Podcasts about Degrees north

Macca Chats to 5 Degrees North

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and to support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.WhoJeff Colburn, General Manager of Silver Mountain, IdahoRecorded onFebruary 12, 2025About Silver MountainClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: CMR Lands, which also owns 49 Degrees North, WashingtonLocated in: Kellogg, IdahoYear founded: 1968 as Jackass ski area, later known as Silverhorn, operated intermittently in the 1980s before its transformation into Silver in 1990Pass affiliations:* Indy Pass – 2 days, select blackouts* Indy+ Pass – 2 days, no blackouts* Powder Alliance – 3 days, select blackoutsClosest neighboring ski areas: Lookout Pass (:26)Base elevation: 4,100 feet (lowest chairlift); 2,300 feet (gondola)Summit elevation: 6,297 feetVertical drop: 2,200 feetSkiable acres: 1,600+Average annual snowfall: 340 inchesTrail count: 80Lift count: 7 (1 eight-passenger gondola, 1 fixed-grip quad, 2 triples, 2 doubles – view Lift Blog's inventory of Silver Mountain's lift fleet)Why I interviewed himAfter moving to Manhattan in 2002, I would often pine for an extinct version of New York City: docks thrust into the Hudson, masted ships, ornate brickwork factories, carriages, open windows, kids loose in the streets, summer evening crowds on stoops and patios. Modern New York, riotous as it is for an American city, felt staid and sterile beside the island's explosively peopled black-and-white past.Over time, I've developed a different view: New York City is a triumph of post-industrial reinvention, able to shed and quickly replace obsolete industries with those that would lead the future. And my idealized New York, I came to realize, was itself a snapshot of one lost New York, but not the only lost New York, just my romanticized etching of a city that has been in a constant state of reinvention for 400 years.It's through this same lens that we can view Silver Mountain. For more than a century, Kellogg was home to silver mines that employed thousands. When the Bunker Hill Mine closed in 1981, it took the town's soul with it. The city became a symbol of industrial decline, of an America losing its rough-and-ragged hammer-bang grit.And for a while, Kellogg was a denuded and dusty crater pockmarking the glory-green of Idaho's panhandle. The population collapsed. Suicide rates, Colburn tells us on the podcast, were high.But within a decade, town officials peered toward the skeleton of Jackass ski area, with its intact centerpole Riblet double, and said, “maybe that's the thing.” With help from Von Roll, they erected three chairlifts on the mountain and taxed themselves $2 million to string a three-mile-long gondola from town to mountain, opening the ski area to the masses by bypassing the serpentine seven-mile-long access road. (Gosh, can you think of anyplace else where such a contraption would work?)Silver rose above while the Environmental Protection Agency got to work below, cleaning up what had been designated a massive Superfund site. Today, Kellogg, led by Silver, is a functional, modern place, a post-industrial success story demonstrating how recreation can anchor an economy and a community. The service sector lacks the fiery valor of industry. Bouncing through snow, gifted from above, for fun, does not resonate with America's self-image like the gutsy miner pulling metal from the earth to feed his family. Town founder/mining legend Noah Kellogg and his jackass companion remain heroic local figures. But across rural America, ski areas have stepped quietly into the vacuum left by vacated factories and mines, where they become a source of community identity and a stabilizing agent where no other industry makes sense.What we talked aboutSki Idaho; what it will take to transform Idaho into a ski destination; the importance of Grand Targhee to Idaho; old-time PNW skiing; Schweitzer as bellwether for Idaho ski area development; Kellogg, Idaho's mining history, Superfund cleanup, and renaissance as a resort town; Jackass ski area and its rebirth as Silver Mountain; the easiest big mountain access in America; taking a gondola to the ski area; the Jackass Snack Shack; an affordable mountain town?; Silver's destination potential; 49 Degrees North; these obscenely, stupidly low lift ticket prices:Potential lift upgrades, including Chair 4; snowmaking potential; baselodge expansion; Indy Pass; and the Powder Alliance.What I got wrongI mentioned that Telluride's Mountain Village Gondola replacement would cost $50 million. The actual estimates appear to be $60 million. The two stages of that gondola total 10,145 feet, more than a mile shorter than Silver's astonishing 16,350 feet (3.1 miles).Why now was a good time for this interviewIn the ‘90s, before the advent of the commercial internet, I learned about skiing from magazines. They mostly wrote about the American West and their fabulous, over-hill-and-dale ski complexes: Vail and Sun Valley and Telluride and the like. But these publications also exposed the backwaters where you could mainline pow and avoid liftlines, and do it all for less than the price of a bologna sandwich. It was in Skiing's October 1994 Favorite Resorts issue that I learned about this little slice of magnificence:Snow, snow, snow, steep, steep, steep, cheap, cheap, cheap, and a feeling you've gone back to a special time and place when life, and skiing, was uncomplicated – those are the things that make [NAME REDACTED] one of our favorite resorts. It's the ultimate pure skiing experience. This was another surprise choice, even to those who named [REDACTED] to their lists. We knew people liked [REDACTED], but we weren't prepared for how many, or how create their affections were. This is the one area that broke the “Great Skiing + Great Base Area + Amenities = Favorite Resort” equation. [REDACTED] has minimal base development, no shopping, no nightlife, no fancy hotels or eateries, and yet here it is on our list, a tribute to the fact that in the end, really great skiing matters more than any other single resort feature.OK, well this sounds amazing. Tell me more……[REDACTED] has one of the cheapest lift tickets around.…One of those rare places that hasn't been packaged, streamlined, suburbanized. There's also that delicious atmosphere of absolute remoteness from the everyday world.…The ski area for traditionalists, ascetics, and cheapskates. The lifts are slow and creaky, the accommodations are spartan, but the lift tickets are the best deal in skiing.This super-secret, cheaper-than-Tic-Tacs, Humble Bro ski center tucked hidden from any sign of civilization, the Great Skiing Bomb Shelter of 1994, is…Alta.Yes, that Alta.The Alta with four high-speed lifts.The Alta with $199 peak-day walk-up lift tickets.The Alta that headlines the Ikon Pass and Mountain Collective.The Alta with an address at the top of America's most over-burdened access road.Alta is my favorite ski area. There is nothing else like it anywhere (well, except directly next door). And a lot remains unchanged since 1994: there still isn't much to do other than ski, the lodges are still “spartan,” it is still “steep” and “deep.” But Alta blew past “cheap” a long time ago, and it feels about as embedded in the wilderness as an exit ramp Chuck E. Cheese. Sure, the viewshed is mostly intact, but accessing the ski area requires a slow-motion up-canyon tiptoe that better resembles a civilization-level evacuation than anything we would label “remote.” Alta is still Narnia, but the Alta described above no longer exists.Well, no s**t? Aren't we talking about Idaho here? Yes, but no one else is. And that's what I'm getting at: the Alta of 2025, the place where everything is cheap and fluffy and empty, is Idaho. Hide behind your dumb potato jokes all you want, but you can't argue with this lineup:“Ummm, Grand Targhee is in Wyoming, D*****s.”Thank you, Geography Bro, but the only way to access GT is through Idaho, and the mountain has been a member of Ski Idaho for centuries because of it.Also: Lost Trail and Lookout Pass both straddle the Montana-Idaho border.Anyway, check that roster, those annual snowfall totals. Then look at how difficult these ski areas are to access. The answer, mostly, is “Not Very.” You couldn't make Silver Mountain easier to get to unless you moved it to JFK airport: exit the interstate, drive seven feet, park, board the gondola.Finally, let's compare that group of 15 Idaho ski areas to the 15 public, aerial-lift-served ski areas in Utah. Even when you include Targhee and all of Lost Trail and Lookout, Utah offers 32 percent more skiable terrain than Idaho:But Utah tallies three times more annual skier visits than Idaho:No, Silver Mountain is not Alta, and Brundage is not Snowbird. But Silver and Brundage don't get skied out in under 45 seconds on a powder day. And other than faster lifts and more skiers, there's not much separating the average Utah ski resort from the average Idaho ski resort.That won't be true forever. People are dumb in the moment, but smart in slow-motion. We are already seeing meaningful numbers of East Coast ski families reorient their ski trips east, across the Atlantic (one New York-based reader explained to me today how they flew their family to Norway for skiing over President's weekend because it was cheaper than Vermont). Soon enough, Planet California and everyone else is going to tire of the expense and chaos of Colorado and Utah, and they'll Insta-sleuth their way to this powdery Extra-Rockies that everyone forgot about. No reason to wait for all that.Why you should ski Silver MountainI have little to add outside of what I wrote above: go to Silver because it's big and cheap and awesome. So I'll add this pinpoint description from Skibum.net:It's hard to find something negative about Silver Mountain; the only real drawback is that you probably live nowhere near it. On the other hand, if you live within striking distance, you already know that this is easily the best kept ski secret in Idaho and possibly the entire western hemisphere. If not, you just have to convince the family somehow that Kellogg Idaho — not Vail, not Tahoe, not Cottonwood Canyon — is the place you ought to head for your next ski trip. Try it, and you'll see why it's such a well-kept secret. All-around fantastic skiing, terrific powder, virtually no liftlines, reasonable pricing. Layout is kind of quirky; almost like an upside-down mountain due to gondola ride to lodge…interesting place. Emphasis on expert skiing but all abilities have plenty of terrain. Experts will find a ton of glades … One of the country's great underrated ski areas.Some of you will just never bother traveling for a mountain that lacks high-speed lifts. I understand, but I think that's a mistake. Slow lifts don't matter when there are no liftlines. And as Skiing wrote about Alta in 1994, “Really great skiing matters more than any other single resort feature.”Podcast NotesOn Schweitzer's transformationIf we were to fast-forward 30 years, I think we would find that most large Idaho ski areas will have undergone a renaissance of the sort that Schweitzer, Idaho did over the previous 30 years. Check the place out in 1988, a big but backwoods ski area covered in double chairs:Compare that to Schweitzer today: four high-speed quads, a sixer, and two triples that are only fixed-grip because the GM doesn't like exposed high-elevation detaches.On Silver's legacy ski areasSilver was originally known as Jackass, then Silverhorn. That original chairlift, installed in 1967, stands today as Chair 4:On the Jackass Snack ShackThis mid-mountain building, just off Chair 4, is actually a portable structure moved north from Tamarack:On 49 Degrees NorthCMR Lands also owns 49 Degrees North, an outstanding ski area two-and-a-half hours west and roughly equidistant from Spokane as Silver is (though in opposite directions). In 2021, the mountain demolished a top-to-bottom, 1972 SLI double for a brand-new, 1,851-vertical-foot high-speed quad, from which you can access most of the resort's 2,325 acres.The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

Isle of Wight Band 5 Degrees North discuss their new single, how the band and their name came about, and the exciting projects they have coming up in the future.

Names Is Critical - Timewarp 01/02/25Track Listing:1: Sonicvibe & Mike Shiver - Lunation (Original Mix)  - Captured Music2: Agenda - Heaven (Lange Remix)  - INCredible3: Pulser - My Religion (Original Mix)  - A State Of Trance4: Second Sun - Playground (Nu Nrg Remix)  - Vandit5: Lange Feat. Skye - Drifting Away (Original 12'' Mix)  - VC Recordings6: Ralph Fridge - Angel (Club Mix) - Incentive7: Hi-Gate - Caned and Unable (Original Mix) - Incentive8: Dumonde - See the Light (Original Mix)  - X-IT Records9: DJ Atmospherik - Will You Remember Me (DJ Spoke Vs Vespa 63 Remix)  - Progressive State Records10: Digital DNA - Stage One! (Original Mix)  - Everlasting Records11: Kai Tracid - Too Many Times (Energy Mix)  - Tracid Traxx12: Marcos and J K Walker - Night Finder (MTW Mix)  - Active Media13: Element - Ghost (Original Mix)  - MD Records14: Servant of Light - Ibex (Reverb Remix)  - Planet Traxx15: Re-Actor – Radiostar (Uberdruck Remix) - Deep Mission Trance16: Marcos pres Sunfire - Sunfire (Jay Walker Remix)  - 90 Degrees North 17: Ravelab feat Purwien - Send Me an Angel (Club Mix)  - EDM18: Rob L. - Hardt beat (Paul Hutsch Remix)  - Friendship Records19: Equinox - Direct Drive (Original Mix)  - Tranzmit Recordings UK 20: Solid Sleep - Clubattack (Phuture Punk Remix)  - Axwax Records21: Alphazone - Flashback (Dave Joy Remix)  - Waterworld22: BK - Revolution (Original Mix)  - Nukleuz23: Weirdo - Fair Warning (Original Mix) - Tinrib Podcast - Search "Name Is Critical Podcast"http://nameiscritical.podomatic.comhttps://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcasthttps://music.amazon.com/podcastshttps://www.deezer.com/en/show/3315052Mixcloud -http://www.mixcloud.com/TranceTechnologyPodcast/http://www.mixcloud.com/NameIsCritical/Facebook-Trance Technology -http://www.facebook.com/groups/170457666300769/Name Is Critical -https://www.facebook.com/nameiscritical

Dominic Wood Band Review - 5 Degrees North

In this episode of Money Tales, our guest is Ashli Sims. Ashli is a reporter turned nonprofit fundraiser, who takes us into the complex world of asking for support. Ashli's current journey began with a Kickstarter campaign to fund a storytelling project in Tanzania, where the ask was clear and the purpose was powerful. But when her career evolved into professional fundraising, the stakes got higher, and so did the challenges. Ashli shares how she learned to focus on impact rather than the dollars, reframing what it means to ask for help in a way that connects people to purpose. Ashli Sims is a storyteller who breaks down barriers and opens doors so Black entrepreneurs can build wealth for themselves, their families, and future generations. She has twenty years of experience, working as a news reporter, an advocate for vulnerable children, a fundraiser and a nonprofit leader. She's a graduate of Northwestern University and has a certificate in Nonprofit Management from the Oklahoma Center of Nonprofits. Ashli has raised more than $16 Million for four different organizations. She joined the Build in Tulsa team in April of 2021, charged with helping raise money for the effort, before she was promoted to lead the initiative in February of 2022. Since Build in Tulsa launched operations two and a half years ago, the network has grown to include 400 entrepreneurs, facilitating more than 10,000 hours of training and coaching and investing $10.5 Million with underrepresented founders. Ashli is an Aspen Institute 2023 Health Communities Fellow and serves on the board of 36 Degrees North in Tulsa and a community pantry and soup kitchen, Iron Gate. She's been featured in Forbes, Essence, and Fortune. As Managing Director of Build in Tulsa, Ashli is helping reclaim the narrative: Black Wall Street is not a history lesson, but a blueprint. She believes the next Black-led billion-dollar company will be based in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

In this episode, we explore Devon Laney's journey as a leader in promoting entrepreneurship in Tulsa. He talks about his vision to change the city's innovation scene through his work at Gradient, a hub for entrepreneurs. Devon's experience at 36 Degrees North set the stage for his current efforts to build a strong business community. Listeners will learn about his plans to make Tulsa a key player in innovation and business growth.Devon is passionate about supporting entrepreneurs and outlines how Gradient aims to boost Tulsa's business revival. His goal is to create a space where startups can thrive, focusing on teamwork, community support, and innovation as drivers of economic progress. This episode is ideal for anyone interested in the dynamics of building a solid innovation ecosystem.As the episode wraps up, Devon talks about the challenges and opportunities for Tulsa's entrepreneurial scene. His leadership is about growth and inspiring new creativity and resilience in business. Committed to developing talent and encouraging innovation, Devon's work highlights the power of visionary leadership. Tune in to see how Devon is shaping Tulsa's future and what lies ahead for local entrepreneurs.

When the phone rang 10 years ago while Norwegian neuroscientist May-Britt Moser was in a particularly engaging lab meeting, she almost didn't answer it.Good thing she did! It was Göran Hansson, secretary of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, with the news: May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser, along with their mentor and colleague John O'Keefe from the University College London, had just won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries of two types of brain cells that work together to function like a GPS in the brain.That system allows animals -including us - to know where they are, and navigate to where they want to go. This was a groundbreaking discovery because it gave us critical insight into how an area of the brain, far from the normal sensory inputs of sight, sound and touch, constructs its own way of understanding space. And, because this same area of the brain, and our ability to navigate, are affected early on in Alzheimer's patients, it offers an inroad for clinicians studying the disease. In fact, the KG Jebsen Centre for Alzheimer's Disease, a part of the Mosers' Kavli Institute, is working to bring these fundamental insights about the brain to clinical practice. This episode is a celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Nobel award. To make it, I cracked open a time capsule of sorts: When the Mosers first learned that they had won the scientific world's highest honour, I ran down to their lab and recorded everything! The files in this podcast are from that day and the heady days afterwards.My guests on today's episode are May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser.You can also find lots more material, including videos, more popular science articles and background information on this webpage. And don't forget to subscribe to 63 Degrees North to hear my second podcast, coming in early 2025, about the most recent findings from the Mosers' lab – and a look into the future. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Did you know that one of the strongest indicators of how long you'll live is how strong you are? Yep, strength training can help with that. I've got Claire and James Davis, aka the brains behind 32 Degrees North and @midlifementors, joining me in this week's podcast episode, and we're diving into the real benefits of weight training. We're talking physical, mental, and even emotional perks that most people don't know about. Plus, we're busting a few myths along the way.Want to get stronger and feel more confident in midlife? This one's for you!Join the waitlist for news of the launch of my new book "Life After Menopause" here; www.happyhormonesforlife.com/book-waitlist

In this episode, Adam Regan and Adam Johnson share the evolution of their pubs—the Hare and Hounds in Kings Heath and the Plough Harborne—in Birmingham's nightlife and hospitality scene. The conversation explores how Medicine Bar, a landmark spot in Digbeth, influenced the local culture and the impact of venues like Circo and 52 Degrees North. They delve into the challenges and successes of running a pub, the importance of passionate staff, and the shifting dynamics of the hospitality industry. The partnership between the Hare and Hounds and the Plough highlights their commitment to great food, music, and community engagement while navigating the pressures of rising costs and competition. 00:00 The Rise of Medicine Bar 01:10 Rivalry and Collaboration: Circa and Medicine Bar 01:57 From Record Shops to DJ Bars 08:34 The Birth of Leftfoot and Club Culture 09:17 The Evolution of The Plough 11:56 Challenges and Triumphs in Hospitality 16:05 The Independent Scene in Birmingham 21:37 Struggles in the Pub Industry 31:02 The Hare and Hounds: A New Beginning 32:26 Exploring the Venue's History and Initial Challenges 33:13 Transforming the Junk Room into Venue Two 34:37 Memorable Performances and Rising Stars 37:02 Introducing Food and Forming Key Partnerships 39:00 Expanding Operations and Embracing New Opportunities 41:46 Collaborating with The Plough Team 44:53 Future Plans and Vision for the Venue 49:02 Fun and Lighthearted Q&A Socials Hare & Hounds Insta- https://www.instagram.com/hareandhoundsbrum/ Facebook- https://www.facebook.com/hareandhoundskingsheath/ X- https://x.com/hareandhounds/ Website- https://hareandhoundskingsheath.co.uk/ The Plough Insta- https://www.instagram.com/ploughharborne/ Facebook- https://www.facebook.com/plough.harborne Website- https://theploughharborne.co.uk/ Sponsors Stock Local Craft Rum Burning Barn In Your Venue-⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠https://www.burningbarnrum.com/pages/trade-1⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Buy Burning Barn Rum-⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠https://www.burningbarnrum.com/collections/3-rums⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Burning Barn On Insta-⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠https://www.instagram.com/burningbarnrum/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Food Delivery Businesses Sign Up & Save Money With Easy Food Here-⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠https://easyfood.co.uk/restaurant-opportunity⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Download Easy Food App Here-⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠https://easyfood.co.uk/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Easy Food On Insta-⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠https://www.instagram.com/easyfood.co.uk/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Easy Food West Mids-⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠https://www.instagram.com/easyfood.westmidlands/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Opening Drone Footage From Rob At Alto Drones-⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠https://www.instagram.com/alto.drones/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Music From Tom Ford-⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠https://www.instagram.com/thetennischampion/⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Us ⁠⁠⁠⁠/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/breakingbreadpodcastbirmingham/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/PodcastBread ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://facebook.com/breakingbreadpodcastuk ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ For full show notes visit our Website ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://breakingbreadbirmingham.co.uk

Get ready for the ultimate basketball rivalry as we break down Team USA and Team Canada's journey to Olympic glory! In this episode of 6iX Degrees North, we analyze the rosters, strategies, and key matchups that could determine the fate of these two powerhouse teams. From superstar showdowns to rising talent, we've got everything you need to know about the men's Olympic basketball tournament. Tune in for expert insights, bold predictions, and in-depth coverage that will have you ready for tip-off!

In this inspiring episode of The Midlife Makeover Show, host Wendy Valentine welcomes the dynamic duo, Claire and James Davis, the masterminds behind the award-winning wellbeing company 38 Degrees North and the thriving midlife coaching business, The Midlife Mentors. With their charming accents and incredible insights, Claire and James share their remarkable journey of overcoming divorce, finding love at midlife, and launching a successful business.   Claire and James delve into their holistic approach to midlife, emphasizing the interconnectedness of mind, body, and soul. They discuss the importance of addressing beliefs, nutrition, and physical health to achieve true well-being. Claire opens up about her personal struggles with anorexia and how she transformed her relationship with her body, while James shares his passion for helping men navigate midlife challenges.   Join Wendy, Claire, and James for an enlightening conversation about the opportunities that midlife presents, the importance of self-compassion, and the power of taking small steps towards transformation. This episode is packed with wisdom, practical tips, and heartfelt moments that will leave you feeling empowered and ready to embrace midlife with gusto.  

