Podcast #171: Mission Ridge & Blacktail CEO Josh Jorgensen The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast

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Who
Josh Jorgensen, CEO of Mission Ridge, Washington and Blacktail Mountain, Montana
Recorded on
April 15, 2024
About Mission Ridge
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: Larry Scrivanich
Located in: Wenatchee, Washington
Year founded: 1966
Pass affiliations:
* Indy Pass – 2 days with holiday and weekend blackouts (TBD for 2024-25 ski season)
* Indy+ Pass – 2 days with no blackouts
* Powder Alliance – 3 days with holiday and Saturday blackouts
Closest neighboring ski areas: Badger Mountain (:51), Leavenworth Ski Hill (:53) – travel times may vary considerably given weather conditions, time of day, and time of year.
Base elevation: 4,570 feet
Summit elevation: 6,820 feet
Vertical drop: 2,250 feet
Skiable Acres: 2,000
Average annual snowfall: 200 inches
Trail count: 70+ (10% easiest, 60% more difficult, 30% most difficult)
Lift count: 7 (1 high-speed quad, 3 doubles, 2 ropetows, 1 carpet – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Mission Ridge’s lift fleet)
View historic Mission Ridge trailmaps on skimap.org.
About Blacktail
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: Larry Scrivanich
Located in: Lakeside, Montana
Year founded: 1998
Pass affiliations:
* Indy Pass – 2 days with holiday and weekend blackouts (TBD for 2024-25 ski season)
* Indy+ Pass – 2 days with no blackouts
* Powder Alliance – 3 days with holiday blackouts
Closest neighboring ski areas: Whitefish (1:18) - travel times may vary considerably given weather conditions, time of day, and time of year.
Base elevation: 5,236 feet
Summit elevation: 6,780 feet
Vertical drop: 1,544 feet
Skiable Acres: 1,000+
Average annual snowfall: 250 inches
Trail count: (15% easier, 65% more difficult, 20% most difficult)
Lift count: 4 (1 triple, 2 doubles, 1 carpet – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Blacktail’s lift fleet)
View historic Blacktail trailmaps on skimap.org.
Why I interviewed him
So much of Pacific Northwest skiing’s business model amounts to wait-and-pray, hoping that, sometime in November-December, the heaping snowfalls that have spiraled in off the ocean for millennia do so again. It’s one of the few regions in modern commercial skiing, anywhere in the world, where the snow is reliable enough and voluminous enough that this good-ole-boy strategy still works: 460 inches per year at Stevens Pass; 428 at Summit at Snoqualmie; 466 at Crystal; 400 at White Pass; a disgusting 701 at Baker. It’s no wonder that most of these ski areas have either no snowguns, or so few that a motivated scrapper could toss the whole collection in the back of a single U-Haul.
But Mission Ridge possesses no such natural gifts. The place is snowy enough – 200 inches in an average winter – that it doesn’t seem ridiculous that someone thought to run lifts up the mountain. But by Washington State standards, the place is practically Palm Beach. That means the owners have had to work a lot harder, and in a far more deliberate way than their competitors, to deliver a consistent snowsportskiing experience since the bump opened in 1966.
Which is a long way of saying that Mission Ridge probably has more snowmaking than the rest of Washington’s ski areas combined. Which, often, is barely enough to hang at the party. This year, however, as most Washington ski areas spent half the winter thinking “Gee, maybe we ought to have more than zero snowguns,” Mission was clocking its third-best skier numbers ever.
The Pacific Northwest, as a whole, finished the season fairly strong. The snow showed up, as it always does. A bunch of traditional late operators – Crystal, Meadows, Bachelor, Timberline – remain open as of early May. But, whether driven by climate change, rising consu