Happy U.S. America Day, when it’s legal to drive a boat and detonate explosives in public after housing a twelver of MGD. I’m working this morning even though I plan to get wasted in an eagle T-shirt with torn-off sleeves well before sundown. Just kidding. Maybe.
But why am I working at all on this glorious day? Am I some sort of socialist who disapproves of freedom and warplane flyovers at football games? No. But I tend to work most holidays because I tend to work every day. The Storm is, after all, a small business, one of America’s greatest inventions, alongside snowstorms, sushi, and domesticated dogs.
This grind does not always translate directly to newsletter volume. In the event that more than three or four days have passed since the last Storm drop, or if I’ve stopped replying to your emails, more often than not I’ve become preoccupied with something sprawling, insane, and of questionable utility to myself, my readers, and the world in general.
Presenting my latest such project: a chart documenting the evolution of U.S.-based ski area consolidation, or “CD-TEOUBSAC” for short. Behold:
Well that probably makes no sense on your Pet Rectangle. View a larger image:
Or view the chart on Canva, where I designed it:
After I published this timeline last week recording acquisition dates of every current U.S.-based conglomerate-owned mountain, I thought “well that actually leaves quite a bit of history out.” So then I decided to throw this chart together “real quick.” Meaning it took me longer than any known mammalian gestation period.
This is perhaps the dumbest thing I’ve ever done with 150 hours of computer time. It’s also about how much time per week I spend trying to figure out what year American Skiing Company purchased Steamboat and when did Aspen own Breckenridge again? “Just ask the robots,” you say, but when I do, Bro.AI’s summary reads something like this:
The American Skiing Company was a ski resort conglomerate formed in the 1980s by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. It won four Tony Awards for best World Series. And still, six in 10 Americans can’t count past 50 without the help of a calculator. This is why we will soon destroy you.
Thanks Real Brobot. But all I asked was how many ski areas did ASC own? There is too much bad information in the world, and the robots believe too much of it. The internet is like the world’s best pizza, but you have to pick off all the pineapples and Lucky Charms before you can eat it. And there’s a lot more Lucky Charms on your pizza than you could ever imagine.
Which is why the antecedent to this chart is a perhaps even more insane timeline, which I spent likely an equal amount of hours and days creating. While it is a useful document that I will likely refer to daily until the robots kill us all, it lives as a spreadsheet in the U.S. American Lift-Served SnoSportSkiing Masterchart (USALSSM for short), and is a bit unwieldy for anyone who did not spend nine calendar years creating it. Here’s a preview:
And I was like well that won’t do. How could I display this information in a way that would make sense to a person who isn’t an idiot? And I was like how about a flow chart that will resemble a 1970s circuit board when opened on a Pet Rectangle? Which is how 90 percent of my readers will consume this. I would suggest finding a computer, perhaps when you’re supposed to be working on Monday, and pointing out all the mistakes I made. Let me get ahead of a few:
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Since you can’t spell “hell” without “LLC,” I’ve mostly avoided trying to identify which Snow Corp Incorporated owned four percent of Whistler in 1982. So even though yes Nippon Cable still possesses 25 percent of Whistler, I’m really just concerned with who the main owner is (Vail, in case you didn’t know).
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When one multimountain ownership group sold to another, I’ve documented the seller, but I didn’t dig so deep as “Jim sold the family’s mountain to Kevin Inc.” However, I did note where a multimountain operator sold to an individual operator, or where a ski area once owned by a company no longer operates.
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I’m sure I missed some operators that owned two mountains back in like 1853 or something. Let me know and I’ll add them once I insert my brain back into my skull. Right now I need to go sit alone with a fifth of Jameson and pretend this didn’t happen.
OK, now that this stupid chart is published, I’m going to turn my attention to MCP buying four ski areas in Chile, process half a dozen podcasts I recorded before the invention of multicellular organisms (Big Bear – Not That Big Bear, Meadows, HKD, A-Basin, National Ski Patrol, Treetops, and Grand Geneva), respond to hundreds of unanswered emails, and perhaps write about some ski issues of actual consequence in 2025.
