Top Five Fridays: February 21, 2025
#1. Killington Races Move to Copper for 2025
Hello, and welcome to Top Five Fridays, the February 21st 2025 edition! This week, we’re focusing a bit less on results and a bit more on stories from around the industry. With ski areas all over the US and Canada getting fresh snow this past week, it’s been a busy time to be out in the mountains! We start with some mixed news from our local racing region and then move on to some wind-related lift issues before hitting some labor dispute and ski area for sale classics. Enjoy!
Killington’s 8-year run of hosting the women’s World Cup GS and SL races in November will end this year as their construction of a new Superstar lift takes priority. It’ll be sad to see this venue, which has miraculously pulled off this event even in some of the warmer autumns as of late, take a break, but the addition of the new lift should allow this event to return the following season.
In the meantime, Copper Mountain in Colorado has graciously stepped in to host the 2025 races. Typically one of the earlier resorts to open in Colorado, Copper is blessed with a high elevation and generally low temperatures at that time of year. They are also no strangers to hosting high-level events and have plenty of infrastructure to handle the influx of visitors and athletes alike. In addition, this will be the only U.S. stop for the women’s Alpine team next season, and it sounds like they’re hoping it’ll be a steppingstone for more World Cup starts in the future. It’s kind of paying dividends already, with the 2025 Stifel Copper Cup slated to host two men’s and two women’s races from November 27-30 this year in Copper’s East Village base area.
#2. Windy Conditions Cause Eastern Issues
Following the footsteps of a strong winter storm, many ski areas in the Eastern US and Canada experienced closures, delays, and damage in the aftermath. Winter storms are funny, because you have to be prepared to take the good with the bad. In order for a storm to dump over a foot of snow on ski areas, there’s generally going to be some sturdy winds to go along with it. That was certainly the case this past President’s Weekend, with the full force of the gusts felt mainly Monday into Tuesday of the holiday week. Powder Magazine has a whole slew of articles highlighting/lowlighting some of the recent lift issues due to wind:
- 100mph Winds Blow Roof Off Stratton Gondola Terminal
- Tree Falls on Chairlift at Belleayre, New York
- 100 Guests Evacuated from New Hampshire Ski Lift
Powder Magazine reports on how strong winds ripped a good portion of the roof off of Stratton Mountain in Vermont’s top gondola terminal station. While the gondola and lift itself were largely unharmed, they still had to go through an extensive cleanup and rebuild phase, as well as checking the safety of the lift overall. The mountain plans on having the gondola operational by Saturday.
Reporter Izzy Lidsky of Powder Magazine was busy this week with other reports of wind damage to lifts, this time at Belleayre Mountain in upstate New York. Fortunately, Belleayre made the right decision to not open the lift on Monday morning, because a tree fell on the Belleayre Express lift cable and caused it to derail. The mountain notes that at this time, they “do not have an estimated timeline for the lift’s return to operation,” which indicates that there may be some serious damage.
Ian Greenwood, this time, still of Powder Magazine, writes of Pat’s Peak in New Hampshire and their issues. On Monday afternoon, the Triple Peak chairlift malfunctioned due to wind, causing an evacuation of about 120 skiers. The ski area states that “The lift experienced a deropement at tower 8 and the evacuation took roughly one and a half hours.” Fortunately, no injuries were reported, and that’s good because it was very cold.
#3. Keystone Ski Patrol Union Has Tentative New Agreement
As reported by SnowBrains, the Keystone Ski Patrol Union has reached a tentative new agreement with Keystone Resort through May 31, 2027. The negotiations started back in September of 2024 with the main issue of starting wages getting bumped from $21.50 to $23 per hour. When those talks stalled in December, about 60 patrollers staged a “walk in” demonstration to show solidarity. Unsurprisingly, management and workers disagreed on the process and the timetable, with both sides claiming that they are negotiating and operating in good faith while at the same time believing the other is not. With the strike in Park City over Christmas vacation showing the true power of the people in charge of on-mountain safety, it seems like more resorts are going to be paying their patrollers more money over the coming years.
#4. Powderhorn, CO Sells to Pacific Group Resorts
It almost seems like Jason Blevins of the Colorado Sun is a colleague of ours now, as he does such great and prolific reporting on ski news. In this article, Blevins covers the sale of Grand Junction, Colorado’s Powderhorn Mountain Resort to Utah-based PGRI. Due to the growth of Mesa County, CO, and the desire to ski in general, resorts like Powderhorn are viable targets for these larger conglomerate groups. PRGI operates much the same way as Vail’s Epic or Alterra’s Icon in that they provide lower-cost passes for the customer as well as larger investment capabilities than individual or private owners. Last bought by the Gart family and Andy Daly in 2011, Powderhorn is a reasonably good sized ski area with about 1600 vertical and 1600 acres of skiing. They average 250 inches of snow in the winter and offer extensive cross-country and downhill mountain biking in the summer.