In a previous post, There Goes the Neighborhood, I wondered about the future of the Yellowstone Club now that economic sanity is being valued even by people with enough money to live frivolously indefinitely. Has all the bad PR and gloating by critics and schadenfreudenistas permanently branded the YC as a new kind of toxic [...]

A couple of days ago I posted the latest NASA map showing all the areas on the Earth’s surface that were either warmer than normal or cooler than normal in March 09 and it was a depressing map for skiers to look at with warming areas covering far more of the Earth than cooling areas.
We [...]

What might Flint, Michigan have to do with the future of skiing? Maybe a report on the radio yesterday about Flint’s efforts to become a smaller city will prove to be predictive of a not to distant in the future happening in the world of some ski resort communities.
What is Flint trying to do? The [...]

It looks like it’s been a tough year for ski instructors and real estate agents in ski towns. We all know about the piling up of inventories of unsold properties across ski country and I’d heard anecdotal reports of a fall off in ski lessons. At last week’s Mountain Travel Symposium, an annual affair where [...]

Yesterday I had to drop in to a local building supplier’s yard to get something for a project I’ve been avoiding since December’s first snows. Ten days into official Spring, everything in the yard was still covered with several inches of snow from the weekend’s storms. One of the employees there, a person I know [...]

One of my hobbyhorses on this blog is to criticize the trend in the ski world to cater to the wealthier skiers, either by selling them special privileges to ski the powder before everyone else, providing them with special on mountain clubs on public land, designing lodges and restaurants so immense and opulent that we [...]

Earlier this month I blogged about the growing trend of ski resorts creating expensive, exclusive  private membership clubs to coddle (and profit handsomely from) the wealthy.  I groused about these clubs because the resorts give these members special privileges to get on the ski lifts before the rest of us. Just yesterday I overheard a [...]

It’s hard to miss all the deals being offered by ski resorts and ski shops these days as they try to harvest as many of the more scarce skier dollars as they can. But, is the ski business really suffering? Are all the deals saving the industry? USA Today recently did an article on how [...]

As I previously mentioned on this blog, Grand Targhee Resort has been working on a way to encourage its day users to carpool. This Sunday will be the first of its Carpool Sundays. All the riders in any private vehicle arriving arriving between 8:30-11:00 AM with three or more people in it will each get [...]

Lou Dawson posted a little rant recently(midway in a longer post), “Industrial skiing is indeed a blemish on the face of public land and snowsports in general. Expensive, resource intensive junkshow, for the most part — though ANY skiing has its upside and we do ride the cable on occasion.”
Lou’s has an admitted bias of [...]