The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast Stuart Winchester

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Who
* Scott Bender, operations and business advisor to Blue Knob ownership
* Donna Himes, Blue Knob Marketing Manager
* Sam Wiley, part owner of Blue Knob
* Gary Dietke, Blue Knob Mountain Manager
Recorded on
May 13, 2024
About Blue Knob
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: Majority owned by the Wiley family
Located in: Claysburg, Pennsylvania
Year founded: 1963
Pass affiliations: Indy Pass and Indy+ Pass – 2 days, no blackouts (access not yet set for 2024-25 ski season)
Closest neighboring ski areas: Laurel (1:02), Tussey (1:13), Hidden Valley (1:14), Seven Springs (1:23)
Base elevation: 2,100 feet
Summit elevation: 3,172 feet
Vertical drop: 1,072 feet
Skiable Acres: 100
Average annual snowfall: 120 inches
Trail count: 33 (5 beginner, 10 intermediate, 4 advanced intermediate, 5 advanced, 9 expert) + 1 terrain park
Lift count: 5 (2 triples, 2 doubles, 1 carpet – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Blue Knob’s lift fleet)
Why I interviewed them
I’ve not always written favorably about Blue Knob. In a state where shock-and-awe snowmaking is a baseline operational requirement, the mountain’s system is underwhelming and bogged down by antiquated equipment. The lower-mountain terrain – Blue Knob’s best – opens sporadically, sometimes remaining mysteriously shuttered after heavy local snows. The website at one time seemed determined to set the world record for the most exclamation points in a single place. They may have succeeded (this has since been cleaned up):
I’ve always tried to couch these critiques in a but-damn-if-only context, because Blue Knob, considered purely as a ski area, is an absolute killer. It needs what any Pennsylvania ski area needs – modern, efficient, variable-weather-capable, overwhelming snowmaking and killer grooming. No one, in this temperamental state of freeze-thaws and frequent winter rains, can hope to survive long term without those things. So what’s the holdup?
My goal with The Storm is to be incisive but fair. Everyone deserves a chance to respond to critiques, and offering them that opportunity is a tenant of good journalism. But because this is a high-volume, high-frequency operation, and because my beat covers hundreds of ski areas, I’m not always able to gather reactions to every post in the moment. I counterbalance that reality with this: every ski area’s story is a long-term, ongoing one. What they mess up today, they may get right tomorrow. And reality, while inarguable, does not always capture intentions. Eventually, I need to gather and share their perspective.
And so it was Blue Knob’s turn to talk. And I challenge you to find a more good-natured and nicer group of folks anywhere. I went off format with this one, hosting four people instead of the usual one (I’ve done multiples a few times before, with Plattekill, West Mountain, Bousquet, Boyne Mountain, and Big Sky). The group chat was Blue Knob’s idea, and frankly I loved it. It’s not easy to run a ski area in 2024 in the State of Pennsylvania, and it’s especially not easy to run this ski area, for reasons I outline below. And while Blue Knob has been slower to get to the future than its competitors, I believe they’re at least walking in that direction.
What we talked about
“This was probably one of our worst seasons”; ownership; this doesn’t feel like PA; former owner Dick Gauthier’s legacy; reminiscing on the “crazy fun” of the bygone community atop the ski hill; Blue Knob’s history as an Air Force station and how the mountain became a ski area; Blue Knob’s interesting lease arrangement with the state; the remarkable evolution of Seven Springs and how those lessons could fuel Blue Kn

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on June 2. It dropped for free subscribers on June 9. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:

Who
Ricky Newberry, Vice President and General Manager of Kirkwood Ski Resort, California
Recorded on
May 20, 2024
About Kirkwood
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: Vail Resorts
Located in: Kirkwood, California
Year founded: 1972
Pass affiliations:
* Epic Pass: unlimited access
* Epic Local Pass: unlimited access with holiday blackouts
* Tahoe Local Epic Pass: unlimited access with holiday blackouts
* Tahoe Value Pass: unlimited access with holiday and Saturday blackouts
* Kirkwood Pass: unlimited access
Closest neighboring ski areas: Heavenly (:43), Sierra-at-Tahoe (:44) – travel times vary significantly given weather conditions, time of day, and time of year.
Base elevation: 7,800 feet
Summit elevation: 9,800 feet
Vertical drop: 2,000 feet
Skiable Acres: 2,300
Average annual snowfall: 354 inches
Trail count: 86 (20% expert, 38% advanced, 30% intermediate, 12% beginner)
Lift count: 13 (2 high-speed quads, 1 fixed-grip quad, 6 triples, 1 double, 1 T-bar, 2 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Kirkwood’s lift fleet).
Why I interviewed him
Imagine this: 1971. Caltrans, the military-grade state agency charged with clearing California’s impossible snows from its high-alpine road network, agrees to maintain an additional wintertime route across the Sierra Crest: Highway 88, over Carson Pass, an east-west route cutting 125 miles from Stockton to US 395.
This is California State Route 88 in the winter:
A ridiculous road, an absurd idea: turn the industrial power of giant machines against a wilderness route whose wintertime deeps had eaten human souls for centuries. An audacious idea, but not an unusual one. Not in that California or in that America. Not in that era of will and muscle. Not in that country that had pushed thousands of miles of interstate across mountains and rivers and deserts in just 15 years. Caltrans would hammer 20-foot-high snow canyons up and over the pass, punching an arctic pathway into and through the howling angry fortress of the Sierra Nevada.
And they did it all to serve a new ski resort.
Imagine that. A California, an America that builds.
Kirkwood, opened in 1972, was part of the last great wave of American ski resort construction. Copper, Northstar, Powder Mountain, 49 Degrees North, and Telluride all opened that year. Keystone (1970), Snowbird (1971), and Big Sky (1973) also cranked to life around this time. Large ski area building stalled by the early ‘80s, though Vail managed to develop Beaver Creek in 1980. Deer Valley opened in 1981. Outliers materialize: Bohemia, in spite of considerable local resistance, in 2000. Tamarack in 2004. But mostly, the ski resorts we have are all the ski resorts we’ll ever have.
But there is a version of America, of California, that dreams and does enormous things, and not so long ago. This institutional memory lives on, even in those who had no part in its happening. Kirkwood is an emblem of this era and its willful collective imagining. The mountain itself is a ludicrous place for a commercial ski resort, steep and wild, an avalanche hazard zone that commands constant vigilant maintenance. Like Alta-Snowbird or Jackson Hole, the ski area offers nominal groomed routes, a comfortable lower-mountain beginner area, just enough accommodation for the intermediate mass-market passholder to say “yes I did this.” This dressing up, too, encapsulates the fading American habit of taming the raw and imposing, of making an unthinkable thing look easy.
But nothing about Kirkwood is easy. Not the in or the out. Not the up or the down. It’s rough and feisty, messy and unpredictable. And that’s the point of the place. As with the airplane or the smartphone,

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on May 20. It dropped for free subscribers on May 27. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:

Who
Nathan McGree, Owner and General Manager of Tyrol Basin, Wisconsin
Recorded on
April 29, 2024
About Tyrol Basin
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: Nathan McGree
Located in: Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin
Year founded: 1958
Pass affiliations: Indy Pass and Indy+ Pass – 2 days, no blackouts
Closest neighboring ski areas: Blackhawk Ski Club (:21), Devil’s Head (:46), Cascade (1:00), Christmas Mountain Village (1:02)
Base elevation: 860 feet
Summit elevation: 1,160 feet
Vertical drop: 300 feet
Skiable Acres: 40
Average annual snowfall: 41 inches
Trail count: 24 (33% beginner, 25% intermediate, 38% advanced, 4% expert)
Lift count: 7 (3 triples, 2 ropetows, 2 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Tyrol Basin’s lift fleet)
Why I interviewed him
When you Google “Tyrol,” the expanse of Italian and Austrian Alps from which this Wisconsin bump draws its name, the robots present you with this image:
That is not Wisconsin.
According to On The Snow, Tyrol Basin recorded two inches of snowfall during the 2021-22 ski season, and 15 inches the following winter. I don’t know if these numbers are accurate. No one runs, like, the Southern Wisconsin Snorkel Dawgs Facebook group as a secondary verification source. The site pegs Tyrol’s average annual snowfall at 30 inches. That’s not even a powder day at Alta. Indy Pass offers a more generous 51. A site called “GottaGoItSnows.com” lists four feet (48 inches), but also offers, as its featured photo of the ski area, this grainy webcam screenshot, which appears to feature two mis-wired AI bots about to zigzag into one another:
But it doesn’t really matter what Tyrol Basin’s average annual snowfall is, or how much snow fell in either of those two winters. The ski area logged a 114-day season during the 2021-22 campaign, and 124 over the winter of 2022-23. That’s an outstanding season, above the NSAA-reported industry averages of 110 and 116 days for those respective campaigns. It’s a particularly respectable number of ski days when a season pass starts at $199.99, as it did last year (McGree told me he expects that price to drop when 2024-25 passes go on sale in July).
No one offers 114 days of skiing on two inches of natural snow by accident. You need what the kids (probably don’t) call “mad skillz ya’ll.” Especially when you offer a terrain park that looks like this:
What’s going on here? How can a snow-light bump 28 miles west of Madison where snowsportskiing ought to be impossible offer nearly four months of something approximating winter? That the answer is obvious (snowmaking) doesn’t make it any less interesting. After all, put me at the controls of a $106-million Boeing 737, and I’m more likely to crash it into a mountain than to safely return it to the airport – having access to technology and equipment is not the same thing as knowing how to use it (not that I have access to an airplane; God help us). Tyrol Basin is the story of a former diesel mechanic who ended up owning a ski area. And doing a hell of a nice job running it. That’s pretty cool, and worth a deeper look.
What we talked about
Coping with a crummy Midwest winter; climate change resilience; a beginner-area expansion; the legend of Dave Usselman; how to create an interesting ski experience; a journey from diesel mechanic to ski area owner; the hardest thing about running a ski area; why ski area owners have to live it; “during winter, it’s a hundred-day war”; why owning a ski area is “a lot like farming”; evolving into a year-round business; why mountain biking isn’t happening at Tyrol; why season pass prices will decrease for next ski season; how snowtubing roiled a W

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on May 3. It dropped for free subscribers on May 10. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:

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

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Who
James Coleman, Managing Partner of Mountain Capital Partners
Recorded on
May 7, 2024
About Mountain Capital Partners
About La Parva
Base elevation: 8,704 feet
Summit elevation: 11,722 feet
Vertical drop: 3,022 feet
Skiable Acres: 988 acres
Average annual snowfall: 118 inches
Trail count: 40 (18% expert, 43% advanced, 20% intermediate, 20% beginner)
Lift count: 15 lifts (2 quads, 2 triples, 1 double, 10 surface lifts)
View historic La Parva trailmaps on skimap.org.
What we talked about
MCP puts together the largest ski area in the Southern Hemisphere; how La Parva and Valle Nevado will work as a single ski area while retaining their identity; “something I’ve always taken tremendous pride in is how we respect the unique brand of every resort”; La Parva village; will MCP purchase El Colorado next?; expansion; 10,000-vertical-foot dreams; La Parva Power Pass access; why Valle Nevado is not unlimited on the Power Pass yet; considering Ikon Pass and Mountain Collective access for Valle Nevado, La Parva, and the rest of MCP’s mountains; Valle Nevado’s likely next chairlift; why MCP builds fewer lifts than it would like; the benefits and drawbacks of surface lifts; where a ropetow might make sense at Purgatory; snowmaking in the treeless Andes; why South America; what it means to be the first North American ski area operator to buy in South America; Chile is not as far away as you think; how MCP has grown so large so quickly; why MCP isn’t afraid to purchase ski areas that need work; why MCP bought Sandia Peak and which improvements could be forthcoming; why MCP won’t repair Hesperus’ chairlift until the company can install snowmaking on the hill; why the small ski area is worth saving; drama and resilience at Nordic Valley; should Nordic have upgraded Apollo before installing a brand-new six-pack and expansion?; future Nordic Valley expansion; exploring expansion at Brian Head; and why MCP has never been able to open Elk Ridge, Arizona, and what it would take to do so.
What I got wrong
I said that I saw “an email” that teased lift infrastructure improvements at Valle Nevado. This tidbit actually came from internal talking points that an MCP representative shared with The Storm.
Why the format is so weird
This is the first time I’ve used the podcast to break news, so I thought the simpler “live” format may work better. I’ll write an analysis of what MCP’s purchase of La Parva means in the coming days.

The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 34/100 in 2024, and number 534 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019.




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This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on April 18. It dropped for free subscribers on April 25. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:

Who
Pete Korfiatis, General Manager of Bluewood, Washington
Recorded on
April 4, 2024
About Bluewood
Click here for a mountain stats overview
Owned by: Local investors
Located in: Dayton, Washington
Year founded: 1980
Pass affiliations:
* Indy Pass and Indy+ Pass: 2 days, no blackouts
Closest neighboring ski areas: Cottonwood Butte, Idaho, 3 hours east
Base elevation: 4,545 feet
Summit elevation: 5,670 feet
Vertical drop: 1,125 feet
Skiable Acres: 355
Average annual snowfall: 300 inches
Trail count: 24 (30% difficult, 45% intermediate, 25% easy)
Lift count: 4 (2 triples, 2 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Bluewood’s lift fleet)
Why I interviewed him
Someday, if it’s not too late, I’m going to track down the old-timers who snowshoed into the wilderness and figured this all out. The American West is filled with crazy little snow pockets, lesser-known mountain ranges spiraling off the vast plateaus. Much of this land falls under the purview of the United States Forest Service. In the decades immediately before and after World War II, the agency established most of our large western ski areas within its 193 million-acre kingdom. That’s a lot of land – approximately the size of Texas – and it’s not all snowy. Where there is snow, there’s not always roads, nor even the realistic possibility of plowing one through. Where there are roads, there aren’t always good exposures or fall lines for skiing.
So our ski areas ended up where they are because, mostly, those are the best places nature gave us for skiing. Obviously it snows like hell in the Wasatch and the Tetons and the Sierra Nevadas. Anyone with a covered wagon could have told you that. But the Forest Service’s map of its leased ski areas is dotted with strange little outposts popping out of what most of us assume to be The Flats:
What to make of Brian Head, floating alone in southern Utah? Or Mt. Lemmon, rising over Tucson? Or Ski Apache and Cloudcroft, sunk near the bottom of New Mexico? Or the ski areas bunched and floating over Los Angeles? Or Antelope Butte, hanging out in the Wyoming Bighorns?
Somewhere, in some government filing cabinet 34 floors deep in a Washington, D.C. bunker, are hand-annotated topo maps and notebooks left behind by the bureaucrat-explorers who determined that these map dots were the very best for snowsportskiing. And somewhere, buried where I’ll probably never find it, is the story of Bluewood.
It’s one of our more improbable ski centers. Not because it shouldn’t be there, but because most of us can’t imagine how it could be. Most Washington and Oregon ski areas line up along the Cascades, stacked south to north along the states’ western thirds. The snow smashes into these peaks and then stops. Anyone who’s driven east over the passes has encountered the Big Brown Endless on the other side. It’s surreal, how fast the high alpine falls away.
But as Interstate 90 arcs northeast through this rolling country and toward Spokane, it routes most travelers away from the fecund Umatilla National Forest, one of those unexpected islands of peaks and green floating above our American deserts. Here, in this wilderness just to the west of Walla Walla but far from just about everything else, 300 inches of snow stack up in an average winter. And this is where you will find Bluewood.
The Umatilla sprawls over two states and 1.4 million acres, and is home to three ski areas (Anthony Lakes and inactive Spouts Springs, both in Oregon, are the other two). Three map dots in the wilderness, random-looking from above, all the final product of years in the field, of hardy folks pushing ever-deeper into the woods to find The Spot. This is