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!
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From the Episode:
Jeff Masters The Derivative Podcast Episode: Super Storms, Mathematical Modeling, and Hurricane Hunting with Dr. Jeff Masters
Meb Faber’s Top Ski resorts – Japan
Citrini Research AI piece: When Skynet Writes a Substack: The AI Doom Piece That Moved Markets
Check out the complete Transcript from this week’s podcast below:
OpenShow’s Joel Gratz built a Pod Shop for Powder Days: the PMs are Meteorologists and the Returns are Faceshots. Send It!
Jeff Malec 00:09
Welcome to the derivative by RCM Alternatives, Send it.
Jeff Malec 00:18
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 iConnections in Miami. So go check both those out at RCM.alts.com/education. Onto this episode, which is a bit of a one for me, as we’ve got the founder of the OpenSnow app, I’m constantly checking all winter long to see where the fresh is. 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.
Jeff Malec 01:18
All right, everybody. We’re here with Joel Gratz, Joel, how are you?
Joel Gratz 01:22
Doing good it’s I’d be a lot happier if it snowed a lot more this season, but I’m happy to speak with you.
Jeff Malec 01:29
I hear you, and we were just talking about flying. You’re in Boulder area.
Joel Gratz 01:33
I am in Boulder area. I grew up in the snow fields of Southeastern Pennsylvania, I say jokingly, outside of Philadelphia, and that might be why I like snow so much, because it didn’t snow very much there. So I grew up skiing and the Poconos of Pennsylvania at Shawnee mountain, went to school for meteorology at Penn State, Pennsylvania, then moved out to Boulder, Colorado for grad school,
Jeff Malec 01:55
nice and went to Boulder itself. See, yep, yep.
Joel Gratz 01:59
So see, see you, Boulder for grad school, where I studied meteorology, well, Environmental Studies. I got an MBA while I was there, but I also discovered this thing called powder, which I had only seen about twice in Pennsylvania. And honestly, I had an amazing childhood skiing, ski racing, ski instructing. I 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 toured 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 I once, I figured it out. I was mesmerized. And then I realized, Oh, hey, hold on a second. I just spent a bunch of time studying meteorology, which is the key to figuring out when the powder is going to hit. And so that was the genesis for this obsession with trying to find powder.
Jeff Malec 02:56
I love it. What my experience some of the best gears 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
Joel Gratz 03:11
i i do, although, you know, growing or now my son, who is eight, is coming up through the ranks, and there’s a lot of good skiers out here, but I will say that meeting people out here and meeting people from the east there is often you can kind of just tell that somebody grew up on the east ski racing, because they have a little bit of a different aggressive stance than people that may have grown up 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.
Jeff Malec 03:47
Yeah, don’t sleep on the east. I went to school upstate New York, and 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,
Joel Gratz 03:59
which is good fun. Do you ever see the sun when you were going to school in the Northeast? Because, yeah,
Jeff Malec 04:05
in fact, I tell my kids there was one day I slept till maybe, like 4:45pm, and I missed the sun entirely. That day, it was it was dark when I went to bed, it was dark when I woke up. That’s not good for your internal clock. No.
Joel Gratz 04:19
And I’ll tell you I loved growing up in Pennsylvania, at 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 it 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.
Jeff Malec 04:49
And weird. What was that a month ago? Right? It snowed like two feet in southern Pennsylvania, in Philly area, and was nothing out west. We were like, what’s happening? Yeah, I
Joel Gratz 04:59
wish I that. 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
Jeff Malec 05:38
call your friends? Be like first to report, hey, it’s gonna be a snow day.
Joel Gratz 05:43
I don’t, I don’t. Actually, I didn’t. I was just so obsessed with going out in the snow, I didn’t call anybody.
Jeff Malec 05:49
So which came first? You wanted to be a weather man first, and then got into the ski angle, or you wanted to be in the ski angle the whole time? Yeah, I think it
Joel Gratz 05:59
was concurrent my so my parents neither grew up skiing, which is odd, because I feel like a lot of skiers, their family grows up skiing and kind of just come up in that rank. So neither 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 was for a lesson. And they, 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 learned to 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 gonna have a snow day, I would obsessively watch the weather channel, and I would stagger my watching of the three local TV stations in Philadelphia, because they would each do the weather at slightly different times during the six o’clock news. One was like 15 after, one was 18 after. One was 21, after so I could see all the different weathers. And so I the skiing and the weather obsession was a concurrent obsession for me. But I will say that I initially wanted to be a pilot, and I still am a big aviation geek, but I realized that my desires for meteorology were stronger than just slightly stronger than my desires for aviation plus, and I don’t, I can’t chop this up to anything specific. I kind of recognized in middle school and high school that I didn’t think the aviation pathway as a pilot would be the right family life for me, 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 focused on meteorology and
Jeff Malec 08:05
never looked 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.
Joel Gratz 08:13
Probably no very 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 raced for a while, I then became an instructor because I wasn’t a very good ski racer. I just I didn’t have the killer instinct, the desire to go fast and then fall like, No, I’m gonna go at like, 80% Yeah. Like, well, that’s probably not gonna work for ski racing, but I was a ski instructor, and that helped me appreciate, you know, learning to ski again. And most of our clientele, or a lot, was from New York City, and so quite diverse, especially, you know, in an industry that is not very diverse among people. Getting people from New York City was hilarious and fun and challenging as a 1617, 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.
Jeff Malec 09:16
Quick, we’ll get we’ll get into the open snow in a second here. But my brain went to when you said your parents saw an ad in the newspaper, what do you think that lesson cost? Like, God, right, versus what it is today?
Joel Gratz 09:27
Yeah, unbelievable. And, you know, 20 bucks. Who knows? But, but the cool thing, I mean, I will say like, and I’m dealing with this as a parent now where, you know, my son has interests that are similar, and in some ways in different than, in other ways than mine, are for sports and other things. I’m trying to support that my dad was a near professional baseball player. He would play AAA for the Orioles at a certain time, had a baseball scholarship in college, and he pushed me, not pushed, but said, Hey, you should, you know, go play baseball. And I told him that I was going to retire after one season of base. All but, you know, I credit him and my mom for not pushing say, All right, you know what else is going on? And they were so on board with me skiing after they had never skied that in elementary school, my dad would take me out of school on just random weekdays and take me up to Shawnee because there were no kids on weekdays, because all the kids were supposed to be in school, which meant I got a private lesson for the cost of a group lesson, because there were no other kids to get lessons. So, you know, there was some creativity there to save some money and and also the flexibility to not necessarily push me to do what they wanted me to do.
Jeff Malec 10:37
That’s one of my hacks I used for years. My wife basically check her under lesson. I go ski good stuff on Aspen Highlands. Not many people go to Highlands for the lesson. So we’d go to islands. I’d get to do all the good stuff, and she’d go in a group lesson. And it ended up being one, maybe two people, yeah, like $300 versus $1,300 like, hey, yep, we’re winning. I So, boom, you go to grad school Colorado, you’re out. You went started open snow immediately. Or you had a real job first? Yeah, I did
Joel Gratz 11:18
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 an earthquake insurance company, so there was a financial angle, yeah, 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 I
Jeff Malec 12:00
was there for them to be based in Boulder, but whatever they were scarce.
Joel Gratz 12:05
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 ICAT, and I got it almost shaking, almost shaking, with the desire to get out of there and get to Vals 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 at icap, but I had an obsession that ran deep.
Jeff Malec 12:55
Well, yeah, insurance and skiing don’t usually mix. So, so Then how’d this all come to be? You just popped in, no, and it popped in your head, or you had a whole business plan.
Joel Gratz 13:06
Yeah, there’s, well, you know, the the myth of the or not even the myth, but the one offs of the Mark Zuckerberg, 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 obsessively 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 grew to 300 go to 500 but it was a side gig, side hustle, not a big deal at that time, I emailed the National Weather Service here in Boulder. I emailed the Colorado Avalanche Information Center. I took classes. I talked to anybody who had ever been a forecast here in Colorado who was interested in snow. I just wanted to obsess and learn about why does Vail get more snow than Beaver Creek on a certain wind direction. Why did Aspen get hit? And so I studied, studied, study, tried to figure things out. And then a couple years into this, I just had this fledgling website, and then I made it a blog, but people started emailing me asking to advertise. People started emailing me asking 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 1000s, but not, you know, not millions. And I was 28 I had a roommate covering half my mortgage. I had no significant other. I had no pets. 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 in Boulder Startup Week and all these other things, is what finally allowed me to wake up one morning, you know, quote, unquote, out of the blue, 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 make any money? Well, yeah, that’s it’s a good question. And right around the volume, yeah, right at the same time, a reporter used to work at the Los Angeles Times and base gear reached out to me and said, Hey, I like what you’re doing. I know the guys at surf line. Surf line is a company that does what we do, but for surfing. So they started in, I believe, the 80s, as a one surf line number, right? With people forecasting surf you
Jeff Malec 16:36
don’t hear much one 900 numbers anymore. No, no,
Joel Gratz 16:41
that’s, that’s a bygone error. But they had a good business, and this guy, this reporter from the LA Times, said, Hey, I want to introduce you to those guys. They’re super nice. You’re not competitive. I bet they could help you kind of think through because they’re an analog to your business how you could, how you could start to run this me was exactly right. The CEO at the time of surfline was a graduate of CU Boulder, so he’s happy to chat with me and I, 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 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 and family. You can raise money from from investors. I chose to just bootstrap it based on the savings that I had and the fact that I was doing most of the work and I needed to eat Chipotle and have some water every day and go ski bum on my friend’s couch. So my cost of living was pretty low. Tell us,
Jeff Malec 17:43
for those who don’t know what open snow is, and does open snow, I have it up on my phone here not going to be able
Joel Gratz 17:52
to open snow. Is a platform that effectively started to tell people when it was going to be a powder day and when you should not go to work or go to school and you should go enjoy this fleeting moment, this perishable moment of wonderful still conditions. And for folks that aren’t aware of kind of powder skiing versus regular skiing, it’s, it’s almost like going to the Super Bowl versus going to, you know, a high school football game or something. Both can be fun. But one, one is the thing that you dream about all year, or, you know, fill in your analogy there, and the other one is enjoyable, but kind of 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 is billowing up over your head and it’s just kind of grown adults are screaming obscenities going down the hill because it’s so much fun. So that’s what this was born around. But then increasingly, we have more people using us to just time out trips for decent conditions or to avoid bad conditions. And it’s now a subscription service that has we have about 15 employees, another 10 contractors, and we reach depending on metrics, you know, hundreds of 1000s to low, millions of people every year, focused mostly in the Western United States, but increasingly around the world.
Jeff Malec 19:07
Yeah, and you got, what do I pay? 70 bucks a year, or something like that. Yeah, it depends
Joel Gratz 19:11
what, it depends what deal you got. But yeah, our subscription is 50 or $100 a year, depending on what features you want. And that’s a whole other story of pricing, because I started this being quite cheap ish on pricing, and then going lower and then coming back higher. And it’s, you know, it’s a journey of time and building confidence in users, and also having advisors advise to charge what we think we need to charge to make a successful, viable, growing business, even if a few people think that it’s too much money, because there will always be a few people that think it’s too much money, right?
Jeff Malec 19:48
But it’s a weird you have a crazy audience, right? You have the total ski bum that has $1 in his pocket to the hedge fund guy who’s checking hella skiing conditions in BC, yeah.
Joel Gratz 20:00
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 the nap, but is our biggest supporter and wants to tell the world about us, and, you know, skis 100 days a year. So we have tried to navigate that. And this year, we started something called the ski 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.
Jeff Malec 20:40
So I was gonna say, I’ll support one of the scholarships
Joel Gratz 20:45
we’ll see, and then we’ll check your LinkedIn and say, maybe, maybe you do have a higher willingness to pay. But look, we’ve often most skiers have ski bummed on a couch, or have done it at some point, just for the love of it, and we understand that. So the technology that we use to forecast, to bring the apps to life to pay all of our forecasters. Like, none of this is free. This all takes real, real money to make work. So we do need to make money as a business. But we’re also thoughtful of trying to get this in the hands of people that are bummed it out there, because we’ve all been there.
Jeff Malec 21:12
But it’s also like, how many times you and I’ve like, I would easily pay $100 right now for a clean powder liner, right for it to snow tonight? Like, yeah, a lot more.
Joel Gratz 21:27
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 with the most wholesome payoff possible, because the game is weather, travel, logistics, previous conditions, geography, mapping, to try to understand where you are in the mountain where the snow is blown in. But if you can play that game, and you can solve it, and you get that untouched run, it is and I mean, for some people, it’s about posting on Instagram and all that. For me, like my outlet is, is open snow. I want to make the science of open snow, the communication, the best it can be. For me personally, I don’t post on Instagram. It is just the inherent joy of that run with family and friends that is just so fun and the culmination of, you know, that game. So, yes, we have spent a lot of money chasing that condition locally and across
Jeff Malec 22:27
the world. I’m trying to think of another sport where, when you’re skiing powder with buddies, and you’re there’s just Whoo, like people are just screaming in a good like it’s just naturally coming out of them, in a way, maybe surfing, I guess, right, you’re not doing that on the golf course. You’re not doing that playing basketball, whatever, like. It’s just this natural emotion that comes out. We’ve had
Joel Gratz 22:48
to discuss with our son, you know, who’s eight. You know, we on a chair lift on a powder day, and, you know, people are just screaming obscenities, right on the lift, or under the lift, or you get on the chair lift 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, there’s like, oh my gosh, how often great we you know? And then they look at the kid and they they apologize. They’re like, No man, we understand. So that raw emotion is is hard to manufacture outside of a certain few situations in life. So to be able to, I mean, I would kind of say, like, chase that naturally, right? Like, it’s not drugs. And the interesting part is, it’s not something that you can control. You can have all the money in the world, but you’re still at the whims of the weather and geography and sometimes bad luck. And so there is an element of effort involved, and an element of luck beyond all of the weather forecasting that feels like it somewhat democratizes this experience. Yes, you of course, you can fly places and go 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.
