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Who

Todd Bennett, President and Chief Operating Officer of Deer Valley Resort, Utah

Recorded on

April 19, 2023

About Deer Valley

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Alterra Mountain Company

Located in: Park City, Utah

Year founded: 1981

Pass affiliations: 7 unrestricted days on Ikon Pass, five days with blackouts on Ikon Base Pass Plus

Reciprocal partners: Unlimited Deer Valley season passholders receive one day each at Alta, Brighton, and Snowbird

Closest 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 base

Summit elevation: 9,570 feet at top of Empire

Vertical 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: 2,026

Average annual snowfall: 300 inches

Trail count: 103

Lift 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 him

There’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 about

Doubling 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 interview

Deer 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 wrong

I 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 Valley

Yes 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 Notes

On the long season

Bennett 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 Maps

If 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 Resort

Did 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 Connection

You 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.

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

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on April 7. It dropped for free subscribers on April 10. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe for free below:

Who

Jody Churich, Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Breckenridge, Colorado

Recorded on

March 27, 2023

About Breckenridge

Click info.aspx">here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Vail Resorts

Located in: Breckenridge, Colorado

Year founded: 1961

Pass affiliations: Unlimited on Pass.aspx">Epic Pass, Local-Pass.aspx">Epic Local Pass; limited access on Value-Pass.aspx">Summit Value Pass (holiday blackouts), Plus-Pass.aspx">Keystone Plus Pass (unlimited access after April 1), Local-Pass.aspx">Tahoe Local Pass (5 days shared with Vail, Beaver Creek, Keystone, Crested Butte, Park City)

Closest neighboring ski areas: Frisco Adventure Park (15 minutes), Copper Mountain (25 minutes), Keystone (25 minutes), Arapahoe Basin (30 minutes), Loveland (38 minutes), Ski Cooper (1 hour, 5 minutes) – travel times can vary considerably pending traffic and weather

Base elevation: 9,600 feet

Summit elevation: 12,998 feet

Vertical drop: 3,398 feet

Skiable Acres: 2,908

Average annual snowfall: 350 inches

Trail count: 187

Lift count: 35 (1 gondola, 5 six-packs, 7 high-speed quads, 1 triple, 6 doubles, 3 platters, 1 T-bar, 11 carpets) – Breckenridge plans to replace 5-Chair, a 1970 Riblet double, with a high-speed quad this summer.

Why I interviewed her

The audacity of it all. Many ski areas reach. Breck soars. Above the town, above the Pacific Ocean-sized parking lots, above the twisty-road condos and mansions, above the frantic base areas and trail-cut high-alpine - there lie the bowls, sweeping one after the next, southeast to northwest, across the range. Chairlifts, improbably, magnificently, will take you there. Or most of the way, at least. Kensho Superchair – a six-pack, rolls up to 12,302 feet, to the doorstep of Peak 6 – it’s a short hike to the tippy top, at 12,573 feet. But Kensho is holding Imperial Superchair’s beer, as that monster climbs to 12,840, just 158 feet shy of the 12,998-foot summit of Peak 8.

Why don’t they go all the way to the summit? Why do you think? Listen to the podcast to get the answer, or go there for yourself and see how those wild winds hit you at the top – or close enough to the top – of America.

The Brobots have plenty to say about Breck, Texas North, Intermediate Mountain. A-Basin is where the Summit County steeps live, don’t you know? There’s some truth to that, but it’s a narrative fed by bravado and outdated information. Breck’s high-alpine chairs – Imperial in 2005 and Kensho in 2013 – have trenched easy access to vast realms of gut-punching terrain. Beat your chest all you will – the only way out is straight down.

Breck is one of the most complete resorts in America, is my point here. And that didn’t happen by accident. Since Vail took ownership of the joint in 1997, the company has deliberately, steadily, almost constantly improved it. Sixteen new lifts, including the inbound 5-Chair upgrade (Breck will swap out a 53-year-old Riblet double for a new high-speed quad this summer); massive expansions onto Peaks 6 and 7; steady snowmaking and parking upgrades. If you want to understand Vail’s long-term intentions for its other 40 ski areas, look to the evolution of this, one of its original four resorts, over decades of always-better incremental upgrades.

Of course, plenty of people know that. Maybe too many. Breck is often – always? – America’s busiest resort by pure skier visits. It’s easy to access, easy to like, mostly – I said mostly Peak 10, E, 6 chairs – easy to ski if you stay below treeline. The town is the town, one of the great après hubs of North American skiing, thrumming, vibrant, a scene. Don’t go unless you want some company.

So what becomes of a place like Breck in a 21st century filled with existential questions about what lift-served skiing has become and what it is destined to be? How does a high-alpine but extremely accessible mountain adapt to its parent company’s insistence on dropping it onto the budget version of its ultra-affordable Epic Pass? Can the super-modern lifts that these pass sales fuel fix the liftlines that spoil the experience without overloading the trails in a way that spoils the experience? How can a town of 5,000 residents accommodate a daily influx of 17,000-ish skiers without compromising its bucolic essence that drew those visitors to begin with? And to what extent do even our highest ski areas need to fortify themselves against the worst outcomes of a changing climate with ever-more-aggressive snowmaking?

Every ski resort-blessed mountain town in the West is grappling with this same set of questions, but Breck, I-70 adjacent and Vail Resorts-bound, is perhaps the most high-profile among them. And where the town and the resort succeed or fail, they inform where our other icons will go. It’s a fascinating story, and we’re still in the book’s early chapters.

What we talked about

Unseasonable Colorado snow and cold; Breck’s strong 2022-23 ski season; how late the season could go and what could be available to ski; that California ski life; thoughts on Tahoe’s big season; Sierra-at-Tahoe’s fire recovery; Alpine Meadows in the pre-Powdr Corp ‘90s; why Alpine Meadows eventually dropped its snowboarding ban and what happened when it did; the early days of terrain parks; reaction when Powdr suddenly sold Alpine; how tiny Boreal and Soda Springs compete in a Tahoe market bursting with mega-resorts; the rise of Woodward; Vail’s ongoing efforts to promote women; leaving Powdr for Vail; Breck magic; four giant ski resorts, mere miles apart, but all distinct; the largest employee housing bed base in Vail Resorts portfolio; an assist with childcare; how a ski resort prepares for and responds to on-mountain fatalities; Breck’s “better not bigger” masterplan; nudging guests toward underutilized terrain; big plans for Peaks 8 and 9; upgrades on Freedom Superchair, Rip’s Ride, and 5-Chair; how a gondola could change Peak 9; a mid-mountain learning center; prioritizing upgrades for Peak 9’s 50-plus-year-old Riblet lifts; why Horseshoe T-bar is an unlikely candidate for an upgrade; why Kensho and Imperial Superchair don’t go to the very top of Breckenridge; the Peak 8 Super Connect chair detachment in December; how the resort determined that the chairlift was safe to run again; massive snowmaking upgrades and how these sync with Vail Resorts’ environmental goals; why Breck is only available on the top-tier Epic Day Pass, but is unlimited on the Epic Local Pass; and why Breck has remained on the Epic Local Pass.

Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview

Late last year, Breck updated its masterplan, as all ski areas operating on U.S. Forest Service land are obliged to do every decade (or so, as it actually ends up working out). Themed “bigger, not better,” the masterplan amounted to a modernization blueprint to maximize the resort’s existing footprint with modern lifts and selective trail- and glade-cutting:

Breckenridge’s goal is to tame its wild peaks. “The structuring vision for the next 10 years at [Breckenridge] is ‘Better not Bigger,’” the master plan states. Noting that the resort’s “significant congestion … can diminish the guest experience,” Breck says that its “goal is not to increase overall skier and rider visits on or around peak days, but rather to concentrate on improving the guest experience and better managing visitation.” To accomplish this, the resort hopes to both better move skiers out of its base areas with more and better lifts, and to keep many of them on the upper mountains with a combination of better chairs and a subtly re-imagined trail network.

Here’s the overview:

And a more granular look at what would and would not change in the mountain’s massive lift network:

The full article is worth a read, as I went peak-by-peak and broke down the proposed changes to each, including upgrades to the snowmaking footprint :

So, what better time to discuss America’s most vibrant ski resort than at the moment when the folks running it just outlined their vision for the far future? Breck will be an important test case of the extent to which a high-profile flagship can climate-proof and crowd-proof itself in an era of climate uncertainty and megapass maximalism. If Breck can thrive without breaking itself and everything around it – including the town at its base, the county it sits in, and the big road that leads up from the flats – then 21st century skiing will follow, adapt, adjust.

Questions I wish I’d asked

Churich and I briefly discussed a skier death at Breckenridge from a few weeks ago. Per the Aspen Times:

An Illinois man clearing snow from his chairlift seat with the safety restraint up fell out and died at Breckenridge Ski Resort a week ago, the local sheriff’s office reported.

John Perucco, 60, of Elgin, Illinois, was pronounced dead March 17 at St. Anthony’s Summit Hospital in Frisco after the fall, the Summit County Coroner’s Office said in an email. He was reportedly wearing a helmet when he fell from the lift.

He had not yet reached Tower 1 of Zendo Chair when he fell 25 feet and landed on a hard-packed, groomed trail below, according to the Summit County Sheriff’s Office. The department was reportedly notified around 11:20 a.m. of a death at the emergency room.

What I would have liked to explore a bit more was the issue of the raised safety bar. This is something I’ve thought a lot about lately. In New England and New York, all of the lifts have safety bars, and most skiers use them most of the time. Their use is required by law in several states, including Vermont, New York, and Massachusetts – patrollers and lift attendants often aggressively pressure skiers who don’t lower them. If you load a lift with strangers and you’re not prepared, you’re liable to be conked in the head by a down-coming bar – Easterners’ etiquette around this is abysmal, as it’s polite to at least call out, “coming down.”

In the Midwest and the West, bar use is much spottier. Forget the Midwest, where modern lifts are rare and most of the old ones have not been retrofit with bars. But skiing’s money is in the West, where most major lifts at most major resorts have been upgraded to detachables, which all have bars. I get a lot of passive-aggressive irritation when I lower the bar (with warning, of course), particularly in Utah and Colorado. This has always puzzled me. What’s the resistance? I’m aware of the NSAA research casting doubt on the efficacy of bar use – I’m skeptical, as there is no way to tell how many accidents have been prevented by a lowered bar.

Anyway, there is a cultural resistance to chairlift bar usage in the western United States that, as far as I can tell, is unique to the world’s major ski cultures. Vail, for its part, retrofits all of its inherited chairlifts with safety bars. So does Alterra. Vail requires its employees to use them at all times. Alterra allows each mountain to set its own policies (Palisades Tahoe and Solitude, for example, require bar use for employees).

I want to dig into this more, to understand both why this resistance exists and why it persists, despite the proliferation of modern chairlifts. It’s a bigger story than can be explored in a single anecdote, and hopefully it’s one I can write about more this offseason. Will this resistance fade, as once-ubiquitous helmet resistance has? Or is this skiing’s version of a cultural wedge issue, set to divide the tourists from the locals in an escalating game of Who Belongs Here?

What I got wrong

* I said that 10 of Vail Resorts’ 41 ski areas were currently led by women. The correct number, at the time of recording, was nine out of 41. Here’s a complete list (several of Vail’s ski areas share a regional general manager: Boston Mills, Brandywine, and Alpine Valley in Ohio; Jack Frost and Big Boulder in Pennsylvania; and Seven Springs, Hidden Valley, and Laurel in Pennsylvania). With yesterday’s news that Beaver Creek COO Nadia Guerriero would move up to VP/COO of the Rockies Region (replacing Bill Rock, who was promoted to head of Vail’s Mountain Division), that number is now eight, I suppose. But who knows how Vail will stir up its mountain leadership team over the summer.

* I also named off all the large ski areas around Lake Tahoe, to give context to Churich’s challenge running tiny Soda Springs and Boreal in that realm of monsters. The only thousand-plus-footer I missed in that riff is Homewood, but here’s a complete list of Tahoe-region ski areas. It really is amazing how these smaller spots exist (and seem to thrive), alongside some of the nation’s largest and most-developed resorts:

* Churich and I also discussed what I referred to as “Vail’s new app” for the 2023-24 ski season. Its official name will be the My Epic app, and it should be a considerable upgrade from Epic Mix. The app will be your Epic Pass (no more RFID card unless you still want one), and will feature interactive trailmaps, real-time liftline wait times, operational updates, blackout date info on your pass, weather updates, resort charge, and more.

Why you should ski Breckenridge

Because you kind of have to. Trying to navigate life as a U.S. American skier without skiing Breck is kind of like trying to go through life without hearing a Taylor Swift song. It’s there whether you want it or not. Even if you’re in the habit of driving past to hit the Eagle County resorts, or you prefer A-Basin or Copper, or you avoid the I-70 corridor altogether, eventually your cousin or your boys from college or your aunt Phyllis is going to plan a spring break trip or a bachelor party or a family Christmas get-together at Breck, and you’re going to go.

And you’re going to like it. This is not the busiest ski area in America by accident. It’s a damn good ski mountain, even if it has more people and fewer steeps and less snow than some of its high-profile ski-biz peers. Yes, liftlines at Peaks 8 and 9 can test your patience at key times. And, yes, the intermediate superhighways can accumulate interstate-esque traffic. But it only takes a little creativity to find quiet glades off Peak 10 and 6-Chair and E-Chair, and tucked between the groomers off every other peak. As with any big western resort, you can follow the crowds or you can follow your skis. The kind of day you have once you stand up and push off the top of the lift is entirely up to you.

Podcast Notes

I’ve hosted several other Colorado-based Vail Resorts leaders on the podcast over the past year. While Bill Rock and Nadia Guerriero have recently moved positions, these conversations are largely still relevant:

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 32/100 in 2023, and number 418 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

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on April 3. It dropped for free subscribers on April 6. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe for free below:

Who

David Dziuban, Owner and General Manager of Whitecap Mountains, Wisconsin

Recorded on

March 13, 2023

About Whitecap Mountains

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: David Dziuban

Located in: Upson, Wisconsin

Year founded: 1964

Pass affiliations: Indy Pass Allied Partner

Reciprocal partners: Whitecap lists the following partners on its season pass page - it is not clear what the benefit is for each mountain: Grand Targhee, Wild Mountain, Mount Bohemia, Sunlight, Camp 10, Lee Canyon, Arizona Snowbowl, Lee Canyon, Mont du Lac.

Closest neighboring ski areas: Mt. Zion (28 minutes), Big Powderhorn (34 minutes), Snowriver (40 minutes), Mt. Ashwabay (1 hour, 15 minutes), Porcupine Mountains (1 hour, 21 minutes)

Base elevation: 1,295 feet

Summit elevation: 1,750 feet

Vertical drop: 455 feet

Skiable Acres: 400 acres

Average annual snowfall: 200 inches

Trail count: 42 (4 expert, 12 advanced, 12 intermediate, 14 beginner)

Lift count: 6 (4 doubles, 1 triple, 1 carpet) – the North Pole-South Pole double functions as two separate chairs, even though it is one long continuous lift. Skiers are not allowed to ride on the middle section, which passes over a long valley. The carpet was not yet functional for the 2022-23 ski season. Whitecap has an additional triple chair that is currently dormant, but which Dziuban intends to resurrect.

Here is Whitecap’s current trailmap:

However, I far prefer this older version, which is my favorite trailmap of all time:

Why I interviewed him

Our ski areas exist where they do for a reason. That rare mix of hills, reliable precipitation, wintertime cold, a near-enough population, a road to get there. Slopes steep enough but not too steep. Water nearby. Someone with enough cash to run chairlifts up the incline and enough brains to put the whole operation together into a viable business.

There are fewer geographic bullseyes of this sort than you may suppose. Look carefully at the map of U.S. ski areas – they are mostly clustered around a few-dozen rarified climate zones. Lake-effect bands or mountain spines or high-altitude nests resting at a desert’s edge. Several dozen have been force-born around large cold-weather cities, of course, bulldozed into existence where cold and water abound but hills are lacking.

We all know the epicenters upon which Epic and Ikon have anchored their empires: the Wasatch, Tahoe, the I-70 corridor, the Vermont Spine. But smaller, less celebrated-by-the-masses clusters dot the continent. The Interstate 90 corridor from 49 Degrees North and Mt. Spokane through Schweitzer, Silver Mountain, and Lookout Pass. Mt. Hood, one mountain that is home to four ski areas. Northern New Mexico, where half a dozen ski areas surround the fabled Taos.

One of the most reliable of these micro-snowzones is Big Snow Country, a hilly wilderness straddling the border of northern Wisconsin and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. There, seated west-to-east, are four – once five – ski areas: Whitecap Mountains, Mt. Zion, Big Powderhorn, and Snowriver, which is a union of the once-separate Indianhead and Blackjack ski areas (now known as Jackson Creek Summit and Black River Basin). Seated fewer than a dozen miles above them, brooding and enormous, is Lake Superior, one of the most reliable lake-effect snowmachines on the planet:

So much of Midwest skiing is funky and improvisational, a tinkerer’s paradise, where the same spirit that animated 20th century factories willed one of the world’s great ski cultures into existence. There are not many hills around Milwaukee or Minneapolis or Detroit, but there are plenty of ski areas. The people of the Midwest do as they please. But the ski areas of Big Snow Country are different. There is so much skiing here because the terrain and the climate seemed sculpted exactly for it.

As a result, the skiing is genuinely sublime. The great tension here is the opposite problem that most of the region’s mobbed ski areas face: great skiing, too few skiers. Big Snow Country is far from pretty much everything. Four hours from Minneapolis, five from Milwaukee, six-and-a-half from Chicago. Residents of those cities can reach Park City or Keystone faster than their Midwest neighbors.

So what to do? For decades, these four (or five), ski areas have struggled to pin themselves to skiers’ to-do lists. Mt. Zion, the smallest of the bunch, is a protectorate of Gogebic Community College, which hosts one of the nation’s only programs on ski area management. Indianhead and Blackjack cycled through generations of owners and were finally combined and then sold, last year, to Charles Skinner, owner of the sprawling Granite Peak and Lutsen ski areas in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Skinner, who transformed Granite from a faltering backwater into one of the Midwest’s top ski areas, is already slinging a high-speed sixer up the hillside at Snowriver and will surely connect the two ski areas within a few years. That leaves Big Powderhorn and Whitecap with a problem.

How to respond? Powderhorn has at least enjoyed stable management and a loyal customer base. Whitecap, however, has struggled. Decades of deferred maintenance pushed skiers away. A 2019 lodge fire erased a crucial piece of infrastructure that has yet to be replaced. The advent, in the region, of the Epic, Ikon, and Indy Passes – not to mention a modernized Granite Peak, two hours closer to pretty much everything, and an unhinged and dirt-cheap Mount Bohemia, not so far to the north – has only clouded Whitecap’s market position.

David Dziuban arrived at the ski area in 2016, and slowly took control over the next few years. It was a period of personal tragedy for him. As soon as he took full ownership, the fire hit. It would have been enough to make anyone surrender. But Dziuban has found in Whitecap both salvation and mission. This place, so naturally blessed, has the bones to be one of the Midwest’s great ski areas. But it needs a push, a pull, a shove into our current moment. Dziuban is the guy to provide all three.

What we talked about

A snowy Wisconsin winter; Whitecap’s unique trail footprint; the great Midwest ski factory; a single sentence in a Wilmot liftline that changed Dziuban’s life; a wild scheme to score a first job as a snowmaker at Plumtree, Illinois; turning down a job at Killington to work at scrappy Magic Mountain; Magic in the ‘80s; making Magic’s Timberside connection; Mt. Tom, Massachusetts; homemade snowmaking; Elk Mountain, the hidden gem of Pennsylvania; a rigged splice gone wrong; Whitecap, lost in the wilderness; first impressions of a run-down and lightly used Whitecap; the long and convoluted process of taking ownership of the resort; balancing personal trauma and loss with the mission of revitalizing the ski area; taming the local homeowners’ entitlement; fire levels the lodge; why Whitecap opened the next day and why it was so vital that it did; plans for a new lodge; Whitecap’s huge development potential; why the ski area hasn’t set up the new conveyor lift it purchased last year; snowmaking; assessing Whitecap’s unique lift fleet; where we could see a new lift at Whitecap; thoughts on the long chair (North Pole/South Pole); getting the CTEC lift running again; “I want to remain affordable to everybody”; why Whitecap launched a $295 (now $325) season pass and how that product has been selling; the surprise response from a one-day season passholder reciprocal deal with Mount Bohemia; thoughts on the Indy Pass and the Allied program; and that Whitecap aura.

Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview

Not to repeat myself, but allow me to repeat myself. A skier living in the Upper Midwest currently enjoys the following options for full-season skiing:

* Purchase a $676 Epic Local Pass, which delivers turns all season at Wilmot or Afton Alps, plus basically unlimited options for runs west to Colorado, Utah, Tahoe, and Whistler.

* Purchase an $829 Ikon Pass and forgo Midwest skiing altogether, hopping frequent flights to Denver and Salt Lake City from major hub airport Minneapolis-St. Paul (MSP).

* Purchase a $329 Indy Pass for two days each at major ski areas across the region, including some of the best and most-developed in Minnesota and Wisconsin: Granite Peak, Lutsen, Spirit Mountain, and, perhaps most significantly for Whitecap, its neighbors Big Powderhorn and Snowriver (both of which are in Michigan).

* Purchase a local season pass at any of dozens of ski areas that sit within 30 minutes of downtown Minneapolis, Madison, or Milwaukee.

* Scratch the gnar itch with a $109 ($99 if you can forego Saturdays), season pass to Mount Bohemia, the ungroomed natural-snow mecca hanging off the top of the UP. The pass includes reciprocal days at ski areas throughout the Midwest and the West.

So, what does Whitecap do? First, control what you can: fix the beat-up lift fleet, improvise a lodge, bring stability to its operations. Dziuban has checked off that list. Second, modernize: rebuild the lodge, build out snowmaking (the current system consists of fewer than half a dozen guns), re-activate the mothballed triple chair. All of this is in progress. But there’s something else: how does a ski area set itself apart in a region dense with ski areas but not with skiers? What is the story it’s going to tell? Dziuban has a good one, and it’s one every skier in the region ought to hear.

What I got wrong

I noted that Whitecap had “360-degree exposure,” when it in fact has slopes primarily facing just three directions: west, north, and south.

Why you should ski Whitecap Mountains

In February, I flew into Minneapolis for a five-day Upper Midwest ski tour, making me perhaps the only person this century to travel from New York to Minnesota on purpose to ski. At least that was my conclusion from multiple chairlift conversations with befuddled locals. I swung through 11 ski areas: Welch Village, Afton Alps, Granite Peak, Nordic Mountain, Snowriver, Big Powderhorn, Mt. Zion, Whitecap, Spirit Mountain, Trollhaugen, and Buck Hill. Each was unique and memorable, in the way that every ski area is. But one resonated with me more than the others: Whitecap.

I have visited hundreds of ski areas, all over the world. There is nothing quite like Whitecap. It’s an enchanting place. Sprawling and gorgeous. Narrow paths wound through woods, leading into and around broad meadows, glades everywhere, all of it knitted together in a Zelda-like sprawl primed for exploration. While the vertical drop is small, the place is multilayered and complex. It is one of the few ski areas where I have ever felt legitimately lost. I took 27 runs and still didn’t see half the place.

Also: there was no one else there. Granted, it was a Wednesday. But coverage was excellent: 100 percent open. I skied that day with Jacob, Whitecap’s grooming ace, a Telluride refugee who had carpeted a shocking breadth of acreage overnight before meeting me to ski. He kept telling his friends from Colorado that they had to move here, he told me. The pace was slower, and he could afford to live. He’d given up finding anything affordable near Telluride, and had instead commuted in from a desert campervan colony hours away. He’d had enough, come back east, back home, with his campervan and his dog. He didn’t see any reason to return to Colorado. Yes, the skiing there is amazing, but the skiing is good here, too, and the stresses of daily life had evaporated. He now lived in the hotel. His commute to the snowcat was a few dozen steps. This was a life that was pleasant, and sustainable. As Western mountain-town life became untenable, places like Big Snow Country, with reliable snow and lower costs for everything, would become more attractive to those who wanted to make skiing central to their lives, he said.

I’m not saying you should move to Whitecap. But you should visit. Everyone should ski the Midwest at least once. Just to understand what it is, this machine that churns out so many of the nation’s most passionate skiers. And when you do go, make sure Whitecap is on your tour.

Podcast Notes

On Plumtree, Illinois

Dziuban’s ski career began at Plumtree, a 210-vertical-foot landfill bump in Illinois. Here’s the 1978 trailmap:

On the podcast, I said that I wasn’t sure if the place was still operating. Its website states that the ski area is “closed for renovations,” and I believe that has been its status for at least as long as I’ve tracked season passes nationally (three seasons). I’m trying to confirm that. Even if it does re-open, it looks as though the place is just a residents’ amenity for whatever gated community it sits in. Here’s a bit more on the joint, per skibum.net:

Former public area, Plumtree is now a private club for Lake Carroll property owners, guests, etc. Aging equipment, wide open bowls, decent place. Look up “typical skiing in the Midwest” and you’ll find Plumtree Ski Area. Wish there were more Plumtrees open to the general public.

On Magic Mountain

Dziuban spent several years at Magic Mountain, Vermont. He was there from the mid-80s to the early ‘90s, a period that included the interlink with the lost Timber Ridge ski area on the backside of Glebe Mountain. Here’s what they looked like connected:

These days, skiers are still allowed to traverse from Magic over to “Timberside,” which is privately owned, and ski down. They have to find their own way back to Magic, however, as the Timber Ridge lifts are long gone.

On the Wine Hut

Follow the trails skier’s left of the Midway double chair, and you’ll sweep past the Wine Hut on your way to the loading station. It’s one of the Midwest’s cooler après joints, though I’ll admit that I did not sample the goods on the February Wednesday I stopped in.

On the North Pole/South Pole double

Whitecap is home to one of the most amazing lifts in America - an up-and-over Hall double that serves as two separate lifts - the North Pole double and the South Pole double. Skiers are not allowed to ride across the middle section, which soars more than 125 feet over the meadow between the two top stations - with no restraint bar. I snagged this video standing beneath the midsection:

And here’s a still pic from the valley floor - note the tower hoisted onto the steel lift:

Here’s a view looking from the North Pole side across the valley to the South Pole:

Going up South Pole:

On Whitecap’s dormant triple chair

A seemingly abandoned lift terminal sits on Whitecap’s summit, the head of a skeleton that follows a liftline down the mountain.

This lift, said Dziuban, is actually not dead yet. He’s already fabricated some parts necessary to restore the 1991 CTEC triple to a functional state, as he explains in the podcast.

The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 31/100 in 2023, and number 417 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane, or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email skiing@substack.com.

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Who

Jim Quimby, General Manager of Saddleback, Maine

Recorded on

March 6, 2023

About Saddleback

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Arctaris Investments

Located in: Rangeley, Maine

Year founded: 1960

Pass affiliations: Indy Pass

Reciprocal partners: None

Closest neighboring ski areas: Sugarloaf (52 minutes), Titcomb (1 hour), Black Mountain of Maine (1 hour, 9 minutes), Spruce Mountain (1 hour, 22 minutes), Baker Mountain (1 hour, 33 minutes), Mt. Abram (1 hour, 36 minutes), Sunday River (1 hour, 41 minutes)

Base elevation: 2,120 feet

Summit elevation: 4,120 feet

Vertical drop: 2,000 feet

Skiable Acres: 600+

Average annual snowfall: 225 inches

Trail count: 68 (23 beginner, 20 intermediate, 18 advanced, 7 expert) + 2 terrain parks

Lift count: 6 (1 high-speed quad, 3 fixed-grip quads, 1 T-bar, 1 carpet)

Why I interviewed him

The best article I’ve ever read on Saddleback came from Bill Donahue, writing for Outside, with the unfortunate dateline of March 9, 2020. That was a few days before the planet shut down to prevent the spread of Covid-19, and just after Arctaris had purchased Saddleback and promised to tug the ski area out of its five-year slumber. Donahue included a long section on Quimby:

But to really register the new hope that’s blossomed in Rangeley, I needed to drive up the winding hill to Saddleback’s lodge and talk to Jimmy Quimby. Fifty-nine years old and weathered, his chin specked with salt-and-pepper stubble, Quimby is the scion of a Saddleback pillar. His father, Doc, poured concrete to build the towers for one of Saddleback’s first lifts in 1963 and later built trails and made snow for the mountain. His mother, Judy, worked in the ski area’s cafeteria for about 15 years. “We were so poor,” Quimby told me, “that we didn’t have a pot to piss in, but I skied every weekend.” Indeed, as a high schooler, Quimby took part in every form of alpine ski competition available—on a single pair of skis. His 163-centimeter Dynastar Easy Riders were both his ballet boards and his giant-slalom guns. They also transported him to mischief. In his teenage years, Quimby was part of a nefarious Saddleback gang, the Rat Pack. “We terrorized the skiing public,” he said. “We built jumps. We skied fast. We made the T-bar swerve so people fell off.”

Just days after his 18th birthday, Quimby left Maine to serve 20 years in the Air Force as an electrical-line repairman and managed, somehow, to spend a good chunk of time near Japan’s storied Hakkoda Ski Resort, where he routinely hucked himself off 35-foot cornices while schussing in blue jeans. When he returned to Maine in 1998, he commenced working at Saddleback and honed such a love for the mountain that, when it closed in 2015, his heart broke. He simply refused to ski after that. “I decided,” he said, “that I just wouldn’t ski anywhere else.” Friends in the industry offered him free tickets at nearby mountains; Quimby demurred and hunkered down at Saddleback, where he remained mountain manager. The Berrys paid him to watch over the nonfunctioning trails and lifts during the long closure. “I’m a prideful person,” he explained. “OK, I did do a little skiing with my grandchildren, but they’re preschoolers. I haven’t made an adult turn since Saddleback closed.”

Quimby is now working for Arctaris, which owns Saddleback Inc., but that’s a technicality. His mission is spiritual, and when I met him in his office, I found that I had stepped into a shrine, a jam-packed Saddleback museum. There were lapel pins, patches, bumper stickers, posters, and also a wooden ski signed in 1960 by about 35 of Saddleback’s progenitors. Quimby’s prize possession, though, is a brass belt buckle he bought in the Saddleback rental shop in the 1970s. “I used to wear it every day,” he told me, “but when Saddleback closed, I put it on a dresser and never wore it again.”

Quimby stood up from the desk now, to reveal that he was wearing the buckle once more. In capitalized brass letters, it read “SKI.” His eyes were glassy with emotion.

“We’re going to do this,” he said quietly, speaking of Saddleback’s resurrection. “We’re going to make this happen.”

They did make this happen. One feature of improbable feats is that they are often taken for granted once achieved. The number of people who confessed doubts to me privately about the viability of Saddleback is significant. It won’t work because… it’s too remote, there are not enough skier visits to spread around Maine, there are too many bodies buried on the property, the previous owners emptied the GDP of a small country onto the property and it still failed. All fair arguments, but for every built thing there are reasons it should have failed. The great advantage of humans over other animals is our ability to solve the unsolvable. I push a button on my phone and a person 5,000 miles away sees a note from me in an instant. That would have been dubbed magic for 100,000 years and now it is a fact of daily existence. Humans can do amazing things. And the humans who dug Saddleback out of the grave did an amazing thing, and it’s a story I just can’t get enough of.

What we talked about

Saddleback’s strong 2022-23 ski season; the Casablanca Glades; the ski area in the sixties; “Saddleback was my babysitter”; Rangeley reminisces; when the U.S. Air Force stations a ski bum in Northern Japan; the Donald Breen era of Saddleback and a long battle with the Forest Service; Saddleback’s relationship with the Forest Service today; the Berry family arrives; an investment spree; why Saddleback closed in 2015; why the Berrys replaced the Kennebago T-bar with a quad and whether they should have upgraded the Rangeley lift first; Quimby’s reaction when Saddleback closed; how Quimby kept Saddleback from falling apart during his five years as caretaker of a lost ski area; why Arctaris finally revitalized the ski area after so many other potential buyers had faded; the most important man at Saddleback; the blessing and the curse of rebuilding a ski area in the pandemic year of 2020; how close Saddleback came to upgrading Rangeley to a fixed-grip, rather than a detachable, quad; how much that lift transformed the ski area; the legacy of Andy Shepard, the former general manager who oversaw the ski area’s comeback; Saddleback the business in year three of its comeback; surveying Saddleback’s ultra-new lift fleet; why Saddleback replaced the 900-year-old Cupsuptic T-bar with a brand-new T-bar; why the ski area chose Partek to build the new Sandy quad and how successful that lift has been; the story behind the old Saddleback trailmaps with theoretical lifts scribbled all over them (yes, this one):

… whether Saddleback will expand terrain any time soon; the ski area’s next likely chairlift; the potential for a hotel; the mountain’s masterplan; how important the Indy Pass has been to Saddleback’s comeback; and Indy blackouts and whether they will continue.

Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview

With lift towers rising up the mountainside and hammers clanging through the valleys and autumn frosts biting the New England hills, Andy Shepard hacked out an hour for me in October 2020 to discuss the previous six months at Saddleback. He itemized the tasks that Saddleback’s crews had achieved in the maw of Covid. An incomprehensible list. Rebuild everything. Clean everything. Hire an army. Demolish and build a chairlift. Stand up a website and an e-commerce platform. All in the midst of the most confusing and contentious time in modern American history. The mission was awesome, and so was the story behind it:

Congratulations, you did it. But the second that new detachable quad started spinning in December 2020, Saddleback became just another New England ski area, just another choice for skiers who already have dozens. So now what? What of all those old masterplans showing terrain expansions and lifts extending halfway to Canada? When can we get more places to stay on the hill? Can we get snowmaking on the trail back to the condos finally?

Two and a half years later, it was time for a check-in. To see how Shepard and Quimby and the crew had quietly transformed what was long a backwater bump into one of the most modern ski areas in the country. To see how the Indy Pass – which hadn’t existed when Saddleback went into its shell – had turbocharged the mountain’s comeback tour. And to see, indeed, what is next for this New England gem.

What I got wrong

I wasn’t wrong on this so much as late to publish: Quimby and I discussed season passes at the end of the podcast. At the time, details on the 2023-24 pass suite had not yet been released, and we talked a bit about where pricing would land. These details have long gone public, but I kept the section intact because Quimby details why the ski area was compelled to raise rates from previous seasons (the increase ended up being modest in the context of ongoing inflation, from $699 this season to $799 for next).

Also there’s a reference in our conversation to Sandy being a detachable quad, but the 227-vertical-foot quad is in fact a fixed-grip lift.

Why you should ski Saddleback

Man is this place big. Two broad ridges staggered and stacked and parallel, with dozens of ways down each. Glades all over. Amazing fall line skiing. Lift lines? Not many. Maybe on Rangeley, maybe on big days. But mostly, the place is a glorious wide-open banger, stuffed into a north country snow pocket that most always stands above New England’s notorious rain-snow line as storms roll through.

“Yes but is it worth the drive?” asks Overthinks Everything Bro. Yes it’s worth the drive. “But I have to pass 19 other big ski areas to get there.” So? If a genie erupts out of my next can of Bang Energy Drink, my first wish will be to eliminate this brand of thinking from existence. Passing other ski areas to ski Saddleback is not like passing a McDonald’s at exit 100 to eat at a McDonald’s at exit 329, more than 200 miles down the road. You’re passing a number of distinct and unique ski areas to experience another distinct and unique ski area. A Saddleback run will imprint on your experience in a way that your 400th day at Waterville Valley will not.

Not all of us, I realize, are so driven by novelty and the unknown. To many of you, turns are turns. Yee-haw. But I’m not suggesting you drive four hours out of your way to lap a town ropetow. This is a serious mountain, with terrain that has few peers in New England. It is special, and it is most definitely worth it.

Podcast Notes

On the ski area’s battle with the National Park Service

Quimby and I had a long discussion on Saddleback’s 15-plus-year war with the National Park Service over former owner Donald Breen’s expansion plans. While Saddleback sits on private land, the Appalachian Trail runs over the mountain’s summit, giving the government a say in any development that may impact the trail. As with most things New England, New England Ski History provides a comprehensive synopsis of what amounts to Saddleback’s lost generation:

With Saddleback finally financially stable and controlling 12,000 acres of land, Breen sought to tap into its vast potential in the mid 1980s. In 1984, Breen told Ski magazine, "Saddleback has the potential to be one of the largest resorts in this part of the country" and could become "the Vail of the East."

While a massive development was possible, including above treeline skiing as well as a bowl on the back side of the mountain, initial plans were made for a phased $36 million expansion "opening up the entire bowl where the ski area sits with three more lifts and numerous trails."

Working to gain approvals, Saddleback offered to donate a 200-foot easement to the National Park Service for the Appalachian Trail while retaining the ability to have skiers and equipment cross the corridor if needed. Countering the ski area's plans, the National Park Service recommended taking 3,000 acres of Saddleback's land. As a result, instead of investing in the mountain, Breen was forced to spend large sums of money to defend his property from eminent domain.

Attempting to break the impasse in the early 1990s, Saddleback offered to pare back expansion plans and sell 2,000 acres to the National Park Service. The National Park Service responded with an offer for one sixth of the amount Saddleback wanted from the property.

By the mid 1990s, Saddleback was offering to donate 300 acres of land to the National Park Service, while retaining the right to cross the Appalachian Trail with connector ski trails. The National Park Service once again refused, sticking with its eminent domain plan. Later Congressional testimony revealed that the Breen family was forced to negotiate with and give concessions to the Appalachian Trail Conference, only to have the agreements retracted by the National Park Service. In addition, the National Park Service would refuse to turn over documents relating to its involvement with other ski areas, or to put parameters of potential agreements in writing.

After having spent a decade and a half of his life trying to work with the Forest Service, Donald Breen took a step back from negotiations in 1997, handing the reins over to his daughter Kitty. The Maine Congressional Delegation was brought in to attempt to get the National Park Service to negotiate.

At Senator Olympia Snowe's urging, Saddleback offered to sell the bowl on the back side of the mountain to the Park Service in exchange for being able to develop its Horn Bowl area. The National Park Service rejected the offer, insisting the expansion was not viable, that the ski area could sustain increased skier visits on its existing footprint, and that Saddleback's undeveloped land had little financial value.

Negotiations continued into 2000, at which point Saddleback had increased its donation offer to 660 acres, while the National Park Service still wanted to take 893 acres by eminent domain. Five proposals were put on the table while the National Park Service threatened to turn the matter over to the Department of Justice for condemnation. Finally, on November 2, 2000, the National Park Service and Saddleback reached a deal in which the Breens donated 570 acres along the Appalachian Trail corridor, while selling the 600 acre back bowl for $4 million. While the deal meant Breen could move forward with his development of the resort, the long battle with the government had consumed millions of dollars and nearly two decades of his life. Now in his 70s, Breen was ready to retire. In 2001, the massive resort property was put on the market for $12 million.

To understand just how deeply this conflict stalled the ski area’s potential evolution, consider this: when Breen and the Forest Service squared off in 1984, Sunday River, less than two hours away and closer to pretty much everyone, looked like this:

And Saddleback looked like this:

While both had just five lifts – Sunday River sported a triple, two doubles, and two T-bars; Saddleback had two doubles and three T-bars – Saddleback was the larger of the two, with a more interesting and complex trail network. But while Breen fought the Forest Service, his mountain stood still. Meanwhile, Les Otten went ballistic at Sunday River, stringing terrain pods for miles in each direction. By 2001, when Breen sold, Sunday River looked like this:

While Saddleback had languished:

Whatever market share Saddleback could have earned during New England’s Great Ski Area Modernization – which more or less exactly coincided with his Forest Service fight from 1984 to 2001 – was lost to Sunday River and Sugarloaf, both of which spent that era building rather than fighting.

And yes, I also thought, “well what did Sugarloaf look like in 1984 and 2001?” So here you go:

On the Berry family

Breen sold Saddleback in 2001 to the Berry family, who absolutely mainlined cash into the joint. Over the next decade, the family replaced the upper (Kennebago) and lower (Buggy) T-bars with fixed-grip quads, and substantially blew out the trail and glade network. Check the place in 2014:

But two big problems remained. First, that double chair marked “C” on the map above is the Rangeley lift, the alpha chair out of the base. It was a 1963 Mueller that could move all of 900 skiers per hour. And while skiers could have ridden Sandy to the Cupsuptic T-bar (if both were running), to the Pass trail to access the Kennebago quad and the upper mountain, that’s not how most people think. They want to go straight to the top. So they’d wait.

Which leads to the second problem. Queueing up for a double chair that was pulled off of Noah’s Ark when you could be skiing onto high-speed (or at least modern) lifts just down the road at Sunday River or Sugarloaf is frustrating. Lines to board the lift could reportedly stretch to an hour on weekends. Facing such gridlock and frustration, most casual skiers who stumbled onto the place probably thought some version of, “This is cute, but next weekend, I’m going to Sunday River.”

And they did. If the Berrys could have upgraded Rangeley, the whole project may have worked. But financing fell through, as Quimby details in the podcast, and the ski area closed shortly after. But to underscore just how crucial the Rangeley lift is to Saddleback’s viability as a modern resort, Arctaris, the current owners, reportedly paid more to replace the chairlift ($7 million), than they did for the ski area itself ($6.5 million).

On potential buyers between the Berrys and Arctaris

Quimby notes that a parade of suitors tromped through Saddleback between 2015, when the ski area closed, and 2020, when it finally re-opened. The most significant of these was Australia-based Majella Group, whose courtship New England Ski History summarizes:

On June 28, 2017, the Berry family announced they had reached an agreement to sell Saddleback to the Australia-based Majella Group. Grandiose plans were announced, as Majella declared it would be "turning Saddleback into the premier ski resort in North America." Initial plans called for reopening for the 2017-18 season with a new fixed-grip quad replacing the Rangeley Double and a new Cupsuptic T-Bar. However, despite announcements that "physical work" had started in September and that the company was "committed to opening in some capacity for the 2017-18 ski season," the area remained idle that winter and the sale was not completed.

Nearly one year after the original sale announcement, the Majella Group CEO Sebastian Monsour was arrested in Australia for alleged investor fraud, revealing a financial house of cards. The Majella branding was removed from the Saddleback web site that fall and the ski area sat idle during the snowy winter of 2018-19.

So things could have been much worse. Had Majella completed the purchase and then fallen apart, Saddleback would likely still be idle, caught in a Jay Peak-esque vortex of court-led asset salvation, but without the benefit of operating revenue.

On Mount Washington

Quimby notes that the weather at Saddleback can be “comparative to Mount Washington and that’s no joke.” For those of you unfamiliar with just how ferocious Mount Washington weather can be, here’s mount-washington.aspx">a synopsis from the Mt. Washington State Park website (emphasis mine):

…in winter, sub-zero temperatures, hurricane-force winds, blowing snow and incredible ice claim the peak, creating an arctic outpost in a temperate climate zone. Known as the Home of the World’s Worst Weather, Mount Washington’s winter conditions rival those of Mount Everest and the Polar regions.

The mountain’s summit record-wind.aspx">holds the world record for the “highest surface wind speed ever observed by man,” at 231 miles per hour. As I write this, the summit temperature is 4 degrees Fahrenheit, with 62-mile-per-hour winds driving the windchill to 28 degrees below zero. It’s April 2.

There’s surely some hyperbole in Quimby’s statement, but the spirit of the declaration is clear: if you go to Saddleback, go prepared.

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 30/100 in 2023, and number 416 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

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on March 29. It dropped for free subscribers on April 1. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription.

Who

Nick Polumbus, President of Whitefish Mountain Resort, Montana

Recorded on

January 13, 2023

About Whitefish

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Winter Sports, Inc.

Pass affiliations: None

Reciprocal pass partners:

* 3 days each at Great Divide, Loveland, Mt. Hood Meadows

* 5 days at Red Lodge

Located in: Whitefish, Montana

Closest neighboring ski areas: Blacktail (1 hour, 15 minutes), Fernie (2 hours), Turner (2 hours, 30 minutes), Kimberley (2 hours, 45 minutes), Montana Snowbowl (3 hours), Lookout Pass (3 hours) – travel times will vary considerably pending weather, border traffic, and time of year

Base elevation: 4,464 feet

Summit elevation: 6,817 feet

Vertical drop: 2,353 feet

Skiable Acres: roughly 3,000 acres

Average annual snowfall: nearly 300 inches

Trail count: 128 (8 expert, 49 advanced, 40 intermediate, 25 beginner, 6 terrain parks)

Lift count: 15­­ (1 six-pack, 3 high-speed quads, 2 fixed-grip quads, 6 triples, 2 T-bars, 1 carpet)

Why I interviewed him

You can be forgiven for thinking that Epkon chewed them all up. That the only ski areas worth skiing are those stacked on the industry’s twin magic carpets. These shuttles to something grand, to what you think of when you think about the mountains. Ikon got Jackson and Palisades and the Cottonwoods and Taos. Epic got Vail and Telluride and Heavenly and Park City. What more could be left? What more could you need?

You probably need this. Whitefish. Or Big Mountain, as you will. Three thousand acres of Montana steep and white. Plenty of snow. Plenty of lifts. A new sixer to boom you up the hillside. The rootin’-tootin’ town below. A C-note gets you a lift ticket and change to buy a brew. No bitterness in the exchange.

It’s hard to say exactly if Whitefish is an anachronism or an anomaly or a portent or a manifestation of wanton Montana swagger. Among big, developed U.S. mountains, it certainly stands alone.

This model is extinct, I thought. Coercion-by-punishment being the preferred sales tactic of the big-mountain conglomerates. “Four lift tickets for today, Mr. Suburban Dad who decided to shepherd the children to Colorado on a last-minute spring break trip? That will be $1,200. Oh does that seem like a lot to you? Well that will teach you not to purchase access to skiing 13 months in advance.”

So far, Whitefish has resisted skiing’s worst idea. Good for them. Better for them: this appears to be a winning business strategy. Skier visits have climbed annually for more than a decade. Look at a map and you’ll see that’s more impressive than it sounds. Whitefish is parked at the top of America, near nothing, on the way to nothing. You have to go there on purpose. And with Epic and Ikon passes tumbling out of every other skier’s jacket pockets, you need a special story to bait that journey.

So what’s going on here? Why hasn’t this mountain done what every other mountain has done and joined a pass? Like the comely maiden at the ball, Whitefish could have its pick: Epic, Ikon, Mountain Collective, Indy. An instant headliner and pass-mover. But the single life can be appealing. Do as you please, chill with who you want, set your own agenda. That’s Whitefish’s game. And I’m watching.

What we talked about

Why Whitefish typically calls it a season with a 100-inch summit base depth; Front Range Colorado and I-70 in the 1970s; how Colorado and Utah snow and traffic impacts skier traffic at Whitefish; how a Colorado kid enters the ski industry in Vermont; a business turnaround at Whitefish; “get the old fish out of the fridge”; how Whitefish has stayed affordable as it’s modernized; why the ski area changed its name from “Big Mountain” and how that landed locally; who owns Whitefish and how committed they are to independence; the new Snow Ghost Express sixer; ripple effects on other chairlifts after Snow Ghost popped live; record skier visits; snow ghosts; the best marketing line of Polumbus’ career; a big-time potential future expansion; the mountain’s recent chairlift shuffles; why chairs 5 and 8 don’t go to the summit; the art of terrain-pod building; why Bad Rock isn’t running this winter; thoughts on the future of Tenderfoot and the Heritage T-bar; Why Whitefish lift tickets cost a fraction of what similarly sized mountains charge; an amazing season pass stat; the mountain’s steady rise of skier visits; and much love for the Indy Pass even if it “isn’t a good fit for us.”

Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview

Well I actually thought that January was a great time for this interview. Which is why I recorded it then. And here it is in your inbox, a mere 11 weeks later. Which is a bad look for me and a bad look for the brand and not very considerate to my guest. I’ll offer an explanation, but not an excuse: the sound quality on this recording was, um, not good. Most podcasts take two to four hours to edit. This one required 10 times that. So why didn’t I just blast it out back in January? Since so much of what I write is reaction to breaking news, every hour I spend on a pod is an hour I’m not delivering more urgent content. And most Storm Skiing Podcasts are fairly evergreen. Skiers binge them on long roadtrips – I know this because they tell me so and because the numbers keep going up on eps that I dropped back in 2019.

But none of that matters to you or to the team at Whitefish, and it shouldn’t. I know that a lot of you have been waiting for this one since I started hyping it last year, and this long delay was disappointing. I get it. One core promise of The Storm, however, is that I will continually improve the product and the process. So I’ll own this one and refine my workflow to prevent future delays. Sorry.

But, to address the actual purpose of this section: why did I think that now was a good time for this interview? It’s everything I said above. Alterra has copied Vail’s ridiculous day-ticket price structure, and Boyne and Powdr aren’t far behind. Even little Mountain Capital Partners is allowing the robots to price-surge Arizona Snowbowl tickets past the $300 mark on peak days. Whitefish doesn’t exactly stand alone in resisting these price schemes – plenty of other ski areas will still sell you a walk-up lift ticket that costs less than a heart transplant. But none are as large, as high-profile, and as modern as Whitefish – at least not in our beloved U.S. America. Like some brash hipster rocking a Walkman on his fixed-gear bicycle, Whitefish has made the once-pedestrian into the novel. Innovation by staying in place.

The Epic Pass gets a lot of well-deserved credit for stabilizing skiing by front-loading pass sales to springtime, insulating revenue from weather-dependency. But Vail and Alterra have cast the $250-plus lift ticket as an essential piece of their passes’ success. As though no one would buy the pass if they knew they could still go ski Beaver Creek for $100 anytime they liked. There is a brutal logic to this. You’re only going to buy a $275 lift ticket one time. Then you’ll go looking for hacks. But the process is demeaning and embarrassing, like you’re the last guy to the gas pump in the apocalypse.

I wrote a story on Whitefish’s business model back in 2021, profiling both that mountain and Jay Peak. Both are run, perhaps coincidentally, by headmen who are fist-bump bros that came up together at late-ASC Killington in the ‘90s: Polumbus and Jay Peak’s Steve Wright. I don’t know how much they brought their brains together to arrive at similar ticket menus, but I know from interacting with both that they share the same kind of heart. A down-to-earth humility and empathy that considers humans in the business equation, rather than just making them the number at the transactional finish line.

Why you should ski Whitefish

Did you see the part above about 3,000 acres of terrain and 300 inches of average annual snowfall? Yeah, go enjoy that.

But let me harp on the lift ticket thing just a little bit more. If your boys are anything like mine, they are more likely to translate War and Peace into Braille than they are to heed your advice to purchase lift tickets 10 months before your next ski trip. I say this not because my friends are brilliant, but because they are lazy a******s who need their wives to label their underwear drawers lest they be forced to go commando for months on end. So if you’re planning, say, “Gary’s 50th Birthday Ski Adventure,” you have choices: Heavenly (South Tahoe!), Jackson (Jackson!), Telluride (Telluride!), etc. My buddies, mostly Three-Day Dans, are going to ignore my clear and repeated reminders to purchase Epic Day or Mountain Collective Passes, and are instead going to commandeer their monthly car payment to cover the cost of two days’ skiing. And then be all shocked and annoyed about it. Whitefish, where even last-minute skiing runs less than $100 per day, is the solution to such gatherings.

That’s an edge case, I realize. And surely there are attributes of skiing Whitefish beyond the low cost at the turnstile: the terrain, the views, the snowghosts, the unpretentious vibe, the snowfall, the enormous breadth of it all. But the price thing matters enormously. If you have an Ikon Pass and you’re passing through Park City, you’re probably not stopping to scope the place out. Throwing down $269 for a day of skiing seems a little stupid if you have unlimited skiing on a $1,000-plus pass that you already own. But if you’re rolling from Sun Peaks down to Big Sky and you want to sidebar to Whitefish, well, that lift ticket’s not going to kill you in the same way. That sort of pop-around spontaneity defined a big piece of the road-trip ski scene for decades, and it’s fading. Too bad.  

Podcast Notes

On American Skiing Company and S-K-I

Polumbus refers to the S-K-I and American Skiing Company (ASC) Merger, which roughly coincided with the beginning of his Killington tenure in 1996. Check this crazy portfolio, as documented by New England Ski History:

At the time of the deal, both companies only had New England ski areas, with LBO Resort Enterprises' portfolio composed of Attitash Bear Peak, NH, Cranmore, NH, Sugarbush, VT, and Sunday River, ME, while S-K-I Ltd. owned Haystack, VT, Killington, VT, Mt. Snow, VT, Sugarloaf, ME, and Waterville Valley, NH.

Can you imagine if that crew had held into the megapass era? Instead, they are split between seven different owners:

The coalition didn’t hold for long. The Justice department made ASC sell Cranmore and Waterville Valley immediately. And even though the company was like “F you Brah” and purchased Pico five minutes later, and went on to purchase The Canyons (then Wolf Mountain, formerly Park West, now part of Park City), Steamboat, and Heavenly, the whole enterprise disintegrated in slow motion over the next dozen years. New England Ski History documents the company’s arc comprehensively:

On lift shuffles

Whitefish moves lifts around its mountain like some of us re-organize our living room couches. Check out the 2005 front-side trailmap on the left. By 2007, the Glacier Chaser Express had been shortened and slid looker’s left to replace the old Swift Creek double, and the Easy Rider triple had moved down-mountain and become Elk Meadows. The new Easy Rider, a quad seated across the mountain, was also a relocated machine, from Moab Scenic Skyway, according to Lift Blog.

In 2017, Whitefish moved Glacier View, a 1981 CTEC triple, to a new location and renamed it East Rim:

Then last year, Whitefish moved the Hellroaring triple looker’s left across the mountain. Note the changes in the trail network below Lacey Lane, which ran under the old line:

Amazingly, that was the second time Whitefish had relocated that same chair. It began life in 1985 as the Big Creek chairlift, which served the North Side in this circa 1995 trailmap:

The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 27/100 in 2023, and number 413 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane, or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email skiing@substack.com.

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Who

Christian Knapp, Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Pacific Group Resorts

Recorded on

February 27, 2023

About Pacific Group Resorts

Pacific Group Resorts (PGRI) owns and/or operates six North American ski areas:

While they don’t have a single unified pass like Vail Resorts or Mountain Capital Partners, PGRI’s ski areas do offer reciprocity for their passholders, largely through their Mission: Affordable product. Here are the 2022-23 exchanges – the company has not yet released 2023-24 passes:

Why I interviewed him

There are more than a dozen companies that own three or more ski areas in North America. The National Ski Areas Association itemizes most of them* here. Everyone knows Vail and Aspen, whether they ski or not. The next tier is a little more insider, but not much: Alterra, Boyne, Powdr. These are the ski companies with national footprints and Ikon Pass headliner resorts. If skiers haven’t heard of these companies, they’re familiar with Mammoth and Big Sky and Snowbird. Everything else on the list is regionally dense: Invision Capital’s three California ski areas (Mountain High, Dodge Ridge, China Peak); Wisconsin Resorts six Midwestern bumps (Alpine Valley, Pine Knob, Mt. Holly, and Bittersweet in Michigan; Alpine Valley in Wisconsin; and Searchmont in Ontario); the State of New York’s Belleayre, Gore, and Whiteface. Some – like Midwest Family Ski Resorts’ trio of gigantors – align with Indy Pass, while others stand alone, with a pass just for their mountains, like Mountain Capital Partners’ Power Pass.

PGRI doesn’t fit any of these templates. The company has a national footprint, with properties stretching from coastal BC to New Hampshire, but no national pass presence (at least before the company inherited Jay Peak’s Indy Pass membership). Its properties’ season passes sort of work together but sort of don’t. It’s all a little strange: a small ski area operator, based in Park City, whose nearest ski area is more than a 400-mile drive away, on the edge of Colorado’s Grand Mesa. PGRI is built like a regional operator, but its ski areas are scattered across the continent, including in improbable-seeming locales such as Maryland and Virginia.

Despite the constant facile reminders that American Skiing Company and SKI failed, small conglomerates such as PGRI are likely the future of skiing. Owning multiple resorts in multiple regions is the best kind of weather insurance. Scale builds appeal both for national pass coalitions and for banks, who often control the cash register. A larger company can build a talent pipeline to shift people around and advance their careers, which often improves retention, creating, in turn, a better ski experience. Or so the theories go. Independence will always have advantages, and consolidation its pitfalls, but the grouping together of ski resorts is not going away. So let’s talk to one of the companies actively growing on its own terms, in its own way, and setting a new template for what corporate skiing balanced with local control can look like.

*Missing from the NSAA’s list is the Schmitz Brothers trio of Wisconsin ski areas: Little Switzerland, Nordic Mountain, and The Rock Snow Park; the list also includes Sun Valley and Snowbasin, which are jointly owned by the Holding Family, but excludes the other two-resort groups around the country: Berkshire East/Catamount, Labrador/Song, 49 Degrees North/Silver Mountain, Homewood/Red Lodge, Perfect North/Timberline, and Mission Ridge/Blacktail - there may be others).

What we talked about

The bomber western winter; closing Wintergreen early; the existential importance of Eastern snowmaking; why Mid-Atlantic ski resorts are such great businesses; growing up in the ski industry; Mt. Bachelor in the ‘90s; Breck in the early Vail days; why founding the Mountain Collective was harder than you probably think; the surprising mountain that helped start but never joined the pass; how essential the existence of Mountain Collective was to Ikon Pass; why Ikon didn’t kill Mountain Collective; the origins and structure of Pacific Group Resorts (PGRI); reviving the historically troubled Ragged Mountain; the two things that PGRI did differently from previous owners to finally help Ragged succeed; the Mission: Affordable pass suite; how Jay Peak turbocharged reciprocity between the company’s resorts; how reciprocity for Jay Peak may shape up for 2023-24 passes; why we’re unlikely to see a Mission: Affordable pass at Jay Peak; why Mount Washington Alpine hasn’t had a Mission: Affordable pass; the future of Jay Peak – and, potentially the rest of PGRI’s portfolio – on the Indy Pass; the fate of Ragged’s Pinnacle Peak expansion; how and why PGRI started running and eventually purchased Wisp and Wintergreen; wild and isolated Mount Washington Alpine; could that Vancouver Island resort ever be a destination?; thoughts on replacing the West End double at Powderhorn; why PGRI has not prioritized lift replacements at the rate of some of its competitors; priorities for lift upgrades at Wisp; winning the bid for Jay Peak; reflecting on receivership; the chances of getting a new Bonaventure lift; and whether PGRI will buy more ski areas.

Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview

The lazy answer: PGRI just bought Jay Peak, and while writing the various stories leading up to and after the auction in which they acquired the joint,  I established contact with PGRI corporate HQ for the first time. My first impression was not a great one (on their side), as I managed to not only jack up the company name in the headline announcing their opening bid, but get the fundamentals of the story so wrong that I had to issue a correction with a full article re-send for the only time in Storm history. Which apparently created a huge PR pain in the ass for them. Sorry.

Maybe the stupid jokes eventually disarmed them over or something, but for whatever reason Knapp agreed to do the pod. As you know I don’t typically host marketing-type folks. I work with them all the time and value them immensely, but that’s just not the brand. The brand is talk-to-whoever-is-in-charge-of-whatever-mountain-or-company-I’m-talking-about. But Knapp is a unique case, the former CMO of Aspen Skiing Company and the creator of the uber-relevant-to-my-readers Mountain Collective Pass. So Knapp joins the equally impressive Hugh Reynolds of Snow Partners as the only other marketing lead to ever carry his own episode.

Ahem. What I was trying to get to is this: yes, this was a convenient time to drill into PGRI, because they just bought one of the most important ski resorts on the Eastern seaboard and everyone’s like, “Now what, Bro?” But this is a company that has been quietly relevant for years. It cannot be overstated what an absolute shitshow Ragged Mountain was for five decades. No one could get that thing right. Now it is one of the most well-regarded ski areas in New Hampshire, with knockout grooming, a killer glade network, one of the state’s best lift systems, and a customer-friendly orientation that begins with its ridiculous Mission: Affordable season pass, one of the few all-access season passes under $400 at a thousand-foot-plus mountain in New England.

Which set them up perfectly to glide into the Jay marquee. Almost any other buyer would have ignited mutiny at Jay. No one I’ve spoken to who skis the mountain regularly wanted the place anywhere near the Ikon Pass. So no Alterra, Powdr, or Boyne. Epic? LOL no. Locals have seen enough downstate. Another rich asshat cackling with cartoon glee as he shifts hundreds of millions of dollars around like he’s reorganizing suitcases in his Escalade? F**k no. Jay will be shedding the scabs of Ariel Quiros’ various schemes for decades. PGRI hit that Goldilocks spot, a proven New England operator without megapass baggage that has operated scandal-free for 15 years, and is run by people who know how to make a big resort go (PGRI CEO Vern Greco is former president and GM of both Park City and Steamboat, and the former COO of Powdr Corp).

PGRI is just good at running ski areas. Wisp opened Thanksgiving weekend, despite 70-degree temperatures through much of that month, despite being in Maryland. Visitation has been trending up at Powderhorn for years after steady snowmaking improvements. It’s hard to find anyone with a bad opinion of Ragged.

But PGRI has never been what business folk call a “consumer-facing brand.” Meaning they let the resorts speak for themselves. Meaning we don’t know much about the company behind all those mountains, or what their plans are to build out their network. Or build within it, for that matter. PGRI has only stood up one new chairlift in 16 years – the Spear Mountain high-speed quad at Ragged. Powderhorn skiers are side-eyeing the 51-year-old, 1,655-vertical-foot, 7,000-foot-long West End double chair and thinking, “are you kidding me with this thing?” Five years into ownership, they want a plan. Or at least to know it’s a priority. There are lesser examples all over the portfolio. It was time to see what these guys were thinking.

Questions I wish I’d asked

I had a few questions teed up that I didn’t quite get to: why is Ragged still owned by something called RMR-Pacific LLC (and operated by PGRI)? I also wanted to understand why some PGRI ski areas use dynamic pricing but others don’t. I’m still a little confused as to the exact timeline of Pacific Group purchasing Ragged and then PGRI materializing to take over the ski area. And of course I could have filled an entire hour with questions on any of the six ski areas.

What I got wrong

When I summarized Ragged’s traumatic financial history, I said, “ownership defaulted on a loan.” It sounded as though I was suggesting that PGRI defaulted on the loan, when it was in fact the previous owner. You can read the full history of Ragged’s many pre-PGRI financial issues on New England Ski History.

I said that Midwest Family Ski Resorts had announced two new high-speed six-packs “in the past couple years.” They’ve actually announced two within the past year, both of which will be built this summer: a new Eagle Mountain lift at Lutsen, and a new sixer to replace three old Riblets on the Jackson Creek Summit side of Snowriver.

Somehow though I got through this entire interview without calling the company “Pacific Resorts Group” and I would like credit for this please.

Why you should ski PGRI’s mountains

Well let’s just fire through these real quick. Jay: most snow in the East. Nearly 300 inches so far even in this drab-until-the-past-two-weeks New England season. Some of the best glade skiing in the country. Just look:

Ragged: Also strong on glades, though it gets maybe a third of Jay’s snowfall if it’s lucky. When the snow doesn’t come, Ragged has some of the best grooming in New Hampshire:

Wisp and Wintergreen: you know, I take my kid to Mt. Peter, a small ski area outside of New York City, every Saturday for a seasonal ski program. I’d say 80 percent of the parents arrive in street clothes, drop their kids, and sit in the lodge zombie-scrolling their phones for 90 minutes. Why? Why wouldn’t a person ski every opportunity they have? This is what Wisp and Wintergreen exist for. Sure, you live in the Mid-Atlantic. No one is trying to pretend it’s Colorado. But these are good little mountains. Wisp is a zinger, with terrific fall line skiing. Wintergreen sprawls, with a fun trail network and two high-speed sixers. If you live anywhere near them, there’s absolutely no reason not to pick up their sub-$400 season passes (though Wintergreen’s is not a true season pass, excluding Saturdays and holidays, which are reserved for club members) to supplement the Epic or Ikon Pass you use for those Western or New England vacations:

Powderhorn: If you live in Grand Junction, you can fight your way east, or stop on the Mesa and go skiing:

Mt. Washington Alpine: I know you’ll all tell me this is for locals, that no one would bother trekking out to Vancouver Island when they can reach Whistler in a fraction of the time. But I don’t know man, I’ve done enough wild voyages to the ass-ends of the earth to have convinced myself that it’s always worth it, especially if skiing is involved:

Besides, you’re not going to find Whistler crowds here, and this is about enough mountain for most of us.

Podcast Notes

On Wisp and Wintergreen opening and closing dates

I mentioned on the podcast that Wisp opened in November. The exact date was Nov. 25 for Wisp. The resort is still open today, though on “limited terrain,” and I imagine the season is winding down quickly. Wintergreen opened on Dec. 20 and closed Feb. 26. Ugh.

On the world’s largest snow fort

Knapp said he helped start this tradition when he worked at Keystone:

On the Mountain Collective

Knapp and I had an extensive discussion about his role founding Mountain Collective, which debuted in 2012 with two days each at Alta, Aspen-Snowmass, Jackson Hole, and Palisades Tahoe. At $349, it’s underwhelming to today’s ski consumer, but it’s impossible to overstate how miraculous it was that the product existed at all. I won’t give away the whole story, but this 2012 Powder article crystalizes the shock and stoke around the realization that these four resorts were on the same pass, Brah!

On Pinnacle Peak at Ragged 

PGRI is probably hoping I will stop asking them about this stalled expansion at Ragged sometime this century. No luck so far, as I presented Knapp with the same set of questions that I’d asked Ragged GM Erik Barnes on the podcast last year. Here’s what I was talking about: in 2007, PGRI took over Ragged. From 2014 to 2019, the mountain teased this future expansion on its trailmaps:

Then, without explanation, the expansion disappeared. What happened? “The expansion does not make financial sense,” Knapp told me last year. But I wanted a more thorough explanation. Knapp delivered. This is still one of the most talked-about projects in New England, and its sudden abeyance has been a source of curiosity and confusion for Ragged skiers for a few years now. Listen up to find out what happened.

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The discounted annual rate is available until March 13, 2023.

The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 19/100 in 2023, and number 405 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

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Feb. 22. It dropped for free subscribers on Feb. 25. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription.

Who

Dave Scanlan, General Manager of Eaglecrest, Alaska

Recorded on

February 13, 2023

About Eaglecrest

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: The City of Juneau

Located in: Juneau, Alaska

Year founded: 1975

Pass affiliations: Indy Pass, Powder Alliance, Freedom Pass

Reciprocal partners:

* 3 days each at: Anthony Lakes, Diamond Peak, Hilltop, Hogadon Basin, Lookout Pass, Monarch Mountain, Mount Bohemia, Mount Sima, Mount Ashland, Skeetawk, Skiland

* 1 unguided day at Silverton

* Eaglecrest has one of the most extensive reciprocal networks in America. Here’s an overview of everything that’s included in a season pass, which debuted for this season at $576. While there’s a ton of overlap, adding an Indy Pass onto this would give you another 50-plus ski areas:

Closest neighboring ski areas: Eaglecrest’s website reminds us that “There are no roads into Juneau, Alaska— you have to live here, fly, or ferry to experience this powder paradise.” There are no other ski areas nearby. So stay for a few days and enjoy it.

Base elevation: 1,130 feet

Summit elevation: 2,750 feet

Vertical drop: 1,620 feet

Skiable Acres: 640

Average annual snowfall: 350 inches

Trail count: 36 (40% advanced/expert, 40% intermediate, 20% beginner)

Lift count: 4 doubles – Eaglecrest also plans to add a pulse gondola, which will likely be ready for the 2025 summer season and 2025-26 ski season.

Why I interviewed him

This podcast started, as so many of them do, with me asking one question: what is going on here?

Every ski area is different, but some are more different than others. Mount Bohemia, with its complete absence of grooming and snowmaking and $109 season pass. Perfect North, which sits on southern Indiana farmland but processes more than 10,000 skiers on a busy day and employs 1,200 workers in the winter – bigger numbers than some Western alphas. Black Mountain of Maine, which, over the past decade, has undergone the largest expansion of any New England ski area – with zero promotion, masterplanning, or fanfare.

And here’s Eaglecrest. This ski area up in Alaska. But not just regular Alaska. Isolated coastal Alaska. Where roads don’t go. You have to fly or take a ferry. There, for some reason, is where the 49th state chose to locate its capital, Juneau. The state’s residents have voted many times to move the capital. But it remains. It is a gorgeous place, mountains launching dramatically from the water. There are 31,000 people there. And one ski area. Eaglecrest is big enough to stir curiosity, but not big enough to draw skiers in volume from the mainland, who have dozens of larger ski areas to bounce between. It is an Indy Pass member, a Freedom Pass member, a Powder Alliance member. It has a dozen reciprocal partnerships besides. Almost anyone can ski there – almost no one does. So what is this place? This city-owned ski area at the end of civilization? And what does it want to be? And how does it plan to get there?

I had questions. Scanlan had answers. This is a good one.

What we talked about

Fifteen straight days of snow is just how they roll in Southern Alaska; the Pineapple Express; if you think Alaska is all dark and subzero weather, think again; skiing in fishing gear; “we don’t have the big testosterone bro-brah attitude”; is Juneau ski bum paradise?; where a crowd on a Saturday pow day is a dozen early-risers ahead of you in the maze; Midwest pride; bump skiing at Wilmot; when “you fall in love with it not for the hype of a powder day, but for the feeling you get when you’re on your skis or snowboard”; a young vagabond in the ‘90s; Hope Alaska; founding the Mountain Rider’s Alliance to help small ski areas; the potential for resurrecting the long-lost Manitoba Mountain, Alaska; Skeetawk (Hatcher Pass); moving to and running Mt. Abram, Maine; what it’s like to compete with Sunday River; hardcore New England; Maine nice; landing a dream job at Eaglecrest; reworking the primitive snowmaking system; the pros and cons of running a city-owned ski area; whether Eaglecrest could ever survive without city subsidies; massive summer potential; easier to get to than you think: “If you live in Seattle, you can be sitting on the chair at Eaglecrest before most days you could be sitting on the chair at Crystal”; fly and ski free with your boarding pass; pushing back against locals who want to keep the place secret; why Eaglecrest has so many reciprocal partners and how effectively that’s drawing skiers to Alaska; why you saw an Eaglecrest booth at the Snowbound Festival in Boston; Indy Pass; comparing the coming Eaglecrest gondola installation with how the Lone Peak Tram transformed Big Sky in the 1990s; 20,000 daily summer visitors to a town that has 30,000 residents; “how do I take advantage of this amazing opportunity to put the cash in the pocket that I need to turn Eaglecrest into the best ski area in the world?”; why low-capacity lifts will continue to be Eaglecrest’s default; the drive to begin relocating quality used ski lifts from Europe to North America; breaking down Eaglecrest’s soon-to-be-installed fixed-grip pulse gondola; where the gondola’s top, bottom, and midstations will sit; how much larger Eaglecrest’s trail footprint will get; “I do carry some guilt of polarizing our ski community” by putting a lift into what’s now hike-in terrain; why the ski area needs investment to survive; thoughts on the future of the four double chairs; visiting and riding the future Eaglecrest gondola in Europe; massive upgrades for the lift; how the gondola will work with the Mt. Roberts Tram; a gondy timeline; potential for a beginner carpet; and how much the official count of 36 trails undersells the resort’s terrain.   

Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview

Eaglecrest is, as noted above, one of the continent’s most aggressive Megapass-Reciprocity players. That makes it an important mountain in an important Storm sub-narrative: how can you ski as much as possible, at as many ski areas as possible, for as little money as possible? While Eaglecrest’s network (50-ish partners), and pass price-point ($576 early-bird for 2022-23) don’t quite drop it into the Ski Cooper realm ($329 early-bird for this season and 61 partner ski areas), it nonetheless acts as a powerful enabling device for skiers with an adventurous bent and a small degree of logistical savvy.

The question, of course, is why Eaglecrest bothers. The place is marooned along the North American coast, one of the few non-island cities unreachable by road from the rest of the landmass. I’m sure some Eaglecrest locals journey south by plane and orchestrate a ski loop through the continental West. But I’m not sure if that’s the point here. Rather, Eaglecrest is trying to get skiers to come to them, to realize that if they hop a plane two-and-a-half hours north, they can land in the Great Unspoiled and have a powder-draped ski area to themselves.

The goal is to create long-term skiers. Tourists, you know. And once they’ve seen what the place is now, they’ll be revved up to return once Eaglecrest runs a new-used pulse gondola from its base to the top of Pittman’s Ridge. That will bring lift service to the ski area’s full 1,620-foot vertical drop for the first time and, more importantly, open hundreds of new acres of terrain skier’s left of the current boundary.

If you’re not familiar with a pulse gondola, you may have seen them at Snowmass or Steamboat – they run with little groups of cabins together, and are typically used in America more as transit lifts than ski lifts (the Snowmass lift mostly takes passengers up the village, and Steamboat’s lift moves skiers up from a cluster of condos down the mountain). These are fixed-grip lifts, but travel at tram speeds – Scanlan estimates the base-to-summit ride at around seven minutes. The lift will travel in three pods of 15-passenger cabins and will have a mid-station, off of which Eaglecrest could eventually build a learning area with carpets, Scanlan tells me. The yellow line here shows where the gondola will run on the mountain - the red lines represent the current lifts:

The lift has been controversial. It’s 34 years old, and operated at Austria’s Galsterberg Ski Area until last April. It cost approximately $2.5 million to purchase and transport, and will cost an additional $5.5 million to install. It will operate at a far lower capacity than a modern detachable gondola, which is what most U.S. ski areas use. Critics say the gondola competes with the private sector – in particular, the Mount Roberts Tramway.

Scanlan addresses each of these points in our conversation, with a nuanced analysis of Juneau’s thumping summer tourism season and how Eaglecrest can both act as a relief valve and boost its own long-term goal of financial independence.

Questions I wish I’d asked

Two points I wanted to discuss that I didn’t get to: how much the gondola will cost, and Eaglecrest’s very low lift ticket prices, which top out at $68. The ski area breaks down the cost in an FAQ on its website:

Q: I’ve heard about a $2 million cost and a $7.5 million cost. Which amount is correct?

$2 million [it ended up being $2.5 million] covers the initial purchase, transportation, and preliminary engineering of the Austrian pulse gondola. The funding ordinance currently under review is for this sum.

$5.5 million covers the cost of installation and additional infrastructure. Eaglecrest may eventually seek this sum as a loan to be paid back by summer operations. This number will be refined in the months ahead as we continue work with the Eaglecrest Board and Eaglecrest Summer Task Force to examine the business case and evaluate future costs.

Why you should ski Eaglecrest

Because this might be it. Survey the West: it’s full. Colorado High Country, the Wasatch, Tahoe, the Seattle and Portland day-drivers, Jackson, Mammoth, Big Sky – it’s traffic or it’s ticket limits or it’s sticker-shock pricing or it’s rivers of people or it’s the raw cost of living and everything else. Or it’s several or all of these factors, blended, to frustrate the romance of mountain-town living.

Not that rustic snowy backwaters don’t remain. But they are backwaters. Places like Turner, Montana, 2,110 vertical feet and 1,000 acres but lodged in the wilderness between Schweitzer and Whitefish. Sunrise Park, Arizona, 1,800 feet of vert and 1,200 acres, but marooned 90 miles from the nearest interstate highway and so dysfunctional that a huge chunk of the mountain sat inaccessible for five years after their monster triple chair broke down (it now takes three lift rides to reach that same terrain).

But look north. Look at this:

If you haven’t watched yet, let me pull one stat: Scanlan says on this video that a busy day at Eaglecrest – a weekend powder day, for instance – might draw 900 skiers. For the day. There’s more people waiting in the average McDonald’s drive-through line than that.

“Yeah Brah but it’s small.”

Watch the video, Brah.

“Yeah but it gets like half the snow of Mt. Tahoe, where my boys ride Brah.”

Watch the video.

“Yeah but it’s in Alaska and I don’t see the point of skiing in Europe when I can ski right here in U.S. America.”

Brah, watch the video.

As mainland Western U.S. skiing boils over, Eaglecrest remains on a low simmer. And while you’ll need an airplane to get there, you land in a state capital, with all the infrastructure and life conveniences that attend such a place. Juneau is a small city – 31,000 people – but an important one, with abundant stable government and industrial fishing jobs. It’s big enough to host a woo-hoo walkable downtown and all the standard American big-box claptrap on the outskirts, small enough that unloading every skier in the valley onto Eaglecrest’s access road won’t be enough to clog the drain. And when you arrive, you just ski. No parking drama. No lines. No Powder Day Death Matches. Just. Ski.

Yes, the lifts are old and slow: four fixed-grip doubles. Yes, accessing the full vert requires some hiking. Yes, coastal snow is not Wasatch snow. And yes, the total skiable acreage does not match your big-mountain Western destinations. But: recalibrate. Reset your expectations. Stripped of the hoards and the Hunger Games mentality they inspire, skiing is something different. A 10-minute lift ride is not so intolerable when you ski right onto the chair. Six hundred forty acres is plenty when it’s mostly ungroomed faces sparsely cut by the local bombers. Three hundred fifty inches is sufficient when it tumbles over the mountain in lake-effect patterns, a few inches every day for weeks at a time, refreshing and resetting the incline day after day.

Eaglecrest is going to get bigger, better, and, probably, busier. That gondola will change how Eaglecrest skis and, eventually, who skis there. It’s not a destination yet, not really. But it could be. And it probably should be – we’re rapidly moving past the era in which it makes sense for city tax dollars to subsidize a ski area. There are plenty of examples of publicly owned ski areas operating at a profit, and Eaglecrest should too. Go there now, before the transformation, to see it, to say you were there, to try that different thing that gets at what you’re probably looking for in the mountains already.

Podcast Notes

On the gondola

We referenced a note Scanlan penned shortly after taking delivery of the gondola. Read it in full here.

On Manitoba Mountain

Scanlan tells the story of trying to resurrect a small ski area called Manitoba Mountain near Hope Alaska. It had operated with up to three ropetows from World War II until the lodge burned down in 1960. Skimap.org has archived a handful of concept maps circa 2011, but Scanlan moved to Maine to take over Mt. Abram before he could re-open the ski area:

On Skeetawk/Hatcher Pass

Scanlan and I discuss a recently opened Alaska ski area that he refers to as “Hatcher Pass.” This is Skeetawk, a 300-vertical-foot bump that finally opened in 2020 after decades of failed plans. Here’s the ski area today:

And here’s a circa 2018 concept map, which shows where a future high-speed quad could run, connecting, in turn, to a high-alpine lift that would transport skiers to 4,068 feet. That would give the ski area a 2,618-foot vertical drop.

On the impact of the Big Sky tram

It’s hard to imagine, but Big Sky was sort of Small Sky before the ski area broke out the Lone Peak Tram in 1995. That project, which acted as a gateway to all-American pants-shitting terrain, transformed the way skiers perceived the mountain. But the tram was bigger than that: the lift accelerated the rapid late-90s/early-2000s evolution of U.S. skiing as a whole. An excerpt from this excellent history by Marc Peruzzi:

As unpolished, friendly, and authentic as Big Sky was in the early 1980s, it was a timid place known within Montana for stunning views, but exceedingly gentle pitches. Big Sky was the yin to rowdy, chute-striped Bridger Bowl’s yang. And it was struggling. Annual skier visits hovered around 80,000. The mountain wasn’t on the destination circuit. The business was losing money. Bound up skiing wasn’t working. …

it’s easy to overlook the fact that the Lone Peak Tram was and is the most audacious lift in North American skiing history. It was such a bold idea in fact, that John Kircher had to agree to the purchase without the approval of his father, and Boyne Resorts founder, Everett who disapproved vehemently with the project. The audacious claim is not hyperbole. The Peak 2 Peak Gondola in Whistler (it came 20 years later) might sport a longer span, but it was a far more straightforward installation and it’s more of a people mover than a ski lift. The Jackson and Snowbird trams serve serious terrain, but they run over a series of towers like traditional lifts. The Lone Peak Tram is an anomaly. Because it ascends a sheer face, the lift features a continuous span that’s unique in North America. No other design would work. Beyond the challenges of the cliff, the routine 120mph hour winds in the alpine would rip chairs off cables and smash tram cars into towers. …

By 1996, the year the tram opened, the skiing nanny state was crumbling. … At the forefront of this change was the Lone Peak Tram. It changed the mindset of the ski industry. But that change was bigger than the sheer audacity of the lift and the terrain it served—or even the fact that Big Sky’s patrol had figured out how to manage it. The Lone Peak Tram didn’t just make for good skiing, it made good business sense. Whereas Kircher is quick to credit Montana’s frontier culture for the actual construction of the tram, Middleton discounts the cowboy element and insists it was a strategic long-term business play to elevate the ski experience. But two things can be true at the same time, and that’s the case with the Lone Peak Tram. …

In the years after the Lone Peak Tram opened, expansion into steep terrain became commonplace again. Sunshine Village’s Delirium Dive opened in 1998. Then came the hike-to terrain of Aspen Highlands’ Highland Bowl; Crystal Mountain’s “inbounds sidecountry” in the Southback zone, and its 2007 Northway expansion; and more recently Taos Ski Valley in New Mexico finally strung a lift to Kachina Peak, which as with Lone Peak had been hiked for years. Any skier worth their weight would add the Headwaters at Moonlight to that list.

This video tells the story just as well:

The context in the podcast was the incoming Eaglecrest gondola, and whether that lift could have the same transformative impact on Eaglecrest. While the terrain that the new-used Alaskan lift will serve is not quite as dramatic as that strafing Big Sky, it will reframe the ski area in the popular conversation.

On ski porn

I don’t write a lot about athletes, obviously, but Scanlan mentions several that he skied with at summer camps on the Blackcomb Glacier back in the ‘90s. One is Candide Thovex, who is like from another galaxy or a CG bot or something:

On old-school Park City

Scanlan talks about the summer he helped yank out the “old-school” Park City gondola and install the “Payday six-packs.” He was referring to the Payday and Bonanza sixers, which replaced the mountain’s two-stage, four-passenger gondola in the summer of 1997. Here’s the 1996 trailmap, showing the gondy, which had run since 1963:

And here’s the 1997-98 trailmap, calling out the new six-packs as only a 1990s trailmap can:

On old-school Alta

Modern Alta – the one that most of you know, with its blazing fast lifts and Ikon Pass partnership – is a version of Alta that would have been sacrilege to the powder monks who haunted the place for decades. “The ski area for traditionalists, ascetics, and cheapskates,” read one Skiing Magazine review in 1994. “The lifts are slow and creaky, the accommodations are spartan, but the lift tickets are the best deal in skiing, especially when Alta’s fabled powder comes with them.” Here’s what Alta looked like in 2000, the year before Sugarloaf gave way to the resort’s first high-speed chairlift:

This is the Alta of Scanlan’s ski-bum days, “before the high-speeders came in,” as he puts it. Before the two-stage Collins lift took out Germania (which lives on at Beaver Mountain, Utah), a longer Supreme killed Cecret, and a new Sunnyside sixer deleted Albion, which served Alta’s boring side. Before a peak-day walk-up lift ticket ran $179 (throw in another $40 if you want to connect to Snowbird). They do, however, still have the stupid snowboard ban, so there’s that.

On previous GM Matt Lillard

Scanlan and I discuss his immediate predecessor, Matt Lillard, who is now running Vermont’s Mad River Glen. Lillard joined me on the podcast three years ago, and we briefly discussed Eaglecrest:

On Gunstock

Scanlan compares Eaglecrest’s operating and ownership models to Gunstock, noting, “we’ve all seen how that can go.” We sure have:

On Eaglecrest’s fly-and-ski-free program

Here are details on how to cash in your boarding pass for an Eaglecrest lift ticket on the day you land in Juneau. Alaska Airlines offers similar deals at Alyeska, Bogus Basin, Red Lodge, Red Mountain, Schweitzer, Marmot Basin, and, shockingly, Steamboat, where a one-day lift ticket can cost as much as a 747.

The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 14/100 in 2023, and number 400 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane, or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email skiing@substack.com.

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Who

Dennis Eshbaugh, President and General Manager of Holiday Valley, New York

Recorded on

February 13, 2023

About Holiday Valley

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Win-Sum Ski Corp, which Holiday Valley’s website describes as “a closely held corporation owned by a small number of stockholders.”

Year founded: 1958

Pass affiliations: None

Located in: Ellicottville, New York

Closest neighboring ski areas: Holimont (3 minutes), Kissing Bridge (38 minutes), Cockaigne (45 minutes), Buffalo Ski Center (48 minutes), Swain (1 hour, 15 minutes), Peek’N Peak (1 hour, 15 minutes)

Base elevation: 1,500 feet

Summit elevation: 2,250 feet

Vertical drop: 750 feet

Skiable Acres: 290

Average annual snowfall: 180 inches

Trail count: 84 (4 glades, 1 expert, 21 advanced, 21 intermediate, 32 beginner, 5 terrain parks) – the official glade number is a massive undercount, as nearly all of the trees at Holiday Valley are well-spaced and skiable (the trailmap below notes that “woods are available to expert skiers and riders and are not open, closed, or marked”).

Lift count: 13­­ (4 high-speed quads, 7 fixed-grip quads, 2 surface lifts) – a high-speed six-pack will replace the Mardis Gras high-speed quad this sumer.

Uphill capacity: 23,850 people per hour

Why I interviewed him

Western New York is one of the most important ski markets in America. Orbiting a vast wilderness zone of hilly lake-effect are the cities of Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Cleveland, and, farther out but still relevant to the market, Pittsburgh. That’s more than 20 million people, as Eshbaugh notes in our conversation. They all need somewhere to ski. They don’t have big mountains, but they do have options. In Western New York alone: Peek’n Peak, Cockaigne, Kissing Bridge, Buffalo Ski Club, Bristol, Hunt Hollow, Swain, Holiday Valley, Holimont, and a half-dozen-ish surface-lift outfits hyper-focused on beginners.

It’s one of the world’s great new-skier factories. Skiers learn here and voyage to the Great Out There. From these metro regions, skiers can get anywhere else quickly. At least four daily flights connect Cleveland and Denver – you can leave your house in the evening and catch first chair at Keystone or Copper the following morning. But sometimes local is good, especially when you start stacking kids in the backseat and your airplane bill ticks past four digits.

Set the GPS for Holiday Valley. In a region of ski areas, this is a ski resort. The terrain is varied and expansive. Downtown Ellicottville, a Rust Belt industrial refugee that has remade itself as one of the East’s great resort towns, is minutes away. The mountain is easy enough to get to (in the way that anything off-interstate is an easy-ish pain in the ass requiring some patience with two-lane state highways and their poke-along drivers). And lift tickets are affordable, topping out at $87 for an eight-hour session.

As a business, Holiday Valley is one of the most well-regarded independent ski areas in the country, on the level of Wachusett or Whitefish or Smugglers’ Notch. But it wasn’t the inevitable King of Western New York. When Eshbaugh showed up in 1975, the place was a backwater, with a handful of double chairs and T-bars and a couple dozen runs. It took decades to build the machine. But for at least the past 20 years, Holiday Valley has led all New York ski areas in annual visits, keeping company with New England monsters Mount Snow and Sunday River at around half a million skiers per season. That’s incredible. I wanted to learn how they did it, and how they keep doing it, even as the ski world evolves rapidly around them.

What we talked about

The wild Western New York winter; what’s driving record business to Holiday Valley; the busiest ski area in New York State; learning from Sam Walton in the best possible way; competing with Colorado; the history and remaking of Ellicotville; from ski school instructor to resort president; staying at one employer for nearly five decades; who owns Holiday Valley and how committed they are to independence; a brief history of the ski area; setting season pass prices at $1,000 in the megapass era – “we have 10,000 buyers of these other pass programs as well”; the importance of night-skiing; the bygone days of skiing all-nighters; why Holiday Valley hasn’t joined the Epic, Ikon, or Indy Passes, and whether it ever would; thoughts on reciprocal coalitions and why the Ski Cooper partnership went away; a picture of Holiday Valley in the mid-1970s; the landmine of too much real-estate development; going deep on the new Mardi Gras Express six-pack; why they’re building the lift over two years; how and why Holiday Valley self-installs chairlifts (one of the few ski areas to do so); remembering 20-minute double-chair rides on Mardi Gras; the surprising potential destination of the Mardi Gras quad; long-term potential upgrades for Sunrise, Eagle, Cindy’s, and Chute; the next lift that Holiday Valley will likely upgrade to a detachable; why Holiday Valley upgraded the 20-year-old Yodeler fixed-grip quad to a detachable quad two years ago; how much more it costs to maintain a detachable lift than a fixed-grip lift, and whether Holiday Valley could one day get to an all-high-speed fleet; “you have to keep a balance between what your customer base wants and what your customer base can support”; Dave McCoy’s thumbprint on Mammoth Mountain; potential expansion opportunities; where the next all-new liftline could sit; potential glade expansion; remembering when insurance carriers were paranoid of glade-skiing and why they backed off that notion; and why Holiday Valley implemented RFID but didn’t install gates.

Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview

Holiday Valley is one of the few large regional destination ski areas that continues to stand alone. No pass allegiance. No reciprocal deals. The pass is good here and only here.

And it works. Like Wolf Creek or Baker or Mount Rose or Smugglers’ Notch or Bretton Woods, Holiday Valley is proving that the one-mountain model isn’t dead just yet. Even with a headliner season pass that runs $1,049*, just $30 cheaper than the good-at-63-mountains Ikon Pass and a couple hundred dollars more than the equally expansive Epic Pass. Many of the mountain’s passholders do also purchase these passes, Eshbaugh told me, but they keep buying the Holiday Valley Pass too.

Why? My guess is the constant, conspicuous investment. A new high-speed quad to replace a 20-year-old fixed-grip quad in 2021. Holiday Valley’s first six-pack – to replace a 27-year-old high-speed quad – next season. And the place is pristine. Everything looks new, even if it isn’t. The lodges – and it feels like there are lodges everywhere – are expansive and attractive. Snowguns all over. I haven’t walked around the joint opening closet doors or anything, but I bet it I did, I’d find the towels sorted by color and shelves labelled accordingly.

In the era of sprawling and standardized, there is still a lot to like in this hyper-local approach to ski resort management. Eshbaugh is in no hurry to chase his peers over the horizon. He admits there may be vast treasure and security waiting there, but there may also be a bottomless void. Holiday Valley and its eclectic and somewhat secretive group of owners will wait and see. In the meantime, we may as well enjoy the place for what it is.

*Holiday Valley offered several more affordable pass options for the 2022-23 ski season, including a nights-only version for $504, a Sundays pass for $313, a pass good for 10 weekdays or evenings for $285, and a nine-use night pass for $213.

Questions I wish I’d asked

I’d wanted to get a bit into Holimont, and ask my usual stupid question about whether the two resorts had ever discussed some sort of lift or ski connection. From a pure engineering standpoint, it wouldn’t be an especially difficult project: the hill that rises from the far side of the Holiday Valley parking lot is the backside of Holimont. You would just need trails down from the top of Holimont’s Exhibition Express or Sunset double to the bottom of Holiday Valley’s Tannenbaum lift, then a return lift up the mountain to Holimont. Here’s a crappy concept sketch I put together:

Of course, there are problems with my elaborate plans, starting with the fact that I have no idea who owns the property that I just designated for new trails and chairlifts. The bigger issue, however, is that Holimont is a private ski club, and it’s closed to the public on weekends and holidays. That won’t change. But if you’re curious, you can roll up and buy a lift ticket midweek, which is pretty cool. The place is substantial, with 56 trails and eight lifts, including a high-speed quad:

A union of these two ski areas seems highly improbable. But it would create an enormous ski area, and it was fun to fantasize about for a few minutes.

Why you should ski Holiday Valley

Holiday Valley skis far larger than the trailmap would suggest. Rolling from Spruce Lake over to Snowpine can take all morning. There’s lots of little offshoots, quirks and nooks to explore. Glades everywhere. Lifts everywhere. Most runs are substantially shorter than the advertised 750 vertical feet, but they cling to the fall line, and there are a lot of them: 84 trails feels like an undercount.

I said in the podcast that Holiday Valley felt like a half dozen or so ski areas stitched together, and it does. Creekside and Sunrise feel like that town bump, with gentle wide-open meadows. Morningstar is big broadsides, park kids and a speedy lift. Yodeler and Chute are raw and steep, tight glades between groomed-out boomers. Eagle is restless and wild and underdeveloped. And Tannenbaum is a sort-of idyll, a rich glen dense with towering pines, a detachable lift line threading low and fast through the trees.

It’s just a very good ski area, with everything except a headline vertical drop. But the sprawling lift system makes fastlaps easy, and if the snow is deep, pretty much all the trees between the trails are skiable. The place is likely to wear you out before you wear it out, and then you can head down the street for a beer and a pillow.

Podcast Notes

On operating hours

I guessed on the podcast that Holiday Valley was open more hours per week than most other ski areas in the country. Their regular schedule is 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Wednesday, 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. Thursday and Friday, and 8:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. That adds up to 89 hours per week. I’m not sure exactly where that ranks among U.S. American ski areas, but its in the upper five percentile.

On Mountains of Distinction

Eshbaugh mentions the Mountains of Distinction program. This is a discount program started by Jiminy Peak before the megapass craze. It currently includes Jiminy, Wachusett, Cranmore, Holiday Valley, Bromley, and Crystal Mountain, Michigan. Passholders at any of these ski areas generally get half off on weekdays and $15 off on weekends and holidays at any of the other resorts. The program was far larger at one time, but it’s lost many members – such as Seven Springs – to consolidation.

On the incredible migrating chairlift

I mentioned a chairlift at Hunt Hollow – a ski area that operates on the same public/private model as Holimont – that relocated one of Snowbird’s old chairs. The chair was Snowbird’s old Little Cloud double, which they removed in 2012 to make way for a high-speed quad. You can read more about it here (pages 13 to 14). Lift Blog documented the lift when it stood at Snowbird, and then again at Hunt Hollow.

On lost ski areas of Western New York

In the podcast intro, I mention a pair of onetime competitors to Holiday Valley that failed to evolve in the same way and went bust. One was Wing Hollow, a 750-footer just 20 minutes south of Holiday Valley that is now best known for a never-solved 1975 double-murder. Here’s the 1978 trailmap, showing two T-bars and a double chair - about the same setup that Holiday Valley had in that period.

I also mention Bluemont, which was just half an hour north of Holiday Valley and claimed an 800-foot-vertical drop, a double chair, a T-bar, and two ropetows. Here it is around 1980:

The land that Bluemont sat on is currently for sale for $5.95 million. I wrote about this in May:

Man I don’t know what happens to these places. Eight hundred vertical feet would make this the second-tallest ski area in Western New York, after Bristol, and poof. Just gone. NELSAP says that the last investors “never received enough capital to get their idea off the ground.” The chairlifts are apparently long gone. Who knows if you would even be able to build on the land if you owned it – everything is impossible these days, especially in New York. But here it is if you have the money and the gumption to try.

These were just the two largest of many lost ski areas in Western New York. You can poke around the lost New York ski areas page on the New England Lost Ski Areas project for more info.

On Holiday Valley’s evolution

Eshbaugh talks about the deliberate way they’ve built out Holiday Valley over the decades. The oldest trailmap I can find for the ski area is from 1969 – 11 years after the resort opened, and six years before Eshbaugh arrived. It shows what is currently the area from Mardi Gras over to Tannenbaum, including Yodeler and Chute:

The mountain added the first Cindy’s lift – a double chair – in 1978. Here’s the trailmap circa 1981 - Cindy’s is lift 3:

Morning Star – a triple – arrived in 1983. The Snowpine double came the following year. This circa 1988 trailmap shows both (Morning Star is lift 5; Snowpine lift 6), and also teases the Eagle quad, which was slated to open the following year (it did, but as a quad, rather than as the triple teased below):

The Sunrise quad rose in 1992. Here it is on a circa 1997 trailmap (lift 10):

The Spruce Lake quad arrived for the 2007-08 season (lift 11):

Which basically takes us to modern Holiday Valley, though the ski area continues to upgrade lifts regularly. Impressive as this growth has been, I don’t think they’re anywhere near finished.

The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 13/100 in 2023, and number 399 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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Who

Brett Cook, Vice President and General Manager of Seven Springs, Hidden Valley, and Laurel Mountain, Pennsylvania

Recorded on

January 30, 2023

About Seven Springs

Owned by: Vail Resorts

Pass affiliations: Epic Pass, Epic Local Pass, Northeast Value Epic Pass, Northeast Midweek Epic Pass

Located in: Seven Springs, Pennsylvania

Year opened: 1932

Closest neighboring ski areas: Hidden Valley (17 minutes), Laurel Mountain (45 minutes), Nemacolin (46 minutes), Boyce Park (1 hour), Wisp (1 hour), Blue Knob (1 hour, 30 minutes)

Base elevation: 2,240 feet

Summit elevation: 2,994 feet

Vertical drop: 754 feet

Skiable Acres: 285

Average annual snowfall: 135 inches

Trail count: 48 (5 expert, 6 advanced, 15 intermediate, 16 beginner, 6 terrain parks)

Lift count: 14­­ (2 six-packs, 4 fixed-grip quads, 4 triples, 3 carpets, 1 ropetow)

About Hidden Valley

Owned by: Vail Resorts

Pass affiliations: Epic Pass, Epic Local Pass, Northeast Value Epic Pass, Northeast Midweek Epic Pass

Located in: Hidden Valley, Pennsylvania

Year opened: 1955

Closest neighboring ski areas: Seven Springs (17 minutes), Laurel Mountain (34 minutes), Mystic Mountain (50 minutes), Boyce Park (54 minutes),Wisp (1 hour), Blue Knob (1 hour 19 minutes)

Base elevation: 2,405 feet

Summit elevation: 2,875 feet

Vertical drop: 470 feet

Skiable Acres: 110

Average annual snowfall: 140 inches

Trail count: 32 (9 advanced, 13 intermediate, 8 beginner, 2 terrain parks)

Lift count: 8 (2 fixed-grip quads, 2 triples, 2 carpets, 2 handle tows)

About Laurel Mountain

Owned by: Vail Resorts

Pass affiliations: Epic Pass, Epic Local Pass, Northeast Value Epic Pass, Northeast Midweek Epic Pass

Located in: Boswell, Pennsylvania

Year opened: 1939

Closest neighboring ski areas: Hidden Valley (34 minutes), Seven Springs (45 minutes), Boyce Park (1 hour), Blue Knob (1 hour), Mystic Mountain (1 hour, 15 minutes), Wisp (1 hour, 15 minutes)

Base elevation: 2,005 feet

Summit elevation: 2,766 feet

Vertical drop: 761 feet

Skiable Acres: 70

Average annual snowfall: 41 inches

Trail count: 20 (2 expert, 2 advanced, 6 intermediate, 10 beginner)

Lift count: 2­­ (1 fixed-grip quad, 1 handle tow)

Below the paid subscriber jump: a summary of our podcast conversation, a look at abandoned Hidden Valley expansions, historic Laurel Mountain lift configurations, and much more.

Beginning with podcast 116, the full podcast articles are no longer available on the free content tier. Why? They take between 10 and 20 hours to research and write, and readers have demonstrated that they are willing to pay for content. My current focus with The Storm is to create value for anyone who invests their money into the product. Here are examples of a few past podcast articles, if you would like to see the format: Vail Mountain, Mt. Spokane, Snowbasin, Mount Bohemia, Brundage. To anyone who is supporting The Storm: thank you very much. You have guaranteed that this is a sustainable enterprise for the indefinite future.

Why I interviewed him

I’ve said this before, but it’s worth repeating. Most Vail ski areas fall into one of two categories: the kind skiers will fly around the world for, and the kind skiers won’t drive more than 15 minutes for. Whistler, Park City, Heavenly fall into the first category. Mt. Brighton, Alpine Valley, Paoli Peaks into the latter. I exaggerate a bit on the margins, but when I drive from New York City to Liberty Mountain, I know this is not a well-trod path.

Seven Springs, like Hunter or Attitash, occupies a slightly different category in the Vail empire. It is both a regional destination and a high-volume big-mountain feeder. Skiers will make a weekend of these places, from Pittsburgh or New York City or Boston, then they will use the pass to vacation in Colorado. It’s a better sort of skiing than your suburban knolls, more sprawling and interesting, more repeatable for someone who doesn’t know what a Corky Flipdoodle 560 is.

“Brah that sounds sick!”

Thanks Park Brah. I appreciate you. But you know I just made that up, right?

“Brah have you seen my shoulder-mounted Boombox 5000 backpack speaker? I left it right here beside my weed vitamins.”

Sorry Brah. I have not.

Anyway, I happen to believe that these sorts of in-the-middle resorts are the next great frontier of ski area consolidation. All the big mountains have either folded under the Big Four umbrella or have gained so much megapass negotiating power that the incentive to sell has rapidly evaporated. The city-adjacent bumps such as Boston Mills were a novel and highly effective strategy for roping cityfolk into Epic Passes, but as pure ski areas, those places just are not and never will be terribly compelling experiences. But the middle is huge and mostly untapped, and these are some of the best ski areas in America, mountains that are large enough to give you a different experience each time but contained enough that you don’t feel as though you’ve just wandered into an alternate dimension. There’s enough good terrain to inspire loyalty and repeat visits, but it’s not so good that passholders don’t dream of the hills beyond.

Examples: Timberline, West Virginia; Big Powderhorn, Michigan; Berkshire East and Jiminy Peak in Massachusetts; Plattekill, New York; Elk Mountain, Pennsylvania; Mt. Spokane, Washington; Bear Valley, California; Cascade or Whitecap, Wisconsin; Magic Mountain, Vermont; or Black Mountain, New Hampshire. There are dozens more. Vail’s Midwestern portfolio is expansive but bland, day-ski bumps but no weekend-type spots on the level of Crystal Mountain, Michigan or Lutsen, Minnesota.

If you want to understand the efficacy of this strategy, the Indy Pass was built on it. Ninety percent of its roster is the sorts of mountains I’m referring to above. Jay Peak and Powder Mountain sell passes, but dang it Bluewood and Shanty Creek are kind of nice now that the pass nudged me toward them. Once Vail and Alterra realize how crucial these middle mountains are to filling in the pass blanks, expect them to start competing for the space. Seven Springs, I believe, is a test case in how impactful a regional destination can be both in pulling skiers in and pushing them out across the world. Once this thing gels, look the hell out.

What we talked about

The not-so-great Western Pennsylvania winter so far; discovering skiing as an adult; from liftie to running the largest ski resort in Pennsylvania; the life and death of Snow Time Resorts; joining the Peak Pass; two ownership transitions in less than a year, followed by Covid; PA ski culture; why the state matters to Vail; helping a Colorado ski company understand the existential urgency of snowmaking in the East; why Vail doubled down on PA with the Seven Springs purchase when they already owned five ski areas in the state; breaking down the difference between the Roundtop-Liberty-Whitetail trio and the Seven-Springs-Hidden-Valley-Laurel trio; the cruise ship in the mountains; rugged and beautiful Western PA; dissecting the amazing outsized snowfall totals in Western Pennsylvania; Vail Resorts’ habit of promoting from within; how Vail’s $20-an-hour minimum wage hit in Pennsylvania; the legacy of the Nutting family, the immediate past owners of the three ski areas; the legendary Herman Dupree, founder of Seven Springs and HKD snowguns; Seven Springs amazing sprawling snowmaking system, complete with 49(!) ponds; why the system isn’t automated and whether it ever will be; how planting more trees could change the way Seven Springs skis; connecting the ski area’s far-flung beginner terrain; where we could see additional glades at Seven Springs; rethinking the lift fleet; the importance of redundant lifts; do we still need Tyrol?; why Seven Springs, Hidden Valley, and Laurel share a single general manager; thinking of lifts long-term at Hidden Valley; Hidden Valley’s abandoned expansion plans and whether they could ever be revived; the long and troubled history of state-owned Laurel Mountain; keeping the character at this funky little upside-down boomer; “We love what Laurel Mountain is and we’re going to continue to own that”; building out Laurel’s snowmaking system; expansion potential at Laurel; “Laurel is a hidden gem and we don’t want it to be hidden anymore”; Laurel’s hidden handletow; evolving Laurel’s lift fleet; managing a state-owned ski area; Seven Springs’ new trailmap; the Epic Pass arrives; and this season’s lift-ticket limits.        

Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview

When Vail bought Peak Resorts in 2019, they suddenly owned nearly a quarter of Pennsylvania’s ski areas: Big Boulder, Jack Frost, Whitetail, Roundtop, and Liberty. That’s a lot of Eagles jerseys. And enough, I thought, that we wouldn’t see VR snooping around for more PA treasures to add to their toybox.

Then, to my surprise, the company bought Seven Springs – which they clearly wanted – along with Hidden Valley and Laurel, which they probably didn’t, in late 2021. Really what they bought was Pittsburgh, metropolitan population 2.3 million, and their large professional class of potentially globe-trotting skiers. All these folks needed was an excuse to buy an Epic Pass. Vail gave them one.

So now what? Vail knows what to do with a large, regionally dominant ski area like Seven Springs. It’s basically Pennsylvania’s version of Stowe or Park City or Heavenly. It was pretty good when you bought it, now you just have to not ruin it and remind everyone that they can now ski Whistler on their season pass. Hidden Valley, with its hundreds of on-mountain homeowners, suburban-demographic profile, and family orientation more or less fit Vail’s portfolio too.

But what to do with Laurel? Multiple locals assured me that Vail would close it. Vail doesn’t do that – close ski areas – but they also don’t buy 761-vertical-foot bumps at the ass-end of nowhere with almost zero built-in customer base and the snowmaking firepower of a North Pole souvenir snowglobe. They got it because it came with Seven Springs, like your really great spouse who came with a dad who thinks lawnmowers are an FBI conspiracy. I know what I think Vail should do with Laurel – dump money into the joint to aggressively route crowds away from the larger ski areas – but I didn’t know whether they would, or had even considered it.

Vail’s had 14 months now to think this over. What are these mountains? How do they fit? What are we going to do with them? I got some answers.

Questions I wish I’d asked

You know, it’s weird that Vail has two Hidden Valleys. Boyne, just last year, changed the name of its “Boyne Highlands” resort to “The Highlands,” partly because, one company executive told me, skiers would occasionally show up to the wrong resort with a condo reservation. I imagine that’s why Earl Holding ultimately backed off on renaming Snowbasin to “Sun Valley, Utah,” as he reportedly considered doing in the leadup to the 2002 Olympics – if you give people an easy way to confuse themselves, they will generally take you up on it.

I realize this is not really the same thing. Boyne Mountain and The Highlands are 40 minutes apart. Vail’s two Hidden Valleys are 10-and-a-half hours from each other by car. Still. I wanted to ask Cook if this weird fact had any hilarious unintended consequences (I desperately wish Holding would have renamed Snowbasin). Perhaps confusion in the Epic Mix app? Or someone purchasing lift tickets for the incorrect resort? An adult lift ticket at Hidden Valley, Pennsylvania for tomorrow is $75 online and $80 in person, but just $59 online/$65 in person for Hidden Valley, Missouri. Surely someone has confused the two?

So, which one should we rename? And what should we call it? Vail has been trying to win points lately with lift names that honor local landmarks – they named their five new lifts at Jack Frost-Big Boulder “Paradise,” “Tobyhanna,” “Pocono,” “Harmony,” and “Blue Heron” (formerly E1 Lift, E2 Lift, B Lift, C Lift, E Lift, F Lift, Merry Widow I, Merry Widow II, and Edelweiss). So how about renaming Hidden Valley PA to something like “Allegheny Forest?” Or call Hidden Valley, Missouri “Mississippi Mountain?” Yes, both of those names are terrible, but so is having two Hidden Valleys in the same company.

What I got wrong

* I guessed in the podcast that Pennsylvania was the “fifth- or sixth-largest U.S. state by population.” It is number five, with an approximate population of 13 million, behind New York (19.6M), Florida (22.2M), Texas (30M), and California (39M).

* I guessed that the base of Keystone is “nine or 10,000 feet.” The River Run base area sits at 9,280 feet.

* I mispronounced the last name of Seven Springs founder Herman Dupre as “Doo-Pree.” It is pronounced “Doo-Prey.”

* I said there were “lots” of thousand-vertical-foot ski areas in Pennsylvania. There are, in fact, just four: Blue Mountain (1,140 feet), Blue Knob (1,073 feet), Elk (1,000 feet), and Montage (1,000 feet).

Why you should ski Seven Springs, Hidden Valley, and Laurel

It’s rugged country out there. Not what you’re thinking. More Appalachian crag than Poconos scratch. Abrupt and soaring. Beautiful. And snowy. In a state where 23 of 28 ski areas average fewer than 50 inches of snow per season, Seven Springs and Laurel bring in 135-plus apiece.

Elevation explains it. A 2,000-plus-foot base is big-time in the East. Killington sits at 1,165 feet. Sugarloaf at 1,417. Stowe at 1,559. All three ski areas sit along the crest of 70-mile-long Laurel Ridge, a storm door on the western edge of the Allegheny Front that rakes southeast-bound moisture from the sky as it trains out of Lake Erie.

When the snow doesn’t come, they make it. Now that Big Boulder has given up, Seven Springs is typically the first ski area in the state to open. It fights with Camelback for last-to-close. Twelve hundred snowguns and 49 snowmaking ponds help.

Seven Springs doesn’t have the state’s best pure ski terrain – look to Elk Mountain or, on the rare occasions it’s fully open, Blue Knob for that – but it’s Pennsylvania’s largest, most complete, and, perhaps, most consistent operation. It is, in fact, the biggest ski area in the Mid-Atlantic, a ripping and unpretentious ski region where you know you’ll get turns no matter how atrocious the weather gets.

Hidden Valley is something different. Cozy. Easy. Built for families on parade. Laurel is something different too. Steep and fierce, a one-lift wonder dug out of the graveyard by an owner with more passion, it seems, than foresight. Laurel needs snowmaking. Top to bottom and on every trail. The hill makes no sense in 2023 without it. Vail won’t abandon the place outright, but if they don’t knock $10 million in snowmaking into the dirt, they’ll be abandoning it in principle.

Podcast Notes

The trailmap rabbit hole – Hidden Valley

We discussed the proposed-but-never-implemented expansion at Hidden Valley, which would have sat skier’s right of the Avalanche pod. Here it is on the 2010 trailmap:

The 2002 version actually showed three potential lifts serving this pod:

Unfortunately, this expansion is unlikely. Cook explains why in the pod.

The trailmap rabbit hole – Laurel

Laurel, which currently has just one quad and a handletow, has carried a number of lift configurations over the decades. This circa 1981 trailmap shows a double chair where the quad now sits, and a series of surface lifts climbing the Broadway side of the hill, and another set of them bunched at the summit:

The 2002 version shows a second chairlift – which I believe was a quad – looker’s right, and surface lifts up top to serve beginners, tubers, and the terrain park:

Related: here’s a pretty good history of all three ski areas, from 2014.

The Pennsylvania ski inventory rabbithole

Pennsylvania skiing is hard to get. No one seems to know how many ski areas the state has. The NSAA says there are 26. Cook referenced 24 on the podcast. The 17 that Wikipedia inventories include Alpine Mountain, which has been shuttered for years. map.html">Ski Central (22), Visit PA (21), and Ski Resort Info (25) all list different numbers. My count is 28. Most lists neglect to include the six private ski areas that are owned by homeowners’ associations or reserved for resort guests. Cook and I also discussed which ski area owned the state’s highest elevation (it’s Blue Knob), so I included base and summit elevations as well:

The why-is-Vail-allowed-to-own-80-percent-of-Ohio’s-public-ski-areas? rabbithole

Cook said he wasn’t sure how many ski areas there are in Ohio. There are six. One is a private club. Snow Trails is family-owned. Vail owns the other four. I think this shouldn’t be allowed, especially after how poorly Vail managed them last season, and especially how badly Snow Trails stomped them from an operations point of view. But here we are:

The steepest-trail rabbithole

We discuss Laurel’s Wildcat trail, which the ski area bills as the steepest in the state. I generally avoid echoing these sorts of claims, which are hard to prove and not super relevant to the actual ski experience. You’ll rarely see skiers lapping runs like Rumor at Gore or White Lightning at Montage, mostly because they frankly just aren’t that much fun, exercises in ice-rink survival skiing for the Brobot armies. But if you want the best primer I’ve seen on this subject, along with an inventory of some very steep U.S. ski trails, read this one on Skibum.net. The article doesn’t mention Laurel’s Wildcat trail, but the ski area was closed sporadically and this site’s heyday was about a decade ago, so it may have been left out as a matter of circumstance.

The “back in my day” rabbithole

I referenced an old “punchcard program” at Roundtop during our conversation. I was referring to the 14.pdf">Night Club Program offered by former-former owner Snow Time Resorts at Roundtop, Liberty, and Whitetail. When Snow Time sold the ski area in 2018 to Peak Resorts, the buyer promptly dropped the evening programs. When Vail purchased the resort in 2019, it briefly re-instated some version of them (I think), but I don’t believe they survived the Covid winter (2020-21). This 5,000-word March 2019 article (written four months before Vail purchased the resorts) from DC Ski distills the rage around this abrupt pass policy change. Four years later, I still get emails about this, and not infrequently. I’m kind of surprised Vail hasn’t offered some kind of Pennsylvania-specific pass, since they have more ski areas in that state (eight) than they have in any other, including Colorado (five). After all, the company sells an Ohio-specific pass that started at just $299 last season. Why not a PA-specific version for, say, $399, for people who want to ski always and only at Roundtop or Liberty or Big Boulder? Or a nights-only pass?

I suppose Vail could do this, and I suspect they won’t. The Northeast Value Pass – good for mostly unlimited access at all of the company’s ski areas from Michigan on east – sold for $514 last spring. A midweek version ran $385. A seven-day Epic Day Pass good at all the Pennsylvania ski areas was just $260 for adults and $132 for kids aged 5 to 12. I understand that there is a particular demographic of skiers who will never ski north of Harrisburg and will never stop blowing up message boards with their disappointment and rage over this. The line between a sympathetic character and a tedious one is thin, however, and eventually we’re all better off focusing our energies on the things we can control.

The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 9/100 in 2023, and number 395 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane, or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email skiing@substack.com.

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Who

Davy Ratchford, Vice President and General Manager of Snowbasin Resort, Utah

Recorded on

January 31, 2023

About Snowbasin

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: The R. Earl Holding Family

Pass affiliations: Ikon Pass, Mountain Collective

Located in: Huntsville, Utah

Year founded: 1940

Closest 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 traffic

Base elevation: 6,450 feet

Summit elevation: 9,350 feet

Vertical drop: 2,900 feet

Skiable Acres: 3,000

Average annual snowfall: 300 inches

Trail count: 111

Lift 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 him

For 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 about

Utah’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 interview

Last 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 wrong

I 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 Snowbasin

I 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 Notes

On 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 season

The 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.

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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