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

Episode Date: March 26, 2026

What happens when a data-obsessed mind that could have been optimizing portfolios decides to optimize powder days instead? This episode features meteorologist and OpenSnow founder Joel Gratz in a deep dive on snow, skiing, and the science of weather forecasting, told through the lens of someone who treats every incoming storm like a market opportunity.Joel shares how a childhood obsession with snow days in Pennsylvania led to studying meteorology, moving to Boulder, and eventually creating OpenSnow, essentially a Bloomberg Terminal for skiers chasing powder. He explains the real science behind why some mountains get more snow than others, how local wind and terrain effects work, and why long-range seasonal forecasts are about as reliable as a sell-side price target for planning your ski trips.Joel and Jeff also explore the realities of climate change and snowpack (warmer temperatures vs. largely unchanged long-term precipitation), how subscription passes like Epic and Ikon affect crowd dynamics, think of it as indexing degrading your alpha, and why niche, bootstrapped businesses like OpenSnow can thrive without trying to own all of weather. They get into powder quality, snow-to-liquid ratios, and why Utah sits in a global sweet spot for both depth and fluff, the true asymmetric bet in skiing. Plus: what makes Japan, British Columbia, and Colorado so special for different kinds of ski experiences. The conversation is equal parts nerdy meteorology, entrepreneurial journey, and pure powder stoke.… SEND IT!Chapters:00:00-01:52= Intro01:18-11:06= From Snow-Obsessed Kid to OpenSnow Founder: Joel Gratz’s Origin Story11:07-24:18= How OpenSnow Helps You Time Powder (and Why 6‑Month Forecasts Don’t Work)24:19-39:28=Bad Snow Year or Climate Change? Joel Gratz on Drought, Variability, and the Future of Snow39:29-49:26= Epic, Ikon, and the Powder Problem: Crowds, Passes, and Chasing Better Ski Days49:27-01:00:25= Utah, Japan, and the Quest for Perfect Powder: Joel Gratz on Global Snow Quality01:00:26-01:13:24= Dream Lines and Bucket-List Mountains: Joel Gratz on His Favorite Ski Destinations01:13:25-01:17:46= Ski Movies, Nostalgia, and Parting Powder WisdomFrom the Episode:Jeff Masters The Derivative Podcast Episode: Super Storms, Mathematical Modeling, and Hurricane Hunting with Dr. Jeff MastersMeb Faber’s Top Ski resorts - JapanCitrini Research AI piece: When Skynet Writes a Substack: The AI Doom Piece That Moved MarketsDon't forget to subscribe to⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Derivative⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, follow us on Twitter at⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@rcmAlts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠sign-up for our blog digest⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.Disclaimer: This podcast is provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as legal, business, or tax advice. All opinions expressed by podcast participants are solely their own opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of RCM Alternatives, their affiliates, or companies featured. Due to industry regulations, participants on this podcast are instructed not to make specific trade recommendations, nor reference past or potential profits. And listeners are reminded that managed futures, commodity trading, and other alternative investments are complex and carry a risk of substantial losses. As such, they are not suitable for all investors. For more information, visit⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.rcmalternatives.com/disclaimer⁠⁠⁠⁠

Welcome to the derivative by RCM 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 Citrini Research AI piece, which was the talk of the town down at I Connections in Miami. So go check both those out at RCMALTS. 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 freshest 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'd be a lot happier if it snowed a lot more of 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 in the Poconos of Pennsylvania at Shawnee Mountain, went to school for meteorology at Pennsylvania. state in Pennsylvania, then moved out to Boulder, Colorado for grad school. Nice. And went to Boulder itself? Yeah, yeah. 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. That wasn't 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 tore us around Vail 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 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. My experience, some of the best skiers I've ever met are East Coast skiers, right? Grew 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 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 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. We're on trimesters, so we would do like at least three weeks every year just going around Vermont, New Hampshire, up into Maine, all those places, which is good fun. Did you ever see the sun when you were going to school in the northeast? No. In fact, I tell my kids, there was one day I slept until maybe like 4, 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. No, and I'll tell you, I loved growing up in Pennsylvania. I had 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 to 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, in 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 some more 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. So my parents neither grew up skiing, which is odd because I feel like a lot of skiers, their family grows up skiing.

