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The Storm Skiing Journal and PodcastEveryones searching for skiings soul. Im trying to find its brains. Author: Stuart Winchester
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Storm News 11/9/2026: Ikon Adds Mountains, Sipapu GM Bradley on Mega-Expansion
Monday, 9 November, 2026
WhoJohn Paul Bradley, General Manager of Sipapu Ski and Summer Resort, New MexicoDate RecordedNov. 9, 2026About SipapuOwned by: Mountain Capital Partners, which also owns:Year founded: 1952Pass affiliations: Unlimited on Power Pass, Power Pass Select, and Power Pass CoreBase elevation: 8,200 feetSummit elevation: 9,255 feetVertical drop: 1,055 feetSkiable acres: 189Average annual snowfall: 185 inchesLift count: 6 (1 fixed-grip quad, 2 triples, 1 double, 2 carpets)Why I interviewed himThat’s a nice trailmap, built out considerably since MCP Managing Partner James Coleman purchased the bump from the founding Bolander family in 2000.But it’s a McNothingStuffing compared to how Sipapu could scale under an expansion plan that the U.S. Forest Service recently accepted for environmental review:Here’s the proposed lift specs - proposed lifts A and B below match with the long dotted lines above:Absurdly, amazingly, the gray-shaded area on the map above represents the entirety of the legacy ski area:Can they do it? I hope so.TranscriptsThere are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them.Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer. Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment.Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio.ZoomTake up Top - Ikon’s new partnersStuart Winchester: All right, let’s start today with changes to the Icon Pass. I say changes, but really I mean changes and additions. Icon Pass just keeps adding mountains at an unbelievable rate. They’ve added more than 40 ski areas.01:10:56.000 --> 01:11:07.000Stuart Winchester: in the past 2 years, and when I say past 2 years, I really just mean since spring of 2025, so really it hasn’t even been 2 years since they’ve added all these mountains.01:11:07.000 --> 01:11:22.000Stuart Winchester: And some of them are the little bonus mountains, and some are full partners. One of the changes, though, that is not a new mountain that Deer Valley added, or that Icon added today, was a little bit of a departure for Icon Pass.01:11:22.000 --> 01:11:24.000Stuart Winchester: So…01:11:24.000 --> 01:11:37.000Stuart Winchester: when the Icon Pass debuted in 2018, all of the ski areas that were on Icon Pass at the time were included on the Icon Base Pass, and they… many of them had blackouts, as many of them do today, but.01:11:37.000 --> 01:11:45.000Stuart Winchester: Jackson Hole, Alta, Aspen, all of those mountains, Deer Valley, were on the Icon Base Pass with five days.01:11:45.000 --> 01:11:47.000Stuart Winchester: In 2020.01:11:47.000 --> 01:11:55.000Stuart Winchester: Jackson Hole and Aspen left Icon Base, and they went to something called Icon Base Plus, and it was…01:11:55.000 --> 01:12:04.000Stuart Winchester: an add-on you could buy, but in general, most people would still get the full Icon Pass. Uh, in 2022, Deer Valley and Alta.01:12:04.000 --> 01:12:16.000Stuart Winchester: followed Jackson Hole and Aspen off of the Icon Base Pass, and Sun Valley and Snow Basin, which had newly joined after leaving the Epic Pass, decided to also be exclusively for Icon Base.01:12:16.000 --> 01:12:18.000Stuart Winchester: But we started to see…01:12:18.000 --> 01:12:30.000Stuart Winchester: what we’ve always seen with Altera, the ability to be really creative with the IconPass, and one of the things that they’ve done is change access.01:12:30.000 --> 01:12:33.000Stuart Winchester: Quite a bit. And they’ve done this to…01:12:33.000 --> 01:12:37.000Stuart Winchester: Experiment to flex to try to get the crowd levels correct.01:12:37.000 --> 01:12:52.000Stuart Winchester: And sometimes they take away access, and sometimes they add access. So in this case, the Deer Valley access they took away on IconBase in 2022, Altera, which owns Deer Valley and IconPass, of course.01:12:52.000 --> 01:13:08.000Stuart Winchester: is adding some Icon Base Pass access back. They’re adding 3 days, though, not 5, so this is a unique thing. There is no other ski area on Icon Base Pass that has a 3-day tier, and I’m not exactly sure.01:13:08.000 --> 01:13:20.000Stuart Winchester: how they arrived at that three days. I am scheduled to host the president of Deer Valley, Todd Bennett, very soon on the podcast, and I will ask him to break this down for us. But nonetheless, if you have an Icon Base Pass, you do get three days.01:13:20.000 --> 01:13:29.000Stuart Winchester: at Deer Valley on it this year. Remember, Deer Valley is only for skiers, no snowboarders allowed, similar to Alta up the road. And…01:13:29.000 --> 01:13:39.000Stuart Winchester: Deer Valley has nearly tripled in size over the past 3 seasons, so if you haven’t been to Deer Valley in a while.01:13:39.000 --> 01:13:44.000Stuart Winchester: I mean, it already felt pretty big, because it’s Utah, and you can ski almost anywhere, but…01:13:44.000 --> 01:13:46.000Stuart Winchester: They added…01:13:46.000 --> 01:14:02.000Stuart Winchester: more than the size of Deer Valley to the back end of it, basically they call it the Wasatch Back, so if you keep driving out of Park City, and it’s actually a lot more pleasant to get to Deer Valley now, because what the expansion allowed them to do was to build a new village, the Deer Valley East Village.01:14:02.000 --> 01:14:14.000Stuart Winchester: You don’t have to drive through Park City to get there anymore, and Park City traffic is always a nightmare, so what you can do is just get off the highway, make one turn, and there you are in Deer Valley East Village, and the…01:14:14.000 --> 01:14:20.000Stuart Winchester: new Lyft network connects really seamlessly to Legacy Deer Valley, so…01:14:20.000 --> 01:14:25.000Stuart Winchester: They’ve done a really good job with it. I’ve not skied the entire expansion.01:14:25.000 --> 01:14:41.000Stuart Winchester: But I skied quite a bit of it the year before last and was really impressed with the way that the whole thing was coming together. So, you know, Deer Valley is not to be mistaken for cottonwood skiing. It is a very different thing. It is positioned differently. It is a, a different.01:14:41.000 --> 01:14:48.000Stuart Winchester: level and kind of skiing, even though they’re really right next door to each other, but uh… but that is, I think, cool.01:14:48.000 --> 01:15:01.000Stuart Winchester: of Icon to do that, and Altera to do that, and to give a little access where they have a little more to give. You know, they have 5,000 acres to fill, and they used to have 2,000, and I’d imagine you could probably fit a few more skiers on there, especially when you’re excluding snowboarders.01:15:01.000 --> 01:15:04.000Stuart Winchester: This echoes what…01:15:04.000 --> 01:15:13.000Stuart Winchester: Icon Pass did with the Aspen Mountains, right? I mentioned that Aspen had left the Icon Base Pass in 2020, and…01:15:13.000 --> 01:15:20.000Stuart Winchester: This past year, this past spring, for the 2026-27 ski season, Aspen said, you know what?01:15:20.000 --> 01:15:27.000Stuart Winchester: That still makes sense for Aspen M… Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe
