Show notes
WhoRon Schmalzle, President, Co-Owner, and General Manager of Ski Big Bear operator Recreation Management Corp; and Lori Phillips, General Manager of Ski Big Bear at Masthope Mountain, PennsylvaniaRecorded onApril 22, 2025About Ski Big BearClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Property owners of Masthope Mountain Community; operated by Recreation Management CorporationLocated in: Lackawaxen, PennsylvaniaYear founded: 1976 as “Masthope Mountain”; changed name to “Ski Big Bear” in 1993Pass affiliations:* Indy Pass – 2 days, select blackouts* Indy+ Pass – 2 days, no blackoutsClosest neighboring ski areas: Villa Roma (:44), Holiday Mountain (:52), Shawnee Mountain (1:04)Base elevation: 550 feetSummit elevation: 1,200 feetVertical drop: 650 feetSkiable acres: 26Average annual snowfall: 50 inchesTrail count: 18 (1 expert, 5 advanced, 6 intermediate, 6 beginner)Lift count: 7 (4 doubles, 3 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Ski Big Bear’s lift fleet)Why I interviewed themThis isn’t really why I interviewed them, but have you ever noticed how the internet ruined everything? Sure, it made our lives easier, but it made our world worse. Yes I can now pay my credit card bill four seconds before it’s due and reconnect with my best friend Bill who moved away after fourth grade. But it also turns out that Bill believes seahorses are a hoax and that Jesus spoke English because the internet socializes bad ideas in a way that the 45 people who Bill knew in 1986 would have shut down by saying “Bill you’re an idiot.”Bill, fortunately, is not real. Nor, as far as I’m aware, is a seahorse hoax narrative (though I’d like to start one). But here’s something that is real: When Schmalzle renamed Masthope Mountain to “Ski Big Bear” in 1993, in honor of the region’s endemic black bears, he had little reason to believe anyone, anywhere, would ever confuse his 550-vertical-foot Pennsylvania ski area with Big Bear Mountain, California, a 39-hour, 2,697-mile drive west.Well, no one used the internet in 1993 except weird proto-gamers and genius movie programmers like the fat evil dude in Jurassic Park. Honestly I didn’t even think the “Information Superhighway” was real until I figured email out sometime in 1996. Like time travel or a human changing into a cat, I thought the internet was some Hollywood gimmick, imagined because wouldn’t it be cool if we could?Well, we can. The internet is real, and it follows us around like oxygen, the invisible scaffolding of existence. And it tricks us into being dumb by making us feel smart. So much information, so immediately and insistently, that we lack a motive to fact check. Thus, a skier in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania (let’s call him “Bill 2”), can Google “Big Bear season pass” and end up with an Ikon Pass, believing this is his season pass not just to the bump five miles up the road, but a mid-winter vacation passport to Sugarbush, Copper Mountain, and Snowbird.Well Bill 2 I’m sorry but you are as dumb as my imaginary friend Bill 1 from elementary school. Because your Ikon Pass will not work at Ski Big Bear, Pennsylvania. And I’m sorry Bill 3 who lives in Riverside, California, but your Ski Big Bear, Pennsylvania season pass will not work at Big Bear Mountain Resort in California.At this point, you’re probably wondering if I have nothing better to do but sit around inventing problems to grumble about. But Phillips tells me that product mix-ups with Big Bear, California happen all the time. I had a similar conversation a few months ago with the owners of Magic Mountain, Idaho, who frequently sell tubing tickets to folks headed to Magic Mountain, Vermont, which has no tubing. Upon discovering this, typically at the hour assigned on their vouchers, these would-be customers call Idaho for a refund, which the owners grant. But since Magic Mountain, Idaho can only sell a limited number of tickets for each tubing timeslot, this internet misfire, impossible in 1993, means the mountain may have forfeited revenue from a different customer who understands how ZIP codes work.Sixty-seven years after the Giants baseball franchise moved from Manhattan to San Francisco, NFL commentators still frequently refer to the “New York football Giants,” a semantic relic of what must have been a confusing three-decade cohabitation of two sports teams using the same name in the same city. Because no one could possibly confuse a West Coast baseball team with an East Coast football team, right?But the internet put everything with a similar name right next to each other. I frequently field media requests for a fellow names Stuart Winchester, who, like me, lives in New York City and, unlike me, is some sort of founder tech genius. When I reached out to Mr. Winchester to ask where I could forward such requests, he informed me that he had recently disappointed someone asking for ski recommendations at a party. So the internet made us all dumb? Is that my point? No. Though it’s kind of hilarious that advanced technology has enabled new kinds of human error like mixing up ski areas that are thousands of miles apart, this forced contrast of two entities that have nothing in common other than their name and their reason for existence asks us to consider how such timeline cohabitation is possible. Isn’t the existence of Alterra-owned, Ikon Pass staple Big Bear, with its hundreds of thousands of annual skier visits and high-speed lifts, at odds with the notion of hokey, low-speed, independent, Boondocks-situated Ski Big Bear simultaneously offering a simpler version of the same thing on the opposite side of the continent? Isn’t this like a brontosaurus and a wooly mammoth appearing on the same timeline? Doesn’t technology move ever upward, pinching out the obsolete as it goes? Isn’t Ski Big Bear the skiing equivalent of a tube TV or a rotary phone or skin-tight hip-high basketball shorts or, hell, beartrap ski bindings? Things no one uses anymore because we invented better versions of them?Well, it’s not so simple. Let’s jump out of normal podcast-article sequence here and move the “why now” section up, so we can expand upon the “why” of our Ski Big Bear interview.Why now was a good time for this interviewEvery ski region offers some version of Ski Big Bear, of a Little Engine That Keeps Coulding, unapologetically existent even as it’s out-gunned, out-lifted, out-marketed, out-mega-passed, and out-locationed: Plattekill in the Catskills, Black Mountain in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, Middlebury Snowbowl in Vermont’s Greens, Ski Cooper in Colorado’s I-70 paper shredder, Nordic Valley in the Wasatch, Tahoe Donner on the North Shore, Grand Geneva in Milwaukee’s skiing asteroid belt.When interviewing small ski area operators who thrive in the midst of such conditions, I’ll often ask some version of this question: why, and how, do you still exist? Because frankly, from the point of view of evolutionary biologist studying your ecosystem, you should have been eaten by a tiger sometime around 1985.And that is almost what happened to Ski Big Bear AKA Masthope Mountain, and what happened to most of the dozens of ski areas that once dotted northeast Pennsylvania. You can spend days doomsday touring lost ski area shipwrecks across the Poconos and adjacent ranges. A very partial list: Alpine Mountain, Split Rock, Tanglwood, Kahkout, Mount Tone, Mount Airy, Fernwood - all time-capsuled in various states of decay. Alpine, slopes mowed, side-by-side quad chairs climbing 550 vertical feet, base lodge sealed, shrink-wrapped like a winter-stowed boat, looks like a buy-and-revive would-be ski area savior’s dream (the entrance off PA 147 is fence-sealed, but you can enter through the housing development at the summit). Kahkout’s paint-flecked double chair, dormant since 2008, still rollercoasters through forest and field on a surprisingly long line. Nothing remains at Tanglwood but concrete tower pads.Why did they all die? Why didn’t Ski Big Bear? Seven other public, chairlift-served ski areas survive in the region: Big Boulder, Blue Mountain, Camelback, Elk, Jack Frost, Montage, and Shawnee. Of these eight, Ski Big Bear has the smallest skiable footprint, the lowest-capacity lift fleet, and the third-shortest vertical drop. It is the only northeast Pennsylvania ski area that still relies entirely on double chairs, off kilter in a region spinning six high-speed lifts and 10 fixed quads. Ski Big Bear sits the farthest of these eight from an interstate, lodged at the top of a steep and confusing access road nearly two dozen backwoods miles off I-84. Unlike Jack Frost and Big Boulder, Ski Big Bear has not leaned into terrain parks or been handed an Epic Pass assist to vacuum in the youth and the masses.So that’s the somewhat rude premise of this interview: um, why are you still here? Yes, the gigantic attached housing development helps, but Phillips distills Ski Big Bear’s resilience into what is probably one of the 10 best operator quotes in the 209 episodes of this podcast. “Treat everyone as if they just paid a million dollars to do what you’re going to share with them,” she says.Skiing, like nature, can accommodate considerable complexity. If the tigers kill everything, eventually they’ll run out of food and die. Nature also needs large numbers of less interesting and less charismatic animals, lots of buffalo and wapiti and wild boar and porcupines, most of which the tiger will never eat. Vail Mountain and Big Sky also need lots of Ski Big Bears and Mt. Peters and Perfect Norths and Lee Canyons. We all understand this. But saying “we need buffalo so don’t die” is harder than being the buffalo that doesn’t get eaten. “Just be nice” probably won’t work in the jungle, but so far, it seems to be working on the eastern edge of PA.What we talked aboutUtah!; creating a West-ready skier assembly line in northeast PA; how – and why – Ski Big Bear has added “two or three weeks” to its ski season over the decades; missing Christmas; why the snowmaking window is creeping earlier into the calendar; “there has never been a year … where we haven’t improved our snowmaking”; why the owners still groom all season long; will the computerized machine era compromise the DIY spirit of independent ski areas buying used equipment; why it’s unlikely Ski Big Bear would ever install a high-speed lift; why Ski Big Bear’s snowmaking fleet mixes so many makes and models of machines; “treat everyone as if they just paid a million dollars to do what you’re going to share with them”; why RFID; why skiers who know and could move to Utah don’t; the founding of Ski Big Bear; how the ski area is able to offer free skiing to all homeowners and extended family members; why Ski Big Bear is the only housing development-specific ski area in Pennsylvania that’s open to the public; surviving in a tough and crowded ski area neighborhood; the impact of short-term rentals; the future of Ski Big Bear management, what could be changing, and when; changing the name from Masthope Mountain and how the advent of the internet complicated that decision; why Ski Big Bear built maybe the last double-double chairlift in America, rather than a fixed-grip quad; thoughts on the Grizzly and Little Bear lifts; Indy Pass; and an affordable season pass.What I got wrongOn U.S. migration into cities: For decades, America’s youth have flowed from rural areas into cities, and I assumed, when I asked Schmalzle why he’d stayed in rural PA, that this was still the case. Turns out that migration has flipped since Covid, with the majority of growth in the 25-to-44 age bracket changing from 90 percent large metros in the 2010s to two-thirds smaller cities and rural areas in this decade, according to a Cooper Center report.Why you should ski Ski Big BearOK, I spent several paragraphs above outlining what Ski Big Bear doesn’t have, which makes it sound as though the bump succeeds in spite of itself. But here’s what the hill does have: a skis-bigger-than-it-is network of narrow, gentle, wood-canyoned trails; one of the best snowmaking systems anywhere; lots of conveyors right at the top; a cheapo season pass; and an extremely nice and modern lodge (a bit of an accident, after a 2005 fire torched the original).A ski area’s FAQ page can tell you a lot about the sort of clientele they’re built to attract. The first two questions on Ski Big Bear’s are “Do I need to purchase a lift ticket?” and “Do I need rental equipment?” These are not questions you will find on the website for, say, Snowbird.So mostly I’m going to tell you to ski here if you have kids to ski with, or a friend who wants to learn. Ski Big Bear will also be fine if you have an Indy Pass and can ski midweek and don’t care about glades or steeps, or you’re like me and you just enjoy novelty and exploration. On the weekends, well, this is still PA, and PA skiing is demented. The state is skiing’s version of Hanoi, Vietnam, which has declined to add traffic-management devices of any kind even as cheap motorbikes have nearly broken the formerly sleepy pedestrian city’s spine:Hanoi, Vietnam, January 2016. Video by Stuart Winchester. There are no stop signs or traffic signals, for vehicles or pedestrians, at this (or most), four-way intersections in old-town Hanoi.Compare that to Camelback:Camelback, Pennsylvania, January 2024. Video by Stuart Winchester.Same thing, right? So it may seem weird for me to say you should consider taking your kids to Ski Big Bear. But just about every ski area within a two-hour drive of New York City resembles some version of this during peak hours. Ski Big Bear, however, is a gentler beast than its competitors. Fewer steeps, fewer weird intersections, fewer places to meet your fellow skiers via high-speed collision. No reason to release the little chipmunks into the Pamplona chutes of Hunter or Blue, steep and peopled and wild. Just take them to this nice little ski area where families can #FamOut. Podcast NotesOn smaller Utah ski areasStep off the Utah mainline, and you’ll find most of the pow with fewer of the peak Wasatch crowds:I’ve featured both Sundance and Beaver Mountain on the podcast:On Plattekill and Berkshire EastBoth Plattekill, New York and Berkshire East, Massachusetts punched their way into the modern era by repurposing other ski areas’ junkyard discards. The owners of both have each been on the pod a couple of times to tell their stories:On small Michigan ski areas closingI didn’t ski for the first time until I was 14, but I grew up within an hour of three different ski areas, each of which had one chairlift and several surface lifts. Two of these ski areas are now permanently closed. My first day ever was at Mott Mountain in Farwell, Michigan, which closed around 2000:Day two was later that winter at what was then called “Bintz Apple Mountain” in Freeland, which hasn’t spun lifts in about a decade:Snow Snake, in Harrison, managed to survive:The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a sustainable small business directly because of my paid subscribers. To upgrade, please click through below. Thank you for your support of independent ski journalism. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe