The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast

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Who

Justin Steck, owner of Steeplechase ski area, Minnesota

Recorded on

January 7, 2025

About Steeplechase

Owned by: Justin Steck

Located in: Mazeppa, Minnesota

Year founded: 1999, by Kevin Kastler; closed around 2007; re-opened Feb. 4, 2023 by Steck

Pass affiliations: Freedom Pass, which offers three days for Steeplechase season passholders at each of these ski areas:

Reciprocal partners

Closest neighboring ski areas: Coffee Mill (:45), Welch Village (:41)

Base elevation: 902 feet

Summit elevation: 1,115 feet

Vertical drop: 213 feet

Skiable acres: 45 acres

Average annual snowfall: N/A

Trail count: 21 (9 easy, 7 intermediate, 5 advanced)

Lift count: 4 (2 triples, 2 doubles – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Steeplechase’s lift fleet)

Why I interviewed him

They seem to be everywhere, once you know where to look. Abandoned ski areas, rusting, fading. Time capsules. Hoses coiled and stacked. Chairs spaced and numbered along the liftline. Paperwork scattered on desks. Doors unlocked. No explanation. No note. As though the world stopped in apocalypse.

America has lost more ski areas than it has kept. Most will stay lost. Many are stripped, almost immediately, of the things that made them commercially viable, of lifts and snowguns and groomers, things purchased at past prices and sold at who-cares discounts and irreplaceable at future rates. But a few ski areas idle as museums, isolated from vandals, forgotten by others, waiting, like ancient crypts, for a great unearthing.

Who knew that Steeplechase stood intact? Who knew, really, that the complex existed in the first place, those four motley cobbled-together chairlifts spinning, as they did, for just eight years in the Minnesota wilderness? As though someone pried open a backlot shed on a house they’d purchased years before and found, whole and rebuilt, a Corvette of antique vintage. Pop in a new battery, change the sparkplugs, inflate the tires, and it’s roaring once again.

Sometimes in the summer I’ll wander around one of these lost ski areas, imagining what it was, what it could be again. There’s one a bit over an hour north of me, Tuxedo Ridge, its four double chairs stilled, its snowguns pointed skyward, holes in the roof and skis scattered about the lodge. To restore a ski area, I sometimes think, is harder than to build one whole from the earth. Most operators I speak with recoil at the very idea.

Which is why, I think, most lost ski area rebuilding or revitalization stories are led by outsiders: Norway Mountain, Holiday Mountain, Tenney, Teton Pass, Paul Bunyan. By the time they realize they’re doing an impossible thing, they’ve done too much to surrender. When Steck acquired the Steeplechase property around 2016, he didn’t really know what he’d do with it. He wanted land, and here was some land. Except the land happened to hold a forgotten-but-intact ski area.

Bit by bit, he rebuilt the business: restoring the chapel for weddings, then the tubing lanes, then the chairlifts. He didn’t ask permission. He didn’t make any big proclamation. Suddenly, one winter day in 2023, a ski area that everyone had forgotten was a ski area reappeared in the world. And isn’t that interesting?

What we talked about

A much stronger start to the 2024-25 Midwestern winter; big expansion potential and when that could happen; the mental march through the rough 2023-24 winter; considering future non-holiday midweek operations; snowmobile racing; how a house-flipping career led Steck to Steeplechase; a snapshot of the ski area lost in time in 2016; rebuilding a ski hill is “a big logistical nightmare on a regular basis,” especially during Covid; the fuzzy origins of Steeplechase’s four chairlifts; Midwest tough; Steeplechase’s founding; Freedom Pass; why Steeplechase isn’t on Indy Pass even though a spring announcement indicated that the ski area would be; and potentially America’s first 2025-26 season pass sale.

What I got wrong

My ski-areas-that-double-as-snowmobile-areas breakdown was not quite right. Cockaigne was, as far as I know, the only New York ski area to explicitly turn a portion of its trails over to snowmobiles, and only during the ski area’s short-lived resurgence (2020 to 2022-ish). Check out the circa 2020 trailmap - all the green-laced trails have been set aside as a snowmobile fun park:

That whole section was once ski trails, and the Hall double that served them is, as far as I know, still standing (lift E below):

Cockaigne is not currently an active ski area.

I also mentioned Snow Ridge, New York as being a snowmobile-friendly ski area, but what I meant by that was that snowmobilers often use the ski area’s parking lot to access trails that happen to connect there. The same dynamic seems to play out at Royal Mountain, which sits a bit farther south in the Adirondacks.

Why now was a good time for this interview

The typical ski area re-opening story is public, incremental, tortuous, and laced with doubt. See: Saddleback, Hatley Pointe, Cuchara, Granite Gorge, Norway. Will they or won’t they? Haters and doubters commandeer the narrative. “Never gonna happen.” Then it happens and I’m all like phew. High fives and headlines.

But Steeplechase just… reappeared. It was the damnedest thing. Like a Japanese ghost ship bumping onto the Oregon shoreline years after its dislodge-by-tsunami. Oh that thing? We’d forgotten all about it. One day Steck just turned two lifts on and said come ski here and people did.

When I spoke to Steck a couple of months after that February 2023 soft opening, he underscored his long-term intention to fully re-open the bump. The following ski season – last winter – was the worst in the recorded history of Midwest skiing. Steck somehow punched his way through the high temps and rain that challenged even the most seasoned operators. He’d restored all the lifts, amped up the snowmaking, cleared the old trails. Steeplechase, a ski area that was barely a ski area to begin with, had, improbably, returned. Permanently, it seemed.

The story doesn’t make a lot of sense in a 2025 U.S. ski world dominated by national ski passes, consolidation, and the exploding cost of everything. But it happened: a guy who’d never worked in skiing and didn’t know much about skiing bought and restored a Midwest ski area with little fuss and fanfare. And now it exists. And there’s a lot we can learn from that.

Why you should ski Steeplechase

Consider the ski-area-as-artwork. One person’s interpretation of wilderness bent in service of ordered recreation, with the caprice of winds and weather intact. Run a lift up one face, hack a trail down another. A twitch and a bend, re-ordered by machines. Trees left over there. Go ahead and ski between them if there’s snow. A logic to it, but bewildering too, the manifestation of a human mind carved into an incline.

Context is important here. Crazy old Merls were hacking trails all over the country in the decades after World War II, stringing inexpensive lifts from valley to summit with little concern for whether the snow would fall. But it’s incredible that Steeplechase opened in 1999, near the end of the Ski Area Extinction Event that began in the mid-70s, with four cobbled-together chairlifts and a surprisingly broad and varied trail network.

Imagine someone doing that today? It’s hard to. At least in North America. That makes Steeplechase one of the last of its kind, the handmade ski area willed into being by good ole’ boys nailing s**t together. That is failed once is unsurprising. That it returned as a second-generation, second-hand relic is a kind of miracle. There aren’t a lot of ski areas left like Steeplechase – unfussy, unfrenzied, improvisational works-in-progress that you can pull up to and ski without planning two election cycles in advance. You’re unlikely to have the best ski day of your life here, but it’s pretty cool that you can ski here at all. And so why not go do it?

Podcast notes

On expansion potential

The Google Earth view of Steeplechase hides the little ski area’s big expansion potential, as it’s hard to tell where the earth rises and dips. Looking at the topo map side-by-side, however, and you can see the ridgelines rising off what may be an ancient riverbed, leaving plenty of hills to build into:

On Midwest tough

I grew up in the Midwest and moved away a couple of decades ago. Transplanted onto the East Coast, I can appreciate some inherent Midwestern character traits that are less prevalent outside the region, including an ability to absorb foul weather. One of the best articulations of this that I’ve read was in this 2006 New York Times piece, on Wyoming industry recruiting workers from Michigan:

Wyoming recruiters say there is another element to their admiration for Michigan. Not only are the people there akin to Wyomingites in the ways and wiles of work, but they also have an inner toughness, they say, that can only come from surviving harsh northern winters.

The state tried a job campaign in the South last fall after Hurricane Katrina, hoping to draw displaced oil industry workers. But the effort largely flopped when people who were used to working on the balmy Gulf Coast got wind of what life can be like in Wyoming in January.

On Steeplechase’s season pass

Steeplechase may have launched America’s first 2025-26 ski season pass: for $300, ski the rest of this winter and next.