#20: Kim Brown: The Origins of Woods Skiing at Stowe

Kim Brown is a well-known figure in Stowe, Vermont's skiing community, recognized for his extensive contributions as a columnist, historian, and avid skier. Since making his first turns at Stowe in 1952, Brown has become a fixture on the slopes, sharing his experiences and insights through his long-running column, "Ski Bum Corner," in the Stowe Reporter and Kim knows the off trail map woods trails around Mt Mansfield as well as anyone

In addition to his journalism, Brown is an architectural designer and one of Stowe's preeminent Ski historians. His deep knowledge of the area's ski culture and history has made him a valuable resource for understanding the evolution of skiing in Stowe

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Welcome listeners to the Octagon Podcast, where we explore the stories, people, and places that make Stowe, Vermont so legendary. I'm your host, Ted Thorndike, joined by my cohost, Mike Carey. We are excited to introduce our guest today, Kim Brown. Kim is a well known figure in Stowe, Vermont's skiing community recognized for his extensive contributions as a columnist, historian, and avid skier. Since making his first turns at Stowe in 1952, Brown has become a fixture on the slopes, sharing his experiences and insights through his long running column, Ski Bum Corner. And the STO reporter, and Kim knows the off trail maps, woods trails around Mount Mansfield as well as anyone in addition to his journalism. Brown is an architectural designer and one of STOs preeminent ski historians. His deep knowledge of the area ski culture and history has made him a valuable resource for understanding the evolution of skiing and Stowe. Welcome, Kim. thank you. I'm happy to be here. Yeah. Great to have you here. Did you go skiing today? I did. Nice. I worked to race and it was about as good a race course as we've had in a couple of years. Beautiful day. Yeah. Beautiful day out there. Yeah. Awesome. So we were chatting a little bit before we started, but when did you first ski at Stowe? I heard stories of a rope tow. So tell us what that was all about. I started skiing here in. 52, and I'm not sure whether it was the winner of 51 52 or 52 53. But I've used 52 because I can pretty much count on that being accurate. And one of the memories that I have that a lot of people do not have is that I actually wrote a rope toe that was located behind the Mansfield Base Lodge and went up to what's now Crossover. And the lower part of North Slope, this name is long gone, that wide Part below, crossover was actually called the practice slope for obvious reasons. And riding rope toe up through there to get up that little steep piece up to crossover. That was pretty challenging for a four or 5-year-old kid. Yeah. I believe that so my father's partner describes how. I would hold on to him and then as I started to lose it I would just not let go of his leg. So here's this poor guy dragging this little five year old up and over the last piece, but by God, I usually made it. And so was Stowe your home ski mountain, 1952 till present day? Pretty much. Yeah, my family went down to Massachusetts for a few years. From 57 to 61. So then I skied Okemo quite a bit. My father had finally figured out that, two hours away was a decent ski area. and Okemo in those days had only pummel lifts, but they had one of the longest pummel lifts ever built, which was a 6, 400 foot long pummel lift. And that may not mean much except that it's longer than the quad. and that was a pretty interesting experience. the only downside was it. We were riding in a VW bus which did not have anything resembling a real heating system, so my siblings and I had some long journeys to Okemo. But we always came up and skied stow. We skied stow probably at least 12, 15 days of winter all through that stretch. the sport of skiing has evolved and I mentioned it in the intro, at times racing is really popular bump skiing. when did you really get into exploring the woods more, off the beaten path skiing and I guess creating that culture and stuff. I, There was a really great period of time when corporate entities decided to subsidize various types of so called citizens races. These were great boondoggles, but no boondoggle was better than the Grand Marnier Ski Club Challenge, where ski clubs would put teams together, it was age group competition, and they would compete regionally to get To get to the Nationals and Stowe was really good at this and I was really good at picking teammates who were fast. Nice. That's an important skill. In 81, we made it out to the Ski Club Championships that were held that year at Keystone and We didn't win, but we had a really good time. And then afterwards, some of us decided to go to Alta. And I'd skied Alta and Taos a couple of times, during my college era. And, I remember I was really humbled. By trying to ski the powder delta. I just did not have my act together and you gotta remember at the skis we were on Yeah, they weren't powder skis. These were like, 210 GS boards and I just was not able to commit to the fall line so that Kind of humbled me. And the next winter I said, I think I'm going to learn to ski powder. And if anybody's been paying attention, the last winter that's being compared to this winter was 81, 82. We had a ton of snow and I just started skiing the woods. Cause that's where the powder was. And I skied the woods all winter long and just got pretty comfortable. And then I remember that spring, I went back to Alta. Now I was ready. I was skiing the fall line, I was able to do the shoots I was able to do these narrow little lines and I was able to ski everything off the North Ridge and high rustler and it was all that winter but one of the things that I learned that winter was that There weren't really enough lines, because nobody had done much in the woods, and I had a friend named John Lynch, who had the nickname of being the Goat Man, and John was interested in starting to do some woods thinning, so my friend Skip Sanery and I joined forces with John, and one of our first projects, interestingly enough, was cleaning up the Bruce Trail, which was really overgrown, and that would have been the summer of 82. And, we went up to where the stake is. and Stu Hall, who was the weatherman for the channel three, the stake was his baby. So we cleaned out a shoot there and we were able to make a turn back to the right and drop back down onto what's. The nosedive bypass. So we cleaned out that area, and that was our first real kind of virgin attempt at adding terrain to what was skiable and still. And it just took off from there. For the next ten years, We did a lot of cutting. And we had the tacit approval of the forester for the Burt, that's called the Burt Block of the State Forest. And, he wasn't saying we should be up there cutting. But he said, I really like it when people use the forest for recreation. Nice. And he was very good at telling us what we shouldn't do. I won't say we had official approval, but we did not have official disapproval. So that's kind of where Tres Amigos came from, and then there was one that was very successful right next to it called The Red Sled. Yeah. and then there was another guy who joined our group, was a guy named Dale Masters. And Dale, he had been the caretaker at the Octagon, and then he became the caretaker at the top of the gondola in the Cliff House. he was from. Idaho, but he did not know how to ski when he got here, but he learned to ski and he figured out this powder thing pretty quickly, like we did. It's like skiing the woods. That's where the powder is. he's the guy that basically, opened up angel food. Now, angel food, a lot of people don't realize this. We learned this from Charlie Lord some years later. If you look at the old maps of Stowe, you will see that Angel Food is actually the trail that was shown on the maps as Chinclip. And when we first started working in there, we were amazed at how wide open a lot of it was. And it turned out that in the 30s, when there were no lifts here, people would Park up in the notch and they would hike up angel food, there's the upper section And then there's almost like a road that goes down to the lower section where you ski back to the woods Or if you know that if you know the traverse line, you can go back over to where the vehicle shed is interestingly enough their picnic spot was what everybody now knows is the bench Charlie described it to us. so you're part of this small crew, does the mountain know what you're doing or is it really just you're keeping this secret to yourself, what's the culture around the mountain? we were trying to be. Pretty discreet. Yeah. we had friends that were patrollers that knew what was going on. but one of the things that you learned was you really didn't want to share your stash with a patrol. Dale Masters, we skied Angel Food for one entire winter. There were maybe five of us skiing that area. And it was great. Dale decided early one March day that he would take a friend of his who was a patroller out there. Huge mistake. in those days the patrol used to gather at the den and that was still the time of the 25 cent pitchers. And here's this guy going, you would not believe this place that Dale Masters took me. within a week, there must have been 50 people out there skiing it. And that, that was the end. So prior to that, we had been pretty good at keeping these places discreet, People were finding them, but there was still pretty much a culture of Secrecy, and the snowboard Group had not really evolved yet, you know because they still couldn't ride the lifts and we had a couple friends that were riders, but I think when the snowboarders Started to find this stuff. They had a whole it was a younger crowd and they were really big on taking their friends out there Yeah Because they just liked sharing it, you know sharing these great lines, and somehow it all went south as far as the secrecy thing. I was in angel food yesterday and the whole top I'm like, I'm skiing bumps. Then I was able to find some lines, but it was a beautiful sunny day and it's all about being out there. so when you are, trimming lines, how do you conceptualize it all? what features are you looking for or areas of the mountain? We were pretty sure that the best thing to do was to go between the good lines. Tres Amigos was laid in just skiers left of Hayride. And that was the first one, that really we went for it. It was a hardwood area, so it was pretty easy to clean it up. and then we knew that. But, further out, if you got in higher off Hayride, we created what was called Red Sled. Yeah. And Red Sled is blended into, Tres Amigos now, and then Dale cut one of his own that he called Major Jones, which is, I think comes out of a song. I can't remember the lyric, but it's Major Jones is where that name came from. And then we just started finding other stuff, like the old S 53 line. And, The star started out as a trail called S 53, and it was incredibly narrow and steep. And so once the star got cut, we knew that next to it were some other lines that were pretty good. And so we, we created the S 53 group, which was between National and Star. And then we knew The Lookout was like Verboten for a while. People don't realize there were years, where the lookout was not legal. It was permanently roped. Yep. Which made for incredibly good powder scheme I now we've got. A lot of woods trails that are pretty popular, right? And I'm always curious how some of them got their names. we've got Outer Planets, Angel Food. Mini Boo's, Tomba's, Kitchen Wall, Birthday Bowls, and the list goes on and on. Any, good stories about how some of those got their names? Tomba's, which is really a great line that most people get to ski at some points, where you get off the top of the gondola and you come out and you take that left into the woods there. I believe that the Tomba's name, I think, Goes back to Tom Silva, who's still coaching here. And Tom is a great ski. he was my coach. Yeah. Yeah. Tom's a great guy. He's a tremendous skier. I think Tom was. I think that's where that came from. The birthday bowls, which are also known as the back bowls, which are on the backside of Bruce, one thing that Stowe has, that nobody else in the East has, is we have Smuggler's Notch on the backside. Incredibly good terrain over there. So the most people call them the back bowls, but the name the birthday bowls goes back to there was a patroller at smugglers And they staged a big birthday party in there one day and they all knew because People from Stowe weren't really skiing the back bowls. they were staying on their own. But the people from Smugs were going up there and accessing this terrain. one of my favorite trail names is Partridge. So Partridge cuts in between Goat and National up fairly high. and when Skippy and I cut it, Skippy had always talked about cutting this line, and I kept saying it's going to be too obvious, too close to the, everybody's going to find this, and, but we decided to call it Skippy's Dream, right? There was a guy who was nicknamed Too Tall, Roger Whiten, who was a really legendary skier here, big tall guy, and he found it, and he skied it one day, and he skied over a partridge. Huh. And he killed the partridge. He literally skied over the partridge and killed it, broke its neck, right? So he took it home, because he's a hunter, took it home, had partridge. And so people started calling it the trail where Roger killed the partridge. I do have one that I have to ask you about. My friend Jeff, also known as Larry, the lizard, who I know you know Mr. Ov. Yes. Mr. Ov. He's been obsessed with finding a secret trail called Babyland, and does that trail exist? And how did that get its name It does exist. Exist. Keep Babyland Ted. I have heard of it. Yeah. So Babyland was literally one of the last ones that I worked on. And the reason it was called Babyland was that when we were first scouting it out. it's interesting. It's very difficult to find. Great. But I'll tell you where the very beginning is and where the end is. if you leave Taft Lodge and you're headed out along the Hellbrook Bypass, really very shortly, maybe 50 or 100 feet, Passed the outhouse is a pretty open sort of inviting glade and it drops down and If you continue down that line, it's actually the stream that you cross Just before you do the last right hand Move to get to the traverse into the actual bench. So what we did was we figured out that you could go left and hug the cliffs. And if you just kept going, you would eventually hit a really good down line. So the reason it was called Babyland was that I was exploring it with David Goodman, whose name is familiar, his wife Sue Minter, me, and we had our babies on our backs. This was in the summer. Wow. And that's why it's called Babyland. That's awesome. Now the outer planets were named by Dale Masters who did, who cut all of those and he called them, there's Venus and Pluto and Neptune or maybe Jupiter. I can't remember the exact names of the three, but he had them stacked in the order. In terms of how far those planets are from Earth. And that's the order of the outer planets. Very cool. Wow, that is some cool history right there. you were, an original ski bum in the 80s and 90s. what was the scene like at that time? How did you make it all work, just financially? I was never truly A pure ski biker. That's disappointing. because I never was a bartender. I was never, It's true. I didn't tune skis. I I wasn't a patroller. I didn't have any of those. What I had was a great enthusiasm for skiing and the ability to somehow Get out on the hill a lot. Get out on the hill a lot. So was I a pure ski bum? I never really claimed that. What I was a guy who spent a lot of time hanging out with ski bums. And I will say that when I came back up here and started skiing very steadily in 78 it was really interesting because I had been a hippie for sure. And I didn't know that hippies actually loved to ski. So I was always coming up here for a few days in the winter. I was a carpenter in Burlington and I didn't know that there were all these hippies skiing. It just didn't have this culture. They didn't have long hair and beards like I did. but once I hit. Here in 78, I realized that there was like a lot of pot around, and I was definitely a guy that liked pot. Yeah, you were fit right in. That fit right in. And there was a lot of drinking going on, and I was never a heavy drinker, but I enjoyed the scene. And the thing that actually sold me On coming to Stowe was I came up to work on a tennis tournament in 78. And I remember I was hired by top notch to look after the ground. So I had a lot of practical experience and we had night play that first. Was that the head turn? Yes. Yep. Jimmy was actually the original English leather. But it was Jimmy Connors that first year and we had night play and after three nights we were done and we were exhausted because these were long days. And I remember I was out there and I was in the mobile hot tub, which was Timmy Meehan's, the down home hot tubs. And I'm sitting in this hot tub and there were probably six of us in there. if I'm correct, I don't believe that any of us actually had clothing on. Okay. And the weed is going around and we're drinking cold beer. And I rule and I look behind me and, there's the outline of the mountain against a starlet sky with some with a moon. And I'm looking around going. Yeah, this is it. I like this. I've arrived. I have arrived. I never left that was it. That, and, but those hot tubs, you talk about ski bum lifestyle, Timmy's mobile unit just had a magical way of appearing at a, he had a hot tub mounted on the back of a heavy dude et etrailer, and he pulled it around with a, his Ford two 50. And, people would rent this thing. I was in that, they would park it next to the Mansfield Base Lodge. We would be in there. They would bring it to special events. It was up at the Stube Rule, which is the old, base lodge. It was the bar attached to the Spruce Peak, the old original Spruce Peak Base Lodge. It was in the parking lot there. I can remember going down the road in that hot tub. And again, probably, I don't think any of us actually were wearing clothes and we were not all males, it was, and going down the mountain road in a hot tub. how many people can claim that as part of their background? Any, legendary ski bums? When you think about more typical ski bums, any kind of characters from those days that You can think of. Oh yeah. in a way, one of the great ski bums wasn't a ski, he wasn't truly a ski bum, but he kinda was. And that was a guy named Bish McGill. Bish was a doctor out of Burlington, but Bish loved to ski. And Bish was really close friends with Charlie Lord. And Bish was so committed to being up here that I always used to say So, Bish McGill wasn't actually born, they just found him under a tree on the mountain. And his kids are still skiing. His wife made it, I think, to 100. She was still skiing in her late 90s. But Bish was just, he was a patroller, he was a part time patroller. I think if you talk to the old patrollers, they'll say Bishmagil was as good as it got for being a ski boom. there were other characters. A guy who taught in a ski school for a long time was a guy named Spike. Yep. Yeah. I remember Spike. Sunglasses, no matter the weather. And Spike never wore a hat. Yep, exactly. And he was a great skier. Did he end up going to Vail? Yeah, he went out west somewhere. Vail or Aspen. Total legend. As a kid, I remember seeing him. I remember one time he wiped out under the lift. So I'm coming up, and this is still single, double days. I'm coming up the lift, and here's Spike with his gear. He's collecting it. And he's explaining to everybody on the lift What actually caused the crash, it had to do with the ski. It was a new ski. It wasn't tuned. he didn't expect it spike. You wiped out people do that, but I'll never forget the sight of spike trying to explain to total strangers what had happened. Yeah. Spike was a pretty big legend. And I'll never forget the sunglasses. It would be 10 below, we'd be bundled up and there's Spike in sunglasses. I was like, this is the coolest guy ever. so as I mentioned at the start, you've been writing the Ski Bum Report for the Stow Reporter for, I don't know how many years. So 87, I was trying to figure out when I started doing this, but when we got the first quad. Not the one we have now, but the first quad. And they got rid of the single and the double. That went up, and, it was great, right? And everybody knew the single was the legendary one, and they kept the chairs from the single and, they probably chopped up the old towers and scrap metalled them. But nobody knew what happened to the double. We just thought they got rid of it, right? So that Winter, in the spring, I went to see an old friend, Rose Blair, who was living in Taos. And Skippy and I had driven out, and we were staying at her house, and she said, the double chair is in Rio Castillo. And I was like, what is a Rio Castillo? it turns out it's a small ski resort that's right on the New Mexico Colorado border. No way. I was like, Skip, we gotta go check out the double chair. And then, I was pretty good friends with the editor of the Stowe Reporter, this woman named Deb Merrill. So I called her up and said, the double chair is in Rio Castillo. We're gonna go visit it. she said, great. So then I called up the ski area and said, I'm going to do a story for the Stowe Reporter on the double chair. So I went out there, we drove up there, and we get there. And I have Skip as my photographer, right? I had a camera, so I handed it to Skip. So they issue us tickets, and we take a couple of laps, and then we decide to go down and see the double chair, which loaded below the main area. And it wasn't running. Now that anybody that knows the history of the single and the double knows the single always ran the double not so much So we get there and we ski down into the bottom and here's the guy sitting in a chair leaning up against the base of this lift Kind of sleeping in the Sun And we're like, so we're from Stowe, Vermont. This lift used to be on our mountain. And so we started talking to the guy. He said, yeah. he said, the ski area was in bankruptcy and they had a, it was in receivership and they hired a guy to run the ski area for them. And the guy arrives and he's informed that a new lift is coming that is from Stowe they had no plans for it, but somehow they got it up and running. But the problem was always having electrical failures. Finally they get it up and running. Skip and I write it, we finish our day, and I send in a story. People love the story, I think it's a picture. It's a cool story. And it was like, That's what happened to the double. That's how it all started. So the next winner, I started talking to the editor. I said, nobody really writes about the ski bumps. Yeah. So they said, you can do a story if you want. And I said, I'll do a weekly. And he said, you have to do it every week. I said, no, I will. And, so I started writing this thing. I was handwriting it because, I didn't have a computer or anything. So I'm handwriting the story. And that was in 88, right? And the funny thing was that people started coming up to me and going, Brownie. We didn't know you could actually write. We thought you could just ski. Doesn't everybody write? I had an Ivy League background, right? So I was like, yeah, people write. And I've been doing it ever since. That's cool. 36, 37 years. Awesome. You're capturing what's going on in the mountains, ski bum racing, culture. You've really Try to capture the whole package. Yeah over the years It's changed a little bit, cuz I'm you know, I don't know. I'm like a 77 year old guy I'm not really hanging out at the Matterhorn anymore, right? But there have been plenty of episodes from the Matterhorn, I was having a lot of fun sort of describing this debauchery, and then I remember I was sitting at the lunch counter around the corner from me in Waterbury Center and the guy who was the liquor inspector for Stowe was a guy named George Whitney and George was sitting there, once every couple of weeks he'd have lunch at TJ's and he looked at me, he said, Kim, so he said, those ski bums, they have. Quite the life, don't they? I realized he was reading my column. So at that point I said, okay, I think we need to throttle it back you know in recent years I've shifted more to trying to, like I've been hitting a lot of fun ski areas, I just skied Saddleback last week. I don't know if you guys heard from Saddleback. I keep hearing great things about Saddleback. there's going to be a story in the report this week about Saddleback. I was in Rangeley. Last spring, but the mountain was closed. it looked awesome. Just the mountain and the town of Rangely was really cool. Yeah. So this area goes up to 42 top lift unloads at 42 60. Wow. That's only 130 feet or so. Yeah. What less than top of Mansfield. so it's that same kind of crazy frozen rhyme ice and horror ice that you see up there at that It's pretty wild. they have a lot of wood skiing there. they manicure the glades and the glades are all, pretty much all, coniferous, it's not like here where we have a lot of hardwoods, You've skied a lot around New England, Vermont, you've probably hit most areas, what are some other hidden gems? Because none of us leave Stowe, but we should, right? I will tell you one that was a real eye opener for me was Magic Mountain. So I went down to do a story on Magic and I walked into the marketing office and the, Jeff Hathaway is the general manager there. It's a foundation now. Magic is a private foundation. So I was introduced and I said, So Jeff, my friend Adam White, from BSAA, Vermont Ski Area Association, calls magic the Mad River of the South. And Jeff looked at me and he said, actually, we like to think of Mad River as the magic. Nice. Good response. And they used to pawn it off as like a sixteen hundred and fifty square, linear, vertical foot ski area but they included all the way to the bottom of the bottom parking lot and Jeff said No, he said we're okay with being like 50 and 80 But they have three ridges that fan out and each one of those ridges comes off the main spine of the mountain and so you get Three exposures off each one of those and they do a lot of woods cutting up there they do it all summer and they don't have a lot of high speed lifts or anything but on the backside is a defunct ski area called Timber Ridge and So the locals ride up magic and ski off the backside and then they arrange transport back. It's probably, I would say, the best ski area in the southern half of the state. Oh wow. Good to know. Nice little nugget there. Yeah. It's time to take a quick break and hear from our sponsors. This episode of the Octagon Podcast is brought to you by Stowe Living. Here's a message from Kate. Majestic Mount Mansfield embodies the spirit of Stowe heritage. And we're proud to present the Octagon Podcast, a true reflection of our amazing community. Stowe Living is honored to sponsor this podcast. We're helping you live your best life daily with stunning furniture, unique design, kitchenwares, thoughtful gifts sourced from around the world. Thank you Stowe for your continued support of Stowe Living and the Octagon Podcast. so switching sports a little bit, we understand you've biked across the United States twice. I'm in that process of the second. Okay. I, yeah, I rode across in 14, I I began in Oregon, ended in Brooklyn. Oh, cool. Manhattan Beach. I was going to go to Coney, but it was too crazy, so I went to Manhattan. but I've ridden the entire East Coast from Callis, Maine down to Key West, and I've so far ridden from Santa Monica through Death Valley to Las Vegas, and then I've ridden from Austin. So this spring I am doing Vegas to Sedona which is just south of Flagstaff and that will only leave me 1, 200 miles to get to Austin. I've always ridden road bike, But I, at my. Age have joined eBike e-bike. Oh. And I, I feel Mike's an e-bike. I feel an guy. I absolutely no shame because, and you shouldn't at 77 guys. Exactly. Game changer. Most of the people that want to criticize me are like 40 No criticism from this podcast. Yeah. Podcaster, I should say. But I've done a lot of touring over the years. Yeah, sounds like it. That's cool. So I have a fun adventure coming. Yeah. Which is, this is a ski bum adventure. So when I drive west this spring, I'm leaving after working the first half of the Stowe Duals on the 16th, driving to East Syracuse, and the next day I'm going to ski Hollymount, which is near Buffalo, right on the Pennsylvania border, and I'm driving across and I'm going to try to ski Snow Trails, which is in Ohio. I'm enamored of the idea of skiing in Mansfield, Ohio, as you should be. And I was actually born in Cincinnati. My family didn't move me here until I was two years old in 49. After I ski Ohio, then I'm going to Mount Chestnut, which is west of Chicago on the east border of the Mississippi river. And that's where Bobby Murphy. began his ski career and he was the first guy that ran Stowe after Dale bought it. Then I'm going across the river and I'm skiing Iowa. I am going to a ski area in Iowa. How? Is there a ski area in Iowa? There are three ski areas. And I talked to a guy today who was the finish ref for a race who just moved his family from Iowa to East Berk because they have a son who's racing in Berk. And the funny thing was He was like, oh yeah, no, it's a fun place and he knew chestnut quite well So I'll probably be skinning up those places because they may not be running But they'll still have some snow and then if conditions are right I'm going to go find a hill in Nebraska, which has no ski areas, and I'm going to skin up the hill and ski down and go back to my car. So I'll be staying tuned to the, ski bum report. Yeah. You're going to be writing about all that. Oh yeah. Yeah. no. this is a different kind of travel adventure. I think that's really cool. Can you ski in every state? I don't know if you can. Maybe well, Florida got snow. Yeah. It's winter. I did see somebody being towed through a backyard on, a snowboard Yeah. during a recent storm. I know. That would be I don't think you can ski at every state. you can ski Like, how is that? You never know. They can get an ice storm. Yeah. You'd have to, you'd have to bolt down there during a storm. Yeah. I know Georgia and Arkansas have skieries. Yep. For sure. And I'm not so sure about Louisiana and Mississippi. and I don't really think of anything. I haven't encountered anything yet in Texas. Yeah. That sounds like a cool adventure. Yeah. I'm, it's not that I'm trying to ski in every state, but I'm trying to add states to where I've skied. That's cool. That's great. I'll be staying tuned on that. So let's talk about your professional. career a little bit. you are an architectural designer. Yeah. what's it like being an architect in Stowe and how's that changed, or the Stowe area? Has that changed through the years? I started out basically as a carpenter, small contractor, and I was pretty decent at it. I was involved with a lot of finish work in Burlington. And when I came up here, I was doing framing, but I was also doing hand drawn plans for projects, so I was like a design build guy, but I didn't really have a formal background in it. and then I discovered, much in the same way I discovered I didn't have to hand write my column, I could do it on a computer. That's right. I discovered that they actually made software that you could run on a computer that would allow you to generate plans. And very quickly I left the field of being an active carpenter. Partly because I had no desire to be hauling stuff up on roofs when I was in my 60s. Especially in the winter when you could be skiing. yeah. It's just expanded. probably my biggest project was very involved with the new building where Commodities is. So I did that for David Wolfgang. I was assisted in that by my cousin, who is actually a board certified architect. I was very involved in the expansion of the Ski Club. I've done a lot of houses around Stowe, a lot of houses around Waterbury and down in the valley, a lot of stuff over in Chittendy County. Somehow I fell into doing projects down at Martha's Vineyard, which was not bad, I used to say. if one end of my orbit is Stowe and the other is Martha's Vineyard, That's pretty good. That's not a bad round trip. Have you skied in Martha's Vineyard? I have actually paddled around On Nordic skis in Martha's Vineyard. the thing about Martha's Vineyard is, I've arrived there in the winter when they've had big snowstorms. But what happens is you have one inch of snow on most of the island. And 10 feet of snow against one side of a building. Yeah, the wind just takes it. Yeah all the way across. Yeah Probably better off skiing the dunes like in gay head. Yeah sand. Yeah, that'd be the way to go. Yeah, I haven't done that I'd like to ski sand sometime. when I cape cod, there's some great dunes when skip and I skied the Great Sand Dunes, it's actually a national park. So we pulled into the lot, and there was snow right at, we had to walk about a half a mile to get to the sand dune, and then we It was 700 verticals, so we walked all the way to the top. we had taped up our gear so that, we wouldn't get sand into the bindings and stuff. I don't think the bindings were going to release at that point, but we were okay with that. And we skied down, and it was a lot of fun. And I remember I took the film, because this was in the days before digital cameras, I took the film that we had shot into the Ward Samuels who had the camera shop in the Stowe Center and dropped it off to be developed. So when I picked it up a few days later, Ward said, it was the weirdest thing he said, but I He said I couldn't get that snow To be white. It kept wanting to be like yellowish and I said, Ward That's because it wasn't snow. It was sand. He was like, really? Where was that? but it was Not a lot of people can say, yeah, I just keep 700 vertical feet of sand. That's cool. Pretty cool. as you reflect on the growth of Stowe and, all the building projects you've done, do you think Stowe has the ability to strike a balance between, sustainable development and also keeping The charm of Stowe, so to speak, the small town charm. Do you think that's possible? I'm not, to be honest, optimistic. I am not unhappy by the way Stowe is. I'm not one of these people that feels unhappy about it. Yep. But I recognize that a lifestyle that was affordable for quite a lot of people isn't really very accessible anymore. It's just the money doesn't work for people. if you have people who are willing to spend a million dollars to buy a house that 10 years ago would have been 300, 000, you can't really compete with that. And I heard recently that only 15 percent of Stowe's residents right now are full time year round people. I don't know whether that's an accurate number. What I do know is Lamoille. County Health just announced they're closing their office because there just aren't enough people to use that facility. So they're going to relocate over to Copley. And I think that's a pretty honest reflection. It's a notable event. I'm a big fan of density. I am not a big fan of five acre zoning and one acre zoning. I like More dense development. I like dense development. If Stoke can find its way to do density, then it will help the community start to build back residential numbers. But if they can't do that, then I don't see how we come back from where we are. the surrounding communities are strong. Morrisville is strong, a lot stronger than it used to be. Waterbury Center is very strong. and I think that, in a way, a lot of the people that populated Stowe have transplanted into other areas now. A common question I get asked all the time, because I've done this, been around here a long time, is, well, has the mountain changed? I like to say, I don't actually think the mountain has changed that much. because it's the same mountain, guys. Yeah, absolutely. I was skiing these trails in the 1950s and 60s. They're the same trails. We've only added a few. when I was growing up, it was, I don't know, 48 trails and then somehow I got to be 52 or 54. And then when Scott got here, Scott Reeves, he's the one who said, he said, why do they call it 54 Trails? He said, I have my morning meetings and these guys are like. They've got a trail list. It's got 120 trails on it because there's upper star and lower star, he said these are all, some are open, some are closed, some are roped off. He said, why do we call it? we've got all this acreage. Why do we call it 50 trails? And you couldn't really argue with logic, particularly in the world of marketing. But the people that ski here have definitely changed. the Epic Pass has been the impact. Nobody needs to hear Kim Brown going on about the impact of the Epic Pass, because everybody sees it. Is it a bad thing? Eh, I don't know. I know that when the Epic Pass first came out, everybody I knew was really excited. About getting a pass for half of what they had been paying. That's right. Everybody thought that was great. And then after about a year, we're like, Yeah, I'll pay two grand. maybe I didn't quite think that fully through. Yeah. Yeah, and the ski bum culture, like you said, it's much harder to be a Ski bum, you have to be a modern day ski bum to exist in stow these days and bring your job from somewhere else, but you can't, just be a typical, what we would have thought of seventies and eighties style ski bum. So that's changed. And the quirkiness of the place we think has changed. I don't know any thoughts on that, these quirky characters and you driving down the mountain road and a hot tub naked, that just doesn't happen in stow anymore. Yeah. So there's some, because I thought about a couple of vignettes that So there was a guy, Dave Smith, who was a really good skier, he was a very good ski bum racer. Dave was hardcore, and Dave spent a winter basically living in his car up in the notch. He'd drive his car up there, he had a spot for it, and that's where he slept. He lived there. He was working. He was a working guy, but he just was happy to live up there, and he skied a lot. Then one of my other real favorite stories was there was a guy whose name I do, I only remember him as George. George was a very good skier, and you know the patrol had some pretty significant rules about what you could and couldn't do. And George was one of these guys that You know, if it's there, I'm going to ski it, and I don't care what the patrol says. So he had skied the upper lift line when it wasn't open. Which it usually was not. For a long time, the upper lift line wasn't open. And he ripped it one day, and so they cornered him and said, You're done. Your pass is gone for a couple of weeks. It was pretty late in the season, and there was a beautiful day a couple days later, and it was like 70, 75. This is late March, early April, right? And everybody's having fun, and George decides he really needs to ski. So George shows up, and he's wearing a full suit. He's got a hood on, he's got a face mask on, and he's got goggles. Nice. So you cannot see who this person is. The only problem was that everybody else was wearing T shirts. And shorts. Yeah. Yeah. You stick out. So of course he manages to get on the lift, but the patrol is waiting up top for him. They're like, come on. Yeah. So you really think you're gonna sneak on in that outfit. Hilarious. Yeah. Yeah. And people like that, there was a lot of that going on. it's, it's Spike explained to everybody why he. fell and George trying to sneak on with his winter garb on it. The poaching culture too, I remember even not that long ago, right? Poaching trails was more tolerated than it is today. Oh yeah, poaching, it was funny because I remember, I had a running battle with some of the patrol over the poaching thing and part of it was, we had this thing where it was like, look. We'll stay off your trails if you stay off ours. So if you want to go ski or stuff in the woods, don't be surprised if we ski your stuff, that's rope. And the thing was that a couple of these patrollers were routinely skiing this stuff with their wives. Yeah. The closed trails. Yeah. Oh, it's okay. You can go do it with your wife, but we can't, I only got popped once or twice poaching, but there was a lot of enthusiasm if Kim Brown got caught. In those days, it was, it was a week off snow and usually I'd just go ski somewhere else. It wasn't that hard. Cool. we got some rapid fire questions for you, Kim, if you're ready. Yeah. favorite secret woods trail? You obviously know a lot of them, but what is your favorite spot up there? to be honest, I would have to say that it's not really a secret trail, but I find it hard to beat the Bruce. the Bruce is one of those routes. And, I think Red Sled is probably the best thing we ever cut. Yeah, awesome. Red Sled is like a really great trail. It's a beauty. Nice. What about Secret Woods Trail you'd take a first timer on? Tres Amigos. Yeah. A choice. Yeah. Tres Amigos is manageable for most people. Yep. What is your favorite front four trail or front five? I would say honestly it's Lookout. Yeah. Lookout's great. Cause I think Lookout, unlike the others, Lookout pretty much goes down the fall line. It's a little wider and it's, it doesn't have snow making. So when it's good, it's all natural. And I think that's what separates it from I have nothing against goat and star, because they're all natural too, but both of them have It's hard to find those trails when they're really good because if they're getting skied the bumps are huge, right? And it's hard to ski those trails. The wind can do good things to look out to. Yeah, hit that left side. The fall line. The fall line. Agreed. So I would say of the front five to look out for. Okay, good choice. Perfect groomer day trail choice. Hayride. Got a lot of hayrides this year. Oh, hands down. Hayride because it's wide and it has good light. It's the ultimate. It doesn't really have any obstacles in the middle of it. And I stop at the halfway point every time and that view over there. Peter Rush wasn't he in charge of a lot of The widening at one point in time. Yeah, he was. And'cause we were trying to get ready to meet, world Cup Yep. Homologation standards. Yep, that's right. So that, those would be, that's right. Okay. First chair, 8:00 AM 12 inch powder day. What trail do you hit first? I guess we just got that. Let him let the man answer. that's a good one. I would say that if the conditions underneath are right. Yeah. Probably National. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I love National when it's, being able to ski the edges of National, especially skiers left. Oh, skiers left is the best. Yeah. it's just. I might go Star. It's just really. the problem with Star is always two things. One is, first off, it's always going to be gnarly at the top. I don't give a shit how much snow is falling. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But National, once you drop into National. Yeah. it's. It's really good all the way down, all the way down, all the way to Houghton's. Yep, I would agree. By the way, do you guys know why Houghton's is called Houghton's? Do not. This is worth sharing. Houghton's begins at the bottom of Nosedive and runs across, it's that route that goes across, will take you all the way over to Lookout, takes you over to North Slow, takes you all the way across. For Most people, that's the end of it. But Houghtons used to go all the way out to Route 108. And when we were doing our cutting, we discovered that we could drive up Houghtons and get into the Mountain Company network up high, up on Lullaby Lane. So we used that until Rod Kessler put a boulder at our entrance. He knew somebody was doing it. But I never knew why it was called Houghtons. And it was called Houghton's because there was a woman named Jesse Houghton that had a bar out at the intersection of the Houghton's Trail and Route 108. Because in the days before the lifts, people are hiking up their skiing nosedive, and then they could take that line all the way to 108 where their cars were parked. That's cool. And it was called Houghton's because it went to Jesse Houghton's bar. I learned that from Brian Lindner. Last question, if you could time travel to any era of Stowe skiing, when would it be? I would say it would be the 1980s. The 1980s were really good, because we still Didn't have that much volume and we had volume sometimes. but it was where the skiing in the woods was really opening up and most people hadn't figured it out yet. so we had a lot of really quality powder. You talked about five people knowing about angel food, right? That must've been an awesome winter. What would you say is your hope for Stowe in the next five to ten years? To be honest, I would love it to see what just happened at Killington happen in Stowe. And that is to find some deep pocketed, local based people who would buy this gear back from Vail. And I don't really have a malicious view of Vail. I just feel like Vail's in the business of promoting skiing across 60 or 70 ski areas. I would like to see Stowe return to a more locally based operation that would maybe make long range planning decisions based on what they felt was more beneficial for the large community and for this northern Vermont skier base that we have. I think that's the one thing that I feel I'd like to see, Nice. All right, we always wrap up our episode with one question. We're going to tweak this a little bit. I know you live in Waterbury, not Stowe, so if Stowe Waterbury area didn't exist and Stowe Mountain was not on the map, where do you think you'd be living and skiing? I think it's a pretty high probability I'd be in the Wasatch. Yeah. I have over 400 days skiing, mostly in little Cottonwood Canyon, and I have a hard time finding a better place to ski than, yeah. Great choice than Utah. Yeah, Utah. Great choice. Utah's pretty good. Maybe Iowa soon. I'm willing to give it a test, that sounds like a quilt trip. who, who would ever think of skiing in Iowa? Yeah, you apparently. It'll be a fun trip and read all about it. Awesome. Order. Cool. Thanks a lot, Kim, for coming on. It's been a great chat. It's been a lot of fun. Thanks. Really appreciate that. You invited me on. Absolutely. Thank you.