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DAY 9 – MT. PETER, NEW YORK

This was year five for my son Logan at Mt. Peter’s low-key, low-commitment seasonal program, a once-per-week-for-seven-weeks group skiaround that has the twin benefits of being an hour and 15 minutes from Brooklyn and including one of his good schoolfriends. It also has the benefit of being at Mt. Peter, which with the exception of one extremely steep race trail is one of the more approachable bumps anywhere.

During Logan’s three-hour class, I ski. A lot of the parents don’t, but Bryan does. Bryan is Logan’s friend’s dad. He grew up in Kansas, where there is no skiing, and lives in New York City, where there is also no skiing. He visited Snow Creek, Missouri a time or two as a teenager, and later tagged along with his wife to a work seminar at Jackson Hole, where he took a lesson because he didn’t realize that the instructor would interpret his Brooklyn address as cover to host a one-on-one MAGA rally, and also because he didn’t realize that it was Jackson Hole. In spite of all this, Bryan became a skier when the family purchased a cabin nearby and decided their daughters needed a wintertime activity.

So while the lifelong-skier ski parents who ski five days per year on their trip Out West fiddle with their Pet Rectangles amongst piled bags in the baselodge, Bryan and I ski. He’s bashful about calling himself a skier, but on this January Sunday, he’d skied more days that winter than I had. At one point later in the season, he held up the torn glove he’d purchased a decade ago at a Jackson Hole church sale and said “I need to fix these,” and I said, “you can fix them into that garbage can over there,” and he said, “no way, I paid $5 for these.” And is anything more Skier than that?

On the Ole’ Pete lift we talk about Middle-Aged Bro Stuff like mortgages and medical appointments and snowstorm contingency plans. Then we ski whatever we want and meet back at the lift because every trail ends at the same place at Mt. Peter.

DAYS 10-12 – GREEK PEAK, NEW YORK

Because it’s not that expensive and because there’s a full-service hotel-with-restaurant-and-water-park across the street and because this mountain has the best top-to-bottom green-trails-that-are-actually-trails-and-not-catwalks in New York State, Greek Peak turned out to be a perfect family-from-NYC-with-widely-varying-ski-abilities-and-enthusiasms MLK weekend destination last year:

So this year we visited Greek Peak again for the MLK long weekend. And all the same things that were great about it last year were great this year, except it didn’t snow as much.

Rather than re-itemize all of those mountain attributes here, I’m going to challenge my own generation’s unearned sense of superiority around our collective latchkey upbringing. Self-congratulatory Gen-X analysis has proliferated in recent years, which usually goes something like this: This sandwich generation, born between the early 1960s and 1980 or so, landed in a historic sweet spot, dodging both the extractive generational smugness of the Baby Boomers and the earnest feelings-ball of the Millennials. We grew up without the internet, without a supercomputer in our pockets, without parental supervision, without real concerns of a military draft, and without fealty to pre-1968 social constructs that had sanctioned smoking-and-yelling as an acceptable parenting, teaching, and management style. But also without affordable starter homes, a proliferation of factory union jobs, post World War II invincible-America optimism, a car-optional lifestyle, affordable healthcare, or social gathering spaces that did not involve commerce. This unique combination of social and cultural pressures – lots of free time with fewer distractions than current youth and a harder path to self-supporting adulthood than our parents – yielded a generation that is supremely creative, beholden more to bettering the future than honoring the past, and less entitled and self-congratulatory than the generations before and after it.

Which, OK, some of this is true: I didn’t use the internet until I was 19, and my childhood was essentially an epic of unstructured and unsupervised free time that neither of my children can quite believe in. As I wrote the other day, when my daughter was 8, she asked me how old I was when I was allowed to go outside by myself, and I couldn’t answer the question because I couldn’t remember ever not being allowed to go out alone. That freedom and flexibility from a young age, anchored in an analogue world, probably helps explain my imagination and independence.

But this is where Gen X self-satisfaction needs to take a smoke break. Because you know who let us be outside unsupervised all the time? The fucking Baby Boomers. And you know who stopped letting their kids have mud fights and dam the local creek without a permit? Gen X. We are the ones who ended thousands of years of free childhood play by reclassifying children from small-but-incrementally-capable humans to endangered and possibly suicidal animals in need of constant supervision, and shamed and threatened anyone who didn’t do the same to the point that 21 is no longer considered the legal drinking age, but a milestone at which Billy can (possibly) run down the driveway to fetch the mail all by himself.

And Dear God has it been annoying to raise kids like this even though I don’t want to. Because I remember being 5 and 6 and 7 and 8 very vividly and wandering alone through forest and field and local stores and never dying while doing so. But I go along with our U.S. American Way because I’ve been culturally compelled to and because I don’t have the means or the will to fight back and because part of participating in society is taking the path of least resistance on most issues. But I’ve been pushing this particular nitpick as far as I can, and when Logan (9), and his friend (11), and his dad Dave and I ended up in Greek Peak’s Trax Pub around 4:00 on Saturday, and I got acquainted with a few Miller Lite tallboys and a “single” of Jameson that probably would have filled a half-pint, and I was cold and sort of over skiing for the day and the boys were clearly bored after massacring a basket of fries, I said, “Kids why don’t you go ski?” And the part I didn’t say was “this thousand-vertical-foot mountain filled with strangers, and without a cellphone or tracking device of any kind*, and down icy runs in the bitter cold.” And I looked at Dave (the other dad), who’s a Scottish fellow and therefore immune to the dumber habits of Americans, and he was like, “see you boys later,” and off they went.

*Edit: my wife informed me, upon reading this article, that both kids were in fact wearing GPS-enabled smartwatches.

And we said “go ski three runs and come back,” and they skied four because they “lost track” and told us that they’d had a conversation with a “nice man” on the lift and the reason none of this worries me is that these kids are as smart as we were at this age, and they can comprehend the workings of even a slightly complex ski area like Greek Peak, and neither of them is going to be carted off by a menacing stranger without some amount of noise that would surely be noticed by the hundreds of other skiers milling about, most of whom, I’m assuming, are wired to not abet the doings of criminals.

If we’re ever, as a society, going to wrench back the childhood that we already irretrievably stole from an American generation-and-a-half-or-more, ski areas – busy, slightly intimidating, challenging, massively fun and rewarding of creativity and navigational competence – are among the best places to start.

DAY 13 – CATAMOUNT, NEW YORK

At a certain point, you lose control of your kids’ schedule. At 11 you can drop them in the backseat of a Ford Escape and take subzero Friday night laps at Mohawk Mountain en route to Sunday River and not bring them home until near midnight on Monday after a Loon Mountain pitstop. By the time they hit 16 you can entice them with a week of slopeside Panorama laps at the top of B.C. and they’ll say, “have fun I can’t miss my friend’s birthday party.” Which is both liberating and disheartening, but natural and normal enough that I never forced more ski participation as my daughter’s annual ski days slipped from around 15 to five or fewer over the past couple of winters.

But then the Magic Thing happened, which is that Waverly’s friend decided he wanted to ski and so suddenly she was interested in skiing again. They had a short mid-week school break and I offered to tour them around a couple nearby mountains. Jake had skied only two days before, so I set the first stop at Catamount, a thousand-footer straddling the New York-Massachusetts state line where long green runs flow beneath a mess of five triple and quad chairs. And I said “Jake take a lesson” and he did:

By the end of the day, the kid was skiing off Ridge Run, a gorgeous top-to-bottom green-circle trail weaving through the forest. He even handled the short blue Mountain View trail, a moderately pitched run that terminates in a spiderweb of greens.

Catamount is one of several New York ski areas – along with West Mountain, Holiday Mountain, Titus, and now Kissing Bridge – that has remade itself under new ownership in the past decade. When Wave and I visited in 2018, Cat’s groomers were solid concrete and a pair of SLI doubles dating to 1967 and ’71 teetered up the ridgeline. The parking lot was empty, the lifts were empty, the hill was empty. It made for a terrible but also hilarious ski day:

That spring, the Schaefer family, longtime owners of Berkshire East, bought the joint, and over the next several years knocked down those SLIs, installed three new-used chairlifts, modernized the snowmaking, cut new trails, and generally nudged the bump into the 2020s. And yeah I guess it worked: the parking lot was two double-parked rows deep when we arrived 15 minutes before first chair, the lodge was full, and Ridge quad had a small wait all day. There’s still more lurking boilerplate than I’d like, and I miss the tree islands that once crowded the frontside, but Jon Schaefer told me on the pod in 2019 that he wanted to make Catamount one of the best small ski areas in the country. I’m not sure if they’re quite there yet, but no one who shows up expecting a competent ski operation is going to leave disappointed.

DAY 14 – HUNTER MOUNTAIN, NEW YORK

Less dramatic but arguably as impactful as the evolution of Catamount has been the transformation of Hunter Mountain since 2018. With 1,600 vertical feet and a blow-the-doors-off snowmaking system just over two hours from New York City, Hunter, historically, has been crowded, chaotic, rowdy, and filled with assholes. But a sequence of investments from Peak Resorts and then Vail Resorts have somewhat tamed all but the last one (an unsolveable problem, I’m afraid, as I was reminded on a very long ride up the Kaatskill Flyer with a moron who couldn’t contemplate how we could possibly re-order our chairlift seating arrangement after he cut between our party).

Anyway: Peak’s 2018 Hunter North expansion and supplemental parking lot, Vail’s 2024 addition of a third six-pack, the removal of several older double chairs, and significant snowmaking upgrades – including on the notorious Annapurna trail – have nudged Hunter from Chaos Island to perhaps just Disorderly Island. Or at least a far more pleasant place to ski.

This was, frankly, perhaps my best day ever at Hunter Mountain, a ski area I have visited probably more than any in New York State other than Mt. Peter. The bump is always better on weekdays – and not better like eating warm pizza is better than eating cold pizza, but better like eating pizza is better than eating dirt. But 2026 weekday Hunter is also better than time-machine versions of weekday Hunter: the grooming held up most of the day, the terrain parks are finally in the right places, and the lift network no longer concentrates every skier on the mountain to the Hellgate-7^th-Avenue-Gun-Hill-Road bullrun.

But I suspect there’s another reason I enjoyed Friday more than Hunter Mountain ski days past: I skied the stuff I’d always ignored. At some point, I assumed the kids would want to split off and ski without me, or hole up in the lodge for Serious Phone O’ Clock. But that never happened, and we skied all day, and so I skied mostly greens and blues, and found some terrific and terrifically pleasant runs, especially the winders at the top of Hunter East and the lower-level runs striping down from the top of the Broadway sixer.

By mid-day, Jake was able to ski Belt Parkway, the meandering, sometimes steep-ish, nearly-always-mobbed blue that circles Hunter Mountain from the top of the Kaatskill Flyer to the bottom.

This was the best ski day Wave and I have had together at least since we went Peak-to-Creek at Whistler two years ago, and perhaps of all time, and by the end of the day she was just gliding strong and confident down the mountain:

At day’s end, this happened, and damn it if it wasn’t just one of the best moments of my life:

In the end, she ended up committing to Brown, which was her first choice, and I’m so happy and proud. But the Michigan connection will always be there.

DAY 15 – HOLIMONT, NEW YORK

There is something unsettling about private ski areas. It’s a familiar thing that feels like a status trap. Like walking into a random backyard barbecue where everyone is named Steve or Ed or Carol and they all know one another from like some fucking sailing club or something. And eventually someone asks “so where do you summer?” and you’re like, “uh Doug invited me,” and they gasp “there is no Doug!” and it’s the biggest fuss since Cheryl found the Kensington’s schnauzer rooting through her marigolds.

Holimont is a private ski area of the sort that we have a lot of in New York. Which is to say that it’s only private sometimes. It’s open to the public only when no one wants to be there, like when it’s five degrees and cloudy on a Tuesday. But at least that’s when you can also park directly in front of the baselodge.

Which is directly in front of the high-speed quad. Holimont is one of just eight ski areas of the 50 in New York that spins a detachable lift. This machine, the Exhibition Express, is one of six chairlifts serving a weaving, wandering trail network on a 700-vertical-foot ridge.

After four runs, I did something I rarely do: switched out my dailies – Blizzard Whatevers – with my great-conditions go-tos: 102-centimeter underfoot Blizzard Rustler 10s. And I did this because I had to admit something I’d hoped would prove untrue: that Holimont is one of the best ski areas in New York State. Powder everywhere. Untracked trees. Creative lines beneath the lifts and powerlines. Narrow routes into bowls. Tricky little hills and unmarked side paths that send skiers inextricably to distinct zones of what looks deceptively like a long-ridge, every-run-the-same ski area.

And there were no sailing club vibes. No one asked me what I was doing there. No one asked me anything at all, other than the liftie who wanted to know about my collection of wicket tickets. I skied it was great. I don’t know what else to say.

DAY 16-17 – ADVENTURES IN OHIO (to come in a separate post)

Stand by to read about that one time I skied in Ohio. Well I guess I already wrote a preview:

DAY 18 – BUFFALO SKI CLUB CENTER

Buffalo Ski Center skis like three former ski areas mashed together. That’s because it’s three former ski areas mashed together. As Buffalo Ski Center – which sometimes refers to itself as “Buffalo Ski Club” – explains on its website:

Buffalo Ski Club brings together three ski areas — Sitzmarker Ski Club, Ski Tamarack and Buffalo Ski Club—and covers 300 acres with 43 trails ranging in terrain from expert to beginner.

… the Buffalo Ski Club continues traditions begun in 1931 when eight families from Bavaria , Germany , came together to share their passion for skiing. They purchased land and a farmhouse in Holland not long after and built the area’s first rope tow. They spent winter weekends skiing, then gathering for huge feasts and songfests. By the 1950’s they had moved to Colden, where the Buffalo Lodge still stands. In 1948 UB students and WWII vets, members of the Sitzmarker Ski Club, bought the adjacent property on Lower East Hill and began to clear the hill still called Old Sitz just below the Sitzmarker Lodge. In a building made of cleared timber they gathered as families for weekends of skiing and comraderie. In the 1960’s Dr. Lore established Ski Tamarack just south of Sitzmarker. Although it was a commercial venture, Tamarack was always a family ski area. In 1991 Buffalo Ski Club and Sitzmarker merged and in 2004 the Club acquired Ski Tamarack from the Lore family to make the entire Colden Ridge one private, family-oriented ski club.

I believe these mentions of “club” are dated, as the Buffalo Ski Center Club of Greater Buffalo appears to have quietly rebranded over the past few years from a public-private hybrid that only allowed non-members midweek to a public-private hybrid that allows non-members any day but only sells season passes to members.

Or something like that. The Buffalo Ski Club Center’s website appears to date to the what’s-your-@hotmail era, with just enough information to contradict itself while omitting clear guidance on things like “am I allowed to ski here?” or “is the ski hill open?”

But last year, Buffalo Ski Resort Center at Sitzmarker-Tamarack-Buffalo-Ski-Club joined Indy Pass with just one blackout date (Jan. 3, which I’m assuming is some sort of club-celebration date). Anyway, I interpreted this as permission to show up.

The first-to-open-on-a-weekday base area at Buffalo Mountain Ski Area is Tamarack. This sits down the sort of access road that makes you feel stupid for not better scrutinizing the GPS route before clicking “go”: a narrow, winding dirt road that crosses a one-way bridge before slogging uphill to the parking lot. It’s not a long road, but it’s long enough to give you time to consider alibis when Cousin Orville of the Buffalo Orvilles greets you at road’s end with an aimed double-barreled 12-gauge and demands to know what happened to his chickens. But at the end of the road a ski lift shot out of the flats up a long, steep hill, and other than the fact that there were only two other cars in the parking lot, I assumed I was at a ski area.

I was, uncharacteristically, onsite before the lifts opened, and figured I’d grab a snack at the cafeteria, but there was no cafeteria. Well, there was one, but it wasn’t open. In fact, there was no one in the baselodge at all. Maybe this was because it was Thursday. Maybe this was because it was five degrees outside. And maybe it’s because the rest of the world was as confused as I was as to whether we were allowed to ski at Buffalo Ski Park.

At 3:00, the Tamarack double opened. What a wonderful trailpod, tall, narrow, steep, and varied. Snow had fallen for weeks and weeks and the temperature had never broken freezing and powder had just piled up everywhere. In the waning light I hammered fastlaps, winding between Tamarack’s tree tunnels and full-bore meadows.

The idle T-bar offered a particularly nice line:

At 5:00, the Sitzmarker side opened. Milder terrain over here, big rollers, a bump line skier’s left beneath the chair:

The terrain far looker’s left didn’t open that day, and typically doesn’t on weekdays. Ski Buffalo Mountain’s trailmap is a gigantic tease, the tangled sort of pseudo-guide that you trust less as a literal wayfinder than as a promise of something different. A puzzle. A maze. A toy unboxed intact from some lost decade. A gigantic whole sewn from parts that fit but were perhaps not supposed to, like a late ‘80s red Chevy Blazer patched after an accident with a blue door removed from a wrecked relative. It keeps running even if it doesn’t quite make sense how.

I left Buffalo Ski Circus as dusk settled and the temperature ticked below zero. Just up the road lay Chestnut Ridge, a free muni ropetow that I’d hiked the year before. “Someone was here running the tow, but then they left,” a young Snowboard Bro told me as I arrived. A few other snowboarders trudged over the snow toward the lift, which, per the county’s website, should have been operating. This is exhibit A for why it’s so difficult to accurately count active ski areas: no staff, no signs, no social media accounts to cross-check. I stared down the hill I had hiked 11 months before, looked back at my warm car, which I’d left idling in the parking lot, thought about the six-plus-hour drive home and the aching shoulder that had transformed long drives into endurance contests. And I walked back to my van and changed out of my ski clothes and drove back toward the city in the long New York night.

More of my dumb ski adventures with Slopes:

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Who

Dan Skelton, President and Chief Operating Officer of Blue Mountain, Ontario

Recorded on

June 26, 2025

About Blue Mountain, Ontario

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Alterra Mountain Company

Located in: The Blue Mountains, Ontario, Canada

Year founded: 1941

Pass affiliations: Unlimited on Ikon and Ikon Base

Base elevation: 229 feet/750 meters

Summit elevation: 1,480 feet/451 meters

Vertical drop: 730 feet/223 meters

Skiable acres: 364 acres/147 hectares

Average annual snowfall: 154 inches/391 centimeters

Trail count: 43

Lift count: 11 (5 six-packs, 1 fixed-grip quad, 1 triple, 4 carpets – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Blue Mountain, Ontario’s lift fleet)

Why I interviewed him: A Very Dumb Story About a Very Dumb Person, Volume I

In the winter of 1995-96, I developed Vertical Fever, a syndrome in which the afflicted believes, in a way that is beyond reason and immune from contrary arguments, that the skiing will be better if the ski hill is taller.

This was a problem. Because in 1995, I lived, as I had all my life up to that point, in Michigan. Specifically, Sanford, a flat town in a flat county in what may be the flattest region of the country, the Tri-Cities area of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. Fortunately for a skier, Michigan is cold and full of ski areas. Unfortunately, these ski areas are small or short or both. The tallest of the 33 ski areas inventoried on the 1995 Michigan Downhill Skiing Guide is Boyne Highlands, which then and today promotes a probably made-up vertical drop of 550 feet. Right across the street was 427-vertical-foot Nub’s Nob, one of six Lower Peninsula ski areas to exceed 400 vertical, along with Caberfae (485 feet), Shanty Creek Schuss Mountain (450 feet), Sugar Loaf (500 feet), and Boyne Mountain (495 feet).

I’d skied all of these and I’d skied them all many times since my first real ski season, which was the previous winter, 1994-95. But once I’d stopped summersaulting down the hill and learned to carve and to land jumps, I grew bored. Skiing in 1995 was not like skiing in 2026. Terrain parks were rare and, anyway, off limits to skiers. Jumping was forbidden. There were signs all over saying so. Everything was groomed and everything was about carving turns, even though grooming was inconsistent and the shaped skis that would transform the average skier into a carver were years away from mass market distribution.

So I scoured maps and guidebooks for ski areas of any size in any direction that I could reasonably drive to. To the south lay Ohio and Indiana. Useless. To the north, at the far western end of the Upper Peninsula, lay several 600-ish footers (Mount Bohemia did not open until 2000), but Michigan is a deceptively large state made larger by the inconvenience of driving around gigantic lakes – those UP ski areas were 10 hours away. But also to the north, east instead of west and just over the Canadian border, lay Searchmont: 750 vertical feet of ungladed bananas skiing, with little cliffs and rocks and glades all over. It was a glorious real-life validation of the less-stuffy Canadian ski-area management culture that I’d read about in Skiing and Powder. And it was only a four-hour drive each way, an easy daytrip on the cruise-control-empty interstates of northern Michigan. This is what a Canadian 700-plus-footer is like, I decided, and I searched for more of them.

That’s when I became obsessed with Blue Mountain, this mysterious guidebook mapdot floating south of Lake Huron. Stat-line, as listed in contemporary guide books: 720 vertical feet, 13 chairlifts and two T-bars, 920 skiable acres (this was, um, not accurate). A Midwest hack, a backdoor to a secret mini-New England unknown to Michiganders. As with Searchmont, I would rise at 4 and arrive by lifts-on and soar all day among the woodsy wide-open drop-step terrain of Ontario yahoo skiing.

Yeah it didn’t work out like that. The first time I tried to drive to Blue Mountain, I wound up at Mount Brighton, 273 miles away in Southeast Michigan. A blizzard had forced course correction to a more achievable destination. But the second time, I made it. Here’s how it went, per a journal entry I wrote few days later:

Monday, March 25^th, 1996 – 11:53 p.m.

Let’s just call Friday the day that didn’t quite flow. In fact, it didn’t flow like no day on skis ever hasn’t. First off, I only slept four hours. Normally , I wouldn’t give a fuck, but that was directly following three hours the night before, which didn’t help my status in an already exhausting week. Then there was the drive. I figured four, maybe five hours at the most, 250 miles, give or take. Wrong. I only realized this somewhere well over the Canadian border. Six hours, 350 miles. Then there’s the mountain.

I knew Blue was big, but I was not, I’ll admit, in any way, shape, or form prepared for what I found Friday. The place is enormous by Midwest standards, though not as mammoth as I’d originally thought coming up the road, scoping out the two private resorts. Notice I said “enormous,” not necessarily “good.” Which is sad, cause, for one thing, they’re trying pretty hard to make a good hill, and, #2, I drove a long fuckin’ way to get there. The whole thing bore a striking resemblance to western skiing – enormous base lodges, hugely wide runs, high-speed chairs. Which I suppose makes it ideal for families. Then there’s the fifty miles or so of safety fence, zero ungroomed runs, and as many jumps as a Fat Albert convention. This, I surmise, makes it extremely unideal for Stuarts. In fact, I really didn’t enjoy it at all. It was bland, repetitive, and almost sickening in its nature. I was tired, pissed, and lonely. The highlight of the day was jumping off the cornice which was the subject of much inner conflict. But I did it, and I’m glad, and then I drove home, and I’m glad for that too.

I only skied four-and-a-half hours. My ticket was good til’ ten, but I considered a lot of things. For starters, it only cost me twenty bucks; second, I told Clint I was gonna make it a point to get out of there by four [to hang out], so I sorta tried; third, I’d skied the whole fuckin’ place anyhow, and I really didn’t feel like getting home at four AM. It’s not like I didn’t ski well, cause I was actually carving and reacting magnificently (to the terrain, not the carving). I was fluid, but I needed more variety, and they just didn’t deliver.

It would have been nice to have the internet in 1996 (it existed, but almost no one used it, partly because there was almost nothing on it, including driving directions, maps, or trailmaps).

Great endorsement of Blue Mountain, Stu. You managed to convince people not to go and make the people who do ski there feel bad about it all at once. Slow clap for aggressive transparency.

But my message here is hardly “Blue Mountain sucks don’t go.” Blue Mountain is, as it was 30 years ago, exactly what it needs to be: a rapid-fire lap machine optimized to provide a consistent ski experience to the residents of Canada’s densest metro area, Toronto. Blue is, historically and probably still, the third-busiest ski area in Canada after Tremblant and Whistler. It is a low-altitude, variable-weather, high-volume business tasked with the twin burdens of being the sole public outpost for recreational skiing in a ridgeline of upscale private clubs and being a profitable enterprise. It is, from a dollar-generating and Ikon Pass-dispersal-to-the-West point of view, probably one of Alterra’s most important ski areas.

The problem, then, is not that every ski area isn’t like Searchmont. The problem is that, in 1996, I thought every ski area should be like Searchmont. It was like walking into a pizza parlor and complaining that they didn’t sell tacos. I was young and dumb, and it didn’t occur to me until arrival that a 700-ish-vertical-foot ski area dangling off the far eastern end of the Lake Superior wilderness (Searchmont), would, by custom and by necessity, offer a far different ski experience than a 700-ish-vertical-foot satellite orbiting metro Toronto (Blue). I thought every ski area should be for me and for people like me, like the people I read about in ski magazines who toured B.C. in rusty pickup trucks and never took bathroom breaks and who viewed skiing as a constant level-up challenge.

Thirty years later, I view Blue Mountain differently, for two reasons. The first is that I’m sure that Blue, like nearly all North American ski areas, is a more interesting mountain in 2026 than it was in 1996. Freeski culture and snowboarding really did loosen up skiing’s stodgier tendencies, most visibly with the widespread building of come-one-come-all terrain parks. The second is that I no longer approach ski areas by asking if they are the best possible experience for me, but if they are the best possible version of themselves for the demographic of skiers who are most likely to ski there. And with Blue – which I will admit, I never visited again - the answer appears to be, always and ever upward, yes.

What we talked about

Oh Ontario; being a Canadian ski area owned by a U.S. company; “one of the beauties of being part of Alterra is our emphasis on honoring and preserving the uniqueness of each resort and each mountain community”; Blue Mountain’s Reserve Pass; fixing up Blue’s disordered lift mazes; growing up at the base of Blue Mountain; the amazing evolution of ski area technology; Blue’s wacky, charismatic founder; preserving the mountain’s independent character after it’s been absorbed by a conglomerate; Blue in the ‘70s; building Blue’s snowmaking system; big leaps forward in snowmaking during the 1990s; the rise of HKD; Alterra’s point of view on snowmaking; the hit-or-miss Lake Huron and Georgian Bay lake-effect snowbelts; snowmaking in the era of climate change; how snow-depth technology impacts snowmaking volumes; living through the transition from independence to Intrawest and ultimately to Alterra; how the village transformed Blue; “we come to the table scrappy, inventive, entrepreneurial” to this company of mega-resort destinations; the impact of the Ikon Pass; Blue’s amazing lift fleet and how the six-pack became the mountain’s workhorse; building chairlifts in-house; 15,000 skiers on Blue’s busiest days; “we’re not going to cut any new trails, so we gotta squeeze every little bit out and make sure we have a balanced experience”; whether Blue could upgrade to an eight-place lift; operating as the only substantial public ski area amid a huge number of private ski areas; and Blue’s history owning and operating the neighboring Georgian Peaks ski area.

What I got wrong

I mentioned that HKD President Charles Santry had told the same side of a story that Skelton shared on a previous podcast recording, which he had. The problem is that as of now, I still haven’t released that pod with Santry. Stand by.

Podcast Notes

On Intrawest

A brief history of Intrawest:

On “Rusty” in the Alterra/Ikon transition

Skelton was referring to Rusty Gregory, Alterra CEO from 2018 to ’22.

On Blue’s 1980 trailmap

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The Alterra Mountain Company is a remarkable thing. Its 2017 formation was both elusive and inevitable. Someone was going to have to stand up to Vail Resorts, which over the previous decade had transformed from a regional operator into a national power running 14 ski areas, including four of the five largest in North America, three urban-adjacent Midwest feeders, and, most recently, Stowe, one of the crown jewels of New England skiing. Something was going to have to compete with the Epic Pass, which wrapped all of those amazing places onto one low-cost season pass.

It just wasn’t clear who that someone or something would be. Plenty of operators seemed positioned to challenge Vail’s dominance. Missouri-based Peak Resorts matched Vail in number of ski areas, but it lacked a western anchor resort. Boyne, the quiet, stubborn, family-run survivor, owned 11. Park City-based Powdr, still sore from Vail’s hostile takeover of its hometown resort, ran 10. Once-mighty Intrawest had sold off Whistler, Panorama, Copper, Mammoth, June, and Mountain Creek, but was still hanging around with seven ski areas.

A spirit of cooperation and experimentation prevailed. The previous year, Peak had united its 14 ski areas under the Peak Pass (generating what may be the greatest tagline in the history of ski passes: “How The East Was One”). The year before that, Boyne, Powdr, and Intrawest had launched the M.A.X. Pass, with five days at each of their mountains plus several independents. And nearly two dozen large independent and conglomerate-owned destination resorts had joined the Aspen-sponsored Mountain Collective, which launched in 2012. Copper, Winter Park, and Steamboat had shared a menu of season passes, alternately under shared and competing ownership groups, since the late 1990s.

All good products. All just a little too demographically specific to compete nationally with Vail’s blockbuster Epic Pass, which had sold 650,000 units for the 2016-17 ski season.

Unbeknownst to skiers, nearly everyone not named Vail had huddled in conspiracy. A skiing Manhattan Project, massive and urgent, was underway. In April 2017, the coalition took shape in a motley, yet-to-be-named company sewn from the ghosts of failed and struggling conglomerates past: Intrawest’s seven remaining properties (Steamboat, Winter Park, Stratton, Snowshoe, Silver Creek, Tremblant, Blue in Ontario), re-combined, 11 years after selling them, with Mammoth and June, which had three years earlier acquired Snow Summit and sister property Bear Mountain, which had been grinding through the conglomerate mill for 30 years as is was bought and sold, in turn, by S-K-I (1988), Fibreboard (1995), Booth Creek (1996), and Snow Summit Ski Corp (2002-2014). Funding this union were the twin ski powers Henry Crown and Company (owners of Aspen’s four ski mountains, which would ultimately remain separate), and KSL, owner of Tahoe titans Squaw Valley and Alpine Meadows (the latter had once been owned by Powdr). Six months later, the still-yet-to-be-named entity bought Deer Valley, which had itself three years earlier purchased nearby Solitude. Three months after that, in January 2018, the 14-mountain coalition became Alterra Mountain Company.

Three weeks later, Alterra dropped its atom bomb: the Ikon Pass would join the company’s entire portfolio on one product that would also include access to top destinations operated by Boyne (Big Sky, Sunday River, Sugarloaf) and Powdr (Snowbird, Copper, Killington), along with A-list independents Jackson Hole, Alta, and Aspen-Snowmass. In the leadup to the 2018-19 ski season, Alterra kept buying (Solitude in June; Crystal, Washington in September), and independents (Revelstoke, Sugarbush, Taos), kept joining. In total, Ikon delivered access to 50 ski areas for the 2018-19 ski season at the incredible price of $599 for Ikon Base and $899 for the full Ikon.

Finally, skiing had a true national challenger to Vail, whose Epic Passes were priced that spring at $669 for Epic Local and $899 for full Epic. The consumer response was immediate, total, overwhelming. Snow hammered the West that winter, and exasperated locals raised their pitchforks against Ikon in Jackson, Aspen, and Big Sky. The protests backfired, as the whining only increased Ikon’s visibility and popularity (though Aspen and Jackson would eventually move off Ikon Base and Big Sky would remove tram access from Ikon). Skiers, long challenged to sort through the statistics and logistics of researching, choosing, and accessing remote ski resorts on their own, rapidly understood that they could simply select from one of two destination menus: Epic or Ikon.

Once that bomb detonated, there was no reassembling it for safe storage. The Ikon Pass altered the lift-served ski landscape instantly and permanently. For ski areas, it normalized the idea that an independent mountain could participate in a larger pass coalition – 242 U.S. ski areas (and 59 percent - 232 of 390 - chairlift-served ski areas), are scheduled to participate in the Epic, Ikon, Indy, or Mountain Collective passes for winter 2026-27. For skiers, Ikon, positioned as a choice against Epic, reset their understanding of what a season pass was and who was allowed to own one, creating a sense of belonging that had been more elusive with a lift ticket dangling from their jacket zipper. The number of skier visits attributed to season pass holders exploded, and within a couple of years had passed the 50 percent mark for the first time.

The Ikon Pass was, on the whole, one of skiing’s best ideas. It is probably not a coincidence that American ski areas have recorded top-10 seasons for aggregate skier visits every winter since Ikon’s debut save the truncated 2019-20 campaign, or that capital investment has ramped up enormously since 2018.

It is probably also not a coincidence that consolidation has slowed – and in some cases reversed – as independent ski areas benefit from Epic and Ikon in two ways: affiliation with a national pass product provides a large, reliable revenue stream, reducing the imperative to join a larger company; and skier visit spillover to non-pass-affiliated independents as locals grow frustrated with the tourist patchwork infiltrating the larger mountains.

This all seems so obvious now that it’s hard to appreciate how long this dynamic took to gel, and how recently it formed. There was nothing inevitable about Alterra or Ikon, and there’s nothing inevitable about their continued existence. Vail, after riding the Epic rocket into the stratosphere for 15 years, has struggled post-Covid with shrinking Epic Pass unit sales and skier visits. We don’t have matching figures on privately held Alterra, but the company is in a delicate spot as it seeks a replacement for CEO Jared Smith following an unceremonious ejection last month. A lot of what Alterra is doing has worked really well, but some of it hasn’t, and whoever gets this job next has to take care not to break things that are working as they fix what’s broken.

If I were Alterra’s next CEO, these are five priorities I would start with, as well as five things I wouldn’t dare change:

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How bad was Vail Resorts’ 2025-26 winter?

Well, the company yesterday shared an initial estimate of approximately 14.4 million skier visits across its 37 North American resorts this season.

To put that number in context, 14.4 million skier visits is:

• A 14.9 percent drop from Vail’s 2024-25 skier visits

• The lowest number of skier visits (excluding 2019-20), to Vail’s North American ski areas since the 2017-18 ski season, during which Vail owned just 13 North American ski areas

• Just 6.7 percent higher than the 13.5 million total skier visits Vail recorded for the Covid-shortened 2019-20 winter, which ended March 14

• Four percent below the 15 million skier visits that Vail recorded for the 2018-19 winter, during which the company operated just 17 North American ski resorts

  

This 14.9 percent drop is even more severe than the 11.9 percent year-over-year skier-visit decline that Vail reported year-to-date on March 9. Vail is blaming the western visitation crash on “record low snowfall and historically bad temperatures.”

Still, it could’ve been a lot worse. Vail’s Rocky Mountain visits declined 25 percent, and a strong overall winter east of the Mississippi surely buoyed Vail’s overall numbers.

It’s hard to know just yet how to interpret these numbers, as the National Ski Areas Association won’t release their estimate of nationwide skier visits until May. But we do have a handful of data points:

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My daughter was 8 years old when she asked me this question: “Dad, how old were you when you were allowed to go outside by yourself?”

I could not answer because I had no answer. I could not remember a time when I was not permitted to play outside unsupervised, I told her. It was small-town Midwest life and it was the ‘80s and all we did all day long was whatever we wanted. I didn’t know where the adults were and they didn’t know where we were and they never asked when we got home.

I’m not sure if this child of Manhattan really understood what I was saying. Anyway, we’re past it. My daughter is 17 now, almost 18, headed to college in the fall. She can do whatever she wants whenever she likes. But I always felt guilty about raising her in New York City, a place that is bacchanalia for adults but a prison for children, who must be ever-shielded from the menaces of traffic and crowds.

Or so we tell ourselves. American parents have, over the past 30 years or so, developed a self-righteous supervision culture that, vested with government authority, mandates compliance. What made me feel simultaneously better and worse was the realization that her circumscribed childhood had less to do with my decision to live in Manhattan than with the fact that she was born in America in 2008, by which time it had become taboo to let children play outside without adult supervision even in the rural and small-town kid-topias I’d rambled in my early years.

The excesses and consequences of this accidental cultural mass movement are well-documented in books such as Free Range Kids by Lenore Skenazy and The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. I read these books like I watch football games, bent in, immersed, cheering for the good guys. “Hell yes!” I say, “we got it all wrong. This must change!” And then I proceed to do absolutely nothing. Well, other than to continue complying with the cultural assumption that children are idiots and hover over them like Predator Drones as they walk 100 yards to the grocery store. Because I don’t know what else to do. Because I don’t want to get my kids taken away and our entire civilization has been reprogrammed as a surveillance state always on alert for unsupervised 7-year-olds and fighting back just feels impossible, like trying to change the weather or rearrange the continents back into Pangea.

But I did find one reprieve from my guilt-as-modern heli-parent: ski areas. Here we have the perfect arena in which to let children roam and explore unsupervised: a confined, well-defined, car-free zone staffed at all times by ski patrol trained in emergency medical services. Ski areas are a recreational version of what urbanist Jane Jacob’s called “eyes on the street” - skiers are constantly in view of other skiers who are skiing, riding lifts, milling about. It would be almost impossible to abduct a child unseen or unheard from such a place.

My daughter, it turned out, had little interest in independent ski roaming. But I started my son, now 9, at skiing much younger, and he was skilled enough, by age 6, to ride the Comet double chair at Mt. Peter with his friends, and lower and raise the safety bar at the appropriate junctures. At first, I would ride the trailing chair, then follow them down the hill, but he quickly progressed to riding up and skiing down without supervision. Context matters, of course. Getting lost at Mt. Peter would be like getting lost in the back seat of your car. Every run takes you back to the same place. And the benefits to his self-awareness, confidence, and self-identity were huge. Repetition flooded him with great confidence, which we could progressively apply at larger ski areas. In January of this year, he skied several late-day runs with his 11-year-old friend at Greek Peak, a sprawling, tricky-to-navigate thousand-footer in Central New York. Last month, he lapped the triple chair at Black Mountain, New Hampshire alone while we hung out in the baselodge. I have limits: when we skied sprawling, hill-and-dale Vail Mountain and Breckenridge in February, he had to stay in my sight at all times.

Oh crap did I just confess to a string of felonies?

On March 1 of this year, 5-year-old Brody Porter boarded a chairlift at Blue Knob, Pennsylvania alone. While adjusting his goggles, he fell 20 feet to the snow. Patrol responded quickly, Brody seemed alert and unharmed, but they called an airlift to Pittsburgh Children’s Hospital as a precautionary measure. He returned home unharmed.

The following week, WTAJ news visited Brody and his family:

It was light work for the news crew: an attractive, put-together family smiling and advocating for helmet use. The parents, Micah and Maya, seemed happy and relieved. The kids are floppy-haired and adorable. Whew, glad that’s over. Let’s make our little pseudo-PSA and get back to planning our next beach trip.

Well, it wasn’t over. On Monday, the State of Pennsylvania filed a second-degree felony count against each parent for endangering the welfare of a child. They released Micah on $50,000 bail and Maya on $30,000. A preliminary hearing is set for May 6 in Bedford Country Central Court.

Court documents provide a vague, somewhat contradictory timeline of the day that contains the following insights: Brody rode the chairlift at least once with his father before, according to a lift attendant, riding alone “three or four times.” Immediately preceding the fall, Brody had been skiing with Maya, who says she asked him to wait for her, which he did not do. He then fell off the Expressway triple chair near the top of the Upper Expressway trail. It took ski area officials 15 minutes to locate his parents. Maya later told police that she did not believe a 5-year-old should be permitted to ride a chairlift unsupervised.

Like for real?

A second-degree felony in Pennsylvania can carry a sentence of up to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $25,000, according to multiple online sources.

This feels, um, excessive.

Prison? Because your child fell off a chairlift while riding alone?

That would destroy what appears to be a healthy, functional family. Maya’s Facebook photo archive is 100 percent wholesome, backpacks and beaches, family strolling hands-held across a park lawn, Hershey Park, Big Wheels, the Dickinson Children’s Center Pumpkin Run ‘25, kids packing themselves in suitcases, ultrasounds, Halloween on a loop.

It’s easy to dress up your social media profiles, of course. Behind-closed-doors transgressions have complicated the human character since Adam. Court records show that this is Micah’s second felony charge for child endangerment, following a 2022 DUI charge. Well that doesn’t sound like it was a good decision.

So who knows what else we don’t know about this incident or this family? As dumb as I reflexively think these charges against Porters are, I appreciate that we live in a nation of laws and transparency. Here are a few points that I’m certain of and some I’m attempting to clarify as I unravel this very strange story:

What I know

About this specific incident, not much beyond what I’ve outlined above. Micah, Maya, and their lawyer did not respond to requests for comment. Blue Knob officials declined to comment, citing legal counsel against doing so. I’m awaiting comment from several other parties, including the National Ski Areas Association.

But I know that if the Porter parents are convicted of a felony or even some bargained-down charges and the state rules that they were neglectful in allowing their child to load a chairlift alone, this could be a big, big problem for lift-served skiing in the United States.

How would we even begin to determine who can and cannot ride a chairlift alone? Do we regulate by age? Or the easier-to-quantify height? The most rational approach would seem to be defaulting toward ability level: Brody had been skiing for two years, he told WTAJ. The thing he liked best about it was “going fast.” The state may have had a case had Brody’s parents dropped him at the baselodge and said, “have fun with your first-ever time skiing, Son. See you in six hours.”

There are potential consequences beyond chairlifts here. If a parent is to be responsible for their child’s every decision at a ski area, could they also be charged with a felony if their 5-year-old falls and breaks their leg while skiing a trail? Or gets hit by another skier? Can we send children to the bathroom alone? To the cafeteria?

I did not ski as a child, so I have no first-person reference here, but the greatest joy of skiing with my children has been watching them develop confidence by doing something that is physically hard while navigating a large and often-intimidating network of trails, lifts, and base buildings. The best thing I can do for my children is to prepare them for adulthood, and I’ve found no better vector for these sorts of mini-victories than ski areas.

What I don’t know

Was Brody prepared to ride a chairlift alone?

If you have more than one kid or know more than one kid or have been part of a family unit with more than one kid, you know that proficiency gaps can be stunningly wide even between children drawn from exactly the same gene pool. My son could ride a chairlift alone at 6, but my daughter was closer to 9 before she’d reached that ability level. The first time I rode a chairlift, I was 14 and came off the exit ramp like a giraffe on rollerskates, a human bowling ball, a terror - but I was tall so I guess go ahead, Kid?

Before I let my son ride a chairlift alone, I drilled lowering and raising the safety bar with him. He did it with my help and then alone. Did Brody have that same guidance? Was the safety bar down when he fell? If not, why not? Were his parents the never-bar sort who tell their kids not to use them, or was he just too busy being a 5-year-old to remember?

Was Brody allowed, by his parents, to ride the chairlift alone?

Here, official reports offer contradictory stories. A lift attendant told police that Micah had told them that Brody could ride alone. Maya later told police that she didn’t think a 5-year-old should be able to ride a lift alone. Were the parents just out of sync here? Sometimes skills jumps happen fast. Maybe dad was going to be like “hey Mom, guess who just rode the lift alone!” That’s how my family tends to work.

And if the kid wasn’t allowed to ride alone, did he do so anyway because he’s a rascal and thought it would be funny, or because he’s 5, or both?

Were the Porters violating any laws?

I am not aware of any local, state, or federal laws specifying minimum heights or ages for chairlift riders, nor do I believe that any such stipulations or recommendations exist in the ANSI codes, which govern ski area construction standards in North America. I also don’t believe that Blue Knob has any sort of height or age minimum in place.

Beyond chairlift regulations, are there any state or local laws regarding child supervision in a public space? Is it (legally speaking), neglectful to lose sight of your child? At what point are parents allowed to hand children off to the commons? Does an adult lift operator suffice? Fellow skiers on the trail? Again, this could get complicated for ski areas very quickly.

What I want to know from you

This is a developing story, and my surveys of various Facebook threads this morning only reinforced my belief that social media has transformed primarily into a virtue-signaling platform for trolls and idiots. So I want to hear from a smarter group: my readers, on any of the following:

• At what age did you first ride a chairlift alone? At what age did you first ski alone without adult supervision? When was this, and where?

• At what age did you allow your children to ride a chairlift alone? At what age did you allow them to ski alone without adult supervision? When was this, and where?

• How did you know that you or your children were ready to ride a chairlift alone?

• What role has skiing alone at a young age played in the personal development of you or your children?

• Do you believe that there should be an age or height requirement for individuals to ride a chairlift alone? If so, why?

• Do you believe that ski areas are, in general, safe places for children to explore alone or in small groups? Why or why not?

• I’ve found that many fixed-grip lift operators are incredibly skilled at gauging, just by the manner in which a child enters the loading area, whether they need to slow the lift or not. Some will proactively swing the safety bar down for children. What are some cool things you’ve seen lifties do to help kids? If you were a liftie, what were the tells you look for when you assess a kid entering the queue alone?

• If you’ve been a liftie, did your ski area provide any advice or guidance on how to determine who could safely load and ride a lift by themselves?

• If you’re a ski area operator, what sort of guidance, if any, do you provide your employees around loading children onto chairlifts without adults?

Please reply to this email or send a note to skiing@substack.com with your answers. The Substack Messenger app is hard to copy and paste from. I may use some or portions of your responses in a future newsletter. If you would like your answer to be anonymous, please indicate that when emailing, as I may not be able to follow up directly with everyone.

More to come on this story.

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For whatever reason the most transparent and consistent ski area newsletters tend to come out of New England. Win Smith penned the stellar Win’s Word for years as Sugarbush president. More recently, Erik Mogensen’s Letters from the GM have repositioned Black Mountain, New Hampshire from an oh-that-place-is-still-open-I-went-there-in-1985 curiosity to a banging New England party scene with the longest ski season in New Hampshire. But the longest-running current email newsletter series is Alpine Update from Geoff Hatheway, the straight-six never-quit engine behind the decade-long comeback of Magic Mountain, Vermont.

Hatheway’s emails, like mine, tend to be longer than is strictly necessary. So when his April 3 edition referenced Magic’s “record breaking 25/26 ski season” without providing details, I reached out to see if he was playing guard-the-numbers ski-operator chess or had more to share. Unsurprisingly, he had more to share:

“Despite less than average snowfall here this winter, Magic had another record-breaking year (2^nd year in a row) in terms of: overall paid skier visits (+9%), day tickets (includes Indy) +16%, pass sales (+9%), and overall revenue (+8%, which does not include delayed revenue from Indy payout that comes after the season ends—Indy redemptions +24%).”

That’s incredible when you consider Magic’s neighborhood. The ski area sits within an hour of Stratton (Ikon), Killington (Ikon), Mount Snow (Epic), and Okemo (Epic). All are larger and taller. They spin 23 detachable chairlifts between them, including 10 of Vermont’s 11 public six-packs. Vail’s Epic Local Pass (currently $809) acts as an unlimited season pass at Mount Snow and Okemo, and, depending on when you buy it, is often less expensive than Magic’s season pass (for non-Vermonters), currently priced at $789.

How is it possible that such a ski area, with its fixed-grip lift fleet and four-days-per-week operating schedule and history of going broke and falling apart, is posting record business results as Colorado-based ownership and pass products embed themselves ever further into local and national ski culture? Isn’t it common knowledge that Epic and Ikon and Vail and Alterra are killing local skiing? Isn’t this Wal-Mart-comes-for-downtowns-and-then-e-commerce-comes-for-Wal-Mart savage capitalism at work on snow?

I’ve yet to be convinced, mostly because I keep writing stories about small ski areas that are doing just fine - and in many cases historically way better than fine - as national pass products rewire the skiing public’s experience and expectations. Magic is actually doing far better now, when it has corporate skiing as a foil, than it was from 1991 to 1997, when it sat dormant while vultures stripped its chairlifts. The Godzilla duopoly has always been a lazy narrative, mostly because it doesn’t withstand even the slightest scrutiny outside of raging social media anecdote by people whose entire identity is based on having skied 150 days per year at the same ski area since 1972 and Fellas in the good old days we’d punch a tourist right in the face if they asked us where we stored the moguls in the summertime.

Still, this small-ski-areas-thriving story is not the one I expected when Vail and Alterra began stacking Ocean’s 11 all-star rosters a decade-ish ago. But it turns out that story trumps stats, and Magic, under Master Marketer Hatheway, is telling a compelling story. “More soul,” reads the banner pinned to Magic’s website. Well that’s hard to quantify, but you can get away with big claims when they’re stapled to tangible things. Hatheway attributes the record 2025-26 winter to the new-used base-to-summit Black quad that went live a few years ago and daily lift ticket limits, which provide, he says, a “less-crowded experience… especially on peak Saturdays and big holiday weekends.”

My own from-a-distance take, as I’ve documented similar dynamics solidify among ski area clusters across the country, is that we long ago exited the era of the easy ski area victim. Most functioning public ski areas in the country - at least anyone with a chairlift - are hardened, fortified survivors, who have, over generations, endured, among other disruptions: bad winters; evolving skier expectations that demanded ever-better snow coverage, grooming, chairlifts, and trail variety, including elaborate and ever-changing terrain parks; a meta-culture more deliberately oriented around kids’ (non-skiing) sports and activities; deep shifts in the labor and energy markets; and, most recently, the 2020 Covid shutdowns, the 2020-21 adaptations to that circumscribed world, and a sudden mandatory shift from analogue ticketing and marketing to digital. With substantive new ski areas nearly impossible to build and social media’s egalitarian communications network to broadcast from, small ski areas today have significant advantages over the small ski areas that failed by the hundreds in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s.

Oddly, one of the strongest cultural forces working against Magic’s long-term success has nothing to do with Big Ski: brand confusion with Six Flags Magic Mountain in California and Magic Mountain ski area in Idaho make Googling Magic a chore. This, per conversations with reps from both ski areas and attempts to wrangle Google toward the correct website, is a real problem that occasionally leads to skiers, say, buying tickets for tubing at Magic Mountain, which is offered in Idaho but not Vermont. Kind of a bummer, that drive between. Sign up for Magic Mountain, Vermont’s Alpine Updates here.

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Two Truths & A Lie, Storm edition: which of the following does not explain the newsletter’s two-and-a-half week absence?

1. A simple story about Aspen season passes that a normal person would have written in 15 minutes spiraled into a thesis-length research project tracing the resort’s marketing evolution against the contours of eight decades of American and Colorado ski history.

2. Before I could finish the story on Aspen season passes, which was one week after I intended to finish the story on Aspen season passes for which I had been given no fewer than 45 days advanced notice and an embargoed press release, it was time for my annual six-figure contribution to the American medical-industrial complex in the form of a surgical implant to mitigate damage from decades of flagrant overuse.

3. I’m like, super into weed and all things weed-related and I was baking up an extra-weed-tacular issue for 4/20 Brah!

Dang it, that’s too easy. Before you answer, let’s add a fourth truth-or-lie to the mayhem:

4. My meticulously plotted and always super up-to-date Storm Skiing Journal editorial calendar was eaten by my pet ferret, Fred.

OK that’s still too easy. Obviously my pet ferret’s name is “Jerry Garcia Snoop Dogg Puff-Puff The Magic Mascot.” Because I LOVE WEED AND IT’S 4/20 WHICH IS THE TIME AT WHICH STONERS SUCH AS MYSELF SMOKE WEED, get it???

And by now you’ve either stopped reading or this is exactly why you come here. And if it’s the latter, then you know the explanation for the content pause is some combination of 1. (“you’ll only have to do it once,” I tell myself as I Google “Aspen season pass price 1992”) and 2. (no need for concern as this year’s edition of the Bionic Storm chronicles was a rotator-cuff/biceps tendon repair scheduled several weeks in advance rather than an emergency intervention to prevent sudden death or dismemberment; it hurts but I can write).

Anyway here’s a story about Aspen season passes. I’ve rarely written about this $3,000-ish product and its slightly less-expensive offshoots in the past, but a handful of important changes are nudging the Aspen-Snowmass pass suite into something more than just an expensive pass of little interest to anyone but locals:

“Prepare to plunk down $78 for one day of skiing”

No one has ever accused Aspen of being a bargain. For years, the four-mountain complex jousted with Vail-Beaver Creek over who could charge more for a lift ticket. “Prepare to plunk down $78 for one day of skiing,” the Aspen Daily News warned ahead of the 2005-06 ski season. “My heavens!” we all thought. Until Vail and Beaver Creek, which the Associated Press described as among “the jet set’s favorite winter playgrounds,” dropped an $81 top lift ticket rate on us later that same winter. The AP quoted then-Vail Resorts CEO Adam Aron with a statement that no ski resort operator would dare utter in 2026:

“Vail and Beaver Creek do have the highest lift ticket price in the United States. And yes, we’re actually — as opposed to hiding from that fact — we’re proud of that fact,” he said. “If the resort is capable of successfully charging the highest lift ticket prices in the country, that may be an indicator that it really is the best vacation experience.”

Vail must have been the best locals’ experience as well, because by 2007, when those Eagle County peak-day lift tickets hit a now-quaint sounding $92 ($145 in 2026 dollars), a season pass to those two mountains (which also included access to Breck, Keystone, and A-Basin), cost $1,849 ($2,905 in 2026 dollars). Aspen was just as, um, “successful,” with an $87 lift ticket and a $1,699 four-mountain season pass.

But then something strange happened. In 2008, Vail decided that lift tickets were an extra-great way of telegraphing best-ness, but that season passes should cost roughly the same as a bag of dogfood. Enter: the Epic Pass, a $579 unlimited season pass good at every Vail mountain in the universe. Which for the pass’ debut 2008-09 season was just five mountains, plus A-Basin, but they were some mountains: Breck, Keystone, Beaver Creek, Vail Mountain, and Heavenly.

In response to the Epic Pass, Aspen decided to do… absolutely nothing.

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In their never-ending contest to see who can murder me first by exhaustion-via-compulsory-write-ups-of-obscure-ski-areas, Ikon Pass added two more partners to its 2026-27 lineup yesterday, just as I was finishing my analysis of the seven new Indy Pass partners to join this week: Silver Star, British Columbia will move up to seven/five-day Ikon partner status after a winter on the pass’ two-day tier, while Giants Ridge, Minnesota joins the two-day Ikon Pass tier.

Silver Star and Giants Ridge, combined with previously announced resorts, add up to 23 national-pass partner additions for the 2026-27 winter, all of them on the Indy (15) or Ikon (eight) passes. Here are Ikon’s newbs, which include six ski areas announced last month:

While split by a continent’s worth of statistical differences, Silver Star and Giants Ridge each deliver important signals about Ikon’s priorities and trajectory.

Silver Star is a windfall for Ikon Pass holders. It’s one of the 20-largest ski areas in North America, and was the biggest all-public holdout from Epic or Ikon on the continent (5,000-ish-acre public/private hybrid Powder Mountain, Utah remains pass-less). Curiously, former Silver Star owner Powdr declined to add the resort to Ikon, even as the company committed its other large ski areas – Bachelor, Snowbird, Copper – to the pass. Last year, Powdr finally stapled Silver Star to Ikon, but only on the pass’ two-day tier. Two months later, they sold the ski area to longtime Indy Pass ally Pacific Group Resorts (PGR), whose Jay Peak ski area has led all Indy partners for number of redemptions for six consecutive years. By committing Silver Star to Ikon while keeping its remaining ski areas on Indy, PGR becomes the first American multimountain operator to split its resorts among the two passes:

The addition of Giants Ridge continues two recent Ikon growth initiatives: an emphatic push into the Midwest, and the steady growth of the two-day tier, which now numbers eight ski areas, all of them available only on the full Ikon Pass (and with blackouts). After staggering along with nothing in the region other than Michigan’s Boyne Mountain and Highlands for Ikon’s first seven years, Alterra added a pair of Minnesota bumps (Wild and Buck) to the two-day tier for the 2025-26 ski season, and followed that with Midwest Family Ski Resorts’ trio and more two-day partners for next winter.

“I think this partnership is somewhat of a recognition that we hold a place in the Midwest along with the Boynes that is a different experience, more like the mountain ski experiences that exist out west,” MFSR founder and CEO Charles Skinner told me in a phone call the day of Ikon’s partnership announcement.

Ikon’s refreshed Midwest roster indeed includes many of the best ski areas in the region:

I count Giants Ridge among these regional standouts. This remote, government-subsidized bump is one of the nicest ski areas I’ve ever visited, and it’s a terrific addition to Ikon’s two-day tier:

Ikon’s eight 2026-27 pass additions build on a 20-recruit class of 2025-26, and boost Ikon’s total roster to 98 ski areas for next winter:

Unfortunately for Indy Pass holders, Skinner confirmed that all four of Midwest Family’s ski areas would not return to the pass for 2026-27. “We think Indy is a great product,” Skinner told me. “We think our resorts are a better fit for the Ikon Pass. We feel that we have the only really large, full-service ski resorts in the Midwest besides the two Boynes. And now skiers near us don’t have to choose: should I get an Ikon Pass and fly all the time to ski? They can either ski our resorts on Ikon at no additional cost, or buy our season pass and add Ikon for a discounted rate.”

Ikon Pass prices are set to rise after April 16, right in their typical spring window, a marker of stability in an uncertain time for Alterra, whose CEO suddenly departed last month.

Here’s a bit more about the additions of Silver Star and Giants Ridge, along with some overdue analysis of Lutsen, Granite Peak, Snowriver, and Devil’s Head, and the changing landscape of Midwest skiing.

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Every year I tell all my dumb friends who don’t ski a lot but want to ski more about this thing called the Indy Pass. “Two days each at like 9,000 ski areas,” I tell them and they say, “that sounds amazing.” But then I either forget to tell them when it’s on sale or they forget to buy it because a Law of American Culture is that your friend groups remain as administratively organized as they were at the age you formed them, which for me mostly means between the ages of 3 and 14.

But that magic millisecond when the Indy Pass goes on sale for people who are not organized enough to click a link and enter their email address into a waitlist is this Friday, April 3, at noon eastern. These will be the prices:

Indy will sell a predetermined but undisclosed number of passes, and expects that the sale “will be over in hours, not days.”

Why, in the era of Epic and Ikon, do I keep beating you to death with the Indy Pass? Because unless you’re the sort who skis 100 days per year at the same mountain or takes a locked-in vacation to the same spot every February, Indy is the most streamlined way to mix up your ski diet. And man, there are A LOT of good dishes out there you probably haven’t tried. With two days each at 233 Alpine ski areas locked in for 2026-27, Indy has built meaningful density across most of the world’s best ski regions. Skiers could spend a couple of months just skipping around Europe (30 ski areas), Japan (29), or Canada (30). In the U.S., Indy offers 143 Alpine ski areas, with 50 in the West, 55 in the East, and 38 in the Midwest. Yesterday, Indy added seven more Alpine ski areas to that ever-growing roster:

That ski area collection may appear a bit scattershot, but they are all meaningful strategic additions, boosting density in regions of existing Indy strength. The Wisconsin and Minnesota ski areas – especially riotous, sprawling Whitecap – help mend the tear left in Indy’s Midwest fabric with the 2026-27 exits of Lutsen, Granite Peak, and Snowriver to Ikon Pass. Soaring Les Contamines becomes the second European ski area that, through a strange cultural loophole, is skiable on both the Indy and Ikon passes.

Here’s the full anticipated 2026-27 Alpine roster (I’m no longer tracking Indy’s cross-country partners, which you can view here).

Let’s take a closer look at these seven Indy joiners, and what sort of impact they could have for 2026-27 Indy Pass holders:

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Slopes is once again teaming up with The Storm to document my ski season. In January, I decided to finally check out one of America’s most legendary ski areas: Mad River Glen, Vermont. Unfortunately, the experience was not what I had hoped for.

My main job as a ski journalist is to cut through the LIES, DECEPTION, and INFLATED STATISTICS peddled by ski areas’ so-called “marketing departments,” so I can bring my readers accurate portraits of ski resorts as they are, not the fairytales they’re made out to be.

This is why they call me The Truth God, and why they sometimes call this newsletter The Straight Talk Express.

Because I tell the truth even when it’s uncomfortable.

Even when it goes against sacred beliefs in the ski world.

Even when it calls out some of the most beloved mountains in all of skiing.

And I’m about to expose one of the biggest FRAUDS in American skiing: Mad River Glen “cooperative,” in “Vermont.”

WHAT “THEY” WANT YOU TO BELIEVE

Ski areas are notorious for adding a few feet to their vertical drops or a few inches to their daily snow reports. As you all know, The Straight Talk Express has no patience for this BULLSHIT, and I will CALL THEM OUT with a NUCLEAR TRUTH BOMB!!! But Mad River Glen is not just inflating a few statistics – their entire brand is built on a MOUNTAIN OF LIES, starting with this more than slightly exaggerated “trail map” posted to their website:

And here’s what you’ll read about Mad River Glen on their fallacious website (boldface mine - to highlight the ski area’s RAMPANT LIES, DISTORTIONS, UNTRUTHS, FALSEHOODS, AND DECEPTIONS!!!!!!):

Mad River Glen is like no other ski area in North America. The mountain is famous for its legendary expert terrain, picturesque and varied novice and intermediate trails and of course, the famous Single Chair. The extensive trail system follows the natural contours of General Stark Mountain to a single base area, making it easy for skiers of different abilities to ski together. An average of nearly 250 inches of natural snow each year combines with uncrowded slopes and a pristine mountain environment to create the unique Mad River Glen ski experience.

If you’re a skier, you have most likely heard of Mad River Glen. Amongst an industry of giants this relatively small ski area packs a big mountain punch. What is it that makes Mad River Glen a bucket list destination for all skiers?

It’s a combination of many things, and for every skier the answer is a little different. The area’s character, the result of a long and proud history, reflects the terrain and natural beauty. There is a special camaraderie among the skiers, with its co-op ownership, non-commercial, family-friendly atmosphere, dedicated staff, and – of course – the Single Chair, America’s favorite ski lift.

Mad River Glen offers the most challenging and diverse ski terrain in New England. The trails were cut to follow the mountain’s natural contours. On the one hand, skiers can descend the entire 2,037’ of vertical on true expert terrain with absolutely no run-outs. …

The Single Chair and Sunnyside Double limit uphill capacity which guarantees low skier density on the trails even on the busiest days. Mad River Glen is one of the last pillars of natural snow skiing in New England and is one of only three areas in North America that prohibit snowboarding.

Combined, these qualities create a ski experience that stands in stark contrast to the mainstream world of skiing. The various facets of the Mad River Glen ski experience appeal to different skiers in different ways, but together they create a sense of place that is truly unique. The mission of the Mad River Glen Cooperative is to protect and preserve these special qualities. You are invited to discover for yourself the experience that the skier-owners of Mad River Glen are dedicated to preserving.

Unfortunately for the Mad River Glen “co-op,” I took them up on this invitation to “discover for myself” this so-called “experience.” And it was an EXPERIENCE, all right. In fact, it was “THE EXPERIENCE OF A LIFETIME.”

MAD RIVER GLEN, HERE I COME

I have to admit that I was excited at first! I knew, from previous trips to Sunday River and Whiteface, that skiing in Vermont could be magical!!! I didn’t know if I would actually like to ride on a single-person chairlift, but I do appreciate one-of-a-kind ski lifts and ski history. I’d recently had the opportunity to ride on the famous six-person chairlift at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, which is the only chairlift of its kind IN THE ENTIRE WORLD!!! I’ve also ridden America’s oldest and first chairlift, the Little Chief double chair at Shawnee Mountain, Pennsylvania, which was built in 1983!! Yes, that’s a “19” at the front of the year. So even if I didn’t end up liking the single chair in the end, the opportunity to experience a piece of Vermont and New England ski history, and to do it with NO SNOWBOARDERS around, sounded pretty good to me! Not that I’m against snowboarders!!! Lots of my friends are snowboarders!!!! It’s just that I ski SO FAST that they have a hard time staying out of my way while I absolutely dominate the terrain parks!!!

But I was also a little nervous! I’ve visited almost 10 different ski areas, and there’s a reason I was leaving Mad River Glen for last!!! Mad River Glen’s famous slogan is “SKI IT IF YOU CAN!!!” And while I know I’m usually one of the best skiers on the mountain because I go straight down the middle of black diamonds with no turns whatsoever, I felt like I was about to play one-on-one basketball against Michael Jordan and LeBron James and Kobe Bryant! And it was intimidating!!!

So I told my Pet Rectangle to set a route from my home in NYC to Mad River ski area, put The Straight Talk Express-mobile on cruise control, and headed toward New England! Little did the Pretenders and Fakers at Mad River know that I’d just launched a precision-guided Truth Missile from the far side of the Hudson!!!

Now, my first hunch that something was wrong was when the robots told me to drive through Pennsylvania. I didn’t remember driving through Pennsylvania the last time I drove to New England, to ski at Hunter Mountain, but I guessed that the robots must have discovered a shortcut. An average person who isn’t a technology expert such as myself probably would have stopped to second-guess the route, but I know a “LIFE HACK” when I see one!!!!!

Or so I thought!!! But after many hours of driving and a sumptuous steak dinner at an exquisite restaurant called Hoss’s Steak & Sea House (can you say “eighth-of-an-inch-thick-steak-with-unlimited-salad-bar-and-BYOB please???”), I ended up in OHIO! Which I know for a FACT is NOT part of New England anymore! But I thought maybe it was still a shortcut and I’d get to Vermont any minute, so I kept driving!

And a few hours later, I at long last arrived at MAD RIVER GLEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!:

WOW!!! Finally I was at Mad River Glen!!!!!!! I couldn’t believe it!!!!!! But I was still a little confused about the directions, so I approached a group of fellows who were grilling cans of beer in the bed of a lifted F-350 with vertical smokestack exhaust pipes. “Hey Fellas, good morning. Did I miss the ‘Welcome to Vermont’ sign?”

“No but you missed the ‘Go Fuck Yourself’ sign!” one of them yelled, before they all started in on some sort of impromptu spelling bee. “O-H-I-O!!!” they kept yelling. This continued for several minutes, until they began beating one another over the heads with red-and-gray folding chairs.

As I ducked and turned to avoid a Ziplock bag full of flaming poop that one of the young men had hurled at me, I caught my first glimpse of the “mountain.”

And this is when it started to set in!!!! That Mad River Glen was like the moon landing or the pyramids!!! FAKE!!! LIES!!! There was no “mountain” here - there was NOTHING here! Or almost nothing!!! Two-thousand vertical feet MY ASS!!! General Stark Mountain? More like General Napoleon Mountain!!! I could barely see this so-called “ski area” over their so-called “non-commercial” baselodge, which looks like a bus-station brew pub! Hardly what I’d call “historic!!!”

It’s hard to describe how I felt at that moment. I’ve been less disappointed after realizing I’d ordered a salad with raisins in it!!!!! (which is NEVER a problem as Hoss’s because you make YOUR OWN salad at the salad bar!).

So there I was, standed in OHIO among violent Spelling Bee Flashmobs, and I’m supposed to “ski” on some so-called “mountain” that I wouldn’t have been able to see over a handheld flagpole planted at the center of the parking lot? Like this one:

@sports.illustrated🫢🫢🫢 (via JordanStrack/TW) #cfb #michigan #football #ohiostate #viral #foryoupage

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But I’d come all this way. And I knew I’d get to eat at Hoss’s again on the way home even if the skiing wasn’t great! And, besides, they don’t call me the BULLSHIT ASSASSIN because I just believe whatever “advertising” tells me and give up without finding the TRUTH. So I went in and bought a lift ticket! And instead of handing me a sticker to attach to a mini-coathanger, like I would expect out of a supposedly “throwback” ski area, the lady who sold me the lift ticket told me I had to DOWNLOAD SOME APP and that the ticket would be ON MY PHONE! And I was like, “sure, just like the Pilgrims did it.” And I felt bad for being such a smart-Alec, but I was really mad about being tricked! They do call me THE ANGRY SKI CRITIC after all, and you don’t get a nickname like that for nothing!!!!!!!

But I looked past it. Because I really wanted to ride that single chair. And I went outside and there were chairlifts all over the place! Probably five or six altogether!!! But I didn’t see a one-person chairlift! They looked like they could all hold three or four people!!!! And I asked a 5-year-old who was passing by if he knew which chairlift was the single chair? And he gave me the finger and shouted “GO BUCKS!!!” then shotgunned a can of Milwaukee’s Best and threw the can at me!!! And I thought that was strange, but then the lift attendant did EXACTLY THE SAME THING!!!

But then I remembered that I was in Ohio. And I thought “Oh maybe those are single chairs” and they just look like four-person chairs because they’ve been retrofit to accommodate the locals! And I was embarrassed for having been so insensitive.

So I still wasn’t sure about the single chair. But guess what else??? There were snowboarders ALL OVER THE PLACE!!!

And so I stopped a passing ski patroller, and I said, “I know you weren’t expecting a visit from The TRUTH KING today, but you better kick those snowboarders out before I tell my 85-going-on-86 Facebook followers that Mad River Glen’s so-called ‘snowboard ban’ is phony!” And he said “Only if they’re from That State Up North! GO BUCKS!!!” Then he skied away.

So I figured I might as well finally ski. So I rode up the chairlift. And the view off the top was hardly of some “pristine mountain environment.” It was just a bunch of boring farms and shit. And the runs were NOT “challenging” OR “diverse” OR “legendary” like Mad River Glen’s website claimed!!! They’re just a bunch of big wide groomers! With snowguns all over them!!! So much for being a “pillar of natural snow skiing!!!!!!!”

And the runs were SHORT!!!! I’ve seen more vertical drop from a playground swingset:

TAKE SHELTER, A TRUTH TORNADO HAS BEEN SPOTTED IN THE AREA

All right, TEAM TRUTH, here’s the #RealTalkNoBullshit take that you come to The Straight Talk Express for: Mad River Glen is NOT in Vermont (it’s in Ohio)! It is NOT in New England (anymore)! It does NOT have a single-person chairlift (I don’t think)!!!! It is NOT a natural-snow ski area!! It is NOT challenging! There are SNOWBOARDERS everywhere!!!! And it was about as family friendly as a car crash! I hadn’t had that many beer cans thrown at me since I told my Uncle Pete that he couldn’t drive his go-kart on the interstate without probably getting a ticket!

But a true Truth Ninja acts not only in Stealth, but also in Frank Confrontation. And so I calmly approached the customer service desk and demanded to speak to a representative of the co-op. But the clerk behind the counter just kept mumbling something about how “it was only five plays… I shouldn’t a betted alls ah my teeth…” And finally herky-jerky pointed to a large map on the wall. So I went and looked at it. And it looked NOTHING like the fake made-up map on Mad River Glen’s website!!! And at the bottom, written real sneaky and small-like so I could hardly see it, was Mad River’s ultimate secret hiding in plain site: this so-called “independent,” “unique,” “non-commercial” ski area was OWNED BY FUCKING VAIL!!!!!

AND to add insult to injury, the fine print revealed that Mad River Glen was on THE FREAKING EPIC PASS!!!!!!!!:

I was raging hot by then. “I HOPE YOUR VACCINES ARE UP TO DATE,” I screamed at the ticket clerk, “BECAUSE A PLAGUE OF FACTUAL ACCURACY IS ON ITS WAY TO OHIO, AND I’M PATIENT ZERO!!!” I stormed out of there so fast that I don’t even remember leaving. Fortunately I was later able to hack into Mad River Glen’s parking lot surveillance footage of me streaking out of there:

@gobluevisuals“Donovan Edwards. Woah. Can they catch him? No.” #michigan #donovanedwards #fyp #football #ohiostate #buckssuck #highlights

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IN CONCLUSION: Mad River Glen is A FRAUD! It is a tiny small little ski area in Ohio that is owned by Vail and filled with snowboarders and unchallenging runs and boring regular chairlifts!!!! IT IS NOT a 2,000-vertical-foot skiers-only throwback collectively owned by a bunch of regular-Joe skiers in some dramatic Vermont mountain range with a special single chair and super-hard expert terrain and no snowboarders!!!!!! MAD RIVER GLEN IS A PACK OF LIES!!!!!

And I don’t care if you don’t want to hear it!!! This is why they call me THE LIQUIDATOR OF LIES!!! And sometimes also THE LIE DETECTOR!!! And also once in a while the EXTERMINATOR OF FALSEHOODS AND UNTRUTHS!!!! Some people put milk on their breakfast cereal, but I drown everything I eat in TRUTH SERUM!!!

Don’t want to hear it?

DON’T CARE!!!

Because MAD RIVER GLEN IS A LIE!!!

TRUTH ENEMA DELIVERED!!!!!!!!!

So take my advice and next time you want to ski in New England A) just fly there, because the GPS directions are super off, B) Go to a REAL classic, independent New England ski area, like Arapahoe Basin or Park City, C) grab a twelver of MGD before you roll into Hoss’s, and, D) Go Blue!!!

@yahoosportsElliot Cadeau spoke it into existence before Michigan defeated Alabama in the Sweet 16 😤 (via CBS) #ncaa #marchmadness #michigan #collegebasketball #michiganwolverines

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Four skiers filed a class-action lawsuit against Vail and Alterra in U.S. District Court in Colorado last week, alleging that the companies’ Epic and Ikon pass sales tactics violated state and federal antitrust laws.

The lawsuit taps long-simmering consumer anger over escalating destination resort lift ticket prices:

“Following the introduction of Defendants’ Mega Passes, the prices of daily or short term (e.g. weekend) lift tickets purchased during the ski season (“Lift Tickets”) have climbed sharply. But this is no accident, or the result of competitive market forces. Pursuant to Defendants’ identical anticompetitive schemes, Lift Tickets for ski areas within the Epic and Ikon ecosystems are priced in a way to induce (or coerce) customers into buying the Mega Pass bundles.

“The primary (and unlawful) way that both Vail Resorts and Alterra drive skiers and snowboarders to purchase Mega Passes is to charge exorbitantly high prices for Lift Tickets. This coerces customers into buying their multi-mountain season pass offerings (the Epic and Ikon Mega Passes) which they then view as more cost effective as compared to a Lift Ticket. …

So framed, on page six of the 74-page lawsuit, the case appears to be built around the notion that ski area operators drove up lift ticket prices to coerce skiers into purchasing season passes (boldface mine):

“Skiers and snowboarders are led to believe they are making a cost-conscious decision in buying the Epic or Ikon Mega Pass, but in reality, and as a result of Vail Resorts’ and Alterra’s respective anticompetitive schemes involving bundling, they are in fact being forced into buying a Mega Pass, which is itself maximally (over)-priced up to the point where it looks like a good deal when compared to the over-priced Lift Ticket. In short, both the Lift Ticket and the Mega Pass are over-priced.”

But the plaintiffs do not build their legal case around pricing, as the “bundling” at the center of the lawsuit is not about lift tickets and season passes. It is, rather, the bundling of “lift access to destination ski resorts” and “lift access to regional ski areas”:

The Mega Passes offered by Vail Resorts and Alterra function as an anticompetitive tie-in, or bundle, under the antitrust laws.

A tying arrangement is an agreement by a party to sell one product but only on the condition that the buyer also purchases a different (or tied) product. Tying arrangements include instances of discount bundling, such as when a seller does not literally require the customer to buy two or more products together, but economically coerces that result by (for instance) charging a supracompetitive penalty price for the individual products compared to the price of the bundle.

With bundling schemes, as a subset or alternate form of an anticompetitive tying arrangement, there must be both a “tying product market” and a “tied product market.”

Here, (1) the tying product market is the market for lift access to Destination Ski Resorts; and (2) the tied product market is the market for lift access to Regional Ski Areas.

This is a novel argument, and one that I’ve never seen articulated in any ski community, online or otherwise. More on this:

Both Mega Passes can be viewed as bundles of individual, day-access lift tickets. But more important with respect to the allegations herein, the Mega Passes also combine lift access to Destination Ski Resorts with lift access to Regional Ski Areas. Consumers cannot purchase the core value proposition of these products—reasonable access to highly desirable Destination Ski Resorts—without also purchasing bundled access to many Regional Ski Areas included in the same Mega Pass ecosystem, even if they do not live anywhere close to these Regional Ski Areas. …

In other words, the lawsuit is claiming that skiers cannot purchase access to destination resorts such as Vail Mountain or Steamboat without also purchasing access to, respectively, Mt. Brighton in Michigan or Snowshoe in West Virginia. By providing more access than is strictly necessary, the Epic and Ikon passes, the plaintiffs argue, are overpriced (boldface mine):

Competition between two functionally identical (anticompetitive) bundles does not cure the coercion inherent in the tying arrangement, because consumers are still forced to accept the tied product to obtain the tying product. Critically, Vail Resorts and Alterra do not compete on the structure of their Mega Pass products. Instead, both Defendants employ the same exclusionary tying and bundling model: conditioning reasonably priced access to must-have Destination Ski Resorts on the purchase of all-or-nothing season passes that also bundle lift access to numerous Regional Ski Areas. At no point have Defendants meaningfully diverged from this model by offering unbundled destination access, modular pricing, or destination-only passes that would permit consumers to avoid the tied products. Thus, whatever putative competition exists between Defendants does not operate to constrain the tying arrangement itself, which is the source of the anticompetitive harm.

I don’t even know if Vail or Alterra has to assign a real lawyer to this case: I can shut it down with three charts. The argument that megapasses are overpriced because they tie destination resort access to regional ski area access is flimsy for two reasons:

1) the Epic and Ikon Passes, where they function as the sole unlimited season pass product for destination ski areas, are in most cases substantially less expensive in both real dollars and inflation-adjusted dollars than their pre-megapass, single-mountain counterparts. Check out select season pass prices, in real and inflation-adjusted dollars, from pre-Epic, pre-Ikon 2006 to 2026 - season pass prices have fallen substantially even as those passes, in general, covered more mountains:

2) Vail and Alterra do in fact offer single-mountain season passes to the majority of their ski areas, as well as a variety of ticket-pack products that exclude smaller ski areas.

We could turn this lawsuit and its many sub-plot arguments inside-out, and analyze whether Vail and Alterra constitute a true duopoly (I don’t think they do), whether skiers and independent ski areas have benefitted from or been harmed by the advent of Epic and Ikon (I believe it’s mostly been for the better), or whether the “quality” of skiing has declined in recent years (again, I don’t think it has, holistically). I’ll analyze these particulars more as the legal process unfolds. And though I don’t believe any judge or jury will find the plaintiffs’ arguments compelling, I do believe this lawsuit should function as an alarm bell for both skiers and ski area operators.

Ski area operators – especially but not exclusively Vail and Alterra – have massively underestimated the raw anger stoked by the quadrupling of lift ticket prices since 2000. While affordable season passes are novel and cool, it’s a product that no one was really asking for. Most skiers looked at season passes like they looked at their uncle’s boat: wow, that’s an expensive cool thing that you probably only want if you live on a lake. But no one was arguing that boats should be less expensive so that everyone can have a boat, so long as boat rides stayed cheap. Vail has started to soften lift-ticket pricing, but both operators could make this price-gouging narrative disappear instantly by dropping lift tickets back to inflation-adjusted historic rates.

Skiers, watch what you ask for. At early-bird prices, purchasing a $369 Indy Base Pass, $809 Epic Local Pass, and $949 Ikon Base Pass gets you access to 217 U.S. ski areas for $2,127. Remember when we were all pissed off about the cost of cable, and so we said “fuck cable” and let the streamers destroy it, and now we have to subscribe to 18 different services for $17.99 per month just to watch college basketball? The megapass has given us an incredible gift in the form of passports that move us seamlessly across skiing’s formerly balkanized borders. Do we really want to return to the days of the $3,000 season pass just because someone who lives in Park City thinks they’re also paying for access to Wilmot, Wisconsin? Because right now, it kind of seems like we do.

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DAY 5 – PLATTEKILL, NEW YORK

Almost the first thing Ryan asked when we met three years ago was if he could see my Slopes map. And it’s a pretty good map, stretching back to the 2018-19 ski season:

I didn’t suppose a Bozeman Bro would care about anything outside of the Bridger Bowl-Big Sky circuit, because the other first thing Ryan asked me was whether I had a transceiver, and I was like “No, I left it next to the scuba gear and car-waxing kit in my Box of Accessories I Don’t Own for Activities I Never Do on Purpose, like ski out of bounds or go underwater or pretend my minivan is anything other than a Chrysler Pacifica with a roofbox and a broken rear windshield wiper.” And he was like “Well that’s too bad you’d need one to ride Schlasman’s” and I was like “The chairlift at Bridger Bowl?” And he was like “Yeah” and I was like “Man that is so Bozeman.”

But Ryan did like the map because he’s the sort who keeps lists of, like, the names of everyone who’s ever given him a haircut and how many Oreos he ate each week in 1992 and how strange that our wives who were college roommates ended up marrying the same sort of List Bro. But I seized on his curiosity and love of novelty to insert a day of skiing into their annual family Christmas visit to New York, and after a 2024 day of blown-snowtrails over dirt at Windham and Hunter, I hoped to show him a better version of Northeast skiing.

Fortunately December 2025 shaped up better than December 2024. Storms had pounded in one after the next and the obligatory rain-thaw cyclone that would typically have pulverized millions of gallons of accumulated snowmaking back to gutter water never materialized. A fortuitous eight inches fell overnight leading into our pre-planned ski day, and we aimed for Plattekill, an 1,100-vertical-foot elevator shaft disguised as a ski hill about three hours north of the city. And this time there was no dirt to be seen:

Plattekill is the Catskills’ hidey-hole, a family-owned bunker that’s dug an atmospheric moat sufficient to fend off Vail-owned Hunter and state-owned Belleayre and whatever-the-hell-Windham-is. The bump only spins two chairlifts but there are never liftlines, even on Christmas week. The triple gets a little backed up but the double never does. And what a spectacular chair that is, one of my favorites anywhere:

Platty is all vibes. That baselodge. Beers upstairs with the live band jamming. And yeah it was nice to have snow to share with Bozeman Bro in a year where he ended up with very little.

DAY 6 – LOST VALLEY, SPRUCE MOUNTAIN

Lost Valley – this is how you run a small ski area.

As we rolled into 2026, I’d skied nearly every ski area with a chairlift in New England, but Maine had proven elusive. Sort of because it tried to dismember me but mostly because it’s far and because most of those faraway ski areas are Wisconsin-sized coastal bumpies that don’t grab a ton of snow and because some of those ski areas (Baker, Jefferson) operate infrequently, have little or no snowmaking, and communicate their opening hours via websites that make the Pony Express look like Starlink. So my Maine ski history was limited to Boyne’s three mountains (Sunday River, Sugarloaf, Pleasant), Saddleback, and Black Mountain of Maine. But with the snowpack unseasonably deep, I prioritized three days in early January to survey the state’s smaller offerings.

And the first thing I thought when I arrived at Lost Valley was “Damn it I should have come here years ago.” Because my first impression of Lost Valley was that it is one of the best-run small ski areas in the country.

That meta-fact helps explain the existence, in 2026, of a 240-vertical-foot, 45-acre anthill within an hour of mega-bigster Sunday River. That, and the bump’s proximity to Lewiston, Maine’s second-largest city (population 37,121) and, so I hear, a hell of a fortunate place to land if your idea of a sickified ski trick is a tib-fib spiral fracture (I’m incapable of writing about skiing Maine without mentioning this incident a minimum of seven times).

About a decade ago, Lost Valley nearly joined the 79-plus ski areas that have dropped dead across Maine since the beginning of industrialized skiing. But then a fellow named Scott Shanaman showed up. With the help of crowd-sourced stopgap funding, he pulled Lost Valley out of debt. He cut new trails and glades and super-boosted snowmaking. In 2024, he relocated Mount Southington’s Northstar double chair to Lost Valley:

The chair is marvelously new looking for a machine that began life circa 1980 at the long-dead Craigmeur ski area in New Jersey and moved up to Connecticut in 2001 before migrating to Maine. Now called simply “Chair #3,” this is one of the few chairlifts to operate in three locations, and perhaps the only one to spin in three U.S. states.

The first sign of a well-run, skiers-first ski area: All three of Lost Valley’s chairlifts were spinning on a Wednesday night in January, even though they could have gotten away with running two. Everything about the place hummed. The grooming was outstanding, snowmaking had buried the trails. All that infrastructure helps, but what impressed me most about Lost Valley was the thing so often missing from night-skiing operations: order. Even in the froth and throng of teenage yee-haw flippy-screamy night. And everyone was nice. And yes that matters a lot, especially with the lift attendants.

Spruce Mountain – Ropetow roundup

Forty minutes up the road from Lost Valley is Spruce Mountain, a three-ropetow bump so obscure that most ski area inventories miss it. It’s a down-a-dirt-road, up-a-hill, where’s-the-parking-lot-oh-this-is-the-parking-lot, still-has-wordpress.com-in-its-url, is-trying-to-raise-$20,000-to-buy-a-“new”-groomer sort of place.

Which means it was me skiing among a bunch of 12-year-olds who seemed confused as to why I would be here. But isn’t it astonishing and wonderful that places like this still exist?

Spruce maintains a surprisingly varied and dense trail network, a little of which I explored. But the upper-mountain tow isn’t night-lit (or wasn’t that night), and I’m fighting off some shoulder soreness that I later discovered is a torn rotator cuff (to be repaired next month; yes I am the king of stupid injuries and nearly dying on a more or less annual basis).

DAY 7 – BIG MOOSE, CAMDEN SNOW BOWL, HERMON MOUNTAIN

Big Moose – this is what it looks like when a ski area refuses to die.

One thing I’ve learned when planning these ski-10-ski-areas-in-three-days hypertrips is that it helps a lot to not change hotels, even if that means more daily driving. So I set up in Waterville, home of Colby College and a pass-through zone for I-95. From there I drove two hours on Thursday morning to Big Moose, which, depending upon your point of view, is either the most dysfunctional or the most resilient ski area in America. In brief, Big Moose once looked like this, with an 1,700-foot lift-served vertical drop:

In 2004, the summit chairlift (“N” on the map above), broke, and the owner never fixed it, shrinking what had been a remote-but-large 1,700-vertical-foot ski area into a still-remote-but-teensy-tiny 583-vertical-foot ski area. Around 2010 the owner, a Mr. James Canfalone of Florida, stopped pretending to operate it, and was subsequently sued by the state, which had sold him the ski area on the condition that he not let it turn into a decrepit pile of crap. Which he did, while also allegedly running a bootleg timber operation, a crime that sounds so ridiculously antiquated that I’m tempted to ask him which pirate he owed money to.

That’s the dysfunction part. The resilience part is this: after the ski area sat idle for two years, a nonprofit group called Friends of the Mountain restored the triple chair and, over time, added snowmaking, a conveyor lift, and Cat rides to the summit. They also, against Canfalone’s indignant protests, renamed the ski area from “Big Squaw” to “Big Moose,” reflecting a change the state had made to the actual mountain that the ski area sits on 26 years ago. Friends of the Mountain’s goal is to raise nearly $6 million to purchase the ski area.

I hope they succeed. A previous plan to restore summit access with a six-pack chair as an anchor to a $113 million resort died. But this doesn’t feel like a dead or dying ski area. The place is pulsing, vibrant, filled, on the weekday I visited, with kids lapping the conveyor or riding up the old T-bar line on this thing:

Oh and there’s this gigantic abandoned hotel/condo complex in the middle of the hill, which I totally did not explore to take these photos:

The skiing, as it stands, is fine, with a funky windy narrow trail network that delights and confuses in that New England, why-don’t-they-build-them-like-this-anymore kind of way. You can hike to the top but I did not hike to the top. Because that seemed like a lot of work for pretty mediocre snow, because I bought the kind of skis that only go down, and because I’d made the logical-sounding-at-the-time decision to chase my two-hour morning drive with a two-and-a-half-hour afternoon drive to the day’s second ski area.

Camden Snow Bowl – Bro it’s the ocean and we only have like four of those.

Let’s start by addressing what you’re all thinking right now: there are too many “snowbowls” in America and no one can agree on how to spell it, probably because it’s not a word:

Or perhaps Camden Snow Bowl is the rebel, facing off against Arizona Snowbowl, Montana Snowbowl, and Middlebury Snowbowl – a legendary ski area trifecta most skiers refer to simply as “The Strike Lane.”* (Fun fact: all three were founded by John Snowbowl IV, a fortuitous name for the ski-loving industrialist who built his fortune selling doorhinges.**) But that doesn’t explain the matter of the intransigent Elko “Snobowl,” a semi-functional outfit in the Nevada desert, and the utterly confusing Mount Hood “Skibowl,” which, when tasked with distinguishing itself as a ski area on a mountain with a half dozen other ski areas, chose the most confusing name possible.

*No one calls it this, mostly because there are probably a maximum of five people on Earth who have skied at all three of these places, and maybe 15 people who are aware that they all exist.

**Sorry I try to stop myself but it’s impossible.

Anyway, even given all my righteous confusion, I found the Camden “Snow Bowl.” And the first thing anyone will tell you about Camden Snow Bowl when you mention Camden Snow Bowl is that from the summit of Camden Snow Bowl you can see the Atlantic Ocean.

I know that doesn’t actually sound that special. The Atlantic Ocean is not exactly hard to come by. Just go east from anywhere on the continent and eventually you’ll hit it. In fact, the Atlantic Ocean is a global brand, like McDonald’s or Wal-Mart. They have it in Europe and Africa and South America, too. It’s not like you ride the chairlift to the top of Camden Snow Bowl and they have, like, a triceratops up there. No, it’s an ocean that, incidentally, I live maybe 10 miles away from but almost never bother to visit. So why was it so goddamn cool to stand off Camden Snow Bowl’s summit unload and stare at an ocean that was difficult to even see, as water and sky had taken a similar hue on this midwinter Thursday?

I found a potential explanation in an unlikely place: Taylor Swift’s End of an Era documentary. “Taylor is my friend,” the also-very-famous Florence Welch says after a rehearsal scene of the clearly well-acquainted pair, “and I know her as this very cozy person, and I came out [on stage] and I was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s fucking Taylor Swift!”

And that’s what it’s like to get to the top of Camden Snow Bowl and see the Atlantic Ocean.

Now, there’s a reason why you can’t see the Atlantic Ocean from the top of very many ski areas. It’s because the Atlantic Coast is a lousy place to put a ski area. And Camden Snow Bowl does not get anywhere near the natural snow, at least on average, of Maine’s western monsters. Instead, Camden blows a lot of snow, and on my visit in January, mountain ops had blown a lot of snow. Unfortunately, that translated to just one top-to-bottom ski trail, which by the time I showed up at around 2 p.m. was pretty icy. So I took a few laps, snapped some photos, and bounced.

Hermon Mountain – the mountain of too many names

If you can help it, always try to arrive at a ski area during daylight hours, at least if it’s your first visit. And this is what I tried to do with Hermon Mountain – which joins “Snow Bowl” on the problematic-names list because it manages the trick of calling itself by two different names. Actually three:

Trying to jam Hermon Mountain/New Hermon Mountain/New Hermon Mountain, Inc. into a day that had already included two ski areas in opposite directions from my hotel was ill-advised, and under different circumstances, I may have stowed this 276-footer for a better day. But the longtime owners had declared that they would shutter the place after this season if they couldn’t find a new buyer, and while the bump is under contract, I thought it best to take a few just-in-case laps.

Me and the rest of Bangor, Maine’s third-largest city (population 31,753). From the parking lot, I could see a line backed up dozens-deep across the snow beach at the base of the mountain. And I thought to myself, “Wow, I hope that’s not a line for lift tickets because I would sure hate to have to wait in that line.”

The good news is this wasn’t a line for lift tickets. The bad news is it was the line for Herman Mountain’s only chairlift, which sits exactly parallel to a T-bar that was for some reason idle. Which meant that I didn’t have to wait in that line once, but every single lift ride.

Which ended up being two lift rides. And the line actually moved pretty fast and, for a teenage scene, with great efficiency and order (Maine really is the best). But there was a lot of teenage energy pulsing through the bump. And after driving two hours up to Big Moose, two and a half hours back down to Camden Snow Bowl and an hour and change up to Herman Mountain, my Teen-O-Meter was out of gas. But, hey, I hope I can return next year.

DAY 8 – MT. ABRAM, TITCOMB, QUARRY ROAD

Mt. Abram – nicer than it looks

Mt. Abram is the ski area you see as you drive out of Sunday River toward the interstate and say, “did that used to be a ski area?” Its close-cut trails don’t pop like Boyne’s megastar, and unlike Sunday River’s assortment of high-tech six- and eight-packs, which can be seen from space, it’s hard to make out Abram’s two antique double chairs from the road.

The ski area seems to be trying hard not to take itself too seriously, starting with its Rocky and Bullwinkle theme. Rocky and Bullwinkle, for those of you born after World War II, is a cartoon show that was popular in like the 1800s or something. Which was approximately 200 years after Mount Abram installed its base-to-summit Wayback Machine, a Hall chairlift which still runs, at least as an auxiliary component, on a straight-six Ford engine.* Here’s an Instagram reel where several hundred people probably tell me I’m an idiot for not giving a more complete engineering breakdown of how the various components of this chairlift work in tandem to transport skiers uphill.

*JK Bro-hombries, Abram installed Wayback in 1970.

But Abram, as it turns out, is an awesome little ski area. Fantastic grooming, with no icy patches, top to bottom, and liberal terrain management, with vast sections of off-piste available even on refrozen garbage snow.

On my second off-piste run, I stumbled across this nifty multicolored, de-roped T-bar and skied down the line.

At the bottom, I ran into a patroller who told me that Abram had run that T-bar until around Covid, then abandoned it because the west side chair was working just fine as a beginner pod. I dug up some old trail maps and here’s the terrain he was talking about - the T-bar line I skied is the short red line labelled “Mini T-bar” on the far left:

That section marked “Hillside Condo” is actually an old trailpod that was served by yet another T-bar:

I’m not sure if Abram ever plans to bring back that beginner terrain. The mountain skis plenty big enough. This was, in fact, the only stop on the Storm Skiing Maine World Tour 2026 during which I recorded more than 10,000 vertical feet on Slopes.

Titcomb – the T-bar revolution starts here

There’s a feeling that I get at small ski areas that I’ve always failed to recreate at larger ski areas. Short shots down the narrow trails, skiing solo, fast, no fear of ice, weeds poking up, a down-bound time machine.

And T-bars. Two of them. Titcomb actually has one of the newest T-bars in America. Doppelmayr built it last offseason, a quick-turnaround replacement for a Constam T-bar that had arrived used in 1973, after a 20-year run as Cannon’s Lower T-bar.

If you want a contrast between what you think T-bars are and what modern T-bars actually are, find $30 and a day to visit Titcomb. The old T-bar, a Franken-lift that was maybe at one point a Poma and has been swinging up the hill since 1956, sounds like the inside of an atom bomb. The lift attendant wears earplugs and stands away from the lift when no one is actively loading.

The new T-bar? Its motor wouldn’t be audible over a running microwave. The Ts tug you uphill like a 3-year-old pulling you into ankle-deep lake water. It’s clean, smooth, and fast. The lift attendant can talk to you:

And of course the skiers were great. At the top of the old T, one kid asked me if I’d ever jumped off the cliffs over in the woods. I told him that, no, I’ve actually never skied here before, and besides, I think those trails are closed. “Closed is just another level of difficulty,” he said as he skied off into the forest.

Quarry Road – as basic as it gets

Quarry Road is a ropetow bump that opened in 1937 as “Mountain Farm,” morphed into school-run “Colby College Ski Area” in 1964, went into mothballs around 1979, and sat dormant until the Waterville Parks and Recreation department purchased the bump and, with the help of an outfit called Friends of Quarry Road, re-opened the ski hill in 2021.

It’s a neat little outfit: one tow, a QR code to pay for your $15 resident lift ticket, a nice pitch, and a Slopes-measured vertical drop of 157 feet – about three times taller than most sources list the ski area’s vert. I took exactly one lap, which reminded me that ropetows and sore shoulders are a poor match. My next stop was scheduled to be Pinnacle Ski Club, a typical New England ski “club” where anyone appears to be able to ski if they show up with $20. The single-ropetow outfit was just half an hour straight up I-95. Which means I would have had to drive 30 minutes up 95. Reboot. Ski. Then drive half an hour back down 95, then six more hours home. Or I could just do the six hours right then. So I made a rare adult decision and turned the car back toward Brooklyn and was home by midnight.

So that was my Maine off Main Street Ski Safari. Not a lot of vert, but a lot of road, captured, as always, by Slopes, which buckets your stats together by trip:

I’m documenting my 2025-26 ski season with Slopes. Here’s a recap of days one through four:

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In what amounts to an act of administrative mercy for ski writers, Berkshire East and Catamount announced this week that they are “joining” Bear Den Partners, the parent company that owns or partly owns or is in transition to express interest in one day hopefully collaborating to discuss potentially owning Burke and Smugglers’ Notch, both in Vermont.

I’m not going to parse the particulars of what it means for the two Massachusetts ski areas, long owned by the Schaefer family, to “join” Bear Den. The press release describes Bear Den Partners as “an independent owner and operator of alpine ski and snowboard resorts including … Berkshire East and Catamount,” but alludes to another entity, the Bear Den Mountain Alliance, which is, “a network of independent mountains that share resources, operational expertise and long-term capital while maintaining local leadership, unique identities and guest experiences.”

If you want to argue about the nuances of who owns what, go join the self-righteous dorks on Reddit. On Planet Storm, this announcement means simply that “Bear Den” will hereby and forever-after be shorthand for all of this:

And what that pile of numbers adds up to is perhaps the most complete and complementary single-digit ski area portfolio in the country: a legitimate thousand-footer two hours from New York City (Catamount); the best pure ski terrain in southern New England (Berkshire East); one of the lowest-volume 2,000-vertical-foot ski areas in America that runs top-to-bottom high-speed chairlifts (Burke); and a mountain that ranks in the top four among the East’s 197 active ski areas in vertical drop, skiable acreage, and average annual snowfall (Smuggs).

As a first step toward uniting this portfolio into a unified ski brand, Bear Den reworked the season pass suite for all four mountains:

• Smuggs and Burke now share a season pass, with two days each at Berkshire East and Catamount.

• Berkshire East and Catamount rebrand their “Berkshire Summit Pass” into the somewhat cheesy AIM High (Authentic Independent Mountains) pass. This is unlimited at both mountains and includes days at Smuggs and Burke. Longtime Berkshire Summit Pass partner Bousquet exits the pass.

The AIM Pass webpage promises “additional mountain access and partner benefits” to be revealed “later this summer.”

This modest product suite confirms what Bear Den officials have been telling me since announcing the Smuggs’ deal last month: that they intend to move cautiously on pass access so as not to overwhelm two of Vermont’s last remaining uncrowded big mountains.

As for Bousquet, I have this update: “With the changes on the Berkshire East/Catamount side, their business structure has become more complex, and it’s made it difficult for them to continue offering a shared pass product outside of their own network,” Bousquet General Manager Kevin McMillan told The Storm. “We’re still in conversation about whether there’s a way to offer some form of informal reciprocity, as the local market really valued the Summit Pass. With their recent move to join the Bear Den investment group, I’m not sure what — if anything — will be possible for this year, but we remain hopeful.”

New England back in charge of itself

Bear Den’s rollup of four recently independent mountains continues two somewhat contradictory trends: the American ski industry’s decades-long consolidation, and the re-assertion, since 2024, of local ski area control by New England operators following decades of takeovers by extra-regional corporations. In just over 18 months, a group led by Boston investor Phill Gross bought Killington – the largest and busiest ski area in the East – from Utah-based Powdr, Park City-based Pacific Group Resorts ended its long tenure managing Ragged Mountain, and Indy Pass parent company Entabeni announced a move to the base of resurgent Black Mountain in New Hampshire.

Bear Den drops an exclamation point on this narrative. For the first time since American Skiing Company’s parts-and-pieces selloff to operators in Colorado, Utah, Michigan, Missouri, and Canada a generation ago, New England skiing, once proudly local before imploding around its national power ambitions, is returning to a form of self-determination.

That independence carries its own challenges. The Epic and Ikon passes, non-existent in the ASC days, are entrenched. Companies headquartered in the Midwest and West still control more than a dozen of New England’s largest ski areas. Once-rusty New England mountains now spin many of North America’s most modern chairlifts, while Smugglers’ Notch’s six double chairs and one T-bar are a combined 392 years old.

The good news: I could think of no better general to lead this band of mutants to battle than Bear Den Partners CEO Jon Schaefer. His father Roy purchased bankrupt and backwater Berkshire East in 1976 and brought Jon to Planet Earth in 1980. Like a baby born to a clan of feudal ninjas, skiing was all he ever knew, and all Jon knew about skiing was that Roy papered and patched together his hunk-of-junk ski area by raiding the scrapyards of failed or modernizing mountains all over North America. As established ski areas Berkshire Snow Basin and Brodie and Mt. Tom dropped dead one by one, this remote bump serving Charlemont, population 1,185, somehow fended off aggressively up-to-date Jiminy Peak to its west and Mount Snow to its north. Jon’s brother Jim went off to New York City to make money and Jon took over the ski area around 2007, when the Schaefers used Jim’s money to buy out Roy’s longtime business partners. And Jon, who had grown up on the mountain and was as rooted to it as the trees growing from its soil, looked around and said “Dad I respect the hell out of you but go park cars while I pilot this boat into the 21^st century because all those failed ski areas have been stripped clean and we need some new chairlifts and new snowguns and how about a wind turbine on the summit and a bike park for summer and some ziplines and rafting in the nearby river?” And in 2018, with Berkshire East sufficiently renovated, the family purchased Catamount, a ski area that had become a ski area museum straddling the New York-Massachusetts border. And with tremendous speed foiled partly by the societal asteroid that was 2020, Jon built a new lodge and demolished two lifts and installed three new-used lifts and dug enormous ponds and rewired and reworked the whole snowmaking system and maybe cut down more frontside trees than I would have liked but hey what the hell do I know I didn’t grow up in a snowcat shed with skis permanently lashed to me like bison horns. And he led a similar effort at somehow-even-more-brokeass Bousquet that involved a botched chairlift installation made right with the procurement of heavy equipment and all-night floodlit work sessions that likely involved a lot of banging and yelling.

Shortly after the University of Michigan hired Jim Harbaugh as their football coach in 2014, one of his former players described him as “a robot who was programmed as a football coach.” Jon Schaefer is the Jim Harbaugh of skiing, a mountain cyborg with no off-switch. And just as Harbaugh eventually led the stuffy Wolverines to a national championship, Schaefer modernized skiing in western Massachusetts even as Vail and Alterra started buying up competitors and peddling their Epic and Ikon passes.

Now Jon Schaefer will do the same for Vermont. Exactly how he will sync overbuilt and scandal-scarred Burke with under-lifted but beloved Smuggs and his cupboard of Masshills without pissing off the locals or sinking the whole fleet I have no idea, but I’m as confident as I can be about anyone in skiing that he will. Few people on the planet better understand the tensions between a ski area’s entrenched identity and the imperative to modernize, a minefield that he capably navigated at Berkshire East, Catamount, and Bousquet.

Rich guys like to buy ski areas and then buy things for those ski areas like chairlifts and hotels. But that formula only works if the rich guy either is or hires a capable on-the-ground manager. But there are more rich guys in the world than there are competent ski area managers, so it’s harder to find this balance than you may suppose. This was the genius of the group that bought Killington: yes we will take this island back to independence but yes we will also keep the corporate management team groomed out of Powdr’s Park City HQ. Ken Graham, the managing partner behind Bear Den, has fortunately entered his tenure as ski area owner with a similar strategy of Jon-go-run-the-ski-areas.

“Schaefer,” the robots tell me, is a German surname that translates to “shepherd.” Considered as “one who tends flocks,” Schaefer is not a bad last name for a ski area operator. Though the family, had the tradition of commandeering your occupation as last name endured through the 1970s, may have more appropriately become the “Skis.” Though “Schaeferski” doesn’t sound too bad, does it?

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Mountain Capital Partners, owner of 11 active ski areas in America and Chile, announced details of its 2026-27 Power Pass suite yesterday, along with a major expansion at Lee Canyon, Nevada; the completion of a stalled expansion at Purgatory, Colorado; a large snowmaking upgrade at Pajarito, New Mexico; and lift and other infrastructure projects at its Chilean ski areas.

The headliner here is the Lee Canyon expansion, which an MCP representative confirmed is the long-teased Chair 8 outlined on the ski area’s U.S. Forest Service masterplan:

For context, the Lift 8 pod will slide looker’s right of Lee Canyon’s current trail network, intersecting with the Bluebird pod:

Language in a past version of Lee Canyon’s MDP details the expansion:

Chair 8 would be a step up in difficulty from Chair 5 [Ponderosa], accessing mostly intermediate runs with some easier and some more difficult terrain within that category. It would be a fixed-grip quad chairlift with a capacity of 1,800 pph, 2,200 feet long, with a vertical rise of 650 feet. It would be a bottom drive lift with approximately 16 towers.

It’s a short but significant terrain expansion for what is becoming a very constrained ski area near (technically within the city bounds of) rapidly growing Las Vegas, and it will be the second new chairlift MCP installed since purchasing Lee Canyon from Powdr in 2023. Still, Lee Canyon may have more untapped terrain potential than any ski area in the country, with 1,919 vertical feet of hike-to terrain towering above its 860-foot lift-served vertical drop (the current masterplan has no plans for lift-served expansion upward).

MCP will also complete its Gelande lift and small expansion at Purgatory:

Purgatory detailed the expansion in an announcement last spring:

This addition will greatly improve our guests’ experience by creating a new way to access the top of the mountain without requiring access through the Columbine or Village base areas while adding to the advanced and expert terrain offered on the frontside of the mountain.

The construction of this new fixed grip triple chairlift manufactured by Skytrac and development of a network of up to five (5) new trails and trail connectors will be a substantial undertaking, requiring significant resources and manpower.

Unfortunately, a permitting issue - now presumably resolved - stalled the project to summer 2026.

MCP reps said that Pajarito’s snowmaking upgrade would amount to a 50 percent increase in the mountain’s capacity, with “major upgrades to pumping systems and electrical distribution for snowmaking. Water will come from a new pipeline that is part of the Jemez Mountain Regional Fire Protection Project, a public-private partnership with Los Alamos County and the state of New Mexico that will also support regional fire protection through a 10-million-gallon reservoir.”

Valle Nevado and La Parva ski areas will modernize several lifts. MCP provided these details to The Storm:

La Parva Lifts

• Tortolas - Full motor rebuild for primary and aux motors

• Alpha - New haul rope

• Vegas - New haul rope

• Aguilas - Electronics Interface Modernization

Valle Nevado Lifts

• Gondola - New Drive and Electronics Modernization

• Andes - Controls Upgrade

• Prado - New Control and Drive

These upgrades will complement “expanded snowmaking, along with other significant upgrades to create one of the largest seamless skiable domains in the Andes,” according to an MCP press release.

MCP announced the purchase of El Colorado - which is part of that “seamless skiable domain” along with Valle and La Parva - and three sister ski areas last summer, but is still awaiting regulatory approval, according to MCP representatives.

Prices for Mountain Capital Partners’ 2026-27 Power Pass suite, which provides access to their 11 active owned ski areas in Chile and the western United States, will remain unchanged for the fourth consecutive year. Kids 12 and under are again eligible for a free unlimited Power Pass. Each pass now includes six buddy tickets at half-off the online rate:

Access tiers across the company’s owned mountains also remains stable, with 10 shared days between La Parva and Valle Nevado for Power Pass and Power Pass Select holders. Independent Monarch will again partner with Power Pass, but longtime independent partners Loveland and Sundance have yet to confirm 2026-27 participation:

Has the Ropetow Revolution arrived in the East?

I don’t know how much Boyne Resorts paid for its eight-packs, but my educated guess is between $15 and $30 million each for the five machines built across four ski areas between 2018 (when prices were certainly lower) and 2024. These mega-lifts, according to Lift Blog, are capable of moving between 2,770 (Madison 8 at Big Sky), and 3,600 (Ramcharger 8, also at Big Sky) skiers per hour.

That sounds like a lot of skiers, and it is. Big Sky’s rocketship tram, which moves an astonishing 2,135 vertical feet in 2.6 minutes, moves just 850 skiers per hour (though the mountain intentionally limits skier capacity up to constrained Lone Peak).

Which is why I was shocked when Rick Schmitz gave me his estimate that the high-speed ropetows he’s installed at his three small Wisconsin ski areas could move 4,000 or more skiers per hour, and cost a fraction of the price of a chairlift to build.

“Ropetows are the best uphill transportation for the Midwest, period,” Schmitz told me on the podcast in 2022, explaining why he replaced a Hall double chair at 183-vertical-foot Crystal Ridge (then Rock Snowpark) with a ropetow in 2019. “Terrain park riders prefer ropetow, especially in the Midwest where our runs are short. They don’t have to unstrap, for the boarders. They can get so many laps in. … It’s inexpensive to build. We build them in-house. We design them in-house. And it moves people extremely efficiently and the riders love it.”

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While this is a good little business, it is still a growin…

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Who

Tim Smith, President and General Manager of Waterville Valley, New Hampshire

Recorded on

November 12, 2025

About Waterville Valley

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: The Sununu Family

Located in: Waterville Valley, New Hampshire

Year founded: 1966

Pass affiliations:

• Indy Pass, Indy+ Pass: 2 days, no blackouts

• White Mountain Super Pass: unlimited, no blackouts

• Indy Learn-to-Turn: 3 days, includes rentals, lesson, lift ticket; limited lift access

• Ski New Hampshire Kids Passport: 1 day with holiday blackouts

• Uphill New England: no lift access

Base elevation: 1,984 feet (highest in New Hampshire, 3rd in New England)

Summit elevation: 4,004 feet (2nd-highest in New Hampshire, 5th in New England)

Vertical drop: 2,020 feet (4th-highest in New Hampshire, 14th in New England)

Skiable acres: 265

Average annual snowfall: 148 inches

Trail count: 62 (14% novice, 64% intermediate, 22% advanced)

Lift count: 10 (1 six-pack, 1 high-speed quad, 2 triples, 2 doubles, 2 T-bars, 2 carpets)

Why I interviewed him

Well no one wants to hear this but we got to $300 lift tickets the same way we got to $80,000 pickup trucks. We’re Americans Goddamnit and we just can’t do stickshifts and we sure as shit ain’t standin’ up on our skis to ride back up the mountain. It’s pure agony you see. We need us a nine-pack chairlift with a bubble and a breakroom and a minibar and surround sound and Lazy-Boy seats and hell no we ain’t ridin’ it with eight strangers we’ll hold back and take a whole chair to our ownselves. And it needs to move fast, Son. Like embarrass-the-Concord fast because God help us we spend more than 90 seconds with our own thoughts.

I’m not aiming to get kicked out of America here, but if I may submit a few requests regarding our self-inflicted false price floors. I would like the option of purchasing a brand-new car with a manual transmission and windows rolled up and down with a hand-crank. I would like to keep pedaling my bicycle. I would like to cut the number of holidays with commercial mandates by 80 percent. I would prefer that we not set the air-conditioners to 60 when it’s 65 degrees outside. This doesn’t mean I want to get rid of all the air-conditioners but could we maybe take it easy on the frostbite-in-July overkill of it all?

My Heretic Wishlist for American Skiing includes but is not limited to: more surface lifts, especially to serve terrain parks, high-altitude exposed terrain, and expert pods; on-resort lodging that does not still require a commute-by-personal-vehicle to reach the lifts; and thoughtful terrain management that retains ungroomed sections for skiers who like things about skiing other than going fast.

Waterville Valley is doing all of these things. It is perhaps the only major American ski area in decades to replace a chairlift with a surface lift on a non-beginner terrain pod, and the only one to build two new T-bars this century. A planned gondola would connect Waterville Valley the town with Waterville Valley the ski area, correcting an only-in-America setup that separates these inseparable places by two miles of road. The glade network grows annually in both subtle and obvious ways.

This is not a ski area going in reverse. Waterville is modern and keeps modernizing. The four-year-old Tecumseh bubble six-pack, though bookended with T-bars, is one of the nicest chairlifts in America. Skiers still go groomer-kaboom on morning cord. Suburban office-park dads with interstate commutes and a habit of lecturing the Facebook Commons about the virtues of snow tires can still park their 42-wheel-drive Abrams-Caterpillar-F-15,000 Tanktruck in sub-parking lot 42Z and walk uphill to the lifts. But Waterville Valley is one of a handful of American ski areas, along with Killington and Deer Valley and Winter Park, that is embracing all of our luxe cultural excesses while pursuing the very un-American ambition of putting more skiers close to skiing.

No ski area is perfect. For all the cash saved on those T-bars, peak-day Waterville lift tickets still hit $145. The mountain’s season pass is the second-most expensive single-mountain season passes in New England – more than a top-line Epic Pass (an adult WV pass includes a free pass for a kid age 6 to 12, which is great if you have one of those). That’s bold pricing for the 22^nd-largest ski area in New England, especially one that still spins three Stadeli chairlifts that predate the extinction of the dinosaurs. And two high-speed chairlifts is not a lot of high-speed chairlifts for a 2,000-vertical-foot ski area (though about half of New England’s 2,000-footers run just two or fewer detaches).

Yeah I know. Sick burn from someone who was waxing about surface lifts four paragraphs ago. I may have collected too many ski area Lego blocks in my mental bucket, and they don’t always click together back here on planet Earth. “More villages,” I say while dismissing Aspen as a subsidized simulacrum of itself. “Big fast lifts rule,” I say while setting off fire alarms as first-generation chairlifts disintegrate and the cost of their most basic replacements escalates. “No-grooming, all-glades makes the best ski area,” I say, while condemning resort operators for $356 lift tickets that dam the masses. “Vail is too expensive,” I say. “Vail is too cheap,” I also say. “Modernize our chairlifts,” I say while celebrating the joy of riding an antique Riblet double. I endorse ski areas splitting off from conglomerates and ski areas joining them. These narratives can feel contradictory at best and schizophrenic at worst.

But that tension is part of what draws me to lift-served ski areas, where two things central to my worldview – wild nature and human invention – merge. Or perhaps more accurately, collide. Both forces act at all times not only to extinguish one another, but themselves: above-freezing temps trash two feet of new snow; bad liftline management cancels out the capacity benefits of a $12 million lift upgrade. Making a ski area function, then, requires continual tweaking, of both the nuanced and look-at-us-press-release variety. A ski area is a business, sure, but that’s almost a coincidence. The act of building and running a ski area is foremost an art, architecture, and engineering project that requires a somewhat madcap conductor to succeed.

As with any artform, there is no one correct and final way to build a ski area. The variety is central to skiing’s appeal. But there are operator/artist attributes - flexibility, inventiveness, consistency tempered by openness to change - that contribute to the overall quality and cohesion of the individual ski area experience in the context of competing ski areas. In the current version of Waterville Valley, we find one of our best contemporary examples of a ski area evolving toward the best version of itself under the stewardship of owners and managers possessing exactly these traits.

What we talked about

The return of World Cup training and events to Waterville; drifting away from and back toward freeskiing culture; the best terrain parks in New England; why terrain parks are drifting away from mega-features; what happened to all the halfpipes?; and ramps?; no really no one wore helmets in the ‘90s; building terrain parks before institutional knowledge and the internet; the lost Hidden Valley, Wisconsin ski area; the rise of the high-speed ropetow; why Waterville replaced one T-bar and one Poma with a new T-bar (rather than a chairlift); why Waterville installed night skiing; the return of the Exhibition terrain park; self-installing the World Cup T-bar; Waterville’s ops blog; why the Tecumseh Express sixer needed new bubbles after just a couple of seasons; why bubbles cost so much and how Waterville manufactured a less expensive one; Tecumseh’s incredible wind resistance; MND lifts as an alternative to the two large U.S.-based lift manufacturers; a chairlift’s “infancy” and how different 2020s lift technology is from early detachable tech; how Waterville’s masterplan would reorient the mountain and skier traffic with an expansion and new lifts; Waterville’s declining skier visits and whether that’s a bad thing; how the resort’s 1994 bankruptcy changed Waterville’s trajectory; what stoked the Green Peak expansion; “we’ve been on a track to try to rebuild that energy we saw in the 1990s”; why Waterville turned away from discounting; “the right quantity of skiers on the right amount of surface”; building more terrain diversity; and a gondola connection from town to mountain.

Should someone tell them they’re running it backwards? Video by Stuart Winchester.

What I got wrong

• I said that the “High Country double chair was still standing” – what I meant was that parts of it were still in place. The top terminal remains, sans bullwheel, and the base terminal and motor room remain as a patrol shack:

• I said that Waterville hadn’t been known for terrain parks until recently, but Smith recalled that the ski area was more freestyle-centric from the ‘70s through the ‘90s, before pulling back during the first part of this century.

• I said that 1,100 skiers per hour was “a little less than what a double chair would move,” thinking standard capacity for a double was 1,200 per hour. Smith says it is 900. Exact capacity varies from lift-to-lift, however. Lift Blog itemizes hourly capacities of between 800 and 1,200 for four of Smugglers’ Notch’s double chairs, between 1,000 and 1,200 for four of Mt. Spokane’s fleet of Riblet doubles, and 1,000 for Waterville’s Lower Meadows double. We all know, however, that the hourly capacity for a double chair is however many people are in line minus the number not paying attention minus singles who refuse to ride with anyone. So I don’t know maybe 50.

Podcast Notes

On other mentioned podcasts

• World Cup competition returning to Sun Valley:

• Heavenly backing out of mega-parks features:

• Killington and the cost of bubbles:

• Waterville part 1, from 2021:

On Partek and each lift being different

On Waterville’s ownership history

Founder Tom Corcoran owned Waterville Valley from 1966 until 1994, when he sold to American Skiing Company (ASC) antecedent S-K-I. The feds made ASC dispense with Waterville and Cranmore when they merged with LBO Enterprises in 1996. Booth Creek (more on them below), bought the ski area and held it until 2010, when they sold it to the Sununu family. This makes Waterville one of just a handful of ski areas to ever enter a multi-mountain pass portfolio and then exit to independence - though Killington and Ragged recently did exactly that, and Eldora may follow.

On Mt. Holiday, Michigan

This is just a little 200-footer, but it’s still around on the outskirts of Traverse City, Michigan:

That trailmap doesn’t really communicate the ski area’s essence. A little better are these pics I took on a summertime swing-through a few years back:

I never skied there though, always preferring the far-larger Sugar Loaf, right down the road (which Smith and I also discussed):

Until it was abandoned around 2000, this was one of the better ski areas in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. After a succession of owners - one of whom stripped all the chairlifts off the bump - failed to bring skiing back, the Leelanau Conservancy recently took ownership of the property. Skiing will return as an officially sanctioned activity, though unfortunately without a lift or snowmaking. I would have at least liked to have seen a ropetow. Here’s their vision:

On midwestskier.com

Yes, Kids, the internet really did used to look like this:

On Hidden Valley, Wisconsin

Here’s a little ski hill that didn’t make it. Smith spent time at Hidden Valley, Wisconsin, which opened in 1956 and closed forever in 2013. The chairlift appears to have been moved to nearby, county-run Kewaunee Winter Park, where it awaits installation.

On high-speed ropetows

I am a huge fan of high-speed ropetows, which are a cheap and effective means to isolate users of terrain parks or other specialized, intensive-use zones from the broader ski area. Here’s one at Spirit Mountain, Minnesota in 2023 (video by Stuart Winchester):

On Waterville Valley’s masterplan

This is perhaps the best angle of how Waterville’s expansion would connect the legacy trail network to the town:

Here’s the Forest Service masterplan slide:

Neither of these images, however, show how the gondola would eventually connect down into town, which is the crucial element of transforming Waterville Valley from a ski-area-that-says-it’s-a-ski-resort into an actual ski resort. Here’s a look at that connection:

Waterville set up an excellent microsite detailing the hoped-for evolution.

On Booth Creek

At the mid-90s height of American Skiing Company dominance, a former Vail executive assembled a cross-country ski area portfolio with ambitions of creating a hub-and-spoke network:

Booth Creek ultimately sold off most of its properties, but still own Sierra-at-Tahoe. Grand Targhee GM Geordie Gillett was involved in the whole saga and broke it down for us in 2024:

On Waterville going from one of the oldest lift fleets in New England to one of the most modern

While Waterville runs some of the last Stadeli lifts in America (I count 16), the ski area has modernized extensively over the past decade:

On U.S. Forest Service ski areas in the East

Most (109) of the 119 active U.S. ski areas on United States Forest Service leases sit in the West; two are in the Midwest, and eight are in the East: Bromley, Mount Snow, and Sugarbush, Vermont; Waterville Valley, Loon, Attitash, and Wildcat, New Hampshire; and Timberline, West Virginia. None, as far as I know, sit entirely within the boundaries of a national forest, but even partial overlap triggers the requirement to submit an updated masterplan each decade.

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Decoding Boyne’s New England Pass

Boyne’s 2026-27 New England Pass suite dropped last week. As usual, it is the most expensive topline season pass in New England, with a $1,499 pricetag ($1,449) for unlimited adult access to Boyne’s four East Coast resorts: Sugarloaf, Sunday River, and Pleasant Mountain, Maine; along with Loon, New Hampshire.

Which could be a headline, but not a very good one. Because what I like about the New England Pass (NEP) is its very broad price spectrum. Boyne offsets the expensive top-end adult access with 22 additional pass variations and price tiers, along with a no-blackout day-pass product:

Boyne tends to include three days at each of its far-flung ski areas for top-tier season passholders. Here’s how that sorts out for Boyne’s 11 ski areas for each version of the NEP - along with (for reference) Ikon and Mountain Collective:

I especially like NEP’s choice of unlimited (Gold), no-holidays (Silver), and no holidays or peak weekends (Bronze) passes at various price points tiered by age. The afternoon pass adds an additional dimension to spread skiers not only around the calendar, but around the operating day.

This is not, of course, a perfect strategy. First, it’s very confusing, especially when you factor in all the additional passes skiers can use to access this same bucket of resorts (more on this below). Second, no one is accusing any of these mountains - other than Sugarloaf - of being uncrowded, basically ever. Loon, especially, is incredibly easy to access for an enormous population. But Boyne is doing everything it can here to incentivize off-peak visitation, which has a finite constituency.

This is the pass-pricing strategy that I wish Vail Resorts would follow for the Epic Pass. I appreciate that Epic Passes are affordable, but should the no-limits Epic Pass ($1,089) really be priced 30 percent below the top-shelf Ikon Pass ($1,399)? Imagine an Epic Pass tiered like New England, where unlimited access to Whistler, Vail Mountain, etc. were in the $1,500 range, an Epic Local was more in the Epic $1,000 range (where Ikon Base already is), and a national midweek Epic was $500 to $700, depending upon whether you limited the number of days at big fellas like Stowe and Park City.

Vail already acknowledges that it’s possible to offer value and protect the majority-skier experience. Its local Epic Pass suite is filled with examples, including:

• A Northeast Midweek pass that is unlimited at most mountains but is limited to five Stowe days

• A Tahoe Value Pass that cuts Saturdays and holidays at Northstar and Kirkwood, but only holidays at larger Heavenly

• A Stevens Pass Select pass that blacks out peak weekends

These are the sorts of nuanced products that could help Vail reach its goal of putting more skiers on its mountains, while avoiding a repeat fallout like 2021’s 20-percent-off-everything-all-at-once sale that maxed out too many of its ski areas during peak times.

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The 2026-27 Ikon Pass suite went live last week without a full price breakdown, but the start of pass sales yesterday filled in the blanks (well, most of them):

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Entabeni Systems, which owns the Indy Pass and provides point-of-sale and other technology systems to dozens of independent ski areas, will re-purchase Black Mountain, New Hampshire, the company announced today.

Entabeni has been invested in Black since company founder Erik Mogensen led a 2023 intervention to halt the ski area’s imminent closing. He pledged at the time to find a long-term owner, and, failing to do so, purchased the ski area the following year and announced plans to convert Black into a co-op. Local investors embraced the plan.

The plan changed. Because when Mogensen appointed himself general manager and started running Black Mountain, he found more than a beat-up, burned-out, New England hill surrounded by Epic and Ikon competitors.

He found a ski-area laboratory. And he found a home.

And not a home in the metaphorical sense. Mogensen bought a house along Black’s Sugarbush trail and moved to New Hampshire from Colorado. He commandeered the baselodge attic as an Entabeni and Indy Pass command center. He knocked down walls and blew up rocks and installed new snowguns. All of this happened in two months.

Still, I was skeptical. Black, I wrote at the time, “is an OK ski area in a state of very good ski areas” with old lifts, a dated lodge, a pain-in-the-ass access road, and nothing-special terrain. And Mogensen lacked the obvious credentials to lead a ski area comeback. He had grown up in Western New York and spent much of his adult life in Colorado. He had never skied Black Mountain and had never run a ski area.

But Mogensen moves like the Road Runner in Looney Tunes, a trail of flames dancing in his wake. He acts with conviction and audacious speed. When both of Black Mountain’s antique chairlifts self-destructed over Christmas week, he led a 24-hour-a-day dismantling-and-rebuilding of both machines within 100 hours. He ignores bad precedent. A south-facing mountain that had rarely run lifts to the summit in the previous two decades closed May 3 last year on top-to-bottom terrain. He runs the ski area like a 10-year-old thinks they’d run a ski area, with snowguns full blast and double-diamond hike-to trails cut off the summit and the snowcat parked out his bedroom window after the midnight groom.

It worked. Black quadrupled revenue in Mogensen’s first winter over the previous record season. Just converting a forlorn mid-mountain snack shack into a champagne party deck brought in nearly as much revenue as Black had made some winters. Attendance and pass sales smashed records. Over a single winter, Mogensen transformed Black Mountain from a failing novelty of a ski area to a holy-shit case study that reset local and national narratives about the potential for independent mountains in the 2020s.

Black was, suddenly and improbably, the place to be. When I visited last February, skiers constantly approached Mogensen. “Are you the Indy Pass guy?” they would ask, before pledging their allegiance to the co-op. He seemed to be everywhere at once, streaking uphill on a snowmobile, banging through baselodge crowds hoisting trays of hot cookies, leaning over control panels in the double chair motor room.

Mogensen told me in 2023 that he had no interest in owning a ski area. But damn it if he didn’t turn out to be great at it. So when Mogensen told me recently that he’d decided to buy out early co-op investors and instead consolidate his various businesses at Black to create a ski-innovation laboratory, I viewed it as a best-case outcome.

The co-op, Mogensen told me in an interview earlier this week, still “would have worked royally. It was on a perfect track.”

But such a structure, with its committees and rules and egos, may have also limited Black’s potential. In possession of his own ski area, Mogensen can directly experiment with solutions to what he sees as the biggest problems in running an independent ski area: efficiency through technology, and the costs of liability insurance and new chairlifts.

“The best use of my time is staying as focused as I can possibly be on the solutions that will allow independent ski areas to survive,” he said.

This ski-area-as-laboratory concept has precedent. Entabeni competitor Snow Partners, which built and sells a resort operating platform called Snow Cloud, refined early iterations of its software by testing them at its two New Jersey ski areas, Mountain Creek and the Big Snow indoor facility. And the now-defunct Hall chairlift company used nearby Dry Hill in New York to test and refine its machines.

Indy Pass, Mogensen said, will remain “100 percent at arm’s length” from Black Mountain, rather than assuming a parent-pass relationship as Vail and Alterra’s owned mountains do with their Epic and Ikon passes. “We will carefully balance operating a small ski area while innovating and supporting many others,” Mogensen wrote in an open letter to the Black Mountain community this morning.

Mogensen is a compulsive multi-tasker, but he intends to hire a general manager for Black, giving him mental space to focus on the larger priorities of tech and lifts and insurance. He’s also consolidating operations, moving what remains of Entabeni’s offices from Colorado to Black Mountain. He will continue to live in his house on the hill. “I want to make this home,” he said. “I want to build a family here.”

Mogensen is good at building things in both the digital and physical worlds, and those attributes alone will make him an important figure in the trajectory of the rapidly changing ski industry. But his secret weapon, I’ve come to believe, is something more subtle, and certainly rarer than the intelligence or stamina of which his supply is bountiful: a complete lack of social fear. The man loves a microphone, and I’ve yet to see the audience of size or composure that could crack his absolute conviction that skiing’s future lies in its aggressive embrace of an anti-corporate narrative and a bootstrapped reset of the institutions (chairlift manufacturers, insurance underwriters) that threaten to set an artificial cost floor on ski area operations. While this trait can lead to conflict, the overthinking of potential consequences is what keeps so many of us from building our own house on the hill.

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We start here because this is enough to scare anyone trying to decide which multimountain ski pass to buy:

That’s 399 ski areas - an impossible number to sort and more than most skiers will ever need. It helps to categorize them, and the easiest category is: are they in America or not?

That’s 159 ski areas spread across the world. Most are in Europe (50), Japan (48), or Canada (51). We covered those yesterday.

Today, we’re back in America, where we’ll try to make sense of this chart showing the regional footprint of Epic, Mountain Collective, Ikon, and Indy (collectively referred to as EMCI² passes):

Wow that’s a lot of ski areas. But sometimes counting is hard, because Big Sky is one of those ski areas and so is Paul Bunyan, Wisconsin. One of those is the third-largest ski area in America, with a 4,366-foot vertical drop and 39 lifts. The other one is a pile of ropetows and a T-bar stapled across 20 acres halfway between Green Bay and Iron River. Having the most of something does not always mean that you have the best of those things.

So, how do EMCI² passes compare across the United States on a more granular level? Let’s see:

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