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Welcome to the Storm’s short-form, news-focused podcast. Don’t worry, I will still write newsletters too. To browse a (robot-generated) podcast transcript, click the “transcript” button above - click on any block of text and the audio will jump to that point in the conversation. Paid subscribers can leave a comment in the article below, or by joining The Storm’s chat (also below). I’ll respond to some comments in the next episode, which is scheduled for Tuesday, Sept. 15.

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Welcome to the Storm’s short-form, news-focused podcast. Don’t worry, I will still write newsletters too. To browse a podcast transcript, click the “transcript” button above - click on any block of text and the audio will jump to that point in the conversation. Paid subscribers can leave a comment in the article below, or by joining The Storm’s chat (also below). I’ll respond to some comments in the next episode, which is scheduled for Monday, Sept. 14.

Stuff referenced in the pod:

Beidahu and Lake Songhua ski areas in China, along with Madarao in Japan, will join Ikon Pass for winter 2026-27. The familiar access terms for each of the three mountains are seven days on full Ikon, five on Ikon Base, and no blackouts on either pass. And of course no access on Ikon Session because it’s a terrible product. Ikon, which added Yunding Snow Park in China to its roster last winter, remains the only U.S.-based multimountain ski pass with a presence in that nation.

Ikon also expands its growing two-day tier – accessible with full Ikon only, with holiday blackouts – to 11 ski areas with the additions of Caberfae Peaks, Michigan and Snowy Range, Wyoming.

With today’s additions, Ikon will deliver access to 103 ski areas for winter 2026-27. Eighty-three of these are also on Ikon Base, and only 53 are on Ikon Session (because it sucks):

In the interest of getting this news live, I’ll save detailed breakdowns of each mountain for a future post. I’ll leave you with these stats: with today’s Ikon additions, piled on top of recent partner surges from Indy and the nascent Snow Pass, U.S.-based multimountain ski passes have added 69 new partners ahead of winter 2026-27: 43 for Indy, 14 for Snow Pass, 12 for Ikon, and zero for Epic or Mountain Collective. Together, those five passes, plus Mountain Capital Partners’ Power Pass, now collectively deliver access to 451 ski areas around the world, including 267 in America, 55 in Canada, and 53 in Japan. Europe accounts for 61 more multimountain pass partners, with the largest concentrations in Austria (20), Switzerland (12), and France (7). Indy Pass, with a 250-resort (alpine-only) roster, claims more than every other pass combined. Vail’s Epic Pass is good at 71 ski areas, Alterra’s Ikon at 103, the Mountain Collective at 32, Snow Pass at 14, and Power Pass at 15.

I’ll get into this announcement a bit more on today’s pod. Look out for full resort write-ups – as well as more regional context on the exploding world of U.S.-based ski passes – as soon as I can dam this Niagara Falls of new partners.

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Welcome to the Storm’s short-form, news-focused podcast. Don’t worry, I will still write newsletters too (I blasted out this post on Smuggs joining Indy Pass this morning). To browse a podcast transcript, click the “transcript” button above - click on any block of text and the audio will jump to that point in the conversation. Paid subscribers can leave a comment in the article below, or by joining The Storm’s chat (also below). I’ll respond to some comments in the next episode.

Stuff referenced in the pod

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In a weeklong blitz of daily partner releases, Indy Pass has added 43 alpine ski areas across nine countries and 13 U.S. states for winter 2026-27:

And here’s the full 2026-27 roster - Indy Pass holders get two days each at these 256 alpine ski areas:

I kept up with Indy’s release blitz for as long as I could during a week in which 90 percent of my waking hours were claimed by packing, driving, unpacking, shopping, drinking, driving, driving, drinking, footballing, and driving. There was no crossover between the drinking and the driving, but unfortunately there was no crossover between the writing and the driving either. Which means I’ve delivered write-ups on nine of these new partners, and I owe you 34.

But here’s the upside: since the full new partner roster is live, I’m under no obligation to follow Indy’s release schedule. So let’s start with the most consequential new Indy partner not just in this cycle, but perhaps since Jay Peak in 2020: Smugglers’ Notch, Vermont.

Relax, Tough Guys, I didn’t say “best” or “most jump-tastic.” I said “most consequential,” and it is. In a region (the Northeast U.S.) in which Indy has historically sold half of its passes, Smugglers’ Notch delivers the second-highest average snowfall total (322 inches), the fourth-tallest vertical drop (2,610 feet), and the fourth-largest skiable acreage footprint (1,060). Smuggs sits less than an hour south of Jay Peak, New England’s snowiest ski area and Indy’s perennial redemption leader. That duo alone could push any ski pass, but Smuggs and Jay are just two outposts in a 30-mountain New England roster that also includes regional headliners Cannon, Waterville Valley, and Saddleback.

All that, plus two days each at 226 additional lift-served ski areas (and a bunch of Nordic ones), for the probably-not-on-sale-for-long fall Base Pass price of $419. Smuggs, like Jay, joins with no blackouts, but the Indy+ lifts all blackouts for just $50 more.

Since I missed Indy’s day-by-day release schedule, I’m going to cover the remaining 34 new partners in a few installments, starting with Smuggs.

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Yesterday I broke down the five new ski areas joining Indy for winter 2026-27, part of a blitz of 30-plus ski areas that the pass promised on Tuesday.

Probably before I was even finished with that post, Indy threw up five more (plus another Nordic ski area, Eastman Cross Country in New Hampshire). Here’s the running tally of new 2026-27 partners, with this week’s additions highlighted in the far-right column (this is just what Indy pass has added in 2026; the full partner roster will clear 300 by next week):

Let’s break down the latest adds:

Kendall Mountain Ski Center, Colorado

My take

Kendall isn’t much, right? Sixteen acres, Midwest vert in a Colorado backwater served by a double chair hobby-shopped together 20 years ago from a 1972 Poma stapled to a 1990 return terminal.

The mystique of Kendall is not in what it is, but in what it could be. First, the name of that backwater town: Silverton, the eponymous home base of the avy-gear-and-guide-required monster six miles up the road. But unlike Silverton ski area, plopped at the end of a treacherously Cottonwoods-esque avalanche dump of a highway, Kendall sits, Telluride- or Aspen-esque, directly above town. And the ski area’s 9,596-foot lift-served summit is a footstool for Kendall Mountain, which slams into the clouds at 13,455 feet.

A 2018 assessment by the ski area geniuses at SE Group envisioned a series of four lifts rising 3,700 feet out of the base, topping out at 13,020 feet and bumping Kendall to 800 skiable acres:

The summit of lift 3 would sit nearly 200 feet higher than Breckenridge’s Imperial Superchair, which is currently America’s highest ski lift.

Here’s a less-ambitious version of SE’s plan, which would cover 300 acres and top out at 12,800 feet:

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On Tuesday, Indy Pass promised 30 new partners over the next week. Yesterday (Wednesday), pass officials dropped the first five: Pyhä, Finland; Kandatsu Snow Resort, Japan; Frost Fire, North Dakota; and Ski Land and Skeetawk in Alaska. Here are core stats for each of these resorts and for the 15 alpine ski area additions that Indy announced earlier this year for winter 2026-27 (the chart does not include Indy’s cross-country roster, including newly added Scotts Cobble/High Peaks XC in New York):

I’m going to save my typical totaling-up across regions and passes until Indy finishes its splurge. For now, let’s examine each of Indy’s latest additions, and how these mostly small and remote ski areas fit into the pass’ broader network.

Skeetawk, Alaska

My Take

Everything in America is either very very old or very very new. Like “Did you know that Pikes Peak is over 1 billion years old? Ben Franklin was just telling me that when I ran into him at the grocery store last week.”

But our ski areas aren’t really old or new. They were all built around the same time, in those few post-World War II decades during which the technology and money to mass-produce mechanized skiing materialized, but before the federal legislation of the late 1960s and ‘70s empowered activist environmentalists to halt a project of nearly any size with a regime of permitting nitpickery and death marches through the legal system. Long live the chipmunks.

But once in a while, someone does figure out how to build a new ski area in America. In the case of Skeetawk, Alaska, which opened in 2020, I guess they did it so far away from everything else or Pinecone Police International was too preoccupied with making sure that salmon weren’t swallowing iron ore tailings that no one noticed until “surprise, we built a triple chair.”

Really, the bump took 40 years to build, and is either on or directly adjacent to the site of the defunct, 500-vertical-foot Independence Mine ski area, which ran a T-bar and at least one ropetow that “incorporated waste straps that were connected to a tow rope holder,” which sounds like a mechanism for the industrial-scale murder of children. “Mike Besh has a childhood memory ‘frozen’ into his mind,” recollects the Alaska Lost Ski Areas Project webpage devoted to the hill. “Near the top he was frantically struggling to get the tow hook off the rope. The metal hook finally popped off the rope, flipped up and hit him in the mouth … where the cold metal hook instantly froze to his tongue!!”

After “many national and international development firms failed to deliver a viable plan for development of a ski area in Hatcher Pass,” reads Skeetawk’s history page, “the grassroots efforts by HAX [Hatcher Alpine Xperience] have taken a dream to a reality in 5 short years by developing a multi phased plan to build a regional alpine recreation facility on land leased from the Matsu [Matanuska Susitna] Borough.” Unfortunately, HAX for inexplicable reasons decided not to name the ski area “Where We Slide Down,” which is the meaning of the Dena’ina word “Shk’ituk’t,” the original name of the village and the etymon for “Skeetawk.”

Anyway, Where We Slide Down Ski Resort Skeetawk’s Phase 1 was, “Let’s A-Team a lift from North America’s ski area boneyards.” If you’re too young or too old to know what the A-Team was, it was this 1980s NBC action series starring four ex-commandoes with a habit of trapping themselves in warehouses or junkyards surrounded by bad guys and then assembling, in the space of about 15 minutes, from like a pile of old vacuum cleaners and coathangers, an improvised tank or helicopter or submarine, which would then erupt from their fortress in a slow-motion salvo of homemade rockets and Gatlin guns, as the crew made their latest daring escape while murdering every sucka in sight. Or sometimes they just accidentally drove their van into a river:

Anyway in Skeetawk’s case the 254-vertical-foot, 1,225-foot-long triple chair is an eclectic Lego kit combining, according to Lift Blog, “tower heads… from a retired lift in Colorado,” Doppelmayr chairs repurposed from another lift, and Poma sheaves.

The comments section attached to each of Lift Blog’s lift profile pages are usually good places to scrounge for additional details on a machine’s backstory. It is also a good place to become extremely confused by conflicting cross-claims. For example, commenter COLLIN PARSONS states that Skeetawk’s triple is “quite the frankenlift. Doppelmayr drive structure, Poma drive bullwheel, Poma towers, Doppelmayr chairs, Hall return structure, Poma return bullwheel.” Commenter LIFTNERD disagrees, writing, “No, it is pure Skytrans. The only components from other manufacturers are the sheave wheels (not the frames) and the chairs, which came from the Summit Triple at Gunstock.”

Anyway there is a triple chair at Skeetawk, which is phase I of a masterplan that could eventually blow the summit up to 4,068 feet, giving the bump a 2,500-ish-foot vertical drop.

Skeetawk recently began fundraising for phase II, a 1,205-vertical-foot, 4,750-foot-long, eight-passenger Doppelmayr gondola that would rise adjacent to the triple and land at midmountain five-and-a-half minutes later.

They’ve already began fundraising for the $30 million machine. Who wants to help me raise $25,000 so we can name one of Skeetawk’s new run’s “U.S. America’s Number One Very Best SnoSportSkiing Run Brought to You By The Storm Skiing Journal & Podcast”?

While Skeetawk’s lift-served terrain is perhaps too small in scope to entice Big Mountain Bro up to Alaska, the ski area has been running cat service to mid-mountain as it prepares the mountain for lift two. Treeline in Alaska is amazingly low, and the photos from Skeetawk’s website make it look sort of like skiing in the Andes and sort of like skiing in Switzerland and sort of like skiing in Alaska and sort of like you accidentally got on the snowcat with a group from the Hackensack Ski Club.

Anyway even though Alaska is huge there are only like seven roads in the whole state so most built things are reachable from either Anchorage or Fairbanks. Skeetawk sits an hour-ish north of fellow Indy partners Arctic Valley and Hilltop, though some wintertime road closures or mandatory elk-drawn sledge transfers to ford unnamed seasonal rivers that I’m unaware of may lengthen that commute by several weeks.

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Well this is pretty incredible: Loon plans to drop the ropes off its high western boundary for winter 2027-28, cracking open a 272-acre glade-skiing kingdom looker’s left off the North Peak Express Quad:

The Black Ridge expansion will pump Loon from 403 acres to 675, blowing past 470-acre Bretton Woods to make the Boyne-owned mountain the largest of New Hampshire’s 30 active ski areas. By itself, Black Ridge would have been the state’s third-largest ski area:

Black Ridge, in its purpose, design, and operation, will echo the massive Brackett Basin expansion opened at Loon sister resort Sugarloaf, Maine in 2011: no grooming, no snowmaking, no new lifts. It is the sort of freeride zone more typical of the West or the deep snowbelts in Northern Vermont or Michigan’s Upper Peninsula than more modestly snowy New Hampshire.

“Black Ridge isn’t for everyone, and that’s the point,” said Loon President and General Manager Brian Norton. “It’s a true rugged experience — natural and raw, unlike anything else we maintain at Loon today.”

Good. New Hampshire – New England in general – is strafed with enough overbuffed cord to repave the interstate highway system. As much as I appreciate that Hedge Fund Henry needs a place to ski and if he can’t ski something the whole industry implodes amidst crowds of ham-sandwich-packing coupon-clippers, the region also needs terrain for skiers whose idea of fun is more than Me Go Fast. The answer is glades.

Easy for me to say. The reason there aren’t more glades in New England is that, outside of that glorious Green Mountain snow pocket from Killington north to Jay Peak – where annual snowfall consistently stacks between 200 and 400 inches – the region’s snowfall is spotty. Even when deep storms sweep through, the low elevations (Loon’s base sits at just 860 feet), beg for freeze-thaw cycles to fossilize the snowpack. Loon claims a respectable 160 inches per winter, but how much total accumulations matter year-to-year depends heavily upon how many of those snowstorms are directly chased by Noah’s Ark-grade rainstorms.

Dense New England undergrowth also tends to complicate the let’s-open-glades-for-Boston-Bill-who’s-skiing-his-third-day-ever-but-thinks-he’s-a-natural-because-he-‘got down’-Upper-Walking-Boss-‘without falling’ equation. Meaning there is a lot of crap in the woods and someone needs to go in there and clear it out unless you’re waiting for a 17-foot snowstorm to open the terrain. Loon’s press release describes Black Ridge as “dense pine forests, steep gullies, and open hardwood glades,” while also stating a need to “prepare” the zone for commercial skiing while “maintaining the area’s natural character.” Skiers will be able to traverse “up to 1.25 miles” into the forest. As at Brackett Basin, “some hiking may be needed.” The reward is 1,350 vertical feet of raw White Mountain puzzle-plunge, lappable off of one lift. Done correctly, Black Ridge could echo some of New England’s other great edge-of-the-resort tree zones – Jay’s Timbuktu, Smuggs’ (unlisted) Back Bowls, or, depending on what’s back there, perhaps even Mad River Glen’s Paradise.

Credit to Boyne, though, for taking a let’s-hope-it-snows gamble on this one. Smaller New England ski areas – Berkshire East, Ragged, Black Mountain of Maine – have considerably boosted their stature as complete skier’s mountains by maintaining large glade networks that are accessible for just a portion of a typical winter. But however aspirational a trailmap is on any given day, the mere potential of that terrain variety matters a lot when a family or BroSquad is deciding where to SnoSportSki.

Up until now, glades have been one of Loon’s weakest points. The mountain has a few treed zones, totaling 35 acres. It’s not enough. In so many ways, Loon is spectacular. The ski area soars with one of the East’s greatest contiguous vertical drops, one of America’s best terrain parks, one of the world’s greatest snowmaking systems, and a chutes-and-ladders fleet of 14 lifts sprawling over three peaks and three base areas. The place is gorgeous from end to end, and North Peak summit views, in particular, dazzle. Boyne has already plugged the spectacular Kancamagus eight-pack into the heart of the resort (2021) and opened the 30-acre Timbertown expansion on South Peak (2023) that will one day connect to town via a planned pulse gondola across the river. Recent filings with the U.S. Forest Service – which owns much of the land that Loon operates on – suggest that Boyne is ready to replace the cramped, 2,000-vertical-foot, four-passenger White Mountain Gondola with a beefier 10-passenger model. And the steam train connecting the Octagon and Governor Adams lodges is one of the great novelties in American skiing. But so much of Loon is also: straight-down blue run beside another straight-down blue run beside seven more straight-down blue runs below some straight-down black runs, all ostensibly groomed but transformed into ice luges by Windshield-Wiper Wallace by 10:30 a.m. on a Saturday. More terrain variety will help.

That Loon will achieve that variety at a relatively low cost also sets a workable template for other big-but-a-bit-boring ski areas that want to vary things up. Boyne has spent hundreds of millions to upgrade its 11 ski areas over the past decade, turboboosting its snowmaking plants and building 36 new aerial lifts (30 percent of its fleet), including five eight-person chairlifts (the only such machines in America) across four mountains, and a new tram and gondola at once-creaky Big Sky. That’s all flashy and cool and fun, but it gets expensive. Fortunately, the company has balanced these sparkplug projects with more understated infrastructure where the mountain’s physical limits or traffic patterns demand it: brand-new triple chairs to reach toward the summits of rowdy Alpental, rebuilt detachable quads – rather than new machines – for Pleasant Mountain, Sugarloaf, and a lesser-trafficked corner of Big Sky. By tapping existing infrastructure to add a massive chunk of low-maintenance terrain at Loon, Boyne is quietly restating its commitment to creating well-balanced mountains even in places where skiers aren’t clamoring for them.

It’s also worth mentioning that Boyne has driven nearly every New England ski area expansion in the past decade and a half: Sugarloaf’s 600-acre Brackett Basin and Burnt Mountain expansions in the early 2010s; Sunday River’s two-lift (real-estate-focused, but still) Merrill Hill expansion in the first half of this decade; Sugarloaf’s 450-acre West Mountain expansion in 2023; and, on the opposite end of Loon, the 30-acre Timbertown expansion on South Peak, which aside from finally establishing true interesting green terrain at Loon, had the enormous resort-building impact of connecting isolated parking lots to the rest of the resort via chairlift.

Part of the reason Boyne has been able to build so much, so fast, is because relatively few of its ski areas operate on U.S. Forest Service land, considerably streamlining the permitting and public-comment periods that can, for example, push the timeline of an Aspen Mountain expansion past the two-decade mark. But Boyne is taking a smart strategy at Loon, where they do have to work with the Forest Service, by essentially determining how they can have the largest impact on the ski experience with the least amount of disturbance to the environment. “The resort is focused on maintaining the area’s natural character while preparing the glades for skiing and snowboarding, a reflection of its commitment to improving the on-mountain experience while respecting the natural habitats and landscape of the area,” reads Loon’s press release, emphasizing that Black Ridge is “a collaboration with the U.S. Forest Service.” Yes, long live the chipmunks, but three cheers to bringing more interesting ski terrain to the Northeast while they’re at it.

I’m attempting to chase Norton down to go a bit deeper on this expansion. Stand by.

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Over the next week, Indy Pass will announce at least 30 additional ski areas, pushing the product’s total past 300 for winter 2026-27. I can’t release the names yet, but there is at least one knock-you-on-your-ass headliner on the roster. Indy waitlisters have their chance to lock in a pass beginning at 10 a.m. ET today. If any remain on Sept. 8, Indy will hold a public sale. Here are the insanely stupid prices that you’ll pay for two days each at 300-plus ski areas:

How stupid are those prices? Well, this is how much the other national ski passes cost per partner:

How stupid are those prices? Here’s how much it will cost you to ski per day on your SnoSportMegaAssKicker Pass:

How stupid are those prices? Not quite as stupid as these prices:

Here’s what Indy and its competing passes have added so far for winter 2026-27:

Unfortunately, Indy lost a few regional bangers this season, in the form of Midwest Family Ski Resorts’ Lutsen, Minnesota; Granite Peak, Wisconsin; and Snowriver, Michigan. Those are heavy losses - some of the largest and best ski areas between New England and Colorado - that migrated to Ikon. The Indy status of Tamarack, Idaho is also unclear after that mountain signed onto Ikon’s two-day tier for 2026-27 (Indy officials tell me they’re considering how to manage that partnership). And both Indy and Snow Pass are currently claiming Snow King, the little brother to Jackson Hole that towers over the town of Jackson, Wyoming. I’m attempting to reach Snow King officials to clarify their intentions, as Indy, unlike Mountain Collective or Ikon two-day, is uninterested in sharing partners.

Anyway this is Indy’s 2026-27 Alpine roster before its coming new-partner blitz. This list does not include ski areas that require you to ski sideways (cross-country), which Indy does include in its “300-resort guarantee” for passholders who decide they want their money back because there just isn’t enough choice here.

That list will be bigger next week. Stand by.

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Over several months in 2026, The Storm examined hundreds of newspaper articles, ski area master development plans, U.S. Forest Service reports, and other archives documenting the evolution of lift-served skiing across the American West – and, in particular, Colorado – since the end of World War II. This fossil record of a mostly pre-internet culture captures the facts and sentiments of skiing’s past unfiltered by nostalgia or selective memory. This is the sixth in a series of articles summarizing those findings.

Look at this fun thing I just did - I plugged Vail Mountain’s 1999-2000 lift ticket price of $61 into an online future-inflation predictor to see when typical economic conditions could have been expected to compound that price to the ski area’s $374 top rate for winter 2026-27. The answer is 2070.

Good job, Vail - you beat inflation by 44 years. Vail Mountain lift tickets would, at their current $374 top rate, hit $1,163 in 2070, according to Tom (who apparently owns the above calculator). But applying the Epic Inflation rate of seven percent annually since 1999 forward to 2070, you could be charging the moron plebes your customers $7,206 per day of skiing! Genius!

OK, you got me: “Tom’s Inflation Calculator” does not qualify as a bulletproof source. But this absurdist exercise does draw a contrast between the runaway price structures of skiing’s two main lift-access products. The lift ticket has leapt into (a theoretical) 2070; while the season pass has hit 88-miles-per-hour and traveled back to 1970: Steamboat’s 2026-27 season pass (a full Ikon) debuted at $1,399, essentially the same rate, adjusted for inflation, that the mountain charged for its 1972-73 season pass ($175, equal to $1,401 in 2026 dollars); Vail is even wilder, with a 2026 Epic Pass costing $1,089 in March - $718 less than a 1970-71 season pass ($215 then, $1807 inflation-adjusted) and more than $2,000 inflation-adjusted dollars cheaper than Vail’s 1986-87 season pass ($1,025, or $3,126 inflation-adjusted).

This century gap is a problem. Because lift ticket anachronisms turbocharge the false narrative that skiing is not affordable, which overshadows the true narrative that skiing actually kind of is more affordable now than it has been since Nixon was president, at least for people who ski a lot and think ahead.

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We have the roster for the fifth (or maybe sixth) national ski pass. The $339.99 Snow Pass will offer two days each at 14 ski areas for winter 2026-27:

The Snow Pass is sponsored by Snow Operating, the outfit that last year launched the Snow Triple Play and is in danger of sliding into Eptacular territory with Snowtastic overbranding*. Snow Triple Play, which offers three days total and a maximum of two days at any given ski area, returns for $179.99 with all 16 of last season’s partners and seven new ones (year highlighted in yellow below), all in eastern North America:

*I am probably just bitter because Snow Partners rejected my suggestion to name the Snow Pass “The Ultimate StudCrusher Supreme SnoSportSkiing SuperPass.”

Snow Pass joins an increasingly crowded multimountain ski pass market dominated by Vail Resorts’ Epic Pass (71 mountains) and Alterra’s Ikon Pass (98), which offer a spectrum of products combining unlimited access with a designated number of days at each ski area. Snow Pass’ two-days-per-mountain allocation mirrors that of the high-end Mountain Collective and the sprawling, 229-mountain Indy Pass, which is sold out for winter 2026-27.

While the Snow Pass’ launch with limited western partners somewhat complicates The Storm’s calculus of what counts as a paid national ski pass, total membership across the Epic, Ikon, Mountain Collective, Indy, Snow Pass, and Power Pass is considerable: 425 active ski areas around the world have joined one or more of these passes. This includes 167 mountains outside of the United States, another 53 in Canada, and 114 outside of North America, with concentrations in Japan (49) and Europe (52). Skiers can access more than half of all active ski areas in America (258 of 495 anticipated active ski areas for winter 2026-27), including a remarkable 67 percent of public ski areas (246 of 369 active, that operate at least one chairlift) on one of these six passes.

I’m on a plane home from family vacation in Ireland, so I’ll leave off with a few quick takes:

• Snow Pass’ inclusion of Belleayre, Gore, and Whiteface – three of the best ski areas in New York – immediately establishes the pass as a potent regional draw around the 20 million-person metro New York area. This could really help the pass compete with Indy in an important ski market.

• Snow Pass’ strong launch somewhat clouds its tough starting position among a mature U.S. pass market, with just 33 percent of ski areas – and few trophy properties of the sort that could supercharge growth – remaining.

• That means the clearest path to Snow Pass growth is likely by looting partners from existing pass rosters. While the inaugural Snow Pass includes crossovers with Mountain Collective (Whiteface), Ikon (Buttermilk), and Power Pass (Monarch), Indy Pass has explicitly forbidden its partners from joining another competing national pass. For example: Snow King, an Indy Pass mountain since 2020, is still listed on the pass’ website as an active partner as of this morning. Snow Pass officials confirmed to The Storm that a Snow King representative had said the mountain “would not be participating” in Indy Pass this winter, and that the Wyoming ski area was therefore cleared for membership. As I was under embargo (meaning I get the information before the general public so I can prepare a write-up), with today’s roster announcements, I couldn’t reach out to Indy officials for comment. I’ll do so shortly.

• While the Snow Triple Play is unlikely to excite my core readership, there is a place for it in a ski market that is increasingly offering these sorts of you-have-this-many-days-total-to-use-across-a-bunch-of-mountains-whenever-you-want ticket packs. The best is still Epic Day, but nearly every major ski area on the continent is skiable on some similar product. I don’t have aggregated stats just yet.

• When Snow Triple debuted last year, I advocated for a true pass like Indy. We’ve got that. Now, Snow Partners just needs to convince some of these shiny new Triple Play partners – Jiminy Peak, Cranmore, Bromont – to join Snow Pass.

• I had a hard time classifying Snow Pass as a true national pass, as the two western ski areas are small and unlikely to draw eastern skiers for a vacation. Nor will the product appeal to anyone outside of the East. But I’m calling this a building-block roster of the sort that Indy so successfully built around since its 2019 launch.

• And since I was classifying Snow Pass as national, I upgraded the 15-mountain Power Pass to national pass status, rooted in the following logic: while Mountain Capital Partners’ homegrown pass only offers access to ski areas in the western U.S., it also includes a pretty baller destination in Chile, with the interconnected Valle Nevado and La Parva ski areas. That’s a compelling opposite-winter carrot even for skiers who may not live in MCP’s core Four Corners region. Plus the pass is a killer deal and delivers unlimited access to nine MCP ski areas and a bucket of days in Chile (and a few bonus days at partner resorts). You win, James.

• When Snow Partners announced Snow Pass earlier this year, the company also teased a Midwest-specific Triple Play. This product launch will, according to today’s press release, “move to the winter 2027/28 season as several prospective resort partners complete previous pass contractual commitments.” From conversations with several Midwest ski area operators, I have a fair idea of which ski areas these may be and which pass they may be leaving, but I’ll hold off from reporting on that just yet.

• I have to scrutinize blackout dates a bit, as they were asymmetrically severe on Snow Triple last year, and how much skiers can actually use the pass has a lot to do with how useful the pass is.

I’ll explore different elements of the bullets above over the coming weeks, as we get a better look at the 2026-27 multimountain ski pass landscape.

Snow Pass and Snow Triple Play will go on sale Tuesday, Sept. 8.

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Over several months in 2026, The Storm examined hundreds of newspaper articles, ski area master development plans, U.S. Forest Service reports, and other archives documenting the evolution of lift-served skiing across the American West – and, in particular, Colorado – since the end of World War II. This fossil record of a mostly pre-internet culture captures the facts and sentiments of skiing’s past unfiltered by nostalgia or selective memory. This is the fifth in a series of articles summarizing those findings.

In some ways, the U.S. ski industry, particularly in the West, is a case study in successful public-private partnerships. The government, meaning We The People, own the land. Private operators, from publicly traded Colorado conglomerates to dudes names Charles who ride the chairlift with their dog, lease the property and assume all operating costs. A government agency - usually the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) but also sometimes the Bureau of Land Management - reviews proposed lift, snowmaking, building, and other upgrades, and Vail Resorts or George or Robby figure out how to pay for them. The operator then pays the government an annual fee based, at least tangentially, on operating revenue.

Some version of this system, authorized by a 1915 Congressional act and modernized in successive legislation, has worked for at least 102 years, since Alpine Meadows and Mountain High started spinning lifts in California’s high mountains. While the USFS has occasionally sold off or traded properties, the agency remains the largest single stakeholder in the enormous American ski market, overseeing 125 ski areas occupying more than 152,000 acres - 63 percent of the nation’s skiable acreage (the actual percentage of USFS land is marginally smaller than this, as many ski areas operate across patchworks of government and private land).

This is where the peculiarities of the U.S. American political and cultural ecosystem assert themselves. The USFS’ scale translates to to authority in some, but not all, matters. The agency retains considerable veto power over on-mountain upgrades, which are subject to layers of internal, environmental, and public review. For example, a lift upgrade “approved” (“accepted” in USFS parlance) in each ski area’s decennial(-ish) master development plan would undergo an entirely new round of review and approval once the operator decides they actually want to build the machine. The agency scrutinizes the project’s impacts on soil, animals, plants, the viewshed, and the water supply; analyzes how the lift would potentially modify skier traffic and capacity from the parking lots to the day lodges to the rental barn; and ensures compliance with federal disability statutes. When workers building Keystone’s Bergman Bowl six-pack damaged high-alpine vegetation in 2022, the USFS shut the project down and demanded remediation, delaying the 550-acre lift-served expansion for an entire year.

So empowered, the agency is remarkably effective at protecting the environment. But the USFS is completely impotent at protecting a constituency that is at least equally as important: the consumer.

Over the past decade, the agency has watched, inert and silent, as peak lift ticket prices at many ski areas under its supervision have risen well beyond the rate of inflation. Check out Vail Mountain, which accounts for up to three percent of U.S. skier visits annually - had prices risen with inflation since the ski area’s turn-of-the-century $61 peak-day lift ticket rate, they would sit at $121 today, rather than the $374 anticipated top price for winter 2026-27:

This strange dynamic is not so strange for an America en thrall to free-market fundamentalism but held hostage by an environmentalism rooted in an absolutist vision of preventing all development, rather than encouraging responsible development. It’s a ski industry-specific version of What’s The Matter With Kansas (promise action on social issues as a cover for economic stridency) for conservationists: account for every pinecone displaced by a trail widening by promising to plant five times more new trees elsewhere on the mountain, so long as the consumer, once they approach the ticket window, remains at the ski area operator’s whims.

It was not always so. Once upon a time, the USFS held considerable authority to regulate the cost of skiing.

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Over several months in 2026, The Storm examined hundreds of newspaper articles, ski area master development plans, U.S. Forest Service reports, and other archives documenting the evolution of lift-served skiing across the American West – and, in particular, Colorado – since the end of World War II. This fossil record of a mostly pre-internet culture captures the facts and sentiments of skiing’s past unfiltered by nostalgia or selective memory. This is the fourth in a series of articles summarizing those findings.

In September 1961, the United States Forest Service (USFS) published a 25-page pamphlet entitled Development Program for the National Forests. The booklet opens with a patriotic appeal to tap the nation’s vast resources for the public good:

In his special messages to the Congress on “Natural Resources” and on “Agriculture” President Kennedy urged the acceleration of all forest development to insure adequate forest resources in the future, including the development of National Forest resources.

While the pamphlet never explicitly mentions ski area development, its publication coincided with a massive build-out of many of America’s most popular and successful ski areas. Between 1961 and 1972, a willful and optimistic postwar generation opened 42 ski areas fully or partially on USFS land that survive to modernity, including Breckenridge, Vail Mountain, Crested Butte, Steamboat, Mt. Rose, Crystal Mountain in Washington, Attitash, Purgatory, Waterville Valley, Jackson Hole, Snowmass, Alpental, Sierra-at-Tahoe, Grand Targhee, Keystone, Snowbird, Telluride, Kirkwood, and Copper Mountain.

Impressive as that roster is, America’s sprawling mountain ranges held deeper potential still. In 1967, the USFS published a report entitled Skiing Trends and Opportunities in Western States. The 90-page booklet summarizes the rapid growth of lift-served skiing, and outlines plans to accommodate future demand on USFS lands [boldface mine]:

The surge in number of skiers during the 50’s developed into a nationwide phenomenon. It captured the attention of those sports enthusiasts who are always seeking new ways to test their physical capabilities. It also challenged the imagination of private entrepreneurs and public land managers -- particularly those interested in acquainting more and more people with year-long experiences of the outdoor recreation opportunities.

This is reflected by what occurred during the 9-year period 1955-63. Skier visits tripled -- from 1.4 million in 1955 to 4.3 million in 1963. And the number of ski areas catering to this new breed of fun seekers increased from 152 to 197. The lift and tow capacity of these western ski areas kept pace with demand. It also tripled --from 66 million in 1955 to 215 million Vertical Transport Feet per hour (VTF/hr.) in 1964. …

There is every reason to expect continued growth for the western ski industry in the near future. Statistics describing the change in the western ski industry during the last decade give considerable basis for optimism that the opportunity for development is a long way from being fully exploited.

The report then outlines several obstacles to skiing’s continued growth, including cost, the sport’s physical demands, an increased preference for aerial lifts over surface tows, and the distance of most ski areas from population centers. What would not be a problem, the report notes, is building new ski areas:

Sites for new ski areas are plentiful

Lack of skiing terrain is not likely to inhibit growth of skiing in the Western States. A survey of State and Federal land management agencies identified 166 sites as having potential for future development as ski areas.

These sites certainly do not represent the entire available supply; rather they are those located in vicinities where demand is most likely to develop in the near future. We can reasonably assume that Wyoming and Alaska, for example, have many more potential sites than are shown on the map … The present demand for skiing in both States is not sufficient to stimulate very much “prospecting “ for potential sites. Nevertheless, the map does give some idea regarding the relative abundance of potential new ski sites. There are more undeveloped potential sites than developed sites in every State in the West, except for California and Colorado. We might conclude that new ski sites are somewhat more difficult to locate in both California and Colorado. This is understandable, for together these States already account for nearly 50 percent of the existing ski area lift and tow capacity in the Western States.

The survey of potential sites was conducted merely to locate areas, not to appraise their individual economic feasibility. They are, for the most part, areas that appear to offer adequate snow conditions and terrain for skiing. More critical examination could reveal physical drawbacks or economic conditions that would limit or even preclude successful operation of some sites. Nevertheless, the total number of sites that apparently could be developed is large. The capacity of the 166 potential sites that have been identified probably amounts to about 236 million VTF /hr -- about equal to the capacity already developed in the 12 Western States.

That map of 166 potential ski areas:

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Over several months in 2026, The Storm examined hundreds of newspaper articles, ski area master development plans, U.S. Forest Service reports, and other archives documenting the evolution of lift-served skiing across the American West – and, in particular, Colorado – since the end of World War II. This fossil record of a mostly pre-internet culture captures the facts and sentiments of skiing’s past unfiltered by nostalgia or selective memory. This is the third in a series of articles summarizing those findings.

In 1967, the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), in conjunction with four national ski associations, published a 25-page pamphlet entitled Skiing The National Forests – America’s Playgrounds. The document assertively casts the agency as the leading steward of America’s then-budding ski industry (boldface mine):

Today the National Forests offer some of the best skiing in the country. Over 200 ski areas, including more than 80 percent of the major ski areas in the West, are located entirely or partially on National Forest land. Well-designed and carefully managed to meet Forest Service safety requirements, these winter playgrounds have been built by businessmen, civic groups, and State agencies, and are operated under forest- use permits.

Two hundred ski areas is a surprising number for two reasons: 1) today, just 125 ski areas operate under USFS leases; and, 2) that 1967 list predated the opening of several major ski centers, including Sierra-at-Tahoe (1968), Mount Hood Meadows (1968), Grand Targhee (1969), Keystone (1970), Snowbird (1971), Kirkwood (1972), 49 Degrees North (1972), Copper (1972), Telluride (1972), Discovery (1972), and Beaver Creek (1980). Here’s the pamphlet’s 1967 inventory of USFS ski areas (which by my count lists 174, rather than “over 200” ski areas):

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Over several months in 2026, The Storm examined hundreds of newspaper articles, ski area master development plans, U.S. Forest Service reports, and other archives documenting the evolution of lift-served skiing across the American West – and, in particular, Colorado – since the end of World War II. This fossil record of a mostly pre-internet culture captures the facts and sentiments of skiing’s past unfiltered by nostalgia or selective memory. This is the second in a series of articles summarizing those findings.

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When The Storm was new and Covid was newer, I launched the earnest and somewhat foolish project of documenting and comparing every ski season pass in America.^* Fueling this endeavor was a self-evident belief in the ski season pass as a product: of course all ski areas offered one. I assumed they always had.

*The Google spreadsheet I created to track season passes has since evolved into whatever I’m calling this monstrosity today (it will come when called as The Pass Tracker 5000, The Encyclopedia Bro-Tannica, The Big Bad Badass Season Pass Chart, The U.S. American SnoSport Skiing Masterchart, and probably some other ones I forgot about). As longtime readers have probably surmised, I no longer attempt to track every season pass in America, mostly because it’s tedious and boring and frankly not that important in terms of the highest and best use of my time. I do still try to capture the early-bird and final prices for any public ski area with a chairlift, but don’t expect this to be like Expedia for ski passes.

So I was shocked to find this throwaway reference to ski season passes in The Straight Creek Journal on Nov. 8, 1979:

For the true skiing addict, a season pass may be the most economical way to go. Not all areas offer them and, in some cases, only the locals know they exist. Keystone, for example, has six categories of season passes: adult, child, family, midweek, nonconsecutive picture pass and spring pass. An adult can ski all season for $300; at Arapahoe Basin only, the same privilege costs $225. A family pass is $500. A midweek pass is $175. A spring pass, good from April 1 to closing, costs $125.

This bargain tip, intended for savvy skiers, appears seventh on a list that includes several discount cards and night sessions at Keystone. Understandably so: these passes were no bargain at all. Adjusted for inflation, Keystone’s unlimited adult pass is $1,320 in today’s dollars; the A-Basin pass is $990; and that spring pass is $550 (Keystone routinely remained open into late April or May in the decades prior to Vail’s 1997 purchase of the resort). All-day adult lift tickets at both Keystone and Arapahoe Basin – then jointly owned by Ralston-Purina – ran $15 per day for the 1979-80 ski season: $66 in 2026 dollars.

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Over several months in 2026, The Storm examined hundreds of newspaper articles, ski area master development plans, U.S. Forest Service reports, and other archives documenting the evolution of lift-served skiing across the American West – and, in particular, Colorado – since the end of World War II. This fossil record of a mostly pre-internet culture captures the facts and sentiments of skiing’s past unfiltered by nostalgia or selective memory. This is the first in a series of articles summarizing those findings.

Beaver Creek’s peak-day walk-up lift ticket is set to hit $392 during the 2026-27 ski season. Right behind is Vail Mountain ($374), Park City ($369), Deer Valley ($349), Steamboat ($344), and Breckenridge ($332).

Complaints are useless. Not because the frustration is invalid, but because our indignance has been made useless through over-saturation. And I don’t mean social-media pile-ons. Complaints about the cost of lift-served skiing, it turns out, are as old as lift-served skiing itself.

In November 1966, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs held hearings on a potential ski resort development in California’s San Gorgonio Wilderness Area. The proceedings included a statement by a Mr. Sylvester Heinberg, identified as an athletic coach and director at San Bernardino Valley College, who stated, in part:

I think I am in a very fine financial position, I am very happy in my position, but I know that I cannot afford for four members of my family a $ 6 ski ticket or to go to Mammoth when my friends tell me that the ski lift ticket there is going up to $7 this year; that would be $28 for a weekend just for the ski lifts alone. If I could, I may make it just once or twice a year, but this does not represent, in my judgment family recreation at these prices for the majority of the southern California people.

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The Friday before last I saw that another antitrust lawsuit was angling for BigSki. The following week I started to write about it and thought, “Gee let me see if any 2026-27 lift ticket rates are live yet?” And much to my horror and delight they were:

And I looked at these prices and I thought, “You know I’m not a lawyer or a government regulator or a Finance Bro or a marketer or a SnoSportSkiing executive or a Mt. McStudlison townie who skis 400 days per year, or really a person who can offer anything to society other than liking skiing and writing about it, but there is perhaps the tiniest chance that the rapid, simultaneous, and ahistoric surge in peak-day, in-person lift ticket prices across Epic- and Ikon-tied ski resorts tracing to the exact moment of those passes’ launch dates in (respectively) 2008 and 2018, while effective in mainstreaming the formerly niche ski season pass and thereby decoupling a weather-dependent industry from the vagaries of planet Earth’s ever-spinning seasonal schizophrenia, also alienated skiing’s core money-spending demographic, which despite the Instaboost reels of floppy-haired Brahs named Coltyn rocking hoodies in negative-four-degree weather while popping upside-down switch flippity-flops is actually guys named Holten with advanced degrees in biofinance who ski six days per year at Deer Valley usually over Christmas or President’s week or in March. And when Holten, who’s just swamped at the office meaning he spends 90 percent of his working hours monitoring Slack messages and updating his fantasy football roster, emails his wife Jennifer, “Wow look at the prices for our ski week this is kind of getting out of control,” she writes back “yeah no,” and even though between salaries and stock options and bonuses they collectively earn a half million dollars per year she proceeds to Google “Ski in Europe” or “Caribbean resorts” or “civilian Space X flight” and emails back “wow look at this awesome thing we could do instead of skiing at the sixth-best Ikon Pass resort in Utah on the busiest week of the year when the ski area could be like 20 percent open if we get another shitty winter?” And so the Trowleys decide they prefer Boca del Carmen to Park City just a couple years before they move from the Upper West Side to Scarsdale and have Brystoll and Archimedes, who grow up knowing only that vacations are to warm places and that skiing is a pastime reserved for hedgefund owners named Rothstonsully who breed camels as a hobby and message their real-estate broker things like “I didn’t say ‘helipad,’ singular. How else is one to get from the poolhouse to the albino tiger paddock?” And the remaining U.S. American skiers think, “well it seems sort of dumb and stupid that the price of one day of skiing has increased 500 percent this century, leaving us no choice, if we would like to SnoSportSki at the biggest Colorado ski areas, but to buy one of these thousand-plus-dollar passes. Which will then compel us, because of some sort of sunk-cost pyschological-economic principle, to ski at only a defined set of mountains all winter, so that even if we have an Ikon Pass and want to drive 15 minutes from Copper to Vail, it’s really no longer feasible because asking someone who’s already spent a month’s rent on a ski pass to pay $300 for an additional day of skiing is like setting up a cash bar inside of an all-inclusive resort.” And so even if, as I find likely, there never was a nefarious backroom meeting in which the major American ski area operators and their interest groups gathered amidst vats of yak blood and piles of baby seal furs and declared “We The Purveyors of the limited numbers of U.S. American SnoSportSkiing Operations Vast and Varied in terrain but also strangely limited in number, where the monied doth gather with their cublings mostly on weekends and holidays but also for most of March in Colorado, do hereby collectively and forever foreswear to set the price of last-minute walk-up lift tickets at levels more befitting of a Hollywood dark comedy set in an illiberal dystopian 2080s, so that these dumb idiot skiers, feeling great offense and shame but with no option other than to charge $1,400 to their credit card for one day of SkiLift access for their family will, taking responsibility for their dumb stupidity, perchance the following March purchase our Epyk and Eyekon SnoSportSkiing Passes, which are a tremendous bargain if you just do the math, so that they will never again suffer the shame of admitting on the Frat Bros Nintey-Fo’ WhatsApp group that they didn’t know they were supposed to pay for skiing 10 months before they actually planned on skiing, and we doth promise to undertake this pricing scheme even though such a strategy, while economically effective, is also objectively stupid and offensive to the human soul, especially since most of our ski resorts operate on leased public land, a detail we shant’n’t worry over since we have effectively handcuffed, via lobbying and nitpicking, the ever-shrinking and overworked U.S. Forest Service administrators who file our paperwork into allowing us to do basically whatever the hell we want on public land, so long as we, like, draw a checkboard pattern across some cliff-riddled unskiable section of the trailmap and label it Porcupine Habitat or whatever Bwah-hah-hah-hah-hah” and instead of this Doom Summit just sort of copied each other because “why the hell not it seems to be working and damn these Epic/Ikon checks are sick Bruh, and you know no one really pays that price anyway, except for the few idiots who do because if skiers spend even like five minutes on our website or scrolling through discussion boards populated by the socially inept dorklings on Reddit they will see that between use-them-any-day pre-purchased day-pass products, ticket packs, multi-mountain passes, or even super-duper early-bird lift tickets there are plenty of options to ski for less than the cost of a surprise brain transplant after forgetting to renew your health insurance.” But maybe just maybe when every single pass-affiliated operator so inflates lift ticket rates beyond historical norms all at once it makes those operators vulnerable to opportunistic lawsuits claiming that this is not simply a market evolution like the shift from horses to cars but is in fact a coordinated, industry-wide effort to fence off the American destination ski market from poor people occasional skiers anyone unwilling or unable to buy a thousand-plus dollar pass in the spring to ski the following February, thereby locking those skiers into a vertically integrated destination resort ecosystem, meaning that while sure the pass covers lift tickets it does not cover lodging and lessons and food, all of which each mountain nearly always exclusively controls within its permit area.

But what the hell do I know?

Without dissecting the particulars of this lawsuit – in which several put-upon skiers claim antitrust violations in the form of collusion by Vail, Alterra, Boyne, and Powdr, along with the National Ski Areas Association and their research consultants, RRC Associates – we can speculate that SkiBros v. SkiCos (Green v. Vail et al, if you prefer official names or whatever), is a product of several historic, cultural, and market ingredients, nurtured and cured and combined into the sort of Crap Stew that is U.S. American Skiing 2026. No one likes Crap Stew, but everyone helped make it. The ski area operators, who trashed traditional pricing structures with an arrogance that ignored socio-cultural and -economic fallout, are the natural and obvious villains here. But American skiers, who for decades have embraced a group identity defined by the irreconcilable beliefs that wilderness recreation ought to be easily accessible but remain as undeveloped as possible, are also to blame for creating, with destination ski resorts, a product scarcity that a handful of opportunistic operators could easily consolidate and control. Abetting and connecting these codependent antagonists is an administrative state that, especially in the West, has been steadily neutered and politicized, its powers defined down to give operators the broadest possible economic freedom at the expense of the consumer, whom the agencies placate with a regime of environmental stridency that over-protects the vanishingly small tracts of America’s 640 million public acres that we’ve set aside for intensive use.

American skiing works well in many ways. Despite ill-informed headlines fixated on the declining number of ski areas from historic highs, the industry, as a whole, has proven itself to be a climate-change super-adapter that offers rich consumer choice in nearly every U.S. market and at nearly every price tier. In 2026, there is more skiable terrain, more skiers, and more average annual skier visits than there was in 1976 or 1986 or 1996 or 2006 (well, 2026 kinda tanked, but 10-year participation trends are solidly higher than historical averages). But American skiing is broken in important ways, too. These are many and varied, and SkiBros v. SkiCos articulates – or at least infers – many of these anxieties. The most important of which is this: an antagonistic day-ticket pricing structure that ski area operators are aware of but refuse to acknowledge is undercutting the advent of dynamic and inventive products that have made skiing cheaper than ever for consumers who pay attention and shop in advance. As a result – and this is perhaps the most important point – the narrative power of the peak-day lift ticket cost, amplified via social media, has overwhelmed any ski industry efforts to keep skiers focused on the fact that skiing is fun and awesome.

There is a lot more to explore here. But I’m on a family vacation until next week, and I’m in the process of a major podcast revamp that will make Storm content more timely, consistent, and frequent. So before getting too deep into Captain Analysis mode and ruining the trip and dismissing my children to the care of the internet where embittered and vengeful they will eventually cast me as the main character in a 2038 Cats In The Cradle punk-country-sci-fi reboot or perhaps just convince the robots to kill me to loot their inheritance which surprise kids is a 2020 Pacifica overdue for an oil change and a bunch of left-over wicket-tickets from the 1990s, I’ll publish a historical series I’ve assembled over the past few months analyzing American lift-served skiing’s modern evolution.

Stand by.

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DAY 24 – BRECKENRIDGE

Have you ever played the How-Many-States/Countries-You’ve-Visited game and gotten hung up on The Airport Problem? Like are you allowed to count a place on your Tourist Checklist if the only thing you did was land in the airport and change planes? I have that problem with South Korea, which I either have or have not been to twice, and I’d had a similar problem since skiing like five runs at Breckenridge in November 1998. The only things I remember about that day are taking a bus to the lifts from the parking lot and “no jumping” signs positioned at all the places where I wanted to jump. So, this past February - even though I was staying the week in Vail Village a hundred yards from Gondola 1 - I figured it was time to make the drive over to Summit County for a Breckenridge refresh.

It helps to get on the ground at Breck, as the mountain’s naming conventions make skiing there as confusing as possible. The ski area’s terrain pod and base-area names correspond with the summit names above them, which are unimaginatively labeled Peak 6, Peak 7, Peak 8, Peak 9, and Peak 10 (I’m aware that this is not Vail’s fault, and that I probably just offended some vaunted American mountain pioneer named Silas or Harlan or Wyatt, who, after a 40-week overland journey in which he lost two covered wagons’ worth of beaver furs and his five trustiest mules in the Ambush of Dead Man’s Creek, gazed upon these Rocky Mountain wonders and declared, “These peaks shall forever memorialize my Trustiest Mules: Mule 6, Mule 7, Mule 8, Mule 9, and Mule 10.” And one of the natives was like “We already have names for those mountains” and Pioneer Bro was like “Bro stop making everything so complicated, we’re only naming the mountains so that we can own them forever, chill Brah jeez”). This numbered convention should make things easier, but I have never been able to remember which peak is which. Complicating navigation is 10 lifts named [SOMETHING] Superchair (sorry Vail I am not going along with the mid-word uppercase “c”), an additional two “super” lifts, and a sprinkling of 900-year-old double chairs named after numbers and letters. This whole constellation bends and crisscrosses in a baffling sprawl that looks as though it was drawn by a 5-year-old (Calm down, Map Defender Bro; it is a good map drawn by a legend, but what it depicts is pure madness):

It’s a good thing I had a guide: Jon Copeland, a Tahoe transplant who’s been Breck’s VP and COO for the past two seasons. Before we arrived, I gave him two pieces of information: we’d be skiing with my 9-year-old son, and our goal was to ride as many of Breck’s 20 aerial lifts as possible.

Our weekday visit eliminated the option of riding weekend backups A-Chair and C-Chair. The mediocre winter eliminated waiting-for-better-conditions, high-altitude 6-Chair and Imperial Superchair. And my son’s not-quite-ready-for-Colorado-blacks ability level eliminated Falcon Superchair.

But we rode everything else. “Well, I’m not sure how much skiing we did,” Copeland said at the end of our tour, “but we moved around a lot.”

What is remarkable about a day at Breckenridge is the degree to which the resort defies its Mt. Generic, epitome-of-corporate-skiing, Epic Pass-tourist-corral rap. In lived experience, that massive, dense lift network, so baffling on a trailmap, crystalizes into something far more approachable. Breck, high-altitude, snow- and sun-blessed, laced with never-ending and tree-dotted blues, delivers the everyskier’s destination archetype - even the most vaguely competent skier will be pleased with themselves here. For skiers more attuned to the big-mountain American destination experience, Breck delivers something else: novelty to a degree normally stowed in backwater ski areas with hand-written cafeteria price boards.

This is especially true of the ski area’s unusual lift fleet. Skiing lift-to-lift at Breckenridge is a little like skiing around a Six Flags, or Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, or a child’s imagination. Each machine is different. This is true at all ski areas, but Breck packs more wacky, what-the-hell-man lifts into one resort footprint than any other ski area on the continent. Breck’s lift fleet, as a whole, “is among the most unique anywhere,” Lift Blog’s Peter Landsman wrote in 2017. “Nowhere else can you find so many lifts with turns (5), lifts that cross other lifts (4), not to mention North America’s only double-loading detachable and its highest elevation chairlift.”

Here are five that stood out when I cruised around with my son in February:

Quicksilver Superchair - the double-loading six-pack

This thing is a bad idea come to life. I’m not even really sure how to explain how strange this double-loading queue is. Extra credit to the liftie for her reaction to my touristing (if it’s Vail protocol to tell skiers not to film while loading, I’ll reiterate that I was skiing with the head of the resort, and she was probably smart enough to file my behavior as an exemption, so don’t go all TPS Reports on her):

This lift probably seemed like a good idea in 1999. It wasn’t a good idea. The lift has the highest misload rate of any chair at the resort, resulting, according to the ski area’s 2022 U.S. Forest Service masterplan, in a “reduction in hourly capacity of approximately 20 percent. … This is a because of the QuickSilver SuperChair’s unusual double-loading design. The bottom station of the QuickSilver SuperChair alternates between sending chairs on two different tracks, both of which have guest loading areas. While this design allows a shorter spacing of carriers, it is also difficult to manage and confusing for guests, leading to an increased misload rate.”

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The 24-hour clock is one of civilization’s great achievements. Nations don’t share a common language, currency, electrical voltage, or system to measure temperature, size, distance, or weight. We can’t agree on what side of the road to drive on or whether dogs are family members or supper. But we all use the same clock.

This is astonishing. How did it happen? Like how do we not have some block of countries that rejected our hierarchy of 60-second minutes and 60-minute hours and 24-hour days for a metric clock with 100 kiloticks each lasting 1,000 ticks of 1,000 milliticks each? Imagine just trying to organize a conference call. Like “OK I’m free at 3 p.m., which is 43.60 for Jim out in Calgary, but that’s the Hour of the Yak in Shanghai, and they’re generally not free until sometime between tail and horn.”

That’s not to say that the clock doesn’t do its best to ruin us. China, a nation wider than the continental United States, locks the entire country into a single timezone. In what felt like a strange sort of time travel, I once departed Seoul, South Korea around 11 a.m., flew 14 hours, and arrived in New York City a bit before 11:00 a.m. the same day.

In skiing, timezones can be our friends. Direct early-morning flights mean I can wake up in Brooklyn and, picking up two or three hours hauling west, be skiing Vail Mountain or Snowbird or Mount Bachelor or Alpental around lunchtime. Timezones can also baffle us, especially when their borders don’t align with more familiar administrative boundaries. Nearly all of Michigan’s 10.1 million residents live in the eastern timezone, with the odd exception of around 75,000 people and nine ski areas in four counties in the far-western portion of the state’s Upper Peninsula. Snow-socked Idaho sits mostly in the Mountain Timezone, but three of the state’s largest ski areas – Schweitzer, Silver Mountain, and Lookout Pass – live in the state’s northern panhandle, a zone inexplicably slotted into Pacific time. In one of the more bizarre administrative setups in skiing, Lookout Pass straddles the Idaho-Montana border, and thus spins lifts in two timezones (the ski area designates all operations with Pacific time).

If our timekeeping practices sometimes feel arbitrary or ridiculous, it’s because they are. Time – along with universally acknowledged things such as money, religion, and national borders – are what historian Yuval Noah Harari calls “fictions” – things that only exist because humans collectively agree to believe in them. There is only one clock. It is called “the sun.” But the sun is difficult to quantify from the vantage of our rounded, tilting planet. The fact that it appears and disappears each day worked fine until trains - and their habit of moving at consistent speeds between stations - came along. Competing train lines invented their own clocks in the United States and Europe, an idea that worked about as well as their contemporary barter system of otter furs, turpentine, and dugout canoes. So that everyone could agree on when 2 p.m. was when preparing for a 2 p.m. train arrival, England instated the first national clock in 1880. The U.S. followed three years later.

We’ve been tinkering with the clock ever since. Congress adopted American timezones in 1918. The rest of the world more or less agreed on what time it was by World War II. Daylight Savings Time (DST) wedged itself in there somewhere, mostly in North America and Europe. For parts of the World Wars and into the 1960s, U.S. DST became (regionally) year-round, then reverted to an every-six-months national clock-switching exercise in 1966, became “permanent” for 10 months in 1974, converted to a seven-month DST block in 1986, and evolved into the current eight-month, November-to-March window in 2005.

The latest proposed change is the Sunshine Protection Act, which would make DST permanent across the United States. The bill passed the U.S. House of Representatives last month and now sits in Senate committee review. U.S. President Donald J. Trump loves the idea of ditching what he’s called the “ridiculous, twice-yearly production” of springing-forward and falling-back. Most sleep experts oppose the bill, claiming that a one-hour extension of morning wintertime darkness would produce ill health effects. As of Aug. 2, Govtrack.us, an independent website that tracks the status of proposed legislation, gave the bill a 12 percent chance of becoming law.

“Bro I thought this was a newsletter about skiing, not a platform for your pseudo-historical recaps and cracks about otter pelts?”

I am getting to the skiing part, Angry Ski Bro. And the skiing part is this: a shift to permanent DST would push already-late winter sunrises an additional hour into darkness during the peak December-to-February ski season for most North American operators. While this is an extreme example, look at how late the sun would rise at Mount Bohemia, Michigan, which hangs off the far west side of the Eastern Timezone (all sunrise times in this article were sourced from maplogs.com, and do not consider hyper-local impacts to useable light, such as shadows from neighboring mountains or a ski area’s predominant directional aspect):

“I can’t imagine a stupider issue to waste time on than changing daylight savings time,” Lonie Glieberman, the outspoken owner of Mount Bohemia, Michigan, wrote to The Storm via text message. “Daylight savings time works.”

Most operators share Glieberman’s concerns. This shift would almost certainly push the traditional ski area opening hour of 9 a.m. later, operators of ski areas across the continent told The Storm. At particular risk are large western resorts that rely on early daylight for avalanche-mitigation measures and patrol sweeps that they cannot conduct in darkness or artificial light.

Ski area operators have been alarmed enough by the momentum behind the Sunshine Protection Act - versions of which have stalled out in past Congressional sessions - to lobby Congress against its passage. Powdr, the Park City-based operator that owns Snowbird, Utah; Copper Mountain, Colorado; Mount Bachelor, Oregon; and several other ski areas, shared with The Storm a letter signed by CEO Justin Sibley addressed to Colorado Congressman Joe Neguse, whose district includes Vail Mountain, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, Keystone, Copper, Arapahoe Basin, Loveland, Winter Park, Steamboat, and six smaller ski areas (Echo, Eldora, Granby Ranch, Howelsen Hill, Frisco, and Hoedown Hill):

Dear Congressman Neguse,

On behalf of POWDR, one of North America’s largest adventure lifestyle, I am contacting you to share our strong opposition to the Sunshine Protection Act, or any movement towards permanent Daylight Savings Time (DST), and to urge a shift in focus toward permanent Standard Time, if change is necessary.

While the public consensus trends towards eliminating the biannual clock change, forcing the country into permanent DST would deal a severe blow to winter recreation, our workforce, and the 5 million American jobs our broader industry supports.

At our seven ski resorts across the United States, including Copper Mountain and Eldora in Colorado, morning efficiency is everything. Our teams routinely begin on-mountain preparations long before our 9:00 AM openings to maximize daylight for skiers and riders. Under a permanent DST model, winter sunrise would be delayed until after 9:00 AM in many mountain regions. Forcing our essential early-morning operations to take place in pitch darkness would immediately compromise worker and guest safety. While grooming machines can operate at night, critical tasks like lift infrastructure inspections, ski patrol safety sweeps, and avalanche mitigation demand natural sunlight. Attempting this highly technical work in the dark introduces unacceptable hazards.

To guarantee basic safety under late sunrises, resorts would be forced to delay openings until daylight permits. This would shrink the ski day, compress our operational window, and artificially inflate energy costs by requiring extensive floodlighting. Furthermore, because skier satisfaction relies heavily on early-morning conditions, these delayed openings will discourage participation. The resulting drop in visitation will hurt not just our resorts, but the hotels, restaurants, and small businesses in our surrounding gateway communities that depend on robust winter tourism. Finally, if schools and standard business hours do not shift in tandem with our forced operational changes, the resulting scheduling friction will create massive logistical hurdles for our workforce, guests, and skiing families alike.

The outdoor recreation economy thrives when it aligns with the natural rhythm of the day. If a change in our timekeeping is necessary, we strongly recommend moving to permanent Standard Time, which achieves the consistency the public desires while protecting the safety, sustainability, and economic viability of the winter sports industry. As this legislative conversation continues, we urge you to vote against permanent Daylight Time and instead champion permanent Standard Time.

The obvious question is: why not simply shift the standard 9 a.m.-to-4 p.m. western ski area operating day one hour, opening at 10 and closing at 5? The issue, Powdr’s Vice President of Communications and Government Affairs Stacey Hutchinson told me, is that skiing exists in a hardened ecosystem of schools, businesses, and government agencies that are unlikely to alter their own business hours, displacing key skier demographics from timeslots they’ve built ski habits around.

“Visitation in our early hours is important, and unless all the other industries in town shift an hour as well, and schools and businesses start at 10, we would lose the folks who show up at 9 for first tracks and then skate into work,” Hutchinson said in a phone call. “And I don’t think the extra hour in the afternoon will make up for that – that’s when people do afternoon activities, dinner, errands.”

The Canadian Complication

Before I go any further into the hassles of a potential shift to permanent DST for U.S. ski areas, I’ll point out that most of British Columbia already shifted to permanent DST as of this past March. That pushes sunrise in Whistler - by far the busiest ski area on the continent - past 9 a.m. starting Dec. 10. Sunrise would then peak at a high of 9:12 a.m. from Dec. 30 to Jan. 2, and float back below 9 (8:59 a.m.) on Jan. 23.

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