by Stuart Winchester
Everyone’s searching for skiing’s soul. I’m trying to find its brains. <br/><br/><a href="https://www.stormskiing.com?utm_medium=podcast">www.stormskiing.com</a>
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April 8, 2025
<p><p>The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and to support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.</p></p><p><strong>Who</strong></p><p>Jeff Colburn, General Manager of <a target="_blank" href="https://silvermt.com/">Silver Mountain</a>, Idaho</p><p><strong>Recorded on</strong></p><p>February 12, 2025</p><p><strong>About Silver Mountain</strong></p><p>Click <a target="_blank" href="https://silvermt.com/mountain/trail-map">here</a> for a mountain stats overview</p><p><strong>Owned by: </strong>CMR Lands, which also owns <a target="_blank" href="https://www.ski49n.com/">49 Degrees North</a>, Washington</p><p><strong>Located in: </strong>Kellogg, Idaho</p><p><strong>Year founded: </strong>1968 as Jackass ski area, later known as Silverhorn, operated intermittently in the 1980s before its transformation into Silver in 1990</p><p><strong>Pass affiliations:</strong></p><p>* <a target="_blank" href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1G2-l2DVg7-QwroOi7EqRDrJYJ4ICYLcJbLx-nARJdrA/edit?gid=192229868#gid=192229868">Indy Pass</a> – 2 days, select blackouts</p><p>* Indy+ Pass – 2 days, no blackouts</p><p>* <a target="_blank" href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1G2-l2DVg7-QwroOi7EqRDrJYJ4ICYLcJbLx-nARJdrA/edit?gid=2096661527#gid=2096661527">Powder Alliance</a> – 3 days, select blackouts</p><p><strong>Closest neighboring ski areas: </strong>Lookout Pass (:26)</p><p><strong>Base elevation: </strong>4,100 feet (lowest chairlift); 2,300 feet (gondola)</p><p><strong>Summit elevation: </strong>6,297 feet</p><p><strong>Vertical drop: </strong>2,200 feet</p><p><strong>Skiable acres: </strong>1,600+</p><p><strong>Average annual snowfall: </strong>340 inches</p><p><strong>Trail count: </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://www.silvermt.com/mountain-info/trail-status">80</a></p><p><strong>Lift count: </strong>7 (1 eight-passenger gondola, 1 fixed-grip quad, 2 triples, 2 doubles – view Lift Blog’s <a target="_blank" href="https://liftblog.com/silver-mountain-id/">inventory</a> of Silver Mountain’s lift fleet)</p><p><strong>Why I interviewed him</strong></p><p>After moving to Manhattan in 2002, I would often pine for an extinct version of New York City: docks thrust into the Hudson, masted ships, ornate brickwork factories, carriages, open windows, kids loose in the streets, summer evening crowds on stoops and patios. Modern New York, riotous as it is for an American city, felt staid and sterile beside the island’s explosively peopled black-and-white past.</p><p>Over time, I’ve developed a different view: New York City is a triumph of post-industrial reinvention, able to shed and quickly replace obsolete industries with those that would lead the future. And my idealized New York, I came to realize, was itself a snapshot of one lost New York, but not the only lost New York, just my romanticized etching of a city that has been in a constant state of reinvention for 400 years.</p><p>It's through this same lens that we can view Silver Mountain. For more than a century, Kellogg was home to silver mines that employed thousands. When the Bunker Hill Mine closed in 1981, it took the town’s soul with it. The city became a symbol of industrial decline, of an America losing its rough-and-ragged hammer-bang grit.</p><p>And for a while, Kellogg was a denuded and dusty crater pockmarking the glory-green of Idaho’s panhandle. The population collapsed. Suicide rates, Colburn tells us on the podcast, were high.</p><p>But within a decade, town officials peered toward the skeleton of Jackass ski area, with its intact centerpole Riblet double, and said, “maybe that’s the thing.” With help from Von Roll, they erected three chairlifts on the mountain and taxed themselves $2 million to string a three-mile-long gondola from town to mountain, opening the ski area to the masses by bypassing the serpentine seven-mile-long access road. (Gosh, can you think of <a target="_blank" href="https://gondolaworks.com/">anyplace else</a> where such a contraption would work?)</p><p>Silver rose above while the Environmental Protection Agency got to work below, cleaning up what had been designated a massive Superfund site. Today, Kellogg, led by Silver, is a functional, modern place, a post-industrial success story demonstrating how recreation can anchor an economy and a community. </p><p>The service sector lacks the fiery valor of industry. Bouncing through snow, gifted from above, for fun, does not resonate with America’s self-image like the gutsy miner pulling metal from the earth to feed his family. Town founder/mining legend Noah Kellogg and his jackass companion remain heroic local figures. But across rural America, ski areas have stepped quietly into the vacuum left by vacated factories and mines, where they become a source of community identity and a stabilizing agent where no other industry makes sense.</p><p><strong>What we talked about</strong></p><p>Ski Idaho; what it will take to transform Idaho into a ski destination; the importance of Grand Targhee to Idaho; old-time PNW skiing; Schweitzer as bellwether for Idaho ski area development; Kellogg, Idaho’s mining history, Superfund cleanup, and renaissance as a resort town; Jackass ski area and its rebirth as Silver Mountain; the easiest big mountain access in America; taking a gondola to the ski area; the Jackass Snack Shack; an affordable mountain town?; Silver’s destination potential; 49 Degrees North; these obscenely, stupidly low lift ticket prices:</p><p>Potential lift upgrades, including Chair 4; snowmaking potential; baselodge expansion; Indy Pass; and the Powder Alliance.</p><p><strong>What I got wrong</strong></p><p>I mentioned that Telluride’s Mountain Village Gondola replacement would cost $50 million. The actual estimates appear to be <a target="_blank" href="https://www.telluridenews.com/news/article_0f28f2ca-d846-11ef-b17e-2325e21ba586.html">$60 million</a>. The two stages of that gondola total 10,145 feet, more than a mile shorter than Silver’s astonishing 16,350 feet (3.1 miles).</p><p><strong>Why now was a good time for this interview</strong></p><p>In the ‘90s, before the advent of the commercial internet, I learned about skiing from magazines. They mostly wrote about the American West and their fabulous, over-hill-and-dale ski complexes: Vail and Sun Valley and Telluride and the like. But these publications also exposed the backwaters where you could mainline pow and avoid liftlines, and do it all for less than the price of a bologna sandwich. It was in Skiing’s October 1994 Favorite Resorts issue that I learned about this little slice of magnificence:</p><p>Snow, snow, snow, steep, steep, steep, cheap, cheap, cheap, and a feeling you’ve gone back to a special time and place when life, and skiing, was uncomplicated – those are the things that make <strong>[NAME REDACTED]</strong> one of our favorite resorts. It’s the ultimate pure skiing experience. This was another surprise choice, even to those who named <strong>[REDACTED]</strong> to their lists. We knew people liked <strong>[REDACTED]</strong>, but we weren’t prepared for how many, or how create their affections were. This is the one area that broke the “Great Skiing + Great Base Area + Amenities = Favorite Resort” equation. <strong>[REDACTED]</strong> has minimal base development, no shopping, no nightlife, no fancy hotels or eateries, and yet here it is on our list, a tribute to the fact that in the end, really great skiing matters more than any other single resort feature.</p><p>OK, well this sounds amazing. Tell me more…</p><p>…<strong>[REDACTED]</strong> has one of the cheapest lift tickets around.</p><p>…One of those rare places that hasn’t been packaged, streamlined, suburbanized. There’s also that delicious atmosphere of absolute remoteness from the everyday world.</p><p>…The ski area for traditionalists, ascetics, and cheapskates. The lifts are slow and creaky, the accommodations are spartan, but the lift tickets are the best deal in skiing.</p><p>This super-secret, cheaper-than-Tic-Tacs, Humble Bro ski center tucked hidden from any sign of civilization, the Great Skiing Bomb Shelter of 1994, is…</p><p>Alta.</p><p>Yes, that Alta.</p><p>The Alta with four high-speed lifts.</p><p>The Alta with $199 peak-day walk-up lift tickets.</p><p>The Alta that headlines the Ikon Pass and Mountain Collective.</p><p>The Alta with an address at the top of America’s most over-burdened access road.</p><p>Alta is my favorite ski area. There is nothing else like it anywhere (well, except directly next door). And a lot remains unchanged since 1994: there still isn’t much to do other than ski, the lodges are still “spartan,” it is still “steep” and “deep.” But Alta blew past “cheap” a long time ago, and it feels about as embedded in the wilderness as an exit ramp Chuck E. Cheese. Sure, the viewshed is mostly intact, but accessing the ski area requires a slow-motion up-canyon tiptoe that better resembles a civilization-level evacuation than anything we would label “remote.” Alta is still Narnia, but the Alta described above no longer exists.</p><p>Well, no s**t? Aren’t we talking about Idaho here? Yes, but no one else is. And that’s what I’m getting at: the Alta of 2025, the place where everything is cheap and fluffy and empty, is Idaho. Hide behind your dumb potato jokes all you want, but you can’t argue with this lineup:</p><p>“Ummm, Grand Targhee is in Wyoming, D*****s.”</p><p>Thank you, Geography Bro, but the only way to access GT is through Idaho, and the mountain has been a member of Ski Idaho for centuries because of it.</p><p>Also: Lost Trail and Lookout Pass both straddle the Montana-Idaho border.</p><p>Anyway, check that roster, those annual snowfall totals. Then look at how difficult these ski areas are to access. The answer, mostly, is “Not Very.” You couldn’t make Silver Mountain easier to get to unless you moved it to JFK airport: exit the interstate, drive seven feet, park, board the gondola.</p><p>Finally, let’s compare that group of 15 Idaho ski areas to the <a target="_blank" href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1G2-l2DVg7-QwroOi7EqRDrJYJ4ICYLcJbLx-nARJdrA/edit?gid=1234341448#gid=1234341448">15 public, aerial-lift-served ski areas</a> in Utah. Even when you include Targhee and all of Lost Trail and Lookout, Utah offers 32 percent more skiable terrain than Idaho:</p><p>But Utah tallies three times more annual skier visits than Idaho:</p><p>No, Silver Mountain is not Alta, and Brundage is not Snowbird. But Silver and Brundage don’t get skied out in under 45 seconds on a powder day. And other than faster lifts and more skiers, there’s not much separating the average Utah ski resort from the average Idaho ski resort.</p><p>That won’t be true forever. People are dumb in the moment, but smart in slow-motion. We are already seeing meaningful numbers of East Coast ski families reorient their ski trips east, across the Atlantic (one New York-based reader explained to me today how they flew their family to Norway for skiing over President’s weekend because it was cheaper than Vermont). Soon enough, Planet California and everyone else is going to tire of the expense and chaos of Colorado and Utah, and they’ll Insta-sleuth their way to this powdery Extra-Rockies that everyone forgot about. No reason to wait for all that.</p><p><strong>Why you should ski Silver Mountain</strong></p><p>I have little to add outside of what I wrote above: go to Silver because it’s big and cheap and awesome. So I’ll add this pinpoint description from <a target="_blank" href="https://www.skibum.net/rocky-mountains/idaho-ski-areas/">Skibum.net</a>:</p><p>It’s hard to find something negative about Silver Mountain; the only real drawback is that you probably live nowhere near it. On the other hand, if you live within striking distance, you already know that this is easily the best kept ski secret in Idaho and possibly the entire western hemisphere. If not, you just have to convince the family somehow that Kellogg Idaho — not Vail, not Tahoe, not Cottonwood Canyon — is the place you ought to head for your next ski trip. Try it, and you’ll see why it’s such a well-kept secret. All-around fantastic skiing, terrific powder, virtually no liftlines, reasonable pricing. Layout is kind of quirky; almost like an upside-down mountain due to gondola ride to lodge…interesting place. Emphasis on expert skiing but all abilities have plenty of terrain. Experts will find a ton of glades … One of the country’s great underrated ski areas.</p><p>Some of you will just never bother traveling for a mountain that lacks high-speed lifts. I understand, but I think that’s a mistake. Slow lifts don’t matter when there are no liftlines. And as Skiing wrote about Alta in 1994, “Really great skiing matters more than any other single resort feature.”</p><p><strong>Podcast Notes</strong></p><p><strong>On Schweitzer’s transformation</strong></p><p>If we were to fast-forward 30 years, I think we would find that most large Idaho ski areas will have undergone a renaissance of the sort that Schweitzer, Idaho did over the previous 30 years. Check the place out in 1988, a big but backwoods ski area covered in double chairs:</p><p>Compare that to Schweitzer today: four high-speed quads, a sixer, and two triples that are only fixed-grip because the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.stormskiing.com/p/podcast-151-schweitzer-mountain-president#details">GM doesn’t like exposed</a> high-elevation detaches.</p><p><strong>On Silver’s legacy ski areas</strong></p><p>Silver was originally known as Jackass, then Silverhorn. That original chairlift, installed in 1967, stands today as Chair 4:</p><p><strong>On the Jackass Snack Shack</strong></p><p>This mid-mountain building, just off Chair 4, is actually a portable structure moved north from Tamarack:</p><p><strong>On 49 Degrees North</strong></p><p>CMR Lands also owns 49 Degrees North, an outstanding ski area two-and-a-half hours west and roughly equidistant from Spokane as Silver is (though in opposite directions). In 2021, the mountain demolished a top-to-bottom, 1972 SLI double for a brand-new, 1,851-vertical-foot high-speed quad, from which you can access most of the resort’s 2,325 acres.</p><p><p>The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us.</p></p><p></p> <br/><br/>Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at <a href="https://www.stormskiing.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">www.stormskiing.com/subscribe</a>
April 7, 2025
<p><p>The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and to support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.</p></p><p><strong>Who</strong></p><p>Tyler Fairbank, General Manager of <a target="_blank" href="https://www.jiminypeak.com/">Jiminy Peak</a>, Massachusetts and CEO of <a target="_blank" href="https://www.fairbankgrp.com/">Fairbank Group</a></p><p><strong>Recorded on</strong></p><p>February 10, 2025 and March 7, 2025</p><p><strong>About Fairbank Group</strong></p><p>From <a target="_blank" href="https://www.fairbankgrp.com/about-us">their website</a>:</p><p>The Fairbank Group is driven to build things to last – not only our businesses but the relationships and partnerships that stand behind them. Since 2008, we have been expanding our eclectic portfolio of businesses. This portfolio includes three resorts—Jiminy Peak Mountain Resort, Cranmore Mountain Resort, and Bromley Mountain Ski Resort—and real estate development at all three resorts, in addition to a renewable energy development company, EOS Ventures, and a technology company, Snowgun Technology.</p><p><strong>About Jiminy Peak</strong></p><p>Click <a target="_blank" href="https://www.jiminypeak.com/the-mountain/mountain-information/know-before-you-go/">here</a> for a mountain stats overview</p><p><strong>Owned by: </strong>Fairbank Group, which also owns Cranmore and operates Bromley (see breakdowns below)</p><p><strong>Located in: </strong>Hancock, Massachusetts</p><p><strong>Year founded: </strong>1948</p><p><strong>Pass affiliations:</strong></p><p>* Ikon Pass: 2 days, with blackouts</p><p>* Uphill New England</p><p><strong>Closest neighboring ski areas: </strong>Bousquet (:27), Catamount (:49), Butternut (:51), Otis Ridge (:54), Berkshire East (:58), Willard (1:02)</p><p><strong>Base elevation: </strong>1,230 feet</p><p><strong>Summit elevation: </strong>2,380 feet</p><p><strong>Vertical drop: </strong>1,150 feet</p><p><strong>Skiable acres: </strong>167.4</p><p><strong>Average annual snowfall: </strong>100 inches</p><p><strong>Trail count: </strong>42</p><p><strong>Lift count: </strong>9 (1 six-pack, 2 fixed-grip quads, 3 triples, 1 double, 2 carpets – view Lift Blog’s <a target="_blank" href="https://liftblog.com/jiminy-peak-ma/">inventory</a> of Jiminy Peak’s lift fleet)</p><p><strong>About Cranmore</strong></p><p>Click <a target="_blank" href="https://www.cranmore.com/The-Mountain/Resort-Information/First-Timers-Guide">here</a> for a mountain stats overview</p><p><strong>Owned by:</strong> The Fairbank Group</p><p><strong>Located in: </strong>North Conway, New Hampshire</p><p><strong>Year founded: </strong>1937</p><p><strong>Pass affiliations: </strong></p><p>* Ikon Pass: 2 days, with blackouts</p><p>* Uphill New England</p><p><strong>Closest neighboring ski areas: </strong>Attitash (:16), Black Mountain (:18), King Pine (:28), Wildcat (:28), Pleasant Mountain (:33), Bretton Woods (:42)</p><p><strong>Base elevation:</strong> 800 feet</p><p><strong>Summit elevation:</strong> 2,000 feet</p><p><strong>Vertical drop:</strong> 1,200 feet</p><p><strong>Skiable Acres:</strong> 170 </p><p><strong>Average annual snowfall: </strong>80 inches</p><p><strong>Trail count:</strong> 56 (15 most difficult, 25 intermediate, 16 easier)</p><p><strong>Lift count:</strong> 7 (1 high-speed quad, 1 fixed-grip quad, 2 triples, 1 double, 2 carpets – view Lift Blog’s <a target="_blank" href="https://liftblog.com/cranmore-nh/">inventory</a> of Cranmore’s lift fleet)</p><p><strong>About Bromley</strong></p><p>Click <a target="_blank" href="https://www.bromley.com/the-mountain/about-bromley/">here</a> for a mountain stats overview</p><p><strong>Owned by:</strong> The estate of Joseph O'Donnell</p><p><strong>Operated by: </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://www.fairbankgrp.com/">The Fairbank Group</a></p><p><strong>Pass affiliations: </strong>Uphill New England</p><p><strong>Located in: </strong>Peru, Vermont</p><p><strong>Closest neighboring ski areas: </strong>Magic Mountain (14 minutes), Stratton (19 minutes)</p><p><strong>Base elevation:</strong> 1,950 feet</p><p><strong>Summit elevation:</strong> 3,284 feet</p><p><strong>Vertical drop:</strong> 1,334 feet</p><p><strong>Skiable Acres:</strong> 300</p><p><strong>Average annual snowfall: </strong>145 inches</p><p><strong>Trail count:</strong> 47 (31% black, 37% intermediate, 32% beginner)</p><p><strong>Lift count:</strong> 9 (1 high-speed quad, 1 fixed-grip quad, 4 doubles, 1 T-bar, 2 carpets - view Lift Blog’s of <a target="_blank" href="https://liftblog.com/bromley-vt/">inventory</a> of Bromley’s lift fleet)</p><p><strong>Why I interviewed him</strong></p><p>I don’t particularly enjoy riding six-passenger chairlifts. Too many people, up to five of whom are not me. Lacking a competent queue-management squad, chairs rise in loads of twos and threes above swarming lift mazes. If you’re skiing the West, lowering the bar is practically an act of war. It’s all so tedious. Given the option – Hunter, Winter Park, Camelback – I’ll hop the parallel two-seater just to avoid the drama.</p><p>I don’t like six-packs, but I sure am impressed by them. Sixers are the chairlift equivalent of a two-story Escalade, or a house with its own private Taco Bell, or a 14-lane expressway. Like damn there’s some cash floating around this joint.</p><p>Sixers are common these days: America is home to <a target="_blank" href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1G2-l2DVg7-QwroOi7EqRDrJYJ4ICYLcJbLx-nARJdrA/edit?gid=364075889#gid=364075889">107 of them</a>. But that wasn’t always so. Thirty-two of these lifts came online in just the past three years. Boyne Mountain, Michigan built the first American six-pack in 1992, and for three years, it was the only such lift in the nation (and don’t think they didn’t spend every second reminding us of it). The next sixer rose at Stratton, in 1995, but 18 of the next 19 were built in the West. In 2000, Jiminy Peak demolished a Riblet double and dropped the Berkshire Express in its place.</p><p>For 26 years, Jiminy Peak has owned the only sixer in the State of Massachusetts (Wachusett will build the second this summer). Even as they multiply, the six-pack remains a potent small-mountain status symbol: Vail owns 31 or them, Alterra 30. Only 10 independents spin one. Sixers are expensive to build, expensive to maintain, difficult to manage. To build such a machine is to declare: we are different, we can handle this, this belongs here and so does your money.</p><p>Sixty years ago, Jiminy Peak was a rump among a hundred poking out of the Berkshires. It would have been impossible to tell, in 1965, which among these many would succeed. Plenty of good ski areas failed since. Jiminy is among the last mountains standing, a survival-of-the-fittest tale punctuated, at the turn of the century, by the erecting of a super lift that was impossible to look away from. That neighboring <a target="_blank" href="https://www.newenglandskihistory.com/Massachusetts/brodie.php">Brodie</a>, taller and equal-ish in size to Jiminy, shuttered permanently two years later, after a 62-year run as a New England staple, was probably not a coincidence (yes, I’m aware that the Fairbanks themselves bought and closed Brodie). Jiminy had planted its 2,800-skier-per-hour flag on the block, and everyone noticed and no one could compete.</p><p>The Berkshire Express is not the only reason Jiminy Peak thrives in a 21st century New England ski scene defined by big companies, big passes, and big crowds. But it’s the best single emblem of a keep-moving philosophy that, over many decades, transformed a rust-bucket ski area into a glimmering ski resort. That meant snowmaking before snowmaking was cool, building places to stay on the mountain in a region of day-drivers, propping a wind turbine on the ridge to offset dependence on the energy grid.</p><p>Non-ski media are determined to describe America’s lift-served skiing evolution in terms of climate change, pointing to the shrinking number of ski areas since the era when any farmer with a backyard haystack and a spare tractor engine could run skiers uphill for a nickel. But this is a lazy narrative (America <a target="_blank" href="https://www.stormskiing.com/p/the-western-us-has-added-54598-acres">offers</a> a lot more skiing now than it did 30 years ago). Most American ski areas – perhaps none – have failed explicitly because of climate change. At least not yet. Most failed because running a ski area is hard and most people are bad at it. Jiminy, once surrounded by competitors, now stands alone. Why? That’s what the world needs to understand.</p><p><strong>What we talked about</strong></p><p>The impact of Cranmore’s new Fairbank Lodge; analyzing Jiminy’s village-building past to consider Cranmore’s future; Bromley post-Joe O’Donnell (RIP); Joe’s legacy – “just an incredible person, great guy”; taking the long view; growing up at Jiminy Peak in the wild 1970s; Brian Fairbank’s legacy building Jiminy Peak – with him, “anything is possible”; how Tyler ended up leading the company when he at one time had “no intention of coming back into the ski business”; growing Fairbank Group around Jiminy; surviving and recovering from a stroke – “I had this thing growing in me my entire life that I didn’t realize”; carrying on the family legacy; why Jiminy and Cranmore joined the Ikon Pass as two-day partners, and whether either mountain could join as full partners; why Bromley didn’t join Ikon; the importance of New York City to Jiminy Peak and Boston to Cranmore; why the ski areas won’t be direct-to-lift with Ikon right away; are the Fairbank resorts for sale?; would Fairbank buy more?; the competitive advantage of on-mountain lodging; potential Jiminy lift upgrades; why the Berkshire Express sixer doesn’t need an upgrade of the sort that Cranmore and Bromley’s high-speed quads received; why Jiminy runs a fixed-grip triple parallel to its high-speed six; where the mountain’s next high-speed lift could run; and Jiminy Peak expansion potential.</p><p><strong>What I got wrong</strong></p><p>* I said that I didn’t know which year Jiminy Peak installed their wind turbine – it was 2007. Berkshire East built its machine in 2010 and activated it in 2011.</p><p>* When we recorded the Ikon addendum, <a target="_blank" href="https://cranmore.com/season-passes">Cranmore</a> and <a target="_blank" href="https://www.jiminypeak.com/skiing-riding/tickets-passes/jiminy-peak-becomes-ikon-pass-bonus-mountain/">Jiminy Peak</a> had not yet offered any sort of Ikon Pass discount to their passholders, but Tyler promised details were coming. Passholders can now find offers for a discounted ($229) three-day Ikon Session pass on either ski area’s website.</p><p><strong>Why now was a good time for this interview</strong></p><p>For all the Fairbanks’ vision in growing Jiminy from tumbleweed into redwood, sprinting ahead on snowmaking and chairlifts and energy, the company has been slow to acknowledge the largest shift in the consumer-to-resort pipeline this century: the shift to multi-mountain passes. Even their own three mountains share just one day each for sister resort passholders.</p><p>That’s not the same thing as saying they’ve been wrong to sit and wait. But it’s interesting. Why has this company that’s been so far ahead for so long been so reluctant to take part in what looks to be a permanent re-ordering of the industry? And why have they continued to succeed in spite of this no-thanks posture?</p><p>Or so my thinking went when Tyler and I scheduled this podcast a couple of months ago. Then Jiminy, along with sister resort Cranmore, joined the Ikon Pass. Yes, just as a two-day partner in what Alterra is labeling a “bonus” tier, and only on the full Ikon Pass, and with blackout dates. But let’s be clear about this: Jiminy Peak and Cranmore <a target="_blank" href="https://www.stormskiing.com/p/why-did-ikon-pass-add-2-days-at-jiminy">joined the Ikon Pass</a>.</p><p>Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), for me and my Pangea-paced editing process, we’d recorded the bulk of this conversation several weeks before the Ikon announcement. So we recorded a post-Ikon addendum, which explains the mid-podcast wardrobe change.</p><p>It will be fascinating to observe, over the next decade, how the remaining holdouts manage themselves in the Epkon-atronic world that is not going away. Will big indies such as Jackson Hole and Alta eventually eject the pass masses as a sort of high-class differentiator? Will large regional standouts like Whitefish and Bretton Woods and Baker and Wolf Creek continue to stand alone in a churning sea of joiners? Or will some economic cataclysm force a re-ordering of the companies piloting these warships, splintering them into woodchips and resetting us back to some version of 1995, where just about every ski area was its own ski area doing battle against every other ski area?</p><p>I have guesses, but no answers, and no power to do anything, really, other than to watch and ask questions of the Jiminy Peaks of the world as they decide where they fit, and how, and when, into this bizarre and rapidly changing lift-served skiing world that we’re all gliding through.</p><p><strong>Why you should ski Jiminy Peak</strong></p><p>There are several versions of each ski area. The trailmap version, cartoonish and exaggerated, designed to be evocative as well as practical, a guide to reality that must bend it to help us understand it. There’s the Google Maps version, which straightens out the trailmap but ditches the order and context – it is often difficult to tell, from satellite view, which end of the hill is the top or the bottom, where the lifts run, whether you can walk to the lifts from the parking lot or need to shuttlebus it. There is the oral version, the one you hear from fellow chairlift riders at other resorts, describing their home mountain or an epic day or a secret trail, a vibe or a custom, the thing that makes the place a thing.</p><p>But the only version of a ski area that matters, in the end, is the lived one. And no amount of research or speculation or YouTube-Insta vibing can equal that. Each mountain is what each mountain is. Determining why they are that way and how that came to be is about 80 percent of why I started this newsletter. And the best mountains, I’ve found, after skiing hundreds of them, are the ones that surprise you.</p><p>On paper, Jiminy Peak does not look that interesting: a broad ridge, flat across, a bunch of parallel lifts and runs, a lot of too-wide-and-straight-down. But this is not how it skis. Break left off the sixer and it’s go-forever, line after line dropping steeply off a ridge. Down there, somewhere, the Widow White’s lift, a doorway to a mini ski area all its own, shooting off, like Supreme at Alta, into a twisting little realm with the long flat runout. Go right off the six-pack and skiers find something else, a ski area from a different time, a trunk trail wrapping gently above a maze of twisting, tangled snow-streets, dozens of potential routes unfolding, gentle but interesting, long enough to inspire a sense of quest and journey.</p><p>This is not the mountain for everyone. I wish Jiminy had more glades, that they would spin more lifts more often as an alternative to Six-Pack City. But we have Berkshire East for cowboy skiing. Jiminy, an Albany backyarder that considers itself worthy of a $1,051 adult season pass, is aiming for something more buffed and burnished than a typical high-volume city bump. Jiminy doesn’t want to be Mountain Creek, NYC’s hedonistic free-for-all, or Wachusett, Boston’s high-volume, low-cost burner. It’s aiming for a little more resort, a little more country club, a little more it-costs-what-it-costs sorry-not-sorry attitude (with a side of swarming kids).</p><p><strong>Podcast Notes</strong></p><p><strong>On other Fairbank Group podcasts</strong></p><p><strong>On Joe O’Donnell</strong></p><p>A 2005 Harvard Business School <a target="_blank" href="https://www.alumni.hbs.edu/stories/Pages/story-bulletin.aspx?num=2010">profile</a> of O’Donnell, who passed away on Jan. 7, 2024 at age 79, gives a nice overview of his character and career:</p><p>When Joe O'Donnell talks, people listen. Last spring, one magazine ranked him the most powerful person in Boston-head of a privately held, billion-dollar company he built practically from scratch; friend and advisor to politicians of both parties, from Boston's Democratic Mayor Tom Menino to the Bay State's Republican Governor Mitt Romney (MBA '74); member of Harvard's Board of Overseers; and benefactor to many good causes. Not bad for a "cop's kid" who grew up nearby in the blue-collar city of Everett.</p><p><a target="_blank" href="https://www.alumni.hbs.edu/stories/Pages/story-bulletin.aspx?num=2010">Read the rest…</a></p><p><strong>On Joe O’Donnell “probably owning more ski areas than anyone alive”</strong></p><p>I wasn’t aware of the extent of Joe O’Donnell’s deep legacy of ski area ownership, but New England Ski History <a target="_blank" href="https://www.newenglandskihistory.com/biographies/odonnelljoseph.php">documents</a> his stints as at least part owner of Magic Mountain VT, Timber Ridge (now defunct, next-door to and still skiable from Magic), Jiminy, Mt. Tom (defunct), and Brodie (also lost). He also served Sugar Mountain, North Carolina as a vendor for years.</p><p><strong>On stroke survival</strong></p><p>Know how to BE FAST by spending five second staring at this:</p><p>More, from the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.cdc.gov/stroke/about/index.html#:~:text=A%20stroke%2C%20sometimes%20called%20a,term%20disability%2C%20or%20even%20death">CDC</a>.</p><p><strong>On Jiminy joining the Ikon Pass</strong></p><p>I covered this extensively here:</p><p><p>The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us.</p></p> <br/><br/>Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at <a href="https://www.stormskiing.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">www.stormskiing.com/subscribe</a>
March 22, 2025
<p><p>For a limited time, upgrade to ‘The Storm’s’ paid tier for $5 per month or $55 per year. You’ll also receive a free year of Slopes Premium, a $29.99 value - valid for <strong>annual subscriptions only. Monthly subscriptions do not qualify for free Slopes promotion. Valid for new subscriptions only.</strong></p></p><p><strong>Who</strong></p><p>Iain Martin, Host of <a target="_blank" href="https://theskipodcast.com/">The Ski Podcast</a></p><p><strong>Recorded on</strong></p><p>January 30, 2025</p><p><strong>About The Ski Podcast</strong></p><p>From the show’s <a target="_blank" href="https://theskipodcast.com/">website</a>:</p><p>Want to [know] more about the world of skiing? The Ski Podcast is a UK-based podcast hosted by Iain Martin.</p><p>With different guests every episode, we cover all aspects of skiing and snowboarding from resorts to racing, Ski Sunday to slush.</p><p>In 2021, we were voted ‘<a target="_blank" href="https://theskipodcast.com/podcast/the-ski-podcast-wins-best-wintersports-podcast-award/">Best Wintersports Podcast</a>‘ in the Sports Podcast Awards. In 2023, we were shortlisted as ‘Best Broadcast Programme’ in the <a target="_blank" href="https://theskipodcast.com/podcast/the-ski-podcast-shortlisted-in-travel-media-awards/">Travel Media Awards</a>.</p><p><strong>Why I interviewed him</strong></p><p>We did a swap. Iain <a target="_blank" href="https://theskipodcast.com/resorts/big-sky/235-big-sky-montana-advice-on-us-multipasses-inc-epic-ikon-indy-mountain-collective/">hosted me</a> on his show in January (I also hosted Iain in January, but since The Storm sometimes moves at the pace of mammal gestation, here we are at the end of March; Martin published our episode the day after we recorded it).</p><p>But that’s OK (according to me), because our conversation is evergreen. Martin is embedded in EuroSki the same way that I cycle around U.S. AmeriSki. That we wander from similarly improbable non-ski outposts – Brighton, England and NYC – is a funny coincidence. But what interested me most about a potential podcast conversation is the Encyclopedia EuroSkiTannica stored in Martin’s brain.</p><p>I don’t understand skiing in Europe. It is too big, too rambling, too interconnected, too above-treeline, too transit-oriented, too affordable, too absent the Brobot ‘tude that poisons so much of the American ski experience. The fact that some French idiot is <a target="_blank" href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14467861/moment-french-skier-snowball-grandfather-alpe-dhuez.html">facing potential jail time</a> for launching a snowball into a random grandfather’s skull (filming the act and posting it on TikTok, of course) only underscores my point: in America, we would cancel the grandfather for not respecting the struggle so obvious in the boy’s act of disobedience. </p><p>In a weird twist for a ski writer, I am much more familiar with summer Europe than winter Europe. I’ve skied the continent a couple of times, but warm-weather cross-continental EuroTreks by train and by car have occupied months of my life. When I try to understand EuroSki, my brain short-circuits. I tease the Euros because each European ski area seems to contain between two and 27 distinct ski areas, because the trail markings are the wrong color, because they speak in the strange code of the “km” and “cm” - but I’m really making fun of myself for Not Getting It. </p><p>Martin gets it. And he good-naturedly walks me through a series of questions that follow this same basic pattern: “In America, we charge $109 for a hamburger that tastes like it’s been pulled out of a shipping container that went overboard in 1944. But I hear you have good and cheap food in Europe – true?” I don’t mind sounding like a d*****s if the result is good information for all of us, and thankfully I achieved both of those things on this podcast.</p><p><strong>What we talked about</strong></p><p>The European winter so far; how a UK-based skier moves back and forth to the Alps; easy car-free travel from the U.S. directly to Alps ski areas; is ski traffic a thing in Europe?; EuroSki 101; what does “ski area” mean in Europe; Euro snow pockets; climate change realities versus media narratives in Europe; what to make of ski areas closing around the Alps; snowmaking in Europe; comparing the Euro stereotype of the leisurely skier to reality; an aging skier population; Euro liftline queuing etiquette and how it mirrors a nation’s driving culture; “the idea that you wouldn’t bring the bar down is completely alien to me; I mean everybody brings the bar down on the chairlift”; why an Epic or Ikon Pass may not be your best option to ski in Europe; why lift ticket prices are so much cheaper in Europe than in the U.S.; Most consumers “are not even aware” that Vail has started purchasing Swiss resorts; ownership structure at Euro resorts; Vail to buy Verbier?; multimountain pass options in Europe; are Euros buying Epic and Ikon to ski locally or to travel to North America?; must-ski European ski areas; Euro ski-guide culture; and quirky ski areas.</p><p><strong>What I got wrong</strong></p><p>We discussed Epic Pass’ lodging requirement for Verbier, which is in effect for this winter, but which Vail <a target="_blank" href="https://www.stormskiing.com/p/epic-pass-tweaks-swiss-network-with">removed</a> for the 2025-26 ski season.</p><p><strong>Why now was a good time for this interview</strong></p><p>I present to you, again, the EuroSki Chart – a list of all 26 European ski areas that have aligned themselves with a U.S.-based multi-mountain pass:</p><p>The large majority of these have joined Ski NATO (a joke, not a political take Brah), in the past five years. And while purchasing a U.S. megapass is not necessary to access EuroHills in the same way it is to ski the Rockies – doing so may, in fact, be counterproductive – just the notion of having access to these Connecticut-sized ski areas via a pass that you’re buying anyway is enough to get people considering a flight east for their turns.</p><p>And you know what? They should. At this point, a mass abandonment of the Mountain West by the tourists that sustain it is the only thing that may drive the region to seriously reconsider the robbery-by-you-showed-up-here-all-stupid lift ticket prices, car-centric transit infrastructure, and sclerotic building policies that are making American mountain towns impossibly expensive and inconvenient to live in or to visit. </p><p>In many cases, a EuroSkiTrip costs far less than an AmeriSki trip - especially if you’re not the sort to buy a ski pass in March 2025 so that you can ski in February 2026. And though the flights will generally cost more, the logistics of airport-to-ski-resort-and-back generally make more sense. In Europe they have trains. In Europe those trains stop in villages where you can walk to your hotel and then walk to the lifts the next morning. In Europe you can walk up to the ticket window and trade a block of cheese for a lift ticket. In Europe they put the bar down. In Europe a sandwich, brownie, and a Coke doesn’t cost $152. And while you can spend $152 on a EuroLunch, it probably means that you drank seven liters of wine and will need a sled evac to the village.</p><p>“Oh so why don’t you just go live there then if it’s so perfect?”</p><p>Shut up, Reductive Argument Bro. Everyplace is great and also sucks in its own special way. I’m just throwing around contrasts.</p><p>There are plenty of things I don’t like about EuroSki: the emphasis on pistes, the emphasis on trams, the often curt and indifferent employees, the “injury insurance” that would require a special session of the European Union to pay out a claim. And the lack of trees. Especially the lack of trees. But more families are <a target="_blank" href="https://www.iloveski.org/en/2025/03/06/winter-holidays-2025/">opting</a> for a week in Europe over the $25,000 Experience of a Lifetime in the American West, and I totally understand why.</p><p>A quote often attributed to Winston Churchill reads, “You can always trust the Americans to do the right thing, after they have exhausted all the alternatives.” Unfortunately, it appears to be apocryphal. But I wish it wasn’t. Because it’s true. And I do think we’ll eventually figure out that there is a continent-wide case study in how to retrofit our mountain towns for a more cost- and transit-accessible version of lift-served skiing. But it’s gonna take a while.</p><p><strong>Podcast Notes</strong></p><p><strong>On U.S. ski areas opening this winter that haven’t done so “in a long time”</strong></p><p>A strong snow year has allowed at least 11 U.S. ski areas to open after missing one or several winters, including:</p><p>* Cloudmont, Alabama (yes I’m serious)</p><p>* Pinnacle, Maine</p><p>* Covington and Sault Seal, ropetows outfit in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula</p><p>* Norway Mountain, Michigan – resurrected by <a target="_blank" href="https://www.stormskiing.com/p/podcast-185-norway-mountain-michigan">new owner</a> after multi-year closure</p><p>* Tower Mountain, a ropetow bump in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula</p><p>* Bear Paw, Montana</p><p>* Hatley Pointe, North Carolina opened under new ownership, who took last year off to gut-renovate the hill</p><p>* Warner Canyon, Oregon, an all-natural-snow, volunteer-run outfit, opened in December after a poor 2023-24 snow year.</p><p>* Bellows Falls ski tow, a molehill run by the Rockingham Recreation in Vermont, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=pfbid02KfU26wf6NUPsrwc39C5wEq1NNdYmnZQWoGQLu7ucBPTaisvMaJJ3UpE3WcWd24CVl&id=100032044196464">opened</a> for the first time in five years after a series of snowy weeks across New England</p><p>* Lyndon Outing Club, another volunteer-run ropetow operation in Vermont, sat out last winter with low snow but <a target="_blank" href="https://www.facebook.com/LyndonOutingClub/posts/pfbid031Fcq9D2qowFYFUkReQAPsASgvq1ZbnpLJYdpe3om1Zneybtf1FJhh5nWMZ8QbER2l">opened</a> this year</p><p><strong>On the “subway map” of transit-accessible Euro skiing</strong></p><p>I mean this is just incredible:</p><p>The map lives on Martin’s <a target="_blank" href="https://skiflightfree.org/the-alps-skiing-by-train-new-2025-map-out-now/">Ski Flight Free </a><a target="_blank" href="https://skiflightfree.org/the-alps-skiing-by-train-new-2025-map-out-now/">site</a>, which encourages skiers to reduce their carbon footprints. I am not good at doing this, largely because such a notion is a fantasy in America as presently constructed.</p><p>But just imagine a similar system in America. The nation is huge, of course, and we’re not building a functional transcontinental passenger railroad overnight (or maybe ever). But there are several areas of regional density where such networks could, at a minimum, connect airports or city centers with destination ski areas, including:</p><p>* Reno Airport (from the east), and the San Francisco Bay area (to the west) to the ring of more than a dozen Tahoe resorts (or at least stops at lake- or interstate-adjacent Sugar Bowl, Palisades, Homewood, Northstar, Mt. Rose, Diamond Peak, and Heavenly)</p><p>* Denver Union Station and Denver airport to Loveland, Keystone, Breck, Copper, Vail, Beaver Creek, and - a stretch - Aspen and Steamboat, with bus connections to A-Basin, Ski Cooper, and Sunlight</p><p>* SLC airport east to Snowbird, Alta, Solitude, Brighton, Park City, and Deer Valley, and north to Snowbasin and Powder Mountain</p><p>* Penn Station in Manhattan up along Vermont’s Green Mountain Spine: Mount Snow, Stratton, Bromley, Killington, Pico, Sugarbush, Mad River Glen, Bolton Valley, Stowe, Smugglers’ Notch, Jay Peak, with bus connections to Magic and Middlebury Snowbowl</p><p>* Boston up the I-93 corridor: Tenney, Waterville Valley, Loon, Cannon, and Bretton Woods, with a spur to Conway and Cranmore, Attitash, Wildcat, and Sunday River; bus connections to Black New Hampshire, Sunapee, Gunstock, Ragged, and Mount Abram</p><p>Yes, there’s the train from Denver to Winter Park (and ambitions to extend the line to Steamboat), which is terrific, but placing that itsy-bitsy spur next to the EuroSystem and saying “look at our neato train” is like a toddler flexing his toy jet to the pilots as he boards a 757. And they smile and say, “Whoa there, Shooter! Now have a seat while we burn off 4,000 gallons of jet fuel accelerating this f****r to 500 miles per hour.”</p><p><strong>On the number of ski areas in Europe</strong></p><p>I’ve <a target="_blank" href="https://www.stormskiing.com/p/presenting-a-complete-list-of-the">detailed</a> how difficult it is to itemize the 500-ish active ski areas in America, but the task is nearly incomprehensible in Europe, which has as many as eight times the number of ski areas. Here are a few estimates:</p><p>* Skiresort.info counts 3,949 ski areas (as of today; the number changes daily) in Europe: <a target="_blank" href="https://www.skiresort.info/ski-resorts/europe/">list</a> | <a target="_blank" href="https://www.skiresort.info/">map</a></p><p>* Wikipedia doesn’t provide a number, but it does have a <a target="_blank" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ski_areas_and_resorts_in_Europe">very long list</a></p><p>* Statista counts a <a target="_blank" href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/660925/europe-number-of-ski-areas-by-country/">bit more than 2,200</a>, but their list excludes most of Eastern Europe</p><p><strong>On Euro non-ski media and climate change catastrophe</strong></p><p>Of these countless European ski areas, a few shutter or threaten to each year. The resulting media cycle is predictable and dumb. <a target="_blank" href="https://www.inthesnow.com/ski-resort-closure-u-turn/">In The Snow</a> concisely summarizes how this pattern unfolds by analyzing coverage of the recent near loss of L’Alpe du Grand Serre, France (emphasis mine):</p><p>A ski resort that few people outside its local vicinity had ever heard of was the latest to make headlines around the world a month ago as it announced it was going to cease ski operations.</p><p>‘<a target="_blank" href="https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/french-ski-resort-shut-snow-shortage-alps-b2627019.html#:~:text=An%20alpine%20ski%20resort%20in,making%20equipment%20on%20its%20pistes.">French ski resort in Alps shuts due to shortage of snow</a>’ reported The Independent, ‘<a target="_blank" href="https://www.timeout.com/news/another-european-ski-resort-is-closing-due-to-lack-of-snow-100824">Another European ski resort is closing due to lack of snow</a>’ said Time Out, The Mirror went for ”<a target="_blank" href="https://www.mirror.co.uk/travel/europe/devastation-another-european-ski-resort-33854715">Devastation” as another European ski resort closes due to vanishing snow</a>‘ whilst The Guardian did a deeper dive with, ‘<a target="_blank" href="https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2024/oct/12/fears-for-future-of-ski-tourism-as-resorts-adapt-to-thawing-snow-season">Fears for future of ski tourism as resorts adapt to thawing snow season.’ </a>The story also appeared in dozens more publications around the world.</p><p><strong>The only problem is that the ski area in question, L’Alpe du Grand Serre, has decided it isn’t closing its ski area after all, at least not this winter.</strong></p><p>Instead, after the news of the closure threat was publicised, the French government announced financial support, as did the local municipality of La Morte, and a number of major players in the ski industry. In addition, a public crowdfunding campaign raised almost €200,000, prompting the officials who made the original closure decision to reconsider. Things will now be reassessed in a year’s time.</p><p><strong>There has not been the same global media coverage of the news that L’Alpe du Grand Serre isn’t closing after all.</strong></p><p>It’s not the first resort where money has been found to keep slopes open after widespread publicity of a closure threat. La Chapelle d’Abondance was apparently on the rocks in 2020 but will be fully open this winter and similarly Austria’s Heiligenblut which was said to be at risk of permanently closure in the summer will be open as normal.</p><p>Of course, ski areas do permanently close, just like any business, and climate change is making the multiple challenges that smaller, lower ski areas face, even more difficult. But in the near-term bigger problems are often things like justifying spends on essential equipment upgrades, rapidly increasing power costs and changing consumer habits that are the bigger problems right now. The latter apparently exacerbated by media stories implying that ski holidays are under severe threat by climate change.</p><p>These increasingly frequent stories always have the same structure of focusing on one small ski area that’s in trouble, taken from the many thousands in the Alps that few regular skiers have heard of. The stories imply (by ensuring that no context is provided), that this is a major resort and typical of many others. Last year some reports implied, again by avoiding giving any context, that a ski area in trouble that is actually close to Rome, was in the Alps.</p><p>This is, of course, not to pretend that climate change does not pose an existential threat to ski holidays, but just to say that ski resorts have been closing for many decades for multiple reasons and that most of these reports do not give all the facts or paint the full picture.</p><p><strong>On no cars in Zermatt</strong></p><p>If the Little Cottonwood activists really cared about the environment in their precious canyon, they wouldn’t be advocating for alternate rubber-wheeled transit up to Alta and Snowbird – they’d be demanding that the road be closed and replaced by a train or gondola or both, and that the ski resorts become a pedestrian-only enclave dotted with only as many electric vehicles as it took to manage the essential business of the towns and the ski resorts.</p><p>If this sounds improbable, just look to Zermatt, which has <a target="_blank" href="http://105orless.com/en/zermatt-the-only-town-on-earth-where-fumes-do-not-exist/?ckattempt=2">banned</a> gas cars for decades. Skiers <a target="_blank" href="https://zermatt.swiss/en/plan-book/arrival">arrive</a> by train. Nearly 6,000 people live there year-round. It is amazing what humans can build when the car is considered as an accessory to life, rather than its central organizing principle.</p><p><strong>On driving in Europe</strong></p><p>Driving in Europe is… something else. I’ve driven in, let’s see: Iceland, Portugal, Spain, France, Switzerland, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, and Montenegro. That last one is the scariest but they’re all a little scary. Drivers’ speeds seem to be limited by nothing other than physics, passing on blind curves is common even on mountain switchbacks, roads outside of major arterials often collapse into one lane, and Euros for some reason don’t believe in placing signs at intersections to indicate street names. Thank God for GPS. I’ll admit that it’s all a little thrilling once the disorientation wears off, and there are things to love about driving in Europe: roundabouts are used in place of traffic lights wherever possible, the density of cars tends to be less (likely due to the high cost of gas and plentiful mass transit options), sprawl tends to be more contained, the limited-access highways are extremely well-kept, and the drivers on those limited-access highways actually understand what the lanes are for (slow, right; fast, left).</p><p>It may seem contradictory that I am at once a transit advocate and an enthusiastic road-tripper. But I’ve lived in New York City, home of the United States’ best mass-transit system, for 23 years, and have owned a car for 19 of them. There is a logic here: in general, I use the subway or my bicycle to move around the city, and the car to get out of it (this is the only way to get to most ski areas in the region, at least midweek). I appreciate the options, and I wish more parts of America offered a better mix.</p><p><strong>On chairs without bars</strong></p><p>It’s a strange anachronism that the United States is still home to hundreds of chairlifts that lack safety bars. <a target="_blank" href="https://blog.ansi.org/ansi-b77-1-2022-passenger-ropeways-aerial-standard/">ANSI standards</a> now require them on new lift builds (as far as I can tell), but many chairlifts built without bars from the 1990s and earlier appear to have been grandfathered into our contemporary system. This is not the case in the Eastern U.S. where, as far as I’m aware, every chairlift with the exception of a handful in Pennsylvania have safety bars – New York and many New England states require them by law (and require riders to use them). Things get dicey in the Midwest, which has, as a region, been far slower to upgrade its lift fleets than bigger mountains in the East and West. Many ski areas, however, have retrofit their old lifts with bars – I was surprised to find them on the lifts at Sundown, Iowa; Chestnut, Illinois; and Mont du Lac, Wisconsin, for example. Vail and Alterra appear to retrofit all chairlifts with safety bars once they purchase a ski area. But many ski areas across the Mountain West still spin old chairs, including, surprisingly, dozens of mountains in California, Oregon, and Washington, states that tends to have more East Coast-ish outlooks on safety and regulation.</p><p><strong>On Compagnie des Alpes</strong></p><p>According to Martin, the closest thing Europe has to a Vail- or Alterra-style conglomerate is Compagnie des Alpes, which operates (but does not appear to own) 10 ski areas in the French Alps, and holds ownership stakes in five more. It’s kind of an amazing list:</p><p>Here’s the company’s acquisition timeline, which includes the ski areas, along with a bunch of amusement parks and hotels:</p><p>Clearly the path of least resistance to a EuroVail conflagration would be to shovel this pile of coal into the furnace. Martin referenced Tignes’ forthcoming exit from the group, to <a target="_blank" href="https://www.skipedia.co.uk/2025/01/tignes-and-sainte-foy-to-join-forces/">join forces</a> with ski resort Sainte-Foy on June 1, 2026 – teasing a smaller potential EuroVail acquisition. Tignes, however, would not be the first resort to exit CdA’s umbrella – Les 2 Alpes <a target="_blank" href="https://www.francebleu.fr/infos/economie-social/la-station-des-deux-alpes-change-de-gestionnaire-et-se-rapproche-de-l-alpe-d-huez-1580552115">left</a> in 2020.</p><p><strong>On EuroSkiPasses</strong></p><p>The EuroMegaPass market is, like EuroSkiing itself, unintelligible to Americans (at least to this American). There are, however, options. Martin offers the Swiss-centric Magic Pass as perhaps the most prominent. It offers access to <a target="_blank" href="https://www.magicpass.ch/en/stations">92 ski areas</a> (<a target="_blank" href="https://www.magicpass.ch/en/stations/map">map</a>). </p><p>You are probably expecting me to make a chart. </p><p>I will not be making a chart.</p><p>S**t I need to publish this article before I cave to my irrepressible urge to make a chart.</p><p>OK this podcast is already 51 days old do not make a chart you moron.</p><p>I think we’re good here.</p><p>I hope.</p><p>I will also not be making a chart to track the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.innsbruck.info/en/skiing/ski-resorts.html">12 ski resorts</a> accessible on Austria’s <a target="_blank" href="https://www.innsbruck.info/en/skiing/ski-plus-city-pass.html">Ski Plus City Pass Stubai Innsbruck Unlimited Freedom Pass</a>.</p><p><p>The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us.</p></p><p></p> <br/><br/>Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at <a href="https://www.stormskiing.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">www.stormskiing.com/subscribe</a>
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