Jan 07 2025 87 mins 18
This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Dec. 31. It dropped for free subscribers on Jan. 7. 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
Shaun Sutner, snowsports columnist for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette and Telegram.com
Recorded on
November 25, 2024
About Shaun Sutner
Sutner is a skier, writer, and journalist based in Worcester, Massachusetts. He’s written a snowsports column for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette from Thanksgiving to April for the past several decades. You can follow Shaun on social media to stay locked into his work:
Read his recent columns:
* On Wildcat, Attitash, and Vail Resorts
* Indy Pass is still kicking ass
Why I interviewed him
Journalism sounds easy. Go there, talk to people, write about it. It’s not easy. The quest for truth is like the Hobbit’s quest for the ring: long, circuitous, filled with monsters who want to eat you. Some truth is easy: Wachusett has four chairlifts. Beyond the objective, complications arise: Wachusett’s decision to replace its summit quad with a six-pack in 2025 is… what, exactly? Visionary, shortsighted, foolish, clever, pedestrian? Does it prioritize passholders or marketing or profit over experience? Is it necessary? Is it wise? Is it prudent? Is it an answer to locals’ frustrations or a compounding factor in it?
The journalist’s job is to machete through this jungle and sculpt a version of reality that all parties will recognize and that none of them will be entirely happy with. Because people are complex and so is the world, and assembling the truth is less like snapping together a thousand-piece puzzle and more like the A-Team examining a trashheap and saying “OK boys, let’s build a helicopter.”
Sutner is good at this, as may be expected of someone who’s spent decades on his beat. He understands that anecdote is not absolute. He knows how to pull together broad narratives (“New England’s outdated lift fleet” of the 2010s), and to acknowledge when they change (“New England operators aggressively modernize lifts” in the 2020s). He is empathetic to locals and operators alike, without being deferential to either. He knows that the best stories are 90 percent what the writer leaves out, and 10 percent identifying the essential bits to frame the larger whole. And he lives the beat, aggressively, joyously, immersively.
We need more Sutners, but we are probably getting fewer. As journalism figures out what it is in the 21st century, it is deciding that it is less about community-based entities employing beat-specific writers and more about feeding mastheads to private equity funds that drag the carcass down to entrails and then feed them to the hounds. Thousands of American communities now have no local news organization, let alone one with the resources to hire writers solely devoted to something as niche as skiing. Filling the information void is Angry Ski Bro, firing off 50 dozen monthly Facebook posts about Vail’s abominable greed being distilled in a broken snowgun at Wildcat.
I started The Storm as an antidote to this global complaint box. And I believe that the future of journalism includes writers tapping Substack and similar platforms to freelance the truth. But I still believe that the traditional news organization – meaning physical newspapers that have evolved into digital-analogue hybrids – can find a sustainable business model that tells a community’s essential stories. Sutner, and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, deserve credit for showing us how to do this.
What we talked about
Ski South America; how to ski 60 days while working full time; Worcester’s legendary Strand’s ski shop; Powdr’s sale of Killington and Pico and how the new owners can keep from ruining it; how to make Pico more relevant; is this the start of New England ski area deconsolidation?; Smuggs; Black Mountain, New Hampshire’s co-op quest; taking stock of New England consolidation; Vail Resorts’ New England GM shuffle; New England’s chairlift renaissance; what is New England’s new most-hated lift?; why New England needs more surface lifts; a new sixer coming to Wachusett; the legacy of Wachusett’s David Crowley; why Wachusett works; and what we lose with consolidation.
What we got wrong
On whatever that city is called
I probably still can’t pronounce “Worcester.” Just congratulate yourself if you can, and keep moving.
On South American skiing
I said in our conversation that there were “40 or so ski areas” in South America. I’ve not taken my magnifying glass to the region as I have with Real America, but I made this quick-hitter chart earlier this year that counted just 26 on the continent, all of them in Chile and Argentina:
This map on skiresort.info counts 45 South American ski areas, including a sporadically operating area in Bolivia and one indoor and one artificial-turf area in Brazil. Someday I’ll do a cross-check with my list, but that day is not today.
On which county Killington lives in
Neither of us knew which county Killington is in, but he suggested Windham County. The correct answer is Rutland County.
On The Man owning our ski centers
When discussing state-owned ski areas, Sutner didn’t remember that New Hampshire owns Cannon and Vail-operated Sunapee, and I didn’t remember to remind him.
On Black Mountain, New Hampshire
We recorded this prior to Black outlining its plans for a transition to co-op ownership. Mountain leadership has since released more details:
On Mad River Glen’s snowmaking hard stop
I noted that Mad River Glen only makes snow up to “2,000-whatever feet.” The actual number, as proclaimed by some past assemblage of the MRG co-op, is 2,200 feet. Though perhaps raising that by a couple hundred feet would have spared them from spending a fat stack to build a double-chair midstation this year.
On Vail’s GM shuffle
When we recorded this conversation, Vail-owned Wildcat, Mount Snow, and Crotched had general manager vacancies. The company has since filled all three (click through on the links above).
On Sugarloaf’s T-bar
In our discussion on surface lifts, Sutner references a T-bar to Sugarloaf’s summit. The Bateau T-bar does land quite high on the mountain, but it stops short of the summit and snowfields.
On Waterville Valley’s T-bars
Waterville’s T-bar game is way ahead of most New England ski areas. Two of them serve lower-mountain race or race-training trails, and one serves the mountain’s top 400 vertical feet, replacing the windhold-prone chairlifts that once ran to the summit. While two of the T-bars run parallel to terrain parks, serving them does not appear to be the lifts’ direct purpose, as we debated on the podcast.
On Vail’s high-speed “T-bars”
I mixed up my lift types when describing the high-speed surface lifts that Vail runs at its Midwest mountains. They are ropetows, not T-bars. Here they go at Afton Alps, Minnesota:
Afton Alps, Minnesota. Video by Stuart Winchester.
On Wachusett upgrades
Sutner noted that Wachusett’s coming summit six-pack would be its first big infrastructure upgrade in 20 years, but the mountain installed the 299-vertical-foot Monadnock Express quad in 2011.
On Berkshire East’s T-Bar Express
Sutner said that last year was Berkshire East’s second season running its T-Bar Express high-speed quad, but the lift first spun for the 2023-24 ski season. The current, 2024-25 season is the lift’s second.
On Sutner’s ski days
We recorded this a while ago, and Sutner had clocked eight ski days before Thanksgiving. As of Dec. 30, he’d hit 21 days, well along to his 60-day goal.
Podcast Notes
On Cerro Catedral
I’m somewhat obsessed with this 3,773-vertical-foot, 1,500-acre Argentinian monster:
On Shaun’s Worcester Living article
Sutner wrote up his Argentinian ski adventure for Worcester Living magazine. The story starts on page 20.
On Powdr’s sale of Killington and Pico
In case you missed it:
On New England consolidation
New England’s 100-ish ski areas are largely independently owned and operated. These 25 are run by an entity that operates at least two ski areas:
On Intrawest and American Skiing Company
It’s impossible to discuss the history of New England ski area consolidation without acknowledging the now-dead Intrawest and American Skiing Company.
On Vail’s management shuffle
I wrote about this recently:
I launched The Storm in October 2019, when Vail owned 34 North American ski areas. To the best of my knowledge, just three of those ski areas’ general manager-level leaders remain where they were on that date: Vail Mountain VP/COO Beth Howard, Okemo VP/GM Bruce Schmidt, and Boston Mills-Brandywine GM Jake Campbell. Compare this to Boyne, where nine of 10 mountain leaders either remain in their 2019 roles, or have since ascended to them after working at the resort for decades, often replacing legends retiring after long careers. Alterra and Powdr have demonstrated similar stability. Meanwhile, Vail’s seven New England Resorts enter this winter with just two mountains – Okemo and Attitash – under the same general manager that ran them in the spring.
The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 90/100 in 2024, and number 590 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. 2024 will continue until the 100-article threshold is achieved, regardless of what that pesky calendar says.
Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe
