Ski Cooper

they have locals, right? Because that's a mountain with interesting terrain, even though it's short vert, where parents would want to go and like put their kids in ski school while they go off and ski, even if you don't get the parents.

Is there, do you see opportunity in that? Because there's lots of hills like that, which are not, you know, down to Frisco level, but you know, if you want to go Summit County, so you have Frisco and you have Keystone, A-Basin, Breck, but then you also have Granby Ranch and you have Ski Cooper and it's like, okay, or you have Echo Mountain, maybe those places are sort of the logical next.

I don't even know if it's possible to get the really big ones, but you know, do you see any growth in that? Just tiering up, not to destinations necessarily, but sort of like ski areas that families actually want to ski a whole season at.

Yeah.

That's all you need.

So all of those first comps, like, you know, the very first snowboard competition ever was held at Ski Cooper in Colorado.

This is we're talking like 81, 82.

They were all races.

And of course, some of the little guys around there.

You know, Ski Cooper hasn't announced their lift ticket prices yet, and I know it's small, but it's still, it's, it's a place you can go.

It's high.

There's no snowmaking.

It's all natural snow.

It's a very cool little experience.

$49 midweek tickets at Ski Cooper last year, maxed out at $99 on weekends.

Down the road, if you're on your way to Aspen, Sunlight, which has 1,750 feet of vertical drop and two brand-new lifts.

And it was about snowmaking.

And Dan Torsell, the longtime GM of Ski Cooper, told me a long time ago when he came on this pod that Ski Cooper and Monarch were the only big lift surf ski areas in Colorado that don't have snowmaking.

I think Silverton is too, but that sometimes gets lost in the shuffle.

So you have it in your master development plan.

I don't see how you can't be anti-collaborative and run a ski area, not to mention operating what is effectively a business-to-business service business and to Benny and the need to work with all their customers.

What's the business justification for not wanting to collaborate outside the sphere he controls? The Ski Cooper thing was a bit different in many ways.

Here we're talking about two third-party systems meant to drive skier visits, and at least at the moment, given the portfolios, I think it is a relatively small percentage of skiers that are most likely choosing between the Snow Pass and Indy.

Most of them, I would assume, are likely NYC Metro-based.

However, what I think you're describing could solve is the free visit problem.

Because I know Indian Ski Cooper, for example, had a dust-up a few years ago because Ski Cooper was essentially – India accused them of essentially creating a national pass.

And that was probably my fault because I wrote an article that said, hey, look at this secret national pass for $300 in Colorado.

Nonetheless, it's a lot of – And you have mountains like Bogus Basin in Idaho that are still giving away a lot of free visits.

One place we can look for like verified info about like who, what snow, what mountains were really supporting snowboarding was like who hosted some of snowboarding's first events.

So Ski Cooper, super small ski area in central Colorado.

It's kind of down the road from Copper Mountain up there on like, you know, in between sort of.

Just in the Summit County, larger Summit County area.

Yeah, we mentioned kind of in our intro, we set up sort of an honor roll of some early like kind of, they tended to be mom and pop resorts that were really doing some of that like hard work.

You know, we talked about Soda Springs and...

Tenney Mountain and Ski Cooper in Colorado, these places that were hosting early events, Berthoud Pass and stuff.

Why do you think it was those smaller resorts were more receptive? Was it just they had less? Well, maybe they were trying to there was like an underdogness about them where they were trying to look for new opportunities.