Entabeni Systems Purchases Black Mountain, N.H., Shelves Co-Op Ambitions

Indy Pass owner to repurpose Black as a laboratory for modernization of small ski areas

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.