The Storm Skiing Journal And podcast

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Sisällön tarjoaa Stuart Winchester. Stuart Winchester tai sen podcast-alustan kumppani lataa ja toimittaa kaiken podcast-sisällön, mukaan lukien jaksot, grafiikat ja podcast-kuvaukset. Jos uskot jonkun käyttävän tekijänoikeudella suojattua teostasi ilman lupaasi, voit seurata tässä https://fi.player.fm/legal kuvattua prosessia.

In Her Ellement

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Navigating Career Pivots and Grit with Milo’s Avni Patel Thompson 26:18

22 päivää sitten26:18

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26:18

How do you know when it’s time to make your next big career move? With International Women’s Day around the corner, we are excited to feature Avni Patel Thompson, Founder and CEO of Milo. Avni is building technology that directly supports the often overlooked emotional and logistical labor that falls on parents—especially women. Milo is an AI assistant designed to help families manage that invisible load more efficiently. In this episode, Avni shares her journey from studying chemistry to holding leadership roles at global brands like Adidas and Starbucks, to launching her own ventures. She discusses how she approaches career transitions, the importance of unpleasant experiences, and why she’s focused on making everyday life easier for parents. [01:26] Avni's University Days and Early Career [04:36] Non-Linear Career Paths [05:16] Pursuing Steep Learning Curves [11:51] Entrepreneurship and Safety Nets [15:22] Lived Experiences and Milo [19:55] Avni’s In Her Ellement Moment [20:03] Reflections Links: Avni Patel Thompson on LinkedIn Suchi Srinivasan on LinkedIn Kamila Rakhimova on LinkedIn Ipsos report on the future of parenting About In Her Ellement: In Her Ellement highlights the women and allies leading the charge in digital, business, and technology innovation. Through engaging conversations, the podcast explores their journeys—celebrating successes and acknowledging the balance between work and family. Most importantly, it asks: when was the moment you realized you hadn’t just arrived—you were truly in your element? About The Hosts: Suchi Srinivasan is an expert in AI and digital transformation. Originally from India, her career includes roles at trailblazing organizations like Bell Labs and Microsoft. In 2011, she co-founded the Cleanweb Hackathon, a global initiative driving IT-powered climate solutions with over 10,000 members across 25+ countries. She also advises Women in Cloud, aiming to create $1B in economic opportunities for women entrepreneurs by 2030. Kamila Rakhimova is a fintech leader whose journey took her from Tajikistan to the U.S., where she built a career on her own terms. Leveraging her English proficiency and international relations expertise, she discovered the power of microfinance and moved to the U.S., eventually leading Amazon's Alexa Fund to support underrepresented founders. Subscribe to In Her Ellement on your podcast app of choice to hear meaningful conversations with women in digital, business, and technology.…

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast

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

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#Sports #Lifestyle #Outdoor #Stuart Winchester

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast

22 subscribers

updated 2 päivää sitten

Jaa

Sarjan koti•Feed

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

219 jaksoa

#Sports #Lifestyle #Outdoor #Stuart Winchester

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The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast

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Podcast #201: 'The Ski Podcast' Host Iain Martin 1:05:17

2 päivää sitten1:05:17

1:05:17

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 annual subscriptions only. Monthly subscriptions do not qualify for free Slopes promotion. Valid for new subscriptions only. Who Iain Martin, Host of The Ski Podcast Recorded on January 30, 2025 About The Ski Podcast From the show’s website : Want to [know] more about the world of skiing? The Ski Podcast is a UK-based podcast hosted by Iain Martin. With different guests every episode, we cover all aspects of skiing and snowboarding from resorts to racing, Ski Sunday to slush. In 2021, we were voted ‘ Best Wintersports Podcast ‘ in the Sports Podcast Awards. In 2023, we were shortlisted as ‘Best Broadcast Programme’ in the Travel Media Awards . Why I interviewed him We did a swap. Iain hosted me 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). 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. 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 facing potential jail time 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. 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. 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. What we talked about 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. What I got wrong We discussed Epic Pass’ lodging requirement for Verbier, which is in effect for this winter, but which Vail removed for the 2025-26 ski season. Why now was a good time for this interview 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: 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. 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. 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. “Oh so why don’t you just go live there then if it’s so perfect?” Shut up, Reductive Argument Bro. Everyplace is great and also sucks in its own special way. I’m just throwing around contrasts. 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 opting for a week in Europe over the $25,000 Experience of a Lifetime in the American West, and I totally understand why. 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. Podcast Notes On U.S. ski areas opening this winter that haven’t done so “in a long time” A strong snow year has allowed at least 11 U.S. ski areas to open after missing one or several winters, including: * Cloudmont, Alabama (yes I’m serious) * Pinnacle, Maine * Covington and Sault Seal, ropetows outfit in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula * Norway Mountain, Michigan – resurrected by new owner after multi-year closure * Tower Mountain, a ropetow bump in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula * Bear Paw, Montana * Hatley Pointe, North Carolina opened under new ownership, who took last year off to gut-renovate the hill * Warner Canyon, Oregon, an all-natural-snow, volunteer-run outfit, opened in December after a poor 2023-24 snow year. * Bellows Falls ski tow, a molehill run by the Rockingham Recreation in Vermont, opened for the first time in five years after a series of snowy weeks across New England * Lyndon Outing Club, another volunteer-run ropetow operation in Vermont, sat out last winter with low snow but opened this year On the “subway map” of transit-accessible Euro skiing I mean this is just incredible: The map lives on Martin’s Ski Flight Free site , 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. 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: * 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) * 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 * SLC airport east to Snowbird, Alta, Solitude, Brighton, Park City, and Deer Valley, and north to Snowbasin and Powder Mountain * 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 * 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 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.” On the number of ski areas in Europe I’ve detailed 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: * Skiresort.info counts 3,949 ski areas (as of today; the number changes daily) in Europe: list | map * Wikipedia doesn’t provide a number, but it does have a very long list * Statista counts a bit more than 2,200 , but their list excludes most of Eastern Europe On Euro non-ski media and climate change catastrophe Of these countless European ski areas, a few shutter or threaten to each year. The resulting media cycle is predictable and dumb. In The Snow concisely summarizes how this pattern unfolds by analyzing coverage of the recent near loss of L’Alpe du Grand Serre, France (emphasis mine): 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. ‘ French ski resort in Alps shuts due to shortage of snow ’ reported The Independent, ‘ Another European ski resort is closing due to lack of snow ’ said Time Out, The Mirror went for ” Devastation” as another European ski resort closes due to vanishing snow ‘ whilst The Guardian did a deeper dive with, ‘ Fears for future of ski tourism as resorts adapt to thawing snow season.’ The story also appeared in dozens more publications around the world. 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. 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. There has not been the same global media coverage of the news that L’Alpe du Grand Serre isn’t closing after all. 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. 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. 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. 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. On no cars in Zermatt 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 resort. If this sounds improbable, just look to Zermatt, which has banned gas cars for decades. Skiers arrive 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. On driving in Europe 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: 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). 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. On chairs without bars It’s a strange anachronism that the United States is still home to hundreds of chairlifts that lack safety bars. ANSI standards 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. On Compagnie des Alpes 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: Here’s the company’s acquisition timeline, which includes the ski areas, along with a bunch of amusement parks and hotels: 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 join forces 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 left in 2020. On EuroSkiPasses 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 92 ski areas ( map ). You are probably expecting me to make a chart. I will not be making a chart. S**t I need to publish this article before I cave to my irrepressible urge to make a chart. OK this podcast is already 51 days old do not make a chart you moron. I think we’re good here. I hope. I will also not be making a chart to track the 12 ski resorts accessible on Austria’s Ski Plus City Pass Stubai Innsbruck Unlimited Freedom Pass . The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe…

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast

18 weeks sitten54:02

54:02

This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Nov. 12. It dropped for free subscribers on Nov. 19. To receive future episodes as soon as they’re live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below: Who Fred Seymour, General Manager of Giants Ridge, Minnesota Recorded on October 28, 2024 About Giants Ridge Click here for a mountain stats overview Owned by: Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board, a State of Minnesota economic development agency Located in: Biwabik, Minnesota Year founded: 1958/59 Closest neighboring ski areas: Mt. Itasca (1:14), Cloquet Ski Club (1:11), Chester Bowl (1:13), Spirit Mountain (1:18), Mont du Lac (1:27) Base elevation: 1,472 feet Summit elevation: 1,972 feet Vertical drop: 500 feet Skiable Acres: 202 Average annual snowfall: 62 inches Trail count: 35 (33% beginners, 50% “confident skiers”; 17% expert) Lift count: 7 (1 high-speed quad, 1 fixed-grip quad, 1 triple, 2 doubles, 2 carpets – view Lift Blog’s i nventory of Giants Ridge’s lift fleet) Why I interviewed him Sometimes a thing surprises me. Like I think New York City is a giant honking mess and then I walk 60 blocks through Manhattan and say “actually I can see this.” Or I decide that I hate country music because it’s lame in my adolescent rock-and-roll world, but once it goes mainstream I’m like okay actually this is catchy. Or I think I hate cottage cheese until I try it around age 19 and I realize it’s my favorite thing ever. All of these things surprised me because I assumed they were something different from what they actually were. And so, in the same way, Giants Ridge surprised me. I did not expect to dislike the place, but I did not expect to be blown away by it, either. I drove up thinking I’d have a nice little downhill rush and drove away thinking that if all ski areas were like this ski area there would be a lot more skiers in the world. I could, here, repeat all the things I recently wrote about Crystal , another model Midwest ski area. But I wrote plenty on Giants Ridge’s many virtues below, and there’s a lot more in the podcast. For now, I’ll just say that this is as solid a ski operation as you’ll find anywhere, and one that’s worth learning more about. What we talked about Rope splicing day for one of Giants Ridge’s classic lifts; a massive snowmaking upgrade; when all the water comes out of the sky after winter’s done; the slowest Midwest ski season on record; how Giants Ridge skied into April in spite of the warm winter; learning to ski with an assist from Sears (the store); skiing Colorado before I-70; the amazing Hyland Hills, Minnesota; why Seymour didn’t go all Colorad-Bro on Midwest skiing – “skiing is special in different places”; some founder’s history of the high-speed ropetow; where Giants Ridge will install its first new high-speed ropetow; the virtues of high-speed tows; Hidden Valley, Missouri and working for Peak Resorts; reaction to Vail purchasing Peak Resorts in 2019; the government agency that owns Giants Ridge; the story of the ski area’s founding and purpose; how and why the ski area is so well-funded; how the ski area funded its latest giant capital project; where Giants Ridge envisions planting a second detachable chairlift; potential for far greater lodging capacity; expansion potential; where to hunt glades at Giants Ridge; the mountain’s trail-naming theme; why the ski area’s grooming is so good; why Giants Ridge offers fourth-graders unlimited access on the Minnesota Ski Areas Association Passport, rather than the standard two days; and why Giants Ridge left the Indy Pass after just one year. Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview Lazy non-ski journalists often pull out some version of this stat to prove that lift-served skiing is a dying industry: America once had more than 700 ski areas, but that number has plummeted to fewer than 500, according to the NSAA (and 505 according to The Storm Skiing Journal ). The culprit, they immediately conclude, is climate change, because what else could it possibly be? The truth is less sinister. Most of these lost ski areas were killed by the same thing that ended the horse and buggy and the landline and the butter churn: capitalism. The simpler story of ski area shrinkage is this: a post-World War II building boom flooded the market with ski areas, many of which were built in questionable locations (like Georgia and Arkansas). As some ski areas modernized, especially with snowmaking, their competitors that failed to do so, um, failed. That great weed-out reached its height from the mid-70s to the mid-90s. The number of active U.S. ski areas has remained more or less stable for the past 20 years. I fear, however, that we are on the edge of the next great weed-out. If the last one targeted ski areas that failed to invest in snowmaking, this next one will bullseye ski areas that fail to invest in technology. Consumers live in their Pet Rectangles. Ski areas need to meet them there or they may as well not exist. Swipe, tap, bink is the dance of modern commerce. Cash-only, on-site only – the default for centuries – now just annoys people. Technology does not just mean computer stuff, however. It also means energy-efficient, automated snowmaking to cut down on utilities and labor. It means grooming your hill like Sun Valley even if you are not in fact Sun Valley. It means modern (not necessarily high-speed) chairlifts with safety bars. And in some cases it means rediscovering old technology that can be re-applied in a modern context – high-speed ropetows, for example, are dirt cheap, move more skiers per hour than a high-speed eight-person chairlift, and are the perfect complement to terrain parks and the skiers who want to lap them 100 times in an afternoon. Unfortunately, a lot of that technology is very expensive. The majority of ski areas are themselves worth less than the cost of a brand-new high-speed quad. Those Riblets and Halls are holding together for now, but they won’t last forever. So what to do? I don’t know, and Giants Ridge is, I’ll admit, a curious example to use here. The ski area benefits from enormous state-sponsored subsidies. But through this arrangement, Giants Ridge acts as a best-case-scenario case study in how a small ski area can fortify itself against a technological revolution, a changing climate, and a social media-saturated consumer base in search of something novel and fun. Not all small ski areas will be able to do all of the things that Giants Ridge does, but most of them can achieve some version of some of them. Third-party companies like Entabeni and White Peaks can tug small ski areas into the digital sphere. A modern chairlift doesn’t have to mean a new chairlift. The one state subsidy that private ski areas have occasionally been able to access is one to purchase energy-efficient snowguns. Inexpensive high-speed ropetows (Giants Ridge is installing its first this year), should be serving almost every terrain park in the country. The Midwest suffered its worst winter on record last ski season. Many ski areas shut down in February or early March. Had a skier been plucked from the Rockies and dropped onto the summit of Giants Ridge, however, they would not have suspected this regional catastrophe. I visited on March 10 – wall-to-wall snow, every trail open, not even a bare patch. The ski area stayed open until April 7. The future holds plenty of challenges for skiing. Giants Ridge is working on answers. Questions I wish I’d asked The largess on display at Giants Ridge introduces the same set of issues that frustrate private ski area owners in New York, who have to compete directly against three ski areas (Whiteface, Gore, Belleayre) that have benefitted from hundreds of millions of dollars in state investment. The dynamic is a bit different here, as the money funnels to Giants Ridge via mining companies who support the ski area en lieu of paying certain taxes. But the result is the same: ski areas that have to pay for capital upgrades out of their profits versus a ski area that gets capital upgrades essentially for free. The massive snowmaking system that Giants Ridge is installing this year is, in Seymour’s words, “on the taxpayer.” While we discuss these funding mechanisms and the history of Giants Ridge as economic-development machine, we don’t explore how this impacts private, competing ski areas. I avoided this for the same reason that I wouldn’t ask a football coach why the taxpayers ought to have funded his team’s $500 million stadium – that wasn’t his choice, and he just works there. His job, like the job of any ski area manager, is to do the best he can with the resources he’s given. But I’ll acknowledge that this setup grates on a lot of private operators in the region. That’s a fight worth talking about, but with the appropriate officials, and in a different context, and with the time it takes to tell the story properly. What I got wrong * When discussing the rope-splicing project underway at Giants Ridge on the day of our conversation, I referred to “the chair you’re replacing the ‘ropetow’ on.” I meant the “haulrope.” * I said I visited Giants Ridge, “in mid-February, or maybe it was early March.” I skied Giants Ridge on March 10 of this year. Why you should ski Giants Ridge This is one of the nicest ski areas I’ve ever skied. Full stop. No asterisk. The slopes are immaculate. The lodge is spotless. The pitch is excellent. The runs are varied. Giants Ridge has a high-speed quad and RFID gates and a paved parking lot. If you need a helper, there are helpers everywhere. Gorgeous views from the top. That may just sound like any other modern ski area, but this is a) the Midwest, where “modern” means the lifts don’t run on diesel fuel, and, b) rural rural Minnesota, which is like regular rural Minnesota, but a lot farther away. To drive out of the range of cell service into the far reaches of a forest within which Google Maps labels human settlements of which no traces can be found, and at the end of this road find not just a ski area but a ski area that looks like it was built yesterday is a rather remarkable experience. I’m not saying cancel your trip to Whistler. I am saying that this is worth driving to if you’re anywhere within driving range (which for a Midwesterner is roughly 90 hours). Giants Ridge is not sprawling like Lutsen or thrilling like Bohemia or snowy like Powderhorn. There are no Granite Peak six-packs or Highlands bubble lifts. But for what it has and what it is, Giants Ridge is as close to a perfect ski area as any I’ve ever encountered. It's not a perfect ski area, of course. None of them are. If I have to nitpick: the hill still runs three old chairlifts with no safety bars; it lacks even a token mogul run; there are no marked glades; loading the Helsinki chair can require an annoying uphill shuffle. And there are signs all over the place referring to something called “golf.” All fixable issues, none considerations for skipping the joint. If you want skiing featuring the best technology of 1984, the Midwest still has plenty of that. If you prefer to ski in 2024, check this place out. Podcast Notes On the Midwest’s weakest winter on record I ran through this on the article accompanying the recent Norway Mountain podcast, but it’s worth reposting what I wrote here: Skier visits were down in every region of the United States last winter, but they all but collapsed in the Midwest, with a 26.7 percent plunge, according to the annual Kottke Demographic Report. Michigan alone was down nearly a half million skier visits. Check out these numbers: For comparison, overall skier numbers dropped just six percent in the Northeast, and five percent in the Rockies. On Hyland Hills Hyland Hills is a 180-vertical-foot volcano, packing 180,000 skier visits into its tiny footprint every winter. The ski area is a model of why small municipal hills should be oriented around terrain parks. The bump is perhaps the birthplace of the high-speed ropetow, which can move up to 4,000 (some estimates claim as many as 8,200), skiers per hour. You can see the tows working in this video: Midwest Skiers tells the full high-speed ropetow story: On the Three Rivers Park District The Three Rivers Park District manages 27,000 acres of parkland across the seven-county Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area, including Hyland Hills and Elm Creek, an even smaller, beginner-focused hill on the north side of town: On Hidden Valley, Missouri An odd fact of American skiing is that Missouri is home to two ski areas, both of which are owned by Vail Resorts. Seymour worked for a time at Hidden Valley, seated a few miles outside of St. Louis. The stats: 320 vertical feet on 65 acres, with 19 inches of snowfall in an average winter. On Peak Resorts Hidden Valley was the OG resort in Peak Resorts’ once-sprawling portfolio. After growing to 19 ski areas scattered from New Hampshire to Missouri, Peak sold its entire operation to Vail Resorts in 2019. On expansion potential into the Superior National Forest Seymour explains that there’s “not a whole lot of potential” to expand the ski area into the Superior National Forest, which Giants Ridge backs into. That may sound odd to folks in the West, where the majority of ski areas operate on Forest Service leases. There’s little precedent for such arrangements in the Midwest, however, and Lutsen’s plans to expand into the same forest slammed into the Pinecone Police last year. As I wrote in my podcast episode with Lutsen GM Jim Vick: Over the summer, Lutsen withdrew the plan, and Superior National Forest Supervisor Thomas Hall recommended a “no action” alternative, citing “irreversible damage” to mature white cedar and sugar maple stands, displacement of backcountry skiers, negative impacts to the 300-mile-long Superior hiking trail, objections from Native American communities, and water-quality concerns. Lutsen had until Oct. 10 to file an objection to the decision, and they did. The expansion would have developed 500-ish acres. Superior National Forest covers 3.9 million acres. Million. With an “M.” On the Minnesota state 4th-grade ski passport Like many state ski associations, the Minnesota Ski Areas Association offers fourth-graders a $39.99 “ passport ” good for at least two lift tickets to each of the state’s ski areas. While many ski areas stick to the two-day offering and black out many peak periods, Afton Alps, Chester Bowl, Detroit Mountain, Giants Ridge, Mount Ski Gull, and Wild Mountain offer unlimited redemptions (Ski Gull blacks out the Christmas holidays). The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year round. Join us. The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 75/100 in 2024, and number 575 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe…

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