This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Sept. 19. It dropped for free subscribers on Sept. 26. To receive future pods 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 Chris Sorensen, Vice President and General Manager of Keystone, Colorado Recorded on September 11, 2023 About Keystone Click here for a mountain stats overview Owned by: Vail Resorts Located in: Keystone, Colorado Year founded: 1970 Pass affiliations: * Epic Pass: unlimited access * Epic Local Pass: unlimited access * Summit Value Pass: unlimited access * Keystone Plus Pass: unlimited access with holiday blackouts * Tahoe Local: five days combined with Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, Crested Butte, Park City * Epic Day Pass: access with All Resorts and 32-resorts tiers Closest neighboring ski areas: Arapahoe Basin (:08), Frisco (:19), Loveland (22 minutes), Breckenridge (:25), Copper (:25), Vail (:44), Beaver Creek (:53), Ski Cooper (:56) – travel times vary considerably given traffic, weather, and time of year. Base elevation: 9,280 feet Summit elevation: 12,408 feet at the top of Keystone Peak; highest lift-served point is 12,282 feet at the top of Bergman Bowl Express Vertical drop: 3,002 feet lift-served; 3,128 feet hike-to Skiable Acres: 3,149 acres Average annual snowfall: 235 inches Trail count: 130 (49% most difficult, 39% more difficult, 12% easiest) Lift count: 20 (1 eight-passenger gondola, 1 six-passenger gondola, 4 high-speed six-packs, 3 high-speed quads, 1 fixed-grip quad, 1 triple, 2 doubles, 7 carpets) Why I interviewed him Keystone arrived in 1970, a star member of the last great wave of western ski resort development, just before Snowbird (1971), Northstar (1972), Telluride (1972), and Big Sky (1973). It landed in a crowded Summit County, just down the road from Arapahoe Basin (1946) and five miles overland from Breckenridge (1961). Copper Mountain came online two years later. Loveland (1937) stood at the gateway to Summit County, looming above what would become the Eisenhower Tunnel in 1973. Just west sat Ski Cooper (1942), the mighty and rapidly expanding Vail Mountain (1962), and the patch of wilderness that would morph into Beaver Creek within a decade. Today, the density of ski areas along Colorado’s I-70 corridor is astonishing: Despite this geographic proximity, you could not find more distinct ski experiences were you to search across continents. This is true everywhere ski areas bunch, from northern Vermont to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to the Wasatch. Ski areas, like people, hack their identities out of the raw material available to them, and just as siblings growing up in the same household can emerge as wildly different entities, so too can mountains that sit side-by-side-by-side. Keystone, lacking the gnar, was never going to be Jackson or Palisades, fierce and frothing. Sprung from wilderness, it could never replicate Breck’s mining-town patina. Its high alpine could not summon the drama of A-Basin’s East Wall or the expanse of Vail’s Back Bowls. But Keystone made its way. It would be Summit County’s family mountain, its night-ski mountain, and, eventually, one of its first-to-open-each-ski-season mountains. This is the headline, and this is how everyone thinks of the place. But over the decades, Keystone has quietly built out one of Colorado’s most comprehensive ski experiences, an almost perfect front-to-back progression from gentle to damn. Like Heavenly or Park City, Keystone wears its steeps modestly, like your quiet neighbor with a Corvette hidden beneath tarps in the polebarn. All you notice is the Camry parked in the driveway. But there are layers here. Keep looking, and you will find them. What we talked about Hopeful for that traditional October opening; why Keystone is Vail’s early-season operator in Colorado; why the mountain closes in early April; breaking down the