Podcasts about woodward park city

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.WhoChris Cushing, Principal of Mountain Planning at SE GroupRecorded onApril 3, 2025About SE GroupFrom the company's website:WE AREMountain planners, landscape architects, environmental analysts, and community and recreation planners. From master planning to conceptual design and permitting, we are your trusted partner in creating exceptional experiences and places.WE BELIEVEThat human and ecological wellbeing forms the foundation for thriving communities.WE EXISTTo enrich people's lives through the power of outdoor recreation.If that doesn't mean anything to you, then this will:Why I interviewed himNature versus nurture: God throws together the recipe, we bake the casserole. A way to explain humans. Sure he's six foot nine, but his mom dropped him into the intensive knitting program at Montessori school 232, so he can't play basketball for s**t. Or identical twins, separated at birth. One grows up as Sir Rutherford Ignacious Beaumont XIV and invents time travel. The other grows up as Buford and is the number seven at Okey-Doke's Quick Oil Change & Cannabis Emporium. The guts matter a lot, but so does the food.This is true of ski areas as well. An earthquake here, a glacier there, maybe a volcanic eruption, and, presto: a non-flat part of the earth on which we may potentially ski. The rest is up to us.It helps if nature was thoughtful enough to add slopes of varying but consistent pitch, a suitable rise from top to bottom, a consistent supply of snow, a flat area at the base, and some sort of natural conduit through which to move people and vehicles. But none of that is strictly necessary. Us humans (nurture), can punch green trails across solid-black fall lines (Jackson Hole), bulldoze a bigger hill (Caberfae), create snow where the clouds decline to (Wintergreen, 2022-23), plant the resort base at the summit (Blue Knob), or send skiers by boat (Eaglecrest).Someone makes all that happen. In North America, that someone is often SE Group, or their competitor, Ecosign. SE Group helps ski areas evolve into even better ski areas. That means helping to plan terrain expansions, lift replacements, snowmaking upgrades, transit connections, parking enhancements, and whatever built environment is under the ski area's control. SE Group is often the machine behind those Forest Service ski area master development plans that I so often spotlight. For example, Vail Mountain:When I talk about Alta consolidating seven slow lifts into four fast lifts; or Little Switzerland carving their mini-kingdom into beginner, parkbrah, and racer domains; or Mount Bachelor boosting its power supply to run more efficiently, this is the sort of thing that SE plots out (I'm not certain if they were involved in any or all of those projects).Analyzing this deliberate crafting of a natural bump into a human playground is the core of what The Storm is. I love, skiing, sure, but specifically lift-served skiing. I'm sure it's great to commune with the raccoons or whatever it is you people do when you discuss “skinning” and “AT setups.” But nature left a few things out. Such as: ski patrol, evacuation sleds, avalanche control, toilet paper, water fountains, firepits, and a place to charge my phone. Oh and chairlifts. And directional signs with trail ratings. And a snack bar.Skiing is torn between competing and contradictory narratives: the misanthropic, which hates crowds and most skiers not deemed sufficiently hardcore; the naturalistic, which mistakes ski resorts with the bucolic experience that is only possible in the backcountry; the preservationist, with its museum-ish aspirations to glasswall the obsolete; the hyperactive, insisting on all fast lifts and groomed runs; the fatalists, who assume inevitable death-of-concept in a warming world.None of these quite gets it. Ski areas are centers of joy and memory and bonhomie and possibility. But they are also (mostly), businesses. They are also parks, designed to appeal to as many skiers as possible. They are centers of organized risk, softened to minimize catastrophic outcomes. They must enlist machine aid to complement natural snowfall and move skiers up those meddlesome but necessary hills. Ski areas are nature, softened and smoothed and labelled by their civilized stewards, until the land is not exactly a representation of either man or God, but a strange and wonderful hybrid of both.What we talked aboutOld-school Cottonwoods vibe; “the Ikon Pass has just changed the industry so dramatically”; how to become a mountain planner for a living; what the mountain-planning vocation looked like in the mid-1980s; the detachable lift arrives; how to consolidate lifts without sacrificing skier experience; when is a lift not OK?; a surface lift resurgence?; how sanctioned glades changed ski areas; the evolution of terrain parks away from mega-features; the importance of terrain parks to small ski areas; reworking trails to reduce skier collisions; the curse of the traverse; making Jackson more approachable; on terrain balance; how megapasses are redistributing skier visits; how to expand a ski area without making traffic worse; ski areas that could evolve into major destinations; and ski area as public park or piece of art.What I got wrong* I blanked on the name of the famous double chair at A-Basin. It is Pallavicini.* I called Crystal Mountain's two-seater served terrain “North Country or whatever” – it is actually called “Northway.”* I said that Deer Valley would become the fourth- or fifth-largest ski resort in the nation once its expansion was finished. It will become the sixth-largest, at 4,926 acres, when the next expansion phase opens for winter 2025-26, and will become the fourth-largest, at 5,726 acres, at full build out.* I estimated Kendall Mountain's current lift-served ski footprint at 200 vertical feet; it is 240 feet.Why now was a good time for this interviewWe have a tendency, particularly in outdoor circles, to lionize the natural and shame the human. Development policy in the United States leans heavily toward “don't,” even in areas already designated for intensive recreation. We mustn't, plea activists: expand the Palisades Tahoe base village; build a gondola up Little Cottonwood Canyon; expand ski terrain contiguous with already-existing ski terrain at Grand Targhee.I understand these impulses, but I believe they are misguided. Intensive but thoughtful, human-scaled development directly within and adjacent to already-disturbed lands is the best way to limit the larger-scale, long-term manmade footprint that chews up vast natural tracts. That is: build 1,000 beds in what is now a bleak parking lot at Palisades Tahoe, and you limit the need for homes to be carved out of surrounding forests, and for hundreds of cars to daytrip into the ski area. Done right, you even create a walkable community of the sort that America conspicuously lacks.To push back against, and gradually change, the Culture of No fueling America's mountain town livability crises, we need exhibits of these sorts of projects actually working. More Whistlers (built from scratch in the 1980s to balance tourism and community) and fewer Aspens (grandfathered into ski town status with a classic street and building grid, but compromised by profiteers before we knew any better). This is the sort of work SE is doing: how do we build a better interface between civilization and nature, so that the former complements, rather than spoils, the latter?All of which is a little tangential to this particular podcast conversation, which focuses mostly on the ski areas themselves. But America's ski centers, established largely in the middle of the last century, are aging with the towns around them. Just about everything, from lifts to lodges to roads to pipes, has reached replacement age. Replacement is a burden, but also an opportunity to create a better version of something. Our ski areas will not only have faster lifts and newer snowguns – they will have fewer lifts and fewer guns that carry more people and make more snow, just as our built footprint, thoughtfully designed, can provide more homes for more people on less space and deliver more skiers with fewer vehicles.In a way, this podcast is almost a canonical Storm conversation. It should, perhaps, have been episode one, as every conversation since has dealt with some version of this question: how do humans sculpt a little piece of nature into a snowy park that we visit for fun? That is not an easy or obvious question to answer, which is why SE Group exists. Much as I admire our rough-and-tumble Dave McCoy-type founders, that improvisational style is trickier to execute in our highly regulated, activist present.And so we rely on artist-architects of the SE sort, who inject the natural with the human without draining what is essential from either. Done well, this crafted experience feels wild. Done poorly – as so much of our legacy built environment has been – and you generate resistance to future development, even if that future development is better. But no one falls in love with a blueprint. Experiencing a ski area as whatever it is you think a ski area should be is something you have to feel. And though there is a sort of magic animating places like Alta and Taos and Mammoth and Mad River Glen and Mount Bohemia, some ineffable thing that bleeds from the earth, these ski areas are also outcomes of a human-driven process, a determination to craft the best version of skiing that could exist for mass human consumption on that shred of the planet.Podcast NotesOn MittersillMittersill, now part of Cannon Mountain, was once a separate ski area. It petered out in the mid-‘80s, then became a sort of Cannon backcountry zone circa 2009. The Mittersill double arrived in 2010, followed by a T-bar in 2016.On chairlift consolidationI mention several ski areas that replaced a bunch of lifts with fewer lifts:The HighlandsIn 2023, Boyne-owned The Highlands wiped out three ancient Riblet triples and replaced them with this glorious bubble six-pack:Here's a before-and-after:Vernon Valley-Great Gorge/Mountain CreekI've called Intrawest's transformation of Vernon Valley-Great Gorge into Mountain Creek “perhaps the largest single-season overhaul of a ski area in the history of lift-served skiing.” Maybe someone can prove me wrong, but just look at this place circa 1989:It looked substantively the same in 1998, when, in a single summer, Intrawest tore out 18 lifts – 15 double chairs, two platters, and a T-bar, plus God knows how many ropetows – and replaced them with two high-speed quads, two fixed-grip quads, and a bucket-style Cabriolet lift that every normal ski area uses as a parking lot transit machine:I discussed this incredible transformation with current Hermitage Club GM Bill Benneyan, who worked at Mountain Creek in 1998, back in 2020:I misspoke on the podcast, saying that Intrawest had pulled out “something like a dozen lifts” and replaced them with “three or four” in 1998.KimberleyBack in the time before social media, Kimberley, British Columbia ran four frontside chairlifts: a high-speed quad, a triple, a double, and a T-bar:Beginning in 2001, the ski area slowly removed everything except the quad. Which was fine until an arsonist set fire to Kimberley's North Star Express in 2021, meaning skiers had no lift-served option to the backside terrain:I discussed this whole strange sequence of events with Andy Cohen, longtime GM of sister resort Fernie, on the podcast last year:On Revelstoke's original masterplanIt is astonishing that Revelstoke serves 3,121 acres with just five lifts: a gondola, two high-speed quads, a fixed quad, and a carpet. Most Midwest ski areas spin three times more lifts for three percent of the terrain.On Priest Creek and Sundown at SteamboatSteamboat, like many ski areas, once ran two parallel fixed-grip lifts on substantively the same line, with the Priest Creek double and the Sundown triple. The Sundown Express quad arrived in 1992, but Steamboat left Priest Creek standing for occasional overflow until 2021. Here's Steamboat circa 1990:Priest Creek is gone, but that entire 1990 lift footprint is nearly unrecognizable. Huge as Steamboat is, every arriving skier squeezes in through a single portal. One of Alterra's first priorities was to completely re-imagine the base area: sliding the existing gondola looker's right; installing an additional 10-person, two-stage gondola right beside it; and moving the carpets and learning center to mid-mountain:On upgrades at A-BasinWe discuss several upgrades at A-Basin, including Lenawee, Beavers, and Pallavicini. Here's the trailmap for context:On moguls on Kachina Peak at TaosYeah I'd say this lift draws some traffic:On the T-bar at Waterville ValleyWaterville Valley opened in 1966. Fifty-two years later, mountain officials finally acknowledged that chairlifts do not work on the mountain's top 400 vertical feet. All it took was a forced 1,585-foot shortening of the resort's base-to-summit high-speed quad just eight years after its 1988 installation and the legacy double chair's continued challenges in wind to say, “yeah maybe we'll just spend 90 percent less to install a lift that's actually appropriate for this terrain.” That was the High Country T-bar, which arrived in 2018. It is insane to look at ‘90s maps of Waterville pre- and post-chop job:On Hyland Hills, MinnesotaWhat an insanely amazing place this is:On Sunrise ParkFrom 1983 to 2017, Sunrise Park, Arizona was home to the most amazing triple chair, a 7,982-foot-long Yan with 352 carriers. Cyclone, as it was known, fell apart at some point and the resort neglected to fix or replace it. A couple of years ago, they re-opened the terrain to lift-served skiing with a low-cost alternative: stringing a ropetow from a green run off the Geronimo lift to where Cyclone used to land.On Woodward Park City and BorealPowdr has really differentiated itself with its Woodward terrain parks, which exist at amazing scale at Copper and Bachelor. The company has essentially turned two of its smaller ski areas – Boreal and Woodward Park City – entirely over to terrain parks.On Killington's tunnelsYou have to zoom in, but you can see them on the looker's right side of the trailmap: Bunny Buster at Great Northern, Great Bear at Great Northern, and Chute at Great Northern.On Jackson Hole traversesJackson is steep. Engineers hacked it so kids like mine could ride there:On expansions at Beaver Creek, Keystone, AspenRecent Colorado expansions have tended to create vast zones tailored to certain levels of skiers:Beaver Creek's McCoy Park is an incredible top-of-the-mountain green zone:Keystone's Bergman Bowl planted a high-speed six-pack to serve 550 acres of high-altitude intermediate terrain:And Aspen – already one of the most challenging mountains in the country – added Hero's – a fierce black-diamond zone off the summit:On Wilbere at SnowbirdWilbere is an example of a chairlift that kept the same name, even as Snowbird upgraded it from a double to a quad and significantly moved the load station and line:On ski terrain growth in AmericaYes, a bunch of ski areas have disappeared since the 1980s, but the raw amount of ski terrain has been increasing steadily over the decades:On White Pine, WyomingCushing referred to White Pine as a “dinky little ski area” with lots of potential. Here's a look at the thousand-footer, which billionaire Joe Ricketts purchased last year:On Deer Valley's expansionYeah, Deer Valley is blowing up:On Schweitzer's growthSchweitzer's transformation has been dramatic: in 1988, the Idaho panhandle resort occupied a large footprint that was served mostly by double chairs:Today: a modern ski area, with four detach quads, a sixer, and two newer triples – only one old chairlift remains:On BC transformationsA number of British Columbia ski areas have transformed from nubbins to majors over the past 30 years:Sun Peaks, then known as Tod Mountain, in 1993Sun Peaks today:Fernie in 1996, pre-upward expansion:Fernie today:Revelstoke, then known as Mount Mackenzie, in 1996:Modern Revy:Kicking Horse, then known as “Whitetooth” in 1994:Kicking Horse today:On Tamarack's expansion potentialTamarack sits mostly on Idaho state land, and would like to expand onto adjacent U.S. Forest Service land. Resort President Scott Turlington discussed these plans in depth with me on the pod a few years back:The mountain's plans have changed since, with a smaller lift footprint:On Central Park as a manmade placeNew York City's fabulous Central Park is another chunk of earth that may strike a visitor as natural, but is in fact a manmade work of art crafted from the wilderness. Per the Central Park Conservancy, which, via a public-private partnership with the city, provides the majority of funds, labor, and logistical support to maintain the sprawling complex:A popular misconception about Central Park is that its 843 acres are the last remaining natural land in Manhattan. While it is a green sanctuary inside a dense, hectic metropolis, this urban park is entirely human-made. It may look like it's naturally occurring, but the flora, landforms, water, and other features of Central Park have not always existed.Every acre of the Park was meticulously designed and built as part of a larger composition—one that its designers conceived as a "single work of art." Together, they created the Park through the practice that would come to be known as "landscape architecture."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

Embark on a thrilling journey to the slopes of Utah in this episode of Night Sky Tourist. Join us as we explore the magical experience of night skiing with special guest Amber Palmer, the creative marketing mind behind Brian Head Resort and an avid skier and mountain climber. Discover how this unexpected mountain paradise, sitting at 10,000 feet elevation just minutes from Cedar Breaks National Monument, offers the unique opportunity to carve through fresh powder under a canopy of stars. Amber reveals what makes Brian Head a must-visit destination for both skiing enthusiasts and stargazers alike in Utah's remarkable winter landscape.Visit NightSkyTourist.com/117 for more information about this episode.CHECK OUT THESE LINKS FROM EPISODE 117:2025 Stargazing Guide (FREE download): https://nightskytourist.com/guide/ Brian Head Resort: https://www.brianhead.com/ 2025 Dark Sky Festivals & Star Parties: https://nightskytourist.com/2025festivals/ Brighton Ski Resort: https://www.brightonresort.com/ Cherry Peak Ski Resort: https://www.skicpr.com/ Powder Mountain: https://powdermountain.com/ Sundance Mountain Resort: https://www.sundanceresort.com/ Woodward Park City: https://www.woodwardparkcity.com/ Rate Night Sky Tourist with 5 stars on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. THANK YOU!FOLLOW NIGHT SKY TOURIST ON SOCIAL MEDIAFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/NightSkyTourist Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nightskytourist/ SPREAD THE WORDHelp us reach more people by subscribing to the podcast, leaving a review, and sharing it with others.GET TO KNOW US MOREVisit NightSkyTourist.com to read our great blog articles, check out our resource page, and sign up for our newsletters. Our monthly newsletter has content that is exclusive for subscribers.SHARE YOUR QUESTIONWe want to hear your questions. They could even become part of a future Q&A. Record your question in a voice memo on your smartphone and email it to us at Hello@NightSkyTourist.com.COMMENTS OR QUESTIONSEmail us at Hello@NightSkyTourist.com.

Welcome back to the Tahoe TAP! Mike Peron and Rob Galloway here, your go-to guides for all things Tahoe—where we dive into Things, Adventure, and People that make this place one-of-a-kind. As always, we'll kick things off with a quick roundup of the top news from around the Tahoe region. Then, we shift gears and dive into an engaging conversation with today's guest—Shaydar Edelmann, the Vice President and General Manager of Heavenly Mountain Resort. With 25 years of experience in the snow sports industry, Shaydar joins Heavenly from Park City Mountain, where he served as VP of Mountain Operations for four years. He was previously GM for the construction and grand opening of Woodward Park City and spent six years at Alpine Meadows followed by a decade at Boreal, Soda Springs, and Woodward Tahoe. Shaydar managed the construction of Woodward Tahoe and won the NSAA Golden Eagle Award for Sustainability in 2016. Shaydar enjoys spending time on the slopes on skis or a board and loves the ocean as much as the mountains! Having grown up in Kaikoura, New Zealand, he was a member of the New Zealand Junior Surf Team and still manages to catch a wave or two in his free time. Shaydar has moved to Genoa with his wife Kelly and takes advantage of the summer months to golf, mountain bike, and travel so he can catch as many waves as possible.

Show Notes: In this episode, Lorraine reconnects with her high school classmate, Luke, now the Brand Activation and Events Manager at Woodward Park City. They dive into Luke's inspiring journey from an unconventional teen to a leader in the action sports industry. Here are the highlights:

KPCW's Connor Thomas reports live from opening day at Canyons Village, Summit County swings slightly right in 2024 presidential vote, annual local art market opens for holiday season, Basin planning commission chair steps back, citing personal workload, Park City School District adds second Jewish holiday to calendar, moves fall break, Park City turkey drive to serve thousands of local families, Park City Councilmember Tana Toly recaps Thursday night's meeting, Park City High School National Honor Society encourages donations for holiday food drive, Deer Valley opens Thanksgiving weekend, earliest day ever, Park City schools won't accept out-of-boundary students next year, Woodward Park City to open Nov. 22, owners to list Town Lift Plaza for $27M amid Vail lawsuit, and Park City school changes mascot from Timberwolves to Miners.

After setting a new record for most people in studio for our last episode of Group Chat, we decided to set another record for the least amount of people in studio. But worry not, the banter seems to flow well regardless. We gathered Nils Mindnich, fresh off of Natural Selection, and Griffin Siebert to discuss all things Natural Selection, Bomb Hole Cup training, and finally decide who is the better climber. We take calls from Jody Wachniak, Treyson Allen, and Jill Perkins to discuss the judging and broadcasting of Natural Selection, what goes in to building Bomb Hole Cup, and an upcoming mini-pipe event at Woodward Park City. Lastly, we bring Stevie Bell in studio to talk about the crew he's apart of: Technically Doing It, and discuss the importance of getting more people of color on hill. All this and more on this week's episode of Group Chat!Keep up with the crew:Chris GrenierNils MindnichGriffin SiebertStevie BellSilkThanks to our call in guests:Jody WachniakTreyson AllenJill PerkinsShow Notes:Natural Selection Tour Revelstoke ResultsRewatch Natural Selection Tour RevelstokeCheck out Mikkel BangWe called Jody Wachniak so you should follow Air Time Podcast on YouTubeCheck out @AustenSweetin and Boardslide WorldwideWatch "Just another day in the Satch, brotha" @zoisynnott 's YELLOWFollow @TheManboys in YouTube for some "Clip High"Special thank you to our Patreon Members for making our show possible! Ask us questions and suggest topics for Group Chat when you become a member. Learn more and sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/thebombholeFor all things Bomb HoleWebsiteInstagramThis episode is sponsored byTurtleBoxWoodward Park CityBlackstrap (Use "Bombhole" at check out)Bubs Naturals (Use "Bombhole" at check out)Ikon10 Barrel's Pub BeerChapters:00:00 Intro4:26 Natural Selection Day 119:06 Call With Jody Wachniak: Judging Natural Selection31:26 Ads (Bubs Naturals & TurtleBox)33:10 Natural Selection Day 1 (Cont'd)41:03 Nitro Turbo Takes54:57 Ads (Woodward Park City & Blackstrap)57:33 Answering Instagram Questions1:11:36 Trivia1:18:31 Technically Doing It With Stevie Bell1:25:18 Ad (Ikon Pass)1:25:49 Checking In With Griffin Siebert: Graphic Design At Nitro1:39:07 Heater Clips1:46:43 Bomb Hole Cup1:55:09 Call With Treyson Allen: Building Bomb Hole Cup2:03:06 Call With Jill Perkins: Round Up2:09:20 Product Talk: SplitboardingCopyright Bomb Hole Media Inc. 2024

In this very special episode of Bomb Hole: Group Chat we set a new record with the most people in studio. And according to our team of scientists, the more people, the more banter. Chris and Silk sit down with Austin Smith, Melissa Riitano, Stan Leveille & Alex Pashley to talk about board sizes, shot gun pullings at Brighton, name titles and discuss some stand-out moments from the recent Natural Selection duels. Not to mention of a very exciting, high energy and intense game of Trivia featuring our newly acquired buzzers (they definitely aren't from a kids toy). All this and more on this week's episode of Bomb Hole Group Chat!Keep up with the crew:Chris GrenierAustin SmithMelissa RiitanoStan LeveilleAlex PashleySilkThanks to our call in guests:Curtis CiszekEric BlehmMike CoxShow Notes: Last Resort with Stan is back, watch the latest episodeEric Blehm and "The Darkest White"Shotgun pulled on snowboarder news storySpecial thank you to our Patreon Members for making our show possible! Ask us questions and suggest topics for Group Chat when you become a member. Learn more and sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/thebombholeFor all things Bomb HoleWebsite | https://thebombhole.com/Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/thebombhole/Listen on Apple Podcast | https://apple.co/3UEm0l5Listen on Spotify | https://sptfy.com/BombHoleSpotifyThis episode is sponsored byMaster Plan Communications:Woodward Park City: https://www.woodwardparkcity.com/Nitro: https://nitrosnowboards.com/enAutumn: https://autumnheadwear.comBlackstrap: https://bsbrand.comGoPro: https://gopro.com/en/us/Ski-Doo: https://ski-doo.brp.com/us/enBubs Naturals: https://www.bubsnaturals.com/Ikon: https://www.ikonpass.comPub Beer: https://10barrel.com/beer/pub-beer/Chapters:00:00 Intro1:29 Silk Got Engaged2:44 Logan Back Country6:08 Last Resort Is Back9:11 Call With Curtis Ciszek: Switching To Polaris22:24 Shot Gun Pulled At Brighton29:50 Trivia40:22 Ads (MCP & Autumn)42:27 Natural Selection Duels1:12:07 Ads (Bubs Naturals & Woodward Park City)1:14:46 Answering Patreon Questions1:32:24 Call With Eric Blehm: The Darkest White1:49:02 Ads (Go-Pro & Ski-Doo)1:51:26 Nitro Turbo Takes2:09:56 Heater Clips2:13:32 Ads (Blackstrap & Ikon)2:15:24 Call With Mike Cox: A Day For Jake2:25:15 Check In With Austin Smith: Season Equipment2:34:24 Answering Instagram Questions2:45:20 Bend Draft Picks2:54:03 Burner Accounts & Name Titles3:09:17 Instagram & Talent Scouting3:19:00 Tech Talk: Board Sizes3:27:47 Call With Pub Beer Lodge3:45:48 Brain Injury Awareness MonthCopyright Bomb Hole Media Inc. 2024

PSIA-AASI First Chair Podcast host George Thomas catches up with National Team member Tony Macri and a few successful FS I candidates from the National Freestyle Academy event at Woodward-Park City. George talks with Diego about his experience at the full 5-day event and how his experience was. Joel got his Alpine FS I and talked about the experience with the instructors and the facility. Joel goes on to say that the examiners were so attentive and helpful throughout the entire process. Connor got his FS II and talked about how the small group he was in was very encouraging. Keelie was intimidated and worried about the entire process but her home crew from Mt. Hood Meadows stepped in to support her. George questions all guests on the personal impact of the event and what it meant to them and then asks if they recommend National Freestyle

PSIA-AASI First Chair Podcast host George Thomas catches up with National Team members Ben Potts and Tony Macri who are at the National Freestyle Academy in Utah at the Woodward-Park City facility. George, Ben and Tony talk about how this is a national event that travels from region to region. Examiners come from nearby regions to help put this event on and assess the students who were in attendance. Every level assessment in Freestyle is offered at this event including Freestyle I, II, and III for alpine and snowboard. George shares that he got his FS I back in 2009 and Tony shares how things have changed with the FS I assessment since then. Tony and Ben talk about the camaraderie at Freestyle Academy and the support that comes from the people there.

PSIA-AASI First Chair Podcast host George Thomas catches up with National Team members Tony Macri and Ben Potts. Tony and Ben are at the PSIA-AASI National Freestyle Academy at Woodward - Park City in Utah. Ben and Tony talk about Freestyle Academy and what it is. Ben talks about comparing Freestyle Academy to National Academy and how they're similar in the way that is brings tradition to the discipline. Tony talks about the worth of joining Freestyle Academy and works through the schedule of the week going from training days to prep days to exam days. Ben goes on to describe what the day-to-day looks like and what people can expect if they attend. Ben and Tony talk about the Woodward facility and how it's so great for this event. Ben shares that February 24 of 2025, the National Freestyle Academy will be the Woodward in Killington, Vermont! This event is open to everyone from beginners to advanced freestylers. Learn more: https://thesnowpros.org/events/freestyle-academy/

Head to any Woodward Mountain Center and you'll immediately be drawn to the kids in the Jib Park and Peace Park pushing themselves to new heights. Since Woodward's humble beginning over 50 years ago as a gymnastics camp in Pennsylvania, progression has been central to its mission. Today, Woodward centers span the globe including Utah's Woodward Park City. In this episode of Last Chair, we catch up with a legend in action sports, Chris “Gunny” Gunnarson. Now the president of Woodward globally, Gunny's three decades in action sports has paralleled the dramatic growth from surf to skateboard to snowboard to ski.Beginning at Snow Summit and Big Bear in southern California, Gunnarson quickly became a leader in the sport from building snow terrain for the X-Games beginning in year one, to crafting private training venues that sent athletes like Shaun White on to olympic gold. Along the way, he built a reputation as a leader in progression with his company Snow Park Technologies and a capable partner with resorts, ultimately helping the world's greatest athletes achieve pinnacles of success in their career.And while his career has been marked by relationships with the greatest athletes, Gunnarson is quick to point out that what's central to his own mission is to bring that experience to enthusiasts of all ages and ability levels. Today, he leads Woodward on a global journey to provide fun and progression for all.As a boy growing up in SoCal in the ‘60s and ‘70s, he was immersed in the cultural revolution of action sports. His life was centered around skateboarding and a little surfing. But when he discovered snowboarding at 13, he used every angle to get up to the mountains and ride on snow.Here's teaser of Gunny's Last Chair interview, which takes you back into the origin years of the culture of snowboarding and tracks you through the impact Woodward is making with people of all ages.Let's go back to the beginning – YOUR beginning!Oh man, how I got involved in sport. I mean, I think I was around five when I got on a surfboard. I know I was seven when I got on a skateboard and I had a bike like every other kid in the neighborhood. And I heard about snowboarding when I was 13. In fact, for my 13th birthday, my dad took us up. I lived in San Diego, so I grew up in the southern California hotbed of board sports. And it was funny. My mom and dad were like, oh, snowboarding? You know, we used to ski before you were born and I didn't even know what skiing was, really. And so we get up to the local mountain and they were like, ‘no snowboarding allowed.' We had rented some boards from the local surf shop. I rented a Chuck Barfoot board and they were like, ‘no snowboards allowed.' My dad got so angry and he's like, ‘I used to ski here all the time. What do you mean no snowboards allowed?' And so we ended up just … we had rented a cabin with a couple of my buddies for my 13th birthday to go snowboarding, trying to figure it out, you know, falling a lot just on this back hill. And I knew right then and there, like, I have got to figure out a way to do this for the rest of my life. And somehow I lucked out.So you must have had some good skateboarding roots in SoCal?Well, it was kind of all I knew. And, you know, sort of in my high school teen years, I was living up in the outskirts of LA, so I was skating swimming pools. There was a big earthquake in Northridge, and there were lots of empty swimming pools. We had maps of pools from condemned buildings and houses. And so we'd show up with buckets, mops, and we would skate all these different pools. I think we skated Tom Petty's pool at one point. It was like a condemned house that he'd owned or something like that. But that was my whole life and culture was skating and a little bit of surfing, but mostly skateboarding and trying to find as many pathways to get up to the mountains as possible.Were your business wheels turning yet in your mind?Honestly, not even a little bit. At that point, it was just living life, having fun and trying to skate as much as possible.What was your first job in the industry?I've had a lot of jobs in my lifetime, but my first job in the industry was at Snow Summit in Big Bear Lake. I was fresh out of high school, and I was going to try and make it as a pro snowboarder, get whatever job I could on the mountain, and, funny enough, I got a job with the patrol at Snow Summit at the time. Being based right in Southern California obviously was right in the middle of what I'll call boardsport Mecca, except they weren't quite there yet. And so I get this job as a snowboarder, but on patrol, thinking, ‘oh, I'm just going to, you know, snowboard a lot.' But I actually ended up really loving patrol and really loving resort operations – becoming a sponge and learning everything I could. They were a very progressive thinking resort ski resort, and they were just starting to launch terrain parks, and none of the other patrol guys wanted to deal with the terrain parks.Was there a turning point for you when you saw your career as a terrain park developer come to light?Over time, that was a real paradigm shift. The terrain park movement, which really was born out of Big Bear, also was a paradigm shift in the entire world of winter sports in the sense that right there in Southern California, it was meeting a market need. But as it became a broader national interest of how do we deal with these rowdy snowboarders and contain them? And now there's freestyle skiers that want to do the same kind of stuff – like we should just give them their own venue to do that kind of stuff and keep them in a little contained area so they don't screw with the rest of the mountain operations. But who knows how to do this kind of stuff? And that is actually when I saw a business opportunity.Gunny, what was it that motivated you to bring your lifelong action sports skills and knowledge to Woodward, now serving as global president?I've known of Woodward virtually my entire career – I mean, you can't be in this in the action sports universe without knowing what Woodward is. You know, it's got a 53-year legacy. I was super intrigued when I learned that Powdr, a ski resort company, had bought Woodward because, you know, everybody knew Woodward as a camp out in Pennsylvania. And it was the Holy Land. Like, if you were going to be a competing skateboarder, BMX athlete, that's where you went. And so when Powdr bought Woodward, I was certainly paying attention from afar. But to answer your question – there I was, life was good, I owned my own company, I had my own TV show. And the folks at Powdr came and said, ‘hey, we want to talk to you about you coming in and helping us figure out how to best propel Woodward from where it currently is.' And I left it all. I moved to Park City, Utah from Truckee.Talk about progression and why it's important to Woodward?Humans want to fly. They want to move. They want to move their bodies. They want to challenge themselves. All the way from the youngest ages – you can hear the kid right behind me. He's jumping on the trampoline. He's figuring out how to move his body in the air, whether he's doing a backflip or just monkeying around. We have zone coaches. We have an entire array of different types of programming, from casual, easy, fun all the way to very focused clinics and training so that people can get better. It's human nature to want to get better, whether you're a golfer or a swimmer or whatever your thing is. And our thing is action sports. And this is where you can do it. And we've got the right people and the right tools and environments to do it.What does it mean to you to be involved with a program like this that just means so much for kids?It means so much because we were all kids at one point and some of us are still kids at heart. I'm looking at you, Tom. I consider you one. I'd like to believe I'm one. And to go back to that sort of joy that you had as a kid when, you know, life was sort of carefree and innocent. We all want that, right? And so here at Woodward, yes, there's a huge focus on kids, but there's also a big focus on kids and families – you know, just sort of what it's like growing up in today's era. I'm glad we can be a bright spot in that way. It's nice to have a spot where you're feeling a part of something, you're learning skills and you're doing something besides sitting on your couch, looking at your phone or looking at the TV. And so as a parent, that means a lot to me for my kids, but also in my role with Woodward means a lot to know that we're the kind of place that can really help shape lives. I have so many parents come to me and tell me how Woodward literally changed their kids' lives. Just last week someone told me that Woodward literally changed the way his daughter approached college, how she got into college, how she's developed a career path, and that she's gunning for my job someday, which I'm like, ‘bring it on.' Listen to the interview to learn more about one of action sports' most interesting and influential figures. Like how many times he's been backstage for Nirvana, what he loves to drive in the Utah desert sand and the skateboarding heroes who helped forge his childhood in Southern California. He shares his personal background with stars like Shaun White, Danny Davis and Jamie Anderson. And he is emotional about the death of his friend and action sports legend Ken Block earlier this year. This hour with Gunny truly captures the spirit and culture of action sports and the passion his Woodward team has to bring it to guests of all ages. Let's dig in to this episode of Last Chair.

Head to any Woodward Mountain Center and you'll immediately be drawn to the kids in the Jib Park and Peace Park pushing themselves to new heights. Since Woodward's humble beginning over 50 years ago as a gymnastics camp in Pennsylvania, progression has been central to its mission. Today, Woodward centers span the globe including Utah's Woodward Park City. In this episode of Last Chair, we catch up with a legend in action sports, Chris “Gunny” Gunnarson. Now the president of Woodward globally, Gunny's three decades in action sports has paralleled the dramatic growth from surf to skateboard to snowboard to ski.Beginning at Snow Summit and Big Bear in southern California, Gunnarson quickly became a leader in the sport from building snow terrain for the X-Games beginning in year one, to crafting private training venues that sent athletes like Shaun White on to olympic gold. Along the way, he built a reputation as a leader in progression with his company Snow Park Technologies and a capable partner with resorts, ultimately helping the world's greatest athletes achieve pinnacles of success in their career.And while his career has been marked by relationships with the greatest athletes, Gunnarson is quick to point out that what's central to his own mission is to bring that experience to enthusiasts of all ages and ability levels. Today, he leads Woodward on a global journey to provide fun and progression for all.As a boy growing up in SoCal in the ‘60s and ‘70s, he was immersed in the cultural revolution of action sports. His life was centered around skateboarding and a little surfing. But when he discovered snowboarding at 13, he used every angle to get up to the mountains and ride on snow.Here's teaser of Gunny's Last Chair interview, which takes you back into the origin years of the culture of snowboarding and tracks you through the impact Woodward is making with people of all ages.Let's go back to the beginning – YOUR beginning!Oh man, how I got involved in sport. I mean, I think I was around five when I got on a surfboard. I know I was seven when I got on a skateboard and I had a bike like every other kid in the neighborhood. And I heard about snowboarding when I was 13. In fact, for my 13th birthday, my dad took us up. I lived in San Diego, so I grew up in the southern California hotbed of board sports. And it was funny. My mom and dad were like, oh, snowboarding? You know, we used to ski before you were born and I didn't even know what skiing was, really. And so we get up to the local mountain and they were like, ‘no snowboarding allowed.' We had rented some boards from the local surf shop. I rented a Chuck Barfoot board and they were like, ‘no snowboards allowed.' My dad got so angry and he's like, ‘I used to ski here all the time. What do you mean no snowboards allowed?' And so we ended up just … we had rented a cabin with a couple of my buddies for my 13th birthday to go snowboarding, trying to figure it out, you know, falling a lot just on this back hill. And I knew right then and there, like, I have got to figure out a way to do this for the rest of my life. And somehow I lucked out.So you must have had some good skateboarding roots in SoCal?Well, it was kind of all I knew. And, you know, sort of in my high school teen years, I was living up in the outskirts of LA, so I was skating swimming pools. There was a big earthquake in Northridge, and there were lots of empty swimming pools. We had maps of pools from condemned buildings and houses. And so we'd show up with buckets, mops, and we would skate all these different pools. I think we skated Tom Petty's pool at one point. It was like a condemned house that he'd owned or something like that. But that was my whole life and culture was skating and a little bit of surfing, but mostly skateboarding and trying to find as many pathways to get up to the mountains as possible.Were your business wheels turning yet in your mind?Honestly, not even a little bit. At that point, it was just living life, having fun and trying to skate as much as possible.What was your first job in the industry?I've had a lot of jobs in my lifetime, but my first job in the industry was at Snow Summit in Big Bear Lake. I was fresh out of high school, and I was going to try and make it as a pro snowboarder, get whatever job I could on the mountain, and, funny enough, I got a job with the patrol at Snow Summit at the time. Being based right in Southern California obviously was right in the middle of what I'll call boardsport Mecca, except they weren't quite there yet. And so I get this job as a snowboarder, but on patrol, thinking, ‘oh, I'm just going to, you know, snowboard a lot.' But I actually ended up really loving patrol and really loving resort operations – becoming a sponge and learning everything I could. They were a very progressive thinking resort ski resort, and they were just starting to launch terrain parks, and none of the other patrol guys wanted to deal with the terrain parks.Was there a turning point for you when you saw your career as a terrain park developer come to light?Over time, that was a real paradigm shift. The terrain park movement, which really was born out of Big Bear, also was a paradigm shift in the entire world of winter sports in the sense that right there in Southern California, it was meeting a market need. But as it became a broader national interest of how do we deal with these rowdy snowboarders and contain them? And now there's freestyle skiers that want to do the same kind of stuff – like we should just give them their own venue to do that kind of stuff and keep them in a little contained area so they don't screw with the rest of the mountain operations. But who knows how to do this kind of stuff? And that is actually when I saw a business opportunity.Gunny, what was it that motivated you to bring your lifelong action sports skills and knowledge to Woodward, now serving as global president?I've known of Woodward virtually my entire career – I mean, you can't be in this in the action sports universe without knowing what Woodward is. You know, it's got a 53-year legacy. I was super intrigued when I learned that Powdr, a ski resort company, had bought Woodward because, you know, everybody knew Woodward as a camp out in Pennsylvania. And it was the Holy Land. Like, if you were going to be a competing skateboarder, BMX athlete, that's where you went. And so when Powdr bought Woodward, I was certainly paying attention from afar. But to answer your question – there I was, life was good, I owned my own company, I had my own TV show. And the folks at Powdr came and said, ‘hey, we want to talk to you about you coming in and helping us figure out how to best propel Woodward from where it currently is.' And I left it all. I moved to Park City, Utah from Truckee.Talk about progression and why it's important to Woodward?Humans want to fly. They want to move. They want to move their bodies. They want to challenge themselves. All the way from the youngest ages – you can hear the kid right behind me. He's jumping on the trampoline. He's figuring out how to move his body in the air, whether he's doing a backflip or just monkeying around. We have zone coaches. We have an entire array of different types of programming, from casual, easy, fun all the way to very focused clinics and training so that people can get better. It's human nature to want to get better, whether you're a golfer or a swimmer or whatever your thing is. And our thing is action sports. And this is where you can do it. And we've got the right people and the right tools and environments to do it.What does it mean to you to be involved with a program like this that just means so much for kids?It means so much because we were all kids at one point and some of us are still kids at heart. I'm looking at you, Tom. I consider you one. I'd like to believe I'm one. And to go back to that sort of joy that you had as a kid when, you know, life was sort of carefree and innocent. We all want that, right? And so here at Woodward, yes, there's a huge focus on kids, but there's also a big focus on kids and families – you know, just sort of what it's like growing up in today's era. I'm glad we can be a bright spot in that way. It's nice to have a spot where you're feeling a part of something, you're learning skills and you're doing something besides sitting on your couch, looking at your phone or looking at the TV. And so as a parent, that means a lot to me for my kids, but also in my role with Woodward means a lot to know that we're the kind of place that can really help shape lives. I have so many parents come to me and tell me how Woodward literally changed their kids' lives. Just last week someone told me that Woodward literally changed the way his daughter approached college, how she got into college, how she's developed a career path, and that she's gunning for my job someday, which I'm like, ‘bring it on.' Listen to the interview to learn more about one of action sports' most interesting and influential figures. Like how many times he's been backstage for Nirvana, what he loves to drive in the Utah desert sand and the skateboarding heroes who helped forge his childhood in Southern California. He shares his personal background with stars like Shaun White, Danny Davis and Jamie Anderson. And he is emotional about the death of his friend and action sports legend Ken Block earlier this year. This hour with Gunny truly captures the spirit and culture of action sports and the passion his Woodward team has to bring it to guests of all ages. Let's dig in to this episode of Last Chair.

This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on Nov. 2. It dropped for free subscribers on Nov. 9. To receive future pods as soon as they're live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:WhoDeirdra Walsh, Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Park City, UtahRecorded onOctober 18, 2023About Park CityClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Vail ResortsLocated in: Park City, UtahYear founded: 1963Pass affiliations:* Epic Pass: unlimited* Epic Local Pass: unlimited with holiday blackouts* Tahoe Local: five non-holiday days combined with Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, Crested Butte, Keystone* Epic Day Pass: access with All Resorts tierClosest neighboring ski areas: Deer Valley (:04), Utah Olympic Park (:09), Woodward Park City (:11), Snowbird (:50), Alta (:55), Solitude (1:00), Brighton (1:08) – or just ski between them all; travel times vary massively pending weather, traffic, and time of yearBase elevation: 6,800 feetSummit elevation: 9,998 feet at the top of Jupiter (can hike to 10,026 on Jupiter Peak)Vertical drop: 3,226 feetSkiable Acres: 7,300 acresAverage annual snowfall: 355 inchesTrail count: 330+ (50% advanced/expert, 42% intermediate, 8% beginner)Lift count: 41 (2 eight-passenger gondolas, 1 pulse gondola, 1 cabriolet, 6 high-speed six-packs, 10 high-speed quads, 5 fixed-grip quads, 7 triples, 4 doubles, 3 carpets, 2 ropetows – view Lift Blog's inventory of Park City's lift fleet)View historic Park City trailmaps on skimap.org.Why I interviewed herAn unfortunate requirement of this job is concocting differentiated verbiage to describe a snowy hill equipped with chairlifts. Most often, I revert to the three standbys: ski area, mountain, and resort/ski resort. I use them interchangeably, as one may use couch/sofa or dinner/supper (for several decades, I thought oven/stove to be a similar pairing; imagine my surprise to discover that these words described two separate parts of one familiar machine). But that is problematic, of course, because while every enterprise that I describe is some sort of ski area, only around half of them are anywhere near an actual mountain. And an even smaller percentage of those are resorts. Still, I swap the trio around like T-shirts in the world's smallest wardrobe, hoping my readers value the absence of repetition more than they resent the mental gymnastics required to consider 210-vertical-foot Snow Snake, Michigan a “ski resort.”But these equivalencies introduce a problem when I get to Park City. At 7,300 acres, Park City sprawls over 37 percent more terrain than Vail Mountain, Vail Resorts' second-largest U.S. ski area, and the fourth-biggest in the nation overall. To call this a “ski area” seems inadequate, like describing an aircraft carrier as a “boat.” Even “mountain” feels insubstantial, as Park City's forty-some-odd lifts shoots-and-ladder their way over at least a dozen separate summits. “Ski resort” comes closest to capturing the grandeur of the whole operation, but even that undersells the experience, given that the ski runs are directly knotted to the town below them – a town that is a ski town but is also so much more.In recent years, “megaresort” has settled into the ski lexicon, usually as a pejorative describing a thing to be avoided, a tourist magnet that has swapped its soul for a Disney-esque welcome mat. “Your estimated wait time to board the Ultimate Super Summit Interactive 4D 8K Turbo Gondola is [one hour and 45 minutes]”. The “megas,” freighted with the existential burden of Epic and Ikon flagships, carry just a bit too much cruise ship mass-escapism and Cheesecake Factory illusions of luxe to truly capture that remote wilderness fantasy that is at least half the point of skiing. Right?Not really. Not any more than Times Square captures the essence of New York City or the security lines outside the ballpark distill the experience of consuming live sports. Yes, this is part of it, like the gondola lines winding back to the interstate are part of peak-day Park City. Those, along with the Epic Pass or the (up to) $299 lift ticket, are the cost of admission. But get through the gates, and a sprawling kingdom awaits.I don't know how many people ski Park City on a busy day. Let's call it 20,000. The vast majority of them are going to spend the vast majority of their day lapping the groomers, which occupy a small fraction of Park City's endless varied terrain. With its cascading hillocks, its limitless pitch-perfect glades, its lifts shooting every which way like hammered-together contraptions in some snowy realm of silver-miners - their century-old buildings and conveyor belts rising still off the mountain – Park City delivers a singular ski experience. Call it a “mountain,” a “ski area,” a “ski resort,” or a “megaresort” – all are accurate but also inadequate. Park City, in the lexicon of American skiing, stands alone.What we talked aboutPark City's deep 2022-23 winter; closing on May 1; skiing Missouri; Lake Tahoe; how America's largest ski area runs as a logistical and cultural unit; living through the Powdr-to-Vail ownership transition; the awesome realization that Park City and Canyons were one; Vail's deliberate culture of women's empowerment; the history and purpose of those giant industrial structures dotting Park City ski area; how you can tour them; the novel relationship between the ski area and the town at its base; Park City's Olympic legacy; thoughts on future potential Winter Olympic Games in Utah and at Park City; why a six-pack and an eight-pack chairlift scheduled for installation at Park City last year never happened; where those lifts went instead; whether those upgrades could ever happen; the incoming Sunrise Gondola; the logic of the Over And Out lift; Red Pine Gondola improvements; why the Jupiter double is unlikely to be upgraded anytime soon; Town Lift; reflecting on year one of paid parking; and the massive new employee housing development at Canyons.      Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewIf only The Storm had existed in 2014. Because wouldn't that have been fun? Hostile takeovers are rare in skiing. You normally can't give a ski area (sorry, a super-megaresort) away. Vail taking this one off Powdr's lunch tray is kind of amazing, kind of sad, kind of disturbing, and kind scary. Like, did that really happen? It did, so onward we go.Walsh, as it happened, worked at Park City at the time, though in a much different role, so we talked about what is was like to live through the transition. But two other events shape our modern perception of Park City: The Olympics and The Lifts.The Olympics, of course, came to Park City in 2002. On this podcast a few weeks back, Snowbird General Manager Dave Fields outlined the dramatic changes the Games wrought on Utah skiing. Suddenly, everyone on the planet realized that a half dozen ski resorts that averaged between 300 and 500 inches of snow per winter were lined up 45 minutes from a major international airport on good roads. And they were like, “Wait that's real?” And they all starting coming – annual Utah skier visits have more than doubled since the Olympics, from around 3 million in winter 2001-02 to more than 7 million in last year's amazing ski season. Which is cool. But the Olympics are (probably) coming back to Salt Lake, in 2030 or 2034, and Park City will likely be a part of them again. So we talk about that.The Lifts refers to this story that I covered last October:Last September, Vail Resorts announced what was likely the largest set of single-season lift upgrades in the history of the world: $315-plus million on 19 lifts (later increased to 21 lifts) across 14 ski areas. Two of those lifts would land in Park City: a D-line eight-pack would replace the Silverlode six, and a six-pack would replace the Eagle and Eaglet triples. Two more lifts in a town with 62 of them (Park City sits right next door to Deer Valley). Surely this would be another routine project for the world's largest ski area operator.It wasn't. In June, four local residents – Clive Bush, Angela Moschetta, Deborah Rentfrow, and Mark Stemler – successfully appealed the Park City Planning Commission's previous approval of the lift projects.“The upgrades were appealed on the basis that the proposed eight-place and six-place chairs were not consistent with the 1998 development agreement that governs the resort,” SAM wrote at the time. “The planning commission also cited the need for a more thorough review of the resort's comfortable carrying capacity calculations and parking mitigation plan, finding PCM's proposed paid parking plan at the Mountain Village insufficient.”So instead of rising on the mountain, the lifts spent the summer, in pieces, in the parking lot. Vail admitted defeat, at least temporarily. “We are considering our options and next steps based on today's disappointing decision—but one thing is clear—we will not be able to move forward with these two lift upgrades for the 22-23 winter season,” Park City Mountain Resort Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Deirdra Walsh said in response to the decision.One of the options Vail apparently considered was trucking the lifts to friendlier locales. Last Wednesday, as part of its year-end earnings release, Vail announced that the two lifts would be moved to Whistler and installed in time for the 2023-24 ski season. The eight-pack will replace the 1,129-vertical-foot Fitzsimmons high-speed quad on Whistler, giving the mountain 18 seats (!) out of the village (the lift runs alongside the 10-passenger Whistler Village Gondola). The six-pack will replace the Jersey Cream high-speed quad on Blackcomb, a midmountain lift with a 1,230-foot vertical rise. These will join the new Big Red six-pack and 10-passenger Creekside Gondola going in this summer on the Whistler side, giving the largest ski area on the continent four new lifts in two years. …Meanwhile, Park City skiers will have to continue riding Silverlode, a sixer dating to 1996, and Eagle, a 1993 Garaventa CTEC triple (the Eaglet lift, unfortunately, is already gone). The vintage of the remaining lifts don't sound particularly creaky, but both were built for a different, pre-Epic Pass Park City, and one that wasn't connected via the Quicksilver Gondola to the Canyons side of the resort. Vail targeted these choke points to improve the mountain's flow. But skiers are stuck with them indefinitely.On paper, Vail remains “committed to resolving our permit to upgrade the Eagle and Silverlode lifts in Park City.” I don't doubt that. But I wonder if the four individuals who chose to choke up this whole process understand the scale of what they just destroyed. Those two lifts, combined, probably cost somewhere around $50 million. Minimum. Maybe the resort will try again. Maybe it won't. Surely Vail can find a lot of places to spend its money with far less friction.All of which I thought was rather hilarious, for a number of reasons. First, stopping an enormous project on procedural grounds for nebulous reasons is the most U.S. American thing ever. Second, the more these sorts of over-the-top stall tactics are wielded for petty purposes (ski areas need to be able to upgrade chairlifts), the more likely we are to lose them, as politicians who never stop bragging about how “business-friendly” Utah is look to streamline these pesky checks and balances. Third, Vail unapologetically yanking those things out of the parking lot and hauling them up to BC was the company's brashest move since it punched Powdr in the face and took its resort away. It was harsh but necessary, a signal that the world keeps moving around the sun even when a small group of nitwits want it to stop on its axis.Questions I wish I'd askedOn Scott's Bowl accessI wanted to ask Walsh about the strange fact that Scott's Bowl and West Scott's Bowl – two high-alpine sections off Jupiter, suddenly closed in 2018 and stayed shut for four years. This story from the Park Record tells it well enough:Park City Mountain Resort on Tuesday said a high-altitude swath of terrain has reopened more than three years after a closure caused by the inability of the resort and the landowner to reach a lease agreement. …PCMR in December of 2018 indefinitely closed the terrain. The closure also included terrain located between Scott's Bowl and Constellation, a nearby ski run. The resort at the time of the closure said the landowner opted not to renew a lease. There had been an agreement in place for longer than 14 years, PCMR said at the time.A firm called Silver King Mining Company, with origins dating to Park City's silver-mining era, owns the land. The lease and renewals had been struck between the Gallivan family-controlled Silver King Mining Company and Powdr Corp., the former owner of PCMR. A representative of Silver King Mining Company in late 2018 indicated the firm traditionally accepted lift passes as compensation for the use of the land.The lease went to Vail Resorts when it acquired PCMR. The two sides negotiated a one-year extension but were unable at the time to reach a long-term agreement, the Silver King Mining Company side said in late 2018.Land ownership, particularly in the west, can be a wild patchwork. The majority of large western ski areas sit on National Forest Service land, but Park City (and neighboring Deer Valley), do not. While this grants them some developmental advantages over their neighbors in the Cottonwoods, who sit mostly or entirely on public land, it also means that sprawling Park City has more landlords than it would probably like.On Park City Epic Pass accessThis is the first Vail Resorts interview in a while where I haven't asked the question about Epic Pass access. I don't have a high-minded reason for that – I simply ran out of time.On the strange aversion to safety bars among Western U.S. skiersWhen you ski in Europe or, to a lesser-extent, the Northeastern U.S., skiers lower the chairlift safety bar reflexively, and typically before the carrier has exited the loading terminal. While I found this jarring when I first moved to New York from the Midwest – where safety bars remain rare – I quickly adapted, and now find it disconcerting to ride a chair without one.This whole dynamic is flipped in the West, where a sort of tough-guy bravado prevails, and skiers tend to ride with the safety bar aloft as a matter of stubborn pride. Many seem shocked, even offended, when I announce that I'm lowering it (and I always announce it, and bring it down slowly). Perhaps they are afraid their friends will see them riding with a lame tourist. It's all a bit tedious and stupid. I've had a few incidents where I've passed out for mysterious reasons. If that happens on a chairlift, I'd rather not die before I regain consciousness. So I like the bar. Vail Resorts, however, mandates that all employees lower the safety bar when in uniform. That doesn't mean they always do it. This past January, a Park City ski patroller died when a tree fell on the Short Cut liftline, flinging him into a snowbank, where he suffocated. Utah Occupational Safety and Health (UOSH) fined the resort a laughably inadequate sum of $2,500 for failing to clear potential hazards around the lift. UOSH's report did not indicate whether the patroller, 29-year-old Christian Helger, had lowered his safety bar, and experts who spoke to Fox 13 in Salt Lake City said that it may not have mattered. “With that type of hit from the weight of that type of a tree with that much snow on it, I don't know that the safety bar would have prevented this incident,” Travis Heggie, a Bowling Green State University professor, told the station.Fair enough. But a man is dead, and understanding the exact circumstances surrounding his death may help prevent another in the future. This is why airplane travel is so safe – regulators consider every factor of every tragedy to engineer similar failures out of future flights. We ought to be doing the same with chairlifts.Chairlifts are, on the whole, very safe to ride. But accidents, when they do happen, can be catastrophic. Miroslava “Mirka” Lewis, a former Stevens Pass employee, recently sued Vail Resorts after a fall from one of Stevens Pass' antique Riblet chairs in January of 2022 left her permanently disabled. From a local paper out of Everett, Washington:The lawsuit claims the ski lift Lewis was operating was designed in the 1960s by Riblet Tramway Company and lacked several safety precautions now considered standard in modern lifts. The lift suspended two chairs from a single pole in the center, with no safety bars or bails on the outside to confine passengers.Lewis suffered a traumatic brain injury, collapsed lung, four fractured vertebrae and other severe injuries, according to the complaint. She required multiple surgeries on her breasts and knees.The plaintiff also reportedly had to relearn how to speak, walk and write due to the severity of her injuries.It is unclear which lift Lewis was riding, but two centerpole Riblets remained at the resort last January: Kehr's and Seventh Heaven. Kehr's has since been removed. Vail Resorts, as a general policy, retrofits all of its chairlifts with safety bars, but these chairs' early-1960s recessed centerpole design is impossible to retrofit. So the lifts remain in their vintage state. It's a bit like buying a '57 Chevy – damn, does that thing look sweet, but if you drive it into a tree, you're kinda screwed without that seatbelt.Vail Resorts, by retrofitting its chairlifts and mandating employee use, has done more than probably any other entity to encourage safety bar use on chairlifts. But the industry, as a whole, could do more. In the east, safety bar use has been normalized by aggressive enforcement from lift crews and ski patrol and, in some cases (Vermont, Massachusetts, and New York), state laws mandating their use. Yet, across the West and the Midwest, hundreds of chairlifts still lack safety bars, let alone enforcement. That, in turn, discourages normalization of their use, and contributes to the blasé and dismissive attitude among western skiers, many of whom view the contraptions as extraneous.Technology can eventually resolve the issue for us – the new Burns high-speed quad at Deer Valley and the new Camelot six-pack at The Highlands in Michigan both drop the bar automatically, and raise it just before unload. But that's two chairlifts, at two very high-end resorts, out of 2,400 or so spinning in America. That technology is too expensive to apply at scale, and will be for the foreseeable future.So what to do? I think it starts with dismantling the tough-guy resistance. There are echoes here of the shift to widespread helmet use. Twenty years ago, almost no one, including me, wore helmets when skiing. I held out for a particularly long time – until 2016. But wearing them is the norm now, even among Western Bro Brahs. As the leader of a major Vail ski area who has watched the resort evolve first-hand, I think Walsh would have some valuable insights here into the roots of bar resistance and how Vail is tackling it, but we just didn't have the time to get into it.What I got wrongI noted that Nadia Guerriero, who appeared on this podcast last year as the VP/COO of Beaver Creek, had “transitioned to a regional leadership role.” That role is senior vice president and chief operating officer of Vail Resorts' Rockies Region.Park City personnel also provided a few clarifications following our conversation:* When discussing our 2023 closing date and “All the Way to May!” Deirdra said we had already extended our season by a week. In fact, our first extension was for two weeks: from April 9 to April 23. On April 12, we announced an additional eight days.* When discussing how we memorialize our Olympic legacy, Deirdra stated, “We have a mountain in the base area.” That should have been “monument.”* When discussing our lift upgrade permit, Deirdra said, “Our permit was upheld.” This should have been EITHER withheld, OR “The appeal was upheld.”Why you should ski Park CityPark City is a version of something that America needs a lot more of: a walkable community integrated with the ski area above it in a meaningful and seamless way. In Europe, this is the norm. In U.S. America, the exception. Only a few towns give you that experience: Telluride, Aspen, Red River. Park City is worth a visit for that experience alone – of sliding to the street, clicking out of your skis, and walking to the bar. It's novel and unexpected here in the land of King Car, but it feels very natural and right when you do it.The skiing, of course, is outstanding. There's less chest-thumping here than up in the Cottonwoods – less snow, too – but still plenty of steep stuff, plenty of glades, plenty of tucked-away spots where you look around and wonder where everyone went. Zip around off McConkey's or Jupiter or Tombstone or Ninety-Nine 90 or Super Condor and you'll find it. This is not Snowbird-off-the-Cirque stuff, but it's pretty good.But what Park City really is, at its core, is one of the world's great intermediate ski kingdoms. I'm talking here about King Con and Silverlode, the amazing jumble of blues skier's right off Tombstone, Saddleback and Dreamscape and Iron Mountain. You can ride express lifts pretty much everywhere as you skip around the low-angle glory. The mountain does not shoot skyward with the drama of Jackson or Palisades or Snowbird or Aspen. It rises and falls, rolls on forever, gifting you, off each summit, another peak to ride to.Before Vail bought it and stapled the resort together with the Canyons, no one talked about Park City in such epic – no pun intended – terms. It was just another of dozens of very good western ski areas. But that combination with its neighbor created something vast and otherworldly, six-and-a-half miles end-to-end, a scale that cannot be appreciated in any way other than to go ski it.Podcast NotesOn Vail's target opening and closing datesIn previous seasons, Vail Resorts would release target opening and closing dates for all of its ski areas. Perhaps traumatized by short seasons, particularly in the Midwest, the company released only target opening dates, and only for its largest ski areas, for 2023:The remainder of its ski areas, “expect to open consistent with target dates shared in years past,” according to a Vail Resorts press release.On Hidden Valley, MissouriWalsh's first ski experience was at Hidden Valley, a 320-footer just west of St. Louis. It's one of just two ski areas in Missouri (both of which Vail owns). Vail happened to acquire this little guy in the 2019 Peak Resorts acquisition. Here's a trailmap:Not to be confused, of course, with Vail's other Hidden Valley, which is stashed in Pennsylvania:Rather than renaming one or the other of these, I am actually in favor of just massively confusing everything by renaming every mountain in the portfolio “Vail Mountain” followed by its zip code. On the Vail-Powdr transitionI'll reset this 2019 story from the Park Record that I initially shared in the article accompanying my podcast conversation with Mount Snow GM Brian Suhadolc in August, who also worked at Park City during Vail's takeover from Powdr:In some circles, though, the whispers had already started that something was afoot, and perhaps not right, at PCMR. Powdr Corp. for some unknown reason was negotiating a sale of its flagship resort, the most prevalent of the rumblings held. The CEO of Powdr Corp., John Cumming, late in 2011 had publicly stated there was not a deal involving PCMR under negotiation, telling Park City leaders during a Marsac Building appearance in December of that year the resort was “not for sale.” Later that evening, he told The Park Record the rumors “always amuse me.”The reality was far more astonishing and something that would define the decade in Park City in a similar fashion as the Olympics did in the previous 10-year span and the population boom did in the 1990s.The corporate infrastructure in the spring of 2011 had inadvertently failed to renew two leases on the land underlying most of the PCMR terrain, propelling the PCMR side and the landowner, a firm under the umbrella of Talisker Corp., into what were initially private negotiations and then into a dramatic lawsuit that unfolded in state court as the Park City community, the tourism industry and the North American ski industry watched in disbelief. As the decade ends, the turmoil that beset PCMR stands, in many ways, as the instigator of a changing Park City that has left so many Parkites uneasy about the city's future as a true community.The PCMR side launched the litigation in March of 2012, saying the future of the resort was at stake in the case. PCMR might be forced to close if it did not prevail, the president and general manager of the resort at the time said at the outset of the case. Talisker Land Holdings, LLC countered that the leases had expired, suddenly leaving doubts that Powdr Corp. would retain control of PCMR. …Colorado-based Vail Resorts, one of Powdr Corp.'s industry rivals, would enter the case on the Talisker Land Holdings, LLC side in May of 2013 with the aim of wresting the disputed land from Powdr Corp. and coupling it with nearby Canyons Resort, which was branded a Vail Resorts property as part of a long-term lease and operations agreement reached at the same time of the Vail Resorts entry into the case. Vail Resorts was already an industry behemoth with its namesake property in the Rockies and other mountain resorts across North America. The addition of Canyons Resort would advance the Vail Resorts portfolio in one of North America's key skiing states.It was a deft maneuver orchestrated by the chairman and CEO of Vail Resorts, Rob Katz. The agreement was pegged at upward of $300 million in long-term debt. As part of the deal, Vail Resorts also seized control of the litigation on behalf of Talisker Land Holdings, LLC. …The lawsuit itself unfolded with stunning developments followed by shocking ones over the course of two-plus years. In one stupefying moment, the Talisker Land Holdings, LLC attorneys discovered a crucial letter from the PCMR side regarding the leases had been backdated. In another such moment, PCMR outlined plans to essentially dismantle the resort infrastructure, possibly on an around-the-clock schedule, if it was ordered off the disputed land.What was transpiring in the courtroom was inconceivable to the community. How could Powdr Corp., even inadvertently, not renew the leases on the ground that made up most of the skiing terrain at PCMR, many asked. Why couldn't Powdr Corp. and Talisker Land Holdings, LLC just reach a new agreement, others wondered. And many became weary as businessmen and their attorneys took to the courtroom with the future of PCMR, critical to a broad swath of the local economy, at stake. The mood eventually shifted to exasperation as it appeared there was a chance PCMR would not open for a ski season if Talisker Land Holdings, LLC moved forward with an eviction against Powdr Corp. from the disputed terrain.The lawsuit wore on with the Talisker Land Holdings, LLC-Vail Resorts side winning a series of key rulings from the 3rd District Court judge presiding over the case. Judge Ryan Harris in the summer of 2014 signed a de facto eviction notice against PCMR and ordered the sides into mediation. Powdr Corp., realizing there was little more that could be accomplished as it attempted to maintain control of PCMR, negotiated a $182.5 million sale of the resort to Vail Resorts that September.Incredible. Here, if you're curious, was Park City just before the merger:And Canyons:Now, imagine if someone, someday, merged this whole operation with the expanded version of Deer Valley, which sits right next door to Park City on Empire Peak:Here's a closer look at the border between the two, which is separated by ropes, rather than by any geographic barrier:Right around the time Vail took over Park City, all seven major local ski areas discussed a “One Wasatch” interconnect, which could be accomplished with a handful of lifts between Brighton and Park City and between Solitude and Alta (the Canyons/Park City connection below has since been built; Brighton and Solitude already share a ski link, as do Alta and Snowbird):This plan died under an avalanche of external factors, and is unlikely to be resurrected anytime soon. However, the mountains aren't getting any farther apart physically, and at some point we're going to accept that a few aerial lifts through the wilderness are a lot less damaging to our environment than thousands of cars cluttering up our roads.On the Park City-Canyons connector gondolaWe talked a bit about the Quicksilver Gondola, which, eight years after its construction, is taken for granted. But it's an amazing machine, a 7,767-foot-long connector that fused Park City to the much-larger Canyons, creating the largest interconnected ski resort in the United States. The fact that such a major, transformative lift opened in 2015, just a year after Vail acquired Park City, and the ski area is now having trouble simply upgrading two older lifts, speaks to how dramatically sentiment around the resort has changed within town.On Park City's mining historyAn amazing feature of skiing Park City is the gigantic warehouses, conveyor belts, and other industrial artifacts that dot the landscape. Visit Park City hosts free daily tours of these historic structures, which we discuss in the podcast. You can learn more here.On the Friends of Ski Mountain Mining HistoryWalsh mentions an organization called “Friends of Ski Mountain Mining History.” This group assumes the burden of restoring and maintaining all of these historic structures. From their website:More than 300 mines once operated in Park City, with the last silver mine closing in 1982. Twenty historic mine structures still exist today, many can been seen while skiing, hiking or mountain biking on our mountain trails. Due to the ravages of time and our harsh winters, many of the mine structures are dilapidated and in critical need of repair. We are committed to preserving our rich mining legacy for future residents and visitors before we lose these historic structures forever.Over the past seven years, our dedicated volunteers have completed stabilization of the King Con Counterweight, California Comstock Mill, Jupiter Ore Bin, Little Bell Ore Bin, two Silver King Water Tanks, the Silver Star Boiler Room and Coal Hopper, the Thaynes Conveyor and the King Con Ore Bin. Previous projects undertaken by our members include the Silver King Aerial Tramway Towers and two Silver King Water Tanks adjacent to the Silver Queen ski run. Our lecture with Clark Martinez, principal contractor on our projects and Jonathan Richards who is our structural engineer, will provide you insight as to how we saved these monuments to our mining era.Preserving our mining heritage is expensive. Our next challenge is to save the Silver King Headframe located at the base of the Bonanza lift and Thaynes Headframe near the Thaynes lift at Park City Mountain Resort. These massive buildings and adjacent structures will take 6 years to stabilize with an expected cost of $3 million. We are embarking on a capital campaign to raise the funds required to save these iconic structures. You can learn more about our campaign here.Here's a cool but slow-paced video about it:On the 2030/34 Winter OlympicsWe talk a bit about the potential for Salt Lake City – and, by extension, host mountains Park City, Deer Valley, and Snowbasin – to host a future Olympic Games. While both 2030 and 2034 are possibilities, the latter increasingly looks likely. Per an October Deseret News article:It looks like there's no competition for Salt Lake City's bid to host the 2034 Winter Games.International Olympic Committee members voted Sunday to formally award both the 2030 and 2034 Winter Games together next year after being told Salt Lake City's preference is for 2034 and the other three candidates still in the race are finalizing bids for 2030.“I think it's everything we could have hoped for,” said Fraser Bullock, president and CEO of the Salt Lake City-Utah Committee for the Games, describing the decision as “a tremendous step forward” now that Salt Lake City was identified as the only candidate for 2034.Salt Lake City is bidding to host the more than $2.2 billion event in either 2030 or 2034, but has made it clear waiting until the later date is better financially, because that will avoid competition for domestic sponsors with the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles.The next step for the bid that began more than a decade ago is a virtual presentation to the IOC's Future Host Commission for the Winter Games during the week starting Nov. 19 that will include Gov. Spencer Cox and Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall. IOC Executive Board members will decide when they meet from Nov. 30 through Dec. 1 which bids will advance to contract negotiations for 2030 and 2034, known as targeted dialogue under the new, less formal selection process. Their choices to host the 2030 and 2034 Winter Games will go to the full membership for a final ratification vote next year, likely in July just before the start of the 2024 Summer Games in Paris. The Summer Olympics have evolved into a toxic expense that no one really wants. The Winter Games, however, still seem desirable, and I've yet to encounter any significant resistance from the Utah ski community, who have (not entirely but in significant pockets) kind of made resistence to everything their default posture.The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 96/100 in 2023, and number 482 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane, or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email skiing@substack.com. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

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You can also subscribe to the free tier below:WhoDave Fields, President and General Manager of Snowbird, UtahRecorded onSeptember 18, 2023About SnowbirdClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Powdr Located in: Snowbird, UtahYear founded: 1971Pass affiliations:* Ikon Pass: 7 days, shared with Alta, no blackouts* Ikon Base Plus Pass: 5 days, shared with Alta, holiday blackouts* Ikon Base Pass: 5 days, holiday blackouts* Mountain Collective: 2 days, no blackouts* Altabird: unlimited accessClosest neighboring ski areas: Alta (1 second), Solitude (:39), Woodward Park City (:39), Brighton (:42), Park City (:47), Deer Valley (:55) - travel times vary dramatically depending upon weather and time of day and year.Base elevation: 7,760 feet (at Baby Thunder)Summit elevation: 11,000 feet (at Hidden Peak)Vertical drop: 3,240 feetSkiable Acres: 2,500Average annual snowfall: 500 inchesTrail count: 140 (35% most difficult, 38% intermediate, 27% beginner – this is the official breakdown by trail name; anyone who has skied Snowbird knows that the count is closer to 99% Oh S**t, 1% for mortals)Lift count: 14 (1 tram, 6 high-speed quads, 4 doubles, 3 conveyors)Why I interviewed himSince I've skied hundreds of ski areas and I write about them incessantly, people often ask me which one is the best, or at least which is my favorite. It should be a hard question to answer. Nothing else in America delivers the drama of Big Sky, the energy of Palisades Tahoe, the aura of Aspen-Snowmass, the sprawl of Vail Mountain. How could I possibly choose a winner? But it is not a hard question to answer. Because the answer is Snowbird and Alta. And nothing else comes close. Not in Utah. Not in Colorado. Not in Tahoe. Not up and down the Rockies. Not in Alaska. Not in BC. Yes, I'm including Whistler. There is no better skiing.One lift to the top. Three thousand feet of sustained pitch. Five hundred inches of snow – on average. Last season, 838. That's more snow than the Poconos have tallied in every winter since the Lincoln Administration, combined. And all of it like a bag of cottonballs, so light it's a wonder the stuff doesn't float off into the sky. The terrain: vast, varied, labyrinthian, mesmerizing, scarcely groomed. Trees like Narnia, spaced for loping pow turns, chained one to the next by snow meadows smooth and ever-rising. Big open bowls. Chutes stacked off The Cirque like weapons arrayed along an armory wall. Hidden Peak. Mineral. Baldy up top. Alta through the gate. Amazing.That such a place exists at all is a stunning confluence of a dozen natural phenomena. That this snowy freefall sits not in some sawtoothed Alaskan range 600 miles from the nearest road, but 34 miles – half of it interstate – from a major international airport is one of the most amazing facts that I'm aware of. And I've witnessed human birth. Twice.Snowbird is so good that it's hard to imagine how we'd think about great ski areas if it didn't exist. Like contemplating the best basketball player if there'd been no Michael Jordan, or arguing over the best way to light a room prior to the invention of lightbulbs. Whatever you think of as the attributes of a great ski area - and by that I mean the skiing, not the shopping or the apres or the wacky tire-tube races - Snowbird transcends them all.Of course, Alta, as a brand and as an organized ski hill, was there first (by 33 years), and it shares Snowbird's every attribute, with a bit more soul and a bit more snow and a bit less flash and lift-served vert. Part of the Snowbird mystique is proximity to – and the direct connection with – its atmospheric neighbor. If Snowbird stood alone on some Utah steppe, perhaps it would not be so easy to notch the mountain above its peers. But the interplay of the two, their vastness and mystery, their videogame-like tap-dancing between realms, their surreal Cloud City patina, creates, in their fusion, the best version of skiing that we have.What we talked aboutLiving through 838 inches of snow; what happens when hundreds of employees have to spend the night to make sure the mountain can open; why Alta gets more snow than Snowbird; assessing Snowbird's new tram cars and related upgrades; why Snowbird didn't build an all-new tram; catastrophe installing the new tram cars; “I've never had an ocean-liner tracker on my phone until this came to pass”; dealing with disappointment; reminiscing on the mysterious pre-Olympics Utah; the legacy of Snowbird's former longtime GM, Bob Bonar; the transition from independent resort to member of Powdr; “I'm amazed at how quickly the marketplace has changed” from a multi-mountain pass point of view; why Snowbird didn't join the Mountain Collective for its inaugural season in 2012; why Snowbird and Alta joined the Ikon Pass as one combined “destination”; why Snowbird didn't follow Alta off the Ikon Base Pass and whether they'll reconsider that decision; how much we can really blame the Ikon Pass for LCC crowding; why the Altabird pass soared in price for 2023-24; Snowbird's “Freeloader” Pass; reflecting on Fast Tracks two years in; why the tram is excluded from Fast Tracks and whether that will continue to be the case; the potential for a Fast Tracks season pass at Snowbird (which Copper and Killington already sell); breaking down the proposed Little Cottonwood Canyon Gondola; “the highway only works as well as the worst car and bus in it”; why this lift would be the least-impactful solution to LCC traffic; paying for the gondola; how the gondola would alter the calculus of canyon closures; “the more people learned about gondola and how it works, the more they supported it”; the current state of the proposed Mary Ellen Gulch expansion; upgrading Wilbere to a new lift on a new line; potential to develop more green terrain at Snowbird; potential for a six-pack lift at Snowbird and where it could go; and phasing out the howitzers.      Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewFrom 1992 to 2002, Utah recorded around 3 million skier visits per winter, plus or minus a couple hundred thousand. Then the Olympics hit. And the world was like, “Damn.” Like aliens had landed and shown them how to teleport. Or turn pinecones into pterodactyls. Or something else that would be as amazing as seven giant ski areas that all average 300-plus inches of fluffy light snow per winter being situated two sitcoms' drive-time from a major airport.By the 2005-06 ski season, four years after the Games, Utah skier visits crested 4 million for the first time. Which seemed amazing until the Ikon Pass landed for the 2018-19 season, the same winter that Utah skier visits (coincidentally or not), blew past 5 million for the first time. Setting aside the Covid-shortened 2019-20 ski season, they just kept accelerating, hitting an astonishing 7.1 million skier visits last winter.Whether you blame the Olympics or the megapasses or the fact that Utah's population has grown by more than a million people (a 50 percent surge) over the past two decades, the state's ski areas – and only 14 are public facilities that can manage any kind of volume – are getting crushed.Luckily, unlike Washington, where a surging population has no choice but to deal with traffic or drive to Idaho, Utah has no shortage of potential solutions to its high-altitude cluster. Deer Valley recently outlined plans to nearly triple in size. A proposed passenger train could thin traffic on Park City's cluttered roads. And the Utah Department of Transportation recently ruled that a gondola from the mouth of Little Cottonwood Canyon to the base of Snowbird and Alta was its preferred option to combat the untenable traffic on State Route 210.The gondola would be eight miles long and run high over the road, skirting the firing squad of 50 avalanche paths that run through the canyon. The highway has “the highest uncontrolled avalanche hazard index of any major highway in the world,” University of Utah professor Jim Steenburgh told KSL News Radio in April. Snowbird is in favor of building the gondola. So is Alta. Here's an overview:And a little explainer video:Just about anywhere else in the world, the gondola would be viewed for what it is: a rational solution to an untenable traffic problem. But this is U.S. America, and the lift has instead been recast as an existential threat to both the natural and manmade worlds. I can't even mention it on Twitter without sending a dozen Brobots into fits of feral rage. It's weird. SR-210 would never be built today – the most disruptive possible thing humans can build into the wilderness is a paved road. But this avalanche-prone, congested scar of concrete has been strangely lionized as the only acceptable conduit to the end of the canyon, while the gondola, a light-footprint machine with 22 towers that would run high above the rich natural environment on the canyon floor, is demonized.That's the reality that Snowbird officials are dealing with coming off a record snow season. In our conversation, Fields goes deep into this project, which is unquestionably the most controversial in U.S. American skiing. He has thoughts for the buses-will-fix-it crowd, for the environmental-doomsday crew, for the fiscal hawks fretting over the cost. I could write a book on this, but Fields makes a compelling argument to just build the damn thing.Questions I wish I'd askedI've always been curious why the Peruvian lift terminates where it does, rather than hoisting skiers up to High Baldy Traverse, or even making a turn up Baldy itself. The answer, I'm sure, is some combination of wind and desire to preserve a high-altitude hike-up experience. But that tunnel cutting over to Mineral couldn't have been cheap, and I'd like to hear the story behind how they landed on that configuration.What I got wrongI said that Snowbird had secured approval for the proposed Mary Ellen Gulch expansion from the U.S. Forest Service, but that approval actually came from the Utah County Board of Adjustment.Why you should ski SnowbirdSnowbird is the closest thing I've found to a perfect ski area. For capable skiers. Don't bother if you're a groomer god, or if you haven't skied - or don't like to ski - powder or bumps, or if carving Chip's Run with half the population of Texas doesn't sound fun (it isn't). I say that not to be an a-hole, but because I don't want you to be disappointed. Snowbird is only fun if you're a very good skier. And by that I mean a very good skier on ungroomed terrain. Because the mountain doesn't groom much. And if you're not so good, but you think you are, well, the mountain will have some news for you.It will have a message for you, regardless. This place is savage. Respect the double-blacks. Because Man do they mean it. There is no bailout on The Cirque, no cat-track oopsie-doodle exit. Move too far the wrong way and find yourself staring down Wilma's or Mach Schnell, sheer cliffs disguised as ski trails, mandatory airs between you and your ride home. Chip's is safe, but wander 50 yards off-trail and try not to miss the “Cliffs Ahead” signs. Because when Snowbird says “cliffs” they mean like 100-footers. And don't ski alone into the trees – tree-well safety bulletins were practically invented for this place.Please excuse me here. I'm usually allergic to tough-guy talk. But this place can kill you if you're not careful. Once, a few years back, a group of us skied off Black Forest and into Organ Grinder, a swatch of wooded snowfields skier's right off the Gad 2 lift. Organ Grinder, on the map, is a single run, a line arcing through Niehues whites. On the ground it is a multi-sheathed arsenal of fierce chutes stacked along a wooded face. After gliding through easy trees, we emerged at the top of one of these, a shot tilted at the approximate angle of a rocket launch. A four- or five-foot drop, a half-dozen steep turns to a wall of trees. Then the terrain cinched shut. The only exit a shot between trees and rock walls. Point and go.The run is a single black diamond.But put all that aside for a moment. Snowbird, and especially Snowbird together with Alta, should be the aspirational capstone for any skier driven to master this quirky sport. The vastness and quality and challenge of the terrain is absolutely unmatched anywhere in America. The two ski areas together are twice as large as Jackson and half as groomed as Palisades, with more and better snow than Whistler. And easier to get to than all of them. So go there. Just wait until you're ready.Podcast NotesMiscellany on items discussed in the podcast:On Jackson Hole's tramTo lend context to our discussion around Snowbird's tram upgrade, we talked quite a bit about Jackson Hole's $31 tram project, which stretched from 2006 to ‘08. I could try to explain it myself, or you could just watch this series of videos:On Powdr's portfolioSnowbird is one of 10 ski areas owned by Park City-based Powdr:On the Mountain CollectiveFields said that one of his regrets was not joining the Mountain Collective's inaugural class in 2012. The founding four were Alta, Jackson Hole, Aspen, and Palisades Tahoe. The pass cost $349 for two days at each ski area.On the varying Snowbird/Alta access on Mountain Collective and IkonOne of Mountain Collective's selling points is that rather than combining Snowbird and Alta days, as Ikon Pass does, the pass gives you two days at each, with no blackouts. As Alta, Aspen, and others have backed out of the Ikon Base Pass, the Mountain Collective has become a potent Ikon Pass Base Base, with most of the pass' top ski areas and a substantially lower price.On rope-drop days on Mineral BasinI don't know if this is inspiring or hilarious or horrifying:The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing all year long. Join us.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 79/100 in 2023, and number 465 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane, or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email skiing@substack.com. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

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You can also subscribe for free below:WhoKeith Kreischer, General Manager of Granite Gorge, New HampshireRecorded onMay 30, 2023About Granite GorgeOwned by: Granite Gorge Partnership LLC, a group of local investorsLocated in: Roxbury, New HampshireYear founded: 1959Pass affiliations: NoneReciprocal partners: NoneClosest neighboring ski areas: Crotched (32 minutes), Brattleboro (32 minutes), Bellows Falls (35 minutes), Pats Peak (37 minutes), Mount Sunapee (50 minutes), Arrowhead (50 minutes), Ascutney (58 minutes), McIntyre (1 hour), Hermitage Club (1 hour, 6 minutes), Mount Snow (1 hour, 9 minutes), Magic (1 hour, 3 minutes), Wachusett (1 hour, 7 minutes), Bromley (1 hour, 13 minutes), Berkshire East (1 hour, 13 minutes), Okemo (1 hour, 13 minutes), Veterans Memorial (1 hour, 14 minutes), Ragged Mountain (1 hour, 16 minutes), Stratton (1 hour, 18 minutes)Base elevation: 800 feetSummit elevation: 1,325 feetVertical drop: 525 feetSkiable Acres: 25Average annual snowfall: 100 inchesTrail count: 17 (2 expert, 3 advanced, 5 intermediate, 7 beginner)Lift count: 3 (1 double, 1 handletow, 1 carpet)Why I interviewed himIt doesn't happen often, these comebacks. Ski areas die and they stay dead. Or they die and return and die again and then they're really gone.We're at a weird inflection point. After decades of exploding numbers followed by decades of divebombing ranks, the number of U.S. ski areas has stabilized over the past 20 years. Most of the ski areas that are going to die already have. Most of the ones that remain will survive indefinitely. Yes, climate change. But this has been a long-simmering storm and operators have strung lines of snowguns like cannons along a castle wall. They are ready to fight and they will.They have plenty to fight for. In most of U.S. America, it is all but impossible to build a new ski area. Imagine if no one could build a new restaurant or grocery store. The owners of existing restaurants and grocery stores would rejoice, knowing that anyone who wanted to eat out or buy a banana would have to do it through them. Such is the state of U.S. skiing – what we have is all we're ever going to get*. The established mountains are not exactly monopolies, but they do not have to worry about unexpected new competition, either.There is one hack: if a would-be owner can find an abandoned ski area, the path to selling lift tickets and hauling weekenders up the incline becomes infinitely easier. It's the difference between fixing up a junkyard car and assembling one from the raw elements of the earth. You'd have a better chance of building a time machine out of cardboard boxes and a Nintendo Game Boy than you would of constructing a ski area on a raw New England hillside. But find one already scarred with the spiderweb of named trails, and you have a chance.It's not a good chance. Ski areas do come back: Saddleback in 2020, Tenney and Granite Gorge in 2023. Les Otten may bring the Balsams Wilderness back as a mega-resort. But most simply fade. There are hundreds of lost ski areas in New England – many times more have died than survived. Many big and established ski centers evaporated: Mt. Tom, Brodie, Crotched East, King Ridge, Moose Mountain, Mt. Whittier, Maple Valley, Plymouth Notch, Snow Valley. Empty lifts still swing over many of these mountains decades after they went bust, but none ever found its way back.So why this one? Why Granite Gorge? A small ski area in a state stuffed with giant ski areas, many of them a mainline shot off the interstate from Boston. Once the joint closed after a rough winter in 1977, that should have been it. Another lost ski area in a state littered with them.But then Granite Gorge re-opened, miraculously, improbably, in 2003, under Fred Baybutt, who also ran a local construction company with his family. Baybutt added snowmaking and night skiing, built a new lodge and a new bridge over from Route 9. He bought a used Borvig double and ran it to the summit.But the ski area never really found momentum under Baybutt. By 2018, the chairlift had ceased operations. The ropetow and carpet continued to spin, but in August 2020, Baybutt died suddenly, and the ski area appeared to die with him.Except that it didn't. Granite Gorge is back. Somehow, this 525-vertical foot, low-elevation molehill whose direct competitors include basically every ski area in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts has more lives than a cartoon coyote smashed under an anvil. It's one of the best stories in New England skiing right now, and I had to hear it.*With rare exceptions, such as the forthcoming Mayflower, Utah.What we talked aboutWhat it's like to take that first general manager job; an overgrown mess; “I had to keep in mind that there was going to be an unlimited amount of punches that were going to be dealt”; how a busted Ford Taurus and a can of Red Bull foreshadowed the renaissance of Granite Gorge; Kreischer's messianic, decade-long quest to rescue Granite Gorge; how an ownership group “who really just wanted this thing back in the hands of the community” came together; advice for up-and-comers in the ski business; trying to save the lost Tanglwood ski area in Pennsylvania or Maple Valley in Vermont; Granite Gorge under the Baybutt family, the previous owners; Keene, New Hampshire; the rabid outdoor culture in the Northeast; how this time is different at Granite Gorge; fixing the bridge back to the ski area; helping ownership understand the enormous capital needs; the power of admitting your shortcomings; “if you don't know something, you need to find someone who does”; the comeback season was “awesome”; much love for Mountain Creek; finding a niche at Nashoba Valley; reviving the Granite Gorge double chair; why the ski area removed the lift's mid-station; Granite Gorge's snowmaking footprint and aspirations; how the ski area's new mountain bike operation will enhance glade skiing; surviving as a small ski area in a big ski state; night skiing; building terrain parks at an appropriate scale for mortals; running a mountain as a dad with five children; keeping lift tickets and passes affordable; a parking shortage; and competing against megapasses.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewI first connected with Keith sometime last spring, when he shot me an email with a promising update on Granite Gorge. The ski area was re-opening, he said, but I'd have to keep it to myself for the time being. Shortly after, the new ownership group officially named him general manager, and by August he was whacking weeds from beneath the Granite Gorge sign on Route 9 and brushing ticks off his legs.Excited as I was about this news, I generally don't ask folks to join me on the podcast until they've weathered at least one season leading their current resort. It's impossible to really know the place until you've sat teeth-gritted through a brown rain-soaked January and roared in glory at a nor-easter-driven March power-up. It's just not something you can appreciate through Zuckerberg's Oculus glasses. You have to be there.So we waited. In January, the ski area cranked open with its ropetow. The chairlift came online in mid-February. I was there the next day, taking fastlaps off the summit with my six-year-old. I stopped Kreischer for what would become my first #TwoMinuteStorm (basically, very short interviews with ski area managers) video on Instagram (click through to listen):Kreischer and I talked last summer, so I had a sense of his baseline. This podcast was almost like talking to a different person. It was like he'd spent 10 months cramming for a master's degree in Granite Gorge. Which I guess he had. But waiting was the right decision. Kreischer is a terrific ski area leader, thoughtful and passionate and enthusiastic and full of positive energy. He's the kind of guy who only gets more interested in a topic as he immerses himself in it. And after transforming an overgrown backwoods bump into a living business, his raw passion for the job had only amplified and become more focused. Last summer, Granite Gorge was an abstract thing. It was right there, waiting, but you could only really find it in your imagination. Now it's real. Now, he's actually done it. Actually re-opened a dead-as-the-dinosaurs ski area. Even if you normally just read this article and skip the podcast, listen to this one. Kreischer is as authentic and sincere as they get.Why you should ski Granite GorgeNot to be lazy with it, but I've covered this one already:Of all the ski states in America, I can't think of a rougher one to make a go as an operator than New Hampshire. There are so many good and large resorts and they are impossibly easy to access, stacked along I-93 like a snowy outlet mall. But here's little Granite Gorge, opened in 1959 but busted in the ‘70s and re-opened in 2003 and busted again in 2020 and now, improbably, opened again under a group of local business owners who bought it at auction last June. The joint sits in the southwest corner of the state, well off the main ski thoroughfares, which means it will make it as a locals' bump for Keene or it won't make it at all. I took my 6-year-old and we rolled 15 runs off the double chair that had re-opened the day before after not running since 2018. It was creaky and cranky and the mid-station was gone but it was running. We skied the same run over and over, a thin and windy green lolling off the summit. Six hundred vertical feet, up and down. Skier traffic was light but the tubing hill was full. It was a holiday weekend and we'd found a hack. No liftlines on a New England Sunday.Skiing there feels like being part of an excavation, as though they are digging things out of the ground and looking at them and trying to figure out what the ancients of New Hampshire could have been doing with such contraptions. It's spunky and plucky and a little ramshackle. You drive over a single-vehicle bridge to access a parking lot that's muddy and ungraded and unmanaged. They removed the chairlift mid-station, but it's still laying in parts scattered all over the woods. The lodge is squat and half-finished like a field hospital. But a strong spirit of revival is there, and if the owners can have patience enough to give this thing five years and focus on busloads of kids, it has a future.OK maybe not the best commercial for the place. But here's what Granite Gorge can give you: a completely uncrowded and inexpensive ski experience in a region that's getting short on both. Probably not your destination if you and the boys are looking to link Flipdoodle Supremes on monster kickers. Perfect if, like me, you're a dad who doesn't want to fight crowds on a holiday weekend. Or if you're a local looking to crush turns after work. Or if you live nearby and you have an Epic Pass but you just want to support the joint. There are worse places for your money.Podcast NotesOn the auction timelineThe current owners won Granite Gorge in an auction last June. From the June 6, 2022 Keene Sentinel:It took nearly 10 minutes of deliberation, two bidders dropping out and a back-and-forth bidding war amounting to $210,000 before a developer secured the rights to the former Granite Gorge Ski Area property along with the intent to reopen it for recreation.Between breaks of silence, bidders at Friday's foreclosure auction raised the stakes from an opening bid of $240,000 to a winning bid of $430,000 on site at the property, located along Route 9 in Roxbury. Bryan Granger, the senior vice president of Keene-based wholesale grocery company C&S Wholesale Grocers, clinched the final bid.Granger represented Granite Gorge Partnership, LLC at the auction, which claims itself to be a local group of Keene investors with a “shared desire of returning winter and summer activities to Granite Gorge in a safe and inclusive manner,” according to a media statement Granger provided to The Sentinel.The other bidder was a Massachusetts-based contractor named Nick Williamson.On Granite Gorge's troubled historyNew England Ski History provides a succinct timeline of Granite Gorge's history (the ski area was originally known as “Pinnacle”). A few highlights:Following the 1974-75 season, George LaBrecque transferred the ski area to Maurice Stone. One year later, Stone sold the area to Paul and Eleanor Jensen of Connecticut. Dealing with subpar snowfall, no snowmaking, and aging infrastructure, the Jensens only operated the Pinnacle for the 1976-77 season. Following the season, when mortgage payments were missed, Stone foreclosed and took back the property. There would be no more lift-served skiing at Pinnacle for the rest of the twentieth century.In November 1980, Stone sold the 94-acre Pinnacle property to Juanita Robinson of Kentucky and her three sons, one of whom lived in Massachusetts. Though “big plans” were teased with skiing to return in 1980 or 1981, Pinnacle remained idle.In December 1985, the Robinsons sold the property to Bald Mountain Park, Inc. The real estate entity held the property for fourteen years.In September 1999, Baybutt Construction purchased the former ski area and commenced studies for a potential reopening. …After a quarter of a century of idleness, the Pinnacle became a work site in the spring of 2002 when a new bridge was built from Route 9 to the base area.The Pinnacle reopened in early 2003 under the name of Granite Gorge. … The tiny startup on the Bunny Buster slope featured a rope tow and snowmaking. …After multiple years of planning and decades after the first proposal, Granite Gorge saw a significant expansion in 2005 with the addition of a double chairlift to Spruce Peak.Snowmaking and night skiing were expanded for 2006-07, which also featured a new base yurt. Snowmaking was expanded to the top of the chairlift for the 2008-2009 season, while night skiing followed up the mountain for the 2009-2010 season.In 2010 Granite Gorge was approved for a 300-person lodge, to be built in phases. Portions were completed in 2011 and 2012.In late 2012, parent company Baybutt Construction was dealing with escalating financial problems. One of Baybutt's lenders, Interstate Electrical Services Corp., arranged for a foreclosure auction of some of Baybutt's properties, including Granite Gorge ski area, for February 1, 2013. The auction was cancelled at the last minute and the ski area remained open. That month, Baybutt Construction Corp. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.Granite Gorge continued to operate and grow in subsequent years, including adding to its off season offerings and events. …Granite Gorge scaled back operations for the 2018-19 season, as it ceased operating the chairlift and instead focused on snow tubing and skiing on the Bunny Buster trail. After nearly being auctioned off in the summer of 2019, the ski area continued to operate its surface lifts during the winter of 2019-20.On August 3, 2020, Fred Baybutt died of a sudden heart event at the age of 60. Following his death, Granite Gorge sat idle.On Tanglwood, PAKreischer recalls early snowboard adventures at Tanglwood, one of dozens of abandoned ski areas in Pennsylvania's Poconos. DCSki lists modest stats for the joint: 415 vertical feet on 35 acres served by two double chairs and a ropetow. The place closed around 2010 and liquidated its lifts in 2012. Here's a circa 2008 trailmap:I spent a few hours hiking the place back in 2021. Here's what I wrote at the time:Another 40 minutes up wild Pennsylvania highway is Tanglwood, 415 vertical feet shuttered since 2010. The mountain once had two doubles and two T-bars and a ropetow but now it has nothing, the place stripped as though looted by a ski grinch stuffing the chairs and tower guns into his wicked sleigh. Concrete lift towers anchored into the forest and the trails themselves are all that remain. The place is filled with deer. Like all the ski areas I visited that day it is lined with houses. It is late in the day and the American mole people are emerging to stand on their decks and tend to their plants and I wonder what it would be like to live on a ski area and then not live on a ski area because the ski area is gone and now you just live on a mountain where it hardly ever snows and you can hardly ever ski. I think I would be pissed.On Maple Valley, VermontKreischer also considered resurrecting Maple Valley, a thousand-footer in Southern Vermont. It had a nice little spread:The place opened in 1963 and made it, haltingly, to the end of the century under a series of owners. The culprit was likely a very tough neighborhood – Southern Vermont skiers have their choice of Stratton, Mount Snow, Bromley, or Magic. Maple Valley was just a little too close and a little too small to compete:I also included Granite Gorge on the map, so you can see how close the place is. I wouldn't have bet on Granite to re-open before Maple if pure ski terrain were the only factor to consider. But a fellow named Nicholas Mercede tried twice to open the ski area, according to New England Ski History. NIMBYs beat him back, and he died in 2018 at age 90.The lifts – a pair of 1960s Hall doubles – are, I believe, still standing. An outfit called “Sugar Mountain Holdings” has owned the ski area since 2018, and “a long-term vision was announced for possibly reopening the ski area,” according to New England Ski History.On Ski Resort Tycoon, the videogameKreischer's first run at ski resort management came via Ski Resort Tycoon, a 2000 sim game that you can still purchase on Amazon for $5.95. According to Wikipedia, “A Yeti can also be seen in the game, and it can be found eating the guests.” My God, can you imagine the insurance bill?On the density of New England ski areasNew England is one of the most competitive ski markets on the planet. It's certainly one of the densest, with 100 ski areas stuffed into 71,988 square miles – that's an area small than any major western ski state. The six New England states are small (Maine occupies nearly half of the total square mileage), so they share the glory, but their size masks just how tightly they are clustered. Check this stat: the number of ski areas per square mile across the six New England states is more than four times that of Colorado and six times that of Utah:Of course, New England ski areas tend to measure far smaller than those of the West. But the point of this exercise is to underscore the sheer volume of choices available to the New England skier. Here's what Granite Gorge is competing against as it works to establish itself as a viable business:That means the ski area is fighting against heavies like Mount Snow, Okemo, Stratton, and Mount Sunapee for its local Keene market – and the Keene market is essentially Granite Gorge's only market. There's probably a place for this little knuckler to act as a new-skier assembly line and weekend hideout for families and teenage Park Bros, but there's probably not a tougher place in America to pull this off than southwest New Hampshire.On Granite Gorge's mountain bike park and better glade skiing Kreischer believes that Granite Gorge cannot survive as a winter-only business. Earlier this spring, he announced the construction of a downhill mountain bike park. You can track their progress via Instagram:As regular readers know, I don't cover MTB, but we discuss these new trails in the context of their potential to enhance the ski area's glade network. Very little of Granite Gorge's face has been cut with trails. The potential for glade development is huge, and this initial poke into the forest is an excellent start.On Highland bike parkKreischer and I briefly discuss Highland Bike Park in New Hampshire. This is the only lift-served MTB park in New England that doesn't also double as a ski area. It was, in fact, once a 700-vertical-foot ski area. Here's a circa 1987 trailmap:Highland closed for skiing in 1995, and re-opened as a mountain bike park at some point over the next dozen years. Bike people tell me that the place is one of the best-regarded MTB facilities in New England. Here's the current bike trailmap:There are no current plans to re-open the area for skiing. “While there have been rumors that limited ski operations could resume in the future, the park remains biking-only at this point,” according to New England Ski History. Highland is in a tough spot for skiing, lodged between Ragged and Gunstock, which both have high-speed lifts and far more vertical. Highland sits just over two miles off Interstate 93, however, and there could be room in the market for a terrain-park only mountain à la Woodward Park City. Loon is the current terrain park king of New Hampshire, but it's crowded and expensive. Imagine a parks paradise with $50 day tickets and $300 season passes. That could work.On the alarm beeping in the backgroundYou may notice an alarm beeping in the background during the latter half of the podcast. I thought this was on my end, and I planned to simply edit the noise out, since I'm listening most of the time. After the podcast, I came up the stairs toting a ladder, prepared to dismantle the fire alarm. My wife looked at me, baffled. “What beeping?” she asked. Well, it was on Keith's end. Hopefully he wasn't so devoted to the podcast that he let his house burn down while recording it. Though I doubt that. Maybe he is Batman and that was his Batman alarm alerting him to nearby crimes. Though frankly I'm not sure a superhero could have revived Granite Gorge in six months. So it was probably just his You're Awesome alarm going off. All part of the story here.On an assist from Pats PeakKeith followed up via email after our call to throw some credit to his contemporary at Pats Peak: “I was reflecting on our conversation last night and one huge thing I forgot to mention was Kris Blomback and the help from Pat's Peak. They were instrumental in giving us a patrol sled and some awesome rental equipment that was a big deal getting us going this season. Kris is an amazing guy and a great leader. When I listened to his podcast episode with you, his words of advice to me was virtually verbatim, which really showcases his honesty, class, and true passion for bolstering skiing in this region. I really want to thank Kris and the rest of the Pats team for their help and assistance bringing us back to being a feeder for the entire Southern NH region.”On New Hampshire skiingI am an enormous, unapologetic fan of New Hampshire skiing. The mountains are many and varied, each one distinct. I've hosted a number of New Hampshire resort leaders on the podcast, and I have conversations scheduled with Cranmore GM Ben Wilcox and Attitash GM Brandon Swartz later this year. I also recorded an episode with Dartmouth Skiway GM Mark Adamczyk earlier this week – you'll have that one soon. Here's what's in the catalog right now:* Loon Mountain GM Brian Norton – Nov. 14, 2022* Pats Peak GM Kris Blomback – Sept. 22, 2022* Ragged Mountain GM Erik Barnes – April 29, 2022* Whaleback Executive Director Jon Hunt – June 17, 2021* Waterville Valley President and GM Tim Smith – Feb. 23, 2021* Gunstock President and GM Tom Day – Jan. 13, 2021* Cannon Mountain GM John DeVivo – Oct. 12, 2020* Loon Mountain President and GM Jay Scambio – Feb. 7, 2020The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing in North America year-round. Join us.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 51/100 in 2023, and number 437 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane, or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email skiing@substack.com. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

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You can also subscribe for free below:WhoTodd Bennett, President and Chief Operating Officer of Deer Valley Resort, UtahRecorded onApril 19, 2023About Deer ValleyClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Alterra Mountain CompanyLocated in: Park City, UtahYear founded: 1981Pass affiliations: 7 unrestricted days on Ikon Pass, five days with blackouts on Ikon Base Pass PlusReciprocal partners: Unlimited Deer Valley season passholders receive one day each at Alta, Brighton, and SnowbirdClosest neighboring ski areas: Park City Mountain Resort (5 minutes), Utah Olympic Park (18 minutes), Woodward Park City (20 minutes), Solitude (1 hour), Snowbird (1 hour), Brighton (1 hour, 8 minutes), Alta (1 hour, 8 minutes) – travel times vary considerably with weather and traffic; if U.S. Americans could summon a worldview that extends beyond their dashboards, they would understand that this entire megaplex could be connected with a handful of gondolas, reducing traffic and emissions in the Wasatch by about 40 billion percent.Base elevation: 6,570 feet at Jordanelle baseSummit elevation: 9,570 feet at top of EmpireVertical drop: 3,000 feet, though this cannot be skied contiguously – the longest high-quality continuous vertical drops are on Bald Mountain, at around 1,750 vertical feet.Skiable Acres: 2,026Average annual snowfall: 300 inchesTrail count: 103Lift count: 27 (1 six-passenger gondola, 14 high-speed quads, 5 triples, 1 double, 1 platter serving private homes, 5 conveyors)Deer Valley's trailmap is a little confusing, as it looks as though you can ski from the top of Empire to the bottom of Jordanelle. The resort sits on a series of adjacent hillocks, however, which you can see on this topographic map on ikonpass.com:Why I interviewed himThere's a version of reality in which Deer Valley is nothing special. A 2,000-ish-acre bump neighboring Park City, which sprawls more than three times as large. A 300-inch bucket of snow standing meekly against the 500-inch-plus dumptrucks stacking up each winter in the nearby Cottonwoods. Three thousand feet of vertical is compelling, but you can't ski it all at once, like you can at Snowbird or Park City. Deer Valley could be the Pico of Utah, a pretty good ski area made average by its address among amazing ski areas.But that's not how we view the place, because that's not what Deer Valley is. Deer Valley is an Alterra flagship, so singular that it is the only one of the company's 16 ski areas excluded from the Ikon Base Pass. The mountain's $2,890 season pass is the most expensive in America. It has landed in the top three of Ski Magazine's reader resort rankings for 25 consecutive seasons.Why? Why is this place so exceptional, so expensive and yet so treasured? Go ahead and list the superficial and the obvious: a fleet of groomers expansive enough to invade Newfoundland, 14 high-speed quads, ski valets, staff to escort your skis onto snow like a prized dachshund. It's still not so obvious why DV is it. The armada of high-speed lifts, once so novel, are standard-issue Wasatch utilities now. Even Alta has them. Every large ski area grooms widely and well. And slopeside ski check is not so rare as to be a differentiator. At least not in 2023. There are lots of fancy ski areas. Sun Valley would gladly throw down in a groom-off. You could coronate the next queen of England in a Snowbasin bathroom stall. And Beaver Creek gives you a warm cookie at the end of the day. Match that, Deer Valley.So there is something more subtle than lifts and grooming going on here. Something that has transcended generations of owners and survived the oft-rough entry into corporate Skidom. The place has an essence. Something as pronounced as Little Cottonwood chest-thumping or parkbrah tumbling over Brighton kickers or party-town Park City. Something fiercely distinct yet hard to define.Have you ever visited the Palace of Versailles? A sprawling and ornate palace rising off 2,500 acres of immaculate grounds a few miles outside of Paris. Built for royals, it is now open to all. To tour the place is to feel both humbled and empowered. Here is this triumph of the human imagination, actualized into a thing too spectacular to comprehend. Yet plain old you can wander and wonder and admire and absorb. And skiing Deer Valley is a little bit like that. Like stumbling into a palace of skiing, unsure what you're looking at, but amazed at the whole scene.What we talked aboutDoubling Deer Valley's average annual snowfall; extending the season and why April 23 will be the last day; what it's like to live among all that snow every single day; where Deer Valley has to do avalanche mitigation; New York ski roots; Vail Mountain in the ‘90s; the vast options for the SoCal skier; how a 20-year career at Disney led to a job running one of America's best ski resorts; how Disney Bro resembles Ski Bro; the making of The Man Behind the Maps: Legendary Ski Artist James Niehues; how the book was born out of luck at Tamarack, Idaho; blowing away expectations on Kickstarter; why Alterra treats Deer Valley differently than its other resorts from an Ikon Pass access standpoint; going deep on Burns Express; why Deer Valley reoriented the liftline uphill and how that's changed the skier flow on the mountain; the thrill of flying towers; the reconfigured Snowflake lift; why Burns is and likely always will be more of a transit lift; auto-down restraint bars are here; you're probably raising the safety bar too early; why Burns got the upgrade before any of Deer Valley's older high-speed quads; Deer Valley's huge base-area redevelopment plans; the higher-capacity lifts that could replace the Carpenter and Silver Lake high-speed quads; employee housing; why a base area development isn't necessarily a play for more skier visits; which lifts could be in line for upgrades next; whether Deer Valley would consider upgrading any of its fixed-grip triples; why there isn't a ski connection between Deer Valley and Park City, even though they meet at Empire; a potential Deer Valley connection with the rising Mayflower resort; the impact of removing Deer Valley from the Ikon Base Pass; the surprising number of daily lift tickets that Deer Valley still sells, even at $250-plus; and why the resort continues to ban snowboarding.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewDeer Valley spent their offseason planting this beauty on the mountainside:The 190-vertical-foot Doppelmayr high-speed quad was the cornerstone Deer Valley's re-imagined Snow Park beginner terrain. Last year, the small terrain pod looked like this:The old Burns lift, a Yan double that dated to the resort's 1981 opening, ran straight up the fall line. It paralleled the shorter Snowflake lift, which loaded halfway up the trail. A series of magic carpets sat below Snowflake.That's all changed. Old Burns is gone, clearing a beginner-friendly skiway. Deer Valley used parts from Burns to lengthen Snowflake all the way to the base. They then moved the existing carpets looker's left, along the old Burns line. A series of four progression carpets now climb the incline.New Burns serves an entirely different purpose from Old Burns. Rather than simply hauling beginners up Wide West, as the old lift did, it transports them up to the Deer Hollow trail, which they can then ski down to Mountaineer Express to access the Little Baldy Peak pod. Prior to this change, beginners had no easy way to access Little Baldy – they had to either ride the Carpenter high-speed quad to the summit of Bald Eagle Mountain and take the Big Stick and Little Stick trails to Deer Hollow; ride Silver Lake Express and ski down to the Crown Point triple and then up to blue-square Kimberly and green-circle Navigator; or catch a ride over to the Jordanelle ticket office and ride the gondola up. Mostly, they didn't do that, and since that terrain holds less appeal to more advanced skiers, it was largely underutilized.Bennett admitted that New Burns is mostly a transit lift to get skiers up to the Little Baldy terrain. Skiers can lap Gnat's Eye, but it's a narrow and not very interesting trail, and so most don't. But as another brick in Palace DV, the lift accomplishes exactly what it's supposed to. And it's a gorgeous machine:I suspect, however, that Burns is simply an anchor for Deer Valley's far larger proposed redevelopment of its Snow Park Base area. Right now, skiers arrive to parking lots, as they do in most of U.S. America, and walk up to a handful of base buildings and a pair of high-speed quads. It's an bland entrance to a remarkable ski resort:Deer Valley would cover these parking lots with a ski-in-ski-out mixed-use village. Cars would go underground. Retail, restaurants, residences, and rental units would rise above pedestrian streets. Carpenter and Silver Lake would extend into the village, the former replaced by a new high-speed quad or six-pack, the latter by a gondola:Here's a clearer image of where the lifts could sit in relation to their current load points:We're a long way out from this transformation. The estimated project completion date is 2029. But this development would transform Deer Valley, infusing it with a sense of place beyond the trail footprint. The resort happens to reside in Park City, one of the liveliest ski towns in North America. For decades, Deer Valley has ceded streetlife to the municipality. But there's no reason it has to. Like sister resorts Steamboat, Winter Park, Palisades Tahoe, and Crystal, the Wasatch fancypants is evolving into something better connected to the community around it and anchored in the current moment, in which we are at long last deprioritizing the personal vehicle and building people-first places that we can all enjoy.What I got wrongI noted that Park City Mountain Resort was “twice as large” as Deer Valley, but it's actually quite a bit bigger: 7,300 acres to Deer Valley's 2,026 – that's 2.3 times as big.Why you should ski Deer ValleyYes groomers blah blah whatever. Honestly this is not a thing I care about when I travel West. But I do like this:And this:And this:Not so much this, but it's here if you're psychotic:No, it's not Snowbird. But it's Utah. The snow is light and fine. The trail network sprawls. If you can't find something fun in 2,000 acres, the problem is not the mountain. Plus, look again at the trailmap – every peak has like four high-speed lifts stringing you to the top. The potential to rack vert here is amazing.Podcast NotesOn the long seasonBennett and I briefly discussed a Snowbasin tweet calling out skiers for not showing up after the resort extended its season. Here it is:On The Man Behind the MapsIf you're reading this newsletter, there's a better than 80 percent chance that someone has stuffed a copy of The Man Behind the Maps, a tome archiving the trailmap art of James Niehues, into your Christmas stocking at some point over the last four years. Bennett, as it turns out, was the muscle behind the book, reaching out to Niehues and convincing him to compile the work, then pulling together a global network to print and distribute it. If you're not familiar with this work of art, check it out:On Mayflower ResortDid you know that a major new public U.S. ski resort is under construction at this moment? And that this resort will cover 4,300 acres on a 3,200-foot vertical drop served by 18 aerial lifts? And that this resort is exactly next door to Deer Valley? And that this is all amazingly getting absolutely no coverage while a couple of dingbats in Park City spin themselves into a hissyfit over Vail's attempts to upgrade two chairlifts and a considerably larger contingent of dingbats fights the most serious attempt to untangle traffic in Little Cottonwood Canyon in decades by assaulting a gondola proposal as though they were defending the Alamo? It's true. It's called Mayflower. Watch this video full of hyperbole that's clearly made for people who know almost nothing about skiing to see for yourself:That this is actually happening - that we are really about to have a brand-new, major ski resort in an over-skied slice of U.S. America that desperately needs more capacity - is a freaking miracle. Bennett and I don't dig too deeply into this project, but we do discuss it in this context: when Mayflower goes live, there is a very good chance that Deer Valley could operate it. And if that happens, well, no snowboarding Brah. Because Deer Values or something. I'm not a fan of snowboarding bans, but I am a fan of building more ski resorts, so I'll take the win.On the lack of a Deer Valley/Park City ski ConnectionYou can ski between Snowbird and Alta, even though one is owned by Powdr Corp and the other is owned by a clandestine group of snow ninjas. You can ski between Brighton and Solitude, even though one is owned by Boyne Resorts and the other is owned by Alterra. But you cannot ski between Deer Valley and Park City, even if you have an Epic Pass and an Ikon Pass, even though they boundary up to one another on Empire Peak:A patrol shack sits atop Empire, halting all who would pass. Locals call this the “Berlin Wall.” I'm not sure what the sense of it is. Deer Valley has done a pretty solid job of restricting ticket availability. I'm pretty sure the number of folks who would add on a DV ticket just for a few runs is nominal. However, there could be enormous environmental benefits to such a connection. When I was skiing Deer Valley, I had to take a long shuttle ride through congested weekend traffic both ways to ski half a day at Park City. Imagine if I could have eliminated two surface transit trips by simply skiing over the pass? Not that this would have eliminated these shuttles, necessarily, as other folks rode them as well, but if a critical mass of people decided to use skis and already-spinning lifts to move across the megaplex rather than surface transit, that could have a material impact on the town's notorious congestion.And imagine skiing all of this in one go:The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 37/100 in 2023, and number 423 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane, or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email skiing@substack.com. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on Feb. 1. It dropped for free subscribers on Feb. 4. To receive future pods as soon as they're live and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription.WhoDavy Ratchford, Vice President and General Manager of Snowbasin Resort, UtahRecorded onJanuary 31, 2023About SnowbasinClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: The R. Earl Holding FamilyPass affiliations: Ikon Pass, Mountain CollectiveLocated in: Huntsville, UtahYear founded: 1940Closest neighboring ski areas: Nordic Valley (30 minutes), Powder Mountain (35 minutes), Woodward Park City (1:05), Utah Olympic Park (1:08), Park City (1:15), Deer Valley (1:15), Snowbird (1:15), Alta (1:20), Solitude (1:20), Brighton (1:25), Sundance (1:40), Cherry Peak (1:45), Beaver Mountain (2:00) – travel times vary considerably based upon weather and trafficBase elevation: 6,450 feetSummit elevation: 9,350 feetVertical drop: 2,900 feetSkiable Acres: 3,000Average annual snowfall: 300 inchesTrail count: 111Lift count: 12­­ (One 15-passenger tram, 2 eight-passenger gondolas, 2 six-packs, 2 high-speed quads, 2 triples, 1 ropetow, 2 carpets) – Snowbasin will add a third six-pack on an all-new line this summer (more on this below).Why I interviewed himFor 60 years it sat there, empty, enormous, unnoticed. Utah skiing was Park City and Alta; Snowbird in the ‘70s; Deer Valley in the ‘80s; sometimes Solitude and Brighton. No need to ski outside that powder pocket east of SLC: in 1995, an Alta lift ticket cost $25, and the area resorts frequently landed on ski magazine “least-crowded” lists.The November 2000 issue of Ski distilled Snowbasin's malaise:Though skiers were climbing the high ridgeline that overlooks the small city of Ogden as far back as the Thirties, Alta founder Alf Engen officially discovered Snowbasin in 1940. At that time the high, sunny basin was used for cattle range, but it was so overgrazed that eroded topsoil and bloated carcasses of dead cows were tainting Ogden's water supply. Working with the U.S. Forest Service, Ogden's town fathers decided that a ski resort would provide income and recreation while also safeguarding the water supply. A deal was struck with the ranch owner, and Snowbasin opened for business.In the 60 years since, the resort has struggled under five owners, including Vail-founder Pete Seibert, who owned it in the mid-Eighties. The problem was a lack of lodging. Snowbasin was too far from Salt Lake City to attract out-of-state skiers and too far from Ogden to use the city's aging railroad center as a resort base. Successive owners realized that to succeed, Snowbasin needed a base village, but building one from scratch is a costly proposition. So for half a century, the resort has remained the private powder stash of Ogden locals and the few lucky skiers who have followed rumors of deep snow and empty lifts up Ogden Canyon.In 1984, Earl Holding, an oil tycoon who had owned Sun Valley since 1978, purchased the resort from Seibert (process the fact that Snowbasin was once part of the Vail portfolio for a moment). For a long time, nothing much changed. Then came the 2002 Olympics. In a single offseason in 1998, the resort added two gondolas, a tram, and a high-speed quad (John Paul), along with the thousand-ish-acre Strawberry terrain pod. A new access road cut 13 miles off the drive from Salt Lake City. Glimmering base lodges rose from the earth.Still, Snowbasin languished. “But despite the recent addition of modern lifts, it has still failed to attract more than 100,000 skier visits the past two seasons,” Ski wrote in 2000, attributing this volume partly to “the fact that the Olympics, not today's lift ticket revenue, is the management's priority.” Holding, the magazine reported, was considering a bizarre name change for the resort to “Sun Valley.” As in, Sun Valley, Utah. Reminder: there was no social media in 2000.That's all context, to make this point: the Snowbasin that I'm writing about today – a glimmering end-of-the-road Ikon Pass jewel with a Jetsonian lift fleet – is not the Snowbasin we were destined to have. From backwater to baller in a generation. This is the template, like it or not, for the under-developed big-mountain West. Vail Mountain, Park City, Snowbird, Palisades Tahoe, Breckenridge, Steamboat: these places cannot accommodate a single additional skier. They're full. The best they can do now is redistribute skiers across the mountain and suck more people out of the base areas with higher-capacity lifts. But with record skier visits and the accelerating popularity of multi-mountain passes that concentrate more of them in fewer places, we're going to need relief valves. And soon.There are plenty more potential Snowbasins out there. Mountains with big acreage and big snowfall but underdeveloped lift and lodging infrastructure and various tiers of accessibility issues: White Pass, Mission Ridge, Silver Mountain, Montana Snowbowl, Great Divide, Discovery, Ski Apache, Angel Fire, Ski Santa Fe, Powder Mountain, Sierra-at-Tahoe, Loveland. There are dozens more.Snowbasin's story is singular and remarkable, a testament to invested owners and the power of media magnification to alter the fate of a place. But the mountain's tale is instructive as well, of how skiing can reorient itself around something other than our current version of snowy bunchball, the tendency for novice soccer players to disregard positions and swarm to wherever the ball moves. Snowbasin didn't matter and now it does. Who's next?What we talked aboutUtah's amazing endless 2022-23 snow season; an Irish fairytale; skiing Beaver Mountain in jeans; helping to establish Utah's Major League Soccer team and then leaving for the ski industry; “if you have a chance to raise your family in the mountains, you should do that”; the unique characteristic of a ski career that helps work-life balance; much love for the Vail Fam; the Holding family legacy; “Snowbasin is a gift to the world”; the family's commitment to keeping Snowbasin independent long-term; “they're going to put in the best possible things, all the time”; amazing lodges, bathrooms and all; Snowbasin's Olympic legacy and potential future involvement in the Games; breaking down the DeMoisy Express six-pack that will go up Strawberry this summer; what the new lift will mean for the Strawberry gondola; soccer fans versus ski fans; managing a resort in the era of knucklehead social media megaphones; “I've lost a lot of employees to guests”; taming the rumor machine; reflecting on the Middle Bowl lift upgrade; long-term upgrades for the Becker and Porcupine triples; Snowbasin's ambitious base-area redevelopment plan, including an all-inclusive Club Med, new lifts and terrain, and upgraded access road; “the amount of desire to own something here is huge”; what happens with parking once the mountain builds a village over it; the curse of easy access; breaking down the new beginner terrain and lifts that will accompany the village; whether future large-scale terrain expansion is possible; and leaving the Epic Pass for Ikon and Mountain Collective.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewLast month, Snowbasin announced that it will build the DeMoisy Express, a long-awaited six-pack that will run parallel to the Strawberry Gondola on a slightly shorter line, for the 2023-24 ski season. Here's where it will sit on the current trailmap (highlighted below):This will be Snowbasin's second six-pack in just two years, and it follows the resort's 2021 announcement of an ambitious base-area development plan, which will include new beginner terrain, several new lifts, a mixed-use pedestrian village, access-road improvements, and an all-inclusive Club Med resort. Here's a rendering of the reconfigured base at full build-out:Snowbasin, along with sister resort Sun Valley, also stalked off the Epic Pass last year, fleeing for the Mountain Collective and Ikon passes. “Because we're smart,” Ratchford half-joked when I asked him why the resorts left Epic after just three years. He framed the switch as an opportunity to expose the resorts to new skiers. Snowbasin surely will not be the last resort to change allegiances. Don't think big indies like Jackson Hole, Taos, and Revelstoke aren't listening when Vail calls, offering them a blank check to change jerseys.What I got wrongI had an on-the-fly moment where I mixed up the Wildcat Express six-pack and the Littlecat Express high-speed quad. I asked Ratchford how they were going to upgrade Little Cat (as suggested in the base-area redevelopment image above), when it was already a six-pack. Dumb stuff happens in the moment during these podcasts, and while I guess I could ask the robots to fix it, I'd rather just own the mistake and keep moving.Why you should ski SnowbasinI love skiing Alta and Snowbird, but I don't love skiing anywhere enough to endure the mass evacuation drill that is a Cottonwoods powder-day commute. Not when there's a place like Snowbasin where you can just, you know, pull into the parking lot and go skiing.What you'll find when you arrive is as good as anything you'll hunt down in U.S. skiing. Maybe not from a total snowfall perspective – though 300 inches is impressive anywhere outside of Utah – but from a lift-and-lodge infrastructure point of view. Four – soon to be five – high-speed chairlifts, a tram and two gondolas, and a couple old triple chairs that Ratchford tells me will be replaced fairly soon, and probably with high-speed quads. The lodges are legendary, palaces of excess and overbuild, welcome in an industry that makes Lunch-Table Death-Match a core piece of the experience. If you need to take your pet elephant to the bathroom, plug Snowbasin into your GPS – I assure you the stalls can accommodate them.But, really, you ski Snowbasin because Snowbasin is easy to get to and easy to access, with the Ikon Pass that most people reading this probably already have, and with terrain that's as good as just about anything else you're going to find in U.S. America.Podcast NotesOn Park City: Ratchford referred obliquely to the ownership change at Park City in 2014, saying, “if you know the history there…” Well, if you don't know the history there, longtime resort owner Powdr Corp made the biggest oopsie in the history of lift-served skiing when it, you know, forgot to renew its lease on the mountain. Vail, in what was the most coldblooded move in the history of lift-served skiing, installed itself as the new lessee in what I can imagine was a fit of cackling glee. It was amazing. You can read more about it here and here. If only The Storm had existed back then.On the Olympics: While I don't cover the Olympics at all (I completely ignored them last year, the first Winter Games in which The Storm existed), I do find their legacy at U.S. ski resorts interesting. Only five U.S. ski areas have hosted events: Whiteface (1980), Palisades Tahoe (1960), and, in 2002, Deer Valley, Park City, and Snowbasin. Ratchford and I talk a bit about this legacy, and the potential role of his resort in the upcoming 2030 or 2034 Games – Salt Lake City is bidding to host one or the other. Read more here.On megapasses: Snowbasin has been all over the place with megapasses. Here's its history, as best I can determine:* 2013: Snowbasin joins the Powder Alliance reciprocal coalition (it is unclear when Snowbasin left this coalition)* 2017: Snowbasin joins Mountain Collective for 2017-18 ski season* 2019: Snowbasin joins Epic Pass, leaves Mountain Collective for 2019-20 ski season* 2022: Snowbasin leaves Epic Pass, re-joins Mountain Collective and joins Ikon Pass for 2022-23 ski seasonThe Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 8/100 in 2023, and number 394 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane, or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email skiing@substack.com.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

Olympian, member of the frends crew and a Burton pro commanding 500k a year for his skills in the halfpipe until it all came crashing down because of heavy spending and a drug fueled lifestyle. We talk Back Flip Joe, The 40oz killer, halfpipe competitions, Mammoth, over spending, bad habits, Shark Tank, life after boarding, addiction, rehab, goggle sag, asking for help, barber school, hitting rock bottom and so much more. Mason tell's us about his incredible journey as a pro snowboarder making more money then you can imagine and how the fast paced lifestyle lead into the darkness because of drugs and heavy spending. As his career slowed down the large checks from sponsors did too until the day came that he found himself bagging grocery for minimum wage with no money in the bank and the only thing left over from his day's as a pro was his drug habit, this was rock bottom. Join us as we hear first hand how Mason beat his demon's going sober and finding a new path as a Barber discovering a new passion on this week's episode of The Bomb Hole! Special ThanksTen Barrel Pub BeerThe Patreon Members, We would not do this without you!!- https://www.patreon.com/thebombhole Bub's Naturals- https://www.bubsnaturals.com Edmonton Style Experience https://exploreedmonton.com/event-calendar/the-style-experience Stance | https://www.stance.com Capita- https://capitasnowboarding.com Union- https://unionbindingcompany.com Woodward Park City- https://www.woodwardparkcity.com InstagramMason Aguirre's instagram @maseintheplace https://www.instagram.com/MaseInThePlace/ @thebombhole: https://www.instagram.com/thebombhole/ @Grendiesel : https://www.instagram.com/grendiesel/@E_stone : https://www.instagram.com/e_stone/ Budz Print Shop- www.e-stonephoto.com https://307o96449135872.3dcartstores.com For all things Bomb Hole, go to : https://thebombhole.com/BOMB HOLE STORE: https://thebombhole.com/collections/allWatch the episode on YouTube- https://youtu.be/6iipGbp1bGYJoin The Bomb Squad on our Patreon page! Props to all of our Patreon members for the support. We could not make these episodes happen without your help! Patreon members get the chance to ask guests questions and find out who we will be interviewing before anyone else. They also receive Bomb Hole merch and a custom Bomb Squad sticker!!! Find out more at https://www.patreon.com/thebombholeShow Notes-Frends Crew | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHIyRJxyiPY Financial Planner | https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/financialplanner.asp Over Spending | https://money.usnews.com/money/personal-finance/spending/articles/inside-the-psychology-of-overspending-and-how-to-stop Height & Performance | https://sites.psu.edu/siowfa16/2016/10/21/can-height-affect-athletic-performance/ Mason's X-Games History | http://www.xgames.com/athletes/3014523/mason-aguirre Full Metal Edges | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CknMXkgqHEg Kevin Pearce Accident | https://www.today.com/health/former-snowboarder-kevin-pearce-finds-new-identity-10-years-after-t186466 Identity Tied To Sports | https://gazette.com/news/athletes-struggle-to-find-purpose-identity-after-sports-special-report/article_ea000d90-220f-11ea-b1ac-9f79e1310dd8.html Getting Sober | https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/321103 Finding Rehab Centers | https://americanaddictioncenters.org/rehab-guide/free Scholarships For Rehab | https://www.addictioncenter.com/treatment/scholarships-grants-substance-abuse/ Cage Rage | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOCF0BLf-BM Cult Barber Craft | https://cultbarbercraft.glossgenius.com Thanks For listening!

Childcare experts call for public investment to help solve Wasatch Back crisis (02:19)Vice President, Mountain Experiences, Woodward Global Steve Metcalf shared how opening weekend went and what to expect this season (06:20)Coalville resident Tonja Hanson to fill open seat on Summit County Council (17:23)Youth Sports Alliance working to get more children involved in programs (19:59) Scammers hit the white-hot Summit County real estate market (29:53)Snyderville Basin Recreation asking for input on upcoming projects (32:59)Vail Resorts ordered to pay more than $2 million in Park City personal injury case (41:22) Tacos, tubes and temps in teens – Woodward Park City snow sports open for winter (43:58) Park City Film to offer seat-testing (47:30)

To support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on Nov. 17. It dropped for free subscribers on Nov. 20. To receive future pods as soon as they're live, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription.WhoChad Linebaugh, President and General Manager of Sundance Mountain, UtahRecorded onNovember 7, 2022About SundanceClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Broadreach Capital Partners and Cedar Capital PartnersPass affiliations: Power PassReciprocal pass partners:* 3 days at each Mountain Capital Partners ski area: Arizona Snowbowl, Purgatory, Hesperus, Brian Head, Nordic Valley, Sipapu, Pajarito, Willamette Pass* 3 days each at Snow King, Ski Cooper* 1 unguided day at SilvertonLocated in: Sundance, UtahClosest neighboring ski areas: Park City (47 minutes), Deer Valley (50 minutes), Woodward Park City (50 minutes), Utah Olympic Park (51 minutes), Solitude (57 minutes), Brighton (1 hour), Snowbird (1 hour, 7 minutes), Alta (1 hour, 10 minutes) – travel times may vary considerably in winter.Base elevation: 6,100 feetSummit elevation: 8,250 feetVertical drop: 2,150 feetSkiable Acres: 515Average annual snowfall: 300 inchesTrail count: 50 (20% black, 45% intermediate, 35% beginner)Lift count: 9 (1 high-speed quad, 4 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 3 carpets)The map above is last season's, and does not include the Wildwood expansion that's coming online for the 2022-23 ski season. Here's where the new terrain will sit - you can see Jake's landing looker's right, and Flathead rising looker's left:And here's an overhead view of the new terrain:Update [11/24/2022]: the new trailmapWhy I interviewed himIt sits inconspicuous and unassuming, 13 air miles and 49 road miles south of Little Cottonwood Canyon. Five hundred acres in a 5,000-acre resort. Step off your plane at Salt Lake airport and you're 40 minutes away from half a dozen powder bangers and this is not one of them. It's Sundance. “Isn't that that film fiestival?” Epkon Bro asks as he punches Park City into his GPS. “No time for that on my HASHTAG POWDY TOWN TRIP!”And that's OK. We won't be needing Epkon Bro for today's stop. Because where we're going today is Utah before Utah skiing went nuclear. Before the California invasion. Before this state with just 15 ski areas became third in the nation in annual skier visits. When Snowbird opened in 1971, Utah had 1.1 million residents. Today it has 3.1 million. On any given Saturday, every single one of them is angling their SUV toward the mouth of the Cottonwoods.Except everyone skiing Sundance. Here's the locals bump we all wish we had: 300 inches of snow, 2,000-plus feet of vert, owners with the cash Gatlings blowing full auto. Everyone else, somewhere else. Most of the tourists. Most of the Salt Locals. Certainly the Epkon hordes, trying to ski their passes down to $5 a day. So, here it is: Utah skiing before all the things that changed Utah skiing, mostly for the worse. Twenty years ago? Thirty? Who cares. You found it. Enjoy it.What we talked aboutEarly snow in the West; from breakfast waiter to running the resort; when big brother takes you skiing; Sundance in the 1970s; setting yourself apart when you're the ski area down the road from the Wasatch; the longest-tenured ski resort employee in the country?; Timp Haven; enter Robert Redford; the resort's expanse and legacy of conservation; working for Redford; the origins and impact of the Sundance Film Festival; why Redford sold Sundance; a profile of the new owners; industry veteran Bill Jensen's impact on the resort; Sundance's rapid and radical transformation under its new owners; the fantastically weird Ray's lift and why the mountain finally upgraded it; bringing back the old Mandan lift unload and corresponding terrain; breaking down the new alignments for Stairway and Outlaw; why Red's isn't a high-speed lift; the massive new lift project Sundance is planning next and the potential terrain expansion that could go with that; what the new lift would mean for Flathead; why Outlaw ended up as a quad, rather than a six-pack; how Outlaw ended up running chairs from Big Sky's Swift Current quad; why the resort retired the Navajo lift in 1995, and brought back a similar lift called Jake's a decade ago; why Jake's runs on a different line than Navajo; Jake's odd lower mid-station; re-thinking the road that runs beneath Jake's; Sundance's huge snowmaking expansion; going deep on Sundance's Wildwood expansion and new lift; the return of hot bread and honey-butter; potential far-future expansion; upgrading the Bearclaw lodge; night-skiing; whether Sundance could expand its group of season pass reciprocal partners; and the possibility of Sundance joining Indy Pass.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewA decade ago, Sundance was a relic. Old lifts. Slow lifts. Fixed-grip lifts all. A handle tow at the bottom. No carpets. One chair out of the base: the unbelievable Ray's, a mile-long up-and-over doozy with two midstations and a ride time longer than the State of the Union. Some snowmaking. Not a lot. Not enough.Two years ago, longtime owner Robert Redford sold the joint. The new owners brought in Bill Jensen, a U.S. Ski & Snowboard Hall of Famer and onetime overlord of Breckenridge, Vail, Telluride, and Intrawest. Overnight, they smashed the place to bits and remade it in the image of a modern ski resort: Ray's demolished (it's going to live on at Lookout Pass), in its place a high-speed quad up the frontside – all the way up the frontside, to where the Mandan lift once landed – and a short connector lift in back; expanded night-skiing; dramatically expanded snowmaking; a trio of progression carpets at the base; more parking. This year: a 10-trail, 15-acre beginner-focused expansion. On its way out next: the 47-year-old Flathead triple. With what? You'll have to listen to the podcast for details on that.Once Flathead goes, Sundance will have one of the newest lift fleets on the continent (Redford did replace Arrowhead with a lift called Red's in 2016, and put in a new lift called Jake's in 2012), a reliable and modern collection buffeted by an ever-evolving snowmaking system that can defend the place from its relatively low elevation. It will have better skier flow, and (probably) more terrain for them to ski on.What it won't have are any of the ever-increasing numbers of Epkon Bros. The ones who won't ski anywhere off-pass. The ones obsessed with stats and biggest-tallest-most. The ones how don't mind company.Sundance is building something different. And it's something worth trying. What I got wrongI asked Chad why Jake's lift did not have a mid-station, like the old Navajo lift. Jake's does have a mid-station, of course, but it's just a touch higher than the bottom load. What I'd meant to ask was this, “why doesn't Jake's have a mid-mountain mid-station, as Navajo had?” I also incorrectly stated that Jake's followed the same line as Navajo, which was a bad reading of the trailmap on my part. Regardless, we sort it all out on the pod.Why you should ski SundanceIt's worth going a bit deeper on passes here, as Utah has what is probably the most mature megapass market of any major ski hub in America. All 14 of the state's major commercial ski areas are affiliated with one pass or another, including Sundance:If you've never heard of the Power Pass, it's the season pass for Mountain Capital Partners eight ski areas: Arizona Snowbowl, Purgatory, Hesperus, Brian Head, Nordic Valley, Sipapu, Pajarito, and Willamette Pass. Like the Ikon Pass, which includes Alterra's 14 ski areas plus a bunch of partners, the Power Pass has some add-ons: Copper Mountain, Loveland, Monarch, and Sundance. Here's the full roster:Anyway, it's a relatively low-volume regional pass, in no danger of overrunning Sundance or any other partner.Sundance doesn't have the elevation, snowfall totals, or sheer size of its megapass neighbors just to its north, but it doesn't have their crowds either, and it has just enough of those other things to make the skiing interesting. On weekends, on holidays, on fight-for-your-life LCC powder days, this is your post-up spot, an alternative where you can rack vert without really worrying about it and without really trying.Podcast notesSundance has one of the most interesting lift histories in the country. Most ski areas simply drop new lifts on their old lines. Sundance rarely does that, instead shuffling machines all over the mountain to try different configurations. Here's what the mountain looked like in 1988:In 1995, they removed the Navajo and Mandan doubles and installed the wacky Ray's, which landed lower than Mandan before curling over the mountain's backside:By 2012, Sundance realized it needed a second out-of-base lift again, and it build the Jake's quad. This lands approximately where Navajo did decades earlier, but follows a shorter line, starting from the newer, upper parking lots:Interestingly, the new Red's quad, built in 2016, follows approximately the same line as the Arrowhead triple, the 1985 Yan lift that it replaced, but Outlaw and Stairway both follow different lines than Ray's, with different load, unload, and mid-station points. Don't expect a direct replacement for Flathead either – Linebaugh outlines what that dramatic change will look like in the podcast.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 124/100 in 2022, and number 370 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane, or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email skiing@substack.com.The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing all year round. Join us. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

Justin Sibley is the CEO of POWDR, an adventure lifestyle company that owns some of the best resorts on earth, including Copper Mountain, Killington, Silver Star and more. Justin is a fellow Fuqua MBA graduate who was the Vice President of Finance at Backcountry.com before becoming CFO and then co-President of POWDR. POWDR also owns Woodward. If you know anything about board sports, you know that Woodward is the leading name in action sports progression and innovation with facilities across North America. Justin and I talk about how he has been able to help leverage the Woodward brand and assets across POWDR's portfolio of resorts.As an international company with properties in different states and provinces, we talk about the challenges of running a hospitality business during the pandemic. Justin and the team at POWDR put on a master class on adjusting to adversity. He shares a lot of great insights and wisdom for managing a massive organization through COVID-19.This episode was a lot of fun for me. As a life-long shredder with a failed pro-snowboard career, I got to geek out on both business and the snowboard industry. If you love the outdoors, action sport or just want to learn more about scaling a large complex organization, this podcast is for you.Discussion Topics:(3:11) New offerings at POWDR.(4:54) The business strategy of expanding into more year-round offerings.(12:51) Woodward … perhaps one of the greatest strategic acquisitions ever?(21:53) Woodward Park City build and opening.(24:02) Managing through COVID-19 with 8,000 employees.(30:29) Playing forever and focusing on environmental protections.(34:25) Advice for people looking to build a career in outdoor adventure lifestyles.(37:47) Rapid fire.

This Burton Pro Rider is one of the best snowboarder's in the world and just happens to also be a mom. This week we talk women's snowboarding, handball, finding snowboarding, getting sponsored, injuries, filming in the streets, being a mother and a pro snowboarder at the same time, bringing her new born on snowboarding film trips, trusting the process, her new movie “Hot Cocoa” and so much more! While most young woman think that having a baby will certainly mean they will no longer have a pro snowboard career, Maria got pregnant and rode as long as she could and then when she had her little boy she would bring him on trips with her and she went on with her career, she even seemed to step up her riding putting out her best video parts. Join us on this episode of the Bomb Hole as we talk to Maria and hear her story first hand, a story that show's other women you don't have to chose baby or career as you can do it all!!! Special ThanksTen Barrel Pub BeerThe Patreon Members, We would not do this without you!!- https://www.patreon.com/thebombhole Bub's Naturals- https://www.bubsnaturals.com Granite Towers- https://www.granitetowersequitygroup.com Slowtide- https://slowtide.co 686- https://www.686.com Woodward Park City- https://www.woodwardparkcity.com/culture/sports/snowboard InstagramMaria Thomsen's instagram @mariathomsen https://www.instagram.com/mariathomsen/?hl=en @Grendiesel : https://www.instagram.com/grendiesel/@E_stone : https://www.instagram.com/e_stone/ Budz Print Shop- www.e-stonephoto.com https://307o96449135872.3dcartstores.comHit Subscribe! Leave a comment, We love your feedback! If you like the show please leave us a review! It all helps us out a ton!!For all things Bomb Hole, go to : https://thebombhole.com/BOMB HOLE STORE: https://thebombhole.com/collections/allWatch the episode on YouTube- https://youtu.be/hKQRPOvAJhIJoin The Bomb Squad on our Patreon page! Props to all of our Patreon members for the support. We could not make these episodes happen without your help! Patreon members get the chance to ask guests questions and find out who we will be interviewing before anyone else. They also receive Bomb Hole merch and a custom Bomb Squad sticker!!! Find out more at https://www.patreon.com/thebombholeShow Notes-Hand Ball | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UovdZ7XB-j0 Too Hard | https://www.snowboarder.com/videos/maria-thomsen-full-part-2016/ The Uninvited | https://www.snowboarder.com/videos/uninvited-maria-thomsen-full-part/ 25 Days One World | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWUWXqJV57s One World | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Frln61fCrGk&t=18s X Games Real Snow Maria | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGLhbmK_Qwc King Snow | https://snowboardmag.com/videos/maria-thomsen-king-snow-movie-full-part Burton | https://www.burton.com/us/en/home Red Bull Heavy Metal | https://www.redbull.com/us-en/events/red-bull-heavy-metal Stuck In Newfoundland | https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/burton-boarders-meet-snowmageddon-1.5889956 Thanks For Listening!

The Blade Dive Episode 40 - We are joined by Jeff “Doorhole” Doran. The Pennsylvania native who's obsessed with Ford 7.3 OBS trucks and Sushi Yoshi, stops by along with Episode 40 Co-Host Corey Tredtin. There's a lot  to talk about. Jeff Doran is the Owner/Operator of JDB Slopeworx in Heber City, Utah and  in his first year of business has landed some massive ski resort clients….Woodward Park City, Eagle Point, Park City, Utah & Sleeping Giant, Wyoming! Growing up near Pennsylvania coal country, Jeff Doran describes his childhood as a “wanna be” farm kid and outlines the best method for changing a tire on a truck is with a forklift. After high school Jeff Doran funded all of his job fair trips to ski resorts with the money he earned working at his uncles farm & some hotshot towing gigs. After landing a job at Killington Resort, Jeff Doran credits Killington and his time there around operators such as Corey Tredtin,  as his training ground for mountain operations. Episode 40 is such a mellow conversation filled with tangents, insight and operating techniques & tips. We discuss Jeff's latest adventure with Slopeworx and Jeff expands on what it's really like to own a business, build a brand and have ski resort clients. We discuss how social media helps your business, but also it's adverse effects on your health. We talk about What it's like to work at Park City & Killington, why networking within the ski industry is vital and of course….why the bell peppers. Enjoy! And if you're in the machine… Turn up the volume!Follow us on:https://www.instagram.com/thebladedive/https://www.facebook.com/thebladedive

On the 20th anniversary of 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympic Games, Nicole and Sarah visit the Salt Lake City area -  including the Utah Olympic Park and Woodward Park City. It's clear that the 2002 Olympics have left a lasting legacy throughout the area. We visited is the Utah Olympic Park (called the “UOP” by the locals).  The UOP  was built for the 2002 Winter Olympics and is just 25 miles east of Salt Lake City.  The 400 acre venue houses one of only four sliding tracks (bobsleigh, luge, skeleton) luge, skeleton) in North America, six Nordic ski jumps, a 2002 Winter Games museum, and a multitude of adventure activities.  At the UOP we saw kids training slalom and moguls. We met a fellow ski mom, Barbara Wirostko Morelli and watched her daughter Cristina train freestyle moguls. We learned about how mogul competitions are scored and got some great advice for moms and kids interested in mogul competition. Cristina attends The Winter Sports School - a school for dedicated winter athletes that out of session during the winter months so she can train full time. We explored Woodward Park City, an indoor/outdoor sports facility and talked with Phoebe Mills, the General Manager of Woodward Park City (and an Olympic medalist). Inside Woodward Park City is a 66,000 square foot Action Sports Hub featuring an action sports concrete park, pump track, mini ramps, parkour zone, spring floor, Olympic grade trampolines, foam pits, and a digital media lab. Outside the Action Sports facility has skateparks, mountain biking and bmx terrain. Woodward offers a huge variety of indoor and outdoor sports options.Woodward's progression-based facilities help kids learn new skills and achieve their goals in a positive and safe environment. Kids advance through progression and air awareness, starting indoors on the spring floor, tramps, and foam pits, and then taking those skills and techniques outdoors, to the parks.  Woodward has a variety of winter and summer camps for kids from age 7-17.Just recently, Woodward Park City was named an official U.S. Ski & Snowboard Training Center through Jan. 2025. The partnership allows athletes to utilize Woodward's indoor and outdoor venues. Athletes will be training year-round in preparation for the 2026 Olympic Winter Games in Italy. Please support our sponsor!Mabels Labels at www.mabelslabels.com and use code SKIMOMS for 15% off your first orderJoin the Ski Moms Fun Community!Follow us on Instagram @skimomsfunCheck out the Ski Moms Fun Store Email us at sarah@skimomsfun.com

On July 2, Woodward Park City introduces First Fridays . The monthly event takes place on the first Friday of July, August and September, features music from Mountain Town Music, and participation from local food and beverage partners, local business and vendors and much more. First Fridays are open and free to the public, vendors and local business.

On this special episode of The World's Greatest Action Sports Podcast, Chris and Todd celebrate Star Wars Day (May The 4th Be With You) and talk about stuff like the Boost Mobile Margaret River Pro Presented By Corona, John John Florence, Steph, Carissa, Tyler, Tati, Sally, Bronte and Isabella, the highs and lows, and what's next. The boys also talk about retro riders, Andy Nieblas, Wookies, Red Bull took over and airport in Louisiana and made it a skate park, Mason Silva and Real Skateboards pay tribute to Natas, Tony Hawk gives fan blood stained board, Snowcats is sick, snowboarding is still happening, Albee Layer picks up the phone from Stab High in Costa Rica to defend Kai Lenny's skate swing that Todd hates. Oh, Chris is friend's with Ken Block, loves Woodward Park City, we answer your questions, talk about Breana Geering, Matt James AKA The Bachelor who rips at skating, and so much more. (Todd screwed up the filming, so no video this week).   Presented by:   YewOnline.com Bub's Naturals! @bubsnaturals BN3TH @BN3THApparel Hansen's Surfboards @hansensurfboards K2 Snowboarding @k2.snowboarding Pannikin Coffee And Tea @pannikincoffeeandtea Chemistry Surfboards @chemistrysurfboards New Greens @newgreens NanocraftCBD @nanocraftCBD Adventure IO @adventureio

Dan Howard, Director of Communications for Park City Utah and the Convention and Visitor's Bureau is our guest on today's show. Park City is absolutely beautiful. The main takeaway is that there are so many outdoor activities year-round.Dan mentioned that Park City is one of the most accessible skiing destinations located only 25 minutes from the Salt Lake City International Airport.Skiing in Park City offers many opportunities for learning to ski through quality instruction and several blue and green colored slopes.Dan also expounded on two places that we've talked about before on The Family Vacationer, Woodward Park City and the Bobsled experience at the US Olympic ParkThere are many wonderful places to stay and Dan went into detail about some of the more family-friendly places to stay.AC by MarriottNewpark ResortCanyons VillageWest GateWaldorf AstoriaHyatt PlaceDoubletreeSheratonThe food scene in Park City offers so many local options because of an anti-chain rule in the city. We were pleasantly surprised to find out the Smores are a Park City staple and offered at many places at the end of a hard day skiing. Places like Java Cow for Coffee and Ice Cream. Dan mentioned the Bill White Restaurant Group and that if you wanted a distinct flavor, they have a restaurant for you.Events have taken a hit here as they have just about everywhere. However, during a "normal" year, you can look for things like the Deer Valley Music Festival, the Kimble Art Festival, the Park Silly Market, and the Park City Songwriters Festival.Thank you, Dan, for sharing your information and love for the area with us.If you're ready to plan your next vacation to Park City, please reach out to Rob at rjones@starstufftravel.com. His services are always free to clients and you can start planning that vacation today!

On this week's episode of The World's Greatest Action Sports Podcast, Chris and Todd are joined by filmmaker, entrepreneur, and all around awesome guy, Josh Landan (Ashland Hard Seltzer, Villager Coconut Water, etc.) and these three guys get deep in the world's of surf, skate, snow and nerd news. This episode includes talk about Chris and Todd's getaway to Woodward Park City, Snowbird, Park City Pow session, as well as Kira Stanley's celebration of life, two new face filter apps, we cold call Parker Coffin to talk the Channel Islands FishBeard, we get a bonus Benji Brand interview talking Snapt4, Virgina's new wave pool, Yago Dora's B-Sides clip, San Francisco 49er Raheem Mostert and his surfy touchdown dance, Red Bull Surfing's latest installment of “Chasing The Shot” in Iceland, Box Jellyfish in Hawaii (via Beach Grit), Gabe Morvil clip via Inherent Bummer, Mohkie Europe 2019, Vans Skate Space 198 in Brooklyn, 1st Annual Snowboarder Awards, X Games, Chloe Kim, Grammy Awards, SAG Awards, The Outsider, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and so much more! The World's Greatest Action Sports Podcast is presented by:  Adventure IO @adventureio Ogio @ogio K2 Snowboarding @k2.snowboarding Pannikin Coffee And Tea @pannikincoffeeandtea Chemistry Surfboards @chemistrysurfboards YewOnline.com @yewonline New Greens @newgreens NanocraftCBD @nanocraftCBD Super 73 Electric Bikes @super73