Podcasts about Squaw Valley

Join Ocean House owner and author Deborah Goodrich Royce for a conversation with authors Annabel Monaghan and Alix Strauss as they discuss their books Summer Romance (Annabel Monaghan) and The Joy of Funerals (Alix Strauss). About Annabel Monaghan: Annabel Monaghan is the author of LibraryReads pick Same Time Next Summer and Indie Next and LibraryReads pick Nora Goes Off Script, as well as two young adult novels and Does This Volvo Make My Butt Look Big?, a selection of laugh-out-loud columns that appeared in the Huffington Post, the Week, and the Rye Record. She lives in Rye, New York, with her family. About Summer Romance: The heart-tugging and hilarious story of a professional organizer whose life is a mess, and the summer she gets unstuck with the help of someone unexpected from her past, by the bestselling author of Same Time Next Summer and Nora Goes Off Script. Benefits of a summer romance: It's always fun, always brief, and no one gets their heart broken. Ali Morris is a professional organizer whose own life is a mess. Her mom died two years ago, then her husband left, and she hasn't worn pants with a zipper in longer than she cares to remember. No one is more surprised than Ali when the first time she takes off her wedding ring and puts on pants with hardware—overalls count, right?—she meets someone. Or rather, her dog claims a man for her in the same way he claimed his favorite of her three children: by peeing on him. Ethan smiles at Ali like her pants are just right—like he likes what he sees. He looks at her as if she's a version of herself she hasn't been in a long while. The last thing newly single mom Ali needs is to make her life messier, but there's no harm in a little summer romance. Is there?   About Alix Strauss: Alix Strauss is a trend, culture and lifestyle journalist; an award-winning, four-time published author; speaker; and frequent contributor to The New York Times. Her books include: The Joy of Funerals (St. Martin's Press & Palagram Press), Based Upon Availability (Harper Collins), and Death Becomes Them: Unearthing the Suicides of the Brilliant, the Famous and the Notorious (Harper Collins). She is also the editor of Have I Got a Guy for You (Simon & Schuster), an anthology of mother-coordinated dating horror stories. Her work has been optioned for several TV and film projects. A media-savvy social satirist, she has been a featured lifestyle, travel, and trend writer on national morning and talk shows including ABC, CBS, CNN, and the Today Show. During the past 25 years she has written over 1500 articles. Her articles, which have appeared in Elle, Harper's Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, Conde Nast Traveler, the Financial Times, Time Magazine, and Departures, among others, and cover a range of topics from trends in beauty, travel, and food to celebrity interviews. The Joy of Funerals is an Ingram Award winner and was named Best Debut Novel by The New York Resident. Alix was the inaugural “First Chapters” pick, Cosmopolitan Magazine's new launchpad of fiction excerpts, giving readers exclusive sneak peeks of gripping new work. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in the Primavera Literary Journal, Hampton Shorts Literary Journal, The Idaho Review, Quality Women's Fiction, The Blue Moon Café III, Sex, Drugs & Gefilte Fish: The Heeb Storytelling Collection, and A Kudzu Christmas. Her short story, “Shrinking Away”, won the David Dornstein Creative Writing Award. She is the recipient of several awards and fellowships from programs such as the Wesleyan Writers Conference, the Skidmore College Writerʼs Institute, the Sarah Lawrence Summer Program, and the Squaw Valleyʼs Screenwritersʼ Summer Program. Alix lectures extensively and has been a keynote speaker, moderator, or panelist at over 200 conferences, symposiums, seminars, and summits including The Southern Festival of Books, The Northwest Bookfest, The New England's Writer's Conference, Wesleyan Writer's Conference, The 92nd Street Y, New York University, Center for Communications, University of Connecticut, and Columbia University. She was chosen to speak at the National Jewish Book Festival and is on the National Speakers Bureau for Israeli Bonds. Alix Lives in Manhattan. You can connect with her at alixstrauss.com or @alixstrauss. About The Joy of Funerals: From the very first page, readers are drawn into the strange, often humorous world where nine women grapple with sex, power, love, and death. Meet a widow who lusts…a daughter who aches…a lover who obsesses…a shopaholic who hungers… a daredevil who desires…a single woman who longs…an outsider who hopes…an artist who craves…and a funeral-junkie who needs. These are the women who inhabit the eerily honest, often heartbreaking world Alix Strauss has created in The Joy of Funerals. Throughout this powerful and provocative collection, these characters explore the basic need for human connection while seeking to understand themselves better. It is the ‘where do I belong' and the ‘how do I fit in' that these sad, bright and amazingly strong women seek to answer. In “Recovering Larry,” a woman mourns for her dead husband by having sex with grieving men. In “Shrinking Away,” a woman pays a daring shiva call on her psychiatrist's widow. “Swimming Without Annette” explores a woman's obsession with her wife's killer, while “Still Life” peers into the life of a pregnant artist who wishes to paint herself out of a bad marriage and into a prettier world. In “Post-Dated,” a single woman wonders if her recently defunct date was perhaps the perfect man. Read independently, these vivid and raw stories stand on their own. When read as a collection, they are anchored together by the novella, “The Joy of Funerals,” which follows the life of Nina, a lonely, single thirty-something woman who attends the funerals of the deceased characters in the previous stories. Begun as an essay in the Lives column of The New York Times magazine, The Joy of Funerals is written with raw wit, mordant humor and a uniquely penetrating voice as Strauss turns the spotlight on the unattractive subjects of loss, grief and loneliness. For more information about author Annabel Monaghan, visit annabelmonaghan.com and for Alix Strauss, visit alixstrauss.com For details on Deborah Goodrich Royce and the Ocean House Author Series, visit deborahgoodrichroyce.com

John Brantingham and Jane Edberg published a unique and delightful book entitled MYDEAD. John's beautiful poetry is accompanied by Jane's vivid art. Neither an illustration nor and illumination, Jane's art adds additional meaning - perhaps even another perspective - to John's words. Their unique collaboration provided the ground for this spirited conversation.John Brantingham is currently and always thinking about radical wonder. He was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks' first poet laureate. His work has appeared in hundreds of magazines including Writer's Almanac, The North America Review, The Journal, Tears in the Fence, and Confrontation. He has been nominated for ten Pushcart Prizes and won a spot in The Best Small Fictions 2016 and 2022 and was a semifinalist in The Best Small Fictions 2018.  He has written twenty-two books of poetry and fiction including The L.A. Fiction Anthology(Red Hen Press), Crossing the High Sierra (https://www.chollaneedles.com/), and California Continuum: Migrations and Amalgamations (http://www.pelekinesis.com/catalog.html) co-written with Grant Hier. His newest work is My Dead, created with the artist Jane Edberg. He lives with his wife and dog in a little house in Jamestown, New York where he spends most of his time in the basement where he's set up a writing studio next to a washing machine. He teaches all around the country at festivals and workshops and at Collins Correctional Facility.Find out more about him and buy his books at https://www.johnbrantingham.com/Chief Editor at The Journal of Radical Wonder: https://medium.com/the-journal-of-radical-wonder.Jane Bio: Jane Edberg holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, Davis with an emphasis on photography and performance art. She teaches writing at California State University at Monterey Bay. She is a writing coach and offers writing workshops. She serves as the arts editor and a contributing editor at The Journal of Radical Wonder. Her writing is featured in the books, Death, and its Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Beautiful Lessons: Field Notes from The Death Dialogues Project; My Dead; BAM 42 Stories (to be released in 2024); and in many journals, including Cholla Needles, and Gyroscope Review. She is a Community of Writers alumna (Squaw Valley). Jane has an illustrated memoir titled The Fine Art of Grieving to be published in 2024 by Linen Presshttps://www.janeedberg.com/https://www.thefineartofgrieving.com/INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/thefineartofgrieving/

This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on June 10. It dropped for free subscribers on June 17. 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:WhoBelinda Trembath, Vice President & Chief Operating Officer of Whistler Blackcomb, British ColumbiaRecorded onJune 3, 2024About Whistler BlackcombClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Vail Resorts (majority owners; Nippon Cable owns a 25 percent stake in Whistler Blackcomb)Located in: Whistler, British ColumbiaYear founded: 1966Pass affiliations:* Epic Pass: unlimited* Epic Local Pass: 10 holiday-restricted days, shared with Vail Mountain and Beaver CreekClosest neighboring ski areas: Grouse Mountain (1:26), Cypress (1:30), Mt. Seymour (1:50) – travel times vary based upon weather conditions, time of day, and time of yearBase elevation: 2,214 feet (675 meters)Summit elevation: 7,497 feet (2,284 meters)Vertical drop: 5,283 feet (1,609 meters)Skiable Acres: 8,171Average annual snowfall: 408 inches (1,036 centimeters)Trail count: 276 (20% easiest, 50% more difficult, 30% most difficult)Lift count: A lot (1 28-passenger gondola, 3 10-passenger gondolas, 1 8-passenger gondola, 1 8-passenger pulse gondola, 8 high-speed quads, 4 six-packs, 1 eight-pack, 3 triples, 2 T-bars, 7 carpets – view Lift Blog's inventory of Whistler Blackcomb's lift fleet) – inventory includes upgrade of Jersey Cream Express from a quad to a six-pack for the 2024-25 ski season.Why I interviewed herHistorical records claim that when Lewis and Clark voyaged west in 1804, they were seeking “the most direct and practicable water communication across this continent, for the purposes of commerce.” But they were actually looking for Whistler Blackcomb.Or at least I think they were. What other reason is there to go west but to seek out these fabulous mountains, rising side by side and a mile* into the sky, where Pacific blow-off splinters into summit blizzards and packed humanity animates the village below?There is nothing else like Whistler in North America. It is our most complete, and our greatest, ski resort. Where else does one encounter this collision of terrain, vertical, panorama, variety, and walkable life, interconnected with audacious aerial lifts and charged by a pilgrim-like massing of skiers from every piece and part of the world? Europe and nowhere else. Except for here.Other North American ski resorts offer some of these things, and some of them offer better versions of them than Whistler. But none of them has all of them, and those that have versions of each fail to combine them all so fluidly. There is no better snow than Alta-Snowbird snow, but there is no substantive walkable village. There is no better lift than Jackson's tram, but the inbounds terrain lacks scale and the town is miles away. There is no better energy than Palisades Tahoe energy, but the Pony Express is still carrying news of its existence out of California.Once you've skied Whistler – or, more precisely, absorbed it and been absorbed by it – every other ski area becomes Not Whistler. The place lingers. You carry it around. Place it into every ski conversation. “Have you been to Whistler?” If not, you try to describe it. But it can't be done. “Just go,” you say, and that's as close as most of us can come to grabbing the raw power of the place.*Or 1.6 Canadian Miles (sometimes referred to as “kilometers”).What we talked aboutWhy skier visits dropped at Whistler-Blackcomb this past winter; the new Fitzsimmons eight-passenger express and what it took to modify a lift that had originally been intended for Park City; why skiers can often walk onto that lift with little to no wait; this summer's Jersey Cream lift upgrade; why Jersey Cream didn't require as many modifications as Fitzsimmons even though it was also meant for Park City; the complexity of installing a mid-mountain lift; why WB had to cancel 2024 summer skiing and what that means for future summer seasons; could we see a gondola serving the glacier instead?; Vail's Australian trio of Mt. Hotham, Perisher, and Falls Creek; Whistler's wild weather; the distinct identities of Blackcomb and Whistler; what WB means to Vail Resorts; WB's Olympic legacy; Whistler's surprisingly low base elevation and what that means for the visitor; WB's relationship with local First Nations; priorities for future lift upgrades and potential changes to the Whistler gondola, Seventh Heaven, Whistler T-bar, Franz's, Garbanzo; discussing proposed additional lifts in Symphony Bowl and elsewhere on Whistler; potential expansion into a fourth portal; potential new or upgraded lifts sketched out in Blackcomb Mountain's masterplan; why WB de-commissioned the Hortsman T-Bar; missing the Wizard-to-Solar-Coaster access that the Blackcomb Gondola replaced; WB's amazing self-managing lift mazes; My Epic App direct-to-lift access is coming to Whistler; employee housing; why Whistler's season pass costs more than an Epic Pass; and Edge cards.   Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewFour new major lifts in three years; the cancellation of summer skiing; “materially lower” skier visits at Whistler this past winter, as reported by Vail Resorts – all good topics, all enough to justify a check-in. Oh and the fact that Whistler Blackcomb is the largest ski area in the Western Hemisphere, the crown jewel in Vail's sprawling portfolio, the single most important ski area on the continent.And why is that? What makes this place so special? The answer lies only partly in its bigness. Whistler is vast. Whistler is thrilling. Whistler is everything you hope a ski area will be when you plan your winter vacation. But most important of all is that Whistler is proof.Proof that such a place can exist in North America. U.S. America is stuck in a development cycle that typically goes like this:* Ski area proposes a new expansion/base area development/chairlift/snowmaking upgrade.* A small group of locals picks up the pitchforks because Think of the Raccoons/this will gut the character of our bucolic community of car-dependent sprawl/this will disrupt one very specific thing that is part of my personal routine that heavens me I just can't give up.* Said group files a lawsuit/formal objection/some other bureaucratic obstacle, halting the project.* Resort justifies the project/adapts it to meet locals' concerns/makes additional concessions in the form of land swaps, operational adjustments, infrastructure placement, and the like.* Group insists upon maximalist stance of Do Nothing.* Resort makes additional adjustments.* Group is Still Mad* Cycle repeats for years* Either nothing ever gets done, or the project is built 10 to 15 years after its reveal and at considerable extra expense in the form of studies, legal fees, rising materials and labor costs, and expensive and elaborate modifications to accommodate one very specific thing, like you can't operate the lift from May 1 to April 20 because that would disrupt the seahorse migration between the North and South Poles.In BC, they do things differently. I've covered this extensively, in podcast conversations with the leaders of Sun Peaks, Red Mountain, and Panorama. The civic and bureaucratic structures are designed to promote and encourage targeted, smart development, leading to ever-expanding ski areas, human-scaled and walkable base area infrastructure, and plenty of slopeside or slope-adjacent accommodations.I won't exhaust that narrative again here. I bring it up only to say this: Whistler has done all of these things at a baffling scale. A large, vibrant, car-free pedestrian village where people live and work. A gargantuan lift across an unbridgeable valley. Constant infrastructure upgrades. Reliable mass transit. These things can be done. Whistler is proof.That BC sits directly atop Washington State, where ski areas have to spend 15 years proving that installing a stop sign won't undermine the 17-year cicada hatching cycle, is instructive. Whistler couldn't exist 80 miles south. Maybe the ski area, but never the village. And why not? Such communities, so concentrated, require a small footprint in comparison to the sprawl of a typical development of single-family homes. Whistler's pedestrian base village occupies an area around a half mile long and less than a quarter mile wide. And yet, because it is a walkable, mixed-use space, it cuts down reliance on driving, enlivens the ski area, and energizes the soul. It is proof that human-built spaces, properly conceived, can create something worthwhile in what, 50 years ago, was raw wilderness, even if they replace a small part of the natural world.A note from Whistler on First NationsTrembath and I discuss Whistler's relationship with First Nations extensively, but her team sent me some follow-up information to clarify their role in the mountain's development:Belinda didn't really have time to dive into a very important piece of the First Nations involvement in the operational side of things:* There was significant engagement with First Nations as a part of developing the masterplans.* Their involvement and support were critical to the approval of the masterplans and to ensuring that all parties and their respective communities will benefit from the next 60 years of operation.* This includes the economic prosperity of First Nations – both the Squamish and Líl̓wat Nations will participate in operational success as partners.* To ensure this, the Province of British Columbia, the Resort Municipality of Whistler, Whistler Blackcomb and the Squamish and Líl̓wat Nations are engaged in agreements on how to work together in the future.* These agreements, known as the Umbrella Agreement, run concurrently with the Master Development Agreements and masterplans, providing a road map for our relationship with First Nations over the next 60 years of operations and development. * Key requirements include Revenue Sharing, Real Estate Development, Employment, Contracting & Recreational Opportunities, Marketing and Tourism and Employee Housing. There is an Implementation Committee, which oversees the execution of the agreement. * This is a landmark agreement and the only one of its kind within the mountain resort industry.What we got wrongI mentioned that “I'd never seen anything like” the lift mazes at Whistler, but that's not quite accurate. Vail Resorts deploys similar setups throughout its western portfolio. What I hadn't seen before is such choreographed and consistent navigation of these mazes by the skiers themselves. To watch a 500-person liftline squeeze itself into one loading ramp with no personnel direction or signage, and to watch nearly every chair lift off fully loaded, is to believe, at least for seven to nine minutes, in humanity as a worthwhile ongoing experiment.I said that Edge Cards were available for up to six days of skiing. They're actually available in two-, five-, or 10-day versions. If you're not familiar with Edge cards, it's because they're only available to residents of Canada and Washington State.Whistler officials clarified the mountain's spring skiing dates, which Trembath said started on May 14. The actual dates were April 15 to May 20.Why you should ski Whistler BlackcombYou know that thing you do where you step outside and you can breathe as though you didn't just remove your space helmet on the surface of Mars? You can do that at Whistler too. The village base elevation is 2,214 feet. For comparison's sake: Salt Lake City's airport sits at 4,227 feet; Denver's is at 5,434. It only goes up from there. The first chairlifts sit at 6,800 feet in Park City; 8,100 at Snowbird; 8,120 at Vail; 8,530 at Alta; 8,750 at Brighton; 9,000 at Winter Park; 9,280 at Keystone; 9,600 at Breckenridge; 9,712 at Copper Mountain; and an incredible 10,780 feet at Arapahoe Basin. Taos sits at 9,200 feet. Telluride at 8,750. Adaptation can be brutal when parachuting in from sea level, or some nominal inland elevation above it, as most of us do. At 8,500 feet, I get winded searching my hotel room for a power outlet, let alone skiing, until my body adjusts to the thinner air. That Whistler requires no such reconfiguration of your atomic structure to do things like blink and speak is one of the more underrated features of the place.Another underrated feature: Whistler Blackcomb is a fantastic family mountain. While Whistler is a flip-doodle factory of Stoke Brahs every bit the equal of Snowbird or Jackson Hole, it is not Snowbird or Jackson Hole. Which is to say, the place offers beginner runs that are more than across-the-fall line cat tracks and 300-vertical-foot beginner pods. While it's not promoted like the celebrated Peak-to-Creek route, a green trail (or sequence of them), runs nearly 5,000 uninterrupted vertical feet from Whistler's summit to the base village. In fact, with the exception of Blackcomb's Glacier Express, every one of the ski area's 16 chairlifts (even the fearsome Peak Express), and five gondolas offers a beginner route that you can ski all the way back to the base. Yes, some of them shuffle into narrow cat tracks for stretches, but mostly these are wide, approachable trails, endless and effortless, built, it seems, for ski-family safaris of the confidence-building sort.Those are maybe the things you're not thinking of. The skiing:Most skiers start with one of the three out-of-base village gondolas, but the new Fitz eight-seater rarely has a line. Start there:That's mostly a transit lift. At the top, head up the Garbanzo quad, where you can start to understand the scale of the thing:You're still not quite to the goods. But to get a sense of the mountain, ski down to Big Red:This will take you to Whistler's main upper-mountain portal, Roundhouse. From Whistler, you can see Blackcomb strafing the sky:From Roundhouse, it's a short ski down to the Peak Express:Depending upon your route down, you may end up back at Big Red. Ride back up to Roundhouse, then meander from Emerald to Harmony to Symphony lifts. For a moment on the way down Symphony, it feels like Euroski:Just about everyone sticks to the narrow groomers:But there are plenty of bumps and trees and wide-open bowls:Nice as this terrain is, the Peak 2 Peak Gondola summons you from all over the mountain:Whoosh. To Blackcomb in an instant, crossing the valley, 1,427 feet to the bottom, and out at Blackcomb's upper-mountain base, Rendezvous. Down to Glacier Express, and up a rolling fantasyland of infinite freeride terrain:And at the top it's like damn.From here, you can transfer to the Showcase T-bar if it's open. If not, climb Spanky's Ladder, and, Kaboom out on the other side:Ride Crystal Ridge or Excelerator back up, and run a lap through bowls and glades:Then ski back down to the village, ride Jersey Cream back to Rendezvous to connect to the spectacular 7th Heaven lift, or ride the gondy back over to Whistler to repeat the whole cycle. And that's just a sampling. I'm no Whistler expert - just go have fun and get lost in the whole thing.Podcast NotesOn the Lost Lifts of Park CityIt's slightly weird and enormously hilarious that the Fitzsimmons eight-seater that Whistler installed last summer and the Jersey Cream sixer that Blackcomb will drop on the mountain this year were originally intended for Park City. As I wrote in 2022:Last September, Vail Resorts announced what was likely the largest set of single-season lift upgrades in the history of the world: $315-plus million on 19 lifts (later increased to 21 lifts) across 14 ski areas. Two of those lifts would land in Park City: a D-line eight-pack would replace the Silverlode six, and a six-pack would replace the Eagle and Eaglet triples. Two more lifts in a town with 62 of them (Park City sits right next door to Deer Valley). Surely this would be another routine project for the world's largest ski area operator.It wasn't. In June, four local residents – Clive Bush, Angela Moschetta, Deborah Rentfrow, and Mark Stemler – successfully appealed the Park City Planning Commission's previous approval of the lift projects.“The upgrades were appealed on the basis that the proposed eight-place and six-place chairs were not consistent with the 1998 development agreement that governs the resort,” SAM wrote at the time. “The planning commission also cited the need for a more thorough review of the resort's comfortable carrying capacity calculations and parking mitigation plan, finding PCM's proposed paid parking plan at the Mountain Village insufficient.”So instead of rising on the mountain, the lifts spent the summer, in pieces, in the parking lot. Vail admitted defeat, at least temporarily. “We are considering our options and next steps based on today's disappointing decision—but one thing is clear—we will not be able to move forward with these two lift upgrades for the 22-23 winter season,” Park City Mountain Resort Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Deirdra Walsh said in response to the decision.One of the options Vail apparently considered was trucking the lifts to friendlier locales. Last Wednesday, as part of its year-end earnings release, Vail announced that the two lifts would be moved to Whistler and installed in time for the 2023-24 ski season. The eight-pack will replace the 1,129-vertical-foot Fitzsimmons high-speed quad on Whistler, giving the mountain 18 seats (!) out of the village (the lift runs alongside the 10-passenger Whistler Village Gondola). The six-pack will replace the Jersey Cream high-speed quad on Blackcomb, a midmountain lift with a 1,230-foot vertical rise.The whole episode is still one of the dumber things I'm aware of. There are like 80 lifts in Park City and two more (replacements, not all-new lines), apparently would have knocked the planet off its axis and sent us caterwauling into the sun. It's enough to make you un-see all the human goodness in Whistler's magical lift queues. More here.On Fitzsimmons 8's complex lineAmong the challenges of re-engineering the Fitzsimmons 8 for Whistler was the fact that the lift had to pass under the Whistler Village Gondola:Trembath and I talk a little about Fitz's download capability. Team Whistler sent over some additional information following our chat, indicating that the winter download capacity is four riders per chair (part of the original lift design, when it was meant for Park City). Summer download, for bike park operations, is limited to one passenger (a lower capacity than the original design).On Whistler's bike parkI'm not Bike Park Bro, though I could probably be talked into it fairly easily if I didn't already spend half the year wandering around the country in search of novel snowsportskiing operations. I do, however, ride my bike around NYC just about every day from May through October-ish, which in many ways resembles the giant jungle gyms that are downhill mountain bike parks, just with fewer jumps and a higher probability of decapitation by box truck.Anyway Whistler supposedly has the best bike park this side of Neptune, and we talk about it a bit, and so I'll include the trailmap even though I'd have a better chance of translating ancient Aramaic runes etched into a cave wall than I would of explaining exactly what's happening here:On Jersey Cream “not looking like much” on the trailmapBecause Whistler's online trailmap is shrunken to fit the same rectangular container that every ski map fills in the Webosphere, it fails to convey the scale of the operation (the paper version, which you can acquire if you slip a bag of gold bars and a map to the Lost City of Atlantis to a clerk at the guest services desk, is aptly called a “mountain atlas” and better captures the breadth of the place). The Jersey Cream lift and pod, for example, presents on the trailmap as an inconsequential connector lift between the Glacier Express and Rendezous station, where three other lifts convene. But this is a 1,230-vertical-foot, 4,647-foot-long machine that could, were you to hack it from the earth and transport it into the wilderness, be a fairly substantial ski area on its own. For context, 1,200 vertical feet is roughly the rise of Eldora or Monarch, or, for Easterners, Cranmore or Black Mountain.On the Whistler and Blackcomb masterplansUnlike the U.S. American Forest Service, which often fails to post ski area master development plans on their useless 1990s vintage websites, the British Columbia authorities have neatly organized all of their province's masterplans on one webpage. Whistler and Blackcomb mountains each file separate plans, last updated in 2013. That predates Vail Resorts' acquisition by three years, and Trembath and I discuss how closely (or not), these plans align with the company's current thinking around the resort.Whistler Mountain:Blackcomb Mountain:On Vail's Australian ski areasTrembath, at different points, oversaw all three of Vail Resorts' Australian ski areas. Though much of that tenure predated Vail's acquisitions (of Hotham and Falls Creek in 2019), she ran Perisher (purchased in 2015), for a year before leaping to the captain's chair at Whistler. Trembath provides a terrific breakdown of each of the three ski areas, and they look like a lot of fun:Perisher:Falls Creek:Hotham:On Sugar Bowl ParallelsTrembath's story follows a similar trajectory to that of Bridget Legnavsky, whose decades-long career in New Zealand included running a pair of that country's largest ski resorts. She then moved to North America to run a large ski area – in her case, Sugar Bowl near Lake Tahoe's North Shore. She appeared on the podcast in March.On Merlin EntertainmentI was unfamiliar with Merlin Entertainment, the former owner of Falls Creek and Hotham. The company is enormous, and owns Legoland Parks, Madame Tussauds, and dozens of other familiar brands.On Whistler and Blackcomb as formerly separate ski areasLike Park City (formerly Park City and Canyons) and Palisades Tahoe (formerly Alpine Meadows and Squaw Valley), Whistler and Blackcomb were once separate ski areas. Here's the stoke version of the mountains' joint history (“You were either a Whistler skier, or you were a Blackcomb skier”):On First Nations' language on lifts and the Gondola Gallery projectAs Whistler builds new lifts, the resort tags the lift terminals with names in English and First Nations languages. From Pique Magazine at the opening of the Fitzsimmons eight-pack last December:Whistler Mountain has a brand-new chairlift ready to ferry keen skiers and snowboarders up to mid-mountain, with the rebuilt Fitzsimmons Express opening to guests early on Dec. 12. …“Importantly, this project could not have happened without the guidance and counsel of the First Nations partners,” said Trembath.“It's so important to us that their culture continues to be represented across these mountains in everything we do.”In keeping with those sentiments, the new Fitzsimmons Express is emblazoned with First Nations names alongside its English name: In the Squamish language, it is known as Sk_wexwnách, for Valley Creek, and in the Lil'wat language, it is known as Tsíqten, which means Fish Spear.New chairlifts are given First Nations names at Whistler Blackcomb as they are installed and opened.Here's Fitzsimmons:And Big Red, a sixer installed two years ago:Whistler also commissioned First Nations artists to wrap two cabins on the Peak 2 Peak Gondola. From Daily Hive:The Peak 2 Peak gondola, which connects Whistler and Blackcomb mountains, is showing off artwork created by First Nations artists, which can be seen by mountain-goers at BC's premiere ski resort.Vail Resorts commissioned local Indigenous artists to redesign two gondola cabins. Levi Nelson of Lil'wat Nation put his stamp on one with “Red,” while Chief Janice George and Buddy Joseph of Squamish Nation have created “Wings of Thunder.” …“Red is a sacred colour within Indigenous culture, representing the lifeblood of the people and our connection to the Earth,” said Nelson, an artist who excels at contemporary Indigenous art. “These shapes come from and are inspired by my ancestors. To be inside the gondola, looking out through an ovoid or through the Ancestral Eye, maybe you can imagine what it's like to experience my territory and see home through my eyes.”“It's more than just the techniques of weaving. It's about ways of being and seeing the world. Passing on information that's meaningful. We've done weavings on murals, buildings, reviving something that was put away all those decades ago now,” said Chief Janice George and Buddy Joseph.“The significance of the Thunderbird being on the gondola is that it brings the energy back on the mountain and watching over all of us.”A pic:On Native American issues in the U.S.I referenced conflicts between U.S. ski resorts and Native Americans, without providing specifics. The Forest Service cited objections from Native American communities, among other factors, in recommending a “no action” alternative to Lutsen Mountains' planned expansion last year. The Washoe tribe has attempted to “reclaim” land that Diamond Peak operates on. The most prominent dispute, however, has been a decades-long standoff between Arizona Snowbowl and indigenous tribes. Per The Guardian in 2022:The Arizona Snowbowl resort, which occupies 777 acres (314 hectares) on the mountain's slope, has attracted skiers during the winter and spring for nearly a century. But its popularity has boomed in recent years thanks to growing populations in Phoenix, a three hour's drive away, and neighbouring Flagstaff. During peak ski season, the resort draws upwards of 3,000 visitors a day.More than a dozen Indigenous nations who hold the mountain sacred have fought Snowbowl's existence since the 1930s. These include the Pueblo of Acoma, Fort McDowell Yavapai; Havasupai; Hopi; Hualapai; Navajo; San Carlos Apache; San Juan Southern Paiute; Tonto Apache; White Mountain Apache; Yavapai Apache, Yavapai Prescott, and Pueblo of Zuni. They say the resort's presence has disrupted the environment and their spiritual connection to the mountain, and that its use of treated sewage effluent to make snow is akin to baptizing a baby with wastewater.Now, a proposed $60m expansion of Snowbowl's facilities has brought simmering tensions to a boil.The US Forest Service, the agency that manages the national forest land on which Snowbowl is built, is weighing a 15-year expansion proposal that would bulk up operations, increase visitation and add new summer recreational facilities such as mountain biking trails, a zip line and outdoor concerts. A coalition of tribes, meanwhile, is resisting in unprecedented ways.The battle is emblematic of a vast cultural divide in the American west over public lands and how they should be managed. On one side are mostly financially well-off white people who recreate in national forests and parks; on the other are Indigenous Americans dispossessed from those lands who are struggling to protect their sacred sites.“Nuva'tukya'ovi is our Mount Sinai. Why can't the forest service understand that?,” asks Preston.On the tight load at the 7th Heaven liftYikes:Honestly it's pretty organized and the wait isn't that long, but this is very popular terrain and the trails could handle a higher-capacity lift (nearly everyone skis the Green Line trail or one of the blue groomers off this lift, leaving hundreds of acres of off-piste untouched; it's pretty glorious).On Wizard and Solar CoasterEvery local I spoke with in Whistler grumped about the Blackcomb Gondola, which replaced the Wizard and Solar Coaster high-speed quads in 2018. While the 10-passenger gondy substantively follows the same lines, it fails to provide the same mid-mountain fast-lap firepower that Solar Coaster once delivered. Both because removing your skis after each lap is a drag, and because many skiers ride the gondola up to Rendezvous, leaving fewer free mid-mountain seats than the empty quad chairs once provided. Here's a before-and-after:On Whistler's season passWhistler's season pass, which is good at Whistler Blackcomb and only Whistler Blackcomb, strangely costs more ($1,047 U.S.) than a full Epic Pass ($1,004 U.S.), which also provides unlimited access to Whistler and Vail's other 41 ski areas. It's weird. Trembath explains.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 42/100 in 2024, and number 542 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

AJ Hurt's passion for skiing and ski racing began at a very early age. Growing up in North Lake Tahoe, Palisades Tahoe was her winter playground. At four years old, she entered the Team Palisades Tahoe and fell in love with the sport. With a father who has been a member of the Squaw Valley Ski Patrol for the past 30 years, Hurt was raised a true member of the Palisades Tahoe (formerly Squaw Valley) family. At 14, Hurt was invited to be a part of the National Training Group. As a first-year FIS racer in the 2016-17 season, she was the top junior for birth year 2000 in NorAm qualifying race points—not only in the speed disciplines but also the technical disciplines. Hurt scored her first World Cup points in 2020 placing 18th in the Courchevel giant slalom. The 2023-24 season was a major breakout year for Hurt. Each World Cup race she improved upon the last scoring person best after person best. In Kranjska Gora, Slovenia, Hurt had a major slalom result scoring third place, her first ever World Cup podium. Then later in the season she did it again! This time in giant slalom, a third place in Soldeu, Andorra. AJ and I discuss injury, going fast, control and lack of control, the recent NCAA women's final four, and what aggression in women's sports looks like now. And she talks about the not-glamourous, living-out-of-a-bag-for-6-months World Cup tour. This episode is a perfect follow up to last week's episode with rock climber Beth Rodden because AJ too likes being in the mode of figuring things out, which she was happy to share with us. I like that mode as well! Always looking for a little bit of improvement or some greater understanding of how things work. Get involved and support the show and more sports media for women through https://www.buymeacoffee.com/hearher Find all episodes http://www.hearhersports.com/ Find Hear Her Sports on all social @hearhersports Find AJ Hurt on IG https://www.instagram.com/ajhurti/ Find US Ski Team on IG at https://www.instagram.com/usskiteam

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

Bob o non bob? Quando la disciplina fu esclusa per i costi eccessivi...Perché non risparmiare una manciata di milioni di euro rinunciando al bob alle prossime Olimpiadi invernali di Cortina? Serafin se lo chiede andando a ripescare un precedente storico. Gli americani soppressero questo sport nel 1960 ai Giochi di Squaw Valley perché dispendioso e lo sostituirono con il biathlon. Ma è escluso che i politici italiani così avidi di consenso possano seguire questo virtuoso esempio. Certo altri tempi, ma c'è da riflettere su cosa siano oggi diventate le OlimpiadiFatti in breveBen venga un po' di pioggia e neve in questi giorni perché nei Fatti in breve di questa settimana Serafin ci racconta che la situazione da inizio 2024 non è allegra. ci racconta poi della crescita del cicloturismo e di un corso del Parco Nazionale delle Dolomiti Bellunesi per riconoscere i Sirfidi.

This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on Jan. 16. It dropped for free subscribers on Jan. 23. 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:WhoTroy Nedved, General Manager of Big Sky, MontanaRecorded onJanuary 11, 2024About Big SkyClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Boyne ResortsLocated in: Big Sky, MontanaYear founded: 1973Pass affiliations:* 7 days, no blackouts on Ikon Pass (reservations required)* 5 days, holiday blackouts on Ikon Base and Ikon Base Plus Pass (reservations required)* 2 days, no blackouts on Mountain Collective (reservations required)Reciprocal partners: Top-tier Big Sky season passes include three days each at Boyne's other nine ski areas: Brighton, Summit at Snoqualmie, Cypress, Boyne Mountain, The Highlands, Loon Mountain, Sunday River, Pleasant Mountain, and Sugarloaf.Closest neighboring ski areas: Yellowstone Club (ski-to connection); Bear Canyon (private ski area for Mount Ellis Academy – 1:20); Bridger Bowl (1:30)Base elevation: 6,800 feet at Madison BaseSummit elevation: 11,166 feetVertical drop: 4,350 feetSkiable Acres: 5,850Average annual snowfall: 400-plus inchesTrail count: 300 (18% expert, 35% advanced, 25% intermediate, 22% beginner)Terrain parks: 6Lift count: 38 (1 75-passenger tram, 1 high-speed eight-pack, 3 high-speed six-packs, 4 high-speed quads, 3 fixed-grip quads, 9 triples, 5 doubles, 3 platters, 1 ropetow, 8 carpet lifts – Big Sky also recently announced a second eight-pack, to replace the Six Shooter six-pack, next year; and a new, two-stage gondola, which will replace the Explorer double chair for the 2025-26 ski season – View Lift Blog's inventory of Big Sky's lift fleet.)View vintage Big Sky trailmaps on skimap.org.Why I interviewed himBig Sky is the closest thing American skiing has to the ever-stacking ski circuses of British Columbia. While most of our western giants labor through Forest Service approvals for every new snowgun and trail sign, BC transforms Revelstoke and Kicking Horse and Sun Peaks into three of the largest ski resorts on the continent in under two decades. These are policy decisions, differences in government and public philosophies of how to use our shared land. And that's fine. U.S. America does everything in the most difficult way possible, and there's no reason to believe that ski resort development would be any different.Except in a few places in the West, it is different. Deer Valley and Park City and Schweitzer sit entirely (or mostly), on private land. New project approvals lie with local entities. Sometimes, locals frustrate ski areas' ambitions, as is the case in Park City, which cannot, at the moment, even execute simple lift replacements. But the absence of a federal overlord is working just fine at Big Sky, where the mountain has evolved from Really Good to Damn Is This Real in less time than it took Aspen to secure approvals for its 153-acre Hero's expansion.Boyne has pulled similar stunts at its similarly situated resorts across the country: Boyne Mountain and The Highlands in Michigan and Sunday River in Maine, each of them transforming in Hollywood montage-scene fashion. Progress has lagged more at Brighton and Alpental, both of which sit at least partly on Forest Service land (though change has been rapid at Loon Mountain in New Hampshire, whose land is a public-private hybrid). But the evolution at Big Sky has been particularly comprehensive. And, because of the ski area's inherent drama and prominence, compelling. It's America's look-what-we-can-do-if-we-can-just-do mountain. The on-mountain product is better for skiers and better for skiing, a modern mountain that eases chokepoints and upgrades facilities and spreads everyone around.Winter Park, seated on Forest Service land, owned by the City of Denver, and operated by Alterra Mountain Company, outlined an ambitious master development plan in 2005 (when Intrawest ran the ski area). Proposed projects included a three-stage gondola connecting the town of Winter Park with the ski area's base village, a massive intermediate-focused expansion onto Vasquez Ridge, and a new mid-mountain beginner area. Nearly 20 years later, none of it exists. Winter Park did execute some upgrades in the meantime, building a bunch of six-packs and adding lift redundancy and access to the high alpine. But the mountain's seven lift upgrades in 19 years are underwhelming compared to the 17 such projects that have remade Big Sky over that same time period. Winter Park has no lack of resources, skier attention, or administrative will, but its plans stall anyway, and it's no mystery why.I write more about Big Sky than I do about other large North American ski resorts because there is more happening at Big Sky than at any other large North American ski resort. That is partly luck and partly institutional momentum and partly a unique historical collision of macroeconomic, cultural, and technological factors that favor construction and evolution of what a ski resort is and can be. And, certainly, U.S. ski resorts build big projects on Forest Service land every single year. But Boyne and Big Sky, operating outside of the rulebooks hemming in their competitors, are getting to the future a hell of a lot faster than anyone else.What we talked aboutYes a second eight-pack is coming to Big Sky; why the resort is replacing the 20-year-old Six Shooter lift; potential future Headwaters lift upgrades; why the resort will replace Six Shooter before adding a second lift out of the Madison base; what will happen to Six Shooter and why it likely won't land elsewhere in Boyne's portfolio; the logic of selling, rather than scrapping, lifts to competitors; adjusting eight-packs for U.S. Americans; automated chairlift safety bars; what happened when the old Ramcharger quad moved to Shedhorn; what's up with the patrol sled marooned in a tree off Shedhorn?; the philosophy of naming lifts; why we won't see the Taco Bell tram anytime soon (or ever); the One & Only gondola; Big Sky's huge fleet of real estate lifts; how the new tram changed Big Sky; metering traffic up the Lone Peak tram; the tram's shift from pay-per-day to pay-per-ride; a double carpet; that new double-blue-square rating on the trailmap; Black Hills skiing at Terry Peak and Deer Mountain; working in Yellowstone; river kayaking culture; revisiting the coming out-of-base gondola; should Swifty have been an eight-pack?; on-mountain employee housing; Big Sky 2025; what does the resort that's already upgraded everything upgrade next?; potential future lift upgrades; and the Ikon Pass.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewI didn't plan to record two Big Sky podcasts in two months. I prefer to spread my attention across mountains and across regions and across companies, as most of you know. This podcast was scheduled for early December, after an anticipated Thanksgiving-week tram opening. But then the tram was delayed, and as it happened I was able to attend the grand opening on Dec. 19. I recorded a podcast there, with Nedved and past Storm Skiing Podcast guests Taylor Middleton (Big Sky president) and Stephen Kircher (Boyne Resorts CEO).But Nedved and I kept this conversation on the calendar, pushing it into January. It's a good thing. Because no sooner had Big Sky opened its spectacular new tram than it announced yet another spectacular new lift: a second eight-pack chair, to replace a six-pack that is exactly 21 years old.There's a sort of willful showiness to such projects. Who, in America, can even afford a six-person chairlift, let alone have the resources to tag such a machine for the rubbish bin? And then replace it with a lift so spectacular that its ornamentation exceeds that of your six-year-old Ramcharger eight-seater, still dazzling on the other side of the mountain?When Vail built 18 new lifts in 2022, the projects ended up as all function, no form. They were effective, and well-placed, but the lifts are just lifts. Boyne Resorts, which, while a quarter the size of Vail, has built dozens of new lifts over the past decade, is building more than just people-movers. Its lifts are experiences, housed in ski shrines, buildings festooned in speakers and screens, the carriers descending like coaster trains at Six Flags, bubbles and heaters and sportscar seats and conveyors, a spectacle you might ride even if skiing were not attached at the end.American skiing will always have room for throwbacks and minimalism, just as American cuisine will always have room for Taco Bell and small-town diners. Most Montana ski areas are fixed-grip and funky – Snowbowl and Bridger and Great Divide and Discovery and Lost Trail and Maverick and Turner. Big Sky's opportunity was, at one time, to be a bigger, funkier version of these big, funky ski areas. But its opportunity today is to be the not-Colorado, not-Utah alt destination for skiers seeking comfort sans megacrowds. The mountain is fulfilling that mission, at a speed that is almost impossible to believe. Which is why we keep going back there, over and over again.What I got wrongI said several times that the Six Shooter lift was “only 20 years old.” In fact, Moonlight installed the lift in 2003, making the machine legal drinking age.Why you should ski Big SkyThe approach is part of the experience, always. Some ski areas smash the viewshed with bandoliers of steepshots slicing across the ridge. From miles down the highway you say whoa. Killington or Hunter or Red Lodge. Others hide. Even from the parking lot you see only suggestions of skiing. Caberfae in Michigan is like this, enormous trees mask its runs and its peaks. Mad River Glen erupts skyward but its ragged clandestine trail network resembles nothing else in the East and you wonder where it is. Unfolding, then, as you explore. Even vast Heavenly, from the gondola base, is invisible.Big Sky, alone among American ski areas, inspires awe on the approach. Turn west up 64 from 191 and Lone Peak commands the horizon. This place is not like other places you realize. On the long road up you pass the spiderwebbing trails off the Lone Moose and Thunder Wolf lifts and still that summit towers in the distance. There is a way to get up there and a way to ski down but from below it's all invisible. All you can see is snow and rocks and avy chutes flushed out over millennia.That's the marquee and that's the post: I'm here. But Lone Peak, with its triple black diamonds and sign-in sheets and muscled exposure, is not for mortal hot laps. Go up, yes. Ski down, yes. But then explore. Because staple Keystone to Breck and you have roughly one Big Sky.Humans cluster. Even in vast spaces. Or perhaps especially so. The cut trails below Ramcharger and Swifty swarm like train stations. But break away from the salmon run, into the trees or the bowl or the gnarled runs below the liftlines, and emerge into a different world. Everywhere, empty lifts, empty glades, endless crags and crannies. Greens and blues that roll for miles. Beyond every chairlift, another chairlift. Stacked like bonus levels are what feel like mini ski areas existing for you alone. An empty endless. A skiing fantasyland.Podcast NotesOn Uncle Dan's CookiesFear not: this little shack seated beside the Six Shooter lift is not going anywhere:On Moonlight Basin and Spanish PeaksLike the largest (Park City) and second-largest (Palisades Tahoe) ski areas in America, Big Sky is the stapled-together remains of several former operations. Unlike those two giants, which connected two distinct ski areas with gondolas (Park City and Canyons; Squaw Valley and Alpine Meadows), seamless ski connections existed between the former Spanish Peaks terrain, on the ski area's far southern end, and the former Moonlight Basin, on the northern end. The circa 2010 trailmaps called out access points between each of the bookend resorts and Big Sky, which you could ski with upgraded lift tickets:Big Sky purchased the properties in 2013, a few years after this happened (per the Bozeman Daily Chronicle):Moonlight Basin, meanwhile, got into trouble after borrowing $100 million from Lehman Brothers in September 2007, with the 7,800-acre resort, its ski lifts, condos, spa and a Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course put up as collateral, according to foreclosure records filed in Madison County.That loan came due in September 2008, according to the papers filed by Lehman, and Moonlight defaulted. Lehman itself went bankrupt in September 2008 and blamed its troubles on a collapse in the real estate market that left it upside down.An outfit called Crossharbor Capital Partners, which purchased and still owns the neighboring Yellowstone Club, eventually joined forces with Big Sky to buy Moonlight and Spanish Peaks (Crossharbor is no longer a partner). Now, just imagine tacking the 2,900-acre Yellowstone Club onto Big Sky's current footprint (which you can in fact do if you're a Yellowstone Club member):On the sled chilling in the tree off ShedhornYes, there's a patrol sled lodged in a tree off the Shedhorn high-speed quad. Here's a pic I snagged from the lift last spring:Explore Big Sky last year recounted the avalanche that deposited the sled there:“In Big Sky and around Montana, ['96 and '97] has never been topped in terms of snowfall,” [veteran Big Sky ski patroller Mike] Buotte said. Unfortunately, a “killer ice layer on the bottom of the snowpack” caused problems in the tram's second season. On Christmas Day, 1996, a patroller died in an explosive accident near the summit of Lone Mountain. Buotte says it was traumatic for the entire team.The next morning, patrol triggered a “wall-to-wall” avalanche across Lenin and the Dictator Chutes. The slide infamously took out the Shedhorn chairlift, leaving scars still visible today. Buotte and another patroller were caught in that avalanche. Miraculously, they both stopped. Had they “taken the ride,” Buotte is confident they would not have survived.“That second year, the reality of what's going on really hit us,” Buotte said. “And it was not fun and games. It was pretty dark, frankly. That's when it got very real for the organization and for me. The industry changed; avalanche training changed. We had to up our game. It was a new paradigm.”Buotte said patrol changed the Lenin route's design—adding more separation in time and space—and applied the same learning to other routes. Mitigation work is inherently dangerous, but Buotte believes the close call helped emphasize the importance of route structure to reduce risk.Here's Boutte recalling the incident:On the Ski the Sky loopBig Sky gamified a version of their trailmap to help skiers understand that there's more to the mountain than Ramcharger and Swifty:On the bigness of Big SkyNedved points out that several major U.S. destination ski areas total less than half Big Sky's 5,850 acres. That would be 2,950 acres, which is, indeed, more than Breckenridge (2,908 acres), Schweitzer (2,900), Alta (2,614), Crystal (2,600), Snowbird (2,500), Jackson Hole (2,500), Copper Mountain (2,465), Beaver Creek (2,082), Sun Valley (2,054), Deer Valley (2,026), or Telluride (2,000).On the One & Only resort and brandWe discuss the One & Only resort company, which is building a super-luxe facility that they will connect to the Madison base with a D-line gondola. Which is an insane investment for a transportation lift. As far as I can tell, this will be the company's first facility in the United States. Here's a list of their existing properties.On the Big Sky TramI won't break down the new Lone Peak tram here, because I just did that a month ago.On the Black HillsSouth Dakota's Black Hills, where Nedved grew up, are likely not what most Americans envision when they think of South Dakota. It's a gorgeous, mountainous region that is home to Mount Rushmore, the Crazy Horse monument, and 7,244-foot Black Elk Peak (formerly Harney Peak), the highest point in the United States east of the Rockies. This is a tourist bureau video, but it will make you say wait Brah where are all the cornfields?The Black Hills are home to two ski areas. The first it Terry Peak, an 1,100-footer with three high-speed quads that is an Indy Pass OG:The second is Deer Mountain, which disappeared for around six years before an outfit called Keating Resources bought the joint last year and announced they would bring it back as a private ski area for on-mountain homeowners. They planned a large terrain reduction to accommodate more housing. I put this revised trailmap together last year based upon a conversation with the organization's president, Alec Keating:The intention, Keating told me in July, was to re-open the East Side (top of the map above), for this ski season, and the West side (bottom portion) in 2025. I've yet to see evidence of the ski area having opened, however.On Troy the athleteWe talk a bit about Nedved's kayaking adventures, but that barely touches on his action-sports resume. From a 2019 Explore Big Sky profile:Nedved lived in a teepee in Gardiner for two years down on the banks of the Yellowstone River across from the Yellowstone Raft Company, where he developed world-class abilities as a kayaker.“The culture around rafting and kayaking is pretty heavy and I connected with some of the folks around there that were pretty into it. That was the start of that,” Nedved said of his early days in the park. “My Yellowstone days, I spent all my time when I was not working on the water.” And even when he was working, and someone needed to brave a stretch of Class V rapids for a rescue mission or body recovery, he was the one for the job.When Teton Gravity Research started making kayak movies, Nedved and his friends got the call as well. “We were pioneering lines that had never been done before: in Costa Rica and Nepal, but also stretches of river in Montana in the Crazy Mountains of Big Timber Creek and lots of runs in Beartooths that had never been floated,” Nedved recounted.“We spent a lot of time looking at maps, hiking around the mountains, finding stuff that was runnable versus not. It was a stage of kayaking community in Montana that we got started. Now the next generation of these kids is blowing my mind—doing things that we didn't even think was possible.”Nedved is an athlete's athlete. “I love competing in just about anything. When I was first in Montana, I found out about Powder 8s at Bridger Bowl. It was a cool event and we got into it,” he said in a typically modest way. “It was just another thing to hone your skills as a ski instructor and a skiing professional.”Nedved has since won the national Powder 8 competition five times and competed on ESPN at the highest level of the niche sport in the Powder 8 World Championships held at Mike Wiegele's heliskiing operation in Canada. Even some twenty years later, he is still finding podiums in the aesthetically appealing alpine events with longtime partner Nick Herrin, currently the CEO of the Professional Ski Instructors of America. Nedved credits his year-round athletic pursuits for what keeps him in the condition to still make perfect turns.Sadly, I was unable to locate any videos of Nedved kayaking or Powder 8ing.On employee housing at Big Sky and Winter ParkBig Sky has built an incredible volume of employee housing (more than 1,000 beds in the Mountain Village alone). The most impressive may be the Levinski complex: fully furnished, energy-efficient buildings situated within walking distance of the lifts.Big mountain skiing, wracked and wrecked by traffic and mountain-town housing shortages, desperately needs more of this sort of investment, as I wrote last week after Winter Park opened a similarly situated project.On Big Sky 2025Big Sky 2025 will, in substance, wrap when the new two-stage, out-of-base gondola opens next year. Here's the current iteration of the plan. You can see how much it differs from the version outlined in 2016 in this contemporary Lift Blog post.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 2/100 in 2024, and number 502 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

Today I'm interviewing the world's foremost ski historian, Seth Masia, who is President of the International Skiing History Association and the Publisher of Skiing History since 2014, and its Editor since 2002. He is perhaps best known for his 20 years of service at SKI (from 1974 to 1993), mostly on the equipment beat, where he was a pillar of the ski media, in those days, a very big deal. He segued from print to the cyber world when, between 1994 and 1996, he designed, built and launched skinet.com, the first consumer website. He capitalized on that experience with a three-year stint at Microsoft, followed by a year as director of Internet strategy at Intrawest, giving him a close-up view of one of the biggest resort conglomerates of its day. Seth is also a Level 3 member of PSIA, logging long teaching stints at Squaw Valley (as it was then known), 22 years at Vail/Beaver Creek ski schools and Aspen/Snowmass. He also saw the ski market from the equipment supplier side, serving as alpine product manager at K2 (during my tenure at Snow Country) in 1993 through 1994. Currently, he serves as a marketing consultant for Wagner Custom skis, as he has since 2007.

At age 54, Alenka Vrecek decided it was never too late for an adventure by bike, rolling out her front door in Tahoe City, aiming 2,500 miles south to her other door at the tip of Baja Mexico. For nearly two months Alenka rode alone, giving her ample time to think about life, struggle, love, loss, family and the meaning of home through the eyes of a Slovenian immigrant. A cancer survivor dealing with her husband's recent diagnosis with Parkinson's disease, Alenka made the tough decision to temporarily leave her family behind, achieving a lifelong desire to adventure before she couldn't any more. Alenka's book, She Rides – Chasing Dreams Across California and Mexico is an exceptionally well-written account of the adventure, channeling the great alpinist authors Reinhold Messner and Nejc Zaplotnik, her literary heroes. Our discussion with Alenka is more than just about the bike or the book; it's about self-discovery, finding strength within yourself and mustering the courage to persevere against all odds. 2:00 – Trail Whisperer gets married, Pow Bot served as officiant.9:00 – Introducing Alenka Vrecek, moving from Slovenia to Lake Tahoe.13:30 – Was it challenging to get on her feet once she first arrived in Alpine Meadows?15:45 – Ski racing, ski instruction and being a certified ski instructor, working at River Ranch.18:00 – Skiing at Squaw Valley in the 1980s with Mike Slattery, Tommy Day and Scot Schmidt. 22:30 – Getting into alpinism and looking up to Nejc Zaplotnik, who was a writer and climber.23:30 – Capturing the essence of Reinhold Messner, a huge inspiration in in writing She Rides.26:00 – The importance of mountains, being outside and exercising regularly. 29:00 – Living with tragedy and personal struggle, and rebuilding your life and identity through being outside and completing a personal journey. 30:00 – What made Alenka want to ride her mountain bike 2,500 miles from Lake Tahoe to Baja? 35:30 – The love of being alone, the power of spending time in the outdoors by yourself. 39:00 – Riding alone in Mexico, feeling less safe around people than around animals.42:00 – Appreciating simple luxuries of life like hot showers and good food. 44:15 – The difference between riding in California and Mexico through the Sierra Nevada. 47:30 – What is the meaning of home? Being content at home, finding adventure in the backyard and learning a life lesson from Alejandro. 53:30 – Pow Bot quotes “Truckin” from the Grateful Dead and its metaphor for life.56:00 – The concept of living to work vs working to live and city culture vs mountain culture.59:00 – Would you do the trip again alone or with someone?1:02:20 – The process of writing the book, “She Rides”. 1:12:00 – Promoting and marketing the book. 1:15:00 – Pow Bot opens up about his wife and her journey with breast cancer.1:17:00 – Did the bicycle heal Alenka mentally and physically?1:20:30 – The flow state and being in the zone and its importance to life, moving meditation. 1:25:25 – Wing foiling, e-foiling and being on the water. 1:27:50 – Alenka rode an Ibis Mojo 3 mountain bike, aka The Beast, from Tahoe to Baja with help from Big Tall Wayne and Karl Rogne at Olympic Bike Shop. 1:31:00 – What “oh shit” moments did Alenka have on the ride? 1:37:30 – What does Mind the Track mean to you?

Alix Strauss recently reissued The Joy of Funerals, 20 years after its initial release (with St. Martin's Press). This fascinated me, as so often I hear authors wonder, "Can I still promote my book? It's been out for a year!" In this episode of the Write the Damn Book Already podcast, we chatted about: what compelled her to reissue the book what she's doing differently this time around how being a frequent contributor to the NYT informs her confidence about being a "good" writer what she loves most about the writing community how she summons and nurtures unflinching belief in her book. I had to sit quite far from the mic for the majority of the interview so it didn't pick up my near-constant laughter; the woman is hysterical!ABOUT ALIXAlix Strauss is a trend, culture, and lifestyle journalist; an award-winning, four-time published author; speaker; and frequent contributor to The New York Times. Her books include: The Joy of Funerals (St. Martin's Press & Palagram Press), Based Upon Availability (Harper Collins), and Death Becomes Them: Unearthing the Suicides of the Brilliant, the Famous and the Notorious (Harper Collins).  She is also the editor of Have I Got a Guy for You (Simon & Schuster), an anthology of mother-coordinated dating horror stories. Her work has been optioned for several TV and film projects. A media-savvy social satirist, she has been a featured lifestyle, travel, and trend writer on national morning and talk shows including ABC, CBS, CNN, and the Today Show. During the past 25 years, she has written over 1500 articles. Her articles have appeared in Elle, Harper's Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, Conde Nast Traveler, the Financial Times, Time Magazine, and Departures, among others, and cover a range of topics from trends in beauty, travel, and food to celebrity interviews. The Joy of Funerals is an Ingram Award winner and was named Best Debut Novel by The New York Resident. Alix was the inaugural “First Chapters” pick, Cosmopolitan Magazine's new launchpad of fiction excerpts, giving readers exclusive sneak peeks of gripping new work. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in the Primavera Literary Journal, Hampton Shorts Literary Journal, The Idaho Review, Quality Women's Fiction, The Blue Moon Café III, Sex, Drugs & Gefilte Fish: The Heeb Storytelling Collection and A Kudzu Christmas. Her short story, “Shrinking Away”, won the David Dornstein Creative Writing Award. She is the recipient of several awards and fellowships from programs such as the Wesleyan Writers Conference, the Skidmore College Writerʼs Institute, the Sarah Lawrence Summer Program, and the Squaw Valleyʼs Screenwritersʼ Summer Program.Alix lectures extensively and has been a keynote speaker, moderator, or panelist at over 200 conferences, symposiums, seminars, and summits, including The Southern Festival of Books, The Northwest Bookfest, The New England's Writer's Conference, Wesleyan Writer's conference, The 92nd Street Y, New York University, Center for Communications, University of Connecticut, and Columbia University. She was chosen to speak at the National Jewish Book Festival and is on the National Speakers Bureau for Israeli Bonds.  CONNECT WITH ALIXWebsite: www.alixstrauss.comInstagram: Thanks so much for listening! If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe and leave a review!To see all the ways we can work together to get your book written, published, and launched, visit publishaprofitablebook.com/work-with-elizabeth

In line with Episode 21 and its Fall theme, @pow_bot and @trail_whisperer chat (rant?) about a cornucopia of topics ranging from the possible arrival of a Super El Nino in Tahoe, looking back on summer's favorite rides and new trails, the etiquette of riding illegal trails, Strava and social media, the season pass conundrum, Palisades Tahoe announcing parking pass reservations and overcrowding due to Ikon and Epic Pass sales, a 15 mph speed limit on trails in Truckee, a gang of Truckee kids on ebikes throwing apples at people and evading the law, Reno's ranking by Outside as “happiest place to live in America”, remembering the legend of Robb Gaffney and more. Like most one-on-one episodes with the boys, this one gets a little ranty, channeling a bit of the Angry Singlespeeder (aka The ASS) in Kurt. The boys also ask listeners – what do you prefer to wear when riding, a hip pack or a backpack? Let us know your preference! 2:00 – Trail Running.4:00 – It's Fall and it's Snowing! Getting ready for winter. Trail Whisperer loves pumpkin pie. 8:20 – Ski Films – Do you watch ski films to get fired up for ski season?12:30 – Summer Recap – Lots of rain, never got too hot, no smoke.14:05 – Super El Nino is coming! Fall Tahoe weather is setting in. Early Winter?17:30 – What was your favorite mountain bike ride this summer?19:45 – What's the etiquette of riding unsanctioned trails?22:00 – Strava and social media rant.30:00 – PowBot and 2NBen's bear and bee encounter on JP Trail. 32:20 – Favorite new trail? Shark Bait at Sky Tavern and flow trail at Sugar Bowl. 35:40 – PowBot is almost 2 months into not drinking alcohol and he's loving it.39:30 – Season Pass sales – PowBot buys Mount Rose, Epic Pass and Ikon Pass.41:50 – Palisades Tahoe announces parking reservations and pay for parking details.48:30 – Fighting for preserving the culture of Squaw Valley.49:20 – In memoriam – Robb Gaffney.51:40 – Outside ranks Reno as the happiest place to live in America. 58:50 – City of Truckee passes 15 mph speed limit on multi-use trails in town in response to an ebike gang of high school kids roaming Truckee throwing eggs and apples at people.1:05:00 – Focus on education, not enforcement. 1:08:00 – Sky Tavern fundraiser – Party in the Sky – October 14 at 10AM. Be there!1:08:40 – Sendy Send of the Week - @cascadeconnections – skiing POW in September. @amymo_11 winning the Enduro in Killington and @marcoOsborne92 taking 2nd in Enduro and 14th in the US Cup Downhill. 1:13:00 – Hip packs vs backpacks. What do you wear mountain biking?

Border facilities are slammed with migrants and officials are mass releasing immigrants into the U.S. interior while thousands more stream into the country. Azerbaijan claimed full control of the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region Wednesday after local Armenian forces there agreed to lay down their weapons following the latest outbreak of fighting in the decades-long separatist conflict. Nearly 10 months after a federal board changed the name of Squaw Valley to Yokuts Valley, Fresno County supervisors want voters to amend the county charter to clarify it should control name changes in unincorporated parts of the county, requests often made by residents or groups because they feel like some names are offensive or inappropriate.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

President Joe Biden is expected to supply Ukraine with cluster bombs, which much of the world has vowed not to use due to their long-term effects on civilians. The nation's largest recreational boat owners advocacy, services and safety group Boat Owners Association of The United States (BoatUS), and the nonprofit state advocacy organization Recreational Boaters of California (RBOC), are asking Golden State boat owners to speak up on a recently proposed 300% boat registration fee increase outlined in Governor Newsom's 2024 budget. California's fast-food scene is buzzing with debate over another controversial fast food bill. Could California Governor Gavin Newsom replace President Joe Biden as the Democrats' presidential nominee?  President Joe Biden on Friday rolled out a new set of initiatives to reduce health care costs: a crackdown on scam insurance plans, new guidance to prevent surprise medical bills and an effort to reduce medical debt tied to credit cards. Fresno County is asking for the public's input on the name change of the community formally known as Squaw Valley. Some of the nation's largest truck makers on Thursday pledged to stop selling new gas-powered vehicles in California by the middle of the next decade, part of an agreement with state regulators aimed at preventing lawsuits that threatened to delay or block the state's emission standards.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Si un ultra siempre es una experiencia, este es algo más. Western States es una carrera especial, única, y no tardas en percibirlo cuando llegas a Squaw Valley y Auburn. Es historia, la cien millera más antigua, la primera, la de Gordy Ainsleig, la tradición de este deporte. Es ambiente y organización, algo familiar por tamaño pero con muchos de los mejores corredores del mundo. Este sábado, a las 5 de la mañana, Paul Lind Jr. disparará su escopeta para dar inicio a una nueva edición de Western States. Sento Acosta recuerda en Sweet Home Alabama sus dos participaciones en la prueba.

This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on June 13. It dropped for free subscribers on June 16. To receive future pods as soon as they're live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe for free below:WhoDarcy Alexander, Vice President and General Manager of Sun Peaks, British ColumbiaRecorded onMay 23, 2023About Sun PeaksClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Nippon Cable CompanyLocated in: Sun Peaks, British ColumbiaYear founded: 1961, as Tod MountainPass affiliations: Ikon Pass: 5 or 7 days; Mountain Collective: 2 daysReciprocal partners: 2 days at Silver StarClosest neighboring ski areas: Harper Mountain (58 minutes), Silver Star (2 hours, 20 minutes)Base elevation: 3,930 feetSummit elevation: 6,824 feetVertical drop: 2,894 feetSkiable Acres: 4,270Average annual snowfall: 237 inchesTrail count: 138 trails and 19 glades (32% advanced/expert, 58% intermediate, 10% beginner)Lift count: 13 (3 high-speed quads, 4 fixed-grip quads, 2 platters, 4 carpets - view Lift Blog's inventory of Sun Peaks' lift fleet) – Sun Peaks will build a fourth high-speed quad, West Bowl Express, in 2024Why I interviewed himBecause this freaking province, man. Twenty-nine ski areas with vertical drops over 1,000 feet. Fourteen soar beyond 2,000. Five cross the 3,000-foot mark. Four pass 4,000. And BC is home to the only two ski areas in North America that give you 5,000 or more vertical feet: Whistler and King Revelstoke. Thirteen BC bumps deliver 1,000-plus acres of terrain, and at least 20 load up on 200 inches or more of snow per season. Check these stats:British Columbia is like the Lamborghini dealership of skiing. Lots of power, lots of flash, lots of hot damn is that real? No duds. Nothing you'd be embarrassed to pick up a date in. A few community bumps, sure. But the BC Bros can stack their power towers – Big White, Fernie, Kicking Horse, Kimberley, Panorama, Red, Revelstoke, Silver Star, Sun Peaks, Whistler, and Whitewater – against any collection of ski areas anywhere on the planet and feel pretty good about winning that knife fight.And yet, even in this Seal Team Six of ski resorts, Sun Peaks looks heroic, epaulets and medals dangling from its dress blues. This is the second-largest ski area in Canada. Ponder that BC ski roster again to understand what that means: Sun Peaks gives you more acreage than anything on the famed Powder Highway, more than Revy or Red or Kicking Horse or Fernie. Turn north at Kamloops, east at Hefley Creek, and get lost at the end of the valley.But Sun Peaks' sheer size is less impressive than how the resort won those big-mountain stats. “British Columbia has probably the most progressive ski resort development policy in the world,” Alexander tells me in the podcast. When he arrived at the bump that was then called “Tod Mountain” in 1993, the place was three chairlifts and some surface movers serving a single peak:Over the next 30 years, Nippon Cable transformed the joint into a vast ski Narnia not only because they were willing to funnel vast capital into the hill, but because the BC government let them do it, under a set of rules known as the B.C. Commercial Alpine Ski policy. While inspiring, this is not an unusual ski area evolution tale for Western Canada. Compare the 10 largest BC ski areas today to the 10 largest in 1994:The acreage explosions at all but Whistler-Blackcomb (which at the time operated as independent ski areas), are astonishing. To underscore the point, check out the same years' comparison for the 10-largest U.S. ski areas:Certainly, the U.S. has seen some dramatic shuffling, especially as Vail and Alterra combined Canyons with Park City and Alpine Meadows with the ski area formerly known as Squaw Valley to form the megaresorts of Park City and Palisades Tahoe. That Big Sky didn't measure on the top 10 in 1994 – the tram didn't arrive until 1995 – is amazing. But the Western U.S., in 1994, was already home to legions of enormous ski resorts. That Heavenly, Mammoth, and Jackson Hole are the exact same size today as they were 29 years ago illustrates the difference between the two countries' attitudes toward ski resort expansion and development. Canada nurtures growth. The U.S. makes it as difficult as possible. Indeed, the reason Big Sky was able to ascend to monster status is that the resort sits entirely on private land, immunizing it from Forest Service bureaucracy and the endless public challenges that attend it.Sun Peaks is a case study in BC's development-friendly policies actualized. More important: the resort's evolution is a case study in smart, transit-oriented, pedestrian-friendly development. Alexander explains in the podcast that the long-range goal has been to build not just walkable base villages, but a walkable community stretching from one end of the valley to the other. This is the point that's so often missed in the United States: not all growth and development is bad. The reckless, developer-driven, luxury-focused, disconnected sprawl that is U.S. America's default building mode is terrible and inhuman and ought to be curtailed. Deliberate, dense, interconnected, metered development based upon a community masterplan - which is what Sun Peaks is doing - should be encouraged.This sort of thoughtful growth does not dilute mountain communities. It creates them. Rather than trying to freeze development in time – a posture that only kicks sprawl ever farther out from the mountains and leads directly to the traffic addling so many Western U.S. ski towns – BC has enabled and empowered the sort of place-building that will create sustainable mountain communities over the long term. It's an inspiring model, and one that The Storm will examine intensely as I focus more deliberately on Canada.What we talked aboutRecord skier visits; bringing back that international vibe; touring Western Canada; Sun Peaks' first season on the Ikon Pass; the secret giant; how to dodge what few liftlines the resort has; the Mountain Collective as Ikon test run; Tod Mountain in the early 1990s; ski area masterplanning; Sunshine Village; growing Sun Peaks from backwater to the second-largest ski area in Canada; Nippon Cable, the Japanese lift manufacturer that owns Sun Peaks; why Sun Peaks doesn't use Nippon lifts; why Sun Peaks changed its name from “Tod Mountain” in 1993; an interesting tidbit about Whistler ownership; whether Sun Peaks ever considered joining the Epic Pass; Sun Peaks' masterplan; potential terrain expansions; upgrade potential for Sunburst and Sundance lifts; future lift additions; “the guy who serves the most ski terrain with the fewest lifts is the most efficient”; going deep on the coming West Bowl Express quad and the new terrain that will go along with it; why Sun Peaks retired the West Bowl T-bar before replacing it; better access to Gil's; why Sun Peaks is building the lift over three summers; the amazing Burfield lift, a fixed-grip quad that stretches nearly 3,000 vertical feet; potentially shortening that lift; why Burfield will likely never be a high-speed lift; prioritizing lift projects after West Bowl; converting – not replacing – Orient from a fixed-grip quad to a high-speed quad or six-pack; village-building; the potential major lift that's not on Sun Peaks' masterplan; and potentially connecting the resort to the Trans-Canada highway by paved road from the east.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewIn April, Sun Peaks announced construction of a new high-speed quad in West Bowl for the 2024-25 ski season. The lift will replace the West Bowl T-bar, visible on this circa 2019 trailmap, on a longer line that pushes the boundary away from the 7 Mile Road trail:The resort will lengthen the existing trails to meet the new lift's load point down the mountain, as Alexander explains in the podcast.This will be Sun Peaks' third new chairlift in three years, following new fixed-grip quads at Crystal and Orient in 2020 and 2018, respectively. Sun Peaks approaches chairlift construction in a unique manner, with a history of building lifts as fixed-grip machines and then upgrading them to high-speed lifts later on. Orient, for example, may evolve into a high-speed six-pack that lands several hundred more feet up the mountain. Slowly, deliberately, endlessly, Sun Peaks grows and evolves.While Alexander and his team continue to stack bricks into the resort's foundation, they simultaneously grow the mountain's profile. A few years back, the resort joined the Mountain Collective. Last October, it joined Ikon. And, kaboom: no more secret at the end of the road.That's a good thing. If these BC giants are to thrive, they're going to need help outside the province, which hosts a population of approximately 5 million in an area the size of California (39 million residents), Colorado (5.8 million), and Utah (3.4 million) combined. That means bringing skiers burned out on Summit County and Wasatch liftlines across the border, where big ski resorts continue to get bigger and the liftlines rarely form (outside of the West Coast).I don't want to overstate the scale of what's happening in BC – certainly big projects still can and do happen in America. And even as they grow fat by North American standards, most of the province's biggest ski areas still look like birdbaths compared to the ski circuses of Europe. But imagine if, over the next 30 years, 480-acre Ski Cooper transformed into 5,317-acre Vail Mountain. That is essentially what's happened at Sun Peaks since 1993, where a small community bump evolved into an international destination resort 10 times its original size. And they're nowhere near finished – Sun Peaks' masterplan (pg. 141), outlines a monster facility at full build-out:The Mountain Master Plan … will ultimately include a total of 26 ski lifts, including one pulse gondola, one 10G/8C Combi lift one detachable grip six-passenger chairlift, four detachable quadruple chairlifts, nine fixed grip quadruple chairlifts, four platter lifts and approximately two beginner moving carpet lifts, with a total combined rated capacity of about 41,186 passengers per hour … The overall Phase 4 [Skier Comfortable Carrying Capacity] will be approximately 14,830 skiers per day. … there will be 225 trails providing 177.5 kilometers of skiing on [1,895 acres] of terrain.Here's a conceptual map of Sun Peaks at full build-out:While plenty of BC ski areas have evolved over the past several decades, no one has accomplished the trick more steadily or with such deliberate, constant momentum as Sun Peaks. It was time to check in to see how they'd done it, and what was going to happen next.What I got wrongAs is my habit, I introduced Sun Peaks as defined by our U.S. American measurement system of feet and acres. Which is not that unusual – this is a U.S. American-based podcast. However, as a courtesy to my Canadian guests, listeners, and readers, I should have also offered the equivalent measurements in meters. Only I am a dumb U.S. American so I don't actually know how to do these conversions. Sorry about that.Why you should ski Sun PeaksThe Ikon Pass is an incredible thing. Purchase one in the spring and spend the following winter bouncing across the snowy horizons. Hit half a dozen of the continent's greatest resorts in Utah, big-mountain hop in Colorado, spend a week in Tahoe or skimming between peaks at Big Sky. Or go to Canada – 10 Ikon destinations sit in the northland, and seven of them crouch in a neat circle straddling BC and Alberta: Norquay, Lake Louise, Sunshine, Panorama, Red, Sun Peaks, and Revelstoke:You could complete that circle in around 17 hours of driving. Which is not much if you're rolling through a two-week roadie and spending two or three days at each resort. Some of them could occupy far more time. Sun Peaks can eat up a week pretty easily. But for the resort-hoppers among us, an Ikon or Mountain Collective pass includes days at Canada's second-largest ski area on its ready-to-eat buffet. Here's a look at every Canadian ski area that participates in a U.S.-based megapass:So the first reason to ski Sun Peaks is that you probably already have access to it. But there's something else – you can just go there and ski. As much as I love the ski resorts of Colorado and Utah, they are just too easy to access for too many people. That's great, but skiing in those powder holes requires a certain patience, an expectation of some kind of madness, a willingness to tweak the algorithm to see what combination of snowfall, open terrain, day of the week, and time of day yields the most open path between you and turns.That calculus is a little easier at Sun Peaks: just show up whenever you want and start skiing. Outside of Whistler, the big-mountain resorts of BC resemble the big-mountain resorts of the American West 40 years ago. Endless labyrinths of untamed terrain, no one to race off the ropeline. BC's collective ski resorts have evolved much faster than the market's realization that there is another set of Rocky Mountain resorts stacked on top of the Rocky Mountain resorts of U.S. America. That's a lot of terrain to roam. And all you need is a passport. Go get it.Podcast NotesOn building an alternate route into Sun Peaks from the eastMost visitors to Sun Peaks are going to spend some time traveling to the resort along the Trans-Canada Highway. Eastbound travelers will simply turn north at Kamloops and then right at Heffley Creek. Westbound travelers pass within five miles of the resort's southeast edge as they drive through Chase, but must continue toward Kamloops before turning toward Sun Peaks – nearly an hour and a half on clear roads. There is a mountain road, unpaved and impassable in wintertime (marked in yellow below), and long-simmering plans for an alternate, less death-defying paved path that could be open year-round (market in blue below). Alexander and I discussed this road, and he seemed optimistic that it will, eventually, get built. Given Sun Peaks' record of actualizing the improbable, I share his outlook. Here's a map of the whole mess:On Nippon Cable and WhistlerWhile Sun Peaks presents as an independent ski area, it is in fact part of a Japan-based conglomerate called Nippon Cable. This is primarily a lift manufacturer, but Nippon also owns a number of ski areas in Japan and 25 percent of Whistler (seriously). Read more about their properties here.On Big Bam ski areaAlexander mentions Big Bam ski area, which sits along the Pine River just west of the Alaska Highway and south of Fort St. John. Here's a homemade trailmap that someone codenamed “Skier72” posted on skimap.org, with the caption, “Approx. Trails at Big Bam. Made with Google Earth. Top lift is future quad chair, bottom lift is rope tow”:Big Bam is a volunteer-run, weekends-only organization with 180 feet of vert. You can follow them on Facebook (their last Instapost was in 2014). Alexander mentioned that the ski area had moved from its original location, though I couldn't find any information on the old hill. The place has had a rough go – it re-opened (I believe in the current location), in 2009, and was closed from 2016 to 2019 before turning the lifts on again. They seem desperate for a chairlift. If anyone knows more about the Big Bam story, please let me know.On Sun Peaks spare lift fleetAlexander notes that Sun Peaks “might have the least number of lifts for a resort of our size” on the continent. Indeed, the ski area has the third-fewest number of lifts among North America's 10 largest ski areas:On the Burfield chairliftStow this one for ski club trivia night: Sun Peaks is home to what is very likely the longest fixed-grip chairlift in the world. The Burfield quad rises 2,890 vertical feet on a 9,510-foot-long line. According to Lift Blog, ride time is 21 minutes, and the carriers are 115 feet apart. The lift's hourly capacity is just 470 riders – compare that to the Crystal fixed-grip quad right beside it, which can move up to 2,400 skiers per hour.The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast 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 50/100 in 2023, and number 436 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

Hello everyone, even though I recorded this on Thursday I wanted to release it today. Herb Brooks was a player and a coach his high school hockey team won the 1955 state ice hockey championship. He also played for the Minnesota Gophers in college from 1955-59. He was a member of the 1960 US hockey team but was the final cut where he watched with his dad on tv that team win the gold medal at Squaw Valley. He later told the coach of that team he made the right decision because they won. From 1960 to 1970 he set a record by playing for the US national team eight times including the 64 and 68 teams. he would later coach the Golden Gophers to three NCAA championships in 1974, 1976, and 1979. In 1980 he would get the opportunity to complete a dream of his by being named the head coach of the US Olympic hockey team he would lead that team by strict means and would later be the USSR Olympic team in Squaw Valley in a game known as the Miracle on Ice and that team would later win the gold medal. After that, he would coach for the NHL and the Olympics twice more. Herb Brooks would die on August 11th, 2003 at the age of 66 near Forest Lake Minnesota. At the time of his death a movie was being made called Miracle starring Kurt Russell as Herb Brooks and the movie showed not only the ways he coached the team but the miracle it would take to get the team passed the Soviets. The movie was later dedicated to him saying he never saw it. He lived it. Support the show and hope you enjoy My social media links:Instagram:Steven Gervais (@steveng123456) • Instagram photos and videosTikTok:Steven Gervais (@sgandfriendspodcast) | TikTokFacebook group: Steven Gervais and Friends Podcast | FacebookYouTube Channel: Steven Gervais and Friends Podcast - YouTubeDeluxe Edition Network website: The Deluxe Edition NetworkGoodpods:Profile (goodpods.com)my website: Steven Gervais and Friend's Podcast (www.stevengervaisandfriendspodcast.com)Copper Johns beard: https://lddy.no/1gh13use SGANDFRIENDSPODCAST12 at check out for a 10 % discount on your purchase https://www.buzzsprout.com/1983118/support

This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on May 4. It dropped for free subscribers on May 7. To receive future pods as soon as they're live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe for free below:WhoDee Byrne, President and Chief Operating Officer of Palisades Tahoe, CaliforniaRecorded onApril 24, 2023About Palisades TahoeClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Alterra Mountain CompanyPass affiliations: Unlimited access on the Ikon Pass; unlimited access with holiday blackouts on the Ikon Base PassLocated in: Olympic Valley, CaliforniaYear founded: * Palisades/Olympic side (as Squaw Valley): 1949* Alpine Meadows: 1961Closest neighboring ski areas: Granlibakken (14 minutes from Palisades base), Homewood (18 minutes), Northstar (23 minutes), Tahoe Donner (24 minutes), Boreal (24 minutes), Soda Springs (28 minutes), Donner Ski Ranch (28 minutes), Kingvale (29 minutes), Sugar Bowl (30 minutes), Diamond Peak (39 minutes), Mt. Rose (45 minutes), Sky Tavern (50), Heavenly (1 hour) - travel times vary dramatically given weather conditions and time of dayBase elevation | summit elevation | vertical drop:* Alpine Meadows side: 6,835 feet | 8,637 feet | 1,802 feet* Olympic Valley side: 6,200 feet | 9,050 feet | 2,850 feetSkiable Acres: 6,000* Alpine Meadows side: 2,400* Olympic Valley side: 3,600Average annual snowfall: 400 inches (713 inches for the 2023-24 ski season through May 3!)Trail count: 270-plus* Alpine Meadows side: 100-plus (25% beginner, 40% intermediate, 35% advanced)* Olympic Valley side: 170-plus (25% beginner, 45% intermediate, 30% advanced)Lift count: 42 (10-passenger tram, 28-passenger funitel, 8-passenger gondola, 8 six-packs, 5 high-speed quads, 1 fixed-grip quad, 10 triples, 8 doubles, 7 carpets - view Lift Blog's inventory of Palisades Tahoe's lift fleet)* Alpine Meadows: 13 (1 six-pack,  3 high-speed quads, 2 triples, 5 doubles,  2 carpets)* Palisades/Olympic: 28 (120-passenger tram, 28-passenger funitel, 7 six-packs, 2 high-speed quads, 1 quad, 8 triples, 3 doubles, 5 carpets)* Shared lifts: 1 (8-passenger Base-to-Base Gondola)Why I interviewed herImagine this: I'm a Midwest teenager who has notched exactly three days on skis, on three separate 200-vert bumps. I know vaguely that there is skiing out West, and that it is big. But I'm thinking Colorado, maybe Wyoming. California? California is Beach Boys and palm trees. Surfboards and San Diego. I have no idea that California has mountains, let alone ski resorts. Anticipating the skis, boots, and poles that I've requested as the totality of my Christmas list, I pick up the December 1994 issue of Skiing (RIP), and read the following by Kristen Ulmer:Nothing is random. You live, die, pay taxes, move to Squaw. It's the place you see in all the ski flicks, with the groovy attitudes, toasty-warm days, wild lines, and that enormous lake. It's California! Squallywood! It's the one place where every born-to-ski skier, at some point or other, wants to move to; where people will crawl a thousand miles over broken glass for the chance to ski freezer burn. The one place to make it as a “professional” skier.My friend Kent Kreitler, a phenomenal skier who doesn't live anywhere in particular, finally announced, “I think I'm move to Squaw.”“So Kent,” I said, “let me tell you what the rest of your life will be like.” And I laid it out for him. …You're curious to find out if you're as good a skier as you think. So you find a group of locals and try to keep up. On powder days the excitement builds like a pressure cooker. Move fast, because it only takes an hour for the entire mountain to get tracked up. There's oodles of cliff jumps and psycho lines. You'd better just do it, because within seconds, 10 other yahoos will have already jumped and tracked out the landing pad.If you're a truly amazing skier (anything else inspires only polite smiles and undisguised yawns), then you land clean on jumps and shred through anything with style. If not, the hyperactivity of the place will motivate you to ski the same lines anyway. Either way is fulfilling.Occasionally a random miracle occurs, and the patrol opens the famed Palisades on Squaw Peak. On those days you don't bother with a warm-up run – just hike 15 minutes from the top of Siberia Express chair and coolly launch some hospital air off Main Chute.There are other places to express your extreme nature. When everything else gets tracked, you hike up Granite Peak for its steep chutes. If the snowpack is good, you climb 10 minutes from the top of the KT-22 chair to Eagle's Nest. And jumping the Fingers off KT-22 seems particularly heroic: Not only do you need speed to clear the sloping rocks, but it's right (ahem) under the lift.At the conclusion of that ski season, teenage Stuart Winchester, a novice skier who lived in his parents' basement, announced, “I think I'm moving to Squaw.” “No D*****s,” his mom said, “you're going to college.”Which doesn't mean I ever forgot that high-energy introduction to California extreme. I re-read that article dozens of times (you can read the full bit here). Until my brain had been coded to regard the ski resort now known as Palisades Tahoe (see why?) as one of the spiritual and cultural homelands of U.S. lift-served skiing.Ulmer's realm, hyperactive as it was, looks pokey by today's standards. An accompanying essay in that same issue of Skiing, written by Eric Hanson, describes a very different resort than the one you'll encounter today:Locals seem proud that there's so little development here. The faithful will say it's because everything that matters is up on the mountain itself: bottomless steeps, vast acreage, 33 lifts and no waiting. America's answer to the wide-open ski circuses of Europe. After all these years the mountain is still uncrowded, except on weekends when people pile in from the San Francisco Bay area in droves. Squaw is unflashy, underbuilt, and seems entirely indifferent to success. The opposite of what you would expect one of America's premier resorts to be.Apparently, “flashy” included, you know, naming trails. Check out this circa 1996 trailmap, which shows lift names, but only a handful of runs:Confusion reigned, according to Hanson:Every day, we set off armed with our trail map and the printed list of the day's groomed runs in search of intermediate terrain – long steep runs groomed for cruising, unmogulled routes down from the top of the black-diamond chairs. It wasn't easy. The grooming sheet named runs which weren't marked on the trail map. The only trail named on the map is The Mountain Run, an expressway that drops 2,000 feet from Gold Coast to the village. And most of the biggest verticals were on the chairs – KT-22, Cornice II, Headwall, Silverado, Broken Arrow – marked “experts only.” We didn't relish the idea of going up an expert chair looking for a particular groomed route down, if the groomed route wasn't to be found. I began feeling nostalgic for all those totem poles of green and blue and black trail signs that clutter the landscapes of other ski resorts, but at least keep the skier oriented.I asked a patroller where I could find some of the runs on the groomed list. He wasn't sure. He told me that the grooming crew and the ski patrol didn't have the same names for many of the runs.Just amazing. While Palisades Tahoe is now a glimmering model of a modern American ski resort, that raw-and-rowdy past is still sewn into the DNA of this fascinating place.What we talked aboutTahoe's megaseason; corn harvest; skiing into July and… maybe beyond; why Alpine will be the later operator this summer; why the base-to-base gondola ceased operation on April 30; snow exhaustion; Cali spring skiing; reminiscing on Pacific Northwest ski culture; for the love of teaching and turning; skiing as adventure; from 49 Degrees North to Vail to Aspen to Tahoe; Tahoe culture shock; Palisades' vast and varied ski school; reflections on the name change a year and a half later; going deep on the base-to-base gondola; the stark differences between the cultural vibe on the Alpine Meadows and Palisades sides of the resort and whether the gondola has compromised those distinctions; why the gondola took more than a decade to build and what finally pushed it through; White Wolf, the property that hosts an unfinished chairlift between Palisades and Alpine; how the gondola took cars off the road; why the base-to-base gondola didn't overload KT-22's terrain; the Mothership; the new Red Dog sixer; why Palisades re-oriented the lift to run lower to the ground; why the lift was only loading four passengers at a time for large parts of the season; snowmaking as fire-suppression system; how Palisades and Mammoth assisted Sierra-at-Tahoe's recovery; candidates for lift upgrades at Alpine Meadows; “fixed-grip lifts are awesome”; an Alpine masterplan refresh incoming; which lift could be next in line for upgrades on the Palisades side; the “biggest experience bust on the Palisades side of the resort”; why Silverado and Granite Chief will likely never be upgraded to detachable lifts; why the Silverado terrain is so rarely open and what it takes to make it live; whether Palisades Tahoe could ever leave the unlimited-with-blackouts tier on the Ikon Base Pass; and paid parking incoming.             Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewThis was the second time I've featured Palisades Tahoe on The Storm Skiing Podcast. The first was a conversation with then-resort president Ron Cohen in September 2020, shortly after the ski area announced that it would ditch the “Squaw Valley” name. We spent the entire 49-minute conversation discussing that name change. At the time, the podcast was mostly focused on New England and New York, and a deep exploration of a distant resort would have been a little off-brand.But The Storm has evolved, and my coverage now firmly includes the State of California. Thank goodness. What an incredible ski state. So many huge resorts, so much wide-open terrain, so much snow, so much energy. The Northeast tugs skiing from the earth through technology and willpower, pasting white streaks over brown land, actualizing the improbable in a weird algorithm that only pencils out because 56 million people camp out within driving distance. California is different. California delivers skiing because it's lined top to bottom with giant mountains that summon ungodly oceans of snow from the clouds. It just happens Brah. There aren't even that many ski areas here – just 28, or 29 if you count the uber-dysfunctional Mt. Waterman – but there seems to be one everywhere you need one – LA (Big Bear, Baldy, Mountain High), Fresno (China Peak), Modesto (Dodge Ridge), Stockton (Bear Valley), Sacramento and the Bay Area (all of Tahoe). Among these are some of the largest and most-developed ski areas in America.And none is bigger than Palisades Tahoe. Well, Heavenly was until this year, as I outlined earlier this week, but the base-to-base gondola changed all that. The ski area formerly known as Squaw Valley and the ski area still-known as Alpine Meadows are now officially one interconnected ski goliath. That's a big deal.Add a new six-pack (Red Dog), a sufficient period to reflect on the name change, a historic winter, and the ongoing impacts of the Covid-driven outdoor boom and the Ikon Pass, and it was a perfect time to check in on one of Alterra's trophy properties.Why you should ski Palisades TahoeOne of the most oft-dished compliments to emphasize the big-mountain cred of a North American ski resort is that it “feels like Europe.” But there just aren't that many ski areas around these parts worthy of that description. Big Sky, with its dramatic peaks and super-duper out-of-base bubble lifts. Snowbird-Alta, with their frenzied scale and wild terrain and big-box tram (though they get way too much snow to mistake for Europe). Whistler, with its village and polyglot vibe. And then there's Palisades Tahoe:Nowhere else in America do you stand in the base area and wonder if you should hop on the tram or the gondola or the other big-gondola-thingy-that-you're-not-quite-sure-what-it-is (the funitel) or the most iconic chairlift in the country (KT-22). Or Wa She Shu. Or Exhibition or Red Dog. And go up and up and then you never need to see the base area again. Up to Headwall or Gold Coast or so help-you-God Silverado if it's open. Or up and over to Alpine and another whole ski area that used to be a giant ski resort but is now just a small part of a giant-er ski resort.It's too much to describe or even really try to. In our conversation, Byrne called Palisades a “super-regional” resort. One that most people drive to, rather than fly to. I'm telling you this one is worth the flight. From anywhere. For anyone. Just go.Podcast NotesOn the name changeThe last time I interviewed Byrne, it was for an article I wrote on the name change in 2021:The name change, promised more than a year ago, acknowledges that many Native Americans consider the word “squaw” to be a racist and sexist slur.“Anyone who spends time at these mountains can feel the passion of our dedicated skiers and riders,” said Ron Cohen, former president and COO of Palisades Tahoe, who moved into the same position at Alterra's Mammoth Mountain in June. “It's electric, exciting, reverential, and incredibly motivating. However, no matter how deep, meaningful, and positive these feelings are and no matter how much our guests don't intend to offend anyone, it is not enough to justify continuing to operate under a name that is deeply offensive to indigenous people across North America.”The former resort name was perhaps the most prominent modern use of the word “squaw” in America, skiing's equivalent to the Cleveland Indians or Washington Redskins, two professional sports teams that are also in the process of replacing their names (Cleveland will become the Guardians, while Washington will announce its new name early next year). The update broadcasts a powerful signal to an American mainstream that still largely regards the word “squaw” as an innocuous synonym for a Native American woman.“We know the founders of our resort had no intention of causing offense in choosing this name for the resort, nor have any of our patrons who have spoken this word over the last seven decades,” said Cohen. “But as our society evolves, we must acknowledge the need for change when we are confronted with harsh realities. Having our name be associated with pain and dehumanization is contrary to our goal of making the outdoors a welcoming space for all people. I feel strongly that we have been given the rare opportunity to effect lasting, positive change; to find a new name that reflects our core values, storied past and respect for all those who have enjoyed this land.”It's a long piece, and my opinion on it stands, but I'll reiterate this bit:I realize that many of us learned something different in grade school. I am one of them. Until last year, I did not know that Native Americans considered this word to be offensive. But the resort, after extensive research and consultation with the local Washoe Tribe, made a good case that the name was an anachronism.Cohen came on my podcast to further elaborate. The arguments made sense. What I had learned in grade-school was wrong. “Squaw” was not a word that belonged on the masthead of a major ski resort.The immediate reaction that this is some PC move is flimsy and hardly worth addressing, but OK: this is not a redefining of history to cast a harmless thing as nefarious. Rather, it is an example of a long-ostracized group finding its voice and saying, “Hey, this is what this actually means – can you rethink how you're using this word?”If you want to scream into the wind about this, be my guest. The name change is final. The place will still have plenty of skiers. If you don't want to be one of them, there are plenty of other places to ski, around Tahoe and elsewhere. But what this means for the ski terrain is exactly nothing at all. The resort, flush with capital from Alterra, is only getting bigger and better. Sitting out that evolution for what is a petty protest is anyone's mistake to make.“We want to be on the right side of history on this,” said Byrne. “While this may take some getting used to, our name change was an important initiative for our company and community. At the end of the day, ‘squaw' is a hurtful word, and we are not hurtful people. We have a well-earned reputation as a progressive resort at the forefront of ski culture, and progress cannot happen without change.”Apparently there are still a handful of Angry Ski Bros who occasionally track Byrne down on social media and yell about this. Presumably in all-caps. Sometimes I think about what life would be like right now had the commercial internet failed to take off and honestly it's hard to conclude that it wouldn't be a hell of a lot better than whatever version of reality we've found ourselves in.On federal place names eliminating the use of the word “squaw”Byrne mentioned that the federal government had also moved to eliminate the word “squaw” from its place names. Per a New York Times article last March:The map dots, resembling a scattergram of America, point to snow-covered pinnacles, remote islands and places in between.Each of the 660 points, shown on maps of federal lands and waterways, includes the word “squaw” in its name, a term Native Americans regard as a racist and misogynistic slur.Now the Interior Department, led by Deb Haaland, the first Native American cabinet secretary, is taking steps to strip the word from mountains, rivers, lakes and other geographic sites and has solicited input from tribes on new names for the landmarks.A task force created by the department will submit the new names for final approval from the Board on Geographic Names, the federal body that standardizes American place names. The National Park Service was ordered to take similar steps.By September, the Biden administration had completed the project. The word persists in non-federally owned place names, however. One ski area – Big Squaw in Maine – still officially carries the name, even though the state was among the first to ban the use of the word “squaw,” back in 2000. While a potential new ownership group had vowed to change the ski area's name, they ultimately backed out of the deal. As long as the broken-down, barely functional ski area remains under the ownership of professional knucklehead and bootleg timber baron James Confalone, the ski area – and the volunteer group that keeps the one remaining chairlift spinning – is stuck with the name.On White Wolf If you've ever looked off the backside of KT-22, you've no doubt noticed the line of chairlift towers standing empty on the mountain:This is White Wolf, a long-envisioned but as-yet-incomplete private resort owned by a local gent named Troy Caldwell, who purchased the land in 1989 for $400,000. Byrne and I discuss this property briefly on the podcast. The Palisades Tahoe blog posted a terrific history of Caldwell and White Wolf last year:So, they shifted to the idea of a private ski area, named White Wolf. In 2000, Placer County issued Caldwell a permit to build his own chairlift. A local homeowners' association later sued the county for issuing him that permit, but, in 2005, the lift towers and cables went in, but construction slowed on the private chairlift as Caldwell weighed his options for a future interconnect between the resorts. To date, the chairlift has yet to operate—but that may be changing if Caldwell's long-term plan comes to fruition.In 2016, Caldwell submitted plans to Placer County for a 275-acre private-resort housing project on his land that would include the construction of dozens of fire-safe custom homes, as well employee housing units, a pool, an ice-skating rink, and two private chairlifts, including the one that's already constructed.After the Palisades Tahoe resorts came under the same ownership in 2012, the plan to physically link them has now become reality. Caldwell is the missing piece enabling the long-awaited gondola to connect the two mountains over his land. Roughly half of the Base to Base Gondola and its mid-stations are on property owned by the Caldwells.“Sure, we could have sold the land for $50 million and moved to Tahiti,” Caldwell says with a laugh. “But we made the decision that this is our life, this is what we wanted to do. We wanted to finish the dream, connect the ski areas and do what we initially set out to do.”Unfortunately, it is unlikely that the general public will ever be able to ski White Wolf.On Alpine Meadows' masterplanByrne and I discuss several proposed but unbuilt lifts at Alpine Meadows, including the Rollers lift, shown here on the 2015 masterplan:And here, just for fun, is an old proposed line for the gondola, which would not have crossed the KT-22 Express:On Sierra-at-Tahoe and the Caldor FireI discussed this one in my recent article for the Heavenly pod.Parting shotThe Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 41/100 in 2023, and number 427 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane, or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email skiing@substack.com. 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This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on May 2. It dropped for free subscribers on May 5. 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 Fortune, Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Heavenly and Vail's Tahoe Region (Heavenly, Northstar, and Kirkwood)Recorded onApril 25 , 2023About Heavenly and Vail's Tahoe RegionHeavenlyClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Vail ResortsLocated in: Stateline, Nevada and South Lake Tahoe, CaliforniaYear founded: 1955Pass affiliations: Unlimited access on Epic Pass; Unlimited access with holiday blackouts on Epic Local Pass, Tahoe Local Pass, Tahoe Value PassClosest neighboring ski areas: Sierra-at-Tahoe (30 minutes), Diamond Peak (45 minutes), Kirkwood (51 minutes), Mt. Rose (1 hour), Northstar (1 hour), Sky Tavern (1 hour, 5 minutes) - travel times vary dramatically given weather conditions and time of day.Base elevation: 6,565 feet at California Lodge; the Heavenly Gondola leaves from Heavenly Village at 6,255 feet – when snowpack allows, you can ski all the way to the village, though this is technically backcountry terrainSummit elevation: 10,040 feet at the top of Sky ExpressVertical drop: 3,475 feet from the summit to California Lodge; 3,785 feet from the summit to Heavenly VillageSkiable Acres: 4,800Average annual snowfall: 360 inches (570 inches for 2022-23 ski season as of May 2)Trail count: 97Lift count: 26 lifts (1 50-passenger tram, 1 eight-passenger gondola, 2 six-packs, 8 high-speed quads, 1 fixed-grip quad, 5 triples, 2 doubles, 2 ropetows, 4 carpets)NorthstarClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Vail ResortsLocated in: Truckee, CaliforniaYear founded: 1972Pass affiliations: Unlimited access on Epic Pass; Unlimited access with holiday blackouts on Epic Local Pass, Tahoe Local Pass; unlimited with holiday and Saturday blackouts on Tahoe Value PassClosest neighboring ski areas: Tahoe Donner (24 minutes), Boreal (25 minutes), Donner Ski Ranch (27 minutes), Palisades Tahoe (27 minutes), Diamond Peak (27 minutes), Soda Springs (29 minutes), Kingvale (32 minutes), Sugar Bowl (33 minutes), Mt. Rose (34 minutes), Homewood (35 minutes), Sky Tavern (39 minutes), Heavenly (1 hour) - travel times vary dramatically given weather conditions and time of day.Base elevation: 6,330 feetSummit elevation: 8,610 feetVertical drop: 2,280 feetSkiable Acres: 3,170Average annual snowfall: 350 inches (665 inches for 2022-23 ski season as of May 2)Trail count: 106Lift count: 19 (1 six-passenger gondola, 1 pulse gondola, 1 chondola with 6-pack chairs & 8-passenger cabins, 1 six-pack, 6 high-speed quads, 1 fixed-grip quad, 2 triples, 1 platter, 5 magic carpets)KirkwoodClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Vail ResortsLocated in: Kirkwood, CaliforniaYear founded: 1972Pass affiliations: Unlimited access on Epic Pass, Kirkwood Pass; Unlimited access with holiday blackouts on Epic Local Pass, Tahoe Local Pass; unlimited with holiday and Saturday blackouts on Tahoe Value PassClosest neighboring ski areas: Sierra-at-Tahoe (48 minutes), Heavenly (48 minutes) - travel times vary dramatically given weather conditions and time of day.Base elevation: 7,800 feetSummit elevation: 9,800 feetVertical drop: 2,000 feetSkiable Acres: 2,300Average annual snowfall: 354 inches (708 inches for 2022-23 ski season as of May 2)Trail count: 94Lift count: 13 (2 high-speed quads, 1 fixed-grip quad, 6 triples, 1 double, 1 T-bar, 2 carpets)Why I interviewed himFor decades, Heavenly was the largest ski area that touched the state of California. By a lot. Four drive-to base areas serving 4,800 acres across two states. Mammoth? Ha! Its name misleads – 3,500 acres, barely bigger than Keystone. To grasp Heavenly's scale, look again at the new North Bowl lift on the trailmap above. A blip, one red line lost among dozens. Lodged near the base like the beginner lifts we're all used to ignoring. But that little lift rises almost 1,300 vertical feet over nearly a mile. That's close to the skiable drop of Sugar Bowl (1,500 feet), itself a major Tahoe ski area. Imagine laying Sugar Bowl's 1,650 acres over the Heavenly trailmap, then add Sierra-at-Tahoe (2,000 acres) and Mt. Rose (1,200). Now you're even.Last year, Palisades Tahoe wrecked the party, stringing a gondola between Alpine Meadows and the resort formerly known as Squaw Valley. They were technically one resort before, but I'm not an adherent of the these-two-ski-areas-are-one-ski-area-because-we-say-so school of marketing. But now the two sides really are united, crafting a 6,000-acre super-resort that demotes Heavenly to second-largest in Tahoe.Does it really matter? Heavenly is one of the more impressive hunks of interconnected mountain that you'll ever ski in America. Glance northwest and the lake booms away forever into the horizon. Peer east and there, within reach as your skis touch a 20-foot snowbase, is a tumbling brown forever, the edge of the great American desert that stretches hundreds of miles through Nevada, Utah, and Colorado.When Vail Resorts raised its periscope above Colorado for the first time two decades ago, Heavenly fell in its sites. The worthy fifth man, an all-star forward to complement the Colorado quad of Vail, Beaver Creek, Keystone, and Breck. That's not an easy role to fill. It had to be a mountain that was enormous, evolved, transcendent. Someplace that could act as both a draw for variety-seeking Eagle County faithful and an ambassador for the Vail brand as benevolent caretaker. Heavenly, a sort of Vail Mountain West – with its mostly intermediate pitch, multiple faces, and collection of high-speed lifts cranking out of every gully – was perfect, the most logical extra-Colorado manifestation of big-mountain skiing made digestible for the masses.That's still what Heavenly is, mostly: a ski resort for everyone. You can get in trouble, sure, in Mott or Killebrew or by underestimating the spiral down Gunbarrel. But this is an intermediate mountain, a cruisers' mountain. Even the traverses – and there are many – are enjoyable. Those views, man. Set the cruise control and wander forever. For a skier who doesn't care to be the best skier in the world but who wants to experience some of the best skiing in the world, this is the place.What we talked aboutRecords smashing all over the floor around Tahoe; why there won't be more season extensions; Heavenly's spring-skiing footprint; managing weather-related delays and shutdowns in a social-media age; it's been a long long winter in Tahoe; growing up skiing the Pacific Northwest; Stevens Pass in the ‘70s; remember when Stevens Pass and Schweitzer had the same owner?; why leaving the thing you love most can be the best thing sometimes; overlooked Idaho; pausing at Snow King; fitting rowdy Kirkwood into the Vail Resorts puzzle; the enormous complexity of Heavenly; what it means to operate in two states; a special assignment at Stevens Pass; stabilizing a resort in chaos; why Heavenly was an early snowmaking adopter; Hugh and Bill Killebrew; on the ground during the Caldor Fire; snowmaking systems as fire-fighting sprinkler systems; fire drills; Sierra-at-Tahoe's lost season and how Heavenly and Kirkwood helped; wind holds and why they seem to be becoming more frequent; “it can be calm down in the base area and blowing 100 up top”; potential future alternatives to Sky Express as a second lift-served route back to Nevada from California; a lift-upgrade wishlist for Heavenly; how Mott Canyon lift could evolve; potential tram replacement lifts; the immediate impact of the new North Bowl express quad; how Northstar, Kirkwood, and Heavenly work together as a unit; paid parking incoming; and the Epic Pass.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewThe first half of my life was dominated by one immutable looming fact: the year 2000 would arrive. That's how we all referenced it, every time: “the year 2000.” As though it were not just another year but the president of all years. The turning of a millennium. For the first time in a thousand years. It sounded so fantastical, so improbable, so futuristic. As though aliens had set an invasion date and we all knew it but we just didn't know if they would vaporize us or gift us their live-forever beer recipe. Y2K hysteria added a layer of intrigue and mild thrill. Whatever else happened with your life, wherever you ended up, whoever you turned out to be, this was a party you absolutely could not miss.This winter in Tahoe was like that. If you had any means of getting there, you had to go. Utah too. But everything is more dramatic in Tahoe. The snows piled Smurf Village-like on rooftops. The incredible blizzards raking across the Sierras. The days-long mountain closures. It was a rare winter, a cold winter, a relentless winter, a record-smashing winter for nearly every ski area ringing the 72-mile lake.Tahoe may never see a winter like this again in our lifetimes. So how are they dealing with it? They know what to do with snow in Tahoe. But we all know what to do with water until our basement floods. Sometimes a thing you need is a thing you can get too much of.In March I flew to California, circled the lake, skied with the people running the mountains. Exhaustion, tinted with resignation, reigned. Ski season always sprawls at the top of the Sierras, but this winter – with its relentless atmospheric rivers, the snows high and low, the piles growing back each night like smashed anthills in the driveway – amplified as it went, like an action movie with no comedic breaks or diner-meal interludes. How were they doing now, as April wound down and the snows faded and corn grew on the mountainside? And at the end of what's been a long three years in Tahoe, with Covid shutdowns leading into a Covid surge leading into wildfires leading into the biggest snows anyone alive has ever seen? There's hardship in all that, but pride, too, in thriving in spite of it.What I got wrongI said that the Kehr's Riblet double was “one of the oldest lifts in the country.” That's not accurate. It was built in 1964 – very old for a machine, but not even the oldest lift at the resort. That honor goes to Seventh Heaven, a 1960 Riblet double rising to the summit. And that's not even the oldest Riblet double in the State of Washington: White Pass still runs Chair 2, built in 1958; and Vista Cruiser has been spinning at Mt. Spokane since 1956.Questions I wish I'd askedFortune briefly discussed the paid-parking plans landing at Heavenly, Northstar, and Kirkwood next winter. Limited as these are to weekend and holiday mornings, the plans will no doubt spark feral rage in a certain group of skiers who want to pretend like it's still 1987 and Tahoe has not changed in an unsustainable way. The traffic. The people. The ripple effects of all these things. I would have liked to have gotten into the motivations behind this change a bit more with Fortune, to really underscore how this very modest change is but one way to address a huge and stubborn problem that's not going anywhere.  Why you should ski Heavenly, Northstar, and KirkwoodFrom a distance, Tahoe can be hard to sort. Sixteen ski areas strung around the lake, nine of them with vertical drops of 1,500 feet or more:How to choose? One easy answer: follow your pass. If you already have an Epic Pass, you have a pre-loaded Tahoe sampler. Steep and funky Kirkwood. Big and meandering Heavenly. Gentle Northstar. The Brobots will try steering you away from Northstar (which they've glossed “Flatstar”) or Heavenly (too many traverses). Ignore them. Both are terrific ski areas, with endless glades that are about exactly pitched for the average tree skier. Kirkwood is the gnarliest, no question, but Northstar (which is also a knockout parks mountain, and heavily wind-protected for storm days), and Heavenly (which, despite the traverses, delivers some incredible stretches of sustained vertical), will still give you a better ski day than 95 percent of the ski areas in America on any given winter date.It's easy to try to do too much in Tahoe. I certainly did. Heavenly especially deserves – and rewards – multiple days of exploration. This is partly due to the size of each mountain, but also because conditions vary so wildly day-to-day. I skied in a windy near-whiteout at Kirkwood on Sunday, hit refrozen crust that exiled me to Northstar groomers on Tuesday, and lucked into a divine four-inch refresh at Heavenly on Wednesday, gifting us long meanders through the woods. Absolutely hit multiple resorts on your visit, but don't rush it too much – you can always go back.Podcast NotesOn Schweitzer and Stevens Pass' joint ownerFortune and I discuss an outfit called Harbor Resorts, which at one time owned both Stevens Pass and Schweitzer. I'd never heard of this company, so I dug a little. An Aug. 19, 1997 article in The Seattle Times indicates that the company also once owned a majority share in Mission Ridge and something called the “Arrowleaf resort development.” They sold Mission in 2003, and the company split in two in 2005. Harbor then sold Stevens to CNL Lifestyle Properties in 2011, where it operated under Karl Kapuscinski, the current owner, with Invision Capital, of Mountain High, Dodge Ridge, and China Peak. CNL then sold the resort to the Och-Ziff hedge fund in 2016, before Vail bought Stevens in 2018 (say what you'd like about Vail Resorts, but at least we have relative certainty that they are invested as a long-term owner, and the days of private-equity ping pong are over). Schweitzer remains under McCaw Investment Group, which emerged out of that 2005 split of Harbor.As for Arrowleaf, that refers to the doomed Early Winters ski area development in Washington. Aspen, before it decided to just be Aspen, tried being Vail, or what Vail ended up being. The company's adventures abroad included owning Breckenridge from 1970 to 1987 or 1988, developing Blackcomb, and the attempted building of Early Winters, which would have included up to 16 lifts serving nearly 4,000 acres in the Methow Valley. Aspen, outfoxed by a group of citizen-activists who are still shaking their pom-poms about it nearly four decades later, eventually sold the land. Subsequent developers also failed, and today the land that would have held, according to The New York Times, 200 hotel rooms, 550 condos, 440 single-family homes, shops, and restaurants is the site of exactly five single-family homes. If you want to understand why ski resort development is so hard, this 2016 article from the local Methow Valley News explains it pretty succinctly (emphasis mine):“The first realization was that we would be empowered by understanding the rules of the game.” Coon said. Soon after it was formed, MVCC “scraped together a few dollars to hire a consultant,” who showed them that Aspen Corp. would have to obtain many permits for the ski resort, but MVCC would only have to prevail on defeating one.Administrative and legal challenges delayed the project for 25 years, “ultimately paving the way to victory,” with the water rights issue as the final obstacle to resort development, Coon said.The existing Washington ski resorts, meanwhile, remain overburdened and under-built, with few places to stay anywhere near the bump. Three cheers for traffic and car-first transportation infrastructure, I guess. Here's a rough look at what Early Winters could have been:On Stevens Pass in late 2021 and early 2022Fortune spent 20 years, starting in the late 1970s, working at Stevens Pass. Last year, he returned on a special assignment. As explained by Gregory Scruggs in The Seattle Times:[Fortune] arrived on Jan. 14 when the ski area was at a low point. After a delayed start to the season, snow hammered the Cascades during the holiday week. Severely understaffed, Stevens Pass struggled to open most of its chairlifts for six weeks, including those serving the popular backside terrain.Vail Resorts, which bought Stevens Pass in 2018, had sold a record number of its season pass product, the Epic Pass, in the run-up to the 2021-22 winter, leaving thousands of Washington residents claiming that they had prepaid for a product they couldn't use. A Change.org petition titled “Hold Vail Resorts Accountable” generated over 45,000 signatures. Over 400 state residents filed complaints against Vail Resorts with the state Attorney General's office. In early January, Vail Daily reported that Vail's stock price was underperforming by 25%, with analysts attributing the drop in part to an avalanche of consumer ire about mismanagement at resorts across the country, including Stevens Pass.On Jan. 12, Vail Resorts fired then-general manager Tom Pettigrew and announced that Fortune would temporarily relocate from his role as general manager at Heavenly Ski Resort in South Lake Tahoe, California, to right the ship at Stevens Pass. Vail, which owns 40 ski areas across 15 states and three countries, has a vast pool of ski industry talent from which to draw. In elevating Fortune, whose history with the mountain goes back five decades, the company seems to have acknowledged what longtime skiers and snowboarders at Stevens Pass have been saying for several seasons: local institutional knowledge matters.Fortune is back at Heavenly, of course. Ellen Galbraith is the resort's current general manager – she is scheduled to join me on The Storm Skiing Podcast in June.On Hugh and Bill KillebrewFortune and I touched on the legacy of Hugh Killebrew and his son, Bill. This Tahoe Daily Tribune article sums up this legacy, along with the tragic circumstances that put the younger Killebrew in charge of the resort:By October of 1964, attorney Hugh Killebrew owned more than 60 percent of the resort. … Killebrew was a visionary who wanted to expand the resort into Nevada. Chair Four [Sky] allowed it to happen.In the fall of 1967, [Austin] Angell was part of a group that worked through storms and strung cable for two new lifts in Nevada. Then on New Year's Day, 1968, Boulder and Dipper chairs started running. Angell's efforts helped turn Heavenly Valley into America's largest ski area. …On Aug. 27, 1977 … Hugh Killebrew and three other resort employees were killed in a plane crash near Echo Summit.Killebrew's son, Bill Killebrew, a then-recent business school graduate of the University of California, was one of the first civilians on the scene. He saw the wreckage off Highway 50 and immediately recognized his dad's plane. …At 23, Bill Killebrew assumed control of the resort. A former youth ski racer with the Heavenly Blue Angels, he learned a lot from his dad. But the resort was experiencing two consecutive drought years and was millions of dollars in debt.Bill Killebrew began focusing on snowmaking capabilities. Tibbetts and others tinkered with different systems and, by the early 1980s, Heavenly Valley had 65 percent snowmaking coverage.With a stroke of good luck and several wet winters, Bill Killebrew had the resort out of debt in 1987, 10 years after bankruptcy was a possibility. It was now time to sell.Killebrew sold to a Japanese outfit called Kamori Kanko Company, who then sold it to American Skiing Company in 1997, who then sold it to likely forever owner Vail in 2002.When he joined me on The Storm Skiing Podcast in 2021, Tim Cohee, current GM of China Peak, called Bill Killebrew “the smartest person I've ever known” and “overall probably the smartest guy ever in the American ski industry.” Cohee called him “basically a savant, who happened to, by accident, end up in the ski business through his dad's tragic death in 1977.” You can listen to that at 26:30 here.On Sierra-at-Tahoe and the Caldor FireMost of the 16 Tahoe-area ski areas sit along or above the lake's North Shore. Only three sit south. Vail owns Heavenly and Kirkwood. The third is Sierra-at-Tahoe. You may be tempted to dismiss this as a locals' bump, but look again at the chart above – this is a serious ski area, with 2,000 acres of skiable terrain on a 2,212-foot vertical drop. It's basically the same size as Kirkwood.The 2021 Caldor Fire threatened all three resorts. Heavenly and Kirkwood escaped with superficial damage, but Sierra got crushed. A blog post from the ski area's website summarizes the damage:The 3000-degree fire ripped through our beloved trees crawling through the canopies and the forest floor affecting 1,600 of our 2,000 acres, damaging lift towers, haul ropes, disintegrating terrain park features and four brand new snowcats and practically melted the Upper Shop — a maintenance building which housed many of our crews' tools and personal belongings, some that had been passed down through generations.The resort lost the entire 2021-22 ski season and enormous swaths of trees. Here's the pre-fire trailmap:And post-fire:Ski areas all over the region helped with whatever they could. One of Vail Resorts' biggest contributions was filling in for Sierra's Straight As program, issuing Tahoe Local Epic Passes good at all three ski areas to eligible South Shore students.On wind holdsFortune discussed why wind holds are such an issue at Heavenly, and why they seem to be happening more frequently, with the San Francisco Chronicle earlier this year.On the pastI'll leave you with this 1972 Heavenly trailmap, which labels Mott and Killebrew Canyons as “closed area - dangerous steep canyons”:Or maybe I'll just leave you with more pictures of Heavenly:The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 40/100 in 2023, and number 426 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane, or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email skiing@substack.com. 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For many of us, winter snow is an occasional inconvenience. For those living in the Sierra Nevada region of California though, it's a way of life. Placer County stretches roughly 65 miles from the suburbs of Sacramento all the way to the border of Nevada and the shore of Lake Tahoe. Dealing with massive amounts of snow, with few places to move it, is a regular problem here. But this winter was truly exceptional. More than 700 inches of snow fell, making it their second snowiest on record. On this week's episode, Donny Francis, Placer County's Road District Superintendent, talks about what this winter was like and the huge effort that was needed to try and keep the county's roads clear. About the Across the Sky podcast The weekly weather podcast is hosted on a rotation by the Lee Weather team: Matt Holiner of Lee Enterprises' Midwest group in Chicago, Kirsten Lang of the Tulsa World in Oklahoma, Joe Martucci of the Press of Atlantic City, N.J., and Sean Sublette of the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia. Episode transcript Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically: Hello, everybody. Meteorologist Joe Martucci here with the Across the Sky podcast, Lee Enterprise's national weather podcast. I am joined this week with Sean Sublette from the Richmond Times Dispatch. Matt Holiner in the Midwest. Kirsten Lang is on maternity leave. We wish her the best. She delivered a healthy baby boy not too long ago, so congratulations to her. We miss her. We will see her in a couple of months. We'll be back here on the podcast sometime later in June or July. Guys, this week we're talking about snow. And I know for many of you listening, you're like, Hey, snow season ended a month ago or three months ago. Or if you're like Sean and I, we didn't even have a snow season. But that is a much different story out west. We'll take you to Lake Tahoe, where one town, two homes got 435.4 inches of snow. Another place got over 700 inches of snow, and that is with Donny Francis. He is the road district superintendent for Placer County in California. Was talking to us all about. You may not know Placer County, but you do. Now, one of the towns there that is Tahoe Cities is right at Lake Tahoe. They actually have an interesting mix of the valley areas, the foothills and then these mountains here. We had the pleasure of chatting with him. We'll go over to Shawn. This was quite the episode, especially for us. Shawn, where I think we saw maybe combined like White Point eight inches of snow between Richmond and South Jersey. I mean, yeah, we're our big snow seasons here are 20 or 30 inches you know and they would get that in a day, you know, several hundred inches of snow this year in Tahoe. And, you know, his county there goes from from the Central Valley all the way up toward Lake Tahoe. So have a huge range in elevation there. And they have to serve areas around ski resorts, too. So they have a wide variety of terrain. They've got to handle narrow roads with these population, you know, these small population centers that are densely populated right around the ski areas. And just some of the things that they have to do to get this job done are phenomenal. Well, after this winter and all the snow pictures we were seeing on social media and all the news stories about just round after round, we knew we had to get somebody on the podcast to talk about that, who is out there in the trenches dealing with injury, like somebody from like the Department of Transportation or somebody who's clearing the roads because what does it take to clear hundreds of inches of snow? I mean, where it is just dumping and dumping. So I am so glad that we are on the show because it is truly a unique experience, you know, and this hasn't happened in a long time. So some good stories to share. Yeah. Especially when he talks about the number of hours that that they've worked over the years and taking care to ski resorts. And when he was talking about the ski resorts, I was like, I wonder why they would take care of those, you know, roads right around there. But it's such a huge tourist attraction, obviously, for everybody who's coming. If you can't get to the ski resort, the county is losing out on money from the businesses. And I think I know I have I don't know if you guys saw there is a one photo of the snow actually up to the ski lift, the chairs there on the chairlift where they could even move an chairlift. The snow is so high. So it was it was pretty incredible. So without further ado, we're going to turn it over to Donny Francis. And we're all about this season's snow near Lake Tahoe. So we are here with Donny Francis from Placer County in California. Here he is with the the Public Works Department. He is a road district superintendent. And he has seen a lot a lot of snow all winter and spring long, too. Donny, good to be here with you today. How's it going? It's going good. How are you? Good, Good. We're doing good. You were saying, when we were recording this on April 20th, that it's a nice sunny day in some 80 degree weather. So that'll take out, you know, maybe one or 2% of the hundreds of inches of snow this winter. It's certainly been near record breaking to record breaking across the area. Let me ask you this. And I kind of do I do a couple of road department stories a year, you know, mostly in New Jersey or I should say, all in New Jersey, of course. What's the mindset of your road crews going into the winter and let's just say going into this winter? And what's the morale like after such a tremendous snow season? I know it's still going to be going in parts, but what's the feeling like before and after? I think after, you know, a long summer, it gets pretty hot here, too. A lot of people look forward to winter. And, you know, we got a lot of people in the valley down here that volunteer to plow snow in the snow districts. So we got three snow districts. There's about nine, ten guys per district. So I think a lot of them look forward to it getting up there because they know they're going to make a lot of extra money, get to play in the snow, run heavy equipment. So that's always a morale booster until you get these record breaking storms where guys are stuck up there. You know, we have to put them in a condo or hotel for I think the last stretch was 31 days straight away from their family. So I think some people really dig it. You know, they love it. And some people kind of just, you know, taper off and get tired and you're working 12 to 16 hours a day, maybe noon to midnight or midnight to noon. So it gets tiring. So then, you know, a lot of people look forward to spring and summer after the door. And from from what I see here and this is a total from a cooperative observer program stations associate with the National Weather Service 316 inches of snow in Tahoe City. Donna, I want to be honest with you. I don't know if I've even seen 316 inches of snow in my life in New Jersey, let alone in one winter. I believe Colfax saw 62 inches of snow. Can you give us a lay of the land? What does a county look like geographically and on a climate basis as well, in terms of what you're seeing during the winter months within the county? So we see everything from flooding to, you know, rockslides, mudslides, significant amounts of snow. We go from a valley level, you know, a couple hundred feet elevation where it's flat farmlands, rice growers, and you get a lot of flooding down there. Appear to the foothills. You'll see some snow and then up to 7000 feet on Donner Summit where we got actually this year, record is 730 inches of snow. And we we plow roads at 7000 foot elevation. So to spring serene lakes, we see the most snow there. You know, I think we're we're usually right top most snow in the United States for you know and expenditures and then up to 5 million, you know, a year in snow removal. So we go from valley to mountain, you know, I-80 corridor. You know, Caltrans takes care of 80, but we take care of all the subdivision side roads and everything in Placer County. It's a pretty big area, 1100 miles of roads we take care of. And depending on elevation, you'll get, you know, those 1100, 3 to 500 miles of snow covered roads that we have to plow. Big area. Absolutely. I'm trying to wrap my mind, too, around 730 inches of snow. Now. I'm trying to get an idea of what your workflow is like. Like how often are those plows having to go like, what was the the worst period of it for you? I mean, I'm sure you you've been busy all winter long and into the spring, but what was the busiest stretch for you and how many drivers did you have out and how frequently were they having to clear the roads late February onto, say, the 27th and 28, we got 52 inches of snow in a 48 hour period. We had bad storms in December, late February, just in Tahoe, we have 12 graders with push plows, eight blowers or push plow trucks. It takes just in Tahoe when we go to 24 hour shifts. We did a stretch of 31 days straight where we worked and that takes up to 28 guys to run that equipment around the clock. And then you come downhill this way a little bit, actually higher elevation. When I say down the hill, our farthest north is Tahoe City, but before that's Donner Summit. And there we have four more graders, five Rotary snowball loaders, multiple push plows, because when the snow level drops, it come all the way down here to Auburn. Then we got to get our valley guys with two wheel drive plow trucks down here with chains. And it's just it's go, go, go. 24 seven. Yeah. So Shawn, here in Virginia, again, just for some kind of additional perspective, we know it has not been as busy. The last few few seasons have not been as busy as this year, obviously. But can you speak to how much how much more busy you are regarding time commitments and manpower in terms of getting these things done? I mean, is it is it six or seven times the workflow? Is it one or two times the workflow? Did you have to was there a big hiring to get people? Were you running out of resources in terms of what we've seen in years before this this snow year? How how, how is this tax to resources? I've been here 22 years and it's the worst I've ever seen. We we've had the contract out both for contractors to help us remove snow and plow extra snow. We have school roads we can't get to. You know, some days they don't want to close the school. So we have contractors we've rented, we've rented extra graders and push plows. We don't really hire extra help other than contractors, but we have 80, 80, not 80 men in our road department. And we ask for volunteers every year to go up to sort of the to go volunteer to pull snow. So, I mean, it takes at one at one time there's probably 40, 50 guys working at once just to plow snow. So in terms of the weather part of this, the weather forecast, who are you working with? Who are your weather partners or partner that you're working with throughout the winter? Mostly? Noah Got it. So the National Weather Service. And are you are you actually speaking with them or like are you speaking with them over the phone or is it something where you're just you're you're reading their forecasts on their website? How does that work? And, you know, before this big, you know, let's say your bigger events, how far out are you planning with their forecast? Well, we have meetings with Noah once, twice a year. And when we have these big events coming in, we will team up with the Office of Emergency Services, which they work with the weather, you know, more than we do. So we'll go have meetings with them and just kind of get a game plan together of what we're going to do and even after and how are we going to recover from it. We have people get trapped in their homes. Oh, yes. Sheriff's search and rescue. Everybody's on board to chip in and, you know, help get through the on average, an average year for us is about 215 inches of snow. And this year, you know, significantly more 730. So and I should ask, too, where do you live? Are you living in the mountains or are you down in the valley? I'm in the foothills, actually, so I'm right in the middle of it all. But I've worked in every district we have in my 22 years here. So I've seen the flooding, the snow that we had early winter. We had trees, low snow, which brought down tons of trees. So then we go into tree clearing mode and then we had to hire contractors for that. I think we put out 500,000 for five contractors to help clear roads and and just open it up for emergency services and so we can get thousands there to open the roads. Okay. So here's kind of a another daunting question I have with my little Eastern bias here. So I apologize. But once you remove this snow, where do you put it? I think Midwest. And that's why our way, when you're driving up our roads up there, the walls of snow are like 20 foot high. So it's just a the process, the repeated process constantly work when it's snowing. Plows are on the ground, pushing it to the side. You know, you can ramp it off in certain places, but we don't have right away. We just have road edge. So we plow. We plow. We plow. When you get a break in the storm, then we send all of our rotary snow blowers out, which cut the snow back. We blow it as far back as we can. Sometimes there's some open area. We can blow it. I mean, we have to stick it between houses. For instance, in serene lakes, the walls are 20 feet high and sometimes you don't know where you're blowing it. You have to experience burying in propane tanks, putting it on people's roofs. We blow it windows quite often because you just can't see where it's going. So, yeah, it's a a process of pushing it off the road and then your roads get so narrow, you're down to one lane or you close them. Then you just blow the snow paths back as possible some place. Some places like in Tahoe City, Caltrans has to blow it in the back of dump trucks and hold out because there's just no place to put it. And we almost ran into that this year. We say don't explain that to us one more time because I might have missed. Are you saying you're putting plow and other dump trucks to hold the snow? Is that what you're saying? Yes. So there's some tight little neighborhoods and in cities up there, Tahoe City, Kings Beach, for one, where there's businesses and sidewalks, you get so much snow, you can only plow it so far. Then you have to blow it with a rotary snow blower and blow it in the back of a dump truck and hauling out to a storing staging area. But what guys, basically, they do that every year in Kings Beach in Tahoe City. Wow. It's less than if you're listening to this podcast and you live out in the Mountain West and I'm sure you get it. I think for the three of us here who, you know, we've seen snow, but not snow like that, that that's just a wild experience. We're here with Donny Francis from the Plaza County partment of Public Works. We're talking all about their crazy snow they had this past week. They're on the Across the Sky podcast. Back with you after the break. And welcome back, everybody, to the Across the Sky podcast, Lee Enterprises National Weather Podcast. You can catch new episodes every Monday, wherever you get podcasts or on your favorite Lee Enterprises news website. Here we are with Donny Francis. He takes care of the county roads that surround Lake Tahoe, the same county that Tahoe City is in. That is the one that he is with in the state of California. He is a road district superintendent. He was just telling us in the break here that 4700 hours work between the crews this winter. Can you tell us when your first day of plowing was this winter? And we're recording this on April 20th. So what was the last day that you guys have plowed so far? Well, you can stop me on that one. Oh. Oh, man. On the first day about maybe that would be October, October, November. And then, you know, the storms come and go, or the worst part of the winter was beginning of December and end of February. Last time we plowed snow was actually last Monday. We got a couple inches up on the summit. Right. Okay. And that's April 17th, is what you're saying, that a couple days ago. Roger. Okay. And you were saying you actually plow some of the ski resorts as well. Tell us about that. Well, we have to we have three actually. Tahoma has one to our main ski resorts or Palisades Olympic Valley, which used to be Squaw Valley. They held the Olympics there in the sixties. The Winter Olympics. And then we have Alpine Meadows. So these are ski resorts in Placer County subdivisions. So there's houses, lots of houses, lots of streets. So we plow all the all the roads in and out and the subdivisions, the ski resorts plow their own parking lots, you know, groom their own runs and stuff. But yeah, those are elevations at around like six, 7000 feet in a lot of snow. And Danny, I'm curious when you're in the worst of it, like that period you mentioned at the end of February, how do you prioritize, I mean, when the snow is just dumping and you're trying to get as many people out there as possible? I mean, you're basically I mean, it's just a continuous process going 24 seven. How do you prioritize which areas are getting the most coverage and which areas are you going to most really? Is it by popular action? Is it by how big the road is? How significant is it by how much you just go to the snowiest area and focus on that? I mean, especially being such a large county and when it's snowing everywhere, how do you prioritize which areas to really focus on? Tahoe City. So we have ten zones that we have our own road district department there, and then Colfax has their own and they plow Donner Summit and Scherger. So two Springs area. So they have a few different areas, zones we call them. And then Tahoe City, we have ten zones. So normally you start your zone at point A and B, right? So but on these heavy storms, you just by the time you get halfway through zone, you can't even tell you plowed. So prioritizing by main roads and main accesses. So we'll just go hit school routes main roads, main roads I mean way like Alpine Meadows Road that goes into that huge subdivision, Olympic Valley. So you start out with your main arteries when you get these heavy snowstorms, start out with your main arteries to keep them open for emergencies and stuff like that. And then when you get those open, you branch off into your side streets and stuff and that's all the heavy store. Normally you plow a zone from beginning to end and then you start it all over. And it's just a process because the snow doesn't start sometimes. So you might start your zone by the time you get back there, there's another 12 inches. That's just it. And it's tough for for me to fathom. So let me ask you this. Are there even in a normal year, are there roads that you that are very high elevation that you was like, well, we're just not going to touch these this year. They're not easy to access in the first place. So we just let them go. And if so, are there additional ones in the year like you just had where you're we are like, we just can't keep up with everything. So we're going to make these other ones exceedingly low priority and just let the snow pile up. Is there anything like that going on at all? Rarely, because we have residents that need, you know, access in and out. So we rarely let anything go. But we did this year have to leave some while we concentrated on the main arteries. So yeah, there was roads that were inaccessible for a short amount of time. And you know, they get so much snow where you can't push the snow. So you take a blower out there and you just open it up with the blower and then you got to clean up behind that. So it's just a long process. We're supposed to plow every road once one pass every 12 hours, two passes every 24 hours, and that's just kind of our motto, just to keep everybody safe and have access. You know, you said that you were that you're born and raised in the area you were and Sacramento and then moved to the foothills here. Most of the crews that you work with, the people who you know, are they from the area, do they understand what it is in such a, you know, snow heavy region like Tahoe? Is most of your crews local or do you have people who are coming from around the country or do you and I don't even know, do you have people say, hey, I want to come here because I love plowing snow so much, This is where I want to be. Is this a haven for people who are who love snow plow? We have we have a guy from Maine, actually, he just retired. He splits his time from there. And here now, because he loves the snow so much. You work for us for years and he was the foreman in total. But normally it's just local people from around I'd say around California. I don't think anybody flocks here to work, but it's mostly local people, a lot of people that have grown up here and, you know, they know they know what's happened and where we get snow and where we don't. Do you run up against people who have relocated there recently and really have had to learn what this is all about or most of the people that that are in your service area have been there a long time and they kind of get it. Or do you still run into these people who are relatively new and they're surprised? Yes, that's one of our the biggest problems we have for complaints is people that moved to Tahoe from maybe the Bay Area. And and if it was this year, then they're always calling and when's the plow come? And I haven't seen a plow. You haven't plowed in days. Well, we have a zone or system or plows that we can go to the GP's and we can track and look and see where the plows been so we can say no, it's been plowed, just not another foot since you looked. So yeah, that's a huge hurdle for us is to just to curb the complaints because we've got a young people, young money that moves up there and you know, they want stuff done Now in the winter like this. It's hard to keep up with just a normal winter. It's hard to keep up with. But yeah, we got a lot of new people in the area and they've never experienced snow like this before. So lots of complaints this year. And I'm sure after a winter like this, you know, with so many crews out there plowing for so many hours, I'm sure you've heard a few good stories this season. Is there one in particular, though, from just chit chatting with the guys as they're coming back and forth, coming in for a quick break and going back out? Is there one story in particular from from this season that stands out to you? Not really. I mean, you get a lot of there's a lot of good in that. You get more complaints than you do, you know, pats on the back. But, you know, probably the the best one was when we had the avalanche in the Olympic Valley, a huge avalanche came down and hit some condos. So, you know, of course, they call us to the rescue. We have to get in there and open it up for emergency search and rescue and that. So we had we sent graders out there and blowers, and that was probably the best story of the year, you know, just to help out, you know, save some people and get them out to safety. Comparing this to the record setting storms since they've been recorded, we're number two right now. Behind 1982, they got over 800 inches. There's a story. It's called the 1982 Avalanche Alpine Letters. And that one actually killed some people. That was that was the biggest record setting snowfall ever recorded here. So this was kind of a flashback because I just watched the documentary. And then here we get hit with another avalanche. What I'm coordinating snow removal. So that was a good story. Just to help out, can you give people a scale of about how much terrain an avalanche is, is covering? You know, there's there's been an avalanche. How how big of like a square mile area do you have to go, you know, effectively excavate after an event like this just to a ballpark? I haven't seen anything bigger than probably a square mile. Okay. So usually there is multiple avalanches in years like this. They may come down on the highway. There is a self triggered avalanche control. The Alpine meadows does they set off, you know, compression bombs and cause them themselves. And sometimes it covers our road. We have to clean them up, but don't usually see a lot of avalanches that consume buildings or people, you know. So this was a first for me. Those compression bombs sound similar to prescribed burning for wildfires. They're intentionally set off to to limit something that's unintentional and bigger. And I know that you said that was good. You said that you also brought up the, you know, the record snowfall mount. I believe you said just those in the 1980s. What I'm curious about is could you tell us how technology has changed with plowing snow over the decades, you know, in terms of either equipment or salting or brining even how much weather, as you know, weather forecasting and improvements there has impacted your job? It's changed a lot. Like, for instance, in 82, you know, watching the documentary, you see these old trucks with push plows on it and stuff like how do you even I think that's back when they lost roads or there wasn't enough population up there, they didn't have to plow as much. So it's been getting a lot better. When I started in 2000, I was running a 1959 international snowblower. That's so that was all back then too. Yeah. So, yeah, we've got a lot of new equipment, but yeah, it's changed a lot. We have a lot more equipment. It's too still though. It's not enough to keep up with the population and the houses they're building and, you know, roads and we're getting new equipment constantly. We got new graders this year, we got new blowers, so we're getting up to date with equipment. Finally, I think our oldest piece of equipment is like a 95 blower, which is about done. Yeah, I bet, especially after this winter. And you know, my final question for you, Donnie, is, you know, now that we're getting these warmer temperatures and finally less snow, are there any concerns, though, about all the snow that is still piled up in these massive piles, this huge amount of snow? Are there any concerns now that we're getting these warm temperatures with the melting? What are your thoughts about that? What are your crews doing to prepare for all of this melting snow now, there's already been warnings for flooding like on the Walker River, but that goes off in towards Nevada. If we get the heat, there's no in-between anymore. It seems like with these winters, the summers, it's goes from cold as heck to 100 degrees. And with this much snow up there, all of our reservoirs are finally full or close to. So they're letting water out. Rivers are at capacity, so they're predicting some more flooding from all the snowmelt that's coming because it's already warming up quick. It's like I said, it's going to be 80 this week, so that'll turn to 100 within probably a month. So for us that all we can do is close roads. You know, we don't have the power to to build levees or stuff, but, you know, our state does and they do without some breaches in levees this year because some a lot of flooding and loss of houses and stuff. But yeah, there's already some warnings for the well, this was very eye opening, especially if you live in a place that doesn't get snow. But even for the three of us or who are low on the snow totem pole, Midwesterners and mid-Atlantic people here, it was really interesting to hear your insight. Dani, anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up with the podcast or I just wish I had some pictures to show you and we'll do the video series next time. If you do some photos though, in the next couple of days, shoot us an email. We can we can get some out as we talk about this episode before we release it here, which I'm sure everyone's listening to now, either on April 24th or sometime thereafter. But otherwise we really appreciate the time and hope you guys have a nice long summer break here. And you know, hopefully next winter will be a fun challenge, but hopefully not record setting like this past winter. So thank you again for your time. We really appreciate it. Thank you. And I'll definitely send you some pictures. Awesome. Sounds good. We are going to take one more break then three of us. We're going to wrap it all up here on the Across the Sky podcast. Thanks again to Donnie for the time here. We know things have been slowing down for him, at least on the snow aspect. But like he said, they're now moving into flooding season with all of that melted snow that has to come. But we do hope he does enjoy a nice long summer here. As you look this up, the most snow that I've experienced in a winter season is 68.2 inches. That was in 2010, 2011. And some places didn't even see 10% of that or excuse me, that was only not even 10% of what some places up by him saw for the winter. Still chilly, incomprehensible amount of snow. Now, what what did you think of the interview? Well, you know, the mountains are just a whole nother a whole nother animal of your if you're a plains person like me, you know, in much of the Midwest where it is, it's pretty flat. You get some hills. But, boy, I mean, so when we get a big snow here, you know, you're talking six, eight, and then, of course, you know, noteworthy. So you're talking about a foot 14 inches. But to be talking about, you know, just getting 12 inches in a matter of hours. A matter of hours, and then, you know, another another 12 inches like that's just an everyday thing up in the mountains when you get up into elevation, it is truly incredible how much it snows. You get up into the Rockies or Sierra Nevada and boy, it it it's remarkable because you could see how much snow in just a short distance, how different it can be. When you go from low elevation to high elevation, you get into those colder temperatures and the snow just just piles up. It is, you know, some really challenging weather forecasts out there, some really, really tight gradients on the snowfall forecasts. Now, forecasting snow is always a challenge, but when you're forecasting the mountains and trying to predict and wrap your mind about forecasting, you know, five feet of snow making a forecast for that and then another system coming in right behind it. And so, you know, to Donnie and those crews, I cannot believe how busy they were this winter. But it's important work, too. I mean, gosh, you know, all the people that are being impacted and, you know, people need to get on with their lives, need to get to school, get to work, but they need help to get to work and get to school. And folks like Bonnie and his crews make it happen. So shout out to them for dealing with one heck of a winter again. And there's still so much snow sitting on the ground there. I mean, I just pulled up visible satellite images and I'm just looking at at the Sierra right now, just packed with snow, deep white, bright whites on the satellite imagery, all this snow that's just sitting there in the Sierra. And as you mentioned, that's it's melting and the water is high. So, you know, they have to manage all of that with rising water from the the snow melt. I mean, you were going to talking earlier on, Joe, about how much snow have you seen in the season? The most I've seen is about 100 inches, 110 inches. And that's when I was up at Penn State in the in the early nineties. And it just a brutal, brutal winter in 93, 94. But that was the last time I'd been through something that one white might call a truly bad winter that was brutally cold, brutally snowy. It wasn't here in Virginia, it was the central mountains of Pennsylvania, although you could get you can you get over 100 inches of snow in Virginia and some of the mountains. And, you know, I think you might be able to pull it off in far northwestern Virginia in the higher elevations in Frederick County or maybe in the in the very high elevations of deeper southwestern Virginia, our paths, I-77, But even that that's a tough that's a tough nut to crack, as we used to say. Got it. And we certainly hope that they catch a little bit of a break here, hopefully as all this snow melts, you know, they're not going be just as busy closing down roads. And I know because I mean, I'm sure that, you know, inevitably there's going to be some road closures due to flooding, but we certainly hope it's not going to be a widespread issue and they can relax a little bit. Boy, they they need it after after this winter. Absolutely. All right. Well, I think we're going to wrap it up for this week's episode of the Across the Sky podcast. We'll be back with you next week. And gosh, it's going to actually be May next week, which sounds kind of crazy. This year is flying by last year. I did not think it flew by this year, but we're going to have a whole bunch of guests for you lined up as we go into May. Of course, we have severe weather season getting into hurricane season two. That officially begins June 1st in the Atlantic Hurricane Basin. Three of us, we'll keep you updated as we go on over the next couple of weeks. So thanks again for listening to the Across the Sky podcast.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There's an awesome little six-lane bowling alley tucked into the heart of the Mission. In this episode, we get to know Molly Bradshaw, owner of Mission Bowling Club. Molly traces her steps from coastal Mendocino to Citrus Heights when she was in second grade. She spent the rest of her youth in the Sacramento area, eventually going to punk shows in Sacto and at Gilman in Berkeley. Molly's grandparents came to California in the Great Migration to work in Richmond. Some of her ancestors lived in Berkeley, some in East Oakland, and Molly would spend summers in the East Bay. After high school, she wanted to go to college and be independent. She lived in what was then known as Squaw Valley (now Palisades Tahoe) for a summer, went to grad school from 1997 to 1999 in Seattle, then moved back to the Bay and started bartending. Around 2007/2008, Molly opened Mini Bar with some friends. In Part 1, she speaks fondly of Divisadero and its history. She and her fellow owners of Mini Bar did lots of community outreach before opening, and we think the fact that the bar continues to be a popular meeting spot 15 years later speaks to those efforts. Please join us for Part 2, when Molly will share the story of opening a bowling alley a little more than 10 years ago. That drops next Tuesday. We recorded this episode at Mission Bowling Club in March 2023. Photography by Michelle Kilfeather

Alenka Vrecek was born at the foot of the Alps in Slovenia, a part of former communist Yugoslavia.  She spent her earliest years idolizing the likes of Reinhold Messner and other great alpine climbers. Born with a spirit for adventure, she came to America at 20 years old with a backpack, a pair of skis, and a pocket full of dreams. Her run as one of the top ski instructors in Squaw Valley ended with an accident that left her with a shattered knee and torn ligaments. During her recovery from surgery, she got a cancer diagnosis that would change the course of her life. Barely through her chemo and radiation treatment, Alenka decided that the way to get clarity was to jump on her bicycle and ride solo from her home in Lake Taho to her home in Baja, Mexico via one of the most grueling trails on the planet, the Baja Divide. This is a story about one woman's quest to summit her own personal Everest. I love this episode so much.  I rode the Baja Divide shortly after my conversation with Alenka and I have no idea how she did it. Actually, I do. She's Alenka. Listen to the end. It's an amazing conversation with an inspirational woman. Support the show

This was recorded on a sunny afternoon in late winter beside Squaw Valley Creek in Shasta-Trinity National Forest, Shasta County, California. I recorded this on the same day as the previous episode at a spot beside the creek where the water was rushing over a large rock, which created a continuous deep glugging sound. The rock over which the water was rushing was just big enough, and the water was flowing just fast enough, that it created a hollow space on the downstream side which(I am no expert in fluid dynamics or acoustics, so this is pure speculation on my part) acted as a resonance chamber to produce the deep, low frequency sound you hear in this recording. I recommend that you listen with a good pair of headphones if you can. I could really use your support. Please consider helping this podcast get made by making a donation, becoming a Patreon supporter, or becoming a monthly supporter through Anchor. You can do so by visiting the following links- https://soundbynaturepodcast.com/donations/ https://www.patreon.com/soundbynaturepodcast You can become a monthly supporter at Anchor by clicking the link at the end of this podcast description. Thank you to my current and past monthly supporters, those of you that have made one time donations, and my supporters on Patreon. I truly appreciate your help! You can see pictures of the area this was recorded, as well as pictures from other locations I have gathered recordings, by visiting the Instagram and Facebook pages for the podcast. You can find them by searching @soundbynaturepodcast. Questions or comments? Send me a message on Facebook or Instagram, or email me at soundbynaturepodcast@gmail.com I hope you enjoy this recording, thank you very much for listening. Stay healthy, stay safe, stay sound. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/soundbynature/support

This recording was gathered on a clear and sunny late winter morning beside Squaw Valley Creek in Shasta-Trinity National Forest, Shasta County, California. The creek was flowing swiftly from snowmelt and recent rain, which was a welcome sight to see after the past couple years of severe drought. I placed the microphone at spot beside creek with some large rocks sticking up out of the water, in the hope of capturing the song of the American Dipper, which is a small bird that feeds on invertebrates beneath the water of rocky, fast moving streams, creeks, and rivers. One of the rocks had a few droppings on it, so I knew that they were in the area. Luckily while I was setting up the recording rig a Dipper flew in, perched atop a rock, and watched me curiously as I set up. You'll hear it's song over the rush of the water a few times on this recording, as well as the brash calls of the Steller's Jay. I could really use your support. Please consider helping this podcast get made by making a donation, becoming a Patreon supporter, or becoming a monthly supporter through Anchor. You can do so by visiting the following links- https://soundbynaturepodcast.com/donations/ https://www.patreon.com/soundbynaturepodcast You can become a monthly supporter at Anchor by clicking the link at the end of this podcast description. Thank you to my current and past monthly supporters, those of you that have made one time donations, and my supporters on Patreon. I truly appreciate your help! You can see pictures of the area this was recorded, as well as pictures from other locations I have gathered recordings, by visiting the Instagram and Facebook pages for the podcast. You can find them by searching @soundbynaturepodcast. Questions or comments? Send me a message on Facebook or Instagram, or email me at soundbynaturepodcast@gmail.com I hope this recording provides you with a little relief from the chaos of the world. Thank you very much for listening. Stay healthy, stay safe, stay sound. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/soundbynature/support

Fighting back against a state law removing “Squaw” from place names, the Fresno County Board of Supervisors voted to initiate litigation against the state. By a 3-2 vote in closed session on Tuesday, the board voted ask a judge for declaratory relief. On Friday, SVB was taken over by regulators after massive withdrawals a day earlier effectively created a bank run. A Russian fighter jet clipped a US Air Force MQ-9 Reaper drone operating over the Black Sea on Tuesday, forcing the American aircraft to crash into the water below.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The last couple weeks in the Lake Tahoe region have been historic, adding to an already crazy winter, this episode is all about SNOWMAGEDDON and the mayhem of relentless storms. Scott Kessler, owner of Truckee Overhead Door, has lived in Tahoe since 1976 and has seen a lot of big winters here. Scott declares 2023 to be a “1 in 50 winter”, so we sat down in his Hirschdale workshop and talked about the shovel quiver, snowmobiles, Telemark skiing, the early days of Squaw Valley, the Alpine Meadows avalanche of 1982, snow loaded roofs, minimizing property damage, snow removal and playing in the best quality snow we've ever seen in Tahoe.

A young witch learns the strength and depth of her powers. When a rogue witch puts the entire coven at risk, will her powers be enough to save the community?Lori D'Angelo's work has appeared in various literary journals including Drunken Boat, Gargoyle, Hawaii Pacific Review, Heavy Feather Review, Juked, Literary Mama, the Potomac Review, Reed Magazine and Word Riot. She is a fellow at Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences, a grant recipient from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and an alumna of the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. She lives in Virginia with her two dogs, two cats, two kids, and one husband. You can find her on Twitter @sclly21. You can read "A Tale of Two Cats" at https://www.kaidankaistories.com.Click here to learn about the 2023 Kaidankai contest for writers. Follow us on: Twitter: Japanese Ghost Stories @ghostJapaneseMastodon: https://mastodon.sdf.org/@KaidankaighoststoriesInstagram: WhiteEnsoJapanYouTube: Kaidankai: Ghost and Supernatural StoriesFacebook: Kaidankai: Ghost and Supernatural Stories Please donate any amount to the Kaidankai:Donate $25 US and a podcast episode will be dedicated to you.Donate $50US and get a t-shirt with the Kaidankai logoKo-Fi. https://ko-fi.com/kaidankaighoststoriesPayPal: https://paypal.me/whiteensokaidankai?country.x=JP&locale.x=en_US

In today's show we go to Palisades Tahoe formerly known as Squaw Valley. Host of the 1960 Winter Olympics, soon to be host to the Mens World Cup races and home to some of Americas best skiers and a significant presence in US Skiing. with Edie Thys Morgan, a native of Olympic Valley, an Olympic skier, mother to two current racers. Edie writes articles, books and blogs as RacerEx.  She grew up in Olympic Valley, raced out of Squaw and brings her husband and kids back here almost every year. Located in Olympic Valley smack in the middle of the Sierra Tahoe Range and only 2.5 Hrs from San Francisco and 8 miles from beautiful Lake Tahoe. Palisades is one of the US's classics. Palisades is known for its huge snow and for sun, its varied terrain and 6,000 acres of excellent skiing across 6 peaks –.  The official stats are 2850 of vertical -30% expert, 45% intermediate and 30% beginner all served by 36 lifts. My Favs Best Restaurant - Gold Coast for the view Best Hotel - Squaw Valley Lodge Best Apres - Le Chamois period Get the Buddy Pass Best Run - Anything off the Palisades --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/john--morgan/message

Hello, and welcome to Beauty and the Biz where we talk about the business and marketing side of plastic surgery, and how Burke Robinson, MD went from a 40-surgeon practice to solo. I'm your host, Catherine Maley, author of Your Aesthetic Practice – What your patients are saying, as well as consultant to plastic surgeons, to get them more patients and more profits. Now, today's episode is called "40-Surgeon Practice to Solo — with Burke Robinson, MD". I am fascinated by surgeons' stories that relay their jagged paths from fellowship to where they are today. Nobody's path was a smooth one and nothing went scheduled as planned.  That's life. It's full of surprises, twists and turns and the secret is to adapt to these challenges and grow (or give up and settle for less). This week's special guest Dr. Burke Robinson knows this well and decided to grow. He is a board-certified facial plastic & reconstructive surgeon with 30 years of experience in private practice in Alpharetta GA. Dr. Robinson had a tough childhood start but managed to become a surgeon in spite of it, and then he ended up in a 40-surgeon ENT practice for years.  Like others who had the calling for “more”, he finally spread his wings and went out on his own.  We talked about the challenges he faced, what it took for him to finally make the move to private practice and pearls learned along the way.  He also gives a really good tip for buying a laser ;-) Visit Dr Robinson's Website P.S. Get my hard copy book for free when you leave a review at Beauty and the Biz Podcast. Just follow the instructions below:

Episode 158 Notes and Links to Javier Zamora's Work       On Episode 158 of The Chills at Will Podcast, Pete welcomes Javier Zamora, and the two discuss, among other things, his early love of learning and influences in his native Él Salvador, the effects of his family members on his world view, the accolades that have come with his writing and his original and continuing goals for his work, his memoir and his light and masterful touch with a young kid's POV, the ways in which traumas and bonding and love were intertwined in his journey to the US, and how writing the book brought him to a greater understanding of the vagaries of human behavior and his own behaviors.      Javier Zamora was born in La Herradura, El Salvador, in 1990. At the age of nine he migrated to the United States to be reunited with his parents. Zamora holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied and taught in June Jordan's Poetry for the People; and an MFA from New York University. He is the recipient of scholarships to Bread Loaf, Frost Place, Napa Valley, Squaw Valley, and VONA Writer's Conferences; and fellowships from CantoMundo and Colgate University where he is the Olive B. O'Connor fellow. His poems also appear in Best New Poets 2013, Indiana Review, Narrative, Ploughshares, Poet Lore, Theatre Under My Skin (Kalina Press: El Salvador), and elsewhere. Zamora has had his work recognized with a Meridian Editor's Prize, CONSEQUENCE Poetry Prize, and the Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook Contest.e enjoys hiking, camping, and is just getting into backpacking.   Buy Solito   Javier Zamora's Website   The New York Times Book Review of Solito   September 2022 from The Los Angeles Times: “At 9, Javier Zamora walked 4,000 miles to the U.S. At 29, he was ready to tell the story” At about 7:30, Pete asks the important question: Does Salvadoran Spanish have the best groseria?    At about 8:10, Javier responds to Pete's questions about his use of Spanish/Spanglish, and Salvadoran-specific words and his rationale/process in using the words    At about 11:50, Pete asks Javier about the awards and acclaim he has received and how it registers compared to the experience of sharing this personal story with the world   At about 14:45, Javier talks about pressures-external and internal-that have weighed him down and how therapy and healing through writing have lifted much of these pressures    At about 19:20, Javier speaks to Pete's question about the writers who have inspired and thrilled and challenged him; Javier mentions the outsized encouragement provided by Roberto Lovato   At about 21:00, Javier cites the huge influences of June Jordan and Roque Dalton    At about 22:25, Pete asks Javier about his early relationship with the written word, and he mentions his grandfather's and parents' educational and political backgrounds and how they shaped his reading     At about 27:05, Javier traces his fairly-circuitous route to becoming a writer, including the impact of Guevara's Motorcycle Diaries   At about 28:55, Javier responds to Pete's question about how the Bay Area's ethic has shaped him   At about 30: 10, Javier discusses the teaching of Salvadoran history in Él Salvador and how he was guided by this    At about 31:00, Javier and Pete highlight Immortal Technique and Rage Against the Machine as educational and radical musicians and inspirations   At about 32:10, Pete asks Javier about the meanings of the book's title, and Javier focuses on the three main parts/time periods of him being ”solito”   At about 34:20, Pete wonders about Javier's individual story and how it compares to, and was inspired by, more recent migrations of Salvadorans and Central Americans, particularly minors, and how journalism has erred in covering the    At about 39:30, Pete reads the epigraphs and Javier expands upon their importance and connections to the book   At about 41:00, Javier puts forth interesting ideas about the use of the word “immigrant” and suggests a possible substitute   At about 43:00, Javier expands upon ideas of the natural affinity that people (Americans, for one) have for children, and connections to the American immigration system     At about 44:30, Pete, stunned at the masterful ways in which Javier uses the POV of 9 yr old him, asks Javier how he managed to pull it off, and Javier talks about how his traumas have affected his growth   At about 47:10, Pete outlines the book's beginnings before Javier goes to the US   At about 48:00, Javier discusses the importance of his bonding time with his grandfather right before he headed North; he highlights The Body Keeps the Score and how he saw his ACES Index.   At about 51:00, Javier explains the Cadejo and its significance for him   At about 52:40, Javier recounts the tortuous boat trip that is depicted in the book and describes the overwhelming fear   At about 54:55, Javier talks about the “Big Four” (formerly the “Big Six” the people who become bonded for life with Javier and ideas of “surviving” as manifested by different people on Javier's journey   At about 58:30, Pete cites examples of charity depicted in the memoir and Pete compliments Javier's humanizing his characters; Javier responds with his views of the coyotes and the ways in which the border “world of 1999 that [he] described is different than now”   At about 1:01:20, Pete asks Javier if his stated goal for the writing of the book has been accomplished    At about 1:03:00, Javier talks about his involvement with Undocupoets, and how the writing world deals with issues of citizenship   At about 1:05:55, Javier describes his upcoming project    At about 1:06:45, Loca the Cat makes an appearance!      You can now subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, and leave me a five-star review. You can also ask for the podcast by name using Alexa, and find the pod on Stitcher, Spotify, and on Amazon Music. Follow me on IG, where I'm @chillsatwillpodcast, or on Twitter, where I'm @chillsatwillpo1. You can watch other episodes on YouTube-watch and subscribe to The Chills at Will Podcast Channel. Please subscribe to both my YouTube Channel and my podcast while you're checking out this episode.     Sign up now for The Chills at Will Podcast Patreon: it can be found at patreon.com/chillsatwillpodcastpeterriehl     Check out the page that describes the benefits of a Patreon membership, including cool swag and bonus episodes. Thanks in advance for supporting my one-man show, my DIY podcast and my extensive reading, research, editing, and promoting to keep this independent podcast pumping out high-quality content! This is a passion project of mine, a DIY operation, and I'd love for your help in promoting what I'm convinced is a unique and spirited look at an often-ignored art form. The intro song for The Chills at Will Podcast is “Wind Down” (Instrumental Version), and the other song played on this episode was “Hoops” (Instrumental)” by Matt Weidauer, and both songs are used through ArchesAudio.com.    Please tune in for Episode 159 with Amanda Korz, whose poetry witnesses previous versions of herself and intimately digs into mental illness, disability, and witchcraft. Her poetry collection, It's Just a Little Blood.    The episode will air on December 27.  

Governor Gavin Newsom signed a new law last month to remove the word ‘Squaw' from nearly 100 landmarks and place names across California. Native Americans and others are celebrating the new law because they find the term 'Squaw' offensive. But in Squaw Valley, an unincorporated area outside of Fresno, some residents want to keep the name. And Fresno County Supervisor Nathan Magsig is siding with them.  Read the transcript here.Host: Gustavo ArellanoGuests: L.A. Times reporter Lila SeidmanMore reading: New law will remove the word ‘squaw' from California place namesNative Americans want to ditch the name Squaw Valley. A county supervisor says context mattersRetiring its racist name, historic Squaw Valley resort will become Palisades Tahoe

An EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW with Fresno County Supervisor Nathan Magsig on Squaw Valley and the resolution by the county asking the government not to change the name.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Who should determine Squaw Valley's name change: The Governor?  Or the people who live there?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Kicking off the week with the Buzz Questions about tiers of justice. Trump visits DC and no one knows why. The reward for missing Selma woman, Jolissa Fuentes, who was last seen at a convenience store on August 7th, has been increased to $15k for information leading to her safe return. "Squaw" has been recognized by the US Department of the Interior as an offensive ethnic, racial and sexist slur, leading to the renaming of four locations in Fresno Co. Seven unincorporated populated places, including Squaw Valley in the foothills of Fresno Co., remain under review. Central Valley Honor Flight #22 has arrived in Washington DC with 67 veterans on board. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Kicking off the week with the Buzz Questions about tiers of justice. Trump visits DC and no one knows why. The reward for missing Selma woman, Jolissa Fuentes, who was last seen at a convenience store on August 7th, has been increased to $15k for information leading to her safe return. "Squaw" has been recognized by the US Department of the Interior as an offensive ethnic, racial and sexist slur, leading to the renaming of four locations in Fresno Co. Seven unincorporated populated places, including Squaw Valley in the foothills of Fresno Co., remain under review. Central Valley Honor Flight #22 has arrived in Washington DC with 67 veterans on board. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

(9/12/22) In today's Federal Newscast: The U.S.Marshals Service is offering a hefty reward for information leading to the arrest of Fat Leonard. GSA will focus more on climate and sustainability considerations in federal acquisition. And the Interior Department's search for a new CIO is over.

We take a bit of a detour from pure self-help in this episode. I started off with the story of a guy who wanted to be an entrepreneur, yet had no idea how to be, and was as he said, “socially uncalibrated,” which in his case meant he was the guy always trying to sell you something that everyone avoided. His first two attempts at being an entrepreneur, completely failed. Completely. Meaning he created a business and didn't make one sale. It's a great story for anyone who feels out of their depth or who is meeting literally zero success in some endeavors. My guest, is Elliot Bisnow. Elliott's somewhat ridiculous story takes him from literally zero, to now being co-founder of Summit Group, which began and still includes the Summit Series events that are as much festival as self-help conference. They've held 250 of the events, loaded with celebrities, thought-leaders, billionaires and politicians. And lots of people like you and me. The event has hosted luminaries like Jeff Bezos (bay-zos), Richard Branson, Jessica Alba, Shonda Rhimes, Brené Brown, and Al Gore in some of the most beautiful places on earth like Playa del Carmen, Mexico, Squaw Valley, California, and Washington, D.C. In this talk though, we really got into discussing the nuances of what makes the events so successful, as opposed to all the events you are used to attending. How they focus on who is attending and where the event takes place, even more than who is speaking. So if you have any interest in holding events, whether paid for as a business, or even just socially, you'll want to hear this. We even talk about what to look for in events as an attendee. Just really intriguing. A little more on Elliott, he's a startup investor, having made almost 50 early stage investments, including Uber, Coinbase, Warby Parker & Allbirds. At the start of the show in a moment, you'll hear he's talking to me from Powder Mountain ski resort in Utah, America's largest ski resort which he is co-owner of. Elliott and his three biz partners recently published the book, MAKE NO SMALL PLANS, which entails the again, fairly ridiculous story of how four, very average guys, created such a successful company after doing so many things wrong. I think you'll find great comfort and come away feeling you can be as clueless, and successful, as they have been. The story really inspired me to think bigger than I have as of late. You can get the book, Make No Small Plans, anywhere, and find Elliott and his pals at Summit.co. Self-Help(ful) is presented by Ziglar, the most trusted brand in personal and business development impacting over 250 million people worldwide. Visit Ziglar.com to see how they can inspire your true performance. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Kicking it off with the Buzz Question. The inclement weather brought with it power outages for over 8k PG&E customers in Oakhurst, Squaw Valley, Clovis, Sanger and Reedley. A new proposal from the Fresno City Council aims to reduce the difference in pay between city councilmembers and county supervisors. Listeners comment. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Kicking it off with the Buzz Question. The inclement weather brought with it power outages for over 8k PG&E customers in Oakhurst, Squaw Valley, Clovis, Sanger and Reedley. A new proposal from the Fresno City Council aims to reduce the difference in pay between city councilmembers and county supervisors. Listeners comment. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This was recorded on a cloudy spring afternoon just above the base of Mount Shasta in a stand of old growth trees near Squaw Valley Creek, Shasta-Trinity National Forest, Siskiyou County, California. The creek was not far away, though out of sight in it's steep gully, with massive conifers towering overhead and light wind blowing through the trees. There is some air traffic on this recording. Please support this show! Your contribution helps make this podcast possible. All contributions go directly towards producing these recordings and providing you with natural sound. If you enjoy the podcast please show your appreciation and make a donation at https://soundbynaturepodcast.com/donations/. If you'd like to become a monthly supporter you can do so by clicking the support link at the end of this podcast description, by visiting the donation page on the podcast website, and now you can support me on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/soundbynaturepodcast I'd very much like to thank my monthly supporters on Anchor, those of you that have donated both recently and in the past, as well as my one Patreon supporter. You truly are helping to keep this podcast going, and I greatly appreciate your help. Recently with your help I was able to acquire a pair of Lom mikroUsi omnidirectional microphones. Thank you!!! You can see pictures of the area this was recorded, as well as pictures from other locations I have gathered recordings, by visiting the Instagram and Facebook pages for the podcast. You can find them by searching @soundbynaturepodcast. Questions or comments? Send me a message on Facebook or Instagram, or email me at soundbynaturepodcast@gmail.com I hope wherever you are listening that this benefits you in some small way, that it inspires you to get outside and into nature yourself, and also to protect and preserve our fragile natural world any way you can. I am also hoping for an end to the war in Ukraine and all war and conflict around the world, and an end to the tragic mass shootings that happen with disturbing frequency in this country. Thank you very much for listening. Stay healthy, stay safe, stay sound. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/soundbynature/support

To support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Starting in June, paid subscribers will receive podcasts three days before free subscribers.WhoJackson Hogen, Editor of Realskiers.com, author of Snowbird Secrets, and long-time industry jack of all trades: ski designer, binding and boot product manager, freestyle competitor, retail salesman, risk management lecturer, ski instructor, marketing director, resort feature writer, OLN and RSN television host, extreme camp ski coach, Desperate Measures co-creator, four-time Warren Miller screenwriter, and research and development chief.Recorded onMay 9, 2022Why I interviewed himA long time ago, ski writers used to write about ski instruction. They were quite good at it. A couple years back, I recounted the value of these dispatches to me as a novice skier in the 1990s:I met skiing like a lawnchair meets a tornado, flung and cartwheeled and disoriented and smashed to pieces. I was 14 with the coordination and dexterity of a lamppost. The mountain was merciless in its certainty of what to do with me. It hurt.I tried again and was met like an invader at the Temple of Doom, each run a stone-rope-and-pulley puzzle I could not solve – a puzzle that invariably ended with me smashed beneath a rock.When two years later I tried a third time I had grown into my body and could without turning or otherwise controlling myself descend the modest hill on most runs intact. The following Christmas I asked for skis and got them and the fabulous snowy north unrolled with purpose and mission before me.Now I just had to learn how to ski.This was a bigger problem than it sounds like. No one in my family skied. None of my friends knew how to ski either – at least not well enough to show me how to do it. Lessons were not happening. If you think a 17-year-old who makes $4.50 an hour bagging groceries is going to spend the equivalent of a week’s pay on what is essentially school on snow when school is not in session, then you have either never met a 17-year-old or have never been one. As it was, I could barely afford the lift tickets and gas to get me to the hill.What I could afford was ski magazines. And ski magazines in the nineties were glorious things, hundreds of pages long and stacked with movie reviews and resort news and adrenaline-laced 14-page feature stories.And there was ski instruction. Pages and pages of it in nearly every issue.This seems arcane now. Why not just watch a video? But this was the mid-nineties. There was no YouTube. Hell, there was barely an internet, and only the computer-savviest among us had the remotest idea how to access it.My first ski magazine was the December 1994 issue of Skiing. It cost $2.50 and it looked like this:The volume of ski instruction in just this one issue is staggering. A nearly-5,000 word piece by venerable ski writer Lito Tejada-Flores anchored a 19-page (!) spread on the art and importance of balance, which was in turn prefaced by a separate front-of-the-mag editorial outlining the whole package. An additional eight pages of ski instruction tiered from solid-green beginner to expert complemented this. And all this in an issue that also included a 13-page high-energy feature on roaming interior BC and 10-page write-ups of Squaw Valley and Whiteface.Each month I bought Skiing, and most months I also bought Ski and Snow Country. I also bought Powder but even then Powder could not be bothered with ski instruction. The instruction wasn’t the first thing I read but I always read it and I usually read it many times.This was a process. Ski instruction articles are often dense and deliberate and usually anchored to numbered photographs or drawings demonstrating movements and technique. Think of it as drill instruction in extreme slow motion. It wasn’t all useful but what was useful became essential.I doubt anyone knows how to write about ski instruction with this kind of clarity and detail anymore, just like no one knows how to build a covered wagon anymore – it is a lost art because it is now an unnecessary one.But this is how I learned how to ski. And because this is how I learned and because I re-read each of the pieces that resonated with me so many times, this written instruction formed the indelible framework around which I still think about skiing.Read the rest:I would like to retract one part of the above essay: “it is a lost art because it is now an unnecessary one.” Re-reading the articles referenced in the piece above, I admire the clarity with which each of these writers dissected the process of skiing trees or bumps or steeps. There is no equivalent, that I am aware of, in the realm of instructional ski videos. And there is a simple reason why: videos can show you what you should be doing, but the visual hegemony makes their creators overlook something even more important: what you should be feeling, and how you should be reacting as you feel those things.There is at least one remaining master of this craft: Jackson Hogen. He understands how to talk about aspects of skiing other than the fact that it’s rad. Snowbird Secrets is a written masterclass for the wannabee expert, the one who’s maybe dropped into the double blacks laced off the Cirque Traverse and survived to the bottom, but knows it wasn’t their best work. Examples:From Chapter 4 – On Anticipation:Your upper body stays ahead of the activities going on underfoot, as though your head and shoulders were in a time machine that is forever stuck on transporting you a few milliseconds into the future. As mental anticipation morphs into the events that both end it and redeem it, physical anticipation allows for the happy confluence between the two states. Anticipation feels like a form of time travel for if you do it well, it shifts you into the future. You take care of business before it happens.Chapter 5 – On Being Early:The single biggest differentiator between the advanced skier and the true expert is the latter’s ability to get to the next turn early. There are several components to being early, each of which moves in concert with the others. The upper body must continue its constant projection down the hill and into the turn, the existential lean of faith that is a prerequisite for performance skiing. The uphill hand cues a shift in weight to the ski below it by reaching for the fall line. And the uphill ski begins to tilt on edge early, at the top of the arc, supporting your hurtling mass as it navigates gravity’s stream.Chapter 12 – On Hands and Feet:Every element that makes up the entirety of the skier is linked to every other, but nowhere is the bond greater than between hands and feet. The primal importance of hand position is never more evident than when your feet fail you. …Even when you’re not about to eat it, your hands tell the rest of your body what to do while your feet are busy making turns. Your torso is attuned to your hands’ bossy attitude; it will always try to follow their lead. So keep them forward, point them where you want to go and don’t get lazy with the uphill hand. Generations of skiers have been taught to plant the pole on the inside of the turn, so that hand often is extended, as if in greeting, to the fall line, while the uphill hand takes a nap somewhere alongside the thigh. Until you are a skier of world-class capabilities, you cannot afford sleep hands. The uphill hand that you’ve left in a mini-coma will be called upon in a trice to reach again downhill; it should be in an on-call position, not on sabbatical. It should be carried no lower than it would be if you were about to draw a sidearm from a holster. You’re engaged in an athletic endeavor, so try to look like it.You can tell how good someone is at writing about skiing by how self-conscious you feel as you read it. I’ll admit I clicked over to photos of myself skiing more than a few times as I made my way through Snowbird Secrets (I’d also recommend having the Snowbird trailmap handy). Great ski books are as rare as a Mountain Creek powder day. But great books on ski instruction are less common still, and this one’s worth your time:Instructional writing is not the point, however, of the Real Skiers website. It is, primarily, a gear-review and recommendation site. But there is no intelligent way to discuss ski gear without a foundational understanding of how to ski. It would be like trying to play hockey without understanding how to skate. The site, like Hogen’s knowledge, is voluminous, layered, cut with a direct and relentless wit. And it’s a tremendous resource in the online desert of ski media. As Hogen says in the interview, “I’d tell you that there are other places you could go to get the same information, but there isn’t.”What we talked aboutThis year in skiing; Mt. Rose; replacing the Snowbird trams; learning to ski at Bromley in the ‘50s; the evolution of sanctioned in-bounds air at ski areas; air as a natural part of good skiing; opening year at Copper Mountain; the life of a product sales rep; the early days of Snow Country magazine with industry legend John Fry; making bindings interesting; the novelty and courage of honest ski reviews; today’s “consequence-free environment for total b******t” in ski media; “there is no more complicated piece of footwear designed by man” than a ski boot; don’t ever ever ever buy ski boots online; the art of boot-fitting; the importance of custom footbeds to ski boots; how to keep warm in ski boots; how to pick skis; whether you should demo skis; the difference between skiing and ski testing; whether you should build a quiver; make friends at the ski shop; picking a binding; why you should avoid backcountry or hybrid bindings; thoughts on setting DIN; “nobody should take anything from the highest levels of the race world and applying it to alpine, regular skiing”; recounting every mistake that prefaced my spectacular leg break at Black Mountain of Maine in February; the problems created by grip-walk boot soles; how often we should be waxing and tuning our skis; the lifespan of skis and boots and how they break down over time; the importance of being present while skiing; ask for the mountain’s permission; Hogen’s incredible book, Snowbird Secrets; the writer’s trance; what makes Snowbird special and whether it has any equals; the mountain has already won; thoughts on Taos; the influence of population growth and the Ikon Pass on Little Cottonwood Canyon; the easiest path down the hill is a straight line; how to use your hands and feet while skiing; and the benefits of a Real Skiers subscription.   Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewNot to be too self-referential, but I’ll again quote myself here. Specifically, my February post recounting the gear failure at Black Mountain of Maine that led to my three-months-and-counting couch sentence:On my final run of the season we swung skier’s right off the lift, seeking shade, tracked-out snow for easier turns. We found them in Crooked glade. Emerged on black-diamond Penobscot. Ungroomed. Snow heavy in the sunshine. A little sticky. As though someone had caulked the hillside. Try this or more glades? Let’s try this. It was my 13th run of the day. My 460th of the season. It was 1:22 p.m. I let my skis run. Gained speed. Initiated turns. I was leaning into a right turn at 18.9 miles per hour when I lost it.I don’t really know what happened. How I lost control. I know what didn’t happen: the binding on my left ski – 12-year-old Rossies I’d bought on spring clearance at Killington – did not release. Amazing pain in my leg. My body folded over backwards, bounced off the snow. A rattling through the shoulder where I’d had rotator cuff surgery last summer. I spun, self-arrested. Came to a stop on a steep section of trail, laying on my left side, my leg pinned into bent-knee position.I screamed. The pain. I could not get the ski off. I screamed again. Removed my helmet. Let it drop. It spun down the hill. Adrenaline kicked in. A skier appeared. He helped me take my ski off. DIN only at 8.5 but the binding was frozen. Finally it released. I tried to straighten my leg. Couldn’t. I assumed it was my knee. Isn’t it always a knee? More skiers arrived. Are you OK? No, I’m in a lot of pain. They left to get help. Patrol arrived with snowmobiles and sleds and bags of supplies. Michael came walking back up the hill.Everything after, rapid but in slow-motion. Does that make sense? Gingerly onto the sled, then the stretcher, then the Patrol-shack table. EMTs waiting. Amazing drugs incoming. Off, with scissors, my ski pants. Removing the boot, pain distilled. Not your knee – your leg. Broken bones. Did not penetrate the skin. Into the ambulance. Rumford Hospital: X-rays and more pain meds mainlined. A bed in the hallway. From the next room a woman, emphatic, that she don’t need no Covid vaccine in her body. All night there. The staff amazing. I would need surgery but there were no surgeons available until the next day. A room opened and they wheeled me in. In a druggy haze they splinted my leg. A train of drunks and incoherents as the bars emptied out. Sleep impossible.Here’s what I didn’t include in that essay: the moment, last August or September, when I’d dropped my skis for a tune at Pedigree Ski Shop in White Plains. “We just need your boots for a binding check,” the clerk had told me. Said boots, stowed at that moment in my closet in Brooklyn, were unavailable, forgotten in my hastening to beat rush-hour traffic. “I’ll bring them when I come back to pick up my skis,” I said. I didn’t. I hadn’t planned on skiing on those Rossies. But at some point in the season, I blew an edge on my Blizzards, couldn’t find a replacement pair, reached in my roof box and there were those old skis.So I’ve had a lot of time to think about that decision chain and how careless I’d been with my own safety, and how to reset my approach so I minimize the chances of a repeat. After nearly three decades of skiing without a major injury (and just two minor ones), I’d gotten arrogant and careless. I’d like this ski season to be the last one that ever ends early. But what else could I do besides remember my boots next time?I’ve been reading Hogen’s site for a few years now. I hadn’t been in explicit need of gear prior to blowing that edge, but he’s an entertaining writer and I enjoyed the regular emails. I figured he was the best-positioned thinker to guide me (and hopefully all of us), into better gear choices and maintenance over the next several years.There was one more thing, one that transcends the empirical realms in which I normally dwell: the notion of mountain as entity. From Snowbird Secrets Chapter 3, On Vibrations:… Hidden Peak is riddled with quartz. Quartz is a crystalline structure, and no ordinary crystal at that. Like all crystals, it not only responds to vibrations, it emits them. Quartz has piezoelectric properties that allow it to store electromagnetic energy and to conduct it. This mountain pulls a pulse from your energy stream and sends it back with interest, but it also skims off a transaction that it stores in its gargantuan energy vault.“So what does the mountain do with all this energy?” Jackson asks, before answering his own question:As it turns out, everyone has a story for how they came to discover Snowbird, but no one knows the reason. Some have the vanity to think they picked the place, but the wisest know the place picked them. This is the secret that Snowbird has slipped into our subconscious; deep down, we know we were summoned here.I’m skeptical but interested. Snowbird is special. No one who has skied there can doubt that. It is different. Incomparable. It is one of the few places where I ever feel genuinely scared on skis. But also reverential, awed, a little miffed and disbelieving the whole time I’m skiing. It’s something else. And I’ve never really been able to figure out why, other than the 600 inches of snow and relentless terrain and location within bowling lane distance of a major airport.Whether or not you’re willing to consider this anthropomorphization of the ski area, Hogen’s call to humility in its presence is inarguable. From Chapter 19, On Gratitude and Asking Permission:Everyone can learn humility before the mountain. Nowhere is this more important than at Snowbird, where if you don’t approach the mountain with the appropriate measure of humility, the mountain will be more than happy to supply some.My final run of the season was on an open trail, ungroomed buy modestly pitched. I was tired, my turns lazy. I wasn’t really paying attention. I wasn’t respecting the mountain. And while that mountain was quite a different thing from Snowbird, it had no issue reminding me that my carelessness was a mistake.Questions I wish I’d askedDespite the fact that this was one of the longest podcasts I’ve ever recorded, we didn’t get to half the questions I’d prepared. I wanted to discuss the devolution of ski shop culture in the maw of the internet, the decline of the industry trade show, the unconstructive nature of a competitive mindset to recreational skiing, the history of Real Skiers, the evolution of ski and boot technology over the past several decades, and how fortunate we are to be alive during this singular epoch in which we can reach the hazardous summits of our most forbidding mountains with a 10-minute lift ride. Hogen also made several interesting comments that would have been worthy of follow-up, from his nomination of Greg Stump to the National Ski & Snowboard Hall of Fame to what he sees as the decline of certain professional ski organization’s institutional integrity. I’ll save it all for next time.What I got wrongI referred to the boot-fitter I’d used in Hunter as “Keith from Sun and Snow Sports.” The boot-fitter’s name is Keith Holmquist, but the name of the shop is, in fact, The Pro Ski and Ride.Sun and Snow Sports is the name of the ski shop I frequented when I lived in Ann Arbor. You can visit their site here.Why you should follow Real SkiersI will admit that I am very bad at winnowing the best gear from the multitudes. I get overwhelmed by choice. This is one reason I don’t buy gear too often: if what I have works, then why change? And it’s why I know enough to use a boot fitter when I do finally decide an upgrade is in order.But maybe what I have – and what you have – doesn’t “work” so much as function. And that’s not the same thing as functioning optimally. Most of us could probably make better choices. And to do that, we need information. Good information. It may seem that the fecundity of the internet precludes the imperative to seek out the hyper-specialized knowledge of a professional. But the vast majority of ski and boot advice is garbage, as Hogen fearlessly reminds us. From a recent Real Skiers post:My methods for capturing skier feedback may not be succeeding to the degree I would like, but at least I’m trying. Most arms of mainstream media that choose to pose as ski experts no longer possess even a patina of credibility. To name two particularly odious examples of advertising posing as editorial, Men’s Journal published a top-10 “Most Versatile Skis of 2022” that was wall-to-wall b******t, assembled purely to incite a direct sale from the supplier. Whatever quality might be shared by their ten selections, “versatility” isn’t even a remote possibility. I could vilify each selection for its exceptional inappropriateness, but instead I’ll just mention that the “writer” admitted that their tenth selection hadn’t even been skied by whatever panel of nitwits they assembled to manufacture this fraud.The second slice of inanity that deserves your contempt is a ruse by Popular Mechanics titled, The 8 Best Ski Boots for Shredding Any Slope. Despite a long prelude about boot selection and how they “tested,” intended to establish a tone of credibility, when they finally got around to picking boots, the editors responsible for this transparent hoax cobbled together an incoherent jumble with but one goal: based on their nothing-burger of a review, the reader is expected to buy his or her boots online, preferably on Amazon. It’s hard to think of a worse disservice to the ski-boot buying public than this inane exercise.At least that’s what I thought until I was invited to peruse The Ski Girl. I can’t say how desperately incompetent all the advice dispensed on this site is, but I can assure you the people assigned to write about skis are the opposite of experts. I’ll let this one example stand as indictment of the whole shebang: someone so well-known she goes simply by the moniker “Christine,” selected as the best ski for an intermediate (woman, one presumes) none other than the ultra-wide Blizzard Rustler 11. It would be hard to make a completely random choice and do worse. There is NOTHING about this model that is right for an intermediate. Period. It’s not merely wrong, it’s dangerous, for reasons that I’m certain would elude “Christine.” On top of it all, she has the witless gall to add, “Every ski review here comes recommended, so you really can’t go wrong.” This is emblematic of everything that’s wrong about what remains of ski journalism. A gross incompetent merrily goes about dispensing advice unblushingly, so the site can collect a commission on a direct sale THAT SHOULD NEVER HAPPEN.Please note that The Ski Girl hasn’t taken down its moronic buying suggestions, suggesting a smug certainty that there will be no serious consequences for its gross negligence. Such is ski journalism today. That sort of raw honesty, that anti-stoke, that unapologetic calling out of b******t, is so rare in today’s ski media that I can’t even conjure another instance of it in the past 12 months. Skiing needs more of this, more blunt and informed voices. At least there’s one. Get in on it here by subscribing to the Real Skiers newsletter (as with The Storm, there are free and paid tiers):The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 53/100 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

Scot Schmidt - The Original Freeskier Episode #36 Brought to you by Ikon Pass  My guest today is the legendary Scot Schmidt: Scot was the very 1st professional freeskier in North America He created the genre and he did it with style Scot's intro into the ski industry was him dropping a 100' cliff at Squaw Valley Palisades Tahoe, California in the 1983 Warren Miller Ski Movie and as he drops the monstrous cliff Warren says:  "Scot Schmidt, his parents raised him wrong." Scot has been in at least 46 ski movies His style is smooth and tight and cameramen ate it up upon first sight Scot was discovered by a Warren Miller filmmaker who was visiting Squaw Valley in 1983 - all the filmmaker had to do was say:  "I wanna film whoever it is making those tracks" It was Scot who was making "Those tracks" the tracks that stood out and took him to the highest heights of ski stardom Scot traveled the world making ski movies for 25-years before settling down in Big Sky, Montana so he could ski more (there's a lotta standing around in ski movie making) Scot was even a stunt double for Dexter Rutecki in the legendary Hollywood ski movie:  "Aspen Extreme" Scot has been sponsored by the North Face for 30-years and while there he designed a line of ski mountaineering clothing called Steep Tech that is worth 3 times more than what it sold for back in the 80s and 90s. Scot has seen it all in this industry and he helped reinvent it. His stories of skiing all over the world are truly an inspiration This episode is brought to you by Ikon Pass: It all starts now – Ikon Pass is on sale for the 22/23 season. It's time to keep the stoke alive, seek a season of fun in the mountains, and DO YEWWW across 50 of the best ski destinations in the world. Whether it's the immediate spring access, hooting and hollering down your favorite runs next season, or connecting with the crew for an afternoon brew, there's always an adventure for how you ride.   This year – DO YEWWW with an Ikon Pass in hand – whether you're hunting bluebird days, scoring après scenes, or tearing through cold smoke, however your ride, there's an adventure waiting for you. Score the best prices on winter 22/23 and get all the early season goods: Upon purchase, Buy Now Ride Now with immediate spring access to 3 mountains, and a total of 10 destinations by April 11. Save up to $200 in child passes with the purchase of an adult pass. 21/22 pass holders can claim up to $100 off in renewal discounts for 22/23. And, pay it all forward with a payment plan as low as $0 down and 0% APR. Claim your pass at IkonPass.com. For 22/23, Ikon Pass is dialing up the stoke and welcoming 3 new legendary destinations to its family of mountains. Get ready to explore the storied slopes of Chamonix in France, the sun-drenched scenes of Sun Valley in Idaho, and the powder-pillow deep history of Snowbasin in Utah. With so much to explore, it's time to DO YEWWW. Claim your pass at Ikon Pass.com. Please enjoy! *** If you enjoyed this podcast, please share with friends & family, and please subscribe. Follow SnowBrains: SnowBrains.com Facebook: facebook.com/snowbrains Instagram: instagram.com/snowbrains Twitter: twitter.com/snowbrains *** The SnowBrains Podcast Episode #36 - Scott Schmidt - The Original Freeskier Recorded on February 17, 2022, in the Park City, UT (Miles Clark) and Big Sky, MT (Scot Schmidt). This episode was edited by Jared White Music by Chad Crouch Host, producer, and creator = Miles Clark

Episode #12: Have you heard about Telosa, city of the future? We've got a roundup of destination news, including a new name for Squaw Valley. Hear about DMO marketers on the move and new job listings, too. Read The Travel Vertical Newsletter here! If you are interested in being a guest on the show, please contact Laurie at laurie@thetravelvertical.com The Travel Vertical Podcast is a part of the Destination Marketing Podcast Network. It is hosted by Adam Stoker and Laurie Farr and produced by the team at Relic. To learn more about the Destination Marketing Podcast network and to listen to our other shows, please visit https://thedmpn.com/. If you are interested in becoming a part of the network, please email adam@relicagency.com.

Carol Heiss Jenkins and Hayes Jenkins. Heiss is an American former figure skater and actress. Competing in ladies' singles, she became the 1960 Olympic champion, the 1956 Olympic silver medalist, and a five-time World champion (1956–1960). Between 1957 and 1960, Heiss dominated women's figure skating. She was the World and U.S. Champion each year, and at the 1960 Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, California, Heiss captured the gold medal. By winning the 1960 World Championships held after the Olympics, Heiss became one of three women to have won five consecutive World Championships. She then retired from competitive skating. She is married to American figure skater Hayes Alan Jenkins, who is the 1956 Olympic champion, a four-time World champion (1953–1956), and a four-time U.S. national champion (1953–1956).

On todays episode of the podcast we get to hang out with Kim Ledgerwood. Kim was  a police officer for 28 yrs and  was diagnosed with PTSD and  Anxiety. Kim thought she was functioning okay and had everything  under control, not realizing her adiction was controlling her. Kim experienced a significant event that turned her life: professional, spiritual and personal completely upside-down. This caused her to start tackling her PTSD and addiction head on. In the midst of her battle, she found God. I loved my conversation with Kim and I believe you will walk away from her testimony feeling encouraged. Nothing is too big for our God!In this episode we discuss:FaithAddictionMental HealthWaterWant to know more about Kim?  Check out the links below:WebsiteFacebookInstagramLet's shop!The Drifted Drum has apparel, gifts, and decor that are faith inspired and hand crafted by local artists in Tennessee.  See something you like?   Use the code "Brave" at checkout to receive 10% off your purchase.Share a positive message with the clothing you wear; check out AlwaysHumble Apparel!  This Fresno based apparel company has the goal to motive and inspire others. What's Next? Are you a woman in your mid thirties in the midst of transition? Are you wondering what's next? My friend and coach, Kelly Knowles has a summer group coaching program that you don't want to miss. Kelly is warm and personable and gives you tools to make noticeable changes in your life. You won't want to miss this program. Interested? Find out more here.Do you LOVE bagels? Coffee? Just plain joy?Guys, one of my new favorite spots to visit is Clingans Junction. It's a quaint little coffee shop in Squaw Valley that is on the way to Kings Canyon National Park. If you're a Fresno local or you ever visit this area, you gotta stop here. Yummy homemade pastries and delish coffee await you.  Wanna learn more about me? Check out my website! Just  kidding...I accidentally killed it. Currently working on the rebuild but you call follow me at the social links below! Support the show (https://www.paypal.com/biz/fund?id=6C9JYUWNLR7GU)Support the show (https://www.paypal.com/biz/fund?id=6C9JYUWNLR7GU)

In this episode of Money Tales, our guest is Jonny Moseley, an Olympic gold medalist freestyle skier who brought his signature moves to the sport. When we think about Olympians, our focus is usually on the sport. There's a whole money story behind it, and Jonny shares how he learned to hustle to pull funds together to support himself. Jonny has leveraged these important relationship and business skills in his ongoing career as a television presenter, fellow podcaster and entrepreneur.Jonny is an Olympic and World Cup champion in mogul skiing and rated by Ski Magazine as one of the top ten most influential skiers of all time. At the Olympics in 1998, Jonny incorporated a snowboard-style grab into his 360° spin and earned a gold medal. His performance helped ignite a re-birth of the ski industry known as Freeskiing. He then challenged the US Ski Team to allow him to compete in professional events and became the first skier to medal in both the X Games and the Olympics. In 2002 Jonny lobbied the International Skiing Federation (FIS) to allow him to perform a semi-inverted trick, the Dinner Roll, at the 2002 Olympics. Reluctantly, the FIS approved but the judges awarded him 4th place.After the Games, Jonny hosted Saturday Night Live and began a career in TV hosting and sports commentating. He devotes most of his time to product development and marketing for the entities he partners with including Squaw Valley, Toyota, Visit California, Warren Miller, K2, Peter Glenn and Tipsy Elves. http://www.mightyiota.comLearn more about Money Tale$ > Subscribe to the podcast Recent episodes See all episodes > Form CRS Form ADV Terms of Use Privacy Rights and Policies

In this episode of Money Tales, our guest is Jonny Moseley, an Olympic gold medalist freestyle skier who brought his signature moves to the sport. When we think about Olympians, our focus is usually on the sport. There's a whole money story behind it, and Jonny shares how he learned to hustle to pull funds together to support himself. Jonny has leveraged these important relationship and business skills in his ongoing career as a television presenter, fellow podcaster and entrepreneur. Jonny is an Olympic and World Cup champion in mogul skiing and rated by Ski Magazine as one of the top ten most influential skiers of all time. At the Olympics in 1998, Jonny incorporated a snowboard-style grab into his 360° spin and earned a gold medal. His performance helped ignite a re-birth of the ski industry known as Freeskiing. He then challenged the US Ski Team to allow him to compete in professional events and became the first skier to medal in both the X Games and the Olympics. In 2002 Jonny lobbied the International Skiing Federation (FIS) to allow him to perform a semi-inverted trick, the Dinner Roll, at the 2002 Olympics. Reluctantly, the FIS approved but the judges awarded him 4th place. After the Games, Jonny hosted Saturday Night Live and began a career in TV hosting and sports commentating. He devotes most of his time to product development and marketing for the entities he partners with including Squaw Valley, Toyota, Visit California, Warren Miller, K2, Peter Glenn and Tipsy Elves. http://www.mightyiota.com See all episodes >

Have you ever explored the power of the gospel? Today's guest Cassandra Philogene talks  about her newest book, The Power of the Gospel; In your Relationships..   Her story stems from her journey with her relationship with God and with other people. One day Cassandra was by herself and she heard this voice say, " you don't know me".   This set her off on a journey to know who God is and to share this with others. You guys, I so enjoyed my conversation with Cassandra. She has such knowledge to share about the importance of truly knowing who God is in our lives and the power that lies in the gospel. This is an episode that you wont want to miss!Cassandra is an author, blogger, and currently hosts an online bible study via YouTube called Enoch 365 Live. You can find out all about Cassandra in the links below.In this episode we discuss:FaithThe GospelGenesisRelationshipsWant to know more about Cassandra and grab her latest book? Check out the links below:WebsiteFacebookBlogInstagramYoutubeLet's shop!The Drifted Drum has apparel, gifts, and decor that are faith inspired and hand crafted by local artists in Tennessee.  See something you like?   Use the code "Brave" at checkout to receive 10% off your purchase.Share a positive message with the clothing you wear; check out AlwaysHumble Apparel!  This Fresno based apparel company has the goal to motive and inspire others. Do you LOVE bagels? Coffee? Just plain joy?Guys, one of my new favorite spots to visit is Clingans Junction. It's a quaint little coffee shop in Squaw Valley that is on the way to Kings Canyon National Park. If you're a Fresno local or you ever visit this area, you gotta stop here. Yummy homemade pastries and delish coffee await you.  Wanna learn more about me? Check out my website! Just  kidding...I accidentally killed it. Currently working on the rebuild but you call follow me at the social links below! Support the show

"The Gentleman" - The Blade Dive, Episode 9. Charles Beckinsale, an incredibly humble individual, yet one of the most influential leaders and talented masterminds of the industry who, worth noting, is truly in it for the right reasons! Beckinsale joins us to discuss what it's like growing up in Australia, his career as a professional Snowboarder as well as how those skills transitioned over to the successes he has seen in Snow Industry management and operations today.A world renowned Terrain Park builder and business owner, Charles Beckinsale came from humble beginnings - Growing up on the coast of Australia. As a young grom, along with his Mum and sister, Beckinsale moved to a small country town (now the ‘place to be' for the Snow industry in Australia) - Jindabyne, New South Wales. Quickly familiarizing himself with his new ‘Snowy Mountains' playground and obtaining his setup through swap meets and discount sales, Beckinsale was equipped ...and he hit the slopes as any first timer would, absolutely frothing. Beckinsale continued to pursue his interest in Snowboarding, investing time around those that were associated with the Terrain Park program at Thredbo Resort.With his scope of interest expanding, Charles Beckinsale was keen to get behind the sticks and delve into Snowcat operations, whilst still riding pro. Beckinsale earned an opportunity to grow his skill set, venturing across the pond to operate at Squaw Valley, California, USA, ironically before even getting the opportunity in Australia and from there, the rest is history. Beckinsale was and continues to be instrumental in putting Australian Snowboarding and Terrain Parks on the map, managing and evolving programs such as Thredbo Resort and Perisher, Snowy Mountains, NSW, Australia.Highs don't come without lows and Charles Beckinsale discusses the dramatic side of the industry - the operator social circles and the need to surround yourself with like minded positive people. Beckinsale opens up about the risks of starting “The Stomping Grounds”, the time and tolls it took and quite frankly... how much he has sacrificed to be where he is, today.In true ‘Charles Beckinsale' form, Beckinsale would be the first person to tell you that none of his successes came without the help from others and credits people like Torstein Horgmo, Jason “NINJA” Isaacs, Brandon Dodds and others, as some of his biggest supporters. A husband and father, Beckinsale views time by his family's side as precious and it's rare that his family does not join him as he travels the globe. This episode is full of laughs, yet the blade does dive deep into being true to oneself and not sacrificing authenticity, operator pay, time management and various other, often shied away from, topics. Enjoy...  and if you're in the machine, go ahead and TURN THE VOLUME UP!Follow us on:https://www.instagram.com/thebladedive/https://www.facebook.com/thebladedive

“Rosie - We can do it!” ....The Blade Dive Podcast, Episode 8. Jess Richitelli joins us, and shares the untracked path she and many like her have and continue to pave, as successful and impactful leaders within the Snowsport industry! A highly regarded industry leader, Jess Richitelli has overseen prominent Terrain Park Programs at both Cranmore Mountain Resort, New Hampshire, USA & Squaw Valley Alpine Meadows, California, USA, and has spent many years at the top in this sector of the business. Richitelli, however, was not always met with such admiration and respect and she knows first hand what it means to be a woman in the the Snow Industry, what the grind to climb looks like and all that comes with being a female in operations.Jess Richitelli has East Coast of the United States roots, spending her childhood in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Raised by a strong ‘biker type' single mom, Richitelli was taught to be herself, believe in her dreams and never let anyone tell her that they weren't achievable. It's this strong foundation and idealistic mentality that was emphasized to Richitelli throughout her upbringing, that has propelled her throughout both her life and career endeavors and successes. Exploring Snowboarding in her 20's, Jess Richitelli quickly found herself moving to New Hampshire, hanging around local Snowboard shops and getting in on trips with friends to her ‘local', Cranmore Mountain Resort. Taking an interest in Terrain Park operations, Richitelli joined the Hand/Day Crew at Cranmore and never looked back. A male dominated sector of the industry; mountain operations, Jess Richitelli was met with resistance from individuals simply not understanding why a ‘woman' held a Terrain Park Manager title. Eyes forward, Richitelli found inspiration from other female leaders, such as Isabelle Falardeau and forged forward. In an endeavor to be and continue to be the best, to break down the barriers, influence change and bring her talent to everything she does, Richitelli was and to this day, is not afraid to ask questions, seek help or guidance and is still a believer in what it means to give and honor ones word. With thoughts of potentially leaving the industry after receiving her welding certification, a skill that she was once mocked for even considering throughout her operations career, Jess Richitelli was presented with an opportunity whereby she saw undeniable success, overseeing and leading the Terrain Park program at Squaw Valley, hosting big name Events and photoshoots like Women's Superpark.  In an industry that has often been described as a “boys club” Jess Richitelli has paved the way for women as both an admired leader and successful operations manager, proof that women should be hired based on their talent and not denied employment based on their gender... Richitelli is one of the queens, smashing the glass ceiling of the Snowsports industry for future female generations to come!Jess Richitelli words to live by: “Don't talk, just act. Don't say, just show. Don't promise, just prove. Enjoy...  and if you're in the machine, go ahead and TURN THE VOLUME UPFollow us on:https://www.instagram.com/thebladedive/https://www.facebook.com/thebladedive

Kicking it off with a bang, The Blade Dive Podcast, Episode 1,  we are joined by legendary operator & Terrain Park builder Brandon Dodds.A Minnesota native, Brandon Dodds developed a passion for Snowboarding early on.   Realizing his interest in the construction of world class Terrain Parks far outweighed his pro snowboarding possibilities, Dodds quickly decided to pursue a career in operations, choosing the sticks instead of the board & bindings. No matter the method, Dodds holds true to his roots and love for the sport to this day.  Choosing Lake Tahoe, CA instead of Summit County, CO, Brandon Dodds was quickly graced with opportunity after opportunity and soon realized that failure was instrumental in moving towards his definition of success, though it didn't come without significant sacrifice - loss, gains and whole lot of life lessons. His biggest cheerleaders are his family and he is beyond proud to be a father, husband and an advocate for not only professional female riders and athletes but recognizing the skill of female operators and  leaders within a typically male dominated  industry. Brandon Dodds has traveled the world operating a Snowcat and values the time that he's spent operating in other states and countries and the true friendships gained. He has contributed to world-class resort programs in California - Heavenly, Boreal, Squaw Valley. Idaho - Tamarack and Australia - Perisher. His list of projects dates back to builds such as but by no means limited to the Forum 8, Red Bull Double Pipe and X-Games . Dodds continues to  impact the industry by currently being an integral part of the innovative elite training  program and facility that is The Stomping Grounds in Saas Fee, Switzerland.Brandon Dodds calls it as he sees it and that is truly a rare quality these days.  Dodds dives deep in both a captivating and hilarious account of a lifelong passion and career, as we  discuss his journey, advice he has both given and received, balancing act of work-life and parenthood, egos, travel, how to's, the value of team, the future of equipment and the overall industry and so much more. Noteworthy, this is actually our first time ever speaking with Dodds - the rumors were real... Brandon Dodds is an incredible human being. Enjoy...  and if you're in the machine, go ahead and TURN THE VOLUME UP! Follow us on: https://www.instagram.com/thebladedive/https://www.facebook.com/thebladedive