Lifestyle
On Big Bear's slopes, a new ski lift opens. Is a link between resorts next?
Snow has been slow to arrive in Big Bear this year, but the long-term forecast calls for big changes.
Bear Mountain resort in Big Bear is adding its first new chair lift in 30 years, a six-seat, high-speed lift that will carry its first customers Thursday.
The new Midway lift (also known as Chair 5) holds up to six skiers at a time. Its features include a short conveyor belt that carries skiers and boarders to the spots where the lift will pick them up for a ride of about 2,500 feet.
“This is our bright, shiny, new toy for the season,” said Mark Burnett, the resort’s vice president for facilities, at a recent test run.
Though Bear Mountain opened chairlifts 7 and 9 for the season Dec. 13, management waited until later in the month before opening up the Midway lift, hoping for more snow that has yet to arrive. Skiers can get updates on Big Bear weather, trails and lifts here.
Meanwhile, Alterra Mountain Co., the company behind Bear Mountain, Snow Summit, Snow Valley and several of the largest winter resorts in the West, continues to inch forward on a bigger idea: linking Bear Mountain and Snow Summit with a pair of lifts and other amenities. This would allow skiers and boarders to move back and forth between resorts without driving or boarding a shuttle bus.
Under the plan — still under review by the U.S. Forest Service — the resorts would build a pair of “Big Bear Connect” lifts. To make the plan work, the two ski operations (together known as Big Bear Mountain Resort) would need to add about 300 acres to the nearly 1,500 acres they use now under permits from the Forest Service.
The Forest Service, which owns the land, began gathering public input on the proposed expansion plan in 2023.
“We are in the analysis phase,” U.S. Forest Service Mountain Resorts program manager Janelle Walker said, confirming that the project is still moving forward. She said “we had additional analysis that was needed, and we are planning to get the Draft Environmental Assessment out to the public in spring 2025.” Even after approval, resort officials noted, the project could take years to complete.
In the meantime, skiers and boarders have the new lift at Bear Mountain’s to try out.
How the new lift works
Bear Mountain officials said they’ve spent about $10.2 million on the new Midway lift, which replaces the now-departed chairlifts 1, 2 and 5 in the resort’s central base area.
Designed by the lift specialist company Leitner-Poma, it is expected to carry passengers 2,494 feet upslope in as little as 2.5 minutes. The lift will be able to carry as many as 3,200 people per hour, resort officials say.
“Now all we need is the snow,” said Burnett.
The construction, which began in May, included helicopters carrying a dozen towers to their new places on the slopes, while other workers dug a vast hole to hold the lift’s many moving and stationary parts at the base of the mountain.
Bear Mountain, known for its terrain parks and half-pipes, has operated under various names in the San Bernardino National Forest since the 1940s. For many years, the resort has relied heavily on artificial snow-making, attracting many beginner and intermediate skiers and snowboarders.
Burnett estimated that in the last eight years, management has invested $30 million in improvements to Bear Mountain, with further investment at Snow Summit and Snow Valley.
How Bear Mountain and Snow Summit could link together
Like many ski resorts, those in Big Bear include large chunks of U.S. Forest Service land, where resort companies operate under long-term special use permits, building improvements and sharing a portion of their income with the Forest Service.
Bear Mountain, whose permit covers 818 acres, runs seven chairlifts on 198 skiable acres.
Snow Summit, whose permit covers 656 acres, operates 10 chairlifts on 240 skiable acres.
The permits are good through 2057, resort officials said, and linking them would require another 300 acres of Forest Service land between the two. Within that area, the “footprint of disturbance” would be relatively small, Walker said — less than 100 acres.
The main way to travel between the resorts now is to drive or catch one of the free Intermountain Shuttle buses that depart every half-hour for the 10-minute journey between the resorts.
Though Bear Mountain and Snow Summit have been under common ownership since 2002, talk of linking them didn’t heat up until after they were bought up by Mammoth Mountain in 2014, then swallowed in 2017 (along with Mammoth) by the Denver-based company now known as Alterra Mountain Co.
Alterra, one of the biggest names in the ski industry, operates 19 resorts in the Western U.S. and Canada and uses its popular Ikon season passes to market them together.
The company’s proposed link between Bear Mountain and Snow Summit is part of a broader upgrade that is spelled out in a Big Bear Mountain Resort Master Development Plan, filed by resort officials with the Forest Service in 2020.
Besides adding the acreage and two lifts — which would average 4,250 feet in length — the plan would include construction of a Goldmine Mountain Lodge (including restaurant) on Bear Mountain; the creation of 60 acres of trails in and near the expansion area; clearing trees; and building a skier bridge so that skiers and boarders can cross above an existing mountain road, 2N10, that runs between Snow Summit and Bear Mountain.
Other elements of the proposal: addition of a zipline system; 12 new mountain biking trails; a “mountain coaster” attraction on land already covered by permits or owned by Alterra; and the addition of about 1,400 parking spaces. Resorts officials said the cost of these projects is yet to be determined, pending reviews and approvals.
To put the connection between resorts in simplest terms, Big Bear Mountain Resorts advertising and public relations director Justin Kanton said, “we’re talking about a narrow ravine with two lifts coming in and out.”
“And there’s already a road that goes in and out,” Burnett added.
In the month after the August 2023 release of Alterra’s proposed plans, more than 40 local residents weighed in with letters to the Forest Service and expressed a mix of caution and support.
Mitchell Chivetta warned that “the local infrastructure cannot handle the current influx of visitors during the winter.” Even when highway 330 and 38 are in good repair, Chivetta wrote, “the traffic on these roads caused by inexperienced winter drivers creates hardship for local residents and frustrates all drivers.”
Conversely, Justin Kohlas wrote that “we’re way overdue for an upgrade to the resorts and experience on the mountain. To be able to move from Bear Mountain to Snow Summit and vice versa without the need to wait in a shuttle line makes so much sense.”
Students walk on the Stanford University campus on March 14, 2019, in Stanford, Calif.
Ben Margot/AP
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Ben Margot/AP
When Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University a few years ago, he joined the student newspaper, following the path of his journalist parents, Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, and Susan Glasser, a writer for The New Yorker.
Through his reporting as a student journalist, he eventually broke a story about manipulated data in Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s neuroscience research that helped lead to the university president’s resignation.
Theo Baker’s book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University was released May 19. In it, Baker describes Stanford as a place where proximity to Silicon Valley gives rise to a parallel system of influence, recruitment and money, with investors looking to identify promising students almost as soon as they arrive on campus.
He told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep there was “a sort of Stanford inside Stanford,” where elite students are drawn into an “alternate reality” of excess and access to cut corners.
In the interview, he discusses how Stanford is not just a university but also a pipeline where status and power can matter as much as ideas.
We reached out to Stanford University for comment and have not heard back.
Listen to the interview by clicking play on the blue box above.
The scoreboard shows the results of the women’s singles final match between Iga Swiatek of Poland and Amanda Anisimova of the U.S. at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025.
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
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Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Fifteen points in tennis? Nice. Thirty, 40 — even better. Advantage — that sounds good. “Love” — that also must be great, right? Well, not quite.
As the French Open rolls on and Serena Williams has announced her return to the sport, maybe you’ve been paying a little more attention to tennis. The sport’s scoring system is notably distinct, and can sometimes be hard to grasp for newcomers. But even tennis aficionados might not know why, or how, “love” became the unmistakable callout for zero points. For this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week, we’re exploring how a word that signifies trailing behind got such a sweet name.
“Love” comes from the heart — or an egg?
It’s hard to pinpoint when the first tennis ball went over the net. Tennis is a derivative of lots of other sports, such as “jeu de paume,” a handball game played in France, said JT Buzanga, the collections manager at the International Tennis Hall of Fame museum.
But tennis became a patented, official sport in 1874, said Steve Flink, a journalist whose tennis coverage got him inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. It has retained its unique, mysterious scoring system ever since.
“By and large, the original system has held up almost entirely,” Flink said.
The use of “love” goes back to the late 18th century, said Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer. But it was used earlier than that in card games such as whist and bridge. Before the term made its way to tennis, the sport favored plain old “nothing,” or “nil,” he said.
Why love in the first place, though? Historians don’t really know for sure, but there are a few theories.
The French could have something to do with it. Some historians believe “love” derives from “l’oeuf,” which means “the egg” in French. Because eggs are shaped like zeros, terms such as “goose egg” and “duck’s egg” have been used in other contexts to mean zero, Sheidlower said.
It’s also possible English speakers mispronounced l’oeuf as “love.” But Sheidlower isn’t convinced that’s the answer.
“It’s the French equivalent of an English expression. But since that expression doesn’t appear in French, the French word wouldn’t have been used,” he said.
To be sure, France has had a lot of influence on tennis culture, Buzanga said. For example, “deuce” or a game tied at 40 points, comes from the French word for “two”: “deux.” But he prefers another prominent theory: that “love” comes from the idiom “for the love of the game.” Even if a player hasn’t scored, it doesn’t matter, because their heart is in it. It’s the theory Sheidlower said is the most plausible, because the idiom was used by the English before tennis was popularized.
Another variation of the “love of the game” theory is that the word could have come from the Dutch “lof,” or “honor” — or the Latin “amare,” meaning “to love,” Flink said.
But if tennis’ “love” doesn’t come from a French word, the theory at least has a French sensibility.
“I think the ‘for the love of the game’ is kind of romantic,” Buzanga said.
“Love” probably isn’t going anywhere
Tennis used to be a sport of leisure. The style of play has changed a lot over the years; players are more athletic and competitive, for instance, Flink said. But the rules of the sport are more steadfast, he said.
“There’s this incredible, enduring respect for tradition in tennis,” he said. “Changes are not made easily.”
There has been one major change in modern history: the tie-break. Matches can go on and on because players have to score two consecutive points to break a deuce, or by two games to break a tied set. But the onset of television meant matches would have to get shorter if the sport wanted to capture a larger audience, Flink said.
Change even came for “love.” An alternative sprouted up in the 1970s, and is still used today: “bagel,” named for its zero shape, Sheidlower said. Novices may say “zero,” and insiders will understand what they mean, but they “will needle them about it,” Flink said.
But “love” still prevails.
“People kind of like it,” Flink said. “It’s different. Why say zero when you can say love?”
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