It's.00:57:13.000 --> 00:57:15.000Stuart Winchester: Oh, three day. Yeah. Okay.00:57:18.000 --> 00:57:19.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:57:27.000 --> 00:57:43.000Pete Meyer: I'm gonna use it. I'm gonna take a trip. And then we've known we've gone out west together and 3 days of skiing is plenty. Like we like to ski bell to bell and it's you're by that 3rd day you're waking up and you're like you can't even move your legs for you know we're so so we think it's a nice.00:57:29.000 --> 00:57:31.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:57:37.000 --> 00:57:38.000Stuart Winchester: Okay, yeah.00:57:40.000 --> 00:57:41.000Stuart Winchester: Okay.00:57:43.000 --> 00:57:55.000Pete Meyer: Uh, you can ski locally here, you can head up in, um, hit up, hit up both Boyne Mountain and Boyne Highlands, or drive over to, uh, Blue Mountain, Ontario, so you don't have to get in a plane. So it's.00:57:55.000 --> 00:58:11.000Pete Meyer: Uh, of our pass holders. Cause we know, we know, Stuart, that nobody's going to buy a full icon pass for two days at Cabaret. We, we know that that wasn't even the, like Pete said, we're, we do like our independence and, and.00:57:57.000 --> 00:57:59.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, yeah, yeah.00:58:03.000 --> 00:58:04.000Stuart Winchester: Right.00:58:04.000 --> 00:58:06.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:58:11.000 --> 00:58:25.000Pete Meyer: And we like to create these partnerships that are good for our core customers. The people that commit to us, we're going to give you the best we can. And so, you know, that that three day session pass is just it's it's.00:58:25.000 --> 00:58:29.000Pete Meyer: It's a it's a great benefit for our core customers.00:58:29.000 --> 00:58:47.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, it's like you take a trip to Steamboat, or Palisades Tahoe, or a lot of the mountains that are on that. So, you know, it all makes sense, and I like the, you know, Boyne, Cabaret, sort of on one team, and then you have Nubs, and Crystal, and Treetops, and Shani on the other. I think that's good for skiers, it's good for.00:58:47.000 --> 00:59:03.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, two more, two more things I wanna talk about and then we'll get out of here. Uh, I, I really wanna talk about your season pass. $299 unlimited. I think it was even a little cheaper for early birds, but that's what it is right now. Uh, 219 for weekday, 129 for Sunday. That, that's an awesome, awesome deal.00:59:03.000 --> 00:59:18.000Stuart Winchester: by any measure. I noticed you no longer have the Saturday-Sunday pass, and I think it's been a couple years, and it also… Saturday lift tickets are more than Sunday, so it seems as though, from my point of view, you're really trying to manage the experience on Saturday. So, talk about your season pass suite.00:59:18.000 --> 00:59:27.000Stuart Winchester: And how that relates to your mountain management as far as making sure when people show up, they have a good experience.00:59:27.000 --> 00:59:42.000Pete Meyer: No, you're exactly right. You hit the nail on the head right there. We're trying to preserve the Saturday experience. That's the day everybody wants to ski. So if you're going to be on a pass and ski at Calgary on a pass, you got to have the seven-day week pass.00:59:42.000 --> 01:00:00.000Pete Meyer: And we wanted to protect that experience and not get overcrowded, not get overrun, and that's one of the main reasons that we got rid of the weekend pass. The weekend pass, we roll out, it was a $99 weekend pass in 2007 when we launched that, and that thing went all the way till.01:00:01.000 --> 01:00:14.000Pete Meyer: I think 2000 or 2001, we had that, so we had that for a long time, and that brought a lot of skiers here and exposed us as we continued to get better, and they saw the resort that we had, and all the work that Tim was doing on the hill.01:00:14.000 --> 01:00:21.000Pete Meyer: And then that just evolved into trying to manage the volume levels on Saturdays.01:00:21.000 --> 01:00:38.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, it's a, it's, it's a great deal. And, uh, you know, even, even as it's risen past 99, I mean, you know, 299, there's, there's a lot of resorts in the West that are charging more than that for a day this year. Beaver Creek's topping out at 392. So I love it. Okay. The last thing I want to.01:00:38.000 --> 01:00:48.000Stuart Winchester: This one's a little personal, and I know I talked to you about this, uh, it was about 4 years ago, Tim or Pete, I forget, it was maybe both of you I was talking to. So I want to talk about this Trail Starkey.01:00:48.000 --> 01:01:03.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, I knew Dick Starkey. I'm friends with his daughter Crystal from way back. We went to school together. Uh, and, and I met him and I, I was always just remember being very impressed by him. He had a really good presence. Uh, he was, he was very fit and active and, and did a lot of things.01:01:03.000 --> 01:01:09.000Stuart Winchester: Um, I didn't know him super well, but I met him a few times, and… and I… I just want to talk about, you know, he passed.01:01:09.000 --> 01:01:25.000Stuart Winchester: Four or five years ago now, and I noticed this trail and, and I said, oh, is that, is that named after Dick? And, and you said it was. So, uh, can, can you talk about the Starkey trail? Talk about Dick Starkey and, and, uh, his legacy at Cabre Fay and, and, and why it was fitting to name a.01:01:27.000 --> 01:01:34.000Pete Meyer: Yeah, Dick was a volunteer patroller at SP, patroller at Caber Fay for…01:01:34.000 --> 01:01:42.000Pete Meyer: I think… I… I think as long as… as my dad was around, you know, uh, Dick was there, and so, you know.01:01:39.000 --> 01:01:40.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.01:01:42.000 --> 01:01:52.000Pete Meyer: 40… however many years, 40… 40-some years, he was a patroller at Cabaret, and uh… you know, just had a big presence, you know, you knew him.01:01:52.000 --> 01:01:53.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.01:01:52.000 --> 01:02:01.000Pete Meyer: Played football at Ferris. Great stories about that. He was a captain and so he's tough.01:01:54.000 --> 01:01:55.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah. Okay.01:02:01.000 --> 01:02:02.000Pete Meyer: And.01:02:02.000 --> 01:02:17.000Pete Meyer: just a… just a great guy, great patroller, great mentor, um, a ton… lots and lots of stories about Dick Starkey for another day, but, uh, just somebody that we wanted to honor, and, um, so, you know, we made that change.01:02:17.000 --> 01:02:21.000Stuart Winchester: And why this trail? Why this, uh, why did you choose this one?01:02:24.000 --> 01:02:35.000Pete Meyer: you know, that… I don't… I don't know why we picked that one. We just… we… we… I think we… the, um… the previous name was an old, you know, an older name that… that… that honored a…01:02:35.000 --> 01:02:47.000Pete Meyer: an older ski instructor, but I think we thought, you know, maybe… maybe it was time for a change there. Some… maybe just something a little more relevant to… someone more relevant to…01:02:41.000 --> 01:02:43.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.01:02:47.000 --> 01:02:52.000Pete Meyer: You know, this this last, you know, 40 years of caprophage tradition.01:02:51.000 --> 01:02:57.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah. And, and I believe, I believe Crystal still, uh, volunteer patrols there as well, right? Yeah.01:02:56.000 --> 01:02:59.000Pete Meyer: Yes. Yes, she is.01:02:57.000 --> 01:03:03.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, that's great. I haven't talked to her in a minute, but hi, Crystal. Hope you're doing great. Pete.01:03:03.000 --> 01:03:05.000Pete Meyer: No, no, not about the trail.01:03:04.000 --> 01:03:22.000Stuart Winchester: Okay, okay, all right. Well, hey, listen, guys, I really appreciate catching up with you. There's so much always going on at Cabaret, and we were long overdue, so let's do it again soon, and I gotta get up there and ski that East Peak lift, because I haven't been in a minute, so I really appreciate that, and I'll talk to you guys soon, and thanks so much.01:03:22.000 --> 01:03:25.000Pete Meyer: Thanks, Stuart. Thanks a lot, Stu. Appreciate it.01:03:24.000 --> 01:03:26.000Stuart Winchester: All right, talk soon.01:03:26.000 --> 01:03:28.000Stuart Winchester: All right, let me just…01:03:30.000 --> 01:03:43.000Stuart Winchester: Okay, that was Tim and Pete Meyer of Cabaret. I love Cabaret. It was my pseudo home mountain when I lived in Michigan. It was just 90 minutes down the road, so I never had a season pass there.01:03:43.000 --> 01:03:51.000Stuart Winchester: but I would go there a lot. I mean, and this was, you know, lift tickets were $20 or something back then, so it didn't really matter, and they had a lot of specials. So, I want to…01:03:51.000 --> 01:03:57.000Stuart Winchester: wrap up today, I want to talk about lift tickets a little bit, because there's some lift ticket deals going on.01:03:57.000 --> 01:03:59.000Stuart Winchester: And…01:03:59.000 --> 01:04:14.000Stuart Winchester: I'll tell you about the deals first, and then I'll, I'll tell you what I make of them as a, as a theme. So we're gonna focus on Colorado for a moment. So Arapahoe Basin, to celebrate its 80th anniversary, is doing $80 lift tickets every Wednesday.01:04:14.000 --> 01:04:29.000Stuart Winchester: from late December through April, except for December 30th, which is holiday week, of course. Uh, they are $50 on Wednesdays outside of those windows, so early season at A-Basin, and then late season, and of course, uh, the mountain typically goes until June.01:04:29.000 --> 01:04:35.000Stuart Winchester: $80 lift ticket today, based in on their anniversary weekend, Saturday and Sunday, December 5th and 6th.01:04:35.000 --> 01:04:45.000Stuart Winchester: Also, anyone born in 1946, making you 80 years old, skis free all winter. Uh, A-Basin has a lot of ways to get in cheap. They have 3-day packs.01:04:45.000 --> 01:05:00.000Stuart Winchester: With no blackouts, any day, use any 3 days for $249. They have midweek packs, 5 days for $319. Midweek season pass is $539, and a full is $699, and of course, A-Basin is unlimited on both the Icon and the Icon.01:05:00.000 --> 01:05:03.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, base pass, and I wanna see…01:05:03.000 --> 01:05:08.000Stuart Winchester: Okay, they did get rid of the fall pass. I had…01:05:09.000 --> 01:05:21.000Stuart Winchester: I had emailed, because… because A-Basin used to have this great pass for, like, 250 bucks. It was from opening day until Christmas, but they did get rid of it. Uh, and… and they… Shayna from A-Basin emailed, and she told me.01:05:21.000 --> 01:05:37.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, for background, that was a very small audience for, for us who were interested in the Fall Pass pack. So, uh, so thank you, Shayna, for getting back to me so quickly, and I'd sent that right before the podcast started. So, so A-Basin deals on Wednesdays, you know, put that down in your.01:05:37.000 --> 01:05:55.000Stuart Winchester: List if you, if you wanna actually day ski and maybe you have an epic pass, but you wanna, you miss a basin. Uh, and then Thursdays Copper Mountain is again doing $99 Thursdays. They're play for every Thursdays and a portion of that goes to a good cause. They're doing that every Thursday from January 7th to April 8th.01:05:55.000 --> 01:06:04.000Stuart Winchester: Including the holiday week in February, I don't know if that's a mistake, but grab it while you can, because I don't think they can take it back once you buy it. Uh, and then.01:06:04.000 --> 01:06:05.000Stuart Winchester: $99 a copper.01:06:05.000 --> 01:06:19.000Stuart Winchester: starting Monday, April 12th, which is pretty awesome. So, if you wanted to do a little day ski, and, you know, right now you can still buy tickets and everything, or still buy passes, because we're recording this on September 17th.01:06:19.000 --> 01:06:30.000Stuart Winchester: But if you're listening in the future, you could do a Wednesday $80 a day basin, a Thursday $99 at Copper Mountain. It's not a bad couple days in Summit County for a pretty reasonable price, given.01:06:30.000 --> 01:06:44.000Stuart Winchester: prices in 2026 for lift tickets at most mountains. Uh, down the road, Aspen, for its 80th anniversary, is doing $80 lift tickets Saturday and Sunday, December 12th and 13th. They also offered…01:06:44.000 --> 01:07:01.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, tickets for $3 and 75 cents for Monday, December 14th. But those are sold out and they, I'm pretty much sure they sold out instantly. And it's funny ‘cause they didn't even market it at first. And, and Aspen folks tell me they just blew off the shelves. So that is for Aspen's 80th anniversary.01:07:01.000 --> 01:07:17.000Stuart Winchester: Same year as, uh, a basin is celebrating right now. And of course, some of the little guys around there, you know, ski Cooper hasn't announced their lift ticket prices yet. And I know it's small, but it's still, it's, it's a place you can go. It's high. There's no snow making. It's all natural snow.01:07:17.000 --> 01:07:22.000Stuart Winchester: $49 midweek tickets at Ski Cooper last year, maxed out at $99 on weekends.01:07:22.000 --> 01:07:30.000Stuart Winchester: Down the road, if you're on your way to Aspen, Sunlight, which has 1,750 feet of vertical drop.01:07:30.000 --> 01:07:46.000Stuart Winchester: And two brand new lifts. Well, one was from a base and used, but it was only 20 years old. So they put in two brand new lifts last year. Big vertical. Uh, their lift tickets max out at $109. Midweek, they're $74 to $94. It's a fun little area. It gives you Colorado.01:07:46.000 --> 01:07:53.000Stuart Winchester: with a little bit more of a… a throwback Colorado, old Colorado feel. So, so the question here is.01:07:53.000 --> 01:07:57.000Stuart Winchester: Are we starting to see a rationalization?01:07:57.000 --> 01:07:58.000Stuart Winchester: In the lift ticket market.01:07:58.000 --> 01:08:04.000Stuart Winchester: Are we starting to see ski areas value the skier that.01:08:04.000 --> 01:08:19.000Stuart Winchester: maybe has an Icon Pass, but wants to ski another mountain for a day? Or I guess more in this case, since Copper and A-Basin are both Epic Pass mountains, are we seeing them take advantage of the fact that right now, if you look at prices for.01:08:19.000 --> 01:08:27.000Stuart Winchester: Breckenridge, it's $153 to ski on Friday, November 6th. Who knows what they'll have open? Probably not a lot.01:08:27.000 --> 01:08:43.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, it's 180 that day. Breckenridge goes over 300 for peak days. Uh, and on Monday, April 19th, as, as copper has dropped to 99, Breck right now is set to have a $179 walkup price for Monday, April 19th. So.01:08:43.000 --> 01:08:49.000Stuart Winchester: I think you're seeing some smart reactions from some of the…01:08:49.000 --> 01:08:55.000Stuart Winchester: larger players and showing there's still a competitive market in Colorado. The question is…01:08:55.000 --> 01:09:07.000Stuart Winchester: will Vail follow? In their earnings call, one of their earnings calls recently, uh, Rob Katz, or their end-of-year earnings, their CEO, Rob Katz, said that Lyft ticket sales had softened considerably.01:09:07.000 --> 01:09:14.000Stuart Winchester: To absolutely no one's surprise, uh, because of the price of lift tickets. So, Ken Vale…01:09:15.000 --> 01:09:27.000Stuart Winchester: find a way in the softer seasons to start to compete, because it's clear that their direct compe

