Oh Dear Lord what ever would I do with more thoughtful ski content in my life? I mean as much as I enjoy self-righteous Twitter knobs lecturing the masses about snow tires, I launched The Storm in 2019 because I wanted to read it. The magazines had wilted to the verge of their pending extinction, and the only ski media remaining seemed to be press release reprints in industry trades, everything-is-rad-let’s-not-offend-the-mountain-overlords stoke pieces, and a handful of big-mouthed morons who had declared themselves the voices of AmeriSki by collecting the most social media minions.

Much to my surprise, The Storm worked. It is the largest ski newsletter on Substack, my full-time job, and a growing and sustainable small business. But I don’t fear competition. I want other smart, interesting voices saying smart, interesting things about skiing. Like skiing itself, ski writing functions better as an ecosystem - Snowbird doesn’t work as an experts’ haven without Park City as a tourist vacuum, and Park City doesn’t work as a mass-market resort without Nordic Valley as a cheap and un-intimidating teaching center. Ski writing needs big voices, loud voices, sensible voices, local voices, tourist voices, pragmatic voices - all streaming around and into one another. That we lack this point-of-view diversity is why my opinions on issues like the Little Cottonwood Gondola (build it), chairlift safety bars (I like them), skinning (you’re skiing in the wrong direction, Bro), and base-area development (the best environmental policy would put more beds at the mountain to temper sprawl and traffic), often spark such feral let’s-cancel-this-guy reactions among the Brobots. “Well what do you know? You live in NEW YORK CITY!” I mean sick burn Bro. But do you have anything to say that isn’t code for how rad or virtuous you are because you can afford a spare set of $1,200 tires?

My other lifestyle obsession aside from skiing is Michigan Wolverines football. I’ve watched every game live for 25 years, often in person, because I have season tickets even though I live 600 miles from Michigan Stadium. The Wolverines only play 12 games per year, but I think about the team every day. This is easy to do, because there are a half-dozen podcasts, a daily radio show, and several blogs that exhaustively cover the team (one of them, MGoBlog, was a huge inspiration for the voice and tenor of The Storm). And yet, Michigan is just one of 138 teams playing at the FBS level. They’re not all prestige programs with Wolverines-level coverage, but several dozen of them support at least an equally sprawling and fanatic media ecosystem.

The world’s tens of millions of skiers deserve better than the scraps of Me-Jump-Off-Cliff stoke, empty corporate quotes, and sourpuss whining from “locals” who moved to Utah five weeks ago. They deserve thoughtful, clever, enlightening, uplifting writing and they deserve a huge range of ideas to consider.

So when I read this post from a newly launched Substack out of New Zealand, I could hardly believe it was real. I expected to skim, but I read, because the writing is original, thoughtful, interesting:

In Europe, winter arrives with a certain institutional confidence. In Japan, snow seems to fall with the reliability of a government department that happens to be very good at powder. In Canada, winter often looks as though it has turned up early, unpacked properly, and intends to stay for dinner.

In New Zealand, winter arrives like a builder.

It says it will be there Monday.

Then maybe Wednesday.

Then it sends a text saying the weather has been a bit tricky, but it is definitely not far away.

So we wait.

More:

The wind did it.

Not wind in the polite sense. Not the alpine breeze that moves through European resort villages and makes people in matching jackets adjust their scarves. This was New Zealand mountain wind. It had arrived from Antarctica in a foul mood, crossed the Southern Ocean, climbed the Southern Alps, and now wished to personally remove my face.

I was standing near the top of a ski field that, technically speaking, was open. A lift was turning. A few skiers were moving. Somewhere below, a café was selling flat whites and pies with the quiet confidence of a civilisation that has survived worse things than sideways sleet. The sky was blue in one direction, black in another, and directly above me was a kind of white-grey violence that made all colour meaningless.

A child in a race suit shot past, utterly unconcerned.

Behind him came his father, less fast but more committed, making the expression common to New Zealand ski parents everywhere. It said: I have driven two hours, paid for the passes, carried three pairs of skis, argued about gloves, and by God we are skiing.

This is New Zealand skiing.

Not glamorous exactly. Not smooth. Not always sensible. But fiercely alive.

Anyway, do yourself a favor and read the rest of it. And also subscribe to The 170 Project newsletter. Because more sign-ups will inspire the author, who will hopefully continue writing very good and interesting ski content (I don’t know the author and have not communicated with them, though once I launch the new podcast format in September, this is the kind of piece that would inspire me to say “Hey Brah come on the pod and talk New Zealand skiing for us U.S. Americans? And by the way, you spelled ‘colour’ wrong. Wait, we’re the ones spelling it wrong? Brah maybe you haven’t heard but these COLORS don’t run.”)

Sorry that one got away from me. Link:

The 170 Project

Waiting for Winter in New Zealand

The first thing you need to understand about skiing in New Zealand is that the emergency sled is not always for emergencies…

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a month ago · 20 likes · 5 comments · NZiSki

If you’re out there and you’re reading The Storm and you’re thinking “this is cool but Stu is an idiot and doesn’t understand these 75 things about skiing and ski life and ski culture and about radness and why he lacks it, and I should start my own podcast/newsletter but I won’t because I don’t want to step on his turf,” please stop thinking that right now. I mean you can think I’m dumb but don’t worry about a turf war or whatever. Start the newsletter and podcast. Not only would I not be upset, I would be absolutely ecstatic. I would (probably) help you promote it. I would have you on the podcast to tell me why it’s better than mine. That, after all, is how America works: find a market and fight to the death to win a piece of it. Right now, skiing is a badly underserved media market. That I’ve proven, with The Storm, that there is an audience willing to pay for quality ski content in 2026 does not mean that I’ve cornered or claimed or tapped out that audience. It just means that I’ve made contact and proven that life can exist in even the most inhospitable environments, like a nation whose brains have been removed and stowed in their Pet Rectangles. And with 10 million or more skiers in America - most of whom, um, are not exactly cashing in foodstamps to buy supper - there is certainly potential to engage them with inventive content about their very favorite thing.

Anyway here are the other skiing Substacks that I recommend. Please consider at least joining their free subscriber tier. They are all different and all do their own bit to keep the scaffolding of ski journalism up while renovations on the main facility continue:

For updates on New England skiing, from the team that maintains the excellent - if eclectic - New England Ski History site:

SkiNewEngland.net

New England ski news and history

For the family skier:

The Ski Mom

The Ski Moms is a community-driven newsletter and podcast for mountain-loving moms, filled with ski tips, gear advice, travel inspiration, and real-life stories from the slopes.

By Nicole Feliciano

From our friends in Australia:

The Snowstack

Over 20 years of experience in closely monitoring the Australian Alpine, snow weather & climate. Sub in to get the low down on the snow, severe weather, climate, and geoscience, with a twist of photography & surfing.

A more conversational voice, out of Colorado:

Slopeside

Slopeside is your year-round dispatch on ski culture covering mountain news, winter trends, skiwear, and overall alpine living.

By Chloe Harlig

This big-mountain patroller makes me laugh:

Ski Patrol Notes

Real life skiing, patrol, adventure stories. Ownership - Courage - Guidance. Inspiration to be scared and do it anyway.

And Halley O’Brien, who has imported her upbeat, clever Snow Report to Substack:

Oh yeah and then there’s this idiot:

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast

Everyone’s searching for skiing’s soul. I’m trying to find its brains.

By Stuart Winchester

Are there other ski Substacks that I should know about? I’m looking for lively voices saying interesting things and publishing consistently.

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Durango, Colorado-based Mountain Capital Partners (MCP) has withdrawn its bid to acquire a controlling interest in El Colorado and three other Chilean ski areas owned by Andacor S.A.

MCP owns nine active and two dormant U.S. ski areas, as well as Valle Nevado and La Parva in Chile. Last summer, the company announced ambitions to interlink El Colorado, along with the smaller Parque Farellones ski area, with its existing Chilean mountains, and to eventually expand the complex into the largest ski center in the western hemisphere. Two mid-sized ski areas included in the deal, Volcán Osorno and Pillán, sit several hours south in the Chilean Andes and would have served as nodes in a hub-and-spoke network that gave local passholders access to one of South America’s premier ski destinations.

Breaking the deal, it appears, was a mandate from Chile’s National Economic Prosecutor’s Office (FNE) – the loose equivalent of the U.S. Justice Department’s Antitrust Division – that one of the so-called Tres Valles ski areas (La Parva, Valle Nevado, El Colorado) be sold to a third-party.

“Naturally, such measures are incompatible with MCP’s investment objectives and the parties’ goal of creating one of the largest and most accessible mountain destinations in the world,” read a joint statement provided to The Storm and credited to MCP and Andacor parent Cururo.

According to the statement, Chile’s FNE rejected “a series of investments and commercial benefits offered by MCP and Cururo as mitigation measures.” MCP provided The Storm with a summary of these “mitigation commitments,” which include:

• Broad access products: MCP promised to sell season passes valid at all of its U.S. and Chilean ski areas as well as unlimited, Tres Vallees-specific passes good for unlimited access between El Colorado, Valle Nevado, and La Parva. MCP would continue to offer free passes to the 12-and-under and over-75 age groups.

• Infrastructure upgrades: MCP would pledge to at least double the $25 million it has invested in snowmaking expansions, lift upgrades, and other infrastructure improvements at Valle Nevado and La Parva since 2023. Planned projects include a chairlift connecting the small Farellones ski area with the larger El Colorado; a two-stage gondola that would feed a 741-acre “Parva Grande” expansion; a “Santa Teresita” chairlift opening another, 437-acre expansion; another new gondola linking the base of La Parva to mid-mountain terrain; and snowmaking and grooming upgrades. MCP also planned a lift rehab at Pillán and a new “drag lift” at Volcán Osorno.

MCP acquired 2,400-acre Valle Nevado in 2023, and adjacent, 1,977-acre La Parva the following year. Existing ski trails connect both ski areas to one another and to 1,100-acre El Colorado, which links down to microscopic Parque Farellones. The giant ski complex looms in the fortress peaks towering over Santiago, the fifth-largest city in South America and the largest in Chile, with 6.2 million residents.

MCP’s ambitions, driven by this enormous adjacent market and a reliable supply of U.S. skiers holding Ikon (valid at Valle), Mountain Collective (same), or the company’s own Power Pass (La Parva and Valle), was to consolidate operations and expand onto adjacent land. Eventually, MCP Managing Partner James Coleman told me on the podcast in 2024, they could create one of the largest ski areas in the world and eclipse 8,171-acre Whistler as the biggest in the western hemisphere.

Rather than foiling competition, MCP argued, this unified ski kingdom would have benefitted skiers. The statement announcing the deal’s termination – translated from the Spanish, which accounts for some awkward wording below – outlines an extensive case for consolidating Tres Valles:

This submission does not alter the conviction that each of the companies maintains that, in this industry, integration constitutes the most solid path to strengthen the development of mountain sports in Chile and position the country as the leading ski destination in the Southern Hemisphere and the world.

During this process of nearly a year of review by the FNE, the parties maintained that a strategic partnership would allow offering a better experience to visitors, drive new infrastructure investments, enable a broader skiable terrain and new runs, and provide greater sustainability to an industry facing increasingly complex financial challenges. This vision is shared by the vast majority of consumers, who supported the integration of the ski centers.

Our commitment to developing mountain tourism in Chile and the vision that has inspired this initiative remains fully in effect. We are convinced that integration would have represented the best alternative for local consumers, for the national economy, and for the sustainability of ski centers.

MCP signs off with a commitment to “continue working and investing in the development of our mountain centers and promoting initiatives that contribute to the ski industry, so that Chile fully leverages one of its greatest tourism potentials.” In other words, the company doesn’t plan to back out of South America just because it couldn’t secure El Colorado.

While Chile is well-respected in ski circles as a reliable destination for June-through-September turns, the nation’s developed ski footprint is incredibly small, with fewer than 20 active, developed ski centers dotting Chile’s 2,600-mile-long chunk of the Andes.

The notion of consolidating more than one-third of the nation’s ski areas - and one of Chile’s only truly modern ski centers - under one owner appears to have spooked Chilean antitrust regulators. Such concerns have foiled ski operators’ consolidation ambitions in the past. U.S. antitrust regulators required American Skiing Company to sell Cranmore and Waterville Valley when LBO Resorts and S-K-I merged to form the new entity in 1996. The following year, the Justice Department required Vail Resorts to sell Arapahoe Basin after purchasing it, along with Keystone and Breckenridge, from Ralston-Purina. More recently, Justice investigated Alterra’s 2024 bid to buy Arapahoe Basin, ultimately allowing the deal to proceed.

This may be the first instance of regulators outside the United States blocking a ski area sale to a U.S.-based operator, though such deals have been limited. While U.S.-based multimountain passes have grown to include access to 163 ski areas outside of the country, U.S.-based multimountain operators own just 14 ski areas abroad, and half of those are in Canada. MCP is the only U.S.-based operator with an interest in a South American ski area. Chilean authorities’ hesitance to approve such a broad American footprint, and the year-long review process, hints at the bureaucratic complexity U.S. operators may continue to face as they run out of local ski areas to buy.

So now what? For MCP, for Chilean skiing, for consolidation? Now that we know that El Colorado is on the market, could one of the other big U.S. ski companies bid for it? Let’s take a deeper look.

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One of my jobs as a low-level NBA drone in the late 2000s was to transcribe public interviews whenever then-commissioner David Stern gave a media interview. It was perhaps the most tedious work I’ve ever been assigned. Each 10-minute interview required hours of starting, stopping, reversing, correcting. And I’m a pretty fast typer (one dumb analogy I often think about is how everyone in a white-collar office setting is an expert typer, just like every professional hockey player is an expert skater, but no one’s ever like “man that dude can fucking type/skate!”)

But now I live in the future, where the robots transcribe a two-hour conversation in about two minutes. Or at least that’s about how long it takes on Substack, which is the platform that I publish The Storm on.

The auto-generated transcript option appeared on the dashboard where I publish Storm articles about four years ago. This sort of obviously-useful-but-unexpected addition is why I love Substack as a host platform. At first, I had to click “generate transcript,” and click again on “show on post” to make the transcript button visible to readers. Eventually, though, the transcripts started appearing automatically. Until they didn’t – and I realized after a reader comment on yesterday’s article that transcripts hadn’t been appearing on podcast articles for the past year or so.

So I went through and added them all. You should see a button to display the transcript just beneath the headline in the article accompanying the podcast at stormskiing.com. The exact location of the “Transcript” button may vary depending upon which browser (Chrome, Safari, etc.) you’re using, and on whether you’re on a computer or Pet Rectangle:

There are pluses and minuses to these transcripts. I do not proofread them. They are not 100 percent accurate. They miss ski-specific eccentricities such as “Ikon” (spelled “icon”). They do not differentiate between speakers. But the transcripts are downloadable and searchable. The coolest feature is that you can click on any part of the transcript and the audio or video player will automatically jump to that point in the podcast:

Transcripts should be in place for every podcast beginning with #92, Alterra CEO Rusty Gregory. If any are missing from 92 onward, let me know and I will update them. Episodes 1 through 91 were uploaded to an older version of Substack’s content management system, which as of July 2026 does not include the option to generate a transcript.

You can browse past Storm Skiing Podcast episodes here. We’re up to episode 227, and I’ll drop another half dozen or so before we shift momentum to the news-focused pod in September. I’ll continue to record long-form Storm Skiing Podcasts indefinitely, though the annual average will shrink from its onetime high of around 45 episodes to more like 10 to 20 to make way for the shorter, more frequent pods that I teased yesterday.

View All Storm Skiing Podcasts

The pod has also been on Youtube since episode 198, with Mammoth head Eric Clark.

The Youtube channel doesn’t have a big following yet, and most of The Storm’s audience still listens to the pod on Apple, Spotify, or other audio channels. But the channel will be increasingly important as The Storm moves into a news-centric podcast format. Please give us a follow:

Follow 'The Storm' on Youtube

One common concern I’m hearing from The Storm’s audience in regards to the pod refresh is that it will diminish coverage of smaller ski areas that I often spotlight on the pod. My goal is exactly the opposite: with shorter, in-the-moment, more-frequent episodes, I can feature more small ski area stories more often. Take, for example, Nub’s Nob, Michigan, a huge favorite of Michiganders that is relatively unknown outside the state. I hosted longtime GM Ben Doornbos on the podcast about four years ago, and we continue to regularly talk, email, and text. Nub’s may be the best-run sub-450-vertical-foot ski area on the continent. But as much as I like and respect Ben and Nub’s Nob and the culture of Midwest skiing, I really can’t serve up an hour-plus Nub’s Nob podcast to a national audience with any sort of regularity. What I can do with this shorter news format, however, is quick check-ins on relevant news. For example, Nub’s announced this spring that the resort would replace its Orange chair, a 1979 Riblet triple, with a new Skytrac quad in time for the 2026-27 ski season. Ben and I messaged back and forth about that, but it would have been a great moment to bring him into a 10-minute Zoom call and talk about the upgrade: why now? Why Orange chair? What did you learn from the Green upgrade to a Skytrac in 2023 that will help you make this project better? Will the new Orange chair follow the same line? Which lift might Nub’s replace next? And so on. Meanwhile, on a separate segment of the same show, I can talk national trends happening with passes or consolidation or skier visits. Tucking Nub’s into a pod that also riffs about, for example, the Ikon Pass, would make it much more likely that my national audience – which may have never clicked on a Nub’s Nob-specific podcast at all – will learn and appreciate the story of a small but important ski area.

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TLDR if you want to skip the long, dumb intro: I will launch a shorter, more frequent, news-oriented podcast format in September. It will not replace the newsletter or the long-form Storm Skiing Podcast, though it will reduce the frequency of the latter from historic levels.

How incredible is the human body? Lockheed Matin’s F-35A fighter jets cost $83 million apiece. Each plane’s expected lifetime use is 8,000 hours, spread over 30 to 40 years. Hourly operating cost is $42,000. Annual maintenance ran $6.6 million per plane as of 2024. Pilot’s helmets cost $400,000 each. Each F-35 takes 18 months to build along a 24-hour-per-day assembly line staffed with 4,000 workers and 50 robots.

And yet, the human body, able to operate 24 hours per day for a century or longer, outlasts this intricate machine even with a far simpler production process. Human life expectancy in the United States is 79 years. Humans are generally free to make, by a process that requires only two workers and less than one minute. Humans then build themselves. And they are amazing. Nothing in life or make-believe has astonished me more than watching my daughter, now 18, emerge from her mother. She was still for a moment, then erupted. A fully formed human. How did this happen? Somehow the female body takes bread and chicken and lasagna and Coke and raspberries and refried beans and water and synthesizes them into a construct more complex and durable than any machine of human crafting.

Human maintenance, however, is not free. The pre-industrial human lifespan hovered around 30 years. Writing for The New York Times Magazine in 2021, Steven Johnson summarized the miracle of extended human longevity in a remarkable article (based on his book of similar name), How Humanity Gave Itself an Extra Life:

“…during the century since the end of the Great Influenza outbreak [1918-19], the average human life span has doubled. There are few measures of human progress more astonishing than this. If you were to publish a newspaper that came out just once a century, the banner headline surely would — or should — be the declaration of this incredible feat. … In a sense, human beings have been increasingly protected by an invisible shield, one that has been built, piece by piece, over the last few centuries, keeping us ever safer and further from death. It protects us through countless interventions, big and small: the chlorine in our drinking water, the ring vaccinations that rid the world of smallpox, the data centers mapping new outbreaks all around the planet.”

I often (maybe constantly), wonder about life before this “invisible shield.” Contemplating the carnage of Civil War battles, at the dawn of industrialized warfare but long before industrialized medicine, horrifies me. Our amazing, invisible-until-you-need-it medical system’s trauma interventions have saved my shattered leg and, two years later, my heart. To be inserted, unexpectedly, into a gigantic and intricate medical-industrial machine that you did not realize existed is humbling.

But broken legs and hearts are outlier events that make a good story. Less dramatic medical developments are no less a miracle. The cholesterol drugs and blood thinners prescribed to me post-heart incident. Childhood vaccines administered to me and my children. And all the machines and scanners and detectors: the colonoscopy that identified a small, benign polyp in my colon; the ultrasound that unveiled images of my children from their earliest weeks (it’s incredible to me that, even in the late 1970s, my parents had no idea of my sex until I popped out); and, my personal bestie at the moment, the MRI.

I say “bestie,” but I hate MRIs. The claustrophobia and noise. When technicians slid me into one about six years ago, I panic-buttoned my way directly back out to the room with a high ceiling that was not going to ingest me like Pinocchio’s whale. But over time, I’ve adopted a sequence of breathing – four breathes in, hold four counts, four counts out – that, along with keeping my eyes shut the entire time, has made the experience at least tolerable.

It’s a good thing, because I’ve had four MRI scans in the past year: one to determine whether the plate nailed to my left tib-fib was infected (it wasn’t); one to confirm that my left shoulder had rotator cuff tears (it did, along with a biceps tendon tear); one to examine my brain for abnormalities related to chronic migraines (all it showed was some dancing cartoon figurine surrounded by unreadably dense charts and spreadsheets); and a final one, this week, to root out the source of neck pain (it found three pinched spinal nerves and a slipped disk).

Like machines, people’s parts wear out. No trauma, just slow decline. In my case, a Manhattan doctor explained to me the following day, mild arthritis had infected my vertebrae. The miracle treatment: a 20-minute epidural infusion done onsite, same-day, under anesthesia. That was yesterday. I feel better already. In two weeks, I’ll return for a follow-up and, if needed, an additional infusion.

And how incredible is all that? The neck pain had erupted more than two years ago, waxing and waning and often making long drives or long hours at a computer – both crucial to my job – unbearable. Over the past couple of months, the stiffness and tension worsened to the point that I was borderline non-functional, constantly on ice packs, whisky or wine my bottled nightly painkillers. I couldn’t sleep for more than 90 minutes at a time, and rarely more than a few hours per night. But in less than a 30-hour span, Our Amazing Future identified and fixed all that with skin-penetrating scanners and a lightweight surgical setup.

Neck pain is the kind of thing that sounds too stupid to complain about. None of the drama of the brain or the heart, or even of a rash or cut. The only material representation of neck pain is complaining about neck pain. But what I’ve come to appreciate over a lifetime of ridiculous injuries is how interdependent this amazing human body is on its countless parts, and how debilitating and painful even the smallest ailment can be: toothaches, a polyp on the tongue, a jammed finger or toe. When the neck is squeezed into a constantly-wrenching vice grip, only the neck hurts, but the discomfort of that takes the rest of the body out with it.

Hopefully I’ve solved the problem (and hopefully my endless run of orthopedic woes will take a few years off). But the neck has contributed to a productivity drop. Unable to sit upright for any amount of time, sleeping poorly, and unable to summon the tremendous mental concentration required for writing, I’ve released content at an irregular pace. But I’ve had a lot of time to think, and I believe that the long-term improvements to The Storm that I’ve been contemplating will be worth the short-term productivity lag.

The big change will be in the podcast. I am proud of The Storm Skiing Podcast. When I launched in 2019, long-format interviews were the safest choice. I was best prepared, at that time, for one-on-one conversations with a deeply knowledgeable leader focused, usually, on a single ski area. The format has worked really well. The 227 episodes add up to a permanent archive of modern lift-served skiing’s inner workings, with many of the most accomplished individuals in the sport, a few of whom are now deceased. The pod has nearly 1.5 million downloads, and no doubt fueled The Storm’s rise from side-hustle startup by an industry unknown into a sustainable small business. And the North American Snowsports Journalists Association has honored the pod with the Harold Hirsch Award as best ski podcast for two consecutive years.

I’m not going to make haphazard changes. I don’t like fixing things that aren’t broken. And I don’t like doing things just for the sake of change. But it’s become apparent to me over the past year or so that the current Storm Skiing Podcast format is inadequate in several ways:

Frequency: In its best years, The Storm hit around 45 episodes. That’s pretty good, but most of the podcasts I listen to publish several times per week.

Duration: The average Storm pod times in at one hour and fifteen minutes. That’s appropriate for long-form interviews, but given the hyper-specific subject matter of each episode, it’s hard to scale the per-episode audience outside of the resort’s season passholders and hardcore ski nuts, especially with the smaller operations.

Relevance: About 70 percent of the average Storm Skiing Podcast is probably evergreen, meaning it’s covering unchangeable facts. But plans change, alliances shift, managers leave. Probably at least a quarter of my podcast guests are no longer in the role they represented on the podcast. Meanwhile, most pods I listen to are discussing what’s happening today.

Scope: Perhaps the greatest intangible benefit of The Storm is that I’ve sewn together a tremendous network of industry contacts. I regularly exchange texts, emails, and phone calls with a large proportion of my former guests. But with each episode so fixed on one resort, I can really only host each person on the podcast once every year or two, at most, no matter how charismatic or interesting they are.

Size: Man The Storm Skiing Podcast is carrying around a lot armor, from the write-up to the audio-video execution. Each pod takes 20 to 30 hours to assemble. For that reason, I often release them months after recording.

So what’s the fix? A new podcast format, focused on news, launching after Labor Day. It will air several times per week, many weeks, with the highest frequency in the September-to-December lead-up to ski season and the new-pass releases in the first half of March. It will be short – the goal is 30 to no more than 45 minutes. It will go live the same day I record it. It may actually air live and then immediately hit the archives. I will record emergency podcasts when something titanic – like last year’s sudden return of Rob Katz as Vail CEO – goes down. It will be video, though audio-only options will exist in all the places they do now. There will be little-to-no text component. It will blend analysis of current news, short guest interviews, and listener interaction. The guest list will blend big-timers who run resorts with lower-level employees in operations, communications, ski school, and ski patrol, offering a voice to the accomplished and knowledgeable up-and-comers, as well as journalists, policymakers, activists, and locals. It will live on the existing podcast channel on all platforms. It will be fully integrated into The Storm, and will come directly to your email, just as newsletters and podcasts do now. It will not replace The Storm Skiing Podcast, which I will continue to record 10 to 20 new episodes of each year. The rest of the newsletter will live on exactly as is for now, with all of its unpredictable willfulness and weirdness.

I still have a lot to figure out from a production pipeline and publishing point of view. The great thing about being a content creator in 2026 is that you no longer need a studio of 50 people to produce a newscast. The flip side to that is the bewildering mechanics of self-production. I still maintain that I am a writer with a podcast, not a podcaster with a newsletter, a distinction acutely obvious when I am flummoxed into an hour-long file transfer that would take someone else five seconds.

This week, a representative from one of the big ski companies texted to ask if I was working on a story about the impacts that the shift to permanent daylight savings time (a bill that passed the House and is now with the Senate), would have on skiing. I was not, so she sent me the statement they’d provided to their local congressional representative, and offered to brief me on the company’s approach to the issue and link me up with resort teams to explore the granular impacts in more detail. And I thought, “Yeah, that’s a great story, and how cool would it be to just say, ‘hey, let’s chat it up tomorrow on the pod?’”

This shift will, I believe, make The Storm an overall more relevant and influential source of ski news and analysis. I have to follow the world where it’s going, and it’s going to video, to more frequent pods with news-of-the-day flare. I’ve drawn the blueprint and laid the concrete. This tower is rising. But expect some degree of variation and experimentation as I figure out what this thing is, which parts of it are resonating, and how frequently I can produce them.

I’d welcome your thoughts, either in the comments below, or by replying to this email (or emailing skiing@substack.com). What do you think of the podcast refresh? Am I reading the room right here that we need a reset? What are some segments that other news-focused podcasts do that you’d like to see on The Storm? What else?

One of my goals is to build in benefits for paid subscribers, such as the ability to interact live with the show or submit questions for a weekly Q&A of the “what’s your least-favorite ski area and why?” variety. What would be useful or cool for you?

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Monarch is not supposed to make it. Monarch is not supposed to matter. Monarch is short. Monarch is small. Monarch has no snowmaking. Monarch’s lift fleet is a Mad Max fever dream of scavenged and patched-together machinery. Monarch is 21 miles from the nearest town and more than 100 miles from the nearest interstate. Monarch is not on the Epic or Ikon or Indy or Mountain Collective passes. Monarch has been independently owned and operated for 87 years. Among Colorado’s 27 chairlift-served ski areas, Monarch ranks 17^th in skiable acreage and 23^rd in vertical drop. Vail and Alterra, Epic and Ikon, I-70 and SLC airport access must be absolutely crushing this speck:

Yet, it doesn’t seem so. Monarch paid for its 377-acre, 2025 No Name expansion in cash (brand-new triple chair included). It’s no mystery where the money is coming from: an ever-growing number of skiers. Monarch’s 2025 master development plan (MDP), recently accepted by the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), documents a decadelong upswing in skier visits:

But Monarch has been growing for decades, even as Colorado evolved, with the advent of Interstate 70 and air travel, from rugged snowy hinterland into home base for nearly one in four of America’s annual skier visits. Even with a hokey-pokey fixed-grip lift fleet of four doubles, a triple, and a quad, Monarch has continued to grow more popular as its Colorado competitors built a combined 120 detachable chairlifts and joined the Epic and Ikon Passes en masse.

Monarch is not, however, mistaking resilience for a skier endorsement of stasis. The ski area’s MDP outlines an aggressive modernization that could replace five legacy fixed-grip lifts with detachable quads, add an additional high-speed quad from base to summit, consider (but probably not install) snowmaking, and expand base-area facilities:

It’s an ambitious blueprint, nominally (and aspirationally), spread over three phases. Bureaucratic forever-approvals mean that these “accepted” plans must still undergo intensive U.S. Forest Service review at every subsequent planning and construction phase, and Monarch could decline to implement any or all of what it proposes here. Whether or not Monarch proceeds with any part of this plan, the intentions outlined here tell us quite a bit about the state of U.S. skiing. And what they tell us is that small ski areas, even those lodged into large and complex competitive markets dominated by name-brand tourist destinations and megapasses, can be successful. They want to – and have the ability to – modernize. To survive in the shadow of Breckenridge and Vail and Crested Butte, Monarch doesn’t need to compete with them so much as offer a palatable alternative to them.

There is another story encoded within Monarch’s masterplan, however, and it is one that is less favorable to American skiing’s long-term trajectory: There is no lodging onsite at Monarch. Every skier has to drive there every morning and drive away every night. Even as skier visits chug ever upward and the ski area plans for massive capacity increases fed by modern chairlifts, Monarch proposes parking lot expansions, but no housing or lodging of any kind. This is the broken part of American skiing: the part so enamored with the notion of skiing as a wilderness activity that it fences off development except that to service the day-skier. Too many of our ski areas – Monarch included – are islands in the sky that achieve remoteness only by shoving all the non-ski necessities of human existence dozens of miles down the road, with only (mostly) private cars to tether the two. USFS MDPs, which act as development blueprints for 122 U.S. ski areas that sit at least partially on Forest Service land and are supposed to be updated every decade, offer the most direct opportunity to reset long-term American ski area development from a car-centric enterprise to one anchoring – even encouraging – the founding and expansion of dense, human-centric communities. Instead, Monarch’s latest MDP echoes those of most USFS leases, prioritizing the temporary daytime storage of personal vehicles on public land over long-term community building, and through this arrangement entrenching an inefficient mode of existence that degrades the environment in the name of environmental preservation.

This gridlock and lack of imagination around land use is not Monarch’s fault, as USFS rules generally forbid housing or lodging developments. But Monarch’s masterplan is a convenient case study in the consequences of well-meaning regulations, accumulated over decades, that have locked the American mountain communities of the 2020s into a 1970s preservation framework; a set of rules that is very good at solving the problems of 50 years ago, but is incapable of meeting the challenges of today. What mountain communities need in 2026 is more latitude to reshape the built environment: lots of mixed-use, pedestrian-oriented construction that puts people closer to the things they need in order to reduce dependence on personal vehicles. What mountain communities have, instead, is a set of regulations and legal procedures that is very effective at delaying, stopping, or at the very least driving up the cost of development of any kind.

Let’s take a deeper look at Monarch’s latest MDP, and what the document tells us about the current state of lift-served skiing in America:

1) The small ski area apocalypse is not happening

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At the risk of alienating Vail Resorts’ communications team, which is truly (sincerely) a class organization from top to bottom and coast to coast, I’m going to begin today’s story by complaining about the press release that that communications team (very kindly and unprompted) provided me several days in advance. I have tried to offset each complaint with a compliment, though in some cases the compliments are not really compliments, but just me being a smartass.

First, the “Broseph, get to the point” section of the newsletter: before complaining about the press release announcing Vail Resort’s news, I should tell readers what the news is. The news is basically that Vail is promising to do a good (better) job when you visit their SnoSportSkiing facilities with a bucket of initiatives called - surprise - “Epic Experience” that enhance food, lessons, rentals, ski school, and the My Epic app that ties them all together. Vail is also pledging to be more “aggressive” with snowmaking. And while I could gloat and say “yeah this is all the stuff I was telling Vail to do a year ago,” I’m not really I-Told-You-So Bro, mostly because for every one thing like this that I get right I have 90 dumb takes like “wow what a great idea to install a 40-year-old used gondola from Europe at Eaglecrest” (it wasn’t). Anyway let’s get to the complaining part.

Complaint #1: the best writing advice I ever got was “if you’ve heard it before, don’t use it.”

Some form of “raise the bar” appears three times in this press release. The number of times “raise the bar” should be used annually in public documents published by a $5.4 billion company is zero. I mean I’m not expecting Tolstoy but could we lose the cliches? Additional cuts include but are not limited to: “a new era”; “the next chapter”; “embarks on a journey”; and “magic of the mountains.”

Offsetting compliment #1: These quotes weren’t written by robots or turned into roadkill-by-committee.

The quotes attributed to Vail Resorts CEO Rob Katz are useful. This one, for example, plainly states the company’s strategic pivot away from growth-by-acquisition:

“For years, Vail Resorts focused on building the Epic Pass model and expanding its resort network,” said Katz. “That strategy helped establish the company’s position today, but the Pass and acquisitions were not the end goal. The next chapter of growth for Vail Resorts is about delivering a guest experience that undeniably leads the ski industry and is best in class in the travel sector.”

That statement also finally acknowledges something that Vail had failed to address for years: that skier experience is the most important thing in skiing. A follow-up quote echoes this sentiment, saying that “Exceptional experience … is the standard” for Vail Resorts.

If finding useful quotes from a corporate CEO in a corporate press release does not sound impressive to you, then you probably haven’t read very many corporate press releases. The typical media release is useful for high-level news mining, but is too often 95 percent useless filler for lazy writers who repost these press releases in full rather than activating five brain cells to write an original story. And oh good job Stu, you’re now alienating not just Vail Resorts’ PR team, but every other ski area communications employee that you’ve established relationships with, as well as like 90 percent of the ski writers in the country* - which, all together, is like half your professional network - so you should clarify that bad press releases and vapid executive quotes are not ski industry-specific problems, but U.S. American ones, structural symptoms of the internet plague that devoured the once-proud profession of journalism and pooped it out as Twitter, leaving five PR professionals for every journalist, all five of whom cycle each press release draft through the five layers of bosses above them, a process as efficient as pre-industrial food storage that usually yields quotes like this: “We are so excited about this game-changing game-changer, which is the biggest news since Jesus invented the wheel, and we are going to leverage this to uniquely meet guest expectations.”

By the way, add “game-changer,” “leverage,” and “unique” to the Do Not Use list alongside (actually, above) “raise the bar.”

*You’re also talking to yourself in the second person, which will likely clean house on your remaining audience. You really are a dumbass.

Complaint #2: The game-changing game-changers highlighted in this press release are not all that game-changing.

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The Storm once again partnered with the Slopes ski tracker app to document my 2025-26 ski season. Click here for a free premium day pass for next winter.

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Somewhere inside of all skiers lives a snowy kingdom all their own. This is the ski area they see in their dreams. It is made up of all the ski areas they’ve visited and all the ones they haven’t. It is nameless and shapeless and boundless. It is always snowing and it is always sunny. It is frantic and empty and it is sprawling and dense and it is retro and spectacularly modern. It soars above a town and it soars above the wilderness. It is familiar and mysterious, each part of it understood even at first encounter.

In America, and for American skiers, the most proximate reality to this fevered vision is Vail Mountain: 5,317 acres, 3,450 vertical feet, 32 lifts, including 18 detachable chairs and two gondolas. Frontside broadridge, three-and-a-half miles wide, crisscrossed trails and machinery erupting over the interstate, village pinched between. There are no cars. Skiers walk to the lifts with skis shoulder-hoisted past firepits and Bavarian restaurants and T-shirt shops. Two or three lifts to the top, depending on where you start and where you’re headed. Off the backside endless realms. A groomer track cut down the middle like a canal trenched through the wilderness and the bewildered 90 percent funnel into this. But for the skiers: ungroomed and spectacular everyterrain, forests and wide-opens. You can’t see to the bottom but there must be a bottom because lifts rise and fly around in all directions. Down to Blue Sky Basin. That mysterious wildworld. Powdery treed meadows, denser and more interesting than the Back Bowls, pitched for ass-hauling-without-summersaulting speed. The perfect ski terrain. It can take a couple of hours to get there and a couple of hours to get back but in those brief windows a skier experiences that videogame sensation of having stepped instantly across worlds.

DAY 20 – VAIL MOUNTAIN

On Sunday morning I woke up in Brooklyn and on Sunday afternoon I was skiing Vail Mountain. Making this miracle possible is a combination of three things. First, the two-hour timezone change when headed from the East Coast to the Rocky Mountains. Second, direct early-morning flights from JFK airport to Vail-Eagle airport, which are more expensive than Denver flights but just half an hour, typically without traffic, from the Vail and Beaver Creek ski areas. And, new to me on this trip, a luggage transport service called Ship Skis, which lowered the trip’s stress level to near zero by collecting ski bags, boot bags, and suitcases for four people in advance and shipping them to our hotel, sparing us the hassle of twice loading and unloading this dozen-bag hoard from taxis and rental cars; negotiating luggage drop around self-tagging systems that still, in 2026, can’t understand that one ski bag and one boot bag counts as one bag total; identifying the appropriate counter staffed with employees who are also aware of this policy; and then playing baggage carousel wait-and-dart upon arrival, a particularly fraught task in Vail-Eagle airport, at which nearly every passenger arrives with similar gear for the same purpose (it was, in fact, at Vail-Eagle airport where my land-and-ski plans were foiled when, in January 2024, an overzealous shuttle driver bunched my bootbag with those of his charges; the airline located the bag and delivered it to my hotel at Copper Mountain that evening, but long after the lifts had closed).

Ship Skis, I must disclose, reached out to ask if I’d like to trial their services, and we traded a pair of podcast reads for round-trip bag shipping from NYC to Colorado. The experience wasn’t without its quirks – the tagging process takes time (they mail you printed tags), the pickup address for our return hotel was wrong, and the shipping and return labels did not include our apartment number - a big deal if you live in NYC, where buildings can have hundreds of units (ours only has 22, but still, phone calls were required upon pickup; at dropoff, FedEx simply left all of our bags in our building’s lobby - it was several hours before I realized this). Ship Skis won’t deliver to hotels on weekends. And the service is more expensive than checking bags with the airline, especially since many of you double as Points Bro and probably own credit cards that zero-out bag charges (I’ll admit I do as well). But the gap between solo ski travel and ski travel with a family is like the difference between ordering a steak and butchering a cow, and over time I’ve accepted that my willingness to tolerate almost any inconvenience when I’m voyaging alone does not translate well to even minor hassles when I’m one of four humans attempting to cross a continent with the equivalent of a U-Haul divided between a dozen bags. And when that stack of bags disappeared from our living room several days before we took off for Colorado, and when I then left them piled in our hotel room at the end of the trip, it eliminated what has become a huge source of travel stress in the peak-kids era of my ski life. You can take 20 percent off your first Ship Skis with the code “STORMSKI” if you want to give it a try:

TLDR: I got to the hotels, put on my skis, and explored Vail Mountain:

DAY 21 – VAIL MOUNTAIN

If Vail Mountain were only the frontside, it would still be one of the more substantial ski areas in America: 22 lifts, three base areas, wild little terrain pockets hiding all over, far more left wild than groomed. And it’s a good thing the frontside could be its own ski area, because when we arrived in the second week of February, the frontside of Vail Mountain was the entire ski area, a scenario I couldn’t have imagined when booking this trip several months earlier.

Vail had offered a ski lesson to my son, Logan, age 9, so I could experience My Epic app’s parent-side ski school integrations, and I left him with his instructor at the top of Gondola 1.

I skied around. Despite a low winter, coverage was consistent top to bottom. And because of the low winter, crowds were light, with few liftlines worthy of the name. I’d skied Vail Mountain plenty, but always with a get-to-the-backside-as-soon-as-possible urgency. Reoriented with a Storm-centric mindset to assess the entire ski area and document as much of the operation as possible, I cruised in the bluebird morning. To the Eagle’s Nest summit beginner zone, where antique gondola cars double as conyeyor lift terminals:

And this wild, summer-only carpet:

I rode the Eagle Bahn Gondola and the Born Free Express quad. I skied the choppy, meandering lines beneath Pride Express and schussed top-to-bottom corduroy in Game Creek Bowl.

Before meeting my wife for lunch at The 10th restaurant at Mid-Vail, I squeezed in this run from the top of Wildwood, down meadows, bumps, and into a winding beat-snow canyon called Cady’s Café - a lightning tour that typifies Vail Mountain’s remarkable variety:

Throughout the day, Logan’s instructor sent photos through the My Epic app. After lunch, I met up with them for an afternoon tour.

In just a couple of hours, Logan had improved noticeably. His upper body was locked to the fall line as he linked crisp, symmetrical turns. The disconnect between his physical abilities and his psychological limitations seemed to have evaporated, and he no longer seemed to notice when the pitch steepened. Logan was not a novice skier, nor an unpracticed one: he’d skied between 15 and 25 days per year, on average, since age 5. Many of those days were in Mount Peter, New York’s seasonal ski program, with an instructor constantly present. But here, on a mountain that intimidates with its sprawl and its busyness and its endless maze of trails and lifts, he seemed to have leveled up over the course of a single morning.

That lesson came on day six of what would end up being a 26-day 2025-26 ski season for Logan, and he described his Vail ski school experience as foundational. “My biggest breakthrough of the year was at Vail,” Logan told me, when I asked him from Killington’s Ramshead chairlift on our last ski day of the season, what his biggest breakthrough had been that winter. “Before Vail, I did not have any confidence. At the Vail lesson, the main things I learned was confidence… I could not have done as good, with the skiing year I had this year, without the Vail lesson.” (By the way, I don’t coach Logan, who’s kind of a natural sound-bite machine, on what to say for these Instagram #LoganOnTheLift videos; I just asked him to reflect on the season, and the Vail lesson experience is what poured out.)

At day’s end, the instructor typed a summary of skills, progress, and goals into the app – which Logan’s next instructor could tap into as a starting line. That’s a big improvement over the traditional handwritten summary booklet, a cute document that is nonetheless almost always immediately lost in the chaos of children, motion, baggage, and travel.

Ski school integration into the My Epic app helped to resolve another administrative pain in the ass, which was the chaos of early-morning ski school dropoff. Rather than navigate lines of equally confused families queued up for waiver hell, we simply met Logan’s instructor at Gondola 1, rode up to Mid-Vail together, and said goodbye until lunchtime.

The Epic Ski School features were new this past season, and available only at Vail’s four biggest Colorado ski areas. But the company is planning a rollout to 11 additional ski areas for winter 2026-27. While Vail plans to “continue to enhance the experience with additional features based on guest feedback and learnings about what they value most,” according to a Vail Resorts spokesperson, no substantive changes are planned for 2026-27. I would suggest the following long-term upgrades:

• Live-tracking of students via parent’s My Epic App throughout the day

• Ability to message the instructor via the app (we communicated via text)

• Ability to book lessons via the app

• Transparency to browse and select specific instructors

A private daylong ski lesson at Vail Mountain is, I realize, a rarified experience, but the features described above are integrated with group lessons as well.

DAY 22 – BEAVER CREEK

I’ll provide more detail in a separate post, but here’s the Slopes overview:

DAY 23 – VAIL MOUNTAIN

Sometime that week, Vail’s Back Bowls opened. Which is to say, mountain ops nailed together a good-enough road through the potholed and exposed-rock expanse of Vail’s backside so that skiers could funnel through the south-facing bowls to access Blue Sky Basin. This has long been my favorite part of Vail, and as snow dumped all morning, we skied east toward Sourdough, where I led my son and his cousin down China Bowl’s Poppy Fields superhighway to Blue Sky.

Blue Sky Basin feels like an independent backwater tacked onto America’s most corporate-identified resort. Like “what’s that?” “Oh those trails up after the Back Bowls?” “Yeah.” “Well that’s Bill’s ski area.” “Bill?” “Yeah.” “Who’s Bill?” “Oh just some dude who started building lifts over there.” “And he lets everyone ski there?” “Yeah Bill’s a hell of a nice fellow, but don’t fuck with his raccoons because he’s got a thing about that.” I mean it’s not exactly Silverton: a trio of high-speed quads serve Blue Sky Basin and groomed routes sweep summit-to-base from all the lifts, but the experience is pit-toilets backwoods, with a few snack shacks that feel decades away from the glimmering Two Elk Lodge atop the Back Bowls or The 10th at Mid-Vail.

But the best part of skiing Blue Sky Basin is the terrain, which is mostly untamed and almost entirely skiable. It’s not too mild and not too extreme. Some years earlier, blind snowstorm charging an unnamed-on-the-trailmap meadow skier’s right off Skyline Express lift, I’d sailed off an unmarked 10-foot drop, kept my feet in the sloppy, impromptu landing, and kept skiing into the unmarked glades ramping back down toward the lifts. Unlike the wilder parts of, say, Snowbird or Palisades Tahoe, Blue Sky keeps you alert but doesn’t try very hard to kill you.

More terrain was open in Blue Sky than in the Back Bowls, but the best tracts were still roped off. Still, even Blue Sky’s marked and groomed trails are delightful, undulating mazes winding through pinestands with little booters ramping up all over.

We had a lunch date, so we hitched a ride up Orient Express to meet the rest of our group on the frontside.

Vail Mountain moves skiers around with one of America’s beefiest lift networks: two gondolas, four six-packs, and 14 high-speed quads. Adding in fixed-grip chairs and surface lifts, Vail’s fleet totals 32 machines, the fifth-most among U.S. ski areas. Thirteen of these measure longer than one mile, and 12 arrived new this century.

It’s a beefy but understated fleet. Unlike Boyne’s mountains, which exclusively buy from Doppelmayr, or Aspen’s, which are Leitner-Poma partisans, Vail Mountain is comfortable with a mix: nine Doppelmayr lifts and 13 Pomas, with a handful of legacy brands mixed in. There are no bubbles or heated seats. There is nothing like Jackson’s tram etched against the Tetons or Big Sky’s D-Line eight- and six-packs with their LED screens and loading carpets and heated seats and whisper-whoosh rides up the mountain.

But Vail Mountain does have one lift that qualifies as quirky and memorable. On the far western edge of the frontside, down a thin narrow trail kept deliberately discreet, is the oldest chairlift at Vail Mountain, and the sixth-tallest fixed-grip machine in Vail’s U.S. lift fleet: the Cascade Village quad. It is the steepest lift on the mountain, one of just three fixed-grip chairs, and the only fixed-grip quad. It is a lappable ski lift, but it is not designed to work that way. Cascade functions, rather, as a transit lift, freighting skiers away from the Cascade lodging hub and back downhill at day’s end. The irony is that, of Vail Mountain’s 15 quad chairs, Cascade is the least-equipped to accommodate downhill loading. Lacking the automatic in-terminal slowdowns that define detachable chairlift mechanics, Cascade moves at the whims of human operators, stopping frequently and moving at grass-growing speeds for long stretches.

I rode Cascade that day only because I had never bothered, and because this was my first time skiing Vail Resorts’ mothership since launching The Storm, and because I now feel some duty to go around riding all these dumb little marginal lifts. It’s actually a pretty scenic ride:

Vail Mountain’s masterplan calls for replacing this machine with a detach quad, which is a sensible but ungodly expensive village-to-terrain connection, and one that begs for alternatives: a cabriolet? A mini-tram? A funicular? A pulse gondola? A train? An elevator? A T-bar? At Big Sky, Boyne repurposed a circa-1955 Riblet double from its Brighton resort to act as the 71-vertical-foot, 922-foot-long Little Thunder transit lift, which serves a handful of lower-mountain homes. I wonder if Vail couldn’t somehow repurpose and lengthen the 2,705-foot-long Cabriolet lift that they’re removing from Park City this summer to serve Cascade’s 3,497-foot line? If that sounds ridiculous, I’d like to introduce you to the Cabriolet at Mountain Creek, New Jersey, which rises 850 vertical feet along a 3,639-foot line:

Yes, it’s ridiculous, but Mountain Creek officials point out that the Cabriolet is one of the most efficient lifts in skiing, and that lines longer than a few minutes rarely form at the base of the lift, even on the resort’s busiest days - and New Jersey busy would give nightmares to anyone accustomed to the relative order of the big-mountain West.

DAY 24 – BRECKENRIDGE

Again, Breck deserves its own post, so I’ll just leave you with a Slopes preview:

DAY 25 – VAIL MOUNTAIN

There is a version of Past Stu that heat-seeks the gnar, that has no patience for Sourdough laps until the Back Bowls open, that refuses to ski a groomer if given any alternative. I admire Past Stu’s enthusiasm, but Past Stu did not have kids, a collection of orthopedic traumas commemorated with permanent body implants, a platform from which to broadcast ski news and a concomitant requirement to understand the whole ski area rather than just the parts that ignite the most adrenaline. But I do think Past Stu would appreciate that Future Stu gets to ski a lot more often than Past Stu, and that he’s still skiing that often as he approaches 50. Past Stu would also appreciate Future Stu’s lunch budget, which while not exactly extravagant at least exists. Anyway, here is Future Stu and one-day-to-be Past Logan lapping the beautiful Sourdough pod while we waited for the Back Bowls to open:

They took a long time to open. We skied around, hit Game Creek Bowl, grabbed lunch at Two Elk. But finally – laps on Blue Sky Basin. Just glorious fun, Man:

My wife had been working down in the hotel as we skied, and had moved to a downstairs office post-check-out. As the valets loaded our bags, they found a flat tire on our rented Jeep Wagoneer, drove it down to a local service station, and had the whole thing repaired at no charge before they even notified us. That’s the kind of stressor that could have turned the whole trip upside-down. The Lodge at Vail if you need them.

Previous 2025-26 winter Storm adventures, brought to you by Slopes:

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It’s a remarkable tally, a testament to American industrial efficiency and capacity, to the durability of machines well-made and well-maintained: the hundreds of active chairlifts crafted by more than two dozen companies that have shuttered, dissolved, or been ingested by competitors, most of them decades ago.

A handful of one-offs remain, legacies of skiing’s start-up era, when America’s huge World War II industrial capacity pivoted from building death machines to building fun machines. As far as machines go, ski lifts are fairly simple, and dozens of companies strung a bullwheel-and-haulrope-hanging-chair contraption up the nation’s mountainsides. Oddball survivors include the Blue double at Mt. Holiday, Michigan, built by something called St. Lawrence at a long-defunct bump called Carousel Mountain and moved to its present location in 1985; Kelly Canyon’s Lost Treasure double chair, built by Hjorth Brothers at Sundance, Utah in 1965 and moved to Idaho sometime after its 1995 de-commissioning; and the Barnstormer double at Coffee Mill, Minnesota, built by Cosmos for Steamboat’s 1963 opening and moved east in 1983.

Those are curiosities, footnotes. Their most useful contribution to the story of American skiing is to help us understand the breadth of competition in skiing’s lightly regulated early days. What I want to focus on today, however, are the defunct brand names that, despite their shuttering decades ago, still spin more than 100 chairlifts: Riblet, Hall, Yan, and Borvig. These numbers are remarkable:

Riblet folded in 2003, Yan in 1996, Borvig in 1993, and Hall in 1982, when the company merged with Von Roll. And yet these orphaned lifts still account for an incredible 36 percent of America’s 2,000 active chairlifts and T-bars, 73 percent of all active double chairs, and 45 percent of active triples.

How impressive is that? Nearly one-quarter of all active U.S. chairlifts are Riblet, Hall, Yan, or Borvig lifts built on their current lines between 1960 and 1989:

The robots tell me that perhaps two percent of all functioning U.S. vehicles were built before 1990. It’s rare to even see a Pontiac, shuttered in 2010, or Oldsmobile (2004). Machines wear out, making the longevity on display in America’s lift fleet a remarkable display of endurance.

But someday within the lifetime of most people reading this, just about all of these lifts will probably disappear. Several retire each year. Last year, we lost three Riblet doubles: the spectacular Primo and Segundo at Sunlight, Colorado; and the wild Chair 2 at Alpental, Washington. This summer, four more: Angel Fire’s Lift 2 (built in 1966); Rocket at Marquette Mountain, Michigan (1972); and the up-and-over Chair 1/Chair 2 combo at Little Switzerland, Wisconsin.

But, hey, I’ve accepted that. Sunlight and Alpental got modern fixed-grip machines, and Angel Fire skiers are getting the state’s first six-pack. Continual upgrades are a sign of a healthy industry, as I wrote last year:

But the loss is easier to process (at least for me), if I’ve ridden the machine, felt its bumps and burps, marveled at its chug-chug minimalist machinework, stood with skis planted watching 60-year-old chairs in their rhythmic ever-up. I was able to do that with the chairs at Little Switz, Marquette, and Alpental, but I missed my chance for Angel Fire and Sunlight.

So here are checklists of what’s left of our American fleet of Riblets, Halls, Yans, and Borvigs. You can quibble with the details here: is Mount Bohemia’s triple truly still a Riblet now that it’s been retrofit with Skytrac terminals? Are Sun Valley’s modified legacy detachables Yans or Doppelmayrs? Does Borvig really count as extinct when Partek emerged from its ashes and still maintains the old fleet?

But if you’re counting, or you just like old stuff, or you want to pretend its 1965 for five minutes next winter, here’s where to start (or, for many of you, where you’ve already been):

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I once read that going back in time was like visiting a different planet. This was around when I was reading a lot of Mark Twain, and I’d fantasize often about the rich but extinct American big-river cultures of the mid-1800s. But damn it if even the lived past doesn’t feel cosmic when viewed from Planet Pet Rectangle. Check out this amazing clip from the Oct. 7, 1985 print edition of the Aspen Daily News:

I’m sure the late-night layout editor who smashed a stack of lift ticket prices on top of an ad for televisions on page 2 had no premonitions or intentions that they would be sending a socio-economic cultural freeze-frame four decades into the future, but the juxtaposition of lift ticket prices with technology-of-1985 prices sketches out the stunning trajectory of the consumer economy from that time to this.

Inflation is a tricky monster, so let’s set the raw prices aside for a moment and consider this: in October 1985, a 19-inch TV cost nearly 10 times more ($248) than a one-day Steamboat lift ticket ($25).

In two generations, that economic math flipped: last week, I bought a 55-inch 4K LED internet-connected flatscreen for $179.99 plus tax. That’s $58.38 in 1985 dollars. A peak-day Steamboat lift ticket for the 2025-26 season hit $309, or $100.23 in 1985 dollars.

So in 40 years, the price of televisions has plummeted while the quality of the product and the content available via that medium have improved exponentially, while the price of one day of skiing has skyrocketed as the quality has improved only marginally.

Imagine explaining these strange consumer-price shifts to the newspaper reader of 40 years ago:

Time-Traveling Tim: “My Friend, in the future, television screens are three times larger, the picture quality is 1,000 times better, content options are limitless, and you can watch whatever you want whenever you want.”

1985 Alice: “My Goodness, the TVs of the future must cost more than a house and weigh more than an elephant!”

TTT: “Well you won’t believe it, but these super-advanced TVs cost a fifth of what these dead-weight tube-boxes cost in 1985, and they’re so thin you can hang them on the wall like a painting and so light you can carry them in one hand! And instead of buying it from a guy named Rick wearing a tie decorated in penguins that are also wearing ties you use a computer to order from a place called ‘Amazon’ and an anonymous delivery driver leaves it on your doorstep within 36 hours. And everyone carries a miniature TV around in their pocket, which is also an alarm clock and a camera and a telephone and a computer and a map of every street on earth and your best friend!”

1985A: “Wow! If technology has advanced so much, I can’t wait to hear how much better skiing has gotten in The Year 2026!”

TTT: “Oh skiing is pretty much exactly the same as it is now, just 10 times more expensive.”

Back to 2026, where we know that no one actually buys lift tickets and that phones are also TVs even as we haven’t quite accepted that they are also Pied Pipers leading us to the sea bottom like the Red Bull did with the unicorns. Let’s run that 1985 newspaper clipping through the CPI Inflation Calculator to see what those dollars equal today:

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There are many problems with my Big Dumb Ski Charts but one of the Biggest and Dumbest is how gigantic the whole ecosystem became once I figured out the fourth-grade concept of pivot tables. Yes I could spin off tables itemizing all 233 Indy Pass ski areas or all 11 ski areas owned by Boyne Resorts and the numbers would update whenever I altered a value in the Big Dumb Mastersheet. But these were still effectively static tables, meaning I couldn’t easily reconfigure them to, for example, order all 42 Vail Resorts by vertical drop or year of acquisition. So tabs multiplied across the main Google Sheet to accommodate these different versions of everything, which in turn slowed the Google Sheet, which in turn distracted from writing because every time I went to reference some Dumb statistic, I had to deal with Google’s pivot table editor, which would lose a footrace to Pangea.

The Dumber part is that I knew what I needed: some sort of live table that users could easily sort with header clicks and checkboxes. While I understood that this technology was so simple that it predated the invention of the wheel by several centuries, I could not figure out how to create such a thing. Whenever I’d Google “make a checkbox site” I would get 10,000 results for platforms named RegynRXX or something equally stupid that would either drop me onto an unusable blank workspace or ask 412 questions so they could assess my enterprise needs and assemble a quote. And I’m like “Dear God I just want a version of the checkbox-thingy that I used on cars.com in like 2003.”

So finally I just asked the robots “hey Robot how do I do this?” And Robot said “here are like five ways.” And I picked a free one called Google Data Studio that plugs into my Google Sheet. It was still stupidly over-complicated, but after a day of fighting my way uphill and to my credit not smashing my laptop into the pavement I came up with this thing:

And you’re like so what that looks even worse than your normal Stupid Charts. And I’m like stay with me here Tiger this is actually pretty cool. Because on the Google Data Studio page (not the image above, which is just a screenshot), any user can click into any category – base elevation, average annual snowfall – and order the resorts from highest to lowest or lowest to highest. Then, using the drop-down menus at the top, they can sort by any combination of five categories, including location, pass affiliation, owner, and operating class (meaning public or private, aerial lifts or surface lifts only). So if I want a list of all the ski areas in Colorado that spin chairlifts and participate in a national ski pass, and I want them ordered from largest to smallest, I do all the proper sorting and come up with this:

Or lets say I want a list of every ski area in Canada that has joined Indy, Epic, Ikon, or Mountain Collective, organized by province:

And if you don’t think that’s the greatest thing ever, you’re probably right. For now, this chart only includes 658 ski areas: all active ski areas in the United States, and any ski area anywhere in the world that participates in the Epic, Ikon, Indy, or Mountain Collective passes. And for now, I’ve only included 13 basic categories (vert, acreage, pass, etc.), rather than the hundreds that are catalogued on the Big Dumb Mastersheet. And even those 13 categories aren’t complete, as I’ve not yet subjected myself to the ordeal of determining, for example, the base elevation of Fox Hill, a 226-vertical-foot, surface-lift-only bump in Wisconsin.

But this chart, rudimentary as it is, should ignite a whole new era at Storm HQ. Because once I figure out how to do a thing poorly, nothing can stop me from doing it slightly better the next time. And even if I never touch it again, at least this stupid sorty thing finally exists.

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Vertigo hell is a stalled centerpole Riblet double with no safety bar swaying 50 feet off the snow and claustrophobia hell is an MRI tube. Ski long enough and you’ll probably encounter both. Fortunately scaredy-cat hacks are my specialty and I’ve resolved the dangling-chair dilemma with a ski pole jammed crosswise in the steel carrier and the MRI problem by closing my eyes the entire time.

My other hack for coping with these things-that-I-hate is to not do them. The Riblet doubles thank God are one-by-one expiring to the scrapyard and I don’t mine a ride or two for posterity but the MRI is here until the robot killing spree sends all of us to the canning facility. And generally avoidance works great for me but after two years of saying, “I don’t think driving is supposed to hurt” and no apocalypse to bail me out I submitted to a left-shoulder MRI in February. And what that told me was this:

And what that is is a description of a torn rotator cuff. And the doc suggested surgery, which I didn’t mind, and soon, which I did mind because I still had a lot of skiing to do. So from February to April I yo-yoed north-south finally visiting Dartmouth Skiway and taking so many pictures of the Burke Mountain J-bar that the mountain’s head of lift ops asked me if I was Lift Blog and watching Michigan hoops win March Madness games in the Black Mountain baselodge and T-shirt skiing at Killington and minor acts of trespassing to scope the abandoned double chair in the woods off Deer Run at Belleayre and soaking to the skin in an Easter rainstorm at Stowe and two days of nuclear mid-winter Mansfield eversnow after that and a rather hilarious incident in which my son broke his rental ski in half while boarding a chairlift and had to be driven down Snowshed via snowmobile. And after all that when I woke up hazy and high in the Manhattan recovery room on April 15 the doc said, “wow that was a lot worse than it looked on the imaging what have you been doing for the past six weeks?”

After surgery I spent three or four days swimming in an oxy haze and then a week battling an arm rash that resembled a medieval infection brought on by a rat bite or a tick bite or a bite from a rat that had been bitten by a tick or perhaps just a peasant getting too feisty with a barrel of expired mead. And it turns out that a rotator cuff repair that also involves re-attaching a biceps tendon is far more intense than a rotator cuff repair that is just a rotator cuff repair. Meaning that this recovery (for my left shoulder) body-slammed me with an intensity I’d not been expecting after a relatively smooth 2021 recovery from a right-shoulder rotator-cuff repair. Which means I spent three weeks barely sleeping, flailing like an over-boiled pot with the lid left on, jumpy and manic and constantly triggering the smoke alarm.

All of this made writing, um, difficult. So I did what I always do when writing-as-a-mechanism-to-escape-the-tedium-of-existence fails me: I worked on my Big Dumb Charts.

And Man I really went for it this time. I can now tell you that there are 217 active Riblets spread across 109 ski areas in 25 states and that 23 of them are quads and 70 are triples and 124 are doubles and 43 have been relocated to their present line. I don’t know how many have safety bars, but I’m working on that. I can tell you that Arapahoe Basin’s Beavers quad is the sixth-highest chairlift in America at its 12,458-foot apex and the 29^th-highest at its 10,948-foot load point, and that the lift’s 1,500-foot vertical rise ties it with chairlifts at Gore and Smuggs and Magic Mountain, Vermont as the nation’s 196^th-tallest ski lift. And if you want more useless Beavers lift facts which I know you do it is the 159^th-tallest chairlift and the 102^nd-tallest quad and the 33^rd-tallest fixed-grip lift and the third-tallest fixed-grip quad in America. Beaver quad’s 4,080-foot length fails to impress the ladies, however, ranking 513^th-longest on our list of America’s 2,145 non-carpet, non-ropetow active ski lifts, 463^rd-longest of 1,922 chairlifts, 251^st of 783 quads, 147^th among 1,413 fixed-grip chairlifts, and 22^nd of 401 fixed-grip quads. I can tell you that the shortest chairlift in America is Montage Mountain, Pennsylvania’s 250-foot-long Short Haul double and that the shortest detachable chairlift is Deer Valley’s 1,020-foot-long Burns Express quad and that the shortest six-pack is Boyne Mountain, Michigan’s 1,941-foot-long Mountain Express, which also happens to be the first sixer ever built in the country. I can tell you that the 4,101-vertical-foot Jackson Hole tram is the tallest ski lift in America and that Park City’s four-vertical-foot Flat Iron double is the shortest. I can tell you that the oldest active ski lift in America is Black Mountain, New Hampshire’s J-bar, built in 1935, and that the oldest active chairlift is Boyne Mountain’s Hemlock double, a Sun Valley original from 1936 that moved to Michigan in 1948 and at some point morphed from a single to a double chair. And I can tell you that the oldest active chairlift that hasn’t been moved is Mad River Glen’s 1948 American Steel-and-Wire single chair and that the oldest active chairlift that does not appear to have undergone a major renovation is Mt. Spokane, Washington’s 1956 Vista Cruiser Riblet double. I can tell you that American ski areas spin 467 double chairs, but that they’ve collectively built just 27 since 2000. I can tell you that 122 lifts built in the 1960s still spin in their original locations and that at least 263 active U.S. lifts have been relocated and that 71 of those just moved to a different part of the same ski area.

I can tell you that the City of Juneau owns Eaglecrest and the U.S. military owns Hillberg ski area on Joint Military Base Elmendorf Richardson in Alaska. I can tell you that if you’re ever quizzed on the founder of such-and-such ski area you’ll probably be right if you just say “Hans” or “Tom.” I can tell you that at least 125 U.S. ski areas once operated under a different name than they use today and that those archival names range from the regrettable (“Satan’s Ridge”; Ski Sundown, Connecticut) to the please come back (“Bear’s Den”; Thrill Hills, South Dakota) to the ridiculous (“Q-Burke”; Burke Mountain, Vermont) to the fleeting (Mt. Hood Skibowl went by “Mirror Mountain” for winter 1985-86). I can tell you that June Mountain sat idle for winter 2012-13 and Frost Fire, North Dakota missed 2022-23 and that Ragged Mountain, New Hampshire missed every winter from 1982-83 to 1987-88. I can tell you that Keystone closed for the season on May 26, 1997 and that Purgatory operated 163 days in winter 1973-74 while under the oversite of general manager Raymond T. Duncan. I can tell you that it snowed 829 inches at Sugar Bowl over the 1982-83 season and 629 inches at Pomerelle, Idaho in 1948-49 and six inches at Ober, Tennessee in 2022-23. I can tell you the cost of a peak-day Vail Mountain walk-up lift ticket in 1969-70 ($8), 2025-26 ($356), and 51 other seasons. I can tell you that Steamboat skier visits collapsed from 630,307 in 1979-80 to 243,000 in 1980-81 and rebounded to 613,354 the following winter. In fact, I can tell you 1,666 years of Colorado skier visit data, which adds up to a 77 percent complete attendance record of active, chairlift-served-ski-areas-that-are-not-Howelsen-Hill dating back to the dawn of the state’s organized ski industry.

I can also tell you that I’m adding some data, such as skier visits and lift ticket rates, proactively, while I enter other things, like founder and former names, as I find them. And I haven’t quite broken all this down into smaller tables yet, but if you want to subject yourself to this 52,477-cell mastersheet, be my guest. And I can also tell you that if you want to use any of this information for any purpose including pointing out that this chart and its subsidiary charts are proof that I’m somewhere on the toolshed spectrum between nincompoop and Dude-who-wants-to-detail-his-fantasy-football-roster-for-you, knock yourself out. It’s not like I hacked into the Pentagon to find this stuff – I’m just putting it in one place so I can stop having to look up what year American Skiing Company bought Steamboat and how much it snowed in Little Cottonwood Canyon in 2022-23. If this information proves useful to other people, great – maybe we can get back to legible ski journalism as a counterweight to social media hysteria about liftline pictures from seven years ago. And if you want to understand how I intend to use this information, the recent article appended to the Taos podcast is a pretty good showcase, with lots of charts like this showing how Taos skier visits stacked up against similar mountains over time:

And then zoom-in charts comparing attendance to things like snowfall:

And the mountain’s built evolution:

Speaking of the podcast, I had to take a little rebuilding break. I have a few in the can that I’ve yet to release, and I intend to start cranking episodes out again in the fall, possibly with an additional format (the GM interviews will never go away). In the meantime, you can directly access the 227 archived episodes here.

In the meantime, I’m teaming up with the robots to help me improve the Big Dumb Charts to make them Bigger and Less Dumber. Mostly this means organizing the data in a way that’s faster to manage. The robots are smart and fast and tireless but also earnest and lazy and mistake-prone. But you can tell them “this is not what I want” without fear of an HR writeup for creating a hostile workplace. Long-term, I believe my best energy is spent on The Storm’s core: writing, analysis, Bros, disrespecting the Euros by referring to “centimeters” as “European inches,” and angering Snow Tires Bro with trip reports of driving a rental car through Glenwood Canyon in a snowstorm. But the Big Dumb Charts are my Panama Canal, a pain in the ass to build that will make this whole world spin faster when it’s finished.

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A statement delivered on the subject of ski area lease fees from late congressman Mike Synar to the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Environment, Energy, and Natural Resources, July 22, 1992 (boldface mine):

As you know, the U.S. Forest Service operates 122 ski areas on National Forest System lands, including 6 of the top 10 concessions operating on federal lands in terms of gross revenues. In recent years, these ski areas generated more than $700 million in gross receipts, but the concession operators paid the taxpayers an average return of only about 2 percent -- a remarkably small return for the exclusive use of taxpayer assets. …

Mr. James Overbay, Deputy Chief of the Forest Service testified on June 25, 1992 before the Senate Subcommittee on Public Lands, National Parks and Forests concerning S. 2606, a measure to revise the system for determining the fees paid for special use permits at ski areas located on National Forest System lands. In that testimony. Mr. Overbay stated that S. 2606 was not revenue neutral and therefore does not comply with the Pay-As-You-Go provisions of the 1990 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act. I agree that S. 2606 and its House companion measure, H.R. 4970, appear to reduce the level of federal revenues currently received from ski area permit fees.

Because that testimony and the analytic work which supported it had a direct bearing on my Subcommittee’s ongoing review, I requested that the Forest Service supply all materials including a complete analytic data set supporting the Forest Service’s testimony on S. 2606 and the House companion measure, H.R. 4970.

Mr. Chairman, the Forest Service analysis of these measures raises several serious concerns, especially with respect to what constitutes a fair rate of return to the federal treasury and the taxpayers for the exclusive use of these public lands. Until those questions are addressed, action to change the current system of determining ski area permit fees would, in my view, be premature and imprudent.

That analysis will be ongoing, but in the meantime, there is one Forest Service document specifically relevant to the legislation before, which I would like to provide to you and your Members. This is the Service’s analysis of the impact of the fee structure under H.R.4970 on existing fee levels paid at individual 113 ski areas in short, which would increase and which would decrease and by how much.

I would note that the Forest Service has indicated at the top of the document that it contains proprietary information. I do not believe that is the case. Instead, the financial data which underlies this particular document (such as gross sales for individual ski areas) were undoubtedly designated proprietary by the concessioner, and the designation appears to have been carried forward on this material as well. In fact, I do not believe one is able to determine anything proprietary from this document. For example, while this document contains an average fee paid over the past three years at particular ski areas, that single figure is meaningless unless one also knows what the gross sales figure was for that ski area. That gross sales figure is not on this document. …

I do, though, want to say something about the efforts of some federal recreation concessioners to keep information about their gross sales and rates of return out of the public domain. You may recall that in 1990 a group of National Park concessioners actually brought a law suit against the Inspector General of the Interior Department to suppress publication or release of such information. Mr. Chairman, that any segment of the recreation industry would ever go to such extraordinary lengths to keep the public from knowing how much money they make off these private concessions on public lands—and how little is being returned to the treasury in my view speaks volumes about what that information shows.

I cannot accept an argument that the taxpayers -- who have given concessioners the exclusive right to operate and earn profits off public lands -- have no right to know what those concessioners are making and how much they are returning to the public. I think that is simply outrageous.

Mr. Synar, I agree. And while I am less concerned with financial receipts than I am with skier volume and how record U.S. skier visits since 2018 have impacted communities across the West, our animating belief is the same: ski areas operating on public land should be transparent with the public about what is happening on that land.

For decades, a tacit component of this public-private agreement was the annual release of skier visit data by ski areas operating on Forest Service land. These figures were widely cited by journalists, academics, and government agencies as one way to communicate to the public how weather patterns, demographic shifts, and infrastructure projects within and outside of ski area bounds impacted the communities adjacent to ski areas. With that context, the public could understand what ski area operators were doing well and where they were failing to adapt, and could in turn use that information to guide future development and policy decisions.

Ski area-specific data began drying up around 2010, and more or less evaporated after the 2020 Covid shutdowns. Unlike many things that get blamed on Vail, this was Vail’s fault, though I also fault the rest of the industry for parading after them. How this shift happened, why it was a mistake, and how we’re going to fix it are topics I’ll save for another day.

In the meantime, I’ve been patching together the past. You would not believe how incredibly difficult this is. Ski area operators appear to have not only masked current skier visits, but to obscure – or at least blur – the past, bullying the state ski associations into removing from the public domain archived documents itemizing these statistics.

Last month, I published 2,406 years of skier visit data that I’d scraped from archived newspapers, U.S. Forest Service documents, academic studies, and public records. I kept going. I’m up to 4,213 years across 211 ski areas, and 3,422 years across 128 ski areas for which more than 10 years of records exist. While this is slow, tedious work, it is slow tedious work that no one is ever going to have to do again, because I’m organizing it all in one place. Here is a (nearly) complete record of Colorado skier visits from winter 1976-77 to winter 2009-10 (black means the ski area didn’t operate; red, which is just Eldora 1983-84, means I couldn’t find the data):

The brickwork falls apart after the 1976-77 season, and more or less disintegrates by the early ‘60s. That’s a hazard of time, but what’s happened since 2010 is a hazard of corporate power forcing bad policymaking. Here is the full Colorado chart stretching backward from this past winter to the beginning of the state’s ski industry:

Since 2010, the Epic and Ikon passes, industry consolidation, social media, evolving work and social norms, shifting population and age demographics, short-term rentals, and byzantine regulatory regimes inherited from a different time have, among other factors, dramatically changed the ways in which people access, utilize, live, and work in these mountain communities. State-level metrics are useless in helping us understand these impacts: Southwest Colorado has nothing to do with Summit County, which has nothing to do with Steamboat, which has nothing to do with Eagle County.

Annual skier visit information for ski areas operating on public land should be public. Credit to Aspen Skiing Company and Whitefish for continuing to annually provide these metrics. I will continue to chase this information, which I believe to be foundational to understanding the current state and future trajectory of U.S. skiing. If you’re in possession of ski area-level skier visit data for any ski area, from any era, please share it so that I can add it to the full database. If it is post-2010, all the better. I will protect all sources as anonymous. As Mr. Synar stated so well more than three decades ago, ski area information isn’t proprietary just because ski area operators say so.

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None of the numbers in the above charts are estimates that I generated myself. Nearly all of them are sourced directly from contemporary media reports, U.S. Forest Service documents, archival Colorado Ski Country USA statistical sheets, and various government and academic reports. However, a handful - perhaps two dozen - of these numbers are extrapolated with known information. I did this in two primary ways:

1. Using published skier visit totals for an entity containing a limited number of ski areas - Summit County, Aspen Skiing Company, Colorado, etc. - I would, when missing just one value - subtract the known numbers from the total to arrive at the ski area visit number. For example: media provided 1970-71 skier visit numbers for Breckenridge, Keystone, and all of Summit County, but not Arapahoe Basin, so I subtracted the published numbers from the total to arrive at A-Basin’s number (Copper did not open until 1972).

2. If media, sourced to the operator, published a percent increase or decrease in visits from the previous winter or another known winter, and I had sourced the number for the reference winter from elsewhere, I would simply plug in the numbers to calculate that year’s visits.

I focused on Colorado first because the state generally accounts for approximately one in four U.S. skier visits, and has for decades. So while this data narrates the life of a small number of ski areas, it covers an enormous percentage of U.S. skier days over 35 winters. Helping the availability of Colorado statistics is a large media presence, an organized advocacy group in Colorado Ski Country USA, and, for most of history, a cooperative ski industry.

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National Ski Areas Association (NSAA) skier visit records stretch back 48 years, to winter 1978-79. This past winter’s 52.9 million skier visits rank 32^nd over that nearly half-century (annual rankings in black):

That’s not great, especially following six consecutive top-10 winters (excluding the truncated 2019-20 campaign).

But here is a more alarming data point: nationwide average ski area snowfall crashed to historic lows in winter 2025-26. The NSAA’s snow stats only date to winter 1991-92, but this past season’s 112 inches lands dead last over that 35-year period, a full 11 percentage points below the previous low of 126 inches (annual rankings in black):

Truncating the skier visit timeline to match the snowfall records reveals an interesting nuance: while 2025-26 ranks as the worst snowfall season in at least 35 years, it only clocks in as the sixth-lowest for skier visits:

This past winter’s 52.6 million skier visits would have finished as a pretty average season in the 1990s, even with those winters’ substantially higher snowfall totals:

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Who

John Kelly, CEO of Taos Ski Valley, New Mexico

Recorded on

November 13, 2025

About Taos Ski Valley

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Louis Bacon (since December 2013)

Located in: Taos Ski Valley, New Mexico

Year founded: 1955

Pass affiliations:

• Ikon Pass – 7 days, no blackouts

• Ikon Base Pass – 5 days, holiday blackouts

• Ikon Session Pass – 1-4 days, holiday blackouts

• Mountain Collective – 2 days, no blackouts

• Ski New Mexico True Pass – 2 days, holiday blackouts

Base elevation: 9,350 feet

Summit elevation: 12,450 feet lift-served, 12,481 hike-to

Vertical drop: 3,100 feet lift-served, 3,131 hike-to.

Skiable acres: 1,294 (some hike-to)

Average annual snowfall: 300 inches claimed on website; calculated 36-year average using data sourced from Taos’ 2010 master development plan, Ski New Mexico tallies, and media reports is 233 inches. The 10-year average falls to 166 inches. Here’s the year-by-year breakdown:

Trail count: 110 (24% beginner, 25% intermediate, 51% expert)

Lift count: 13 (1 pulse gondola, 2 high-speed quads, 2 fixed-grip quads, 4 triples, 1 double, 3 carpets)

Why I interviewed him

Let’s start with a superficially troubling number: Taos’ long, steady decline in average annual skier visits:

That doesn’t look so good, especially when laid alongside the long-term increase in national skier visits:

Taos not only declined in the context of national skier visits, but also among its peers. In winter 1983-84, Taos drew more skiers (241,000) than Telluride (132,460), Big Sky (136,000), Jackson Hole (177,000), Whitefish (I’m lacking an estimate for that winter, but the ski area then known as “Big Mountain” logged 209,000 skiers in 1980-81 and 170,581 in 1985-86). Taos (dark blue line below), continued to out-duel this group through about the mid-90s before falling off a cliff:

So what happened? 1995 Taos, a freeride mecca before freeride was cool, should have been perfectly suited to flourish in a cultural moment when skiers began demanding more interesting terrain than the groomed superhighways that had become the industry’s default setting. Sure, Taos was remote and a bit harder to access than, say, Keystone or Park City, but so were Jackson and Whitefish and Big Sky and Telluride. A partial explanation: Taos stopped modernizing. After replacing the Lift 2 double with a fixed-grip quad in 1994, Taos didn’t install another new chairlift for 19 years. The first detachable didn’t arrive until 2018. The resort banned snowboards until 2008. Meanwhile, Big Sky laced a tram to the summit of Lone Peak in 1995 and started pushing detachable quads up the mountain; the first high-speed quads arrived at Telluride in 1986 and Whitefish in 1989.

It’s not a perfect narrative – while Jackson Hole rolled out its short Sublette detach in the mid-90s, the mountain didn’t install an upper-mountain high-speed chairlift until Casper in 2012. Skier visits went up and up and up all that time, probably due in large part to aggressive improvements at the Jackson Hole airport.

Maybe, though, it’s as simple as this: banger snow years descended upon Taos – and New Mexico in general – from the late ‘80s through mid-‘90s. It’s little surprise that attendance ups-and-downs largely mirror snowfall patterns:

But, as the corresponding trendlines show, Taos’ skier visits have not declined at the same rate as the mountain’s average annual snowfall. And while Jackson’s long-term average snowfall has remained relatively constant, attendance has crept steadily upward. Attendance spiked at both mountains when the 2018-19 season brought both plentiful snow and the introduction of the Ikon Pass:

Unfortunately, Taos stopped reporting skier visits after the Covid-shortened 2019-20 season, so we have less concrete insight into whether the mountain’s recent investments in a reconfigured beginner area and a second detachable on the backside have insulated it from two historically poor snow years. This is why it’s nice to have basic visitation data, and why I’m pushing the ski industry to again publicize annual attendance for ski areas occupying public lands (since going live with a chart of 2,406 years of skier visit data for 97 ski areas with 10 or more years of attendance available, I’m up to 2,822 years across 108 ski areas, and I have a total of 3,802 years of data across 184 active U.S. ski areas for which I could find at least one year of attendance).

We do know this: Taos doesn’t want to return to the world of 300,000-plus skier visits. Somewhere between 250,000 and 275,000 is the “right number for the experience we want Taos to have,” Kelly tells us on the pod. Meaning: fewer skiers spread via a modern lift network is a better business than 364,000 skiers funneling onto double chairs. This flips the busiest-equals-best narrative that made skier-visit counts a 20^th-century bragging point. I’ve heard the same logic articulated by the leaders of Killington, Waterville Valley, and other ski areas that have created a better business even with fewer skiers on their mountains. Jackson Hole, too, halted its relentless upward surge – that 2020-21 dip was deliberate, as the mountain exited Ikon Base and implemented a reservation system.

This approach makes sense to me. With U.S. skier visits surging (until this year) and an Ikon or Epic pass in every pocket, no one wants to brag about being busy anymore. Space is the new volume. Social media can still transform one bad liftline into an eternal meme, but at least most skiers on the ground will have a better day most of the time than they probably would have 30 years ago.

What doesn’t make sense to me is why, in a less-is-more era, ski area operators have suddenly decided that skier visits should be guarded like Fort Knox. If fewer skiers is a good thing and a stated goal, why hide the numbers? The resorts ought to just say “Hey we’ve deliberately reduced our annual skier count from 300,000 to 250,000 [or whatever] to create a better mountain for you.” Instead, this secrecy around volume just looks cagey - if national skier visit numbers are up, then why should skiers just believe ski areas when they say “trust us, it’s better now,” and offer no data to support it? Perception is reality, and today’s skiing zeitgeist, as channeled by social media, tells us that American skiers perceive busier mountains today than they did a decade ago.

But I’m getting off track. Since Louis Bacon bought Taos in 2013, he’s funded an almost-complete renovation of what had become America’s most decrepit destination ski resort. I don’t think any mountain operating on U.S. Forest Service lands has more completely remade itself in the past decade (rapidly changing Big Sky, Deer Valley, and Powder Mountain operate on private property). Glimmering new but reset to 1970s volume, Taos is beautifully positioned to tap a skiing public that’s burned-out on Colorado and Utah crowds but accustomed to modern lifts and snowmaking.

What we talked about

Taos as a family ski mountain; last winter’s Chair 7 upgrade and custom terminals; owner Louis Bacon’s mission to “improve everything without changing a thing”; why Taos changed from Skytrac to parent company Leitner-Poma for its newer lifts; Taos’ great base-area reorganization; the story behind the Free Tacos run; a green run from the top of every lift other than the fierce Kachina triple; Taos’ massive evolution since 2015; whether the mountain is committed to long-term independence; the founding Blake family’s legacy and presence at Taos today; executing rapid development on Forest Service land; [VIDEO BONUS: Cat photobombing]; running Taos with the context of having worked at also-independent Telluride; becoming a skier growing up in Nashville, Tennessee; Telluride’s evolution from semi-affordable to gigantic housing puzzle; employee housing at Taos; the logic behind the proposed base-to-base gondola and navigating local opposition; thoughts on the evolution of lifts 2 and 8; preserving parts of the hike-to ski experience; Taos’ evolution after the Kachina Peak lift; lift 7A; the Minnesotas glades from the masterplan; avalanche mitigation; old-school boot-packing; parking lot evolutions; an ideal annual skier visit number and why that number is below historic highs; and getting to Taos.

What I got wrong

• When we discuss the wood-paneled terminals on Taos’ new Lift 7, I ask if they’re thematically related to the “wood RFID gates.” This is a reference to an earlier conversation that I cut, about Taos finally installing RFID for the 2025-26 ski season (the gates carry a wood theme).

• I said that the trees skier’s left of the Pioneer chair were not a named run, but they in fact are, and “Free Tacos” has a pretty awesome story behind it.

• I accidentally asked Kelly to, “lay out the housing landscape for Telluride” but meant to say “Taos.” I didn’t catch this in real time, but Kelly – who spent several years at Telluride before moving to Taos in 2015 – caught it and course-corrected.

Questions I wished I’d asked

Taos’ 2010 USFS masterplan proposed a 7,045-foot-long, 2,363-vertical-foot detach quad that would have run parallel to Lift 1 to the top of Lift 2:

We did, however, discuss the proposed 545-vertical-foot, 991-foot-long Ridge Lift off of Lift 8, and why Taos nixed that machine from its latest MDP:

Why you should (or shouldn’t) ski Taos

Taos, like Jackson Hole or Snowbird or Palisades Tahoe, has a toughguy reputation. The place ripples with hike-to chutes and glades. To calm visitors shocked by the vertical bump run rocketing skyward beneath Chair 1, Taos to erected this base-area sign decades ago:

The sign refers to the infamous Al’s Run, which typically ripples with moguls, but was closed on my last visit, in March 2025 (Lift 1 was open):

Taos certainly has plenty of nasty. The terrain ripping off the Kachina Peak triple is among the steepest inbounds terrain I’m aware of in America.

But what shocked me about the place was how approachable it was for my then-8-year-old son, a solid but very intermediate skier. Every chair other than Kachina offers a top-to-bottom green – and some mostly mellow blues – making Taos one of the better family mountains in America.

A lot of the solid-black terrain sits above the lifts, and requires a short, easy hike. If you’ve ever humped up Catherine’s at Alta or Spanky’s Ladder on Blackcomb, the ascent off of Lift 2 over to Highline Ridge or West Basin Ridge isn’t much longer, and it flattens out considerably after the short incline. Unlike East Wall at A-Basin or Highlands Bowl at Aspen Highlands, this is hike-up terrain that’s approachable for people who (like me), live at sea level and only like going up the mountain on machines. The runs are steep, and solo missions are discouraged, but the easy-in and proximity to lifts means a strong skier could reasonably expect to tuck a half-dozen hike-up laps into an afternoon. Here I am huffing and puffing right off Chair 2:

Dang those trees are steep even right off the jump. Crunch crunch crunch:

Go up a bit higher, and things get Lord of The Rings pretty fast:

Taos’ only real buyer-beware statistic is its insane base elevation of 9,350 feet, which makes everything, especially sleep, a bit more challenging. That altitude is actually a bit lower than the bases at Copper (9,712) or Breck (9,600). I start to have trouble functioning around 8,000 feet, which is the Vail (8,120), Snowmass (8,110), Snowbird (7,760), and Mammoth (7,953) range. So maybe see how you do at one of those burners before leveling up above 9,000 feet. Or at least arrive knowing that Taos will try punching you in the face. Hydrate and lay off the beer bongs for a day or two. You’ll be fine.

Podcast Notes

On Stadeli lifts

We’ve got 16 of these guys left across 10 U.S. ski areas, including Lift 7A at Taos:

On the character of old chairlifts

I wrote last year that U.S. ski lifts’ overall design aesthetic has deteriorated with the decline in number of manufacturers and a tacit emphasis on technology over beauty.

And I love old Riblets and Halls and Yans, but sentimentalism that locks skiing in a time capsule ultimately stalls long-term growth and invites disaster-by-disintegration. Rather than fight to live in a museum, I’ve adopted a quest mentality to ride as many of these dinosaurs as I can before they go extinct:

On Taos’ base-area fliparound

On Taos’ current masterplan

Here’s the conceptual overview of Taos’ 2021 U.S. Forest Service master development plan:

The major unrealized part of this is the base-to-base gondola - here’s the most recent plan for that lift:

On “class A avalanche mountains” with more than 200 slidepaths

Kelly mentioned that Taos’ more than 200 slidepaths earn it the designation of a Class A avalanche mountain. I of course went looking for a list of U.S. ski areas so classified, and of course did not find one. In a rare exercise in self-restraint, however, I also did not create one. A quick Google search suggests that that such a list would include Alta, Kirkwood, and Stevens Pass alongside Taos. I would also assume that Alpine Meadows, Palisades, Mammoth, Snowbird, Big Sky, Silverton, and Crested Butte are among the most avy prone. That is not a complete list or an attempt at one so please don’t write that I “forgot about” some particularly avalanche-prone mountain that I’m not trying very hard to remember.

On The Storm’s first Taos podcast

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My son’s half-birthday was last week. Yes I know that’s not actually a thing. I’m not one of these parents who, like, buys him a zebra or rents out Yankee Stadium to mark every made-up milestone. But I’ve Sharpied my now 17-year-old daughter’s height on the wall every six months since she turned 3, and I continue the tradition for my son. The resulting record is a neat physical relic in an increasingly digital world:

But here’s the funny part: how often I get the measurement wrong. Kids are squirrely, wild-haired, uncertain from day to day how straight they ought to stand up to be standing up straight. It’s tricky to hold a marker exactly level and slide it from the crown of their head to the writing surface. Or at least these are the excuses I make when one of my kids suddenly grows nine inches in six months or, once my daughter maxed out a few years back, seems to occasionally shrink.

Measuring is hard. That’s my point here. Even when the thing you’re measuring is a three-foot-tall human. So I grant resort operators, engineers, maintenance teams, government officials, and media latitude to conjure slightly different measurements for machines that climb a mile or more up steep and unruly mountains. For example: Breckenridge’s trailmap lists its Kensho Superchair six-pack at 1,536 vertical feet, the resort’s 2022 U.S. Forest Service masterplan stakes the lift at 1,540 feet, and the independent Lift Blog lists the machine at 1,502 feet. Lengths diverge by source as well: Lift Blog lists Kensho at 5,902 feet long, while the Forest Service says 5,735 feet.

That’s a 167-foot length difference, which felt significant enough that I asked Lift Blog founder Peter Landsman about the discrepancies. “My info comes from the manufacturers,” he wrote via email. “Sometimes they make mistakes compiling data, particularly when converting meters to feet or they flip length and vertical.”

About length in particular, Landsman added: “There are several different ways to calculate slope length. A fully loaded uphill haul rope is longer than an empty line because of stretch. There is also variation when accounting for tensioning, which can add 6-10 feet. Then there is horizontal length which is distinct from slope length.”

These slight variances probably don’t matter much outside of marketing claims over the longest/tallest/steepest etc., and recitations of such stats have mostly given way to storytelling-style marketing in the social media era. Landsman is probably correct in defaulting to the manufacturers’ records, but I tend to go with the Forest Service numbers when they’re available, mostly because ski area masterplan lift tables tend to include top and bottom elevations. While altitude has nothing to do with length, it’s a (mostly) fair determinate of vertical rise, and for consistency’s sake I’ll use all of the USFS numbers if I use one of them.

Which takes us to today’s exercise: itemizing the tallest ski lifts in the United States. Here are the top 10:

Cool list, Bro. But we run into the same set of problems with this inventory as we did with our longest-ski-lifts list last week: three of the machines listed above are not lappable ski lifts, and one of them is technically two different machines strung together as one lift.

So let’s sort out America’s tallest ski lifts, chairlifts, detachable lifts, fixed-grip lifts, quads, doubles, and triples.

One note before we get to that – I intended to publish this article the day after last week’s lift-length dispatch, but the volume of still-incomplete data was bothering me. Even with the combined references of Lift Blog, New England Ski History, U.S. Forest Service documents, and measurements from ski area websites and trailmaps, I was missing lengths for 279 chairlifts, and verticals for 275. That’s around 15 percent of active ski chairlifts in America, and it included some monsters, such as Lost Trail’s Saddle Mountain double chair (which turned out to be the 13th-tallest and fourth-longest fixed-grip lift in the country).

So I set about filling in the blanks. First, I reached out to my contacts at several dozen ski areas where I was missing lift measurements. Officials from Cascade Mountain, Little Switzerland, Nordic Mountain, and Crystal Ridge, Wisconsin; Mount Brighton, Nub’s Nob, and Crystal Mountain, Michigan; Mad River and Alpine Valley, Ohio; Snow Creek, Missouri; Paoli Peaks, Indiana; Wisp, Maryland; Big Boulder and Seven Springs, Pennsylvania; Mountain Creek, New Jersey; West Mountain, Windham, and Hunter Mountain, New York; Wachusett, Massachusetts; Crotched, New Hampshire; Lost Valley, Maine; Lookout Pass, Idaho/Montana; 49 Degrees North and Summit at Snoqualmie, Washington; Whitefish and Blacktail Montana; Boreal, California; and Solitude, Utah provided updated measurements, and several other operators promised to send measurements soon.

In the meantime, I filled in the blanks using a brand-new site that just debuted this week called “Google Earth.” Most of you have probably not heard of this site, since you do not live on the cutting edge of technology like I do.

OK you got me. Google Earth debuted in like 2001 and has long been an obvious tool that could help fill in missing chairlift dimensions. But I’d failed to click some “allow accelerator” setting on my computer, and thus the site hadn’t loaded properly for me in several years. But then Jon Schaefer said “hey Dumbass just measure on Google Earth because I have no idea how long these lifts are” when I asked if he could fill in some missing info at Berkshire East. Well these were not his exact words, but that was the spirit of it, and so I fixed the stupid setting which took like 15 seconds and three clicks. Then I went around measuring lifts.

This sounds very simple, but it took all week, working (no kidding) 12-hour days. But I filled in the grid. I now have an approximate length and vertical rise for every ski lift in America (excluding ropetows and carpets, which shoot me if I ever go there). On the accuracy continuum, the Google Earth measurements fall somewhere between an educated guess and a fully clothed doctor’s office weigh-in. Meaning they’re close enough. To stress test this, I compared my approximations to published manufacturer, resort, or USFS stats, and the numbers usually landed within 15 feet on vertical rise and within 50 feet on length. So not exactly splitting the atom, but close enough to publish statistical rankings of gigantic machines that scale mountains.

OK anyway here are the stupid lists:

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Earlier this week, I blamed a nearly three-week content absence on a relapse into one of my more regrettable habits: overzealous data accumulation in service of a single article. But I have an even worse habit: overzealous data accumulation that never becomes an article at all.

I spent a considerable amount of time last year assembling an inventory of active American ski lifts, but never made it public. I did this because I needed to know, for a story, how many six-pack chairlifts existed, and it took several hours to compile that inventory. To forestall a repeat of that irritating process, I put together a more complete list of active lifts, which I’ve been using as a personal reference document.

Why have I kept this to myself? Well, like the Encyclopedia Bro-Tannica (formerly My Big Dumb Charts), it’s messy, ever-changing, and inconsistent in places. People looking for a site that is not those things can visit Lift Blog, which is the most complete contemporary resource for North American ski lifts (carpets and ropetows excepted), and indexes a page for every active ski area on the continent (as well as non-ski aerial lifts).

The reason I made my own list is that I needed the ability to sort machines by characteristic - type, age, length, height, make, etc. – and across ski areas, states, regions, and companies without cross-checking dozens of individual resort inventories. What, for example, are the 10 longest active double chairs in America? What is the shortest detachable quad? Which Midwest chairlift claims the tallest vertical rise? What is the longest gondola? How many Riblet and Hall lifts remain in service? What are the steepest lifts? The oldest?

All of the information existed to answer these questions, but aggregating the data proved laborious. So I tapped Lift Blog as a primary source, then supplemented missing or contradictory data with measurements from New England Ski History, ski resort websites, U.S. Forest Service masterplans, historical maps on skimap.org, and other sources (I’m attempting to clarify the measurements discrepancies with Lift Blog).

Once I put all this data onto one sheet, I had the foundation to begin answering additional questions: How many active U.S. lifts have been relocated from their original location? What are America’s highest-altitude lifts? How many of the country’s lifts still lack safety bars? I’ve yet to accumulate sufficient data to answer any of these questions comprehensively (though I’ve made good progress on relocations), but I add data as I find it – often while researching a particular resort for a podcast episode.

I’ll leave most of these questions aside for today to focus on one metric, and to explain why even that simple measurement is more complicated than it at first appears: length.

What exactly counts as a ski lift?

To understand why a metric as simple as how long something is proves to be a puzzle, consider this list of the 10 longest lifts that access ski terrain in the United States:

Well that’s pretty straightforward, right? Math is as certain as gravity. But asterisks abound: first, four of these 10 machines are not, technically, lappable ski lifts: the Silver Mountain Gondola, the Sandia Peak tram, Heavenly’s Stateline Gondola, and Ober’s tram. While brave and inventive skiers could perhaps bushwack summit-to-base, skis-on routes in perfect post-storm conditions, these are primarily transit lifts that move skiers to staging areas near lappable ski lifts. Second, four of these lifts are technically two separate machines that riders can exit at an early stage or experience as one continuous machine: Steamboat’s Wild Blue Gondola, Deer Valley’s East Village Gondola, Killington’s Skyeship Gondola, and Palisades Tahoe’s Base-to-Base Gondola. Only Jackson Hole’s tram and Aspen Mountain’s Silver Queen Gondola function as single-machine, lappable ski lifts.

Fortunately, more clarity emerges as we drill deeper into the numbers. So let’s do that.

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There are only two reasons why anyone would attempt to visit every ski area in Ohio. The first is that they live in Ohio. The second is that there is something wrong with them. This is not because Ohio’s five public ski areas are remote or run-down. Most sit directly off an interstate, offer parking within 100 feet of the ski runs, and are served by modern-enough lifts, snowmaking, and grooming. But Ohio is a state you pass through, not one you go to on purpose. Unless your destination is The Horseshoe, where the Columbus Buckeyes (as their fans universally refer to them) play their home football games. But if you’re a visiting fan, the Shoe is less a destination than a gameshow-style survival mission. There’s a reason that this guy, who looks like a Mad Max extra who suffered an onset concussion and never re-joined our collective reality, is television’s favorite Buckeye mascot:

There is probably no telling this dude that it is not in fact a law that the loser of the Michigan-Ohio State football game be drawn and quartered by motorbikes driving in opposite directions.

Then again Michigan has this guy:

But that’s just Terrance. And Terrance is a friend of mine.

Which is another way of saying I’m from Michigan. Or at least, I grew up there. Which is most of the context you need for the Reliable Narrator portion of this story.

Speaking of football, analysts often praise a quarterback’s knack for “taking what the defense gives them.” Meaning: don’t insist on throwing 50 yards to your double-covered receiver when you can just hand off to Stumpy for a guaranteed four-yard gain.

And skiing is like that too: sometimes, you have to take what the winter gives you. And sometimes winter gives you 2022-23, when the daily snow reports out of Utah and California resembled an AI that confused inches with centimeters and had mistranslated the Ice Age movies as contemporary news reports. It snowed 903 inches at Alta that winter and Mammoth closed in August not because it ran out of snow, but because at some point the mountain had to prep for the next winter. But sometimes winter gives us 2025-26, when blizzards paint the eastern half of the continent white while the Mountain West wonders if this El Nino fellow mis-read the calendar.

I was supposed to go west in December and I cancelled it and I was supposed to go west in January and I cancelled that too. And instead I went to a place where generational snowfalls had churned up the best ski conditions in decades and single-digit temps had kept the snow nice. It was a place that I had passed through hundreds of times but had never skied. And that place, (believe it or not, Terrance), was Ohio.

DAY 16 - SNOW TRAILS, BOSTON MILLS, BRANDYWINE

Snow Trails – Ohio’s independent outpost

To reach Snow Trails, exit Interstate 71 and hang a left at the Wal-Mart. Then drive a mile and a half into the 1930s and you’re there.

Snow Trails is the only public ski area in Ohio that is not owned by Vail Resorts. How that happened I don’t know. Actually I do know. Peak Resorts purchased Mad River in 2001, Boston Mills and Brandywine in 2002, and Alpine Valley in 2012. Then Vail bought all of Peak in 2019. And what was once a state of family-run ski areas is now a state of one family-run ski area plus Vail. “Vail took over Mad River, so I only come here,” one woman said when I asked if she’d ever been to Mad River, metro Columbus’ other ski area. And this is what Vail is up against when it comes to public sentiment in Ohio.

They are also up against good operators. The Crislip family has operated Snow Trails since its 1961 founding. That story occupied a good portion of this 2022 podcast:

Snow Trails is not much of a mountain, but it’s a hell of a ski area, packing an unbelievable amount of variety onto 80 acres: six chairlifts, two carpets, and at least four terrain parks, one of which is served by a modern upper-mountain Sunkid ropetow. I rode this one time and cannot understand how Snow Trails park kids still possess functioning rotator cuffs.

Boston Mills - names are hard

I understand that a ski area parked next to an Ohio interstate may, for purposes of marketing and self-esteem, mine the far reaches of Planet Ski in search of a worthy name. Little Switzerland, Wisconsin and Afton Alps, Minnesota both present as playful, self-aware urban ski-hives nodding toward their aspirational mountain gods across the ocean. And I get that Boston - wealthy, cold, swarthy, iron-skinned Boston - is one of North America’s great ski markets, which, along with New York metro, supports the bulk of New England’s enormous ski industry. But to most of the world, Boston is about as synonymous with skiing as it is with bullfighting. Which is to say not at all.

It’s not Vail’s fault that the hill’s name is stupid, but if they’re looking for something with more contemporary ties to the region than a town demolished decades ago to expand Cuyahoga Valley National Park, how about “Cleveland Mills?” Or better yet, “King James’ Kingdom?” They could theme it like the old King Ridge ski area in New Hampshire:

Though I’m not sure if the NBA’s all-time leading scorer would be interested in lending his name to a 230-vertical-foot, 40-acre bump. You may be able to get LeBron’s attention with Big Sky, but from just about any point on Boston Mills, you can see just about all of the rest of the ski area:

This makes it difficult to shutter terrain. And because it had snowed two feet, everything in sight was skiable. And Boston Mills’ mountain ops team, accustomed to offering skiing only where they can make snow, didn’t bother roping anything off. Joyous kids stacked themselves like mountain goats on every knoll and side-hill and blazed novel-if-somewhat-useless forest paths and no one stopped them.

The skiing was intense, short, varied, and delightful. A mix of bump fields and beginner meadows and terrain parks and big heaving snowpiles that doubled as impromptu jumps. School appeared to have been deemed irrelevant and the hill swarmed. I wish Vail would have responded to this unusual volume by opening an extra chairlift. Or at least by repurposing a scanny-gun employee to encourage more than one skier at a time to ride the quad, as anyone under the age of 30 has some sort of allergy to sharing the lift with a stranger (this is true at all Midwest ski areas). Anyway I skied the kids’ dumb little backside run just for fun:

Brandywine - at least it evokes a good buzz

Brandywine is about a five-minute drive from Boston Mills, and the two have been co-owned for decades, and maybe forever. In summer or fall 2022 I’d stopped through both ski areas to inspect the two new fixed-grip Skytrac quads – one at each ski area - that Vail Resorts was installing as part of its Eptacular Lift Upgrade.

They were beautiful new machines, but I was skeptical about their potential impact. What good would one modern lift do for small ski areas that already ran half a dozen lifts each?

I’m not sure about Boston Mills, where the Buena Vista quad replaced a double chair and the old lift 4 rises condemned-looking in parallel (VR reps tell me Boston Mills’ Lift 4 is certified and operational), and the other chair on that side of the ski area sat idle. But the upgrade’s impact was clear at Brandywine, where the Ram quad runs beside an amazing double quad, showcasing the lifts’ speed differential. A video I shot from Ram, with the double quad spinning in the distance:

But Man what is cooler than a double-freaking quad:

The only other such machine I’ve encountered is at Swain, New York, though the looker’s right machine only ascends partway up that ski area:

Brandywine is the RV of American ski areas, with incredible variety crammed onto a steep and narrow ridge: five chairlifts, a terrain park handletow, and one of the steeper carpets I’ve encountered. It’s one of America’s more unique terrain layouts, even if it looks kind of blah on this trailmap:

Like its sister ski area Boston Mills (the two share a website and are often classified as one ski area, though they sit a few miles apart), Brandywine is denuded, industrial, intentional. It’s what ski areas would look like had nature not bothered leaving us hills to ski down: steep and severe and relatively short, littered with terrain parks and ski lifts, with a topridge oriented for spectacular sunsets. It is also a testament to man’s industrial ingenuity and insistence on carving ski centers out of variable-weather zones in which no native ski culture exists.

A quirk at Brandywine: Lift 4, the beginner lift that runs short but quite high, still lacks safety bars, an unusual oversight for a Vail ski area. The company typically retrofits all of its chairlifts with safety bars, even in places like Ohio that do not require such features by law (all new lifts must follow ANSI standards, which require bars, but hundreds of older, bar-free machines have been grandfathered in across the Midwest and West). That Vail has owned this bump for going on seven years and still not gotten around to adding bars felt odd to me, and I asked company reps if there was something inherently challenging about this particular chair’s engineering or construction. The bars were, in fact, onsite, the rep told me. “Our intention is to have restraining bars installed across [this lift and Lift 4 at Boston Mills] for the 2026-27 season,” they wrote.

Both Boston Mills and Brandywine share an unusual moat aesthetic – the former supplied by a gate, the latter by an actual bridge-over-a-stream. This single point of entry makes it difficult to sneak onsite without a valid lift ticket, a strategy I’ve also seen deployed at Trollhaugen, Wisconsin, another urban-adjacent ski area catering to the teenage rule-bending crowd.

A Midwest anecdote before I get the hell off this frozen Midwest bump and find myself in a Chili’s drinking Miller Lite tallboys and eating a molten chocolate cake: I shared my first Brandywine chairlift ride with a purple-bedecked snowboarder. “Watch your head,” I said as I brought the bar down. She seemed shocked, a reaction that I first interpreted as indigence, but quickly translated as joy. “No one ever wants this,” she said. It would have been useless to explain that I lived in New York, where chairlift bars and chairlift bar usage were mandatory, and that I had driven to Ohio to ski on purpose and for no other purpose, importing my effete East Coast habits along with me. So instead she told me how much she liked Vail’s new chairlift and the sunsets off the ridge, and I skied off toward the slow double-quad, where the lift attendant told me I was the first rider of the day.

DAY 17 - MAD RIVER AND ALPINE VALLEY, OHIO

Mad River - the real Mad River ski area

For various reasons, Peak Resorts ended up building a lot of baselodges. At Crotched this was because they rebuilt the entire ski area after it spent two decades rotting in the woods. At Alpine Valley, Ohio, it was because one day the whole lodge just collapsed. At Mad River, it was a fire that chewed up the legacy structure – which I discussed with former Mad River GM Tom Price, current GM at Timberline, West Virginia, when he joined me on the pod in 2023. (Someone on the lift at BM had described the lodge as “industrial” and that was correct – it reminded me of the lodge at Crotched, New Hampshire, which Peak also built, and I wondered if there was some sort of industrial design aesthetic at work within the company.)

The skiing at Mad River is a lot like the skiing at Snow Trails – both ski areas present almost identically: 300-foot vertical drops, a disorienting number of chairlifts strung side-by-side along a broad face, excellent grooming, large sections of the mountain devoted to terrain parks of various sizes, small gladed areas. The differences are more operational than atmospheric: Mad River staffed by Vail’s blue-jacket scanny folks, the 20^th-century lift fleet updated with safety bars, one chairlift spinning rather than Snow Trails’ three. That latter reality was too bad, as the one terrain pod inaccessible via the summit quad is a 2006 expansion installed by Peak and serviced by the Mines Peak triple from the defunct Berthoud Pass ski area in Colorado. I’ll leave it to you to decide if life serving an Ohio buttercup is an ignominious end for a chairlift that once sat atop the Rocky Mountains, or a symbol of skiing’s resilience and an apt way to honor a fallen domain.

Both Snow Trails and Mad River shared an unexpected trait: a competent skier corps. Good skiers – a mix of over-60 retiree carvers and under-25 student park-lappers – far outnumbered fumblers. Every ski area is home to great skiers, but generally the overall student body’s skier rating drops in direct proportion to the bump’s distance from the nearest large metro, especially in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwest. Meaning: closer to a city = more beginners. But I suppose it is the hardcore and most-prepared that beeline for spinning chairlifts in single-digit weather, especially on weekdays.

One additional tidbit that I learned at Mad River: folks working at Vail’s regional ski areas design the merch sold in their onsite stores. I had assumed - I guess cynically but not really on purpose - that all designs spun from some Epic Merchandise and Branding team in Broomfield. But both Mad River Resort Operations Manager Brian Onofrio and Alpine Valley Resort Operations Manager Chuck Shultz told me that they had designed the hoodies, hats, and other merch hung in the baselodge shops.

EDITOR’S NOTE: I have been informed by numerous parties that the article I published last month on my visit to Mad River was erroneous, that I had mistaken two completely different ski areas in two different states for the same ski area simply because they share a similar name, that I ought to be ashamed of myself for denigrating a cathedral of American and New England skiing. And so I have to admit a gigantic flaw in my article: I failed to mention THE VAST CONSPIRACY propping up the mirage of “Mad River Glen” in “Vermont.” Nice try, Suckers. But unlike you idiots, I actually did my reeserch and visited the place in person. So eat this Factburger for breakfast:

ALPINE VALLEY, OHIO – The #Realest Alpine Valley

Skiers driving up to towering Cascades bomber Alpental dead-end at a covered bridge. You walk over. It’s an appropriate arrival experience for what may be America’s greatest small ski area:

So when I arrived at Alpine Valley, Ohio in the snowy dusk and encountered a similar covered bridge, with a double chair shooting skyward from the far side, I deferentially parked the minivan and began booting up for the walk across:

And about 30 seconds later, a civilian SUV sped across the bridge. Followed by another and several more. And this was my first indication that Alpine Valley was not in fact the Alpental of Ohio.

It is, rather, the Buttermilk of Ohio: broad, gentle, uncrowded runs. It is quite beautiful:

One reason for that beauty: Alpine Valley, to stick with the Washington State comparisons, is the Mount Baker of Ohio. Meaning it’s the state’s snowiest ski area, and not by a little bit. Because of its position in the Lake Erie lake-effect bullseye, Alpine Valley hauls in around 120 inches of snowfall in an average season, more than double any other ski area in the state. This microdot is, in fact, one of the snowiest ski areas in the entire Midwest, and the only non-Michigan resort in the top 20 outside of not-really-in-the-Midwest-because-it’s-practically-in-Wyoming-and-has-a-5,900-foot-base Terry Peak, South Dakota:

This snowbelt location no doubt helped Alpine Valley weather the great ski-area weedout that shuttered at least half a dozen chairlift-served ski areas across Ohio over the decades:

What really probably helped it along, however, was Peak Resorts’ 2012 purchase of the ski area, their fourth in Ohio. Here’s what the bump looked like before the Missouri-based operators arrived:

Shultz, who has worked at the ski area for decades, rattled off the sequence of improvements as we skied around: Peak had replaced the lower ropetows with the Sycamore Lake triple chair, installed a new base-to-summit Partek quad, demolished the increasingly unreliable summit double, converted the old Hall quad (Chair 2 above) to a triple, and dispensed with the expensive halfpipe:

Then Vail Resorts nudged the bump further along, restoring summit access with an inexpensive handletow, converting Snowbelt from a triple to a double using discarded chairs from its Afton Alps resort, shuttering tubing to focus those operations at its nearby ski areas, and ramping up snowmaking. Future improvements, Shultz told me, could include a progression park on the old tubing site, where a carpet has remained intact, inspected, and functional.

I am not trying to brag, but I have now skied every Alpine Valley ski area in America. This one is not the best one from a pure ski point of view, but it is probably my favorite. Unlike the much larger Alpine Valley, Wisconsin, all of the lifts at Alpine Valley, Ohio have safety bars. Unlike Alpine Valley, Michigan, Alpine Valley, Ohio does not overlook a Meijer superstore. And unlike both of those Alpine Valleys, Alpine Valley, Ohio, actually gets real snow on more than an occasional basis. It’s also probably my favorite ski area in Ohio, because unlike the other four, Alpine Valley had nothing resembling a liftline. I realize most of you will never ski here or ever want to ski here, but if you have kids and live anywhere in this region, I can’t think of a better low-key spot to spend a few hours sliding around.

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Earlier this month, the National Ski Areas Association (NSAA) released preliminary skier visit numbers for the 2025-26 ski season. To no one’s surprise, they were bad: 52.6 million visits, a 14.5 percent drop from 2024-25.

How bad is this? This past winter ranks 32^nd out of the 48 years since the NSAA began reliable record-keeping in 1978-79. It is the first winter to land outside the all-time top-10 since the 2017-18 season. Well, other than the Covid-shortened 2019-20 ski season. Winter 2025-26 wasn’t as bad as Civilization-Shutdown Fest 2020, but almost: this winter only beat 2019-20 by 1.5 million skier visits. It was the worst non-Covid winter since 2011-12, which ranks 39^th, with 50.96 million skier visits.

Not everything was terrible. Separately from the NSAA estimates, the three New York State-owned ski areas reported record visitation, with around a quarter-million visits each at Belleayre, Gore, and Whiteface. I anticipate more records as eastern state associations release aggregate 2025-26 counts, but we’ve also gotten tidbits of better-than-expected results out of the West: Whitefish, in northern Montana, improbably recorded their fifth-best season ever for visits. These national results are also weirdly positive for Vail Resorts, which matched the national trend after lagging for two consecutive winters.

A normal person would have written a story around those factoids. But I am not a normal person, and so instead of writing those three paragraphs, which took five minutes, I decided that I needed more historical context to really communicate how bad – or not – the 2025-26 ski season was.

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Six months before the 2026-27 ski season begins in earnest, the Epic, Ikon, Indy, and Mountain Collective passes have secured partnerships with 407 Alpine ski areas, including 52 in Canada, 49 in Japan, and 52 resorts across 15 European nations. Domestically, these four passes collectively grant skiers access to 242 American mountains (excluding Ikon-Mountain Collective overlap), which equals 63 percent of all public ski areas with chairlifts in the country, and 73 percent (176,757) of the nation’s 241,954 lift-served skiable acres.

Is there room in this crowded marketplace for a fifth national multi-mountain ski pass?

Snow Partners – owners of Mountain Creek and Big Snow in New Jersey and popular operating software and learning-terrain programs – thinks there is. Yesterday, the company announced the Snow Pass, which will be an Indy/Mountain Collective-style passport with two days each at “a curated network of regional destination and drive-to resorts in the Northeast, Midwest and Western United States and Canada.”

This national pass builds upon – but will remain separate from – Snow Partners’ Snow Triple Play (STP) product launched last year. STP, which is valid for three total days of skiing across all partner resorts (and a max of two days at any one ski area), will return in two regional varieties for 2026-27:

• East: All 16 inaugural Snow Triple Play partners plan to return for season two. Joining them, according to a Snow Partners press release, will be “approximately six new partner mountains…” in Pennsylvania, Vermont, and New Hampshire.

• Midwest: Snow Partners will also debut a Midwest-specific Snow Triple Play, with an anticipated menu of 10 to 15 ski areas.

Partner lineups and pricing for Snow Pass, Snow Triple Play East, and Snow Triple Play Midwest will debut “this summer.” SAM reports that passes will go on sale post Labor Day (Sept. 7) “at a sub-$400 price point and will be on sale through December.” SAM also reported that existing STP partners Mount Southington and Pleasant Mountain intended to join the Snow Pass, and that New York State’s Olympic Regional Development Authority was in discussions to potentially add some combination of Whiteface, Gore, and Belleayre to the new product.

Snow Partners is framing Snow Pass as a cooperative, with “a partner advisory board or mountain partners to help guide the product’s future and growth,” and “open reporting on economics, expenses, and product performance.” Snow Partners will retain a five percent administrative fee, plus marketing expenses (SAM suggests these will add up to 15 percent, noting that 80 percent of “total revenue” will flow down to partners), and distribute the remainder to partner mountains “based on their utilization and ticket value.”

The Snow Pass will enter a congested and somewhat confusing North American multi-mountain pass market, and it will do so well after the now-entrenched March window during which most operators offer the lowest pass prices. Snow Pass faces the task of cobbling together a compelling partner roster with a combination of pass free agents, STP partners, customers of Snow Partners’ software or Terrain Based Learning businesses, willing double-dippers already aligned with Mountain Collective or Ikon’s two-day tier (which allow pass-sharing), and anyone it can coax off Indy Pass (which does not).

Is there room for a fifth national ski pass? Are there enough ski areas to form one? Enough skiers to buy one? Is this a mature market, or an evolving one? Let’s dig deeper:

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DAY 9 – MT. PETER, NEW YORK

This was year five for my son Logan at Mt. Peter’s low-key, low-commitment seasonal program, a once-per-week-for-seven-weeks group skiaround that has the twin benefits of being an hour and 15 minutes from Brooklyn and including one of his good schoolfriends. It also has the benefit of being at Mt. Peter, which with the exception of one extremely steep race trail is one of the more approachable bumps anywhere.

During Logan’s three-hour class, I ski. A lot of the parents don’t, but Bryan does. Bryan is Logan’s friend’s dad. He grew up in Kansas, where there is no skiing, and lives in New York City, where there is also no skiing. He visited Snow Creek, Missouri a time or two as a teenager, and later tagged along with his wife to a work seminar at Jackson Hole, where he took a lesson because he didn’t realize that the instructor would interpret his Brooklyn address as cover to host a one-on-one MAGA rally, and also because he didn’t realize that it was Jackson Hole. In spite of all this, Bryan became a skier when the family purchased a cabin nearby and decided their daughters needed a wintertime activity.

So while the lifelong-skier ski parents who ski five days per year on their trip Out West fiddle with their Pet Rectangles amongst piled bags in the baselodge, Bryan and I ski. He’s bashful about calling himself a skier, but on this January Sunday, he’d skied more days that winter than I had. At one point later in the season, he held up the torn glove he’d purchased a decade ago at a Jackson Hole church sale and said “I need to fix these,” and I said, “you can fix them into that garbage can over there,” and he said, “no way, I paid $5 for these.” And is anything more Skier than that?

On the Ole’ Pete lift we talk about Middle-Aged Bro Stuff like mortgages and medical appointments and snowstorm contingency plans. Then we ski whatever we want and meet back at the lift because every trail ends at the same place at Mt. Peter.

DAYS 10-12 – GREEK PEAK, NEW YORK

Because it’s not that expensive and because there’s a full-service hotel-with-restaurant-and-water-park across the street and because this mountain has the best top-to-bottom green-trails-that-are-actually-trails-and-not-catwalks in New York State, Greek Peak turned out to be a perfect family-from-NYC-with-widely-varying-ski-abilities-and-enthusiasms MLK weekend destination last year:

So this year we visited Greek Peak again for the MLK long weekend. And all the same things that were great about it last year were great this year, except it didn’t snow as much.

Rather than re-itemize all of those mountain attributes here, I’m going to challenge my own generation’s unearned sense of superiority around our collective latchkey upbringing. Self-congratulatory Gen-X analysis has proliferated in recent years, which usually goes something like this: This sandwich generation, born between the early 1960s and 1980 or so, landed in a historic sweet spot, dodging both the extractive generational smugness of the Baby Boomers and the earnest feelings-ball of the Millennials. We grew up without the internet, without a supercomputer in our pockets, without parental supervision, without real concerns of a military draft, and without fealty to pre-1968 social constructs that had sanctioned smoking-and-yelling as an acceptable parenting, teaching, and management style. But also without affordable starter homes, a proliferation of factory union jobs, post World War II invincible-America optimism, a car-optional lifestyle, affordable healthcare, or social gathering spaces that did not involve commerce. This unique combination of social and cultural pressures – lots of free time with fewer distractions than current youth and a harder path to self-supporting adulthood than our parents – yielded a generation that is supremely creative, beholden more to bettering the future than honoring the past, and less entitled and self-congratulatory than the generations before and after it.

Which, OK, some of this is true: I didn’t use the internet until I was 19, and my childhood was essentially an epic of unstructured and unsupervised free time that neither of my children can quite believe in. As I wrote the other day, when my daughter was 8, she asked me how old I was when I was allowed to go outside by myself, and I couldn’t answer the question because I couldn’t remember ever not being allowed to go out alone. That freedom and flexibility from a young age, anchored in an analogue world, probably helps explain my imagination and independence.

But this is where Gen X self-satisfaction needs to take a smoke break. Because you know who let us be outside unsupervised all the time? The fucking Baby Boomers. And you know who stopped letting their kids have mud fights and dam the local creek without a permit? Gen X. We are the ones who ended thousands of years of free childhood play by reclassifying children from small-but-incrementally-capable humans to endangered and possibly suicidal animals in need of constant supervision, and shamed and threatened anyone who didn’t do the same to the point that 21 is no longer considered the legal drinking age, but a milestone at which Billy can (possibly) run down the driveway to fetch the mail all by himself.

And Dear God has it been annoying to raise kids like this even though I don’t want to. Because I remember being 5 and 6 and 7 and 8 very vividly and wandering alone through forest and field and local stores and never dying while doing so. But I go along with our U.S. American Way because I’ve been culturally compelled to and because I don’t have the means or the will to fight back and because part of participating in society is taking the path of least resistance on most issues. But I’ve been pushing this particular nitpick as far as I can, and when Logan (9), and his friend (11), and his dad Dave and I ended up in Greek Peak’s Trax Pub around 4:00 on Saturday, and I got acquainted with a few Miller Lite tallboys and a “single” of Jameson that probably would have filled a half-pint, and I was cold and sort of over skiing for the day and the boys were clearly bored after massacring a basket of fries, I said, “Kids why don’t you go ski?” And the part I didn’t say was “this thousand-vertical-foot mountain filled with strangers, and without a cellphone or tracking device of any kind*, and down icy runs in the bitter cold.” And I looked at Dave (the other dad), who’s a Scottish fellow and therefore immune to the dumber habits of Americans, and he was like, “see you boys later,” and off they went.

*Edit: my wife informed me, upon reading this article, that both kids were in fact wearing GPS-enabled smartwatches.

And we said “go ski three runs and come back,” and they skied four because they “lost track” and told us that they’d had a conversation with a “nice man” on the lift and the reason none of this worries me is that these kids are as smart as we were at this age, and they can comprehend the workings of even a slightly complex ski area like Greek Peak, and neither of them is going to be carted off by a menacing stranger without some amount of noise that would surely be noticed by the hundreds of other skiers milling about, most of whom, I’m assuming, are wired to not abet the doings of criminals.

If we’re ever, as a society, going to wrench back the childhood that we already irretrievably stole from an American generation-and-a-half-or-more, ski areas – busy, slightly intimidating, challenging, massively fun and rewarding of creativity and navigational competence – are among the best places to start.

DAY 13 – CATAMOUNT, NEW YORK

At a certain point, you lose control of your kids’ schedule. At 11 you can drop them in the backseat of a Ford Escape and take subzero Friday night laps at Mohawk Mountain en route to Sunday River and not bring them home until near midnight on Monday after a Loon Mountain pitstop. By the time they hit 16 you can entice them with a week of slopeside Panorama laps at the top of B.C. and they’ll say, “have fun I can’t miss my friend’s birthday party.” Which is both liberating and disheartening, but natural and normal enough that I never forced more ski participation as my daughter’s annual ski days slipped from around 15 to five or fewer over the past couple of winters.

But then the Magic Thing happened, which is that Waverly’s friend decided he wanted to ski and so suddenly she was interested in skiing again. They had a short mid-week school break and I offered to tour them around a couple nearby mountains. Jake had skied only two days before, so I set the first stop at Catamount, a thousand-footer straddling the New York-Massachusetts state line where long green runs flow beneath a mess of five triple and quad chairs. And I said “Jake take a lesson” and he did:

By the end of the day, the kid was skiing off Ridge Run, a gorgeous top-to-bottom green-circle trail weaving through the forest. He even handled the short blue Mountain View trail, a moderately pitched run that terminates in a spiderweb of greens.

Catamount is one of several New York ski areas – along with West Mountain, Holiday Mountain, Titus, and now Kissing Bridge – that has remade itself under new ownership in the past decade. When Wave and I visited in 2018, Cat’s groomers were solid concrete and a pair of SLI doubles dating to 1967 and ’71 teetered up the ridgeline. The parking lot was empty, the lifts were empty, the hill was empty. It made for a terrible but also hilarious ski day:

That spring, the Schaefer family, longtime owners of Berkshire East, bought the joint, and over the next several years knocked down those SLIs, installed three new-used chairlifts, modernized the snowmaking, cut new trails, and generally nudged the bump into the 2020s. And yeah I guess it worked: the parking lot was two double-parked rows deep when we arrived 15 minutes before first chair, the lodge was full, and Ridge quad had a small wait all day. There’s still more lurking boilerplate than I’d like, and I miss the tree islands that once crowded the frontside, but Jon Schaefer told me on the pod in 2019 that he wanted to make Catamount one of the best small ski areas in the country. I’m not sure if they’re quite there yet, but no one who shows up expecting a competent ski operation is going to leave disappointed.

DAY 14 – HUNTER MOUNTAIN, NEW YORK

Less dramatic but arguably as impactful as the evolution of Catamount has been the transformation of Hunter Mountain since 2018. With 1,600 vertical feet and a blow-the-doors-off snowmaking system just over two hours from New York City, Hunter, historically, has been crowded, chaotic, rowdy, and filled with assholes. But a sequence of investments from Peak Resorts and then Vail Resorts have somewhat tamed all but the last one (an unsolveable problem, I’m afraid, as I was reminded on a very long ride up the Kaatskill Flyer with a moron who couldn’t contemplate how we could possibly re-order our chairlift seating arrangement after he cut between our party).

Anyway: Peak’s 2018 Hunter North expansion and supplemental parking lot, Vail’s 2024 addition of a third six-pack, the removal of several older double chairs, and significant snowmaking upgrades – including on the notorious Annapurna trail – have nudged Hunter from Chaos Island to perhaps just Disorderly Island. Or at least a far more pleasant place to ski.

This was, frankly, perhaps my best day ever at Hunter Mountain, a ski area I have visited probably more than any in New York State other than Mt. Peter. The bump is always better on weekdays – and not better like eating warm pizza is better than eating cold pizza, but better like eating pizza is better than eating dirt. But 2026 weekday Hunter is also better than time-machine versions of weekday Hunter: the grooming held up most of the day, the terrain parks are finally in the right places, and the lift network no longer concentrates every skier on the mountain to the Hellgate-7^th-Avenue-Gun-Hill-Road bullrun.

But I suspect there’s another reason I enjoyed Friday more than Hunter Mountain ski days past: I skied the stuff I’d always ignored. At some point, I assumed the kids would want to split off and ski without me, or hole up in the lodge for Serious Phone O’ Clock. But that never happened, and we skied all day, and so I skied mostly greens and blues, and found some terrific and terrifically pleasant runs, especially the winders at the top of Hunter East and the lower-level runs striping down from the top of the Broadway sixer.

By mid-day, Jake was able to ski Belt Parkway, the meandering, sometimes steep-ish, nearly-always-mobbed blue that circles Hunter Mountain from the top of the Kaatskill Flyer to the bottom.

This was the best ski day Wave and I have had together at least since we went Peak-to-Creek at Whistler two years ago, and perhaps of all time, and by the end of the day she was just gliding strong and confident down the mountain:

At day’s end, this happened, and damn it if it wasn’t just one of the best moments of my life:

In the end, she ended up committing to Brown, which was her first choice, and I’m so happy and proud. But the Michigan connection will always be there.

DAY 15 – HOLIMONT, NEW YORK

There is something unsettling about private ski areas. It’s a familiar thing that feels like a status trap. Like walking into a random backyard barbecue where everyone is named Steve or Ed or Carol and they all know one another from like some fucking sailing club or something. And eventually someone asks “so where do you summer?” and you’re like, “uh Doug invited me,” and they gasp “there is no Doug!” and it’s the biggest fuss since Cheryl found the Kensington’s schnauzer rooting through her marigolds.

Holimont is a private ski area of the sort that we have a lot of in New York. Which is to say that it’s only private sometimes. It’s open to the public only when no one wants to be there, like when it’s five degrees and cloudy on a Tuesday. But at least that’s when you can also park directly in front of the baselodge.

Which is directly in front of the high-speed quad. Holimont is one of just eight ski areas of the 50 in New York that spins a detachable lift. This machine, the Exhibition Express, is one of six chairlifts serving a weaving, wandering trail network on a 700-vertical-foot ridge.

After four runs, I did something I rarely do: switched out my dailies – Blizzard Whatevers – with my great-conditions go-tos: 102-centimeter underfoot Blizzard Rustler 10s. And I did this because I had to admit something I’d hoped would prove untrue: that Holimont is one of the best ski areas in New York State. Powder everywhere. Untracked trees. Creative lines beneath the lifts and powerlines. Narrow routes into bowls. Tricky little hills and unmarked side paths that send skiers inextricably to distinct zones of what looks deceptively like a long-ridge, every-run-the-same ski area.

And there were no sailing club vibes. No one asked me what I was doing there. No one asked me anything at all, other than the liftie who wanted to know about my collection of wicket tickets. I skied it was great. I don’t know what else to say.

DAY 16-17 – ADVENTURES IN OHIO (to come in a separate post)

Stand by to read about that one time I skied in Ohio. Well I guess I already wrote a preview:

DAY 18 – BUFFALO SKI CLUB CENTER

Buffalo Ski Center skis like three former ski areas mashed together. That’s because it’s three former ski areas mashed together. As Buffalo Ski Center – which sometimes refers to itself as “Buffalo Ski Club” – explains on its website:

Buffalo Ski Club brings together three ski areas — Sitzmarker Ski Club, Ski Tamarack and Buffalo Ski Club—and covers 300 acres with 43 trails ranging in terrain from expert to beginner.

… the Buffalo Ski Club continues traditions begun in 1931 when eight families from Bavaria , Germany , came together to share their passion for skiing. They purchased land and a farmhouse in Holland not long after and built the area’s first rope tow. They spent winter weekends skiing, then gathering for huge feasts and songfests. By the 1950’s they had moved to Colden, where the Buffalo Lodge still stands. In 1948 UB students and WWII vets, members of the Sitzmarker Ski Club, bought the adjacent property on Lower East Hill and began to clear the hill still called Old Sitz just below the Sitzmarker Lodge. In a building made of cleared timber they gathered as families for weekends of skiing and comraderie. In the 1960’s Dr. Lore established Ski Tamarack just south of Sitzmarker. Although it was a commercial venture, Tamarack was always a family ski area. In 1991 Buffalo Ski Club and Sitzmarker merged and in 2004 the Club acquired Ski Tamarack from the Lore family to make the entire Colden Ridge one private, family-oriented ski club.

I believe these mentions of “club” are dated, as the Buffalo Ski Center Club of Greater Buffalo appears to have quietly rebranded over the past few years from a public-private hybrid that only allowed non-members midweek to a public-private hybrid that allows non-members any day but only sells season passes to members.

Or something like that. The Buffalo Ski Club Center’s website appears to date to the what’s-your-@hotmail era, with just enough information to contradict itself while omitting clear guidance on things like “am I allowed to ski here?” or “is the ski hill open?”

But last year, Buffalo Ski Resort Center at Sitzmarker-Tamarack-Buffalo-Ski-Club joined Indy Pass with just one blackout date (Jan. 3, which I’m assuming is some sort of club-celebration date). Anyway, I interpreted this as permission to show up.

The first-to-open-on-a-weekday base area at Buffalo Mountain Ski Area is Tamarack. This sits down the sort of access road that makes you feel stupid for not better scrutinizing the GPS route before clicking “go”: a narrow, winding dirt road that crosses a one-way bridge before slogging uphill to the parking lot. It’s not a long road, but it’s long enough to give you time to consider alibis when Cousin Orville of the Buffalo Orvilles greets you at road’s end with an aimed double-barreled 12-gauge and demands to know what happened to his chickens. But at the end of the road a ski lift shot out of the flats up a long, steep hill, and other than the fact that there were only two other cars in the parking lot, I assumed I was at a ski area.

I was, uncharacteristically, onsite before the lifts opened, and figured I’d grab a snack at the cafeteria, but there was no cafeteria. Well, there was one, but it wasn’t open. In fact, there was no one in the baselodge at all. Maybe this was because it was Thursday. Maybe this was because it was five degrees outside. And maybe it’s because the rest of the world was as confused as I was as to whether we were allowed to ski at Buffalo Ski Park.

At 3:00, the Tamarack double opened. What a wonderful trailpod, tall, narrow, steep, and varied. Snow had fallen for weeks and weeks and the temperature had never broken freezing and powder had just piled up everywhere. In the waning light I hammered fastlaps, winding between Tamarack’s tree tunnels and full-bore meadows.

The idle T-bar offered a particularly nice line:

At 5:00, the Sitzmarker side opened. Milder terrain over here, big rollers, a bump line skier’s left beneath the chair:

The terrain far looker’s left didn’t open that day, and typically doesn’t on weekdays. Ski Buffalo Mountain’s trailmap is a gigantic tease, the tangled sort of pseudo-guide that you trust less as a literal wayfinder than as a promise of something different. A puzzle. A maze. A toy unboxed intact from some lost decade. A gigantic whole sewn from parts that fit but were perhaps not supposed to, like a late ‘80s red Chevy Blazer patched after an accident with a blue door removed from a wrecked relative. It keeps running even if it doesn’t quite make sense how.

I left Buffalo Ski Circus as dusk settled and the temperature ticked below zero. Just up the road lay Chestnut Ridge, a free muni ropetow that I’d hiked the year before. “Someone was here running the tow, but then they left,” a young Snowboard Bro told me as I arrived. A few other snowboarders trudged over the snow toward the lift, which, per the county’s website, should have been operating. This is exhibit A for why it’s so difficult to accurately count active ski areas: no staff, no signs, no social media accounts to cross-check. I stared down the hill I had hiked 11 months before, looked back at my warm car, which I’d left idling in the parking lot, thought about the six-plus-hour drive home and the aching shoulder that had transformed long drives into endurance contests. And I walked back to my van and changed out of my ski clothes and drove back toward the city in the long New York night.

More of my dumb ski adventures with Slopes: