OpenSnow’s Joel Gratz built a Pod Shop for Powder Days: the PMs are Meteorologists and the Returns are Faceshots. Send It!

Welcome to the derivative by our Sam Alternatives.

Send it.

Hello there.

Welcome back.

I've been traveling like crazy conferences, a ski trip, more conferences.

But back in the saddle here, back in the office looking over what we've missed.

I think we dropped a new white paper, how to start a hedge fund.

For those of you thinking about getting into this crazy business,

and I wrote up a post around the Satrini Research AI piece,

which was the talk of the town down at Eye Connections in Miami.

Let's go check both those out at rcmalts.com slash education.

Under this episode, which is a bit of a one for me.

As we've got the founder of the Open Snow app,

I'm constantly checking all winter long

to see where the fresh snow is for skiing.

So Joel Gratz, the founder, is on talking powder forecasting,

starting a small business.

If this year's crappy snow is the new norm, luckily he said no,

and what's wrong with the ski business.

Send it.

All right, everybody.

We're here with Joel Gratz.

Joel, how are you?

Doing good.

I feel I'm happier if it's not a lot more this season,

but I'm happy to speak with you.

I hear you.

And we were just talking offline.

You're in Boulder area.

I am in Boulder area.

I grew up in the snow fields of southeastern Pennsylvania.

I say jokingly outside of Philadelphia.

And that might be why I like snow so much,

because it didn't snow very much there.

So I grew up skiing.

And the coconut of Pennsylvania at Shawnee Mountain went to school

from meteorology at Penn State in Pennsylvania

and moved out to Boulder, Colorado for grad school.

Nice.

And went to Boulder itself.

See you.

Yep.

So see you Boulder for grad school where I studied meteorology.

Well, environmental studies.

I got an MBA while I was there.

But I also discovered this thing called powder,

which I had only seen about twice in Pennsylvania.

And honestly, I had an amazing childhood skiing ski racing,

ski instructing.

I had a great racer, but it was fun to keep me on the hill.

And I never understood that powder was a thing

until I moved to Colorado.

And then a friend's uncle toured us around Vale

on a really good powder day.

And I was, I mean, one, I couldn't ski it because I had east coast

race skis.

Yeah, I had no idea.

And I'd never trained at all on how to ski it.

So I fell all the time.

But I, once I figured it out, I was mesmerized.

And then I realized, oh, hey, hold on a second.

I just spent a bunch of time studying meteorology,

which is the key to figuring out when the powder is going to hit.

And so that was the genesis for this obsession

with trying to find powder.

I love it.

What my experience, some of the best skiers I've ever met

are east coast scares, right?

Grow up skiing on basically metal plates on ice.

And then once you get them into the real stuff, they're like,

oh, this is easier than I thought it would be.

You think the same?

I, I do.

Although, you know, growing or now my son who is eight is coming up

through the ranks and there's a lot of good skiers out here.

But I will say that meeting people out here and meeting people

from the east, there is often, you can kind of just tell that

somebody grew up on the east ski racing because they have a little

bit of a different aggressive stance than people that may have grown

up, you know, free riding and skiing powder and jumping cliffs

in the West.

Hey, whatever people want to do to have fun is fine.

But I agree with you that there is the training ground of the east

is a good spot to learn good technique.

Yeah, don't sleep on the east.

I went to school upstate New York and we're on trimester.

So we would do like at least three weeks every year just going

around Vermont, New Hampshire.

It's been the main all those places, which is good fun.

Did you ever see the sun when you were going to school in the northeast

because yeah,

in fact, I tell my kids and there was one day I slept till maybe

like four or 45 p.m.

And I missed the sun entirely that day.

It was dark when I went to bed.

It was dark when I woke up.

That's not good for your internal clock.

Now, and okay, I loved growing up in Pennsylvania,

a great childhood.

It was really fun.

But I found myself going to school at Penn State,

which is not even as cloudy as some other areas farther up in

upstate New York or farther to the west.

But I found myself after a couple of weeks of mostly gray skies

being less happy than I was accustomed to being.

And I didn't really realize until I came out the Colorado

how impactful, kind of just sunny weather can be.

So I love being on the east coast, but I love Colorado even more.

And we're, what was that a month ago, right?

It snowed like two feet in Southern Pennsylvania.

And Philly area and was nothing out west.

We're like, what's happening?

Yeah, I wish.

That is the time that I remember.

I mean, so this obsession for a similar backstory runs very deep.

I still remember listening to KYW 1060 news radio outside of Philly

when, you know, before the internet, they would report which schools

would be closed with a number.

And so I think central bucks was 755.

And so, you know, I'd be listening for that.

But then some kids might hear that and go back to bed or lounge

around the second.

I heard that school was closed.

I would wake up.

I would shovel.

I would pile snow.

I would take weather records and write them down.

I would watch the weather channel.

I would build a fire.

Like I was insatiable for snow from a young age.

So I'm just continuing that.

Did you call your friends be like first to report?

Hey, it's going to be a snow day.

I don't actually, I didn't.

I was just so obsessed with going out in the snow.

I didn't call anybody.

So which came first?

You wanted to be a weatherman first and then got into the ski angle

or you wanted to be in the ski angle the whole time.

Yeah, I think it was concurrent.

Um, my, so my parents neither grew up skiing, which is odd

because I feel like a lot of skiers.

Their family grows up skiing and kind of just come up in that rank.

So neither my parents ski it.

And honestly, the entire reason that I'm here talking to you now

and having this business is because my parents saw an ad in the newspaper

when I was four years old for a ski and stay special up at Shawnee Mountain.

You know, for whatever weekend special was for a lesson.

And they, they took me out there and I got a lesson.

And I, as they tell it, I was asleep before they got back to the car

because often, you know, it's a lot of effort for young kids and fall asleep soon.

But I was, I was hooked and they, they kept me doing it.

And then my parents learned the ski to kind of support my habit.

And I think my obsession with calling the snow report line at Shawnee

and trying to figure out if it was going to snow or add Shawnee or actually,

I mean, come on, it barely snowed at Shawnee.

What I was really trying to figure out is if it would be cold enough for them to make snow.

So between that and figuring out if we were going to have a snow day,

I would obsessively watch the weather channel.

And I would stagger my watching of the three local TV stations in Philadelphia

because they would each do the weather at slightly different times

during the six o'clock news.

One was like 15 after one, 18 after one was 21 after.

So I could see all the different weather.

And so I, the skiing and the weather obsession was a concurrent obsession for me.

But I will say that I initially wanted to be a pilot.

And I still am a big aviation geek.

But I realized that my desires for meteorology were stronger than just slightly stronger than my desires for aviation plus.

And I don't, I can't chop this up to anything specific.

I kind of recognized in middle school and high school that I didn't think the aviation pathway as a pilot

or the right family life.

For me, not saying you can't have a wonderful life in a family,

but just being away for, you know, multiple days at a time or however it might work out.

I realized in high school, it was just kind of not my thing.

So I, I focus on meteorology and never look back.

You're ahead of your years there knowing what you're wanted the future life pattern to look like.

Is Shawnee the closest ski hill to New York City?

Probably.

No.

There is a little creek.

Yeah, which was called Vernon Valley back in the day that's closer to New York City.

But Shawnee as a Pennsylvania mountain is right off of I 80.

So if you pass mountain creek in New Jersey, then the closest spot is Shawnee.

And I'll tell you, after I ski race for a while, I then became an instructor because I wasn't a very good ski racer.

I just, I didn't have the killer instinct.

The desire to go fast and then fall.

Like, no, I'm going to go at like 80%.

Well, that's, yeah, probably not going to work for ski racing, but I was a ski instructor.

And that helped me appreciate, you know, learning to ski again.

And most of our clientele or a lot was from New York City.

And so quite diverse, especially, you know, in an industry that is not very diverse among people.

Getting people from New York City was hilarious and fun and challenging as a 16 17 year old teaching skiing.

It was really enjoyable.

And, you know, that's what I did for my high school years before going to college.

Quick, we'll get, we'll get into the open snow in a second here.

But my brain went to when you said your parents son had the newspaper.

What do you think that less than cost?

Like, God, right versus what it is today.

Yeah, unbelievable.

And he, you know, 20 bucks, who knows, but, but, but the cool thing.

I mean, I will say like, and I'm dealing with this as a parent now, where, you know, my son has interests

that are similar.

And in some ways, and different than in other ways than mine for sports and other things.

I'm trying to support that.

My dad was a near professional baseball player.

He played triple A for the Orioles at a certain time had a baseball scholarship and college.

And he pushed me, not pushed, but it said, hey, you know, go play baseball.

And I told him that I was going to retire after one season of baseball.

But, you know, I credit him and my mom for not pushing.

Say, all right, you know, what else is going on?

And they were so on board with me skiing.

After they had never skied that in elementary school, my dad would take me out of school on just random weekdays and take me up to Shawnee.

Because there were no kids on weekdays because all the kids were supposed to be in school, which meant I got a private lesson for the cost of a group lesson because there were no other kids to get lessons.

So, you know, there was some creativity there to save some money and, and, and also the flexibility to not necessarily push me to do what they wanted me to do.

That's one of my hacks. I used for years my wife basically would check her under a lesson and I'd go ski good stuff.

And on Aspen Highlands, not many people go to Highlands for the lessons.

So, we'd go to Highlands. I'd get to do all the good stuff.

And she'd go in a group lesson and it ended up being one, maybe two people.

Yeah.

Like, $300 versus $1,300.

I'm like, hey, we're winning.

So, boom, you go to grad school, Colorado, you're out, you went, started open snow immediately or you had a real job first.

Yeah, I did have a real job, which we were talking offline, which aligned with one of your previous podcast guest Jeff Masters, you started the weather underground.

I was an analyst for a hurricane earthquake insurance company. So there was a financial angle.

There was this whole thing, but that was a phenomenal mix of business and weather. I was interested in business. I was interested in weather.

And here we go. So I spent four years here in Boulder working for a company called iCat Managers, which was a insurance company for hurricane and earthquake risk for small businesses.

And I had a great time working for them. I learned quite a bit.

And I also learned that powder was my first obsession.

Weird for them to be based in Boulder, but whatever.

It was, yeah, Jack Graham, who started the company, I believe, was based in Boulder. I believe that's one of the reasons that it was here, but him and some other people that started the company had deep ties to earthquake insurance in California, other places.

But it was here in Boulder. It was helpful for me, but I realized about four years in that there's a day that it was nuking snow at bail, just nuking snow.

And I remember sitting in my desk at iCat and almost shaking almost shaking with the desire to get out of there and get to bail and refreshing the webcam.

And I can just see it absolutely nuking and how fun that must be. And I just knew that at some point probably need to do something else. Nothing against the folks at iCat, but I had an obsession that ran deep.

Well, yeah, insurance and skiing don't usually mix up. So then how does all come up to be you just popped in.

It popped in your head or you had a whole business plan. Yeah, there's, well, you know, the myth of the, they're not even the myth, but the one off of the Mark Zuckerbergs that just have an idea and they do it and it nearly takes off. It's not generally how anything works in life for most people.

So when I first became obsessed with snow, I started to talk with my friends and I said, hey, I think we should go to name the location this weekend because it's going to have good snow.

And my friends, as friends do, made fun of me and excessively for being wrong all the time and saying it's a big jinx and all that stuff, but they kept asking me where to go.

So eventually I put them, I put 37 in my friends on an email list and I said, I'm not going to text you every time we get tired of this.

Now you once or twice a week to say, this is where we're going to go skiing because of the snow and that 37 person email list grew to 100, 300, go to 500, but it was a side gig side hustle, not a big deal.

At that time, I emailed the National Mother Service here in Boulder, I emailed the Colorado Avalanche Information Center. I took classes. I talked to anybody who had ever been a forecaster in Colorado, who was interested in snow.

I just wanted to obsess and learn about why does they all get more snow than beaver creek on a certain wind direction, why did ask them get hit.

And so I studied, studied, studied, tried to figure things out. And then a couple years into this, I just had this fledgling website and then I made a blog, but people started emailing me asking to advertise people started emailing me asking to write a story and a local publication.

One day, I woke up and I thought, well, you know what, I studied entrepreneurship in the MBA program. I've got what you would call traction, not internet traction, you know, I was on the scale of hundreds of thousands, but not, you know, not millions. And I was 28.

I had a roommate covering half my mortgage. I had no significant other. I had no pets. I was like, man, if there was ever a time to do this thing, this is the time. And I also want to give a big credit to the Boulder entrepreneurial community.

Because tech stars, which is an incubator, a kind of a business incubator that had started in Boulder and it's now all over the world. I had a lot of friends going through that. I watched friends quit their job and start businesses.

They were meetups everywhere all over town.

I'm just talking about the process of starting a business venture funding. You name it. VCs were open with their time. They call them office hours. So I would just go sit with VCs not pitching them for them to fund me, but just, hey, what do you think about this? What am I missing?

Yeah. And so that entire ecosystem over years and years in Boulder startup week and all these other things is what finally allowed me to wake up one morning, you know, quote unquote out of the blue.

Like, okay, I should finally quit and do this thing. So it is not an overnight deal. It's not like you just wake up one day and it all were.

It was many years of effort and thinking and kind of a community exercise to get me to this point. But yeah, I thought about it. I told my dad that I was going to quit my job and start this and he said, how are you going to make money?

He said, it sounds great. How are you making money? Well, yeah, that's a good question. And at the same time, a reporter used to work at the Los Angeles Times and a base gear reached out to me and said, hey, I like what you're doing.

I know the guys that surf line surf line is a company that does what we do, but for surfing. So they started in, I believe the 80s as a one surf line number, right with people forecasting surf.

You don't hear much about one 900 numbers anymore. No, no, that's that's a bygone error. But they had a good business. And this guy, this reporter from the LA Times said, hey, I want to introduce you to those guys. They're super nice.

You're not competitive. I bet they could help you kind of think through because they're an analog to your business, how you could, how you could start to run this.

Me was exactly right. The CEO at the time of surf line was a graduate of CU Boulder. So he's happy to chat with me. And I, and they were really helpful to with their time and just kind of running me through how they think about their business with advertising and subscription.

And I still think about those days. So, nope, I quit. And, and it was a long slow road to open snow. And there are many ways to get a business off the ground.

You can bootstrap it. You can raise money from friends of family. You can raise money from from investors. I chose to just bootstrap it based on the savings that I had and the fact that I was doing most of the work. And I needed to eat Chipotle and have some water every day and go ski bum on my friends couch. So my cost of living was pretty low.

Tell us for those who don't know what open snow is and does. Open snow. I have it up on my phone here. Can I be able to see that?

Open snow is a platform that effectively started to tell people when it was going to be a powder day and when you should not go to work or go to school and you should go enjoy this fleeting moment, this perishable moment of wonderful still conditions. And for folks that aren't aware of kind of powder skiing versus regular skiing.

It's it's almost like going to the Super Bowl versus going to, you know, a high school football game or something. Both can be fun. But one one is the thing that you dream about all year or, you know, fill in your analogy there. And the other one is enjoyable, but kind of every day kind of daily driver type thing.

So powder skiing can make enjoyable skiing something that you will never forget that one day with those one friend on that one run.

When snow is billowing up over your head and it's just kind of grown adults are screaming obscenities going down the hill because it's so much fun. So that's what this was born around.

But then increasingly we have more people using us to just time out trips for decent conditions or to avoid bad conditions. And it's now a subscription service that has what we have about 15 employees and other 10 contractors.

And we reach depending on metrics, you know, hundreds of thousands to low millions of people every year focused mostly in the Western United States, but increasingly around the world.

Yeah, and you got what do I pay 70 bucks a year or something like that?

Yeah, depends what it does with deal you got, but yeah, our subscription is 50 or $100 a year, depending on what features you want.

So a whole other story of pricing because I started this being quite cheapish on pricing and and then going lower and then coming back higher.

And it's, you know, it's a journey of time and building confidence and users and also having advisors advise to charge what we think we need to charge to make a successful viable growing business, even if a few people think that it's too much money because there will always be a few people that think it's too much money.

Right, but it's weird. You have a crazy audience, right? You have the total ski bum that has a dollar in his pocket to the hedge fund guy who's checking hella skiing conditions and BC.

Yeah, and we've, you know, we've gone, I hear from people that say, look, I have a jet and I can literally, I'm a San Francisco and go anywhere on the world next week, like just tell me where to go.

And then of course, right all the way down to the ski bum retiree that can't stomach spending 1999, you know, a year on the nap, but is our biggest supporter and wants to tell the world about us and, you know, skis 100 days a year.

So we have tried to navigate that. And this year, we started something called the ski bum scholarship. So if you go to, you know, the page, you feel like you can't pay.

You don't want to pay, you know, write us a note about, you know, what skiing means to you and we'll just give it to you. And we have a lot of people on that as well.

I was going to say I'll support one of the scholarships.

We'll see and then we'll check your LinkedIn and say maybe maybe you do have a higher willingness to pay, but look, we've often most skiers have ski bummed on a couch or have done it at some point just for the love of it. And we understand that.

So the technology that we use to forecast to bring the apps to life to pay all of our forecasters like none of this is free. This all takes real real money to make work.

So we do need to make money as a business, but we're also thoughtful of trying to get this in the hands of people that are bummed it out there could be bulb in there.

But it's also like how many times you and I have like I would easily pay a hundred dollars right now for a clean powder line or right for it to snow tonight.

Like so I can see both sides of it. Yeah.

So it is. Yeah, when you get the look, I've traveled to Japan many times with my wife and my son.

This ski and the chase snow and there's a cultural element, but there's also this it's a game, but with the with the most wholesome payoff possible because the game is weather travel logistics, previous conditions, geography mapping to try to understand where you are in the mountain.

Where the snow is blown in, but if you can play that game and you can solve it and you get that untouched run.

It is and I mean for some people it's about posting on Instagram and all that for me like my outlet is is open snow. I want to make the science of open snow the communication the best it can be for me personally.

I don't post on Instagram. It is just the inherent joy of that run with family and friends that is just so fun in the culmination of, you know, that game. So yes, we have spent a lot of money chasing that condition locally and across the world.

We're trying to think of another sport where when you're skiing powder with buddies and you're there's just whoo like people are just screaming in a good like it's just naturally coming out of them in a way, maybe surfing, I guess, right?

You're not doing that on the golf course. You're not doing that play and basketball, whatever, like it's just this natural emotion that comes out.

We've had to discuss with our son, you know, who's a, you know, we on a chairlift on the powder day and you know, people are just screaming obscenities right on the lift under the lift or you get on the chairlift with somebody else after a powder run and the first thing somebody does they don't look and see you got an eight year old with you.

You know, they're like, oh, my gosh, how often great, you know, and then they look at the kids and they apologize like, no, man, we understand. So that raw emotion is is hard to manufacture outside of a certain few situations in life.

So to be able to, I mean, I would kind of say like chase that naturally, right? Like it's not drugs and the interesting part is it's not something that you can control.

You can have all the money in the world, but you're still at the wins of the weather and geography and sometimes bad luck.

And so there is an element of effort involved and an element of luck beyond all of the weather forecasting that feels like it somewhat democratizes this experience.

Yes, you, of course, you can fly places and go heliskying and things like that, but those also don't guarantee you perfection.

You can spend a lot of money on heliskying and the conditions just aren't there and the helicopter is not going to change that.

I went, Belacula, it rained up to 9,000 feet on the coast there was like the pineapple Express, all that was happening.

And I'm like, why the one right? I booked it like 14 months in advance and all that and you're just at the whims.

You said earlier, right? You were like, okay, I'm talking to groups.

Why does the wind a certain way dump on veil or speed or creek, which are essentially right next to each other?

Like, was that known that people know that or people like, it seems like 10, 15 who knows how many years ago, just like, I don't know, that place always gets more snow.

And like, how long did it take for the, did people actually know the science and you just had to tap into that or did you kind of create some of the science?

Yeah, partially. I think what I did is bring the science and focus it on people that just wanted snow.

So the local National Mother Service offices, they know the science pretty well, but they're also not obsessed with snow, right? They're there for life and safety protection.

So while they are phenomenal scientists, often they're more thinking about highway based conditions and not obsessing over why they all got seven inches more snow than be or creek.

Right, exactly. It kind of just, it didn't matter as much from the, from a life safety standpoint.

For the Colorado Avalanche Information Center, they're thinking about it more in terms of snowpack and layers. And so what they understand it for sure.

Their communication style is mostly around Avalanche is not, here's where to go to ski.

After this fact, correct. Yeah. And so what I did was learn from them, piece together this science based on my, you know, going to school for meteorology and then bring this communication to the people that wanted to find powder like my friends and I and to be clear, I had a business idea in my head.

I had the summary of this, but I did not write a full business plan. And initially this was a, you know, friends and family have some fun with it.

And in my wildest dreams, this is about what it would turn into. Like if everything went right, hey, you've got a successful business that you can run for the rest of your life with 15-ish employees and can be on the frontiers of the science. And we can get into the AI work that we've been doing because I am super excited now to get out of.

Hey, it's just in Joel's head or Brian's head or any of our forecasters and into an actual repeatable kind of scientifically valid unique product that we're building to hopefully fine tune some of these kind of local tricks and knowledge that we have in our brain.

So it's, it's come all the way from just writing what we saw and what we think we know to now trying to prove that scientifically.

And that what was in your head was if it's from this direction and the winds blowing this way and it's above a certain temperature.

Winter parks going to get more than veil and north of the highway gets more than south of the highway, all that kind of stuff.

That's exactly right. And you know how you usually figure these things out is that you're out there doing it because there are very few weather stations in the mountains.

Even the snow reports themselves from from the mountains only measure snowing one location on the mountain.

So for instance, we've talked about bail, but we can talk about, you know, Aspen Highlands because you were mentioning the official reports at bail and Aspen Highlands are generally less snow than what you're going to ski in the back bowls of bail or in Highland.

And that's not because anybody lying. It's just because the mountains are massive and it's knows a different amount and different parts of the mountains.

But if you're not at Highland bowl or you're not in the back bowls of bail on those special days and you just look at the weather data from the snow reports, you might not understand how special of a day it was.

And then you probably wouldn't go dig into the weather data to try to figure out what created an extra eight or 10 inches of fluff in that location, which you will then be chasing for the rest of your life.

That is what that is what I did. And that's also because those we don't have many weather stations out. That's why that wasn't kind of well studied by anybody else in the meteorological community because there's just not a high available availability of objective data kind of showing these conditions.

So I just become upset, excuse me, upsets with it and that led to open snow today. But like any business man, there's trials and tribulations and it took because we didn't raise any money.

We bootstrap this. It took years and years and years of slow methodical growth to kind of get the business to where it is today. And I wouldn't trade it, but I mean, I went from a stable, you know, nicely paying job to thinking that this company could go to zero at any time.

And honestly, it took me the better part in probably seven to 10 years before I got over the faculty. Like it's probably not going to go to zero next year. But you know, that's just the entrepreneur journey for some people are these for me.

The what do they call entrepreneurial valley. Yeah, yep.

But so why don't the resorts put more weather gathering stuff in on each of their peaks, right? Snowmass could do on all four peaks essentially. Yeah, well, I'm going to have the ball at the base at the mid.

Yeah, and ask them actually a great example because there are one of the few places that do have four or five sensors poor mountain per mountain, but I will say that the majority of people that go skiing or at least the majority of people that spend the most money.

skiing at the resorts are not timing the weather. Yeah, and they're not caring and have booked their one week during Easter or Christmas break or whatever it is.

And so from a resort standpoint and also from a resort standpoint, they're trying to smooth out. I mean, they don't really have much control over this, but they would like to smooth out the visitation and not have everybody come during the five days of Christmas break or have everybody come during the one foot pattern day.

Resorts are not actively at all working against me. Like I'm not not snowing here. Yeah, well, no, and they do want to tell the snow story, but also, you know, for a lot of people looking at multiple weather stations and timing this.

Like the obsession just isn't that deep, right? Like they're just, oh, it's snow cool. I'll go out there and I'll, you know, I'll see what the conditions are, but Aspen is a wonderful example of a mountain that has instrumented their mountains with multiple stations and sensors, but most of that.

And you mentioned earlier, though, I think some, I know several people who I wouldn't call powder obsessed, right? And they'll cancel their trips. They're like, right, especially this here. Hey, Utah's got nothing. I've been checking open snow. We're going to cancel. So, and you mentioned that earlier, it's become not just powder, right? You're not called powder.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, that's right. So people are looking and look, I think about this as skiing is quite an investment, you know, no matter how much money you have, there's a lot of time.

And there's gas money hotel being on the hill, lift, I get ski passes, food, all of that. And everybody has options of what to do with their time. And so while skiing with friends and family is usually really fun. Look, I was out.

Recording this in late March of 2026, it's been hot and dry in Colorado. I mean, record temps, he's on the hill, just very, very hot type of weather. And I was out skiing at winter park this weekend.

And it was really slushy, like really slushy and difficult ish the ski at times. And I can understand your daily snow.

Understand somebody not wanting to spend the money for those conditions. That said, it was beautifully sunny. It was the first time I'm a very, I'm a skinny cold body.

So it was the first time I've been on the hill all year that I was generally like wasn't cold in any way. And the slushy bumps were so so fun.

I mean, there's not a hand of ice. Everything is just soft. And if you're into that thing, it's amazing. So there's always a way to have fun. But I also understand that if you were going to fly out from some other city.

And that wasn't your goal then, then sure you should think about those conditions. And honestly, one of the underlying things that motivates me for open snow.

These two level up people's weather knowledge and weather confidence to the point that they can make more confident decisions about what's going to bring them happiness. So I think a lot of people before, I'm not saying we're the only weather outlet.

But a lot of people kind of like, oh, you just go and you get what you get, whether that's a hike or a mountain bike or skiing or whatever it is.

And sometimes that's true. But I'm trying to help people understand that you can use weather information to adjust what you're doing at least three quarters of the time with some level of confidence and accuracy.

And when I hike all summer, I will not touch, I will not go near a tall mountain unless I am very confident about what the lightning forecast looks like and know that I can get up and down below tree line before the first, yeah, before, before the first strike.

And it's not always perfect. But the tools that we have now are really, really good. And it's far better than a crapshoot. And I don't think still a lot of people realize that.

So I'm not ever advocating for people to spend money skiing or not spend money skiing or cancel trips. But if you can use weather to your advantage and make the best use to your time, that makes me really happy.

So two things impact their one that led me to, can you give me a six month view, right?

Because then I'm planning out on buying my stuff that far advanced. I know whether it doesn't quite work that way. But is there, is that getting better? Can you get closer to that? Can you give broad ranges?

Yeah, are you asking as a trader or as a, well, as a skier, both. Yeah. But more as a skier like, hey, where are we going? Right. wife wants me to book the thing six months in advance. We're going to Colorado. We're going to Utah.

Yep. So I'll go in reverse order actually as a trader. So the six month kind of call it season, kind of seasonal forecast. So anywhere between about three weeks and three to six months.

And there is not much utility in those forecasts for objective or I would say deterministic decisions like I want to go here versus here.

So the best that I would ever suggest is look at base your decision on two things one historical patterns like is this Colorado, you know, copper is often open early because the tie elevation and cold and they makes now and that's on average join the happen most years.

The second piece of that is go to a place that has limited downside risk. So if you want to go to a Aspen because you love the town or, you know, for me, like to go over to a hot springs nearby or something like that. And that's always going to be there.

We're kind of listed what the weather's doing if you have to plan that for advance for skiing, but I will say for trading the longer range forecast couple weeks to a couple of months are useful from a probabilistic sense.

So if you're running a bunch of simulations and you see that there's a slight shift towards warmer or drier or weather or whatever you're looking for putting those into your risk modeling may depending on what you're what you're trading may help you or give you a slight edge, but for kind of normal everyday people making a deterministic singular decision.

I don't ever base things on kind of a six month for fast.

Sorry, have come on. I wanted to say, oh, our new AI model is going to tell you exactly now. And you know what, I have seen somebody shared with us a couple of months ago, and I think it was a hedge fund out of New York City.

Something where they ran the simulations for ski areas all over the world. And of course anybody can run simulations, right, and you can see trends in the simulations.

Do they actually verify and from what I have seen it's not it's not good enough to see the other thing is that you could you could simulate a below average snow year, which might actually be true.

What you're not figuring out is hey, that three week period in January or whatever is going to be amazing and phenomenal. So I just do not, and this is somebody like I'm somebody who trust me if there was a six month way for me to tell you where to go next year.

I would work hard on it, but it's just not there. There are various a weather models that do extend out to a four to six weeks.

And I would say occasionally when all of those models align, there is some signal there out to maybe a month, but it is not good enough to kind of dial in a certain day or even a certain mountain.

But sometimes like if the West is really dry and everything shows a signal toward it going snowier for weeks out, then sometimes I feel pretty good about.

And you guys do a good job of that. I think of like there's short term forecast extended and usually it's like, hey, the models hinting at a big storm coming, but super low confidence because it's so far.

Yeah, and I want to touch on one more thing because people often give us grief.

They're like, oh, you know, only job fill in whatever you want. Only job, you can be wrong half the time to have a job or, you know, whatever.

And then I was like, well, you know, probably not different than sportscasters or most traders like you make one good trade that you know, they all have to have to be like great either.

But what I do want to say is that it's okay to believe that longer range forecasts aren't useful and also to understand that shorter range forecasts are getting increasingly good and can be the basis for your decision making.

This year we released 15 day forecast. We always limited them to 10 and we release 15 and the reason is because they've gotten better.

I use them at least to get a sense of what's going on. I usually want powder chase based on a 14 day forecast, but it's getting my mind thinking about, hey, is the trend looking good and the final reason we released it is because we have a feature called forecast range, which, you know, for the finance folks is not going to be anything hard to understand.

But it's just all the models and a spaghetti lines showing all the models and what they're doing.

And I felt it was a responsible thing to release a 15 day forecast if you can also scroll down and see all the modeling and understand if there's high confidence low confidence in all of those trends.

So by releasing all of that, I feel I didn't want to be the gatekeeper like we used to be looking at these 15 day models all the time and mentioned them occasionally.

Like here you go.

Yeah, just here you go. And this is what Jeff master said when you try to with him, they were just trying to make weather data available.

You know, that was on whether underground and effectively that's what we're doing.

We're just doing something a little bit different where we are adjusting that weather data for the mountain environment.

So rather than just ripping out the number that comes from the European model or the American model or whatever it is, we are actively making adjustments to fine tune those numbers for the mountain.

My thing with masters and that is like show me the whole spaghetti chart all the lines hitting Florida.

And if I see the one outlier that's going to hit Saint Peter whatever like I might be nervous Nelly and want to get out of there, but show me all the lines like they're taking the third and giving me the cone but like show all the lines.

We mentioned so 50 sunny right I'm scrolling through today looking at all my favorites.

50% of average 69% of snowmass 40% of average snowbird 45% of it so is this a one off is this climate change and global warming and are we in big trouble moving forward.

Like what's your and we just talked about how we can't predict six months much less six years, but.

Is it you see year over year we're trending this way and there's less and less snowpack.

Now reversion to the mean is a pretty strong concept so right up front.

This is not a trend that I see and that there have been similarly or at least nearly as bad years over the last 50 and we're going to keep getting bad years and we're going to keep getting good years and there is is no long term trend what I tell people in a regional talks that I give around Colorado is that.

From a climate change perspective, there is high confidence that temperatures are warming and that they will continue to warm you can cherry pick weather stations know I say cherry pick you can find weather stations worth not warming but for the most part for most of the United States for most of Colorado for most of the globe.

Temperatures are warming and the best science that we have shows that it will continue to warm from a precipitation standpoint while there are some changes in kind of heavy precip events like the strongest thunderstorms or something when you look at overall precipitation especially across Colorado and the Western United States and the Western North America there is no long term trend in precipitation.

So if you combine warming temperatures and no trend in precipitation then logic just dictates that lower elevations are going to have more rain events right because it doesn't warmer on the shoulder seasons spring and fall where it's often more borderline between snow and rain there's just going to be a few more rain episodes.

But there is no long term trend with precipitation so the best that I can tell at this point is this is not a climate change signal this is bad luck the atmosphere is a chaotic system and it can all combine in certain ways to bring good news bad news or whatever news you want.

And in this case it was dryness and bad news for the west so it was mostly dryness it wasn't just warm this year's bad and calm it yeah it was warm and dry for sure I mean that and you hit on that exactly right is that not only was the season drier than than normal in a lot of places but importantly it was much warmer than normal but often those things go together when you get a high pressure that just anchors itself over the west warmer usually goes together with drier.

And over the east cooler generally goes together not always but often I was snowier and stormier it seemed to me this was more widespread than other years like some years Colorado's bad Jackson holes killing it Utah's killing it Utah especially seemed as bad as it's been in a long long time.

And that a lot of that has to mean look I don't have the exact numbers in front of me but Alta had many 500 plus I mean the average 500 inches season and then they had you know many seasons are over 700 inches which is incredible and they are a shred of what that I'll do some real time sleuthing here but you know Alta so far this year 280 inches which is wow.

I mean Alta is one of the snowiest places in the world and so they've had great powder days there this year but I mean it's you know it's half of what they they normally get and you're right this was widespread but also you know I like to remind people.

You can look back and I show this graph of the Colorado River flows reconstructed over a thousand years using tree cores and samples and all sorts of things and you can see significant trials.

You know through the period of a thousand years ago droughts as better or in generally worse than what we have in modern history and so I like to remind people is like we think of this year as being awful but we generally compare this to the last 50 years like the atmosphere is capable of far more variability than I think we appreciate as the humans and it's hard for us to keep kind of hundred and thousand year you know cycles and time spans in our minds.

But it's kind of normal to have a dry year a very dry year a very wet year and everything in between now I will caveat all of this by saying that maybe this podcast won't age well maybe we'll look back in 20 well no maybe we'll look back in 20 or 30 years and see that this was the beginning of a strong drying trend and that and or a strong trend toward a dry or storm track or something like that and that's exactly right.

But both could be true that's exactly right at this point with the knowledge that we have historically we do not think that there is a massive change in weather patterns, you know during Jeff masters interview and I really like this he had mentioned wildfires out in Oregon, this was many years ago maybe 2020 or 2021 and he was saying that the.

Winds that fan those flames were potentially caused by a pretty wavy jet stream and the potentially pretty wavy jet stream was likely caused by this typhoon in the western Pacifica Pacific which may have been at least strengthened a little bit by warmer than average water temperatures in the western Pacific Ocean and that is a hundred percent scientifically supportable what though becomes more dubious is there is a study.

Many years ago that said of the jet streams getting wavier due to climate change and in subsequent studies have said actually when we look at this in more detail and kind of in a different way like actually that's not happening so I was happy to hear Jeff talk about the typhoon potentially being the genesis of that weather pattern and not just climate change.

necessarily causing a wavy jet stream maybe in five or 10 years we see more data and I got it actually is causing you know difference from facts but it what we can tell right now it's not and I just want to like give one other perspective.

About kind of reversion to the mean and for anybody listening don't misunderstand me climate change appears to be quite real and that humans have you know impacts on the world however that doesn't mean that everything that happens in the climate or that everything that happens with weather.

Is based on climate change and back in 2005 I was a young analyst at this insurance company and 2005 was a.

Very active hurricane season and the risk modeling companies that model hurricanes on for the insurance industry got scientists together and effectively said oh it seems like a new normal.

You know and it was a reasonable science but all the risks of all just as the model.

Yeah yeah like yeah it's going like based on you know quote unquote available science and that's a whole other story but it seems like the risks are going up were in a new normal.

You know that's not exactly what happened over the subsequent 20 years now could risk prices have been too low to begin with maybe right like I can't comment on any of that but you just have to be real careful about getting away from 100 year mean and we did have 100 years of hurricane history.

I'm to look at all the data wasn't perfect because there weren't satellites 100 years ago but you just have to think really critically if we're trying to go far from the mean it can happen.

Not saying that life doesn't change and the atmosphere doesn't change but a lot of times you want to see some big change and often it's not always there.

That's my Bermuda triangle was just hurricanes that were curving around offshore and nobody knew it was there because they didn't have the satellites or anything right so.

Yeah they're just getting lost get flew right into a huge hurricane and yeah or sailed right into a huge hurricane without nose maybe yeah absolutely.

And so when you say the jet stream's a wavier that means it's curving like three times over the US or that around its edges it's like doing weird stuff.

Oh no I'm sorry it's so the jet stream is is a fast moving kind of river of air up around 30,000 feet or so about where planes fly and it is caused by the contrast in temperatures.

Of colder readings over the poles and then warmer readings over the equator and the jet stream is always wavy at times sometimes it's straighter sometimes it goes up and down the reason that we have storms is because it goes up and down.

And so that this is totally normal for it to be wavy go up and down and have times where it's flatter things like that the research had suggested that it's becoming wavier than.

Normal and then other research showed well actually probably not because if you extend the time period that you look at you know the jet stream that it actually doesn't show a trend and a lot of the climate analysis again i'm not saying that there's any conspiracy here but you just have to look at the time period that people use for climate analysis if they happen to use.

1987 to 2017 just ask the authors why they use 1987 it could be a great reason well it could fit the data or it could be a great reason like in the late 70s and 80s satellites were coming online and so for certain applications.

You don't really want to go farther back than that because you're not going to see a lot of things and so on some situations it's a wonderful reason and in other situations.

It might be slightly more dubious or well it was just available then but maybe that's not kind of scientifically supported so again i'm not trying to conspiracy this whole thing just useful to dig into this with a fine to call that's our hedge fund road right check your data make sure you're not fitting it.

A few random ones here I wrote down as we're talking one do you ever worry that you're actually ruining the powder like you're telling everyone right you're like making it too crowded versus just this is my own personal model and i'm going to go find the best powder.

Yeah yeah you know my as part of growing up my son is starting to ask even more interesting questions in the other day data.

Do you ever worry about anything i was like oh yeah i run a small business i worry about everything i'm like literally everything.

I do think about it and there are two sides to this one as a friend of mine mentioned it was like look if you're not doing it somebody else will weather data is just becoming more and more available and what was really specialized knowledge.

Even five years ago is even easier to get now with very little programming understanding so somebody's going to somebody's going to do this on the flip side I do think about it I am out there I am lining up hours before first share I am dreaming days in advance of how that run going to go.

And can we do that and can I stay a little bit ahead of the crowds or think a little bit more creatively on to you so.

I do think about it man as we release new products I think real hard about how much we're trying you know we tell somebody to go to one spot versus another spot.

To try to not call out you know small mountains too much to kind of overwhelm I'm not hiding anything everything is.

Available or just saying like note if you all listen to this it's going to be super crowded right well there's the Instagram effect right like that really cool hike is now.

You know over and hey like I can't take responsibility whatever we're people and we're just going to do any humans are messy and all of this stuff but I think about I just want.

To hear to let people know that I do consider this is not put my head down make as much money as possible and not ever think about the end result because.

I do this every day because I cannot wait for the next powder day and find a good condition so if I ruin it for everybody else and also ruining it for yourself and along those same lines of crowds I was just in rebel stoked recently.

About a 45 minute lifeline up the single gondola like unbearable what do you think icon pass epic pass right the locals will complain it's ruined it's made it too crowded to expensive all that so what's your take net good net bad how do we fix it if there is a fix man like most things in life this is really tough yeah and I don't tell you this I was just and I'm not trying to call out.

Like I've been in long lines right I've been in long lines at small ski areas I've been in long lines at at you know the veil resorts in the epic or the icon mountains so i'm not calling anybody out.

This was just my experience last a week ago or two weeks ago I chased up to Washington state can be a couple feet of snow and I couldn't get there for the early part of the storm which was colder fluffier drier less operational challenges I got there for the thicker heavier weather.

Deeper part of the storm they were power outages not the resorts fault you know road closures not the resorts fall but by the time we finally got the Stevens pass parking was totally full.

And a Stevens pass seems like a great mountain it's not massive right and if everybody from Seattle goes there on the powder day I totally understand that parking full I bring this up just to say like I've been there like i'm going to quote a professional.

You know in this regard and I still I still got host and so that happened to me and I heard.

Kirkwood once was like what can you close the mountain like no more yeah and I get it I you know my my class answer is for rebel stoke look at the webcam their time stand figure out when people get in line wake up earlier have a coffee and be first in line.

And and like the mountain will be delightful you won't have to wait for 45 minute line unless you ride all the way back down to the bottom my less crash answer my defenses I got into town at 330 in the morning that's impressive and you got some sleep all right go go work dedicated my my less crash answer is that.

This is challenging there aren't many new places to develop scare is there aren't many new scares coming online right so the supply is somewhat fixed we also have this issue where a lot of people want to go.

At the same time same holidays same powder days so you're getting a crush on the other times you could probably walk on the back on the low without an issue yeah so that's just like rush hour or surge pricing or anything else like that and then the other.

This is that and i'm not an expert in a scary financial planning but these are capital intensive businesses and the subscription product which really the epic past made famous you know 18 years ago now and that a lot of skiers but I believe it was I thought it was 2008 or 2010 it's been a long time.

But they made famous and then the icon pass came on a lot of individual ski areas run on subscription revenue as well and you look at an independent resort like monarch in Colorado I mean it's a reasonably small closely held ownership group and they probably wouldn't have had a viable business where not for seasons passes and so you know go to go to subscription right to do this so I think the subscription model at least not in a year like this year right not only year.

Like this right and and but that's what the subscription product is therefore so that this year doesn't break your business right you just kind of keep on going right man I get it and I don't I just I just don't have that solution my the way I play in this world is I just play in this world if I go to a place that I know is crowded I just try to get there earlier and deal with it and if I think now the powder days on a weekend and everywhere is going to be nuts all think about going to a smaller mountain or.

Going to the backcountry and safe terrain that's low angle and having a peaceful experience and it might be 2000 vertical feed instead of 20,000 but maybe I probably toward prioritize that I I thought really hard about this experience thing because I grew up as we started talking about on 700 vertical foot Shawnee mountain family owned it operated so fun and but also I remember in the 80s it was crowded there too yeah from everybody coming to New York so like I just don't know how much.

Of this is is you know new quote unquote and also people have never had more information and more of an ability to make their own decisions and if you don't like this then go travel to Europe or Japan look on open snow or anywhere else find there are literally hundreds of small ski areas go to your research go pick one and from a traveling standpoint.

tickets in Japan and Europe 50 bucks 60 bucks 70 bucks yeah going to a place because it's on icon or epic if you travel to Japan or Europe just because it's on icon or epic like you're not saving much money at that point because the lip tickets aren't you know they're not too hurt $300 like here so I would say just like anything else in life or you know what you do with with your fun.

If you're just a little bit more creative you can usually try to get ahead of things or think just a little bit differently and yes I did dodge the question you know capitalism and these programs but honestly I don't I don't have the right answer because I don't think it's an altogether terrible strategy to pull a lot of mountains together and insulate the weather risk through subscriptions and on the flip side.

Even icon which is tried to be much more independently minded and allow the local mountains to kind of do what they do even that generates big problems because people you know we'll go chase to these mountains because it's on the past so man I don't I don't I'm guilty on that I call yeah they they told me meteorology school to just eventually if you don't know just tell me you don't know so I'll tell you I don't know the flip side of that whole conversation is bail resorts is down like 70% they're stocking the

last two years so not to put you in a financial spot but like it's not really working for them either so if it's not working for the consumer it's not working for the guys running it like what's happening.

Well I don't know why everything's been sold and of course you know the financial performance hasn't been as good but also previous to that I believe it way outperformed the market and I don't think anything can be up forever.

And so you know they had a probably plus or minus great decade run and you bring up a great point if but here's a flip side people look at lines and all that kind of stuff I had a number.

Whiskey Val a lot they all mountain to be really good friends that live near valen be recruit so just from a proximity standpoint for their time.

People accused me all the time like all the resorts are paying you to you know to like show more so I would like trust me no marketing person has ever emailed me at 430 in the morning you're like hey pop up that number something also all of our forecast data is automated so like none of this is happening but I yeah some of those powder days are annoying I mean there were very few powder days actually this year but some of them are annoying and tough and difficult.

But also I've had remarkably fun times there and the product is totally great and enjoyable and I've also had wonderful times that asked me and asked me is a totally different deal right now like I don't know all the details of how you know val mountains operational finance compares to the aspens you know finance but like they don't know there's in some right but that that's it so man I don't know but like this is the point is.

You have a choice like this is so wonderful and if you don't like bail you can drive an hour and 45 minutes and go to ask and if you don't like the big rounds and you can go to sunlight which is right in between them and have a burger in a beer for probably 10 bucks and have an awesome day and you know back go back to the hot springs in Glenwood 20 minutes away so.

Like the fact that there's a choice is wonderful and the fact that people choose to operate their businesses differently and they can do that is also wonderful and you know what if

bail resorts keeps getting punished in the markets and epic pal sales decline then they'll probably make a change because of that type of feedback so um the fact that we have options I think is wonderful you want my bail slams down do you go there for the view of the highway or the Pepsi machine in the middle of the slope i love it spoken like a true aspenite like.

One more random one here do you think fat skis right I was just doing the cat skiing thing and I'm like time in my life but I also is like in the back of my mind I was like was it more fun on my normal skis back in the day in the powder right like i'm not sinking in as much it was just it's different so you have a view on the.

Yeah if you want more face shots you should go a little skinnier I got skis I went to school grad school just happened to go to grad school with a guy named Pete Wagner who then went on to start a custom ski company called Wagner custom skis based out of tell you right and he's made me a couple skis over the years and one of them was a powder ski and it actually it absolutely changed my scheme it has a pin tail at the bottom so meaning usually skis are wider in the tip and tail and skinnier in the middle and this ski.

Basically just keeps getting narrower into the tail and what that does is it allows my tail not to get locked in to the turn so if i'm in trees I want to quickly swivel left and right it's a very fast motion versus really having to do a big on weight and kind of change your style and that.

Opened up i can like a ski racer yeah that's fair that opened up a level of joy in my powder skiing i'm that i hadn't previously.

Had before and it also caused me to work less so I can ski full powder days and have legs left at the end of the days but I agree.

It takes a really special deep perfect day to get face shots but i'll also say.

It makes it even more worthwhile when you get those face shots on that extra special deep fluffy day on the wide ski so again just like veil versus aspen versus icon we all have choices which I think is just so fortunate.

And I can't let you off without shouting out Evan and that's his name right and you talk yeah what was he was he a different company and then you guys merge or something or you brought him yes so what what happened was that back in 2010 I started writing forecast.

Ryan Elegrado in Tahoe was writing forecast called Tahoe Weller discussion dot com I was writing a Colorado powder forecast to calm dot com and Evan Thayer was writing at what's that.

That's right no forecast dot com and we all.

Started independent of each other didn't know of any each other and we're just doing these things and so my strategy was none of us are going to make.

Probably an amazing living all doing it independently and especially almost 20 years ago before some stack and all these tools were available yeah.

But if we got together and not only kept writing together to build this platform together which is what we have now with open snow with maps and forecast and point and you can get a forecast for anywhere in the world and we're about to do some other really cool stuff we all do this together.

Then we might have a viable business and it took many I mean I didn't go in there with big checks or something like that you know it's wrapping this thing so it took many years of convincing and discussions and meetings.

To you know for them to kind of go give up their baby and join the crew but we're all now working together.

It's really it's our dream jobs like this this is what we love to do and for the most part we all want to be here for you know decades into the future.

And you can tell in the writing right like you can tell you guys are like literally excited about it and you should go here it's going to be epic it's going to be and I will just I will just tell you how lucky we are to be alive.

I mean this sounds like I'm writing for office or something like political friendly statements or something but how lucky we are to be alive at this point where people can be have profitable niches like we don't need to take over the world of weather and buy the weather channel for this to be a viable company.

We can exist and do well snow dash forecast which has been around since you know the year 2000 is bigger in Europe but also big here they can have a viable business and have I think they're about the same size company.

That we are slopes which is a ski tracking app kind of like Strava but really just for skiing there about our say size company there are viable profitable great business as well like we don't have to.

Kind of take over the world to make these things work and with just monetization on the internet and in the app store and via stripe and everything else like we can just have nice quote unquote small businesses.

And ride this way you know quite a while doing what we love it in a profitable way serving customers and we don't need to go on you know massive M&A strategies or something like that to do it.

I hear you but I'm going to advise you stop calling out the competition.

Oh Evans taught me I'm going to forget now but I like have quoted the water content or what he's always talking about like it's this much liquid.

Yeah, it equates to that much snow which they never heard before so yeah and you and you can view that and so okay I won't call out the competition because you can view this exclusively on open snow you can look right next to each snow forecast.

You know because people might be listening like I just go to you know Apple weather or Google weather or something else with weather channel and all they're quite viable but most are not optimized to the mountain environments that are skiers and the other thing is.

We will actually show you snow quality so if you go next to you know like Wednesday night might take 3 to 6 inches of snow right next to there will say a snow liquid ratio and we were generally taught growing up that it's 10 to 1 10 inches of snow if you melted it down will be 1 inches of water.

But that varies wildly and the generally the best powder fluffiest powder skiing is 15 to 1 or even 20 to 1 that means 20 inches of snow would melt down to 1 inch of water said another way it's super fluffy.

So we show you those numbers and then because we know that not everybody keeps the snow liquid ratio numbers memorized in their brains like I just did yeah like you do at the top of the screen where you see the forecast for the next 15 days under there there's a little drop down that says powder quality and it will just show you a bar graph of how big the powder quality is because sometimes you might see a big number like it's going to snow at 10 or 15 inches but it could be really windy or it could be really thick snow or it could be.

Fix no one top of fluffy snow so we take all of this into account and show you that powder quality so you don't just say oh it's going to be a powder day on Wednesday when in fact you know the powder quality could be quite poor and actually better the next day so we try to make that easier to understand.

Have you is Utah usually in the top right they claim they are in my experience mostly yes yeah Utah Utah snow is not generally the fluffiest it's usually about as fluffy as Colorado and Montana.

Every storm is different but on average Utah Colorado Montana the interior states are roughly the same and it doesn't always have the most snow sometimes with Pacific Northwest you're up in British Columbia you can have more but Utah on average has the best combination of fluff and amount and yeah so the amount of snow and the fluffiness of the snow is usually maximized somewhere around Utah and also just to the North couple hours in North around Jackson and Grand Targaryen.

That's kind of the sweet spot if you go closer to the coast and the west coast you're often getting more moisture so you can get more snow but it can be thicker and if you come further east into Colorado often you're still getting fluffy snow but you have left moisture making it this far away from the ocean so you just don't have as deep of snow so often Utah and western Wyoming are the sweet spot closer to the coast close enough to the coast to get a lot of snow far enough from the coast to still be cold and have.

Fluffy condition versus Sierra cement which is on average Sierra cement but if you go at the right time and you use that storm man it can be deep and fluffy and two last bits one you mentioned Japan a few times it's on my bucket list haven't been i'll give you an anecdote that med favor i'll send you the podcast we'll put it in the show notes he was talking about how all those resorts came out of the like financial boom in Japan in the 80s right that there was all this cheap money.

And everyone's like oh i'm going to buy this mountain and put up a resort so yeah they have literally hundreds of resorts i think more than North America he was saying on the pot yeah but terms of powder known for huge amounts of snow is it also light and fluffy.

yep so there's two main areas of Japan there's Hanshu which is the main island of Japan where Tokyo is and then there's Hokkaido the island to the north where this echo is Hokkaido is farther north generally colder so if you had to book your trip six months in advance and you were prioritizing you know fluff generally going to Hokkaido just by averages it's just a little bit colder it's often a little bit fluffier that said every storm is different you can find very fluffy snow on the main island as well you just got to kind of you know if you.

really care about conditions then you can actually chase Japan often high higher air fairs are in the summer when there's more tourism or in the spring for cherry blossoms and in the winter even though it seems like everybody in your Instagram feed is going to Japan I guess the raw numbers of that are still reasonably low so you can find last minute fights I would also say that in Japan the infrastructure most areas are tiny by comparison to the Western United States so just keep that in mind the infrastructure at ski areas is much much much much.

smaller not sprawling hotels and condos and stuff like that so sometimes especially last minute it's very difficult or literally just impossible to find anywhere to stay but if you can rent a car and are happy with getting lodging in a nearby town and driving 30 to 45 minutes no problem I will also say that we adjusted our forecast algorithm how long it takes to get down the little cottonwoods yeah that's right we adjusted our forecast algorithm in Japan is here to better.

model there's no fall they get a lot of snow but it's it's similar lake effects now it kind of comes off the ocean not all models show that well so I think we've done a better job of that we also have I mean this is in the weeds but maybe 12 people listening this will really take advantage of we also have a radar layer that is global across the world to show you what's actually falling from the sky so works in the United States and in Europe and Japan it is useful because while it knows a lot of Japan it doesn't snow in every mountain at all times so.

If you stay in a nearby town and you see a good snow forecast and you wake up and you can check radar and you can see where those bands of snow are setting up and you can adjust your plans even that morning based on where the radar is showing snowfall and we did that I was there with my wife and son this winter.

And we kind of stayed centrally located and then I look at radar at night and in the morning and have a decent game plan but yeah can can mix or match a little bit.

Based on that radar so it is an amazing place it is much smaller areas and even the big areas that you've heard of are are much smaller than what you expect in the United States and I would also heavily heavily heavily suggest.

That you do some research and try some small areas rather than just going to the name brands yeah because there's a lot.

There and and the excitement of exploration is half the fun when it's calling you I just thought I thought a new business line for you of like open snow tours right you just sign up you're in Japan you're in that central spot and then the guide is like we're going here today.

Yeah well you know a lot of there are a lot of tours in Japan and I would I'm glad you brought this up because I the first time we went we went on a guided tour.

And I kind of helped the guide like adjust we were going to go based on snow as I was learning over there and then once we want once we kind of understood the lay of the land of how to run a car and we're to stay and so we've done our own power chasing but I would say if you've never gone and you want to go.

Look up a tour that does power chasing within a region and there are many of these on the main island and also in Hokkaido and they'll get hotels you know hotel block in a main area they will have a van and the guide will basically pick out.

You know who's getting snow and how to go there is some snow reporting there but it is not like the United States where you can just zoom through your favorites at 5 a.m.

And see what's going on it is not nearly as consistent with that so I find myself doing the same thing over there as I was doing in Colorado 20 years ago which is a see how much it's snowed.

Zooming through our 24 hour time lapses of webcams and trying to piece together like oh this is a webcam of a parking lot there's a car that's been there for 24 hours I can see how much snow kind of has accumulated on the roof rack or whatever to try to understand how much it's known so sometimes you have to kind of piece together and start using AI for stuff like that to we are so we are actually doing that for some of the snow state cams now so it is getting to be a brave new world which is really really fun now.

All right we could go six hours so we're going to wrap it up here I need your Mount Rushmore right instead of your favorite I let you pick four so your mouth Rushmore of ski resorts globally you can go around well.

Okay anywhere where there's deep snow family and friends and terrain that's 30 to 35 degrees and I'm serious about that yeah I want names but you're like doesn't know well no I mean but I have a few favorites but it depends on the conditions right like high on bowl can be absolutely incredible or can be wind blown craft like it really just depends on the day but I I am not a steep skier a grip ski racing I've great technique I can ski steep it's not what brings me the most happiness.

I will say aside from that like deep powder you know 3035 degrees.

Yeah it doesn't feel so steep when the powder is steep.

No no but also British Columbia whether you're in bounds at a ski location a heli ski location doing backcountry with the guide the tree skiing there if you hit the conditions right is I think the best tree skiing you can do you know steep good tree skiing in the world.

The pan I find amazing because not always but often the train is pretty friendly depending on where you go and if you're pretty good at reading maps and pretty good at reading terrain there's a lot of options in the backcountry you still have to think about avalanches and guide clacks and all our sorts of things but it's a lot less scary from a backcountry perspective and Colorado which feels like it's just going to have lunch no matter where you are.

And then if you go to Europe the chase I'll go for the apri and I hope you get a good snow day too.

Yeah we're there it was no snow but it was still a fantastic time the only time I've ever wanted to have the hour and a half lunch where they're like bringing drinks and pasta like this is pretty good.

And finish it off best you can give me however many want ski movies.

I mean there's really only one answer which is hot hot yeah I have to say probably when I was in middle school ish I probably watch ski patrol movie not not ski school which is like the R slash NC ski version but ski patrol like the PG inversion of I don't know probably 500 times or something on a VHS state and I don't know how well it's aged because I haven't seen it for a long time.

But man that got me to do my childhood I love um all right we'll leave it there we'll put a link to open snow I use it all winter pilot recommend and thanks for coming on Joel great story.

Yeah thank thanks for having me and and going deep and nerdy I appreciate deep and nerd that's all I got especially when it comes to this stuff.

All right that's it for the pod thanks to Joel for coming on thanks to RCM for sponsoring thanks Jeff burger for producing.

We'll be back next week I think talking ppli and how the wealthy use insurance to shield some assets from the tax man I might dust off the bottle opener and do a little solo six pack for you guys so talk to you soon peace.

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