Podcast #220: Stowe Mountain VP & GM Mike Giorgio

Who

Mike Giorgio, Vice President and General Manager of Stowe Mountain, Vermont

Recorded on

October 8, 2025

About Stowe

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Vail Resorts, which also owns:

Located in: Stowe, Vermont

Year founded: 1934

Pass affiliations:

* Epic Pass: unlimited access

* Epic Local Pass: unlimited access with holiday blackouts

* Epic Northeast Value Pass: 10 days with holiday blackouts

* Epic Northeast Midweek Pass: 5 midweek days with holiday blackouts

* Access on Epic Day Pass All and 32 Resort tiers

* Ski Vermont 4 Pass – up to one day, with blackouts

* Ski Vermont Fifth Grade Passport – 3 days, with blackouts

Closest neighboring U.S. ski areas: Smugglers’ Notch (ski-to or 40-ish-minute drive in winter, when route 108 is closed over the notch), Bolton Valley (:45), Cochran’s (:50), Mad River Glen (:55), Sugarbush (:56)

Base elevation: 1,265 feet (at Toll House double)

Summit elevation: 3,625 feet (top of the gondola), 4,395 feet at top of Mt. Mansfield

Vertical drop: 2,360 feet lift-served, 3,130 feet hike-to

Skiable acres: 485

Average annual snowfall: 314 inches

Trail count: 116 (16% beginner, 55% intermediate, 29% advanced)

Lift count: 12 (1 eight-passenger gondola, 1 six-passenger gondola, 1 six-pack, 3 high-speed quads, 1 fixed-grip quad, 1 triple, 2 doubles, 2 carpets)

Why I interviewed him

There is no Aspen of the East, but if I had to choose an Aspen of the East, it would be Stowe. And not just because Aspen Mountain and Stowe offer a similar fierce-down, with top-to-bottom fall-line zippers and bumpy-bumps spliced by massive glade pockets. Not just because each ski area rises near the far end of densely bunched resorts that the skier must drive past to reach them. Not just because the towns are similarly insular and expensive and tucked away. Not just because the wintertime highway ends at both places, an anachronistic act of surrender to nature from a mechanized world accustomed to fencing out the seasons. And not just because each is a cultural stand-in for mechanized skiing in a brand-obsessed, half-snowy nation that hates snow and is mostly filled with non-skiers who know nothing about the activity other than the fact that it exists. Everyone knows about Aspen and Stowe even if they’ll never ski, in the same way that everyone knows about LeBron James even if they’ve never watched basketball.

All of that would be sufficient to make the Stowe-is-Aspen-East argument. But the core identity parallel is one that threads all these tensions while defying their assumed outcome. Consider the remoteness of 1934 Stowe and 1947 Aspen, two mountains in the pre-snowmaking, pre-interstate era, where cutting a ski area only made sense because that’s where it snowed the most. Both grew in similar fashion. First slowly toward the summit with surface lifts and mile-long single chairs crawling up the incline. Then double chairs and gondolas and snowguns and detachable chairlifts. A ski area for the town evolves into a ski area for the world. Hotels a la luxe at the base, traffic backed up to the interstate, corporate owners and $261 lift tickets.

That sounds like a formula for a ruined world. But Stowe the ski area, like Aspen Mountain the ski area, has never lost its wild soul. Even buffed out and six-pack equipped and Epic Pass-enabled, Stowe remains a hell of a mountain, one of the best in New England, one of my favorite anywhere. With its monster snowfalls, its endless and perfectly spaced glades, its never-g