This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Oct. 11. It dropped for free subscribers on Oct. 18. 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 Andy Cohen, General Manager of Fernie Alpine Resort, British Columbia Recorded on September 3, 2024 About Fernie Click here for a mountain stats overview Owned by: Resorts of the Canadian Rockies, which also owns: Located in: Fernie, British Columbia Pass affiliations: * Epic Pass: 7 days, shared with Kicking Horse, Kimberley, Nakiska, Stoneham, and Mont-Sainte Anne * RCR Rockies Season Pass: unlimited access, along with Kicking Horse, Kimberley, and Nakiska Closest neighboring ski areas: Fairmont Hot Springs (1:15), Kimberley (1:27), Panorama (1:45) – travel times vary considerably given time of year and weather conditions Base elevation: 3,450 feet/1,052 meters Summit elevation: 7,000 feet/2,134 meters Vertical drop: 3,550 feet/1,082 meters Skiable Acres: 2,500+ Average annual snowfall: 360 inches/914 Canadian inches (also called centimeters) Trail count: 145 named runs plus five alpine bowls and tree skiing (4% extreme, 21% expert, 32% advanced, 30% intermediate, 13% novice) Lift count: 10 (2 high-speed quads, 2 fixed-grip quads, 3 triples, 1 T-bar, 1 Poma, 1 conveyor - view Lift Blog’s inventory of Fernie’s lift fleet) Why I interviewed him One of the most irritating dwellers of the #SkiInternet is Shoosh Emoji Bro. This Digital Daniel Boone, having boldly piloted his Subaru beyond the civilized bounds of Interstate 70, considers all outlying mountains to be his personal domain. So empowered, he patrols the digital sphere, dropping shoosh emojis on any poster that dares to mention Lost Trail or White Pass or Baker or Wolf Creek. Like an overzealous pamphleteer, he slings his brand haphazardly, toward any mountain kingdom he deems worthy of his forcefield. Shoosh Emoji Bro once Shoosh Emoji-ed me over a post about Alta. 🤫 Shoosh Emoji Bro may want to admit when he’s been beat. He's not quite been beat yet on the Powder Highway, but I’m pushing all my most powerful weapons to the front lines. Because f**k you Shoosh Emoji Bro. The skiers of the world ought to know that a string of gigantic, snowy, rowdy-riding, and mostly empty mountains sits just north of Montana and Washington. Red, Whitewater, Revy, Kicking Horse, Fernie, and their tamer cousins Sun Peaks, Silver Star, Kimberley, Big White, and Panorama. These are ski areas with Keystone-to-Mammoth acreage but Discovery, Montana crowds. But here’s the crucial difference between the Big Empties of the American West and the Canadian South: those south of the 49th Parallel tend to be old, remote, ragtag and improbable, served by two-mile-long double chairs staked up through the pines before The Beatles were a thing. BC’s large ski areas, by contrast, mostly sprouted from the nubs of town bumps over the past three decades, sprawling up and out with chains of high-speed (or at least modern) lifts. As a group, they are, from an infrastructure point of view, as modern as anything owned by Vail or Alterra or Boyne. Lift-served skiing is hamstrung by a set of cultural codes that are well past their expiration date: the fetishization of speed, the lionization of the dirtbag fringe, the outsized distribution of media resources to covering the .01 percent of skiers who can stunt an aerial backflip, the Brobot toughguys hostile to chairlift safety bars. I like skiing, frankly, a lot more than I like ski culture, or at least as it’s defined by this micro-sect of cool kids who have decided that their version of skiing is the realist, and that the rest of us either need to rekognize or stay the hell away. Shoosh Emoji Bro distills much of what is juvenile and counterproductive about contemporary ski culture. But Shoosh Emoji Bro is a buffoon. Because if skiing is ever