Podcast #190: Giants Ridge, Minnesota GM Fred Seymour

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast

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Who

Fred Seymour, General Manager of Giants Ridge, Minnesota

Recorded on

October 28, 2024

About Giants Ridge

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board, a State of Minnesota economic development agency

Located in: Biwabik, Minnesota

Year founded: 1958/59

Closest neighboring ski areas: Mt. Itasca (1:14), Cloquet Ski Club (1:11), Chester Bowl (1:13), Spirit Mountain (1:18), Mont du Lac (1:27)

Base elevation: 1,472 feet

Summit elevation: 1,972 feet

Vertical drop: 500 feet

Skiable Acres: 202

Average annual snowfall: 62 inches

Trail count: 35 (33% beginners, 50% “confident skiers”; 17% expert)

Lift count: 7 (1 high-speed quad, 1 fixed-grip quad, 1 triple, 2 doubles, 2 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Giants Ridge’s lift fleet)

Why I interviewed him

Sometimes a thing surprises me. Like I think New York City is a giant honking mess and then I walk 60 blocks through Manhattan and say “actually I can see this.” Or I decide that I hate country music because it’s lame in my adolescent rock-and-roll world, but once it goes mainstream I’m like okay actually this is catchy. Or I think I hate cottage cheese until I try it around age 19 and I realize it’s my favorite thing ever.

All of these things surprised me because I assumed they were something different from what they actually were. And so, in the same way, Giants Ridge surprised me. I did not expect to dislike the place, but I did not expect to be blown away by it, either. I drove up thinking I’d have a nice little downhill rush and drove away thinking that if all ski areas were like this ski area there would be a lot more skiers in the world.

I could, here, repeat all the things I recently wrote about Crystal, another model Midwest ski area. But I wrote plenty on Giants Ridge’s many virtues below, and there’s a lot more in the podcast. For now, I’ll just say that this is as solid a ski operation as you’ll find anywhere, and one that’s worth learning more about.

What we talked about

Rope splicing day for one of Giants Ridge’s classic lifts; a massive snowmaking upgrade; when all the water comes out of the sky after winter’s done; the slowest Midwest ski season on record; how Giants Ridge skied into April in spite of the warm winter; learning to ski with an assist from Sears (the store); skiing Colorado before I-70; the amazing Hyland Hills, Minnesota; why Seymour didn’t go all Colorad-Bro on Midwest skiing – “skiing is special in different places”; some founder’s history of the high-speed ropetow; where Giants Ridge will install its first new high-speed ropetow; the virtues of high-speed tows; Hidden Valley, Missouri and working for Peak Resorts; reaction to Vail purchasing Peak Resorts in 2019; the government agency that owns Giants Ridge; the story of the ski area’s founding and purpose; how and why the ski area is so well-funded; how the ski area funded its latest giant capital project; where Giants Ridge envisions planting a second detachable chairlift; potential for far greater lodging capacity; expansion potential; where to hunt glades at Giants Ridge; the mountain’s trail-naming theme; why the ski area’s grooming is so good; why Giants Ridge offers fourth-graders unlimited access on the Minnesota Ski Areas Association Passport, rather than the standard two days; and why Giants Ridge left the Indy Pass after just one year.

Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview

Lazy non-ski journalists often pull out some version of this stat to prove that lift-served skiing is a dying industry: America once had more than 700 ski areas, but that number has plummeted to fewer than 500, according to the NSAA (and 505 according to The Storm Skiing Journal). The culprit, they immediately conclude, is climate change, because what else could it possibly be?

The truth is less sinister. Most of these lost ski areas were killed by the same thing that ended the horse and buggy and the landline and the butter churn: capitalism. The simpler story of ski area shrinkage is this: a post-World War II building boom flooded the market with ski areas, many of which were built in questionable locations (like Georgia and Arkansas). As some ski areas modernized, especially with snowmaking, their competitors that failed to do so, um, failed. That great weed-out reached its height from the mid-70s to the mid-90s. The number of active U.S. ski areas has remained more or less stable for the past 20 years.

I fear, however, that we are on the edge of the next great weed-out. If the last one targeted ski areas that failed to invest in snowmaking, this next one will bullseye ski areas that fail to invest in technology. Consumers live in their Pet Rectangles. Ski areas need to meet them there or they may as well not exist. Swipe, tap, bink is the dance of modern commerce. Cash-only, on-site only – the default for centuries – now just annoys people.

Technology does not just mean computer stuff, however. It also means energy-efficient, automated snowmaking to cut down on utilities and labor. It means grooming your hill like Sun Valley even if you are not in fact Sun Valley. It means modern (not necessarily high-speed) chairlifts with safety bars. And in some cases it means rediscovering old technology that can be re-applied in a modern context – high-speed ropetows, for example, are dirt cheap, move more skiers per hour than a high-speed eight-person chairlift, and are the perfect complement to terrain parks and the skiers who want to lap them 100 times in an afternoon.

Unfortunately, a lot of that technology is very expensive. The majority of ski areas are themselves worth less than the cost of a brand-new high-speed quad. Those Riblets and Halls are holding together for now, but they won’t last forever. So what to do?

I don’t know, and Giants Ridge is, I’ll admit, a curious example to use here. The ski area benefits from enormous state-sponsored subsidies. But through this arrangement, Giants Ridge acts as a best-case-scenario case study in how a small ski area can fortify itself against a technological revolution, a changing climate, and a social media-saturated consumer base in search of something novel and fun. Not all small ski areas will be able to do all of the things that Giants Ridge does, but most of them can achieve some version of some of them. Third-party companies like Entabeni and White Peaks can tug small ski areas into the digital sphere. A modern chairlift doesn’t have to mean a new chairlift. The one state subsidy that private ski areas have occasionally been able to access is one to purchase energy-efficient snowguns. Inexpensive high-speed ropetows (Giants Ridge is installing its first this year), should be serving almost every terrain park in the country.

The Midwest suffered its worst winter on record last ski season. Many ski areas shut down in February or early March. Had a skier been plucked from the Rockies and dropped onto the summit of Giants Ridge, however, they would not have suspected this regional catastrophe. I visited on March 10 – wall-to-wall snow, every trail open, not even a bare patch. The ski area stayed open until April 7. The future holds plenty of challenges for skiing. Giants Ridge is working on answers.

Questions I wish I’d asked

The largess on display at Giants Ridge introduces the same set of issues that frustrate private ski area owners in New York, who have to compete directly against three ski areas (Whiteface, Gore, Belleayre) that have benefitted from hundreds of millions of dollars in state investment. The dynamic is a bit different here, as the money funnels to Giants Ridge via mining companies who support the ski area en lieu of paying certain taxes. But the result is the same: ski areas that have to pay for capital upgrades out of their profits versus a ski area that gets capital upgrades essentially for free. The massive snowmaking system that Giants Ridge is installing this year is, in Seymour’s words, “on the taxpayer.”

While we discuss these funding mechanisms and the history of Giants Ridge as economic-development machine, we don’t explore how this impacts private, competing ski areas. I avoided this for the same reason that I wouldn’t ask a football coach why the taxpayers ought to have funded his team’s $500 million stadium – that wasn’t his choice, and he just works there. His job, like the job of any ski area manager, is to do the best he can with the resources he’s given.

But I’ll acknowledge that this setup grates on a lot of private operators in the region. That’s a fight worth talking about, but with the appropriate officials, and in a different context, and with the time it takes to tell the story properly.

What I got wrong

* When discussing the rope-splicing project underway at Giants Ridge on the day of our conversation, I referred to “the chair you’re replacing the ‘ropetow’ on.” I meant the “haulrope.”

* I said I visited Giants Ridge, “in mid-February, or maybe it was early March.” I skied Giants Ridge on March 10 of this year.

Why you should ski Giants Ridge

This is one of the nicest ski areas I’ve ever skied. Full stop. No asterisk. The slopes are immaculate. The lodge is spotless. The pitch is excellent. The runs are varied. Giants Ridge has a high-speed quad and RFID gates and a paved parking lot. If you need a helper, there are helpers everywhere. Gorgeous views from the top. That may just sound like any other modern ski area, but this is a) the Midwest, where “modern” means the lifts don’t run on diesel fuel, and, b) rural rural Minnesota, which is like regular rural Minnesota, but a lot farther away. To drive out of the range of cell service into the far reaches of a forest within which Google Maps labels human settlements of which no traces can be found, and at the end of this road find not just a ski area but a ski area that looks like it was built yesterday is a rather remarkable experience.

