Beloved Belleayre Lift Attendant Passes Away

These days, it’s pretty rare to find a person who, through sheer force of personality, becomes the unofficial face of a business by embodying certain key attributes.

Belleayre's Jerry Siegel at the Tomahawk Midstation
Belleayre’s Jerry Siegel

For years, Belleayre Mountain in the Catskills had one of these unique people — someone who radiated the ski area’s atmosphere of friendliness, fun, and lack of pretention. Here’s what I wrote about him in a 2008 article:

Despite Belleayre not having the biggest, deepest, steepest, longest, or most expensive anything, there are a handful of reasons why so many New Yorkers are passionate about this mountain. One of them is the lift attendant at the Tomahawk Lift mid-station. Instead of a bored post-teen with tattoos, lip piercings, and bad skin, you’ll find a cheerful older gent who clearly seems to enjoy his job.

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What Kind of Ski Snob Are You?

If you think about it, we are all ski snobs of one sort or another. Some are terrain snobs and care about nothing else but lapping the steepest, gnarliest, longest, and most consistently-pitched lines they can find.

Hickory Ski Center

Others are snow snobs who don’t bother leaving the house unless there’s a decent amount of powder waiting for them; and if the lift-served ski areas don’t have it, they’ll go off-the-map for their fix. Of course, for most people, the best situation is getting both powder and great terrain at the same time, but hey, this is the northeast and we have to deal with whatever’s on the menu for a given day and not whine about it.

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Steve Wright of Jay Peak Resort

Steve Wright Jay Peak Resort.I first ran into Steve Wright in cyberspace on the First Tracks Online eastern forum a few years ago. As Jay Peak’s Vice-President of Sales and Marketing, he occasionally popped into discussions to add a comment or two. But instead of coming off as a ski-resort salesman — there only to perform damage control or to publicize something — Steve took us behind the curtain to explain how and why things happen at ski-area marketing departments, both at Jay Peak and industry-wide.

As Jay transforms itself from a no-frills mountain with the deepest lift-served snow east of the Rockies into one with a fair amount of destination resort accoutrements, we thought that it’d be interesting to hear his thoughts on a variety of marketing-related topics.

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