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In this episode of Do The Work | Mindset Mastery… I reflect on a powerful moment that unfolded on Camelback Mountain—me, surrounded by 25 people who are all fighting for something greater. That climb wasn't just a hike. It was a metaphor for what this life is really about: choosing the hard things, getting uncomfortable, and proving to yourself that you can handle more. Camelback is no joke. You feel it in your legs, your lungs, your thoughts. But it teaches you—if you're willing to pay attention. Just like this business. Just like this life. I've been doing this for 21 years. That's 21 years of doubt, resistance, setbacks, and the heavy weight of comparison. There were days when I questioned if anything would ever work. Times I looked at others and felt like I was falling behind. And even today, when I post success or share a win, I know some people get triggered. One guy even commented, “Y'all too much new money. Quit showboating.” And I get it. But here's what he—and maybe others—don't understand: this is new money. Not inherited. Not luck. I wasn't handed tools or a roadmap. I had to build all of it from scratch. And what you see now? That's the result of sacrifice, consistency, and refusing to play the victim. I used to live in survival mode—where a $50 cable bill felt like the end of the world. And I've watched people give up on big dreams over something like a $75 office fee. That's not a money problem. That's a mindset problem. And I had to crush those patterns to become who I am today. A journal entry from 2018 reminded me just how far I've come. I was overwhelmed. Depressed. Losing agents. Losing momentum. I wrote, “You want good? It's not easy. You want more? It's not easy. You want success? It's not easy.” But I kept showing up. I changed my thoughts, and with that, I changed my reality. So if you're in a moment where you feel behind, not good enough, not smart enough—hear me: you're not stuck. You're not broken. You just have to take that next step, even if it's small. Even if it's scary. And if your growth is triggering people around you? That's okay. Your purpose is louder than their opinions. Let them talk. You keep moving.
In this episode the Ski Moms welcome Lutricia Eberly, Executive Director of PORA (Pennsylvania Outdoor Recreation Association), to discuss skiing in the Keystone State. Lutricia shares her journey from college skiing at Round Top Mountain to her current leadership role, transitioning from an IT career through various positions in the ski industry. Pennsylvania's winter sports landscape includes 23 member resorts, ranging from day facilities to full-service lodging properties like Seven Springs, Liberty Mountain, Camelback, and Bear Creek. The state's resorts are known for extensive snowmaking capabilities, night skiing options, and family-friendly base areas, typically operating from mid-December through mid-March. Lutricia highlights Pennsylvania's significant outdoor recreation economy, with skiing contributing nearly $1 billion to the state's $17 billion outdoor recreation sector. As PORA's leader, she focuses on workforce development and promoting outdoor recreation careers, while maintaining the organization's "Start Here" philosophy that positions Pennsylvania as an accessible destination for families beginning their outdoor adventures. Resources for planning a Pennsylvania ski trip can be found at SkiPA.com, while those interested in industry careers can visit PathToOutdoorRecJobs.com.Keep up with the latest from Ski PA:Website: https://www.skipa.comFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/GoSkiPA/Path To Outdoor Rec Jobs: https://pathtooutdoorrecjobs.comReady for your next adventure? Download the Vrbo app or check out Vrbo.com for trusted, family-friendly getaways and plan a stay everyone will love! If your skis and boards are feeling sluggish, it's time for a tune-up! A fresh wax and edge sharpening can make all the difference. Treat your gear right, and it'll treat you to your best ski days yet! Head to SkiHaus to get your skis and boards in great shape. Pick from three locations Woburn and Framingham, MA, and shop Tax-Free in Salem, NH. Check them out at skihaus.com Start planning your trip here visitulstercountyny.comThe Ski Moms are so excited to be partnering with Ulster County this year. Located in New York State, Ulster County is tucked into the Hudson Valley and offers families a chance to get out in nature all year long.Support the showKeep up with the Latest from the Ski Moms!Website: www.theskimoms.coSki Moms Discount Page: https://www.theskimoms.co/discountsSki Moms Ski Rental HomesJoin the 13,000+ Ski Moms Facebook GroupInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/theskimoms/ Send us an email and let us know what guests and topics you'd like to hear next! Sarah@skimomsfun.comNicole@skimomsfun.com
This month on Pocono Mountains Magazine: learn how Blue Mountain is leading the way in snowmaking technology with 500+ snow guns and a dedicated crew of snowmakers then take an exhilarating ride down Camelback's snow tubing lanes with Bri & Dee. Get inspired as you step inside The Artist Studio Loft, a creative vacation rental made for artists, by artists, then meet the couples uncorking love at Three Hammers Winery and Milford Wine & Cheese Co. Find out what's new and exciting in dining at Kalahari Resorts and Conventions and explore Pocono Mountain Maple, PA's largest organic maple farm, which offers a unique tasting experience and seasonal maple tours. Discover the benefits of self care at Alchemy Lounge where holistic treatments will help you find balance and enhance your well-being. It's awards season! Celebrate the numerous Pocono Mountains businesses which have received local and national recognition for everything from hospitality and service to craft beer and marketing. Catch the latest Pocono Perspectives with Trip Ruvane and Stephanie Rath from Barley Creek Brewing Company as they share their experiences in the hospitality industry.
Season 4, Episode 36 - We've shared over the years all the great places and features across the region that make the Poconos so special - but one thing that we have as a major source of pride is our people. The folks on the frontlines of the hospitality industry who welcome, serve, and give of themselves day in, day out. One employee in particular stood out in 2024 more than all the others: Eider Prados at Camelback Resort. We featured Prados in our January Pocono Mountains Magazine after he took home the Hospitality Worker of the Year Award! The Poconos is a year-round destination for millions and with 24-hundred square miles of mountains, forests, lakes and rivers with historic downtowns and iconic family resorts, it's the perfect getaway for a weekend or an entire week. You can always find out more on PoconoMountains.com or watch Pocono Television Network streaming live 24/7.
In the latest episode of Tell Me About Your Bike, host Wesley Cheney talks to fellow cyclists Dale Sergeant and Liz Schleeper about the rewards and perils of going tubeless.https://www.amazon.com/Tyre-Glider-Bicycles-Including-Mountain/dp/B09TCFRVC8/ref=asc_df_B09TCFRVC8?mcid=c6e1ede90a4e3eaca3aaf413c094592f&tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=693440399003&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=4167399516588370019&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=1028320&hvtargid=pla-1640810557580&psc=1Stashed in my Camelback is the new Tyre Glider tool. So far I've had no need to use it. Have you used a Tyre Glider? Tell me how it went at tellmeaboutyrbike@gmail.comSupport the show
This month on Pocono Mountains Magazine: discover nearly 60 life-size Snowmen of Stroudsburg, including 10 new designs, gracing the streets for another winter season, hit the trails at Alvin's Offroad Playground for an unforgettable, adrenaline-filled adventure, and sample outstanding mocktail menus available during Dry January (and refreshed seasonally!) at The Frogtown Chophouse, Siamsa Irish Pub, and Sycamore Grille. Go behind the scenes in the Pocono Mountains hospitality industry at Camelback Resort, a four-season destination with hundreds of employees, and meet the Pocono Mountains Hospitality Employee of the Year, Eider Prados, an instrumental member of the Camelback team. Visit Paradise Stream with Bri & Dee as they explore the iconic resort's activities and amenities and hear the latest special announcement from family-run, family-focused Woodloch Resort: the nation's first Cancer Respite Center will be opening at Woodloch next year. Finally, jam out to great music at the Sherman Theater in a new Pocono Showcase episode with the Agitators.
The Phoenix Chamber Music Society opens its 65th season by bringing in the Dover Quartet for a performance Sunday afternoon, October 27 at Camelback...
Born in Baku, Azerbaijan, to thereafter live in Moscow until moving to the United States and living in both Massachusetts & Arizona, David Arustamian brings a unique skill set to the field of real estate and our team here at Russ Lyon | Sotheby's International Realty. David attended Babson College in Massachusetts, where he successfully graduated in 2011. Immediately following his studies, David delved into Real Estate, and his passion for being a salesperson connecting with his clients to achieve their goals truly set in.Now a member of Russ Lyon Sotheby's International Realty and Gibson Sotheby's International Realty, David is licensed and active in multiple states. As a determined, passionate, disciplined, and incredibly ambitious individual, David consistently strives to further his real estate business, credibility, and client base. With a deep knowledge of a Valley as well as neighborhoods all around the city, David is appropriately able to handle either side of the transaction at any price point.In his spare time, David also is a frequent contributor to the Realogy Charitable Foundation, as well as Living Arrangements for the Developmentally Disabled (LADD). In addition, David is a serious believer in living a healthy lifestyle. From going to the gym to running track, hiking the Camelback's and more, he knows that being fit, eating right, and being healthy helps keep him motivated and on a competitive path both in business and in his overall life and well-being. Furthering himself as an agent, even more, is David's unique ability to get his clients to the closing table both in English as well as Russian, which he is also fluent in.
Episode Summary: In this episode, we explore how the innovative Ice Buddy Cooler transforms from a disaster-relief tool into a must-have lifestyle product for tailgaters, campers, and adventurers. Learn how repurposing this versatile product for everyday and recreational use opens up new markets, creates predictable revenue, and builds a brand that goes beyond emergencies.To contact Antonio T. Smith Jr.https://www.facebook.com/theatsjrhttps://www.amazon.com/stores/Antonio-T.-Smith-Jr/author/B00M3MPVJ8https://www.linkedin.com/in/antoniotsmithjrhttps://antoniotsmithjr.comhttps://www.instagram.com/theatsjr Product Overview and FeaturesIce Buddy Cooler:A portable cooling system consisting of a cooler and a multi-functional backpack.Cooler: Designed to store food, medications (like insulin), and other perishables. Kosher and halal certified, with a food-grade dish for eating.Backpack (QPAC): Holds 120 ounces of water, a 10-pound bag of ice, or a dozen 16-ounce bottles. It has a spout for easy access to liquids and space for clothes and essential items.Potential Markets and UsesDisaster Relief and Medical Uses:Ideal for storing medications like insulin and other critical medical supplies during emergencies.Dialysis and medical transport for keeping necessary supplies cool.Everyday and Recreational Uses:Tailgating: Customizable with team logos, perfect for storing drinks at sports events.Hiking and Camping: Use as a water source or cooler while hiking or camping. Could be a Camelback alternative.Fishing and Hunting: For storing fish or game in the cooler.Military: Could be used to store water and medical supplies during deployment.Breastfeeding Mothers: Convenient for transporting breast milk.Survival and Tactical Gear:Emergency preparedness: Used during natural disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes.Portable bathroom: Potential to create biodegradable liners, making it useful during camping or hiking.Creative Marketing IdeasTargeting College Students:Promote Ice Buddy as a customizable cooler for college game days, especially with custom team logos.Target college tailgating and party culture to make it trendy and socially acceptable.Professional Partnerships:Use connections with NFL players, sports figures, and military personnel to market Ice Buddy as a multifunctional, rugged product.Brand Expansion:Baby Buddy: A smaller version for kids, appealing to parents for field trips or school activities.Customization for different niches: Outdoor brands like Bass Pro Shops, REI, or Camping World for campers and hunters.High School Football Teams: Offering Ice Buddy to sports teams for keeping water and beverages cool during games.Key Selling PointsMultifunctional Design: Can be used as a cooler, a backpack, and for storing water or food.Durability: Designed to withstand rugged conditions, suitable for military and outdoor use.Customization: Can be tailored for sports teams, military units, or other specific groups.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-secret-to-success/exclusive-contentAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
Episode Summary:In this episode, we dive deep into how to effectively market to your audience with bold and unapologetic messaging, featuring a live breakdown of John Nowinsky's latest project. Learn how daring creative choices and targeted messaging can transform your business into a brand that resonates deeply with the right customers.To contact Antonio T. Smith Jr.https://www.facebook.com/theatsjrhttps://www.amazon.com/stores/Antonio-T.-Smith-Jr/author/B00M3MPVJ8https://www.linkedin.com/in/antoniotsmithjrhttps://antoniotsmithjr.comhttps://www.instagram.com/theatsjr Product Overview and FeaturesIce Buddy Cooler:A portable cooling system consisting of a cooler and a multi-functional backpack.Cooler: Designed to store food, medications (like insulin), and other perishables. Kosher and halal certified, with a food-grade dish for eating.Backpack (QPAC): Holds 120 ounces of water, a 10-pound bag of ice, or a dozen 16-ounce bottles. It has a spout for easy access to liquids and space for clothes and essential items.Potential Markets and UsesDisaster Relief and Medical Uses:Ideal for storing medications like insulin and other critical medical supplies during emergencies.Dialysis and medical transport for keeping necessary supplies cool.Everyday and Recreational Uses:Tailgating: Customizable with team logos, perfect for storing drinks at sports events.Hiking and Camping: Use as a water source or cooler while hiking or camping. Could be a Camelback alternative.Fishing and Hunting: For storing fish or game in the cooler.Military: Could be used to store water and medical supplies during deployment.Breastfeeding Mothers: Convenient for transporting breast milk.Survival and Tactical Gear:Emergency preparedness: Used during natural disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes.Portable bathroom: Potential to create biodegradable liners, making it useful during camping or hiking.Creative Marketing IdeasTargeting College Students:Promote Ice Buddy as a customizable cooler for college game days, especially with custom team logos.Target college tailgating and party culture to make it trendy and socially acceptable.Professional Partnerships:Use connections with NFL players, sports figures, and military personnel to market Ice Buddy as a multifunctional, rugged product.Brand Expansion:Baby Buddy: A smaller version for kids, appealing to parents for field trips or school activities.Customization for different niches: Outdoor brands like Bass Pro Shops, REI, or Camping World for campers and hunters.High School Football Teams: Offering Ice Buddy to sports teams for keeping water and beverages cool during games.Key Selling PointsMultifunctional Design: Can be used as a cooler, a backpack, and for storing water or food.Durability: Designed to withstand rugged conditions, suitable for military and outdoor use.Customization: Can be tailored for sports teams, military units, or other specific groups.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-secret-to-success/exclusive-contentAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
Support the show. Become a Patron: www.patreon.com/highscore510 ----more---- We discuss: - July 2024 Rundown: Presidential Shifts and Sassination Attempts - Paris Olympics: The Good, the Bad, & DaFuq? *Patreon Page: www.patreon.com/highscore510 *Email: (HighScore510.Fans@gmail.com) *MUSIC BY: Taj Easton (https://www.tajeaston.com) *SPONSORS: 1) New Parkway Theatre, Oakland: https://www.thenewparkway.com 2) Til Infinity Clothing
Hello everyone. Welcome to the latest episode of The Matchbox Podcast powered by Ignition Coach Co. I'm your host, Adam Saban, and on this week's episode we're talking about the best strategies for carrying your fluids and nutrition on the bike as well as low calorie density foods. Today's show is also brought to you by Flow Formulas. Head over to flowformulas.com today to check out their full suite of endurance nutrition offerings and make sure to use the discount code “Matchbox” when checking out. As always, if you like what you hear please share this with your friends and leave us a five star review and if you have any questions for the show drop us an email at matchboxpod@gmail.com with email title The Matchbox Podcast or head over to ignitioncoachco.com and fill out The Matchbox Podcast listener question form. Alight let's get into it! For more social media content, follow along @ignitioncoachco @adamsaban6 @dizzle_dillman @dylanjawnson @kait.maddox Matchbox Patreon: The Matchbox Patreon https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnvEDN2A2ZjhNHb6uxh84PQ https://www.youtube.com/c/DylanJohnsonCycling https://www.ignitioncoachco.com Intro/ Outro music by AlexGrohl - song "King Around Here" - https://pixabay.com/music/id-15045/ The following was generated using Riverside.fm AI technologies Summary The conversation discusses the use of bottles versus backpacks for endurance cycling events, specifically focusing on the Leadville race. The hosts provide their insights and experiences on the topic, considering factors such as aid station accessibility, hydration needs, and temperature conditions. They also touch on the idea of using insulated bladders and the convenience of swapping out bladders in a hydration pack. The conversation concludes with a brief mention of another question from a listener about episode numbers. The conversation discusses the concept of low calorie density foods and how they can help with weight loss and performance. Dylan shares examples of low calorie density meals, such as oatmeal with berries for breakfast and rice, beans, and vegetables for lunch or dinner. The importance of order of operation in eating low calorie density foods is also highlighted. The conversation concludes with a humorous exchange about Dylan's supposed love for barbecue sauce. Overall, the conversation provides insights into how to incorporate low calorie density foods into a cyclist's diet. Keywords bottles, backpacks, Leadville, endurance cycling, hydration, aid stations, temperature, insulated bladders, swapping bladders, episode numbers, low calorie density foods, weight loss, performance, examples, oatmeal, berries, rice, beans, vegetables, order of operation, barbecue sauce Takeaways For longer endurance rides or races like Leadville, using both bottles and a backpack is common. Consider the accessibility of aid stations and the time between them when deciding where to store carbs and water. Putting hydration mix or carb mix in the backpack and water in the bottles is a convenient option. Having at least one bottle of clear water is useful for purposes other than hydration. Insulated bladders and DIY solutions for carrying hydration are worth exploring. Pay attention to the correct proportion of water and mix when using a hydration pack. Low calorie density foods can help with weight loss and performance. Examples of low calorie density meals include oatmeal with berries and rice, beans, and vegetables. Order of operation in eating low calorie density foods is important. Barbecue sauce can make low calorie density foods more palatable. Titles DIY Solutions for Carrying Hydration on Long Rides Exploring the Idea of Insulated Bladders for Cycling Examples of Low Calorie Density Meals for Cyclists Making Low Calorie Density Foods More Palatable with Barbecue Sauce Sound Bites "I'm wondering for Leadville if it would be better to have the Camelback filled with carbs and carbs mix and the bottles filled with water because there are times at Leadville which is difficult to get to your bottles." "I'm always a proponent in that case of putting the hydration mix or your high carb drink mix in your pack." "If your plan is not to have any pure water on your bike, then it doesn't matter, right? Cause you're going to put hydration mix or carb mix in both." "Okay, so like breakfast is the same for me every single morning I do oatmeal and it's not just, it's not just oatmeal. I add, I actually add a bunch of stuff to it. I add, I add peanut butter. I had flax seed. I had chia seed. I berries, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, banana." "Mm -hmm. yeah, like, anyway, my go -to is like rice, beans, ton of vegetables. I also put a ton of spices on it, then put a ton of barbecue sauce on it. That's probably, other than oatmeal, that's probably my second most consumed meal." Chapters 00:00 Bottles vs. Backpacks for Endurance Cycling 04:29 Optimizing Hydration Strategies for Leadville 06:30 Using Ice and Insulated Bladders 14:26 Swapping Bladders in a Hydration Pack 19:18 DIY Solutions and Proper Proportions 27:32 The Relationship Between Weight Loss and Performance 33:46 Examples of Low Calorie Density Meals 36:32 Making Low Calorie Density Foods More Palatable
This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on June 4. It dropped for free subscribers on June 11. 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:Who* Scott Bender, operations and business advisor to Blue Knob ownership* Donna Himes, Blue Knob Marketing Manager* Sam Wiley, part owner of Blue Knob* Gary Dietke, Blue Knob Mountain ManagerRecorded onMay 13, 2024About Blue KnobClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Majority owned by the Wiley familyLocated in: Claysburg, PennsylvaniaYear founded: 1963Pass affiliations: Indy Pass and Indy+ Pass – 2 days, no blackouts (access not yet set for 2024-25 ski season)Closest neighboring ski areas: Laurel (1:02), Tussey (1:13), Hidden Valley (1:14), Seven Springs (1:23)Base elevation: 2,100 feetSummit elevation: 3,172 feetVertical drop: 1,072 feetSkiable Acres: 100Average annual snowfall: 120 inchesTrail count: 33 (5 beginner, 10 intermediate, 4 advanced intermediate, 5 advanced, 9 expert) + 1 terrain parkLift count: 5 (2 triples, 2 doubles, 1 carpet – view Lift Blog's inventory of Blue Knob's lift fleet)Why I interviewed themI've not always written favorably about Blue Knob. In a state where shock-and-awe snowmaking is a baseline operational requirement, the mountain's system is underwhelming and bogged down by antiquated equipment. The lower-mountain terrain – Blue Knob's best – opens sporadically, sometimes remaining mysteriously shuttered after heavy local snows. The website at one time seemed determined to set the world record for the most exclamation points in a single place. They may have succeeded (this has since been cleaned up):I've always tried to couch these critiques in a but-damn-if-only context, because Blue Knob, considered purely as a ski area, is an absolute killer. It needs what any Pennsylvania ski area needs – modern, efficient, variable-weather-capable, overwhelming snowmaking and killer grooming. No one, in this temperamental state of freeze-thaws and frequent winter rains, can hope to survive long term without those things. So what's the holdup?My goal with The Storm is to be incisive but fair. Everyone deserves a chance to respond to critiques, and offering them that opportunity is a tenant of good journalism. But because this is a high-volume, high-frequency operation, and because my beat covers hundreds of ski areas, I'm not always able to gather reactions to every post in the moment. I counterbalance that reality with this: every ski area's story is a long-term, ongoing one. What they mess up today, they may get right tomorrow. And reality, while inarguable, does not always capture intentions. Eventually, I need to gather and share their perspective.And so it was Blue Knob's turn to talk. And I challenge you to find a more good-natured and nicer group of folks anywhere. I went off format with this one, hosting four people instead of the usual one (I've done multiples a few times before, with Plattekill, West Mountain, Bousquet, Boyne Mountain, and Big Sky). The group chat was Blue Knob's idea, and frankly I loved it. It's not easy to run a ski area in 2024 in the State of Pennsylvania, and it's especially not easy to run this ski area, for reasons I outline below. And while Blue Knob has been slower to get to the future than its competitors, I believe they're at least walking in that direction.What we talked about“This was probably one of our worst seasons”; ownership; this doesn't feel like PA; former owner Dick Gauthier's legacy; reminiscing on the “crazy fun” of the bygone community atop the ski hill; Blue Knob's history as an Air Force station and how the mountain became a ski area; Blue Knob's interesting lease arrangement with the state; the remarkable evolution of Seven Springs and how those lessons could fuel Blue Knob's growth; competing against Vail's trio of nearby mountains; should Vail be allowed to own eight ski areas in one state?; Indy Pass sales limits; Indy Pass as customer-acquisition tool; could Blue Knob ever upgrade its top-to-bottom doubles to a high-speed quad?; how one triple chair multiplied into two; why Blue Knob built a mile-long lift and almost immediately shortened it; how Wolf Creek is “like Blue Knob”; beginner lifts; the best ski terrain in Pennsylvania; why Mine Shaft and Boneyard Glades disappeared from Blue Knob's trailmap, and whether they could ever return; unmarked glades; Blue Knob's unique microclimate and how that impacts snowmaking; why the mountain isn't open top-to-bottom more and why it's important to change that; PA snowmaking and how Blue Knob can catch up; that wild access road and what could be done to improve it; and the surprising amount of housing on Blue Knob's slopes. Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewSo here's something that's absolutely stupid:That's southeastern Pennsylvania. Vail Resorts operates all of the ski areas in blue font. Ski areas in red are independent. Tussey, a local bump serving State College and its armies of sad co-eds who need a distraction because their football team can't beat Michigan, is not really relevant here. Blue Knob is basically surrounded by ski areas that all draw on the same well of out-of-state corporate resources and are stapled to the gumball-machine-priced Epic Pass. If this were a military map, we'd all say, “Yeah they're fucked.” Blue Knob is Berlin in 1945, with U.S. forces closing in from the west and the Russians driving from the east. There's no way they're winning this war.How did this happen? Which bureaucrat in sub-basement 17 of Justice Department HQ in D.C. looked at Vail's 2021 deal to acquire Seven Springs, Hidden Valley, and Laurel and said, “Cool”? This was just two years after Vail had picked up Whitetail, Liberty, and Roundtop, along with Jack Frost and Big Boulder in eastern Pennsylvania, in the Peak Resorts acquisition. How does allowing one company to acquire eight of the 22 public ski resorts in one state not violate some antitrust statute? Especially when six of them essentially surround one independent competitor.I don't know. When a similar situation materialized in Colorado in 1997, Justice said, “No, Vail Resorts, you can not buy Keystone and Breckenridge and Arapahoe Basin from this dog food company. Sell one.” And so A-Basin went to a real estate conglomerate out of Toronto, which gut-renovated the mountain and then flipped it, earlier this year, to Vail arch-frenemy Alterra. And an independent ski area operator told me that, at some point during this ongoing sales process, the Justice Department reached out to ask them if they were OK with Alterra – which already operates Winter Park, owns Steamboat, and has wrapped Copper, Eldora, and the four Aspen mountains into its Ikon Pass – owning A-Basin (which has been on the Ikon Pass since 2019). Justice made no such phone call, Blue Knob officials tell me on this podcast, when Vail was purchasing the Seven Springs resorts.This is where Colorad-Bro reminds me that Pennsylvania skiing is nothing compared to Colorado. And yes, Colorado is unquestionably the epicenter of American skiing, home to some of our most iconic resorts and responsible for approximately one in four U.S. skier visits each winter. But where do you suppose all those skiers come from? Not solely from Colorado, ranked 21st by U.S. population with just 5.9 million residents. Pennsylvania, with Philly and Pittsburgh and dozens of mid-sized cities in-between, ranks fifth in the nation by population, with nearly 13 million people. And with cold winters, ski areas near every large city, and some of the best snowmaking systems on the planet, PA is a skier printing press, responsible not just for millions of in-state skier visits annually, but for minting skiers that drive the loaded U-Haul west so they can brag about being Summit County locals five minutes after signing their lease. That one company controls more than one-third of the ski areas – which, combined, certainly account for more than half of the state's skier visits – strikes me as unfair in a nation that supposedly maintains robust antitrust laws.But whatever. We're locked in here. Vail Resorts is not Ticketmaster, and no one is coming to dismantle this siege. Blue Knob is surrounded. And it's worse than it looks on this map, which does not illuminate that Blue Knob sits in a vast wilderness, far from most population centers, and that all of Vail's resorts scoop up skiers flowing west-northwest from Philadelphia/Baltimore/D.C. and east from Pittsburgh. So how is Blue Knob not completely screwed? Answering that question was basically the point of this podcast. The mountain's best argument for continued existence in the maw of this Epic Pass blitzkrieg is that Blue Knob is a better pure ski area than any of the six Vail mountains that surround it (see trailmap above). The terrain is, in fact, the best in the State of Pennsylvania, and arguably in the entire Mid-Atlantic (sorry Elk Mountain partisans, but that ski area, fine as it is, is locked out of the conversation as long as they maintain that stupid tree-skiing ban). But this fact of mountain superiority is no guarantee of long-term resilience, because the truth is that Blue Knob has often, in recent years, been unable to open top to bottom, running only the upper-mountain triple chairs and leaving the best terrain out of reach.They have to fix that. And they know it. But this is a feisty mountain in a devilish microclimate with some antiquated infrastructure and a beast of an access road. Nothing about this renovation has been, or likely will be, fast or easy.But it can be done. Blue Knob can survive. I believe it after hosting the team on this podcast. Maybe you will too once you hear it.What I got wrong* When describing the trail network, I said that the runs were cut “across the fall line” in a really logical way – I meant, of course, to say they were cut down the fall line.* I said that I thought the plants that sprouted between the trees in the mothballed Mine Shaft and Boneyard Glades were positioned “to keep people out.” It's more likely, however, based upon what the crew told us, that those plants are intended to control the erosion that shuttered the glades several years ago.* I mentioned “six-packs going up in the Poconos at the KSL-owned mountains.” To clarify: those would be Camelback and Blue Mountain, which each added six-packs in 2022, one year before joining the Ikon Pass.* I also said that high-speed lifts were “becoming the standard” in Pennsylvania. That isn't quite accurate, as a follow-up inventory clarified. The state is home to just nine high-speed lifts, concentrated at five ski areas. So yeah, not exactly taking over Brah.* I intimated that Blue Knob shortened the Beginners CTEC triple, built in 1983, and stood up the Expressway triple in 1985 with some of the commandeered parts. This does not appear to be the case, as the longer Beginners lift and Expressway co-exist on several vintage trailmaps, including the one below from circa 1989. The longer lift continues to appear on Blue Knob trailmaps through the mid-1990s, but at some point, the resort shortened the lift by thousands of linear feet. We discuss why in the pod.Why you should ski Blue KnobIf we took every mountain, fully open, with bomber conditions, I would rank Blue Knob as one of the best small- to mid-sized ski areas in the Northeast. From a rough-and-tumble terrain perspective, it's right there with Berkshire East, Plattekill, Hickory, Black Mountain of Maine, Ragged, Black Mountain (New Hampshire), Bolton Valley, and Magic Mountain. But with its Pennsylvania address, it never makes that list.It should. This is a serious mountain, with serious terrain that will thrill and challenge any skier. Each trail is distinct and memorable, with quirk and character. Even the groomers are interesting, winding nearly 1,100 vertical feet through the trees, dipping and banking, crisscrossing one another and the lifts above. Lower Shortway, a steep and narrow bumper cut along a powerline, may be my favorite trail in Pennsylvania. Or maybe it's Ditch Glades, a natural halfpipe rolling below Stembogan Bowl. Or maybe it's the unmarked trees of East Wall Traverse down to the marked East Wall Glades. Or maybe it's Lower Extrovert, a wide but ungroomed and mostly unskied trail where I found wind-blown pow at 3 p.m. Every trail is playful and punchy, and they are numerous enough that it's difficult to ski them all in a single day.Which of course takes us to the reality of skiing Blue Knob, which is that the ski area's workhorse top-to-bottom lift is the 61-year-old Route 66 double chair. The lift is gorgeous and charming, trenched through the forest on a narrow and picturesque wilderness line (until the mid-station, when the view suddenly shifts to that of oddly gigantic houses strung along the hillside). While it runs fast for a fixed-grip lift, the ride is quite long (I didn't time it; I'll guess 10 to 12 minutes). It stops a lot because, well, Pennsylvania. There are a lot of novice skiers here. There is a mid-station that will drop expert skiers back at the top of the best terrain, but this portal, where beginners load to avoid the suicidal runs below, contributes to those frequent stops.And that's the reality when that lift is running, which it often is not. And that, again, is because the lower-mountain terrain is frequently closed. This is a point of frustration for locals and, I'll point out, for the mountain operators themselves. A half-open Blue Knob is not the same as, say, a half-open Sugarbush, where you'll still have access to lots of great terrain. A half-open Blue Knob is just the Expressway (Lift 4) triple chair (plus the beginner zone), mostly groomers, mostly greens and blues. It's OK, but it's not what we were promised on the trailmap.That operational inconsistency is why Blue Knob remains mostly unheralded by the sort of skiers who are most drawn to this newsletter – adventurous, curious, ready for a challenge – even though it is the perfect Storm mountain: raw and wild and secretive and full of guard dog energy. But if you're anywhere in the region, watch their Instagram account, which usually flashes the emergency lights when Route 66 spins. And go there when that happens. You're welcome.Podcast NotesOn crisscrossing chairliftsChairlifts are cool. Crisscrossing chairlifts are even cooler. Riding them always gives me the sense of being part of a giant Goldbergian machine. Check out the triple crossing over the doubles at Blue Knob (all videos by Stuart Winchester):Wiley mentions a similar setup at Attitash, where the Yankee Flyer high-speed quad crosses beneath the summit lift. Here's a pic I took of the old Summit Triple at the crossover junction in 2021:Vail Resorts replaced the triple with the Mountaineer high-speed quad this past winter. I intended to go visit the resort in early February, but then I got busy trying not to drop dead, so I cancelled that trip and don't have any pics of the new lift. Lift Blog made it there, because of course he did, and his pics show the crossover modified but intact. I did, however, discuss the new lift extensively with Attitash GM Brandon Swartz last November.I also snagged this rad footage of Whistler's new Fitzsimmons eight-pack flying beneath the Whistler Village Gondola in February:And the Porcupine triple passing beneath the Needles Gondola at Snowbasin in March:Oh, and Lift 2 passing beneath the lower Panorama Gondola at Mammoth:Brah I could do this all day. Here's Far East six-pack passing beneath the Red Dog sixer at Palisades Tahoe:Palisades' Base-to-Base Gondola actually passes over two chairlifts on its way over to Alpine Meadows: the Exhibition quad (foreground), and the KT-22 Express, visible in the distance:And what the hell, let's make it a party:On Blue Knob as Air Force baseIt's wild and wildly interesting that Blue Knob – one of the highest points in Pennsylvania – originally hosted an Air Force radar station. All the old buildings are visible in this undated photo. You can see the lifts carrying skiers on the left. Most of these buildings have since been demolished.On Ski Denton and LaurelThe State of Pennsylvania owns two ski areas: Laurel Mountain and Ski Denton (Blue Knob is located in a state park, and we discuss how that arrangement works in the podcast). Vail Resorts, of course, operates Laurel, which came packaged with Seven Springs. Denton hasn't spun the lifts in a decade. Late last year, a group called Denton Go won a bid to re-open and operate the ski area, with a mix of state and private investment.And it will need a lot of investment. Since this is a state park, it's open to anyone, and I hiked Denton in October 2022. The lifts – a double, a triple, and a Poma – are intact, but the triple is getting swallowed by fast-growing trees in one spot (top two photos):I'm no engineer, but these things are going to need a lot of work. The trail network hasn't grown over too much, and the base lodge looks pristine, the grasses around it mowed. Here's the old trailmap if you're curious:And here's the proposed upgrade blueprint:I connected briefly with the folks running Denton GO last fall, but never wrote a story on it. I'll check in with them soon for an update.On Herman Dupre and the evolution of Seven SpringsBender spent much of his career at Seven Springs, and we reminisce a bit about the Dupre family and the ski area's evolution into one of the finest mountains in the East. You can learn more about Seven Springs' history in my podcast conversation with the resort's current GM, Brett Cook, from last year.On Ski magazine's top 20 in the EastSki magazine – which is no longer a physical magazine but a collection of digital bits entrusted to the robots' care – has been publishing its reader resort rankings for decades. The list in the West is fairly static and predictable, filled largely with the Epkonic monsters you would expect (though Pow Mow won the top place this year). But the East list is always a bit more surprising. This year, for example, Mad River Glen and Smugglers' Notch claimed the top two spots. They're both excellent ski areas and personal favorites, with some of the most unique terrain in the country, but neither is on a megapass, and neither owns a high-speed lift, which is perhaps proof that the Colorado Machine hasn't swallowed our collective souls just yet.But the context in which we discuss the list is this: each year, three small ski areas punch their way into an Eastern lineup that's otherwise filled with monsters like Stowe and Sugarbush. Those are: Seven Springs; Holiday Valley, New York; and Wachusett, Massachusetts. These improbable ski centers all make the list because their owners (or former owners, in Seven Springs' case), worked for decades to transform small, backwater ski areas into major regional destinations.On Vail's Northeast Value Epic PassesThe most frightening factor in the abovementioned difficulties that Blue Knob faces in its cagefight with Vail is the introduction, in 2020, of Northeast-specific Epic Passes. There are two versions. The Northeast Value Pass grants passholders unlimited access to all eight Vail Resorts in Pennsylvania and all four in neighboring Ohio, which is a crucial feeder for the Seven Springs resorts. It also includes unlimited access to Vail's four New Hampshire resorts; unlimited access with holiday blackouts at Hunter, Okemo, and Mount Snow; and 10 non-holiday days at Stowe. And it's only $613 (early-bird price was $600):The second version is a midweek pass that includes all the same resorts, with five Stowe days, for just $459 ($450 early-bird):And you can also, of course, pick up an Epic ($1,004) or Epic Local ($746) pass, which still includes unlimited Pennsylvania access and adds everything in the West and in Europe.Blue Knob's season pass costs $465 ($429 early-bird), and is only good at Blue Knob. That's a very fair price, and skiers who acted early could have added an Indy Pass on at a pretty big discount. But Indy is off sale, and PA skiers weighing their pass options are going to find that Epic Pass awfully tempting.On comparisons to the liftline at MRGErf, I may have activated the Brobots at Mad Brother Glen when I compared the Route 66 liftline with the one beneath their precious single chair. But I mean it's not the worst comparison you could think of:Here's another Blue Knob shot that shows how low the chairs fly over the trail:And here's a video that gives a bit more perspective on Blue Knob's liftline:I don't know if I fully buy the comparison myself, but Blue Knob is the closest thing you'll find to MRG this far south.On Wolf Creek's old summit PomaHimes reminisced on her time working at Wolf Creek, Colorado, and the rattletrap Poma that would carry skiers up a 45-degree face to the summit. I was shocked to discover that the old lift is actually still there, running alongside the Treasure Stoke high-speed quad (the two lifts running parallel up the gut of the mountain). I have no idea how often it actually spins:Lift Blog has pics, and notes that the lift “very rarely operates for historic purposes.”On defunct gladesThe Mine Shaft and Bone Yard glades disappeared from Blue Knob's trailmap more than a decade ago, but this sign at the top of Lower Shortway still points toward them:Then there's this sign, a little ways down, where the Bone Yard Glade entrance used to be:And here are the glades, marked on a circa 2007 trailmap, between Deer Run and Lower Shortway:It would be rad if Blue Knob could resurrect these. We discuss the possibility on the podcast.On Blue Knob's base being higher than Killington'sSomewhat unbelievably, Blue Knob's 2,100-foot base elevation is higher than that of every ski area in New England save Saddleback, which launches from a 2,460-foot base. The five next highest are Bolton Valley (2,035 feet), Stowe (2,035), Cannon (2,034), Pico (2,000), and Waterville Valley (1,984). Blue Knob's Vail-owned neighbors would fit right into this group: Hidden Valley sits at 2,405 feet, Seven Springs at 2,240, and Laurel at 2,000. Head south and the bases get even higher: in West Virginia, Canaan Valley sits at 3,430 feet; Snowshoe at 3,348-foot base (skiers have to drive to 4,848, as this is an upside-down ski area); and Timberline at 3,268. But the real whoppers are in North Carolina: Beech Mountain sits at 4,675, Cataloochee at 4,660, Sugar Mountain at 4,100, and Hatley Pointe at 4,000. I probably should have made a chart, but damn it, I have to get this podcast out before I turn 90.On Blue Knob's antique snowmaking equipmentLook, I'm no snowmaking expert, but some of the stuff dotting Blue Knob's slopes looks like straight-up World War II surplus: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 41/100 in 2024, and number 541 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. 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You can also subscribe to the free tier below:WhoJosh Jorgensen, CEO of Mission Ridge, Washington and Blacktail Mountain, MontanaRecorded onApril 15, 2024About Mission RidgeClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Larry ScrivanichLocated in: Wenatchee, WashingtonYear founded: 1966Pass affiliations:* Indy Pass – 2 days with holiday and weekend blackouts (TBD for 2024-25 ski season)* Indy+ Pass – 2 days with no blackouts* Powder Alliance – 3 days with holiday and Saturday blackoutsClosest neighboring ski areas: Badger Mountain (:51), Leavenworth Ski Hill (:53) – travel times may vary considerably given weather conditions, time of day, and time of year.Base elevation: 4,570 feetSummit elevation: 6,820 feetVertical drop: 2,250 feetSkiable Acres: 2,000Average annual snowfall: 200 inchesTrail count: 70+ (10% easiest, 60% more difficult, 30% most difficult)Lift count: 7 (1 high-speed quad, 3 doubles, 2 ropetows, 1 carpet – view Lift Blog's inventory of Mission Ridge's lift fleet)View historic Mission Ridge trailmaps on skimap.org.About BlacktailClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Larry ScrivanichLocated in: Lakeside, MontanaYear founded: 1998Pass affiliations:* Indy Pass – 2 days with holiday and weekend blackouts (TBD for 2024-25 ski season)* Indy+ Pass – 2 days with no blackouts* Powder Alliance – 3 days with holiday blackoutsClosest neighboring ski areas: Whitefish (1:18) - travel times may vary considerably given weather conditions, time of day, and time of year.Base elevation: 5,236 feetSummit elevation: 6,780 feetVertical drop: 1,544 feetSkiable Acres: 1,000+Average annual snowfall: 250 inchesTrail count: (15% easier, 65% more difficult, 20% most difficult)Lift count: 4 (1 triple, 2 doubles, 1 carpet – view Lift Blog's inventory of Blacktail's lift fleet)View historic Blacktail trailmaps on skimap.org.Why I interviewed himSo much of Pacific Northwest skiing's business model amounts to wait-and-pray, hoping that, sometime in November-December, the heaping snowfalls that have spiraled in off the ocean for millennia do so again. It's one of the few regions in modern commercial skiing, anywhere in the world, where the snow is reliable enough and voluminous enough that this good-ole-boy strategy still works: 460 inches per year at Stevens Pass; 428 at Summit at Snoqualmie; 466 at Crystal; 400 at White Pass; a disgusting 701 at Baker. It's no wonder that most of these ski areas have either no snowguns, or so few that a motivated scrapper could toss the whole collection in the back of a single U-Haul.But Mission Ridge possesses no such natural gifts. The place is snowy enough – 200 inches in an average winter – that it doesn't seem ridiculous that someone thought to run lifts up the mountain. But by Washington State standards, the place is practically Palm Beach. That means the owners have had to work a lot harder, and in a far more deliberate way than their competitors, to deliver a consistent snowsportskiing experience since the bump opened in 1966.Which is a long way of saying that Mission Ridge probably has more snowmaking than the rest of Washington's ski areas combined. Which, often, is barely enough to hang at the party. This year, however, as most Washington ski areas spent half the winter thinking “Gee, maybe we ought to have more than zero snowguns,” Mission was clocking its third-best skier numbers ever.The Pacific Northwest, as a whole, finished the season fairly strong. The snow showed up, as it always does. A bunch of traditional late operators – Crystal, Meadows, Bachelor, Timberline – remain open as of early May. But, whether driven by climate change, rising consumer expectations, or a need to offer more consistent schedules to seasonal employees, the region is probably going to have to build out a mechanical complement to its abundant natural snows at some point. From a regulatory point of view, this won't be so easy in a region where people worry themselves into a coma about the catastrophic damage that umbrellas inflict upon raindrops. But Mission Ridge, standing above Wenatchee for decades as a place of recreation and employment, proves that using resources to enable recreation is not incompatible with preserving them.That's going to be a useful example to have around.What we talked aboutA lousy start to winter; a top three year for Mission anyway; snowmaking in Washington; Blacktail's worst snowfall season ever and the potential to add snowmaking to the ski area; was this crappy winter an anomaly or a harbinger?; how Blacktail's “long history of struggle” echoes the history of Mission Ridge; what could Blacktail become?; Blacktail's access road; how Blacktail rose on Forest Service land in the 1990s; Blacktail expansion potential; assessing Blacktail's lift fleet; could the company purchase more ski areas?; the evolution of Summit at Snoqualmie; Mission Ridge's large and transformative proposed expansion; why the expansion probably needs to come before chairlift upgrades; Fantasy Lift Upgrade; and why Mission Ridge replaced a used detachable quad with another used detachable quad.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewWashington skiing is endangered by a pretty basic problem: more people in this ever-richer, ever more-populous state want to ski than there are ski areas for them to visit. Building new ski areas is impossible – you'd have better luck flying an American flag from the roof of the Kremlin than introducing a new mountain to Washington State. That shortage is compounded by the lack of slopeside development, which compels every skier to drive to the hill every day that they want to ski. This circumstance reflects a false commitment to environmental preservation, which mistakes a build-nothing philosophy for watching over Mother Earth, an outmoded way of thinking that fails to appreciate the impacts of sprawl and car culture on the larger natural ecosystem.Which is where Mission Ridge, with its large proposed ski-and-stay expansion, is potentially so important. If Mission Ridge can navigate the bureaucratic obstacle course that's been dropped in its path, it could build the first substantial slopeside village in the Pacific Northwest. That could be huge. See, it would say, you can have measured development in the mountains without drowning all the grizzly bears. And since not everyone would have to drive up the mountain every day anymore, it would probably actually reduce traffic overall. The squirrels win and so do the skiers. Or something like that.And then we have Blacktail. Three-ish years ago, Mission Ridge purchased this little-known Montana bump, one of the West's few upside-down ski areas, an unlikely late addition to the Forest Service ski area network seated south of Whitefish Mountain and Glacier National Park. I was surprised when Mission bought it. I think everyone else was too. Mission Ridge is a fine ski area, and one with multi-mountain roots – it was once part of the same parent company that owned Schweitzer (now the property of Alterra) – but it's not exactly Telluride. How did a regional bump that was still running three Riblet doubles from the ‘60s and ‘70s afford another ski area two states away? And why would they want it? And what were they going to do with it?All of which I discuss, sort of, with Jorgensen. Mission and Blacktail are hardly the strangest duo in American skiing. They make more sense, as a unit, than jointly owned Red Lodge, Montana and Homewood, California. But they're also not as logical as New York's Labrador and Song, Pennsylvania's Camelback and Blue, or Massachusett's Berkshire East and Catamount, each of which sits within easy driving distance of its sister resort. So how do they fit together? Maybe they don't need to.Questions I wish I'd askedThere's a pretty cool story about a military bomber crashing into the mountain (and some associated relics) that I would have liked to have gotten into. I'd also have liked to talk a bit more about Wenatchee, which Mission's website calls “Washington's only true ski town.” I also intended to get a bit more into the particulars of the expansion, including the proposed terrain and lifts, and what sort of shape the bedbase would take. And I didn't really ask, as I normally do, about the Indy Pass and the reciprocal season pass relationship between the two ski areas.What I got wrongI said that Mission Ridge's first high-speed quad, Liberator Express, came used from Crystal Mountain. The lift actually came used from Winter Park. Jorgensen corrected that fact in the podcast. My mis-statement was the result of crossing my wires while prepping for this interview – the Crystal chairlift at Blacktail moved to Montana from Crystal Mountain, Washington. In the moment, I mixed up the mountains' lift fleets.Why you should ski Mission RidgeMission Ridge holds echoes of Arapahoe Basin's East Wall or pre-tram Big Sky: so much damn terrain, just a bit too far above the lifts for most of us to bother with. That, along with the relatively low snowfall and Smithsonian lift fleet, are the main knocks on the place (depending, of course, upon your willingness to hike and love of vintage machinery).But, on the whole, this is a good, big ski area that, because of its snowmaking infrastructure, is one of the most reliable operators for several hundred miles in any direction. The intermediate masses will find a huge, approachable footprint. Beginners will find their own dedicated lift. Better skiers, once they wear out the blacks off lifts 2 and 4, can hike the ridge for basically endless lines. And if you miss daylight, Mission hosts some of the longest top-to-bottom night-skiing runs in America, spanning the resort's entire 2,250 vertical feet (Keystone's Dercum mountain rises approximately 2,300 vertical feet).If Mission can pull off this expansion, it could ignite a financial ripple effect that would transform the resort quickly: on-site housing and expanded beginner terrain could bring more people (especially families), which would bring more revenue, which would funnel enough cash in to finally upgrade those old Riblets and, maybe, string the long-planned Lift 5 to the high saddle. That would be amazing. But it would also transform Mission into something different than what it is today. Go see it now, so you can appreciate whatever it becomes.Why you should ski BlacktailBlacktail's original mission, in the words of founder Steve Spencer, was to be the affordable locals' bump, a downhome alternative to ever-more-expensive Whitefish, a bit more than an hour up the road. That was in 1998, pre-Epic, pre-Ikon, pre-triple-digit single-day lift tickets. Fast forward to 2024, and Whitefish is considered a big-mountain outlier, a monster that's avoided every pass coalition and offers perhaps the most affordable lift ticket of any large, modern ski area in America (its top 2023-24 lift ticket price was $97).That has certainly complicated Blacktail's market positioning. It can't play Smugglers' Notch ($106 top lift ticket price) to neighboring Stowe ($220-ish). And while Blacktail's lift tickets and season passes ($450 early-bird for the 2024-25 ski season), are set at a discount to Whitefish's, the larger mountain's season pass goes for just $749, a bargain for a 3,000-acre sprawl served by four high-speed lifts.So Blacktail has to do what any ski area that's orbiting a bigger, taller, snowier competitor with more and better terrain does: be something else. There will always be a market for small and local skiing, just like there will always be a market for diners and bars with pool tables and dartboards hanging from the walls.That appeal is easy enough for locals to understand. For frequent, hassle-free skiing, small is usually better than big. It's more complicated to pitch a top-of-the-mountain parking lot to you, a probably not-local, who, if you haul yourself all the way to Montana, is probably going to want the fireworks show. But one cool thing about lingering in the small and foreign is that the experience unites the oft-opposed-in-skiing forces of novelty and calm. Typically, our ski travels involve the raucous and the loud and the fast and the enormous. But there is something utterly inspiring about setting yourself down on an unfamiliar but almost empty mountain, smaller than Mt. Megaphone but not necessarily small at all, and just setting yourself free to explore. Whatever Blacktail doesn't give you, it will at least give you that.Podcast NotesOn Mission Ridge's proposed expansionWhile we discuss the mountain's proposed expansion in a general way, we don't go deep into specifics of lifts and trails. This map gives the best perspective on how the expansion would blow Mission Ridge out into a major ski area - the key here is less the ski expansion itself than the housing that would attend it:Here's an overhead view:Video overviews:The project, like most ski area expansions in U.S. America, has taken about 700 years longer than it should have. The local radio station published this update in October:Progress is being made with the long-planned expansion of Mission Ridge Ski & Board Resort.Chelan County is working with the resort on an Environmental Impact Statement.County Natural Resources Director Mike Kaputa says it'll be ready in the next eight months or so."We are getting closer and closer to having a draft Environmental Impact Statement and I think that's probably, I hate to put a month out there, but I think it's probably looking like May when we'll have a draft that goes out for public comment."The expansion plan for Mission Ridge has been in the works since 2014, and the resort brought a lawsuit against the county in 2021 over delays in the process.The lawsuit was dismissed earlier this year.Kaputa gave an update on progress with the Mission Ridge expansion before county commissioners Monday, where he said they're trying to get the scope of the Environmental Impact Statement right."You want to be as thorough as possible," Kaputa said. "You don't want to overdo it. You want to anticipate comments. I'm sure we'll get lots of comments when it comes out."In 2014, Larry Scrivanich, owner of Mission Ridge, purchased approximately 779 acres of private land adjacent to the current Mission Ridge Ski and Board Resort. Since then, Mission Ridge has been forging ahead with plans for expansion.The expansion plans call for onsite lodging and accommodations, which Mission Ridge calls a game changer, which would differentiate the resort from others in the Northwest.I'm all about process, due diligence, and checks-and-balances, but it's possible we've overcorrected here.On snowfall totals throughout WashingtonMission gets plenty of snow, but it's practically barren compared to the rest of Washington's large ski areas:On the founding of BlacktailBlacktail is an outlier in U.S. skiing in that it opened in 1998 on Forest Service land – decades after similarly leased ski areas debuted. Daily Inter Lake summarizes the unusual circumstances behind this late arrival:Steve Spencer had been skiing and working at Big Mountain [now Whitefish] for many years, starting with ski patrol and eventually rising to mountain manager, when he noticed fewer and fewer locals on the hill.With 14 years as manager of Big Mountain under his belt, Spencer sought to create an alternative to the famous resort that was affordable and accessible for locals. He got together with several business partners and looked at mountains that they thought would fit the bill.They considered sites in the Swan Range and Lolo Peak, located in the Bitterroot Range west of Missoula, but they knew the odds of getting a Forest Service permit to build a ski area there were slim to none.They had their eyes on a site west of Flathead Lake, however, that seemed to check all the right boxes. The mountain they focused on was entirely surrounded by private land, and there were no endangered species in the area that needed protection from development.Spencer consulted with local environmental groups before he'd spent even “two nickels” on the proposal. He knew that without their support, the project was dead on arrival.That mountain was known as Blacktail, and when the Forest Service OK'd ski operations there, it was the first ski area created on public land since 1978, when Beaver Creek Resort was given permission to use National Forest land in Colorado.Blacktail Mountain Ski Area celebrates its 25th anniversary next year, it is still the most recent in the country to be approved through that process.On Glacier National Park and Flathead LakeEven if you've never heard of Blacktail, it's stuffed into a dense neighborhood of outdoor legends in northern Montana, including Glacier National Park and Whitefish ski area:On WhitefishWith 3,000 skiable acres, a 2,353-foot vertical drop, and four high-speed lifts, Whitefish, just up the road from Blacktail, looms enormously over the smaller mountain's potential:But while Whitefish presents as an Epkon titan, it acts more like a backwater, with peak-day lift tickets still hanging out below the $100 mark, and no megapass membership on its marquee. I explored this unusual positioning with the mountain's president, Nick Polumbus, on the podcast last year (and also here).On “Big Mountain”For eons, Whitefish was known as “Big Mountain,” a name they ditched in 2007 because, as president and CEO at the time Fred Jones explained, the ski area was “often underestimated and misunderstood” with its “highly generic” name.On “upside-down” ski areasUpside-down ski areas are fairly common in the United States, but they're novel enough that most people feel compelled to explain what they mean when they bring one up: a ski area with the main lodge and parking at the top, rather than the bottom, of the hill.These sorts of ski areas are fairly common in the Midwest and proliferate in the Mid-Atlantic, but are rare out west. An incomplete list includes Wintergreen, Virginia; Snowshoe, West Virginia; Laurel, Blue Knob, Jack Frost, and Ski Big Bear, Pennsylvania; Otsego, Treetops, and the Jackson Creek Summit side of Snowriver, Michigan; and Spirit Mountain and Afton Alps, Minnesota. A few of these ski areas also maintain lower-level parking lots. Shawnee Mountain, Pennsylvania, debuted as an upside-down ski area, but, through a tremendous engineering effort, reversed that in the 1970s – a project that CEO Nick Fredericks detailed for us in a 2021 Storm Skiing Podcast.On LIDAR mappingJorgensen mentions LIDAR mapping of Mission Ridge's potential expansion. If you're unfamiliar with this technology, it's capable of giving astonishing insights into the past:On Blacktail's chairliftsAll three of Blacktail's chairlifts came used to the ski area for its 1998 opening. The Crystal double is from Crystal Mountain, Washington; the Olympic triple is from Canada Olympic Park in Alberta; and the Thunderhead double migrated from Steamboat, Colorado.On Riblet chairliftsFor decades, the Riblet double has been the workhorse of Pacific Northwest skiing. Simple, beautiful, reliable, and inexpensive, dozens of these machines still crank up the region's hills. But the company dissolved more than two decades ago, and its lifts are slowly retiring. Mission Ridge retains three (chairs 1, 3, and 4, which date, respectively, to 1966, 1967, and 1971), and has stated its intent to replace them all, whenever funds are available to do so.On the history of Summit at SnoqualmieThe Summit at Snoqualmie, where Jorgensen began his career, remains one of America's most confusing ski areas: the name is convoluted and long, and the campus sprawls over four once-separate ski areas, one of which sits across an interstate with no ski connection to the others. There's no easy way to understand that Alpental – one of Washington's best ski areas – is part of, but separate from, the Summit at Snoqualmie complex, and each of the three Summit areas – East, Central, and West - maintains a separate trailmap on the website, in spite of the fact that the three are interconnected by ski trails. It's all just very confusing. The ski area's website maintains a page outlining how these four ski areas became one ski area that is still really four ski areas. This 1998 trailmap gives the best perspective on where the various ski nodes sit in relation to one another:Because someone always gets mad about everything, some of you were probably all pissed off that I referred to the 1990s version of Summit at Snoqualmie as a “primitive” ski area, but the map above demonstrates why: 17 of 24 chairlifts were Riblet doubles; nine ropetows supplemented this system, and the mountain had no snowmaking (it still doesn't). Call it “retro” or whatever you want, but the place was not exactly Beaver Creek.On Vail and Alterra's Washington timelineI mentioned Washington's entrance onto the national ski scene over the past decade. What I meant by that was the addition of Summit and Crystal onto the Ikon Pass for the 2018-19 ski season, and Stevens Pass onto the Epic Pass the following winter. But Washington skiing – and Mt. Baker in particular – has always been a staple in the Temple of the Brobots, and Boyne Resorts, pre-Ikon, owned Crystal from 1997 to 2017.On Anthony LakesJorgensen mentioned that he applied for the general manager position at Anthony Lakes, a little-known 900-footer lodged in the western Oregon hinterlands. One triple chair serves the entire ski area: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 33/100 in 2024, and number 533 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. 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Today, we're talking with Jon Seaton, Managing Partner of Camelback Strategy Group, a full-service political consulting and public affairs firm. Jon was Associate Director of Political Affairs for President George W. Bush and served as Regional Campaign Manager for Senator John McCain's presidential campaign. Jon and I dig into the changing nature of the campaign ground game, how data and technology have transformed door knocking, and the rise of paid canvassing. TakeawaysTechnology has revolutionized the campaign ground game, allowing for more effective measurement and targeting of door knocking operations.Building a modern, effective ground game involves identifying persuadable voters, creating scripts that resonate with them, and maintaining ongoing contact to reinforce messaging.Canvassing remains a highly effective and personal way to communicate with voters, providing an opportunity for face-to-face conversations and influencing voter decisions.Paid canvassing has become increasingly popular as it allows campaigns to recruit well-trained canvassers and ensure consistent standards and productivity.The risks of paid canvassing include potential negative interactions captured on doorbell cameras and the need for careful training and management to maintain a positive campaign image.The future of campaign ground games involves further advancements in targeting, personalized messaging, and coordination across multiple communication channels.
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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Season 3, Episode 38 - A high speed, high capacity, comfortable ride on the chairlift at Camelback Resort. The Poconos just got another healthy helping of snow just in time for President's Day weekend – a biggie in the ski industry! So, recently we caught up with some folks at Camelback Resort on its newest high speed lift, Black Bear 6 and a mom who's just loving all that Camelback has to offer for her family visit. Plus, for this Valentine's Day, a listen to our three-part series on the Land of Love, Cove Haven - Paradise Stream - Pocono Palace. The Poconos is a year-round destination for millions and with 24-hundred square miles of mountains, forests, lakes and rivers with historic downtowns and iconic family resorts, it's the perfect getaway for a weekend or an entire week. You can always find out more on PoconoMountains.com or watch Pocono Television Network streaming live 24/7.
While Camelback Resort, celebrating 60-years of operation, may be most well known for its gigantic indoor and outdoor waterparks, it should also get love for being home to the ‘long ski day in PA.' A compliment! On weekends and holidays, lifts start spinning at 7:30am (First Tracks) and stop – 14 hours later – at 9:00pm. While night skiing is not unique at smaller ski areas, the sheer cluster of ski areas (7) within 88 miles of one another that offer night skiing with 100% of terrain open, makes the Poconos special. Also noteworthy, this is the first winter season that Camelback is a parter on the Ikon Pass (along with nearby Blue), offering 7 days without blackout dates for full Ikon; 5 days with holiday blackouts for Ikon base. The usual topics covered include, ski area history, mountain profile, prices while focusing on the benefits of night skiing. The episode wraps-up with an Elite Eight set of trivia questions. I also bring back an old starter segment, regional ski news, including headlines, weather forecasts, open terrain rankings and a notable event. This episode – and all episodes – have a little something for everyone. Happy February, Powder Hounds! Segment time: 3:55 – Regional Ski News 8:55 – Episode Introduction 9:52 – Camelback History 14:12 – Mountain Profile 17:00 – Benefits of Night Skiing 19:56 – Night Skiing in Poconos 23:33 – Trivia Questions
Abhay is joined by Anita Verma-Lallian, the CEO of both Arizona Land Consulting and Camelback Productions. They talked about everything from finding value and opportunity to land development in 2024 to launching a South Asian American media production company. As she definitely should, Anita shared that she likes the word "mogul."(0:00 - 2:56) Introduction(2:56) Part 1 - opportunity and surprises, balancing patience and instinct(12:12) Part 2 - land development in 2024, launching Camelback productions(25:53) Part 3 - South Asian American storytelling, leading, cultivating trust(37:43) Conclusion
Phoenix we thank you for a wonderful time! Craig and Nick breakdown their trip and show out there as Austen is still traveling. They discuss their hike to the top of Camelback and the ways they spent exploring parts of the area. Austen and Craig then answer some tantalizing bestie questions to close out the show
In this episode, James and Lavelle Smith Hall talk with Melvin Freeman, Director of Data and Strategy at Camelback Ventures about how to use data for social impact. We also talked about Camelback Ventures' upcoming application openings on Feb 5th for their $40K fellowship. You can learn more and apply here. James and Lavelle shared some important life updates that happened while they were on hiatus from the podcast. And stick around to the end for the dad jokes! To get two free months of podcasting service on Libsyn, use code "PARENTS". Please join us in celebrating the podcast being ranked by FeedSpot as the #10 entrepreneurship podcast! If you love the podcast, please subscribe to it on your fave podcast player, rate it, and leave a review. Also, please share it on social media. P.S., If you're a tech entrepreneur looking for a co-founder, visit James' startup, Kabila, to download the co-founder matching app.
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To receive new posts and to support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.WhoBoyne Resorts CEO Stephen Kircher, Big Sky President Taylor Middleton, Big Sky GM Troy Nedved, and Garaventa Chief Rigger Cédric AelligWhereBig Sky invited media to attend the opening of their new Lone Peak tram, the first all-new tram at a U.S. ski resort since Jackson Hole opened theirs in 2008.Recorded onDecember 19, 2023About Big SkyClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Boyne ResortsBase elevation: 6,800 feet at Madison BaseSummit elevation: 11,166 feetVertical drop: 4,350 feetSkiable Acres: 5,850Average annual snowfall: 400-plus inchesTrail count: 300 (18% expert, 35% advanced, 25% intermediate, 22% beginner)Terrain parks: 6Lift count: 40 (1 75-passenger tram, 1 high-speed eight-pack, 3 high-speed six-packs, 4 high-speed quads, 3 fixed-grip quads, 9 triples, 5 doubles, 3 platters, 2 ropetows, 9 carpet lifts) – View Lift Blog's inventory of Big Sky's lift fleet.About the new Lone Peak TramIt may seem like the most U.S. American thing ever to spend tens of millions of dollars to replace a lift that was only 28 years old (remember when the Detroit Lions dropped half a billion to replace the 26-year-old Pontiac Silverdome?), but the original tram cost just $1 million to build, and it served a very different ski resort and a very different ski world. It was, besides, a bit of a proof of concept, built against the wishes of the company's own CEO, Boyne Resorts founder Everett Kircher. If they could just string a lift to the top, it would, the younger Kirchers knew, transform Big Sky forever.It did. Then all sorts of other things happened. The Ikon Pass. Montana's transformation into a hipster's Vermont West. Social media and the quest for something different. The fun slowly draining from Utah and Colorado as both suffocated under their own convenience. Big Sky needed a new tram.The first thing to understand about the new tram is that it does not simply replace the old tram. It runs on a different line, loading between the top of Swift Current and the bottom of Powder Seeker; the old tram loaded off the top of the latter lift. Here's the old versus the new line:The new line boosts the vertical drop from 1,450 feet to 2,135. Larger cabins can accommodate 75 passengers, a 500 percent increase from 15 in the old tram (Big Sky officials insist that the cars will rarely, if ever, carry that many skiers, with capacity metered to conditions and seats set aside for sightseers).One dramatic difference between the old and the new lines is a tower (the old tram had none), perched dramatically below the summit:It's a trip to ride through:But the most astonishing thing about riding the new Lone Peak tram is the sheer speed. It moves at up to 10 meters per second, which, when I first heard that, meant about as much to me as when my high school chemistry teacher tried to explain the concept of moles with a cigar-box analogy. But then I was riding up and the down-bound cabin passed me like someone just tossed a piano off the roof of a skyscraper:Here's the down-bound view:The top sits at 11,166 feet, which is by no means the highest lift in America, but it is the most prominent point for an amazing distance around, granting you stunning views of three states and two national parks, plus the Yellowstone Club ski area and Big Sky itself:The peak is fickle as hell though – an hour after I took those photos, I walked into a cloud bank on a second trip to the summit.Right now, the only way to access the tram is by riding the Swift Current 6 (itself an extraordinary lift, like borrowing someone's Porsche for a ride around the block), and skiing or walking a few hundred vertical feet down. But a two-stage, 10-passenger gondola is already under construction. This will load where the Explorer double currently does, and will terminate adjacent to the tram, creating an easy pedestrian journey from base to summit. That lift is scheduled to open for the 2025-26 ski season, and will, along with the Ramcharger 8 and Swifty, create an amazing 24 high-speed seats out of the main Big Sky base.The Lone Peak tram is, in my opinion, the most spectacular new ski lift coming online in America this winter. In a year of big lift projects, with Steamboat's 3.1-mile-long gondola and 14 new six-packs coming online, that's saying a lot.Right now, everyone has to download - it's been a low-snow year, and there's no skiing yet off the summit. Big Sky will, however, stay open until late April this season, so we have plenty of tram-ski days ahead.What we talked aboutWith Troy and TaylorSki town culture; the evolution of Big Sky from Montana backwater to leading North American ski area; why the new tram won't overload Lone Peak even though its capacity is five times that of the old tram; how much – and how fast – Big Sky changed after the 1995 installation of Tram 1; why Big Sky evolved in a way that other small Montana ski areas never did; wind mitigation for a lift going somewhere as insane as Lone Peak; the new tram's incredible speed; plans for the old tram's top and bottom stations; and the switch from pay-per-day to pay-per-ride for the tram. With Stephen KircherThe significance of this lift when Boyne is putting in so many lifts; what the tram means for the future of Big Sky; the Kircher family legacy, past and future, at Big Sky; the near-death of Tram 1 before it was even built; who we can thank for Big Sky's insane lift fleet; what justifies the huge expense of D-Line technology; why Boyne only builds Doppelmayr lifts; European influence; and how America fell behind Europe in lift technology.What I got wrongI said that, when Middleton arrived in 1980, Big Sky had just a “handful of lifts off Andesite, nothing on Lone Peak.” While there wasn't a lift to the top of Lone Peak, Lone Mountain itself had several lifts by 1980:When I said that “Vail tends to split its lift fleet 50/50,” I meant between Doppelmayr and Leitner-Poma, the two major North American lift manufacturers.Podcast NotesOn the shift to pay-per-tram rideThis year, Big Sky switched from charging per day for tram access to charging per ride. The price ranges from $20 to $40 for skiers. That seems hefty, but frankly the place is so huge that you can have a great ski week with just a handful of tram laps. Here's a primer on how to set up your tram access:On cannister film rollsBefore we lived in the future, photos were scarce and expensive. A two-week family trip may involve two to five rolls of film, with 24 or 36 photos per roll, which you could not see until you deposited the spent cannisters at a photo development emporium and returned, some hours or days later, to retrieve them. Each roll cost between $5 and $7 to purchase, and an equal price to develop. Reprints were expensive and complicated. The rolls themselves were impossibly easy to destroy, and could, like vampires, disintegrate with direct exposure to sunlight. Witnessing the destruction of this system and its displacement by digital photos as limitless as videogame ammunition has been one of the great joys of my life.Anyway, that's what Middleton was referring to when he tells the story about the lost film cannister that almost ruined his day.On D-Line liftsKircher talks extensively about “D-Line lifts.” I constantly reference these as well, as though I have the faintest idea what I'm talking about, but all I know is that these are really kick-ass chairlifts, and are better than other sorts of chairlift. While several non-Boyne ski areas (Camelback, Sun Valley, Mammoth), have installed this most advanced lift class, Boyne owns perhaps as many as the rest of North American resorts combined, with two each at Big Sky (Ramcharger 8 and Swift Current 6) and Sunday River (Jordan 8 and Barker 6), and one each at Brighton (Crest 6), Loon (Kanc 8), Boyne Mountain (Disciples 8), and The Highlands (Camelot 6).On Everett Kircher the elderEverett Kircher, Stephen Kircher's father, was a bit of a cowboy entrepreneur, the swaggering sort from America's black-and-white past. He purchased the land for Boyne Mountain for $1, built an audacious contraption called the Gatlinburg Sky Park that ended up fueling the growth of the whole ski empire, and flew himself between Michigan and Montana after buying the resort in the mid-70s. He built the world's first triple, quad, and detachable six-person chairlifts and invented all sorts of snowmaking equipment. Boyne has more on their history page.On John KircherStephen's brother, John Kircher, was an important figure in the U.S. ski industry in general, and at Big Sky in particular. He passed away on Jan. 28 of this year. From Explore Big Sky:The oldest son of late Boyne Resorts co-founder Everett Kircher, John will be remembered for his impact in the modern ski industry. After stepping into Big Sky Resort's GM role in 1980, he became widely known for spearheading the Lone Peak Tram project in the early 1990s. He then spent roughly two decades of his career as president, CEO and, briefly, owner of Crystal Mountain Resort in Washington.Read the rest of the obit here.On Kircher ConceptsStephen Kircher's son is also named Everett. We discuss his contributions to the tram project, and also allude to a digital design agency he founded, Kircher Concepts. This work, which I find incredibly valuable, essentially visualizes lift projects at their announcement. The gondola rendering above comes from Kircher Concepts, but the agency does not work exclusively with Boyne – Telluride, Sun Valley, and Mount St. Louis Moonstone are also clients. Check out the full portfolio here.On Big Sky 2025Kircher refers to Big Sky 2025, which is essentially a masterplan outlining the resort's rapid evolution since 2015. While the plan has changed quite a bit since its announcement, it has completely transformed the resort with all sorts of lift, employee housing, parking, snowmaking, and other infrastructure upgrades. You can read the latest iteration here.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 110/100 in 2023, and number 495 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe
In September of 2022, we had Michelle Pabis of Honor Health talking about the initiative of getting Blue Zones off the ground. In a short time of about 2 years, we've gone from initiative to kick off and I'm excited to have Executive Director of Blue Zones Scottsdale Sarah Kearney with us this week. Sarah comes to Blue ZOnes with an EXTENSIVE love of Scottsdale. She held many positions at Experience Scottsdale for over 16 years. She's held many leadership positions such as Board President for Scottsdale Leadership, Board President for Community Celebrating Diversity, Board Member for Scottsdale Sister Cities, Officer of Membership for Millennials in Travel, and the Vice President of Community Outreach at GiGi's Playhouse Phoenix/Scottsdale. Seems to only make sense that she lead the Blue Zone initiative for Scottsdale. Blue Zones Project makes healthy choices easy through permanent and semi-permanent changes to human made surroundings, policies, systems, and social networks. Instead of a focus on individual behavior change (diet and exercise), it improves the places and spaces people spend the most time so healthy choices are easier. It is community-led and focuses on improving the well-being of the entire community. The project seeks to improve the overall well-being of residents, measured by overall physical, social, and emotional health. A higher level of well-being leads to lower healthcare costs, higher productivity, increased economic vitality, and offers benefits for everybody. Calendar of Events Hope everyone had a wonderful week of Hanukkah to all who celebrate. My kids are always spoiled and thanks to our community for celebrating with us this week. Last week to get all those last minute Christmas plans from last minute gifts to activities. Gingerbread House decorating JW Marriott in Camelback is having a gingerbread making event on Dec. 21 from 3-5 in the lobby. Come and have some fun with the littles and try not to eat the decorations before decorating them! Santa @ Scottsdale Quarter Get those last minute gifts and get your picture taken with Santa as there are still slots left through the weekend. And of course you still have all the lights to go check out from Enchant, Princess and Zoo Lights. SUBSCRIBE on your Favorite podcast listening app. Find us on IG & FB at Scottsdale Vibes Podcast or check us out on scottsdale vibes dot media. And don't forget that we are now the proud owners of Scottsdale City Lifestyle magazine where you can read about even more of your favorite community.
In September of 2022, we had Michelle Pabis of Honor Health talking about the initiative of getting Blue Zones off the ground. In a short time of about 2 years, we've gone from initiative to kick off and I'm excited to have Executive Director of Blue Zones Scottsdale Sarah Kearney with us this week. Sarah comes to Blue ZOnes with an EXTENSIVE love of Scottsdale. She held many positions at Experience Scottsdale for over 16 years. She's held many leadership positions such as Board President for Scottsdale Leadership, Board President for Community Celebrating Diversity, Board Member for Scottsdale Sister Cities, Officer of Membership for Millennials in Travel, and the Vice President of Community Outreach at GiGi's Playhouse Phoenix/Scottsdale. Seems to only make sense that she lead the Blue Zone initiative for Scottsdale. Blue Zones Project makes healthy choices easy through permanent and semi-permanent changes to human made surroundings, policies, systems, and social networks. Instead of a focus on individual behavior change (diet and exercise), it improves the places and spaces people spend the most time so healthy choices are easier. It is community-led and focuses on improving the well-being of the entire community. The project seeks to improve the overall well-being of residents, measured by overall physical, social, and emotional health. A higher level of well-being leads to lower healthcare costs, higher productivity, increased economic vitality, and offers benefits for everybody. Calendar of Events Hope everyone had a wonderful week of Hanukkah to all who celebrate. My kids are always spoiled and thanks to our community for celebrating with us this week. Last week to get all those last minute Christmas plans from last minute gifts to activities. Gingerbread House decorating JW Marriott in Camelback is having a gingerbread making event on Dec. 21 from 3-5 in the lobby. Come and have some fun with the littles and try not to eat the decorations before decorating them! Santa @ Scottsdale Quarter Get those last minute gifts and get your picture taken with Santa as there are still slots left through the weekend. And of course you still have all the lights to go check out from Enchant, Princess and Zoo Lights. SUBSCRIBE on your Favorite podcast listening app. Find us on IG & FB at Scottsdale Vibes Podcast or check us out on scottsdale vibes dot media. And don't forget that we are now the proud owners of Scottsdale City Lifestyle magazine where you can read about even more of your favorite community.
Holmberg's Morning Sickness - Friday November 17, 2023 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Holmberg's Morning Sickness - Friday November 17, 2023 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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
In this episode, we discuss:Tim's addiction recovery journeyShifting from self-centeredness to a life of serviceRebuilding after losing everythingMental, emotional, spiritual and physical fitnessNatural dopamine sourcesThe importance of who you surround yourself withTim Westbrook is the Founder & CEO of Camelback Recovery, an organization with an impressive track record in helping individuals achieve lifelong sobriety.Tim is not only a survivor of substance addiction but also a passionate advocate for recovery. With a background in business and a Master's in Addiction Counseling, Tim's story is a testament to resilience, dedication, and the power of community.Website: https://www.camelbackrecovery.com/ Instagram: @camelbackrecovery___Connect with our Sun & Moon Sober Living community:Join the Virtual Membership: https://sunandmoonsoberliving.com/membership/Retreat Waitlist: https://pages.sunandmoonsoberliving.com/retreat-waitlistInstagram: @sunandmoon.soberliving__Disclaimer: The content of this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment
Tim Westbook and Paul Krauss MA LPC discuss the multiple elements of working to get sober, treatment options, and Tim's personal story of difficulties and recovery. Tim and Paul discuss the recovery community in Phoenix, AZ and engage in a discussion about the challenges and victories of a life being sober. Tim is also the host of the podcast "I Love Being Sober." Struggles with substance addiction eventually began to affect every area of his life. By March of 2011, Tim Westbook hit his bottom and became willing to go to any lengths to get and stay sober. Through his journey out of addiction and in recovery, Tim brings experience, strength, and hope to the man who wants lifelong sobriety. His passion for health and fitness, long-term sobriety, and changing lives is not only what inspired him to open Camelback Recovery, but accounts for Camelback's high success rate. Get involved with the National Violence Prevention Hotline: 501(c)(3) Donate Share with your network Write your congressperson Sign our Petition Looking for excellent medical billing services? Check out Therapist Billing Services. A behavioral and mental health billing service developed by therapists for therapists. Preview an Online Video Course for the Parents of Young Adults (Parenting Issues) EMDR Training Solutions (For all your EMDR training needs!) Paul Krauss MA LPC is the Clinical Director of Health for Life Counseling Grand Rapids, home of The Trauma-Informed Counseling Center of Grand Rapids. Paul is also a Private Practice Psychotherapist, an Approved EMDRIA Consultant , host of the Intentional Clinician podcast, Behavioral Health Consultant, Clinical Trainer, and Counseling Supervisor. Paul is now offering consulting for a few individuals and organizations. Paul is the creator of the National Violence Prevention Hotline (in progress) as well as the Intentional Clinician Training Program for Counselors. Paul has been quoted in the Washington Post, NBC News, and Wired Magazine. Questions? Call the office at 616-200-4433. If you are looking for EMDRIA consulting groups, Paul Krauss MA LPC is now hosting weekly online and in-person groups. For details, click here. For general behavioral and mental health consulting for you or your organization. Follow Health for Life Counseling- Grand Rapids: Instagram | Facebook | Youtube Original Music: ”Alright" from the forthcoming album Mystic by PAWL (Spotify) "Get By" from Quality by Talib Kweli (Spotify) "Two Can Win" from Donuts by J Dilla (Spotify)
Original Air Date: March 06, 1946Host: Andrew RhynesShow: The Lone RangerPhone: (707) 98 OTRDW (6-8739) Stars:• Earle Graser (Lone Ranger)• John Todd (Tonto) Writer:• Fran Striker Producer:• George W. Trendle Music:• Ben Bonnell Exit music from: Roundup on the Prairie by Aaron Kenny https://bit.ly/3kTj0kK
Original Air Date: March 06, 1946Host: Andrew RhynesShow: The Lone RangerPhone: (707) 98 OTRDW (6-8739) Stars:• Earle Graser (Lone Ranger)• John Todd (Tonto) Writer:• Fran Striker Producer:• George W. Trendle Music:• Ben Bonnell Exit music from: Roundup on the Prairie by Aaron Kenny https://bit.ly/3kTj0kK
BEST OF HMS PODCASTS - FRIDAY - July 7, 2023 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
BEST OF HMS PODCASTS - FRIDAY - July 7, 2023 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Stupid News Extra 4-27-2023 …They were stuck on Mt Camelback
This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on Feb. 3. It dropped for free subscribers on Feb. 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.WhoBrett Cook, Vice President and General Manager of Seven Springs, Hidden Valley, and Laurel Mountain, PennsylvaniaRecorded onJanuary 30, 2023About Seven SpringsOwned by: Vail ResortsPass affiliations: Epic Pass, Epic Local Pass, Northeast Value Epic Pass, Northeast Midweek Epic PassLocated in: Seven Springs, PennsylvaniaYear opened: 1932Closest neighboring ski areas: Hidden Valley (17 minutes), Laurel Mountain (45 minutes), Nemacolin (46 minutes), Boyce Park (1 hour), Wisp (1 hour), Blue Knob (1 hour, 30 minutes)Base elevation: 2,240 feetSummit elevation: 2,994 feetVertical drop: 754 feetSkiable Acres: 285Average annual snowfall: 135 inchesTrail count: 48 (5 expert, 6 advanced, 15 intermediate, 16 beginner, 6 terrain parks)Lift count: 14 (2 six-packs, 4 fixed-grip quads, 4 triples, 3 carpets, 1 ropetow)About Hidden ValleyOwned by: Vail ResortsPass affiliations: Epic Pass, Epic Local Pass, Northeast Value Epic Pass, Northeast Midweek Epic PassLocated in: Hidden Valley, PennsylvaniaYear opened: 1955Closest neighboring ski areas: Seven Springs (17 minutes), Laurel Mountain (34 minutes), Mystic Mountain (50 minutes), Boyce Park (54 minutes),Wisp (1 hour), Blue Knob (1 hour 19 minutes)Base elevation: 2,405 feetSummit elevation: 2,875 feetVertical drop: 470 feetSkiable Acres: 110Average annual snowfall: 140 inchesTrail count: 32 (9 advanced, 13 intermediate, 8 beginner, 2 terrain parks)Lift count: 8 (2 fixed-grip quads, 2 triples, 2 carpets, 2 handle tows)About Laurel MountainOwned by: Vail ResortsPass affiliations: Epic Pass, Epic Local Pass, Northeast Value Epic Pass, Northeast Midweek Epic PassLocated in: Boswell, PennsylvaniaYear opened: 1939Closest neighboring ski areas: Hidden Valley (34 minutes), Seven Springs (45 minutes), Boyce Park (1 hour), Blue Knob (1 hour), Mystic Mountain (1 hour, 15 minutes), Wisp (1 hour, 15 minutes)Base elevation: 2,005 feetSummit elevation: 2,766 feetVertical drop: 761 feetSkiable Acres: 70Average annual snowfall: 41 inchesTrail count: 20 (2 expert, 2 advanced, 6 intermediate, 10 beginner)Lift count: 2 (1 fixed-grip quad, 1 handle tow)Below the paid subscriber jump: a summary of our podcast conversation, a look at abandoned Hidden Valley expansions, historic Laurel Mountain lift configurations, and much more.Beginning with podcast 116, the full podcast articles are no longer available on the free content tier. Why? They take between 10 and 20 hours to research and write, and readers have demonstrated that they are willing to pay for content. My current focus with The Storm is to create value for anyone who invests their money into the product. Here are examples of a few past podcast articles, if you would like to see the format: Vail Mountain, Mt. Spokane, Snowbasin, Mount Bohemia, Brundage. To anyone who is supporting The Storm: thank you very much. You have guaranteed that this is a sustainable enterprise for the indefinite future.Why I interviewed himI've said this before, but it's worth repeating. Most Vail ski areas fall into one of two categories: the kind skiers will fly around the world for, and the kind skiers won't drive more than 15 minutes for. Whistler, Park City, Heavenly fall into the first category. Mt. Brighton, Alpine Valley, Paoli Peaks into the latter. I exaggerate a bit on the margins, but when I drive from New York City to Liberty Mountain, I know this is not a well-trod path.Seven Springs, like Hunter or Attitash, occupies a slightly different category in the Vail empire. It is both a regional destination and a high-volume big-mountain feeder. Skiers will make a weekend of these places, from Pittsburgh or New York City or Boston, then they will use the pass to vacation in Colorado. It's a better sort of skiing than your suburban knolls, more sprawling and interesting, more repeatable for someone who doesn't know what a Corky Flipdoodle 560 is.“Brah that sounds sick!”Thanks Park Brah. I appreciate you. But you know I just made that up, right?“Brah have you seen my shoulder-mounted Boombox 5000 backpack speaker? I left it right here beside my weed vitamins.”Sorry Brah. I have not.Anyway, I happen to believe that these sorts of in-the-middle resorts are the next great frontier of ski area consolidation. All the big mountains have either folded under the Big Four umbrella or have gained so much megapass negotiating power that the incentive to sell has rapidly evaporated. The city-adjacent bumps such as Boston Mills were a novel and highly effective strategy for roping cityfolk into Epic Passes, but as pure ski areas, those places just are not and never will be terribly compelling experiences. But the middle is huge and mostly untapped, and these are some of the best ski areas in America, mountains that are large enough to give you a different experience each time but contained enough that you don't feel as though you've just wandered into an alternate dimension. There's enough good terrain to inspire loyalty and repeat visits, but it's not so good that passholders don't dream of the hills beyond.Examples: Timberline, West Virginia; Big Powderhorn, Michigan; Berkshire East and Jiminy Peak in Massachusetts; Plattekill, New York; Elk Mountain, Pennsylvania; Mt. Spokane, Washington; Bear Valley, California; Cascade or Whitecap, Wisconsin; Magic Mountain, Vermont; or Black Mountain, New Hampshire. There are dozens more. Vail's Midwestern portfolio is expansive but bland, day-ski bumps but no weekend-type spots on the level of Crystal Mountain, Michigan or Lutsen, Minnesota.If you want to understand the efficacy of this strategy, the Indy Pass was built on it. Ninety percent of its roster is the sorts of mountains I'm referring to above. Jay Peak and Powder Mountain sell passes, but dang it Bluewood and Shanty Creek are kind of nice now that the pass nudged me toward them. Once Vail and Alterra realize how crucial these middle mountains are to filling in the pass blanks, expect them to start competing for the space. Seven Springs, I believe, is a test case in how impactful a regional destination can be both in pulling skiers in and pushing them out across the world. Once this thing gels, look the hell out.What we talked aboutThe not-so-great Western Pennsylvania winter so far; discovering skiing as an adult; from liftie to running the largest ski resort in Pennsylvania; the life and death of Snow Time Resorts; joining the Peak Pass; two ownership transitions in less than a year, followed by Covid; PA ski culture; why the state matters to Vail; helping a Colorado ski company understand the existential urgency of snowmaking in the East; why Vail doubled down on PA with the Seven Springs purchase when they already owned five ski areas in the state; breaking down the difference between the Roundtop-Liberty-Whitetail trio and the Seven-Springs-Hidden-Valley-Laurel trio; the cruise ship in the mountains; rugged and beautiful Western PA; dissecting the amazing outsized snowfall totals in Western Pennsylvania; Vail Resorts' habit of promoting from within; how Vail's $20-an-hour minimum wage hit in Pennsylvania; the legacy of the Nutting family, the immediate past owners of the three ski areas; the legendary Herman Dupree, founder of Seven Springs and HKD snowguns; Seven Springs amazing sprawling snowmaking system, complete with 49(!) ponds; why the system isn't automated and whether it ever will be; how planting more trees could change the way Seven Springs skis; connecting the ski area's far-flung beginner terrain; where we could see additional glades at Seven Springs; rethinking the lift fleet; the importance of redundant lifts; do we still need Tyrol?; why Seven Springs, Hidden Valley, and Laurel share a single general manager; thinking of lifts long-term at Hidden Valley; Hidden Valley's abandoned expansion plans and whether they could ever be revived; the long and troubled history of state-owned Laurel Mountain; keeping the character at this funky little upside-down boomer; “We love what Laurel Mountain is and we're going to continue to own that”; building out Laurel's snowmaking system; expansion potential at Laurel; “Laurel is a hidden gem and we don't want it to be hidden anymore”; Laurel's hidden handletow; evolving Laurel's lift fleet; managing a state-owned ski area; Seven Springs' new trailmap; the Epic Pass arrives; and this season's lift-ticket limits. Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewWhen Vail bought Peak Resorts in 2019, they suddenly owned nearly a quarter of Pennsylvania's ski areas: Big Boulder, Jack Frost, Whitetail, Roundtop, and Liberty. That's a lot of Eagles jerseys. And enough, I thought, that we wouldn't see VR snooping around for more PA treasures to add to their toybox.Then, to my surprise, the company bought Seven Springs – which they clearly wanted – along with Hidden Valley and Laurel, which they probably didn't, in late 2021. Really what they bought was Pittsburgh, metropolitan population 2.3 million, and their large professional class of potentially globe-trotting skiers. All these folks needed was an excuse to buy an Epic Pass. Vail gave them one.So now what? Vail knows what to do with a large, regionally dominant ski area like Seven Springs. It's basically Pennsylvania's version of Stowe or Park City or Heavenly. It was pretty good when you bought it, now you just have to not ruin it and remind everyone that they can now ski Whistler on their season pass. Hidden Valley, with its hundreds of on-mountain homeowners, suburban-demographic profile, and family orientation more or less fit Vail's portfolio too.But what to do with Laurel? Multiple locals assured me that Vail would close it. Vail doesn't do that – close ski areas – but they also don't buy 761-vertical-foot bumps at the ass-end of nowhere with almost zero built-in customer base and the snowmaking firepower of a North Pole souvenir snowglobe. They got it because it came with Seven Springs, like your really great spouse who came with a dad who thinks lawnmowers are an FBI conspiracy. I know what I think Vail should do with Laurel – dump money into the joint to aggressively route crowds away from the larger ski areas – but I didn't know whether they would, or had even considered it.Vail's had 14 months now to think this over. What are these mountains? How do they fit? What are we going to do with them? I got some answers.Questions I wish I'd askedYou know, it's weird that Vail has two Hidden Valleys. Boyne, just last year, changed the name of its “Boyne Highlands” resort to “The Highlands,” partly because, one company executive told me, skiers would occasionally show up to the wrong resort with a condo reservation. I imagine that's why Earl Holding ultimately backed off on renaming Snowbasin to “Sun Valley, Utah,” as he reportedly considered doing in the leadup to the 2002 Olympics – if you give people an easy way to confuse themselves, they will generally take you up on it.I realize this is not really the same thing. Boyne Mountain and The Highlands are 40 minutes apart. Vail's two Hidden Valleys are 10-and-a-half hours from each other by car. Still. I wanted to ask Cook if this weird fact had any hilarious unintended consequences (I desperately wish Holding would have renamed Snowbasin). Perhaps confusion in the Epic Mix app? Or someone purchasing lift tickets for the incorrect resort? An adult lift ticket at Hidden Valley, Pennsylvania for tomorrow is $75 online and $80 in person, but just $59 online/$65 in person for Hidden Valley, Missouri. Surely someone has confused the two?So, which one should we rename? And what should we call it? Vail has been trying to win points lately with lift names that honor local landmarks – they named their five new lifts at Jack Frost-Big Boulder “Paradise,” “Tobyhanna,” “Pocono,” “Harmony,” and “Blue Heron” (formerly E1 Lift, E2 Lift, B Lift, C Lift, E Lift, F Lift, Merry Widow I, Merry Widow II, and Edelweiss). So how about renaming Hidden Valley PA to something like “Allegheny Forest?” Or call Hidden Valley, Missouri “Mississippi Mountain?” Yes, both of those names are terrible, but so is having two Hidden Valleys in the same company.What I got wrong* I guessed in the podcast that Pennsylvania was the “fifth- or sixth-largest U.S. state by population.” It is number five, with an approximate population of 13 million, behind New York (19.6M), Florida (22.2M), Texas (30M), and California (39M).* I guessed that the base of Keystone is “nine or 10,000 feet.” The River Run base area sits at 9,280 feet.* I mispronounced the last name of Seven Springs founder Herman Dupre as “Doo-Pree.” It is pronounced “Doo-Prey.”* I said there were “lots” of thousand-vertical-foot ski areas in Pennsylvania. There are, in fact, just four: Blue Mountain (1,140 feet), Blue Knob (1,073 feet), Elk (1,000 feet), and Montage (1,000 feet).Why you should ski Seven Springs, Hidden Valley, and LaurelIt's rugged country out there. Not what you're thinking. More Appalachian crag than Poconos scratch. Abrupt and soaring. Beautiful. And snowy. In a state where 23 of 28 ski areas average fewer than 50 inches of snow per season, Seven Springs and Laurel bring in 135-plus apiece.Elevation explains it. A 2,000-plus-foot base is big-time in the East. Killington sits at 1,165 feet. Sugarloaf at 1,417. Stowe at 1,559. All three ski areas sit along the crest of 70-mile-long Laurel Ridge, a storm door on the western edge of the Allegheny Front that rakes southeast-bound moisture from the sky as it trains out of Lake Erie.When the snow doesn't come, they make it. Now that Big Boulder has given up, Seven Springs is typically the first ski area in the state to open. It fights with Camelback for last-to-close. Twelve hundred snowguns and 49 snowmaking ponds help.Seven Springs doesn't have the state's best pure ski terrain – look to Elk Mountain or, on the rare occasions it's fully open, Blue Knob for that – but it's Pennsylvania's largest, most complete, and, perhaps, most consistent operation. It is, in fact, the biggest ski area in the Mid-Atlantic, a ripping and unpretentious ski region where you know you'll get turns no matter how atrocious the weather gets.Hidden Valley is something different. Cozy. Easy. Built for families on parade. Laurel is something different too. Steep and fierce, a one-lift wonder dug out of the graveyard by an owner with more passion, it seems, than foresight. Laurel needs snowmaking. Top to bottom and on every trail. The hill makes no sense in 2023 without it. Vail won't abandon the place outright, but if they don't knock $10 million in snowmaking into the dirt, they'll be abandoning it in principle.Podcast NotesThe trailmap rabbit hole – Hidden ValleyWe discussed the proposed-but-never-implemented expansion at Hidden Valley, which would have sat skier's right of the Avalanche pod. Here it is on the 2010 trailmap:The 2002 version actually showed three potential lifts serving this pod:Unfortunately, this expansion is unlikely. Cook explains why in the pod.The trailmap rabbit hole – LaurelLaurel, which currently has just one quad and a handletow, has carried a number of lift configurations over the decades. This circa 1981 trailmap shows a double chair where the quad now sits, and a series of surface lifts climbing the Broadway side of the hill, and another set of them bunched at the summit:The 2002 version shows a second chairlift – which I believe was a quad – looker's right, and surface lifts up top to serve beginners, tubers, and the terrain park:Related: here's a pretty good history of all three ski areas, from 2014.The Pennsylvania ski inventory rabbitholePennsylvania skiing is hard to get. No one seems to know how many ski areas the state has. The NSAA says there are 26. Cook referenced 24 on the podcast. The 17 that Wikipedia inventories include Alpine Mountain, which has been shuttered for years. Ski Central (22), Visit PA (21), and Ski Resort Info (25) all list different numbers. My count is 28. Most lists neglect to include the six private ski areas that are owned by homeowners' associations or reserved for resort guests. Cook and I also discussed which ski area owned the state's highest elevation (it's Blue Knob), so I included base and summit elevations as well:The why-is-Vail-allowed-to-own-80-percent-of-Ohio's-public-ski-areas? rabbitholeCook said he wasn't sure how many ski areas there are in Ohio. There are six. One is a private club. Snow Trails is family-owned. Vail owns the other four. I think this shouldn't be allowed, especially after how poorly Vail managed them last season, and especially how badly Snow Trails stomped them from an operations point of view. But here we are:The steepest-trail rabbitholeWe discuss Laurel's Wildcat trail, which the ski area bills as the steepest in the state. I generally avoid echoing these sorts of claims, which are hard to prove and not super relevant to the actual ski experience. You'll rarely see skiers lapping runs like Rumor at Gore or White Lightning at Montage, mostly because they frankly just aren't that much fun, exercises in ice-rink survival skiing for the Brobot armies. But if you want the best primer I've seen on this subject, along with an inventory of some very steep U.S. ski trails, read this one on Skibum.net. The article doesn't mention Laurel's Wildcat trail, but the ski area was closed sporadically and this site's heyday was about a decade ago, so it may have been left out as a matter of circumstance.The “back in my day” rabbitholeI referenced an old “punchcard program” at Roundtop during our conversation. I was referring to the Night Club Program offered by former-former owner Snow Time Resorts at Roundtop, Liberty, and Whitetail. When Snow Time sold the ski area in 2018 to Peak Resorts, the buyer promptly dropped the evening programs. When Vail purchased the resort in 2019, it briefly re-instated some version of them (I think), but I don't believe they survived the Covid winter (2020-21). This 5,000-word March 2019 article (written four months before Vail purchased the resorts) from DC Ski distills the rage around this abrupt pass policy change. Four years later, I still get emails about this, and not infrequently. I'm kind of surprised Vail hasn't offered some kind of Pennsylvania-specific pass, since they have more ski areas in that state (eight) than they have in any other, including Colorado (five). After all, the company sells an Ohio-specific pass that started at just $299 last season. Why not a PA-specific version for, say, $399, for people who want to ski always and only at Roundtop or Liberty or Big Boulder? Or a nights-only pass?I suppose Vail could do this, and I suspect they won't. The Northeast Value Pass – good for mostly unlimited access at all of the company's ski areas from Michigan on east – sold for $514 last spring. A midweek version ran $385. A seven-day Epic Day Pass good at all the Pennsylvania ski areas was just $260 for adults and $132 for kids aged 5 to 12. I understand that there is a particular demographic of skiers who will never ski north of Harrisburg and will never stop blowing up message boards with their disappointment and rage over this. The line between a sympathetic character and a tedious one is thin, however, and eventually we're all better off focusing our energies on the things we can control.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 9/100 in 2023, and number 395 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane, or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email skiing@substack.com. 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Episode 5: Couch Potato to Ultramarathoner: My Slow Journey to Lasting Change “You have a gallstone and need to get your gallbladder taken out.” I stare at my doctor in disbelief. I have to get my gallbladder taken out at 28 years old? Just hours before, I was at my office in Dachau, Germany, doubled over with sharp, stabbing pain under my right rib cage. But still… I can't wrap my head around it. I'm not ready to have my gallbladder out! God put it in there for a reason and I'd like it to stay right where it is. I tell the doctor this and she replies, “Well, the other option is that you get in shape. Stop eating animal fat and start exercising.” Sounds like simple advice for a 28-year-old, but it was a tall order for me at the time. After all, I'd gained around 30 pounds since moving to Germany. I was enjoying a lot of beer, schnitzel, spaetzle, and delicious bread. I'd fallen in love with German food, but it was doing not-so-wonderful things to my size and health. Just a couple of weeks prior, I had to quit a hike halfway through because my knees hurt so badly. I'd chalked it up to aging, but now — with my doctor giving me the option between surgery or lifestyle change at 28! — I knew it was time to make a transition. A transition that would take me from being limited physically in my late 20's to becoming an ultra-marathoner at the age of 40. THEMED INTRO: (DON'T RECORD)[themed music plays]I'm Art Blanchford, and this is Life in Transition, a podcast about making the most of the changes we're given. As a married father of three teenagers, long-time global business executive, personal growth fanatic, and adventurer, I've been through hundreds of transitions in my life. Many have been difficult, but all have led to a depth and richness I could never have imagined. You'll get to hear about them on this podcast so that, together, we can create more love and joy in our lives — no matter what transitions we go through. EPISODE:Part 1: Why this matters to listeners Hello and welcome back to Life in Transition. I'm Art Blanchford and today we're going to talk about a transition that took over 10 years for me to complete: going from couch potato to ultra marathoner. I want to share this experience with you because if you're like me, maybe you've wrestled with your eating and weight your whole life. Maybe you've started and stopped countless exercise routines and healthy eating plans — and feel like getting into better shape is an impossible obstacle in your life. I've been there. When my doctor in Germany told me I had to make some changes or I'd face surgery, it was a HUGE wakeup call. But if you told me that I would be running ultramarathons a decade later, I would've laughed in your face. “That's impossible!” I would've said. But as you're about to learn, small, incremental changes over a long period of time can make the impossible, POSSIBLE. My hope is that by hearing my story, you'll see the extraordinary potential you have — even if it's not obvious right now. [a beat… possibly with transitional music] Part 2: Backstory to the gallstone If you've been listening to Life in Transition since the beginning, then you know that I've always been a bit of an overachiever. I've routinely put work ahead of taking care of my body. When I played football in high school, but in college, I was all about school and work. I only ran a little bit to get my energy up in the mornings, and didn't bother much with exercise outside of that. These habits continued into my young professional years, until one day my wife came home with an idea. [energetic music starts] “Nashville is hosting a Country Music marathon this year. Want to go?” she asked. It was 2000 — the first time Nashville had ever hosted a marathon like this. And since we both loved Nashville and it was for a good cause, I said, “Okay, I'll try it.” I used the marathon as a way to raise funds for the Leukemia Society, got a coach, and started training. I'd never run a race in my life, so training was a very tough process. Everything hurt — especially my knees. It got so bad that I started packing bags of frozen peas in a cooler to use after my long runs in the park. When marathon day came, it was more difficult than I had imagined. [race sounds] I ran and walked it in four hours and 45 minutes, and the 10 days after were excruciating. I could barely walk and everything hurt really badly. [music ends] You'd think after all that work I would continue with my training. But soon after the Country Music marathon, my wife and I moved to Germany for my job. When I tried to run, everything hurt too much. So I quit. I tried hiking with my wife sometimes, but going down mountains made my knees hurt so badly that I quit that too for the most part. The only physical activity I did was mountain biking — but only occasionally. I spent most of my time working hard and traveling a lot. Add that sedentary lifestyle to consuming a ton of delicious German food, and that's how I landed in the doctor's office with what appeared to be a gallstone. Part 3: The Slow Road to Health Even though I walked out of that doctor's office determined to do everything I could to avoid gallbladder surgery. It was not an overnight transition. I still didn't exercise regularly — even though I made plans to do so many times. Instead, I focused on my diet first thanks to Tony Robbins. I attended his Unleash the Power Within conference and was inspired by his outlook on diet. He talked about eating mostly vegetables and plant-based fats, and consuming very little to no meat, dairy, or animal fat. So I started on that path. Two years later, work moved me back to the U.S. and I found myself under tremendous pressure. At 31 years old, I was a VP of a multi billion dollar global corporation. I felt like I had so much riding on my shoulders. I needed to do something to help manage my stress, and I needed it fast. [energetic music] Telling myself I didn't have time for anything big, I started with fifteen minutes every morning. I would get up a little early and walk around my neighborhood, following along with the Tony Robbins 15 minutes to Fulfillment. I'd say the things I'm grateful for, do breathing exercises that helped me feel more energized, and say affirmations. It was only fifteen minutes, but it helped a LOT with managing my stress. I didn't know it at the time but committing to those 15 minutes every single morning was the start of an entirely new way of living. It was the foundation for what would become a slow and steady physical transformation. [music rises and plays for a beat]. As that 15 minute morning walk became a daily habit , I found myself wanting more. I thought, “Well hey, I used to run. Maybe I'll try jogging for five minutes in the middle.” So jogging became part of my daily habit. I'd walk for five or ten minutes, jog for five minutes, and then walk for five or ten minutes. I did it almost every morning. Slowly, what started as 15 minutes stretched into what Tony Robbins calls a full Hour of Power. I told a friend about what I was doing at work, and he recommended a book called Galloway's Book on Running by Jeff Galloway. It was all about how to run injury-free. “That's what I need!” I thought. So I started following the Galloway regimen, where I'd run one mile, and then walk one minute. I kept my pace very slow as I built my endurance up. The idea is that you allow your body to train and transform slowly to avoid injury. Deep down, I wanted to run another marathon but I was nervous about it. My back still bothered me a lot, and I worried that another marathon meant hurting myself even more. So I didn't put a date on it. I just said, “I'm going to do another at some point.” For years, I continued using the Galloway method to build up endurance and my distance, getting up 5 or six days a week as part of my morning habit. Finally, in 2007 — a full seven years after my first marathon — I ran a half marathon in Detroit. Then in 2008, I ran it again. I enjoyed these races so much that one day it hit me that running was no longer something I did to manage my weight or stress. It was something I truly enjoyed. If I didn't get a morning run in, I'd come home from work, put my young kids in a double jogging stroller and take off for a run. I love being outside, being in nature, and moving my body. I added yoga and eating well into my routine with the encouragement of my sister-in-law. The hardest part wasn't moving my body — it was eating well. I still battled my weight, because I loved bread, sweets, and eating big portions of both in the evenings. If there were any sweets around, I would eat it. But I kept at it just like I did with the running. Slow and steady everyday. I aimed for small improvements everyday, not comparing my progress to anyone else. And then finally, in 2009, I got big news. After two years of trying, I'd won the New York City Marathon lottery. I was finally going to run another marathon. [transitional music]Part 4: NYC Marathon By this point, I was nervous and excited, but committed to training. But just days before the big day, I pulled my hamstring. My first thought was, “See, I knew I couldn't do it without getting injured. I'm out. It's too dangerous and I don't want to hurt myself.” I was living in Michigan at the time, and bought all my gear and got sports massages a Hanson's Running Stores. . There were a lot of Olympic hopefuls on the Hanson's running team and one such runner was my masseuse right after the injury. When she completed the massage, she said, , “I think you can still do the NYC marathon. . If you were sprinting, it would be a problem. But you can run a marathon and be just fine.” That was a pivotal moment for me. Her words gave me the confidence and inspiration I needed to show up to the New York City marathon — hurt hamstring and all. [music builds] On race day, I had all kinds of butterflies in my stomach. It was the day after Halloween and so people were making their way back home from parties the night before while the runners lined up at the starting gate. You could just feel the energy of the million spectators. e. My family and good friend, Jim, werw there, and my sister came up from Philly to watch. As soon as I heard the starting shot[1], I followed the Galloway way, running and walking, then running and walking some more. It was shoulder-to-shoulder throughout most of the race because there are just so many people who come to do the New York City marathon. During my walking periods, I'd go to the side and try to get out of the way. But some people still get really upset that I was slowing down so much during those minutes. But I did it anyway every mile and trusted it was the right method for my body. In every race I've ever done, there's always this short period of time where you know your limits are, and you go for it anyway. Everything feels so real in that moment. I felt that many times during the New York City marathon. It was really tough. But at mile 20, I rounded the corner and when I saw my wife, kids, and sister, I just started crying. It was so great to see them and steal a quick hug. Tears just kept coming into my eyes because I was pushing myself as hard as I could. When I finally crossed that finish line, I felt like a rock star. My time was 4 hours and 15 minutes. A whole 30 minute improvement from my first marathon nine years prior. [music beat] It felt amazing. And that night, my family and I had a blast walking around New York City. I wore my marathon shirt out to dinner and got a standing ovation in the restaurant. We saw tons of other marathoners with their medals on out and about and I'll never forget it. Best of all, I hadn't injured myself. My body could run a marathon without getting hurt. [transitional music] Part 5: Improving Times & Shifting Paradigms After that New York City marathon, I decided to do one marathon every year and see if I could keep improving my time. And sure enough, in Chicago of 2010, I ran it in just over four hours — cutting my time by nearly 15 minutes. Then in 2011, I ran a marathon in Montana. I felt great the entire race, and my end time was 3 hours, forty-four minutes and forty-five seconds. Not only is that still my best time, but I also ran into Jeff Galloway himself during that marathon. I got to thank him for his mile run, minute walk method that helped me heal my body and saved me from getting any serious injuries. After that marathon, my family and I moved to Shanghai, China for my job, and I got plugged into a local running group there. It was full of mostly Scandinavian guys who ran marathons every month or so. This completely shifted the paradigm I'd been operating under. “You CAN”T run more than one marathon a year without injury?” I thought. But with these guys, I did exactly that. I ran the Shanghai marathon, Great Wall marathon, HongZhou marathon, each twice, Nanjing mountain marathon, and many others. Training with these guys, I increased my mileage a lot, and I started doing martial arts and p90x plyo training to strengthen my body. It worked. I felt like I was in the best shape of my life. So much so that when my friend Didier Chavet said, “Hey, you should do a 100km, 60 mile, trail race,” I jumped at it. I wanted to see what was possible. But boy,[2] I had NO idea what I was getting into. [fresh music builds] Part 6: Ultramarathon[nature sounds + footsteps] It's over 90 degrees. I've been running, hiking, and climbing, mostly by myself, for more than eight and a half hours on the beautiful, rugged terrain of southwest China. I'm descending a large canyon with a black, 3000 foot granite wall that's radiating the desert sun heat onto me as I climb down. My body feels like it's right at the edge of shutting down. My legs quake with every big step, and when I bite into my Camelback valve to suck in some much needed water, I feel nothing but thick saliva and air in my mouth. It's empty. I have no more water and I'm in the middle of nowhere China all by myself descending into Tiger Leaping Gorge. My mind starts to race. All the inner critics come out saying, “You're so stupid. You have three kids and a wife and you're not going to make it home. Who do you think you are for doing this silly race?” I was also kicking myself because I'd initially signed up for only 60k, 40 miles, but when I heard the race director describing the beautiful views of the 100k race, I changed my mind last minute. I had enough supplies and thought, “Why not? When else will I be in southwest China?” This was the first day of the 100k race. I was supposed to run 40k, 25 miles, and already I wasn't sure if I was going to make it. My body was shot from the 10,000 foot elevation climb I'd already made that day, and I was really second guessing this step to become an ultramarathoner. I prayed and thought, “Well, what can I do? Stopping in the middle of the dessert didn't seem like a good option. Well, Ikeep putting one foot in front of the other and I'll go a little slower. I'll conserve energy. And I'll keep my eyes open for anybody that might be out here and see if they have some water. If not, maybe I can figure out a way to go down to the river.” I knew drinking out the river was not a smart thing to do, but definitely better than cramping up and not being able to move or completely dehydrating and damaging myself. So I slowly rounded the next switchback and as I came around to the next part of the trail, I saw a young lady tending her goats. In broken Chinese I said, “Hey, do you have something to drink?” Maybe she knew the race was coming through, because she had two or three Chinese versions of gatorades in a little woven basket in the shade. I always carried money when I ran long distances in China so I gave her 20 RMB or so and she was really happy with that even though I couldn't really communicate too well because my Chinese is so bad. That was truly a godsend. I slugged down two or three 16 ounces of Gatorade equivalent and was able to finish that day of the race. Later that night, all the racers (the ones doing the 60k AND 100k) all met up and stayed at a little country bed and breakfast. We ate food, drank beer and just enjoyed the camaraderie with one another. But that next morning, I woke up and couldn't move my legs. They were unbelievably sore. I've experienced pain and soreness before — but NOTHING like this. I told my friend Andrew Lacey who was doing the race as well, “Look, I think I'm done. I can't move my legs.” Andrew replied, “Well, do what you can do. Can you get out of bed?” “Yeah,” I said. “I think so.” So I moved my legs over the edge of the bed. It took a lot to stand up. The pain was there, but I could do it. I walked around a little bit, and every step was really painful. I said, “I'm done, I'm just going to quit or at the most finish with the 60k runners.” Andrew encouraged me to walk around a little bit more to work out the lactic acid and said, “It's gonna hurt whether you do it or not. And maybe it hurts less if you do it.” To get to breakfast, I had to walk down a spiral staircase. The whole way hurt, but Andrew kept saying, “Just do what you can do. Don't give up because something hurts or give up because it's hard. Just do what you can do. If you can take another step, take another step.” Luckily on that day, the 20k version and the 40k version started together. So I had a big breakfast, worked on my legs with the roller and learned how to run using my glutes instead of my quads from one of the other runners. It hurt a lot, but it also hurt a lot to sit. So I kept focusing on what I could do, and didn't stop even when I felt that pain. After an hour or so of running, the lactic acid cycled through and my legs didn't hurt. I ran another 40 kilometers (25 miles) — almost a full marathon that day. And I made a BETTER time than I had the previous day. By the third day, I felt strong. There was a lot of sliding down hills through pine forests, which was so much fun because it felt like skiing on pine needles. I had adjusted to the altitude and finished feeling great. 20k (13 miles) that day seemed easy, even if it was after running back to back marathons the 2 days before . At the end when they started calling the winners of age brackets, they called out ‘Art Blanchford' for third place. It felt amazing. Of course later I would find out that there were only three in my age bracket, but it was still a great experience. It had been a LONG journey from that doctor's office in Germany to now — over 10 years. But it was ALL worth it. [music swells] Part 7: 5 Steps to Lasting Change I wanted to share my couch potato to ultramarathoner story with you because I think we sometimes expect ourselves to transition and transform as fast as possible. But often that's not how real, lasting change happens. In fact, you'll be shocked at the power of small, incremental changes. The impossible will become possible. Whether you want to work on your physical health or something else entirely, here are some ways you can implement that slow and steady transition. First, get in the habit of doing something — even if it's really small. You hear my story of how I started walking 15 minutes every morning, James Clear mentions it in his book, Atomic Habits, if you want to get in the habit of being somebody who: fill-in-the-blank, start small, really small, but do it consistently over time Maybe you want to be somebody who works out. Then do something every day, go for a walk or go s to the gym. Amount of time does not matter here. It could be as small as five minutes. You're just getting in the habit of doing something. Maybe you want to become somebody who always takes the stairs instead of the elevator or somebody who parks in the farthest parking space to get extra steps. And make it easy on yourself. If you want to be somebody who works out in the morning, have your exercise clothes or swimsuit already laid out the night before. Again, it'all about getting in the habit of DOING something and doing it consistently. Second, make steady progress. Everybody overestimates what they can accomplish in one year, but most people UNDERESTIMATE what they'll accomplish in three years. Take a, long term outlook and make steady progress. Remember, you're not out there to prove anything. You're out there to improve. That's true for all of life, but especially when you're getting in shape. It's not about comparing yourself to your friends, or how much you can do on the first day or even the first year. It's about slow and steady improvement leading to a new you Third, find your joy. This is a really important one because whatever you choose, you want to be able to stick with it for a long time. Maybe you don't like walking or running, but you really like skipping, biking, swimming, or playing paddle ball. Find your joy to be willing or even excited tostick with it for a while. I didn't realize how much I really loved running until I'd been doing it for a few years. So give something a try, and be willing to stick with it for a while before you reevaluate. When you find your joy, you'll start to see exercise not as something you should do, but something youlove to do. And that makes all thedifference. Fourth, hang out with people who inspire you in that space. There are so many ways to hang out with people who enjoy doing the same kind of physical activity as you. You can read books, listen to podcasts, or watch athletes on TV. For me, that was reading Jeff Galloway's book on running and Chris McDougall's book called, Born to Run. But my favorite way is to find people who are further ahead in their journey than you. For example, my brother is a much better runner than I am. And I loved training with these crazy Scandinavian running dudes in Shanghai because they really inspired me by showing me what was possible. So hang out with those that inspire you mentally, physically, and spiritually. Fifth, say “What can I do?” instead of “I can't.” What can you do? What's a little thing you can do? Can you walk around the block? Can you walk up the stairs? Can you pedal your stationary bike for 20 minutes while you watch something on TV? Can you run a mile or two? What can you do? And as you push yourself to do even more, don't quit. I was out hiking with my son and his scout troop a couple weeks ago, and it was really tough. We did 11 and a half miles on very steep terrain, while carrying heavy packs. After about seven and a half hours, the boys were done. They were tired and sore. So what did I do? I first gave them all something to eat, and then said, “Hey, what can you do? Can you take one step?” “Yes,” they said. And then it was just one step after the other. It's like that old adage of this journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step. And another. And another. So whenever you feel like quitting, remember to ask yourself, “What can I do?” And then do it. Part 8: Conclusion I really hope you found my story helpful as you begin your journey. Remember, I NEVER thought I would be running ultramarathons when I first started getting into shape. I just wanted to avoid gallbladder surgery and manage my stress better. But now that I am in better shape, I love being fit, as Christopher McDougall says, to be useful. I love the things I can do because I'm fit and not in pain. I can climb trees with my kids, swim out the water falls, clear heavy debris after the tornado, lead the scouts on long hikes, and lift and relocate the furniture for my wife easily. I feel so much more fit than 25 years before I feel usefull in so many ways. Before we wrap this up, I want to ask you some questions to help you figure out your next steps.What's one small habit you can start today? Something you have been talking to yourself about for a long time? Can you start doing it just 2 or 5 minutes per day?How can you make steady progress with that habit? Take a three-year view. Where would you like to be? What would bring you joy? What would you like to be able to do three years from now? What has worked for you? What are you already doing? Take a minute and jot that down. Record or write it on your phone. Email or text yourself, or write it on a piece of paper. And please share it with me. I can't wait to hear what you look forward to doing as you make your slow and steady progress. Connect with me on LinkedIn or our website, LifeInTransition.online and let me know if anything stood out to you from this episode. Let a close friend know too — it could be a huge encouragement to them as well. Thank you so much for joining me today. Make sure you subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and it would mean a lot to me if you shared this episode with a friend. I'm Art Blanchford, and I'll see you next time on Life in Transition. [music plays] CREDITS (Don't record) Life in Transition is co-written and produced by Laura Boach. And if you want to learn more about me and what I do when I'm not podcasting, please visit me at artblanchford.com. Life In Transition is a production of (GFS Sonic Logo [“Great Feeling Studios” read by my nephew followed by a laugh of my son])whistle? gong? not sure what's the norm :)Feel free to chance this to sound more like you
Health to Injury or SicknessEpisode 4 Possible Headlines:#4: What to Do When Life Hands You Sickness or Injury The Hook[outdoor noises w/ reflective, suspenseful music] I don't know how I'm gonna get out of this one. I'm lying at the bottom of a ravine. Shooting pain courses down the whole right side of my body, especially my shoulder. It hurts so bad that I think I'm going to black out. When I move my fingers on my left hand, I feel a burst of pain there too. Blood oozes from my right shin and knee onto the forest floor below me. I look to see where my bike is, but it doesn't matter. [music fades] Because I'm not going to be able to ride this one out. All my hard work of regaining strength the last four months is shot. In the blink of an eye, I've gone from healthy and fit, to out of commission … again. The only question is… how am I going to respond to this unexpected transition? THEMED INTRO: (DON'T RECORD)[themed music plays]I'm Art Blanchford, and this is Life in Transition, a podcast about making the most of the changes we're given. As a married father of three teenagers, long-time global business executive, and adventurer, I've been through hundreds of transitions in my life. Many have been difficult, but all have led to a depth and richness I could never have imagined. You'll get to hear all about them on this podcast so that together, we can create more love and joy in our lives — no matter what transitions we go through. EPISODE:Part 1: Why this matters to listeners Hello everybody, welcome back to Life in Transition. I'm Art Blanchford and today we're going to talk about a transition that's not exactly fun to go through, but it's something that everyone faces at some point: going from healthy and fit to injured or sick. Whether you get sick only once in a while, or have battled through some really difficult health circumstances, feeling physically less than where you want to be, is difficult and frustrating. I know, because I've been there many times — often because of my own hard-headedness. This episode is not about squashing or denying the negative thoughts and feelings we have when we suffer physically. It's about making the most of it, as best we can. Today I'm going to share many moments when I've wrestled with unexpected illnesses and injuries, and some practices that have helped me meet these transitions with more openness and ease. To start us off, I want to take us back to that mountain biking crash I talked about at the beginning of this episode. [suspenseful music] Part 2: The Bike Accident It was August of 2020. After months of being bed-ridden from chronic fatigue syndrome, I had finally recovered enough to get back into my fitness routine. On that particular day, I decided to go mountain biking with my friend, Kevin. It felt so good to be back out there. The sun was shining and I felt really strong and healthy. I couldn't remember the last time I'd felt that way. Kevin and I had ridden in this park many times. There are lots of technical trails with varying degrees of difficulty. We'd ridden most of them already, but there was one double Black Diamond descent that I'd never done before. And for good reason. It was the most difficult one by far. It had a huge 20-foot drop-off that took you nearly straight down. But I was feeling my oats that day, so I told Kevin I was going to try it. He decided to take an easier way down (smarter than me:-) and when he got down there, asked if I wanted him to film me. “No I said, just go on and I'll catch up to you.” There's no rush quite like riding a difficult trail — especially when you take a 20 foot drop like that. My stomach lurched, and my hands held tight to the handlebars as I braced for landing. But when I hit the bottom, I landed only on my front wheel. I didn't get the back wheel down in time, and before I knew it, I crashed into the ground, feeling my right shoulder collapse beneath me. I slid on the ground for 30-40 feet until I slammed into and slid along the side of the boardwalk that I was meant to be riding on. [crashing sounds] Once the dust settled, my entire body wracked with pain. I'd fallen on my side when I hit the ground, and my right shoulder had collapsed under me. I knew instantly something had to be broken. I'd used my left hand to protect my face from the boardwalk and so it was also badly damaged. My right shin was bloody and resembled a tin can that had just gone under a can opener. The skin was stripped and all rolled up like a ribbon. I tried to sit up but almost blacked out because of the pain. “How am I going to get out of this?” I asked myself. From farther up the trail, Kevin heard me cry out in pain and asked if I was OK. For the first time in my MTB[1] experience I said, “No! I won't be riding this one out.” We've been through a lot of crashes over the years that we've managed to ride through, but I knew this wasn't one I could ride out. I heard him turn his bike around to ride back towards me. I looked around. There was no way any EMT's could get to us. I was going to have to find a way to walk out of there. Kevin arrived and asked, “What do you need?” I replied, “I need food.” I felt woozy and lightheaded and only had water in my Camelback. Right before the drop, I'd given my last energy bar to Kevin because he was running out of energy. So between the two of us, we had nothing with nutrients in it. Luckily, a few riders came along the trail and asked if they could help. I said, “I need food. Do you have something to eat?” All they had were some energy chews, so I popped three or four of those into my mouth as I lay on the ground. The energy chews were gooey and sticky, and as I chewed, I felt a temporary crown pop off one of my teeth. It was so ridiculous at this point that I had to laugh. I pulled this big gooey glob out of my mouth, found the temporary crown in the mess, and put it in my pocket to take to the dentist later. I continued to lay there, eating those energy chews until I felt better. Again I tried to sit up, and again I started to blackout from the pain. Kevin stayed with me while the other riders went to find a cell phone signal and call the EMT's so they could get as close as possible to this point in the trail. So I laid there and asked myself once again, “How am I going to get out of this? What can I do?” And then it popped into my head, “I can do the Wim Hof breathing.” Wim Hof is a Dutch extreme athlete who developed some unique, short breathing exercises that can affect your nervous system and physiological responses to stress. I've used it for years to tackle various fitness challenges — a few minutes of it has helped me double the amount of pushups I can do. So I started doing the Wim Hof breathing. And then my friend suggested that we use a bike tube as a sling for my right arm. So we set that up, and after a few more minutes of the Wim Hof breathing I felt strong enough to stand without passing out. By that point a sheriff's deputy had arrived, and he helped me hobble with the sling to where the ambulance was waiting. [ambulance sirens + transitional music] The ambulance took me straight to the emergency room. The staff at the hospital confirmed that I had broken my right humerus (the single bone on the top of your arm) into four pieces, likely dislocated my shoulder, bruised some ribs, and suffered serious bone contusions all over my left hand. When my wife wheeled me out of the hospital, my right arm was in a sling and my right leg was bandaged all over. We would be back the next day for surgery. Part 3: How to Make the Most of the Transition As I recovered from this whole ordeal at home, I had a choice: to make myself suffer even more by agonizing over this new physical setback, OR lean into all the lessons I've learned over the years and make the best of a transition like this. Going from healthy and fit, to sick or injured is never easy. But my hope is that these practices and tips will help you make that transition a little less difficult. The first practice is to tune into yourself. Humor me and put your language scholar hat on with me for a moment. Because I want to talk about the word disease. Separateted, it becomes dis-ease. The Latin root of the prefix, dis, means Tunis. And ‘tunis' means trying to be something that you're not. Trying to be something I'm not always leads to more suffering. It never fails. There have been so many moments in my life where I haven't taken my health as seriously as I should, or I've tried to do too much, or pretended to be something or someone that I'm not. Case in point: I ended up in the bottom of that ravine because I was trying to be an adventure athlete above my capabilities. And then I paid the price for that. A very intense price. You see, there's a conflict that arises inside of us when we're trying to be two opposing things at once, instead of being integrated — or instead of being one. Even though I don't like it, sickness and injury often remind me who I am, and signal when I'm not living in integrity with myself. But by tuning into yourself, you'll be able to come back to yourself, and come back to oneness. You'll get back in integrity with who you are. Second, remember that you are not your health. Yes, health is VERY important. But whether you're healthy or sick, fit, or injured, you are a worthy and loved child of God. I have to remind myself of that whenever I'm not feeling 100%, because my health, performance, and fitness are valuable to me, but they do not define me. Being sick or injured helps me to see what identities I'm clinging to, or what stories I'm telling myself that just aren't true. In fact, this is often the perfect time to question everything. Is that thing I thought was SO important really necessary? Probably not. Can work survive without me for a couple days? Yes. Will the world go on, even when I'm resting and recovering? Absolutely. Is outdoor adventure the ONLY physical activity I can do to release work stress? Not at all. Are their other ways to play and connect with friends? For sure! If you find yourself unexpectedly sick or injured, I encourage you to use this downtime to think through your assumptions on life. Question everything. Look for opportunities to do things differently or think differently and you may be surprised at what you find. After all, while it is really important, you are not your health. Third, practice acceptance. Take stock of where you are, and be present with that. When I resist what's happening and try to do more or push harder, it usually gets much worse. There was one Christmas many years ago, when I ignored my need for rest and it all backfired. [christmas-ey music plays] I had traveled and worked like crazy leading up to the holidays. It was my usual big Christmas Push before coming home to be with the family for a while. Once there though, I couldn't get out of bed. My wife came in to wake me up Christmas morning saying, “Hey, honey, come on. Help get the Christmas meal going and welcome the guests.” I felt like crap and absolutely couldn't get out of bed. I simply pushed myself too hard, ran my immune system down, and picked up something on the overseas flight home. I had treated work as an emergency when it wasn't. I'd lived in fight or flight mode without even realizing it. It was like my body was finally able to say, “Hey, I need a break!” and shut itself down because it recognized a need to rest and repair. So long story, short, I did NOT get to enjoy that Christmas with my family. I laid in bed most of that day and the next. [music ends] That happened many times in my career along the way, where I wouldn't allow myself to get sick, or I'd pretend I wasn't sick until I got home and was able to crash. This was again pretending to be something I am not, leading to dis-ease. That pattern eventually led to getting diagnosed with chronic fatigue. So when I got injured from mountain biking, I knew. I HAD to practice acceptance and give my body what it needed. I had to say, “Ok, this is the way that I am right now.” Remember, our bodies are always trying to bring us back to ourselves, and to wholeness. Accept what's happening. Be present. The fourth way to make the best of this transition is to give yourself permission to rest, relax, and do the things you enjoy. There was a decade of my life, where the only time I would allow myself to lay around and read a book is if I was sick. And I really loved laying somewhere comfortable, in bed or on a sleeping bag outside, to read. I can't help but wonder if sometimes I drove myself so hard to be sick so that I would allow myself the luxury of time to do that. Now when I get sick, I pay attention to the things I want to do and make a note of it. Because chances are, I probably need to make more time for that recharging or relaxing activity when I'm healthy as well to prevent me from getting sick. So when you are sick or injured, give yourself permission to be completely off. Relax, read a book, lay in bed all day and watch TV — whatever it is that you need to do to recover. And remind yourself, that you don't have to make yourself sick to enjoy those things. You can enjoy them when you're healthy too. By giving yourself this chill time to recharge, you will keep yourself well and vital. Have a sense of humor about the situation if you can, and take care of yourself and connect with the people who are taking care of you. The fifth and final tip I have for this kind of transition is to look at what you CAN do. When I was recovering from the mountain bike injuries, this helped me a lot. After all, I'd worked so hard to bring my health back up after from chronic fatigue syndrome the four months prior. So it was very discouraging that my fitness — or at least my adventure ability was taken away again. So I had to ask myself with a spirit of curiosity, “What CAN I do?” And that really helped. After all, being an adventure athlete is only one part of me. I'm also the family income contributor, a family man, and I enjoy all kinds of things. I realized that even though I was wearing this big sling on my shoulder, I could walk. So that's what I did. A few days after the accident, I was able to go for a hike in the park. I took walking poles in my left hand to make sure I didn't fall down, but still — I was able to walk at least. Slowly walking turned into running. It took many more months, but I was eventually able to get back to biking and doing pull-ups and those types of things. It turns out that I really enjoyed the period of time where I wasn't running or biking because it gave me an opportunity to walk with friends who don't run or bike. I got to see the world a little differently. At work, when I struggled to do tasks like typing because my hands were immobilized, I learned how to use speech recognition. Again, I focused on what I could do and that made being injured so much better, so much easier to accept. I know it can be tough to lose something that's really important to you like your health or fitness, but that doesn't mean you're completely lost or incapable. There are still good things that you can do. So get curious and ask yourself, “What do I want to do that I CAN do? ?” Part 4: Conclusion I'm recording this about nine months since my mountain biking accident. While it was the most painful injury I've ever had and the recovery was difficult and long, I can honestly say that it was also one of the smoothest I've ever been through. Not because of the particular circumstances, but because of my mindset. All of those practices helped. Tuning into yourself, remembering that you are not your health, practicing acceptance, giving yourself permission to rest, and looking at what you CAN do — I promise that these will help you make the most of a less than ideal health transition. I'm a big believer in finding the silver linings of the hardships we go through and scars we earn along the journey of life. Of course, nobody WANTS to be sick or injured. But a lot of good things can come from it. You might be thinking, “Well, maybe not ALL good things will come from it.” And that's true. But think about it this way: if life hands you a tough transition like going from healthy and fit to sick or injured, what can you do with it? And how can you make the most of it? Those are actually great questions to end this episode on, so let me ask you that again. If you're going through a tough transition right now — whether it's with your health or something else:What can you do with this set of difficult circumstances?How can you make the most of it?And here's a bonus question: of all the practices I listed in this episode (Tuning into yourself, remembering that you are not your health, practicing acceptance, giving yourself permission to rest, and looking at what you CAN do), which one could you do right now for yourself? Take a minute and jot that down. Record or write it on your phone. Email or text yourself, or write it on a piece of paper. And please share it with me. I look forward to hearing how you handled a transition like this and if any of these practices worked for you. Connect with me on LinkedIn or our website, LifeInTransition.online and let me know if anything stood out to you from this episode. Let a close friend know too — it could be a huge encouragement to them as well. Thank you so much for joining me today. Make sure you subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and it would mean a lot to me if you shared this episode with a friend. I'm Art Blanchford, and I'll see you next time on Life in Transition. [music plays] CREDITS (Don't record) Life in Transition is co-written and produced by Laura Boach. And if you want to learn more about me and what I do when I'm not podcasting, please visit me at artblanchford.com. Life In Transition is a production of (GFS Sonic Logo [“Great Feeling Studios” read by my nephew followed by a laugh of my son]) What does this stand for? I would explain this so people don't get confused
Season 2, Episode 30 - Ski season is back! All six resorts are open in the Pocono Mountains and all of them have new upgrades this season, four added new chairlifts! In this episode we chat with Molly at Camelback and Trent at Jack Frost - Big Boulder about the new chairlifts installed this season at their resorts. Head to PoconoSki.com for all you need to know on the slopes this year! The Poconos is a year-round destination for millions and with 24-hundred square miles of mountains, forests, lakes and rivers with historic downtowns and iconic family resorts, it's the perfect getaway for a weekend or an entire week. You can always find out more on PoconoMountains.com or watch Pocono Television Network streaming live 24/7.
Kathi Vidal, Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property/Director of the US Patent and Trademark Office and Paul DelPonte, Executive Director of National Crime Prevention Council, join Michelle to talk about how to shop safely this holiday season.The holiday hustle and bustle are in full swing as shoppers search for this year's best steals and deals. The good news, discounts are expected to hit record highs for popular categories such as electronics, computers, and toys according to Adobe's online-shopping forecast. However, scammers are looking to take advantage of American consumers as fears of a looming recession increase, and people tighten their purse strings leading up to the Holidays. These criminals are on the prowl both online and off looking to entice consumers with even lower-cost price tags attached to dangerous counterfeit products.According to a new study by Skyscanner, Savvy US travelers have taken pride in being adventurous at heart with more than 3/4s saying they consider themselves spontaneous.Laura Lindsey joins Michelle to talk about this and other travel trends.Molly Coneybeer is Camelback Resort's director of marketing and she joins Michelle to talk about this really fun family property in the Poconos. Ski season is here and they have a lot planned for the winter when it comes to ski and winter activities. Camelback is a great family destination with an indoor waterpark, Aquatopia, and arcade.Research shows there is a strong two-way connection between the gut and the brain. Psychological factors can affect a person's gut health, and a person's gut symptoms or condition can also affect their psychological health and well-being. This can spell trouble during the holidays because sugary treats, fatty dishes and excessive alcohol are in abundance and can cause digestive trouble, making a person miserable. Katherine Tomasino, PhD, is the co-director of the Behavioral Medicine for Digestive Health Program at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago and talks with Michelle about the brain gut connection.
Martin Perdomo also known as "The Elite Strategist", is an inspired instructor, speaker, and entrepreneur that has inspired thousands around the globe and is the host of Latinos in Real Estate Investing Podcast. Martin is now available for leadership training, Sales Training, Business consulting, and coaching. Martin's Elite Real Estate Strategies with the Elite Strategist DVD is Featured on Amazon and all major online and offline retailers. Martin is the founder and host of the Stroudsburg Real Estate Investors club. With his leadership, the group has gone from zero to over three hundred members in less than two years. He currently manages and operates a Real Estate Investing firm operating over five million dollars in assets and he helps investors get above-average returns by investing passively in multifamily Real Estate with him and his team. In this episode, Sam and Martin are going to discuss why to educate people on real estate investments, the passion that Martin made him start his podcast, and the journey that led him to find financial freedom through real estate investing. Highlights: [00:00 - 05:45] Hustling Until You Achieve Your Goals Martin Perdomo is a real estate entrepreneur, trainer, podcast host, speaker, consultant, and mindset strategist. He aims to educate people and get them started on their journey to financial freedom through real estate investing. Martin started investing in real estate in 2007, bought his first property two years later and it burned down in 2012. Since then, he's learned to focus on the long term and has shifted his thinking when evaluating properties. He currently owns 108 units of multifaceted real estate, including 40 units next to each other. [05:45 - 11:04] Alternative Real Estate Investments Martin shares his story about the dream that he had when he found his passion for real estate investments, at 17 years old. He discusses his latest long-term goal to be true: owning a hotel. He then explains the advantages of why owning a hotel can be a great investment. Martin talks about his diversified assets and his strategies to make those assets scalable. [11:04 - 15:33] Finding Your Public Martin talks about how TV commercials gave him a great lead in the area that he works. He shares how he identified the demographic that he wants to buy from and the strategies to do that. Why TV commercials are an underrated strategy to scale your real estate investments. [15:33 - 19:38] Helping the Community: A Passion Martin shares his real purpose in the business of the real estate. He discusses the importance of mindset and skill set in achieving success, and how shifting to an abundance mindset has changed his life for the better. He also discusses his podcast and his meet-ups, and how he created those spaces to help others achieve success in the business of real estate. [19:38 - 20:56] Closing Segment Reach out to Martin See links below Final words Tweetable Quote “You gotta let people know what you're doing. You gotta take action. Like the old saying of ready, fire, aim. Just ready, action, and then readjust and aim again and adjust accordingly”. – Martin Perdomo “Once I shifted my mindset right from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset, my life changed”. – Martin Perdomo ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Connect with The Elite Strategist himself, Martin Perdomo on his Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or check out more ways to reach him out in his Link Tree. Also, check his podcast Latinos In Real Estate Investing Podcast, and his YouTube Channel. Connect with me: I love helping others place money outside of traditional investments that both diversify a strategy and provide solid predictable returns. Facebook LinkedIn Like, subscribe, and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or whatever platform you listen on. Thank you for tuning in! Email me → sam@brickeninvestmentgroup.com Want to read the full show notes of the episode? Check it out below: 00:00 Martin Perdomo: And if you're doing something you gotta let the world know that you're doing it. You're doing something. "Hey, this is what I'm doing. You're raising money. "Hey, I'm looking to help people, get above average return on their investments, right? You gotta let people know what you're doing. You gotta take action. Like the old saying of ready, fire, aim. Just ready, action, and then readjust and aim again and adjust accordingly. 00:19 Intro: Welcome to the How to Scale Commercial Real Estate Show. Whether you are an active or passive investor, we'll teach you how to scale your real estate investing business into something big. 00:31 Sam Wilson: Martin Perdomo is the host of Latinos and Real Estate Investing podcast. Martin aims to educate people and get them started on their journey to financial freedom through real estate investing. Martin, welcome to the show. 00:43 Martin Perdomo: Sam, thank you for having me, brother. It's a pleasure and an honor to be able to share with your audience. 00:48 Sam Wilson: Awesome Martin. Glad to have you on today. There are three questions I ask every guest who comes on the show. In 90 seconds or less, can you tell me where did you start? Where are you now, and how did you get there? 00:58 Martin Perdomo: Started investing in real estate in 2007. Bought my first property. I was a mortgage broker, so I had FOMO, fear of missing out. Everyone was buying real estate and I was giving money away basically back in those days. In '05, '06 and '07. And I bought my first investment property, paid $275.000 for it. Knew nothing about real estate investing. Only did it because I knew that was a way to financial freedom. You hear it, you know it intuitively, but there's more to it than that, as you know. Bought it two years later, a hundred thousand under water, same property, was worth $179,000 and 14 years later had an appraisal come here. Last month I bought a property not too far from it. He was using a comp property, same property, two doors down, exact same property. Sold for $385,000. So don't wait to buy real estate. Buy real estate and wait. 01:47 Sam Wilson: What did you do with that house? 01:50 Martin Perdomo: Good question. I've had it, I bought it cuz it was close to the university by ESU University and I rented it to college students. And what college students typically do is they rent it in, they rent it around May, and they go to May right when school starts and around May, around April, they start winding down. These kids didn't pay their light bill, so one kid was studying with a candle in the. And the curtain caught on fire. Mattress caught on fire. They burned my house down. I like to think that I kind of attracted that because I was like my energy energetically, I was felt like, so stuck with that property cuz I didn't know what I was doing. That it was like the universe, God was the way of getting me out. 02:38 Sam Wilson: What year did it burn to the ground? 02:40 Martin Perdomo: I burned to the ground in 2012. 02:44 Sam Wilson: Okay, so you held it through the recession? 02:47 Martin Perdomo: Yeah, I held it. 02:47 Sam Wilson: Held it, which is, yeah, which is the right move. 02:50 Martin Perdomo: Yeah. There was no other move. I was broken. I didn't know what to do, brother. I didn't have the education I have today. But in hindsight, you know, it was a, if I would've held on. I still would've won. 02:59 Sam Wilson: You still would've won. And I think that's the thing that, the lesson that so many people probably didn't employ, you know, for those that were in unable to, hold on. That's a different story, but everybody panics when they see that the comp value of their property goes down. How has your thinking shifted now when you evaluate and look at properties in light of that experience? 03:20 Martin Perdomo: That's a great question. I just bought a quad. Up the street from here. And I was just in a meeting with my business coach this morning and he asked me a similar question cuz we're looking at: "Hey, the stuff we're flipping". And the difference in my mindset and what I look at now is I look at the longview. I focus on 10 years, 15 years. I look at the long view of things. I don't just focus that interest rates are going up. Hey, this happens. Interest rates go up. I don't concern. Prices are going down. Hey, this happens. Prices went down. There's always a panic in the market, Sam, no matter what. Last year's panic, what was it? "Oh, this is a bubble. People paying $20,000, 40,000 over asking 22, 21". Right? 21 and 20. That was it. In '19 and '18 before Covid, what was it? "Shit, any moment of recession's gonna happen, we're due. It's been, we're the longest bull market in history, and we're due". So, it's the media. There's something about human beings. We're always looking for what's next around the corner that can come kill us. But if we can just, when it comes to real estate, I like to think of it as long term and when I think of it of long term, all the noise goes away, right? All of the noise goes. 04:24 Sam Wilson: That's exactly it. Yeah. Somebody, and this is kind of in line with that, but somebody asked me this yesterday. It was like talking about a couple bees of real estate we own. I said "Look, I'm gonna hold those forever. It's long term I'm gonna hold 'em until I no longer want to own them". Like we buy stuff today that produces an income and I wanna hold it. No, I don't want to anymore. And I really don't care what the value of it is on paper, as long as it continues to produce revenue. I'm happy man. Yep, that's that's really cool. You mentioned a quad, you mentioned a single-family residence. How many aspects of real estate are you involved in at the moment? 04:58 Martin Perdomo: So, we buy apartment buildings. We currently own 108. It goes up and down cuz we flip and we also flip. So, we currently own 108 doors. We own a bunch of assets. Our biggest asset is 40 units. And 17, right next to each other. So, we do a multifacet of things. We currently have a television commercial locally. We're marketing to motivated sellers. We're just kind of lining ourselves and getting ourselves ready for if there is, and I use that word intentionally, if there is a real correction, because it's just so different, you know? We have people with interest rates of 2% and 3% that, yeah, they might have overpaid last year, but where are they going? There's an affordability issue. Where are they going? They can come rent from us, from you and from me for, you know, for what they're paying for. The less, they're paying less for mortgage. I don't know, you know, there's a lot of hype about the market this to market that. Either way I always plan for worst case scenario. I'm planning when the fear starts, because the fear mongering has already begun. Mainstream media is already, you know, putting the fear and human beings, especially people that aren't like you and I in this business, educated, they're gonna panic and they're gonna get scared. We flip, we buy fix and flip properties. I enjoy that. That is fun for me. And we also buy and hold long term. We're in the middle of buying a hotel right now. We're looking to acquire a hotel right now. I'm really excited about the future. Future's Bright Sam. Future's bright, brother. That's all I could tell you. man. Future is bright. I'm excited about the future. 06:27 Sam Wilson: I love that attitude. Somebody asked me that a couple weeks ago. They said, Hey: " Is now a good time to get under real estate?" I'm like: "Yes, absolutely it is. Like now is a great time to get in". Tell me about your hotel. We've talked about multifamily; you've talked about single family residences; you've talked about flipping. Tell me about your hotel, and then I got some other follow up questions, but we'll start on this. 06:49 Martin Perdomo: Yeah, so as a young, as a kid, right? I remember, I'll share the story with you. My wife and I, we've been together 25, 26 years now, and we were teenagers, we were kids, right? When we first started dating. And one day I used to work in the body shop in New York City in Harlem. I dunno if you're familiar with Harlem. It's, you know, common place in New York City. And it was really rough man. Really rough place. It was burnt down buildings, crack buildings, low place in the late eighties, nineties. And it was 1997. One day I used to work in this place called The Body Shop on one 25th and Fifth Avenue. My wife comes to pick me up, my girlfriend at the time, and I look across the street and I see this building and this burnt down. In the hundred 25th and fifth, and I say, you see that building across 300? I said: "If I could buy that building, fix it, and renovate it and rent it, we can be rich". I'm 17 years old, right? And she's no way. She's looking at the area and she's saying: "No way". But we've always, my wife and I have always romanticized with owning bigger assets. We're owning big assets. We've always talked about owning a hotel, like that's a play. So, I'm at a place in my career where it's about the game. You know, this is fun for me. And it's like Monopoly. So, you buy houses, and then boom, you put the hotel. So, one of my long-term goals is, has always been to own hotels and we are about to, we've looked at a couple, I think we're about to go on the contract with one. It's 38 keys cuz that's the language in hotel. So, it's 38 doors equivalent to 38 doors. So, it's 38 keys. Its small hotel here in the Poconos, but it's the locations amazing. The locations across the street from a casino, from Mount Airy casino. Here in, in the Poconos and it's close to the ski resorts. It's like the strategy. We did the numbers and we're talking about 173% return on investment to our investors when we raised that capital. It's an amazing deal where we don't have on the contract yet, but by the time this podcast comes out, it should be on the contract. 08:35 Sam Wilson: Man, that's awesome. I love that. I love that. What are you doing with it? Are you gonna turn it into? A lot of not a lot of, but many guests who come on the show that are buying hotels, are doing like the Airbnb model, getting rid of the front desk. They're making it keyless. They're going to... 08:50 Martin Perdomo: Yeah, so we're toying around with that idea because we're in the Poconos. So, Poconos is a very resorty vacation area, so it's perfect. It's across street from the casino. We're toying around with that idea. You know, we have an affordable housing crisis across the whole country. 09:04 There's no different here, right? We're thinking about creating some extended stay. We're toying around with that idea, but that's the primary right now, what we're thinking is creating it into an experience type of hotel. And what I mean by that is partnering up with a bus company that'll bus people into: Hey, the ski resort, bring you back to the hotel, take you to the casino, take you to the indoor water park that we have here. Just kind of making it that hub. But not the price of Camelback where they have the indoor waterpark and all that stuff, right? But uh, kind of, that's what we're envisioning right now as we're in the beginning stages of that particular deal. 09:38 Sam Wilson: That's really cool. Let's talk about how you are finding opportunities. There's, each of these channels has their own unique acquisition strategy, you know? 09:49 Martin Perdomo: Yes, sir. 09:50 Sam Wilson: So how are you having such a diverse asset? Or such diversified assets that you're investing in and then finding opportunity in a meaningful way? 09:58 Martin Perdomo: So that's a really great question. I do multiple things. First thing is, we have our own marketing channel. All our properties, we buy 'em off market. Everything's off market. We do it through mailers. We don't do a lot of mailers, but yet we do. We have a television commercial, just gives us local branding recognition. We get a lot of calls from there. I'm actually hosting tonight, my every other month meetup. So, I host a meetup and I fill the room with investors and I just educate and empower and help, you know, just give, I give, I like to give. This is why I do things like this. I like to give and help others come up. And through that means it just kind of gives us that credibility and they know we're real buyers cuz there's a lot of pretenders out there. As you know, Sam, there's a lot of guys: "Oh, I'm a buyer". And we have a broker channel. We have relationships. Just through the year that I built through all the stuff that I do: the meetups, the advertising, just I'm very involved. This is what I do. I do this. Every day, all day, every day, 24/7 a week, brother. This is all I do is real estate. We've got multiple angles and multiple things that we work on. Property managers bring us deals, brokers bring us deals, wholesalers bring us deals. We have our own marketing that bring us deals. So, we are just constantly letting people know we're buying. And if you're doing something you gotta let the world know that you're doing it. Right. You're doing something. "Hey, this is what I'm doing. You're raising money. "Hey, I'm looking to help people, get above average return on their investments, right? You gotta let people know what you're doing. You gotta take action. 11:29 Sam Wilson: I love that. 11:30 Martin Perdomo: You gotta take action. I like the old saying of ready, fire, aim. Just ready, action, and then readjust and aim again and adjust accordingly. 11:39 Sam Wilson: That's awesome. Tell me about the TV commercial. That is not a medium that many people are utilizing today. How do you calculate return on investment on that? 11:51 Martin Perdomo: That's an amazing question. And before we did it, we toyed around with that. And the thing is, that really gets us deals for our single-family distress owners. And it's very strategic. We're very strategic in where we advertise, what TV channels we advertise on, and who is it that's watching what we're selling, right? And we advertise on like the Jerry Springers of the world shows. The court tv, daytime shows. Right? Well, who's watching those? The people that are distressed, they're going through a divorce, people that are losing that don't have a job or, and we advertise day at night, right? Third shift people. So, we're very specific on the demographics and who we're getting in front of, you know, maybe grandma, grandpa that's got that old house that's falling apart or it's got that old 10-unit apartment building that they no longer can handle. And here's this guy on TV saying: "Hey, we'll buy it 21 days or less, or we'll give you an extra $5,000, regardless of the condition". 12:45 Sam Wilson: And that, that's the demographic. I guess that was gonna be my follow up question is who's the demographic who you're shooting for? And... 12:52 Martin Perdomo: Yeah, that's the demographics for that's what's watching that, right? It's not, you know, guys like you and I are not watching Judge Judy. Let's be real, right? We're not watching Jerry Springer, right? We're working, we're hustling, we're running and we're leading our teams, and we're doing things differently. 13:05 Sam Wilson: Yeah. No, we are not watching either of those daytime TV shows. I wish it'd be nice to have that amount of free time to go, you know? But I wouldn't spend it doing that if I did have the free time. So regardless, I'm still not watching it. What about cost on that? I know that there is no cost when advertising works, right? It's a return on investment is what you're really looking for. But I am really curious, like when you look at that and before you launched into it, was it a tough pill to swallow to say: "Man, we gotta shell out X number of dollars for a TV commercial? 13:35 Martin Perdomo: It was not cuz I just believe in investing in my business. It's just: " Hey, I'm gonna invest in my business no matter what". I processed it when I looked at it, I processed. I said: "This makes sense". And this is a model that's working for the other investors across the country. And then when I looked at the numbers, it made even more sense. I got one of my invoices and I'm looking at the invoice, gives me the time and what channel it plays and what I'm paying for that slot. 32nd slot. I mean, I am blessed brother because of where I'm located. I'm not in Philadelphia or the New York City market. I'm like kind of in between. And so, the slots that I'm paying $15 for a 32nd commercial. Dude. I know some late-night ones I'm paying $5; some I'm paying $35. In other slots, I'm paying $50 depending on the show and the slots. So, I'm looking at it and I'm saying, hey man, what does it cost me to pay per click, right? What does it cost me on the PPC leads. The PPC leads, because I do that too, those things cost me. I'm bidding, right? That's my money's going up. I gotta bid a dollar amount that I bid every day, and when I use it, it's over. I'm like: "Hey, wait a minute. If I'm gonna spend $5 in a commercial on the low end, $50 on the high end". Depending, I got commercials from $5, $15 and $35 and $50. I'm like: "This makes sense". And not only that, but I get the credibility in the community like: "Hey, these guys are the real deal". If they're on TV, they must be doing something right. It's the psychology of what people think. And when my sales guys show up, their life is so much easier, right? Cause hey, we got you from the TV there. They're not competing with wholesalers. It's my guys show up and if there's a deal to be done, we're gonna do the deal. So, the cost is not cost prohibitive. However, I did want to go into other markets closer to the Philly market. Lehigh Valley area, which is closer to the Philly market. And now it starts getting whoa, really expensive per spot. $350 per spot. And again, I'm just, you know, in the right location for what we're doing. 15:33 Sam Wilson: Right. 15:35 Martin Perdomo: But again, I mean if, let's say that ad ran 15 times at 400 bucks a slot. That's, let's call it six grand you went out the door and you closed one good deal out of it. Yeah, so I did the numbers. The numbers for us. I could tell you; I don't mind sharing this. The numbers because of my market, my demographics, the numbers wind up being somewhere close to six grand a month. After it's all said and done, I'm probably in $95,000 a year. But if I do a couple flips and like we make usually our return on our investment in the first quarter for the year. Like we know how to run the numbers. We know the market; we understand interest rates are going up. So, we know, if we're buying a property to flip. In this economy, we're not buying anything that ARVs over 300. We want to stay low for affordability, cuz we're always gonna move that product. And then, we're always picking up stuff. We're always adding to our portfolio. So, we pick up through that commercial, a 10 unit, a 15 unit, cuz a grandma will watch us or the grandson is gonna watch us with grandma and say: "Hey grandma, we gotta call that guy cuz that apartment building you have is falling apart. We need to sell it". 16:37 I Sam Wilson: It's brilliant. I love it. You know, the other thing I love about that is that it separates you from everyone else. And I always said that with pay per click, back when I was doing single family stuff, it was like I can outspend most of my wholesale competition. And while you might say on the front end, that doesn't make any sense. Well, like you said, you know, you're paying for that in the first quarter. I remember my pay per click budget. I did single family 2018, and in the first 30 days I'd already paid for my years budgeting with pay per click. It was like, I can outspend you and that puts me the front of the pack over everybody else because I can do that. And it's a different medium. This is a very different medium as well, so you're separating yourself both by medium type and by the amount of money you can devote to actually advertising on that front. So that's really, really cool. Martin, before we sign off here, I do want to hear about your podcast. Why you started it and just gimme a little bit of insight on that. 17:32 Martin Perdomo: So, for me, I'm a big personal development guy. I'm a big mindset guy. I believe that success is 80% mindset and 20% skill set, and that's combined is a hundred percent success. And for me, coming up I realized that once I shifted my mindset right from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset and that's a loaded statement. But once I shifted my mindset from one to the other, my life changed. And that's when I really started celebrating my growth. And I really started making bigger and power moves. And I've always, the purpose of my life is to empower others to be the best version of themselves. So, while I love real estate. I love the game. I love what I do. I really do. And I also host a podcast, cuz I wanna help other people come up. I really want to wholeheartedly like: "Hey man, you can do this too". If a poor guy like me from the ghetto and the hood in Washington Heights in New York City can come from nothing and do this. So can anyone else! If you are not, if you are really determined and you wanna, and you work on yourself, and you work on your mindset and you work on your skill set, you can do it right? Everything about: "Oh, I don't have enough money". It's a limiting belief. Who says you need your money. That's all limiting belief. It's just, go get educated, listen to podcasts like this. Listen to Sam, listen to podcasts like mine. Go and listen to other smart people that are doing it. Gather the information. Take action. Then adjust. Ready, fire, aim. Right? Take action to adjust. So, it's because I just love to empower and help others. I'm hosting my meet up tonight. That thing takes me five hours out of my day. Five, six hours. I gotta go set up at the church, cuz I host it at the church. I gotta go set up, prepare the content, write all this stuff, and it's It takes a lot of work to do. But it's more fulfilling to me when I see that guy that does his first deal and they're like: "Martin, thank you cuz you shared that and you showed me this and you showed me that". Man, that fills me. 19:31 Sam Wilson: Right. That's really... 19:33 Martin Perdomo: It's all worth it when like I see others like helping others and others are coming up. 19:38 Sam Wilson: Martin, I absolutely love it. If our listeners wanna get in touch with you or learn more about you, what is the best way to do that? 19:43 Martin Perdomo: Yeah, they could just go to Latinos and Real Estate Investing podcast, check out my podcast or check out my YouTube. I'm constantly putting out vlogs out on my projects and what's going on. I literally just walked from one of my projects up to the road here. My roofers are putting on the roof and that property I just bought. So, I'm constantly putting up content, giving people the real deal, right? On my channel, YouTube channel. I give people the real deal. I tell you the truth about evictions and what really happens. I give it to you all straight. Construction workers, what really happens with them if you're not, if you're not doing it the right way, they will kill you. They will hurt your business if you know them. 20:16 Sam Wilson: Right, right. 20:17 Martin Perdomo: You know, they can check out my YouTube: The Elite Strategist. Or my podcast: Latinos and Real Estate Investing podcast. Or Instagram. I'm on Instagram and Facebook. "The Elite Strategist. They can let me up there too. 20:26 Sam Wilson: Awesome. Martin, thank you so much for coming the show today. I certainly appreciate it. 20:30 Martin Perdomo: Thank you brother. I appreciate you! 20:32 Outro: Hey, thanks for listening to the How to Scale Commercial Real Estate Podcast. If you can, do me a favor and subscribe and leave us a review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Podcast, whatever platform it is you use to listen. If you can do that for us, that would be a fantastic help to the show. It helps us both attract new listeners as well as rank hire on those directories. So, appreciate you listening. Thanks so much and hope to catch you on the next episode.
Tim Westbrook is the Founder and CEO of Camelback Recovery, a mental health clinic and addiction treatment center in Phoenix, Arizona. Tim had struggled with a substance addiction that eventually affected every area of his life. Through his journey out of addiction and into recovery, Tim brings strength and hope to those who want lifelong sobriety. He is also the Host of the I Love Being Sober podcast where he goes into detail on recovery and addiction treatment. In this episode… Drug addiction is a killer. The sooner people get real help, the faster they can begin their journey to recovery and better health. Most people are aware of the standard recovery process, but there are many levels of treatment a person should go through to get their life back. Unfortunately, not many know what the journey to recovery entails. So how do you find the right resources you need for you or a loved one? What should you expect from the process? Listen to this Inspired Insider episode with Dr. Jeremy Weisz, featuring the CEO and Founder of Camelback Recovery, Tim Westbrook. They discuss Tim's journey into and out of addiction, the struggle of getting and staying sober, how to win after sober living, and much more!
This special episode chronicles the weeks leading up to the fall of Roe v. Wade on June 24th, 2022. In Tulsa, a newly equipped clinic has a sudden, drastic decline in patients seeking abortion care as a total ban on abortion at conception takes effect Oklahoma. Dr. Diane Horvath, a traveling abortion doctor, flies to Montgomery, AL, to perform her final abortion procedures before it is criminalized. In Texas, Drs. Curtis and Glenna Boyd, a dynamic husband-and-wife duo who have played a huge role in providing reproductive choice for decades, grapple with the possible closure of their Dallas clinic on the day Roe falls and how they will comfort their staff. We hear from clinic directors, nurses, and staff in TX, AZ, NM, AL, TN, and LA as they express their rage, disappointment, and heartbreak about Roe's reversal after nearly 50 years as a constitutional right, and what the future may hold for reproductive freedom in the U.S.Visit CTLpod.com to find out more about the podcast, resources for abortion care, and information on how you can take action.Thank you to the Co-Directors of the Southwestern Women's Surgery Center Dr. Curtis Boyd and Dr. Glenna Boyd, the Tulsa Women's Clinic Founder Dr. Alan Braid and Exec Director Andrea Gallegos, and nurse Tiffany Taylor, Dr. Diane Horvath, Patient Advocate Becky at the Knoxville Center for Reproductive Health, Dr. Goodrick and her staff at Camelback and to Planned Parenthood. Special thanks to all those who have shared their stories with us. Some names and voices were changed to protect identities.Since this episode was recorded, Roe v. Wade was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. The changing legal landscape in Arizona means that some providers are changing or pausing their operations. Go to AbortionFinder.org to get up-to-date information on where to access an abortion. Go to Plan C Pills to learn how to access abortion pills. Explore National Abortion Funds to inquire about funding support and Planned Parenthood's Ban Off our Bodies to get involved.This podcast is brought to you by Population Media Center. Executive Producers are Lisa Caruso and Alex Demyanenko, with Co-Producer Kathleen Bedoya and Associate Producer Dominica Ruelas. This episode was field produced by Joanna Friedman and Charity Tooze, edited by Lynn Hughes with production services provided by Pidge Productions. Production coordination is by June Neely. Charity Tooze leads impact strategy. The narration is by Tatiana St. Phard. Original music is composed by Valeri Ortiz.
On this episode of Shawna and LaLa, the girls talk all about their weekend getaway to Camelback Resort in the Pocono's Pennsylvania. Camelback Resort is best known for their indoor and outdoor water parks in the summer and skiing in the Winter. It is a fantastic place for a family getaway of all ages! For more information visit our website. #shawnaandlala #CamelbackResort #weekendgetaway #poconosPennsylvania #getaway #familygetaway
Camelback Family Planning Clinic in Phoenix, Arizona, has been operating since 1999 but recently started to receive a surge of abortion-seeking patients due to increased restrictions on reproductive healthcare access in nearby states. The clinic doesn't take appointments - it's first-come, first-serve, with a daily line that extends around the modest brick and glass building. Many mornings, patients line up as early as 5 a.m. in hopes of securing one of that day's walk-in appointments. Samira*, 39, is one of them. A mother of two, Samira, flew from Texas to Arizona to get an abortion due to a fetal anomaly which made the pregnancy unviable. Despite the risk, doctors in Texas refused to perform the procedure. Following her ultrasound, nurses and staff at Camelback pivot into immediate action to get Samira the abortion care she needs.Visit CTLpod.com to find out more about the podcast, resources for abortion care, and information on how you can take action. Thank you to Camelback Family Planning Clinic's founder Dr. Gabrielle Goodrick and Dr. Sarah Valliere, Ashleigh Feiring, the clinic nurses, patient advocates, and other Camelback staff, as well as Executive Director of Pro-Choice Arizona, Eloisa Lopez, and Planned Parenthood. Special thanks to Samira, her family, and all who shared their stories with us. Some names and voices were changed to protect identities.Since this episode was recorded, Roe v. Wade was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. The changing legal landscape in Arizona means that some providers are changing or pausing their operations. Go to AbortionFinder.org to get up-to-date information on where to access an abortion. Go to Plan C Pills to learn how to access abortion pills. Explore National Abortion Funds to inquire about funding support and Planned Parenthood's Ban Off our Bodies to get involved. This podcast is brought to you by Population Media Center. Executive Producers are Lisa Caruso and Alex Demyanenko, with Co-Producer Kathleen Bedoya and Associate Producer Dominica Ruelas. This episode was field produced by Joanna Friedman with production services provided by Pidge Productions. Production coordination is by June Neely, and Charity Tooze leads impact strategy. The narration is by Tatiana St. Phard. Original music is composed by Valeri Ortiz.*Indicates name change
To support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on June 25. Free subscribers got it on June 28. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription.WhoRusty Gregory, CEO of Alterra Mountain Company, owner of the Ikon PassRecorded onJune 23, 2022About Alterra Mountain CompanyOwned by: KSL Capital and Henry Crown and CompanyAbout the Ikon PassHere’s a breakdown of all the ski areas that are party to Alterra’s Ikon Pass:Why I interviewed himIn its first five years, Alterra has gotten just about everything right – or about as right as any ski company can as it Starfoxes its way through an asteroid belt filled with Covid and empowered workers and shattered supply chains and The Day After Tomorrow weather patterns and an evolving social fabric and the sudden realization by U.S. Americans that there’s such a thing as outside. The company changed the name of one of America’s iconic resorts, managed a near meltdown of its Pacific Northwest anchor, met Covid as well as it could, and continually tweaked Ikon Pass access tiers to avoid overwhelming partner mountains while still offering skiers good value. Oh, and adding Sun Valley, Snowbasin, Chamonix, Dolomiti Superski, Kitzbühel, Schweitzer, Red Mountain, Mt. Bachelor, and Windham to the pass – all since Covid hit.If it’s all seemed a little improvisational and surprising, that’s because it has been. “I have a great propensity for enjoying chaos and anarchy,” Gregory tells me in the podcast. That explains a lot. In the frantic weeks after Covid zipped North American skiing shut in March 2020, angry skiers demanded concessions for lost spring skiing. Vail released, all at once, an encyclopedic Epic Pass credit plan, which metered discounts based upon number of days skied and introduced an “Epic Coverage” program that secured your investment in the event of everything from a Covid resurgence to the death of a beloved houseplant. Alterra, meanwhile, spun its plan together in four dispatches weeks apart – a renewal discount here, a deferral policy there, an extension six weeks later. “We’re continuing to strengthen our offerings,” Gregory told me on the podcast mid-way through this staggered rollout.In other words, Dude, just chill. We’ll get it right. Whether they ultimately did or not – with their Covid response or anything else – is a bit subjective. But I think they’ve gotten more right than wrong. There was nothing inevitable about Alterra or the Ikon Pass. Vail launched the Epic Pass in 2008. It took a decade for the industry to come up with an effective response. The Mountain Collective managed to gather all the best indies into a crew, but its reach was limited, with just two days at each partner. M.A.X. Pass, with five days per partner, got closer, but it was short on alpha mountains such as Jackson Hole or Snowbird (it did feature Big Sky, Copper, Steamboat, and Winter Park) and wasn’t a season pass to any ski area. The Ikon Pass knitted together an almost impossible coalition of competitors into a coherent product that was an actual Epic Pass equal. Boyne, Powdr, and the ghosts of Intrawest joining forces was a bit like the Mets and the Red Sox uniting to take on the Yankees. It was – and is – an unlikely coalition of competitors fused around a common cause.The Ikon Pass was a great idea. But so was AOL-Time Warner – or so it seemed at the time. But great things, combined, do not always work. They can turn toxic, backfire, fail. Five years in, Alterra and Ikon have, as Gregory tells me, “dramatically exceeded our expectations in every metric for the fifth year in a row.” While Rusty is allergic to credit, he deserves a lot. He understands how complex and unruly and unpredictable skiing and the ski industry is. He came up under the tutelage of the great and feisty Dave McCoy, founder of the incomparable and isolated Mammoth Mountain, that snowy California kingdom that didn’t give a damn what anyone else was doing. He understood how to bring people together while allowing them to exist apart. That’s not easy. I can’t get 10 people to agree to a set of rules at a tailgate cornhole tournament (the beer probably doesn’t help). Everyone who loves the current version of lift-served skiing – which can deliver a skier to just about any chairlift in the United States on a handful of passes (and that’s definitely not all of you), and has inspired an unprecedented wave of ski area re-investment – owes Gregory at least a bit of gratitude.What we talked aboutThe accidental CEO; Alterra’s “first order of business was to do no harm”; Rusty’s mindset when the Ikon Pass launched; the moment when everyone began believing that the Ikon Pass would work; reflections on the first five years of Alterra and Ikon; the challenges of uniting far-flung independent ski areas under one coalition; “every year we have to make the effort to stay together”; the radically idiosyncratic individualism of Dave McCoy; what it means that Ikon has never lost a partner – “there’s no points in life for losing friends”; Alterra doesn’t like the Ikon Base Plus Pass either; Covid shutdown PTSD; the long-term impact of Covid on skiing and the world; the risks of complacency around the Covid-driven outdoor boom; why Alterra’s next CEO, Jared Smith, comes from outside the ski industry; how the Ikon Pass and Alterra needs to evolve; preserving the cultural quirks of individual mountains as Alterra grows and evolves under new leadership; “we dramatically exceeded our expectations in every metric for the fifth year in a row”; the importance of ceding local decisions to local resorts; “I have a great propensity for enjoying chaos and anarchy”; the current state of the labor market; Ikon Pass sales trends; “having too many people on the mountain at one time is not a great experience”; staying “maniacally guest-experience focused”; Crystal Mountain’s enormous pass price increase for next season; why Deer Valley and Alta moved off the Base Pass for next season; Mayflower, the resort coming online next to Deer Valley; the Ikon Session Pass as a gateway product; why Alterra pulled Mammoth, Palisades Tahoe, and Sugarbush off the Mountain Collective Pass; Sun Valley and Snowbasin joining Ikon; Ikon’s growing European network; whether Alterra would ever look to buy in Europe; “we’re making constant efforts” to sign new Ikon Pass partners; “we’re very interested in Pennsylvania”; I just won’t let the fact that KSL owns Blue and Camelback go; “Alterra needs to move at the right pace”; whether we will ever see more Ikon partners in the Midwest; why Alterra hasn’t bought a ski area since 2019; whether Alterra is bidding on Jay Peak; and thoughts on Rob Katz’s “growth NIMBYism” speech.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewGregory has been Alterra’s CEO for about four and a half years. That seems to be about four and a half years longer than he wanted the job. In 2017, he was enjoying retirement after four decades at Mammoth. As an investor in the nascent Alterra Mountain Company – a Frankenski made up of Mammoth, Palisades Tahoe, and the remains of Intrawest – he helped conduct a wide-reaching search for the company’s first CEO. He ended up with the job not through some deft power play but because the committee simply couldn’t find anyone else qualified to take it.His only plan, he said, was to do no harm. There are, as we have seen, plenty of ways to make multi-mountain ski conglomerates fail. Boyne alone has managed the trick over the extra long term (a fact that the company does not get nearly enough credit for). The years after Gregory took the job in February 2018 certainly tested whether Alterra and Ikon, as constructs, were durable beyond the stoke of first concept.They are. And he’s done. At 68, confined for the past half decade to a Denver office building, I get the sense that Gregory is ready to get away from his desk and back in the liftline (or maybe not – “I will be so pissed if I have to wait in a line,” he tells me on the podcast). He’s earned the break and the freedom. It’s someone else’s turn.That someone else, as we learned last month, will be Jared Smith, Alterra’s current president. Gregory will move into a vice chairman of the board role, a position that I suspect requires extensive on-the-ground snow reporting. Smith, who joined Alterra last year after nearly two decades with Live Nation/Ticketmaster, has plenty to prove. As I wrote in May:Gregory was the ultimate industry insider, a college football player-turned-liftie who worked at Mammoth for 40 years before taking the top job at Alterra in 2018. He’d been through the battles, understood the fickle nature of the ski biz, saved Mammoth from bankruptcy several times. Universally liked and respected, he was the ideal leader for Alterra’s remarkable launch, an aggressive and unprecedented union of the industry’s top non-Vail operators, wielding skiing’s Excalibur: a wintry Voltron called the Ikon Pass. That such disparate players – themselves competitors – not only came together but continued to join the Ikon Pass has no doubt been at least partly due to Gregory’s confidence and charisma.Smith came to Alterra last June after 18 years at Live Nation and Ticketmaster. I don’t know if he even skis. He is, by all accounts, a master of building products that knit consumers to experiences through technology. That’s a crucial skillset for Alterra, which must meet skiers on the devices that have eaten their lives. But technology won’t matter at all if the skiing itself suffers. Alterra has thrived as the anti-Vail, a conglomerate with an indie sheen. Will the Ikon Pass continue to tweak access levels to mitigate crowding? Will Alterra continue its mega-investments to modernize and gigantify its resorts? Can the company keep the restless coterie of Boyne, Powdr, Jackson Hole, Alta, Taos, A-Basin, Revelstoke, Red, and Schweitzer satisfied enough to stay united on a single pass? For Alterra, and for the Ikon Pass, these are the existential questions.I have been assured, by multiple sources, that Smith does, in fact, ski. And has an intuitive understanding of where consumers need to be, helping to transform Ticketmaster from a paper-based anachronism into a digital-first experience company. Covid helped accelerate skiing’s embrace of e-commerce. That, according to Gregory, is just the beginning. “Different times require different leadership, and Jared Smith is the right leader going forward,” Gregory tells me in the podcast.Alterra’s first five years were a proof of concept: can the Ikon Pass work? Yes. It works quite well. Now what? They’ve already thought of all the obvious things: buy more mountains, add more partners, play with discounts to make the thing attractive to loyalists and families. But how does Alterra sew the analogue joy that is skiing’s greatest pull into the digital scaffolding that’s hammering the disparate parts of our modern existence together? And how does it do that without compromising the skiing that must not suffer? Is that more difficult than getting Revelstoke and Killington and Taos to all suit up in the same jersey? It might be. But it was a good time to get Gregory on the line and see how he viewed the whole thing before he bounced.Questions I wish I’d askedEven though this went long, there were a bunch of questions I didn’t get to. I really wanted to ask how Alterra was approaching the need for more employee housing. I also wanted to push a little more on the $269 Steamboat lift tickets – like seriously there must be a better way. I also think blackout dates need to evolve as a crowding counter-measure, and Vail and Alterra both need to start thinking past holiday blackouts (as Indy has already done quite well). I’ve also been preoccupied lately with Alterra’s successive rolling out of megaprojects at Palisades Tahoe and Steamboat and Winter Park, and what that says about the company’s priorities. This also would have been a good time to check in on Alterra’s previously articulated commitments to diversity and the environment. These are all good topics, but Alterra has thus far been generous with access, and I anticipate ample opportunities to raise these questions with their leadership in the future.What I got wrongWell despite immense concentration and effort on my part, I finally reverted to my backwater roots and pronounced “gondola” as “gon-dole-ah,” a fact that is mostly amusing to my wife. Rusty and I vacillated between 61 million and 61.5 million reported U.S. skier visits last year. The correct number was 61 million. I also flip-flopped Vail’s Epic Pass sales number and stated at one point that the company had sold 1.2 million Epic Passes for the 2021-22 ski season. The correct number is 2.1 million – I did issue a midstream correction, but really you can’t clarify these things enough.Why you should consider an Ikon PassI feel a bit uncomfortable with the wording of this section header, but the “why you should ski X” section is a standard part of The Storm Skiing Podcast. I don’t endorse any one pass over any other – my job is simply to consider the merits and drawbacks of each. As regular readers know, pass analysis is a Storm pillar. But the Ikon Pass is uniquely great for a handful of reasons:An affordable kids’ pass. The Ikon Pass offers one of the best kids’ pass deals in skiing. Early-birds could have picked up a full Ikon Pass (with purchase of an adult pass) for children age 12 or under for $239. A Base Pass was $199. That’s insane. Many large ski areas – Waterville Valley, Mad River Glen – include a free kids pass with the purchase of an adult pass. But those are single-mountain passes. The Ikon lets you lap Stratton from your weekend condo, spend Christmas break at Snowbird, and do a Colorado tour over spring break. The bargain child’s pass is not as much of a differentiator as it once was – once Vail dropped Epic Pass prices last season, making the adult Epic Pass hundreds of dollars cheaper than an Ikon Pass, the adult-plus-kids pass equation worked out about the same for both major passes. Still, the price structures communicate plenty about Alterra’s priorities, and it’s an extremely strong message.A commitment to the long season. On April 23 this year, 21 Ikon partners still had lifts spinning. Epic passholders could access just nine resorts. That was a big improvement from the previous season, when the scorecard read 20-2 in favor of Ikon. Part of this is a coincidence – many of Alterra’s partners have decades-long histories of letting skiers ride out the snow: Killington, Snowbird, Arapahoe Basin, Sugarloaf. Others. But part of it is Alterra’s letting of big operational decisions to its individual resorts. If Crystal Mountain wants to stay open into June, Crystal Mountain stays open into June. If Stevens Pass has a 133-inch base on April 18… too bad. Closing day (in 2021) is April 18. The long season doesn’t matter to a lot of skiers. But to the ones it does matter to, it matters a lot. Alterra gets that.That lineup though… The Ikon Pass roster has been lights out from day one. But as the coalition has added partners, and as key mountains have migrated from Epic to Ikon, it has grown into the greatest collection of ski areas ever assembled. As I wrote in March:Whatever the reason is that Snowbasin and Sun Valley fled Epic, the ramifications for the North American multipass landscape are huge. So is Alterra’s decision to yank its two California flagships and its top-five New England resort off of the Mountain Collective. Those two moves gave the Ikon Pass the best top-to-bottom destination ski roster of any multi-mountain ski pass on the continent.Good arguments can still be made for the supremacy of the Epic Pass, which delivers seven days at Telluride and unlimited access to 10 North American megaresorts: Whistler, Northstar, Heavenly, Kirkwood, Park City, Crested Butte, Vail, Beaver Creek, Keystone, and Breckenridge, plus Stowe, one of the top two or three ski areas in the Northeast.But many of Vail’s ski areas are small and regionally focused. I like Hunter and Jack Frost and Roundtop and Mount Brighton, Michigan, and their value as businesses is unquestioned, both because they are busy and because they draw skiers from rich coastal and Midwestern cities to the Mountain West. But the Epic Pass’ 40-some U.S. and Canadian mountains are, as a group, objectively less compelling than Ikon’s.The Ikon Pass now delivers exclusive big-pass access to Steamboat, Winter Park, Copper Mountain, Palisades Tahoe, Mammoth, Crystal Washington, Red Mountain, Deer Valley, Solitude, and Brighton, as well as a killer New England lineup of Killington, Stratton, Sugarbush, Sunday River, and Loon. The pass also shares big-mountain partners with Mountain Collective: Alta, Arapahoe Basin, Aspen Snowmass, Banff Sunshine, Big Sky, Jackson Hole, Lake Louise, Revelstoke, Snowbasin, Snowbird, Sugarloaf, Sun Valley, and Taos. For pure fall-line thrills and rowdy, get-after-it terrain, there is just no comparison on any other pass.In large parts of America, it’s become impossible to imagine not buying an Ikon Pass. The lineup is just too good. Epic still makes more sense in many circumstances. But for the neutral party, aimed primarily for big-mountain destinations in a city not defined by access to a local, the Ikon is telling a damn good story.Podcast NotesRusty and I talked a bit about the huge jump in Crystal’s pass price for next season. Here’s a more comprehensive look that I wrote in March, based on conversations with Crystal CEO Frank DeBerry and a number of local skiers.We also discuss Mayflower Mountain Resort, which is to be built adjacent to Deer Valley. Here’s a bit more about that project, which could offer 4,300 acres on 3,000 vertical feet. The developers will have to overcome the ski area’s relatively low elevation, which will be compounded by Utah’s larger water issues.Rusty explained why Alterra pulled Palisades Tahoe, Mammoth, and Sugarbush off the Mountain Collective pass ahead of next ski season. Here were my initial thoughts on that move. A tribute to Mammoth Mountain founder Dave McCoy, who died in 2020 at age 104:Previous Storm Skiing Podcasts with Rusty or Ikon Pass mountain leadersThe Summit at Snoqualmie President & GM Guy Lawrence – April 20, 2022Arapahoe Basin COO Alan Henceroth – April 14, 2022Big Sky President & COO Taylor Middleton – April 6, 2022Solitude President & COO Amber Broadaway – March 5, 2022The Highlands at Harbor Springs President & GM Mike Chumbler – Feb. 18, 2022Steamboat President & COO & Alterra Central Region COO Rob Perlman – Dec. 9, 2021Jackson Hole President Mary Kate Buckley – Nov. 17, 2021Crystal Mountain, Washington President & CEO Frank DeBerry – Oct. 22, 2021Boyne Mountain GM Ed Grice – Oct. 19, 2021Mt. Buller, Australia GM Laurie Blampied – Oct. 12, 2021Aspen Skiing Company CEO Mike Kaplan – Oct. 1, 2021Taos Ski Valley CEO David Norden – Sept. 16, 2021Alterra CEO Rusty Gregory – March 25, 2021Sunday River GM Brian Heon – Feb. 10, 2021Windham President Chip Seamans – Jan. 31, 2021Sugarbush President & GM John Hammond – Nov. 2, 2020Sugarloaf GM Karl Strand – Part 2 – Sept. 30, 2020Sugarloaf GM Karl Strand – Part 1 – Sept. 25, 2020Palisades Tahoe President & COO Ron Cohen – Sept. 4, 2020Alterra CEO Rusty Gregory – May 5, 2020Boyne Resorts CEO Stephen Kircher – April 1, 2020Sunday River President & GM Dana Bullen – Feb. 14, 2020Loon Mountain President & GM Jay Scambio – Feb. 7, 2020Sugarbush President & COO Win Smith – Jan. 30, 2020Boyne Resorts CEO Stephen Kircher – Nov. 21, 2019Killington & Pico President & GM Mike Solimano – Oct. 13, 2019Future Storm Skiing Podcasts scheduled with Ikon Pass mountainsBoyne Resorts CEO Stephen Kircher – September 2022Sun Valley VP & GM Pete Sonntag – September 2022The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 69/100 in 2022, and number 315 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane). You can also email skiing@substack.com. Please be patient - my response may take a while. 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
Holmberg's Morning Sickness - Opening Break - Friday June 24, 2022
6PM @ The Newton in Phoenix, AZ at 3rd Ave and Camelback. Tickets at the $10 door. http://www.thenewtonphx.com/ Has your Milky Way gone Oat? Is your Kuiper Belt feeling tight? ? Is Uranus losing its luster? Come see the Never Rad Miscellany Live at The Newton Phoenix, Formerly Beefeaters at 300 W. Camelback, Monday June […]
Micro-dosing psilocybin despite the insufferable overtones. Probiotics but not just any Yoplait strain. JN did the research on NCBI. Sub-perceptual benefits don't sell. Butterflies in the stomach, preserving energy, and anti-climactic repulsion. Bats in the hotel room and the Tetanus man. The Camelback and Drunk Elephant BabyFacial. Motility. . . . . . This episode was edited and engineered by C. Tweedie. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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