Who
Yesterday, I interviewed Brent Gardner, founder of the Savage Mountain Collective, about his Substack newsletter. Today (well, we recorded it yesterday), he interviewed me. Why do I like SnoSportSkiing? Can I provide some examples of people who made good SnoSportSkiing centers? What are the challenges in reporting on SnoSportSkiing centers? Do MultiMegaMountainSnoSportSkiing passes grow the sport? What danger to SnoSportSkiing am I probably not writing enough about? Where would I most like to enjoy SnoSportSkiing this winter? If you would like to listen to me talk about such things, boy are you in the right place.
Remember to subscribe to Savage Mountain Collective. Seriously Brent’s crushing it over there with ski content:
Date Recorded
Nov. 11, 2026
Transcripts
There are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them.
Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer. Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment.
Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio.
Zoom
The take up top: more new Indy Pass partners
Stuart Winchester: Welcome to STORM! I’m your host, Stuart Winchester. Today is Thursday, November 12th, 2026.
02:22:49.000 --> 02:23:04.000
Stuart Winchester: Today on The Storm, we flip the script as Brent Gardner of the Savage Mountain Collective grills me on what it is that I love so much about skiing, what I think of the current multi-mountain pass landscape, and what makes a great ski area.
02:23:04.000 --> 02:23:15.000
Stuart Winchester: Also, a bunch of new partners on IndiePass, including on the Discount Allied program, Whiteface Gore and Bel Air. We will get into all of that right here.
02:23:15.000 --> 02:23:20.000
Stuart Winchester: All right, I want to start with IndiePass, and this is…
02:23:20.000 --> 02:23:35.000
Stuart Winchester: They just keep going, man. They just keep going and going and going, and, and I have a longer write-up of this that I put out on stormskiing.com, and, and that’s where I break down all the episodes or, uh, all the resorts, but Indy Pass today.
02:23:35.000 --> 02:23:42.000
Stuart Winchester: Added, on top of all the ski areas that they already had added, the hundreds that they have, they added.
02:23:42.000 --> 02:23:57.000
Stuart Winchester: 10 new mountains, uh, sort of. Sort of 10 new mountains. And they also added 5 cross-country, and then their allied program, they added Bel Air Gore Whiteface. So let me go through these things one at a time. So the… the… the Alpine Mountains first. So when I say Alpine, I just mean.
02:23:57.000 --> 02:24:03.000
Stuart Winchester: Chairlifts and, uh, downhill. Uh, basically a lift served ski area.
02:24:03.000 --> 02:24:18.000
Stuart Winchester: They, one of them is not new. So there’s, there’s nine altogether. And at this point, most of the growth is coming outside of the United States simply because pretty much everyone who has joined a pass or wants to join a pass or will join a pass has joined a pass.
02:24:18.000 --> 02:24:34.000
Stuart Winchester: And you’ll find some exceptions here and there and a few additions. Uh, but, but these 10 ski areas, one of them is Cherry Peak in Utah. And Cherry Peak, if you’re not familiar, is actually one of the newer ski areas in the country. It’s, it’s up there near Beaver Mountain in North.
02:24:34.000 --> 02:24:46.000
Stuart Winchester: Utah. It’s in the Logan metro area, and it opened, I think, in 2014, and it’s been an Indy Allied partner for a long time. And Indy Allied is just a program where.
02:24:46.000 --> 02:24:53.000
Stuart Winchester: If you are an Indy Allied member, then Indy Pass holders get half off.
02:24:53.000 --> 02:25:04.000
Stuart Winchester: on weekdays, 25% off on weekends and holidays of your window lift ticket rate, and your pass holders are able to add on an Indy add-on pass.
02:25:04.000 --> 02:25:05.000
Stuart Winchester: So…
02:25:05.000 --> 02:25:09.000
Stuart Winchester: It’s a program that has…
02:25:09.000 --> 02:25:19.000
Stuart Winchester: waxed and waned over the years. You know, Doug Fish announced it, I think, in 2022, and at first it was a lot of New England ski areas, and he did it.
02:25:19.000 --> 02:25:29.000
Stuart Winchester: really because he didn’t want to add too much density there in New England. So, a lot of the initial ski areas on there.
02:25:29.000 --> 02:25:35.000
Stuart Winchester: were McIntyre and King Pine and Whaleback.
02:25:35.000 --> 02:25:38.000
Stuart Winchester: And Middlebury Snow Bowl in Vermont.
02:25:38.000 --> 02:25:50.000
Stuart Winchester: And what ended up happening was all of those mountains ended up shifting off the Allied program to become full IndyPass partners. And that was just part of the product’s evolution, as Eric Mogenson, when he bought the pass in 2023.
02:25:50.000 --> 02:26:06.000
Stuart Winchester: had data to show that the density of ski areas, uh, was not, in fact, cannibalizing season passes for local ski areas, which was their fear. That if you had too many ski areas in one region… and New England is very dense with ski areas, okay? There’s 100 ski areas in New England, and this…
02:26:06.000 --> 02:26:16.000
Stuart Winchester: the whole six-state region is about two-thirds the size of Colorado, which has 30 ski areas, so it gives you a sense. I mean, when you’re up on, say, Mount Sunapee.
02:26:16.000 --> 02:26:24.000
Stuart Winchester: or Okemo, you can look around and see a half-dozen other ski areas. They’re very close together. So…
02:26:24.000 --> 02:26:29.000
Stuart Winchester: It was a legitimate fear. It turned out to be unfounded, as far as…
02:26:29.000 --> 02:26:44.000
Stuart Winchester: All the data that I can see, I haven’t seen an instance yet of where Indy Pass has cost season pass holders. So, so Cherry Peak is switching from allied to full, and that actually leaves just one ski area in the entire country on the allied program.
02:26:44.000 --> 02:26:59.000
Stuart Winchester: which is Mount Ripley in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and that’s a fun little ski area. It’s right across the river from Michigan Tech. I’ve skied there. All the Michigan Tech students get it for free. Uh, it’s also right down the road from Mount Bohemia with their $99 season pass, so…
02:26:59.000 --> 02:27:06.000
Stuart Winchester: Really, and they get 300 inches of snow a year, so they get lake effect off Lake Superior, and it’s good, light, high-quality snow.
02:27:06.000 --> 02:27:22.000
Stuart Winchester: So Ripley’s great, only 400 feet of vertical, but a lot, a lot of fun. Anyway, that is the last one left on Allied, except, and I guess I’ll do Allied first because I’m talking about it. Now, the three, we call them the Orda Mountains, and Orda stands for Olympic Regional Development Auth.
02:27:22.000 --> 02:27:27.000
Stuart Winchester: These three ski areas, Bel Air, Gore, and Whiteface, are owned by the state of New York.
02:27:27.000 --> 02:27:29.000
Stuart Winchester: And…
02:27:29.000 --> 02:27:34.000
Stuart Winchester: They were on the Max Pass, which was the immediate predecessor to the Icon Pass.
02:27:34.000 --> 02:27:36.000
Stuart Winchester: For whatever reason.
02:27:36.000 --> 02:27:38.000
Stuart Winchester: When…
02:27:38.000 --> 02:27:40.000
Stuart Winchester: Icon.
02:27:40.000 --> 02:27:49.000
Stuart Winchester: formed. Uh, they took a lot of ski areas off of the Max Pass, but they did not take the Orta Mountains, and they should have.
02:27:49.000 --> 02:27:59.000
Stuart Winchester: So, these three ski areas are owned by New York State, and they’re managed by the Olympic Regional Development Authority. They are very, very good ski areas. Whiteface has hosted the Olympics.
02:27:59.000 --> 02:28:13.000
Stuart Winchester: in 1980. It has the highest vertical drop of any skier in the East, it’s over 3,300 feet. Lift served, and you can get another, I don’t know, several hundred if the slides are open, which they rarely are, but some double black diamond terrain above the top of the lifts.
02:28:13.000 --> 02:28:26.000
Stuart Winchester: And Gore Mountain is the largest skier in New York State, probably the most extensive best glades in New York State and really fun glades like low angle, very approachable.
02:28:26.000 --> 02:28:37.000
Stuart Winchester: great glazes to get your technique in. And Bel Air is just this fabulous mountain, it’s 2 hours from New York City, and I used to take my daughter there all the time when she was little, because they have a gondola.
02:28:37.000 --> 02:28:40.000
Stuart Winchester: And that gets to the point that…
02:28:40.000 --> 02:28:46.000
Stuart Winchester: these ski areas are so nice, Bel Air Gore and Whiteface, because…
02:28:46.000 --> 02:28:50.000
Stuart Winchester: They get a lot of their CapEx from…
02:28:50.000 --> 02:28:54.000
Stuart Winchester: New York State budget distributions every year, so.
02:28:54.000 --> 02:29:09.000
Stuart Winchester: The state has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into these ski areas. They have tons of new lifts, new snowmaking. Bel Air, if you haven’t been there in a decade, is basically a new ski area. Their gondola is the nicest lift, in my opinion, in New York state. So there’s a lot.
02:29:09.000 --> 02:29:23.000
Stuart Winchester: to like about the Orta ski areas. Uh, and the Orta ski areas, actually, so they’d been on Max Pass, they were… they were stoned off Icon Pass, they built their own pass program for a while. Then they actually, uh, last year, Whiteface joined Mountain Collective.
02:29:23.000 --> 02:29:35.000
Stuart Winchester: Uh, and became one of the few mountains in the East, the Mountain Collective, along with Sunday River and Sugarloaf in Maine. And there’s a couple up in Canada as well, La Mesif and, I believe, Bromont. And, uh…
02:29:36.000 --> 02:29:51.000
Stuart Winchester: And then they joined also snow partner, snow triple play, which gave you three days to use across a menu of mountains. It was something like 17 of them last year. Anyway, uh, they’re still on snow triple play. A white face is still on.
02:29:52.000 --> 02:29:55.000
Stuart Winchester: Oh, Collective? Uh, Bel Air…
02:29:55.000 --> 02:30:04.000
Stuart Winchester: Gore, and Whiteface all join the Snow Pass, so you get two days at each of those, Snow Partners Snow Pass. Uh, and Snow Partners, again, is the owners of…
02:30:04.000 --> 02:30:19.000
Stuart Winchester: Big Snow in New Jersey, Mountain Creek in New Jersey, and that’s an excellent starting point, because then you work your way north, and Bel Air is next, and, you know, Gore is 4 hours north of the city, and Whiteface is about 5 hours north of the city, depending on traffic and when you go.
02:30:19.000 --> 02:30:24.000
Stuart Winchester: and what kind of weather conditions there are. So, 3 great ski areas, and so now…
02:30:24.000 --> 02:30:26.000
Stuart Winchester: Indie Pass holders.
02:30:26.000 --> 02:30:28.000
Stuart Winchester: Get half off.
02:30:28.000 --> 02:30:34.000
Stuart Winchester: At those mountains on weekdays, and 25% off on weekends and holidays, which is…
02:30:34.000 --> 02:30:35.000
Stuart Winchester: Awesome.
02:30:35.000 --> 02:30:37.000
Stuart Winchester: And…
02:30:37.000 --> 02:30:40.000
Stuart Winchester: The IndiePass is…
02:30:40.000 --> 02:30:42.000
Stuart Winchester: Back on sale!
02:30:42.000 --> 02:30:46.000
Stuart Winchester: It is on sale for…
02:30:50.000 --> 02:30:52.000
Stuart Winchester: Sorry, let me see this.
02:30:53.000 --> 02:30:56.000
Stuart Winchester: Yeah, starting…
02:30:56.000 --> 02:30:57.000
Stuart Winchester: Tomorrow.
02:30:57.000 --> 02:31:02.000
Stuart Winchester: Starting tomorrow, the Indie Pass is back on sale.
02:31:02.000 --> 02:31:04.000
Stuart Winchester: And you should join the waitlist.
02:31:04.000 --> 02:31:13.000
Stuart Winchester: And people on the waitlist should get a chance to buy it, but here are the prices. Adult Base Pass is your basic Indy $399, so that’s gonna have some blackouts.
02:31:13.000 --> 02:31:15.000
Stuart Winchester: Uh, the…
02:31:15.000 --> 02:31:19.000
Stuart Winchester: adult Indie Plus is 449 that’s no blackouts.
02:31:19.000 --> 02:31:34.000
Stuart Winchester: And then Kids Indie Base is $249, and Kids Indie Plus is $279, and there’s also different rates for add-ons, and I’ll add… you can go to stormseeing.com to see all of those, but the Indie Pass is back on sale, that’s a big deal. Okay.
02:31:34.000 --> 02:31:46.000
Stuart Winchester: So, let me get to the new resorts. The Orta Mountains are a big deal, and one of the new resorts, full resort, is Cherry Peak. To be clear, they are switching to full Indy from Indy Allied, so you will get two days at Cherry Peak.
02:31:46.000 --> 02:31:51.000
Stuart Winchester: The other new ski areas, there are three in Norway.
02:31:51.000 --> 02:31:52.000
Stuart Winchester: Beto.
02:31:52.000 --> 02:31:55.000
Stuart Winchester: Half gel, and kvich…
02:31:55.000 --> 02:32:00.000
Stuart Winchester: I’m not even gonna try to pronounce it. It starts with a K. It’s spelled K-V-I-T.
02:32:00.000 --> 02:32:02.000
Stuart Winchester: E-L-L.
02:32:02.000 --> 02:32:03.000
Stuart Winchester: Anyway.
02:32:03.000 --> 02:32:19.000
Stuart Winchester: I don’t know. I’ve never been to Norway, let alone see it there, but I would love to. It looks like a really fun trip. So Indy has signed a number of resorts now across Norway, Sweden, and Finland, and it looks like a super cool part of the world to go check out, and that would be a great excuse to do it.
02:32:19.000 --> 02:32:33.000
Stuart Winchester: Uh, I don’t have a lot of detail on those ski areas right now, but again, I had a full write-up on stormskiing.com, you can go check that out. Uh, in Austria, India’s added yet another resort called Bad Kleinkirchheim.
02:32:33.000 --> 02:32:40.000
Stuart Winchester: whatever. I don’t even… bad must mean resort or something, because everything in Austria, Germany is, like, bad this or that.
02:32:40.000 --> 02:32:50.000
Stuart Winchester: And… let’s see, we have… oh, did I miss one in Norway? Yeah. Opdal, Norway. So there’s 4 new ones in Norway. Uh, U2 in Quebec. La Release.
02:32:51.000 --> 02:32:53.000
Stuart Winchester: Ski Mont Blanc.
02:32:53.000 --> 02:33:05.000
Stuart Winchester: Again, more detail on those in the write-up. You also get Mount Kane in BC, so another new ski area there. And then this is interesting, something called Stoke Mountain, Washington. It’s sort of an indoor…
02:33:05.000 --> 02:33:19.000
Stuart Winchester: snow… like, fake snow surface area? I don’t know much about that yet, either. I don’t think I’m going to inventory that as an actual ski area, uh, because one of my parameters is you have to have snow.
02:33:19.000 --> 02:33:28.000
Stuart Winchester: Uh, which is why I count the indoor Big Snow, uh, but not the outdoor… called, like, the Snowflex Sports Center in Virginia. It’s by, uh…
02:33:29.000 --> 02:33:31.000
Stuart Winchester: What’s that?
02:33:31.000 --> 02:33:46.000
Stuart Winchester: ski area, or what’s that? James Madison University. So, but I don’t know, I don’t count it. So anyway, you get two days there at Silk Mountain, if you’re in Washington. Uh, cross-country ski areas, which I don’t really cover, but I’ll mention them. Devil’s Thumb in Colorado, Gore.
02:33:46.000 --> 02:34:02.000
Stuart Winchester: Mount Van Hovenberg in New York, Oak Hill Outdoor Center in New Hampshire, and Paul Smith’s College Visitor Interpretive Center in New York. So if you’re a cross-country bro, you can get in on that. I’m sure that it’s a lot of fun, and I’m sure I will try it at some point.
02:34:02.000 --> 02:34:08.000
Stuart Winchester: I’m too busy going through all of the alpine ski areas that I have to get to, and…
02:34:08.000 --> 02:34:23.000
Stuart Winchester: really helps to have an IndyPass in your back pocket, because, my goodness, what a list. And I won’t do an exhaustive inventory here, but if you want to see all the charts and all the lists, go to stormseating.com, and paid subscribers will have access to the full write-ups on all of these.
02:34:23.000 --> 02:34:25.000
Stuart Winchester: Ski areas. So.
02:34:25.000 --> 02:34:33.000
Stuart Winchester: I want to tell you about my partners at Islands Snowbus. If you are in Long Island, Queens or Brooklyn like I am.
02:34:33.000 --> 02:34:39.000
Stuart Winchester: You don’t have to drive all the way up and back and ski all day all by yourself.
02:34:39.000 --> 02:34:42.000
Stuart Winchester: Instead, you can try Island Snow Bus.
02:34:42.000 --> 02:34:49.000
Stuart Winchester: Island Snowbus has pickups throughout Suffolk and Nassau counties and in eastern Queens near the Whitestone Bridge.
02:34:49.000 --> 02:34:56.000
Stuart Winchester: And they plan trips to awesome ski areas. Some of my favorites in the region, I mean, if I was to…
02:34:56.000 --> 02:34:59.000
Stuart Winchester: Make a wish list of where I wanted to go.
02:34:59.000 --> 02:35:06.000
Stuart Winchester: for this year would look a lot like this. Whitebase, Jay Peak, Stratton, Gore, Killington, Bel Air, Jiminy Peak, Elk Mount.
02:35:06.000 --> 02:35:17.000
Stuart Winchester: I’ve skied them all, I endorsed them all. All very different. Very different character at each mountain. And you might even get some more out of that list. If a big storm rolls through, Alan Snowbus might throw together a pop-up trip.
02:35:17.000 --> 02:35:25.000
Stuart Winchester: Island Snowbus offers packages that include lift tickets and transportation, or if you have your own pass.
02:35:25.000 --> 02:35:26.000
Stuart Winchester: Just pay for the bus ride.
02:35:26.000 --> 02:35:42.000
Stuart Winchester: Take the early pickup, crash out, meet someone, sleep, find some ski buddies when you get there. You can check out Island Snowbus’ 2026-2027 winter calendar at islandsnowbus.com. Use code STORM for $50 off your first trip.
02:35:42.000 --> 02:35:59.000
Stuart Winchester: It is islandsnowbus.com. All right, this is my second episode with Brent Gardner, and he flips it around, and Brent is going to interview me and ask me some questions about skiing, about the storm, and about the current state of the ski industry and ski passes. It’s a lot of fun. Brent’s doing some great stuff over at Savage Mountain Collective.
02:35:59.000 --> 02:36:09.000
Stuart Winchester: And it was really cool to get to know him and to be able to do the interview both ways. So check out this interview, then go check out Savage Mountain Collective.
The interview with Stu
01:02:01.000 --> 01:02:16.000
Stuart Winchester: Alright, joining me again for the second consecutive day is Brent Gardner. He is the founder of the Savage Mountain Collective, a Substack newsletter that obsessively covers the world of lift-served skiing. Brent, welcome back to The Storm.
01:02:16.000 --> 01:02:32.000
Stuart Winchester: I assume you’re still doing great. And we are going to flip this around now. Brent has some questions for me. And so we’re going to take a little different format today. But that’s what I love about this new pod format is I can switch it up and experiment. So Brent, fire away.
01:02:17.000 --> 01:02:18.000
Brent Gardner: Yeah.
01:02:18.000 --> 01:02:20.000
Brent Gardner: I’m still doing great.
01:02:32.000 --> 01:02:48.000
Brent Gardner: I love it. Well, listen, I think one of the things that interests me the most here is you’re a not so casual observer on this. We oftentimes hear kind of where you’re interested. We know a little bit of your backstory if you pick it up over the years, but today you’re wearing a Michigan sweatshirt, and I’m curious.
01:02:48.000 --> 01:02:59.000
Brent Gardner: Having grown up in Michigan at small non-destination resorts, what is something that you know about skiing that maybe someone who grew up at a destination resort would not?
01:03:00.000 --> 01:03:02.000
Stuart Winchester: Skiing is…
01:03:03.000 --> 01:03:05.000
Stuart Winchester: Great.
01:03:05.000 --> 01:03:08.000
Stuart Winchester: Because it’s skiing.
01:03:08.000 --> 01:03:11.000
Stuart Winchester: Not because of where you’re skiing.
01:03:11.000 --> 01:03:12.000
Stuart Winchester: So, so…
01:03:13.000 --> 01:03:23.000
Stuart Winchester: the skiing that I fell in love with one night at age 16 at 250 vertical foot-ish Snow Snake, Michigan.
01:03:23.000 --> 01:03:33.000
Stuart Winchester: is the feeling of skiing, and we talked about this in our last interview. You talked about it, and the sense of enlightenment that it gave you.
01:03:33.000 --> 01:03:38.000
Stuart Winchester: Flying down that hill and just telling myself, don’t fall.
01:03:38.000 --> 01:03:47.000
Stuart Winchester: And deciding right then that I was a skier. But no one could have told me after that. I was 16 years old. I had skied three days of my life. The first two were disasters.
01:03:47.000 --> 01:03:53.000
Stuart Winchester: Uh, but I… those were a couple years before that. And… I was a skier, and, you know…
01:03:53.000 --> 01:03:55.000
Stuart Winchester: This was…
01:03:55.000 --> 01:04:03.000
Stuart Winchester: In the 90s, you have to understand, like, today, people really like to talk about their identity and, like, as a this or as a that.
01:04:03.000 --> 01:04:08.000
Stuart Winchester: In the 90s, no one did that. Like, if you said you’re a basketball player.
01:04:08.000 --> 01:04:23.000
Stuart Winchester: people would be like, okay, why? Because you, like, play streetball? Like, what are you, Michael Jordan? You know, there wasn’t that identity-first mindset. And so I was never, you know, I played video games all the time, but I wasn’t like, oh, I’m a gamer, you know? I was just someone who played video games.
01:04:23.000 --> 01:04:39.000
Stuart Winchester: But as soon as I skied, I was a skier, and it became part of my identity, and I knew that I was going to ask for skis for Christmas the next year, in 1994, and I got them, and went to all the different skiers I could, because the wonderful thing about Michigan.
01:04:39.000 --> 01:04:48.000
Stuart Winchester: is it has the second most ski areas after any state other than New York. It’s 40-something, had even more back in the 90s, and…
01:04:48.000 --> 01:05:03.000
Stuart Winchester: You don’t have to deal with mountain driving in Michigan, and most of the roads are flat and straight. There’s a lot of snow, but they clear it off pretty well, and there’s just a… it’s very easy. Within 3 hours of where I grew up, there were a couple dozen ski areas, and I…
01:05:03.000 --> 01:05:12.000
Stuart Winchester: I got after them, and I explored them, and to me, that adventure as a 17-year-old kid just driving around Michigan in a Ford Probe.
01:05:12.000 --> 01:05:21.000
Stuart Winchester: And pulling up to a mountain, and getting to know the new mountain, and just anticipating the drive up, because also in the 90s.
01:05:21.000 --> 01:05:25.000
Stuart Winchester: There was no internet. You couldn’t look up a trail map online.
01:05:25.000 --> 01:05:30.000
Stuart Winchester: you know, you didn’t really know what a ski area was. Like, you would get a brochure from a rest stop.
01:05:30.000 --> 01:05:45.000
Stuart Winchester: And it would say, you know, take US-10 to exit 32, and go right for 5 miles, and then turn left at the oak tree. You know, it was very non-specific, so you kinda didn’t know, like, you might know how much lifts they had.
01:05:45.000 --> 01:05:51.000
Stuart Winchester: But there was a magic in that exploration and that novelty.
01:05:51.000 --> 01:05:53.000
Stuart Winchester: And also just…
01:05:53.000 --> 01:05:55.000
Stuart Winchester: The gathering of life?
01:05:55.000 --> 01:06:10.000
Stuart Winchester: that you see at a ski area. You know, I think Michigan being a driving based culture, sometimes it was very hard to find those centers of life that were not necessarily built around commerce. Like you’d go to a mall or something and it was indoors.
01:06:10.000 --> 01:06:20.000
Stuart Winchester: But with skiing, you find this hive of life in the middle of winter when you’re used to people hibernating in a season that most people disdain.
01:06:20.000 --> 01:06:24.000
Stuart Winchester: And I, and I loved that. I, I, I love not.
01:06:24.000 --> 01:06:41.000
Stuart Winchester: being negative about half the year. When you live in Michigan, it really is half the year. So, the first… what I mean, that being said, one of the first things I did is go to the library, so again, no internet, and I found a book, and it was called The Greatest Ski Resorts in America, and at the time.
01:06:28.000 --> 01:06:29.000
Brent Gardner: Hello?
01:06:41.000 --> 01:06:49.000
Stuart Winchester: I think it only listed about 20. Most of them were in Colorado, had Jackson in there, had Snowbird, Park City.
01:06:49.000 --> 01:07:00.000
Stuart Winchester: But very few, because they really weren’t built out so much at the time, but I obsessed over that, and I’d look at the trail maps, and yeah, I went west as soon as I could, and I’ve been west.
01:07:00.000 --> 01:07:05.000
Stuart Winchester: dozens and dozens of times, and I love it, and it’s fantastic skiing.
01:07:05.000 --> 01:07:12.000
Stuart Winchester: But I also take a Midwest trip every year, and sometimes two if I’m home for Christmas.
01:07:12.000 --> 01:07:13.000
Stuart Winchester: And, uh…
01:07:13.000 --> 01:07:15.000
Stuart Winchester: There’s something about…
01:07:16.000 --> 01:07:22.000
Stuart Winchester: the culture there. I think it’s one of the world’s great ski cultures, and I mean that genuinely.
01:07:22.000 --> 01:07:34.000
Stuart Winchester: Because it’s so accessible, because the ski areas are everywhere, you don’t have to drive up a canyon, you don’t have to pay $200 for a lift ticket, uh, you know, you see guys skiing in jeans with their bros from high school, and…
01:07:34.000 --> 01:07:38.000
Stuart Winchester: You know, on some $20 Tuesday or something.
01:07:38.000 --> 01:07:39.000
Stuart Winchester: It’s…
01:07:40.000 --> 01:07:46.000
Stuart Winchester: Really the opposite of everything that skiing gets.
01:07:46.000 --> 01:07:57.000
Stuart Winchester: uh, stereotyped as… as a… as a rich, elitist sport, as an inaccessible sport. It’s just fun, man. There… there is nothing more fun.
01:07:57.000 --> 01:08:02.000
Stuart Winchester: Then I’m pulling up to a Midwest ski hill on, like, a Tuesday at 3 o’clock, when the schools are.
01:08:02.000 --> 01:08:04.000
Brent Gardner: I love it.
01:08:02.000 --> 01:08:08.000
Stuart Winchester: So I would say that it’s just the feeling, you know, it’s it’s skiing is is where you are.
01:08:08.000 --> 01:08:22.000
Brent Gardner: You know, I love the way you talk about skiing. One of the things that you’ve written about is how ski area operators are artists, and I’ve really… I’ve connected with that a lot. What is one mountain where you can actually feel someone’s imagination in the way that it skis?
01:08:14.000 --> 01:08:15.000
Stuart Winchester: Yeah.
01:08:23.000 --> 01:08:28.000
Stuart Winchester: Mount Bohemia in Michigan is extraordinary.
01:08:28.000 --> 01:08:31.000
Stuart Winchester: The it’s 550 acres.
01:08:31.000 --> 01:08:33.000
Stuart Winchester: No grooming, no snowmaking.
01:08:33.000 --> 01:08:36.000
Stuart Winchester: The glading is…
01:08:36.000 --> 01:08:40.000
Stuart Winchester: a masterpiece. I mean, because, you know, Michigan…
01:08:40.000 --> 01:08:49.000
Stuart Winchester: Got clear-cut down to the bones in the 1800s, right? And it’s still working its way back, right? Those big forests take a long time.
01:08:49.000 --> 01:09:00.000
Stuart Winchester: And there’s a lot of underbrush in a typical Michigan forest. And Bohemia is lucky. They get about 300 inches of lake effect a year because they’re sitting on a peninsula off the upper peninsula, and they just hammer by Lake Super.
01:09:00.000 --> 01:09:19.000
Stuart Winchester: But when you go in there, I mean, the glades are just perfectly cut. Uh, I’ll give you another one, also in Michigan, is… is Cabar Fay Peaks, which is a scary I talk about all the time, and it went from… it used to be this sprawl of rope toes. They had about 25 rope toes, and they were all over the place on these…
01:09:19.000 --> 01:09:32.000
Stuart Winchester: on these mountains. And this area wasn’t really making money, and so what they did… and this is why I love Michigan, guys, and, like, I just… I love the… the ethos of the Midwest. People just, like, do things.
01:09:32.000 --> 01:09:39.000
Stuart Winchester: And, uh, they dug out the bottom of the hill, and they moved the dirt to the top, and you could do that in Michigan because there’s no rock.
01:09:39.000 --> 01:09:40.000
Brent Gardner: Mmhm.
01:09:39.000 --> 01:09:52.000
Stuart Winchester: And they built a scary up from, you know, about 200-ish vertical feet to almost 500, and they did that on 2 peaks, and they closed almost all the old terrain, and so they really.
01:09:53.000 --> 01:09:57.000
Stuart Winchester: Sculpted out of what should have been a failed ski area.
01:09:57.000 --> 01:10:08.000
Stuart Winchester: a really great modern operation. It almost feels a little Alps-like when you’re up there, because you’ve got the bare peaks, and there’s, you know, there’s obviously nothing above treeline in Michigan.
01:10:08.000 --> 01:10:15.000
Stuart Winchester: But those two, I think, are great examples. And I guess I go to the Midwest.
01:10:15.000 --> 01:10:17.000
Stuart Winchester: Because…
01:10:17.000 --> 01:10:19.000
Stuart Winchester: They have less to work with?
01:10:19.000 --> 01:10:21.000
Stuart Winchester: Right, like…
01:10:21.000 --> 01:10:24.000
Stuart Winchester: when Peacekeeper went off Vail Mountain, he was like.
01:10:24.000 --> 01:10:32.000
Stuart Winchester: let’s frickin’ put a lift right now, you know? I mean, and obviously they’ve done a lot of landscaping and grooming on it, uh, but Vail Mountain is…
01:10:33.000 --> 01:10:41.000
Stuart Winchester: is a masterpiece of nature as much as man. Caberfay Peaks, Michigan is not a masterpiece of nature.
01:10:41.000 --> 01:10:45.000
Stuart Winchester: But but man really made something special there.
01:10:45.000 --> 01:11:08.000
Brent Gardner: Yeah. And that makes a difference these days, because more and more the opportunities to find that raw place isn’t there. We’re gonna have to make the environment work. I love the way you talk about that, you know, in starting the the storm, you know, you’ve really had to work a delicate balance. You need to have operators that trust you enough to be able to talk openly, and you need to be critical enough that your readers believe that you’re you’re kind of given the the tough spot there. I know that’s a tough.
01:11:08.000 --> 01:11:15.000
Brent Gardner: balance to be able to make. When has getting that balance been the hardest, and what are some golden rules that you have about that?
01:11:16.000 --> 01:11:18.000
Stuart Winchester: Yeah, I think.
01:11:22.000 --> 01:11:29.000
Stuart Winchester: Well, my first rule, I’ll start with that, and I’ll try to get back to the toughest one, so I might think about that one for a minute.
01:11:29.000 --> 01:11:31.000
Stuart Winchester: The…
01:11:31.000 --> 01:11:36.000
Stuart Winchester: Really, the only rule I have is that the truth is all that matters.
01:11:36.000 --> 01:11:38.000
Stuart Winchester: um…
01:11:38.000 --> 01:11:41.000
Stuart Winchester: So I can’t ever worry about…
01:11:41.000 --> 01:11:46.000
Stuart Winchester: how something is gonna land with a certain group.
01:11:46.000 --> 01:11:55.000
Stuart Winchester: Uh, or I can’t worry about access, I can’t worry about people not talking to me. Uh, and I found that…
01:11:56.000 --> 01:12:02.000
Stuart Winchester: Ski area operators in general are pretty good about.
01:12:02.000 --> 01:12:07.000
Stuart Winchester: Accepting criticism, so long as they think it’s coming from…
01:12:07.000 --> 01:12:08.000
Stuart Winchester: a.
01:12:08.000 --> 01:12:11.000
Stuart Winchester: a well-considered place.
01:12:11.000 --> 01:12:13.000
Stuart Winchester: And.
01:12:13.000 --> 01:12:20.000
Stuart Winchester: that I do give them also an opportunity to respond to that. And I do like having operators on and saying.
01:12:20.000 --> 01:12:34.000
Stuart Winchester: like, Jiminy Peak, and say, hey, man, you have one of the most expensive season passes in the East, but you don’t have one of the biggest mountains, like, what… how do you justify that? And they lay it out, and I was like, I’ve been critical of that, it’s like, tell me why I’m wrong.
01:12:34.000 --> 01:12:42.000
Stuart Winchester: Uh, those weren’t my exact words, but we had that conversation, uh, with the… with the Fairbanks, uh, with Brian and Tyler, and uh…
01:12:42.000 --> 01:12:49.000
Stuart Winchester: You know, I am a trained journalist. It’s not, I’m not doing this.
01:12:49.000 --> 01:12:54.000
Stuart Winchester: For ski access, I made the storm because I wanted to read it.
01:12:54.000 --> 01:13:00.000
Stuart Winchester: I think you did the same thing with the Savage Mountain Collective from the way you talked about it yesterday, and uh…
01:13:01.000 --> 01:13:03.000
Stuart Winchester: the…
01:13:03.000 --> 01:13:06.000
Stuart Winchester: What I wanted to do was was give.
01:13:07.000 --> 01:13:12.000
Stuart Winchester: Accurate information to people because there was just there was just too much.
01:13:12.000 --> 01:13:17.000
Stuart Winchester: Opinions and… and junk and garbage on the internet that…
01:13:17.000 --> 01:13:26.000
Stuart Winchester: and assumptions, like, a lot of assumptions, and… and no one was really talking to the ski area operator. So, um, as far as, uh…
01:13:27.000 --> 01:13:32.000
Stuart Winchester: a tough situation. I would say there was a… there was a dust-up a few years back.
01:13:33.000 --> 01:13:36.000
Stuart Winchester: with Indy Pass.
01:13:36.000 --> 01:13:40.000
Stuart Winchester: and Ski Cooper. I think I’m gonna say this was in 2023.
01:13:40.000 --> 01:13:42.000
Stuart Winchester: And…
01:13:42.000 --> 01:13:44.000
Stuart Winchester: Ski Cooper…
01:13:44.000 --> 01:13:47.000
Stuart Winchester: had kind of built a shadow national pass.
01:13:47.000 --> 01:13:52.000
Stuart Winchester: And you get 3 days each at several dozen ski areas.
01:13:57.000 --> 01:14:02.000
Stuart Winchester: Priced around the same as the Indy Pass. It was maybe 300 bucks or 400 bucks.
01:14:02.000 --> 01:14:04.000
Stuart Winchester: And Indy…
01:14:04.000 --> 01:14:15.000
Stuart Winchester: said, and I was. I was writing about this. I kind of blew the lid off it to the world and said, Hey, this is another national pass. And then Indy said, Okay, we don’t like this.
01:14:15.000 --> 01:14:23.000
Stuart Winchester: Because you’re not… no one’s getting paid for this, the reciprocal visits, so you can’t be on IndyPass and Ski Cooper.
01:14:23.000 --> 01:14:25.000
Stuart Winchester: And so there was a big.
01:14:25.000 --> 01:14:31.000
Stuart Winchester: a lot of exodus from Ski Cooper, who went to Indy, because they were getting paid visits. There were some that went…
01:14:31.000 --> 01:14:35.000
Stuart Winchester: From Indy, they left Indy and went to ski Cooper.
01:14:35.000 --> 01:14:36.000
Stuart Winchester: And…
01:14:37.000 --> 01:14:40.000
Stuart Winchester: The Ski Cooper folks, I had been really…
01:14:40.000 --> 01:14:45.000
Stuart Winchester: had a good relationship with before. Dan Torcella, been on the podcast, the general manager.
01:14:45.000 --> 01:14:50.000
Stuart Winchester: Uh, they… they stopped answering my emails. They were… they were pretty sore with me.
01:14:50.000 --> 01:14:52.000
Stuart Winchester: On the other side.
01:14:52.000 --> 01:14:53.000
Stuart Winchester: I…
01:14:53.000 --> 01:14:58.000
Stuart Winchester: You know, Eric and I have talked about this. It took him a while.
01:14:58.000 --> 01:15:02.000
Stuart Winchester: to understand the role of the media.
01:15:03.000 --> 01:15:05.000
Stuart Winchester: Uh, and he has, he’s…
01:15:05.000 --> 01:15:08.000
Stuart Winchester: He’s one of the best people I’ve ever met about…
01:15:08.000 --> 01:15:20.000
Stuart Winchester: evolving his worldview based on evidence, not on what he wants it to be. Like, he… he really thinks, and he really changes it, and he’s… he under… he understands now, I have a job to do, right?
01:15:20.000 --> 01:15:23.000
Stuart Winchester: And, and I can’t let.
01:15:23.000 --> 01:15:33.000
Stuart Winchester: anything get in the way of that, as far as personal relationships, or, like, not wanting to hurt someone’s feelings, or something else. I just… I just have to tell the truth, and that’s really…
01:15:33.000 --> 01:15:38.000
Stuart Winchester: what it comes down to, and I… I miss Ski Cooper, because I really, uh…
01:15:38.000 --> 01:15:43.000
Stuart Winchester: respect what they do, operating that little ski area between Wreck and Vail.
01:15:43.000 --> 01:15:55.000
Stuart Winchester: And, you know, that’s not an easy task, but they do it, and they keep at it, and I think it’s great. And so hopefully I’ll get a chance to reset that relationship at some point. There was also, uh…
01:15:57.000 --> 01:15:59.000
Stuart Winchester: Uh, it was…
01:15:59.000 --> 01:16:02.000
Stuart Winchester: Oscaria in Oregon.
01:16:02.000 --> 01:16:06.000
Stuart Winchester: And I had them lined up, pretty major ski area. I had them lined up for an interview.
01:16:06.000 --> 01:16:14.000
Stuart Winchester: And I sent them kind of a list of topics I want to talk about at a time, and they said, well, we’re not talking about this, and I said, okay, well, I…
01:16:14.000 --> 01:16:21.000
Stuart Winchester: you know, then I’m not going to do the interview. Like, you know, I have to ask the question. You cannot answer it.
01:16:21.000 --> 01:16:23.000
Stuart Winchester: But I have to ask it.
01:16:23.000 --> 01:16:33.000
Stuart Winchester: And you can’t say that I can’t even ask it. That was where I drew a line and said, okay, there’s no point. Like, I’m not doing a PR interview for you.
01:16:33.000 --> 01:16:48.000
Brent Gardner: Yeah, it’s not easy, I can tell you that much, but I think you do a good job of it. Hey, you know, you built the storm partly because ski media wasn’t giving you what you were looking for. What is one story about skiing that still isn’t getting told by well, even by you, that you’d like to see get told better?
01:16:36.000 --> 01:16:38.000
Stuart Winchester: Thank you.
01:16:48.000 --> 01:16:50.000
Stuart Winchester: Yeah…
01:16:53.000 --> 01:16:55.000
Stuart Winchester: There is…
01:17:08.000 --> 01:17:10.000
Stuart Winchester: I think that…
01:17:13.000 --> 01:17:15.000
Stuart Winchester: The…
01:17:17.000 --> 01:17:19.000
Stuart Winchester: People that you need.
01:17:19.000 --> 01:17:22.000
Stuart Winchester: To run a ski area.
01:17:22.000 --> 01:17:25.000
Stuart Winchester: are getting squeezed from two directions.
01:17:25.000 --> 01:17:28.000
Stuart Winchester: Mechanical and technological.
01:17:28.000 --> 01:17:31.000
Stuart Winchester: On the on the mechanical end.
01:17:31.000 --> 01:17:34.000
Stuart Winchester: We still have a number of.
01:17:34.000 --> 01:17:36.000
Stuart Winchester: Very old lifts.
01:17:36.000 --> 01:17:38.000
Stuart Winchester: Uh, in snow machines.
01:17:38.000 --> 01:17:40.000
Stuart Winchester: That.
01:17:40.000 --> 01:17:43.000
Stuart Winchester: It takes a certain kind of.
01:17:43.000 --> 01:17:56.000
Stuart Winchester: brain and a certain kind of build and upbringing to do. And I grew up around a lot of these guys, and I was talking about with Michigan folks, they just, you know, they rewire their whatever, and they like to do it themselves.
01:17:56.000 --> 01:18:00.000
Stuart Winchester: If you take a ski area like Ski Big Bear, for example, in Pennsylv.
01:18:00.000 --> 01:18:11.000
Stuart Winchester: the dudes that run this, I mean, they’ve cobbled together this Frankenstein snowmaking system from the discards of a dozen different ski areas, and it…
01:18:11.000 --> 01:18:16.000
Stuart Winchester: It’s all these different brands, and it’s all wired together like some kind of Dr. Seuss.
01:18:16.000 --> 01:18:18.000
Stuart Winchester: mystery, and…
01:18:18.000 --> 01:18:19.000
Stuart Winchester: you know.
01:18:19.000 --> 01:18:28.000
Stuart Winchester: they, the Smallsley brothers, they have stepped away, and they’re transitioning ownership to the housing group that runs it.
01:18:28.000 --> 01:18:34.000
Stuart Winchester: I don’t know how… there’s not… I’m not gonna say there’s none of those people anymore, but I think that…
01:18:34.000 --> 01:18:37.000
Stuart Winchester: From a societal point of view.
01:18:37.000 --> 01:18:47.000
Stuart Winchester: we produce fewer of them than we used to. I’m not trying to say I am one of those guys, because I’m not. I’m an idiot. I don’t, you know… my car breaks, I go to the mechanic. So.
01:18:47.000 --> 01:18:58.000
Stuart Winchester: I do have a lot of respect for these kind of people, and it… you know, my cousin’s like that. He’s just… since he was little, he just understood engines and, like, loves, you know, building out his cars and all this stuff.
01:18:58.000 --> 01:19:07.000
Stuart Winchester: I just don’t have that brain, uh, and I think that, as a society, we produce fewer and fewer of them, so I think on the mechanical end.
01:19:07.000 --> 01:19:14.000
Stuart Winchester: we have a lot of people that are aging out, and not a lot of good people to replace them. And then on the technological end.
01:19:14.000 --> 01:19:16.000
Stuart Winchester: You have, uh…
01:19:17.000 --> 01:19:34.000
Stuart Winchester: Machines and other infrastructure that’s almost too complicated. So, so you have the new D-line lifts that Doppelmayr builds, for example, and, and obviously you need to be a pretty well-heeled resort, like one of the Boynes to even build one of those. But the uptake and maintenance and the.
01:19:34.000 --> 01:19:36.000
Stuart Winchester: the… the…
01:19:36.000 --> 01:19:38.000
Stuart Winchester: Digital.
01:19:38.000 --> 01:19:44.000
Stuart Winchester: control of these things adds a whole nother layer on top of that mechanical.
01:19:44.000 --> 01:19:46.000
Stuart Winchester: And it’s almost like…
01:19:47.000 --> 01:19:51.000
Stuart Winchester: They get too complicated, and…
01:19:51.000 --> 01:19:57.000
Stuart Winchester: So even a guy who’s really good at the mechanical part, he’s not going to do this, and so you kind of run into the problem with the, uh…
01:19:57.000 --> 01:19:59.000
Stuart Winchester: The right to repair.
01:19:59.000 --> 01:20:12.000
Stuart Winchester: law that the farmers want to push through because they, you know, John Deere or whoever, or Caterpillar, had made the machine so complicated that they couldn’t fix them anymore, and they wouldn’t even let them open them, right? They wouldn’t even, like, you couldn’t even get into it.
01:20:09.000 --> 01:20:10.000
Brent Gardner: Yeah.
01:20:12.000 --> 01:20:17.000
Stuart Winchester: I think, I might not have that exactly right, but essentially it’s, you know.
01:20:17.000 --> 01:20:27.000
Stuart Winchester: if your Doppelmayr D-line breaks, there’s a guy in Austria who has to fly in and fix it, because you don’t know how to do it. And it’s not just lifts and snowmaking, it’s.
01:20:27.000 --> 01:20:29.000
Stuart Winchester: The entire…
01:20:29.000 --> 01:20:31.000
Stuart Winchester: Customer experience.
01:20:33.000 --> 01:20:34.000
Stuart Winchester: With your, uh…
01:20:34.000 --> 01:20:37.000
Stuart Winchester: With all the systems you have to have in place for.
01:20:37.000 --> 01:20:40.000
Stuart Winchester: Selling tickets for scanning.
01:20:41.000 --> 01:20:42.000
Brent Gardner: Yeah.
01:20:41.000 --> 01:20:47.000
Stuart Winchester: for selling everything, interconnecting all the different parts of the resort, and that’s what Mogensen’s working on with, uh…
01:20:47.000 --> 01:20:54.000
Stuart Winchester: with his Entebeni. So yeah, I think that it’s a story I don’t tell enough.
01:20:48.000 --> 01:20:49.000
Brent Gardner: Goodbye.
01:20:50.000 --> 01:20:52.000
Brent Gardner: What else?
01:20:54.000 --> 01:21:10.000
Brent Gardner: Well, I think you know, I think back to all of the resorts that I was at when I was a kid, and there was always that guy who got called, you know. They’d call the 1st line guy, and then they’d call Bill, who’s been there for 40 years. You’re right. There’s 1 of those at every mountain, especially with these, the aging infrastructure that we have.
01:21:00.000 --> 01:21:01.000
Stuart Winchester: Yeah.
01:21:02.000 --> 01:21:03.000
Stuart Winchester: Okay.
01:21:10.000 --> 01:21:31.000
Brent Gardner: you know, some of these guys were here when the lifts got put in, and they’re the only ones who know that. You know the schematics that you have aren’t what it looks like anymore. And you know you mentioned that, you know. Sometimes it requires, you know, the Doppelmeyer, whoever to come in. I know you’ve been tracking Slidebrook up at Sugarbush, too, you know, getting that thing going again. Last year I I rushed right up there to ride it, because you never know if it’s.
01:21:31.000 --> 01:21:32.000
Stuart Winchester: Yeah, thank you.
01:21:31.000 --> 01:21:49.000
Brent Gardner: Well, listen, I want to just transition to a couple of quick questions that I have for you here. You know, you’ve covered a lot on some of these passes. I’ve covered a lot on some of these passes. This year, the Snow Pass came into being. And, you know, we’ve got Snow Pass, Epic, Icon. You know, we seem to see new passes enter the market every few years.
01:21:43.000 --> 01:21:44.000
Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.
01:21:49.000 --> 01:21:57.000
Brent Gardner: What would convince you that another pass is actually growing skiing instead of moving existing skiers around?
01:21:57.000 --> 01:22:05.000
Stuart Winchester: I think I’m already convinced that the multi-mountain passes have grown skiing. And the reason I believe that is that.
01:22:05.000 --> 01:22:17.000
Stuart Winchester: 7 of our last 8 ski seasons have been among the top 10 ever. It might be 6 of the last 7. I have to check that stat. Uh, COVID messed that up, so you throw that year out, and you throw last year out.
01:22:17.000 --> 01:22:21.000
Stuart Winchester: All the other years have been among the top 10 seasons ever.
01:22:21.000 --> 01:22:28.000
Stuart Winchester: So, it appears that since those numbers track with the advent of the IconPass.
01:22:28.000 --> 01:22:30.000
Stuart Winchester: In 2018.
01:22:31.000 --> 01:22:33.000
Stuart Winchester: And really, the epic pass was…
01:22:33.000 --> 01:22:37.000
Stuart Winchester: Quite small before that, compared to what it is now.
01:22:37.000 --> 01:22:39.000
Stuart Winchester: Pardon me.
01:22:39.000 --> 01:22:41.000
Stuart Winchester: And it really…
01:22:41.000 --> 01:22:45.000
Stuart Winchester: Its resort numbers really grew after Icon debuted.
01:22:44.000 --> 01:22:46.000
Brent Gardner: No.
01:22:45.000 --> 01:23:01.000
Stuart Winchester: So, I think I’m already convinced of that, with the small caveat that there’s a chance that skier visit numbers may be bigger now because of the sudden shift to RFID, and people just aren’t as good at counting as machines. So, I will say that perhaps the data is tainted.
01:23:01.000 --> 01:23:10.000
Stuart Winchester: that’s another story that someone needs to cover, and it can’t be me, because I’m already swimming in data. As far as… was growing skiing…
01:23:10.000 --> 01:23:12.000
Stuart Winchester: Beyond.
01:23:12.000 --> 01:23:14.000
Stuart Winchester: what it is now.
01:23:15.000 --> 01:23:19.000
Stuart Winchester: I would have to see…
01:23:21.000 --> 01:23:26.000
Stuart Winchester: I guess I would have to see numbers. You only have numbers on Epic Pass, right?
01:23:26.000 --> 01:23:27.000
Brent Gardner: No.
01:23:26.000 --> 01:23:32.000
Stuart Winchester: Uh, and I know that’s not exactly what you were asking. Uh, what I… just a quick thought about the snow pass.
01:23:32.000 --> 01:23:41.000
Stuart Winchester: I like Snowpass so much because it ties in Big Snow and that is such a cool learning incubator.
01:23:41.000 --> 01:23:53.000
Stuart Winchester: right in the heart of 20 million people that people can go and learn at. It’s really fun, and it’s cheap, it’s kind of a cool thing to do for a party, or a date, or just, you know, take your kids.
01:23:53.000 --> 01:23:58.000
Stuart Winchester: Uh, and… and the fact that you can now tie that to Mountain Creek.
01:23:58.000 --> 01:24:07.000
Stuart Winchester: and… which is owned by the same folks, and then the scary’s up in the Catskills, and Platykill, and Bel Air, and go north from there to Gore. I think it.
01:24:07.000 --> 01:24:13.000
Stuart Winchester: network. I tend to think more passes is better. I like consumer choice.
01:24:13.000 --> 01:24:25.000
Stuart Winchester: you know, I push back against the duopoly argument a lot, just because I’m around people like Joe Hessian, who is behind the Snowpass, or Eric Mogenson, who’s behind the IndyPass so much, and I see them…
01:24:25.000 --> 01:24:33.000
Stuart Winchester: doing so many cool, interesting things, completely outside of the orbit of Epic and Icon, that I’m just not…
01:24:33.000 --> 01:24:50.000
Stuart Winchester: willing to accept a duopoly argument as so many folks like to make it. So I don’t know, I don’t think that’s a good answer to your question exactly, but the general thoughts on Snowpass, I do like it and I hope it.
01:24:50.000 --> 01:24:59.000
Stuart Winchester: is able to succeed and grow, uh, because when you have a choice of a couple different things, I think that.
01:24:59.000 --> 01:25:06.000
Stuart Winchester: makes those passes act more in a consumer-friendly way. I think Epic certainly.
01:25:06.000 --> 01:25:12.000
Stuart Winchester: got better after Icon came out, and introduced some different products, and lowered their prices, and…
01:25:12.000 --> 01:25:17.000
Stuart Winchester: Did all these things as a response, and you know, they’ve introduced the Epic Day Pass, which is a f.
01:25:17.000 --> 01:25:18.000
Stuart Winchester: So.
01:25:18.000 --> 01:25:24.000
Stuart Winchester: in general, I love all the past competition, and I’m eager to see more.
01:25:24.000 --> 01:25:38.000
Brent Gardner: I appreciate the chance to be able to ask you questions like this. I’ve got one about the storm, and then I’ve got one about the next year, and then I think we can close it up. You know, the storm 3.0 has seen a change in a lot of different things that those of us as part of your community are able to watch.
01:25:27.000 --> 01:25:29.000
Stuart Winchester: Sure.
01:25:29.000 --> 01:25:30.000
Stuart Winchester: Okay.
01:25:38.000 --> 01:25:45.000
Brent Gardner: What’s one thing that you’re excited that you can do with the Storm 3.0 that’s the biggest change from the Storm 2.0?
01:25:45.000 --> 01:25:50.000
Stuart Winchester: I think just react faster to news. The written pieces…
01:25:50.000 --> 01:25:53.000
Stuart Winchester: They really are a huge lift.
01:25:53.000 --> 01:26:03.000
Stuart Winchester: And Substack makes it as easy as possible, but even staging and proofreading when you’re a one-man show is… is a lot. So, you know, ICON…
01:26:03.000 --> 01:26:08.000
Stuart Winchester: On Monday, I announced a bunch of new partners, and they never give me an embargo.
01:26:08.000 --> 01:26:15.000
Stuart Winchester: Vail does, and everyone else does, but ICON will not, for whatever reason. And so I had to respond to that.
01:26:15.000 --> 01:26:23.000
Stuart Winchester: I just… the way my day was set up, I could not write a story about it. And I wasn’t able to write it till today, and I pushed it out today.
01:26:23.000 --> 01:26:34.000
Stuart Winchester: But I was able to do 5 minutes on the podcast on it, or whatever I ended up doing on it. It was just acknowledged it, I was able to throw it in the headline, because I’m doing a podcast almost every day.
01:26:34.000 --> 01:26:36.000
Stuart Winchester: Uh, in some…
01:26:36.000 --> 01:26:37.000
Stuart Winchester: Folks have said, well.
01:26:37.000 --> 01:26:43.000
Stuart Winchester: You know, not writing is a cop-out, you know, you’re not… you’re just sort of mailing it in.
01:26:43.000 --> 01:26:54.000
Stuart Winchester: you know, it is easier in some ways. It’s harder in some ways because it’s easier to babble and sound like an idiot when you’re not able to proofread yourself and check yourself, right?
01:26:54.000 --> 01:27:03.000
Stuart Winchester: Uh, but yeah, I can just acknowledge it, and… but writing is very considered. I’m not a fast writer, and I like slow, and I think, and I…
01:27:03.000 --> 01:27:13.000
Stuart Winchester: delete, and I redo, and you know, everything that I send out takes, you know, probably a minimum of 10 hours, I would say. I don’t think I’m ever able to do anything faster than that.
01:27:13.000 --> 01:27:20.000
Stuart Winchester: in a written piece, so it’s just getting to the news faster. I think the podcast…
01:27:20.000 --> 01:27:36.000
Stuart Winchester: when I envisioned it in 2019, I think that it was an appropriate podcast for the time, because it was filling a niche in the market that wasn’t there, because all the ski interview podcasts then were just talking to ski bros who were good at skiing, and that’s fine, but…
01:27:36.000 --> 01:27:43.000
Stuart Winchester: I just wanted to hear about Killington, and I wanted to hear about Sugarbush, and I wanted to hear about Vail, and I wanted people to tell me why…
01:27:43.000 --> 01:27:48.000
Stuart Winchester: They did these things that everyone else was just complaining about on social media and coming to conclusions on.
01:27:48.000 --> 01:27:51.000
Stuart Winchester: But, you know, a couple hundred episodes in it.
01:27:51.000 --> 01:28:01.000
Stuart Winchester: I felt like it needed to be evolved into something different, and it needed to be more frequent, less elaborate, less writing-heavy, independent.
01:28:01.000 --> 01:28:17.000
Stuart Winchester: and just more reactive. Like, yes, the one that we recorded yesterday, I was able to tape onto the front of it the fact that a small skier in Illinois, Snowstar, does not plan to open this year. And I know a lot of people don’t care about Snowstar or Midwest skiing, but.
01:28:17.000 --> 01:28:26.000
Stuart Winchester: Uh, it does matter, because it’s the only ski area within quite a long drive of there. Uh, and… and hopefully, when I talk about it, one of my crazy listeners will…
01:28:26.000 --> 01:28:37.000
Stuart Winchester: will decide they want to go save it, because that’s what happened with Norway Mountain in Michigan, is… uh, is Justin Hoppe was listening to my podcast and… and heard that it… Norway Mountain was…
01:28:37.000 --> 01:28:46.000
Stuart Winchester: shut down, and he went and reopened it. It’s awesome! So, you know, I’m not gonna do it, because one thing I’ve learned from running the storm is I have no interest in running a ski area.
01:28:46.000 --> 01:28:53.000
Stuart Winchester: I just want to talk to people who do because it’s it’s man, it’s it’s a whole.
01:28:53.000 --> 01:28:55.000
Stuart Winchester: all-encompassing thing. So, um…
01:28:55.000 --> 01:28:57.000
Stuart Winchester: Um, I…
01:28:57.000 --> 01:29:04.000
Stuart Winchester: You know, I, I wanted, I started to make, I realized I was not making the kind of podcast that I actually listened to.
01:29:04.000 --> 01:29:08.000
Stuart Winchester: Which was talking about, you know, Michigan football and.
01:29:08.000 --> 01:29:16.000
Stuart Winchester: coach was texting OnlyFans models, and got fired, and who’s our next coach, and uh… you know, what happened against Ohio State, and… and…
01:29:16.000 --> 01:29:30.000
Stuart Winchester: that’s what I was listening to, but I wasn’t making that. I was making something that was a little more ponderous, and I’m proud of it, and I think it’s a good archive, it’s a good library to have, and I’m not saying I’ll never go back to it or mix it in.
01:29:30.000 --> 01:29:33.000
Stuart Winchester: But I think this pod that I’m doing now.
01:29:34.000 --> 01:29:37.000
Stuart Winchester: Gets me a lot more…
01:29:37.000 --> 01:29:45.000
Stuart Winchester: in the moment, right? Because it’s… I mean, you’ve lived… you’ve lived through it. From anyone, I think, who grew up when we grew up.
01:29:45.000 --> 01:29:48.000
Stuart Winchester: And grew up without the internet.
01:29:48.000 --> 01:29:51.000
Stuart Winchester: And now lives in this world.
01:29:51.000 --> 01:29:55.000
Stuart Winchester: Really appreciates how much…
01:29:55.000 --> 01:30:02.000
Stuart Winchester: Everything has changed culturally, through habits, and how much it continues to change, and…
01:30:03.000 --> 01:30:06.000
Stuart Winchester: This is my job, so I…
01:30:06.000 --> 01:30:08.000
Stuart Winchester: I made this chart.
01:30:08.000 --> 01:30:12.000
Stuart Winchester: that I put in that Storm 3.0 post, and it showed that.
01:30:12.000 --> 01:30:17.000
Stuart Winchester: Even though my subscribers went up and everything else went up, the podcast listens actually went down.
01:30:17.000 --> 01:30:21.000
Stuart Winchester: So, so how would I have fewer podcast listens?
01:30:21.000 --> 01:30:24.000
Stuart Winchester: When my audience is five times bigger, it didn’t make any sense.
01:30:24.000 --> 01:30:28.000
Stuart Winchester: But it did make sense once I figured out, okay.
01:30:28.000 --> 01:30:42.000
Stuart Winchester: the reason is because I’m kind of telling, you know, the format’s getting a little predictable, and I just need to be something that’s more in the moment, more talking about what’s actually going on. So, uh, I’m not saying it’s perfect, but I hope.
01:30:42.000 --> 01:30:47.000
Stuart Winchester: And it’s certainly some of my legacy audience has been vocal about.
01:30:48.000 --> 01:31:05.000
Stuart Winchester: their resistance to the change, and I still want to keep the writing as the main thing, but I want the writing to be good, and if I can spend a little less time writing on the podcast, I think that I can produce more good writing. So, it’s always going to be a work in progress, it’s never going to be perfect.
01:31:05.000 --> 01:31:07.000
Stuart Winchester: But I hope that…
01:31:07.000 --> 01:31:13.000
Stuart Winchester: It resonates a little more with the current consumer mindset.
01:31:13.000 --> 01:31:18.000
Stuart Winchester: And hopefully I won’t have to change too much more for a little while.
01:31:18.000 --> 01:31:35.000
Brent Gardner: Well, let me just say thank you to you. Thank you for for taking this as an opportunity to talk to me, and thank you for what you do. I mean, I think, from our perspective for both of us. It’s important to have a ski community that’s active and engaged. And that’s also the people that are talking broadly to everybody. And so.
01:31:35.000 --> 01:31:55.000
Brent Gardner: you know whether it’s hopefully you coaching Matthew Prince through what the Killington experience is when a when a local buys in buys a resort, and how they can invest and get with the community, or whether it’s telling us about an Indiana ski resort that that needs to be saved. I think it’s a really critical voice, and I appreciate being able to talk directly with you. The last question I’m going to ask you today.
01:31:55.000 --> 01:32:09.000
Brent Gardner: is far less serious than the ones we’ve been talking, but as we head into this winter with talk of Super El Nino and everything else, what’s one ski day that you’re genuinely daydreaming about that you’re looking forward to? What’s the mountain, and what does it look like?
01:32:09.000 --> 01:32:12.000
Stuart Winchester: I am so…
01:32:12.000 --> 01:32:14.000
Stuart Winchester: pumped to go to Grand Targhee.
01:32:14.000 --> 01:32:16.000
Stuart Winchester: I’ve never been there before.
01:32:16.000 --> 01:32:25.000
Stuart Winchester: And I was supposed to go a couple years ago when I was at Jackson, and when I was having some issues, I ended up having, actually, a heart issue. It was quite serious.
01:32:23.000 --> 01:32:25.000
Brent Gardner: Hmm. Okay.
01:32:25.000 --> 01:32:33.000
Stuart Winchester: And, and so I got foiled. And it’s probably the last big place in the West that I’ve just not gotten to.
01:32:33.000 --> 01:32:35.000
Stuart Winchester: And…
01:32:35.000 --> 01:32:47.000
Stuart Winchester: I’m at a point as a skier where I don’t necessarily love skiing double black diamonds. Like, I usually will, just to kind of checklist, because I…
01:32:47.000 --> 01:32:55.000
Stuart Winchester: I do want the ego boost of like, okay, I can ski that, like the backside of the circuit snowbird, right?
01:32:55.000 --> 01:33:01.000
Stuart Winchester: But what I really like is just, you know, good low angle trees.
01:33:01.000 --> 01:33:05.000
Stuart Winchester: And I think that’s what Targhee sets up as. So, so I’m, I.
01:33:04.000 --> 01:33:06.000
Brent Gardner: I love it.
01:33:05.000 --> 01:33:08.000
Stuart Winchester: We’re staying there for three nights in February. I’m super fired up for that.
01:33:08.000 --> 01:33:17.000
Brent Gardner: Well, I hope you get great snow. I hope you have a great time, and I’m really excited for everything you’re doing with 3.0. Thanks for giving me a chance to chat with you a little bit, and.
01:33:17.000 --> 01:33:19.000
Brent Gardner: We’ll be paying attention going forward.
01:33:19.000 --> 01:33:24.000
Stuart Winchester: Yeah, absolutely, Brent. So, but before I let you go, tell people one more time where to find you.
01:33:24.000 --> 01:33:26.000
Brent Gardner: Yeah, 7 now.
01:33:24.000 --> 01:33:28.000
Stuart Winchester: And also, this is kind of interesting, so I know you’re…
01:33:28.000 --> 01:33:35.000
Stuart Winchester: you’re gonna start podcasting more, so can they expect this kind of thing? Or just talk a little bit about the brand and where they find it.
01:33:34.000 --> 01:33:58.000
Brent Gardner: Yeah, so you can see us multiple times a week increasing in amplitude as we get into the ski season at savagemountaincollective.com, which carries all the content from our substack. We did some podcast tests last year. We’re excited to be coming back with guests and talking about gear in a different way than I think some of the other great voices out there talking technically about it, but just from a perspective and a use case.
01:33:58.000 --> 01:34:13.000
Brent Gardner: in ways that people can use for their ski day. We’re gonna be talking about resorts, hopefully some of the insider knowledge that you find only by going and being there, and so, um, you know, on the Substack at Savage Mountain Collective, on our social media, which is all linked on our website, hopefully you find us, and.
01:34:13.000 --> 01:34:29.000
Brent Gardner: you know, let us know also, you know, this is another voice in ski media. If we can talk about something or do it, we love great ideas, and we call it a collective for a reason. The goal here is for us to become a stronger community of skiers that’s ever expanding the number of people who love and really enjoy the sport, so…
01:34:29.000 --> 01:34:32.000
Stuart Winchester: Awesome, Brett. I will be…
01:34:33.000 --> 01:34:42.000
Stuart Winchester: following along, and I will get you back on the show at some point, because this was a lot of fun. Really enjoyed it, both conversations. All right, you got it.
Listener reaction to Tuesday’s Whistler podcast
Stuart Winchester: Alright, that was me with Brent Gardner, the founder of the Savage Mountain Collective. Go find him on Substack, give him a follow. He’s doing great work, and I love to see a new voice in the ski industry. We need more good ski riders, so…
02:12:02.000 --> 02:12:06.000
Stuart Winchester: Don’t just look at the storm and say, oh, well, he’s already doing it.
02:12:06.000 --> 02:12:13.000
Stuart Winchester: I want competition. I want a robust, lively landscape of ski journalists.
02:12:13.000 --> 02:12:30.000
Stuart Winchester: All right, let’s listen to, let’s get some listener reaction here on the Whistler podcast, which I published on Tuesday with COO Belinda Trembath. And what is great, she’s been on the pod before, so it was good of her to join me in the run up to the season to talk about.
02:12:30.000 --> 02:12:32.000
Stuart Winchester: Some really interesting things, and…
02:12:33.000 --> 02:12:48.000
Stuart Winchester: the most interesting, and the reason, really, why I want to do the podcast, is British Columbia’s decision to go to permanent daylight savings time, which I know is a popular cause here in America as well, and that bill is before Congress, to.
02:12:48.000 --> 02:12:50.000
Stuart Winchester: To do just that.
02:12:50.000 --> 02:13:05.000
Stuart Winchester: However, it will mean very late sunrises, uh, after 9am in some cases. So, Whistler’s gonna have to adjust their operations. So, Belinda, talk to us about that. So, here’s some listener reaction, and again, if you are a paid subscriber to the Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast.
02:13:05.000 --> 02:13:12.000
Stuart Winchester: you are able to comment on the articles, and then I will read some of the comments here. Unless Scott talks about…
02:13:12.000 --> 02:13:22.000
Stuart Winchester: Oregon. Ducks. Which I don’t even know what that means. Eric Morris says, I went to law school at the highest ranked, asterisk, law school in the country in Laramie.
02:13:22.000 --> 02:13:37.000
Stuart Winchester: Snowy Range is how I learned you can’t be late to a court hearing, even when it is a fake mock one. Snowy Range had $10 or $15 Wednesdays for students. I asked that my mock trial be postponed an hour so I could get in a few extra runs before returning.
02:13:37.000 --> 02:13:52.000
Stuart Winchester: The teacher said no, saying a judge probably wouldn’t consider that a justifiable day. Also, not surprised Bob Maddox’s son did so well improving it. I knew Bob in Steamboat, and he is an impressive guy. This is great all around for Laramie, the Maddoxes, and the Boyds.
02:13:52.000 --> 02:14:09.000
Stuart Winchester: Going back to that asterisk, Eric said, I went to law school at the highest ranked asterisk law school in the country in Laramie. The asterisk is by elevation. Well done. And probably also that was very confusing ‘cause I just said a bunch about Whistler and then I started talking about Snowy Range. So I also talked on that episode.
02:14:09.000 --> 02:14:15.000
Stuart Winchester: in the lead-in about the… the… the folks who owned Peak Resorts.
02:14:15.000 --> 02:14:28.000
Stuart Winchester: actually purchasing Snowy Range, so they don’t want to get in and start a whole other empire, but they might buy a couple more ski areas, they said, so I think that’s really cool to see.
02:14:28.000 --> 02:14:43.000
Stuart Winchester: new ownership there at Snowy Range, which is a nice little ski area there in southeast Wyoming that has always been… had a little relationship with Steamboat. Ari says, appreciate the small tweaks to the transcripts, the Zoom version with the subheads for the interview, etc.
02:14:43.000 --> 02:14:47.000
Stuart Winchester: is the most readable yet, in my opinion. Thank you, Ari.
02:14:47.000 --> 02:14:57.000
Stuart Winchester: Little by little, man, trying to get there. If I can figure out a good way to get rid of those timestamps and make it more readable, I will. But what he’s talking about is, I was only putting the interview portion.
02:14:57.000 --> 02:14:59.000
Stuart Winchester: In the.
02:14:59.000 --> 02:15:01.000
Stuart Winchester: In the Zoom transcript.
02:15:01.000 --> 02:15:05.000
Stuart Winchester: Uh, but now I am including the opening and closing takes. So.
02:15:05.000 --> 02:15:08.000
Stuart Winchester: Trying to make it better little by little.
02:15:08.000 --> 02:15:20.000
Stuart Winchester: Thanks for that, Ari. Greg Dobbs says, good conversation. I would have liked to hear what she has to say about the future of Whistler Bowl, and how they are going to handle the rock slide in the future. Yeah, I…
02:15:21.000 --> 02:15:38.000
Stuart Winchester: Yeah, uh, Belinda was, was, she had a small window, so, you know, I’ll ramble if you let me, and I will talk for 2 hours if I have the right guest, and we could have gone for a lot longer, but she, she had 30 minutes, she had to get out, she had something else.
02:15:38.000 --> 02:15:40.000
Stuart Winchester: So I… I…
02:15:40.000 --> 02:15:42.000
Stuart Winchester: when I get someone who…
02:15:43.000 --> 02:15:48.000
Stuart Winchester: Their responsibility is running the largest ski area in North America.
02:15:48.000 --> 02:16:04.000
Stuart Winchester: And they’re like, Oh yeah, I’ll take, I’ll give this person a half hour. I hate to waste anyone’s time. And I am always so appreciative of that. So, uh, yeah, there was a lot more questions that I had for Belinda, but, um, good news is with the shorter format, I can, I can have.
02:16:04.000 --> 02:16:23.000
Stuart Winchester: her on more often, and hopefully I will. Scott Abraham says, a very timely and pertinent pod, seeing as the plan, weather permitting, is to be up there the first Monday they are open. For damn near all of the last 30 years or so, I’ve started my season in the crown jewel of Kanakistan skiing for the simple reason that they had snowmaking.
02:16:23.000 --> 02:16:30.000
Stuart Winchester: Not much up top, but enough. Granted, the conditions are much like skiing the east with better views.
02:16:30.000 --> 02:16:35.000
Stuart Winchester: That’s one of your worst takes, guys. You have no idea what the views are like in the East. They’re actually.
02:16:35.000 --> 02:16:51.000
Stuart Winchester: But hey, it is skiing. I won’t let Robcats drive me out of Whistler, so I maintain a 5-day edge card that gives free skiing the first couple weeks of the season, old friends to stay with in exchange for beer and car parts, and ancient legs need a couple of hours of starting to ski myself into shape.
02:16:51.000 --> 02:17:08.000
Stuart Winchester: As much as I hate to say anything nice about VR, they usually do a decent job of at least making a few runs safe and enjoyable. Quite a challenge last year, and this year is fickle. But as the Aussie Belinda noted, we all ski it differently. I’ve tried to hit first gondola on the Blackcomb side, run Jersey Cream until it scrapes off.
02:17:08.000 --> 02:17:23.000
Stuart Winchester: Get about 10 thou vert and escape when the hordes finally get out of bed. Those runs epitomize the old saying, white ribbons of death. The time change will cut my getaway day a bit short since I live in Seattle, have to be off the hill on the ski to die highway in time to be Vancouver rush hour traffic.
02:17:24.000 --> 02:17:34.000
Stuart Winchester: I’ve been offered a ticket to this Saturday’s… uh, no, not reading that. Don’t even know what you’re talking about. It’s not a football podcast, Scott. We don’t talk about football on the Storm Ski.
02:17:35.000 --> 02:17:52.000
Stuart Winchester: Uh, yeah, that’s, that was all Scott has to say. He, there’s nothing else to his comment. Gustav says, I’m not sure what people have against high noon, but they should have gone with permanent standard time like most of Arizona. You want more time in the daylight after work, get your employer to start shifts earlier. Don’t change the whole time zone.
02:17:52.000 --> 02:18:07.000
Stuart Winchester: People have strong opinions about, uh, about time changes. I’ve always just kind of rolled with it. I’ve always treated it like flying. You know, when I fly to Chicago, it’s an hour behind and I have to adjust to that. When I fly to California, I’m three hours behind and I have to adjust to that.
02:18:07.000 --> 02:18:15.000
Stuart Winchester: So, I don’t know. I’ve never really seen what the big deal is with the time change. I think it kind of works. Uh, I don’t mind doing it twice a year, but…
02:18:15.000 --> 02:18:29.000
Stuart Winchester: I’m not gonna talk anyone off that, so I will instead wrap the show. That will be it for today. Got lots of good stuff coming up for you. I will have Little Switzerland, Nordic Mountain, and Crystal Ridge owner.
02:18:30.000 --> 02:18:45.000
Stuart Winchester: Rick Schmitz on the podcast tomorrow. I’m actually, uh, well, actually would be on Friday, recording that on Thursday, and he will talk about joining the Epic Pass, or Icon Pass this year, and leaving the Indy Pass, and also, uh, the new quads.
02:18:47.000 --> 02:18:53.000
Stuart Winchester: Plural, that are going in at Little Switzerland. Lots of fun, love talking to Rick, so that should be a great conversation.
02:18:53.000 --> 02:19:10.000
Stuart Winchester: All right, if you want to get that and other episodes the moment they’re live, please subscribe to the storm@stormskiing.com. You can start with the free version of the newsletter and then upgrade to the paid. If you would like to support my mission of independent ski journalism, the paid tier is the only way to support.
02:19:10.000 --> 02:19:17.000
Stuart Winchester: Uh, to interact with the podcast, and it’s the only way to get most of the written content, which is most of what I write.
02:19:18.000 --> 02:19:32.000
Stuart Winchester: You can also go to the Storm store, stormskiing.myshopify.com, and you can get a hat, hoodie, t-shirt, other swag there that my wife and editor, Patricia, designed. It’s all good stuff, cool stuff. I should wear it more often on the pod, I don’t know, I’m…
02:19:32.000 --> 02:19:37.000
Stuart Winchester: I’m just, uh, since I like to talk about Michigan football a lot, I wear my Michigan football gear here.
02:19:37.000 --> 02:19:38.000
Stuart Winchester: I…
02:19:39.000 --> 02:19:42.000
Stuart Winchester: You know, even though this is a ski podcast. So, anyway…
02:19:44.000 --> 02:19:49.000
Stuart Winchester: Until next time, stay well, stay safe. I’m Stuart Winchester, and I’ll talk to you again very soon.
