Who
Dustin Lyman, President and General Manager of Copper Mountain, Colorado
Recorded on
October 21, 2024
About Copper Mountain
Owned by: Powdr, which also owns:
Located in: Frisco, Colorado
Year founded: 1972
Pass affiliations: Ikon Pass and Ikon Base Pass: unlimited access, no blackouts
Closest neighboring ski areas: Frisco Adventure Park (:15), Keystone (:19), Vail Mountain (:21), Breckenridge (:23), Loveland (:23), Arapahoe Basin (:30), Beaver Creek (:32), Ski Cooper (:34) – travel times vary considerably depending upon time of day, time of year, and apocalypse level on I-70
Base elevation: 9,738 feet
Summit elevation: 12,441 feet
Vertical drop: 2,703 feet
Skiable Acres: 2,538
Average annual snowfall: 305 inches
Trail count: 178
Lift count: 25 (1 6/8-passenger chondola, 3 high-speed six-packs, 3 high-speed quads, 5 triples, 4 doubles, 2 platters, 1 T-bar, 6 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Copper Mountain’s lift fleet)
Why I interviewed him
Imagine if, rather than finding an appropriate mountain upon which to build ski area, we just identified the best possible location for a ski area and built a mountain there. You would want to find a reliable snow pocket, preferably at elevation. You would want a location close to a major highway, with no access road drama. There should be a large population base nearby. Then you would build a hill with a great variety of green, blue, and black runs, and bunch them together in little ability-based kingdoms. The ski area would be big but not too big. It would be tall but not too tall. It would snow often, but rarely too much. It would challenge you without trying to kill you. You may include some pastoral touches, like tree islands to break up the interstate-wide groomers. You’d want to groom a lot but not too much. You’d want some hella good terrain parks. You’d want to end up with something pretty similar to Copper Mountain.
Because Copper is what we end up with when we lop off all the tryhard marketing meth that attempts to make ski resorts more than what they are. Copper is not Gladiator on skis, you against the notorious Batshit Chutes. But Copper is not one big groomer, either. Copper is not fur shawls in the hotel lobby. But Copper is also not duct tape around a pants leg. Copper does not serve passenger pigeon eggs in its mountaintop eateries. But Copper is also not frozen burritos and a plastic sleeve of powdered donuts. Copper is not angry, or haughty, or cloying, or righteous, or overwrought. Copper does not call you “Sir.” Copper fixes your refrigerator without having to come back with another part. Copper, quietly and without a lot of hassle, just works.
What we talked about
The new Timberline six-pack chairlift; why Copper upgraded T-Rex before the mountain’s much older lifts; how much better a 2024 detachable lift is from a 1994 detachable lift; why Copper didn’t sell the lift to another ski area; that one summer that Copper installed two gargantuan frontside lifts; why new chairlift installations are so challenging; Leitner-Poma; the challenges of installing mid-mountain versus base-area lifts; installing American Eagle, American Flyer, and Three Bears; how Copper quietly offered skiing for 12 consecutive months from October 2023 to September 2024, despite an official May closing date; whether year-round skiing will become an official Copper activity; why Copper builds its halfpipe entirely from snow each season rather than constructing an earthwork base; The Athlete’s Mountain; why Copper continues to build bigger and more advanced terrain parks even as many big mountains back out of the space; Woodward parks; how many crew members and snowcats Copper devotes to maintaining its enormous terrain park network; why the Union Creek high-speed quad became Woodward Express; why Copper doesn’t compete with Keystone and A-Basin as first-to-open for the skiing public; Copper’s World Cup ambitions; how to get a job running a ski resort when you’ve never worked at a ski resort; why it’s so important for a ski area manager to ski every day; counting ski days; mad love for ski areas; potential candidates for lift replacements; how to get a ski trail named after you; retrofitting old lifts with safety bars; expansion opportunities; $99 Thursday lift tickets and whether that program could expand to additional weekdays; Copper’s amazing season pass benefit; why Copper Mountain access is unlimited with no blackouts on the Ikon and Ikon Base passes; and why Copper continues to sell its own season pass that doesn’t cost much less than the Ikon Base Pass.
Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview
Copper is a curious bloke. Copper sits within 30 minutes of four Vail Resorts, one of the toughest draws in North American skiing. So Copper is an unlimited-access member of Alterra’s Ikon Pass even though Copper is not owned by Alterra. Copper also sells its own season pass that only costs $60 less than an Ikon Base Pass. Copper sells $99 lift tickets on Thursdays, but $264 walk-up lift tickets if you show up on certain Wednesdays or Fridays. Copper sits atop I-70, observing the antlines of inbound vehicles and saying “I’m flattered.” Copper greets its guests with a halfpipe that could launch an intercontinental ballistic missile. Copper just offered year-round skiing and didn’t bother bragging about it until the whole thing was over. Copper lets you cut the line. Copper has quietly become some ninjitsu November training ground for the global ski-race community. Copper is parked in the middle of the most important ski county in the most important ski state in America.
If anything is happening in skiing, Copper is dealing with it: expensive lift tickets, cheap season passes, easy access that may be a little too easy, ferocious competition in every direction. Because of its naturally divided terrain, ordered black to green as you sweep west across the mountain, Copper is often referred to as a nearly perfect ski area. And it is. But because of where it is and what it’s chosen to become, the resort also happens to be the perfect thermometer for taking skiing’s temperature. How we doing up there past 10,000? What’s your story? What makes you special? Why should I drive past Keystone to ski here? Why shouldn’t I just keep driving 20 minutes to Vail instead? Why, I’m asking, do you even exist?
What I got wrong
I said that certain old chairlifts had not yet been retrofit with safety bars; Lyman clarified that Copper had in fact updated the carriers on all of those lifts.
I also said that Lyman was the first former NFL player that I’d hosted on the pod. He’s actually at least the third: Vail East Region VP and COO Tim Baker played for the Chargers, Panthers, and Steelers; and three-time guest Rusty Gregory played on the Chiefs’ practice squad.
Why you should ski Copper Mountain
Here are some things I remember about skiing Copper Mountain in 1995:
Riding a high-speed quad. Probably American Flyer but I can’t say for sure. Four of us on the lift. My buddy Andy and two middle-aged fellows of indeterminant provenance. “My cat sleeps 22 hours a day and can catch a bird out of the air,” one says to the other. And I’ve never been able to stop thinking about the truth of that and how it’s possible.
My room at the Foxpine Inn came with an underground parking space, which I declined to use until a New Year’s snowstorm buried my poor little four-cylinder Ford Probe beneath an igloo. Rather than clean the car off, I leaned my head out the window and drove down the ramp to my parking spot below. Then all the snow melted. Easiest snow removal job ever.
Near the terminus of the long-gone B lift, a double chair displaced by Super Bee, a lightly treed knoll stood above the trails. I watched, awestruck, as a skier materialized from the forest depths above and trenched the newfallen snow and blasted down the fall-line with superhero poise and ease.
My first attempted powder turn, three minutes later, ended in a yardsale. This was in the flat just off of the lift unload. That ended up being a very long run.
Modern Copper is more polished, better-lifted, more expensive, better known than the version I encountered on my first western ski trip 29 years ago. There’s more ski terrain and a little pedestrian base village. I’m not certain that two eighteen-year-olds could still afford a room at the base of the chairlifts (Foxpine rates are not listed online). But what struck me on a return visit last winter, as much as the six-packs and the terrain parks and the base village that used to be a parking lot was how much Copper, despite all that investment, had retained a coziness that still makes it feel more like a ski area than a ski resort.
Some of this humility, I suppose, is anchored in the mountain’s profile. Copper doesn’t have Breck’s big exposed peaks or Vail’s endless bowls or Beaver Creek’s Grey Poupon trim. Copper doesn’t give you cookies or promise you The Experience of a Lifetime. The mountain’s core lifts are fast and modern, but Copper runs nearly as many fixed-grip chairs (9) as Vail (3), Beaver Creek (3), and Keystone (4), combined (10).
But it works. Rather wonderfully, really. Go see for yourself.
Podcast Notes
On Copper’s masterplan
Copper’s most recent comprehensive Forest Service masterplan dates to 2011. A 2015 addendum focused mostly on summer activities. Here’s an overview of what the 2011 plan imagined:
A 2021 addendum added a new trail, which we discuss on the pod:
On Copper Mountain’s halfpipe
I mean this thing is just so damn extra:
On Summit County ski areas by size
The four Summit County ski areas compare favorably to one another, stats-wise. I’m going to go ahead and throw Loveland in there as an honorary member, since it’s like two feet from Summit County:
On the Slopes App
Being Stats Tracker Bro, I am a loyalist to the Slopes app, which recently updated their static map with a zoomable version:
Slopes is also handy in real-time, when I want to ensure that I’ve hit every trail on a mountain. Here’s my map from Giants Ridge, Minnesota last winter (the big unskied trails in the middle were closed for racing):
On Silverton
While I would expect Elvis to rise from the dead before we see another Breckenridge-style megaresort built in Colorado, developers have had some luck creating low-impact, low-infrastructure ski areas. The now-defunct Bluebird Backcountry, near Steamboat, operated with no lifts on private land. Silverton, in the state’s southwest corner, operates out of a small parcel of private land and runs one double chair, which in turn opens up huge swaths of land under permit from the Bureau of Land Management. Any future big-mountain western developments will likely hinge on some version of a Silverton/Bluebird model. Here’s Silverton’s trailmap:
And here’s Bluebird’s:
On expansions
Colorado ski areas have had great success expanding existing operations in recent years. Since 2012, nine large expansions have added more than 3,000 acres of high-quality terrain to the state’s ski resorts. That’s the equivalent of opening another Breckenridge, without all the outrage.
On Snowbird’s Freeloader Pass
Copper’s adult season pass includes a free season pass for one child up to 15 years old. Sister resort Snowbird one-upped them last year by rolling out the same benefit and raising the age to 18. Lyman and I discuss Snowbird’s move, and whether it will inspire a similar deal at Copper.
On Copper’s unlimited Ikon Pass access
One of the strangest alliances in all of Megapass-dom is Copper’s status as a stowaway unlimited Ikon Pass partner. Alterra has transformed the Ikon Pass into a season pass for all of its owned mountains except for Deer Valley and Arapahoe Basin, but it’s also a de facto season pass for Powdr-owned Copper and Eldora. To confuse things further, Copper sells its own season pass that isn’t much less expensive than an Ikon Base Pass. We discuss this whole dynamic on the pod, but here’s where Alterra-owned mountains sit with Ikon Pass access, with Eldora and Copper slotted in for comparison:
On Powdr owning Eldora “at least for now”
Park City-based Powdr has owned Eldora, just under two hours northeast of Copper, since 2016. In August, the company announced that it had sold its Killington and Pico resorts to a group of local Vermont investors, and would soon put Eldora – along with Mt. Bachelor, Oregon and Silver Star, B.C. – up for sale as well.
The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 74/100 in 2024, and number 574 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019.
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