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"I don't want to just read names and countries the whole time. That gets boring. I like to talk to runners, too. 'If this is your first New York City Marathon, throw your hands in the air!' And then half the hands go up, and you're like, 'Oh my gosh, this is so amazing!' I don't know why after all this time I'm still surprised they're listening to me!" Even if you don't know her name or her face, you probably know her voice. Karla Bruning is one of the longtime announcers and emcees for the New York Road Runners, and has been hyping up runners at the New York City Marathon since 2010, when she not only ran the race for the first time, but also sang the National Anthem at the start! In this conversation, Karla talks about how she has become one of the voices of the TCS New York City Marathon, and what the road to life on the mic has looked like. In addition to being a marathoner, a triathlete, a mom, a wife, a journalist, and a race announcer and event emcee, Karla and her husband also own Dovetail and Co., a hotel group with seven properties in locations including Bermuda, Waikiki, the Catskills, and Newport, RI. Life is good for Karla, who is booked, booking, and busy! FOLLOW KARLA @runkarlarun SPONSOR: New Balance. Click here to get your hands on the just-released SC Rebel. You're going to love it! IN THIS EPISODE: What's making Karla happy today, and what she's into right now (4:05) How Karla's spends her days off the run (8:00) Karla's road to becoming a race announcer at the New York City Marathon (14:15) What it was like singing the National Anthem at the New York City Marathon start line in 2010, and how Karla started working races after that (19:30) All about being a start line announcer, and what runners don't see (24:20) The view from the New York City Marathon finish line, and what it takes to be a finish line announcer (27:50) On learning how to pronounce all those names (37:45) Karla's most memorable finish line moments (41:30) Karla's jam-packed marathon week schedule (45:30) The parts of the job that Karla says are the most stressful (53:40) Karla's take on the changing landscape at finish lines (1:02:50) On Karla's relationship with running right now (1:05:35) Karla's advice for this year's New York City Marathoners (1:09:20) Follow Ali: Instagram @aliontherun1 Subscribe to the newsletter Join the Facebook group Support on Patreon SUPPORT the Ali on the Run Show! If you're enjoying the show, please subscribe and leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. Spread the run love. And if you liked this episode, share it with your friends!
A special election is being held by the Narrowsburg Fire District to get permission to sell some equipment. Veterans, families and community members have come together for a Veterans Brunch hosted by Hospice of Orange & Sullivan Counties.Ten people have arrested as part of a statewide sting for drug trafficking including in Ulster and Orange counties. A unique art installation is opening at the Liberty Mall. Jim Sabastian of Mid-Hudson News has the story.
AGREEMENT IS THE FOUNDATION OF A FUNCTIONAL RELATIONSHIP1. If you want to lead your relationship as a man, your foundational drive needs to be to create Agreement within your relationship unit.2. This means, don't bring people into your relationship unit who are not interested in coming into Agreement with you.3. Contentious women are bad relationship partners.*********************4. Any voices and influences in your life that are driving a wedge between men and women coming into Agreement are poisonous to your relationship harmony.5. Any voices and influences simply stirring you up into the energy of discontentment and antagonism are sabotaging your relationship mastery. Please note, even these darker forces are working to bring you into Agreement with THEM. *********************6. Being a great partner to our partner involves us coming into deeper Agreement with our partner's true nature.7. Becoming a better lover to our partners involves understanding and coming into Agreement with our partner's erotic makeup.*********************8. At the spiritual level, wisdom is in coming into Agreement with life and the shape of the present moment.*********************9. At the interpersonal level, the more we associate with people we cannot come into Agreement with, the more discordant and antagonistic our life energies will become. The more we associate with people with whom we are invested in creating Agreement, the more harmonious our lives will be.*********************10. Building greater things in life requires a greater level of Agreement between people. Building a 10-story building requires that we first know how to build a 1-story building well. Discord and disagreement are the equivalent of never being able to successfully build even a 1-story building. Building anything greater with such a person becomes impossible. Our relationships keep going through the same cycle of deterioration soon after starting. Such a life becomes a ledger of failed relationships of discord. Unfortunately, this is how most people's lives look today.*********************OBISIDIAN. October 4-8, 2026. Catskills, NYCOURSE PAGE : https://omrupani.org/obsidian/*******************COUPLES' COURSE. Dominican Republic. November 12-17, 2026COURSE PAGE : https://omrupani.org/dscouples*******************SUBMISSIVE WOMAN - SELF STUDY COURSE : https://www.omrupani.com/spaces/18894018/contentwww.OmRupani.org
A raccoon in the town of Delhi has tested positive for rabies.Villa Roma, the resort in Callicoon had their electricity turned back on. Bar Veloce in Narrowsburg is still closed due to code violations though. Super Bowl MVP Ottis "OJ" Anderson volunteers at the Regional Food Bank.
PODCAST - Creating the Dominant ManOBISIDIAN. October 4-8, 2026. Catskills, NYCOURSE PAGE : https://omrupani.org/obsidian/*******************COUPLES' COURSE. Dominican Republic. November 12-17, 2026COURSE PAGE : https://omrupani.org/dscouples*******************SUBMISSIVE WOMAN - SELF STUDY COURSE : https://www.omrupani.com/spaces/18894018/contentwww.OmRupani.org
A woman in Ellenville has been arrested related to the death of her daughter.The fight goes on to keep the Sullivan County Adult Care Center open. Not paying electric gets you cut off by NYSEG. ((Last Monday the utility company sent trucks to the Villa Roma Resort and Conference Center and cut service due to unpaid electric bills)).The Sullivan County Partnership for Economic Development has announced they're honoring the president and CEO of the Center for Discovery Dr. Theresa Hamlin with the 2026 Walter A. Rhulen Award.
The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast thinks that yelling “PIZZA!” and “FRENCH FRY!” at a 2-year-old superman straightlining down a green slope is a highly effective ski instruction technique. If you agree, please sign up for my newsletter:WhoBrian Bensch, founder of Snow SchoolersDate recordedSeptember 24, 2026About Snow SchoolersSnow Schoolers, per its website, is an “independent ski school program” that teaches lessons “at any mountain where we've established a revenue-sharing partnership with the ski area.” Skiers sign up for lessons on their Pet Rectangles, like this:Why I interviewed himThat sounds pretty neat, right? Let me go see if Snow Schoolers teaches at my favorite mountain. Snow Schoolers probably does not teach at your favorite mountain. Unless your favorite mountain is 222-vertical-foot Granlibakken, which is about five feet away from 6,000-acre Palisades Tahoe, or 100 vertical-foot Frisco Adventure Park, tucked off highway 9, after 1.5 million-ish skiers exit I-70 on their way to nearby Breckenridge.That is not an indictment of small ski areas, which I love, or Snow Schoolers' business model, which I also love. Rather, it's my way of saying that the only way to sign up for ski school at Palisades Tahoe or Breckenridge is through Palisades Tahoe or Breckenridge. With the strange, grandfathered-in exception of the strange, cobbled-together ski bazaar that is Summit at Snoqualmie in Washington, all major American ski areas (so far as I know) operate with a monopoly over ski school operations on their property. In ways subtle and aggressive, they police and ban rogue instructors who would offer discounted lessons on resort property.There are probably ways to break this system, either through the courts or legislative amendment of the Forest Service leases that 125 U.S. ski areas operate on. Such change sounds radical only in an American context - most European ski areas already operate with multiple independent competing ski schools onsite. Over the past 20 years, technology has challenged monopolies across American commerce. Sports and concert tickets and taxi rides offer two prime examples of power shifting from one central operator to many operators, with benefits and drawbacks for the consumer. Perhaps we will get there with ski school. For now, I see a more practical path for an asset-light, app-based, independent ski school like Snow Schoolers - as the costs of labor, utilities, infrastructure, and insurance pile up, perhaps outsourcing the operation of a ski school is more practical for many smaller, independent ski areas than establishing and maintaining one of their own. That is what you get at Granlibakken and Frisco: Snow Schoolers pays the ski areas a share of each lesson, essentially as rent for the right to operate a ski school on their property. And Granlibakken and Friso don't have to worry about hiring instructors and organizing lessons. There are probably 100 under-resourced ski areas in America where this model could work tomorrow. Brian and I discuss why Snow Schoolers works where it does, and why the model has been slow to spread.TranscriptsThere are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them.Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer. Because I don't know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment.Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio.ZoomStuart Winchester: My guest today founded Snowschoolers in 2014 with the mission to make skiing and riding affordable and accessible for average Americans.00:16:06.000 --> 00:16:11.000Stuart Winchester: and to pay snow sports pros a sustainable living wage.00:16:11.000 --> 00:16:19.000Stuart Winchester: Today, Snowschoolers operates at Grand Lebakken in Lake Tahoe, and Frisco Adventure Park in Colorado, two small ski areas.00:16:19.000 --> 00:16:36.000Stuart Winchester: Last year, Snow Schoolers hosted approximately 6,000 students. He is a good friend of the Storm. He is Brian Bench. Brian, welcome to the Storm. You reached out to me very shortly after I launched in 2019 or 20, and we've been talking for years, and you've helped me out a lot.00:16:36.000 --> 00:16:38.000Stuart Winchester: With the…00:16:38.000 --> 00:16:45.000Stuart Winchester: digital side of things, which I'm not so good at, so it's awesome to finally get you on and talk some snow schoolers. How you doing today?00:16:44.000 --> 00:16:48.000Brian Bensch: Doing lovely. Can't complain. Always busy, never bored.00:16:46.000 --> 00:16:52.000Stuart Winchester: And that is… yeah, that is a picture out your window of Tahoe, right?00:16:51.000 --> 00:17:00.000Brian Bensch: Yes, that is a, it's called Maggie's Peak, but that's looking at the little lake just next to Emerald Bay.00:16:55.000 --> 00:16:57.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:17:00.000 --> 00:17:05.000Stuart Winchester: Okay, which would be sort of north side of the lake, so you'd be looking…00:17:02.000 --> 00:17:03.000Brian Bensch: Oh.00:17:03.000 --> 00:17:08.000Brian Bensch: South Tahoe, kind of on the other side of the corner, like, across from Heavenly.00:17:08.000 --> 00:17:18.000Stuart Winchester: Oh, south, right? I was… I was backwards. So… so on the… up the left side, there would be Homewood, and then up the right side would be Heavenly and Diamond Peak, and at the top is, like.00:17:09.000 --> 00:17:10.000Brian Bensch: Yeah.00:17:13.000 --> 00:17:15.000Brian Bensch: Correct.00:17:18.000 --> 00:17:19.000Brian Bensch: Mostly correct.00:17:18.000 --> 00:17:26.000Stuart Winchester: Or North Star? North Star, Northwood. Okay, alright, uh, before I hurt myself, let's just get into this. So, so Brian.00:17:24.000 --> 00:17:28.000Brian Bensch: Well, we'll get you out to Tahoe soon enough, and then your Tahoe geography will get.00:17:26.000 --> 00:17:31.000Stuart Winchester: It's been a minute. So…00:17:32.000 --> 00:17:40.000Stuart Winchester: What is broken about American ski schools, and how did you try to fix it with snow schoolers?00:17:39.000 --> 00:17:45.000Brian Bensch: Yeah. So I would say similar to, you know.00:17:45.000 --> 00:17:49.000Brian Bensch: The the general diatribe about, you know.00:17:49.000 --> 00:17:55.000Brian Bensch: The ski industry being kind of broken with lift tickets too expensive and climate change is gonna end the world.00:17:55.000 --> 00:18:07.000Brian Bensch: Not everything is broken, but particularly the most front and center in your face resorts that you know everyone hears about, and you know, makes the quote unquote mainstream news has been broken for a while.00:18:07.000 --> 00:18:15.000Brian Bensch: And, you know, the gist is, if you roll up to, you know, a Tier 1 destination resort.00:18:15.000 --> 00:18:16.000Brian Bensch: Brooke, uh…00:18:16.000 --> 00:18:32.000Brian Bensch: Not only is lift ticket price what it is, but if you are looking for a group lesson, you're looking at a couple 100 bucks. And if you're looking for a private lesson, you're lucky if you can find anything that is under 1000 today. When we started Snow Schoolers, I remember telling people like, you know, a private lesson is $700 or $800.00:18:32.000 --> 00:18:35.000Brian Bensch: Well, now it's roughly double that.00:18:35.000 --> 00:18:51.000Brian Bensch: And I started teaching skiing back in college at the Dartmouth Skiway shout out to Mark and the team there, and you know I thought it was the best job ever making 12 bucks an hour in college, but it is still a minimum wage hourly job.00:18:51.000 --> 00:18:55.000Brian Bensch: Despite the high margins that resorts take.00:18:54.000 --> 00:18:59.000Stuart Winchester: Okay, wait, wait, let's, let's pause right there. So over a thousand a day for a lesson.00:18:59.000 --> 00:19:07.000Stuart Winchester: patrollers are making… I think at the Tier 1 resorts, they're probably making more than minimum wage. I think it's probably more in… at least in the 20s.00:19:07.000 --> 00:19:10.000Brian Bensch: Yeah, the, the, go ahead.00:19:07.000 --> 00:19:09.000Stuart Winchester: Plus tips, but, but.00:19:09.000 --> 00:19:19.000Stuart Winchester: Still, right, so you figure it's $1,200 a day for a lesson, and the instructor's getting, you know, $150 of that, or something. What… why…00:19:19.000 --> 00:19:23.000Stuart Winchester: Why does that model even exist? Like, who would even do that?00:19:24.000 --> 00:19:25.000Brian Bensch: Out.00:19:26.000 --> 00:19:28.000Brian Bensch: Because…00:19:26.000 --> 00:19:31.000Stuart Winchester: Like, who would work for that? Like, when you, right? Like, why not just give your own lessons?00:19:28.000 --> 00:19:29.000Brian Bensch: Yeah.00:19:29.000 --> 00:19:44.000Brian Bensch: Yeah, well, and there's two sides… two sides of the mark, and I, uh… outside of my passions for skiing, I consider myself sort of a marketplace, you know, guru of sorts. And, you know, on the supply side, or, like, the staffing side.00:19:31.000 --> 00:19:33.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, thank you.00:19:47.000 --> 00:19:52.000Brian Bensch: could ever imagine, and there's a reason why people love to teach skiing.00:19:53.000 --> 00:19:55.000Brian Bensch: One of the, I would say.00:19:54.000 --> 00:20:03.000Stuart Winchester: Hey, Brian, I'm sorry, you froze there for probably about, like, 5 seconds. Um, I don't know if you're on a hard line, or you have good Wi-Fi, or…00:19:58.000 --> 00:20:00.000Brian Bensch: Okay.00:20:03.000 --> 00:20:11.000Brian Bensch: It's Tahoe Wi-Fi. But it's generally fine, unless it goes out and flickers, but…00:20:03.000 --> 00:20:05.000Stuart Winchester: Is it?00:20:05.000 --> 00:20:07.000Stuart Winchester: It's Tahoe Wi-Fi.00:20:07.000 --> 00:20:09.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:20:11.000 --> 00:20:13.000Stuart Winchester: you…00:20:12.000 --> 00:20:19.000Brian Bensch: I can close a couple tabs, that might help. Or we can just… I don't want you to… I know editing is tough.00:20:15.000 --> 00:20:17.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, I think so.00:20:19.000 --> 00:20:22.000Stuart Winchester: No, no, no, you, you, uh, can you plug in, possibly?00:20:22.000 --> 00:20:25.000Brian Bensch: I don't have an Ethernet.00:20:23.000 --> 00:20:31.000Stuart Winchester: You know, okay, alright. Um, yeah, let's just, yeah, try to close some stuff, and we'll keep going, and at worst case, you can, uh, go off screen.00:20:28.000 --> 00:20:29.000Brian Bensch: Yep.00:20:31.000 --> 00:20:32.000Brian Bensch: Sure.00:20:33.000 --> 00:20:38.000Brian Bensch: To pick back up the… the kind of…00:20:38.000 --> 00:20:54.000Brian Bensch: Why is it, you know, possible for a lesson to cost $1,200 and the instructor only keeps 20% of that? There's two components to it. The first is that, you know, historically there was a glut of ski instructors going back into the 60s, 70s, 80s.00:20:54.000 --> 00:21:10.000Brian Bensch: Uh, you know, the, the quintessential ski bum, uh, is and was a great job, particularly for people that, you know, get the addiction that I know we both have. Um, and so, you know, lessons didn't used to be this expensive, um, just like lift tickets didn't used to be this expensive.00:21:10.000 --> 00:21:29.000Brian Bensch: Um, and so just like being a lifty, being a ski instructor was, you know, maybe a slight step above, you know, requires more training, but it has always been the sort of an entry-level hourly position. Um, and it's certainly not the federal minimum wage at most resorts. Uh, when Vail came out, uh, post-COVID with the $20 an hour kind of cross-board raise.00:21:29.000 --> 00:21:41.000Brian Bensch: Uh, that was great for the industry, not just, you know, Vail Resorts staff. Um, and… but the prevailing wage for, you know, first-year ski instructor is certainly in that $20 an hour range today.00:21:41.000 --> 00:21:45.000Brian Bensch: And, you know, we try to do things differently.00:21:44.000 --> 00:21:49.000Stuart Winchester: Right, but okay, so, but fundamentally to get at the…00:21:49.000 --> 00:21:55.000Stuart Winchester: at this dynamic. I'm a ski instructor. Let's say I'm a great ski instructor, right? And everybody loves me.00:21:55.000 --> 00:21:57.000Stuart Winchester: And I… I can see that…00:21:57.000 --> 00:22:07.000Stuart Winchester: you know, Northstar is charging $1,000 for a lesson, and they're paying me $25 an hour. I don't know what Northstar pays, so feel free to correct me, Northstar, but…00:22:07.000 --> 00:22:10.000Stuart Winchester: Why don't I as an instructor?00:22:10.000 --> 00:22:25.000Stuart Winchester: just say, well, I'm just gonna go on Facebook and advertise my services, and say, meet me at the Lyft at Northstar, and I'll give you a lesson for $200 for the day, because then I'm making more, and… and we're just… and the consumer's getting a better deal.00:22:25.000 --> 00:22:34.000Stuart Winchester: And then we established this one-on-one relationship. Why doesn't that marketplace exist? Why do ski areas exist?00:22:34.000 --> 00:22:42.000Stuart Winchester: How are they able to do this weird market dynamic, which sounds fundamentally unfair to the instructor?00:22:42.000 --> 00:22:57.000Brian Bensch: Yeah. Well, that question is certainly more or less exactly what I pondered 10 years ago. And how I got into this fun little project called Snowschoolers.00:22:57.000 --> 00:23:03.000Brian Bensch: was the realization that, oh my god, like, why does this exist? Um, and, you know, and…00:23:03.000 --> 00:23:08.000Brian Bensch: 10 years ago, Uber and Airbnb had just become kind of a mainstream thing.00:23:08.000 --> 00:23:10.000Brian Bensch: Um, and so I was like, oh.00:23:10.000 --> 00:23:28.000Brian Bensch: I wonder if we could just connect instructors to students directly and have a little marketplace for ski school. At the time, I knew nothing about, you know, special use permits from the Forest Service and the ski industry broadly. You know, I'd grown up skiing, but I was just a lay consumer skier. The reality is, and very similar to.00:23:28.000 --> 00:23:36.000Brian Bensch: you know a lot of the work you've done this summer going into Forest Service kind of history. The special use permit system.00:23:36.000 --> 00:23:54.000Brian Bensch: effectively grants the resort, at least on Federal lands, where the special use permit exists, a micro monopoly over all business activity at their mountain. And it doesn't have to be that way. If you do go over to Europe, it is a much more laissez-faire free market.00:23:54.000 --> 00:24:07.000Brian Bensch: Um, and most major resorts in Europe have at least four to six, you know, uh, ski schools that operate and compete, and, you know, the average lesson prices are roughly a third, and instructors keep, you know, 50 to 60% of lessons.00:24:07.000 --> 00:24:19.000Brian Bensch: And so it doesn't have to be the way it is. But at at the core it is. It is because resorts have the legal right to be the only ski school of record. And.00:24:17.000 --> 00:24:30.000Stuart Winchester: Right, so just to get ahead of the people who like to point out details, so North Star was a weird example for me to use because it's on private land, it's not on Forest Service land. However, it's owned by Vail Resorts, and I think what you're saying is.00:24:30.000 --> 00:24:44.000Stuart Winchester: even though not every U.S. skier is on U.S. Forest Service land, 125 of them are, it… the fact that that encompasses the majority of our ski terrain has normalized the culture of one mountain, one ski school. Is that fair?00:24:44.000 --> 00:25:01.000Brian Bensch: Correct. And there is maybe a dirty little secret of capitalism that monopolies are great businesses. So Northstar does not want six other ski schools competing and driving the price down because ski school is very, very lucrative to the at least traditional big resort ski model.00:24:44.000 --> 00:24:46.000Stuart Winchester: Okay.00:24:49.000 --> 00:24:50.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:25:02.000 --> 00:25:09.000Stuart Winchester: So, disruptor Brian comes out and says, alright guys, get out of the way, I am gonna change the world with.00:25:09.000 --> 00:25:19.000Stuart Winchester: snow schoolers and my Uber for skiing app, which I know you don't want to call it anymore, but nonetheless, since you brought up the analogy, let's go back to 2014.00:25:19.000 --> 00:25:22.000Stuart Winchester: Take us into it. What did you do and what happened?00:25:22.000 --> 00:25:32.000Brian Bensch: Yeah. In short, I would say, did a little bit of experimenting with that idea. And, you know, by the end of the first season.00:25:32.000 --> 00:25:43.000Brian Bensch: Learned pretty quickly that the ski resort management does not like the idea. And if you want to be able to ski at places that you love to ski.00:25:43.000 --> 00:25:55.000Brian Bensch: it's probably a good idea to not, uh, not poke the bear too much, so to speak. Um, and so, uh, that first kind of pilot program very much led me into the, uh.00:25:55.000 --> 00:26:14.000Brian Bensch: and and this it was always a snooze. This has been a side project of mine for a while. It's a I would call it a thriving small business. That 1st year I I pretended it was a startup, or I called it a startup, but never took funding and you know that 1st pilot program helped me realize that the only way, if I was going to turn this into real business.00:26:06.000 --> 00:26:07.000Stuart Winchester: Okay.00:26:14.000 --> 00:26:27.000Brian Bensch: was to find a way that was mutually beneficial for both resorts and instructors, uh, and obviously the students. Um, and that led me to, you know, how can I create a revenue share model.00:26:27.000 --> 00:26:41.000Brian Bensch: Uh, where by bringing more new skiers to the mountain, everyone benefits. Um, the resort gets to share the revenue, uh, the student gets a cheaper lesson, and the instructor gets higher pay. Um, and, uh…00:26:41.000 --> 00:26:54.000Brian Bensch: you know, by the time 2016 rolled around I was ready to quit my corporate job and give it a role, and so moved to Tahoe. And you know, without the.00:26:54.000 --> 00:27:04.000Brian Bensch: A gentleman named Brian Schilling out in Homewood. Without him taking sort of a chance on me, snow schoolers would not exist. But Homewood was coming off.00:27:04.000 --> 00:27:22.000Brian Bensch: we'll say a typical bad snow year, and had to let go a lot of their ski school staff the year prior, because I think they were open for, like, 40 days that season, and hiring was a huge priority. Like, they were rebuilding a ski school from scratch, and the reality was the pitch that resonated with Homewood.00:27:22.000 --> 00:27:37.000Brian Bensch: was much less about, can we, like, you know, offer more affordable lessons and increase gear visits that way, but we need, like, we don't know how to hire instructors, we need a bunch of instructors, and this Uber model of.00:27:37.000 --> 00:27:52.000Brian Bensch: uh, pseudo-freelance instructors was attractive to them. Um, and, you know, I told them that, like, I had put up a couple ads and had, you know, 20 people apply within a few weeks, and they're like, ah, that's interesting. Um, and so that led to our first season, uh, which I would say was.00:27:52.000 --> 00:28:06.000Brian Bensch: uh, not a hands-down success at Homewood, um, but I skied nearly 100 days, and it ended up being, uh, Tahoe's second best winter of at least my young adulthood, um, and, you know, you know, no regrets at all.00:28:06.000 --> 00:28:17.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, I mean, Homo's a serious mountain. I mean, right on the lake, it's dramatic, it has pretty nice chair lifts. But that didn't end up being the future, right?00:28:18.000 --> 00:28:23.000Stuart Winchester: How did Homewood break down, and how did you…00:28:23.000 --> 00:28:25.000Stuart Winchester: reassemble…00:28:25.000 --> 00:28:35.000Stuart Winchester: like, sort of rethink the business, uh, on a different scale, and I mean both, like, going smaller to get bigger, if that makes sense.00:28:35.000 --> 00:28:44.000Brian Bensch: Yeah. So the core hypothesis of snow schoolers was always kind of twofold. If you make lessons.00:28:46.000 --> 00:28:52.000Brian Bensch: more interest or demand and potential customers when lessons are affordable.00:28:52.000 --> 00:29:09.000Brian Bensch: I think the same thing is true of lift tickets, and that's why, you know, the places that are still offering $700 lift tickets are thriving. But affordable lessons drives an outsized increase in, you know, lesson visits. And if you pay instructors well, there's no shortage of instructors you can find if you're willing to pay them well.00:29:09.000 --> 00:29:25.000Brian Bensch: What we didn't get right in that 1st year at Homewood was the affordable lesson side of things. We were able to teach lessons at Homewood, but we were offering the normal prices from the year before, which were more or less, I would say, 10% below what Squaw Valley Alpine Meadows up the road was charging.00:29:25.000 --> 00:29:41.000Brian Bensch: Um, and we were not… yeah, we taught a total of, I think, 50 lessons that season, um, which was, you know, better than zero, but certainly not enough to get me too, too excited. Um, and the kind of going smaller to get bigger.00:29:42.000 --> 00:29:45.000Brian Bensch: Uh, it was a function of, uh…00:29:45.000 --> 00:29:57.000Brian Bensch: my my tiny little hill in the woods called Grand Lebakken, that, as someone who'd grown up skiing Tahoe, I had literally never heard of. I think I'd probably skied in Tahoe 500 days at that point.00:29:57.000 --> 00:29:59.000Brian Bensch: Um, but, uh…00:29:57.000 --> 00:30:02.000Stuart Winchester: And it's right by Palisades, right? It's, like, right across the street, basically.00:30:01.000 --> 00:30:17.000Brian Bensch: Not quite across the street. It is two minutes from the lake, but you can't see the lake from Grand Labaquin. So it's literally like tucked in the way, tucked kind of behind a hill. It is between Alpine Meadows and Homewood, if you look at the map. And it's roughly like 10 minutes from both of them.00:30:04.000 --> 00:30:05.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:30:06.000 --> 00:30:08.000Stuart Winchester: Right.00:30:08.000 --> 00:30:09.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:30:16.000 --> 00:30:18.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:30:17.000 --> 00:30:23.000Brian Bensch: Um, and as I was winding down that first season with Homewood, I challenged myself, um.00:30:23.000 --> 00:30:39.000Brian Bensch: And, you know, tried to put it on social media, but no one really cared to do a March Madness Sweet 16 circuit, because there, at the time, were 16 unique mountains in Tahoe, and Grand Lebakken was one of the last stops on that circuit, and I forget who told me it existed.00:30:33.000 --> 00:30:34.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:30:39.000 --> 00:30:44.000Brian Bensch: Um, but, you know, Grand Lubakken is not a ski resort. Grand Lubakken is a ski.00:30:47.000 --> 00:30:51.000Brian Bensch: Kind of known for its lodging and accommodations business.00:30:49.000 --> 00:30:54.000Stuart Winchester: Hey, Brian, you, uh, you just froze again, but you said Grand Lebakken is a ski…00:30:53.000 --> 00:30:55.000Brian Bensch: Yeah.00:30:54.000 --> 00:30:57.000Stuart Winchester: So just start over from Grand Lebakken is a ski.00:30:56.000 --> 00:31:13.000Brian Bensch: Sure. Grand Labaca is not a ski resort. It is a ski hill or a ski area, as Stuart likes to say. It is two surface lifts. It is roughly 20 acres from the bottom of the hill of Grand Labaca. You can see the entire hill, the entire mountain. What you see is what you get.00:31:13.000 --> 00:31:30.000Brian Bensch: It is not, I would say, exclusively for beginners. The Poma that goes to the top, and it's, I think, roughly 225 feet. I would put it at a solid, you know, a Jackson Hole blue. It is at least a 25 to 30 degree slope.00:31:30.000 --> 00:31:46.000Brian Bensch: and I have seen 12 year olds straight line it and almost die. So it is. It is certainly like there's enough terrain that you could do ski race like training on it, and we do a little bit of that in the winter on weekdays. But it is a ski hill.00:31:46.000 --> 00:31:57.000Brian Bensch: Um, not at all, sort of, no bells and whistles, no high-speed quads, um, just a bunny lift, uh, rope toe, and a, you know, slightly more advanced poma that goes to the top.00:31:57.000 --> 00:32:09.000Brian Bensch: And, uh, spent a good afternoon with, uh, the Parson family back in spring 2017, and I was like, this price is pretty cool, this is cute, and told them about my ideas for ski school.00:32:07.000 --> 00:32:09.000Stuart Winchester: And who are they?00:32:09.000 --> 00:32:25.000Brian Bensch: Chris Parson and Ron Parson. Ron is Chris's father, and has owned the mountain for quite a while, and what Grand Lombachman is known for is, it is more of an accommodations center. It's a lodge and conference center.00:32:18.000 --> 00:32:20.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:32:25.000 --> 00:32:42.000Brian Bensch: Uh, with roughly, I think, 150-ish units. Um, and the ski hill is an amenity, uh, along with their pool, along with their spa, along with, like, you know, their, you know, uh, dining areas and so forth. Um, and they've operated the ski area and sled hill, um, for…00:32:28.000 --> 00:32:29.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:32:42.000 --> 00:32:55.000Brian Bensch: I think Ron is — the Parson family is going on maybe 30 years. I hope to convince him that he should come on the pod at some point. But he is —.00:32:46.000 --> 00:32:47.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:32:55.000 --> 00:33:12.000Brian Bensch: Their family, you know, is the quintessential mom and pop ski hill ski area sort of operators. When I met them, ski school was run mostly with Chris, who had sort of two group lesson slots a day and a piece of paper for people to sign up in the morning.00:33:12.000 --> 00:33:28.000Brian Bensch: And they were like, you know, we could probably be more organized with this. And I was like, yeah, I think I can help you a little bit. And then the season ended and I went home, had made no money. So, you know, my day job has been in marketing.00:33:28.000 --> 00:33:40.000Brian Bensch: for big and small tech companies for a while. Um, and so I went and had to get a big boy tech job again to, you know, pay for rent. Um, and my Tahoe ski lease was up for the season. So, I went back home.00:33:38.000 --> 00:33:39.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:33:40.000 --> 00:33:47.000Brian Bensch: you know, wasn't sure if Snow Solutions was going to continue, kind of just assumed it was a one-year thing, and, you know.00:33:47.000 --> 00:34:03.000Brian Bensch: you know, hadn't talked a ton with Homewood, but I knew, like we weren't gonna you know the business wasn't great. But fast forward October 1st roughly, this time of year the Gm. Gives me a call out of the blue, and I pick up. I'm now at my new day job, and I just play it cool. And I'm like, Oh, yeah.00:34:03.000 --> 00:34:19.000Brian Bensch: Yeah, no, we'll run your ski school this winter. Grant Lebakken did, yeah. So the GM of Grant Lebakken picked up and said, hey, you know, we love meeting you in the spring, and you know, winter's around the corner. Let's talk about, you know, what needs to be done for you guys to run ski school for us this year.00:34:06.000 --> 00:34:08.000Stuart Winchester: Grand Labaquin?00:34:08.000 --> 00:34:10.000Stuart Winchester: Okay, okay.00:34:10.000 --> 00:34:11.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, thank you.00:34:13.000 --> 00:34:14.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:34:18.000 --> 00:34:20.000Stuart Winchester: Mm-hmm. Right.00:34:19.000 --> 00:34:23.000Brian Bensch: Um, and I remember going home that night being like, huh.00:34:23.000 --> 00:34:33.000Brian Bensch: This is not going to be easy because I'm working 40 to 50 hours a week now at my new job. But skiing in this space is what I love to do.00:34:24.000 --> 00:34:25.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:34:33.000 --> 00:34:51.000Brian Bensch: You know, at one point, a quote on the website was the Confucius quote, “If you find a job you love, you'll never work another day.” And, you know, I said, yes, you know, porque no las dos, let's do both. Didn't tell my employer at the time.00:34:48.000 --> 00:34:49.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:34:51.000 --> 00:35:06.000Brian Bensch: Because, you know, don't want to give them reason to question how much time you're putting in. But basically worked, you know, spent many nights, and I was a bad developer at the time. So everything snow schoolers is kind of built in-house from a code perspective.00:34:53.000 --> 00:34:55.000Stuart Winchester: Been there?00:35:01.000 --> 00:35:03.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:35:06.000 --> 00:35:23.000Brian Bensch: And, you know, I just, every evening from 6 p.m. to midnight, I'd be plugging away to build the Grand Le Bacon kind of new system that we built that first year. And it worked. You know, year two, we taught.00:35:23.000 --> 00:35:38.000Brian Bensch: I think 300 plus lessons, and we did five times more revenue than year one at Homewood. And again, I was, you know, I only taught probably 2% of lessons because I had my full-time job. Christmas was a fun disaster where.00:35:38.000 --> 00:35:47.000Brian Bensch: all of a sudden, we were sold out every single day, and I was like, uh, I guess I need to figure out how to stop selling lessons, uh, because I hadn't really built that into the model the first year, because we were never sold out.00:35:46.000 --> 00:35:48.000Stuart Winchester: Ah, okay, okay.00:35:48.000 --> 00:35:56.000Brian Bensch: But, you know, we made it work and lots of families had amazing, you know, first experiences learning to slide on snow.00:35:55.000 --> 00:36:06.000Stuart Winchester: So let me zoom out and just tell you why I think this makes sense from my point of view, and then you can color that in with with how Graham Lebakken actually achieved it. I look at…00:36:07.000 --> 00:36:13.000Stuart Winchester: something like the Icon Pass, and they have a partnership with Jackson Hole.00:36:13.000 --> 00:36:22.000Stuart Winchester: but Altera doesn't have to own or operate Jackson Hole, and if a lift breaks, it's not Altera's problem, but they get the benefit of Jackson Hole.00:36:22.000 --> 00:36:25.000Stuart Winchester: on their IconPass. Uh…00:36:25.000 --> 00:36:36.000Stuart Winchester: this model that Grand Lebakken has, there used to be hundreds of ski areas like this, just attached to resorts all across. In this part of the country, there were a ton of them, in the Catskills and the Poconos, and…00:36:36.000 --> 00:36:38.000Brian Bensch: Okay.00:36:36.000 --> 00:36:42.000Stuart Winchester: most of them, I mean, they frankly weren't super interesting hills, but they…00:36:42.000 --> 00:37:02.000Stuart Winchester: Those resorts found that as God running a ski hill became more complex, it wasn't worth keeping all those pieces and parts as an amenity. So in the case of, of Grand Le Bacon, I, I imagine, you know, you have a couple Pomas, so your market is probably like people who wanted to come to Tahoe in the winter, but aren't necessarily skiers, but maybe want to try it.00:37:02.000 --> 00:37:18.000Stuart Winchester: Right? Because no one's like, hmm, should I go to Palisades or Grand Lebakken today, right? Like it's, it's a very unique place. So, but Grand Lebakken, I mean, if they're going to have a hill, that means they also have to have, you know, a rental shop and they have to have a ski school and instructors. This basically.00:37:07.000 --> 00:37:08.000Brian Bensch: Yeah.00:37:18.000 --> 00:37:21.000Stuart Winchester: Takes the whole ski school, all that labor.00:37:21.000 --> 00:37:23.000Stuart Winchester: all the infrastructure.00:37:23.000 --> 00:37:25.000Stuart Winchester: out of it, and I'd imagine you just…00:37:25.000 --> 00:37:41.000Stuart Winchester: Pay, you know, you just write them a check like a lease, basically like a forest service lease where a skier operates and they, they pay based on what they make to the government. So it, it seems to me like ski areas would love that. And I, and I could think of 100 small ski areas in the country where that would work. That's how I'm understanding this is that.00:37:41.000 --> 00:37:44.000Stuart Winchester: Is that fair? And…00:37:43.000 --> 00:37:47.000Brian Bensch: Yeah, I I would say you more or less hit the nail on the head.00:37:46.000 --> 00:37:47.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:37:48.000 --> 00:38:03.000Brian Bensch: The and and the models the operating model that we've sort of developed, that we are sort of most in favor of is, we do ski school. We take full responsibility for ski school and nothing else.00:38:03.000 --> 00:38:14.000Brian Bensch: we've we've we're not obligated, or we don't have to stick with that model entirely. And at our Frisco location, Colorado. We also do all of rentals.00:38:14.000 --> 00:38:20.000Brian Bensch: And but ski school is what sort of what we love, what we care about.00:38:20.000 --> 00:38:34.000Brian Bensch: And you know, in in other past smaller partnerships we've done. We were responsible for even more of operations, grooming and parking and snow removal is.00:38:33.000 --> 00:38:34.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:38:34.000 --> 00:38:40.000Brian Bensch: like very underappreciated. How time consuming, expensive those can be.00:38:39.000 --> 00:38:40.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:38:40.000 --> 00:38:50.000Brian Bensch: And so I I am very thankful that Gran Lebakken and our partners at Frisco take responsibility for for grooming, and particularly grooming snowmaking.00:38:50.000 --> 00:39:00.000Brian Bensch: um, and sort of the general operations, uh, lift operations and so forth, are… are never gonna be our sweet spot. Um, and we would happily run the, like.00:38:56.000 --> 00:38:57.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:39:00.000 --> 00:39:06.000Brian Bensch: like ski school is often the biggest human part of the organization, because you have a bunch of instructors.00:39:06.000 --> 00:39:22.000Brian Bensch: Uh, and you have to, like, you know, herding cats doesn't happen without effort. Um, and scheduling does not happen, uh, without good software, and a human to supervise the software. Um, and so, yeah, that's been our sweet spot. Um, I likewise, uh, think that there are at least.00:39:10.000 --> 00:39:11.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:39:15.000 --> 00:39:16.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:39:22.000 --> 00:39:35.000Brian Bensch: a few dozen, if not hundreds, of other small ski areas, whether they're surface lift only, or just small with, like, a single fixed grip lift, that, um, that want to do a better ski school program, and we would love to talk to them.00:39:35.000 --> 00:39:53.000Stuart Winchester: So, so Grand Labakin you've been with ever since, so I'm assuming they've been pretty happy with it. Let's jump across the country to another really weird ski area that probably people don't know exists, that we've been talking about, which is Frisco, which is… you pass by it on the way to Breckenridge, but you won't even see it. It's so small, like.00:39:53.000 --> 00:40:09.000Stuart Winchester: You have to drive around this weird road and it's, you know, underneath a hill. And I've not skied there, but I stopped by after they were closed, uh, a couple years ago. So, so that is not attached to a resort. That's, I think, a city park. So you have a completely different demo there.00:40:09.000 --> 00:40:19.000Stuart Winchester: So who is Frisco trying to serve, and how did you meet that need? And it seems like you've had a long-term relationship with them as well.00:40:18.000 --> 00:40:29.000Brian Bensch: Yes. So we're now going to our fifth season with the town of Frisco. And so, yes, it is a municipally managed ski area and tubing park.00:40:29.000 --> 00:40:42.000Brian Bensch: You can't miss the tubing element when you're driving from getting off I-70 and heading to Breckenridge, but very few people will know that there's beginner ski and snowboarding there as well. I've been to Colorado a good handful of times.00:40:42.000 --> 00:40:48.000Brian Bensch: definitely drove by it once and didn't know they were skiing there. And you know a mutual acquaintance.00:40:44.000 --> 00:40:45.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:40:48.000 --> 00:41:01.000Brian Bensch: post-COVID, when I was talking about, you know what, you know, the world's going remote, maybe I can just, you know, expand snow schoolers without me physically being there all the time. Um, and I was like, huh, have you heard of Frisco? I was like, no, what.00:40:57.000 --> 00:40:58.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah. Okay.00:41:01.000 --> 00:41:07.000Brian Bensch: And, you know, that was probably two months before our first successful season with Frisco.00:41:07.000 --> 00:41:22.000Brian Bensch: Um, the audience they're serving, to your question, is not nearly as local as you might expect for being, like, a town-run hill. Uh, we certainly have some local programs, but their audience is Summit County visitors.00:41:14.000 --> 00:41:15.000Stuart Winchester: Hmm.00:41:22.000 --> 00:41:35.000Brian Bensch: Who primarily are either not skiers yet, not skiers and swimmers yet, or are brand new and want to get their sort of their ski legs on because someone invited them on a trip to Breck or trip to Copper.00:41:35.000 --> 00:41:52.000Brian Bensch: and they're like, well, I've never skied before. You know a lifting. It's expensive, less expensive. B like, can I get my legs like, you know, get my footing somewhere, and we are smack dab in the middle of, you know, 4 major resorts. In addition to Copper Breck, you've got a base and and.00:41:51.000 --> 00:41:52.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:41:52.000 --> 00:41:59.000Brian Bensch: and Keystone around the corner, and we are the affordable alternative for Summit County visitors.00:41:59.000 --> 00:42:03.000Stuart Winchester: It's expensive for a rope tail, by the way, it's like $40 for a lift ticket.00:41:59.000 --> 00:42:01.000Brian Bensch: Um, and the town…00:42:03.000 --> 00:42:07.000Brian Bensch: Sure. Expenses is very relative. That is fair.00:42:06.000 --> 00:42:07.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:42:07.000 --> 00:42:08.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, okay.00:42:08.000 --> 00:42:10.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, okay, so, so…00:42:10.000 --> 00:42:21.000Stuart Winchester: you established… that's funny, that's not at all what I expected. I thought it would be, like, bust loads of kids, but I guess they probably have deals with Breckenridge or something. So you've had success.00:42:21.000 --> 00:42:35.000Stuart Winchester: at Frisco and at Grand Labaca, and you've had a couple others that you've been in and out of other than Homewood. Tell us about those, and what did work, and ultimately what didn't work about them.00:42:35.000 --> 00:42:46.000Brian Bensch: Yeah. Let's go with — let's stick with the Colorado trend first, and then we'll come back to Tahoe. There's an awesome little mountain.00:42:46.000 --> 00:43:01.000Brian Bensch: that, I think you know, and and didn't. As you think about your the last ski resorts to open or ski areas to open. I actually think Hoedown Hill is the most recently opened new ski area in the country. It's about an hour north of Denver.00:43:01.000 --> 00:43:06.000Brian Bensch: in Windsor, Colorado, and we worked with them for their 1st 2 seasons.00:43:06.000 --> 00:43:15.000Brian Bensch: Um, and we did not work with them last year. Um, still in touch with them, um, but they are a brand new ski area that is, I would say, a…00:43:15.000 --> 00:43:18.000Brian Bensch: a privately…00:43:18.000 --> 00:43:26.000Brian Bensch: run like you. You could say there's similarities to the Grand Lebakken business model, but on a whole other level of, I would say.00:43:26.000 --> 00:43:40.000Brian Bensch: affluence and like target demo. The Hoedown Hill facility is attached to the Raindance National Golf Course, which I'm not a golfer, but I hear it's a tier one destination golf course.00:43:40.000 --> 00:43:49.000Brian Bensch: They want to build, you know, 4 seasons esque hotel there, and it is a we'll say a bourgeois experience that they're going for with some, you know.00:43:49.000 --> 00:44:06.000Brian Bensch: you know, a good culture vibe there. And I think so long as the management team remains committed, it will continue to grow. They are at the IndyPass, so shout out there, like, it's worth a quick visit if you're flying into Denver with your IndyPass.00:44:00.000 --> 00:44:01.000Stuart Winchester: Yep.00:44:05.000 --> 00:44:07.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:44:06.000 --> 00:44:10.000Brian Bensch: Um, and in our first two seasons there, um.00:44:10.000 --> 00:44:12.000Brian Bensch: We did, we did.00:44:12.000 --> 00:44:19.000Brian Bensch: we did okay. But we weren't able to draw the numbers that we saw in Summit County, or anywhere close to them.00:44:18.000 --> 00:44:20.000Stuart Winchester: Hmm. Okay.00:44:19.000 --> 00:44:22.000Brian Bensch: And my conclusion.00:44:22.000 --> 00:44:26.000Brian Bensch: or one of my conclusions is that.00:44:26.000 --> 00:44:39.000Brian Bensch: It is much, much harder to influence the macro kind of tide of skier movements than it is to siphon off.00:44:39.000 --> 00:44:55.000Brian Bensch: not to capture demand in an underserved market in Northern Colorado. You know, it's great that they have Hodown Hill, but there weren't a thousand people looking for affordable lessons in Northern Colorado before Hodown Hill existed.00:44:44.000 --> 00:44:45.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:44:53.000 --> 00:44:55.000Stuart Winchester: Hmm. Okay.00:44:55.000 --> 00:45:11.000Brian Bensch: Uh, whereas there's, you know, thousands of Summit County visitors who want more affordable lessons and just don't take lessons today. Um, and so, like, it was… and same thing in Tahoe. Uh, it was much easier, like, we open up for business and, like, we don't have to do much marketing for.00:45:02.000 --> 00:45:04.000Stuart Winchester: You know.00:45:11.000 --> 00:45:25.000Brian Bensch: for the wave of customers to come in, whereas every customer we earned in, uh, in Windsor and Fort Collins area, sort of, we had to hustle to get. There weren't people, like, already looking for affordable skiing there, because it's… it's a suburb of Denver.00:45:19.000 --> 00:45:21.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, that's true.00:45:25.000 --> 00:45:28.000Stuart Winchester: That's so interesting because I.00:45:28.000 --> 00:45:39.000Stuart Winchester: wrote up, and I talked to the folks at Hood on Hill, and they were opening it. And the way I thought… the way they pitched it to me was more of making skiing accessible for locals at an entry level.00:45:39.000 --> 00:45:49.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, they didn't… I mean, I understood that it was attached to this other resort, but my understanding is it was kind of a low-cost thing for the community. I think one mistake they made, and…00:45:49.000 --> 00:45:53.000Stuart Winchester: Maybe you don't want to criticize them, but I think having four carpets.00:45:53.000 --> 00:46:02.000Stuart Winchester: I think they should have had at least one rope tower or T-bar, like, something to serve the terrain park that wasn't so slow. I think that would have gotten them more…00:46:02.000 --> 00:46:04.000Stuart Winchester: Energy on site.00:46:04.000 --> 00:46:18.000Stuart Winchester: And… and had a multiplier effect. I just didn't… I didn't like the four carpets model. I liked the model of putting a ski area there, because otherwise the closest place is, what, like Eldora, and a lift ticket's 180 bucks?00:46:18.000 --> 00:46:30.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, so… so there wasn't… or you go up to Echo, I guess, but that's a pain to get to. So… so I… I don't know, that… that was my… that's my impression of Hoedown so far, is it was, like, a good idea with bad execution.00:46:22.000 --> 00:46:24.000Brian Bensch: Yeah.00:46:31.000 --> 00:46:35.000Brian Bensch: I I think that there's some fairness to that.00:46:35.000 --> 00:46:48.000Brian Bensch: They did a great job with the terrain park, given the resources available. And yes, like, a rope tower right next to the park is always, like, I think, a good idea. And it's something that the town of Frisco invested in, I think.00:46:37.000 --> 00:46:38.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:46:43.000 --> 00:46:44.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah. Okay.00:46:48.000 --> 00:47:05.000Brian Bensch: 3 years ago, maybe 2 years ago, and it has been wildly popular. And you know, rope toes, you know you don't need to convince me. But I'm I'm with you on the rope toes are the most affordable, accessible way for a ski area to like increase uphill uphill capacity.00:47:05.000 --> 00:47:06.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:47:05.000 --> 00:47:17.000Brian Bensch: Um, I think the biggest challenge for Hoedown was… and you'd call this bad luck, um, I would say bad luck more than bad execution, but it is at, you know, 6,000 feet, and uh…00:47:17.000 --> 00:47:24.000Brian Bensch: Natural snowfall in an hour north of Denver is not the most plentiful.00:47:23.000 --> 00:47:25.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah. Okay.00:47:24.000 --> 00:47:28.000Brian Bensch: And they invested heavily in snowmaking, but you can't fight temps.00:47:28.000 --> 00:47:40.000Brian Bensch: And so, in both of our first two seasons at Hoedown, we opened between January 2nd and January 7th, but we missed Christmas both of those years, and it's really hard to, sort of.00:47:40.000 --> 00:47:57.000Brian Bensch: generate momentum for a ski area when you miss Christmas. Um, and, you know, Mother Nature is the biggest determiner of that. Uh, I'm not positive, but I don't think they got open for Christmas last year, and last year was obviously the worst of the three past seasons. So, um, hoping Mother Nature cooperates better for them this year.00:47:43.000 --> 00:47:44.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, thank you.00:47:53.000 --> 00:47:55.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:47:57.000 --> 00:48:00.000Stuart Winchester: All right, Brian, so you can keep hunting rope toes.00:48:00.000 --> 00:48:16.000Stuart Winchester: You know, I was having this debate with someone yesterday. A lot of the stats you hear when you point back in time, oh, there was 1,200 ski areas and now there's only 500. It's like, well, a lot of them were little rope toes. Like, most of the lost ski areas in Colorado were just little rope toes that existed. The reason they went away…00:48:16.000 --> 00:48:22.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, is, is not because there, there was some catastrophe in, uh.00:48:22.000 --> 00:48:34.000Stuart Winchester: anywhere other than the fact that there just was better ski areas built, and they're kind of boring. Like, when you just… you get over that pretty quick. Like, 100 vertical foot, wide open run, with a rope tow, unless it has some park features.00:48:29.000 --> 00:48:31.000Brian Bensch: Yeah.00:48:34.000 --> 00:48:47.000Stuart Winchester: you're gonna get over it. And almost all of them, they still exist. And I've been to a lot of them across America, and they're mostly in New England and Midwest, and kind of sprinkled throughout the West, especially in the Pacific Northwest. They're almost all…00:48:47.000 --> 00:48:56.000Stuart Winchester: None of them are actual businesses, almost. Like, they're almost all subsidized, they're a city park, they're owned by a school, they're attached to a resort.00:48:56.000 --> 00:49:01.000Stuart Winchester: My point is, this is not a growth area long term.00:49:01.000 --> 00:49:02.000Stuart Winchester: And…00:49:02.000 --> 00:49:17.000Stuart Winchester: you know, the big ski areas mostly do have really good beginner centers, and they're getting better all the time, right? You see places like Jackson and Big Sky building mid-mountain beginner centers to put people more up in the alpine experience and away from.00:49:17.000 --> 00:49:22.000Stuart Winchester: the chaos of the base. So what I'm getting at here is.00:49:22.000 --> 00:49:24.000Stuart Winchester: Eventually…00:49:25.000 --> 00:49:28.000Stuart Winchester: It seems like you have to get…00:49:28.000 --> 00:49:41.000Stuart Winchester: into a ski area where there's somewhere else to go after the beginner hill's done, right? Or else you're just gonna be teaching pizza French fry forever, and… and I don't think that even the most passionate ski instructor wants to do that, so…00:49:42.000 --> 00:49:49.000Stuart Winchester: And it's funny, because you started at Homewood, and it's like, how do you get back to Homewood is almost the question I'm asking.00:49:49.000 --> 00:49:51.000Stuart Winchester: But I…00:49:51.000 --> 00:50:02.000Stuart Winchester: How do you… First of all, do you agree with that or am I totally missing the point? And second, if you do want to eventually get into bigger operations, what…00:50:02.000 --> 00:50:07.000Stuart Winchester: What are the obstacles to doing so other than the obvious permitting issue we just talked about?00:50:07.000 --> 00:50:20.000Brian Bensch: Yeah, so I would say I 80% agree with you. The 20% carve out would be that Grand Lavaca is still a business and Ron runs it like a business.00:50:12.000 --> 00:50:13.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:50:16.000 --> 00:50:18.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:50:20.000 --> 00:50:27.000Brian Bensch: And the town of Frisco, even if it's town-operated, is a business that, like, reports its P&L, and they're both, like, pretty thriving.00:50:27.000 --> 00:50:33.000Brian Bensch: medium sized businesses. Snow schoolers is a small business. They're they're certainly, you know, 5 to 10 x bigger.00:50:33.000 --> 00:50:42.000Brian Bensch: And and I think that just like, you know, grade school education is a business.00:50:40.000 --> 00:50:41.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:50:42.000 --> 00:50:46.000Brian Bensch: There is a steady stream of families.00:50:46.000 --> 00:50:47.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:50:46.000 --> 00:51:01.000Brian Bensch: You know, kids that, you know, will hopefully have the opportunity to learn to ski. And, you know, I think there's a world for, you know, bump hills, so to speak, to remain thriving in existence without having, you know.00:51:01.000 --> 00:51:13.000Brian Bensch: the Jackson Hole Palisades terrain to keep people forever. As far as you know, snow schoolers and kind of the the lesson ecosystem.00:51:04.000 --> 00:51:06.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:51:06.000 --> 00:51:07.000Stuart Winchester: Right.00:51:14.000 --> 00:51:22.000Brian Bensch: I would say vehemently believe there is an underserved market for intermediate and advanced lessons.00:51:21.000 --> 00:51:22.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:51:22.000 --> 00:51:37.000Brian Bensch: at, you know, quote-unquote, real resorts. Um, I'd somewhat be lying if I said I had the answer, uh, to how to break into that, because I probably would have done so already, uh, even if this is my part-time endeavor. Um, but the… in a similar manner to.00:51:28.000 --> 00:51:29.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, thank you.00:51:38.000 --> 00:51:44.000Brian Bensch: Uh, you know, how to… you know, we've… we struggled to create demand at Hoedown Hill. Hoedown Hill? Um…00:51:42.000 --> 00:51:43.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:51:44.000 --> 00:51:59.000Brian Bensch: It is a completely new endeavor to create demand for that, you know, lifelong skier who skis, you know, 5 to 15 days a year, or maybe even like 10 to 50 days a year, and doesn't think that they need a lesson.00:51:59.000 --> 00:52:01.000Brian Bensch: Um, that is a much sort of.00:52:01.000 --> 00:52:14.000Brian Bensch: harder marketing challenge. But I can guarantee you, unless they are in the top 1% of like wealth. They're not going to pay $1,000. And so that's the like. How do you? How do you like? Come up with the right product?00:52:14.000 --> 00:52:15.000Stuart Winchester: Right.00:52:14.000 --> 00:52:26.000Brian Bensch: And, you know, when I talk to people on chairlifts, you know, fun skiing, I'll often ask, like, you know, hey, when's the last time you took a lesson now? Yeah, when I was a kid. What would you be willing to pay?00:52:26.000 --> 00:52:42.000Brian Bensch: Uh, you know, to get 20% better at your skiing riding today. It's like, yeah, maybe 50 bucks, maybe 40 bucks, 60 bucks, like, you know. Uh, and there's no mountain that offers that, particularly for, like, the one or two hour segment. Um, and, you know.00:52:42.000 --> 00:52:49.000Brian Bensch: I think there's a lot of experimentation that the bigger mountains could do with ski school to serve that sort of.00:52:46.000 --> 00:52:48.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:52:49.000 --> 00:52:52.000Brian Bensch: Latent market, or latent demand, uh…00:52:52.000 --> 00:52:55.000Brian Bensch: I'd love to help, but I'd be lying if I think that.00:52:55.000 --> 00:52:58.000Brian Bensch: Ask a 3rd party to do it for them.00:52:57.000 --> 00:52:59.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah. Okay.00:52:58.000 --> 00:53:13.000Brian Bensch: And but you know, in the the only thing I think that I am a believer of Einstein's definition of insanity, and and if you do the same thing over over and over again, and expect different results like that's insane.00:53:13.000 --> 00:53:28.000Brian Bensch: Um, and I'd love to see more experimentation with, like, you know, better serving sort of lessons for people that already know how to ski. Um, because that's what… that's what got me addicted. Uh, becoming an instructor made me realize how much more.00:53:21.000 --> 00:53:23.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, I'm.00:53:25.000 --> 00:53:26.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah. Okay.00:53:28.000 --> 00:53:37.000Brian Bensch: fun I could have and how much more like I still I want to learn to be a better skier this year uh and like everyone that sort of.00:53:33.000 --> 00:53:34.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, I think so.00:53:37.000 --> 00:53:47.000Brian Bensch: really gets sort of addicted to ski instruction. They do it because, like there, it's a lifelong pursuit of learning to like, get better. And most.00:53:47.000 --> 00:53:50.000Brian Bensch: lace gears like don't have that sort of.00:53:50.000 --> 00:53:54.000Brian Bensch: have that spark that I'd love to spread.00:53:51.000 --> 00:53:52.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, thank you.00:53:53.000 --> 00:54:08.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, I guess the cynic in me thinks you're never gonna get the robots to ski. Like, there's too much ego in American skiing, especially among the sort of core demographic of males. But what I… I think what I meant more was, like, okay.00:54:08.000 --> 00:54:24.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, Grand Le Bacon's kind of a novelty, and I get that it's a business, uh, that's attached to it. I, how about like Tahoe Donner, right? So it's, it's, it's not a big resort. It's, you know, right next to Sugar Bowl. It's got 500 vertical feet, like five double.00:54:24.000 --> 00:54:31.000Stuart Winchester: Maybe they don't need the hassle of running a ski school, and the…00:54:31.000 --> 00:54:41.000Stuart Winchester: they have locals, right? Because that's a mountain with interesting terrain, even though it's short vert, where parents would want to go and, like, put their kids in ski school while they go off and ski, even if you don't.00:54:41.000 --> 00:54:57.000Stuart Winchester: get the parents. Is there… do you see opportunity in that? Because there's… there's lots of hills like that, which are not, you know, down the Frisco level, but, you know, if you want to go Summit County, so you have Frisco, and you have, like, Keystone Basin.00:54:57.000 --> 00:55:07.000Stuart Winchester: uh, Breck, but then you also have Granby Ranch, and you have Ski Cooper, and it's like, okay, may… or you have Echo Mountain, maybe those places are sort of the logical next.00:55:07.000 --> 00:55:18.000Stuart Winchester: I don't even know if it's possible to get the really big ones, but, you know, do you see any growth in that? Just tiering up, not to destinations necessarily, but sort of like.00:55:18.000 --> 00:55:21.000Stuart Winchester: ski areas that families actually want to ski a whole season at.00:55:21.000 --> 00:55:23.000Brian Bensch: Yeah, um…00:55:23.000 --> 00:55:28.000Brian Bensch: A few things to come back to your earlier question. Not all of ski school is broken.00:55:27.000 --> 00:55:28.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:55:28.000 --> 00:55:30.000Brian Bensch: I visited Granby Ranch.00:55:30.000 --> 00:55:37.000Brian Bensch: last spring, I believe? Maybe it was 2 springs ago. Um, and I've been to Tahoe Donner many a times. Both of those, uh…00:55:32.000 --> 00:55:34.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:55:35.000 --> 00:55:36.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:55:37.000 --> 00:55:42.000Brian Bensch: mountains have pretty phenomenal ski schools. Like, they don't need our help.00:55:42.000 --> 00:55:50.000Brian Bensch: You know, maybe, you know, maybe there's some cool software things that we're doing that they could, you know, borrow and replicate, but they are thriving.00:55:50.000 --> 00:56:00.000Brian Bensch: learning area programs. And I think there's a like for for the listeners that have, you know, you know.00:56:00.000 --> 00:56:03.000Brian Bensch: young kids that are thinking about when to start in ski school.00:56:03.000 --> 00:56:22.000Brian Bensch: That, I would say, tier of mountain is today, like, if it's not on your radar, it should be, because the affordability, like, they're not gouging people nearly as much as the Tier 1 Icon Epic Resorts are, and every time I've visited them, on a weekend at least.00:56:22.000 --> 00:56:30.000Brian Bensch: Yeah, their fault. They're thriving. And so I don't think that at least the class of the Tahoe Donners and Granbys of the world. I don't think they're broken.00:56:30.000 --> 00:56:38.000Brian Bensch: Other than, you know, yeah, more staff, like, how do you keep scaling? But they are thriving pretty well from what I've seen.00:56:34.000 --> 00:56:36.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, I'm.00:56:37.000 --> 00:56:50.000Stuart Winchester: I could still see some operator… you know, I was talking to the guy who revitalized Steeplechase, and he was saying, you know, we don't have a ski school, and I think I may have even connected you guys, but it's like, you sort of have a ski school in a box you could offer them.00:56:50.000 --> 00:56:51.000Brian Bensch: Yeah.00:56:50.000 --> 00:56:57.000Stuart Winchester: Alright, one more ski school question, and then you can make fun of my charts. Um, so… so, Summit at Snoqualmie.00:56:57.000 --> 00:57:11.000Stuart Winchester: and I'm sure you know this, for some reason, because of, like, it's grandfathered in, because it used to be, like, 92 different ski areas, and now it's… it's one. They have competing ski schools there. It's one of the few… might be the only place in America.00:57:11.000 --> 00:57:16.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, that I'm aware of, at least the only major, you know, it's owned by Boeing. And I've asked Boe.00:57:16.000 --> 00:57:25.000Stuart Winchester: I don't know, we don't really want to have that war. You know, it works. But but what do you think of Summit at Snoqualmie?00:57:25.000 --> 00:57:27.000Stuart Winchester: And is it just?00:57:27.000 --> 00:57:40.000Stuart Winchester: a fringe case, and it doesn't tell us anything useful about how we could maybe change American ski school structure. Any thoughts on that? That's right outside of Seattle, by the way, for folks who don't know.00:57:39.000 --> 00:57:40.000Brian Bensch: Yeah, yeah, uh…00:57:40.000 --> 00:57:43.000Brian Bensch: Now, fun, fun fact.00:57:43.000 --> 00:57:45.000Brian Bensch: You know, in my 1st year of.00:57:45.000 --> 00:57:52.000Brian Bensch: researching this space and figuring out what I was gonna do. Uh, the Pacific Northwest, and Snoqualmie in particular, was sort of.00:57:52.000 --> 00:58:08.000Brian Bensch: Number one, I'm like, I need to get up there and figure out, like, what they're doing, why, how they made it work, and how do we do that in Tahoe? That was my, like, year one thesis. I finally got up there just before the world shut down with COVID.00:58:01.000 --> 00:58:03.000Stuart Winchester: Yes.00:58:08.000 --> 00:58:11.000Brian Bensch: Knocked on doors, had some good conversations.00:58:11.000 --> 00:58:23.000Brian Bensch: And and you're correct like there are at least 6 or 7, maybe even more independent ski schools. They all have their own little lodge building. They're all primarily seasonal programs.00:58:23.000 --> 00:58:33.000Brian Bensch: And they do. They still do a good deal of the sort of transportation coordination. You know that whole market is, you know, Seattle and Seattle suburbs, you know, coming up.00:58:33.000 --> 00:58:36.000Stuart Winchester: Right off the interstate. Yeah.00:58:33.000 --> 00:58:45.000Brian Bensch: to the mountains right off the interstate. It's it's as sort of like convenient as you could imagine. And more or less the answer I got was, we've done it this way.00:58:39.000 --> 00:58:40.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:58:45.000 --> 00:58:48.000Brian Bensch: Uh, but we're not looking to make it more this way.00:58:49.000 --> 00:58:51.000Brian Bensch: And you know they.00:58:50.000 --> 00:58:52.000Stuart Winchester: That was the answer from Boyne or from the ski schools?00:58:52.000 --> 00:59:08.000Brian Bensch: Uh, it was… I would say both. There was a, uh, like, the first party unoperated, like, Snoqualmie Ski School manager, like, told me that. And there was a person who coordinated, basically, was the Boyne representative for the seven other independents.00:59:07.000 --> 00:59:09.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:59:08.000 --> 00:59:11.000Brian Bensch: And it was like, yeah, we're not, you know, we're not inviting new people.00:59:11.000 --> 00:59:18.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, and in case anyone from the ski schools at Summit is listening to this, don't run to Guy Lawrence or Steven Kirchner and be like.00:59:11.000 --> 00:59:13.000Brian Bensch: Um, okay.00:59:18.000 --> 00:59:33.000Stuart Winchester: Stu Winchester said that you said this. I'm paraphrasing, and that's my take, is that they don't want that war. What they said was probably something like, our ski schools do a great job, and we're so happy to work with them. So don't run that back to them. This is just my take on it.00:59:22.000 --> 00:59:23.000Brian Bensch: Yeah.00:59:30.000 --> 00:59:31.000Brian Bensch: Yep.00:59:33.000 --> 00:59:37.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, that they don't want to fight you, and I think they're smart not to.00:59:36.000 --> 00:59:43.000Brian Bensch: Yeah. The thing I would probably acknowledge is when a…00:59:43.000 --> 00:59:47.000Brian Bensch: Sierra is running a…00:59:49.000 --> 00:59:54.000Brian Bensch: a well executed, operationally efficient ski school.00:59:53.000 --> 00:59:54.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:59:54.000 --> 01:00:00.000Brian Bensch: They don't necessarily need third parties to come in and, like, try to do it better.01:00:00.000 --> 01:00:02.000Brian Bensch: Okay.01:00:02.000 --> 01:00:06.000Brian Bensch: However, there is a short term sort of.01:00:06.000 --> 01:00:09.000Brian Bensch: financially motivated incentive.01:00:09.000 --> 01:00:15.000Brian Bensch: to run a, I would say, less at scale, more profitable ski area over time.01:00:15.000 --> 01:00:19.000Brian Bensch: And you know that is sort of.01:00:19.000 --> 01:00:22.000Brian Bensch: what I would attribute to, like, you know, the…01:00:23.000 --> 01:00:37.000Brian Bensch: the non-snow summit at Snoqualmie Mountains that have one ski school and their list prices are $279 for group lesson or $1,299 for private lesson.01:00:37.000 --> 01:00:50.000Brian Bensch: they've decided that it's better for their business to, you know, maximize, like, short-term financials over long-term bringing skiers in the market. Um, and the history of Snoqualmie was, you know.01:00:50.000 --> 01:01:05.000Brian Bensch: Because it was like this, and because the ski schools were busing kids, you know, from school to the mountain afternoon, and, like, handling the very messy logistics and operations, that, like, they saw that as valuable and let them keep doing that.01:01:05.000 --> 01:01:12.000Brian Bensch: But from a business perspective, it's just more profitable, at least in the short term, to teach fewer lessons at higher margin.01:01:13.000 --> 01:01:17.000Stuart Winchester: So to end on this thought on ski lessons.01:01:17.000 --> 01:01:27.000Stuart Winchester: I think they're…
Annual urban design festival begins Oct. 2 With over 50 free events, including lectures, workshops, tours and parties, taking place in Newburgh during the city's fourth annual Archtober urban design festival, it can be difficult to keep track of it all. To make sure I wouldn't miss anything, I asked Naomi Hersson-Ringskog and Wendy Smith, two members of its organizing team, to walk me around. First, they pointed out a site on Chambers Street that will become a "co-housing," or cooperative, neighborhood and the subject of a talk on Oct. 24. Down the street was the site of the future Newburgh Tool Library, an idea hatched from an earlier Archtober lecture. It's being built out of invasive reeds and other natural materials, and it'll be open for tours on Oct. 4. A few blocks south is the city's defunct American Legion, YMCA and Masonic Temple, a complex that is being converted into a suite of restaurants and a hotel — something this city of nearly 30,000 people has lacked for 50 years. Its developer, the Catskills-based Foster Supply Hospitality, will offer a hard-hat tour on Oct. 3. The Grand Street project, as it's known, brings cautious optimism: It will provide local jobs and draw tourist money — Hersson-Ringskog said she hopes the project can absorb overflow from Cold Spring — but it's also moving ahead, something other ambitious projects over the past decades failed to do. "Good machine day today," Hersson-Ringskog said as we walked past the Masonic Temple while a dark orange forklift carried two workers to the engravings near the roof. "I love it when they get the forklift out," Smith said. It's easy to be overwhelmed by the downtown projects. In the past decade, the city has sold 600 of 700 vacant buildings, putting them back on the tax rolls. It seemed like Hersson-Ringskog and Smith knew something about every one of them — as well as every person in Newburgh. A man working on an orange pickup truck on Washington Street called out: "Hey Wendy, I've got something up in Open Studios this weekend!" Smith replied: "I know! I'm already coming!" A woman walking a tiny dog on Liberty Street shouted: "I've got a great idea for the parade route!" Hersson-Ringskog shouted back that she would call her later. That drew Ricardo Fuente out of his Fabhaus Warehouse. "You guys want to see something cool?" he asked. Inside the fabrication studio, he showed off a zoetrope his team built that was about to be shipped to England for a film. Fuente will be part of a panel on Oct. 24 about building Newburgh's design economy. Like many makers and designers, he moved his business from Beacon for more space and cheaper rent. (Later we passed Jessica Wickham's relocated woodworking studio and the Newburgh outposts of One Nature Studios and Big Mouth Coffee.) They've joined an ecosystem of established studios in Newburgh such as Atlas and Thornwillow Press. As Hersson-Ringskog and Smith explained while we wound through a block of houses rebuilt by Habitat for Humanity, Newburgh has the second-largest historical district in New York and the nation's first publicly owned historic site: George Washington's Headquarters on Liberty Street. Guides will lead a twilight lantern walk around the site on Oct. 25. The Archtober organizers hope to make the case that Newburgh should be considered the state's historic preservation capital, which requires a new generation of craftspeople. To that end, on Oct. 4, Archtober will host a talk on the state's new Parks Trades Corps program. Inspired by AmeriCorps, the pilot is training a crew to restore Camp Baker in Harriman State Park. "These are highly skilled, good-paying, specialized jobs that AI can't do," said Hersson-Ringskog. An Oct. 4 workshop will show off The Newburgh Project, an initiative within the Minecraft video game to reconstruct what Newburgh looked like before the Urban Renewal movement in the 1960s and 1970s demolished 1,300 buildings and displaced 800 families. Archtober is also hosting work...
Recorded at Fantastic Fest 2026 in Austin, No Film School founder Ryan Koo talks with Into the Sky writer-directors Drew Mylrea and Evan Buxbaum about the decade-long path to making their sci-fi comedy. They trace the project from an early script that Evan initially rejected through Black List evaluations, financing, casting Sam Richardson, and an ambitious 25-day production with dozens of locations and hundreds of VFX shots. Drew and Evan also explain how they divided responsibilities as co-directors, used LiDAR scans and Lego figures to pre-visualize scenes, navigated production setbacks, tested unfinished cuts with audiences, and learned to trust their instincts while making an independent film designed to feel like a blockbuster. In this episode, No Film School's Ryan Koo and guests Drew Mylrea and Evan Buxbaum discuss... How Drew and Evan became filmmaking collaborators after spending hours together shooting a Method soap commercial in a tiny shower Evan's experience making Sun Belt Express and the long gap between his first and second features Why Drew kept returning to the alien-abduction concept that eventually became Into the Sky Revisiting old material after years of becoming better writers and filmmakers How strong Black List evaluations gave the filmmakers psychological momentum to commit to the project Spending roughly two years rewriting the script and assembling financing Why casting director Kate Geller became an important part of building the movie's cast How attaching Sam Richardson helped the project gain momentum The pressures created when an in-demand actor gives an independent production a narrow shooting window Walking away from a “turnkey” production-services solution that would have forced most of the movie onto a single estate Finding the town of Catskill, New York, and rebuilding their location strategy around what the movie actually needed Why filmmakers sometimes have to reject the easiest logistical solution when it threatens the film creatively Shooting the movie in 25 days while managing frequent company moves How Drew and Evan divided directing responsibilities according to their complementary strengths Drew's focus on visual storytelling, camera placement, and spectacle versus Evan's focus on performance, character, and dialogue Using iPhone LiDAR scans and Polycam to create digital models of locations Printing location blueprints and using custom Lego figures and a Lego camera to block scenes with the AD and cinematographer Building detailed storyboards and turning them into rough animatics for complicated sequences Trying to create an “indie blockbuster” without a blockbuster budget The challenge of completing approximately 500 visual-effects shots with an extremely small VFX team Why extensive preparation became a starting point for improvisation once production problems appeared Delaying a cornfield sequence until the final day of photography so the corn would be tall enough for the scene How rain, heat, scheduling problems, and other uncontrollable factors reshaped the production Watching dailies and determining whether scenes needed to be reshot Why a scene they believed needed a reshoot ultimately used mostly material from the original shoot Working 12-hour shooting days followed by another four or five hours of preparation each night Splitting up the first stages of post-production so Drew could eventually watch the assembly with fresh eyes Why comedy becomes difficult to judge after watching the same material dozens of times Screening cuts for friends and family to measure real laughter and audience energy Using QR codes and Google Forms to collect individual reactions before a group discussion could influence everyone's opinions Measuring character likability and other audience responses between different test screenings Asking test audiences to respond to major VFX sequences while those sequences were still extremely unfinished The moment completed visual effects and music finally made the filmmakers feel that the movie was working Their goal of making large, entertaining movies with heart on an independent scale Why Drew and Evan believe their filmmaking education ultimately came from making things, making mistakes, and “touching the stove” Memorable Quotes: “If I have any takeaway from that, it's that, like, in those moments of extreme pressure when you have a lot of competing interests that have started rolling down on you, you've just gotta trust your gut.” “We always called this movie an indie blockbuster. You know, we were trying to make an indie film that felt like a blockbuster.” “We went in with a great plan, and then you get hit in the fucking face. And your plan becomes the launching point for an improvisational new plan.” “We learned by making mistakes and doing things out in the world. We learned by touching the stove.” Guests: Drew Mylrea Evan Buxbaum Find No Film School everywhere: On the Web: No Film School Facebook: No Film School on Facebook Twitter: No Film School on Twitter YouTube: No Film School on YouTube Instagram: No Film School on Instagram
OBSIDIAN, Q&A. DEEPER JOURNEY IS ANCHORED IN RELATIONSHIP.I give information and answer some questions about my new BDSM training.This training will emphasize foundational skills for this realm. It will also focus on each student mapping out their own erotic make up. And it will emphasize relationship skills for creating a functional and sustainable dynamic.Please reach out if you have any questions. OmRupani@me.comPayment plans and limited scholarships available for this course.Course date : October 4-8. Catskills, NY.COURSE PAGE : https://omrupani.org/obsidian/www.OmRupani.org
A Sullivan County jury has delivered a legal blow to the Monticello Central School District, finding the district liable in a case involving a claim of repeated assaultsTwo teenagers face felony charges after reported assault in the Village of LibertySullivan County election officials are putting out an urgent call for poll workers ahead of the November 3 vote A Latin celebration with music and dancing in Ellenville. Delaware County is rolling out the red carpet for local veterans as part of America's 250th birthday celebration.
Send us Fan MailA new 100-mile race is coming to the Catskill Mountains, and it's not pulling any punches. Amy Kohler, race director at The Running Kind, joins us to reveal the Catskill 100, a technical Northeast ultra marathon that leans hard into steep climbs, rocky descents, and true backcountry vibes. Think Devil's Path brutality up front, big mountain linkups across the range, and more than 27,000 feet of vert that won't feel “easy” for a single step. If you've ever felt like the Catskills get overlooked in mountain running conversations, this one makes the argument in the loudest possible way. We walk through the course like a guided tour: where it starts, how the Devil's Path packs massive elevation into a short distance, and why this terrain can favor strong hikers as much as fast runners. We also get into the on-the-ground realities that make this a serious undertaking, including DEC permitting through state-designated wilderness, minimal road running, long stretches with limited cell service, and the operational lift of building aid stations at trailheads. Amy shares ideas for a Phoenicia halfway cheer zone and what it takes to staff an event that can run for 51 hours. Then we zoom out to the bigger “why.” The Running Kind is a carbon neutral race organization, and Amy ties trail running directly to stewardship and advocacy, including what she learned meeting lawmakers in Washington, DC with Runners for Public Lands. We break down the Roadless Rule and the Travel Management Rule in plain language, why they matter for trail access and safety, and how runners can have real influence by paying attention and speaking up. If you're excited for the Catskill 100, share this with a friend who loves technical terrain, then subscribe so you don't miss upcoming race previews and interviews. And if the show helps you, leave a rating and review to help new listeners find it.Follow the Running Kind - @therunningkindFor More Information on the Catskill 100 - > Catskill 100Register for the Catskill 100 - > Catskill 100 Registration Use code SteepStuff for 20% your cart on Sidas.usFollow James on IG - @jameslaurielloFollow the Steep Stuff Podcast on IG - @steepstuff_podFollow Sidas USA on IG - @sidas_usa
A pair of men in South Fallsburg have been arrested after an investigation into a reported altercation where they bothered another man, using knives.Three people have pleaded guilty to gang violence in Kingston. A first for the regional food bank.A cell tower is reportedly planned in the Town of Cochecton, in two possible locations.
As the leaves change, Kaatscast and Cidiot join up to look at fall foliage on both sides of the Hudson. Cidiot's episode covers the science of leaf color with Cary Institute scientist Dr. Amy Zanne. This one covers the west side: an environmental educator explains why leaves change color, and five more Catskills residents describe how they spend the season and where they go to see it.In this episode00:00 Introduction, with a reading of "Poème d'Automne" by Langston HughesThe autumn leavesAre too heavy with color.The slender treesOn the Vulcan RoadAre dressed in scarlet and goldLike young courtesansWaiting for their lovers.But soonThe winter windsWill strip their bodies bareAnd thenThe sharp, sleet-stungCaresses of coldWill be their onlyLove.01:33 Matt Savatgy, environmental scientist in residence in the Onteora School District (Cornell Cooperative Extension / Ashokan Watershed Stream Management Program), on chlorophyll, why trees go dormant, how drought and a wet August affect color, and why the Northeast shares its foliage with places at similar latitudes like South Korea. Favorite spots: the escarpment at North Lake, Ashokan Quarry Trail, Giant Ledge, Overlook Mountain.11:57 Milton O'Connell of the Bruderhof community in Platte Clove on fall hikes (Kaaterskill High Peak, Indian Head, Plattekill Mountain, Dibble's Quarry) and the community's fall festival.15:41 Painter Christie Scheele on why fall is the season she paints least, what she looks for in late-fall oaks, and driving Route 28 west.21:24 Photographer Casey Kelbaugh on shooting foliage in overcast light, iPhone settings, and a one-way hike through Diamond Notch to the West Kill brewery.28:10 Ed Ullmanm of Wellness Rx in Phoenicia on fall as a season of reflection, plus his advice on flu shots, COVID boosters and immune support.33:05 Samantha Awand-Gortel, manager of Ulster Savings Bank's Phoenicia branch, on preparing finances for winter costs and her favorite views, including the Belleayre and Hunter Mountain Oktoberfests.35:42 Closing and how to send in your own fall favoritesEvent: The Bruderhof fall festival in Platte Clove is Saturday, October 3, 2026, 2:00–5:00 PM, open to the public (hayrides, pumpkin carving, cider making).LinksCidiot podcast, East of Hudson fall guide with Dr. Amy Zanne: https://www.cidiot.com/Bruderhof: A Christian Community in the Platte Clove: https://www.kaatscast.com/bruderhof-a-christian-community-in-the-platte-clove/Christie Scheele's Kaatscast episode: https://www.kaatscast.com/catskills-artist-christie-scheele/... and the Drive 28 Arts & Culture audio tour: https://drive28.com/Walking the Long Path from Manhattan to the Catskills (Casey Kelbaugh): https://www.kaatscast.com/walking-the-long-path-from-manhattan-to-the-catskills/Wellness Rx: A Prescription for Rural Healthcare: https://www.kaatscast.com/wellness-rx-a-prescription-for-rural-healthcare/Samantha Awand-Gortel's 2023 financial literacy episode: https://www.kaatscast.com/financial-literacy-at-ulster-savings-bank/Share your fall favorites: kaatscast.com (contact page or Send a Voicemail): https://www.kaatscast.com/contact/
Three men from Middletown have been arrested after a lengthy drug investigation.The village of Monticello is reportedly preparing for snow-plowing season. A man who admitted he arranged for the murder of another man in Middletown is being retried. The leader of the police force in Ellenville has plans for his future.
A reminder about court action today regarding the temporary stay on closing the Adult Care Center in Liberty.A man in Monticello has been arrested after a reported break in at a local restaurant. A familiar voice on these airwaves has been recognized for a half century of work behind the mic. A young bald eagle that could not fly has been found in the Town of Delaware.
Your window into rural life in the Catskills and the Delaware River Valley.
Welcome to episode 238! This week, mushroom forager and fungi enthusiast Jonathan Kranz joins us to dive into the fascinating world of mushrooms and fungi! Jonathan is a Massachusetts Audubon Certified Field Naturalist and has been exploring and foraging throughout the Catskills for more than 40 years. We chat about his passion for fungi, what keeps drawing him back to the Catskills, and some of the incredible things you can discover when you slow down and start looking beneath the forest canopy. We also talk about a memorial for the legendary mountain lion P-22 in Los Angeles, the Windham Board approving a new addition to the area's luxury hotel scene, and the DEC spending money on… well, stuff we already know. Make sure to subscribe on your favorite platform, share the show, donate if you feel like it… or just keep tuning in. I'm just grateful you're here. And as always... VOLUNTEER!!!!Links for the Podcast: https://linktr.ee/ISLCatskillsPodcast, Donate a coffee to support the show! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/ITLCatskills, Like to be a sponsor or monthly supporter of the show? Go here! - https://www.buymeacoffee.com/ITLCatskills/membershipThanks to the sponsors of the show: Outdoor chronicles photography - https://www.outdoorchroniclesphotography.com/, Trailbound Project - https://www.trailboundproject.com/, Camp Catskill - https://campcatskill.co/, Another Summit - https://www.guardianrevival.org/programs/another-summitLinks: Jonathan's Website, Mushroomexpert.com, Catskill Fungi, The Complete Mushroom Hunter, Volunteer Opportunities: Trailhead stewards for 3500 Club -https://www.catskill3500club.org/trailhead-stewardship, Catskills Trail Crew - https://www.nynjtc.org/trailcrew/catskills-trail-crew, NYNJTC Volunteering - https://www.nynjtc.org/catskills, Catskill Center - https://catskillcenter.org/, Catskill Mountain Club - https://catskillmountainclub.org/about-us/, Catskill Mountainkeeper - https://www.catskillmountainkeeper.org/ Post Hike Brews and Bites - Equilibrium IPA, Bombshell Hard Cider, #mushrooms #foraging #fungi #hudsonvalley #hudsonvalleyhiking #NYC #history #husdonvalley #hikingNY #kaaterskill #bluehole #catskillhiking #visitcatskills #catskillstrails #catskillmountains #3500 #catskills #catskillpark #catskillshiker #catskillmountainsnewyork #hiking #catskill3500club #catskill3500 #hikethecatskills #hikehudson
It looks like the closure of the Sullivan County Adult Care Center is on hold a while. Jim Sebastian reports.The Monticello Central School District has been found liable for not protecting a student being attacked by other students.A student in Goshen has reportedly died so counselors are being brought into the school district to help their classmates with their grief.A school bus stop that has been relocated has created some concern from parent in the Pine Bush Central School District.
Following a massive bust in Liberty related to child exploitation, another pair of arrests have been announced.A man from Monticello has been arrested on drug charges while on probation on past drug offenses.They've replenished funding in Sullivan County for a vital service.If you happen by the government center, you might pop in and hear lawmakers with a proclamation for our longtime pal, and morning host on Catskills News Talk.
Step into The Other Side of Midnight with Walter Sterling for a late-night show dedicated to overnight shift workers, insomniacs, and fellow misfits. In this episode, metaphysical healer Dr. Linda Salvin breaks down "wicks of wisdom" candle magic, haunted college dorms, sleep paralysis ("witches riding"), and the metaphysical connections to physical health. Plus, callers share eerie tales of ghost attachments in Catskill inns and hearing crowd chants in the woods at 3:00 a.m.. Retired NYPD detective Vic Ferrari drops by to expose a stolen Lexus car-lot sting, and Walter rants on midnight McDonald's survival hacks, saving AM radio in electric cars, and why banning school phones is just like trying to outlaw car radios in the 1930s.
Almost two dozen Orange County employees have reportedly either gotten ill with food poisoning or were exposed to something.A fundraiser is being held to help a former Barryville medical office transform into a community health center. A household hazardous waste event is planned in Sullivan County. An event in Sullivan County will bring out glass collectors and enthusiasts alike.
Michelle from Northport, Long Island, is excited that Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman is heading to the Catskills to campaign! Blauvelt, Florida, calls Mark to highlight the calls the show received on 9/11, reflecting on the events of that day and sharing how deeply the conversations moved him.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Welcome to the Storm's short-form, news-focused podcast. Don't worry, I still write long-form newsletters. Paid subscribers can leave a comment in the article below, or by joining The Storm's chat (also below). I'll respond to some comments in the next episode, which is scheduled for Wednesday, Sept. 16.Transcript updateFollowing up on yesterday's feedback, there are now two transcripts available for each podcast:* Substack's transcript: This transcript is auto-generated when I upload the podcast file to Substack, which is the platform that hosts stormskiing.com. This one is cool because you can click on any block of text and the audio will jump to that point in the conversation. Click the “transcript” button above to access. * Zoom's transcript: Zoom automatically generates this transcript as I record. It should be more or less identical to Substack's transcript, but with names attached to each quote block. The downside of this transcript is that you can't teleport to that point in the pod by clicking on the text block, as you can with Substack's. Another downside: the timestamps are off, since I typically start recording prior to the start of the podcast. I'll work on cleaning this up.So until the robots get smarter, we're stuck with two different transcripts. Both are auto-generated, and I don't proofread either one, as that would be the fastest way to make sure my quick-turnaround, up-to-date podcast turns into a slow-turnaround, out-of-date one. My hope is that Substack will soon hire or invent or weld from raw iron a robot that's smart enough to know who's speaking when. I'll just keep following the robots around and using their hyper-intelligence until they decide to kill me.The Zoom transcript (click “transcript” above for the Substack transcript, which will zoom to any point in the video when you click on the associated text block; timestamps below DO NOT MATCH THE VIDEO)Stuart Winchester: Welcome to The Storm! I'm your host, Stuart Winchester. It is Tuesday, September 15th, 2026, and I am very excited today to bring you a conversation with the General Manager of Monarch Mountain, Colorado, Chris Haggerty. Now, I've never featured Monarch either on the long-form pod or on the short-form pod.00:09:57.000 --> 00:10:11.000Stuart Winchester: There's never really a reason behind that, other than this is just kind of when it happened. If you run an area, a ski area anywhere in America, I do want to talk to you. I've just never had the opportunity to feature Monarch before, so we will talk about Monarch in just a little bit here.00:10:11.000 --> 00:10:27.000Stuart Winchester: Part of the reason why we're talking about Monarch is because they were one of two Western Mountains to this year join Snow Operating's Snow Pass. Now, the Snow Pass, if you missed the news, it works a lot like the Indy Pass or the Mountain Collective Pass, where you get two days each.00:10:27.000 --> 00:10:37.000Stuart Winchester: at a set number of ski areas. In this case, it's planned to be 14 ski areas for the 2026-27 ski season. And…00:10:37.000 --> 00:10:45.000Stuart Winchester: That product went on sale last Tuesday. I had Snow Operating CEO Joe Heschen on the podcast to talk through it with us.00:10:45.000 --> 00:11:01.000Stuart Winchester: Couple days later, I got an email from Snow Operating saying, Hey, guess what? Our first round of Snow Operating and Snow Triple Play, which are two different products, and I'll explain the difference in a moment, sold out. So we're taking it off sale. We're putting it back on sale next Monday, September 21st.00:11:01.000 --> 00:11:13.000Stuart Winchester: at 10 a.m. Eastern. It will be $349.99 for Snowpass, and $184.99 for Snow Triple Play. Still a pretty good deal. Those products at full price.00:11:13.000 --> 00:11:24.000Stuart Winchester: the prices that Snow Partners gave me, and they anticipate selling both products through Christmas Eve, December 24th, just like they did last year with the first season of the Triple Play.00:11:24.000 --> 00:11:40.000Stuart Winchester: They, the final prices they anticipate will be 3 99 99 for snow pass and 1 99 99 for snow triple play. So you get a nice little discount, particularly with the snow pass, $50 off if you buy it in the next round. So let's talk a little bit about the snow pass because.00:11:40.000 --> 00:11:43.000Stuart Winchester: When this product debuted.00:11:43.000 --> 00:11:53.000Stuart Winchester: I… I've been saying for years, there's 4 national ski passes, right? There's obviously Epic and Icon, and those have some season pass unlimited tiers at certain mountains.00:11:53.000 --> 00:12:08.000Stuart Winchester: And a limited number of days at other partner mountains. And then you have Indian Mountain Collective, which essentially worked the same way, 2 days at each ski area that is on their roster. Uh, Mountain Collective is more expensive, tends to be your bigger, more high-end resorts, Snowbird, Jackson Hole.00:12:08.000 --> 00:12:23.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, Sun Peaks up in Canada. And Indy tended to be the lesser-known ski areas, but still some really dynamite stuff there, and a lot more ski areas. Mountain Collective always has around 30, and Indy is more like 250, not counting their cross-country.00:12:23.000 --> 00:12:36.000Stuart Winchester: ski areas. So, I always thought there was probably room for a fifth national pass, but I wasn't sure, and as time went on, and more and more mountains joined multi-mountain passes.00:12:36.000 --> 00:12:37.000Stuart Winchester: I…00:12:37.000 --> 00:12:41.000Stuart Winchester: I thought, okay, maybe there's not room for a fifth national pass. Maybe everyone who's…00:12:41.000 --> 00:12:44.000Stuart Winchester: who wants to join a pass has, because I know Indy, uh.00:12:44.000 --> 00:12:58.000Stuart Winchester: Now, I'm not saying they don't have standards, but they'll let just about anybody on the pass just to help them get that exposure and that national marketing. But Snow Operating, the outfit that owns Mountain Creek in New Jersey and the indoor big snow ski area in New Jersey, they launched.00:12:58.000 --> 00:13:15.000Stuart Winchester: their Snow Pass, and it's a pretty good roster. Here, I'm gonna share my screen for those of you watching on video, and if you're not watching on video, don't worry, I'm gonna talk through it. So, here's the Snow Triple Play East roster, and here's the Snow Pass roster. Now, the Snow Pass has 14 ski areas on it.00:13:15.000 --> 00:13:18.000Stuart Winchester: And you get 2 days at each ski area.00:13:18.000 --> 00:13:22.000Stuart Winchester: The Snow Triple Play has…00:13:22.000 --> 00:13:27.000Stuart Winchester: 23 total ski areas on it, and you get 3 days total.00:13:27.000 --> 00:13:43.000Stuart Winchester: across all 23 ski areas. That's why it's so much less expensive. The most days you can use at any ski area is 2, so you can't buy this as a 3-pack Force A Gore Mountain, alright? So, that's the first important.00:13:43.000 --> 00:13:59.000Stuart Winchester: distinction is that Snow Triple Play is a much more limited basket of days. You also don't want to assume that they have the same roster. Just because something's on Snow Pass doesn't mean it's on Snow Triple Play, and vice versa. Snow Triple Play right now has a pretty…00:13:59.000 --> 00:14:15.000Stuart Winchester: Big roster that I wish was on the, uh, Snow Pass, because it has Jiminy Peak in, uh, Massachusetts, and also Cranmore in New Hampshire, which is jointly owned. It has Platykill up in the New York Catskills.00:14:15.000 --> 00:14:30.000Stuart Winchester: It has all these summit ski areas around Quebec. It has Bromont, one of the great eastern townships ski areas. Uh, so that's Snow Triple Play. Snow Triple Play does not have anything in the west. It's all east. It's all east coast, either eastern Canada or eastern New York.00:14:30.000 --> 00:14:45.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, Snow Pass has… it's a pretty interesting roster, and it's a great roster for a very particular type of skier. Now, it does have two ski areas in the West, uh, Snow King, which has been controversial, I'm gonna set that aside, and Monarch, which we'll talk about in a moment.00:14:45.000 --> 00:15:00.000Stuart Winchester: The core of the Snow Pass, and the reason why it makes sense, is because of the south to north line of ski areas that it offers. So if you buy the Snow Pass, again, goes back on sale for $349.99 next Monday, September 21st.00:15:00.000 --> 00:15:05.000Stuart Winchester: You would get two days each at Bel Air, which is in New York's Catskills.00:15:05.000 --> 00:15:07.000Stuart Winchester: Gore.00:15:07.000 --> 00:15:16.000Stuart Winchester: higher up in the Adirondacks, and Whiteface, which are all owned and run and operated by the state, all fantastic ski areas. So it's 2 days at each of those, that alone would be worth $350.00:15:16.000 --> 00:15:33.000Stuart Winchester: Then you add in the fact that you get two days at Mountain Creek, which is right there in New Jersey, uh, two days at the indoor snow dome, big snow American dream. Uh, if you have kids, two days at Butternut and two days at Mount Southington in Connecticut. Uh, Butternut is in Massachusetts. They're both day drive distance from New York City.00:15:33.000 --> 00:15:42.000Stuart Winchester: Let them wander around, let them explore. They're both, uh, especially Butternut. It's very up-to-date, very modern lifts, very, very well-run ski area. So…00:15:42.000 --> 00:15:45.000Stuart Winchester: You have a really great little, you know.00:15:46.000 --> 00:16:03.000Stuart Winchester: 5, 6, 7 ski areas that really make sense. Now, Ski Martok doesn't really make sense. It's all the way up in the middle of nowhere in the, in the Atlantic provinces in, in Canada. Uh, and, and Pleasant Mountain makes less sense. It's, it's up in Maine and, uh, harder to get to from, from the folks who would likely buy this as.00:16:03.000 --> 00:16:13.000Stuart Winchester: But what you have to ask yourself is, okay, the snow pass, that's a pretty good deal, right? It's $349.99 for 2 days each of 14 mountains. Then you look at Indy.00:16:13.000 --> 00:16:16.000Stuart Winchester: And Indy Pass is 254.00:16:16.000 --> 00:16:34.000Stuart Winchester: uh, alpine ski areas, and it just went off sale for $429 for the base pass. So, it would be 2 days each at all of these, and the… the plus pass, the ND plus pass, was $469. It had no blackouts. Now, the other thing to know about Snow Triple Play.00:16:34.000 --> 00:16:50.000Stuart Winchester: and snow passes, there are a lot of blackouts, okay? So, a lot of these are holidays, you probably expect that. Uh, you know, here I see Big Snow, Oak Mountain, Plattekill, a lot of holiday blackouts, Butternut holiday blackouts, Gore, uh, Bel Air. Bel Air, though, you want to stop.00:16:50.000 --> 00:17:06.000Stuart Winchester: Bel Air is blacked out every Saturday and Sunday. That's a big deal, because when do you probably want to go to Bel Air if you're someone skiing around with your little kids? Probably on a Saturday or Sunday. So, you want to be really careful and really look at these, uh, these blackout dates before you pull the trigger.00:17:06.000 --> 00:17:09.000Stuart Winchester: on the snow pass. So…00:17:09.000 --> 00:17:14.000Stuart Winchester: So if you have a snow pass, I I'm calling it.00:17:14.000 --> 00:17:18.000Stuart Winchester: A national pass, kind of, uh…00:17:18.000 --> 00:17:24.000Stuart Winchester: out of anticipation, right? It's more of a, I think they'll get there, sort of designation, because right now.00:17:24.000 --> 00:17:40.000Stuart Winchester: it's not really a national pass, right? You have one small skier in Wyoming, one small skier in Colorado. Is someone who lives in New York's metro really going to travel to Colorado just to ski that because they have a snow pass, right? Because it's not cheap to get up to Colorado.00:17:40.000 --> 00:17:56.000Stuart Winchester: And there's a lot of much bigger mountains out there. So… so I think that Snow Pass, much like Indy did when it started in 2019, will grow into a national… a true national pass. Uh, for now, just based on the reputation of the operators, uh, the fact that I think that they will be able to grow this thing, the fact that I…00:17:56.000 --> 00:18:11.000Stuart Winchester: know their relationships with folks all around the country, and how much folks like working with them, I am assuming that this pass will grow up, and if it does, Monarch will be the OG Western partner. So, let's talk more about Monarch now, and I'm gonna bring.00:18:11.000 --> 00:18:13.000Stuart Winchester: Chris Haggerty in.00:18:14.000 --> 00:18:17.000Stuart Winchester: And we will, uh… Chris, how you doing?00:18:17.000 --> 00:18:20.000Chris Haggerty: I'm doing well today, Stuart. How are you?00:18:19.000 --> 00:18:37.000Stuart Winchester: I'm doing great. All right, you passed the sound check, so I'm going to give you an intro here. Joining us now is the general manager of Monarch Mountain, Colorado. Monarch has six chairlifts serving 1,017 acres of terrain, including the 377-acre no-name expansion that opened last winter.00:18:37.000 --> 00:18:44.000Stuart Winchester: Monarch's 10,727-foot base elevation is the third highest in American skiing.00:18:44.000 --> 00:18:59.000Stuart Winchester: Prior to taking the top job at Monarch in 2024, he spent 21 years as general manager of Mountain Creek, New Jersey. Chris Haggerty is my guest. Chris, welcome to The Storm. Awesome to connect with you. I've really been wanting to spotlight Monarch for a long time now, and I'm so hyped we get to.00:19:00.000 --> 00:19:10.000Chris Haggerty: Yeah. Thanks for having me, and I'm excited to be here and chat Monarch. It's a special place, so excited to share some discussion about it.00:19:10.000 --> 00:19:23.000Stuart Winchester: So, the New Jersey to Colorado pipeline is maybe not necessarily a well-trod one, although there are a surprising amount of IntraWest vets working in the ski industry because of its relationship with IntraWest, but talk to us about…00:19:24.000 --> 00:19:40.000Stuart Winchester: Getting to Monarch, and you were taking over for Randy Stroud, super experienced guy, he was retiring, uh, he'd been there 23 years, a decade as GM, and he stayed on, I believe, for, for a year. So, talk to us about going from New Jersey, where they have a lot of snowmaking, because they have to.00:19:39.000 --> 00:19:41.000Chris Haggerty: Mmhm.00:19:40.000 --> 00:19:47.000Stuart Winchester: to Monarch, where they have no snowmaking, and just what that adjustment period was like, and how you settled into the role.00:19:48.000 --> 00:20:07.000Chris Haggerty: Yeah, just a quick story is that, you know, as you mentioned, I was at Mountain Creek for a long time, and, you know, really where I found my love for the ski industry, and after college, I had taken a trip out to Colorado and got my first taste of, like.00:20:07.000 --> 00:20:12.000Chris Haggerty: the Rockies, right? So it's always been something in the back of my mind. Um…00:20:12.000 --> 00:20:28.000Chris Haggerty: And I ended up stumbling upon Monarch. I hadn't been to Monarch before, and I was like, oh, this place looks pretty cool. It definitely screamed the ski independent. I definitely wanted to.00:20:28.000 --> 00:20:50.000Chris Haggerty: you know, if I was going to relocate, wanted to find an area where the resort and the local community both had that kind of just feeling of community and stuff. So a monarch was it. And I was blessed to step in after Randy Stroud, and we shared a season together. So I got to learn a lot of institutional knowledge from him.00:20:50.000 --> 00:20:58.000Chris Haggerty: Um, but also bring my viewpoints coming from New Jersey in an area where, you know, we're not…00:20:58.000 --> 00:21:15.000Chris Haggerty: maybe blessed with natural snow. Um, so last year was, like, a challenging winter, and, um, I was ready for it, because I was like, man, 120 inches, like, if you gave me that in New Jersey, we'd be celebrating for years, right? So, um, you know, just kind of a unique perspective, but…00:21:15.000 --> 00:21:21.000Chris Haggerty: um, definitely happy to be here, and just pumped to keep the Monarch kind of spirit going forward.00:21:21.000 --> 00:21:37.000Stuart Winchester: So you've been there for a couple years, one full year as GM, and one of the… there's been tons of stuff coming out of Monarch, it's amazing for a small ski area, which is why I wanted to get you on. So you recently joined the Snow Pass, one of two Western partners to join the Snow Pass, which gives pass holders.00:21:32.000 --> 00:21:34.000Chris Haggerty: Thank you.00:21:37.000 --> 00:21:54.000Stuart Winchester: Two days at Monarch. I don't think there's blackouts on that, but correct me if I'm wrong now. Now, Multimon Pass has been around for years and almost everybody in Colorado is on either Epic or Icon if they're large and if they're small, a lot of them have joined Indy. So the option has been there for years.00:21:54.000 --> 00:22:00.000Stuart Winchester: Why was it finally time for Monarch to join a multi-mountain pass, and why the snow pass?00:22:02.000 --> 00:22:15.000Chris Haggerty: Yeah, two parts there. I think on the, I mentioned it before, we're ski independent as our tagline, right? Part of independence is like the definition is freedom.00:22:10.000 --> 00:22:11.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:22:15.000 --> 00:22:19.000Chris Haggerty: Right? Like, you make your own choices. You do what you wanna do.00:22:19.000 --> 00:22:31.000Chris Haggerty: we've been approached in the past for IndyPass, and, you know, it wasn't right for us because it kind of went against our spirit of being independent. Like, we want to be able to work with who we…00:22:31.000 --> 00:22:43.000Chris Haggerty: who we choose at any given moment, um, and that just isn't something that, um, is available through the Unipass, so… so we've passed on that. Um, we were even approached about it this year. Um…00:22:43.000 --> 00:23:00.000Chris Haggerty: As far as Snowpass goes, they respect that. They're all about, hey, you want to work with XYZ Pass, go for it. And obviously, I've spent some time working with the Snow Partners group.00:23:00.000 --> 00:23:05.000Chris Haggerty: You know, from my perspective, that group is all about, um…00:23:05.000 --> 00:23:17.000Chris Haggerty: you know, rising tides lifts all boats, right? And, um, you know, for me personally, they've opened doors for me, right? And helped me throughout growing in my career, so, um…00:23:39.000 --> 00:23:40.000Chris Haggerty: We're down.00:23:40.000 --> 00:23:52.000Stuart Winchester: I want to share, because you've sort of created your own… I'm sharing my screen now, if you can see that, and hopefully the folks watching can as well, and if you're listening, I'll talk through it. So, Monarch has…00:23:45.000 --> 00:23:46.000Chris Haggerty: Thank you.00:23:52.000 --> 00:24:07.000Stuart Winchester: not joined a pass, necessarily, but you've kind of built your own pass, and what I have on the screen right now is a list of Monarch's reciprocals, and it's a pretty amazing pass all in and of itself, so if you buy a Monarch season pass, which I believe now is, what, $6.59, less if you renew.00:24:07.000 --> 00:24:24.000Stuart Winchester: It comes with a lot of reciprocal days. Some of the big ones that people probably are really attracted to, 3 days at A-Basin, 3 days at Copper. Now there's blackouts on that, but still, it's freaking Copper Mountain. Uh, 3 days at Purgatory. And then, uh, 3 days each at all of the Mountain Capital Partners-owned skiers, which Purgatory.00:24:07.000 --> 00:24:08.000Chris Haggerty: Mm-hmm.00:24:14.000 --> 00:24:16.000Chris Haggerty: I'll do that.00:24:24.000 --> 00:24:25.000Chris Haggerty: Yes.00:24:24.000 --> 00:24:39.000Stuart Winchester: Also, Arizona Snowball. And there's a bunch more. I don't want to list them all, given our time constraints here today. But talk about this reciprocal program, because essentially, you're saying you're going to give pass holders of all these mountains.00:24:33.000 --> 00:24:34.000Chris Haggerty: Yes.00:24:37.000 --> 00:24:38.000Chris Haggerty: Sure.00:24:39.000 --> 00:24:46.000Stuart Winchester: free visits to Monarch in exchange for your pass holders getting free visits there, so…00:24:41.000 --> 00:24:42.000Chris Haggerty: Oh.00:24:43.000 --> 00:24:44.000Chris Haggerty: Yes.00:24:46.000 --> 00:24:52.000Stuart Winchester: whatever you did or didn't like about IndyPass, it does pay per visit, so what was attractive about.00:24:47.000 --> 00:24:49.000Chris Haggerty: Just a second.00:24:52.000 --> 00:24:57.000Stuart Winchester: this, and why did it make sense to do these free visit exchanges with other ski areas?00:24:57.000 --> 00:25:15.000Chris Haggerty: We look at it as other skiers are not our competition, right? There's 350 million people roughly in the United States. Less than 5% actually ski or snowboard, right? So there's a lot of people out there that just need to be introduced into the sport.00:25:15.000 --> 00:25:17.000Chris Haggerty: Um…00:25:17.000 --> 00:25:23.000Chris Haggerty: rather than trying to fight for visits between resorts. So… so one of the things is just…00:25:23.000 --> 00:25:39.000Chris Haggerty: How do we get more people skiing and snowboarding, which is obviously a huge conversation you could talk about forever. But with this one, it's just like, hey, these are other resorts that are interested in also giving their pass holders as well as ours.00:25:55.000 --> 00:26:10.000Chris Haggerty: allow our pass holders to try each out while still knowing that, like most people that have a copper pass, they're not migrating to Monarch because they came here for two days.00:26:10.000 --> 00:26:28.000Chris Haggerty: they're bought a Copper Pass for a reason, they love that, and they're like, yeah, if I could get two days over at Monarch, cool. Same thing with our Monarch guests, like, they… they… they love Monarch, they want most of their days to be here, and if we could break it up for them, um, you know, a couple times a year, or they could go to A-Basin and Copper, then.00:26:16.000 --> 00:26:17.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah. Okay.00:26:28.000 --> 00:26:37.000Chris Haggerty: That adds a lot of value to them and gives them that flexibility to move around and go where it works for them.00:26:37.000 --> 00:26:52.000Stuart Winchester: You know, Monarch is small by Colorado standards, but it always surprised me to see that it actually does have a pseudo national following. And I get emails from people all over the country that say they buy the Monarch Pass because it gives them all those reciprocals and they come out and they like to support the small ski area.00:26:52.000 --> 00:26:59.000Stuart Winchester: I want to get your take on something here, Chris. I'm going to share my screen again, and I want to share a chart that I made.00:26:59.000 --> 00:27:14.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, so, so this is a chart of Monarch's skier visits since 1997, up to 2024 to 25, right? And I've compiled these from all kinds of different places, and I have a little bit of a gap there. But as you, as you see right here, they've been going steadily up, right?00:27:14.000 --> 00:27:29.000Stuart Winchester: So, so you were averaging below $200,000 for most of the, of the 2010s, you know, much lower some years, and now you're pretty steadily adding, averaging over $200,000. Now, last year, I don't have your numbers, I'm, I'm sure that they were, uh, pretty bad, but.00:27:29.000 --> 00:27:33.000Stuart Winchester: You know, in relation to what your past numbers were.00:27:33.000 --> 00:27:35.000Stuart Winchester: So here's my question.00:27:35.000 --> 00:27:48.000Stuart Winchester: Monarch was supposed to be one of the ski areas that got squeezed out by Epic, squeezed out by Icon. That was one of the big worries. Uh, independent ski areas can't compete. We're seeing the opposite, because I've put some things on this timeline.00:27:48.000 --> 00:28:04.000Stuart Winchester: So, for example, 2007, IntraWest buys Steamboat. Uh, 2008, the Epic Pass launches. 2009, Powder buys Copper. Uh, the Mountain Collective launched in 2012. Uh, Mountain Capital Partners bought Purgatory in 2015. Powder bought Eldora the following year.00:28:04.000 --> 00:28:21.000Stuart Winchester: Uh In 2017, Alterra combined Steamboat and Winter Park in 2018, they launched the icon pass. Uh And then we had the 20% epic price cut in 2022. So all these things you think, ok, Vale and Alterra putting their mountains on sale. These are big world famous mountains, Steamboat Vale Mountain.00:28:21.000 --> 00:28:25.000Stuart Winchester: Monarch must be getting crushed. No, it's not. Why?00:28:27.000 --> 00:28:45.000Chris Haggerty: I think it's a couple of reasons. Number one is we've just stayed true to who we are. And as the population has grown in the front range, like since 2010, Denver and Colorado Springs have grown by about 20%.00:28:45.000 --> 00:29:00.000Chris Haggerty: Right? So there's just more people, um, that are finding Monarch, and they're, they're like, wow, we like this, this is what we want. You know, you also throw in the fact that, um, I-70, for those in Colorado, are pretty familiar with, like, the traffic that is.00:28:49.000 --> 00:28:50.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:29:00.000 --> 00:29:17.000Chris Haggerty: created there on the weekends and it's not for everybody. So thankfully the drive to Monarch currently is a pretty attractive one, a lot less traffic. And I give credit to our ownership group, our current ownership group. They bought the resort in.00:29:17.000 --> 00:29:33.000Chris Haggerty: 2002. And part of it was, you know, a little bit of a passion project. Right? Like, they had come here and just really liked the vibe at Monarch and and wanted to protect that. And what they've been able to do is, number one, protect it.00:29:33.000 --> 00:29:53.000Chris Haggerty: Um, by not selling, you know, to, to one of the larger players, um, to just investing into our, our core, um, like deferred maintenance projects and those types of things, and then being really committed to the no name project, which we talked about and, and making sure timing was right on that and.00:29:53.000 --> 00:30:11.000Chris Haggerty: Um, that we were a healthy company before we jumped into that, so we didn't need a lifeline from, you know, someone else. So, um, there's kind of a lot of pieces that go into it. Um, and it's also worth noting that, like, our pass holders, like, and I think this goes to the growth, like, once people find us.00:30:11.000 --> 00:30:25.000Chris Haggerty: Um, our pass holder, uh, renewal rate is about 85% every year. Um, and the industry standard, depending on where you, you know, who you ask, it's somewhere between, like, 55% and 62%.00:30:25.000 --> 00:30:42.000Chris Haggerty: Um, and, and most of the 15% that we lose as we've dug into it is because of, uh, we have a lot of season pass holders from Fort Carson, um, military base outside of Colorado Springs, and they've just moved out of the area, right? So, um, I think our growth is partly due to, like.00:30:34.000 --> 00:30:35.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:30:42.000 --> 00:30:49.000Chris Haggerty: Once people come here and they discover it and they love it and they just keep coming back and we're just building upon that.00:30:49.000 --> 00:31:06.000Stuart Winchester: So you have owners that are willing to invest and that's really important. And Randy Stroud, I interviewed him, not on the podcast, but just for an article a couple of years ago. And he told me, and I'm not sure if this ended up being true, but their intention was to pay for the entire no name expansion in cash, including a brand new SkyTrak.00:31:06.000 --> 00:31:22.000Stuart Winchester: triple chair, or Doppelmayr, I can't remember what it was offhand, but regardless, it spoke to a very stable operation. Now, meanwhile, you still have some pretty old lifts, some pretty old infrastructure on the front side of the mountain, and recently Monarch's.00:31:22.000 --> 00:31:36.000Stuart Winchester: Master Development Plan was accepted by the U.S. Forest Service, which, for the listeners, just means that they said, okay, we'll let you consider doing these things on a project-by-project basis in the future. I have a lot of questions about the Master Plan, but first.00:31:36.000 --> 00:31:52.000Stuart Winchester: I want to focus on one that you called out, that Monarch Mountain called out in its first blog post announcing acceptance of the Master Plan, and it was about snowmaking. And Dan Torsell, the longtime GM of Ski Cooper, told me a long time ago when he came on this pod that.00:31:52.000 --> 00:32:04.000Stuart Winchester: that Ski Cooper and Monarch were the only big lift-surf ski areas in Colorado that don't have snowmaking. I think Silverton is too, but that sometimes gets lost in the shuffle. So, uh, you have it in your master development plan.00:32:04.000 --> 00:32:19.000Stuart Winchester: to a sort of rudimentary snowmaking system that would allow you to open early. But, this is a quote from your blog, quote, Before anyone panics when they read about snowmaking, let me assure you that Monarch is committed to remaining 100% all natural.00:32:19.000 --> 00:32:37.000Stuart Winchester: Snowmaking has been a part of our previous MDPs, Master Development Plan, and we have chosen not to implement it as we truly believe that natural snow provides the best skiing experience. This continues to be the case as snowmaking is in the plan to cover all bases, but we will not implement anything unless Mother Nature gives us no other choice.00:32:37.000 --> 00:32:40.000Stuart Winchester: Care to expand upon that at all?00:32:41.000 --> 00:32:53.000Chris Haggerty: Definitely. And yeah, and we are committed to that. And I actually, last summer, I spoke in front of some of the locals and pass holders, and when I let them know that we were committed to.00:32:41.000 --> 00:32:43.000Stuart Winchester: Or elaborate.00:32:53.000 --> 00:33:09.000Chris Haggerty: 100% all natural. That was the loudest cheer we got all day. So, like, that's what our, that's what our guests want. That's what we want. Um, as far that, you know, snowmaking has come a long way, and, and it is a necessity for a bunch of resorts.00:33:09.000 --> 00:33:19.000Chris Haggerty: Um, we're not at that point, um, and we're gonna push as far as we can, um, leaning into, like, snow farming and everything else before we ever, um.00:33:19.000 --> 00:33:35.000Chris Haggerty: have snow… have snowmaking. But, you know, in the Master Development Plan, it's in there because, like, part of putting things into that document is because it's a conceptual document. It's, like, it's designed to be a 15-year document. If it's not in there.00:33:35.000 --> 00:33:51.000Chris Haggerty: The Forest Service really doesn't even consider something. So if 15 years from now we're like, we need to put snowmaking in and it's not in there, we'd have some challenges. I will say our base elevation being basically 10,800 feet.00:33:51.000 --> 00:34:02.000Chris Haggerty: has helped us out, right? Like, as weather patterns has changed, and temperatures have rised, and winters are, you know, different every year, um…00:34:02.000 --> 00:34:13.000Chris Haggerty: we've been pretty lucky because of that base elevation, where we're… we are seeing snow, where other resorts are seeing some of that other precipitation falling, right? So, um…00:34:13.000 --> 00:34:30.000Chris Haggerty: you know, and then I mentioned the snow farming, like, we're… we're gonna do everything we can, like, on that side of things, right? And that's all the way from, like, fences strategically placed throughout the mountain, whether they're permanent or temporary, to catch the snow when the winds are coming from whatever direction.00:34:30.000 --> 00:34:47.000Chris Haggerty: And we do early season, we take the snow in the parking lots and we plow it all up and get it into one of the corners and then our groomers take it from there and start to build our base in the base area. So we have some different techniques to try to insulate us as much as possible.00:34:47.000 --> 00:34:53.000Chris Haggerty: And we're going to keep going that way as long as Mother Nature allows us to.00:34:53.000 --> 00:35:09.000Stuart Winchester: So snowmaking, it sounds like, is Monarch's emergency parachute. Meanwhile, there are a lot of big chairlift upgrades outlined on the master development plan. So Monarch has had substantially the same footprint for decades until last season's snowmaking upgrade.00:35:09.000 --> 00:35:24.000Stuart Winchester: And like I said before, more and more skier visits, and you were still running, with the exception of the 1999 Pioneer lift, the quad that was put in, with a lot of older double chairs. So Breezeway is a 1968 hall, Garfield is a 1969 hall, Panorama is a 1980 hall.00:35:24.000 --> 00:35:40.000Stuart Winchester: Tumbling as a 1981 hall. Those are all doubles. Now they've all gotten new drive terminals. So I understand they're, they're more modern in their actual functioning than, than in their look. However, the capacity is probably not a whole lot more than maybe it would have been. The master development plan proposes.00:35:40.000 --> 00:35:43.000Stuart Winchester: Replacing all of these with.00:35:43.000 --> 00:35:54.000Stuart Winchester: is advanced of a lift as a high-speed quad. Now, I realize you wanna… maybe the same reason as somebody… you say high-speed quad because you can always take it down, easier to go down than up, but talk us through…00:35:54.000 --> 00:36:05.000Stuart Winchester: your lift upgrade plan, and whether you think that high speed would be good for Monarch, or if you think that maybe fixed grip is the way you want to stay.00:36:06.000 --> 00:36:09.000Chris Haggerty: Yeah, fixed script is, you know.00:36:09.000 --> 00:36:24.000Chris Haggerty: Well, let me back up. A lot of that is in there because it's got to be in there if we choose to do that. And with no name opening, there's a lot of unknowns as far as, like, how is that going to change skier traffic around the mountain, right?00:36:14.000 --> 00:36:15.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:36:24.000 --> 00:36:41.000Chris Haggerty: One of the things we worked with the SE group, so they're, you know, a company that helps ski areas, right, with all sorts of development projects, big and small. And one of the things that they do is they do this density analysis, right? And it's a complicated, you know.00:36:41.000 --> 00:36:57.000Chris Haggerty: Analysis that takes on a lot of different data, but basically it's like they look at your uphill capacity based on the speed of the lift, the size of the lift, the length of the trip up, the time, and then what terrain it accesses from that lift.00:36:57.000 --> 00:37:14.000Chris Haggerty: And, like, an optimal score where, like, you have, like, perfect harmony from uphill and downhill is, like, a hundred percent. If you're below that, you're actually putting fewer people up the hill, that the downhill terrain can handle.00:37:14.000 --> 00:37:34.000Chris Haggerty: Monarch, in our current state, sits at a 56%. So basically, like, when you ski the runs at Monarch, even on our busiest day, because of the capacity that we have at our lifts, like, you have, like, semi-private runs, right? If we were to do all of our lift upgrades in the 2025 MDP.00:37:34.000 --> 00:37:49.000Chris Haggerty: we would actually get to an 84% density analysis. So even still, you wouldn't feel overcrowded on the runs. So knowing that, we're like, wow, well, we don't need to right away push for any kind of high speed lifts.00:37:49.000 --> 00:37:58.000Chris Haggerty: Um, and in fact, again, things that our guests like about them is twofold. Number one, it's like…00:37:58.000 --> 00:38:11.000Chris Haggerty: that slow metering from a fixed grip lift just adds, like, this extra time, right? Like, part of why we ski and snowboard is because we like to just disconnect, right, from reality for a little while and, like, be out in nature and, like.00:38:11.000 --> 00:38:21.000Chris Haggerty: you know, our guests like taking a step back and slowing things down here, and it feels like things are just moving a little slower. And second, one thing that we feel is like a…00:38:21.000 --> 00:38:36.000Chris Haggerty: a strong differentiator for us is, um, having a fixed grip lift. Our lift operators have to be at, like, the load point, and, um, you know, bumping the chairs and helping our guests on, and.00:38:36.000 --> 00:38:40.000Chris Haggerty: It's this, like, human interaction piece that, like.00:38:40.000 --> 00:38:56.000Chris Haggerty: You don't get everywhere else, especially with some of the newer lifts where, you know, it's everything's so automated, um, which has its value, but for us, again, with who Monarch is and taking that step back in time a little bit like that, that face-to-face interaction.00:38:56.000 --> 00:39:14.000Chris Haggerty: like, so many of our reviews are constantly calling out our lift operators, like, oh, yeah, I remember so-and-so, like, he's awesome, he helped me on, or he just said hello, or he remembered what kind of skis I'm wearing, or told me about this secret powder stash, which… another benefit of a slower uphill capacity is, like.00:39:14.000 --> 00:39:23.000Chris Haggerty: Monarch, even though it's smaller in size, doesn't get tracked out. Like, you get powder turns at the end of the day on a powder day.00:39:23.000 --> 00:39:34.000Stuart Winchester: So the, I'm gonna share my screen to, to talk about this next bit. So those are the lift upgrades that you're proposing. There's also two, and I'm, I, so for those watching.00:39:34.000 --> 00:39:49.000Stuart Winchester: On YouTube or stormskiing.com, I have the master development plan, conceptual plan up. There's also two infill lifts. Okay, so there would be this planned NNB lift, which is a redundant lift in the No Name Basin expansion. This is the new lift that opened last year. And then there's this…00:39:49.000 --> 00:40:04.000Stuart Winchester: Plan, divide, express. So, again, it's two more lifts on the same footprint. And I didn't see in the master plan, maybe I missed it, that you do have all this cat skiing terrain over here, so…00:40:04.000 --> 00:40:10.000Stuart Winchester: So, talk us through the logic of putting in more lists to serve the same amount of terrain, and if you've considered.00:40:10.000 --> 00:40:18.000Stuart Winchester: moving lift surf skiing into the cat skiing, as Targi did with its peaked mountain expansion a couple of years ago.00:40:19.000 --> 00:40:37.000Chris Haggerty: Yeah, so no name is actually was a part of our cat skiing terrain. So we did take a little bit of that. That redundant lift out there is just because we'll see what happens, how many people just access the terrain and no name. And if we ever need a second lift there, then.00:40:23.000 --> 00:40:24.000Stuart Winchester: Hmm. Okay.00:40:37.000 --> 00:40:55.000Chris Haggerty: um, we'll consider it. As far as further into cat skiing terrain, um, you know, our current MDP outlines our next 15 years, so we're not looking to push any further into that. Um, we also have, um, the Mirkwood terrain, which is a little bit of a hike-to terrain.00:40:55.000 --> 00:41:04.000Chris Haggerty: Um, between, like, the front side and no name, and we get… that's… that's the area we most commonly get asked about a lift, and uh…00:41:04.000 --> 00:41:12.000Chris Haggerty: I will tell you from my, uh, initial conversations with owners, it's… it's not a, um…00:41:12.000 --> 00:41:27.000Chris Haggerty: the answer isn't no, we're not putting a lift there, it's a expletive no, we're not putting a lift there. Um, we take pride in having, like, being a small mountain, but still offering, like, all these other things, right? Which one being hike to terrain, um, which is pretty cool for…00:41:27.000 --> 00:41:31.000Chris Haggerty: a small mountain like this. And then that, um…00:41:31.000 --> 00:41:41.000Chris Haggerty: the Divide Express, right, that would get us all the way from the base area to the summit on the front side. Um, that… that is one that we've, you know, had some…00:41:41.000 --> 00:41:55.000Chris Haggerty: serious discussions about, and, um, you know, it probably… number one, it would just, you know, allow guests to not have to take two lifts to get to the… to the summit on the front side. Um, but also, if we…00:41:55.000 --> 00:42:06.000Chris Haggerty: explore, um, summer operations in the future. You know, having a high-speed, you know, detachable lift gives you more flexibility to do that.00:42:06.000 --> 00:42:13.000Chris Haggerty: So that kind of, you know, would add into that if we get to that point.00:42:12.000 --> 00:42:24.000Stuart Winchester: So let me ask a stupid question, because that's what I'm here for. So Garfield Lyft, as I said, was built in the 60s. Pioneer Lyft came along in 1999. So I would have thought, okay, they cross over each other.00:42:24.000 --> 00:42:41.000Stuart Winchester: Because they, they retroactively built Pioneer and didn't realize it. Uh, I would have thought, hey, the master plan is an opportunity to straighten those out so they don't have to cross over each other. Maybe I'm overthinking it and it's not that complicated, but, but talk about this interesting crisscross pattern you have here and, and why that's where Garfield and Pioneer are slated.00:42:24.000 --> 00:42:25.000Chris Haggerty: Mm-hmm.00:42:41.000 --> 00:42:45.000Stuart Winchester: to continue to exist, even if you were to upgrade their lifts.00:42:47.000 --> 00:43:05.000Chris Haggerty: Yeah, I mean, I don't know that I have the best answer. We do have a proposal to shift the base of the bottom terminal of Pioneer uphill a little bit, just because the terrain is a little more desirable there. And obviously, if we needed to add the Divide Express, we need to open that area up.00:43:05.000 --> 00:43:06.000Chris Haggerty: um…00:43:06.000 --> 00:43:21.000Chris Haggerty: but other than that, right, we just kind of… we like the terrain that they serve right now, we don't really have a better spot, so the lifts crisscrossing wasn't like a, oh man, we need to change this. It wasn't something that we were focused on solving, um, in a way.00:43:21.000 --> 00:43:24.000Chris Haggerty: I think it's kind of a little cool, I guess.00:43:24.000 --> 00:43:40.000Stuart Winchester: I do like criss-crossing lifts, so I'm glad we're doing this one a video, because every time I bring this up, I get tomatoes thrown at me. Uh, Monarch skier visits have gone up and up, as we said. However, as they've gone up and up, there's still nowhere to stay on the mountain. There never has been. Uh.00:43:40.000 --> 00:43:51.000Stuart Winchester: a philosophical choice? Is that just a practical matter of, hey, the Forest Service owns the land at the base? Is it both? Talk us through why there's nowhere to stay at Monarch as a drive ski area only.00:43:52.000 --> 00:43:55.000Chris Haggerty: Yeah, there's a couple of reasons.00:43:56.000 --> 00:44:02.000Chris Haggerty: And, you know, one of them, again, I'll say our pass holders and our guests, like…00:44:02.000 --> 00:44:18.000Chris Haggerty: are pretty vocal about not wanting that, right? Like that's what separates Monarch. We're not that resort that has the big base village. And again, that's not to knock those resorts. I think that that's, you know, I've gone to those resorts as a guest. I think it's awesome.00:44:18.000 --> 00:44:38.000Chris Haggerty: I think another side of it for us is we're really focused on our community, right? We're a small mountain ski area and there's a small mountain community 15 miles from where we are that has a really cool, the town of Salida has a really cool downtown, a main street.00:44:38.000 --> 00:44:52.000Chris Haggerty: Um, with a ton of restaurants, a ton of mom-and-pop-owned shops, right? And, um, you know, we're our largest, uh, driver for winter visits, and, and, you know, um…00:44:52.000 --> 00:45:01.000Chris Haggerty: in the wintertime, and we want to make sure we embrace that community. If we moved a village up onto the mountain, like.00:45:01.000 --> 00:45:16.000Chris Haggerty: Salida is going to suffer. All those guests now are going to stay in the lodging up at Monarch versus in town. And we want to be good community partners and be like, no, here, you guys should be the ones to have lodging. And we live.00:45:16.000 --> 00:45:35.000Chris Haggerty: all of us live in the community as well, and we want to see those restaurants, you know, stay active all year round, the mom-and-pop shops, like, you know, thrive. So part of it is just, like, wanting to be a part of something bigger, right, in that larger community, rather than.00:45:35.000 --> 00:45:38.000Chris Haggerty: moving everything up to… to Monarch.00:45:38.000 --> 00:45:53.000Stuart Winchester: So if Snowpass skiers do decide to come out and visit Monarch, they'll stay in Salida, most likely, and drive up that day. So leave us with this, Chris, because Joe Heschen, the CEO of Snow Partners.00:45:53.000 --> 00:45:58.000Stuart Winchester: Said we get so caught up on stats, but stats aren't aren't always the thing and and.00:45:58.000 --> 00:46:04.000Stuart Winchester: when you look statistically at Monarch, it's 1,100 vertical feet.00:46:04.000 --> 00:46:21.000Stuart Winchester: Lift serve drop. That's 25th in Colorado. Uh, 1017 acres that ranks 17th in Colorado is bigger than Aspen Mountain. I'll point, I'll point out, uh, it's 308 inch average annual snowfall is good, but it's, it's good for ninth best. It has the third highest base, as I said, but the 12th highest summ.00:46:21.000 --> 00:46:28.000Stuart Winchester: It has those older lifts in a state that has 120 high-speed lifts, and there's nowhere to stay on the mountain, so…00:46:28.000 --> 00:46:34.000Stuart Winchester: I'm just stating those facts, right? So what's your pitch to someone to come.00:46:34.000 --> 00:46:37.000Stuart Winchester: use that snow pass, and try out Monarch.00:46:39.000 --> 00:46:44.000Chris Haggerty: Yeah, the big one is to start with, we're 100% natural, right?00:46:44.000 --> 00:46:59.000Chris Haggerty: you want natural snow, it is a definitely a different feel, even as good as snowmaking is these days, like, come check it out. And this, and the second part is, um, the people that are at Monarch are a unique group, right? Like, we're, we're.00:46:59.000 --> 00:47:18.000Chris Haggerty: past the characters, whether you work here or you're a guest here. And, um, we're looking out for each other, right? Like, it's not, um, it's not judgmental, like, no matter what you show up wearing or what your ability is, like, we just want everyone here to have a fun day on the mountain.00:47:18.000 --> 00:47:37.000Chris Haggerty: whether you're the extreme person out in the cat skiing terrain, hiking Mirkwood, the Never Ever, or the SnowTuber, which I love SnowTubers, you know, I think that's who we all are at our core. Um, you know, it's just… it's just a cool vibe that you gotta just come check it out, and our track record's saying that.00:47:29.000 --> 00:47:31.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:47:37.000 --> 00:47:40.000Chris Haggerty: People love it once they find it. So give it a shot.00:47:40.000 --> 00:47:51.000Stuart Winchester: I'm always telling my readers that these old lifts, these hauls, these riblets, they're not gonna be around for a whole lot longer, right? There's still hundreds in operation, but they don't last forever.00:47:51.000 --> 00:48:08.000Stuart Winchester: And the best thing you can do to memorialize them, you can't really preserve them forever because they're functional machines, right? But go ride them. And right now, Monarch, along with Lost Trail, is probably the best place in the West to go and ride all Old Hall Liftley. And I understand, again, they've been updated.00:48:08.000 --> 00:48:23.000Stuart Winchester: But the aesthetic is similar. So, alright, Chris, look, I gotta take my own advice and get out there and ride those hauls with you this winter. It was really great to talk to you. I really appreciate you coming on. I can't wait to catch up and hopefully make some turns together this winter.00:48:23.000 --> 00:48:27.000Chris Haggerty: Yeah, thanks a lot for the time and look forward to seeing you out here at Monarch.00:48:26.000 --> 00:48:29.000Stuart Winchester: All right. Talk to you soon. Thanks so much, Chris.00:48:28.000 --> 00:48:30.000Chris Haggerty: Thank you. Bye.00:48:31.000 --> 00:48:47.000Stuart Winchester: Alright, that was Chris Haggerty, the General Manager of Monarch Mountain. That was really fun, I'm really glad that he came on. Uh, Randy Stroud, just to be clear, the former GM, it's not that he ever didn't want to come on the podcast, it's just that.00:48:47.000 --> 00:49:00.000Stuart Winchester: I covered Monarch in a different way for the story about the expansion. So he was very good to the storm as well. I do want to tell you that today's podcast is brought to you by Profile Search International.00:49:00.000 --> 00:49:08.000Stuart Winchester: If you want to find a great leader for your mountain team, I want to introduce you to the pros at Profile Search International.00:49:08.000 --> 00:49:18.000Stuart Winchester: They are the ski industry talent acquisition experts, and they are the only executive search and recruitment firm in the entire world that is 100% focused on the ski industry.00:49:18.000 --> 00:49:31.000Stuart Winchester: ProfileSearch has used their intimate understanding of skiing and related industries, and of available candidates worldwide, to place hundreds of transformational leaders at the best and most progressive ski areas over the past 30 years.00:49:31.000 --> 00:49:44.000Stuart Winchester: Profile Search has offices in the US and Canada. They find and negotiate with the right leaders for your team, which sometimes you don't even know that you need in this era of online everything and big data. You can reach Profile Search.00:49:44.000 --> 00:49:59.000Stuart Winchester: Directly at ProfileSearch.com, where you will find their email or phone number. You can also send me a note. I will be happy to connect you directly with this expert team. My email address is skiing at substack.com. Alright, we are going to wrap up today.00:49:59.000 --> 00:50:05.000Stuart Winchester: With some reader reaction to yesterday's podcast on…00:50:06.000 --> 00:50:22.000Stuart Winchester: with Midwest skiers, Matt Zabranski, and there wasn't a lot of feedback. I think, number one, because the Midwest doesn't get as much feedback in general, but also because I published this one pretty late, I think I put it out at 8 or 9 at night, and so folks may just have not had a chance.00:50:24.000 --> 00:50:27.000Stuart Winchester: really process it yet. So…00:50:28.000 --> 00:50:30.000Stuart Winchester: Nell says…00:50:30.000 --> 00:50:41.000Stuart Winchester: Midwest Skiers, meaning MidwestSkiers.com, Matthew Zbrensky's site, is a regional treasure. The ride-throughs are so thorough, and what Nell means by that is.00:50:41.000 --> 00:50:52.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, Midwest Skiers puts up on their YouTube channel a, hey, look, here's the trail map at, say, Trollhagen, Wisconsin. Here's all 32 trails, whatever it is.00:50:52.000 --> 00:51:03.000Stuart Winchester: and then it rides the reach for the GoPro, and tells you about them, and gives you a really specific breakdown, uh, with some great graphs. So the production quality is really, really good. So, I second that now. Really good.00:51:03.000 --> 00:51:15.000Stuart Winchester: breakdowns of the ski areas from Midwest Skiers. Eric Morris says, great Midwest content, it'd be great to talk to the Dean of Southern Skiing, Randy Johnson, who wrote Southern Snow, the new guide to winter sports.00:51:15.000 --> 00:51:31.000Stuart Winchester: Couldn't agree more, Eric. If you know him, I would love an introduction. I am not acquainted with Mr. Randy Johnson, but I would love to meet him, as the South has certainly been an undercovered region from my point of view, and not on purpose, just because there's…00:51:31.000 --> 00:51:44.000Stuart Winchester: a little different culturally than the rest of the United States from a ski point of view, and I have not sunk as far of roots in there as I would like to, especially since I'm not too far from those ski areas. There was also…00:51:44.000 --> 00:51:47.000Stuart Winchester: We're not getting as much action on the chat, but here's one.00:51:47.000 --> 00:51:57.000Stuart Winchester: question on the chat, and this is not to do with the podcast from yesterday, but I want to talk about it a little. What will it take for Vail Resorts to turn around? That's from Saurabh Jain.00:51:57.000 --> 00:52:06.000Stuart Winchester: And commenter Slappy said, redefine what success looks like and suspend the dividend and stock buyback. Of course, those last two may be non-negotiable.00:52:06.000 --> 00:52:24.000Stuart Winchester: I'm not going to get out of my lane and talk too much about dividends and stock buybacks, though I do like stocks and follow that world nominally. It's certainly nothing that I'm an expert to speak on. What Vail needs to do to turn around, I think, is very simple, and I've said this many, many times.00:52:24.000 --> 00:52:25.000Stuart Winchester: And I've written about it.00:52:25.000 --> 00:52:37.000Stuart Winchester: many times, and we've talked about it on the podcast many times, is they need to treat every single ski resort like it's Vail Mountain, and every single guest like they're the President of the United States. They…00:52:37.000 --> 00:52:40.000Stuart Winchester: They need to make sure that.00:52:41.000 --> 00:52:48.000Stuart Winchester: the experience of a lifetime ethos is transferred to any Skiera, whether it's Beaver Creek.00:52:48.000 --> 00:53:03.000Stuart Winchester: or it's Mad River, Ohio. And that has not always seemed to be the case since Vail Resorts purchased Peak Resorts in 2019 and sort of doubled the size of its owned resort portfolio within a year's span. Now.00:53:03.000 --> 00:53:08.000Stuart Winchester: Certainly, Vail has recently recommitted to.00:53:08.000 --> 00:53:11.000Stuart Winchester: To that sort of quality, and we'll see how that plays out.00:53:11.000 --> 00:53:13.000Stuart Winchester: I think…00:53:13.000 --> 00:53:19.000Stuart Winchester: maybe a little more shuffling with the Epic Pass, uh, maybe a higher-priced.00:53:19.000 --> 00:53:22.000Stuart Winchester: Full pass to to.00:53:22.000 --> 00:53:37.000Stuart Winchester: help traffic some of the more popular ski areas, and maybe some more options. They do a really good job, actually, with the Epic Regionals, with the Tahoe Local, the Northeast Local, and the Summit County Local. So, I think Vail's done a nice job with that. And I think…00:53:38.000 --> 00:53:45.000Stuart Winchester: From my experience, Vail executives, and I've hosted many of them on this podcast. They're very receptive to criticism.00:53:45.000 --> 00:53:47.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, and they are…00:53:48.000 --> 00:53:53.000Stuart Winchester: Willing to listen and change and evolve. I'm not sure.00:53:53.000 --> 00:53:57.000Stuart Winchester: If that always comes through.00:53:57.000 --> 00:54:04.000Stuart Winchester: Outside of direct lines of questioning, if that makes sense. So, so the, the owning of mistakes and saying, okay, you know what?00:54:04.000 --> 00:54:19.000Stuart Winchester: we messed up because Paley Peaks was only open 25 days a year in 2021, or whatever it was. There was a year when a lot of its Midwest ski areas were extremely restricted, or the COVID restrictions and everyone else, but the local ski area operators there.00:54:19.000 --> 00:54:24.000Stuart Winchester: we're out competing them. Uh, you know, when Vail first bought Wilmot, Wisconsin.00:54:24.000 --> 00:54:27.000Stuart Winchester: In 2016, there…00:54:27.000 --> 00:54:38.000Stuart Winchester: their… or maybe that was 2012. They bought Afton Alps, Wilmot, and Mount Brighton in some order, two of them in 2012 and one in 2016. Anyway, there was a great article I read that said.00:54:38.000 --> 00:54:49.000Stuart Winchester: what Wilmot skiers can expect, and Wilmot's a small ski area outside of, well, it's broad, it has a lot of lifts, outside of Wisconsin and Chicago, uh, Milwaukee and Chicago.00:54:49.000 --> 00:54:56.000Stuart Winchester: And what they said was, we're gonna bring Western standards to the Midwest, right? And that was very out front. Dale spokespeople were saying that.00:54:56.000 --> 00:55:11.000Stuart Winchester: You never hear them say that anymore, and it's not clear that that is the standard, and I had a very nice time at Wilmot when I went two years ago, and super friendly staff, and all the lifts were running, even though clearly they didn't need to be, because it was a Monday, and hardly anyone was there, so I'm certain they were.00:55:11.000 --> 00:55:19.000Stuart Winchester: losing money on that day, and yet they still did their best to provide an experience. I'm just not…00:55:19.000 --> 00:55:21.000Stuart Winchester: It's just not always…00:55:21.000 --> 00:55:31.000Stuart Winchester: super clear throughout the portfolio, particularly in the Lower Midwest, Indiana, Missouri, Ohio, uh, in some of the Pennsylvania ski areas, Mid-Atlantic.00:55:31.000 --> 00:55:36.000Stuart Winchester: that that this is their operating philosophy. So I think that.00:55:36.000 --> 00:55:38.000Stuart Winchester: I think Vail's better than most…00:55:38.000 --> 00:55:49.000Stuart Winchester: than you would think, scrolling through social media. Uh, in general, I've been to pretty much every Vail resort in North America, other than, I think, the two in Missouri and Paoli Peaks.00:55:49.000 --> 00:56:07.000Stuart Winchester: And I generally have a really good time and a positive experience, and I find the staff friendly, and that's a super important thing to me. I love that Vail puts bars on all the lifts. I love that they're focused on safety in general, that they help police speed. As someone who skis with my kids, that's important to me.00:56:07.000 --> 00:56:13.000Stuart Winchester: So I generally have a pretty good experience. I think…00:56:14.000 --> 00:56:29.000Stuart Winchester: there's a little too much gum in the machine, maybe, when it comes to communicating these things and owning and correcting mistakes. So, anyway, with that, I will leave Vel alone for today, and you're probably wondering why I haven't yet covered the new Slate.00:56:29.000 --> 00:56:44.000Stuart Winchester: of proposed board members by Oasis Capital for Vail Resorts. I don't want to get too into the weeds on stock stuff, but I do have some thoughts on that. I want to wait till I have a little bit more time to break it down.00:56:45.000 --> 00:56:50.000Stuart Winchester: So I thank you for coming today. I hope you enjoyed that podcast episode.00:56:50.000 --> 00:56:58.000Stuart Winchester: If you are not already subscribed to the Storm Skiing newsletter, please click over to stormskiing.com and subscribe.00:56:58.000 --> 00:57:14.000Stuart Winchester: That will come right to your inbox. It is not only podcasts, I do a ton of writing. And if you want to upgrade to a paid subscription to the Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast, that will give you everything below the paywall, which is a lot of really deep analysis.00:57:14.000 --> 00:57:29.000Stuart Winchester: that I do on the lift service ski industry, particularly in North America, and especially in the United States. Also, if you're a paid subscriber to The Storm at stormskiing.com, that is the only way to interact with the podcast, because I'm only reading comments from the.00:57:29.000 --> 00:57:30.000Stuart Winchester: Previous.00:57:31.000 --> 00:57:47.000Stuart Winchester: Day's podcast and only paid subscribers can comment. Only paid subscribers can join the chat, which is the second way that they can interact with the podcast. If you want to rep the storm, we have a swag store. You can buy shirts, hats, et cetera, at stormskiing.myshopify.com.00:57:47.000 --> 00:57:48.000Stuart Winchester: Okay.00:57:48.000 --> 00:57:52.000Stuart Winchester: Please follow me on YouTube. YouTube is…00:57:52.000 --> 00:57:55.000Stuart Winchester: Where we will increasingly.00:57:55.000 --> 00:58:02.000Stuart Winchester: It'll be increasingly important to us, and right now, we don't have that many subscribers there. Uh, everything is going there, but it's just not…00:58:02.000 --> 00:58:12.000Stuart Winchester: made it into the cultural fabric of that site just yet, so please follow me at Storm Ski Journal on YouTube. Also, Instagram, which I post on more during the winter season.00:58:12.000 --> 00:58:27.000Stuart Winchester: I will be back tomorrow, or I'm scheduled to be back tomorrow, with, and this is one a lot of people have asked me for, a conversation with the general manager of what I think was perhaps the most improved ski area in the country last year, Camelback.00:58:27.000 --> 00:58:38.000Stuart Winchester: Pennsylvania. If you're rolling your eyes, if you live out west, I encourage you to tune in anyway, because the story of Camelback is a really good story of how do we do things wrong?Stuff referenced in the pod:Monarch's amazing season pass reciprocal network:A full breakdown of Monarch's U.S. Forest Service masterplan:Conversation with Snow Partners' CEO Joe Hession: Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe
Continuing our I Love the 90s series, we move on to 1996, the year the Atlanta Olympics captivated the country and Bill Clinton edged out Bob Dole to win a second term in the White House. Don and Dude drop the needle on one studio album from festival rock royalty and one alt hip hop record that became a crossover phenomenon, connecting both records to a world of holiday shoppers fighting over Tickle Me Elmo, scientists cloning a sheep named Dolly, and dance floors everywhere catching the Macarena.The AlbumsPhish – Billy Breathes (1996)Formed in Burlington, Vermont in 1983 around guitarist Trey Anastasio, bassist Mike Gordon, drummer Jon Fishman and keyboardist Page McConnell, Phish built a devoted touring and tape trading fan base well before recording its sixth studio album at Bearsville Studios in the Catskills between February and June 1996. Producer Steve Lillywhite, brought in partway through on Dave Matthews' recommendation despite never having heard the band, helped steer Phish toward shorter, more direct and emotionally exposed songwriting, a marked shift from their denser earlier records.Fugees – The Score (1996)Formed by Wyclef Jean, Lauryn Hill and Pras Michel out of New Jersey's hip hop scene in the early 1990s, the Fugees followed their inconsistent 1994 debut Blunted on Reality with a major creative reset, taking greater control of their sound and recording much of the follow up in Wyclef's cousin's New Jersey basement. Released February 13, 1996, The Score fused hard edged East Coast rap with reggae, soul, R&B and live instrumentation, with Lauryn Hill's ability to move between rapping and singing becoming central to the group's identity. Diggin AlbumsMastodon – Marrow Deep (2026)Atlanta metal band Mastodon's first album without founding guitarist Brent Hinds, who died in 2025, leans on Greek mythology to explore life, death and destiny, with guests including Josh Homme, Geezer Butler and Randy Blythe.Stone Temple Pilots – Tiny Music...Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop (1996)San Diego's Stone Temple Pilots traded the grunge weight of Core and Purple for brighter guitars, psychedelic textures and glam swagger on this Brendan O'Brien produced left turn, spinning off Mainstream Rock No. 1s in "Big Bang Baby," "Trippin' on a Hole in a Paper Heart" and "Lady Picture Show."Dexys Midnight Runners – Love (2026)The English band fronted by Kevin Rowland, best known for "Come On Eileen," release their first album under the full Dexys Midnight Runners name since 1985, a David Holmes produced record built around stories from Rowland's own life.Dinosaur Jr. – There Near (2026)The Amherst, Massachusetts trio's thirteenth studio album was made in short bursts over about a year, with J Mascis reportedly reaching for the same vintage amp from their mid 1980s debut to chase a rawer, more fuzzed out guitar sound.Follow & Support Follow the show on Instagram, Facebook, Threads and Bluesky @albumnerds, email your own favorites to podcast@albumnerds.com, and support the podcast by subscribing, rating, reviewing and sharing it with another music obsessive who still loves hearing whole albums front to back."There's more to life than a little money, you know. Don'tcha know that? And here ya are, and it's a beautiful day. Well, I just don't understand it." - Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand), Fargo (1996).
The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip rolls into New York and follows the western shore of Lake Champlain, home to one of America's oldest and most enduring lake-monster legends.Across the water, Vermont may have the famous photograph, but Port Henry, New York has spent generations embracing Champ. A hand-painted sightings board records reports dating back more than two centuries, a highway sign welcomes visitors to the "Home of Champ," and every August the town celebrates a creature no one has ever managed to catch. The journey begins on the lake with strange encounters reported from a Port Henry dock, Crown Point, Westport, the Valcour channel, and the ferry landing at Essex. From there, Brian digs into the history behind the legend—from Indigenous traditions and Samuel de Champlain's often-misquoted 1609 account to Captain Crum's enormous creature, the famous 1873 sightings, P. T. Barnum's reward, Sheriff Nathan Mooney's report, and the controversial 1977 Sandra Mansi photograph.The episode also follows researcher Joseph Zarzynski's decades of investigation, the unusual laws passed by New York and Vermont to protect Champ, mass sightings, sonar contacts, recordings, and videos that have kept the mystery alive into the modern era.Then the road turns south to Whitehall, New York, where a series of dramatic August 1976 sightings involving local residents and police became one of the most famous Bigfoot cases in the state.From there, the trip pushes into the Adirondacks, the hills around Fort Ann, Allegany State Park, the Catskills, and the Tug Hill Plateau for frightening Sasquatch encounters involving hunters, hikers, fishermen, loggers, and families who found themselves face-to-face with something they never expected to see in the New York wilderness.Lake monsters, Bigfoot, and more than two centuries of unexplained encounters—this stop on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip belongs to New York.Have a sighting of your own? Send it to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.
A young intern at a state asylum wires a homemade telepathy set to the forehead of a dying, illiterate mountain man whose ravings describe palaces of fire he could never have read about.Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/OTRCHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “It's Hard To Be Rich” (September 18, 1978) ***WD00:46:47.126 = Beyond Midnight, “Short Circuit” (January 03, 1969) ***WD01:12:15.812 = MindWebs, “Beyond The Wall of Sleep” (April 16, 1983)01:40:59.205 = Half Hour to Kill, “Blackout” (October 29, 1946 – Never Aired) ***WD02:10:00.512 = Molle Mystery Theater, “Angel Face” (December 20, 1946)02:39:18.122 = Mr Keen, “Murder And Bloodstained Necklace” (September 15, 1949) ***WD03:08:03.457 = Murder at Midnight, “The Thirteenth Floor” (July 24, 1950)03:34:31.197 = The Black Museum, “A Woman's Pigskin Glove” (1952) ***WD04:01:08.926 = Mysterious Traveler, “The Good Die Young” (February 27, 1944)04:29:57.647 = House of Mystery, “The Ghost Who Forgot Halloween” (October 27, 1945) ***WD05:01:19.157 = Show Close(ADU) = Air Date Unknown(LQ) = Low Quality***WD = Remastered, edited, or c = leaned up by Weird Darkness to make the episode more listenable. Audio may not be pristine, but it will be better than the original file which may have been unusable or more difficult to hear without editing.CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0772
OBSIDIAN - SAFE MEN DON'T MAKE WOMEN FEEL SAFECourse Date : October 4-8. Catskills, NY.Course Page : https://omrupani.org/obsidian/www.OmRupani.org
What does it actually mean to choose yourself when your choices affect other people?In this episode, I'm joined by hypnotherapist Sheri Fitzner for a conversation about sovereignty, overfunctioning, and why knowing you have a choice doesn't always make it easy to actually choose differently.We talk about the roles and identities we learn to inhabit in order to feel loved, worthy, safe, and accepted—and what happens when those roles start to feel more exhausting than protective.Sheri walks us through the process she uses with clients to move from simply recognizing a pattern to actually being able to make a different choice: recognition, acknowledgement, validation, and eventually, accountability.We also get into what this looks like in real life: being the easy one, becoming a chameleon at work, struggling to receive support, feeling responsible for other people's reactions, anticipating everything that could go wrong, and believing that changing your role will somehow threaten the relationships and structures around you.Plus, we talk about why discomfort doesn't necessarily mean you're unsafe, how small experiments can expand your capacity to choose differently, and how hypnotherapy can help you hear what's actually true for you underneath everyone else's expectations.In this episode, we talk about:What sovereignty actually meansWhy overfunctioning is often a symptom of something deeperThe identities we create in order to feel safe, loved, and acceptedWhy awareness alone doesn't automatically create changeRecognition → acknowledgement → validation → accountabilityThe difference between discomfort and actual lack of safetyWhy changing your “dance moves” changes your relationshipsLearning to receive support instead of automatically saying “I've got it”Using small, real-life experiments to build capacity for bigger changesHow hypnosis can help you reconnect with your own truth and intuitionConnect with Sheri:Follow her on IG @hypnoforhealingHow to work with SheriSheri will also be joining us at The Retreat, October 15–18 in the Catskills, where she'll guide us through a hypnosis session designed to support this work from the subconscious level.The Retreat is an intimate four-day experience for six women who are ready to stop just understanding their patterns and start practicing a different way of living—with three months of coaching and integration support afterward to help those changes stick.Registration closes September 27.LEARN MORE ABOUT THE RETREAT✨ Start HereNew to my work? Explore the podcast, free resources, Human Design guide, and more.Any questions? You can always email me at nicole@nicoleguenaconsulting.comFollow in IG @Nicole.guena
Episode 190: Modi and Leo are joined by comedian Jared Freid and discuss everything from Catskills comedy to Ozempic, and how they helped make a shidduch! Watch his new special 'The Family Plan' on Netflix!Modi's special "Know Your Audience" is available on YouTube now!For all upcoming shows visit www.modilive.com.Follow Modi on Instagram at @modi_live.Follow the AHM podcast on Instagram at @AHM_Podcast.Leave us a voicemail!Send us Fan MailSupport the show
Eric Leveillee is the culinary director of The DeBruce, a 12-roomboutique hotel in the Catskills community of Livingston Manor, N.Y., where he has worked since 2020, offering a seasonal tasting menu as well as regular à la carte service. He spent his formative culinary years in Philadelphia aftergraduating from Temple University with a degree in economics. He started at a Mexican restaurant called El Camino Real, where he fell in love with his waitress and got a job in the kitchen to try to get to know her better. It worked — they're still married — and Leveillee went on to pursue a cooking career, working at Vernick Food & Drink under Greg Vernick and then heading up the kitchen at Marigold. His next stop was Lacroix at The Rittenhouse Hotel, wherehe worked during the runup to the pandemic and then ended up at The DeBruce. He recently shared his perspective on highlighting theingredients that he sources from the area, buying most of his produce from a farmer within walking distance of the property, as well as the occasional import, such as the Mexican herb epazote that he said goes well with trout.
Welcome to episode 236! This week, Kristi Confortin from Trail Sisters Catskills joins me for a great conversation about her amazing organization and the community it's building by connecting women with the outdoors. We chat about how Trail Sisters Catskills helps women get more comfortable and confident in the outdoor world, how the group has grown, and what makes the women's outdoor community so incredibly supportive—and just how tight-knit this group can be. Plus, I dive into some other big happenings in the outdoor world, including Dale “Grey Beard” Sanders setting a new Appalachian Trail record as the oldest person to complete the trail, Cody Taylor setting a new FKT on Vermont's Long Trail, and a recent rescue here in the Catskills. Make sure to subscribe on your favorite platform, share the show, donate if you feel like it… or just keep tuning in. I'm just grateful you're here. And as always... VOLUNTEER!!!!Links for the Podcast: https://linktr.ee/ISLCatskillsPodcast, Donate a coffee to support the show! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/ITLCatskills, Like to be a sponsor or monthly supporter of the show? Go here! - https://www.buymeacoffee.com/ITLCatskills/membershipThanks to the sponsors of the show: Outdoor chronicles photography - https://www.outdoorchroniclesphotography.com/, Trailbound Project - https://www.trailboundproject.com/, Camp Catskill - https://campcatskill.co/, Another Summit - https://www.guardianrevival.org/programs/another-summitLinks: Trail Sisters Catskills, Trail Sisters Catskills Instagram, Trail Sisters, Grey Beard sets AT record, Cody Taylor sets Long Path recordVolunteer Opportunities: Trailhead stewards for 3500 Club -https://www.catskill3500club.org/trailhead-stewardship, Catskills Trail Crew - https://www.nynjtc.org/trailcrew/catskills-trail-crew, NYNJTC Volunteering - https://www.nynjtc.org/catskills, Catskill Center - https://catskillcenter.org/, Catskill Mountain Club - https://catskillmountainclub.org/about-us/, Catskill Mountainkeeper - https://www.catskillmountainkeeper.org/ Post Hike Brews and Bites - Hudson North, Momma's Boy#trailsisters #trailsisterscatskills #ladiesinhiking #womeninhiking #hudsonvalley #hudsonvalleyhiking #NYC #history #husdonvalley #hikingNY #kaaterskill #bluehole #catskillhiking #visitcatskills #catskillstrails #catskillmountains #3500 #catskills #catskillpark #catskillshiker #catskillmountainsnewyork #hiking #catskill3500club #catskill3500 #hikethecatskills #hikehudson
Lyz Glick Best was married to Jeremy Glick, one of the passengers who fought back against the hijackers aboard United Flight 93 on September 11, 2001. That morning, from her parents' farmhouse in the Catskills, Lyz spent about 30 minutes on the phone with Jeremy. They stayed calm. They assessed the situation together. And he told her what he wanted if he didn't make it off the plane. Twenty-five years later, Lyz joins us for a tribute episode — to Jeremy, to everyone aboard Flight 93, and to all the victims and families of September 11th. She told the first part of this story in the 2004 book Your Father's Voice. This conversation is about the man behind the title — and the life Lyz built for their daughter in the years since. In this episode, we discuss: [03:08] High School Sweethearts: The first day of ninth-grade biology, 1984 — and the girl Jeremy told his mom he was going to marry. [05:45] "Who's Working the Chess Pieces": Falling out of touch, a chance collision in a New York City bar, and a national judo title won without a coach. [14:10] A Father for 12 Weeks: The video of Jeremy narrating a diaper change — and the joy their daughter Emmy inherited from him. [17:38] "Redemption of Sky": The remarkable poem Jeremy wrote at 16 or 17, published in his school's literary magazine – and which made its way to Lyz after 9/11. [19:05] The Phone Call: About 30 minutes on the phone — staying calm, making a plan, and what Jeremy asked for if he didn't make it home. [28:09] The Tuesday Group: The 9/11 widows who were pregnant or with young children — and how they learned that trauma and grief heal differently. [35:30] Finding Joy After Loss: The life Lyz rebuilt, her husband Jim's quiet crazy good turn, and marking 25 years since the day honored at the Flight 93 National Memorial. Image: Courtesy ACCESS
What's up bros??? We're up in the Catskills with the crew for a little chill ski weekend and by little we mean massive and by chill we mean absolutely not even remotely chill. I think by now everyone clearly sees that Charlie is the straw that stirs the drink that is this show and maybe even some of the cast are starting to catch on which really helps. Slowly but surely it seems like we're rounding out the cast and oh wait nevermind that's Brooks complaining again and not wanting to be part of anything. Figure it out Brooksy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What does it actually mean to be “embodied”? Or “in alignment”? What does “learning to receive” look like on a random Thursday afternoon?The self-help, healing, and spiritual worlds are FULL of words we hear so often that we start to think we know what they mean… until we try to actually apply them to our lives.In this episode, I'm breaking down some of the biggest personal-development buzzwords—nervous system safety, capacity, embodiment, alignment, receiving, self-trust, resilience, and play—and translating them into what they actually look like in real life.We're talking about why knowing you're “allowed” to have boundaries is very different from holding one when someone is disappointed in you. Why desperately wanting more support doesn't necessarily mean you're comfortable receiving it. Why self-trust has nothing to do with always making the “right” decision. And why play does not require buying an adult coloring book you don't actually want to use.
Welcome to episode 235! This week, Tad and I are joined by Kumi and Glenn Redpath for one hell of a conversation! Back in May, Kumi set the Fastest Known Time (FKT) on the Long Path, and she joins us to tell the story behind the record—from the tough moments and unexpected challenges to the fun, the laughs, and everything in between. And of course, no record-setting effort happens alone, so Glenn joins us to talk about what it was like being Kumi's crew chief and helping keep the whole operation moving. We also dive into recent rescues, the loss of some of our favorite Catskill viewpoints, and a pretty big milestone—the five-year anniversary of the podcast! Make sure to subscribe on your favorite platform, share the show, donate if you feel like it… or just keep tuning in. I'm just grateful you're here. And as always... VOLUNTEER!!!!Links for the Podcast: https://linktr.ee/ISLCatskillsPodcast, Donate a coffee to support the show! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/ITLCatskills, Like to be a sponsor or monthly supporter of the show? Go here! - https://www.buymeacoffee.com/ITLCatskills/membershipThanks to the sponsors of the show: Outdoor chronicles photography - https://www.outdoorchroniclesphotography.com/, Trailbound Project - https://www.trailboundproject.com/, Camp Catskill - https://campcatskill.co/, Another Summit - https://www.guardianrevival.org/programs/another-summitLinks: Sign the petition to restore our viewpoints, Kumi's FKT, Brio's, WFA CPAC, Volunteer Opportunities: Trailhead stewards for 3500 Club -https://www.catskill3500club.org/trailhead-stewardship, Catskills Trail Crew - https://www.nynjtc.org/trailcrew/catskills-trail-crew, NYNJTC Volunteering - https://www.nynjtc.org/catskills, Catskill Center - https://catskillcenter.org/, Catskill Mountain Club - https://catskillmountainclub.org/about-us/, Catskill Mountainkeeper - https://www.catskillmountainkeeper.org/ Post Hike Brews and Bites - 1911 Sweet Apple, Paradox IPA, West Kill Brewing,#FKT #FKTlongpath #fastestknowntime #Kumiredpath #hudsonvalley #hudsonvalleyhiking #NYC #history #husdonvalley #hikingNY #kaaterskill #bluehole #catskillhiking #visitcatskills #catskillstrails #catskillmountains #3500 #catskills #catskillpark #catskillshiker #catskillmountainsnewyork #hiking #catskill3500club #catskill3500 #hikethecatskills #hikehudson
Aimee is joined by Queen of the Catskills, Julie McGuire to deconstruct the course for the Catskill 100. The Running Kind is proud to present one of the first carbon neutral 100 milers in the country - the Catskill 100. This course will showcase the beauty and difficulty that the Northeast offers as runners traverse over extremely challenging terrain in the Catskill Mountains. Running through four distinct NYS Wilderness Areas, this course was designed to leave runners more connected to the trails they are running on. Over the distance, runners will summit 12 of the 33 Catskill High Peaks including Indian Head, Twin, Sugarloaf, Plateau, Hunter, West Kill, Wittenberg, Cornell, Slide, Big Indian, Eagle and Balsam. The route also includes the entirety of the most challenging trail in the Catskills, The Devil's Path. This event will be one of the few 100 milers across the country with over 25,000ft of elevation gain and descent on extremely technical terrain and is sure to leave a stamp as one of the hardest 100 milers in the country. We have been dreaming up something masochistic since the first year at Climb It For Climate. The time has finally come to bring it to life. We are excited to share this route with runners from all over the country. The event will be led by a female leadership team and the race director is reserving 50% of spots for women and non-binary runners.
"Close your eyes when you roll through town and open them when you get to the driveway," is essentially how Peter and Sarah Finn jokingly welcomed friends to their Hunter home in the mid-1990s — when dilapidated buildings and FOR SALE signs dominated Main Street.The Finns turned frustration into action, buying a rotting dairy barn and a struggling movie theater, and building what would become the Catskill Mountain Foundation in 1998. Nearly 30 years later, CMF runs a three-screen cinema, a piano performance museum, ballet and theater programs, artist housing, an organic farm, and a monthly regional magazine, and employs about 30 people. Peter's new book, Driven to Build, Guided by Values: Leading for Long-Term Success in the For-Profit and Nonprofit Worlds, traces the principles behind both CMF and FINN Partners, the global PR firm he founded.Peter and Sarah join host Brett Barry at their home in Hunter, along with CMF Executive Director Amy Scheibe, to talk through the foundation's origins and where it's headed. Topics include:The Finn family's roots in Hunter, going back to Peter's great-grandparents, who arrived from the Poland-Ukraine borderlands in 1889 (a story also told in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers)Buying and renovating the Red Barn and the old Hunter movie theater, and how conversations with Sean Byrne (Hunter Foundation), Barry Kerr, Linda Nichols, and Pam and Judd Weisberg shaped CMF's formationThe distinction between CMF (arts) and its neighbor, The Hunter Foundation (Main Street revitalization)Funding the foundation's early years and building donor relationships, including Hunter Mountain's Slutsky familyHow Peter's PR-agency background shaped CMF's multi-pronged structureCurrent capital projects: new theatrical equipment and a rehearsal/dance studio at the Orpheum (funded by a $1.75M state matching grant), a NYSERDA net-zero grant for the studio building, and new artist housing (Creekside Retreat)What's next for CMFLinks:Peter Finn's book: Driven to Build, Guided by ValuesThe Catskill Mountain Foundation: catskillmtn.orgKaatscast: kaatscast.com — full episode archive, transcribed and searchable
Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash In 2015, the Primary Care Development Corporation conducted an analysis of primary care capacity in counties in New York State. Delaware County in the Catskill region of the state was found to be a primary care desert. Since that time, Margaretville Hospital, a critical access hospital that is part of Health Alliance of the Hudson Valley and WMCHealth, has worked to build primary care in the region. Among the new providers at the hospital's primary care practice is family nurse practitioner, Erin Black, MSN, FNP. HealthCetera producer and host Diana Mason, RN, talked with Erin about her work in primary care and health care in general. This interview first aired on July 22, 2026, on HealthCetera in the Catskills on WIOX Radio. The post Primary Care in the Catskills appeared first on HealthCetera.
Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash Mental health problems have worsened in the United States, worsening since the COVID pandemic. It's particularly a problem among young people, as they appear to be experiencing higher rates of anxiety and depression, among other problems. It's crucial for local communities to examine how to promote mental health and how to ensure that people with mental health problems are about to get the help they need. But local communities often lack the resources to ensure that they have robust mental health services. They depend upon funding from the federal government and they depend upon their state for both funding and policies that can support community efforts on mental health. NAMI is the National Alliance on Mental Illness, a nonprofit organization that provides advocacy, education, and other support for people affected by mental illness. HealthCetera producer and host, Diana Mason, RN, talked with James Norton, the Government & Community Affairs Manager for NAMI New York State about what happened, or didn't happen, around mental health issues in the NYS legislative session that ended on June 6th. This interview first aired on HealthCetera in the Catskills on July 22, 2026, on WIOX Radio. The post Mental Health Policy in New York appeared first on HealthCetera.
Photo by Thomas Loizeau on Unsplash The Reporter is a newspaper covering the Catskill region, with a focus on Delaware County. Joan Lawrence Bauer, a reporter for The Reporter, talks with HealthCetera producer and host, Diana Mason, RN, about two topics she is reporting on for the newspaper: 1) an annual tour of artists’ studios in SouthEastern Delaware County, and 2) the fourth agreement between New York City and local communities on the Watershed that protects NYC’s water supply from the Catskill region and has become controversial because of “land swaps” that could see a rise in solar fields in the region. This interview first occurred on WIOX Radio on July 29, 2026. The post Arts and the Catskills Watershed appeared first on HealthCetera.
Photo by New York Suburban Homes on Unsplash New York State has been providing funds for villages, towns and cities to revitalize their communities. A couple years ago, Roxbury received some of these funds and now Margaretville and Stamford have had their proposals funded. Lissa Harris wrote much of Margaretville's proposal for the Mark Project for what is now called NY Forward. She's also the outreach coordinator for the HUBB, an initiative under the umbrella of the MARK Project that works on increasing people's access to free community programs. HealthCetera producer and host, Diana Mason, RN, talked with Harris about both initiatives and how community members can be engaged with them. This interview first aired on WIOX Radio on August 12, 2026. The post Revitalizing Catskills Communities appeared first on HealthCetera.
To listen to this entire episode ad-free, join me over on Patreon here: https://tinyurl.com/iseemfunepisode24Hello!I tried to fix the audio so it's less white noise in the background - and I know y'all say it's a comforting sound but I wanted to keep it to a minimum. I don't want you all getting too comforted! JK JKJK KIDDING. I promise the next episode will be back on a normal microphone. In this episode I'm driving on I-87 South - even though I said it was North, talking about not seeing a bear on the Catskills resort grounds, ghosts in my family, my eavesdropping of a country mart owner and her teenaged employee, and whatever else comes to mind. xo, JenSHOW NOTESTo find out about all things Jen click here https://jenkirkman.bio.link and you can find out how to:Take a somatics movement class with Jen on ZoomJoin Jen's online co-working communityListen to Jen's other podcast about ADHD/AuDHDRead Jen's SubstackBrowse Jen's merchandiseGet discounts on fun stuff with Jen's affiliate partnersGet on Jen's “Can't Live Without List” NewsletterGet Jen's comedy album OK, Gen-XFind all of Jen's socials like Tik Tok, Instagram and You TubeBook Jen on Cameo!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
What happens when you've gotten really good at understanding yourself—but you're still trying to think your way through everything?In this episode, I'm joined by breathwork facilitator AJ Alvarez for a conversation about what becomes available when we get underneath the thinking mind and allow ourselves to actually experience what's there.AJ has been teaching breathwork in New York City for six years, and I've been attending his classes for almost two. His work has been a meaningful part of my own journey with overfunctioning, which is exactly why I knew I wanted him to be part of The Retreat this October.We talk about how breathwork can help us access and move emotions we may not even have words for, quiet some of the constant analysis long enough to hear our own clarity, and reconnect with the younger parts of ourselves that existed before all the rules about who we were supposed to be.We also get into something that feels especially important for overfunctioners: the difference between doing and being. When so much of your identity and value has become wrapped up in being productive, useful, responsible, or needed, what does it feel like to simply exist alongside other people without having to do anything for them?And we explore why doing this work in community can be so powerful—what changes when we allow ourselves to be seen, experience something together, and realize we may not be carrying our experiences as alone as we thought. In this episode, we talk about:AJ's path to breathwork and how it became an important tool for moving through griefThe difference between responding to life and constantly reacting to itWhy breathwork can help us access emotions beneath our thoughtsGetting underneath the thinking mind to access clarity and intuitionReconnecting with your inner child—and the curiosity, creativity, play and authenticity that existed before all the “shoulds”Why “being” can feel so difficult when you're used to deriving value from doingThe power of healing and resting in communityWhy insight and self-awareness are important—but eventually, you have to actually experience yourself differently Connect with AJ:Follow him on IG @ajmakeithappenHow to work with AJAJ will also be joining me as the breathwork facilitator at The Retreat, October 15–18 in the Catskills. ✨ The RetreatOctober 15–18, 2026 | Catskills, NYFour days to step outside the patterns that have been running your life, understand the overfunctioning underneath them, and begin experiencing a different way of being—followed by three months of coaching and integration to help you bring that version of yourself home.✨ Start HereNew to my work? Explore the podcast, free resources, Human Design guide, and more.Any questions? You can always email me at nicole@nicoleguenaconsulting.comFollow in IG @Nicole.guena
Welcome to episode 234! This week, Tad and I go live from the Climb it from Climate Trail Run from Belleayre Mountain. We have interviews with Aimee from the Running Kind, 25k first place finisher Maeve Thistle, 8k first place winner Jeremy and many others. We also chat about several rescues and another solar project in the Catskills. Make sure to subscribe on your favorite platform, share the show, donate if you feel like it… or just keep tuning in. I'm just grateful you're here. And as always... VOLUNTEER!!!!Links for the Podcast: https://linktr.ee/ISLCatskillsPodcast, Donate a coffee to support the show! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/ITLCatskills, Like to be a sponsor or monthly supporter of the show? Go here! - https://www.buymeacoffee.com/ITLCatskills/membershipThanks to the sponsors of the show: Outdoor chronicles photography - https://www.outdoorchroniclesphotography.com/, Trailbound Project - https://www.trailboundproject.com/, Camp Catskill - https://campcatskill.co/, Another Summit - https://www.guardianrevival.org/programs/another-summitLinks: Climb it for Climate, The Running Kind, Sassquad Trail Running, Volunteer Opportunities: Trailhead stewards for 3500 Club -https://www.catskill3500club.org/trailhead-stewardship, Catskills Trail Crew - https://www.nynjtc.org/trailcrew/catskills-trail-crew, NYNJTC Volunteering - https://www.nynjtc.org/catskills, Catskill Center - https://catskillcenter.org/, Catskill Mountain Club - https://catskillmountainclub.org/about-us/, Catskill Mountainkeeper - https://www.catskillmountainkeeper.org/ Post Hike Brews and Bites - Industrial Arts Hazy IPA, Hudson North,#climbitforclimate #therunningkind #trailrunning #hudsonvalley #hudsonvalleyhiking #NYC #history #husdonvalley #hikingNY #kaaterskill #bluehole #catskillhiking #visitcatskills #catskillstrails #catskillmountains #3500 #catskills #catskillpark #catskillshiker #catskillmountainsnewyork #hiking #catskill3500club #catskill3500 #hikethecatskills #hikehudson
[REBROADCAST FROM May 22, 2026] Where would you stop if you were to plan a road trip around New York? Ross Levi, Empire State Development Vice President and Executive Director of New York State's Division of Tourism, helps plan your New York State summer road trip and listeners share their favorite destinations. Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images: A landscape view of the Taconic Parkway, looking southbound, as it winds its way through the rural landscape between the Hudson River Valley and the Catskills, August 18, 2023. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
This week's episode of "Surveyor Says! The NSPS Podcast" highlights one of our Diamond Sponsors, Control Point Associates (CPA), a surveying firm based in Warren, New Jersey. Your host, NSPS Executive Director Tim Burch, recently sat down with Ken Stigner, P.L.S., P.P., Principal of CPA, to hear more about the firm. Ken discussed CPA's history since 1992, its focus as a purely surveying and geospatial firm, and its growth from 80-90 employees to over 250 with 13 offices across the Mid-Atlantic and Florida. He highlighted the company's embrace of technology, such as laser scanning, mobile LiDAR, and UAVs, and its strategy of not competing with engineering or architectural firms. Ken explained CPA's regional structure, its commitment to mentoring young professionals, and the unique challenges of surveying in different geographic areas like New York City and the Catskills. They also touched on the camaraderie within CPA and the company's current focus on expanding into Georgia, South Carolina, and Western Florida. The conversation concluded with a discussion on the future of surveying, emphasizing the importance of technology and attracting the next generation. NSPS would like to again thank CPA for its support, particularly its sponsorship of the national student competition and the CST program.
What happens when you already know so much about yourself… but you're still living inside the same patterns?You've done therapy. Read the books. Learned your Human Design. You understand your childhood wounds, your limiting beliefs, your attachment style. You know you need better boundaries, more self-trust, less overthinking, more capacity to receive.And yet somehow, you keep getting pulled back into the same ways of being.In this episode, I'm breaking down the piece I think so much of personal development misses: the difference between knowing about yourself and actually living what you know.We'll talk about why so many of the seemingly separate things you're working on may actually be symptoms of the same underlying pattern—overfunctioning—and why awareness of that pattern is only the beginning.I'm also sharing the methodology I use with my clients to turn insight into actual change: small real-life experiments, gathering new evidence, expanding nervous system capacity, and slowly making a different way of living feel safe enough to become your new normal.Because at some point, you have to stop reading the manual and get in the car (this will make more sense when you listen
The Mountains, the Catskills, the Borscht Belt, upstate, the country. Monticello, Liberty, Woodridge, Swan Lake, Woodbourne, Fallsburg. A place of many names with one thing in common: a place rich in Jewish history and lore. As a summer destination, the Catskills would be home to countless bungalow colonies as city Jews organized their communities for a mountain air getaway. Generations of children attended the many summer camps that dotted Sullivan County. Camps included Mesivta, Agudah, Munk, HILI, Kol Rinah, Torah Vodaath, Ohr Shraga, Sternberg and many more including the Betar Jewish self defense camp where Vladimir Jabotinsky died in 1940. It was also famously known as the Borscht Belt, and the legendary hotels/resorts/country clubs like Grossinger's, Kutscher's and the Concord made their mark as vacation sites. Most Jewish comedians of the time commenced their careers there. In addition to the summer crowd, the Catskills were home to many year round Jewish communities over the years. These towns built shuls, mikvas, hired Rabbis and even Jewish owned farms burgeoned for a time. This included Yeshivas as well such as the Mountaindale Yeshiva of Rav Yehuda Davis and the famous Yeshiva of South Fallsburg. Subscribe to Jewish History Soundbites Podcast on: PodBean: https://jsoundbites.podbean.com/ or your favorite podcast platform Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram at @Jsoundbites For sponsorship opportunities about your favorite topics of Jewish history or feedback contact Yehuda at: yehuda@yehudageberer.com
Patrick Miller is the founder and distiller of Faccia Brutto, an Italian-style spirits brand based in Brooklyn, New York. He worked as a chef for 19 years in some of LA and New York's brightest restaurants, and he began making amari as holiday gifts for loved ones while working as the chef-partner at Rucola in Brooklyn. Today Faccia Bruttio is busy using old-world techniques to create singular and special amari and aperitivi, and on the show, we go deep into their process and vision. And it's the return of Three Things, where Aliza and Matt discuss what's interesting in the food world including Matt's visits to Golden Hof in Manhattan and The Dale in the Catskills, and he previews Morgan Eckroth's debut coffee book, Coffee, for Here. Aliza visits a Creole pop-up from Chasing Chaz, enjoys Ha's Snack Bar a great deal, and tries Julia Sherman's new salad dressing. Subscribe to This Is TASTE: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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