You kind of just come up in that rank. So neither of my parents skied, and honestly the entire reason that I'm here talking to you now and have 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 it was for a lesson. And they took me up 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 kept me doing it. And then my parents learn 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 at 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 6 o'clock news. One was like 15 after. One was 18 after. One was 21 after. So I could see all the different weathers. And so 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 would be the right family life for me. It's not saying you can't have a wonderful life and 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 was just kind of not my thing. So I focus on meteorology and never look back. You're ahead of your years there, knowing what you wanted the future life pattern to look like. Is Shawnee the

closest ski hill to New York City, probably? No. There is Mountain 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. It's like, no, I'm going to go at like 80%. Yeah, I'm like, well, that's, yeah, I'm 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 are 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 six 17-year-old teaching skiing. But 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 into the open snow in a second here.

But my brain went to when you said your parents saw an ad in the newspaper. What do you think that less than cost? Like, God. Right? Versus what it is today. Yeah, unbelievable. And, you know, 20 bucks. Who knows?

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 in different 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 AAA for the Orioles at a certain time. Had a baseball scholarship in college. And he pushed me, not push, 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 also the flexibility did not necessarily put. 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 into a lesson and I'd go ski good stuff.

On Aspen Highlands, not many people go to Highlands for the lesson. 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'd end 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 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 guests, Jeff Masters, who started the weather underground. I was an analyst for a hurricane and earthquake insurance company, so there was a financial angle to 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. Weird for them to be based in Boulder, right? But whatever. They were scares? 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 at my desk at Dicat and almost shaking, almost shaking with the desire to get out of there and get to bailes and refreshing the webcams.

And I can just see it absolutely nuking. and how fun that must be. And I just knew that at some point, I probably need to do something else. Nothing against the folks that I kept, but I had an obsession that ran deep. Well, yeah, insurance and skiing don't usually mix. So then how'd this all come up to be?

You just popped in? No. It popped in your head or you had a whole business plan? No, there's, well, you know, the myth of the, or not even the myth, but the one-offs of the Mark Zuckerbergs that just have an idea and they do it and it immediately 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.

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 obsessantly 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 of my friends on an email list. And I said, I'm not going to text you every time. I'm getting tired of this. I'll just email 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, go to 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 Bale get more snow than Beaver Creek on a certain wind direction? Why did Aspen get hit? And so I studied, studied, studied, studied, studied, studied, studied, studied, studied, studied, studied, studied, studied, studied, studied, studied, study, studied, study, tried to write a story in a local, you know, publication. And so 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 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 is now all over the world. I had a lot of friends going through that. I watched friends quit their job and start businesses.

There were meetups everywhere all over town just talking about the process of starting a business, venture funding, you name it. VCs were open with their time. They called 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? All of that. And so that entire ecosystem over years and years and Boller 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, be 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 worked. 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 any money? He said, well, yeah, that's a good question. Volume. Right around us. Volume.

Yeah, right. At the same time, a reporter used to work at the Los Angeles Times and a big skier reached out to me and said, hey, I like what you're doing. I know the guys that's surfline. Surfline is a company that does what we do, but for surfing. So they started in, I believe, the 80s as a one-s surfline number, right, with people forecasting surf. You don't hear much about 1-900 numbers anymore. No, no, 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 start to run this. Me was exactly right. The CEO at the time of Surfline was a graduate of CU Boulder, so he was happy to chat with me. And they were really helpful, too, 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 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 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 friend's 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 is...

I have it up on my phone here. Not going to 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 snow conditions. And for folks that aren't aware of kind of powder skiing versus regular skiing, 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, of everyday 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 friends on that one run when snow's 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 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 it depends what it depends what deal you got but yeah our subscription is 50 or a hundred dollars a year depending on what features you want and that's a whole other story of pricing because I started this being quite cheapish on pricing and then going lower and then coming back higher. And it's a journey of time and building confidence in users and also having advisors advised 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 a 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 helisking conditions in BC. 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 in San Francisco and go anywhere in 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 an app, but is our biggest supporter and wants to tell the, world about us and, you know, skis a hundred days a year. So we have tried to navigate that. And this year, we started something called the ski bump scholarship. So if you go to, you know,

the page and 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 link in and say maybe, maybe you do have a higher willingness it's 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

trying to get this in the hands of people that are bumming it out there. Because we've both in there. But it's also like how many times you and I would easily pay $100 right now for a clean, powder liner, right, for it to snow tonight. Like, so I can see both sides of it. Yeah. Yeah. So it is, yeah, when you get the, look, I've traveled to Japan many times with my wife and my son, the ski and to chase snow.

And there's a cultural element, but there's also this. It's a game, but 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 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 enhanced. 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. I'm trying to think of another sport where when you're skiing powder with buddies and you're, there's just, woo, 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 playing basketball, whatever. Like it's just this natural emotion that comes out.

We've had to discuss with our son, you know, who's eight, you know, we're on a chairlift on the powder day. And, you know, people are just screaming obscenities, right, on the lift or 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 effing great. You know, and then they look at the kid and they apologize. They're like, no, man, we understand. So that raw emotion 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 winds 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, of course, you can fly places and go heli skiing and things like that. But those also don't guarantee you perfection.

You can spend a lot of money on heli skiing and the conditions just aren't there and the helicopter is not going to change that. I went, Bella Kula. It rained up to 9,000 feet on the coast there. It was like the pineapple express. All that was happening. And I'm like, why the one? 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 Vale versus Beaver Creek, which are essentially right next to each other? Like, was that known? Did 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 Vail got seven inches more snow than Beaver Creek. Right. This peak versus that peak or whatever. Exactly. It kind of just, it didn't matter as much 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 the most powder.

It's like after the fact. Correct. Yep. 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 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 wind's blowing this way and it's above a certain temperature, winter park's going to get more than veil and north of the highway, it 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. And even the snow reports themselves from the mountains only measure snowing one, 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 Vale and Aspen Highlands are generally less snow than what you're going to ski in the back bowls of Vale or in Highland Bowl. And that's not because anybody lying. It's just because the mountains are massive and it snows a different amount in different parts of the mountains. But if you're not at Highland Bowl or you're not in the back bowls of Vail 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 I did. And that's also because 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 obsessed. Excuse me, obsessed 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 and 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 ten years before I got over the fact that it's probably not going to go to zero next year. But, you know, that's just the entrepreneurial journey for some people, or at least for me. The, what do they call, the entrepreneurial valley? Yeah, yep. But so why don't the resorts put more weather gathering stuff in on each of their peaks, right? snow mass could do on all four peaks essentially.

Highlands could have in the bowl at the base at the mid. Yeah, and Aspen's actually a great example because they're one of the few places that do have four or five sensors 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 there 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 powder day. So resorts are not actively at all working against me or not snowing here. Yeah, 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, yep, right? Especially this year. 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 hounds. You're called open snuff. 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 out on the hill, lift, a ticket, 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. We're 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 to ski at times. And I can understand something. 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 that I'd been on the hill all year that I legitimately like wasn't cold in any way. And the slushy bumps were so, so fun. I mean, there's not a hint 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 is to 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 believe 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. My family and 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 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. And 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 of your time, that makes me really happy. So two things unpack there. One that led me to, can you give me a six-month view, right?

because then I'm planning out I'm buying my stuff that far advance I know weather doesn't quite work that way but 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 as a skier? Both

yeah but 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 So the six-month kind of call it seasonal forecast, so anywhere between about three weeks

and three to six months, 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 Colorado, you know, copper is often open early because it's high elevation and cold and they make snow, and that's on average going to 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 Aspen because you love the town or, you know,

for me like to go over to hot springs nearby or something like that, and that's always going to be there regardless of what the weather is doing, if you have to plan that far in advance for skiing. But I will say for trading the longer range forecasts, a couple of 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 wetter or whatever you're looking for, putting those into your risk modeling may, depending on 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 forecast. Sorry. Come on. I wanted to say, oh, our new AI model is going to tell you, exactly. You know what? I have seen somebody shared with us a couple of months ago,

and I think it was a head fund out of New York City, something where they ran these 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 good enough to see. The other thing is that you could simulate a below average snow year, which might actually be true. But 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 weather models that do extend out to 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, four weeks out, then sometimes I feel pretty good about it. And you guys do a good job of that. I think of like there's short-term forecasts extended. And usually it's like, hey, the model's hinting at a big storm coming,

but super low confidence because it's so far out. Yeah. And I want to touch on one more thing because people often give us grief. You're like, oh, you know, only job, fill in whatever you want. Only job you can be wrong half the time and still 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, you know, the other ones don't have to be that 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 won't 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 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 mention them occasionally. Yeah, just here you go. Yeah, just here you go. And this is what Jeff Masters said when you chat with him. They were just trying to make weather data available. You know, that was on weather underground.

And effectively, that's what we're doing. We're just doing something a little bit different. 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 St. Pete or whatever, like I might be a nervous Nellie 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 it, 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, do 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 no long-term trend. What I tell people in the 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. I don't want to say cherry pick. You can find weather stations where it's 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 precipicep 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. more rain events, right, because it's just warmer. The shoulder season, 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 in Colorado. It was warm and dry for sure.

I mean, and you hit on that exactly right, is that not only was this season drier 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 dryer. And over the east, cooler generally goes together, not always, but often with snowy or year and stormier. It seemed to me this was more widespread than other years. Like some years, Colorado's bad, Jackson Hole is killing it, Utah's killing it. Utah especially seemed as bad as it's been in a long, long time. Yeah. And that, a lot of that has to, I mean,

look, I don't have the exact numbers in front of me, but Alta had many 500 plus inch, I mean, they average 500 inches a season. And then they had, you know, many seasons that were over 700 inches, which is incredible. And they are a shred of what that. And I'll do some real-time sleuthing here. But yeah, Alta, so far this year is 280 inches, which is, I mean, and 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 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 droughts, you know, through the period of a thousand years ago. Droughts as bad or in generally worse than what we have in modern history. And so I like to remind people as 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 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 or a strong trend toward a drier storm track or something like that. Well, both could be true, 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 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 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 100% scientifically supportable. What though becomes more dubious is there is a study many years ago that said, the jet stream's getting wavier due to climate change. And then 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 wave view of gesturing. Maybe in five or ten years we see more data and it actually is causing, you know, different storm tracks. But 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 for the insurance industry got scientists together and effectively said, oh, it seems like a new normal.

You know, and it was reasonable science. But the risks of all these hurricanes. They're just at the model? Yeah, yeah. 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, we're in a new normal. Oh, 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 a hundred year mean. And we did have 100 years of hurricane history 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 that 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?

Fair enough. They're just getting lost, get flu right into a huge hurricane. or sailed right into a huge hurricane without no. Maybe. Yeah, absolutely. And so when you say the jet stream's waver, that means it's curving like three times over the U.S. or that around its edges it's like doing weird stuff?

Oh, no, I'm sorry. So the jet stream 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 and 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 out.

And the reason that we have storms is because it goes up and down. And so this is totally normal for it to be wavy and 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 periods that people use for climate analysis. If they happen to use 1987 to 2017, just ask the authors why they used 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 in satellite show. So in 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. It's just useful

to dig into this with a fine-tooth comb. Well, that's our hedge fund world, right? Check your data. Make sure you're not fitting it. A few random ones here. I wrote down as we were 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 than the other days. Do you ever worry about anything? I was like, oh, yeah, I run a small business. I worry about everything all the time.

Like literally everything. I do think about it. And there are two sides to this. One, as a friend of mine mentioned, he 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 do this. On the flip side, I do think about it.

I am out there. I am lining up hours before first chair. I am dreaming days in advance of how that run is 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 to do this? So I do think about it. And 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 and open snow. Or just saying like note, if you all listen to this, it's going to be super crowded. Right. Well, and 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, and humans are messy and all of this stuff. But I think about it. I just want to hear, to let people know that I do consider this. 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 the good condition. So if I ruin it for everybody else, I'm also ruining it for yourself. For myself. And along those same lines of crowds, I was just in Revelstoke recently, about a 45-minute lift line

up the single gondola, like unbearable. What do you think, icon pass, Epic Pass, right? The locals will complain, it's ruined, made it too crowded, too 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'll 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, you know, the Vail Resorts and 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, it's going to 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, wetter, deeper part of the storm. There were power outages, not the resort's fault.

You know, road closures, not the resorts fall. But by the time we finally got the Stevens Pass and parking was totally full. And 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 is full. I bring this up just to say, like, I've been there, right? Like I'm, quote, unquote, a professional, you know, in this regard. And I still got hosed.

And so. That happened to me at that. And I heard Kirkwood once. I was like, what? Can you close the mountain? Like, no more to park. Yeah. And I get it.

I, you know, my, my crass answer is for Rebel Stoke, look at the webcam, their timestant, figure out when people get in line, wake up earlier, have a coffee. and be first in line. And like the mountain will be delightful and you won't have to wait for a 45 minute line unless you ride all the way back down to the bottom. My less crass answer. My defense is I got into town

at 3.30 in the morning. That's impressive. And you got some sleep. All right. Good work. Dedicated. My less crass answer is that this is challenging.

There aren't many new places to develop or ski areas. There aren't many new ski areas 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. I mean, other times you could probably walk into that gone below without an issue.

So that's just like rush hour or storage pricing or anything else like that. And then the other piece is that, and I'm not an expert in ski area financial planning, but these are capital intensive businesses. And the subscription product, which really the Epic Pass made famous, you know, 18 years. years ago now and that a lot of skiers, but I believe it, 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, were it not for seasons passes and, you know, quote, quote, subscriptions, right, to do this. So I think the subscription model, or at least not in a year like this year, right? Right, not in a year like this. Right. Right. But that's what the subscription product is there for,

so that this year doesn't break your business, right? You just kind of keep on going. Man, I get it. And I just don't, I just don't have that solution. 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, I'll 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 2,000 vertical feet instead of 20,000, but maybe I prioritize that. I have thought really hard about this experience thing because I grew up as we started talking about on 700 vertical foot, Shawnee Mountain, family owned and operated. So fun. But also, I remember in the 80s, it was crowded there too from everybody coming to New York. So, like, I just don't know how much of this 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. there are literally hundreds of small ski areas. Go do your research, go pick one. And from a traveling standpoint, tickets in Japan and Europe, I mean, a 50 bucks, 60 bucks, 70 bucks. Like 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 two or $300. like here. So I would say just like anything else in life or, you know, what you do with your fund, 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 of, you know, capitalism and these programs. But honestly, 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 has 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, will go chase to these mountains because it's on the past. So, man, I don't know. I'm guilty. I'm the I'm the icon. Yeah, they told me a meteorology school that 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 Vail Resorts is down like 70%. Their stock in 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 to 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. But here's the flip side.

People look at lines and all that kind of stuff. I had a number. We ski Vale a lot, Vale Mountain. We have really good friends that live near Vale and Beaver Creek. So just from a proximity standpoint for there a ton. People accuse me all the time. I'm like, oh, the resorts are paying you to. I have, you know, to like show more snow.

I would like, trust me, no marketing person has ever emailed me at 4.30 in the morning you're like, hey, pop up that number or 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 at Aspen. And Aspen is a totally different deal. Right. And now, like, I don't know all the details of how, you know, Vale Mountains operational finance compares to the Aspins, you know, finance. But, like, they both succeed in some way. Right.

But that's it. So, man, I don't know. But, like, this is the point is that you have a choice. Like, this is so wonderful. And if you don't like Vale, you can drive an hour and 45 minutes and go to Aspen. And if you don't like the big mountains, and you can go to sunlight, which is right in between them, and have a burger and a beer for probably $10 and have an awesome day. And 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 Vail Resorts keeps getting punished in the markets and epic sales decline, then they'll probably make a change because of that type of feedback. So the fact that we have options, I think, is wonderful. You want my veil slams now? 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. One more random one here.

Do you think fat skis, right? I was just doing the cat skiing thing. And time in my life, but I also was 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. Yeah.

So you have a view on that? Yeah, if you want more face shots, you should go a little skinnier. I got skis. I went to school, grad school, just having to go to grad school, the guy named Pete Wagner, who then went on to start a custom ski company called Wagner Custom Skies based out of Telluride. And he's made me a couple skis over the years, and one of them was a powder ski. And it absolutely changed my skiing. 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, unweight and kind of change your style. And that opened up a level of- Like a ski racer. Yeah, that's fair.

That opened up a level of joy in my powder skiing that I have. 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 day. 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 skis. So again, just like Bale 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? In Utah? Yeah. Was he a different company and then you guys merged or something or you brought him on? Yeah. So what happened was that back in 2010, I started writing forecasts.

Brian Allegretto in Tahoe was writing forecasts called tahoweatherdiscution.com. I was writing at Colorado Powderforecast.com. dot com and Evan Thayer was writing at watsatch, snow forecast.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 Substack and all these tools were available. But if we got together and not only kept writing together, but built this platform together, which is what we have now

with open snow with maps and forecasts 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 years i mean i didn't go in there with big checks or something like that you know i'm just strapping this thing so it took many years of convincing and discussions and meetings uh to you know for them to kind of quote unquote give up their baby and join the crew but we're all now working together um 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 would just tell you how lucky we are to be alive. I mean, this sounds like I'm writing for office or something with all these 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 the year 2000, and 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.

They're about RSA size company. They're a 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, quote, small businesses and ride this way, you know, quite a while doing what we love

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

which equates to that much snow, which he'd never heard before. And you can view that. And so, okay, I won't call off the competition because you can view this exclusively on open snow, but 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 the weather channel. And all are quite viable, but most are not optimized to the mountain environments instead of skiers. And the other thing is we will actually show you snow quality. So if you go next to, you know, like Wednesday night, I'd say three to six inches of snow. Right next to there, we'll say a snow to liquid ratio.

And we were generally taught growing up that it's 10 to 1. 10 inches of snow, if you melted it down, would be 1 inch of water. But that varies wildly. And 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. or 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 of 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 good the powder quality is because sometimes you might see a big number like,

oh, it's going to snow 10 or 15 inches, but it could be really windy or it could be really thick, snow or could be thick snow on 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 the 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, a couple hours to the north around Jackson and Grand Targhee, 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 conditions. Versus Sierra cement. Which is on average Sierra cement, but if you go at the right time and he chased 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. I'll give you an anecdote that Meb Faber, 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. Japan in the 80s, right? That there was all this cheap money and everyone was 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 pod. Yep. But in 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 Honshu, which is the main island of Japan where Tokyo is. And then there's Hakeido, the island to the north where Nisako is. Hikido is farther north, generally cold. 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 higher airfares 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 flights. I would also say that in Japan, the infrastructure, most ski 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. 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. It's how long it takes to get down the little cottonwoods. Yeah, that's right. We adjusted our forecast algorithm in Japan this year to better model. There's snowfall. They get a lot of snow, but it's similar to the 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. We also have a radar layer that is global across the world to show you what's actually falling from sky. So it works in the United States and in Europe and Japan. It is useful because while it snows 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 then I look at radar at night and in the morning and have a decent game plan, but yeah, 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 much smaller than were you expecting 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 the excitement of exploration.

is half the fun. I'm just calling you. I just 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 where we were going to go based on snow as I was learning over there. And then once we went once, we kind of understood the layout. of the land of how to rent a car and we're to stay. And so we've done our own powder chasing.

But I would say if you've never gone and you want to go, look up a tour that does powder 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, a 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 kind of 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 to see how much it 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 snowed. So sometimes you have to kind of piece together things like that. You start using AI for stuff like that? 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.

Yeah. 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'd let you pick four. So your Mount Rushmore of ski resorts globally, you can go around the world. 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 no, you're like, it doesn't matter. Oh, no, I mean, but I have a few favorites, but it depends on the conditions, right? Like, Highland Bowl can be absolutely incredible or it can be windblown craft. Like, it really just depends on the day. But I am not a steep skier.

A grip ski racing, I have great technique. I can ski steeps. It's not what brings me the most happiness. I will say, aside from that, like, deep powder, you know, 30, 35 degrees. Yeah, it doesn't feel so steep when the powder steep. No, no, but also British Columbia, whether you're inbound at a cat ski location, a heli ski location, doing backcountry with a 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.

Japan, 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 glide clacks and all sorts of things. But it's a lot less scary

from a backcountry's perspective than Colorado, which feels like it's just going to avalanche no matter where you are. And then if you go to Europe to chase, go for the apprae and hope you get a good snow day too. Yeah. Yeah, we were 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. You're like, hey, this is pretty good. And finish it off. Best, you can give me however many you want, ski movies.

I mean, there's really only one answer, which is hot. Yeah. I have to say probably when I was in middle school-ish, I probably watched ski patrol in the movie. Not ski school, which is like the R slash MCC version, but ski patrol, like the PG-3. version of, I don't know, probably 500 times or something on a VHS date.

And I don't know how well it's age because I haven't seen it for a long time. But man, that got me through my childhood. I love it. All right. We'll leave it there. We'll put a link to open snow. I use it all winter. Highly recommend.

And thanks for coming on, Joel. Great story. Yeah. Thanks for having me and going deep and nerdy. I appreciate it. 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 Berger 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. You've been listening to The Deriviv. Links from this episode will be in the episode description of this channel. Follow us on Twitter at RCM Altz and visit our website.

to read our blog or subscribe to our newsletter at rcm-aults.com. If you liked our show, introduce a friend and show them how to subscribe. And be sure to leave comments. We'd love to hear from you. This podcast is provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. All opinions expressed by podcast participants are solely their own opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of RCM alternatives,

their affiliates, or companies featured. Due to industry regulations, participants on this podcast are instructed not to make specific trade recommendations nor reference past their potential profits, and listeners are reminded that manage futures, commodity training, and other alternative investments are complex and carry a risk of substantial losses. As such, they are not suitable for all investors.