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That generally means overnight hotels. I have only done this ~5x despite driving Teslas since 2016, with extensive road trips including 8,000 miles circuitously round trip between SoCal and Florida in summer 2020. Hotels with L2 chargers tend to be more expensive and constrain one’s choices...

+1. Biden snubbed Elon Musk in 2021 by not inviting him to a clean energy conference while praising GM, which at that time had sold fewer EVs in its history than Tesla was selling every month. This was because Biden is beholden to the UAW. Since Elon is an emotional adolescent, he has never...

I would rate Copper better than Winter Park for snow preservation but on an absolute scale both are excellent. A-Basin is the best area in North America for preserving winter packed powder typically into late April or early May. Among those resorts A-Basin is in a class by itself for expert...

Update: Below are selected good Utah snowfall seasons before and all seasons after the pandemic. The second number is Rocky Mountain visits excluding Utah. 1996-97: 3.0 million, 15.9 million 2001-02: 3.0 million, 15.1 million 2004-05: 3.9 million, 15.7 million 2010-11: 4.2 million, 16.7...

The proper way for management to best serve shareholders is to buy back stock when it's cheap and issue more when it's expensive. You can be 99% assured that when Berkshire Hathaway buys back stock, that means Buffett thinks it's undervalued. Conversely when Tesla stock ran way up in...

+1 Crested Butte has very distinctive skiing. We were there March 21 and March 22. As I commented at the time, we were lucky to have the clear spring weather. You do not want powder or bad visibility with the rocky, technical skiing.

Point conceded. However you Northeasterners know as much as anyone that most people who live in cold winter climates blow off skiing as soon as it gets warm enough at home for golf and other warm weather recreation. I suspect that's true in Denver and Salt Lake too, and the recent syndrome of...

No argument from me on A-Basin, but high alpine at Breck is better than Copper's IMHO, longer sustained fall lines. April groomer skiing is probably better at Copper due to higher proportion of north facing. Breck's unpleasantness is highly a function of crowds, and they weren't bad when the...

I've seen that video before, I think two years ago. Breck has about the same skier visits as Vail with 55% of lift capacity and acreage. Breck is a worthy destination in April with the high altitude alpine and lesser crowds. But this February a friend of mine was mowed down at Breck by an...

That's the complete explanation for the attraction to destination visitors. As far superior Cottonwood Canyon snow and terrain are, the absence of a resort town makes them a non-starter for a lot of destination visitors vs. Park City or numerous Colorado resorts. This was true long before...

Historically I recall reading that LCC visits were half local and that Park City visits were 1/4 local. That was pre-pandemic though.

Which accounts for close to half of Colorado's 14+ million skier visits. The weekend/daytrip market impacts Vail and Winter Park as well as all of Summit County.

The drastically worsening weekend traffic on I-70 and in the Cottonwood Canyons strongly implies most of that skier growth is local. I used to be one of those fly-in visitors to Salt Lake but it was always at least 4 days. Now it's my timeshare week and I drive from SoCal.

Seattle and to some extent Tahoe too. The skier population growth in these areas is the overall driver of US skier visits breaking out of the 2000-2018 plateau. All of the US skier visit growth is coming from the Rockies and 45% of that growth is coming from Utah, where skier visits have...

But gradually, then a sharp increase with the pandemic. 2018-19 looks fairly abrupt vs. the prior 7 seasons, so I think the advent of Ikon is the most important explanation. I agree WFH was a factor in keeping skier visits high during the mediocre 2020-21 and 2021-22 seasons.

I have done that. Since 1979: Northeast 57% Pacific Northwest 66% California 70% Rockies 17% The latter number is so low because so much of the business is destination booked far in advance. In the other regions, we locals can ski when it's good and stay home when it's not. But the bump started...

Column 1: Year Column 2: My calculation of percent of normal ski area snowfall, US & Canada Column 3: Kottke Report US skier visits (x 1 million) 07-08 117% 60.5 08-09 105% 57.4 09-10 96% 59.8 10-11 129% 60.5 11-12 80% 51.0 12-13 91% 56.9 13-14 92% 56.5 14-15 73%...

There is no question that skier visits will be down this year, particularly since last year was a record high. North America November/December ski area snowfall was 57% of normal; that's the second worst to 38% in 1976-77. Since January most of that deficit has been made up, but Christmas...

Composite image from Carrabassett Valley: Very clear skies to show that much outer corona! This is a very close to natural view composite from Mont Megantic:

The relative sizes are so close that other factors primarily the moon's elliptical orbit affect the character of central eclipses. Only 48% of them are total. The other 52% are annular (like last October in the Southwest) because the apparent size of the sun is larger than the moon so like...