Jeff Malec 23:58
I went Bella Coola, it rained up to 9000 feet on the coast there, like the Pineapple Express, all that was happening. And I’m like, why the one right? I’d booked it like 14 months in advance and all that. And you’re just at the whims. You
Jeff Malec 24:20
Yeah, 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 1015, 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?
Joel Gratz 24:47
Yeah, partially, I think what I did is bring the science and focus it on people that just wanted snow. So the local National Weather Service offices, they know the science pretty well. But. They’re also not obsessed with snow, right? They’re there for life and safety production. 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, because that peak, or whatever exactly, it kind of just it didn’t matter as much from the from a life safety standpoint, for the Colorado Avalanche Information Center, they’re thinking about it more in terms of snow pack and layers. And so while they understand it for sure, their communication style is mostly around avalanche is not here’s where to go to ski the most after that. 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, it’s come all the way from just writing what we saw and what we think we know to now trying to prove that
Jeff Malec 26:44
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 gonna get more than Vale and north of the highway, it gets more than south of the highway, all that kind of stuff.
Joel Gratz 26:58
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 from the mountains only measure snow in one location on the mountain. So, for instance, we’ve talked about Vail, 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 bull. And that’s not because anybody is 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 bull, or you’re not in the back bowls of Vale 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’s what that is, what I did. And that’s also because those we don’t have many weather stations out. That’s why that wasn’t kind of well studied by any buddy 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 bootstrapped 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, 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 and probably seven to 10 years before I got over the fact that, like, it’s probably not going to go to zero next year. But yeah, that’s just the entrepreneurial journey for some people, or
Jeff Malec 28:55
at least for me, the what do they call it, 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, yeah, at the base, at the mid Yeah.
Joel Gratz 29:13
And Aspen is actually a great example, because they’re one of the few places that do have four or five sensors per mountain, per mountain. But I will say that the majority of people that go skiing, or at least the majority of people that spend the most money skiing at the resorts, are not timing the weather, yeah, and are not caring, and have booked their one week during Easter or Christmas break or whatever it is. And so from a resort standpoint, and also from a resort standpoint, they’re trying to smooth out. I mean, they don’t really have much control over this, but they either 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. Not snowing here? Yeah, well no, and they do want to tell the snow story. But also. So, 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 snowed, 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
Jeff Malec 30:18
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 gonna cancel so, and you mentioned that earlier, it’s become not just powder, right? You’re not called powder hounds. You’re called, yeah, yeah, open snow,
Joel Gratz 30:39
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 tickets, 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 is on the hill, just very, very hot type of weather. And I was out skiing at Winter Park this weekend, and it was really slushy, like really slushy and difficult ish, the ski at times, and I can
Jeff Malec 31:23
understand your daily snow,
Joel Gratz 31:26
understand somebody not wanting to spend the money for those conditions that said it was beautifully sunny. It was the first time I’m a very I’m a skinny, cold body. So it was the first time I’ve been on the hill all year that I 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, 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 crap shoot. 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.
Jeff Malec 33:21
So two things to 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 advanced. I know weather doesn’t quite work that way, but is there? Is that getting better? Can you get closer to that? Can you give broad Yeah, are
Joel Gratz 33:39
you asking as a trader or as a well, no, as a skier,
Jeff Malec 33:43
both, yeah, but more as a skier, like, Hey, where are we going? Right? Wife wants me to book the thing six months in advance, to Colorado. We’re going to Utah, yep.
Joel Gratz 33:53
So reverse order, actually, as a trader, so the six month kind of call it season to kind of 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 the 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 a Aspen, because you love the town, or, you know, for be like to go over to hot springs nearby, or something like that, then 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, couple weeks to a couple of months are useful from a probabilistic sense. Yes. 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 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.
