The first time I put on skis was as a young kid, probably 4 or 5, at a hotel in the Catskills. I was growing up in New Rochelle, about 30 minutes north of Manhattan. It was not really a ski mountain; it was more like a sledding hill that you could ski on. I liked sliding on the snow and the exhilaration of it. Then I went to Hunter Mountain [in New York] for the first time when I was 10 or 11 on a school trip. I wound up going there a number of times in middle school and high school. At that point, I was skiing in jeans for real—with gaiters on. I loved the freedom of being able to go where I wanted on the mountain. 

I didn’t take my first trip out to Vail until 1990. I was good work friends with Mitch Whiteford. He grew up in Vail. His dad was Bill Whiteford [an original Vail Mountain investor]. So, on my first trip to Vail, I slept on Bill Whiteford’s floor.

Ricky’s Ridge has always been a favorite run. Also, Iron Mask in Blue Sky Basin, CJ’s Glade in Earl’s Bowl, and, in Beaver Creek, the Stone Creek Chutes. Being mushed into Belle’s Camp on a powder day when you’re in Blue Sky, and it’s cold and everybody’s in there and you’re getting your hot chocolate and your Snickers bar—I can remember so many times being back there with my kids. At Beaver Creek, skiing Golden Eagle when it’s been groomed is awesome. 

I started with Apollo Advisors in August of 1990, and in 1991, one of the investments that we made was [acquiring] the bank debt of Gillett Holdings—the parent company for Vail Associates. When Gillett Holdings came out of bankruptcy in 1992, Apollo was the majority owner, and I was the primary person from Apollo working on the investment. In 1997 we took the company public, renamed it Vail Resorts, and I went on the board. After Apollo sold its shares in Vail Resorts [in 2004], I stayed on the board and was the lead director. When [CEO] Adam Aron stepped down from his position in 2006, a couple of the board members reached out to me to say, Hey, maybe this is something you would be interested in doing. And so, in March 2006, I became CEO of Vail Resorts [for the first time].

One of my favorite stories about George Gillett is from when he and I went skiing in the Back Bowls, probably in 1992. He was a really strong skier, very fast, and I was trying to keep up with him. All of a sudden, he completely blew up—double ejection. And George just popped right up, dusted off his uniform, quickly put back on his skis, and just kept going down as fast as he was before. My takeaway: This is somebody who’s super passionate about taking chances and understanding that even if not everything goes well, you just dust yourself off, put back on your skis, and keep going. 

After stepping down as CEO of Vail Resorts in 2021, I stayed on the board and spent a fair amount of time on the Katz Amsterdam Foundation, focusing on mental health and mountain communities, civic engagement, and reproductive rights. Also, I’d been CEO for 16 years, and I was decompressing a little bit. 

I felt like there was a new transition that [Vail Resorts] was going through, and that maybe the whole industry was going through, and there was an opportunity for me to help in that process. I’ve been around this company in different aspects for 34 years. So, yeah, I feel a tremendous amount of ownership, pride, and responsibility for our company. But I had to make sure that I was ready to jump back in. I also had to come to grips with the fact that when I started as CEO, I was 39 and now I’m almost 59. I don’t have the same energy, and I have to rely a little bit more on wisdom and my experience. But I felt like this was the right thing for me, and the right thing for the company in this moment, to help manifest whatever the next 5 to 10 years is going to look like. 

I love the people that I get a chance to work with, and I love the culture. That doesn’t mean that everybody’s always happy about everything that’s going on in the company, but I understand that for the people that are not happy, it’s because they have a lot of passion for the sport, for the mountain, for the town that they’re in. And they are very willing to tell you what they think. And that is not always easy, but it’s a blessing.

We’re still always looking for new resorts that we think would be additive to the company. That said, obviously within North America, there’s only a handful of resorts that would make sense for us to buy, if those ever come up for sale. I think there’s an opportunity for us to continue to grow in Europe. The same is true for Asia, which is another big ski market. But we grew quite a lot over the last 15 years, and I think there are opportunities for us to do things better. 

We’re putting a lot of our effort and time into growing from within. How do we do better in food? In ski school? At rentals? At lift tickets? We’ve had a record-high seasonal employee return and retention rate in the last couple of years, so how do we continue to build on that growth so we can leverage the size that we have to drive the guest experience? How do we innovate around that? There’s an opportunity for us, given our size and scope, to be the industry innovator. 

We need to broaden the sport to communities of color. It’s both the right thing to do because we want a welcoming, inclusive sport, but it’s also the smart thing to do because that is where population growth is happening, especially in the United States. By every measure, we are woefully under-connected with these other communities. These are all things that need to shift when I think about where the industry needs to be 10 years from now.

Skiing has never been more accessible. But [admittedly] that’s for people willing to commit before the season [and buy an Epic Pass]. It’s also true that there are always going to be some people who don’t want to buy before the season, and it is incumbent upon us to provide options for them. The Epic Friends ticket is a big one—50 percent off a lift ticket for anyone who’s skiing with an Epic passholder. There are all these ways that we can provide other discounts to ensure that skiing is more accessible, and we’re very committed to that. 

Now [some] say that skiing is so exclusive because it’s too high-priced. And then others say that it’s too crowded. You have to take all of these comments with a grain of salt. We can’t whipsaw the company or the industry around either one of those. I am very strongly against trying to kick people out of the sport. When people say, “You should put more restrictions, and “We don’t want people to come skiing,” it’s like, well, who shouldn’t come? We’re not building more ski resorts, so it is our responsibility, and the community’s responsibility, to continue to invest in new lifts, new terrain, and more parking. There are going to be certain moments, like a powder day on a Saturday morning, [when] there’s going to be the long line. But you know what, I’m willing to wait on that line, understanding that most of the season, you can get on a lift in under four minutes. 

The industry is really good at healthy competition, between not just the Ikon and the Epic Pass, but you’ve got the Indy Pass and the Mountain Collective. What we’re not doing well is having a more consistent message that we want new people in the sport. That is something the industry may be having its own identity crisis about. We like to think that there’s a certain just-right amount of skiers—we don’t want more than that, we don’t want less than that. But the minute you stop thinking about how you bring new people in, you’re going to start declining. I don’t want to see us return to the ’70s, when ski areas were closing left and right.