2026-27 Epic, Ikon, Indy, & Mountain Collective: By The Numbers
Skiers with an Epic, Ikon, Indy, and Mountain Collective pass can access 73 percent of America’s skiable acreage.
Yesterday I sent around a Big Dumb List of Big Dumb Charts as a sort of homework assignment for Big Dumb Pass Bros (like me!) who are already plotting out their 2026-27 through 2039-40 ski seasons. “Oh look at this, Uncle Greg’s 63rd-and-a-half birthday will be on March 12, 2033 and he only lives six hours from Antelope Butte. I could fly into Rapid City, but Minneapolis is $75 cheaper and if I just add six days onto either end of the trip I can hit every ski area in North and South Dakota on the loop up through Red Lodge.”
If you know I’m only partly kidding, you’ve come to the right place. The multimountain ski pass, still a relative novelty less than a decade ago, has transformed American skiing. During the 2012-13 winter, season passes accounted for 36 percent of U.S. skier visits, according to Kottke end-of-season surveys from that era. That number surged past 50 percent for several years (before a slight reversal, to 49 percent last winter, per Kottke). These figures include data for all season passes, not just megapasses, but the clear upward pass visitation trend after decades of day-ticket dominance illustrates how deeply these products have penetrated skiers’ collective habits and psyches.
Ski areas like them too. We know this because most of them have joined one: 229 of America’s 395 public, chairlift-served ski areas have joined Epic, Indy, Ikon, or Mountain Collective. That’s 58 percent of such ski areas, which account for 78 percent of the U.S.’ 504 active ski areas and 96 percent of the nation’s skiable acreage. Skiers with an Epic, Ikon, Indy, and Mountain Collective pass can access 73 percent of America’s skiable acreage.
“So, Stu, how did you get all that from your incomprehensible Google Sheets that make astrological charts look like the blueprint to the Pentagon?”
Well that’s a fair question. The Big Dumb Charts Mastersheet is baffling and borderline useless to anyone but me. It’s incomplete in more places than not. I reprint made-up statistics such as ski areas’ claimed average annual snowfall totals. Many U.S. ski area entries lack basic facts like base elevation, while I took the time to itemize every ski area in North Korea mostly because I wanted to make fun of the Supreme Leader’s habit of executing disfavored underlings with flamethrowers and antiaircraft guns.
This is why I try not to send you there. The Mastersheet is basically my notebook, where I’m organizing things like who founded each ski area and which year the mountain installed snowmaking as I stumble across them. If I stopped to track down every founder of every ski area, I’d get nothing else done for a year, but I’m hoping for progress through incrementalism. And there’s a lot of increments: right now the mastersheet is at 935 columns and 2002 rows. Enter this space at your own risk and with lower expectations than an Arby’s drivethru.
But I do have pretty good data on certain aspects of the U.S. American lift-served skiing universe, including: which companies own which ski areas, which ski areas around the world have joined which U.S.-based passes, and the timelines around these evolutions. I also have a pretty good inventory of active U.S. ski areas, including close-enough core stats (vertical drop, skiable acres, etc.), for most of them.
Where I’m confident in my numbers, I add them up in the Major Stats Summary Chart. This saves me from writing things like “VAIL AND ALTERRA HAVE BOUGHT EVERY SKI AREA IN THE WORLD” because I can look and see that Vail owns 36 of 504 U.S. ski areas, which collectively add up to 38,573 acres of skiable terrain, or 16 percent of the nation’s total, while Alterra’s numbers are 18 ski areas totaling 32,762 acres. So Vail and Alterra collectively own 54 U.S. ski areas that account for 32 percent of the country’s skiing. Which is a lot but hardly Standard Oil.
The Major Stats Summary Chart also gives us a nice snapshot, at any given moment, of how deeply multimountain ski passes have penetrated U.S. and global skiing. While these raw numbers don’t give us a lot of data on actual visitation, they do help us understand how deeply these passes have become embedded as a cultural construct.
I’ll drill into the U.S. numbers tomorrow, but first, let’s examine where multimountain ski pass rosters sit as a whole: