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This is not like the Poconos, not like Virginia or North Carolina, where skiing waited for the dawn of industrial snowmaking, for the 1960s and ‘70s and ‘80s. Here, towering above Los Angeles – Los Angeles, where the average January high is 68 degrees Fahrenheit – Mountain High opened for skiing 99 years ago. In 1924. It is the fourth-oldest active ski area in the country.

At one time there were more than a dozen ski areas in Southern California. Today we have seven individual, active, reliably operating public ski areas in the region. Or maybe we have three. It depends on how you count them. Three of them are Mountain High East (formerly Holiday Hill), West, and North (formerly Ski Sunrise/Table Mountain), which all operate as Mountain High Resorts. One is raucously independent Mount Baldy.

And, as of last Friday, when Colorado-based Alterra Mountain Company announced the acquisition of Snow Valley and jammed it together with Bear Mountain and Snow Summit, three of them operate as Big Bear Resort.

The purchase strengthens the company’s Ikon Pass, which will be valid for unlimited access at Snow Valley beginning Monday, Feb. 20, and drops another California ski area onto a roster that already includes Mammoth, June, Palisades Tahoe, Bear Mountain, and Snow Summit. Here’s Alterra’s owned portfolio with the addition of Snow Valley:

And here’s an updated Ikon Pass roster:

Seated just a dozen miles west of Snow Summit and Bear Mountain, Snow Valley could help mitigate crowds at Southern California’s busiest ski areas, offering skiers gentler slopes and a more welcoming learning environment than either of Alterra’s other two local properties can offer.

The Snow Valley addition “makes a lot of sense for Big Bear Mountain Resort,” said Ski California President Michael Reitzell. “It will help them spread the traffic across the three resorts on the Ikon pass. Snow Valley is a unique resort, and different from BBMR.”

Snow Valley is Alterra’s first acquisition since Sugarbush, Vermont in 2019. The addition of a small, city-adjacent ski area suggests a potential strategy shift for the company, whose owned and partner network has so far focused mostly on large, destination resorts.

Ripple effects will be immediate. This is the second sale of a California ski area in the past two months, continuing a years-long consolidation process that has put half of the state’s ski areas under just four owners. The Snow Valley purchase leaves Alterra’s largest competitor, Vail Resorts, with few options to capture direct market share in the nation’s second-largest city. And it likely subtracts one ski area from both the Indy Pass and the Freedom Pass for the 2023-24 ski season (both will remain valid at Snow Valley through the end of the current ski season).

The sale could also be monumental for Snow Valley, a thousand-footer seated on the eastern hem of metropolitan Los Angeles. The mountain has a schizophrenic past, investing in flourishes such as the region’s only six-seater chairlift while slowly stripping lifts and snowmaking off large chunks of terrain.

Here’s a deeper look at Snow Valley, and what Alterra’s purchase means for the Ikon Pass, for Southern California skiers, for Alterra’s competitors, and for California skiing in general:

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