Marketing a mountain out of a mole hill.

• Position: DRAWING CONCLUSIONS

Get Midwesterners skiing on a modest slope near home, and soon enough they'll want to head West for some real mountains. That makes sense for Vail Resorts Inc., which announced in January the acquisition of Wilmot Mountain, located about halfway between Chicago and Milwaukee.

Mountain Town News pointed out that Wilmot has a vertical rise of only 230 feet, compared to Vail Mountain's 3,450 feet. And Wilmot's base of 800 feet is dwarfed by Vail's 8,150-foot base. But one amenity available to skiers at both resorts for the 2016-2017 season is Vail's Epic Pass and Epic Local Pass, an option that will help in "further connecting the Chicago area to the...