In today's edition of Realskiers with Jackson Hogen - the final installment of the 23/24 season - I explore the current crisis facing the ski retail community in collaboration with today's guest, Gary Fleming, the newly anointed president of Winter Sports Retailers, an organization that represents over 300 locations in the U.S ..read more

There's no going back to the good old days, no matter how much we may miss them. This tidy excursion into the past asks the pertinent question, is skiing better today, or worse ..read more

Jonny Moseley’s Olympic gold medal at the Nagano Games in 1998 set the stage for a post-competition career that would be the envy of any athlete. Of course, a lot of athletes have followed a victory with a spot on late-night TV, as Moseley did on the David Letterman show, but not many are invited back, and even fewer go on to host their own show, as Moseley did for three years on MTV (which was a much more important entity then than now), or make the cover of Rolling Stone, or host Saturday Night Live, or segue into the announcing booth, as Moseley did for NBC at the Vancouver Olympics. This i ..read more

It’s the New Year, often touted as a time for resolutions, for filing an amended flight plan for the trajectory of one’s life. It is in this spirit that today I’ve chosen to give voice to the Introduction to Snowbird Secrets, a pithy block of background information that isn’t included in its e-book version, and for all I know is routinely skipped over by those who consume this slender tome in print. While its date of issue lies well in the past, the eternal verities of Snowbird Secrets are still largely unfamiliar to the skiing public, perhaps because its title suggests it simply reveals some ..read more

My guest today is Dave Bertoni, a curious choice, in that Dave currently has nothing whatsoever to do with the ski business, but today’s podcast isn’t about today’s ski trade, but explores its roots in the not-so-distant past. Did you ever wonder what became of the legendary Salomon rear-entry boot design that drove the two-piece overlap to the brink of extinction? Dave Bertoni knows, for he was at the meeting where the nails were driven into its coffin. Want to know the backstory behind the Salomon Spheric and Propulse binding designs or the creation of the first integrated ski/binding system ..read more

Today I’m interviewing the world’s foremost ski historian, Seth Masia, who is President of the International Skiing History Association and the Publisher of Skiing History since 2014, and its Editor since 2002. He is perhaps best known for his 20 years of service at SKI (from 1974 to 1993), mostly on the equipment beat, where he was a pillar of the ski media, in those days, a very big deal. He segued from print to the cyber world when, between 1994 and 1996, he designed, built and launched skinet.com, the first consumer website. He capitalized on that experience with a three-year stint at Micr ..read more

My guest today is Thor Verdonk, the Technical Product Director for the Rossignol Group. You’ve probably never heard of him, but you’ve heard of the products he has helped to shepherd into the market, most recently the Lange Shadow. The Shadow is unquestionably the biggest story in Alpine ski gear this winter. Bear in mind that Lange has been the epitome of the modern race boot for generations of racers. It’s probably the most imitated design in the post-war history of our sport. But the Shadow isn’t being touted because of its rich heritage, but for the degree to which it has departed from its ..read more

Guru Dave Powers is my cherished co-author of Snowbird Secrets, a modern mystic with a way of looking at the world that is both whimsical and profound. He shares his intimate knowledge of Snowbird in his daily snow reports at Gurudavepowers.com, a must-read for anyone who wants to catch the best snow on this magnificent mountain. He is, in a word, unique ..read more

On Traverses is Chapter 9 of Snowbird Secrets, 22 meditations about what it means to ski this cosmically connected mountain. I'm posting it today to commemorate this coming Thursday's podcast with Guru Dave Powers, whose work you can find at gurudavepowers.com. Enjoy ..read more

You’ve probably never heard of my guest today, but Mike Bisner might be the most well-connected person in our sport. He has covered every base at an executive level, as general manager of one of the largest specialty chains in the retail sector, as marketing director at Salomon when the French juggernaut was riding high, and he later played a similar role at Head as it was shouldering its way into the first rank of ski suppliers in this country. His list of ski-industry connections might be the most extensive in our sport ..read more