Podcasts about Vail Resorts

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Thank you for supporting independent ski journalism.About CamelbackOwned by: EPR Properties, managed by Peregrine Hospitality (formerly KSL Resorts)Located in: Tannersville, PennsylvaniaYear founded: 1963Pass affiliations:* Ikon Pass: 7 days, no blackouts* Ikon Base Pass: 5 days, holiday blackoutsClosest neighboring ski areas: Shawnee Mountain (:24), Jack Frost (:26), Big Boulder (:27), Skytop Lodge (:29), Saw Creek (:37), Blue Mountain (:41), Pocono Ranchlands (:43), Montage (:44), Hideout (:51), Elk Mountain (1:05), Bear Creek (1:09), Ski Big Bear (1:16)Base elevation: 1,252 feetSummit elevation: 2,079 feetVertical drop: 827 feetSkiable Acres: 166Average annual snowfall: 50 inchesTrail count: 45, with three new trails for 2026-27 (not on the map below, but discussed on the podcast)Lift count: 12 (1 high-speed six-pack, 1 high-speed quad, 1 fixed-grip quad, 2 triples, 2 doubles, 5 carpets – view Lift Blog's inventory of Camelback's lift fleet)For reference:The Zoom transcript (click “transcript” above for the Substack transcript, then click on any text block to teleport to the associated point in the video; timestamps below DO NOT MATCH THE VIDEO)00:03:25.000 --> 00:03:37.000Stuart Winchester: Welcome to The Storm! I'm your host, Stuart Winchester. Today is Wednesday, September 16th, 2026, and I've got a really good show for you today.00:03:37.000 --> 00:03:45.000Stuart Winchester: we're going to talk some Pennsylvania skiing. And Pennsylvania skiing is a really interesting thing. As I travel around the country.00:03:45.000 --> 00:03:56.000Stuart Winchester: and ski at all these different places in the Midwest, and out West, and in New England, and in the Mid-Atlantic. Uh, and as I talk to folks who… who don't ski that much, or only ski at the big mountains.00:03:56.000 --> 00:04:05.000Stuart Winchester: I'll often bring up some experience I had at a Pennsylvania ski area. Pennsylvania has quite a few ski areas as 21.00:04:05.000 --> 00:04:20.000Stuart Winchester: public chairlift-served ski areas, and it does 2.6 million skier visits on average per year. That is more than any state except for Colorado, California, Utah, Vermont, and New York.00:04:20.000 --> 00:04:26.000Stuart Winchester: It's more than Washington, it's more than Oregon, it's more than Montana, it's more than New.00:04:26.000 --> 00:04:39.000Stuart Winchester: So, Pennsylvania is a really important ski state, which is probably why Vail Resorts owns 8 ski areas there, because it is really close to a lot of population centers. In western PA, you have Pittsburgh.00:04:39.000 --> 00:04:54.000Stuart Winchester: and Seven Springs, and Laurel, and Hidden Valley, and then you have Philadelphia on the east side, and you can also draw up from Baltimore and D.C. for Round Top and Whitetail. And uh…00:04:54.000 --> 00:04:57.000Stuart Winchester: And Jack Frost's Big Boulder up in the Poconos. So…00:04:58.000 --> 00:05:00.000Stuart Winchester: Vail has a big presence there.00:05:00.000 --> 00:05:15.000Stuart Winchester: Icon has a presence there with Camelback and Blue Mountain. Uh, and then Indy Pass just signed their 8th ski area in Pennsylvania with Spring Mountain, uh, down near Philadelphia. So, so it's, it's a place where a lot of skiers start.00:05:15.000 --> 00:05:19.000Stuart Winchester: And it's a little bit of a funny place to ski, because…00:05:19.000 --> 00:05:29.000Stuart Winchester: it tends to have an outsized number of novice skiers, which is great. They're very good at doing that. Uh, but it can make it a little chaotic.00:05:29.000 --> 00:05:38.000Stuart Winchester: And the lift lines can get a little crazy, and people are all over the hill, and sometimes they're walking down the hill because they're frustrated and they're giving up.00:05:38.000 --> 00:05:40.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, and…00:05:40.000 --> 00:05:44.000Stuart Winchester: You take that as your baseline in Pennsylvania.00:05:44.000 --> 00:05:49.000Stuart Winchester: And you had any sort of complications.00:05:49.000 --> 00:05:54.000Stuart Winchester: And things get out of hand really quickly. And in general.00:05:55.000 --> 00:06:00.000Stuart Winchester: For that reason, the ski areas that have survived in Pennsylvania.00:06:00.000 --> 00:06:07.000Stuart Winchester: are among the best operators in the world, and I would put that up against anyone.00:06:07.000 --> 00:06:14.000Stuart Winchester: It's a very, very challenging environment, not only because you have a high number of novice skiers.00:06:14.000 --> 00:06:17.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, but also because you have…00:06:17.000 --> 00:06:31.000Stuart Winchester: not a ton of snow, sometimes in the west part of the state, where there's higher elevation, they do get a lot of snow, but… but not as a rule, you couldn't count on it for natural snow. Uh, you get a lot of rain, you get a lot of warm-ups.00:06:31.000 --> 00:06:35.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, and… and you, in general, have to rely on…00:06:35.000 --> 00:06:42.000Stuart Winchester: a very short season, generally mid-December-ish to mid-March-ish.00:06:42.000 --> 00:06:45.000Stuart Winchester: And the skiers there…00:06:47.000 --> 00:06:52.000Stuart Winchester: They're they're accustomed to a pretty high standard, so.00:06:52.000 --> 00:06:57.000Stuart Winchester: So when things do get out of control, uh…00:06:57.000 --> 00:07:04.000Stuart Winchester: They really rebelled, and they really noticed. So, a couple years ago, this is what happened at Camelback. So, Camelback…00:07:05.000 --> 00:07:09.000Stuart Winchester: You know, I don't generally do ops stories, uh…00:07:09.000 --> 00:07:10.000Stuart Winchester: You know.00:07:10.000 --> 00:07:19.000Stuart Winchester: ski area didn't groom this run, or they haven't opened this lift, or, uh, you know, they usually let this bump up, but they don't, or, or…00:07:19.000 --> 00:07:27.000Stuart Winchester: you know, they… they are trying to save money, or they're being cheap. I generally don't bother with those, even though I get a lot of messages.00:07:27.000 --> 00:07:32.000Stuart Winchester: Complaining about things like that, because there's almost always a pretty good reason.00:07:32.000 --> 00:07:38.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, and it's almost always temporary, and it's really not worth the effort.00:07:38.000 --> 00:07:48.000Stuart Winchester: to write the story if I'm just writing about, you know, why Stratton or Mount Snow or Magic Mountain didn't open a certain lift on a certain day.00:07:48.000 --> 00:08:04.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, it's, it's a lot to track down and it's a lot of, uh, this person said this and the other person said that. It's just not the kind of thing that I'm want to cover with the storm, right? I want to do bigger stories. I want to do trend stories. I want to look at the culture and evolution of skiing.00:08:04.000 --> 00:08:11.000Stuart Winchester: And the passes, and all the infrastructure, and all the fun stuff. So I don't generally cover the day-to-day stuff, just because…00:08:12.000 --> 00:08:18.000Stuart Winchester: The ski areas that remain in 2026 are, for the most part, run by really good operators.00:08:18.000 --> 00:08:32.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, it… because… and they've survived. Most of the bad ski areas that were either mismanaged or were in the wrong places, they went out of business a long time ago, which is why the number of ski areas has been stable for around 25 years now in America.00:08:32.000 --> 00:08:35.000Stuart Winchester: So I but I started to notice.00:08:35.000 --> 00:08:45.000Stuart Winchester: several years ago that I was getting an outsized number of complaints around one ski area in particular in the Poconos.00:08:45.000 --> 00:08:47.000Stuart Winchester: And it was Camelback.00:08:47.000 --> 00:08:51.000Stuart Winchester: And Camelback had a long history of being an independent.00:08:51.000 --> 00:08:52.000Stuart Winchester: And…00:08:52.000 --> 00:08:54.000Stuart Winchester: Really…00:08:54.000 --> 00:08:59.000Stuart Winchester: the way it's been described to me by… by season pass holders, and I've skied…00:08:59.000 --> 00:09:04.000Stuart Winchester: some at Camelback, but I don't have that depth of knowledge of having grown up there.00:09:04.000 --> 00:09:20.000Stuart Winchester: That Camelback for a long time, for decades, set the standard on snowmaking, on grooming, on just general maintenance of lifts in the ski area in the Poconos. And that was why they had chosen to ski there all those years.00:09:20.000 --> 00:09:30.000Stuart Winchester: But things had started to fall apart when a new owner showed up in 2019. It was at the time KSL Capital, who was.00:09:30.000 --> 00:09:43.000Stuart Winchester: was managing it for EPR Properties, which is the entity that bought it, and they own a bunch of ski areas, EPR Properties, including a bunch owned by Vail, including North Star, and a lot of the old Peak Resorts in Ohio and such.00:09:43.000 --> 00:09:50.000Stuart Winchester: And KSL Resorts was a division of KSL Capital.00:09:50.000 --> 00:09:53.000Stuart Winchester: which is a part owner of Altera.00:09:53.000 --> 00:09:58.000Stuart Winchester: But for some reason, Altera, which is very good at running ski resorts.00:09:58.000 --> 00:10:00.000Stuart Winchester: did not…00:10:00.000 --> 00:10:15.000Stuart Winchester: get assigned as the… as the owner of Camelback. And when KSL Resorts purchased Blue Mountain, not in Ontario, the Blue Mountain in Pennsylvania, that's about 45 minutes from Camelback, two years later, in 2021.00:10:15.000 --> 00:10:26.000Stuart Winchester: That ski area also did not fall under Altera's ownership. And it was an odd choice to make, because Altera's really good at running ski areas, and they run…00:10:26.000 --> 00:10:35.000Stuart Winchester: Mammoth, and Deer Valley, and Steamboat, and Solitude, and Palisades Tahoe, and Stratton, and Sugarbush, and they definitely have.00:10:35.000 --> 00:10:41.000Stuart Winchester: the institutional knowledge and internal firepower to be able to run these ski areas in the Poconos.00:10:41.000 --> 00:10:43.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, Blue Mountain…00:10:43.000 --> 00:10:47.000Stuart Winchester: Had the benefit of a long time tenured management team.00:10:47.000 --> 00:11:02.000Stuart Winchester: That kept the place, by all accounts, running pretty well. Camelback, on the other hand, seemed to be falling apart before our eyes, and before the eyes of the loyalist skiers who loved the place so much. And they were really, really concerned, and I started to…00:11:02.000 --> 00:11:08.000Stuart Winchester: Because they had put, uh, a management team in place, it seemed.00:11:08.000 --> 00:11:10.000Stuart Winchester: that…00:11:11.000 --> 00:11:22.000Stuart Winchester: was not familiar with the… with the inner workings of a ski area. Uh, I… I hosted Dave Makarski, the former general manager of Kalenbach, on this podcast.00:11:22.000 --> 00:11:33.000Stuart Winchester: and very nice guy. We had a great conversation. Uh, he's not a skier. And, and, you know, sometimes you can be not a skier and run a great ski resort. Uh, look at Bill Stritzler up at Smuggler's Notch.00:11:33.000 --> 00:11:43.000Stuart Winchester: Bill hasn't skied in years, and he snowboarded for a little bit, but he's not a daily skier. Look at Shawnee.00:11:43.000 --> 00:11:54.000Stuart Winchester: that where the owner… that's one of the most modern, nice ski areas in the Poconos, uh, and the owner has not skied in decades. So, so it's not always necessary, uh, but…00:11:55.000 --> 00:12:10.000Stuart Winchester: It does help and it's certainly a benefit. So everyone I talked to, I was, I was gathering all this stuff for a story and I was gonna write about Camelback and, and it, it really seemed like it was the worst run ski area anywhere that I could find based on the amount of feedback I was getting.00:12:10.000 --> 00:12:25.000Stuart Winchester: I was gathering all this feedback from all these long-time pass holders, and then they hired a new general manager, and so I scrapped the story, but I still wanted to get it, and by all accounts, Jason Bays, who I'll bring on the podcast in a moment.00:12:25.000 --> 00:12:34.000Stuart Winchester: has really done a nice job of turning CamelBak around. So, so let's go to Jason now.00:14:09.000 --> 00:14:16.000Stuart Winchester: My guest today is the Vice President and General Manager of Camelback Ski Area in Pennsylvania.00:14:16.000 --> 00:14:26.000Stuart Winchester: Camelback runs six chairlifts, or maybe seven. I might have had a typo there. Serving 45 trails on an 827-foot vertical drop.00:14:26.000 --> 00:14:41.000Stuart Winchester: Prior to taking the top job at Camelback, he was general manager for Great Wolf Resorts around the United States. He also spent time as chief operating officer and general manager of Mountain Creek Ski Area in New Jersey and director of operations.00:14:41.000 --> 00:14:54.000Stuart Winchester: for Jay Peak, Vermont. His very first jobs as a teenager were as a lifeguard and ski instructor at Camelback. Jason Bay is my guest. Jason, welcome to the Storm. Awesome to have you. How you doing today?00:14:53.000 --> 00:15:00.000Jason Bays: Thank you, Stuart. Great to be here. I've been a listener from day one, so excited to join you.00:14:59.000 --> 00:15:14.000Stuart Winchester: I love that. I'm so hyped to hear that. I know I started with a little Northeast focus. You know, you're the… you probably know this already, but you're the second straight guest I've had on. There was a Mountain Creek alum, Chris Haggerty, on yesterday. Are you acquainted with Chris?00:15:13.000 --> 00:15:18.000Jason Bays: Yeah, Chris and I worked together, um, back in our days at Mountain Creek, great guy.00:15:17.000 --> 00:15:33.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, yeah, I'm, uh, I'm not sure, I'm sure you're aware I'm based in New York City and Mountain Creek is one of my go-tos and, and was my home mountain before I started traveling all over the place for the storm. So, so, you know, Jason, I, I think it's awesome that you grew up at Camelback. Tal.00:15:34.000 --> 00:15:41.000Stuart Winchester: your childhood Camelback. What was the kingdom of Camelback like to you, uh, when you were growing up skiing there?00:15:40.000 --> 00:16:03.000Jason Bays: Yeah, look, I, you know, took, I grew up in Pocono Kid, born and raised 10 minutes from the resort. After school ski program was the first, you know, first sort of foray into life at Camelback and was immediately hooked in the summer as a swimming pool and two water slides. I thought that was the most awesome place in the world too.00:15:44.000 --> 00:15:45.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:15:54.000 --> 00:15:55.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:16:03.000 --> 00:16:04.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:16:03.000 --> 00:16:21.000Jason Bays: And my parents thought it was a great babysitting service, you know, relative to that. So it was just an awesome, awesome place to grow up and, you know, be part of the small but mighty ski community that is Tannersville, Pennsylvania, in this area, in the Poconos.00:16:21.000 --> 00:16:39.000Jason Bays: um, you know, when it came to get a first job, uh, there's no place I was, uh, gonna consider other than Camelback. It's where all my friends were, it's where we all hung out all the time, and, um, you know, really just got introduced to, uh, to the sport, and, um, had some freedom. It was the first time I had some freedom, and it was to be at Camelback, so that's.00:16:27.000 --> 00:16:29.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:16:39.000 --> 00:16:56.000Stuart Winchester: So you worked there, and you were part of the machine, so to speak, and I realized you were sort of on the peripheral of the machine, as opposed to in the center of it, as you are now. But, you know, you grew up in the Poconos, and had that experience, and you had this vision of Camelback in your head, right? Then you went off and had a big life, as…00:16:56.000 --> 00:16:57.000Jason Bays: Yes.00:16:56.000 --> 00:17:00.000Stuart Winchester: as people do, and you went and worked at all these places that I just mentioned.00:17:00.000 --> 00:17:03.000Stuart Winchester: And then you came back to Camelback.00:17:03.000 --> 00:17:06.000Stuart Winchester: When you, when you arrived.00:17:06.000 --> 00:17:10.000Stuart Winchester: How had the place changed? And I just want to tee this up. I, you know.00:17:10.000 --> 00:17:19.000Stuart Winchester: before you came on, I was talking about how I don't generally write operations stories, right? Because it… there's usually a good reason for why a trail is closed, a lift's not running.00:17:19.000 --> 00:17:26.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, but a few years ago, I started to get an outsized number of complaints about Camelback.00:17:26.000 --> 00:17:38.000Stuart Winchester: And so I started to write a story about it, and then when you came along, I shelved it, because honestly, everyone immediately was like, oh, this is so much better. So, you know, how had…00:17:38.000 --> 00:17:41.000Stuart Winchester: Camelback changed.00:17:41.000 --> 00:17:42.000Stuart Winchester: when you…00:17:42.000 --> 00:17:44.000Stuart Winchester: Came back to work there.00:17:44.000 --> 00:17:51.000Stuart Winchester: And what were the challenges facing the resort? What did you focus on immediately?00:17:50.000 --> 00:18:08.000Jason Bays: Yeah, I'll just back up to say, you know, just to contextualize, um, from when I was there as a teenager and, um, through college on the ski team, too, I would say that community was a really big word, um, that was used all the time. You, you felt like it was, it was the Camelback community, and there's a really big emphasis on the ski product.00:18:08.000 --> 00:18:28.000Jason Bays: Um, as a ski instructor, like, what we were putting out, how we were doing lessons, how many lessons we could do, and the experience that was surrounding that. And same thing on the water park side. And, you know, I think the, um, you know, some of the observations, um, coming back to Camelback was, um, I think there's a little bit of focus, um, focus direction for, for, like, to focus on the ski product.00:18:28.000 --> 00:18:44.000Jason Bays: and focusing on the water park product, and I sort of look at it as, like, a… as Disney World, right? Whereas we fill out… if we do the ski part well, we do the snow tubing part well, we do the water park well, that puts heads in beds, um, versus trying to put heads in beds.00:18:44.000 --> 00:19:01.000Jason Bays: And then have them do the activities. We're leading with an activity front and centered focus. And that means making the strategic investments in the ski product, in our recreational product, and making that the very best that it can be.00:19:01.000 --> 00:19:23.000Jason Bays: back in 2008 when I was here as a teenager, that was all there was. There was no hotel product, right? So the ski product got outsized attention just naturally because it was a 560-acre resort that identified as a ski area and a water park. And I think some of the context that was missing was that while there's been a great evolution of Camelback as a four-season resort.00:19:15.000 --> 00:19:16.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:19:23.000 --> 00:19:40.000Jason Bays: It's really important that, to me, that each of those business units gets the time and attention that they would deserve if they were stand-alone units, particularly because a cog… it's a cog in the wheel, and that wheel is… it's a flywheel. It needs to… it all needs to turn at once, and so we lead with.00:19:40.000 --> 00:19:43.000Jason Bays: the recreational offerings first.00:19:43.000 --> 00:19:48.000Stuart Winchester: You know, you mentioned the community, and I wasn't aware…00:19:48.000 --> 00:19:59.000Stuart Winchester: that there was such a strong community around Camelback, and I'm not surprised, because most ski areas have that group of folks who, you know, they're retirees, and they boot up at 8am, and they take runs together.00:19:59.000 --> 00:20:14.000Stuart Winchester: But they were really passionate, and the running theme, Jason, in the emails and messages that I got from Camelback locals was that they loved Camelback. It wasn't that they hated Camelback, they hated to complain about Camelback.00:20:14.000 --> 00:20:18.000Stuart Winchester: They wanted to love it, but they couldn't. There was there was.00:20:18.000 --> 00:20:34.000Stuart Winchester: a lot of things they cited, uh, not making snowmaking when it's cold, understaffed grooming, uh, missed lift inspections. I don't know if this is true. This is what people were… they were reaching, I think, for answers. Uh, put it all together, and there was… it was definitely…00:20:34.000 --> 00:20:47.000Stuart Winchester: seemed as though the ski product was not the focus. So when you came in, what did you focus on right away and say, okay, this is what we gotta change, you know, we have to cover every trail 100% right away, or whatever it was?00:20:47.000 --> 00:21:09.000Jason Bays: Yeah, I think that's, look, I would start, you hit the nail on the head that there's a very passionate skiing community here at Camelback and in the Poconos and it means a lot to people. This is second, third generations that are learning to ski here, bring their families here and be part of this. And to your point, everyone wants to be prideful of Camelback, right?00:21:09.000 --> 00:21:24.000Jason Bays: This was the, this was family run for a really long time and, you know, very focused on sort of the, you know, season pass holders renewing year after year.00:21:24.000 --> 00:21:40.000Jason Bays: You know, a couple of things. One is I think that how we authentically tell our story isn't done in a way that is, you know, is done in a way that's authentic. A, bringing back the Camelback Mountain Facebook page that communicated ski related content.00:21:38.000 --> 00:21:39.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:21:40.000 --> 00:22:06.000Jason Bays: Right? I think that, you know, there's only so many things you can say about a hotel room and how exciting it is. Like, we really lead now first with authentically telling the story. Our snow report got a lot more detailed, gave granular information as to what was going on. So, you know, did we have a perfect winter last winter? By all means, no, but we communicated that authentically. And where we messed up, we took.00:22:06.000 --> 00:22:23.000Jason Bays: the blame for it, and said, hey, we didn't get this right, and where we were working to improve the experience, we communicated that… communicated that story. So, to me, it started from a communication standpoint, that we were authentic, that we were honest, that we were truthful, and that we were communicating on a medium that.00:22:23.000 --> 00:22:31.000Jason Bays: our guests would see, um, and relate to. So I think a big miss was, I think, admittedly, a big miss was removing the, um, Camelback Mountain.00:22:31.000 --> 00:22:53.000Jason Bays: social media pages, um, and bringing those back were really important so that, um, we could tell the story authentically. I think SKUs really appreciate, um, knowing what's going on, and to your point on, hey, there's sort of this rumor flying or that rumor flying, um, you know, we were able to, uh, sort of hone in and, and tell, tell that story. Secondarily, I think from an infrastructure standpoint.00:22:53.000 --> 00:23:09.000Jason Bays: um, we really needed to make sure that we had, um, the right team in place. And we have an amazingly talented team at Camelback, um, but we did not have key positions filled, um, in certain areas. Um, and so, we bolstered up the snowmaking. Snowmaking team went from.00:23:04.000 --> 00:23:05.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:23:06.000 --> 00:23:08.000Stuart Winchester: Like, what areas?00:23:09.000 --> 00:23:30.000Jason Bays: you know, 3 to 4 to 30, um, this past winter, um, that makes a big difference, right? Our trail rollout was, um, you know, first to open in the East, uh, for Pennsylvania, um, and, uh, um, and, and focus on the core products. Um, same thing with lift operations. We brought in a really experienced lift, uh, maintenance manager.00:23:12.000 --> 00:23:13.000Stuart Winchester: Hey!00:23:13.000 --> 00:23:14.000Stuart Winchester: Wow.00:23:14.000 --> 00:23:16.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:23:20.000 --> 00:23:21.000Stuart Winchester: Yep.00:23:30.000 --> 00:23:46.000Jason Bays: Um, to our team that really helped, um, support our Lyft, um, uh, operation. Um, decisions on when Lyfts ran and what time they ran, uh, you know, our thought was, let's, um, be more… like, you have to run the Terrain Park Lyft every day.00:23:46.000 --> 00:23:47.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:23:46.000 --> 00:24:06.000Jason Bays: to me, that's a commitment. We make that every day. We say we're running the Glen Lift every day. It services great novice terrain. It services the train park. And so, looking at the operational plan and saying, okay, what are ways that we can give back, you know, and make deposits back to our skiers? And in turn.00:24:06.000 --> 00:24:24.000Jason Bays: that builds momentum, right? People talk, and, like, the ski community is so connected, right? It's like, if you do something, like, people find out about it, because they're really, you know, they hear about it. And so, for us, focus on the core business was, um, you know, from a ski standpoint, was really important, and the infrastructure.00:24:12.000 --> 00:24:13.000Stuart Winchester: Right.00:24:17.000 --> 00:24:19.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:24:24.000 --> 00:24:41.000Jason Bays: to be able to do it. And I would just, lastly, just say I go back to making sure that our team had the resources to do their job. We're supported, we're empowered, collaborative leadership, you know, we sat around the table and said, this is the operating plan, this is what we're going to do for our guests.00:24:41.000 --> 00:24:46.000Jason Bays: And then go out and execute it to the best we can.00:24:45.000 --> 00:25:03.000Stuart Winchester: You know, Jason, I, I, I think you could have run for governor with one of the first things that you did, which was get rid of paid parking. I, I, I don't think that I've ever, uh, heard people happier about anything. Now, now, and let me, let me qualify this, right? I think in, in some instances, paid parking and parking reservations.00:25:03.000 --> 00:25:05.000Stuart Winchester: make sense.00:25:05.000 --> 00:25:18.000Stuart Winchester: you know, super high volume days. Arapahoe Basin, I think, is a model in Colorado where they only charge for certain days and certain times, and they keep backing off which days as they learn when they really need it. Camelback was charging every day.00:25:18.000 --> 00:25:36.000Stuart Winchester: All day, you know, a Monday with, you know, 10 people on the mountain, they were charging for it. And, you know, acknowledging that sometimes it's appropriate, I think Camelback got pretty out of hand with it, and when I had Mr. Markowski on the podcast, great guy, we had a great conversation, but he was not backing off that. He said, nope, paid parking.00:25:36.000 --> 00:25:51.000Stuart Winchester: we're all in. You said no. So talk about that and how you sold. I'd imagine it was a revenue stream, right? And you had to sell management on that, and I don't know if I'm giving you credit for something someone else did, but talk to us about parking and the evolution there.00:25:51.000 --> 00:26:12.000Jason Bays: Yeah, that was a week one decision from the Camelback team when I got here made from our leadership team at Camelback that everyone was in alignment on our senior leadership team here at the property and myself to remove the paid parking. And I think definitely there's actually you have so many nice pictures behind you.00:26:12.000 --> 00:26:30.000Jason Bays: I have a picture of the old paid parking sign behind me there, if you can see it on the corner, and it actually serves to me as a reminder of the guest experience, because someone's put a sticker on that paid parking sign that you probably can't see there, but it says, Ski Camelback, we're not happy until you're not happy.00:26:15.000 --> 00:26:19.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:26:30.000 --> 00:26:48.000Jason Bays: Um, and it's a reminder to, to me and our team, um, that we're here to have fun, and we're here for the guest experience, and we're here to live, live and breathe fun Camelback style. This is not a, um, you know, we want guests to look forward to, to being here. And I think, you know, yes, there was.00:26:37.000 --> 00:26:38.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:26:48.000 --> 00:27:05.000Jason Bays: So obviously we ran a financial model. We didn't just, you know, get rid of paid parking and not assume, you know, that there wasn't some revenue to be recaptured elsewhere with a strategy to do it. But I think more importantly, you know, think about it.00:27:05.000 --> 00:27:22.000Jason Bays: a non-busy day, it might even be raining, it's 40 degrees, the last thing you want is someone running around a parking lot telling you, like, hey, I need you to hand over $15, and by the way, then you're gonna schlep your stuff up two different levels of parking, um, you know, that might be even charged higher, and then get to.00:27:18.000 --> 00:27:19.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:27:22.000 --> 00:27:38.000Jason Bays: uh, the mountain and go to guest services. You know, I have a 3-year-old. If my wife and I went skiing, that would be an incredible amount of friction, um, just to get to, uh, the front of the mountain. And so I think putting ourselves in the guest lens of saying, is that really what we want the guests to experience?00:27:29.000 --> 00:27:30.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:27:38.000 --> 00:27:53.000Jason Bays: Um, it's not, and, and it was a burden to everyone at this, you know, you think I'm talking about, we talked to frontline associates too, like, the first thing that they had to tell people was that they had to pay for parking. You just imagine, sort of, the cascading effect that, that, that, uh, that that had, and we said, look, is there.00:27:53.000 --> 00:28:09.000Jason Bays: Um, is there a better way? Um, can we run shuttles to these lots and pick people up and bring them to the mountain and make them feel, um, you know, like our valued… like our valued guests? What does that arrival experience look like? Um, you know, that's really what we… what we looked at, and then said, okay.00:28:09.000 --> 00:28:25.000Jason Bays: can we… ultimately, will we drive more volume here? Will more people come because of a better guest experience? And I'll say that I would rather grow the sport, grow the industry. Our team would rather grow the sport and grow the industry than figuring out how to.00:28:25.000 --> 00:28:35.000Jason Bays: You know, sort of, you know, run a secondary ancillary business that's not to our core product and what we want our guests to experience here.00:28:34.000 --> 00:28:48.000Stuart Winchester: You know, it's a little counterintuitive, but sometimes, by removing a revenue stream, you get that less-is-more effect. Another example, your season pass, you know, according to my records.00:28:48.000 --> 00:29:04.000Stuart Winchester: Starting in 2020 to ‘21, the season pass was $599 at its early bird price, and it hovered between that and $649 for the next five years. This year, you put it on sale for $399. It's still at that price for unlimited Camelback.00:29:04.000 --> 00:29:20.000Stuart Winchester: That's a great bargain for, uh, for a season pass on the East Coast, and, you know, for the listeners, you are competing with the Epic Pass, which has Jack Frost, Big Boulder, right down the road, a couple exits down I-80, and their Northeast season pass is pretty affordable, and it's a pretty good deal.00:29:20.000 --> 00:29:33.000Stuart Winchester: So… so talk to us about that decision and… and… and how… how that $399 is worth it. You also wrote back, if you want to talk about, uh, the… the triple pack. I thought that was great, and I don't have the price right in front of me, but… but you've really done a lot to… to…00:29:33.000 --> 00:29:39.000Stuart Winchester: create more of a value experience for that loyal Camelback skier, from my point of view.00:29:39.000 --> 00:29:55.000Jason Bays: Yeah, thank you, and that's definitely the goal. Um, you know, I think our thought process here is let's get more people on Snow, um, and have them have a great experience while they're here. Um, I would love to tell you that there's some master business plan behind this.00:29:50.000 --> 00:29:52.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:29:55.000 --> 00:30:10.000Jason Bays: But, you know, truly, at the heart of what we do is, let's figure out how to get more people on snow, get them to a spot where they want to come back and learn and be part of it. And guess what I would just share to that is.00:30:10.000 --> 00:30:24.000Jason Bays: you know, we were charging a day ticket in 2025 of $169, um, at its highest point, right? And I would rather have a lifelong… I would rather have one per… I would much rather, I think from business proposition, we would rather have.00:30:16.000 --> 00:30:17.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:30:24.000 --> 00:30:39.000Jason Bays: one person definitely not come and spend $15 to $40 to park and $169 and say, I'm never coming back, versus $399, now they're like, wow, this place is awesome, I'm getting a great value, I bring my family.00:30:32.000 --> 00:30:33.000Stuart Winchester: Damn.00:30:39.000 --> 00:31:01.000Jason Bays: I want to come enjoy food and beverage. And hey, by the way, we also have this great snow tubing park and this great water park. And would you like to stay at our hotel when you come with your season pass and enjoy Aquatopia? And we're debuting The Curse of Camelback this fall, right? Which is the Halloween, if you haven't heard, it's a Halloween 13 scare zones. Take a chair, lift up to it.00:31:01.000 --> 00:31:03.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:31:01.000 --> 00:31:24.000Jason Bays: But I say all that to say we've got so many great cross marketing promotional opportunities at Camelback that that really becomes a super compelling business case for us. And I think it's the right thing to do for the sport is grow it, make it more accessible, allow more people to come here and see what we have to offer. I can't tell you how many people I meet, whether it's snow tubing, skiing.00:31:24.000 --> 00:31:41.000Jason Bays: water park, the hotel, whatever they're here for, CBKMA or Adventure Park, they have no idea that the other part exists to, um, the resort. And I'll share that that's been the case even in, like, when I was, uh, at Jay Peak running the water park.00:31:32.000 --> 00:31:34.000Stuart Winchester: Hmm. Okay.00:31:41.000 --> 00:31:43.000Jason Bays: People would come there, and they'd be like.00:31:43.000 --> 00:32:02.000Jason Bays: what is this mountain that is here? And it's Jay Peak, like, one of the most hardcore ski resorts in the world. And there were people that were coming there and were like, I had no idea there was a ski resort here. So, if it's true at Jay Peak, it certainly is true at Camelback, where.00:31:48.000 --> 00:31:49.000Stuart Winchester: Right.00:31:49.000 --> 00:31:52.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:31:52.000 --> 00:31:53.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, thank you.00:31:59.000 --> 00:32:00.000Stuart Winchester: Mm-hmm.00:32:01.000 --> 00:32:02.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, okay.00:32:02.000 --> 00:32:19.000Jason Bays: we have all these different offerings that people don't know about, maybe necessarily about all of them, so our fundamental business philosophy is make it accessible, make them lifelong, um, skiers and riders, and introduce them to everything that we have to offer here in the Poconos. And I would just argue, when I say Poconos.00:32:19.000 --> 00:32:41.000Jason Bays: Like go, like experience Shawnee and experience Jack Frost Big Boulder and experience, you know, the other great ski areas in this region and Mountain Creek and wherever else and get a flavor for it. I think that's, we could use more skiers in the industry and to grow the sport. So for us, that's sort of the long-term business model that we're using.00:32:22.000 --> 00:32:23.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:32:41.000 --> 00:32:58.000Stuart Winchester: So, I just looked at the triple ticket, and it looks like $149, and I think that's no blackouts. $199 includes rentals. That's pretty amazing. So, talk about that product, and then you mentioned the $169 peak day ticket. Have you settled on prices yet for 2020?00:32:58.000 --> 00:33:03.000Stuart Winchester: 6, 27. I should have checked your site in advance, but I didn't. So I don't know if you've.00:33:03.000 --> 00:33:21.000Jason Bays: Yeah, we have not, uh, posted, uh, day ticket prices for this year. Last year, um, we didn't exceed around $110, um, on a day ticket. Uh, so we kept it, I think, pretty reasonable for, for, for a, for a Pocono offering. Um, triple tickets, massive, um, success, uh, for us.00:33:10.000 --> 00:33:12.000Stuart Winchester: Oh, okay.00:33:14.000 --> 00:33:15.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, yeah.00:33:21.000 --> 00:33:37.000Jason Bays: Um, and when we talk about, like, again, getting more people introduced to the sport, you don't necessarily pick up skiing on the first time. Um, you think about that rental product, which we, um, tremendously… whatever we had on the pro forma for that was, uh, blown by by, like.00:33:28.000 --> 00:33:30.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:33:37.000 --> 00:33:53.000Jason Bays: 400% on the triple ticket with rentals. And what I really believe in is that, you know, you become a lifelong skier by getting repetition, not by going once a year. It's really hard to sustain as a skier going once a year.00:33:50.000 --> 00:33:52.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah. Okay.00:33:53.000 --> 00:34:11.000Jason Bays: and saying, oh yeah, that was our trip. We're really trying to create a guest for life and get them to return visit. That's in many ways more important to us than, again, trying to get, like, the highest yield on that one day that they picked. Like, come back and visit our resort and, um, you know, again, the business side to this is.00:34:11.000 --> 00:34:28.000Jason Bays: we're cross-marketing across all of our other offerings here that we have on this campus to say, come and visit us again. And again, to us, that's more important than, you know, the highest yield that we can get to. So the triple ticket's really successful. And I think one last thing I would share.00:34:28.000 --> 00:34:46.000Jason Bays: a lot of season passes in the market right now, um, the triple ticket's a great opportunity for people to get a couple of days at Camelback, even if they've committed somewhere else, and particularly, you know, our long season, um, there's plenty of time to use it, um, as well, uh, from the, uh, long season that we established from last year.00:34:46.000 --> 00:34:50.000Stuart Winchester: Jason, I think that's a really smart way to look at it as…00:34:50.000 --> 00:34:57.000Stuart Winchester: a… creating a habit rather than pulling as much yield as possible. And a lot of the larger operators.00:34:57.000 --> 00:35:11.000Stuart Winchester: get frustrated with me and the rest of the ski media because they don't understand why we focus on that peak price, right? Because the peak lift ticket this year at Beaver Creek is $392, set to be. Probably almost no one will pay that price, but…00:35:11.000 --> 00:35:28.000Stuart Winchester: What it does is it acts as a, a billboard for the rest of the ski industry and especially so, so Camelback for, for people who don't know when you're driving on I 80 I mean, you see it, it looms right over the highway. It is one of the major interstates in America, especially at night. The thing is lit up.00:35:28.000 --> 00:35:46.000Stuart Winchester: And so, chances are, if people think about skiing, and they think about where to go, they're gonna think about the most obvious one, and that's Camelback, and that's why, for many years, it was that, or Seven Springs was the busiest ski area in Pennsylvania, traditionally. So I think that's a really smart way to look at it, because if people show up that one time, and.00:35:46.000 --> 00:35:59.000Stuart Winchester: cost them, you know, $500 for 2 people, they're just not gonna come back, and they're not gonna try Shawnee, or… or Blue Mountain, or Jack Frost, or Elk Mountain, or Montage. So, um, I wanna talk about… Jason, I wanna talk about Lyft.00:35:59.000 --> 00:36:16.000Stuart Winchester: And… can you see this trail map? This is an old trail map. I mentioned that I know this, so for those watching on StormSkiing.com or YouTube, you can see this. So there's been a ton of changes, and I want to break all these down with you. The first I want to talk about is, over the past couple years.00:36:16.000 --> 00:36:32.000Stuart Winchester: Mark Antony and Cleopatra, these two lifts right here, an old triple and an old double, have been removed. Can you talk about why you took those lifts out of service, and if you plan to replace them with anything, or what you planned, or what the rationale was behind it?00:36:32.000 --> 00:36:49.000Jason Bays: Yeah, I appreciate that. Uh, that does predate my time here, that they had reached the end of their, um, uh, ability to operate. Um, and so they have, um, both been, um, sort of partially disassembled. Um, there is unfortunately not.00:36:35.000 --> 00:36:37.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:36:39.000 --> 00:36:41.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:36:46.000 --> 00:36:47.000Stuart Winchester: Okay.00:36:49.000 --> 00:37:05.000Jason Bays: I, by the way, two of my favorite lifts when I was a ski instructor, because you could get right up and not wait in long lines on the weekends, so absolutely realizing and recognizing the capacity that they brought, but no opportunity for us to.00:37:01.000 --> 00:37:02.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:37:05.000 --> 00:37:23.000Jason Bays: um, reinstate those lifts as presently, um, as presently, uh, uh, sort of, um, situated, um, and, and not, not, not able to, uh, um, not able to, uh, rerun them. It will require a, um, new, uh, chairlift to, um, to ultimately replace.00:37:23.000 --> 00:37:37.000Jason Bays: those two lifts. It saddens me to share that, but that is, in fact, what has happened there, and I've been very open with our season pass holders about that messaging and the why behind it.00:37:38.000 --> 00:37:41.000Stuart Winchester: So, so in fantasy ski resort world, Jason.00:37:41.000 --> 00:37:46.000Stuart Winchester: Would you put a new lift here, and what would you put, if you could?00:37:45.000 --> 00:38:04.000Jason Bays: Yeah, absolutely. Um, same thing. We've, uh, we've made clear, uh, with no time, no official time frame to share, um, but certainly, uh, we've, we've, um, had, uh, preliminary conversations, um, about a fixed grip, um, quad that would, uh, would be able to take the place of both of those lifts, uh, and create that.00:38:03.000 --> 00:38:04.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:38:04.000 --> 00:38:10.000Jason Bays: original redundancy that those two lifts brought to the resort when they were in operation.00:38:10.000 --> 00:38:27.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, that would be really nice. So, so, so these are gone and I, I have a, a current trail map now. So, um, and, and it's not completely current. We'll discuss the new trails in a moment, but this is the most current posted on your website. So, uh, we go over, these are the lifts that remain and see, uh, yeah, I, I miscounted in my intro, so sorry about that.00:38:27.000 --> 00:38:42.000Stuart Winchester: So this one is Stevenson, and Stevenson was, uh, it's a high-speed quad, uh, for the listeners, and it… it was a real junker. It was always stop, stop, stop, and, you know, it was… it was really… seemed to be falling apart and have a lot of issues. Now, uh, in 2020…00:38:42.000 --> 00:38:51.000Stuart Winchester: 5, this year, or 2024, I believe, Camelback, uh, McCarthy, the GM at the time, sent out a letter saying it was due for a…00:38:51.000 --> 00:38:53.000Stuart Winchester: Waltz.00:38:53.000 --> 00:39:02.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, let me see what he said… like, a complete modernization of Stevenson. So, so did that happen? And talk to us about Stevenson, and what kind of shape it's in right now.00:39:01.000 --> 00:39:20.000Jason Bays: Yeah, great, um, yes, that was a, uh, look, an amazing, um, project that was completed by, uh, by Dave and team, um, to modernize that lift. Um, it has, essentially, Doppelmayr came in and put in an entire new, uh, minus the, uh, minus the, uh, uh, the terminals and the.00:39:08.000 --> 00:39:09.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:39:20.000 --> 00:39:35.000Jason Bays: Um, uh, and the structure itself, um, essentially all new components, all new electrical, um, uh, wiring components to it, a lot of the things that had plagued it. Um, and last year, uh, it operated 138 days.00:39:34.000 --> 00:39:36.000Stuart Winchester: Unbelievable.00:39:35.000 --> 00:39:53.000Jason Bays: Uh, which for Pennsylvania, uh, that's pretty darn good. I think we recognize it's a workhorse, um, it's key to accessing some really, um, fantastic terrain for us, um, and that modernization project with Doppel… in, um, partnership with Doppelmeyer that was done in the summer and fall of 2025.00:39:53.000 --> 00:39:54.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:39:53.000 --> 00:40:08.000Jason Bays: um, was, uh, very, uh, so it's all immediate impact, um, with, uh, Stevenson Reliability this past year, and we expect that to, uh, you know, knock on wood, to, uh, to continue going forward. We essentially, again, have a brand new lift, minus the, uh.00:40:08.000 --> 00:40:10.000Jason Bays: Uh, minus the physical pieces.00:40:10.000 --> 00:40:26.000Stuart Winchester: That's a really smart way to do it because they are tremendously expensive, these new lifts. And for folks who are watching or listening, this Stevenson is really important because you walk out of this giant hotel that's right here, that's not on the trail map with 400 and some rooms, and that is how you get up the mountain. Otherwise you got to.00:40:26.000 --> 00:40:41.000Stuart Winchester: pull your way over, so when that lift is not running or has problems, it's a real big issue. So, the alternative was, over here, Black Bear 6, uh, you replaced an old high-speed quad that was there, and… and I love this Black Bear 6 lift. It is…00:40:41.000 --> 00:41:01.000Stuart Winchester: Freakin' Ferrari, man. I think the price they gave me was something like $12 million that they spent, or maybe it was $10 to put that in. So that's the alternative, right? If you don't just modernize that current lift, you replace it. So, uh, Black Bear is awesome. I love it. It has bubbles. Is it too much? I mean, I know that KSL Now Peregrine had reasons for.00:41:01.000 --> 00:41:16.000Stuart Winchester: for putting it in, but what have you learned from a couple of years of having BlackBerry around, which is, again, probably the nicest lift in the state of Pennsylvania and one of the nicest in the Northeast, but maybe a little heavier than what you need for CamelBak, but I don't know, you tell me.00:41:17.000 --> 00:41:41.000Jason Bays: Yeah, you know, you know what I would share to that, um, you know, we, we brought it back for scenic chairlift rides this summer, and I mean, it's a massive hit. The summer, summer guests love, uh, the bubbles, they put them down when it's sunny, they put them down, um, probably gets more use in the summer as a bubble lift than the winter, uh, but look, it's, it's nice to, uh, have on the days where, you know, there's some liquid precipitation out here. It certainly happens in the Poconos.00:41:22.000 --> 00:41:24.000Stuart Winchester: Hmm.00:41:34.000 --> 00:41:35.000Stuart Winchester: Okay.00:41:41.000 --> 00:41:58.000Jason Bays: um, and, uh, and, and or, um, uh, you know, other, other weather events, it's, it's, it's a nice to have, um, and it certainly, it gets you up in, you know, a little bit over two minutes. Um, it's a smooth ride, it's a great ride. Um, you are not going to get any complaints from me that we have a, um.00:41:47.000 --> 00:41:48.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:41:51.000 --> 00:41:52.000Stuart Winchester: Mm-hmm.00:41:58.000 --> 00:42:11.000Jason Bays: bubble, D-line, six-pack, um, in place, uh, and able to operate as our main workhorse lift. Um, and, uh, I think the six-pack versus the quad was absolutely the right, uh, call. Um…00:42:11.000 --> 00:42:27.000Jason Bays: from my experience being here before with the Sullivan Express, um, with the four-seater, the six-seater, just the… the added, uh, ability, uh, there is, uh, is… is well worth it. So, uh, we're happy to have that… happy to have that lift. I… I wouldn't, uh… I wouldn't…00:42:27.000 --> 00:42:31.000Jason Bays: We won't be trading it in at this point. Let's put it that way.00:42:30.000 --> 00:42:38.000Stuart Winchester: It is a gorgeous machine, and I have to tell you, I'm that weird person who, if there's a line on one lift.00:42:38.000 --> 00:42:56.000Stuart Winchester: And no line on the lift next to it. Even if it's a slower lift, I'll take the slower lift, because I just would rather not deal with the hassle of the line. So right here, for those who are watching, is the Bailey Double, and this is an old chair lift. It's an old slow double, it runs almost exactly parallel to Black Bear 6, doesn't land quite as high.00:42:56.000 --> 00:43:16.000Stuart Winchester: on the mountain, but functionally, it does about the same thing for you. So I like Bailey, and I was glad to see that not only did you keep it, and it does run, and that was true even under the previous regime, but you got a new gearbox for it, which is a really big deal for a lift like this in several decades. Also, talk about the work you've done on Bailey, and how you hope to use that lift.00:43:16.000 --> 00:43:18.000Stuart Winchester: this year to complement Black Bear.00:43:18.000 --> 00:43:21.000Jason Bays: Yeah, so, um, Bailey Lift…00:43:21.000 --> 00:43:32.000Jason Bays: full disclosure, Bailey Lift, Meadows Lift, Raceway Lift, and our season pass holders are very aware of this. Um, unfortunately, uh, we're not, um…00:43:32.000 --> 00:43:41.000Jason Bays: ready for day one of last year, um, or even close. And so, uh, we had to do a lot of, um…00:43:34.000 --> 00:43:35.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:43:41.000 --> 00:43:57.000Jason Bays: normal PM maintenance, um, throughout the, um, end of fall and into winter to have all of them operational. Um, what I share to that is, um, we will run, just level set here really quickly, we will run all the lifts that we have on this trail map.00:43:42.000 --> 00:43:44.000Stuart Winchester: Okay.00:43:57.000 --> 00:44:02.000Jason Bays: Um, and take care of them, maintain them, operate them.00:44:02.000 --> 00:44:18.000Jason Bays: Staff them, everything that you would do to run the extra capacity, we certainly need it. We'd like more capacity, actually. So that being said, Bailey Lift is critical. We got it back online.00:44:08.000 --> 00:44:10.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah. Okay.00:44:18.000 --> 00:44:34.000Jason Bays: End of January, it ran for 2 or 3 weekends, and we had a failed gearbox, um, on it, which is really unfortunate. Um, this off-season, uh, we've replaced the gearbox, we've done a full PM over the course of the summer on it, which is…00:44:34.000 --> 00:44:50.000Jason Bays: the, as you, as everyone knows, the ideal time, uh, to be, um, conducting such work, um, so that it is ready on, uh, day one. Um, it is a critical backup lift. We will run it every weekend.00:44:50.000 --> 00:45:07.000Jason Bays: Um, that we're, you know, in season, I would say in the heart of season, we're gonna run it. Won't be shy to not run it. Um, same thing with the Meadows, same thing with the Glen, same thing with the Raceway, which, um, you know, I know that that was, um, certainly chief among the complaints of.00:45:07.000 --> 00:45:22.000Jason Bays: locals and guests who were visiting from out of town alike was Lyft availability, Lyft reliability. That was something that we focused as fast as we could on last year, but we're setting ourselves up this year to be.00:45:22.000 --> 00:45:39.000Jason Bays: um, very proactive to that, and recognizing the importance of, of each of, uh, uh, you know, each of these. And look, every once in a while, uh, if the, you always want to have, like, Bailey is critical because it's the only other, if there's Black Bear, without Black Bear, it's the only other thing left, right?00:45:36.000 --> 00:45:38.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:45:39.000 --> 00:45:55.000Jason Bays: Um, and so, uh, you know, I think the, you know, back in the, when I was here, like, every Lyft ran on the weekends. It was Camelback. Um, it was busy, right? Like, everything was going. That's, that's essentially our, our, our philosophy, um, will continue to be our philosophy going forward.00:45:46.000 --> 00:45:48.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:45:55.000 --> 00:46:11.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, Jason, I'll admit, I didn't come to Camelback last season, so I wasn't able to experience it firsthand. I really wanted to come to your May thing, which I'll talk about, I'll get to in a minute, but I had a shoulder surgery, so I wasn't able to do that. But I wasn't only basing my perceptions of C.00:46:11.000 --> 00:46:19.000Stuart Winchester: on locals' reactions. I had skied there myself in recent years, and the lift line management, I have to say.00:46:19.000 --> 00:46:21.000Stuart Winchester: It was…00:46:21.000 --> 00:46:33.000Stuart Winchester: really frustrating from a skier point of view, when you're waiting for the Stevenson lift, and there's a big line, and every chair is going up with one or two people, and this is not peak COVID or anything else, this is several years later.00:46:33.000 --> 00:46:50.000Stuart Winchester: So, you know, and I had a lot of locals tell me, oh, we walk up Sun Bowl because the lift line is just too chaotic. People come from both sides. No, no, again, that was all before. What's your philosophy of lift line management? How have you tried to tame that? And there's always, it's always going to be a little wild and hard in Pennsylvan.00:46:50.000 --> 00:46:56.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, but they could definitely have been managed better. Is that something that was important to you, that you focused on?00:46:56.000 --> 00:47:15.000Jason Bays: Yeah, we focused on that. We have a new lift operations manager that was hired in November of 2025, who took the bull by the horns. We developed a supervisor team in fairly short order to that as well, to build out a well-rounded team. And then I would just share that our lift attendants.00:47:15.000 --> 00:47:32.000Jason Bays: All hired locally within the community. And I think that we were fully staffed in LiftOps this year, which was a big, very big win. It starts there, right? A, the people, and then B, the right people.00:47:22.000 --> 00:47:23.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:47:32.000 --> 00:47:49.000Jason Bays: um, on the, uh, on the bus, um, as a catalyst to drive, uh, lift operations forward. Um, and then absolutely, uh, we focused on, uh, line management, queuing, um, we set new, in some cases, new queues. We had, um, uh, supervisors, in many cases, out.00:47:49.000 --> 00:48:04.000Jason Bays: um, putting up chairs, um, and, um, and managing the lift line. We added, once we got that right, and we felt like we were in a good spot, and we, you know, look, I think, admittedly, a couple technology hiccups here and there, it was not a perfect, uh.00:48:04.000 --> 00:48:17.000Jason Bays: we didn't, like, on opening day, it wasn't perfect, but, uh, we improved, it was a big focus for our team, and I think when we talk about fundamental ski operation, um, if we just were a ski area, we would absolutely be focusing on.00:48:06.000 --> 00:48:08.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:48:17.000 --> 00:48:36.000Jason Bays: lift queuing, but we have to do that, like, we have to execute that every day because we are a ski area, um, and that's core to our business, and so that's important. Um, then we added, once we got queuing, uh, uh, correct, we added surprise and delights. Lift, uh, chocolate chip cookies were massively popular.00:48:36.000 --> 00:49:04.000Jason Bays: We handed out over 15,000 chocolate chip cookies this winter at the Stevenson lift line. And so, you know, then it becomes fun, right? Then it's the hospitality side of the business of how do we engage with our guests now that we have full chairs going up for the most part off of the Stevenson and the Black Bear and the Sun Bowl. So we hired extra associates to do that, to surprise and delight, to help our guests.00:48:40.000 --> 00:48:42.000Stuart Winchester: Cool.00:49:04.000 --> 00:49:20.000Jason Bays: The one other thing I would just share is Sunbowl is a great example. How many people get down to the Sunbowl and have never ridden a lift before? And so you need that extra human touch to be able to help. It's not even just putting people in groups of four. It's just helping them with like, here's where you go to load the lift. Here's what you do.00:49:12.000 --> 00:49:14.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:49:20.000 --> 00:49:21.000Stuart Winchester: Yep.00:49:20.000 --> 00:49:33.000Jason Bays: Um, I think that that investment in our people to provide that service to our guests is very well worth it, and it's the difference between someone having a bad experience getting on a lift and never coming back.00:49:33.000 --> 00:49:43.000Jason Bays: or having a great experience, feeling well cared for, and wanting to try again. Um, and so that, that, that was, um, you know, I think that's a core, um, focus for us.00:49:43.000 --> 00:50:02.000Stuart Winchester: So, one of the ways that I can tell the resort is being run by a skier, in addition to all the things you just said, and your passion for the minutiae of things like lift lines, which I share, is that you're cutting 3 new trails in a resort that's 60 years old, and I love that. So, talk us through these trails, Jason. I'll do my best to trace them.00:50:02.000 --> 00:50:08.000Stuart Winchester: on the trail map. I don't have the updated trail map, I don't know if you've created it yet, but talk us through these three trails.00:50:08.000 --> 00:50:25.000Jason Bays: Yeah, so we're really excited. Look, this, you know, came after, you know, the so many guests, new guests that visited us at Camelback this past season. We said, you know what, let's do something fun and exciting. And like, you know, you think about how.00:50:25.000 --> 00:50:43.000Jason Bays: Um, yeah, I just, you know, if someone said, anyone puts in a new trail, uh, the skier in me wants to drive to that resort, no matter how big or small, and be like, alright, like, let's do it. Um, and our team feels, uh, you know, much of the same way. So, um, that being said, uh, we had a lot of natural snowfall this year, so…00:50:32.000 --> 00:50:33.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:50:33.000 --> 00:50:36.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:50:36.000 --> 00:50:37.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, sure. Yeah.00:50:43.000 --> 00:50:59.000Jason Bays: I was acutely paying attention to where people were skiing when we had natural snowfall, where they wanted to go, and then, you know, maybe following those lines, too, and seeing what the fun was about. So, my point to all of that is, we said, let's create some, and I think for Camelback, too.00:50:46.000 --> 00:50:48.000Stuart Winchester: Mm-hmm.00:50:59.000 --> 00:51:15.000Jason Bays: it's very, um, you know, we wanted to create something that was sort of unique. I didn't want to just put in, like, regular trails that, A, we don't have a lot of space for regular trails, and B, um, we really wanted to create sort of unique experience. So, right underneath Black Bear, um, in between Sullivan and John Bailey there.00:51:07.000 --> 00:51:09.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:51:15.000 --> 00:51:30.000Jason Bays: um, there's a, um, there's a chute, um, where the old Alpine Slide used to go. Basculus goes back into Rocket, uh, but underneath there is some really fun rolling terrain. Like, it's, it's because the mountain, the, uh, Alpine Slide.00:51:26.000 --> 00:51:28.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, thank you.00:51:30.000 --> 00:51:54.000Jason Bays: back in the day did had several dips and curves and so we're going to lean into those dips and curves and create something sort of fun that you can get some you know launch some airtime off of if you want or carve a turn over it but it'll have some some really nice terrain variation in a way that most trails at Camelback don't have and they're coming off of an expert trail there so.00:51:54.000 --> 00:52:06.000Jason Bays: um, gives, uh, you know, anyone skiing Asp, Hump, Rocket, um, or Basilisk would be able to reach that trail, um, and, uh, and be able to, uh, just have a little bit more excitement on the way back down.00:52:06.000 --> 00:52:08.000Jason Bays: Um…00:52:08.000 --> 00:52:20.000Jason Bays: Upper Cleopatra there, if you go to the, uh, where the U is, uh, or where Upper is, we're gonna cut a trail through the woods there that's going to end up on the bottom of Big Pocono.00:52:19.000 --> 00:52:21.000Stuart Winchester: Okay.00:52:20.000 --> 00:52:31.000Jason Bays: Um, so it's gonna go down and across. So, um, that… um, and I see where your cursor is. If you go to the… where it says Upper on Upper Cleopatra.00:52:26.000 --> 00:52:29.000Stuart Winchester: So, like, here? Or…00:52:30.000 --> 00:52:32.000Stuart Winchester: Oh, upper…00:52:32.000 --> 00:52:54.000Jason Bays: So, Big Pocono, that's Uncle B. Yeah, right there. Yep, we're going through there. Yeah, so that's gonna be, that's a narrow blue square. So, you know, I think one of the things that's fun for us is we're gonna create a blue square there. That used to be a trail back in the 60s and 70s, fun fact, when Walter Foger was designing Camelback.00:52:34.000 --> 00:52:37.000Stuart Winchester: Upper… oh, this one. Okay, so you're cutting through here?00:52:37.000 --> 00:52:39.000Stuart Winchester: Oh, cool. Okay.00:52:49.000 --> 00:52:51.000Stuart Winchester: Oh, cool.00:52:54.000 --> 00:53:09.000Jason Bays: Um, that being said, um, the… actually, it got filled in with pine trees, so it's gonna be really cool, because there's pine trees on both sides. Um, we made it narrow, so we kept the pine trees, um, and so that's gonna be a really fun, um, sort of narrow… I think about, like, the, um.00:52:58.000 --> 00:52:59.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:53:01.000 --> 00:53:03.000Stuart Winchester: That's cool. It's pretty.00:53:09.000 --> 00:53:26.000Jason Bays: the ending of Jay Peak with some of the blues at the very bottom there by Interstate. We're trying to sort of have that, obviously in a much smaller zone, have that same effect, though, where you're feeling like you're really in the trees, and you've got some nice twists and turns to it. It's not terribly steep.00:53:12.000 --> 00:53:13.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, okay.00:53:26.000 --> 00:53:44.000Jason Bays: Um, two things on that trail. One is, it takes traffic off of Honeymoon Lane, which is a main boulevard, it pushes it onto the Sphinx, which has much more trail capacity, which is great, um, comfortable carrying capacity, and secondarily, um, on weekends, we're gonna have a hot chocolate, um, hut that people can ski up to.00:53:31.000 --> 00:53:32.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:53:44.000 --> 00:53:52.000Jason Bays: Um, and get shots of hot chocolate, um, as well, so we're excited to, um, uh, to offer that to our guests. We think that'll be really fun.00:53:46.000 --> 00:53:47.000Stuart Winchester: That's cool.00:53:51.000 --> 00:53:53.000Stuart Winchester: That was awesome.00:53:53.000 --> 00:54:17.000Jason Bays: And then the Stevenson, it's going to drop on the cliffhanger side and drop down that lift line and go right down into the Faroe there and follow that lift line. Vermont skiing in a very short array but very much Vermont skiing, that's an intimidating drop. Stevenson for those that may not be familiar has a extremely.00:53:53.000 --> 00:53:55.000Stuart Winchester: And it.00:53:58.000 --> 00:53:59.000Stuart Winchester: Okay.00:54:08.000 --> 00:54:09.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, I think so.00:54:17.000 --> 00:54:34.000Jason Bays: extremely tight, um, and high, uh, crest of the lift, because the mountain crests, um, really steeply. Well, we're gonna ski that, um, and, uh, and make snow on it, and, uh, and, and, uh, and allow our guests to, uh, um, and allow skiers to, uh, to, to, to test, um, you know, a more narrow.00:54:34.000 --> 00:54:44.000Jason Bays: um, uh, trail up there that has a really great expansive view ov

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Welcome to the Storm's short-form, news-focused podcast. Don't worry, I still write long-form newsletters. Paid subscribers can leave a comment in the article below, or by joining The Storm's chat (also below). I'll respond to some comments in the next episode, which is scheduled for Wednesday, Sept. 16.Transcript updateFollowing up on yesterday's feedback, there are now two transcripts available for each podcast:* Substack's transcript: This transcript is auto-generated when I upload the podcast file to Substack, which is the platform that hosts stormskiing.com. This one is cool because you can click on any block of text and the audio will jump to that point in the conversation. Click the “transcript” button above to access. * Zoom's transcript: Zoom automatically generates this transcript as I record. It should be more or less identical to Substack's transcript, but with names attached to each quote block. The downside of this transcript is that you can't teleport to that point in the pod by clicking on the text block, as you can with Substack's. Another downside: the timestamps are off, since I typically start recording prior to the start of the podcast. I'll work on cleaning this up.So until the robots get smarter, we're stuck with two different transcripts. Both are auto-generated, and I don't proofread either one, as that would be the fastest way to make sure my quick-turnaround, up-to-date podcast turns into a slow-turnaround, out-of-date one. My hope is that Substack will soon hire or invent or weld from raw iron a robot that's smart enough to know who's speaking when. I'll just keep following the robots around and using their hyper-intelligence until they decide to kill me.The Zoom transcript (click “transcript” above for the Substack transcript, which will zoom to any point in the video when you click on the associated text block; timestamps below DO NOT MATCH THE VIDEO)Stuart Winchester: Welcome to The Storm! I'm your host, Stuart Winchester. It is Tuesday, September 15th, 2026, and I am very excited today to bring you a conversation with the General Manager of Monarch Mountain, Colorado, Chris Haggerty. Now, I've never featured Monarch either on the long-form pod or on the short-form pod.00:09:57.000 --> 00:10:11.000Stuart Winchester: There's never really a reason behind that, other than this is just kind of when it happened. If you run an area, a ski area anywhere in America, I do want to talk to you. I've just never had the opportunity to feature Monarch before, so we will talk about Monarch in just a little bit here.00:10:11.000 --> 00:10:27.000Stuart Winchester: Part of the reason why we're talking about Monarch is because they were one of two Western Mountains to this year join Snow Operating's Snow Pass. Now, the Snow Pass, if you missed the news, it works a lot like the Indy Pass or the Mountain Collective Pass, where you get two days each.00:10:27.000 --> 00:10:37.000Stuart Winchester: at a set number of ski areas. In this case, it's planned to be 14 ski areas for the 2026-27 ski season. And…00:10:37.000 --> 00:10:45.000Stuart Winchester: That product went on sale last Tuesday. I had Snow Operating CEO Joe Heschen on the podcast to talk through it with us.00:10:45.000 --> 00:11:01.000Stuart Winchester: Couple days later, I got an email from Snow Operating saying, Hey, guess what? Our first round of Snow Operating and Snow Triple Play, which are two different products, and I'll explain the difference in a moment, sold out. So we're taking it off sale. We're putting it back on sale next Monday, September 21st.00:11:01.000 --> 00:11:13.000Stuart Winchester: at 10 a.m. Eastern. It will be $349.99 for Snowpass, and $184.99 for Snow Triple Play. Still a pretty good deal. Those products at full price.00:11:13.000 --> 00:11:24.000Stuart Winchester: the prices that Snow Partners gave me, and they anticipate selling both products through Christmas Eve, December 24th, just like they did last year with the first season of the Triple Play.00:11:24.000 --> 00:11:40.000Stuart Winchester: They, the final prices they anticipate will be 3 99 99 for snow pass and 1 99 99 for snow triple play. So you get a nice little discount, particularly with the snow pass, $50 off if you buy it in the next round. So let's talk a little bit about the snow pass because.00:11:40.000 --> 00:11:43.000Stuart Winchester: When this product debuted.00:11:43.000 --> 00:11:53.000Stuart Winchester: I… I've been saying for years, there's 4 national ski passes, right? There's obviously Epic and Icon, and those have some season pass unlimited tiers at certain mountains.00:11:53.000 --> 00:12:08.000Stuart Winchester: And a limited number of days at other partner mountains. And then you have Indian Mountain Collective, which essentially worked the same way, 2 days at each ski area that is on their roster. Uh, Mountain Collective is more expensive, tends to be your bigger, more high-end resorts, Snowbird, Jackson Hole.00:12:08.000 --> 00:12:23.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, Sun Peaks up in Canada. And Indy tended to be the lesser-known ski areas, but still some really dynamite stuff there, and a lot more ski areas. Mountain Collective always has around 30, and Indy is more like 250, not counting their cross-country.00:12:23.000 --> 00:12:36.000Stuart Winchester: ski areas. So, I always thought there was probably room for a fifth national pass, but I wasn't sure, and as time went on, and more and more mountains joined multi-mountain passes.00:12:36.000 --> 00:12:37.000Stuart Winchester: I…00:12:37.000 --> 00:12:41.000Stuart Winchester: I thought, okay, maybe there's not room for a fifth national pass. Maybe everyone who's…00:12:41.000 --> 00:12:44.000Stuart Winchester: who wants to join a pass has, because I know Indy, uh.00:12:44.000 --> 00:12:58.000Stuart Winchester: Now, I'm not saying they don't have standards, but they'll let just about anybody on the pass just to help them get that exposure and that national marketing. But Snow Operating, the outfit that owns Mountain Creek in New Jersey and the indoor big snow ski area in New Jersey, they launched.00:12:58.000 --> 00:13:15.000Stuart Winchester: their Snow Pass, and it's a pretty good roster. Here, I'm gonna share my screen for those of you watching on video, and if you're not watching on video, don't worry, I'm gonna talk through it. So, here's the Snow Triple Play East roster, and here's the Snow Pass roster. Now, the Snow Pass has 14 ski areas on it.00:13:15.000 --> 00:13:18.000Stuart Winchester: And you get 2 days at each ski area.00:13:18.000 --> 00:13:22.000Stuart Winchester: The Snow Triple Play has…00:13:22.000 --> 00:13:27.000Stuart Winchester: 23 total ski areas on it, and you get 3 days total.00:13:27.000 --> 00:13:43.000Stuart Winchester: across all 23 ski areas. That's why it's so much less expensive. The most days you can use at any ski area is 2, so you can't buy this as a 3-pack Force A Gore Mountain, alright? So, that's the first important.00:13:43.000 --> 00:13:59.000Stuart Winchester: distinction is that Snow Triple Play is a much more limited basket of days. You also don't want to assume that they have the same roster. Just because something's on Snow Pass doesn't mean it's on Snow Triple Play, and vice versa. Snow Triple Play right now has a pretty…00:13:59.000 --> 00:14:15.000Stuart Winchester: Big roster that I wish was on the, uh, Snow Pass, because it has Jiminy Peak in, uh, Massachusetts, and also Cranmore in New Hampshire, which is jointly owned. It has Platykill up in the New York Catskills.00:14:15.000 --> 00:14:30.000Stuart Winchester: It has all these summit ski areas around Quebec. It has Bromont, one of the great eastern townships ski areas. Uh, so that's Snow Triple Play. Snow Triple Play does not have anything in the west. It's all east. It's all east coast, either eastern Canada or eastern New York.00:14:30.000 --> 00:14:45.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, Snow Pass has… it's a pretty interesting roster, and it's a great roster for a very particular type of skier. Now, it does have two ski areas in the West, uh, Snow King, which has been controversial, I'm gonna set that aside, and Monarch, which we'll talk about in a moment.00:14:45.000 --> 00:15:00.000Stuart Winchester: The core of the Snow Pass, and the reason why it makes sense, is because of the south to north line of ski areas that it offers. So if you buy the Snow Pass, again, goes back on sale for $349.99 next Monday, September 21st.00:15:00.000 --> 00:15:05.000Stuart Winchester: You would get two days each at Bel Air, which is in New York's Catskills.00:15:05.000 --> 00:15:07.000Stuart Winchester: Gore.00:15:07.000 --> 00:15:16.000Stuart Winchester: higher up in the Adirondacks, and Whiteface, which are all owned and run and operated by the state, all fantastic ski areas. So it's 2 days at each of those, that alone would be worth $350.00:15:16.000 --> 00:15:33.000Stuart Winchester: Then you add in the fact that you get two days at Mountain Creek, which is right there in New Jersey, uh, two days at the indoor snow dome, big snow American dream. Uh, if you have kids, two days at Butternut and two days at Mount Southington in Connecticut. Uh, Butternut is in Massachusetts. They're both day drive distance from New York City.00:15:33.000 --> 00:15:42.000Stuart Winchester: Let them wander around, let them explore. They're both, uh, especially Butternut. It's very up-to-date, very modern lifts, very, very well-run ski area. So…00:15:42.000 --> 00:15:45.000Stuart Winchester: You have a really great little, you know.00:15:46.000 --> 00:16:03.000Stuart Winchester: 5, 6, 7 ski areas that really make sense. Now, Ski Martok doesn't really make sense. It's all the way up in the middle of nowhere in the, in the Atlantic provinces in, in Canada. Uh, and, and Pleasant Mountain makes less sense. It's, it's up in Maine and, uh, harder to get to from, from the folks who would likely buy this as.00:16:03.000 --> 00:16:13.000Stuart Winchester: But what you have to ask yourself is, okay, the snow pass, that's a pretty good deal, right? It's $349.99 for 2 days each of 14 mountains. Then you look at Indy.00:16:13.000 --> 00:16:16.000Stuart Winchester: And Indy Pass is 254.00:16:16.000 --> 00:16:34.000Stuart Winchester: uh, alpine ski areas, and it just went off sale for $429 for the base pass. So, it would be 2 days each at all of these, and the… the plus pass, the ND plus pass, was $469. It had no blackouts. Now, the other thing to know about Snow Triple Play.00:16:34.000 --> 00:16:50.000Stuart Winchester: and snow passes, there are a lot of blackouts, okay? So, a lot of these are holidays, you probably expect that. Uh, you know, here I see Big Snow, Oak Mountain, Plattekill, a lot of holiday blackouts, Butternut holiday blackouts, Gore, uh, Bel Air. Bel Air, though, you want to stop.00:16:50.000 --> 00:17:06.000Stuart Winchester: Bel Air is blacked out every Saturday and Sunday. That's a big deal, because when do you probably want to go to Bel Air if you're someone skiing around with your little kids? Probably on a Saturday or Sunday. So, you want to be really careful and really look at these, uh, these blackout dates before you pull the trigger.00:17:06.000 --> 00:17:09.000Stuart Winchester: on the snow pass. So…00:17:09.000 --> 00:17:14.000Stuart Winchester: So if you have a snow pass, I I'm calling it.00:17:14.000 --> 00:17:18.000Stuart Winchester: A national pass, kind of, uh…00:17:18.000 --> 00:17:24.000Stuart Winchester: out of anticipation, right? It's more of a, I think they'll get there, sort of designation, because right now.00:17:24.000 --> 00:17:40.000Stuart Winchester: it's not really a national pass, right? You have one small skier in Wyoming, one small skier in Colorado. Is someone who lives in New York's metro really going to travel to Colorado just to ski that because they have a snow pass, right? Because it's not cheap to get up to Colorado.00:17:40.000 --> 00:17:56.000Stuart Winchester: And there's a lot of much bigger mountains out there. So… so I think that Snow Pass, much like Indy did when it started in 2019, will grow into a national… a true national pass. Uh, for now, just based on the reputation of the operators, uh, the fact that I think that they will be able to grow this thing, the fact that I…00:17:56.000 --> 00:18:11.000Stuart Winchester: know their relationships with folks all around the country, and how much folks like working with them, I am assuming that this pass will grow up, and if it does, Monarch will be the OG Western partner. So, let's talk more about Monarch now, and I'm gonna bring.00:18:11.000 --> 00:18:13.000Stuart Winchester: Chris Haggerty in.00:18:14.000 --> 00:18:17.000Stuart Winchester: And we will, uh… Chris, how you doing?00:18:17.000 --> 00:18:20.000Chris Haggerty: I'm doing well today, Stuart. How are you?00:18:19.000 --> 00:18:37.000Stuart Winchester: I'm doing great. All right, you passed the sound check, so I'm going to give you an intro here. Joining us now is the general manager of Monarch Mountain, Colorado. Monarch has six chairlifts serving 1,017 acres of terrain, including the 377-acre no-name expansion that opened last winter.00:18:37.000 --> 00:18:44.000Stuart Winchester: Monarch's 10,727-foot base elevation is the third highest in American skiing.00:18:44.000 --> 00:18:59.000Stuart Winchester: Prior to taking the top job at Monarch in 2024, he spent 21 years as general manager of Mountain Creek, New Jersey. Chris Haggerty is my guest. Chris, welcome to The Storm. Awesome to connect with you. I've really been wanting to spotlight Monarch for a long time now, and I'm so hyped we get to.00:19:00.000 --> 00:19:10.000Chris Haggerty: Yeah. Thanks for having me, and I'm excited to be here and chat Monarch. It's a special place, so excited to share some discussion about it.00:19:10.000 --> 00:19:23.000Stuart Winchester: So, the New Jersey to Colorado pipeline is maybe not necessarily a well-trod one, although there are a surprising amount of IntraWest vets working in the ski industry because of its relationship with IntraWest, but talk to us about…00:19:24.000 --> 00:19:40.000Stuart Winchester: Getting to Monarch, and you were taking over for Randy Stroud, super experienced guy, he was retiring, uh, he'd been there 23 years, a decade as GM, and he stayed on, I believe, for, for a year. So, talk to us about going from New Jersey, where they have a lot of snowmaking, because they have to.00:19:39.000 --> 00:19:41.000Chris Haggerty: Mmhm.00:19:40.000 --> 00:19:47.000Stuart Winchester: to Monarch, where they have no snowmaking, and just what that adjustment period was like, and how you settled into the role.00:19:48.000 --> 00:20:07.000Chris Haggerty: Yeah, just a quick story is that, you know, as you mentioned, I was at Mountain Creek for a long time, and, you know, really where I found my love for the ski industry, and after college, I had taken a trip out to Colorado and got my first taste of, like.00:20:07.000 --> 00:20:12.000Chris Haggerty: the Rockies, right? So it's always been something in the back of my mind. Um…00:20:12.000 --> 00:20:28.000Chris Haggerty: And I ended up stumbling upon Monarch. I hadn't been to Monarch before, and I was like, oh, this place looks pretty cool. It definitely screamed the ski independent. I definitely wanted to.00:20:28.000 --> 00:20:50.000Chris Haggerty: you know, if I was going to relocate, wanted to find an area where the resort and the local community both had that kind of just feeling of community and stuff. So a monarch was it. And I was blessed to step in after Randy Stroud, and we shared a season together. So I got to learn a lot of institutional knowledge from him.00:20:50.000 --> 00:20:58.000Chris Haggerty: Um, but also bring my viewpoints coming from New Jersey in an area where, you know, we're not…00:20:58.000 --> 00:21:15.000Chris Haggerty: maybe blessed with natural snow. Um, so last year was, like, a challenging winter, and, um, I was ready for it, because I was like, man, 120 inches, like, if you gave me that in New Jersey, we'd be celebrating for years, right? So, um, you know, just kind of a unique perspective, but…00:21:15.000 --> 00:21:21.000Chris Haggerty: um, definitely happy to be here, and just pumped to keep the Monarch kind of spirit going forward.00:21:21.000 --> 00:21:37.000Stuart Winchester: So you've been there for a couple years, one full year as GM, and one of the… there's been tons of stuff coming out of Monarch, it's amazing for a small ski area, which is why I wanted to get you on. So you recently joined the Snow Pass, one of two Western partners to join the Snow Pass, which gives pass holders.00:21:32.000 --> 00:21:34.000Chris Haggerty: Thank you.00:21:37.000 --> 00:21:54.000Stuart Winchester: Two days at Monarch. I don't think there's blackouts on that, but correct me if I'm wrong now. Now, Multimon Pass has been around for years and almost everybody in Colorado is on either Epic or Icon if they're large and if they're small, a lot of them have joined Indy. So the option has been there for years.00:21:54.000 --> 00:22:00.000Stuart Winchester: Why was it finally time for Monarch to join a multi-mountain pass, and why the snow pass?00:22:02.000 --> 00:22:15.000Chris Haggerty: Yeah, two parts there. I think on the, I mentioned it before, we're ski independent as our tagline, right? Part of independence is like the definition is freedom.00:22:10.000 --> 00:22:11.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:22:15.000 --> 00:22:19.000Chris Haggerty: Right? Like, you make your own choices. You do what you wanna do.00:22:19.000 --> 00:22:31.000Chris Haggerty: we've been approached in the past for IndyPass, and, you know, it wasn't right for us because it kind of went against our spirit of being independent. Like, we want to be able to work with who we…00:22:31.000 --> 00:22:43.000Chris Haggerty: who we choose at any given moment, um, and that just isn't something that, um, is available through the Unipass, so… so we've passed on that. Um, we were even approached about it this year. Um…00:22:43.000 --> 00:23:00.000Chris Haggerty: As far as Snowpass goes, they respect that. They're all about, hey, you want to work with XYZ Pass, go for it. And obviously, I've spent some time working with the Snow Partners group.00:23:00.000 --> 00:23:05.000Chris Haggerty: You know, from my perspective, that group is all about, um…00:23:05.000 --> 00:23:17.000Chris Haggerty: you know, rising tides lifts all boats, right? And, um, you know, for me personally, they've opened doors for me, right? And helped me throughout growing in my career, so, um…00:23:39.000 --> 00:23:40.000Chris Haggerty: We're down.00:23:40.000 --> 00:23:52.000Stuart Winchester: I want to share, because you've sort of created your own… I'm sharing my screen now, if you can see that, and hopefully the folks watching can as well, and if you're listening, I'll talk through it. So, Monarch has…00:23:45.000 --> 00:23:46.000Chris Haggerty: Thank you.00:23:52.000 --> 00:24:07.000Stuart Winchester: not joined a pass, necessarily, but you've kind of built your own pass, and what I have on the screen right now is a list of Monarch's reciprocals, and it's a pretty amazing pass all in and of itself, so if you buy a Monarch season pass, which I believe now is, what, $6.59, less if you renew.00:24:07.000 --> 00:24:24.000Stuart Winchester: It comes with a lot of reciprocal days. Some of the big ones that people probably are really attracted to, 3 days at A-Basin, 3 days at Copper. Now there's blackouts on that, but still, it's freaking Copper Mountain. Uh, 3 days at Purgatory. And then, uh, 3 days each at all of the Mountain Capital Partners-owned skiers, which Purgatory.00:24:07.000 --> 00:24:08.000Chris Haggerty: Mm-hmm.00:24:14.000 --> 00:24:16.000Chris Haggerty: I'll do that.00:24:24.000 --> 00:24:25.000Chris Haggerty: Yes.00:24:24.000 --> 00:24:39.000Stuart Winchester: Also, Arizona Snowball. And there's a bunch more. I don't want to list them all, given our time constraints here today. But talk about this reciprocal program, because essentially, you're saying you're going to give pass holders of all these mountains.00:24:33.000 --> 00:24:34.000Chris Haggerty: Yes.00:24:37.000 --> 00:24:38.000Chris Haggerty: Sure.00:24:39.000 --> 00:24:46.000Stuart Winchester: free visits to Monarch in exchange for your pass holders getting free visits there, so…00:24:41.000 --> 00:24:42.000Chris Haggerty: Oh.00:24:43.000 --> 00:24:44.000Chris Haggerty: Yes.00:24:46.000 --> 00:24:52.000Stuart Winchester: whatever you did or didn't like about IndyPass, it does pay per visit, so what was attractive about.00:24:47.000 --> 00:24:49.000Chris Haggerty: Just a second.00:24:52.000 --> 00:24:57.000Stuart Winchester: this, and why did it make sense to do these free visit exchanges with other ski areas?00:24:57.000 --> 00:25:15.000Chris Haggerty: We look at it as other skiers are not our competition, right? There's 350 million people roughly in the United States. Less than 5% actually ski or snowboard, right? So there's a lot of people out there that just need to be introduced into the sport.00:25:15.000 --> 00:25:17.000Chris Haggerty: Um…00:25:17.000 --> 00:25:23.000Chris Haggerty: rather than trying to fight for visits between resorts. So… so one of the things is just…00:25:23.000 --> 00:25:39.000Chris Haggerty: How do we get more people skiing and snowboarding, which is obviously a huge conversation you could talk about forever. But with this one, it's just like, hey, these are other resorts that are interested in also giving their pass holders as well as ours.00:25:55.000 --> 00:26:10.000Chris Haggerty: allow our pass holders to try each out while still knowing that, like most people that have a copper pass, they're not migrating to Monarch because they came here for two days.00:26:10.000 --> 00:26:28.000Chris Haggerty: they're bought a Copper Pass for a reason, they love that, and they're like, yeah, if I could get two days over at Monarch, cool. Same thing with our Monarch guests, like, they… they… they love Monarch, they want most of their days to be here, and if we could break it up for them, um, you know, a couple times a year, or they could go to A-Basin and Copper, then.00:26:16.000 --> 00:26:17.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah. Okay.00:26:28.000 --> 00:26:37.000Chris Haggerty: That adds a lot of value to them and gives them that flexibility to move around and go where it works for them.00:26:37.000 --> 00:26:52.000Stuart Winchester: You know, Monarch is small by Colorado standards, but it always surprised me to see that it actually does have a pseudo national following. And I get emails from people all over the country that say they buy the Monarch Pass because it gives them all those reciprocals and they come out and they like to support the small ski area.00:26:52.000 --> 00:26:59.000Stuart Winchester: I want to get your take on something here, Chris. I'm going to share my screen again, and I want to share a chart that I made.00:26:59.000 --> 00:27:14.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, so, so this is a chart of Monarch's skier visits since 1997, up to 2024 to 25, right? And I've compiled these from all kinds of different places, and I have a little bit of a gap there. But as you, as you see right here, they've been going steadily up, right?00:27:14.000 --> 00:27:29.000Stuart Winchester: So, so you were averaging below $200,000 for most of the, of the 2010s, you know, much lower some years, and now you're pretty steadily adding, averaging over $200,000. Now, last year, I don't have your numbers, I'm, I'm sure that they were, uh, pretty bad, but.00:27:29.000 --> 00:27:33.000Stuart Winchester: You know, in relation to what your past numbers were.00:27:33.000 --> 00:27:35.000Stuart Winchester: So here's my question.00:27:35.000 --> 00:27:48.000Stuart Winchester: Monarch was supposed to be one of the ski areas that got squeezed out by Epic, squeezed out by Icon. That was one of the big worries. Uh, independent ski areas can't compete. We're seeing the opposite, because I've put some things on this timeline.00:27:48.000 --> 00:28:04.000Stuart Winchester: So, for example, 2007, IntraWest buys Steamboat. Uh, 2008, the Epic Pass launches. 2009, Powder buys Copper. Uh, the Mountain Collective launched in 2012. Uh, Mountain Capital Partners bought Purgatory in 2015. Powder bought Eldora the following year.00:28:04.000 --> 00:28:21.000Stuart Winchester: Uh In 2017, Alterra combined Steamboat and Winter Park in 2018, they launched the icon pass. Uh And then we had the 20% epic price cut in 2022. So all these things you think, ok, Vale and Alterra putting their mountains on sale. These are big world famous mountains, Steamboat Vale Mountain.00:28:21.000 --> 00:28:25.000Stuart Winchester: Monarch must be getting crushed. No, it's not. Why?00:28:27.000 --> 00:28:45.000Chris Haggerty: I think it's a couple of reasons. Number one is we've just stayed true to who we are. And as the population has grown in the front range, like since 2010, Denver and Colorado Springs have grown by about 20%.00:28:45.000 --> 00:29:00.000Chris Haggerty: Right? So there's just more people, um, that are finding Monarch, and they're, they're like, wow, we like this, this is what we want. You know, you also throw in the fact that, um, I-70, for those in Colorado, are pretty familiar with, like, the traffic that is.00:28:49.000 --> 00:28:50.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:29:00.000 --> 00:29:17.000Chris Haggerty: created there on the weekends and it's not for everybody. So thankfully the drive to Monarch currently is a pretty attractive one, a lot less traffic. And I give credit to our ownership group, our current ownership group. They bought the resort in.00:29:17.000 --> 00:29:33.000Chris Haggerty: 2002. And part of it was, you know, a little bit of a passion project. Right? Like, they had come here and just really liked the vibe at Monarch and and wanted to protect that. And what they've been able to do is, number one, protect it.00:29:33.000 --> 00:29:53.000Chris Haggerty: Um, by not selling, you know, to, to one of the larger players, um, to just investing into our, our core, um, like deferred maintenance projects and those types of things, and then being really committed to the no name project, which we talked about and, and making sure timing was right on that and.00:29:53.000 --> 00:30:11.000Chris Haggerty: Um, that we were a healthy company before we jumped into that, so we didn't need a lifeline from, you know, someone else. So, um, there's kind of a lot of pieces that go into it. Um, and it's also worth noting that, like, our pass holders, like, and I think this goes to the growth, like, once people find us.00:30:11.000 --> 00:30:25.000Chris Haggerty: Um, our pass holder, uh, renewal rate is about 85% every year. Um, and the industry standard, depending on where you, you know, who you ask, it's somewhere between, like, 55% and 62%.00:30:25.000 --> 00:30:42.000Chris Haggerty: Um, and, and most of the 15% that we lose as we've dug into it is because of, uh, we have a lot of season pass holders from Fort Carson, um, military base outside of Colorado Springs, and they've just moved out of the area, right? So, um, I think our growth is partly due to, like.00:30:34.000 --> 00:30:35.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:30:42.000 --> 00:30:49.000Chris Haggerty: Once people come here and they discover it and they love it and they just keep coming back and we're just building upon that.00:30:49.000 --> 00:31:06.000Stuart Winchester: So you have owners that are willing to invest and that's really important. And Randy Stroud, I interviewed him, not on the podcast, but just for an article a couple of years ago. And he told me, and I'm not sure if this ended up being true, but their intention was to pay for the entire no name expansion in cash, including a brand new SkyTrak.00:31:06.000 --> 00:31:22.000Stuart Winchester: triple chair, or Doppelmayr, I can't remember what it was offhand, but regardless, it spoke to a very stable operation. Now, meanwhile, you still have some pretty old lifts, some pretty old infrastructure on the front side of the mountain, and recently Monarch's.00:31:22.000 --> 00:31:36.000Stuart Winchester: Master Development Plan was accepted by the U.S. Forest Service, which, for the listeners, just means that they said, okay, we'll let you consider doing these things on a project-by-project basis in the future. I have a lot of questions about the Master Plan, but first.00:31:36.000 --> 00:31:52.000Stuart Winchester: I want to focus on one that you called out, that Monarch Mountain called out in its first blog post announcing acceptance of the Master Plan, and it was about snowmaking. And Dan Torsell, the longtime GM of Ski Cooper, told me a long time ago when he came on this pod that.00:31:52.000 --> 00:32:04.000Stuart Winchester: that Ski Cooper and Monarch were the only big lift-surf ski areas in Colorado that don't have snowmaking. I think Silverton is too, but that sometimes gets lost in the shuffle. So, uh, you have it in your master development plan.00:32:04.000 --> 00:32:19.000Stuart Winchester: to a sort of rudimentary snowmaking system that would allow you to open early. But, this is a quote from your blog, quote, Before anyone panics when they read about snowmaking, let me assure you that Monarch is committed to remaining 100% all natural.00:32:19.000 --> 00:32:37.000Stuart Winchester: Snowmaking has been a part of our previous MDPs, Master Development Plan, and we have chosen not to implement it as we truly believe that natural snow provides the best skiing experience. This continues to be the case as snowmaking is in the plan to cover all bases, but we will not implement anything unless Mother Nature gives us no other choice.00:32:37.000 --> 00:32:40.000Stuart Winchester: Care to expand upon that at all?00:32:41.000 --> 00:32:53.000Chris Haggerty: Definitely. And yeah, and we are committed to that. And I actually, last summer, I spoke in front of some of the locals and pass holders, and when I let them know that we were committed to.00:32:41.000 --> 00:32:43.000Stuart Winchester: Or elaborate.00:32:53.000 --> 00:33:09.000Chris Haggerty: 100% all natural. That was the loudest cheer we got all day. So, like, that's what our, that's what our guests want. That's what we want. Um, as far that, you know, snowmaking has come a long way, and, and it is a necessity for a bunch of resorts.00:33:09.000 --> 00:33:19.000Chris Haggerty: Um, we're not at that point, um, and we're gonna push as far as we can, um, leaning into, like, snow farming and everything else before we ever, um.00:33:19.000 --> 00:33:35.000Chris Haggerty: have snow… have snowmaking. But, you know, in the Master Development Plan, it's in there because, like, part of putting things into that document is because it's a conceptual document. It's, like, it's designed to be a 15-year document. If it's not in there.00:33:35.000 --> 00:33:51.000Chris Haggerty: The Forest Service really doesn't even consider something. So if 15 years from now we're like, we need to put snowmaking in and it's not in there, we'd have some challenges. I will say our base elevation being basically 10,800 feet.00:33:51.000 --> 00:34:02.000Chris Haggerty: has helped us out, right? Like, as weather patterns has changed, and temperatures have rised, and winters are, you know, different every year, um…00:34:02.000 --> 00:34:13.000Chris Haggerty: we've been pretty lucky because of that base elevation, where we're… we are seeing snow, where other resorts are seeing some of that other precipitation falling, right? So, um…00:34:13.000 --> 00:34:30.000Chris Haggerty: you know, and then I mentioned the snow farming, like, we're… we're gonna do everything we can, like, on that side of things, right? And that's all the way from, like, fences strategically placed throughout the mountain, whether they're permanent or temporary, to catch the snow when the winds are coming from whatever direction.00:34:30.000 --> 00:34:47.000Chris Haggerty: And we do early season, we take the snow in the parking lots and we plow it all up and get it into one of the corners and then our groomers take it from there and start to build our base in the base area. So we have some different techniques to try to insulate us as much as possible.00:34:47.000 --> 00:34:53.000Chris Haggerty: And we're going to keep going that way as long as Mother Nature allows us to.00:34:53.000 --> 00:35:09.000Stuart Winchester: So snowmaking, it sounds like, is Monarch's emergency parachute. Meanwhile, there are a lot of big chairlift upgrades outlined on the master development plan. So Monarch has had substantially the same footprint for decades until last season's snowmaking upgrade.00:35:09.000 --> 00:35:24.000Stuart Winchester: And like I said before, more and more skier visits, and you were still running, with the exception of the 1999 Pioneer lift, the quad that was put in, with a lot of older double chairs. So Breezeway is a 1968 hall, Garfield is a 1969 hall, Panorama is a 1980 hall.00:35:24.000 --> 00:35:40.000Stuart Winchester: Tumbling as a 1981 hall. Those are all doubles. Now they've all gotten new drive terminals. So I understand they're, they're more modern in their actual functioning than, than in their look. However, the capacity is probably not a whole lot more than maybe it would have been. The master development plan proposes.00:35:40.000 --> 00:35:43.000Stuart Winchester: Replacing all of these with.00:35:43.000 --> 00:35:54.000Stuart Winchester: is advanced of a lift as a high-speed quad. Now, I realize you wanna… maybe the same reason as somebody… you say high-speed quad because you can always take it down, easier to go down than up, but talk us through…00:35:54.000 --> 00:36:05.000Stuart Winchester: your lift upgrade plan, and whether you think that high speed would be good for Monarch, or if you think that maybe fixed grip is the way you want to stay.00:36:06.000 --> 00:36:09.000Chris Haggerty: Yeah, fixed script is, you know.00:36:09.000 --> 00:36:24.000Chris Haggerty: Well, let me back up. A lot of that is in there because it's got to be in there if we choose to do that. And with no name opening, there's a lot of unknowns as far as, like, how is that going to change skier traffic around the mountain, right?00:36:14.000 --> 00:36:15.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:36:24.000 --> 00:36:41.000Chris Haggerty: One of the things we worked with the SE group, so they're, you know, a company that helps ski areas, right, with all sorts of development projects, big and small. And one of the things that they do is they do this density analysis, right? And it's a complicated, you know.00:36:41.000 --> 00:36:57.000Chris Haggerty: Analysis that takes on a lot of different data, but basically it's like they look at your uphill capacity based on the speed of the lift, the size of the lift, the length of the trip up, the time, and then what terrain it accesses from that lift.00:36:57.000 --> 00:37:14.000Chris Haggerty: And, like, an optimal score where, like, you have, like, perfect harmony from uphill and downhill is, like, a hundred percent. If you're below that, you're actually putting fewer people up the hill, that the downhill terrain can handle.00:37:14.000 --> 00:37:34.000Chris Haggerty: Monarch, in our current state, sits at a 56%. So basically, like, when you ski the runs at Monarch, even on our busiest day, because of the capacity that we have at our lifts, like, you have, like, semi-private runs, right? If we were to do all of our lift upgrades in the 2025 MDP.00:37:34.000 --> 00:37:49.000Chris Haggerty: we would actually get to an 84% density analysis. So even still, you wouldn't feel overcrowded on the runs. So knowing that, we're like, wow, well, we don't need to right away push for any kind of high speed lifts.00:37:49.000 --> 00:37:58.000Chris Haggerty: Um, and in fact, again, things that our guests like about them is twofold. Number one, it's like…00:37:58.000 --> 00:38:11.000Chris Haggerty: that slow metering from a fixed grip lift just adds, like, this extra time, right? Like, part of why we ski and snowboard is because we like to just disconnect, right, from reality for a little while and, like, be out in nature and, like.00:38:11.000 --> 00:38:21.000Chris Haggerty: you know, our guests like taking a step back and slowing things down here, and it feels like things are just moving a little slower. And second, one thing that we feel is like a…00:38:21.000 --> 00:38:36.000Chris Haggerty: a strong differentiator for us is, um, having a fixed grip lift. Our lift operators have to be at, like, the load point, and, um, you know, bumping the chairs and helping our guests on, and.00:38:36.000 --> 00:38:40.000Chris Haggerty: It's this, like, human interaction piece that, like.00:38:40.000 --> 00:38:56.000Chris Haggerty: You don't get everywhere else, especially with some of the newer lifts where, you know, it's everything's so automated, um, which has its value, but for us, again, with who Monarch is and taking that step back in time a little bit like that, that face-to-face interaction.00:38:56.000 --> 00:39:14.000Chris Haggerty: like, so many of our reviews are constantly calling out our lift operators, like, oh, yeah, I remember so-and-so, like, he's awesome, he helped me on, or he just said hello, or he remembered what kind of skis I'm wearing, or told me about this secret powder stash, which… another benefit of a slower uphill capacity is, like.00:39:14.000 --> 00:39:23.000Chris Haggerty: Monarch, even though it's smaller in size, doesn't get tracked out. Like, you get powder turns at the end of the day on a powder day.00:39:23.000 --> 00:39:34.000Stuart Winchester: So the, I'm gonna share my screen to, to talk about this next bit. So those are the lift upgrades that you're proposing. There's also two, and I'm, I, so for those watching.00:39:34.000 --> 00:39:49.000Stuart Winchester: On YouTube or stormskiing.com, I have the master development plan, conceptual plan up. There's also two infill lifts. Okay, so there would be this planned NNB lift, which is a redundant lift in the No Name Basin expansion. This is the new lift that opened last year. And then there's this…00:39:49.000 --> 00:40:04.000Stuart Winchester: Plan, divide, express. So, again, it's two more lifts on the same footprint. And I didn't see in the master plan, maybe I missed it, that you do have all this cat skiing terrain over here, so…00:40:04.000 --> 00:40:10.000Stuart Winchester: So, talk us through the logic of putting in more lists to serve the same amount of terrain, and if you've considered.00:40:10.000 --> 00:40:18.000Stuart Winchester: moving lift surf skiing into the cat skiing, as Targi did with its peaked mountain expansion a couple of years ago.00:40:19.000 --> 00:40:37.000Chris Haggerty: Yeah, so no name is actually was a part of our cat skiing terrain. So we did take a little bit of that. That redundant lift out there is just because we'll see what happens, how many people just access the terrain and no name. And if we ever need a second lift there, then.00:40:23.000 --> 00:40:24.000Stuart Winchester: Hmm. Okay.00:40:37.000 --> 00:40:55.000Chris Haggerty: um, we'll consider it. As far as further into cat skiing terrain, um, you know, our current MDP outlines our next 15 years, so we're not looking to push any further into that. Um, we also have, um, the Mirkwood terrain, which is a little bit of a hike-to terrain.00:40:55.000 --> 00:41:04.000Chris Haggerty: Um, between, like, the front side and no name, and we get… that's… that's the area we most commonly get asked about a lift, and uh…00:41:04.000 --> 00:41:12.000Chris Haggerty: I will tell you from my, uh, initial conversations with owners, it's… it's not a, um…00:41:12.000 --> 00:41:27.000Chris Haggerty: the answer isn't no, we're not putting a lift there, it's a expletive no, we're not putting a lift there. Um, we take pride in having, like, being a small mountain, but still offering, like, all these other things, right? Which one being hike to terrain, um, which is pretty cool for…00:41:27.000 --> 00:41:31.000Chris Haggerty: a small mountain like this. And then that, um…00:41:31.000 --> 00:41:41.000Chris Haggerty: the Divide Express, right, that would get us all the way from the base area to the summit on the front side. Um, that… that is one that we've, you know, had some…00:41:41.000 --> 00:41:55.000Chris Haggerty: serious discussions about, and, um, you know, it probably… number one, it would just, you know, allow guests to not have to take two lifts to get to the… to the summit on the front side. Um, but also, if we…00:41:55.000 --> 00:42:06.000Chris Haggerty: explore, um, summer operations in the future. You know, having a high-speed, you know, detachable lift gives you more flexibility to do that.00:42:06.000 --> 00:42:13.000Chris Haggerty: So that kind of, you know, would add into that if we get to that point.00:42:12.000 --> 00:42:24.000Stuart Winchester: So let me ask a stupid question, because that's what I'm here for. So Garfield Lyft, as I said, was built in the 60s. Pioneer Lyft came along in 1999. So I would have thought, okay, they cross over each other.00:42:24.000 --> 00:42:41.000Stuart Winchester: Because they, they retroactively built Pioneer and didn't realize it. Uh, I would have thought, hey, the master plan is an opportunity to straighten those out so they don't have to cross over each other. Maybe I'm overthinking it and it's not that complicated, but, but talk about this interesting crisscross pattern you have here and, and why that's where Garfield and Pioneer are slated.00:42:24.000 --> 00:42:25.000Chris Haggerty: Mm-hmm.00:42:41.000 --> 00:42:45.000Stuart Winchester: to continue to exist, even if you were to upgrade their lifts.00:42:47.000 --> 00:43:05.000Chris Haggerty: Yeah, I mean, I don't know that I have the best answer. We do have a proposal to shift the base of the bottom terminal of Pioneer uphill a little bit, just because the terrain is a little more desirable there. And obviously, if we needed to add the Divide Express, we need to open that area up.00:43:05.000 --> 00:43:06.000Chris Haggerty: um…00:43:06.000 --> 00:43:21.000Chris Haggerty: but other than that, right, we just kind of… we like the terrain that they serve right now, we don't really have a better spot, so the lifts crisscrossing wasn't like a, oh man, we need to change this. It wasn't something that we were focused on solving, um, in a way.00:43:21.000 --> 00:43:24.000Chris Haggerty: I think it's kind of a little cool, I guess.00:43:24.000 --> 00:43:40.000Stuart Winchester: I do like criss-crossing lifts, so I'm glad we're doing this one a video, because every time I bring this up, I get tomatoes thrown at me. Uh, Monarch skier visits have gone up and up, as we said. However, as they've gone up and up, there's still nowhere to stay on the mountain. There never has been. Uh.00:43:40.000 --> 00:43:51.000Stuart Winchester: a philosophical choice? Is that just a practical matter of, hey, the Forest Service owns the land at the base? Is it both? Talk us through why there's nowhere to stay at Monarch as a drive ski area only.00:43:52.000 --> 00:43:55.000Chris Haggerty: Yeah, there's a couple of reasons.00:43:56.000 --> 00:44:02.000Chris Haggerty: And, you know, one of them, again, I'll say our pass holders and our guests, like…00:44:02.000 --> 00:44:18.000Chris Haggerty: are pretty vocal about not wanting that, right? Like that's what separates Monarch. We're not that resort that has the big base village. And again, that's not to knock those resorts. I think that that's, you know, I've gone to those resorts as a guest. I think it's awesome.00:44:18.000 --> 00:44:38.000Chris Haggerty: I think another side of it for us is we're really focused on our community, right? We're a small mountain ski area and there's a small mountain community 15 miles from where we are that has a really cool, the town of Salida has a really cool downtown, a main street.00:44:38.000 --> 00:44:52.000Chris Haggerty: Um, with a ton of restaurants, a ton of mom-and-pop-owned shops, right? And, um, you know, we're our largest, uh, driver for winter visits, and, and, you know, um…00:44:52.000 --> 00:45:01.000Chris Haggerty: in the wintertime, and we want to make sure we embrace that community. If we moved a village up onto the mountain, like.00:45:01.000 --> 00:45:16.000Chris Haggerty: Salida is going to suffer. All those guests now are going to stay in the lodging up at Monarch versus in town. And we want to be good community partners and be like, no, here, you guys should be the ones to have lodging. And we live.00:45:16.000 --> 00:45:35.000Chris Haggerty: all of us live in the community as well, and we want to see those restaurants, you know, stay active all year round, the mom-and-pop shops, like, you know, thrive. So part of it is just, like, wanting to be a part of something bigger, right, in that larger community, rather than.00:45:35.000 --> 00:45:38.000Chris Haggerty: moving everything up to… to Monarch.00:45:38.000 --> 00:45:53.000Stuart Winchester: So if Snowpass skiers do decide to come out and visit Monarch, they'll stay in Salida, most likely, and drive up that day. So leave us with this, Chris, because Joe Heschen, the CEO of Snow Partners.00:45:53.000 --> 00:45:58.000Stuart Winchester: Said we get so caught up on stats, but stats aren't aren't always the thing and and.00:45:58.000 --> 00:46:04.000Stuart Winchester: when you look statistically at Monarch, it's 1,100 vertical feet.00:46:04.000 --> 00:46:21.000Stuart Winchester: Lift serve drop. That's 25th in Colorado. Uh, 1017 acres that ranks 17th in Colorado is bigger than Aspen Mountain. I'll point, I'll point out, uh, it's 308 inch average annual snowfall is good, but it's, it's good for ninth best. It has the third highest base, as I said, but the 12th highest summ.00:46:21.000 --> 00:46:28.000Stuart Winchester: It has those older lifts in a state that has 120 high-speed lifts, and there's nowhere to stay on the mountain, so…00:46:28.000 --> 00:46:34.000Stuart Winchester: I'm just stating those facts, right? So what's your pitch to someone to come.00:46:34.000 --> 00:46:37.000Stuart Winchester: use that snow pass, and try out Monarch.00:46:39.000 --> 00:46:44.000Chris Haggerty: Yeah, the big one is to start with, we're 100% natural, right?00:46:44.000 --> 00:46:59.000Chris Haggerty: you want natural snow, it is a definitely a different feel, even as good as snowmaking is these days, like, come check it out. And this, and the second part is, um, the people that are at Monarch are a unique group, right? Like, we're, we're.00:46:59.000 --> 00:47:18.000Chris Haggerty: past the characters, whether you work here or you're a guest here. And, um, we're looking out for each other, right? Like, it's not, um, it's not judgmental, like, no matter what you show up wearing or what your ability is, like, we just want everyone here to have a fun day on the mountain.00:47:18.000 --> 00:47:37.000Chris Haggerty: whether you're the extreme person out in the cat skiing terrain, hiking Mirkwood, the Never Ever, or the SnowTuber, which I love SnowTubers, you know, I think that's who we all are at our core. Um, you know, it's just… it's just a cool vibe that you gotta just come check it out, and our track record's saying that.00:47:29.000 --> 00:47:31.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:47:37.000 --> 00:47:40.000Chris Haggerty: People love it once they find it. So give it a shot.00:47:40.000 --> 00:47:51.000Stuart Winchester: I'm always telling my readers that these old lifts, these hauls, these riblets, they're not gonna be around for a whole lot longer, right? There's still hundreds in operation, but they don't last forever.00:47:51.000 --> 00:48:08.000Stuart Winchester: And the best thing you can do to memorialize them, you can't really preserve them forever because they're functional machines, right? But go ride them. And right now, Monarch, along with Lost Trail, is probably the best place in the West to go and ride all Old Hall Liftley. And I understand, again, they've been updated.00:48:08.000 --> 00:48:23.000Stuart Winchester: But the aesthetic is similar. So, alright, Chris, look, I gotta take my own advice and get out there and ride those hauls with you this winter. It was really great to talk to you. I really appreciate you coming on. I can't wait to catch up and hopefully make some turns together this winter.00:48:23.000 --> 00:48:27.000Chris Haggerty: Yeah, thanks a lot for the time and look forward to seeing you out here at Monarch.00:48:26.000 --> 00:48:29.000Stuart Winchester: All right. Talk to you soon. Thanks so much, Chris.00:48:28.000 --> 00:48:30.000Chris Haggerty: Thank you. Bye.00:48:31.000 --> 00:48:47.000Stuart Winchester: Alright, that was Chris Haggerty, the General Manager of Monarch Mountain. That was really fun, I'm really glad that he came on. Uh, Randy Stroud, just to be clear, the former GM, it's not that he ever didn't want to come on the podcast, it's just that.00:48:47.000 --> 00:49:00.000Stuart Winchester: I covered Monarch in a different way for the story about the expansion. So he was very good to the storm as well. I do want to tell you that today's podcast is brought to you by Profile Search International.00:49:00.000 --> 00:49:08.000Stuart Winchester: If you want to find a great leader for your mountain team, I want to introduce you to the pros at Profile Search International.00:49:08.000 --> 00:49:18.000Stuart Winchester: They are the ski industry talent acquisition experts, and they are the only executive search and recruitment firm in the entire world that is 100% focused on the ski industry.00:49:18.000 --> 00:49:31.000Stuart Winchester: ProfileSearch has used their intimate understanding of skiing and related industries, and of available candidates worldwide, to place hundreds of transformational leaders at the best and most progressive ski areas over the past 30 years.00:49:31.000 --> 00:49:44.000Stuart Winchester: Profile Search has offices in the US and Canada. They find and negotiate with the right leaders for your team, which sometimes you don't even know that you need in this era of online everything and big data. You can reach Profile Search.00:49:44.000 --> 00:49:59.000Stuart Winchester: Directly at ProfileSearch.com, where you will find their email or phone number. You can also send me a note. I will be happy to connect you directly with this expert team. My email address is skiing at substack.com. Alright, we are going to wrap up today.00:49:59.000 --> 00:50:05.000Stuart Winchester: With some reader reaction to yesterday's podcast on…00:50:06.000 --> 00:50:22.000Stuart Winchester: with Midwest skiers, Matt Zabranski, and there wasn't a lot of feedback. I think, number one, because the Midwest doesn't get as much feedback in general, but also because I published this one pretty late, I think I put it out at 8 or 9 at night, and so folks may just have not had a chance.00:50:24.000 --> 00:50:27.000Stuart Winchester: really process it yet. So…00:50:28.000 --> 00:50:30.000Stuart Winchester: Nell says…00:50:30.000 --> 00:50:41.000Stuart Winchester: Midwest Skiers, meaning MidwestSkiers.com, Matthew Zbrensky's site, is a regional treasure. The ride-throughs are so thorough, and what Nell means by that is.00:50:41.000 --> 00:50:52.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, Midwest Skiers puts up on their YouTube channel a, hey, look, here's the trail map at, say, Trollhagen, Wisconsin. Here's all 32 trails, whatever it is.00:50:52.000 --> 00:51:03.000Stuart Winchester: and then it rides the reach for the GoPro, and tells you about them, and gives you a really specific breakdown, uh, with some great graphs. So the production quality is really, really good. So, I second that now. Really good.00:51:03.000 --> 00:51:15.000Stuart Winchester: breakdowns of the ski areas from Midwest Skiers. Eric Morris says, great Midwest content, it'd be great to talk to the Dean of Southern Skiing, Randy Johnson, who wrote Southern Snow, the new guide to winter sports.00:51:15.000 --> 00:51:31.000Stuart Winchester: Couldn't agree more, Eric. If you know him, I would love an introduction. I am not acquainted with Mr. Randy Johnson, but I would love to meet him, as the South has certainly been an undercovered region from my point of view, and not on purpose, just because there's…00:51:31.000 --> 00:51:44.000Stuart Winchester: a little different culturally than the rest of the United States from a ski point of view, and I have not sunk as far of roots in there as I would like to, especially since I'm not too far from those ski areas. There was also…00:51:44.000 --> 00:51:47.000Stuart Winchester: We're not getting as much action on the chat, but here's one.00:51:47.000 --> 00:51:57.000Stuart Winchester: question on the chat, and this is not to do with the podcast from yesterday, but I want to talk about it a little. What will it take for Vail Resorts to turn around? That's from Saurabh Jain.00:51:57.000 --> 00:52:06.000Stuart Winchester: And commenter Slappy said, redefine what success looks like and suspend the dividend and stock buyback. Of course, those last two may be non-negotiable.00:52:06.000 --> 00:52:24.000Stuart Winchester: I'm not going to get out of my lane and talk too much about dividends and stock buybacks, though I do like stocks and follow that world nominally. It's certainly nothing that I'm an expert to speak on. What Vail needs to do to turn around, I think, is very simple, and I've said this many, many times.00:52:24.000 --> 00:52:25.000Stuart Winchester: And I've written about it.00:52:25.000 --> 00:52:37.000Stuart Winchester: many times, and we've talked about it on the podcast many times, is they need to treat every single ski resort like it's Vail Mountain, and every single guest like they're the President of the United States. They…00:52:37.000 --> 00:52:40.000Stuart Winchester: They need to make sure that.00:52:41.000 --> 00:52:48.000Stuart Winchester: the experience of a lifetime ethos is transferred to any Skiera, whether it's Beaver Creek.00:52:48.000 --> 00:53:03.000Stuart Winchester: or it's Mad River, Ohio. And that has not always seemed to be the case since Vail Resorts purchased Peak Resorts in 2019 and sort of doubled the size of its owned resort portfolio within a year's span. Now.00:53:03.000 --> 00:53:08.000Stuart Winchester: Certainly, Vail has recently recommitted to.00:53:08.000 --> 00:53:11.000Stuart Winchester: To that sort of quality, and we'll see how that plays out.00:53:11.000 --> 00:53:13.000Stuart Winchester: I think…00:53:13.000 --> 00:53:19.000Stuart Winchester: maybe a little more shuffling with the Epic Pass, uh, maybe a higher-priced.00:53:19.000 --> 00:53:22.000Stuart Winchester: Full pass to to.00:53:22.000 --> 00:53:37.000Stuart Winchester: help traffic some of the more popular ski areas, and maybe some more options. They do a really good job, actually, with the Epic Regionals, with the Tahoe Local, the Northeast Local, and the Summit County Local. So, I think Vail's done a nice job with that. And I think…00:53:38.000 --> 00:53:45.000Stuart Winchester: From my experience, Vail executives, and I've hosted many of them on this podcast. They're very receptive to criticism.00:53:45.000 --> 00:53:47.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, and they are…00:53:48.000 --> 00:53:53.000Stuart Winchester: Willing to listen and change and evolve. I'm not sure.00:53:53.000 --> 00:53:57.000Stuart Winchester: If that always comes through.00:53:57.000 --> 00:54:04.000Stuart Winchester: Outside of direct lines of questioning, if that makes sense. So, so the, the owning of mistakes and saying, okay, you know what?00:54:04.000 --> 00:54:19.000Stuart Winchester: we messed up because Paley Peaks was only open 25 days a year in 2021, or whatever it was. There was a year when a lot of its Midwest ski areas were extremely restricted, or the COVID restrictions and everyone else, but the local ski area operators there.00:54:19.000 --> 00:54:24.000Stuart Winchester: we're out competing them. Uh, you know, when Vail first bought Wilmot, Wisconsin.00:54:24.000 --> 00:54:27.000Stuart Winchester: In 2016, there…00:54:27.000 --> 00:54:38.000Stuart Winchester: their… or maybe that was 2012. They bought Afton Alps, Wilmot, and Mount Brighton in some order, two of them in 2012 and one in 2016. Anyway, there was a great article I read that said.00:54:38.000 --> 00:54:49.000Stuart Winchester: what Wilmot skiers can expect, and Wilmot's a small ski area outside of, well, it's broad, it has a lot of lifts, outside of Wisconsin and Chicago, uh, Milwaukee and Chicago.00:54:49.000 --> 00:54:56.000Stuart Winchester: And what they said was, we're gonna bring Western standards to the Midwest, right? And that was very out front. Dale spokespeople were saying that.00:54:56.000 --> 00:55:11.000Stuart Winchester: You never hear them say that anymore, and it's not clear that that is the standard, and I had a very nice time at Wilmot when I went two years ago, and super friendly staff, and all the lifts were running, even though clearly they didn't need to be, because it was a Monday, and hardly anyone was there, so I'm certain they were.00:55:11.000 --> 00:55:19.000Stuart Winchester: losing money on that day, and yet they still did their best to provide an experience. I'm just not…00:55:19.000 --> 00:55:21.000Stuart Winchester: It's just not always…00:55:21.000 --> 00:55:31.000Stuart Winchester: super clear throughout the portfolio, particularly in the Lower Midwest, Indiana, Missouri, Ohio, uh, in some of the Pennsylvania ski areas, Mid-Atlantic.00:55:31.000 --> 00:55:36.000Stuart Winchester: that that this is their operating philosophy. So I think that.00:55:36.000 --> 00:55:38.000Stuart Winchester: I think Vail's better than most…00:55:38.000 --> 00:55:49.000Stuart Winchester: than you would think, scrolling through social media. Uh, in general, I've been to pretty much every Vail resort in North America, other than, I think, the two in Missouri and Paoli Peaks.00:55:49.000 --> 00:56:07.000Stuart Winchester: And I generally have a really good time and a positive experience, and I find the staff friendly, and that's a super important thing to me. I love that Vail puts bars on all the lifts. I love that they're focused on safety in general, that they help police speed. As someone who skis with my kids, that's important to me.00:56:07.000 --> 00:56:13.000Stuart Winchester: So I generally have a pretty good experience. I think…00:56:14.000 --> 00:56:29.000Stuart Winchester: there's a little too much gum in the machine, maybe, when it comes to communicating these things and owning and correcting mistakes. So, anyway, with that, I will leave Vel alone for today, and you're probably wondering why I haven't yet covered the new Slate.00:56:29.000 --> 00:56:44.000Stuart Winchester: of proposed board members by Oasis Capital for Vail Resorts. I don't want to get too into the weeds on stock stuff, but I do have some thoughts on that. I want to wait till I have a little bit more time to break it down.00:56:45.000 --> 00:56:50.000Stuart Winchester: So I thank you for coming today. I hope you enjoyed that podcast episode.00:56:50.000 --> 00:56:58.000Stuart Winchester: If you are not already subscribed to the Storm Skiing newsletter, please click over to stormskiing.com and subscribe.00:56:58.000 --> 00:57:14.000Stuart Winchester: That will come right to your inbox. It is not only podcasts, I do a ton of writing. And if you want to upgrade to a paid subscription to the Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast, that will give you everything below the paywall, which is a lot of really deep analysis.00:57:14.000 --> 00:57:29.000Stuart Winchester: that I do on the lift service ski industry, particularly in North America, and especially in the United States. Also, if you're a paid subscriber to The Storm at stormskiing.com, that is the only way to interact with the podcast, because I'm only reading comments from the.00:57:29.000 --> 00:57:30.000Stuart Winchester: Previous.00:57:31.000 --> 00:57:47.000Stuart Winchester: Day's podcast and only paid subscribers can comment. Only paid subscribers can join the chat, which is the second way that they can interact with the podcast. If you want to rep the storm, we have a swag store. You can buy shirts, hats, et cetera, at stormskiing.myshopify.com.00:57:47.000 --> 00:57:48.000Stuart Winchester: Okay.00:57:48.000 --> 00:57:52.000Stuart Winchester: Please follow me on YouTube. YouTube is…00:57:52.000 --> 00:57:55.000Stuart Winchester: Where we will increasingly.00:57:55.000 --> 00:58:02.000Stuart Winchester: It'll be increasingly important to us, and right now, we don't have that many subscribers there. Uh, everything is going there, but it's just not…00:58:02.000 --> 00:58:12.000Stuart Winchester: made it into the cultural fabric of that site just yet, so please follow me at Storm Ski Journal on YouTube. Also, Instagram, which I post on more during the winter season.00:58:12.000 --> 00:58:27.000Stuart Winchester: I will be back tomorrow, or I'm scheduled to be back tomorrow, with, and this is one a lot of people have asked me for, a conversation with the general manager of what I think was perhaps the most improved ski area in the country last year, Camelback.00:58:27.000 --> 00:58:38.000Stuart Winchester: Pennsylvania. If you're rolling your eyes, if you live out west, I encourage you to tune in anyway, because the story of Camelback is a really good story of how do we do things wrong?Stuff referenced in the pod:Monarch's amazing season pass reciprocal network:A full breakdown of Monarch's U.S. Forest Service masterplan:Conversation with Snow Partners' CEO Joe Hession: Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is going to cover Midwestern skiing whether you like it or not. Don't worry, Colorad-Bro, it's your turn tomorrow.Welcome to the Storm's short-form, news-focused podcast. Don't worry, I will still write newsletters too. To browse a (robot-generated) podcast transcript, click the “transcript” button above - click on any block of text and the audio will jump to that point in the conversation. Paid subscribers can leave a comment in the article below, or by joining The Storm's chat (also below). I'll respond to some comments in the next episode, which is scheduled for Tuesday, Sept. 15.The Zoom transcript (click “transcript” above for the Substack transcript, which will zoom to any point in the video when you click on the associated text block; timestamps below DO NOT MATCH THE VIDEO)Stuart Winchester: Welcome to the Storm! I'm your host, Stuart Winchester. It is Monday, September 14th, 2026. Welcome to week two of the New Look Storm Skiing Podcast. If you missed last week, I am still doing the longer form pod.00:15:53.000 --> 00:16:08.000Stuart Winchester: But I'm cutting way back on the frequency of those. Instead, I am doing a shorter, news-focused pod that I release more often, and whenever possible, that I release the same day that I record it.00:16:08.000 --> 00:16:11.000Stuart Winchester: And the reason that I'm doing that is because…00:16:11.000 --> 00:16:19.000Stuart Winchester: the world has changed a lot since 2019, when I launched the Storm Skiing podcast, and when I launched it, there really wasn't anything quite like…00:16:19.000 --> 00:16:26.000Stuart Winchester: what I was doing with the long-form audio stories of a ski area's background.00:16:27.000 --> 00:16:29.000Stuart Winchester: I've done a couple hundred episodes at this point.00:16:29.000 --> 00:16:31.000Stuart Winchester: I feel like…00:16:31.000 --> 00:16:47.000Stuart Winchester: They're evergreen. But what they don't allow me to do is to really talk about what's happening in a ski area right now. Uh Especially when there's a lot of things happening and there's a lot of pieces and parts shuffling around as there is right now in the Midwest.00:16:47.000 --> 00:16:51.000Stuart Winchester: with multi-mountain passes. So, what I'm doing…00:16:51.000 --> 00:17:06.000Stuart Winchester: is I'm trying out a little bit of a new format today. The format… we're gonna experiment, we're gonna play around with it. Sometimes there'll be a guest off the top, sometimes I'll have a take off the top, uh, sometimes I'll have a guest on for a longer period, and that's gonna be the case today.00:17:06.000 --> 00:17:22.000Stuart Winchester: Because right now there is so much happening in the Midwest with multi mountain passes and different mountains leaving and joining is completely changing the landscape there. So I want to bring in someone to talk to us at length about that. We'll do a couple other fun things as well.00:17:22.000 --> 00:17:24.000Stuart Winchester: Let's bring…00:17:25.000 --> 00:17:27.000Stuart Winchester: I'm in now.00:17:32.000 --> 00:17:35.000Stuart Winchester: And there he is. Can you hear me, Matthew?00:17:32.000 --> 00:17:34.000Matthew Zabransky: Hey, how's it going, Stuart?00:17:34.000 --> 00:17:36.000Matthew Zabransky: I can.00:17:35.000 --> 00:17:41.000Stuart Winchester: Oh, I can't hear you. All right. This is a flub, and this is why I haven't heard her.00:17:40.000 --> 00:17:41.000Matthew Zabransky: Thank you.00:17:42.000 --> 00:17:45.000Stuart Winchester: Because I am not that smart.00:17:46.000 --> 00:17:49.000Stuart Winchester: Okay, you there?00:17:48.000 --> 00:17:50.000Matthew Zabransky: Can you hear me?00:17:49.000 --> 00:17:52.000Stuart Winchester: Oh, yes, I can. Look at that.00:17:50.000 --> 00:17:54.000Matthew Zabransky: Okay, perfect.00:17:52.000 --> 00:18:07.000Stuart Winchester: The technology known as headphones. Matthew, this is why you're the production guy, and I generally stick to writing, because I'm an idiot. Alright, I want to introduce today the founder of MidwestSkiers.com.00:18:07.000 --> 00:18:13.000Stuart Winchester: He founded that in 2018, and in 2020, founded MWS Productions.00:18:13.000 --> 00:18:29.000Stuart Winchester: He is making all the Midwest content that I was dying for in the 1990s when I was a teenager living and skiing in Michigan, and the ski mags would completely ignore the region and maybe mention Boyne Mountain or Luton once per year, but he makes.00:18:19.000 --> 00:18:20.000Matthew Zabransky: Okay.00:18:29.000 --> 00:18:38.000Stuart Winchester: Top quality content. I link to it all the time in my stuff because no one else quite does it, as well as Matthew Zabranski. Matthew, welcome to The Storm. How you doing today?00:18:37.000 --> 00:18:56.000Matthew Zabransky: I am doing fantastic. Stuart, thank you, first of all, for the opportunity, but more importantly, for also repping the Midwest. I think it's such an important, obviously, region, and you have ties to it, I obviously have ties to it as well, so it's great that we're getting recognition, not only, obviously, in our region now, but on the national, even international scale, so…00:18:56.000 --> 00:19:00.000Matthew Zabransky: Thank you so much for doing that. I appreciate it. I'm excited to be here.00:18:59.000 --> 00:19:08.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, I love covering the Midwest, Matthew, and I still make it a point to go back and take a Midwest trip every year, because there's…00:19:00.000 --> 00:19:01.000Matthew Zabransky: Thank you.00:19:08.000 --> 00:19:27.000Stuart Winchester: when I'm doing this podcast, there's nothing quite like making relationships, like showing up at, you know, a 200 vertical foothill in the boondocks in Minnesota. People are like, okay, I'll talk to this guy, even though, you know, I've never heard of him. So, but you are 100% Midwest-focused. I cover it where I can and whenever I can.00:19:20.000 --> 00:19:21.000Matthew Zabransky: Mm-hmm.00:19:25.000 --> 00:19:26.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.00:19:27.000 --> 00:19:37.000Stuart Winchester: There is so much happening in the Midwest that we could talk about. I really want to focus today on multi-mountain passes. So…00:19:32.000 --> 00:19:34.000Matthew Zabransky: Okay.00:19:36.000 --> 00:19:37.000Matthew Zabransky: Mm-hmm.00:19:37.000 --> 00:19:53.000Stuart Winchester: I'll start by, I'll just set this up and then I'll, and then I'll, I'll let you comment on it. So if you go back about 10 years, there was nothing in the Midwest on multi mountain passes. You know, Vale had started to add a few things to Epic Pass and B Brighton and Afton Alps and Wilmot and such.00:19:53.000 --> 00:20:03.000Stuart Winchester: But the real inflection point came in 2019, when IndiePass came along. 2018, Icon added a couple things. So, right now, I'll give you some stats.00:20:03.000 --> 00:20:09.000Stuart Winchester: Of the 124 ski areas that I have inventoried in the Midwest, that you might have a different count.00:20:08.000 --> 00:20:10.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.00:20:09.000 --> 00:20:15.000Stuart Winchester: They're 117 of those are public. 89 of those are public with aerial lifts.00:20:15.000 --> 00:20:28.000Stuart Winchester: 58 of those, although there's a couple that are just surface toes only, so 58 ski areas in the Midwest are now on a national multi-mountain ski pass. 10 on Epic.00:20:28.000 --> 00:20:32.000Stuart Winchester: 11 on Icon, 37 for Indy. So, so to start out with, Matthew.00:20:32.000 --> 00:20:34.000Stuart Winchester: How has…00:20:34.000 --> 00:20:47.000Stuart Winchester: the acceptance of the Midwest by multi-mountain national passes change the calculus for skiers as they're planning out their winter in the Midwest, compared to what it was for most of history up until just a few years ago?00:20:47.000 --> 00:21:02.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah, it's changed dramatically. It's even going back a little bit further. I think the first initial, if you look at the statistics and you obviously know all this offhand, but back when you go back to Vail's acquisition of Wilmont, Afton.00:21:02.000 --> 00:21:19.000Matthew Zabransky: Brighton back in like 2012. I mean, that's really what started to to kick off this like idea of like. Maybe the Midwest has some legs in it, as far as like developing skiers, and then, you know, bringing them into a pass portfolio that could bring them out west. So that was the very early set, you know, early iteration of this. And then, obviously, as we went along, there wasn't.00:21:19.000 --> 00:21:37.000Matthew Zabransky: too many options outside of just the epic pass. But then, like you mentioned, Indie Pass came in, and I knew, and it's you know, as we dive into this, I do want to do a little disclosure here, and like Indie Pass was my very 1st client from a production side of things. So Doug and I, because I I saw the opportunity like there was an absolute gold mine here. I'm like.00:21:31.000 --> 00:21:32.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:21:32.000 --> 00:21:33.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:21:37.000 --> 00:21:55.000Matthew Zabransky: Because I got to travel around, that's why I started MidwestGears.com, because we were… we were traveling for my wife's job all over the Midwest, and every time we'd go to a new city, Columbus, Akron, I'd be a pass holder at one of these little ski areas, and I'd be like, holy crap, there's a lot of them here, no one's talking about them.00:21:55.000 --> 00:22:15.000Matthew Zabransky: But you know, once you start to realize there was this many, then you're then you're starting to think, okay, like, why isn't somebody coming in here and starting to develop a past that could actually stand on its own. And that's what we've seen the last, I would say, 5 to 10 years. Specifically, we've seen more people traveling around in the Midwest. You'll catch people at any stereo across the Midwest. That's not their home hill, and that's not how it used.00:22:15.000 --> 00:22:27.000Matthew Zabransky: you go ski or one little local place for the most part, you might do your weekend trip up to Boyne or something, but you would never catch people going to some of these really small places, you know, outside of just the local crew there, so it's been really cool to watch people.00:22:27.000 --> 00:22:45.000Matthew Zabransky: travel and discover, more importantly, the different areas, uh, throughout the Midwest. I think a lot of that had to do with IndyPass's push in the Midwest, because, as we're gonna talk about here in a second, it was an absolute auto-buy. Like, there was not even a question about it. From the day it started, when it was, you know, what was that, $99?00:22:45.000 --> 00:23:02.000Matthew Zabransky: up until even just the last year. It was like you almost just were gonna if you lived in the Midwest, and you like skiing, and you don't. You know you like traveling around checking out new things. There was no reason not to buy it. You'd be silly, basically not to, just because how much saturation there was in the Midwest, which I think is going to lead us into our next conversation a little bit here.00:23:02.000 --> 00:23:04.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, so, so the…00:23:04.000 --> 00:23:15.000Stuart Winchester: Just being on the ground, before we get to the shuffling around, you know, I'd imagine you're pretty connected with a lot of pretty hardcore skiers, pretty frequent skiers.00:23:11.000 --> 00:23:13.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.00:23:15.000 --> 00:23:17.000Stuart Winchester: How much has…00:23:17.000 --> 00:23:24.000Stuart Winchester: that a… a season… a multi-mountain pass becomes something that the person in the Midwest just…00:23:24.000 --> 00:23:40.000Stuart Winchester: considers or, or automatically buys it as compared to several years ago where you might buy your local season pass, but, but you, you probably, like you said, you wouldn't go around. And when I lived in the Midwest, actually, I always appreciated how close the areas were, so I would just kind of bounce around a lot for.00:23:34.000 --> 00:23:36.000Matthew Zabransky: Mm-hmm.00:23:40.000 --> 00:23:46.000Stuart Winchester: for deal days or whatever, back when those were still a thing. But how automatic has it become?00:23:41.000 --> 00:23:42.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.00:23:46.000 --> 00:24:01.000Matthew Zabransky: Very. I mean, there's people that have been buying the IndyPass specifically now. Up until this season, it was like they were probably on their fifth year of doing it and just continue to. And to be honest, there wasn't any reason not to because the pricing has stayed relatively affordable.00:24:01.000 --> 00:24:17.000Matthew Zabransky: they keep they kept strengthening their pro, their their product. I mean, like they just kept adding more ski areas in the Midwest. And so in in a lot of times the pass would pay itself off within a couple of visits based off of some of the redemption rates that you'd be getting at some somewhere like Lutz and Snow River.00:24:17.000 --> 00:24:34.000Matthew Zabransky: um, those are all, like, you know, $100 tickets, so you buy… you go there once or twice, you get two days of each of them, and basically that's already done. So if you already had one of those trips kind of on there, and if you lived in Chicago, you're going to Granite Peak usually once or twice a year. If you lived in Minnesota, you're going to Lutz.00:24:34.000 --> 00:24:52.000Matthew Zabransky: So it almost became this thing. And then you shuffle in like nubs, knob, and all that. So it it very much was like, yeah, we're gonna buy it every single year, you know, we might not. And some people are hardcore and going to all the places they could. And some people were just, you know. Hey? I'm gonna buy it because I'm gonna go for a weekend, so I might as well. And then I have this option of going some other places.00:24:46.000 --> 00:24:47.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:24:52.000 --> 00:25:03.000Matthew Zabransky: it was huge. I mean, I don't… of course, I don't have any of the IndyPass numbers, but I would… I would venture to say that the Midwest had to be a very big portion of their portfolio from the sales and redemption standpoint.00:25:03.000 --> 00:25:20.000Stuart Winchester: So the traditional numbers that Indy has given me, and it's been a couple years since Doug Fish provided these round numbers to me, but he told me about half of their sales came in New England, and 25% came in the Midwest, which is a really big number for a national pass. So you figured the other quarter were coming from somewhere else.00:25:04.000 --> 00:25:05.000Matthew Zabransky: Thank you.00:25:15.000 --> 00:25:16.000Matthew Zabransky: Cool.00:25:17.000 --> 00:25:19.000Matthew Zabransky: For… yeah.00:25:20.000 --> 00:25:25.000Stuart Winchester: I always give Doug Fish credit, because he's a Pacific Northwest guy, and…00:25:25.000 --> 00:25:40.000Stuart Winchester: Western skiers just love to hate on the Midwest. Everyone loves to hate on the Midwest. It's like the national pastime. It's like the safe thing to make fun of, and you know, I hope you take that personally, because I always do, and I really appreciated that Doug.00:25:30.000 --> 00:25:32.000Matthew Zabransky: Is…00:25:37.000 --> 00:25:38.000Matthew Zabransky: I do.00:25:40.000 --> 00:25:55.000Stuart Winchester: Included the Midwest from the start. That first year in 2019, he had Little Switz, he had Crystal, he had Cabre Fay, he had a bunch of other ski areas. Really got big in 2020 when he added Lutzen and Granite Peak. Now, I always say his insight was…00:25:44.000 --> 00:25:45.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.00:25:55.000 --> 00:26:02.000Stuart Winchester: that Doug's great insight with the IndyPass was realizing there was value in the mountains that are not.00:26:02.000 --> 00:26:08.000Stuart Winchester: super destinations when you put them all together for skiers across the country. He also…00:26:05.000 --> 00:26:07.000Matthew Zabransky: Mm-hmm.00:26:08.000 --> 00:26:23.000Stuart Winchester: the fact that he extended that to the Midwest is huge, because, yes, I… so, before Icon started adding in into the Midwest, which we'll talk about in a minute, I would always say, Indy Pass is the pass to go to in the Midwest, no one else has anything, and everyone would always say, oh, wait, Epic has 10 mountains. I was like.00:26:14.000 --> 00:26:16.000Matthew Zabransky: Thank you.00:26:17.000 --> 00:26:18.000Matthew Zabransky: Okay.00:26:23.000 --> 00:26:34.000Stuart Winchester: But the Midwest is gigantic. Unless you live in Ohio, they're very spread out, and they're near cities, and there are actually mountains in the Midwest that are more…00:26:34.000 --> 00:26:44.000Stuart Winchester: of, of what you would consider, like, regional destinations. And that, that's your Boyne, Nubs, Lutsen, uh, even, even Spira with the bigger, uh, all the stuff over in the UP.00:26:37.000 --> 00:26:38.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.00:26:44.000 --> 00:26:57.000Stuart Winchester: So Indy really collected them all together, and it was almost too good to be true, because they had over 40 ski areas in the Midwest. Talk about Indy at its peak.00:26:57.000 --> 00:27:02.000Stuart Winchester: And how great of a pass that was for the Midwest here.00:26:58.000 --> 00:26:59.000Matthew Zabransky: Okay.00:27:00.000 --> 00:27:17.000Matthew Zabransky: It was too great. We're going to get into this, I'm sure, but I think that's part of the reason for the course correction. There was a moment two or three years ago when I literally turned to Nick, my associate who edits for me and stuff, and I said, with some of the additions they announced at that time, I said.00:27:05.000 --> 00:27:06.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:27:17.000 --> 00:27:33.000Matthew Zabransky: this is too saturated like it's got to fix itself at some point like it's just. It's too good of a value, and like for skiers, we like anybody that was buying the passes like this is amazing. It makes it like again. It's an auto buy like, why wouldn't you do this? But I knew that this time was going to come at some point. But I'm you know, at least we got to.00:27:18.000 --> 00:27:20.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:27:33.000 --> 00:27:50.000Matthew Zabransky: to see what it like. The peak of that was for a little while. We got a couple of years. We've got to be happy for that, to be honest. We're starting to see some of those what I'll call course corrections now and and we're going to continue to see this. I mean, you know that every every year it's going to be something new. Someone's changing. It's just kind of the nature of the business. But.00:27:50.000 --> 00:28:02.000Matthew Zabransky: it was not a shock to me when, um, when these changes were announced, uh, both in the spring and then more recently in the last few weeks and stuff, so it wasn't… I kind of saw it coming, it was just a matter of, like, when was it gonna happen.00:28:02.000 --> 00:28:14.000Stuart Winchester: So everyone left… they seemed as though… Epic and Icon seemed like they were just leaving the Midwest to Indy, to take. And I've always thought that Icon's original sin was when they killed the Max Pass.00:28:06.000 --> 00:28:08.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.00:28:14.000 --> 00:28:15.000Matthew Zabransky: Mm-hmm.00:28:14.000 --> 00:28:30.000Stuart Winchester: And launched the Icon Pass. They brought all the Powder Mountains, all the Boyne Mountains, uh, all the Intra West Mountains, but they didn't bring Granite Peak and Lutzen, which are the biggest ski areas or most modern, however, whatever metric you want to use in Minnesota and, and Wisconsin.00:28:26.000 --> 00:28:27.000Matthew Zabransky: Yep.00:28:30.000 --> 00:28:31.000Stuart Winchester: So…00:28:31.000 --> 00:28:46.000Stuart Winchester: for a long time, Indy just built up this huge coalition. Started to see some cracks last year. Icon had just two mountains, Boyne Mountain and Boyne Highlands, and honestly, and Boyne has never affirmed this to me, but my hunch is, Boyne said, include our mountains or you don't get Big Sky.00:28:39.000 --> 00:28:40.000Matthew Zabransky: Yep.00:28:46.000 --> 00:28:48.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah, yeah.00:28:46.000 --> 00:29:01.000Stuart Winchester: So, so, Icon was like, okay, I guess we'll add these stupid little things. Uh, which is not my opinion of them, but I think that's probably what they thought from Colorado, which is why they dropped Lutzen and Granite Peak. So, last year, we started to see the first crack in Indy's armor.00:28:52.000 --> 00:28:55.000Matthew Zabransky: I was like, don't do that.00:29:01.000 --> 00:29:02.000Matthew Zabransky: Mm.00:29:01.000 --> 00:29:12.000Stuart Winchester: when the Icon Pass… they call them bonus mountains, I call them two-day mountains, because that's what they are. If you have an Icon Pass, you get two days of these mountains. Uh, Buck Hill, Minnesota.00:29:06.000 --> 00:29:07.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.00:29:12.000 --> 00:29:27.000Stuart Winchester: Uh joined the icon pass as a two day mountain, which for the listeners, that's no, you get no base pass access, you only get full icon access and there are holiday blackouts. So that's what the two day tier is. They added Buck Hill. Uh Indy said, no, you're not allowed to do that. Remove Buck Hill.00:29:27.000 --> 00:29:30.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, which is a great little, uh, you know.00:29:30.000 --> 00:29:34.000Stuart Winchester: kind of trainer hill outside of the Twin Cities.00:29:34.000 --> 00:29:40.000Stuart Winchester: And every square inch is used with very maximum effect. So Indy removed them.00:29:40.000 --> 00:29:53.000Stuart Winchester: Buck Hill has been on Icon, and that was sort of the first… when you first saw that, did you think, okay, here we go, Icon is finally starting to realize the value of the Midwest, and if not, what was the moment that you did think that they got it?00:29:53.000 --> 00:30:09.000Matthew Zabransky: I would, you know, the whole time I've been shaking my head a little bit because it's just ironic to me that Boeing, Boeing, one of the biggest companies in, you know, that started in the Midwest, that literally has its roots here. And I'm just shocked that Icon hasn't.00:30:09.000 --> 00:30:26.000Matthew Zabransky: made this push earlier, and it took this long. But that was like the 1st that was the 1st like mention of that. And the other connection that was really kind of just crazy to me is, there's so many people from the twin cities that go to Big Sky like a lot like you talk to people all over the place. They have cabins up there. They.00:30:23.000 --> 00:30:24.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, so. Yeah.00:30:26.000 --> 00:30:27.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:30:26.000 --> 00:30:42.000Matthew Zabransky: They're traveling there all the time. It's a huge destination for specifically for Minnesota, it seems. So I was always thinking, man, like if they were just to strengthen this pass a little bit in the Midwest, give somebody a reason to, to jump on to the icon pass. They're probably going out to Big Sky anyway.00:30:42.000 --> 00:30:57.000Matthew Zabransky: now all of a sudden, you give them another reason to buy the full pass, you got some… some more local hills, some day… like, weekend trips, you can go up to Lutzen, things like that, and I think that's when… when Lutzen and those guys came on, that was, like, full-blown, that's gonna… that changes everything. Like, everything.00:30:57.000 --> 00:31:14.000Matthew Zabransky: As you know, the lake, Lake Michigan, is a huge divider for the eastern and the western side of what I'll call the Midwest. Basically, if you're on the eastern side of the lake, you're kind of going to stick to mostly your lower peninsula, maybe go up to the UP occasionally. But if you're on the western side over here, in the Minneapolis.00:31:14.000 --> 00:31:31.000Matthew Zabransky: Um, there was really no offerings for Icon, so it really made no sense at that point to buy an Icon Pass. You know, maybe Chicago, you drive up to Boeing, but you're kind of on that cusp there, where it's like, mmm… but I think once they strengthened it this past year, now it's like… it's a fair fight, in my opinion. Now we're.00:31:31.000 --> 00:31:46.000Matthew Zabransky: You know, which one is gonna make more sense for you, or your situation, which it was not, it didn't used to be that way, it just, there was never an opportunity for most people that were on this side of the lake, or in Minneapolis. Sometimes it didn't make sense, unless you're going out to, you know, Big Sky for a week and a half, it, you know.00:31:47.000 --> 00:31:50.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, so just a little background for the listeners.00:31:48.000 --> 00:31:49.000Matthew Zabransky: Mm.00:31:50.000 --> 00:31:52.000Stuart Winchester: Boyne Mountain and and.00:31:52.000 --> 00:32:08.000Stuart Winchester: what they call the Highlands at Harbor Springs. I'll call it Boyne Highlands because no one knows what I'm talking about when I say the Highlands. So Boyne and Boyne Highlands are two of the nicer ski areas, more built up ski areas in Michigan, and they were long on Icon. Uh, Lutzen and Granite Peak.00:31:55.000 --> 00:31:58.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah, this…00:32:06.000 --> 00:32:07.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.00:32:08.000 --> 00:32:14.000Stuart Winchester: that, uh, Midwest Family Ski Resorts, which owns Lutzen and Granite Peak, bought, immediately took.00:32:14.000 --> 00:32:25.000Stuart Winchester: four old riblet lifts, put in a high-speed six-pack, the first one in the UP. So, those three ski areas had been indie anchors in the Midwest for years.00:32:23.000 --> 00:32:24.000Matthew Zabransky: Okay.00:32:25.000 --> 00:32:30.000Stuart Winchester: This year, for 2026-27 winter, they're going as 5-7 day…00:32:30.000 --> 00:32:42.000Stuart Winchester: mountains each on Icon and Icon Base, and so they are leaving the Indy Pass as a result of that. Now, Icon has also added some more two-day mountains. I'm gonna put those to the side for a second.00:32:40.000 --> 00:32:42.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.00:32:42.000 --> 00:32:50.000Stuart Winchester: How big of a loss was Lutsen and Granite Peak and Snow River for Indy Pass in the Midwest?00:32:51.000 --> 00:33:06.000Matthew Zabransky: It's it's an easy question. I mean the answer just like, go look at the comments on the thread when it was announced, and you could just read how an impactful it was. And I think that was my argument when people started talking about like, Oh, they're you know, hey? Like they're leaving. They're leaving us in the dust, and we we don't like them anymore.00:33:07.000 --> 00:33:29.000Matthew Zabransky: It's probably justified. If you guys are this upset about them leaving, it means they probably had a little more leverage than they should have in that past portfolio. And I think it to that. And again, I don't know that it needs, like, a passion never be so strong, in my opinion. And I'm talking about the business side of things. You're not talking about the skier. Trust me, if I was, like, just skiing Matthew, put my skiing thing on, I'd be like, yeah, absolutely.00:33:10.000 --> 00:33:12.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:33:24.000 --> 00:33:25.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:33:26.000 --> 00:33:28.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:33:29.000 --> 00:33:49.000Matthew Zabransky: Uh, but from the business side, as an area owner, operator, you gotta look at it, like, what kind of value are we getting back out of this pass? Are we the ones carrying your product? Like, that's the other thing to think about, too, right? We don't… you don't always necessarily want to be the top dog in the pass lineup. Sometimes it works well, sometimes it doesn't. Uh, and in this case, I think that they…00:33:49.000 --> 00:33:56.000Matthew Zabransky: they were carrying that pass line up, and I think nothing speaks more to the volumes of how upset people were when they came off of the pass.00:33:56.000 --> 00:34:00.000Stuart Winchester: So we're… I've kind of looked at this as it's…00:34:00.000 --> 00:34:12.000Stuart Winchester: sucks for Indy, it's probably good for the consumer in the long run, because, like you said, you never want too much market concentration, so now you have… you have the Snow Pass coming up, which is… which is Snow Partners in two days…00:34:04.000 --> 00:34:05.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.00:34:12.000 --> 00:34:28.000Stuart Winchester: at each mountain. There's none in the Midwest yet, but I suspect there may be at some point. Right now, they're mostly in the Northeast. And then you have Icon. So, before, I think a lot of people in Michigan probably had Icon, because you could use it for the Boynes, but like you said.00:34:28.000 --> 00:34:44.000Stuart Winchester: if you're not from the Midwest, you're probably just thinking it's like a big square, but there's a lake there, and you can't… I mean, you can take a ferry over it, but it takes all day, right? You have to go to Ludington, and it's like a whole thing, right? So really, you have Michigan, the Lower Peninsula, and then you kind.00:34:32.000 --> 00:34:33.000Matthew Zabransky: Yep.00:34:44.000 --> 00:34:58.000Stuart Winchester: Wisconsin. So, you live on the west side of that, I believe, like, around the Minnesota-Wisconsin line. How immediately did you see people say, okay, well, now, yeah, let's consider Icon that maybe never would have before?00:34:48.000 --> 00:34:49.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.00:34:59.000 --> 00:35:04.000Matthew Zabransky: I think the original, like, when it first was announced, there was just a lot of, like.00:35:04.000 --> 00:35:17.000Matthew Zabransky: oh man, this sucks. Like, now what? You know, what do we do? Because the initial reaction was like, well, I'm not gonna auto-buy this now, I gotta think about it a little bit more. I'm curious because I haven't… it's still so fresh, to be honest, and I haven't, like.00:35:06.000 --> 00:35:07.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:35:10.000 --> 00:35:12.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:35:17.000 --> 00:35:32.000Matthew Zabransky: but to, like, really figure that question, like, the answer to that question out, but I have… the one thing I have been seeing is a lot more people starting to weigh those options, right? They're starting to look at the passes differently now. Now it's, like, not just, like, we're gonna pick up Indy automatically and, you know, whatever might throw a different pass on there. Now they.00:35:25.000 --> 00:35:26.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:35:32.000 --> 00:35:49.000Matthew Zabransky: think about, how am I using my pass? Am I going up to Lutzen for a weekend or 2? Does it make sense for me to just get an icon pass? Am I a pass holder at Lutzen, and want to add it on now that that's an option, and maybe do an out west trip, or if you're granted peak. So I'm starting to see more people analyzing.00:35:42.000 --> 00:35:44.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah. Okay.00:35:49.000 --> 00:36:03.000Matthew Zabransky: in an area where they haven't before. So I'll be curious to see this upcoming season will be a really good test to kind of figure out, like, where are those numbers starting to shift a little bit. But, um, from my first reaction is I have a feeling that there's gonna be a pretty big drop in IndyPass sales in the Midwest.00:36:03.000 --> 00:36:20.000Matthew Zabransky: For that reasoning. Um, and then I do think there's gonna be a bit of a spike, um, in, in IconPass sales. I don't think it's gonna obviously affect much on the Michigan side, Lower Peninsula side of things. I think that'll stay pretty stable. But I think this side, for sure, this market, Minneapolis specifically, a little bit of Chicago.00:36:20.000 --> 00:36:25.000Matthew Zabransky: Um, but I would expect to see a pretty good little spike in sales on the IconPass side.00:36:25.000 --> 00:36:35.000Stuart Winchester: So, Lutzen and Granite Peak, I think, huge losses for India. Snow River, less so, just because Powderhorn is right next door, and it's kind of the same size, and it's, you know, gets the same s.00:36:29.000 --> 00:36:30.000Matthew Zabransky: Mm.00:36:30.000 --> 00:36:32.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.00:36:35.000 --> 00:36:53.000Stuart Winchester: Continued building by Icon after that announcement, and, and some, and some continued bleeding by Indy. So, so Icon had a Giants Ridge, which is an excellent ski area up in Minnesota. It's, it's kind of in the middle of nowhere, but it's worth it. Uh, Devil's Head, which is a nice, uh, Madison ski area, and then.00:36:44.000 --> 00:36:45.000Matthew Zabransky: Yep.00:36:53.000 --> 00:37:10.000Stuart Winchester: in Michigan left Indy to join the Icon today, so those all joined Icon today. And then Indy also lost Little Switzerland, Nordic Mountain, and Crystal Ridge in Wisconsin. As of now, they are passless. So, you know, those are small ski areas, but they're really important sort of urban.00:37:10.000 --> 00:37:21.000Stuart Winchester: collectors, but do you worry, Matthew, and I'll say, Indy still has 37 ski areas in the Midwest, but do you worry that their coalition is splintering a little bit, starting to fall apart?00:37:16.000 --> 00:37:17.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.00:37:21.000 --> 00:37:40.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah, a little bit. So I'm going to dance around this as carefully as I can because I have connections with all these owners, operators, and I talk to them on a regular basis, so I kind of know more than I probably should. But I'll try to navigate this the best that I can.00:37:35.000 --> 00:37:36.000Stuart Winchester: Yep.00:37:40.000 --> 00:37:56.000Matthew Zabransky: with… when IndyPass started, Doug Fish and the team did a really nice job of making sure that when they signed a ski area on, that they were being very, very intentional about its location, what… who was serving, and then when they would add another person on, a lot of times they would even approach.00:37:56.000 --> 00:38:04.000Matthew Zabransky: some of the nearby ski areas, and be like, hey, we're adding so-and-so, or making sure that those partnerships were all, you know.00:38:04.000 --> 00:38:22.000Matthew Zabransky: You're not too close where you're starting to monopolize business in different ways. I'll talk a little bit more about this in a second. So that was the approach for many, many years. However, I noticed a pretty big change a handful of years ago when it became more about a statistical difference than building those partnerships and.00:38:22.000 --> 00:38:41.000Matthew Zabransky: making those owners feel valued, if that makes sense. So it was like, okay, how can we just continue to pump numbers, get more? And in that process, what happened was a lot of ski areas in a small geographical area. And why has that caused a lot of issues for owners and operators? Is the idea of the IndyPass was, yeah.00:38:41.000 --> 00:38:50.000Matthew Zabransky: to create value with a portfolio of ski areas across the Midwest to rival that of, like, you know, other multi-mountain passes.00:38:50.000 --> 00:39:06.000Matthew Zabransky: Um, but what some of the owners and operators were starting to see was that instead of skiers buying a season pass at their local ski area, what they would do is buy the Indy Pass, ski two days at the ski area that would have been their local ski area, and then.00:39:01.000 --> 00:39:03.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:39:06.000 --> 00:39:22.000Matthew Zabransky: You know, in some cases, like in the Twin Cities, you have a handful that are within a two hour drive. So then it became this thing of like, oh, we're starting to see RR like personal season passes drop for then people that are using IndiePass redemptions to treat it as if it were basically a season pass.00:39:10.000 --> 00:39:12.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:39:22.000 --> 00:39:40.000Matthew Zabransky: I'm summarizing a lot there. There's a lot, like, to dive into, like, the details, but I can't, unfortunately, go into too much of that. But I think you can probably get the idea of why that was a little bit frustrating for some, um, owners and operators. So they really had to take a deep dive into some of those numbers and start to look at, like.00:39:24.000 --> 00:39:25.000Stuart Winchester: Yes.00:39:25.000 --> 00:39:26.000Stuart Winchester: Okay.00:39:29.000 --> 00:39:30.000Stuart Winchester: Mm-hmm.00:39:40.000 --> 00:39:50.000Matthew Zabransky: Where are these people coming from? How are the redemptions being used? And then, you know, how is this pass either, you know, net positive or net negative for us? And, you know, I always tell everybody, it's…00:39:50.000 --> 00:40:00.000Matthew Zabransky: the ski business is, you know, Stuart, is just a very, very low margin business, and it is a business. Like, at the end of the day, like, they have to treat it like…00:40:00.000 --> 00:40:22.000Matthew Zabransky: you know, like you gotta find out where you're losing money, or is there opportunity? And that assessment has to happen on a yearly basis. And sometimes when they run it for their business, they might be finding out that this might not be a great option for them. Or maybe it was, and things have changed. And now it's not so. It's an ongoing assessment. And like I was mentioning earlier, this is going to be a game that is going to play out over the next 10 years, probably where people are going to be switching teams all the time. And.00:40:22.000 --> 00:40:28.000Matthew Zabransky: and just get used to it. I mean, this is gonna be the way it is, unfortunately or fortunately, you know.00:40:26.000 --> 00:40:31.000Stuart Winchester: If you're Indy, what's your next move to try to build your coalition back up?00:40:31.000 --> 00:40:49.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah, I think the biggest thing they need to do is get some sort of anchor on this side of the lake. I mean, you've got Nub's Knob on Lower Peninsula, which is a great offering. I think that that really does anchor that side for sure. Over here, you gotta start eyeing up some areas that would serve as that anchor ski area. I know Whitecap was added.00:40:37.000 --> 00:40:38.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:40:49.000 --> 00:41:04.000Matthew Zabransky: Um, which is good, but I think, like, you gotta think about, you know, what is that replacement for? You know, what is that replacement for Granite Peak? And it immediately comes to mind, like, a Cascade, right? Or one of those. And we all know, like, it's just gonna be a tough sale for some of these operations, because it's always that, like.00:40:59.000 --> 00:41:00.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, I think so.00:41:04.000 --> 00:41:09.000Matthew Zabransky: If you're an anchor skier, you've probably got a good operation and a good thing going already, so…00:41:09.000 --> 00:41:29.000Matthew Zabransky: you know, what is the pitch? Why should I join your indie pass? So it's always this give and take a little bit, but, you know, given that we've had a bunch of ski areas now come off of indie, there might be an opportunity to fill that little bit of a void and be kind of that new anchor spot that would then highlight that side of the lake. I don't know. It'll be curious to see kind of how things play out, but.00:41:29.000 --> 00:41:37.000Matthew Zabransky: Um, I think we'll see a little bit of this course correction go on for the next year or two, and then I think maybe we'll see some moves in the future. It's hard to say.00:41:36.000 --> 00:41:43.000Stuart Winchester: That was really good, so I'm gonna extend that question. If you're Icon, what's your next move in the Midwest, and if you're Epic?00:41:45.000 --> 00:42:02.000Matthew Zabransky: If if I'm icon, what I'm circling right now to be quite frank is somewhere in the Chicagoland area. There's an opportunity there, and I don't, you know, of course. What is it? We don't know, but I think if you could add an offering like a full offering to which is a little bit tricky to do. But yeah, like you think of something like.00:42:02.000 --> 00:42:24.000Matthew Zabransky: Cascade, Devil's Head, one of those areas, if you can get it into, like, a full area where you can now grab that Chicago market and have it really well solidified, because right now you're kind of in a, you know, it's about four hours from up to Granite Peak, and then Boeing the other way is something like that, five or something. So you're kind of in that weird dead zone there, so I think there's still a huge opportunity to grab that market, which obviously is a huge market of skiers and s.00:42:13.000 --> 00:42:15.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:42:18.000 --> 00:42:20.000Stuart Winchester: Yep.00:42:24.000 --> 00:42:30.000Stuart Winchester: Mm-hmm. And if you're Epic, I mean, they have all city stuff, so what do you do if you're Epic?00:42:28.000 --> 00:42:29.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.00:42:30.000 --> 00:42:49.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah, I mean, I think Epic's playing the card that they want. The one thing that I am curious to see with Epic is not necessarily that, it's what's gonna happen with some of these smaller regional ski areas that have kind of been left in the dust a little bit. Paley Peaks is the first one that comes to mind when you start to think about this Snow Creek.00:42:45.000 --> 00:42:46.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:42:49.000 --> 00:43:06.000Matthew Zabransky: These ones that are just kind of in no man's land a little bit. They kind of got brought in with the Peak Resorts acquisition. I'm not sure that they necessarily wanted some of these ski areas, but they came in as a package deal as part of that. So it's just gonna be kind of interesting to see. They need a lot of reinvestment over the next, you know.00:43:06.000 --> 00:43:23.000Matthew Zabransky: 10 to 15 years, for sure, if not even sooner than that. So it'll be curious to see kind of how they approach those sort of areas in those regions, because some of those are in their own land like there is no ski area relatively close to some of them, or a couple of hours to the nearest ski area. So it'll be curious to see how they leverage that going forward.00:43:23.000 --> 00:43:44.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, Matthew, I could sink into that one for about two hours and we could have a talk. I'm going to have to bring you back for that one. But for now, let's move on. And some of the folks who may not be familiar with the Midwest, we're going to talk about some of our favorite Midwest ski areas in just a moment. First, I want to tell you that this podcast is brought to you today by Profile Search International.00:43:44.000 --> 00:44:03.000Stuart Winchester: Profile Search is the only talent acquisition firm in the entire world that is 100% focused on the ski industry. They have used their intimate understanding of skiing and related industries, and of available candidates worldwide, to place hundreds of transformational leaders at the best and most progressive ski areas over the past.00:44:03.000 --> 00:44:19.000Stuart Winchester: 30 years. Profile Search has offices in the US and Canada, and they find and negotiate with the right leaders for their team. If you want to reach out to Profile Search, you can find them at profilesearch.com, and you can get their email or phone number there, or send me a note and I will.00:44:19.000 --> 00:44:26.000Stuart Winchester: make that connection for you. That is profilesearch.com. All right, Matthew, I gave you a challenge.00:44:26.000 --> 00:44:43.000Stuart Winchester: Or, or homework or something. I don't know. I'm sure you didn't have to think too hard about this, but we are going to break down our five favorite Midwest ski areas. We each have five. We'll, we'll start with five and, and, uh, and we'll take turns. Now, these are not what we think are the best necessarily because that's a whole different.00:44:43.000 --> 00:44:47.000Stuart Winchester: Conversation and I tried to think about.00:44:47.000 --> 00:44:59.000Stuart Winchester: If you've never skied the Midwest and are only going to ski here once in your life, where would I tell people to go? So, Matthew, I'll start with you. What is your number five favorite Midwest ski area and why?00:44:58.000 --> 00:45:14.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah. So I'll just just key this up with like, yeah, I agree with you. I went with kind of like I took an approach of uniqueness. There's different things that I enjoy about this years for different reasons, and I'll obviously unpack them as we kind of go through number 5 for me was perfect north slopes.00:45:06.000 --> 00:45:08.000Stuart Winchester: Mm-hmm.00:45:14.000 --> 00:45:15.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:45:14.000 --> 00:45:32.000Matthew Zabransky: And at its face, you might not think that that's… it's, you know, it's a ski area right outside of, uh, Cincinnati, um, and the southern tip of Indiana down there. And for, you know, for people that have never heard of it, they'd be like, why does this… why is this even on here? Uh, but the moment that you visit there, I think it all becomes very clear. Their throughput.00:45:32.000 --> 00:45:51.000Matthew Zabransky: their snowmaking capacity, their operations. It is a gold standard when we think of how to run a ski area in extremely challenging conditions and environments. Perfect North is the one that comes to mind. The way that they can move people through their rental department is phenomenal. The way that they can have a stable season based off of where they are.00:45:51.000 --> 00:46:08.000Matthew Zabransky: is just absolutely mind blowing. And they've been doing this since day one. So this isn't something that they have. You know they're new to. They've been doing this for many, many, many decades now at this point. So it's it's definitely worth a visit. Their train's really good as well. They have some Olympians that have come out of there just some some good stuff going down at at perfect north slopes.00:46:08.000 --> 00:46:23.000Stuart Winchester: I'm so glad you said Perfect North, because I did not include it on my list, but I think they are one of the best operators in the country. My number 5 is Chestnut, Illinois, and everyone's… you know why, but everyone's gonna say, Illinois? Like, what does it matter with you?00:46:20.000 --> 00:46:23.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.00:46:23.000 --> 00:46:29.000Stuart Winchester: It is so unique, because you get up there, and it's about 500 vertical feet.00:46:29.000 --> 00:46:45.000Stuart Winchester: and you ski down to the freaking Mississippi River. It is… there is nothing else like that in American skiing. It is such a gorgeous view, and there's a train that goes by, and, and, and… the lift system is fantastic. Bunch of, you know, really maintained quads.00:46:45.000 --> 00:47:00.000Stuart Winchester: They have bars, which I like, which most Midwest ski areas don't, but they've retrofit them. Their grooming is phenomenal. Terrain's really good, steep and varied, and then one of the best things is on the backside, and the name of this probably is escaping me, it's like the backyard or something.00:46:47.000 --> 00:46:48.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah. Okay.00:46:58.000 --> 00:47:00.000Matthew Zabransky: Uh, far side.00:47:00.000 --> 00:47:15.000Stuart Winchester: Okay, yeah, so they have a terrain park that could be its own ski area, and it has a lift by itself, and so all the badly behaved teenagers go over there and throw cans around and smoke. Maybe it was just the day I was there.00:47:00.000 --> 00:47:02.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.00:47:15.000 --> 00:47:20.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, but, but my number five is Chestnut, Illinois. Uh, number four, Matthew.00:47:20.000 --> 00:47:37.000Matthew Zabransky: This is gonna be. This is gonna be a deep cut here, and I'll give you my reasoning. So I'm a sucker for community rope toe ski places like it. It warms my heart every time every year there's at least one or 2 that I go to every time I show up. It's just the kids are so excited to show me around.00:47:23.000 --> 00:47:25.000Stuart Winchester: Okay.00:47:27.000 --> 00:47:29.000Stuart Winchester: Mm-hmm. Oh, love it.00:47:37.000 --> 00:47:38.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah. Okay.00:47:37.000 --> 00:48:00.000Matthew Zabransky: They're so passionate and it really brings me back to why skiing is important and what it really is about, right? We talk about the steeps and all this fun stuff all the time, but like when you go to these places, there's just to see a kid just in jeans or whatever it may be after school ripping down. It's so fun. So one of my favorite, if not my favorite rope to ski area in the entire Midwest is a place called Hickory Hills. It's in Traverse City.00:47:59.000 --> 00:48:00.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:48:00.000 --> 00:48:18.000Matthew Zabransky: It's a beautiful setting overlooking the bay, and they have just all ropes and one conveyor, and it's stacked. And it was one of the first ski areas in the Midwest to offer night skiing, which I thought was really, really cool as well. Obviously, not a lot of vertical, maybe 200 feet of vertical, depending on which rope you're going on, but it's one of those places you just show up.00:48:10.000 --> 00:48:12.000Stuart Winchester: Mm-hmm.00:48:18.000 --> 00:48:30.000Matthew Zabransky: And they've reinvested, as recently as 2018, they built a new lodge, new snowmaking, and you just show up there, and you're just like, it brings you back to that, like, oh yeah, this is some good skiing, like, just…00:48:30.000 --> 00:48:37.000Matthew Zabransky: fundamental, good stuff, you see kids ripping around after school, it's like, it's what I think of when I think of, uh, rope tow places.00:48:36.000 --> 00:48:42.000Stuart Winchester: And long live the rope tow. I mean, it is amazing that I think they run five or six there, right?00:48:42.000 --> 00:48:46.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah, I think they have six total, I believe, yeah.00:48:45.000 --> 00:48:59.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, I've been there in the summer. I've never skied there. I used to ski at Sugarloaf down the… down the road till that went out of business. My number 4 is one you already mentioned, Matthew. Whitecap, Wisconsin. I just love this crazy ski area. It is…00:48:49.000 --> 00:48:51.000Matthew Zabransky: Yo.00:48:59.000 --> 00:49:04.000Stuart Winchester: I like to be confused when I'm skiing. I like it when a ski area…00:49:04.000 --> 00:49:05.000Matthew Zabransky: Okay.00:49:04.000 --> 00:49:22.000Stuart Winchester: Kind of hides its secrets and has lots of little trails and the trail map doesn't quite match up with the, with what you actually see. And, and there's lifts all over the place and there's little pockets and there's, you can tell that they don't care if you ski in the trees. And, and, and Whitecap is, is one of the most confusing ski areas I've, I've ever been to and I love.00:49:21.000 --> 00:49:23.000Matthew Zabransky: Okay.00:49:22.000 --> 00:49:40.000Stuart Winchester: it's in the great snow pocket off of Lake Superior, gets 200 or more inches of snow average per year, which is a good thing, because they don't have a lot of snowmaking, uh, there. But I really, really love Whitecap, and by the way, we did not share ours before, so we may have some crossover here. So, uh, what's your number 3, Matthew?00:49:38.000 --> 00:49:39.000Matthew Zabransky: Thank you.00:49:40.000 --> 00:49:55.000Matthew Zabransky: Number three, I am going with a ski area that I think people around here would know, but I think people on the other side of the lake would not. And it is going to be Welch Village. Welch Village is an area that just, you look at the numbers, you read the stats, and you're like, this place…00:49:50.000 --> 00:49:51.000Stuart Winchester: Mmm.00:49:55.000 --> 00:50:15.000Matthew Zabransky: cannot be that good. But it really is. It skis so much bigger than the stats suggest. I think it's about 300 feet of vertical. They have like 50 something runs. But I think what Welch Village has that a lot of skiers don't is the amount of terrain variation and stepping that they have is just phenomenal for beginners, and the fact that it's only about 40 minutes from the Twin Cities.00:50:15.000 --> 00:50:31.000Matthew Zabransky: is amazing. So they have basically a run for every progression. If you want super steep, now obviously it's only 300 feet of vertical, so it's gonna be a handful of turns, but they have that. If you want something very, very gently sloped, they got that, and basically everything in between. And it's just one of those areas that is a perfect.00:50:23.000 --> 00:50:24.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:50:31.000 --> 00:50:41.000Matthew Zabransky: Kind of like just outside the urban reach, right? It's not like in your backyard, but it's close enough where you can easily go for a few hours and just a perfect place to learn how to ski and snowboard.00:50:41.000 --> 00:50:57.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, I love Welch Village. I was super impressed when I went there a few years ago, and it's not too far from Vail's Afton Alps, so you can do both in a day easily if you want to, but Welch Village, first-rate operation, absolutely one of the best in the Midwest. My number three is a nostalgia play, and I'm gonna say Boyne Mount.00:50:42.000 --> 00:50:44.000Matthew Zabransky: Okay.00:50:57.000 --> 00:51:13.000Stuart Winchester: The reason I love Boyne Mountain is not because of the fast lift, so they were the first six-pack in North America, and, you know, they put in the first eight-pack in the Midwest, and there's a lot of history there. The first chairlift in the world is there. They moved it from Sun Valley.00:51:13.000 --> 00:51:23.000Stuart Winchester: the single chair from Sun Valley back in the… in the 40s, and it's now the Hemlock double chair. But what I love Boyne Mountain is because when I… back in the 90s, when I lived in Michigan.00:51:23.000 --> 00:51:30.000Stuart Winchester: they would stay open into May. And back then, there was no social media, so no one knew about it, so I'd show up, and there would be…00:51:25.000 --> 00:51:26.000Matthew Zabransky: Mm-hmm.00:51:30.000 --> 00:51:47.000Stuart Winchester: not kidding, 10 people skiing, and they would be running that six-pack all day, and they would let it bump up, and just run idiots to light, and it's where I learned how to ski moguls, and I've always just been tremendously fond of Boyne for that reason. So while it is one of the nicest ski areas in the Midwest, just on its own terms.00:51:32.000 --> 00:51:34.000Matthew Zabransky: Thank you.00:51:47.000 --> 00:52:02.000Stuart Winchester: It's also very steep. It's just, I have that feeling of, you know, that memory of skiing in my t-shirt in May in 1996, you know, down the moguls at Boyne Mountain with five other people, and it was just, it's one of my favorite ski memories ever, and the fact that they.00:52:02.000 --> 00:52:13.000Stuart Winchester: empowered that and did that. When they lost money, there's no way they didn't lose money doing that. It just speaks a lot to the spirit that still animates that company, even though it's a bigger company now.00:52:06.000 --> 00:52:07.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.00:52:13.000 --> 00:52:16.000Stuart Winchester: Number two for you, Matthew.00:52:16.000 --> 00:52:31.000Matthew Zabransky: We'll get to this, I'm sure, at the end, but it's cool to see some of that going full circle. I don't want to give too much away. We'll get into that in a second. Number two for me is a pick that I think is going to change a lot this year, specifically because of the new lift alignment, and that's Marquette Mountain.00:52:17.000 --> 00:52:19.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, yeah, yeah.00:52:31.000 --> 00:52:32.000Stuart Winchester: Mmm.00:52:31.000 --> 00:52:50.000Matthew Zabransky: They have phenomenal terrain up there, they get great snow, and the thing that was always just missing was a little bit of polishing around the edges, and I think they're finally getting to that point now with, uh, you know, a lot of snowmaking investments over the last handful of years. This new chair from Dolphin Meyer, uh, triple gonna run up basically the center of the ski area, and I think it's really gonna change the way that this.00:52:50.000 --> 00:53:07.000Matthew Zabransky: Uh, previously, it was divided into kind of two almost separate pods. It kind of had this weird split down the middle. It was kind of hard to navigate. But given that this one's gonna go right up to the center there, you're gonna be able to get full top-to-bottom access a lot more easily, be able to access a lot more of the terrain across the port, the entire, you know, trail map off the front side there.00:52:54.000 --> 00:52:55.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:53:07.000 --> 00:53:23.000Matthew Zabransky: and I think it's 1 of those that like it. This they have the terrain, and there's not many areas in the Midwest that have the terrain. It's usually the other way where it's like, Yeah, okay, we have. You know the infrastructure. We have the location, but we don't have the steeps, or we don't have the trees, or whatever it may be.00:53:15.000 --> 00:53:16.000Stuart Winchester: Okay.00:53:18.000 --> 00:53:20.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:53:23.000 --> 00:53:34.000Matthew Zabransky: It's a Marquette, good city up there in the UP, really the only major city in the UP, but they have a good demographic up there. And I think with the changes that they're gonna see this year with the new lift, it's gonna be really fun to watch.00:53:27.000 --> 00:53:28.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:53:34.000 --> 00:53:44.000Stuart Winchester: Not only do they have the terrain, they have the snow. I mean, they're another one of those Lake Superior. They don't get quite as much as up in the Keweenaw or Snow River, but they do get a fair amount.00:53:36.000 --> 00:53:38.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah, yeah.00:53:44.000 --> 00:53:45.000Matthew Zabransky: They do.00:53:45.000 --> 00:53:54.000Stuart Winchester: So my number two, I'm kind of going chalk on these last two, so you can probably guess what my number one is. My number two is a very obvious one, and that's Lutzen.00:53:54.000 --> 00:53:56.000Matthew Zabransky: Mm-hmm.00:53:54.000 --> 00:54:10.000Stuart Winchester: You know, for, for folks who have never been to Lutzen, it, first of all, it has a gondola. Now, now it's more of a transit lift. It goes more sideways than up and down, but it does have, is it eight or 900 feet of vertical? I think 800 and, or you could ski down to, yeah, of lift served vertical. And the.00:54:00.000 --> 00:54:01.000Matthew Zabransky: Thank you.00:54:05.000 --> 00:54:07.000Matthew Zabransky: It's… yeah.00:54:10.000 --> 00:54:26.000Stuart Winchester: enormous. It's really four separate mountains and it goes in all different directions and they have two six packs and they have that Gandhi, which is fairly new. I think within the last 10 years, they built that to replace their older one. Uh That is one of the best run ski areas in the Midwest. Another one that will stay open into May.00:54:26.000 --> 00:54:42.000Stuart Winchester: when they can. Oh, and speaking of views, I mean, the view off of Moose Mountain of Lake Superior just knock you on your ass. It is so good. I really love Lutzen Mountain, which takes us, Matthew, to your number one ski area in the Midwest.00:54:42.000 --> 00:55:01.000Matthew Zabransky: Man, man, this is one, and it's funny ‘cause I'm working on this video right now, and it's a place that every time I leave this ski area or while I'm at this gear, I just have a smile on my face the entire time. It has nothing flashy, but they do everything right, and that's nub knob. I mean, you go to this place and you just…00:54:42.000 --> 00:54:44.000Stuart Winchester: Favorite ski area.00:54:59.000 --> 00:55:00.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, thank you.00:55:01.000 --> 00:55:17.000Matthew Zabransky: It's just crazy to me that we were working on this video and my editor, Nick, we got to the end of the video and I mentioned like, “Oh, it doesn't have any high-speed lifts, but it almost feels like it does just because of the way that they're aligned and the way the traffic flows and the way that the runs are cut and everything.00:55:17.000 --> 00:55:34.000Matthew Zabransky: It feels like another one that just, you read the stats and you're like, okay, that sounds decent. But then you get on site and you're just like, this is just a really well run ski area. Snowmaking is always top notch. Grooming is amazing. Lifts spin, they don't stop very often. I mean, everything is just really well polished.00:55:31.000 --> 00:55:33.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:55:34.000 --> 00:55:45.000Matthew Zabransky: the core skiing experience, and they really nail it, and again, it's one of those, like, every time I come off the hill there, I'm just like, man, that was a great day of skiing, even if, you know, it's raining outside, I feel like.00:55:43.000 --> 00:55:44.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:55:45.000 --> 00:56:01.000Stuart Winchester: And as a… just to underscore how good of a scary it is, it's right across the street from Boyne Highlands, and it has been, you know, obviously its whole time, but for a scary to succeed, a lot of times, a smaller scary will fail next to a big corporate area, but Nubs has managed to flourish. Matthew, we actually had no crossover, because.00:55:46.000 --> 00:55:47.000Matthew Zabransky: Okay.00:55:49.000 --> 00:55:51.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.00:56:01.000 --> 00:56:16.000Stuart Winchester: as you can probably guess, is Mount Bohemia, and I'm sure that's probably why you left it off. Uh, Mount Bohemia, for the folks who are not familiar with it, I wrote an article last year, I called it, Mount Bohemia, the scarier the Midwest deserves, because when Mount Bohemia opened in 2000, it.00:56:02.000 --> 00:56:03.000Matthew Zabransky: Hey.00:56:04.000 --> 00:56:07.000Matthew Zabransky: Yep.00:56:16.000 --> 00:56:31.000Stuart Winchester: And it has 900 feet of vertical. They do not groom. They have no snowmaking. They get 300 inches annually. It's all, almost all, glades. Their glading is some of the best I've ever seen anywhere, because there's a lot of underbrush in Michigan.00:56:20.000 --> 00:56:22.000Matthew Zabransky: Okay.00:56:31.000 --> 00:56:48.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, the place is an absolute riot. Talk about culture. You get on the ground and you're like, oh, what's here? They don't even have a proper base lodge. It's, it's all these yurts and then they have this giant complex of hot tubs for some reason that, that everyone's always in there drinking beer and.00:56:48.000 --> 00:56:55.000Stuart Winchester: And the skiing is just… it's great! It's… it's… there's nothing else like it anywhere in North America, where there's just…00:56:55.000 --> 00:57:12.000Stuart Winchester: that much just free skiing available off of a lift, and Lonnie, the owner, has been on a couple times, and I cannot say enough good things about Nubs Knob, including… and I'll let people do their own research on this, but their season pass is $117, or $99 for… you don't want Fridays and Saturdays, and you get all kinds of reciprocals with it, so…00:57:12.000 --> 00:57:16.000Stuart Winchester: It's not a bad multi-mountain pass on its own. So…00:57:12.000 --> 00:57:14.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah.00:57:15.000 --> 00:57:30.000Matthew Zabransky: I was so. I was so nervous the 1st so I went to Bohemia last year for the 1st time ever, and I it has been on my list forever, and I keep like I want to hit it right, because I don't want to like. Just go there and not be able to ski everything. And the entire time I've been super fortunate to see a lot of amazing places in in North.00:57:18.000 --> 00:57:20.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:57:24.000 --> 00:57:26.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, yeah, yeah.00:57:30.000 --> 00:57:49.000Matthew Zabransky: And I was super nervous it was not going to live up to the hype, because I was like, this place is hyped up so much, there is no way that it is going to live up to the hype, and it absolutely did. It's one of the most unique scary areas that you'll ever go to, the operations, the bus system, the hot tub. Nothing makes sense there, but it all does in a weird way. It's an absolute riot.00:57:49.000 --> 00:58:04.000Stuart Winchester: I couldn't have said any better. I always tell people, if you ski one place in the Midwest in your life, make it Mount Bohemia. All right, now, Matthew, what I want you to leave us with today is… I imagine, maybe deliberately, you didn't mention any of these ski areas, but one of the…00:58:04.000 --> 00:58:15.000Stuart Winchester: things that you do an awesome job with every year is covering the race to open in the Midwest. So, so tell us about the race to open. Who's involved?00:58:15.000 --> 00:58:19.000Stuart Winchester: When it generally takes place and how you cover it.00:58:19.000 --> 00:58:35.000Matthew Zabransky: Yeah, so the race to open is a pretty big deal across the Midwest. It was something that before I started this website and YouTube channel, I did not really realize a lot, but the Midwest is always usually fighting for one of the first areas to open in the entire country on occasion. It really just depends on the weather.00:58:35.000 --> 00:58:52.000Matthew Zabransky: But what

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication. The only way to interact with the podcast is to upgrade to The Storm's paid tier. Thank you for supporting independent ski journalism.Welcome to the Storm's short-form, news-focused podcast. Don't worry, I will still write newsletters too (I blasted out this post on Smuggs joining Indy Pass this morning). To browse a podcast transcript, click the “transcript” button above - click on any block of text and the audio will jump to that point in the conversation. Paid subscribers can leave a comment in the article below, or by joining The Storm's chat (also below). I'll respond to some comments in the next episode. The Zoom transcript (click “transcript” above for the Substack transcript, which will zoom to any point in the video when you click on the associated text block; timestamps below DO NOT MATCH THE VIDEO)00:01:40.000 --> 00:01:56.000Stuart Winchester: Welcome to Storm. It is September 9th, 2026 on a Wednesday. I've got a really great show for you today. We are going to visit with Loon President and General Manager, Brian Norton, who has been on the show before.00:01:56.000 --> 00:02:04.000Stuart Winchester: But we are going to have him on to talk about the Blackridge expansion that Loon announced last week.00:02:04.000 --> 00:02:10.000Stuart Winchester: There's actually a couple of expansion items in the news today, and I want to hit on those first before we get to Brian.00:02:10.000 --> 00:02:27.000Stuart Winchester: Altera today confirmed a couple of things we already knew in their 2026 to 27 capital plan. So unlike Vale who tends to release all their lifts and expansions and projects at once, Vale or Altera lets them leak out.00:02:27.000 --> 00:02:41.000Stuart Winchester: and then officially announces them sometime later. So, we had a pretty good idea these were coming. The first one will be up at Mont Tremblant, and Tremblant is…00:02:41.000 --> 00:02:44.000Stuart Winchester: If you've been there, it's…00:02:44.000 --> 00:02:55.000Stuart Winchester: an IntraWest legacy, so it has one of these really nice walkable villages of the sort that I'm always pushing for, and it has really great ski terrain. Busiest… it's…00:02:55.000 --> 00:03:11.000Stuart Winchester: Traditionally, Intrawest had the three busiest ski areas in Canada. They had, uh, Whistler was number one, obviously. Number two was Tremblant, and number three, surprisingly, was Blue Mountain, Ontario, which we covered on in the podcast.00:03:11.000 --> 00:03:14.000Stuart Winchester: Pretty recently, but I want to…00:03:14.000 --> 00:03:19.000Stuart Winchester: show you something here. So this is why it's cool to watch, because you can see…00:03:19.000 --> 00:03:31.000Stuart Winchester: some of these things on YouTube or Substack if you're watching the podcast. So this is Tremblant's timber expansion that they're gonna open for 27 to 28. They're gonna have a new.00:03:31.000 --> 00:03:46.000Stuart Winchester: quad, high-speed quad, coming up to the Timber Summit with 8 new trails over here. Uh, and that's gonna be… let's see, they gave an acreage on that, 62 acres. So sometimes it's hard when you see these things, especially if you don't know the mountain.00:03:46.000 --> 00:03:57.000Stuart Winchester: to really know where it fits in. So this one, here's from the top, you can see the new trails, the timber trails, coming down here off of the new.00:03:57.000 --> 00:04:09.000Stuart Winchester: high-speed quad that'll come out of the Versant-Soleil base. And then here is the existing, if you're watching, here's the existing lift that comes up to the current Tremblant Summit.00:04:09.000 --> 00:04:19.000Stuart Winchester: And you can see that right here. So the new expansion will go bloop right up here, and we'll have some new trails over there. And then Altera also announced.00:04:19.000 --> 00:04:32.000Stuart Winchester: or not really announced, but reconfirmed, that will be when the Club Med is open, so that all-inclusive experience will be there for Tremblant. So, nice expansion coming for Tremblant. Obviously.00:04:32.000 --> 00:04:42.000Stuart Winchester: Altera has had a big expansion ongoing at Deer Valley for years and years. So, Deer Valley, prior to 2023.00:04:42.000 --> 00:04:46.000Stuart Winchester: was really just Bald Mountain.00:04:46.000 --> 00:05:02.000Stuart Winchester: On over to Empire. Uh, and then here's the front side, and then this little baldy peak was here. But over the past three seasons, they've really blown the place out and added thousands and thousands of acres. Uh, Deer Valley, believe it or not, is now the…00:05:02.000 --> 00:05:18.000Stuart Winchester: Sixth largest ski area in America. And, and they're opening 200 more acres this year. Hale Peak will be another high speed quad. I don't have a vertical on Hale Peak, but they did confirm today that Hale Peak will be.00:05:18.000 --> 00:05:29.000Stuart Winchester: 200 acres, so Deer Valley will now total 4,500 acres. It looks, it sounds pretty big, but right next door to it is Park City, which.00:05:29.000 --> 00:05:45.000Stuart Winchester: Combined with the historic canyons is 7,300 acres. That's the largest ski area in the United States. So those are a couple of the expansions that we have coming up. We'll talk about another one in a little bit with Loon. And the reason I wanna talk about expansions with you.00:05:45.000 --> 00:05:47.000Stuart Winchester: Is… is I… I…00:05:48.000 --> 00:05:58.000Stuart Winchester: I write about this over and over again, but sometimes when I write an article, it fritters off into the wilderness, and I'm not able to…00:05:58.000 --> 00:06:12.000Stuart Winchester: it doesn't have the staying power necessarily where people might find it sometime later. So I want to revisit some of these points that I made in the past about expansions and how important they are. So I wrote this article a few years ago.00:06:12.000 --> 00:06:14.000Stuart Winchester: And…00:06:16.000 --> 00:06:18.000Stuart Winchester: I was looking at…00:06:18.000 --> 00:06:34.000Stuart Winchester: So everyone always gets hung up on this active ski ski areas number. And the NSA has tracked this for years and years. And here's the numbers you can see on the screen if you're watching in 1991 to 92 season.00:06:34.000 --> 00:06:46.000Stuart Winchester: The United States had 546 active ski areas. As of 2023 to 24, it had 486. The number for this season was right around 490.00:06:46.000 --> 00:06:49.000Stuart Winchester: So, oftentimes.00:06:49.000 --> 00:07:04.000Stuart Winchester: We will see articles usually written by folks who are not ski media, just general media, and they'll write about this number and they'll find this statistic and they'll point to the declining number of ski areas and say, skiing is dying. Climate change is killing skiing.00:07:05.000 --> 00:07:17.000Stuart Winchester: But there's actually a much more nuanced story behind that. So I pulled this number last year when I was reading an article from The Motley Fool, which is an investor site that I use. I love The Motley Fool.00:07:18.000 --> 00:07:24.000Stuart Winchester: But it was talking about MTN stock, which a lot of you know is the stock ticker for Vail Resorts.00:07:24.000 --> 00:07:33.000Stuart Winchester: And the Motley Fool article pointed out that in 1992, and this was their bear case, their case against buying MTN stock.00:07:33.000 --> 00:07:44.000Stuart Winchester: During… I'm gonna quote here, the Motley Fool. During the 1992 ski season, there were 546 ski areas operating in the United States, compared to 486 today. This article's from 2025.00:07:44.000 --> 00:07:57.000Stuart Winchester: Supply, says the fool, is flat to shrinking. On the demand side, 3 of the top 5 busiest ski seasons on record occurred each of the last 3 years. Demand is up. So, they were trying to make the point that.00:07:58.000 --> 00:08:07.000Stuart Winchester: Vail Resorts had a very valuable commodity, because the number of ski areas was shrinking. I said, wait a second, this doesn't really make sense, because…00:08:08.000 --> 00:08:11.000Stuart Winchester: How are you having so many fewer?00:08:11.000 --> 00:08:25.000Stuart Winchester: ski areas, and so many more skier visits? Well, the answer is pretty simple. We have a lot more ski terrain. In fact, I did an analysis in response to that Fool article.00:08:25.000 --> 00:08:27.000Stuart Winchester: And I found, just examining…00:08:27.000 --> 00:08:30.000Stuart Winchester: The 11 western ski states.00:08:30.000 --> 00:08:40.000Stuart Winchester: that, minus Alaska, that those 11 states had 54,598 more acres of terrain.00:08:40.000 --> 00:08:50.000Stuart Winchester: available at their ski areas, their lift service ski areas, than they had in 1994. So, yes, there are fewer ski areas.00:08:50.000 --> 00:09:00.000Stuart Winchester: now than there were in the early 90s. There were 546 in 92, 486 today, but there's a lot more terrain, and so what ended up happening was.00:09:00.000 --> 00:09:08.000Stuart Winchester: The ski areas that were successful expanded. It was as simple as that. And when I did this analysis.00:09:08.000 --> 00:09:10.000Stuart Winchester: I looked at…00:09:11.000 --> 00:09:24.000Stuart Winchester: I looked at 92 ski areas that I had the data for from 1992, and they happen to be some of the biggest ski areas in the West. And I compared their acreage in 1994 according to a guidebook I had from that date that I'd kept.00:09:24.000 --> 00:09:30.000Stuart Winchester: 107,671 acres was the total for these ski areas.00:09:30.000 --> 00:09:45.000Stuart Winchester: Fast forward to 2025, when I did this analysis, those same 92 ski areas had grown from 107,671 acres to 159,754 acres.00:09:45.000 --> 00:09:55.000Stuart Winchester: Then I added in a few ski areas that had opened since then, places like Tamarack in Idaho, Blacktail in Montana. There hasn't been a lot, but there's been a few.00:09:55.000 --> 00:10:11.000Stuart Winchester: And then I subtracted the lost ski areas. The biggest of them was Ski Rio in New Mexico. But for the most part, the ski areas that closed were small surface tow operations and they were in the region of a much larger area and most likely failed in large part.00:10:11.000 --> 00:10:29.000Stuart Winchester: Because they couldn't compete with that full service area, which could offer folks not only beginner terrain, but a progression up to more interesting terrain. So, there's a lot more ski terrain than there used to be, and to give you an idea of how much terrain 54,598 acres is.00:10:29.000 --> 00:10:36.000Stuart Winchester: Currently in Colorado, the whole state of Colorado, which has a quarter of the ski terrain in the entire United States.00:10:36.000 --> 00:10:42.000Stuart Winchester: there's 45,552 acres of terrain. So we've added the equivalent of another Colorado.00:10:42.000 --> 00:10:45.000Stuart Winchester: Now, there's a caveat to that.00:10:45.000 --> 00:10:48.000Stuart Winchester: The ski industry has been able to grow by expansion.00:10:48.000 --> 00:10:58.000Stuart Winchester: But it hasn't necessarily been able to grow where it needs to grow, and I made another point, a related point, in another recent article that I wrote.00:10:58.000 --> 00:11:11.000Stuart Winchester: for… about the U.S. Forest Service, and how most of the ski areas in the western United States are built on U.S. Forest Service land. They're leased from the U.S. Forest Service under 40-year terms.00:11:11.000 --> 00:11:18.000Stuart Winchester: However, following the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, those permits.00:11:18.000 --> 00:11:33.000Stuart Winchester: got almost impossible to obtain new permits. The Forest Service had lots and lots of ski areas proposed, but they were all shut down. Everyone except for Beaver Creek and then Blacktail in 1998 were shut down with.00:11:33.000 --> 00:11:51.000Stuart Winchester: court challenges that came out of NEPA in 1969. So, while we have more terrain, skiable terrain, than we had in 1994, the reason it often feels as though the mountains are overcrowded and insufficiently distributed.00:11:51.000 --> 00:11:57.000Stuart Winchester: is because they are. Because we've only been able to expand the ski areas where they were.00:11:57.000 --> 00:12:10.000Stuart Winchester: rather than building new ski areas where people move to. Look at snowy regions like Washington and Oregon, some of the snowiest ski areas in the country. A lot of them still don't have snowmaking because they get so much snow there.00:12:10.000 --> 00:12:22.000Stuart Winchester: Washington in 1980 had 4.1 million people. Today it has 8.2 million people, double the population, but fewer ski areas and some larger.00:12:22.000 --> 00:12:37.000Stuart Winchester: Stevens Pass has certainly grown, Crystal has grown, Mission Ridge has grown. Oregon, same thing, went from 2.6 million people in 1980 to 4.3 million today, but has fewer ski areas now than it did in the 1980s. So…00:12:37.000 --> 00:12:48.000Stuart Winchester: For better or worse, we are stuck right now with growth through expansion. So, I want to get to an expansion. First, I want to tell you about one of my awesome partners.00:12:48.000 --> 00:13:00.000Stuart Winchester: I've been working with Bonfire Collective for a long time, and if you run a ski area or an outdoor brand, you should consider hooking up with them as well.00:13:00.000 --> 00:13:10.000Stuart Winchester: Bonfire Collective is a fractional marketing team that collaborates with ski areas and outdoor brands to give your marketing a fresh perspective and better storytelling.00:13:10.000 --> 00:13:16.000Stuart Winchester: Bonfire can help you rethink your approach in ways that can turbocharge your business.00:13:16.000 --> 00:13:31.000Stuart Winchester: Bonfire Collective, for example, took on the marketing at one New Hampshire sea area and doubled revenue in just three years. And when the storm was ready to invest in its first ever digital marketing campaign last year, I worked with Bonfire to make it happen.00:13:31.000 --> 00:13:36.000Stuart Winchester: I could not be happier with the results. I think you will love working with them too.00:13:36.000 --> 00:13:40.000Stuart Winchester: To get started, you will want to talk to Eric over at Bonfire Collective.00:13:40.000 --> 00:13:56.000Stuart Winchester: Eric was a co-founder of Bluebird Backcountry Colorado, the first human powered ski area. He knows the ski business, as many of you know from that episode of the Storm Skiing Podcast that he appeared on last year. Visit bonfirecollective.com or I will be happy.00:13:56.000 --> 00:14:03.000Stuart Winchester: to make that connection for you. Alright, with that, let's go to our guest for today.00:14:05.000 --> 00:14:08.000Stuart Winchester: And…00:14:09.000 --> 00:14:15.000Stuart Winchester: Here he is, Mr. Brian Norton. Brian, what an awesome background! Where are you at?00:14:15.000 --> 00:14:19.000brian norton: Uh, I'm in my office, but that's hanging outside my office, so…00:14:18.000 --> 00:14:24.000Stuart Winchester: Oh, okay, cool, I thought maybe you were in the, uh, the kink barn with the, uh…00:14:24.000 --> 00:14:27.000Stuart Winchester: With that, with the cool groomer behind you.00:14:28.000 --> 00:14:44.000Stuart Winchester: All right, well, let me give you a proper introduction here. Uh, my guest today is president and general manager of Loon Mountain, New Hampshire since 2022. Loon claims New Hampshire's tallest vertical drop at 2,190 feet.00:14:44.000 --> 00:14:58.000Stuart Winchester: served by 13 lifts. Last week, Loon announced the 272-acre Black Ridge expansion that, when added to the resort's existing 403-acre footprint.00:14:58.000 --> 00:15:08.000Stuart Winchester: will make Lune the largest ski area in New Hampshire, and the sixth largest ski area in the eastern United States at 675 acres.00:15:08.000 --> 00:15:23.000Stuart Winchester: He began his Loon career in 2001 as a Lyft attendant, and now he's running the place. He is Brian Norton. Brian, welcome back to the storm. Always good to see what's new at Loon, because there is always something new at Loon. How you doing today, Brian?00:15:23.000 --> 00:15:29.000brian norton: I'm doing awesome. It's sweatshirt weather right now, so we're getting closer.00:15:29.000 --> 00:15:33.000Stuart Winchester: Nice. Did you do a snowmaking test yet, or is that Sunday River's ter.00:15:32.000 --> 00:15:38.000brian norton: No, we have not done that yet. Sunday will probably beat us to that one.00:15:37.000 --> 00:15:54.000Stuart Winchester: All right, let's talk about Black Ridge. This is really an amazing project, and I've been pretty vocal and frank over the years about what I saw as Loon's biggest shortcoming, which was not enough real expert terrain, and by that I really meant glades, wild terrain.00:15:54.000 --> 00:15:58.000Stuart Winchester: Talk to us about Black Ridge, what it is, and how it's going to change Loon.00:15:59.000 --> 00:16:14.000brian norton: Yeah, I mean, it's a pivotal project for the ski resort. As you mentioned, it's almost doubling the size of the ski resort. For those not familiar with it, it's this kind of secret shoulder glade skiing. It's been there.00:16:14.000 --> 00:16:30.000brian norton: It was developed over time by some locals just kind of going out there, you know, maybe not necessarily following the rules, certainly not at our approval, but people have been skiing there. I mean, I think the first time I went skiing over there, I was in college, like 2001, and it was like you had to kind of find your way over there. You had to commit to it.00:16:27.000 --> 00:16:28.000Stuart Winchester: Okay.00:16:31.000 --> 00:16:42.000brian norton: beautiful, um, beautiful area. It's like a big catcher's mitt off the side of the ski resort that just holds snow really well, and there's a lot of, um, it's a mile and a quarter.00:16:42.000 --> 00:16:51.000brian norton: hike, uh, across a ridgeline. You can actually ski or skate most of it. There's a few sections where you have to, you know, unclick and walk and…00:16:51.000 --> 00:17:09.000brian norton: um, you just get this incredible glade scheme that brings you right back to the bottom of North Peak, so it's like this full circle, you're way the heck out there, there's a couple viewpoints where you can stand at this cliff and just look back at the ski resort and look into the town of Lincoln, you're like, whoa, I am way out there, but a completely different view than, you know, most people would.00:17:09.000 --> 00:17:23.000brian norton: would ever get to see from Loon. And so, yeah, we've been working on it for a couple years with the Forest Service, trying to, like, wrap that into our special use permit. And, um, yeah, super happy to have that announcement, kind of. Like I said, planning.00:17:23.000 --> 00:17:28.000brian norton: For a long time, but awesome to have that hit the newsstands the other day.00:17:27.000 --> 00:17:34.000Stuart Winchester: So help us understand Loon's Forest Service footprint. This is a conversation I'm accustomed to having with.00:17:34.000 --> 00:17:53.000Stuart Winchester: your partners who run western ski areas. There's very few, just 7 in New England, that touch Forest Service land. My understanding is that Loon is not entirely on Forest Service land. I believe it's Kissing Cousins Lift. You're riding up, and you see a sign, welcome to the White Mountains National Forest. So, where are those boundaries at?00:17:53.000 --> 00:17:55.000Stuart Winchester: at Loon.00:17:54.000 --> 00:18:05.000brian norton: Yeah, it's really just the bottom. I mean, like, pretty much if you can hit a golf ball there, you're on private land from a base area, hit it up, and then everything above there is forest service land, so…00:17:59.000 --> 00:18:00.000Stuart Winchester: Okay.00:18:01.000 --> 00:18:02.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:18:04.000 --> 00:18:05.000Stuart Winchester: Okay.00:18:05.000 --> 00:18:09.000brian norton: Yeah, it's the top 95% of the skewers work.00:18:05.000 --> 00:18:07.000Stuart Winchester: So how?00:18:08.000 --> 00:18:16.000Stuart Winchester: Right, so Loon went through quite a process as I remember it back in the 90s to open up South Peak and there was…00:18:16.000 --> 00:18:22.000Stuart Winchester: a lot of resistance to that locally, and ultimately, you got it opened.00:18:23.000 --> 00:18:25.000Stuart Winchester: was…00:18:25.000 --> 00:18:30.000Stuart Winchester: if you look at Black Ridge, it's… there's no new lift, right? It's essentially…00:18:30.000 --> 00:18:35.000Stuart Winchester: Glade thinning. So, so I want to talk about the process for that in a minute, but.00:18:36.000 --> 00:18:45.000Stuart Winchester: What was the process like of working with the Forest Service? Did they seem much more amenable and does the local community seem much more amenable?00:18:45.000 --> 00:18:54.000Stuart Winchester: to this given the small actual environmental impact? And was that a consideration in deciding how to develop this terrain?00:18:54.000 --> 00:19:10.000brian norton: I mean, it was definitely a consideration for us as we think about, you know, growing the ski resort sustainably. I think the, you know, and our partnership with the Forest Service is a really great one. I hear, you know, different stories from around the industry or around the country.00:19:10.000 --> 00:19:26.000brian norton: I just can't speak highly enough of our team here and the relationship that we have with them. And, the fact that this was kind of already skiing, the fact that it was super low impact, we weren't ever going to put a lift or a lodge or some sort of, you know, driving snow cats over there. We're not even doing any of that.00:19:26.000 --> 00:19:31.000brian norton: really, so it was a small lift, I think, to bring this kind of.00:19:31.000 --> 00:19:43.000brian norton: thing that people were skiing into the permit boundary, which really, you know, there's some work to clean it up and to create slightly better access, mostly for our patrol team to react out there.00:19:43.000 --> 00:19:44.000Stuart Winchester: Mm-hmm.00:19:43.000 --> 00:19:46.000brian norton: But this is, um…00:19:46.000 --> 00:19:48.000brian norton: It's a small lift to bring our…00:19:48.000 --> 00:19:52.000brian norton: Services, so that we can go, you know, in the past.00:19:52.000 --> 00:19:56.000brian norton: Someone would get hurt, someone would get lost ‘cause they thought they knew where they were going.00:19:56.000 --> 00:19:57.000Stuart Winchester: Yep.00:19:56.000 --> 00:20:14.000brian norton: technically, we're supposed to call fish and game, and they're supposed to go rescue them. A lot of times, we helped with that. So, by bringing this into the permit boundary, we're allowed to help manage it. So, um, this is really a win-win for everyone. It's a win-win for the skiers, it's a win-win for the Forest Service, because now we can actually manage something that wasn'.00:20:01.000 --> 00:20:02.000Stuart Winchester: Okay.00:20:14.000 --> 00:20:16.000brian norton: That's a great opportunity for us.00:20:16.000 --> 00:20:28.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, it's going to be tremendous terrain. You know, another big difference between working in the East and the West is sometimes if you want to open 500 acres of glades in the West, you just drop a rope.00:20:28.000 --> 00:20:39.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, in the east, there tends to be a lot of undergrowth. Now, I don't know if that's the case at Loon, because maybe you have some old growth there, where the canopy is, is, has, you know, shut out some of that little stuff.00:20:39.000 --> 00:20:45.000Stuart Winchester: 200 and what is it, 267 acres? That's a lot of acres to clear.00:20:45.000 --> 00:20:55.000Stuart Winchester: What does it look like in there, and what is the… what is the labor lift gonna be like to glade that out and make it so that you don't need 4 feet of snow to ski it?00:20:56.000 --> 00:21:08.000brian norton: Um, we'll talk about snow in a minute, but in terms of glading, you get across the ridgeline, and you get to this… it's not the high point, like, the actual peak of the mountain, but the high point of the ridgeline.00:21:08.000 --> 00:21:23.000brian norton: And you kind of drop in there, and then it just funnels out both directions. And from that point, it's all hardwoods. And it's just… it's really open. You can kind of ski wherever you want. Now, we're gonna manage it slightly better, so there's better waypoint finding, you know, kind of…00:21:23.000 --> 00:21:42.000brian norton: more organized corridors. There's a river, uh, a stream valley that is between what I would call, you know, Black Ridge proper and, like, the North Peak Glades and Walking Boss, um, that you don't want to end up in, so that's kind of the part of the land that, you know, we're going to try to manage away from, and.00:21:42.000 --> 00:21:43.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:21:42.000 --> 00:21:53.000brian norton: kind of cut that, you know, the extent of it, kind of clear those glades a little more, so that it's obvious, like, no, no, no, I want to go this way, or I want to go that way, so you all come back out to the… to.00:21:48.000 --> 00:21:50.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:21:53.000 --> 00:21:57.000brian norton: But it's not a heavy lift to cut a lot out there.00:21:53.000 --> 00:21:54.000Stuart Winchester: So I.00:21:57.000 --> 00:22:13.000Stuart Winchester: So as far as snow goes, you mentioned a, a little catcher's mitt and along North Peak, and there are some terrific glades in lower New England. Stratton, I think has really, really excellent glades. Magic Mountain has some excellent glades. They're in a little bit different.00:22:13.000 --> 00:22:33.000Stuart Winchester: snow pocket, obviously, than you are, but also farther south. So, so talk to us, you know, Loon averages 160 inches of snow per year, but I don't know where you measure that, and I know that snow stays on different parts of the mountain in different ways, right? Because you can ski in New Hampshire in June on natural snow at Mount Washington and Tucks.00:22:33.000 --> 00:22:34.000Stuart Winchester: But…00:22:34.000 --> 00:22:39.000Stuart Winchester: That's not the case in most places. So, so talk to us about.00:22:39.000 --> 00:22:48.000Stuart Winchester: the snow in that area, and how often you think you'll realistically be able to offer that glade skiing experience in Black Ridge.00:22:48.000 --> 00:23:06.000brian norton: Yeah, I mean, I think it's gonna be… it's definitely a different experience, so we're gonna have different, um, opening protocols when that part of the mountain will open versus your traditional glade skiing, so it's gonna be a little more raw, a little more rugged, we're gonna be a little more free with opening it. Um, we're working through those kind of details with our patrol team right now.00:23:07.000 --> 00:23:23.000brian norton: Um, in terms of holding snow, predominant northeast wind here, everything cuts across the ski resort as you're looking at it, right to left, and guess what's far left? This, right? So, um, I'll tell you a funny story. We were walking over there with the Forest Service this.00:23:23.000 --> 00:23:25.000brian norton: Spring, and we're walking along the ridgeline.00:23:25.000 --> 00:23:38.000brian norton: And we're contemplating, like, how we get snowmobile access out there for our patrol team to, you know, manage this terrain in a reasonable amount of time to, like, respond to an incident. And we get to these two big boulders.00:23:38.000 --> 00:23:47.000brian norton: like, oh man, how are we gonna get a snowmobile through here? Like, it's… we can't get a machine all the way out here to move these boulders, what are we gonna do? And then it, like.00:23:47.000 --> 00:24:06.000brian norton: I don't remember seeing these boulders in the winter. That means there's 4 feet of snow here on this ridgeline, so it's like… it just… it's not the same as the rest of the ski resort when you think about, like, how that pocket holds snow and takes all the wind-deposited snow from the whole area and just stacks up in there, so it was a bit… it was eye-opening for us to be like.00:23:51.000 --> 00:23:54.000Stuart Winchester: Wow.00:23:57.000 --> 00:23:59.000Stuart Winchester: Right.00:24:06.000 --> 00:24:11.000brian norton: Wait a minute, we don't see these in the winter, and they're 4-foot boulders, so.00:24:11.000 --> 00:24:28.000Stuart Winchester: Oh, man, you're really making me want to get back in there. You know, I did not mention in the intro that Loon is owned by Boyne Resorts, one of the 11 ski areas in the Boyne family. And Boyne has done just a tremendous amount of work over the past decade, putting in new lifts and doing expansions.00:24:28.000 --> 00:24:30.000Stuart Winchester: In fact, I think…00:24:30.000 --> 00:24:42.000Stuart Winchester: the last 5 expansions in New England were all Boyne Mountains. It was Brackett Basin, Burnt Mountain, it was, uh, Merrill Hill at Sunday River, it was the little one you did at Loon the other… the other, uh, couple years ago, and… and.00:24:42.000 --> 00:24:54.000Stuart Winchester: Black Ridge, you know, the one that this most echoes for Sugarloaf fans, and Sugarloaf is far, far, far, far north, but it's worth going to, is… is they opened that several hundred acre.00:24:54.000 --> 00:25:04.000Stuart Winchester: terrain expansion of Brackett Basin back in 2011. They expanded it with Burnt Ridge a few years later, and it's all natural bladed. How much…00:25:04.000 --> 00:25:06.000Stuart Winchester: Did you…00:25:06.000 --> 00:25:21.000Stuart Winchester: did Loon and the team at Loon use Bracket Basin as an inspiration, either… either to see as, like, a proof of concept this'll work, or… or just to imagine a… a different way of, uh… of expanding the resort without necessarily having to spend.00:25:21.000 --> 00:25:28.000Stuart Winchester: you know, $20 million on a new lift. Just talk about it, if there's any relationship there, or, you know, learning how to manage it, etc.00:25:29.000 --> 00:25:51.000brian norton: A lot for me personally, and for the team here. I mean, I'm not the the people that have been out there developing that glade skiing probably aren't necessarily thinking about bracket basin, but 100%. That was the equivalent. That was, you know, I've referred to it through this whole planning process as our version of bracket basin. We've been in communication with the team up there about how they manage it, what their entrance looks like all of those things. So.00:25:30.000 --> 00:25:31.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:25:51.000 --> 00:25:54.000brian norton: Yeah, it's our version of that, 100%.00:25:54.000 --> 00:26:12.000Stuart Winchester: And just from a liability point of view, it's funny, because I grew up in Michigan, and I've been skiing the Boyne Mountains there since the 90s, and I remember you weren't allowed in the trees, and that was a big no-no. So now here you have, fast forward 30 years, and they're developing these enormous glade skiing pockets, and obviously Jay Peak was a leader.00:26:12.000 --> 00:26:17.000Stuart Winchester: our early leader in that, in New England. But what has Boyne learned, do you think.00:26:17.000 --> 00:26:25.000Stuart Winchester: by operating Brackett Basin for the last 15 years, about liability and skiers' abilities to self-manage in terrain like that.00:26:25.000 --> 00:26:36.000brian norton: Yeah, I mean, Sugarloaf, they're Sugarloafers, right? So they're a slightly different clientele than we have here, so I'm sure we'll learn different things. I think the big thing is, you know.00:26:28.000 --> 00:26:30.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:26:36.000 --> 00:26:50.000brian norton: clear messaging, and… and with this project, it's… it's very different. I said it earlier, it's different than the rest of the Glades here, so, um, you gotta know what you're doing, and it's gonna be messaged that way, but it's gonna be managed that way, too, and…00:26:50.000 --> 00:27:06.000brian norton: it's gonna pull people around the resort and move people around to places that, you know, it's a bit of a destination now. Camp 3 in North Peak was already a destination, and now you've got another, you know, 300 acres or so just past there that's serviced by the same portal, so…00:27:06.000 --> 00:27:15.000brian norton: yeah, I think our patrol team's gonna have a little bit of work cut out for them, but frankly, the guys and girls that work for our team that are gonna end up over there, like.00:27:15.000 --> 00:27:18.000brian norton: They… they're looking forward to that, so…00:27:18.000 --> 00:27:22.000Stuart Winchester: Alright, well, let's talk about access a little bit. I'll tell you…00:27:22.000 --> 00:27:39.000Stuart Winchester: That, or the listeners at least, people who haven't been there. So you access this expansion through the North Peak lift. It's a high speed quad built in 2004, 1500 vertical foot, 4,800 foot long. But the view off the top is an absolute showstopper. It's one of the best.00:27:39.000 --> 00:27:49.000Stuart Winchester: in New England. I just love it. Uh, my question for you, Brian, is Flight Path 2030, your… your Loon 2030 plan, essentially 10-year plan, published around 2020.00:27:49.000 --> 00:27:55.000Stuart Winchester: did consider an upgrade for the North Peak lift. Now, it's obviously not a very old lift.00:27:55.000 --> 00:28:10.000Stuart Winchester: But I would imagine that there may be some volume considerations as you look to expand the terrain available off this lift. So, A, am I right in seeing that you will be able to fully lap Black Ridge?00:28:10.000 --> 00:28:17.000Stuart Winchester: on the North Peak lift? And B, do you have thoughts on what might be next for North Peak lift?00:28:17.000 --> 00:28:26.000brian norton: Um, yes, you access it from the top of that lift. The entrance is 150 feet from the top of that lift, maybe, off of Whatcom House.00:28:24.000 --> 00:28:26.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, thank you.00:28:26.000 --> 00:28:45.000brian norton: the primary exit is slightly lower in elevation than North Peak. You come out onto Brookway Extension there, so if you really wanted to lap it, you'd probably unclick and go down there. More often than not, I think what people will do is they'll ski down Brookway, go up Seven Brothers and a gondola, and get back over there if they want to do it again.00:28:30.000 --> 00:28:32.000Stuart Winchester: Okay.00:28:46.000 --> 00:29:06.000brian norton: So, yeah, I mean, access is pretty strong. In terms of replacing North Peak, yes, that lift is on our planning process. It's probably equivalent to South Peak on any given day, or Lincoln Express, I should say. On any given day, I flip-flop which one's more important. You know, we did the Timbertown expansion, and we thought, oh, these people are over here.00:29:02.000 --> 00:29:03.000Stuart Winchester: Okay.00:29:06.000 --> 00:29:22.000brian norton: maybe we should be focused on this lift, and now we're doing this thing over here, or maybe we should be focused on North Peak, and, um, I'll tell you that the RFID data that we, you know, 3, 4 years ago, we put RFID gates at North Peak, remote up mountain, you can't get to it without passing another gate, and everyone was kind of looking at us, like.00:29:17.000 --> 00:29:19.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:29:22.000 --> 00:29:29.000brian norton: What are you doing that for? Data collection, 100%. The things we've learned about how people use that terrain have…00:29:25.000 --> 00:29:26.000Stuart Winchester: Right.00:29:29.000 --> 00:29:40.000brian norton: driven our snowmaking philosophy, our investment philosophy. Uh, it's… it's last winter that Lyft opened on day one and closed on day 151, I think it was, so it was open every day of the season, so…00:29:40.000 --> 00:29:45.000brian norton: Maybe today, if you're asking me, that one gets done before Lincoln Express.00:29:44.000 --> 00:29:48.000Stuart Winchester: And are you thinking a six-pack? One of those nice D-lines?00:29:47.000 --> 00:29:51.000brian norton: Yeah, I'm sure that's what it would be at a minimum, yeah.00:29:49.000 --> 00:29:51.000Stuart Winchester: Okay.00:29:51.000 --> 00:29:56.000Stuart Winchester: Okay, do you like the bubbles, like the one you have at CANC and up at Sunday River?00:29:55.000 --> 00:30:17.000brian norton: The bubbles are awesome for all the reasons they're awesome, but there are some hidden challenges with them as well, particularly when they come into the terminal. They're aerodynamic when the chairs are on the line, but when they come into the terminal, if the wind's blowing the wrong way and the bubbles opening and the wind wants to shut it or vice versa.00:29:58.000 --> 00:29:59.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:30:17.000 --> 00:30:26.000brian norton: Uh, there's a little give and take there. I… we'd probably end up with bubbles, I think, but, um, yeah, there are… it's not all… it's not all easy with them.00:30:22.000 --> 00:30:24.000Stuart Winchester: That's that.00:30:25.000 --> 00:30:34.000Stuart Winchester: It's Boyne style, right? I was surprised, actually, when I got out to Brighton, and the, uh… their new Sixer, their D-Line out there does not have bubbles. I was like, oh, this.00:30:27.000 --> 00:30:28.000brian norton: Yep.00:30:33.000 --> 00:30:42.000brian norton: Or footrests, or footrests, which is the only one that I think doesn't have footrests, and as a snowboarder, I appreciated that when I rode that.00:30:34.000 --> 00:30:36.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah.00:30:40.000 --> 00:30:52.000Stuart Winchester: Right, right, right. Yeah, well, the Utah guys don't want to bring the bar down anyway so So, you know, I always think of this expansions like this first, Brian, as a skier.00:30:52.000 --> 00:31:10.000Stuart Winchester: Unless as a customer or as someone, you know, doing a business, I'm really curious. Loon has already historically been the busiest skier in New Hampshire and the pub, the skier visits aren't public anymore. But I would imagine that's still the case. It is busy, busy, busy all the time. It is the idea here.00:31:10.000 --> 00:31:18.000Stuart Winchester: Is it to bring in more skiers, or is it to create more variety at a mountain that…00:31:18.000 --> 00:31:28.000Stuart Winchester: I really think has traditionally had the reputation as a good intermediates family mountain. To maybe start to nudge that a little bit more toward a…00:31:28.000 --> 00:31:40.000Stuart Winchester: uh, more of a Killington profile, where there's… where there's more than one kind of skier? Like, the whole family can have fun there. So is it… is it more skiers, or more terrain for the same amount of skiers to spread them out better?00:31:41.000 --> 00:31:46.000brian norton: Um, both, and I'll clarify more skiers, because, um.00:31:47.000 --> 00:31:58.000brian norton: as the ski resort develops, and as the town develops, we inch closer to destination ski resort instead of day ski resort. I think we're still a day ski resort, but we're working our way towards destination.00:31:54.000 --> 00:31:55.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:31:58.000 --> 00:32:18.000brian norton: Um, and as you become a destination, your skier visits spread equally over the 7-day week, right? We're heavily skewed to weekends right now. We're not talking about more skiers on the weekends. We're already managing tickets and limiting sales to keep guest experience where we want it. I think we can have more visits mid-week, or early season, late season.00:32:18.000 --> 00:32:33.000brian norton: this will certainly help with that, but on your peak Saturday in January, like, no, we don't… we're… we're not having more skiers here. We're… we're happy with where we're at. Um, in terms of terrain, yeah, I mean, you and I talked about it, I think, the last time we were together talking about glade skiing here.00:32:33.000 --> 00:32:40.000brian norton: We need more of it. Variety of terrain, um, is important, and this is a huge step in the right direction.00:32:39.000 --> 00:32:48.000Stuart Winchester: So I think in New England, when you talk about more skiers, more capacity, reflectively, we think parking, but you have this interesting project going on.00:32:48.000 --> 00:33:05.000Stuart Winchester: Where a pulse gondola is set to leave from near the new Timbertown quad that you put in 2023, go over the river, uh, and land, not exactly in the town of Lincoln, but to service some resorts there. Uh, I thought that project was gonna open.00:33:05.000 --> 00:33:15.000Stuart Winchester: This winter, it doesn't look like that's gonna happen. Tell us about that Pulse Gondola, Brian, what you hope to achieve with it, and kind of where you're at with approvals and permits.00:33:16.000 --> 00:33:33.000brian norton: Um, yeah, me too. I was hoping it was gonna open this winter, too. Um, yeah, we've said with that project all along that we're not really in a rush, and we want to do it right. More importantly, we want to get buy-in from all the current stakeholders, and that's where the project, um, lives. It's a really unique thing where.00:33:34.000 --> 00:33:48.000brian norton: you've got three different parties that are involved, two different completely owned land, uh, landowners, plus Loon being the easement and holders on some of that land, and, um, just working with the town currently and trying to.00:33:48.000 --> 00:34:08.000brian norton: none of us have been through this. I can't think of another example where you've got so many different entities trying to get one project approval. I actually have a planning board meeting tonight, and we're on the docket. So if you're if you're not doing anything at 6 o'clock tonight, feel free to join the zoom. Yeah. So we're we're still working on that. We've gotten essentially approval on one side. And now we're working on the loon side.00:33:56.000 --> 00:33:57.000Stuart Winchester: Okay.00:34:08.000 --> 00:34:23.000brian norton: our hope is that that project still comes through in the next year. It's unique in the sense that it doesn't need to happen, like, for day one of ski season. It can be built during the ski season, because it's not replacing something, it's a true add to the ski resort, so…00:34:21.000 --> 00:34:22.000Stuart Winchester: Right.00:34:23.000 --> 00:34:38.000brian norton: the Daubmeyer team that would do the lift is kind of excited that, you know, they have a project that they can work on out of cycle, keep their team busy year-round, have the electricians there when they'd otherwise, you know, not be doing anything, because the crew's still standing steel somewhere else, that kind of thing.00:34:38.000 --> 00:34:39.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, okay.00:34:39.000 --> 00:34:44.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, Boyne's had a lot of success doing those sorts of lifts at Big Sky, and it's amazing what.00:34:44.000 --> 00:34:59.000Stuart Winchester: Even if it's a low capacity, low use lift, like the one and only gondola or the lift that connects to the montage out there in Big Sky, it really gives the skiers a lot of freedom. And I think it really would make a big difference in being able to connect to the town. So let's talk about a lift.00:34:59.000 --> 00:35:01.000Stuart Winchester: That would not be easy.00:35:01.000 --> 00:35:18.000Stuart Winchester: Let's talk about that. Uh, the four passenger gondola you have, I believe it's the last four passenger Gandhi left in the east. It is a monster. This is a 1738 vertical foot lift, 6970.00:35:18.000 --> 00:35:30.000Stuart Winchester: foot long, uh, and recently Loon filed an application with the Forest Service to replace it, so tell us, Brian, what you want to do with the White Mountain Gondola.00:35:30.000 --> 00:35:32.000brian norton: Yeah, so, um…00:35:32.000 --> 00:35:44.000brian norton: a really cool old lift. You probably know better than me, but one of the oldest detachables in New England. It's one of the highest utilized lifts in Boyne's network.00:35:44.000 --> 00:36:00.000brian norton: around this 10-plus months out of the year, you know, between winter and summer. Uh, two years ago, I got a text message from our lift mechanic showing me the hour meeting that was 8675309. Um, it's nearing… it's nearing 100,000 hours now, so yeah, it's due for replacement.00:36:00.000 --> 00:36:10.000brian norton: Um, we filed some paperwork with the Forest Service to get in the queue. We're still working out the details of that project, that's why we haven't really addressed it publicly.00:36:10.000 --> 00:36:23.000brian norton: Try to figure out how it fits, where it goes. It will be a D-line Omega 10, you know, 10-person cabins. Boeing style, as you like to say, you know, we're gonna do it right. It's a pivotal lift for us.00:36:19.000 --> 00:36:20.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, okay.00:36:23.000 --> 00:36:29.000brian norton: the main base area that opens first and closes last, and, um, yeah, we want to make sure we do it right. So, we will.00:36:29.000 --> 00:36:48.000Stuart Winchester: One detail I thought was really cool in the permit, Brian, was, and obviously I'm not holding you to this, the permit is, you know, the application is the application, but this notion of moving the load terminal, it gets set 100 feet or 80 feet up the hill, away from the Octagon Lodge, I imagine that opens all kinds of possibilities for you.00:36:48.000 --> 00:36:52.000Stuart Winchester: Talk about what you have in mind there and how that would change just the whole flow of Loon.00:36:52.000 --> 00:37:02.000brian norton: Yeah, the problem is that the current lift is inside of a building, and the new one, you know, without tearing the building down, is not going to go inside of the same building, so…00:36:56.000 --> 00:36:57.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, thank you.00:37:01.000 --> 00:37:03.000Stuart Winchester: Right.00:37:02.000 --> 00:37:21.000brian norton: how do we handle that? And, you know, I'd say there's a couple options on the table. Some of them is, you know, partially modifying that building, putting the lift against it, and or the polar opposite of that is just pushing it into the hillside as far as you can, and, um, you know, using the building for something else, which we have some cool ideas for.00:37:21.000 --> 00:37:36.000brian norton: Um, this lift is gonna need parking. That's a big space constraint that we don't necessarily have. I mean, those cabins aren't small, and you're talking, you know, another Kank 8 size. Probably not that big, but close to Kank 8 size, you know, parking structure to park all the cabins in, and.00:37:36.000 --> 00:37:42.000brian norton: Is parking at the top? Is parking at the bottom? You know, how do we, uh… how does our… if we put it…00:37:42.000 --> 00:37:57.000brian norton: upslope, not in the building, how does our food and beverage team that uses that as their main, you know, mover up the mountain, get food and everything else up, how do they get their food to the Summit Cafe now in the winter? And so, there's a lot of challenges with that, and that's why we haven't, you know.00:37:57.000 --> 00:38:13.000brian norton: really detailed the project, because we're… I mean, just this morning, I was walking out there, driving stakes in the ground, like, trying to visualize, okay, if we did this, how would it work? How would that work? So, yeah, ongoing, um, super exciting project, and I can't wait till we have that nailed down, and we can really start.00:38:13.000 --> 00:38:15.000brian norton: Showing people what we're doing.00:38:14.000 --> 00:38:20.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, that would be huge, and maybe quiet at the Peanut Gallery, because I know a big storyline.00:38:20.000 --> 00:38:31.000Stuart Winchester: when the cant gate went in was, why'd they do that before the gondola? And I know there's a lot of reasons for that, but… and I love the cant gate, but I'm sure you heard those same narratives. You know.00:38:32.000 --> 00:38:40.000Stuart Winchester: Out with the old, I guess. Quick note, Brian, the little sister, a 1966 Hall double.00:38:40.000 --> 00:38:57.000Stuart Winchester: has taken its last ride. I just made this connection prepping for this podcast. That's actually an original lift from Loon's opening, right? So tell us about Little Sister. It was a small lift, a hall lift, but you took it out this summer. Why was it time to retire Little Sister?00:38:57.000 --> 00:39:01.000Stuart Winchester: And what are you doing with the lift, the chairs, the pieces, the parts?00:39:01.000 --> 00:39:07.000brian norton: Yeah, so, um, Old Lyft, um, couple things. One…00:39:07.000 --> 00:39:10.000brian norton: When we installed Seven Brothers.00:39:10.000 --> 00:39:21.000brian norton: the skiers really stopped using that lift, because… sorry, when we upgraded Seven Brothers Triple to the Seven Brothers Quad, which was the old Kank Quad and got rebuilt.00:39:13.000 --> 00:39:14.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:39:20.000 --> 00:39:21.000Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.00:39:21.000 --> 00:39:37.000brian norton: the lap time off Seven Brothers was just as quick as Little Sister, but you got more vertical, and we had more uphill PPH. So, um, no one was really using it for skiing. We maintained it for tubing for a while, we got out of the tubing business.00:39:37.000 --> 00:39:56.000brian norton: Um, we'll maybe be back in the tubing business in the future, but not in that location. So, um, at the same time, it needed some maintenance work. Our friends at Cypress, one of the other Boyne properties, um, needed some spare parts to one of their lifts. We had them in the drive here at Little Sister, so…00:39:56.000 --> 00:40:13.000brian norton: Um, plus, in a base area that's crammed for space, when that thing eventually, you know, physically moves away, it'll be additional space, it'll open up skiing possibilities, it'll open up more space for our seasonal programs that are in that base area, or that part of the base area over there. Uh, in terms of what we're doing with the lift.00:40:13.000 --> 00:40:30.000brian norton: Um, towers are still standing right now, the terminals are still standing, we'll hopefully get that down next summer. The chairs were all auctioned off recently, we sold a few to employees, like myself, I bought one, I'll have that hanging on my porch at my house.00:40:26.000 --> 00:40:27.000Stuart Winchester: Nice.00:40:30.000 --> 00:40:44.000brian norton: Um, the rest of… I think we sold… there was 20, or there was 31 chairs… 30 or 31 chairs, and um, we sold some to employees. We're keeping 5 for spare parts, maybe future auction-type stuff. The rest of them…00:40:44.000 --> 00:40:50.000brian norton: were auctioned off to the public, and they're benefiting two incredible local charities, one, the Pemi Valley.00:40:51.000 --> 00:41:07.000brian norton: Uh, Upper Pemi Valley Historical Society, um, who's, you know, I saw some really cool historic stuff, check out their Instagram feed, there's some cool stuff about the Riverwalk Gondola, and then they just put a couple posts. Um, and then, uh, Lincoln Friends Iraq, which, you know, one of our purposes is making sure.00:40:57.000 --> 00:40:59.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah. Okay.00:41:07.000 --> 00:41:15.000brian norton: That we're connected to the community and doing everything we can for the youth of the community, and so that's what we're doing with the money, and we're proud to say that.00:41:15.000 --> 00:41:30.000Stuart Winchester: So don't go looking for Little Sister Lift this year. It is gone. That leaves you with one haul lift, a 1968 East Basin. I didn't see a map for that gondola proposal. Brian, is part of that proposal removing that East Basin haul lift?00:41:18.000 --> 00:41:20.000brian norton: And it's gone.00:41:31.000 --> 00:41:39.000brian norton: I started at East Basin and as long as I'm here, East Basin will, you know, I shouldn't say that. And maybe it'll go away, but it's not going away as part of.00:41:33.000 --> 00:41:34.000Stuart Winchester: Okay.00:41:34.000 --> 00:41:37.000Stuart Winchester: Okay, I love it.00:41:39.000 --> 00:41:55.000Stuart Winchester: Love that. All right, Brian, hey, I really appreciate you joining us today on the New Look Pod. You're my second guest ever, and I really want to make this timely, so the fact that we could talk about this new expansion at Loon is awesome, and I hope I can be up there on opening day.00:41:55.000 --> 00:41:57.000Stuart Winchester: And I hope that's next winter.00:41:57.000 --> 00:42:00.000brian norton: Yeah, and I hope to get out there on Black Ridge with you.00:42:00.000 --> 00:42:04.000Stuart Winchester: Yeah, yeah, definitely. Well, good luck at your planning board meeting tonight, Brian. Talk to you.00:42:04.000 --> 00:42:05.000brian norton: All right. Thanks, Stuart.00:42:04.000 --> 00:42:06.000Stuart Winchester: Thanks so much. Bye.00:42:05.000 --> 00:42:06.000brian norton: Bye.00:42:08.000 --> 00:42:10.000Stuart Winchester: All right, so…00:42:11.000 --> 00:42:17.000Stuart Winchester: That is Brian Norton, President and General Manager of Loon Mountain.00:42:17.000 --> 00:42:25.000Stuart Winchester: Before we move on to the closing segment, I want to tell you about my friends at Profile Search International.00:42:25.000 --> 00:42:31.000Stuart Winchester: A lot of you come to this podcast to hear from the best minds in skiing, guys like Brian Norton.00:42:31.000 --> 00:42:41.000Stuart Winchester: Managing mountains that are making big moves like Loon. But, what if you want to find one of these great leaders for your own mountain team? Brian is pretty happily employed.00:42:41.000 --> 00:42:46.000Stuart Winchester: I'd like to introduce you to the folks at Profile Search International.00:42:46.000 --> 00:42:59.000Stuart Winchester: Profile Search are ski industry talent acquisition experts, and they are the only executive search and recruitment firm in the world that is 100% focused on the ski industry.00:42:59.000 --> 00:43:05.000Stuart Winchester: ProfileSearch has used their intimate understanding of skiing and related industries.00:43:05.000 --> 00:43:14.000Stuart Winchester: and of available candidates worldwide to place hundreds of transformational leaders at the best and most progressive ski areas over the past 30 years.00:43:14.000 --> 00:43:21.000Stuart Winchester: With offices in the US and Canada, they find and negotiate with the right leaders for your team.00:43:21.000 --> 00:43:33.000Stuart Winchester: You can reach out to Profile Search directly at profilesearch.com, or contact them by email or phone, or send me a note, and I will connect you directly with this expert team.00:43:33.000 --> 00:43:40.000Stuart Winchester: Alright, I'm really looking forward to this next segment. As promised, I am going to use this segment.00:43:40.000 --> 00:43:52.000Stuart Winchester: to read reaction to the previous podcast. I'm not at a point where I can do the podcast live, maybe someday, but right now, we are…00:43:52.000 --> 00:44:08.000Stuart Winchester: Read and react the next day. So, uh, the way that you can interact with the podcast is to make a comment on the article that accompanies this podcast on stormskeeting.com. Only paid subscribers can do that.00:44:08.000 --> 00:44:23.000Stuart Winchester: You can upgrade to the paid tier of the storm, which is the very best way to support the product@stormskiing.com. That will get you 100% of the content below the paywall, and it will also allow you to interact with the podcast, but.00:44:23.000 --> 00:44:31.000Stuart Winchester: everyone can listen to the podcast. The podcast has always been for everyone, and my intent is to keep it that way. So…00:44:31.000 --> 00:44:40.000Stuart Winchester: Some reaction to yesterday, and a lot of this is just reacting to… So yesterday, as a reminder, Joe Hessian came on, talked about…00:44:40.000 --> 00:44:43.000Stuart Winchester: The Snow Pass, uh, talked about…00:44:43.000 --> 00:44:51.000Stuart Winchester: Indy Pass and Snow Pass, both claiming Snow King and the confusion around that.00:44:51.000 --> 00:45:00.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, and I talked a little bit about, just in general, uh, the Indy Pass and the fact that smugglers not to join. So…00:45:00.000 --> 00:45:14.000Stuart Winchester: Reading the comments from top to bottom. And again, these are all paid subscribers, so thank you very much, and a lot of these folks I have been in dialogue with for years, so they're not necessarily new to me, but perhaps new to the community.00:45:14.000 --> 00:45:17.000Stuart Winchester: Starting with Peter Schlachtes.00:45:17.000 --> 00:45:21.000Stuart Winchester: So, just under an hour, in the short format?00:45:21.000 --> 00:45:27.000Stuart Winchester: I liked it. I had heard the backstory on Hessian and didn't need to hear it again.00:45:27.000 --> 00:45:30.000Stuart Winchester: It focused on the compelling stuff.00:45:30.000 --> 00:45:44.000Stuart Winchester: But remember that your growing audience, I hope, consists over time of more and more people who won't have heard or remember that context and texture and won't necessarily seek it out on an old podcast that features your speaker.00:45:44.000 --> 00:45:59.000Stuart Winchester: By the way, though, you really must make a point of steering people to relevant past podcasts that provide the backstory on guests and mountains you cover in the new format. Mention it, flash it on the screen, put it in a subtext, and leave it there, because people won't know they're interested in learning more until…00:45:59.000 --> 00:46:00.000Stuart Winchester: They are.00:46:00.000 --> 00:46:08.000Stuart Winchester: Yes, Peter, I appreciate the short comment, and short has never been my…00:46:08.000 --> 00:46:25.000Stuart Winchester: Strength. So expect some experimentation. Uh, expect me to play around with this a little bit. Expect some episodes to be longer than others. I truly will try to get some bite size episodes out there, but I, I find that the podcasts that I listen to that are news focused are usually right around an hour and.00:46:25.000 --> 00:46:34.000Stuart Winchester: And I don't run out of steam with that, as long as what they're talking about is interesting to me. As far as your point about linking to past podcasts, look.00:46:35.000 --> 00:46:38.000Stuart Winchester: One of the reasons that…00:46:38.000 --> 00:46:42.000Stuart Winchester: I had to move to a different podcast format.00:46:42.000 --> 00:46:43.000Stuart Winchester: Was that…00:46:43.000 --> 00:47:03.000Stuart Winchester: the old podcast was becoming too laborious, and part of the reason was I was too concerned with building a big story around it, and making sure that everything I mentioned had some context that a reader could go back to. And what that… and it was great, and a lot of people appreciated that, and again, I'll still do some long-form product…00:47:03.000 --> 00:47:17.000Stuart Winchester: Podcasts and I'm still doing plenty of writing, but it actually gummed things up to the point where I was just not making as many podcasts as I should be. So my goal here with the new short format podcast, keep it light, keep it moving.00:47:18.000 --> 00:47:33.000Stuart Winchester: The trend is toward search, right? So with all the AI tools and everything available, it's pretty easy to find my old podcast. I do have a master list that I linked to from the homepage, uh, and, and.00:47:33.000 --> 00:47:38.000Stuart Winchester: As much as I agree with you, it would be nice, I think that most people…00:47:38.000 --> 00:47:50.000Stuart Winchester: will just Google Joe Hessian Storm Skiing Podcast, and it will pop right up. But, we'll see how it evolves. Next comment from Mimi Ma, another long-time paid subscriber. Shout out to Mimi.00:47:50.000 --> 00:47:57.000Stuart Winchester: Like the format, especially good that I can skim read if needed, and then jump to the sections of interest. Keep up the good work. I want to make that point.00:47:57.000 --> 00:48:09.000Stuart Winchester: there is a transcript for every single episode. You can click on the transcript, and when you're reading it, you click to any section, and it will go to that section of the podcast, if you're on Substack.00:48:09.000 --> 00:48:22.000Stuart Winchester: If you're on YouTube, you won't have that capability, so you can always check out the video version on Substack. Again, if you're listening via audio on Apple or Spotify or something, you also won't have that. So, go to stormskiing.com to get that capability.00:48:22.000 --> 00:48:36.000Stuart Winchester: Comment from Robert. Quote, I think Joe's comment about Eric self-describing himself as the, quote, anti-collaborator, and I'm curious to hear what his, Eric's, answer is.00:48:36.000 --> 00:48:39.000Stuart Winchester: To what is apparently a self-reference.00:48:39.000 --> 00:48:58.000Stuart Winchester: I don't see how you can't be anti collaborative and run a ski area, not to mention operating what is effectively a business to business service business and to Benny and the need to work with all their customers. What's the business justification for not wanting to collaborate outside the sphere he controls?00:48:58.000 --> 00:49:14.000Stuart Winchester: The ski Cooper thing was a bit different in many ways. Here we're talking about two third party systems meant to drive skier visits, and at least at the moment, given the portfolios, I think it is a relatively small percentage of skiers that are most likely choosing between the snow pass and Indy.00:49:14.000 --> 00:49:27.000Stuart Winchester: Most of them, I would assume, are likely NYC Metro-based. Good stuff on the new format. Looking forward to its evolution. Look, Joe was referencing a conversation that he had with Eric. It wasn't…00:49:27.000 --> 00:49:39.000Stuart Winchester: a publicly available conversation, so this is why I'm going to get Eric on the podcast tomorrow, to give his reaction to it. I… you know, Eric, from my point of view.00:49:39.000 --> 00:49:55.000Stuart Winchester: Look at the explosive growth of IndiePass under his tenure, right? He's, he purchased the pass, I believe in 2023, and, and I believe the number of partners, and I can double check this, uh, has more than tripled since Eric took it over, and he's really done a phenomenal job.00:49:56.000 --> 00:50:08.000Stuart Winchester: transforming Black Mountain and 10x-ing revenue at a ski area, which is simply unheard of in the ski business, and making it to Benny, which is a platform that people use.00:50:08.000 --> 00:50:19.000Stuart Winchester: As with any person doing a lot of things, Eric sometimes runs into controversies, but that's what this podcast.00:50:19.000 --> 00:50:34.000Stuart Winchester: Is here for is to give folks an opportunity to air their sides of the stories. Uh, I have a lot of respect for Joe and for Eric, and I think they're both doing really cool things in the ski industry. So, so we'll, we'll see. We'll see what Eric's.00:50:34.000 --> 00:50:51.000Stuart Winchester: answer is to that. From Scott Abraham, another long-time reader, I presume your hair is still standing out from being present at the Hail Mary. Quack, he's a Ducks fan. Alright, Scott, I'm gonna move right past that one. Eric Morris, great new format. You've written great stuff on walkable ski areas. How did you develop those thoughts?00:50:51.000 --> 00:51:00.000Stuart Winchester: Are you aware of strong towns? Are you aware of the Congress of New Urbanism? Eric, thank you. Yes, that is a running theme.00:51:00.000 --> 00:51:03.000Stuart Winchester: We threw out the storm.00:51:03.000 --> 00:51:19.000Stuart Winchester: I'll say this. There's a reason I live in New York City, and it's not because I think it's the greatest place in the world. It's because I value living in a walkable community. I value a pedestrian environment. I like that I don't need to get in my car.00:51:19.000 --> 00:51:26.000Stuart Winchester: Every time I need to go to the grocery store to get a box of pancakes. And New York City offers a really.00:51:26.000 --> 00:51:30.000Stuart Winchester: Great environment for that sort of lifestyle.00:51:30.000 --> 00:51:32.000Stuart Winchester: Uh, and when you travel around Europe.00:51:32.000 --> 00:51:45.000Stuart Winchester: those sorts of communities are everywhere, including in the ski towns. And our ski areas, being developed post-World War II, were mostly developed as most of America was at the time, which is around the automobile.00:51:45.000 --> 00:51:47.000Stuart Winchester: And…00:51:47.000 --> 00:51:49.000Stuart Winchester: I don't think that…00:51:49.000 --> 00:52:04.000Stuart Winchester: Car-centric mountain towns are necessarily the best way to evolve our towns into the future. So I think there's a rethinking in order. And yes, I am familiar with the schools of new urbanism and read frequently.00:52:04.000 --> 00:52:09.000Stuart Winchester: I'm not claiming these are ideas I'm coming up with mysel

Cody and Jonathan discuss skiing in Portillo; the roadless rule repeal; whether Vail Resorts will sell some of their ski areas; using AI for expedition beta; recent avalanche safety fines; the Most ‘American' News; what they're reading & watching; & more. Note: We Want to Hear From You! Tell us the stories or topics you'd like us to cover next month on Reviewing the News; ask your most pressing mountain town advice questions; or offer your hot takes for us to rate. Email us at: info@blisterreview.com  RELATED LINKS:  DraftKings.com - code: Blister FactorMeals.com - code: BLISTERPOD50OFF BLISTER+ Get Covered Order our 26/27 Winter Buyer's Guide Enter Our Free Weekly Gear Giveaways TOPICS & TIMES News & Shoutouts (0:00) Portillo & Vegas (3:03) Crowdsourcing Jonathan's Punishment (9:12) Roadless Rule Repeal (11:06) Will Vail Resorts Sell Off Some Ski Areas? (19:37) A.I. & Expedition Planning (28:42) Blackbird Guides Fined (35:48) The Most ‘American' News (52:11) What We're Reading & Watching (58:54) CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCASTS: The Blister Vault Blister Cinematic CRAFTED Bikes & Big Ideas GEAR:30

Former SEC enforcement official Bill Baker joins Mountain Money to unpack Oasis Capital's activist stake in Vail Resorts, the rules behind big-share disclosures and how a potential proxy fight for the company could unfold.

Today, Sun outdoors reporter Jason Blevins breaks down the recent one-day spike in the stock price for Vail Resorts shares and how the company's leader is responding. https://coloradosun.com/2026/06/26/takeover-reports-vail-resorts-stock/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Die Wall Street startet freundlich in den Handel, getragen von einer Erholung bei Technologie- und Halbleiterwerten sowie neuer Hoffnung auf Fortschritte in den Gesprächen zwischen den USA und Iran. Fallende Ölpreise helfen, wobei die Renditen mit 4,55 Prozent bei zehnjährigen US-Staatsanleihen klebrig bleiben. Im Fokus stehen die US-Verbraucherpreise am Mittwoch, die vor dem Opening gemeldet werden. Zudem bleibt J.P. Morgan trotz der Erholung taktisch vorsichtig, da ein heißer Verbraucherpreisindex die Zinsdebatte sofort neu entfachen könnte. Apple steht nach der Entwicklerkonferenz ebenfalls im Blick. Die neuen Siri- und Itelligence-Funktionen werden als Fortschritt gesehen, aber nicht als Auslöser eines neuen iPhone-Zyklus. Bei den Einzelwerten lieferten J. M. Smucker und Vail Resorts gemischte Signale. Heute Abend berichtet Casey's General Stores. Zusätzlich richtet sich der Blick auf die Morgan Stanley-Finanzkonferenz an der das Top-Management der Großbanken und Investmenthäuser teilnehmen. Abonniere den Podcast, um keine Folge zu verpassen! ____ Folge uns, um auf dem Laufenden zu bleiben: • X: http://fal.cn/SQtwitter • LinkedIn: http://fal.cn/SQlinkedin • Instagram: http://fal.cn/SQInstagram

Die Wall Street startet freundlich in den Handel, getragen von einer Erholung bei Technologie- und Halbleiterwerten sowie neuer Hoffnung auf Fortschritte in den Gesprächen zwischen den USA und Iran. Fallende Ölpreise helfen, wobei die Renditen mit 4,55 Prozent bei zehnjährigen US-Staatsanleihen klebrig bleiben. Im Fokus stehen die US-Verbraucherpreise am Mittwoch, die vor dem Opening gemeldet werden. Zudem bleibt J.P. Morgan trotz der Erholung taktisch vorsichtig, da ein heißer Verbraucherpreisindex die Zinsdebatte sofort neu entfachen könnte. Apple steht nach der Entwicklerkonferenz ebenfalls im Blick. Die neuen Siri- und Itelligence-Funktionen werden als Fortschritt gesehen, aber nicht als Auslöser eines neuen iPhone-Zyklus. Bei den Einzelwerten lieferten J. M. Smucker und Vail Resorts gemischte Signale. Heute Abend berichtet Casey's General Stores. Zusätzlich richtet sich der Blick auf die Morgan Stanley-Finanzkonferenz an der das Top-Management der Großbanken und Investmenthäuser teilnehmen. Ein Podcast - featured by Handelsblatt. ► Entdecke den exklusiven NordVPN Deal! Jetzt risikofrei testen mit einer 30-Tage-Geld-zurück-Garantie: https://nordvpn.com/wallstreet * ► Direkt an der Börse handeln mit tradegate.direct: https://bit.ly/WallStreet_Juni * ► Erhalte einen exklusiven 15% Rabatt auf Saily eSIM Datentarife! Lade die Saily-App herunter und benutze den Code wallstreet beim Bezahlen: https://saily.com/wallstreet * +++ Alle Rabattcodes und Infos zu unseren Werbepartnern findet ihr hier: https://linktr.ee/wallstreet_podcast +++ ► Mehr Einblicke: https://bit.ly/360wallstreetpc * Impressum: https://www.360wallstreet.de/impressum *Werbung

Today, Sun outdoors reporter Jason Blevins has a look at the final and shocking Colorado skier visits data from the rough season and also why Utah’s richest resident is poking Vail Resorts to sell him Park City resort. https://coloradosun.com/2026/06/04/colorado-skier-visits-collapse-2025-26/ https://coloradosun.com/2026/06/05/matthew-prince-park-city-vail-resorts/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ethan gives an economic update after some shifts in the markets today. Plus, billionaire Matthew Prince is pressing Vail Resorts to sell him Park City Mountain Resort and says he'd invest $500 million — Vail isn't selling. We talk about the value of youth sports with the announcement of Utah Youth Sports Giving Day, a dam safety engineer joins us in-studio for the 50th anniversary of the Teton Dam failure, and Jon Smith stops by with a Utah fire season update. We wrap it all up with more of your First World Problems — including one husband whose wife's FWP is having to listen to us 24 hours a day.   Stream KSL NewsRadio LIVE: kslnewsradio.com/listen Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@KSLBrightside Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KSLBrightside Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/KSL_Brightside TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ksl.brightside  

Amidst the best spring ever, in episode 88 the boys recap Memorial Day weekend filled with skiing Lassen and Shasta, riding moto out in the Toiyabe and Toquima ranges of central Nevada and digging dirt with the Truckee Dirt Union. Memorial Day was also highlighted by stupid people doing stupid things, including a grown man taking his 18-month old son on an ebike ride that ended at 10,000 feet in snow, darkness and a helicopter rescue. The boys also make a huge announcement – their first sponsorship with a local business, the Start Haus in Truckee! To celebrate, the first three people to who walk into Start Haus and drop the password CORE LORD will get 10% off any new bike of their choice. Speaking of Core Lord, in the spirit of Jeff Foxworthy, the boys run through a “You Might be a Core Lord if…” exercise. Got more? Call or email us! Plus Mark Weir rants about Strava, we DOPE or DERP Hypershell Exoskeleton legs and more Mind the Track hats made by Deso are coming, so get your pre-order in if you want one. 3:00 – Best spring ever? Blessed rain and cool temps4:28 – Truckee Dirt Union Trail Day and Loam Masters Rally recap9:00 – The legend of Pow Bot the bartender and the power of being a conversation starter16:40 – Memorial Day weekend recap – TW rides moto in NV, PB skis Shasta/Lassen28:00 – Memorial Day stupidity - Dad and his 18-month old son getting airlifted off Freel Pass37:10 – Words of wisdom from Mark Weir about Strava and Strava users40:38 – We misspoke about a trail system and mentioned trails we shouldn't have41:45 – Bike parks, Vail Resorts, Heavenly and Northstar45:05 – Mind the Track announces a sponsorship with Start Haus!48:48 – The first three listeners to drop CORELORD as the secret password – 10% off a new bike51:08 – All about the new Aventon Current ebike – available at Start Haus57:00 – More Mind the Track Deso hats coming! Reach out to us if you want to pre-order59:30 – Carlorado - You might be a Core Lord if….1:10:20 – Downhill Phil calls in and asks – do you watch motocross or supercross?1:13:10 – Watching professional extreme sports and 100 Foot Wave documentary1:16:45 – Gordo calls in but gets cut off twice1:19:00 – DOPE or DERP – Hypershell Exoskeleton Legs. The ebike of backcountry skiing?1:25:00 – Meeting a legend while riding mountain bikes on Prison Hill in Carson City

On this episode of the Woodard Report podcast, Heather speaks with Tyler Otto about his unconventional path into accounting, growing a firm, and how niching down helped strengthen both company culture and client relationships. Tyler shares candid advice on when and how to "fire" difficult clients, what red flags to watch for during prospecting, and why firm owners should prioritize cultural fit over revenue. The conversation also dives into Tyler's upcoming live game show at Scaling New Heights, and practical ways accounting firms can safely experiment with AI while preparing for the future of the profession. About Tyler Otto Tyler Otto is the president and owner of Specialized Accounting, a thriving seven-figure remote firm dedicated to the hospitality industry. Before joining forces with his wife Karen at her solo practice, Tyler honed his finance chops with leadership roles at Vail Resorts and Imprint Hospitality. Known for his energy and approachability, Tyler is passionate about collaboration with fellow professionals and welcoming new accountants to the field. He's presented at major accounting, tech, and hospitality conferences and recently launched Firm Foundation, a step-by-step course turning firm-building from daunting into doable. Whether behind a microphone or trading insights on podcasts, Tyler brings both expertise and a dash of fun to any discussion.  Learn more about Specialized Accounting Connect with Tyler on LinkedIn Thank you to our show sponsor, Woodard! The Woodard membership program will help you build your ideal practice with our coaching, education, community, and resources. We'll get you there with strategic direction from experienced pros, access to skill building and resources, and a community to continually inspire your practices transformation. Learn more about the show and our sponsors at Woodard.com/podcast

A skier who is suing Vail Resorts may have complicated matters by buying another season's pass...the owner of a yacht found a stranger on his boat who claimed the vessel belonged to President Trump...and a teacher is out of a job after drinking gin in front of the class and throwing up in a toilet! 

Plus: American Airlines says it could lose money this year because of higher fuel prices. And record low snowfall and warm weather added up to a bad ski season for Vail Resorts. Pierre Bienaimé hosts. Sign up for WSJ's free What's News newsletter. An artificial-intelligence tool assisted in the making of this episode by creating summaries that were based on Wall Street Journal reporting and reviewed and adapted by an editor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We visit La Clusaz and find out about local freeride skier Candide Thovex's new range of skis. We also go to Verbier to learn what it was like to become the first woman to work on their ski patrol.We have snow reports from Flaine in France, Via Lattea in Italy and St Anton in Austria, news on the class action lawsuit going on in the States and there's a Team GB update as well. Host Iain Martin was joined by Victoria Jamieson, the first woman to join the Verbier ski patrol, and Tony McWilliam, the founder of Faction Skis and designer of Candide Thovex's new line of skis. ---------Tirol in Austria sponsors The Ski Podcast, which means this winter we're are finding out more about some of the great destinations in Tirol, and how you can connect with the Austrian way of life: ‘Lebensgefühl' – that you'll find there. --------- SHOW NOTESTony McWilliam is the founder of Faction Skis (2:00)Listen to Iain's interview with Tony about his story Simon Burgess reports from Flaine (5:00) James and Sinead from Sauze Online are in the Via Lattea (7:00) Andy Butterworth from Kaluma Travel is in St Anton (8:30) A class action lawsuit has been filed against Vail Resorts and Alterra (11:00) Read the excellent analysis by Stuart Winchester from the Storm Skiing Podcast (11:15) Kirsty Muir, Charlotte Bankes & Zoe Atkin won Crystal Globes in Ski Slopestyle, Snowboard Cross and Ski Halfpipe (12:00) Jim Duncombe lives in La Clusaz and was co-founder of The Ski Podcast (12:30) The new black run is named after home town hero Candide Thovex (16:20)Check out Candide on YouTube… (16:30) Candide has said that La Balme taught him everything and shaped his skiing (16:45) Philippine Bories works for the La Clusaz tourist office (18:00) Listen to Iain's previous interview with Tony (22:30) Tony first met Candide when he was 16 and signed him to Faction Skis later (23:30) Faction supplied him with 27 sets of skis for his epic ‘Ski The World'  video (25:00)Tony worked with Candide on his own range of skis (27:00) The design of the top sheets are very minimalist (29:00) Only 100 of the limited edition La Clusaz 101 were made (29:30) The construction of the skis (30:00) Tony now runs Forward Outdoor (32:30) Angelika Kaufmann spoke about her job blasting avalanches in Lech in Episode 270 (33:00) Victoria was the first woman to join the Verbier ski patrol in 2008 (34:00) The exams or qualifications required (37:00) Why blasting avalanches is so important (38:30)FeedbackYou can leave a comment on Spotify, Instagram or Facebook – our handle is @theskipodcast – or drop Iain an email to theskipodcast@gmail.com. You can also follow us on our WhatsApp channel.andrewdickson: "Great interview with Tim Wall (Episode 299). I love the Ski Lodge and all the bands that have played there over the years. We will be back for our 21st visit next year.” James Rice: "Just downloaded Episode 308 (about Chamonix). Really looking forward to it."Sean Burton: “I just wanted to reiterate how much I enjoy the podcast.I discovered it after my first ski trip in January 2024 and have been listening avidly ever since.”There are now 309 episodes of The Ski Podcast to catch up with. If you'd like to get some insight on a particular destination or the latest kit, just go to theskipodcast.com, have a search around the tags and categories and you're bound to find something you'll find something of interest.If you enjoy the podcast, you can always buy Iain a coffee at buymeacoffee.com/theskipodcast

The two largest ski resort owners in North America are facing a class-action lawsuit alleging they inflate daily lift ticket prices to "coerce" skiers. Dennis Romboy with the Deseret News joins the show with the latest details.

After two weeks of bi-polar weather in Canada chasing pow and getting rained on, aka a “dog's breakfast”, the boys recount the trip to Ice Creek Lodge and the wisdom gained from the jedi master of snow, Russell Hulbert. Meanwhile, back home in the Sierra, a dismal March left zero inches of snow on Donner Summit, the first time in recorded history, capping off a Winter to forget. Moving on to Spring things, the boys chat about a variety of topics including DOPE or DERPs on 32” mountain bike wheels, uphill or downhill traffic having the right of way on trails and reintroducing grizzly bears into the Sierra Nevada. Other topics include introducing a new AI-generated Mind the Track theme song, Trail Whisperer almost getting maced by a hiker while logging out a trail with his chainsaw, Lost Sierra trail conditions updates, a class-action anti-trust lawsuit against Vail Resorts and Alterra and has social media ruined April Fools Day?2:10 – New intro song for Mind the Track created by AI. Maybe AI is good for something.4:30 – Recapping a wild Canada ski hut trip to Ice Creek Lodge.8:00 – Watching avalanches come down all around the crew at Ice Creek Lodge.9:00 – Russell Hulbert, owner of Ice Creek Lodge, is a jedi of snow. The snow Yoda.13:50 – Learning everything you'd ever want to know about avalanche beacons – Mammut Barryvox versus the BCA Tracker 4.17:50 – Is all the risk, variables and dangers of pow skiing worth it? Should we just ski corn only?21:50 – Shout out to the crew of Ice Creek – Benny, Brodie and Hannah.25:05 – Jerry of the Day awards from the trip.28:14 – Skiing Kicking Horse in Golden, BC and attending the “State of the Snowpack”.35:25 – March closes out with zero inches of snow on Donner Summit all month – the first time in recorded history.38:20 – Has social media ruined April Fools?40:45 – A few LOST and FOUND stories – leave it where you found it.43:10 – Anti-trust lawsuit against Alterra and Vail Resorts regarding a duopoly and inflating the price of day pass tickets.49:50 – Update on the Downieville mountain biker getting lost. It's way dumber than expected.52:20 - DOPE or DERP from Stu – 32” wheels on a mountain biker.54:30 – DOPE or DERP/RANT from Lee – Uphill traffic has the right of way.1:02:45 – TW almost gets bear sprayed by a hiker while cutting out a log with a chainsaw.1:04:55 – DOPE or DERP – reintroduction of grizzly bears into California.1:12:55 – Update on the Ruby Mountains ski resort near Lamoille Canyon.1:16:35 – Listener feedback about the Frog Lake avalanche accident.1:18:40 – The Durand Glacier accident in 2003 changed guiding in Canada.1:23:50 – Spring corn skiing missions to Shasta and Lassen.1:25:55 – Calling 311 to complain about the Ice Cream Man1:28:30 – Trail Whisperer's story about being a cold calling headhunter machine. 1:35:15 – Lost Sierra trail conditions update – Mount Hough completely open!1:39:10 – Weather forecasters calling for Godzilla El Nino!

Vail Resorts and Alterra Mountain have been hit with a class action lawsuit over their "Epic Pass" and "Ikon Pass". This could be big if you have one of these passes and you even could possibly get some money.

In this episode, Scott Becker breaks down Vail Resorts' weak winter-driven decline in visits, long-term stock struggles, and its strategic shift toward annual passes to stabilize revenue.

In this episode, Scott Becker breaks down Vail Resorts' weak winter-driven decline in visits, long-term stock struggles, and its strategic shift toward annual passes to stabilize revenue.

As we limp into the final weeks of winter, Sun outdoors reporter Jason Blevins has insights on the latest Vail Resorts earnings, a change at Alterra and the world’s most social hermit citizen scientist who has been collecting snow data for more than 50 years above Crested Butte.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today on Outdoor Unfiltered, Eoin Comerford breaks down the news that REI is cutting pay and benefits for employees as the co-op struggles to return to profitability. After four straight years of losses REI is facing some tough financial realities — and payroll is squarely in the spotlight. Eoin digs into what's driving the decision, why payroll costs at REI are significantly higher than other retailers, and why a healthy REI still matters to the broader outdoor industry.Also in this episode:Vail Resorts' historically bad winter seasonWhy ski resorts are still making money despite poor snowEoin is then joined by Rock Founder and Outdoor Industry veteran, Colin True, to discuss the outdoor recreation economy's “$1.3 trillion” headline number (and why it's misleading) as well as the new brand campaigns from The North Face and Merrell.Outdoor Unfiltered looks past the PR spin to explore what's really happening in the outdoor industry and why it matters.Connect with Eoin:https://www.linkedin.com/in/eoincomerford/Email the show: outdoorunfilteredpod@gmail.com

WhoShaun Sutner, snowsports columnist for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette and Telegram.comRecorded onNovember 24, 2025Why I interviewed himHey Man, we do this every year:What we talked aboutThe psychology of injury recovery; the power of being there; the “gladiatorial atmosphere” of ski racing; the East's strong winter; a Canadian facepalm; the Black Mountain, New Hampshire co-op; Hermon Mountain, Maine for sale; how to make a crappy old ski area into a modern-seeming ski area without big infrastructure upgrades; is every ski area closing a tragedy?; Lost Valley, Maine; lost Berkshires ski areas that make great backcountry ski spots; new owners at Ragged, New Hampshire; Magic Mountain, Vermont and the four-year lift installation; would Vail Resorts purchase Smugglers' Notch, Vermont?; assessing Killington's independent owners one year in; the Super Star six-pack upgrade at Killington; is it worth buying a new lift if it doesn't improve capacity?; why Loveland, Colorado's only detachable lift is also one of its shortest; expectations and potential from Berkshire East buying Burke, Vermont; is the demise of the good ol' boy overstated?; Wachusett's new six-pack; locals hate everything; priorities for New England lift upgrades; will Cannon ever replace its decommissioned tram (and should it be with a gondola)?; should New Hampshire lease out Cannon?; Whaleback's chairlift woes; thoughts on the Boston Ski Show moving to Connecticut; and BOA boot buckles.What I got wrongMost of these aren't “wrong,” so much as outdated:* We recorded this as Sutner was still recovering from an injury, and he said he wouldn't be able to get back to skiing until, um, February. Which is now I guess.* We talked about the “budding winter,” which started strong in November, but has kept banging away to be one of the best ski seasons in recent New England history.* We discuss since-resolved drama at Black Mountain around a withheld liquor license for the mid-mountain champagne shack.* Sutner didn't get this wrong – he was prescient, however, in saying Pacific Group Resorts would do something “big” after selling Ragged – the company purchased Silver Star, British Columbia shortly after we spoke:Then there were these:* I didn't really understand the point of Hermon Mountain, but between recording and releasing this episode, I was able to visit it. Stand by for that write-up, which helped me understand it as a teen holding pen for Bangor Maine.* I said that Pacific Group Resorts “may have” purchased Powderhorn after its Flat Top Flyer high-speed quad installation – that is the case; the lift arrived in 2015, and PGR bought the ski area in 2018.* Sure enough, Burke joined the Berkshire Summit Pass - a season pass for sister resorts Berkshire East and Catamount, as well as Bousquet. Here are the details:I said the Mohegan Sun Arena held 6,000 to 8,000 people – it's about 8,000 for basketball games, which is what I was referring to.Podcast NotesOn the closing of Four Seasons ski area in New YorkOn the new owners at Ragged and KillingtonOn Geoff Hatheway at Magic Mountain, VermontMy pods with Geoff are both a bit dated, but you can keep up with Magic by subscribing to Hatheway's Alpine Update emails, which is one of the most transparently honest ski area newsletters in America.On Wachusett's Clueless Construction UpdatesWell done, Stimpson:On other pods mentionedThe 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 Ski Moms welcome legendary skier Wendy Fisher, whose name is synonymous with both Olympic racing and big mountain freeskiing. Wendy started skiing at age 2 in Squaw Valley (now Palisades Tahoe), chasing her older brothers down the hill. After losing one of her brothers in a tragic accident, she poured her grief into skiing—eventually making the U.S. Ski Team and competing in the 1992 Winter Olympics.Wendy opens up about the emotional toll of elite racing, how fear of failure held her back, and what finally pushed her to walk away at age 23. A soul-searching road trip led her to Crested Butte, where she entered her first big mountain contest and redefined the sport by skiing bold lines no woman had attempted before. She went on to become a two-time World Extreme Skiing Champion and star in iconic films by Warren Miller and Matchstick Productions.Now based in Crested Butte, Wendy shares how she's reinvented herself many times—becoming a mom of two, ski instructor, DJ, and event coordinator. She talks about teaching through Vail Resorts' “Ski with an Olympian” program and her ongoing love for skiing and community.Resources:Website: WendyFisher.meSki with Wendy: Available at Crested Butte and Epic Pass resortsDJ Services: DJ Red for events and weddingsAprès Ski: The Beckwith (formerly Elevation Spa), Crested Butte Mountain Resort base areaNotable Quotes:"I felt so much guilt for losing the love of skiing, because by the end of my racing career, I just dreamed of when I was 7 and skiing at Squaw, having fun, hitting jumps, playing. Like, skiing used to be so fun. Where did it go?""When that crowd noticed where I was SHOP HEREUse Code SKIMOMS for 15% off all labels. Code is not valid on sale items or stamps. Other restrictions may apply.  There  are 4 events happening this year at: Sugarbush, Sunday River and Stratton, plus a cross country skiing event at the von Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe. Register here, spots are limited https://www.theskimoms.co/events Hey Ski Moms—let's talk staying warm.  Ski Haus isn't just a gear shop—it's where smart ski moms go to get outfitted for the whole family.  Head to skihaus.com to check store hours and directions. Find your perfect family-friendly mountain stay—or list your own! 

Vail Resorts has teamed up with Uber to launch Uber Ski for this ski season! Have you tried it yet?? Is it worth the price??

After a month of being ridged with displeasure and no snow, a series of atmospheric rivers dumps buckets of rain before changing to snow, finally delivering major dumpage to Tahoe just in time for Christmas. In the final episode of Mind the Track's third season, in Episode 77 the boys recap a month of inversions, brown pow and Tule Fog, contemplate chasing snow up into Canada, shout out the core lords for their 10th Shredmandment recommendations and DOPE or DERP making sound effects when riding your bike or filling uncomfortable silences. Pow Bot gives a gray wolf update, SKI BORG makes an appearance and the boys ask listeners to send in their questions for an upcoming interview with the CEO of Sugar Bowl resort. 2:10 – SKI BORG vs POW BOT5:00 – No snow in Lake Tahoe with a huge storm a-coming just in time for Christmas chaos.8:50 – On an airplane - window shade open or window shade closed?11:00 – Trail Whisperer still hasn't bought a ski pass for the season. 13:55 – All the different taglines describing the snow dry spell in Tahoe. 15:20 – Gnarly Tule Fog in the Central Valley of California for the last month. 16:10 – Washington State flooding – Stevens Pass, Crystal Mountain and Mount Baker roads blown out.18:14 – Vail Resorts discounting ski lift tickets and medium range lodge bookings are way down.22:50 – Pow Bot is finally maturing – he isn't frothed out on chasing pow.25:35 – DOPE or DERP – Do you chase the pow north to Canada right now?27:15 – Alpenglow Winter Speaker Series Opener – Truckee Dirt Union raises $120,000!30:40 – Spotify year-end wrap-up statistics for Mind the Track podcast.32:20 – Shout out to Core Lord listener Stavros on Mount Hough in Quincy!35:20 – HOT TIP: If you have poison oak, don't scratch it, use the hottest water you can tolerate to flush the histamines.38:10 – DOPE or DERP – Humming or whistling to fill an uncomfortable silence.42:00 – DOPE or DERP – Making sound effects when you ride your bike.46:10 – Listener Feedback – Finders Keepers stories.49:25 – Atlanta, Georgia is the most surveilled city in the World.50:45 – Pow Bot uses his Garmin watch to find his lost smartphone.56:20 – Listener Feedback – Grocery gear baskets.57:30 – Kurt Refsnider mountain bikes the whole Orogenesis Route – 4,275 miles in 135 days. 59:25 – Sugar Bowl asks if Mind the Track would like to interview the CEO of the ski resort.1:01:40 – Listener Feedback on the 10th Shredmandment. Steve says respect the trailhead.1:05:16 – Liz and Cam – Always be learning and avalanche education.1:06:45 – Stu – Be a capable backcountry skiing partner.1:09:30 – Tony from Lee Vining – Observe, consider and decide. 1:12:30 – Alex – Keep your gear tight. Know how to use a first aid kit.1:13:00 – @patagonia_snow Instagram shouts out Mind the Track and the Butt Vest.1:15:55 – Wolf pulls a crab pot out of water with the buoy and rope to eat the bait.1:20:30 – Gray Wolf is de-listed by the Endangered Species Act.1:25:00 – Cam says Snack Man is DOPE. 1:26:30 – Telluride Ski Patrol is threatening strike, could shut the whole season down.1:33:00 – The unsustainable game of buying a season's pass at a ski resort.

How did China's trade surplus hit $1.1 trillion this year? The United States purchased around $450 billion of manufactured goods from China in 2024, but trade has dropped between the two countries so how did China have a record surplus of $1.1 trillion through November 2025? The current tariff on goods imported from China is around 37% according to the Tax Policy Center and imported goods from China have dropped dramatically. China has been able to increase their exports to other countries to more than compensate for the loss of exports to the United States which are down roughly 19%. China has seen an increase of exports to Southeast Asia of 14%, the European Union has increased 8%, and Latin America saw a 7% increase in exports from China. A big increase of 25% in exports to Africa was also very helpful to China's manufacturing surplus. Even though they're turning out more cars, manufacturing products and chemicals than ever before, it has created a very heavy competition in China which is pushing down prices, profits, and income for the Chinese manufacturing companies. There will not be another round of talks between the US and Chins until next year. At the last set of trade talks the US did lower our tariffs and China promised to buy American soy beans and end a plan to tighten the export of rare earths, which are critical and found in many products from jet engines to cars and many other electronics as well. We will continue to follow the developments of these trade talks as there should be more news coming next year!   Finally some data on the labor market! With the government shutdown, a lot of the data for the labor market was delayed. We finally got employment figures for October and November, and they were interesting to say the least! To start, the October numbers looked horrific considering payrolls declined by 105,000 in the month. While this sounds troubling, it's important to remember all of those government workers on severance were still counted as employed until the severance ended. This led to a decline in government payrolls of 162,000 in the month of October. Losses in government payrolls continued in November, but at a much slower rate as they tallied 6,000 in the month. Since reaching a peak in January, government employment has seen a decline of 271,000 jobs. Looking at November, payrolls increased by 64,000, but healthcare continued to carry most of the weight as the sector accounted for more than 70% of the total net increase and added 46,000 jobs. Construction was also strong in the month as the sector added 28,000 jobs, but many other areas saw little change and transportation and warehousing was weak as payrolls declined by 18,000. Another concern in the report was the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.6%, which was above the 4.4% level in September and marked the highest reading since September 2021. Overall, when I look at the labor market it is definitely slowing, but I wouldn't say I'm overly concerned at this point in time. While it is concerning to see declines in the payroll level in three of the last six months, for the most part the private market has done a good job picking up the large declines in the government sector, which I view as healthy. I don't want to say our labor market is booming at this point in time, but I would still classify as relatively healthy.    Inflation report shows great progress, can it be trusted? Headline November CPI came in at 2.7% compared to last November, which was well below the estimate of 3.1% and core CPI, which excludes food and energy, showed an increase of just 2.6%. This was the lowest reading for core CPI since March 2021 when the increase was just 1.6% and it also came in well below the estimate of 3.0%. Some areas in the report remained challenging particularly in food, where we saw uncooked beef roast climb 21.2% and coffee increase by 18.8%. Beef prices have struggled as cattle supply touched its lowest point in 2025 since the early 1950s and coffee prices have been hit by extreme weather in major coffee-producing countries as well as the tariffs levied on Brazil. Shelter inflation was positive in the report as the annual increase was just 3% and it's believed there is more relief coming for the largest weight in the CPI, which generally occupies around 1/3 of the headline number. If the inflation for shelter slows further, it would be very beneficial for the inflation rate as we progress through 2026. The big problem with this report is there are questions about how accurate the data is. Due to the shutdown, there was no data collected for the month of October, and the BLS was only able to collect data for about half the month of November as the shutdown did not end until November 12th. For the time being we are pleased with the results from this CPI report, but I do believe there will now be even more emphasis on the December CPI as that will be the first full month of data following the record-breaking government shutdown.    Want to become a millionaire? Invest in your 401(k)! There are more and more people with $1 million or more in a 401(k) as companies like Fidelity and Vanguard are seeing record numbers of people with accounts of more than $1 million. Fidelity said they hit the highest level ever when it comes to 401k millionaires with about 3.2% of their 401k's or 654,000 accounts now over $1 million. Vanguard also had similar numbers for 401k millionaires. Becoming a 401k millionaire is not a get rich quick scheme, but it's a proven way to build your wealth long-term with proper investment choices. It is estimated that roughly 86% of those with $1 million plus in their 401k are 50 or older. It is also estimated that around 1000 people per day become 401k millionaires in the US. The key to becoming a 401K millionaire is to invest wisely, which means not too aggressive, but also not too conservative. Also, when a portfolio drops, you cannot sell everything and wait for the market to get better, you or an investment professional must verify that you have good quality investments in your portfolio that can handle the financial storms and also it's important to continue adding to your portfolio during these difficult times. It is important not to pull money out from your 401(k) for any reason at all, no matter how bad you think the situation is, it will improve. It is much better to deal with problems when you're young rather than when you're in your 60s because you did not let your 401(k) grow to over a million dollars.   Financial Planning: Taking Advantage of Itemized Deductions Before December 31st With the repeal of the $10,000 SALT deduction limit, many taxpayers may once again benefit from itemizing deductions rather than taking the standard deduction, and there are practical steps that can be taken before year-end to further enhance that benefit. The SALT deduction includes both state income taxes and property taxes, and because individuals are cash-basis taxpayers, deductions are generally taken when expenses are paid rather than when they are due, meaning that paying certain obligations before December 31st can shift future deductions into the current tax year. In California and many other states, property taxes are paid in two installments, with the first due in December and the second due in April.  If the April installment is paid by December 31st, it may be deductible in the current year instead of the following one. Similarly, the final state estimated tax payment is typically due on January 15th, but making that payment in December allows the deduction to be taken in the current year. Another significant itemized deduction is mortgage interest, and while mortgage payments are usually due on the first of the month, making the January 1st payment in December can allow the interest from that payment to be deducted in 2025 rather than 2026. In addition, charitable deduction rules are scheduled to change in 2026 and will be subject to an adjusted gross income (AGI) limitation, which means taxpayers who are charitably inclined may benefit from accelerating planned donations into the current year while the rules are more favorable. Taken together, these strategies tend to be most effective when income is higher in the current year, as accelerating deductions while in higher tax brackets results in greater overall tax savings.   Companies Discussed: Oxford Industries, Inc. (OXM), Exxon Mobil Corporation (XOM), Vail Resorts, Inc. (MTN) & Costco Wholesale Corporation (COST)

WhoMike Giorgio, Vice President and General Manager of Stowe Mountain, VermontRecorded onOctober 8, 2025About StoweClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Vail Resorts, which also owns:Located in: Stowe, VermontYear founded: 1934Pass affiliations:* Epic Pass: unlimited access* Epic Local Pass: unlimited access with holiday blackouts* Epic Northeast Value Pass: 10 days with holiday blackouts* Epic Northeast Midweek Pass: 5 midweek days with holiday blackouts* Access on Epic Day Pass All and 32 Resort tiers* Ski Vermont 4 Pass – up to one day, with blackouts* Ski Vermont Fifth Grade Passport – 3 days, with blackoutsClosest neighboring U.S. ski areas: Smugglers' Notch (ski-to or 40-ish-minute drive in winter, when route 108 is closed over the notch), Bolton Valley (:45), Cochran's (:50), Mad River Glen (:55), Sugarbush (:56)Base elevation: 1,265 feet (at Toll House double)Summit elevation: 3,625 feet (top of the gondola), 4,395 feet at top of Mt. MansfieldVertical drop: 2,360 feet lift-served, 3,130 feet hike-toSkiable acres: 485Average annual snowfall: 314 inchesTrail count: 116 (16% beginner, 55% intermediate, 29% advanced)Lift count: 12 (1 eight-passenger gondola, 1 six-passenger gondola, 1 six-pack, 3 high-speed quads, 1 fixed-grip quad, 1 triple, 2 doubles, 2 carpets)Why I interviewed himThere is no Aspen of the East, but if I had to choose an Aspen of the East, it would be Stowe. And not just because Aspen Mountain and Stowe offer a similar fierce-down, with top-to-bottom fall-line zippers and bumpy-bumps spliced by massive glade pockets. Not just because each ski area rises near the far end of densely bunched resorts that the skier must drive past to reach them. Not just because the towns are similarly insular and expensive and tucked away. Not just because the wintertime highway ends at both places, an anachronistic act of surrender to nature from a mechanized world accustomed to fencing out the seasons. And not just because each is a cultural stand-in for mechanized skiing in a brand-obsessed, half-snowy nation that hates snow and is mostly filled with non-skiers who know nothing about the activity other than the fact that it exists. Everyone knows about Aspen and Stowe even if they'll never ski, in the same way that everyone knows about LeBron James even if they've never watched basketball.All of that would be sufficient to make the Stowe-is-Aspen-East argument. But the core identity parallel is one that threads all these tensions while defying their assumed outcome. Consider the remoteness of 1934 Stowe and 1947 Aspen, two mountains in the pre-snowmaking, pre-interstate era, where cutting a ski area only made sense because that's where it snowed the most. Both grew in similar fashion. First slowly toward the summit with surface lifts and mile-long single chairs crawling up the incline. Then double chairs and gondolas and snowguns and detachable chairlifts. A ski area for the town evolves into a ski area for the world. Hotels a la luxe at the base, traffic backed up to the interstate, corporate owners and $261 lift tickets.That sounds like a formula for a ruined world. But Stowe the ski area, like Aspen Mountain the ski area, has never lost its wild soul. Even buffed out and six-pack equipped and Epic Pass-enabled, Stowe remains a hell of a mountain, one of the best in New England, one of my favorite anywhere. With its monster snowfalls, its endless and perfectly spaced glades, its never-groomed expert zones, its sprawling footprint tucked beneath the Mansfield summit, its direct access to rugged and forbidding backcountry, Stowe, perhaps the most western-like mountain in the East, remains a skier's mountain, a fierce and humbling proving ground, an any-skier's destination not because of its trimmings, but because of the Christmas tree itself.Still, Stowe will never be Aspen, because Stowe does not sit at 8,000 feet and Stowe does not have three accessory ski areas and Stowe the Town does not grid from the lift base like Aspen the Town but rather lies eight miles down the road. Also Stowe is owned by Vail Resorts, and can you just imagine? But in a cultural moment that assumes ski area ruination-by-the-consolidation-modernization-mega-passification axis-of-mainstreaming, Aspen and Stowe tell mirrored versions of a more nuanced story. Two ski areas, skinned in the digital-mechanical infrastructure that modernity demands, able to at once accommodate the modern skier and the ancient mountain, with all of its quirks and character. All of its amazing skiing.What we talked aboutStowe the Legend; Vail Resorts' leadership carousel; ascending to ski area leadership without on-mountain experience; Mount Brighton, Michigan and Midwest skiing; struggles at Paoli Peaks, Indiana; how the Sunrise six-pack upgrade of the old Mountain triple changed the mountain; whether the Four Runner quad could ever become a six-pack; considering the future of the Lookout Double and Mansfield Gondola; who owns the land in and around the ski area; whether Stowe has terrain expansion potential; the proposed Smugglers' Notch gondola connection and whether Vail would ever buy Smuggs; “you just don't understand how much is here until you're here”; why Stowe only claims 485 acres of skiable terrain; protecting the Front Four; extending Stowe's season last spring; snowmaking in a snowbelt; the impact and future of paid parking; on-mountain bed-base potential; Epic Friend 50 percent off lift tickets; and Stowe locals and the Epic Pass.What I got wrongOn detailsI noted that one of my favorite runs was not a marked run at all: the terrain beneath the Lookout double chair. In fact, most of the trail beneath this mile-plus-long lift is a market run called, uh, “Lookout.” So I stand corrected. However, the trailmap makes this full-throttle, narrow bumper – which feels like skiing on a rising tide – look wide, peaceful, and groomable. It is none of those things, at least for its first third or so.On skiable acres* I said that Killington claimed “like 1,600 acres” of terrain – the exact claimed number is 1,509 acres.* I said that Mad River Glen claimed far fewer skiable acres than it probably could, but I was thinking of an out-of-date stat. The mountain claims just 115 acres of trails – basically nothing for a 2,000-vertical-foot mountain, but also “800 acres of tree-skiing access.” The number listed on the Pass Smasher Deluxe is 915 acres.On season closingsI intimated that Stowe had always closed the third weekend in April. That appears to be mostly true for the past two-ish decades, which is as far back as New England Ski History has records. The mountain did push late once, however, in 2007, and closed early during the horrible no-snow winter of 2011-12 (April 1), and the Covid-is-here-to-kill-us-all shutdown of 2020 (March 14).On doing better prepI asked whether Stowe had considered making its commuter bus free, but it, um, already is. That's called Reeserch, Folks.On lift ticket ratesI claimed that Stowe's top lift ticket price would drop from $239 last year to $235 this coming season, but that's inaccurate. Upon further review, the peak walk-up rate appears to be increasing to $261 this coming winter:Which means Vail's record of cranking Stowe lift ticket rates up remains consistent:On opening hoursI said that the lifts at Stowe sometimes opened at “7:00 or 7:30,” but the earliest ski lift currently opens at 8:00 most mornings (the Over Easy transit gondola opens at 7:30). The Fourrunner quad used to open at 7:30 a.m. on weekends and holidays. I'm not sure when mountain ops changed that. Here's the lift schedule clipped from the circa 2018 trailmap:On Mount Brighton, Michigan's supposed trashheap legacyI'd read somewhere, sometime, that Mount Brighton had been built on dirt moved to make way for Interstate 96, which bores across the state about a half mile north of the ski area. The timelines match, as this section of I-96 was built between 1956 and '57, just before Brighton opened in 1960. This circa 1962 article from The Livingston Post, a local paper, fails to mention the source of the dirt, leaving me uncertain as to whether or not the hill is related to the highway:Why you should ski StoweFrom my April 10 visit last winter, just cruising mellow, low-angle glades nearly to the base:I mean, the place is just:I love it, Man. My top five New England mountains, in no particular order, are Sugarbush, Stowe, Jay, Smuggs, and Sugarloaf. What's best on any given day depends on conditions and crowding, but if you only plan to ski the East once, that's your list.Podcast NotesOn Stowe being the last 1,000-plus-vertical-foot Vermont ski area that I featured on the podYou can view the full podcast catalogue here. But here are the past Vermont eps:* Killington & Pico – 2019 | 2023 | 2025* Stratton 2024* Okemo 2023* Middlebury Snowbowl 2023* Mount Snow 2020 | 2023* Bromley 2022* Jay Peak 2022 | 2020* Smugglers' Notch 2021* Bolton Valley 2021* Hermitage Club 2020* Sugarbush 2020 with current president John Hammond | 2020 with past owner Win Smith* Mad River Glen 2020* Magic Mountain 2019 | 2020* Burke 2019On Stowe having “peers, but no betters” in New EnglandWhile Stowe doesn't stand out in any one particular statistical category, the whole of the place stacks up really well to the rest of New England - here's a breakdown of the 63 public ski areas that spin chairlifts across the six-state region:On the Front Four ski runsThe “Front Four” are as synonymous with Stowe as the Back Bowls are with Vail Mountain or Corbet's Couloir is with Jackson Hole. These Stowe trails are steep, narrow, double-plus-fall-line bangers that, along with Castlerock at Sugarbush and Paradise at Mad River Glen, are among the most challenging runs in New England.The problem is determining which of the double-blacks spiderwebbing off the top of Fourrunner are part of the Front Four. Officially, the designation has always bucketed National, Liftline, Goat, and Starr together, but Bypass, Haychute, and Lookout could sub in most days. Credit to Stowe for keeping these wild trails intact for going on a century, but what I said about them “not being for the masses” on the podcast wasn't quite accurate, as the lower portions of many - especially Liftline - are wide, often groomed, and not particularly treacherous. The best end-to-end trail is Goat, which is insanely steep and narrow up top. Here's part of Goat's middle-to-lower section, which is mellower but a good portrayal of New England bumpy, exposed-dirt-and-rocks gnar, especially at the :19 mark:The most glorious ego boost (or ego check) is the few hundred vertical feet of Liftline directly below Fourrunner. Sound on for scrapey-scrape:When the cut trails get icy, you can duck into the adjacent glades, most of which are unmarked but skiable. Here, I bailed into the trees skier's left of Starr to escape the ice rink:On Vail Resorts' leadership shufflesTwelve of Vail's 37 North American ski areas began the 2024-25 ski season with a different leader than they ended the 2023-24 ski season with. This included five of the company's New England resorts, including Stowe. Giorgio, in fact, became the ski area's third general manager in three winters, and the fourth since Vail acquired the ski area in 2017. I asked Giorgio about this, as a follow up to a similar set of questions I'd laid out for Vail Resorts CEO Rob Katz in August:I may be overthinking this, but check this out: between 2017 and 2024, Vail Resorts changed leadership at its North American ski areas more than 70 times - the yellow boxes below mark a new president-general-manager equivalent (red boxes indicate that Vail did not yet own the ski area):To reset my thinking here: I can't say that this constant leadership shuffle is inherently dysfunctional, and most Vail Resorts employees I speak with appreciate the company's upward-mobility culture. And I consistently find Vail's mountain leaders - dozens of whom I have hosted on this podcast - to be smart, earnest, and caring. However, it's hard to imagine that the constant turnover in top management isn't at least somewhat related to Vail Resorts' on-the-ground reputational issues, truncated seasons at non-core ski areas (see Paoli Peaks section below), and general sense that the company's arc of investment bends toward its destination resorts.On Peak ResortsVail purchased all of Peak Resorts, including Mount Snow, where Giorgio worked, in 2019. Here's that company's growth timeline:On Vernon Valley-Great GorgeThe ski area now known as Mountain Creek was Vernon Valley-Great Gorge until 1997. Anyone who grew up in the area still calls the joint by its legacy name.On Paoli Peaks versus Perfect NorthMy hope is that if I complain enough about Paoli Peaks, Vail will either invest enough in snowmaking to tranform it into a functional ski area or sell it. Here are the differences between Paoli's season lengths since 2013 as compared to Perfect North, its competitor that is the only other active ski area in the state:What explains this longstanding disparity, which certainly predates Vail's 2019 acquisition of the ski area? Paoli does sit southwest of Perfect North, but its base is 200 feet higher (600 feet, versus 400 for Perfect), so elevation doesn't explain it. Perfect does benefit from a valley location, which, longtime GM Jonathan Davis told me a few years back, locks in the cold air and supercharges snowmaking. The simplest answer, however, is probably the correct one: Perfect North has built one of the most impressive snowmaking systems on the planet, and they use it aggressively, cranking more than 200 guns at once. At peak operations, Perfect can transform from green grass to skiable terrain in just a couple of days.So yes, Perfect has always been a better operation than Paoli. But check this out: Paoli's performance as compared to Perfect's has been considerably worse in the five full seasons of Vail Resorts' ownership (excluding 2019-20), than in the six seasons before, with Perfect besting Paoli to open by an average of 21 days before Vail arrived, and by 31 days after. Perfect's seasons lasted an average of 25 days longer than Paoli's before Vail arrived, and 38 days longer after:Yes, Paoli is a uniquely challenged ski area, but I'm confident that someone can do a better job running this place than Vail has been doing since 2019. Certainly, that someone could be Vail, which has the resources and institutional knowledge to transform this, or any ski area, into a center of SnoSportSkiing excellence. So far, however, they have declined to do so, and I keep thinking of what Davis, Perfect North's longtime GM, said on the pod in 2022: “If Vail doesn't want [its ski areas in Indiana and Ohio], we'll take them!”On the 2022 Sunrise Six replacement for the tripleIn 2022, Stowe replaced the Mountain triple chair, which sat up a flight of steep steps from the parking lot, with the at-grade Sunrise six-pack. It was the kind of big-time lift upgrade that transforms the experience of an entire ski area for everyone, whether they use the new lift or not, by pulling skiers toward a huge pod of underutilized terrain and away from longtime alpha lifts Fourrunner and the Mansfield Gondola.On Fourrunner as a vert machineStowe's Fourruner high-speed quad is one of the most incredible lifts in American skiing, a lightspeed-fast base-to-summit, 2,040-vertical-foot monster with direct access to some of the best terrain west of A-Basin.The highest vert total in my 54-day 2024-25 ski season came (largely) courtesy of this lift - and I only skied five-and-a-half hours:On Stowe-Smuggs proximity and the proposed gondola and a long drive in winterAdventurous skiers can skin or hike across the top of Stowe's Spruce Peak and ski down into the Smugglers' Notch ski area. An official ski trail once connected them, and Smuggs proposed a gondola connector a couple of years back. If Vail were to purchase sprawling Smuggs, a Canyons-Park City mega-connection – while improbable given local environmental lobbies -could instantly transform Stowe into one of the largest ski areas in the East.On Jay Peak's big snowmaking upgradesI referenced big offseason snowmaking upgrades for water-challenged (but natural-snow blessed), Jay Peak. I was referring to this:This season brings an over $1.5M snowmaking upgrade that's less about muscle and more about brains. We've added 49 brand new HKD Low E air-water snowmaking guns—32 on Queen's Highway and 17 on Perry Merrill. These aren't your drag-'em-out, hook-'em-up, hope-it's-cold-enough kind of guns. They're fixed in place for the season and far more efficient, using much less compressed air than the ones they replace. Translation: better snow, less energy.On Perry Merrill, things get even slicker. We've installed HKD Klik automated hydrants that come with built-in weather stations. The second temps hit 28 degrees wetbulb, these hydrants kick on automatically and adjust the flow as the mercury drops. No waiting, no guesswork, no scrambling the crew. The end result? Those key connecting trails between Tramside and Stateside get covered faster, which means you can ski from one side to the other—or straight back to your condo—without having to hop on a shuttle with your boots still buckled. …It's all part of a bigger 10-year snowmaking plan we're rolling out—more automation, better efficiency, and ultimately, better snow for you to ski and ride on.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

Vail Resorts has teamed up with Uber this ski season to launch Uber Ski. It's a set price to head up to the mountains to your favorite resort so you don't have to be stressed out in I-70 traffic! Will you take it?

The Broncos do it AGAIN! They've won 9 in a row! Jamie and Carson stayed up way too late. We are curious, is there anyone out there who has presents already wrapped and under the tree for Christmas? Vail Resorts has teamed up with Uber to launch Uber Ski this ski season. Will you take it? And wait until you hear about Weird Cat Guy!

Today we find out about Carv - ‘the wearable ski coach' - and learn about one of the world's great ski resorts: Whistler Blackcomb in Canada. We also have snow reports from Tignes, Val Thorens and Cervinia. Iain was joined in the studio by Alex Jackson from Carv and Lauren Everest from Tourism Whistler, and down the line by Floss Cockle, Alex Irwin and Alex Armand. Tirol in Austria sponsors The Ski Podcast. We've already covered Innsbruck, Ischgl, Tirol West, St Johann in Tirol and the SkiWelt area this winter, with more to come. Catch up now to learn about the different areas and the ‘‘Lebensgefühl' – that Austrian way of life that connects them all together.   SHOW NOTES Floss Cockle from FreeFlo Ski Coaching reported from Tignes (3:45) Alex Irwin from 150 Days of Winter skied in Val Thorens (5:30) Alex Armand from Tip Top Ski Coaching was in Cervinia in the Aosta Valley, Italy Listen to interviews recorded at The London Snow Show (8:30) What is the Carv? (10:00) How does Carv work? (11:30) Listen to Iain's interview with Carv co-founder Jamie Grant (12:30) The Carv dataset covers over a billion turns (14:00) How your Ski:IQ is calculated (14:30) The gamification aspects (19:30) New developments for this year: Ski:IQ™ Wasatch (21:30) Carv costs £199 for an annual subscription, or £99 for a single week (26:00) Where is Whistler? (28:00) Whistler is biggest ski resort in North America with 8171 skiable acres? (28:30) There are 200+ runs in Whistler Blackcomb (29:20) Whistler is celebrating its 60th anniversary (30:00) Hosting the 2010 Vancouver Olympics (32:00) Find out about the Peak to Valley Race (33:45) Can you tell us about the ‘Seven Wonder Routes' (34:30) Whistler is owned by Vail Resorts and included in the Epic Pass (35:00) Buy your Epic Pass before the deadline (36:00) Try the Garibaldi Lift Company (GLC) for an apres ski drink (38:00) Feedback If you've enjoyed this episode – or even if you didn't like it – I would love to know. You can leave a comment on Spotify, Instagram or Facebook – our handle is @theskipodcast – or drop me an email to theskipodcast@gmail.com. You can also follow us on WhatsApp for exclusive material released ahead of the podcast Matt Hayes: “The Bladon Lines episode is such a great story. A must listen.” Wayne Reeder: “Really enjoy your shows, guests and great information.” He also asked about the ‘Ski à la Carte' pass Phil Shotton: “Long time listener to your podcast. I really enjoyed them in the closed season – they helped keep me in the ski mood”  Make sure you subscribe to the Skipedia YouTube channel and find out how to carry skis properly! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9ZALXFwR34 There are now 283 episodes of The Ski Podcast to catch up with and when I looked this morning, the stats say that 175 of those were listened to in the last week. Go to theskipodcast.com, have a search around the tags and categories and you're bound to find something you'll find interesting to listen to.  f you'd like to help the podcast, there are three things you can do:     -          you can follow us, or subscribe, so you never miss an episode   -          you can give us a review on Apple Podcasts or leave a comment on Spotify   -          And, if you're booking ski hire this winter, don't forget that you can get an additional discount if you use the code ‘SKIPODCAST' when you book at intersportrent.com or simply take this link for your discount to be automatically applied

Today we find out about SkiWelt Wilder Kaiser-Brixental in Tirol, plus we look at a new women only ski touring to Iceland We also have snow reports from the opening day of the season in Verbier and Sunshine Valley – the first ski resort to open in Canada. ---------  Tirol in Austria sponsors The Ski Podcast, which means that this winter we'll be able to find out more about some of the great destinations in Tirol, and how you can connect with ‘Lebensgefühl' - the wonderful ‘feeling of life' you can find there. --------- SHOW NOTES Nickie Mabey is founder of Mabey Ski (1:45) Rob Rees reported on Slovenia in Episode 207 (3:00) Listen to Episode 186 for tips on autumn skiing in Austria (5:45) Robin Shah reported from Verbier (6:00) Check out Xavier De La Rue's Insta from opening weekend (7:45) Kendra Scurfield reported from Sunshine Valley in Canada (8:20) In Episode 219, Laax was strongly linked as possible acquisition by Vail Resorts (11:00) Laax has now bought its own lifts as defensive measure (11:15) Where is SkiWelt Wilder Kaiser-Brixental (12:15) How to get to SkiWelt (12:30) It's easy to travel to by train – there is a Nightjet package (13:00) There are 275km pistes and over 80 lifts (14:00) Ski resorts in the SkiWelt include Brixen im Thale, Ellmau, Going, Hopfgarten, Itter, Scheffau, Söll and Westendorf The SkiWelt region was created in 1977 (14:45) You can ski the SkiWelt Tour circuit (15:45) Children up to the age of 15 get free lift tickets in low season (16:45) Another great idea is the Young Family Ski Pass SkiWelt uses 100% green electricity from hydro power (17:45) There are over 80 mountain huts in the SkiWelt (18:30) Austria's highest revolving restaurant is at the Hohe Salve (19:00) In Episode 256 Betony Garner told us about her all female ski touring trip to Tromso (22:00) Nickie's connection to skiing goes back to 1912 (22:30) She founded Mabey Ski in 2017 (25:00) Maybe Ski is putting on a women's only ski touring tripto Iceland (25:30) Sara Sigurdardottir is an Icelandair pilot (26:00) The Troll Peninsula (27:30) Iceland is famous for its geothermal pools (29:30) Feedback (31:45) You can leave a comment on Spotify, Instagram or Facebook – our handle is @theskipodcast – or drop me an email to theskipodcast@gmail.com. You can also also follow us on WhatsApp for exclusive material released ahead of the podcast. Immanuel John: “Loved the Innsbruck in Tirol episode” Matt Hayes: “Keep up the great work on the podcast”  Ster at Snowheads: “The Bladon Lines and Fiona Easdale episodes are some of the most interesting and engaging I have heard, but the ‘How to become a Ski Patroller' episode with Tom Greenall must be the best of the lot.” There are now 280 episodes of The Ski Podcast to catch up with. There is so much in our back catalogue - just go to theskipodcast.com, have a search around the tags and categories and you're bound to find something you'll find interesting about our wonderful world of skiing and snowboarding.  If you'd like to help the podcast, there are three things you can do:  -          you can follow us, or subscribe, so you never miss an episode -          you can give us a review on Apple Podcasts or leave a comment on Spotify -          if you're booking ski hire, you can save money on your ski hire with Intersport Ski Hire by using the code ‘SKIPODCAST' or simply take this link for your discount to be automatically applied

Eric Resnick joins host Brandon Sedloff to discuss his remarkable journey from a lifelong passion for skiing to leading one of the world's most prominent travel and leisure investment firms, KSL Capital Partners. Eric shares how early lessons in combining vocation with avocation shaped his career, from his first role at McKinsey to helping professionalize the ski industry with Vail Resorts. He details KSL's evolution from its early recreation roots to its current global platform investing across hotels, resorts, health clubs, and hospitality businesses. The conversation explores the firm's investment philosophy, the development of the Ikon Pass, and the operational discipline behind building authenticity at scale in leisure-focused businesses. They discuss: • The origins of KSL and its transformation from recreation to global travel and leisure investing • Lessons from the early institutionalization of the ski industry and creation of the Epic and Ikon Passes • How KSL creates value through operational excellence and alignment between real estate and operations • The future of travel: luxury experiential trends, wellness, and the role of AI in shaping guest experiences • Leadership lessons on authenticity, culture, and staying nimble in times of uncertainty Links: Eric Resnick on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-resnick-1b96a8b6/ KSL Capital Partners - https://www.kslcapital.com/ Topics: (00:00:00) - Intro (00:01:51) - Meet Eric Resnick: CEO of KSL Capital Partners (00:14:43) - The evolution of Vail Resorts and the ski industry (00:18:14) - Founding of KSL Capital Partners (00:22:24) - KSL's investment strategy and industry impact (00:24:01) - The intersection of real estate and private equity (00:29:39) - Challenges in raising a first-time fund (00:30:58) - Key factors for success in platform investing (00:34:24) - KSL's current scale and investment strategies (00:40:51) - The Icon Pass: revolutionizing the ski industry (00:46:40) - Future trends in travel and leisure (00:52:01) - Balancing authenticity and scale in hospitality (00:55:41) - Navigating volatility and cybersecurity concerns (00:59:19) - Conclusion and final thoughts

Take 20% off a paid annual ‘Storm' subscription through Monday, Oct. 27, 2025.WhoJared Smith, Chief Executive Officer of Alterra Mountain CompanyRecorded onOctober 22, 2025About Alterra Mountain CompanyAlterra is skiing's Voltron, a collection of super-bots united to form one super-duper bot. Only instead of gigantic robot lions the bots are gigantic ski areas and instead of fighting the evil King Zarkon they combined to battle Vail Resorts and its cackling mad Epic Pass. Here is Alterra's current ski-bot stable:Alterra of course also owns the Ikon Pass, which for the 2025-26 winter gives skiers all of this:Ikon launched in 2018 as a more-or-less-even competitor to Epic Pass, both in number and stature of ski areas and price, but long ago blew past its mass-market competitor in both:Those 89 total ski areas include nine that Alterra added last week in Japan, South Korea, and China. Some of these 89 partners, however, are so-called “bonus mountains,” which are Alterra's Cinderellas. And not Cinderella at the end of the story when she rules the kingdom and dines on stag and hunts peasants for sport but first-scene Cinderella when she lives in a windowless tower and wears a burlap dress and her only friends are talking mice. Meaning skiers can use their Ikon Pass to ski at these places but they are not I repeat NOT on the Ikon Pass so don't you dare say they are (they are).While the Ikon Pass is Alterra's Excalibur, many of its owned mountains offer their own season passes (see Alterra chart above). And many now offer their own SUPER-DUPER season passes that let skiers do things like cut in front of the poors and dine on stag in private lounges:These SUPER-DUPER passes don't bother me though a lot of you want me to say they're THE END OF SKIING. I won't put a lot of effort into talking you off that point so long as you're all skiing for $17 per day on your Ikon Passes. But I will continue to puzzle over why the Ikon Session Pass is such a very very bad and terrible product compared to every other day pass including those sold by Alterra's own mountains. I am also not a big advocate for peak-day lift ticket prices that resemble those of black-market hand sanitizer in March 2020:Fortunately Vail and Alterra seem to have launched a lift ticket price war, the first battle of which is The Battle of Give Half Off Coupons to Your Dumb Friends Who Don't Buy A Ski Pass 10 Months Before They Plan to Ski:Alterra also runs some heli-ski outfits up in B.C. but I'm not going to bother decoding all that because one reason I started The Storm was because I was over stories of Bros skiing 45 feet of powder at the top of the Chugach while the rest of us fretted over parking reservations and the $5 replacement cost of an RFID card. I know some of you are like Bro how many stories do you think the world needs about chairlifts but hey at least pretty much anyone reading this can go ride them.Oh and also I probably lost like 95 percent of you with Voltron because unless you were between the ages of 7 and 8 in the mid-1980s you probably missed this:One neat thing about skiing is that if someone ran headfirst into a snowgun in 1985 and spent four decades in a coma and woke up tomorrow they'd still know pretty much all the ski areas even if they were confused about what's a Palisades Tahoe and why all of us future wussies wear helmets. “Damn it, Son in my day we didn't bother and I'm just fine. Now grab $20 and a pack of smokes and let's go skiing.”Why I interviewed himFor pretty much the same reason I interviewed this fellow:I mean like it or not these two companies dominate modern lift-served skiing in this country, at least from a narrative point of view. And while I do everything I can to demonstrate that between the Indy Pass and ski areas not in Colorado or Utah or Tahoe plenty of skier choice remains, it's impossible to ignore the fact that Alterra's 17 U.S. ski areas and Vail's 36 together make up around 30 percent of the skiable terrain across America's 509 active ski areas:And man when you add in all U.S. Epic and Ikon mountains it's like dang:We know publicly traded Vail's Epic Pass sales numbers and we know those numbers have softened over the past couple of years, but we don't have similar access to Alterra's numbers. A source with direct knowledge of Ikon Pass sales recently told me that unit sales had increased every year. Perhaps some day someone will anonymously message me a screenshot code-named Alterra's Big Dumb Chart documenting unit and dollar sales since Ikon's 2018 launch. In the meantime, I'm just going to have to keep talking to the guy running the company and asking extremely sly questions like, “if you had to give us a ballpark estimate of exactly how many Ikon Passes you sold and how much you paid each partner mountain and which ski area you're going to buy next, what would you say?”What we talked aboutA first-to-open competition between A-Basin and Winter Park (A-Basin won); the allure of skiing Japan; Ikon as first-to-market in South Korea and China; continued Ikon expansion in Europe; who's buying Ikon?; bonus mountains; half-off friends tickets; reserve passes; “one of the things we've struggled with as an industry are the dynamics between purchasing a pass and the daily lift ticket price”; “we've got to find ways to make it more accessible, more affordable, more often for more people”; Europe as a cheaper ski alternative to the West; “we are focused every day on … what is the right price for the right consumer on the right day?”; “there's never been more innovation” in the ski ticket space; Palisades Tahoe's 14-year-village-expansion approval saga; America's “increasingly complex” landscape of community stakeholders; and Deer Valley's massive expansion.What I got wrong* We didn't get this wrong, but when we recorded this pod on Wednesday, Smith and I discussed which of Alterra's ski areas would open first. Arapahoe Basin won that fight, opening at 3 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 25, which was yesterday unless you're reading this in the future.* I said that 40 percent of all Epic, Ikon, and Indy pass partners were outside of North America. This is inaccurate: 40 percent (152) of those three passes' combined 383 partners is outside the United States. Subtracting their 49 Canadian ski areas gives us 103 mountains outside of North America, or 27 percent of the total.* I claimed that a ski vacation to Europe is “a quarter of the price” of a similar trip to the U.S. This was hyperbole, and obviously the available price range of ski vacations is enormous, but in general, prices for everything from lift tickets to hotels to food tend to be lower in the Alps than in the Rocky Mountain core.* It probably seems strange that I said that Deer Valley's East Village was great because you could drive there from the airport without hitting a spotlight and also said that the resort would be less car-dependent. What I meant by that was that once you arrive at East Village, it is – or will be, when complete – a better slopeside pedestrian village experience than the car-oriented Snow Park that has long served as the resort's principal entry point. Snow Park itself is scheduled to evolve from parking-lot-and-nothing-else to secondary pedestrian village. The final version of Deer Valley should reduce the number of cars within Park City proper and create a more vibrant atmosphere at the ski area.Questions I wish I'd askedThe first question you're probably asking is “Bro why is this so short aren't your podcasts usually longer than a Superfund cleanup?” Well I take what I can get and if there's a question you can think of related to Ikon or Alterra or any of the company's mountains, it was on my list. But Smith had either 30 minutes or zero minutes so I took the win.Podcast NotesOn Deer ValleyI was talking to the Deer Valley folks the other day and we agreed that they're doing so much so fast that it's almost impossible to tell the story. I mean this was Deer Valley two winters ago:And this will be Deer Valley this winter:Somehow it's easier to write 3,000 words on Indy Pass adding a couple of Northeast backwaters than it is to frame up the ambitions of a Utah ski area expanding by as much skiable acreage as all 30 New Hampshire ski areas combined in just two years. Anyway Deer Valley is about to be the sixth-largest ski area in America and when this whole project is done in a few years it will be number four at 5,700 acres, behind only Vail Resorts' neighboring Park City (7,300 acres), Alterra's own Palisades Tahoe (6,000 acres), and Boyne Resorts' Big Sky (5,850 acres).On recent Steamboat upgradesYes the Wild Blue Gondola is cool and I'm sure everyone from Baton-Tucky just loves it. But everything I'm hearing out of Steamboat over the past couple of winters indicates that A) the 650-acre Mahogany Ridge expansion adds a fistfighting dimension to what had largely been an intermediate ski resort, and that, B) so far, no one goes over there, partially because they don't know about it and partially because the resort only cut one trail in the whole amazing zone (far looker's left):I guess just go ski this one while everyone else still thinks Steamboat is nothing but gondolas and Sunshine Peak.On Winter Park being “on deck”After stringing the two sides of Palisades Tahoe together with a $75 trillion gondola and expanding Steamboat and nearly tripling the size of Deer Valley, all signs point to Alterra next pushing its resources into actualizing Winter Park's ambitious masterplan, starting with the gondola connection to town (right side of map):On new Ikon Pass partners for 2025-26You can read about the bonus partners above, but here are the write-ups on Ikon's full seven/five-day partners:On previous Alterra podcastsThis was Smith's second appearance on the pod. Here's number one, from 2023:His predecessor, Rusty Gregory, appeared on the show three times:I've also hosted the leaders of a bunch of Alterra leaders on the pod, most recently A-Basin and Mammoth:And the heads of many Ikon Pass partners – most recently Killington and Sun Valley:On U.S. passes in JapanEpic, Ikon, Indy, and Mountain Collective are now aligned with 48 ski areas in Japan – nearly as many as the four passes have signed in Canada:On EuropeAnd here are the European ski areas aligned with Epic, Ikon, Indy, and Mountain Collective – the list is shorter than the Japanese list, but since each European ski area is made up of between one and 345 ski areas, the actual skiable acreage here is likely equal to the landmass of Greenland:On skier and ski area growth in ChinaChina's ski industry appears to be developing rapidly - I'm not sure what to make of the difference between “ski resorts” and “ski resorts with aerial ropeways.” Normally I'd assume that means with or without lifts, but that doesn't make a lot of sense and sometimes nations frame things in very different ways.On the village at Palisades TahoeThe approval process for a village expansion on the Olympic side of Palisades Tahoe was a very convoluted one. KCRA sums the outcome up well (I'll note that “Alterra” did not call for anything in 2011, as the company didn't exist until 2017):Under the initial 2011 application, Alterra had called for the construction of 2,184 bedrooms. That was reduced to 1,493 bedrooms in a 2014 revised proposal where 850 housing units — a mix of condominiums, hotel rooms and timeshares — were planned. The new agreement calls for a total of 896 bedrooms.The groups that pushed this downsizing were primarily Keep Tahoe Blue and Sierra Watch. Smith is very diplomatic in discussing this project on the podcast, pointing to the “collaboration, communication, and a little bit of compromise” that led to the final agreement.I'm not going to be so diplomatic. Fighting dense, pedestrian-oriented development that could help reconfigure traffic patterns and housing availability in a region that is choking on ski traffic and drowning in housing costs is dumb. The systems for planning, approving, and building anything that is different from what already exists in this nation are profoundly broken. The primary issue is this: these anti-development crusaders position themselves as environmental defenders without acknowledging (or, more likely, realizing), that the existing traffic, blight, and high costs driving their resistance is a legacy of haphazard development in past decades, and that more thoughtful, human-centric projects could mitigate, rather than worsen, these concerns. The only thing an oppose-everything stance achieves is to push development farther out into the hinterlands, exacerbating sprawl and traffic.British Columbia is way ahead of us here. I've written about this extensively in the past, and won't belabor the point here except to cite what I wrote last year about the 3,711-home city sprouting from raw wilderness below Cypress Mountain, a Boyne-owned Ikon Pass partner just north of Vancouver:Mountain town housing is most often framed as an intractable problem, ingrown and malignant and impossible to reset or rethink or repair. Too hard to do. But it is not hard to do. It is the easiest thing in the world. To provide more housing, municipalities must allow developers to build more housing, and make them do it in a way that is dense and walkable, that is mixed with commerce, that gives people as many ways to move around without a car as possible.This is not some new or brilliant idea. This is simply how humans built villages for about 10,000 years, until the advent of the automobile. Then we started building our spaces for machines instead of for people. This was a mistake, and is the root problem of every mountain town housing crisis in North America. That and the fact that U.S. Americans make no distinction between the hyper-thoughtful new urbanist impulses described here and the sprawling shitpile of random buildings that are largely the backdrop of our national life. The very thing that would inject humanity into the mountains is recast as a corrupting force that would destroy a community's already-compromised-by-bad-design character.Not that it will matter to our impossible American brains, but Canada is about to show us how to do this. Over the next 25 years, a pocket of raw forest hard against Cypress' access road will sprout a city of 3,711 homes that will house thousands of people. It will be a human-scaled, pedestrian-first community, a city neighborhood dropped onto a mountainside. A gondola could connect the complex to Cypress' lifts thousands of feet up the mountain – more cars off the road. It would look like this (the potential aerial lift is not depicted here):Here's how the whole thing would set up against the mountain:And here's what it would be like at ground level:Like wow that actually resembles something that is not toxic to the human soul. But to a certain sort of Mother Earth evangelist, the mere suggestion of any sort of mountainside development is blasphemous. I understand this impulse, but I believe that it is misdirected, a too-late reflex against the subdivision-off-an-exit-ramp Build-A-Bungalow mentality that transformed this country into a car-first sprawlscape. I believe a reset is in order: to preserve large tracts of wilderness, we should intensely develop small pieces of land, and leave the rest alone. This is about to happen near Cypress. We should pay attention.Given the environmental community's reflexive and vociferous opposition to a recent proposal to repurpose tracts of not-necessarily-majestic wilderness for housing, I'm not optimistic that we possess the cultural brainpower to improve our own lives through policy. Which is why I've been writing more about passes and less about our collective ambitions to make everything from the base of the lifts outward as inconvenient and expensive as possible.The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us for 20% off the annual rate through Monday, Oct. 27, 2025. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

Take 20% off an annual Storm subscription through 10/22/2025 to receive 100% of the newsletter's content. Thank you for your support of independent ski journalism.WhoPhill Gross, owner, and Mike Solimano, CEO of Killington and Pico, VermontRecorded onJuly 10, 2025About KillingtonClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Phill Gross and teamLocated in: Killington, VermontYear founded: 1958Pass affiliations: Ikon Pass: 5 or 7 combined days with PicoReciprocal partners: Pico access is included on all Killington passesClosest neighboring ski areas: Pico (:12), Saskadena Six (:39), Okemo (:40), Quechee (:44), Ascutney (:55), Storrs (:59), Harrington Hill (:59), Magic (1:00), Whaleback (1:02), Sugarbush (1:04), Bromley (1:04), Middlebury Snowbowl (1:08), Arrowhead (1:10), Mad River Glen (1:11)Base elevation: 1,165 feet at Skyeship BaseSummit elevation: 4,142 feet at top of K-1 gondola (hike-to summit of Killington Peak at 4,241 feet)Vertical drop: 2,977 feet lift-served, 3,076 hike-toSkiable Acres: 1,509Average annual snowfall: 250 inchesTrail count: 155 (43% advanced/expert, 40% intermediate, 17% beginner)Lift count: 20 (2 gondolas, 2 six-packs, 4 high-speed quads, 5 fixed-grip quads, 2 triples, 1 double, 1 platter, 3 carpets - view Lift Blog's inventory of Killington's lift fleet; Killington plans to replace the Snowdon triple with a fixed-grip quad for the 2026-27 ski season)History: from New England Ski HistoryAbout PicoClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Phill Gross and teamLocated in: Mendon, VermontYear founded: 1934Pass affiliations: Ikon Pass: 5 or 7 combined days with KillingtonReciprocal partners: Pico access is included on all Killington passes; four days Killington access included on Pico K.A. PassClosest neighboring ski areas: Killington (:12), Saskadena Six (:38), Okemo (:38), Quechee (:42), Ascutney (:53), Storrs (:57), Harrington Hill (:55), Magic (:58), Whaleback (1:00), Sugarbush (1:01), Bromley (1:00), Middlebury Snowbowl (1:01), Mad River Glen (1:07), Arrowhead (1:09)Base elevation: 2,000 feetSummit elevation: 3,967 feetVertical drop: 1,967 feetSkiable Acres: 468Average annual snowfall: 250 inchesTrail count: 58 (36% advanced/expert, 46% intermediate, 18% beginner)Lift count: 7 (2 high-speed quads, 2 triples, 1 doubles, 2 carpets - view Lift Blog's inventory of Pico's lift fleet)History: from New England Ski HistoryWhy I interviewed themThe longest-tenured non-government ski area operator in America, as far as I know, is the Seeholzer family, owner-operators of Beaver Mountain, Utah since 1939. Third-generation owner Travis Seeholzer came on the pod a few years back to trace the eight-decade arc from this dude flexing 10-foot-long kamikaze boards to the present:Just about every ski area in America was hacked out of the wilderness by Some Guy Who Looked Like That. Dave McCoy at Mammoth or Ernie Blake at Taos or Everett Kircher at Boyne Mountain, swarthy, willful fellows who flew airplanes and erected rudimentary chairlifts in impossible places and hammered together their own baselodges. Over decades they chiseled these mountains into their personal Rushmores, a life's work, a human soul knotted to nature in a built place that would endure for generations.It's possible that they all imagined their family name governing those generations. In the remarkable case of Boyne, they still do. But the Kirchers and the Seeholzers are ski-world exceptions. Successive generations are often uninterested in the chore of legacy building. Or they try and say wow this is expensive. Or bad weather leads to bad financial choices by our cigar-smoking, backhoe-driving, machete-wielding founder and his sons and daughters never get their chance. The ski area's deed shuffles into the portfolio of a Colorado Skico and McCoy fades a little each year and at some point Mammoth is just another ski area owned by Alterra Mountain Company.It's tempting to sentimentalize the past, to lament skiing's macro-transition from gritty network of founder-kingpin fifes to set of corporate brands, to conclude that “this generation” just doesn't have the tenacity of a Blake or a McCoy. But the America where a fellow could turn up with a dump truck and a chainsaw and flatten raw forest into a for-profit business with minimal protest is gone. Every part of the ski ecosystem is more regulated, complicated, and expensive than it's ever been. The appeal of running such a machine - and the skillset necessary to do so - is entirely different from that of sculpting your own personal snow Narnia from scratch. We will always have family-owned ski areas (we still have hundreds), and an occasional modern founder-disruptor like Mount Bohemia's Lonie Glieberman will materialize like a new X-man. But ski conglomerates have probably always been inevitable, and are probably largely the industry's future. They are best suited, in most cases, to manage, finance, and maintain the vast machinery of our largest ski centers (and also to create a ski landscape in which not all ski area operators are Some Guy Who Looked Like That).Killington demonstrates this arc from rambunctious founder to corporate vassal as well as any mountain in the country. Founded in 1958 by the wily and wild Pres Smith, the ski area's parent company, Sherburne Corp., bought Sunday River, Maine in 1973 and Mount Snow, Vermont in 1977. The two Vermont mountains became S-K-I in 1984, bought five more ski areas, and merged with four-resort LBO in 1996 to become the titanic American Skiing Company. Unfortunately ASC turned out to be skiing's Titanic, and one of the company's last acts before dissolution was to sell Killington and Pico to Utah-based Powdr in 2007.The Beast had been tamed, at least on paper. Corporate ownership of some sort felt as stapled to the mountain as Killington's 3,000 snowguns. And mostly, well, it didn't matter. Other than Powdr's disastrous attempts to shorten the resort's famously long seasons, Killington never lost its feisty edge. Over the decades the ski area modernized, masterplanned, and shed skier volume while increasing its viability as a business. Modern Killington wasn't the kingdom of a charismatic and ever-present founder, but it was a pretty good ski area.And then, suddenly, shockingly, Powdr sold both Killington and Pico last August. And they didn't sell the ski areas to Vail or Alterra or Boyne or to anyone who owned any ski areas at all. Instead, a group of local investors - led by Phill Gross and Michael Ferri, longtime Killington homeowners who ran a variety of non-ski-related businesses - bought the mountains. After 51 years as part of a multi-mountain ownership group, Killington (its relationship to neighboring Pico notwithstanding), was once again independent.It was all so improbable. Out-of-state operators had purchased five of Vermont's large ski areas in recent years: Colorado-based Vail Resorts bought Stowe in 2017, Okemo in 2018, and Mount Snow in 2019; Denver-based Alterra claimed Sugarbush in 2019; and Utah-based Pacific Group Resorts added Jay Peak to their small portfolio in 2022. Very few ski areas have ever entered the corporate matrix and re-emerged as independents. Grand Targhee, Wyoming; Waterville Valley, New Hampshire; and Mountain Creek, New Jersey (technically owned by multimountain operator Snow Partners) are exceptions spun off from larger companies. But mostly, once a larger entity absorbed a ski area, it stays locked in the multimountain universe forever.So what would this mean? For the largest and busiest mountain in the eastern United States to be independent? Did this, along with Powdr's intentions to sell Mount Bachelor (since rescinded), Eldora (sale in process), and Silver Star (no update), mark a reversal in the consolidation trend that had gathered 30 percent of America's ski areas under the umbrella of a multi-mountain operator? Did Killington's group of wealthy-but-not-Bezos-wealthy investors set an alternate blueprint for large-mountain ownership, especially when considered alongside the sale of Jackson Hole to a similar group the year before? Had the Ikon Pass – that harbinger of mass-market pass domination that had forced the we-better-join-them sales of Crystal Mountain, Washington and Sugarbush – inadvertently become a reliable revenue pipeline that made independence more viable? And would Killington, well-managed and constantly improving, backslide under cowboy owners who want to Q-Burke the place in their image?We're a year in now, and we have some clarity on these questions, along with two new chairlifts (Superstar this year, Snowdon next), 1,000 new snowguns, a revitalized Skyeship Gondola, and progressing plans on the East's first true ski village. Locals seem happy, management seems happy, the owners seem happy. Easy enough, Gross points out in our interview, when winter hits deep like the last one did. But can we keep the party going indefinitely? It was time for a check-in.What we talked aboutA strong first winter under independent ownership; what spring skiing off Canyon lift told us about the importance of Superstar; “it's an incredibly complex operation”; letting the smart people do their jobs; Killington's surprise spin-off from a multi-mountain operator; “our job is to keep the honeymoon going”; Superstar's six-pack upgrade; why six-packs are probably Killington's lift-upgrade future; why Pico is demolishing the Bonanza lift for a covered carpet; why Superstar won't have bubbles; where bubbles might make sense in a future lift; why ski areas can no longer run snowmaking under newly constructed chairlifts; why Superstar is a Doppelmayr machine after Killington installed a brand-new Leitner-Poma six at Snowdon in 2018; long- and short-term Superstar impacts to Killington's long season; long-term thoughts around early-season walkway access to North Ridge; Skyeship Gondola upgrades, including $5 million in new cabins; what 1,000 new snowguns means in practice; why Killington sold the Wobbly Barn; considering Killington as a business and investment; how Killington is a different financial beast from other Vermont ski areas; how close Killington was to going unlimited on Ikon Pass; Phill's journey to buying Killington; Devil's Fiddle and why sometimes things that don't make sense financially make sense anyway; “we want to own this for generations to come”; a village layout and timeline update – “we want to make sure that this is something that's additive to the ski experience” even if you don't own within it; “Great Gulf wants this [village] to be competitive for the western resorts”; “we don't want to change what Pico is”; how piping water over from Killington has reinvigorated and stabilized Pico; why Killington and Pico remained on Ikon Pass post-sale and probably will for the foreseeable future; is Ikon helping big ski areas stay independent?; Killington's steady rise in lift ticket prices; future lift upgrades and why the Snowdon Triple is next up for a replacement.What I got wrong* File “opinionation” under LOL I'm Dumb Talking Is Hard* I said that former Killington owner Powdr had “just sold” Eldora, but that's not accurate: in July, the town of Nederland, Colorado, announced their intent to purchase the ski area. The sales process is ongoing.Podcast NotesOn previous Killington podsOn Gross' purchase of Killington and PicoOn ANSI chairlift standardsWe get a bit in the weeds with a reference to “ANSI standards” for chairlifts. ANSI is the American National Standards Institute, a nonprofit organization that sets voluntary but widely adopted standards for everything from office furniture to electrical systems to safety signage in the United States. The ANSI standard for lifts, according to a blog post describing the code's 2022 update, is “developed by the National Ski Areas Association (NSAA), [and] establishes standard requirements for the design, manufacture, construction, operation, and maintenance of passenger ropeways.” On Killington's long seasonsKillington often opens in October (though it has not done so since 2018), and closes in June (three straight years before a deliberately truncated 2024-25 season to begin demolition of the Superstar chair). List of Killington open and close dates since 1987-88.On Win Smith and Killington and SugarbushOn Killington's villageThe East needs more of this:On Killington's peak lift ticket pricesPer New England Ski History: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

In this episode, Scott Becker reviews market movers including gains for Salesforce, Nestle, LVMH, and Hims & Hers, while Trump Media and Vail Resorts see declines.

In this episode, Scott Becker reviews market movers including gains for Salesforce, Nestle, LVMH, and Hims & Hers, while Trump Media and Vail Resorts see declines.

WhoAlan Henceroth, President and Chief Operating Officer of Arapahoe Basin, Colorado – Al runs the best ski area-specific executive blog in America – check it out:Recorded onMay 19, 2025About Arapahoe BasinClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Alterra Mountain Company, which also owns:Pass access* Ikon Pass: unlimited* Ikon Base Pass: unlimited access from opening day to Friday, Dec. 19, then five total days with no blackouts from Dec. 20 until closing day 2026Base elevation* 10,520 feet at bottom of Steep Gullies* 10,780 feet at main baseSummit elevation* 13,204 feet at top of Lenawee Mountain on East Wall* 12,478 feet at top of Lazy J Tow (connector between Lenawee Express six-pack and Zuma quad)Vertical drop* 1,695 feet lift-served – top of Lazy J Tow to main base* 1,955 feet lift-served, with hike back up to lifts – top of Lazy J Tow to bottom of Steep Gullies* 2,424 feet hike-to – top of Lenawee Mountain to Main BaseSkiable Acres: 1,428Average annual snowfall:* Claimed: 350 inches* Bestsnow.net: 308 inchesTrail count: 147 – approximate terrain breakdown: 24% double-black, 49% black, 20% intermediate, 7% beginnerLift count: 9 (1 six-pack, 1 high-speed quad, 3 fixed-grip quads, 1 double, 2 carpets, 1 ropetow)Why I interviewed himWe can generally splice U.S. ski centers into two categories: ski resort and ski area. I'll often use these terms interchangeably to avoid repetition, but they describe two very different things. The main distinction: ski areas rise directly from parking lots edged by a handful of bunched utilitarian structures, while ski resorts push parking lots into the next zipcode to accommodate slopeside lodging and commerce.There are a lot more ski areas than ski resorts, and a handful of the latter present like the former, with accommodations slightly off-hill (Sun Valley) or anchored in a near-enough town (Bachelor). But mostly the distinction is clear, with the defining question being this: is this a mountain that people will travel around the world to ski, or one they won't travel more than an hour to ski?Arapahoe Basin occupies a strange middle. Nothing in the mountain's statistical profile suggests that it should be anything other than a Summit County locals hang. It is the 16th-largest ski area in Colorado by skiable acres, the 18th-tallest by lift-served vertical drop, and the eighth-snowiest by average annual snowfall. The mountain runs just six chairlifts and only two detachables. Beginner terrain is limited. A-Basin has no base area lodging, and in fact not much of a base area at all. Altitude, already an issue for the Colorado ski tourist, is amplified here, where the lifts spin from nearly 11,000 feet. A-Basin should, like Bridger Bowl in Montana (upstream from Big Sky) or Red River in New Mexico (across the mountain from Taos) or Sunlight in Colorado (parked between Aspen and I-70), be mostly unknown beside its heralded big-name neighbors (Keystone, Breck, Copper).And it sort of is, but also sort of isn't. Like tiny (826-acre) Aspen Mountain, A-Basin transcends its statistical profile. Skiers know it, seek it, travel for it, cross it off their lists like a snowy Eiffel Tower. Unlike Aspen, A-Basin has no posse of support mountains, no grided downtown spilling off the lifts, no Kleenex-level brand that stands in for skiing among non-skiers. And yet Vail tried buying the bump in 1997, and Alterra finally did in 2024. Meanwhile, nearby Loveland, bigger, taller, snowier, higher, easier to access with its trip-off-the-interstate parking lots, is still ignored by tourists and conglomerates alike.Weird. What explains A-Basin's pull? Onetime and future Storm guest Jackson Hogen offers, in his Snowbird Secrets book, an anthropomorphic explanation for that Utah powder dump's aura: As it turns out, everyone has a story for how they came to discover Snowbird, but no one knows the reason. Some have the vanity to think they picked the place, but the wisest know the place picked them.That is the secret that Snowbird has slipped into our subconscious; deep down, we know we were summoned here. We just have to be reminded of it to remember, an echo of the Platonic notion that all knowledge is remembrance. In the modern world we are so divorced from our natural selves that you would think we'd have lost the power to hear a mountain call us. And indeed we have, but such is the enormous reach of this place that it can still stir the last seed within us that connects us to the energy that surrounds us every day yet we do not see. The resonance of that tiny, vibrating seed is what brings us here, to this extraordinary place, to stand in the heart of the energy flow.Yeah I don't know, Man. We're drifting into horoscope territory here. But I also can't explain why we all like to do This Dumb Thing so much that we'll wrap our whole lives around it. So if there is some universe force, what Hogen calls “vibrations” from Hidden Peak's quartz, drawing skiers to Snowbird, could there also be some proton-kryptonite-laserbeam s**t sucking us all toward A-Basin? If there's a better explanation, I haven't found it.What we talked aboutThe Beach; keeping A-Basin's whole ski footprint open into May; Alterra buys the bump – “we really liked the way Alterra was doing things… and letting the resorts retain their identity”; the legacy of former owner Dream; how hardcore, no-frills ski area A-Basin fits into an Alterra portfolio that includes high-end resorts such as Deer Valley and Steamboat; “you'd be surprised how many people from out of state ski here too”; Ikon as Colorado sampler pack (or not); local reaction to Alterra's purchase – “I think it's fair that there was anxiety”; balancing the wild ski cycle of over-the-top peak days and soft periods; parking reservations; going unlimited on the full Ikon Pass and how parking reservations play in – “we spent a ridiculous amount of time talking about it”; the huge price difference between Epic and Ikon and how that factors into the access calculus; why A-Basin still sells a single-mountain season pass; whether reciprocal partnerships with Monarch and Silverton will remain in place; “I've been amazed at how few things I've been told to do” by Alterra; A-Basin's dirt-cheap early-season pass; why early season is “a more competitive time” than it used to be; why A-Basin left Mountain Collective; Justice Department anti-trust concerns around Alterra's A-Basin purchase – “it never was clear to me what the concerns were”; breaking down A-Basin's latest U.S. Forest Service masterplan – “everything in there, we hope to do”; a parking lot pulse gondola and why that makes sense over shuttles; why A-Basin plans a two-lift system of beginner machines; why should A-Basin care about beginner terrain?; is beginner development is related to Ikon Pass membership?; what it means that the MDP designs for 700 more skiers per day; assessing the Lenawee Express sixer three seasons in; why A-Basin sold the old Lenawee lift to independent Sunlight, Colorado; A-Basin's patrol unionizing; and 100 percent renewable energy.What I got wrong* I said that A-Basin was the only mountain that had been caught up in antitrust issues, but that's inaccurate: when S-K-I and LBO Enterprises merged into American Skiing Company in 1996, the U.S. Justice Department compelled the combined company to sell Cranmore and Waterville Valley, both in New Hampshire. Waterville Valley remains independent. Cranmore stayed independent for a while, and has since 2010 been owned by Fairbank Group, which also owns Jiminy Peak in Massachusetts and operates Bromley, Vermont.* I said that A-Basin's $259 early-season pass, good for unlimited access from opening day through Dec. 25, “was like one day at Vail,” which is sort of true and sort of not. Vail Mountain's day-of lift ticket will hit $230 from Nov. 14 to Dec. 11, then increase to $307 or $335 every day through Christmas. All Resorts Epic Day passes, which would get skiers on the hill for any of those dates, currently sell for between $106 and $128 per day. Unlimited access to Vail Mountain for that full early-season period would require a full Epic Pass, currently priced at $1,121.* This doesn't contradict anything we discussed, but it's worth noting some parking reservations changes that A-Basin implemented following our conversation. Reservations will now be required on weekends only, and from Jan. 3 to May 3, a reduction from 48 dates last winter to 36 for this season. The mountain will also allow skiers to hold four reservations at once, doubling last year's limit of two.Why now was a good time for this interviewOne of the most striking attributes of modern lift-served skiing is how radically different each ski area is. Panic over corporate hegemony power-stamping each child mountain into snowy McDonald's clones rarely survives past the parking lot. Underscoring the point is neighboring ski areas, all over America, that despite the mutually intelligible languages of trail ratings and patrol uniforms and lift and snowgun furniture, and despite sharing weather patterns and geologic origins and local skier pools, feel whole-cut from different eras, cultures, and imaginations. The gates between Alta and Snowbird present like connector doors between adjoining hotel rooms but actualize as cross-dimensional Mario warpzones. The 2.4-mile gondola strung between the Alpine Meadows and Olympic sides of Palisades Tahoe may as well connect a baseball stadium with an opera house. Crossing the half mile or so between the summits of Sterling at Smugglers' Notch and Spruce Peak at Stowe is a journey of 15 minutes and five decades. And Arapahoe Basin, elder brother of next-door Keystone, resembles its larger neighbor like a bat resembles a giraffe: both mammals, but of entirely different sorts. Same with Sugarbush and Mad River Glen, Vermont; Sugar Bowl, Donner Ski Ranch, and Boreal, California; Park City and Deer Valley, Utah; Killington and Pico, Vermont; Highlands and Nub's Nob, Michigan; Canaan Valley and Timberline and Nordic-hybrid White Grass, West Virginia; Aspen's four Colorado ski areas; the three ski areas sprawling across Mt. Hood's south flank; and Alpental and its clump of Snoqualmie sisters across the Washington interstate. Proximity does not equal sameness.One of The Storm's preoccupations is with why this is so. For all their call-to-nature appeal, ski areas are profoundly human creations, more city park than wildlife preserve. They are sculpted, managed, manicured. Even the wildest-feeling among them – Mount Bohemia, Silverton, Mad River Glen – are obsessively tended to, ragged by design.A-Basin pulls an even neater trick: a brand curated for rugged appeal, scaffolded by brand-new high-speed lifts and a self-described “luxurious European-style bistro.” That the Alterra Mountain Company-owned, megapass pioneer floating in the busiest ski county in the busiest ski state in America managed to retain its rowdy rap even as the onetime fleet of bar-free double chairs toppled into the recycling bin is a triumph of branding.But also a triumph of heart. A-Basin as Colorado's Alta or Taos or Palisades is a title easily ceded to Telluride or Aspen Highlands, similarly tilted high-alpiners. But here it is, right beside buffed-out Keystone, a misunderstood mountain with its own wild side but a fair-enough rap as an approachable landing zone for first-time Rocky Mountain explorers westbound out of New York or Ohio. Why are A-Basin and Keystone so different? The blunt drama of A-Basin's hike-in terrain helps, but it's more enforcer than explainer. The real difference, I believe, is grounded in the conductor orchestrating this mad dance.Since Henceroth sat down in the COO chair 20 years ago, Keystone has had nine president-general manager equivalents. A-Basin was already 61 years old in 2005, giving it a nice branding headstart on younger Keystone, born in 1970. But both had spent nearly two decades, from 1978 to 1997, co-owned by a dogfood conglomerate that often marketed them as one resort, and the pair stayed glued together on a multimountain pass for a couple of decades afterward.Henceroth, with support and guidance from the real-estate giant that owned A-Basin in the Ralston-Purina-to-Alterra interim, had a series of choices to make. A-Basin had only recently installed snowmaking. There was no lift access to Zuma Bowl, no Beavers. The lift system consisted of three double chairs and two triples. Did this aesthetic minimalism and pseudo-independence define A-Basin? Or did the mountain, shaped by the generations of leaders before Henceroth, hold some intangible energy and pull, that thing we recognize as atmosphere, culture, vibe? Would The Legend lose its duct-taped edge if it:* Expanded 400 mostly low-angle acres into Zuma Bowl (2007)* Joined Vail Resorts' Epic Pass (2009)* Installed the mountain's first high-speed lift (Black Mountain Express in 2010)* Expand 339 additional acres into the Beavers (2018), and service that terrain with an atypical-for-Colorado 1,501-vertical-foot fixed-grip lift* Exit the Epic Pass following the 2018-19 ski season* Immediately join Mountain Collective and Ikon as a multimountain replacement (2019)* Ditch a 21-year-old triple chair for the mountain's first high-speed six-pack (2022)* Sell to Alterra Mountain Company (2024)* Require paid parking reservations on high-volume days (2024)* Go unlimited on the Ikon Pass and exit Mountain Collective (2025)* Release an updated USFS masterplan that focuses largely on the novice ski experience (2025)That's a lot of change. A skier booted through time from Y2K to October 2025 would examine that list and conclude that Rad Basin had been tamed. But ski a dozen laps and they'd say well not really. Those multimillion upgrades were leashed by something priceless, something human, something that kept them from defining what the mountain is. There's some indecipherable alchemy here, a thing maybe not quite as durable as the mountain itself, but rooted deeper than the lift towers strung along it. It takes a skilled chemist to cook this recipe, and while they'll never reveal every secret, you can visit the restaurant as many times as you'd like.Why you should ski Arapahoe BasinWe could do a million but here are nine:1) $: Two months of early-season skiing costs roughly the same as A-Basin's neighbors charge for a single day. A-Basin's $259 fall pass is unlimited from opening day through Dec. 25, cheaper than a Dec. 20 day-of lift ticket at Breck ($281), Vail ($335), Beaver Creek ($335), or Copper ($274), and not much more than Keystone ($243). 2) Pali: When A-Basin tore down the 1,329-vertical-foot, 3,520-foot-long Pallavicini double chair, a 1978 Yan, in 2020, they replaced it with a 1,325-vertical-foot, 3,512-foot-long Leitner-Poma double chair. It's one of just a handful of new doubles installed in America over the past decade, underscoring a rare-in-modern-skiing commitment to atmosphere, experience, and snow preservation over uphill capacity. 3) The newest lift fleet in the West: The oldest of A-Basin's six chairlifts, Zuma, arrived brand-new in 2007.4) Wall-to-wall: when I flew into Colorado for a May 2025 wind-down, five ski areas remained open. Despite solid snowpack, Copper, Breck, and Winter Park all spun a handful of lifts on a constrained footprint. But A-Basin and Loveland still ran every lift, even over the Monday-to-Thursday timeframe of my visit.5) The East Wall: It's like this whole extra ski area. Not my deal as even skiing downhill at 12,500 feet hurts, but some of you like this s**t:6) May pow: I mean yeah I did kinda just get lucky but damn these were some of the best turns I found all year (skiing with A-Basin Communications Manager Shayna Silverman):7) The Beach: the best ski area tailgate in North America (sorry, no pet dragons allowed - don't shoot the messenger):8) The Beavers: Just glades and glades and glades (a little crunchy on this run, but better higher up and the following day):9) It's a ski area first: In a county of ski resorts, A-Basin is a parking-lots-at-the-bottom-and-not-much-else ski area. It's spare, sparse, high, steep, and largely exposed. Skiers are better at self-selecting than we suppose, meaning the ability level of the average A-Basin skier is more Cottonwoods than Connecticut. That impacts your day in everything from how the liftlines flow to how the bumps form to how many zigzaggers you have to dodge on the down.Podcast NotesOn the dates of my visit We reference my last A-Basin visit quite a bit – for context, I skied there May 6 and 7, 2025. Both nice late-season pow days.On A-Basin's long seasonsIt's surprisingly difficult to find accurate open and close date information for most ski areas, especially before 2010 or so, but here's what I could cobble together for A-Basin - please let me know if you have a more extensive list, or if any of this is wrong:On A-Basin's ownership timelineArapahoe Basin probably gets too much credit for being some rugged indie. Ralston-Purina, then-owners of Keystone, purchased A-Basin in 1978, then added Breckenridge to the group in 1993 before selling the whole picnic basket to Vail in 1997. The U.S. Justice Department wouldn't let the Eagle County operator have all three, so Vail flipped Arapahoe to a Canadian real estate empire, then called Dundee, some months later. That company, which at some point re-named itself Dream, pumped a zillion dollars into the mountain before handing it off to Alterra last year.On A-Basin leaving Epic PassA-Basin self-ejected from Epic Pass in 2019, just after Vail maxed out Colorado by purchasing Crested Butte and before they fully invaded the East with the Peak Resorts purchase. Arapahoe Basin promptly joined Mountain Collective and Ikon, swapping unlimited-access on four varieties of Epic Pass for limited-days products. Henceroth and I talked this one out during our 2022 pod, and it's a fascinating case study in building a better business by decreasing volume.On the price difference between Ikon and Epic with A-Basin accessConcerns about A-Basin hurdling back toward the overcrowded Epic days by switching to Ikon's unlimited tier tend to overlook this crucial distinction: Vail sold a 2018-19 version of the Epic Pass that included unlimited access to Keystone and A-Basin for an early-bird rate of $349. The full 2025-26 Ikon Pass debuted at nearly four times that, retailing for $1,329, and just ramped up to $1,519.On Alterra mountains with their own season passesWhile all Alterra-owned ski areas (with the exception of Deer Valley), are unlimited on the full Ikon Pass and nine are unlimited with no blackouts on Ikon Base, seven of those sell their own unlimited season pass that costs less than Base. The sole unlimited season pass for Crystal, Mammoth, Palisades Tahoe, Steamboat, Stratton, and Sugarbush is a full Ikon Pass, and the least-expensive unlimited season pass for Solitude is the Ikon Base. Deer Valley leads the nation with its $4,100 unlimited season pass. See the Alterra chart at the top of this article for current season pass prices to all of the company's mountains.On A-Basin and Schweitzer pass partnershipsAlterra has been pretty good about permitting its owned ski areas to retain historic reciprocal partners on their single-mountain season passes. For A-Basin, this means three no-blackout days at Monarch and two unguided days at Silverton. Up at Schweitzer, passholders get three midweek days each at Whitewater, Mt. Hood Meadows, Castle Mountain, Loveland, and Whitefish. None of these ski areas are on Ikon Pass, and the benefit is only stapled to A-Basin- or Schweitzer-specific season passes.On the Mountain Collective eventI talk about Mountain Collective as skiing's most exclusive country club. Nothing better demonstrates that characterization than this podcast I recorded at the event last fall, when in around 90 minutes I had conversations with the top leaders of Boyne Resorts, Snowbird, Aspen, Jackson Hole, Sun Valley, Snowbasin, Grand Targhee, and many more.On Mountain Collective and Ikon overlapThe Mountain Collective-Ikon overlap is kinda nutso:On Pennsylvania skiingIn regards to the U.S. Justice Department grilling Alterra on its A-Basin acquisition, it's still pretty stupid that the agency allowed Vail Resorts to purchase eight of the 19 public chairlift-served ski areas in Pennsylvania without a whisper of protest. These eight ski areas almost certainly account for more than half of all skier visits in a state that typically ranks sixth nationally for attendance. Last winter, the state's 2.6 million skier visits accounted for more days than vaunted ski states New Hampshire (2.4 million), Washington (2.3), Montana (2.2), Idaho (2.1). or Oregon (2.0). Only New York (3.4), Vermont (4.2), Utah (6.5), California (6.6), and Colorado (13.9) racked up more.On A-Basin's USFS masterplanNothing on the scale of Zuma or Beavers inbound, but the proposed changes would tap novice terrain that has always existed but never offered a good access point for beginners:On pulse gondolasA-Basin's proposed pulse gondola, should it be built, would be just the sixth such lift in America, joining machines at Taos, Northstar, Steamboat, Park City, and Snowmass. Loon plans to build a pulse gondola in 2026.On mid-mountain beginner centersBig bad ski resorts have attempted to amp up family appeal in recent years with gondola-serviced mid-mountain beginner centers, which open gentle, previously hard-to-access terrain to beginners. This was the purpose of mid-stations off Jackson Hole's Sweetwater Gondola and Big Sky's new-for-this-year Explorer Gondola. A-Basin's gondy (not the parking lot pulse gondola, but the one terminating at Sawmill Flats in the masterplan image above), would provide up and down lift access allowing greenies to lap the new detach quad above it.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

WhoStephanie Cox, CEO of the National Ski PatrolRecorded onJune 3, 2025About National Ski PatrolFrom the organization's website:The National Ski Patrol is a federally-chartered 501(c)(3) nonprofit membership association. As the leading authority of on-mountain safety, the NSP is dedicated to serving the outdoor recreation industry by providing education and accreditation to emergency care and safety service providers.With a primary focus on education and training, the organization includes more than 30,000 members [Cox says 32,000 on the pod] serving 650 patrols in the U.S., Canada, Europe and Asia. Our members work on behalf of local ski/snowboard areas and bike parks to improve the overall experience for outdoor recreationalists. Members include ski and bike patrollers, mountain and bike hosts, alumni, associates, and physician partners.The National Ski Patrol operates as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, deriving its primary financial support from membership dues, donations, user fees, and corporate sponsorships. …The national office is located in Lakewood, Colorado, and is staffed with full-time employees that handle administrative duties.Why I interviewed herThe Storm focuses unapologetically on the lift-served variety of skiing. I'll often reinforce that point by teasing Uphill Bro for skiing in the wrong direction or making fun of myself for being a lazy U.S. American happy to ride a machine up the mountain. That, mostly, is a shtick to express my preference for an ordered ski experience over the wild variety. Acres of glades twisting down the mountainside – yes, please. But I'll also take that groomed run-out back to the six-pack. This all-you-can-eat variety of skiing feeds the adrenaline monster, stows energy for the bristling explosive down. The fun part. But my hyperbolic preference for the down is also a sort-of cover-up. Because what really glues me to the trail-labeled and lift-laced bumps is that gigantic and ever-present panic button floating alongside me: ski patrol.Oh I just ran into a tree? Well that's inconvenient because now I can't remember how to speak English or why I have eight empty Miller Lite cans in my backpack. But no need to fret. Within five minutes a corps of uniformed professionals specifically trained in the idiosyncratic art of piloting an injured moron down an ungroomed hillside on an eight-foot-long sled will materialize with crackling radios and stabilize me. It's kind of amazing. Like who thought of this? I guess the same person who came up with lifeguards at the beach. When a squirrel misses its branch and falls 75 feet to the forest floor there is no Squirrel 911. Just a variety of bobcats and coyotes who are about to find an easy dinner. Humans are quite amazing animals in this way, setting up systems both highly effective and borderline invisible that grant us wide margins of error to in most cases survive even catastrophic misjudgments.Depending on your view of human nature, the existence of ski patrol is either the most or least predictable miracle layer of organized commercial ski centers. The cynical may interpret this network of makeshift shacks and their occupants as liability shields, a legal hey-we-tried taskforce vaguely taming the chaos inherent in an impossible and awkward activity. But a more generous interpretation might view ski patrol as the most benevolent component of a ski area, the only piece not intended to generate income, an acknowledgement that any one of us, on even the gentlest slope, could in an instant need someone who knows exactly what to do.I prefer that latter interpretation, but the truth is of course a complex blend of the cynical and the generous viewpoints, interlaced with a million other factors. We are all vaguely aware of this, which doesn't mean we can explain it. I mean, why is ski patrol at every ski area? The question is both simplistic and baffling. Well of course there's ski patrol because there always is. OK. But shouldn't there be some live-free-or-die exception in the rowdy ski world of backwoods trails axe-cut by misanthropic good ole' boys putting two middle fingers to society's nine-to-five, collared-shirt expectations? Like “hey man, look at the waiver, if you break your leg it's not my goddamned problem.” But there they are, anyplace there's a ski lift, wearing that same plus-symbol uniform, enforcing that same yellow-signed skier code, blanketed with that same aura of stoic unsurprise and readiness: ski patrol. Is this omnipresence simply custom and tradition? State or federal law? Insurance requirement? Do patrollers work for the ski area or for some agency or entity? An imposition like restaurant food inspectors? Enforcers like a city's police department? Attendants like stadium ushers? It's hard to say without asking, so I asked.What we talked aboutTouring ski patrols across America; #SkiVirginia; Ski Patrol's philosophical evolution over time; patrol saving my butt in Maine; how NSP ensures that patrollers are prepared to deal with the worst injuries at even the smallest ski areas; evolving and adapting over time; “this organization is by and large run by volunteers”; Avy dogs; why ski patrol is everywhere; organizational history; the relationship between NSP and individual ski areas; who funds NSP; paid versus volunteer patrollers; “one of my big goals for the organization is to make sure that all patrols fall under the NSP shield”; a couple of major ski area patrols that are not part of NSP; the general public “is not going to notice the difference” between a paid and volunteer patroller; where most of the paid patrollers work, and why; the amazing number of years the average volunteer patroller commits to the work; the rising cost of living in mountain towns; why NSP does not involve itself in pay or benefits conversations between patrollers and resorts; staying neutral on unionization drives; what it means to modernize NSP; and applying tech to help police on-mountain collisions.What I got wrong* I referenced a recent snowless winter at Wintergreen, Virginia, and said it was “in 21/22 or 22/23.” It was the winter of 2022-23, which, according to Snow Brains, was the ski area's third snowless winter in a decade, after the 2016-17 and 2018-19 campaigns.* At one point in our conversation, I mentioned “voluntary volunteers.” Which I don't know Man talking is hard I guess.Why now was a good time for this interviewI'd initially reached out to Cox as a follow-up to my podcast conversation with United Mountain Workers union President Max Magill, conducted in the wake of the December-to-January Park City patrol strike that leveled the ski area and sent owner Vail Resorts spiraling:National Ski Patrol, it turns out, has no involvement in or position on unionization. That was a bit of a record scratch but also clarifying: patrol union drives, at least for now, lack a national sponsor that could propel the movement to critical mass. Still, it seemed odd that a national organization's most visible umbrella would stand neutral on the trajectory of a tectonic movement flexing against consolidating, ever-more-distant management and escalating mountain-town affordability crises. So we talked about it a bit anyway.What I've learned, 212 episodes into The Storm, is that organizations and entities are rarely – maybe never – what you expect them or want them to be. In episode 11, recorded in January 2020, just a few months after The Storm's launch, I asked Win Smith, then National Ski Areas Association board chair and onetime owner of Sugarbush, the now very-innocent-seeming question of what the organization was doing to subsidize small or independent ski areas. Smith patiently explained that the NSAA was a trade organization, not a charity (I'm paraphrasing), and that their mission was education, lobbying, and helping to establish uniform operating standards and best practices, not a U.N.-style stabilizing force money-cannoning resources where necessary. I get that now, and have developed, through extensive interaction with the group, a deep appreciation for what the NSAA is and does, even if it is not the thing 2020 Stu thought it was or should be.I guess that's the point of The Storm Skiing Podcast: a dumb guy asking dumb questions like “so when are you going to build a gondola over Interstate 90 to connect Alpental to the rest of Summit at Snoqualmie?” and letting the nice smart people say “well wouldn't that be nice but we have other priorities,” when they mean, “sure let me pull $100 million out of my back pocket to build a more-or-less useless lift that would also spark two decades of environmental litigation and has as much chance of clearing airspace over a federal road as a Russian stealth bomber.” Luckily I don't mind asking dumb questions. They emerge from an impulse to sort reality from fiction, to tell the story of modern lift-served skiing by tapping the brains who understand some little corner of it. Podcast NotesOn recent Ski Patrol leadershipThis could maybe go under the sometimes-included “questions I wish I'd asked” section, but really I don't wish I'd asked about it, as I have inherently little interest in organizational human drama, or the appearance of such. In this case, that maybe-drama is the rapid recent turnover in NSP leadership, aptly described by Jason Blevins last year in The Colorado Sun:The former executive director of the nonprofit World Child Cancer heath organization arrived at the National Ski Patrol two years ago, becoming the fourth director of the organization in only five years. The former bosses reported conflicts with the group's member-elected board of directors. An online petition was calling for an overhaul of the venerable organization that formed in 1938. Staff were bailing after years of turmoil that included board members twice suing their own organization. The group was losing its relevance in a quickly shifting ski resort industry.Cox landed with a plan. She started visiting ski patrols across the country. She shepherded an overhaul of the organization's training programs. She enlisted staff and kept them onboard. She mended fences with her board.Whatever happened before, Cox just hit her third anniversary with the organization, and I was mostly interested in her efforts to modernize the 87-year-old NSP.On skier visit numbers nationally and in ColoradoColorado annually accounts for nearly one in four U.S. skier visits. Here's the breakdown from last winter, according to the Kotke end-of-year survey, the definitive statistical ski industry report published annually by the NSAA:On breaking my leg at Black Mountain of MaineMost of you are tired of hearing about this, but if you're new here, this is my big ski-patrol-saves-my-ass story:On federal chartersAn important piece of the NSP why-does-it-exist puzzle is its status, since 1980, as a federally chartered nonprofit organization. Congress charters such organizations “to carry out some regional or national public purpose,” according to a 2022 report on congress.gov. As with just about anything, a comprehensive list is frustratingly difficult to find (that's why I moonlight as ski area spreadsheet mad scientist), but federally chartered organizations include such vaunted entities as the American Red Cross, the Boy and Girl Scouts of America, and Disabled American Veterans. Here's a probably-not-entirely-accurate list on Wikipedia, and a government list from 1994.On “14 patrols unionizing across the west”Here's a list I compiled of unionized ski area groups back in January. I haven't updated it, so there may be a few additions since:On Snow AngelsThis is a pretty good gut-check conversation for the Speed Gods among us:On Wachusett's anti-theft systemSki theft sucks, and some ski areas are better at fighting it than others. One of the best I'm aware of is Wachusett, Massachusetts, which has installed a comprehensive system of ski-rack-to-parking-lot cameras that has reduced thieves' success rate to near zero. “A lot of times, the police will be waiting for them when they get home with the stolen board,” longtime Wachusett President Jeff Crowley told me on a 2022 visit to the ski area.The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing all year long. Join us. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

In this episode, I'm joined by Dillon Snyder, Creative Director at Vail Resorts. Dillon makes the case that much of today's marketing output has become the equivalent of “yellow page ads.”   We unpack why so much creative feels homogenized, how overemphasis on bottom-funnel tactics hurts long-term brand health, and why simplicity is often harder than complexity. Dillon also shares his vision for a “reset button” on creative: more collaboration between creatives and marketers, less energy on commoditized tactics, and a greater willingness to take risks that actually give audiences a reason to care.     About: This podcast is produced by Port Side, a creative production studio. We help brands that move, create strategy-led, emotionally charged video campaigns.   Enjoy this episode and discover other resources below: Insight Deck | Want 20 of our favorite insights shared on the show?  Booklist | Here's our curated list of recommended books over the years. LinkedIn | Join the conversation and share ideas with other industry peers. Apple Podcast | Want to help us out? Leave us a review on Apple. Guest List | Have a Guest in Mind?  Share them with us here. Patreon | Want to support us financially?   

This podcast and article are free, but a lot of The Storm lives behind a paywall. I wish I could make everything available to everyone, but an article like this one is the result of 30-plus hours of work. Please consider supporting independent ski journalism with an upgrade to a paid Storm subscription. You can also sign up for the free tier below.WhoRob Katz, Chairperson and Chief Executive Officer, Vail ResortsRecorded onAugust 8, 2025About Vail ResortsVail Resorts owns and operates 42 ski areas in North America, Australia, and Europe. In order of acquisition:The company's Epic Pass delivers skiers unlimited access to all of these ski areas, plus access to a couple dozen partner resorts:Why I interviewed himHow long do you suppose Vail Resorts has been the largest ski area operator by number of resorts? From how the Brobots prattle on about the place, you'd think since around the same time the Mayflower bumped into Plymouth Rock. But the answer is 2018, when Vail surged to 18 ski areas – one more than number two Peak Resorts. Vail wasn't even a top-five operator until 2007, when the company's five resorts landed it in fifth place behind Powdr's eight and 11 each for Peak, Boyne, and Intrawest. Check out the year-by-year resort operator rankings since 2000:Kind of amazing, right? For decades, Vail, like Aspen, was the owner of some great Colorado ski areas and nothing more. There was no reason to assume it would ever be anything else. Any ski company that tried to get too big collapsed or surrendered. Intrawest inflated like a balloon then blew up like a pinata, ejecting trophies like Mammoth, Copper, and Whistler before straggling into the Alterra refugee camp with a half dozen survivors. American Skiing Company (ASC) united eight resorts in 1996 and was 11 by the next year and was dead by 2007. Even mighty Aspen, perhaps the brand most closely associated with skiing in American popular culture, had abandoned a nearly-two-decade experiment in owning ski areas outside of Pitkin County when it sold Blackcomb and Fortress Mountains in 1986 and Breckenridge the following year.But here we are, with Vail Resorts, improbably but indisputably the largest operator in skiing. How did Vail do this when so many other operators had a decades-long head start? And failed to achieve sustainability with so many of the same puzzle pieces? Intrawest had Whistler. ASC owned Heavenly. Booth Creek, a nine-resort upstart launched in 1996 by former Vail owner George Gillett, had Northstar. The obvious answer is the 2008 advent of the Epic Pass, which transformed the big-mountain season pass from an expensive single-mountain product that almost no one actually needed to a cheapo multi-mountain passport that almost anyone could afford. It wasn't a new idea, necessarily, but the bargain-skiing concept had never been attached to a mountain so regal as Vail, with its sprawling terrain and amazing high-speed lift fleet and Colorado mystique. A multimountain pass had never come with so little fine print – it really was unlimited, at all these great mountains, all the time - but so many asterisks: better buy now, because pretty soon skiing Christmas week is going to cost more than your car. And Vail was the first operator to understand, at scale, that almost everyone who skis at Vail or Beaver Creek or Breckenridge skied somewhere else first, and that the best way to recruit these travelers to your mountain rather than Deer Valley or Steamboat or Telluride was to make the competition inconvenient by bundling the speedbump down the street with the Alpine fantasy across the country.Vail Resorts, of course, didn't do anything. Rob Katz did these things. And yes, there was a great and capable team around him. But it's hard to ignore the fact that all of these amazing things started happening shortly after Katz's 2006 CEO appointment and stopped happening around the time of his 2021 exit. Vail's stock price: from $33.04 on Feb. 28, 2006 to $354.76 to Nov. 1, 2021. Epic Pass sales: from zero to 2.1 million. Owned resort portfolio: from five in three states to 37 in 15 states and three countries. Epic Pass portfolio: from zero ski areas to 61. The company's North American skier visits: from 6.3 million for the 2005-06 ski season to 14.9 million in 2020-21. Those same VR metrics after three-and-a-half years under his successor, Kirsten Lynch: a halving of the stock price to $151.50 on May 27, 2025, her last day in charge; a small jump to 2.3 million Epic Passes sold for 2024-25 (but that marked the product's first-ever unit decline, from 2.4 million the previous winter); a small increase to 42 owned resorts in 15 states and four countries; a small increase to 65 ski areas accessible on the Epic Pass; and a rise to 16.9 million North American skier visits (actually a three percent slump from the previous winter and the company's second consecutive year of declines, as overall U.S. skier visits increased 1.6 percent after a poor 2023-24).I don't want to dismiss the good things Lynch did ($20-an-hour minimum wage; massively impactful lift upgrades, especially in New England; a best-in-class day pass product; a better Pet Rectangle app), or ignore the fact that Vail's 2006-to-2019 trajectory would have been impossible to replicate in a world that now includes the Ikon Pass counterweight, or understate the tense community-resort relationships that boiled under Katz's do-things-and-apologize-later-maybe leadership style. But Vail Resorts became an impossible-to-ignore globe-spanning goliath not because it collected great ski areas, but because a visionary leader saw a way to transform a stale, weather-dependent business into a growing, weather-agnostic(-ish) one.You may think that “visionary” is overstating it, that merely “transformational” would do. But I don't think I appreciated, until the rise of social media, how deeply cynical America had become, or the seemingly outsized proportion of people so eager to explain why new ideas were impossible. Layer, on top of this, the general dysfunction inherent to corporate environments, which can, without constant schedule-pruning, devolve into pseudo-summits of endless meetings, in which over-educated and well-meaning A+ students stamped out of elite university assembly lines spend all day trotting between conference rooms taking notes they'll never look at and trying their best to sound brilliant but never really accomplishing anything other than juggling hundreds of daily Slack and email messages. Perhaps I am the cynical one here, but my experience in such environments is that actually getting anything of substance done with a team of corporate eggheads is nearly impossible. To be able to accomplish real, industry-wide, impactful change in modern America, and to do so with a corporate bureaucracy as your vehicle, takes a visionary.Why now was a good time for this interviewAnd the visionary is back. True, he never really left, remaining at the head of Vail's board of directors for the duration of Lynch's tenure. But the board of directors doesn't have to explain a crappy earnings report on the investor conference call, or get yelled at on CNBC, or sit in the bullseye of every Saturday morning liftline post on Facebook.So we'll see, now that VR is once again and indisputably Katz's company, whether Vail's 2006-to-2021 rise from fringe player to industry kingpin was an isolated case of right-place-at-the-right-time first-mover big-ideas luck or the masterwork of a business musician blending notes of passion, aspiration, consumer pocketbook logic, the mystique of irreplaceable assets, and defiance of conventional industry wisdom to compose a song that no one can stop singing. Will Katz be Steve Jobs returning to Apple and re-igniting a global brand? Or MJ in a Wizards jersey, his double threepeat with the Bulls untarnished but his legacy otherwise un-enhanced at best and slightly diminished at worst?I don't know. I lean toward Jobs, remaining aware that the ski industry will never achieve the scale of the Pet Rectangle industry. But Vail Resorts owns 42 ski areas out of like 6,000 on the planet, and only about one percent of them is associated with the Epic Pass. Even if Vail grew all of these metrics tenfold, it would still own just a fraction of the global ski business. Investors call this “addressable market,” meaning the size of your potential customer base if you can make them aware of your existence and convince them to use your services, and Vail's addressable market is far larger than the neighborhood it now occupies.Whether Vail can get there by deploying its current operating model is irrelevant. Remember when Amazon was an online bookstore and Netflix a DVD-by-mail outfit? I barely do either, because visionary leaders (Jeff Bezos, Reed Hastings) shaped these companies into completely different things, tapping a rapidly evolving technological infrastructure capable of delivering consumers things they don't know they need until they realize they can't live without them. Like never going into a store again or watching an entire season of TV in one night. Like the multimountain ski pass.Being visionary is not the same thing as being omniscient. Amazon's Fire smartphone landed like a bag of sand in a gastank. Netflix nearly imploded after prematurely splitting its DVD and digital businesses in 2011. Vail's decision to simultaneously chop 2021-22 Epic Pass prices by 20 percent and kill its 2020-21 digital reservation system landed alongside labor shortages, inflation, and global supply chain woes, resulting in a season of inconsistent operations that may have turned a generation off to the company. Vail bullied Powdr into selling Park City and Arapahoe Basin into leaving the Epic Pass and Colorado's state ski trade association into having to survive without four (then five) of its biggest brands. The company alienated locals everywhere, from Stowe (traffic) to Sunapee (same) to Ohio (truncated seasons) to Indiana (same) to Park City (everything) to Whistler (same) to Stevens Pass (just so many people man). The company owns 99 percent of the credit for the lift-tickets-brought-to-you-by-Tiffany pricing structure that drives the popular perception that skiing is a sport accessible only to people who rent out Yankee Stadium for their dog's birthday party.We could go on, but the point is this: Vail has messed up in the past and will mess up again in the future. You don't build companies like skyscrapers, straight up from ground to sky. You build them, appropriately for Vail, like mountains, with an earthquake here and an eruption there and erosion sometimes and long stable periods when the trees grow and the goats jump around on the rocks and nothing much happens except for once in a while a puma shows up and eats Uncle Toby. Vail built its Everest by clever and novel and often ruthless means, but in doing so made a Balkanized industry coherent, mainstreamed the ski season pass, reshaped the consumer ski experience around adventure and variety, united the sprawling Park City resorts, acknowledged the Midwest as a lynchpin ski region, and forced competitors out of their isolationist stupor and onto the magnificent-but-probably-nonexistent-if-not-for-the-existential-need-to-compete-with Vail Ikon, Indy, and Mountain Collective passes.So let's not confuse the means for the end, or assume that Katz, now 58 and self-assured, will act with the same brash stop-me-if-you-can bravado that defined his first tenure. I mean, he could. But consumers have made it clear that they have alternatives, communities have made it clear that they have ways to stop projects out of spite, Alterra has made it clear that empire building is achieved just as well through ink as through swords, and large independents such as Jackson Hole have made it clear that the passes that were supposed to be their doom instead guaranteed indefinite independence via dependable additional income streams. No one's afraid of Vail anymore.That doesn't mean the company can't grow, can't surprise us, can't reconfigure the global ski jigsaw puzzle in ways no one has thought of. Vail has brand damage to repair, but it's repairable. We're not talking about McDonald's here, where the task is trying to convince people that inedible food is delicious. We're talking about Vail Mountain and Whistler and Heavenly and Stowe – amazing places that no one needs convincing are amazing. What skiers do need to be convinced of is that Vail Resorts is these ski areas' best possible steward, and that each mountain can be part of something much larger without losing its essence.You may be surprised to hear Katz acknowledge as much in our conversation. You will probably be surprised by a lot of things he says, and the way he projects confidence and optimism without having to fully articulate a vision that he's probably still envisioning. It's this instinctual lean toward the unexpected-but-impactful that powered Vail's initial rise and will likely reboot the company. Perhaps sooner than we expect.What we talked aboutThe CEO job feels “both very familiar and very new at the same time”; Vail Resorts 2025 versus Vail Resorts 2006; Ikon competition means “we have to get better”; the Epic Friends program that replaces Buddy Tickets: 50 percent off plus skiers can apply that cost to next year's Epic Pass; simplifying the confusing; “we're going to have to get a little more creative and a little more aggressive” when it comes to lift ticket pricing; why Vail will “probably always have a window ticket”; could we see lower lift ticket prices?; a response to lower-than-expected lift ticket sales in 2024-25; “I think we need to elevate the resort brands themselves”; thoughts on skier-visit drops; why Katz returned as CEO; evolving as a leader; a morale check for a company “that was used to winning” but had suffered setbacks; getting back to growth; competing for partners and “how do we drive thoughtful growth”; is Vail an underdog now?; Vail's big advantage; reflecting on the 20 percent 2021 Epic Pass price cut and whether that was the right decision; is the Epic Pass too expensive or too cheap?; reacting to the first ever decline in Epic Pass unit sales numbers; why so many mountains are unlimited on Epic Local; “who are you going to kick out of skiing” if you tighten access?; protecting the skier experience; how do you make skiers say “wow?”; defending Vail's ongoing resort leadership shuffle; and why the volume of Vail's lift upgrades slowed after 2022's Epic Lift Upgrade.What I got wrong* I said that the Epic Pass now offered access to “64 or 65” ski areas, but I neglected to include the six new ski areas that Vail partnered with in Austria for the 2025-26 ski season. The correct number of current Epic Pass partners is 71 (see chart above). * I said that Vail Resorts' skier visits declined by 1.5 percent from the 2023-24 to 2024-25 winters, and that national skier visits grew by three percent over that same timeframe. The numbers are actually reversed: Vail's skier visits slumped by approximately three percent last season, while national visits increased by 1.7 percent, per the National Ski Areas Association.* I said that the $1,429 Ikon Pass cost “40% more” than the $799 Epic Local – but I was mathing on the fly and I mathed dumb. The actual increase from Epic Local to Ikon is roughly 79 percent.* I claimed that Park City Mountain Resort was charging $328 for a holiday week lift ticket when it was “30 percent-ish open” and “the surrounding resorts were 70-ish percent open.” Unfortunately, I was way off on the dollar amount and the timeframe, as I was thinking of this X post I made on Wednesday, Jan. 8, when day-of tickets were selling for $288:* I said I didn't know what “Alterra” means. Alterra Mountain Company defines it as “a fusion of the words altitude and terrain/terra, paying homage to the mountains and communities that form the backbone of the company.”* I said that Vail's Epic Lift Upgrade was “22 or 23 lifts.” I was wrong, but the number is slippery for a few reasons. First, while I was referring specifically to Vail's 2021 announcement that 19 new lifts were inbound in 2022, the company now uses “Epic Lift Upgrade” as an umbrella term for all years' new lift installs. Second, that 2022 lift total shot up to 21, then down to 19 when Park City locals threw a fit and blocked two of them (both ultimately went to Whistler), then 18 after Keystone bulldozed an illegal access road in the high Alpine (the new lift and expansion opened the following year).Questions I wish I'd askedThere is no way to do this interview in a way that makes everyone happy. Vail is too big, and I can't talk about everything. Angry Mountain Bro wants me to focus on community, Climate Bro on the environment, Finance Bro on acquisitions and numbers, Subaru Bro on liftlines and parking lots. Too many people who already have their minds made up about how things are will come here seeking validation of their viewpoint and leave disappointed. I will say this: just because I didn't ask about something doesn't mean I wouldn't have liked to. Acquisitions and Europe, especially. But some preliminary conversations with Vail folks indicated that Katz had nothing new to say on either of these topics, so I let it go for another day.Podcast NotesOn various metrics Here's a by-the-numbers history of the Epic Pass:Here's Epic's year-by-year partner history:On the percent of U.S. skier visits that Vail accounts forWe don't know the exact percentage of U.S. skier visits belong to Vail Resorts, since the company's North American numbers include Whistler, which historically accounts for approximately 2 million annual skier visits. But let's call Vail's share of America's skier visits 25 percent-ish:On ski season pass participation in AmericaThe rise of Epic and Ikon has correlated directly with a decrease in lift ticket visits and an increase in season pass visits. Per Kotke's End-of-Season Demographic Report for 2023-24:On capital investmentSimilarly, capital investment has mostly risen over the past decade, with a backpedal for Covid. Kotke:The NSAA's preliminary numbers suggest that the 2024-25 season numbers will be $624.4 million, a decline from the previous two seasons, but still well above historic norms.On the mystery of the missing skier visitsI jokingly ask Katz for resort-by-resort skier visits in passing. Here's what I meant by that - up until the 2010-11 ski season, Vail, like all operators on U.S. Forest Service land, reported annual skier visits per ski area:And then they stopped, winning a legal argument that annual skier visits are proprietary and therefore protected from public records disclosure. Or something like that. Anyway most other large ski area operators followed this example, which mostly just serves to make my job more difficult.On that ski trip where Timberline punched out Vail in a one-on-five fightI don't want to be the Anecdote King, but in 2023 I toured 10 Mid-Atlantic ski areas the first week of January, which corresponded with a horrendous warm-up. The trip included stops at five Vail Resorts: Liberty, Whitetail, Seven Springs, Laurel, and Hidden Valley, all of which were underwhelming. Fine, I thought, the weather sucks. But then I stopped at Timberline, West Virginia:After three days of melt-out tiptoe, I was not prepared for what I found at gut-renovated Timberline. And what I found was 1,000 vertical feet of the best version of warm-weather skiing I've ever seen. Other than the trail footprint, this is a brand-new ski area. When the Perfect Family – who run Perfect North, Indiana like some sort of military operation – bought the joint in 2020, they tore out the lifts, put in a brand-new six-pack and carpet-loaded quad, installed all-new snowmaking, and gut-renovated the lodge. It is remarkable. Stunning. Not a hole in the snowpack. Coming down the mountain from Davis, you can see Timberline across the valley beside state-run Canaan Valley ski area – the former striped in white, the latter mostly barren.I skied four fast laps off the summit before the sixer shut at 4:30. Then a dozen runs off the quad. The skier level is comically terrible, beginners sprawled all over the unload, all over the green trails. But the energy is level 100 amped, and everyone I talked to raved about the transformation under the new owners. I hope the Perfect family buys 50 more ski areas – their template works.I wrote up the full trip here.On the megapass timelineI'll work on a better pass timeline at some point, but the basics are this:* 2008: Epic Pass debuts - unlimited access to all Vail Resorts* 2012: Mountain Collective debuts - 2 days each at partner resorts* 2015: M.A.X. Pass debuts - 5 days each at partner resorts, unlimited option for home resort* 2018: Ikon Pass debuts, replaces M.A.X. - 5, 7, or unlimited days at partner resorts* 2019: Indy Pass debuts - 2 days each at partner resortsOn Epic Day vs. Ikon Session I've long harped on the inadequacy of the Ikon Session Pass versus the Epic Day Pass:On Epic versus Ikon pricingEpic Passes mostly sell at a big discount to Ikon:On Vail's most recent investor conference callThis podcast conversation delivers Katz's first public statements since he hosted Vail Resorts' investor conference call on June 5. I covered that call extensively at the time:On Epic versus Ikon access tweaksAlterra tweaks Ikon Pass access for at least one or two mountains nearly every year – more than two dozen since 2020, by my count. Vail rarely makes any changes. I broke down the difference between the two in the article linked directly above this one. I ask Katz about this in the pod, and he gives us a very emphatic answer.On the Park City strikeNo reason to rehash the whole mess in Park City earlier this year. Here's a recap from The New York Times. The Storm's best contribution to the whole story was this interview with United Mountain Workers President Max Magill:On Vail's leadership shuffleI'll write more about this at some point, but if you scroll to the right on Vail's roster, you'll see the yellow highlights whenever Vail has switched a president/general manager-level employee over the past several years. It's kind of a lot. A sample from the resorts the company has owned since 2016:The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing all year long. Join us. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

The Storm does not cover athletes or gear or hot tubs or whisky bars or helicopters or bros jumping off things. I'm focused on the lift-served skiing world that 99 percent of skiers actually inhabit, and I'm covering it year-round. To support this mission of independent ski journalism, please subscribe to the free or paid versions of the email newsletter.WhoGreg Pack, President and General Manager of Mt. Hood Meadows, OregonRecorded onApril 28, 2025About Mt. Hood MeadowsClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: The Drake Family (and other minority shareholders)Located in: Mt. Hood, OregonYear founded: 1968Pass affiliations:* Indy Pass – 2 days, select blackouts* Indy+ Pass – 2 days, no blackoutsClosest neighboring U.S. ski areas: Summit (:17), Mt. Hood Skibowl (:19), Cooper Spur (:23), Timberline (:26)Base elevation: 4,528 feetSummit elevation: 7,305 feet at top of Cascade Express; 9,000 feet at top of hike-to permit area; 11,249 feet at summit of Mount HoodVertical drop: 2,777 feet lift-served; 4,472 hike-to inbounds; 6,721 feet from Mount Hood summitSkiable acres: 2,150Average annual snowfall: 430 inchesTrail count: 87 (15% beginner, 40% intermediate, 15% advanced, 30% expert)Lift count: 11 (1 six-pack, 5 high-speed quads, 1 fixed-grip quad, 3 doubles, 1 carpet – view Lift Blog's inventory of Mount Hood Meadows' lift fleet)About Cooper SpurClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: The Drake FamilyLocated in: Mt. Hood, OregonYear founded: 1927Pass affiliations: Indy Pass, Indy+ Pass – 2 days, no blackoutsClosest neighboring U.S. ski areas: Mt. Hood Meadows (:22), Summit (:29), Mt. Hood Skibowl (:30), Timberline (:37)Base elevation: 3,969 feetSummit elevation: 4,400 feetVertical drop: 431 feetSkiable acres: 50Average annual snowfall: 250 inchesTrail count: 9 (1 most difficult, 7 more difficult, 1 easier)Lift count: 2 (1 double, 1 ropetow – view Lift Blog's inventory of Cooper Spur's lift fleet)Why I interviewed himVolcanoes are weird. Oh look, an exploding mountain. Because that seems reasonable. Volcanoes sound like something imagined, like dragons or teleportation or dinosaurs*. “So let me get this straight,” I imagine some puzzled Appalachian miner, circa 1852, responding to the fellow across the fire as he tells of his adventures in the Oregon Territory, “you expect me to believe that out thataways they got themselves mountains that just blow their roofs off whenever they feel like it, and shoot off fire and rocks and gas for 50 mile or more, and no one never knows when it's a'comin'? You must think I'm dumber'n that there tree stump.”Turns out volcanoes are real. How humanity survived past day one I have no idea. But here we are, skiing on volcanoes instead of tossing our virgins from the rim as a way of asking the nice mountain to please not explode (seriously how did anyone make it out of the past alive?).And one of the volcanoes we can ski on is Mount Hood. This actually seems more unbelievable to me than the concept of a vengeful nuclear mountain. PNW Nature Bros shield every blade of grass like they're guarding Fort Knox. When, in 2014, federal scientists proposed installing four monitoring stations on Hood, which the U.S. Geological Survey ranks as the sixth-highest threat to erupt out of America's 161 active volcanoes, these morons stalled the process for six years. “I think it is so important to have places like that where we can just step back, out of respect and humility, and appreciate nature for what it is,” a Wilderness Watch official told The New York Times. Personally I think it's so important to install basic monitoring infrastructure so that thousands of people are not incinerated in a predictable volcanic eruption. While “Japan, Iceland and Chile smother their high-threat volcanoes in scientific instruments,” The Times wrote, American Granola Bros say things like, “This is more proof that the Forest Service has abandoned any pretense of administering wilderness as per the letter or spirit of the Wilderness Act.” And Hood and the nation's other volcanoes cackle madly. “These idiots are dumber than the human-sacrifice people,” they say just before belching up an ash cloud that could take down a 747. When officials finally installed these instrument clusters on Hood in 2020, they occupied three boxes that look to be approximately the size of a convenience-store ice freezer, which feels like an acceptable trade-off to mass death and airplanes falling out of the sky.I know that as an outdoor writer I'm supposed to be all pissed off if anyone anywhere suggests any use of even a centimeter of undeveloped land other than giving it back to the deer in a treaty printed on recycled Styrofoam and signed with human blood to symbolize the life we've looted from nature by commandeering 108 square feet to potentially protect millions of lives from volcanic eruption, but this sort of trivial protectionism and willful denial that humans ought to have rights too is the kind of brainless uncompromising overreach that I fear will one day lead to a massive over-correction at the other extreme, in which a federal government exhausted with never being able to do anything strips away or massively dilutes land protections that allow anyone to do anything they can afford. And that's when we get Monster Pete's Arctic Dune Buggies setting up a casino/coal mine/rhinoceros-hunting ranch on the Eliot Glacier and it's like thanks Bros I hope that was worth it to stall the placement of gardenshed-sized public safety infrastructure for six years.Anyway, given the trouble U.S. officials have with installing necessary things on Mount Hood, it's incredible how many unnecessary ones our ancestors were able to build. But in 1927 the good old boys hacked their way into the wilderness and said, “by gum what a spot for snoskiing” and built a bunch of ski areas. And today 31 lifts serve four Mt. Hood ski areas covering a combined 4,845 acres:Which I'm just like, do these Wilderness Watch people not know about this? Perhaps if this and similar groups truly cared about the environmental integrity of Mount Hood they would invest their time, energy, and attention into a long-term regional infrastructure plan that identified parcels for concentrated mixed-use development and non-personal-car-based transit options to mitigate the impact of thousands of skiers traveling up the mountain daily from Portland, rather than in delaying the installation of basic monitoring equipment that notifies humanity of a civilization-shattering volcanic eruption before it happens. But then again I am probably not considering how this would impact the integrity of squirrel poop decomposition below 6,000 feet and the concomitant impacts on pinestand soil erosion which of course would basically end life as we know it on planet Earth.OK this went sideways let me try to salvage it.*Whoops I know dinosaurs were real; I meant to write “the moon landing.” How embarrassing.What we talked aboutA strong 2024-25; recruiting employees in mountains with little nearby housing; why Meadows doesn't compete with Timberline for summer skiing; bye-bye Blue double, Meadows' last standing opening-year chairlift; what it takes to keep an old Riblet operating; the reliability of old versus new chairlifts; Blue's slow-motion demolition and which relics might remain long term; the logic of getting a free anytime buddy lift ticket with your season pass; thoughts on ski area software providers that take a percentage of all sales; why Meadows and Cooper Spur have no pass reciprocity; the ongoing Cooper Spur land exchange; the value of Cooper Spur and Summit on a volcano with three large ski areas; why Meadows hasn't backed away from reciprocal agreements; why Meadows chose Indy over Epic, Ikon, or Mountain Collective; becoming a ski kid when you're not from a ski family; landing at Mountain Creek, New Jersey after a Colorado ski career; how Moonlight Basin started as an independent ski area and eventually became part of Big Sky; the tension underlying Telluride; how the Drake Family, who has managed the ski area since inception, makes decisions; a board that reinvests 100 percent of earnings back into the mountain; why we need large independents in a consolidating world; being independent is “our badge of honor”; whether ownership wants to remain independent long term; potential next lift upgrades; a potential all-new lift line and small expansion; thoughts on a better Heather lift; wild Hood weather and the upper limits of lift service; considering surface lifts on the upper mountain; the challenges of running Cascade Express; the future of the Daisy and Easy Rider doubles; more potential future expansion; and whether we could ever see a ski connection with Timberline Lodge.Why now was a good time for this interviewIt's kind of dumb that 210 episodes into this podcast I've only recorded one Oregon ep: Timberline Lodge President Jeff Kohnstamm, more than three years ago. While Oregon only has 11 active ski areas, and the state ranks 11th-ish in skier visits, it's an important ski state. PNW skiers treat skiing like the Northeast treats baseball or the Midwest treats football or D.C. treats politics: rabid beyond reason. That explains the eight Idaho pods and half dozen each in Washington and B.C. These episodes hit like a hash stand at a Dead show. So why so few Oregon eps?Eh, no reason in particular. There isn't a ski area in North America that I don't want to feature on the podcast, but I can't just order them online like a pizza. Relationships, more than anything, drive the podcast, and The Storm's schedule is primarily opportunity driven. I invite folks on as I meet them or when they do something cool. And sometimes we can connect right away and sometimes it takes months or even years, even if they want to do it. Sometimes we're waiting on contracts or approvals so we can discuss some big project in depth. It can take time to build trust, or to convince a non-podcast person that they have a great story to tell.So we finally get to Meadows. Not to be It-Must-Be-Nice Bro about benefits that arise from clear deliberate life choices, but It must be nice to live in the PNW, where every city sits within 90 minutes of a ripping, open-until-Memorial-Day skyscraper that gets carpet bombed with 400 annual inches but receives between one and four out-of-state visitors per winter. Yeah the ski areas are busy anyway because they don't have enough of them, but busy with Subaru-driving Granola Bros is different than busy with Subaru-driving Granola Bros + Texas Bro whose cowboy boots aren't clicking in right + Florida Bro who bought a Trans Am for his boa constrictor + Midwest Bro rocking Olin 210s he found in Gramp's garage + Hella Rad Cali Bro + New Yorker Bro asking what time they groom Corbet's + Aussie Bro touring the Rockies on a seven-week long weekend + Euro Bro rocking 65 cm underfoot on a two-foot powder day. I have no issue with tourists mind you because I am one but there is something amazing about a ski area that is gigantic and snowy and covered in modern infrastructure while simultaneously being unknown outside of its area code.Yes this is hyperbole. But while everyone in Portland knows that Meadows has the best parking lot views in America and a statistical profile that matches up with Beaver Creek and as many detachable chairlifts as Snowbasin or Snowbird and more snow than Steamboat or Jackson or Palisades or Pow Mow, most of the rest of the world doesn't, and I think they should.Why you should ski Mt. Hood Meadows and Cooper SpurIt's interesting that the 4,845 combined skiable acres of Hood's four ski areas are just a touch larger than the 4,323 acres at Mt. Bachelor, which as far as I know has operated as a single interconnected facility since its 1958 founding. Both are volcanoes whose ski areas operate on U.S. Forest Service land a commutable distance from demographically similar markets, providing a case study in distributed versus centralized management.Bachelor in many ways delivers a better experience. Bachelor's snow is almost always drier and better, an outlier in the kingdom of Cascade Concrete. Skiers can move contiguously across its full acreage, an impossible mission on Balkanized Hood. The mountain runs an efficient, mostly modern 15 lifts to Hood's wild 31, which includes a dozen detachables but also a half dozen vintage Riblet doubles with no safety bars. Bachelor's lifts scale the summit, rather than stopping thousands of feet short as they do on Hood. While neither are Colorado-grade destination ski areas, metro Portland is stuffed with 25 times more people than Bend, and Hood ski areas have an everbusy feel that skiers can often outrun at Bachelor. Bachelor is closer to its mothership – just 26 minutes from Bend to Portland's hour-to-two-hour commutes up to the ski areas. And Bachelor, accessible on all versions of the Ikon Pass and not hamstrung by the confusing counter-branding of multiple ski areas with similar names occupying the same mountain, presents a more clearcut target for the mainstream skier.But Mount Hood's quirky scatterplot ski centers reward skiers in other ways. Four distinct ski areas means four distinct ski cultures, each with its own pace, purpose, customs, traditions, and orientation to the outside world. Timberline Lodge is a funky mix of summertime Bro parks, Government Camp greens, St. Bernards, and its upscale landmark namesake hotel. Cooper Spur is tucked-away, low-key, low-vert family resort skiing. Meadows sprawls, big and steep, with Hood's most interesting terrain. And low-altitude, closest-to-the-city Skibowl is night-lit slowpoke with a vintage all-Riblet lift fleet. Your Epic and Ikon passes are no good here, though Indy gets you Meadows and Cooper Spur. Walk-up lift tickets (still the only way to buy them at Skibowl), are more tier-varied and affordable than those at Bachelor, which can exceed $200 on peak days (though Bachelor heavily discounts access to its beginner lifts, with free access to select novice areas). Bachelor's $1,299 season pass is 30 percent more expensive than Meadows'.This dynamic, of course, showcases single-entity efficiency and market capture versus the messy choice of competition. Yes Free Market Bro you are right sometimes. Hood's ski areas have more inherent motivators to fight on price, forge allegiances like the Timberline-Skibowl joint season pass, invest in risks like night and summer skiing, and run wonky low-tide lift ticket deals. Empowering this flexibility: all four Hood ski areas remain locally owned – Meadows and T-Line by their founding families. Bachelor, of course, is a fiefdom of Park City, Utah-based Powdr, which owns a half-dozen other ski areas across the West.I don't think that Hood is better than Bachelor or that Bachelor is better than Hood. They're different, and you should ski both. But however you dissect the niceties of these not-really-competing-but-close-enough-that-a-comarison-makes-sense ski centers, the on-the-ground reality adds up to this: Hood locals, in general, are a far more contented gang than Bachelor Bros. I don't have any way to quantify this, and Bachelor has its partisans. But I talk to skiers all over the country, all the time. Skiers will complain about anything, and online guttings of even the most beloved mountains exist. But talk to enough people and strong enough patterns emerge to understand that, in general, locals are happy with Mammoth and Alpine Meadows and Sierra-at-Tahoe and A-Basin and Copper and Bridger Bowl and Nub's Nob and Perfect North and Elk and Plattekill and Berkshire East and Smuggs and Loon and Saddleback and, mostly, the Hood ski areas. And locals are generally less happy with Camelback and Seven Springs and Park City and Sunrise and Shasta and Stratton and, lately, former locals' faves Sugarbush and Wildcat. And, as far as I can tell, Bachelor.Potential explanations for Hood happiness versus Bachelor blues abound, all of them partial, none completely satisfactory, all asterisked with the vagaries of skiing and skiers and weather and luck. But my sense is this: Meadows, Timberline, and Skibowl locals are generally content not because they have better skiing than everyplace else or because their ski areas are some grand bargain or because they're not crowded or because they have the best lift systems or terrain parks or grooming or snow conditions, but because Hood, in its haphazard and confounding-to-outsiders borders and layout, has forced its varied operators to hyper-adapt to niche needs in the local market while liberating them from the all-things-to-everyone imperative thrust on isolated operations like Bachelor. They have to decide what they're good at and be good at that all the time, because they have no other option. Hood operators can't be Vail-owned Paoli Peaks, turning in 25-day ski seasons and saying well it's Indiana what do you expect? They have to be independent Perfect North, striving always for triple-digit operating days and saying it's Indiana and we're doing this anyway because if we don't you'll stop coming and we'll all be broke.In this way Hood is a snapshot of old skiing, pre-consolidation, pre-national pass, pre-social media platforms that flung open global windows onto local mountains. Other than Timberline summer parks no one is asking these places to be anything other than very good local ski areas serving rabid local skiers. And they're doing a damn good job.Podcast NotesOn Meadows and Timberline Lodge opening and closing datesOne of the most baffling set of basic facts to get straight in American skiing is the number of ski areas on Mount Hood and the distinction between them. Part of the reason for this is the volcano's famous summer skiing, which takes place not at either of the eponymous ski areas – Mt. Hood Meadows or Mt. Hood Skibowl – but at the awkwardly named Timberline Lodge, which sounds more like a hipster cocktail lounge with a 19th-century fur-trapper aesthetic than the name of a ski resort (which is why no one actually calls it “Timberline Lodge”; I do so only to avoid confusion with the ski area in West Virginia, because people are constantly getting Appalachian ski areas mixed up with those in the Cascades). I couldn't find a comprehensive list of historic closing dates for Meadows and Timberline, but the basic distinction is this: Meadows tends to wrap winter sometime between late April and late May. Timberline goes into August and beyond when it can. Why doesn't Meadows push its season when it is right next door and probably could? We discuss in the pod.On Riblet clipsFun fact about defunct-as-a-company-even-though-a-couple-hundred-of-their-machines-are-still-spinning Riblet chairlifts: rather than clamping on like a vice grip, the end of each chair is woven into the rope via something called an “insert clip.” I wrote about this in my Wildcat pod last year:On Alpental Chair 2A small but vocal segment of Broseph McBros with nothing better to do always reflexively oppose the demolition of legacy fixed-grip lifts to make way for modern machines. Pack does a great job laying out why it's harder to maintain older chairlifts than many skiers may think. I wrote about this here:On Blue's breakover towers and unload rampWe also dropped photos of this into the video version of the pod:On the Cooper Spur land exchangeHere's a somewhat-dated and very biased-against-the-ski-area infographic summarizing the proposed land swap between Meadows and the U.S. Forest Service, from the Cooper Spur Wild & Free Coalition, an organization that “first came together in 2002 to fight Mt. Hood Meadows' plans to develop a sprawling destination resort on the slopes of Mt. Hood near Cooper Spur”:While I find the sanctimonious language in this timeline off-putting, I'm more sympathetic to Enviro Bro here than I was with the eruption-detection controversy discussed up top. Opposing small-footprint, high-impact catastrophe-monitoring equipment on an active volcano to save five bushes but potentially endanger millions of human lives is foolish. But checking sprawling wilderness development by identifying smaller parcels adjacent to already-disturbed lands as alternative sites for denser, hopefully walkable, hopefully mixed-use projects is exactly the sort of thing that every mountain community ought to prioritize.On the combination of Summit and Timberline LodgeThe small Summit Pass ski area in Government Camp operated as an independent entity from its 1927 founding until Timberline Lodge purchased the ski area in 2018. In 2021, the owners connected the two – at least in one direction. Skiers can move 4,540 vertical feet from the top of Timberline's Palmer chair to the base of Summit. While Palmer tends to open late in the season and Summit tends to close early, and while skiers will have to ride shuttles back up to the Timberline lifts until the resort builds a much anticipated gondola connecting the full height, this is technically America's largest lift-served vertical drop.On Meadows' reciprocalsMeadows only has three season pass reciprocal partners, but they're all aspirational spots that passholders would actually travel for: Baker, Schweitzer, and Whitefish. I ask Pack why he continues to offer these exchanges even as larger ski areas such as Brundage and Tamarack move away from them. One bit of context I neglected to include, however, is that neighboring Timberline Lodge and Mount Hood Skibowl not only offer a joint pass, but are longtime members of Powder Alliance, which is an incredible regional reciprocal pass that's free for passholders at any of these mountains:On Ski Broadmoor, ColoradoColorado Springs is less convenient to skiing than the name implies – skiers are driving a couple of hours, minimum, to access Monarch or the Summit County ski areas. So I was surprised, when I looked up Pack's original home mountain of Ski Broadmoor, to see that it sat on the city's outskirts:This was never a big ski area, with 600 vertical feet served by an “America The Beautiful Lift” that sounds as though it was named by Donald Trump:The “famous” Broadmoor Hotel built and operated the ski area, according to Colorado Ski History. They sold the hotel in 1986 to the city, which promptly sold it to Vail Associates (now Vail Resorts), in 1988. Vail closed the ski area in 1991 – the only mountain they ever surrendered on. I'll update all my charts and such to reflect this soon.On pre-high-speed KeystoneIt's kind of amazing that Keystone, which now spins seven high-speed chairlifts, didn't install its first detachable until 1990, nearly a decade after neighboring Breckenridge installed the world's first, in 1981. As with many resorts that have aggressively modernized, this means that Keystone once ran more chairlifts than it does today. When Pack started his ski career at the mountain in 1989, Keystone ran 10 frontside aerial lifts (8 doubles, 1 triple, 1 gondola) compared to just six today (2 doubles, 2 sixers, a high-speed quad, and a higher-capacity gondy).On Mountain CreekI've talked about the bananas-ness of Mountain Creek many times. I love this unhinged New Jersey bump in the same way I loved my crazy late uncle who would get wasted at the Bay City fireworks and yell at people driving Toyotas to “Buy American!” (This was the ‘80s in Michigan, dudes. I don't know what to tell you. The auto industry was falling apart and everybody was tripping, especially dudes who worked in – or, in my uncle's case, adjacent to (steel) – the auto industry.)On IntrawestOne of the reasons I did this insane timeline project was so that I would no longer have to sink 30 minutes into Google every time someone said the word “Intrawest.” The timeline was a pain in the ass, but worth it, because now whenever I think “wait exactly what did Intrawest own and when?” I can just say “oh yeah I already did that here you go”:On Moonlight Basin and merging with Big SkyIt's kind of weird how many now-united ski areas started out as separate operations: Beaver Creek and Arrowhead (merged 1997), Canyons and Park City (2014), Whistler and Blackcomb (1997), Alpine Meadows and Squaw Valley (connected via gondola in 2022), Carinthia and Mount Snow (1986), Sugarbush and Mount Ellen (connected via chairlift in 1995). Sometimes – Beaver Creek, Mount Snow – the terrain and culture mergers are seamless. Other times – Alpine and the Palisades side of what is now Palisades Tahoe – the connection feels like opening a store that sells four-wheelers and 74-piece high-end dinnerware sets. Like, these things don't go together, Man. But when Big Sky absorbed Moonlight Basin and Spanish Peaks in 2013, everyone immediately forgot that it was ever any different. This suggests that Big Sky's 2032 Yellowstone Club acquisition will be seamless.**Kidding, Brah. Maybe.On Lehman BrothersNearly two decades later, it's still astonishing how quickly Lehman Brothers, in business for 158 years, collapsed in 2008.On the “mutiny” at TellurideEvery now and then, a reader will ask the very reasonable question about why I never pay any attention to Telluride, one of America's great ski resorts, and one that Pack once led. Mostly it's because management is unstable, making long-term skier experience stories of the sort I mostly focus on hard to tell. And management is mostly unstable because the resort's owner is, by all accounts, willful and boorish and sort of unhinged. Blevins, in The Colorado Sun's “Outsider” newsletter earlier this week:A few months ago, locals in Telluride and Mountain Village began publicly blasting the resort's owner, a rare revolt by a community that has grown weary of the erratic Chuck Horning.For years, residents around the resort had quietly lamented the antics and decisions of the temperamental Horning, the 81-year-old California real estate investor who acquired Telluride Ski & Golf Resort in 2004. It's the only resort Horning has ever owned and over the last 21 years, he has fired several veteran ski area executives — including, earlier this year, his son, Chad.Now, unnamed locals have launched a website, publicly detailing the resort owner's messy management of the Telluride ski area and other businesses across the country.“For years, Chuck Horning has caused harm to us all, both individually and collectively,” reads the opening paragraph of ChuckChuck.ski — which originated when a Telluride councilman in March said that it was “time to chuck Chuck.” “The community deserves something better. For years, we've whispered about the stories, the incidents, the poor decisions we've witnessed. Those stories should no longer be kept secret from everyone that relies on our ski resort for our wellbeing.”The chuckchuck.ski site drags skeletons out of Horning's closet. There are a lot of skeletons in there. The website details a long history of lawsuits across the country accusing Horning and the Newport Federal Financial investment firm he founded in 1970 of fraud.It's a pretty amazing site.On Bogus BasinI was surprised that ostensibly for-profit Meadows regularly re-invests 100 percent of profits into the ski area. Such a model is more typical for explicitly nonprofit outfits such as Bogus Basin, Idaho. Longtime GM Brad Wilson outlined how that ski area functions a few years back: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

Nadia Rawlinson and Michael Alter are co-owners of the WNBA team, the Chicago Sky. Nadia was the Chief People Officer at Slack Technologies when the company was acquired by Salesforce in 2021 for $28 billion.  She is an advisor for Google Ventures, serves on the Stanford University Board of Trustees and is on the Board of Directors for J. Crew and Vail Resorts. Michael is President of the Alter Group, which was founded by his father and has become one of the largest private commercial real estate developers in the country.  He is also the founder and a board member of the non-profit organization City Year Chicago. In today's conversation, we will learn: (1:05) – What were Michael and Nadia's formative years like?(4:16) – How and why did Michael join the family business (Alter Group)?(8:39) – How did Nadia define her career path after the Slack acquisition?(12:23) – What makes for a good board member?(15:12) – What do entrepreneurs get wrong when building a business?(16:43) – Why did Michael decide to buy Chicago Sky?(21:08) – What does being a good “steward” of the Chicago Sky mean to Nadia?(24:35) – How does the organizational structure of a sports franchise work?(29:01) – What life lessons have Nadia and Michael brought home from Chicago Sky?(33:15) – What are Michael and Nadia's “why's”?  © 2025 Northern Trust Corporation. Head Office: 50 South La Salle Street, Chicago, IL 60603. Incorporated with limited liability in the U.S. Member FDIC.

Join Eric Thompson on the Ninja Selling Podcast as he sits down with "Ninja Jack" Affleck, a top-producing real estate broker with Slifer, Smith & Frampton in beautiful Vail, Colorado. Recorded on location in Vail, this episode explores how to successfully apply Ninja principles in a unique resort market. Jack shares his inspiring journey, from his previous career as the iconic resort photographer for Vail Resorts to becoming a leading real estate professional, and how he's achieved his best year ever and best start to a year by embracing authentic Ninja practices. Discover how Jack leverages his stunning photography in his marketing, creating a genuine connection with clients who love Vail. Learn about his creative "hospitality satchels" – fun, personalized gifts for people he meets on the ski lift or golf course – and how these simple gestures build rapport and open doors. Jack also discusses the challenges and strategies for staying in flow with clients who are often not in town, emphasizing the importance of consistent, authentic communication and sharing his passion for the Vail lifestyle. This episode delves into Jack's evolution with real estate reviews, from initial apprehension to a breakthrough approach of asking for feedback and focusing on providing value without immediate valuation. He also highlights the critical role of Ninja Coaching with Lisa Connors in his success, focusing on accountability, support, and refining his systems. Whether you're in a resort market or not, Jack's story is packed with actionable takeaways on building genuine relationships, leveraging your unique strengths, and finding joy and success in your real estate business. Join the community of 16,000+ Ninjas on the Ninja Selling Podcast Facebook Group for more valuable insights, collaboration, and networking opportunities! Leave a voicemail at 208-MY-NINJA if you'd like to offer more direct feedback. Be sure to check out Ninja Selling Events for upcoming installations and other events, and if you'd like personalized help in achieving your goals, visit Ninja Coaching to connect with one of our fantastic coaches. Episode Highlights: Introducing "Ninja Jack" Affleck from Slifer, Smith & Frampton in Vail, Colorado Jack's Record-Breaking Success: Best Year Ever and Best Start to a Year The Power of Authentic Flow: Connecting Genuinely with Clients Jack's Unique Background: From Vail Resorts Photographer to Top Real Estate Broker Leveraging Personal Brand: Using Iconic Vail Photography in Marketing Creative Connection: "Hospitality Satchels" for Ski Lifts and "Birdie Bags" for Golfers Staying in Flow in a Resort Market: Connecting with Part-Time Residents The Hot & Warm List Business Tracker: Maintaining a Realistic Dashboard and Motivation Jack's Evolution with Real Estate Reviews: From RPRs to Value-Focused Market Updates The Breakthrough: Asking for Feedback on Real Estate Reviews The Importance of Personalized, Authentic Marketing (vs. "Canned" Content) The Value of Ninja Coaching: Accountability, Support, and System Refinement Jack's Commitment to Ninja: Multiple Installations and Ninja Now Attendee Key Takeaways: "The thing that I began much, much more of is to become more and more in flow with my people because they're not in town." "[Lisa Connors] has encouraged me to really be me with my people and share who I am with them and be genuine." "If it's gonna be a postcard, if it's gonna be something that's gonna be in their inbox, it has a piece of me. It's with my voice, and it's not something that's canned." "I really enjoy my clients become my friends. And they enjoy hearing from me and I enjoy reaching out and sharing my life with them..." "[The hospitality satchel is] basically a survival kit if you fall in a tree well... everything you need to survive is right here and oh, so there may be a need for my card as well." "When you think about somebody, call them. Write something, text them. Let them know that you're thinking about them." "By looking at the business tracker, what it does is it helps me find out where they are in their mindset and help me understand how I can best serve them." "[The breakthrough with real estate reviews was] asking them for their opinion on it... I need you to help me to be better." "If you have the opportunity to make something that is truly genuine to you... that is what your people want." "Accountability is so, so critical because we think that we're doing all the things that we are."   Links: Website: http://www.NinjaSelling.com/Podcast  Email: TSW@NinjaSelling.com  Phone: 1-800-254-1650  Podcast Facebook Group: http://www.facebook.com/TheNinjaSellingPodcast  Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/NinjaSelling  Instagram: @NinjaSellingOfficial LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ninjaselling  Upcoming Public Ninja Installations: https://NinjaSelling.com/events/list/?tribe_eventcategory%5B0%5D=183&tribe__ecp_custom_2%5B0%5D=Public  Ninja Coaching: http://www.NinjaSelling.com/course/ninja-coaching/

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us.WhoPete Sonntag, Chief Operating Officer and General Manager of Sun Valley, IdahoRecorded onApril 9, 2025About Sun ValleyClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: The R. Earl Holding family, which also owns Snowbasin, UtahPass affiliations:* Ikon Pass – 7 days, no blackouts; no access on Ikon Base or Session passes; days shared between Bald and Dollar mountains* Mountain Collective – 2 days, no blackouts; days shared between Bald and Dollar mountainsReciprocal pass partners: Challenger Platinum and Challenger season passes include unlimited access to Snowbasin, UtahLocated in: Ketchum, IdahoClosest neighboring ski areas: Rotarun (:47), Soldier Mountain (1:10)Base elevation | summit elevation | vertical drop:Bald Mountain: 5,750 feet | 9,150 feet | 3,400 feetDollar Mountain: 6,010 feet | 6,638 feet | 628 feetSkiable Acres: 2,533 acres (Bald Mountain) | 296 acres (Dollar Mountain)Average annual snowfall: 200 inchesTrail count: 122 (100 on Bald Mountain; 22 on Dollar) – 2% double-black, 20% black, 42% intermediate, 36% beginnerLift fleet:Bald Mountain: 12 lifts (8-passenger gondola, 2 six-packs, 6 high-speed quads, 2 triples, 1 carpet - view Lift Blog's of inventory of Bald Mountain's lift fleet)Dollar Mountain: 5 lifts (2 high-speed quads, 1 triple, 1 double, 1 carpet - view Lift Blog's of inventory of Dollar Mountain's lift fleet)Why I interviewed him (again)Didn't we just do this? Sun Valley, the Big Groom, the Monster at the End of The Road (or at least way off the interstate)? Didn't you make All The Points? Pretty and remote and excellent. Why are we back here already when there are so many mountains left to slot onto the podcast? Fair questions, easy answer: because American lift-served skiing is in the midst of a financial and structural renaissance driven by the advent of the multimountain ski pass. A network of megamountains that 15 years ago had been growing creaky and cranky under aging lift networks has, in the past five years, flung new machines up the mountain with the slaphappy glee of a minor league hockey mascot wielding a T-shirt cannon. And this investment, while widespread, has been disproportionately concentrated on a handful of resorts aiming to headline the next generation of self-important holiday Instagram posts: Deer Valley, Big Sky, Steamboat, Snowbasin, and Sun Valley (among others). It's going to be worth checking in on these places every few years as they rapidly evolve into different versions of themselves.And Sun Valley is changing fast. When I hosted Sonntag on the podcast in 2022, Sun Valley had just left Epic for Ikon/Mountain Collective and announced its massive Broadway-Flying Squirrel installation, a combined 14,982 linear feet of high-speed machinery that included a replacement of North America's tallest chairlift. A new Seattle Ridge sixer followed, and the World Cup spectacle followed that. Meanwhile, Sun Valley had settled into its new pass coalitions and teased more megalifts and improvements to the village. Last December, the resort's longtime owner, Carol Holding, passed away at age 95. Whatever the ramifications of all that will be, the trajectory and fate of Sun Valley over the next decade is going to set (as much or more than it traces), the arc of the remaining large independents in our consolidating ski world.What we talked aboutThe passing and legacy of longtime owner Carol Holding and her late husband Earl – “she was involved with the business right up until the very end”; how the Holdings modernized the Sun Valley ski areas; long-term prospects for Sun Valley and Snowbasin independence following Mrs. Holding's passing; bringing World Cup Downhill races back to Sun Valley; what it took to prep Bald Mountain for the events; the risks of hosting a World Cup; finish line vibes; the potential for a World Cup return and when and how that could happen; the impact of the Challenger and Flying Squirrel lift upgrades; potential upgrades for the Frenchman's, River Run, Lookout Express, and Christmas lifts; yes Sun Valley has glades; the impact of the Seattle Ridge chairlift upgrade; why actual lift capacity for Sun Valley's legacy high-speed quads doesn't match spec; explaining Sun Valley's infrastructure upgrade surge; why Mayday and Lookout will likely remain fixed-grip machines; the charm of Dollar Mountain; considering Dollar lift upgrades; what happened to the Silver Dollar carpet; why Sun Valley is likely sticking with Ikon and Mountain Collective long-term after trying both those coalitions and Epic; whether Sun Valley could join Ikon Base now that Alterra ditched Ikon Base Plus; RFID coming at last; whether we could still see a gondola connection between Sun Valley Village and Dollar and Bald mountains; and why Sun Valley isn't focused on slopeside development at Bald Mountain.Why now was a good time for this interviewSince I more or less covered interview timing above, let me instead pull out a bit about Sun Valley's megapass participation that ended up being timely by accident. We recorded this conversation in April, well before Vail Resorts named Rob Katz its CEO for a second time, likely resetting what had become a lopsided (in Alterra's favor) Epic-versus-Ikon battle. Here's what Sonntag had to say on the pod in 2022, when Sun Valley had just wrapped its three-year Epic Pass run and was preparing for its first season on Ikon:… our three-year run with Epic was really, really good. And it brought guests to Sun Valley who have never been here before. I mean, I think we really proved out the value of these multi-resort passes and these partner passes. People aspire to go other places, and when their pass allows them to do that, that sometimes is the impetus. That's all they need to make that decision to do it. So as successful as that was, we looked at Ikon and thought, well, here's an opportunity to introduce ourselves to a whole new group of guests. And why would we not take advantage of that? We're hoping to convert, obviously, a few of these folks to be Sun Valley regulars. And so now we have the opportunity to do that again with Ikon.When I asked Sonntag during that conversation whether he would consider returning to Epic at some point, he said that “I'm focused on doing a great job of being a great partner with Ikon right now,” and that, “I'm not ready to go there yet.”With three winters of Ikon and Mountain Collective membership stacked, Sonntag spoke definitively this time (emphasis mine):We are very very happy with how everything has gone. We feel like we have great partners with both Ikon, which is, you know, partnering with a company, but they're partners in every sense of the word in terms of how they approach the partnership, and we feel like we have a voice. We have access to data. We can really do right by our customers and our business at the same time.Should we read that as an Epic diss on Broomfield? Perhaps, though saying you like pizza doesn't also mean you don't like tacos. But Sonntag was unambiguous when I asked whether Sun Valley was #TeamIkon long-term: “I would see us staying the course,” he said.For those inclined to further read into this, Sonntag arrived at Sun Valley after a long career at Vail Resorts, which included several years as president/COO-equivalent of Heavenly and Whistler. And while Sun Valley is part of a larger company that also includes Snowbasin, meaning Sonntag is not the sole decision-maker, it is interesting that an executive who spent so much of his career with a first-hand look inside the Epic Pass would now lead a mountain that stands firmly with the opposition.What I got wrongI mischaracterized the comments Sonntag had made on Epic and Ikon when we spoke in 2022, making it sound as though he had suggested that Sun Valley would try both passes and then decide between them. But it was me who asked him whether he would decide between the two after an Ikon trial, and he had declined to answer the question, saying, as noted above, that he wasn't “ready to go there yet.”Why you should ski Sun ValleyIf I was smarter I'd make some sort of heatmap showing where skier visits are clustered across America. Unfortunately I'm dumb, and even more unfortunately, ski areas began treating skier visit numbers with the secrecy of nuclear launch codes about a decade ago, so an accurate map would be difficult to draw up even if I knew how.However, I can offer a limited historical view into the crowding advantages that Sun Valley offers in comparison to its easier-to-access peer resorts. Check out Sun Valley's average annual skier visits from 2005 to 2011, compared to similarly sized Breckenridge and Keystone, and smaller Beaver Creek:Here's how those four ski areas compare in size and average skier visits per acre:Of course, 2011 was a long time ago and multi-mountain passes have dramatically reworked visitation patterns. Breck, Keystone, and Beaver Creek, all owned by Vail during the above timeframe, joined Epic Pass in 2008, while Sun Valley would stand on its own until landing on Mountain Collective in 2015, then Epic in 2019, then back to MC and Ikon in 2022. Airline service to Sun Valley has improved greatly in the past 15 years, which could also have ramped up the resort's skier visits.Still, anecdote and experience suggest that these general visitation ratios remain similar to the present day. Beaver Creek remains a bit of a hidey-hole by Colorado standards, but Breck and Keystone, planted right off America's busiest ski corridor in America's busiest ski state, are among the most obvious GPS inputs for the Epic Pass masses. No one has to try that hard to get to Summit County. To get to Sun Valley, you still have to work (and spend), a bit more.So that's the pitch, I guess, in addition to all the established Sun Valley bullet points: excellent grooming and outrageous views and an efficient and fast lift network. By staying off the Ikon Base Pass, not to mention Interstates 70 and 80, Sun Valley has managed to achieve oxymoron status: the big, modern U.S. ski resort that feels mostly empty most of the time. It's this and Taos and Telluride and a few others tossed into the far corners of the Rockies, places that at once feel of the moment and stand slightly outside of time.Podcast NotesOn Sun Valley/Pete 1.0Sonntag first joined me on the pod back in 2022:On Carol HoldingLongtime Sun Valley owner Carol Holding passed away on Dec. 23, 2024. Boise Dev recalled a bit of the family legacy around Sun Valley:“One day, I spotted Earl and Carol dining on the patio and asked him again,” Webb told Bossick. “And Carol turned to him and said, ‘Earl, you've been saying you're going to do that for years. If you don't build a new lodge, I'm going to divorce you.' That's what she said!”The lodge opened in 2004, dubbed Carol's Dollar Mountain Lodge.In a 2000 interview with the Salt Lake Tribune, Carol made it clear that she was as much a part of the business as Earl, whose name caught most of the headlines.“I either became part of his business or lived alone,” she said.The pair often bought distressed or undervalued assets and invested to upgrade them. She told the Tribune that paying attention to the dollars in those early years made a big difference.“I still have the first dollar bill that anyone gave me as a tip,” she said.Once they bought Sun Valley, Robert and Carol wasted no time.Wally Huffman, the resort's GM, got a call to the area above the Ram Restaurant. Someone was stuffing mattresses out the window, and they were landing with a thud on the kitchen loading dock below. Huffman called Janss – the person who had owned the resort – and asked what to do.“I think you should do whatever Mr. Holding tells you to do.”Robert and Carol had purchased the property, and upgrades were well underway. They didn't know how to ski. But they did know hospitality.“Why would anyone who didn't know how to ski buy a ski resort? That wasn't why we bought it—to come here to ski,” Carol said. “We bought it to run as a business.”Earl Holding's 2013 New York Times obituary included background on the couple's purchase of Sun Valley:A year later, Carol Holding, who was her husband's frequent business partner, showed him a newspaper article about the potential sale of Sun Valley. He bought the resort, which had fallen into disrepair since its glory years as a getaway for Ernest Hemingway and others, after he and his wife spent a day there skiing. They had never skied before.Davy Ratchford, President of sister resort Snowbasin, told a great story about Carol Holding on the podcast back in 2023 [31:20]:Mrs. Holding is an amazing woman and is sharp. She knows everything that's going on at the resorts. She used to work here, right? She'd flip burgers and she'd sell things from the retail store. I mean she's an original, right? Like she is absolutely amazing and she knows everything about it. And I was hired and I remember being in our lodge and I had all the employees there and she was introducing me, and it was an amazing experience. I remember I was kneeling down next to her chair and I said, “You know, Mrs. Holding, thank you for the opportunity.” And she grabs both your hands and she holds them in tight to her, and that's how she talks to you. It's this amazing moment. And I said, “I just want to make sure I'm doing exactly what you want me to do for you and Earl's legacy of Snowbasin.” I know how much they love it, right? Since 1984. And I said, “Can I just ask your advice?” And this is exactly what she said to me, word for word, she said, “Be nice and hire nice people.” And every employee orientation since then, I've said that: “Our job is to be nice and to hire nice people.”Listen to the rest here:On Sun Valley's evolutionWhen the Holdings showed up in 1977, Sun Valley, like most contemporary ski areas, was a massive tangle of double and triple chairs:The resort upgraded rapidly, installing seven high-speed quads between 1988 and 1994: Unfortunately, the ski area chose Yan, whose bungling founder's shortcuts transformed the machines into deathtraps, as its detachable partner. The ski area heavily retrofit all seven machines in partnership with Doppelmayr in 1995. Sun Valley has so far replaced three of the seven Yans: the Seattle Ridge sixer replaced the detach quad of the same name last year and the Broadway sixer and Flying Squirrel quad replaced the Broadway and Greyhawk quads in 2023, on a new alignment:Sonntag outlines which of the remaining four Yan-Doppelmayr hybrids will be next on the pod.I've summarized the Yan drama several times, most recently in the article accompanying my podcast conversation with Mammoth COO Eric Clark earlier this year:On World Cup resultsWhile we talk in general about the motivation behind hosting the World Cup, what it took to prep the mountain, and the energy of the event itself, we don't get a lot into the specifics of the events themselves. Here are all the official stats. Videos here.On gladesYes, Sun Valley has glades (video by #GoProBro, which is me):On Ikon Pass' evolutionI feel as though I publish this chart every other article, but here it is. If you're reading this in the future, click through for the most current:On the Sun Valley Village masterplanWe discuss an old Sun Valley masterplan that included a gondola connection from the village to Dollar and then Bald mountains:The new village plan, which is a separate document, rather than an update of the image above, doesn't mention it:Why? We discuss.The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication. Please support independent ski journalism, or we'll all be reading about bros backflipping over moving trains for the rest of our lives. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

Forget tariffs, earnings season rolls on! Jason Moser and Matt Argersinger discuss: Okta's good quarter versus the market's glass half-empty reaction. Dick's Sporting Goods brings the goods, though the acquisition of Foot Locker leaves some questions. Vail Resorts has new "old" leadership, but will it be enough? Companies Discussed: OKTA, MSFT, DKS, MTN Host: Jason Moser Guest: Matt Argersinger Producer: Mary Long Engineer: Rick Engdahl Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. The Motley Fool and its affiliates (collectively, "TMF") do not endorse, recommend, or verify the accuracy or completeness of the statements made within advertisements. TMF is not involved in the offer, sale, or solicitation of any securities advertised herein and makes no representations regarding the suitability, or risks associated with any investment opportunity presented. Investors should conduct their own due diligence and consult with legal, tax, and financial advisors before making any investment decisions. TMF assumes no responsibility for any losses or damages arising from this advertisement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

Deals are back! Rocket Companies sees a fixer upper with Redfin and ServiceNow steps into the agentic AI era with Moveworks. (00:21) Tim Beyers and Dylan Lewis discuss: - Rocket Company's plans to own even more of the homebuying process with its all-stock purchase of Redfin. - ServiceNow's step into agentic AI and Salesforce's turf with its $2.8B purchase of Moveworks. (17:03) Vail Resorts kicked off the winter season with some rough conditions despite having snowy slopes. Motley Fool analyst Anthony Schiavone joins Mary Long to check in on the ski resort owner before the company's quarterly report after the bell today. Companies discussed: RDFN, RKT, NOW, MTN Host: Dylan Lewis Guests: Tim Beyers, Anthony Schiavone, Mary Long Engineers: Tim Sparks, Dan Boyd Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Vail Resorts is the king of the mountain. But recently, the ski company has been facing issues with overcrowding and labor disputes. WSJ travel reporter Allison Pohle on how Vail Resorts might be a victim of its own success. Further Reading: - Vail Resorts Has an Epic Problem  - Vail Resorts Shareholder Calls for Overhaul, Ouster of Executives Including CEO  Further Listening: - How Target Got Off Target  - A Surprise Turkey and 200 Lemons: Everyday Stories From the Pandemic   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices