Podcasts about Mad River

The Sundilla Radio Hour for the week of 05/12/2025 featuring: Tiffany Williams “When You Go” When You Go (2019 Tiffany Williams) 4:56 Joy Oladokun “Nazareth (Live)” Single (2025 White Boy) 4:25 Julian Taylor “100 Proof” Beyond the Reservoir (2022 Howling Turtle) 3:57 Louise Coombe “Nameless Lady” Paris (2025 Louise Coombe) 3:08 The Dillards “Don't Hit Your Gramma with a Great Big Stick” Songs that Made Charlene Cry (2025 The Dillards) 1:43 Low Lily “Good, Bad, Better” 10,000 Days Like These (2018 Mad River) 3:26 Donal Hinely “When We Meet Again” Everything Must Go (2024 Donal Hinely) 2:42 Minor Gold “Cannonball” Minor Gold (2023 Minor Gold) 3:35 The Rough & Tumble “You Get What You Get” Hymns For My Atheist Sister & Her Friends To Sing Along To (2024 Penny Jar) 4:00 Vashti Bunyan “Train Song” Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind (Singles and Demos 1964 to 1967) (2007 DiCristina) 2:17 Jake Blount “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” Spider Tales (2020 Jake Blount) 3:56 Dawn Landes “The Housewife's Lament (1866)” The Liberated Woman's Songbook (2024 FunMachine) 5:32 Grayson Capps “Moody River” Heartbreak, Misery & Death (2024 Royal Potato Family) 2:29 Maya de Vitry & Ethan Jodziewicz “April in Your Eyes” April in Your Eyes: A Tribute to the Songs of John Lilly (2021 Diamond Ranch) 2:30

Mad River school bus controversy; Idiot of the Week candidate; Mail Call; Brands from your childhood; Ohio Man achieves legendary status; Neighborly lawn competition; Crazy kids; Creeper janitor; Tasty Tuesday; Debut of "Brynnoyances"

Rob is outside in amazing Vermont again ~ for Stand-Up shows and skiing, he talks about the current legalization temperature in the US, minimalism, ski-town hippy vibes and modern hotel coffee. IG ~ @cchpost

Filmmakers Dave Feral and Michelle Hernandez talk with The EcoNews Report about their new film about Baduwa't — a.k.a., the Mad River.PREVIOUSLY:(PREVIEW) The Makers of the New Baduwa't Documentary Want People to Get Mad About the RiverSupport the show

What does Harry Potter and railfanning have in common, well nothing really, unless of course you add in an Ohio native named Adam Matthews, railroad preservationist, photographer and model railroader who was inspired by his grandfather, a retired vice superintendent of shipping at US steel in Lorain, Ohio. We've been wanting to interview Adam for quite sometime now, after stumbling across his website “Train Wizard Productions,” a must see for anyone even remotely interested in trains, model railroading and great photography. With more than 150,000 followers on Instagram, Adam is a preservationist heavily involved with the Nickel Plate Historical Society, Mad River and NKP Museum, plus the Fort Wayne Railroad Historical Society. He's also got a great O-Gauge 3-Rail layout. There's so much information in this podcast by the time you're finished you'll be dizzier than a trout in a blender. Enjoy!!

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

Send us a textIn this episode Nicole and Sarah welcome Jordan Schaefer, who runs marketing and events for the Mad River Taste Place in Vermont's Mad River Valley (Waitsfield, Vt). Jordan shares her journey from urban living to embracing the Vermont lifestyle, highlighting the unique offerings of the Mad River Taste Place, a specialty grocery store featuring local Vermont products. We loved delving into the art of building the perfect cheese board, with Jordan offering expert tips on pairings and selections, including recommendations for apres ski snacks and hosting. Jordan spotlights local Vermont cheeses and producers, particularly praising Von Trapp Farmstead's Mount Alice brie-style cheese. We also touch on ski culture in the Mad River Valley, the experience of transitioning to rural mountain life, and the unique school ski programs available for children in Vermont. We conclude with information about upcoming events at the Mad River Taste Place, including their Saturday sampling series during farmers market season.Keep up with the Latest from Taste Place:Website: www.madrivertaste.comInstagram: www.instagram.comGet your Ikon Pass until December 12th here https://www.ikonpass.com/. For the Kids Ski Free Deal, check out this post here www.momtrends.com/travel/kids-ski-free-week-at-alterra-mountains Ready for your next adventure? Download the Vrbo app or check out Vrbo.com for trusted, family-friendly getaways and plan a stay everyone will love! Skida's hats, neck warmers, and headbands come in the most amazing prints – from bold colors to playful patterns, there's something for every style. For gift giving, look no further than the high pile fleece collection of hats, neck warmers and mittensSki Moms Podcast listeners can use save 20% Head to skihaus.com/jr-lease-trade-in to get more details on the Junior Trade-In Program. Visit Ski Haus in Woburn, Framingham, or Salem, NH, or go to skihaus.com. Support the showKeep up with the Latest from the Ski Moms!Website: www.skimomsfun.comSki Moms Discount Page: https://skimomsfun.com/discountsSki Moms Ski Rental HomesJoin the 10,000+ Ski Moms Facebook GroupInstagram: https://instagram.com/skimomsfun Send us an email and let us know what guests and topics you'd like to hear next! Sarah@skimomsfun.comNicole@skimomsfun.com

Whisk(e)y Wednesday: Mad River w/ Maura Connelly Oct 23rd 2024

On this episode of Words on a Wire, host Daniel Chacón talks with author Lucrecia Guerrero about her new book, On the Mad River (Mouthfeel Press, 2024).Lucrecia Guerrero grew up in Nogales, Arizona in a bilingual and bicultural home--her mother is from Kentucky, her father from Mexico. Both parents held a fierce pride in their perspective cultures and shared stories with their children. Guerrero is proud to say that she was raised on biscuits and gravy with a jalapeno on the side. Her stories inevitably involve cultural clashes between experience and tradition; and explore themes such as the abuse of power, both political and personal, and the strength and beauty of the human spirit.Guerrero has lived in the Midwest for years where she teaches creative writing.

Mad river Ambience, and you read that right. Vermont has a Mad River. It flows North toward payback and revenge. And it's a great place to swim. Spend an evening on the rocky bank listening to a small angry river gush by.

A noir romance set in a place a lot like Dayton, Ohio.

California's system of awarding water rights is anachronistic and out of touch with modern needs. Yet, we are still bound by it. The Humboldt Bay Municipal Water District is navigating these challenges. The District once provided a lot of water to the pulp mills of Humboldt Bay. When these shuttered, the District faced a challenge: without putting that water to “beneficial use,” the District could lose its water right. (And in the worst case scenario, some big water user could put their straw into our river and slurp that water away, like is done in the Trinity and Eel Rivers.)Now the District is proposing a new in-stream flow dedication to protect that water right. District Board Director Michelle Fuller joins the show to discuss the process to dedicate an in-stream flow right.Support the Show.

Lee Kittell co-hosts with Ross Connolly. They are joined first by the Director of the Composting Association of Vermont Natasha Duarte. Then later, John Malter of the Mad River Resource Management Alliance.

The Sundilla Radio Hour for the week of 04/15/2024 featuring: Kelly Hunt “Across the Great Divide” Even the Sparrow (2019 Rare Bird) 4:58 Sonya Cohen Cramer “You've Been a Friend to Me” You've Been a Friend to Me (1992 Rounder) 3:23 Julian Taylor “I Am a Tree” Beyond the Reservoir (2022 Howling Turtle) 4:32 Kaia Kater “In Montreal” Strange Medicine (2024 Kaia Kater) 3:33 James Lee Stanley “Heart in Amber” The Day to Day (2024 James Lee Stanley) 4:41 Jeff Talmadge “Top of the Hour” Sparrow (2024 Jeff Talmadge) 2:45 Dawn Landes “Keep Woman in Her Sphere (1882)” The Liberated Woman's Songbook (2024 FunMachine) 2:54 Jillian Matundan “All Mine” Singing to the Moon (2024 Jillian Matundan) 3:14 The Milk Carton Kids “Running on Sweet Smile” I Only See the Moon (2023 Far Cry) 3:21 Bud And Travis “South Wind” Bud and Travis, 1959 (2014 Vintage Music) 2:05 Low Lily “Good, Bad, Better” 10,000 Days Like These (2018 Mad River) 3:26 Peter Mulvey “Shoulderbirds (You Know Me)” More Notes From Elsewhere (2024 Peter Mulvey) 3:25 The Bombadils “Through and Through” Dear Friend (2022 The Bombadils) 3:29 Over The Moon “I Can't Get Over You” Chinook Waltz (2021 Borealis) 3:32

Part of the magic of live comedy, especially when it comes to just putting on stand-up, is that it seems like a lone person is captivating and inspiring spontaneous laughter to a group of strangers shrouded in darkness. Of course, the ingredients as to what make that magic actually happen are elusive and ever changing (not to mention, wholly impermanent). LA comedy torchbearer and beloved comedian Paul Danke and TCB's very own Jake Kroeger dig into what makes live comedy special (when it is indeed special, of course) as well tease what they got up their sleeve to possibly make that happen. Follow Paul @pauldanke across socials and get into his brand new album, Mad River, here. Produced by Jake Kroeger Music by Brian Granillo Artwork by Andrew Delman and Jake Kroeger

Paul Danke has never seen The Bucket List, but he rewrote it and we read his script! First timer Paul takes on this oddly-forgotten-but-phrase-mainstreaming film, and then we play some games! Kyle and Paul are joined by Adam Newman!  Check out Paul's new album, Mad River, on A Special Things Records, streaming and for purchase wherever you get stuff! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ryan Conner, Paul Danke, Annelise Dekker-Hernandez, Matt Kirshen, and Brendan Sargent join Brido on the panel.  They discuss the good ol' pre-Internet days, the Katt Williams-Shannon Sharpe interview, Jo Koy hosting the Globes, Dave Chappelle, the moon, and a soung tournament from 1957. Video and extras are at www.patreon.com/brido

Comedian Paul Danke returns to the charts to promote his new album, Mad River! Topics: The Country Quiz. Following JC. Erewhon Water. Reacher Recap. Dan+Shay+Reznor. Grease 3: Burning Aquaman.Subscribe at www.whochartedpod.com to support the show, and gain access to Two Charted, the weekly Howard/Brett deep-dive bonus show, and the entire Who Charted and Preem Streem archives ad-free! Now includes the Who Charted Holiday Bundle.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on Nov. 21. It dropped for free subscribers on Nov. 28. 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:WhoBrandon Swartz, General Manager of Attitash Mountain Resort, New HampshireRecorded onNovember 6, 2023About AttitashClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Vail ResortsLocated in: Bartlett, New HampshireYear founded: 1964Pass affiliations:* Epic Pass: unlimited access* Epic Local Pass: unlimited access* Northeast Value Pass: unlimited access* Northeast Midweek Pass: unlimited midweek access* Epic Day Pass: 1 to 7 days of access with all resorts, 32-resorts, and 22-resorts tiersClosest neighboring ski areas: Black Mountain (:14), Cranmore (:16), Wildcat (:23), Bretton Woods (:28), King Pine (:35), Pleasant Mountain (:45), Mt. Eustis (:49), Cannon (:49), Loon (1:04), Sunday River (1:04), Mt. Abram (1:07)Base elevation: 600 feetSummit elevation: 2,350 feet at the top of Attitash PeakVertical drop: 1,750 feetSkiable Acres: 311-plusAverage annual snowfall: 120 inchesTrail count: 68 (27% most difficult, 44% intermediate, 29% novice)Lift count: 8 (3 high-speed quads, 2 fixed-grip quads, 2 triples, 1 surface lift – view Lift Blog's inventory of Attitash's lift fleet)View historic Attitash trailmaps on skimap.org.Why I interviewed himAsk any casual NBA fan which player won the most championships in the modern era, and they will probably give you Michael and Scottie. Six titles, two threepeats, '91 to '93 and '96 to '98. And it would've been eight in a row had MJ not followed his spirit animal onto the baseball diamond for two summers, they might add.But they're wrong. The non-1950s-to-‘60s player with the most NBA titles is Robert Horry, Big Shot Bob, who played an important role in seven title runs with three teams: the 1994 and '95 Houston Rockets; the 2000, 2001, and 2002 Lakers; and the 2005 and '07 San Antonio Spurs. While he's not in the hall of fame (Shaq thinks he should be), and doesn't make The Athletic or Hoops Hype's top 75 lists, Stadium Talk lists Horry as one of the 25 most clutch players of all time.Attitash might be skiing's Robert Horry. Always in the halo of greatness, never the superstar. Vail Resorts is the ski area's third consecutive conglomerate owner, and the third straight that doesn't quite seem to know what to do with the place. LBO Resort Enterprises opened Bear Peak in 1994, but then seemed to forget about Attitash after the merger with American Skiing Company two years later (ASC did install the Flying Yankee detachable quad in 1998). Peak Resorts picked Attitash out of ASC's rubbish bin in 2007, then mostly let the place languish for a decade before chopping down the Top Notch double chair in 2018 with no explanation. That left no redundant route to the top of Attitash peak, which became a problem when the Summit Triple dropped dead for most of the 2018-19 ski season. Rather than replace the lift, Peak repaired it, then handed the spruced-up-but-still-hated machine off to Vail Resorts, along with the rest of its portfolio, that summer.Like someone who inherits a jam-packed storage bin from a distant strange relative, Vail spent a couple of years just staring at all the boxes, uncertain what was in them and kind of afraid to look. Those first few winters, which corresponded with Covid, labor shortages, and supply-chain issues, weren't great ones at Attitash. A general sense of dysfunction reigned: snowmaking lagged, lifts opened late in the season or not at all, generic corporate statements thanked the hardworking teams without acknowledging the mountain's many urgent shortcomings. As it was picking through the storage unit, Vail made the strange decision of stacking the New Hampshire box next to the Midwest boxes, effectively valuing Attitash and long-suffering sister resort Wildcat – both with 2,000-ish-foot vertical drops and killer terrain – on the same day-pass tier as 240-foot Mad River, Ohio and 35-acre Snow Creek, Missouri. Anyone committed to arguing against absentee ownership of New England ski areas had a powerful exhibit A with Attitash.Then, last year, Vail opened the Attitash box. And instead of the Beanie Baby collection and Battle of Hamburger Hill commemorative coins that the company expected to find, they pulled out a stack of Microsoft stock certificates from the 1986 IPO. And they were like, “Well now, these might be worth something.”So they got to work. The company improved snowmaking. They replaced the 49-year-old East/West double-double with a brand-new fixed-grip quad. They raised the companywide minimum wage to $20 an hour, well above average for New Hampshire, helping Attitash staff up and resemble a functioning business. Then, this summer, they finally did it: demolished the wickedly inefficient Summit Triple and replaced it with a glimmering high-speed quad.Of course, in true Attitash fashion, the Mountaineer, as the new lift is called, was the last of 60-plus 2023 lift projects in North America to fly towers. But the chair will be open this winter, and it should reset the mountain's rap. Whether Mountaineer will finally push the resort's reputation and stature to match its burly vertical drop and trail count remains to be seen. Ski's readers did not list Attitash on their top 20 eastern ski areas for 2023. Z Rankings lists the mountain 28th in the East.Unlike NBA players, ski areas' careers span generations. In this way, they're more like the franchises themselves. Sometimes the Lakers have Magic or Kobe, and in some eras, well, they don't. Attitash just went a few decades without a franchise player. They may have finally drafted one. This is a top-20 New England ski area that may finally be ready to act like it.What we talked aboutThe overdue death of the Attitash triple; the story behind the “Mountaineer” lift name; why a high-speed quad was the right replacement lift; take the train to the mountain; what happened to the lift tower that Flying Yankee and Summit Triple shared; expansion opportunities off Attitash Peak; other alignments the ski area considered for Mountaineer; why and where Attitash moved the Mountaineer lift load station; the circa-Peak Resorts Mount Snow intelligentsia; Vail's culture of internal development and promotion; the unique challenges of running Attitash in a very crowded neighborhood; the Attitash-Wildcat combo; the Progression Quad replacement for the East/West double-double; considering Bear Peak's lift fleet; why glades disappeared from Attitash's trailmap, and why they're back; whether the old Top Notch double chair line could ever enter the official trail network; snowmaking upgrades; how big of an impact the $20-an-hour minimum wage had on Attitash; employee housing; Northeast-specific Epic Passes; and the Epic Day Pass.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewThe Mountaineer, of course. For 30 years, successive owners have insisted that Attitash Peak was incompatible with a high-speed quad: too much capacity feeding too few trails from a lift that would cost too much to build.Well, Vail built it. So Swartz and I discuss why, after saying no for so long, mom finally bought us our expensive toy. I won't get into that here, because that's what the podcast is for, but I will make this point: there is a dirt-stupid but persistent narrative that Vail Resorts doesn't care about its eastern properties, and only bought them to entice monied New Englanders to its western trophies. But, nearly seven years after entering the region with the surprise purchase of Stowe, Vail has done plenty to disprove that notion, launching Northeast-specific Epic Passes in 2020; installing new six-packs at Stowe, Mount Snow, and Okemo; adding high-speed quads at Attitash and Mount Snow; and moving another HSQ at Okemo. It's been a quiet but complete gut-renovation of what had been some very tired ski areas.Vail must feel, often, like it can't win. They're often framed as elitists for building too much and as cheapskates for investing too little. Social media piles on because their resorts are too busy but also because they're priced too high. I'll admit that I criticize them for making lift tickets too expensive and passes too cheap. The Mountaineer, which New England has spent two decades begging for, will likely draw criticism for overcrowding Attitash as skiers soon forget the aches and pains of the Summit Triple.Skiers can be impossible pains in the ass, no question. But Vail showed up at the steakhouse and came back to the table with the whole buffet. In the five years from 2016 to 2021, Vail purchased 29 ski areas. Prior to that, it owned just 11. That's nearly a quadrupling of size in half a decade. That would be challenging at any time. Add the Covid face-rearranging, and it was nearly impossible to digest.After several rough winters, however, Vail may be taming this herd of feral horses. They're not done yet, but things are calming down. The lift investments are helping, management is stabilizing. They still need to loosen the reigns on snowmaking outside of the West, better limit crowds on peak days, and find a less-gun-to-the-head method of incentivizing Epic Pass sales than $299 lift tickets. But Vail Resorts, as a stable entity rather than a growth monster, is beginning to gel, and Attitash symbolizes that metamorphosis as well as any mountain in the portfolio.What I got wrongWe alluded to the fact that Attitash would fly the Mountaineer towers on the day we recorded this, Nov. 6. Weather delays pushed that installation to later in the month.This isn't something I got wrong at the time, but the Epic Day Pass rates I mentioned were tier four prices. They've since increased slightly. Here are the current (and final) rates (the 22-resorts tier gets you in the door at Attitash):Why you should ski AttitashLet's continue the basketball metaphor. Who's your starting five if New Hampshire is your basketball team? Cannon makes the roster by default, a 2,180-footer with the best terrain in the state. Go ahead and fill out the roster with your other 2,000-footers: Loon, with its jungle gym of fancy upgraded lifts; Wildcat, with its Mount Washington views and high-speed top-to-bottom laps of twisted glory; and sprawling, falling Waterville Valley.So who's your number five? I'd accept arguments for gorgeous Mount Sunapee, beefy Bretton Woods, or Attitash. But as captain, I'm probably picking Attitash. Maybe not the Attitash of three years ago, but the Attitash that just got back from Chairlift Camp and can now offer a true, modern ski experience across its two mountains.But, carve away the cosmetics, and the truth is that Attitash is an incredible ski mountain. That 1,750 vertical feet is all fall line, consistent, beautiful cruisers up and down. It's not the steepest mountain, or the snowiest, or the most convenient to get to – you'll drive past Waterville and Loon and Cannon to get there (or not, Route Expert Bro; save it for your Powder DAWGZ WhatsApp chat). But from a pure, freefalling skiing point of view, it's among the best in the east. Just maybe don't show up at 11 a.m. on a Saturday.Podcast NotesOn the Top Notch DoubleI'm not sure if anyone ever really loved Attitash's Summit Triple, but the removal of the parallel Top Notch double in 2018 intensified focus on the summit lift's shortcomings. Here's where Top Notch ran (Lift 1 far looker's left):No one has ever really given me a good answer as to why former owner Peak Resorts removed that lift without a backup plan, but the timing could not have been worse – the Summit Triple suffered a series of catastrophic mechanical failures in late 2018 and early 2019, effectively shuttering the upper part of Attitash Peak for the bulk of that ski season.Anyway, once Peak removed the lift, the liftline stayed on the trailmap, suggesting that it may join the official trail network at some point:But the liftline slowly faded:This year, the old ghost line is gone completely:On the shared Flying Yankee-Attitash Summit Triple towerAn engineering quirk of the Summit Triple is that it shared a tower with the Flying Yankee high-speed quad, which crossed below the older lift:So what happened to that tower? We discuss it in the podcast.On the train from North ConwayEventually, U.S. America will have to figure out better ways to tie cities to its mountains. One of the best ways to do this is also one of the oldest: trains. Swartz and I briefly discuss the train that runs from downtown North Conway and drops you at the Attitash base. I looked into this a bit more, and unfortunately it's more of a novelty than a practical commuter service at this point. It's expensive ($40 per person roundtrip for coach), slow (the train ride takes around half an hour, compared to a 16-minute drive), and inconvenient, with the first trains arriving at the mountain around 11 a.m. and the latest one departing the mountain at 2:40. Not a great ski day, and the schedule is, for now, fairly limited, running weekends and holidays from the day after Christmas to late February. You can book rides and see details here.On the Attitash masterplanAttitash, like all ski areas that sit partially or fully on Forest Service land, is required to file an updated masterplan every so often. Unlike the highly organized western Forest Service divisions, however, which often have their ski area masterplans neatly organized online (three cheers for Colorado's White River National Forest), eastern districts rarely bother. So, while we discuss the mountain's masterplan, I couldn't find it, and the ski area couldn't readily provide it.On the Mystery of the Missing GladesCirca 2011, Attitash's trailmap called out several named glades on Bear Peak:By 2020, 10 marked glades appeared across both peaks, though Attitash had removed their names:By last season, all of them had disappeared:But this year, some (but not all) of the legacy glades, are back:What's going on? We discuss this in the podcast.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 101/100 in 2023, and number 487 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

The Sundilla Radio Hour for the week of 10/30/2023 featuring: Rhiannon Giddens “We Could Fly” Freedom Highway (2017 Nonesuch) 4:52 The Lowlies “Drink From the Well” The Lowlies (2023 Airloom)3:15 Brooks Williams “Seven Sisters” Work My Claim (2020 Brooks Williams) 3:20 Kelly Hunt “Everybody Knows” Ozark Symphony (2023 Compass) 4:57 Miles & Mafale “Remember to Be Brave” Be Brave (2023 Miles & Mafale) 3:45 Ellis Paul “Cosmos” 55 (2023 Ellis Paul) 3:07 Lilli Lewis “If It Were You” Americana (2021 Elysium House) 3:52 Davey O. “Some Days” Some Days (2023 Davey O.) 3:36 Tiffany Williams “Harder Heart” All Those Days of Drinking Dust (2022 Blue Redbird) 3:02 Pierce Pettis “Tennessee River” Moments (1984 Small World) 3:18 Low Lily “10,000 Days Like These” 10,000 Days Like These (2018 Mad River) 3:18 Dom Flemons “We Are Almost Down to the Shore” Traveling Wildfire (2023 Smithsonian Folkways) 3:01 Shawna Caspi “Love in a Moving Van” Forest Fire (2017 Shawna Caspi) 3:40 Darden Smith “Fall Apart at the Seams” Trouble No More (1990 Columbia) 3:33

On this episode, Blane recaps his recent trip for monster redfish, updates us on his work with ASGA and shares the details of an upcoming weekend class with Mad River Outfitters and Flip Pallot. Have a question for Blane?  DM either of us on social media. Grab Some Game Changer Merch! Get the Details for the Fly Tying and Fly Fishing Weekend with Mad River and Flip Support American Saltwater Guides Association All Things Social Media Follow Blane on Facebook and Instagram. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. Support the Show Shop on Amazon Become a Patreon Patron Subscribe to the Podcast or, Even Better, Download Our App Download our mobile app for free from the Apple App Store, the Google Play Store or the Amazon Android Store. Subscribe to the podcast in the podcatcher of your choice.

From Ep 180 Located right next to City Hall Park in Burlington, Vermont is one of the tasting rooms of Mad River Distillers. Even though tours are available for the distillery in nearby Warren, the tasting room allows people to sit down and sample all of their craft spirits, as well as a variety of cocktails. Not only that, everything that is needed to make a cocktail can be bought there. In this interview, tasting room manager Jesse makes Karp taste 6 of Mad River's products. All Beer Inside is a podcast by and for craft beer lovers. We travel near and far to sample the best brews and meet fellow aficionados. Drink craft, not crap! Please like, share, comment, subscribe and hit that notification bell! Mad River DistillersBurlington Tasting Room: 137 St Paul St, Burlington, VermontWaitsfield Tasting Room: 89 Mad River Green, Waitsfield, VermontWebsite, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube All Beer Inside:Website, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Untappd: @allbeerinside The video portion of this interview can be found here Please like, comment and subscribe Search for All Beer Inside in all your favorite apps. #craftbeer #craftbeerlove #drinkcraftbeer #distilleries #interview #madriver

From Ep 180 Located right next to City Hall Park in Burlington, Vermont is one of the tasting rooms of Mad River Distillers. Even though tours are available for the distillery in nearby Warren, the tasting room allows people to sit down and sample all of their craft spirits, as well as a variety of cocktails. Not only that, everything that is needed to make a cocktail can be bought there. In this interview, tasting room manager Jesse makes Karp taste 6 of Mad River's products. All Beer Inside is a podcast by and for craft beer lovers. We travel near and far to sample the best brews and meet fellow aficionados. Drink craft, not crap! Please like, share, comment, subscribe and hit that notification bell! Mad River Distillers Burlington Tasting Room: 137 St Paul St, Burlington, Vermont Waitsfield Tasting Room: 89 Mad River Green, Waitsfield, Vermont Website, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube All Beer Inside: Website, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Untappd: @allbeerinside The video portion of this interview can be found here Please like, comment and subscribe Search for All Beer Inside in all your favorite apps. #craftbeer #craftbeerlove #drinkcraftbeer #distilleries #interview #madriver

Manda Aufochs Gillespie/ Folk U - On July 21, Manda Aufochs Gillespie welcomed Cortes Island songwriter/guirtarist Rick Bockner for the fourth in a series of Friday Market Live Music shows under the big tent in the Village Commons. Rick began playing guitar at age 7 and was fortunate to be given his first lessons by Pete Seeger, a family friend. Rick was part of the influential San Francisco band Mad River from 1967-69, before moving to B.C. and settling in the Kootenays.     Rick toured as a solo act from 1992 to 2020 in Europe, the UK, and Canada. He has released 5 albums in that period under his Harby Dar Music label, and taught at music camps and festivals.  In more recent years Rick was a co-founder (with Rex Weyler) of Love Fest- a music celebration on Cortes held every August. He continues to play and teach at a more leisurely pace these days. Folk U Radio is taking old school viral every Friday at 1 and Mondays at 6:30 p.m./Wednesday at 6 a.m. @CKTZ89.5FM or livestreamed at cortesradio.ca. Find repeats anytime at www.folku.ca/podcasts.

This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on July 15. It dropped for free subscribers on June 18. 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:WhoTom Price, General Manager of Timberline, West VirginiaRecorded onJune 26, 2023About Timberline, West VirginiaClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: The Perfect FamilyLocated in: Davis, West VirginiaYear founded: 1983Pass affiliations: The Perfect Pass – unlimited accessReciprocal partners: unlimited access to Perfect North, Indiana with the Perfect PassClosest neighboring ski areas: Canaan Valley (8 minutes); White Grass XC touring/backcountry center (11 minutes); Wisp, Maryland (1 hour, 15 minutes); Snowshoe, West Virginia (1 hour, 50 minutes); Bryce, Virginia (2 hours); Homestead, Virginia (2 hours); Massanutten, Virginia (2 hours, 21 minutes)Base elevation: 3,268 feetSummit elevation: 4,268 feetVertical drop: 1,000 feetSkiable Acres: 100Average annual snowfall: 150 inchesTrail count: 20 (2 double-black, 2 black, 6 intermediate, 10 beginner), plus two named glades and two terrain parksLift count: 4 (1 high-speed six-pack, 1 fixed-grip quad, 2 carpets - view Lift Blog's inventory of Timberline's lift fleet)Why I interviewed himIn January, I arrived at Timberline on day five of a brutal six-day meltdown across the Mid-Atlantic. I'd passed through six other ski areas en route – all were partially open, stapled together, passable but clearly struggling. Then this:After three days of melt-out tiptoe, I was not prepared for what I found at gut-renovated Timberline. And what I found was 1,000 vertical feet of the best version of warm-weather skiing I've ever seen. Other than the trail footprint, this is a brand-new ski area. When the Perfect Family – who run Perfect North, Indiana like some sort of military operation – bought the joint in 2020, they tore out the lifts, put in a brand-new six-pack and carpet-loaded quad, installed all-new snowmaking, and gut-renovated the lodge. It is remarkable. Stunning. Not a hole in the snowpack. Coming down the mountain from Davis, you can see Timberline across the valley beside state-run Canaan Valley ski area – the former striped in white, the latter mostly barren.I skied four fast laps off the summit before the sixer shut at 4:30. Then a dozen runs off the quad. The skier level is comically terrible, beginners sprawled all over the unload, all over the green trails. But the energy is level 100 amped, and everyone I talked to raved about the transformation under the new owners. I hope the Perfect family buys 50 more ski areas – their template works.Perfect North is one of the most incredible ski areas in the country, a machine that proves skiing can thrive in marginal conditions. Timberline is Exhibit B, demonstrating that an operating model built on aggressive snowmaking and constant investment can scale.Which seems obvious, right? We're not exactly trying to decipher grandma's secret meatloaf recipe here. But it's not so easy. Vail Resorts has barely kept Paoli Peaks – Indiana's only other ski area – open two dozen days each of the past two seasons (Perfect North hit 86 days for the 2022-23 winter and 81 in 2021-22). And Canaan Valley, next door to Timberline, is like that house with uncut grass and dogs pooping all over the yard. Surely they're aware of a lawnmower. And yet.Skiers, everywhere, want very simple things: snow to ski on, a reliable product, consistency. That can be hard to deliver in an unpredictable world. But while their competitors make excuses, Timberline and Perfect North make snow.What we talked aboutSnowmaking, snowmaking, snowmaking; applying an Indiana operating philosophy to the Appalachian wilds; changing consumer expectations; 36 inches of snow in May and why the ski area didn't open when the storm hit; night skiing returns; when you fall in love with an uncomfortable thing; leaving Utah for Indiana; The Perfect family and Perfect North Slopes; fire in Ohio; what happened when Perfect North bought Timberline; a brief history of Timberline and why it failed; why this time is different; Mid-Atlantic and West Virginia ski culture; “you bought a ski area with no chairlifts”; why Timberline installed a six-pack to the summit to replace two old top-to-bottom triples; deciding on a fixed-grip quad for a mid-mountain lift; coming tweaks to smooth out unloading; why Timberline moved the beginner area over toward the lodge; whether we could see a mountain-top beginner area; the surprising trail that was a major factor in the decision to purchase Timberline; big plans for the terrain park, including a surface lift; how the trail footprint evolved from one ownership group to the next; trail map as marketing tool versus functional tool; expanding the glade network; potential trail expansion; considering a second summit lift for Timberline; a spectacular lodge renovation; adding up the investment; assessing local and destination support three seasons into the comeback; growing Timberline into more of a Southeast-style resort a-la Snowshoe or Wintergreen; reception so far for the “Perfect Pass” combo pass with Perfect North; the Indy Pass; and Timberline's unique day-ticket price structure.    Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewThis has been one of my most-requested interviews since the Perfects bought the place back in 2019. The splash and kazam of Timberline's renovation inspired awe and jealousy among skiers, who couldn't believe how easy the new owners made it all look and resent the 60-year-old Hall doubles spinning at their local. Despite the fact that It's three-decades-old technology, a high-speed six-pack still stirs up a thrill in most skiers, an emblem of prosperity and seriousness, amplified by the fact that some of America's wealthiest resorts – Jackson Hole, Deer Valley, Aspen Mountain and Highlands, Beaver Creek, Alta, Snowbird – still don't have a single sixer between them.Which, OK, great. Throw a $20 million renovation at a trailer park, and it will start to resemble Beverly Hills. But do you want to live there? That's what I needed to figure out: was Timberline a flashy gamble for an out-of-its-league Midwest operator, or proof-of-concept for an industry that needs to fortify itself for life in a different sort of world than most of its ski areas were born into?Obviously, I think it's the latter. But it's hard to explain. Most skiers outside of the region refuse to take Mid-Atlantic skiing seriously. But it's time to start paying closer attention. There are some seriously talented operators in Appalachia. Wintergreen, Virginia just finished a season with exactly zero inches of natural snowfall. Massanutten, Virginia and Wisp, Maryland both opened in November despite temperatures in the 70s for most of the month. The climate catastrophes that loom over skiing's future are the realities that Mid-Atlantic ski areas just spent three decades adapting to.Timberline had the advantage of starting over with all of its institutional knowledge, the hard lessons of the region's recent past, and the low-energy, high-impact technology of the current moment. It's a powerful combination, and one that has made Timberline a showcase for what a ski area of the 2020s can be. With three seasons of operations behind it, it was time to check in and ask how well all that was working.What I got wrongI said that Perfect North had 200 snowguns. The actual number, according to this SMI case study, is 245.I stated that the vertical drop of the now-removed lower-mountain beginner chairlift was “a couple hundred vertical feet maybe.” It was 90 feet, according to Lift Blog.Why you should ski TimberlineTimberline has one thing that its competitors don't: legit, border-to-border terrain. As Price tells me in our interview, there are “probably 100” trails on the mountain when it snows, which it does more in this pocket of high-altitude West Virginia than anywhere else in the region. Most Mid-Atlantic ski areas are all-seasons resorts with ski areas attached. Timberline, however, is more ski than resort. It's a badass little mountain, with a thousand vertical feet of expansive, imaginative lines. That makes Timberline an indispensable character in the regional ski cast, the sort of bruiser that any ski state needs as a foil to its more manicured neighbors (think Mount Bohemia, Michigan; Berkshire East, Massachusetts; Plattekill, New York; Magic Mountain, Vermont; Wildcat, New Hampshire). Yes, parks are important. Grooming is essential. But so is tree-skiing. So is opening up the wide and wild world off-piste. This is what keeps skiing interesting, and what sends locals out into the wider world, north and west, to explore the vastness of it all.Podcast NotesOn Perfect NorthThe other day, my family watched Back to the Future Part II. My daughter hadn't been with us when we'd watched part one a few days prior, and so she was a little confused. Similarly, if you listen to this Timberline episode before the episode I recorded with Perfect North GM Jonathan Davis last summer, you'll be starting behind. Not only does that episode contain important background on the Perfect family's accidental but fierce entrance into the ski industry, but Davis discusses how the family bought Timberline in a 2019 auction. The story starts at the 1:30:33 mark:On Timberline's renaissanceDC Ski also wrote a comprehensive article on Timberline's comeback:On the lodge fire at Mad River (not that Mad River)Price was general manager at Mad River, Ohio – which was at the time owned by Peak Resorts and is now a Vail property – when a fire destroyed the lodge:Peak Resorts quickly built a new lodge, investing $6.5 million into a facility that was almost twice the size of the old one.On the lift accident at TimberlinePrice discusses a lift de-ropement that marred Timberline's reputation. The local ABC News affiliate wrote about the incident shortly after it occurred, in February 2016:About 25 people fell to the ground after a ski lift derailed at the Timberline Resort in Davis, West Virginia, this morning, an official told ABC News.The drop was about 30 feet, according to Joe Stevens of the West Virginia Ski Areas Association, of which Timberline is a member.Two people were hospitalized with non-life threatening injuries, Stevens said.About 100 skiers were left stranded on the ski lift after the derailment, Chief Sandy Green of Canaan Valley Fire Department Chief Sandy Green told ABC News.The lift in question was Thunderstruck, a triple chair that, along with the resort's other two chairlifts, the new owners demolished in 2020.On the old trailmaps/lift configuration/trail footprintPrice and I talked extensively about Timberline's new and old lift and trail alignments, which differ significantly. Here's a circa 2016 trailmap, showing the mountain with two top-to-bottom triples and several trails that no longer exist:And here are the old and contemporary maps side by side:On White Grass and Canaan ValleyTimberline is adjacent to two ski areas: White Grass Touring Center and Canaan Valley. Here's how they stack together on the map:White Grass is widely considered one of the best cross-country ski areas in the East, with 50 kilometers of trails:Canaan Valley is owned by the state of West Virginia. It's an 850-footer with 95 acres of terrain:Both Canaan and White Grass are Indy Pass partners. You can ski between all three ski areas, Price says, on cross-country skis, though a peak separates White Grass and Canaan.As impressive as this three-resort lineup is, the region could have grown into something even more spectacular, had a planned resort been built at nearby Mount Porte Crayon. Blue Ridge Outdoors profiled this ski-area-that-never-was in 2010:Porte Crayon has all the right ingredients for a resort: an average of 150 to 200 inches of snow a year, a unique hollow shape that helps push much of the windblown snow onto the northern slopes, and big vertical drop.“From top to bottom, we were looking at a true 2,200 foot vertical drop, making it the sixth largest vertical drop at a resort east of the Rockies, with weather similar to southern Vermont,” Jorgenson says. “It would have been the largest resort south of Lake Placid, New York.”Bright Enterprises started buying up land on Porte Crayon over a decade ago. The plan called for a 2,000-acre resort with more than 2,000 feet of vertical drop on a north-facing slope that got plenty of natural snow. Skiers salivated over the prospect of skiing that kind of terrain below the Mason Dixon, while environmentalists cringed at the thought of a mountaintop village, golf course, and second home development scarring the pristine landscape.For ten years, a debate brewed with locals and skiers coming down hard either for or against Almost Heaven. Eventually, Bright Enterprises failed to purchase a significant piece of private land at the top of the mountain, and resort plans fell apart.Today, the mountain is a well-known backcountry ski zone. It sits just eight miles overland from Timberline: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 60/100 in 2023, and number 446 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

The MVABL baseball game between the Dodgers and the Machine is now availabl on demand at no charge!

Meet Linda Cooley (Yurok tribe), CEO of Mad River Brewing Company in beautiful Blue Lake, California! And look out, world – because this American Indian CEO is out to help her tribe and the planet too. After profitability, Linda set out to put a portion of Mad River Brewing funds to good use by helping her Yurok Nation and the land in the area. For instance, their Undammed Seltzer promotes the removal of dams in Native country. This effort resulted in the largest undamming in history, with hopes of restoring the salmon spawning grounds back to their original glory. Mad River also partners with California State Parks for good causes so take a listen to hear more! We all know there is great sensitivity around substance abuse in our Native American population, and I took this factor into consideration when contemplating this episode. Linda herself experienced the detrimental effects of her father's addiction, and she determined to utilize her work in the beverage industry to bring awareness to the topic, while also doing good for her tribe and community. In this episode, you'll also hear about: • Linda's family and ancestral stories • How Linda got started in the industry • Tourism being an economic driver in Native country • The Yurok tribe and the challenges the brewery is trying to help solve • Mad River Brewing's intertribal partnerships • Linda's first pitch with Mad River Brewery's partner, the San Francisco Giants • The brewery's gold-winning brews Mad River Brewing is family and dog-friendly (yay!), has live music and some of the best BBQ on the planet! Linda is on a mission to do good in an unexpected way, with results that are actually working. Her strong leadership skills, determination to make change, and care for her tribe and surroundings is a legacy many can only hope to leave behind. Yakoke, Linda for all you're doing and for making Indian country proud – cheers to you! Please consider supporting Mad River Brewing by liking and sharing their page at: https://www.facebook.com/madriverbrewing Website: https://www.madriverbrewing.com/. Special thanks to Justin Chester of @tepacompanies for the introduction! Native ChocTalk Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/nativechoctalkpodcast All Podcast Episodes: https://nativechoctalk.com/podcasts/

The Sundilla Radio Hour for the week of 02/27/2023 featuring: Scott Cook “Let Love Have Its Way” Tangle of Souls (2020 Scott Cook) 5:01 Sunny War “New Day” Anarchist Gospel (2023 New West) 3:21 Yasmin Williams “Sunshowers” Urban Driftwood (2021 SPINSTER) 4:14 The Bombadils “Dangling Like Keys” Dear Friend (2022 The Bombadils) 3:57 David Jacobs-Strain and Bob Beach “Rollin'” The Belfry Session (2023 David Jacobs-Strain and Bob Beach) 3:57 Rhiannon Giddens “Shake Sugaree” Tomorrow Is My Turn (2014 Nonesuch) 4:24 The Kennedys “Angels Cry” Retrospective (2012 The Kennedys) 3:07 Davey O. “Nothing Could Go Wrong” A Bright Horizon Line (2017 Davey O.) 4:25 Johnny Flynn “Detectorists” Live at the Roundhouse (2018 Johnny Flynn) 2:45 Low Lily “Good, Bad, Better” 10,000 Days Like These (2018 Mad River) 3:26 Chris Coole “Make This Day” The Old Man and the C Chord (2022 Chris Coole) 3:06 Buffalo Rose & Tom Paxton “I Give You the Morning” Rabbit (2022 Misra) 3:31 Watchhouse “Belly of the Beast” Watchhouse (Duo) (2022 Tiptoe Tiger) 3:34

Esta semana en Islas de Robinson abrimos nueva senda. Se viene de "discada" el grandísimo Iñigo Bregel (Los Estanques) a compartir la música que le viene en gana. Maravillosa, por supuesto. Repetiremos bien pronto, fijo. Suenan: Malcolm Scarpa, Ananta, Dirty Proyectors, Celentano, Mad River, United States of America, Millennium y Magma. Escuchar audio

Show Notes: https://wetflyswing.com/374 Presented By: Range Meal Bars, Country Financial, FishHound Expeditions, Zoe Angling Group Sponsors: https://wetflyswing.com/sponsors Brian Flechsig, founder of Mad River Outfitters, takes us back to square one today as we break down the steps to getting started in fly fishing. We find out the 6 basic things that you need to understand as a beginner and why the leader is one of the most important parts of your gear. We dig into their YouTube channel that's about to hit 200k subscribers with over 500 videos published, how they make it educational and entertaining, and why they don't want to specifically promote any brands. Brian also shares about his 30 years of friendship with Kelly Galloup and some of the fly-fishing folks we know. Mad River Outfitters Show Notes with Brian Flechsig  08:00 - When Brian was in college, he was immersed in playing music and fly fishing. He played the Mandolin and studied jazz guitar. He eventually quit college to work at a music store and then later worked at a fly shop in Cincinnati, Ohio where he became a guide and a shop manager. 09:50 - Brian hosted his first trip in the Fall of 1990 at the Pere Marquette River. His guides were Charlie Weaver, Walt Grau, and Kelly Galloup. 11:30 - In December 1994, Brian opened Mad River Outfitters in Columbus, Ohio 12:15 - Brian talks about Clyde Rolf who was a great friend and customer at Mad River fly shop. He invented the Nicorette Gum. 16:00 - He noted a YouTube video they created with Brad Befus, President of Scientific Anglers 31:55 - Brian and Kelly have been friends for 33 years now 35:00 - Mad River Outfitters is about to hit 200k subscribers - subscribe here 40:00 - Brian shares some advice: Surround yourself with the right people 43:30 - They have a YouTube series, Getting Started in Fly Fishing where Episode 1 teaches the 6 basic things that you need to understand as a beginner: 1. Understand a fly rod 2. Understand a fly reel 3. Understand the fly line system 4. Have a few basic accessories (including a fly) 5. Have some polarized sunglasses 6. You need a body of water that has fish 50:00 - Brian talks about how they answer email questions from people 57:42 - Brian explains why the leader is one of the most important parts of your gear 1:02:30 - Fish early or fish late to avoid river traffic in Mad River 1:08:45 - The best question Brian had was: How do you know what you're fishing for? 1:12:30 - They did a trip to Labrador for the trophy brook trout, New Orleans for redfish, tarpon and bonefishing in Florida, etc. One of the most exotic trips they did was in the Amazon jungle in Brazil for peacock bass. 1:15:25 - Sam Bush is Brian's mandolin hero Show Notes: https://wetflyswing.com/374

The former Mad River restaurant in Manayunk is revamping under new management on Oct. 6 as Lincoln Mill Haunted House. KYW Newsradio's Hadas Kuznits chats with co-owner Brian Corcodilos about how Hurricane Ida plays into the haunted backstory of the building at 4100 Main St. And, Caitlin Marsilii with the Manayunk Development Corporation talks about what's being done to help incorporate the Main Street restaurants into your spooky night out on the town.

The Sundilla Radio Hour for the week of 08/22/2022 featuring: Scott Cook “Let Love Have Its Way” Tangle of Souls (Scott Cook) 5:01 Lucy Kaplansky “Last Days of Summer” Last Days of Summer (Lucy Kaplansky) 4:02 Yasmin Williams “Sunshowers” Urban Driftwood (2021 SPINSTER) 4:14 Megan Bee “Never Known” Cottonwood (2022 Megan Bee) 3:15 Peter Mulvey & SistaStrings “February Too” Love Is the Only Thing (2022 Peter Mulvey) 3:11 Sarah Clanton “Silver Lining” Here We Are (2018 Sarah Clanton) 3:13 Sam Robbins “All I Know” Bigger Than in Between (2022 Sam Robbins) 4:17 Hannah Wyatt “Hail Mary (And Start Again)” Iron Line (2021 Hannah Wyatt) 2:46 Tre Burt “I Cannot Care” You, Yeah, You (2021 Oh Boy) 2:42 Roy Schneider “Mandolin Jim” The Roadside Turtle Rescue (Roy Schneider) 3:21 Grace Morrison “Mothers” Single (2020 Grace Morrison) 2:54 Todd Lewis Kramer “Dancin' in the Kitchen” Brooklyn (2021 Hit Focus) 3:49 Low Lily “Good, Bad, Better” 10,000 Days Like These (2018 Mad River) 3:26 Moors & McCumber “Buried In Stone” Live From Blue Rock (2021 M & M) 2:53

Justin and Jack join John Egan, founder of Mad River Distillers, for a chat about his thoughts on cybersecurity acquisitions, and his own experience as a lawyer in the technology field. Special thank you to John, Mad River Distillers President Mimi Buttenheim, and General Manager/Head Distiller Alex Hilton for welcoming the team and giving their time. To view the Mad River crew, click here. Justin and Jack took the time to write out reviews of some of the beverages from Mad River. Those can be found below: Burnt Rock Bourbon The Burnt Rock Bourbon has a long finish, combining a sweet undertone of vanilla and oak with a distinctive power at the front of the palate. Revolution Rye The Revolution Rye is a spicy entrant, capable of standing up to an ice cube, or even a little mixing, without losing its personality. That's why we featured it in our Old Fashioned Madman cocktail. PX Rum All of the bourbons and even the featured special, a caramel-y rum called the Mad River PX Rum, have a custom feel to them. There is a sense that somebody specifically put that booze in that bottle with thought for who would be drinking it. If you want to reach out to John Egan, you can email him at jegan@goodwinlaw.com, or find him on LinkedIn. If you have any questions or suggestions, send us an email at pwned@nuharborsecurity.com. If you like our content, please like, share, and subscribe! We'll catch you on the next one. Check out NuHarbor Security for complete cyber security protection for your business and a security partner you can trust. Website: https://nuharborsecurity.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nuharbor/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/NuHarbor@nuharbor LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nuharbor/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nuharborsecurity/

The Sundilla Radio Hour for the week of 08/01/2022 featuring: Allison Russell “Nightflyer” Outside Child (2021 Birds of Chicago) 4:55 The Bombadils “Bicycle” Single (2022 Leaf Music) 4:02 Ben Bedford “Letters from the Earth” The Pilot and the Flying Machine (2016 Ben Bedford) 4:10 Megan Bee “Cottonwood Leaves” Cottonwood (2022 Megan Bee) 3:16 Dan Navarro “Circling the Drain” Horizon Line (2022 Red Hen) 4:42 Crys Matthews “It Was You” These Old Hands (2019 NewSong) 3:52 Richie & Rosie “No Longer Lonely” Nowhere in Time (2017 Richie and Rosie) 3:11 The Ladies “Baltimore” Springville Sessions (The Ladies) 4:08 The Believers “Birds of a Feather” Row (2002 Baptism By Fire) 3:20 Trae Sheehan “Heartbreak Casts” Postcards from the Country (2020 Half Moon) 4:27 Low Lily “10,000 Days Like These” 10,000 Days Like These (2018 Mad River) 3:08 Berkley Hart “Barrel of Rain” Wreck ‘N Sow (2001) 4:54

This episode is a replay of our Tuesday night Brewsday event from July 20th, 2022 where we spoke with Linda Cooley who is the CEO Of Mad River Brewing located in Northern California. We took some time to discuss the great things they are doing out there and tapped into conversations on diversity and inclusion among many other things. Take a listen and enjoy, and if you ever make it out to The Golden State then definitely try to make a visit, I know I will! Cheers! --- 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/rodjbeerventures/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/rodjbeerventures/support

 To support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on June 28. Free subscribers got it on July 1. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription.WhoJonathan M. Davis, General Manager of Perfect North, IndianaRecorded onJune 20, 2022About Perfect NorthClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: The Perfect FamilyPass affiliations: NoneLocated in: Lawrenceburg, IndianaClosest neighboring ski areas: Mad River, Ohio (2 hours, 18 minutes); Paoli Peaks, Indiana (2 hours, 39 minutes); Snow Trails (3 hours)Base elevation: 400 feetSummit elevation: 800 feetVertical drop: 400 feetSkiable Acres: 100Average annual snowfall: 24 inchesTrail count: 22 (1 double-black, 3 black, 3 blue-black, 10 intermediate, 5 beginner)Lift count: 12 (2 quads, 3 triples, 5 carpets, 2 ropetows - view Lift Blog’s inventory of Perfect North’s lift fleet)About Timberline, West VirginiaWhile this podcast is not explicitly about Timberline, Jonathan had an important role in the ski area’s acquisition in 2019. His enthusiasm for Timberline is clear, the opportunity and the investment are enormous, and this conversation acts as a primer for what I hope will be a full Timberline podcast at some future point.Click here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: The Perfect FamilyPass affiliations: NoneLocated in: Davis, West VirginiaClosest neighboring ski areas: Canaan Valley (8 minutes); White Grass XC touring/backcountry center (11 minutes); Wisp, Maryland (1 hour, 15 minutes); Snowshoe, West Virginia (1 hour, 50 minutes); Bryce, Virginia (2 hours); Homestead, Virginia (2 hours); Massanutten, Virginia (2 hours, 21 minutes)Base elevation: 3,268 feetSummit elevation: 4,268 feetVertical drop: 1,000 feetSkiable Acres: 100Average annual snowfall: 150 inchesTrail count: 20 (2 double-black, 3 black, 5 intermediate, 10 beginner)Lift count: 3 (1 high-speed six-pack, 1 fixed-grip quad, 1 carpet - view Lift Blog’s inventory of Timberline’s lift fleet)Why I interviewed himThere are two kinds of ski areas in the Midwest. The first are the big ones, out there somewhere in the woods. Where 10,000 years ago a glacier got ornery. Or, farther back in time, little mountains hove up out of the earth. They’re at least 400 feet tall and top out near 1,000. They’re not near anything and they don’t need to be. People will drive to get there. Often they sit in a snowbelt, with glades and bumps and hidden parts. Multiple peaks. A big lodge at the bottom. There are perhaps two dozen of these in the entire region, all of them in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Boyne, Nub’s Nob, Crystal, Caberfae, Bohemia, Powderhorn, Whitecap, Granite Peak, Spirit, Lutsen. This is not a complete list. I’m making a point here.The second kind of Midwest ski area is usually smaller. It claims 200 vertical feet and actually has 27. It has four chairlifts for every run. It has a parking lot that could swallow Lake George. It’s affordable. And it’s close. To something. Metro Detroit has four ski areas. Milwaukee has eight. Minneapolis has six. But pretty much any Lower Midwestern city of any size has at least one ski area in its orbit: Cleveland (Alpine Valley, Boston Mills, Brandywine), Columbus (Snow Trails, Mad River), St. Louis (Hidden Valley), Kansas City (Snow Creek), Des Moines (Seven Oaks), Chicago (Four Lakes, Villa Olivia), Omaha (Mt. Crescent).For Cincinnati, that ski area is Perfect North. It’s actually one of the larger city-adjacent ski areas in the region: 400 vertical feet on 100 acres (accurate numbers, as far as I can tell). Twelve lifts. Twenty-two trails. Indiana has 6.7 million residents and two ski areas. Some winter days, approximately half of them are skiing at Perfect North.I’m just kidding around about the numbers. What I’m trying to say is that urban Midwestern ski areas are terrific businesses. They’re small but handle unimaginable volume in short, intense seasons of 12-hour-plus days. Davis tells me in the podcast that the ski area hires 1,200 seasonal employees for winter. That is an almost incomprehensible number. Killington, the largest ski area in the east, 20 times the size of Perfect North, has around 1,600 wintertime employees.But that’s what it takes to keep the up-and-down moving. Perfect North was a sort of accidental ski area, born when a college student knocked on farmer Clyde Perfect’s door and said, “hey did you know your land is perfect for a ski area?” In almost snowless Indiana, this was quite a wild notion. Not that no one had tried. The state has nine lost ski areas. But Perfect North is one of only two that survived (the other is Vail-owned Paoli Peaks, which survives no thanks to the mothership). I don’t know enough about the ski areas that failed to say why they’re gone, but it’s obvious why Perfect North has succeeded: relentless investment by committed operators. Here’s an excerpt from a case study by SMI snowmakers:[Perfect North] employs 245 snowmaking machines and an infrastructure that pumps about 120 million gallons of water annually, giving the resort a 3-4 foot snowpack throughout the season. The system is so efficient that operators can start as many as 200 snowmakers in about an hour.At its modest start-up in 1980, Perfect North had only rope tows, T-bars and about a dozen snowmakers covering roughly seven acres. But the family-owned operation has expanded each year and now features five chair lifts and six surface lifts serving more than ten times the skiable terrain, as well as one of the largest tubing operations in the entire U.S. …“We knew early on that snowmaking was critical to a great experience on the hills. The snow is the reason people come; everything else is secondary. So we really focused on it right from the beginning, and we’ve enhanced our snowmaking capability every year,” said [Perfect North President Chip] Perfect.All of the snow guns now in use at Perfect North are manufactured by SMI, and every one is permanently mounted on a SnowTower™ (or pole-top unit). Most are the company’s signature PoleCat™ or Super PoleCat™ designs, with either hill air feed or onboard compressors. Unlike some resorts that boast 100% snowmaking on their trails, Perfect North runs enough machines to be able to make snow on virtually the entire skiing and tubing area at the same time.This is not one model of how to make a ski area work in the Lower Midwest – this is the only way to make a ski area work in the Lower Midwest. The region was a bit late to skiing. Perfect North didn’t open until 1980. Snowmaking had to really advance before such a thing as consistent skiing in Indiana was even conceivable. But being possible is not the same thing as being easy. There are only two ski areas in Indiana for a reason: it’s hard. Perfect North has mastered it anyway. And you’ll understand about two minutes into this conversation why this place is special.What we talked aboutA couple kids watching for the lights to flip on across the valley, announcing the opening of the ski season; Perfect North in the ‘80s; a place where jeans and “layered hunting gear” are common; ski area as machine; from bumping chairs to general manager; the pioneer days of 90s tech; moving into the online future without going bust; RFID; the surprising reason why Perfect North switched from metal wicket tickets to the plastic ziptie version; taking over a ski area in the unique historical moment that was spring 2020; staff PTSD from the Covid season; the power of resolving disputes through one-on-one talks; “we lost something in those two years with how we interact with people”; 1,200 people to run a 400-vertical-foot ski area; how Perfect North fully staffed up and offered an 89-hour-per-week schedule as Vail retreated and severely cut hours at its Indiana and Ohio ski areas; Perfect North would have faced “an absolute mutiny” had they pulled the Vail bait-and-switch of cutting operating hours after pass sales ended; how aggressive you have to be with snowmaking in the Lower Midwest; “the people of the Midwest are fiercely loyal”; reaction to Vail buying Peak Resorts; “I want Midwest skiing to succeed broadly”; Cincinnati as a ski town; skiing’s identity crisis; the amazing story behind Perfect North’s founding; the Perfect family’s commitment to annual reinvestment; remembering ski area founder Clyde Perfect, who passed away in 2020; you best keep those web cams active Son; snowmaking and Indiana; the importance of valleys; the importance of a committed owner; potential expansion; where the ski area could add trails within the existing footprint; terrain park culture in the Lower Midwest; the management and evolution of parks at Perfect North; potential chairlift upgrades and a theoretical priority order; where the ski area could use an additional chairlift; the potential for terrain park ropetows; coming updates to Jam Session’s ropetows; Perfect North’s amazing network of carpet lifts; the ski area’s massive tubing operation; why Perfect North purchased Timberline and how the purchase came together; why creditors rejected the first winner’s bid; West Virginia as a ski state; the reception to Timberline’s comeback; “it didn’t take us long to realize that the three lifts on site were unworkable”; how well Perfect North and Timberline work as a ski area network; “Timberline Mountain has got to stand on its own financially”; whether Perfect North could ever purchase more ski areas; “I hate to see ski areas wither up and die”; Perfect North’s diverse season pass suite; “what drives our guest’s visits is their availability”; and whether Timberline or Perfect North could join the Indy Pass.            Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewYou want to hear something funny? I often put out queries on Twitter or via email, asking people to tell me who they would most like to hear from on the podcast. Or sometimes people just write and say something like, “hey love the pod you should interview…” And the interview they’ve most often requested has been some combination of Timberline and Perfect North. I don’t really understand why. I mean, I think it’s an awesome story. I’ve yet to meet a ski area I wasn’t fascinated by, and this Midwest-buys-Mid-Atlantic storyline is especially compelling to me. But this one has, for whatever reason, resonated broadly. I’ve never once had someone ask me to track down the head of Telluride or Mammoth or Heavenly (I’d gladly talk to the leaders of any of the three), but the Perfect North/Timberline request has been hitting my inbox consistently for years.Well, it’s done. I’d still like to do a Timberline-first pod, but the basic story of the acquisition is there, and we spend about 15 minutes on the West Virginia ski area. Still, I was not just listening to the request line. I tracked down Davis for the same reason that I tracked down Snow Trails, Ohio’s Scott Crislip last month: these are the only two ski areas in Indiana or Ohio that functioned normally last season. And they are the only two ski areas in those states that are not owned by Vail.Paoli Peaks was open 28 hours per week, from Thursday through Sunday, with no night skiing on weekends. Perfect North was open 89 hours per week, with night skiing seven days per week. I found this fairly offensive, and WTIU Public TV in Indiana invited me on-air back in March to talk about it:How, exactly, did Vail get owned by two independent operators with a fraction of the institutional resources? That is the question that these two podcasts attempt to answer. Vail clearly misread the market in Ohio and Indiana. They did not make enough snow or hire enough people. They cut night skiing. In the Midwest. That’s like opening a steakhouse and cutting steak off the menu. Sorry, Guys, budget cuts. You can’t find steak at this steakhouse, but we have beef broth soup and canned greenbeans. And by the way, we’re only open for lunch. Like, how did they not know that? It may be the worst series of ski area operating decisions I’ve ever seen.I should probably just let this go. Now that I’ve said my piece via these two interviews, I probably will. I’ve made my point. But seriously Vail needs to look at what Perfect North and Snow Trails did this past season and do exactly that. And if they can’t, then, as Davis says in this interview, “if they don’t want Paoli and Mad River, we’ll take them.”Questions I wish I’d askedPerfect North has a really interesting pass perk for its highest-tiered pass: Perfect Season Pass holders can go direct to lift. That pass is $356. Gold passholders, who can ski up to eight hours per day, must pick up a lift ticket at the window each time they ski. That pass is $291. While the gold pass is not technically unlimited, eight hours per day seems more than sufficient. I’m ready to wrap it up after seven hours at Alta. I can’t imagine that eight hours wouldn’t be enough Indiana skiing. But I don’t think the ski area would bother with the two different passes if the market hadn’t told them there was a need, and I would have liked to have discussed the rationale behind this pass suite a bit more.What I got wrongI said on the podcast that Snow Trails was open “80-some hours per week.” The number was actually 79 hours. I also stated in the introduction that Perfect North was founded by “the Perfect family and a group of investors,” but it was the Perfect family alone.  Why you should ski Perfect NorthWe’ve been through this before, with Snow Trails, Mountain Creek, Paul Bunyan, Wachusett, and many more. If you live in Cincinnati and you are a skier, you have a choice to make: you can be the kind of skier who skis all the time, or you can be the kind of skier who skis five days per year at Whistler. I know dozens of people in New York like this. They ski at Breckenridge, they ski at Park City, they ski at Jackson Hole. But they don’t – they just couldn’t – ski Mountain Creek or Hunter or even Stowe. East Coast skiing is just so icy, they tell me. Well, sometimes. But it’s skiing. And whether you ski six days per year or 50 largely depends upon your approach to your local.If I lived in Cincinnati, I’d have a pass to Perfect North and I’d go there all the time. I would not be there for eight hours at a time. Ten runs is a perfectly good day of skiing at a small ski area. More if conditions are good or I’m having fun. Anything to get outside and make a few turns. Go, ride the lifts, get out. No need to overthink this. Any skiing is better than none at all.Most of Perfect North’s skiers, of course, are teenagers and families. And it’s perfect for both of these groups. But it doesn’t have to be for them alone. Ski areas are for everyone. Go visit.As far as Timberline goes, well, that’s a whole different thing. A thousand feet of vert and 150 inches of average annual snowfall shouldn’t take a lot of convincing for anyone anywhere within striking distance.Podcast NotesPerfect North founder Clyde Perfect passed away in 2020. Here is his obituary.I mentioned that Indiana had several lost ski areas. Here’s an inventory. My 1980 copy of The White Book of Ski Areas lists nine hills in Indiana. Perfect North isn’t one of them (Paoli Peaks, the state’s other extant ski area, is). Here’s a closer look at two of the more interesting ones (you can view more trailmaps on skimap.org):Nashville AlpsHere’s the 2001 trailmap for Nashville Alps, which had a 240-foot vertical drop. The ski area closed around 2002, and the lifts appear to be gone.If anyone knows why Nashville Alps failed, please let me know.Ski StarlightThe White Book pegs this one with an amazing 554 vertical feet, which would make it taller than any ski area in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. The map shows trails running along little ridgelines separated by valleys, which would have made this a really interesting spot on the rare occasions it snowed enough to ski the trees.Google maps suggests that this trailmap more or less reflects geologic reality. Here’s a YouTube video from a few years back, when the ski area was apparently for sale. The lifts were still intact (though likely unusable):The White Book says that this place had a double-double and two J-bars in 1980. Just 20 minutes from Louisville, this seems like the kind of little Midwestern spot that could boom with the right operators. The cost to bring it online would likely be prohibitive, however. As with most things in U.S. America, it would be the permitting that would likely kill it in the crib.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 70/100 in 2022, and number 316 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. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

To support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Paid subscribers receive thousands of extra words of content each month, plus all podcasts three days before free subscribers.WhoScott Crislip, General Manager of Snow Trails, OhioRecorded onMay 31, 2022About Snow TrailsClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: The Carto familyLocated in: Mansfield, OhioClosest neighboring ski areas: Mad River Mountain (1.5 hours), Boston Mills-Brandywine (1 hour)Base elevation: 1,174 feetSummit elevation: 1,475 feetVertical drop: 301 feetSkiable Acres: 200Night skiing: Yes, 100% of terrainAverage annual snowfall: 30 to 50 inchesTrail count: 17 (20% black, 60% intermediate, 20% beginner)Lift count: 7 (4 triples, 2 doubles, 1 carpet - view Lift Blog’s inventory of Snow Trail’s lift fleet)Why I interviewed himStare at it for a while, and the American ski map teases some captivating storylines. How is it that there are so many ski areas in Southern California? Or New Mexico? Or how about that map dot above Tucson, or, for God’s sake, Ala-freaking-bama? Are those real? Why are there so many ski areas in practically snowless eastern Pennsylvania, and so few (relatively speaking) in snow-choked and mountainous Washington and Oregon?But one of the most curious sectors of U.S. skiing is the lower Midwest. Ohio hosts five public ski areas; Indiana has two; Illinois, four; Iowa, three; Missouri, two. That’s just 16 ski areas across five states. The upper Midwest, by contrast, hosts 90 ski areas across three states: 40 in Michigan, 31 in Wisconsin, 19 in Minnesota. So that 16 may seem low, but the lower Midwest’s ski area count is actually quite impressive if we look at the macro conditions. Take Ohio: why – how – does this windblown flatland host five public ski areas (a sixth, Big Creek, operates as a private club near Cleveland). Eastern Ohio – the western borderlands of Appalachia – is actually quite hilly. But there aren’t any ski areas there. Instead, Ohio ski life is clustered around or between the state’s many large cities – Dayton, Columbus, Cleveland.Most of America’s ski areas, if you pick them apart, exist because of a favorable combination of at least a couple of the following factors: elevation, population, aspect, accessibility, snowfall – often lake effect. North-facing Snow Trails, seated high (for Ohio) in the Possum Run Valley, right off Interstate 71 between Columbus (population 889,000) and Cleveland (population 383,000), combines four of the five. The ski area only averages 30 to 50 inches of snowfall per year, depending upon the source, but there’s plenty of juice (snowmaking) to keep the lifts spinning.The place, in fact, has more skiers than it knows what to do with. Last year, Snow Trails began limiting season pass sales for the first time in its 60 seasons. The outdoor boom hit Ohio as much as it hit New England or Colorado. People wanted to ski. If they live in the north-central part of the state, they’ve got a fine little hill to do it on.What we talked aboutSummertime at Snow Trails; the passing of Snow Trails long-time founder and operator David Carto; the ski area’s founding in the ‘60s; the unique climate of Ohio’s Possum Run Valley; Snow Trails’ novel water source; introducing a “Western” feel to an Ohio ski area; how climate, technology, commitment, and culture work together to make a ski area succeed; the incredible longevity of Snow Trail’s management team; 60 years working at one ski area; Snow Trails’ future as a family-run ski area; don’t let your significant other teach you how to ski; learning to ski on ropetows; the insane grind of a lower Midwest ski season; the Cal Ripken of skiing: 22 years as GM and he’s never missed a day; reflecting on last ski season; “whenever the opportunity comes to make snow, come November, we’re going to do it”; managing volume at a small, insanely busy ski area during the Covid boom; limiting season pass sales; when Snow Trails’ season passes may go on sale; whether Snow Trails has considered joining the Indy Pass; watching Ohio’s collection of independent ski areas slowly consolidate under a single owner throughout the early 2000s; the moment Vail bought four of the five public ski areas in Ohio; Vail’s abysmal performance in Ohio this past season and how Snow Trails rose above skiing’s larger labor and weather struggles to offer 79 hours of operations per week; how Snow Trails will respond to Vail’s $20-an-hour minimum wage; the “gut punch” of Vail’s decision to slash operating hours and days of operation after Epic Pass sales ended; whether the ski area will bring back midnight Fridays; oh man you do NOT take night skiing away from Midwesterners; thoughts on how Vail can turn around the disappointing state of their operations in Ohio; how the installation of carpet lifts transformed the beginner experience at Snow Trails; which chairlift the ski area would like to upgrade next; where the resort is thinking about installing a ropetow; the best location on the mountain to potentially add an additional chairlift; where Snow Trails could potentially expand; the story behind Snow Trails’ glades, an anomaly in the lower Midwest; advancing snowmaking technology and how it increases resilience to climate change; what’s new at Snow Trails for the 2022-23 ski season; and RFID.  Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewVail stole the show in Ohio this past winter, mostly through a stunning display of callous ineptitude. Their four ski areas, which for decades have spun the lifts seven days per week, 10 or 12 or more hours per day, slashed hours and days of operation. Here’s what you were faced with, this past winter, if you were an Epic Pass holder in Ohio:Alpine Valley: closed Monday-Thursday, 3:30-9 Friday, 9-4 weekends (19.5 hours per week)Boston Mills: closed Monday & Tuesday, 10-3 Wednesday and Thursday, 4-10 Friday, 9-5 weekends (32 hours per week)Brandywine: 4-10 Monday-Friday, 9-5 Saturday and Sunday (46 hours per week)Mad River: 3-9 Monday-Friday, 10-5 Saturday and Sunday (44 hours per week)There were several elements of this modified schedule that were stunning in their complete misapprehension of the local market. First: night skiing, in the Midwest, is everything. Everything. Eliminating it – on Saturdays especially – is baffling beyond belief. Second: curtailing hours after season pass sales are complete is an offensive bait-and-switch, particularly for Midwesterners, who already weather the disrespect of the “flyover country” label. “How dumb does this Colorado, big-mountain company think we are?” was, by all accounts, the sort-of meta-narrative defining local sentiment this past season. Yes, the Epic Ohio Pass – good for unlimited access to all four of the state’s Vail-owned ski areas – started at just $279 for the 2021-22 ski season (it’s $305 right now), but it came with an implied promise that the ski areas would function as the ski areas always had. Crowded? Yes. Frantic? Yes. Existing on the margins of where people can hack a ski experience out of nature’s ferocious whims? Always. But it would be skiing, pretty much whenever you wanted it, for 12 weeks from mid-December to mid-March.Vail did not deliver on that expectation. The company responded to a mild early season and tight labor market not by dumping resources into operations and hiring but by retreating. Not just in Ohio, but in Indiana and Missouri as well. Paoli Peaks operated four days per week. The Missouri ski areas did better, with seven-day schedules and a decent amount of night skiing. But overall, Vail Resorts did not look like Vail Resorts in the lower Midwest during the 2021-22 ski season. The largest ski company in the world – proud, bold, insatiable, domineering Vail – looked bumbling, scared, confused, lost.And they would have gotten away with it, too, were it not for those meddling independent ski areas that carried on as though it were a completely normal Midwest ski season. Vail owns seven of the nine public ski areas in Ohio, Indiana, and Missouri. The other two – Perfect North, Indiana and Snow Trails – absolutely embarrassed Vail, exposing every flimsy excuse the company made for curtailing operations. Perfect North spun the lifts 89 hours per week. Snow Trails went 79, offering night skiing until 9 p.m. seven days per week. How did they do this? “We did what we always did,” Crislip told me in the interview. But what was that, exactly? And what could Vail learn from a little reflection after the humbling that was this past Ohio ski season?Why you should ski Snow TrailsCrislip mused, during our conversation, on the long-term advantages of severely discounting lift tickets for school groups. Those discounted tickets, he said, pay big dividends down the line.No kidding. I only ever tried skiing because 200-vertical-foot Mott Mountain, Michigan offered $6 lift tickets to my high school in the winter of 1992. I think rentals were an extra $5. A bus ride to the hill and back – about half an hour each way – was free.Mott Mountain is long gone, but I think we can conclude that the ski industry’s return-on-investment was sufficient. The amount of money that I’ve spent on the sport in the decades since that first bus ride is all of it. There were winters during which I did little else but ski and purchased almost nothing that was not directly ski related, other than gasoline and Taco Bell.Which is great for kids, right? But why would an accomplished skier ever want to ski a bump like Snow Trails, let alone travel there to do it on purpose? It’s a rhetorical question, asked because the world is still filled with studly chest-beaters, who answer questions like this:With machofest responses like this:Twenty years ago, we’d say that if you wanted someone to expose their true selves, get them drunk or angry. Now, you can just open their social media accounts. I don’t know where this dude lives, but if it’s anywhere near Snow Trails, I’d give him this bit of unsolicited advice: put your ego down (it may require the assistance of a forklift), store it somewhere safe, buy a season pass, and go enjoy yourself. If you can’t have fun skiing a bump like this, then I’m not sure you understand how to have fun skiing at all. Get to know the hill, get creative, nod to the lifties – treat it like your local bar or gym or coffee shop. Somewhere to be in the wintertime that isn’t your couch.  Or wait until your trip to Whistler and be happy skiing six days per year. I can’t tell you how to live. I’m just here to make suggestions. Here in New York, I know plenty of people like this. They wouldn’t dare ski Mountain Creek, New Jersey’s beehive-busy analogue to Snow Trails. “You probably ski Mountain Creek” they’ll type on social media, as though there’s something wrong with a thousand-footer with high-speed lifts and a happy hour-priced season pass. But once you adopt this mentality, it’s malignant. Soon, you’re also too good for Hunter, then Gore, then Killington, then, like the Twitter turkey above, the venerable Jay Peak, the NEK powder palace that averages more inches of average annual snowfall than Steamboat or Winter Park. Before you know it, your ski-day choices are down to Snowbird, Jackson Hole, Palisades Tahoe, and Revelstoke. Anything else “isn’t real skiing.”Or something like that. It’s all a little tedious and stupid. We’re fortunate, in this country, to have hundreds of viable ski areas, pretty much anyplace that hills and cold collide. If you live anywhere near one, there are a lot more reasons to frequent it than to snub it. There are plenty of skiers who live in Florida or Texas or Georgia, places where the outdoor lift-served bump is an impossibility. Not to sound like your mom when you were five years old, but there are plenty of kids in the world that don’t have any toys to play with, so try to be happy with the ones you’ve got. Go skiing.More Snow TrailsA Mansfield News Journal obituary for longtime Snow Trails owner David CartoNear the end of the interview, Crislip says refers to the work that “you and Matt” are doing to promote Midwest skiing. Matt is Matt Zebransky, founder of midwestskiers.com and all-around good dude. The site is comprehensive and terrific, and Zebransky is a really talented video producer and editor, who puts together some knockout reels laser-focused on Midwest skiing. Zebransky introduced me to Crislip after he hosted me for a podcast interview recently (I’ll let you know whenever that’s live). The Midwest Skiers Instagram account is a terrific follow.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 60/100 in 2022, and number 306 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.This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on June 2. Free subs got it on June 5. To make sure you get future pods as soon as they’re live, please consider an upgrade. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

Today's Friday, May 27th, 2022, so it's time for your weekly news roundup. On today's episode, there's a lot to cover, and there are quite a few events happening this weekend and beyond, so you'll want to listen to this episode soon! Also, you can find the complete show transcript on my website at discoverdaytonpodcast.com. I also really could use some Apple podcast reviews, so if you visit my Facebook page at www.facebook.com/discoverdaytonpodcast, you will find instructions on how to leave a review as well as a template you can use to fill out and create your own review, so please go do that now!   Organizations mentioned in this episode include: Dayton Police The FUDGE Foundation GDPM City of Dayton Fiver Rivers MetroParks Dayton International Peace Museum House of Bread Dayton NAACP Dayton Public Schools - Ponitz Equality Ohio Just Cakin' It Launch Dayton Dayton LGBT Center Dayton Theatre Guild The Nerve PNC Annex Dayton Live Schuster Center Wiley's Comedy Club Dayton Daily News Carillon Historical Park Bozack's Cocktail Lounge 1Eleven Flavor House Dayton Track Club St. Anne's Cheese Company Evan's Bakery RiverScape MetroPark Dublin Pub Tender Mercy Dayton Homecoming Branch and Bone Brightside Dayton Dayton Philharmonic Dayton Jewish Film Festival/Jewish Dayton Son Del Caribe Levitt Pavillion MojoFlo Wholly Grounds Coffee House Pecha Kucha Dayton   5/27/22 News Roundup Transcript:   Hello and welcome to the Discover Dayton podcast, the show that's all about the Gem City's past, present, and future. I'm Arch Grieve and I'm your host, and today's episode is the weekly news roundup for Friday, May 27th, 2022. A lot happened recently, including stories about rental assistance for Montgomery County residents, a new mobile culinary STEAM lab for kids, and some local DPS students earning national recognition. Next week is also the start of Pride Months, and there are a lot of events happening in relation to that that you'll want to know about, so happy almost-Pride Month to you and please stay tuned for last week's news in just a moment.    And now for this week's news:   Well if you're listening to this and you're under the age of 18, you should be aware that the Dayton police are going to be conducting a juvenile curfew sweep tonight, which is to say that any juvenile that is out in public without a guardian from 11pm to 5am will be arrested and charged with a misdemeanor, as will the youth's guardians. This comes in response to the fact that juvenile arrests have been up greatly this year over last year, with there being 774 juvenile arrests so far this year already, which is three times what it was last year at the same time. This is the first curfew sweep police have done in years, and there are many critics of the practice as well who argue that enforcement can be discriminatory and unfairly impact black and brown communities and can lead to increased tensions between police and those communities.    In the wake of the tragic shooting earlier this week of 19 children and two adults at a Texas elementary school, a local man, Dion Green, whose father, Derrick Fudge, was killed in the Oregon District shooting back in 2019, is traveling there to provide support for the families. Green started the FUDGE Foundation to honor his father's memory. Through the help of donations, Green travels to places where mass shootings have occurred to help the families who are dealing with trauma in the aftermath of those shootings. Green is a survivor, victim, and father who explains that the victims of the shooting are a part of his family now and argues for gun-control laws and background checks and getting rid of assault rifles. You can learn more about the foundation at www.fudgefoundation.org.    Well if you're a Montgomery County resident who is in need of rental assistance, there's good news for you from the Montgomery County Commission, which recently approved $1 million in rental assistance to local residents. A county spokesperson explained that the money will go to people who are late on their rent and also receive HUD assistance. The money will be funneled through GDPM, or Greater Dayton Premier Management, which specializes in low-income housing, and will be working with renters who have the greatest amount of debt first. To contact GDPM, call 937-910-7500 or visit gdpm.org.    The City of Dayton may be giving about 58 acres of vacant land to the Five Rivers MetroParks soon. The land in question is what remains of the Foxton Court Apartments, which were damaged beyond repair by the 2019 Memorial Day tornadoes. In exchange, the property would be remediated by Five Rivers MetroParks, which is expected to cost $1.9 million. The land used to be a tree nursery, although the nursery hasn't been utilized since the early 2000s. The city explained that the land in question is in a flood zone as well and should not be redeveloped.    Later today the Dayton International Peace Museum will be holding a ceremony to celebrate its move into a new space at 10 N. Ludlow St. at the Courthouse Square. Some of the museum's board members and founders will speak at the event and attendees can participate in preview tours of the museum after the ceremony. Friday, June 3rd is the museum's official re-open date, however, and their first guest exhibit is “MLK In Color.” Visit daytonpeacemuseum.org for more information about the museum.    Well while I don't often do national news on here, there is one national news item that may be affecting you right now without you knowing it, and that is that Jif brand peanut butter has been linked to salmonella outbreaks and the FDA has issued a recall starting on May 20th. If you have Jif peanut butter with lot numbers between 1274425 and 2140425, you should definitely not eat it, and you can also go online to Jif's website at jif.com and enter in your lot code number for your peanut butter and if it's a match for one of the contaminated jars, they'll send you a coupon for a replacement product.    The House of Bread here in Dayton is seeking a couple of volunteers to help with food distribution from 10:30am to 1:30pm each day. Applicants must be fully vaccinated and be at least 16 years of age. You can email Judith Moore to sign up at moorehob@gmail.com, and that's Moore with an “e.”   The City of Dayton is setting aside $7.6 million of the $138 million that it received in federal funding through the American Rescue Plan Act to help minority-owned businesses in Dayton, most of which will be going towards non-profits that are geared towards helping build up Dayton's minority-owned business community. Of that, $3 million is going towards the creation of an organization that will help business owners, and $1.5 million will go towards the awarding of micro-grants that go up to $10,000. A little over $500,000 of the money is being awarded to five local organizations, including a vaccine clinic, two restaurants, a law firm, and a childcare center. Some groups, such as the Dayton NAACP, however, are critical of the disbursement of funds, arguing that having just 5.6% of those funds go towards minority-owned businesses isn't enough.    Well, some local Dayton Public Schools students recently traveled to Texas to participate in the Business Professionals of America National Leadership Conference in Dallas. That group of students are the Ponitz CTC Broadcast News Production Team, who went on to place in the top 10 in the country for news production, so congratulations to them!   In an update to an interview I had with Equality Ohio back on episode 12 of this podcast, the Ohio Statehouse recently heard testimony in a committee hearing last week from two individuals who are part of what the Southern Poverty Law Center labels as hate groups. I would encourage you to go and listen to that episode to learn more about proposed Bill 454, which seeks to end gender-affirming care for LGBTQ+ youth. House members also heard testimony recently on House Bill 598, which seeks to criminalize abortions should Roe v. Wade be overturned by the Supreme Court and would make it a felony for doctors to perform abortions and does not include exceptions for rape, incest, or even the mother's health. The Supreme Court's final ruling is expected to be announced late next month.    And finally, to end on a good news note, there's a new business in Dayton called “Just Cakin' It,” which is a mobile STEAM dessert lab. The mobile lab is the brainchild of Dayton Native, Courtney Barrett, and operates Monday through Thursday and serves kids ages 5 through 16. Barrett has been baking since 2017 and the business stems from her work as a substitute teacher and her work in the prison system, where she saw childhood trauma and lack of positive outlets lead to incarceration for many people. She hopes that her business can help young people see the value of education. She was helped in getting her business of the ground by participating in the UD Flyer Pitch Competition, which helped provide seed money for the business. She also participates in the Early Risers Academy through Launch Dayton, which I recently talked to KeAnna Daniels about on this podcast in episode 29. She's looking to partner with schools and other local organizations moving forward, and you can learn more by visiting www.justcakinit.com to find out about educational opportunities and classes.    And now here's what's happening next week and beyond:   Well if you're looking for something fun and free to do tonight, you can check out the movie night at the Dayton LGBTQ Center, which is screening the movie “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which is about Queen frontman Freddie Mercury's life. Visit daytonlgbtcenter.org for more information.    If, however, you're more in the mood for theater tonight, you can attend a performance of “The Old Man and the Moon,” tonight at 8pm at the Dayton Theatre Guild. Ticket prices range from $14 to $21, and you can visit daytontheatreguild.org for tickets and information. There's another screening on Saturday as well at 8pm and Sunday at 3pm..   Another theater option tonight is a performance by The Nerve, which is presenting its show “Friend Art,” by Sofia Alvarez at the PNC Annex from 8-9:30pm. The Nerve is an ensemble-driven theatre company working to build a safe and encouraging artistic community in Dayton where local artists can discover their voices and explore their craft. Tickets are going for $22, and you can visit daytonlive.org for more ticket information. There's also a performance on Saturday and Sunday.    Yet another theater option is at the Schuster Center, where you can see a production of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” tonight from 8-10:30pm. Ticket prices range from $29 to $89 and are available at daytonlive.org.    Or, if you're more in the mood for comedy tonight, standup comedian, actor, and TV show host, Donnell Rawlings, will perform at Wiley's tonight and tomorrow, May 27th and 28th. Tickets go for $45 and can be purchased online at wileyscomedy.com.    Well this weekend on Saturday, May 28th, is National Burger Day, and my friend Alexis Larsen wrote recently in the Dayton Daily News about some of the places locally where you can get a great burger, so I encourage you to check that out! My favorite on the list is probably Slyder's though.    This Sunday, May 29th, at Carillon is the Dayton Heritage Festival, which goes from 12:00-8:30pm. It's free for Dayton History members and $12 per adult or $8 per child. The event celebrates Dayton's history and features special activities, costumed interpreters, and more. Visit daytonhistory.org for more information.    Also on Sunday May 29th, downtown's Bozack's Cocktail Lounge is hosting a Beards, Brims, and Bourbon event. Tickets are $10 in advance or $15 at the door, and more information can be found at facebook.com/bozacks.    Also happening Sunday, although a bit pricier, Master Mixologist Mike Jones will be leading a workshop entitled Cocktail Basics Part II: The Cheat Code, where he will explore cocktail basics and explain how to design and craft your own drinks. Tickets are $150, and the event takes place from 4:30-6:30pm at the 1eleven Flavor House downtown. Visit 1elevenflavorhouse.com for more information.    There's a Memorial Day 5K event happening Sunday as well from 9am to noon at the Eastwood Metro Park, where participants will run or walk along the Mad River. Ticket prices to participate are now at $30, and you can sign up at daytontrackclub.com/events.    Happening Tuesday, May 31st, you can participate in the Ethnic Cheese and Dessert Workshop at Evan's Bakery, which is being put on in partnership with the St. Anne's Cheese Company, who I had on the podcast as well recently on episode 27. This next workshop will highlight Jewish food and tickets are still available for $29 at stannescheeseco.com. The workshop goes from 11am to 1pm.    Also happening on Tuesday in the evening from 6-7pm is the BootyMix with the Ninth Beat event, which is taking place at the RiverScape MetroPark. BootyMix a high-intensity hip-hop dance class that is designed for people of all fitness levels and is free to attend. Learn more at MetroParks.org.    You can see the play production version of “Mean Girls” in Dayton starting next Tuesday, May 31st at the Schuster Center. The show is based on the Tina Fae movie of the same name and will run through June 5th. Tickets are available at daytonlive.org.   And I'm not sure why Tuesday the 31st is so popular in Dayton, but you can also go to the Dublin Pub for their 4-course Bourbon and Cigars Dinner. The event goes from 6-9pm and is a bit pricey at $80 in advance or $90 at the door, but in return, you get a four-course meal featuring hand-rolled cigars from Foundation Cigar, bourbon from Old Forrester, and swag and door prizes. RSVP by emailing tonyg@dubpub.com.    Moving on from Tuesday finally, on Wednesday at Tender Mercy in Dayton from 5-7pm there's a Dayton Homecoming event happening. Dayton Homecoming is the brainchild of The Collaboratory and seeks to inspire former Daytonians to come back to Dayton and non-native Daytonians to consider moving here. You can visit facebook.com/groups/daytonhomecoming to learn more.    Well, June 1st kicks off Pride Month, and there are a number of event celebrating that in Dayton, including one happening Wednesday, June 1st at Branch and Bone brewery, and that is the Pride Beer and Cheese tasting, where proceeds will go towards a Dayton LGBTQ+ charity. The event costs $45 and in return participants will get four five-ounce pours and hand-selected craft cheese boards as well as a limited Pride glass. Visit branchandboneales.com for more information and tickets.    There's another Pride event Wednesday as well, which is the Drag Fest Pride Kickoff event happening at the Brightside Dayton. The event features some of the area's best drag performers, including Katrina Reelfish, Cherry Poppins, Johnny Justice, Kiara Chimera, Landon Cherry, and Mocha Lisa, Featuring Lola Vuitton and Scarlett Chimera. Doors open at 6:30pm and the event kicks off at 7:30pm. I didn't see the event listed on the Brightside's website, however, but there is a long EventBrite URL that you can find in the show notes on my website at discoverdaytonpodcast.com and tickets are $10. Here's the URL: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/drag-fest-pride-kickoff-tickets-338467253667?aff=ebdssbdestsearch   The Dayton Jewish Film Festival kicks off on Thursday, June 2nd, at the Dayton Art Institute with a screening of “That Orchestra With the Broken Instruments.” Before that though there will be a special program with Neal Gittleman, the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra's conductor. After that, the remaining screenings will take place at The Neon and will go through June 26th. Visit jewishdayton.org for more information.    Also on Thursday June 2nd, Son Del Caribe will be performing at a free Levitt Pavilion concert starting at 7pm for the Levitt's summer concert series opening night. If you haven't attended a Levitt event before, it's a lot of fun and you can bring your own food and alcohol, although make sure to bring your own blanket or lawn chairs as well. The following day on Friday will feature another performance, this one by the Neo Funk group MojoFlo. Visit levittdayton.org for more information about other upcoming shows.    Another Thursday event is the First Thursday Jazz Jam at Wholly Grounds Coffee,  which happens every week from 7-10pm and is free to attend. In addition to coffee, they also serve alcoholic drinks. Learn more at whollygrounds.com.    And if that wasn't enough, Thursday night is also another Pecha Kucha event, the first since I interviewed Pecha Kucha organizer Shayna McConville on episode 9 on this podcast. This time the event takes place at Grace Church and goes from 7:30-9:30pm. As always it is free to attend, and you can learn more about PK events by checking out episode 9 or visiting PechaKucha.com/cities/dayton.    And finally next Friday, June 3rd, is the kickoff to the Dayton Pride Festival and the Pride Affair on the Square will take place at Courthouse Square from 6-10pm, featuring live performances, food trucks, and a beer truck as well. The event is free and open to the community, and on Saturday there will be a Pride parade and festival, and more will be happening Sunday as well. Check out daytonlgbtcenter.org/pride for more information.      Well that's about it for this week's News Roundup episode. As a reminder, you can call me at 513-400-3538 and tell me who you'd like me to talk to, why, and leave me a question you'd like me to ask, which I may put into an episode as well. Also, I know I say this every episode, but we still don't have any reviews on Apple podcasts, so on my Facebook page I've created a template for you to use to do so as well as a link to an article on how to do it, so please go do that now! As a reminder please visit discoverdaytonpodcast.com for the show notes to this and other news roundup episodes. Thanks so much for listening, and stay funky, Dayton. 

Full show transcript available at discoverdaytonpodcast.com.    Today's Friday, May 20th, 2022, and it's time for your weekly News Roundup episode, where I read the news so you don't have to. A lot happened this past week, including stories about an uptick in Covid cases, an EPA report about our local waterways, and new inductees into the Dayton Walk of Fame. There's also a lot happening in the future, so you won't want to miss this episode. Things going on today actually start about 30 minutes from this episode's release, so tune in and listen now!  Transcript:   Hello and welcome to the Discover Dayton podcast, the show that's all about the Gem City's past, present, and future. I'm Arch Grieve and I'm your host, and today's episode is the weekly news roundup for Friday, May 20th, 2022. A lot happened recently, including stories about an uptick in Covid cases, an EPA report about our local waterways, and new inductees into the Dayton Walk of Fame. You won't want to miss it as there's a lot happening today, including in about 30 minutes from this episode's release, so tune in now!   To start off this week's news I'd like to say Happy National Bike to Work Day! If you're listening to this before 7:00-9:00am you still have time to make it to the Five River MetroParks Bike to Work Day celebration, which is happening this morning. The first 500 riders to register and check in at the event receive a gift, and you can pre-register now online at MetroParks.org. The event takes place from 7:00-9:00am at the RiverScape Metro Park on Monument Ave. and features a free pancake breakfast, live music, a bike expo, and more, so hopefully I'll see you there!   Well in a reminder that Covid-19 is still unfortunately with us, Coronavirus cases in Ohio have been going up steadily for the past 6 weeks in a row, with weekly cases being over 15,000, as reported about a week and a half ago. That's up a lot from where they were at the beginning of April, when the state averaged a little over 3,500 cases per week. According to the Ohio Department of Health, over 7 million Ohioans have gotten at least one shot, but only 3.56 million have received two shots and a booster.    If you remember a while back me talking about Dayton Public Schools possibly reopening the World of Wonder school to serve students who are learning English as a second language, well that plan is now official after school board members voted unanimously to do so this past Tuesday. The school will be open to students in grades K-6 who live in Residence Park, but also open up to 12th grade for English language learners. Superintendent Lolli explained that the school will have separate English-native and English-learner classes, but that those will be combined during lunch, recess, and possibly classes like art and extracurriculars.    Also in DPS news, if you're interested in mentoring a Dayton Public School student, DPS is starting the Transform Career Mentoring Program, which will match about 100 high school students with local mentors. Mentors will be matched with 10th and 11th graders to help them with decisions on things like colleges and careers and mentors and mentees are expected to connect for a minimum of five minutes per week.    The locally-organized TEDxDayton event will be taking place on October 14th, which is a ways out, but more pressingly they are now accepting applications for speakers. TED is a nonprofit dedicated to spreading ideas, and TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design. So, if you're interested in being a TEDx speaker, you can apply at tedxdayton.com. Applying is no guarantee to speak, and I would know because I've applied and not made it in the past, but a volunteer-run committee will review your application if you apply and then may invite you to audition. If selected, they'll work with you to prepare to tell your story, so maybe give it a shot!   The Ohio EPA recently released a report about our local waterways that said that they're about as healthy as they were two years ago, although that's not necessarily a great thing. The report is required by the Clean Water Act to be released every two years, and in it they explained that in terms of local waterways, the stretch of the Great Miami from Tawawa Creek in Sidney to where Mad River joins it in Dayton is classified as “not impaired,” but that from Dayton to where it enters the Ohio River it is impaired by polychlorinated biphenyl, or PCB, a toxic industrial chemical that does not go away easily. The Mad River and Little Miami are also considered impaired by PCBs, although the Stillwater is not. In good news, one section of the Little Miami is being delisted because it meets a different set of cleanliness goals, so it's not all bad news at least completely.    A local Dayton couple is suing rapper Travis Scott after they allege that his Astroworld musical festival last fall resulted in the death of their unborn child, as well as 10 people who also died. The couple, Shanazia Williamson and Jarawd Owens, filed suit against Scott, the festival organizers, and the security companies that were hired, and are seeking over $1 million in damages. They explain in their suit that Williamson was trampled and crushed during the event, which resulted in her unborn child's death. So far, over 700 other concert-goers have filed suit as well, and Rolling Stone reports that nearly 5,000 people suffered some type of injury. Scott denies responsibility and has performed this month for the first time since the tragedy, which also resulted in the death of a UD student, Franco Patino, of Illinois. His family is also filing suit against the rapper.     There were protestors at the Ohio Statehouse on Saturday protesting against the likely adoption of abortion bans by the Ohio state legislature. Those protests were joined by others, including in Xenia and one here in Dayton at the Courthouse Square, where hundreds gathered to protest against abortion bans. In the wake of the leaked Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, many states such as Ohio are considering banning abortion, and in Ohio the bills that seek to do just that are Senate Bill 123 and House Bill 598. Ohio's version of the abortion ban, if it passes, which seems likely, will outlaw abortion except in cases where the mother's life is in danger or to prevent irreversible bodily impairment of the pregnant person, but no exceptions in the case of rape or incest.    Well it will be at least another year until marijuana is legalized in Ohio fully as state officials recently settled a case with the Coalition to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol, who had been pushing to have their signatures accepted on this year's ballot for voters to weigh in on. In exchange for delaying until 2023, the coalition will not have to re-collect signatures again for next year and the state will accept the over 140,000 signatures they've already collected.    The Carillon Historical Park here in Dayton has some new exhibits you might want to check out now. There is now a new industrial block of buildings on the grounds where you can see an expanded print shop, a new demonstration foundry, a soap shop, and a landscaped plaza where Carillon will hold programs for children. The Gem City Letterpress Company was the first hands-on experience the museum offered to visitors back in 1988, but it's now expanded and will be joined by the new Rubicon Foundry and Air City Soap Company. Paper printing was a big business in Dayton years ago, and Dayton History's Vice President, Alex Heckman, explained to the Dayton Daily News that due to Dayton's location next to the river, there were a lot of of paper mills here in the 1930s, in fact 25 out of Ohio's 36 paper mills were in Dayton, and because it was easier to do the printing next to where the paper mills were, there were 77 paper printing companies at one point as well. If you're interested in getting involved you can volunteer at Carillon as well, simply call volunteer coordinator Kay Locher at 937-293-2841 ext. 102. For more information about the museum, visit daytonhistory.org.    The Dayton Playhouse is bringing back its annual event, FutureFest, for the first time since the pandemic, the event where they produce six previously unproduced plays over the course of three days. FutureFest is a nationally-recognized all-volunteer event, and they received 378 play submissions this year. They have their six finalists who will be performing at the festival selected now, and at the festival those plays will be judged by professional adjudicators. One of the plays is particularly timely, and is called “Griswold,” which is about Estelle Griswold of the Supreme Court case Griswold v. Connecticut, which enabled unmarried couples the right to obtain birth control. You can learn more at wordpress.thedaytonplayhouse.com.    Salem Avenue in Dayton is now undergoing what will likely be over a year-long reconstruction process on the strip between Riverview and North Avenues. A reconstruction is not a simple repaving and actually involves much more work, hence the length of the project. Traffic will be down to a single lane during the construction process, so city leaders urge people to find alternate routes. The rebuilding is overdue, however, as some sections of the underlying base pavement are reported by the city to be over 100 years old. Once reopened, the road will have five lines, with two on each side and a center lane in between, as well as a two-way 10-foot wide cycle track. This is just phase 2 of the entire project, and the final phase 4 is not expected to be done until the end of 2025.    The Dayton Walk of Fame recently inducted some new members, including one of my favorite local bands, Guided by Voices. The walk began in 1996 and recognizes individuals with outstanding achievements in the arts, education, invention, community or military service, philanthropy, and more. The inductees this year as follows: Phyllis G. Bolds - a black woman who graduated from Dunbar High School in 1950 and went on to become internationally-known for her work in aircraft dynamics.  Neal Gittleman - artistic director and conductor of the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra for almost thirty years.  Roger Glass - president and CEO of Marion's Piazza who is known for his philanthropy work, including helping to found Equitas Health.  A.B. Graham - who was considered the founding father of 4-H youth programming.  Sharon Rab - the founder and co-chair of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.  Guided by Voices - known as the “forefathers of lo-fi rock,” who are headed by frontman Bob Pollard. They're still active of course and just this past March released Crystal Nuns Cathedral.  The inductees will be formally inducted and honored at a luncheon at Sinclair in October. Visit daytonregionwalkoffame.org for more information.    Well if you're into BBQ then you're gonna want to hear this next story, but a Dayton woman, Erica Roby, recently competed in World Championship BBQ Cooking Contest in Memphis, Tennessee, where she took fourth place in a competition that the USA Today calls the “most prestigious BBQ contest.” She came in fourth place for ribs out of 104 teams. Roby also competed in the Food Network's season 2 of BBQ Brawl, which she won. If you want to try her BBQ, she plans on cooking for the Yellow Springs Juneteenth Celebration this year as well as having some local popups in August. You can find her on Instagram at @bluesmokeblaire. Also in related news, I will be having an interview with AJ Bauer coming up soon, and he's the owner of Smokin BBQ in the Oregon District, so if you're a fan of BBQ don't miss that one!   Well apparently there's a thief in Dayton who is in possession of a key that can, quote, “unlock all Dayton-area mailboxes,” who has been stealing checks from people. So far the Montgomery County Sheriff's office has reported that at least 26 checks have been stolen from outdoor mailboxes since February. US Postal Service spokespeople say that there is an active investigation that is ongoing, and while they argue that mailing checks is still secure, the sheriff's office is telling people they should go inside the post office to mail checks for the time being.     And finally in our news stories for this week, I actually just got back from a week of birding in northern Ohio, Illinois, and Iowa, which I mention because while I was gone apparently the bird flu popped up in Dayton. The Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza virus has been found in birds locally, which can infect chickens, duck, geese, pheasants, quail, and guinea fowl, and there is no cure. It can infect humans, so City Manager Shelley Dickstein warned recently in a commission meeting for people not to handle dead birds, so stay safe out there if you come across one.     And now for local events happening soon:   Well today, Sideshow, one of the Dayton Yellow Cab's annual shows, is coming back this month today and tomorrow after taking several years off due to Covid-19. This year performers will include Far From Eden, Tino, Nautical Theme, Snake Oil Revival, and more. Ticket information is available at yellowcabtavern.com.   If you're looking for something fun to do with friends tomorrow that has an opportunity to win prizes, then you're in luck, because there's a downtown Dayton scavenger hunt going on, which is being put on by the Downtown Dayton Partnership. The scavenger hunt takes place from 11:00am-5:00pm and starts in the Oregon District but will lead you all over downtown Dayton. Answers will be recorded on a clue sheet, although some hunt locations will require you to text photos of the things you find. The 1st place prize is $300 cash, so nothing to sneeze at. There is a $10 registration fee per team, although in return you receive $10 in Downtown Dollars, which you can use at any participating downtown business. All teams also get entered into a raffle prize drawing as well. There's no limit on the number of people per team. Visit downtowndayton.org to sign your team up and learn more.    Well if you're in town on Sunday, May 22nd, which happens to be my birthday, then you can go to the Branch and Bone brewery's Brunch with Chef Dane event, which is happening from 12:00pm noon until they run out. They'll be serving up dishes like donut breakfast sandwiches, country ham, polenta eggs, and more. Visit branchandboneales.com for more information.    Also on Sunday, Carillon Historical Park hosts its annual “party in the park” event, AKA Fleurs de Fete, from 1:00-4:00pm. The event features over 200 wine samplings and food from local eateries, in addition to live music. Pre-sale tickets are $70 and you must be 21 or older to purchase tickets. Visit daytonhistory.org for more event information.    Another thing happening Sunday is the FreenCommunity Art Workshop: Peace Pole event. For this event the Dana L. Wiley Gallery is teaming up with Front Street for a workshop that allows people to paint a wooden tile that will placed on the Peace Pole at the Dayton International Peace Museum. Materials are provided and the event is free and open to everyone and goes from 2:00-4:00pm. The event takes place at the Dana L. Wiley gallery at 1001 E. Second St, and you can sign up on the Dayton Peace Musem's Facebook page at facebook.com/daytoninternationalpeacemuseum.    Also on Sunday there's an event being put on by the Dayton Woman's Club, which is the Founders' Hall of Fame High Tea event. This event is $25 and features a guest speaker, T. Douglas Toles of Toles Media, who will be talking about Dayton's Founding Mothers. It goes from 3:00-5:00pm on Sunday and you can learn more at daytonwomansclub.org.    Once again on Sunday, Dayton's Bach Society will be performing “Renewed,” a tribute to Paul Laurence Dunbar. This event features three world premiers of works set to Dunbar poems by composer Adolphus Hailstork and the winner's of the Bach Society's Young Composers Competition. Tickets are $25 and can be found at bachsocietyofdayton.org.    Standup comedian, actor, and TV show host, Donnell Rawlings, will perform at Wiley's later this month on May 27th and 28th. Tickets go for $45 and can be purchased online at wileyscomedy.com.    Next Sunday May 29th at Carillon is the Dayton Heritage Festival, which goes from 12:00-8:30pm. It's free for Dayton History members and $12 per adult or $8 per child. The event celebrates Dayton's history and features special activities, costumed interpreters, and more.    Also on Sunday May 29th, downtown's Bozack's Cocktail Lounge is hosting a Beards, Brims, and Bourbon event. Tickets are $10 in advance or $15 at the door, and more information can be found at facebook.com/bozacks.    Also happening Sunday, although a bit pricier, Master Mixologist Mike Jones will be leading a workshop entitled Cocktail Basics Part II: The Cheat Code, where he will explore cocktail basics and explain how to design and craft your own drinks. Tickets are $150, and the event takes place from 4:30-6:30pm at the 1eleven Flavor House downtown. Visit 1elevenflavorhouse.com for more information.    The following Monday, May 30th, the Dayton Track Club is hosting a Memorial Day 5K at the Eastwood MetroPark from 9:00am to noon. Race entry ticket are $30, and participants do receive a t-shirt. Visit daytontrackclub.com for more information.    Also happening next Monday is an ethnic cheese and dessert workshop at Evans Bakery, which is partnering with St. Anne's Cheese Company, who I recently had on the show, so check out Episode 27 with Annie Foos to learn more about that, or visit stannescheeseco.com. The cost is $29 and it goes from 11;00am to 1:00pm. The event on May 31st will feature Jewish food, but the June 11th event will feature Turkish food.    All right well that's about it for this episode, although before I go I recently saw another podcast doing this and thought it was a great idea, so if there's someone or some organization that you'd like me to interview, I'd like to hear from you. Please call me at 513-400-3538 and leave me a voice message explaining who you would like me to contact, why you want me to have them on the show, and one question you'd like me to ask them. I'm anxious to see where this leads, so I hope you'll call! Thanks so much for listening everyone, and stay funky, Dayton. 

A few of our boys, Sean, Tim, and Clay, sit down this week to discuss the trout fishing. Learn about the differences between fishing the Midwest and out West. Sit back and listen to the ReelFlyRod crew talk about our favorite flies, tactics, water conditions, the fishing culture in Utah, comparisons to the Mad River, as well as tips for those traveling to find new waters. Take a seat, grab your favorite cold one, and take a listen on this episode of Sippin' the Dry. 

The biddies are joined by Mimi Buttenheim, president of Mad River Distillers. Mad River Distillers is an award-winning craft distillery located in Vermont's Mad River Valley with a tasting room in Burlington, VT. Tune in to hear about some tasty whiskey, rye and rum and to learn all about the craft spirits world. For the full show notes: boozybiddies.com/81 Check out Mad River Distillers: madriverdistillers.com and @madriversdistillers

Rod J BeerVentures is honored to have Linda Cooley, CEO of Mad River Brewing Company as a guest for tonight's live stream as we discuss her brewery and the path they are blazing in Blue Lake, California. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/rodjbeerventures/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/rodjbeerventures/support

The Storm Skiing Podcast is sponsored by Spot and Mountain Gazette - Listen to the podcast for discount codes on subscriptions and merch.To support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Organizations can email skiing@substack.com to add multiple users on one account at a per-subscriber enterprise rate.WhoNadia Guerriero, Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Beaver Creek, ColoradoRecorded onMarch 25, 2022About Beaver CreekClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Vail ResortsBase elevation: 7,400 feet at Arrowhead Village; 8,100 feet at Beaver Creek VillageSummit elevation: 11,440 feetVertical drop: 3,340 feet (continuous)Skiable acres: 2,082Average annual snowfall: 325 inchesTrail count: 150 (39% advanced, 42% intermediate, 19% beginner)Lift count: 24 (12 high-speed quads, 1 chondola, 2 gondolas, 1 triple, 1 double, 7 conveyors - view Lift Blog’s inventory of Beaver Creek’s lift fleet)Uphill capacity: 48,264 skiers per hourWhy I interviewed herAmerica may or may not have suspected, when Beaver Creek flipped the power on in 1980 with three double chairs and three triples, that we were nearing the end of big-time ski resort construction in the United States. In the previous decade, Keystone (1970), Snowbird (1971), Copper Mountain (1972), Kirkwood (1972), Northstar (1972), Powder Mountain (1972), Telluride (1972), and Big Sky (1973) had all come online. Breckenridge (1961), Crested Butte (1962), Vail (1962), Park City (1963), Schweitzer (1963), Steamboat (1963), Crystal Mountain Washington (1964), Mt. Rose (1964), Purgatory (1965), Diamond Peak (1966), Jackson Hole (1966), Mission Ridge (1966), Snowmass (1967), Sierra-at-Tahoe (1968), and Grand Targhee (1969) had materialized out of the wilderness the decade before. This was a country that thought big and acted big, that crafted the tangible out of the improbable: a high-end ski resort, buffed smooth as an interstate and hemmed in by the faux villages of aspirational America, rising 3,000 feet out of the Colorado wilderness. The resort would be Vail’s answer to Aspen, high-end and straight down, without the drive to the end of the world.But after Deer Valley cranked to life the following year, big-mountain ski area development mostly broke down in the United States. The mammoth Yellowstone Club – all private, exclusively for individuals who consider automobiles to be single-use disposables – didn’t open until 1997. Tamarack, Idaho, was the next entrant, in 2004. The private Wasatch Peaks should open soon, and Mayflower may follow. But for the most part, this is a nation that, for better or worse, has decided to make do with the ski resorts it has.So what? Well, I lay this history out to make a simple point: Beaver Creek is about the best illustration we have of how and where we would build a ski resort if we still built ski resorts, with all our modern technology and understanding. The fall lines are incredible. The lift network sprawls and hums. The little walkable villages excise vehicles at exactly the right points. The place is just magnificent.The aversion to large-scale mountain construction did not, fortunately, temper Beaver Creek’s ambition. That simple half-dozen lifts multiplied to the west until the network overran and absorbed the formerly independent Arrowhead ski area. In 1991, Beaver Creek ran a high-speed quad up Grouse Mountain, one of the best pure black-diamond pods in Colorado. This year, the ski area added McCoy Park, a terrific high-altitude beginner pod, which complements the green-circle paradise off the Red Buffalo Express, already some of the most expansive top-of-the-world beginner terrain in America.Not that Beaver Creek got everything it wanted. A long-imagined 3.8-mile gondola connection to Vail, with a waystation at the long-abandoned Meadow Mountain ski area in Minturn, has been stalled for years. A lift up from Eagle-Vail would also be nice (and would eliminate a lot of traffic). But this isn’t the Alps, and the notion of lifts-as-transit is a tough sell to U.S. Americans, even in a valley already served by 55 of them (Vail Mountain has 31 lifts on top of Beaver Creek’s 24). They’d rather just drive around in the snow.Whatever. It’s a pretty fine complex just the way it is. And it’s one with a big, bold, ever-changing present. Beaver Creek is, along with Whistler and Vail Mountain, one of Vail Resorts’ three flagships, a standard-setter and an aspirational end-point for all those Epic Pass buyers around Milwaukee and Minneapolis and Detroit and Cleveland. This one has been on my list since the day I launched The Storm, and I was happy to finally lock it down.What we talked aboutWhy Beaver Creek is closing a bit later than usual this season; Guerriero’s early career as an agent for snowsports athletes, including Picabo Street and Johnny Moseley; night skiing at Eldora; working at pre-Vail Northstar; reactions to Vail buying Northstar; taking the lead at Beaver Creek; the differences between running a ski resort in Colorado versus Tahoe; what it means to get 600-plus inches of snow in a season; what elevates Beaver Creek to alpha status along with Vail Mountain and Whistler among Vail’s 40 resorts; going deep on the evolution and opening of McCoy Park, Beaver Creek’s top-of-the-mountain gladed beginner oasis; why the mountain converted McCoy to downhill terrain when it already had the excellent Red Buffalo pod on the summit of Beaver Creek Mountain; once again, I go on and on about green-circle glades; thoughts on the mountain’s lift fleet and where we could see upgrades next; why Beaver Creek doesn’t tend to see monster liftlines and the weird un-business of the ski area in general; the status of the long-discussed Vail Mountain-to-Beaver Creek gondola; thoughts on the rolling disaster that is Colorado’s Interstate 70; how Arrowhead, once an independent ski area, became part of Beaver Creek; the surprising sprawl and variety of Beaver Creek; potential future terrain expansions; the mountain’s high-end and rapidly evolving on-mountain food scene; cookies!; watching the evolution of the Epic Pass from the inside; whether Vail would ever build another ski area from scratch; Vail’s deliberate efforts to create leadership opportunities for women within its network; the mountain-town housing crisis; thoughts on Vail’s massive employee and housing investment; and Guerriero’s efforts to address the mountain-town mental health crisis.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewTwo words: McCoy Park. I recall skiing past this oddly wide-open and empty bowl, perched atop the mountain like some snowy pit-mine, years ago and wondering what was going on in there. The trailmap explained. For a long time, it was a Nordic and snowshoeing center. But this year, Beaver Creek finally finished a long-planned project to drop a new beginner center into the bowl. Two lifts and a clutch of blues and greens, some ungroomed, a contained adventure center for the graduated-from-the-carpet set that’s craving top-of-the-mountain adventure without the whooshing crowds or oops-I-just-skied-into-a-mogul-field regrets. Reviews have been solid. There’s one more thing: Vail has quietly built a very deep roster of women mountain leaders. Four of the company’s five Colorado resorts, and eight of its 40*, are led by women. Women hold approximately 45 percent of Vail’s corporate leadership roles, and half of its 10 board of directors members are women. Also, according to a Vail spokeswoman, CEO Kirsten Lynch is the only female CEO among travel and leisure companies listed on the 2021 Fortune 100 list.These gender-diversity efforts are, Vail Resorts’ Director of Corporate Communications Jamie Alvarez told me, “intentional and explicit. The ski industry has traditionally been male-dominated, particularly in senior leadership roles. As a company, Vail Resorts has prioritized creating an environment that encourages and enables growth opportunities for women at all levels of the company. This isn’t just in corporate, but also throughout our operations. We are proud of our industry-leading accomplishments and are committed to continuing to accelerate women at our company and in our industry.”They should be.*The eight current women heads of Vail Resorts are: Jody Churich at Breckenridge, Nadia Guerriero at Beaver Creek, Beth Howard at Vail, Tara Schoedinger at Crested Butte, Dierdra Walsh at Northstar, Belinda Trembath at Perisher, Sue Donnelly at Crotched, and Robin Kisiel at Whitetail. Vail recently promoted Mount Snow GM Tracy Bartels to VP of mountain planning, projects, and maintenance, overseeing maintenance and mountain-planning efforts across the portfolio.Questions I wish I’d askedI’ve always found it interesting that Alterra chose to leave Deer Valley off the unlimited tier of the Ikon Pass, while Vail granted unlimited Beaver Creek access on its comparatively cheap Epic Pass (Deer Valley’s season pass is $2,675). Both ski areas have similar philosophies around grooming, on-mountain food, and delivering a high-end experience. My guess is that this model works at Beaver Creek because it’s just a little bit harder to get to, while you can fall off your patio in Salt Lake City and end up at the top of Deer Valley’s Empire Express. Since Alterra just limited Deer Valley access even more, yanking it off the Ikon Base Pass, I’m guessing they’re fairly committed to that model, but it’s still an interesting contrast that I’d like to explore more at some point.What I got wrongNadia and I discussed one of the more tedious meta-critiques of Vail, which is that the company makes all its resorts the same. I don’t agree with this narrative, but the example I gave on the podcast was, to be honest, pretty lame, as I couched my counterpoint in a discussion of how Beaver Creek and Northstar differ operations-wise. Which, of course. No one is comparing Kirkwood to Mad River, Ohio from a snowfall and terrain point of view. What I should have done instead is to ask Guerriero what makes each resort culturally distinct. That’s on me.I also made the assertion that skiers could drop into McCoy Park from the top of the Bachelor Gulch lift, which is untrue. The three lifts with McCoy access (aside from the two lifts within the bowl intself) are Strawberry Express, Larkspur Express, and Upper Beaver Creek Express. I made a bad assumption based on the trailmap.Why you should ski Beaver CreekLiving in New York, I find myself in a lot of casual conversation with skiers pointed west for a week at Vail. I don’t know why (actually I do know why), but New Yorkers are drawn to the place like cows to grass. Like hipsters to $9 coffee drinks. Like U.S. Americans to 18-wheel-drive pickups. Like… well, they really like Vail, OK? And every time someone tells me about their long-planned trip to Vail, I ask them how many days they plan on spending at Beaver Creek, and (just about) every time, their answer is the same:Zero.This, to me, is flabbergasting. A Storm reader, Chris Stebbins, articulated this phenomenon in an email to me recently:“Beaver Creek is the single biggest mystery in skidom in my humble opinion. On Epic. On I-70.  Just 12 minutes past Vail. 15 high-speed lifts strung across six pods, suiting every ability. A huge bed base, with a mountain ‘village.’ And I’m making 15-minute laps on Centennial. On a perfect blue-bird day. After 16 inches of snow. On a Saturday. During Presidents’ Week.”I don’t get it either, Chris. But there it is. I’ve been having similar experiences at Beaver Creek for almost 20 years. Enormous powder days, lapping Birds of Prey and Grouse Mountain, no liftlines all day. Maybe here and there on Centennial. Once or twice on Larkspur or Rose Bowl. The entirety of the Arrowhead and Bachelor Gulch side deserted, always, like some leftover idyll intact and functional after an apocalyptic incineration of mankind. Once, on Redtail, or maybe it was Harrier, I crested the drop-off at mid-day to catch the growling hulks of half a dozen Snowcats drifting out of my siteline. Ahead of me a corduroy carpet, woven and royal, the union of all that is best in nature and best in technology. And no one to fight for it. I stood there perched over the Rockies just staring. Like I’m in a museum and contemplating something improbably manmade and ancient. Glorious. And 18 years later I still think about those turns, the large arcing sort born of absolute confidence in the moment, those Rossi hourglass twin-tips bought at an Ann Arbor ski shop and buried, for an ecstatic instant, in the test-lab best-case-scenario of their design.Look, I love Vail Mountain as much as anyone. It’s titanic and frenetic and pitch-perfect for hero turns on one of the most unintimidating big mountains in North America. I could spend the rest of my life skiing there and only there and be like, “OK well if it has to be one place I’m just relieved it’s not Ski Ward.” But the dismissive attitude toward 2,082-acre Beaver Creek, with its 3,340-foot vertical drop and zippidy-doo lift fleet and endless sprawling trail network, is amazing. The terrain, especially on Grouse, is steep and fall-line beautiful. My last trip to Beaver Creek – a midwinter pow-day Sunday where I never so much as shared a chair with another skier – was a dozen runs off Grouse, eight of those in the tangled wilds of Royal Elk Glades.All of which is a long way of suggesting that you work at least one Beaver Creek day into your next Vail run. It may be right down the road from Vail and an Epic Pass headliner, but Beaver Creek feels like it’s on another planet, or at least lodged within another decade.Oh yeah, and the cookies. Just trust me on this one. Go there.A pictorial history of Beaver Creek’s developmentBeaver Creek opened with six chairlifts, all on the main mountain, in 1980. By the next season, a triple ran up Strawberry Park. McCoy Park is a named section of the ski area more than four decades before it would enter the downhill system:The Larkspur triple came online in 1983. Two years later, McCoy Park is defined on the trailmap as a Nordic center:In 1991, Grouse Mountain opened:In 1997, Beaver Creek as we know it today came together, with lift connections from Rose Bowl all the way to Arrowhead, which was once an independent ski area. Beaver Creek purchased the small mountain in 1993 and eventually connected it to the rest of the resort via the Bachelor Gulch terrain expansion. Here’s what the mountain looked like in 1998:The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 31/100 in 2022. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer. You can also email skiing@substack.com. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

In February of 1998 the body of John Campbell would be found in the Mad River in Springfield Ohio. Months later another body would be found and identified as Raymond Kreitzer. Law enforcement would discover that John and Raymond had somethings in common. The Springfield Police Department don't know if their murders are tied together. This remains as two unsolved homicide cases out of Springfield Ohio. If you have any information on this case, please contact the Springfield Police Department. Cold Ohio and music were put together by William Swafford Email William Swafford at miopodcast@outlook.com or find on twitter at @williamswafford Resources: Kreitzer - Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost Campbell - Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost Unsolved Homicides | Clark County, OH - Official Website (clarkcountyohio.gov) --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/william-swafford9/support

The Storm Skiing Podcast is sponsored by Spot and Mountain Gazette - Listen to the podcast for discount codes on subscriptions and merch.WhoRick Schmitz, Co-Owner of Nordic Mountain, Little Switzerland, and The Rock Snowpark, WisconsinRecorded onFebruary 7, 2022Why I interviewed himBecause no one cares about small ski areas. At least that’s the conclusion you can come to if, like me, you lurk amid the If-It’s-Not-A-Redwood-It’s-Deadwood Size-Matters Bros that animate Facebook ski groups. Take, for example, the incisive observation of one Mr. Forrest Michael Culp to my announcement in the Colorado Ski and Snowboard group that Sunlight had joined the Indy Pass:“Looks boring”Does it?“I’ll have to try it just don’t like small mountains / short runs”Sunlight has a 2,000-foot vertical drop and sits on 730 acres. Its summit lift is 7,260 feet long – nearly a mile and a half. The ski area is larger than Aspen Mountain or Sugarbush. If this dude thinks Sunlight is small, then my guess is he’s driving one hell of a pickup truck.If Mr. Culp looks down on Sunlight, I wonder what his opinion would be of Rick Schmitz’s trio of Wisconsin bumps: 265-vertical-foot Nordic Mountain, 230-foot The Rock Snowpark, and 200-foot Little Switzerland?It really doesn’t matter. What interested me was why someone had built a mini-conglomerate of such ski areas, and how he had transformed them into what were by all accounts highly successful businesses.Turns out that small ski areas are cash registers on an incline. At least if you do it right. My first tip-off to this was my podcast interview last year with current Granite Peak and former Mad River, Ohio General Manager Greg Fisher. He described a frantic 12-week season of 12-hour-plus days, a Columbus-area bump mobbed by school kids, teenage parksters, and Ohio State party people, an absolute tidal wave for the brief winter. And 300-foot Mad River is hardly a special case – mountainvertical.com counts at least 42 ski areas with 300 vertical feet or fewer across the United States, and I know of several dozen more not inventoried on the site. My guess is that around 20 percent of America’s 462 active ski areas fit into this micro-hill category.Not all of them are great businesses – many of them, especially in New England, barely scratch out a dozen operating days in a good year and are run mostly by volunteers. But Schmitz’s hills are great businesses. This was not pre-ordained. When Schmitz bought Nordic Mountain in 2005 at age 22, the ski area had lost money in each of the previous five seasons. Little Switzerland had been closed for five years when he and his brothers hooked up the respirator and saved it from an alternate future as a real-estate development. And The Rock Snowpark sat mostly ignored among an entertainment megaplex outside Milwaukee for years before Schmitz stepped in as operator.Schmitz turned them all around. Adding a twist to the story, Schmitz for several years ran Blackjack, a 638-vertical-foot romper in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula that averages more than 200 inches of snow per year. He learned, he told me, that “the better ski hill is not always the better business.” He sold his stake in the UP bomber several years ago and has been focused on his Wisconsin resorts ever since.Yes, small ski areas are vital to the health of the industry, as incubators of future I-70 vacationers and Whistler cliff-jumpers who hone their aerials with endless ropetow park laps. Yes, they are vital community gathering places that transform brutal winter from endurance test to celebration. Yes, they provide a humbling reprieve for the EpKon hoppers who’ve become enamored with high-speed terrarium lifts that each come with their own raccoon or marsupial for your personal entertainment.But that’s not all they are. They’re also, with the right leader, damn good businesses. I wanted to find out how.What we talked aboutKeeping the momentum from last year’s Covid outdoor boom; how often the owner of three ski areas skis; the intensity of working the short Midwest dawn-to-dusk ski season; growing up in a middle-class ski family and how that sets the culture for Schmitz’s ski areas today; balancing affordability with rising costs; how Schmitz came to own Nordic Mountain at age 22 as a flat-broke business student; how to ignore the haters when you’re taking a risk; how someone who’s never worked at a ski area learns how to run a ski area that he’s just purchased; why snowmaking has to come before everything and why that means much more than just guns; the evolution of Nordic Mountain from a run-down, barely-break-even operation in 2005 to a successful business today; how Schmitz became part-owner and manager of burly Blackjack, Michigan; why the better ski hill is not always the better business; why Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is the bomber sweet spot of Midwest skiing; how Schmitz bought and re-opened Little Switzerland, his childhood ski hill; “you don’t hire someone to do something you can do yourself”; why Schmitz ultimately sold Blackjack and focused his efforts on his smaller Wisconsin ski areas; why small ski areas fail; how Little Switzerland nearly became a real estate development and what saved it from the bulldozer; what remained after Little Switzerland sold itself off for parts and how Schmitz and his family got it running again after a five-year closure; assembling a ski-area staff from scratch; the incredible value in a name; a deep look at Little Switzerland’s antique up-and-over Riblet doubles, which each serve both sides of the ski area:How Schmitz came to run The Rock Snowpark; “the model is people, population, and location, location, location”; the enormous challenges required to reinvigorate the ski area; why Schmitz replaced a chairlift with a high-speed ropetow; the vastly different personalities of Schmitz’s two Milwaukee-adjacent, 200-ish-vertical-foot bumps; “our ultimate goal is to change peoples lives with the sport of skiing or snowboarding”; Milwaukee as a ski market; the importance of night-skiing in the Midwest; a wishlist of upgrades at all three ski areas; new buildings incoming; whether Schmitz would ever buy another ski area; why he no longer believes every ski area can be saved; why Schmitz’s three ski areas require an upgrade for a multi-mountain pass; and why all three ski areas joined the Indy Pass (and why The Rock held off on joining).Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewWhen Indy Pass debuted in 2019 with a selection of Wisconsin ski areas, I thought Little Switzerland and Nordic Mountain were odd choices. After all, the state has a number of well-appointed 500-ish footers with robust trailmaps: Devil’s Head, Cascade, La Crosse, and Whitecap. Granite Peak – which Indy later added – towers over them all at 700 feet. In general, Indy was aiming for tier-two resorts like Brundage or Berkshire East or Black Mountain – good-sized ski areas that were just a little less well-capitalized and a bit smaller than the corporate big boys in their neighborhoods. What was with the Wisconsin molehills?The molehills, as it turns out, are run by one of a new generation of ski area operators that is aggressively reshaping what a ski area is and how it should operate. Schmitz is the Midwest version of Jon Schaefer, the second-generation owner of Berkshire East who is one of the most original minds in American skiing. I first read about him in Chris Diamond’s Ski Inc. 2020, as a case study of how regional mini-conglomerates were quickly becoming an alternate model for a sustainable skiing future. When I asked Indy Pass founder Doug Fish which of his partners would make a good podcast interview, Schmitz was among his top suggestions.Good call. This was one of my favorite podcast conversations yet. There’s a reason it’s nearly two hours long. Schmitz has a lot of ideas, a ton of positive energy, and an incredibly captivating backstory. Even if you have no interest in Midwest skiing, I’d encourage you to check this one out. Hell, even if you have no interest in skiing whatsoever, you ought to listen. Schmitz’s story is one we can all learn from, an inspiring lesson in how to chase and create a fulfilling life, how to cede your dreams with grace when they don’t work out, and how to ignore the negative people around you and make the improbable into the inevitable. It sounds clichéd, but everything he talks about really happens, and it’s powerful stuff.Why you should ski Little Switzerland, Nordic Mountain, and The Rock SnowparkIn my relentless romp around the ski world, I’ve come to appreciate the salutary effects of small ski areas. The energy at a place like Killington or Sunday River or Steamboat or Snowbird is infectious, the terrain amazing, the sheer scale impossible, mesmerizing. However, a good ski season, for me, is like a good movie. It can’t all be tension and drama. It needs some levity, some lulls, some unexpected and novel moments. At Snowbird I feel the need to throw myself through vertical forests over and over again. I’ve been there 10 times and have never skied Chip’s run or any other blue unless I was traversing or funneling down to a lift. The place is a proving ground, rowdy and relentless. To cruise Snowbird groomers is a waste, like going to Paris and eating at McDonald’s.But sometimes I do just want to cruise. Or do fast laps on a modest pitch with big fast turns. Or lap a subdued terrain park and take a little air. Just ski without stress or expectation or the gnawing sense that I need to challenge myself.Enter small ski areas. Skiing this year at Nashoba Valley or Mount Pleasant or Cockaigne or Sawmill or Otis Ridge was delightful. Relaxed skiing. No pressure to burrow into the hard stuff because there is no hard stuff. Cruise along, enjoy the forest, find interesting lines and side hits. Then I would go to Smugglers’ Notch and ski stuff like this:Balance.Another rad thing about small ski areas: they tend to be close to lots and lots of people, including, likely, you. And since the season passes tend to be inexpensive, you can tack one onto your EpKon Pass and crush night turns after work for an hour or two. Who cares if it’s only 200 feet of vert? Do you drink 12 beers every time you crack one open? Sometimes one or two is enough, and sometimes a few laps on a bump is enough to get your fix between weekend runs to Mount Radness. If I lived in Milwaukee, I can guarantee you I’d own a Granite Peak season pass and one at one of the eight local bumps orbiting the city.As far as skiing these ski areas, specifically, Schmitz lays it out: Little Switzerland draws families, The Rock is the spot for park laps. Nordic is a bit farther out, but if you live anywhere nearby, the pass is a no-brainer: seven days a week of night skiing. Hit it for a couple hours two or three nights per week, and suddenly skiing isn’t something you do when you can get away – it’s your gym, your zone-out time. It’s part of your routine. Something you do, and not something you wait for.More Little Switzerland, Nordic Mountain, and The Rock SnowparkLift Blog’s inventory of Little Switzerland’s lift fleetHistoric Little Switzerland trailmaps on skimap.orgLift Blog’s inventory of Nordic Mountain’s lift fleetHistoric Nordic Mountain trailmaps on skimap.orgNordic Mountain’s current trailmap:Lift Blog’s inventory of The Rock Snowpark’s lift fleetHistoric Rock Snowpark trailmaps on skimap.orgThe Rock Snowpark’s current trailmap: Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

We'll start the morning in the Valley again taking a trip to Mad River Fiber Arts & Mill. Then we'll open the phones for a half hour. After that, we'll learn about the stresses our avian friends face in the winter and the help that VINS in Quechee needs to transport injured birds. And we finish the morning learning about ”Cry Havoc,”  a play being performed at Norwich University about the re-integration into civilian life.

My special guest tonight is Thomas J. Carey, who has co-authored a book with Donald Schmitt called UFO Secrets Inside Wright-Patterson: Eyewitness Accounts from the real Area 51.     The true nature of what crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 remains classified. Only a select few have ever had access to the truth about what became known as Area 51.  But what happened to the remnants of that crash is shrouded in even greater mystery. What began in the high desert of New Mexico ended at Wright-Patterson, an ultra-top-secret Air Force base in Dayton, Ohio. The physical evidence of extraterrestrial visitation was buried deep within this nuclear stronghold. How tragic that such seismic news should be kept from the people of the world . . . pieces of history, now quickly dwindling into oblivion as the last of the secret-keepers passes on.  In addition to its rich history of military service to our nation, Wright-Patterson also stands as the secret tomb of one of the most significant occurrences in recorded history. Be prepared . . . the real Area 51—Wright-Patterson‘s vault—is about to be opened.  UFO Secrets Inside Wright-Patterson is a thoroughly researched work that includes:  New eyewitness accounts from the late Leonard Stringfield's files about the crash retrieval evidence stored at Wright-Patterson  New testimonies from the late Emmy-award-winning TV reporter Carl Day concerning physical evidence of crashed UFOs stored in underground facilities at Wright-Patterson  I recently discovered Project Blue Book files from Wright-Patterson, including photos and Air Force investigations of UFOs.  Prehistoric Indian mounds of the Adena culture at Wright-Patterson are along P Street, and a hilltop moundight Brothers Memorial group is at the Wr.[7]  Aircraft operations on land now part of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base began in 1904–1905 when Wilbur and Orville Wright used an 84-acre (340,000 m2) plot of Huffman Prairie[8] for experimental test flights with the Wright Flyer III. Their flight exhibition company and the Wright Company School of Aviation returned 1910–1916 to use the flying field.[9]  World War I transfers of land that later became WPAFB include 2,075-acre (8.40 km2) (including the Huffman Prairie Flying Field) along the Mad River leased to the Army by the Miami Conservancy District, the adjacent 40 acres (160,000 m2) purchased by the Army from the District for the  Fairfield Aviation General Supply Depot, and a 254-acre (1.03 km2) complex for McCook Field just north of downtown Dayton between Keowee Street and the Great Miami River. In 1918, Wilbur Wright Field agreed to let McCook Field use the hangar and shop space and its enlisted mechanics to assemble and maintain airplanes and engines under the direction of Chief of Air Service Mason Patrick.[10]  After World War I, 347 German aircraft were brought to the United States—some were incorporated into the Army Aeronautical Museum[11] (in 1923, the Engineering Division at McCook Field "first collected technical artifacts for preservation"). The training school[specify] at Wilbur Wright Field was discontinued. Wilbur Wright Field and the depot merged after World War I to form the Fairfield Air Depot. The Patterson family created the Dayton Air Service Committee, Inc., which held a campaign that raised $425,000 in two days and purchased 4,520.47 acres (18.2937 km2) northeast of Dayton, including Wilbur Wright Field and the Huffman Prairie Flying Field.[12]

Mad River Mix Madness! Whisk(e)y Wednesday from June 30, 2021 Interview and tasting with Maeghan from Mad River Distillery.

First eve Pod eppy