Ski Patrol Radio National Ski Patrol

On this episode of Ski Patrol Radio, we sat down with patrol directors Drew Kneeland of Jackson Hole Mountain Resort and Janna Allen of Brundage Mountain to discuss what brought them into the profession of ski patrolling. They discuss their career path, what they love about their jobs, the threats to the next generation of career patrollers, and how the National Ski Patrol as an organization supports them and where it can improve.

Ski patrollers bring a variety of unique experiences and perspectives to their work, but very few have the experience and background that our guest Peter Gannon arrived with. Peter grew up on the Oglala Lakota Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota and is a member of the Cheyenne River tribe. Listen to our conversation about how Peter’s family and life experience affects the way he sees life in the mountains, what it is like to come to skiing as an adult and as a person of color, and what he loves about patrolling.  

As ski season kicks off around the country, we sit down with the National Ski Area Association’s Director of Risk & Regulatory Affairs, Dave Byrd, and National Ski Patrol medical committee member and Infectious Disease Physician, Dr. Jon Persichino. We discuss their recommended COVID precautions to keep ski patrollers and guests safe and healthy for the 2021 – 2022 ski season.

We sit down with the National Ski Patrol’s new CEO Chris Castilian in this episode of Ski Patrol Radio. We talk about his prior experiences, his goals for bringing the National Ski Patrol forward in the ski industry, and honoring NSP’s past without living in it.

On this episode of Ski Patrol Radio we sit down with Mount Hood ski patroller Dave Watson. He speaks about his experiences training patrollers in Kashmir, India, being buried while conducting avalanche mitigation in Oregon, and how his training and experiences as a ski patroller have aided him while climbing the tallest peaks in the world, including Mount Everest twice!

In the historically male-centric culture of ski patrolling, women are finding a better place in the community. We sit down with Kolina Coe, the Assistant Director and a dog handler at Northstar California, and Kristen Russo, the Assistant Patrol Director at Holiday Valley in New York state. We discuss their experiences as being women ski patrollers, what has changed over the years, and what still needs to be improved.