Who
Brandi Hammon, President and CEO of Powder Mountain and Powder Haven, Utah
Date Recorded
Oct. 22, 2026
About Powder Mountain & Powder Haven
Powder Mountain and Powder Haven are two sides of one interconnected ski area. The general public can ski anywhere, but they can only ride the lifts on the Powder Mountain side. The Powder Haven lifts are reserved for the ski area’s private homeowners.
Located in: Eden, Utah
Owned by: Reed Hastings
Year founded: 1972 (as Powder Mountain; Powder Haven terrain carved out in 2024)
Pass affiliations: None
Lift-served base elevation:
Powder Mountain: 6,905 feet (bottom of Paradise Express)
Powder Haven: 6,326 (bottom of Primetime Express)
Lift-served summit elevation:
Powder Mountain: 9,004 feet (top of Lightning Ridge lift)
Powder Haven: 8,882 feet (top of Mary’s lift)
Lift-served vertical drop:
Powder Mountain: 2,099 feet
Powder Haven: 2,556 feet
Skiable acres: 8,000 total
Powder Mountain: 5,000
Powder Haven: 3,000
Average annual snowfall: 345 inches
Lift count: 15 total (5 high-speed quads, 6 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 1 poma, 1 ropetow, 1 carpet)
Powder Mountain: 9 (3 high-speed quads, 2 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 1 poma, 1 ropetow, 1 carpet)
Powder Haven: 6 (2 high-speed quads, 4 fixed-grip quads)
Why I interviewed her
A very dumb story about a very dumb person, Volume III
Last year, Powder Mountain’s communications team reached out to ask if I would like to host resort owner and Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings on The Storm Skiing Podcast. Why yes, I believe I can squeeze him in, I replied. Great, they said. And one more thing: Reed would like to record the podcast onsite here at Powder Mountain. Which OK I guess, if I absolutely have to I will fly to Utah and ski on your awesome gigantic mountain. And besides I’m already scheduled to ski around Idaho in a few weeks so I’ll just plan to fly through of SLC and roll through Pow Mow on my way out the door. The logistics would be a little wacky, but I’d make it work. Cool? Cool. See you soon.
On interview day, I woke up at 4 a.m. in Twin Falls, Idaho, a roughly three-hour, mostly-interstate drive from Powder Mountain. Traffic rolled smoothly in the predawn, and a bit after seven I was driving up the resort’s long access road among heavy snowfall. As instructed I parked in the special Rich Person lot at Pow Mow’s summit and went into the special Rich Person Building, where after some fussing the attendants allowed me to enter and pillage the Rich Person Buffet. I was early and I sat alone and an attractive couple sat beside me and I suppose mistaking me for a fellow Rich Person began chatting with me, and, though tempted to invent a story about how I was a big-game guide for Rich People interested in hunting things like rhinos and Siberian tigers and yes Bigfeet are real and we know where to kill them, I told them I was a journalist here to interview Reed. And they said OMG he’s doing so great we love it and everything is awesome and they spent all their time there skiing mach pow. Well all their time that they weren’t in the Bay Area, they told me, which was less and less these days, since they were now retired. And this confused me because they both looked to be about 35, so I guessed that either they had invented, like, the microchip or something else equally at the center of the Robot Takeover or that maybe they had reverse-engineered aging and were actually 175 years old and I nearly quizzed them on Antietam to see if the Never-Forget day-of angst seemed overly familiar to them but by then Pow Mow’s team had arrived to escort me to Reed.
In the upper room of a nearby condominium we reorganized furniture and I assembled my mobile interview kit of cameras and microphones and halo lights. Reed arrived and he was a perfectly pleasant fellow as I’d expected and I interviewed him and Pow Mow Chief Creative Officer Alex Zhang against a full-wall window’s view of nuclear Wasatch pow. We talked for maybe 50 minutes and then Reed, clearly anxious to snowboard the foot or so of fresh awaiting us, excused himself because what’s the point of owning a mountain if you just sit inside answering some idiot’s questions about chairlifts on a pow day? So I thanked him and he left and before voyaging out myself into this wonderful Utah thumper I wanted to quickly download the Zoom files to make sure everything was tight and would you listen to this:
Listen to what, Stu?
Stu? There’s no sound. Am I doing it wrong?
No. You’re not doing it wrong. I am just showing you how the interview that I had traveled thousands of miles in circles for came out. I mean it came out great. Other than the fact that I didn’t record any sound. Otherwise Man I totally fucking crushed it.
The second I realized that I had blown one of the biggest interviews of my career by omitting what most people would consider to be the most important part of an interview which is the sound of people saying things, which was like the second after Reed left, I felt about as shitty and stupid as I ever have in my entire life. I’ve never been so miserable skiing as I was that day even though the snow was deep and the trails were empty and Pow Mow had set me up with a guide and access to the Rich Person Private Lifts. Still I hoped somehow I’d recorded the audio somewhere on the many cameras and devices I’d had running. At my hotel that night I checked everything and checked it again and checked it again and then concluding that no sound existed and all I had was useless video of important people in a room against a snowy window I slept for like 12 hours because that’s what I do when I’m stressed is just leap down the go-to-sleep escape hatch and disappear from the world.
So that happened. Pretty simple story, really: I agreed to do something that I did not know how to do (record an in-person podcast), and then failed to adequately prepare for it, and then unsurprisingly blew the whole thing because well I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing. I just assumed Zoom would have a safeguard. But there is no safeguard. The safeguard is not having a moron in charge of the setup. Well who hired that guy?
Anyway I tried a bunch of different things to salvage the footage, including AI lip-reading apps so I could at least produce a transcript. This… did not work. And Pow Mow’s team kept being like Brah when’s the story going up? And I kept being like well I fucked it up but I think I can salvage something just hold on and we went back and forth like that three or four times and eventually I assumed they just gave up and I was kind of relieved even if I remained deeply disappointed in myself and my ability to do simple things like record a video which literally my cat can do if I leave my phone open on the kitchen table.
So I was surprised a few weeks ago when Powder Mountain’s team reached out and said hey how about we give this another shot there Big Guy? And I was like are you sure you got the right guy you remember what happened last time? But this time instead of asking me to pretend like I’m an actual professional journalist who does things like go places they let me just record the interview from my basement in New York with my cat photo-bombing and Brandi set up by those nice big windows (different windows, I believe) in Utah.
And she was great. And this whole section has nothing to do with Pow Mow and you’re probably like thanks for nothing Bro I still don’t understand all this Powder Haven business and which lifts are coming and which ones are going, I mean it’s like the Sneetches on the Beaches over there we don’t know which one was that one or which one was who. And my apologies McBroseph but you’re just gonna have to listen to the interview I guess. There’s a transcript that you can see on a desktop computer machine above by the video viewer, but no Zoom transcript today because guess what I fucked that up too and you’re probably like Bro you just have to hit the “robot record” button how could you possibly get that wrong? And it’s like I don’t know Man sometimes living in the future is great like how doctors keep intercepting my mortal wounds and keeping me alive. But then again when living in the past I would just hit the “on” button and the TV would show me a channel and now I can watch anything ever made anytime I want but it takes me 10 minutes to turn on the TV and find the proper app and sign in and locate the show and then God help me I push the wrong button and send the television into some sort of Settings Hell where I can adjust the brightness and tone but really all I wanted to do was watch Dark Matter. And I don’t know dude if that box was real I might just slip in and take a look around for a world where phones are still wired into the wall and have no purpose other than to enable talking to people who are in another room somewhere else.