I’m not saying cancel your trip to Whistler. I am saying that this is worth driving to if you’re anywhere within driving range (which for a Midwesterner is roughly 90 hours). Giants Ridge is not sprawling like Lutsen or thrilling like Bohemia or snowy like Powderhorn. There are no Granite Peak six-packs or Highlands bubble lifts. But for what it has and what it is, Giants Ridge is as close to a perfect ski area as any I’ve ever encountered.

It's not a perfect ski area, of course. None of them are. If I have to nitpick: the hill still runs three old chairlifts with no safety bars; it lacks even a token mogul run; there are no marked glades; loading the Helsinki chair can require an annoying uphill shuffle. And there are signs all over the place referring to something called “golf.” All fixable issues, none considerations for skipping the joint. If you want skiing featuring the best technology of 1984, the Midwest still has plenty of that. If you prefer to ski in 2024, check this place out.

Podcast Notes

On the Midwest’s weakest winter on record

I ran through this on the article accompanying the recent Norway Mountain podcast, but it’s worth reposting what I wrote here:

Skier visits were down in every region of the United States last winter, but they all but collapsed in the Midwest, with a 26.7 percent plunge, according to the annual Kottke Demographic Report. Michigan alone was down nearly a half million skier visits. Check out these numbers:

For comparison, overall skier numbers dropped just six percent in the Northeast, and five percent in the Rockies.

On Hyland Hills

Hyland Hills is a 180-vertical-foot volcano, packing 180,000 skier visits into its tiny footprint every winter. The ski area is a model of why small municipal hills should be oriented around terrain parks.

The bump is perhaps the birthplace of the high-speed ropetow, which can move up to 4,000 (some estimates claim as many as 8,200), skiers per hour. You can see the tows working in this video:

Midwest Skiers tells the full high-speed ropetow story:

On the Three Rivers Park District

The Three Rivers Park District manages 27,000 acres of parkland across the seven-county Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area, including Hyland Hills and Elm Creek, an even smaller, beginner-focused hill on the north side of town:

On Hidden Valley, Missouri

An odd fact of American skiing is that Missouri is home to two ski areas, both of which are owned by Vail Resorts. Seymour worked for a time at Hidden Valley, seated a few miles outside of St. Louis. The stats: 320 vertical feet on 65 acres, with 19 inches of snowfall in an average winter.

On Peak Resorts

Hidden Valley was the OG resort in Peak Resorts’ once-sprawling portfolio. After growing to 19 ski areas scattered from New Hampshire to Missouri, Peak sold its entire operation to Vail Resorts in 2019.

On expansion potential into the Superior National Forest

Seymour explains that there’s “not a whole lot of potential” to expand the ski area into the Superior National Forest, which Giants Ridge backs into. That may sound odd to folks in the West, where the majority of ski areas operate on Forest Service leases. There’s little precedent for such arrangements in the Midwest, however, and Lutsen’s plans to expand into the same forest slammed into the Pinecone Police last year. As I wrote in my podcast episode with Lutsen GM Jim Vick:

Over the summer, Lutsen withdrew the plan, and Superior National Forest Supervisor Thomas Hall recommended a “no action” alternative, citing “irreversible damage” to mature white cedar and sugar maple stands, displacement of backcountry skiers, negative impacts to the 300-mile-long Superior hiking trail, objections from Native American communities, and water-quality concerns. Lutsen had until Oct. 10 to file an objection to the decision, and they did.

The expansion would have developed 500-ish acres. Superior National Forest covers 3.9 million acres. Million. With an “M.”

On the Minnesota state 4th-grade ski passport

Like many state ski associations, the Minnesota Ski Areas Association offers fourth-graders a $39.99 “passport” good for at least two lift tickets to each of the state’s ski areas. While many ski areas stick to the two-day offering and black out many peak periods, Afton Alps, Chester Bowl, Detroit Mountain, Giants Ridge, Mount Ski Gull, and Wild Mountain offer unlimited redemptions (Ski Gull blacks out the Christmas holidays).

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