SlopeFillers hasn’t always been the easiest project to keep going. I chuckle when I read articles on sites like Skiing Business where they have a whole staff of writers churning out as much content as I do. Thanks to a many early mornings, late nights, and lots and lots of people, the project is alive and well. On this U.S. Thanksgiving (sorry Canadians, I missed your day), here are ten of these people who helped me along the way:

1) Eric Hoffman (Park City) – Eric is listed first because he was the first person to ever post a comment on SlopeFillers and creator resorts on Twitter list I leaned heavily on to get my rankings started.

2) Christian Knapp (then Keystone, now Aspen/Snowmass) – Met officially at NSAA. He had more important people to talk to, but spent a good chunk of time letting me bask in his marketing-ness. Also introduced me to a handful of people including…

3) Corey Ryan (& Amy Josef – Ryan Solutions) – Soon after NSAA, Corey gave me a call about getting me on board with Ryan Solutions and getting behind SlopeFillers. Two months later, I moved to Colorado and haven’t stopped smiling since.

4) Dave Amirault (Aspen/Snowmass) – Smart dude doing some cool stuff in Aspen. Always has honest, intelligent feedback on things which is extremely refreshing when many people would tend to just agree rather than try to learn from our differences in opinion.

5) Kim (My Wife) Kim has been awesome in supporting me (she is a biologist but faithfully reads my posts every morning) and listening to me excitedly blabber on about this campaign or that promo over dinner each night.  I’m way beyond head over heels.  She rocks.

6) Jon Slaughter (Boreal) – Jon has always been really supportive of the site, given me great feedback, and provided opportunities to share insights and learn from other talented marketers in his circle.

7) Evan Reece (Liftopia) – During the early days when much smaller, less busy business owners turned down my request for interviews, Evan spent an inordinate amount of time, giving me something great to write about and teaching me a lot about the industry.

8) Doug Holton (Utah State University) – When I got my master’s degree, Doug was my advisor. He let me do an abnormal amount of independent study on things like PHP and MySQL which is the backbone of SlopeFillers resort social rankings and dashboards.

9) Brian Rodine (Vail) – Brian took me to lunch one day soon after I moved to Colorado. That’s it. No sneaky desire to get me to blog about his business or work, just a marketing peer interested to hear my story and chat about soccer for a few. Awesome.

10) The Utah Joes – Joe Johnson (Canyons Resort) often tweets about my daily posts before I can and always has great insights. Joe Myers (Designer) has gone the extra mile to provide some awesome content for the site.

So, that’s actually 11. My apologies for the misleading title. There are, of course, many, many more and I hope I’ve said “thanks” at one time or another. Now stop reading, eat some pie, and go make some turns.