After more than 30 years, Pebble Creek Ski Area has a new owner.
Shay Carl, the YouTube celebrity who grew up in Pocatello, signed the paperwork and officially became the King of Mount Bonneville early last fall. For decades beforehand, the Inkom ski resort was owned by a group of investors. Pebble Creek has always been a popular place to hit the slopes for Southeast Idaho ski bums, but when news of Shay Carl’s purchase was released, it invigorated the regional skiing community.
Though it’s only been a few months, Shay Carl is already making his snowprint on Pebble Creek. Naturally, the internet star had Pebble Creek’s website redesigned. Plus, skiers and snowboarders were welcomed to a remodeled lodge when Pebble Creek opened for the 2016-2017 winter season. Next year, the Aspen area will be expanded to accommodate more beginner- and intermediate-level skiers.
However, Shay Carl has said that any and all ideas for improvements to the ski resort have been considered. Some of these potential long-term projects include building mountain bike trails, hosting concerts, showing movies on large outdoor screens and offering summer tubing down the mountain.
Shay Carl, who is known by his friends and family by his birth name, Shay Butler, sat down with Xtreme Idaho Editor David Ashby for an interview, in which he discussed why he purchased Pebble Creek, his childhood in Pocatello and his online fame.
Q: Why did you purchase Pebble Creek Ski Area?
A: I grew up here, I learned how to ski here, this was always the place that I came to escape the frustrations of the world, and then this last season being here, skiing here, somehow that idea got put into my mind somehow by someone, and so I decided to do it. I went in and I talked to Mary (Mary Reichman, Pebble Creek’s general manager) and we started discussing it. It was a seven-month process, just to make sure everything was done correctly. But you look back on your life and you ask, “why did I do that,” but you wouldn’t change it most of the time. I’m already so excited with this place and I want to jump ahead five years from now, but you have to take it day-by-day.
Q: You have an interesting story about something you found on the mountain that encouraged you to ultimately make your decision. What happened?
A: During the seven-month process of this deal, I kept constantly thinking it was going to fall through. During that seven months of trying to get the deal done, I almost got cold feet during certain times. I remember skiing here one day and thinking, “man, what if we don’t get snow,” because there was no snow that day and there were rocks, and like, “this is a horrible idea, what about global warming?” So, when we were close to finalizing the deal, I just decided to hike to the top of the mountain. I just took a day, canceled all of my appointments, got a backpack with some water and started walking up. I had a little lunch and stopped along the trail. My favorite run on this mountain is Liftline. I love Liftline, I love the jumps and the trees. I was just hiking straight up Liftline and took the cattracks as high as I could go, then I went straight up. So I was sitting on a rock, eating lunch, and I looked down and saw this nickel that was in this crack of this boulder next to where I was eating lunch. I leaned down and thought, “oh cool, a lucky nickel.” Like if you find a penny, you pick it up all day long and have good luck. So when I grabbed the nickel, and I think most people do this, I always think, “if this coin has my birth year on it, then it’s like a special omen.” And sure enough, and it sounds too good to be true, but the nickel had a 1980 year on it, and I was like, “oh my heck, that’s a good sign.” And five has been my lucky number growing up, and so that was cool, too. So I took a picture of the nickel and sent it to my mom and said, “look at what I found up here!” It was just a cool thing. It wasn’t like that’s what made me decide to buy the mountain, because we were kind of already in the thick of it, it was under contract, but it definitely gave me this good vibe that it was going to work out.
Q: What was the response like when word got out that you purchased Pebble Creek?
A: It was shocking. I couldn’t believe how much Facebook attention it got. The articles that I was seeing from the ski industry and different people from around the world. I was kind of blown away, honestly. I didn’t promote it much on my social media avenues. But it was cool meeting friends in L.A. two weeks later, and they were like, “you bought a ski hill?!” And I was like, “yeah.” It was really encouraging. I think mostly it was cool to see how many people are excited to come skiing again this year.
Q: What are the challenges ski areas like Pebble Creek face due to the current economic and environmental situation?
A: Skiing is a very niche life sport. If you really break it down, how silly of an idea is it to put on these skis with edges and try to make it down a steep mountain, especially one as steep as Mount Bonneville here (at Pebble Creek). To take it to the next step and say “what if we could actually have a business where we had people come and do that,” it’s a high-risk, low-reward scenario because there’s so many factors with the weather, with global warming. The mountain that we have here is really jagged, there’s a lot of rocks, and with the economy, with people being fearful of what’s going to happen with their job because of the new president or whatever, yeah, it’s a scary time to get in the ski business. But it’s a passion project, and I know that there’s enough people in this local community that love this mountain enough, that call this mountain home, that I think it can be a really good thriving local business. I don’t see it as a global business or anything where you can expand into something you can scale, but we’re excited just to have this local mountain here.
Q: What is your history to the Pocatello area?
A: I was born in Logan, Utah, and then we moved here when I was 4 years old. I went to third grade at Gate City Elementary, and then I transferred to Edahow and then I went to Franklin Middle School and graduated from Highland High School. I did all my schooling at School District 25.
Q: Why did you decide to learn to ski at Pebble Creek when you were a kid?
A: My mom skied. Growing up, my mom lived in Logan, Utah, and they would go to Beaver (Beaver Mountain Ski Area in Logan), and she skied a lot growing up. My very, very first experience skiing was a bad one because I almost got frostbite. We were at Beaver, skiing down the face of Beaver. I just fell face-first and my gloves fell off and I went probably 300 yards barehanded through the snow. I have very vague memories as a 5-year-old being in the lodge standing around the fire sobbing, trying to get my hands warm. But after that I was at Edahow and Mr. K, who was my fifth grade teacher, who was awesome, he used to play flag football with us at lunch. He was like all-time quarterback, and there would be like 50 kids running out screaming, “Mr. K! Mr. K!” He would throw a Hail Mary and if you caught it you were the coolest kid in the lunch hour. So he took us cross-country skiing. It was a field trip, and it was hard, it was like, “where’s the gravity?” And I remember my buddy who said, “we should go up to Pebble Creek and ski,” and I’m like, “what’s Pebble Creek?” So two weeks later we talked my parents into bringing us up here, so 5th grade was my first time at Pebble. My dad actually took us down our very first run up here, and I was terrified. I was up here on the Sunshine Lift, it was the triple, and just coming down the ridge it felt so steep that I felt like I almost had like talon claws clutched into the side of the mountain and if I was to release I would just fall into the abyss immediately. That’s how steep I remember it feeling the first time I skied here. And it was the only thing that was close because we grew up here, so we skied here all the time. When there was a snow day, it was my mom who we all begged to load us into the minivan and drive us up here in her 2-wheel drive vehicle. I learned to do a back flip up here and it became the place where all the guys came to challenge each other.
Q: What’s your best memory on the slopes?
A: Finding the nickel has probably got to be right up there. I do have very, very vivid memories of the very first time I did a back flip. It was such a huge powder day, school was canceled. We were watching the Warren Miller movies. We were fans of Glenn Plake and Scot Schmidt, and like, I don’t know if this was the time, I think it came out later, when Johnny Moseley did the 360 Iron Cross in the Olympics to win the gold. We were fans of all those guys, and it was like, “what if we could do a back flip?” I remember we were at lunch and it was like powder everywhere up to your waist, and I remember telling my friends in this exclamatory way, “I’m going to do a back flip!” And they were like, “na uh!” I said, “I’m going to do it on this run, let’s go.” So we go up on Liftline and I had my brother hold my poles because I thought I was going to be like the ski jumpers without the poles where I flip my arms like this (laughs). So my buddy, he went down and packed down the jump, ha ha, Mary’s sitting over there, she’s doesn’t want to hear this (during the interview, Mary Reichman shakes her head). But my very first back flip, I went up and only did a half of a rotation and barely skinned my head in the snow, and basically landed on my head. But because there was 3 feet of powder it didn’t hurt. And then all my friends were like, “yeah, you did it!” And I said, “no, I ate it.” (laughs). But then I had the confidence, then I felt it, and I said, “oh, I just need to pull a little bit more.” So the very next run I did it and I landed a backflip, and like going home that day and saying, “Mom, I landed a backflip! I landed a backflip!” That’s another very fond memory of mine at Pebble Creek.
Q: We heard you could be quite a hellraiser at Pebble Creek back in the day. Any truth to that?
A: Well, when you’re a kid and you just think you know everything and you think you don’t owe anybody anything, you can be disrespectful. But we weren’t hurting anybody, we just liked to ski. We saw ourselves as these renegade skiers. There were only a couple people that could do a backflip, and then more people started doing them, then more people started trying them, and then people were getting hurt, and so they were saying “no backflips,” and then it was like, “we’re going to do them anyways.” Or people were saying “don’t hike in the backcountry” because if you get into an avalanche, it’s going to be this big fine, and it was like, “we’re going to do it anyways.” And we did get caught in an avalanche once. When you’re young you do stupid things, but we were just extreme skiers, that’s all we wanted to be. We would come up here with no money, we would get hot water and ketchup and crackers and make soup, and that’s what our lunch was because we were so broke. Yeah, we were ski bums.
Q: What did you do for a living before you launched your Internet channels?
A: Before I did Internet, I did a little bit of everything. I was doing real estate, I was a car salesman, I was a door-to-door pest control salesman, I was a school bus driver, I was a radio DJ. Basically, I was kind of looking for what I wanted to do when I grew up.
Q: What encouraged you to launch your YouTube channel?
A: I was working at American Heritage here in town. At 10 a.m. every day we had a 15-minute break, and we would go down to the break room and there was this little computer. We would just huddle around this computer and watch this guy named Kimbo Slice, who was a bareknuckle fighter. He was just fighting in these backyard brawls on YouTube. So that was my first introduction to YouTube. And then when I turned 27 I got my first laptop computer, and that was the only thing that I knew that was on the internet, so I got on YouTube and I found a guy named Phillip de Franco, who had his own show, and I thought, “I could do that!” And so I uploaded my very first video, probably eight years ago, of me dancing around in my living room wearing my old wife’s unitard that she took video of as blackmail material. But I showed her because I used it as the very first video (laughs). So it just started there and it evolved into something I never expected. I always say it’s a dream come true of a dream I never knew I even had.
Q: For those who aren’t familiar with your online videos, what is your channel all about?
A: Well, I have multiple channels. Our biggest channel is the SHAYTARDS channel. You can kind of compare it to a reality show that I shoot and edit. It’s about me and my wife and my five kids and our daily life. We talk about motivation, we share our struggles, when our dog, that was a big part of our life, died. We had to put him to sleep. That was a video we made that a lot of people watched, because they have experienced losing a dog. It’s like a reality show that’s not edited by Hollywood to make fake drama seem apparent. I do all the production and uploading and everything, so check it out.
Q: What’s your favorite online video that you’ve made?
A: Oh, that’s like picking a favorite kid, how can you? I don’t know. Probably just the one that you’re creating at the moment. We have over 2,600 videos and I have five different YouTube channels, and the reason I’ve done it for so long is the creative process. Here’s my definition of creativity — thinking something’s cool or having an idea and not being able to explain it, and just doing it anyways. A lot of people are like, “why? What does that mean?” It’s like, “I don’t know, it just came out of my brain and I want to make it.” That’s creativity. And a lot of times people are afraid to share that, because it doesn’t make sense. Well, so what? Picasso didn’t care about that, he just made art. It’s hard to pick a favorite, because then you start picking it apart after you’ve watch it long enough, so it’s always about the next creation.
Q: When did you first realize your channels were a hit?
A: Oh, it’s hard to say. The first time I got paid for making YouTube videos was probably the biggest paradigm shift I had ever experienced, where I was like, “wait I can make money from making these videos?” First, it was mostly because I am an entertainer. I was the class clown and was voted most daring in high school and stuff like that. But it was communication. I remember the first comment I got was from a guy named Rob in Ohio, who was like, “when are you going to upload your next video?” Some dude I’ve never met before wants to see another video. That, first of all, was really cool where I thought, “we are transcending geographical boundaries where it doesn’t matter where you live, if we’re on the internet, we’re practically hanging out together.” Those realizations happened slowly. And then all of a sudden you think, “oh, 100,000 people saw this video,” and you picture, “what does the Super Bowl stadium look like?” That’s about 80,000 people. So you picture that. You never really have this moment, when you’re like, “oh, it’s a hit!” The very first time I ever got recognized, I was at a Salt Lake City Bees baseball game with all my family, and some girl said “you’re Shay Carl!” And then all my family made fun of me for the rest of the day. They were like, “oh, you’re Shay Carl! Oh, you’re Shay Carl!” And then I never heard the end of it, so there’s little moments like that that happen where you’re like, “oh cool, this is catching on.”
Q: Why did you move back to Pocatello from Los Angeles?
A: We lived in Los Angeles for five years, and then we just wanted to be back home. We have five kids and my family is here and my wife’s family is from this area, so we thought, “we aren’t getting any younger and neither are our parents.” So our motivation was to be with family.
Q: What is the message you want to deliver to all the ski bums up here?
A: I love the sign that is at the top of our terrain park that’s been here for years, and it’s on a few of our poles, which is “respect gets respect.” We love this mountain, we know everybody else loves this mountain, and we’re trying our hardest to make this the coolest place for everybody and we expect the community to help us with that. Respect gets respect and we can’t wait to ski up here with everybody and have a great year and have a great winter.
