Basecamp Podcast: Jay Peak GM Steve Wright

The tram at Jay Peak provides the only lift access to some of its most popular skiing. (Keith Pearson)

When ski resorts eventually throw in the towel on the season in April or May, odds are one mountain will stand among the rest in terms of natural snow.

Jay Peak in northern Vermont is a magnet for natural snow. Sure, the wind will blow it around, but it means the tree skiing at Jay is among the best you can find in New England.

Steve Wright has been the general manager through the highs and lows of the mountain, and he joined Basecamp Podcast co-hosts Mike Specian and Keith Pearson recently to discuss the mountain and industry.

Maybe he even gave away a few places he likes to ski.

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HIGHLIGHTS

How important has Indy Pass been for the mountain?

Steve Wright: It’s been huge for us. I mean, we’re the number one resort redeemed on Indy for the last two consecutive years, maybe three. We jumped on when we went into receivership. But really we jumped on when the pandemic landed and they closed the Canadian border, so we had plenty of capacity and we were the last on the line in New England, so if you were going to ignore the pandemic travel restrictions, you were probably going to ignore them at Killington, or someplace south of that. You weren’t going to drive all the way up to Jay, which we saw very little activity during that period.

So we said, let’s jump on this pass and try to fill up some of this capacity, and it was a good move. It was important to us. Now we like the other resorts that are on there. The management of Indy is solid. We like those guys, and we think that, like these other ownership configurations provide a counterpoint sort of these past configurations, and Indy for us was the right one.

Wright followed up an earlier point about the industry’s need to get more skiers on the mountain.

Wright: Just like the golf industry did when Tiger Woods was at his apex, the PGA went out and marketed golf and you could see everything from new golfers’ hardware, hardgood sales, the golf course creation spiked.

We have the greatest skier of a generation in Mikaela Shiffrin, who should be the ambassador of this sport, telling every single person, whether they’re a 14-year-old girl or a 50-year-old man, that they should be taking up the sports of skiing and riding. We’ll never have a better ambassador in our lifetime, for sure.

So, if we could get a coordinated message and a coordinated offer in the hands of the best skier in our generation, how would that not impact us in a good way?

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