This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Nov. 14. It dropped for free subscribers on Nov. 21. 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 Jim Vick, General Manager of Lutsen Mountains, Minnesota Recorded on October 30, 2023 About Lutsen Mountains Click here for a mountain stats overview Owned by: Midwest Family Ski Resorts Located in: Lutsen, Minnesota Year founded: 1948 Pass affiliations: * Legendary Gold Pass – unlimited access, no blackouts * Legendary Silver Pass – unlimited with 12 holiday and peak Saturday blackouts * Legendary Bronze Pass – unlimited weekdays with three Christmas week blackouts * Indy Pass – 2 days with 24 holiday and Saturday blackouts * Indy Plus Pass – 2 days with no blackouts Closest neighboring ski areas: Chester Bowl (1:44), Loch Lomond (1:48), Spirit Mountain (1:54), Giants Ridge (1:57), Mt. Baldy (2:11) Base elevation: 800 feet Summit elevation: 1,688 feet Vertical drop: 1,088 feet (825 feet lift-served) Skiable Acres: 1,000 Average annual snowfall: 120 inches Trail count: 95 (10% expert, 25% most difficult, 47% more difficult, 18% easiest) Lift count: 7 (1 eight-passenger gondola, 2 high-speed six-packs, 3 double chairs, 1 carpet) View historic Lutsen Mountains trailmaps on skimap.org. Why I interviewed him I often claim that Vail and Alterra have failed to appreciate Midwest skiing. I realize that this can be confusing. Vail Resorts owns 10 ski areas from Missouri to Ohio. Alterra’s Ikon Pass includes a small but meaningful presence in Northern Michigan. What the hell am I talking about here? Lutsen, while a regional standout and outlier, illuminates each company’s blind spots. In 2018, the newly formed Alterra Mountain Company looted the motley M.A.X. Pass roster for its best specimens, adding them to its Ikon Pass. Formed partly from the ashes of Intrawest, Alterra kept all of their own mountains and cherry-picked the best of Boyne and Powdr, leaving off Boyne’s Michigan mountains, Brighton, Summit at Snoqualmie, and Cypress (which Ikon later added); and Powdr’s Boreal, Lee Canyon, Pico, and Bachelor (Pico and Bachelor eventually made the team). Alterra also added Solitude and Crystal after purchasing them later in 2018, and, over time, Windham and Alyeska. Vail bought Triple Peaks (Crested Butte, Okemo, Sunapee), later that year, and added Resorts of the Canadian Rockies to its Epic Pass. But that left quite a few orphans, including Lutsen and sister mountain Granite Peak, which eventually joined the Indy Pass (which didn’t debut until 2019). All of which is technocratic background to set up this question: what the hell was Alterra thinking? In Lutsen and Granite Peak, Alterra had, ready to snatch, two of the largest, most well-cared-for, most built-up resorts between Vermont and Colorado. Midwest Family Ski Resorts CEO Charles Skinner is one of the most aggressive and capable ski area operators anywhere. These mountains, with their 700-plus-foot vertical drops, high-speed lifts, endless glade networks, and varied terrain deliver a big-mountain experience that has more in common with a mid-sized New England ski area than anything within several hundred miles in any direction. It’s like someone in a Colorado boardroom and a stack of spreadsheets didn’t bother looking past the ZIP Codes when deciding what to keep and what to discard. This is one of the great miscalculations in the story of skiing’s shift to multimountain pass hegemony. By overlooking Lutsen Mountains and Granite Peak in its earliest days, Alterra missed an opportunity to snatch enormous volumes of Ikon Pass sales across the Upper Midwest. Any Twin Cities skier (and there are a lot of them), would easily be able to calculate the value of an Ikon Pass that could deliver 10 or 14 days between Skinner’s two resorts, and additional days on that