Storm Skiing 9/30/2026: Indy Pass & Snowvana Founder Doug Fish on Megapass Proliferation and the Future of Ski Shows

Who

Doug Fish, founder of the Snowvana ski show and Indy Pass

Date Recorded

Sept. 30, 2026

About Snowvana

Snowvana is a “winter kick-off festival” (a ski show) scheduled for a four-city 2026 tour:

Use the code “thestorm26” to snatch a free ticket here for any 2026 Snowvana show.

Check out the list of free and discounted lift tickets available onsite at each show.

Why I interviewed him

If we trust the metonymic origin story of our surnames, then Doug Fish is a descendant of “a catcher or seller of fish,” probably sometime before the invention of the printing press. I cannot think of anything that I understand less than fishing. Specifically, how a person can be good at it. My experience with fishing is that you cast a line in the water and nothing happens while you get drunk. But my buddy’s brother could go out on Sanford Lake in a rowboat and return an hour later surrounded by like 50 fish. Every damn time. And I was always just astonished like whatever inherent traits you need to be good at fishing that dude has them.

I don’t know if Doug Fish is good at fishing, or if he even likes it. I do know that he’s good at skiing, and that he likes it. And whatever fishing ability he may or may not have inherited from Alabaster Fish of the 12th Century, he certainly possesses some of the traits of great fishermen: patience, instinct, and the ability to do hard things that no one else can figure out.

Organizing and launching the Indy Pass is probably one of the great achievements of modern skiing, in that it proved that any ski area - and therefore nearly any skier - could join the multimountain pass club. While Indy wasn’t a novel or new concept, Fish was able to achieve the heretofore impossible task of organizing far-flung ski areas into a coalition with patience, persistence, and a low-key, no-pressure approach devoid of Big Ski’s ego.