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is going to cover Midwestern skiing whether you like it or not. Don't worry, Colorad-Bro, it's your turn tomorrow.Welcome to the Storm's short-form, news-focused podcast. Don't worry, I will still write newsletters too. To browse a (robot-generated) podcast transcript, click the “transcript” button above - click on any block of text and the audio will jump to that point in the conversation. Paid subscribers can leave a comment in the article below, or by joining The Storm's chat (also below). I'll respond to some comments in the next episode, which is scheduled for Tuesday, Sept. 15.The Zoom transcript (click “transcript” above for the Substack transcript, which will zoom to any point in the video when you click on the associated text block; timestamps below DO NOT MATCH THE VIDEO)Stuart Winchester: Welcome to the Storm! I'm your host, Stuart Winchester. It is Monday, September 14th, 2026. Welcome to week two of the New Look Storm Skiing Podcast. If you missed last week, I am still doing the longer form pod.00:15:53.000 --> 00:16:08.000Stuart Winchester: But I'm cutting way back on the frequency of those. Instead, I am doing a shorter, news-focused pod that I release more often, and whenever possible, that I release the same day that I record it.00:16:08.000 --> 00:16:11.000Stuart Winchester: And the reason that I'm doing that is because…00:16:11.000 --> 00:16:19.000Stuart Winchester: the world has changed a lot since 2019, when I launched the Storm Skiing podcast, and when I launched it, there really wasn't anything quite like…00:16:19.000 --> 00:16:26.000Stuart Winchester: what I was doing with the long-form audio stories of a ski area's background.00:16:27.000 --> 00:16:29.000Stuart Winchester: I've done a couple hundred episodes at this point.00:16:29.000 --> 00:16:31.000Stuart Winchester: I feel like…00:16:31.000 --> 00:16:47.000Stuart Winchester: They're evergreen. But what they don't allow me to do is to really talk about what's happening in a ski area right now. Uh Especially when there's a lot of things happening and there's a lot of pieces and parts shuffling around as there is right now in the Midwest.00:16:47.000 --> 00:16:51.000Stuart Winchester: with multi-mountain passes. So, what I'm doing…00:16:51.000 --> 00:17:06.000Stuart Winchester: is I'm trying out a little bit of a new format today. The format… we're gonna experiment, we're gonna play around with it. Sometimes there'll be a guest off the top, sometimes I'll have a take off the top, uh, sometimes I'll have a guest on for a longer period, and that's gonna be the case today.00:17:06.000 --> 00:17:22.000Stuart Winchester: Because right now there is so much happening in the Midwest with multi mountain passes and different mountains leaving and joining is completely changing the landscape there. So I want to bring in someone to talk to us at length about that. We'll do a couple other fun things as well.00:17:22.000 --> 00:17:24.000Stuart Winchester: Let's bring…00:17:25.000 --> 00:17:27.000Stuart Winchester: I'm in now.00:17:32.000 --> 00:17:35.000Stuart Winchester: And there he is. Can you hear me, Matthew?00:17:32.000 --> 00:17:34.000Matthew Zabransky: Hey, how's it going, Stuart?00:17:34.000 --> 00:17:36.000Matthew Zabransky: I can.00:17:35.000 --> 00:17:41.000Stuart Winchester: Oh, I can't hear you. All right. This is a flub, and this is why I haven't heard her.00:17:40.000 --> 00:17:41.000Matthew Zabransky: Thank you.00:17:42.000 --> 00:17:45.000Stuart Winchester: Because I am not that smart.00:17:46.000 --> 00:17:49.000Stuart Winchester: Okay, you there?00:17:48.000 --> 00:17:50.000Matthew Zabransky: Can you hear me?00:17:49.000 --> 00:17:52.000Stuart Winchester: Oh, yes, I can. Look at that.00:17:50.000 --> 00:17:54.000Matthew Zabransky: Okay, perfect.00:17:52.000 --> 00:18:07.000Stuart Winchester: The technology known as headphones. Matthew, this is why you're the production guy, and I generally stick to writing, because I'm an idiot. Alright, I want to introduce today the founder of MidwestSkiers.com.00:18:07.000 --> 00:18:13.000Stuart Winchester: He founded that in 2018, and in 2020, founded MWS Productions.00:18:13.000 --> 00:18:29.000Stuart Winchester: He is making all the Midwest content that I was dying for in the 1990s when I was a teenager living and skiing in Michigan, and the ski mags would completely ignore the region and maybe mention Boyne Mountain or Luton once per year, but he makes.00:18:19.000 --> 00:18:20.000Matthew Zabransky: Okay.00:18:29.000 --> 00:18:38.000Stuart Winchester: Top quality content. I link to it all the time in my stuff because no one else quite does it, as well as Matthew Zabranski. Matthew, welcome to The Storm. How you doing today?00:18:37.000 --> 00:18:56.000Matthew Zabransky: I am doing fantastic. Stuart, thank you, first of all, for the opportunity, but more importantly, for also repping the Midwest. I think it's such an important, obviously, region, and you have ties to it, I obviously have ties to it as well, so it's great that we're getting recognition, not only, obviously, in our region now, but on the national, even international scale, so…00:18:56.000 --> 00:19:00.000Matthew Zabransky: Thank you so much for doing that. I appreciate it. I'm excited to be here.00:18:59.000 --> 00:19:08.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, I love covering the Midwest, Matthew, and I still make it a point to go back and take a Midwest trip every year, because there's…00:19:00.000 --> 00:19:01.000Matthew Zabransky: Thank you.00:19:08.000 --> 00:19:27.000Stuart Winchester: when I'm doing this podcast, there's nothing quite like making relationships, like showing up at, you know, a 200 vertical foothill in the boondocks in Minnesota. People are like, okay, I'll talk to this guy, even though, you know, I've never heard of him. So, but you are 100% Midwest-focused. I cover it where I can and whenever I can.00:19:20.000 --> 00:19:21.000Matthew Zabransky: Mm-hmm.00:19:25.000 --> 00:19:26.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.00:19:27.000 --> 00:19:37.000Stuart Winchester: There is so much happening in the Midwest that we could talk about. I really want to focus today on multi-mountain passes. So…00:19:32.000 --> 00:19:34.000Matthew Zabransky: Okay.00:19:36.000 --> 00:19:37.000Matthew Zabransky: Mm-hmm.00:19:37.000 --> 00:19:53.000Stuart Winchester: I'll start by, I'll just set this up and then I'll, and then I'll, I'll let you comment on it. So if you go back about 10 years, there was nothing in the Midwest on multi mountain passes. You know, Vale had started to add a few things to Epic Pass and B Brighton and Afton Alps and Wilmot and such.00:19:53.000 --> 00:20:03.000Stuart Winchester: But the real inflection point came in 2019, when IndiePass came along. 2018, Icon added a couple things. So, right now, I'll give you some stats.00:20:03.000 --> 00:20:09.000Stuart Winchester: Of the 124 ski areas that I have inventoried in the Midwest, that you might have a different count.00:20:08.000 --> 00:20:10.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.00:20:09.000 --> 00:20:15.000Stuart Winchester: They're 117 of those are public. 89 of those are public with aerial lifts.00:20:15.000 --> 00:20:28.000Stuart Winchester: 58 of those, although there's a couple that are just surface toes only, so 58 ski areas in the Midwest are now on a national multi-mountain ski pass. 10 on Epic.00:20:28.000 --> 00:20:32.000Stuart Winchester: 11 on Icon, 37 for Indy. So, so to start out with, Matthew.00:20:32.000 --> 00:20:34.000Stuart Winchester: How has…00:20:34.000 --> 00:20:47.000Stuart Winchester: the acceptance of the Midwest by multi-mountain national passes change the calculus for skiers as they're planning out their winter in the Midwest, compared to what it was for most of history up until just a few years ago?00:20:47.000 --> 00:21:02.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah, it's changed dramatically. It's even going back a little bit further. I think the first initial, if you look at the statistics and you obviously know all this offhand, but back when you go back to Vail's acquisition of Wilmont, Afton.00:21:02.000 --> 00:21:19.000Matthew Zabransky: Brighton back in like 2012. I mean, that's really what started to to kick off this like idea of like. Maybe the Midwest has some legs in it, as far as like developing skiers, and then, you know, bringing them into a pass portfolio that could bring them out west. So that was the very early set, you know, early iteration of this. And then, obviously, as we went along, there wasn't.00:21:19.000 --> 00:21:37.000Matthew Zabransky: too many options outside of just the epic pass. But then, like you mentioned, Indie Pass came in, and I knew, and it's you know, as we dive into this, I do want to do a little disclosure here, and like Indie Pass was my very 1st client from a production side of things. So Doug and I, because I I saw the opportunity like there was an absolute gold mine here. I'm like.00:21:31.000 --> 00:21:32.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:21:32.000 --> 00:21:33.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:21:37.000 --> 00:21:55.000Matthew Zabransky: Because I got to travel around, that's why I started MidwestGears.com, because we were… we were traveling for my wife's job all over the Midwest, and every time we'd go to a new city, Columbus, Akron, I'd be a pass holder at one of these little ski areas, and I'd be like, holy crap, there's a lot of them here, no one's talking about them.00:21:55.000 --> 00:22:15.000Matthew Zabransky: But you know, once you start to realize there was this many, then you're then you're starting to think, okay, like, why isn't somebody coming in here and starting to develop a past that could actually stand on its own. And that's what we've seen the last, I would say, 5 to 10 years. Specifically, we've seen more people traveling around in the Midwest. You'll catch people at any stereo across the Midwest. That's not their home hill, and that's not how it used.00:22:15.000 --> 00:22:27.000Matthew Zabransky: you go ski or one little local place for the most part, you might do your weekend trip up to Boyne or something, but you would never catch people going to some of these really small places, you know, outside of just the local crew there, so it's been really cool to watch people.00:22:27.000 --> 00:22:45.000Matthew Zabransky: travel and discover, more importantly, the different areas, uh, throughout the Midwest. I think a lot of that had to do with IndyPass's push in the Midwest, because, as we're gonna talk about here in a second, it was an absolute auto-buy. Like, there was not even a question about it. From the day it started, when it was, you know, what was that, $99?00:22:45.000 --> 00:23:02.000Matthew Zabransky: up until even just the last year. It was like you almost just were gonna if you lived in the Midwest, and you like skiing, and you don't. You know you like traveling around checking out new things. There was no reason not to buy it. You'd be silly, basically not to, just because how much saturation there was in the Midwest, which I think is going to lead us into our next conversation a little bit here.00:23:02.000 --> 00:23:04.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, so, so the…00:23:04.000 --> 00:23:15.000Stuart Winchester: Just being on the ground, before we get to the shuffling around, you know, I'd imagine you're pretty connected with a lot of pretty hardcore skiers, pretty frequent skiers.00:23:11.000 --> 00:23:13.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.00:23:15.000 --> 00:23:17.000Stuart Winchester: How much has…00:23:17.000 --> 00:23:24.000Stuart Winchester: that a… a season… a multi-mountain pass becomes something that the person in the Midwest just…00:23:24.000 --> 00:23:40.000Stuart Winchester: considers or, or automatically buys it as compared to several years ago where you might buy your local season pass, but, but you, you probably, like you said, you wouldn't go around. And when I lived in the Midwest, actually, I always appreciated how close the areas were, so I would just kind of bounce around a lot for.00:23:34.000 --> 00:23:36.000Matthew Zabransky: Mm-hmm.00:23:40.000 --> 00:23:46.000Stuart Winchester: for deal days or whatever, back when those were still a thing. But how automatic has it become?00:23:41.000 --> 00:23:42.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.00:23:46.000 --> 00:24:01.000Matthew Zabransky: Very. I mean, there's people that have been buying the IndyPass specifically now. Up until this season, it was like they were probably on their fifth year of doing it and just continue to. And to be honest, there wasn't any reason not to because the pricing has stayed relatively affordable.00:24:01.000 --> 00:24:17.000Matthew Zabransky: they keep they kept strengthening their pro, their their product. I mean, like they just kept adding more ski areas in the Midwest. And so in in a lot of times the pass would pay itself off within a couple of visits based off of some of the redemption rates that you'd be getting at some somewhere like Lutz and Snow River.00:24:17.000 --> 00:24:34.000Matthew Zabransky: um, those are all, like, you know, $100 tickets, so you buy… you go there once or twice, you get two days of each of them, and basically that's already done. So if you already had one of those trips kind of on there, and if you lived in Chicago, you're going to Granite Peak usually once or twice a year. If you lived in Minnesota, you're going to Lutz.00:24:34.000 --> 00:24:52.000Matthew Zabransky: So it almost became this thing. And then you shuffle in like nubs, knob, and all that. So it it very much was like, yeah, we're gonna buy it every single year, you know, we might not. And some people are hardcore and going to all the places they could. And some people were just, you know. Hey? I'm gonna buy it because I'm gonna go for a weekend, so I might as well. And then I have this option of going some other places.00:24:46.000 --> 00:24:47.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:24:52.000 --> 00:25:03.000Matthew Zabransky: it was huge. I mean, I don't… of course, I don't have any of the IndyPass numbers, but I would… I would venture to say that the Midwest had to be a very big portion of their portfolio from the sales and redemption standpoint.00:25:03.000 --> 00:25:20.000Stuart Winchester: So the traditional numbers that Indy has given me, and it's been a couple years since Doug Fish provided these round numbers to me, but he told me about half of their sales came in New England, and 25% came in the Midwest, which is a really big number for a national pass. So you figured the other quarter were coming from somewhere else.00:25:04.000 --> 00:25:05.000Matthew Zabransky: Thank you.00:25:15.000 --> 00:25:16.000Matthew Zabransky: Cool.00:25:17.000 --> 00:25:19.000Matthew Zabransky: For… yeah.00:25:20.000 --> 00:25:25.000Stuart Winchester: I always give Doug Fish credit, because he's a Pacific Northwest guy, and…00:25:25.000 --> 00:25:40.000Stuart Winchester: Western skiers just love to hate on the Midwest. Everyone loves to hate on the Midwest. It's like the national pastime. It's like the safe thing to make fun of, and you know, I hope you take that personally, because I always do, and I really appreciated that Doug.00:25:30.000 --> 00:25:32.000Matthew Zabransky: Is…00:25:37.000 --> 00:25:38.000Matthew Zabransky: I do.00:25:40.000 --> 00:25:55.000Stuart Winchester: Included the Midwest from the start. That first year in 2019, he had Little Switz, he had Crystal, he had Cabre Fay, he had a bunch of other ski areas. Really got big in 2020 when he added Lutzen and Granite Peak. Now, I always say his insight was…00:25:44.000 --> 00:25:45.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.00:25:55.000 --> 00:26:02.000Stuart Winchester: that Doug's great insight with the IndyPass was realizing there was value in the mountains that are not.00:26:02.000 --> 00:26:08.000Stuart Winchester: super destinations when you put them all together for skiers across the country. He also…00:26:05.000 --> 00:26:07.000Matthew Zabransky: Mm-hmm.00:26:08.000 --> 00:26:23.000Stuart Winchester: the fact that he extended that to the Midwest is huge, because, yes, I… so, before Icon started adding in into the Midwest, which we'll talk about in a minute, I would always say, Indy Pass is the pass to go to in the Midwest, no one else has anything, and everyone would always say, oh, wait, Epic has 10 mountains. I was like.00:26:14.000 --> 00:26:16.000Matthew Zabransky: Thank you.00:26:17.000 --> 00:26:18.000Matthew Zabransky: Okay.00:26:23.000 --> 00:26:34.000Stuart Winchester: But the Midwest is gigantic. Unless you live in Ohio, they're very spread out, and they're near cities, and there are actually mountains in the Midwest that are more…00:26:34.000 --> 00:26:44.000Stuart Winchester: of, of what you would consider, like, regional destinations. And that, that's your Boyne, Nubs, Lutsen, uh, even, even Spira with the bigger, uh, all the stuff over in the UP.00:26:37.000 --> 00:26:38.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.00:26:44.000 --> 00:26:57.000Stuart Winchester: So Indy really collected them all together, and it was almost too good to be true, because they had over 40 ski areas in the Midwest. Talk about Indy at its peak.00:26:57.000 --> 00:27:02.000Stuart Winchester: And how great of a pass that was for the Midwest here.00:26:58.000 --> 00:26:59.000Matthew Zabransky: Okay.00:27:00.000 --> 00:27:17.000Matthew Zabransky: It was too great. We're going to get into this, I'm sure, but I think that's part of the reason for the course correction. There was a moment two or three years ago when I literally turned to Nick, my associate who edits for me and stuff, and I said, with some of the additions they announced at that time, I said.00:27:05.000 --> 00:27:06.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:27:17.000 --> 00:27:33.000Matthew Zabransky: this is too saturated like it's got to fix itself at some point like it's just. It's too good of a value, and like for skiers, we like anybody that was buying the passes like this is amazing. It makes it like again. It's an auto buy like, why wouldn't you do this? But I knew that this time was going to come at some point. But I'm you know, at least we got to.00:27:18.000 --> 00:27:20.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:27:33.000 --> 00:27:50.000Matthew Zabransky: to see what it like. The peak of that was for a little while. We got a couple of years. We've got to be happy for that, to be honest. We're starting to see some of those what I'll call course corrections now and and we're going to continue to see this. I mean, you know that every every year it's going to be something new. Someone's changing. It's just kind of the nature of the business. But.00:27:50.000 --> 00:28:02.000Matthew Zabransky: it was not a shock to me when, um, when these changes were announced, uh, both in the spring and then more recently in the last few weeks and stuff, so it wasn't… I kind of saw it coming, it was just a matter of, like, when was it gonna happen.00:28:02.000 --> 00:28:14.000Stuart Winchester: So everyone left… they seemed as though… Epic and Icon seemed like they were just leaving the Midwest to Indy, to take. And I've always thought that Icon's original sin was when they killed the Max Pass.00:28:06.000 --> 00:28:08.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.00:28:14.000 --> 00:28:15.000Matthew Zabransky: Mm-hmm.00:28:14.000 --> 00:28:30.000Stuart Winchester: And launched the Icon Pass. They brought all the Powder Mountains, all the Boyne Mountains, uh, all the Intra West Mountains, but they didn't bring Granite Peak and Lutzen, which are the biggest ski areas or most modern, however, whatever metric you want to use in Minnesota and, and Wisconsin.00:28:26.000 --> 00:28:27.000Matthew Zabransky: Yep.00:28:30.000 --> 00:28:31.000Stuart Winchester: So…00:28:31.000 --> 00:28:46.000Stuart Winchester: for a long time, Indy just built up this huge coalition. Started to see some cracks last year. Icon had just two mountains, Boyne Mountain and Boyne Highlands, and honestly, and Boyne has never affirmed this to me, but my hunch is, Boyne said, include our mountains or you don't get Big Sky.00:28:39.000 --> 00:28:40.000Matthew Zabransky: Yep.00:28:46.000 --> 00:28:48.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah, yeah.00:28:46.000 --> 00:29:01.000Stuart Winchester: So, so, Icon was like, okay, I guess we'll add these stupid little things. Uh, which is not my opinion of them, but I think that's probably what they thought from Colorado, which is why they dropped Lutzen and Granite Peak. So, last year, we started to see the first crack in Indy's armor.00:28:52.000 --> 00:28:55.000Matthew Zabransky: I was like, don't do that.00:29:01.000 --> 00:29:02.000Matthew Zabransky: Mm.00:29:01.000 --> 00:29:12.000Stuart Winchester: when the Icon Pass… they call them bonus mountains, I call them two-day mountains, because that's what they are. If you have an Icon Pass, you get two days of these mountains. Uh, Buck Hill, Minnesota.00:29:06.000 --> 00:29:07.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.00:29:12.000 --> 00:29:27.000Stuart Winchester: Uh joined the icon pass as a two day mountain, which for the listeners, that's no, you get no base pass access, you only get full icon access and there are holiday blackouts. So that's what the two day tier is. They added Buck Hill. Uh Indy said, no, you're not allowed to do that. Remove Buck Hill.00:29:27.000 --> 00:29:30.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, which is a great little, uh, you know.00:29:30.000 --> 00:29:34.000Stuart Winchester: kind of trainer hill outside of the Twin Cities.00:29:34.000 --> 00:29:40.000Stuart Winchester: And every square inch is used with very maximum effect. So Indy removed them.00:29:40.000 --> 00:29:53.000Stuart Winchester: Buck Hill has been on Icon, and that was sort of the first… when you first saw that, did you think, okay, here we go, Icon is finally starting to realize the value of the Midwest, and if not, what was the moment that you did think that they got it?00:29:53.000 --> 00:30:09.000Matthew Zabransky: I would, you know, the whole time I've been shaking my head a little bit because it's just ironic to me that Boeing, Boeing, one of the biggest companies in, you know, that started in the Midwest, that literally has its roots here. And I'm just shocked that Icon hasn't.00:30:09.000 --> 00:30:26.000Matthew Zabransky: made this push earlier, and it took this long. But that was like the 1st that was the 1st like mention of that. And the other connection that was really kind of just crazy to me is, there's so many people from the twin cities that go to Big Sky like a lot like you talk to people all over the place. They have cabins up there. They.00:30:23.000 --> 00:30:24.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, so. Yeah.00:30:26.000 --> 00:30:27.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:30:26.000 --> 00:30:42.000Matthew Zabransky: They're traveling there all the time. It's a huge destination for specifically for Minnesota, it seems. So I was always thinking, man, like if they were just to strengthen this pass a little bit in the Midwest, give somebody a reason to, to jump on to the icon pass. They're probably going out to Big Sky anyway.00:30:42.000 --> 00:30:57.000Matthew Zabransky: now all of a sudden, you give them another reason to buy the full pass, you got some… some more local hills, some day… like, weekend trips, you can go up to Lutzen, things like that, and I think that's when… when Lutzen and those guys came on, that was, like, full-blown, that's gonna… that changes everything. Like, everything.00:30:57.000 --> 00:31:14.000Matthew Zabransky: As you know, the lake, Lake Michigan, is a huge divider for the eastern and the western side of what I'll call the Midwest. Basically, if you're on the eastern side of the lake, you're kind of going to stick to mostly your lower peninsula, maybe go up to the UP occasionally. But if you're on the western side over here, in the Minneapolis.00:31:14.000 --> 00:31:31.000Matthew Zabransky: Um, there was really no offerings for Icon, so it really made no sense at that point to buy an Icon Pass. You know, maybe Chicago, you drive up to Boeing, but you're kind of on that cusp there, where it's like, mmm… but I think once they strengthened it this past year, now it's like… it's a fair fight, in my opinion. Now we're.00:31:31.000 --> 00:31:46.000Matthew Zabransky: You know, which one is gonna make more sense for you, or your situation, which it was not, it didn't used to be that way, it just, there was never an opportunity for most people that were on this side of the lake, or in Minneapolis. Sometimes it didn't make sense, unless you're going out to, you know, Big Sky for a week and a half, it, you know.00:31:47.000 --> 00:31:50.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, so just a little background for the listeners.00:31:48.000 --> 00:31:49.000Matthew Zabransky: Mm.00:31:50.000 --> 00:31:52.000Stuart Winchester: Boyne Mountain and and.00:31:52.000 --> 00:32:08.000Stuart Winchester: what they call the Highlands at Harbor Springs. I'll call it Boyne Highlands because no one knows what I'm talking about when I say the Highlands. So Boyne and Boyne Highlands are two of the nicer ski areas, more built up ski areas in Michigan, and they were long on Icon. Uh, Lutzen and Granite Peak.00:31:55.000 --> 00:31:58.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah, this…00:32:06.000 --> 00:32:07.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.00:32:08.000 --> 00:32:14.000Stuart Winchester: that, uh, Midwest Family Ski Resorts, which owns Lutzen and Granite Peak, bought, immediately took.00:32:14.000 --> 00:32:25.000Stuart Winchester: four old riblet lifts, put in a high-speed six-pack, the first one in the UP. So, those three ski areas had been indie anchors in the Midwest for years.00:32:23.000 --> 00:32:24.000Matthew Zabransky: Okay.00:32:25.000 --> 00:32:30.000Stuart Winchester: This year, for 2026-27 winter, they're going as 5-7 day…00:32:30.000 --> 00:32:42.000Stuart Winchester: mountains each on Icon and Icon Base, and so they are leaving the Indy Pass as a result of that. Now, Icon has also added some more two-day mountains. I'm gonna put those to the side for a second.00:32:40.000 --> 00:32:42.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.00:32:42.000 --> 00:32:50.000Stuart Winchester: How big of a loss was Lutsen and Granite Peak and Snow River for Indy Pass in the Midwest?00:32:51.000 --> 00:33:06.000Matthew Zabransky: It's it's an easy question. I mean the answer just like, go look at the comments on the thread when it was announced, and you could just read how an impactful it was. And I think that was my argument when people started talking about like, Oh, they're you know, hey? Like they're leaving. They're leaving us in the dust, and we we don't like them anymore.00:33:07.000 --> 00:33:29.000Matthew Zabransky: It's probably justified. If you guys are this upset about them leaving, it means they probably had a little more leverage than they should have in that past portfolio. And I think it to that. And again, I don't know that it needs, like, a passion never be so strong, in my opinion. And I'm talking about the business side of things. You're not talking about the skier. Trust me, if I was, like, just skiing Matthew, put my skiing thing on, I'd be like, yeah, absolutely.00:33:10.000 --> 00:33:12.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:33:24.000 --> 00:33:25.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:33:26.000 --> 00:33:28.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:33:29.000 --> 00:33:49.000Matthew Zabransky: Uh, but from the business side, as an area owner, operator, you gotta look at it, like, what kind of value are we getting back out of this pass? Are we the ones carrying your product? Like, that's the other thing to think about, too, right? We don't… you don't always necessarily want to be the top dog in the pass lineup. Sometimes it works well, sometimes it doesn't. Uh, and in this case, I think that they…00:33:49.000 --> 00:33:56.000Matthew Zabransky: they were carrying that pass line up, and I think nothing speaks more to the volumes of how upset people were when they came off of the pass.00:33:56.000 --> 00:34:00.000Stuart Winchester: So we're… I've kind of looked at this as it's…00:34:00.000 --> 00:34:12.000Stuart Winchester: sucks for Indy, it's probably good for the consumer in the long run, because, like you said, you never want too much market concentration, so now you have… you have the Snow Pass coming up, which is… which is Snow Partners in two days…00:34:04.000 --> 00:34:05.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.00:34:12.000 --> 00:34:28.000Stuart Winchester: at each mountain. There's none in the Midwest yet, but I suspect there may be at some point. Right now, they're mostly in the Northeast. And then you have Icon. So, before, I think a lot of people in Michigan probably had Icon, because you could use it for the Boynes, but like you said.00:34:28.000 --> 00:34:44.000Stuart Winchester: if you're not from the Midwest, you're probably just thinking it's like a big square, but there's a lake there, and you can't… I mean, you can take a ferry over it, but it takes all day, right? You have to go to Ludington, and it's like a whole thing, right? So really, you have Michigan, the Lower Peninsula, and then you kind.00:34:32.000 --> 00:34:33.000Matthew Zabransky: Yep.00:34:44.000 --> 00:34:58.000Stuart Winchester: Wisconsin. So, you live on the west side of that, I believe, like, around the Minnesota-Wisconsin line. How immediately did you see people say, okay, well, now, yeah, let's consider Icon that maybe never would have before?00:34:48.000 --> 00:34:49.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.00:34:59.000 --> 00:35:04.000Matthew Zabransky: I think the original, like, when it first was announced, there was just a lot of, like.00:35:04.000 --> 00:35:17.000Matthew Zabransky: oh man, this sucks. Like, now what? You know, what do we do? Because the initial reaction was like, well, I'm not gonna auto-buy this now, I gotta think about it a little bit more. I'm curious because I haven't… it's still so fresh, to be honest, and I haven't, like.00:35:06.000 --> 00:35:07.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:35:10.000 --> 00:35:12.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:35:17.000 --> 00:35:32.000Matthew Zabransky: but to, like, really figure that question, like, the answer to that question out, but I have… the one thing I have been seeing is a lot more people starting to weigh those options, right? They're starting to look at the passes differently now. Now it's, like, not just, like, we're gonna pick up Indy automatically and, you know, whatever might throw a different pass on there. Now they.00:35:25.000 --> 00:35:26.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:35:32.000 --> 00:35:49.000Matthew Zabransky: think about, how am I using my pass? Am I going up to Lutzen for a weekend or 2? Does it make sense for me to just get an icon pass? Am I a pass holder at Lutzen, and want to add it on now that that's an option, and maybe do an out west trip, or if you're granted peak. So I'm starting to see more people analyzing.00:35:42.000 --> 00:35:44.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah. Okay.00:35:49.000 --> 00:36:03.000Matthew Zabransky: in an area where they haven't before. So I'll be curious to see this upcoming season will be a really good test to kind of figure out, like, where are those numbers starting to shift a little bit. But, um, from my first reaction is I have a feeling that there's gonna be a pretty big drop in IndyPass sales in the Midwest.00:36:03.000 --> 00:36:20.000Matthew Zabransky: For that reasoning. Um, and then I do think there's gonna be a bit of a spike, um, in, in IconPass sales. I don't think it's gonna obviously affect much on the Michigan side, Lower Peninsula side of things. I think that'll stay pretty stable. But I think this side, for sure, this market, Minneapolis specifically, a little bit of Chicago.00:36:20.000 --> 00:36:25.000Matthew Zabransky: Um, but I would expect to see a pretty good little spike in sales on the IconPass side.00:36:25.000 --> 00:36:35.000Stuart Winchester: So, Lutzen and Granite Peak, I think, huge losses for India. Snow River, less so, just because Powderhorn is right next door, and it's kind of the same size, and it's, you know, gets the same s.00:36:29.000 --> 00:36:30.000Matthew Zabransky: Mm.00:36:30.000 --> 00:36:32.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.00:36:35.000 --> 00:36:53.000Stuart Winchester: Continued building by Icon after that announcement, and, and some, and some continued bleeding by Indy. So, so Icon had a Giants Ridge, which is an excellent ski area up in Minnesota. It's, it's kind of in the middle of nowhere, but it's worth it. Uh, Devil's Head, which is a nice, uh, Madison ski area, and then.00:36:44.000 --> 00:36:45.000Matthew Zabransky: Yep.00:36:53.000 --> 00:37:10.000Stuart Winchester: in Michigan left Indy to join the Icon today, so those all joined Icon today. And then Indy also lost Little Switzerland, Nordic Mountain, and Crystal Ridge in Wisconsin. As of now, they are passless. So, you know, those are small ski areas, but they're really important sort of urban.00:37:10.000 --> 00:37:21.000Stuart Winchester: collectors, but do you worry, Matthew, and I'll say, Indy still has 37 ski areas in the Midwest, but do you worry that their coalition is splintering a little bit, starting to fall apart?00:37:16.000 --> 00:37:17.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.00:37:21.000 --> 00:37:40.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah, a little bit. So I'm going to dance around this as carefully as I can because I have connections with all these owners, operators, and I talk to them on a regular basis, so I kind of know more than I probably should. But I'll try to navigate this the best that I can.00:37:35.000 --> 00:37:36.000Stuart Winchester: Yep.00:37:40.000 --> 00:37:56.000Matthew Zabransky: with… when IndyPass started, Doug Fish and the team did a really nice job of making sure that when they signed a ski area on, that they were being very, very intentional about its location, what… who was serving, and then when they would add another person on, a lot of times they would even approach.00:37:56.000 --> 00:38:04.000Matthew Zabransky: some of the nearby ski areas, and be like, hey, we're adding so-and-so, or making sure that those partnerships were all, you know.00:38:04.000 --> 00:38:22.000Matthew Zabransky: You're not too close where you're starting to monopolize business in different ways. I'll talk a little bit more about this in a second. So that was the approach for many, many years. However, I noticed a pretty big change a handful of years ago when it became more about a statistical difference than building those partnerships and.00:38:22.000 --> 00:38:41.000Matthew Zabransky: making those owners feel valued, if that makes sense. So it was like, okay, how can we just continue to pump numbers, get more? And in that process, what happened was a lot of ski areas in a small geographical area. And why has that caused a lot of issues for owners and operators? Is the idea of the IndyPass was, yeah.00:38:41.000 --> 00:38:50.000Matthew Zabransky: to create value with a portfolio of ski areas across the Midwest to rival that of, like, you know, other multi-mountain passes.00:38:50.000 --> 00:39:06.000Matthew Zabransky: Um, but what some of the owners and operators were starting to see was that instead of skiers buying a season pass at their local ski area, what they would do is buy the Indy Pass, ski two days at the ski area that would have been their local ski area, and then.00:39:01.000 --> 00:39:03.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:39:06.000 --> 00:39:22.000Matthew Zabransky: You know, in some cases, like in the Twin Cities, you have a handful that are within a two hour drive. So then it became this thing of like, oh, we're starting to see RR like personal season passes drop for then people that are using IndiePass redemptions to treat it as if it were basically a season pass.00:39:10.000 --> 00:39:12.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:39:22.000 --> 00:39:40.000Matthew Zabransky: I'm summarizing a lot there. There's a lot, like, to dive into, like, the details, but I can't, unfortunately, go into too much of that. But I think you can probably get the idea of why that was a little bit frustrating for some, um, owners and operators. So they really had to take a deep dive into some of those numbers and start to look at, like.00:39:24.000 --> 00:39:25.000Stuart Winchester: Yes.00:39:25.000 --> 00:39:26.000Stuart Winchester: Okay.00:39:29.000 --> 00:39:30.000Stuart Winchester: Mm-hmm.00:39:40.000 --> 00:39:50.000Matthew Zabransky: Where are these people coming from? How are the redemptions being used? And then, you know, how is this pass either, you know, net positive or net negative for us? And, you know, I always tell everybody, it's…00:39:50.000 --> 00:40:00.000Matthew Zabransky: the ski business is, you know, Stuart, is just a very, very low margin business, and it is a business. Like, at the end of the day, like, they have to treat it like…00:40:00.000 --> 00:40:22.000Matthew Zabransky: you know, like you gotta find out where you're losing money, or is there opportunity? And that assessment has to happen on a yearly basis. And sometimes when they run it for their business, they might be finding out that this might not be a great option for them. Or maybe it was, and things have changed. And now it's not so. It's an ongoing assessment. And like I was mentioning earlier, this is going to be a game that is going to play out over the next 10 years, probably where people are going to be switching teams all the time. And.00:40:22.000 --> 00:40:28.000Matthew Zabransky: and just get used to it. I mean, this is gonna be the way it is, unfortunately or fortunately, you know.00:40:26.000 --> 00:40:31.000Stuart Winchester: If you're Indy, what's your next move to try to build your coalition back up?00:40:31.000 --> 00:40:49.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah, I think the biggest thing they need to do is get some sort of anchor on this side of the lake. I mean, you've got Nub's Knob on Lower Peninsula, which is a great offering. I think that that really does anchor that side for sure. Over here, you gotta start eyeing up some areas that would serve as that anchor ski area. I know Whitecap was added.00:40:37.000 --> 00:40:38.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:40:49.000 --> 00:41:04.000Matthew Zabransky: Um, which is good, but I think, like, you gotta think about, you know, what is that replacement for? You know, what is that replacement for Granite Peak? And it immediately comes to mind, like, a Cascade, right? Or one of those. And we all know, like, it's just gonna be a tough sale for some of these operations, because it's always that, like.00:40:59.000 --> 00:41:00.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, I think so.00:41:04.000 --> 00:41:09.000Matthew Zabransky: If you're an anchor skier, you've probably got a good operation and a good thing going already, so…00:41:09.000 --> 00:41:29.000Matthew Zabransky: you know, what is the pitch? Why should I join your indie pass? So it's always this give and take a little bit, but, you know, given that we've had a bunch of ski areas now come off of indie, there might be an opportunity to fill that little bit of a void and be kind of that new anchor spot that would then highlight that side of the lake. I don't know. It'll be curious to see kind of how things play out, but.00:41:29.000 --> 00:41:37.000Matthew Zabransky: Um, I think we'll see a little bit of this course correction go on for the next year or two, and then I think maybe we'll see some moves in the future. It's hard to say.00:41:36.000 --> 00:41:43.000Stuart Winchester: That was really good, so I'm gonna extend that question. If you're Icon, what's your next move in the Midwest, and if you're Epic?00:41:45.000 --> 00:42:02.000Matthew Zabransky: If if I'm icon, what I'm circling right now to be quite frank is somewhere in the Chicagoland area. There's an opportunity there, and I don't, you know, of course. What is it? We don't know, but I think if you could add an offering like a full offering to which is a little bit tricky to do. But yeah, like you think of something like.00:42:02.000 --> 00:42:24.000Matthew Zabransky: Cascade, Devil's Head, one of those areas, if you can get it into, like, a full area where you can now grab that Chicago market and have it really well solidified, because right now you're kind of in a, you know, it's about four hours from up to Granite Peak, and then Boeing the other way is something like that, five or something. So you're kind of in that weird dead zone there, so I think there's still a huge opportunity to grab that market, which obviously is a huge market of skiers and s.00:42:13.000 --> 00:42:15.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:42:18.000 --> 00:42:20.000Stuart Winchester: Yep.00:42:24.000 --> 00:42:30.000Stuart Winchester: Mm-hmm. And if you're Epic, I mean, they have all city stuff, so what do you do if you're Epic?00:42:28.000 --> 00:42:29.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.00:42:30.000 --> 00:42:49.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah, I mean, I think Epic's playing the card that they want. The one thing that I am curious to see with Epic is not necessarily that, it's what's gonna happen with some of these smaller regional ski areas that have kind of been left in the dust a little bit. Paley Peaks is the first one that comes to mind when you start to think about this Snow Creek.00:42:45.000 --> 00:42:46.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:42:49.000 --> 00:43:06.000Matthew Zabransky: These ones that are just kind of in no man's land a little bit. They kind of got brought in with the Peak Resorts acquisition. I'm not sure that they necessarily wanted some of these ski areas, but they came in as a package deal as part of that. So it's just gonna be kind of interesting to see. They need a lot of reinvestment over the next, you know.00:43:06.000 --> 00:43:23.000Matthew Zabransky: 10 to 15 years, for sure, if not even sooner than that. So it'll be curious to see kind of how they approach those sort of areas in those regions, because some of those are in their own land like there is no ski area relatively close to some of them, or a couple of hours to the nearest ski area. So it'll be curious to see how they leverage that going forward.00:43:23.000 --> 00:43:44.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, Matthew, I could sink into that one for about two hours and we could have a talk. I'm going to have to bring you back for that one. But for now, let's move on. And some of the folks who may not be familiar with the Midwest, we're going to talk about some of our favorite Midwest ski areas in just a moment. First, I want to tell you that this podcast is brought to you today by Profile Search International.00:43:44.000 --> 00:44:03.000Stuart Winchester: Profile Search is the only talent acquisition firm in the entire world that is 100% focused on the ski industry. They have used their intimate understanding of skiing and related industries, and of available candidates worldwide, to place hundreds of transformational leaders at the best and most progressive ski areas over the past.00:44:03.000 --> 00:44:19.000Stuart Winchester: 30 years. Profile Search has offices in the US and Canada, and they find and negotiate with the right leaders for their team. If you want to reach out to Profile Search, you can find them at profilesearch.com, and you can get their email or phone number there, or send me a note and I will.00:44:19.000 --> 00:44:26.000Stuart Winchester: make that connection for you. That is profilesearch.com. All right, Matthew, I gave you a challenge.00:44:26.000 --> 00:44:43.000Stuart Winchester: Or, or homework or something. I don't know. I'm sure you didn't have to think too hard about this, but we are going to break down our five favorite Midwest ski areas. We each have five. We'll, we'll start with five and, and, uh, and we'll take turns. Now, these are not what we think are the best necessarily because that's a whole different.00:44:43.000 --> 00:44:47.000Stuart Winchester: Conversation and I tried to think about.00:44:47.000 --> 00:44:59.000Stuart Winchester: If you've never skied the Midwest and are only going to ski here once in your life, where would I tell people to go? So, Matthew, I'll start with you. What is your number five favorite Midwest ski area and why?00:44:58.000 --> 00:45:14.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah. So I'll just just key this up with like, yeah, I agree with you. I went with kind of like I took an approach of uniqueness. There's different things that I enjoy about this years for different reasons, and I'll obviously unpack them as we kind of go through number 5 for me was perfect north slopes.00:45:06.000 --> 00:45:08.000Stuart Winchester: Mm-hmm.00:45:14.000 --> 00:45:15.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:45:14.000 --> 00:45:32.000Matthew Zabransky: And at its face, you might not think that that's… it's, you know, it's a ski area right outside of, uh, Cincinnati, um, and the southern tip of Indiana down there. And for, you know, for people that have never heard of it, they'd be like, why does this… why is this even on here? Uh, but the moment that you visit there, I think it all becomes very clear. Their throughput.00:45:32.000 --> 00:45:51.000Matthew Zabransky: their snowmaking capacity, their operations. It is a gold standard when we think of how to run a ski area in extremely challenging conditions and environments. Perfect North is the one that comes to mind. The way that they can move people through their rental department is phenomenal. The way that they can have a stable season based off of where they are.00:45:51.000 --> 00:46:08.000Matthew Zabransky: is just absolutely mind blowing. And they've been doing this since day one. So this isn't something that they have. You know they're new to. They've been doing this for many, many, many decades now at this point. So it's it's definitely worth a visit. Their train's really good as well. They have some Olympians that have come out of there just some some good stuff going down at at perfect north slopes.00:46:08.000 --> 00:46:23.000Stuart Winchester: I'm so glad you said Perfect North, because I did not include it on my list, but I think they are one of the best operators in the country. My number 5 is Chestnut, Illinois, and everyone's… you know why, but everyone's gonna say, Illinois? Like, what does it matter with you?00:46:20.000 --> 00:46:23.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.00:46:23.000 --> 00:46:29.000Stuart Winchester: It is so unique, because you get up there, and it's about 500 vertical feet.00:46:29.000 --> 00:46:45.000Stuart Winchester: and you ski down to the freaking Mississippi River. It is… there is nothing else like that in American skiing. It is such a gorgeous view, and there's a train that goes by, and, and, and… the lift system is fantastic. Bunch of, you know, really maintained quads.00:46:45.000 --> 00:47:00.000Stuart Winchester: They have bars, which I like, which most Midwest ski areas don't, but they've retrofit them. Their grooming is phenomenal. Terrain's really good, steep and varied, and then one of the best things is on the backside, and the name of this probably is escaping me, it's like the backyard or something.00:46:47.000 --> 00:46:48.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah. Okay.00:46:58.000 --> 00:47:00.000Matthew Zabransky: Uh, far side.00:47:00.000 --> 00:47:15.000Stuart Winchester: Okay, yeah, so they have a terrain park that could be its own ski area, and it has a lift by itself, and so all the badly behaved teenagers go over there and throw cans around and smoke. Maybe it was just the day I was there.00:47:00.000 --> 00:47:02.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.00:47:15.000 --> 00:47:20.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, but, but my number five is Chestnut, Illinois. Uh, number four, Matthew.00:47:20.000 --> 00:47:37.000Matthew Zabransky: This is gonna be. This is gonna be a deep cut here, and I'll give you my reasoning. So I'm a sucker for community rope toe ski places like it. It warms my heart every time every year there's at least one or 2 that I go to every time I show up. It's just the kids are so excited to show me around.00:47:23.000 --> 00:47:25.000Stuart Winchester: Okay.00:47:27.000 --> 00:47:29.000Stuart Winchester: Mm-hmm. Oh, love it.00:47:37.000 --> 00:47:38.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah. Okay.00:47:37.000 --> 00:48:00.000Matthew Zabransky: They're so passionate and it really brings me back to why skiing is important and what it really is about, right? We talk about the steeps and all this fun stuff all the time, but like when you go to these places, there's just to see a kid just in jeans or whatever it may be after school ripping down. It's so fun. So one of my favorite, if not my favorite rope to ski area in the entire Midwest is a place called Hickory Hills. It's in Traverse City.00:47:59.000 --> 00:48:00.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:48:00.000 --> 00:48:18.000Matthew Zabransky: It's a beautiful setting overlooking the bay, and they have just all ropes and one conveyor, and it's stacked. And it was one of the first ski areas in the Midwest to offer night skiing, which I thought was really, really cool as well. Obviously, not a lot of vertical, maybe 200 feet of vertical, depending on which rope you're going on, but it's one of those places you just show up.00:48:10.000 --> 00:48:12.000Stuart Winchester: Mm-hmm.00:48:18.000 --> 00:48:30.000Matthew Zabransky: And they've reinvested, as recently as 2018, they built a new lodge, new snowmaking, and you just show up there, and you're just like, it brings you back to that, like, oh yeah, this is some good skiing, like, just…00:48:30.000 --> 00:48:37.000Matthew Zabransky: fundamental, good stuff, you see kids ripping around after school, it's like, it's what I think of when I think of, uh, rope tow places.00:48:36.000 --> 00:48:42.000Stuart Winchester: And long live the rope tow. I mean, it is amazing that I think they run five or six there, right?00:48:42.000 --> 00:48:46.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah, I think they have six total, I believe, yeah.00:48:45.000 --> 00:48:59.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, I've been there in the summer. I've never skied there. I used to ski at Sugarloaf down the… down the road till that went out of business. My number 4 is one you already mentioned, Matthew. Whitecap, Wisconsin. I just love this crazy ski area. It is…00:48:49.000 --> 00:48:51.000Matthew Zabransky: Yo.00:48:59.000 --> 00:49:04.000Stuart Winchester: I like to be confused when I'm skiing. I like it when a ski area…00:49:04.000 --> 00:49:05.000Matthew Zabransky: Okay.00:49:04.000 --> 00:49:22.000Stuart Winchester: Kind of hides its secrets and has lots of little trails and the trail map doesn't quite match up with the, with what you actually see. And, and there's lifts all over the place and there's little pockets and there's, you can tell that they don't care if you ski in the trees. And, and, and Whitecap is, is one of the most confusing ski areas I've, I've ever been to and I love.00:49:21.000 --> 00:49:23.000Matthew Zabransky: Okay.00:49:22.000 --> 00:49:40.000Stuart Winchester: it's in the great snow pocket off of Lake Superior, gets 200 or more inches of snow average per year, which is a good thing, because they don't have a lot of snowmaking, uh, there. But I really, really love Whitecap, and by the way, we did not share ours before, so we may have some crossover here. So, uh, what's your number 3, Matthew?00:49:38.000 --> 00:49:39.000Matthew Zabransky: Thank you.00:49:40.000 --> 00:49:55.000Matthew Zabransky: Number three, I am going with a ski area that I think people around here would know, but I think people on the other side of the lake would not. And it is going to be Welch Village. Welch Village is an area that just, you look at the numbers, you read the stats, and you're like, this place…00:49:50.000 --> 00:49:51.000Stuart Winchester: Mmm.00:49:55.000 --> 00:50:15.000Matthew Zabransky: cannot be that good. But it really is. It skis so much bigger than the stats suggest. I think it's about 300 feet of vertical. They have like 50 something runs. But I think what Welch Village has that a lot of skiers don't is the amount of terrain variation and stepping that they have is just phenomenal for beginners, and the fact that it's only about 40 minutes from the Twin Cities.00:50:15.000 --> 00:50:31.000Matthew Zabransky: is amazing. So they have basically a run for every progression. If you want super steep, now obviously it's only 300 feet of vertical, so it's gonna be a handful of turns, but they have that. If you want something very, very gently sloped, they got that, and basically everything in between. And it's just one of those areas that is a perfect.00:50:23.000 --> 00:50:24.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:50:31.000 --> 00:50:41.000Matthew Zabransky: Kind of like just outside the urban reach, right? It's not like in your backyard, but it's close enough where you can easily go for a few hours and just a perfect place to learn how to ski and snowboard.00:50:41.000 --> 00:50:57.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, I love Welch Village. I was super impressed when I went there a few years ago, and it's not too far from Vail's Afton Alps, so you can do both in a day easily if you want to, but Welch Village, first-rate operation, absolutely one of the best in the Midwest. My number three is a nostalgia play, and I'm gonna say Boyne Mount.00:50:42.000 --> 00:50:44.000Matthew Zabransky: Okay.00:50:57.000 --> 00:51:13.000Stuart Winchester: The reason I love Boyne Mountain is not because of the fast lift, so they were the first six-pack in North America, and, you know, they put in the first eight-pack in the Midwest, and there's a lot of history there. The first chairlift in the world is there. They moved it from Sun Valley.00:51:13.000 --> 00:51:23.000Stuart Winchester: the single chair from Sun Valley back in the… in the 40s, and it's now the Hemlock double chair. But what I love Boyne Mountain is because when I… back in the 90s, when I lived in Michigan.00:51:23.000 --> 00:51:30.000Stuart Winchester: they would stay open into May. And back then, there was no social media, so no one knew about it, so I'd show up, and there would be…00:51:25.000 --> 00:51:26.000Matthew Zabransky: Mm-hmm.00:51:30.000 --> 00:51:47.000Stuart Winchester: not kidding, 10 people skiing, and they would be running that six-pack all day, and they would let it bump up, and just run idiots to light, and it's where I learned how to ski moguls, and I've always just been tremendously fond of Boyne for that reason. So while it is one of the nicest ski areas in the Midwest, just on its own terms.00:51:32.000 --> 00:51:34.000Matthew Zabransky: Thank you.00:51:47.000 --> 00:52:02.000Stuart Winchester: It's also very steep. It's just, I have that feeling of, you know, that memory of skiing in my t-shirt in May in 1996, you know, down the moguls at Boyne Mountain with five other people, and it was just, it's one of my favorite ski memories ever, and the fact that they.00:52:02.000 --> 00:52:13.000Stuart Winchester: empowered that and did that. When they lost money, there's no way they didn't lose money doing that. It just speaks a lot to the spirit that still animates that company, even though it's a bigger company now.00:52:06.000 --> 00:52:07.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.00:52:13.000 --> 00:52:16.000Stuart Winchester: Number two for you, Matthew.00:52:16.000 --> 00:52:31.000Matthew Zabransky: We'll get to this, I'm sure, at the end, but it's cool to see some of that going full circle. I don't want to give too much away. We'll get into that in a second. Number two for me is a pick that I think is going to change a lot this year, specifically because of the new lift alignment, and that's Marquette Mountain.00:52:17.000 --> 00:52:19.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, yeah, yeah.00:52:31.000 --> 00:52:32.000Stuart Winchester: Mmm.00:52:31.000 --> 00:52:50.000Matthew Zabransky: They have phenomenal terrain up there, they get great snow, and the thing that was always just missing was a little bit of polishing around the edges, and I think they're finally getting to that point now with, uh, you know, a lot of snowmaking investments over the last handful of years. This new chair from Dolphin Meyer, uh, triple gonna run up basically the center of the ski area, and I think it's really gonna change the way that this.00:52:50.000 --> 00:53:07.000Matthew Zabransky: Uh, previously, it was divided into kind of two almost separate pods. It kind of had this weird split down the middle. It was kind of hard to navigate. But given that this one's gonna go right up to the center there, you're gonna be able to get full top-to-bottom access a lot more easily, be able to access a lot more of the terrain across the port, the entire, you know, trail map off the front side there.00:52:54.000 --> 00:52:55.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:53:07.000 --> 00:53:23.000Matthew Zabransky: and I think it's 1 of those that like it. This they have the terrain, and there's not many areas in the Midwest that have the terrain. It's usually the other way where it's like, Yeah, okay, we have. You know the infrastructure. We have the location, but we don't have the steeps, or we don't have the trees, or whatever it may be.00:53:15.000 --> 00:53:16.000Stuart Winchester: Okay.00:53:18.000 --> 00:53:20.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:53:23.000 --> 00:53:34.000Matthew Zabransky: It's a Marquette, good city up there in the UP, really the only major city in the UP, but they have a good demographic up there. And I think with the changes that they're gonna see this year with the new lift, it's gonna be really fun to watch.00:53:27.000 --> 00:53:28.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:53:34.000 --> 00:53:44.000Stuart Winchester: Not only do they have the terrain, they have the snow. I mean, they're another one of those Lake Superior. They don't get quite as much as up in the Keweenaw or Snow River, but they do get a fair amount.00:53:36.000 --> 00:53:38.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah, yeah.00:53:44.000 --> 00:53:45.000Matthew Zabransky: They do.00:53:45.000 --> 00:53:54.000Stuart Winchester: So my number two, I'm kind of going chalk on these last two, so you can probably guess what my number one is. My number two is a very obvious one, and that's Lutzen.00:53:54.000 --> 00:53:56.000Matthew Zabransky: Mm-hmm.00:53:54.000 --> 00:54:10.000Stuart Winchester: You know, for, for folks who have never been to Lutzen, it, first of all, it has a gondola. Now, now it's more of a transit lift. It goes more sideways than up and down, but it does have, is it eight or 900 feet of vertical? I think 800 and, or you could ski down to, yeah, of lift served vertical. And the.00:54:00.000 --> 00:54:01.000Matthew Zabransky: Thank you.00:54:05.000 --> 00:54:07.000Matthew Zabransky: It's… yeah.00:54:10.000 --> 00:54:26.000Stuart Winchester: enormous. It's really four separate mountains and it goes in all different directions and they have two six packs and they have that Gandhi, which is fairly new. I think within the last 10 years, they built that to replace their older one. Uh That is one of the best run ski areas in the Midwest. Another one that will stay open into May.00:54:26.000 --> 00:54:42.000Stuart Winchester: when they can. Oh, and speaking of views, I mean, the view off of Moose Mountain of Lake Superior just knock you on your ass. It is so good. I really love Lutzen Mountain, which takes us, Matthew, to your number one ski area in the Midwest.00:54:42.000 --> 00:55:01.000Matthew Zabransky: Man, man, this is one, and it's funny ‘cause I'm working on this video right now, and it's a place that every time I leave this ski area or while I'm at this gear, I just have a smile on my face the entire time. It has nothing flashy, but they do everything right, and that's nub knob. I mean, you go to this place and you just…00:54:42.000 --> 00:54:44.000Stuart Winchester: Favorite ski area.00:54:59.000 --> 00:55:00.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, thank you.00:55:01.000 --> 00:55:17.000Matthew Zabransky: It's just crazy to me that we were working on this video and my editor, Nick, we got to the end of the video and I mentioned like, “Oh, it doesn't have any high-speed lifts, but it almost feels like it does just because of the way that they're aligned and the way the traffic flows and the way that the runs are cut and everything.00:55:17.000 --> 00:55:34.000Matthew Zabransky: It feels like another one that just, you read the stats and you're like, okay, that sounds decent. But then you get on site and you're just like, this is just a really well run ski area. Snowmaking is always top notch. Grooming is amazing. Lifts spin, they don't stop very often. I mean, everything is just really well polished.00:55:31.000 --> 00:55:33.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:55:34.000 --> 00:55:45.000Matthew Zabransky: the core skiing experience, and they really nail it, and again, it's one of those, like, every time I come off the hill there, I'm just like, man, that was a great day of skiing, even if, you know, it's raining outside, I feel like.00:55:43.000 --> 00:55:44.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:55:45.000 --> 00:56:01.000Stuart Winchester: And as a… just to underscore how good of a scary it is, it's right across the street from Boyne Highlands, and it has been, you know, obviously its whole time, but for a scary to succeed, a lot of times, a smaller scary will fail next to a big corporate area, but Nubs has managed to flourish. Matthew, we actually had no crossover, because.00:55:46.000 --> 00:55:47.000Matthew Zabransky: Okay.00:55:49.000 --> 00:55:51.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.00:56:01.000 --> 00:56:16.000Stuart Winchester: as you can probably guess, is Mount Bohemia, and I'm sure that's probably why you left it off. Uh, Mount Bohemia, for the folks who are not familiar with it, I wrote an article last year, I called it, Mount Bohemia, the scarier the Midwest deserves, because when Mount Bohemia opened in 2000, it.00:56:02.000 --> 00:56:03.000Matthew Zabransky: Hey.00:56:04.000 --> 00:56:07.000Matthew Zabransky: Yep.00:56:16.000 --> 00:56:31.000Stuart Winchester: And it has 900 feet of vertical. They do not groom. They have no snowmaking. They get 300 inches annually. It's all, almost all, glades. Their glading is some of the best I've ever seen anywhere, because there's a lot of underbrush in Michigan.00:56:20.000 --> 00:56:22.000Matthew Zabransky: Okay.00:56:31.000 --> 00:56:48.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, the place is an absolute riot. Talk about culture. You get on the ground and you're like, oh, what's here? They don't even have a proper base lodge. It's, it's all these yurts and then they have this giant complex of hot tubs for some reason that, that everyone's always in there drinking beer and.00:56:48.000 --> 00:56:55.000Stuart Winchester: And the skiing is just… it's great! It's… it's… there's nothing else like it anywhere in North America, where there's just…00:56:55.000 --> 00:57:12.000Stuart Winchester: that much just free skiing available off of a lift, and Lonnie, the owner, has been on a couple times, and I cannot say enough good things about Nubs Knob, including… and I'll let people do their own research on this, but their season pass is $117, or $99 for… you don't want Fridays and Saturdays, and you get all kinds of reciprocals with it, so…00:57:12.000 --> 00:57:16.000Stuart Winchester: It's not a bad multi-mountain pass on its own. So…00:57:12.000 --> 00:57:14.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.00:57:15.000 --> 00:57:30.000Matthew Zabransky: I was so. I was so nervous the 1st so I went to Bohemia last year for the 1st time ever, and I it has been on my list forever, and I keep like I want to hit it right, because I don't want to like. Just go there and not be able to ski everything. And the entire time I've been super fortunate to see a lot of amazing places in in North.00:57:18.000 --> 00:57:20.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:57:24.000 --> 00:57:26.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, yeah, yeah.00:57:30.000 --> 00:57:49.000Matthew Zabransky: And I was super nervous it was not going to live up to the hype, because I was like, this place is hyped up so much, there is no way that it is going to live up to the hype, and it absolutely did. It's one of the most unique scary areas that you'll ever go to, the operations, the bus system, the hot tub. Nothing makes sense there, but it all does in a weird way. It's an absolute riot.00:57:49.000 --> 00:58:04.000Stuart Winchester: I couldn't have said any better. I always tell people, if you ski one place in the Midwest in your life, make it Mount Bohemia. All right, now, Matthew, what I want you to leave us with today is… I imagine, maybe deliberately, you didn't mention any of these ski areas, but one of the…00:58:04.000 --> 00:58:15.000Stuart Winchester: things that you do an awesome job with every year is covering the race to open in the Midwest. So, so tell us about the race to open. Who's involved?00:58:15.000 --> 00:58:19.000Stuart Winchester: When it generally takes place and how you cover it.00:58:19.000 --> 00:58:35.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah, so the race to open is a pretty big deal across the Midwest. It was something that before I started this website and YouTube channel, I did not really realize a lot, but the Midwest is always usually fighting for one of the first areas to open in the entire country on occasion. It really just depends on the weather.00:58:35.000 --> 00:58:52.000Matthew Zabransky: But what

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast supports bears, quadrangles, and liberal interpretations of The Iliad. Sign up for the free or paid newsletter to get updates on none of these things. Thank you for supporting independent ski journalism.Welcome to the Storm's short-form, news-focused podcast. Don't worry, I will still write newsletters too. Paid subscribers can leave a comment in the article below, or by joining The Storm's chat (also below). I'll respond to some comments in the next episode, which is scheduled for Monday, Sept. 14.The Zoom transcript (click “transcript” above for the Substack transcript, which will zoom to any point in the video when you click on the associated text block; timestamps below DO NOT MATCH THE VIDEO)Stuart Winchester: Welcome to The Storm! I'm your host, Stuart Winchester. It is September 10th, 2026, and we have some big, big news in Ski World today.00:06:07.000 --> 00:06:14.000Stuart Winchester: So one of the things that I focused on since launching the storm in 2019 is the rapid.00:06:14.000 --> 00:06:30.000Stuart Winchester: Exponential growth in US based multi mountain ski passes and one of the biggest icon pass today released five new partners for the 2026 to 27 season. So I'm gonna break those down for you.00:06:30.000 --> 00:06:46.000Stuart Winchester: I am going to talk a little bit more about IndyPass and some of their partner shuffles. Then we are going to be joined by IndyPass owner, Eric Mogenson, who will give us a breakdown on all things happening with Indy, Black Mountain, and Entebeni Systems.00:06:46.000 --> 00:07:01.000Stuart Winchester: reader reaction, but I want to jump right into Icon Pass. Icon hits us today with, as I said, 5 new ski areas, 3 are full partners, and those… which means 7 days on the Icon Pass.00:07:01.000 --> 00:07:06.000Stuart Winchester: 5 days on the Icon Base Pass. All 3 are in Asia.00:07:06.000 --> 00:07:13.000Stuart Winchester: The first is Matarau, Japan. That will be ICON's 10th ski resort in Japan.00:07:13.000 --> 00:07:28.000Stuart Winchester: And then, Icon, last year, was the first U.S.-based pass to add a ski area in China, and Icon adds two more today, though they're nowhere near the ski area that it added last year. They are sort of close.00:07:28.000 --> 00:07:47.000Stuart Winchester: to each other. So, we're gonna break those down first, and then ICON added two mountains to its two-day tier, uh, which it calls Bonus Mountains, which ICON insists are not ICON Pass members, uh, but I insist they are, because you can access them with your ICON Pass. Therefore, they are on.00:07:47.000 --> 00:07:53.000Stuart Winchester: the Icon Pass, no matter what Altera tells us. So, let's start with Montreal, Japan, and if you're on…00:07:53.000 --> 00:07:55.000Stuart Winchester: The…00:07:56.000 --> 00:08:04.000Stuart Winchester: If you're on the video, I'm going to share my screen here because we're going to do a little visual helping.00:08:04.000 --> 00:08:10.000Stuart Winchester: All right, so let's take this away. All right, so the first one I want to break down.00:08:10.000 --> 00:08:12.000Stuart Winchester: is…00:08:12.000 --> 00:08:26.000Stuart Winchester: Madarao, Japan, and I've actually written about this ski area before, because they were an IndiePass member, and this is the article that I wrote back in 2023, when Madarao joined IndiePass, and Indie's been a big leader in.00:08:26.000 --> 00:08:27.000Stuart Winchester: Bye.00:08:28.000 --> 00:08:40.000Stuart Winchester: building out a network in Japan. So, the ski resorts in Japan are interesting. I've not skied there, but I've been there in the summer and ridden the lifts around.00:08:40.000 --> 00:08:45.000Stuart Winchester: And the skiing is very much like a mix of…00:08:46.000 --> 00:08:58.000Stuart Winchester: The Cottonwoods and New England. And what I mean by that is, if you're looking at the screen here, you can see the stats on Mattarau. 512 inches of average annual snowfall.00:08:58.000 --> 00:09:12.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, but not a lot of vert, 1,444 feet, and as you can see from the trail map, if you're looking here, it's not a big trail footprint. So, what I mean when I say Cottonwoods is the snowfall, and when I say…00:09:12.000 --> 00:09:29.000Stuart Winchester: New England, I mean the size. They tend to be not huge vert, sort of compact. If they do have a lot of vert, like the Jacuba Valley ski resorts that are on Vail, they tend to go, uh, kind of straight up and be side by side. You don't have a lot of the mega resorts as you would have.00:09:29.000 --> 00:09:40.000Stuart Winchester: in North America, or especially in Europe. So, it's good that the passes are all building density in Japan, because the ski areas are not…00:09:40.000 --> 00:09:43.000Stuart Winchester: This is not a place that you would go to necessarily.00:09:43.000 --> 00:10:02.000Stuart Winchester: like Vail Mountain and spend a week, or like Whistler. Another thing I want to note about Japan, you can see here that Matarau has some glade zones marked. In a lot of cases, skiing off-piste or in the trees, even though that's what Japan is known for, in a lot of cases, my understanding is that that's pretty heavily policed and forbidden.00:10:02.000 --> 00:10:17.000Stuart Winchester: So you really have to research your ski areas before you go over to figure out which ones will actually allow you to go off-piste, which is what most of us want to do, right? If we're coming from North America, we're going there for the big powder. Japan is a little more of an on-piste tradition.00:10:17.000 --> 00:10:21.000Stuart Winchester: a little bit more like Europe. So, I…00:10:21.000 --> 00:10:33.000Stuart Winchester: there's… to underscore the scope of what we have now available to us in Japan as U.S.-based pass holders. So, with the addition of Madarao today.00:10:33.000 --> 00:10:49.000Stuart Winchester: Now, 53 ski areas in Japan have joined the Epic, Icon, Indy, or Mountain Collective Passes. And I actually, I want to show you something I have that's really cool. So, I have this gigantic chart, and it's kind of…00:10:49.000 --> 00:11:04.000Stuart Winchester: it's kind of hard to navigate, but I'm slowly making it a little bit better. And so this is a chart that's variously called a bunch of different things. Right now, I'm calling it the Encyclopedia Britannica. Sometimes it's been the Passmaster.00:11:04.000 --> 00:11:17.000Stuart Winchester: 5,000. And I just kind of change the name whenever I want, but the link is always the same. And what I've… it's a really slow Google Sheet, and I definitely need a better platform, but if you go, there's all these tabs.00:11:17.000 --> 00:11:33.000Stuart Winchester: Down at the bottom, and again, this is where it's nice to have the video, so you can see what I'm showing you here. So I have all these tabs. One of the tabs is all MegaPass ski areas. So I have this divided up, and these are just little tables that pivot off the main table, so all the stats are up to date.00:11:33.000 --> 00:11:35.000Stuart Winchester: So first, I have this…00:11:35.000 --> 00:11:42.000Stuart Winchester: chart here with all ski areas that are on any U.S.-based pass, and we'll talk about that a little bit more in a second.00:11:42.000 --> 00:11:43.000Stuart Winchester: Then I have…00:11:43.000 --> 00:11:59.000Stuart Winchester: all U.S. ski areas, then I have New England, I have Japan, so let's pause on Japan for a moment. 53 ski areas, 11 Epic, 10 Icon, 32 Indy, 1 Mountain Collective. You can see all the stats down here. Again, not big.00:12:00.000 --> 00:12:16.000Stuart Winchester: skiable acre footprints, and really, Japan measures things differently than North America. They tend to measure snowpack rather than inches of snowfall. I did find a good average annual snowfall chart on Powderhounds, which is a great site that I'll talk more about.00:12:16.000 --> 00:12:25.000Stuart Winchester: for international research of ski areas. But if you see these acreage totals, you know, there's really nothing much.00:12:25.000 --> 00:12:35.000Stuart Winchester: Here's Niseko United, it's 2,100 acres, that's 5 ski resorts combined, right next to each other. Rasutsu is, uh, is 2,000, but most of these are under…00:12:35.000 --> 00:12:51.000Stuart Winchester: 500, so you really prepare yourself for that. It's one place, I think, Japan, where it would help to get a guide. Everything tends to be pretty cheap once you get on the ground. In Japan, the lift tickets are nothing, so having someone to show you around and show you where you can go under the ropes.00:12:51.000 --> 00:12:57.000Stuart Winchester: is a good idea. And, you know, I want to jump ahead to reader feedback for a moment. So I had…00:12:58.000 --> 00:13:14.000Stuart Winchester: this comment from Allison Wood. She said, I look forward to seeing your future efforts. I know there's enough in American skiing to discuss, but I'd be curious if you would further discuss European Alps destinations. It seems to be growing in popularity due to competitive pricing versus U.S.00:13:14.000 --> 00:13:28.000Stuart Winchester: Western resorts. A week at Big Sky appears to be the same price as a week in Switzerland for those in the Eastern USA. The answer is absolutely yes. I do want to cover the Alps and Japan and all of these international destinations more.00:13:28.000 --> 00:13:43.000Stuart Winchester: I don't have the personal on-the-ground knowledge base with those ski areas that I do with the U.S. ski areas, so I'm reaching out to my contacts in Europe, in Japan, who know these resorts intimately, and I'm gonna bring them on the show to try to help us make sense, because if you go back.00:13:43.000 --> 00:13:47.000Stuart Winchester: We go back to the Encyclopedia Britannica for a second.00:13:47.000 --> 00:13:49.000Stuart Winchester: You'll see that…00:13:49.000 --> 00:13:52.000Stuart Winchester: The, uh… if I can get to it…00:13:52.000 --> 00:14:05.000Stuart Winchester: Okay, so Japan has 53 ski areas, Canada has another 55, and most of us can sort those out easily enough. The harder ones is Europe. I mean, Europe, there's 61 ski areas, and sometimes a ski area in Europe is, you know.00:14:05.000 --> 00:14:21.000Stuart Winchester: 10 ski areas that put together are as big as all the ski areas in Utah. So I really need some help to break those down. But that's the great thing about this new format is that it will allow me to bring in more voices more frequently since there's more frequent shows. All right.00:14:21.000 --> 00:14:38.000Stuart Winchester: Icon also today added two ski areas in China, and the best site to just get the basics of any ski area in the world is, I've found, skiresort.com. They have a profile of every ski area. They tend to keep it up to date. I don't know who runs the site.00:14:38.000 --> 00:14:54.000Stuart Winchester: I would like to connect with them at some point, but this is really my go-to for… so this is Betahu, I'm sure I'm pronouncing that wrong, one of the ski areas that ICON added in China, and they have all the basic information, the elevation, which is not high, it's all in meters, obviously, out of the U.S.00:14:54.000 --> 00:15:01.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, what I really like is the lift breakdown and the trail map. So, the… the thing about the ski areas in China.00:15:01.000 --> 00:15:07.000Stuart Winchester: is just like everything else in China, they're pretty much brand new. I read this really interesting.00:15:07.000 --> 00:15:13.000Stuart Winchester: quote in the New York Times several years ago, and the notion.00:15:13.000 --> 00:15:16.000Stuart Winchester: was basically China…00:15:16.000 --> 00:15:31.000Stuart Winchester: stayed pretty much in the 19th century for all of the 20th century, and then it got to the 21st century in about 10 years. So, you go there, there's high-speed rail, everything's new, there's new buildings. The ski resorts are new as well, and you can see this in their lift fleet. I mean, this…00:15:31.000 --> 00:15:34.000Stuart Winchester: You know, they have a…00:15:34.000 --> 00:15:49.000Stuart Winchester: six eight-person gondolas, one six-person gondola, two high-speed six-packs, three high-speed detached quads, no fixed grip lifts at all, and then you take a look at the trail map, and again, this is probably a little more like Japan, where these are.00:15:49.000 --> 00:16:03.000Stuart Winchester: a little bit smaller ski areas than what we're used to, uh, as far as the Mountain West. But, you know, it's all very well interconnected. I would expect a lot of on-piste skiing. You know, with a… with a immature ski culture, I wouldn't expect a lot of glade stuff.00:16:03.000 --> 00:16:19.000Stuart Winchester: to be developed. Kind of talking on my rear end, to be honest, because I've not skied in China or even been to China, but these are my perceptions with the different ski cultures I know. I'll try to track down someone who knows better. Here's the other Icon Pass resort, Lake Songwa Resort, and I want to make…00:16:19.000 --> 00:16:30.000Stuart Winchester: that we kind of have an Aspen-Crested Butte situation going on here, so Sangua and, uh, this other one they added, uh…00:16:30.000 --> 00:16:49.000Stuart Winchester: Beidou, there, as you can see on this Google map, they're 24 miles apart in the mountains, but it looks like about a 4-hour drive, so there's not really a road through the city. It's the same kind of deal with Aspen and Crested Butte, where they're pretty close, but it's a long drive around. These are seasonal roads that Google doesn't know about, so it's about a 5-hour drive in the winter.00:16:49.000 --> 00:16:51.000Stuart Winchester: I believe. So…00:16:51.000 --> 00:17:03.000Stuart Winchester: We have these, and then, if you want to go to China to experience skiing, Icon gives you the means to do so. And then, Icon added…00:17:04.000 --> 00:17:16.000Stuart Winchester: to their 2-day tier, which again, they're saying is not IconPass. I want to talk about the 2-day tier a little bit in general. So, Icon started this 2-day tier.00:17:16.000 --> 00:17:23.000Stuart Winchester: last year, and I think what they were trying to do is mirror what Vail did.00:17:23.000 --> 00:17:37.000Stuart Winchester: with its feeder ski areas and all these little places that are bought all over the country, Mount Brighton in Michigan, and Afton Alps in Minnesota, and Wilmot in Wisconsin, and all the resorts around Cleveland.00:17:37.000 --> 00:17:49.000Stuart Winchester: and you know, Alpine Valley. And then there's the names escaping me. Boston Mills, Brandywine. I just skied there and did a write-up on it. So so yeah, they're.00:17:49.000 --> 00:18:04.000Stuart Winchester: Vail bought up all these ski areas. Well, Icon, instead of doing that and buying, has added two days only on the full Icon Pass, which is currently $1,449, uh, two days to 11 different ski areas around the country.00:18:04.000 --> 00:18:19.000Stuart Winchester: It's been growing that list. Silver Star was one last year, and it converted to full Icon, but right now, if you're on the screen share, you can see the 11 that are currently on the Icon Pass two-day roster. So we…00:18:19.000 --> 00:18:23.000Stuart Winchester: had today the additions of Cabarfay Peaks in Michigan.00:18:23.000 --> 00:18:25.000Stuart Winchester: And…00:18:26.000 --> 00:18:37.000Stuart Winchester: In Wyoming, we had snowy range. So Caberfay Peaks is actually, it's an awesome ski area. It's one of my favorite ski areas. I grew up about an hour and 15 minutes from there.00:18:37.000 --> 00:18:40.000Stuart Winchester: And with Cabot Fay, it…00:18:40.000 --> 00:18:55.000Stuart Winchester: It's a really fun place. They're constantly building it up. And what the cabaret you see today is very different than the cabaret that existed a long time ago. It basically used to be a two mile sprawl of rope tows and starting in the 1980s.00:18:55.000 --> 00:18:59.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, the families that owned it dug up from the bottom here.00:18:59.000 --> 00:19:07.000Stuart Winchester: and added to the top. So they went from a couple hundred vertical feet to 485 vertical feet, and it continued to…00:19:07.000 --> 00:19:18.000Stuart Winchester: expand, and they have another expansion in the works over here on Green Mountain. Should be coming 27-28, and I'm gonna have Tim and Pete Meyer from Calgary Fay Peaks on next week to talk about that a little more.00:19:18.000 --> 00:19:20.000Stuart Winchester: And then we have…00:19:20.000 --> 00:19:36.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, it's Snowy Range, Wyoming, and Snowy Range might seem like a little bit of a weird one, but Snowy Range is actually very logical. They've had a long-standing relationship that's in southern Wyoming. It's not, it's only a couple hours from Steamboat. They have a long-standing relationship with Steamboat.00:19:36.000 --> 00:19:51.000Stuart Winchester: to a snowy range season pass for 300 and some dollars this year. They changed that to half off in a 3 day icon session pass, which is good at Steamboat and several other mountains. And now, if you have a full icon, you would also get 2 more days at Steamboat.00:19:51.000 --> 00:19:54.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, or you would actually get 2 days at Snowy Range.00:19:54.000 --> 00:20:00.000Stuart Winchester: if you were, you know, wanted to escape the crowds at Steamboat one day. So, we are gonna…00:20:00.000 --> 00:20:03.000Stuart Winchester: Come back to…00:20:04.000 --> 00:20:16.000Stuart Winchester: IndyPass in a moment. Actually, I have one more IndyPass update, then I'm gonna go to Eric. So, Mission Ridge and Blacktail in Washington have left IndyPass.00:20:16.000 --> 00:20:17.000Stuart Winchester: And…00:20:18.000 --> 00:20:19.000Stuart Winchester: Hold on, let me just…00:20:23.000 --> 00:20:25.000Stuart Winchester: So Eric, I'll be right there.00:20:26.000 --> 00:20:30.000Stuart Winchester: We'll get to Mission to Blacktail in a minute. I'm gonna bring Eric in.00:20:30.000 --> 00:20:34.000Stuart Winchester: And I'm going to stop my screen share.00:20:40.000 --> 00:20:42.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, Eric?00:20:42.000 --> 00:20:43.000Erik Mogensen: What's up, man?00:20:43.000 --> 00:20:57.000Stuart Winchester: How you doing? Joining us now is the director of IndyPass, the founder of Entebeni Systems, and the operator of Black Mountain, New Hampshire. Eric Mogenson is a good friend of the storm, and he joins us now from where? Where are you, Eric?00:20:57.000 --> 00:21:05.000Erik Mogensen: I am, uh, calling in from Black Mountain, New Hampshire, our new home, and I'm up at the Alpine Cabin.00:21:04.000 --> 00:21:18.000Stuart Winchester: I want to start on the Alpine Cabin. Tell us what the Alpine Cabin was when you arrived at Black Mountain and what it has turned into from what it is and from a revenue standpoint.00:21:06.000 --> 00:21:07.000Erik Mogensen: Yep.00:21:19.000 --> 00:21:34.000Erik Mogensen: Yeah, so, um, I spend the first 8 to 10 hours of my day working with our engineering and product teams, and most of it is in front of a computer or on the phone, but by 5 PM I try to be up here on the mountain every.00:21:34.000 --> 00:21:52.000Erik Mogensen: night. Like, doing trail work, on the excavator, snowmaking, lift work. But I keep a desk up here in the summer. Couldn't keep a desk here in the winter. Um, but I do keep a desk up here so that when I have an idea, or I want to come write something down, or I want to watch a YouTube video, or do something, this place is super productive for me.00:21:53.000 --> 00:22:11.000Erik Mogensen: It's like my peaceful, happy place in the summer. In the winter, there is nothing peaceful about this place. This, this place rages, uh, European style. So, when we took over Black Mountain, the Alpine cabin, the credit card receipts from the Alpine cabin the year before.00:22:11.000 --> 00:22:22.000Erik Mogensen: were $38,000, uh, for the season in sales. Um, and the year after, our first year that we took it over, it was over $300,000.00:22:22.000 --> 00:22:29.000Erik Mogensen: Um, and then our second year, it was over $600,000, and most of that comes down to champagne.00:22:29.000 --> 00:22:38.000Erik Mogensen: But don't look at champagne as something you drink. Champagne is something that you use to celebrate. And so I think.00:22:38.000 --> 00:22:50.000Erik Mogensen: The long-winded answer to your question is, is the Alpine cabin is truly a place to celebrate the sport and culture of skiing, and people are definitely holding on to that.00:22:50.000 --> 00:23:03.000Stuart Winchester: It's an amazing space, and if folks aren't familiar with Black Mountain, that's the main double chair to the summit right behind you, and it goes right over the alpine cabin. It's a party scene, and it's a lot of fun.00:22:59.000 --> 00:23:00.000Erik Mogensen: Oh, yeah.00:23:03.000 --> 00:23:20.000Stuart Winchester: Going from $38,000 to $600,000, 20X in revenue, I mean, Eric, that's the kind of revenue stream that could change the path of a lot of small ski areas. Is that replicable, do you think, at some of these smaller family-owned ski areas around the country that.00:23:20.000 --> 00:23:25.000Stuart Winchester: are really tied to old revenue models and just need a little spark.00:23:24.000 --> 00:23:32.000Erik Mogensen: Yeah, I don't know if you can scale the champagne necessarily, but you can definitely scale.00:23:32.000 --> 00:23:51.000Erik Mogensen: the focus on the culture of skiing. And I think that's really what the independents do so well, is that, you know, the wood fireplaces smell authentic, the people are very authentic, the ski trails are authentic, they're weird, they're quirky, the lifts are slow, right?00:23:51.000 --> 00:24:06.000Erik Mogensen: Those a lot of people look at those things. We've been programed as skiers to see those things as liabilities. They're actually our biggest assets. And so, yeah, the Alpine, you know, the Alpine cabin was a little 200 square foot patrol shack.00:24:06.000 --> 00:24:11.000Erik Mogensen: that sold some, you know, beer and hot dogs.00:24:11.000 --> 00:24:21.000Erik Mogensen: But we never looked at that as a liability. We never looked at that as, hey, we need to go build a 20,000 square foot mid-mountain lodge, take on a ton of debt.00:24:21.000 --> 00:24:32.000Erik Mogensen: Um, we really looked at it as an opportunity, and I think every single small ski area has that exact same opportunity to focus on the authenticity of the product that they deliver.00:24:32.000 --> 00:24:48.000Stuart Winchester: There's been a ripple effect, too. I mean, what can you tell us about skier visits before and after you purchased it? Because Black, for background, for people who are not familiar with Black, the reason you own Black is because they announced they were closing on Facebook. They said, we're done. The skier has been open since 1930, whatever.00:24:48.000 --> 00:24:57.000Stuart Winchester: said, we're done, this was 3 years ago, and you said, no. And you tried to find a buyer, looked for a year, uh, and decided to buy it yourself. So, so…00:24:57.000 --> 00:25:03.000Stuart Winchester: You took a dying skier, what did the skier visits revenue look like when you got it, and what do they look like today?00:25:03.000 --> 00:25:15.000Erik Mogensen: It was about $700,000, $750,000 in top line revenue when we bought the whole ski area. Yeah, including the $32,000 in hot dogs and beer at this cabin.00:25:08.000 --> 00:25:11.000Stuart Winchester: That's the whole ski area.00:25:11.000 --> 00:25:12.000Stuart Winchester: Okay.00:25:15.000 --> 00:25:16.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:25:15.000 --> 00:25:27.000Erik Mogensen: Um, so it was the entire ski area. I don't quite know what the skier visits were. Um, we know what the ticketed visits were, but I would guesstimate that the skier visits were somewhere between, you know, 10 and 15,000.00:25:19.000 --> 00:25:20.000Stuart Winchester: Mm-hmm.00:25:27.000 --> 00:25:43.000Erik Mogensen: Um, in our second year, we took it to $2.5 million in top line revenue. Um, we've surpassed $5 million, uh, here in our 25th or 26th month. And skier visits, you know, all in, including employees and the whole thing, right about 55,000.00:25:43.000 --> 00:25:48.000Erik Mogensen: So it's been a big turnaround. It's been interesting, learned a lot.00:25:48.000 --> 00:25:50.000Erik Mogensen: And.00:25:50.000 --> 00:25:56.000Erik Mogensen: I think this is 100% doable by most of the smallest areas on the planet.00:25:56.000 --> 00:26:02.000Erik Mogensen: You just have to realize that if you want a different and better result, you have to take different and better action.00:26:02.000 --> 00:26:05.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, I mean, you proved me wrong, because I, you know…00:26:05.000 --> 00:26:16.000Stuart Winchester: I thought Black had maybe just had its time, because it's surrounded by two Vail Own Mountains and Cranmore, which is a high-speed lift. Sunday River is right down the road. Uh, you have intense competition from Epic.00:26:16.000 --> 00:26:26.000Stuart Winchester: and… and Black Mountain is not an especially snowy mountain, like, say, Smuggler's Notch, we'll talk about in a minute. I… I didn't know if… if it had enough aura.00:26:26.000 --> 00:26:38.000Stuart Winchester: But it seems like you've either tapped the aura or created it, and really turned it around, and really given me a lot of hope that a lot of the ski areas that we see around the country, that…00:26:38.000 --> 00:26:45.000Stuart Winchester: Seem to be up against this modernization curve, they can't quite get ahead, might be able to take other routes to get there.00:26:45.000 --> 00:27:00.000Erik Mogensen: Yeah, and I think, too, Stu, it's worth noting, like, yeah, I'm proud of what we've done here, but there's a lot of really good operators out there that have done this, too. You know, having grown up in Buffalo, which I'll call, like, the Eastern Midwest of the Midwest.00:26:59.000 --> 00:27:00.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:27:00.000 --> 00:27:10.000Erik Mogensen: Right? There's really well-managed ski areas that focus on the food and beverage, that focus on the authenticity, um, that drive a ton of other revenue.00:27:10.000 --> 00:27:23.000Erik Mogensen: Um, that are creative, uh, in that way, and I think we just have to be accepting of those things. We have to be accepting of them, we have to share what works, uh, share what doesn't work, and collaborate, um.00:27:23.000 --> 00:27:29.000Erik Mogensen: And and then we'll be fine. We'll be fine. These little skier is have a huge advantage.00:27:29.000 --> 00:27:39.000Erik Mogensen: in the fact that they are… they are run by authentic and passionate people. That… they… they are… they are run…00:27:39.000 --> 00:27:46.000Erik Mogensen: not as a profit center. Um, and yes, they need to be profitable to be sustainable and have reinvestment, right? But…00:27:46.000 --> 00:27:51.000Erik Mogensen: These little ski areas have such a remarkable advantage over some of the big areas.00:27:51.000 --> 00:27:57.000Erik Mogensen: and and how they're managed and what their direction looks like. We just have to take advantage of it and talk about it more.00:27:57.000 --> 00:28:06.000Stuart Winchester: this is just the beginning of the story, too. All right, let's switch over to Andy Pass, and, you know, my questions around Black, when you were initially taking it over, were…00:28:06.000 --> 00:28:24.000Stuart Winchester: how many retro ski areas does New England have room for in a market? Like, Mad River Glen has crafted its whole image around being this retro ski area. You know, they groom, they make snow up to 2,000 whatever feet, the single chair is a 1940 whatever, but they rebuilt it in 2007, so…00:28:24.000 --> 00:28:27.000Stuart Winchester: It is a well-maintained place.00:28:27.000 --> 00:28:42.000Stuart Winchester: as sort of like a museum. It's… it's… it's… the facade is old school, and it skis that way, but really, it's… it's been well tended to. Smuggler's Notch is another one of those that feels like 1960s, around 1960s haul lifts, including.00:28:42.000 --> 00:28:57.000Stuart Winchester: One of the longest in the country, the Madonna lift. Uh, and I saw black in that same mold and said, okay, how many of these do we have room for? But Smuggs is, at the end of the day, a awesome ski area, and you added it to IndyPass. I mean, how big of a victory is that for New England skiers?00:28:57.000 --> 00:29:03.000Stuart Winchester: to now have Smuggs, Jay, Waterville, all these ski areas on the one pass.00:29:02.000 --> 00:29:11.000Erik Mogensen: I mean, look, you've got… you've got Smogs, you've got Jay, you've got Bolton, you've got Cannon, you've got Waterville, um.00:29:11.000 --> 00:29:28.000Erik Mogensen: we've really leveled the playing field in the East, and it's exactly what we intend to do in other places of the country, and also around the world. Uh, and I think what we're proving here in New England, there's been a lot of focus with IndyPass in New England over the last two years, and a lot of that has to do.00:29:28.000 --> 00:29:44.000Erik Mogensen: With Black Mountain and our move and our things there. But what we're proving we can do here, we are going to replicate in other markets. There's no question in my mind. And I think what we're going to replicate is the fact that you don't have to be epic. You don't have to be iconic.00:29:44.000 --> 00:29:50.000Erik Mogensen: to be a really stable, well-earning business. You can be part of an independent group.00:29:50.000 --> 00:30:09.000Erik Mogensen: and still push and plow forward, and compete. So, you know, and I… look, I don't judge a ski area by its vertical. Don't judge a ski area by how many high-speed lifts it has. I think that's the mistake that we keep getting pulled into in skiing. And our… it's the mistake that we make as well as operators, and we…00:29:53.000 --> 00:29:54.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah. Okay.00:30:09.000 --> 00:30:16.000Erik Mogensen: we pass that mistake on to the consumers, right? Bigger is not better, it's just bigger.00:30:16.000 --> 00:30:33.000Erik Mogensen: Faster is not better. It's just faster, right? More lifts. Sure, that sounds great, but you have to pay for those lifts as well. And so that is going to there's that money doesn't just come from the sky that that money is going to be passed on to the consumer.00:30:33.000 --> 00:30:41.000Erik Mogensen: And the more and more we continue to do that, the more and more expensive and exclusive skiing's gonna become. So, again, I'll bring it back to…00:30:42.000 --> 00:30:51.000Erik Mogensen: One of the greatest advantages these places have are being small, are having slow lifts, are being independent, are being authentic. And that's exactly what Smugs is.00:30:51.000 --> 00:31:01.000Stuart Winchester: However, SMUGS also has 2,600 feet of vertical, 1,000 acres of skiing, and 322 inches of average snowfall. The numbers do help.00:31:01.000 --> 00:31:08.000Erik Mogensen: They do, but I'll leave the numbers to your spreadsheets that I can barely understand at this point.00:31:01.000 --> 00:31:03.000Stuart Winchester: The numbers do help, though, it's offline.00:31:06.000 --> 00:31:10.000Stuart Winchester: Well, that makes two of us and probably everyone else.00:31:08.000 --> 00:31:11.000Erik Mogensen: Those will speak for themselves.00:31:10.000 --> 00:31:16.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, so having Jay and Smugs on there is an awesome combo. You know, I think that…00:31:16.000 --> 00:31:28.000Stuart Winchester: Indy and Doug before you, when Doug… I know Doug's still heavily involved, but the founder of the Indy Pass, Doug Fish. I think you have done a great job of building these little nodes of skiing.00:31:28.000 --> 00:31:44.000Stuart Winchester: around the country, and now around the world. So the… the donut hole has always kind of been Colorado, Utah, Tahoe, and that's because that's where Epic and Icon logically went. Those are the three biggest ski markets. But I want to talk a little bit first about the Midwest, where.00:31:44.000 --> 00:31:59.000Stuart Winchester: Indy built a really nice network, and you have a lot of ski areas in the Midwest. You have… 37. Uh, you've had some big departures this year. Lutzen, Granite Peak, and Snow River, run by Midwest Family Ski Resorts.00:31:59.000 --> 00:32:16.000Stuart Winchester: Went over to Icon, and Lutzen is, for the listeners, biggest ski area in Minnesota. It skis like a New England ski area. Granite Peak, you know, lots of high-speed lifts. Charles Skinner really turned that place from a dump into something nice. And the Snow River's on the come up. It's in a nice snow belt in Michigan.00:32:16.000 --> 00:32:19.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, you know, how much…00:32:19.000 --> 00:32:27.000Stuart Winchester: Did you see those as drivers of IndyPass sales in the Midwest? And how concerned, if at all, are you that they departed?00:32:26.000 --> 00:32:41.000Erik Mogensen: Well, look, let's… let's talk… I mean, the moose in the room here is that that… that loss sucks for us. Like, there's no way around it. Um, it… it… it's a bummer. It stings. Uh, I really like Charles Skinner. I really like Charlotte. I think they're both.00:32:32.000 --> 00:32:34.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah. Okay.00:32:41.000 --> 00:32:57.000Erik Mogensen: really great operators. They're very, very smart. They're very, very sharp. We had a we had a great call around when we kind of showed them what the revenue was in their last season, and we talked through it, and very, very amicable. I've always relied. Have some great, you know, dinner conversations with Charles.00:32:57.000 --> 00:33:12.000Erik Mogensen: And and I think they're great. They they have to make a move. They made a business decision to go to Icon and Icon makes that very, very, very attractive. You know whether or not that initial sales pitch.00:33:12.000 --> 00:33:29.000Erik Mogensen: translates into the long-term vision? I don't know. I firmly believe that, you know, Midwest skiers are some of the most authentic and purposeful, you know, skiers on the continent, and they'll figure it out. I think we have lots of options, there's no question.00:33:29.000 --> 00:33:38.000Erik Mogensen: But none of them are going to be quite like those Midwest family resorts. And so we'll have to see what happens. It stings, but I don't.00:33:38.000 --> 00:33:42.000Erik Mogensen: What I've really learned about Indy is that.00:33:42.000 --> 00:33:47.000Erik Mogensen: Our our strength is in the diversity of of.00:33:47.000 --> 00:33:56.000Erik Mogensen: the resorts that we've put together. It's not on a… it's not on a single one resort, or a single resort operator. Um, so…00:33:56.000 --> 00:34:01.000Erik Mogensen: I hate losing resorts, but I'm never afraid to lose them and/or replace them if necessary.00:34:01.000 --> 00:34:12.000Stuart Winchester: So, when they go to ICON, there's a couple different tiers for ICON. So, Midwest family went to the traditional 7-5 tier of 7 on full ICON, 5 on ICON base. Today.00:34:12.000 --> 00:34:19.000Stuart Winchester: I kind of announced that Cabaret, a former IndyPass partner that actually just left Indy, was a founding member in 2019.00:34:19.000 --> 00:34:32.000Stuart Winchester: left for Icon. That news just broke. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. Buck Hill similarly left Indy for Icon today, a couple of years ago. Is that too new to process, or what are your thoughts on Cabra Fact?00:34:31.000 --> 00:34:48.000Erik Mogensen: Yeah, I think it's exactly the same where, you know, we, we, you know, Cabrifay is a great ski area. Um, we're sad to see them go. We, you know, look, they're independent for a reason. They get to make their choice. They've made their choice. They're going to go to Icon. The consumers can make their choice of where they go and where they want to.00:34:48.000 --> 00:35:05.000Erik Mogensen: they want to spend their time and money. You know, we're going to fight as hard as we can to drive as much value for the operators and the consumers as possible. I can tell you, we had some people that had left for that icon two day product that now want to come back because of the payout.00:35:02.000 --> 00:35:04.000Stuart Winchester: Okay.00:35:05.000 --> 00:35:22.000Erik Mogensen: Or lack thereof. So, look, none of this is static. One thing I can absolutely guarantee everybody on the pass and everyone listening to this is, is this is going to happen every single year forever. You're going to have people come, you're going to have people go. And we're all going to think it's way more consequential.00:35:10.000 --> 00:35:11.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:35:22.000 --> 00:35:33.000Erik Mogensen: than it actually is. The reality is, is that indie sales for the last 7 seasons continue to go like this, and we're directing more and more.00:35:33.000 --> 00:35:39.000Erik Mogensen: revenue, meaningful revenue to these independent resorts. And that's not going to stop.00:35:39.000 --> 00:35:43.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah. The, uh… another place you have…00:35:43.000 --> 00:35:45.000Stuart Winchester: Good.00:35:46.000 --> 00:35:55.000Stuart Winchester: cluster is the Pacific Northwest. Mission Ridge and Blacktail, which are jointly owned, recently announced that they left, and I reached out.00:35:55.000 --> 00:35:57.000Stuart Winchester: to…00:35:57.000 --> 00:35:59.000Stuart Winchester: Mission Ridge.00:35:59.000 --> 00:36:06.000Stuart Winchester: COO and GM Matt Neubauer, and I just asked him, you know, what's going on, and this was his email, this is a quote.00:36:06.000 --> 00:36:15.000Stuart Winchester: Mission Ridge's agreement ran through the end of the 25-26 season, and we declined to seek a new one. Being independent means making the calls we think are right for the mountain long term.00:36:15.000 --> 00:36:32.000Stuart Winchester: So, that's basically echoing what you just said, the mountains will make the right decision. Uh, Blacktail's situation is different. This is a continuation of the email. Uh, they reached out to establish a new agreement before the old one ended and did not get engagement on it. Indy did reach out after passes, went back on sale September 1st, but by then, Blacktail had moved on.00:36:32.000 --> 00:36:42.000Stuart Winchester: and was preparing for the season ahead. So that was the rationale that I have for Matt. He didn't want to talk about it further publicly, but that was his on-the-record statement.00:36:43.000 --> 00:36:59.000Erik Mogensen: Yeah, I, I, you know, look, Stu, I, I think as good as it is for your ratings, you know, I, we're not gonna hang out every, every scary as, you know, laundry and every single conversation. Um, I would disagree with how that was had. I think, I think one of the greatest things about India is we have.00:36:53.000 --> 00:36:55.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:36:59.000 --> 00:37:09.000Erik Mogensen: 300-plus resorts around the world. One of the hard things about Indy is that we have 300-plus resorts around the world. It's a lot of contracts to manage, it's a lot of things.00:37:06.000 --> 00:37:07.000Stuart Winchester: Okay.00:37:09.000 --> 00:37:19.000Erik Mogensen: I could, like, tell you from the ski area operating, um, perspective, like, I feel everything's nice and chill all summer, and we're doing really good, and then all of a sudden it's, you know.00:37:19.000 --> 00:37:35.000Erik Mogensen: September 1st, and it's like, wow, we got a lot to do in the next 60 days before we make snow. And I think every single ski area operator runs through that. Uh, and there's a lot going back. Stu, sometimes I have to go look at your spreadsheets to understand who's on the pass.00:37:35.000 --> 00:37:52.000Erik Mogensen: That's why we usually give everything to you ahead of time so that you can, like, count them up and do the math and do everything. So it's hard. But I would say, that team at Blacktail is world class. Jesse is and is incredible. We've I've always had a great relationship with Jesse.00:37:52.000 --> 00:38:08.000Erik Mogensen: We'd welcome them on the pass. I don't think that that's changed. And I think that Blacktail and Mission Ridge are two very different ski areas. And I'm really fascinated and hopeful that they figure out a way.00:38:08.000 --> 00:38:10.000Erik Mogensen: how to make the whole thing work between the two of them.00:38:10.000 --> 00:38:28.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, you still have a really nice set of resorts out there with White Pass, and 49 Degrees North, and Mount Hood Meadows, and Bluewood, and Brundage, and Tamarack. And Tamarack's interesting, because so Tamarack, and I want to clarify this, I've actually gotten a lot of inquiries about this, people emailing me telling me my charts are wrong.00:38:28.000 --> 00:38:43.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, which… which happens, you know, they're… they're big and… and, uh, unwieldy, so I get things wrong, but that's… they're always a work in progress. But, uh, they're telling me Tamarack's not in the past because they joined Icon today, which… which obviously they did. Uh…00:38:43.000 --> 00:38:46.000Stuart Winchester: So what's going on with Tamarack? Are they on Indy?00:38:46.000 --> 00:38:59.000Erik Mogensen: Tamarack's on Indy, um, you know, we're excited about Tamarack, we've always been excited about Tamarack. Again, Scott, really great operator, um, super smart guy, great ownership group.00:38:59.000 --> 00:39:13.000Erik Mogensen: You know, I think we could probably comment on that a little bit further. But you know my job is not to speak for these resorts, Stu. My my job is to support them, and there's a difference between supporting them and speaking for them.00:39:07.000 --> 00:39:08.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah. Okay.00:39:13.000 --> 00:39:20.000Erik Mogensen: So, I'll always support them, and what Tamarack decides to do and where they decide to sit is good, but.00:39:20.000 --> 00:39:23.000Erik Mogensen: I'm comfortable saying that Tamarack's on Indy.00:39:23.000 --> 00:39:37.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, in general, you know, when Buck Hill joined the Icon 2 Day last year, you said adios. I think that's what was my understanding from a distance, correct me if I'm wrong. What was different about the Tamarack situation? Why are you making the exception for Tamarack?00:39:37.000 --> 00:39:52.000Erik Mogensen: Look, I think, look, Icon's aggressive. They're aggressive. They're trying to add as many people as they possibly can to that two-day pass. You know, I think that there's a lot of promises on that, and I think they have a very aggressive sales team.00:39:52.000 --> 00:40:08.000Erik Mogensen: Which is which is good. They're they're, you know, trying to replicate what Indy has done. So we'll just have to see what happens. But I would say that I would I would say that, you know, I have a I have a good relationship with a couple people over in that organization.00:40:08.000 --> 00:40:15.000Erik Mogensen: And I think they're trying to figure out what they're going to do. But there's no question that we're in, you know, pretty intense competition right now.00:40:08.000 --> 00:40:09.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:40:16.000 --> 00:40:18.000Stuart Winchester: All right, let's…00:40:18.000 --> 00:40:32.000Stuart Winchester: wrap up on that. Let's talk about Snow King, because the Indy Pass, you know, part of the reason the Indy Pass is able to grow so fast, from my point of view, was Doug had this great insight that the ski areas that Epic and Icon were overlooking.00:40:32.000 --> 00:40:38.000Stuart Winchester: Did have value collected onto a pass, and when you put them all together as a dynamite product.00:40:38.000 --> 00:40:47.000Stuart Winchester: and now I think, as you said, ICON's going for that, and then you have the Snow Pass, and the Snow Pass, uh…00:40:47.000 --> 00:41:02.000Stuart Winchester: has signed Snow King as a partner, and that's a long-time Indy Pass partner, and I can read these emails if you'd like, or you can just talk through it yourself on how you see the Snow King.00:41:02.000 --> 00:41:03.000Stuart Winchester: um…00:41:03.000 --> 00:41:05.000Stuart Winchester: conflict here.00:41:05.000 --> 00:41:20.000Erik Mogensen: Yeah, look, I wouldn't really say that there is any controversy here. I think Snow King is staying on Indy. Um, you know, Ryan and I never discussed any sort of litigation, and I connected him directly with you so that he could, you know, explain the situation for himself.00:41:21.000 --> 00:41:36.000Erik Mogensen: Look, again, it's not my job to get out in front and speak for these resorts. These are really great resorts with phenomenal and sophisticated operators, and they can speak for themselves. So, what I can do, Stu, is, you know, say, hey, Ryan.00:41:36.000 --> 00:41:43.000Erik Mogensen: you know, you're on Indy, and you're not on the snow pass, copy you on that email, and then you can read the email to the group.00:41:43.000 --> 00:41:46.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, the email…00:41:47.000 --> 00:41:50.000Stuart Winchester: from Ryan said.00:41:51.000 --> 00:42:06.000Stuart Winchester: Stuart, hi Stuart, this is Ryan Stanley, General Manager of Snow King. That is correct, we're going to remain on the Indy Pass this upcoming season and also offer two free tickets to the Snow Pass holders without receiving compensation, meaning Snow King will not receive compensation.00:42:06.000 --> 00:42:16.000Stuart Winchester: We are fairly desperate for some skier visits and are working on an offer for free and or $20 tickets to other pass holders as well. You know, I…00:42:16.000 --> 00:42:18.000Stuart Winchester: Ran this…00:42:18.000 --> 00:42:20.000Stuart Winchester: Bye.00:42:20.000 --> 00:42:22.000Stuart Winchester: Snow pass and.00:42:22.000 --> 00:42:26.000Stuart Winchester: I can read this email from Joe Heschen that he sent me today.00:42:26.000 --> 00:42:33.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, he said, Hi Stuart, I'm a bit confused by how this has become so complex. As stated, we have signed a signed agreement with Snow King.00:42:33.000 --> 00:42:43.000Stuart Winchester: While I would like to keep their details confidential, you are welcome to share ours. Our goal with this is not to profit, but rather to gather a group to work together for the betterment of the industry.00:42:43.000 --> 00:42:56.000Stuart Winchester: And then, it sounds like Snow King will be working with Indy and Snow Pass this season, which is great news for them. Thank you. Go Hessian. So, from Snow Pass's point of view, Snow King is still on both passes.00:42:57.000 --> 00:43:16.000Erik Mogensen: I don't know, Stu's starting to sound like a big old, you know, fun high school group text message here. I don't, I, you know, I don't know what to tell you. Um, again, I think Ryan's email's pretty clear. I'm not gonna speak for Ryan, not gonna speak for Joe. Um, they're definitely, you know, Snow King is definitely on the Indy Pass. We're definitely gonna pay them, just like we have.00:43:16.000 --> 00:43:21.000Erik Mogensen: every year. We're definitely gonna push a lot of visits to them. Um, you know, I'm not…00:43:21.000 --> 00:43:33.000Erik Mogensen: entirely sure, uh, beyond that. Uh, and, and, you know, Ryan, again, Ryan's a really smart guy. I've enjoyed talking to him. Um, I've spent a…00:43:33.000 --> 00:43:49.000Erik Mogensen: few, you know, longer phone calls, and he is desperate for skier visits, and I get that. He's a small skier area in the shadow of Jackson Hole, and doesn't have a ton of population to pull from. Most of the population that's coming through is destination visits.00:43:49.000 --> 00:43:57.000Erik Mogensen: And he needs more skier visits. We… we want Snow King to get skier visits. We… we… and if Ryan wants to comp…00:43:57.000 --> 00:44:07.000Erik Mogensen: you know, snow pass holders, or icon pass holders, or epic pass holders, then that's fine. I think that's great. But just because Ryan is going to comp.00:44:03.000 --> 00:44:04.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:44:07.000 --> 00:44:18.000Erik Mogensen: the Snow Pass doesn't mean that he's on the Snow Pass, and just because Ryan is going to comp Icon Pass holders, that doesn't mean that he's joined the Icon Pass. Um, all I can come down to, again.00:44:18.000 --> 00:44:27.000Erik Mogensen: is that Snow King's on the Indy Pass, um, and from our perspective, they're giving some free tickets to some of the other passes.00:44:27.000 --> 00:44:35.000Erik Mogensen: Hopefully, that checks everyone's box for early September ski area drama.00:44:35.000 --> 00:44:43.000Stuart Winchester: All right, it is an ongoing story. I just have a lot of conflicting information from…00:44:42.000 --> 00:44:56.000Erik Mogensen: What we should do is just, you know, get Uncle Joe on the call, and get Ryan on the call, and you on the call, and we all talk about it, right? Like, I think it's… I don't think it's that complicated, and frankly, it's not that big of a deal.00:44:56.000 --> 00:45:12.000Erik Mogensen: And I question the intentions behind making it a big deal. I think that, you know, Snowpass is definitely looking for us to bite into a controversy, and we're just not going to.00:45:12.000 --> 00:45:22.000Erik Mogensen: We're just not going to. We… our job is to focus on the independent resorts and make sure that we drive more visits to more independent resorts.00:45:22.000 --> 00:45:23.000Erik Mogensen: more often.00:45:23.000 --> 00:45:31.000Erik Mogensen: It's really simple, you know, and I think, I think in general too, Stu, like, you know.00:45:24.000 --> 00:45:26.000Stuart Winchester: Do you? Yeah.00:45:31.000 --> 00:45:46.000Erik Mogensen: What I've gotten from a lot of our operators and partners and people in skiing is they're just very confused by this. And again, it might be good for ratings or listeners, but there is no litigation here.00:45:46.000 --> 00:45:56.000Erik Mogensen: there is no problem with Snow King. They're a great, valued partner. You know, this comment, you know, an idea around democratizing skiing, right? Like.00:45:56.000 --> 00:46:08.000Erik Mogensen: you know, let's let every resort build their own reciprocal deal with, you know, Jersey Joe's commission-based software pitch, right? That's cute, that sounds nice, but in practice, IndiePass exists for a reason.00:46:08.000 --> 00:46:12.000Erik Mogensen: It's a lot more work for skier is and most importantly.00:46:12.000 --> 00:46:20.000Erik Mogensen: It's much more fragmented and a confusing product for the consumer. A single pass with a single price point.00:46:20.000 --> 00:46:22.000Erik Mogensen: And a lot of partners.00:46:22.000 --> 00:46:28.000Erik Mogensen: you know, mitigates the patchwork of one-off deals, and that's the whole reason IndyPass exists.00:46:28.000 --> 00:46:37.000Erik Mogensen: More people skiing more often at independent resorts, right? Like, we redirect tens of millions of dollars a year to independent operators.00:46:38.000 --> 00:46:48.000Erik Mogensen: Arguing that somehow the absence of the IndyPass is better for the industry is nonsensical at best. It would just give Icon and Epic a more…00:46:48.000 --> 00:46:51.000Erik Mogensen: More opportunity to eat our lunch. So…00:46:51.000 --> 00:47:02.000Erik Mogensen: you know, we can… we can dive into all the muddy details all day long, but I don't see any controversy here. We're super excited to have snowpack… I mean…00:47:02.000 --> 00:47:04.000Erik Mogensen: Snow King.00:47:04.000 --> 00:47:15.000Erik Mogensen: on the Indy Pass. Um, and, you know, maybe you just have to come up with a different color for it on your spreadsheet, like some sort of gradient between the two. Whatever you want to do, we trust you.00:47:15.000 --> 00:47:32.000Stuart Winchester: Let me zoom out a little and make this a little more conceptual, because you've told me before that IndyPass doesn't make money, and I believe you're still sticking to Doug's original ratio of 15% for admin, which I doubt covers admin. So 85% traditionally was paid out to the resorts, correct?00:47:33.000 --> 00:47:49.000Erik Mogensen: Correct. Oh, yeah. Still the case. Yeah. No, I mean, look, we, we, you know, 85% of every passport just goes back to the independents. And remember, look, we, we take 100% of our money in on credit cards. We pay the ski resorts in check cash. Right. So we're also eating that credit card fee.00:47:33.000 --> 00:47:36.000Stuart Winchester: Is that still it? Okay.00:47:40.000 --> 00:47:41.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:47:49.000 --> 00:47:59.000Erik Mogensen: So now you're down to, you know, 12% in change. Running a pass like this, it's not profitable. We never looked at this as being profitable.00:47:52.000 --> 00:47:53.000Stuart Winchester: Right.00:47:59.000 --> 00:48:10.000Erik Mogensen: I really bought IndyPass because I knew that Doug was going to exit and needed to exit, and I thought some of the other people that would buy the pass.00:48:10.000 --> 00:48:21.000Erik Mogensen: would view it more as a media company or a marketing opportunity, and less of something that I think is very important for the independents. So…00:48:21.000 --> 00:48:39.000Erik Mogensen: Uh, you know, Snowpass has committed to giving 80% back, um, to the resorts in their first year, and then something else beyond that, right? And the difference between 80% and 5%, right? You know, it sounds like 5%, but if you actually do the math, that's a 25% difference.00:48:39.000 --> 00:48:49.000Erik Mogensen: Uh, and so we pay every resort the same percentage back of their, you know, top ticket price. We've always done that, um, so…00:48:50.000 --> 00:48:55.000Erik Mogensen: That's what we do, that's what we've done, that's what worked, and that's what we.00:48:54.000 --> 00:48:59.000Stuart Winchester: So to zoom out to the conceptual level a little bit here, I want to look at…00:48:59.000 --> 00:49:09.000Stuart Winchester: Snow King's neighbor, Jackson Hole. Okay, so Jackson Hole is on Icon. They're also on Mountain Collective. You've taken a pretty firm stand that Indy.00:49:09.000 --> 00:49:16.000Stuart Winchester: partners should be exclusive with Indy. If you're looking at a ski area like Snow King that is desperate for.00:49:16.000 --> 00:49:18.000Stuart Winchester: for visits.00:49:18.000 --> 00:49:24.000Stuart Winchester: why cut that pathway off? Why is it important to make indie exclusive and not say, okay.00:49:24.000 --> 00:49:39.000Stuart Winchester: case by case, if you're, uh, you know, certain resorts, if we don't have an exclusivity agreement with you, like, maybe you want to give, you know, Brundage a higher payout because they're a destination and… and to be exclusive, but maybe some of these other ones, you give them all the tools in the toolbox. What…00:49:39.000 --> 00:49:42.000Stuart Winchester: Why is that not an option? Or is it an option?00:49:40.000 --> 00:49:48.000Erik Mogensen: Yeah, I just, I think it complicates things, number one. Number two, I just don't find it very equitable. The great thing about IndyPass, look, I get…00:49:48.000 --> 00:49:58.000Erik Mogensen: There's a lot of conversations all the time when we have a larger resort wanting to join, or has joined, or wants to renew about getting a bigger payout.00:49:58.000 --> 00:50:08.000Erik Mogensen: What I can tell you for as long as I own and run IndyPass, I'm going to treat every single resort the same. I'm not going to make special side deals.00:50:08.000 --> 00:50:14.000Erik Mogensen: That's just what we're going to do. I think it's a mistake to do that.00:50:14.000 --> 00:50:20.000Erik Mogensen: Everyone's going to get the same. Everyone's going to be the same. Everyone's going to get the same percentage payout.00:50:14.000 --> 00:50:15.000Stuart Winchester: It.00:50:15.000 --> 00:50:17.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:50:20.000 --> 00:50:23.000Erik Mogensen: No special deals.00:50:23.000 --> 00:50:37.000Stuart Winchester: So let me wrap on that point. So you added Smugs, your New England network is lights out. You know, like I said, Jay, Smugs, Cannon, Waterville, Saddleback, and a bunch of smaller places, including Black Mountain. Doug was concerned when he started the pass.00:50:37.000 --> 00:50:48.000Stuart Winchester: About dilution in the marketplace, and if you put too many ski areas in a market, you would both cannibalize their season pass, and drive down their yield, or their eventual payout.00:50:49.000 --> 00:51:04.000Stuart Winchester: you have filled in a lot more density, and when I've asked you about it in the past, you said that's a data-driven decision, so can you break that down for us, and what gives you confidence that adding smugs is not going to take away from.00:51:04.000 --> 00:51:08.000Stuart Winchester: Fulton Valley, or Jay Peak, or Cannon, or Titus.00:51:08.000 --> 00:51:23.000Erik Mogensen: Well, we know exactly how many pass holders we're adding every single year, right? We, we have a unique control over how many passes we sell, right? So we have, we know the data that comes in on one lever and we 100% control the amount.00:51:11.000 --> 00:51:12.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:51:23.000 --> 00:51:43.000Erik Mogensen: of passes in that lever that we sell. So it's just simple math, right? It isn't even that complex of a spreadsheet. Uh, you wouldn't even have to have it in a spreadsheet. So we need to add enough customers to make sure that we don't over dilute Bolton's payout or those things. And what's remarkable is the data shows us this is, I think now our fourth season.00:51:43.000 --> 00:51:49.000Erik Mogensen: of owning and operating the IndyPass is that we just keep going in the right direction.00:51:49.000 --> 00:52:04.000Erik Mogensen: And that's the reality. Like, JPEAK and Bolton's payout, the check that they get from IndyPass and take to the bank to pay their bills and buy more chairlifts and more snowmaking pipe and pay their employees, is only getting bigger and bigger.00:52:04.000 --> 00:52:08.000Erik Mogensen: With smugs on the pass. And again, I cannot.00:52:08.000 --> 00:52:23.000Erik Mogensen: reiterate enough how sophisticated of an operator these guys are. Like, the DeLauriers are smart. They see the numbers, you know? Christian Knapp at PGRI, he sees the numbers. Steve Wright, these are smart guys. John Schaefer, the…00:52:23.000 --> 00:52:27.000Erik Mogensen: Really smart. You know, if they figure it out.00:52:27.000 --> 00:52:30.000Erik Mogensen: I think that that itself.00:52:29.000 --> 00:52:38.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, Jay has been, uh, has recommitted to Indy several times, uh, through one-year contracts. All right, Eric, IndyPass is still on sale?00:52:38.000 --> 00:52:56.000Erik Mogensen: Uh, 80 Pass is on sale right now, yes. I think what we've announced is we've said tomorrow's the day. I think we could go into midday Saturday. Um, it's… it's hard to tell, right? We look at a couple numbers, we look at people that have put things in their cart, and what the potential conversion rate is, and where things go, and…00:52:56.000 --> 00:53:01.000Erik Mogensen: the geography around them. We definitely have a very firm ceiling on what we're gonna sell.00:53:02.000 --> 00:53:10.000Erik Mogensen: When we're going to sell that through, that's the hard part. But yeah, we've identified that tomorrow's the day.00:53:08.000 --> 00:53:16.000Stuart Winchester: And this will be the end of 26-27 IndyPass sales guaranteed, or is there a chance for a flash December sale or something?00:53:15.000 --> 00:53:30.000Erik Mogensen: There is never a guarantee of anything in this thing. We are talking to some pretty major additions as well that I think would be meaningful, and we'll have to decide if that's a this year thing or a next year thing with them.00:53:19.000 --> 00:53:20.000Stuart Winchester: Okay.00:53:30.000 --> 00:53:46.000Stuart Winchester: I mean, you've already added over 40 new partners. India has more partners than Epic, Icon, Mountain Collective, Snowpass, and Mountain Collective Capital's Powerpass combined around the world. So you're saying we should expect or could expect more partners?00:53:31.000 --> 00:53:32.000Erik Mogensen: Alright.00:53:46.000 --> 00:53:49.000Stuart Winchester: In advance of the 26-27 winter?00:53:48.000 --> 00:54:02.000Erik Mogensen: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I can tell you that there will definitely be some more. And I think, Stu, it's actually about 60 new additions. And I know you don't like to count the cross-country ski areas, but we should maybe find a separate tab for them on the spreadsheet.00:54:02.000 --> 00:54:04.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:54:02.000 --> 00:54:12.000Erik Mogensen: Every ski area matters to us here, whether it's cross country or downhill or big or small. I think that's what makes us different.00:54:11.000 --> 00:54:27.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, you know, I didn't start stop counting them out of malice. I stopped because I couldn't really understand them, and the maps kind of looked like a brain scan, and some would leave, and it was just a lot. I was already trying to track too much.00:54:27.000 --> 00:54:44.000Stuart Winchester: I will take that piece of advice, though, and I will see if I can find a place where they make sense. Eric, really appreciate everything today, appreciate everything you're doing with Indy and Black Mountain, and look forward to catching up with you again really soon.00:54:44.000 --> 00:54:49.000Erik Mogensen: Yeah. Thanks so much, Stu. Keep those spreadsheets going, dude.00:54:46.000 --> 00:54:47.000Stuart Winchester: Alright.00:54:48.000 --> 00:54:51.000Stuart Winchester: That's all I do.00:54:49.000 --> 00:54:52.000Erik Mogensen: Yeah, I know. See ya.00:54:51.000 --> 00:54:53.000Stuart Winchester: All right, take care.00:54:52.000 --> 00:54:53.000Erik Mogensen: Bye.00:54:55.000 --> 00:55:05.000Stuart Winchester: All right, that was Eric Mogensen, director of IndyPass, owner of Black Mountain, responding to some of the questions.00:55:06.000 --> 00:55:21.000Stuart Winchester: initial conversation I had with Joe Heschen the other day. So, uh, that's great. We have no more clarity on Snow King, and this episode went a little off the rails, because I need to… there's gonna be a lot of experimentation here, guys.00:55:21.000 --> 00:55:35.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, the… the opening take, I'm realizing, I don't know if I should be recording that before the guest. I think maybe I need to start with the guest, because otherwise, I end up having to cut myself short. So…00:55:35.000 --> 00:55:39.000Stuart Winchester: I want to get to some reader reaction.00:55:39.000 --> 00:55:42.000Stuart Winchester: To close us out today.00:55:42.000 --> 00:55:44.000Stuart Winchester: And…00:55:44.000 --> 00:55:47.000Stuart Winchester: The first comes from…00:55:47.000 --> 00:55:49.000Stuart Winchester: Matt Hart.00:55:49.000 --> 00:56:03.000Stuart Winchester: He said, really, this is in reaction to Brian Norton's interview yesterday about Loon Mountain's expansion. Matt Hart, really good, loved Brian's description of the expansion and how they will make it work from an operations point of view.00:56:03.000 --> 00:56:06.000Stuart Winchester: Catcher's mitt for snow, love it.00:56:06.000 --> 00:56:21.000Stuart Winchester: And then, and then Matt asks, did he give you grief for calling the Timbertown expansion that little one LOL? I, no, he didn't, but, but it is, I mean, it was a 30 acre expansion on a huge ski area. So, uh, I don't know, maybe, I think they, uh.00:56:22.000 --> 00:56:36.000Stuart Winchester: you know, I'm always the tourist, so anytime I'm asking these guys anything, they… I think that it sounds a little ridiculous, because they live it every day of their life. It would be like them asking me a question about my cats, you know, it's something that I'm around every day.00:56:36.000 --> 00:56:46.000Stuart Winchester: All right, this is a comment from Robert, a paid subscriber, which is the way you can interact with the show is to be a paid subscriber to the Storm Skiing Podcast.00:56:46.000 --> 00:57:00.000Stuart Winchester: Robert says, again, of the Brian Norton pod yesterday, great second effort. Are you planning to stick to a drop time of about 4 p.m. Eastern time? What is your anticipated schedule? Daily, four days a week, three?00:57:00.000 --> 00:57:07.000Stuart Winchester: 4pm drop makes for a nice way to wrap up the day, at least for those in a compatible time zone.00:57:07.000 --> 00:57:22.000Stuart Winchester: And then Brian Bench, paid subscriber, says, ditto on sharing the anticipated schedule. We humans are creatures of habit, and so would be great to know when we can generally expect these to land. Excited for your chat with Eric today. Well…00:57:22.000 --> 00:57:23.000Stuart Winchester: Brian.00:57:23.000 --> 00:57:26.000Stuart Winchester: I have an amazing guest.00:57:26.000 --> 00:57:29.000Stuart Winchester: scheduled for…00:57:29.000 --> 00:57:46.000Stuart Winchester: Sep

There is a bronze soldier standing on the courthouse lawn in Smithfield. He has been there since 1926. He stands at parade rest — chin up, eyes forward — with the posture of a man who doesn't yet know what's waiting for him.On the stone beneath his feet: forty-seven names.Buck Hill. Pearlie H. Harris. Maudius Godwin. Charlie Wall.Tobacco farmers. Mill workers. Farm boys from Four Oaks and Kenly and the banks of the Little River. They went to France. They did not come home.

This Saturday teams will race down Buck Hill in Burnsville on mattresses for a good cause. Bedrace for Bridging raises money to help people transition into stable housing. Shunzyu Haigler is the Director of Development at the non profit and talks about the event and the impact it has for those who need help.

This Saturday teams will race down Buck Hill in Burnsville on mattresses for a good cause. Bedrace for Bridging raises money to help people transition into stable housing. Shunzyu Haigler is the Director of Development at the non profit and talks about the event and the impact it has for those who need help.

If you think back to Valentine's Day 2025, you may remember the release of a dating reality show featuring a group of Minnesotans.‘Love is Blind: Minneapolis' portrayed the relationships of five couples who got engaged after a short, but intense period of dating, without ever seeing one another. Later in the show, the couples came back to the Twin Cities and put places like Buck Hill, Bryant Lake Bowl and the Como Conservatory on screens around the world. MPR News mapped the filming locations, talked to cast members and heard mixed reactions from fans.At the end of the season, just one couple said “I do” at the altar. Taylor and Daniel Hastings renewed their vows this summer and recently celebrated their favorite holiday, Christmas, together for the first time since their relationship became public. They joined MPR News host Nina Moini to talk about life after the show.

On Sept. 11, 2001, Tom Burnett was aboard a hijacked airliner when it crashed in rural Pennsylvania. Tom grew up in Bloomington. He managed to call his wife Deena four times from his cell phone before the plane went down.Just two months after the terrorist attack, Deena Burnett sat down with MPR News deputy managing editor Lorna Benson. We listen back to their conversation as people gather across the state to remember the nearly 3,000 lives lost on 9/11.Buck Hill is hosting a remembrance concert. In St. Cloud, the Army ROTC Fighting Saints Battalion is organizing a memorial stair climb. And this weekend Austin, Minn., will hold a 9/11 heroes run.

This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on Feb. 12. It dropped for free subscribers on Feb. 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:WhoDavid Makarsky, General Manager of Camelback Resort, PennsylvaniaRecorded onFebruary 8, 2024About CamelbackClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: KSL Capital, managed by KSL ResortsLocated in: Tannersville, PennsylvaniaYear founded: 1963Pass affiliations:* Ikon Pass: 7 days, no blackouts* Ikon Base Pass: 5 days, holiday blackoutsReciprocal partners: NoneClosest neighboring ski areas: Shawnee Mountain (:24), Jack Frost (:26), Big Boulder (:27), Skytop Lodge (:29), Saw Creek (:37), Blue Mountain (:41), Pocono Ranchlands (:43), Montage (:44), Hideout (:51), Elk Mountain (1:05), Bear Creek (1:09), Ski Big Bear (1:16)Base elevation: 1,252 feetSummit elevation: 2,079 feetVertical drop: 827 feetSkiable Acres: 166Average annual snowfall: 50 inchesTrail count: 38 (3 Expert Only, 6 Most Difficult, 13 More Difficult, 16 Easiest) + 1 terrain parkLift count: 13 (1 high-speed six-pack, 1 high-speed quad, 1 fixed-grip quad, 3 triples, 3 doubles, 4 carpets – view Lift Blog's inventory of Camelback's lift fleet)View historic Camelback trailmaps on skimap.org.Why I interviewed himAt night it heaves from the frozen darkness in funhouse fashion, 800 feet high and a mile wide, a billboard for human life and activity that is not a gas station or a Perkins or a Joe's Vape N' Puff. The Poconos are a peculiar and complicated place, a strange borderland between the Midwest, the Mid-Atlantic, and the Northeast. Equidistant from New York City and Philadelphia, approaching the northern tip of Appalachia, framed by the Delaware Water Gap to the east and hundreds of miles of rolling empty wilderness to the west, the Poconos are gorgeous and decadent, busyness amid abandonment, cigarette-smoking cement truck drivers and New Jersey-plated Mercedes riding 85 along the pinched lanes of Interstate 80 through Stroudsburg. “Safety Corridor, Speed Limit 50,” read the signs that everyone ignores.But no one can ignore Camelback, at least not at night, at least not in winter, as the mountain asserts itself over I-80. Though they're easy to access, the Poconos keeps most of its many ski areas tucked away. Shawnee hides down a medieval access road, so narrow and tree-cloaked that you expect to be ambushed by poetry-spewing bandits. Jack Frost sits at the end of a long access road, invisible even upon arrival, the parking lot seated, as it is, at the top of the lifts. Blue Mountain boasts prominence, rising, as it does, to the Appalachian Trail, but it sits down a matrix of twisting farm roads, off the major highway grid.Camelback, then, is one of those ski areas that acts not just as a billboard for itself, but for all of skiing. This, combined with its impossibly fortuitous location along one of the principal approach roads to New York City, makes it one of the most important ski areas in America. A place that everyone can see, in the midst of drizzling 50-degree brown-hilled Poconos February, is filled with snow and life and fun. “Oh look, an organized sporting complex that grants me an alternative to hating winter. Let's go try that.”The Poconos are my best argument that skiing not only will survive climate change, but has already perfected the toolkit to do so. Skiing should not exist as a sustained enterprise in these wild, wet hills. It doesn't snow enough and it rains all the time. But Poconos ski area operators invested tens of millions of dollars to install seven brand-new chairlifts in 2022. They didn't do this in desperate attempts to salvage dying businesses, but as modernization efforts for businesses that are kicking off cash.In six of the past eight seasons, (excluding 2020), Camelback spun lifts into April. That's with season snowfall totals of (counting backwards from the 2022-23 season), 23 inches, 58 inches, 47 inches, 29 inches, 35 inches, 104 inches (in the outlier 2017-18 season), 94 inches, 24 inches, and 28 inches. Mammoth gets more than that from one atmospheric river. But Camelback and its Poconos brothers have built snowmaking systems so big and effective, even in marginal temperatures, that skiing is a fixture in a place where nature would have it be a curiosity.What we talked aboutCamelback turns 60; shooting to ski into April; hiding a waterpark beneath the snow; why Camelback finally joined the Ikon Pass; why Camelback decided not to implement Ikon reservations; whether Camelback season passholders will have access to a discounted Ikon Base Pass; potential for a Camelback-Blue Mountain season pass; fixing the $75 season pass reprint fee (they did); when your job is to make sure other people have fun; rethinking the ski school and season-long programs; yes I'm obsessed with figuring out why KSL Capital owns Camelback and Blue Mountain rather than Alterra (of which KSL Capital is part-owner); much more than just a ski area; rethinking the base lodge deck; the transformative impact of Black Bear 6; what it would take to upgrade Stevenson Express; why and how Camelback aims to improve sky-high historic turnover rates (and why that should matter to skiers); internal promotions within KSL Resorts; working with sister resort Blue Mountain; rethinking Camelback's antique lift fleet; why terrain expansion is unlikely; Camelback's baller snowmaking system; everybody hates the paid parking; and long-term plans for the Summit House.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewA survey of abandoned ski areas across the Poconos underscores Camelback's resilience and adaptation. Like sharks or alligators, hanging on through mass extinctions over hundreds of millions of years, Camelback has found a way to thrive even as lesser ski centers have surrendered to the elements. The 1980 edition of The White Book of Ski Areas names at least 11 mountains – Mt. Tone, Hickory Ridge, Tanglwood, Pocono Manor, Buck Hill, Timber Hill (later Alpine Mountain), Tamiment Resort Hotel, Mt. Airy, Split Rock, Mt. Heidelberg, and Hahn Mountain – within an hour of Camelback that no longer exist as organized ski areas.Camelback was larger than all of those, but it was also smarter, aggressively expanding and modernizing snowmaking, and installing a pair of detachable chairlifts in the 1990s. It offered the first window into skiing modernity in a region where the standard chairlift configuration was the slightly ridiculous double-double.Still, as recently as 10 years ago, Camelback needed a refresh. It was crowded and chaotic, sure, but it also felt dumpy and drab, with aged buildings, overtaxed parking lots, wonky access roads, long lines, and bad food. The vibe was very second-rate oceanfront boardwalk, very take-it-or-leave-it, a dour self-aware insouciance that seemed to murmur, “hey, we know this ain't the Catskills, but if they're so great why don'chya go there?”Then, in 2015, a spaceship landed. A 453-room hotel with a water park the size of Lake George, it is a ridiculous building, a monstrosity on a hill, completely out of proportion with its surroundings. It looks like something that fell off the truck on its way to Atlantic City. And yet, that hotel ignited Camelback's renaissance. In a region littered with the wrecks of 1960s heart-shaped-hottub resorts, here was something vital and modern and clean. In a redoubt of day-ski facilities, here was a ski-in-ski-out option with decent restaurants and off-the-hill entertainment for the kids. In a drive-through region that felt forgotten and tired, here was something new that people would stop for.The owners who built that monstrosity/business turbo-booster sold Camelback to KSL Capital in 2019. KSL Capital also happens to be, along with Aspen owner Henry Crown, part owner of Alterra Mountain Company. I've never really understood why KSL outsourced the operation of Camelback and, subsequently, nearby Blue Mountain, to its hotel-management outfit KSL Resorts, rather than just bungee-cording both to Alterra's attack squadron of ski resorts, which includes Palisades Tahoe, Winter Park, Mammoth, Steamboat, Sugarbush, and 14 others, including, most recently, Arapahoe Basin and Schweitzer. It was as if the Ilitch family, which owns both the Detroit Tigers and Red Wings, had drafted hockey legend Steve Yzerman and then asked him to bat clean-up at Comerica Park.While I'm still waiting on a good answer to this question even as I annoy long lines of Alterra executives and PR folks by persisting with it, KSL Resorts has started to resemble a capable ski area operator. The company dropped new six-packs onto both Camelback and nearby Blue Mountain (which it also owns), for last ski season. RFID finally arrived and it works seamlessly, and mostly eliminates the soul-crushing ticket lines by installing QR-driven kiosks. Both ski areas are now on the Ikon Pass.But there is work to do. Liftlines – particularly at Stevenson and Sunbowl, where skiers load from two sides and no one seems interested in refereeing the chaos – are borderline anarchic; carriers loaded with one, two, three guests cycle up quad chairs all day long while liftlines stretch for 20 minutes. A sense of nickeling-and-diming follows you around the resort: a seven-dollar mandatory ski check for hotel guests; bags checked for outside snacks before entering the waterpark, where food lines on a busy day stretch dozens deep; and, of course, the mandatory paid parking.Camelback's paid-parking policy is, as far as I can tell, the biggest PR miscalculation in Northeast skiing. Everyone hates it. Everyone. As you can imagine, locals write to me all the time to express their frustrations with ski areas around the country. By far the complaint I see the most is about Camelback parking (the second-most-complained about resort, in case you're wondering, is Stratton, but for reasons other than parking). It's $12 minimum to park, every day, in every lot, for everyone except season passholders, with no discount for car-pooling. There is no other ski area east of the Mississippi (that I am aware of), that does this. Very few have paid parking at all, and even the ones that do (Stowe, Mount Snow), restrict it to certain lots on certain days, include free carpooling incentives, and offer large (albeit sometimes far), free parking lot options.I am not necessarily opposed to paid parking as a concept. It has its place, particularly as a crowd-control tool on very busy days. But imagine being the only bar on a street with six bars that requires a cover charge. It's off-putting when you encounter that outlier. I imagine Camelback makes a bunch of money on parking. But I wonder how many people roll up to redeem their Ikon Pass, pay for parking that one time, and decide to never return. Based on the number of complaints I get, it's not immaterial.There will always be an element of chaos to Pennsylvania skiing. It is like the Midwest in this way, with an outsized proportion of first-timers and overly confident Kamikaze Bros and busloads of kids from all over. But a very well-managed ski area, like, for instance, Elk Mountain, an hour north of Camelback, can at least somewhat tame these herds. I sense that Camelback can do this, even if it's not necessarily consistently doing it now. It has, in KSL Resorts, a monied owner, and it has, in the Ikon Pass, a sort of gold-stamp seal-of-approval. But that membership also gives it a standard to live up to. They know that. How close are they to doing it? That was the purpose of this conversation.What I got wrongI noted that the Black Bear 6 lift had a “750/800-foot” vertical drop. The lift actually rises 667 vertical feet.I accidentally said “setting Sullivan aside,” when asking Makarsky about upgrade plans for the rest of the lift fleet. I'd meant to say, “Stevenson.” Sullivan was the name of the old high-speed quad that Black Bear 6 replaced.Why you should ski CamelbackLet's start by acknowledging that Camelback is ridiculous. This is not because it is not a good ski area, because it is a very good ski area. The pitch is excellent, the fall lines sustained, the variety appealing, the vertical drop acceptable, the lift system (disorganized riders aside), quite good. But Camelback is ridiculous because of the comically terrible skill level of 90 percent of the people who ski there, and their bunchball concentrations on a handful of narrow green runs that cut across the fall line and intersect with cross-trails in alarmingly hazardous ways. Here is a pretty typical scene:I am, in general, more interested in making fun of very good skiers than very bad ones, as the former often possess an ego and a lack of self-awareness that transforms them into caricatures of themselves. I only point out the ineptitude of the average Camelback skier because navigating them is an inescapable fact of skiing there. They yardsale. They squat mid-trail. They take off their skis and walk down the hill. I observe these things like I observe deer poop lying in the woods – without judgement or reaction. It just exists and it's there and no one can say that it isn't (yes, there are plenty of fantastic skiers in the Poconos as well, but they are vastly outnumbered and you know it).So it's not Jackson Hole. Hell, it's not even Hunter Mountain. But Camelback is one of the few ski-in, ski-out options within two hours of New York City. It is impossibly easy to get to. The Cliffhanger trail, when it's bumped up, is one of the best top-to-bottom runs in Pennsylvania. Like all these ridge ski areas, Camelback skis a lot bigger than its 166 acres. And, because it exists in a place that it shouldn't – where natural snow would rarely permit a season exceeding 10 or 15 days – Camelback is often one of the first ski areas in the Northeast to approach 100 percent open. The snowmaking is unbelievably good, the teams ungodly capable.Go on a weekday if you can. Go early if you can. Prepare to be a little frustrated with the paid parking and the lift queues. But if you let Camelback be what it is – a good mid-sized ski area in a region where no such thing should exist – rather than try to make it into something it isn't, you'll have a good day.Podcast NotesOn Blue Mountain, PennsylvaniaSince we mention Camelback's sister resort, Blue Mountain, Pennsylvania, quite a bit, here's a little overview of that hill:Owned by: KSL Capital, managed by KSL ResortsLocated in: Palmerton, PennsylvaniaYear founded: 1977Pass access:* Ikon Pass: 7 days, no blackouts* Ikon Base Plus and Ikon Base Pass: 5 days, holiday blackoutsBase elevation: 460 feetSummit elevation: 1,600 feetVertical drop: 1,140 feetSkiable Acres: 164 acresAverage annual snowfall: 33 inchesTrail count: 40 (10% expert, 35% most difficult, 15% more difficult, 40% easiest)Lift count: 12 (2 high-speed six-packs, 1 high-speed quad, 1 triple, 1 double, 7 carpets – view Lift Blog's inventory of Blue Mountain's lift fleet)On bugging Rusty about Ikon PassIt's actually kind of hilarious how frequently I used to articulate my wishes that Camelback and Blue would join Alterra and the Ikon Pass. It must have seemed ridiculous to anyone peering east over the mountains. But I carried enough conviction about this that I brought it up to former Alterra CEO Rusty Gregory in back-to-back years. I wrote a whole bunch of articles about it too. But hey, some of us fight for rainforests and human rights and cancer vaccines, and some of us stand on the plains, wrapped in wolf furs and banging our shields until The System bows to our demands of five or seven days on the Ikon Pass at Camelback and Blue Mountain, depending upon your price point.On Ikon Pass reservationsIkon Pass reservations are poorly communicated, hard to find and execute, and not actually real. But the ski areas that “require” them for the 2023-24 ski season are Aspen Snowmass (all four mountains), Jackson Hole, Deer Valley, Big Sky, The Summit at Snoqualmie, Loon, and Windham. If you're not aware of this requirement or they're “sold out,” you'll be able to skate right through the RFID gates without issue. You may receive a tisk-tisk email afterward. You may even lose your pass (I'm told). Either way, it's a broken system in need of a technology solution both for the consumer (easy reservations directly on an Ikon app, rather than through the partner resort's website), and the resort (RFID technology that recognizes the lack of a reservation and prevents the skier from accessing the lift).On Ikon Pass Base season pass add-onsWe discuss the potential for Camelback 2024-25 season passholders to be able to add a discounted Ikon Base Pass onto their purchase. Most, but not all, non-Alterra-owned Ikon Pass partner mountains offered this option for the 2023-24 ski season. A non-exhaustive inventory that I conducted in September found the discount offered for season passes at Sugarloaf, Sunday River, Loon, Killington, Windham, Aspen, Big Sky, Taos, Alta, Snowbasin, Snowbird, Brighton, Jackson Hole, Sun Valley, Mt. Bachelor, and Boyne Mountain. Early-bird prices for those passes ranged from as low as $895 at Boyne Mountain to $2,890 for Deer Valley. Camelback's 2023-24 season pass debuted at just $649. Alterra requires partner passes to meet certain parameters, including a minimum price, in order to qualify passholders for the discounted Base pass. A simple fix here would be to offer a premium “Pennsylvania Pass” that's good for unlimited access at both Camelback and Blue, and that's priced at the current add-on rate ($849), to open access to the discounted Ikon Base for passholders.On conglomerates doing shared passesIn November, I published an analysis of every U.S.-based entity that owns or operates two or more ski areas. I've continued to revise my list, and I currently count 26 such operators. All but eight of them – Powdr, Fairbank Group, the Schoonover Family, the Murdock Family, Snow Partners, Omni Hotels, the Drake Family, and KSL Capital either offer a season pass that accesses all of their properties, or builds limited amounts of cross-mountain reciprocity into top-tier season passes. The robots aren't cooperating with me right now, but you can view the most current list here.On KSL ResortsKSL Resorts' property list looks more like a destination menu for deciding honeymooners than a company that happens to run two ski areas in the Pennsylvania Poconos. Mauritius, Fiji, The Maldives, Maui, Thailand… Tannersville, PA. It feels like a trap for the robots, who in their combing of our digital existence to piece together the workings of the human psyche, will simply short out when attempting to identify the parallels between the Outrigger Reef Waikiki Beach Resort and Camelback.On ski investment in the PoconosPoconos ski areas, once backwaters, have rapidly modernized over the past decade. As I wrote in 2022:Montage, Camelback, and Elk all made the expensive investment in RFID ticketing last offseason. Camelback and Blue are each getting brand-new six-packs this summer. Vail is clear-cutting its Poconos lift museum and dropping a total of five new fixed-grip quads across Jack Frost and Big Boulder (replacing a total of nine existing lifts). All of them are constantly upgrading their snowmaking plants.On Camelback's ownership historyFor the past 20 years, Camelback has mostly been owned by a series of uninteresting Investcos and property-management firms. But the ski area's founder, Jim Moore, was an interesting fellow. From his July 22, 2006 Pocono Record obituary:James "Jim" Moore, co-founder of Camelback Ski Area, died Thursday at age 90 at his home — at Camelback.Moore, a Kentucky-born, Harvard-trained tax attorney who began a lifelong love of skiing when he went to boarding school in Switzerland as a teenager, served as Camelback's president and CEO from 1963, when it was founded, to 1986."Jim Moore was a great man and an important part of the history of the Poconos," said Sam Newman, who succeeded Moore as Camelback's president. "He was a guiding force behind the building of Camelback."In 1958, Moore was a partner in the prominent Philadelphia law firm Pepper, Hamilton and Scheetz.He joined a small group of investors who partnered with East Stroudsburg brothers Alex and Charles Bensinger and others to turn the quaint Big Pocono Ski Area — open on weekends when there was enough natural snow — into Camelback Ski Area.Camelback developed one of the most advanced snowmaking systems in the country and diversified into a year-round destination for family recreation."He was one of the first people to use snowmaking," said Kathleen Marozzi, Moore's daughter. "It had never been done in the Poconos before. ... I remember the first year we opened we had no snow on the mountain."Marozzi said her father wanted to develop Camelback as a New England-type ski resort, with winding, scenic trails."He wanted a very pretty ski area," she said. "I remember when the mountain had nothing but trees on it; it had no trails.I also managed to find a circa 1951 trailmap of Big Pocono ski area on skimap.org:On Rival Racer at CamelbeachHere's a good overview of the “Rival Racer” waterslide that Makarsky mentions in our conversation:On the Stevenson ExpressHopefully KSL Resorts replaces Stevenson with another six-pack, like they did with Sullivan, and hopefully they can reconfigure it to load from one side (like Doppelmayr just did with Barker at Sunday River). Multi-directional loading is just the worst – the skiers don't know what to do with it, and you end up with a lot of half-empty chairs when no one is managing the line, which seems to be the case more often than not at Camelback.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 11/100 in 2024, and number 511 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. 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You can also subscribe to the free tier below:WhoNathan Birr, Chief Operating Officer of Buck Hill, MinnesotaRecorded onJanuary 26, 2024About Buck HillOwned by: David and Corrine (Chip) SolnerLocated in: Burnsville, MinnesotaYear founded: 1954Pass affiliations:* Indy Base Pass – 2 days with 16 holiday blackouts* Indy+ Pass – 2 days with no blackoutsClosest neighboring ski areas: Hyland Hills (:21), Como Park (:33), Afton Alps (:41), Elm Creek (:43), Welch Village (:46)Base elevation: 919 feetSummit elevation: 1,225 feetVertical drop: 306 feetSkiable Acres: 45 Average annual snowfall: 60 inchesTrail count: 14 (2 most difficult, 6 intermediate, 6 beginner), 4 terrain parksLift count: 9 (2 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 4 ropetows, 2 conveyors - view Lift Blog's inventory of Buck Hill's lift fleet)View historic Buck Hill trailmaps on skimap.org.Why I interviewed himBuck Hill rises like a ludicrous contraption, impossible there in the Twin Cities flatlands, like the ski resort knotted into Thneedville's inflatable glades and shirt-sleeve clime (1:25):How did it get there? What does it do? Did someone build it? At first, I thought someone must have, like Mount Brighton, Michigan. But no. The glaciers made it, a gift to the far future as these ice walls retreated and crumbled. It is the highest point for 200 miles in any direction.Before skiing, Native Americans used the hill as a vantage to stalk deer drinking from Crystal Lake. Thus the name. It has probably been “Buck Hill” for hundreds of years. Maybe thousands. Now the lake is covered in ice-fishing shanties all winter, and the hill is hemmed in by an interstate on one side and housing developments on all the rest. And the hill, 45 acres of fall line that erupts from seemingly nowhere for seemingly no reason, is covered with skiers.Good skiers. I am enormously fond of the Midwest's blue-collar ski scene, its skiers on rental gear in hunter-orange jackets, rat-packing with their buddies as a hootalong thing to do on a Wednesday night. This does not exist everywhere anymore, but in the Midwest skiing is still cheap and so it still does. And these rough fellows dot the slopes of Buck. But they don't define the place like they do at Spirit or Nub's Nob or Snowriver. Because what defines Buck Hill is the shin-guard-wearing, speed-suit wrapped, neon-accented-even-though-neon-has-been-over-for-30-years squadrons of velocity-monsters whipping through plastic poles drilled into the snow.It can be hard to square smallness with might. But England once ruled half the world from a nation roughly the size of Louisiana. Some intangible thing. And tiny Buck Hill, through intention, persistence, and a lack of really anything else to do, has established itself, over the decades, as one of the greatest ski-race-training centers on the planet, sending more than 50 athletes to the U.S. Ski Team. Credit founders Chuck and Nancy Stone for the vision; credit confused-upon-arrival Austrian Erich Sailer (“Where's the hill?” he supposedly asked), for building the race program; credit whatever stalled that glacier on that one spot long enough to leave us a playground that stuck around for 10,000 years until we invented chairlifts. Buck is a spectacular amalgam of luck and circumstance, an improbable place made essential.What we talked aboutBuck Hill's brand-new quad; party up top; the tallest point in 200 miles; Chuck and Nancy Stone, who started a ski area on a farmer's pasture; a glacier's present to skiers; the hazards of interstate-adjacent snowmaking; why the resort's founders and long-term owners finally sold the bump in 2015; Erich Sailer and Buck's incredible ski racing legacy; Lindsay Vonn; a perfect competition center sitting just outside of 3 million front doors; experiments in year-round skiing; the lift fleet; taming the electric bills; Buck's Great Parking Puzzle; the Indy Pass; why Buck chose Indy Pass over Ski Cooper; and $49 for a weekend lift ticket.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewA skier dropping into Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport can find skiing within half an hour in any direction. East to Vail-owned Afton Alps, north to city-owned Como Park, west to Hyland Hills and what are perhaps the fastest ropetows in America. I chose south, to Buck Hill, on a sunny Sunday last February.It was a mistake. I circled the parking lot, then circled the neighborhood beside the parking lot, then circled the parking lot again. Nothing. So I drove to Welch Village, where people on the chairlift kept asking, in a borderline accusatory way, why I would travel to Minnesota from New York, on purpose, to ski.The answer is that I value novelty and quirk more than brand-name and stoke (at least when it comes to ski areas; as an adherent of both Taco Bell and Miller Lite, I have a Basic Bro Deluxe side as well). But also because I have this ski newsletter and podcast, whose vitality is based at least in part on a commitment to examining the entirety of American skiing.I made it back to Buck Hill on Thursday, my last stop before I boarded my flight home to LaGuardia. This time, I parked without issue. I was in no mood for a challenge, and Buck Hill was in no position to offer one. Sightseer skiing. I cruised around and watched the park kids and the racer kids and the little kids trickling in after school. It felt like stumbling into a gymnasium with basketball practice on one court and volleyball practice on the next one and track practice on the elevated lanes above. In other words, not like any version of skiing I had ever seen before. It felt purposeful, focused, deliberate; the opposite of the improvisational exploratory sort of wandering that anchors my own skiing.All of which makes complete sense to anyone indoctrinated to the Buck Hill Way. But I'd gone in blind, poking the nearest ski hill into the GPS and seeing what turned up. It turned up something pretty special, and I wanted to get the full story.Questions I wish I'd askedI'd meant to get into Birr's new blog, “Notes from Nate.” Check it out here.What I got wrongI suggested that Wilmot, Wisconsin was a manufactured hill, like Mount Brighton, Michigan (which is made of landfill from the construction of two nearby freeways, I-96 and US 23). This is incorrect: Wilmot's 194 vertical feet are the result of the same glaciation process that formed Buck Hill.Why you should ski Buck HillI have never seen anything like Buck Hill. I have seen ski areas with race courses and terrain parks and mogul fields, of course, because most ski areas have most of these things. But until I pulled into Buck's parking lot last February, I had never seen these things stacked side-by-side, end-to-end, with such deliberate precision, like crops rowed along a hillside. The halfpipe has its own lift. The terrain park has its own lift. The race course has its own lift. The mogul run has its own lift. These are a combination of chairlifts and high-speed ropetows, utilitarian machines with a workmanlike purpose: pump athletes up the hill hundreds of times in a row.It's less mechanized than I'm making it sound. Like a coffee shop that can sometimes host evening concerts, Buck Hill takes many forms. And despite the racer troops constantly bunching around all parts of the hill, Buck is often just a bunch of people sitting around drinking lattes. I free-skied there for a few hours without getting yelled at, which frankly is less common than you would think, given my general curiosity and willingness to loosely interpret ambiguous signage. But the fall lines are steady and consistent. Looker's right hosts a fabulous beginner area, with an incomprehensibly long carpet that rides into a tunnel and over a bridge. I rode it just for fun.I can't say that the skiing is terribly interesting. Buck lacks the rollicking nooks and crannies of nearby Afton Alps and Welch Village. It's so small that I imagine it being a first-hand-up candidate if we ever start panic-converting our outdoor ski areas into indoor ones. There's just not a lot to do or explore. But one of the most common mistakes we make as skiers is trying to wish a ski area into something it can never be. This is why so many New Yorkers refuse to ski New England after taking that first trip west. But they're missing so much of what Vermont is by obsessing over what it is not.Buck, rote, repetitive, and tiny, is exactly perfect for the market it serves: beginners, racers, freestylers, and their families. All the on-hill hubbub can make it hard to hang out, but find a moment to linger at the summit, to gaze at the frozen lake below, at the placid Midwest rolling off into forever. It's not the greatest ski area you'll ever find, but it is a singular, spectacular place in a very specific way. If you can find a parking spot.Podcast NotesHere's a little feature on Buck Hill from Minnesota BoundAnother from Midwest skiersOn the SolnersI kept referring to “things the Solners said they wanted to do” when they bought Buck Hill back in 2015. I mined that info from various sources, but this article from Hometown Source is a good overview:[The Solners] envision a year-round business with plastic slopes for warm weather, an indoor training center, a mixed-use entertainment and retail development beneath floors of hotel rooms, and a hilltop restaurant and banquet center reached via “chondola.”“It's a combination of chairlift and gondola,” said Don McClure, who's worked at Buck Hill for 40 years. …The first piece may be laying a plastic “dry slope” product called Neveplast on part of the hill. Lessons, clinics, team training and general recreational use could be extended year-round.Solner said dry slopes haven't caught on widely in North America, though he skied on a plastic jump in his hometown of Middleton, Wisconsin.A training gym with indoor ramps and foam pits is also envisioned. Solner said he saw one a couple of years ago in Colorado. He later approached McClure with the idea, and “conversations led to where we are today,” Solner said.The owners also envision a microbrewery, coffee shop and retail stores, with a hotel above the ground-level uses.Outdoor concerts are part of the plan, with an amphitheater of about 1,500 seats — the size of the Minnesota Zoo's.On Erich SailerWhile transforming Buck Hill into an internationally renowned racing center was the vision of founders Chuck and Nancy Stone, it was Erich Sailer who actually executed the transformation. Here's an excellent video on his legacy:On the M.A.X. PassI've written often about the M.A.X. Pass, which Ikon mercilessly crushed beneath its Godzilla feet in 2018. The partner list was just terrific:On founder Nancy Stone's Buck Hill history bookMrs. Stone's book is called Buck Hill: A History, Let's Give It a Whirl. I can't find a print edition for sale anywhere (perhaps they sell it at Buck Hill).On snowmaking and proximity to the freewayBirr sent me this photo of the warning signs MDOT lights up on Interstate 35 when Buck Hill is making snow:On Lindsay VonnThe Olympic gold medalist's fondness for Buck Hill is well-documented. The feeling is mutual – the ski area dedicated a ropetow to its most famous alum in 2019:The world may know her as Lindsey Vonn, but the Minnesota community that watched her grow into one of the greatest ski racers in history still remembers little Lindsey Caroline Kildow climbing up Buck Hill's simple rope tow. Vonn, the daughter of a local ski racer Alan Kildow, got her own racing start at the Burnsville ski area at a young age. Patrons remember seeing her soaring down the hill when she was only 2 years old, and just five years later she began riding up the rope that will now bear her name.On September 23rd, at her home hill of Buck Hill, in Burnsville, Minn., Lindsey's ascent to the top of her sport was recognized formally, with the official naming of "Kildow's Climb" rope tow. "All of us at Buck Hill are very happy and excited to honor Lindsey by renaming our lift on the race training hill in her name," said Dave Solner, owner of Buck Hill.September 23 was also declared “Lindsey Vonn Day” in Burnsville, Minn."Obviously being from Buck is not the most likely of paths to become Olympic downhill champion, but I think I proved that anything is possible" said Vonn at the ceremony. "So, for all of you kids that are still racing here, just keep believing in yourself and anything is possible. And listen to Erich (Sailer), even though he's not always around anymore, but he's probably still yelling from somewhere. I wanted to name the rope tow after my family. My grandfather was the one who taught us how to ski. He built a rope tow in Wisconsin, and started my dad skiing, and the whole family. Then my dad taught me, and Erich taught my father and taught me. Kildow is my family name, and I wanted my family name to stay here at Buck, so 'Kildow's Climb' is here to show you that anything's possible."On that long magic carpetMan this thing is so cool:On the concentration of ski areas around the Twin CitiesI'll reset this chart I put together for the Trollhaugen podcast last year, which shows how densely clustered ski areas are around the Twin Cities:On warm-weather outdoor skiingWe talk a bit about Buck's experiments with warm-weather skiing. There's actually a whole year-round ski area at Liberty University in Virginia that's built on something called Snowflex. I don't count it in my official ski areas inventory because there's no snow involved, but it's pretty neat looking. Kinda like a big skate park:On energy efficiencyWe talk a bit about Buck Hill's energy-efficiency initiatives. This Dakota Energy profile breaks down the different elements of that, including snowmaking and lighting efficiency.On In Pursuit of Soul IIProduced by Teton Gravity Research, In Pursuit of Soul II features Buck Hill and seven other Midwest ski areas: Lutsen, Granite Peak, Nordic Mountain, Tyrol Basin, Little Switzerland, The Rock Snowpark, and Caberfae Peaks. It's awesome:On the Ski Cooper controversyBirr and I briefly discuss Buck Hill getting caught in the crossfire of an Indy Pass/Ski Cooper dispute. I'm not going to reset the whole thing here, but I wrote two long articles detailing the whole fiasco over the summer.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 9/100 in 2024, and number 509 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. This is a public episode. 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We are back with a new episode of Real Talk with Chad Otterstrom and Mark Sullivan. In this episode we talk about the preseason as well as the beginning of the new snowboarding season. Then we discuss the question, "What is wrong with snowboarding?"   Support independent snowboarding media at http://patreon.com/thesnowboardproject Send us feedback at mark@thesnowboardproject.com    Here is a transcription of the show:   Mark (00:20.844) Today we have another episode of Real Talk on the Snowboard Project. I'm joined by Chad Otterstrom. Chad is a contender for greatest of all time status in the sport of snowboarding. He would never claim that for himself, so I'll just claim it for him. How you doing today, Chad? Chad (00:27.892) Yeah. Chad (00:47.722) I'm good, just, you know, I just moved out of Breckenridge for the season. I'll be back and forth. But I've been living in my truck for the last 16.5 months. Mark (00:57.756) 16.5, okay. You were counting the days, I see. Chad (00:59.963) the Yeah, now I'm back. I'm back and I got a place and you know, for my dogs, I live by a river. It's awesome. I'm doing good. Mark (01:09.464) Okay, well maybe you can explain this. It's like you were living in your truck for 16 and a half months. Why? Chad (01:16.978) Um, because I'm trying to crack the code, uh, of passive income. I was trying to Airbnb my condo and see how that went. And instead of renting a place, I just put a topper on my truck and just went rogue. And, and, uh, that, you know, six months to a year turned into 16 months, which is longer than expected, but, uh, now I've cracked the code and, uh, yeah, I was just going to, yeah, I got a place to sleep. I have a bed. Mark (01:19.535) Mm-hmm. Mark (01:36.22) Mm-hmm. Mark (01:41.772) You cracked the code and you're back in the house? Chad (01:46.186) outside of the back of my truck. Mark (01:47.82) Okay, so you were on the road for 16 and a half months. What's like the coolest thing that you saw while you were on the road? Chad (01:53.274) Um, I saw way too many whole foods parking lots. Uh, I did get hit by a semi and Edwards. I was parked at a rest area and the semi clipped me and then took off. And that cost me thousands of dollars because the insurance didn't cover that because they took off. Um, that wasn't the coolest thing. That was for sure. But, uh, I did, I went to Japan. I went to Canada. I went to Alaska. I went to Mount Hood. I did all these things that didn't require my own home. So, uh. Mark (01:56.684) Okay. Oh. Mark (02:17.372) That's right. Mark (02:21.509) Mm-hmm. Chad (02:22.742) I did all the, yeah, like last year, the only thing I didn't do last year was go to Rick's Grants. And I wanted to put that in the May category. No, it's Colorado, Canada, or Colorado, Japan, Canada, Alaska, Rick's Grants, and then Mount Hood. That would be the ultimate year. Mark (02:29.735) Mm-hmm. Mark (02:40.804) You pretty much like spent the whole year riding. Chad (02:44.49) Yeah, for sure. Mark (02:46.38) Now, is it hard to do works? I know you also are an owner of Academy Snowboards. Was it hard to work for the road or find wifi or whatever? Are we able to pull that off pretty effectively? Chad (02:56.446) Uh, I, you know, what I wasn't able to do was like demos and clinics and things like that. I'd had to do kind of a little more communicating online, but no, I mean, I basically do a lot of the social and organize that. So I, um, I was able to do that wherever I had wifi, which I had everywhere. Mark (03:01.96) Mm-hmm. Mark (03:14.636) Okay cool so it sounds like you were able to maximize your 16 and a half months for your bank account sake. Chad (03:22.546) Yeah, no, I cracked the code. I'm hoping and fingers are crossed, you know the next couple years. We'll see what happens Mark (03:28.216) Okay, so now you've had a couple of months off. I mean, have you been getting ready for this season? What have you been up to? Chad (03:33.858) Um, I mean, I haven't been living in LA going to art shows, but, uh, Mark (03:38.08) Yeah, that's what I've been doing. So, I mean. Ha ha. Chad (03:43.222) No, I, yeah, I mean, what do you do early season? This is the time in the year, like, if you ride till, if you're like really into like riding every day for like meditation is kind of why I do it, but then that ends in July. And you have from July till now to like keep your sanity. So I just find other forms of like, you know, kind of getting out there and doing things. So yeah, I've been, you know, staying in shape. I do, I've gotten into jumping into rivers. It's trending, cold plunging and. Mark (03:59.474) Mm-hmm. Mark (04:12.616) Cold plunging, yes. What's the coldest river you've jumped in? Chad (04:13.974) and it's turning. Oh, it's as close to ice as I can get is what I'm looking for. I want it to be like an ice cube. And I can do like up to five minutes and yeah. And then you do this thing called grounding where you walk around on the ground and then you do, you know, I, yeah, yeah. And then when I do the Wim Hof scene, it's funny cause I listen to a lot of podcasts and then they're telling me what I've already been doing, which is I feel like I'm on the right track, but. Mark (04:21.14) Okay. Mark (04:30.188) like barefooted or something, you're barefoot on the ground. Chad (04:42.878) Yeah, do that and then work out a little bit. Once you're able to hike up hills though, we'll start split boarding just to stay in shape. I'm not a fan of going to the gym, but you're gonna have to a little bit, I guess. Mark (04:54.692) Well, the world is your gym when you're a split-boarder. Ha ha ha. Chad (05:00.696) Yes, this is true. Mark (05:02.816) Yeah, okay. So you're in shape. You're ready for the season. I know resorts are opening, you know, all over the country, but especially in Colorado. I mean, what are you like looking to like get done this season? Do you like goals for this season? Do you like have a list of things that you want to accomplish? Or like, how do you kind of like approach a new season? And like, how do you kind of set yourself up to accomplish things and keep pushing that ball downfield? Chad (05:28.106) Um, pushing the ball down the field. I, uh, well, first of all, I set myself up for a place to live. That's a hard thing to do now in mountain towns because there's, they call it a housing crisis and I think everybody likes to use the word crisis and everything they do these days. We started a production company, you know, with our movies called midlife crisis. So first thing you got to do is find a place to live and then get your season pass. And then, um, yeah, I don't know. Mark (05:46.696) Mm-hmm. Mark (05:56.488) Okay. Chad (05:56.578) just kind of move forward, get the ball rolling. Get your boots broken in, your sticker job done, if you're into getting a good sticker job. Yeah, yeah. Mark (06:02.748) Right? That's all preseason stuff though. I mean, how about for goals for riding? Like, are you like, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do 122 foot, you know, 50, 50. What kind of like riding goals? Chad (06:11.278) Oh. Chad (06:15.214) Oh yeah, yeah. Goals. I have, it's just kind of funny, I guess the more aged you become, you get more into like, I wanna ride that mountain as opposed to I wanna do that trick. I think kids are more into I wanna do that trick or I wanna do that challenge rail or I wanna do this and that. But yeah, for me, I have a list of mountains around where I live right now that I wanna go hike and just ride down and enjoy it. I wanna... Mark (06:25.992) Mm-hmm. Chad (06:44.79) Do some more drone filming this year as opposed to GoPro filming. I'm trying to work on figuring out how to make a drone, do a little more follow than, as opposed to your head cam, you know what I mean? And then that, and then yeah, do a lot more split boarding just cause it keeps me in shape and outside and exercising more. Mark (06:48.356) Mm-hmm. Mark (06:58.408) Totally. Mark (07:06.636) Indeed, indeed. And so, you know, I know a lot of people, you're in Colorado, and a lot of people are like, I want to do all the 14ers. Is that kind of your goal? Or is it is it just like, wow, that's a beautiful mountain or that that's got a great line on I want to ride that. Chad (07:21.066) Yeah, I'm more of the aesthetically fun looking line as opposed to the 14ers. There's a lot of 14ers that are not that fun. They're just high mountains and they're far away. It would be cool to kind of go, I do enjoy like kind of go just tacking certain zones off, not exactly every 14er, but just so I could kind of get a lay of the land of Colorado. I went down to this place called Lake City this summer and hiked a 14 year called Uncompatible Peak. Mark (07:43.67) Mm. Chad (07:49.57) And I've never been there. It's kind of like the Eastern San Juans. And that was kind of cool just to go there and see, you could see Telluride from there and you could see a couple of other things. So it's fun, but I'm not into the ticking off teeners lifestyle. I'm more into like, they're fun looking, ripping lines. You know what I mean? Mark (08:07.596) Yeah, totally, totally. Okay. So hopefully, I know you went to Alaska this year. Do you think you're going to make it back this year? Chad (08:15.114) If I do, it will be for fun. Yes, I did go to the natural selection. I stood on top of some of those peaks and you know if I do go back, I'll be going to where you're at the Valdez era area and I'll probably split board and go hike to the top of a you know an area or I'll hitchhike with a snowmobile, you know, something like that. Mark (08:18.353) Okay. Mark (08:30.982) Yeah. Mark (08:40.716) Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's all good. And you know, there's snowmobile rentals, there's other ways to get there. And people are pretty, you know, helpful as far as like helping you bump yourself out to different zones. So hopefully you do make it back. Chad (08:51.722) Yeah. So yeah, no, it was cool. I went there this last winter. I've been there, you know, before, but this last winter, I stood on one of the peaks that you're supposed to ride down as opposed to a blue-green run. And I got to look down. It looked like, you know, you go left and right, maybe backwards and a 2,000-foot run. Looks like a good time, you know? Mark (09:13.128) Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that the, there's a lot of like challenging type of peaks in Alaska. There's, there's mellow ones too, but you know, I think the thing that Alaska is known for these kind of like high consequence or things that kind of require your focus and attention to the best of your ability. And so that's something that I think sets it apart a little bit compared to a lot of other areas, I think in Colorado you get that too, but sometimes. Maybe you're more worried about like the avalanche conditions and other things than just like the treachery of the mountain face. Chad (09:47.654) Yeah, I mean, you know, Trollhagen's pretty intense too, you know, like, uh, Yeah. Mark (09:53.036) Yeah, but that's like the lift lines and like the line and like the rail, you know, runouts from the rails, that kind of thing. It's a different kind of, you know, gripping type of emotion that you feel in Trollhagen. But, but, you know, it doesn't matter really, like what you find enjoyment in snowboarding. It's like, as long as you're enjoying yourself and you're kind of like. Chad (10:02.876) Yeah, no for sure. Mark (10:14.54) you know, pushing yourself and being in that moment, I think that you can do that in Alaska, you can do it in Trollhagen. And like the same feelings I got, you know, riding on the East Coast as a kid or some of the same feelings I got as I kept progressing kind of the mountains and terrain that I was able to ride. So. Chad (10:30.999) Yeah, it's like catching the feeling, but like you say, everybody says it, the Super Bowl of freeride and freestyle freeriding is in Alaska at the top level. You can catch that feeling anywhere, but if you're looking for it, you can go up there. Mark (10:45.094) Yeah. Mark (10:51.288) We just got, by the way, Chad, we got at my cabin in Alaska, I have a cabin up there as you know, but maybe not everyone knows. Anyhow, we got six. Yeah, yeah, that's true. We got we got six feet of snow this week in Alaska, literally one storm. We got six feet. There's a base now. Chad (10:58.742) I mean if they watch the show you definitely know. Chad (11:09.726) at your cabin so that means probably like 12 feet up where you're at, you know? Mark (11:12.544) Oh more. Yeah, yeah. I mean people are starting to head out. So it's like game on in Alaska right now, which is pretty cool. Pretty early, but yeah, it's going. Chad (11:22.032) Nice, yeah. It's the same with here. Like that's early. If we had a six foot storm here, I've actually ridden a hundred inches at Wolf Creek on Halloween before. Still kind of bony always, even with a hundred inches here, we need 20 feet here to have that boniness go away. But we got blue green groomers. You know, we were, I think it was two weeks ago now that we got first share at A Basin. And... Mark (11:31.217) Yeah. Mark (11:45.632) Okay, let's talk about that real quick. So I know like Nate Dogg, Taylor Tom, yourself, you guys have pretty much gotten first chair in the country, maybe the world, like every year in the last like, I don't even know how many years, how long has it been going on? Chad (12:00.551) Um, Nate likes to claim 31 years. I, uh, yeah, it's interesting though, because I, I mean, trailer Tom has had 31 years. I don't know if they've been consecutive, but you know, he's on, on the page, but I think 31 years would put you at 1992, right? Mark (12:03.036) 31 years of first chairs. Wow. Mark (12:18.941) Yeah, I think so. Chad (12:20.15) And I think Maydog moved to Colorado in 1998. So I'm just saying, I don't know, but I still believe him. I don't know. I mean, I wasn't here, so I can't say that, but I know. No, I think I actually do think that he might've driven out here those years. I'm not sure, so. Mark (12:24.096) Oh. Mark (12:27.628) That sounds like a call out. Mark (12:33.2) You better be careful what you say, because Nate Dogg is your property manager. Ha ha ha. Mark (12:42.982) I don't know Chad, a pipe burst. Chad (12:46.07) So it's great, you know, I think last year it was 25 years. I don't know how that six years popped up on him, but either way, it's a great, um, you know. Mark (12:53.911) So what was that scene like? Like what time did you guys get there? I'm sure you got there like the day before or something. Like what does it take to like get first chair? Chad (13:00.362) Yeah, so these are the rules. Nate's really good at articulating it. I'm going to do my best. So you know, you kind of like go to the resorts, you'll see them, there's no other blowing snow, you go talk to the mountain ops in the parking lots, you know, a couple weeks before, kind of get a feel. And then usually on a Monday or a Tuesday, they like to announce that they're going to open. They usually open on weekends just for crowds, so it's usually a Friday. So if they announce on a Tuesday, Mark (13:25.33) Mm-hmm. Chad (13:27.37) You gotta gun it and go lock down Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday night. Three days. Mark (13:31.452) Three days. Like when does the second person show up? Like if you're there for three days, when does like chair number two show up? Chad (13:39.434) Oh, that usually happens like within, you know, the last day. So then chair number two usually hangs for a good 24, 36 hours. And then, but usually we, this dude Ant has been kind of a fourth member of the crew, but it's trailer Tom, myself, Nate, and this dude Ant. And I did two days and I slipped straight on the ground this time right out in front of the lot or the lift. I have a baby and a mat, but it's a... Mark (13:42.82) Okay. Mark (13:46.335) Okay. Chad (14:07.69) It's just kind of something entertaining to do. It's like a, you know, when you get, like I said, when you need something to do with your life this time of year and you just want something exciting and people to talk to, people are constantly coming through all day long. So you're hanging out with people for like two days, which is fun. Except for, you know, that period from 10 at night till about 10 the next day is freezing cold. If not even six, cause it gets dark. But otherwise, I do negative 40. Mark (14:28.453) Mm-hmm. Mark (14:31.844) So is it like a negative 20 bag that you have to like stay warm in this negative 20? Okay. Negative 40. Okay. Chad (14:37.406) Actually, yeah, I won it at the love games from the satellite board shop love games. I really pushed hard for that because I knew I'd need it. But yeah, I don't know, it's something to do. And then now they're all opening, like resorts are opening. I think Breck opened today, Veil opened today, Keystone's open, Copper opens Monday. So the groomer lifestyle is on, you know what I mean? Mark (14:42.056) Cool. Mark (14:47.662) And that was at. Mark (14:58.796) Right now are they setting up parks or like little rail features? Like what kind of stuff do they have besides like a white ribbon of death? You know. Chad (15:06.206) Um, yeah, white ribbon of life is what we called it. We did. Mark (15:10.429) Oh, that's because you had first chair. If you were on like the 140th chair, you would have been like right ribbon of death. Oh really? Chad (15:17.19) And it was pretty fun. Actually, it snowed like a foot. So it was like kind of slasher pal on the side with groom slasher pal. But they have I think, Keystone has a little hike park, a base and probably has a couple slide bars. And then I don't really know I do know that Breck was on the verge of like kind of ending their park lifestyle. And now I hear they have a four speed, four pack high speed trailer for the five chair was and they're putting a park in with a half pipe this year. I heard. Mark (15:45.916) Really. Chad (15:46.634) I don't know. I'm not going to be around this year to find out really, but we'll see. You know, I think. Mark (15:50.552) Okay. Yeah. And it's not just Colorado, by the way, Chad, like Mammoth opens today. Wild Mountain is open in Minnesota. Killington, I think, is open right now as well. They may have been the first open. I'm not sure if they beat Colorado this year. Okay. And then also in Canada, you got Lake Louise, Mountain Workway. Chad (15:56.359) Oh yeah yeah. Yeah, troll Ogden as well. Chad (16:09.046) I think Abason was the, I think Abason. Mark (16:17.333) Sunshine Village is going to open this weekend and then you got Sommet Saint-Solvier in Quebec is open as well. So I guess there's riding all over America and Canada right now. Chad (16:29.514) Yeah, it's awesome. Everybody's gonna check out for the next five to six months. You know, it's that kind of a life. Mark (16:34.228) Yup. Yeah, well it seems like it's shaping up. I know we have like a Super El Nino coming this year. What does that mean for Colorado? Chad (16:45.29) Um, well last year La Niña was supposed to end, you know, mid late winter. And then El Niño is going to kick in and El Niño is better than La Niña. I don't really know what it means. It has to do with the weather pattern, I think. But, uh, I, uh, yeah, it's, uh, it just means, yeah, more fresh blue green groomer, you know, for Colorado. Mark (16:59.6) Yeah. Mark (17:03.565) More powder. Mark (17:08.909) Okay, right on. Well, it sounds like you're ready though. It sounds like you've gotten prepared as far as, you know, traveling and working out and your sticker job is done. Your board has probably been waxed a couple of times already. And yeah, it sounds like you're ready to get things going here. Chad (17:29.406) Yeah, I mean, if I was in Valdez, I'd be like potato sacking off cliffs, but I'm here. So it's just going to be groomer. I'm excited. Mark (17:38.404) Yeah, well, it should be fun. So have you been checking out any of the snowboard movies this fall? I know there've been, you know, obviously every year, there's like this time of year, there's movies that have been coming out for a couple of months now. Anything standing out to you so far this year? Chad (17:54.538) Um, uh, there's a few there's, I'm, uh, I went to the, I was back in Minnesota a couple of weeks ago and I went to the ride premiere and that was cool because it was kind of an industry event. Uh, and I was going to say the last time I went to a premiere in Minnesota was with Gillian Yoder and I went and saw a fear of a flat planet and the movie never showed up, so we just hung out on like Hannappin or something and he didn't know who I was, but I knew who he was. He would have randomly was back in Minnesota. Mark (18:02.248) Mm-hmm. Mark (18:14.257) Heh. Chad (18:22.934) That was like 1994. And then I went to this premiere in Minnesota this last time, the ride premiere was really good. Jed Anderson, I mean the movie was a great, it was a jib movie. Jed Anderson's awesome and he ended up hitting this rail at the end of his part that my dad is an usher for at the church. It's the cathedral in St. Paul and he had this double line and I was always telling my dad, if you ever see kids hitting the rails out of it on those stairs, don't kick them out. So my dad wasn't there the day they were doing it, but. Mark (18:24.729) Yep. Chad (18:52.886) So that was a good one. And then I see that you wrote East bump up. Mark (18:56.752) That was my favorite like video that I saw just because it had a different approach. It was like somehow fresh and it was like one dude, three shovels, one tripod. That's how I made this. And it was just cool. And like all the shots were steady, no shaky cam because it was on a tripod for all of it. But for me, it was just different. And I guess, you know, I'm less into. a lot of the tricks, you know, I watch a lot of these movies and there's like people doing pillow lines, you know, in BC or whatever. And I love powder riding. But then it's like, wow, Jonathan Moore did that in like 1998. You know, and it was just as good then as it is now. But it's not really that much different now than it was then. And so to me, it's kind of like a little bit of repetition when you see all these people just riding powder or doing basic tricks into powder. It's fairly consistent with the kind of footage we've seen over the last 20 years. And so to me, East Bumfuck was something new. Chad (20:01.166) 100% hold on. I agree with you. I think I really enjoy like he didn't talk in his video but he was kind of telling a story the whole way through. And I love watching that dude ride. He's like pigeon-toed. It seems like he's riding negative three, negative three. And for snowboard movies, I think I was looking earlier the Quicksilver movies up to 1.7 million views. Mark (20:13.126) Yep. Mark (20:19.865) Yeah. Mark (20:29.544) That's a lot of views. Chad (20:30.73) And I think those guys are great, but it was just like you just talked about it. It was like, cool, we saw the same movie last year and the year before and the year before and the year before. But I think that they have the outlet to put it out there. So it got that many views. But I mean, these kids from Michigan, I know this kid, Derek Lemke, Brent Bann and Drake Warner put together a movie that's going to come out in the next couple of weeks. I'm really excited to see it's probably going to be a lot of challenge rails and a lot of dangerous kinks and things like that. But I really enjoy like local movies or people I know or, you know, movies that are gonna have a feel as opposed to like a kind of a been there done that. We owned two movies from here last night and we're like, cool. And that was happened at Buck Hill 30 years ago. You know? Mark (21:15.692) Yeah, but you know you guys actually made a movie this year called Midlife Crisis. What did you do for that one to make it stand out? Chad (21:24.315) Um, we... Um... Chad (21:30.814) We just, you know, we filmed and edited and put it up on slush to make it stand out, I guess. But it's more of an, I would always open it or end it and Blaze would open it and end it as well. And then we would put people in the middle of it, if that makes sense. And it was more about midlife crisis, like vintage snowboarders. And then we would put like the up and coming kids in the middle, you know? So we weren't just like all vintage. Mark (21:59.524) You guys aren't vintage, you guys are like, you know, seasoned. I would say seasoned. Like you're like a fine wine. You've gotten better with age. Yeah. Chad (22:03.166) Season, yeah, Season's a good name, yeah. Yeah, aged, all right. Aged, classic, you know, kind of classic. But yeah, I mean, what did we do to make it stand out? Nothing besides edit, and we made three movies this year called, the first one is Rock Bottom, the second one is Spring Chickens, and then the third one is the full meltdown, a play on MacDog Productions, The Meltdown Project. Mark (22:13.061) Yeah. Mark (22:22.78) Mm-hmm. Chad (22:31.67) and that was in Mount Hood. And then, so we did that and yeah, you know, just pushing forward, we're actually making another one this year. We're gonna do a couple other things. I could ramble on, Blaze is way better at rambling on about it than I am. But, yeah, I am the editor of all the things. I'm the editor, Blaze is the talker. We're trying to make a brand. We're selling T-shirts and hoodies and hats. Mark (22:31.783) Right. Mark (22:51.432) But you're the co-host of this show, so damn it, it's up to you to ramble on. Chad (23:01.434) And we're going to sell t-shirts to the kids and just say, life crisis with the mid crossed out. So we can kind of include everybody. Mark (23:08.473) Okay. Mark (23:11.881) life crisis of living in mountain towns. Chad (23:14.118) Yeah, and then, so we're doing that. But yeah, I mean, it's just something to keep the dream alive, you know what I mean? Something to take away at life as opposed to sit there on the couch. Mark (23:22.669) Yeah. Mark (23:28.104) Well, that's cool. I'm glad you're doing stuff and it sounds like for this year, you're going to try to film yourself with a drone, which seems like it could add like a layer of complexity, but also, you know, just get a whole new kind of, you know, different kinds of shots for the films you're making. Chad (23:44.926) Yeah, no, it should be exciting. I feel like I can sell film or whatever other friends to any kind of a 1500 foot line, uh, the way I'm going to approach it. We'll see if it works. I'm ordering the drone here in a week. So I'm waiting for black Friday so I can get a discount on one, but, uh, yeah, but no midlife crisis is, yeah, we we're actually coming out with a Mark (23:58.442) Okay. Right? That's the time to buy your drones, folks. Clock is ticking. Chad (24:11.81) Blaise and I have full video parts coming out the next week on Slush. It's called Yearbook, where we put some old shots of Friends that didn't make it in like the other movies, not because they weren't good shots, but because they didn't really fit in the narrative of the movie. And then Blaise is going to have a full part. So he's got a 50-year-old full video part, like amazing part. Like I don't think anybody's ever really done that well anyways. Once you get to 50, a lot of people just start turning and give up. So he's got... Mark (24:16.677) Okay. Mark (24:40.956) So like who else is in that category? You got Todd Richards, film and video parts. You got... Chad (24:45.874) Yeah, I don't know. He's not filming video parts, is he? He's filming clips. Mark (24:49.496) I don't know. I mean he had a part in the in the. In the what's called Quicksilver movie. He was in that so. Chad (24:57.218) Oh yeah yeah, I mean what kind of clip was it Parkshots? Mark (25:01.744) I'm not sure I just remember him talking on the chairlift. I think he does a couple of shots. He always does like a switch McTwist. I'm not sure if it was a full part. I kind of like, I kind of fast forwarded through some of that to watch Powder and to watch Travis Rice and then when I was watching Travis Rice, I was actually just watching the mountains that he was riding. So I definitely agree with you on the, on the, you know, getting old and looking at mountains instead of like tricks and riding. So. Chad (25:04.17) Yeah, he's got a couple. Um, he's got a full part though. Thank you very much. Chad (25:26.483) And I mean, Todd does have a part in my, a couple clips in my part that I'm dropping this week. But Blaze has a full part is what I'm saying. Like back country, park jumps, rails. You know what I mean? Like this is like a full four minute, like single part. Full song, yeah, full everything. And yeah, that's what I'm saying. But I mean, I wrote Richard's is. Mark (25:33.319) Okay. Mark (25:40.402) Yeah. Mark (25:45.064) full song. Chad (25:52.634) older than all of us. He's like 53, 54, maybe he's your age, maybe you're older than him. Yeah, so he's, you know, he's in that, you know, probably Tony Hawk era of snowboarders and I like, I rode with him at Woodward this May and he actually, just for, you know, showing up and riding, he warmed up pretty quick and he's pretty good. I think surfing might keep him in shape, you know. Mark (25:57.592) I'm younger than him by a few years. Mark (26:04.637) Yep, completely. Mark (26:18.528) Yeah, yeah, for sure. I know he lives down in Carlsbad, so he's close to the beach, gets to go out any day of the surf. So that's probably pretty good. But you know, right now, aside from all these video parts, it's kind of coming to the end of video season, and we're kind of getting into the beginning of event season. And so I know that coming up in like a week or so, they have that event in, I think it's Innsbruck called Do It Yourself Extreme. Chad (26:25.029) Yeah. Mark (26:47.328) Or Dix, if you will, DIYX. Um, and it sounds like that'll be a pretty good one. Uh, you know, what do you know about the Dix event, Chad? Chad (26:51.34) Yeah. Chad (27:01.335) I mean, yeah, I know that there'll be a lot of dicks there and a lot of not-dicks there. And I hung out with a lot of the kids that went to it last year when I was in Minnesota right before they went and they said it's not really even a contest. They just set up spots in cities. And you know, there's a group of 20 kids that get invited to come up and... Mark (27:18.502) Yep. Mark (27:23.212) Yep, and it looks like Max Warbbington, Benny Malam, Dusty Hendrickson, Zeb, Jib Girl. So it sounds like a lot of the Americans will be there. I'm sure there's a full card of Europeans as well. Chad (27:26.94) Bye bye. Chad (27:36.262) Yeah. It's kind of like an Aaron style, but for jibbing and way more public. If that makes sense, not more as much of an arena style, but if you go and you see the video of it, there's hundreds of people surrounding like a rail or a flaming circle with Dylan Henderson back flip through that circle last year. Um, and they're all just hanging out and, you know, sipping on beverages and having a good time. It looks like a fun early season. Mark (27:46.28) Mm-hmm. Mark (27:56.377) Yeah. Chad (28:06.102) You know, I wouldn't say warm up, because everything they do is pretty aggressive. But the early season, you know, kind of a raw, natural street contest, you could call it. Mark (28:18.548) Yeah, it should be a pretty cool event. It's coming up 16th, the 20th of this month here in November. And then, you know, they also, I saw that they just recently announced the natural selection. And I know that last year you were a judge, so you got to go to BC and Alaska. What can you tell us about this year's natural selection? Chad (28:39.027) Um, the only thing I can tell you is what has been gone on. Spoken to anybody just yet about anything there, but I know there are three stops in Colorado. One down by Durango and two in Crested Butte. So yeah, yeah. Mark (28:54.544) And I think those are for like the duels segment where they have like the riders face off. It says they're going to do it in Switzerland around Crested Butte and the, the what the Irwin Lake Lodge, Red Mountain BC and Purgatory Adventures in Durango. And somewhere in Japan sounds like they're going to be able to do as well. Chad (29:06.623) Yeah. Chad (29:13.262) Yeah, that'll be interesting. And then it looks like two stops in Revy, one at Selkirk's and then one off of the resort where I think they might've built some stuff, but I don't know. And then that's gonna be middle of March. Mark (29:23.201) Mm. Mark (29:27.284) Yeah, that's the 10th to the 17th of March. We'll look forward to that. But I was actually pretty disappointed that there wasn't a Alaska stop because to me it's like Alaska represents the pinnacle of free riding. It's where people can test themselves on like a higher level. And so, you know, and I thought that, you know, they were kind of able to do that last year and then no Alaska stopped this year kind of has me scratching my head because it's like, well, How can it be the absolute pinnacle of free riding if you're not in the pinnacle place for free riding? Chad (30:02.622) Yeah, that's a point. It's, I think they are trying to hone it in and figure things out, I would imagine. I mean, I would imagine that one day they wanna go back to Alaska, you know? For now, I think it's a little bit on hold. I know that the natural selection did have almost a 10-year break anyways, right? So I think that it's just kind of like a wave. It's like life, you know? Like... Mark (30:15.212) Yep. Well... Mark (30:24.432) That's true. That is true. Chad (30:30.398) Some years, it might not be this five feet dropping in Jackson Hole or those pillows like last year at Rebel Stoke, where some years it might be kind of crusty Jackson Hole and Tomahawk King down ball face. So that's kind of how I see it. I think they have the same sights that you do. I think that they're just trying to work out the kinks and make it happen. Mark (30:45.217) Yeah. Mark (30:56.16) Yeah, I mean, I think the thing with Alaska, which they found out probably the hard way this year is that it is crazy expensive and, and there's a lot of curveballs in Alaska and so you can't, you know, you can't really plan things out to the day or the minute nature has the final say on everything in Alaska. And, uh, and so it, it can, it can lead to cost overruns if you're running an event. Chad (31:22.014) Yeah, we were out there, we did a scope day hoping that we, riders would drop. Everybody went up and it just ended up being a rehearsal day that costs like in the fives of thousands, you know, the five figures of thousands of dollars just to go hang out and come back. So yeah, they're figuring it out. You know, they gotta, you gotta get those non endemic snowboard sponsors like, like Red Bull and, and donkey juice and whatever else there is, you know. Mark (31:39.276) Yeah, yeah, so anyhow, but I... Mark (31:50.516) Right. I mean, that's the thing is like a natural selection could bring that kind of free riding and what a lot of the athletes consider kind of like the, the most desirable part of riding, you know, to a larger audience. And so to me, that's like kind of the promise of natural selection. So I hope they can deliver on that this year from Revelstoke and from the dual series, and hopefully they can come back to Alaska soon. Chad (32:06.391) Yeah. Chad (32:19.31) Yeah, we'll see. I mean, there's a whole nother element too of the Olympics kind of buying the scene that they're probably gonna try to get their feet wet in a interesting way that we're gonna be able to watch. I'm more like kind of into sitting in the backgrounds and watching it unfold and enjoying myself snowboarding. These days. Mark (32:40.681) It's crazy that you were in Alaska for like, I think about two weeks last year. And I was there the whole time you were there, we didn't see each other even though we were both hanging out in Valdez. So, but anyhow, well, hopefully you can make it back this year because I definitely know that's a place for you and I think you know it too. Chad (32:50.286) Yeah, for sure. Chad (32:57.873) Yeah, yeah. Honestly, the reason I took that job at Natural Selection was to go stand on a peak and kind of be involved. And now that that's been done, we'll see where it goes, you know? Mark (33:09.132) Yeah, well, I mean, I think that you're one of the most qualified judges they could have. So let's hope they get you back. Chad (33:16.81) Yeah, I kind of like snowboarding, so we'll see. I'd rather, I'd rather ride than judge, but I'm not going to say anything about that. Mark (33:20.569) Okay. Mark (33:26.164) Right, sometimes you gotta judge to ride. Okay. That's true, that's true. Sometimes you gotta not compete to ride as well. Otherwise, they're going to be standing around the top of a, uh, of a half pipe for half your life. Chad (33:28.822) Yeah, no, not really. Sometimes you've got to not judge to ride. Chad (33:37.503) Yeah, yeah, true. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that was the hard part about trying to go to the Olympics those years. It was like, wow, you have been complete riding half pipe from, you know, beginning of the year all the way till end of February. And you're like, but now that we've become more of a, you know, expert at figuring out the terrain and where to go and how to ride, you don't really start riding good stuff till after February anyways unless, you know, depending on where you're at. Mark (34:06.38) Yeah, I mean you can in Japan, but that's just like for the powder. Chad (34:10.921) And motorboat and power in Japan is the best. Mark (34:13.076) Yeah. So, you know, I went to dinner last night with Scott Zergabel, who started holding with LeBlanc. You know, Scott? Yeah, he's yeah, he's a really cool dude. And he was telling me last night that ISPO, the European trade show, is going to be November 28th to 30th this year. And I was like, what? Chad (34:20.346) Oh wow. I know Scott, yeah M3 remember? Yeah, M3 I see. Mark (34:36.924) they've moved it now out of January. I remember when it was in March, when I first got involved in the snowboard industry, it was like the beginning of March every year in Vegas and they moved it to Colorado, I wanna say, and then they moved it up to like January or I guess before they moved to Colorado, they moved it up to the end of January. And now in Europe, they've decided to put it in November. Now, it's... Kind of interesting because to me trade shows are kind of dead in America. I went to the outdoor retailer maybe three years ago, maybe four years ago. And it was like the endemic snowboard brands had pretty much given up on, on going to trade shows to kind of, to, to approach shops and to get new orders or try to increase their distribution. And, you know, it occurs to me that like moving the trade shows up to November makes it harder. on small brands, I think it plays to people like Burton who want to run production all year long, or you know, a capita who has their own factory, they want to keep those people employed and not have to like ramp up seasonal laborers and then let them, you know, and lay them off at the end of production season for like six months or whatever. So it makes sense for these like big brands. How does it affect a brand like Academy though, that's what I'm curious about, because it doesn't make sense to me for this like You know, just for like the organic grassroots aspect of the industry, it seems like that really plays into the hands of these like large major brands. Chad (36:06.642) Yeah, I think even Never Summer quit doing, or Burton definitely quit doing trade shows a long time ago. Remember they had their own like, Denver, they had their own showroom there. And I mean, the one in Denver is gone, from what I understand. And I didn't even know Ispo was really still going. It's just, it's more of a, yeah, it's more of an event for people, brands that make a lot of money. Mark (36:13.282) Yeah. Mark (36:27.174) What? Chad (36:34.054) non-independent snowboard brands, I guess you could call it. Like, you know, your Solomons and K2s and Arc'teryx and Smartwools and, you know, North Faces, these brands that, like, that's just kind of part of their program and they do it. But for us, it doesn't really affect us because we just call shops and, you know, we have our reps and we have our, we're pretty self-sustainable. as opposed to these bigger brands kind of have to show face, I guess. Where I mean, it'd be great for us to be there if there was still a Denver trade show, it would be super fun to do because you get to see everybody. But every year, like the shops less and less would show up because it would cost them, you know, $5,000 or whatever to get four of their employees out there to go do loops and get hotel rooms for four days. And food and things would be... Mark (37:29.272) No, it used to be like a family reunion at the trade show. Like every year you'd see people you haven't seen in a year. And then I went like three years ago to the last one I went to in Denver. And it was like, nobody was there. And so it wasn't a family reunion. I was just sitting there. I saw maybe five or seven people that I knew, but literally, I mean, the snowboard industry was absent almost completely. Chad (37:50.174) Yeah, I think that's just e-commerce or whatever you want to call it. Everything kind of went to the internet and your computer and kind of how we are now as opposed to social interaction. Mark (37:56.828) Yeah, it's kind of interesting because even ispo, they used to have 18 trade show halls. And so each trade show hall at ispo was about, I don't know, half the size of the entire si a trade show or outdoor retailer trade show, and they had 18 halls of this and they had also beyond skiing and snowboarding, they would also have like the outdoor industry. And then also even stuff like gym equipment would be at that trade show. But I saw that they have a map and now Um, there are only 11 halls being filled in seven of the halls. They used to fill up with brands and, and people and, you know, and the industry are now empty and they don't even put anything in those halls. And so to me, that's like kind of a sign of the times, you know, between the internet and kind of how the retail environment has changed and, you know, the kind of direct consumer and these kind of macro big box. online retailers, like your back countries or EVOs or whatever. It seems like it's really kind of changed the face of snowboarding as far as like the ability for people to get FaceTime with each other, you know? And to me as a kid, it was like, I would get that FaceTime in a snowboard shop and the sales reps would drop by and we get to hang out with them and understand all the different lines. And then we'd go and hang out after school at the shop. And, and we would have this kind of like. you know, connection with the sport of snowboarding, even in the off season, like five days a week, we'd go hang out at a shop. And to me, it's like, now you get to hang out on Instagram and it's not quite the same thing. Chad (39:39.226) Yup, it definitely is not the same thing. No, splitboarding is the answer, hanging out with your friends is the answer. It's the business. I feel like it's not just snowboarding. I would imagine it's like in every business, right? Mark (39:43.727) Yeah. Mark (39:51.688) Yeah, I mean, I would say every business has faced that, but snowboarding, especially, I mean, I just did some simple math earlier today. And so when I started Snowboard Magazine, there were about 800 snowboard shops that we would distribute to. And then I just looked on Slush the Magazine's website, and currently there's about 216 shops in the country. That's a 74% Percent reduction in the amount of doors, right? That people can walk into to like interact with the culture of snowboarding. And so that's a negative thing. I mean, obviously people are getting it in other ways and other places, but. You know, to have that ability to just walk in and feel that culture of snowboarding. I think that's affected, you know, the. The overall size and scope of the industry and case in point is like. At that time, the overall winter sports business between skiing and snowboarding was about $10.7 billion a year. And now it's about $4.28 billion a year. So despite the fact that 74% of shops have closed in the last 20 years, there's also a 60% reduction in overall revenue. And I would attribute that, and this is me, there's no science behind this or anything, but I would attribute that to... just the lack of people being able to just like make snowboarding like a part of their identity by being able to walk into a snowboard shop five days a week or whatever as a 16 year old kid. That was my identity. I was a snowboarder first and foremost and today you know you do a lot of different things but snowboarding is kind of something you do in your own private time you know when you're sitting in front of your computer something like that. Chad (41:42.426) Yeah, it's, it's true. You got to really, really search for it. I went to actually underground snowboards in Breckener's through their locals appreciation party last night. And there was a few hundred people at the Riverwalk center in Breck and we watched movie premieres and they gave away stuff and you know, but it's still, it's still, you know, it was still the, your, your 200 people as opposed to the thousands of people that live in Summit County. If you think about it. Mark (42:00.173) Old times. Mark (42:10.606) Yeah. Chad (42:11.102) And it is interesting too, like things like lift lines and traffic and things like that have become more centralized or however you want to say it. Like if you look at I-70 coming up to Summit County, if you look at the canyons in Utah or I-80 coming up from San Francisco, they're just packed with vehicles and the parking lots are full and lift lines are crazy and resorts are tracked at, you know, before they even open if you're talking Jackson Hole. Like what is that compared to like what it was when those billions of dollars were being made compared to what they are now? Mark (42:47.416) And it's kind of crazy because it's like, there's less money involved, but there's also this other thing that's going on, like the Lyft Pass products where like, it used to be like to get a season pass at Sun Valley, it was like $3,500, some ridiculous amount of money. And now you can get like one of these kind of group season, epic icon, mountain collective passes, and, and they're affordable for pretty much anywhere. And, and To me, at least it's affected the traffic on the 70, the 80, like all these like road corridors to the mountains, but it hasn't resulted in more money being spent in the sport overall. And so my question to you is, are these past products a good thing? Like, is this good for the industry or is this just a way for the resort companies to make more money in the short term? Is it... Chad (43:24.238) True, they just smart cheeseburgers in real estate. Mark (43:38.224) benefiting in the short term at the expense of the long term longevity and health of the sports. Chad (43:44.614) Um, that's interesting. It's like a wonder where the, if there is, if you could do the comparison on board sales compared to like, you know, resort traffic. Mark (43:55.328) Yeah, we'll look into that further as time goes on. That just occurred to me as we were sitting here talking, but it is kind of a question that I have is like, what's happening to snowboarding? We'll get a little bit more into that. One more piece of news, Slush the Magazine is about to launch Slush the App. And so you can actually download it right now. They haven't promoted it yet, but it's out there. And yeah, and so they have like copies of their stories and magazines online through the app that you can download through the App Store. Chad (43:57.943) Yeah. Mark (44:25.768) So that's kind of cool. Yeah. Chad (44:27.018) That's awesome. I'm gonna be interested to have a Slush the Magazine app on my phone. It'll be my first kind of like snowboard app. What other app? Yeah, yeah, it's like Instagram or Slush. Which one are you gonna click? Facebook. What apps have I been using lately? I've been doing YouTube a lot. Just cause it's, I don't know, whatever. I'm trying to just load everything on my hard drives on YouTube just for fun for some reason. Mark (44:32.824) Yep, just another icon on your phone to make you a snowboarder. Mark (44:56.088) Mm-hmm. You get to like a point of like, you know, where you have enough videos that are getting plays here and there where it really adds up, you know, so the more videos the merrier, I guess. Chad (44:57.462) and I'll... Chad (45:05.097) Hmm. we'll see what happens. But speaking of app, I would imagine this is gonna be on the app, the 2160 by Hirota Ogawara. Yeah. Mark (45:19.188) Yeah, man, I'm kind of torn on the 2160, I gotta say, Chad, because, you know, yes, it is progression. No one's done a 2160 before, and I know you have thoughts on the 2160, but to me, it's like they've added a 180, you know, to what happened before, you know, and I don't know, I mean, Chad (45:23.401) Yeah. Mark (45:46.104) According to you Chad, you're like the matrix is complete now you can stop bullets with your teeth. Is that is that how it goes? Chad (45:52.498) Yes, this is the truth 100% like I thought it was at five, but apparently 2160 is six pins. So this is another 360 pass bullet catching bullets. So that's pretty cool. When I was a coach, I always like to say I would always tell the kids that your trick doesn't count unless you did it on something never touched by a human or modified by human. So how many tricks do you got the kids to be like? Mark (46:11.068) Mm-hmm. Chad (46:16.99) If you went to, you know. and it was like, how many tricks do you got? I bet he might not have any tricks either, but he does have a 2160 and a park jump, but technically somebody else built that kicker for him. So it doesn't really count. He doesn't own that trick, but I do enjoy the more spins, you know, like it's just entertaining. I don't think it's marketable or something that people wanna do, but I like to see. The possibility is pushed in every direction. I wouldn't say it's necessarily good for the sport or for sales, but it's like, why not? I don't know. Mark (46:59.656) I mean, you could definitely define it as progression. It's never been done before. Now it's been done. So that is progression, right? By maybe definition. But to me, it's like there's something missing from that. Right? It's like, when you watch that 2160, I mean, he is whipping around and it's getting closer and closer to helicopter status with each like added 180, but. Chad (47:05.952) Right. Chad (47:20.314) He might, if he put a little tweak on his board, he might like be able to just kind of levitate. You know what I mean? If you think about it, if he puts his board at the right angle, he might actually be able to helicopter and just kind of hang out up there. Mark (47:26.607) Yeah. Mark (47:33.716) Yeah, I mean, that's true. That might be the next level beyond stopping bullets with your teeth, it's just levitating. So we'll have to wait and see where this goes. But to me though, it's like, it's still missing like this essential creative element. It's like back in the day, let's go back to like the early 90s. It's like you watch Jamie Lynn do a method, you watch Chris Roach do a method, you watch Dave Alden do a method, and they were all different tricks, but they were the same trick. And it's like the way that each person Chad (47:38.663) Man. Yeah. Mark (48:03.736) made that trick their own was part of the essence of like, of the creativity of snowboarding. It's like you would put your own mark on every trick you did. And once we got into like nine hundreds and beyond, that's when you kind of stopped making tricks your own. You just had to get it around to the landing, but. I kind of miss the days where it was like your creative approach and how you did it. And I guess that's what I identified with like East bum fuck is like the way that he like just approached making a movie differently. Um, but to me, it's like that creative element doesn't exist when it's just a matter of adding rotations. Chad (48:44.274) 100%. Yeah. I mean, Sean, like, like they like the claims that he was inventing tricks, but like you said, it was it's just not in our eyes is not really the progression we want to see. It's just more rotations. Mark (48:56.344) Yeah, and I do see that there is some progression in the sport. I don't think progression is dead. And by the way, it's like, I don't consider like a 50-50 on a challenge rail necessarily progression, even if you go 20 feet longer than the last guy or whatever that to me isn't necessarily progression, but I do see progression in like the pullback tricks that you see guys, you know, like Marcus Cleveland and Ted Powell doing a little bit and, and I, so I see that as something cool, obviously like natural selection, they're bringing you know, kind of like just back country kind of filming and then making it into full lines where you have to like really do multiple tricks on one face. And so that to me is a kind of progression. And then this other thing to me, where really I see the progression of free riding is in what I consider like adventure free riding, where people are going out and like discovering new areas or exploring to get to these areas and then riding them and then making it back out in one piece. And to me, that's kind of like this. very potentially dangerous, but also rewarding part of freeriding that, that has kind of like really been progressing in the last like, like five or 10 years as far as like people going really to like further lengths. I know people have been using snowmobiles to access areas for about 20 years, but really I've seen like this progression in the last 10 years of crews going out to like new areas and going to places that literally have never been gotten to before. And so to me, that's like a whole new level of exploration and therefore progression to me anyway. Chad (50:31.334) I agree with you. I enjoy watching those movies as more documentary style and in-depth and what's going on. Like I didn't like watching Jeremy Jones's video parts ever. The big mountain, Jeremy Jones until he started telling his story. And then you're like, Whoa, that's pretty cool. Like what you're doing besides that. It was just kind of like, you know, turning down a hill or a steep hill, you know? And, uh, once you hear the story and you hear what's going on behind, it's great. Mark (50:54.285) Yeah, we get- Mark (50:58.968) Yeah, it's like I took it for granted when all those TV movies were coming out in the 90s. You just see Tom Burt on a mountain face a fly on the wall making his way down a mountain. And you didn't really appreciate all the thought and calculation and you know, figuring out what would go into like a big mountain line. And then when Jeremy Jones started talking about that's when I think the regular viewer kind of started to gain an appreciation of what goes on in like big mountains and And really just how a risky it is, but B then how much more calculation you put into each line you're doing. Chad (51:36.11) Yeah, like the story behind it is the progression I feel like. I did notice and I paid attention. I saw a lot of movies come out in the last couple of years, a lot of big brands, like big outdoor brands are sponsoring expeditions. And they do a lot of sponsoring expeditions to a lot of skiers and snowboarders. It might not be the best skiers and snowboarders. So they just go out and struggle and come back and tell their story. That's kind of degression to me. Like a lot of these adventure movies that have come out that Travis and Jeremy put out over the last couple of years have kind of spawned a lot of people trying to go make their own and they don't have the talent that Jeremy and Travis do so it's kind of a boring... Yeah. I see a lot of those on YouTube. I'm like, oh, but they're still interesting to watch. And if they go to cool places, you know. Mark (52:17.037) It's like a watered down version of that progression, you know? Mark (52:25.204) Is it progression if you struggle more? Is that progression? It's like the bigger the struggle, the more the progression. I don't think so. Yeah. Chad (52:31.71) Yeah, like DMX says to live is to struggle, to die is to feel good. You know, but anyways, yeah, yeah. So, but I do, I really love enjoy like, you know, all those climbing adventure movies, as opposed to your standard trick movie that happened here before. But like I said, unless it's very unique, like used bumfuck, or if I personally know them, then I'm excited to watch it. Like I just saw Jed at that. Mark (52:38.504) Yup. Chad (53:00.086) you know, premiere in Minneapolis. And I was like, what's up, Jed? I'm like, we're here for you. We heard you got a two song part. I wanna watch it, you know what I mean? And then my dad was at the usher at the rail at the end of his part. So there was like a little connection there, but otherwise it's just another challenge rail to me when I'm watching it. Mark (53:08.124) Yeah. Mark (53:18.788) Yeah, interesting. Well, you know, we I had another subject that I was going to talk about here, but I think we'll save it for our next episode. I think it's a pretty juicy subject that we could get really into. And so maybe we'll save that for the next time around. But I think we've kind of covered a lot of bases here for the preseason. Is there anything else that you want to talk about? I mean, I think that we got an open mic, we got, you know, an open platform for you to speak your mind, Chad. Chad (53:33.111) Yeah. Chad (53:47.502) Speak my mind, I'm like the more and more I'm involved in the snowboarding industry, the more and more I want to be more involved in just snowboarding, not outside of it, which a lot of brands are these days and I notice it. So I'm really excited at what we're doing with Academy and I hope on the next episode, I plan on this next November, December, I want to go ride Minnesota and then go surf the North Shore of Lake Superior. Mark (54:17.58) Interesting. Chad (54:18.674) And with a wetsuit because I guess it's really good in the winter and my buddy Mark (54:22.5) I got a guy who's like a big Chicago surfer. Now I know that's like kind of an oxymoron to some people, but he's the guy for Great Lakes surfing apparently. It's snowboard or two. So he might be able to show you some spots, some secret spots on the Great Lakes. Chad (54:26.09) none. Chad (54:33.267) Yeah. Chad (54:40.002) Oh, for sure. Yeah, yeah. Like a, well, damaged Duluth. I'm gonna, there's a shop up in Duluth and that's kind of where we're going. We're going to go east of there, but I mean, there are secrets, but they're not because it's so cold up there that no one does it. You know what I mean? Mark (54:42.084) I think they're all kind of secret. Mark (54:57.144) Right. It's not like you're fighting for waves. Chad (55:01.002) Yeah, my buddy Matt that I'm going to do it go surf with he lived in San Diego for 15 years and he's like a you know He's got a sailboat in Mexico and he's like the best place to surf is You know the great lace because no one's there Yeah, you just got to be able to deal with the cold Mark (55:12.856) Really? Interesting. Okay, well, I guess now with all your cold plunge training, you should be ready. Chad (55:18.051) We'll see. Chad (55:21.523) I'm going that's kind of the goal. Yeah. Mark (55:23.596) You know, if you really want to impress me, you're going to trunk it. Right on. Well, thank you for taking the time to jump onto this real talk. This has been real Chad, and I enjoy talking to you, uh, snowboarding. And, you know, I, I've, um, been progressing my, my interest in snowboarding and, and part of that progression though, is, is. Chad (55:27.142) I'll die, are you? Yeah, we'll see. Chad (55:37.642) It has, it's been a couple years. Mark (55:50.132) as you have, I'm less interested in the snowboard industry and, and more interested in kind of what snowboarding can do for the individual, you know, and how that can impact your life and what it can contribute to your peace and happiness in your life. And so I think that snowboarding can still bring that to you. It's just I'm not looking at it through the same lens as I used to, as far as the industry and you know, then this kind of daily in and out of, you know, Instagram posts or whatever. Chad (56:21.002) Yup, you know, there's only one person made for Instagram that's Zeb Powell, you know? Mark (56:25.9) Exactly. It's like you just have to watch what Zeb does and it's like, what are you going to do? What? You know, you can watch Marcus Cleveland too, you know, yeah, there's a there's a handful, but you can get your full fill pretty quick. Just saying. Time to figure out some new ways to sell yourself through Instagram, maybe. Chad (56:33.978) Yeah, yeah, true. For sure. Five. Chad (56:40.846) For sure. Chad (56:45.43) Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean Who knows of my plan this winter is to go snowboarding every day I can and I live in an area where once I leave my house with my cell phone Mark (56:55.076) That's, that's why you're a real contender for goat status is because your passion for snowboarding is like real. And you know, there's a lot of people who like just being around snowboarding for 30 years, there's like a lot of people who like became pros and like, we're all about it, had video parts and all this stuff. And then they lost their sponsor deal or whatever and haven't been seen from since. And to me, that was always disappointing. It's like, were you after the, you know, the accolades or were you after kind of the joy of snowboarding? You know, and for me, I have no question in my mind about you, Chad. You love snowboarding more than anyone else. I know. I think so. Chad (57:32.45) Thank you, I appreciate that. You are correct, snowboarding's not really that hard. So, well it is and it isn't, but some people are really naturally talented and then their passion doesn't really go along with their scene. So once they're done, they're done. And I love it, it's gonna be a good time. It's just a great way to get outside. Mark (57:45.853) Yeah. Mark (57:49.844) Well, apparently we're not done yet with the snowboard project. We're going to keep doing it. And we're not doing it with sponsors anymore because we just want to keep the talk as real as possible. So I think that's a good thing. And I want to thank you all for tuning into our first episode in about nine months. And you got to take a break from time to time. I mean, I literally worked in the snowboard industry from the 19, I think 1991. is when I first got involved and I just, I worked a ridiculous amount of time in it for all these years and it was time for a break, you know, so. Chad (58:28.49) Yeah, I'm down to get back on once we come up with another good list of awesome things to talk about. Mark (58:34.228) I think it won't take long because we didn't even get to the juiciest part of this list this week. So we'll be back soon. I talked to Bjorn, by the way, he wants to jump back on as well. So we'll get, we'll get both of you guys back on here. I'm not counting Bjorn out, but he was busy with Cardiff business today. So he was doing that. There's some kind of snow safety kind of deal in Utah right now. And, you know, he's, he's involved with that. So more power to him. Chad (58:40.138) Oh yeah, yeah. All right. Chad (58:45.65) Nice. Chad (58:52.238) Ah, that's it. Mark (59:01.972) And more power to you, Chad. And I'm glad that you've got a roof over your head, some photos on the wall that you shot and a couple of Vordivox bags behind you. Chad (59:11.462) Those aren't my photos, those are Jeff's. But yeah, a couple of order box bags, so you know. Pretty good gear. Speaking of, well, yeah, thank you. They do have a, I'm not sponsored by them, but they do have a beacon that his voice talks to you while you're searching. It says, go left, go right, start digging. Things like that, I believe so, yeah. It's pretty advanced, you know. Hopefully you never have to have that happen, but. Mark (59:13.904) Okay. Yep, you're ready for any kind of mishap. Mark (59:30.604) Like what, go left, go right, five meters? Really? That is pretty cool. Chad (59:40.706) They do that. Mark (59:41.144) Maybe, maybe for our next episode, we can kind of do a review because it seems like, you know, like all this backcountry technology is still evolving as far as the airbag backpacks, you know, there's the canister ones, the electric ones. There's beacons seem to evolve every year. Now radios are part of the game. Um, they always have been, but they kind of have been refined a little bit by the industry. So maybe we could talk about some of the backcountry tools next time around as well. Cool. Chad (01:00:07.362) That sounds awesome. I'm way into that. Mark (01:00:10.284) Well, thank you everyone for tuning in and yeah, we will be back with some more snowboard projects soon. Chad (01:00:18.539) Thank you. Mark (01:00:19.592) And, uh, Chad, just

This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on Oct. 23. It dropped for free subscribers on Oct. 30. 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 Vohs, General Manager of Cascade Mountain, WisconsinRecorded onOctober 10, 2023About Cascade MountainClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: The Walz familyLocated in: Portage, WisconsinYear founded: 1962Pass affiliations: NoneReciprocal partners: NoneClosest neighboring ski areas: Devil's Head (:20), Christmas Mountain Village (:30), Tyrol Basin (1:00)Base elevation: 820 feetSummit elevation: 1,280 feetVertical drop: 460 feetSkiable Acres: 176Average annual snowfall: 50-60 inchesTrail count: 48 (23% advanced, 40% intermediate, 37% beginner)Lift count: 10 (2 high-speed quads, 3 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 2 doubles, 1 ropetow, 1 carpet – view Lift Blog's inventory of Cascade's lift fleet)Why I interviewed himContrary to what you may imagine, Midwesterners do not pass their winters staring wistfully at the western horizon, daydreaming only of the Back Bowls and Wasatch tram rides. They're not, God help us, New Yorkers. Because unlike the high-dollar Manhattanite with weeks booked at Deer Valley and Aspen, Midwesterners ski even when they're not on vacation. Sure, they'll tag that week in Summit County or Big Sky (driving there, most likely, from Grand Rapids or Cincinnati or Des Moines), but they'll fill in the calendar in between. They'll ski on weekends. They'll ski after work. They'll ski with their kids and with their buddies and with their cousins. They'll ski in hunter orange and in Vikings jerseys and in knit caps of mysterious vintage. They'll ski with a backpack full of High Life and a crockpot tucked beneath each arm and a pack of jerky in their coat pocket. “Want some,” they'll offer as you meet them for the first time on the chairlift, a 55-year-old Hall double with no safety bar. “My buddy got an elk permit this year.”They ski because it's fun and they ski because it's cold and they ski because winter is 16 months long. But mostly they ski because there are ski areas everywhere, and because they're pretty affordable. Even Vail doesn't break double digits at its Midwest bumps, with peak-day lift tickets reaching between $69 and $99 at the company's 10 ski areas spread between Missouri and Ohio.Because of this affordable density, the Midwest is still a stronghold for the blue-collar ski culture that's been extinguished in large parts of the big-mountain West. You may find that notion offensive - that skiing, in this rustic form, could be more approachable. If so, you're probably not from the Midwest. These people are hard to offend. Michigan-born Rabbit, AKA Eminem, channels this stubborn regional pride in 8 Mile's closing rap battle, when he obliterates nemesis Papa Doc by flagrantly itemizing his flaws.“I know everything he's got to say against me” may as well be the mantra of the Midwest skier. In the U.S. ski universe, Colorad-Bro is Papa Doc, standing dumbfounded after Wisco Bro just turned his sword around on himself:This guy ain't no m***********g MCI know everything he's got to say against meMy hill is short, It snows 30 inches per yearI do ski with a coffee Thermos filled with beerMy boys do ski in camouflageI do ride Olin 210s I found in my Uncle Jack's garageI did hit an icy jumpAnd biff like a chumpAnd my last chairlift ride was 45 seconds longI'm still standing here screaming “Damn let's do it again!”You can't point out the idiosyncratic shortcomings of Midwest skiing better than a Midwest skier. They know. And they love the whole goddamn ball of bologna.But that enthusiasm wouldn't track if Wisconsin's 33 ski areas were 33 hundred-foot ropetow bumps. As in any big ski state to its east or west, Wisco has a hierarchy, a half-dozen surface lift-only operations; a smattering of 200-footers orbiting Milwaukee; a few private clubs; and, at the top of the food chain, a handful of sprawling operations that can keep a family entertained for a weekend: Granite Peak, Whitecap, Devil's Head, and Cascade. And, just as I'm working my way through the Wasatch and Vermont and Colorado by inviting the heads of those region's ski areas onto the podcast, so I'm going to (do my best to) deliver conversations with the leaders of the big boys in the Upper Midwest. This is my sixth Wisconsin podcast, and my 15th focused on the Midwest overall (five in Michigan, one each in Indiana, Ohio, and South Dakota, plus my conversation with Midwest Family Ski Resorts head Charles Skinner – view them all here). I've also got a pair of Minnesota episodes (Lutsen and Buck Hill), and another Michigan (Snowriver) one booked over the coming months.I don't record these episodes just to annoy Colorado-Bro (though that is pretty funny), or because I'm hanging onto the Midwest ski areas that stoked my rabid obsession with skiing (though I am), or because the rest of the ski media has spent 75 years ignoring them (though they have). I do it because the Midwest has some damn good ski areas, run by some damn smart people, and they have a whole different perspective on what makes a good and interesting ski area. And finding those stories is kind of the whole point here.What we talked aboutCascade's season-opening plan; summer improvements; how much better snowmaking is getting, and how fast; improving the load area around Cindy Pop; Cascade's unique immoveable neighbor; the funky fun Daisy mid-mountain parking lot; upgrading the Mogul Monster lift; why Cascade changed the name to “JL2”; Cascade's “Midwest ski-town culture”; Devil's Head; when I-94 is your driveway; why JL2 is a fixed-grip lift, even though it runs between two high-speed quads; other lift configurations Cascade considered for JL2; the dreaded icing issue that can murder high-speed lifts; reminiscing on old-school Cascade – “if the hill was open, we were here”; Christmas Mountain; a brief history of the Walz family's ownership; a commitment to independence; whether slopeside lodging could ever be an option; which lifts could be next in line for upgrades; whether Cascade considered a midstation for Cindy Pop; the glory of high-speed ropetows and where Cascade may install another one; the summer of two lift installations; the neverending saga of Cascade's expansion and what might happen next; the story behind the “Cindy Pop” and “B-Dub” lift names and various trail names; why Cindy Pop is a detachable lift and B-Dub is a fixed-grip, even though they went in the same summer; additional expansion opportunities; why Cascade hasn't (and probably won't), joined a multi-mountain ski pass; and Cascade's best idea from Covid-era operations.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewThe National Ski Areas Association asked me to lead a panel of general managers at their annual convention in Savannah last spring. I offered them a half-dozen topics, and we settled on “megapass holdouts”: large (for their area), regionally important ski areas that could join the Indy Pass – and, in many cases, the Epic and Ikon passes – but have chosen not to. It's a story I'd been meaning to write in the newsletter for a while, but had never gotten to.We wanted nationwide representation. In the west, we locked in Mt. Baker CEO Gwyn Howat and Mt. Rose GM Greg Gavrilets. For the eastern rep, I tapped Laszlo Vajtay, owner of Plattekill, an 1,100-footer tucked less than three hours north of New York City (but nearly unknown to its mainstream skier populations). In the Midwest, Cascade was my first choice.Why? Because it's a bit of an outlier. While the Ikon Pass ignores the Midwest outside of Boyne's two Michigan properties, opportunities for megapass membership are ample. Indy Pass has signed 32 partners in the region, and Vail has added 10 more to its Epic Pass. Five of the remainder are owned by an outfit called Wisconsin Resorts, which has combined them on its own multi-mountain pass. The model works here, is my point, and most of the region's large ski areas have either opted into the Indy Pass, or been forced onto a different megapass by their owner. But not Cascade. Here is a mountain with a solid, modern lift fleet; a sprawling and varied trail network; and what amounts to its own interstate exit. This joint would not only sell Indy Passes – it would be a capable addition to Ikon or Epic, selling passes to voyaging locals in the same way that Camelback and Windham do in the East and Big Bear does in the West. And they know it.But Cascade stands alone. No pass partnerships. No reciprocal deals. Just a mountain on its own, selling lift tickets. What a concept.A core operating assumption of The Storm is that multi-mountain passes are, mostly, good for skiers and ski areas alike. But I have not made much of an effort to analyze counter-arguments that could challenge this belief. The Savannah panel was an exercise in doing exactly that. All four mountain leaders made compelling cases for pass independence. Since that conversation wasn't recorded, however, I wanted to bring a more focused version of it to you. Here you go.What I got wrongI said that “I grew up skiing in Michigan” – that isn't exactly correct. While I did grow up in Michigan, and that's where I started skiing, I never skied until I was a teenager.Why you should ski CascadeLet's say you decided to ski the top five ski areas in every ski state in America. That would automatically drop Cascade onto your list. Even in a state with 33 ski areas, Cascade easily climbs into the top five. It's big. The terrain is varied. It's well managed. The infrastructure is first-rate. And every single year, it gets better.Yes, Cascade is consistent and deliberate in its lift and snowmaking upgrades, but no single change has improved the experience more than limiting lift ticket sales. This was a Covid-era change that the ski area stuck with, Vohs says, after realizing that giving a better experience to fewer skiers made more long-term business sense than jamming the parking lot to overfill every Saturday.Every ski area in America is a work in progress. Watching The Godfather today is the same experience as when the film debuted in 1972. But if you haven't skied Vail Mountain or Sun Valley or Stowe since that year, you'd arrive to an experience you scarcely recognized in 2023. Some ski areas, however, are more deliberate in crafting this evolving story. To some, time sort of happens, and they're surprised to realize, one day, that their 1985 experience doesn't appeal to a 21st century world. But others grab a handsaw and a screwdriver and carefully think through the long-term, neverending renovation of their dream home. Cascade is one of these, constantly, constantly sanding and shifting and shaping this thing that will never quite be finished.Podcast NotesOn Wisconsin's largest ski areasI mentioned that Cascade was one of Wisconsin's largest ski areas. Here's a full state inventory for context:On more efficient modern snowmaking I mentioned a conversation I'd had with Joe VanderKelen, president of SMI Snow Makers, and how he'd discussed the efficiency of modern snowmaking. You can listen to that podcast here:On naming the JL2 liftWhen Cascade replaced the Mogul Monster lift last year, resort officials named the new fixed-grip quad on the same line “JL2.” That, Vohs tells us, is an honorarium to two Cascade locals killed in a Colorado avalanche in 2014: Justin Lentz and Jarrard Law. Per the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Feb. 16, 2014:Two men from Portage were killed in a Colorado avalanche while skiing over the weekend.Justin Lentz, 32, and Jarrad Law died when they and five other skiers were swept away by an avalanche late Saturday afternoon, friends and family told Madison television station WISC-TV (Channel 3.)The avalanche occurred at an elevation of about 11,000 feet near Independence Pass, roughly 120 miles southwest of Denver.The two skiers were found at the top of the avalanche, said Susan Matthews, spokeswoman for the Lake County Office of Emergency Management."The skiers were equipped with avalanche beacons, which assisted search and rescue crews in locating them," she said.She said authorities believe the seven skiers triggered the slide. Officials found the bodies of Lentz and Law Sunday afternoon but did not release their names.One of Lentz's family members told WISC-TV that the family was notified Saturday night. Lentz was a Portage High School graduate who was in Colorado on a skiing trip. A friend said Law had worked at Cascade Mountain and was an avid skier.WKOW captured the scene at the JL2 lift's opening this past January:It was a bittersweet moment for those at Cascade Mountain as visitors took a ride on a new ski lift named in honor of two late skiers.When it came time to name the new ski lift at Cascade Mountain in Portage, crews at the resort said there was only option that seemed fitting."We tossed around the idea of naming it after a couple of just really awesome guys who grew up skiing and snowboarding here," said Evan Walz, who is the Inside Operations Manager for Cascade Mountain.The name they landed on was JL2. It's in honor of Jarrard Law and Justin Lentz."[I] wanted to cry," Justin Lentz's mother, Connie Heitke, said. "Because I knew that people were still thinking of them and love them as much as when it first happened."Law and Lentz lost their lives to an avalanche while on a backcountry trip in Colorado in February 2014. Heitke said it has been hard but said it's the support from friends and family that helps her get through."[I] still miss him awfully a lot. He was my first. It's coming around and now that I can feel that it was okay because he used to enjoy life," she said.Seeing people gather for the ribbon cutting of the ski lift's grand opening, Heitke said is a fabulous feeling."He [Justin] would have been grabbing my head and shaking my head and shaking me screaming and yelling and hollering just like he did," she said. "Jarrard would have just been sitting over there really calm with a smile on his face enjoying watching Justin."From Lentz's obituary:Justin T. Lentz, age 32, of Sun Prairie, died on Saturday, February 15, 2014 as the result of a skiing accident in Twin Lakes, Colorado.Justin was born on August 7, 1981 in Portage, the son of Robert and Connie (Heitke) Lentz.  He graduated from Portage High School in 2000.  He had worked at Staff Electric in Madison since 2005.  Justin loved skiing, snowboarding, fishing, hiking, mountain biking, and making his weekends better than everyone else's year.    From Law's obituary:Jarrard Leigh Law, 34, of Portage, formerly of Carroll County, died tragically while skiing in Colorado Saturday, Feb. 15, 2014.He was born Dec. 6, 1979, in Freeport, to Joan (Getz) and Robert Law.Jarrard was baptized at St. Peter's Lutheran Church in Savanna and confirmed at Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Portage.He was a 1998 graduate of Portage High School and earned a degree in computer information systems from Madison Area Technical College.For the past 12 years, he was employed by CESA 5 working as a computer technician for the Necedah Area School District.Jarrard was a member of Bethlehem Lutheran Church serving as an usher and communion assistant.He enjoyed skiing, biking, hiking and many other outdoor activities.On Devil's HeadI've long had a low-grade obsession with ski areas that sit near one another. Despite drawing from identical or very similar weather systems, terrain features, and population bases, they ski, look, and feel like completely different entities. Think A-Basin/Keystone or Sugarbush/Mad River Glen – neighbors that exist, it can seem, in different universes.Many versions of this dot the Midwest, with perhaps the most well-known being Nub's Nob/The Highlands, an independent/Boyne Resorts duo that face one another across a Michigan backroad. How different are they? Both ski areas built new lifts this summer. The Highlands removed three Riblet triples and replaced them with one Doppelmayr D-Line bubble six-pack, a chairlift that probably cost more than the Detroit Lions. Nub's Nob, meanwhile, replaced a Riblet fixed-grip quad with… a Skytrac fixed-grip quad. “High-speed chairlifts at Nub's Nob just don't make sense,” GM Ben Doornbos underscored in a video announcing the replacement:Wisconsin's version of this is Cascade and Devil's Head, which sit 14 road miles apart. While both count similar vertical drops and skiable acreage totals, Devil's Head, like Nub's, relies solely on fixed-grip lifts. It's a bit more backwoods, a bit less visible than Cascade, which is parked like a sentinel over the interstate. Vohs and I talk a bit about the relationship between the two ski areas. Here's a visual of Devil's Head for reference:On Christmas MountainVohs spent some time managing Christmas Mountain, 22 miles down the interstate. He refers to it as, “a very small operation.” The place is more of an amenity for the attached resort than a standalone ski area meant to compete with Cascade or Devil's Head. It's around 200 vertical feet served by a quad and a handletow:On the capacity differences between fixed-grip and high-speed liftsCascade runs four top-to-bottom quads: two detachables and two fixed-grips. Vohs and I discuss what went into deciding which lift to install for each of these lines. Detachable quads, it turns out, are about twice as expensive to install and far more expensive to maintain, and – this is hard to really appreciate – don't move any more skiers per hour than a fixed-grip quad. Don't believe it? Check this excellent summary from Midwest Skiers:You can also read the summary here.On high-speed ropetowsI'm going to go ahead and keep proselytizing on the utility and efficiency of high-speed ropetows until every ski area in America realizes that they need like eight of them. Look at these things go (this one is at Mount Ski Gull in Minnesota):On Cascade's expansion and Google MapsMany years ago, Cascade cut a half dozen or so top-to-bottom trails skier's right of the traditional resort footprint. Were this anywhere other than Cascade, skiers may have barely noticed, but since the terrain rises directly off the interstate, well, they did. Cascade finally strung the B-Dub lift up to serve roughly half the terrain in 2016, but, as you can see on Google Maps, a clutch of trails still awaits lift service:So what's the plan? Vohs tells us in the podcast.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 90/100 in 2023, and number 476 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane, or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email skiing@substack.com. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on Oct. 2. It dropped for free subscribers on Oct. 9. 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:WhoDan Grider, General Manager of Great Bear, South DakotaRecorded onSeptember 25, 2023About Great Bear Ski ValleyOwned by: The City of Sioux FallsLocated in: Sioux Falls, South DakotaYear founded: 1966Pass affiliations: NoneReciprocal partners:* 3 days at Seven Oaks* 2 days at Mont du Lac* 1 day each at Buck Hill, Powder Ridge MN, Snowstar* Discounts at several other local ski areasClosest neighboring ski areas: Mt. Crescent (2:37), Mount Kato (2:16)Base elevation: 1,352 feetSummit elevation: 1,534 feetVertical drop: 182 feetSkiable Acres: 20Average annual snowfall: 49 inchesTrail count: 15 (7 most difficult, 5 more difficult, 3 easiest)Lift count: 3 (1 fixed-grip quad, 1 ropetow, 1 carpet – view Lift Blog's inventory of Great Bear's lift fleet)Why I interviewed himFrequent Storm readers have probably started to notice the pattern: every fourth or fifth podcast swerves off Megapass Boulevard and takes four state highways, a gravel path, a Little Caesars pit-stop, and ends in the Wal-Mart-sized parking lot of a Midwest ski area. Which often sits next to a Wal-Mart. Or a car dealership. Or, in the case of Great Bear, between a construction supply depot and the Sioux Falls chapter of the Izaak Walton League, a conservation society.Why do I do this? My last three podcasts featured the leaders of Killington, Keystone, and Snowbird. The next one to drop into your inbox will be Northstar, a Vail Resorts staple that is the ninth-largest ski area in America. If you're reading this newsletter, there is a high probability that you either already have skied all four of those, or plan to at some future point. Most of you will probably never ski Great Bear or anywhere else in South Dakota. Many of you will never ski the Midwest at all.Which I understand. But there are several reasons I've worked Midwest ski areas into the podcast rotation, and why I will continue to do so for as long as The Storm exists:* The episodes with the leaders of Caberfae, Boyne Mountain, The Highlands, and Nub's Nob are for 18-year-old me. Or whatever version of 18-year-old me currently sits restlessly in the ski-mad but ignored flatlands between Ohio and the Dakotas. I devoured every ski magazine on the drugstore shelves of the 1990s, but if I could scrub 500 words of Midwest content from their combined catalogue each winter, I was lucky. I was dying – dying – for someone, anyone, to say something, anything, about the Midwest or Midwest skiing. Even a list of the top 10 ski areas in Michigan, with 50 words on each, would have made my year. But the ski mags, great as they were in those days, barely covered the rich and varied ski culture of New England, let alone the Midwest. I would have lost my goddamn mind had someone published a 90-minute conversation with the owner of the mysterious (to me at the time) Caberfae, with its hills upon hills of abandoned lifts and ever-changing footprint. * The Midwest is home to one of the world's great ski cultures. If you don't believe me, go ski there. The region hosts 122 ski areas across 10 states, most of them in Michigan (43), Wisconsin (33), and Minnesota (21). But the volume matters less than the attitude: Midwest skiers are absolutely unpretentious. They'll ski in hunting gear and Carhartts. They'll ski on 25-year-old sticks they found at a yard sale for five dollars. They'll ski when it's 25 below zero. They'll ski at night, in the rain, on a 200-vertical-foot bump running 60-year-old chairlifts. These are skiers, Man. They do it because it's fun, because it's right there, and because this is one of the few regions where skiing is still accessible to the masses. If you want to understand why every third Colorado liftie you meet is from Grand Rapids or Madison or Duluth, go ski Canonsburg or Cascade or Spirit Mountain. It will make sense in about five seconds.* Because the Midwest has so many owner-operators, and because it takes a certain sort of swaggering competence to run something as temperamental and wild as a 300-vertical-foot, city-adjacent ski area with 17 chairlifts all built before the Reagan Administration, these tend to be very good interviews. The top five most-downloaded Storm Skiing Podcasts of 2023 are Alterra CEO Jared Smith, Holiday Valley President Dennis Eshbaugh, Pacific Group Resorts CMO Christian Knapp, Indy Pass President Doug Fish, and Whitecap Mountains owner David Dziuban. Those first four are fairly predictable (Holiday Valley is a bit of an outlier, as the resort heavily shared the conversation), but the last one is remarkable. Both because only five people have actually skied at Whitecap, and because the 33 podcasts that I've pushed out this year include many prominent and popular megapass headliners with well-known and highly respected leaders. Why did the Whitecap podcast land so hard? I can't say for certain, but I suspect because it is completely raw, completely authentic, and absolutely unconcerned with what anyone will think or how they will react to it. Dziuban, an industry veteran on a mission to salvage a dying business from the scrapyard, has no boss, nothing to lose, and no one to impress. It's an incredible conversation (listen for yourself). And while Dziuban is a special character, bolstered by a fearless Chicago moxie and the accent to match, every single guest I have on from the Midwest brings some version of that no-b******t attitude. It's fun.* I'm from there. I grew up in Michigan. Many of my best friends still live there. I return frequently, hold Michigan football season tickets, camp in the UP every April, still rock the Old English “D” ballcap. I moved to the East Coast in 2002, but the longer I'm gone, the more I admire the region's matter-of-fact work ethic, the down-to-earth worldview, the way Midwesterners simplify the complicated (next time you ride a chairlift with a Michigander at Keystone or Breckenridge, ask them how they got to Colorado – there's a better than 50 percent chance that they drove). Midwest skiing is the reason I love skiing, and I will always be grateful for these hills, no matter how small they are. Plus, I gotta represent.So, there you go. Skip this ep if you want. But you shouldn't, because it's very good.What we talked aboutGreat Bear's record-shattering 2022-23 ski season for skier visits; how the ski area has been able to recruit and retain staff in a difficult labor market; staying open into April; the importance of Christmas Week; memorializing Roxie Johnson; Great Bear in the 1970s; the quirks of running a city-owned ski area; the appeal of working at a small ski area for decades; what it means to a flatland city to have a ski area; the best age to make skiers; “if you can sit, you can tube”; “The nice thing about our profitability is that there's no owner here, so our money just stays in the bank”; contemplating a new chalet; the location, size, and timeline for Great Bear's potential expansion; the glacial phenomenon that left Great Bear in its wake; reflecting on the Covid season; what it means for a small municipal Midwestern ski area to put in a brand-new chairlift; why the outgoing Borvig quad had to go, even though it was “a tank”; the brilliance and cost-effectiveness of high-speed ropetows; scarves and ropetows don't mix; the story behind the “Children's Dental Center Beginner Area”; the power of tubing; Keeping season pass and lift ticket prices low; the story behind the season passholders-only timeslot on Sunday; holding strong on wicket tickets; free buddy tickets for passholders; Flurry the mascot; and the Indy Pass.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewLike many small ski areas, Great Bear publishes a periodic newsletter to complement its social media presence. I subscribe to as many of these email digests as I am aware of, as they often contain nuggets that larger resorts would celebrate with a big campaign and press release. Great Bear's April newsletter hooked me with this:We are excited to finally start sharing with you our plans for future expansion! Efforts to expand have been in the works since 2013. Our top priority is adding another 7-acres of skiable downhill terrain with a second chairlift. Additionally, we are working on plans to significantly expand the lodge.As a city park, our next step is presenting a detailed plan to the Parks Board next month. We appreciate all your enthusiasm for a bigger and better Great Bear. Projects of this size take an enormous amount of work and collaboration. We are so grateful for our partnership with the City of Sioux Falls and all the community support!An expansion project at a municipal ski area marooned in a state with a population of fewer than 900,000 people is a big deal. It means the place is well-run and well-cared-for, and most likely a community staple worthy of some national attention. The fact that Great Bear was served not by a collection of ropetows and a 60-year-old Hall double, but by a carpet and a brand-new Skytrac quad, complemented with a high-speed Park Brah ropetow, were further evidence of a highly capable management team.Intrigued, I reached out. It took a minute, but we set up the podcast with Grider, who's been running the bump since 1992. He's a great storyteller with an upbeat disposition and a good mind for business, and he convincingly lays out a long-term future for Great Bear that will ensure the mountain's status as a skier assembly line for many generations to come. If you love skiing, you'll enjoy this one.Questions I wish I'd askedI'd meant to ask about this “I Ski 182 Vert Campaign,” which profiles locals who have put Great Bear at the center of their recreational lives:Why you should ski Great BearThere are different ways to think about yourself as a skier. One is as a sort of progressionist. Like a student working their way through school, you graduate from one grade to the next. Always forward, never back. So a Jersey kid may learn at Campgaw as a 6-year-old, join after-school ski bus trips to Mountain Creek in junior high, take weekend trips to Mount Snow in high school, and spend college spring breaks at Palisades Tahoe. But by the time he moves to the Upper East Side and has two kids of his own, he only skis on his annual trips to Deer Valley. He sits on his laptop in the lodge as the kids run beginner-chair laps at Thunder Ridge. He's not going to bother with this little stuff – he's graduated.But this is a strange way to think about skiing. We don't apply such logic to other facets of our lives. Consider food – sometimes you have the inch-thick porterhouse on a special-occasion outing, sometimes you have Taco Bell, and sometimes you eat Pop-Tarts on your drive to work. But I don't know anyone who, once they've dined at Peter Luger, never deigns to eat a hotdog again. Sometimes you just need to fuel up.I approach skiing in the same way. A dozen or so days per season, I'm eating steak: Snowbird or Big Sky or Vail or Heavenly. But since I'm not content to ski 12 days per winter, I also eat a lot of pasta. Let's call that New England and the Catskills on their best days, or just about anyplace with fresh snow. And I snack a lot, skiing's equivalent of a bag of Doritos: a half-open Poconos bump, a couple hours on a Sunday morning at Mountain Creek, a Michigan T-bar when I'm visiting family for Christmas. My 6-year-old son is in a seasonal program at 250-vertical-foot Mt. Peter in New York. The vast majority of the parents sit in the lodge on their phones while the kids ski. But I ski, lapping the Ol' Pete double chair, which accesses the whole mountain and rarely has a line. When his lesson is over, we often ski together. It's fun.Everyone funnels the joys of skiing through different lenses. The lift or the freefall, the high-altitude drama, the après electricity of crowded places and alcohol. For me, the draw is a combination of dynamic movement and novelty, an exploration of new places, or familiar places under the changing conditions wrought by weather and crowds. Even though Mt. Peter is familiar, it's a little different place every week.Which takes us to Great Bear, a 182-foot bump that is, most likely, nowhere near you. I'm not suggesting you cancel your Tahoe reservations and book yourself into the Sioux Falls Best Western. But there are two groups of skiers who ought to consider this place: locals, and cross-country road-trippers.If you live in Sioux Falls and are over the age of 16, you probably consider yourself a progressionist. Maybe you learned to ski at Great Bear, but now it's too small for you to bother with. You'll ski your five days per year at Copper Mountain and be content with it. But why? You have a ski area right there. The season pass is $265. Why ski five days per year when you can ski 25? With that Great Bear season pass, you can ski every Saturday morning and two nights a week after work. Consider it your gym. The runs are short, but the sensation of dynamic movement is still there. It's skiing. And while it's (typically) a materially a worse form of skiing than your high-altitude Colorado version of the sport, it's also in many ways better, with less attitude, less pretense, less entitlement, less ego. Just kids having fun. It's fulfilling in a different way.The second group is those of us who live east of America's best versions of skiing. Most East Coast skiers will fly west, but the most adventurous will drive. You see them on Facebook, posting elaborate three- or six-week Google maps dotted all over the west. But why wait until you arrive in Colorado or Wyoming or Montana to start skiing? There are ski areas all along your route. Great Bear sits two miles from Interstate 90, the 3,021-mile-long route that runs from Boston to Seattle. So why not scoot through Kissing Bridge, Buffalo Ski Center, and Peek'N Peak, New York; Alpine Valley, Boston Mills, and Brandywine in Ohio; Swiss Valley, Michigan; Four Lakes and Villa Olivia, Illinois; and Cascade, Devil's Head, and LaCrosse, Wisconsin en route? Yes, you want to hurry west. But the drive will take several days no matter what. Why not mix in a little novelty along the way?My first trip west was over Christmas break in the mid-90s, a 22-hour bender from Michigan to Summit County, Colorado with my buddy Andy. We'd booked a Super 8 or some similar thing in Lincoln, Nebraska, at our approximate halfway point. We rode into Nebraska sometime after dark, but early enough for a night session at Nebraski, a run-down hundred-footer between Omaha and Lincoln. The chairlift coughed up the bump like a cartoon contraption and skiers yard-saled all over the hill and it was just about the most amazing scene you could imagine. Four days later a two-footer hammered Copper, dropping an exclamation-point powder day onto our first Rocky Mountain adventure. Nearly three decades later, when we reminisce on that trip, we talk about that Copper pow day, but long-gone Nebraski (I don't think the place made it out of the ‘90s alive), is an equal part of the legend.A Great Bear stop would be a little different, of course. This is a modern ski area, with a 2021 Skytrac quad and modern snowmaking and solid financial backing. It will make you feel good about skiing and about its future. It may even be a highlight of your trip.Podcast NotesOn the remoteness of Great BearIt is impossible to overstate how important Great Bear is to curating skiers among the 300,000-ish residents of greater Sioux Falls. There are two other ski areas in South Dakota – Terry Peak and resurgent, probably semi-private Deer Mountain – but they sit nearly six hours west, in the Black Hills. Mt. Crescent, Iowa, sits two-and-a-half hours down I-29. Mt. Kato, Minnesota is two hours east. And that's about it. If you're a teenager in Sioux Falls without Great Bear, you may as well be a teenager in Fort Lauderdale. You're probably never going to ski.That wasn't always true. A 175-vertical-foot (at most) bump with the amazing name of Hole In The Mountain once operated with up to three ropetows near Lake Benton, an hour north, according to the Midwest Lost Ski Areas Project. But that's been gone for decades.  On Great Bear's potential expansionGreat Bear is in the process of a sizeable expansion, which could add a second chairlift and several more trails. Great Bear provided this preliminary map, which shows a new lift sitting adjacent to the learning area and a new entrance road and chalet:On the outcome of the Sept. 25 masterplan meetingGrider referenced a meeting he had coming up “later this week,” which means last week, since we recorded this on Sept. 25. I followed up on Sunday to see if the meeting had thrown any landmines in the way of Great Bear's potential expansion. It had not. The reception from local officials had been optimistic and enthusiastic, Grider said.“What we've got to do here in the next six weeks is they're going to formalize the plans and we'll get some drawings, we'll get a rendering,” Grider told me. “Then we go in front of the park board and we just keep our foot on the gas pedal.”On the stem in the middle of Great Bear's old Borvig chairGreat Bear's spanking-new Skytrac replaced a gorgeous but problematic Borvig centerpole quad. Luckily, Lift Blog documented the old lift before the ski area demolished it.On high-speed ropetows and Hyland HillsI remain obsessed with high-speed ropetows as the ultimate solution to terrain park-driven congestion. They're fast, they're cheap, and they tamp down liftlines by drawing Parkbrahs away from the workhorse chairlifts. Here's one I documented at Spirit Mountain, Minnesota last season:And here's one at Hyland Hills, which Grider mentions:On me not knowing who Mary Hart isAt one point in the podcast, Dan Grider asked me if I knew who Mary Hart was. I said I did not, which was true. It turns out that she is quite famous. She was Miss South Dakota 1970 and hosted a show called Entertainment Tonight for 29 years. I have never watched that show, nor was I aware of its existence until I looked up Ms. Hart on Wikipedia.This probably sounds dubious to you. But there is something wrong with my brain. I simply do not process information having to do with pop culture or celebrities. I say this not out of proud ignorance, but as a matter of observable fact. I have always been this way. Hit me with a well-known movie quote, and I will stare at you as though you just spoke to me in Elvish.An anecdote to illustrate the larger void in which I exist: my wife and I began watching a show called Suits the other day. She asked me if I recognized the young woman who plays a paralegal on this show. I said no. She asked if I knew who Meghan Markle was. I said no. She asked if I knew who Prince [can't remember the name] was. I said no. Because apparently they're married. And that matters somehow. Though I'm not exactly sure why. Though I am curious why we still have princes in this world, because I thought we got rid of them when we exiled the dragons back in like 1502 or whenever.We all have gaps, right? Or shortcomings. One of mine, and there are many, is aggressive indifference to things that I find boring. It's probably how some of you feel when I write about skiing in Ohio. Like, Man, get me to the next thing.On charging the same for kids as adultsMost ski areas kick you a discount for a kids' lift ticket. And why not? Expenses add up for a family, and when you start multiplying everything by three or four, you get to a scary price range pretty quickly. So some of you may have been surprised when Grider mentions, during our interview, that Great Bear doesn't offer discounted lift tickets for kids.There's a simple reason for that. A discounted kids ticket doesn't do much for you when most of your clientele is children. Great Bear is one of our skier factories, where busloads of kids prime themselves for roadtrips to Colorado 10 years from now. So the parents don't need the incentive – they're just signing the waiver to get the kid on the ski bus.Plenty of ski areas follow a similar model. Mount Peter, where my 6-year-old participates in a seasonal program, is currently selling adult season passes for $499, and kids' passes for $479. Nearby Campgaw posts similar rates: $389 for adults, $359 for kids. But it makes sense to minimize the discount: both are 300-ish-foot bumps that are dwarfed by nearby Mountain Creek, a thousand-footer with a killer terrain park and high-speed lifts (and, incidentally, a less-expensive season pass). They can't compete from a terrain point of view, but they can offer something that Creek can't: an unintimidating atmosphere to learn in. And the skiers who mostly need such a thing is kids. And if Mt. Peter and Campgaw discount kids too much, their whole model falls apart.In the case of Great Bear, well, the season pass is currently $265. This winter's lift ticket price will be $38. So, really, who cares?On Flurry the MascotIf your ski area doesn't have a mascot, it should: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 2023, and number 467 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane, or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email skiing@substack.com. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

On This episode of Backstage Jazz, we're featuring an interview with jazz drummer Harold Summey. Summey has been a drummer/percussionist for over thirty years. The individuals he has performed with as either drummer or percussionist include Sonny Rollins, Clark Terry, Buck Hill, Harold Mabern, Eric Alexander, Gunther Schuller, Wynton Marsalis, Geri Allen, Pat Metheny, Whitney Houston. In 1992, Mr. Summey was the first-prize winner of the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition. Every week on Backstage Jazz, you'll hear a blend of contemporary and classic jazz and a touch of soul, funk, and blues, all selected by music journalist and host Steven Roby. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/backstagejazz/message

This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on August 1. It dropped for free subscribers on August 4. To receive future pods as soon as they're live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe for free below:WhoJim Rochford Jr., Owner and General Manager of Trollhaugen, WisconsinRecorded onJuly 10, 2023About TrollhaugenClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: The Rochford familyLocated in: Dresser, WisconsinYear founded: 1950Pass affiliations: Indy Pass – 2 daysReciprocal partners: NoneClosest neighboring ski areas: Wild Mountain (18 minutes), Como Park (1 hour), Afton Alps (1 hour, 3 minutes), Elm Creek (1 hour, 3 minutes), Hyland Hills (1 hour, 18 minutes), Buck Hill (1 hour, 22 minutes), Welch Village (1 hour, 33 minutes), Christie Mountain (1 hour, 24 minutes), Powder Ridge (1 hour 54 minutes), Coffee Mill (1 hour, 56 minutes)Base elevation: 920 feetSummit elevation: 1,200 feetVertical drop: 280 feetSkiable Acres: 90 (2023 expansion will increase this total)Average annual snowfall: 50 inchesTrail count: 24 (28% advanced, 43% intermediate, 29% beginner)Lift count: 9 (4 fixed-grip quads, 5 ropetows – lift count includes new Partek fixed-grip Chair 1 that Trollhaugen is installing this summer – view Lift Blog's inventory of Trollhaugen's lift fleet)Why I interviewed himWhat if the greatest ski town in America is not Aspen or Telluride or Park City or Jackson, but Minneapolis? Within an hour of downtown, eight ski areas: Elm Creek, Como Park, Hyland Hills, Buck Hill, Afton Alps, Welch Village, Wild Mountain, and Trollhaugen. Not one of them tops 360 vertical feet or collects more than 60 inches of snow in an average season.Underwhelming stats that underscore the point: only the hardcore would swarm such bumps, endure the windblown cloud-cluttered upper Midwest dead-winter, in pursuit of the turn, the loft, the float, that singular moment of ski-high. There's a reason Vail's first stop on its march east was Minneapolis – this is a ski town (and one you can actually afford to live in).Midwest skiing is a bizarre world for the uninitiated. Chairlifts everywhere, often side-by-side, trolling up clear-cut hillsides seemingly conjured from the flats. Between these chairs, high-speed ropetows, hauling more skiers than you'd thought possible, faster than you can believe. You assume the ski areas are small, but they just keep going, rolling hillock after hillock over vast snowy complexes. At Afton, 17 Hall chairlifts ordered in industrial rows, threading a chutes-and-ladders labyrinth of gullies and tunnels and wide-open faces. At Welch, a mini-Vail Mountain, endless linked trailpods terminating at the Back Bowl, a spiderweb of burners diving through the trees. At Buck, every inch reserved, the place a vast school for racers, for bumpers, for flippity-flap flip-flap Brahs.Trollhaugen is a little bit of all of these things: four quads and five ropetows serving a hunk of Wisconsin countryside that feels bigger than 260 vertical feet on 100-ish acres. The Rochford family – which has owned the bump since the ‘60s – has resisted the urge to clear-cut, instead carving tree-lined tracks through the gullies. Wide-open faces aplenty, still, and zones for ropetow rockers fast and slow. The base area is themed Euro-Alpine, Bavarian perhaps, or Scandinavian.Don't let the Midwestern kitsch, wicket tickets, Rube Goldberg beginner tows, or pair of vintage ‘70s Borvig quads distract you: this is a terrific, and modern, ski area. The grooming is excellent. Snowmaking and night-skiing cover 100 percent of the hills. Trollhaugen erected a brand-new Partek quad two years ago, and it's installing another this summer. It was an inaugural Indy Pass partner, hyper-aware of the rapidly evolving lift-served skiing landscape and its competitive place within it. When you have seven direct competitors, one of which belongs to the Epic Pass, excellence is your only option. Trollhaugen delivers.What we talked aboutThe Covid outdoor surge just keeps on surging; limiting lift tickets; how different Covid-era policies impacted ski areas near the Wisconsin-Minnesota border; Wild Mountain; Trollhaugen's tradition of early-season openings; why Trollhaugen closed April 1 after a 10-inch snowstorm; post-closing railjams; what happened when Vail Resorts bought nearby Afton Alps; whether the Epic Pass' arrival contributed to Trollhaugen's decision to join the Indy Pass; how Indy visitation has evolved over time; three generations of family ownership; remembering an era in which a mailman and a firefighter could start a ski area; the non-skiing dentists who bought a ski area to party; a brief history of Trollhaugen's lifts; growing up with a ski area as your backyard; the surprisingly circuitous route that Rochford took to eventually run the family business; respecting the family legacy while building upon it; going deep on Trollhaugen's expansion; glade skiing at Trollhaugen; why the conceptual expansion map shows a triple chair but we're getting a quad; the quiet brilliance of Partek chairlifts; stepping up to automated snowmaking; how the expansion may change the annual terrain-opening plan; connecting the expansion to the ski area proper; parking expansions; the story behind the parking lot sign equipped with old double chairs; Welch Village; ropetows versus carpets; the fate of the Summit ropetow; high-speed ropetows rule; a fenced ski area; 3 a.m. Fridays; and behind the Trollhaugen name and theme.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview  Trollhaugen is the only one of the eight metro Minneapolis-St. Paul ski areas that sits in Wisconsin. It's four miles east of the state line, and 18 minutes from Wild. Usually, that doesn't matter. U.S. state borders, practically speaking, are mostly roadside signs. No checkpoints or paperwork. Perhaps a speed-limit adjustment. Perhaps a slight state-of-mind shift.But during Covid, that address mattered. Wisconsin, for the most part, introduced less stringent Covid safety measures than its neighbor, and relaxed them faster. No need to itemize them here: the net impact was a clanging cash register for Trollhaugen. Record numbers of skiers dumped record revenues into the joint. And, as Rochford tells me on the podcast, “if the skiers are going to invest in us, then we're going to invest in them.”So Trollhaugen ripped out a 52-year-old Hall double chair and stood up a brand-new Partek quad in 2021. That was phase one of a three-year capital project and expansion that is set to open this coming winter, with three-and-a-half new trails and yet another new Partek quad.It's hard to overstate how big of a deal this is for a small Midwestern ski area. Skiers acclimated to New England or the Rockies would be stunned at the condition of the average lift fleet in Michigan, Wisconsin, or Minnesota. Lots of Riblets. Lots of Halls. Very few detachables. Very few safety bars. It's vintage skiing, often quite good – snowmaking tends to be excellent – but unadorned by the trappings of big-time resorts in other regions. In this neighborhood, two new lifts in three years is an enormous flex.Trollhaugen is not the only family-owned Midwest ski area investing this year. Buck Hill, Wild Mountain, Nub's Nob, and Perfect North are also erecting new quads this summer. And the big Midwestern operators have fully activated their cash cannons: Boyne is dropping a D-line sixer onto The Highlands and a fixed quad and triple at Boyne Mountain; Midwest Family Ski Resorts is building six-packs at Snowriver and Lutsen; and Wisconsin Resorts is adding a second high-speed quad to Mt. Holly and a triple to Alpine Valley, Michigan. But Trollhaugen's new lift will serve the region's only terrain expansion for the 2023-24 ski season. That's a really big deal, and worth taking a deeper look at.What I got wrong* I said in the intro that Trollhaugen had been the first ski area to open in America for the 2022-23 ski season. It was actually the first to open a chairlift, on Oct. 19. Wild Mountain and Andes Tower Hills, both in Minnesota, opened ropetows on Oct. 18.* I intimated that Loveland was in Summit County, Colorado, along with Keystone and Arapahoe Basin. Loveland actually sits just across the border, in Clear Creek County. Breckenridge and Copper Mountain also sit in Summit County.* I said that Welch Village “must have had a dozen chairlifts.” It has eight.* I said that Trollhaugen had a “Bavarian” theme, but the backstory that Rochford told us suggests that the ornate buildings clustered at the ski area's base are better classified as “Scandinavian.”Why you should ski TrollhaugenThere's something about Midwest skiing that is extremely gratifying. Even for those who have other options. Remember that 2000 movie, The Family Man, where a rich a-hole played by Nick Cage is shoved into an alternate timeline where he's stripped of his Ferrari and closetful of $10,000 suits and self-important Wall Street job? And suddenly he's living in suburban New Jersey as a tire salesman who drives two kids around in a minivan. And at first he's like, “Oh boy this sucks a fat one.” But by the end of the film he's b******g about the price of a bag of rock salt and relishing domestic life in his messy falling-apart house in Maplewood or wherever.Midwest skiing is kind of like that. If you're accustomed to RFID and superfast lifts and 3,000-acre playgrounds stuffed with chutes and glades and 15-foot bases of natural snow, you may be unable to imagine skiing unadorned with those jewels. But what if you forced yourself to? What if you pulled up to a Midwest bump on a jam-packed Saturday and skied just for the sake of doing it? Surrounded by thousands of skiers who didn't seem to give a damn that the chairlifts didn't have heated toilets or Netflix-equipped safety bars? Who act like they're at the best party ever? Who seem as giddy as any skiers you've ever seen anywhere?It's odd that the people who seem most insecure about Midwest ski areas are those who've never been within 50 miles of one. I see this every time I write a post about the Midwest – the hate, the impulse to belittle a thing that so many people love. It's all so stupid and tedious, so boring. Midwest skiing is about relishing what's there, not bemoaning what isn't. Yes, it's a different sort of skiing than you get in the Rockies or New England. But it's fun. An often-overcomplicated thing boiled down to its essence.If you love skiing, you will love skiing at Trollhaugen. Yes, it demands a certain creativity to stay engaged, to draw new lines out of the hillside, to sink into the moment between frequent chairlift rides. But, just as a minivan gets you to the same place as a Ferrari, this stripped-down version of skiing can get you exactly where you need to go. If you let it.Podcast NotesOn the view from Spirit MountainThe view from the summit of Spirit Mountain, overlooking the St. Louis River just before it drains into Lake Superior. At the base of the lifts (Spirit is an upside-down ski area), the mountain is only about a half mile from the Wisconsin border.On Wisconsin's lost ski areasRochford's grandparents purchased Trollhaugen in the 1960s. During the podcast, he commented that “of the ski areas we had in Wisconsin in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, I bet half of those are open today.” It's hard to get exact numbers on what may or may not have existed 50-plus years ago, but I did dig up these old maps from the Wisconsin Lost Ski Areas Project:19671971For context, here's a complete list of active Wisconsin ski areas. In some cases, ski areas have changed their names: Rib Mountain is now Granite Peak, for example. I'd love to do a side-by-side here, but that would be a project I just don't have time for at the moment:On other ski area expansions happening this summerTrollhaugen's expansion is one of seven happening at U.S. ski areas this summer. Here's an overview:On Trollhaugen's parking lot chairliftWe briefly discuss the cool chairlift structure (which I referred to as a “sign”) at Trollhaugen's entrance. Here it is:On Trollhaugen's ropetowsTrollhaugen has two types of ropetows – these whacky Rube Goldberg contraptions in the beginner area that look like they're about 175 years old:And these burners for the Park Brahs:On the border fenceTrollhaugen, like the vast majority of Midwest ski areas, still trades in metal wicket tickets. But rather than station an attendant at the bottom of each lift, the ski area fences off the base area, leaving just one access point to the lifts. One attendant checks the ticket one time – a pretty brilliant (and inexpensive), fraud-prevention system:On the spring skiing surchargeMany ski areas use free spring skiing as an incentive for new passholders. Buy your 2023-24 season pass in February 2023 and ski the rest of the 2022-23 season for free. But many ski areas in Minnesota and Wisconsin charge for the spring skiing option. Trollhaugen is one of them, charging new 2023-24 passholders $75 for spring 2023 access if they wanted spring skiing. Not a bad deal, actually, as that's probably not much more than the cost of a weekend lift ticket. Here are the other ski areas in the region that charge new passholders for spring access: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 66/100 in 2023, and number 452 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane, or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email skiing@substack.com. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on April 3. It dropped for free subscribers on April 6. 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 for free below:WhoDavid Dziuban, Owner and General Manager of Whitecap Mountains, WisconsinRecorded onMarch 13, 2023About Whitecap MountainsClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: David DziubanLocated in: Upson, WisconsinYear founded: 1964Pass affiliations: Indy Pass Allied PartnerReciprocal partners: Whitecap lists the following partners on its season pass page - it is not clear what the benefit is for each mountain: Grand Targhee, Wild Mountain, Mount Bohemia, Sunlight, Camp 10, Lee Canyon, Arizona Snowbowl, Lee Canyon, Mont du Lac.Closest neighboring ski areas: Mt. Zion (28 minutes), Big Powderhorn (34 minutes), Snowriver (40 minutes), Mt. Ashwabay (1 hour, 15 minutes), Porcupine Mountains (1 hour, 21 minutes)Base elevation: 1,295 feetSummit elevation: 1,750 feetVertical drop: 455 feetSkiable Acres: 400 acresAverage annual snowfall: 200 inchesTrail count: 42 (4 expert, 12 advanced, 12 intermediate, 14 beginner)Lift count: 6 (4 doubles, 1 triple, 1 carpet) – the North Pole-South Pole double functions as two separate chairs, even though it is one long continuous lift. Skiers are not allowed to ride on the middle section, which passes over a long valley. The carpet was not yet functional for the 2022-23 ski season. Whitecap has an additional triple chair that is currently dormant, but which Dziuban intends to resurrect.Here is Whitecap's current trailmap:However, I far prefer this older version, which is my favorite trailmap of all time:Why I interviewed himOur ski areas exist where they do for a reason. That rare mix of hills, reliable precipitation, wintertime cold, a near-enough population, a road to get there. Slopes steep enough but not too steep. Water nearby. Someone with enough cash to run chairlifts up the incline and enough brains to put the whole operation together into a viable business.There are fewer geographic bullseyes of this sort than you may suppose. Look carefully at the map of U.S. ski areas – they are mostly clustered around a few-dozen rarified climate zones. Lake-effect bands or mountain spines or high-altitude nests resting at a desert's edge. Several dozen have been force-born around large cold-weather cities, of course, bulldozed into existence where cold and water abound but hills are lacking.We all know the epicenters upon which Epic and Ikon have anchored their empires: the Wasatch, Tahoe, the I-70 corridor, the Vermont Spine. But smaller, less celebrated-by-the-masses clusters dot the continent. The Interstate 90 corridor from 49 Degrees North and Mt. Spokane through Schweitzer, Silver Mountain, and Lookout Pass. Mt. Hood, one mountain that is home to four ski areas. Northern New Mexico, where half a dozen ski areas surround the fabled Taos.One of the most reliable of these micro-snowzones is Big Snow Country, a hilly wilderness straddling the border of northern Wisconsin and Michigan's Upper Peninsula. There, seated west-to-east, are four – once five – ski areas: Whitecap Mountains, Mt. Zion, Big Powderhorn, and Snowriver, which is a union of the once-separate Indianhead and Blackjack ski areas (now known as Jackson Creek Summit and Black River Basin). Seated fewer than a dozen miles above them, brooding and enormous, is Lake Superior, one of the most reliable lake-effect snowmachines on the planet:So much of Midwest skiing is funky and improvisational, a tinkerer's paradise, where the same spirit that animated 20th century factories willed one of the world's great ski cultures into existence. There are not many hills around Milwaukee or Minneapolis or Detroit, but there are plenty of ski areas. The people of the Midwest do as they please. But the ski areas of Big Snow Country are different. There is so much skiing here because the terrain and the climate seemed sculpted exactly for it.As a result, the skiing is genuinely sublime. The great tension here is the opposite problem that most of the region's mobbed ski areas face: great skiing, too few skiers. Big Snow Country is far from pretty much everything. Four hours from Minneapolis, five from Milwaukee, six-and-a-half from Chicago. Residents of those cities can reach Park City or Keystone faster than their Midwest neighbors.So what to do? For decades, these four (or five), ski areas have struggled to pin themselves to skiers' to-do lists. Mt. Zion, the smallest of the bunch, is a protectorate of Gogebic Community College, which hosts one of the nation's only programs on ski area management. Indianhead and Blackjack cycled through generations of owners and were finally combined and then sold, last year, to Charles Skinner, owner of the sprawling Granite Peak and Lutsen ski areas in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Skinner, who transformed Granite from a faltering backwater into one of the Midwest's top ski areas, is already slinging a high-speed sixer up the hillside at Snowriver and will surely connect the two ski areas within a few years. That leaves Big Powderhorn and Whitecap with a problem.How to respond? Powderhorn has at least enjoyed stable management and a loyal customer base. Whitecap, however, has struggled. Decades of deferred maintenance pushed skiers away. A 2019 lodge fire erased a crucial piece of infrastructure that has yet to be replaced. The advent, in the region, of the Epic, Ikon, and Indy Passes – not to mention a modernized Granite Peak, two hours closer to pretty much everything, and an unhinged and dirt-cheap Mount Bohemia, not so far to the north – has only clouded Whitecap's market position.David Dziuban arrived at the ski area in 2016, and slowly took control over the next few years. It was a period of personal tragedy for him. As soon as he took full ownership, the fire hit. It would have been enough to make anyone surrender. But Dziuban has found in Whitecap both salvation and mission. This place, so naturally blessed, has the bones to be one of the Midwest's great ski areas. But it needs a push, a pull, a shove into our current moment. Dziuban is the guy to provide all three.What we talked aboutA snowy Wisconsin winter; Whitecap's unique trail footprint; the great Midwest ski factory; a single sentence in a Wilmot liftline that changed Dziuban's life; a wild scheme to score a first job as a snowmaker at Plumtree, Illinois; turning down a job at Killington to work at scrappy Magic Mountain; Magic in the ‘80s; making Magic's Timberside connection; Mt. Tom, Massachusetts; homemade snowmaking; Elk Mountain, the hidden gem of Pennsylvania; a rigged splice gone wrong; Whitecap, lost in the wilderness; first impressions of a run-down and lightly used Whitecap; the long and convoluted process of taking ownership of the resort; balancing personal trauma and loss with the mission of revitalizing the ski area; taming the local homeowners' entitlement; fire levels the lodge; why Whitecap opened the next day and why it was so vital that it did; plans for a new lodge; Whitecap's huge development potential; why the ski area hasn't set up the new conveyor lift it purchased last year; snowmaking; assessing Whitecap's unique lift fleet; where we could see a new lift at Whitecap; thoughts on the long chair (North Pole/South Pole); getting the CTEC lift running again; “I want to remain affordable to everybody”; why Whitecap launched a $295 (now $325) season pass and how that product has been selling; the surprise response from a one-day season passholder reciprocal deal with Mount Bohemia; thoughts on the Indy Pass and the Allied program; and that Whitecap aura.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewNot to repeat myself, but allow me to repeat myself. A skier living in the Upper Midwest currently enjoys the following options for full-season skiing:* Purchase a $676 Epic Local Pass, which delivers turns all season at Wilmot or Afton Alps, plus basically unlimited options for runs west to Colorado, Utah, Tahoe, and Whistler.* Purchase an $829 Ikon Pass and forgo Midwest skiing altogether, hopping frequent flights to Denver and Salt Lake City from major hub airport Minneapolis-St. Paul (MSP).* Purchase a $329 Indy Pass for two days each at major ski areas across the region, including some of the best and most-developed in Minnesota and Wisconsin: Granite Peak, Lutsen, Spirit Mountain, and, perhaps most significantly for Whitecap, its neighbors Big Powderhorn and Snowriver (both of which are in Michigan).* Purchase a local season pass at any of dozens of ski areas that sit within 30 minutes of downtown Minneapolis, Madison, or Milwaukee.* Scratch the gnar itch with a $109 ($99 if you can forego Saturdays), season pass to Mount Bohemia, the ungroomed natural-snow mecca hanging off the top of the UP. The pass includes reciprocal days at ski areas throughout the Midwest and the West.So, what does Whitecap do? First, control what you can: fix the beat-up lift fleet, improvise a lodge, bring stability to its operations. Dziuban has checked off that list. Second, modernize: rebuild the lodge, build out snowmaking (the current system consists of fewer than half a dozen guns), re-activate the mothballed triple chair. All of this is in progress. But there's something else: how does a ski area set itself apart in a region dense with ski areas but not with skiers? What is the story it's going to tell? Dziuban has a good one, and it's one every skier in the region ought to hear.What I got wrongI noted that Whitecap had “360-degree exposure,” when it in fact has slopes primarily facing just three directions: west, north, and south.Why you should ski Whitecap MountainsIn February, I flew into Minneapolis for a five-day Upper Midwest ski tour, making me perhaps the only person this century to travel from New York to Minnesota on purpose to ski. At least that was my conclusion from multiple chairlift conversations with befuddled locals. I swung through 11 ski areas: Welch Village, Afton Alps, Granite Peak, Nordic Mountain, Snowriver, Big Powderhorn, Mt. Zion, Whitecap, Spirit Mountain, Trollhaugen, and Buck Hill. Each was unique and memorable, in the way that every ski area is. But one resonated with me more than the others: Whitecap.I have visited hundreds of ski areas, all over the world. There is nothing quite like Whitecap. It's an enchanting place. Sprawling and gorgeous. Narrow paths wound through woods, leading into and around broad meadows, glades everywhere, all of it knitted together in a Zelda-like sprawl primed for exploration. While the vertical drop is small, the place is multilayered and complex. It is one of the few ski areas where I have ever felt legitimately lost. I took 27 runs and still didn't see half the place.Also: there was no one else there. Granted, it was a Wednesday. But coverage was excellent: 100 percent open. I skied that day with Jacob, Whitecap's grooming ace, a Telluride refugee who had carpeted a shocking breadth of acreage overnight before meeting me to ski. He kept telling his friends from Colorado that they had to move here, he told me. The pace was slower, and he could afford to live. He'd given up finding anything affordable near Telluride, and had instead commuted in from a desert campervan colony hours away. He'd had enough, come back east, back home, with his campervan and his dog. He didn't see any reason to return to Colorado. Yes, the skiing there is amazing, but the skiing is good here, too, and the stresses of daily life had evaporated. He now lived in the hotel. His commute to the snowcat was a few dozen steps. This was a life that was pleasant, and sustainable. As Western mountain-town life became untenable, places like Big Snow Country, with reliable snow and lower costs for everything, would become more attractive to those who wanted to make skiing central to their lives, he said. I'm not saying you should move to Whitecap. But you should visit. Everyone should ski the Midwest at least once. Just to understand what it is, this machine that churns out so many of the nation's most passionate skiers. And when you do go, make sure Whitecap is on your tour.Podcast NotesOn Plumtree, IllinoisDziuban's ski career began at Plumtree, a 210-vertical-foot landfill bump in Illinois. Here's the 1978 trailmap:On the podcast, I said that I wasn't sure if the place was still operating. Its website states that the ski area is “closed for renovations,” and I believe that has been its status for at least as long as I've tracked season passes nationally (three seasons). I'm trying to confirm that. Even if it does re-open, it looks as though the place is just a residents' amenity for whatever gated community it sits in. Here's a bit more on the joint, per skibum.net:Former public area, Plumtree is now a private club for Lake Carroll property owners, guests, etc. Aging equipment, wide open bowls, decent place. Look up “typical skiing in the Midwest” and you'll find Plumtree Ski Area. Wish there were more Plumtrees open to the general public.On Magic MountainDziuban spent several years at Magic Mountain, Vermont. He was there from the mid-80s to the early ‘90s, a period that included the interlink with the lost Timber Ridge ski area on the backside of Glebe Mountain. Here's what they looked like connected:These days, skiers are still allowed to traverse from Magic over to “Timberside,” which is privately owned, and ski down. They have to find their own way back to Magic, however, as the Timber Ridge lifts are long gone.On the Wine HutFollow the trails skier's left of the Midway double chair, and you'll sweep past the Wine Hut on your way to the loading station. It's one of the Midwest's cooler après joints, though I'll admit that I did not sample the goods on the February Wednesday I stopped in.On the North Pole/South Pole doubleWhitecap is home to one of the most amazing lifts in America - an up-and-over Hall double that serves as two separate lifts - the North Pole double and the South Pole double. Skiers are not allowed to ride across the middle section, which soars more than 125 feet over the meadow between the two top stations - with no restraint bar. I snagged this video standing beneath the midsection:And here's a still pic from the valley floor - note the tower hoisted onto the steel lift:Here's a view looking from the North Pole side across the valley to the South Pole:Going up South Pole:On Whitecap's dormant triple chairA seemingly abandoned lift terminal sits on Whitecap's summit, the head of a skeleton that follows a liftline down the mountain. This lift, said Dziuban, is actually not dead yet. He's already fabricated some parts necessary to restore the 1991 CTEC triple to a functional state, as he explains in the podcast.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 31/100 in 2023, and number 417 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane, or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email skiing@substack.com. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

For this edition of Shop Talk, Kara Williard talks with Jeff Perry and Isabel Berg from Gear West, our Blister Recommended Shop in Long Lake, Minnesota, to learn about how they build a year-round community around Gear West's “campus”; what it means to provide service for everything from ski racing to park skiing; some gear trends they're noticing; how new uphill access at their local mountain, Buck Hill, has influenced the community and their gear purchases; what it looks like to train and staff a large year-round specialty shop, and much more. TOPICS & TIMESGear West Campus (4:53)Gear West Community (7:20)Growing the Sport (10:12)30-Year Anniversary (12:00)Staying Relevant Year-Round (14:50)Service & Ski Racing (17:27)Park Skiing (21:36)Gear Trend Follow-up (22:37)Buck Hill Uphill (25:56)Staffing & Training (29:25)Masterfit University (31:51)What We're Celebrating (37:24)RELATED LINKS Ep 136: Shop Talk: Gear West, Long Lake, MNEp 190: Gear West on Current Trends + New Ski & Snowboard Gear Blister + Spot Membership Blister + Spot Real World Testimonials Get Your Blister x John Fellows Artist Series ShirtCHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCASTS:CRAFTEDBlister PodcastBikes & Big IdeasOff the CouchHappy Hour Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dive deep into the earth with us as we explore ghostly Tommyknockers and other creepy cave legends. Additional vocal talents by Jaysen & Jack Buterin. 

The American Downhillers welcomed the #GOAT Lindsey Vonn onto the Podcast to hear her thoughts on the Downhill Course she dominated for 17 years – winning the DH 14 times – but also to hear her take on development, World Cup rivalries, equipment, coaching, and people telling her she “couldn't do something”. And she dropped nuggets of wisdom throughout. The interview will inspire young athletes, educate coaches, and put a smile on all of her fans' faces!Right off the bat she shares her thoughts on the Course that some people call “Lake Lindsey” and how she was able to create speed on every inch of the course. She was able to “find the rhythm” of the course from day 1 and that translated into a confidence that she could win no matter how many mistakes she would make on a run. Her key to the course? The “Fall-Away” turn that most often separated her from the rest of the field.A lot of the interview centered around the importance of the Mental Skills she had, which seemed more important to her than the technical skills. She was motivated by challenges, competitors, speed, risk, and her ultimate elixir – when somebody told her she couldn't do something! Unfortunately for her rivals, if she heard about someone doubting her abilities, she took that and turned it into inspiration to work even harder!Another takeaway is the fact that she “never skied to have the perfect run”, but always was pushing the limits to see “what she could get away with”. Her view of risk and never wanting to have the regret of not pushing it to the limit is inspiring, but also a peek into the reasons why she sometimes pushed it too far and was injured a lot.We find out how a young 11 year-old from the 300 vertical drop of Buck Hill became the World's best speed skier. She combined her technical skills honed run after run in Minnesota with her speed skills learned on the big slopes of Vail to turn herself into the ultimate speed weapon who went on to win 43 Downhills all over the globe.Doug, Daron and Marco then bring up her focus on equipment and how important dialing in skis and boots is to both a junior and a World Cup Superstar. She talks about how she questioned everything, especially why she couldn't and/or shouldn't use the stiffer Men's skis, and how that lead to her biggest win in Lake Louise – a whopping 1.95 seconds in 2011! Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BEHqBwIrmQOther topics they touch upon include: - Nutrition and how she ultimately found what works for her through many years of experimenting, - How Patrick Riml affected her career and the challenges he has now that he is back with the US Ski Team, - Her thoughts on Breezy, Bella, Trisha and the up and comers on the US Women's speed team, - And she answers the question; Are Downhillers wound too tight or is something just too loose?One of the highlights of the interview was learning the reason behind her start routine of systematically gripping and re-gripping her poles in the starting gate. She ends with sharing her latest workout routines, the way she enjoys skiing these days, and the many things she is involved with to keep challenging herself. This interview is filled with excellent takeaways that will inspire young athletes, guide coaches, and entertain her many fans.

Ford talks to the only surviving members of the Leonard family about the murder of their dad and mom, which is unsolved, 52+ years later.

This week: Roxy Coss; Ava Selimi Memisi; The Pyramids; Billy Higgins;  Sabib Shihab; Shyamal Mitra; Lata Mangeshkar; Vijay Kumar Kichlu; Wadi Al Safi; George Wasouf; Billy Higgins; Rich West; Buck Hill; The Orchestra Soledad; Candido; Kunle Ayo;  Simaro; Orchestra Shika Shika; Susan Howe ;much more... Always FREE of charge to listen to the radio program on WRFI, or stream, download, and subscribe to the podcast: via PODBEAN: https://conferenceofthebirds.podbean.com/ via iTUNES: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/conference-of-the-birds-podcast/id478688580 Also available at podomatic, Internet Archive, podtail, iheart Radio, and elsewhere. PLAYLISTS at SPINITRON: https://spinitron.com/WRFI/pl/16068975/Conference-of-the-Birdshttps://spinitron.com/WRFI/pl/16068975/Conference-of-the-Birds and via the Conference of the Birds page at WRFI.ORG https://www.wrfi.org/wrfiprograms/conferenceofthebirds/  We will continue to update playlists at confbirds.blogspot.com 24-48 hours of the program's posting  online. Join us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/conferenceofthebirds/?ref=bookmarks FIND WRFI on Radio Garden: http://radio.garden/visit/ithaca-ny/aqh8OGBR Contact: confbirds@gmail.com

In this week's episode, we're wrapping up our summer series of highlighting different communities around the cities, and we're ending it with a look at Lakeville! Dena goes through the history of Lakeville and the 10 ten things to do in and around Lakeville! As always, enjoy!Places mentioned in this episode:Lakeville Brewing  - https://lakevillebrewing.com/Minnesota Zoo - https://mnzoo.org/Buck Hill - https://buckhill.com/Various Parks in Lakeville - https://www.lakevillemn.gov/FacilitiesLakeville Area Arts Center - https://visitlakeville.org/explore/things-to-do/arts-theater/lakeville-area-arts-center/Labyrinth Puzzle Rooms & More - https://www.labyrinthpuzzlerooms.com/Whitetail Woods - https://www.co.dakota.mn.us/parks/parksTrails/WhitetailWoods/Pages/whitetail-woods-camper-cabins.aspxAirlake Airport - https://metroairports.org/our-airports/airlake-airportOn a Mission Podcast can be found onFacebook at https://www.facebook.com/onamissionpod/Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/onamissionpod/Kelly can be found onFacebook at https://www.facebook.com/kellyanntanke/Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/kellyatanke/Dena can be found onFacebook at https://www.facebook.com/dfrankrealtor/Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/denafrankcoaching/website at http://www.denafrank.com

When I was a boy, my father told me a story about a ghost town. I come from northern Maine, Aroostook County, a place of endless trees and potato fields with more deer than people. It's lonely country, a place of long, quiet, windswept vistas, of dark temples in the forest, of a world not yet destroyed by the endless march of human industry. Not yet. To be clear, I had heard my share of ghost stories - my sister had even seen the spirit of my grandmother standing at the foot of her bed, watching over her. I know because I awoke to her screaming. We lived with the idea of the Holy Ghost, the idea that life did not end with death, that life is but a walking shadow of the world and times to come. Once, when I was 17, I came face to face with a full body apparition. I'm still not sure what that was. But when my father told me of the ghost town, it was a horse of a different color. It wasn't the remnant or memory of a person - no, it was an entire place, lost and forgotten, like a ghost but not a ghost. You can't hang out and linger with a ghost, but a ghost town? Maybe it was the next, best thing. “The clay there is red,” he told me. “That's how you'll know you're there. It lies next to the river. It was a whole settlement, with a general store, homes, you know…A while back some folks dug there for clay to make ceramics with. Reddest clay you ever saw. Like blood. Not much left now, just a couple of old foundations and an old, broken down church from what I remember when I went there as a kid. It's not far away,” he told me, “just over the hill and down by the river, a hidden place. No one goes there anymore. It used to be called Dow Siding. There's a road, but it's hard to find. Mostly grown over. More like a path” he told me, “but be careful. Don't go there alone.” That was my old man, for you. Tell your boy about a ghost town, give him the rough coordinates, and then tell him not to go. So when there came a day when I didn't have any real adult supervision, I hopped on my little Yamaha Mini-Enduro 60 and headed up through the field roads, over Buck Hill and down to the Aroostook River to search for a road that I hoped…man, I hoped for dear life that it existed. It did. It took me half the day to find it, past people's homes, down along fields even the farmers didn't plow anymore, a patch of earth no one thought worthy of visiting. But there I was, going back and forth in a search pattern until…what was that? A pair of ruts in a tiny clearing? A pathway mostly overgrown with raspberry vines and thistle? Slowly, I drove the little bike through the thicket, dodging low hanging branches that cut at my face. Through squinting eyes, an opening appeared and then, a cleared area in the forest, something you only ever saw if it was a farmer's field. This was not a field, but a half acre of land cleared years ago by forgotten hands and still, the woody root and red alder hadn't been able to reclaim all of it. There were the remains of a building, very likely the church my father saw when he was a boy, all a pile of ruins. There were bits and pieces of metal, a wagon wheel, an ancient rusted hand pump resting at an angle in the ground. There were fieldstone foundations just peeking up through the undergrowth and, as I recall, a rosebush more full of blossoms than I had ever seen before. Someone had planted that rose, I thought. Someone had lived here, children had grown up here, men had risen early in the morning to keep the fires burning in the coldest winters imaginable. I got off my dirt bike and walked into the middle of the clearing. I could see where someone had dug into the side of a hill and, sure enough, the clay there was fine and as red as the dust of Mars. Someone had come back for it, as my father had told me, but even they eventually left this place alone. I stood there and listened for a long while. A silence fell, a kind of weight covering everything I could see. It was like I was all alone in the world - a totally empty planet, and this was all that was left. For a second, I was the ghost. And the absence of sound probably caused my own imagination to hear, on the edge of things, a cart rolling past, a horse's measured clop as it passed me, a faint ringing of a bell far in the distance. For a moment, I realized the truth of things: a place, whether it be a room, a house, or even a town, doesn't hold you and shelter you from the storm for the years of your life and then just let you go. It retains a memory of sorts, an echo of days long past and if you are receptive to such things, you can hear that echo and see those phantoms. They are not ghosts, they are only memories with weight, but on that lost afternoon of my youth nearly fifty years ago, I know one thing to be true - for a few moments, I was somewhere else. I never went back. It wouldn't be the last time I stepped off the map. Just like people, there are places that disappear. In the American West, there are many ghost towns. You can find them from Alaska to southern Texas, but there's something about the climate in those places that keep the buildings standing and the roads open. In Maine, where the cold and the snow, the wind and rain rage and the green growth covers all, such places tend to quickly vanish from view. A road untraveled in this place will soon get lost in the thicket by the little maple saplings and the puckerbrush tangle of growth that are only kept at bay by constant travel. There are many such places in Maine. This story is about one of them, a place known as Riceville. On a map made in 1894, it is noted as the F. Shaw and Brothers Bark Extract Works. An ancient way of tanning animal skins requires boiling down tree bark to make a dark tea-like liquid that is full of tannins, the substances that give tanning its name. The raw materials for bark extraction were plentiful there: water, trees, and wood for boiling it all down. On the edge of Buffalo Stream, east of Greenfield and west of Nickatous Lake in Hancock County, a little village arose to support the bark extraction works. By 1890, 130 or more people called the place home. Eventually, F. Shaw and brothers sold the works. Its name comes from the fellows who bought it from F. Shaw and Brothers, a company called Buzzell and Rice. They converted the works into a full-fledged tannery. At the time, shoe leather was desperately needed and buffalo skins were shipped all the way to Riceville so they could be processed and shipped back to the growing shoe industry in New England. If you try to find Riceville now, you'll have a hard time. It's nearly lost to the forest. If you do find the tote road a few miles northeast of Old Town, you'll be walking to Township 39, a place that has a number instead of a name. You'll be lucky if you can get there on foot - it's wet and overgrown and you might have to turn back. A couple of hours of trudging will get you to the first thing you encounter - the Riceville Cemetery. There, in the middle of the thick undergrowth, it meets you with an old crooked white picket fence and a sign nailed to a tree growing in the middle of the little plot. Someone pays enough attention to this place to see that the fence remains and the little plot is kept fairly clear. Strangely enough, there are no markers at all in the cemetery. You wonder as you walk the little spot who lies below, forgotten. It's quiet here, but the wind whispers through the trees. You listen, then you move a little further into the woods and after a few minutes of walking and dodging, you will come upon an opening, a cleared area, littered with scraps of metal here and there, a wagon axle, a pipe, and rusted barrel hoops. There's a big open well that has been circled by faded yellow warning tape. If someone fell into that hole this far away from help, they might never emerge. There's a stone foundation still standing strong after so many years of neglect. You look around a little more, wonder at the thought of it all and realize that you've got quite a hike to get out of there and really, there is nothing left. Nothing except the story of how this all came to be. Today, hunters and ruin-seekers are about the only folks who make it to Riceville, but a little over a hundred years ago, this place had a mill, a school, a general store, boarding house and homes for the workers at the tannery. It was a thriving community. A vital trade in tanned buffalo hides made this place perfect. There was a stream with clean, pure water. It was far enough away from civilization that the foul odors of the tannery would not be bothersome. Set far from any major town or city, Riceville was a successful little community carved into the Maine forest. For years, it was a hub of activity. Families thrived there. Children grew up and went to a school, played on a the baseball team. Visitors stayed at the boarding house. Commerce thrived as product was made and shipped out for the larger markets of the world. The people who lived there, though, lived alone among themselves, especially in the winter. Places that are far from the main currents of the world of people and doings do not often have casual visitors. Long periods of time can occur when no one comes or goes from the town. Days might pass without a visitor, something that would never happen today. It was not unusual for no one to leave or visit for long periods. Riceville, situated where it was, was self-sustaining. It was also isolated. So what happened to the people of Riceville? And this is where the story comes in. One day, it occurred to someone that they had not heard from anyone in Riceville for a while. We don't know who asked, but someone did. Asking around in town, they discover that no one else has had any contact with Riceville for more than a week, maybe two. Someone decides it's time to pay the good folks a visit. In other stories, it's not a deputation from a town but a traveling merchant who eventually finds his way to Riceville on that fateful day. What was found is legend. As their horse slowly made its way up the road to the village, they noticed a strange stillness, an absence of movement. Actually, there was nothing moving. They cast their gaze around to find someone to speak with but to their shock and then their horror, they begin discovering the bodies. First one lying on the side of the road then others, lying in the grass, their bodies swollen by the heat. They've been there awhile. Further investigation of the little homes and boarding house prove an undeniable fact - everyone of them, over a hundred people, are dead. Officials are called in - investigations are made. Has cholera killed them all? Poison from the tannery? Those in charge determine that they need to bury these bodies quickly - a mass grave is dug and the bodies are placed together and covered. In time, the mystery deepens. No one can determine exactly how these people died and why at least one of them did not take a horse and seek help in the next settlement. No one knows what happened to the people of Riceville. And so, a legend is born. The buildings fall in, the road disappears, and the story is the only thing that remains. Even if it isn't quite true. As storytelling creatures, we tend to remember the most sensational tales, the ones that leave us wondering, the ones that make our world seem more mysterious. Everyone loves a good mystery, even if there is, after all, no mystery. I've heard of cholera as the cause of the large number of deaths or of mercury poisoning the water source. The large number of deaths, however, is not supported by the evidence. An entire town disappearing overnight? Didn't happen.In fact, as far as we know, nobody died of anything. But something did happen to the settlement and the people. Towns don't usually disappear overnight and people need time to move on. According to a report in the Ellsworth American, sometime between December 30 and 31st, 1905, the tannery burned to the ground. The store and boarding house survived, but the rest of the tannery works was suddenly gone. Every single person in Riceville was in some way employed by the tannery, so the livelihood of all was contingent upon the mill being rebuilt. But it wasn't. The tannery was insured. The owners of the Riceville Tannery also owned a tannery in Lowell, Massachusetts which had previously burned under similar circumstances. Neither was rebuilt. With no income, the people soon found no reason to stay in Riceville. They moved on, as people do, when the income suddenly stops. This is how ghost towns are born, after all. Within ten years, the post office closed and no one lived there anymore. For years, the surviving buildings remained there, alone, quiet, with echoes and shadows and nothing more. In 2009, a group of ghost hunters from Bangor visited Riceville. Their visit was written up in the Bangor Daily News article entitled, Bangor Ghost Hunters probe site of former tannery town. The members of the team reported a few strange occurrences: a clear path through the trees suddenly filled in with nearly impassable growth, the sound in the wind of someone calling, “It's time to go in now!” One of the members, a sensitive, was sure they were being followed by the ghost of a young girl. They did their best to document this place, but in the end, there is little to tell except the story of a mill owner who, for awhile, did well financially and whose benefits were shared among his workers. It's not a ghost story, not really. It's not even really a ghost town. It's just a place that used to be, a place with a few reminders left lying in the undisturbed middle of nowhere that once, people thrived here, children ran the streets and went to school and a town prospered. And then it didn't. Slowly, it ran out of steam and then, one day the last family left and no one ever lived there again. It's a sad story and perhaps that's why people keep going there, standing in the quiet, wandering around the few artifacts left to show Riceville even existed. Perhaps the sadness calls them and they answer the call. Perhaps the idea that once, something good existed there and now, there is nothing, is a reminder that we all live on very precarious ground ourselves. If Riceville could turn into nothing more than a legend, what of the towns and cities we live in now? What happened to Riceville? A single thing - a fire. From there, all the dominoes fell into place. That's all it takes. A single thing.

Welcome to a new edition of the Neon Jazz interview series with New York City Jazz Drummer Aaron Seeber .. This emerging musician has a debut coming out .. the new 2022 CD First Move .. He is originally from Washington DC and early on was exposed to many great musicians like Buck Hill, Freddie Redd, Butch Warren, Larry Willis and many other legends that helped feed his enthusiasm for jazz. Over the years, he has shared the stage with greats like Eric Reed, Warren Wolf, Grant Stewart, Jeremy Pelt in premiere joints all over the place .. Enjoy his story ..  Click to listen.Thanks for listening and tuning into yet another Neon Jazz interview .. where we give you a bit of insight into the finest players in Illinois, Venezuela, Nashville, Kansas City, and spots all over the USA giving fans all that jazz .. and thanks to Solitaire for her time, honesty and story ..  If you want to hear more interviews, go to Famous Interviews with Joe Dimino on the iTunes store, visit the Neon Jazz Youtube Channel, go The Home of Neon Jazz at  http://theneonjazz.blogspot.com/ and for everything Joe Dimino related go to www.joedimino.com and if you feel like it, you can donate to the Neon Jazz cause - https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=ERA4C4TTVKLR4 Until next time .. enjoy the music my friends

Brittany's Random Thoughts: There was a big surprise at a viewing of 'The Batman' this weekend? would you stay and watch knowing that this happened? Dianna Dalsin joins the show to talk about the 24th annual Slumberland Furniture Bedrace for Bridging at Buck Hill. Hollywood Speak: Kris Jenner has an entire room dedicated to her dishes!

Brittany's Random Thoughts: There was a big surprise at a viewing of 'The Batman' this weekend? would you stay and watch knowing that this happened? Dianna Dalsin joins the show to talk about the 24th annual Slumberland Furniture Bedrace for Bridging at Buck Hill. Hollywood Speak: Kris Jenner has an entire room dedicated to her dishes! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this episode we take a look at Buck Hill Road in Pembroke, Ontario, The Grey Nuns Motherhouse in Montreal, Quebec, and Walterdale Playhouse in Edmonton, Alberta. In our Para-Media segment we discuss the 2005 film, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which is based on true events. This is a chilling tragic tale of a young girl possessed by something unnatural and the fight to save her life. We also touch on what is in store for next month! As always you can reach out to us and tell us about your experience with the paranormal at paranormalfilescanada@gmail.com Enjoy and Stay safe!

First Chair catches up with PSIA-AASI Board of Director member, Brooks Lillehei, who hails from the PSIA-AASI Central division. Brooks chat about his role as training director at Buck Hill, located in Burnsville, Minnesota. Listen in about what it’s been like to be back on snow. Brooks also talks about his journey to become an instructor and what he looks for in the individuals that he hires to join their team.

Erosion is constant in Theodore Roosevelt National Park, where the colorful but crumbly Badlands are on full display. A scenic loop rings the park’s South Unit at Medora, taking visitors through prairie dog towns, river bottomland and layered bluffs. The park was established in 1947 as Theodore Roosevelt National Memorial Park, but the 21-mile loop wasn’t completed until 1968, when the final seven miles of road were laid. Visitors previously had to retrace the road from Wind Canyon and Buck Hill.

In my hometown, there is a legend of a father whose little girl went missing, and he spent the rest of his days looking for her. What lengths would a father go to in order to find his little girl? What happens when you try to fool him? Listen and you'll find out…

Useful LinksPatrick Donohue (https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickedonohue/)Hill Capital Corporation (https://www.hillcapitalcorp.com/)1 Million Cups Eden Prairie (https://www.1millioncups.com/edenprairie)Buck Hill (https://buckhill.com/)

Early in his career Billy Hart performed in Washington, D.C. with soul artists such as Otis Redding and Sam and Dave, and then later with Buck Hill and Shirley Horn, and was a sideman with the Montgomery Brothers (1961), Jimmy Smith (1964–1966), and Wes Montgomery (1966–1968). Hart moved to New York in 1968, where he recorded with McCoy Tyner, Wayne Shorter, and Joe Zawinul, and played with Eddie Harris, Pharoah Sanders, and Marian McPartland.Hart was a member of Herbie Hancock’s sextet (1969–1973), and played with McCoy Tyner (1973–1974), Stan Getz (1974–1977), and Quest (1980s), in addition to extensive freelance playing (including recording with Miles Davis on 1972’s On the Corner).At age 78, Billy Hart continues to work steadily and teaches widely. Since the early 1990s, Hart spends considerable time at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and is adjunct faculty at the New England Conservatory of Music and Western Michigan University. He also conducts private lessons through The New School and New York University. Hart often contributes to the Stokes Forest Music Camp and the Dworp Summer Jazz Clinic in Belgium.Hart leads his band, the Billy Hart Quartet with Mark Turner, Ethan Iverson, and Ben Street, which has released two albums on ECM Records.

This special Sunday we are taking a break from our normal schedule to host our good friend, Buck Hill. Buck Hill serves as the State Director of Missions for the Dakota Baptist Convention. Enjoy as he leads us through a time of studying the letters to the churches in the book of Revelation, and consider what your letter from Jesus would say.

Join us today as our guest speaker, Buck Hill shares with us a message on courage, life transformation, and mission as we study God's Word together.

May 8, 2018 MBR& Show Page ABOUT THIS EPISODE Pat Sorensen is the owner of Penn Cycle in Minnesota. He has been showing up to Buck Hill every Thursday night for the weekly summer mountain bike series. This Thursday will mark the beginning of the 27th year, making it one of the longest running mountain bike race series in the country. Pat takes a little time to discuss history, changes, and reflections of the series. The Beginner class race starts at 7:30 pm and costs $5. $10 will gain you entry into the Advanced, Recreational or Fat Bike class races that start at 6:30 pm.  Free kids' races start at 7:45 pm.  Registration for the races runs from 5:00-6:15 pm. 2018 Buck Hill Race Schedule: May 10, May 17, May 24, May 31, June 7, June 14, June 21, June 28, July 12, July 19, July 26, August 2, August 9 Do you have a person or company you want to hear on Mountain Bike Radio? If so, let us know at info@mountainbikeradio.com. ----------- RELATED SHOW LINKS Support Mountain Bike Radio by shopping through our Amazon Affiliate Link: http://amzn.to/1SC3svC Penn Cycle Website: http://penncycle.com Thursday Night at the Races at Buck Hill: https://www.penncycle.com/about/events-pg1942.htm Penn Cycle on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/penncycle/ Penn Cycle on Twitter: https://twitter.com/penncycle Penn Cycle on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/penncycle/ Info about the races from MN Bike Trail Navigator: https://mnbiketrailnavigator.blogspot.com/2018/05/penn-cycles-27th-season-of-thursday.html Buck Hill Website: http://www.buckhill.com/ Mountain Bike Radio Links: Shop via our Amazon Affiliate Link: http://amzn.to/1SC3svC Go to the Mountain Bike Radio Store: https://shopmbr.com/ Become a Mountain Bike Radio Member: http://mountainbikeradio.bigcartel.com/category/mbr-memberships Mountain Bike Radio Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/MountainBikeRadio Mountain Bike Radio on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MtnBikeRadio Mountain Bike Radio on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mtnbikeradio/ Mountain Bike Radio on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYE6EAkjP_dmm94_HbKya0Q

A room filled with heroes- Dan Hanzus, Gregg Rosenthal, Marc Sessler, Chris Wesseling and Colleen Wolfe- discuss the latest QB rumors leading up to the draft. But first, they welcome back Marc from his trip overseas on the USO tour (2:00); Check in on the latest news, including the rich history of Buck Hill (4:00), Khalil Mack and Aaron Donald contract talk (5:30), Richie Incognito says he's ‘done' with football (9:30), Cordarrelle Patterson has interesting things to say about a former teammate (17:00) and changes to the NFL's Color Rush uniforms (22:00). Marc fields press conference questions about his recent trip (25:00) and Rotoworld's Josh Norris joins the show for the first installment of “Guys, We Need To Talk About…..” To discuss QB prospect Sam Darnold (34:00).Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A room filled with heroes- Dan Hanzus, Gregg Rosenthal, Marc Sessler, Chris Wesseling and Colleen Wolfe- discuss the latest QB rumors leading up to the draft. But first, they welcome back Marc from his trip overseas on the USO tour (2:00); Check in on the latest news, including the rich history of Buck Hill (4:00), Khalil Mack and Aaron Donald contract talk (5:30), Richie Incognito says he's ‘done' with football (9:30), Cordarrelle Patterson has interesting things to say about a former teammate (17:00) and changes to the NFL's Color Rush uniforms (22:00). Marc fields press conference questions about his recent trip (25:00) and Rotoworld's Josh Norris joins the show for the first installment of “Guys, We Need To Talk About…..” To discuss QB prospect Sam Darnold (34:00).Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A room filled with heroes- Dan Hanzus, Gregg Rosenthal, Marc Sessler, Chris Wesseling and Colleen Wolfe- discuss the latest QB rumors leading up to the draft. But first, they welcome back Marc from his trip overseas on the USO tour (2:00); Check in on the latest news, including the rich history of Buck Hill (4:00), Khalil Mack and Aaron Donald contract talk (5:30), Richie Incognito says he's ‘done' with football (9:30), Cordarrelle Patterson has interesting things to say about a former teammate (17:00) and changes to the NFL's Color Rush uniforms (22:00). Marc fields press conference questions about his recent trip (25:00) and Rotoworld's Josh Norris joins the show for the first installment of “Guys, We Need To Talk About…..” To discuss QB prospect Sam Darnold (34:00).Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A room filled with heroes- Dan Hanzus, Gregg Rosenthal, Marc Sessler, Chris Wesseling and Colleen Wolfe- discuss the latest QB rumors leading up to the draft. But first, they welcome back Marc from his trip overseas on the USO tour (2:00); Check in on the latest news, including the rich history of Buck Hill (4:00), Khalil Mack and Aaron Donald contract talk (5:30), Richie Incognito says he’s ‘done’ with football (9:30), Cordarrelle Patterson has interesting things to say about a former teammate (17:00) and changes to the NFL’s Color Rush uniforms (22:00). Marc fields press conference questions about his recent trip (25:00) and Rotoworld’s Josh Norris joins the show for the first installment of “Guys, We Need To Talk About…..” To discuss QB prospect Sam Darnold (34:00).

Nobody knows trumpet quite like Harold Little. That's because the DC area musician doesn't see it as just an instrument – it's literally part of who he is, an extension of his personality. Anyone who's seen him play will tell you that he's got a fingertip feel for embouchure and valves. So it's no surprise that he's played with legends like Chuck Brown, Butch Warren, Buck Hill, Eddie Gladden and Calvin Jones. Now with his new band and album, Akoben, scheduled for release on Aug. 11th, that fuses jazz, funk and R&B, Harold is here to show that a Little goes a long way. Ronald Jackson of The Smooth Jazz Ride said about Akoben: "This exotic and eclectic blend of material is vibrant, colorful, and smoothly melodic. It breathes and moves to its own vibe and brings the listener along for an experience-filled ride that should be quite difficult to forget. There is a solid uniqueness to its groove and texture. In a word, it has personality." Follow Harold on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

In this episode we hear another story from Sammy about a ghost car that follows her all the way out of town! Then we go into the legend of Buck Hill. I was searching and found the the cabin that this story originates from is for sale!!! Visit us - www.TheHauntedEstate.com Call and record your own story - 1-877-260-3428 Email us - Celina@TheHauntedEstate.com

The Riding Gravel Radio Ranch is Ridinggravel.com's podcast. MBR hosts it for mobile users.  Pat Sorensen, owner of Penn Cycle, joins the 7th episode of The Riding Gravel Radio Ranch. Ben and Pat discuss the Almanzo 100 on May 16 in Spring Valley, Minnesota including his very personal reason for riding it, what it means to him and the 1,000's of other riders who have participated over the years, and why Penn Cycle got involved. Listen in to hear details about the ride, the other Almanzo races, and the Almanzo weekend , as well as what's up with the Buck Hill weekly races. If you have any questions, comments, or have an idea for an episode, please feel free to contact us anytime!   RELATED SHOW NOTES: EPISODE SPONSOR: Travel Kansas Almanzo 100 Website Almanzo 100 on Twitter Almanzo 100 on Facebook Spring Valley, MN Website Spring Valley, MN on Facebook Penn Cycle Website Penn Cycle on Facebook Penn Cycle on Twitter MN Bike Trail Navigator provides endless information about cycling in Minnesota MN Bike Trail Navigator on Twitter Gravel Event Calendar Interested in sponsoring an episode? Contact us.