Podcast #208: Bluebird Backcountry Co-Founder Erik Lambert

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Who

Erik Lambert, Co-Founder of Bluebird Backcountry, Colorado and founder of Bonfire Collective

Recorded on

April 8, 2025

About Bluebird Backcountry

Located in: Just east of the junction of US 40 and Colorado 14, 20-ish miles southwest of Steamboat Springs, Colorado

Years active: 2020 to 2023

Closest neighboring U.S. ski areas: Steamboat (:39), Howelsen Hill (:45),

Base elevation: 8,600 feet

Summit elevation: 9,845 feet

Vertical drop: 1,245 feet

Skiable acres: 4,200-plus acres (3,000 acres guided; 1,200-plus acres avalanche-managed and ski-patrolled)

Average annual snowfall: 196 inches

Lift fleet: None!

Why I interviewed him

First question: why is the ski newsletter that constantly reminds readers that it’s concerned always and only with lift-served skiing devoting an entire podcast episode to a closed ski area that had no lifts at all? Didn’t I write this when Indy Pass added Bluebird back in 2022?:

Wait a minute, what the f**k exactly is going on here? I have to walk to the f*****g top? Like a person from the past? Before they invented this thing like a hundred years ago called a chairlift? No? You actually ski up? Like some kind of weird humanoid platypus Howard the Duck thing? Bro I so did not sign up for this s**t. I am way too lazy and broken.

Yup, that was me. But if you’ve been here long enough, you know that making fun of things that are hard is my way of making fun of myself for being Basic Ski Bro. Really I respected the hell out of Bluebird, its founders, and its skiers, and earnestly believed for a moment that the ski area could offer a new model for ski area development in a nation that had mostly stopped building them:

Bluebird has a lot of the trappings of a lift-served ski area, with 28 marked runs and 11 marked skin tracks, making it a really solid place to dial your uphill kit and technique before throwing yourself out into the wilderness.

I haven’t really talked about this yet, but I think Bluebird may be the blueprint for re-igniting ski-area development in the vast American wilderness. The big Colorado resorts – other than Crested Butte and Telluride – have been at capacity for years. They keep building more and bigger lifts, but skiing needs a relief valve. One exists in the smaller ski areas that populate Colorado and are posting record business results, but in a growing state in a finally-growing sport, Bluebird shows us another way to do skiing.

More specifically, I wrote in a post the following year:

Bluebird fused the controlled environment and relative safety of a ski area with the grit and exhilaration of the uphill ski experience. The operating model, stripped of expensive chairlifts and resource-intensive snowmaking and grooming equipment, appeared to suit the current moment of reflexive opposition to mechanized development in the wilderness. For a moment, this patrolled, avalanche-controlled, low-infrastructure startup appeared to be a model for future ski area development in the United States. …

If Bluebird could establish a beachhead in Colorado, home to a dozen of America’s most-developed ski resorts and nearly one in every four of the nation’s skier visits, th