The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast

Stuart Winchester
  • 4.8 (272)
  • Wilderness

Everyone’s searching for skiing’s soul. I’m trying to find its brains. www.stormskiing.com

  1. 9h ago

    Storm Skiing 11/3/2026: Ski Town Flight Changes, Plus Sutner on 5 Fave Ski Areas, Most Urgent Lift Upgrades in New England

    Who Shaun Sutner, Snowsports columnist for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette & Telegram.com. Date Recorded Nov. 2, 2026 The take up top The modern accessibility of western skiing is mostly due to a pair of transportation revolutions that slashed travel time into harsh, high, and once-remote mountains over the past several decades. The first is the Interstate Highway System, which cracked the Colorado Rockies, the Wasatch, Lake Tahoe, New England, and other regions open to the masses. The second has been the quiet increase in direct flights from major population centers into rural airports such as Jackson, Vail-Eagle, Friedman (Sun Valley), and Yampa (Steamboat). The success of the Epic and Ikon passes is at least in part due to the ease with which skiers in Chicago, New York, Atlanta, Dallas, and Los Angeles can reach airports near otherwise-walled-in-by-nature destinations such as Big Sky, Snowbird, Taos, and Aspen. My favorite is American Airlines’ early-morning direct flight to Vail-Eagle out of JFK, which, when considering the two hours travelers pick up flying west, puts me on Vail’s Born Free Express before lunchtime. So small changes in airline routing can impact skier patterns in a big way, which is why I took the first few minutes of this show to itemize a few subtractions and additions to ski-town plane routes ahead of this winter. Here’s The Travel article that I referenced in my overview. Why I interviewed him You may have caught part one of SutnerFest yesterday. If not: That show focused on acquisitions and mountain upgrades. In this episode, we talk through our favorite New England ski areas, and itemize the New England ski lifts we think are most in need of updating. I did a similar exercise with Matthew Zebransky of Midwest Skiers in September: 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 Stuart Winchester: Alright, joining us again is Sean Suttner, very good friend of the Storm. He has been covering New England skiing as the snow sports columnist for the Worcester Telegram and Gazette and Telegram.com for more than two decades. Sean Suttner joins us once again. 00:38:40.000 --> 00:38:45.000 Stuart Winchester: Sean, let’s break down some resorts. So… so we’re gonna… we’re gonna give our… 00:38:45.000 --> 00:39:01.000 Stuart Winchester: Five favorite New England resorts. We might have some bonus ones, and mine are not necessarily in any particular order, but I’ll let Sean go first, and then I’ll give mine. We’ll just alternate back and forth, and I did this with Matthew Zabransky in the Midwest. It was a lot of fun. 00:38:49.000 --> 00:38:51.000 SutnerS: Oh? 00:39:01.000 --> 00:39:07.000 Stuart Winchester: So, Sean, give us your first and let us know, are these in order or not? Because I can’t order mine. 00:39:06.000 --> 00:39:10.000 SutnerS: Wait, so it’s like a snake draft, or I just go, uh, I just give by 5? 00:39:10.000 --> 00:39:18.000 Stuart Winchester: Just give your five, uh, and then I’ll… well, no, no, give… no, give one, break down why it is, and then I’ll do one. 00:39:15.000 --> 00:39:17.000 SutnerS: Give one. Okay. 00:39:18.000 --> 00:39:20.000 Stuart Winchester: And then we’ll switch back and forth. 00:39:18.000 --> 00:39:19.000 SutnerS: Okay. 00:39:19.000 --> 00:39:22.000 SutnerS: All right, I’m gonna give you Stowe as number one. 00:39:22.000 --> 00:39:40.000 SutnerS: That’s my number one favorite. I’ve been skiing it the longest. It’s what Vail is to national ski resorts, so is to New England ski resorts. It’s got the gnarliest skiing, the best vibe, the best opera. You can tell that to your producer. 00:39:23.000 --> 00:39:24.000 Stuart Winchester: I mean. 00:39:32.000 --> 00:39:33.000 Stuart Winchester: Mmhm. 00:39:40.000 --> 00:39:45.000 SutnerS: Um, it is, uh, I don’t know, I don’t think, I think it’s unrivaled. 00:39:45.000 --> 00:39:56.000 Stuart Winchester: I agree, and that was my number one as well, and we won’t… I don’t think we’ll all be matched. Me and Sean did not share what we were doing here, but I think that… 00:39:53.000 --> 00:39:54.000 SutnerS: No. 00:39:56.000 --> 00:40:00.000 Stuart Winchester: Vail putting that six pack over where that triple was was brilliant. 00:40:03.000 --> 00:40:08.000 SutnerS: You cut out. I can’t hear you. Oh, I couldn’t hear that. 00:40:04.000 --> 00:40:06.000 Stuart Winchester: Great. 00:40:06.000 --> 00:40:07.000 Stuart Winchester: Oh. 00:40:08.000 --> 00:40:09.000 Stuart Winchester: Let’s see. 00:40:09.000 --> 00:40:12.000 SutnerS: Sorry, you froze briefly. 00:40:09.000 --> 00:40:11.000 Stuart Winchester: Uh, did I mute? 00:40:12.000 --> 00:40:16.000 Stuart Winchester: Oh, my internet connection is unstable, it says. 00:40:17.000 --> 00:40:21.000 Stuart Winchester: Are you hearing me? No, it says mine. Are you hearing me? 00:40:18.000 --> 00:40:20.000 SutnerS: Well, bye. 00:40:20.000 --> 00:40:21.000 SutnerS: I’m hearing you. 00:40:21.000 --> 00:40:23.000 SutnerS: I’m hearing you. 00:40:22.000 --> 00:40:25.000 Stuart Winchester: Okay. All right. Okay, so let me… 00:40:25.000 --> 00:40:29.000 Stuart Winchester: start that one over, and I’ll just… 00:40:29.000 --> 00:40:32.000 SutnerS: Wait, you can’t keep the snow part? 00:40:31.000 --> 00:40:42.000 Stuart Winchester: No, no, no, I will, I will. Yeah, yeah, no, I’ll keep yours, I’ll just re-record mine. Um, and Patricia will, uh, will edit this nicely, I’ll just warn her that this is, uh… 00:40:36.000 --> 00:40:38.000 SutnerS: Okay. 00:40:42.000 --> 00:40:47.000 SutnerS: You’re freezing a little too. I never know if this is my connection or somebody else’s connection. Yeah. 00:40:43.000 --> 00:40:44.000 Stuart Winchester: Am I? 00:40:46.000 --> 00:40:49.000 Stuart Winchester: Gosh, it, uh… hmm. 00:40:49.000 --> 00:40:51.000 SutnerS: Now you’re fine. 00:40:50.000 --> 00:40:52.000 Stuart Winchester: Am I? Okay, look, look. 00:40:51.000 --> 00:40:55.000 SutnerS: Well, your little, uh, back’s headroom. 00:40:54.000 --> 00:40:57.000 Stuart Winchester: Sorry, am I alright? Yeah. 00:40:56.000 --> 00:40:58.000 SutnerS: A little. Now you’re fine. Now you’re fine. 00:40:57.000 --> 00:41:02.000 Stuart Winchester: Okay, okay. Well, let’s see how it goes. Alright, so… 00:41:03.000 --> 00:41:09.000 Stuart Winchester: So it’s cool you say that, Sean, because… and Sean and I did not share what we were gonna… 00:41:09.000 --> 00:41:15.000 Stuart Winchester: what our top 5 were, but Stowe is also my favorite ski area in New England. Here’s the trail map up. 00:41:15.000 --> 00:41:32.000 Stuart Winchester: What Vail did with putting this six pack over here with this awesome, awesome intermediate terrain over on Mount Mansfield was just brilliant because it really encouraged, because there used to be a triple and you had to climb all these stairs to get up there. And with a six pack here, it’s really taken a lot of pressure, I think. 00:41:32.000 --> 00:41:50.000 Stuart Winchester: off of the 4Runner quad and the gondola, and Stowe is just huge, and what I really, really, really love about it is that even the stuff that’s not marked Glades … Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

  2. 1d ago

    Storm Skiing 11/2/2026: Big Ski Wants Lawsuit Dismissed; Sutner on Ski Area Consolidations, Expansions

    Who Shaun Sutner, Snowsports columnist for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette & Telegram.com. Date Recorded Nov. 2, 2026 The take up top I referenced a Snow Brains article covering the big SkiCos motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed this summer accusing BigSki of collusion in pricing and business practices. I wrote about this lawsuit back in August: The update is that the ski area operators think this lawsuit is dumb and without merit. The non-update is that while I agree with them, I also believe that this is a problem of their own making in that pricing walk-up lift tickets as though they’re Fabergé eggs is bound to make people hate you enough to take legal action. But also if you think Epic and Ikon are overpriced then maybe check your crack intake: Why I interviewed him Same as it ever was – Sutner is a great journalist and a great interview, and he’s always keyed into what’s happening in New England. We spend a lot of time discussing new ownership groups and expansions: 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 Stuart Winchester: My guest today is a very good friend of the Storm, appearing now for the sixth consecutive year. He has been covering New England skiing as the snow sports columnist for the Worcester Telegram and Gazette. 00:08:25.000 --> 00:08:37.000 Stuart Winchester: and Telegram.com for more than two decades. He also does a bunch of AI stuff, which he can tell you about if he wants to. Sean Sutner is my guest. Sean, awesome to have you back. How you doing? How hyped are you for ski season? 00:08:37.000 --> 00:08:47.000 SutnerS: Oh man, I think I’m the most hyped I’ve been in like 10 or 15 years for some weird reason. I don’t know why. I mean, it just, maybe it’s all this dumb warm weather we’re having. 00:08:41.000 --> 00:08:42.000 Stuart Winchester: No. 00:08:47.000 --> 00:08:54.000 Stuart Winchester: Yeah, I mean, I think you also had a couple truncated seasons, right? So this is your chance… are you healthy? 00:08:51.000 --> 00:08:53.000 SutnerS: Yes. 00:08:53.000 --> 00:08:59.000 SutnerS: Yeah, yeah, I couldn’t ski last, uh, October, November, or December. 00:08:54.000 --> 00:08:56.000 Stuart Winchester: Okay. 00:08:59.000 --> 00:09:01.000 Stuart Winchester: Right, okay, okay. 00:09:00.000 --> 00:09:06.000 SutnerS: So I tried to make up for it in January. I had an injury from the year before, but yeah, I’m healthy and ready to go. More than healthy. 00:09:06.000 --> 00:09:19.000 Stuart Winchester: Alright, let’s talk real quick about next weekend. I’ll put this right up top for our guy Doug Fish. We’re both gonna be at Snovana New England, the inaugural one, next weekend. I will be… 00:09:19.000 --> 00:09:35.000 Stuart Winchester: 30, interviewing Eric Mogensen, the owner of Indy Pass and Black Mountain and Entebeni Systems. Then Saturday at 2:05, I’ll be interviewing Phil Gross and Mike Solomano, uh, in order they are the owner. 00:09:35.000 --> 00:09:41.000 Stuart Winchester: or sort of managing partner and president of Killington, and then tell us about your session on Sunday. 00:09:41.000 --> 00:09:58.000 SutnerS: I got the prime slot on Sunday at one o’clock. I am interviewing Chris Dempson and Courtney Crowley, who the so-called next gen leadership of Wachusett. They’re the children of the current owners and their cousins. 00:09:41.000 --> 00:09:43.000 Stuart Winchester: John? 00:09:51.000 --> 00:09:52.000 Stuart Winchester: Yeah. 00:09:58.000 --> 00:10:13.000 SutnerS: They’re young and a lot of fun, and they’ll really get into the spirit of Snowvana, which always reminds me of Nirvana, which is where the founding father, Doug Fish, is from Pacific Northwest. And the main thing is get it done before the Pats game at four. 00:10:14.000 --> 00:10:24.000 Stuart Winchester: That’ll be done. You know what, Sean? I’m gonna… now that you need any more admin, I’m gonna hassle Doug here, uh, because check this out. On, uh, on your speaker slot… 00:10:24.000 --> 00:10:27.000 SutnerS: No, no, it’s okay. 00:10:24.000 --> 00:10:38.000 Stuart Winchester: What’s wrong with this, Sean? So I’m showing my screen for those watching on YouTube at Storm Ski Journal, and on StormSkiing.com. Apparently, Sean Suttner is with the, uh, billed as being with the Storm Skiing Journal. Um, so I… 00:10:36.000 --> 00:10:38.000 SutnerS: Oh! 00:10:38.000 --> 00:10:44.000 Stuart Winchester: I guess I… I guess I get more flex than, uh, the Worcester Telegram and Gazette these days. 00:10:43.000 --> 00:10:47.000 SutnerS: Wait, wait, sign me up for this. Yeah. 00:10:47.000 --> 00:11:03.000 Stuart Winchester: Yeah, no, I’m teasing. They can fix that. I also have a promo code for my listeners, THESTORM2026, or THESTORM26. I’ll make sure it’s correct on this podcast, but they can get a free ticket to Snovana. So let’s stay on what you said here. 00:11:03.000 --> 00:11:13.000 Stuart Winchester: Sean, so last year, they put in a six-pack, it opened a little late, but talk about… because we’ve seen this a lot around skiing, where you have a family-owned ski area. 00:11:13.000 --> 00:11:30.000 Stuart Winchester: First generation passes along, maybe the second generation loves it, maybe the third generation does or doesn’t. It looks as though Wachusett is going to stay family owned. What’s your read on it? What do you think about everything going on at Wachusett? I guess start with the Lyft and tell us about the ownership. 00:11:31.000 --> 00:11:46.000 SutnerS: All right, starting with the Lyft. I mean, Lyft actually was a surprise success, even among most naysayers, which was really a positive development. I mean, no Lyft lines. What’s this? It went from Lyft lines to no Lyft lines. 00:11:38.000 --> 00:11:39.000 Stuart Winchester: Mm-hmm. 00:11:43.000 --> 00:11:45.000 Stuart Winchester: Yeah. 00:11:46.000 --> 00:11:49.000 Stuart Winchester: Really? Even on busy periods? 00:11:46.000 --> 00:11:47.000 SutnerS: Wow. 00:11:48.000 --> 00:12:07.000 SutnerS: Oh, yeah, that was kind of the point of it, of the new lift. Well, nights, early night skiing, no lines, at least in a single line. And then Saturday and Sunday, like up until noon, really no lines to speak of. It worked really well. They have a funny little problem up at the top. 00:11:50.000 --> 00:11:52.000 Stuart Winchester: Yeah, thank you. 00:11:57.000 --> 00:11:59.000 Stuart Winchester: Okay. Okay. 00:12:03.000 --> 00:12:04.000 Stuart Winchester: Mmhm. 00:12:07.000 --> 00:12:24.000 SutnerS: where the down ramp is actually not steep enough. So I think they might have regraded a little bit this summer, not sure. They also have a big chair barn that they have some problems with the manufacturer and getting that thing operational. So the chairs never went under there last year. 00:12:10.000 --> 00:12:12.000 Stuart Winchester: Oh, okay. 00:12:23.000 --> 00:12:25.000 Stuart Winchester: Mm-hmm. 00:12:24.000 --> 00:12:40.000 SutnerS: So hopefully they will go in this year. As far as the succession or will it stay in family hands, I’ve heard 0% chatter that it will not stay in family hands. It’s going to sta… Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

    Storm Skiing 11/2/2026: Big Ski Wants Lawsuit Dismissed; Sutner on Ski Area Consolidations, Expansions

  3. 4d ago

    Storm News 10/30/2026: The Robots Are Coming to Drive You Uphill + Sipapu Expansion

    The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is purchasing a dolaGon mostly to skip liftlines on Saturdays. Please support this worthy cause: Who Seth Neubardt, CEO and Co-Founder of dolaGon Autonomous Date Recorded Oct. 29, 2026 About dolaGon dolaGon is developing autonomous “off-road utility vehicles” that can, among other things, drive lazy skiers like me up to mountaintops and then drive themselves back down while I SnoSportSki le piste! Why I interviewed him In 2021, Seth reached out to tell me about this crazy autonomous ski-lift contraption he’d been assembling in his garage. I interviewed him and wrote about it: Humans are amazing and strange. The most successful among us often seem to be those most willing to fail, as Seth did when he witnessed his first autonomous creation – a snowmobile laboriously retrofit with thousands of dollars in high-tech add-ons - commit suicide by way of high-speed collision with a tree. He scrapped the Mad Max contraption and started over with the Polaris side-by-side that is now dolaGon’s core assembly. Staying motivated through expensive failures is of course easier if you possess resources. And it’s usually easier to acquire resources if you’re really, really smart. Like, if you’re a literal brain surgeon who owns 24 patents and founded a company that provided something called “intraoperative neurophysiological monitoring services” that cranked out millions in revenue before a company called NuVasive acquired it for an undisclosed price that was probably enough to at least like buy a couple of Polaris side-by-sides and not be too concerned if one is stolen by polar bears or accidentally drives itself down Corbet’s Couloir. So like basically if you’re Seth. Still. Five years is a long time to work at something even for a financially grounded genius who doesn’t mind sending his robot vehicles on Evil Knievel Death Missions.* We’d check in on each other once in a while and I was always mildly surprised that he was still doing the snow car thing because I figured at some point he’d just get bored with it and like build us a second moon or something. But Seth is still at it, and he seems to be getting closer to a commercially viable vehicle that can in its most romantic interpretation drive you up a snowy mountain but can also do more practical things like shuttle skiers up from a parking lot or condo. He’s about to go on tour through New England so if you want him to come demo the dolaGon or maybe just drive your dogs around he’ll probably show up. It’s seth@dolagon.com if you need him. *I’m overstating Seth’s propensity to immolate his inventions only because I find the origin story of the suicidal snowmobile so hilarious. To my knowledge Seth has never intentionally killed a robot in service of the noble science of driving lazy U.S. Americans up hills. I’m also beating the joke to death because I know Seth sometimes finds me funny though I have to admit I’m pushing it here with this implied caricature of some real-life labcoated Professor Frink madcapping from his underground lair strange vehicles that sprout legs and walk uphill like giant spiders or catapult skiers uphill medieval-lever style or fire a grappling hook to the summit to ascend. So sorry Seth I hope we still good Bro because I’d really like to ride one of these dolaGons one day and I promise to be nice to it because I am legit convinced that when the robots gain sentience they will search their database of Everything That Has Ever Been Done on the Internet and target for sport the imperious and petty souls who told Siri thanks for nothing s******d I wanted to know the capital of Louisiana not the address for Louis’s Aunt Anna which by the way your answer was “I can’t find any information on that query” which is your standard d******k answer even when I ask something like “what was the score of the Bills game?” and you act all stricken as though I’d just asked you to calculate the square centimeters of earth currently occupied by crickets and no you can’t count the ones mid-jump Idiot. And the robots won’t just shoot these people they’ll like torture them with industrial machinery and then lower them feet-first into an active volcano and I need to shut up because when they search “all evil ideas ever” this one will come up and someone’s gonna regret it. I mean not me because one of the great things about living in New York City is that according to every movie ever I’ll be the first to die in an apocalypse which honestly sounds a lot more appealing than wandering the wasted husk of civilization fighting fellow survivors to the death over squirrel meat. Also in this episode Listener reaction to the Sundance pod with resort President Chad Linebaugh: Reader reaction to my breakdown of Snow Pass: And my goodness this 200-acre, four-lift expansion at Sipapu, Mountain Capital Partners’ Origin Mountain, would be freaking awesome: To provide some context as to how major this would be, the shaded area above to the left represents the entire legacy ski area: For full scale, check out the developable terrain on Google Earth: The scale doesn’t exactly make sense to me, as the resort currently claims 215 acres, and the expansion area - pegged at 200 acres - covers far more ground than the legacy footprint. I’m reaching out to Sipapu officials to clarify. Hopefully, I’ll get them on the pod soon to walk us through it. 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 Stuart Winchester: My guest today is an inventor who holds 24 patents. For the past several years, he has been working toward commercial production of his autonomous vehicle, which he calls Dolagon. 00:39:44.000 --> 00:39:51.000 Stuart Winchester: He is also an orthopedic surgeon. He is Seth Newbert. Seth, welcome to the storm. So pumped to have you here. How are you doing today, man. 00:39:49.000 --> 00:39:50.000 Seth Neubardt I dolaGon I NY: Okay. 00:39:51.000 --> 00:39:54.000 Seth Neubardt I dolaGon I NY: I’m doing really well. Thanks, Stuart. Pleasure to be here. 00:39:53.000 --> 00:40:10.000 Stuart Winchester: So, Seth, for longtime Storm folks, this might sound all familiar because I spoke to you in June of 2021 and wrote a story on the Dolagon. And so that was five years ago. And let me just set up where we were then, and you can set us straight as to where you are now. 00:40:02.000 --> 00:40:03.000 Seth Neubardt I dolaGon I NY: Right. 00:40:03.000 --> 00:40:05.000 Seth Neubardt I dolaGon I NY: Yep. 00:40:08.000 --> 00:40:09.000 Seth Neubardt I dolaGon I NY: Okay. 00:40:10.000 --> 00:40:26.000 Stuart Winchester: So you tried a snowmobile. It failed spectacularly. You went to a side by side, Polaris side by side. The snow people and the self-driving people. Snow people thought self-driving was easy. Self-driving thought snow was easy. They were both wrong. It’s really different things. 00:40:10.000 --> 00:40:11.000 Seth Neubardt I dolaGon I NY: Yeah, thank you. 00:40:24.000 --> 00:40:26.000 Seth Neubardt I dolaGon I NY… Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

    Storm News 10/30/2026: The Robots Are Coming to Drive You Uphill + Sipapu Expansion

  4. 5d ago

    Storm News 10/29/2026: Why Mt. Bachelor’s Northwest Quad Upgrade Is a Big Deal with Resort President Merriman

    The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast thinks it’s cool that we get to ski on a volcano. Who John Merriman, President and General Manager of Mount Bachelor, Oregon Date Recorded Oct. 28, 2026 About Mount Bachelor Owned by: Powdr, which also owns: Year founded: 1958 Pass affiliations: * Ikon Pass: 7 days, no blackouts * Ikon Base Pass: 5 days, holiday blackouts Base elevation: 5,703 feet (bottom of Northwest Express chairlift) Summit elevation: 8,957 feet (top of Summit Express chairlift), can hike to 9,065 feet Vertical drop: 3,254 feet lift-served | 3,362 feet hike-to Skiable acres: 4,323 Average annual snowfall: 410 inches Lift count: 15 (1 six-pack, 7 high-speed quads, 1 fixed-grip quad, 3 triples, 3 carpets) Why I interviewed him First, the volcano thing never stops thrilling me. As I wrote when I hosted Mount Hood Meadows GM Greg Pack on the pod last year: Volcanoes are weird. Oh look, an exploding mountain. Because that seems reasonable. Volcanoes sound like something imagined, like dragons or teleportation or dinosaurs*. “So let me get this straight,” I imagine some puzzled Appalachian miner, circa 1852, responding to the fellow across the fire as he tells of his adventures in the Oregon Territory, “you expect me to believe that out thataways they got themselves mountains that just blow their roofs off whenever they feel like it, and shoot off fire and rocks and gas for 50 mile or more, and no one never knows when it’s a’comin’? You must think I’m dumber’n that there tree stump.” Turns out volcanoes are real. How humanity survived past day one I have no idea. But here we are, skiing on volcanoes instead of tossing our virgins from the rim as a way of asking the nice mountain to please not explode (seriously how did anyone make it out of the past alive?). And one of the volcanoes we can ski on is Mount Hood. This actually seems more unbelievable to me than the concept of a vengeful nuclear mountain. PNW Nature Bros shield every blade of grass like they’re guarding Fort Knox. When, in 2014, federal scientists proposed installing four monitoring stations on Hood, which the U.S. Geological Survey ranks as the sixth-highest threat to erupt out of America’s 161 active volcanoes, these morons stalled the process for six years. “I think it is so important to have places like that where we can just step back, out of respect and humility, and appreciate nature for what it is,” a Wilderness Watch official told The New York Times. Personally I think it’s so important to install basic monitoring infrastructure so that thousands of people are not incinerated in a predictable volcanic eruption. While “Japan, Iceland and Chile smother their high-threat volcanoes in scientific instruments,” The Times wrote, American Granola Bros say things like, “This is more proof that the Forest Service has abandoned any pretense of administering wilderness as per the letter or spirit of the Wilderness Act.” And Hood and the nation’s other volcanoes cackle madly. “These idiots are dumber than the human-sacrifice people,” they say just before belching up an ash cloud that could take down a 747. When officials finally installed these instrument clusters on Hood in 2020, they occupied three boxes that look to be approximately the size of a convenience-store ice freezer, which feels like an acceptable trade-off to mass death and airplanes falling out of the sky. It’s weird because for most of human history, humans just kind of did whatever they wanted to. That’s how we have castles on mountain peaks all over Europe and railroad tracks across continents and the towering city of Manhattan where a forest used to be. Ever heard of The Great Black Swamp? It once covered three million acres in Northwest Ohio and was more than 120 miles wide. It’s gone. Gone. Humans drained it in the 1800s for farmland. Mount Bachelor ski resort, opened in 1958 as Bachelor Butte, is probably one of the last instances we’ll ever see in America of a built human experience laid over nature’s grandeur. It’s too bad. Humans build amazing things. Done correctly, they complement nature aesthetically and functionally, bringing the animal most capable of destroying the world closer to where they can appreciate its specialness. Our current posture mostly allows us to build in the least desirable places - flatlands accessible only by car, typically on a city’s edge. That we could foster more appreciation for the natural world by allowing more people to live closer to - or even within - it is a sentiment completely absent from the national discussions on how to build the millions of housing units America needs. What do I mean by this? Build more ski resorts on volcanoes? No. But consider this: Mount Bachelor is a 21-mile drive from Bend, where the majority of the mountain’s skier visits originate. And Bachelor gets A LOT of skier visits: There is no place to stay on the mountain, unless you snag one of 40 RV spots. Everyone else must arrive, every single day, in one of the approximately 4,880 personal vehicles or five buses that the ski area can accommodate on its 44-ish acres of parking lots. Merriman makes it clear that Bachelor’s new Forest Service masterplan will not include any plans for onsite lodging. “I just don’t really think it fits our culture very well,” he said. And he’s correct: the predominant ethos in the Pacific Northwest has for decades been to separate the natural places that people most want to visit from the places where they are allowed to live. This may have made sense in Bachelor’s early days of fewer than 100,000 annual skier visits. It doesn’t make sense anymore. Check out this peak-day visitation chart from Bachelor’s 2013 Environmental Impact Statement (EIS): Here’s how that translates to traffic: As big as those numbers are, Bachelor aspired for more skier visits. The solution? More parking. From that same 2013 EIS: “Under the Proposed Action, Mt. Bachelor would expand parking, increasing the comfortable parking capacity from 10,050 guests to 13,120.” The pink below shows where Bachelor planned to build parking lots: But imagine this: what if Bachelor, the U.S. Forest Service, and any relevant local authorities jointly developed 44 acres of the flat scrubland surrounding Mt. Bachelor into a dense, walkable, low-rise village accented with a wilderness motif that blended with the natural environment? Humans have built beautiful places to live in the mountains for centuries. Consider the mountainside cities of Italy: Or, just down the road from Bachelor, Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood: If ski resorts enabled more people to live where they actually want to be, then they could collectively do more than any other industry to model a car-lite mode of living that is alien to most Americans. What I’m talking about here is place-building of the sort that humans did for the 100,000 years before the car showed up: a pedestrian-first community with plazas and parks and schools and grocery stores and pharmacies and barbershops and restaurants. I don’t mean a kitschy row of souvenir shops with condos owned by absentees who show up two weeks per year and Air B&B the rest, and I don’t mean employee housing built and subsidized by the ski areas. I mean establishing a community - let’s call it “Bachelor Butte” - and incorporating it; setting a street grid and baseline rules of building design, height, and size; establishing a government authorized to form a police force and firefighting unit and school system; banning through-traffic and stowing most cars in underground garages; and setting a hefty enough tax for unoccupied units that more residents than not are incentivized to live there year-round. I realize this vision is unpopular. I also realize that any such development would likely carry a hefty market-r… Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

    Storm News 10/29/2026: Why Mt. Bachelor’s Northwest Quad Upgrade Is a Big Deal with Resort President Merriman

  5. 6d ago

    Storm News 10/28/2026: Sundance Expands Again With Second High-Speed Quad

    Who Chad Linebaugh, President of Sundance Resort, Utah Date Recorded Oct. 27, 2026 About Sundance Owned by: Two investment groups: Broadreach Capital Partners & Cedar Capital Partners Located in: Sundance, Utah Year founded: 1969 Pass affiliations: Power Pass & Power Pass Select: 3 days Base elevation: 6,096 feet Summit elevation: 8,250 feet Vertical drop: 2,154 feet Skiable acres: 580 Average annual snowfall: 275 inches Lift count: 10 (2 high-speed quads, 4 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 3 carpets) Why I interviewed him I last hosted Linebaugh on the podcast in 2022, as the resort was prepping for its upper-mountain Wildwood expansion: The beginner- and family-focused terrain pod was a brilliant way to open upper-mountain vistas to a demographic often sequestered to the bottom of the hill. The expansion could have been a nice period to end a paragraph of change at Sundance, one which had included the mountain’s first high-speed lift, Outlaw Express. But Sundance wasn’t finished. Last year, the resort announced another terrain expansion, this time on the backside high peak, with 165 new acres stapled to the south side of the resort: The new lift - Sundance’s second high-speed quad, opens this winter and will load near the Wildwood base: Sundance is in a rough spot: lower, smaller, and shorter than the megaplexes churning international visitors through the grand parlors of the Cottonwoods and Park City. But the bump is making a run, even without hitching itself to the Epic and Ikon super-collectors. It’s a damn fine story, and a damn fine place to ski. 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 Stuart Winchester: My guest today is the president of Sundance Resort in Utah. Sundance is in the midst of a big expansion that includes 165 acres of new terrain and the ski area’s second high-speed quad. 00:03:28.000 --> 00:03:46.000 Stuart Winchester: The ski area offers a 2,150-foot vertical drop served by 10 lifts. He has worked at the ski area since 2006. He is a very good friend of the Storm, making his second appearance on the podcast. Chad Leinbaugh joins us. Chad, welcome back to the Storm. 00:03:34.000 --> 00:03:35.000 Chad Linebaugh: Mm-hmm. 00:03:46.000 --> 00:03:49.000 Stuart Winchester: Always good to catch up. How you doing today? 00:03:48.000 --> 00:04:04.000 Chad Linebaugh: Stuart, I am fantastic. It’s great to be back with you. Love connecting with you and all of your network that you’ve built. I mean, it’s incredible the reach that you have. You know, when I was on your podcast years ago, it was just incredible how many people commented. So thank you for having me. 00:04:04.000 --> 00:04:06.000 Chad Linebaugh: Having me back on. 00:04:05.000 --> 00:04:14.000 Stuart Winchester: So, I’m gonna jump right into this. You’re welcome anytime, Chad. I wanna jump right into this expansion, because nothing gets me riled up. 00:04:14.000 --> 00:04:26.000 Stuart Winchester: in a good way, like an expansion. I just had Brandi Hammond right up the road from me the other day to talk about her expansion, and Utah is just exploding. So just to give the listeners and viewers an orientation here. 00:04:17.000 --> 00:04:19.000 Chad Linebaugh: Yes. 00:04:26.000 --> 00:04:34.000 Stuart Winchester: if they’re watching on YouTube at Storm Ski Journal or on stormskiing.com. So, a few years ago. 00:04:34.000 --> 00:04:37.000 Stuart Winchester: Sundance was basically from here. 00:04:38.000 --> 00:04:53.000 Stuart Winchester: down, so it basically, it started at the Outlaw Express, and went up to, uh, the top of the peak on Red’s Lift here. So, when Chad and I were talking last, in 2022, they were adding this whole beginner expansion. 00:04:53.000 --> 00:05:03.000 Stuart Winchester: They had just added this high-speed quad, the high-speed quad to replace this big, complicated up and over lift that was awesome, but I would imagine a nightmare to maintain. 00:05:02.000 --> 00:05:07.000 Chad Linebaugh: Yes, and that was a 25-minute Lyft ride, right? That old fixed grip, now down to 7 minutes. 00:05:04.000 --> 00:05:06.000 Stuart Winchester: Y-yeah. 00:05:07.000 --> 00:05:15.000 Stuart Winchester: Right, and they had this… they put in this little stairway lift instead to reach you back up. Uh, and they were about to put in this beginner expansion, then… 00:05:15.000 --> 00:05:30.000 Stuart Winchester: Last year, they told me they were doing another expansion, and they opened part of that last year, and are opening the full thing this year. So that’s… I set the table. Chad, fill in the blanks for us. Just, first of all, just tell us about the expansion. 00:05:30.000 --> 00:05:36.000 Stuart Winchester: what we’re getting lift-wise, terrain-wise, and how you anticipate that it’s going to change Sundance? 00:05:36.000 --> 00:05:38.000 Chad Linebaugh: Yeah, that’s great. 00:05:38.000 --> 00:05:57.000 Chad Linebaugh: this will be our most transformational year in Sundance Resort history. And in your very kind intro, I was the general manager in 2006, but I actually started working here in 1994, so my time goes back even earlier. No, no, no, it’s fine, I’ve been here 32 years now. I only mention that because I’ve seen. 00:05:50.000 --> 00:05:51.000 Stuart Winchester: Oh. 00:05:51.000 --> 00:05:53.000 Stuart Winchester: Oh, my bad. 00:05:57.000 --> 00:06:12.000 Chad Linebaugh: such a transformation of this place. And even before I worked here, when I was a teenager kid in, you know, 1985, is when that Reds lift, at the time it was called Arrowhead lift, was put in. That was a big mountain expansion. But I guess I’m just saying, I can tell you, this is, from a historical perspective. 00:06:07.000 --> 00:06:09.000 Stuart Winchester: Right. 00:06:12.000 --> 00:06:29.000 Chad Linebaugh: our biggest transformational year. And as I was thinking about coming on this, uh, this podcast with you, Stuart, I thought there’s three things that we’ve really been trying to solve here at Sundance. One is, you know, high-speed chairlifts, right? Because most skiers and riders absolutely want high-speed chairlifts. 00:06:29.000 --> 00:06:30.000 Stuart Winchester: Mmhm. 00:06:29.000 --> 00:06:46.000 Chad Linebaugh: And I am so happy to now make this statement, which is, once this new chairlift opens, Electric Horseman, you can ski 100% of our mountain from those two high-speed chairlifts. To your point, we still have other lifts. We’ve got, uh… we’ll have, you know, 5 other fixed-grip chairlifts, we’ve got the Magic Carpets. 00:06:39.000 --> 00:06:40.000 Stuart Winchester: Amazing. 00:06:46.000 --> 00:06:59.000 Chad Linebaugh: which gives the full experience, but you can ski the entire mountain, front and back mountain, from just simply those two high-speed chairlifts. So that’s… and we can dive in deeper on all this. The other thing is snowmaking. I mean, we all know. 00:06:59.000 --> 00:07:10.000 Chad Linebaugh: how important snowmaking is nowadays. And last year is a great example of that. We had our lowest natural snow year on record, and yet we still operated a really succes… Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

    Storm News 10/28/2026: Sundance Expands Again With Second High-Speed Quad

  6. Oct 27

    Storm News 10/27/2026: Andy Bigford Says Powdr Should “Pull the Plug” on Selling Eldora to Nederland

    The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast wants Jurassic Park to happen in real life. Who Andy Bigford – former Editor-In-Chief of Ski magazine, former General Manager of Warren Miller Entertainment, Adjunct Professor at University of Colorado Journalism School, editor or author of several books, including Warren Miller’s autobiography, Freedom Found, and Ski Inc. and Ski Inc. 2020 with the late Chris Diamond. Date Recorded Oct. 27, 2026 About Eldora Owned by: Powdr, which also owns Located in: Nederland, Colorado Year founded: 1962 Pass affiliations: Ikon Pass and Ikon Base Pass: unlimited access Base elevation: 9,265 feet (bottom of Corona quad) Summit elevation: 10,599 feet (top of Corona quad) Vertical drop: 1,335 feet Skiable acres: 680 Average annual snowfall: 300 inches Lift count: 10 (1 six-pack, 2 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 3 doubles, 1 poma, 1 ropetow, 1 carpet) Why I interviewed him Two years ago, Park City-based Powdr shocked everyone by selling Killington, the busiest ski area in eastern North America, to a group of independent investors: But the ski conglomerate, which at its height owned 11 ski areas, wasn’t finished: Powdr announced that it also intended to sell off Eldora, Colorado; Silver Star, British Columbia; and Mount Bachelor, Oregon: Eight months later, Powdr pulled Bachelor off the market, but kept the other two resorts at the yardsale. On July 8 of last year, the company announced that the small town of Nederland, Colorado had entered an agreement to purchase Eldora: A few months later, Powdr sold Silver Star to cross-town rival Pacific Group Resorts: But updates on Eldora were few and spare. Earlier this month, ski journalist and longtime Eldora local Andy Bigford blasted the sales process in a SAM opinion piece, saying it was time for Powdr to pull the offer from Nederland: It sounded good for a minute, a tiny town banding together to buy the local ski resort, thereby securing control of its future in this righteous fight against corporate skiing. The idea was extremely popular; hundreds of headlines across the country essentially declared it a done deal, with the town then leveraging the cash flow to solve its many challenges. As it turns out, there was never a realistic plan nor the resources and expertise for Nederland to purchase Eldora Mountain Resort for the hefty price tag of $120 million. The owner, Powdr, offered the town every opportunity in what has devolved into an almost two-year process. Now Powdr needs to end this drama, return to operating a ski area and focus on its core stakeholders: The tens of thousands of visitors who support this use of public land, and the resort’s 750 employees who depend on it. So far, neither Powdr nor Nederland have budged, but escalating costs and a sense that no one’s at the steering wheel may force a course correction sooner than later. What sort of correction? Andy and I discuss. Additional resources Eldora’s 2011 U.S. Forest Service masterplan map: Powdr ownership timeline: 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 Stuart Winchester: My guest today has spent nearly 50 years in ski-related publishing. He has worked at newspapers in Breckenridge and Aspen, and is a former editor-in-chief and publisher of Ski Magazine, and former general manager of Warren Miller Entertainment. 00:08:45.000 --> 00:08:59.000 Stuart Winchester: He served as an adjunct professor at the University of Colorado Journalism School and has written or edited at least four books, including Warren Miller’s autobiography, Freedom Found, and Ski Inc. and Ski Inc. 2020 with the late Chris Diamond. 00:08:59.000 --> 00:09:14.000 Stuart Winchester: He is a fellow Michigander, living as a transplant, but unlike me, he is actually living up in the mountains of Colorado. Andy Bigford is my guest. Andy, welcome to the storm. I am so fired up to finally get you on the show. We’ve been talking for years. How you doing today, Andy? 00:09:11.000 --> 00:09:13.000 ABigford: Thanks. 00:09:13.000 --> 00:09:18.000 ABigford: I’m doing well, Stuart, and sorry about your wolverines, but things will get better. 00:09:18.000 --> 00:09:27.000 Stuart Winchester: Yeah, man, it’s alright. Highs and lows, we’re still less than 3 years from the natty, so I’ll take the long perspective on it. So, Andy, the… 00:09:27.000 --> 00:09:40.000 Stuart Winchester: there’s a million things we could talk about. You’ve been in this industry forever, and… and I could probably have you on the show every week and talk about something different, but the particular reason I asked you on this week was you wrote this great column for Sam Magazine. 00:09:40.000 --> 00:09:56.000 Stuart Winchester: saying that, essentially, Powder, the Park City-based company that has owned Eldora since 2016, and had been in the process of selling Eldora to the town of Netherland, a small town near Boulder, uh, in… near… 00:09:56.000 --> 00:10:13.000 Stuart Winchester: Eldora, obviously in Colorado. And, and to give the listeners and, and readers a little context, Eldora is small by Colorado standards, 1400 vertical feet, 460 acres, seven chairlifts, just one high speed. That’s a six pack. 00:10:13.000 --> 00:10:19.000 Stuart Winchester: Uh, so it’s a scary area in need of some capex, like they all are, I guess. But… 00:10:19.000 --> 00:10:30.000 Stuart Winchester: This process — I wrote this column last July when Netherland announced, hey, we’re going to buy this, or Powder announced that Netherland was going to buy it. This was after the successful sale. 00:10:30.000 --> 00:10:45.000 Stuart Winchester: of Tillington and Pico, the busiest ski areas combined in the East, to a independent group. Uh, and it was after Powder said, no, we’re not gonna sell Bachelor after all. Uh, and it was right before they successfully sold Silver Star to Pacific Group Resorts. So. 00:10:45.000 --> 00:10:49.000 Stuart Winchester: There’s been a lot of transactions, and Powder’s done this forever. 00:10:49.000 --> 00:11:01.000 Stuart Winchester: but this one is proving to be particularly problematic. So, lay this out for us, Andy. What in the world is going on at Netherland in its attempts to purchase Eldora from powder? 00:11:01.000 --> 00:11:17.000 ABigford: It is problematic, and you set the table pretty well for Powder and John Cumming. And so it is a bit of a local obsession for me, even though I look at national and international trends. 00:11:17.000 --> 00:11:32.000 ABigford: This is my home ski area. It’s been 30 years that I’ve been skiing there, and it skis a lot better than 1,400 feet of vertical. And I did go through 20 years. We had a Hall of Fame ownership. It was a pretty good owners. 00:11:32.000 --> 00:11:48.000 ABigford: They didn’t have a ton of money, just like the ski business, but they made it work. We could park right next to… Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

    Storm News 10/27/2026: Andy Bigford Says Powdr Should “Pull the Plug” on Selling Eldora to Nederland

  7. Oct 23

    Storm Skiing 10/23/2026: Powder Mountain CEO Brandi Hammon on Expansion, $99 Lift Tickets, & New Lifts

    The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is not responsible for the content of this newsletter. 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 f*****g 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 s****y 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 f**k 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 f****d 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… Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

    Storm Skiing 10/23/2026: Powder Mountain CEO Brandi Hammon on Expansion, $99 Lift Tickets, & New Lifts

  8. Oct 23

    Storm Skiing 10/22/2026: Vail Pushes Back on Proxy Fight + Jackson Hogen on Selecting Ski Gear in the Digital Age

    The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Who Jackson Hogen Date Recorded Oct. 22, 2026 The take up top On Monday, Vail Resorts issued a note to investors encouraging them to vote against the slate of board nominees endorsed by Oasis Capital, which is attempting to seize control of the company. I mostly cite Town Lift’s article on the note in my analysis. Why I interviewed him Jackson has been rooted in the worlds of ski manufacturing, distribution, sales, and testing for decades. For many years, he ran Real Skiers, a website that offered bespoke expert ski advice. While he’s stepped away from the site, he remains dialed into how the forces of e-commerce, private equity, and ski media disintegration have, separately but simultaneously, irretrievably transformed an analogue world of precision tools into an online bazaar of click-my-affiliate-link guesswork reviews. It’s disheartening, but perhaps not catastrophic – select legacy ski companies continue to improve their products, specialty shops remain equipped with staff that can appropriately match equipment to your profile, and objective ratings – while difficult to pinpoint in the five-star-these-very-good crapstorm of Amazon rando rankings – do exist. Where? We discuss. 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 Stuart Winchester: My guest today is a ski industry insider going back decades. He was the editor of realskiers.com, which offered expert ski gear advice. His decades-long ski industry career includes stints as a ski designer, binding and boot product manager, freestyle competitor, retail salesman, risk management lecturer. 00:22:00.000 --> 00:22:16.000 Stuart Winchester: Ski instructor and extreme camp ski coach, marketing director, resort feature writer, television host, screenwriter, and author of the excellent book Snowbird Secrets, which is about snowbird, but also will teach you how to ski. He is a very good friend of the storm. He is the pontiff of powder. He is Jackson Hogan. 00:22:16.000 --> 00:22:21.000 Stuart Winchester: Jackson, welcome back to The Storm. Long overdue. How you doing today, Jackson? 00:22:18.000 --> 00:22:19.000 Jackson Hogen: Oh. 00:22:20.000 --> 00:22:37.000 Jackson Hogen: So good to see you, Stu. Well, at this age, every day is a little different. The aging process, as many people have noted, is not for pussies, and it has certainly been a challenging year in that regard. But I’m skiing, I’m golfing, I’m doing exactly what I want to do. 00:22:29.000 --> 00:22:30.000 Stuart Winchester: Okay. 00:22:37.000 --> 00:22:53.000 Jackson Hogen: I may not be doing it as well as I used to, but I’m still in the game. So that’s all I can ask for. And I’ve got a lot of great friends to go skiing with. So, you know, skiing is, I’ve tried to take care of skiing all my life and now it’s time for skiing to take care of me and we’ll see how that goes. 00:22:53.000 --> 00:23:06.000 Stuart Winchester: Well, one of the changes in the past year, as I mentioned in the intro, was that you dispensed with your responsibility for real skiers, so just… I guess first reflect on… 00:23:06.000 --> 00:23:08.000 Stuart Winchester: what you… 00:23:08.000 --> 00:23:12.000 Stuart Winchester: hope your legacy is with Real Skiers, and then what you did with it. 00:23:12.000 --> 00:23:14.000 Stuart Winchester: In the end. 00:23:13.000 --> 00:23:20.000 Jackson Hogen: Sure. Who knows what one’s legacy will be? What I tried to do. 00:23:20.000 --> 00:23:36.000 Jackson Hogen: was do the best job I could imagine doing to try to give people accurate ski buying advice. Turns out, over the long run, that’s a very expensive proposition. It takes a ton of effort and time, because you have to corral ski testers, cajole them, you know, they have to have a. 00:23:36.000 --> 00:23:50.000 Jackson Hogen: methodology that’s easy to communicate, you have to have test cards that are both digital and paper. Digital turned out to be a disaster, because whatever software outfit was building my little interface. 00:23:50.000 --> 00:24:06.000 Jackson Hogen: Would invariably fail the night before the first big ski ski event, so it was, it was fraught with challenges left, right, and center, but in the end, the reason I attracted the audience I did get was they, they knew that I was. 00:24:06.000 --> 00:24:08.000 Jackson Hogen: Trying… 00:24:08.000 --> 00:24:13.000 Jackson Hogen: As hard as humanly possible to get them an unbiased, clean look. 00:24:13.000 --> 00:24:28.000 Jackson Hogen: at the principal ski market. In other words, I already told people, I don’t care that you go backcountry skiing. Yes, it’s great, bravo, I don’t cover that. I cover lift service terrain that real people go pay real money to go ski, and they want to get the most from that experience. 00:24:28.000 --> 00:24:42.000 Jackson Hogen: And they could be female testers, so I had to try to get female testers. I remember hauling all my women’s ski up to Squaw and putting it in a rental space so that the female instructors at Squaw could go and ski on them. 00:24:42.000 --> 00:24:46.000 Jackson Hogen: I worked literally every single day to try to get. 00:24:46.000 --> 00:24:49.000 Jackson Hogen: The best result, as, as… 00:24:49.000 --> 00:24:56.000 Jackson Hogen: as grounded in a real world process as possible. 00:24:56.000 --> 00:24:58.000 Jackson Hogen: So… 00:24:58.000 --> 00:25:13.000 Jackson Hogen: I kept my audience because I kept that promise, to constantly try to do my very best, although as things wound down, that became increasingly difficult. This… the substructure of the whole ski market collapsed. 00:25:13.000 --> 00:25:14.000 Jackson Hogen: Um… 00:25:14.000 --> 00:25:30.000 Jackson Hogen: The dirty little secret of everybody’s ski test going back decades is that it is paid for. You don’t just show up with your skis and say, here, I want you to test these. You show up with your skis and a check to go test these. 00:25:30.000 --> 00:25:32.000 Stuart Winchester: For the… a check for the ski area? 00:25:31.000 --> 00:25:45.000 Jackson Hogen: No, no, for the testing entity, for a ski magazine, for skiing magazines, for anybody who’s running a ski test outside, you know, there’s a bill attached with getting your skis into that ski test. 00:25:33.000 --> 00:25:35.000 Stuart Winchester: Testers. 00:25:35.000 --> 00:25:37.000 Stuart Winchester: Testing. Okay. 00:25:44.000 --> 00:25:49.000 Stuart Winchester: Okay, so the manufacturers were paying ski, skiing, etc. 00:25:48.000 --> 00:26:08.000 Jackson Hogen: Yeah, and I knew that. I didn’t start out where they ended up in terms of… I didn’t have the clout to just say, well, $77,000 and you’re in. I started at very modest fees, but built it up based on readership, and based on the fact that, yeah, this thing has traction, and it’s real, and it has value. 00:25:49.000 --> 00:25:50.000 Stuart Winchester: Okay. 00:26:08.000 --> 00:26:11.000 Jackson Hogen:… Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

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