This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on July 7. It dropped for free subscribers on July 14. 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 Chip Chase, Founder and Owner of White Grass Ski Touring Center, West Virginia Recorded on May 16, 2024 About White Grass Touring Center Click here for a mountain stats overview Owned by: Chip Chase Located in: Davis, West Virginia Year founded: 1979 (at a different location) Pass affiliations: Indy Pass and Indy+ Pass: 2 days, no blackouts Closest neighboring ski areas: Canaan Valley (8 minutes), Timberline (11 minutes) Base elevation: 3,220 feet (below the lodge) Summit elevation: 4,463 feet (atop Weiss Knob) Vertical drop: 1,243 feet Skiable Acres: 2,500 Average annual snowfall: 140 inches Trail count: 42 (50 km of maintained trails) Lift count: None Why I interviewed him One habit I’ve borrowed from the mostly now-defunct U.S. ski magazines is their unapologetic focus always and only on Alpine skiing. This is not a snowsports newsletter or a wintertime recreation newsletter or a mountain lifestyle newsletter. I’m not interested in ice climbing or snowshoeing or even snowboarding, which I’ve never attempted and probably never will. I’m not chasing the hot fads like Norwegian goat fjording, which is where you paddle around glaciers in an ice canoe, with an assist tow from a swimming goat. And I’ve narrowed the focus much more than my traditionalist antecedents, avoiding even passing references to food, drink, lodging, gear, helicopters, snowcats, whacky characters, or competitions of any kind (one of the principal reasons I ski is that it is an unmeasured, individualistic sport). Which, way to squeeze all the fun out of it, Stu. But shearing off 90 percent of all possible subject matter allows me to cover the small spectrum of things that I do actually care about – the experience of traveling to and around a lift-served snowsportskiing facility, with a strange side obsession with urban planning and land-use policy – over the broadest possible geographic area (currently the entire United States and Canada, though mostly that’s Western Canada right now because I haven’t yet consumed quantities of ayahuasca sufficient to unlock the intellectual and spiritual depths where the names and statistical profiles of all 412* Quebecois ski areas could dwell). So that’s why I don’t write about cross-country skiing or cross-country ski centers. Sure, they’re Alpine skiing-adjacent, but so is lift-served MTB and those crazy jungle gym swingy-bridge things and ziplining and, like, freaking ice skating. If I covered everything that existed around a lift-served ski area, I would quickly grow bored with this whole exercise. Because frankly the only thing I care about is skiing. Downhill skiing. The uphill part, much as it’s fetishized by the ski media and the self-proclaimed hardcore, is a little bit confusing. Because you’re going the wrong way, man. No one shows up at Six Flags and says oh actually I would prefer to walk to the top of Dr. Diabolical’s Cliffhanger. Like do you not see the chairlift sitting right f*****g there? But here we are anyway: I’m featuring a cross-country skiing center on my podcast that’s stubbornly devoted always and only to Alpine skiing. And not just a cross-country ski center, but one that, by the nature of its layout, requires some uphill travel to complete most loops. Why would I do this to myself, and to my readers/listeners? Well, several factors collided to interest me in White Grass, including: * The ski area sits on the site of an abandoned circa-1950s downhill ski area, Weiss Knob. White Grass has incorporated much of the left-over refuse – the lodge, the ropetow engines – into the functioning or aesthetic of the current business. The first thing you see upon arrival at Whit