Podcast #201: 'The Ski Podcast' Host Iain Martin
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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 aboutThe 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 wrongWe 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 interviewI 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 NotesOn 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 yearOn the “subway map” of transit-accessible Euro skiingI 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 AbramYes, 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 EuropeI’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 EuropeOn Euro non-ski media and climate change catastropheOf 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 ZermattIf 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.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 EuropeDriving 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).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 barsIt’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 AlpesAccording 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 EuroSkiPassesThe 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
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