Join Me Live with Mt. Bohemia at Snowvana Milwaukee Saturday, Nov. 8
A live conversation with the founder of the Midwest’s most unique ski area
TLDR: I’ll be interviewing Mount Bohemia founder and owner Lonie Glieberman live on stage at Snowvana Milwaukee next Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025, from 2 to 2:45 p.m. The event will be at the MOSH Performance Facility in Franklin, Wisconsin, and will feature a 10,000-plus-square-foot ski swap and gear sale. Admission includes free lift tickets to Tyrol Basin, Devil’s Head, Mt. La Crosse, Marquette Mountain, and Nordic Mountain or Crystal Ridge, and access to buy-one-get-one-free lift tickets at Wilmot, Norway Mountain, and Sunburst, among other deals. Buy your Snowvana tickets (they’re cheap) here:
The 1950s would have been a pretty rad time to start The Storm Skiing Podcast. The American backwoods were filled with war vets clutching a chainsaw in one hand and a fifth of Beam in the other, hacking the outlines of our great ski areas into the mountains. Sugarloaf and Mount Snow and Jay Peak and Smugglers’ Notch and Killington in the East; Mammoth and Heavenly and Taos and Aspen Highlands and Mount Bachelor in the West. These founding fellows, who grew up during The Depression and could build a house in an afternoon from a pile of second-hand lumber, could have told us some stories. “So Dick,” I would have asked (everyone was named Dick or Al or Dave in those days), “tell us exactly how you built that first chairlift with a Model T engine and a truckload of whisky barrels.” But I missed the window, mostly because the internet didn’t exist and I wasn’t alive yet.
Since most of our notable ski areas came online between the 1930s and 1970s, I don’t often get the opportunity to interview a ski area founder. Especially the founder of a transformative ski area, the sort of operation that resets the notion of skiing for an entire region. I can’t ask Everett Kircher, who died in 2002, why he built Boyne Mountain in 1947 when everyone told him he was crazy or why he moved a chairlift to Michigan from Sun Valley or bought Big Sky in 1974 or built America’s first six-pack chairlift on a 500-vertical-foot ski area or how he funded the whole empire with a scenic chairlift in Tennessee.
But there is one big exception to this founder-be-gone reality. In the early 2000s, rumors started trickling out of the Keweenaw, the most remote corner of Michigan’s remote Upper Peninsula, that some crazy dude had bought a couple of used chairlifts from Canada and strung them up a 900-vertical-foot mountain. He’d cut a couple of trails, but mostly you could just ski wherever you wanted. Cliffs included. There was an 80-footer in the woods. There was no snowmaking, no grooming, no green runs, and a big sign in the parking lot that said “no beginners allowed.”
It’s impossible to overstate how improbable this all felt to the Midwest skier who had just lived through the 1990s. The ski region’s greatest shortcoming had never been its midget vertical drops, but the lack of imagination in how skiers were allowed to ski them. Jumps were not allowed. Trees were not allowed. Moguls were rare. Want to have fun? Go ski those seven NASTAR gates. Even when Midwest ski areas began begrudgingly building small terrain parks in the mid-90s, these were mostly designated as “snowboard parks,” with skiers explicitly banned.
So how could this “Mount Bohemia” be real? I knew it snowed buckets up in the Keweenaw – I’d visited friends at Michigan Tech every year from 1996 through 2000. We’d voyaged up into those hills, hiked in the snow, bound (ski-less) off cliffs into snowfields that swallowed us like oceans. It was, indeed, a fairytale realm, one that only seems more exotic in hindsight, as I’ve now travelled the world and encountered nothing else remotely similar to this fabulous snowzone. But by 2000, no one started new ski areas anymore. If anything, more seemed to be closing all the time – places like Sugar Loaf and Skyline that I’d skied in just the previous half-decade had suddenly ceased operations. And even if you wanted to start a ski area, there was no one up there in the vast and empty UP to ski it.
But Mount Bohemia - Boho - was real. A crazy dude – his name was Lonie Glieberman – really had rammed a couple of chairlifts up the wilderness and built a Wild West ski area in the Midwest’s backyard. It took a while for all of us to understand this. But Lonie just kept building and glading and expanding. He launched a $99 season pass. He built a ski area for experts in defiance of an industry preoccupied with the blue-square family.
Boho soon became a pilgrimage, and a rite of passage for all Midwest skiers. It’s success, both as a business and as a cultural totem, forced other Midwest operators to rethink their ski product. If skiers were willing to drive eight hours and spend a weekend in a yurt to ski trees then maybe we ought to just let them? Slowly, ski areas across Michigan and Wisconsin and Minnesota expanded terrain parks, gladed formerly forbidden woods, and left some trails to bump up.
In an era of inexpensive airfare and national multimountain passes, this evolution to a more interesting ski product probably saved Midwest skiing. Skiing the Twin Cities will never be like skiing above Salt Lake, but at least massive terrain parks at Hyland and Buck and Trollhaugen and Afton and Wild can present a tolerable version of skiing that’s not just make-five-turns-and-ride-the-lift-again.
So how did Lonie do this? And why? And how long did it take? And how does he manage Boho’s growth today without compromising that end-of-existence radness that made it so appealing in the first place?
Lonie and I will break it all down in a live one-on-one talk on stage at Snowvana Milwaukee next Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025, from 2 to 2:45 p.m. local time. The event will be at the MOSH Performance Facility in Franklin, and will feature a 10,000-plus-square-foot ski swap and gear sale, ski area booths, film screenings, and more. Admission includes free lift tickets to Tyrol Basin, Devil’s Head, Mt. La Crosse, Marquette Mountain, and Nordic Mountain or Crystal Ridge, and access to buy-one-get-one-free lift tickets at Wilmot, Norway Mountain, and Sunburst, among other deals. Get tickets here (again, they’re cheap):
The Storm is the official media partner of Snowvana Milwaukee, and I’ll be around all day Saturday. I’d love to meet you there.
Past Storm coverage of Boho:
