Podcast #203: Silver Mountain General Manager Jeff Colburn

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Who

Jeff Colburn, General Manager of Silver Mountain, Idaho

Recorded on

February 12, 2025

About Silver Mountain

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: CMR Lands, which also owns 49 Degrees North, Washington

Located in: Kellogg, Idaho

Year founded: 1968 as Jackass ski area, later known as Silverhorn, operated intermittently in the 1980s before its transformation into Silver in 1990

Pass affiliations:

* Indy Pass – 2 days, select blackouts

* Indy+ Pass – 2 days, no blackouts

* Powder Alliance – 3 days, select blackouts

Closest neighboring ski areas: Lookout Pass (:26)

Base elevation: 4,100 feet (lowest chairlift); 2,300 feet (gondola)

Summit elevation: 6,297 feet

Vertical drop: 2,200 feet

Skiable acres: 1,600+

Average annual snowfall: 340 inches

Trail count: 80

Lift count: 7 (1 eight-passenger gondola, 1 fixed-grip quad, 2 triples, 2 doubles, 1 carpet – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Silver Mountain’s lift fleet)

Why I interviewed him

After moving to Manhattan in 2002, I would often pine for an extinct version of New York City: docks thrust into the Hudson, masted ships, ornate brickwork factories, carriages, open windows, kids loose in the streets, summer evening crowds on stoops and patios. Modern New York, riotous as it is for an American city, felt staid and sterile beside the island’s explosively peopled black-and-white past.

Over time, I’ve developed a different view: New York City is a triumph of post-industrial reinvention, able to shed and quickly replace obsolete industries with those that would lead the future. And my idealized New York, I came to realize, was itself a snapshot of one lost New York, but not the only lost New York, just my romanticized etching of a city that has been in a constant state of reinvention for 400 years.

It's through this same lens that we can view Silver Mountain. For more than a century, Kellogg was home to silver mines that employed thousands. When the Bunker Hill Mine closed in 1981, it took the town’s soul with it. The city became a symbol of industrial decline, of an America losing its rough-and-ragged hammer-bang grit.

And for a while, Kellogg was a denuded and dusty crater pockmarking the glory-green of Idaho’s panhandle. The population collapsed. Suicide rates, Colburn tells us on the podcast, were high.

But within a decade, town officials peered toward the skeleton of Jackass ski area, with its intact centerpole Riblet double, and said, “maybe that’s the thing.” With help from Von Roll, they erected three chairlifts on the mountain and taxed themselves $2 million to string a three-mile-long gondola from town to mountain, opening the ski area to the masses by bypassing the serpentine seven-mile-long access road. (Gosh, can you think of anyplace else where such a contra