This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on June 26. It dropped for free subscribers on July 3. To receive future pods as soon as they're live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:WhoJD Crichton, General Manager of Wildcat Mountain, New HampshireRecorded onMay 30, 2024About WildcatClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Vail ResortsLocated in: Gorham, New HampshireYear founded: 1933 (lift service began in 1957)Pass affiliations:* Epic Pass, Epic Local Pass, Northeast Value Pass – unlimited access* Northeast Midweek Pass – unlimited weekday accessClosest neighboring ski areas: Black Mountain, New Hampshire (:18), Attitash (:22), Cranmore (:28), Sunday River (:45), Mt. Prospect Ski Tow (:46), Mt. Abram (:48), Bretton Woods (:48), King Pine (:50), Pleasant Mountain (:57), Cannon (1:01), Mt. Eustis Ski Hill (1:01)Base elevation: 1,950 feetSummit elevation: 4,062 feetVertical drop: 2,112 feetSkiable Acres: 225Average annual snowfall: 200 inchesTrail count: 48 (20% beginner, 47% intermediate, 33% advanced)Lift count: 5 (1 high-speed quad, 3 triples, 1 carpet)Why I interviewed himI've always been skeptical of acquaintances who claim to love living in New Jersey because of “the incredible views of Manhattan.” Because you know where else you can find incredible views of Manhattan? In Manhattan. And without having to charter a hot-air balloon across the river anytime you have to go to work or see a Broadway play.* But sometimes views are nice, and sometimes you want to be adjacent-to-but-not-necessarily-a-part-of something spectacular and dramatic. And when you're perched summit-wise on Wildcat, staring across the street at Mount Washington, the most notorious and dramatic peak on the eastern seaboard, it's hard to think anything other than “damn.”Flip the view and the sentiment reverses as well. The first time I saw Wildcat was in summertime, from the summit of Mount Washington. Looking 2,200 feet down, from above treeline, it's an almost quaint-looking ski area, spare but well-defined, its spiderweb trail network etched against the wild Whites. It feels as though you could reach down and put it in your pocket. If you didn't know you were looking at one of New England's most abrasive ski areas, you'd probably never guess it.Wildcat could feel tame only beside Mount Washington, that open-faced deathtrap hunched against 231-mile-per-hour winds. Just, I suppose, as feisty New Jersey could only seem placid across the Hudson from ever-broiling Manhattan. To call Wildcat the New Jersey of ski areas would seem to imply some sort of down-tiering of the thing, but over two decades on the East Coast, I've come to appreciate oft-abused NJ as something other than New York City overflow. Ignore the terrible drivers and the concrete-bisected arterials and the clusters of third-world industry and you have a patchwork of small towns and beach towns, blending, to the west and north, with the edges of rolling Appalachia, to the south with the sweeping Pine Barrens, to the east with the wild Atlantic.It's actually pretty nice here across the street, is my point. Even if it's not quite as cozy as it looks. This is a place as raw and wild and real as any in the world, a thing that, while forever shadowed by its stormy neighbor, stands just fine on its own.*It's not like living in New Jersey is some kind of bargain. It's like paying Club Thump Thump prices for grocery store Miller Lite. Or at least that was my stance until I moved my smug ass to Brooklyn.What we talked aboutMountain cleanup day; what it took to get back to long seasons at Wildcat and why they were truncated for a handful of winters; post-Vail-acquisition snowmaking upgrades; the impact of a $20-an-hour minimum wage on rural New Hampshire; various bargain-basement Epic Pass options; living through major resort acquisitions; “there is no intention to make us all one and the same”; a brief history of Wildcat; how skiers lapped Wildcat before mechanical lifts; why Wildcat Express no longer transforms from a chairlift to a gondola for summer ops; contemplating Wildcat Express replacements; retroactively assessing the removal of the Catapult lift; the biggest consideration in determining the future of Wildcat's lift fleet; when a loaded chair fell off the Snowcat lift in 2022; potential base area development; and Attitash as sister resort.   Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewSince it's impossible to discuss any Vail mountain without discussing Vail Resorts, I'll go ahead and start there. The Colorado-based company's 2019 acquisition of wild Wildcat (along with 16 other Peak resorts), met the same sort of gasp-oh-how-can-corporate-Vail-ever-possibly-manage-a-mountain-that-doesn't-move-skiers-around-like-the-fat-humans-on-the-space-base-in-Wall-E that greeted the acquisitions of cantankerous Crested Butte (2018), Whistler (2016), and Kirkwood (2012). It's the same sort of worry-warting that Alterra is up against as it tries to close the acquisition of Arapahoe Basin. But, as I detailed in a recent podcast episode on Kirkwood, the surprising thing is how little can change at these Rad Brah outposts even a dozen years after The Consumption Event.But, well. At first the Angry Ski Bros of upper New England seemed validated. Vail really didn't do a great job of running Wildcat from 2019 to 2022-ish. The confluence of Covid, inherited deferred maintenance, unfamiliarity with the niceties of East Coast operations, labor shortages, Wal-Mart-priced passes, and the distractions caused by digesting 20 new ski areas in one year contributed to shortened seasons, limited terrain, understaffed operations, and annoyed customers. It didn't help when a loaded chair fell off the Snowcat triple in 2022. Vail may have run ski resorts for decades, but the company had never encountered anything like the brash, opinionated East, where ski areas are laced tightly together, comparisons are easy, and migrations to another mountain if yours starts to suck are as easy as a five-minute drive down the road.But Vail is settling into the Northeast, making major lift upgrades at Stowe, Mount Snow, Okemo, Attitash, and Hunter since 2021. Mandatory parking reservations have helped calm once-unmanageable traffic around Stowe and Mount Snow. The Epic Pass – particularly the northeast-specific versions – has helped to moderate region-wide season pass prices that had soared to well over $1,000 at many ski areas. The company now seems to understand that this isn't Keystone, where you can make snow in October and turn the system off for 11 months. While Vail still seems plodding in Pennsylvania and the lower Midwest, where seasons are too short and the snowmaking efforts often underwhelming, they appear to have cracked New England – operationally if not always necessarily culturally.That's clear at Wildcat, where seasons are once again running approximately five months, operations are fully staffed, and the pitchforks are mostly down. Wildcat has returned to the fringe, where it belongs, to being an end-of-the-road day-trip alternative for people who prefer ski areas to ski resorts (and this is probably the best ski-area-with-no-public-onsite lodging in New England). Locals I speak with are generally happy with the place, which, this being New England, means they only complain about it most of the time, rather than all of the time. Short of moving the mountain out of its tempestuous microclimate and into Little Cottonwood Canyon, there isn't much Vail could do to change that, so I'd suggest taking the win.What I got wrongWhen discussing the installation of the Wildcat Express and the decommissioning of the Catapult triple, I made a throwaway reference to “whoever owned the mountain in the late ‘90s.” The Franchi family owned Wildcat from 1986 until selling the mountain to Peak Resorts in 2010.Why you should ski WildcatThere isn't much to Wildcat other than skiing. A parking lot, a baselodge, scattered small buildings of unclear utility - all of them weather-beaten and slightly ramshackle, humanity's sad ornaments on nature's spectacle.But the skiing. It's the only thing there is and it's the only thing that matters. One high-speed lift straight to the top. There are other lifts but if the 2,041-vertical-foot Wildcat Express is spinning you probably won't even notice, let alone ride, them. Straight up, straight down. All day long or until your fingers fall off, which will probably take about 45 minutes.The mountain doesn't look big but it is big. Just a few trails off the top but these quickly branch infinitely like some wild seaside mangrove, funneling skiers, whatever their intent, into various savage channels of its bell-shaped footprint. Descending the steepness, Mount Washington, so prominent from the top, disappears, somehow too big to be seen, a paradox you could think more about if you weren't so preoccupied with the skiing.It's not that the skiing is great, necessarily. When it's great it's amazing. But it's almost never amazing. It's also almost never terrible. What it is, just about all the time, is a fight, a mottled, potholed, landmine-laced mother-bleeper of a mountain that will not cede a single turn without a little backtalk. This is not an implication of the mountain ops team. Wildcat is about as close to an un-tamable mountain as you'll find in the over-groomed East. If you've ever tried building a sandcastle in a rising tide, you have a sense of what it's like trying to manage this cantankerous beast with its impossible weather and relentless pitch.We talk a bit, on the podcast, about Wildcat's better-than-you'd-suppose beginner terrain and top-to-bottom green trail. But no one goes there for that. The easy stuff is a fringe benefit for edgier families, who don't want to pinch off the rapids just because they're pontooning on the lake. Anyone who truly wants to coast knows to go to Bretton Woods or Cranmore. Wildcat packs the rowdies like jacket-flask whisky, at hand for the quick hit or the bender, for as dicey a day as you care to make it.Podcast NotesOn long seasons at WildcatWildcat, both under the Franchi family (1986 to 2010), and Peak Resorts, had made a habit of opening early and closing late. During Vail Resorts' first three years running the mountain, those traditions slipped, with later-than-normal openings and earlier-than-usual closings. Obviously we toss out the 2020 early close, but fall 2020 to spring 2022 were below historical standards. Per New England Ski History:On Big Lifts: New England EditionI noted that the Wildcat Express quad delivered one of the longest continuous vertical rises of any New England lift. I didn't actually know where the machine ranked, however, so I made this chart. The quad lands at an impressive number five among all lifts, and is third among chairlifts, in the six-state region:Kind of funny that, even in 2024, two of the 10 biggest vertical drops in New England still belong to fixed-grip chairs (also arguably the two best terrain pods in Vermont, with Madonna at Smuggs and the single at MRG).The tallest lifts are not always the longest lifts, and Wildcat Express ranks as just the 13th-longest lift in New England. A surprise entrant in the top 15 is Stowe's humble Toll House double, a 6,400-foot-long chairlift that rises just 890 vertical feet. Another inconspicuous double chair – Sugarloaf's older West Mountain lift – would have, at 6,968 feet, have made this list (at No. 10) before the resort shortened it last year (to 4,130 feet). It's worth noting that, as far as I know, Sugarbush's Slide Brook Express is the longest chairlift in the world.On Herman MountainCrichton grew up skiing at Hermon Mountain, a 300-ish footer outside of Bangor, Maine. The bump still runs the 1966 Poma T-bar that he skied off of as a kid, as well as a Stadeli double moved over from Pleasant Mountain in 1998 (and first installed there, according to Lift Blog, in 1967. The most recent Hermon Mountain trailmap that I can find dates to 2007:On the Epic Northeast Value Pass versus other New England season passes Vail's Epic Northeast Value Pass is a stupid good deal: $613 for unlimited access to the company's four New Hampshire ski areas (Wildcat, Attitash, Mount Sunapee, Crotched), non-holiday access to Mount Snow and Okemo, and 10 non-holiday days at Stowe (plus access to Hunter and everything Vail operates in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan). Surveying New England's 25 largest ski areas, the Northeast Value Pass is less-expensive than all but Smugglers' Notch ($599), Black Mountain of Maine ($465), Pico ($539), and Ragged ($529). All of those save Ragged's are single-mountain passes.On the Epic Day PassYes I am still hung up on the Epic Day Pass, and here's why:On consolidationI referenced Powdr's acquisition of Copper Mountain in 2009 and Vail's purchase of Crested Butte in 2018. Here's an inventory all the U.S. ski areas owned by a company with two or more resorts:On Wildcat's old Catapult liftWhen Wildcat installed its current summit chair in 1997, they removed the Catapult triple, a shorter summit lift (Lift F below) that had provided redundancy to the summit alongside the old gondola (Lift A):Interestingly, the old gondy, which dated to 1957, remained in place for two more years. Here's a circa 1999 trailmap, showing both the Wildcat Express and the gondola running parallel from base to summit:It's unclear how often both lifts actually ran simultaneously in the winter, but the gondola died with the 20th Century. The Wildcat Express was a novel transformer lift, which converted from a high-speed quad chair in the winter to a four-passenger gondola in the summer. Vail, for reasons Crichton explains in the podcast, abandoned that configuration and appears to have no intentions of restoring it.On the Snowcat lift incidentA bit more on the January 2022 chairlift accident at Wildcat, per SAM:On Saturday, Jan. 8, a chair carrying a 22-year-old snowboarder on the Snowcat triple at Wildcat Mountain, N.H., detached from the haul rope and fell nearly 10 feet to the ground. Wildcat The guest was taken to a nearby hospital with serious rib injuries.According to state fire marshal Sean Toomey, the incident began after the chair was misloaded—meaning the guest was not properly seated on the chair as it continued moving out of the loading area. The chair began to swing as it traveled uphill, struck a lift tower and detached from the haul rope, falling to the ground. Snowcat is a still-active Riblet triple, and attaches to the haulrope with a device called an “insert clip.” I found this description of these novel devices on a random blog from 2010, so maybe don't include this in a report to Congress on the state of the nation's lift fleet:[Riblet] closed down in 2003. There are still quite a few around; from the three that originally were at The Canyons, only the Golden Eagle chair survives today. Riblet built some 500 lifts. The particularities of the Riblet chair are their grips, which are called insert clips. It is a very ingenious device and it is very safe too. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, You'll see a sketch below showing the detail of the clip.… One big benefit of the clip is that it provides a very smooth ride over the sheave trains, particularly under the compression sheaves, something that traditional clam/jaw grips cannot match. The drawback is that the clip cannot be visually inspected at it is the case with other grips. Also, the code required to move the grip every 2 years or 2,000 hours, whichever comes first. This is the same with traditional grips.This is a labor-intensive job and a special tool has been developed: The Riblet "Grip Detensioner." It's showed on a second picture representing the tool in action. You can see the cable in the middle with the strands separated, which allows the insertion of the clip. Also, the fiber or plastic core of the wire rope has to be cut where the clip is inserted. When the clip is moved to another location of the cable, a plastic part has to be placed into the cable to replace the missing piece of the core. Finally, the Riblet clip cannot be placed on the spliced section of the rope.Loaded chairs utilizing insert clips also detached from lifts at Snowriver (2021) and 49 Degrees North (2020). An unoccupied, moving chair fell from Heavenly's now-retired North Bowl triple in 2016.The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 44/100 in 2024, and number 544 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

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You can also subscribe to the free tier below:WhoRicky Newberry, Vice President and General Manager of Kirkwood Ski Resort, CaliforniaRecorded onMay 20, 2024About KirkwoodClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Vail ResortsLocated in: Kirkwood, CaliforniaYear founded: 1972Pass affiliations:* Epic Pass: unlimited access* Epic Local Pass: unlimited access with holiday blackouts* Tahoe Local Epic Pass: unlimited access with holiday blackouts* Tahoe Value Pass: unlimited access with holiday and Saturday blackouts* Kirkwood Pass: unlimited accessClosest neighboring ski areas: Heavenly (:43), Sierra-at-Tahoe (:44) – travel times vary significantly given weather conditions, time of day, and time of year.Base elevation: 7,800 feetSummit elevation: 9,800 feetVertical drop: 2,000 feetSkiable Acres: 2,300Average annual snowfall: 354 inchesTrail count: 86 (20% expert, 38% advanced, 30% intermediate, 12% beginner)Lift count: 13 (2 high-speed quads, 1 fixed-grip quad, 6 triples, 1 double, 1 T-bar, 2 carpets – view Lift Blog's inventory of Kirkwood's lift fleet).Why I interviewed himImagine this: 1971. Caltrans, the military-grade state agency charged with clearing California's impossible snows from its high-alpine road network, agrees to maintain an additional wintertime route across the Sierra Crest: Highway 88, over Carson Pass, an east-west route cutting 125 miles from Stockton to US 395. This is California State Route 88 in the winter:A ridiculous road, an absurd idea: turn the industrial power of giant machines against a wilderness route whose wintertime deeps had eaten human souls for centuries. An audacious idea, but not an unusual one. Not in that California or in that America. Not in that era of will and muscle. Not in that country that had pushed thousands of miles of interstate across mountains and rivers and deserts in just 15 years. Caltrans would hammer 20-foot-high snow canyons up and over the pass, punching an arctic pathway into and through the howling angry fortress of the Sierra Nevada.And they did it all to serve a new ski resort.Imagine that. A California, an America that builds.Kirkwood, opened in 1972, was part of the last great wave of American ski resort construction. Copper, Northstar, Powder Mountain, 49 Degrees North, and Telluride all opened that year. Keystone (1970), Snowbird (1971), and Big Sky (1973) also cranked to life around this time. Large ski area building stalled by the early ‘80s, though Vail managed to develop Beaver Creek in 1980. Deer Valley opened in 1981. Outliers materialize: Bohemia, in spite of considerable local resistance, in 2000. Tamarack in 2004. But mostly, the ski resorts we have are all the ski resorts we'll ever have.But there is a version of America, of California, that dreams and does enormous things, and not so long ago. This institutional memory lives on, even in those who had no part in its happening. Kirkwood is an emblem of this era and its willful collective imagining. The mountain itself is a ludicrous place for a commercial ski resort, steep and wild, an avalanche hazard zone that commands constant vigilant maintenance. Like Alta-Snowbird or Jackson Hole, the ski area offers nominal groomed routes, a comfortable lower-mountain beginner area, just enough accommodation for the intermediate mass-market passholder to say “yes I did this.” This dressing up, too, encapsulates the fading American habit of taming the raw and imposing, of making an unthinkable thing look easy.But nothing about Kirkwood is easy. Not the in or the out. Not the up or the down. It's rough and feisty, messy and unpredictable. And that's the point of the place. As with the airplane or the smartphone, we long ago lost our awe of the ski resort, what a marvelous feat of human ingenuity it is. Kirkwood, lost in the highlands, lift-served on its crazy two-mile ridge, is one of the more improbable organized centers of American skiing. In its very existence the place memorializes and preserves lost impulses to actualize the unbelievable, to transport humans into, up, and down a ferocious mountain in a hostile mountain range. I find glory in Kirkwood, in that way and so many more. Hyperbole, perhaps. But what an incredible place this is, and not just because of the skiing.What we talked aboutComing down off a 725-inch 2022-23 winter; what's behind Kirkwood's big snows and frequent road closures; scenic highway 88; if you're running Kirkwood, prepare to sleep in your office; employee housing; opening when the road is closed; why Kirkwood doesn't stay open deep into May even when they have the snowpack; the legacy of retiring Heavenly COO Tom Fortune; the next ski area Vail should buy; watching Vail Resorts move into Tahoe; Vail's culture of internal promotion; what it means to lead the ski resort where you started your career; avalanche safety; the nuance and complexity of managing Kirkwood's avy-prone terrain; avy dogs; why is Kirkwood Vail's last Western mountain to get a new chairlift?; bringing Kirkwood onto the grid; potential lift upgrades (fantasy version); considering Kirkwood's masterplan; whether a lift could ever serve the upper bowls looker's right; why Kirkwood shrank the boundary of Reuter Bowl this past season; why the top of The Wall skied different this winter; why Kirkwood put in and then removed surface lifts around Lift 4 (Sunrise); Kirkwood's fierce terrain; what happens when Vail comes to Rowdy Town; The Cirque and when it opens for competitions; changes coming to Kirkwood parking; why Kirkwood still offers a single-mountain season pass; and the Tahoe Value and Tahoe Local passes.  Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewMaybe last year, when the stacked snows transformed Tahoe into a Seussian mushroom village, would have been a better moment for this interview. Kirkwood – Kirkwood – beat a 700-inch single-winter snowfall record that had stood for 40 years, with 725 inches of freaking snow. By the time I arrived onsite, in late March, the snowpack was so deep that I could barely see out the windows of my condo – on the second floor:This winter marked a return to almost exactly average, which at Kirkwood is still better than what some ski areas clock in a decade: 370 inches. Average, in draught-prone Tahoe and closure-prone Kirkwood, is perhaps the best possible outcome. As this season settled from a thing that is to a thing that happened, it felt appropriate to document the contrast: how does 370 feel when it chases 725? Is snow like money, where after a certain amount you really can't tell the difference? Or does snow, which, like money, occupies that strange space between the material and the ephemeral, ignite with its vanishing form some untamable avarice? More is never enough. Even 725 inches feels stingy in some contexts – Alta stacked 903 last winter; Baker's 1,140-inch 1998-99 season bests any known season snowfall total on Planet Earth.But Californians, I've found, have little use for comparisons. Perhaps that's an effect of the horizon-bending desert that chops the state off from the rest of the continent. Perhaps it's a silent pride in being a resident of America's most-populous state – more people live in California than in the 21 least-populous U.S. states combined, or in all of Canada. Perhaps its Surf Brah bonhomie drifting up to the mountains. Whatever it is, there seems to be something in Cali's collective soul that takes whatever it's given and is content with it.Or at least it feels that way whenever I go there, and it sure felt that way in this interview. At a moment when it seems as though too many big-mountain skiers at headliner mountains want to staple their home turf's alpha-dog patch to their forehead and walk around with two thumbs jerking upward repeating “You do realize I'm a season passholder at Alta, right?”, Kirkwood still feels tucked away, quiet in its excellence, a humble pride masking its fierce façade. Even 12 years into Vail Resorts' ownership, the ski area feels as corporate as a guy selling bootleg purses out of a rolled-out sheet on Broadway. Swaggering but approachable, funky and improvised, something that's probably going to make a good story when you get back home.Why you should ski KirkwoodOddly, I usually tell people not to go here. And not in that stupid social media way that ever-so-clever (usually) Utah and Colorad-Bros trip over one another to post: “Oh Snowbird/Wolf Creek/Pow Mow sucks, no one should go there.” It's so funny I forgot to laugh. But Kirkwood can be genuinely tough to explain. Most Epic Pass-toting tourists are frankly going to have a better time at Heavenly or Northstar, with their fast lifts, Tahoe views, vast intermediate trail networks, and easy access roads. Kirkwood is grand. Kirkwood is exceptional. Kirkwood is the maximalist version of what humankind can achieve in taming an angry pocket of wilderness for mass recreation. But Kirkwood is not for everyone.There. I've set expectations. So maybe don't make this your first Tahoe stop if you're coming west straight from Paoli Peaks. It's a bruiser, one of the rowdiest in Vail's sprawling portfolio, wild and steep and exposed. If you're looking for a fight, Kirkwood will give you one.That's not to say an intermediate couldn't enjoy themselves here. Just don't expect Keystone. What's blue and green at Kirkwood is fine terrain, but it's limited, and lacks the drama of, say, coming over Ridge Run or Liz's at Heavenly, with the lake shimmering below and miles of intermediate pitch in front of you. **This message is not endorsed (or likely appreciated) by the Kirkwood Chamber of Commerce, Vail Resorts, or Kirkwood ski area.Podcast NotesOn former Kirkwood GMs on the podcast Sometimes it seems as though everyone in skiing has taken their turn running Kirkwood. An unusual number of past Storm Skiing Podcast guests have done so, and I discussed the resort with all of them: Chip Seamans (now at Windham), Tim Cohee (now at China Peak), and Tom Fortune (recently retired from Heavenly). Apologies if I forgot anyone.On Apple MountainApple Mountain wasn't much: 200-ish vertical feet (pushed up from an original 30-footer) with a quad chair and a bunch of ropetows. Here was the 2000 trailmap:But this little Michigan ski area – where both Newberry and I learned (partially, in my case), to ski – moved nearly 800,000 students through its beginner programs from 1961 to '94, according to the Michigan Lost Ski Areas Project.It's been closed since 2017. Something about the snowmaking system that's either too hard or too expensive to fix. That leaves Michigan's Tri-Cities – Midland, Bay City, and Saginaw, with a total metro population approaching 400,000 – with no functioning ski area. Snow Snake is only about 40 minutes north of Midland, and Mt. Holly is less than an hour south of Saginaw. But Apple Mountain, tucked into the backwoods behind Freeland, sat dead in the middle of the triangle. It was accessible to almost any schoolkid, and, humble as it was, stoked that fire for thousands of what became lifelong skiers.What skiing has lost without Apple Mountain is impossible to calculate. I would argue that it was one of the more important ski areas anywhere. Winters in mid-Michigan are long, cold, snowy, and dull. People need something to do. But skiing is not an obvious solution: this is the flattest place you can imagine. To have skiing – any skiing – in the region was a joy and a novelty. There was no redundancy, no competing ski center. And so the place was impossibly busy at all times, minting skiers who would go off to start ski newsletters and run huge resorts on the other side of the country.The most frustrating fact about Apple Mountain is that it continues to operate as a conference center, golf course, and apple orchard. The ski lifts are intact, the slopes mowed in summertime. I stopped in two summers ago (I accidentally said “last summer,” implying 2023, on the podcast), and the place was immaculate:I haven't given up on Apple Mountain just yet. The hill is there, the market is there, and there is no shortage of people in Michigan – home to the second-most ski areas after New York – who know how to run a ski area. I told Ricky to tell Vail to buy it, which I am certain they will not do. But a solution must exist.On Mount Shasta and “the big mountain above it”Newberry references his time at “Mt. Shasta and the big mountain above it.” Here's what he meant by that: Mt. Shasta Ski Park is a mid-sized ski area seated on the lower portion of 14,179-foot Mt. Shasta. The lifts top out at 7,536 feet, even after an uphill expansion last ski season. The trailmap doesn't really capture the scale of it all (the ski area's vert is around 2,000 feet):Shasta is a temperamental (and potentially active) volcano. A previous ski area called Mt. Shasta Ski Bowl ran chairlifts up to 9,400 feet, but an avalanche wiped out the summit lift in 1978. Ski Bowl never ran again. Here's a nice history of the lost ski area:On Vail Resorts' timelineWe talk a lot about Vail's growth timeline. Here's the full roster, in order of acquisition:On HeavenlyWe discuss Heavenly - where Newberry spent a large part of his career - extensively. Here's the mountain's trailmap for reference:On Ted LassoIf you haven't watched Ted Lasso yet, you should probably go ahead and do that immediately:On Ellen at Stevens PassNewberry mentioned “Ellen at Stevens Pass.” He was referring to Ellen Galbraith, the ski area's delightful general manager, who joined me on the podcast last year.On Vail's lift installations in the WestGiven its outsized presence in the ski zeitgeist, Vail actually operates very few ski areas in Western North America: five in Colorado, three in California, and one each in Utah, Washington, and British Columbia. The company has stood up 44 (mostly) new lifts at these 11 ski areas since 2012, with one puzzling exception: Kirkwood. Check this:Why is Big K getting stiffed? Newberry and I discuss.On Kirkwood's masterplanAs far as I know, Vail hasn't updated Kirkwood's Forest Service masterplan since acquiring the resort in 2012. But this 2007 map shows an older version of the plan and where potential lifts could go:I can't find a version with the proposed Timber Creek lift, which Newberry describes in the pod as loading near Bunny and TC Express and running up-mountain to the top of the bowls.On the shrinking border of Reuter BowlKirkwood's 2023-24 trailmap snuck in a little shrinkage: the border of Reuter Bowl, a hike-in zone on the resort's far edge, snuck south. Newberry explains why on the pod:On Kirkwood's short-lived surface liftsWe discuss a pair of surface lifts that appeared as Lift 15 on the trailmap from around 2008 to 2017. You can see them on this circa 2017 (earlier maps show this as one lift), trailmap:On The CirqueThe Cirque, a wicked labyrinth of chutes, cliffs, and rocks looming above the ski area, was, somewhat unbelievably, once inbounds terrain. This circa 1976 trailmap even shows a marked trail through this forbidden zone, which is now open only occasionally for freeride comps:On Kirkwood's parking changesKirkwood will implement the same parking-reservations policy next winter that Northstar and Heavenly began using last year. Here's a summary from the ski area's website:Skiers get pretty lit up about parking. But Vail is fairly generous with the workarounds, and a system that spreads traffic out (because everyone knows they'll get a spot), across the morning is a smart adjustment so long as we are going to continue insisting on the automobile as our primary mode of transport.On Saginaw, MichiganNewberry and I share a moment in which we discover we were both born in the same mid-sized Michigan city: Saginaw. Believe it or not, there's a song that starts with these very lyrics: “I was born, in Saginaw, Michigan…” The fact that this song exists has long puzzled me. It is kind of stupid but also kind of great. The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 40/100 in 2024, and number 540 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

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You can also subscribe to the free tier below:WhoPete Korfiatis, General Manager of Bluewood, WashingtonRecorded onApril 4, 2024About BluewoodClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Local investorsLocated in: Dayton, WashingtonYear founded: 1980Pass affiliations:* Indy Pass and Indy+ Pass: 2 days, no blackoutsClosest neighboring ski areas: Cottonwood Butte, Idaho, 3 hours eastBase elevation: 4,545 feetSummit elevation: 5,670 feetVertical drop: 1,125 feetSkiable Acres: 355Average annual snowfall: 300 inchesTrail count: 24 (30% difficult, 45% intermediate, 25% easy)Lift count: 4 (2 triples, 2 carpets – view Lift Blog's inventory of Bluewood's lift fleet)Why I interviewed himSomeday, if it's not too late, I'm going to track down the old-timers who snowshoed into the wilderness and figured this all out. The American West is filled with crazy little snow pockets, lesser-known mountain ranges spiraling off the vast plateaus. Much of this land falls under the purview of the United States Forest Service. In the decades immediately before and after World War II, the agency established most of our large western ski areas within its 193 million-acre kingdom. That's a lot of land – approximately the size of Texas – and it's not all snowy. Where there is snow, there's not always roads, nor even the realistic possibility of plowing one through. Where there are roads, there aren't always good exposures or fall lines for skiing.So our ski areas ended up where they are because, mostly, those are the best places nature gave us for skiing. Obviously it snows like hell in the Wasatch and the Tetons and the Sierra Nevadas. Anyone with a covered wagon could have told you that. But the Forest Service's map of its leased ski areas is dotted with strange little outposts popping out of what most of us assume to be The Flats:What to make of Brian Head, floating alone in southern Utah? Or Mt. Lemmon, rising over Tucson? Or Ski Apache and Cloudcroft, sunk near the bottom of New Mexico? Or the ski areas bunched and floating over Los Angeles? Or Antelope Butte, hanging out in the Wyoming Bighorns?Somewhere, in some government filing cabinet 34 floors deep in a Washington, D.C. bunker, are hand-annotated topo maps and notebooks left behind by the bureaucrat-explorers who determined that these map dots were the very best for snowsportskiing. And somewhere, buried where I'll probably never find it, is the story of Bluewood.It's one of our more improbable ski centers. Not because it shouldn't be there, but because most of us can't imagine how it could be. Most Washington and Oregon ski areas line up along the Cascades, stacked south to north along the states' western thirds. The snow smashes into these peaks and then stops. Anyone who's driven east over the passes has encountered the Big Brown Endless on the other side. It's surreal, how fast the high alpine falls away.But as Interstate 90 arcs northeast through this rolling country and toward Spokane, it routes most travelers away from the fecund Umatilla National Forest, one of those unexpected islands of peaks and green floating above our American deserts. Here, in this wilderness just to the west of Walla Walla but far from just about everything else, 300 inches of snow stack up in an average winter. And this is where you will find Bluewood.The Umatilla sprawls over two states and 1.4 million acres, and is home to three ski areas (Anthony Lakes and inactive Spouts Springs, both in Oregon, are the other two). Three map dots in the wilderness, random-looking from above, all the final product of years in the field, of hardy folks pushing ever-deeper into the woods to find The Spot. This is the story of one of them.What we talked aboutGrowing up Wenatchee; “the mountains are an addiction”; THE MACHINE at Mammoth; Back-In-The-Day Syndrome; Mammoth's outsized influence on Alterra Mountain Company; how the Ikon Pass strangely benefited Mammoth; the accidental GM; off the grid; Bluewood and southeast Washington's unique little weather pattern; “everybody that knows Bluewood comes for the trees”; why the Forest Service is selling a bunch of Bluewood's trees; massive expansion potential; when your snowline is 50 feet above your base area and you have no snowmaking; the winter with no snow; Skyline Basin and dreams that never happened; ambitious lift-upgrade plans; summer and “trying to eliminate the six-month revenue drought”; “if you take the North American lifts right now, they're only coming out because they're pieces of crap”; potential future chairlifts; Bluewood's owners and their long-term vision; mountaintop lodging potential; whether night skiing could ever happen; power by biomass; the Indy Pass; Southeast Washington ski culture; free buddy tickets with your season pass; Bluewood's season pass reciprocal program; why Bluewood's lift ticket prices are so low; and the absolute killer expense for small ski areas.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewOne of the more useful habits I've developed is attending offseason media events and consumer ski shows, where ski area managers and marketers tend to congregate. The regional gatherings, where mountain booths are stacked side by side like boxes in a cereal aisle, are particularly useful, allowing me to connect with reps from a dozen or more resorts in an hour. Such was the setup at the Snowvana “stoke event” in Portland, Oregon last November, which I attended both to host a panel of ski area general managers and to lay deeper roots in the rabid Pacific Northwest.Two podcasts emerged directly from connections I made that day: my February conversation with Red Mountain CEO Howard Katkov, and this one, with Korfiatis.So that's the easy answer: a lot of these podcasts happen simply because I was finally able to connect with whomever runs the mountain. But there's a certain amount of serendipity at work as well: Bluewood, right now, is on the move.This is a ski area that is slowly emerging from the obscurity I caged it into above. It has big-picture owners, an energetic general manager, a growing nearby population, and megapass membership. True, it also has no snowmaking and outdated, slow chairlifts. But the big, established ski centers to its west are overwhelmed, exhausted, and, with a few exceptions, probably un-expandable. Bluewood could be a big-deal alternative to this mess if they can do what Korfiatis says they want to do.There are a lot of millions standing between vision and reality here. But sometimes crazy s**t happens. And if it goes down at Bluewood, I want to make sure we're sitting right there watching it happen.What I got wrongI said that Mammoth was an independent mountain when Korfiatis arrived there in 2000. This is incorrect. Intrawest owned a majority stake in Mammoth from 1997 to 2006.Why you should ski BluewoodUsually, when casual skiers ask me where they ought to vacation, their wishlist includes someplace that's relatively easy to get to, where they can stay slopeside, where the snow will probably be good [whenever their kids' spring break is], and that is a member of [whatever version of the Epic or Ikon pass they purchased]. I give them a list of places that would not be a surprising list of places to anyone reading this newsletter, always with this qualifier: expect company.I like big destination ski areas. Obviously. I can navigate or navigate around the crowds. And I understand that 24-chairlifts-and-a-sushi-bar is exactly what your contemporary megapass patron is seeking. But if someone were to flip the question around and ask me which ski area characteristics were likely to give them the best ski experience, I'd have a very different answer for them.I'd tell them to seek out a place that's hard to get to, where you find a motel 40 miles away and drive up in the morning. Make it a weekday morning, as far from school breaks as possible. And the further you get from Epkon branding, the farther you'll be from anything resembling a liftline. That's the idea with Bluewood.“Yeah but it's only 1,100 vertical feet.”Yeah but trust me that's plenty when most of your runs are off-piste and you can ski all day without stopping except to ride the lift.“But no one's ever heard of it and they won't be impressed with my Instastory.”You'll live.“But it's not on my Ultimo-Plus Pass.”Lift tickets are like $50. Or $66 on weekends. And it's on the Indy Pass.“But it's such a long drive.”No it isn't. It's just a little bit farther than the busier places that you usually go to. But it's not exactly in Kazakhstan.“Now you're just making things up.”Often, but not that.Podcast NotesOn Bluewood's masterplanHere's the basic map:And the lift inventory wishlist:On Mission Ridge and WenatcheeKorfiatis grew up in Wenatchee, which sits below Mission Ridge. That mountain, coincidentally, is the subject of an already-recorded and soon-to-be-released podcast, but here's the trailmap for this surprisingly large mountain in case you're not familiar with it:On Mission Ridge's expansionAgain, I go deep on this with Mission CEO Josh Jorgensen on our upcoming pod, but here's a look at the ski area's big proposed expansion, which Korfiatis and I discuss a bit on the show:And here's an overhead view:On “The Legend of Dave McCoy”The Dave McCoy that Korfiatis refers to in the pod is the founder of Mammoth Mountain, who passed away in 2020 at the age of 104. Here's a primer/tribute video:Rusty Gregory, who ran Mammoth for decades, talked us through McCoy's legacy in a 2021 Storm Skiing Podcast appearance (18:08):On Kim Clark, Bluewood's last GMIn September 2021, Bluewood GM Kim Clark died suddenly on the mountain of a heart attack. From SAM:Longtime industry leader and Bluewood, Wash., general manager Kim Clark died of an apparent heart attack while working on the mountain Tuesday. He was 65. Clark had been the Bluewood GM since 2014.In a statement sharing the news of Clark's death, Bluewood said, “significant rescue efforts were unsuccessful. Kim passed away doing what he loved, with people he loved, on the mountain he loved.”Clark was an influential leader during his career in the mountain resort industry, much of which was spent at resorts in the Pacific Northwest. He is remembered by his peers as a mentor, a teacher, and a leader with a passion for the industry who cared deeply for the teams he led and the resorts he helped to improve.Prior to becoming GM at Bluewood, Clark led Mt. Ashland, Ore., as its general manager from 2005 to 2014.On the Tri-Cities of WashingtonImagine this: I'm 18 years old and some dude on the lift at Copper Mountain asks me where I'm from. I say “Michigan” and he says “where” and I say, “the Tri-Cities area” and he says “what on earth is that?” And I say “Oh you've never heard of the Tri-Cities?” as though he'd just told me he'd never heard of Paris. And he's like “no, have you ever heard of the Quad Cities?” Which apparently are four cities bunched along the Iowa-Illinois border around Interstate 80 and the Mississippi River.It was my first real-time lesson in hyper-regionalism and how oft-repeated information becomes so ingrained that we assume everyone must share it, like the moon or the wind. The Tri-Cities of Michigan are Bay City, Saginaw, and Midland. But no one who doesn't live there knows this or cares, and so after that chairlift conversation, I started saying that I was from “two hours north of Detroit,” which pretty much every American understands.Anyway imagine my surprise to learn that America had room for a second Tri-Cities, this one in Washington. I asked the robots to tell me about it and this is what they said:The Tri-Cities are three closely linked cities (Kennewick, Pasco, and Richland)[2][3] at the confluence of the Yakima, Snake, and Columbia Rivers in the Columbia Basin of Eastern Washington. The cities border one another, making the Tri-Cities seem like one uninterrupted mid-sized city. The three cities function as the center of the Tri-Cities metropolitan area, which consists of Benton and Franklin counties.[4] The Tri-Cities urban area consists of the city of West Richland, the census-designated places (CDP) of West Pasco, Washington and Finley, as well as the CDP of Burbank, despite the latter being located in Walla Walla County.The official 2016 estimate of the Tri-Cities MSA population is 283,869, a more than 12% increase from 2010. 2016 U.S. MSA estimates show the Tri-Cities population as over 300,000. The combined population of the three principal cities themselves was 220,959 at the 2020 census. As of April 1, 2021, the Washington State Office of Financial Management, Forecasting Division estimates the cities as having a combined population of 224,640.[5]And actually, it turns out that there are tri-cities all over the country. So what the hell do I know? When I moved east to New York in 2002, it took me about five years to figure out what the “Tri-State Area” was. For a long time I thought it must be New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. But it is New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, from which many people commute into NYC daily to work.On Scot Schmidt For those of you who don't know who “that guy” Scot Schmidt is:On the Greyhawk lift at Sun ValleyKorfiatis refers to the “Greyhawk lift” at Sun Valley as an example of a retiring high-speed quad that is unlikely to have a useful second life. He was referring to this lift, which from 1988 until last year ran parallel to the monster Challenger lift:Last summer, Sun Valley replaced both lifts with one Challenger six-pack with a mid-station, and built a new high-speed quad called Flying Squirrel (which replaced a shorter double chair of the same name that met death-by-fire in 2014):On the number of Washington ski areasWashington, while home to several legendary ski areas, does not have nearly as many as its growing, active population needs. Of the state's 17 active ski areas, five operate only surface lifts, and I'm not even certain whether one of them – Badger Mountain – operated this past ski season. Sitzmark also failed to spin its lift. There are really only nine volume-capable ski areas in the state: 49 Degrees North, Crystal, Mission Ridge, Baker, Mt. Spokane, Stevens Pass, Summit, Alpental, and White Pass. Here's an inventory:The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing all year long. Join us.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 32/100 in 2024, and number 532 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

Looking for strange attractions in Lagos & Yorubaland? Look no further.In this episode, we talk to local travel journalist and tour guide Pelu Awofeso.Pelu is a culture and travel writer and contributor to Lonely Planet and Medium. A winner at the CNN Multichoice African Journalist Awards in travel reporting, Pelu is also the author of several Nigeria travel books — his latest, One for the Road, is out now. He regularly guides tourists around Yorubaland and Nigeria.In this episode you'll find out…Where to pick up monkey heads, snakes and other ‘fetishes'Why you shouldn't ask a tour guide to go to Makoko floating villageHow an ancient Yoruba city was the place where the world began…and so much more.You'll find all Pelu's picks on the podcast website: www.strangeoldworld.comYou can read his travel articles about Nigeria on the Lonely Planet website.His books are available in various places. Head to Amazon to buy Nigerian Festivals, Route 234 and Tour of Duty. Visit Rovingheights Books to get White Lagos and 9 Degrees North. And nip across to Paystack for One for the RoadWant to book Pelu as your Lagos tour guide? He's on Facebook, X and Insta Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on Feb. 28. It dropped for free subscribers on March 6. To receive future pods as soon as they're live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription (on sale at 15% off through March 12, 2024). You can also subscribe to the free tier below:WhoHoward Katkov, Chairman and CEO of Red Mountain Resort, British ColumbiaRecorded onFeb. 8, 2024About Red MountainClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Red Mountain VenturesLocated in: Rossland, British Columbia, CanadaYear founded: 1947 (beginning of chairlift service)Pass affiliations:* Ikon Pass: 7 days, no blackouts* Ikon Base Pass and Ikon Base Pass Plus: 5 days, holiday blackouts* Lake Louise Pass (described below)Closest neighboring ski areas: Salmo (:58), Whitewater (1:22), Phoenix Mountain (1:33), 49 Degrees North (1:53)Base elevation: 3,887 feet/1,185 metersSummit elevation: 6,807 feet/2,075 metersVertical drop: 2,919 feet/890 metersSkiable Acres: 3,850Average annual snowfall: 300 inches/760 cmTrail count: 119 (17% beginner, 34% intermediate, 23% advanced, 26% expert)Lift count: 8 (2 fixed-grip quads, 3 triples, 1 double, 1 T-bar, 1 carpet)View historic Red Mountain trailmaps on skimap.org. Here are some cool video overviews:Granite Mountain:Red Mountain:Grey Mountain:Rossland:Why I interviewed himIt's never made sense to me, this psychological dividing line between Canada and America. I grew up in central Michigan, in a small town closer to Canada (the bridge between Sarnia and Port Huron stood 142 miles away), than the closest neighboring state (Toledo, Ohio, sat 175 miles south). Yet, I never crossed into Canada until I was 19, by which time I had visited roughly 40 U.S. states. Even then, the place felt more foreign than it should, with its aggressive border guards, pizza at McDonald's, and colored currency. Canada on a map looks easy, but Canada in reality is a bit harder, eh?Red sits just five miles, as the crow flies, north of the U.S. border. If by some fluke of history the mountain were part of Washington, it would be the state's greatest ski area, larger than Crystal and Stevens Pass combined. In fact, it would be the seventh-largest ski area in the country, larger than Mammoth or Snowmass, smaller only than Park City, Palisades, Big Sky, Vail, Heavenly, and Bachelor.But, somehow, the international border acts as a sort of invisibility shield, and skiing Red is a much different experience than visiting any of those giants, with their dense networks of high-speed lifts and destination crowds (well, less so at Bachelor). Sure, Red is an Ikon Pass mountain, and has been for years, but it is not synonymous with the pass, like Jackson or Aspen or Alta-Snowbird. But U.S. skiers – at least those outside of the Pacific Northwest – see Red listed on the Ikon menu and glaze past it like the soda machine at an open bar. It just doesn't seem relevant.Which is weird and probably won't last. And right now Shoosh Emoji Bro is losing his goddamn mind and cursing me for using my platform focused on lift-served snowskiing to hype one of the best and most interesting and most underrated lift-served snowskiing operations in North America. But that's why this whole deal exists, Brah. Because most people ski at the same 20 places and I really think skiing as an idea and as an experience and as a sustainable enterprise will be much better off if we start spreading people out a bit more.What we talked aboutRed pow days; why Red amped up shuttle service between the ski area and Rossland and made it free; old-school Tahoe; “it is the most interesting mountain I've ever skied”; buying a ski area when you've never worked at a ski area; why the real-estate crash didn't bury Red like some other ski areas; why Katkov backed away from a golf course that he spent a year and a half planning at Red; why the 900 lockers at the dead center of the base area aren't going anywhere; housing and cost of living in Rossland; “we look at our neighborhood as an extension of our community of Rossland”; base area development plans; balancing parking with people; why and how Red Mountain still sells affordable ski-in, ski-out real estate; “our ethos is to be accessible for everybody”; whether we could ever see a lift from Rossland to Red; why Red conducted a crowd-funding ownership campaign and what they did with the money; Red's newest ownership partners; the importance of independence; “the reality is that the pass, whether it's the Epic or the Ikon Pass, has radically changed the way that consumers experience skiing”; why Red joined the Ikon Pass and why it's been good for the mountain; the Mountain Collective; why Red has no high-speed lifts and whether we could ever see one; no stress on a powder day; Red's next logical lift upgrades; potential lift-served expansions onto Kirkup, White Wolf, and Mt. Roberts; and the Powder Highway.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewMy full-scale assault of Canada, planned for 2023, has turned into more of an old-person's bus tour. I'm stopping at all the big sites, but I sure am taking my time, and I'm not certain that I'm really getting the full experience.Part of this echoes the realization centuries' of armies have had when invading Russia: damn this place is big. I'd hoped to quickly fold the whole country into the newsletter, as I'd been able to do with the Midwest and West when I expanded The Storm's coverage out of the Northeast in 2021. But I'd grown up in the Midwest and been skiing the West annually for decades. I'd underestimated how much that had mattered. I'd skied a bit in Canada, but not consistently enough to kick the door down in the manner I'd hoped. I started counting ski areas in Quebec and stopped when I got to 4,000*, 95 percent of which were named “Mont [some French word with numerous squiggly marks above the letters].” The measurements are different. The money is different. The language, in Quebec, is different. I needed to slow down.So I'm starting with western Canada. Well, I started there last year, when I hosted the leaders of SkiBig3 and Sun Peaks on the podcast. This is the easiest Canadian region for a U.S. American to grasp: Epic, Ikon, Mountain Collective, and Indy Pass penetration is deep, especially in British Columbia. Powdr, Boyne, Vail, and Pacific Group Resorts all own ski areas in the province. There is no language barrier.So, Red today, Panorama next month, Whistler in June. That's the way the podcast calendar sets up now, anyway. I'll move east as I'm able.But Red, in particular, has always fascinated me. If you're wondering what the largest ski area in North America is that has yet to install a high-speed lift, this is your answer. For many of you, that may be a deal-breaker. But I see a time-machine, an opportunity to experience a different sort of skiing, but with modern gear. Like if aliens were to land on today's Earth with their teleportation devices and language-translation brain chips and standard-issue post-industro-materialist silver onesies. Like wow look how much easier the past is when you bring the future with you.Someday, Red will probably build a high-speed lift or two or four, and enough skiers who are burned out on I-70 and LCC but refuse to give up their Ikon Passes will look north and say, “oh my, what's this all about?” And Red will become some version of Jackson Hole or Big Sky or Whistler, beefy but also busy, remote but also accessible. But I wanted to capture Red, as it is today, before it goes away.*Just kidding, there are actually 12,000.^^OK, OK, there are like 90. Or 90,000.Why you should ski Red MountainLet's say you've had an Ikon Pass for the past five or six ski seasons. You've run through the Colorado circuit, navigated the Utah canyons, circled Lake Tahoe. The mountains are big, but so are the crowds. The Ikon Pass, for a moment, was a cool little hack, like having an iPhone in 2008. But then everyone got them, and now the world seems terrible because of it.But let's examine ye ‘ole Ikon partner chart more closely, to see what else may be on offer:What's this whole “Canada” section about? Perhaps, during the pandemic, you resigned yourself to U.S. American travel. Perhaps you don't have a passport. Perhaps converting centimeters to inches ignites a cocktail of panic and confusion in your brain. But all of these are solvable dilemmas. Take a deeper look at Canada.In particular, take a deeper look at Red. Those stats are in American. Meaning this is a ski area bigger than Mammoth, taller than Palisades, snowy as Aspen. And it's just one stop on a stacked Ikon BC roster that also includes Sun Peaks (Canada's second-largest ski area), Revelstoke (the nation's tallest by vertical drop), and Panorama.We are not so many years removed from the age of slow-lift, empty American icons. Alta's first high-speed lift didn't arrive until 1999 (they now have four). Big Sky's tin-can tram showed up in 1995. A 1994 Skiing magazine article described the then-Squaw Valley side of what is now Palisades Tahoe as a pokey and remote fantasyland:…bottomless steeps, vast acreage, 33 lifts and no waiting. America's answer to the wide-open ski circuses of Europe. After all these years the mountain is still uncrowded, except on weekends when people pile in from the San Francisco Bay area in droves. Squaw is unflashy, underbuilt, and seems entirely indifferent to success. The opposite of what you would expect one of America's premier resorts to be.Well that's cute. And it's all gone now. America still holds its secrets, vast, affordable fixed-grip ski areas such as Lost Trail and Discovery and Silver Mountain. But none of them have joined the Ikon Pass, and none gives you the scale of Red, this glorious backwater with fixed-grip lifts that rise 2,400 vertical feet to untracked terrain. Maybe it will stay like this forever, but it probably won't. So go there now.Podcast NotesOn Red's masterplanRed's masterplan outlines potential lift-served expansions onto Kirkup, White Wolf, and Mount Roberts. We discuss the feasibility of each. Here's what the mountain could look like at full build-out:On Jane CosmeticsAn important part of Katkov's backstory is his role as founder of Jane cosmetics, a ‘90s bargain brand popular with teenagers. He built the company into a smash success and sold it to Estée Lauder, who promptly tanked it. Per Can't Hardly Dress:Lauder purchased the company in 1997. Jane was a big deal for Lauder because it was the company's first mass market drugstore brand. Up until that point, Lauder only owned prestige brands like MAC, Clinique, Jo Malone and more. Jane was a revolutionary move for the company and a quick way to enter the drugstore mass market.Lauder had no clue what do with Jane and sales plummeted from $50 million to $25 million by 2004. Several successive sales and relaunches also failed, and, according to the article above, “As it stands today, the brand is dunzo. Leaving behind a default Shopify site, an Instagram unupdated for 213 weeks and a Facebook last touched three years ago.”On Win Smith and SugarbushKatkov's story shares parallels with that of Win Smith, the Wall-Streeter-turned-resort-operator who nurtured Sugarbush between its days as part of the American Skiing Company shipwreck and its 2019 purchase by Alterra. Smith joined me on the podcast four years ago, post-Alterra sale, to share the whole story.On housing in Banff and Sun PeaksCanadian mountain towns are not, in general, backed up against the same cliff as their American counterparts. This is mostly the result of more deliberate regional planning policies that either regulate who's allowed to live where, or allow for smart growth over time (meaning they can build things without 500 lawsuits). I discussed the former model with SkiBig3 (Banff) President Pete Woods here, and the latter with Sun Peaks GM Darcy Alexander here. U.S. Americans could learn a lot from looking north.On not being able to buy slopeside real estate in Oregon, Washington, or California The Pacific Northwest is an extremely weird ski region. The resorts are big and snowy, but unless you live there, you've probably never visited any of them. As I wrote a few weeks back:Last week, Peak Rankings analyzed the matrix of factors that prevent Oregon and Washington ski areas, despite their impressive acreage and snowfall stats, from becoming destination resorts. While the article suggests the mountains' proximity to cities, lousy weather, and difficult access roads as blockers, just about every prominent ski area in America fights some combination of these circumstances. The article's most compelling argument is that, with few exceptions, there's really nowhere to stay on most of the mountains. I've written about this a number of times myself, with this important addendum: There's nowhere to stay on most of the mountains, and no possibility of building anything anytime soon.The reasons for this are many and varied, but can be summarized in this way: U.S. Americans, in thrall to an environmental vision that prizes pure wilderness over development of any kind, have rejected the notion that building dense, human-scaled, walkable mountainside communities would benefit the environment far more than making everyone drive to skiing every single day. Nowhere has this posture taken hold more thoroughly than in the Pacific Northwest.Snowy and expansive British Columbia, perhaps sensing a business opportunity, has done the opposite, streamlining ski resort development through a set of policies known as the B.C. Commercial Alpine Ski Policy. As a result, ski areas in the province have rapidly expanded over the past 30 years…California is a very different market, with plenty of legacy slopeside development. It tends to be expensive, however, as building anything new requires a United Nations treaty, an act of Jesus, and a total eclipse of the sun in late summer of a Leap Year. Perhaps 2024 will be it.On “Fight The Man, Own the Mountain”Red ran a crowd-funding campaign a few years back called “Fight the Man, Own the Mountain.” We discuss this on the pod, but here is a bit more context from a letter Katkov wrote on the subject:Investing in RED means investing in history, independence, and in this growing family that shares the same importance on lifestyle and culture. RED is the oldest ski resort in Western Canada and it has always been fiercely independent. There are not many, if any ski resorts left in North America like Red and the success of our campaign demonstrates a desire by so many of you to, help, in a small way, to protect the lifestyle, soul and ski culture that emanates from Red.RED is a place I've been beyond proud to co-own and captain since 2004 and the door is still open to share that feeling and be a part of our family. But please note that despite the friendly atmosphere, this is one of the Top 20 resorts in North America in terms of terrain. The snow's unreal and the people around here are some of the coolest, most down-to-earth folks you're ever likely to meet. (Trying to keep up with them on the hill is another thing entirely…)With $2 million so far already committed and invested, we wasted no time acting on promised improvements. These upgrades included a full remodel of fan favorite Paradise Lodge (incl. flush toilets!) as well as the expansion of RED's retail and High Performance centres. This summer we'll see the construction of overnight on-mountain cabins and the investor clubhouse (friends welcome!) as well as continued parking expansion. We've heard from a number of early investors that they were beyond stoked to enjoy the new Paradise Lodge so soon after clicking the BUY button. Hey, ownership has its privileges…On the Lake Louise PassKatkov mentions the “Lake Louise Pass,” which Red participates in, along with Castle Mountain and Panorama. He's referring to the Lake Louise Plus Card, which costs $134 Canadian up front. Skiers then get their first, fourth, and seventh days free, and 20 percent off lift tickets for each additional visit. While these sorts of discount cards have been diminished by Epkon domination, versions of them still provide good value across the continent. The Colorado Gems Card, Smugglers' Notch's Bash Badge, and ORDA's frequent skier cards are all solid options for skiers looking to dodge the megapass circus.On the Powder HighwayRed is the closest stop on the Powder Highway to U.S. America. This is what the Powder Highway is:And here's the circuit:Fairmont is just a little guy, but Kicking Horse, Kimberley, and Fernie are Epic Pass partners owned by Resorts of the Canadian Rockies, and Revy, Red, and Panorama are all on Ikon. Whitewater used to be on M.A.X. Pass, but is now pass-less. Just to the west of this resort cluster sits Big White (Indy), Silver Star (Ikon), and Sun Peaks (Ikon). To their east is Sunshine, Lake Louise, Norquay (all Ikon), and Castle (Indy). There are also Cat and heli-ski operations all over the place. You could lose a winter here pretty easily.On Katkov's business backgroundIn this episode of the Fident Capital Podcast, Katkov goes in-depth on his business philosophy and management style. Here's another:On bringing the city to the mountainsWhile this notion, rashly interpreted, could summon ghastly visions of Aspen-esque infestations of Fendi stores in downtown Rossland, it really just means building things other than slopeside mansions with 19 kitchens and a butler's wing. From a 2023 resort press release:Red Development Company, the real estate division of RED Mountain Resort (RED), in conjunction with ACE Project Marketing Group (ACE), recently reported the sell-out of the resort's latest real estate offering during the season opening of the slopes. On offer was The Crescent at RED, a collection of 102 homes, ranging from studio to one bedrooms and lofts featuring a prime ski in – ski out location. Howard Katkov, CEO of RED, and Don Thompson, RED President, first conceived of bringing the smaller urban living model to the alpine slopes in January 2021. ACE coined the concept as "everything you need and nothing you don't" …An important component was ensuring that the price point for The Crescent was accessible to locals and those who know and love the destination. With prices starting mid $300s – an excellent price when converted to USD – and with an achievable 5% deposit down, The Crescent at RED was easily one of the best value propositions in real estate for one of the best ranked ski resorts in North America. Not surprisingly, over 50% of the Crescent buyers were from the United States, spurred on by the extraordinary lifestyle and value offered by The Crescent, but also the new sparsity of Canadian property available to foreign buyers.As a good U.S. American, I ask Katkov why he didn't simply price these units for the one-percenters, and how he managed the House-Flipping Henries who would surely interpret these prices as opportunity. His answers might surprise you, and may give you hope that a different sort of ski town is possible.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 15/100 in 2024, and number 515 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

In this inspiring episode, Sara Davison welcomes James and Claire Davis, the dynamic duo behind the successful coaching and fitness company, 38 Degrees North, and hosts of the popular midlife wellness podcast, The Midlife Mentors. This episode delves into their journey through midlife challenges, including relationships, identity, and fitness.  James and Claire share their personal experiences with divorce and the complexities of finding love and happiness in midlife.  Listeners will discover valuable insights on overcoming midlife obstacles, from tackling body image issues to embracing a positive mindset. The couple candidly discusses their path to rebuilding self-esteem and fostering a healthy relationship with food, exercise, and self-love.Find more information and resources here: http://saradavison.com/Follow me on social media►Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/saradavisondivorcecoach/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SaraDavisonDivorceCoachTwitter: https://twitter.com/SDDivorceCoachLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sara-davison-742b453/

To celebrate this special occasion, we're taking a trip down memory lane and bringing you the absolute best bits from our most impactful and insightful episodes. Tune in as we delve into various topics including the emotional journey, co-parenting and children, and finances on divorce. We'll touch on finding your inner strength, co-parenting with grace, rebuilding your life, and embracing personal growth. Our guests will share their expertise, stories, and advice, creating a space for understanding and support.About the guests (In order of appearance):Jessica Fostekew: comedian, actor and writerIn 2019, Jess was nominated for The Dave Edinburgh Comedy Award ‘Best Show' for her show Wench. She's the co-writer and co-star of the forthcoming Sky special 'Real Friends' and her series 'Sturdy Girl Club' is now on BBC Sounds. Ed Bassett: well-being entrepreneur, Dad, and rugby fanFather of two, Ed is involved in several not-for-profit companies, an Ambassador for Staffordshire, a start-up mentor and a passionate believer in finding your voice and speaking your truth.The Midlife Mentors, Claire and James DavisClaire and James Davis are the husband-and-wife team behind the multi-award-winning well-being company 38 Degrees North and the thriving midlife coaching business, The Midlife Mentors. Dr Angharad Rudkin: clinical psychologist Dr Angharad Rudkin a clinical psychologist with over 20 years experience of working with children and families to discuss divorce from the perspective of children.  Marcie Shaoul: Director of The Co-Parent WayMarcie is the Director of The Co-Parent Way, the UK's only Co-Parent Coaching Practice. She is responsible for developing a unique coaching methodology that enables parents to co-parent together effectively after separation.Christina McGhee: internationally recognised divorce parenting expertWith over 25 years of experience, Christina has been featured across television, radio and podcasts including The Times, Channel 4 and the BBC.Louise Oliver: financial plannerLouise has worked in the financial services sector for over 30 years and is a Certified Financial Planner and a Chartered Wealth Manager.Daniel Copley: consumer expert at ZooplaDan is an editor with over 10 years of experience in the property, lifestyle and fashion sectors.Shreepali Chauhan-Tufail: Divorce Specialist at amicableShreepali is a former Solicitor with over 20 years of experience in Dispute Resolution, Family and Commercial law. Joshua Rozenberg: the UK's most experienced legal commentatorJoshua Rozenberg KC (hon) is Britain's most experienced full-time legal commentator. He is the only journalist to have been appointed as Queen's Counsel honoris causa. David Hodson: solicitor, mediator, arbitratorProf David Hodson OBE KC(Hons) MCIArb is a co-founder partner of The International Family Law Group, which works with international families and their children.

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This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on Nov. 6. It dropped for free subscribers on Nov. 13. To receive future pods as soon as they're live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:WhoTom Chasse, President and CEO of Schweitzer Mountain, IdahoRecorded onOctober 23, 2023About SchweitzerClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Alterra Mountain CompanyLocated in: Sandpoint, IdahoYear founded: 1963Pass affiliations:* Ikon Pass: unlimited* Ikon Base Pass, Ikon Base Plus Pass: 5 days with holiday blackoutsClosest neighboring ski areas: 49 Degrees North (1:30), Silver Mountain (1:42), Mt. Spokane (2:00), Lookout Pass (2:06), Turner Mountain (2:17) – travel times vary considerably depending upon weather, time of day, and time of yearBase elevation: 3,960 feet (at Outback Inn)Summit elevation: 6,389 feetVertical drop: 2,429 feetSkiable Acres: 2,900Average annual snowfall: 300 inchesTrail count: 92 (10% Beginner, 40% Intermediate, 35% Advanced, 15% Expert)Lift count: 10 (1 six-pack, 4 high-speed quads, 2 triples, 1 double, 1 T-bar, 1 carpet)View historic Schweitzer trailmaps on skimap.org.Why I interviewed himChasse first appeared on the podcast in January 2021, for what would turn out to be the penultimate episode in the Covid-19 & Skiing miniseries. Our focus was singular: to explore the stress and irritation shoved onto resort employees charged with mask-police duty. As I wrote at the time:One of the biggest risks to the reconstituted-for-Covid ski season was always going to be that large numbers of knuckleheads would treat mask requirements as the first shots fired in Civil War II. Schweitzer, an enormous ski Narnia poking off the tip of the Idaho panhandle, became the most visible instance of this phenomenon when General Manager Tom Chasse chopped three days of twilight skiing after cantankerous Freedom Bros continually threw down with exhausted staff over requests to mask up. While violations of mask mandates haven't ignited widespread resort shutdowns and the vast majority of skiers seem resigned to them, Schweitzer's stand nonetheless distills the precarious nature of lift-served skiing amidst a still-raging pandemic. Skiers, if they grow careless and defiant, can shut down mountains. And so can the ski areas themselves, if they feel they can't safely manage the crowds descending upon them in this winter of there's-nothing-else-to-do. While it's unfortunate that a toxic jumble of misinformation, conspiracy theories, political chest-thumping, and ignorance has so thoroughly infected our population that even something as innocuous as riding a chairlift has become a culture war flashpoint, it has. And it's worth investigating the full story at Schweitzer to gauge how big the problem is and how to manage it in a way that allows us to all keep skiing.We did talk about the mountain for a few minutes at the end, but I'd always meant to get back to Idaho's largest ski area. In 2022, I hosted the leaders of Tamarack, Bogus Basin, Brundage, and Sun Valley on the podcast. Now, I'm finally back at the top of the panhandle, to go deep on the future of Alterra Mountain Company's newest lift-served toy.What we talked aboutThe new Creekside Express lift; a huge new parking lot incoming for the 2024-25 ski season; the evolution of the 2018 masterplan; why and how Schweitzer sold to Alterra; the advantages of joining a conglomerate versus remaining independent; whether Schweitzer could ever evolve into a destination resort; reflecting on the McCaw family legacy as Alterra takes control; thoughts on the demise-and-revival of Black Mountain, New Hampshire; the biggest difference between running a ski resort in New England versus the West; the slow, complete transformation of Schweitzer over the past two decades; the rationale behind the Outback Bowl lift upgrades; why Schweitzer's upper-mountain lifts are mostly fixed-grip machines; whether Alterra will continue with Schweitzer's 2018 masterplan or rethink it; potential for an additional future Outback Bowl lift, as outlined in the masterplan; contemplating future frontside lifts and terrain expansion; thoughts on a future Sunnyside lift replacement; how easy it would be to expand Schweitzer; the state of the ski area's snowmaking system; Schweitzer's creeping snowline; sustained and creative investment in employee housing; Ikon Pass access; locals' reaction to the mountain going unlimited on the full Ikon; whether Schweitzer could convert to the unlimited-with-blackouts tier on Ikon Base; dynamic pricing; whether the Musical Carpet will continue to be free; discount night-skiing; and whether Schweitzer's reciprocal season pass partners will remain after the 2023-24 ski season.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewUntil June, Schweitzer was the third-largest independent ski area in America, and just barely, trailing the 3,000 lift-served acres at Whitefish and Powder Mountain by just 100 acres. It's larger than Alta (2,614 acres), Grand Targhee (2,602), or Jackson Hole (2,500). That made this ever-improving resort lodged at the top of America the largest independent U.S. ski area on the Ikon Pass.Well, that's all finished. Once Alterra dropped Idaho's second-largest ski area into its shopping cart in June, Schweitzer became another name on the Denver-based company's attendance sheet, their fifth-largest resort after Palisades Tahoe (6,000 acres), Mammoth (3,500), Steamboat (3,500), and Winter Park (3,081).But what matters more than how the mountain stacks up on the stat sheet is how Alterra will facilitate Schweitzer's rapidly unfolding 2018 masterplan, which calls for a clutch of new lifts and a terrain expansion rising out of a Delaware-sized parking lot below the current base area. Schweitzer has so far moved quickly on the plan, dropping two brand-new lifts into Outback Bowl to replace an old centerpole double and activating a new high-speed quad called Creekside to replace the Musical Chairs double this past summer. Additional improvements include an upgrade to the Sunnyside lift and yet another lift in Outback. Is Alterra committed to all this?The company's rapid and comprehensive renovations or planned upgrades of Palisades Tahoe, Steamboat, and Deer Valley suggest that they will be. Alterra is not in the business of creating great day-ski areas. They are building destination ski resorts. Schweitzer, always improving but never quite gelling as a national bucket-lister, may have the captain it needs to finally get there.What I got wrongI asked Chasse if there was an “opportunity for a Snowcat operation.” There already is one: Selkirk Powder runs day-long tours in Schweitzer's “west-northwest-facing bowls adjacent to the resort.”Why you should ski SchweitzerAllow me to play the Ida-homer for a moment. All we ever hear about is traffic in Colorado. Traffic in the canyons. Traffic in Tahoe. Traffic at Mount Hood and all around Washington. Sometimes, idling amid stopped traffic in your eight-wheel-drive Chuckwagon Supreme Ultimate Asskicker Pickup Truck can seem as much a part of western skiing as pow and open bowls.But when was the last time you heard someone gripe about ski traffic in Idaho? Probably never. Which is weird, because look at this:Ten ski areas with a thousand-plus acres of terrain; 12 with vertical drops topping 1,000 feet; seven that average 300 inches or more of snow per season. That's pretty, um, Epic (except that Vail has no mountains and no partners in this ripper of a ski state).So what's going on? Over the weekend, I hosted a panel of ski area general managers at the Snowvana festival in Portland, Oregon. Among the participants were Tamarack President Scott Turlington and Silver Mountain GM Jeff Colburn. Both told me some version of, “we never have lift lines.” Look again at those stats. What the hell?Go to Idaho, is my point here, if you need a break from the madness. The state, along with neighboring Montana, may be the last refuge of big vert and big snow without big crowds in our current version of U.S. America.Schweitzer, as it happens, is the largest ski area in the state. It also happens to be one of the most modern, along with Tamarack, which is not yet 20 years old, and Sun Valley, with its fleet of high-speed lifts. Schweitzer sports what was long the state's only six-pack (until Sun Valley upgraded Challenger this year), along with four high-speed quads. Of the remaining lifts, all are less than 20 years old with the exception of Sunnyside, a 1960s relic that is among the last artifacts of Old Schweitzer.Chasse tells us on the podcast that the ski area could add hundreds of acres of terrain simply by moving a boundary rope. So why not do it? Because the mountain, as it stands, absorbs everyone who shows up to ski it pretty well.A lot of the appeal of Idaho lies in the rough-and-tumble, in the dented-can feel of big, remote mountains towering forgotten in the hinterlands, centerpole doubles swinging empty up the incline. But that's changing, slowly, ski area by ski area. Schweitzer is way ahead of most on the upgrade progression, infrastructure built more like a Wasatch resort than that of its neighbors in Idaho and Washington. But the crowds – or relative lack of them – is still pure Idaho.Podcast NotesOn Schweitzer's masterplan Even though Schweitzer sits entirely on private land, the ski area published a masterplan similar to those of its Forest Service peers in 2018, outlining new lifts and terrain all over the mountain:Though that plan has changed somewhat (Creekside, for instance, was not included), Schweitzer has continued to make progress against it. Alterra, it seems, will keep pushing it down the assembly line.On the Alterra acquisitionIn July, I hosted Alterra CEO Jared Smith on the podcast. We discuss the Schweitzer acquisition at the 53:48 mark:On Alterra's megaresort ambitionsWithout explicitly saying so, Alterra has undertaken an aggressive cross-portfolio supercharging of several marquee properties. Last year, the company sewed together the Palisades and Alpine Meadows sides of its giant California resort with a 2.1-mile-long gondola:This year, Steamboat will open the second leg of its 3.1-mile-long, 10-passenger Wild Blue gondola and a several-hundred-acre terrain expansion (and attendant high-speed quad), on Mahogany Ridge:Earlier this year, Alterra announced a massive expansion that will make Deer Valley the fourth-largest ski area in America:Winter Park's 2022 masterplan update included several proposed terrain pods and a gondola linking mountain to town:If my email inbox is any indication, New England Alterra skiers – meaning loyalists at Stratton and Sugarbush – are getting inpatient. When will the Colorado-based company turn its cash cannon east? I don't know, but it will happen.On Mt. WittierChasse learned how to ski at Mt. Wittier, New Hampshire. I included a whole bit on this place in a recent newsletter:As far as ski area relics go, it's hard to find a more captivating artifact than the Mt. Whittier gondola. While the New Hampshire ski area has sat abandoned since the mid-1980s, towers for the four-passenger gondola still rise 1,300-vertical feet up the mountainside. Tower one stands, improbably, across New Hampshire State Highway 16, rising from a McDonald's parking lot. The still-intact haul rope stretches across this paved expanse and terminates at a garage-style door behind the property. Check it out:Jeremy Davis, founder of the New England Lost Ski Areas Project, told me an amazing story when he appeared on The Storm Skiing Podcast in 2019. A childhood glimpse of the abandoned Mt. Whittier ignited his mad pursuit to document the region's lost ski areas. Years later, he returned for a closer look. He visited the shop that now occupies the former gondola base building, and the owner offered to let him peek in the garage. There, dusty but intact, sat many, or perhaps all, of the lift's 35 four-passenger gondola cars. It's still one of my favorite episodes:A bizarre snowtubing outfit called “Mt. Madness” briefly operated around the turn of the century, according to New England Ski History. But other than the gondola, traces of the ski area have mostly disappeared. The forest cover is so thick that the original trail network is just scarcely visible on Google Maps.The entire 797-acre property is now for sale, listed at $3.2 million. The gondola barn, it appears, is excluded, as is the money-making cell tower at the summit. But there might be enough here to hack the ski area back out of the wilderness:Which would, of course, cost you a lot more than $3.2 million. Whittier has a decent location, west of King Pine and south of Conway. But it's on the wrong side of New Hampshire for easy interstate access, and we're on the wrong side of history for realistically building a ski area in New England. On the seasonal disruption of hunting in rural areasChasse points to hunting season as an unexpected operational disruption when he moved from New England to Idaho. If you've never lived in a rural area, it can be hard to appreciate how ingrained hunting is into local cultures. Where I grew up, in a small Michigan town, Nov. 15 – or “Deer Day,” as the first day of the state's two-week rifle-hunting season was colloquially known – was an official school holiday. Morning announcements would warn high-schoolers to watch out for sugar beets – popular deer bait – on M-30. It's a whole thing.On 2006 SchweitzerIt's hard to overstate just how much Schweitzer has evolved since the turn of the century. Until the Stella sixer arrived in 2000, the mountain was mostly a kingdom of pokey old double chairs, save for the Great Escape high-speed quad, which had arrived in 1990:The only lift from that trailmap that remains is Sunnyside, then known as Chair 4. The Stella sixer replaced Chair 5 in 2000; Chair 1 gave way to the Basin Express and Lakeview triple in 2007; Chair 6 (Snow Ghost), came down for the Cedar Park Express quad and Colburn triple in 2019; and Creekside replaced Chair 2 (Musical Chairs), this past summer. In 2005, Schweitzer opened up an additional peak to lift service with the Idyle Our T-bar.While lifts are (usually) a useful proxy for measuring a resort's modernization progress, they barely begin to really quantify the extreme changes at Schweitzer over the past few decades. Note, too, the parking lots that once lined the mountain at the Chair 2 summit – land that's since been repurposed for a village.On Schweitzer's proximity to Powder Highway/BC mountainsMany reference materials stop listing ski areas at the top of America, as though that is the northern border of our ski world. But stop ignoring that big chunk of real estate known as “Canada,” and Schweitzer suddenly sits in a far more interesting neighborhood. The ski area could be considered the southern-most stop on the Powder Highway, just down the road from Red and Whitewater, not far from Kimberley and Fernie, skiable on the same circuit as Revelstoke, Sun Peaks, Silver Star, Big White, Panorama, and Castle. It's a compelling roadtrip:Yes, there area lot more ski areas in there, but these are most of the huge ones. And no, I don't know if all of these roads are open in the winter – the point here is to show the overall density, not program your GPS.On Alterra's varying approach to its owned mountains on the Ikon PassAlterra, unlike Vail, does not treat all of its mountains equally on the top-tier Ikon Pass. Here's how the company's owned mountains sit on the various Ikon tiers:On cheap I-90 lift ticketsI've written about this a bunch of times, but the stretch of I-90 from Spokane to the Idaho-Montana border offers some of the most affordable big-mountain lift tickets in the country. Here's a look at 2022-23 walk-up lift ticket prices for the five mountains stretched across the region:Next season's rates aren't live yet, but I expect them to be similar.On Alterra lift ticket pricesI don't expect Schweitzer's lift tickets to stay proportionate to the rest of the region for long. Here are Alterra's top anticipated 2023-24 walk-up lift ticket rates at its owned resorts:On Bogus Basin's reciprocal lift ticket programI mentioned Bogus Basin's extensive reciprocal lift ticket program. It's pretty badass, as the ski area is a member of both the Freedom Pass and Powder Alliance, and has set up a bunch of independent reciprocals besides:The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 97/100 in 2023, and number 483 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane, or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email skiing@substack.com. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

In today's episode, Anna is with Claire Davis. Claire and James Davis are a mid-life, award-winning duo and owners of the world-renowned fitness brand 38 Degrees North. And also they created the phenomenal, successful, five-star rated The Midlife Mentors podcast.   The Midlife Method has been developed over 12 years, backed by years of research, experience, and client transformations that have a profound and lasting impact on the lives it's touched. Claire and James continue to be a force of truth and integrity in the health and wellness industry, demystifying the fads, fake promises, and pseudoscience that plague our newsfeed.    They also talked about: 05:34 Who are the Midlife Mentors? 11:24 Gender differences in health checkups  21:30 Understanding life through looking backwards  26:52 Making connections and moving therapy 33:14 How Claire can help you 42:08 What does freedom mean to Claire?   Quotes:  “That faux positivity can actually be quite damaging. I think we're in a world now where we see everyone's highlight reels and everyone looking like they've got everything made up, like they're just sailing through life without any issues. And I think it's really, really important for us to have that toolkit because life just is not like that.” -Claire   “I think because I know that if someone is being angry it's coming from some insecurity and I just know that it's usually because they've been treated or not been heard” -Anna   “If you're stuck in the weeds and the mud right now, that's the first thing I would say is get a routine, start having a bit more routine so you feel like you've got a bit of control over your life.” -Claire   “If we're still stuck in a body that is deeply unhealthy, and deeply unwell, and we're not nourishing it properly, we're not moving it properly, nothing else is going to stick. It just won't, because there is such a link between our body and our mind and our soul.” -Claire   “You cannot outperform your own self-identity. Well, however, you think about yourself and the beliefs you have about yourself, that's what you're going to get.” -Claire    Check out Claire Davis' social media account and website:   The Midlife Mentors  The Midlife Mentors Community | Facebook 

Claire and James Davis, aka The Midlife Mentors, are on a mission to get midlifers - and beyond! moving and feeling fitter than ever. Their integrated, science-based approach and compassionate understanding of hormones and life changes makes for a thought provoking, informative episode - with plenty of laughter thrown in!Enjoy - and hit subscribe to be the first to know about new episodes!In this episode, we talk about: 0.54 The joys and trials of working and living together5.57 Is it ever too late to start exercising?9.09 Jo's personal struggles with mobility and fitness12.04 The pain trap 14.45 Mindset around aging16.40 Andropause19.15 Addressing lifestyle factors19.34 Mindset factors20.34 Libido21.04 Midlife Mental health 22.43 Feeling invisible24.32 Loneliness25.35 Communication26.37 Divorce30.05 Stress35.28 Small steps37.08 Reducing cortisol40.08 An integrated approach to midlife health and happiness You can check out The Midlife Mentors at: https://themidlifementors.com/jo See below for more information about James and Claire.About this Podcast. Like all transitions, midlife can be messy and sad and glorious all at once, leaving many midlife women feeling rather alone and somewhat invisible. But what does this transition we are experiencing lead to? I'm here to remind you that if we manage our health and embrace it, growing older can lead to one of the greatest periods of growth and transformation of our lives. I'm Jo Blackwell, a photographer, author and coach for women who want more from their lives post 50. This podcast is part of my business, The Midlife Movement, on a mission to make the midlife transition easier through coaching, information and community. My aim is to help women step into a starring role in their own lives - whatever that means to you. The Midlife Movement was created to change minds about midlife and growing older, one story at a time. Because we only become invisible when when we stop seeing ourselves. email jo@joblackwell.co.uk to take part in the podcast or suggest guests. See The Midlife & Beyond section of my website for more information and resources to help you navigate change with less stress and more joy! www.joblackwell.co.uk More about James and Claire:Claire and James Davis are the husband and wife team behind the multi-award winning wellbeing company 38 Degrees North and thriving midlife coaching business, The Midlife Mentors.The couple have a successful midlife health podcast; The Midlife Mentors (top 1.5% globally) and their passion is helping midlifers achieve the body, mind and lifestyle they deserve, without giving up what they love or making huge sacrifices.The couple's science based approach, leveraging their backgrounds and qualifications in psychology, coaching, hormones, nutrition, personal training, stress management, menopause and NLP, empowers individuals with the practical tools and knowledge they need to make positive, long lasting changes to their lives. Claire & James are incredibly passionate about offering an anti-fad approach to the health and wellness narrative. You'll find no fancy diets or pseudo science - just authentic, balanced information based on years of professional and personal experience. They also work with corporates providing coaching and wellness programmes for individuals and teams, and are regular media commentators. They have also been featured in The New York Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Times, The Observer, The Times, The Daily Mail, Conde Nast Traveller, The Evening Standard and more. https://themidlifementors.com/jo tiktok.com/@themidlifementors instagram.com/midlifementors facebook.com/@themidlifementors

Claire and James Davis are the husband and wife team behind the multi-award winning coaching and fitness company 38 Degrees North and coaching company The Midlife Mentors. They host a midlife health podcast The Midlife Mentors, and their passion is helping midlifers achieve not only the body, but the lifestyle they deserve. Their backgrounds in psychology, coaching, hormones, nutrition and NLP, empowers individuals with the tools and knowledge they need to make positive changes to their lives. They're also regular media commentators and have been featured in The New York Times, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Observer, The Mail, National Geographic Traveller, Conde Nast Traveller, and more. In this episode of Last First Date Radio: How James and Claire met and fell in love in midlife How to reclaim your midlife mojo How to balance being a couple and working together How to get back into dating in midlife https://Themidlifementors.com   TikTok @themidlifementor   IG @midlifementors FB https://facebook.com/themidlifementors ►Please subscribe/rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts http://bit.ly/lastfirstdateradio  ►If you're feeling stuck in dating and relationships and would like to find your last first date, sign up for a complimentary 45-minute breakthrough session with Sandy https://lastfirstdate.com/application  ►Join Your Last First Date on Facebook https://facebook.com/groups/yourlastfirstdate  ►Get Sandy's books, Becoming a Woman of Value; How to Thrive in Life and Love https://bit.ly/womanofvaluebook  and Choice Points in Dating https://amzn.to/3jTFQe9  ►Get FREE coaching on the podcast! https://bit.ly/LFDradiocoaching  ►FREE download: “Top 10 Reasons Why Men Suddenly Pull Away” http://bit.ly/whymendisappear  ►Group Coaching: https://lastfirstdate.com/the-woman-of-value-club/  ►Website → https://lastfirstdate.com/  ► Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/lastfirstdate1/  ►Get Amazon Music Unlimited FREE for 30 days at getamazonmusic.com/lastfirstdate  --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/sandy-weiner9/message

This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on May 4. It dropped for free subscribers on May 7. To receive future pods as soon as they're live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe for free below:WhoDee Byrne, President and Chief Operating Officer of Palisades Tahoe, CaliforniaRecorded onApril 24, 2023About Palisades TahoeClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Alterra Mountain CompanyPass affiliations: Unlimited access on the Ikon Pass; unlimited access with holiday blackouts on the Ikon Base PassLocated in: Olympic Valley, CaliforniaYear founded: * Palisades/Olympic side (as Squaw Valley): 1949* Alpine Meadows: 1961Closest neighboring ski areas: Granlibakken (14 minutes from Palisades base), Homewood (18 minutes), Northstar (23 minutes), Tahoe Donner (24 minutes), Boreal (24 minutes), Soda Springs (28 minutes), Donner Ski Ranch (28 minutes), Kingvale (29 minutes), Sugar Bowl (30 minutes), Diamond Peak (39 minutes), Mt. Rose (45 minutes), Sky Tavern (50), Heavenly (1 hour) - travel times vary dramatically given weather conditions and time of dayBase elevation | summit elevation | vertical drop:* Alpine Meadows side: 6,835 feet | 8,637 feet | 1,802 feet* Olympic Valley side: 6,200 feet | 9,050 feet | 2,850 feetSkiable Acres: 6,000* Alpine Meadows side: 2,400* Olympic Valley side: 3,600Average annual snowfall: 400 inches (713 inches for the 2023-24 ski season through May 3!)Trail count: 270-plus* Alpine Meadows side: 100-plus (25% beginner, 40% intermediate, 35% advanced)* Olympic Valley side: 170-plus (25% beginner, 45% intermediate, 30% advanced)Lift count: 42 (10-passenger tram, 28-passenger funitel, 8-passenger gondola, 8 six-packs, 5 high-speed quads, 1 fixed-grip quad, 10 triples, 8 doubles, 7 carpets - view Lift Blog's inventory of Palisades Tahoe's lift fleet)* Alpine Meadows: 13 (1 six-pack,  3 high-speed quads, 2 triples, 5 doubles,  2 carpets)* Palisades/Olympic: 28 (120-passenger tram, 28-passenger funitel, 7 six-packs, 2 high-speed quads, 1 quad, 8 triples, 3 doubles, 5 carpets)* Shared lifts: 1 (8-passenger Base-to-Base Gondola)Why I interviewed herImagine this: I'm a Midwest teenager who has notched exactly three days on skis, on three separate 200-vert bumps. I know vaguely that there is skiing out West, and that it is big. But I'm thinking Colorado, maybe Wyoming. California? California is Beach Boys and palm trees. Surfboards and San Diego. I have no idea that California has mountains, let alone ski resorts. Anticipating the skis, boots, and poles that I've requested as the totality of my Christmas list, I pick up the December 1994 issue of Skiing (RIP), and read the following by Kristen Ulmer:Nothing is random. You live, die, pay taxes, move to Squaw. It's the place you see in all the ski flicks, with the groovy attitudes, toasty-warm days, wild lines, and that enormous lake. It's California! Squallywood! It's the one place where every born-to-ski skier, at some point or other, wants to move to; where people will crawl a thousand miles over broken glass for the chance to ski freezer burn. The one place to make it as a “professional” skier.My friend Kent Kreitler, a phenomenal skier who doesn't live anywhere in particular, finally announced, “I think I'm move to Squaw.”“So Kent,” I said, “let me tell you what the rest of your life will be like.” And I laid it out for him. …You're curious to find out if you're as good a skier as you think. So you find a group of locals and try to keep up. On powder days the excitement builds like a pressure cooker. Move fast, because it only takes an hour for the entire mountain to get tracked up. There's oodles of cliff jumps and psycho lines. You'd better just do it, because within seconds, 10 other yahoos will have already jumped and tracked out the landing pad.If you're a truly amazing skier (anything else inspires only polite smiles and undisguised yawns), then you land clean on jumps and shred through anything with style. If not, the hyperactivity of the place will motivate you to ski the same lines anyway. Either way is fulfilling.Occasionally a random miracle occurs, and the patrol opens the famed Palisades on Squaw Peak. On those days you don't bother with a warm-up run – just hike 15 minutes from the top of Siberia Express chair and coolly launch some hospital air off Main Chute.There are other places to express your extreme nature. When everything else gets tracked, you hike up Granite Peak for its steep chutes. If the snowpack is good, you climb 10 minutes from the top of the KT-22 chair to Eagle's Nest. And jumping the Fingers off KT-22 seems particularly heroic: Not only do you need speed to clear the sloping rocks, but it's right (ahem) under the lift.At the conclusion of that ski season, teenage Stuart Winchester, a novice skier who lived in his parents' basement, announced, “I think I'm moving to Squaw.” “No D*****s,” his mom said, “you're going to college.”Which doesn't mean I ever forgot that high-energy introduction to California extreme. I re-read that article dozens of times (you can read the full bit here). Until my brain had been coded to regard the ski resort now known as Palisades Tahoe (see why?) as one of the spiritual and cultural homelands of U.S. lift-served skiing.Ulmer's realm, hyperactive as it was, looks pokey by today's standards. An accompanying essay in that same issue of Skiing, written by Eric Hanson, describes a very different resort than the one you'll encounter today:Locals seem proud that there's so little development here. The faithful will say it's because everything that matters is up on the mountain itself: bottomless steeps, vast acreage, 33 lifts and no waiting. America's answer to the wide-open ski circuses of Europe. After all these years the mountain is still uncrowded, except on weekends when people pile in from the San Francisco Bay area in droves. Squaw is unflashy, underbuilt, and seems entirely indifferent to success. The opposite of what you would expect one of America's premier resorts to be.Apparently, “flashy” included, you know, naming trails. Check out this circa 1996 trailmap, which shows lift names, but only a handful of runs:Confusion reigned, according to Hanson:Every day, we set off armed with our trail map and the printed list of the day's groomed runs in search of intermediate terrain – long steep runs groomed for cruising, unmogulled routes down from the top of the black-diamond chairs. It wasn't easy. The grooming sheet named runs which weren't marked on the trail map. The only trail named on the map is The Mountain Run, an expressway that drops 2,000 feet from Gold Coast to the village. And most of the biggest verticals were on the chairs – KT-22, Cornice II, Headwall, Silverado, Broken Arrow – marked “experts only.” We didn't relish the idea of going up an expert chair looking for a particular groomed route down, if the groomed route wasn't to be found. I began feeling nostalgic for all those totem poles of green and blue and black trail signs that clutter the landscapes of other ski resorts, but at least keep the skier oriented.I asked a patroller where I could find some of the runs on the groomed list. He wasn't sure. He told me that the grooming crew and the ski patrol didn't have the same names for many of the runs.Just amazing. While Palisades Tahoe is now a glimmering model of a modern American ski resort, that raw-and-rowdy past is still sewn into the DNA of this fascinating place.What we talked aboutTahoe's megaseason; corn harvest; skiing into July and… maybe beyond; why Alpine will be the later operator this summer; why the base-to-base gondola ceased operation on April 30; snow exhaustion; Cali spring skiing; reminiscing on Pacific Northwest ski culture; for the love of teaching and turning; skiing as adventure; from 49 Degrees North to Vail to Aspen to Tahoe; Tahoe culture shock; Palisades' vast and varied ski school; reflections on the name change a year and a half later; going deep on the base-to-base gondola; the stark differences between the cultural vibe on the Alpine Meadows and Palisades sides of the resort and whether the gondola has compromised those distinctions; why the gondola took more than a decade to build and what finally pushed it through; White Wolf, the property that hosts an unfinished chairlift between Palisades and Alpine; how the gondola took cars off the road; why the base-to-base gondola didn't overload KT-22's terrain; the Mothership; the new Red Dog sixer; why Palisades re-oriented the lift to run lower to the ground; why the lift was only loading four passengers at a time for large parts of the season; snowmaking as fire-suppression system; how Palisades and Mammoth assisted Sierra-at-Tahoe's recovery; candidates for lift upgrades at Alpine Meadows; “fixed-grip lifts are awesome”; an Alpine masterplan refresh incoming; which lift could be next in line for upgrades on the Palisades side; the “biggest experience bust on the Palisades side of the resort”; why Silverado and Granite Chief will likely never be upgraded to detachable lifts; why the Silverado terrain is so rarely open and what it takes to make it live; whether Palisades Tahoe could ever leave the unlimited-with-blackouts tier on the Ikon Base Pass; and paid parking incoming.             Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewThis was the second time I've featured Palisades Tahoe on The Storm Skiing Podcast. The first was a conversation with then-resort president Ron Cohen in September 2020, shortly after the ski area announced that it would ditch the “Squaw Valley” name. We spent the entire 49-minute conversation discussing that name change. At the time, the podcast was mostly focused on New England and New York, and a deep exploration of a distant resort would have been a little off-brand.But The Storm has evolved, and my coverage now firmly includes the State of California. Thank goodness. What an incredible ski state. So many huge resorts, so much wide-open terrain, so much snow, so much energy. The Northeast tugs skiing from the earth through technology and willpower, pasting white streaks over brown land, actualizing the improbable in a weird algorithm that only pencils out because 56 million people camp out within driving distance. California is different. California delivers skiing because it's lined top to bottom with giant mountains that summon ungodly oceans of snow from the clouds. It just happens Brah. There aren't even that many ski areas here – just 28, or 29 if you count the uber-dysfunctional Mt. Waterman – but there seems to be one everywhere you need one – LA (Big Bear, Baldy, Mountain High), Fresno (China Peak), Modesto (Dodge Ridge), Stockton (Bear Valley), Sacramento and the Bay Area (all of Tahoe). Among these are some of the largest and most-developed ski areas in America.And none is bigger than Palisades Tahoe. Well, Heavenly was until this year, as I outlined earlier this week, but the base-to-base gondola changed all that. The ski area formerly known as Squaw Valley and the ski area still-known as Alpine Meadows are now officially one interconnected ski goliath. That's a big deal.Add a new six-pack (Red Dog), a sufficient period to reflect on the name change, a historic winter, and the ongoing impacts of the Covid-driven outdoor boom and the Ikon Pass, and it was a perfect time to check in on one of Alterra's trophy properties.Why you should ski Palisades TahoeOne of the most oft-dished compliments to emphasize the big-mountain cred of a North American ski resort is that it “feels like Europe.” But there just aren't that many ski areas around these parts worthy of that description. Big Sky, with its dramatic peaks and super-duper out-of-base bubble lifts. Snowbird-Alta, with their frenzied scale and wild terrain and big-box tram (though they get way too much snow to mistake for Europe). Whistler, with its village and polyglot vibe. And then there's Palisades Tahoe:Nowhere else in America do you stand in the base area and wonder if you should hop on the tram or the gondola or the other big-gondola-thingy-that-you're-not-quite-sure-what-it-is (the funitel) or the most iconic chairlift in the country (KT-22). Or Wa She Shu. Or Exhibition or Red Dog. And go up and up and then you never need to see the base area again. Up to Headwall or Gold Coast or so help-you-God Silverado if it's open. Or up and over to Alpine and another whole ski area that used to be a giant ski resort but is now just a small part of a giant-er ski resort.It's too much to describe or even really try to. In our conversation, Byrne called Palisades a “super-regional” resort. One that most people drive to, rather than fly to. I'm telling you this one is worth the flight. From anywhere. For anyone. Just go.Podcast NotesOn the name changeThe last time I interviewed Byrne, it was for an article I wrote on the name change in 2021:The name change, promised more than a year ago, acknowledges that many Native Americans consider the word “squaw” to be a racist and sexist slur.“Anyone who spends time at these mountains can feel the passion of our dedicated skiers and riders,” said Ron Cohen, former president and COO of Palisades Tahoe, who moved into the same position at Alterra's Mammoth Mountain in June. “It's electric, exciting, reverential, and incredibly motivating. However, no matter how deep, meaningful, and positive these feelings are and no matter how much our guests don't intend to offend anyone, it is not enough to justify continuing to operate under a name that is deeply offensive to indigenous people across North America.”The former resort name was perhaps the most prominent modern use of the word “squaw” in America, skiing's equivalent to the Cleveland Indians or Washington Redskins, two professional sports teams that are also in the process of replacing their names (Cleveland will become the Guardians, while Washington will announce its new name early next year). The update broadcasts a powerful signal to an American mainstream that still largely regards the word “squaw” as an innocuous synonym for a Native American woman.“We know the founders of our resort had no intention of causing offense in choosing this name for the resort, nor have any of our patrons who have spoken this word over the last seven decades,” said Cohen. “But as our society evolves, we must acknowledge the need for change when we are confronted with harsh realities. Having our name be associated with pain and dehumanization is contrary to our goal of making the outdoors a welcoming space for all people. I feel strongly that we have been given the rare opportunity to effect lasting, positive change; to find a new name that reflects our core values, storied past and respect for all those who have enjoyed this land.”It's a long piece, and my opinion on it stands, but I'll reiterate this bit:I realize that many of us learned something different in grade school. I am one of them. Until last year, I did not know that Native Americans considered this word to be offensive. But the resort, after extensive research and consultation with the local Washoe Tribe, made a good case that the name was an anachronism.Cohen came on my podcast to further elaborate. The arguments made sense. What I had learned in grade-school was wrong. “Squaw” was not a word that belonged on the masthead of a major ski resort.The immediate reaction that this is some PC move is flimsy and hardly worth addressing, but OK: this is not a redefining of history to cast a harmless thing as nefarious. Rather, it is an example of a long-ostracized group finding its voice and saying, “Hey, this is what this actually means – can you rethink how you're using this word?”If you want to scream into the wind about this, be my guest. The name change is final. The place will still have plenty of skiers. If you don't want to be one of them, there are plenty of other places to ski, around Tahoe and elsewhere. But what this means for the ski terrain is exactly nothing at all. The resort, flush with capital from Alterra, is only getting bigger and better. Sitting out that evolution for what is a petty protest is anyone's mistake to make.“We want to be on the right side of history on this,” said Byrne. “While this may take some getting used to, our name change was an important initiative for our company and community. At the end of the day, ‘squaw' is a hurtful word, and we are not hurtful people. We have a well-earned reputation as a progressive resort at the forefront of ski culture, and progress cannot happen without change.”Apparently there are still a handful of Angry Ski Bros who occasionally track Byrne down on social media and yell about this. Presumably in all-caps. Sometimes I think about what life would be like right now had the commercial internet failed to take off and honestly it's hard to conclude that it wouldn't be a hell of a lot better than whatever version of reality we've found ourselves in.On federal place names eliminating the use of the word “squaw”Byrne mentioned that the federal government had also moved to eliminate the word “squaw” from its place names. Per a New York Times article last March:The map dots, resembling a scattergram of America, point to snow-covered pinnacles, remote islands and places in between.Each of the 660 points, shown on maps of federal lands and waterways, includes the word “squaw” in its name, a term Native Americans regard as a racist and misogynistic slur.Now the Interior Department, led by Deb Haaland, the first Native American cabinet secretary, is taking steps to strip the word from mountains, rivers, lakes and other geographic sites and has solicited input from tribes on new names for the landmarks.A task force created by the department will submit the new names for final approval from the Board on Geographic Names, the federal body that standardizes American place names. The National Park Service was ordered to take similar steps.By September, the Biden administration had completed the project. The word persists in non-federally owned place names, however. One ski area – Big Squaw in Maine – still officially carries the name, even though the state was among the first to ban the use of the word “squaw,” back in 2000. While a potential new ownership group had vowed to change the ski area's name, they ultimately backed out of the deal. As long as the broken-down, barely functional ski area remains under the ownership of professional knucklehead and bootleg timber baron James Confalone, the ski area – and the volunteer group that keeps the one remaining chairlift spinning – is stuck with the name.On White Wolf If you've ever looked off the backside of KT-22, you've no doubt noticed the line of chairlift towers standing empty on the mountain:This is White Wolf, a long-envisioned but as-yet-incomplete private resort owned by a local gent named Troy Caldwell, who purchased the land in 1989 for $400,000. Byrne and I discuss this property briefly on the podcast. The Palisades Tahoe blog posted a terrific history of Caldwell and White Wolf last year:So, they shifted to the idea of a private ski area, named White Wolf. In 2000, Placer County issued Caldwell a permit to build his own chairlift. A local homeowners' association later sued the county for issuing him that permit, but, in 2005, the lift towers and cables went in, but construction slowed on the private chairlift as Caldwell weighed his options for a future interconnect between the resorts. To date, the chairlift has yet to operate—but that may be changing if Caldwell's long-term plan comes to fruition.In 2016, Caldwell submitted plans to Placer County for a 275-acre private-resort housing project on his land that would include the construction of dozens of fire-safe custom homes, as well employee housing units, a pool, an ice-skating rink, and two private chairlifts, including the one that's already constructed.After the Palisades Tahoe resorts came under the same ownership in 2012, the plan to physically link them has now become reality. Caldwell is the missing piece enabling the long-awaited gondola to connect the two mountains over his land. Roughly half of the Base to Base Gondola and its mid-stations are on property owned by the Caldwells.“Sure, we could have sold the land for $50 million and moved to Tahiti,” Caldwell says with a laugh. “But we made the decision that this is our life, this is what we wanted to do. We wanted to finish the dream, connect the ski areas and do what we initially set out to do.”Unfortunately, it is unlikely that the general public will ever be able to ski White Wolf.On Alpine Meadows' masterplanByrne and I discuss several proposed but unbuilt lifts at Alpine Meadows, including the Rollers lift, shown here on the 2015 masterplan:And here, just for fun, is an old proposed line for the gondola, which would not have crossed the KT-22 Express:On Sierra-at-Tahoe and the Caldor FireI discussed this one in my recent article for the Heavenly pod.Parting shotThe Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 41/100 in 2023, and number 427 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane, or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email skiing@substack.com. 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This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on April 3. It dropped for free subscribers on April 6. To receive future pods as soon as they're live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe for free below:WhoDavid Dziuban, Owner and General Manager of Whitecap Mountains, WisconsinRecorded onMarch 13, 2023About Whitecap MountainsClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: David DziubanLocated in: Upson, WisconsinYear founded: 1964Pass affiliations: Indy Pass Allied PartnerReciprocal partners: Whitecap lists the following partners on its season pass page - it is not clear what the benefit is for each mountain: Grand Targhee, Wild Mountain, Mount Bohemia, Sunlight, Camp 10, Lee Canyon, Arizona Snowbowl, Lee Canyon, Mont du Lac.Closest neighboring ski areas: Mt. Zion (28 minutes), Big Powderhorn (34 minutes), Snowriver (40 minutes), Mt. Ashwabay (1 hour, 15 minutes), Porcupine Mountains (1 hour, 21 minutes)Base elevation: 1,295 feetSummit elevation: 1,750 feetVertical drop: 455 feetSkiable Acres: 400 acresAverage annual snowfall: 200 inchesTrail count: 42 (4 expert, 12 advanced, 12 intermediate, 14 beginner)Lift count: 6 (4 doubles, 1 triple, 1 carpet) – the North Pole-South Pole double functions as two separate chairs, even though it is one long continuous lift. Skiers are not allowed to ride on the middle section, which passes over a long valley. The carpet was not yet functional for the 2022-23 ski season. Whitecap has an additional triple chair that is currently dormant, but which Dziuban intends to resurrect.Here is Whitecap's current trailmap:However, I far prefer this older version, which is my favorite trailmap of all time:Why I interviewed himOur ski areas exist where they do for a reason. That rare mix of hills, reliable precipitation, wintertime cold, a near-enough population, a road to get there. Slopes steep enough but not too steep. Water nearby. Someone with enough cash to run chairlifts up the incline and enough brains to put the whole operation together into a viable business.There are fewer geographic bullseyes of this sort than you may suppose. Look carefully at the map of U.S. ski areas – they are mostly clustered around a few-dozen rarified climate zones. Lake-effect bands or mountain spines or high-altitude nests resting at a desert's edge. Several dozen have been force-born around large cold-weather cities, of course, bulldozed into existence where cold and water abound but hills are lacking.We all know the epicenters upon which Epic and Ikon have anchored their empires: the Wasatch, Tahoe, the I-70 corridor, the Vermont Spine. But smaller, less celebrated-by-the-masses clusters dot the continent. The Interstate 90 corridor from 49 Degrees North and Mt. Spokane through Schweitzer, Silver Mountain, and Lookout Pass. Mt. Hood, one mountain that is home to four ski areas. Northern New Mexico, where half a dozen ski areas surround the fabled Taos.One of the most reliable of these micro-snowzones is Big Snow Country, a hilly wilderness straddling the border of northern Wisconsin and Michigan's Upper Peninsula. There, seated west-to-east, are four – once five – ski areas: Whitecap Mountains, Mt. Zion, Big Powderhorn, and Snowriver, which is a union of the once-separate Indianhead and Blackjack ski areas (now known as Jackson Creek Summit and Black River Basin). Seated fewer than a dozen miles above them, brooding and enormous, is Lake Superior, one of the most reliable lake-effect snowmachines on the planet:So much of Midwest skiing is funky and improvisational, a tinkerer's paradise, where the same spirit that animated 20th century factories willed one of the world's great ski cultures into existence. There are not many hills around Milwaukee or Minneapolis or Detroit, but there are plenty of ski areas. The people of the Midwest do as they please. But the ski areas of Big Snow Country are different. There is so much skiing here because the terrain and the climate seemed sculpted exactly for it.As a result, the skiing is genuinely sublime. The great tension here is the opposite problem that most of the region's mobbed ski areas face: great skiing, too few skiers. Big Snow Country is far from pretty much everything. Four hours from Minneapolis, five from Milwaukee, six-and-a-half from Chicago. Residents of those cities can reach Park City or Keystone faster than their Midwest neighbors.So what to do? For decades, these four (or five), ski areas have struggled to pin themselves to skiers' to-do lists. Mt. Zion, the smallest of the bunch, is a protectorate of Gogebic Community College, which hosts one of the nation's only programs on ski area management. Indianhead and Blackjack cycled through generations of owners and were finally combined and then sold, last year, to Charles Skinner, owner of the sprawling Granite Peak and Lutsen ski areas in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Skinner, who transformed Granite from a faltering backwater into one of the Midwest's top ski areas, is already slinging a high-speed sixer up the hillside at Snowriver and will surely connect the two ski areas within a few years. That leaves Big Powderhorn and Whitecap with a problem.How to respond? Powderhorn has at least enjoyed stable management and a loyal customer base. Whitecap, however, has struggled. Decades of deferred maintenance pushed skiers away. A 2019 lodge fire erased a crucial piece of infrastructure that has yet to be replaced. The advent, in the region, of the Epic, Ikon, and Indy Passes – not to mention a modernized Granite Peak, two hours closer to pretty much everything, and an unhinged and dirt-cheap Mount Bohemia, not so far to the north – has only clouded Whitecap's market position.David Dziuban arrived at the ski area in 2016, and slowly took control over the next few years. It was a period of personal tragedy for him. As soon as he took full ownership, the fire hit. It would have been enough to make anyone surrender. But Dziuban has found in Whitecap both salvation and mission. This place, so naturally blessed, has the bones to be one of the Midwest's great ski areas. But it needs a push, a pull, a shove into our current moment. Dziuban is the guy to provide all three.What we talked aboutA snowy Wisconsin winter; Whitecap's unique trail footprint; the great Midwest ski factory; a single sentence in a Wilmot liftline that changed Dziuban's life; a wild scheme to score a first job as a snowmaker at Plumtree, Illinois; turning down a job at Killington to work at scrappy Magic Mountain; Magic in the ‘80s; making Magic's Timberside connection; Mt. Tom, Massachusetts; homemade snowmaking; Elk Mountain, the hidden gem of Pennsylvania; a rigged splice gone wrong; Whitecap, lost in the wilderness; first impressions of a run-down and lightly used Whitecap; the long and convoluted process of taking ownership of the resort; balancing personal trauma and loss with the mission of revitalizing the ski area; taming the local homeowners' entitlement; fire levels the lodge; why Whitecap opened the next day and why it was so vital that it did; plans for a new lodge; Whitecap's huge development potential; why the ski area hasn't set up the new conveyor lift it purchased last year; snowmaking; assessing Whitecap's unique lift fleet; where we could see a new lift at Whitecap; thoughts on the long chair (North Pole/South Pole); getting the CTEC lift running again; “I want to remain affordable to everybody”; why Whitecap launched a $295 (now $325) season pass and how that product has been selling; the surprise response from a one-day season passholder reciprocal deal with Mount Bohemia; thoughts on the Indy Pass and the Allied program; and that Whitecap aura.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewNot to repeat myself, but allow me to repeat myself. A skier living in the Upper Midwest currently enjoys the following options for full-season skiing:* Purchase a $676 Epic Local Pass, which delivers turns all season at Wilmot or Afton Alps, plus basically unlimited options for runs west to Colorado, Utah, Tahoe, and Whistler.* Purchase an $829 Ikon Pass and forgo Midwest skiing altogether, hopping frequent flights to Denver and Salt Lake City from major hub airport Minneapolis-St. Paul (MSP).* Purchase a $329 Indy Pass for two days each at major ski areas across the region, including some of the best and most-developed in Minnesota and Wisconsin: Granite Peak, Lutsen, Spirit Mountain, and, perhaps most significantly for Whitecap, its neighbors Big Powderhorn and Snowriver (both of which are in Michigan).* Purchase a local season pass at any of dozens of ski areas that sit within 30 minutes of downtown Minneapolis, Madison, or Milwaukee.* Scratch the gnar itch with a $109 ($99 if you can forego Saturdays), season pass to Mount Bohemia, the ungroomed natural-snow mecca hanging off the top of the UP. The pass includes reciprocal days at ski areas throughout the Midwest and the West.So, what does Whitecap do? First, control what you can: fix the beat-up lift fleet, improvise a lodge, bring stability to its operations. Dziuban has checked off that list. Second, modernize: rebuild the lodge, build out snowmaking (the current system consists of fewer than half a dozen guns), re-activate the mothballed triple chair. All of this is in progress. But there's something else: how does a ski area set itself apart in a region dense with ski areas but not with skiers? What is the story it's going to tell? Dziuban has a good one, and it's one every skier in the region ought to hear.What I got wrongI noted that Whitecap had “360-degree exposure,” when it in fact has slopes primarily facing just three directions: west, north, and south.Why you should ski Whitecap MountainsIn February, I flew into Minneapolis for a five-day Upper Midwest ski tour, making me perhaps the only person this century to travel from New York to Minnesota on purpose to ski. At least that was my conclusion from multiple chairlift conversations with befuddled locals. I swung through 11 ski areas: Welch Village, Afton Alps, Granite Peak, Nordic Mountain, Snowriver, Big Powderhorn, Mt. Zion, Whitecap, Spirit Mountain, Trollhaugen, and Buck Hill. Each was unique and memorable, in the way that every ski area is. But one resonated with me more than the others: Whitecap.I have visited hundreds of ski areas, all over the world. There is nothing quite like Whitecap. It's an enchanting place. Sprawling and gorgeous. Narrow paths wound through woods, leading into and around broad meadows, glades everywhere, all of it knitted together in a Zelda-like sprawl primed for exploration. While the vertical drop is small, the place is multilayered and complex. It is one of the few ski areas where I have ever felt legitimately lost. I took 27 runs and still didn't see half the place.Also: there was no one else there. Granted, it was a Wednesday. But coverage was excellent: 100 percent open. I skied that day with Jacob, Whitecap's grooming ace, a Telluride refugee who had carpeted a shocking breadth of acreage overnight before meeting me to ski. He kept telling his friends from Colorado that they had to move here, he told me. The pace was slower, and he could afford to live. He'd given up finding anything affordable near Telluride, and had instead commuted in from a desert campervan colony hours away. He'd had enough, come back east, back home, with his campervan and his dog. He didn't see any reason to return to Colorado. Yes, the skiing there is amazing, but the skiing is good here, too, and the stresses of daily life had evaporated. He now lived in the hotel. His commute to the snowcat was a few dozen steps. This was a life that was pleasant, and sustainable. As Western mountain-town life became untenable, places like Big Snow Country, with reliable snow and lower costs for everything, would become more attractive to those who wanted to make skiing central to their lives, he said. I'm not saying you should move to Whitecap. But you should visit. Everyone should ski the Midwest at least once. Just to understand what it is, this machine that churns out so many of the nation's most passionate skiers. And when you do go, make sure Whitecap is on your tour.Podcast NotesOn Plumtree, IllinoisDziuban's ski career began at Plumtree, a 210-vertical-foot landfill bump in Illinois. Here's the 1978 trailmap:On the podcast, I said that I wasn't sure if the place was still operating. Its website states that the ski area is “closed for renovations,” and I believe that has been its status for at least as long as I've tracked season passes nationally (three seasons). I'm trying to confirm that. Even if it does re-open, it looks as though the place is just a residents' amenity for whatever gated community it sits in. Here's a bit more on the joint, per skibum.net:Former public area, Plumtree is now a private club for Lake Carroll property owners, guests, etc. Aging equipment, wide open bowls, decent place. Look up “typical skiing in the Midwest” and you'll find Plumtree Ski Area. Wish there were more Plumtrees open to the general public.On Magic MountainDziuban spent several years at Magic Mountain, Vermont. He was there from the mid-80s to the early ‘90s, a period that included the interlink with the lost Timber Ridge ski area on the backside of Glebe Mountain. Here's what they looked like connected:These days, skiers are still allowed to traverse from Magic over to “Timberside,” which is privately owned, and ski down. They have to find their own way back to Magic, however, as the Timber Ridge lifts are long gone.On the Wine HutFollow the trails skier's left of the Midway double chair, and you'll sweep past the Wine Hut on your way to the loading station. It's one of the Midwest's cooler après joints, though I'll admit that I did not sample the goods on the February Wednesday I stopped in.On the North Pole/South Pole doubleWhitecap is home to one of the most amazing lifts in America - an up-and-over Hall double that serves as two separate lifts - the North Pole double and the South Pole double. Skiers are not allowed to ride across the middle section, which soars more than 125 feet over the meadow between the two top stations - with no restraint bar. I snagged this video standing beneath the midsection:And here's a still pic from the valley floor - note the tower hoisted onto the steel lift:Here's a view looking from the North Pole side across the valley to the South Pole:Going up South Pole:On Whitecap's dormant triple chairA seemingly abandoned lift terminal sits on Whitecap's summit, the head of a skeleton that follows a liftline down the mountain. This lift, said Dziuban, is actually not dead yet. He's already fabricated some parts necessary to restore the 1991 CTEC triple to a functional state, as he explains in the podcast.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 31/100 in 2023, and number 417 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane, or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email skiing@substack.com. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

Greetings, you're listening to the Liam Photography Podcast, I'm your host Liam Douglas and this is Episode 325. In this episode I am talking about the latest news and rumor stories that caught my eye this past week. You can find the show notes here https://liamphotographypodcast.com/episodes/episode-325-hidden-snakes-66-degrees-north-northern-lights-from-a-plane-more-870 Remember I now have my own discount code for all Platypod branded products at http://www.platypod.com using my code LD20 you can save 20% off on ALL individual Platypod branded products EXCLUDING Bundles, which are already discounted and Square Jellyfish or Lume Cube branded items. Also be sure to join the Liam Photography Podcast Facebook Group https://www.facebook.com/groups/liamphotographypodcast/ You can reach the show by call or text @ 470-294-8191 to leave a comment or request a topic or guest for the show. Additionally you can email the show @ liam@liamphotographypodcast.com and find the show notes at http://www.liamphotographypodcast.com. You can find my work @ https://www.liamphotography.net and follow me on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter @liamphotoatl. If you like abandoned buildings and history, you can find my project @ http://www.forgottenpiecesofgeorgia.com. and http://www.forgottenpiecesofpennsylvania.com. Please also stop by my Youtube channels Liam Photography Forgotten Pieces of Georgia Project Forgotten Pieces of Pennsylvania Project

This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on Jan. 13. It dropped for free subscribers on Jan. 16. To receive future pods as soon as they're live and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription.WhoJim van Löben Sels, General Manager of Mt. Spokane, WashingtonRecorded onJanuary 9, 2023About Mt. SpokaneClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Mt. Spokane 2000, a nonprofit groupPass affiliations: Freedom Pass – 3 days each at these 20 ski areasReciprocal partners: 3 days each at Mt. Ashland, Mount Bohemia, Great Divide, Loup Loup, Lee Canyon, Snow King, White Pass, Ski CooperLocated in: Mt. Spokane State Park, WashingtonYear opened: 1938Closest neighboring ski areas: 49 Degrees North (1 hour, 45 minutes), Silver Mountain (1 hour, 45 minutes), Schweitzer (2 hours, 10 minutes) – travel times may vary considerably in winterBase elevation: 3,818 feetSummit elevation: 5,889 feetVertical drop: 2,071 feetSkiable Acres: 1,704Average annual snowfall: 300 inchesTrail count: 52 (15% advanced/expert, 62% intermediate, 23% beginner)Lift count: 7­­ (1 triple, 5 doubles, 1 carpet)Why I interviewed himPerception is a funny thing. In my Michigan-anchored teenage ski days any bump rolling more than one chairlift uphill seemed impossibly complex and interesting. Caberfae (200 acres), Crystal (103), Shanty Creek (80), and Nub's Nob (248 acres today, much smaller at the time) hit as vast and interesting worlds. That set my bar low. It's stayed there. Living now within two and a half hours of a dozen thousand-plus-footers feels extraordinary. In less than an instant I can be there, lost in it. Teleportation by minivan.Go west and they think different. By the millions skiers pound up I-70 through an Eisenhower Tunnel framed by Loveland, to ski over the pass. Breck, Keystone, Copper, A-Basin, Vail, Beaver Creek – all amazing. But Loveland covers 1,800 acres standing on 2,210 vertical feet – how many Colorado tourists have never touched the place? How many locals?It seems skiers often confuse size with infrastructure. Loveland has one high-speed chairlift. Beaver Creek has 13. But the ski area's footprint is only 282 acres larger than Loveland's. Are fast lift rides worth an extra 50 miles of interstate evacuation drills? It seems that, for many people, they are.We could repeat that template all over the West. But Washington is the focus today. And Mt. Spokane. At 1,704 acres, it's larger than White Pass (1,402 acres), Stevens Pass (1,125), or Mt. Baker (1,000), and just a touch smaller than Summit at Snoqualmie (1,996). But outside of Spokane (metro population, approximately 600,000), who skis it? Pretty much no one.Why is that? Maybe it's the lift fleet, anchored by five centerpole Riblet doubles built between 1956(!) and 1977. Maybe it's the ski area's absence from the larger megapasses. Maybe it's proximity to 2,900-acre Schweitzer and its four high-speed lifts. Probably it's a little bit of each those things.Which is fine. People can ski wherever they want. But what is this place, lodged in the wilderness just an hour north of Washington's second-largest city? And why hadn't I heard of it until I made it my job to hear about everyplace? And how is Lift 1 spinning into its 67th winter? There just wasn't a lot of information out there about Mt. Spokane. And part of The Storm's mission is to seek these places out and figure out what the hell is going on. And so here you go.What we talked aboutFully staffed and ready to roll in 2023; night skiing; what happened when Mt. Spokane shifted from a five-day operating week to a seven-day one; a winding career path that involved sheep shearing, Ski Patrol at Bear Valley, running a winery, and ultimately taking over Mt. Spokane; the family ski routine; entering the ski industry in the maw of Covid; life is like Lombard Street; Spokane's long-term year-round business potential; who owns and runs Mt. Spokane; why and how the ski area switched from a private ownership model to a not-for-profit model; looking to other nonprofit ski areas for inspiration; a plan to replace Spokane's ancient lift fleet and why they will likely stick with fixed-grip chairlifts; the Skytrac-Riblet hybrid solution; sourcing parts for a 67-year-old chairlift; how much of Lift 1 is still original parts; which lift the mountain will replace first, what it will replace it with, and when; the virtues of Skytrac lifts; parking; the Day-1-on-the-job problem that changed how Jim runs the mountain; why Northwood lift was down for part of January; what it took to bring the Northwood expansion online and how it changed the mountain; whether future expansions are possible; Nordic opportunities; working with Washington State Parks, upon whose land the ski area sits, and how that compares to the U.S. Forest Service; whether Mt. Spokane could ever introduce snowmaking; how eastern Washington snow differs from what falls on the west side of the state; glading is harder than you think; where we could see more glades on the mountain; the evolution of Spokane's beginner terrain; why Mt. Spokane tore out its tubing lanes; expanding parking; which buildings could be updated or replaced and when; whether we could ever see lodging at the mountain; why the mountain sets its top lift ticket price at $75; why Mt. Spokane joined Freedom Pass; exploring the mountain's reciprocal pass partnerships and whether that network will continue to grow; and the possibility of joining the Indy Pass.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewIn August, Troy Hawks, the marketing mastermind at Sunlight and the administrator of the Freedom Pass, emailed to tell me that Mt. Spokane was joining the Freedom Pass. I asked him to connect me with the ski area's marketing team for some context on why they joined (which I included in this story). Then I asked if Jim would like to join me on the podcast. And he did.That's the straight answer. But Mt. Spokane fits this very interesting profile that matches that of many ski areas across the country: a nonprofit community hill with dated infrastructure and proximity to larger resorts that's been pushed to the brink not of insolvency but doors-bursting capacity despite successive waves of macro-challenges, including Covid and EpKon Mania. Weren't these places supposed to be toast? As a proxy for the health of independents nationwide, Mt. Spokane seemed like as good a place as any to check in.There's another interesting problem here: what are you going to do with a Riblet double built in 1956? The thing is gorgeous, tapering low and elegant up the hillside, a machine with stories to tell. But machines don't last forever, and new ones cost more than some whole ski areas. Mt. Spokane also has no snowmaking and dated lodges and too little parking. Will it modernize? If so, how? Does it need to? What is that blend of funk and shine that will ensure a mountain's future without costing its soul?In this way, too, Mt. Spokane echoes the story of contemporary independent American skiing: how, and how much, to update the bump? Jim, many will be happy to learn, has no ambitions of transforming Mt. Spokane into Schweitzer Jr. But he does have a vision and a plan, a way to make the mountain a little less 1950s and a little more 2020s. And he lays it all out in a matter-of-fact way that anyone who loves skiing will appreciate.Questions I wish I'd askedI'm so confused by Mt. Spokane's trailmap. Older versions show the Hidden Treasure area flanking the main face:While new versions portray Hidden Treasure as a distinct peak. Again:Meanwhile, Google Maps doesn't really line up with what I'm seeing above:While I love the aesthetic of Mt. Spokane's trailmap, it seems wildly out of scale and oddly cut off at the bottom of Hidden Treasure. The meanings of the various arrows and the flow of the mountain aren't entirely clear to me either.Really, this is more a problem of experience and immersion than anything I can learn through a knowledge transfer. A smart professor made this point in journalism school: go there. I really should be skiing these places before I do these interviews, and for a long time, I wouldn't record a podcast about a ski area I hadn't visited. But I realized, a year and a half in, that that would be impractical if I wanted to keep banging these things out, particularly as I reached farther into the western hinterlands. Sometimes I have to do the best I can with whatever's out there, and what's out there can be confusing as hell. So I guess I just need to go ski it to figure it out.What I got wrong* I intimated that Gunstock was a nonprofit ski area, but that is not the case. The mountain contributes revenue to its owner, Belknap County, each season.* I stated that Mt. Spokane didn't have any beginner surface lifts. In fact, it has a carpet lift.* Jim and I discussed whether Vista Cruiser was the longest contiguously operating chairlift in the United States. It's not – Hemlock has been serving Boyne Mountain, Michigan, since 1948. It's a double that was converted from a single that originally served Sun Valley as America's first chairlift in the 1930s. Still, Vista Cruiser may be the most intact 1950s vintage lift in America. I really don't know, and these things can be very hard to verify what with all the forgotten upgrades over the years, but it really doesn't matter: a 67-year-old chairlift is a hell of an impressive thing in any context.* While discussing reciprocal agreements, I said, rather hilariously, that Mt. Ashland was “right there in Oregon.” The ski area is, in fact, an 11-hour drive from Mt. Spokane. I was vaguely aware of how dumb this was as I said it, but you must remember that I grew up in the Midwest, meaning an 11-hour drive is like going out to the mailbox.Why you should ski Mt. SpokaneLet's start here:How many 2,000-vertical-foot mountains post those kind of rack rates? A few, but fewer each year. And if you happen to have a season pass to any other Freedom Pass ski area, you can cash in one of your Mt. Spokane lift tickets as you're floating through.As for the skiing itself, I can only speculate. It looks like typical PNW wide-open: wide runs, big treed meadows, bowls, glades all over. Three hundred inches per winter to open it all up. I mean there's really not much else that's necessary on my have-a-good-time checklist.Podcast Notes* Jim mentioned that Schweitzer was working on adding parking. More details on their plan to plug 1,400 more spaces into the mountain here.* I was shocked when Jim said that Mt. Spokane's $75 lift tickets ($59 midweek) were the second-most expensive in the region after Schweitzer's, which run $110 for a full-day adult pass. But he's correct: 49 Degrees North runs $72 on weekends and holidays and $49 midweek. Silver Mountain is $71 on weekends (but $65 midweek). And Lookout Pass is $66 on weekends and $55 midweek. I guess the memo about $250 lift tickets hasn't made its way up I-90 just yet.* The best way to support Mt. Spokane, which is a nonprofit ski area, is to go buy a lift ticket. But you can also donate here.* Here's a bit more Mt. Spokane history.* And some stoke Brah:The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 4/100 in 2023, and number 390 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane, or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email skiing@substack.com. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

This episode of Grow With Us features Jamie Leupen, Director of Marketing and Communications at 36 Degrees North. Jamie is a passionate Tulsa-native who enjoys creating and curating space for entrepreneurial development in town by collaborating with business owners, entrepreneurs, and small businesses looking to grow. We talk about 36 Degrees North's expansion plans for the future, how it's a growing community of entrepreneurs and business owners, and the importance of physical space in community building. If you are interested in looking at our open career opportunities, don't forget to check out our career website: https://talent.intulsa.com/

Saying goodbye to a house, spaces that evoke memories and emotion, personal experiences of working (and living) remotely, mentoring emerging professionals, and how the architectural profession has been the model for Elon's recent email to Twitter employees (except for the severance option).LinksElon Musk demands Twitter staff commit to ‘long hours' or leave: Read the email (CNBC)

As part of our salmon connections and resilience series, we go further north to Taku River Tlingit territory to learn about the work and research being done to protect salmon and adapt to changing conditions from climate impacts. Thanks for the interviews and insights from Mark Connor and Chris Sergeant.Music thanks to the late Telkwa Ted Turner, and to Facundo Gastiazoro for the art.This episode was recorded on unceded Witsuwit'en territory between July and October 2022. 54 Degrees North is produced by Nikki Skuce (@nikkiskuce) from the Northern Confluence Initiative (a project of MakeWay), with some editing assistance by Namita Prakash thanks to the Canada Summer Jobs program. Contact us at 54DegreesNorthPodcast@gmail.com or check us out on Instagram @northern_confluence.

Early entrepreneurs often underestimate the importance of understanding both the craft and the business side of things. For example, they might enjoy doing PR, but they don't know how to run a PR agency. That small gap is what differentiates an entrepreneur from a business leader. Today's guest for Coffee with Closers found herself facing similar challenges. She had to learn a lot in the process of building her own company, but everything turned out fantastic. Meet Nicole Morgan – public relations, marketing & creative expert, and CEO at Resolute PR. She is also a board member of the Tulsa Ballet and serves as an advisor to several small business and entrepreneurial organizations, including 36 Degrees North, the Tulsa Regional Chamber Small Business Connection, and ACT Tulsa. Coming up in this episode: ►What it takes to become a visionary leader rather than a doer in your organization; ►Why it's important to have a hierarchy in the team and give authority to your employees; ►How to set up a remote team and keep operating when you are forced out of the office; ►Why culture and vision are extremely important for a growing organization, and more. Tune in!

On this week's episode of #LeadingWithLee, Lee is joined by Kojo Asamoa Caesar, attorney, advocate, and the 2020 Democratic nominee for Oklahoma's 1st Congressional District. Kojo shares about his historic run and the lessons he learned throughout his campaign. He also shares about turning down a huge law firm opportunity to come to Tulsa, OK, and serve with Teach For America and later led a Tulsa-based incubator, 36 Degrees North. To connect with Kojo, Follow him on social media at @kojoacFollow "Leading with Lee" on Instagram and Facebook for the daily content that will motivate you at @leadingwithlee Follow Lee on Instagram, Tiktok & Twitter at @leeascottii and to book him for events, visit his website at www.leeascott.com

As part of the salmon connections and resilience series for 54 Degrees North, we reached out to a number of people who have defended salmon in some way against the myriad of threats they face. We hear about their connectedness to this critical species that is so intertwined with cultures and communities of the Skeena region and throughout the Pacific Northwest. Interviews and insights from Yahaan, Chief Namoks, Nuskmata, Jonathon Moore and Chris Sergeant who share their salmon love stories and connections.Music thanks to the regionally talented Telkwa Ted Turner, whose music lives on, and to Facundo Gastiazoro for the artwork.This episode was recorded on unceded Witsuwit'en territory in the summer months of 2022. 54 Degrees North is produced by Nikki Skuce (@nikkiskuce) from the Northern Confluence Initiative (a project of MakeWay), and edited with the help of Namita Prakash. Thanks to the Canada Summer Jobs program for helping make this podcast possible. Contact us at 54DegreesNorthPodcast@gmail.com or check us out on Instagram @northern_confluence 

As part of our salmon connections and resilience series, we explore the potential impacts of mining on salmon watersheds. The episode features some of the authors who collaborated on a science and policy paper published in Science Advances in July 2022 that reviewed the ecological complexities of rivers and some of the risks mines can have on salmon watersheds. We also hear from those facing impacts from mining on the Fraser River. Thanks for the interviews and insights from Chief Laceese, JP Lapointe, Jonathan Moore, Chris Sergeant, and Nuskmata.Music thanks to the regionally talented Los Gringos Salvajes, and Facundo Gastiazoro for the art.This episode was recorded on unceded Witsuwit'en territory in the summer months of 2022, along with clips from a 2021 webinar “Dilution is not the Solution to Pollution”. 54 Degrees North is produced by Nikki Skuce (@nikkiskuce) from the Northern Confluence Initiative (a project of MakeWay), and edited with the help of Namita Prakash.  Thanks to the Canada Summer Jobs program for helping make this podcast possible. Contact us at 54DegreesNorthPodcast@gmail.com or check us out on Instagram @northern_confluence. Take action to help reform BC's mining laws at: https://reformbcmining.ca 

The Skeena River is the second largest salmon producing watershed in Canada and a critical part of it is the unique and highly productive estuary. The area deserves protection from future threats and is essential to the survival and resilience of salmon and cultures in this region. In this episode of 54 Degrees North, we learn more about this critical habitat as part of a series exploring salmon connections and resilience.Interviews and insights from Yahaan (Don Wesley) and Dr. Jonathon Moore.Music thanks to the regionally talented Los Gringos Salvajes, and art work thanks to Facundo Gastiazoro.Thanks to the Canada Summer Jobs program for helping make this possible. This episode was recorded on unceded Witsuwit'en territory in the summer months of 2022. 54 Degrees North is produced by Nikki Skuce (@nikkiskuce) from the Northern Confluence Initiative (a project of MakeWay), and edited with the help of Namita Prakash. Contact us at 54DegreesNorthPodcast@gmail.com or check us out on Instagram @northern_confluence 