Jeff Malec 35:28
Sorry, have come on. I wanted to say, Oh, our new AI model is going to tell you exactly now.
Joel Gratz 35:33
And you know what I have seen somebody shared with us a couple of months ago. I think it’s it was a hedge 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. It’s not good enough to see. The other thing is that you could, you could simulate a below average snow year, which might actually be true. 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 trusts 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 a four to six weeks, and I would say Occasionally, when all of those models align, there is some signal there out to maybe a month, but it is not good enough to kind of dial in a certain day, or even a certain mountain. But sometimes, like, if the West is really dry and everything shows a signal toward it going snowy, or four weeks out, then sometimes I feel pretty good
Jeff Malec 36:53
about 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 models hinting at a big storm coming, but super low confidence because it’s so
Joel Gratz 37:04
far out. Yeah, and I yeah, I want to touch on one more thing, because people often give us grief, because, like, ah, 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 forecasts. We always limited them to 10, and we released 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. Here you go. What? Yeah, just here you go. And this is what Jeff master said when he chatted 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, where we are adjusting that weather data for the mountain environment. So rather than just ripping out the number that comes from the European model or the American model or whatever it is, we are actively making adjustments to fine tune those numbers for the mountain.
Jeff Malec 39:03
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 nervous Nelly and want to get out of there, but show me all the lines. Like they’re taking the third and giving me the cone, but like show all the lines
Jeff Malec 39:32
we mentioned. So 50 Sunny, right? I’m scrolling through today looking at all my favorites. 50% of average, 69% of it, snow mass, 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 I. Is it? Do you see year over year? We’re trending this way, and there’s less and less snow pack.
Joel Gratz 40:06
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 and there is 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. No, I 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 precip events, like The strongest thunderstorms or something. When you look at overall precipitation, especially across Colorado and the western United States and Western North America, there is no long term trend in precipitation. So if you combine warming temperatures and no trend in precipitation, then logic just dictates that lower elevations are going to have more rain events, right? Because it’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, whatever news you want. And in this case, it was dryness and bad news for the West. So it was
Jeff Malec 41:55
mostly dryness. It wasn’t just warm. This year’s bad income warm it
Joel Gratz 41:59
Yeah, it was warm and dry, for sure. I mean that, and you hit on that exactly right is that not only was this season drier than than normal in a lot of places, but importantly, it was much warmer than normal, but often those things go together when you get a high pressure that just anchors itself over the West, warmer usually goes together with drier, and over the East cooler generally goes together, not always, but often, with snowy and stormier it
Jeff Malec 42:26
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.
Joel Gratz 42:39
Yep, 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, then I’ll do some real time sleuthing here. But yeah, Alta, so far this year is 280 inches, which is wow. I mean, and alth 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, yeah, I like to remind people, you can look back and I show this graph of the Colorado River flows reconstructed over 1000 years using tree cores and samples and all sorts of things. And you can see significant droughts, you know, through the period of 1000 years ago, droughts as bad, or in generally, worse than what we have in modern history. And so I like to remind people is like, we think of this year as being awful, but we generally compare this to the last 50 years, like the atmosphere is capable of far more variability than I think we appreciate as humans, and it’s hard for us to keep kind of 100 and 1000 year, you know, cycles and time spans in our minds, but it’s kind of normal to have a dry a very dry year, a very wet year, and everything in between. Now I will caveat all of this by saying that maybe this podcast won’t age well. Maybe we’ll look back in 20 Well, no, maybe we’ll look back in 20 or 30 years and see that this was the beginning of a strong drying trend, and that and or a strong trend toward a drier storm track, or something like that. And that’s 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 like this, he had mentioned wildfires out in Oregon. And 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, 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 was a study many years ago that said the jet stream is 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 way we adjusting, maybe in five or 10 years, we see more data, it actually is causing, you know, different storm effects. 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 just as
Jeff Malec 46:35
the model, yeah, yeah, like,
Joel Gratz 46:36
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. You know, that’s not exactly what happened over the subsequent 20 years. Now, could risk prices have have been too low to begin with? Maybe right? Like, I can’t comment on any of that, but you just have to be real careful about getting away from 100 year mean, and we did have 100 years of hurricane history 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.
Jeff Malec 47:23
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? Yeah, they’re just getting lost. Get flew right into a huge hurricane and or sailed right into a huge hurricane without
Joel Gratz 47:37
nose. Maybe, yeah, absolutely.
Jeff Malec 47:38
And so when you say the jet streams wavier. That means it’s curving like three times over the US, or that around its edges, it’s like doing weird stuff.
Joel Gratz 47:47
Oh no, I’m sorry. It’s so the jet stream is, is a fast moving kind of river of air up around 30,000 feet or so, about where planes fly. And it is caused by the contrast in temperatures of colder readings over the poles and then warmer readings over the equator. And the jet stream is always wavy at times, sometimes it’s straighter, sometimes it goes up and down. The reason that we have storms is because it goes up and down. And so 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 expand 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, 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 use 1987 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, etc. 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
Jeff Malec 49:23
our hedge fund world, right? Check your data. Make sure you’re not fitting it.
Jeff Malec 49:36
A few random ones here I wrote down as we were talking. One Do you have? 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 gonna go find
Joel Gratz 49:49
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 day. Data, do you ever worry about anything? I was like, oh, yeah, run a small. Business, I worry about everything, all every 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 gonna, somebody’s gonna 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 runs 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, like, 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’s available on open or just saying,
Jeff Malec 51:04
like, note, if you all listen to this, it’s going to be super crowded, right?
Joel Gratz 51:08
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, 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 a good condition. So if I ruin it for everybody else, I’m also ruining it for yourself, for
Jeff Malec 51:40
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. It’s 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
Joel Gratz 52:07
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 Vale resorts and the epic and 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, gonna 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, they were power outages, not the resort’s fault, you know, road closures, not the resort’s fault. 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, I still got hosed. And so
Jeff Malec 53:11
that happened to me. I heard Kirk wood once was like, what? How can you close the mountain? Like, no more, yeah,
Joel Gratz 53:16
and I get it. I, you know, my, my crass answer is for rebel stoke. Look at the webcams. They’re timestamped. Figure out when people get in line. Wake up early or 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
Jeff Malec 53:37
answer, my defense, was, I got into town at 330 in the morning.
Joel Gratz 53:41
That’s impressive, and you got some sleep. All right? Good, 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 skiaries 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 onto that envelope without an issue. Yeah, so that’s just like Rush Hour or surge 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 ago now, and that a lot of ski areas, but I believe, I thought it was 2008 or 2010, or something. 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, unquote subscriptions right to do. It. So I think the subscription model at least
Jeff Malec 55:02
not in a year like this year, right? Not
Joel Gratz 55:04
in a year like this, right? And 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, I man, I get it, and I just, I just don’t have that solution. My the way I play in this world is I just play in this world. If I go to a place that I know is crowded, I just try to get there earlier and deal with it. And if I think now the powder days on a weekend and everywhere is going to be nuts, I’ll think about going to a smaller mountain, or going into the back country and safe terrain that’s low angle, and having a peaceful experience. And it might be 2000 vertical feet instead of 20. Of 20,000 but maybe I probably prioritize that. I 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 and 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, is, you know, new quote, unquote. And also, people have never had more information and more of an ability to make their own decisions. And if you don’t like this, then go travel to Europe or Japan, look on open snow or anywhere else. Find there are literally hundreds of small ski areas. Go do your research. Go pick ones. And from a traveling standpoint, tickets in Japan and Europe, 50 bucks, 60 bucks, 70 bucks, like going to a place because it’s on icon or epic, after 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 lift 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 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, you know, capitalism and these programs, but honestly, I don’t, I don’t have the right answer, because I don’t think it’s an altogether terrible strategy to pull a lot of mountains together and insulate the weather risk through subscriptions. And on the flip side, even icon, which 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, I’m guilty. Yeah, they, they told me meteorology school to just eventually, if you don’t know, just tell me you don’t know. So I’ll
Jeff Malec 57:44
tell you I don’t know. The 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?
Joel Gratz 58:03
Well, I I don’t know why every 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, yeah, market, and I don’t think anything can be up forever. And so, you know, they had a probably plus or minus great decade run, and you bring up a great point if but here’s the flip side. People look at lines and all that kind of stuff. I had a number. We ski veil a lot Vail mountain, because we have really good friends that live near Vail and Beaver Creek. So just from a proximity standpoint, we’re there a ton. People accuse me all the time, like, oh, the resorts are paying you to forget, you know, to like, Yeah, show more snow, I would like, trust me, no marketing person has ever emailed me at 430 in the morning. You’re like, hey, pop up that number 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, Vail mountains, operational finance, compares to the aspens, you know finance. But like, they both, we don’t know theirs 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 Vail, you can drive an hour and 45 minutes and go to Aspen, and if you don’t like the big rounds, and you can go to sunlight, which is right in between them, and have a burger and a beer for probably 10 bucks, and have an awesome day. And you know, back, go back to the hot springs in Glenwood, 20 minutes away. So like, the fact that there’s a choice is wonderful, and the fact that. People choose to operate their businesses differently, and they can do that is also wonderful. And you know what? If Vail Resorts keeps getting punished in the markets and epic pale sales decline, then they’ll probably make a change because of that type of feedback. So I don’t know the fact that we have options, I
Jeff Malec 1:00:15
think is wonderful. You want my veil slam sound? Do you go there for the view of the highway or the Pepsi machine in the middle of the slope. I love
Joel Gratz 1:00:23
it, Spoken like a true aspenite.
Jeff Malec 1:00:35
One more random one here. Do you think fat skis? Right? I was just doing the cat skiing thing, you know, my 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.
Joel Gratz 1:00:55
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 with a guy named Pete Wagner, who then went on to start a custom ski company called Wagner custom skis 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 actually 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 on weight and kind of change your style. And that opened up
Jeff Malec 1:01:43
like a ski racer.
Joel Gratz 1:01:44
Yeah, that’s fair. That opened up a level of joy in my powder skiing that I hadn’t previously had before, and it also caused me to work less so I can ski full powder days and have legs left at the end of the 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 ski. So again, just like bale versus Aspen versus icon, we all have choices, which I think is just so fortunate,
Jeff Malec 1:02:21
and I can’t let you off without shouting out Evan, and that’s his name, right? And Utah, yep, was he? Was he a different company? And then you guys merge or something,
Joel Gratz 1:02:31
or you brought him, yeah? So what? What happened was that back in 2010 I started writing forecasts. Brian Allegretto in Tahoe was writing forecasts called Tahoe weather discussion.com I was writing a Colorado powder forecast.com.com and Evan Thayer was writing at watsach Snow forecast.com and we all started independent of each other. Didn’t know of 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 sub stack and all these tools were available. Yeah, 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, bootstrapping this thing. So it took many years of convincing and discussions and meetings 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. 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.
Jeff Malec 1:03:51
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 gonna be epic. It’s gonna be and
Joel Gratz 1:03:59
I will just, I would just tell you how lucky we are to be alive. I mean, this sounds like I’m running 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, you know, 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 our same 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, unquote small businesses and ride this wave, you know, quite a while doing what we love in a profitable way. Service. Customers, and we all need to go on, you know, massive M A strategies or something like that. To do
Jeff Malec 1:05:05
it, I hear you, but I advise you stop calling out the competition. Evans taught me. I’m going to forget now, but I like have quoted the water content, or what he’s always talking about, like it’s this much liquid, which equates to that much snow, which they never heard before,
Joel Gratz 1:05:23
and you and you can view that. And so, okay, I won’t call it the competition, because you can view this exclusively on open snow. You can look right next to each snow forecast, you know, because people might be listening like, I just go to, you know, Apple weather, or Google weather, or something else, or the Weather Channel. And all are quite viable, but most are not optimized to the mountain environments or ski areas. And the other thing is, we will actually show you snow quality. So if you go next to, you know, like Wednesday night, you might 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 110 inches of snow, if you melted it down, would be one inch of water. But that varies wildly, and the generally the best powder, fluffiest powder, skiing, is 15 to one, or even 20 to one. That means 20 inches of snow would melt down to one 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 numbers memorized in their brains, like I just did, yeah, like 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 it 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,
Jeff Malec 1:06:59
have you is Utah usually in the top right. They claim they are. And my experience mostly, yes, yeah,
Joel Gratz 1:07:06
Utah, Utah’s 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 depth and yeah. So the amount of snow and the fluffiness of the snow is usually maximized somewhere around Utah and also just to the north, couple hours to 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 less 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
Jeff Malec 1:08:12
conditions, versus Sierra cement,
Joel Gratz 1:08:15
which is on average, Sierra cement. But if you go at the right time and you chase that storm, man, it can be deep and fluffy.
Jeff Malec 1:08:23
And two last bits. One, you mentioned Japan a few times. It’s on my bucket list. Haven’t been I’ll give you an anecdote that 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 in the 80s, right? That there was all this cheap money, and everyone’s like, Oh, I’m gonna 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 terms of powder, known for huge amounts of snow, is it also light and fluffy? Yep.
Joel Gratz 1:08:58
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 Hokkaido, the island to the north, where niseiko is. Hekaido is farther north, generally colder. So if you had to book your trip six months in advance and you were prioritizing, you know, fluff generally going to Hokkaido, just by averages, it’s just a little bit colder. It’s often a little bit fluffier. That said, every storm is different. You can find very fluffy snow on the main island as well. You just got to kind of, you know, if you really care about conditions, then you can actually Chase Japan. Often high higher air fares 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. Times, especially last minute, it’s very difficult, or literally just impossible, to find anywhere to stay. But if you can rent a car and are happy with getting lodging in a nearby town and driving 30 to 45 minutes, no problem. I will also say that we adjusted our forecast algorithm how long it
Jeff Malec 1:10:18
takes to get down the little cottonwoods.
Joel Gratz 1:10:21
Yeah, that’s right. We adjusted our forecast algorithm in Japan this year to better model their snowfall. They get a lot of snow, but it’s, it’s similar to lake effect snow. 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 the sky. So it works in the United States and in Europe and Japan. It is useful because while it snows a lot in Japan, it doesn’t snow in every mountain at all times. So if you stay in a nearby town and you see a good snow forecast, and you wake up and you can check radar, and you can see where those bands of snow are setting up, and you can adjust your plans even that morning based on where the radar is showing snowfall. And we did that. I was there with my wife and son this winter, and we kind of stayed centrally located. And then I look at radar at night and in the morning and have a decent game plan, but yeah, can can mix or match a little bit based on that radar. So it is an amazing place. It is much smaller areas. And even the big areas that you’ve heard of are much smaller than what you expect in the United States. And I would also heavily, heavily, heavily, suggest that you do some research and try some small areas rather than just going to the name brands, yeah? Because there’s a lot there and and the excitement of exploration is half the
Jeff Malec 1:11:49
fun I’m just calling you. I just found, I thought, a new business line for you, of like, open snow tours, right? You just sign up. You’re in Japan, you’re in that central spot, and then the guide is like, we’re going here today. Yeah.
Joel Gratz 1:12:01
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’re going to go based on snow, as I was learning over there. And then once we went, once we kind of understood the lay of the land, of how to rent a car and where 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 guy 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 5am 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 known. So sometimes you have to kind of piece together.
Jeff Malec 1:13:14
You start using AI for stuff like that too. We
Joel Gratz 1:13:17
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.
Jeff Malec 1:13:35
All right, we could go six hours. So we’re gonna wrap it up here. I need your Mount Rushmore, right? Instead of your favorite, I’d let you pick four. So you’re Mount Rushmore of ski resorts globally. You can go around
Joel Gratz 1:13:49
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 have, I want names, but you’re like, Oh no, I mean, but I mean, but I have a few favorites, but it depends on the conditions, right? Like Highland bull can be absolutely incredible, or it can be wind blown crap, like it really just depends on the day. But I, 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, 3035 degrees,
Jeff Malec 1:14:25
yeah, it doesn’t feel so steep when the powder sticks.
Joel Gratz 1:14:27
No, no. But also British Columbia, whether you’re in bounds at a cat ski location, a heli ski location, doing back country 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 back country. You still have to take. About avalanches and glide cracks and all sorts of things. But it’s a lot less scary from a back country’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 app Ray, and hope you get a good snow day too.
Jeff Malec 1:15:16
Yeah, we were there 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, bring it. That’s right, you got drinks and pasta. You’re like, Hey, this is pretty good, and finish it off best you can give me however many want ski movies. I mean, there’s really only one answer which is hot. Hot, yeah,
Joel Gratz 1:15:41
I have to say, probably when I was in middle school, ish, I probably watched ski patrol movie, not, not Ski School, which is like the r slash NC version, but ski patrol, like the PG conversion of, I don’t know, probably 500 times or something on a VHS tape. And I don’t know how well its age, because I haven’t, I haven’t. I haven’t seen it for a long time, but man, that got me through my childhood.
Jeff Malec 1:16:05
I love it. Um, 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 Gratz 1:16:15
Joel, great story. Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me and and going deep and nerdy.
Jeff Malec 1:16:19
I appreciate it. Deep inert that’s all I got, especially when it comes to this stuff. All right, that’s it for the pod. Thanks to Joel for coming on. Thanks to RCM for sponsoring. Thanks Jeff burger for producing. We’ll be back next week, I think, talking ppli And how the wealthy use insurance to shield some assets from the tax man. I might dust off the bottle opener and do a little solo six pack for you guys. So talk to you soon. Peace,
This transcript was compiled automatically via Otter.AI and as such may include typos and errors the artificial intelligence did not pick up correctly.
