Storm News 10/29/2026: Why Mt. Bachelor’s Northwest Quad Upgrade Is a Big Deal with Resort President Merriman
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The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast thinks it’s cool that we get to ski on a volcano.
Who John Merriman, President and General Manager of Mount Bachelor, Oregon Date Recorded Oct. 28, 2026 About Mount Bachelor Owned by: Powdr, which also owns: Year founded: 1958 Pass affiliations: * Ikon Pass: 7 days, no blackouts * Ikon Base Pass: 5 days, holiday blackouts Base elevation: 5,703 feet (bottom of Northwest Express chairlift) Summit elevation: 8,957 feet (top of Summit Express chairlift), can hike to 9,065 feet Vertical drop: 3,254 feet lift-served | 3,362 feet hike-to Skiable acres: 4,323 Average annual snowfall: 410 inches Lift count: 15 (1 six-pack, 7 high-speed quads, 1 fixed-grip quad, 3 triples, 3 carpets) Why I interviewed him First, the volcano thing never stops thrilling me. As I wrote when I hosted Mount Hood Meadows GM Greg Pack on the pod last year: Volcanoes are weird. Oh look, an exploding mountain. Because that seems reasonable. Volcanoes sound like something imagined, like dragons or teleportation or dinosaurs*. “So let me get this straight,” I imagine some puzzled Appalachian miner, circa 1852, responding to the fellow across the fire as he tells of his adventures in the Oregon Territory, “you expect me to believe that out thataways they got themselves mountains that just blow their roofs off whenever they feel like it, and shoot off fire and rocks and gas for 50 mile or more, and no one never knows when it’s a’comin’? You must think I’m dumber’n that there tree stump.” Turns out volcanoes are real. How humanity survived past day one I have no idea. But here we are, skiing on volcanoes instead of tossing our virgins from the rim as a way of asking the nice mountain to please not explode (seriously how did anyone make it out of the past alive?). And one of the volcanoes we can ski on is Mount Hood. This actually seems more unbelievable to me than the concept of a vengeful nuclear mountain. PNW Nature Bros shield every blade of grass like they’re guarding Fort Knox. When, in 2014, federal scientists proposed installing four monitoring stations on Hood, which the U.S. Geological Survey ranks as the sixth-highest threat to erupt out of America’s 161 active volcanoes, these morons stalled the process for six years. “I think it is so important to have places like that where we can just step back, out of respect and humility, and appreciate nature for what it is,” a Wilderness Watch official told The New York Times. Personally I think it’s so important to install basic monitoring infrastructure so that thousands of people are not incinerated in a predictable volcanic eruption. While “Japan, Iceland and Chile smother their high-threat volcanoes in scientific instruments,” The Times wrote, American Granola Bros say things like, “This is more proof that the Forest Service has abandoned any pretense of administering wilderness as per the letter or spirit of the Wilderness Act.” And Hood and the nation’s other volcanoes cackle madly. “These idiots are dumber than the human-sacrifice people,” they say just before belching up an ash cloud that could take down a 747. When officials finally installed these instrument clusters on Hood in 2020, they occupied three boxes that look to be approximately the size of a convenience-store ice freezer, which feels like an acceptable trade-off to mass death and airplanes falling out of the sky. It’s weird because for most of human history, humans just kind of did whatever they wanted to. That’s how we have castles on mountain peaks all over Europe and railroad tracks across continents and the towering city of Manhattan where a forest used to be. Ever heard of The Great Black Swamp? It once covered three million acres in Northwest Ohio and was more than 120 miles wide. It’s gone. Gone. Humans drained it in the 1800s for farmland. Mount Bachelor ski resort, opened in 1958 as Bachelor Butte, is probably one of the last instances we’ll ever see in America of a built human experience laid over
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Who Chad Linebaugh, President of Sundance Resort, Utah Date Recorded Oct. 27, 2026 About Sundance Owned by: Two investment groups: Broadreach Capital Partners & Cedar Capital Partners Located in: Sundance, Utah Year founded: 1969 Pass affiliations: Power Pass & Power Pass Select: 3 days Base elevation: 6,096 feet Summit elevation: 8,250 feet Vertical drop: 2,154 feet Skiable acres: 580 Average annual snowfall: 275 inches Lift count: 10 (2 high-speed quads, 4 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 3 carpets) Why I interviewed him I last hosted Linebaugh on the podcast in 2022, as the resort was prepping for its upper-mountain Wildwood expansion: The beginner- and family-focused terrain pod was a brilliant way to open upper-mountain vistas to a demographic often sequestered to the bottom of the hill. The expansion could have been a nice period to end a paragraph of change at Sundance, one which had included the mountain’s first high-speed lift, Outlaw Express. But Sundance wasn’t finished. Last year, the resort announced another terrain expansion, this time on the backside high peak, with 165 new acres stapled to the south side of the resort: The new lift - Sundance’s second high-speed quad, opens this winter and will load near the Wildwood base: Sundance is in a rough spot: lower, smaller, and shorter than the megaplexes churning international visitors through the grand parlors of the Cottonwoods and Park City. But the bump is making a run, even without hitching itself to the Epic and Ikon super-collectors. It’s a damn fine story, and a damn fine place to ski. Transcripts There are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them. Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer. Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment. Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio. Zoom Stuart Winchester: My guest today is the president of Sundance Resort in Utah. Sundance is in the midst of a big expansion that includes 165 acres of new terrain and the ski area’s second high-speed quad. 00:03:28.000 --> 00:03:46.000 Stuart Winchester: The ski area offers a 2,150-foot vertical drop served by 10 lifts. He has worked at the ski area since 2006. He is a very good friend of the Storm, making his second appearance on the podcast. Chad Leinbaugh joins us. Chad, welcome back to the Storm. 00:03:34.000 --> 00:03:35.000 Chad Linebaugh: Mm-hmm. 00:03:46.000 --> 00:03:49.000 Stuart Winchester: Always good to catch up. How you doing today? 00:03:48.000 --> 00:04:04.000 Chad Linebaugh: Stuart, I am fantastic. It’s great to be back with you. Love connecting with you and all of your network that you’ve built. I mean, it’s incredible the reach that you have. You know, when I was on your podcast years ago, it was just incredible how many people commented. So thank you for having me. 00:04:04.000 --> 00:04:06.000 Chad Linebaugh: Having me back on. 00:04:05.000 --> 00:04:14.000 Stuart Winchester: So, I’m gonna jump right into this. You’re welcome anytime, Chad. I wanna jump right into this expansion, because nothing gets me riled up. 00:04:14.000 --> 00:04:26.000 Stuart Winchester: in a good way, like an expansion. I just had Brandi Hammo
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Who Josh Bean, General Manager of Lee Canyon, Nevada Date Recorded Oct. 20, 2026 About Lee Canyon Owned by: Mountain Capital Partners, which also owns: Year founded: 1965 Pass affiliations: * Power Pass: unlimited * Power Pass Select: 12 shared days with Arizona Snowbowl, Purgatory – holiday blackouts apply * Power Pass Core: 4 shared days with Arizona Snowbowl, Purgatory, Brian Head – holiday blackouts apply Base elevation: 8,510 feet Summit elevation: 9,370 feet lift-served | 11,289 feet hike-to Vertical drop: 860 feet lift-served | 2,779 feet hike-to Skiable acres: 235 Average annual snowfall: 161 inches Lift count: 7 (4 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 1 ropetow, 1 carpet) In my conversation with Josh, I noted that Lee Canyon’s chairlifts were all built this century, a rare circumstance for an American ski area. That’s true, with an asterisk - the Sherwood triple arrived used at Lee Canyon in 2005, from then-sister resort Alpine Meadows (both were then owned by Powdr; Alpine Meadows is now part of Alterra’s Palisades Tahoe complex). If we include the machine’s dozen years in California (and we must), the Sherwood clocks in as Lee Canyon’s elder, at a still-not-so-old-for-a-fixed-grip-triple 33 years (I’m also not 100 percent certain that this is only the lift’s second life, as it may have been relocated to Alpine in 1993): Why I interviewed him Just three years after completing the intermediate-oriented Ponderosa expansion, Lee Canyon is adding the long-planned West Bowl pod looker’s right of Bluebird: The new Skytrac fixed-grip quad serving the terrain will rise about the same number of feet as neighboring Bluebird and Sherwood, but will land a bit higher, finally edging Lee Canyon close to a four-digit vertical drop. Skiable acreage jumps from a modest 195 to a still-modest 235, though Lee Canyon has always lowballed its terrain footprint. But owner Mountain Capital Partners (MCP) may just be pouring concrete for the mansion they want to build above. Well, the mansion is already built, Lee Canyon just needs an elevator to access the nearly 2,000 vertical feet of steep alpine bowls towering above the lifts. It could be America’s Kicking Horse or Revelstoke, a community bump promoted to international freeride destination, with the addition of a single megalift. Here’s Lee Canyon today, as shown on Google Earth, (which has not yet added the trails cut for West Bowl) - future lifts could run as high as the top of Lee Peak (Charleston Peak, rising in the distance, is the highest point in the county, and is not on anyone’s ski area plans): The basic ingredients for mega-expansion - someone to build it and someone to ski it -are all there. Meaning we have an operator who would be happy to spend unreasonable sums of money to build an unimaginably awesome ski experience for the enormous numbers of skiers who already live nearby or could easily get there via Vegas’ gigantic airport. Lee Canyon sits close enough to Las Vegas that the Grinch could ride his fucked-up dog-deer sled from the top of Lee Peak to The Strip and loot enough cheer to cancel Christmas for a century. And MCP would like nothing more than its very own Snowbird or Jackson Hole (besides the one they already have in South America), to make their Power Pass go KaBoom. Resort officials have already begun talks with the U.S. Forest Service on a master development plan update that would sanction Lee Canyon’s transformation into Super Lee Canyon. Of course this is America, not Canada, so instead of rapidly building Revelstoke or Kicking Horse on the site of its small ski hill, MCP is likely on a collision course with a righteous mob of pinecone enthusiasts, guardians of various species of endangered pebbles, astrologists and oil painters who need viewshed integrity to practice their craft, and like five cranky a******s whose idea of a fun ski day is hiking uphill for several hours wearing 50 pounds of gear for one powder run that they’d rather not share with all the dorks w