I’m really glad you de-linked from Epic. I had disagreements with the overly-moderated nature of the site comments and asked them to pull all my posts (perhaps a bit of an overreaction but I wanted no association with Epicski). A lawyer associated with the site sent me a letter in a poorly veiled attempt to get me to drop my request. Fortunately I’m a specialist in intellectual property law and responded accordingly. Nothing really to add further other then, not only is their readership and content almost completely useless insofar as it pertains backcountry skiing knowledge but I loathe their bullying business practices.

I agree that TGR has so much garbage that its very hard to find the gems but its a strong runnerup for useful content. TetonAT, FeedtheHabit are the best alternative pure knowledge sites, second only to Wildsnow in this category IMO.

There’s a new entry skiingthebackcountry.com – but so far the majority of their articles are puff pieces without substance so it remains to see how they will do.

The crew at EpicSki.com has a good goal to revive the site and make it relevant to the masses, but its appropriateness to a site like yours and mine seems to be questionable–yours even less than mine.

I signed up with their program April 15 and I’m still on the fence with it. Originally, I thought that only my ski-related posts would be pulled into EpicSki and thus reciprocally tagged on FeedTheHabit.com. As it turns out, they place links on biking and hiking-related articles too, which seems completely irrelevant.

For what it’s worth… all the links on EpicSki yield just over 100 visits/month. A simple link on your site gives me 85. That simple link is much mess obtrusive and much more powerful pound-for-pound.

I’ll stick with it for awhile, but I’m still in the air as to whether or not I’ll re-commit come April.

The EpicSki linkage system I was using is probably totally appropriate for a smaller blog looking to build their traffic. it would also be great for search engine favor if EpicSki was ranked higher than the site they were linking to. Neither is the case for WildSnow, but I wish the other bloggers well who chose to do this stuff.

Ultimatly, for me this was a case of “link greed” versus using my real estate wisely in ways that benefit you readers the most. Sometimes, one has to know when to quit chasing links, and when to concentrate on making content.

Now, back to blogging!