Podcast #227: Taos Ski Valley CEO John Kelly

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast still has a podcast. Get new episodes the moment they’re live by subscribing to the email newsletter:WhoJohn Kelly, CEO of Taos Ski Valley, New MexicoRecorded onNovember 13, 2025About Taos Ski ValleyClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Louis Bacon (since December 2013)Located in: Taos Ski Valley, New MexicoYear founded: 1955Pass affiliations:* Ikon Pass – 7 days, no blackouts* Ikon Base Pass – 5 days, holiday blackouts* Ikon Session Pass – 1-4 days, holiday blackouts* Mountain Collective – 2 days, no blackouts* Ski New Mexico True Pass – 2 days, holiday blackoutsBase elevation: 9,350 feetSummit elevation: 12,450 feet lift-served, 12,481 hike-toVertical drop: 3,100 feet lift-served, 3,131 hike-to.Skiable acres: 1,294 (some hike-to)Average annual snowfall: 300 inches claimed on website; calculated 36-year average using data sourced from Taos’ 2010 master development plan, Ski New Mexico tallies, and media reports is 233 inches. The 10-year average falls to 166 inches. Here’s the year-by-year breakdown:Trail count: 110 (24% beginner, 25% intermediate, 51% expert)Lift count: 13 (1 pulse gondola, 2 high-speed quads, 2 fixed-grip quads, 4 triples, 1 double, 3 carpets)Why I interviewed himLet’s start with a superficially troubling number: Taos’ long, steady decline in average annual skier visits:That doesn’t look so good, especially when laid alongside the long-term increase in national skier visits:Taos not only declined in the context of national skier visits, but also among its peers. In winter 1983-84, Taos drew more skiers (241,000) than Telluride (132,460), Big Sky (136,000), Jackson Hole (177,000), Whitefish (I’m lacking an estimate for that winter, but the ski area then known as “Big Mountain” logged 209,000 skiers in 1980-81 and 170,581 in 1985-86). Taos (dark blue line below), continued to out-duel this group through about the mid-90s before falling off a cliff:So what happened? 1995 Taos, a freeride mecca before freeride was cool, should have been perfectly suited to flourish in a cultural moment when skiers began demanding more interesting terrain than the groomed superhighways that had become the industry’s default setting. Sure, Taos was remote and a bit harder to access than, say, Keystone or Park City, but so were Jackson and Whitefish and Big Sky and Telluride. A partial explanation: Taos stopped modernizing. After replacing the Lift 2 double with a fixed-grip quad in 1994, Taos didn’t install another new chairlift for 19 years. The first detachable didn’t arrive until 2018. The resort banned snowboards until 2008. Meanwhile, Big Sky laced a tram to the summit of Lone Peak in 1995 and started pushing detachable quads up the mountain; the first high-speed quads arrived at Telluride in 1986 and Whitefish in 1989.It’s not a perfect narrative – while Jackson Hole rolled out its short Sublette detach in the mid-90s, the mountain didn’t install an upper-mountain high-speed chairlift until Casper in 2012. Skier visits went up and up and up all that time, probably due in large part to aggressive improvements at the Jackson Hole airport.Maybe, though, it’s as simple as this: banger snow years descended upon Taos – and New Mexico in general – from the late ‘80s through mid-‘90s. It’s little surprise that attendance ups-and-downs largely mirror snowfall patterns:But, as the corresponding trendlines show, Taos’ skier visits have not declined at the same rate as the mountain’s average annual snowfall. And while Jackson’s long-term average snowfall has remained relatively constant, attendance has crept steadily upward. Attendance spiked at both mountains when the 2018-19 season brought both plentiful snow and the introduction of the Ikon Pass:Unfortunately, Taos stopped reporting skier visits after the Covid-shortened 2019-20 season, so we have less concrete insight into whether the mountain’s recent investments in a reconfigured beginner area and a second detachable on the backside have insulated it from two historically poor snow years. This is why it’s nice to have basic visitation data, and why I’m pushing the ski industry to again publicize annual attendance for ski areas occupying public lands (since going live with a <a target="_blank" href="https://www.stormskiing.com/p/here-is-2406-years-of-us-skier-vis