Indy Pass Acquires Black Mountain, NH; Will Convert Ski Area to Co-Op
“Just because you’re small, doesn’t mean you can’t be great" - Indy Pass, Entabeni Systems, and Black Mountain owner Erik Mogensen.
Black Mountain almost died last year. I had the obituary all ready to go:
Oct. 11, 2023, Jackson, New Hampshire: Black Mountain ski area, age 88, died peacefully in its sleep last night. County coroners listed the official causes of death as old age, exhaustion, and “kind-of crappy infrastructure.” The mountain, born as a ropetow operation for a local innkeeper in December 1935, will be mourned by its dozens of loyal fans.
“Is that place even still open?” asked Jackson resident Cooper Mattingly, who was dropping his skis off for a preseason tune at Heavens Ski Shop, nine minutes south of Black. “That’s cute. My grandma used to ski there. When she was like seven. She said you could trade a bundle of firewood for a lift pass. Anyway, how stoked are you for Attitash’s new high-speed summit lift?”
The ski area, which failed to modernize in recent decades even as its numerous nearby larger, taller competitors invested millions in high-speed lifts, advanced snowmaking, and new lodges, has struggled with mild winters, inconsistent operations, skilled labor shortages, and competition from Vail’s Northeast-specific Epic Passes, which were cheaper than Black’s season pass and offered access to more and larger mountains, including neighboring Attitash and Wildcat.
But we stopped the presses. Because a few days after the Fichera family, which had owned the ski area since 1995, posted to Black’s Facebook page that they were picking out coffins, a group led by Entabeni Systems founder and Indy Pass owner Erik Mogensen parachuted in from Colorado with a proposal: let us help you run the ski area for a year, and we’ll find you a buyer. The Ficheras said yes. And so Black Mountain spun the lifts for its 89th ski season.
It wasn’t a great winter. Black opened for the season on Dec. 23 and closed on March 16, just before a series of deep late-season storms buried New England (Attitash and Cranmore, Black’s two closest competitors, stayed open until April 7; Wildcat made it to April 21).
And Mogensen never found a buyer. At least 30 potential suitors rolled through. All lacked the means, the will, or both to acquire and run Black Mountain.
“About halfway through the process, I realized this was the definition of insanity,” Mogensen told The Storm. “If I was going to keep doing the same thing, I was going to keep getting the same result.”
So Mogensen is trying something different. He – via Entabeni and Indy Pass – bought Black Mountain. He moved to New Hampshire. This season, he will act as the ski area’s general manager. And, by the 2025-26 ski season, he plans to sell it back to the community as a Mad River Glen-style co-op.
Entabeni announced all of this today at a in a standing-room-only meeting livestreamed from Black Mountain’s baselodge. Details on the structure of the Black Mountain cooperative, the cost and number of shares, the responsibilities of shareholders, and details around a charter that would establish rules of governance and operation are not yet available. But “anyone can purchase shares” once they are available, according to a press release that accompanied today’s meeting. Skiers who purchase a 2024-25 Black Mountain season pass will have first dibs on shares.
This new period of stewardship underscores Entabeni’s commitment to helping independent ski areas identify long-term sustainable operating models. The company is also assisting nonprofit Antelope Butte, Wyoming and natural-snow-only Hickory Ski Center, New York bridge the chasm between failing ski area and functional recreation center. The exact nature of that assistance varies from one ski area to the other, and so far Black is the only proposed candidate for the co-op model.
The co-op proposal marks a shift in strategy, if not necessarily in philosophy, for Entabeni and Indy. The entities do not plan to evolve into Vail- or Alterra-style owner-operators, or to stack up a portfolio of endangered ski areas. But Mogensen told me last year that he believes up to a quarter of America’s 500-ish ski areas will have to transition to a non-profit or community-owned business model to survive the coming decades. There is no one correct way to do this, Mogensen believes, but if his companies can act as agents to help explore sustainable ski area pathways, that could be enough, long term, to save dozens of them.
The co-op model is one of those pathways. But while intriguing, transforming a ski area into a co-op is not as easy as it sounds. Several ski areas have attempted, unsuccessfully, to form MRG-style co-ops. If Black is to transition to this model, the ski area is either going to have to become something different, or it’s going to have to define itself as something different. Here are questions Entabeni, Indy, and Mogensen will have to answer as they plot out Black’s future: