#SkiTheMississippi: Exploring Sundown, Iowa & Chestnut, Illinois

Wrapping up a Midwest run, with Slopes

The Storm teamed up with the Slopes app to document my 2024-25 ski season. The Slopes team had no editorial input into these posts.

The skier’s list

You probably have a ski list and that list probably includes Vail’s Back Bowls, Kachina Peak, the Mothership, Pali, Highland Bowl to 12,392, Rambo, Spiral Stairs, the trams at Jackson and Snowbird, Steamboat glades, Sun Valley’s Challenger, Lone Peak, The Beach in June and Mammoth in July and Timberline in August, 360-degree May corn harvest off Bachelor’s summit, Baker if you’re really dialed, MRG’s single if you’re anchored near the Atlantic, weekday pow two-feet deep at Targhee or South Shore or up the Cottonwoods, bluebird with Rainier etched against the foresky, a kind of pre-horizon to the wild Cascades tumbling beyond.

I have a ski list too, and my list includes all of these things. Some of which I have done and some of which I plan to do soon. It is a good list, a skier’s equivalent of the Dadcore summertime Rushmore-to-Yellowstone-to-Glacier-back-to-St.-Cloud looping campervan roadie, with its fanny-pack hikes and marshmallow campfires and occasional elk sighting. I like lists, especially in skiing. Narrative scaffolding to order the endless side-to-side and up-and-down.

But my ski list also includes the fringe. Places intended for yellow school buses and blue jeans, for people who don’t own multiple pairs of gloves for distinct activities, for the curious who dust-off third-hand 210s standing cornerwise in the basement and drive them to the bump with no tuning or check-up. Places owned by guys named Ed who have never skied and give surly quotes to the local papers about this or that God-damned state political party’s policies making it impossible on small business owners. Places where nine out of 10 cafeteria menu items are likely to contribute to a chronic medical condition. And in skiing, the fringe includes Iowa.

Whatever you think about Iowa, if you have not at the very least driven through the state, is probably wrong. The bucolic middle America farmstead storybook fits, from a distance, just in a different way than you imagine. Iowa is more green than corncob yellow-brown, more rolling hills than steamroller flats, more vista than horizon. Yes, lots of cows, lots of corn, but, because of that wavy terrain, skiing too.

Skiing! Iowa is a ski state. It is not a big ski state. The 1980 White Book of Ski Areas itemized a dozen ski areas flung across its glacial hills. By the 1998 edition of the same guide, Iowa’s ski count had shrunk to seven. Today it is three, a total of 170 acres: Crescent Hill, which orbits Omaha; Seven Oaks, serving metro Des Moines’ 700,000; and Sundown, a west-facing 475-footer anchored portside 10 miles off the Mississippi. A former snow-ski hill called Sleepy Hollow also offers skiing on something called “Snowflex,” complete with a chairlift, but one thing my ski list does not include is skiing on surfaces that aren’t snow.

I have driven across Iowa many times. Mostly I-80, mostly fast, often at night, always en route to points beyond, Colorado or California or the high parts of the northern Pacific coast. Thirty years ago, in the pre-GPS, paper guidebook past, I exited the interstate between Omaha and Lincoln and, following the light-dome haloed above the pitchdark discovered a now-long-dead 200-footer by the name of Nebraski. A chairlift and some ropetows and bad snow on a mild evening. Like Mars, this place. I was the best skier there, and I was not very good. I have no photos but I do still have the lift ticket:

So I’ve skied the wild Out There, the Great Plains. Perhaps that could have been enough to satisfy The List. But as a native Midwesterner I am deeply programmed to not only accept the notion of skiing in places that are the opposite of the fecund and soaring spectacles in which most people imagine all skiing must occur, but to consider their conquering an essential part of my ski story. And still I had never skied in Iowa.

Bad natural ski conditions = great operators (and lots of failed ones)

I no longer live in the Midwest, but I ski there every year. I consider it part of my beat, part of my job, an obligation as the publisher of a national ski publication who passed his anxious teens desperate for even a Skiing or Powder mag mention of Caberfae or Nub’s Nob.

Michigan’s Lower Peninsula is easiest, and I ski there when I visit family for Christmas. But around the first week of February, I book a flight to the far side of the Great Lakes, where I wander the vast and varied ski outposts littered across Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Those three states are home to 98 of the region’s 123 ski areas (80 percent). The remaining 25 are scattered, two or three or four or five per state, in a geographic nest that cradles the big three, from Ohio in the east, west through Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, and up through the Dakotas to the Canadian frontier, with a dogleg into Missouri.

It would be tempting to examine the nubbin’ vertical drops, the campsite-sized skiable acreage, the paltry snowfall, the vast flats surrounding them, and assume that these outfits are Podunk and rinky-dink, with rental skis left over from Noah and guys named Skeeter hand-cranking a Model-T to fire up the ropetow. But, with a few exceptions, Darwin won. The 1980 White Book of Ski Areas itemizes eight ski areas in Ohio, nine in Indiana, nine in Illinois, 12 in Iowa, four in South Dakota, seven in North Dakota, one in Missouri, and even one ski area in Kansas.

That’s 51 ski areas across a region that now supports 25. The survivors didn’t survive because Uncle Tucker would just as soon’s not shut down and keeps paying the bills out of his trout winnings. They survived because the owners modernized snowmaking, modernized grooming, and adapted to the parks-first Instapost world that demands consistent operating hours and things to jump off of.

Many of the best ski area operators in the country – perhaps anywhere – can be found across this Mediocrity Belt. They are good because they have to be good. Perfect North, Indiana, which can run 212 snowguns simultaneously, and consistently stretches toward 100-day ski seasons, is the operation I celebrate most frequently, but Snow Trails, Ohio; Great Bear, South Dakota; Huff Hills, North Dakota; and pretty much everything else slotted in that region that is not owned by Vail Resorts is the product of generations of scrape and scrap, of industrial ingenuity and creative adaptation, of big machines and long hours moving dirt and cutting trees, of fixin’ the God-damned somethin’-or-other, of lashing together pumps and pipes and hoses that were never intended to marry, of knowing the fine difference between an antique that still functions and one that should be decorating the parking lot entry sign.

And one of these places is Iowa’s largest ski area, Ski Sundown.

Ski Sundown, Iowa

I’ve already detailed the first three days of 2025’s Midwest run, starting with a touchdown in Chicago and a rapid-fire loop of metro Milwaukee’s ski hives:

Then two days at America’s end, the inimitable Mount Bohemia:

I left off in the suburban miasma of Iowa, which I had reached after piling south through an icestorm from the UP. This was the a.m. view from my Holiday Inn:

Nine minutes and four-and-a-half miles west down Asbury Road was, supposedly, a ski area. How such a thing could exist in such a place I did not know. Like a fish standing in a train station or a cactus curling from a Vermont front lawn, more alien than invader. As surprised to be there as you are to see it.

But there it was. Glory from the top, rolling forest, gigantic sky. Trenched cord top to bottom, 475 vertical feet (Slopes measured 427). Smooth, steady, good fall lines.

All videos by #GoProBro (me).

Borvigs, stark red against the snow, assembled like Lincoln Log contraptions in decades that start with a “19.” Still, all the chairs retrofit with bars. Old skiers who ignored the bars. One fellow bare-headed, late-50s perhaps, hair flying magnificently, not unlike the early-retirees who populate the day lodges of every ski area in America, but this one possessing a something else, something shopworn and blue-collar; the look of a man who owned more than one ATV, who carried a multi-tool in a belt holster, who could repair his own dishwasher or lawnmower. Off the top of the triple chair, a 15-foot cliff tucked into the trees. Not a trail, but in my daydreams I imagined the local 12-year-olds who almost certainly christen this as their first mega-stomp in the wild whooping freefall of a local snow day. Skier’s left an enormous park of the sort once reserved for movie shoots at Mammoth, features endless and elaborate. A beginner park off to the far right. Little trails all over, but mostly boulevards. Just enough variety to establish an illusion of bigness. Nothing particularly steep, runs just long enough, lift just fast enough, the whole place sewn together with a patina of competent order.

Sundown Mountain, Iowa. Top to bottom, L to R: parallel double and triple chairs, cord, the idle double chair, park served by a quad, a little cliff for junior huckers, lifts at mid-day, skiers park at the top, ticket windows. All photos by Stuart Winchester.

It doesn’t take long to ski these places. Eleven runs and I’d swept all zones and headed east across the Mississippi to Illinois.

Chestnut, Illinois

The Mississippi splits the nation in two, its trunk anchoring the fourth-longest and 10^th-largest river system on earth. It’s so big that you can easily miss it. At least 130 bridges cross the river between its Minnesota headwaters and its Louisiana terminus. A glimpse is all we get as we wheel across at 70 miles per hour. And we say, “Whoa look the Mississippi,” but it feels inadequate. Like unwrapping a hamburger and saying “look, a cow.”

But the Mississippi commands Chestnut, which rises fortress like from its shores. This is Twain’s Mississippi. Island Mississippi. Broad-as-a-lake Mississippi. A rupture in the Midwest’s gentle post-ice-age garden. Brown-blue, ice flows mingling, it offers some of the most novel views in American skiing:

More:

Ski the Mississippi. All photos by Stuart Winchester.

Chestnut, like Sundown, is broad, many-lifted, precision-groomed, thoughtfully treed, and upside-down. Unlike Sundown, Chestnut is freefall steep, angling like the ancient riverbanks they are toward the waters below. Time it right and a cargo train passes along the shore. This is mesmerizing. The effect of pinning industrial throughput to the primeval river at the base of a human park is spectacularly disorienting, as though you’d asked AI to draw you a scene that captured the whole of the American experience.

All six chairlifts, the majority imported used from places like Aspen Highlands and Ski Apache, are old, though none of them look it. All have bars. Three rise top to bottom. Two funnel beginners in opposite directions out of a gentle mountain-top bowl. And the Far Side Triple runs off the back, opposite the mainline terrain, a deliberate segregating that begins to make sense as you approach this zone.

The Far Side is a freeride Narnia, kickers and ramps and rails, a lames-stay-home refuge penned-off from the world, ornamented by a dedicated chairlift with a view. It also appears to be, even at 1 o’clock on a Thursday, a snowy outpost of Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island. F-bombs and beer cans rained from the bluebird sky.

I half expected the teenage vapsters to sprout buck teeth and donkey ears.

I didn’t hang out long enough to watch the metamorphosis, but man the vibes are weird back there.

Alpine Hills Adventure Park, Illinois

Drive an hour and a half east through a rugged and hilly stretch of U.S. 20 thick with 18-wheelers and you’ll come to Rockford. Exit north at Alpine Road, past an RV lot and a Culver’s and a Burger King and several gas stations and car dealerships and strip malls and a self-storage complex and sad brick apartments and one-story ranches and a seven-story office building that must exist on a diet of souls and those big four-way stoplight intersections that define the American urban fringe, all of it flat. The glaciers did nothing here. Or so it seems until a left turn three miles north of the exit, where a hill curves up off the main road, rising through a neighborhood and turning right into a small hilltop parking lot.

And here is Alpine Hills Adventure Park, perhaps the smallest ski area I have ever seen. Fifty-one vertical feet, documented on Slopes only via great effort – meaning I had to hike above the top of the carpet and ski well below it to accumulate enough vertical for Slopes to activate. Slopes, in fact, does not even acknowledge this as a ski area, and has so far refused to add it as such, though I reported Alpine Hills Adventure Park as a missing ski center four months ago. The teenagers operating the carpet appeared to have no idea of how to configure it: the unload dumped out onto an exposed metal plate, rather than the snow. The contraption appeared to be configured to force riders to make a hard right exit at the top.

But it was a pleasant little facility, clean inside and out, equipped with snowmaking, grooming, and what looked to be a fairly new carpet that was for both skiers and tubers. The land, according to the ski area’s website, was donated by a local family in 2011 and is maintained as a city park.

The list demands it

One rad feature of Slopes is that you can bunch separate days together as a trip. The dashboard aggregating stats for my four-day trip underscores the sometimes ridiculous proportions of Midwest skiing: 86 runs at seven ski areas, 32,635 vertical feet, nearly 18,000 of which I logged in two days at 900-vertical-foot Mount Bohemia:

The Slopes app.

That’s less vert than I racked up at Stowe (36,103 feet) on a single April day later in the winter. A few laps at Alpine and I turned my rented minivan toward O’Hare. Concrete funnels west, moving against the evening rush. The hoped-for original plan had been to swing through 180-vertical-foot Villa Olivia, another parks department-operated learner’s hill serving the west Chicago suburbs with a quad and six ropetows. I probably still had time. A few laps and dusky vistas of the car dealerships across the highway. But I saved them for Future Stu who will, at some not too distant point, trade a high-season Rocky Mountain run for a dozen laps on a suburban ski hill so subdued that it doubles as a golf course in summer. The list demands it.

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The Storm teamed up with the Slopes app to document my 2024-25 ski season. The Slopes team had no editorial input into these posts.