To support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on Oct. 10. Free subscribers got it on Oct. 13. To receive future pods as soon as they're live, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription.WhoKen Rider, general manager of Brundage Mountain, IdahoRecorded onOct. 3, 2022About BrundageClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Brundage Mountain Holdings LLC, which Rider describes as a collection of “Idaho families.”Pass affiliations: Indy PassReciprocal pass partners – view full list here:* 5 days at Red Lodge* 4 days at Diamond Peak* 3 days each at Loveland, Monarch, Ski Cooper, Sunlight, Mt. Bohemia, Snow King, Mt. Hood Meadows, Beaver Mountain* 2 days at Homewood* Limited tickets available at Powder Mountain* Half off lift tickets at AltaLocated in: McCall, IdahoClosest neighboring ski areas: Little Ski Hill (10 minutes), Tamarack (47 minutes)Base elevation: 5,882 feetSummit elevation: 7,803 feet at SargentsVertical drop: 1,920 feetSkiable Acres: 1,920 acresAverage annual snowfall: 320 inchesTrail count: 70 (46% black, 33% intermediate, 21% beginner)Lift count: 6 (1 high-speed quad, 4 triples, 1 surface lift - view Lift Blog's of inventory of Brundage's lift fleet)Uphill capacity: 7,900 skiers per hourWhy I interviewed himIn April, I put together a list of 11 ski areas offering bomber reciprocal season pass benefits. Since the passes I chose are inexpensive and offer free days at up to 50 partners, they've become a bit of a cheat code for the adventure set ready to break from (or supplement) Epic or Ikon - even for skiers who live nowhere near the mountain. With that wink-wink in mind, I contacted each ski area to ask whether they mailed season passes. Brundage's answer led to an email exchange that led to this podcast.Some version of that story is how around half of Storm Skiing Podcasts are booked, but the timing was fortuitous. I'd been meaning to reach out anyway. What was this big mountain with big snow that was an Indy Pass favorite? How does a place that's larger than Aspen Mountain and Aspen Highlands combined, that's roughly the size of Beaver Creek or Deer Valley, that gets as much snow as Winter Park, stand so unassuming on the national scene? Yes, the place only has one high-speed lift and no on-slope lodging. It's far off any interstate and not particularly close to any large cities. But it's up the road from a great resort town (McCall), and close enough to supernova-ing Boise to catch some of the ambient heat.Who are you, Brundage? And why are you so shy about it? It was time to talk.What we talked aboutDetermining this year's opening date; snowmaking at Eldora; going from grad school to $10-an-hour peddling Copper Mountain lift tickets; working at heyday Intrawest; Tamarack in its Wild West 2004 grand opening; Tamarack's decline and current renaissance; Grand Targhee; McCall 101; the Little Ski Hill; how mountain-town pricing pressures are hitting Idaho; wage bumps and creative employee housing at Brundage; modernizing Brundage; the ski area's ownership history and the group that purchased it two years ago; Brundage's aggressive, expansive master plan; the Temptation Knob beginner/intermediate pod and what sort of lifts we could see there; Brundage's 320 average annual inches of snow falls at its base; potential lifts up Hidden Valley and Sargents; whether the Centennial triple could make its way to another part of the mountain; potential expansion off the East Side/backside of Brundage; how large Brundage could become if the master plan is fully built out; whether Brundage could be or wants to be a national destination; whether Bluebird Express could ever be upgraded to a six-pack; the evolution of BEARTOPIA!!!; Brundage's snowmaking capabilities, potential, and water source; the incoming new lodge; fixing the flow from parking lot to lodge to rentals to ski school; finally slopeside housing; the tension between the keep-it-wild crowd and people who want to sleep on the mountain; season passes; why Brundage was an inaugural Indy Pass member; the percentage of Brundage skier visits that are Indy and whether the pass is causing peak-period crowding; why the ski area introduced Indy Pass blackouts last year; and why Brundage continues to offer reciprocal lift ticket partnerships (for now).                Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewBrundage is one of many indie resorts across the West that are leveling up. Under an Idaho-strong group that took ownership a few years ago, the ski area is reworking its master plan. The scale of this thing is pretty incredible. Observe:Compare that to the trailmap above. The new plan would add:* A new beginner/intermediate pod on Temptation Knob, adjacent to the existing Beartopia pod. Rider told me that he foresees a high-speed quad rising up the knob's 650-ish vertical feet and a surface lift off the backside.* A fixed-grip quad serving Hidden Valley from the base area.* A pair of lifts serving Sargents, which is currently on the trailmap as unpatrolled terrain. Rider said that he imagines both Sargents and Wayback as fixed-grip doubles or quads.* Two large intermediate/beginner pods off the backside, both likely served by fixed-grip quads – labelled “Lift G” and “Eastside” on the map.If completed, these expansions would vault Brundage into Bogus Basin/Sun Valley territory size-wise, but there's a lot more happening here: a new lodge that isn't 700 steps above the parking lot, on-site residences, extensive (and creative) employee housing, serious snowmaking investments, and much more.Brundage is also a bit of a barnstormer, among the top two Indy Pass resorts in the West every year since launch. New England, of course, is Indy ground zero, but this year Brundage finished 10th in redemptions out of 82 Indy Pass partners. The only Western resort to top out higher was Utah A-bomb Powder Mountain.That really surprised me. My guess would have been Indy's big Washington ski areas – Mission Ridge, White Pass, 49 Degrees North – and Silver Mountain plopped dead off Interstate 90 an hour east of Spokane. Yes, the Tamarack/Brundage combo – the mountains sit less than an hour apart – is one of Indy's best, but the McCall Miracle was a top draw even before Tamarack joined in 2020.Brundage is telling a good story, and it's getting better. Now was a great time for a check-in.Questions I wish I'd askedI meant to ask about the Rainbow Fire, which hit Brundage last month but ended up leaving minimal damage. An article on the resort's website summarizes the whole ordeal pretty well anyway:Just five days after lightning sparked a fire at the top of Brundage Mountain, the Forest Service has declared the Rainbow Fire to be officially under control.The Rainbow Fire was sparked by lightning during a thunderstorm event on the evening of Wednesday, September 7 and was immediately visible from both McCall and New Meadows. Initial attack efforts kept the fire from spreading beyond the upper Hidden Valley area, which is located to the north of Brundage Mountain's main front side runs.Smokejumpers and engine crews engaged with the fire the first night, and an aerial assault from helicopters and scoopers doused the flames with water and applied fire retardant at the top of Brundage Mountain the following day.Ground crews circled the fire zone with hoses and worked through the weekend to monitor the perimeter and put out hot spots. The fire was contained to an area of less than five acres.“The Brundage Mountain team would, once again, like to thank the smokejumpers, firefighters and fire managers who sprung into action to quickly control this fire,” says Brundage Mountain General Manager, Ken Rider. “Wednesday night's lightning event resulted in a number of new fire starts on the Payette National Forest. The efforts to contain and control those new fires, while continuing to make progress on larger, existing fires in the area, speaks to the skill, dedication and hard work of our friends at the Payette National Forest and partner organizations like SITPA, the BLM and Lone Peak Fire Department from Utah.”Brundage Mountain crews will be assessing the Rainbow Fire scar but the impacts on skiers and riders are expected to be minimal.“The torching and visible flames the first night of this fire were alarming,” added Rider. “We are beyond grateful that it will have such a minor impact on our overall operations and on the skiing and riding public.”What I got wrongI say in the intro that Rider began his ski career at Intrawest. As we discuss in the conversation, his first ski job was actually at Eldora. I also asked Rider about going to the “new ski state” of Idaho when he went to work at Tamarack – I meant to say “new-to-you ski state,” since Rider was moving there from Colorado. I also have it stuck in my head that Beaver Creek, opened in 1980, was the last major ski resort developed in the U.S. prior to Tamarack in 2004, but Rider correctly reminded me that it was Deer Valley, in 1981. One could also argue for Yellowstone Club (1997), Mount Bohemia (2000), Silverton (2001), or even Whitetail (1991). But those all have some sort of asterisk: too oligarchy, too minimalist, too borderline-backcountryish, too Pennsylvania. The NSAA keeps a list here, though it's missing quite a few ski areas (Wolf Creek), and has a bunch that haven't operated in a while (Gateway, New Hampshire; Elk Ridge, Arizona).Why you should ski BrundageIf you're reading this far down the page then you don't need much of a nudge to pencil “ski 2,000-acre, 2,000-foot-vertical-drop ski area with 300-plus inches of snow” into your winter calendar. The skiing, like most Idaho skiing, is pretty great. But I always feel a sense of urgency when describing ski areas that are poised to unfold like a pop-up book into something far larger. It's only going to take a few more seasons of Epic and Ikon mountains disgorging the Epkonotron onto their slopes to turbocharge the Skipass Hack-O-Matic 5000. Savvy vacationers are going to figure out the McCall + a growing Brundage + a growing Tamarack = a-good-ski-vacation-without-feeling-as-though-you're-re-enacting-the-invasion-of-Normandy equation at some point.Brundage will never be Park City or Palisades Tahoe. But it will get bigger and better and busier than it is today. So go now, while their longest lift is still a fixed-grip triple crawling 1,653 vertical feet up the incline, over hillocks and pine forests and with the lakes placid in the distance. Enjoy the motion in the midst of stillness, the big mountain with the little-mountain vibe and prices and energy. And look around and imagine what it will one day be.Podcast notesRider and I discussed the Beartopia map briefly. It's a pretty brilliant rework of Brundage's beginner corner. If you don't have kids, perhaps you don't agree. But I recently sat beside my 5-year-old for a flight across the Atlantic, during which time he became obsessed with the route map displayed on the seatback monitor. The touchscreen offered two options: the regular map or the “kids' map.” The kids' map was nothing more than the regular map with some skunks and deer and bears superimposed over the atlas. And yet so extreme was his delight that you would have thought I had just invented cookie burgers. Yes Son it's just like a hamburger but instead of meat there's a giant cookie in there and yes of course you can have seven of them.Anyway, here's the map:Rider at one point compares the Brundage baselodge to “a steamship on the Mississippi Delta.” It was not meant to be a compliment. The lodge, like those antique riverboats, is staggered, boxy, imposing. An anachronism in our architecture-at-peace-with-the-earth moment. Still, as an avid reader of Twain, I found the comparison interesting, a literary-historic reference in a podcast about an Idaho ski area. Those sorts of thinkers, fecund and surprising, are the sorts of folks I want running my local.I also mentioned in the intro that Brundage is my third Idaho podcast this year. In January, I went deep on the Tamarack story with the resort's president, Scott Turlington:Then, this summer, I chatted with Bogus Basin General Manager Brad Wilson:The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 109/100 in 2022, and number 355 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane). You can also email skiing@substack.com.The Storm is exploring the world of lift-served skiing all year long. Join us.Like The Storm? Invite the rest of your organization in via a per-subscriber discount that can be managed through a single administrator: Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

Today on Exploring the Marketplace, Shawn Bolz & Bob Hasson interview Bob's spouse, Lauren Hasson,  Lauren is a cultural catalyst who has pioneered a relational movement between organizations, ministries and entrepreneurs. She is a Speaker, Writer, Founder of Longitude and 33 Degrees North, and she delivers revelatory teaching with a prophetic edge that equips and empowers people to move in the fullness of who God has created them to be. Tune in as Shawn, Bob & Lauren share an epic prophetic journey of land and how God taught her that justice is in His hands, how Lauren connects with God in her life and career, and understanding God's vision for women in ministry and leadership. God is always speaking, if you will just slow down enough to listen.

Today we are talking about Andropause which is sometimes been miscalled the 'male menopause'.To help me understand more about Andropause I am joined by James Davis is one half of the husband and wife team behind multi-award-winning coaching and fitness company 38 Degrees North and cohost of the highly successful wellness podcast The Midlife Mentors.We dive into this area of men's health that is rarely discussed in public and shine a light on...What is the andropause?How is it different to menopause?What are the symptoms?The impact of andropause on our relationshipsWhat can men do about it?You can connect with James here at https://themidlifementors.com and find out more about the programmes on offer and tune in to the podcastFollow The Midlife MentorsInstagram| Facebook|If you have enjoyed this conversation then go to https://www.thrivethrumenopause.com and rate and review the podcast.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/thriving-thru-menopause/exclusive-contentAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

What does it take to reinvent a community, revive a local economy, and reinvigorate a workforce? In this five-part Work in Progress podcast series – Destination Tulsa: Tech Hub in the Heartland – we look at how Tulsa, Oklahoma, is embracing in-demand tech industries to do just that. At the heart of the effort is a strong foundation of education, entrepreneurship, health care tech, energy tech, and cybersecurity. In the final episode of our Destination Tulsa: Tech Hub in the Heartland, we examine how Tulsa is attracting tech startups to the city, how it's encouraging homegrown talent to build their businesses in their community, and how it's retaining that talent to create a thriving and equitable economic base. On a recent visit to Tulsa, I stopped by 36 Degrees North, one of three downtown co-working spaces where entrepreneurs, innovators, and remote workers can come in and grab a table or a conference room, or network. One of those 36 Degrees North spaces – called the Business Incubator – is located in City Hall. You might consider it Ground Zero for Tulsa's tech reinvention. There I met two young tech startup founders, one from Norway and one a Tulsa native. I also talked with an entrepreneur who took Tulsa Remote up on its offer of cash to move there.  In this episode, you'll hear from: Martin Lien, founder and CEO of VOLT, who explains how he ended up in Tulsa from Norway and why he chose to stayAmbrose Midget, founder and CEO of Fresh Fabrics, on the support she's gotten from the tech community as she grows her new tech businessKian Kamas, executive director of Tulsa Authority for Economic Opportunity, on how growing strategically requires investing in public resourcesTyrance Billingsly, founder and executive director of Black Tech Street, on inspiring Black youth and showing them they have a future in tech in their hometownDustin Baker, founder and CEO of Baker Lewis, on why he took up the Tulsa Remote offer to relocate to the city and how it changed his businessJustin Harlan, managing director of Tulsa Remote, on how the pay-to-relocate initiative is changing the future of Tulsa You can listen to the full conversation here, or look for the Work in Progress podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Destination Tulsa: Tech Hub in the Heartland is made possible by the support of Tulsa Innovation Labs. Episode 223: Destination Tulsa - Attracting and Retaining Tech StartupsHost & Executive Producer: Ramona Schindelheim, Editor-in-Chief, WorkingNationProducer: Larry BuhlExecutive Producers: Joan Lynch and Melissa PanzerTheme Music: Composed by Lee Rosevere and licensed under CC by 4.0Music for Destination Tulsa series: From Bensound.comDownload the transcript for this podcast here.You can check out all the other podcasts at this link: Work in Progress podcasts

This episode of Grow With Us features Tara Payne, Member Success Coordinator at 36 Degrees North. Tara is an entrepreneur, mother, and connector of people in Tulsa. In this episode, Evan and Tara talk about the importance of strong support networks when trying something new, Black History Month in Tulsa, and the Black Gold Entrepreneur series. Join us today! Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or follow on Spotify  to get notified of our releases and share with anyone. https://open.spotify.com/show/6LzbIUdXRlrymXQIk89XF5 (Spotify) https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/grow-with-us/id1572581072 (Apple Podcast) https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9ncm93LXdpdGgtdXMuY2FwdGl2YXRlLmZtL3Jzc2ZlZWQ (Google Podcast) If you are interested in looking at our open career opportunities, don't forget to check out our career website:https://talent.intulsa.com/ ( https://talent.intulsa.com/) Additionally, join our Talent Network for featured opportunities and tailored outreach from our Talent Partners at: https://jobs.intulsa.com/talent-network (https://jobs.intulsa.com/talent-network)

Techstination, your destination for gadgets and gear.   I'm Fred Fishkin.       It's the kind of technology that gets me charged up.   Get ready for a pair of sunglasses…that you will have to charge up.  They're called 32 Degrees North from DeepOptics….and the electrical current can transform the sunglasses...

Join us for another episode of the Be Atento podcast! Aaron and special co-host and producer Jesse talk with Devon Laney, President & CEO at 36 Degrees North. Aaron and Jess talk with Devon about his entrepreneurial journey, his time in Alabama and the growth of 36 Degrees North over the past few years.  Subscribe to the Be Atento Podcast anywhere podcasts can be found, if you need help, check us out on Captivate:  https://the-be-atento-podcast.captivate.fm/ (https://the-be-atento-podcast.captivate.fm)

Claire & James Davis are a mid life, award winning duo and owners of world renowned fitness brand 38 Degrees North and creators of the phenomenally successful, five star rated ‘The Midlife Mentors' podcast.The Midlife Method has been developed over the past 10 years – backed by years of research, experience and client transformations – that's had a profound and lasting impact on the lives it's touched.The science based method promises strength and resilience in body, mind and emotional wellbeing– giving clients the ultimate step by step toolkitthey need to regain control, reduce stress and dramatically improve their quality of life.Claire & James continue to be a force of truth and integrity in the health and wellness industry – demystifying the fads, fake promises and pseudo science that plague our news feedsCONNECT WITH James & ClaireWebsite Instagram 

Elizabeth Frame Ellison had endless professional opportunities upon graduating from law school, but she chose the less obvious one. Instead of the "typical" corporate or big firm career path, she chose to serve those who needed it the most. From her experiences in our broken justice system to her travels abroad to her love for her Tulsa community, Elizabeth is changing lives one dish at a time. Join us as we talk about:Everyone deserves a fighting chanceDifferent is great and deliciousEquity is inherently valuable and builds good businessFaking it til you make it... sort ofThe world is your oyster Get ready to pack your bags to head to Tulsa, Oklahoma.About ElizabethElizabeth Frame Ellison is the President and CEO of Lobeck Taylor Family Foundation (LTFF) in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In her eleven years leading LTFF, Ellison has founded Oklahoma's FIRST food hall, Mother Road Market (2018) as well as Tulsa's kickstart kitchen incubator, Kitchen 66 (2016). Ellison is also a founding partner of 36 Degrees North (2016), a co-workspace and basecamp for entrepreneurs in Tulsa's Arts District and a founding board member of Vest (2020).Ellison received recognition as one of Oklahoma's 40 under 40 and several awards for small business and entrepreneurial support. She has given several keynote addresses and served as a panelist at a Google conference on the future of food in 2017.Ellison received her Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and Classical Culture in 2004 and worked for Boren for Congress as the deputy finance director before joining Congressman Boren (OK Dist. 2) as a Legislative Assistant. In 2006, Ellison served as Political Director when her mother, Kathy Taylor, decided to run for Mayor and asked for campaign help. After a successful campaign, Ellison entered Law School at The University of Oklahoma. As the class President, Ellison was honored to give the commencement address at her Law School graduation. In 2012, Ellison was elected to serve as a school board representative for Tulsa Technology Center.When she isn't working, Ellison enjoys travel, culinary exploration, true crime novels and athletic activity alongside her husband Chris and their boys Taylor (9) and Wyatt (6). Ellison lives in Tulsa and San Francisco.Social: @elizabethframeellison

Claire and James Davis are the husband and wife team behind behind multi-award winning coaching and fitness company 38 Degrees North. The couple have a successful midlife health podcast The Midlife Mentors (top 2% glob- ally on Listen Notes) and their passion is helping midlifers achieve not only the body, but the lifestyle they deserve. The couple's science based approach, leveraging their backgrounds in psychology, coaching and NLP, empowers individuals with the tools and knowledge they need to make positive changes to their lives. They also work with corporates providing coaching and wellness programmes for individuals and teams. They run presentations on The Science Of Staying Young, Midlife Mistakes And How To Fix Them, The Male Menopause, and How to Naturally Navigate A Happy & Healthy Peri-menopause & Menopause, The Science Of Stress. Claire and James are regular media commentators and have been featured in The New York Times, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Observer, The Mail, National Geographic Traveller, Conde Nast Traveller, Womens Health, Mens Fitness and more. themidlifementors.com team@themidlifementors.com INSTAGRAM --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/tracy-minnoch/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/tracy-minnoch/support

This episode of Grow With Us features Marc LaManque, Tulsa Service Year Fellow at 36 Degrees North. 36 Degrees North is the entrepreneurial hub of Tulsa that provides resources to founders and entrepreneurs through community engagement initiatives and coworking spaces. Tune in to find out how Marc started his career in Tulsa and how the entrepreneurial spirit can be fostered through community.  If you are interested in looking at our open roles, don't forget to check out our career website: https://talent.intulsa.com/ (https://talent.intulsa.com/) Additionally, join our Talent Network for featured opportunities and tailored outreach from our Talent Partners at: https://jobs.intulsa.com/talent-network (https://jobs.intulsa.com/talent-network) 

Devon Laney is a tech entrepreneur and also has over 15 years of experience in building thriving entrepreneurial & innovation ecosystems. Devon has also spoken in both the U.S. and internationally on entrepreneurial development, business incubation, and innovation, and currently serves as the Board Chairman of the International Business Innovation Association. And today, Devon talks with Canem about how his team is maximizing its momentum and finding new, fresh ways to serve and elevate the Tulsa community through entrepreneurial support made possible by 36 Degrees North. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/endeavornorthamerica/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/endeavornorthamerica/support

After sailing 100,000 miles around the world, full-time filmmakers from the SV Delos crew go arctic.Read the full article on The Outdoor Journal.SV Delos is the most popular sailing channel on youtube. Over the past 10 years, they've sailed 100,000 miles around the world, enough to loop the equator three times, and they've filmed every thrilling adventure. Brady Trautman and Alex Blue film, edit and produce weekly episodes for SV Delos, of which there are over 430. They are used to traveling close to the equator, but they decided to step out of their comfort zone by committing to a sailing expedition in the arctic, just 600 miles from the North Pole. In this 4-part docuseries, the team covers several threatening issues to the wildlife and ecology of the region - from the extreme rate of glacial retreating, to the negative effect of Cruise ship tourism, to the brutal history of whaling in Svalbard, to the harmful impact of plastics pollution on Svalbard, which is in direct line of the gulf stream.In addition to these sobering themes, the series includes a veritable “polar petting zoo” with numerous wildlife encounters, including polar bears, walruses and a gigantic pod of beluga whales.In this episode of The Outdoor Journal Podcast, Trautman and Blue discuss  the crew member they wish they didn't invite on, their most intimate wildlife encounter in the arctic and how to keep from murdering each other while living, working and traveling together with no personal space and nowhere to escape to.The best way you can support stories like this is to subscribe to the podcast right now and take a second to leave your review.Alright, let's go.

It's the BIG Christmas giveaway on The Bernard Geraghty Photography Podcast. I am delighted to be joined by The Irish Photography Podcast host Darren J Spoonley for this BIG Christmas giveaway. I have over €2,000 worth of prizes to give away thanks to some small Irish businesses and my amazing sponsors. Thanks to them I'm giving away 12 prizes, be sure to tune in to this episode from start to finish to hear about all prizes in detail, find out how to enter and when winners will be announced. 12 prizes = 12 chances of winning. Please rate review & subscribe | Follow us on Instagram @bgphotopod | Join our private Facebook group bglandscapetours. Photo Workshops & Tours at www.bglandscapetours.ie Special thanks to all sponsors: Formatt Hitech Filters, Shimoda Bags, Columbia Sportswear, 53 Degrees North, Whelan Cameras, The Glenmalure Lodge in Wicklow, 360DPI Printing & Framing, LED Lenser & F1.0 Camera Repair.