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The Vint Podcast
Bobby Stuckey MS Returns: Lessons on Service, Leadership, and Lasting Hospitality

The Vint Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 21, 2025 64:42


In this episode, Master Sommelier Bobby Stuckey returns to the Vint Wine Podcast for a wide-ranging conversation on the art of hospitality, the evolving role of the sommelier, and the deep connections forged through thoughtful service. From his early days bussing tables after being expelled from school, to building one of America's most respected restaurant groups, Bobby shares the personal philosophy that guides his work on the floor, in the cellar, and as a leader.We explore what defines a great sommelier, the enduring importance of humility and guest-focused service, and why social media influence is no substitute for decades of commitment. Bobby also reflects on the continued growth of Frasca Hospitality Group, the complexities of operating in a luxury hotel setting, and the expansion of his Scarpetta wine label in Friuli, Italy. Along the way, he shares stories that reveal why graduation dinners and post-surgery guests in Vail can be as instructive as any textbook on hospitality.This episode is essential listening for those passionate about wine, committed to service, or building something with lasting impact.

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast
Podcast #205: Snow Partners CEO Joe Hession

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 18, 2025 76:55


The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication (and my full-time job). To receive new posts and to support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.WhoJoe Hession, CEO of Snow Partners, which owns Mountain Creek, Big Snow American Dream, SnowCloud, and Terrain Based LearningRecorded onMay 2, 2025About Snow PartnersSnow Partners owns and operates Mountain Creek, New Jersey and Big Snow American Dream, the nation's only indoor ski center. The company also developed SnowCloud resort management software and has rolled out its Terrain Based Learning system at more than 80 ski areas worldwide. They do some other things that I don't really understand (there's a reason that I write about skiing and not particle physics), that you can read about on their website.About Mountain CreekLocated in: Vernon Township, New JerseyClosest neighboring public ski areas: Mount Peter (:24); Big Snow American Dream (:50); Campgaw (:51) Pass affiliations: Snow Triple Play, up to two anytime daysBase elevation: 440 feetSummit elevation: 1,480 feetVertical drop: 1,040 feetSkiable Acres: 167Average annual snowfall: 65 inchesTrail count: 46Lift count: 9 (1 Cabriolet, 2 high-speed quads, 2 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 1 double, 2 carpets – view Lift Blog's inventory of Mountain Creek's lift fleet)About Big Snow American DreamLocated in: East Rutherford, New JerseyClosest neighboring public ski areas: Campgaw (:35); Mountain Creek (:50); Mount Peter (:50)Pass affiliations: Snow Triple Play, up to two anytime daysVertical drop: 160 feet Skiable Acres: 4Trail count: 4 (2 green, 1 blue, 1 black)Lift count: 4 (1 quad, 1 poma, 2 carpets - view Lift Blog's of inventory of Big Snow American Dream's lift fleet)Why I interviewed himI read this earlier today:The internet is full of smart people writing beautiful prose about how bad everything is, how it all sucks, how it's embarrassing to like anything, how anything that appears good is, in fact, secretly bad. I find this confusing and tragic, like watching Olympic high-jumpers catapult themselves into a pit of tarantulas.That blurb was one of 28 “slightly rude notes on writing” offered in Adam Mastroianni's Experimental History newsletter. And I thought, “Man this dude must follow #SkiTwitter.” Or Instabook. Of Flexpost. Or whatever. Because online ski content, both short- and long-form, is, while occasionally joyous and evocative, disproportionately geared toward the skiing-is-fucked-and-this-is-why worldview. The passes suck. The traffic sucks. The skiers suck. The prices suck. The parking sucks. The Duopoly sucks. Everyone's a Jerry, chewing up my pow line with their GoPro selfie sticks hoisted high and their Ikon Passes dangling from their zippers. Skiing is corporate and soulless and tourist obsessed and doomed anyway because of climate change. Don't tell me you're having a good time doing this very fun thing. People like you are the reason skiing's soul now shops at Wal-Mart. Go back to Texas and drink a big jug of oil, you Jerry!It's all so… f*****g dumb. U.S. skiing just wrapped its second-best season of attendance. The big passes, while imperfect, are mostly a force for good, supercharging on-hill infrastructure investment, spreading skiers across geographies, stabilizing a once-storm-dependent industry, and lowering the per-day price of skiing for the most avid among us to 1940s levels. Snowmaking has proven an effective bulwark against shifting weather patterns. Lift-served skiing is not a dying pastime, financially or spiritually or ecologically. Yes, modern skiing has problems: expensive food (pack a lunch); mountain-town housing shortages (stop NIMBY-ing everything); traffic (yay car culture); peak-day crowds (don't go then); exploding insurance, labor, utilities, and infrastructure costs (I have no answers). But in most respects, this is a healthy, thriving, constantly evolving industry, and a more competitive one than the Duopoly Bros would admit.Snow Partners proves this. Because what the hell is Snow Partners? It's some company sewn together by a dude who used to park cars at Mountain Creek. Ten years ago this wasn't a thing, and now it's this wacky little conglomerate that owns a bespoke resort tech platform and North America's only snowdome and the impossible, ridiculous Mountain Creek. And they're going to build a bunch more snowdomes that stamp new skiers out by the millions and maybe – I don't know but maybe – become the most important company in the history of lift-served skiing in the process.Could such an outfit possibly have materialized were the industry so corrupted as the Brobot Pundit Bros declare it? Vail is big. Alterra is big. But the two companies combined control just 53 of America's 501 active ski areas. Big ski areas, yes. Big shadows. But neither created: Indy Pass, Power Pass, Woodward Parks, Terrain Based Learning, Mountain Collective, RFID, free skiing for kids, California Mountain Resort Company, or $99 season passes. Neither saved Holiday Mountain or Hatley Pointe or Norway Mountain or Timberline West Virigina from the scrapheap, or transformed a failing Black Mountain into a co-op. Neither has proven they can successfully run a ski area in Indiana (sorry Vail #SickBurn #SellPaoliPeaks #Please).Skiing, at this moment, is a glorious mix of ideas and energy. I realize it makes me uncool to think so, but I signed off on those aspirations the moment I drove the minivan off the Chrysler lot (topped it off with a roofbox, too, Pimp). Anyhow, the entire point of this newsletter is to track down the people propelling change in a sport that most likely predates the written word and ask them why they're doing these novel things to make an already cool and awesome thing even more cool and awesome. And no one, right now, is doing more cool and awesome things in skiing than Snow Partners.**That's not exactly true. Mountain Capital Partners, Alterra, Ikon Pass, Deer Valley, Entabeni Systems, Jon Schaefer, the Perfect Clan, Boyne Resorts, Big Sky, Mt. Bohemia, Powdr, Vail Resorts, Midwest Family Ski Resorts, and a whole bunch more entities/individuals/coalitions are also contributing massively to skiing's rapid-fire rewiring in the maw of the robot takeover digital industrial revolution. But, hey, when you're in the midst of transforming an entire snow-based industry from a headquarters in freaking New Jersey, you get a hyperbolic bump in the file card description.What we talked aboutThe Snow Triple Play; potential partners; “there's this massive piece of the market that's like ‘I don't even understand what you're talking about'” with big day ticket prices and low-priced season passes; why Mountain Creek sells its Triple Play all season long and why the Snow Triple Play won't work that way (at least at first); M.A.X. Pass and why Mountain Creek declined to join successor passes; an argument for Vail, Alterra and other large ski companies to participate on the Snow Triple Play; comparing skiing to hotels, airlines, and Disney World; “the next five years are going to be the most interesting and disruptive time in the ski industry because of technology”; “we don't compete with anybody”; Liftopia's potential, errors, failure, and legacy; skiing on Groupon; considering Breckenridge as an independent ski area; what a “premium” ski area on the Snow Triple Play would be; why megapasses are “selling people a product that will never be used the way it's sold to them”; why people in NYC feel like going to Mountain Creek, an hour over the George Washington Bridge, is “going to Alaska”; why Snow Triple Play will “never” add a fourth day; sticker shock for Big Snow newbs who emerge from the Dome wanting more; SnowCloud and the tech and the guest journey from parking lot to lifts; why Mountain Creek stopped mailing season passes; Bluetooth Low Energy “is certainly the future of passes”; “100 percent we're getting more Big Snows” – but let's justify the $175 million investment first; Big Snow has a “terrible” design; “I don't see why every city shouldn't have a Big Snow” and which markets Snow Partners is talking to; why Mountain Creek didn't get the mega-lift Hession teased on this pod three years ago and when we could see one; “I really believe that the Vernon base of Mountain Creek needs an updated chair”; the impact of automated snowmaking at Mountain Creek; and a huge residential project incoming at Mountain Creek.What I got wrong* I said that Hession wasn't involved in Mountain Creek in the M.A.X. Pass era, but he was an Intrawest employee at the time, and was Mountain Creek's GM until 2012.* I hedged on whether Boyne's Explorer multi-day pass started at two or three days. Skiers can purchase the pass in three- to six-day increments.Why now was a good time for this interviewOkay, so I'll admit that when Snow Partners summarized the Snow Triple Play for me, I wasn't like “Holy crap, three days (total) at up to three different ski areas on a single ski pass? Do you think they have room for another head on Mount Rushmore?” This multi-day pass is a straightforward product that builds off a smart idea (the Mountain Creek Triple Play), that has been a smash hit at the Jersey Snow Jungle since at least 2008. But Snow Triple Play doesn't rank alongside Epic, Ikon, Indy, or Mountain Collective as a seasonlong basher. This is another frequency product in a market already flush with them.So why did I dedicate an entire podcast and two articles (so far) to dissecting this product, which Hession makes pretty clear has no ambitions to grow into some Indy/Ikon/Epic competitor? Because it is the first product to tie Big Snow to the wider ski world. And Big Snow only works if it is step one and there is an obvious step two. Right now, that step two is hard, even in a region ripe with ski areas. The logistics are confounding, the one-off cost hard to justify. Lift tickets, gear rentals, getting your ass to the bump and back, food, maybe a lesson. The Snow Triple Play doesn't solve all of these problems, but it does narrow an impossible choice down to a manageable one by presenting skiers with a go-here-next menu. If Snow Partners can build a compelling (or at least logical) Northeast network and then scale it across the country as the company opens more Big Snows in more cities, then this simple pass could evolve into an effective toolkit for building new skiers.OK, so why not just join Indy or Mountain Collective, or forge some sort of newb-to-novice agreement with Epic or Ikon? That would give Snow Partners the stepladder, without the administrative hassle of owning a ski pass. But that brings us to another roadblock in Ski Revolution 2025: no one wants to share partners. So Hession is trying to flip the narrative. Rather than locking Big Snow into one confederacy or the other, he wants the warring armies to lash their fleets along Snow Partners Pier. Big Snow is just the bullet factory, or the gas station, or the cornfield – the thing that all the armies need but can't supply themselves. You want new skiers? We got ‘em. They're ready. They just need a map to your doorstep. And we're happy to draw you one.Podcast NotesOn the Snow Triple PlayThe basics: three total days, max of two used at any one partner ski area, no blackouts at Big Snow or Mountain Creek, possible blackouts at partner resorts, which are TBD.The pass, which won't be on sale until Labor Day, is fully summarized here:And I speculate on potential partners here:On the M.A.X. PassFor its short, barely noted existence, the M.A.X. Pass was kind of an amazing hack, granting skiers five days each at an impressive blend of regional and destination ski areas:Much of this roster migrated over to Ikon, but in taking their pass' name too literally, the Alterra folks left off some really compelling regional ski areas that could have established a hub-and-spoke network out of the gate. Lutsen and Granite Peak owner Charles Skinner told me on the podcast a few years back that Ikon never offered his ski areas membership (they joined Indy in 2020), cutting out two of the Midwest's best mountains. The omissions of Mountain Creek, Wachusett, and the New York trio of Belleayre, Whiteface, and Gore ceded huge swaths of the dense and monied Northeast to competitors who saw value in smaller, high-end operations that are day-trip magnets for city folks who also want that week at Deer Valley (no other pass signed any of these mountains, but Vail and Indy both assembled better networks of day-drivers and destinations).On my 2022 interview with HessionOn LiftopiaLiftopia's website is still live, but I'm not sure how many ski areas participate in this Expedia-for-lift-tickets. Six years ago, I thought Liftopia was the next bargain evolution of lift-served skiing. I even hosted founder Evan Reece on one of my first 10 podcasts. The whole thing fell apart when Covid hit. An overview here:On various other day-pass productsI covered this in my initial article, but here's how the Snow Triple Play stacks up against other three-day multi-resort products:On Mountain Creek not mailing passesI don't know anything about tech, but I know, from a skier's point of view, when something works well and when it doesn't. Snow Cloud's tech is incredible in at least one customer-facing respect: when you show up at a ski area, a rep standing in a conspicuous place is waiting with an iPhone, with which they scan a QR code on your phone, and presto-magico: they hand you your ski pass. No lines or waiting. One sentimental casualty of this on-site efficiency was the mailed ski pass, an autumn token of coming winter to be plucked gingerly from the mailbox. And this is fine and makes sense, in the same way that tearing down chairlifts constructed of brontosaurus bones and mastodon hides makes sense, but I must admit that I miss these annual mailings in the same way that I miss paper event tickets and ski magazines. My favorite ski mailing ever, in fact, was not Ikon's glossy fold-out complete with a 1,000-piece 3D jigsaw puzzle of the Wild Blue Gondola and name-a-snowflake-after-your-dog kit, but this simple pamphlet dropped into the envelope with my 2018-19 Mountain Creek season pass:Just f*****g beautiful, Man. That hung on my office wall for years. On the CabrioletThis is just such a wackadoodle ski lift:Onetime Mountain Creek owner Intrawest built similar lifts at Winter Park and Tremblant, but as transit lifts from the parking lot. This one at Mountain Creek is the only one that I'm aware of that's used as an open-air gondola. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

OwlScoop.com - The Scoop
Season 10, Episode 44: TUFF Fund tales, hoops recruiting and a Dad Vail champion

OwlScoop.com - The Scoop

Play Episode Listen Later May 16, 2025 92:54


A packed episode this week includes our interviews with TUFF Fund Executive Director Andy Carl, new Temple basketball recruit Derrian Ford, and Grace Crosby, the coxswain who led the Temple men's crew varsity eight to a gold medal at last Saturday's Dad Vail Regatta. Carl shared some insightful stories about his time leading an NIL collective that helped raise more than $1 million for Temple athletics while Ford, a former 4-star and top-100 recruit, explained why he committed to Adam Fisher and his staff without an official visit. And Crosby, who steered the gold-medal varsity eight boat at the Dad Vail less than 48 hours after graduating from Temple's Klein College of Media and Communication, took listeners into the demands of being a coxswain on one of the nation's top crew teams. Intro: 0:00 – 1:40 Andy Carl interview: 1:40 – 26:54 Adam Fisher reels in three new transfers: 26:54 – 32:27 Former 4-star Derrian Ford talks about choosing Temple: 32:27 – 34:23 Sizing up the men's hoops roster: 34:23 – 38:22 Grace Crosby talks about Temple crew's Dad Vail gold: 38:22 – 56:49 On (or around) this date: 56:49 – 1:07:32 Mailbag: 1:02:32 – end ** Timestamps are approximate due to advertisements.

Healthy Wealthy & Smart
TJ Slattery: The Crow's Nest Mindset: Elevating Your Business Beyond Daily Operations

Healthy Wealthy & Smart

Play Episode Listen Later May 15, 2025 36:52 Transcription Available


In this episode of the Healthy, Wealthy, and Smart Podcast, host Dr. Karen Litzy welcomes TJ Slattery, a seasoned entrepreneur and strategic advisor dedicated to helping small business owners thrive. With over 20 years of experience in small business management, TJ shares insights on how to grow your business while achieving personal and professional freedom sustainably. He reflects on his entrepreneurial journey, which began in his youth with various small ventures, and discusses the importance of leveraging experience and strategic partnerships to propel business success. Tune in for valuable tips and inspiration for aspiring entrepreneurs and small business owners alike!   Time Stamps:  [00:03:25] Strategic leaders vs. reactive operators. [00:03:48] Importance of proactive planning. [00:07:30] Delegating roles in business. [00:12:24] Owner feedback and business growth. [00:15:24] Transitioning from PT to CEO. [00:19:00] Team toxicity and leadership challenges. [00:21:20] System changes and entrepreneurship challenges. [00:27:30] Celebrating personal business wins. [00:28:07] The importance of asking questions. [00:32:07] Take it easier on yourself. More About TJ Slattery: TJ is a lifetime entrepreneur, small business owner, and strategic advisor with an insatiable desire to help other small business owners scale their enterprise and gain freedom in their professional and personal lives. With 20 years operating in the world of small business and entrepreneurship, TJ leverages his boots-on-the-ground experience and tenure as a business advisor to partner with small business owners and propel their business to the next level.   A Denverite with midwestern roots and a passion for music, gardening, house-projects, travel, skiing, and spoiling his dog Bella, TJ has a deep appreciation for keeping a balance between running a successful business and pursuing the things in life that make us happy.  TJ earned his bachelor's degree in Interdisciplinary Business Management from Miami University of Ohio and his MBA from the University of Denver. Gathering more experiences along the way, TJ has worked in multitude of industries. From owning and operating a pedicab service in Vail, CO and a handyman service in Denver, CO, to becoming a partner in a facilities management firm in London, UK and starting Zuni Street Brewing in Denver, CO. Resources from this Episode: Crowsnest Consulting Business Case Studies   Jane Sponsorship Information: Book a one-on-one demo here Front Desk @ Jane Mention the code LITZY1MO for a free month Follow Dr. Karen Litzy on Social Media: Karen's Twitter Karen's Instagram Karen's LinkedIn Subscribe to Healthy, Wealthy & Smart: YouTube Website Apple Podcast Spotify SoundCloud Stitcher iHeart Radio

Raw Intentions
Build With Purpose ft. Jim Deters

Raw Intentions

Play Episode Listen Later May 15, 2025 106:38


Hello & welcome back to Raw Intentions! This week, we're sitting down with serial entrepreneur and Gravity Haus founder, Jim Deters. Jim is a dad of three, an avid skier & biker, and a major force in the world of startups, hospitality, tech, and wellness. He's built companies like Ascendant Tech, Galvanize, and now Gravity Haus—a boutique hotel and social club experience built for outdoor lovers & wanders seeking community. We talk about his journey from small-town Illinois to Vail, CO, how he made his first dollar, the lessons he's learned building multiple companies, and why mindfulness is at the core of everything he does. He opens up about fatherhood, building companies with his wife Alicia, success, mental health, and what he's most proud of (spoiler: it's not his businesses). Such a powerful, honest conversation, and I learned SO much from the few hours we spent together. Can't wait for you to hear it, and let us know your favorite takeaways.Gravity Haus: https://www.instagram.com/gravityhaus/?hl=enGravity Haus: https://gravityhaus.com/Shop Raw & Rebellious: https://www.rawrebellious.com/Raw & Rebellious Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/raw_rebellious/Raw & Rebellious TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@raw_rebellious?lang=enRaw Intentions Podcast Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rawintentionspodcast/

Gone South
S4|E30: Catching Felix Vail | Part 3

Gone South

Play Episode Listen Later May 14, 2025 39:33


After acquiring secretly recorded audio of Felix Vail, Jerry Mitchell approaches a Louisiana prosecutor named Hugo Holland who takes on the case. Hugo makes additional breakthroughs in the investigation, and nearly 51 years after his first wife's death, Felix stands trial. Find us on ⁠Facebook⁠, ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ and ⁠Twitter⁠. You can also subscribe to our newsletter, ⁠Gone South with Jed Lipinski⁠. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Thomas Jefferson Hour
#1651 Ten Things About the American Revolution

The Thomas Jefferson Hour

Play Episode Listen Later May 13, 2025 50:31


Clay and frequent guest Lindsay Chervinsky discuss the American Revolution in a “live” podcast recording in Vail, Colorado. Was George Washington a great military strategist? How vital was Jefferson's Declaration of Independence when it was written? Why weren't women incorporated as full citizens — as Abigail Adams suggested — when America re-constituted itself in the 1770s and 1780s? Was what happened in those dramatic years a true revolution — or merely a separation from the mother country England? How important was Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense? This program was the first time Clay and Lindsay had met in person and one of the few live audience recordings of Listening to America. This podcast was recorded live on March 27, 2025.

Gone South
S4|E29: Catching Felix Vail | Part 2

Gone South

Play Episode Listen Later May 7, 2025 34:24


After discovering a shocking audio interview with Felix Vail's son, reporter Jerry Mitchell publishes his story detailing mutliple alleged murders. The case stalls -- until a reader in Texas contacts Jerry Mitchell with a plan to approach Felix in person. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Sports Docs Podcast
128: (Reboot): Dr. Matt Provencher and Dr. Armando Vidal on Strategies for Multi-ligamentous Knee Surgery (LIVE at AOSSM 2024)

The Sports Docs Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 5, 2025 35:39


Today's episode is going to focus on the workup of a patient with a suspected multiligamentous knee injury as well as a surgical approach that follows – including acute versus delayed surgery, repair versus reconstruction, surgical technique and order of operations in the OR. We are joined today by two outstanding guests! Dr. Matt Provencher is an orthopedic surgeon at the Steadman Clinic in Vail Colorado, Principle Investigator at the Steadman Philippon Research Institute and assistant Editor-in-Chief of Arthroscopy.  He is very active in academic societies and serves on the Board of Directors for AOSSM, AANA and SOMOS.Dr. Armando Vidal is also an orthopedic surgeon at the Steadman Clinic in Vail and is the Vice President of the Medical Staff of Vail Health Hospital.  He is was previously the head team physician for the Denver Nuggets, and  former team physician for the University of Colorado men's basketball and the University of Denver men's hockey.So, without further ado, let's get to the Field House!

Entrepreneur Mindset-Reset with Tracy Cherpeski
From Shoveling Water to Strategic Leadership Featuring TJ Slattery, EP 177

Entrepreneur Mindset-Reset with Tracy Cherpeski

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 30, 2025 37:43 Transcription Available


In this insightful episode, TJ Slattery of Crow's Nest Mindset Consulting shares strategies for healthcare practice owners who find themselves stuck "below deck" in their businesses. TJ explains how practitioners can transition from frantically managing day-to-day operations to gaining the strategic perspective needed for sustainable growth and leadership. Through practical advice and compelling metaphors, he offers a roadmap for escaping the "entrepreneurial island" that traps many healthcare business owners. Episode Highlights: The crow's nest metaphor: Why healthcare providers often find themselves "shoveling water below deck" instead of navigating strategically The challenge of transitioning from clinical excellence (where "never let them see you sweat" is valued) to business leadership (where vulnerability and delegation are crucial) Understanding your true hourly value and why tasks like "opening the mail" could be costing you thousands Building a holistic performance model that aligns financial goals with marketing, operations, and leadership Moving from "magical thinking" about growth to practical planning with measurable steps The three mindset blocks that prevent effective delegation: martyrdom, "I alone can fix it," and guilt How creating space for your team allows them to develop, flourish, and make your business stronger Memorable Quotes: "The death of every entrepreneur is you all become glorified managers. If you're doing this right, in a year from now, you're not the one getting your hands dirty - you're managing people and managing your managers." "Would you pay a bookkeeper $1,200 an hour to go through your books? That's what you're doing when you handle those tasks yourself instead of delegating." "Just because we can doesn't mean we should. How is a business owner to fulfill their mission and vision if they're not able to get up to that view and keep checking on it?" "A lot of people, whatever their background or industry is, never let them see you sweat. That is a teachable mindset that you can maneuver over. That is something you can loosen up and get better at." Guest Bio: TJ Slattery is the Founder and Strategic Advisor at Crow's Nest Mindset Consulting, where he helps small business owners scale their enterprises and achieve greater freedom in both professional and personal spheres. With 20 years of experience in entrepreneurship and small business operations, TJ brings a unique blend of practical expertise and strategic insight to his clients. A self-described "business plan tinkerer," TJ's approach stems from genuine curiosity and a collaborative drive to identify core challenges and implement effective solutions. His diverse background includes founding a pedicab service in Vail, running a handyman business in Denver, partnering in a London-based facilities management firm, and co-founding Zuni Street Brewing Company. TJ holds a bachelor's degree in Interdisciplinary Business Management from Miami University of Ohio and an MBA from the University of Denver. When not helping business owners climb to their own crow's nest for a better strategic view, this Denver resident with Midwestern roots enjoys music, gardening, home projects, traveling, skiing, and spending quality time with his dog, Bella. Find TJ: Website LinkedIn Connect With Us: Be a Guest on the Show Thriving Practice Community Schedule Strategy Session with Tracy Tracy's LinkedIn Business LinkedIn Page Thriving Practice Community Instagram

Life Love Music & Space Travel
Breaking up is hard to do. And yet SO well worth it!! - EP67

Life Love Music & Space Travel

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 30, 2025 22:56


I'm guessing we've all dealt with breaking up. Perhaps you're in the midst of a breakup right now? And if you haven't yet broken up with anything then get prepared for the eventual guaranteed experience ;) I'm not just talking about the kind of breakup most of us are familiar with. You know, the significant other kind of break up. But rather I'm including ALL the breakups that can, and most likely will find their way into your life experience at one time or another. Those breakups can include: Breaking up with an employer, a particular career path, lover, family member, friend, idea or ideal, perspective, belief system, mandates, behavior pattern, relationships of all kinds, thought process, living situation, a place you've called home, etc... I can shorten the list by just saying breakups include all PEOPLE, PLACES and THINGS! And although many might call this more of a process of "letting go", I've recently realized that for me the breakup has to come before I can really begin to let go in any healthy manner ;) A few months ago I was back in my longtime homestate of Colorado, and it really washed over me that I have been in the process of breaking up with Colorado for a few years now., but for whatever reason I hadn't been able to see it from that perspective until this most recent visit. That being said, I have since been feeling a shift is taking place within and I'm now more able to embrace my new home, even though I've been here for 3 years now ;) Better late than never!  If any of this resonates with you then please take a listen and join me in breaking up with the people, places and things that are no longer serving us, so as to get on with the business of living a life untethered :)   Lifeline (988lifeline.org) Eagle Valley Hope Center: Your Hope Center: YOUR 24/7 SUPPORT LINE: (970) 306-4673 I LOVE Ebay!! I've had an online shop for over 15 years! My podcast is proudy sponsored by SHYGIRL'S SHOP :) | eBay Stores I'm always in the process of rebuilding my inventory :) 1 Million Strong - Supporting 1 Million People in Recovery High Country Infusion And Wellness : Ketamine Treatment In Frisco, CO My friend Alex introduced me to the world of podcasting and was the catalyst in my creating a podcast of my own! Below is his podast ;) The Builders Journey - A behind the scenes look at the Vail, Colorado and its surrounding communities through the eyes of a builder. My intro & outro music came from the endless archives of Pond5!! Are you interested in Pond5's incredible catalog of music, sounds and videos for your own podcast? Use my link for 20% off your first order!  https://www.pond5.com?ref=ashy743 Michael Singer 8 Week Course: Living From a Place of Surrender – Michael Singer Course Michael Singer Podcast - Sounds True Pema Chödrön Foundation – Wisdom for a Courageous Life https://www.dramapothecary.com/?sld=ashyisbadass https://www.everydaydose.com/ANGIESHY https://taspens.com/?ref=ANGELASHY https://wingedwellness.refr.cc/default/u/angieshy?s=esp&t=cp Interested in checking out some of the books I've mentioned in any of my episodes?   If so check out Audible or Amazon to find what your lookin' for :) AND feel free to use the links below to explore membership options available on Audible :) Try Audible Premium Plus and Get Up to Two Free Audiobookshttps://amzn.to/3JckYp5 https://www.amazon.com/hz/audible/mlp/membership/plus?ref_=assoc_tag_ph_1524216631897&_encoding=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=pf4&tag=jabberjaw777-20&linkId=a99e6a781d9a05447fc1965421e65c63 https://www.amazon.com/hz/audible/gift-membership-detail?tag=jabberjaw777-20&ref_=assoc_tag_ph_1524210806852&_encoding=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=pf4&linkId=684d5bd8bca7a06ed5c2816b57fd73d9 https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/hz/signup?ref_=assoc_tag_ph_1454291293420&_encoding=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=pf4&tag=jabberjaw777-20&linkId=0dfcda1f5ff3e45f2cb35569b0bd50db

FiringTheMan
How to Turn Your Message Into a Movement with Steve Werner

FiringTheMan

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 29, 2025 53:36 Transcription Available


What happens when you quit your bartending job, book the largest event space in Las Vegas, and only sell two tickets? For most, that would signal the end of an entrepreneurial journey—but for Steve Werner, it was just the beginning of a remarkable transformation from failure to seven-figure success.Steve pulls back the curtain on his journey from working seven days a week in a Vail ski town to building a thriving business helping entrepreneurs craft signature talks, high-converting offers, and emotionally resonant content. The turning point? A Tony Robbins event that forced him to confront the uncomfortable truth about where his life was heading if he continued on the same path.What sets Steve's story apart is his refreshing approach to failure. Rather than retreating after his disastrous first event, he developed a powerful methodology: "Take action, learn without emotion. Did this work? Did this not work? What can I learn from it?" By removing emotional attachment from his analysis, he could iterate rapidly, holding progressively more successful events and crossing the million-dollar mark within just three years.For e-commerce entrepreneurs struggling to create emotional connections with "ordinary" products, Steve offers two practical pathways: either align your brand with a meaningful cause (like TOMS Shoes) or incorporate authentic personal storytelling into your marketing. He emphasizes that everyone has a story worth telling—it's about finding the right angle that resonates with your audience.The conversation takes a fascinating turn when Steve reveals the dramatic shifts in the post-COVID event landscape. Virtual events have surged in popularity but suffer from abysmal attendance rates, while traditional conferences are struggling as consumers increasingly demand solutions to specific pain points rather than generalized content. This explains why even established events like Traffic and Conversion Summit are canceling shows that would have been considered successful by previous standards.Ready to transform your message into a movement? Steve's insights will help you build deeper connections with your audience while avoiding the pitfalls that derail most entrepreneurs. The question isn't whether you'll face obstacles—it's whether you'll have the mindset to turn those obstacles into opportunities.How to connect with Steve: Website: https://stevenphillipwerner.com/Steve.coffee.com Book a call with Steve: https://bookacall.reachingmillions.co/Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steven-phillip-werner/Podcast: Grow Your Impact, Income & Influence Podcast - [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/grow-your-impact-income-influence/id1532299107]Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stevenphillipwerner/Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SteveWernerStoriesFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/StevenPhillipWerner Support the show

レアジョブ英会話 Daily News Article Podcast
Independent US ski resorts get tech overhaul to futureproof their business

レアジョブ英会話 Daily News Article Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 29, 2025 1:59


Data and tech are helping ski resorts operate more efficiently. A New Hampshire mountain destination is using technology to analyze everything from how many ski runs its customers complete to the busiest time for selling hot dogs. The Black Mountain resort is owned by businessman Erik Mogensen. He calls it a “quintessential independent mountain.” But behind the scenes, the experience is now propelled by a high-tech system designed to increase efficiency at the state's oldest ski area. The company builds systems that put lift tickets sales, lesson reservations and equipment rentals online, while collecting detailed data to inform decisions like where to make more snow and how much. “When you don't have data to fall back on and you don't have a marketing plan to fall back on, you're just kind of, like, hoping that it snows one day. And hoping that it snows is not a business plan,” he says. So, his team crunches the numbers to monitor exactly what his customers are doing so they can adjust staffing and resources accordingly. “A lot of general managers will go out and look how many rows of cars are parked and that's kind of how they tell how busy they are. We really want to look at transactional data, down to the deepest level. When are people buying hot dogs and hamburgers, right? How do we staff the cafeteria and at what time?” he says. The entrepreneur is betting that technology will be a great "equalizer” with the larger players. “Vail and Alterra and the large operators, they can do a lot of things at scale that we can't. They can buy 20 snow cats at a time, ten chairlifts. Those type of things. We can't do that. But we're really nimble here at Black. We can decide to change the way we groom very quickly or change the way we open trails,” he says. This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for April 25, 2025 is: travail • truh-VAIL • noun Travail is a formal word, usually used in plural, that refers to a difficult experience or situation. // The book describes the political travails of the governor during her first year in office. See the entry > Examples: "Written by Samy Burch, the film [Coyote vs. Acme] follows the travails of the desert denizen who is tired of being slammed with Acme products as he tries to outsmart the Roadrunner. Coyote finally decides to hire a lawyer to take the Acme Corp. to court for product liability, such as faulty rocket skates and defective aerial bombs." — Meg James, The Los Angeles Times, 20 Mar. 2025 Did you know? Travail traces back to trepalium, a Late Latin word for an instrument of torture. We don't know exactly what a trepalium looked like, but the word's history gives us an idea. Trepalium comes from the Latin adjective tripalis, which means "having three stakes" (from tri-, meaning "three," and palus, meaning "stake"). Trepalium eventually led to the Anglo-French verb travailler, meaning "to torment" but also, more mildly, "to trouble" and "to journey." The Anglo-French noun travail was borrowed into English in the 13th century, along with another descendant of travailler, travel.

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast
Podcast #204: Hunter Mountain VP/GM Trent Poole

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 22, 2025 74:23


The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and to support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.WhoTrent Poole, Vice President and General Manager of Hunter Mountain, New YorkRecorded onMarch 19, 2025About Hunter MountainClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Vail ResortsLocated in: Hunter, New YorkYear founded: 1959Pass affiliations:* Epic Pass, Epic Local Pass – unlimited access* Epic Northeast Value Pass – unlimited access with holiday blackouts* Epic Northeast Midweek Pass – unlimited access with holiday and midweek blackouts* Epic Day Pass – All Resorts, 32 Resorts tiersClosest neighboring ski areas: Windham (:16), Belleayre (:35), Plattekill (:49)Base elevation: 1,600 feetSummit elevation: 3,200 feetVertical drop: 1,600 feetSkiable acres: 320Average annual snowfall: 120 inchesTrail count: 67 (25% beginner, 30% intermediate, 45% advanced)Lift count: 13 (3 six-packs, 1 high-speed quad, 2 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 2 doubles, 1 platter, 3 carpets)Why I interviewed himSki areas are like political issues. We all feel as though we need to have an opinion on them. This tends to be less a considered position than an adjective. Tariffs are _______. Killington is _______. It's a bullet to shoot when needed. Most of us aren't very good shots.Hunter tends to draw a particularly colorful basket of adjectives: crowded, crazy, frantic, dangerous, icy, frozen, confusing, wild. Hunter, to the weekend visitor, appears to be teetering at all times on the brink of collapse. So many skiers on the lifts, so many skiers in the liftlines, so many skiers on the trails, so many skiers in the parking lots, so many skiers in the lodge pounding shots and pints. Whether Hunter is a ski area with a bar attached or a bar with a ski area attached is debatable. The lodge stretches on and on and up and down in disorienting and disconnected wings, a Winchester Mansion of the mountains, stapled together over eons to foil the alien hordes (New Yorkers). The trails run in a splintered, counterintuitive maze, an impossible puzzle for the uninitiated. Lifts fly all over, 13 total, of all makes and sizes and vintage, but often it feels as though there is only one lift and that lift is the Kaatskill Flyer, an overwhelmed top-to-bottom six-pack that replaced an overwhelmed top-to-bottom high-speed quad on a line that feels as though it would be overwhelmed with a high-speed 85-pack. It is, in other words, exactly the kind of ski area you would expect to find two hours north of a 20-million-person megacity world famous for its blunt, abrasive, and bare-knuckled residents.That description of Hunter is accurate enough, but incomplete. Yes, skiing there can feel like riding a swinging wrecking ball through a tenement building. And I would probably suggest that as a family activity before I would recommend Hunter on, say, MLK Saturday. But Hunter is also a glorious hunk of ski history, a last-man-standing of the once-skiing-flush Catskills, a nature-bending prototype of a ski mountain built in a place that lacks both consistent natural snow and fall lines to ski on. It may be a corporate cog now, but the Hunter hammered into the mountains over nearly six decades was the dream and domain of the Slutsky family, many of whom still work for the ski area. And Hunter, on a midweek, when all those fast lifts are 10 times more capacity than you need, can be a dream. Fast up, fast down. And once you learn the trail network, the place unfolds like a picnic blanket: easy, comfortable, versatile, filled with delicious options (if occasionally covered with ants).There's no one good way to describe Hunter Mountain. It's different every day. All ski areas are different every day, but Hunter is, arguably, more more different along the spectrum of its extremes than just about any other ski area anywhere. You won't get it on your first visit. You will show up on the wrong day, at the wrong time, in the wrong parking lot, and the whole thing will feel like playing lasertag with hyenas. Alien hyenas. Who will for some reason all be wearing Jets jerseys. But if you push through for that second visit, you'll start to get it. Maybe. I promise. And you'll understand why one-adjective Hunter Mountain descriptions are about as useful as the average citizen's take on NATO.What we talked aboutSixty-five years of Hunter; a nice cold winter at last; big snowmaking upgrades; snowmaking on Annapurna and Westway; the Otis and Broadway lift upgrades; Broadway ripple effects on the F and Kaatskill Flyer lifts; supervising the installation of seven new lifts at three Vail Resorts over a two-year period; better liftline management; moving away from lettered lift names; what Otis means for H lift; whether the Hunter East mountaintop Poma could ever spin again; how much of Otis is re-used from the old Broadway lift; ski Ohio; landing at Vail Resorts pre-Epic Pass and watching the pass materialize and grow; taking over for a GM who had worked at Hunter for 44 years; understanding and appreciating Hunter madness; Hunter locals mixed with Vail Resorts; Hunter North and the potential for an additional base area; disappearing trailmap glades; expansion potential; a better ski connection to Hunter East; and Epic Local as Hunter's season pass.Questions I wish I'd askedI'd wanted to ask Poole about the legacy of the Slutzky family, given their founding role at Hunter. We just didn't have time. New York Ski Blog has a nice historical overview.I actually did ask Poole about D lift, the onetime triple-now-double parallel to Kaatskill Flyer, but we cut that segment in edit. A summary: the lift didn't run at all this past season, and Poole told me that, “we're keeping our options open,” when I asked him if D lift was a good candidate to be removed at some near-future point.Why now was a good time for this interviewThe better question is probably why I waited five-and-a-half years to feature the leader of the most prominent ski area in New York City's orbit on the podcast. Hunter was, after all, the first mountain I hit after moving to the city in 2002. But who does and does not appear on the podcast is grounded in timing more than anything. Vail announced its acquisition of Hunter parent company Peak Resorts just a couple of months before I launched The Storm, in 2019. No one, including me, really likes doing podcast interviews during transitions, which can be filled with optimism and energy, but also uncertainty and instability. The Covid asteroid then transformed what should have been a one-year transition period into more like a three-year transition period, which was followed by a leadership change at Hunter.But we're finally here. And, as it turns out, this was a pretty good time to arrive. Part of the perpetual Hunter mess tied back to the problem I alluded to above: the six-pack-Kaatskill-Flyer-as-alpha-lift muted the impact of the lesser contraptions around it. By dropping a second superlift right next door, Vail appears to have finally solved the problem of the Flyer's ever-exploding liftline.That's one part of the story, and the most obvious. But the snowmaking upgrades on key trails signal Hunter's intent to reclaim its trophy as Snow God of the New York Thruway. And the shuffling of lifts on Hunter East reconfigured the ski area's novice terrain into a more logical progression (true green-circle skiers, however, will be better off at nearby Belleayre, where the Lightning Quad serves an incredible pod of long and winding beginner runs).These 2024 improvements build on considerable upgrades from the Peak and Slutzky eras, including the 2018 Hunter North expansion and the massive learning center at Hunter East. If Hunter is to remain a cheap and accessible Epic Pass fishing net to funnel New Yorkers north to Stowe and west to Park City, even as neighboring Windham tilts ever more restrictive and expensive, then Vail is going to have to be creative and aggressive in how the mountain manages all those skiers. These upgrades are a promising start.Why you should ski Hunter MountainThink of a thing that is a version of a familiar thing but hits you like a completely different thing altogether. Like pine trees and palm trees are both trees, but when I first encountered the latter at age 19, they didn't feel like trees at all, but like someone's dream of a tree who'd had one described to them but had never actually seen one. Or horses and dolphins: both animals, right? But one you can ride like a little vehicle, and the other supposedly breathes air but lives beneath the sea plotting our extinction in a secret indecipherable language. Or New York-style pizza versus Domino's, which, as Midwest stock, I prefer, but which my locally born wife can only describe as “not pizza.”This is something like the experience you will have at Hunter Mountain if you show up knowing a good lot about ski areas, but not much about this ski area. Because if I had to make a list of ski areas similar to Hunter, it would include “that Gwar concert I attended at Harpos in Detroit when I was 18” and “a high-tide rescue scene in a lifeguard movie.” And then I would run out of ideas. Because there is no ski area anywhere remotely like Hunter Mountain.I mean that as spectacle, as a way to witness New York City's id manifest into corporeal form. Your Hunter Mountain Bingo card will include “Guy straightlining Racer's Edge with unzipped Starter jacket and backward baseball cap” and “Dude rocking short-sleeves in 15-degree weather.” The vibe is atomic and combustible, slightly intimidating but also riotously fun, like some snowy Woodstock:And then there's the skiing. I have never skied terrain like Hunter's. The trails swoop and dive and wheel around endless curves, as though carved into the Tower of Babel, an amazing amount of terrain slammed into an area that looks and feels constrained, like a bound haybale that, twine cut, explodes across your yard. Trails crisscross and split and dig around blind corners. None of it feels logical, but it all comes together somehow. Before the advent of Google Maps, I could not plot an accurate mental picture of how Hunter East, West, North, and whatever the hell they call the front part sat in relation to one another and formed a coherent single entity.I don't always like being at Hunter. And yet I've skied there more than I've skied just about anywhere. And not just because it's close. It's certainly not cheap, and the road in from the Thruway is a real pain in the ass. But they reliably spin the lifts from November to April, and fast lifts on respectable vert can add up quick. And the upside of crazy? Everyone is welcome.Podcast NotesOn Hunter's lift upgradesHunter orchestrated a massive offseason lift upgrade last year, moving the old Broadway (B) lift over to Hunter East, where the mountain demolished a 1968 Hall Double named “E,” and planted its third six-pack on a longer Broadway line. Check the old lines versus the new ones:On six-packs in New York StateNew York is home to more ski areas than any other state, but only eight of them run high-speed lifts, and only three host six-packs: Holiday Valley has one, Windham, next door to Hunter, has another, and Hunter owns the other three.On five new lifts at Jack Frost Big BoulderPart of Vail Resorts' massive 2022 lift upgrades was to replace eight old chairlifts at Jack Frost and Big Boulder with five modern fixed-grip quads.At Jack Frost, Paradise replaced the E and F doubles; Tobyhanna replaced the B and C triples; and Pocono replaced the E and F doubles:Over at Big Boulder, the Merry Widow I and II double-doubles made way for the Harmony quad. Vail also demolished the parallel Black Forest double, which had not run in a number of years. Blue Heron replaced an area once served by the Little Boulder double and Edelweiss Triple – check the side-by-side with Big Boulder's 2008 trailmap:Standing up so many lifts in such a short time is rare, but we do have other examples:* In 1998, Intrawest tore down up to a dozen legacy lifts and replaced them with five new ones: two high-speed quads, two fixed-grip quads, and the Cabriolet bucket lift (basically a standing gondola). A full discussion on that here.* American Skiing Company installed at least four chairlifts at Sugarbush in the summer of 1995, including the Slide Brook Express, a two-mile-long lift connection between its two mountains. More here.* Powder Mountain installed four chairlifts last summer.* Deer Valley built five chairlifts last summer, including a bubble six-pack, and is constructing eight more lifts this year.On Mad River Mountain, OhioMad River is about as prototypical a Midwest ski area as you can imagine: 300 vertical feet, 144 acres, 36 inches of average annual snowfall, and an amazing (for that size) nine ski lifts shooting all over the place:On Vail Resorts' acquisition timelineHunter is one of 17 U.S. ski areas that Vail purchased as part of its 2019 acquisition of Peak Resorts.On Hunter's 2018 expansionWhen Peak opened the Hunter West expansion for the 2018-19 ski season, a number of new glades appeared on the map:Most of those glades disappeared from the map. Why? We discuss.On Epic Pass accessHunter sits on the same unlimited Epic Local Pass tier as Okemo, Mount Snow, Breckenridge, Keystone, Crested Butte, and Stevens Pass. Here's an Epic Pass overview:You can also ski Hunter on the uber-cheap 32 Resorts version of the Epic Day Pass:The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

The Steep Stuff Podcast
#92 - Sophie Wright - 2025 Trail Team Elite Selection

The Steep Stuff Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 22, 2025 33:14 Transcription Available


Send us a textSophie Wright is a name you need to know in the American mountain running scene. Fresh off completing her collegiate career at Western Washington University—where she holds the school record in the mile—this Alaskan-born trail runner is ready to make waves on the professional circuit as a 2025 Trail Team Selection athlete.Growing up in Palmer, Alaska provided Sophie with the perfect training environment. Surrounded by Hatcher Pass, Pioneer Peak, and Lazy Mountain, she developed technical skills on some of the most challenging terrain North America has to offer. The tight-knit Alaskan mountain running community, featuring inspirational figures like Denali Foldager-Strabel and Christy Marvin, helped shape Sophie into the competitor she is today.Sophie's racing resume already impresses with accolades including the 2022 Cirque Series Alyeska championship and top-five finishes at the iconic Mount Marathon race. Now, with her collegiate career behind her, she's focusing entirely on mountain running with ambitious goals for 2025, including making the U.S. Mountain Running Team at the Sunapee Mountain Race and competing in prestigious events like the GoPro Games in Vail.What makes Sophie particularly dangerous is her versatility. She combines elite track speed with technical mountain skills, excelling on uphill sections while actively working to improve her downhill capabilities. Her self-described 9/10 competitiveness extends beyond running into everyday life, fueling her drive to succeed at the highest levels of the sport.As Sophie relocates to Colorado for summer training and joins the 2025 Trail Team under coach Andy Wacker, she represents an exciting new generation of American mountain runners poised to make an impact on the international stage. Follow her journey this season as she transitions from collegiate track star to professional mountain running talent—this is just the beginning for Sophie Wright.This episode was brought to you by Ultimate Direction use code steepstuffpod for 25% off your next purchase !Follow Sophie on IG - @wrightsophie_Follow James on IG - @jameslaurielloFollow The Steep Stuff on IG - @steepstuff_pod

First Chair: PSIA-AASI Podcast
Episode 751: National Team Member Lyndsey Stevens Talks Spring Riding, Team Tryouts, and Interski

First Chair: PSIA-AASI Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 15, 2025 13:46


In this episode, George Thomas catches up with PSIA-AASI Snowboard Team member Lyndsey Stevens. They chat about the shift into spring riding, exam season, and what it's like to go through National Team tryouts—not once, but twice. Lyndsey shares her perspective on coaching at Rider Rally, prepping for an adaptive exam, and her excitement about Interski 2027 coming to her home mountain, Vail. A great listen for anyone passionate about snowsports and professional growth.

The Powell Movement Action Sports Podcast
TPM Episode 430: Stuart Rempel, Salomon, Olin, K2, Whistler

The Powell Movement Action Sports Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 14, 2025 62:56


Stuart Rempel has one of those resumes. If you look at it, you know that he has lived an incredible life, and it all started with a ski bum mentality. Stuart went from pounding nails and skiing winters to running Salomon NA, Olin, K2 Skis, and Whistler. Most people at that level have a few degrees and plenty of suits. That's not Stuart, though. Throughout his career, he made it a priority to be on snow as much as possible, and the beta he gathered from the hill was used to make skiing better.  It's another great business episode with an important person in the hardgoods and resort world, and Stuart's legendary neighbor, Mike Douglas, asks the Inappropriate Questions.   Stuart Rempel Show Notes: 4:00:  His streak, growing up in Kamloops, skiing, working construction to ski, going to the ski show, getting into the biz at the bottom, the traveling RV sample room, Salomon Rep,  the boot launch, and being a subsidiary 20:00:  Stanley:  The brand that invented the category! Only the best for Powell Movement listeners.  Check out Stanley1913.com   Best Day Brewing:  All of the flavor of your favorite IPA or Kolsch, without the alcohol, the calories, or the sugar. 22:00:  Working with French Salomon Team, launching the skis, Olin Skis, sharing technology, Smooth Johnson, K2, Your Mamas a Mountain campaign, internet sales and Intrawest 40:00:   Elan Skis:  Over 75 years of innovation that makes you better. Outdoor Research:  Click here for 25% off Outdoor Research products (not valid on sale items or pro products) 42:30:  The early Whistler vibe, using the weather to market the mountain, the energy of Whistler, does Vail change that energy   60:00:  Expensive taste, not making the 2018 Olympic team, bad teammates, not going to his last Olympic because of injury Palmer and Nate Holland  54:00:  Inappropriate Questions with Mike Douglas

Vetted: The UFO Sleuth
Chris Mellon Drops BOMBSHELLS in New UFO Presentation at Vail Symposium

Vetted: The UFO Sleuth

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 14, 2025 18:34


The Coaching Equation
FFF 020: Bagel Shop Lessons, The Power of Influence, Calculating Opportunity Cost

The Coaching Equation

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 11, 2025 15:03


Episode Highlights[00:00] Bagel Shop Lessons in Customer Service Ryan shares a frustrating Friday morning tradition gone wrong—and explains how one small apology can change the course of your customer's loyalty.[05:35] Influence Is the Ultimate Skill Why influence is the one skill every entrepreneur should master—and why you should never fully offload sales or marketing as a founder.[09:18] Aligning Outcomes with Your Team A misalignment during a meeting sparks a lesson on clarity: when setting initiatives, make sure everyone knows exactly what success looks like from the start.[13:37] Calculating Opportunity Cost in Business Decisions A $21K investment leads to a bigger question: how much is not investing in speed actually costing you?[18:33] The Power of Community (and a Personal Invite) After attending two powerful mastermind events, Ryan reflects on the energy and expansion that come from being in the right room—and invites listeners to the June event in Vail, CO.

The Maximum Lawyer Podcast
How to Build a Network That Fuels Your Firm with Alycia Vail Taylor

The Maximum Lawyer Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 8, 2025 74:54


Watch the YouTube version of this episode HERE.Are you a lawyer who is looking for advice on starting a firm? In this insightful episode of the Maximum Lawyer podcast, Tyson engages in a discussion with Alycia Vail Taylor, founder of the law firm, Avail. Alycia shares her journey and innovative strategies for standing out in the crowded legal marketplace. Alycia shares some misconceptions of working in the legal field. One of them is that lawyers are greedy and only want to work to make money. But, for Alycia she came to the realization that it is possible and sometimes needed to be accessible to your clients to ensure they get the support they need during stressful times. This could be monetary or adjusting your working style. Alycia embeds community and service into her firm's mission to ensure those in her community can make connections and network for other services.Alycia and Tyson chat about marketing across different legal practices. Marketing for different practice areas can be tough and very time consuming to ensure you are reaching a wide range of people. It does involve utilizing multiple social media platforms to reach different audiences. Since Alycia has a community based model, it helps to get the word out there through community partners on what the firm offers.Take a listen to learn more!05:30 Advice for Law Students14:45 Revenue Generation for Law Firms 16:07 Potential Subscription Model for Clients 22:09 Health and Wellness Importance26:08 Virtual Firm Services 35:10 Marketing for Multiple Practice Areas 45:25 Managing a Law FirmTune in to today's episode and checkout the full show notes here. Connect with Alycia:Website  Website Instagram  Facebook Linkedin  Youtube TikTok 

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast
Podcast #203: Silver Mountain General Manager Jeff Colburn

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 8, 2025 59:31


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

The Operatory Podcast by Upgrade Dental
Aimee Vail, RDH, MHA/Ed Explains What You Might Not Know About the Minimally Invasive Dentistry Movement

The Operatory Podcast by Upgrade Dental

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 8, 2025 17:27


Just as advances in technology are moving the practice of dentistry forward, so advances in clinical care are making a huge impact in the quality of care patients today receive. And sometimes, more advanced clinical care means going back to deceptively simple basics. The dynamic Aimee Vail, RDH, MHA/Ed and Special Markets Manager for Centrix joined me in the Toothapps® booth at the 2025 Chicago Midwinter Meeting to record this lively interview for The Patient First Podcast. In this episode, we talk about what she has been doing to help make more patients and providers aware of the benefits of minimally invasive dentistry and some modalities that can lower caries risk. I'm Dr. Bryan Laskin—author, entrepreneur and dentist who supports all initiatives that make dentistry easier, faster, more comfortable and more accessible for more people. Connect with Aimee Vail on LinkedIn Explore preventive dental solutions: CentrixDental.com 

movement vail rdh minimally invasive dentistry
The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast
Podcast #202: Jiminy Peak GM & Fairbank Group CEO Tyler Fairbank

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 7, 2025 80:13


The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and to support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.WhoTyler Fairbank, General Manager of Jiminy Peak, Massachusetts and CEO of Fairbank GroupRecorded onFebruary 10, 2025 and March 7, 2025About Fairbank GroupFrom their website:The Fairbank Group is driven to build things to last – not only our businesses but the relationships and partnerships that stand behind them. Since 2008, we have been expanding our eclectic portfolio of businesses. This portfolio includes three resorts—Jiminy Peak Mountain Resort, Cranmore Mountain Resort, and Bromley Mountain Ski Resort—and real estate development at all three resorts, in addition to a renewable energy development company, EOS Ventures, and a technology company, Snowgun Technology.About Jiminy PeakClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Fairbank Group, which also owns Cranmore and operates Bromley (see breakdowns below)Located in: Hancock, MassachusettsYear founded: 1948Pass affiliations:* Ikon Pass: 2 days, with blackouts* Uphill New EnglandClosest neighboring ski areas: Bousquet (:27), Catamount (:49), Butternut (:51), Otis Ridge (:54), Berkshire East (:58), Willard (1:02)Base elevation: 1,230 feetSummit elevation: 2,380 feetVertical drop: 1,150 feetSkiable acres: 167.4Average annual snowfall: 100 inchesTrail count: 42Lift count: 9 (1 six-pack, 2 fixed-grip quads, 3 triples, 1 double, 2 carpets – view Lift Blog's inventory of Jiminy Peak's lift fleet)About CranmoreClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: The Fairbank GroupLocated in: North Conway, New HampshireYear founded: 1937Pass affiliations: * Ikon Pass: 2 days, with blackouts* Uphill New EnglandClosest neighboring ski areas: Attitash (:16), Black Mountain (:18), King Pine (:28), Wildcat (:28), Pleasant Mountain (:33), Bretton Woods (:42)Base elevation: 800 feetSummit elevation: 2,000 feetVertical drop: 1,200 feetSkiable Acres: 170 Average annual snowfall: 80 inchesTrail count: 56 (15 most difficult, 25 intermediate, 16 easier)Lift count: 7 (1 high-speed quad, 1 fixed-grip quad, 2 triples, 1 double, 2 carpets – view Lift Blog's inventory of Cranmore's lift fleet)About BromleyClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: The estate of Joseph O'DonnellOperated by: The Fairbank GroupPass affiliations: Uphill New EnglandLocated in: Peru, VermontClosest neighboring ski areas: Magic Mountain (14 minutes), Stratton (19 minutes)Base elevation: 1,950 feetSummit elevation: 3,284 feetVertical drop: 1,334 feetSkiable Acres: 300Average annual snowfall: 145 inchesTrail count: 47 (31% black, 37% intermediate, 32% beginner)Lift count: 9 (1 high-speed quad, 1 fixed-grip quad, 4 doubles, 1 T-bar, 2 carpets - view Lift Blog's of inventory of Bromley's lift fleet)Why I interviewed himI don't particularly enjoy riding six-passenger chairlifts. Too many people, up to five of whom are not me. Lacking a competent queue-management squad, chairs rise in loads of twos and threes above swarming lift mazes. If you're skiing the West, lowering the bar is practically an act of war. It's all so tedious. Given the option – Hunter, Winter Park, Camelback – I'll hop the parallel two-seater just to avoid the drama.I don't like six-packs, but I sure am impressed by them. Sixers are the chairlift equivalent of a two-story Escalade, or a house with its own private Taco Bell, or a 14-lane expressway. Like damn there's some cash floating around this joint.Sixers are common these days: America is home to 107 of them. But that wasn't always so. Thirty-two of these lifts came online in just the past three years. Boyne Mountain, Michigan built the first American six-pack in 1992, and for three years, it was the only such lift in the nation (and don't think they didn't spend every second reminding us of it). The next sixer rose at Stratton, in 1995, but 18 of the next 19 were built in the West. In 2000, Jiminy Peak demolished a Riblet double and dropped the Berkshire Express in its place.For 26 years, Jiminy Peak has owned the only sixer in the State of Massachusetts (Wachusett will build the second this summer). Even as they multiply, the six-pack remains a potent small-mountain status symbol: Vail owns 31 or them, Alterra 30. Only 10 independents spin one. Sixers are expensive to build, expensive to maintain, difficult to manage. To build such a machine is to declare: we are different, we can handle this, this belongs here and so does your money.Sixty years ago, Jiminy Peak was a rump among a hundred poking out of the Berkshires. It would have been impossible to tell, in 1965, which among these many would succeed. Plenty of good ski areas failed since. Jiminy is among the last mountains standing, a survival-of-the-fittest tale punctuated, at the turn of the century, by the erecting of a super lift that was impossible to look away from. That neighboring Brodie, taller and equal-ish in size to Jiminy, shuttered permanently two years later, after a 62-year run as a New England staple, was probably not a coincidence (yes, I'm aware that the Fairbanks themselves bought and closed Brodie). Jiminy had planted its 2,800-skier-per-hour flag on the block, and everyone noticed and no one could compete.The Berkshire Express is not the only reason Jiminy Peak thrives in a 21st century New England ski scene defined by big companies, big passes, and big crowds. But it's the best single emblem of a keep-moving philosophy that, over many decades, transformed a rust-bucket ski area into a glimmering ski resort. That meant snowmaking before snowmaking was cool, building places to stay on the mountain in a region of day-drivers, propping a wind turbine on the ridge to offset dependence on the energy grid.Non-ski media are determined to describe America's lift-served skiing evolution in terms of climate change, pointing to the shrinking number of ski areas since the era when any farmer with a backyard haystack and a spare tractor engine could run skiers uphill for a nickel. But this is a lazy narrative (America offers a lot more skiing now than it did 30 years ago). Most American ski areas – perhaps none – have failed explicitly because of climate change. At least not yet. Most failed because running a ski area is hard and most people are bad at it. Jiminy, once surrounded by competitors, now stands alone. Why? That's what the world needs to understand.What we talked aboutThe impact of Cranmore's new Fairbank Lodge; analyzing Jiminy's village-building past to consider Cranmore's future; Bromley post-Joe O'Donnell (RIP); Joe's legacy – “just an incredible person, great guy”; taking the long view; growing up at Jiminy Peak in the wild 1970s; Brian Fairbank's legacy building Jiminy Peak – with him, “anything is possible”; how Tyler ended up leading the company when he at one time had “no intention of coming back into the ski business”; growing Fairbank Group around Jiminy; surviving and recovering from a stroke – “I had this thing growing in me my entire life that I didn't realize”; carrying on the family legacy; why Jiminy and Cranmore joined the Ikon Pass as two-day partners, and whether either mountain could join as full partners; why Bromley didn't join Ikon; the importance of New York City to Jiminy Peak and Boston to Cranmore; why the ski areas won't be direct-to-lift with Ikon right away; are the Fairbank resorts for sale?; would Fairbank buy more?; the competitive advantage of on-mountain lodging; potential Jiminy lift upgrades; why the Berkshire Express sixer doesn't need an upgrade of the sort that Cranmore and Bromley's high-speed quads received; why Jiminy runs a fixed-grip triple parallel to its high-speed six; where the mountain's next high-speed lift could run; and Jiminy Peak expansion potential.What I got wrong* I said that I didn't know which year Jiminy Peak installed their wind turbine – it was 2007. Berkshire East built its machine in 2010 and activated it in 2011.* When we recorded the Ikon addendum, Cranmore and Jiminy Peak had not yet offered any sort of Ikon Pass discount to their passholders, but Tyler promised details were coming. Passholders can now find offers for a discounted ($229) three-day Ikon Session pass on either ski area's website.Why now was a good time for this interviewFor all the Fairbanks' vision in growing Jiminy from tumbleweed into redwood, sprinting ahead on snowmaking and chairlifts and energy, the company has been slow to acknowledge the largest shift in the consumer-to-resort pipeline this century: the shift to multi-mountain passes. Even their own three mountains share just one day each for sister resort passholders.That's not the same thing as saying they've been wrong to sit and wait. But it's interesting. Why has this company that's been so far ahead for so long been so reluctant to take part in what looks to be a permanent re-ordering of the industry? And why have they continued to succeed in spite of this no-thanks posture?Or so my thinking went when Tyler and I scheduled this podcast a couple of months ago. Then Jiminy, along with sister resort Cranmore, joined the Ikon Pass. Yes, just as a two-day partner in what Alterra is labeling a “bonus” tier, and only on the full Ikon Pass, and with blackout dates. But let's be clear about this: Jiminy Peak and Cranmore joined the Ikon Pass.Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), for me and my Pangea-paced editing process, we'd recorded the bulk of this conversation several weeks before the Ikon announcement. So we recorded a post-Ikon addendum, which explains the mid-podcast wardrobe change.It will be fascinating to observe, over the next decade, how the remaining holdouts manage themselves in the Epkon-atronic world that is not going away. Will big indies such as Jackson Hole and Alta eventually eject the pass masses as a sort of high-class differentiator? Will large regional standouts like Whitefish and Bretton Woods and Baker and Wolf Creek continue to stand alone in a churning sea of joiners? Or will some economic cataclysm force a re-ordering of the companies piloting these warships, splintering them into woodchips and resetting us back to some version of 1995, where just about every ski area was its own ski area doing battle against every other ski area?I have guesses, but no answers, and no power to do anything, really, other than to watch and ask questions of the Jiminy Peaks of the world as they decide where they fit, and how, and when, into this bizarre and rapidly changing lift-served skiing world that we're all gliding through.Why you should ski Jiminy PeakThere are several versions of each ski area. The trailmap version, cartoonish and exaggerated, designed to be evocative as well as practical, a guide to reality that must bend it to help us understand it. There's the Google Maps version, which straightens out the trailmap but ditches the order and context – it is often difficult to tell, from satellite view, which end of the hill is the top or the bottom, where the lifts run, whether you can walk to the lifts from the parking lot or need to shuttlebus it. There is the oral version, the one you hear from fellow chairlift riders at other resorts, describing their home mountain or an epic day or a secret trail, a vibe or a custom, the thing that makes the place a thing.But the only version of a ski area that matters, in the end, is the lived one. And no amount of research or speculation or YouTube-Insta vibing can equal that. Each mountain is what each mountain is. Determining why they are that way and how that came to be is about 80 percent of why I started this newsletter. And the best mountains, I've found, after skiing hundreds of them, are the ones that surprise you.On paper, Jiminy Peak does not look that interesting: a broad ridge, flat across, a bunch of parallel lifts and runs, a lot of too-wide-and-straight-down. But this is not how it skis. Break left off the sixer and it's go-forever, line after line dropping steeply off a ridge. Down there, somewhere, the Widow White's lift, a doorway to a mini ski area all its own, shooting off, like Supreme at Alta, into a twisting little realm with the long flat runout. Go right off the six-pack and skiers find something else, a ski area from a different time, a trunk trail wrapping gently above a maze of twisting, tangled snow-streets, dozens of potential routes unfolding, gentle but interesting, long enough to inspire a sense of quest and journey.This is not the mountain for everyone. I wish Jiminy had more glades, that they would spin more lifts more often as an alternative to Six-Pack City. But we have Berkshire East for cowboy skiing. Jiminy, an Albany backyarder that considers itself worthy of a $1,051 adult season pass, is aiming for something more buffed and burnished than a typical high-volume city bump. Jiminy doesn't want to be Mountain Creek, NYC's hedonistic free-for-all, or Wachusett, Boston's high-volume, low-cost burner. It's aiming for a little more resort, a little more country club, a little more it-costs-what-it-costs sorry-not-sorry attitude (with a side of swarming kids).Podcast NotesOn other Fairbank Group podcastsOn Joe O'DonnellA 2005 Harvard Business School profile of O'Donnell, who passed away on Jan. 7, 2024 at age 79, gives a nice overview of his character and career:When Joe O'Donnell talks, people listen. Last spring, one magazine ranked him the most powerful person in Boston-head of a privately held, billion-dollar company he built practically from scratch; friend and advisor to politicians of both parties, from Boston's Democratic Mayor Tom Menino to the Bay State's Republican Governor Mitt Romney (MBA '74); member of Harvard's Board of Overseers; and benefactor to many good causes. Not bad for a "cop's kid" who grew up nearby in the blue-collar city of Everett.Read the rest…On Joe O'Donnell “probably owning more ski areas than anyone alive”I wasn't aware of the extent of Joe O'Donnell's deep legacy of ski area ownership, but New England Ski History documents his stints as at least part owner of Magic Mountain VT, Timber Ridge (now defunct, next-door to and still skiable from Magic), Jiminy, Mt. Tom (defunct), and Brodie (also lost). He also served Sugar Mountain, North Carolina as a vendor for years.On stroke survivalKnow how to BE FAST by spending five second staring at this:More, from the CDC.On Jiminy joining the Ikon PassI covered this extensively here:The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

The Mountain Side
#213 Meghan Buchanan - Mountaineer Adventure Athlete & Aerospace Engineer

The Mountain Side

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 5, 2025 131:50


Meghan Buchanan - mountaineer, adventure athlete, and advocate for neurodivergence, & aerospace engineer. Meghan has successfully summited the Seven Summits—the highest peaks on each continent—including Mount Everest and Antarctica's Mount Vinson. She is also close to completing the Explorers Grand Slam, which entails reaching both the North and South Poles in addition to the Seven Summits. As an advocate for neurodivergence, Meghan openly shares her experiences with dyslexia, inspiring others to embrace their unique challenges. She developed the GGRIT philosophy—Gratitude, Growth, Resilience, Integrity, and Tenacity—which she embodies in her pursuits and promotes through motivational speaking engagements. In 2024, Meghan expanded her reach by joining the cast of Netflix's “Outlast” Season 2, a survival competition set in the Alaskan Arctic that tests contestants' physical endurance, mental fortitude, and teamwork skills. Her participation showcased her resilience and adventurous spirit to a broader audience. Meghan at a young age was diagnosed with dyslexia, and faced significant academic challenges. Her mother instilled in her a philosophy of perseverance, emphasizing that with hard work, she could achieve anything. This mindset propelled Meghan to earn an undergraduate degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Colorado Boulder and a master's degree in engineering management, leading to a successful career with prominent companies such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Beyond her engineering achievements, Meghan is a dedicated adventure athlete. Her passion for the outdoors began in childhood, hiking with her father. In 2011, she suffered a severe snowboarding accident in Vail's Sunup Bowl, breaking her left femur and enduring a challenging 19-month recovery. Defying medical expectations, she not only regained her mobility but also pursued mountaineering with renewed determination. Through her multifaceted career and personal endeavors, Meghan Buchanan continues to inspire and empower individuals worldwide, demonstrating that with determination and GGRIT, any obstacle can be overcome. Tune in as Meghan Buchanan joins Bobby Marshall in studio to discuss mountaineering, impacts to the environment, public lands, Mt. Everest, neurodivergence, would travels, culture, mountain life, and so much more. Please subscribe or like us on social media platforms for updates on shows, events, and episode drops.www.TheMountainSidePodcast.comAffiliates LinksSponsor Linkswww.BulletProof.comMountain Side listeners Use Discounts code: MOUNTAINSIDE to receive 20% off all Bulletproof products!www.Knicpouches.comMountain Side listeners Use Discounts code: MOUNTAINSIDE15 to receive 15% off all K-Nic products!www.ONNIT.comMountain Side listeners use Discount code TMS to receive 10% off ONNIT products!

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast
Podcast #201: 'The Ski Podcast' Host Iain Martin

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 22, 2025 65:17


For a limited time, upgrade to ‘The Storm's' paid tier for $5 per month or $55 per year. You'll also receive a free year of Slopes Premium, a $29.99 value - valid for annual subscriptions only. Monthly subscriptions do not qualify for free Slopes promotion. Valid for new subscriptions only.WhoIain Martin, Host of The Ski PodcastRecorded onJanuary 30, 2025About The Ski PodcastFrom the show's website:Want to [know] more about the world of skiing? The Ski Podcast is a UK-based podcast hosted by Iain Martin.With different guests every episode, we cover all aspects of skiing and snowboarding from resorts to racing, Ski Sunday to slush.In 2021, we were voted ‘Best Wintersports Podcast‘ in the Sports Podcast Awards. In 2023, we were shortlisted as ‘Best Broadcast Programme' in the Travel Media Awards.Why I interviewed himWe did a swap. Iain hosted me on his show in January (I also hosted Iain in January, but since The Storm sometimes moves at the pace of mammal gestation, here we are at the end of March; Martin published our episode the day after we recorded it).But that's OK (according to me), because our conversation is evergreen. Martin is embedded in EuroSki the same way that I cycle around U.S. AmeriSki. That we wander from similarly improbable non-ski outposts – Brighton, England and NYC – is a funny coincidence. But what interested me most about a potential podcast conversation is the Encyclopedia EuroSkiTannica stored in Martin's brain.I don't understand skiing in Europe. It is too big, too rambling, too interconnected, too above-treeline, too transit-oriented, too affordable, too absent the Brobot ‘tude that poisons so much of the American ski experience. The fact that some French idiot is facing potential jail time for launching a snowball into a random grandfather's skull (filming the act and posting it on TikTok, of course) only underscores my point: in America, we would cancel the grandfather for not respecting the struggle so obvious in the boy's act of disobedience. In a weird twist for a ski writer, I am much more familiar with summer Europe than winter Europe. I've skied the continent a couple of times, but warm-weather cross-continental EuroTreks by train and by car have occupied months of my life. When I try to understand EuroSki, my brain short-circuits. I tease the Euros because each European ski area seems to contain between two and 27 distinct ski areas, because the trail markings are the wrong color, because they speak in the strange code of the “km” and “cm” - but I'm really making fun of myself for Not Getting It. Martin gets it. And he good-naturedly walks me through a series of questions that follow this same basic pattern: “In America, we charge $109 for a hamburger that tastes like it's been pulled out of a shipping container that went overboard in 1944. But I hear you have good and cheap food in Europe – true?” I don't mind sounding like a d*****s if the result is good information for all of us, and thankfully I achieved both of those things on this podcast.What we talked aboutThe European winter so far; how a UK-based skier moves back and forth to the Alps; easy car-free travel from the U.S. directly to Alps ski areas; is ski traffic a thing in Europe?; EuroSki 101; what does “ski area” mean in Europe; Euro snow pockets; climate change realities versus media narratives in Europe; what to make of ski areas closing around the Alps; snowmaking in Europe; comparing the Euro stereotype of the leisurely skier to reality; an aging skier population; Euro liftline queuing etiquette and how it mirrors a nation's driving culture; “the idea that you wouldn't bring the bar down is completely alien to me; I mean everybody brings the bar down on the chairlift”; why an Epic or Ikon Pass may not be your best option to ski in Europe; why lift ticket prices are so much cheaper in Europe than in the U.S.; Most consumers “are not even aware” that Vail has started purchasing Swiss resorts; ownership structure at Euro resorts; Vail to buy Verbier?; multimountain pass options in Europe; are Euros buying Epic and Ikon to ski locally or to travel to North America?; must-ski European ski areas; Euro ski-guide culture; and quirky ski areas.What I got wrongWe discussed Epic Pass' lodging requirement for Verbier, which is in effect for this winter, but which Vail removed for the 2025-26 ski season.Why now was a good time for this interviewI present to you, again, the EuroSki Chart – a list of all 26 European ski areas that have aligned themselves with a U.S.-based multi-mountain pass:The large majority of these have joined Ski NATO (a joke, not a political take Brah), in the past five years. And while purchasing a U.S. megapass is not necessary to access EuroHills in the same way it is to ski the Rockies – doing so may, in fact, be counterproductive – just the notion of having access to these Connecticut-sized ski areas via a pass that you're buying anyway is enough to get people considering a flight east for their turns.And you know what? They should. At this point, a mass abandonment of the Mountain West by the tourists that sustain it is the only thing that may drive the region to seriously reconsider the robbery-by-you-showed-up-here-all-stupid lift ticket prices, car-centric transit infrastructure, and sclerotic building policies that are making American mountain towns impossibly expensive and inconvenient to live in or to visit. In many cases, a EuroSkiTrip costs far less than an AmeriSki trip - especially if you're not the sort to buy a ski pass in March 2025 so that you can ski in February 2026. And though the flights will generally cost more, the logistics of airport-to-ski-resort-and-back generally make more sense. In Europe they have trains. In Europe those trains stop in villages where you can walk to your hotel and then walk to the lifts the next morning. In Europe you can walk up to the ticket window and trade a block of cheese for a lift ticket. In Europe they put the bar down. In Europe a sandwich, brownie, and a Coke doesn't cost $152. And while you can spend $152 on a EuroLunch, it probably means that you drank seven liters of wine and will need a sled evac to the village.“Oh so why don't you just go live there then if it's so perfect?”Shut up, Reductive Argument Bro. Everyplace is great and also sucks in its own special way. I'm just throwing around contrasts.There are plenty of things I don't like about EuroSki: the emphasis on pistes, the emphasis on trams, the often curt and indifferent employees, the “injury insurance” that would require a special session of the European Union to pay out a claim. And the lack of trees. Especially the lack of trees. But more families are opting for a week in Europe over the $25,000 Experience of a Lifetime in the American West, and I totally understand why.A quote often attributed to Winston Churchill reads, “You can always trust the Americans to do the right thing, after they have exhausted all the alternatives.” Unfortunately, it appears to be apocryphal. But I wish it wasn't. Because it's true. And I do think we'll eventually figure out that there is a continent-wide case study in how to retrofit our mountain towns for a more cost- and transit-accessible version of lift-served skiing. But it's gonna take a while.Podcast NotesOn U.S. ski areas opening this winter that haven't done so “in a long time”A strong snow year has allowed at least 11 U.S. ski areas to open after missing one or several winters, including:* Cloudmont, Alabama (yes I'm serious)* Pinnacle, Maine* Covington and Sault Seal, ropetows outfit in Michigan's Upper Peninsula* Norway Mountain, Michigan – resurrected by new owner after multi-year closure* Tower Mountain, a ropetow bump in Michigan's Lower Peninsula* Bear Paw, Montana* Hatley Pointe, North Carolina opened under new ownership, who took last year off to gut-renovate the hill* Warner Canyon, Oregon, an all-natural-snow, volunteer-run outfit, opened in December after a poor 2023-24 snow year.* Bellows Falls ski tow, a molehill run by the Rockingham Recreation in Vermont, opened for the first time in five years after a series of snowy weeks across New England* Lyndon Outing Club, another volunteer-run ropetow operation in Vermont, sat out last winter with low snow but opened this yearOn the “subway map” of transit-accessible Euro skiingI mean this is just incredible:The map lives on Martin's Ski Flight Free site, which encourages skiers to reduce their carbon footprints. I am not good at doing this, largely because such a notion is a fantasy in America as presently constructed.But just imagine a similar system in America. The nation is huge, of course, and we're not building a functional transcontinental passenger railroad overnight (or maybe ever). But there are several areas of regional density where such networks could, at a minimum, connect airports or city centers with destination ski areas, including:* Reno Airport (from the east), and the San Francisco Bay area (to the west) to the ring of more than a dozen Tahoe resorts (or at least stops at lake- or interstate-adjacent Sugar Bowl, Palisades, Homewood, Northstar, Mt. Rose, Diamond Peak, and Heavenly)* Denver Union Station and Denver airport to Loveland, Keystone, Breck, Copper, Vail, Beaver Creek, and - a stretch - Aspen and Steamboat, with bus connections to A-Basin, Ski Cooper, and Sunlight* SLC airport east to Snowbird, Alta, Solitude, Brighton, Park City, and Deer Valley, and north to Snowbasin and Powder Mountain* Penn Station in Manhattan up along Vermont's Green Mountain Spine: Mount Snow, Stratton, Bromley, Killington, Pico, Sugarbush, Mad River Glen, Bolton Valley, Stowe, Smugglers' Notch, Jay Peak, with bus connections to Magic and Middlebury Snowbowl* Boston up the I-93 corridor: Tenney, Waterville Valley, Loon, Cannon, and Bretton Woods, with a spur to Conway and Cranmore, Attitash, Wildcat, and Sunday River; bus connections to Black New Hampshire, Sunapee, Gunstock, Ragged, and Mount AbramYes, there's the train from Denver to Winter Park (and ambitions to extend the line to Steamboat), which is terrific, but placing that itsy-bitsy spur next to the EuroSystem and saying “look at our neato train” is like a toddler flexing his toy jet to the pilots as he boards a 757. And they smile and say, “Whoa there, Shooter! Now have a seat while we burn off 4,000 gallons of jet fuel accelerating this f****r to 500 miles per hour.”On the number of ski areas in EuropeI've detailed how difficult it is to itemize the 500-ish active ski areas in America, but the task is nearly incomprehensible in Europe, which has as many as eight times the number of ski areas. Here are a few estimates:* Skiresort.info counts 3,949 ski areas (as of today; the number changes daily) in Europe: list | map* Wikipedia doesn't provide a number, but it does have a very long list* Statista counts a bit more than 2,200, but their list excludes most of Eastern EuropeOn Euro non-ski media and climate change catastropheOf these countless European ski areas, a few shutter or threaten to each year. The resulting media cycle is predictable and dumb. In The Snow concisely summarizes how this pattern unfolds by analyzing coverage of the recent near loss of L'Alpe du Grand Serre, France (emphasis mine):A ski resort that few people outside its local vicinity had ever heard of was the latest to make headlines around the world a month ago as it announced it was going to cease ski operations.‘French ski resort in Alps shuts due to shortage of snow' reported The Independent, ‘Another European ski resort is closing due to lack of snow' said Time Out, The Mirror went for ”Devastation” as another European ski resort closes due to vanishing snow‘ whilst The Guardian did a deeper dive with, ‘Fears for future of ski tourism as resorts adapt to thawing snow season.' The story also appeared in dozens more publications around the world.The only problem is that the ski area in question, L'Alpe du Grand Serre, has decided it isn't closing its ski area after all, at least not this winter.Instead, after the news of the closure threat was publicised, the French government announced financial support, as did the local municipality of La Morte, and a number of major players in the ski industry. In addition, a public crowdfunding campaign raised almost €200,000, prompting the officials who made the original closure decision to reconsider. Things will now be reassessed in a year's time.There has not been the same global media coverage of the news that L'Alpe du Grand Serre isn't closing after all.It's not the first resort where money has been found to keep slopes open after widespread publicity of a closure threat. La Chapelle d'Abondance was apparently on the rocks in 2020 but will be fully open this winter and similarly Austria's Heiligenblut which was said to be at risk of permanently closure in the summer will be open as normal.Of course, ski areas do permanently close, just like any business, and climate change is making the multiple challenges that smaller, lower ski areas face, even more difficult. But in the near-term bigger problems are often things like justifying spends on essential equipment upgrades, rapidly increasing power costs and changing consumer habits that are the bigger problems right now. The latter apparently exacerbated by media stories implying that ski holidays are under severe threat by climate change.These increasingly frequent stories always have the same structure of focusing on one small ski area that's in trouble, taken from the many thousands in the Alps that few regular skiers have heard of. The stories imply (by ensuring that no context is provided), that this is a major resort and typical of many others. Last year some reports implied, again by avoiding giving any context, that a ski area in trouble that is actually close to Rome, was in the Alps.This is, of course, not to pretend that climate change does not pose an existential threat to ski holidays, but just to say that ski resorts have been closing for many decades for multiple reasons and that most of these reports do not give all the facts or paint the full picture.On no cars in ZermattIf the Little Cottonwood activists really cared about the environment in their precious canyon, they wouldn't be advocating for alternate rubber-wheeled transit up to Alta and Snowbird – they'd be demanding that the road be closed and replaced by a train or gondola or both, and that the ski resorts become a pedestrian-only enclave dotted with only as many electric vehicles as it took to manage the essential business of the towns and the ski resorts.If this sounds improbable, just look to Zermatt, which has banned gas cars for decades. Skiers arrive by train. Nearly 6,000 people live there year-round. It is amazing what humans can build when the car is considered as an accessory to life, rather than its central organizing principle.On driving in EuropeDriving in Europe is… something else. I've driven in, let's see: Iceland, Portugal, Spain, France, Switzerland, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, and Montenegro. That last one is the scariest but they're all a little scary. Drivers' speeds seem to be limited by nothing other than physics, passing on blind curves is common even on mountain switchbacks, roads outside of major arterials often collapse into one lane, and Euros for some reason don't believe in placing signs at intersections to indicate street names. Thank God for GPS. I'll admit that it's all a little thrilling once the disorientation wears off, and there are things to love about driving in Europe: roundabouts are used in place of traffic lights wherever possible, the density of cars tends to be less (likely due to the high cost of gas and plentiful mass transit options), sprawl tends to be more contained, the limited-access highways are extremely well-kept, and the drivers on those limited-access highways actually understand what the lanes are for (slow, right; fast, left).It may seem contradictory that I am at once a transit advocate and an enthusiastic road-tripper. But I've lived in New York City, home of the United States' best mass-transit system, for 23 years, and have owned a car for 19 of them. There is a logic here: in general, I use the subway or my bicycle to move around the city, and the car to get out of it (this is the only way to get to most ski areas in the region, at least midweek). I appreciate the options, and I wish more parts of America offered a better mix.On chairs without barsIt's a strange anachronism that the United States is still home to hundreds of chairlifts that lack safety bars. ANSI standards now require them on new lift builds (as far as I can tell), but many chairlifts built without bars from the 1990s and earlier appear to have been grandfathered into our contemporary system. This is not the case in the Eastern U.S. where, as far as I'm aware, every chairlift with the exception of a handful in Pennsylvania have safety bars – New York and many New England states require them by law (and require riders to use them). Things get dicey in the Midwest, which has, as a region, been far slower to upgrade its lift fleets than bigger mountains in the East and West. Many ski areas, however, have retrofit their old lifts with bars – I was surprised to find them on the lifts at Sundown, Iowa; Chestnut, Illinois; and Mont du Lac, Wisconsin, for example. Vail and Alterra appear to retrofit all chairlifts with safety bars once they purchase a ski area. But many ski areas across the Mountain West still spin old chairs, including, surprisingly, dozens of mountains in California, Oregon, and Washington, states that tends to have more East Coast-ish outlooks on safety and regulation.On Compagnie des AlpesAccording to Martin, the closest thing Europe has to a Vail- or Alterra-style conglomerate is Compagnie des Alpes, which operates (but does not appear to own) 10 ski areas in the French Alps, and holds ownership stakes in five more. It's kind of an amazing list:Here's the company's acquisition timeline, which includes the ski areas, along with a bunch of amusement parks and hotels:Clearly the path of least resistance to a EuroVail conflagration would be to shovel this pile of coal into the furnace. Martin referenced Tignes' forthcoming exit from the group, to join forces with ski resort Sainte-Foy on June 1, 2026 – teasing a smaller potential EuroVail acquisition. Tignes, however, would not be the first resort to exit CdA's umbrella – Les 2 Alpes left in 2020.On EuroSkiPassesThe EuroMegaPass market is, like EuroSkiing itself, unintelligible to Americans (at least to this American). There are, however, options. Martin offers the Swiss-centric Magic Pass as perhaps the most prominent. It offers access to 92 ski areas (map). You are probably expecting me to make a chart. I will not be making a chart.S**t I need to publish this article before I cave to my irrepressible urge to make a chart.OK this podcast is already 51 days old do not make a chart you moron.I think we're good here.I hope.I will also not be making a chart to track the 12 ski resorts accessible on Austria's Ski Plus City Pass Stubai Innsbruck Unlimited Freedom Pass.The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

Mind the Track
Clear and Still | E57

Mind the Track

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 19, 2025 101:45


Recapping a polarizing winter that has been “clear and still” – either literally clear with no snow and still with no wind, or snow clear up to your ass and still snowing, the boys catch up on a number of topics including PowBot's surf trip to Costa Rica, Trail Whisperer's Death Valley four wheeling adventure and helicopter skiing, the sketchy last month of avalanches and the lack of stoke for resort skiing. The boys DERP local ski resorts for their season pass money grab of selling next years pass in March, they also DERP @palisadestahoe for leaning on local law enforcement to bust ski pass poachers. The ASS rants about social media and the unnecessary steepness of West Shore skin tracks and ponder why skins haven't improved that much in the last 10 years. The boys also play some 888 COR LORD call-ins from listeners. 2:00 – Recording from the Tahoe City Transit Center in PowBot's new van.4:20 – Recapping a banger couple of days skiing the West Shore of Lake Tahoe.10:20 – PowBot witnesses public hate for the Tesla Cybertruck.14:20 – Trail Whisperer takes the Land Cruiser four wheeling in Death Valley then goes to Tonopah to stay at the Mizpah Hotel.21:20 – Trail Whisperer goes helicopter skiing.25:40 – Skiing in the Toiyabe.26:25 – PowBot goes surfing in Costa Rica34:55 – The boys have been down on the ski resort experience this year, too busy everywhere.39:20 – DOPE OR DERP – Do you buy next year's ski pass now in March?46:00 – ASS rant about the state of social media and podcasting.55:40 – Tom has an encounter on his flight home from Costa Rica related to the podcast.58:45 – ASS rant about the unnecessary steepness of West Shore skin tracks.1:01:40 – Why have skins not improved that much in the last decade?1:05:20 – DOPE OR DERP – Alterra and Vail leaning on local law enforcement to prosecute ski pass poachers.1:13:05 – ebiker gets stranded for 30 hours in rural Texas after her ebike battery died and PowBot's story of his ebike dying in Downieville.1:16:00 – Listeners call into the 888 COR LORD hotline, talking about attainable, approachable backyard adventures.1:23:55 – Shout out to Alenka Vrecek – new article in Adventure Sports Journal about her Tahoe to Baja ride.1:25:10 – Trail Whisperer restores a vintage road bike and takes it for a ride.1:33:34 – The recent rash of avalanche incidents and fatalities since early February.

The Real GI Doc Show
The Psychology of Medical Anxiety With Noreen Vail, PhD

The Real GI Doc Show

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 18, 2025 53:07


In this episode of The Real GI Doc Show, Dr. Fred Gandolfo welcomes back Clinical Psychologist Dr. Noreen Vail to delve into the complex relationship between anxiety and medical conditions. The discussion is sparked by a heartfelt letter from a listener named David, who struggles with severe anxiety and challenges related to preparing for a colonoscopy. Dr. Vail explores the nuances of anxiety, its irrational nature, and how it can manifest in specific situations, particularly around medical procedures. She discusses  the importance of self-awareness, coping mechanisms, and the role of psychological support in managing health-related fears. Key topics include: - A patient's experience with anxiety and colonoscopy prep - Understanding the definition and symptoms of anxiety - The impact of anxiety on decision-making and health outcomes - Strategies to cope with medical anxiety - The importance of patient autonomy and informed decision-making Listeners will gain valuable insights into the psychology of anxiety, the significance of open communication with healthcare providers, and the importance of addressing mental health as part of overall well-being. Related: Episode 27-Practical Solutions for Severe Anxiety Related to Colonoscopy Prep Watch The Real GI Doc Show on YouTube! Click here! Be sure to subscribe to The Real GI Doc Show for more insights, and reach out with your questions on social media @realgidoc or leave an audio question for Dr. Gandolfo here. Find The Real GI Doc Show on social media, join the newsletter, read Dr. Gandolfo's bio, or ask a question using this link.

Whiskey Bros Around The Table
#114 - Nazis Don't Paint Fences

Whiskey Bros Around The Table

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 17, 2025 73:29


Buckle up, folks! This episode is a wild ride through whiskey-fueled debates, questionable life choices, and breaking news from the Great White North. We kick things off by taste-testing Archetype Smoked Gin from Vail—because nothing says sophisticated like a drink that reminds you of a campfire.Then, we break down the most recent windstorm that absolutely sucked, debate whether Canada just won the trade war by threatening to block Pornhub (seriously, is this a 4D chess move?), and question whether Oak Island ever actually found anything besides more hype.Meanwhile, Doc's officially a Tesla Nazi (his words, not ours), and Savage Bro just bought a welder, so obviously, he's now identifying as a certified badass. Finally, we explore the ancient art of eating animal eyeballs, because nothing says alpha energy like staring back at your food as you eat it.Pour yourself a drink, hit play, and join the madness!

Crime & Comedy
Felix Vail - 100 Ragazze Per Me - C&C Capsule - 69

Crime & Comedy

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 16, 2025 101:35


ADV - NordVPN: https://nordvpn.com/crimeandcomedy ADV - Paramount+ - https://www.paramountplus.com/it/?utm_source=Vois&utm_medium=cpm&utm_campaign=ProceduralCrimeDramas&utm_content=audioad Felix Vail è un mistero: sicuramente un uomo che piaceva alle donne, e anche tanto. Sicuramente un uomo che si è lasciato dietro dei cuori infranti… ma anche dei misteri. Che fine ha fatto Annette? Possibile che sia davvero andata in Messico senza dire niente a nessuno? E Sharon? E cosa è successo alla sua prima moglie Mary? Solo l'interesse di un giornalista d'inchiesta farà luce su questo giallo lungo 50 anni --------- Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/crimeandcomedy Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/crimeandcomedy.podcast/ Telegram: https://t.me/crimeandcomedy Sito: https://www.crimeandcomedy.it Instagram: Clara Campi: https://www.instagram.com/claracampicomedy/ Marco Champier: https://www.instagram.com/mrchreddy/ Editing - Ilaria Giangrande: https://www.instagram.com/ilaria.giangrande/ Caricature - Giorgio Brambilla: https://www.instagram.com/giorgio_brambilla_bookscomedy/ Tutti i Podcast: https://link.chtbl.com/CrimeandComedy Capitoli: (00:00:00) | Intro (00:00:53) | Sigla (00:01:07) | Ringraziamenti Patreon (00:03:13) | NordVPN (00:04:41) | Annette e Felix Vail (00:20:08) | Mary Horton e Felix Vail (00:34:51) | Sharon Hensley e Felix Vail (00:45:48) | Mary Rose e Jerry Mitchel scoprono cose sulla vita di Felix Vail (01:12:36) | Le indagini ufficiali su Felix Vail (01:24:13) | L'arresto di Felix Vail (01:31:51) | I nostri Patreon Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Terrence Non-Duality
The vail of duality part 2

Terrence Non-Duality

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 15, 2025 12:02


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Terrence Non-Duality
The vail of Duality part 3

Terrence Non-Duality

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 15, 2025 11:38


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Terrence Non-Duality
The vail of Duality part 4

Terrence Non-Duality

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 15, 2025 11:28


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Terrence Non-Duality
The vail of Duality Part 1

Terrence Non-Duality

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 15, 2025 14:35


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Motley Fool Money
The Uncertainty-Fueled Market Correction

Motley Fool Money

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 14, 2025 40:12


Companies, investors, and countries are all having a hard time knowing what the future holds. And that makes forecasting hard. (00:21) Jason Moser and Matt Argersinger discuss: - The market's correction reaction to tariffs, and what higher prices might mean for consumers that are already spending less. - The market's questions around Tesla's tough start to 2025, slipping european sales, and Elon Musk. - Earnings from Adobe, Vail, and Docusign. (19:22) Macro-focused investor Richard Bernstein walks Ricky Mulvey through the big picture he's seeing, and how tariffs, trade uncertainty, and how it all flows into what we've seen in the stock market over the past few weeks. (32:51) Jason and Matt break down where they turn to celebrate Pi Day and two stocks on their radar: Ansys and Starbucks. Stocks discussed: TSLA, ADBE, MTN, DOCU, ANSS, SBUX Host: Dylan Lewis Guests: Jason Moser, Matt Argersinger, Richard Bernstein, Ricky Mulvey Engineers: Dan Boyd Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Coaching Equation
Fast Five for Friday: Born to Win, The Programming to Fail, and The 490 Formula

The Coaching Equation

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 14, 2025 14:11


Episode Highlights:[00:12] The Power of Passion ProjectsBrook shares how revisiting a long-shelved book project reignited his creativity and focus—reminding us all that when passion calls, it's time to go all in.[02:07] The Science of Giving: Why Altruism Leads to SuccessRyan dives into research from Adam Grant, revealing that while pure givers might not always be top sales performers, they create environments that dramatically outperform teams with a transactional mindset.[05:45] Are We Born to Win but Programmed to Fail?Brook unpacks a thought-provoking insight from The 490 Formula—how we're naturally equipped for success but conditioned by society to think small and settle for less.[07:05] The Timeless Truth of Staying in the GameRyan reflects on a classic quote from Confucius: “It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.” The key to success isn't speed—it's relentless persistence.[09:11] A Sold-Out Event and What's NextAs Profitable Coach Live kicks off in Florida, Ryan and Brook share their excitement, reflect on past event growth, and announce the waitlist for the next event in Vail, CO, June 5-7.Links Mentioned:Profitable Coach Live – Vail, CO (June 5-7, 2025)Get on the waitlist: profitablecoachlive.com/waitlist

Bigfoot Society
Sasquatch of the Rockies! | Colorado

Bigfoot Society

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 4, 2025 66:10


Join us as we hear from Fred, a lifelong resident of Colorado, who recounts his extraordinary encounters with Bigfoot over the years. From eerie fog-filled canyons of Morrison to the dense forests near Bear Creek, Fred shares detailed tales including a face-to-face encounter in Yellowstone, unsettling rock-throwing episodes, and sightings in iconic locations like Vail and Bailey.Sasquatch Summerfest this year, is July 11th through the 12th, 2025. It's going to be fantastic. Listeners, if you're going to go, you can get a two day ticket for the cost of one. If you use the code "BFS" like Bigfoot society and it'll get you some off your cost.Priscilla was a nice enough to provide that for my listeners. So there you go. I look forward to seeing you there. So make sure you head over to www. sasquatchsummerfest. com and pick up your tickets today.If you've had similar encounters or experiences, please reach out to bigfootsociety@gmail.com. Your story could be the next one we feature!

BackTable ENT
Ep. 212 Allergy Immunotherapy and the Microbiome with Dr. Jennifer Villwock

BackTable ENT

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 25, 2025 46:59


Could the key to more effective allergy therapies lie in the nasal microbiome? In this episode of BackTable ENT, Dr. Jennifer Villwock from Kansas University Medical Center discusses the intricacies of treating allergies and sinus issues with hosts Dr. Ashley Agan and Dr. Gopi Shah. --- SYNPOSIS Dr. Villwock begins by highlighting the importance of personalized medicine and the role of the microbiome in immunotherapy. Topics include topical and oral probiotics, the nasal microbiome, intralymphatic immunotherapy, and the significance of accurate allergy testing. Dr. Villwock also shares insights on sublingual and subcutaneous immunotherapy, the future of allergy treatments, and the impact of environmental factors on sinus health. --- TIMESTAMPS 00:00 - Introduction 01:53 - Understanding the Sinus Microbiome 04:34 - The Role of the Microbiome in Health 09:31 - Challenges in Microbiome Research 23:21 - Clinical Decision-Making in Antibiotic Use 25:07 - Exploring Probiotics & Dietary Factors for Sinus Health 30:12 - Immunotherapy and Microbiome 35:47 - Allergy Testing Methods 41:40 - Future Directions in Immunotherapy 44:18 - Conclusion and Final Thoughts --- RESOURCES Jennifer Villwock Profile https://www.kumc.edu/jvillwock.html AAOA 2025 Explorers Course in Allergy and Immunology, Vail, CO. March 27-29, 2025 https://www.aaoallergy.org/education/aaoa-explorers-course-2025/ BackTable+ for ENT https://plus.backtable.com/pages/ent Check out BackTable+ for ENT, our sponsor and new e-learning platform! https://plus.backtable.com/pages/ent

Pursuit of Wellness
Girl's Trip and “Valentine's Day

Pursuit of Wellness

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 24, 2025 34:32


Ep. 177: I'm back from an amazing trip to Colorado, and in this solo episode, I'm sharing all the details—my first real girls' trip, incredible food, nostalgic skiing, and the support I didn't know I needed. Greg even came out to meet me for Valentine's Day in Aspen, making the trip even more special. But beyond the fun, this time away gave me space to reflect on everything I'm going through with IVF. I'm opening up about the emotional ups and downs, how I'm staying grounded during the waiting period, and the mindfulness tools that are helping me through it. Leave Me a Message - click here! For Mari's Instagram click here! For Pursuit of Wellness Podcast's Instagram click here! For Mari's Newsletter click here! Sponsored By: Glow up with BON CHARGE's Red Light Face Mask! Just 10 minutes a day for radiant, youthful skin. Save 15% at boncharge.com with code PURSUIT. Healthy eating made simple! Hungryroot curates personalized groceries & quick meals just for you. Get 40% off your first box + a free item for life at hungryroot.com/pow with code POW!  Experience clearer, healthier skin with CLEARSTEM—skincare that treats both acne and aging without harsh ingredients. Get 20% off your first order at clearstem.com/pow. Find all-natural relief for period discomfort with FORIA's Relief Collection, designed to soothe cramps and tension with organic, science-backed formulas. Get 20% off your first order at foriawellness.com/pow or use code POW. Show Links: Reach your fitness goals with Strength by Mari! Access expert workouts, track progress, and stay supported with everything in one app. Available in the App Store and Google Play! The Ultimate Morning Routine for Balance, Mental Health & Hormone Support Support gut health, immunity, and radiant skin with Bloom's Colostrum & Collagen Peptides—a 3-in-1 blend of colostrum, collagen, and probiotics. Topics Discussed 00:00:00 Welcome 00:04:02 Vail trip 00:04:39 Skiing 00:06:28 Keeping up with routine while on vacation 00:11:51 Aspen trip with Greg 00:12:31 Struggling with alone time 00:13:25 Anxious IVF thoughts 00:14:25 Thankful for Greg 00:15:11 Using TikTok as a distraction and support 00:16:46 Dealing with friends' pregnancies  00:19:15 Getting back into routine 00:20:53 Understanding the greater purpose of the pain God gives us 00:26:06 Things that have helped Mari get through her struggles with IVF 

Out of Bounds Podcast
Out of Office – E3 – Kings and Queens of Corbets, Last Skier Standing, and More Vail News

Out of Bounds Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 19, 2025 21:19


Out of Office – E3 – Kings and Queens of Corbets, Last Skier Standing, and More Vail News This week was quite the week for ski industry news. From skimo to freestyle, skiing and snowboarding saw athletes from around the world compete at the highest level. Meanwhile, Vail Resorts continues [...] The post Out of Office – E3 – Kings and Queens of Corbets, Last Skier Standing, and More Vail News appeared first on Out Of Collective.

The Tim & Chelsea Podcast
Worst pain ever?!?

The Tim & Chelsea Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 18, 2025 36:23


The pain continues! Chelsea stepped on a bee. And we share an update on Vail's tooth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The Tim & Chelsea Podcast
Worst pain ever?!?

The Tim & Chelsea Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 18, 2025 36:23


The pain continues! Chelsea stepped on a bee. And we share an update on Vail's tooth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

World Cafe Words and Music from WXPN
Carter Vail on his latest album, '100 Cowboys'

World Cafe Words and Music from WXPN

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 17, 2025 29:58


The musician's record harkens back to his time as a producer in Nashville.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Don't Be Sour
Ep. 106 - Deep Conversations with Close Friends

Don't Be Sour

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 17, 2025 102:25


Parenting solo for the first time is like navigating uncharted waters, and David takes us through his whirlwind experience with his seven-week-old daughter, Sophia. We reflect on the joys and tribulations of this new chapter, including the delicate balance of feeding schedules, nurturing bilingual bonds, and the ever-present fear of mishaps. As memories of childhood and the innocence of the early years blend seamlessly into tales of teenage mischief, we ponder on the evolution from baby giggles to teenage grumbles. As we gather around for a lively chat, the conversation takes a sharp turn into the world of celebrity turbulence and social media's unyielding glare. We question the disproportionate outrage over provocative tweets by personalities like Kanye West and Donald Trump while more pressing global issues await attention. The complexity of separating an artist's work from their personal antics becomes a focal point, encouraging an introspection of moral boundaries. With humor and candor, we navigate through this tangled web, leaving no stone unturned. Amidst our spirited discussions, we escape into the opulence of private travel and the allure of luxury ski resorts like Vail and Aspen. From the thrill of private aviation's departure to the camaraderie shared while tackling diaper duty on the slopes, our stories paint a vivid picture of adventure and laughter. We weigh the merits of extravagant destinations, recount amusing travel tales, and celebrate the friendships grounded in shared experiences. As we wrap up, reflections on creative control and the intricacies of video-making provide a thoughtful close, highlighting the blend of creativity and discipline in content creation.

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast
Podcast #198: Mammoth & June Mountains President & Chief Operating Officer Eric Clark

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 12, 2025 76:33


The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and to support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.As of episode 198, you can now watch The Storm Skiing Podcast on YouTube. Please click over to follow the channel. The podcast will continue to stream on all audio platforms. WhoEric Clark, President and Chief Operating Officer of Mammoth and June Mountains, CaliforniaRecorded onJanuary 29, 2025Why I interviewed himMammoth is ridiculous, improbable, outrageous. An impossible combination of unmixable things. SoCal vibes 8,000 feet in the sky and 250 miles north of the megalopolis. Rustic old-California alpine clapboard-and-Yan patina smeared with D-Line speed and Ikon energy. But nothing more implausible than this: 300 days of sunshine and 350 inches of snow in an average year. Some winters more: 715 inches two seasons ago, 618 in the 2016-17 campaign, 669 in 2010-11. Those are base-area totals. Nearly 900 inches stacked onto Mammoth's summit during the 2022-23 ski season. The ski area opened on Nov. 5 and closed on Aug. 6, a 275-day campaign.Below the paid subscriber jump: why Mammoth stands out even among giants, June's J1 lift predates the evolution of plant life, Alterra's investment machine, and more.That's nature, audacious and brash. Clouds tossed off the Pacific smashing into the continental crest. But it took a soul, hardy and ungovernable, to make Mammoth Mountain into a ski area for the masses. Dave McCoy, perhaps the greatest of the great generation of American ski resort founders, strung up and stapled together and tamed this wintertime kingdom over seven decades. Ropetows then T-bars then chairlifts all over. One of the finest lift systems anywhere. Chairs 1 through 25 stitching together a trail network sculpted and bulldozed and blasted from the monolithic mountain. A handcrafted playground animated as something wild, fierce, prehuman in its savage ever-down. McCoy, who lived to 104, is celebrated as a businessman, a visionary, and a human, but he was also, quietly, an artist.Mammoth is not the largest ski area in America (ranking number nine), California (third behind Palisades and Heavenly), Alterra's portfolio (third behind Palisades and Steamboat), or the U.S. Ikon Pass roster (fifth after Palisades, Big Sky, Bachelor, and Steamboat). But it may be America's most beloved big ski resort, frantic and fascinating, an essential big-mountain gateway for 39 million Californians, an Ikon Pass icon and the spiritual home of Alterra Mountain Company. It's impossible to imagine American skiing without Mammoth, just as it's impossible to imagine baseball without the Yankees or Africa without elephants. To our national ski identity, Mammoth is an essential thing, like a heart to a human body, a part without which the whole function falls apart.About MammothClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Alterra Mountain Company, which also owns:Located in: Mammoth Lakes, CaliforniaYear founded: 1953Pass affiliations:* Ikon Pass: unlimited, no blackouts* Ikon Base Pass: unlimited, holiday blackoutsClosest neighboring ski areas: June Mountain – around half an hour if the roads are clear; to underscore the severity of the Sierra Nevada, China Peak sits just 28 miles southwest of Mammoth, but is a seven-hour, 450-mile drive away – in good weather.Base elevation: 7,953 feetSummit elevation: 11,053 feetVertical drop: 3,100 feetSkiable acres: 3,500Average annual snowfall: 350 inchesTrail count: 178 (13% easiest, 28% slightly difficult, 19% difficult, 25% very difficult, 15% extremely difficult)Lift count: 25 (1 15-passenger gondola, 1 two-stage, eight-passenger gondola, 4 high-speed six-packs, 8 high-speed quads, 1 fixed-grip quad, 6 triples, 3 doubles, 1 Poma – view Lift Blog's inventory of Mammoth's lift fleet) – the ski area also runs some number of non-public carpetsAbout JuneClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Alterra Mountain Company (see complete roster above)Located in: June Lake, CaliforniaYear founded: 1963Pass affiliations:* Ikon Pass: unlimited, no blackouts* Ikon Base Pass: unlimited, holiday blackoutsClosest neighboring ski areas: Mammoth Mountain – around half an hour if the roads are clearBase elevation: 7,545 feetSummit elevation: 10,090 feetVertical drop: 2,590 feetSkiable acres: 1,500 acresAverage annual snowfall: 250 inchesTrail count: 41Lift count: 6 (2 high-speed quads, 4 doubles – view Lift Blog's inventory of June Mountain's lift fleet)What we talked aboutMammoth's new lift 1; D-Line six-packs; deciding which lift to replace on a mountain with dozens of them; how the new lifts 1 and 16 redistributed skier traffic around Mammoth; adios Yan detachables; the history behind Mammoth's lift numbers; why upgrades to lifts 3 and 6 made more sense than replacements; the best lift system in America, and how to keep this massive fleet from falling apart; how Dave McCoy found and built Mammoth; retaining rowdy West Coast founder's energy when a mountain goes Colorado corporate; old-time Colorado skiing; Mammoth Lakes in the short-term rental era; potential future Mammoth lift upgrades; a potentially transformative future for the Eagle lift and Village gondola; why Mammoth has no public carpets; Mammoth expansion potential; Mammoth's baller parks culture, and what it takes to build and maintain their massive features; the potential of June Mountain; connecting to June's base with snowmaking; why a J1 replacement has taken so long; kids under 12 ski free at June; Ikon Pass access; changes incoming to Ikon Pass blackouts; the new markets that Ikon is driving toward Mammoth; improved flight service for Mammoth skiers; and Mammoth ski patrol.What I got wrong* I guessed that Mammoth likely paid somewhere in the neighborhood of $15 million for “Canyon and Broadway.” I meant that the new six-pack D-line lifts likely cost $15 million each.* I mentioned that Jackson Hole installed a new high-speed quad last year – I was referring to the Sublette chair.* I said that Steamboat's Wild Blue Gondola was “close to three miles long” – the full ride is 3.16 miles. Technically, the first and second stages of the gondola are separate machines, but riders experience them as one.Why now was a good time for this interviewTalk to enough employees of Alterra Mountain Company and a pattern emerges: an outsized number of high-level execs – the people building the mountain portfolio and the Ikon Pass and punching Vail in the face while doing it – came to the mothership, in some way or another, through Mammoth Mountain.Why is that? Such things can be a coincidence, but this didn't feel like it. Rusty Gregory, Alterra's CEO from 2018 to '23, entered that pilot's seat as a Mammoth lifer, and it was possible that he'd simply tagged in his benchmates. But Alterra and the Ikon Pass were functioning too smoothly to be the products of nepotism. This California ski factory seemed to be stamping out effective big-ideas people like an Italian plant cranking out Ferraris.Something about Mammoth just works. And that's remarkable, considering no one but McCoy thought that the place would work at all as a functional enterprise. A series of contemporary dumbasses told him that Mammoth was “too windy, too snowy, too high, too avalanche-prone, and too isolated” to work as a commercial ski area, according to The Snow Mag. That McCoy made Mammoth one of the most successful ski areas anywhere is less proof that the peanut gallery was wrong than that it took extraordinary will and inventiveness to accomplish the feat.And when a guy runs a ski area for 52 years, that ski area becomes a manifestation of his character. The people who succeed in working there absorb these same traits, whether of dysfunction or excellence. And Mammoth has long been defined by excellence.So, how to retain this? How does a ski area stitched so tightly to its founder's swashbuckling character fully transition to corporate-owned megapass headliner without devolving into an over-groomed volume machine for Los Angeles weekenders? How does a mountain that's still spinning 10 Yan fixed-grip chairs – the oldest dating to 1969 – modernize while D-Line sixers are running eight figures per install? And how does a set-footprint mountain lodged in remote wilderness continue to attract enough skiers to stay relevant, while making sure they all have a place to stay and ski once they get there?And then there's June. Like Pico curled up beside Killington, June, lost in Mammoth's podium flex, is a tiger dressed up like a housecat. At 1,500 acres, June is larger than Arapahoe Basin, Aspen Highlands, or Taos. It's 2,590-foot-vertical drop is roughly equal to that of Alta, Alyeska, or Copper (though June's bottom 1,000-ish vertical feet are often closed due to lack of lower-elevation snow). And while the terrain is not fierce, it's respectable, with hundreds of acres of those wide-open California glades to roll through.And yet skiers seem to have forgotten about the place. So, it can appear, has Alterra, which still shuffles skiers out of the base on a 1960 Riblet double chair that is the oldest operating aerial lift in the State of California. The mountain deserves better, and so do Ikon Pass holders, who can fairly expect that the machinery transporting them and their gold-plated pass uphill not predate the founding of the republic. That Alterra has transformed Deer Valley, Steamboat, and Palisades Tahoe with hundreds of millions of dollars of megalifts and terrain expansions over the past five years only makes the lingering presence of June's claptrap workhorse all the more puzzling.So in Mammoth and June we package both sides of the great contradiction of corporate ski area ownership: that whoever ends up with the mountain is simultaneously responsible for both its future and its past. Mammoth, fast and busy and modern, must retain the spirit of its restless founder. June, ornamented in quaint museum-piece machinery while charging $189 for a peak-day lift ticket, must justify its Ikon Pass membership by doing something other than saying “Yeah I'm here with Mammoth.” Has one changed too much, and the other not enough? Or can Alterra hit the Alta Goldilocks of fast lifts and big passes with throwback bonhomie undented?Why you should ski Mammoth and JuneIf you live in Southern California, go ahead and skip this section, because of course you've already skied Mammoth a thousand times, and so has everyone you know, and it will shock you to learn that there is anyone, anywhere, who has never skied this human wildlife park.But for anyone who's not in Southern California, Mammoth is remote and inconvenient. It is among the least-accessible big mountains in the country. It lacks the interstate adjacency of Tahoe, the Wasatch, and Colorado; the modernized airports funneling skiers into Big Sky and Jackson and Sun Valley (though this is changing); the cultural cachet that overcomes backwater addresses for Aspen and Telluride. Going to Mammoth, for anyone who can't point north on 395, just doesn't seem worth the hassle.It is worth the hassle. The raw statistical profile validates this. Big vert, big acreage, big snows, and big lift networks always justify the journey, even if Mammoth's remoteness fails to translate to emptiness in the way it does at, say, Taos or Revelstoke. But there is something to being Not Tahoe, a Sierra Nevada monster throwing off its own gravity rather than orbiting a mother lake with a dozen equals. Lacking the proximity to leave some things to more capable competitors, the way Tahoe resorts cede parks to Boreal or Northstar, or radness to Palisades and Kirkwood, Mammoth is compelled to offer an EveryBro mix of parks and cliffs and groomers and trees and bumps. It's a motley, magnificent scene, singular and electric, the sort of place that makes all realms beyond feel like a mirage.Mammoth does have one satellite, of course, and June Mountain fills the mothership's families-with-kids gap. Unlike Mammoth, June lets you use the carpet without an instructor. Kids 12 and under ski free. June is less crowded, less vodka-Red Bull, less California. And while the dated lifts can puzzle the Ikon tote-bagger who's last seven trips were through the detachable kingdoms of Utah and Colorado, there is a certain thrill to riding a chairlift that tugged its first passengers uphill during the Eisenhower administration.Podcast NotesOn Mammoth's masterplanOn Alterra pumping “a ton of money into its mountains”Tripling the size of Deer Valley. A massive terrain expansion and transformative infill gondola at Steamboat. The fusing of Palisades Tahoe's two sides to create America's second-largest interconnected ski area. New six-packs at Big Bear, Mammoth, Winter Park, and Solitude. Alterra is not messing around, as the Vail-Slayer continues to add mountains, add partners, and transform its portfolio of once-tired giants into dazzling modern megaresorts with billions in investment.On D-Line lifts “floating over the horizon”I mean just look at these things (Loon's Kancamagus eight on opening day, December 10, 2021 – video by Stuart Winchester):On severe accidents on Yan detachablesIn 2023, I wrote about Yan's detachable lift hellstorm:Cohee referenced a conversation he'd had with “Yan Kunczynski,” saying that, “obviously he had his issues.” If it's not obvious to the listener, here's what he was talking about: Kuncyznski founded Yan chairlifts in 1965. They were sound lifts, and the company built hundreds, many of which are still in operation today. However. Yan's high-speed lifts turned out to be death traps. Two people died in a 1985 accident at Keystone. A 9-year-old died in a 1993 accident at Sierra-at-Tahoe (then known as Sierra Ski Ranch). Two more died at Whistler in 1995. This is why all three detachable quads at Sierra-at-Tahoe date to 1996 – the mountain ripped out all three Yan machines following the accident, even though the oldest dated only to 1989.Several Yan high-speed detachables still run, but they have been heavily modified and retrofit. Superstar Express at Killington, for example, was “retrofitted with new Poma grips and sheaves as well as terminal modifications in 1994,” according to Lift Blog. In total, 15 ski areas, including Sun Valley, Schweitzer, Mount Snow, Mammoth, and Palisades Tahoe spent millions upgrading or replacing Yan detachable quads. The company ceased operations in 2001.Since that writing, many of those Yan detachables have met the scrapyard:* Killington will replace Superstar Express with a Doppelmayr six-pack this summer.* Sun Valley removed two of their Yan detachables – Greyhawk and Challenger – in 2023, and replaced them with a single Doppelmayr high-speed six-pack.* Sun Valley then replaced the Seattle Ridge Yan high-speed quad with a Doppelmayr six-pack in 2024.* Mammoth has replaced both of its Yan high-speed quads – Canyon and Broadway – with Doppelmayr D-line six-packs.* Though I didn't mention Sunday River above, it's worth noting that the mountain ripped out its Barker Yan detachable quad in 2023 for a D-Line Doppelmayr bubble sixer.I'm not sure how many of these Yan-detach jalopies remain. Sun Valley still runs four; June, two; and Schweitzer, Mount Snow, and Killington one apiece. There are probably others.On Mammoth's aging lift fleetMammoth's lift system is widely considered one of the best designed anywhere, and I have no doubt that it's well cared for. Still, it is a garage filled with as many classic cars as sparkling-off-the-assembly-line Aston Martins. Seventeen of the mountain's 24 aerial lifts were constructed before the turn of the century; 10 of those are Yan fixed- grips, the oldest dating to 1969. Per Lift Blog:On Rusty's tribute to Dave McCoyFormer Alterra CEO Rusty Gregory delivered an incredible encomium to Mammoth founder Dave McCoy on this podcast four years ago [18:08]:The audio here is jacked up in 45 different ways. I suppose I can admit now that this was because whatever broke-ass microphone I was using at the time sounded as though it had filtered my audio through a dying air-conditioner. So I had to re-record my questions (I could make out the audio well enough to just repeat what I had said during our actual chat), making the conversation sound like something I had created by going on Open AI and typing “create a podcast where it sounds like I interviewed Rusty Gregory.” Now I probably would have just asked to re-record it, but at the time I just felt lucky to get the interview and so I stapled together this bootleg track that sounds like something Eminem would have sold from the trunk of his Chevy Celebrity in 1994.More good McCoy stuff here and in the videos below:On Mammoth buying Bear and Snow SummitRusty also broke down Mammoth's acquisition of Bear Mountain and Snow Summit in that pod, at the 29:18 mark.On Mammoth super parksWhen I was a kid watching the Road Runner dominate Wile E. Coyote in zip-fall-splat canyon hijinks, I assumed it was the fanciful product of some lunatic's imagination. But now I understand that the whole serial was just an animation of Mammoth Superparks:I mean can you tell the difference?I'm admittedly impressed with the coyote's standing turnaround technique with the roller skis.On Pico beside KillingtonThe Pico-Killington dilemma echoes that of June-Mammoth, in which an otherwise good mountain looks like a less-good mountain because it sits next door to a really great mountain. As I wrote in 2023:Pico is funny. If it were anywhere else other than exactly next door to the largest ski area in New England, Pico might be a major ski area. Its 468 acres would make it the largest ski area in New Hampshire. A 2,000-foot vertical drop is impressive anywhere. The mountain has two high-speed lifts. And, by the way, knockout terrain. There is only one place in the Killington complex where you can run 2,000 vertical feet of steep terrain: Pico.On the old funitel at JuneCompounding the weirdness of J1's continued existence is the fact that, from 1986 to '96, a 20-passenger funitels ran on a parallel line:Clark explains why June removed this lift in the podcast.On kids under 12 skiing free at JuneThis is pretty amazing – per June's website:The free June Mountain Kids Season Pass gives your children under 12 unlimited access to June Mountain all season long. This replaces day tickets for kids, which are no longer offered. Everyone in your family must have a season pass or lift ticket. Your child's free season pass must be reserved in advance, and picked up in-person at the June Mountain Ticket Office. If your child has a birthday in our system that states they are older than 12 years of age, we will require proof of age to sell you a 12 and under season pass.I clarified with June officials that adults are not required to buy a season pass or lift ticket in order for their children to qualify for the free season pass.While it is unlikely that I will make it to June this winter, I signed my 8-year-old son up for a free season pass just to see how easy it was. It took about 12 seconds (he was already in Alterra's system, saving some time).On Alterra's whiplash Ikon Pass accessAlterra has consistently adjusted Ikon Pass access to meter volume and appease its partner mountains:On Mammoth's mammoth snowfallsMammoth's annual snowfalls tend to mirror the boom-bust cycles of Tahoe, with big winters burying the Statue of Liberty (715 inches at the base over the 2022-23 winter), and others underperforming the Catskills (94 inches in the winter of 1976-77). Here are the mountain's official year-by-year and month-by-month tallies. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

Behind the Bots
February 2025 NHRL Golden Dumpster Winner Dan Vail and ChonkIV!

Behind the Bots

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 12, 2025 97:13


This week on the podcast, we're catching up with Georgia Tech engineering student and ChonkIV team lead Daniel Vail. ChonkIV is the most effective shell spinner competing today, with two Golden Dumpsters within the last 12 months, and taking home second place at the 2024 NHRL Championship. We learn what it takes to build a killer 30-pounder, how Team RoboJackets works, and answer obscure questions about student life on campus.   Follow us on Facebook: facebook.com/behindthebots Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts Tell a friend about the show; we really appreciate your support!

Don't Be Sour
Ep. 105 - Home Renovations, Going Bald & Border Security

Don't Be Sour

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 10, 2025 98:09


Hopping on a private jet to Vail with snowboarding on our minds, we couldn't help but reminisce about past adventures as we packed our gear. The thrill of first-class comforts and the amusing quirks of airplane interiors set the stage for our upcoming skiing escapade, all while we navigate the logistics of podcasting on the move. Plus, a big shoutout to new listeners joining us from our recent collab with Andrew Flair—welcome to the chaos! Our conversation takes a wild turn from the slopes to the great outdoors, where city life meets the rawness of nature. Hunting stories abound, complete with ethical reflections and a hilarious turtle rescue attempt that turned out to be more complicated than expected. Throw in some adrenaline-fueled snowboarding mishaps, where speed meets tree, and the importance of helmets becomes all too real. The episode also touches on everything from home renovations to the ins and outs of snowboarding gear, with Joe sharing his fitness and renovation journey amidst the chaos of permits and budget overruns. As we wrap things up, we delve into the unexpected twists of verbal defense, legal escapades, and the societal pressures of masculinity. There's a candid discussion on aging gracefully, the quest for eternal youth, and the intriguing world of truck purchasing. Toss in some heated debates on border security and tariffs, topped off with dreams of flying a Vision Jet, and you've got an episode bursting with humor, insight, and adventure. Remember, whether you're on the slopes or stuck in traffic, there's always a story waiting to unfold. Follow Maxx on IG https://www.instagram.com/maxxchewning Maxx on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/maxxchewning Joe on IG https://www.instagram.com/joeknows.best Christian on IG https://www.instagram.com/christianguzmnanfitness

Tim Conway Jr. on Demand
Superbowl & Butch Cassidy

Tim Conway Jr. on Demand

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 5, 2025 32:01 Transcription Available


Tim and Mark Thompson share their experiences of getting pulled over by police and questioned over sobriety. // Tim Talks Superbowl 2025 and Richie's Trip to Vail, Colorado with pals/ Tim Conway Fame. // Paul Newman urinal and autograph ban story with Mark Thompson. // Both, Tim and Mark talk about a favorite classic film, “Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid” the movie. 

The Best One Yet
⛷️ “Ski-Pocalypse” — Park City's ski strike. NYC's traffic tax. The Birth of Gen Beta.

The Best One Yet

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 7, 2025 22:58


The biggest strike in ski history hit during the busiest ski week of the year… and Vail lost $400M.A brand new generation is being born in 2025: Gen Beta… And we found its 1 defining trait.NYC launched America's largest traffic experiment: Congestion Pricing… And every city is watching.$MTN $SPY $BTCWant more? Check out the latest episode of our weekly deep dive show, The Best One Yet. This week's episode is on The Oregon Trail: “Tricking Kids Into Liking School Since 1971”