Ikon Pass Adds Camelback and Blue Mountain, Pennsylvania for 2023-24 Ski Season
Additions bolster Ikon Pass with easy day-trip options less than two hours from NYC, Philly
Draw lines dead west from New York City and north from Philadelphia and they’ll crisscross in a bullseye over the Poconos. There, less than two hours by car for the combined 26.2 million residents of these sprawling metropolises, sit two of Pennsylvania’s biggest and busiest ski areas: 1,140-vertical-foot Blue Mountain and 850-vertical-foot Camelback.
Both are owned by KSL Resorts, an arm of KSL Capital, which, together with Aspen owner Henry Crown, owns Alterra Mountain Company. Both are home to new six-packs installed in advance of the 2022-23 ski season. Both deliver a ski experience that is part evacuation drill, part fall-line glory, and part bedazzling spectacle. And both will join the Ikon Pass as standard five- and seven-day partners for the 2023-24 ski season.
Here's what Ikon’s lineup will look like with its first Pennsylvania additions (as shown in the new-and-improved Storm Skiing Ikon Pass chart):
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_2400,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6abd9962-04b3-484e-ae4b-eb040c85dce1_3004x4121.jpeg)
For anyone outside the Philly-NYC-Poconos drive region, this is the most boring Ikon Pass announcement possible. For a large constituency within this circle, however, the additions of two large day-trip ski areas is the equivalent of that bucket of wine tucked away at the 5-year-old’s birthday party – it changes the whole calculus of the occasion. In this case, the occasion is the ski season, the admission ticket is the Ikon Pass, and the party just got a whole lot more interesting.
Here's a breakdown of what the additions of Blue and Camelback mean for Ikon Pass skiers, the ski areas, and Northeast skiing in general: