Last Chance to Get ‘The Storm’s’ Best Rate + Free Slopes
Appealing to my fans by dealing with my haters
TLDR: click through now to secure the best rate on The Storm’s paid tier. You can support independent ski journalism for $5 per month or $55 per year:
That will get you: 100 percent of The Storm’s paid content, including previously published articles; podcasts seven days early; and the satisfaction of supporting ski writing that is about something other than Bros Jumping Off Things.
But, if you’re new here, I want to help you understand this newsletter. I often tell people that if I’m making everyone happy, I’m not doing my job. Here are five readers who were not very happy with me, and how that unhappiness helps explain what The Storm is, what it is not, and the sort of independent ski journalism your paid subscription supports.
1. “Lack of content - interviews dropped off over the last 8 months and the author is a nanny state liberal who thinks all ski lifts should be retrofitted with safety bars. Bye.”
The Storm Skiing Podcast has published 25 episodes in the last eight months, for an average of just over three per month. In the eight months prior to that, the total was 26 episodes. I’m not sure how to explain this stupendous drop-off in productivity.
Seriously though, the podcast output has been a bit slow in 2025 as I’ve transitioned to video. I anticipate that changing soon, however, as we settle into the new production process. The result, after this transition period, should be a better product available on more platforms to a broader audience. The video pod really is also cool:
Please click through and subscribe to The Storm’s YouTube channel (you can also watch the video pods on stormskiing.com). The podcasts will continue to stream on all audio platforms.
Looking ahead, the podcast interview schedule is stacked, with four episodes already recorded and 17 more on the calendar through September:
I am constantly adding more guests, and you can always view the upcoming schedule here.
As far as the chairlift bar thing goes – I don’t see how advocating for basic restraint devices on open-air machines moving 50 feet off the ground makes me a “nanny state liberal.” I’ve never, for the record, advocated for Vermont-style laws that require skiers to use the bar. I just think the option ought to be available for skiers who prefer to drop the restraint device for any number of reasons: fear of heights, squirmy kids, any variety of medical conditions that could trigger a sudden loss of consciousness, high winds, etc.
But bar resistance in general is the kind of dumb, retrograde, macho custom that poisons lift-served skiing, stalling its growth by intimidating potential skiers through human shaming or just fear of boarding a machine that looks like it fell out of an 1890s steampunk novel. This is the same sort of Brobot energy that pushed 99 percent of ski journalism into Stokeville, where tales of dudes backflipping out of helicopters into Chilean couloirs dominates an arch-narrative obsessed with “progressing” the sport.
I have no interest in or deference to that Little-Boy-Big-Pickup-Truck culture that insists you’re not a real skier unless you spend most of your ski time engaged in aerial acrobatics. I’m here to talk about something different: the lift-served skiing experience that defines the ski life of 99 percent of skiers.
2. “Make it easier to cancel or change sub. It’s annoying.”
Look I get it – the tech is imperfect. But I want you to understand that it’s not my tech. The Storm lives on Substack, which has created this incredible platform where writers can make a living on the internet without also having to be computer programmers and web designers. Yes, some of their customer interface tools need work – I’ve had a number of problems with the flow of gift subscriptions. I agree that you ought to be able to shift your paid account to a new email address without an assist from Substack support. But I’ll say this: Substack 2025 is far, far, far superior to the Substack of 2019 that I launched The Storm on. It gets better all the time, and the tech team is very receptive of and responsive to critiques and feedback. Please tell me what you don’t like about the tech and I will pass it along to them.
3. “Way too broad content that is of no interest to me, especially midwest skiing and non New England East Coast skiing”
Fair enough. Not everyone wants to hear the story of Steeplechase, Minnesota or Blue Knob, Pennsylvania. Most skiers want to read about the places where most skiers ski, the aspirational big-timers that populate our collective daydreams. I, too, love Big Sky and Vail Mountain and Snowbird and Mammoth. And I write about these mountains all the time. But every ski publication for the past 75 years has devoted 99 percent of their coverage to the 50 or so ski areas that we’ve all heard of and been to. And in case you haven’t noticed, those places can get crowded. So part of my mission is this: what else is out there? Where can you find a great-but-not-necessarily brand-name ski experience? One of the best ski days of my life was at 633-vertical-foot McCauley Mountain, New York, where a $17 lift ticket got me 40 laps through two feet of fresh on riveting, utterly empty terrain. If you’re reading this, I assume that sort of experience is of interest to you, even if you’re #IkonNation4Life.
There is plenty that I don’t cover in The Storm: gear, competitions, athletes, hotels, après, weather, backcountry, heli-skiing, ski schools, etc. The focus is narrow: the lift-served ski experience (lifts, terrain, passes, trailmaps) and the built environment around it (where people come from and how they get to the mountain). That allows me to cover a broad area: the United States, with a slow roll into Canada. I like the variety, the exploration, the way so many versions of one thing can be so different.
And I will always cover the Midwest. Not only did I grow up there, desperate for any of the various contemporary ski magazines to publish anything – a 50-word blurb could be gold – about the ski areas that I actually skied. But even setting my personal bias aside, the Midwest is one of the world’s great ski cultures, with an unpretentious, come-one-come-all attitude that the rest of skiing could learn a great deal from.
4. “Occasionally interesting, but often tending to boring, and too stuck in the trap of access journalism to ask challenging questions or look meaningfully beyond platitudes and the superficial. There are some fascinating questions at play in this era of skiing in the shadows of climate change, industry consolidation, and a shifting political economy --to cite only three overarching issues -- but they too infrequently appear here. Oh well.”
I’ve been called worse than “occasionally interesting,” so I’ll take the win. As far as being stuck in “access journalism,” well, I disagree. My only true client is the truth.
A few years ago, I booked the owner of a major western ski area on the podcast. As is my custom, I provided them with an outline of the questions that I planned to ask during our interview. Their team asked that I delete several topics and modify the way that I positioned many others. I cancelled the interview, despite having promoted it heavily for several weeks, knowing that this episode would drive a significant increase in subscribers.
That is one example. I have dozens. There are very few ski area operators in this country that I have not annoyed at least a little bit over the past five-and-a-half years. In general, they don’t cut me off, but sometimes they do. And that’s OK. I would rather lose a contact than my self-respect.
As for those “fascinating questions,” I think that some of you want The Storm to be something it’s not. I am not a muckraker, an investigative reporter, or a pretentious grad student defined by contrarianism. This is a niche publication, built to appeal to people who ski a dozen or more days per winter at multiple resorts. What I primarily write is analysis: what is happening in the lift-served skiing world, and what does that mean for skiers and ski areas.
As for the particular topics pointed out above:
Climate change: the ski industry is too small to meaningfully contribute to or alter the trajectory of climate change. So I mostly focus on adaptation. Which mostly means snowmaking. Which works. And that’s pretty much the story. While the non-ski media is desperate to prove their pre-written “Climate Change Is Killing Skiing” headline, it just isn’t happening. Again, I’m not here to recycle dumb narratives, but to examine the truth.
Industry consolidation: I’ve written 28 mountain-specific consolidation stories over the past five years. I also typically include an annual consolidation summary in my end-of-year newsletters, and I mention industry consolidation in just about everything I publish. But, again, the popular narrative that skiing has been crushed by a duopoly is not true. I think that some of you want me to say it’s true. But: Vail and Alterra, combined, own 53 of 505 active U.S. ski areas. About 100 are controlled by a combined 27 other multi-mountain operators. Seventy percent of U.S. ski areas remain independent. Consumer choice remains.
Political economy: Some of you are obsessed with the transactional, banks-and-lawyers back-end of ski resort sales transactions. But outside of Vail Resorts’ required disclosures as a publicly traded company, and a few nonprofit or government-owned ski areas, most of this information is locked away in confidentiality agreements that I don’t have the time, energy, or, frankly, interest in unlocking. But as far as the cost of skiing and its accessibility as an activity for mortals goes, I discuss this all the time, mostly, again, as a counter-narrative to the incorrect-but-ubiquitous declarations that skiing is unaffordable.
5. “I admire the clarity of your writing style though, kind of a nerdy version of NPR meets Hunter Thompson. But I do have a question/observation: I heard you on Jackson Hogan's podcast go on and on about the indy pass and the fun one could have traveling on the indy pass, but I got the distinct feeling you never did that yourself, of course I could be wrong.”
You’re wrong. Here’s a map of the 206 ski areas that I’ve skied at since October 2018, when I began using Slopes:
That leaves off the 24 years I skied before I decided to document my ski days on my Pet Rectangle.
That’s a very nice compliment about my writing, though. So thank you for that.